Hollow Tree

by Ian Neligh

  Not a second later The Champion came back into view. Who the hell could have survived that? What kind of man could fly around and lift eighty thousand pounds into the air?

  The kind of man you don’t want to piss off.

  I was in his office only five short minutes when I was threatened, bribed and found myself flung against a shatterproof window fifty-three floors up. I watched out of the corner of my eye as the glass instantly spiderwebbed from the impact. Falling behind the upended desk, I understood my chance of survival was damn bleak. This was why the police didn’t want to know who the killer was, this was why The Raven passed it on to me, and why none of the other superheroes could or wanted to deal with it. I was the only one stupid enough to follow it all the way to the end.

  Many of my ribs were already broken—and he was coming again. Like a goddamn locomotive, so fast that I didn’t have time to react. He grabbed me by the foot and swung me like a doll through the air, letting go so that I flew back to the other side of the office and hit the wall.

  “Who do you think you are?” he boomed. Watching him across the office, I still couldn’t believe it. No one had ever noticed Richard Hanson and The Champion were one and the same. With the exception of the silly suit, they were identical. He was hiding in plain sight. It was so damn obvious that I cursed myself for not realizing it days ago, years ago. He was also identical to the fifth member of Mayweather’s black-and-white World War II photo. In all that time he hadn’t aged more than a few years. Of course he wouldn’t though; he was special.

  It was something the military had discovered; it was something that Mayweather, Keegan, Seabrook, and Kinny had discovered. But his teammates also found that Richard Hanson, then going by a different name, was also a monster. Details of war atrocities sprinkled Mayweather’s diary like arterial spray. Decades later the men who had served with Hanson recognized him in his current identity and decided to confront him. He didn’t react well. I remembered his terrible grip from when we shook hands outside of Fernley’s office. It didn’t take a lot of imagination to see why the crime scenes were littered with orphaned fingers. A handshake was one hell of a way to commence a murder.

  I had the video, I had the diary, I had everything that I needed for the story, but I had to see him with my own eyes, to confront him with what I knew and see his reaction. I’d thought his place of work during the day would be the safest option. I’d been wrong.

  He started to move toward me again when I held up a hand. “Okay,” I said trying to focus. “There’s something you may not have considered.”

  He stopped. It was a slim chance, but I had to try. With some difficulty, I got back to my feet.

  “While you may be able to deny this or lie your way out of being connected to the deaths of two officers and several veterans, you’re going to have a hell of a time explaining why a reporter was tossed out of your office window above morning traffic,” I said.

  Unsure of what to do, he paused and ran his giant hands through his black hair.

  “You could…you could not run the story,” he said. “I could pay money, a lot of money, to not run it.”

  Less the unstoppable monster now, and more the trapped animal, Richard Hanson looked at me, pleading.

  “I do good for the city, for the people, that’s why I did what I did. It wasn’t nice, I know that. People will think it was wrong, but I did it for them. I do good for the city; I give them hope as The Champion,” he said, looking almost embarrassed at the amount of damage tossing me around his office had caused. “As Richard Hanson I give them jobs, homes, a paycheck. And as The Champion I give them something more—I give them hope. For what little damage I’ve caused, I’ve put hundreds of criminals, murderers too, in prison. Not publishing your little story is for the greater good—and I will do whatever I can to stop you.”

  And if he could, I knew he would too. He’d stopped Mayweather and everyone who’d come before.

  “I’m on the verge of buying your paper. I could tell Fernley not to run it; he would listen.”

  Straightening up, I squared my shoulders and looked him in the eyes. “Mr. Hanson, or The Champion, or whatever the hell you want to call yourself, I came here to get your reaction, to see if you had a comment—but if you think the paper’s editor will hold the story for anyone, well, you don’t know my boss very well. I filed the story an hour ago, and he thought it was pretty good. I think it's my best.”

  He stopped; his mouth opened and closed.

  “They might not be able to try you for crimes or imprison you—or hell, do anything to you at all—but people will now know who you are, what you are, and what you did.”

  I walked out of his office and held the door open, looking back at him. He stood there, looking lost, like a child in a forest. This was how you destroyed an invincible man.

  “So, what? If you’re not a superhero now—what does that make you?” I asked, letting the door shut behind me.

  I didn’t know what would happen next, but it was enough that something would happen. I went back down the elevator, through the lobby, and outside. It had stopped raining above Municipal City, but the sky was still gray and cold. The weather was far from perfect, but that was good enough for me.

  One

  Out of all the doors, two were locked. There was only one window, and despite his initial reluctance, he had to see what was on the other side.

  Squinting at the wording next to the illustration of the androgynous being on the wall, Butler read the warning again: Please wear solar-protective face shield when activating window shades. Remember, activating it with others unaware is negligent.

  The picture showed the “responsibly protected” but sexless human being wearing a large black mask and touching a green button on the wall. The next image showed light streaming in the cartoon window, revealing a bright green paradise.

  The actual window was twelve feet long and maybe about as tall as he was. The cream-white shutter was made of several yards of protective metallics in front of a window made from palladium micoalloy polymers.

  A small sign read: Warning, UV light may appear normal —but may be far brighter than you remember. Wear protection.

  Butler found a vertical rack of welding-mask-like helmets, set up similarly to a giant cup dispenser. It was made for convenience and looked like a futuristic, if unimaginative, totem pole. Next to it was a green button with a plastic protective cover.

  He walked up to the helmet dispenser and pulled one free, placing it on his head as the next fell into position. Then, groping in the near-absolute blackness of the protective screen, he flipped up the button’s cover and depressed it.

  As Butler waited, he heard the sounds of various engines whirring to life under his feet and in the metallic gray ceiling. A warbled prerecorded female voice began speaking.

  “The shade will rise momentarily and a new world will be revealed. A world of hope, promise, and fertility. You are the future of humanity and all our hopes ride with you. Please make sure your protective visor is in place as the sun’s rays may still be too bright for safe viewing. Note: Depending on the planet’s progress, some viewers may experience disquieting emotions. If so, please notify your team’s assigned therapist or schedule an appointment on the medical level.”

  Butler was pretty sure if he had a team, or a therapist, they were among the thousands of skeletal remains still neatly packed into their Somnus Hibernation Tubes.

  The machinery continued to rumble, and a thin sliver of light appeared at the bottom of the floor as the shield raised. Among the therapists were probably team and group leaders, planners, engineers, politicians, cooks, janitors, scientists, and many others meant to kick-start human society again on a planet now safe from danger. The shutter reached waist high and filled the dark room with ultra-brilliant light. Butler felt for a moment like he was standing in front of a giant opening eye.

  Butler, despite his name, was a magazine writer, a detail only remembered after he spent s
everal terrifying minutes scampering around in the near-black of the hibernation rooms, running past rows of the long dead, stacked shoulder-to-shoulder like sardines.

  The shade rose to its zenith, and Butler saw the world of tomorrow—and it did not look good. Firestorms raged across the land and through what was left of the distant blackened cities. The supports of ancient buildings reached to the howling sky like arthritic, skeletal fingers. The ground exploded and swirled in a maelstrom of molten rock and hot gasses. The air seemed to shake with the violence of the sun’s psychotic heat. He had to admit that as far as optimistic new beginnings for humanity went, this had to rank at the absolute goddamn bottom. The warbled voice clicked on again accompanied by an equally distorted piano rendition of John Field’s Nocturne no. 5.

  “While the work we have in front of us is no doubt daunting, the seeds of possibility await your attention. Now please make your way to your color- or numeric-associated team leader in the staging area for assignments. Unborn generations are counting on you.”

  Then they’d better be made of fire-retardant materials, Butler thought. One big, terrible mistake had been made.

  The shade began to close, sinking the room back into darkness. Neon lights began to sporadically flicker back to life in the viewing room. Butler took the helmet off and let it drop to the floor. He looked for a place to sit. Finding none, he too dropped to the floor.

  Two

  Lacking a cafeteria “ambassador,” as was strongly recommended by the signs on the wall, Butler inspected the nutrient-dispensing machine himself. During the initial tour he’d received with other members of the media, he’d learned that, until real food could be grown and prepared, glorified lunch ladies with doctorate degrees would dispense an enriched nutrient.

  In the end, and despite everything else, it was his biological response to hunger that got him up and to the giant rows of elevators in the color-coded staging area. Large portions of the floor were colored red, green, or blue. The elevator, which took him to the cafeteria, could have fit a hundred people. Butler felt like an ant in a new shoebox. Various assurances and safety recommendations were made by the disembodied voice all the way down to the next level. Her voice slurred and sped up; it was almost as if she had found where the liquor was stashed before he could. The fading and flickering power was likely due to the limitations of his jumpsuit, with its built-in kinetic generator. His movement was the only source of power for many of the superficial lights and surrounding equipment.

  The facility had originally been built to be partially powered by many thousands of suits, all moving at the same time. A great idea, unless everyone’s dead. Everyone, that was, but a slow-moving, automated janitorial unit. Its energy was so low after several hundred years of looking for stuff to clean that its arms and articulate fingers hung limp by its side. The robot moved along on its tracks at a snail’s pace.

  After briefly examining the almost-dead support technology, Butler moved on to the massive cafeteria level. It was filled with high-school-like foldable tables and benches. Lights activated and clicked on to light Butler’s way through them.

  In a funny way he felt self-conscious as he walked between tables. The area was big enough to land a passenger jet. Oddly, he felt he was being observed.

  After a few moments of experimentation, and after removing several hygienic plastic seals, Butler managed to get a tube attached to the ceiling to dispense a humorless pile of green and yellow paste. Hoping that it was a food, and that he wasn’t tapping into a sewer line, Butler took a seat and shoveled it into his mouth with a spoon. The kinetic engines in his suit activated the plate and warmed the vitamin-enriched sludge.

  At least that’s what he hoped it was. He thought sourly that it would be ironic if the last person alive poisoned himself by eating some type of machine lubricant, or food long past its prime. The act of eating, spoon scraping along the plate, echoed in the room. It tasted like salty pudding. With a sudden passion, he felt unfit to be the last man alive on Earth.

  Three

  After a lifetime of magazine deadlines, Butler found himself with a lot of free time. Something he found surprisingly uncomfortable. He explored the facility more thoroughly than he had his first run through—three hundred years before.

  He walked past the children’s area and watched as various animatronic bears and other animals came to life, waving furry paws at him and singing. As he walked a few feet farther they slumped forward again into silence.

  In his white suit, walking down the giant gray-and-black corridors, Butler realized he must look like a piece of chalk skipping along a blackboard. But the only lesson here was that they should have replaced him with an engineer. An investigative journalist with no practical skills wouldn’t turn the facility back on. A lifetime of really efficient analytical thinking wouldn’t grow food.

  So Butler did what he did best and looked around, noting details. It was all he could do. There were nurseries, clinics, and entertainment rooms. There were two doors that did not open for him: One was a discreet door with the label “Meeting A1” next to it. Butler had found “Meeting B1” and “Meeting C1” on the other levels and assumed it held, like the others, a coffee machine, a handful of chairs, and a round table.

  The second locked door was the entrance to the transit station. Double doors with thick windows teased of the presence of a train and elevated transit rail to the other facility. Butler could not get the door to move. It was possible, Butler allowed, that others still lived on the second station and were still in hibernation.

  On the lowest level of the facility, acres of raised planting beds stretched on for almost as far as he could see. Undisturbed dirt fields lay under carefully placed plastic sheets, and suspended farming equipment on rails hung silent, like sinister insect bats.

  He walked among the hibernation rooms, looking at the mummies with their names printed on the glass tubes. It felt like he was in a museum. A handful of the tubes were empty and, unlike his own, unused. For whatever reason, not everyone made it in on time for the big sleep.

  Even with “the due date,” no one, especially the government, could get on the same page about what to do —or decide if it was really happening. Speeches were made and prominent scientists had come forward. And this had gone on for years.

  It had been the private sector that made the first move to find a solution. A group of billionaire kids from the high-tech industry had refocused their plans of building independent floating countries in the middle of the ocean to creating two underground arks along the Great Plains, miles apart and connected by a tramway.

  Of course they were originally planning to hold only other billionaires, their families, and people deemed interesting to start a new world with. Then the government had started taking the threat seriously. Under extreme protest, the government forcibly took the facilities away from the Silicon Valley wunderkinds. And, given the impending danger, ignored the rule of law.

  Then, in another highly controversial move, the government had given each person in the country a value. It was based on things like a person’s job, experience, mental and physical health, age, IQ, EQ, and a lot of other dubious indicators to predict future potential.

  The top 5,000 had been chosen and split between the two arks. Some refused to go—but many went.

  The arks had everything: flora, fauna, bacteria, and even viruses. But they didn’t get anywhere close to everything on the planet. Some species just wouldn’t fit, or there wasn’t time, and these would have to live in the coloring books of future generations. In the beginning only one ark was ready to go into service. The other one, the one Butler was assigned to, would go active thirty days after the first. The two were nicknamed Athens and Thebes, two of the greatest cities of the ancient world.

  The government offered media outlets limited spots for handpicked journalists, who were then also rated. Butler had made the cut to go on the second ark, Athens. He’d never been sure if the threat was something to t
ake seriously or a lot of hype. With a lot of debt, a failed marriage, and nothing to lose, he’d agreed to go. A few hours ago he woke up on a destroyed planet by himself. Everyone else was dead, and try as he might, he could not find out why.

  Lost in his thoughts, Butler made a random turn and ended up in a small carpeted hallway. The muffled sound of his footsteps took him from his reverie. He looked around and found he stood in the mental health and therapy portion of the medical wing. Peering into one of the doors randomly, he found a dark office with a desk and several chairs. The farthest side showed a window frame surrounding a blank portion of the wall. Though he couldn’t explain it, the room somehow looked used and dirty. A stylish head made from glass sat on the bookshelf closest to the door. It wore a pair of clear glasses, which had what looked like a sleek power button on one side. Butler reached out for them, hesitated, then turned and left the room to its ancient silence.

  Four

  The days passed and eventually Butler began an awkward routine. He would sleep by the great shuttered window with bedding stolen from the cavernous dormitories below.

  Every morning he would wake, take a new protective helmet from the dispenser, open the window to look upon the wastes that had once been a field of swaying grass. Staring at the destruction and hearing the warped voice go through its routine, “…A world of hope, promise, and fertility. You are the future of humanity and all our hopes ride with you…” didn’t do much for building a sense of positivity. Yet he couldn’t help himself.

  The automated voice randomly presented jaunty music and posed him with facts such as:

  “Did you know it takes two weeks for a corn seed to germinate?”

  Butler would then take the oversized elevator to the exercise level, where he found pools filled with water and mounted television screens that turned on when he appeared, offering to play for him a variety of prerecorded and motivational entertainment.