Echo Island

by Jared C. Wilson

  Tim didn’t like the look on Bradley’s face. It was one he’d only seen two or three times in his life. It was the look Bradley got whenever reason and patience became unintelligible to him and violence became its own logic.

  The translucent window proved tough. Before he could even break it, Bradley managed to kick the machine on its back.

  “You’re gonna hurt yourself,” Tim said.

  Bradley stood over the fallen contraption and started ramming the heel of his foot down into the facing. Eventually, it cracked and, after a few more slams, split open.

  They divided the paper up and sat on the bench, scanning the headlines for anything that might begin to explain their predicament.

  Tim first pondered the date on each turned page, as if it might say something to him, as if it might convey some sense of its own significance. Less speculative, Bradley scanned quickly, looking for keywords in bold print without expecting anything really.

  The world, national, and entertainment news revealed nothing. The local news consisted of school board items, park reports, and updates on native personalities. This section was as thin as Echo Island was uneventful, which is to say very. There was no news about storm drills or any major event that might attract most of the populace. Even the weather forecast looked unremarkable: clear skies, relatively calm seas, and mild temperatures. No reports of lightning storms, power outages, or anything of the sort.

  Tim figured read-outs at the lighthouse weather station might be revelatory. He looked at the date again, hoping it would rearrange itself into an answer.

  Bradley crumpled up the paper, chucked it into the street, and wiped the newsprint from his hands onto his shorts.

  Tim said, “They couldn’t have just disappeared.”

  “Well, okay, then,” Bradley said matter-of-factly. “We should start looking again.”

  On the long ocean road crowning the island’s western face, Jason and Archer pedaled feverishly for the south woods. Occasionally, on a rise or wide-open patch, they thought they could still see that wisp of smoke, thin as pencil lead against the blue sky that was miles in the distance. They had stopped briefly, cutting inland far enough just to check the movie theater, where they found an empty parking lot and locked doors. They decided then to leave other large buildings for later inspection and book it toward the source of the smoke. But when they reached the outskirts of Archer’s neighborhood, they both slowed without a word.

  Jason pulled even with Archer, who stared straight ahead like he hadn’t noticed. They’d sailed past the open field bordering the back of the subdivision when Jason skidded to a stop.

  Archer circled. “What’s wrong?” he said.

  Jason cocked his head. “Don’t you wanna check your house?”

  “Why? We both know no one’s there.”

  Jason looked at him. “Archer. I mean . . . your mom.”

  Archer spit on the pavement and kept circling, sticking a bony leg out to trace his short arc on the street with the toe of his sneaker.

  Jason said, “I know it’s unlikely. But you don’t even want to check?”

  Archer sighed and streamed for the shoulder opposite the lot. He jumped the curb, rambled over rocks and timber, and stopped at the railing separating the flatland from the steep slope down to the beach. The western world looked empty.

  He rode back. “Sure, why not?” He blew by Jason and started across the field.

  The two-story, white house was small, just big enough to accommodate Archer and his mother. Archer’s dad left the family when Archer was three; his mom always said he took some job in the Alaskan wilderness, a job she never quite labeled. But Archer got a card from him on his thirteenth birthday that was postmarked Detroit.

  Neither he nor his mother ever felt the need to search the man out. They shared a convenient, rationalistic pragmatism about nearly all things, and in their minds, Archer’s dad had simply chosen an option more appealing to him. They never talked about it, but the silence was an easy one.

  Archer traced a finger in the dirt on his mother’s white Honda Civic as he rolled slowly by and up the cracked driveway. He and Jason leaned the bikes against the small, detached garage, which housed Archer’s makeshift chemical lab and the remnants of every one of his mechanical experiments going back to early childhood.

  They entered through the laundry room and navigated two baskets of dirty clothes and stacks of books that the house could no longer contain in any orderly fashion. The Baucus home was stuffed with teetering columns of books. Archer’s mom taught junior high mathematics, and Archer’s general interest was science, but their shared and insatiable thirst for knowledge knew no bounds.

  Books about small engine repair covered the kitchen counter, theoretical physics adorned the bathroom, guides to nations they’d never visit occupied every bedroom. Books on collecting coins, stamps, comic books, baseball cards, antique dolls, McDonald’s toys, and PEZ dispensers cataloged hobbies neither had. Archer’s mom maintained a particular fondness for coffee table books—fine art, portraiture, landscapes, wildlife, and pop culture. If it was big and bulky and glossy, she wanted it.

  Mother and son eked out a meager existence on a schoolteacher’s salary and Archer’s part-time jobs repairing lawnmower equipment and tutoring classmates, and their only extravagance was books. Jason reckoned the Baucuses owned more tomes than the island’s public library. (They were not nearly as organized, however.)

  As they entered the dim and dusty kitchen, Jason yelled, “Mrs. Baucus?”

  Archer shot him an angry look.

  “What?” Jason said.

  But Archer didn’t explain.

  He walked across the dingy linoleum and onto the ancient brown carpet of the living room, looking about suspiciously as if he expected an intruder, not his mother. He pushed the power button on the tiny television. Nothing happened.

  Jason, still in the entryway between the kitchen and living room, flipped the light switch to no results either.

  Archer walked robotically to the downstairs bedroom where his mother slept. He knocked, then pushed the door open. The blank digital alarm clock stared back at him from the bedside table like a black eye. She wasn’t in the bathroom either.

  Archer came back to the living room and plopped down in silence on the couch.

  Jason said, “I’ll look upstairs.”

  He, of course, found it unoccupied, so he sat on the couch next to Archer, resigned to waiting out his friend’s mental exercise.

  Archer finally said, “There has to be a logical explanation for this.”

  “Yeah.”

  “People don’t just disappear. And with power out everywhere.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  As they crossed back through the kitchen, Archer said, “Hey, are you hungry?”

  “No, not really.”

  “Yeah, me neither.” He looked at the refrigerator. “All that stuff’s gonna go bad, though.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Archer looked at him, blinking.

  “Oh, right,” Jason said. “Electricity.”

  Archer’s brow furrowed, and he chewed his lips. “I keep thinking I’ve read something about this before, but I can’t remember where.”

  Jason couldn’t tell if he was more chagrined at not finding his mother or at not remembering some random text that might shed light on their mystery. He assumed the latter. Archer was ever the pragmatist.

  “Hey, look,” Archer said.

  “What?”

  “The clock.”

  Jason looked at the wall clock. “It’s not ticking. Guess your batteries are shot too.”

  “No. I mean, yeah, that too. But look at the time. It was 8:57 when the hands stopped moving.”

  “Huh. I wonder if that’s a.m. or p.m.”

  “Good question, but at least
we have some roundabout digits for what time the island shut down.”

  There was a spark in Archer’s eye now.

  Jason said, “Yeah, man.”

  Archer scratched his narrow chin.

  Jason stood. “Now let’s go check out that smoke.”

  Tim pondered a problem in the frozen foods section of the Bee Market. All those lovely pizzas and egg rolls spoiling for lack of refrigeration.

  “Dude,” Bradley said, “those things have enough nitrates in them to last till World War Ten.”

  “It’s nitrites, I think.”

  “Whatever. Are you hungry?”

  Tim retrieved a supreme pizza and examined the ingredients.

  Bradley opened a package of pizza bagels. “Pull,” he said, and he began throwing them through the air, pausing after each toss to mock shooting skeet. “Ka-bow!”

  Tim winced. “You’re making a mess.”

  Bradley snorted. “I would love for the cops to come arrest me, man. But you know what? Ain’t. Nobody. Here.”

  Tim shook his head and continued trying to parse the lesser ingredients on the pizza box.

  Bradley skipped a pizza bagel off Tim’s shoulder. Tim flinched but ignored it.

  “Baby Huey! Tienes hambre?”

  Tim didn’t look up but said, “No, I’m not hungry.”

  “Well, lo and behold, miracles happen! Look, if you’re not hungry, why are we hanging out here?”

  “Don’t you think we should get some food for later?”

  “Why, you think all the grocery stores are gonna disappear too?”

  “No. It’s just, it’s such a long walk.”

  “Well, I don’t think our pantries got raptured. So, we can always put the walk off until we run out of whatever we got at home.”

  Tim nodded. He returned the pizza but removed a couple of burritos.

  Bradley sighed. “I’m going over to the magazines. I think Anna Kournikova is in the new GQ.”

  “She’s gross,” Tim muttered.

  Bradley grinned but kept walking away. “Dude, them’s fightin’ words, but it’s too early in the day to kick your butt.”

  Tim had found his way past the registers to the candy machines by the front windows, and Bradley was still perusing the periodicals when a loud clang sounded from the back of the store.

  Both boys froze.

  Bradley’s mind stalled. It took him a second to register what he’d even heard. Finally, he yelled out, “Tim?”

  The reply came instantly. “Wasn’t me!”

  Both of them rushed to the back and met at the swivel doors by the butcher’s counter, which Bradley pushed through roughly. A big aluminum pot lay on the tile next to a metal cart.

  The boys looked at each other in wide-eyed wonder. Bradley put a finger to his lips to signal silence. Side by side, they crept about the long room, half of which served as storage, half of which served as the butcher’s workspace. The deep space opened up into more storage, an employee breakroom, and then offices that led to a rear exit.

  Bradley jogged toward it and burst out. A thin strip of pavement served as the back lot, but beyond the curb lay an embankment rising up to a curtain of trees. On either end of the store, smatterings of small businesses stood.

  “Shoot,” he said.

  Tim caught up. “No way to tell?”

  “No. Could’ve gone anywhere. But at least we know not everybody’s gone.”

  “Yeah. But it could’ve been one of them.”

  “Who?”

  “Whoever did all this.”

  Bradley scanned the tree line. “That’s assuming,” he said, “that somebody did all this. We don’t know what happened. They could’ve been someone like us, but who’s just scared.”

  Tim asked, “You wanna go check out the woods?” But his face indicated hope for a negative.

  Bradley obliged. “I’d like to, but all we’ve got is a knocked-over pot and no sign of where they went. Might not have even gone into the woods, but if they did, they’ve got a pretty good head start on us. I say we just stick with the program.”

  Jason and Archer traveled south along the island’s western coast, between Archer’s neighborhood and the forest where they saw the smoke. The path rose and fell and wound through dense woodlands and around the town’s unofficial hotel district. They passed four bed-and-breakfasts and five country inns, all of which were booked fairly steadily throughout the non-winter months with tourists seeking the romance and grandeur of Pacific Northwest island life. The boys stopped at the first two bed-and-breakfasts to snoop around, but they didn’t expect to find anybody, and they didn’t. After that, they bypassed the other inns, despite the abundance of cars in the small parking lots. Still, they saw no one. And as there were no large buildings left on the long stretch from the lighthouse to the southwestern woods, they beelined for the woods.

  The arduous ride through the woods lasted forty-five minutes, and then they rode for thirty minutes on the bike trail that lay just inside the forest park. The far end of the park ended where the trails did—against a dense wall of trees and brush that even the rangers didn’t monitor.

  “There bears in there?” Jason asked.

  “Probably,” said Archer. “But I’ve never seen one. You ever seen one on the island?”

  “Just once, when we were driving through the park when I was a kid. But I’ve never hung out in these woods either.”

  “I think the worst danger in these woods is probably getting lost.”

  “Or maybe a rabid raccoon.”

  Archer nodded, not registering the joke. “Come on,” he said.

  They laid their bicycles down and walked through the high sylvan curtain. Past the initial brushy overlay bordering the wildwoods from the bike trails, the ground ran relatively smoothly, although in a gentle upward grade. They stepped over rocks and around moss and weaved in and out of both fallen and towering trees hundreds of years older than the town.

  Through juniper, oak, pine, and birch, they hiked up the wet, grassy mounds in the direction of the clear sea air. Although he was the more rugged of the two, Jason followed Archer. They weren’t hiking so much as investigating, and anybody would have followed Archer’s lead on such a case.

  Suddenly, Archer stopped and raised his bony hand to command silence.

  Jason listened. Then he whispered, “What?”

  Archer didn’t answer, but his face puzzled.

  And then, breaking through the silence of the woods came a low, moaning roar.

  When it stopped, Jason waited a beat and then said, “What was that? A whale?”

  “A whale? I don’t think so,” Archer scoffed.

  “Are we close to the water?”

  “Not close enough to hear a whale.”

  “Another mystery to solve.”

  “Right,” Archer chuckled. “Come on, let’s keep going.”

  When the ridge seemed to level out, they faced denser woods. The upper boughs of the tall trees interlocked arms, darkening as they rose. Only splinters of light fell through, and the air looked hazy and vaguely golden. Every creaking branch and swirl of leaves spooked them, and they found themselves whirling about at the slightest sound.

  “Do you know where you’re going?” Jason said.

  “Why are you whispering?”

  “I don’t know. We don’t know who’s in these woods, or who’s making that fire.”

  Archer whispered back, “Okay. No, I don’t know where I’m going. I’m not sure if we’re even close to that house, or whatever it is. I’m just assuming the smoke came from a chimney, remember. But even if it is, and even if we are close to it, I hope that if somebody’s there, they will hear us and come out. Don’t you?”

  “I guess,” said Jason. “Unless . . . I mean, what if it’s someone we don’t want
to meet?”

  “I don’t know what you’ve got in your head, but I really doubt terrorists or serial killers or whatever it is you’re imagining would light a cozy fire to alert everyone to their location. Look, the minute we stop thinking logically about this thing is the minute we stop figuring it out.”

  “Whatever. Let’s just keep going.”

  Archer resumed the lead on his improvised trail. “My plan,” he said over his shoulder, “is to get to the coastline at the end of the woods and search along it. If there’s a house or a ranger’s station or anything else out here, it more than likely overlooks the beach.”

  “Makes sense,” Jason said, but inside, he was begrudging Archer’s customarily emotionless analytical mode.

  They hiked another thirty minutes under the stifling wooden cloisters, and then, the boughs seemed to gradually open up. They could hear the ocean for fifteen minutes before they could see it, but eventually, they stood upon a rocky ledge overlooking a thirty-foot drop to the gray sands of the beach.

  “There’s the smoke,” Archer said. And there it was indeed, trailing a thin line into the sky about two hundred yards north, the direction from which they’d come.

  Jason pushed past Archer and began traipsing the perilous line between the woods and the cliff.

  “Watch your step, man,” Archer said.

  He crept behind on his spindly legs, and eventually, they came upon a stone cottage peeking out of the forest. A picture window overlooked a panoramic view of the Pacific Ocean, but dark curtains had been drawn across it.

  Archer pointed at the slate-shingled roof upon which sat a red chimney, the source of that line of smoke still listing into the air like the end of a dying cigar.

  Jason led the way to the door, a large expanse of wood with a latch handle instead of a knob. “Should we go in?”

  “We could knock,” Archer said, reaching past him to rap on the door.

  When there was no answer, they looked at each other expectantly, and Archer knocked again, much louder this time.

  “Hello?” he called out.

  Jason put a cheek against the window, trying to see through the gap between the drapes and the inside wall. “It’s dark in there, man. I don’t think anyone’s home.”