Echo Island

by Jared C. Wilson

  Archer had to kick the door in, which was a feat in itself given his scrawny legs. Once inside, he found the darkness frustrating. The murkiness outside shrouded the room from daylight. In the dim haze and with feeling hands, he could tell that the walls were hung with broad metal boxes. He figured they held fuses and circuit breakers. He expected a large control panel and a desk layout with chairs and monitors. There may have been a manual of some sort in there, but he’d need more light to find it. It bugged him immensely that to understand the thing, he needed the help of the thing itself.

  Back in the yard he wandered among the transformers, imagining what it might feel like with the current active. He imagined his skin tingling, every hair on his body standing at attention. In the lingering fog, the towers were an eerie monument to industrialization, a sleek steel Stonehenge memorializing a silence and a stillness they used to eradicate.

  Archer was a fan of lines, of connections and congruencies, of right angles, of symmetry. Despite the chaotic décor of his home, he desired patterns, discernible trajectories, textures with referents. As with all things, he viewed art with a mathematic straightforwardness. He loved the idea of a system, which is why he felt comfortable in the company of the transformers.

  Despite knowing full well no current flowed, he hesitated to touch them.

  Though he couldn’t see even ten feet in any direction, Archer could hear the whisper of the waves brushing the stones at the bottom of the grade outside the yard. Unless Echo Island hosted another power station he’d never seen, the power came from the mainland, no doubt in huge cables under the ocean running through the ground beneath his feet. If restoring the power was possible, Archer trusted the responsible authorities would see to it. He wasn’t keen on rowing out to the mainland that Bradley said didn’t exist anymore.

  Not there. As if such a thing were possible.

  He found it impossible to follow the wires. He couldn’t see them. He’d been walking in fifteen feet of visibility for going on forty-five minutes, with only the occasional hint of cable above him—high, high above him—and not only did he not think he’d find a real power plant, he didn’t think he could find his way back.

  Archer had journeyed across countless streets but never saw street signs. He followed electric poles until they led up grassy slopes or into other places that he didn’t feel like navigating the bike through. Occasionally, he’d board a sidewalk and register his location by the sign on a door or window, but he’d long since wandered into undeveloped wooded areas. They were parks maybe, or just the acres and acres of Pacific Northwest forest, miles and miles of Echo Island scenic routes.

  Something occurred to him while on this trek, albeit briefly. If a sudden, say, rapture-like event had vanished everyone, why didn’t anything on the island seem interrupted? Sure, traffic would be sparse on a Sunday morning, but the sudden and surprise interruption of life might have left a crashed car here and there. There’d be litter in the streets, food left out on tables uneaten. Even if the event had caused no structural or environmental damage, it would have at least left signs of life interrupted. The island looked the same as it always had, but the actual signs of life, of activity, were gone with the inhabitants. It was like a stage set for a play that hadn’t begun.

  It was a reset, he thought.

  But the thought didn’t fit, not yet, so he filed it away and instead tried to figure out where he was walking.

  Bradley changed his mind when he and Tim got to the Bee Market.

  “I’m gonna walk down to the liquor store,” he said.

  “Why? It’s not open.”

  “Everything’s open, dude.”

  Tim puckered, then frowned. “That’s stealing.”

  “I’ll keep a log, how ’bout that? With all my purchases. So, when Jesus comes back with everybody after the Tribulation, I can pay the liquor store guy what I owe.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  Tim stuck his hand in the gap between the market’s once-electric doors and pried them open. He said, “I’m not going to look around in those woods by myself.”

  “I don’t blame you. Come with, if you want then.”

  Tim pushed the right door back on its track.

  Bradley said, “Or hang out in the market. I’ll meet you over there later.”

  Tim walked into the shadowy Bee Market, leaving Bradley there smirking like a fool, oblivious to the fog engulfing him.

  Inside the Bee Market, the faint whiff of rot tickled Tim’s nostrils. Meat had begun to spoil, dairy to sour. The lack of refrigeration and irrigation left an earthy reek hanging over the produce section.

  He first located matches near the picnic items, then lit all six kerosene lanterns found in the small housewares section and scattered them strategically at six equidistant points around the store. The light was sparse.

  Tim took one up and wandered the aisles slowly, unnerved by the sound of his own breathing. Maybe he’d made a mistake going in alone. The store was awfully dark.

  A shuffled footstep squealed on the tile, and he gave himself goosebumps.

  Rounding the corner of the breakfast aisle, he came to the meat cases on the back wall, where the odor lingered strongly and the swinging butcher’s door stood waiting.

  That’s where the other person had been. Maybe he still wasn’t alone.

  It took him five minutes to muster the will to push the door open. His hand shook, shining a jittery beam into the dark room. Heart pounding, Tim crept through the room, past the break room and office, and into the pitch-black storage room. It stunk of turning meat.

  The exit door lay ahead, and by his feet (but out of his view) lay the fallen pot, the pot of the clang that had originally alerted Bradley and him to another presence.

  His next step sent it skittering across the floor. The clanging was unnerving. Tim winced.

  When the pot finally rattled to a stop, the only thing louder in his head than the metallic echo of its course was his heartbeat. He stifled imminent hyperventilation.

  The wall of clouds outside the back door did not appeal to him at all. He reentered the store and walked the aisles again, looking at boxes and bags like someone tours art in a museum.

  Tim wasn’t hungry, but food—packaged food—appealed to his psychological and emotional appetites. He lost track of time staring passively at rows of geometric rainbows—boxes and cartons forming bright pixels in a Technicolor display. Here was where Tim was most comfortable. Here was where Tim would have stayed forever if he could have.

  Before smashing the glass on the door to the liquor store, Bradley tried the handle and found it unlocked.

  Callisto Liquors was painted hunter green and had brass trim and windows that were either tinted or very dusty. The store centered a five-store strip mall collectively dubbed The Shops at Echo Point. While each storefront maintained a unique look, they were all connected by a common utility hall in the rear. The architecture revealed a vague attempt at a scene of Dickensian charm: the chocolatier and the stationery store both spelled shop “shoppe,” and there was a Tea Pantry and a used bookstore called Pickwick’s Paperbacks.

  Inside Callisto Liquors, Bradley surveyed all the bottles. So many options and nobody to card him. The mystery of the missing adults had this intriguing upside. Something inside him trembled at the notion of lifted limitations. He could quite possibly do whatever he wanted now.

  It bothered him that he’d probably have to drink alone. Or with Tim, who wasn’t that much fun. He had taken a bottle from his father’s stash on the camping trip, but none of the other guys wanted to partake. Maybe now that they weren’t in danger of getting in trouble with anybody, he could convince them to let loose. But then, it bothered him that they weren’t really in danger of getting in trouble either. What’s the point if there’s no one to watch? No one to catch you?

  The cedars and sycamores
gave way to steel-beamed giants, and Archer was happy to see he’d been following the wires even though he couldn’t see them through the fog. He still held out hope that he could make sense of the thing at their convergence.

  He strode among the tall legs of the stickmen who held up the island’s electric current on their cloud-shrouded shoulders. After an hour of walking tower to tower, having left streets behind, he had no idea what part of the island he was on. Electric line towers weren’t things he normally thought to look for; they were always in the background.

  The grass flicked dew onto his bare ankles. Down a slope, Archer journeyed into a wide bowl in the earth from which the fog seemed to lift. To his left he could see the white line of a curb, and he diverted from his previous trajectory along the electric towers to investigate.

  The curb bordered a parking lot, and Archer walked up the asphalt incline to discover the Echo Island Historical Center, a small museum of island artifacts, legends, and lore that doubled as a tourist information center. Outside the heavy black door stood a statue of a bearded man in turn-of-the-century seaman’s garb, mist clinging to his arms and torso like white streamers. He held a lantern in his left hand and a set of keys in his right. A silver plate on the pedestal read: virgil grosset, founder of echo island, 1895.

  Archer had visited the center only once on a fourth-grade field trip. He hadn’t thought of the place in ages, but he vividly recalled a young Bradley Hershon performing chin-ups on Virgil Grosset’s stone arms. He also remembered looking at the framed, yellowed maps on the wall with Jason.

  The door was unlocked.

  The view outside Jason’s bedroom window was stark white. His pillow lay damp with tears under his cheek. Raising his stiff body from the bed, he shuffled to the door.

  On the landing he called, “Hello?”

  Downstairs he saw that his friends were still gone.

  In the kitchen he stared at the food in the pantry but didn’t feel hungry enough to eat anything. The faint smell of food turning in the dead fridge made him queasy.

  He leaned against the counter by the sink. The clock was still stuck at 8:56.

  He shoved his hands in his pockets. His left fist touched something, and he removed the crumpled note from his mother to his father. He flattened it out between his palms, running it over the edge of the counter to iron out the wrinkles. He put it back under its magnet on the refrigerator door.

  Jason’s solitude suddenly felt like vulnerability. He didn’t like that feeling, so he decided to pedal out to the Bee Market to look for Tim and Bradley.

  Halfway down Royal Garden, he hopped off his bike to walk instead. The fog was so dense it just didn’t feel safe speeding along.

  Just outside the big brick Royal Garden subdivision sign, he cut right across the soccer field bordering the church, assuming he was saving time and energy. The wet grass itched his legs. One hundred yards later, he realized he should have followed the ditch he encountered left instead of right. The gravestone was the first indication.

  He’d wound up around the far side of the church, between the rear parking lot and the woods that circled Cutter Pond like a garland. He’d wandered into the church’s old cemetery.

  They didn’t bury bodies there anymore; the most recent burial had been in 1968. Ever since, the church had interred its departed with the rest of Echo Island’s dead in the cemetery that, since the late 1950s, had begun inching its way into the windswept ocean vista of Minuai Fields on the island’s west coast.

  Lost in an old graveyard in a disorienting fog. Creepy.

  Jason stopped and tried to regain his bearings. The stuff was so thick, he couldn’t tell which way lay the church and which, the pond. He figured that the grave inscriptions faced the church, so he walked that way. The world was silent, but not quite. His steps squished on the wet grass, but there was something else.

  Someone else?

  He stopped, and the other sound—footsteps?—continued.

  He couldn’t discern the origin.

  He turned around and around, careful not to make another sound.

  His blood ran cold.

  He craned his neck, wincing in anticipation of what terrible thing he might see. In the fog over his right shoulder, about ten feet away, a vein of mist appeared to shimmy snakelike into its own opacity. It was just a wisp, but it was distinct.

  He swallowed, put his hands up as if to defend himself and followed it slowly, searching for that movement.

  It stayed just barely out of sight. In the near distance, enshrouded in a more stationary haze, it was like a strip of fog had become a swirl of ribbon.

  Then it vanished.

  Jason stopped.

  He listened.

  He heard nothing.

  His arms tingled with gooseflesh. The hair on his neck stood up. He was just about to sprint into the billows when a young woman in a flowing white dress suddenly passed before him and disappeared.

  7

  GHOST TOWN

  Bradley loaded a heavy sack of liquor bottles into a backpack he’d found in the stock room. Tim, who had finally left the Bee Market to rejoin his friend, stood there dumbly, staring at him.

  “What?” Bradley said, annoyed.

  “Do you really think you should be doing this?”

  “Look, Baby Huey, this may be the end of the world. I intend to have one last party.”

  He went behind the counter and began rifling through the shelves beneath.

  “What are you doing?” Tim said.

  “Looking for a corkscrew.”

  Bradley stopped, staring at the space within the counter. His face looked blank.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Tim.

  “You know,” Bradley said. “I bet they had a gun back here.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I don’t know. It just reminds me of where, like, convenience stores keep their guns.”

  “I doubt they had a gun. There’s not crime like that on the island.”

  Bradley sighed, thinking. “You know, the police station’s not far from here. Just a ways up the road. We never checked it.”

  “Bradley, if you’re saying you want to find a gun, I think it’s a bad idea.”

  “Dude, we are not alone out here, and if whoever we heard kidnapped everybody else, we’re going to need protection, don’t you think?”

  “First you want to get hammered. Then you want to get armed. Sounds brilliant.”

  Bradley did not like when Tim pushed back. “Maybe you should mind your own business,” he said.

  “Well, I’m not walking to the police station. Let’s go back to Jason’s.”

  “Dude, you’re killing me!”

  It never took much to convince Tim that what Bradley wanted was more important than what he did. So Tim sighed, which Bradley interpreted as compliance.

  They walked uphill into the fog, Tim lagging behind in a steady rhythm of huffs and puffs. Bradley increased his pace.

  The Echo Island City Police Headquarters building was not large. A lobby, a set of office cubicles, a locker room, an evidence room and armory, and a five-cell jail all occupied about two thousand square feet of space. They were tight quarters, to be sure, but Tim was right about the island’s near nonexistent crime element—public intoxication and teenage vandalism were the most common offenses. So the station did not frequently require full capacity of either offices or inmates.

  The place looked oddly clean and organized. It did not look as if anyone had left in a hurry. Desks were clear and orderly, chairs pushed in and straightened. There were no half-empty coffee cups laying about, no errant pens or paperwork. The tile floors looked recently waxed. A decrepit dot matrix printer dangled exactly one perforated section of paper neatly from its spindles, a squat white tongue mocking them.

  Th
e two steel doors leading to the jail were open, as were the cell doors.

  “Hey, go in there for a second,” Bradley joked.

  “Uh-huh. And then you wouldn’t be able to find the key.”

  “You could just eat your way out, all Cookie Monster and whatnot.”

  Tim shot him a look, like very funny.

  “Oh, hey,” said Bradley, “Keys are right there.” A wide silver loop holding five fat keys hung on a hook right inside the second entry door.

  Tim started to leave. “Let’s go, man.”

  Bradley followed him back into the station house but said, “Hold up a minute.”

  He crossed the labyrinth of open offices in the main room, stopping once to lift a heavy, black belt off a table to see its holster held no firearm. He then passed through a door marked in white stenciled letters, evidence / armory / maintenance.

  Tim waited and watched, and eventually Bradley returned, obviously distraught.

  “What’s up?” Tim said.

  “This door’s been busted open. And there aren’t any guns in there. None. Not even a TASER. No ammo. Nothing.”

  “Um . . .”

  “Why would they be gone, man? Who would take all the guns?”

  Tim couldn’t tell if Bradley was scared or just disappointed that he didn’t get to pack any heat. “I think we should head back.”

  “Yeah,” Bradley said, definitely more concerned now than disappointed. “Yeah, okay.”

  Jason was sure it was a girl and not a ghost. Or maybe a ghost-girl. But it wasn’t a trick of the fog. He entertained that theory for only a second. No. He had clearly seen a girl in a white dress pass in front of him.

  “Hello,” he said quietly, too quietly, almost as if he didn’t want her to hear.

  He couldn’t hear her footsteps anymore and now he said it louder: “Hello.” Firm, stern, making sure to sound like a man who could fight a ghost if he needed to. Just a little bit louder, he said, “I saw you.”