RUNAWAY MOON

by Howard Brian Edgar

  “First light tomorrow?”

  After agreeing to accompany Hannibal to Jake’s lair, Alex shares their plan with Jessa and Deuce.

  “I want to go,” begs Deuce.

  “No way, I don’t want you anywhere near that hellhole,” says Jessa emphatically. The last thing she wants is exposing her now sixteen-year-old son to whatever dark remnants remain of the four Jakes’ way of life inside their cave.

  “Mom’s right Deuce. Besides, you need to stay here and look after Samson, keep him out of trouble.”

  Reluctantly, Deuce resigns himself to staying behind.

  Not long after first light, Alex and Hannibal arrive at the charred remains of Jake’s last campfire next to the lake. Seeing it again, this exact place where he and Satin made first contact with the four Jakes, sends a shiver up Hannibal’s spine. It’s almost as if their malevolence is still poisoning the air molecules around him.

  “This is where we found them,” says Hannibal. He gazes up into the hills and locates the mouth of the cave where he suspected the Jakes had lived. He points it out to Alex. “I’m almost sure that’s their place right there.”

  So Alex follows him three-quarters of the way up the hill until they reach the cave mouth. They stop, scan the outside looking for evidence of the cave’s former inhabitants and find the telltale footprints left by the Jakes in the dirt and dust of the cave mouth.

  “Yup, this is it,” says Hannibal as he crouches to study the dozens of shoe prints and partial footprints in the dirt just outside the cave mouth. Alex crouches beside him, compares their footprints to his.

  “Big feet.”

  Both men stand and peer inside.

  “Big cave,” says Hannibal. “I once read that thirty million Chinese people lived in caves. I wonder how many of them survived The Crash.”

  “I hope it was more than twenty-two,” says Alex.

  “Well, let’s hope we don’t have to fight them.”

  They enter, giving their eyes some time to adjust to the dimmed light inside. To their surprise, the innermost section of the cave is bathed in rays of light streaming down from above.

  “Must be some kind of vent to the ridge,” Alex speculates. He walks toward the brightest shaft of light and looks straight up. “There it is.”

  Hannibal stares up at the jagged opening directly overhead.

  “Damn, I’ve always wanted a cave with a skylight.”

  Along with having a natural sunroof, the cave is quite large inside with a main area near the cave entrance and three distinct spaces with partial rock walls that approximate separate rooms inside. There are torches jammed into rock crevices throughout the cave, handy for lighting the interior rooms at night. Hannibal finds his matches, lights one of the torches, pulls it from the wall and carries it slowly through the cave’s rooms with Alex right behind him in search of anything that might be useful to them.

  They find themselves in what must have been the Jakes’ sleeping quarters. There are several bearskin blankets, old terrycloth towels and four US Army-issued mess kits complete with their own eating utensils. There are two axes, a hatchet, a regular saw with large brown stains on the charred wooden handle, plus a lumberjack-strength hacksaw with fresh wood shavings still stuck to its serrated blade. The tools look older than Jake. Probably belonged to his father. Probably were rescued by Jake himself from the deadly fire he set that destroyed his parents’ cabin. Somehow, even at six years old, Jake had enough sense to know he would need tools someday.

  “Excellent,” says Alex holding up the saws. “The Emerald Bay Colony building industry just advanced a couple hundred thousand years.”

  “We’ll have to wash their DNA off these blankets but we can definitely use them if it gets any colder. Just don’t tell Satin where we found them. She’s still spooked about the whole ordeal.” Hannibal gathers the bearskin blankets, sets them down and fashions them into a sling around the tools.

  They drag everything from the sleeping quarters to the next room. From the looks of it, this room was the Jakes’ kitchen and dining area. There’s an old wood dining table and four wood chairs in the center, a wood-burning stove and a six-foot-long, two-foot-wide aluminum trough along one wall. There’s also a shallow wooden bucket filled with coarse salt for curing and storing meat, and there’s a pile of bones from a variety of large and small animals stacked on the ground not far from the table.

  “So this is where they ate,” says Hannibal, holding the torch closer for a better look at the bones. He reaches and picks up one particularly large straight bone and holds the torch closer.

  “That looks like a human femur,” says Alex.

  Hannibal abruptly drops the bone back into the pile as if it’s burning his hand. He can’t get rid of it fast enough. The colliding bones sound like crashing bowling pins.

  “Okay, that’s creepy,” says Hannibal.

  “I’m glad Deuce isn’t here to see this.”

  Then, in the torchlight Alex notices two cardboard shoeboxes near the bone pile. There’s a dusty old Polaroid camera that hasn’t been moved in years perched on top of the shoeboxes. The layer of dust around it must be a half-inch thick.

  “I wonder what’s in the shoeboxes,” says Alex, his curiosity getting the better of him.

  “Only one way to find out,” says Hannibal. He brushes off the dust, grabs the camera, lifts it away from the shoeboxes and sets it on the table. He inadvertently presses the power button. There’s an audible click and the camera motor suddenly whirs to life. They are both startled when the ancient Polaroid comes to life, spits out a little puff of dust along with the last image ever taken with it.

  Alex and Hannibal stare at each other, then at the slowly developing image on the table then back at each other again. As the image becomes clearer, they see an adult female surrounded by three boys. Her naked body is pale and blue and lying facedown in the sleeping area. The boys are stripped bare from the waist down, grinning and holding their manhood proudly over her swollen, scarred blue buttocks and her head.

  “Oh my God,” says Hannibal. He grabs the shoeboxes, sets them on the table next to the camera and removes the tops. They are filled with Polaroid photos Jake took when Ella was still alive. The first few show her standing with the three boys, a family portrait. The boys are smiling. Ella is not.

  The images get progressively worse as Alex thumbs through them. Some show Ella with her blouse undone, the boys suckling hungrily at her breasts. Others show her in various stages of undress while the four Jakes prod and poke her like a human sex toy.

  “I’m really glad Deuce didn’t see this.” Alex shakes his head in disgust. “He wanted to come, but Jessa stopped him.”

  “Good call for Jessa,” says Hannibal.

  The poor woman in the snapshots must have been their mother. Alex feels the nausea suddenly rising from the pit of his stomach. He shoves the last Polaroid quickly into its box. He covers both boxes and tosses them back on the floor, a family photo collection so depraved, so pornographic, unlike anything Alex has ever seen. The images, graphic proof of the evil that gripped Jake and his sons before they died, would have made great evidence for the prosecution at trial ... if only there had been one. Emerald Bay Colony had made its choice. They didn’t need a court system, a judge or a jury trial to convict the four Jakes. Putting them to death was completely, inarguably justified.

  “No one else should ever see these,” says Hannibal.

  “I wish I could un-see them,” says Alex. He stands back, watches as Hannibal torches the shoeboxes and the camera. The flames lick up the cave walls and light the kitchen for several minutes with multicolored sparks from the old photo emulsions, finally melting the old camera. The photos burn down into tiny black curls of Polaroid paper before turning to crumbling grey ash.

  It takes Hannibal and Alex several minutes to gather themselves. Despite their eighty-plus years of combined life experience, they have never witnessed anything quite like this. It has to be the abso
lute lowest Homo sapiens could possibly sink on the evolutionary scale.

  “You should feel vindicated,” says Alex after a long silence.

  “I learned to trust my instincts as a kid. They’re always right.”

  “Even when Marcus doubted you.”

  “He should know me better,” laughs Hannibal.

  They find Jake’s remaining M-16 ammunition, four boxes of 5.56 mm rounds and a spare banana clip, along with a bucket of recently collected pine nuts and seeds. They gather the blankets, tools, mess kits, ammunition and bucket of food then head home with their bounty and a palpable sense of closure.

  “We did the right thing,” says Alex.

  “Really,” says Hannibal grinning. “Nothing but good times ahead now.”

  Lake Tahoe is twenty-two miles long and eleven miles wide, Emerald Bay only a tiny fraction of that. Even on overcast nights with no mist over the lake, a fire would still be visible to the naked eye for at least a few miles, like Jake’s fire. On a rare clear night, Hannibal could probably spot flames all the way at the northern end of the lake, if only they were there. Tonight, like every other night since the Jakes’ demise, he and Satin scan the lake in search of new campfires, hoping that if they find one, the responsible humans will be vastly more hospitable than the Jakes. Until now, Hannibal and Satin have not ventured beyond five or six miles of the southwestern corner, which leaves them with most of the lake still to explore.

  “We haven’t seen a spark since the Jakes,” says Hannibal.

  “Just as well,” says Satin.

  “Come on. Do you really think we’d ever find more like them?”

  “Disasters make people do strange shit, Hannibal. Who knows what we’ll find under these godforsaken conditions?”

  “I’m just curious. Is Emerald Bay Colony really the last of Lake Tahoe’s survivors? Hard to imagine us being the only ones left in all of California, Nevada or the western United States.”

  “Or the world,” says Satin.

  It’s been months since they fought the Jakes. Nothing at all has happened since. No signs of other survivors. Just a long string of grey, nondescript days and nights helping them settle back into routines. They share the tools they recovered from Jake’s cave, spoils of their brief, bloody war, to reinforce and rebuild their shelters.

  Rachel uses Jake’s axes and saws to cut pinewood to size and frame out front and back doorways and small windows, turning her shelter into a small but stylish log cabin, easily the handsomest of all the shelters in Emerald Bay Colony.

  “Always wanted a log cabin.” Rachel swings the axe as well as any man, while Ankur stands off to one side studying her every move. He can’t help but marvel at her skill, her well-defined arms and her rippling shoulder muscles or the fact that she reminds him of a Swedish farm girl with mad survival skills.

  “Watching you makes me think I should have joined a commune,” says Ankur. “I could have learned survival skills instead of rocks.”

  “You’ll learn faster by doing something than watching it.” Rachel winks at him and hands him the hacksaw. “Get to work, slacker.”

  Sam Hayden’s shortwave radio has been silent for months, leaving him wondering about conditions in Africa, Asia and Europe or the island nations of Australia and New Zealand. For Sam, it has always been about the big picture. He wonders how many souls remain to be counted on planet Earth. He wonders how much time twenty-two of them have left if the Pacific continues rising. How much time before he has to warn the others of yet another threat to their existence?

  It has been weeks since he last accompanied Deuce, Eric and Donnie up to Sugar Pine Point. Nothing had changed then, so Sam decided they could cut back to monthly sea level checks. After a dozen or so trips to the mountain, Sam’s legs began feeling too old, his occasional hip pain becoming constant hip pain, so he was relieved about making fewer trips. Besides, he had helped the boys rig up a more accurate, easy-to-use measuring device using leftover supplies from his cabin. They can take their own readings without him.

  Except for Deuce, they don’t want to. Eric and Donnie don’t want to spend possibly their last days on Earth worried about an ocean twenty miles away. Deuce, however, can think of little else. He considers going to Sugar Pine Point solo or taking Samson along for company, but he doesn’t want to explain his absence or arouse suspicion.

  Mateo, a year younger than Deuce, has fallen in with the three older boys. Together they have become nearly inseparable, with Mateo willingly adapting to his servile role of surrogate little brother and gofer.

  “You guys need anything?” Mateo seems desperate for something to do.

  “Some sunshine would be righteous,” says Eric. Nearing his eighteenth birthday, he is the oldest of the four, just a few months ahead of Donnie.

  Deuce had turned sixteen with little fanfare back in late December. Alex and Jessa had gifted him with a serrated Bowie-style hunting knife and a nanotech sheath donated by Hannibal from one of his many foraging expeditions. It wasn’t much, but Deuce cherished it and kept it fastened to the belt at his side all the time, even when he slept.

  “Sorry,” says Mateo. “Only God can bring the sun.”

  “You really believe there’s a God?” asks Donnie, filled with doubt.

  “Of course,” says Mateo. “I’m just not sure there’s a sun.”

  The boys laugh, survivalist humor.

  The responsibility for bringing a sense of normalcy to life at Emerald Bay falls to the adults. By unanimous vote, they decide the eight surviving children should receive education in the subjects that matter to their survival: earth science, astronomy, building with natural materials, edible plants, even terraforming. The school sessions last about four hours each day, although no one really knows for sure since there’s no way to tell time, no sun moving across the sky. For four days each week, Sam, Ankur, Rachel and Meg tag-team the teaching duties.

  Rachel teaches yoga and natural building and farming techniques, which attracts most of the men plus Julia, who attends in Sam’s place. When he’s not teaching, Sam prefers fishing by himself, quiet time to ponder why the Pacific Ocean has risen over three-thousand feet in just a few months.

  Deuce obsesses over the same thing. What really bothers him is his premonition and frequent nightmares about runaway sea level rise, living on a liquid world. Hastily, he excuses himself. “Good luck wishing for sun. Maybe Professor Hayden knows where it is. Catch you guys later.” He is overwhelmed by his curiosity and fear, and has no one to talk to. Eric and Donnie are with Mateo. Ankur is teaching the little kids about rocks and Alex is still off limits.

  That leaves Sam. So Deuce heads straight to Sam’s favorite fishing spot, finds him sitting on the same fallen log close to the water’s edge in the middle of the same sandy half-hidden beach near the mouth of Lake Tahoe. Deuce plops onto the log next to him, begins peppering him with questions.

  “Okay, Professor, if the Pacific is way up, does that mean the Atlantic is way down?” Deuce hopes he will say yes.

  “I’m afraid not, Deuce. Most of the big debris from The Crash landed in the Atlantic. Between the rising sea level and eight-hundred-foot tsunamis, the East Coast, from Massachusetts to Miami Beach, is long gone. I’ll bet anything that the Atlantic has risen, too. My big fear is that the Pacific Plate is cracked.”

  “I don’t get how that would make the ocean rise. Wouldn’t it just fill in the crack and make some waves?”

  Sam chuckles at the notion of the mighty Pacific Ocean gently filling a crack and making a few waves.

  “You’re thinking small-scale. I’m talking about an unimaginably massive shifting of the world’s largest ocean and the world’s largest tectonic plate.”

  “Oh,” says Deuce trying to picture the calamity on a much grander scale. “Do you think there are other survivors, Professor?”

  “Blind faith tells me there have to be, though I find myself feeling less confident with each passing day.”

  Deuce shrugs.
“I still haven’t told anyone, not even my dad. It’s killing me. I don’t think I can hold out much longer.”

  “Then you should tell him and nobody else but him. If he wants to know more, he can come talk to me. Fair enough?”

  Relieved knowing he can tell Alex without guilt, Deuce stands to leave. “Thanks, Professor Hayden.”

  “You’re a good kid, Deuce. From now on, call me Sam.”

  “Sure thing, Sam,” Deuce shoots him a devilish grin. “From now on, call me Professor Jacks.”

  “Well, Professor, do me a ginormous favor and stop worrying about the sea level. It’s going to do whatever it does. We’re going to do whatever it takes to survive. We need intelligence to solve this, not emotion,” says Sam with a wink.

  Deuce’s lesson for the day: In a crisis, intelligence trumps emotion. That’s how Emerald Bay Colony trumped the four Jakes. They outsmarted them. Deuce is left wondering how many more disasters they will have to outsmart.

  Part Three – The Flood

  Chapter 13

  March 28, 2030

  It’s the first real rain since years before The Crash, a warm steady rain bringing much warmer temperatures. Alex is the first to feel the twenty-degree warm-up, a heavy blanket of tropical air as the leading edge of the front arrives. Only the altitude makes the added heat bearable.

  The rain scrubs the air clean of the last remaining moon dust and particulates that have lingered since The Crash. By the following day, after a dry pause lasting several hours, the survivors set about reinforcing their rooftops and sidewalls with layers of pine branches and needles, making stronger water barriers.

  The Jacks’ family shelter already has alternating layers of burlap and pine needles on its roof to keep rain water out, so Alex and Deuce sit comfortably in the ‘living room’ and watch the rain begin anew.

  “Well, this is different.” Alex watches the rainfall on the bay and the surrounding Sierra Nevada Mountains.

  “Just like Sam said it would be,” says Deuce.

  “When did he say that?”