The Only Ones

by Aaron Starmer

  It started off as thrilling for Martin as it had ever been, but as the summer went on, he began to wonder what else there was in the world besides what George was telling him about. Martin had no idea what video games were, but they sounded soulless and flat to him. Soccer seemed like an intriguing sport at first, but then he realized that nothing happened. And school? It must be something other than just pranks played on substitute teachers and gossip involving invitations to birthday parties. Martin’s father had been out beyond the ocean for over a month. There had to be something bigger keeping him there.

  “Do you know anyone else’s stories?” Martin asked George.

  “What do you mean?” George said. “Like books and stuff?”

  “You have books?”

  “Sure,” George said with a shrug. “I’ll bring you one.”

  So he did. The next night, George presented Martin with a ratty paperback with a picture of a pistol and a pair of broken eyeglasses on the cover. Martin took it home, and over the course of the next day, he read the entire thing.

  The plot centered on a police detective who was investigating the kidnapping of a child. It didn’t make much sense to Martin, but all the voices of the characters were endlessly fascinating. In this book there were people who grunted and cackled when they talked, who sneered and whispered and said inappropriate things. They were nothing like his father and nothing like George or the people he constantly talked about.

  “You have any other books?” Martin asked George.

  “I don’t read much, but my parents have tons,” George said. The next night he gave Martin another.

  It became an addiction. At first, he took one book a night from George, but after a couple of weeks, he was demanding three or four. All day he would sit on the rock outcropping and read about pirates and doctors and magicians and lots of people who kissed and lots of people who killed and lots of people whose lives changed in an instant. As far as Martin was concerned, all the books were classics, because they were all full of such surprises. They distracted him from life.

  The meetings with George became less about friendship than they were about exchanging books. By the end of the summer, George didn’t even bother leaving his yard. He would simply place an old wooden lobster pot full of books next to the flagpole, and Martin would grab what he wanted and return what he had finished.

  It didn’t even occur to Martin that this arrangement might bother George. After all, George had his own family and his own life full of stories, and if those things bored him, then he could always pull a book off the shelf. Martin had taught him everything he could about the island. What more was in it for George?

  One night, Martin got his answer to that question. When he opened the lobster pot in search of books, he found just an envelope with his name written on it. Inside, there was a single sheet of paper. On the paper was an address.

  It meant nothing to him, so he quietly made his way to George’s window and gave it a tap. Almost immediately, George’s face appeared. He had been waiting.

  “It’s his home,” George said.

  “Whose home?” Martin asked.

  “Your dad’s. Before he came here.”

  Martin stared at the address. It was a simple string of numbers and the names of a street and a town. He assumed it was the farmhouse where he and his father had lived when Martin was a baby. It was impossible to picture a place, though. It was impossible to imagine them anywhere but on the island.

  “I told you about the Internet, right?” George went on. “You can find all sorts of things with it.”

  “Thank you … I guess,” Martin said.

  “He left, didn’t he?”

  “How do you know that?”

  “You taught me the island,” George said. “How to watch people. Some of us don’t sit around all day reading books, you know.”

  “Oh.”

  “I haven’t told anyone,” George assured him. “People try to ignore you and your dad.”

  “I know.”

  “Is that why you try to ignore us?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I was your friend, Martin. Your only friend.”

  “You still are.”

  “We’re going home tomorrow. I know it’s been a while, but I’m gonna miss telling you stories. Helping you out.”

  “I’m gonna miss—”

  George stopped him right there. “Do you wanna come with us?”

  This was the question Martin had dreamt about being asked. Now that he was being asked, it was also the most frightening thing he could imagine. The world he had read about was so big and so strange and so unlike the island he didn’t know if he could handle it. Besides, his eleventh birthday hadn’t come. His father had promised to be back by then. Together, they would finish the machine.

  “No,” he told George. “No thank you. But can you do me a favor?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Go to the address,” Martin said. “Tell me what you see there.”

  “It’s on the other side of the country,” George explained.

  “Is that far?”

  Then George looked at Martin as if this were the first time he had ever laid eyes on him, and asked, “You gonna be okay here, all by yourself?”

  “Of course,” Martin said, less than convincingly. “I’ve already done it for months. Besides, my father will be back and everything will be fine.”

  “I’ll be back too,” George assured him. “Next summer. Count on it.”

  On a morning in early autumn, after the summer people had left, Martin celebrated his eleventh birthday. He did so by climbing up to the rock outcropping and watching the ocean. For the last time, he waited for his father.

  It was midday and the tide was high when Martin saw a smudge of white on the horizon. It was his father’s skiff, its bow pointed toward the island. A rush of pure joy grabbed Martin, and he hurried down from the outcropping, into the woods, past the cabin, to the ladder. He almost slipped on the ladder’s steps, but he made it to the rocks unscathed and just in time to see the boat floating a few hundred yards offshore.

  He waved his arms and called for his father, but there was no response. The skiff, flat-bottomed and wooden, with slats for seats, rocked back and forth on the water. There was no cabin, so Martin could see why no one waved or called back: it was empty, except for a leafy branch of a tree that was resting on the seats, as if it had broken off and fallen inside during a storm.

  Martin dove into the frigid water. The tide was on its way out, a wind was picking up, and the current was pulling the skiff back to sea. Martin couldn’t let it get away. He had to know if there was anything else inside, any clue that his father had recently been aboard. But as hard as he swam, it was not nearly hard enough. Before long, the skiff was near the horizon, disappearing almost as quickly as it had come.

  Defeated, wet, and cold, Martin returned to the cabin. He lit a fire in their wood-burning stove. Sadness didn’t sit with him. Anger did. To be teased by the skiff! His father was an experienced mariner. Was Martin to believe he had fallen overboard? As soon as Martin was dry and warm, he went to the back room, where the machine was hidden. He hoisted it onto the dollies and brought it out into the yard.

  He turned all his attention to the machine. By studying it, he hoped that he would understand what exactly his father was seeking, why it was taking so long to find it, and why the skiff had appeared on Martin’s birthday in the guise of a gift when it was merely an empty box. He took the machine apart, and he put it back together. He searched the book his father had given him, underlining passages about machines, hoping they would reveal something. They revealed nothing. The blank spaces in the machine were blank spaces in his mind, and he realized the painful truth: he didn’t have the ability to know what might fill them.

  Martin fell into a deep depression. Every day he regretted his decision to stay on the island instead of leaving with George. As the winter winds blew in and then blew out, the only th
ing that kept him going was the knowledge that when the days got long, the boats would show up, and so too would his friend. He would have his second chance.

  “Of course I’ll go with you,” he would tell George. “My father’s not coming back. I have this machine, but I don’t care about that anymore. You were right. You’re always right about everything.”

  So he waited again, only this time he waited for George. He climbed the rock outcropping and looked for boats. He watched the horizon for a long time, but no one came. It was hot, but there was no music playing across the open water. The sun was high, but there were no families fumbling along the rocks with picnic baskets in their hands. It was summer, but the summer people just weren’t there.

  The lobster trawlers should have clued him in. He hadn’t seen them since before that horrible eleventh birthday. While his father used to tell him that “someday the lobsters will run out and the trawlers will disappear,” he’d probably meant they would trickle away, with fewer trawlers appearing every year, until one day there would be none left. He probably hadn’t meant it would happen all at once. But that was what happened. One day they were there. The next they weren’t.

  Now the summer people hadn’t come, and this went against everything his father had predicted. “They will keep coming,” he had said. “There will be more and more of them, until the place becomes a theme park.”

  “What’s a theme park?”

  “It’s torture, son. With roller coasters.”

  His father was wrong. This was torture. Alone, clueless, Martin was trapped. His body throbbed with anxiety. He slept very little. As strange and cruel as it might have seemed, the loss of Martin’s father paled in comparison to the loss of George. Devastation was worsened by desperation. He needed to know what had happened to everyone. When the summer ended, he had to make a choice. He could go on just as he had been, wallowing in self-pity. Or he could prepare.

  He thought about something George had once told him: “There are all sorts of people in the world. With all sorts of ways of seeing stuff.”

  With this in mind, Martin formulated a plan. He would start breaking into the island’s houses. He would search them front to back. He would gather every book he could find. From that point on, he would do little else but read.

  So he did. He went from house to house, living in each until he finished every title inside. He continued fishing, gardening, and trapping, but only for a couple of hours a day, only for long enough to keep himself going, to keep himself reading.

  From the books, he came to realize that the world had plenty of joy in it, but also some terrible things. Bombs that wiped out cities. Savage landscapes full of people willing to fight you at the drop of a hat. Diseases and vengeful gods and science gone mad. Whether it was fiction didn’t matter. This was how the people out there saw their home. If he was going to survive among them, he needed to speak their language.

  Eleven years old became twelve years old. Fall tumbled into winter, and winter raged into spring. Another summer arrived and Martin still hadn’t seen a single person, but his head was now rattling with a hoard of stories and dialogues. And when that summer neared its end, he confronted a fateful day. He read the last of the books on the island.

  So he returned to his cabin. He grabbed the grubby mass of paper that was the book his father had left him. He found the sheet with the address George had given him and slid it into the pages of the book. He placed it all in a canvas bag, which he slung over his shoulder. And he didn’t think much about what he did next. Thinking often leads to second thoughts, and he certainly didn’t need those. He simply headed straight across the island.

  Martin’s body could have withered during his year of bookish solitude, but a recent growth spurt had gifted his muscles with an unexpected bulk and had forced him to scavenge a new wardrobe from cardboard boxes in the summer peoples’ closets. It had also granted him the strength to drag the rowboat out from behind George’s house and over the rocks. He placed it into the ocean. With oars on his shoulder and the bag on his hip, he climbed inside. He looked up at the sun. He looked back at the island he had called home for as long as he could remember.

  “They come from where the sun sets,” Martin’s father had once said about the summer people. “That’s why we do our fishing where the sun rises.”

  Martin leaned an oar into a rock and pushed off. He would head toward the sunset. If he wasn’t ready now, then he never would be.

  PART I

  “They were frozen stiff. I think we mighta killed ’em. There was that blondie, layin’ out past those stupid palm trees. I don’t think she was breathin’.”

  “Don’t worry about that. Keep running.”

  “We need to go back for it. We need to check on them.”

  “You’re done with that bunch. We’ll find other folks. People we can trust.”

  “I keep tellin’ you. There’s nobody else.”

  “Nonsense. Lies.”

  “He wasn’t lyin’ ’bout that. In the mornin’, you’ll see. It’s a totally different world out there.”

  “Well, if that’s true, then … it’s our world. Isn’t it?”

  —— 1 ——

  The Mainland

  The stars melted away. Martin had rowed through the night. The next time I see stars, he thought, it won’t be from the island and it won’t be from the ocean.

  For through the first spits of morning sunlight, he spied the mainland only a few hundred yards ahead of him. The island had ten houses, while the mainland had hundreds. Dozens of docks lined the water’s edge, and countless boats bobbed quietly in a harbor. Many of the boats were half submerged. A few were almost entirely covered in water. Broken masts stuck up through the froth like stubborn little birch trees.

  Seagulls circled above him as Martin guided the boat up to a dock. He climbed out and scanned the surroundings. Streets and paths wound their way through the town and into hills in the distance. Cars were strewn everywhere—along the streets, in the streets, even in the grass, which was as high as Martin’s shoulder. Martin had never seen a car before, but he knew that they were “boats with wheels and windshield wipers,” as his father put it, and in nearly every book Martin had read, they were the preferred manner of transportation.

  Many of the buildings near the dock were decorated with signs announcing things like THE COLDEST BEER IN TOWN or FINE DINING FOR FINE FOLKS. Martin hadn’t eaten in a day, and while he was accustomed to going without a meal or two, the row from the island had left him ravenous.

  He made his way down the dock and entered the first building he came upon, a modest construction with a hand-carved sign above the door that read THE BARNACLED BUTCHER.

  The first things he noticed were the red stains on the floor. Then a scattering of meat- and marrow-picked bones. Lingering scents of rot and feces hit him next. It had seemed a reasonable place to find a meal, but he had read far too many books about murderers and monsters. He wasn’t going to risk meeting such things.

  For now, he would explore the rest of the town. Perhaps he would meet someone. Perhaps someone would know where to find George. It had been almost two years since he had seen a soul, and he desperately needed to see one now.

  But there wasn’t anyone anywhere he looked.

  Without even a sliver of warning, a fog hustled in. Martin became blind to everything more than a few yards away. So he kept to the winding streets, hiking for more than a mile and dodging car after car—some with their windows open and their seat cushions torn into tidy little nests; all abandoned and splattered white with gull guano.

  If there’s not someone, he thought, then there must be something that can tell me where I am and where I should go.

  For now, the best the world could give Martin was a pile of waterlogged books, pouring out onto the street. He stepped over them and onto a wild, dewy lawn, where he found a series of plastic tables overturned on the ground, their legs sticking up and hugged by weeds. Next to one table, he
found a sign. He lifted it, wiped away the mud, and read: GENTLY USED BOOKS—SUPPORT OUR RENOVATIONS THIS SATURDAY AND SUNDAY.

  He placed the sign down and squinted through the fog at a building across the lawn. He could barely make out a line of steel letters on the brick entryway.

  LIBRARY

  It was chillier inside. And dark—so dark that Martin had to let his eyes adjust for a minute before taking a step beyond the doorway. There was an odor, a mustiness, but nothing like in the butcher shop. The floors were relatively free of debris, and as he made his way past a large wooden desk, Martin drew in a breath of relief.

  Thousands of books filled dozens of shelves. A few books lay open on the floor, but for the most part, everything seemed in good shape. Martin placed his hand on a line of bindings, then ran his fingers down the row, releasing flurries of dust and listening to the beautiful thwap, thwap, thwap.

  He lifted a book off a shelf and stared at its glossy cover, adorned with a photograph of the moon. It would take a lifetime to read every book in the library, and Martin began to wonder if maybe it wasn’t such a bad way to spend his days. Maybe he wasn’t ready to go on. Maybe he was meant to see the world through the filter of books.

  Something in the world had changed, though. It couldn’t always have been like this, and the books couldn’t answer the most important questions.

  What happened?

  Where is everyone?

  Why is something pressing against my knee?

  Martin looked down to see a dark mass at his feet. A black nose rubbed gently against his right knee, then moved down his shin until it came to his sock, where it tried to work itself inside with an inquisitive snuff.