The Only Ones

by Aaron Starmer

  … to my house with a statue of a lizard in its mouth. “You Have Been Summoned!” That was written on it. You can’t make up that stuff. We met in the church. He was sitting in a puffy chair. A big lizard sat next to him. He told me there was work to be done. He was nice enough about it, polite and all that. His name is Nigel. He wants me to …

  Nigel told me there will be others. He said he’s seen them out there. It’s taken a week or so to destroy everything that “needed to be destroyed” and he said I could name “our new kingdom.” Xibalba is what I came up with. He chuckled and he asked me if I knew what it meant. I told him it was the Mayan underworld. He told me it also meant “Place of Fear.” He had a bear with him when we were talking ab out this, so there was that …

  … town this morning. He will make his entrance when the timing is right. He took the animals with him. I won’t miss him, but I don’t hate him. I really don’t.

  … is Trent and he seems like a good kid. It shocked him to see me, but we sat around in the church and he told me about how he got here. It was pretty wild. He seems wimpy and all, but he swam through a flooded subway tunnel! I told him to stay and he decided to sleep in the McNallys’ house. It’s yours …

  … once or twice a week. Lots of kids on bikes. One girl came in on a monster truck. She’s kind of nasty, but she’s smart and, you know, she drives a monster truck. I’m not great at being mayor or whatever, but they want to listen to me, so I started giving everyone jobs, based on what they’re good at. We should have plenty of fun, but I need to make up more rules. First things first. No one goes in the hospital. This is my place to get away from it all. This is my home away from …

  … exactly like he said it would. We were leaving the church after doing the Arrival Stories for this crunchy girl named Gina. There was Nigel, waiting in Town Square with the tiger and the Komodo dragon and he pointed at me all serious and he said, “I will be talking to him and only him.” Then he walked up the hill and went inside Dr. Rubio’s house. The kids asked if I knew him and I told them I had never seen him in my life.

  I kissed four girls today, but not the one I really wanted to kiss. I’d like to bring her here and show her this room and tell her the truth, but there are things you don’t tell when you are …

  … Felix’s wacko plans. His Internet idea seems beyond strange, but Nigel told me to let him go ahead with it because it could prove useful. I call Felix plenty of terrible stuff and I’m not sure why I do it, but the kid bugs me more than …

  … Green died right in her own bed. It took about two days and there was blood dripping out of her mouth and it was awful. Tiberia tried, but she couldn’t do a thing. Nigel was right on the money. It hurts me to wonder how on Earth he predicted it. He tells me over and over again that “sacrifices need to be made in order to have the world of our dreams.” Of our dreams? If he really thinks …

  It was almost ten pages until the next set of legible entries. Martin held the smudged and dirty paper up to the light, but he couldn’t make out more than a few scattered words. When the entries were readable again, they seemed sloppier. It was as if each one had been written faster than the one before. He could see the anxiety in the ink and he could almost hear Kelvin’s voice, exactly as it sounded that night by the fire—wry, exhausted.

  … and when I ask him where all this prophecy crap is getting us, he goes full-on jerk and lectures me on leadership and power and how “the weak are here to serve the strong.” Kids used to be happy doing what they wanted for so long that I didn’t think it would end up like this. Now everyone’s getting nervous and arguments are starting. There hasn’t been a new Forgotten in almost a year. I think it’s finally time to do something. I got the Diggers together and told them about the mine shaft and they’re obsessed with it now. There are worse ideas than going down there and looking. For Marjorie’s sake, I should at least have a look. What’s wrong with …

  … her a message in a bottle and she came and we hung out in my basement again and we stayed up for a long time talking about who we were and what we did before the Day. I told her that Xibalba was supposed to be the perfect place, a balsa world, popped out and glued to gether. Lane told me how mu ch she hated her family and so I pretended to hate Aunt Bonnie just as much, but I really don’t. Aunt Bonnie was there and that’s all and that’s fine. Not that I miss Aunt Bonnie. I miss her laugh, maybe. I miss Marjorie. More now than when I was alone. I don’t miss Tyler or school. I miss the feel of being a kid and not making decisions that …

  … swallows arrived fast and dark. I’m not sure how Nigel pulled that one off, but there has to be an explanation. Always seems to be. He gave me a bird-shaped clasp for my cloak and when I was leaving he told me that I’ll have to “take responsibility for my decisions.” What is that about? He can sit in his stinky zoo and blab in riddles and keep them all scared and docile, but he sure can’t control my decisions. I’m done with his garbage. I meet with the Diggers tonight and we pack for the …

  … begging me not to go. She says she won’t be able to handle this place without me. I’m going anyway. I can always come …

  I dumped water all over myself to clean off and I must have dumped it all over the journal and it’s like it’s wiping out my thoughts and erasing my past and telling me I never mattered. I’m worthless. A coward. I am a coward. A coward! They’re dead. All of them. I’m in this bed hugging the talisman that I made for Marjorie and I’m telling the demons that I want them out. Out! I want them gone for good because I didn’t ask for this. The only thing I ever asked for was to be alone. But Nigel found me. He came to this room and I had to tell him what happened. I explained that I wasn’t there. I wasn’t even close. I was a hundred yards away, heading out, when it collapsed. Then I went back and there was nothing but rubble. Couldn’t even hear their screams anymore. Just like that. Just like that. Nigel didn’t seem pleased that he was right again and he didn’t judge me. He actually hugged me and he told me that I’ll have to wait a few days, to pretend like I was trapped in there, so it doesn’t seem like I abandoned them. I’ll have to take the blame, but he promised they’ll forgive me. As long as I go out into the world and find something to save us all. He said he’ll talk to Lane and give her a hopeful prophecy. And he said I should mark my trail to find my way back, because I have to go as far as the ocean. When I find it, I can return, and I’ll be welcomed as a hero. I asked him what “it” is. He said when I see “it,” I’ll know.

  And that was all there was. The journal ended there. Martin sat with it open in his lap for a moment. Then he peeled back the pages, prepared to read it all over again. Not all of it made sense, but it gripped him just the same.

  A voice came from across the room: “Is it a good book?”

  Martin looked up, expecting Darla. A response of “Excuse me?” was perched on his lips, but it didn’t come out. It couldn’t.

  Because standing in the doorway was a woman. Her stringy blond hair was hanging haphazardly over her face. Her feet were sheathed in pink bunny slippers. She wore a floral dress with a puffy white winter coat over it. A large digital watch decorated her left wrist. When she stepped forward, she put a dirty finger to her lips.

  “They don’t let you read anything that’s not approved, you know?” she whispered.

  “I … I …”

  The woman was at least twice Martin’s age, probably three times. As she got closer, he could see that her lips were chapped and broken, peppered with blood.

  “They’re coming back, I’m sure,” she went on. “And they can’t have you in the wrong room. Especially in my room.” With each word her voice grew more agitated. Strands of tensed muscle hollowed out valleys in her neck.

  “This is no one’s room,” Martin made the mistake of saying.

  “So I’m no one now?” she barked back.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “And is that why you put me in that cage?”

  “I …”

  “You took
my kitten,” she roared. “What did you do with my kitten?”

  Even if he’d had an answer, it was too late. The woman lunged at Martin, and before he could defend himself, she had her hands around his throat. Her thumbs pressed down on his windpipe and sent a jolt into his chest. It was the most terrible feeling he had ever known. He tried to knock her back with his hands, and she thrust her knees forward and pinned his biceps to the bed. In her eyes there was a singular look. He could have been wrong, but he felt they were telling him something: “It’s your fault.”

  As the feeling drained from his face and dizziness worked worms into his skull, Martin decided to let go. He had never given much thought to dying, and he didn’t give much more thought to it now. All he knew was that his life had been leading to this moment, to this room, to this woman, whoever she was.

  He closed his eyes.

  When he felt her hands pull away from his throat, he assumed that his adventure had come to its conclusion. His story had come to an end.

  PART IV

  “Lane?”

  “Yes?”

  “We’re concerned about you.”

  “Don’t be.”

  “You lock yourself away for hours. And you build this …”

  “Art, Mom. It’s art.”

  “Art is painting the ocean. Or maybe a portrait. Have you tried those?”

  “Jeez. Could you be more old-fashioned?”

  “When you’re my age—”

  “I’ll be all alone, eating cat food and talking to the rosebushes. Is that what you’re afraid of?”

  “I’m afraid that a twelve-year-old girl knows what she wants, but not what she needs.”

  “I need you to leave.”

  —— 32 ——

  The Knife

  If it was Henry who greeted souls in the afterlife, then Martin wanted back to the land of the living. Ruddy and sweaty and saddled with a breathy stink, Henry’s face looked down on Martin’s.

  “You alive?” Henry asked.

  “Am I?”

  “Yeah, you’re alive. Dead guys don’t say squat,” Henry grumbled as he backed away.

  “Was I dreaming?” Martin asked, sitting up from the bed. The woman was nowhere to be seen.

  “Naw,” Henry said. “You were gettin’ choked by some woman.”

  “You saw her too?”

  “I pulled her off you, stupid,” Henry said, shaking his head.

  “Who was she?”

  “I dunno, your girlfriend. She took off down the hall. Why you askin’ me?”

  “Well, ’cause …” Martin ran his fingers across his neck. It felt hot.

  “I don’t know who she is, but I know where she’s goin’,” Henry told him. “If you care.”

  Martin stood from the bed. The journal was on the floor, so he picked it up. He looked at the closing passages again. “I care.”

  Almost all the snow was gone, but the woods were thicker with mud than ever. They call it mud season around here, Darla had informed him in one of her recent notes. Henry trudged in front, his hands awkwardly out to his sides, shaking as if they needed to hold on to something. That he didn’t seem surprised by the appearance of the woman, presumably the only woman on earth, bothered Martin.

  “How do you know where she’s going?” Martin asked.

  “ ’Cause I been watchin’ her,” Henry said.

  “From where?”

  Henry pointed through the bud-dressed branches to the rock face of Alcatraz, where the Ring of Penance was located. “Cell block six.”

  “Oh,” Martin replied guiltily. He hadn’t thought about Henry in weeks. Pity was something he had lavished on himself, not on the boy who spent his nights in a tent above the tree line on a mountain.

  “Darla brought me my scope,” Henry explained. “I promised to keep an eye on you.”

  “Has that woman been in the hospital all along?”

  “Don’t know.” Henry picked up a thin dead branch and began twirling it like a sword. “Noticed her a few days ago. She comes and goes.”

  “Did you tell Darla?” Martin asked.

  “I ain’t the mornin’ paper,” Henry said. “I watch. All I do.”

  Martin’s windpipe ached, but he had to count himself as lucky, and he could thank only one person for that luck. “You save people too. You saved me.”

  “I came down to see what was doin’,” Henry mumbled. “Right place at the right time.”

  “Thank you just the same.”

  Henry lifted the branch and pointed straight ahead. “Save your thank-yous. You’re the one who’s gotta go in there.”

  Fifty yards in the distance was the ledge and the opening to the mine shaft. Martin had never approached it from this direction, and it puzzled him that of all the places, this was where the woman would come.

  “Are you sure that’s where she is?” he asked.

  “The hospital and the mine,” Henry said. “Only places she goes.”

  “And you want me to go in alone?”

  Henry shrugged and flicked the branch to the side. “I don’t want you to do nothin’. I’m not goin’ in that place is all I’m sayin’.”

  Even if he was curious about this woman’s identity, Henry certainly had done more than his part. It was up to Martin now.

  “I don’t have a torch,” Martin said, staring at the oppressive blackness of the hole.

  Henry smiled smugly, dug into his pocket, and removed a bundle of cloth. He handed it to Martin. “Borrowed it from Felix a while back. He ain’t missing it now.”

  It was one of Felix’s headbands, and wrapped inside was a series of his firefly lightbulbs.

  “Okay,” Martin said, looking them over with suspicion. The lightbulbs weren’t glowing at all.

  “They may be old, but they still work. All you do is shake ’em and that’ll fire ’em up,” Henry explained. “Pretty cool, actually.” Without giving Martin a chance to do it himself, Henry grasped Martin’s wrist and shook it. Within a few seconds, light was sprouting from the cracks between Martin’s fingers.

  It was foolhardy, dangerous at best. To chase a person who just tried to murder you? Into a mine shaft? For what? For Martin, it was answers. It had been over two and a half years since the Day, and there hadn’t been a single adult spotted anywhere. Not by the kids of Xibalba, in any case. Now there was one in the hospital, in the mine shaft. Surely she knew something, and she was willing to strangle to keep her secrets. People strangled for a reason. There were plenty of complicated books dedicated to complicated people strangling for complicated reasons. Martin had read them.

  So as he made his way through the darkness, he held in both hands a knife that Henry had loaned him. The firefly lightbulbs worked better than expected. The shell of light surrounded his head and allowed him to see three to four yards in all directions.

  Choices were nonexistent. The mine shaft was full of switchbacks, but no forks. It led forward and down, like a long winding ramp into the center of the earth. The walls were flat in most places, but in a few, it seemed as though the rock had been scooped out with a giant spoon, leaving patches of smooth craters. Wooden braces framed the tunnel, but plenty of those had cracked and broken from lack of maintenance. At Martin’s feet was a railroad track, its ties rotted from all the puddles.

  He didn’t feel safe at all, and he thought of turning back and rejoining Henry, who was waiting outside. The woman would have to come out sometime, and he would confront her then. It was the smart thing to do, but it wasn’t what he wanted to do. By opening Kelvin’s journals, he had opened himself to the idea that if the machine wasn’t the answer, maybe something else was. Maybe this mine was.

  When Martin had met Kelvin, he had thought he had come across a boy as different from him as possible. Yet from that point on, he had followed in Kelvin’s footsteps. From the woods, to Kelvin’s house, to Nigel’s side, where suggestions could be whispered into his ear. From a liar, to a de facto leader of Xibalba, to an outcast—a lost an
d repentant failure. From the hospital room to right here in the veins of this mine. He would stop the cycle now. He wouldn’t leave until he had some answers and could return to Xibalba with something more than empty proclamations. It had taken him a while to realize that he didn’t owe the kids salvation. He owed them truth.

  Cries reached Martin in echoed flutters. He was getting close. The air was warmer here than outside, and it was dead still, but not stifling. He filled his lungs to the brim. Around the next bend, the puddles at his feet turned from brown to black, and Martin saw what Kelvin must have seen during his last frantic moments in the mine. A mound of dirt and stone formed a wall that blocked the tunnel.

  “This is a grave,” Lane had told him.

  But there was light coming from the grave. At the top of the mound was a hole, dug by hand presumably, and through the hole came a soft shaft of light and the sound of the woman crying. Martin kept moving. He placed the knife handle in his mouth and used his hands to pull himself up to the hole. It was just big enough for him to fit through.

  Working through it was harder than he’d expected, and in an attempt to wiggle himself forward, he struck his head against a stone and the firefly lightbulbs shattered. Tiny cuts in his forehead let loose with blood. The only available light was coming from the other side. Turning back was hardly an option now.

  A cavern was on the other side, a massive room the size of Xibalba’s church. As Martin pulled himself from the hole, he tumbled down to the floor. Dirty water splashed into his face and mixed with his blood, and the liquid that wasn’t absorbed by his headband ran down his cheeks. He scanned the room for other exits, but there were none. There was only the woman, sitting next to a pile of backpacks, their contents strewn on the floor around her. She held her wrist up to her chin and the light from her digital watch illuminated her face.