The Only Ones

by Aaron Starmer

  “They were?” Kelvin said, reaching for some peanuts.

  “Of course.”

  “They were for me too.”

  “I missed you, more than I’ve missed anything.” With a hunter’s stare she watched him chew the peanuts. “Thank you, Martin,” she said, not turning her head.

  One of Trent’s cousins met Martin outside the school. He pushed Martin back through town and helped him into the machine.

  “We’ll be outside for you, Mr. Maple,” the boy told him. “Just let us know if you need anything.”

  “Thank you,” Martin said. “Sleep is what I need.”

  The boy nodded and left him alone, and Martin lowered himself onto the inflatable bed. He pulled the covers up to his neck, and he let his mind linger on a thought. He remembered that night months back, when he was alone on the ocean, rowing the boat away from his island. He remembered thinking that on the mainland there was a world where all the books he had read were born. The books told stories, and the endings to the stories that still stuck with him weren’t always the ones filled with happiness. They were the ones that could end only one way.

  “Mr. Maple?”

  “Yes.”

  “She’s not here.”

  “What?”

  “She’s gone.”

  “But where?”

  “We don’t know. She went to the bathroom. Then … we lost track of her. The doctors, the nurses, we’ve all been looking.”

  “She just … disappeared? But is he …?”

  “He’s in the nursery. He’s beautiful.”

  The Summer People

  MARTIN MAPLE lived in the town of Ararat, in a sturdy brick library a short walk from a machine his father taught him how to build. The machine hummed and whirred every day, and it brought forth laughs and people. When they arrived, the people were shown a movie in the local movie theater and they were told that the world was new.

  Not far from Ararat, up and down the river and east and west into the mountains, were other towns waiting to be sparked back into existence. It wasn’t as easy as some had hoped. Even adults, capable and confident ones, knew little about what starting from scratch really meant.

  Clearing roads was a priority, and the monster truck named Kid Godzilla was nearing retirement. It still traversed the country with Darla Barnes at the helm, and it came back every three weeks, packed to the scales with objects. Once families had been reunited, they called forth friends, and neighbors, and coworkers, and teachers. They brought back anyone who had left pieces of themselves behind in the form of gifts. They brought them back one at a time, but occasionally two people would appear in the machine. Babies, and toddlers, and kids who were just too young to have had a chance to make their mark would materialize alongside someone they loved and trusted.

  “Innocence is their gift,” was Trent Bethany’s explanation for the anomaly.

  Martin had a slightly more pragmatic answer. “Until someone is ready to survive alone, they’re inevitably bound to someone else.”

  When other doctors volunteered to work at the hospital, Dr. Bethany, her son Trent, and their family went on their way. This left Martin as the only person in Ararat permitted to run the machine. It was one of the rules. There were many rules.

  At night, Martin would remove a few essential pieces from the machine, rendering it useless. He would sleep with the pieces hidden beneath his pillow while a series of trustworthy guards patrolled the town and protected the machine and its master. In the mornings, Martin would return the pieces to their designated places and cater to the swirling line of eager folks who waited with their trinkets and their WELCOME BACK signs.

  Darla brought her parents back on a brilliant summer afternoon, when the clouds were hearty but white, and the soggy ground had firmed up from a spat of blazing days. She used a jump rope and a necklace.

  “Don’t laugh,” she told Martin.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Because they’re regular,” she sighed.

  Martin didn’t know if they were regular, but the Barnes were a quiet couple, in sweatshirts and nylon pants, and when their daughter saw them, her impious smile disappeared and she became a mush of sniffles and giggles. Martin couldn’t join them in the theater, but he assumed that Darla sat next to her parents and watched them as they took in her movie. When they left the theater, Darla held both their hands and showed them Kid Godzilla, and they listened intently as she chattered nonstop. Martin heard there was something close to awe in Darla’s father’s eyes. Finally, she brought them to the bowling alley to eat lunch.

  They would leave a few days later. Ararat couldn’t hold everyone, nor should it have. With the roads opening and nearby communities coming to life, Ararat was merely a gateway, and Martin a gatekeeper.

  “Come with us,” Darla pleaded to Martin.

  He wanted to, more than anything, but the rules paralyzed him. Until he allowed someone else to operate the machine, he was committed to it. “I can’t,” he told her.

  She understood why, and she didn’t argue, but Darla being Darla, she made a proclamation. “I’m going to come back for you, Martin Maple. And I won’t let you say no again.”

  Then she kissed him on the lips and he didn’t have time to think about it. He could only experience it. It was a fragile and lovely thing, like ocean fog at dawn. It bloomed and it held and it was gone.

  Tiberia Davis still lived in Ararat, but with the influx of adults, her strength was less in demand and her knowledge of medicine and vitamins was no longer unique. This didn’t bother her, however, because through her experiences with Marjorie Rice, she learned that she possessed a hidden talent. She could talk to people, set them at ease. Almost everyone needed someone to talk to these days. So she convinced her family to stay in Ararat with her, where she could do the world some good. At least for the time being.

  Every once in a while, Tiberia would visit Marjorie in the hospital, but doctors and Marjorie’s son, Kelvin, and his girlfriend, Lane Ruez, provided the primary care. Marjorie was medicated now. Her mood swings and delusions were kept mostly at bay, but her survival would always depend on the help of others. It consumed much of Kelvin’s and Lane’s free time, so they rarely stopped by to see Martin. Neither of them had much interest in the machine.

  A few people posed an obvious question: how exactly had Kelvin come back if he had never disappeared on the Day? Martin didn’t get into details. He didn’t talk about the Birthday Dials. He simply said that the machine brought Kelvin, and he left it at that.

  “Can it bring back dead people too?” was often the next question. And they trucked in gifts from the deceased. No matter what they tried, it never worked. The dead were gone, and gone for good.

  Martin sometimes found himself thinking about the boy named Nigel Moon and wondering about the night of the fire, when he had sprinted back into his burning house. They had never found Nigel’s body. Had he burned away in there or had he escaped into the woods? Was he still alive?

  The question mattered less and less as the summer went on, until it didn’t matter at all. Nigel was both dead and alive. He was both a con man and a prophet. He was a nurturer and he was a murderer. He was almost anything you wanted him to be. But he had never been one of them. Gifts, the kids’ links to people from the past, were more than simple objects. They were symbols of connections. Nigel never had any real connections, at least not with humans. There were probably no gifts in Nigel’s past, given or received.

  The only gift Martin had was the one he thought he’d never see again. It was that piece of paper with his father’s address.

  A few nights after Darla left, Martin decided not to return to the library after his long day of work. He stayed in the machine instead, and when he was sure the line of lonely souls had been led away, he finally did something for himself. He placed the piece of paper in the basin. He summoned George Hupper.

  Martin was nearing his fourteenth birthday, but George was still a ten-year-old, fresh
off his summer visit to the island and as confused as everyone else who had been funneled into the future by the machine. Rather than showing him Darla’s movie, Martin walked the scared boy down the trail past the mine shaft and up a hill to a clearing, where the moon held them in its snug light. There he told George the story of his last three years.

  Over the next few weeks, a fleet of trucks went into service and set out on reconnaissance missions, including one that would stop in George’s hometown. Meanwhile, George remained in Ararat, and every night, he and Martin met in that clearing on the hill, and Martin told him everything he could about their new world. The Internet might have been ash, but it still lived in Martin’s mind. So he enlightened George about Chet and Felix and Sigrid and the greenhouse and Impossible Island and the Arrival Stories and the marble and the Diggers.

  “You ever think about why no one found the Diggers’ bodies in the mine?” George asked one night.

  “Sure I do,” Martin admitted. “It’s because they never died in there. I’m going to bring them back someday.”

  “How you gonna do that?”

  “We know the date and time the mine caved in. Ask Kelvin. He can give you the exact moment. The Diggers left things behind, and some of those things are probably gifts. Those gifts will help summon people, and those people will provide us with gifts that will help summon the Diggers.”

  “But the Diggers didn’t disappear on the Day, right?”

  “Neither did Kelvin,” Martin said. “Let me show you something.”

  Martin led George down from the clearing and to the trail. They walked past the entrance to the mine shaft and back into town. Martin’s guards patrolled the empty streets, but there was an anxiousness in the air. As dedicated as these kids were, they were still just kids. You could see it in their tentative steps. You could hear it in their stutters. They wouldn’t be able to handle their duties for much longer.

  They accompanied Martin and George to the machine and opened the door to let them in. Once inside and alone, Martin showed George the control panel.

  “The machine has levers and switches and all sorts of things to make it work. But it also has a calendar, a way to set a date.” But Martin didn’t reveal what that calendar was. He didn’t show George the Birthday Dials. As much as he trusted his friend, he knew that it was best if only one person knew how to set the machine’s date.

  “Why would you set a date?” George asked.

  “Because you have to pinpoint the exact moment in time from which you want to summon someone. When my father and I built the machine on the island, the date was supposed to be set to when I was born. And I’m pretty sure it was only supposed to summon one person.”

  “So what’s different about this machine?”

  “Well, first of all, it’s summoned a lot of people. And second, I’ve set it to other dates. I’ve set it to the Day.”

  “You never told me what caused the Day.”

  “I’m telling you right now,” Martin said in a calm but somber tone. “I caused it. This machine caused it. It started when I summoned Marjorie. Then Henry’s father, Keith. Then Christianna. And it kept going while Trent was at the helm. And it will keep going, well into the future, whether I’m running this machine or thousands of other people are running thousands of other identical machines. We’ll keep bringing people back, one person at a time, until everyone is here again.”

  George walked over to the interior door. He opened the machine’s heart, looked inside, and said, “I don’t know if I get it. So where did they all go on the Day?”

  “No one escaped into space, or underground, or to an alternate universe,” Martin explained. “They came to the future. Some of them have made it here already. A whole lot more will be coming later. That’s why people don’t age between the Day and when they emerge next to that basin. Not a second has passed in their lives, while here … well, years have passed.”

  “So they all disappeared at the same moment, but they end up in different times?”

  Martin nodded. He understood that it might be a bit confusing. “It helps if you think of people like they’re a school of fish. On the Day, every fish in the school bit a hook and was pulled out of the water. But each hook brought each fish to a different moment in the future. The machine’s calendar is set to the Day. So every time we use the machine, we drop one of those hooks to that exact moment in the past, and we hook one of those fishes and bring them to the present.”

  It was hard to say whether George fully understood what Martin was telling him. While they used to be peers, Martin was now the elder, someone for George to look up to. George closed the door to the machine’s heart and sat down next to the control panel. He sat cross-legged and stared at the jumble of knobs and levers and buttons in front of him.

  “Why don’t you stop using the machine, then?” he asked politely.

  Martin had thought of that, of course, but he knew it couldn’t happen. “I’ve read a lot,” he told George. “The thing is, you can read a book a bunch of times, and while the story may seem different, the words are always the same. Once the words are on the page, they don’t change. The Day happened. There’s no changing that. This will go on, for years and years, for as long as it takes, because everyone disappeared, which means everyone will be brought back. That’s the way the story was written.”

  “But you’re talking about the future?”

  “The future is written too, and it affects the past,” Martin said plainly. “People like me will think about old friends like you, and we’ll put objects like that piece of paper in machines like the one I built, and we’ll drop all those hooks, and we’ll hook all those fishes. It’s inevitable. We’ll keep causing the Day. We’ll keep making them all disappear.”

  George was starting to grasp how monumental this was. He turned his attention to his own hand and traced the lines in his palm with an index finger. In a whisper, he asked, “Are you the only person who knows this?”

  Martin shrugged. “For now. But then again, everyone just wants to be reunited with the people they love. That’s all that matters to them. And when they figure out what I’m telling you, they’ll also figure out that there’s only one way to see those loved ones again.”

  Martin motioned with his head to the controls of the machine.

  “There’s something that doesn’t fit, though,” George said, lifting his chin and finally looking Martin in the eyes.

  “There is?”

  “You didn’t disappear. Why were you and those other kids the only ones who were left?”

  For a brief moment, a breeze of memory swept over Martin and his mind sailed back to his first lonely summer on the island, to those days sitting on the rock outcropping and waiting for the summer people to arrive. He remembered worrying that George, the only person besides his father he’d ever known, had simply forgotten about him. That worry had lived with Martin for a long time.

  “Lane told me once it was because we’re awful,” Martin said. “I don’t think that exactly. I think it’s because we chose to live alone, secluded from the rest of the world. As the years go on, and more and more people are remembered and summoned, no one’s ever going to think to summon us. We’re the only ones who were forgotten. So in the long run, we’re the only ones who will be forgotten.”

  Martin could tell from George’s squint that he wasn’t buying it. “They’re gonna make movies about you guys. Write songs. Books. They’ll write more books than even you can read, Martin! They’ll keep on telling the story about how you kids got the world working again.”

  “Really? You think so?”

  George stood up and placed his hand on Martin’s shoulder. “You didn’t live alone. You were a bunch of amazing kids who created this crazy machine and put the world back together. People won’t think to summon you because they’ll know they won’t have to. Everyone will know that you were here all along. You’re the only ones who’ll always be remembered.”

  It was true. The
logic could go either way, but Martin had never considered that before. “It’s possible,” he said. “It’s a nice way of thinking of things, I guess.”

  It was late. They were tired. So they left the machine and walked back to the library, and on the way George mused about all the stories that might be written about Martin and the other kids. Perhaps someone would tell the tale of Henry and his dad and their cowardly escape on the night of the luau. Maybe they would imagine the conversation between Darla and Nigel on the afternoon of Chet’s funeral. Felix’s arrival in Xibalba could surely be fodder for a chapter of a book. His strange sparks of genius deserved at least that much. And while Lane was unlikely ever to tell anyone besides Kelvin what past pain had given birth to her cynicism, plenty of wordsmiths were sure to speculate.

  Of course, they’d all want to write about Martin’s father, about what kicked off this chain of events in the first place. Because everyone loved an origin story.

  “Heck,” George said as the two paused outside the library. “I was never much of a reader, but I’d read all that stuff.”

  “So what will my story be?” Martin asked.

  “Yours? Yours will be a hero’s story,” George said.

  “Hardly,” Martin said, guilt flavoring his voice. “I’m just a kid who convinced myself I knew what I was doing. When I didn’t. But that doesn’t matter, does it? ’Cause I’m also just a victim of inevitability.”

  George wrinkled up his nose. “Do you know the future? I mean, you say that everyone is gonna be brought back, but do you know exactly how that’s gonna happen?”

  “No,” Martin admitted.

  “Have you ever known exactly how anything is gonna happen?”

  “No.”

  “Then who cares about inevita-whatever?” George said, his smile flattening out the nose wrinkles. “You just go out and try to make the best of things. And that’s what you’ve done, right? That’s all you can do, right?”