Nomad

by Matthew Mather

  Dusting off his arms, Ben forced himself to focus and began searching along the wall. “Over there,” he yelled to Roger. He pointed at an arch in the half-destroyed wall, just visible in the beam of his headlamp. Roger nodded, but instead of coming toward Ben, he walked the opposite direction, away from the wall.

  “Where are you going? It’s here!” Ben yelled. Monterufoli boomed in the distance, the concussion waves echoing off the hills. The wind howled. “Roger!” Ben screamed. “Come back. It’s just here.”

  Roger had disappeared into the swirling maelstrom.

  Ben swore. What the hell? He hesitated, almost ran to fetch Roger, but stopped. The bag. He needed his bag. He ran under the arch, down the steps below it into the wall, and there, in the light of his headlamp, just where he left it in the corner of the half-basement, was Ben’s backpack. He crossed over and picked it up, then jogged back up the stairs. Easy.

  “Roger!” Ben screamed again. “I’ve got it.”

  Something caught Ben’s eye. Someone coming through the entrance door through the wall. But it wasn’t Roger. “Celeste? What are you doing?”

  She stared down the valley, her eyes wide, her scarf wrapped around her mouth.

  “Honey, I’ve got it.” He ran to her. “Let’s get back—”

  A crunching concussion knocked Ben off his feet, throwing him sideways. His ears rang. He shook his head and propped himself up, using his left hand to take off his glasses so he could wipe his stinging eyes with the back his hand holding the backpack. The ground around him was littered with boulders. Glancing behind him, the wall section he’d just been into was completely gone. Blasted to the ground.

  Celeste pulled him to his feet. “Are you hurt?” she screamed over the wind, dragging him toward the opening in the wall.

  Ben shook his head. “I’m fine.”

  “Where’s Roger?””

  Ben pointed into the churning darkness. “He went that way.” He turned to his wife. “Why did you come up here?” he yelled through his cloth.

  “I’m not leaving you alone again.” Celeste reached up to wipe dirt off her husband’s glasses. She stroked his cheek. “Whatever we do, we do it together from now on. Okay?”

  The ground juddered, sending a shower of pebbles onto them from the wall.

  Ben stared into his wife’s eyes. “Okay. Together. No matter what.” It was too dangerous to keep her up here. If Roger didn’t come back in ten minutes, he’d come back with Leone to search for him.

  Ben reached for the door, but had the sensation of something horribly wrong. Looking up, a dark shape rushed toward him. He grabbed Celeste, cradled her underneath him as a three-story wall of stone collapsed onto them. Straining, he did his best to hold it back, but the crushing weight fractured his arms and his legs. The mountain of rock cracked and crushed his chest, squeezing out every drop of air. As blackness descended, an image flickered in his mind, of Jess as a child, holding Billy in her arms.

  Please, no…

  41

  CHIANTI, ITALY

  JESS SHIVERED AND tried to find a comfortable angle to lean on Giovanni, her thigh resting on the wooden floor of the wine cave with her head nestled on Giovanni’s stomach. She knew he was doing his best to accommodate her. He had a gunshot wound through the flesh on the right of his chest, and was beaten mercilessly the night before. Still, Jess needed someone, perhaps for the first time in her life, to hold her close and tell her everything would be all right.

  She hated feeling trapped, and the walls of the caves seemed to close in around her. The air felt fetid, and a fine dust covered everything. Buried alive. That’s how she felt.

  “I’m sure they’re fine,” Giovanni murmured. He stroked Jess’s hair.

  Jess nodded, but she wasn’t so sure. Hector was curled between them, a blanket covering the three of them together. Hector coughed and grimaced.

  The air was rancid. It literally stank like hell. Brimstone. Jess knew it was hydrogen sulfide from the volcano. It was one of the last things her mother had explained to her. She wondered what other gases they were breathing in. A headache banged inside her skull. Giovanni had one too. They all did.

  Beside them, the shortwave radio hissed. It was attached to an outside antenna, a cable snaking through the wreckage into the outside. Two days ago, her mother had shown her how to use it. They’d been able to raise dozens of channels, but now, everything had fallen silent. Giovanni cycled through the frequencies, but found nothing. Nobody else out there.

  For the past ten hours, she’d been digging through the rubble, trying to move the rocks blocking the tunnel to the staircase. Her fingers bled, her shoulders and back burned, but she ripped and tore into the pile. Lucca and Raffael and Leone tried the other tunnel, the one leading to the ledge under the cable car, but that side of the cliff had sheared away. She’d stared into the roaring blackness; thought of trying to scale the sheer wall, but it was madness. So she returned to the tunnel, tore her fingers to shreds until they forced her away.

  Forced her to sit down.

  The crunching bombardment died down in the first hour as she pulled the stones away, and in the hours since, the world above had gone eerily silent. Hours ago, the hot wind pressing through the rock had turned cool, but the sulfurous stench of rotten eggs remained. The only sound now was the steady thump and groan of Lucca and Raffael, working steadily on the rocks, slowly working their way through the debris blocking the tunnel.

  Jess wrapped her arm around Hector tighter, not for him, but for her. Her body and mind were utterly exhausted. She couldn’t remember the last time she slept.

  For ten hours she’d been digging.

  Ten hours.

  By now, Nomad was three hundred million kilometers away after its closest approach to Earth. A staggering number. Three hundred million kilometers in ten hours. Jess turned the number over and over in her head. Three hundred million kilometers was halfway to Jupiter, but Jupiter wasn’t where it used to be. She had a sense of vertigo, like a roller coaster out of control. Nomad was gone, but where was the Earth? Was the sun already receding, disappearing? When they got topside, would they see the sun as just another star in a black sky?

  After surviving all this, were they doomed to a frozen death in a matter of days?

  The oceans were already slipping back across the land, settling into their basins; the crust relaxing, the surface of the Earth, cracked and damaged, now sinking back. But the damage was done. The tidal effects of Nomad, at this distance, were almost back to what the Earth felt from the moon.

  Jess laughed. The moon. If that was even still there.

  “What are you laughing about?” Giovanni asked softly.

  “Nothing very funny. Did I tell you that I killed my brother Billy?” She said it matter-of-factly, like she just knocked over a glass of water.

  She thought Giovanni would stiffen. She half-expected some outcry, something…but he continued to stroke her hair.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “He fell through the ice at our cottage, when we were kids.”

  “Doesn’t sound like you killed him.”

  “I told him to go out on the ice.” Jess pulled her legs inward. She wasn’t used to her secret being out. Her entire adult life was a lie, a cover up, but no more. “I was mad at my mother.”

  “I’m sure you didn’t mean to hurt him.”

  He was right. She meant to hurt her mother. Show her that she couldn’t tell her what to do.

  “And that was a long time ago, Jess,” continued Giovanni, “you need to let go. You’ve paid for whatever mistake you might have made, and you were just a child. I’m sure if Billy was here, he wouldn’t want you to suffer like this.”

  Even now, more than twenty years past, she could still see little Billy’s eyes. Giovanni was right. She sighed. Billy wouldn’t want her to suffer. She felt a weight lifting. “Maybe.”

  “And let me tell you something,” Giovanni added.

  Jess fel
t the oppressive weight of the mountain holding her down. She was happy to move on to something else. “What?”

  “I abandoned my father.” Giovanni let out a long sigh. “I told everyone I wanted to explore, be an adventurer, but the truth was I just wanted to be away from him. This whole blood feud with the Tosetti, it consumed him. I think he might have even had people killed. I wanted nothing to do with it. So I ran away, just like you.”

  “That doesn’t sound so bad.” In Nico’s final words to Jess, he said to ask Giovanni why he was in Antarctica. Now she knew. She didn’t need to ask.

  “I might have been able to stop it. I didn’t even try.” Giovanni’s chest shuddered. “I even…I even wished for him to be dead, sometimes, so I could return and be free here.”

  Jess didn’t say anything.

  “I wished my father dead, and Nico killed him. Maybe I could have stopped that, could have stopped all of this. This is all my fault.”

  Looking up, Jess saw tears in Giovanni’s eyes. “No more secrets, then.”

  “No more secrets.”

  Jess settled her head into Giovanni’s stomach, pulling Hector into her.

  So tired.

  She closed her eyes.

  OCTOBER 25th

  42

  CHIANTI, ITALY

  IN THE CONICAL beam of light from her headlamp, Jess watched fat purple snowflakes fall in the grainy black soup enveloping her. Looking down, the beam glistened off rocks frozen together in a slurry of mottled black ice and ash. She brought her hands together, blowing on them. A plume of vapor dissipated into the chilled air with each labored breath. “Are you ready yet?” she called out, her voice muffled.

  The air was putrid and thick, breathing and speaking difficult from behind the N-95 particulate masks Giovanni had scrounged from his supplies. He brought his scuba tanks up to top, to give everyone a blast of fresh air from time to time. A headache throbbed between Jess’s temples, her senses scrambled, shapes shifting in the darkness. She was lightheaded from whatever they breathed in—hydrogen sulphide, carbon monoxide and dioxide. Slow poisoning, but they had no choice. They had to find her parents.

  “One minute, just one second,” Giovanni croaked, his voice disembodied in the darkness.

  Jess pulled her mitts back on and sat on top of the generator. She inspected the yellow cords snaking out of it, umbilicals feeding some unseen monster. The purplish snow accumulated in hoary clumps on the rocks.

  Eerily quiet.

  They finally broke through the tunnel to topside about two hours ago. Jess slept the whole night before, if night was really a thing anymore in this suffocating underworld. For fourteen hours Giovanni let her sleep, said she needed it. She was furious when she awoke, her head splitting in pain, but she went straight back to tearing away the rocks in a panic. Lucca, Raffael, Leone and Giovanni did their best to help, wheezing and coughing. By six p.m., the five of them had opened a gap big enough for her to squeeze through.

  And she scrambled out.

  Up top.

  Into this blackness.

  Nothing seemed to be where she remembered. She stumbled around for ten minutes in the freezing darkness, gagging and gasping for air in a black tomb that used to be the world.

  “Ben! Celeste!” she’d screamed, her voice hoarse. “Roger, are you out here?”

  Giovanni found her, brought her a coat and mitts, brought the oxygen tanks up. For another hour she circled, trying to make sense of the piles of rock looming in the small pool of light from her headlamp. But nothing.

  No answering calls.

  Just silence. No crickets. No rustling of leaves. No sound at all.

  It seemed nothing was left alive. Had the world fallen into the black hole? Her father always said that the rules of physics disappeared at the event horizon. While she slept, had they passed over, in the rumbling thunder, into a netherworld? The world above seemed to have collapsed into a dark shell, floating disconnected. Her mind barely felt connected to her body in the blackness.

  “Okay, now.” Giovanni’s voice echoed.

  Jess pulled one mitt off and stood. The cold bit into the stump of her left leg. It rubbed painfully against the ill-fitting prosthetic. She’d never get a new one now. One more in a long list of things that were no more. How long could they even survive in this?

  Leaning over, she grabbed the red handle of the generator and pulled back as hard as she could. It sputtered, then roared to life.

  She looked up. “My God…”

  Six floodlights glowed to life. Through swirling ash and snow, they illuminated the castle and walls, or what was left of them. Most of it was gone, nothing more than a pile of rubble. The southern and western walls were flattened; the two-story museum crushed under a boulder the size of a semi-truck. Only the north-eastern tower remained, the observatory dome unscathed. In the middle of the devastation, L’Olio, the ancient olive tree, stood proud. Its leaves stripped and branches scorched, but still it stood.

  “Sparsi!” Giovanni waved his hands at Leone and Lucca and Raffael. “See if you can find anything.” He hobbled forward, intent on helping, even bandaged and battered.

  Jess put her mitt back on. Over-sized, they were from Giovanni’s arctic expedition boxes. He had crates of gear stored in the caves, none of it her size.

  The air temperature dropped to near freezing already, down from almost sixty Fahrenheit less than forty hours before. But it fluctuated. On the side of the castle closest to Monterufoli, it was ten degrees warmer. The temperature depended on the direction of the wind.

  Jess didn’t let her mind dwell on any of it. Only one thing circled in her mind: she had to find her mother and father. They were out here somewhere. If they didn’t find them soon, they’d freeze to death soon.

  Shots like cannon echoed from the darkness.

  It had to be Monterufoli volcano, invisible in the choking murk. The snow thickened, flakes sticking to her eyelashes.

  “Over here!” Giovanni yelled. “Jessica, over here!”

  Jess bolted upright and almost slipped off the frozen rock pile she was trying to get across. “Did you find them?” Her heart raced.

  “We found something, not sure what.” His voice a muffled echo in the darkness.

  Doing her best to quick step through the boulders and rocks, Jess tried to triangulate Giovanni’s voice. “Where are you?” she yelled, stopping still and closing her eyes.

  “This way!”

  His voice was louder to her right. Climbing over a boulder, she reversed course. She’d gone around the back wall, the floodlights a dim glow from where she was. Slipping and sliding across the ashen snow, Giovanni’s outline finally emerged from the gloom. He was gathered with the workers and Leone by a pile of rubble next to the twisted remains of the iron portico gate. A strong northerly wind began blowing an hour ago, finally clearing away some of the putrid stench.

  She arrived just as Leone heaved away a chunk of flat concrete. Lucca and Raffael stood back. Giovanni’s lips pressed together. He grimaced and looked at Jess.

  “What?” She skidded to a stop.

  There, sticking from the pile of rock, a hand. Not just any hand. Jess recognized the gold wedding band. Her father’s.

  “Get him out,” Jess shrieked, diving at the rocks.

  Leone and Giovanni jumped in beside her, grunting to pull away a huge slab.

  Ben’s face appeared in the glare of their headlamps. Even in the dim, unnatural light, Jess saw the purple bruises, his skull crushed, his lips blue. She brought one hand to her mouth and sobbed. Giovanni wrapped his left arm around her, his right hanging in a sling under his winter coat.

  Gently, Leone reached in and pulled away another wall fragment.

  The blood drained from Jess’s face, her knees buckling. Giovanni strained to hold her up. A keening, animal wail echoed off the rocks. Jess realized the sound was coming from her own lips.

  Celeste’s body was below Ben’s, his arms around her, cradling her. Her face
as blue and bruised as his.

  Her mother and father.

  Dead.

  “Come on, let’s go in,” Giovanni wheezed. Jess knew he was in pain. “Nothing we can do for them now.” He squeezed Jess.

  She slipped free, dropped to her knees. Kneeling, she stroked her father’s hair, kissed his cold cheek. She leaned deeper and kissed her mother’s forehead, the skin freezing cold, hard.

  “Have the Lucca and Raffa search around here, see if we can find Roger,” Giovanni said to Leone.

  “Should we bring them in?” Leone asked.

  “No.” Jess pushed herself up. They almost looked asleep, their arms around each other. “Leave them here, as they are.”

  What could have been so important that they came up here?

  Jess squinted.

  What was that under her father?

  Leaning in, she grabbed a strap. Pulled. A backpack slithered out from between Ben and Celeste. She sat in the snow and looked inside to find his super-ruggedized laptop along with some notepads. A metal box was in there too, filled with old tape spool and CDs. Taking a deep breath, she rocked her head back. Is this what he came out for? His work? The north wind blew hard. Jess shivered and stared into the blackness above.

  Blackness.

  But not blackness. Tiny dots of light danced across it.

  “Stars,” Jess whispered, pointing up. “Stars!” she yelled.

  Giovanni and Leone looked up, their mouths dropping open.

  “What time is it?” Jess got to her feet, closing up and shouldering the backpack.

  “Almost midnight,” Giovanni replied.

  “Come on, I need your help.” She strode forward two steps, but stopped and turned. “And Leone, could you get us some paper and pens?”

  Metal screeched across metal. The observatory roof looked undamaged from the ground, but it was battered, dented. Slowly the dome awning squealed open as Jess frantically cranked the mechanical winch by the stairs. She had no idea how long the opening in the clouds would last. Could the Earth have been knocked over? No, it spun like a top, a giant gyroscope. Even if it was sucked away from the sun, the northern hemisphere would still point the same way.