FOREVERLAND
IS DEAD
by
Tony Bertauski
Copyright © 2013 by Tony Bertauski
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
This book is a work of fiction. The use of real people or real locations is used fictitiously. Any resemblance of characters to real persons is purely coincidental.
Cover art by Mike Tabor.
AUGUST
Now I lay me down to sleep,
When I wake,
Who will I be?
1
The rising sun on us, day beginning.
The sky collapses.
And consumes us all.
A rooster crows.
Over and over and over.
He wants her to wake up, to get up. But the girl is stuck in a dream where she’s screaming, submerged in a cloud of fear, unable to move. Unable to see.
Everything, just gray.
She can’t escape, buried beneath the snowy sleep that buzzes like the inside of an anesthetist’s mask. Holding her down.
And the rooster crows.
The girl claws to escape, scratches through the cloth of sleep, follows the rooster like a beacon, a lighthouse on the rocky shoals of the living. She rises to the surface— The seal of crusty sleep breaks.
She blinks to stay awake, to clear her sight, staring into darkness. Her head is nestled in a pillow, covers pulled up to her chin. The gel-like mattress fits perfectly to her body. Still, her body aches.
Her eyes adjust. Forms bleed from the darkness. First, there are lines…lines scratched on a wooden wall only inches away. They are bundled in groups of five, organized in rows.
She can smell her own breath, thick and rank. A film glues the corners of her lips together. She swallows. Her tongue sticks to the roof of her mouth. Hunger growls in her stomach, perhaps expecting something now that she’s awake.
“Mmmm.”
She jerks her head around, sinking into the pillow. Eyes wide. She listens to her pulse.
It’s a cabin.
There are more beds with lumps beneath the covers, not moving. She can’t tell where the moan came from, but she hears slumbering breath.
She breathes slowly, silently, until it hurts. She tries to remember where she was before she woke, but nothing has ever existed before this moment except for fleeting dreams, like whispers of another world. She dreamed of someone else.
A boy.
The sky falling.
And screaming.
Something flutters on the back of her neck.
She runs her hand over her scalp, her hair bristling on her palm, and feels a lump. It’s marble-sized and quivers beneath her touch, sending electric tingles through her head, all the way to the back of her eyeballs. She jerks her hand away. A wave of nausea fades.
She tries it again, this time starting at the crown of her head and rubbing as close as she can to the lump until the tingling warns her.
Fear balls up in her throat.
The faint sound of a helicopter is nearby, interrupted by the sound of an insistent rooster.
The girl pushes up on one elbow, waits and listens. She sits up, moving silently. Her bare feet meet a cold, wooden floor. It’s brisk outside the blankets. Her bed is in the corner. With her back to the wall, a door is to her right and a window to her left.
She walks to the window.
The floor creaks, and she waits to take another step. Her reflection looks back from the dark glass like a ghost, an unreal apparition: white skin smudged with dirt. Perhaps her hair is blonde. It’s definitely a buzz cut. Body odor wafts up from her long t-shirt, her legs exposed from the knees down. Outside, the jagged edges of distant mountains.
A gust of wind slams the cabin. The window crackles. The helicopter gets louder. She can’t see anything in the sky, though. It’s hard to see anything except her reflection. And she doesn’t recognize that.
Coughing.
The girl spins around. Chills creep into her chest, fear and cold. Another girl whimpers, stifled by a sucking sound. Maybe a thumb.
There’s a can on the small table in front of the window. The side has been cut out. It’s fastened onto a saucer with a short candle. A box of matches next to it. She pulls one out and holds the wooden stick in her fingers, trembling. She looks around, not really seeing the back of the cabin. There could be monsters.
The girl strikes the match. The flame quivers but finds the black wick curled at the top. The tin can reflects the firelight like a lantern.
Oh, my.
It’s a small dormitory.
A total of six beds with a window and table between them. There are boxes beneath the beds. The tables each have a hooded candle like the one she’s holding, surrounded by a variety of knick-knacks.
The lumps beneath the blankets come to life, rolling over and lifting up. Their heads are shaved, each with a fuzzy crop of black or brown or blonde. Some of them rub their eyes, waking from a long sleep. One of them throws the covers over her head and whimpers.
“Who are you?” A skinny girl sits up, her skin smooth and brown. She can’t be more than fourteen years old.
“Where am I?” another asks.
The girl shines the candlelight on each bed. The one in the back corner looks empty, but the rest are filled with young girls, all about the age of puberty, maybe a little older. The girl with the candle isn’t sure how old she is. Her breasts are loose beneath her shirt, no bra. She’s definitely past puberty. She feels older than the others but isn’t sure. She can’t remember her birthday or where she was born.
I don’t know my name.
There has to be an adult somewhere, someone that knows where they are and how they got there.
And who they are.
She takes the candle to the front door and steps outside. The wind quickly snuffs out the flame and almost knocks the candle from her hand. The sun isn’t visible, but morning light bleeds through the sky from her left. She quickly notes which way is East.
She feels the helicopter’s whoop-whoop-whoop in her chest. To her right, near a barn, there are three windmills, each with big white blades spinning on a post. Grit blows into her eyes and she drops the candle to shield her face. Knee-high grass waves in a wide-open pasture.
Hooves stampede up to a five-wire fence near the windmills. A horse rears up and neighs. Two others join it, stomping around when they see her. Just past the horses, the barn looms, the doors swinging on rusty hinges that sing in protest.
One of the girls comes outside, followed by two more. They crowd together. The early morning chill has them hugging themselves, teeth chattering.
“Who are you?” one of them asks.
“Go back inside,” the blonde girl says.
She looks to her left, away from the whoop-whoop-whoop of the windmills and rampaging horses, to see a big cabin built from logs like the bunkhouse.
“Hello?” the blonde calls, walking toward it.
There are no lights inside it. She steps onto the empty porch, the boards creaking under her bare feet. Some of the girls follow from a distance. The blonde cups her hands over one of the windows. It looks like a dining hall, of sorts: a long wooden table with chairs on both sides and an elegant candelabrum in the center. Empty and lifeless.
Her breath fogs the glass.
There’s a large garden on the other side of the building, filled with sprawling vines and rows and rows of vegetables. Compost bins are at the far end, and maybe a hundred yards past that is another cabin. Not really a cabin.
More like a two-story modern brick house.
One of the youngsters climbs onto the porch. Her hair is black, her skin dark. The other two follo
w. Two more are still inside the bunkhouse.
The blonde steps quickly past them. She just wants to find someone who knows what’s going on. These are just kids.
Grassy stalks stab the soft bridges of her feet. She folds her arms over her chest, hunches against the chilly wind and shuffles past the garden. Ten black-dotted faces of solar panels are near the compost bins that are turned towards the East where the sun is due to rise at any time now.
“Where you going?” someone shouts.
She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know where she is, how could she know where she’s going? But someone does. Someone has to be in that house, and they would know. Someone knows why there’s a bunkhouse of filthy girls running around in bare feet and long tshirts in the middle of nowhere.
Someone has to.
She’s halfway there when the back of her neck starts to tingle again. She’s not touching it this time. It’s a low vibration. It tickles, at first. Makes her skin itch. She reaches up to scratch it and remembers what it felt like the last time she did that. But each step makes it worse.
Electric lines extended out from the lump, tiny bolts of lightning crawling along her jaw and the back of her head. She looks back. The girls are watching from the front porch of the dark and empty dinner house.
She starts for the brick house again. One step.
Two.
Three.
The tingling begins to sting. Tears well up in her eyes, blur the house. She’s twenty steps away from the front porch with ceiling fans and bench swings and glass tables. There’s a lamp in one of the windows, illuminating the front room.
“Hello?”
She’s ten steps away when her ears begin ringing. Someone will hear her. Someone will come out. Someone will tell her where she is.
Tell her who she is.
“Is anyone—”
An electric shock shoots from the lump in the back of her neck, her teeth snap together. Her jaw clenches. Black shutters drop over her eyes.
She doesn’t feel the earth slam into her face.
2
Sky. Sky. Sky.
And boys.
They’re laughing. One of them, his hair is brown. He has dimples when he smiles. There’s a gap between his front teeth that’s more endearing than goofy. He grabs her hand— Screaming.
The look on his face.
And the sky falls, and it’s over. Over.
Over—
The girl is nowhere in particular, but feels the dull grind of grit on the back of her head, the bumpy ground beneath it— She sits up, sucking in air like she’s drowning.
Sun-sting on her cheeks. She tries to open her eyes, breathing greedily. Things are a bit blurry. Her face is numb on the left side. Her bottom lip is swollen, the taste of blood.
This time, though, she remembers something. She remembers that it was cold when she awoke in a strange bed inside a bunkhouse; she remembers a dinner house and windmills. The brick house is behind her.
A few girls are on the dinner house porch. They’re watching another girl walk toward her. She swaggers along the garden where bell peppers swing in the breeze. Her skin is pasty white, her hair jet black and shaved near the scalp. She’s wearing denim jeans and a stained white shirt. Her boots are heavy.
She carries a bundle beneath her arm. She stops a few feet away and tosses a pair of jeans at the girl on the ground. Drops a pair of boots.
“Thought you might want these, Cyn,” she says.
The girl on the ground squints, not sure what “Sin” means. The black-haired girl smiles, sensing the confusion. It’s a ‘been there, done that’ sort of smile. She crouches down and flips the waistline of the jeans inside-out, revealing a white tag and block letters.
“Cyn.”
That word means nothing to her. It rings no bells, brings no memories. It’s just a word.
“These were under your bed,” the black-haired girl says. “At least, we figure they’re yours. Everyone else had clothes under their bed, their name tagged on the inside. I’m Roc.”
She holds out a clear plastic bottle.
“Water?”
Cyn doesn’t hesitate, and the water spills over her lips. It washes down her throat, brings small relief to her empty stomach. She tips it up, chugs it all. Roc holds out an apple.
“Hungry?” she asks.
Cyn takes it without a word, biting off most of one side. The sugars hit her tongue like a drug. She barely chews before swallowing and takes another bite. It’s nearly gone before she looks up.
“Figured you were starving,” Roc says. “Everyone is. Found a stash in the middle cabin.”
The white windmills rotate in the distance, slower than before. The wind has slowed, not nearly as cold. She recalls the odd sensation on the back of her neck when she neared the brick house.
“How long have I been here?” Cyn asks.
“A while. We couldn’t get near you without this going off.”
Roc turns around and points at the lump. She’s got one, too. And she’s careful not to touch it.
Cyn remembers something electric wrapped around her face. It feels like days ago, but it was just this morning. Now the sun is overhead.
“I woke up last,” Roc says. “Everyone was already outside, the sun was up. You were on the ground; we thought you were dead. The girls told me what happened, said you started wobbling when you got close to the house, did a face-plant right about there.”
She points a few feet behind her.
“We tried to get you, but the lump gets strange the closer we get.” Roc scratches her throat like it’s starting to buzz. “There’s like an invisible fence around the place. You could draw a line in the dirt right where things get weird, like we’re dogs with invisible leashes.”
Cyn notices the scar on Roc’s throat. The raised white line slashes just below her jaw.
“How’d I get here?” Cyn asks.
“You mean outside the fence?” She lets loose a humorless smile. “The little one walked out of the brick house like nothing at all, like her leash ain’t working. She got the lump, it just doesn’t do anything. She says she just woke up. We were all standing around trying to figure out if you were breathing or not and she comes out the front door, stares at us. We told her stop gawking and drag you out. She did, but you kept on sleeping. Thought you were dead, but I checked your pulse.” She shrugs. “You just got knocked out.”
“Where is she?” Cyn looks around. “The girl, where is she?”
“With the rest of them.”
Nothing makes sense. Roc looks the same age as Cyn—sixteen or seventeen, if she had to guess. The girls, as far as she can tell, are younger. They’re still on the porch, watching from a distance. She can’t blame them. The brick house is spooky, even without the fence. The light is still on but nothing moves inside.
It’s almost noon. Cyn’s cheeks feel sunburned, maybe a little wind-scorched, too.
“Want to tell me what the hell is going on?” Roc asks. “‘Cause none of the other dipsticks have a clue.”
Cyn shakes her head. “Where’d you get the food?”
“There’s a stash in the dinner house, in the back room. All sorts of stuff—eggs and fruit and milk. You put that there?”
“I don’t know.”
“What’s that mean?”
“That means I don’t know.”
Cyn pushes herself up, pausing until her balance is right. Roc watches her knock the dust off her bare knees. Cyn’s only wearing a t-shirt and underwear that look like they’ve never been washed. Smell like it, too. She puts the jeans on and they fit just right. The boots are worn leather, cracked along the seams. There’s a hole in the right one, but they fit. Without socks, though, they chafe.
“Maybe we should get everyone together,” Cyn says. “Meet in the dinner house around the table, find out what everyone knows. See what’s around here.”
Roc heads back while Cyn tucks her shirt inside her jeans, flipping the waistband one mo
re time, reading her name stitched inside. It feels strange.
Everything does.
The solar panels had raised their mechanical faces to follow the sun. The garden is mostly free of weeds. The houses all face a large, grassy meadow interspersed with swaying yellow flowers.
White-capped mountains are in the distance.
The middle of nowhere.
The girls are on the porch. Three of them stand next to the door, shoulders hunched against the slight chill. Or maybe it’s fear. Their filthy shirts freshly stained, their chins glistening with the sticky juice of apples or oranges. Their eyes, though, are still hungry.
The one girl that doesn’t belong is in the corner. Her blouse is clean, her shorts pressed. Her socks have little frilly edges. She leans into the railing, blonde hair hiding her eyes.
Roc tells one of the girls to fetch her an apple.
Cyn walks past the porch for a closer look at the bunkhouse. The cabins look different in the daylight. Even older than she would’ve guessed, like they were built with an ax. The horses gallop to the wire fence, one of them rearing up. They snort and stomp dust clouds.
The windmills stand in contrast to the dilapidated barn. Wind harvesters. That thought pops into Cyn’s awareness, like she knows it’s not some ordinary windmill but a wind turbine that converts kinetic energy into electricity.
Yet the barn is missing planks.
The girls watch her, all except the blonde. She’s hiding in the shadows.
“Let’s go inside,” Cyn says.
Roc pulls the door open, lets it slam behind her. The others watch Cyn, wait for her. She opens the door and waves them in. Cyn looks around like she’s not sure if someone else will show up. The horses whinny.
The walls and furniture look like something from pioneer days, all hand-carved and primitive. A cold black wood stove is in the back, a pipe running straight up the wall, through the rafters and ceiling. But the windows are triple-pane insulated.
The girls shuffle around the table but don’t sit. There are plenty of chairs—twelve of them. There are only six girls. Roc drops into the chair at the head of the table, throws her boots on it. She rips into the apple, juice dribbling from her chin.
Foreverland Is Dead Page 1
