by Edward Aubry
STATIC MAYHEM
by Edward Aubry
www.static-mayhem.com
WorldMaker Media
P.O. Box 610383
Newton, MA 02461
www.worldmakermedia.com
Static Mayhem Copyright 2010 Edward Aubry. All Rights Reserved.
First published by WorldMaker Media, a division of TheNextBigWriter, LLC on September 24, 2010.
For my mother, Rosemary Ix Morgan (1935-2010)
Acknowledgements
This novel would likely never have advanced beyond an outline and a handful of scattered notes, if it had not been for Guinevere Crescenzi. She invited me into her writers group, and they transformed it, in my eyes, from an unfinished project to an urgent assignment. My most profound gratitude goes out to her, as well as to Steve Carabello, Kate Knapp, and Paul Murray.
The contributions made by the members of TheNextBigWriter.com community cannot be understated. The experience of having this manuscript critiqued by dozens of readers from widely diverse backgrounds has been invaluable. My thanks go out to Greg Crites, Mike Davis, Archie Hooton, Dora McAlpin, Charlie Truscott, Brian Sealy, Mickey Dodson, Danae Wilkin, John Hamler, Ann Simko, Jerry Travis, and many, many more. I am grateful for every observation, suggestion, complaint and picked nit, from every single one of you. However, I would be remiss if I did not doubly thank Lori Bentley-Law, Mitch Geller, and Michelle Montgomery, who stayed with this story to the end, and then back again, for draft after draft. They came to know the word of Static Mayhem as well as I do, and their insights had a large hand in sculpting it to its final form.
A heartfelt thanks to my mother, Rosemary Morgan; my sister, Rose Blodgett; her husband, Tim Blodgett; and my brother, Richard Aubry. They provided me with overwhelming support and encouragement as I plodded my way through the early drafts, from hundreds of miles away in several different directions. Their unanimously positive reception to the book buoyed me on my way to fulfilling this dream. No aspiring author could ask for a better family.
Special thanks go out to Adam Long, whose role in the development of Static Mayhem took many wonderful and unexpected turns. Thank you, Adam, for believing in this book, and perpetually pushing it to be a finished product.
Finally, and most of all, my deepest gratitude goes to my wife, Annelisa Aubry-Walton, whose patience and support never wavered through the years it took to write this story. She has been my biggest fan, my sharpest critic, my publicist, my editor, and my rock. There is simply no way I ever would have pulled this off without her.
BOOK ONE:
INTERSUBSTANTIAL
Chapter One
Harrison
Just around the time his car reached ninety miles an hour, Harrison closed his eyes. He knew the road curved in front of him, and he steered from memory. Late on a weekday afternoon, I-91 might once have been crowded with traffic, but other cars were no longer a hazard. He pushed in the clutch, and waited for the car to coast to a stop. The sense of motion diminished. By the time the speedometer dropped to zero, his eyes were open again and surveying the scraps of twisted iron and concrete rubble that were the ruins of the Holyoke Mall parking garage.
The car had come to rest on the shoulder of an exit ramp now overgrown with sunflowers, about a half-mile shy of the mall. Other than the parking garage, the mall was intact, at least on the outside. Inside, though, he knew from previous expeditions that things fell to chaos. No shops, no merchandise, no restaurants-just empty lot after empty lot. Up near the skylights, local flora ran rampant.
Trekking over the embankment and around the bend in the mall parking lot driveway, Harrison made for his destination in one of the satellite buildings, the Barnes & Noble. On his last visit, he had picked up a copy of The Great Gatsby, for which he had left a ten dollar bill on the counter. The gesture was pointless, other than to maintain the illusion of normalcy. He planned to leave more money today, in exchange for a copy of Tom Sawyer.
As he made his way to the empty parking lot, he glanced over at the vast field of sunflowers a hundred yards away. Some of the enormous blossoms had risen from their natural droopy state, and tracked his movement. The first time, it had been the entire field, an easy fifty thousand, in silent scrutiny of his behavior. Now it was fewer than fifty, evidence of his predictability.
"Nothing to see here!" he shouted in their direction. Several flopped back down. The rest continued to watch.
Harrison stood just over six feet tall, and in the time since he had lost all concern about his personal appearance, his dark brown hair had grown long and unkempt. A good shave was a rarity that cycled back once every two weeks, and he was due. Clad in a short sleeve plaid shirt (unbuttoned over a Pink Floyd T-shirt) and a pair of cut-off jeans shorts, he took an odd satisfaction in the scruffy look, a badge of his having walked away from his day job forever.
At the edge of the parking lot, he stopped, his breath catching in his throat. A large, dark lump lay in the dirt before him. "Damn. Another one," he whispered. Closer to it, he could make out the pebbly skin and the beginnings of that God-awful smell. This was the sixth dead dinosaur he had found in ten weeks. They always fascinated him. While he had yet to see a live one, he felt neither surprise nor disappointment on that count. It made perfect sense that these displaced creatures would not live long in such a random environment. If these dinosaurs had all come into the world at the same time, when everything else changed, they must have been dying off.
He reached into his breast pocket and removed a small plastic clamshell case. Inside lay a pair of sleek, dark glasses, which he unfolded and put on. The lenses darkened in automatic response to the sun, although there was no more than an hour until dusk. Harrison tapped the edge of the glasses with his finger. A three-dimensional display appeared in the air about three feet in front of his face. It provided him with the date, time, temperature, relative humidity, mean barometric pressure, and wind speed. There was also a readout for wind direction, but for reasons unknown it had only ever given him error messages. The display was an illusion, a tiny hologram projected onto his retina. He knew from experimenting-he had mounted them on a mannequin head once-that an outside observer would see nothing but a man tapping his glasses. He tapped them twice more and cycled through two categories of data, until the word "infrared" appeared. He looked at the form of the fallen beast. It showed no deviation from the ambient temperature. That might mean it was dead, or it might just mark it a cold-blooded animal. He tapped twice more, and saw a passive sonar display overlaid against the natural background. Birds, small rodents, and insects showed faint blips as they pinged away in their native tongues. The dinosaur showed nothing. It was dead for certain, then. A live animal, and a large one at that, would give a visible heartbeat.
He removed the glasses and moved closer. From that angle, only the dinosaur's back was evident, and it was marked by its lack of adornment. Of the ones he had seen so far, all were equipped with some sort of armor or horns, except for the gigantic one, which smelled far too horrible for any sort of close inspection. Maybe this one was a younger specimen of the huge variety. But, then, it lacked the long neck. Above the tail, its distinguishing features became clearer. Harrison felt blood drain from his face as he took them in. The powerful hind legs and short forelegs, the huge head, even the claws he was able to observe with some degree of detachment. But, oh, God, the teeth. Like big bone knives.
A predator.
His first instinct was to flee back to the road, back to the car, back to the ninety miles an hour. He had been sure, somehow, that none of the dinosaurs would be carnivores. Now all bets were off. After the initial surge of adrenaline, he reasoned that the presence of one did not necessitate the presence of more. He had never seen more than one example o
f any species. He had even speculated that might be why they didn't live long, since popular opinion had last been that these were herd animals. Maybe they couldn't survive alone. And if there were herds, he surely would have seen one by now. But, then, he had been certain that there were no predators, and here was one that had stayed alive for ten weeks. Eating … something.
Five minutes later he was on the road, at ninety miles an hour, his eyes wide open.
Chapter Two
Claudia
On his way north, Harrison fumbled through a box of cassettes in the passenger seat. Mozart's clarinet concerto trickled from the speakers, chosen because it relaxed him. But he no longer wanted to be relaxed. He settled on a tape by a band named the Treadles and popped it into the deck. He had never heard of the Treadles, which stood to reason, since none of the members had been born yet. In all likelihood, they never would be.
The cassette showed a copyright notice from 2031, which put it twenty-eight years into the future. The fact that cassettes, already obsolete by 2003, had somehow managed to survive as viable commercial products implied that the Treadles might not even be from Harrison's future. Maybe they came from some other parallel one. In either case, it was a future no longer likely to happen.
Three months earlier, everyone Harrison had ever known, and every trace of civilization, had flashed out of existence. He had watched it happen. There had been no warning, no obvious cause. In three months, he hadn't come across any other survivors.
Harrison's early assumption was that the world had come to an end, but discoveries like future music, dinosaurs, and sentient sunflowers complicated that model. It wasn't an ending; it was a bizarre, colossal shuffling, and Harrison's life went on.
Each time he discovered some remnant of the world he had known, he embraced it with the small hope that it might help keep him from losing his mind.
An enormous sign came into view. It offered the irrelevant sentiment, Welcome to Vermont. The landmark meant he had about forty miles to go before I-91 came to an abrupt end at the bottom of a steep, tall rock. Some days, he would drive right up to the cliff, stop, turn around, and head back.
Driving the length of I-91 had become a favorite outing as of late. Not much of it was left. It now stretched from the cliff face in Vermont to the point just north of where New Haven, Connecticut, used to be, where the road plunged into the ground and was overgrown with brush. Some days, he would explore a side road. All the exit ramps were still in place, although most of them now led to nothing. Still, the odd ramp led to a road, or what was left of one, though none of the roads he had found so far went more than two miles in any direction. Most of them led to no more than dead ends and more forest. He did luck into the occasional gas station, and, of course, the music store where he had acquired the Mozart and the Treadles. He had also found the ruins of a small apartment building, unsuitable for habitation, and a coffee shop, overrun by bugs. His greatest find, a motel, became his home base. Otherwise, the highway was adorned with exits to nowhere.
So after a typical day out, he would head back to the comfort of his room. Today, however, he was hesitant to return to what might be carnivorous dinosaur country. His rational mind knew that the probability he would encounter a live specimen of what he had seen today defied measurement. But in his gut, he could not shake the belief that a pack of those things waited for him right now and might even have tracked his exhaust fumes. Worst of all, the sun had just passed behind the cover of the Berkshire Mountains. Prefacing the darkness to come, their shadows descended upon him. Harrison had no idea what a dinosaur's night vision could detect. A slow panic began to superimpose itself over all other considerations.
The Treadles tape wore on his nerves. No, he found it easier to blame his agitation on the unfamiliar music than on the obvious culprit, the dinosaur. He determined that he needed to hear something from his old life, hit eject, and caught the intro to "Here Comes the Sun" by the Beatles. "Perfect," he said aloud. Ironic as well, he thought. As he put the rejected tape back into its case, he began to sing along.
Thoughts of his next move troubled and eluded him. He often considered how it would feel to drive right into that Vermont rock at top speed. His newfound fear of carnivorous dinosaurs was a point in favor of that choice. Better that than being eaten. Of course, better eaten than not quite killed in a terrible wreck with no hope of rescue in a world with no hospitals.
In the middle of his morbid line of thought, he heard the song enter its bridge and began to sing along at top volume. Then it dawned on him. He had never put in a Beatles tape.
The song came from the radio.
He stopped singing. It would have been difficult to continue over the din of his heartbeat, anyway. Aware of safety concerns for the first time in a long while, he focused on the drive. A radio station existed and transmitted. He allowed that thought to develop before he added the logical implication. That station had an operator.
Another person had survived.
Despite the evidence of his eyes, there must be something left of Springfield, or maybe Hartford, that included a radio tower. The trip across the Vermont border ruled out Hartford as too far away for adequate reception. That left Springfield, which he could reach in about an hour if he turned around and hightailed it. If he decided he wanted to. He was halfway through concocting a search plan when the song ended.
"Hi," said the radio. It was a female voice.
He turned it up. His hand was trembling. "Hi," he said. His throat felt tight. Moisture nagged at the outer edges of his eyes.
"You're still listening to Claudia. That was 'Here Comes the Sun' by the Beatles. I'd like to take a moment to repeat my message for anyone listening who hasn't heard it yet. This is an open invitation for any survivors to meet me here in Chicago."
Harrison missed the next bit, which was drowned out by the scream of his tires against the pavement and his own screams. The car started to spin. It almost started to roll when its momentum ran out. It stood balanced on the two driver's side wheels for what must have been far shorter time than it seemed before it flopped back down onto all four wheels with an unceremonious thud.
"… further instructions. I'll be broadcasting until midnight, Eastern Daylight Time, for those of you still keeping track. Remember, come to Chicago. Tell your friends."
Harrison identified the initial chords of a Fleetwood Mac song whose title he could not recall as he attempted to refocus himself. His reflex to stomp on the brakes did not feel productive.
"Chicago," he said, just to hear it out loud, "is a thousand miles away."
* * *
It took him about a half an hour to get to the motel he called home, near what was once Northampton, Massachusetts. The whole way there, he listened to Claudia. She presented a selection of pop songs from the sixties and seventies to which he sang along. It felt warm and friendly to do so. A song still on his lips, he pulled into the motel parking lot.
After killing the engine, he kept his hand on the ignition. After a minute, his hand continued the motion one click back to start the radio again. Harrison sat there for four more songs until he yielded to the desire for the comforts of home.
He emerged from his car just in time to watch a plume of teal light shoot straight up from a pine tree ten feet from the building. It left a vertical trail that extended much further than he could see. After a few seconds, the trail dissipated into tiny sparks that bounced around at random and fizzled out to nothing.
"Good one!" Harrison said to the tree. This light show presented itself almost every day, and the color varied. Harrison suspected that multiple trees entered into the performance, but he never remembered to keep track of which one he had seen last. Like the sunflowers, this display illustrated the extent to which the world had changed.
The creature comfort of the motel was a godsend. He had slept in a Laundromat for the first few days before he had worked up the fortitude to explore. After that, he had ventured out and found a gas stat
ion whose convenience store had a wider variety of food. It was luxurious by comparison with the selections in the Laundromat snack machine. Then he came across the motel. As with the other buildings, he found this one with every door unlocked, every room deserted. Unlike the other buildings, these doors could be locked from the inside without a key. This excited him until he found that none of the locks stayed locked when he tried them. The deadbolt to his room snapped open every time he tried to force it shut, so he settled for the chain. At this point, he had been living behind unlockable doors for so long that he had convinced himself locks were unnecessary, anyway. Still, it bothered him. One more irrational change to his world.
Not only did the motel offer him a bed, but it also had power and running water. Of course, any power plant within fifty miles of this place would have long since disappeared. The less he thought about it, the easier it was to live with. It shocked him how easy it became not to think about it.
He let himself in now, with care to keep it slow and cautious so as not to scare himself. He chained the door, sat down on the bed, and, for the first time since he had moved in, turned on the television. All he got was snow on every channel, so he turned it off again. "So much for that hunch," he commented. The room held no radio, a detail he had not noticed or missed before. He missed it now. For a moment, he entertained the idea of a whole night spent in his car. Then he thought about dinosaurs. He opted for the bed.
He had a beer.
He tried to sleep.
It was about two in the morning when he rolled out of bed and turned on the light, covering his eyes against the sudden brightness. He groaned a little and sighed a little. He had reached a state of paradox: too anxious to sleep, too depressed to stay awake. He needed something to do to get himself back on an even keel.
