Harmonic: Resonance

by Laeser, Nico

  “Yeah, I got it for you. If you like it, then maybe we can search for the others in the series. I’m sure that some libraries and book stores survived somewhere, we’ll make it our quest to find all seven.” He smiled at her, and she beamed back at him.

  When he turned to face me, I realized I too was beaming. “You’re very sweet, Powell,” I said.

  After the cans had warmed and then cooled a little, we ate. Powell and I sat listening to the song of a blue jay choir, while Haley turned the first few pages of her book, eager to begin her own adventure.

  30 | The column

  With the safety on and the bolt open, I put my eye to the scope and leveled the rifle at the camp. I scanned the faces of those waiting at the gates for processing. None were faces I recognized, and all seemed drained of emotion or expression. I wondered how long it had taken for those at the front to get there as I followed the column of people across the plains and into the hazy distance.

  “They’re transferring more people from the lineup to the building at the back,” Powell said.

  “What do you think that building is for?” I raised up from the scope and looked over at Powell.

  “Infirmary maybe, or some kind of staging area?” he replied, without lowering the binoculars. “Every so often, they bring a new group from that large building beyond the lineup and take them in through the gate at the back of the camp to the gray building just inside the fence. The people that come in through the main gate are kept in the yard until they’re taken into the same building but through the blue door on the opposite side.”

  “Separating the citizens from the N.L.D. maybe?” I asked. The words dissidents and subversives flashed in my mind.

  “Could be. If so, then Sean and Sarah will be, or have been, separated. Unless they’re still in the lineup.”

  “Most of the people farther back in the lineup are sitting or lying down. Looks like they’ve been waiting a while. They’re not going to fit everyone in there,” I said.

  “Just over to the left of the staging building, there’s a three-man crew working on the vehicles. They must have lost them in the surge. They look like people carriers. Maybe they’re transferring people to other camps, or temporary housing,” he said.

  “So Sean and Sarah could be anywhere by now?”

  “It’s just a guess, but like you said, they can’t fit them all in there. They have to be going somewhere,” Powell said. “There’s something going on in the camp. They’re escorting a large group out back.”

  I thought of what Gary had said, about the N.L.D. having no rights, and about one of the words he had used during his drunken rants, “extermination.” Through the scope, I watched as soldiers grouped together forming a line parallel to the column of people waiting to get in. My stomach turned, as my mind conjured images of a firing squad or some other execution party waiting for those being led behind the building. I imagined their faces, replaced with those of all the people who had lived in my house, our friends.

  “Are they going to ...” I started.

  “Train,” Powell said.

  “Train?”

  “There’s a train coming,” he said.

  The train slowed to a stop behind the wall of armed soldiers, and groups of people from the camp, and surrounding buildings, were led to the open boxcars. I scrutinized the faces of those I caught in the scope, but Sean and Sarah were not among them. The containers were loaded to capacity within minutes, and then the train continued on and out of sight. The soldiers returned to their positions, while the people in the lineup, within a few hundred feet of the gate, stood and began the slow shuffle forward. The newly admitted filtered into the yard and took their places on the benches or at the fences. The gates were closed again, and the column of people outside lowered themselves back to the dirt.

  “Where does the train go?” I asked.

  “Should be able to trace it on the map,” he said.

  The trees shuddered, raining leaves and small branches down all around us. The flutter of wings as the birds took to the sky and followed in the direction of the train replaced the rustle of leaves.

  In a sudden panic, I got to my feet and ran back to Haley. She sat cross-legged with the book in her lap, staring up at the trees.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  She nodded and pulled out her notepad. She wrote and turned it for me to see. Where are the birds going?

  “I don’t know. I thought maybe a vehicle had driven by and scared them away,” I said.

  Haley shook her head, looked down, and scribbled in her pad. There weren’t any cars, they just flew away.

  They had all taken flight as if in reaction to a gunshot, but there had been no gunshot and no passing vehicle.

  “Emily.”

  I rejoined Powell between the clearing in the trees and followed his gaze skyward. The skies were filled with birds, all tracing the same lines that the blue jays and crows had flown just minutes before. All had heard or felt the signal, and that signal had told them it was time to leave. Shadows littered the plains, giving chase to the birds, swelling to a blur, as the ground dipped down, and then shrinking and becoming dark specks, as they climbed the sloping cliffs and disappeared over the ridge.

  “The next wave is coming,” Powell said.

  I picked up the rifle and put my eye to the scope. The veil of a thousand birds had slipped over the ridge and out of view, but in the camp and across the surrounding plains, their erratic shadows remained.

  ***

  Farther up the hill as the road turned around the cliff, we found a camper van. The doors were unlocked, the windows intact and rolled up, and the keys were hanging from the ignition. Powell climbed in, turned the key, then turned back to me, and shook his head. A cold breeze accompanied the evening, and even though we would have no heat from the engine, we were glad of the extra protection offered by the camper’s walls.

  Powell boiled water on the grill and split a single sachet of hot chocolate between three rinsed-out cans, while I tucked Haley into her sleeping bag in the back of the camper. I wondered what her nightly rituals had been in the past with Sean and Sarah. Reading bedtime stories aloud and competing with the colorful pictures for her attention seemed more work than comfort. She strained to read in the dimming light, but soon her eyelashes began to wave goodnight, and by the time Powell rejoined us with the hot chocolate, she was fast asleep.

  We moved to the cab and set our drinks on the dash before settling into our own sleeping bags, zipped up to our waists.

  “The camps won’t be able to take another wave. There’s not enough room for those who are waiting, let alone another wave,” Powell said.

  “If the waves keep coming, the world won't be big enough to hold us all. Gary was right. They’ll be fighting over the scraps. Another wave might drown us all,” I said.

  “Maybe we should put up signs—Earth population full, no vacancy.” He smiled thinly, but there was little joy in it, and it faded away as quickly as it appeared.

  “What if our world is the staging area?”

  “Maybe we should get on the next rocket to the moon,” he said.

  I turned and studied Haley as she slept, the worldwide turmoil unreadable in her soft, peaceful expression. “We can’t leave until we find them.”

  “Let’s hope they’re still here then …” He sat up straight and whipped around in his seat.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. I thought I saw something, an animal maybe,” he said.

  “Hopefully it wasn’t a bear,” I said, trying not to give in to panic.

  “No, it was smaller, and fast, maybe a deer.”

  I pushed the images of bears and cougars out of my mind, but what replaced them was no better.

  “You all right?”

  “What will we tell Haley if we can’t find Sean and Sarah?” I asked.

  “The truth and that we’ll keep her safe until we do,” he said and offered a smile, that for a second
made me feel like everything was going to be okay. “If they took the highway like they planned, they wouldn’t have gotten past all of those obstructions, and it would’ve taken them days or weeks to come the rest of the way on foot. Maybe they are somewhere in the lineup. We should get some sleep. We’ll start again at first light.”

  I finished my hot chocolate and closed my eyes, unsure if I would be able to sleep with so many thoughts buzzing around in my mind like swarms of agitated bees, but the buzzing soon dulled to a hum. As I began to drift off to sleep, I felt Powell reach across me to zip my sleeping bag up over my shoulders. I murmured my thanks over the distant sounds of him zipping himself into his own.

  31 | The next wave

  When I awoke, I could see my breath, although it didn’t feel as cold as the night before. The others were sleeping soundly, but I worried about Haley catching a chill without a working engine to idle and warm up the space. I unzipped my sleeping bag slowly and as quietly as possible, then passed between the seats, and folded my sleeping bag over Haley. I returned to the cab, took the binoculars from the dash, opened the door, and climbed down.

  With the door pushed closed, I leaned against it to click it shut before making my way back down the hill to where we had stopped the previous day. There was a red haze on the horizon, but otherwise it was still dark. I stared down at the road as I walked carefully along its edge and stopped at the clearing where I could make out the small campfires dotting the plains below.

  As I stared at the small glowing lights, trailing into the distance, it wasn’t hard to imagine them as street lamps lighting the road. For an instant, everything was back to normal, power was restored, the world was not broken, the dead had remained dead, and my father was not among them. I placed the binoculars down at my side, not wanting to break the illusion, which would be broken soon enough by the rising sun.

  ***

  After breakfast, Haley passed a note, asking if she could come with us to the ridge to search for her parents, and neither of us could find it in us to refuse her. Powell took the rifle while Haley and I took turns with the binoculars, scanning the yard and sweeping the lineup as far as was in focus through the glass.

  The train arrived empty and left filled to capacity with those brought out from the buildings. Those at the front of the lineup shuffled forward, filtered through the gates, and spread out across the yard. I scanned each of the new faces in the camp before handing the binoculars to Haley.

  A while later I felt her tug at my shirt. She handed the binoculars back to me and pointed down at the column of people. I traced the line through the glass but couldn’t see what she wanted me to.

  “What did you see?” I asked.

  She flipped to a new leaf in her notepad and wrote in large letters—Kyle.

  “Kyle?”

  Haley nodded, took the binoculars, and scanned the line, lowering them every few seconds to make notes on her pad. She handed the pad and binoculars to me.

  He’s in the lineup, just behind the man in the red shirt and cowboy hat.

  I followed the column, studying each group for the man in the red shirt. The man she had described now stuck out like a plastic buoy in dark water. I continued tracing the line back from Haley’s beacon, slowly and meticulously studying each group, and there they were—Kyle, Kate, and Owen.

  I relayed Haley’s instructions to Powell and waited. A smile spread across his face. “Sean and Sarah are there too, and Sam and Abby. We found them.”

  “Do you want to tell her?” I asked.

  He touched Haley’s shoulder and told her to look past the lineup at the group sitting on the ground just behind Kyle. I gave her the binoculars and surely gave away the surprise with an uncontrollable smile.

  When she saw them, she bounced on the spot and then threw her arms around me.

  “So now what?” Powell asked.

  “I don’t know. Do you think that we should go down there?”

  “The train has already been and gone. They’re not going anywhere today or tomorrow by the rate they’re moving people through. We should wait a while and think about what we’re doing,” Powell said. His tone held a note of caution.

  “What do you think is going to happen?” I asked.

  “Do you have any ID on you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Me neither. If they catch us down there, they might put us in with the N.L.D. With all that civil disobedience will not be tolerated stuff, we might not be able to leave. Without ID, we have no way of proving who we are. We might as well tell them we’re Bonnie and Clyde.”

  “So what do you think we should do?” I asked.

  “Maybe wait until dark—one of us stay with Haley and the other go down and let Sean and Sarah know where we are. They might want us to bring Haley down to them; they might want us to wait. Hopefully, they can let us know what’s going on down there,” he said.

  “Hopefully they know more than we do.”

  ***

  We surveyed the camp—the column of people as they sat or shuffled along, and the soldiers as they worked to repair vehicles and equipment. From our position, we couldn’t hear the generators, but we could see the spotlights growing bright as the generators were brought back to life. As the sun set behind a distant ridge, the people gathered around campfires for warmth.

  The spotlights bathed the area with yellow light, turning the airborne dust into a luminous fog and striping the plains between long, moving shadows that swelled from the feet of the stragglers searching for something to burn. Beyond the falloff of generated light, the campfires created a glowing trail that shrank to a line in the darkness. Closer to the gates, the bright yellow smoke from each fire plumed and connected over each group to form a series of ghostly archways, supporting the dissipating canopy above.

  Our plan to wait for nightfall no longer held any advantage. Anything within the reach of the spotlights shone like a beacon, and each of the long shadows narrowed like an arrow, pointing at the feet of each of those glowing beacons. The cloak of darkness had been removed, and with it, so had our chance of reaching Sean and Sarah without being seen.

  “What now?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I can’t get to them without attracting attention from the soldiers. I can’t come from the back of the lineup either. People will think I’m trying to skip ahead—I’ll get lynched,” Powell said.

  “What if I go down there and say I’m looking for my family?” I asked.

  “I’d like to think people would be decent and understanding, but I don’t believe it. Besides, if the soldiers catch you trying to leave the lineup, then we’ll be in an even worse position.”

  “We could wait for another power surge,” I said. “One of us could make our way down to the plains tomorrow, while it’s still light, and I guess, just wait until the power goes out again.”

  Powell looked at me. “Could be a long wait.”

  “What other choices do we have?” I asked.

  “You’re right. I’ll go down there, and you stay with Haley.”

  Before I could explain the frown on my face, he added, “If I get stuck in the lineup, Haley has a better chance with you.”

  The flitting thought of leaving Haley quickly disassembled my rebuttal. “Okay, but what if you do get stuck?”

  “If you see me get stopped or stuck, wait until morning, then find a working vehicle, and take Haley back to your house. As soon as I can get away, I’ll head back to you.”

  It seemed impossible to weigh the consequences against any possible gains, but the plan itself was simple—wait for the next power surge, wait for Powell to make contact, and hope he and the others would come back to us. If anything went wrong, Haley and I would begin our journey home and pray we would see Powell, Sean, and Sarah again.

  We explained the plan to Haley without explaining the risks, only that if Powell gave the signal for us to leave, then we would do so, and he and her parents would meet us at home.

  She st
ruggled to write with only the light from the moon. The scrawled message asked why we had to wait for the blackout.

  “People might think I’m trying to jump ahead in the lineup and get mad at me for it,” he said, leaving out the innumerable other threats and concerns.

  Haley sat for a moment, locked in her own thoughts, and then she nodded solemnly.

  Powell gave her hand a squeeze and asked, “How’s the book?”

  Haley’s face changed as though controlled by a switch. She smiled and scribbled in her pad.

  Powell leaned in close to read the message. “Good, and you’re very welcome. Maybe we can find some more books for you on our way home.”

  The look she gave me was one I’d seen before when she had asked if Powell was my boyfriend. I smiled back at her, similarly comforted by the loving, lullaby quality of the word home.

  ***

  The cans simmering on the grill had all come from Powell’s pack. He said he needed to pare down and reduce the pack’s weight for the arduous return climb, but part of me wondered if it was to preserve what food Haley and I had left, for our return journey, if Powell failed to make it back. The meal was big enough to feed double our number, and while we ate, I couldn’t help but think it might be the last time the three of us would eat together.

  After breakfast, we returned to the ridge and settled in the shade beneath the trees. Haley postponed her adventure with a group of siblings and a talking lion and raised the binoculars to her eyes.

  “So what are we going to do when this is over?” Powell asked, as he searched through the scope for a safe route down to the plains below.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you know anything about farming or gardening?” he asked.

  “Oh ...” I started.

  “What did you think I meant?” Powell asked with a smirk.

  “I thought you were asking me out on a date,” I said with a smirk of my own.

  “What would you say if I did?” he asked and turned to face me.

  Haley dropped the binoculars into her lap and tugged impatiently at Powell’s shirt, pointing down at the camp.