Harmonic: Resonance

by Laeser, Nico

  I had to slide the driver seat all the way back to allow room for my splinted leg and turn my body in the seat to reach the pedals with my right foot, my left knee pressed against the door. We made our way down the hill—my foot feathering the brake, and my one good arm fighting the wheel to keep the car going straight against its will. The car seemed desperate to turn off the road, pull over, or plummet over the cliff to spare itself the long limp home, and at the first major obstruction, I had to brake completely to turn the wheel enough to go around. The car made its own efforts to arc back around as we passed. When I slowed to straighten the wheel, the tire flapped, and as the vehicle rocked, there came the intermittent sounds of scraping metal.

  The vehicles we passed were beyond salvage and marked on the map as checked. I passed a note to Haley, asking her to watch out for another vehicle like ours, or at least one that looked to have the same size tires and bolt pattern. The task was more to keep her mind busy and in the car with me instead of returning to the floor under the passenger dash of the truck. There were few cars on the road like ours. Most of the crashed or abandoned vehicles were minivans, trucks, and suburbans, vehicles big enough to transport whole families and their remaining worldly possessions to the resettlement and registration camps—to the feeding pits. We took what little gas, food, and water the vehicles held, and I tried to start those with keys, but even the older vehicles, which had proven more resilient against the electrical phenomenon, would not start.

  Fighting the car’s limb deficit, amplified by my own, shortened the effectiveness of the painkillers to a mere two hours according to the dashboard clock. I pulled over at the next wreckage to medicate and sent Haley to check for supplies.

  ***

  I opened my eyes to Haley, knocking on the glass and gesturing for me to get out and follow her. I turned off the engine, opened the door, and climbed out to an array of forgotten pain, while Haley stood waiting with my makeshift crutch. She moved the crutch along, directing my steps, and not making eye contact long enough for me to ask where she was taking me.

  Behind a wrecked minivan was a car, newer than our own, but in worse condition. She pointed at the wheel and at the note I had given to her with the tire size written on it under a crude sketch of the bolt pattern. She had found a suitable donor for the replacement of our own car’s severed limb.

  “Are the keys in it?” I asked.

  Haley nodded, and ran to retrieve them.

  I unlocked the trunk, pulled up the panel, and unfastened the spare. As I tried to lift the tire, pain wrapped my torso, a pair of skeletal hands beneath my skin, squeezing my lungs, and I had to stop. I leaned on the crutch, trying to catch my breath, waiting for the pain to recede. Haley climbed over the rear fender and into the trunk and took hold of the tire. She fixed her wet stare on me, begging me not to give up, pleading for me to try again, and all without saying a single word. Had she not been there, I would have crawled onto the back seat and slept. For better or worse, had she not been there, I would have already taken the easy way out back at the truck. We pulled together, lifting and dragging the wheel up and over. It dropped to the road, wobbled, and threatened to roll away, but Haley dropped down in its path, stopping the wheel and restarting my heart.

  I reset the crutch with my good arm across my broken body, swinging it between each step, while Haley rolled the tire beside her. She fought to keep it straight, from turning down the hill, a scaled-down reenactment of my struggle with our three-wheeled car, but with just as much at stake.

  With the parking brake on and the jack in place, I leaned over the new tire and wound the crank, having to adjust my position to gain leverage between every half-turn. Once the car was up, I set the tire iron in place and put all my weight on it. It wasn’t enough. I lifted myself up to sit on the new tire and leaned onto the tire iron, but the only thing that gave was me. I slumped against the wheel well, staring at the deflated rubber remnants, hanging from the bent and ground rim.

  I felt the motion of the car against my head and shoulder and opened my eyes to Haley, holding onto the roof of the car, balancing and bouncing atop the tire iron. I heard the first crack and the second before the nut gave and the tire iron dropped her to the ground. I stared for a second in disbelief as she reset the tire iron onto the next nut and climbed up onto its arm. For the rest, I steadied the tire iron while she bounced and cracked them loose—some gave easier than others, but all turned eventually.

  The rim was difficult to remove with only one arm. I had to pull, shake, and walk the wheel to the end of the pins and then shuffle out of the way before letting it drop. It fell with a flat pat and a dull clang, rolled for a few feet, wobbled, and spiraled to a stop on its back. Getting the new wheel up and onto the pins took both of us—my one good arm having to work in tandem with Haley’s two. What should have been a simple, twenty-minute task had outlasted the painkillers, but the hardest part was over. With the wheel in place and the nuts finger-tight, we repeated the process in reverse, her bouncing on the tire iron until the crack signaled enough torque, and I signaled her to stop.

  “Thank you,” I said, unsure whether to add she had saved our lives—mine for a third time.

  This little girl had saved me from the shirtless man, saved me from the 1911, and saved me from giving up. We had enough food and gas to last us the rest of the way. We would not stop again until we reached the house.

  38 | Purge

  We managed to reach the other side of town as the sun was going down. The back roads leading to my house had been clear when we left, but I kept to a slow and careful pace, not wanting to tempt fate so close to home. Without streetlights, the transition from light to dark was hasty and absolute. The headlights were a necessity, and although they were a beacon for anyone within sight, the possibility of being followed seemed less of a risk than not making it home at all.

  The house appeared only as a gap in the stars, a square cutout at the top of the hill. As we pulled in from the dirt road, the headlights panned across the front of the house to the open door. I shut off the engine, opened the car door, and struggled to pull myself out.

  As my eyes readjusted to the dark, a silhouetted figure stepped out from the shadows. The outline of the figure’s head and shoulders were pinstriped by the soft blue light of the moon, so too was the barrel of the shotgun in his hands.

  “Emily?”

  It was Gary’s voice. “What happened? Where’s Powell?”

  My mind raced through the events of our journey, trying to organize a response, but I couldn’t bring myself to say anything. I began to weep and couldn’t stop myself.

  ***

  Randall set the bucket of water down just inside the candlelit bathroom before adding a drop of bleach. Gary rejoined us in the living room carrying a set of clean clothes and a towel. “When Haley is done washing up, you should do the same, and then we can take a look at your leg and your arm and get them wrapped properly,” he said.

  Haley peered back over her shoulder at me as Gary escorted the bloodied girl to the bathroom. I opened my mouth to offer words of comfort, but I could say nothing that would not be a lie. I had told her everything would be okay, but that had been a lie.

  While Haley scrubbed, I relived the events of our journey, telling what I could between fits of tears. Both Randall and Gary remained silent throughout my tale and for a long while afterward.

  Randall looked up from his hands. “How long do you think we have until their world converges with ours?”

  “If it’s anything like the last wave, maybe months, maybe only a few weeks, I don’t know. When we left, they were just shapes and shadows,” I said.

  “We need to find a bunker,” Gary said.

  “How would we find one?” Randall asked rhetorically. “And if we did manage to find a bunker, there would be at least one other person who knows about it, and probably at least one person inside. They’re not going to open the doors for us, and any bunker sufficient to hold back those creat
ures will be more than strong enough to keep us out.”

  Gary lowered his gaze to the floor. The alpha-male retort that I expected from him never came. Perhaps it had always been liquid courage, or perhaps the futility of our situation spoke for itself.

  “Maybe they won’t find us here, maybe they’re only at the camp. We didn’t see any on the way back, and there aren’t any here yet,” I said, perhaps trying to convince myself more than the others.

  Gary glanced over at Randall and then back at me. “If they’re like most any other kind of animal, they won’t go too far from their food source, but when they run out of food, they’ll follow the scents of all the people that fled the camps. Eventually, one of those breadcrumb trails will lead them here.”

  “Powell said that when the creatures chased the fleeing people, some of them disappeared into the mountain, as if the mountain didn’t exist in their world. Maybe there are none here because this hill doesn’t exist where they are,” I said. “When the others, the N.L.D., spoke about it, they said that, to them, the house and furniture materialized from out of nowhere.”

  “They appeared in this very room, the furniture may not have been in their world, or the house even, but the terrain was the same. They were standing on the same ground as us,” Gary said.

  “Do you think that the N.L.D. and these things come from the same place? They never said anything about demons.”

  “They never said anything at all about where they’d been, just that it was like a dream,” Gary snapped. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. “Sorry. I’m dealing with my own demons too. It seems like the longer I stay sober, the less this all makes sense.”

  “We need to secure this place. Once they’re finished with the camps, if they come here, we need to be ready,” Randall interjected.

  “There’s barbed wire and cattle wire in the barn,” I said. “We can set that up around the property.”

  Randall nodded. “It’s a start. We need to reinforce the window coverings, leave a slit big enough to shoot through, and seal up the rest, all the windows, top and bottom. We have everything we need to survive. We won’t be leaving again until this is over. First we deal with security and defense, then we plan our offense.”

  “I can rig up traps and snares around the perimeter,” Gary said.

  “We’ll make a start on it at first light. The more of them we can stop at the fence, the better chance we’ll have against those that get through,” Randall said.

  When Haley emerged from the bathroom, the dried blood was gone, but she remained red. Her eyes were glazed over and circled pink from crying, and her skin was blotchy and red as if scrubbed with wire wool. She had scrubbed herself raw, trying to wash away the blood of her parents. Images flashed through my mind of Sean and Sarah, lifeless in the truck cab, and Haley trapped in that cage of tangled limbs. I suddenly felt sick. The remembered copper smell forced me into a hobbling rush, instinctively to the bathroom.

  The remembered smell was nothing to the sickly metallic tang that filled the bathroom. The water in the bucket had become a red-brown soup. The sight of it sent my stomach into convulsive fits, each one accompanied by an excruciating pain throughout my ribs—each breath between convulsions was a gasp of putrid air to be spat back out.

  I held my breath, long enough to calm my body, and then covered my mouth and nose with the neckline of my shirt. With my face pressed forward against the material, holding the shirt in place, I pulled the bucket up onto the rim of the bath, tipped it, and watched the lumped red mess splash into the tub.

  I returned to the toilet bowl, bent over and unable to fight the spasmodic tensing of my now emptied stomach. Shivers pulsed through me, along with waves of hot and cold. The room spun and my head throbbed as I sat, leaned against the porcelain, sobbing and dry heaving.

  “You okay, Emily?” Randall asked from the other side of the bathroom door.

  “I’m fine,” I lied, hoisted myself up by the sink, and pulled open the door.

  Randall looked past me, at the horror scene inside, and put his arms around me. “It’s okay. You’re both safe now.”

  I heard his words, but in my mind, it was Powell saying them, and I broke down, crying uncontrollably into the preacher’s chest.

  “Come sit in the living room for a little while. I’ll clean this up and get you some fresh water.”

  ***

  Randall brought pail after pail of water from the old troughs in the barn. He cleaned the bathroom without complaint and helped me back in there when it was done.

  While washing the blood and dirt from my body, I was all but numb to the process, having imagined how traumatic it must have been for Haley and having already purged everything from my system. I was thinner, bonier than the last time I had paid attention. There were bruises all over my body—some had already turned green or yellow. My elbow had a ring of dark purple around it, like ink blotting beneath the skin and spreading away, up and down my arm, and it remained too tender to clean without having to suppress a scream through my teeth. My ankle looked better than it had, although it too was still bruised and swollen, and each attempt to scrub below my knees caused severe pain behind the purple skin, stretched over my now embossed ribcage.

  There seemed no point to washing the rags that remained of my clothes, and I had seen all the blood I could, or couldn’t, stomach. Dressing proved more difficult and painful than undressing. Even the simple task of putting on a sports bra became a test of pain tolerance when working my arm through. I managed to get Haley’s attention from the bathroom doorway. She came to help me pull on a tank top, pull up my jeans, and button them up for me.

  The creatures would surely be upon us in less time than it would take my body to heal. What help would I be in a fight against demonic creatures when I couldn’t even dress myself?

  39 | Preparation

  I didn’t know how long I’d slept, but I had slept, in spite of the slide show of death and horror, projected in the perfect dark of my room. That same perfect dark was now accompanied by a perfect silence. The house seemed empty, as did the world outside the boarded-up window. Where had the birds and animals gone? Had they known of somewhere safe, or were they simply evading the electrical signals in the air, warning of something cataclysmic?

  I moved and winced at the pain, shuffled to a seated position, and fumbled in the darkness for the lighter on my bedside table. I flicked on its flame and shared it with the wick of the candle, watching as the light and shadow bounced around the room in a push-pull dance for territory, or equilibrium. The flame settled into a bright yellow spade, and the tussle was over, save for the odd rebellious flicker.

  My left elbow was wrapped and supported by a cut section of an old yoga mat, taped and bandaged to restrict movement, and slung snuggly in a ripped strip of a cotton bed sheet, tied behind my neck. Randall had done a good job on the dressings—I couldn’t move my arm or my left leg below the knee, but the dressings were not too tight or too loose. Next to my bed was a crutch Gary had made. He said it was intended as an upgrade to the one he’d made for Owen, but it had served equally as an excuse for his time in the barn with his other friends. The making of Owen’s crutch had allowed for the indulgence of his own.

  It was impossible to use the crutch under my left arm with that arm held so close and slung across my chest. Under my right arm, the crutch forced an awkward hop-swing motion that would take some getting used to. When I pulled at the bedroom door, it opened a fraction and shuddered loudly, having been stopped short by the foot of the crutch. I stepped aside and opened the door. The house was black, save for a thin strip of light under the front door, and I made my way toward it.

  Airborne dust swirled in the sunlight flooding in through the open door. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust. Leading with the foot of my crutch, I crossed the threshold into warmth of the low morning sun. Gary rolled a large wooden spool, spinning a web of barbed wire behind him—around newly driven stakes and
the sporadic trees along the perimeter of the property. As I made my way toward Gary, he stopped, set the spool down on its side, and came to meet me halfway.

  “How you feeling?” he asked.

  “Better than yesterday. Thank you for the crutch.”

  He offered a sympathetic smile. “Doesn’t seem to be doing you too much good though with that other arm busted up.”

  “Is there anything I can do? I’m not much good for running wire right now, but I still have one good arm.”

  “Preacher’s in the barn going through your dad’s materials. You can probably find everything we need better than he can.”

  “Where is Haley?”

  “She’s with the preacher. He’s been keeping her busy.”

  My father’s words replayed in my mind—Idle hands make a restless mind, followed by Powell’s version—are The Devil’s playground. I gave what I could of a smile, little more than an act of muscle memory, and it was quickly consumed by the joyless void behind it.

  ***

  In the barn, Randall was digging through screw trays and drawers, while Haley sat cross-legged on the dirt floor sorting through piles of eyelets, nails, bolts, and washers.

  “What can I do?” I asked. “Gary said you might need help finding everything.”

  Randall picked up a sheet of paper, turned, and handed it to me. “I’m searching for everything on this list to start with.”

  “A lot of the small items on the list will be in one of the green job-boxes at the back of the barn—the keys for all the boxes are on the key loop with the belt-clip in the kitchen drawer,” I said. “The large spools of wire are shrink-wrapped and under the tarp. My dad was always worried about water getting at the wire, or rats gnawing on it, that’s why he set all the rat traps up around the walls.”