The Echo Room

by Parker Peevyhouse

  How accurate was that map? Rett wondered. He glanced back at the depot up on the slope. Even a glimpse of it sent up a flare of horror inside of him. We can’t stay here. “Okay,” he finally said.

  “We should consolidate our packs, too. Take turns carrying it.”

  Rett wasn’t sure that made sense, but he didn’t have it in him to debate. Bryn unzipped the packs and loaded the contents of one into the other.

  “I’ll carry it,” Rett blurted, suddenly worried by the thought of her having the gun and all the supplies.

  Bryn reluctantly handed it over. “I’ll navigate.” Her arm shook as she held the compass out before her. “You keep an eye on the GPS unit and watch for when it picks up a signal.”

  Her wet boots squelched as she started down the slope. A thought occurred to Rett as he made to follow. “A signal from what?”

  “What?”

  “How does this thing determine coordinates?” Rett lifted the GPS unit. “It gets a signal from what?”

  “A satellite. Does it matter?”

  Rett moved his gaze from the barren moonscape to the soup of gray clouds overhead. “Do satellites work when it’s cloudy?”

  “They should.” She started again down the crumbling slope, headed for the canyons. “Just tell me when it picks up a signal,” she said, her voice low in the quiet air.

  Rett silently added, If it picks up a signal.

  His thoughts went back to the corpse they were leaving behind. Locked out, left out. Rett’s stomach turned cold. We’ve got the flare, he reminded himself. We’ve got a weapon.

  One flare, he thought while he walked.

  8:44 A.M.

  Rett stumbled on, his gaze flicking constantly to the antenna icon as he walked. Striated rock walls rose on either side like the window tiers of skyscrapers. A mineral smell hung in the air that reminded Rett too much of the milky water now draining from the depot they’d left behind.

  He thought constantly of water as he walked—clean water, the water stashed in his backpack. And of his raw feet inside his damp boots. The mesh uppers had shed most of the water from the depot, but even so, Rett felt like his skin would soon be rubbed right off.

  Every once in a while the image of a bloodless corpse would pass through his mind and he would think, That was almost me.

  If not for Bryn, that would be me.

  Just ahead of him, Bryn stopped walking. Her arms hung limply at her side. “Let’s stop for a minute.” She glanced at the GPS unit in Rett’s hand and said, “Signal?”

  Rett pushed a button to bring up the antenna display. “Still nothing.”

  Bryn wilted.

  Overhead, the clouds were clearing. The air had turned warm and muggy and was now choked with the dirt they had been kicking up. “Maybe we need to get up to higher ground?” Rett suggested.

  “We started on higher ground,” Bryn grumbled. “No signal then, either.”

  Rett dragged his sleeve over the back of his sweaty neck. “Let’s have some water.”

  “You need a new GPS unit, too,” Bryn said. “Looks like the battery’s about to die.”

  Rett took one out of the pack and stuck it in his pocket for later.

  “And I’ve been thinking,” she said, her voice a dry rasp. “We should have the flare gun ready to go. In case anything surprises us.”

  Rett nodded, mouth too dry to speak. He retrieved the red case from his pack, and before he realized what was happening, Bryn had taken it from him and opened it. She slid the gun from her pocket, snapped the barrel down, and loaded in the flare. “Okay,” she said. “I feel better now.”

  Rett wanted to agree, but he could only stare, trying to decide if he felt reassured or threatened.

  She seemed to notice his hesitancy. “Don’t worry. I won’t use it on you.”

  “Right.” He cleared his throat. “I guess that’d be a waste after saving my life.”

  “Especially considering you thanked me so nicely.”

  “Near-death situations bring out my best manners.” He thought about asking if he could be the one to hold the flare gun, but she slipped it into her pocket and thrust the case at him. Guess not.

  They retreated farther into the shade at the side of the canyon and finished two water packets and one maple-flavored ration bar each, then took off their boots and wiped grit from their raw feet.

  “I keep hoping for the stupidest things while we’re walking,” Bryn said. “Like, maybe we’ll suddenly come upon a stream by surprise.”

  “I don’t think any surprises we’ll find out here will be good ones.”

  “Once I was backpacking as a kid, and my mom and I stumbled onto this lake, completely unexpectedly. It happens.”

  “Was your secret lake in the middle of a wasteland?”

  She didn’t answer. Rett looked over at her. Dirt had settled into the lines in her face so that her worry seemed permanent. Through the opening in the pack, two water pouches showed. The only two left.

  “Do you ever worry,” Bryn said finally, “that for every good moment in your life, you have to go through the inverse? Like, I swam in a secret lake once, and it was the best day of my life. Now I’m lost in a wasteland, and no one knows I’m stuck out here.”

  Rett thought of the things he’d done that he regretted. Things he’d said. I’m better off without you. Now he was alone. Maybe that was what he deserved.

  Not quite alone, he told himself. He looked at Bryn. “After growing up in Walling, we must have a really long vacation coming to us.”

  She pawed grit out of her boots. “If this is the vacation, I’ll pass.”

  “What are you going to do with your payday when we get out of here?” Rett asked.

  “I told you, I’m going to find my boyfriend,” she said, her voice tight. “He graduated already.”

  Why so tense? Rett wondered.

  The light had gone out of Bryn’s eyes. She hunched over the pack like something deflated.

  “You don’t know where he is,” Rett guessed.

  “I have a few ideas. For one thing, we used to talk obsessively about White Castle. Like, we used to pretend to place orders with each other for sliders and fries, and then apologize that the kitchen had just closed.” Her smile trembled.

  “But he hasn’t told you where he’s gone.”

  Bryn only hunched lower.

  Rett scratched his ear. “You sure he’s still your boyfriend?”

  Bryn glared at him, then at her boots. Not exactly a yes, Rett thought. He tried to figure out what she wasn’t saying. Her boyfriend had left Walling without telling her where he was going, and she had left to find him. But desperation had led her here first …

  “He took your stash, didn’t he?” Rett asked her. “All the stuff you stole from Walling’s staff. He swiped it from you when he left.”

  Bryn shifted in the dirt.

  “That’s why you need money now,” Rett said, more quietly. He didn’t mean to make her feel bad. He only wanted to understand. “But why do you want to find him? If he stole from you?” Rett considered that she might want revenge. He remembered her standing on the slope above him near the depot, flare gun aimed in his direction.

  Bryn finally answered: “Same reason you still want to find your mom, I guess.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “She left you at Walling.”

  Rett stifled anger. “She brought me to Walling because she was sick. She couldn’t take care of herself and a kid.”

  “She never came back.”

  “She couldn’t. She didn’t have any money.”

  Bryn squinted at him in the sunlight that was edging its way closer to the cliff wall. “That wouldn’t be enough to stop me.”

  Rett bristled. He worked at pulling his boots back on even while he felt as if he were shriveling in the sun. His mother never came back during all those years, even after he’d begged her to. He would have lived anywhere with her—in a workhouse, anywhere. How coul
d she think he was better off at Walling? “She’s sick again. The cancer came back.” He’d already told Bryn a million times. He stood and brushed dirt off his jumpsuit. “We should get going.”

  Bryn didn’t move. She curled her fingers around the pack’s strap. “He didn’t steal it.”

  “What?” Rett twisted back toward her, annoyed.

  “My boyfriend. He didn’t steal my stuff.” Bryn looked up at Rett, but he turned away. “He asked for it. He was supposed to graduate a year earlier than me and he had nothing. He asked for the stuff I’d stolen so he wouldn’t have to live on the street.”

  “And you gave it to him.” Because some people help the ones they love instead of just trying to survive, Rett thought bitterly. Unlike my mom—is that what you mean? Bryn hadn’t said anything more, so Rett turned to see if she was ready to walk yet. Her boots still lay in the dirt. She sat curled in on herself, her face lined with regret.

  “No,” she said.

  “You didn’t give it to him? I thought you said all that stuff was gone.”

  “It is. But not because I gave it to him. I wouldn’t. And then someone on staff found it. So now neither of us has it.”

  Rett let it sink in: “You wouldn’t share it with him?”

  “You can’t always trust people,” she said to the ground.

  “You were worried he’d take it and leave you to fend for yourself.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  Rett’s heart sank. “You meant he shouldn’t have trusted you.”

  “I haven’t exactly proven myself.” Bryn squinted up at him. “Isn’t that why you tried to leave me trapped in the depot? You couldn’t trust me.”

  Rett looked away. Do I trust her?

  She has the pack, the gun. I need her.

  But do I trust her?

  You choose who to trust. Or do you?

  “I shouldn’t have trapped you,” he said finally. “I’d be dead right now if you hadn’t followed me. I owe you for that.”

  Bryn tugged on her boots. “No, you don’t. The only reason I followed you was to get the GPS units in your backpack.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Why not?”

  Because once—I don’t know when—you put your hand in mine and let me trace the trail of freckles below your knuckles. Once, you drew close enough that I could see the color of your eyes shift when you smiled. “Because you have the pack now. And the gun. And you haven’t ditched me.”

  Bryn finished lacing her boots. She stood and swung the pack onto her shoulder without looking at Rett. “I’m going to use whatever we find to help him. My boyfriend. As soon as I get out of this place.”

  The compass glinted in her palm as she turned to find her way. Rett followed her, clutching the GPS, wishing it weren’t so completely useless.

  “Do you think that’ll make up for what I did?” Bryn asked.

  Rett kept his eyes on the path ahead. He wanted to ask if she actually missed her boyfriend or if she just needed relief from her guilt. Instead, he thought of the workhouses that were closing even now, and of his mother waiting for him or not. “If it doesn’t, I don’t know what will.”

  9:25 A.M.

  A shadow went scuttling over the top of a distant rise.

  It wasn’t the first one Rett had seen.

  He eyed Bryn up ahead, wondering if she had noticed the creatures, too. She plodded on, head down, every step sending chalky sprays of rock falling to either side of the ridge they had climbed.

  They’d been forced to leave the shade of the canyon when it had curved away from their northwest route. Rett felt dangerously exposed—to the sun angling through the thinning clouds, to the creatures lurking in dark crevices. “We need to get down from here.”

  “How?” Bryn croaked, barely lifting her head to get the word out.

  The descent on either side of the ridge was steep and loosely blanketed with rock. Rett felt a surge of annoyance toward whoever had included the rope among the depot’s survival gear. What good is rope when you have nothing to anchor it to? Only one scraggly juniper jutted anywhere in sight, and Rett wasn’t confident it would hold their weight.

  “What do you think?” Rett asked Bryn, nodding at the stunted tree.

  “About what?”

  “Climbing down.”

  Bryn regarded the tree for a moment. “I think the tree would decide to come with us.”

  Rett had to agree, but he wasn’t sure they had a better choice. “Are we even sure we’re heading in the right direction?”

  “I know how to read a compass.”

  Rett held up the GPS so Bryn could see the same antenna icon that had taunted him for hours. “I’d feel better if this thing worked. Why won’t it grab on to a signal?”

  Bryn looked out over the jagged horizon. “Do you remember…” She frowned at him. “I keep picturing myself outside at night, maybe early morning. And—a green light in the sky.”

  Rett’s head snapped up. A green flame, dancing overhead. “I remember that, too.”

  “It made a sort of crackling noise. Like electricity.”

  Rett looked down at the device in his hand. The little light near the corner of the screen had turned red. Almost out of charge.

  “Can an aurora interfere with satellites?” Bryn asked.

  “An aurora? You think that’s what that green light was?”

  “Maybe that’s why we can’t get a signal. Maybe it takes a while for the satellite to get working again.” Bryn moved closer to peer down at the screen in Rett’s hand. “The date on this thing is wrong.”

  “It’ll fix itself when it connects to the satellite.” If, Rett corrected himself.

  “But why would it be wrong in the first place?”

  Who cares? Rett thought. “It’s not broken, Bryn. It’s just a little off.”

  Another shadow rippled over the next rise, this one close enough to send lightning through Rett’s heart. Rett’s hand went out, quick as a whip, reaching for the butt of the flare gun sticking out of Bryn’s pocket.

  But Bryn was just as quick. She closed her hand around the barrel as Rett drew the gun.

  “What are you doing?” she snapped, trying to yank the gun back from him.

  “There’s a bug,” Rett said as she yanked again.

  He lost his grip on the gun.

  So did Bryn.

  The gun flew from their hands and slid down the incline on a waterfall of gravel, skidding over the rocks until it finally came to a stop near the canyon floor, a glint against pale dirt.

  Rett gaped in horror.

  Their only protection against the creatures—the bug he had seen moments ago—was gone.

  “What do we do?” Bryn said, her voice choked with panic.

  “Go down after it?”

  They both looked at the spindly tree, their only anchor for a rope. Rett swore.

  “You couldn’t just let me have the gun?” Rett raked his fingers over his skull. It was the worst thing that could have happened. No, the second worst, after being eaten by a monster that might be stalking them even now. “You want me to trust you, but you don’t trust me.”

  Bryn glared back at him. “You want me to trust you, but you’ve been waiting hours for an excuse to grab the gun from me.”

  They considered each other silently. To Rett, the patter of rocks still tumbling after the gun sounded too much like the tap of scythe-like feet.

  “Fine.” He looked down at the gun glinting far below. “Next time I’ll let you shoot it.”

  Bryn didn’t reply. She slipped off the pack and brought out the nylon rope and a carabiner.

  “Bryn, wait, I was kidding,” Rett said, gaping at her as she wrestled the end of the rope around the carabiner. “We can’t go down there. You said yourself that tree won’t hold our weight.”

  “It might hold my weight. Alone. You can come down after I reach the bottom.”

  Rett scanned the slope for signs of movement, for any
twitching shadows among the rocks. “I told you, I saw a bug.”

  “I don’t see anything.”

  Rett had to admit she was right. Had it been a trick of the light? A thirst-induced hallucination?

  Or maybe …

  Maybe she was right: he’d seen a suspicious shadow and had jumped on a reason to grab the gun. “I still don’t think we should split up.”

  “So you think we should forget the gun? Hope we don’t run into anything that wants to eat us? Or you think we should go down the rope at the same time and double the odds of the tree breaking?”

  “I think we should backtrack and find an easier way down.”

  Bryn just went on tying another knot. Rett watched her loop the rope in complicated patterns and tried to take comfort in the fact that she seemed to know what she was doing. “You’ve done something like this before?”

  “It’s been a while. Used to backpack with my mom, BW. Before Walling.” Bryn gave the rope a sharp tug, testing her knot. “And my stepdad. But then my mom died and my stepdad took me on one last camping trip, except it wasn’t a camping trip, it was a ride to the front door of Walling.”

  Rett opened his mouth to say something, but Bryn went on.

  “So trust me when I say I know splitting up isn’t great.” Bryn gave the knot one final tug and looked up from her work. “But I promise I’m not going to abandon you.”

  Rett’s throat went raw. He felt the pull of Bryn’s gravity on his bones, as if he were a satellite to her. Then he was somehow nearer to her, his ears full of the sound of his boots scraping over the dirt, of his breath gone uneven.

  She had named a fear he didn’t know was pressing on him—that she would leave him.

  And now that fear sat heavier in his gut.

  He thought she might say something more as his arm brushed hers, but before she could, a high-pitched beep sounded from his pocket.

  “What’s happening in your pocket?” she asked.

  “It’s the GPS unit.” Rett fished it out. The screen showed the familiar antenna icon, but in place of the moving lines was a set of concentric rings. Adrenaline quickened his weary muscles. “I think we have a signal.”

  “Can you enter the coordinates?” Bryn asked, moving behind him to look over his shoulder.