by Hamill, Ike
“I’ve got electronic copies of all that stuff,” Robby said. “And I remember it all anyway.”
“It’s good you’ve got copies, but you’ve got to remember—if something happens to you, it doesn’t matter how good your memory is. The rest of us will be in the dark,” Ted said.
“Maybe we shouldn’t stay here,” Romie said. “Plenty of people know we live here. We should go hide out until they’re all gone.”
“You think they’ll come after us?" Lisa asked.
“Why not?" Ted asked. “All we know is this: at least one of them is trying to hurt us. For all we know, several of them wish us harm. Did you see all the guns that Frank and Luke were packing?”
“Frank had a bunch,” Brad said. “I only saw one on Luke.”
“They had guns?" Sheila asked. “What for? What do they think guns are going to help with?”
The group fell silent, but the tension in the room built anyway. Sheila started to chew at her fingernails and Ted sat down on the edge of a table and rocked back and forth.
Robby stood up and addressed the group—“Romie’s right. We shouldn’t stay here. I don’t think Luke’s crew is coming after us, but if the fire spreads, it might attract other attention.”
“You mean from the thing up north?" Romie asked. “I thought you said it was still gestating.”
“Yes,” Robby said, “I think it is, but I’m talking about the forces that were deployed to prepare the area. There might be versions we haven’t seen yet—things like white blood cells. Things that will show up to counteract any destructive forces; fire, for instance. I’ve got another place set up. It’s downtown. It will be closer to the bridge anyway. We can start executing the plan from there.”
“Is it safe?" Lisa asked.
“Safe as anywhere, I guess,” Robby said.
They didn’t wait long to find out if Robby’s theory about the white blood cells would be correct. The men and women piled into three cars and left after Romie and Lisa gathered a few things they thought they’d need from their borrowed house.
✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪
THEY FOLLOWED ROBBY to the third floor of a downtown parking garage. From there, a covered walkway led to a well-appointed apartment building. Robby had equipped several adjacent dwellings with portable heaters and water. He ran a generator in the atrium to provide basic electricity.
Robby and Brad pinned maps to the living room wall while Ted, Sheila, and Pete ventured out to collect their possessions from their temporary homes. By the time the three of them returned to the apartment, Robby and Brad finished reconstructing the plans and Lisa and Romie joined them in the center apartment.
Although they’d discussed the plan, this marked the first time they’d all seen Robby’s map laid out. Robby and Brad constructed a mural on the wall of high-detail topographic maps showing the terrain from Portland to Waterville. The highlighted route stretched about seventy-five miles—north from the coast to deep inland.
Ted scratched the back of his head as he studied the map. He traced his fingers up the gently waving dotted line. “You’ve told us it will be using our own infrastructure as the scaffolding for its growth, right?”
“Correct,” Robby said.
“But why wouldn’t it just use the rivers?" Ted asked. “Our roads follow the rivers for the most part. I don’t see why the thing wouldn’t grow into them.”
“I don’t know exactly,” Robby said. “But if this thing has tried to colonize Earth several times before and and it was unsuccessful, we should look for the man-made differences. Since the origin of the planet, it’s had natural features like these rivers. I assume if it could use the rivers, it would have done so back in the time of dinosaurs or even earlier. Since it didn’t gestate then, I’m guessing it needs things like roads to thrive. Maybe it waited until our civilization tamed the landscape enough to make it suitable.”
“There’s a lot of guesses in there,” Pete said.
“You bought in last night—has your opinion changed?” Brad asked.
“Not substantially,” Pete said. “Just stating the obvious.”
“Well, we can try the highway up to here,” Robby said, pointing at the center map. “This is where the train tracks diverge from the highway. It’s several miles south of Brad’s house. If everything looks okay north of there, I’m fine continuing on the highway. If not, we can backtrack to the rails.”
“Fair enough,” Pete said. “I can even go ahead on a fast snowmobile to scout. Make sure everything is kosher.”
“I object,” Ted said. “For one thing, we’ll need everyone driving a rig if we want to do this in one trip. And second, I don’t think we should split up for any reason.”
“I’m with Ted,” Sheila said. “Everyone together.”
“Okay, okay,” Pete said. “Just thinking out loud, that’s all.”
“What about the people?" Sheila asked. “We have to get a thousand of them you said?”
“I have no way to come up with an exact number,” Robby said, “but I think a thousand will do.”
“Any particular people?" Sheila asked.
“No,” Robby said. “The first thousand corpses we can find will do.”
“I’ve been thinking—we need to respect them,” Ted said. “We need to remember that they were our neighbors.”
Romie waved a hand at Ted—“They’re just meat now. What difference does it make?”
“We’re human,” Ted said. “We have certain rules we live by so we can respect life. You wouldn’t want us to drop into chaos, would you?”
“This is an emergency situation,” Romie said. “And we’ve all lost people.”
“We’ll certainly respect the dead,” Pete said. “Let’s just not go crazy here. At the heart of the matter, we’re going to have to collect, and then haul those bodies across a big chunk of real estate. There’s only so much respect you can pay when you’re loading a body on the back of a big sled.”
“As long as we remember them as people,” Ted said. “I used to live down in Saco, before all this happened. I moved up here because I couldn’t stand to be around all those eyeless people. Everywhere I’d go, I’d see someone and it wouldn’t register who they were. It’s hard to recognize someone when their eyes are blown out, running down their face.” Ted lowered his head and sat down on the edge of a chair while he rubbed his temples. “I wished I could give them all a decent burial, pay my respects, but what could I do?”
Romie rolled her eyes and shifted forward. Lisa put a hand on her shoulder to stop her from interrupting Ted’s confession.
“I got a backhoe running and figured out how to dig up our plot for my Marie, but then I just left the rest of them,” Ted said.
Pete crouched down next to Ted—“If Robby’s plan works, then we’ll be paying them the ultimate respect, because they’ll be the ones who save everything.”
“I suppose,” Ted said.
“And even if it seems a little undignified to be piled up, you’ve got to remember—respect comes from the intentions. It comes from our intentions,” Pete said. He rose to his feet and found a particular spot on the map. “I can start lining up the seven Bombardiers right here, on this bridge. It’s right on the edge where the snow starts to get deep, so we should be able to drive pickups with the bodies right up to them.”
“Shouldn’t we use something bigger than pickups?” Brad asked. “That’s going to be a lot of trips.”
“We’ll need to use maneuverable vehicles to collect the bodies,” Robby said. “So I think big pickups or moving vans are probably the way to go.”
“I can’t lift a body,” Romie said. “At least not a big one. Maybe a dead kid or something.”
Lisa gave Romie’s arm a light smack.
“What?" Romie asked.
“We’ll go in pairs,” Brad said. “One strong person per pair.”
“I know a place where I’ve seen a few big trucks,” Sheila said. “I’ll get them over to the garage so
we can start first thing in the morning. Ted? You want to come with?”
Ted was still looking down at the floor, not making eye contact. “Sure,” he said. He rose and headed for the door. Sheila waved to everyone and followed him out.
“You have the list from last night, or did it burn up?” Pete asked Robby.
“Burned up,” Robby said, “but I can remember it.”
“Good,” Pete said. “I’ve got some stuff to add to it.”
“You guys want spaghetti for dinner?” Lisa asked.
“Sure,” Brad said. Pete and Robby agreed also.
“Good,” she said. “Romie and I will make dinner.”
“How did I get conscripted?" Romie asked. “I hate making pasta.”
“Just come on,” Lisa said. She took Romie’s hand and led her to the door. “We’ll be back.”
✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪
BY THE SECOND day, Brad and Romie achieved a decent working arrangement. Despite her objections to lifting, Brad found that Romie could easily shoulder her share of the burden. For the first day, they cruised the streets, stopping at derelict cars and pulling out the drivers. Most were easy to extract—their slumped bodies were stiff from the cold and Brad slid them out to the street with one hand. Then, he took the shoulders and Romie the feet. Together they transported each body over to the moving van and loaded the person into the back.
For the heaviest bodies, they sometimes stopped to rest. For anyone even moderately fat, they used the van’s lift-gate to elevate the person to the van’s height.
Brad found he liked Romie a lot more when she wasn’t talking. She looked to be a few years older than Brad, and carried a sour expression on her face matching the band of extra weight she carried around her midsection. While they drove, he wished they had a way to play music in the moving van, so she wouldn’t feel the need to fill the silence with her angry commentary about everything that crossed her mind. Only when they were carrying a body, did Brad actually welcome her diatribes as a distraction from the horror of the dead.
It didn’t matter how many corpses he saw, something about the dead appalled Brad’s eyes. He couldn’t see them as chunks of meat, as Romie professed. He couldn’t see them as former friends and neighbors, as Ted described. To Brad, the corpses looked like broken puppets; like marionettes with the strings cut. He kept imagining them fluttering their eyelids over empty sockets, or working their jaws up and down in hitches and jerks. Each time he touched a corpse, he expected their hand to reach over and grab his arm.
Only Romie’s constant talking kept Brad rooted to reality.
“You think the birds would be back at least,” she said as they hauled a middle-aged guy out from a convenience store.
“Back?” Brad asked. Since they carried a corpse, this was one of the times he wanted her to talk. He gripped the guy under the armpits, and the man’s head flopped back and kept hitting Brad in the knees.
“Yeah,” Romie said. “I mean after a fire, or a flood, or something, you always see birds on the scene right away. It’s been months and there isn’t a bird around. Where are they? Did that thing really kill all the birds in the whole goddamn world?”
“Maybe the birds are afraid of something?” Brad asked. “Or maybe the food is better somewhere else?”
“It’s like Noah’s Ark, you know?” she asked.
Brad did not know what she meant, but he kept his mouth shut figuring she would continue. He was right.
“They gathered up all the animals two-by-two,” she said. “I don’t believe in any of that horse shit, but it might just be a story they put around something half-remembered. What if almost everything disappeared, like now, and they just made up the story about the flood and Noah’s Ark to explain it all away.”
“The genetic record would reflect it,” Brad said. “DNA would be less diverse.”
“Oh, so we’re taking as gospel the word of a whole lot of scientists not smart enough to survive the apocalypse? We’re the ones who got through it. Doesn’t our survival give our opinions just a tad more weight?” she asked. She didn’t wait for a reply. “So I think the kid is right. This thing he’s talking about has tried to take the Earth before. The birds ain’t coming back, because they’re all dead. Maybe there’s a couple around, like us.”
“Or like Luke’s horse?” Brad asked.
“If you ask me, I wish Luke hadn’t made the cut,” she said. “He strikes me as a jackass.”
When they got to the back of the moving van, they didn’t bother to engage the lift-gate; the guy was too small to bother. They moved into their positions and swung the man like a hammock: one, two, three times. On the third, they both let go and his stiff body skidded quickly to a stop in the bed of the van. Brad jumped up to drag the corpse towards the front of the vehicle with the other bodies. When they had a few more up there, Romie would clamber up to help him stack.
“So everything is dead, right?” she asked, but didn’t really ask. “At least everything that used to move around is. Seems to have left all the plants. I wonder if there are any fish left. But how long are the plants going to last if there aren’t any animals around? I mean, maybe the plants don’t really care about animals, but the bugs, they must need the bugs to pollinate all the flowers. That’s how they reproduce, right? So maybe we make it until summer, then the grocery stores start to run out of food, and then we’re done.”
“There aren’t very many of us,” Brad said. “I don’t think the grocery stores are going to run out of canned goods.”
“Yeah, but we can only get to so many of them,” Romie said. “There’s too much snow up north, and worse things down south.”
Brad jumped back down to the pavement and scanned around the parking lot. They’d grabbed the body of the clerk and the one shopper they’d found in the convenience store, and the few cars around them were tapped out.
“Plus,” she continued, “who knows what kind of climate changes we can expect going forward. Are we even going to have seasons anymore? If all the plants die, will we have oxygen?”
“Romie?” Brad asked.
“You know, Robby is relying on that thing not even being aware of us. What did he say? When a bird makes a nest in a tree, do you think it’s aware of the bacteria living on the branches?” she asked.
“Romie?” he asked again.
“What?” she asked.
“Do you have any ideas of where we could hunt for more bodies? Or should we just start going door-to-door?” Brad asked.
“Yeah—Chinese place over near the mall,” she said.
“You sure? Everyone died on Thanksgiving. Do people go for Chinese food on Thanksgiving?” Brad asked.
“Any holiday,” she replied. “I bet there’s thirty of them over there. Let’s go.”
Brad rolled down the cargo door and climbed back into the cab. Romie was already strapping herself in.
“So what do you think of his theories?” she asked Brad as he started the engine.
“Who? Robby?” Brad asked. He knew what she was talking about but the question just fell out of his mouth. He was shocked she actually asked him a question that she expected an answer to.
“Yes, Robby,” she said. “Who else?”
“He certainly presented a compelling case,” Brad said. “There’s no real way to verify some of what he said. A lot of it was based on the interpretation of those runes he found in a basement. When I looked at those things there was definitely something interesting going on. It made me feel fuzzy just to look at the symbols.”
“Hmmm, yeah, well…” Romie started, but Brad cut her off for once.
“And the fourth dimension stuff seems a little outlandish. I’m an engineer and a software architect. Spatial reasoning and higher math are not foreign to me at all, but I’ve always been taught that time is the fourth dimension. He said these things can move through three-dimensional space without continuity because they exist in four or more dimensions,” Brad said as he slowed for a stop sign
. He knew he shouldn’t bother to heed the sign, but it was hard to break the habit.
“I remember,” agreed Romie.
“So it would be like if you or I were interacting with creatures that lived on a sheet of paper. We could pick up and move to a different spot and they’d be oblivious to how it happened. Robby says that’s how these creatures manage space travel. For them, all the points in the universe are essentially connected through the higher dimensions,” Brad said. He glanced over at Romie, who was looking straight ahead. He continued—“I guess I can visualize that, but it seems like if that’s the case, we would have had contact with them before.”
Now Romie spoke up—“Exactly. He said we have had contact before. We just didn’t recognize it, or it was too long ago. Their idea of an hour or a year might not be the same as ours. What if they don’t live from one moment to the next?”
“I suppose,” Brad said.
“But you didn’t answer my question—what do you think of his theories? Like about how to drive this thing off?” she asked.
“Well, I guess to me it’s the same question,” Brad said. “If he’s right about the extra-dimensional beings and the planet-wide organism, then he may very well be right about the immune response of dumping a thousand bodies into the embryo. No way to tell except giving it a try, you know?”
“That’s exactly how I feel,” Romie said. “I believe him. I just wish we didn’t have to go a hundred miles north to test it out.”
“I’m not sure I’d go that far,” Brad said.
“What? Not all the way to Augusta?" Romie asked.
“No, no, it’s just that you said you believe him,” Brad said.
“And I do,” Romie said. “He’s a trustworthy kid.”
“Yes he’s trustworthy,” Brad said, “but I’m thinking that if he’s right about the planet-wide organism, then dumping bodies into it might be the appropriate thing to do.”
“But you’re not convinced?" Romie asked.
“Not entirely, no,” Brad said.
