by Scott Mackay
‘‘We need to warm up in my truck.’’
Lesha’s eyes narrowed. She struggled to her feet and looked around the cellar, but did so in a dazed fashion. Roosevelt lifted his head and stared.
Cam pulled out his cell, checked the little monitor, but the display was still telling him service wasn’t available. He slid the phone into his pocket, lifted the water bottle, and drank. At least they had food. And water. But how were they going to get out of here? How could they get through all that snow blocking the roads? Surely as a government priority Blunt would find a way to rescue them soon.
He walked to the steps and peered at the cellar door. Light glimmered under its crack. He struggled upstairs, careful of the small slicks of water on the gray risers. Lesha followed. Out the corner of his eye he saw steam from her breath.
Eight more steps and he reached the top. He gripped the brass knob and pushed the door open.
He saw fog, not particularly thick, but oppressive, phlegmatic in its flow through the dim Texas morning. He felt each individual particle alight on his face, the backs of his hands, and down his neck.
He shivered. ‘‘It’s all melting.’’
The heavy snow on the fields glowed—the impression was of more light coming from the ground than the sky. Out beyond the swimming pool, where the land dipped, water collected on top of the accumulation, in some places a meter deep. The Navasota River, flowing just beyond the stand of trees to the west, had risen above its banks.
He glanced over his shoulder to the east where the land climbed into a cornfield. The cornstalks, bludgeoned by snow, now tilted, some leaning against each other, cobs and leaves saturated with wet. He turned back to the Navasota. How high would the river rise? Would they have to go up the east hill? And if they went there, how would they stay warm? All his firewood had been blown away by the hurricane. Maybe they could drag some of his wrecked house over for a fire.
They picked their way through his demolished home. Roosevelt came up the stairs behind them, walked to the house’s edge, leaped from the floor to the ground, and immediately got stuck in snow, sinking right to his chest. Once the dog had assessed his predicament, he bounded in a series of leaps to the nearest puddle and drank.
As Cam reached the edge of his house, he saw a framed photograph lodged under some broken plaster—his parents, in the days before the accident. He reached for the photograph. His fingers closed stiffly in the cold and he lifted the photograph. Would he always lose things, then? First his parents? Then his life’s work? Now his house? He turned to Lesha. Would he lose her as well? She seemed to sense his thoughts. She clutched his arm. He heard music, but it wasn’t the Builders’ music this time. It was Lesha’s music, quiet, serene, and steadfast.
She released him, jumped to the snow, and helped him down.
They walked past her vehicle until they came to his. High overhead he heard the screech of a kestrel, and looking up he saw the creature circling, its wing feathers splayed like fingertips. Why would the Builders want to destroy such innocence and beauty? How did they evaluate worth?
The integers of his plan tumbled through his mind in a disjointed fashion as Lesha helped him into the driver’s seat of his truck. He inserted the key into the ignition. It hummed to life and he turned on the heater. The heat coming from the below-dash vents was like the breath of welcome summer. Yes. His plan. For a demonstration. But just how was he going to sell it to Blunt and the others? Sell it to them he must. For their own good.
Lesha climbed in the other side of the truck.
He turned on the radio and heard a country music station in Kansas. Also a Spanish language station in Austin. But they didn’t receive any signals from the immediate area.
After fifteen minutes, they got news, and through the various reports, he pieced together what he and Lesha had missed.
Widespread damage had occurred in eastern Texas and western Louisiana. Over five million people were without power. Cell phone networks were down. Looting was widespread in Houston, and the National Guard had been called in.
In related news, there was word about the sun. Dr. Nolan Pratt had been interviewed. The sun’s temperature was now rising dramatically.
There was word about the Moon. Colonel Timothy Pittman, theater commander, said a second Builder communication attempt had failed, resulting in the disappearance of three scientific team members, and the death of at least one. Dr. Renate Tennant was reported as missing. Pittman wouldn’t speculate on a possible military response.
The fate of the Princeton Team saddened Cam greatly. He was particularly sorry about Renate’s disappearance. Why did it have to be this way? Why wouldn’t the Builders at least try to talk to them? He took a deep breath and sighed. Why take Renate away from them when she had just been a scientist doing her job? And his house. He glanced over. A pile of wreckage. Where was he going to live? How was he going to find the courage to start over, particularly if the sun was going to bloat into a red giant and consume them all? He turned to Lesha. What kind of future could they possibly expect together when the future seemed to be quickly running out? He lifted his chin. A demonstration. If only he could convince the powers in Washington that it was necessary. He was upset, but tried to control it. He had to think. Had to somehow figure out a way to stop all this.
Roosevelt pawed at the door. Lesha let him in and he climbed into the backseat of the quad cab.
The heat made Cam sleepy, and he drifted off.
He must have dozed a long time because when he woke, he saw that all the clouds had cleared. The sun, setting to the northwest, now touched the horizon. What startled him was how the horizon had changed. It was all water. Five wood ducks—a mother and four ducklings—paddled across the new lake to the west of his house, serene and untroubled. The trees by the river were now half submerged, the water’s smooth surface reflecting their branches. He couldn’t see his swimming pool, nor his diving board—both were underwater. The water crept toward his house, and was rising so quickly that within the next minute it extended its reach by another fifty centimeters.
‘‘Lesha?’’
She moaned, turned. Looking at her, he saw that a strand of straw-tinted hair had become caught between her lips. He pulled it free. She opened her eyes. She looked at him, her cheek against the headrest. The wood ducks quacked. She glanced.
She sat up and gripped her knees. ‘‘What do we do?’’
‘‘We should climb the hill.’’
They got out of the truck. The snow had turned slushy.
They had blankets. And a bit of food. They had matches, but everything was too wet to make a fire. They reached the top of the hill and saw that the small valley on its eastern side had also filled with water.
Lesha said, ‘‘We’re becoming an island.’’
He got down on his knees and moved slush aside. It squished through his fingers, and the cold, that which had penetrated his fingers for the last three days, came back quickly. Lesha got down on her knees beside him and they pushed the slush aside until they had made a small hollow for themselves.
Then they trudged back and forth to the house, using its wreckage to construct a shelter, even though the broken pieces of wood were sharp, splintery, and dangerous with exposed nails. Occasionally he looked up at the sky, wondering when a helicopter would come.
Once they were finished, Lesha attempted to drive the truck into the cornfield, but couldn’t get past the first part of the incline. The truck’s wheels sank into the slush, then into the mud, and finally spun and spun.
They stayed in the truck as long as they could, but eventually the water eased around its tires, and as the final light left the sky and the first stars appeared, they got out and climbed the hill to their makeshift shelter.
Much to Cam’s surprise, the air was a lot warmer, bizarrely so, having risen ten degrees in the last hour. He thought that at least they wouldn’t freeze to death, even if it meant the sun was reigniting itself due to gravitational pressu
re.
The gold hydrogen band appeared a short while later, rippling, flexing, shining as hypercharged particles drifted away from the sun.
The night was long and uncomfortable. To pass the time, Lesha recounted her early life in California: herself and her four sisters growing up in Orange County, her father leaving them when they were young, her mother having to work two jobs, a lab tech during the day, a cleaner at night. ‘‘It just about killed her. We lived in a two-bedroom apartment. That was hard, the six of us in such a small space.’’
They dozed on their little platform. Roosevelt crawled in between them, and the dog was like an electric blanket.
Cam woke a little while later, went outside, and had a look. The Moon, like a dollop of orange sherbet, rose. Navasota floodwaters had climbed above his house. He saw some of its wreckage float away. Lesha’s truck was now submerged, and the back half of his own vehicle was underwater. How high would it go? He heard trickling water everywhere, including underneath their makeshift floor.
He walked a little ways up the hill and gazed down the other side. An island, and a shrinking one at that.
An hour later, the water was so high it had submerged both trucks, and only the uppermost branches of the trees along the Navasota were visible in the moonlight. All the snow had melted. The temperature was around twenty-five degrees Celsius. The sky had clouded over again.
Lesha now stood beside him clutching his arm, staring out at the water. Menacing little whirlpools formed on its surface. Farther out a dead cow floated by, lit by the orange moon.
The flood rose until finally they were standing on a small disk of muddy land an inch above the surface. Water threatened from every direction. He tried his cell phone but still got no service.
At last the flood lapped at their ankles. As the water consisted of snowmelt, it was bitterly cold.
‘‘I lived in San Francisco for a while,’’ said Lesha. ‘‘When I was going to school. In a basement apartment. Do you remember all that weird rain the West Coast got eighteen years ago? My apartment flooded. I was walking around ankle deep. You wouldn’t think it possible in a place like San Francisco, with all those hills.’’
She had barely finished telling him this when from the north he heard the blup-blup-blup of a rescue helicopter. That’s when he felt another pain in his head. Blue light seemed to crowd around from the edges of his eyes. He lost all feeling in his body and collapsed. His head tilted to one side. His shoulder cramped. He had that crazy sense again that his body was expanding in every direction. He heard a phrase or two of the music. Then saw written in the ripples the helicopter made against the water the beautiful and poetic mathematical cuneiform he had seen on the television in the hospital. A grin came to his face. It turned out Navasota was going to be conducive to contact after all. He had a gut feeling that something dramatic had happened, that some fundamental shift had occurred, perhaps with Alpha Vehicle or with the Builders themselves; the spark of this new contact was searing and direct, and felt jumper-cabled into his mind. He turned to Lesha. The enormous and all-encompassing peace came to him. The last thing he remembered as unconsciousness slowly overtook him was Lesha—the beautiful California blonde— leaning over him, calling him, and Cam not being able to hear her over the curious two-to-one music that flooded his soul.
21
It was like an absence—like the way things were before Cam’s birth, and the way they would be after he died. But out of this absence there emerged a sense of them again, the Builders, whoever or whatever they were, peering down at him, wondering about him, trying to figure out what they were going to do with him. He thought when he opened his eyes he would see a hospital room, that maybe he might be back in his special wing at Johns Hopkins. But when his leaden lids finally rose he didn’t see a wardroom at all. He was floating free in space. A bright light illuminated a foreshortened view of the Earth, and it was as though he were staring at the planet through a fish-eye lens; and with this vista of Earth, it appeared as if the Builders, in the dark sleep of this new contact, were trying to communicate with him again; and in fact, it wasn’t a fish-eye lens but a magnifying glass; and through this magnifying glass— though everything was blurry—he grasped his first real view of the Builders.
They appeared as bands of purple light angling down through the universe, two dimensions, three dimensions, and hyperdimensional, all at the same time, glowing, happy, benevolent, not aggressive, like the plus in a plus/minus equation. The purple bands slanted through the starry heavens like an indigo aurora borealis.
At last he saw a more conventional view of Earth. And in this view he witnessed a series of detonations along the Pacific equator. And it was the oddest thing, because first there were two detonations, then three, then five, and it was like the Builders were trying to communicate to him with this basic sequence of prime numbers after all, only doing it with nuclear strikes. He couldn’t understand it. What had happened? Weren’t they going to show him the symbols anymore? Were they so disappointed that they had to use this primitive and ultimately puzzling expression of the prime number sequence?
Then he woke up in his same old room at Johns Hopkins, and forgot most of what he had seen.
Dr. Ochoa and Lesha, when they came to check him a short while later, acted weirdly. They tiptoed around him as though they thought he had an embarrassing disease.
When Lesha finally came to him alone an hour after that, she acted even more oddly than before. And stranger still, she wore a silk head scarf tied in babushka fashion over her hair. ‘‘They’re recommending a hat. Not that we’ll get much of it this far northeast of Washington, but they say a head scarf is a good idea. And when I’m outside, I use this.’’ She pulled out a surgical mask. ‘‘The levels aren’t too bad, all things considered.’’ He was now under the impression that she had previously provided him with some context, but that this context was now lost somewhere in his confused memory. Later she said, ‘‘That’s why they took so long to come get us. They had their hands full with other things.’’ He couldn’t make sense of this either. He must have been awake at some point, and simply didn’t remember the missing pieces.
‘‘I’m like a broken radio,’’ he said. ‘‘I’m getting only part of the signal.’’
‘‘You didn’t get what I said about the PRNC attacks?’’
‘‘No.’’
She looked at him closely, and he had to admit, he liked her in a babushka, especially one that was so colorful, because it brought out her feminine features beautifully.
The tale she told petrified him with its freakish Kafkaesque turns: the breakdown of communications between the Earth and the Moon because of the runaway radiation coming from the slowly bloating sun; Pittman ready, willing, and able to take matters into his own hands; the nuclear launch against Alpha Vehicle; the Builder obliteration of Gettysburg with what Lesha called a spontaneous chain reaction five hundred meters above the installation; then a series of spontaneous fusion events in the Pacific, with no evidence of launch or trajectory. ‘‘Like the local hydrogen atoms all decided to get together on their own.’’ And finally the PRNC’s big mistake, believing American forces had launched against them, retaliating against the continental U.S. with their own nuclear assets, destroying six American cities, including Washington; and America then taking out Shanghai, Beijing, and Tianjin before diplomats on both sides got the hawks to simmer down.
‘‘Blunt and the others were lucky to get out of Arlington alive. And the president was lucky to get out of Washington. I guess Greenhow paid off after all. What’s odd is the pattern of initial Builder attacks before the PRNC launched. They didn’t target cities. They detonated in a sequence. All events occurred over the equator in the Pacific. Which makes you wonder why the PRNC launched in the first place, or if they were just looking for an excuse. Initially, there were two Builder detonations ninety-two kilometers apart. Then there were three more detonations. Then there were five final detonations. In other word
s, these sequences represent the first three prime numbers, two, three, and five.’’
And that’s when he remembered the strange vision he had had, of detonations in the Pacific. ‘‘What time did Pittman launch?’’
‘‘Early yesterday morning. Just a little before you had your attack. I can’t help wondering if there’s a correlation between the two.’’
He thought of his gut feeling, his sense that something dramatic had happened, of this new contact’s searing and direct feel, and understood she had to be right. More unsettling, though, was this whole new mode of expression.
‘‘The prime number sequence is worrisome.’’
‘‘How so?’’
‘‘Because they’re using nuclear detonations to convey it.’’
She looked terrified by the implication. ‘‘So you think they’re actually trying to communicate with us via nuclear exchange?’’
‘‘That would be my guess. They’re picking up on Pittman’s lead. And that could be devastating if they decide to talk to us again.’’
Ochoa rechecked him an hour later. After the examination, the doctor said, ‘‘You seem much better than after your last episode. Maybe you’re getting acclimatized to it. Are you up to meeting the president?’’
Cam glanced out the window, where the effects of the slowly bloating sun had become evident. He was surprised by how bright everything was. The park across the street was like an overexposed photograph. Cars moved up and down Jefferson as if through the highest setting in a tanning booth. Take a small room, wall it with stadium lights, and that’s how bright it was. The light stunned his eyes, and he squinted; he felt his headache come back, but none of his confusion.
