Hellworld

by Tom Leveen

  “I tend to agree with you, Abby,”he said. “Probably she’s gone. But just in case, let’s go check this place out. Maybe find out if they really are gone or not. I love her, you know?”

  I didn’t answer, but I didn’t think I needed to. Alex had used the present tense too.

  “So then why are you coming along?”I said to Selby. I figured part of the reason had to do with dating Charlie, and that was reason enough, but couldn’t resist the question. I hoped it didn’t come out sounding like a challenge. But it might have.

  Her eyes darted briefly to Charlie before she said, “I was asked.”

  “Selby’s making a name for herself in the online skeptical community,”Charlie said. “She’s got almost six thousand followers on her blog.”

  “I’ve got a book signed by Richard Dawkins,”Selby said, raising her eyebrows.

  Richard Dawkins was, among other things, one of the world’s leading skeptics. I hadn’t read him myself, but Mom had been a fan. We still had books of his at the house.

  I didn’t normally pick fights, of any kind, with any person, but Selby’s snotty attitude pushed me over the edge. “Is that supposed to be a credential? Anyone can buy a signed book.”

  I thought I’d neatly won that one until Selby stabbed back.

  “Uh, I’m, like, the Texas State Science Fair first-place winner two years running, I’ll be getting my early action results from Caltech in December, which will doubtless be in my favor, my SATs are rivaled only by my prodigious IQ, and I’ll probably have my first doctorate before I can buy alcohol. As for Richard, we were having dinner when he signed it, he and me and my older brother, who was working for him at the time. What’re your credentials, Girl Scout? Merit badge for most Thin Mints sold?”

  So that pretty much shut me down.

  17

  Now

  * * *

  We use cached maps on Charlie’s phone to navigate an out-of-the-way route toward Dr. Riley’s house, twisting and squirreling around on back roads as best we can. Again I wonder about the integrity of the RV. We don’t see many cars, but at one point, farther out deep in the desert, we spot a short caravan of pickup trucks thumping over dunes and hills, piled high with equipment that looks like camping gear and personal belongings.

  “They’re bugging out,”Charlie says when I point out the trucks to him. “Getting out of Dodge.”

  “Smart,”I say.

  Charlie doesn’t answer.

  About an hour later we pull up to Dr. Riley’s house again. Surprisingly, he’s sitting on the porch, rocking gently back and forth in the chair Selby was in yesterday.

  “Yesterday.”That word cannot do justice to how much time has actually passed, how old I actually am now.

  Charlie parks the RV and says, “He knew we were coming.”

  “In like a mystical hell-beast kind of way, or . . . ?”

  Charlie climbs out of the driver’s-side door while I go back to the bedroom to check on Selby. She’s fallen asleep. Her temperature seems okay, as far as I can tell. I do my best to check her pulse, but don’t know what would be too fast or too slow. It seems normal to me. I lift her shirt. Dr. Kay has rebandaged the wound, and the gauze is clear and bright; no blood. It doesn’t appear to me that her stomach has swelled.

  I replace her shirt, thinking I’m an idiot. I’m no nurse, no doctor. How am I supposed to know if she’s improving, stable, or dying right in front of me?

  I push the thought away and rush to join Charlie outside. As we approach, I see Dr. Riley has set up a metallic TV tray beside him. On it, a bottle of tequila stands guard beside a can of Dr Pepper. Beads of clear condensation well up on the surface of the can, suddenly making me excruciatingly thirsty. His heavy stone ashtray from the house also sits on the tray, while his pipe is clamped between his teeth, smoking lazily from the bowl.

  A shotgun lies across his lap.

  “Howdy,”he says sarcastically. “Wondered if you’d be showing up again.”

  “What the hell is going on?”Charlie demands, putting on a burst of speed to mount the steps and stand right beside the older man. I grit my teeth and wince, sure the professor won’t hesitate to blow Charlie away with the gun. I’ve never seen a weapon like that in person before. They aren’t nearly as sexy in real life as the movies make them out to be. It just looks cold and heavy and serious and determined to destroy anything it wishes.

  Dr. Riley arches an eyebrow and gazes up at Charlie. Softly, he says, “Step back.”

  Charlie hesitates, but must decide he can’t take on the shotgun. He takes three steps back, but keeps his body angled a bit, like he’s ready to leap at the old teacher if he needs to.

  “That’s better,”Riley says. “Last thing we should all be doing is fighting amongst ourselves, wouldn’t you say? Seeing as how there won’t be many of us left before long.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us what was down there?”Charlie says. “Why?!”

  Dr. Riley looks disgusted. “Oh, you think I knew? You think I had inside knowledge of what the leviathan was? The nephilim, the behemoth, the seraphs? Where were you when he laid the earth’s foundation?”

  “What?”I can’t help but say. I haven’t climbed the porch, choosing to stay on the hard-packed brown earth.

  “Bible stuff,”Charlie says, not taking his eyes off Riley. “He’s just quoting Bible stuff. So, what? You’re . . . you’re this religious fanatic now? You believe in God?”

  “Son, it doesn’t matter what I believe. I thought you all would’ve figured that by now. Even your sassy little scientist . . .”He trails off. “You’re two people short.”

  “Yeah,”Charlie snaps. “You could say that. Keep talking.”

  Riley considers this for a second before speaking again. “Belief doesn’t mean anything, Charlie. You wanted proof, you got it. This isn’t about faith. This isn’t about religion, or about God. This is about reality. And our reality has come crashing right down.”

  “How do we stop it?”I ask. “Please.”

  His red-rimmed eyes unsettle me, which, after everything we’ve seen, is really saying something.

  “Stop it?”he asks. “Now where is that written?”

  “People are getting killed. Kids . . . babies . . .”

  Something in his face slackens. “The slaughter of the innocents.”

  “That’s from the Gospels,”Charlie says. “You just said—”

  “No, the Bible never uses that phrase,”Riley says. Ever the teacher. “You want to know what I knew? Nothing. I knew nothing, not for sure. I feared there was something down there, yes. Or, believed, if you like. I sometimes believed that something was down there that should’ve damn well stayed down there. Something that we had no business messing around with. Whoever put them there had a reason. Well, take a look around. Now we know why.”

  “Why didn’t you stop us?”Charlie says.

  “What conversation were you having? I tried to stop you. You wanted to know what happened to your family, so you went. I couldn’t wrestle you all to the ground.”He shakes his head and works his mouth as if he’s going to spit. Instead, he says, “Now here’s a fun thought for you: Maybe none of us had a choice.”

  I don’t like the sound of that.

  “But it’s been done before,”Charlie says. “They were put there. So there must be a way to do it again.”

  “Sure,”Riley says. “Why don’t you find yourselves a good righteous man and his three sons to build you a zoo attraction for them, hmm? Maybe that’ll work.”

  “There’s got to be a way!”Charlie shouts.

  Dr. Riley calmly swigs from his tequila bottle, and smacks his lips afterward with a sigh.

  “If I thought that,”he says, “I wouldn’t be out here with a gun I’ve never fired once in my entire life.”

  “Can they be killed?”I ask.

  “Sure, why not. Give it a go. But from what I’ve seen on the news so far, things aren’t going real well for the human race. Oh, we’ll
raise the stakes as time goes on. More guns, bigger guns, then the rockets and missiles and bombs. Maybe we even bust into our chemical and biological weapons when we get desperate enough. But kill them? The gods had a tough time, I don’t see where we stand much chance.”

  “So that’s it,”Charlie says. “That’s all you’ve got. You and my dad knew more about this than anyone, right? Don’t you have more notes, an idea, some theory? Anything?”

  Dr. Riley taps out his pipe.

  “Children,”he says, and somehow, it actually sounds paternal rather than patronizing, “you might want to start adjusting yourselves to the idea that the rest of your lives will be spent in Hell.”

  Funny. I’d been thinking the same thing.

  18

  Then

  * * *

  “Sorry,”I said to Selby, feeling stupid for having doubted her prodigious IQ. Then I couldn’t help adding, “But could you at least just chill out for a second so I can talk to you like a normal person? We’ve got a whole weekend to go, here.”

  Selby held her glare a moment longer, then said, as if doing me a favor: “Sure.”

  “Thank you.”

  I took a deep breath and shut my eyes, rubbing my hands hard against my forehead, thinking this might be an awfully long forty-eight hours or so if I couldn’t make peace with Selby.

  “Okay,”I said when I felt like I could speak again. “So, if I hear you correctly, you’re going along specifically because you don’t believe anything supernatural happened to our parents.”

  “Correct,”Selby said. Her tone was neutral. “There’s an explanation for everything. There’s always a scientific explanation. Always.”

  “We need a reporter,”Charlie said. “Keep our Spectre Spectrum skepticism going. We need someone who will fight us, or me, on anything we find. Keep us honest-like.”

  “And add drama,”Alex said dryly.

  “Voilà,”Selby said, striking a glam pose in her captain’s chair.

  “Why don’t you believe something supernatural could have happened at the cave?”I asked her. “I’m not saying it did, I’m just curious.”

  “There’s no proof. I mean, it’s really just common sense. Like on Ghost Hunters and The Spectre Spectrum, people would say, ‘An apparition of a woman in an old-fashioned dress will appear!’ Okay, so . . . does this ghost exert free will? Did she choose to appear right then? If so, was her goal to frighten the observer? And if so, why? There’s no logic at work. If ghosts were real, we’d have proof. Not evidence, proof. Everyone would see one. Why would a spirit make a chandelier swing, or a chair rock? What is the ghost trying to do, exactly? What’s its point?”

  “They may be psychic energy,”Alex said. “Impressions left in rooms, the residual of heightened emotion, things like that. It’s a theory.”

  “Okay,”Selby said, like she was accepting a dare. “Let’s just pretend that’s possible. Let’s assume traumatic events can somehow imprint themselves on a building or an object. Maybe trauma releases some kind of eternal photon that sticks to the atoms in a wall or a chair or something. Let’s call them ghostons.”

  I actually caught myself grinning at that. Damn.

  “And those ghostons stick around for ages and ages until suddenly one day they light up out of nowhere,”Selby continued. “And someone happens to see it and says, ‘Oh, wow! A ghost!’ All right. Cool. But come on! A full-torso vaporous apparition like in Ghostbusters, for God’s sake? No. We’d have it recorded by now, unless you count the dumb shit on YouTube, which is hardly the zenith of hard science. People want to believe in something, I get that. God, their Buddha, nature, whatever. But existential dread isn’t evidence of an afterlife.”

  I realized then that she’d dropped the snotty tone from her voice. She sounded like a professor, and not at all eighteen.

  “Existential dread?”I asked, slowly, not wanting to stumble on my pronunciation in front of Selby. “You mean—”

  “We’re all afraid to die. So we pretend there’s something else out there for us to make ourselves feel better. Only, there’s not. We’re all alone.”

  Well, that pretty much sucked the sunshine out of the day.

  Feeling an absurd need to say something to Selby, I came up with this: “I wasn’t a Girl Scout.”

  I may as well have said, I’m rubber, you’re glue. Everyone froze. Then . . . they laughed. Even Selby.

  And I joined them. Not a lot. But some.

  “Just out of curiosity, what if you’re wrong?”I said.

  “I’m never wrong. But just for shits and giggles, about what, exactly?”

  “About . . . afterward. What if we’re not alone? What if there’s a heaven or a hell or something else entirely? What would change for you?”

  Not bitchily, she asked me, “What do you think happens after we kick the bucket?”

  “Nothing,”I said automatically. My default skepticism came back, and I welcomed it. It warmed me as surely as a favorite faded hoodie. But I couldn’t help adding, “Or, probably nothing. If I found out for sure there was an afterward, then that would be kind of great. I guess I’d see my mom again someday.”

  Selby took that in for a moment before leaning forward toward me. As she spoke, her tone still wasn’t bitchy or condescending, but she definitely sounded like a teacher.

  “Abby, there’s a scientific, logical reason for everything. Even things we don’t understand yet. I want to see my dad, too. But based on existing laws, it’s not going to be on some cloud playing a harp, or making inarticulate noises and rattling chains in some attic. Know what I mean?”

  “Your dad?”

  “He died when I was ten. Random brain thing.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”

  “S’okay,”Selby said with a shrug. “But thanks.”

  The rest of the drive was not exactly a party, but it was cordial. I didn’t mind. It still beat being at home in the dark. At Selby’s insistence—she was having what she called a “nic fit,”and the term suited her demeanor—we stopped for food at a little fifties-themed diner outside Phoenix.

  Charlie, Alex, and I talked while Selby chain-smoked outside. I tried hard not to show my surprise when Alex mentioned that, until recently, he’d been attending a seminary in order to become a youth pastor.

  “Oh!”I said. “So, you’re like a . . . Christian, then? Or . . . ?”

  “I’m not going to throw any Bibles at you,”Alex said, grinning. “You don’t have to cross your arms quite so hard.”

  He was right. I’d practically shrunk two sizes, sinking into myself and away from him. I hurried to drop my arms and sit up. Alex and Charlie both smiled through all my nervous acrobatics.

  “So, who did it to you?”he asked. “Was it a specific pastor, or one particular church, or . . . ?”

  “Huh?”

  “Usually a response like yours comes from someone who got beat up by a religion. Physically, sexually, emotionally, spiritually. What’s your story?”

  “Oh. Nothing. I mean, nothing like that ever happened. My mom was just really, you know . . . reasonable.”

  “Ah, so I’m unreasonable.”

  “No! I just mean—”

  Alex poked my arm. “Only teasing. I understand, trust me. The ones who show up wearing crosses generally intend to crucify someone.”

  “Does Selby know that you . . . ?”

  Alex and Charlie both started laughing. “Are you kidding me?”Alex said. “I’ve been living with that little troll for two days already. The last thing I need is for her to go off about me and make-believe Jesus.”

  All of us laughed at that. Frankly, I’d take whatever brand of faith Alex had over Selby’s caustic attitude anytime.

  “So why’d you stop going?”I asked. “If you don’t mind.”

  The mirth left Alex’s face. “I started asking certain questions, and those questions were not met with the lovingness I had expected. Eventually, it was decided that maybe it would be best if I took a
break.”

  “ ‘It was decided’? Meaning—”

  “Meaning I was gently, with the guidance of the Holy Spirit, of course, asked to ‘hate the sin and love the sinner,’ and would I please fuck off and never come back.”

  The booth seemed to cool by twenty degrees.

  “Maybe not in those exact words,”Alex said wryly. “But where I come from, the meaning comes through loud and clear. But don’t worry. They’re praying for me.”

  An echo of Mrs. Brower’s frequent promise to do the same bounced back at me. I wondered if she was the type of person who could hurt someone like Alex. I didn’t think so, but you could never tell with religious people.

  “You ever read it?”Alex asked. “The Bible, I mean? It’s okay if you didn’t. I’m still not going to walk you through the Four Spiritual Laws or anything.”

  “What are those? I’m probably breaking them.”

  “Trust me, it’s better if you don’t know. But have you? Ever read it?”

  “No.”

  “Well, lemme tell ya, there’s a lot of weird stuff in there. I know that. I’m not stupid. Believe me, nothing messes with your faith more than going to Bible college. But then there’s a few things that strike me as pretty clear, you know? Like, I dunno . . . ‘Love people.’ ‘Don’t judge.’ Those seem like easy ones to remember. Maybe not to do, but to try to do. I mean, I even feel bad for calling Selby a troll.”

  “Oh, don’t feel bad about that,”I said. “It’s not a sin if it’s true.”

  Alex looked me square in the eye, and for a second, I thought my joke had totally misfired. But then he laughed hard, and we were okay.

  “I’m sorry about whatever happened,”I said.

  “Thanks,”Alex said. “It’s been a long couple months, and I haven’t really had anyone I could trust to say any of that to. Just Chuck here, I guess, since he took me in.”

  “He’s been staying with Stephen and me for a few months,”Charlie said.

  “Right, but only, and I mean only, until I figure out what the fuck to do with the rest of my life,”Alex said. “As soon as I know that little tidbit, I am gone.”