by David Arnold
“My psyche would unleash so fast,” said Nico.
“Hard same,” said Lennon. “A little magic is better than no magic at all.”
Nico glared at him. “Says the boy who’s never read Harry Potter.”
“I mean, he has to get the ring to Mordor before Voldemort turns him to stone.”
“Oh my God, enough with the talking.”
Later, when Lennon and Harry had started a game of fetch, Kit dug around in his bag and pulled out the best of last night’s sketches. He was never able to get the room quite right, but that was the way it went. His art never felt “good” or “done.” It was always just . . . enough.
“Here,” he said, handing the folded-up paper to Nico.
“What’s this?”
“I drew something for you. Last night.”
She started to open it.
“Not yet,” he said.
“What?”
“Just—don’t open it in front of me.”
“Got it.”
“It’s probably not very good. But it’s part of me. My beginning. Anyway. Maybe someday you’ll find the perfect spot to hang it.”
“I’m sure I will.” Nico tucked it away. “Thank you, Kit.”
Eventually they were reunited with the river and the old train tracks, as with old friends. And even though they tried to avoid roads (thereby avoiding the possibility of others), there were sections of the river that ran right beside the road, and still other sections where houses lined the water, and they found themselves walking through the high grasses of what had once been maintained yards.
“You guys hear that?” asked Nico.
They stopped and listened: a thrumming drone in the distance.
“A waterfall,” said Lennon.
Farther south, the rushing sound intensified, and they saw the outline of a wooden structure built across the river like a bridge, but fenced off, clearly meant for some other purpose. Approaching it, a sign read DANGER: NO TRESPASSING, and a tall barbed-wire fence ran between them and the Merrimack.
And then the waterfall came into view.
Having never seen one in real life, Kit walked right up to the fence. “Look at that.”
Behind him, silence. Turning, he found Lennon and Nico had continued walking, only to stop at a bend in the path some twenty paces ahead. At first, after catching up with them, he thought they were staring at the large brick warehouse by the riverbank. But as he rounded the corner, he saw what had stopped them in their tracks: adjacent to that warehouse, probably the size of two Paradise Twins stacked on top of each other, was a steel cage-like construction, with cables and antennae and power lines running in every direction.
“What is it?” he asked.
Lennon shook his head. “No idea.”
“Garvin Falls Hydroelectric Station,” said Nico.
They both looked at her.
“How in the world would you know that?” asked Lennon.
“Oh, I’m quite brilliant.” She rolled her eyes, pointed to a sign posted nearby.
“So the water . . . made electricity?” Kit turned a slow, full 360 degrees, taking it all in. The power lines, the electrical station, the train tracks, the warehouse, the waterfall, the structure built like a bridge over the river.
“I won’t pretend to understand how,” said Lennon. “But yes.”
A constant enigma, these humans of old. To build things like this. To invent things like a smartphone and a room with two machines, one for washing clothes, one for drying. To lay miles of train tracks so people and food could get from one place to the next.
He would never understand how humans could be so entirely smart and so entirely stupid at the same time.
Not 50 percent one and 50 percent the other.
They were 100 percent smart and stupid.
He turned back to the waterfall. Existential was a word he knew, which he found a bit confusing, but which he thought was in the same family as the unleashed psyche. When you feel deep things you can’t explain or see something that makes you wonder at the meaning of life.
The river was wide, the water fell fast and hard. And even though the drop wasn’t nearly as steep as it sounded, Kit watched the spray at the bottom as water hit rock, and he felt like he was standing in a second-story window staring at mountains, wondering of breezes from far-off places.
He wanted to paint this place. He wanted to have a conversation with it. Hi. My name is Kit. Where are you from? How were you made? Tell me all about your genesis . . .
And if finding your voice as an artist meant listening to your art, then maybe feeling existential was like that too.
Hi, Kit. We are the waterfall. We were made at the beginning of all things, by the Master of Breezes. What about you? Where are you from? How were you made? Tell us your genesis . . .
Kit turned, found Nico and Lennon staring at the waterfall too. Maybe they were having their own conversations with it. Maybe there were other languages, not just of art.
The language of loss, which sounded like a hollow breeze through a dead tree.
The language of sacrifice, which sounded like tying a red bandanna in your hair or buttoning a yellow plaid shirt.
The language of friendship, which sounded like a steady river, and soft footsteps at your side.
One thing was for sure.
“Good thing we decided against a boat,” he said.
there is no there
Late in the afternoon, somewhere north of Manchester and south of Garvin Falls Hydroelectric Station, they passed a sign welcoming them to the town of Waterford.
WELCOME TO WATERFORD, NEW HAMPSHIRE
FOUNDED IN 1822
POPULATION 2,023
The first thing they noticed about Waterford were the murals. They were everywhere. Colorful images plastered across storefronts and signs, walls of brick and stone, the sides of houses and banks, and, yes, even a movie theater.
It was real mural mania.
Some of the images depicted in these murals were strange but harmless: a car at the bottom of the ocean; a rabbit on top of a cannon; a house in the shape of a man’s face. Others were far more frightening: an enormous empty eye socket; humans with animal heads dancing around a fire; a woman giving birth to a smartphone.
“This town is unpleasant,” Kit said.
Lennon shook his head. “You are not wrong.”
The main road had no name, or the sign had long since been torn down. It felt like an old place, but not old like Town, where the streets smelled of nostalgia and hugs.
Here, the streets just smelled like street. No fancy shoes, no fancy cars or dresses. Aside from the murals, it was all crumbly and forgotten, either side of the road lined with ramshackle shops, unreadable signs, and a thin layer of snowy rust. Even the trees grew at haphazard angles, twisty and turny in all the wrong places. Overhead, clouds filled the sky, and suddenly late afternoon felt like early evening.
Waterford was the kind of place where a person might believe there were no other places. When you’re here, there is no there.
“Where are all the marrowless bones?” asked Kit.
“The whats?”
“You know. People-bits.”
Every other town they’d cut through: people-bits everywhere. But not here. Which meant the town had been completely cleared out prior to the Flu, or else someone had moved them since. They shifted to the center of the road, as if the missing marrowless bones might jump out at them from one of these abandoned shops.
A faded sign in a bookstore advertised a local author event.
A pub. A bakery.
No windows, just gaping holes of darkness.
In the front yard of an old church, a sign read:
BLESSED CHURCH OF THE RISEN SAVIOR
BE FRUITFUL,
AND MULTIPLY, AND REPLENISH THE EARTH.
—GENESIS 1:28
Lennon mumbled something about it being a weird thing to put on a sign, when—
“Stop!” The word rang through the street, the gaping shop windows, the twisty trees. “Just the three of you?”
The Blessed Church of the Risen Savior was on their right, a run-down mess, with cloudy stained glass, chipped white paint, and heavy-looking wooden front doors; on their left, a row of equally dilapidated houses.
“Yes!” said Nico, turning in a slow circle. The voice had been too echoey to be sure which side of the road it had come from. “Plus the dog.”
Lennon yelled, “Just passing through!”
The clunk of a lock being turned, and the heavy doors of the church swung open, and two men—one old, one young, identical aside from age—stood in its frame.
The younger one held something like a gun, pointed right at them.
“Tell you what,” said the older one. “Come on inside, and we’ll have a nice chat about who’s going where.”
NICO
Phonologies
Some people said a lot in quiet voices, some said nothing in loud ones. And some, she was learning, simply loved the sound of their own voice.
Stages
“We’re the last survivors of Waterford, proud descendants of the town’s first fucking settlers.”
Bruno and Gabe Rainer looked like they’d been eaten, digested, and passed through the bowels of an adult moose. Small but sinewy, white, with oil-black hair pulled back into tight ponytails, the dirt on their faces had moved into whatever stage came after caked on.
Bruno was older, probably in his fifties (calling into question Nico’s theory that age reactivated the virus), with a chunk missing from one ear. He’d introduced himself first, and then, with a flourish, “And this is my son, Gabe.” The bravado in his voice was off-putting, as if Nico and Lennon and Kit had crossed mountain, canyon, swarm unending with the sole aim of meeting his offspring, Gabe Rainer, the Chosen One.
Gabe was a bit older, maybe early twenties, with perpetually watery eyes and the face of an empty sack. He walked with a limp and carried an object about the size of a rifle, made of wood and metal and a kind of cord. Clearly a gun-like weapon—Nico could only guess at its function.
The way they carried themselves, Bruno’s tone of voice, Gabe’s weapon, both sets of eyes dim as could be—these two would’ve fit right in with the Metal Masks, thought Nico.
Bruno, especially, whose dramatic shift into consummate host was clearly an act.
Inside the church, he rattled on about its history while they took in its bizarre architecture. It reminded Nico of a photograph she’d once seen of an old town after it had been bombed, buildings where one side remained intact, while the other was demolished.
The entire back wall of the church, and part of the ceiling, was gone. And since the church backed up to the woods, she found herself staring out into a thick-forested darkness. In the middle of the floor, an enormous firepit with flames kicking around, smoke funneling up through the hole in the ceiling. What walls were still intact had hanging torches, which, when combined with the size of the firepit, accounted for the relative warmth in the room, as well as the damp floors.
“What’s that sound?” Lennon looked at the floor.
Nico had noticed it too, a low frequency humming under their feet.
“Catacombs.” Bruno walked to the corner, stomped his foot on a trapdoor with a giant padlock. “Run the length of the church underneath. With the falls upriver, certain times of year, water rattles the ground, you can actually feel it here.” He fell back into his regional history lesson, how this was the first structure built in Waterford. “Should have seen it in its heyday, long before the businesses arrived.”
“Businesses?” asked Lennon.
“He means Flies.” From the moment they’d entered the church, Kit had stood like a statue, facing the interior of the front wall, less interested in catacombs and gaping holes, more interested in the strange mural looming over them. “Business is the technical term for a swarm,” he said quietly.
Bruno smiled. “Little man knows his shit.”
This mural was done in the same style as the ones they’d seen outside, though it was bigger and more elaborate. In the top corner of the wall, a big moon, and in the sky around it, instead of stars, bright red computers and telephones, blue light bulbs and televisions, neon outlets and keyboards, a thousand twinkling technologies wild and alive in the dancing firelight.
Nico put an arm on Kit’s shoulder. “You okay?”
He didn’t say anything, just stared up at the strange image.
“Our very own drawings on the cave wall.” Bruno pointed to Gabe, who’d been sitting quietly in the corner, wooden weapon on one shoulder, watery-eyed and silent. “Man of few words, my son, but quite the talent. Now see, you got me rambling on about history, and I’ve forgotten my fucking manners. Who’s hungry?”
Operations
The only real furniture in the church was a long wooden table with chairs on each side. Surely, somewhere in Waterford, they have a building with four walls and a ceiling, thought Nico. Even for their strange hosts, dining in the ruins of an old church seemed bizarre. But the firepit and torches made it feasible, temperature-wise, and she thought it best not to question.
Eager to get back on the road, they wouldn’t have accepted the dinner invite had it been presented as an invitation. As it was, Gabe’s rifle-like weapon was never far from use, always on his shoulder or in his hands or beside him as he tended the fire.
The food was fine: a salted lettuce with tomatoes and some sort of corn relish. Bruno sat at the head; Nico and Lennon sat by each other on one side, while Kit sat across from them, staring up at the mural over their heads. Seemingly uninterested in food, Gabe remained preoccupied with the fire. Under the table, Harry’s wet snout rested in Nico’s lap.
“So you’re an artist,” said Bruno, chewing as he talked.
“Not really,” said Nico.
“Actually”—Bruno pointed to Kit—“I was talking to Little Man.”
Kit turned from the mural, looking genuinely shocked to be addressed.
“Some people see my son’s art and it sort of—freaks them out.” Bruno turned in his chair, looked up at the wall. “But the way you’ve been staring at it makes me think, There’s an artist who gets it. You saw the ones coming into town, I assume. What’d you think of the empty eye socket? Mark of genius, am I right?”
Kit took a well-timed bite.
“We’ve got a whole setup of art supplies in an underground bunker out back.” Bruno pointed through the back of the church, into the forest.
“Sorry.” Lennon gazed out into the woods. “Underground bunker?”
“Good place to hide, when the need arises. Thoroughly designed and fucking fortified. But it’s primarily a space for Gabe to store his supplies. My boy would’ve had quite the life for himself in the old world. Big studio in New York City, the whole nine. As it is, he’s got a bunch of brick walls and a hatch in the ground. But so be it.”
Bruno’s smile was the opposite of a smile; even the way he ate his salad—slowly, methodically, planning the next bite while chewing the current one—felt scripted. And yet somehow, each topic bled into the next, so that now he was talking about some period of time in which America was in jeopardy of being bombed by the Russians. “1960s, I think. Underground bomb shelters were all the rage. Of course, they never attacked, but we got pretty good and wiped out anyway, didn’t we?”
Under their feet, the river’s dull roar took the reins of the conversation for a moment.
Harry had disappeared, gone out for dinner, no doubt.
“So”—Bruno gulped his water, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand—“what brings you three to Waterford?”
; “We’re headed to the coast.” Like that, Nico was in the lie, espousing Monty’s motivations as her own, explaining how they’d had a radio in their old town, how they’d heard a recorded loop, and were now making their way to an island off the coast. She was careful to omit specific names and timelines, not wanting to get caught in the lie, but mostly, wanting to keep her friends safe. If the Isles of Shoals really was some safe haven, she had a feeling it wouldn’t be for long once Bruno and Gabe got there.
“Interesting.” Bruno looked up at his son. “Isn’t that interesting, Gabe?”
The room was well lit, warm. But apparently not warm or bright enough for Gabe, who’d been piling wood and prodding the fire while they ate. Like he’s a servant or something, preparing the room for his guests.
“Yes. Interesting.” Gabe’s first words of the evening. He followed them up with a few more. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to use the facilities.”
They watched him leave, then ate in awkward silence. Eventually, as much to break the silence as anything, Lennon commented on the freshness of the salad.
“Gave up meat for obvious reasons,” said Bruno. “Thought I’d miss it, but we’ve gotten creative with the vegetables. You like the relish?”
“Obvious reasons?”
“Hmm?”
“You said you quit eating meat for obvious reasons.”
“Right.” Bruno stopped chewing as he looked around the table. “Oh. You don’t know?”
“Know what?” asked Nico.
Bruno leaned back in his chair, rubbed his hands together slowly, as if savoring the moment. “Okay, well. Let’s start here. Did you know sharks can smell blood in the water from hundreds of meters away? Doesn’t take much either. One part blood for every one million parts water. Roughly”—he picked up his cup, held it out, and tipped a few drops of water onto the floor—“that. In a room like this. Resilient creatures, sharks. And still. No match for Flies.”
“Hard to imagine a shark being deterred by cinnamon,” said Nico.
