Weather

They came to a town, or - more correctly - they came to a sign. “Welcome to Lovely Pinto, North Carolina, Pop. 3,781.” There was nothing after that. They could see the remnants of a road in a telltale, straight line of overgrowth. As they walked, though, they saw nothing. No buildings or parts of buildings. No chimneys (which seemed to last longer than other house parts). No foundations. No burnt-out shells of cars. The fifty-six years since the earth cracked open had erased this place.

***

None of them remembered anything since the disaster, but all of them remembered the disaster itself. The twins remembered being in a boat, and the girl remembered watching the sea fall upwards from a beach. The tall man had been in an airplane, at the controls. They’d chewed over it a bit, in the hours and days after waking up next to each other, in what they’d thought was a desert. Nobody had mentioned it since. The dry sand and dunes had given way, within a day’s walk, to a thick forest of live trees, all growing in a bent-over upside-down U. Their tops mashed into the ground and interlocked like vines. The reverse-canopy proved difficult to negotiate, but the tall man had lead them through. By day they put as many miles behind them as they could, moving fast and staying parallel to, but never on, the road-remains. At night they found cover, or the tall man built it. He could make wind-shelter, it seemed, from anything. Rocks, branches (dead and alive), dirt, had all been whipped into unlikely warmth providers by the tall man.

He told them, that first day after waking up together, that he remembered being a pilot at the controls of a military aircraft, and that he still thought he remembered most of how to fly one. He said his brother had been in military intelligence, and that he thought he’d been warned against whatever had happened. He had maps. Old ones with notations in handwriting he recognized as his own. The tall man said he knew where they were. He was carrying a satchel across his chest, and in it were military-looking ration tubes of nutrient-blasted paste. Enough, he had told them, to last four adults for a six months if properly rationed. Also in the bag, were two other containers, both a bit bigger than the rations. About the same dimensions as a twelve ounce soda can, they appeared to be cast from seamless, heavy blown glass. A colorless liquid, viscous like honey, bobbed back and forth in each one, along with a single, marble-sized bubble.


***

A mile or so down the road-scar they saw the ground had begun to look more manicured, more cared for. They saw weeds still, but they were not as high, and not as wild. This area had been tended. Maybe not recently, but definitely in the last few years. The woman spoke in a voice still hoarse from disuse:

“It looks as if something dealt with the underbrush temporarily, and then let it start growing again.”

The other three stopped. Considered the words, reaching the same conclusion at the same time:

They’ve gone underground.

They didn’t talk anymore after that, but the leader, the one who’d spoken first, gave a conspicuous arm wave and held a finger to his lips.

“This way. Keep quiet.”

They walked behind him distanced at ten paces. He was a tall man, but he had no weight because he hadn’t eaten anything worth eating in weeks. He was walking away from the road, perpendicular to it. They could see a tree line in the distance, but between them and it was what looked like a solid mile of hard thicket and ice-plant. Surely he can’t mean to…

But then he stopped. They were about 50 yards from the road and here the growth was older. They began to walk in the same direction, this time watching the new growth on the left instead of the right.

“If anything moves, we break for that.”

The leader again, gesturing toward the thicket. He felt the group doubt. Added:

“We have to, we can move through it.”

And he got moving again. The others exchanged glances but fell right in. If somebody were living in holes out here, would they hear invading footsteps? The steps were stressful and heavy with the fear born of not knowing. After a while they left the area with the strangely maintained landscape, but all of them puzzled on about what it may have been, or might be now. They’d almost moved into another bent-tree forest, when they came to an elongated mound rising up in a dirt-colored half circle. They were standing on one end, and the thing went away from them in a straight line for what had to be 500 yards. Ten feet high, twenty feet across, the whole way. The air was still, and the silence was still total, but the sky had darkened. They saw no entrance to the immense mound. The leader spoke:

“We gotta keep going. It’s gonna’ storm. I don’t see a door…”

One of the twins said:

“We don’t want to walk a bit? Down the way?”

He gestured away down the length of the thing. The rest followed his gaze. The leader said:

“Could fit a whole lot of people in something like that. A lot of people don’t know us. And we only got a few people. ‘Sides…”

He looked skyward.

“…Weather’s coming.”

He looked at the clouds gathering in the distance. Below them was an opaque nightshade that looked like the meridian of the day might be right there. The darkness ahead of them was complete. He wanted to bed down someplace covered before it moved over him.

“OK?”

From the woman. After a little while longer, they moved on.

***

The voices were disembodied in the pitch dark. There were little points of light laser beaming through the space, but none to light faces, discern features. The voices were scratchy and hoarse. Well used.

There’s four of them. Two kids, an older man dressed in military issue. Aviator, maybe, or a mechanic. looks like they’re in good shape. None injured. Making good time in one direction since at least three days ago.

There was a long pause. Only the quietest sounds of breathing in the room. Finally, one of the voices:

“They’re heading to the needles…”

“Well I dunno, they could be heading anywhere, nowhere. They’re nothing to be worrying…”

The other voice cut him off:

“Send somebody out to follow them. Somebody armed, give them a radio.”

“Sir, they’ll be on camera for the next hundred miles. I hardly think…”

“Do it.”

The voice was flat, disinterested. It was a voice that brooked no argument, and so there was none.

“Sir. Yes, sir.”

***

It was two weeks now they‘d been on the road and their memories were only now beginning to cobble events back into order. For the first few days they’d been more or less stationary. Retraining their bodies and looking for clues about what had happened to them. It had been much warmer then. They counted out 34 tubes of food paste from the tall man’s pockets. They’d also discovered the strange feeling that everything was somehow lighter, or of less substance than they had been used to. The twins talked about how much easier walking was. The tall man found a rock as big as his fist one day, and threw it so far that is was lost to them for a while. They walked a whole six hours before finding it again.

“Well well…”

He had said then, turning the thing in his hands, feeling it’s lightness.

“…Shit’s definitely different.”

After they felt comfortable enough to begin moving, the walking proved to be comparatively effortless. They floated along for what seemed like hours, days without so much as a rest stop. The twins had a running contest going to see who could turn the most back-flips in the air from ground level. Whenever one of them voiced any doubt or concern about stopping, resting, or possibly staying put for a while, the tall man would reiterate their situation. Explaining, in calm voice, that their food wouldn‘t last. He told them that if they expected to live, then they had to look for meat, or at least a fresh water spring. That the water-pills wouldn‘t last much longer. And that he was also tired, but if they wanted to live, they had to find food. For some reason, the tall man was able to keep them motivated.

Almost immediately, the weather began to deteriorate. The tall man though it might be because they’d been moving to fast in one direction. The woman disagreed, thinking they’d not traveled far enough to see such a complete turnaround. The days, at first, seemed to have been quite warm enough and sometimes - when the sun was out - unbearably so. Now the day time temperature rarely went above forty, and usually hovered around thirty. Nights were a whole different story. Usually wet with sleet and rain, always no-moon pitch, travel then was a non-starter. They had fallen into the habit of gaining and preparing shelter hours before sunset, if only to avoid the risk of being exposed when that ferocious wind came up. They were long too, the nights. They seemed, to the tall man, to last almost twice as long as the days. But he didn’t let the fear seep in. To avoid it he kept moving, and kept talking about where they might be headed with his weird road-party.

***

The woman was a problem. Her re-up hadn’t gone as smoothly as the others had seemed to. Her body had re-formed with a pronounced tilt to her right side. As a result, her right arm was quite a bit larger than her left, and her right leg had a similar advantage over the left leg. Watching her walk was head-ache inducing.

The other two were brothers. When they woke up , the tall man remembered, they had been wearing the ripped remains of what looked like matching sweat-suits. They didn’t talk much, and - if they did - it was always only to one another. The tall man had no recollection of knowing them before. For some reason though, their presence made him nervous in a deep, unnamable kind of way. He’d thought, more than once, about killing them again. Today they were bringing up the rear. Walking a good twenty yards behind himself and the lob-sided woman. The tall man looked back. Watched them tramping along back there. They kept looking at each other and hand-motioning as if having some super important, but completely silent, conversation.

***

They were about five or six miles from the sign they’d seen for the town of Pinto and - so far - no town had showed itself. The landscape had turned to a grassless prairie, and the tall man felt he could see, maybe, twenty miles out. The weather was coming, skies were grey-black here, ominous in the distance. The tall man started looking for potential shelter but there was nothing obvious. He’d just started to make out a rocky draw a mile or so ahead, when he saw the runner. A tiny dot, in relief against the dark horizon. For a few minutes he couldn’t say weather or not the figure was coming towards them or running away. It grew in relief against the grey clouds though, and eventually disappeared. The man thought he might have ducked under the rocks. They were walking up on them when one of the brothers said of the figure:

“He’s comin’ this way.”

They came up to the rocks, which had proved to be a sort of miniature canyon growing out of the endless grass-lands. Walls about 40 feet high and 10-15 feet wide at the widest. Can’t go down there.

“We gotta walk up and over.”

Little eye rolls and sighs all at once. The walls rose fast and the climb was very steep. Also, the runner had stopped. He was sitting in their path maybe 2 miles away. The Tall Man:

“He stopped.”

“Naw. He’s just getting a rest. Runnin’…”

“He stopped.”

“Really. You think he’s just sitting there?”

“No.”

“What then?”

“He’s lying down.”

It took them a good twenty minutes to climb the outer slope of the draw. The summit found them on the verge of collapse. From the height they could see the runner better. He was lying down. As they moved over the draw the Tall Man watched him. The runner didn’t move the whole time. Tall man seemed agitated. The girl didn’t bother asking why. The twins already knew.

***

They came up on him an hour later. It was a man. Dark hair, light complexion wearing jeans and a sweater. I was plain to see why he had laid down, and stopped.

One of the twins said: “Damn he’s fucked up. No arm!”

And it was true, the guys arm had been severed, with no great precision, just after the shoulder. His face was ghostly white and his breathing shallow, as to be non-existent. Just before the stump there was a loose cloth tourniquet, not even close to doing the job for which it had been intended. The Tall man could see dirt caked into the wound. The guy wasn’t breathing, his eyes were open but rolled to white.

One of the twins said:

We should bury him.

***

It was a full, heavy dusk as they ranged from the road looking for a good spot to dig, but the ground was hard and full of rocks. In the end they left the man under the windward side of a boulder with a little Cairn of pebbles to mark the spot. The woman said a prayer. She was just getting to the “Amen” when it began to rain.

They walked on, leaving the decrepit road to walk switchbacks down to what appeared to be a salt-flat. The salt stretched to the horizon under the grey/black skies, but its flatness was dotted with long rock formations. They saw, about 400 yards out on the jagged bleach white floor, a rock edifice like a natural wall growing out of the salt. The Tall man said:

“Almost there. Hurry.”

They picked out a path up the rocks, and found themselves looking out on two concentric circles of stone, the walls stretching off into the haze in both directions. They were at the top, looking over almost a sheer one hundred foot drop of steep, narrow switchbacks, down to more of the hard-pan salt that went for a few hundred feet before the inner circle of stone shot from the floor.

Feeling the first raindrops on his face, the Tall man was determined to make the next rock-band.

“We gotta make it to the top of that. Let’s get there…”

And started running full out down the tightrope switchbacks.

At first it was just a misty sprinkle. Cold as it was, the moisture was enough to set both twins to shivering. Before long, the mist thickened and all of them got soaked through walking. They increased the pace to an urgent cantor, and it began to rain in earnest. They were just starting into an all-out gallop when the first sheet hit. It was small one, but it had brought enough force to knock them all off their feet. The woman was screaming as they gathered wits. Clutching her ankle with head thrown back and teeth-gnashing.

“My fucking leg is broken…What the fuck was that!?”

It was raining harder now, and the wind had switched directions, picked up. Before long they were all soaked from head to toe like they’d been swimming fully dressed.

The Tall man motioned to the wall, and waved the two brothers to help him with the woman. The three converged around her, still rocking back and forth in pain from her foot. The Tall man saw why: Just below her ankle, a jagged spear of bone sticking from between ripped flesh. Blood was running into the soaked earth, mixing in little collages on the ground. Whatever had happened, it had brought enough force to pile-drive the woman’s ankle down through the composite of tissue that formed her heal. He was suddenly worried. In the close distance, not more than one hundred yards ahead, he saw another giant load of water leak from the sky. It slammed into the salt and formed a small body of water that jumped and splashed in the increasing downpour.

He shouted:

“WE GOTTA GET THERE. IF THAT HAPPENS AGAIN…”

And then it happened again. This time he saw it begin around them before it happened where they were. It looked as if somebody had just magically dropped a sheet of water, an in-ground pool’s depth of water, from a great height. It made a sound when it hit like a giant hand clapping. He was looking up for the next one and it fell on his face. When his senses returned, he found himself treading water. His head on a swivel, swinging to and fro to find any sign of his companions, he saw them a few yards to his right, but the wind was driving the rain so hard he found it impossible to move to them. He dove under then, trying to go deep enough to offset the tumultuous seas, but as he was skimming along the bottom the waters receded and he was beached. He stood up feeling a bit odd. The twins were next to the woman. She was on the ground, on her back, not moving. Her head was crooked at an angle impossible for someone breathing. They left her there and ,without so much as a glance back, started booking for the rocks. They were just arriving, running up the initial grade looking for switchbacks of fissures when, suddenly, they found themselves under water.

“Deep under water,” the tall man thought as his ears popped and fizzed with the greatly increased pressure. He looked in the direction he thought was and saw only darkness. He paddled desperately for the surface, but his head stopped with nasty impact at something jagged. He didn’t have to reach out to feel the salt floor. Instead he fought to gain his feet, and pushed off. He was barley conscious when he reached breathable air. He bobbed and floated like a cork in the maelstrom, and before long he felt himself slipping back down. He watched the water close over his head and started to welcome whatever happened next. He spiraled down and thought about home…

He was awakened a few hours later and immediately thought he’d died. All around him was gleaming metal and carved wood. He was looking upwards into what appeared to be a mile-high cone or a silo of some sort. His brain went into a sort of overload trying to process the events, but he didn’t get long to cogitate. The twins nudged him gently from both sides, urging him awake:

“Bro! Hey dude. Dude!”

“Do you have a brother named Stephen?”

He shot awake, bolt upright yelling:

“How do you know that!? How could you fucking know that!? Answer me…”

“I told him Scott.”

The Tall man stood then, and paused like to gather his wits in preparation. He was making ready to meet a man he hadn’t seen in eighty years.