A flurry of papers rained down, blown out by the wind, and landed on the boat. One document stuck to the windshield and Robby ducked to the right to see. A police car dropped into the ocean. The nose sank first, and the trunk stuck up out of the water like a big blue tombstone before it slipped out of site. Off to the right, a red pickup truck landed with a giant splash.
Back at the shore, the person still waved both arms overhead. It looked like a man, Robby decided.
“Why don’t you get out of there?” Robby whispered.
A giant log floated directly in Robby’s path. He pulled back on the throttle and maneuvered around it. He was immediately blocked by section of clapboarded wall. Robby put the boat in neutral and banged his way through the door to the deck. He climbed the ladder which ran up the back of the cabin. With a little elevation, he saw the extent of the problem. The ocean between him and the man on the shore was becoming a minefield of debris, and every second the tornados dropped off more pollution to block his course.
Robby climbed down and went back in the cabin. He couldn’t even see the man anymore, the air was thick with dust, and everything on the shore was a fuzzy blur. He tried to use the binoculars, but couldn’t find anything to focus on.
Robby stood there, trying to spot the man, while junk floated out to him and started to surround the boat. When another car splashed down a few dozen yards from the boat, he jumped and nearly screamed. He frowned and spun the wheel to the right. He brought the boat around so his back was to the pier before he gunned the throttle. The boat ground through the chop and the waves at its stern seemed to help push the boat along. Robby never looked back to try to spot the man again.
Down the coast he saw two more towns being dismantled; he gave them a wide berth. Robby lost track of time. He just steered the boat to the left of the next point or the next island and checked the charts to make sure he was staying out of shallow water. Eventually, the GPS told him he was entering Casco Bay, and then across the bay, the entrance to the city of Portland. Robby veered the boat to the left, dreading the destruction he would see to the small city.
Eventually, his curiosity won out and he let the wheel drift to the right a bit. He passed within a mile of the islands which protected the port, and saw glimpses of the city skyline. He expected destruction, but he couldn’t spot any, even with the binoculars.
The fuel gauge showed a little less than half a tank. Robby decided to keep heading south.
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Even from out on the water, Robby could see the snow accumulations south of Portland didn’t nearly measure up. Some places looked like they’d only received a dusting, although the grey sky seemed to promise more was on its way. Robby spotted a private dock that looked like it had deepwater access, and he headed to shore.
His landing was tentative, but reasonable. He was so afraid of bringing the boat in too quickly, it took him forever to sidle the boat up to the dock. He reversed several times to account for lateral drift, but eventually he got the boat alongside the floating dock and jumped out with the stern rope. He tied it up the best he could and looked to the shore.
There was no beach here—the land came down to the water’s edge and then dropped off suddenly. A wooden staircase, built into the side of the hill, gave access to property above. Robby filled a backpack with some food, flashlight, and basic supplies and climbed up the stairs. He gripped the railing to make it up the stairs. They were fine—not slippery, and not too steep—but Robby’s balance was tweaked from the long boat trip. He constantly felt like he was falling to the left, and his rubbery legs wanted to compensate.
At the top, he found a well-groomed lawn, still greenish, under about a half-inch of snow. A flagstone path led past a flagpole, between gardens, and up to the back of a big building. The side facing him was virtually all glass, affording excellent views of the ocean.
Robby walked up the path, crunching the snow and scanning back and forth for signs of life.
In the distance he could hear an engine, humming away at a steady pace. He approached the lower door of the building. The windows looked in on a big empty room. Stacks of chairs lined the far wall, a big fireplace and hearth took up most of the left wall, and on the right, overhead fixtures lit up a long bar. To Robby, it looked like a fancy version of the Lion’s Club recreation hall. He reached towards the door and then stopped his hand.
The pulsing engine in the distance troubled him. He figured it was probably just a generator—that would account for the lights over the bar—but would it automatically come on? On the island the power had been out for a while; should this generator still be running? Robby turned from the door and circled the building in the direction of the engine sound. He found the unit about halfway up a steep slope. It didn’t say “Generator,” but it had big cables leading inside and was plumbed to two big propane tanks up near the corner of the building. Robby continued around the perimeter until he found himself at the front of the building.
A narrow driveway led to the door from a parking lot a little ways off, down in the woods. He counted fourteen cars parked down there. No tire tracks disturbed the thin layer of the snow and he could see dark patches beneath the vehicles—they had been parked there since before the snow.
A sign near the glass double-doors read “Towering Pines Conference & Renewal Center.” Robby approached and looked through the glass to a small lobby. He knocked three times on the door. A green lamp lit up a desk, but nobody was sitting at the office chair. He tugged on the metal handle with his gloved hand. The door swung open and Robby stepped inside.
The air inside felt pleasantly warm, but it smelled wrong. It smelled like the cabinet where his mom kept her vitamins—a slight edge of old urine and sweat. Robby wrinkled his nose and let the door swing shut behind him. He was looking for keys, if he could get them. His dad already taught him to drive the island truck they shared with another family, so he would prefer to find truck keys, but he would take whatever he could get. He wanted to head south, to find out for sure if the disappearances were indeed local. The lack of snow this far south bolstered his confidence in the idea he could find help somewhere farther south.
Robby crossed the oriental carpet of the lobby and pushed through the door on his right. He found himself in a hall leading to the back part of the building. Some light came through the glass doors behind him and the window in the door at the far end of the hall, but the emergency lights in the ceiling—presumably lit by the generator—drove the shadows from the middle of the hall. On his right, a door led to an empty conference room. On the left wall, he found doors to the bathrooms.
When he got to the men’s room, his body responded as if on cue. Robby stayed in the hall and swung the door in. Compared to the hallway, the minimal emergency lighting barely lit up the bathroom. Robby debated; he stood in the hall and peered into the cave-like bathroom. It looked clean, had one urinal and three stalls, and he suddenly really needed to go. He stepped in and let the door swing shut behind him. The smell crept up on him as the darkness folded around him. The room smelled worse than the hall. Robby dropped his backpack to the floor and walked to the nearest stall.
He changed his mind and went back for the pack. He hung it from the hook on the back of the stall door and locked himself in. He kept his jacket on, but pulled off the gloves and stuffed them in his pockets.
Robby tried to go quick, but his bowels became shy in the gloomy bathroom. He pulled paper from the roll and folded it around his hand. He would take a bunch for his backpack, in case he needed it later. Robby sighed—almost ready to give up—when things finally started moving. His eyes adjusted to the dark and he could make out more detail in the tiles on the floor. They made a pattern of grey and black rectangles. His eyes rearranged them into different shapes.
Robby’s gaze drifted to the side, where a black line interrupted the pattern on the tiles. He kept his eyes locked on the line—he couldn’t quite make it out in the shadows—while he reached up to his backpack. He pulled out the flashlight and turned it on against his palm, so it wouldn’t blind him. In the red glow the light made through his hand, Robby could see the line was a shoelace in the next stall. He leaned forward and saw the edge of a shoe. His body pulled away, but he forced himself to lean forward. A little higher up the shoe he saw four curled fingers and thumb.
He shut off the flashlight and sucked in a shocked breath. The smell suddenly seemed more intense. Robby hastily cleaned himself up and reflexively flushed the toilet. He cringed from the sound and pressed himself against the opposite wall of the stall, sure the hand would shoot out and grab for his ankle. Robby unlocked the stall door and it swung gently inward with the weight of the backpack.
While the water still filled the bowl, Robby placed one foot and then the other up on the toilet seat. He leaned forward with the flashlight and put his hands against the stall with the shoe and hand. The hand didn’t move at all when the light hit it. Based on the smell, and that he could hear his own breathing, but nothing from the neighboring stall, Robby figured he was sharing the bathroom with a corpse. He needed to be sure.
He turned on the flashlight again—full strength this time—and pointed it over the top of the stall. He waited a second and listened. When he didn’t hear anything, he poked his head over the top of the stall.
The man on the toilet slumped forward. His torso rested against his legs. His head turned to the side, like he was trying to listen closely to a secret his knee was telling him. The man’s tongue stuck out and a splash of blood soaked into his tan pants. The man’s chin was pulled back, like he had gagged on his last breath.
What shocked Robby most about this corpse—the only corpse he’d seen other than at his grandmother’s wake—was the eyes. The man’s eyes had burst, leaving dark red holes. Robby could see one clearly, and just the outline of the other. A splatter pattern on the stall wall suggested his eyes had exploded with some force.
Robby started to feel seasick again. He lowered himself to the floor, still careful to stay pressed to the opposite wall, and grabbed his backpack before shuffling sideways out of the stall. He backed to the door and let himself out of the bathroom. He turned off the flashlight and backed down the hall towards the rear of the building. Something inside him insisted the door would swing open at any second and the eyeless man would stagger down the hall after him. Robby jumped when he backed into the door.
He propped himself up against the door until he got his breathing under control. He flipped the flashlight around, so he could use it as a weapon if he needed to, and pushed his way to the back room of the building.
Light filled every corner of this room from the windows along the back wall. Easy chairs and couches divided up the room into five seating areas, each centered on a round coffee table. Nearly every seat held a well-dressed corpse. Robby took a deep breath of fetid air and let it out slowly. He scanned back and forth, looking for any movement. They all shared the same symptoms—gagging mouth, lolling tongue, and exploded eyes. For some, eye juice and blood dripped down their cheeks. Others had turned to one side or the other, allowing their eyeballs to leave streaks down the back of a leather couch, or down the front of a button-down shirt.
A distant rumbling broke the silence. Warm air came from a vent to Robby’s right.
He counted thirty-eight bodies. With the corpse in the toilet, that meant almost three times more people than cars in the parking lot. Either a lot of people came together, were dropped off, or he had missed a bunch more cars. He didn’t think many of the people here had walked—they looked like they were dressed too well to have walked.
Robby wanted keys. He wanted keys to a truck, if he could get them. He repeated that to himself in his head, trying to get up the courage to frisk the corpses.
“I’m looking for keys to a truck. Who here would drive a truck?” he asked himself inside his head.
It doesn’t have to be a truck, he reminded himself. Any car would do, it’s just he was accustomed to a truck, and thought somehow the seats were up higher and would be more familiar. He tried to remember if he had even seen a truck outside, but couldn’t recall. That wasn’t like him. Usually anything he saw or heard was pretty much at his disposal. This was different—his mind was clouded by the stress of being in this room of thirty-eight exploded-eye corpses. Surely that was enough to break the concentration of anyone.
He moved his lips as he repeated the thought. "I’m looking for keys to a truck. Who here would drive a truck?”
Robby kept his back to the wall and side-stepped closer to the back of the couch in front of him, where a bald man’s head rested on the back. From the shower of blood and slime on the man’s lap, Robby figured he had been looking upward when his eyes exploded. Robby stood behind the couch and extended his hand to touch a finger to the dead man’s head. He poked him again, a little harder. The man’s neck was stiff and he barely moved at Robby’s touch. Robby slapped at the head. He jumped back at the sound. Nothing else in the room moved.
Robby took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He reached forward with a shaky hand and pressed his fingers to the left side of the man’s neck, where his jugular should be. Nothing—cold skin, no pulse. He braced himself to search the man and then stopped. He wondered—what if they used a valet? This looked like a fancy crowd; maybe someone parked the cars and the keys were hanging on a board somewhere in the lobby? He almost walked away to go search someplace that didn’t contain a bunch of corpses, but then he saw the irregular lump in the man’s slacks, just where his left pocket would be. Robby kept his eye’s on the corpse’s face as he reached down and touched the slacks. He felt angular metal under the fabric. Perhaps he would find keys elsewhere, perhaps not, but now he knew he would find keys here.