“Sure. We saw the same thing in Oslo. When there were more people, we had more contact. But our numbers have been dwindling, and the number of incidents has tracked down as well. Wasn’t there a time when everything first started that a person couldn’t even be outside without being harassed?”
“It wasn’t like that exactly,” Madelyn said. She wasn’t sure if she was speaking of her experience, or just arguing because she didn’t like being corrected. In truth, she had moved to the woods just after the cull. She had heard of the hysteria, but she didn’t pay close attention until it came to her doorstep. Even then, she felt more like an observer than a participant.
“And, like I said, our Civi was actively working on both defensive and offensive solutions. They had research going all the time and they didn’t come up with anything. There were chemical trials, ballistics… Even radiation. I don’t know what else there is to try.”
Madelyn’s mind went to the green light in the box. But that was a movie. He was right—she had seen a stupid movie and thought it was real life. Madelyn exhaled slowly and looked at the lake. It seemed so peaceful. It was easy to imagine that the society hadn’t collapsed. They were just an aunt and a nephew, backpacking through the woods. There was no real danger.
The sound came like a response to her thought. Jacob’s hand shot out and grabbed her arm. He jumped up and pulled her towards the door. Madelyn didn’t want to go. She was beginning to think that maybe she didn’t belong in this world after all. Maybe she couldn’t wrap her brain around it because it wasn’t the kind of place that she could survive. She had been faking it all these years.
Jacob hadn’t given up.
As the sound increased, he pulled harder.
Once through the door, he closed it tight and pulled her towards the kitchen.
“Where’s the control panel?” he whispered to Madelyn.
She shook her head.
“Voice control,” she said. He put his finger to his lips.
Jacob turned his face towards the ceiling and whispered to the kitchen. “System. Building. Windows. All. Dim. Ten percent.”
The kitchen didn’t respond.
“It doesn’t work like that,” Madelyn said. “You have to talk to it like it’s a person.”
Jacob reacted to her voice with wide open eyes and a hand gesture that told her to shut her mouth. He crouched down and slid over towards the window so he could look out towards the woods. She didn’t hear the Roamers anymore, but they were surely still out there.
“Please dim the windows to ten percent,” Madelyn said.
The kitchen didn’t respond verbally, but the windows all began to fade and a tiny chime sounded. They turned a hazy gray, like there was a fog outside and it was pressed right against the windows.
“Block heat and noise,” Madelyn said.
The kitchen responded with the chime again.
“A house like this will have noise-canceling built in. It’s meant to block outside noise from getting in, but to some extent it will block the sound from leaving too.”
Jacob approached the window slowly and reached for the fogged glass.
“Don’t touch that,” Madelyn said.
He jerked back like it was hot.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s see if there’s somewhere more safe. We’re going to be here a while.”
Something banged on the door. The noise got Jacob moving.
#
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The basement didn’t have a locking door. It didn’t even have a shaft down to the utilities. It was just a normal staircase—very difficult to defend. Madelyn sighed and frowned as she looked around.
“How long are we going to have to stay in here?” Jacob asked.
“Until morning, I suppose,” Madelyn said. “The house’s sensors won’t pick up those things, so we won’t know it’s safe until the sun is out.”
Jacob walked into the middle of the family room. For a basement, it was better furnished than Madelyn’s whole cabin. The place had couches and chairs that would swallow a person into cushioned bliss.
It looked like this was the place where the family would take refuge on rainy days. There was a big screen on one wall and some old board games on the shelves. Madelyn moved towards those. Jacob picked up a book from the coffee table. It had photographs of old cars. He ran his fingers over the glossy pages.
Jacob set down the book and moved to the screen. There were no physical controls for him to use. He seemed at a loss for how to operate the thing.
“You have to talk to it,” Madelyn said. She pulled the Monopoly box from the shelf. The board looked good, but the rest of the game was in bad shape. The money was dirty and crinkled. The cards were dog-eared and scuffed. She only found one of the metal game pieces. It was the shoe.
“Power on the screen,” Jacob said.
She glanced up and chuckled. The thing wouldn’t obey him at all.
He turned to her, shaking his head.
“I don’t understand. We haven’t been chased by those things in years. My dad said that recently they only seem to go after people in groups. I was fine last night. You show up, and they’re here within an hour.”
“It’s because of this place,” Madelyn said. She gestured to the walls around them. “When I woke up this house, the environmental controls came on. This place vents heat out through the roof. It attracted them, same as a group of people would.”
Jacob narrowed his eyes. He looked like he didn’t want to believe her explanation.
“How come I can’t turn on this screen?”
Madelyn tilted her chin up a little. “Show outside sensors on this screen,” Madelyn said.
The screen ticked and then came to life. Most of wall showed her images from the outside cameras. She saw the lake, the dock, the porch, and the overgrown yard. The trees swayed gently in the wind. The shadows had grown even longer since Madelyn had taken refuge inside. On the other part of the screen, she saw a display of the environmental conditions. The temperature was 18° C and falling.
Jacob settled down into a chair.
“Maybe you should turn everything off,” he said. “To get rid of the heat.”
“It won’t do any good. They’ve swarmed. They won’t leave until the sun calls them.”
“The sun doesn’t always call.”
Madelyn shrugged.
She put the lid back on the Monopoly box. The game was no fun with just two people. Besides, she would probably have to explain capitalism to Jacob just so he could understand the rules.
She sat on the floor and looked at the display.
“You want to watch a movie, or talk?”
Jacob looked at her. He didn’t say anything for an entire minute. She felt uneasy in his gaze.
“You keep trapping me alone in places,” he said. “Are you lonely? Did you lead those things here just so I would be trapped and you would have someone to talk to?”
“Of course I’m lonely,” she said. Jacob flinched at her volume. She lowered her voice before she spoke again. “Yes—of course I’m lonely, but that doesn’t mean that I trapped you here on purpose. We’re both victims of the same circumstance. You talked me out of my idea that we could return to the city and fight back. Consider me disabused of that notion. When the morning comes, I will head back to…”
The voice from the screen interrupted her.
“Intrusion detected,” it said.
The views of outside slipped from the screen and were replaced by a view of the front door. It was slowly creaking open.
“I thought you locked the door,” Jacob said.
“Damn haunted houses,” Madelyn said. “We either have to find a place to hide or another way out of here.”
#
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She stuffed Jacob into the laundry closet before she climbed into the nearby cabinet. The door to Jacob’s closet was pretty thick—meant to muffle the sound of the spin cycle—but her cabinet door didn’t seem very solid. Madelyn’s legs started to go numb right away. If she had to run, it was going to be a bad scene.
She held her breath and listened.
The clicking began.
The light leaking under her cabinet door flickered. It was a good thing she hadn’t turned off the environmental controls. The hot water circulating through the baseboard heat might be the only thing that kept her alive.
The clicking grew louder.
Madelyn had to take a breath. If she waited any longer, she was going to pass out.
She heard the creaking of the laundry closet door.
Madelyn squeezed her eyes shut. The next sound would be Jacob being disintegrated. She couldn’t bear the thought. Madelyn balled her hands into fists and resolved to burst out of her cabinet. Numb legs or not, she would fight the things before she let them take Jacob away. It was likely they would both die, but that would be preferable to living with the memory that she had gotten him killed.
Logic wouldn’t let her act until she heard him scream. As long as there was a chance that he evaded the things, she wasn’t going to sacrifice herself.
The waiting was torture.
The door creaked again and the clicking grew even louder.
Madelyn bit down on the side of her own hand. The pain helped her keep control.
The clicking stopped.
Out of surprise more than anything else, Madelyn gasped for air.
She pushed open the cabinet door. The basement was empty. She dragged her numb legs under herself and steadied against the wall as she stood. The door to the laundry closet was wide open. Jacob was gone. She rushed over.
The room was barely bigger than the machine it housed. Madelyn turned back towards the stairs, prepared to run on her shaky legs so she could find her nephew.
The door to the washing machine clicked and then swung open. Jacob began to climb out.
“That was close,” he said.
Madelyn exhaled.
“I thought they had you.”
“You didn’t see me through the glass?”
She shook her head.
“I’ll go lock the door.”
I
T
WAS
BLACK
OUTSIDE
.
Madelyn set up the screen so that most of it showed the upstairs living room and the front door. They found blankets and put them in their hiding places. She asked the house to turn up the heat, hoping that a higher temperature inside would mean less heat expelled through the roof vent.
They had nothing to do but wait.
Neither of them wanted to sleep. The Roamers could come back at any second.
“What do you think happened to your sister?” Madelyn asked.
Jacob scratched the side of his nose with a finger.
He shook his head.
“I don’t know. There are a lot of possibilities that Dad talked about. It might have been her time, you know? They came in waves. Nobody would walk off for months or even a year, and then four would go in the course of a week. Dad said it was contagious.”
“People would walk off?”
Jacob nodded. “Some of the old folks called it Desperation, like it was a real disease. We caught one boy, Everett, and wrestled him back to the base. He was trying to walk off. People sat him down—his friends and his parents—and tried to talk sense into him. Every time we left him alone, he would try to walk away again.”
“Did he say why?”
“He denied it. We caught him down by the castle and Wahid shook him and yelled at him. Everett just blinked and then said, ‘Hey, what’s up?’ like nothing had happened. We told him that he had wandered out into the street and he said that was crazy.”
“So he was in a trance or something?”
Jacob shrugged. “Desperation.”
“What happened to him?”
“Eventually, Everett disappeared.”
“Nobody knows where?”
“Not with him. There was one girl that they followed. I didn’t know her. I heard about it later. They waited for her to walk away and they sent a unit to follow her. She walked right through the middle of an infiltrated park. Nothing touched her. Then, when she got to the other side, she went behind a car and then vanished.”
“So they got her? The Roamers?”
Jacob shrugged again. “I wasn’t there, but some people said no. There was no hair left behind. She was just gone.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“I know.”
“So your sister went to talk to the Civi, and when she came out she had Desperation?”
“That’s one explanation.”
“But not the one you believe.”
Jacob shook his head. “No. I think that whatever she found out in there was so disturbing that she knew we all had to disperse. Dad was clear when he instructed her. He said, ‘Come back no matter what. If there’s danger, you give me the nod and I’ll evacuate.’ So the only reason she would have turned away is because time was critical. That’s what I told my dad.”
“You guys left immediately.”
“Yeah. We were all packed up and we ran to try to catch up with Abigail. One of the bachelors from Four—a guy named Christian—was attacking people. He was trying to cut their legs with his machete. Dad tried to stay to fight him, but I made him go for Abigail. It turned out that it didn’t matter. We never found any sign of her.”
“You got away.”
“Yeah. Probably because of Christian. A lot of people who escaped from our base were limping and bleeding. They drew the most attention. Dad and I circled the Civi and searched. There was no way to track her. We went the same direction she had turned, but there was no way of telling where she went.”
Jacob looked down at his feet.
“When the limping people started to catch up, we couldn’t search anymore. They were closing on us so fast. We would have been taken. Our best hope was that she had already crossed the bridge. When we didn’t find any sign of her on the other side, we knew we couldn’t go back. Nobody survived on the other side of the bridge.”
“I’m so sorry,” Madelyn said. She reached out to touch his arm. He pulled away.