Isle of Man Page 2

  We spend the afternoon working separately. Jimmy heads off to hunt up some food. Hannah collects wood for the fire. I climb the bluff and break pine branches and build a lean-to shelter in the exposed root cavity of a tree stripped from the ground by the wave. It’s a perfect spot, halfway up the slope, protected from the wind, where we can look down and keep the beached boat in sight.

  Just as I’m weaving in the last branch, I hear Hannah drop another armload of wood behind me. A minute later, she sighs, letting me know she’s still standing there, waiting for me to say something. I keep my back turned and pretend to be working.

  “Shelter looks good,” she finally says.

  I feign dissatisfaction with the last branch and pull it free and begin weaving it in again.

  “You could say something,” she says, “couldn’t you?”

  “I don’t feel like it right now.”

  “Will you be mad forever?”

  I turn around to face her.

  “You betrayed me, Hannah.”

  “Well, that’s a little dramatic,” she says.

  “Really?” I ask, offended that she’s putting this off on me. “You can’t just go around doing whatever you want, you know. Maybe you could while you were spoiled here at the house, but you don’t know anything about surviving out in the real world.”

  “And you do?” she asks.

  “I know we have to trust one another.”

  “Like you and Jimmy do?”

  “Is that what this is about? You’re jealous of Jimmy?”

  “Maybe,” she says.

  “Why?”

  She steps up next to me and picks idly at the lean-to roof. “I don’t know,” she says, cutely.

  “Why, Hannah?”

  “Maybe because you wouldn’t commit to spending forever with me unless Jimmy took the serum, too.”

  “Jimmy’s my best friend.”

  “Shouldn’t I be your best friend?”

  The look of sadness on her face melts my anger, and I reach over and lift her chin.

  “Look at me. You need to listen. I’m not going to fight with you about Jimmy all the time. You got that? You need to ease up on him already. Okay? We’ve been through some tough stuff together, that’s all.”

  She nods.

  “Can you forgive me?”

  “Can you stop being a brat?”

  “If you’ll forgive me.”

  “Maybe you can talk to Jimmy?”

  “About what?” she asks.

  “Convince him to take the serum.”

  “Would you forgive me then?”

  “Maybe.”

  She lifts an eyebrow and bites her lip.

  “Yes, I’d forgive you then.”

  She smiles. Then she throws her arms around me and hugs her head to my chest.

  “Have I told you you’re the best boy in the whole world, Aubrey Van Houten?”

  “I’m not a boy,” I say. “I’m almost sixteen.”

  “Well, you’re the best man in the world then.”

  I laugh.

  “Compared to all the other men out here?”

  “I’d have chosen you if there were a million men.”

  As evening falls we build a fire just outside the lean-to. Hannah managed to collect a surprising amount of wood, and even Jimmy is impressed with her. We sit inside and watch the sky go dark beyond the fire, eating a light dinner of more fish for us and more foraged plants and mushrooms for Hannah.

  “I’d give anything for some algaecrisps right now,” I say.

  Hannah must be thinking the same thing, because I see her eyeing our fish as she gnaws on yet another root. I hold a hunk of pink trout meat out to her. She shakes her head.

  “Come on,” I say. “Just a taste.”

  “I don’t like killing things.”

  “It’s already dead whether you taste it or not.”

  To my surprise, she plucks the fish from my palm. Jimmy’s eyes widen, his curiosity pricked. Hannah brings the fish to her nose and smells it. Then she bites off a tiny piece and quickly chews it with her eyes closed. I see her swallow, then she sticks out her tongue and shakes her head.

  “Ahk! No thanks.”

  Jimmy and I laugh. Hannah holds the rest of her uneaten fish out to Junior, and he rises from beside the fire, walks over, and scarfs it down, then licks her fingers. She pulls him onto her lap and pets him, his tired eyes closing with each stroke then opening again. Jimmy pulls around his netted sack and dumps out a pile of enormous pine cones that he collected. He begins plucking nuts from their spikey bodies and cracking them open between two stones. He eats a pine nut then hands one to me. Then he eats another pine nut and hands one to Hannah. The fire crackles, Junior’s eyes open and close as Hannah pets him, and the quiet night is punctuated by the methodical cracking as Jimmy pounds open the pine nuts.

  “Hey, wait a minute,” I say, coming out of a near trance. “You’re doing sneaky middles.”

  Jimmy looks confused. “Sneaky what?”

  “Sneaky middles.”

  “I dunno what yer talkin’ about,” he says, cracking open another pine nut.

  “Yes, you do. You eat one then you give me one. Then you eat another, and you give Hannah one. Then you eat one again. You’re getting two nuts for every one nut we get.”

  Jimmy laughs and pops a nut in his mouth.

  “You wanna crack ’em then?”

  I shake my head and smile. I catch Hannah’s eye and nod, signaling that now’s a good time for her talk. Then I palm her the case of syringes and scoot toward the door.

  “Where ya goin’?” Jimmy asks, holding out a nut.

  “I’m full,” I say, waving it away. “I’m gonna go down and check on the boat.”

  Jimmy starts to rise.

  “I’ll go with ya.”

  “No, you stay. I want to be alone for a bit.”

  Jimmy turns back to his pine cones and lets me leave.

  The boat is just a dark silhouette now against the near black sky, and a gentle breeze drives small waves to lap against its side. I can hear Jimmy in the distance clacking his rocks together, splitting the pine nuts. I hope Hannah knows what to say. I sit on the edge of the small peninsula, where the grass used to be before the wave came, and look past the boat to the dark shadow of the dam far on the other side of the lake.

  It’s strange to think of those scientists entombed in the flooded Foundation beneath the dam. I try to picture it. The closed locks. Water to the ceiling. The sealed train tunnel gates. Then I think about those subterranean tracks leading south, where my people work away right now as I sit here, nearly five miles underground and still in absolute ignorance of what really lies above their heads. It’s hard to imagine just how much I didn’t know. I wonder how much I still don’t.

  I reach into my pocket and pull out my father’s pipe. I’ve got some of his tobacco left, but I don’t feel like smoking it tonight. Instead, I just sit in the dark and feel the weight of the stone pipe in my hand, smelling the cool pine breeze and listening to Jimmy’s clacking stones as I try to remember my father’s face. It’s harder to do than you might think. Mostly, I see his hands—strong and veiny, the fingers wrapped around his work reader, or maybe, on Sundays, wrapped around the bowl of his pipe. This pipe. My pipe.

  I wonder where it is we do go when we leave this world, or if Hannah’s right about there being nothing. Growing up, we were taught that we’d be together forever in Eden, so I guess I never gave any other afterlife much thought. I’d like to believe I’ll be reunited with my dad some faraway day. My mom, too.

  Even so, I hope Jimmy decides to take the serum, because although I’m curious about what waits for me on the other side of this life, I’m in absolutely no rush to find out.

  CHAPTER 2

  A Flood of Surprises

  The lake is quiet when I wake.

  The cold air smells of coming snow.

  I sit up and swirl in empty space under a starless sky that gives no ligh
t. I can’t seem to get my bearings until I spot the orange glow of the distant burned down fire on the bluff. I feel around in the dark and find my father’s pipe and stuff it in my pocket before heading up to the shelter.

  The fire is mostly embers, one small flame fighting to stay alive atop the heap of glowing coals. Inside, Jimmy is curled on his side, sleeping, with his arm around Junior, also asleep. I think Hannah must be sleeping too, until she opens her eyes and lifts her finger to her lips, signaling for me to be quiet as I duck inside and scoot next to her and sit down.

  “How’d it go?” I whisper.

  Hannah grins and holds up an empty syringe. Relief surges through me. The idea of living a long time without Jimmy was just too much to bear, but so was the thought of dying decades sooner than I had to. It’s funny to think that when I was a kid down in Holocene II, thirty-five seemed impossibly old. Now ninety seems to be a cruelly short life. I guess it’s silly to think anything could ever outgrow our rising expectations, even life expectancy.

  Producing the remaining unused syringe, Hannah signals for me to roll up my sleeve. It occurs to me that it’s her father’s shirt I’m wearing, which seems fitting in some strange way. She clamps the syringe in her teeth and grabs Jimmy’s canteen and pours water into a small circular impression dug in the dirt and lined with rawhide. Then she grabs a stick and rolls a hot rock forth from the coals, guiding it to the hole. Steam erupts as the rock rolls into the water. She tears a small piece of cloth from the hemline of her dress, dips the cloth into the boiling water, and pulls it out steaming into the air.

  “Did Jimmy teach you that?” I ask, trying to be quiet.

  “Shh ... ,” she says, nodding.

  She cleans the inside of my left arm with the hot cloth, scrubbing until my skin is red. Then she removes the thin sash from the waist of her dress and wraps it around my upper arm, looping it once before pulling it tight. I watch as the veins in my arm swell. Removing the syringe from her teeth, she uncaps it and holds it up, depressing the plunger until just a tiny drop of serum appears on the needle’s tip. It looks like a drop of black oil in the low light of the coals. Then she turns to me and smiles, waiting for my approval.

  I look from the syringe in her hand to the veins snaking down my arm. What is it that runs through them anyway? It seems strange to pump something inside of me, some foreign thing born in a lab long before I was born. My dad used to say nothing comes free without a price following along later. And usually a heavy one. I wonder what he’d say about the serum? I remember Mr. Zales drawing my blood sample the night before my test. I remember sitting at our kitchen table and talking with my dad about his pipe and about our ancestors, with whom he couldn’t wait to be reunited in Eden. But Eden was just a lie. A fairytale told to keep us trapped underground, slaving away until we walked willingly up to our slaughter. We were the ignorant working at the hands of the wise. And what separated us below from those like Radcliffe here above, even more than the five miles of bedrock over our heads, was the knowledge that comes with age. They never let any of us get old enough to question things. They killed us when we turned 35. I don’t know what my dad would say about the serum, but I do know that it’s time for me to become a man.

  I nod, and Hannah thrusts the needle into my vein. She holds it steady and depresses the plunger and the dark serum disappears into my arm. It’s surprisingly painless.

  Several hours later, I wake with Hannah in my arms. The fire is nothing but smoldering ash, and Jimmy is gone. Gray light filtering into the shelter announces the new day, and I ease myself away from Hannah, careful not to wake her, and scoot to the entrance and look down on the lake.

  The boat is beached right where we left it, but there’s no sign of Jimmy anywhere. I stand and stretch, stepping away from the shelter to piss. The morning air bites my cheeks, and my hot breath floats away from me in little clouds that hang in the stagnant air. An eagle screeches somewhere in the distance. I turn back and stir the coals and add some wood to the fire so Hannah won’t be cold. Then I swig from the canteen and head down to the lake to inspect the boat.

  It’s a four-seat, enclosed cabin design, probably Radcliffe’s backup boat for bad weather. The carbon-fiber skin looks like a solar-cell impregnated material we engineer down in Holocene II for highflying drones. Light and strong. I’m guessing the solar cells charge a liquid metal battery and that the battery runs an electric engine powering a jet drive. Other than a few dents, it looks to have weathered the wave with little damage.

  I wade into the freezing water and am instantly awake. I manage to pop the cabin latches with no trouble, and the lid unseals and lifts easily on hydraulic hinges. I hoist myself up, slide into the cabin, and sink down into the pilot’s chair. The instruments are simple—steering wheel, compass, speedometer, and a throttle lever. An LED battery indicator reads full. I press the start button, and jets hum to life. Then the boat violently rocks, and Jimmy is sitting next to me in the passenger seat.

  “Let’s see what she can do,” he says, pulling the lid down and latching it.

  “Where’s Junior?”

  “He’s got a rabbit holed up, and he won’t quit it. Stubborn little fella.”

  “Takes after you,” I say, smiling.

  I pull the throttle back and bang my head on the wheel as we jet backward off the beach. When I manage to neutral the throttle, we’re floating fifty feet from shore. The engines make almost no sound. Jimmy nods, obviously impressed by the boat’s power. Movement catches my eye, and I look through the windshield as Hannah appears on the hillside, her wild mane of red hair framing her sleepy face. She lifts a hand to us and then disappears again into the shelter.

  I turn the wheel left and push the throttle forward, and the boat whips around, its nose lifting until all we can see through the windshield is gray sky. Then the water returns to our view as we plane level and take off like a rocket across the lake. The speed feels awesome. We cut through the glassy water like an arrow cuts through the air. And it sure feels much more like flying than traveling in a boat. When I glance over at Jimmy, he’s grinning so big all I see are teeth.

  Then I notice the dam across the lake, and I remember the giant monolith of stone crashing into the water and raising the wave that toppled Dr. Radcliffe’s boat like a toy. My palms sweat on the wheel to think about it. I cut left, away from the dam, and cruise us toward the shoreline to survey the wave’s damage. Everywhere we look the banks are stripped clean. And the closer to shore we get, trees and floating debris make our progress slow. It feels like some apocalyptic water tour.

  When we finally get back to the peninsula, I slow the boat and run it onto the shore before killing the engines.

  There’s a moment of silence where I feel Jimmy staring at me. “Ya wanna go back down there, don’t ya?” he asks.

  “I do and I don’t.”

  “I know what ya mean,” he says.

  “But I think we’ll need to if I’m going to find a way to free my people.”

  “Well, ya can count me in.”

  “Thanks, Jimmy.”

  I look down and notice a handle beneath my seat. I pull it open, exposing a drawer filled with emergency supplies: food rations, thermal blankets, bottles of water. Jimmy opens the drawer beneath his seat and finds a first aid kit and a few flares, which he appears to be fascinated by. I grab the foil blankets and some food rations, and we head up toward the shelter.

  Almost immediately we hear Hannah’s scream and take off running. Jimmy is slowed some by his old thigh wound from the cove, and I actually outpace him up the hill. As I approach the shelter, I notice a trail of blood leading toward the door, and my heart jumps. I drop the supplies and clench my fists.

  I see Hannah first, cowering in the back of the shelter with a look of horror on her face. Then I see Junior sitting in front of her with a dead rabbit hanging from his mouth. It takes several heart-pounding seconds for everything to sink in, then I laugh uncontrollably with relief. Jimmy races up
beside me and looks in, and then he laughs, too.

  “It isn’t funny,” Hannah says, looking as if she might cry.

  “He’s just showin’ off his catch,” Jimmy says, stepping in and rubbing Junior’s ears and reassuring him he did good.

  I turn back and collect my dropped supplies. Hannah’s mood improves when I hand her the rations. She bites into a meal bar, spits the wrapper, and chews with her eyes closed, making little moaning sounds. Then she heads down to the lake with her breakfast—I’m guessing to freshen up. I collect more wood while Jimmy field-dresses the rabbit. Thirty minutes later, we’re all sitting side by side at the edge of the bluff, looking over the lake with one of the foil blankets spread over our laps. I can feel the fire’s warmth on my back and hear the hiss of sizzling rabbit juice as it drips into the flames behind us. None of us wants to say what we’re thinking, but we’re all looking across the lake at the dam.

  “Think it’s still flooded?” I ask, after a long silence.

  “I dunno,” Jimmy says, twisting around to turn the rabbit.

  “You’d think the water would drain away pretty quickly,” Hannah says. “At least I hope so.”

  “It sure would be nice to know, though,” I say.

  “You think there are bodies?” she asks.

  “I’m sure,” I reply. “Can’t imagine where they’d go.”

  “If that’s the case,” Jimmy says, “we better be gettin’ down there sooner than not. ’Fore they get too ripe.”

  “Gross,” Hannah says, but then quickly adds, “although it sure would be nice to have supplies.”

  “And shelter,” I say, reaching out and catching a single falling snowflake in my palm.

  After a while, Hannah turns to me and asks: “What should we do about ... well, you know?”

  “Holocene II?”

  “Yes,” she says.

  “We need to free them, of course.”

  “Have you thought it through?” she asks.