CHAPTER 11

“So, how’ve things been going with Jack?” Charlie asked between mouthfuls of a cherry biscuit. Naomi knew they were his favorite, and the only thing he’d craved more this morning was a cup of fresh coffee, which he could smell being brewed in the kitchen not ten paces away. He’d left Clive at five in the morning to make it back to their cabin at a decent hour and needed the caffeine badly.

            “Actually not bad. I feel like he’s coming around,” Daniel said.

            “That’s good, that’s good.”

            “Mom said you were at the library all day yesterday. Find anything useful?”

            “Oh, plenty. Their collection of books just keeps improving and growing. They’ll need a second building soon enough. And I got to talk with someone who was really knowledgeable about biology. Took lots of notes. I can’t wait to see what Harold thinks.” Charlie smiled at his son and suppressed the sudden urge to reach out and tousle the boy’s hair. It was easy to forget how old he actually was.

            “You think this might be a turning point then?” Daniel asked.

            “I hope so. Because if this doesn’t work, I’m out of ideas.” Charlie laughed.

            Fifteen minutes later father and son were riding the lift to the peak. The temperature was slightly above normal, making for a cozy climb in the morning sunlight.

            “You seem really excited,” Daniel observed.

            “I am, son. I got a lot of encouragement yesterday. Jehovah always knows exactly what we need.”

            Charlie whistled as he pushed his way through the front doors. Sophie had apparently brought a batch of her mom’s famous biscuits here, too, he noted as the sweet and buttery aroma embraced him. It was the smell of home. And now, finally, this center would begin to feel like home, since the residents had begun to feel like family.

            Charlie plucked two biscuits from the baking tray in the kitchen and waltzed down the hallway to Harold’s room. He knocked.

            “Hey Harold, rise and shine. I’ve got some breakfast biscuits for you and they’re still hot.”

            Charlie waited as the small space beyond the door produced nothing but silence. “Harold? You there? Late night?”

            Still nothing. Charlie shrugged and stepped to the next door–Jack’s. “Jack, you up? How about some breakfast?”

            Still no sound. Charlie glanced out the back windows to see if anyone was on the deck. Nothing. Then he returned to the kitchen. “Sophie, you see either of the guys this morning?”

            She shook her head.

            Puzzled, Charlie returned to their hallway. He didn’t want to pry, but usually both Jack and Harold were early risers. It was strange that they’d still be in their rooms so late. Charlie knocked a few times more on each of the doors. Finally, he tried Harold’s door knob. It clicked open freely and the door swung ajar.

            Charlie peeked in. “Harold?” he said softly. The room had been cleaned. The bed was made. And there was no sign of Harold.

            “Hey Dad, do you know if mom moved stuff from the kitchen lately?” Daniel’s voice was loud as he called down the hallway.

            “No, I don’t think so. Why?” Charlie called back. A strong sense of unease was overcoming him.

            “I can’t find a bunch of stuff.”

            “What stuff?” Charlie asked, the tension in his bones rising steadily.

            “Cups, some utensils, and the backpacks, too. Did you move them?”

            “Oh no…” Charlie said, suddenly full of dread. “Oh no, no, no.”

            Charlie raced over to Jack’s room and flung the door open. The horror set in. Charlie put his hands against his head, breathing heavily.

            “What’s wrong?” Sophie asked.

            “They’re gone. Both of them. They’ve run away!”

***

            Jack and Harold had left before the sun had risen. The welcome center was far behind them when the ski lift cranked to life, and it was far out of sight when Charlie finally arrived to find them gone. Jack wasn’t sure he’d made the right decision, but the idea of taking charge of his situation was appealing, and he preferred the outdoors anyway. Marching through the mountains in his hiking boots with a pack on his shoulders felt right.

            “Where’d you get the map?” Jack asked. On the dirt path a few paces ahead, Harold fumbled with the large sheet of creased paper.

            “Found it in one of the lobby drawers,” Harold muttered, turning the map in his hands.

            “Lucky for us.”

            “Nothing lucky about it. When you keep your ears and eyes open you hear things. I knew it’d be there.”

            Jack reached forward and tugged at Harold’s pack, causing the man to stagger backwards. “No need to rush, Sherlock,” Jack said. “Let’s get our bearings first and figure out where we’re headed. The mountains probably go on for miles. It’ll be easy to get lost.”

            Harold opened his mouth as if to say something, his face flashing with momentary anger. “Fine,” he finally said.

            Harold spread the map out on the face of a large rock shelf. “From what I’ve gathered, this is the center here, to the East. We’ve been walking for about three hours now, so that puts us somewhere around here. If this map is right, this path should descend to a river, which should have a bridge, allowing us to cross.”

            “And if the map is wrong?”

            “Well, then we’ll have proof of at least one lie.” Harold creased the map neatly back together and slipped in into his pack and the two trudged on.

            “So,” Jack said a few minutes later. “You’re a scientist, huh?”

            “I’m an evolutionary biologist, yes,” Harold said, kicking a stone from the path.

            “So that means you come up with theories to try and figure things out?”

            “Yes, if you want to reduce it to its simplest definition I suppose that’s accurate.”

            “So you have any theories about what this place might be?”

            “A few, but I need more data. That’s why we’re out here.”

            “And what if the data leads you back to the explanation they gave us in the first place?” Jack asked.

            “It sounds like they’ve already gotten in your head,” Harold scoffed.

            Jack breathed deeply, as if resisting Harold’s remarks on a stream of exhalation.

            “Baghdad, 2012,” said Jack.

            “What?”

            “I was stationed there in Iraq. Things were heating up with insurgent groups. We’d had warnings of suicide bombers. There’d been reports of them from time to time, but it was hard to get the facts. No one knew what was going on. It was June, and we were walking back to the barracks from a bar. The other guys had been drinking but I was sober. They’d lost money to some young Iraqis in a game of poker and were feeling kind of rowdy as we left. Nothing serious, just kicking trash cans over and making noise. We heard some shouting from some of the neighbors, telling them to keep it down.

            “It was right then that I noticed a woman walking towards us from a building on the other side of the street. Something didn’t feel right about it. Something about the way she walked, it just didn’t look natural to me. I put my hands out, told her to keep her distance. But this woman. She just kept coming. And my friends–they were making all this noise. I couldn’t focus. Couldn’t think straight. I started shouting at the woman, telling her to go back, go back, go back. I lifted my rifle, let out a warning shot in the air, still nothing. She just.... kept walking.

            “They always say you gotta trust your gut in situations like that. You gotta make the tough calls. It’s your life or theirs. So I pulled the trigger again. And this time I was aiming right at her. One shot. That was it. She fell straight down. The neighbors heard it, and suddenly people were shouting and screaming from the windows all around the street. Some were throwing things at us. But the worst was that a little boy ran into the street. He knelt next to the woman’s body and just started this awful, heart-wrenching sobbing. He was doing something with his hands, too, that I couldn’t understand at first. He kept making the same motions over and over. Then I finally realized he was signing to her. His mom had been deaf.”

            Harold stopped to turn and look at Jack, the words from Jack’s story floating somewhere above them into the trees, scaring birds. Jack cleared his throat and continued,

            “I don’t want to make a mistake like that again. I don’t shoot first and ask questions later anymore. I’m just trying to give them the benefit of the doubt.”

            “It’s a sad story,” Harold managed to say quietly. “But so far as I’ve seen, no one’s put a rifle in your hands in this place,” Harold said. “You’re not pulling any triggers. You’re just looking for answers.”

            “And you really think we’ll find them out here?” Jack asked.

            “I do. I want to see how far this commune extends, and I want to see what’s outside it.”

            “So you think it’s a commune? That’s your theory?”

            “Possibly a big commune. I made a call out recently and have reason to believe this place extends into a nearby town.”

            “You made a call?”

            “There was a phone in the lobby.”

            “That would’ve been nice to know before we ran out into the wilderness.”

            “Well if you want to run on back be my guest. No one forced you to come.”

            Jack felt the beginnings of rage prickling at his face. The muscles in his jaw clenched. His fists clamped shut.

            “You asked me to come,” he said.

            “I thought you’d want a ticket out of the crazy house.”

            “Let me remind you, I’m the only one between the two of us who knows how to survive out here.”

            “And yet, I’m leading the way. How about that?” Harold snickered.

            How dare he! Jack thought. Harold needed him and he knew it. Jack had spent years trekking through dangerous wildernesses, learning how to cope with storms, extreme cold and extreme heat. He knew what plants had medicinal use. He was invaluable to this journey and now Harold was treating him like extra weight. A cool bolt of fury raced up Jack’s spine.

            It would be so easy. Harold was smaller, and there was no way he’d had combat training. It wouldn’t take much to overpower him, grab the map, and go on by himself. Jack eyed the back of Harold’s head, calculating. One well-placed blow and Harold would be unconscious, and Jack would be free of that mouth.

            Harold turned suddenly.

            “Look,” he said, startling Jack. “I have a plan. There are two towns we can reach before sunset. The closer one is a town called Clive, and the one beyond that is called Bighton. I believe I talked to an operator that was stationed there when I placed that call I mentioned. We can stop at either one of these towns and gather information. See what people know, maybe even gather some supplies. The food we’ve got won’t last long and I’m not about to resort to catching fish with my bare hands and playing mushroom roulette. What do you say?”

            The tension released its grip slowly on Jack’s mind and body. The lines etched in his face from the scowl began to fade.

            “Fine,” Jack said. They walked on in silence.

***

            Daniel followed closely behind his father as he stormed onto the landing platform and charged through the cabin doors. They climbed the stairs to the attic crawlspace, and within moments his father was yanking supplies from the shelves and out of boxes and stuffing them into old hiking backpacks. A plume of dust expanded and thickened, but Charlie seemed not to notice. Daniel shielded his face and stared blankly at the scene before him.

            He’d never seen his father so troubled, and Daniel found it disturbing and difficult to process. He stepped back suddenly as an old metal canister flew at his feet.

            “Wash out the canteens and the utensils,” his father said in a flat tone.

            “Are we going after them?”

            “Yes, of course, Daniel. Now please, get moving. We can’t waste any more time. They’ve already got a head start. Who knows how many hours they’ve been gone.”

            “Ok,” Daniel murmured as he gathered some of the dusty items in his arms and hauled them off to be cleaned. Even from the bathroom Daniel could hear the sounds of agitation in the attic above as Charlie thrashed around collecting things.

            Daniel tried to distract himself. He wondered idly how long it had been since his parents had used any of their hiking gear. The attic had reeked of old rubber and plastics, and every inch of it had been covered in a thick layer of dust. Daniel scrubbed the canteen diligently for a few minutes before the metallic sheen finally returned.

            “I just can’t believe these people,” Charlie grumbled as Daniel lumbered up the ladder to lug away another batch of items.

            “You mean Harold and Jack?”

            “We’ve shown them nothing but hospitality, and this is how they repay us. It’s just unbelievable.”

            Daniel was unsure how to respond and decided to keep quiet. He stuffed a raincoat into one of the backpacks and eased back down the steps.

             None of it made sense to him either, but he’d had few expectations. He knew the unrighteous had never known Jehovah in their old lives and had lived in ways contrary to God’s ways. It seemed understandable that they would have difficulty adjusting to the New World. Without having ever experienced the Old World, Daniel was less inclined to treat them judgmentally. His father’s reaction, however, indicated to him that even for the unrighteous, the situation was disastrous. This, more than anything else, worried him immensely.

            “Here’s a basic list of things we need,” Charlie said, handing his son a sheet of paper and jabbing his finger into it. “I need to talk to your sister. We’re getting back on that lift in the next thirty minutes.”

            Daniel nodded. He felt afraid.

            The stairs creaked and groaned as Charlie raced back down to the kitchen.

            Daniel retrieved the remaining items as quickly as he could, wiping them with a damp rag and stuffing them one by one into the large bags. He’d camped before as a small child in the woods not far from their cabin but had never seen many of these items. He knew them by name only.

            Charlie returned minutes later, clearly no less perturbed.

            “Sophie’s been checking the woods for any signs of where they might’ve gone. So far she’s found nothing. No footprints, no tracks, nothing.”

            “You don’t think they just took the road down?”

            “No. They planned this carefully and they won’t risk being seen. I think they probably took one of the trails.”

            “The trails! But those trails go on for miles, and some of them just dead end completely.”

            “Which is why we need to hurry. If something happens to them…” Charlie trailed off and shook his head. His frown intensified. “Forget it. Let’s not dwell on that. At least they have a map.”

            “A map? How do you know?”

            “Sophie said that map we keep in the lobby drawer was missing.”

            “How did they even know about it?”

            “I don’t know. That’s one of the questions I’ll be asking once we track them down,” Charlie said as he lifted the pack onto his shoulders and cinched up the straps.

***

            Sophie had been stripping the place down for an hour and a half, trying to determine what Harold and Jack had taken. She’d gone through each of their rooms carefully, but neither of them had had much to begin with and in both cases had only taken clothes and shoes.

            But the storage room adjacent to the kitchen had been practically ransacked. Backpacks, flashlights, binoculars, and rain ponchos were a just a few of the many items missing, along with what Sophie estimated to be at least twenty pounds in canned nuts, beans, fruits, and vegetables. She’d put together a list of everything missing and sat it on the kitchen counter. A bowl of raw eggs stood next to it, eggs that she’d been preparing that morning just before they’d discovered the empty rooms. Sophie scooped the bowl in her arm and dumped the contents into the sink.

            It there were any clues to be discovered as to where Jack and Harold were headed, they would be on that list. At least they’d taken the map. That meant they might actually have had a plan, however foolhardy. Sophie knew Jack had been a soldier in the Old World, and that sort of profession didn’t come without at least some cursory survival knowledge. As for Harold, that was anyone’s guess.

            The real question in Sophie’s mind was why the two of them left together. Sophie’s abrupt realization that they’d somehow managed to overcome their differences before fleeing brought her an odd moment of hope and relief in spite of everything else.

            As far as she knew, occurrences of injuries and people going missing in the wild were unheard of. Under theocratic rule directed by holy spirit, accidents and disasters simply didn’t happen. But Harold and Jack were acting independently now, resisting the efforts of those who’d been assigned to help them. Possibly, this put them out from under the umbrella of Divine protection.

            The thought that they may be actually grieving the holy spirit racked Sophie’s bones with unease. Her worry was now a sickly, creeping thing deep in her body. She imagined the Earth opening up and devouring them, or perhaps a pillar of fire falling from the sky. In that final moment, when they cried for their lives, would they still doubt?

            Sophie struggled to peel the anxiety from her mind with a quick prayer. She needed focus. It was in this very moment that the swinging kitchen doors squeaked open, and a curious-faced Liping poked her head inside.

            “What’s happening?” She asked.

            Sophie’s head dropped apologetically. “Oh! I’m so sorry Liping, I’ve forgotten all about your breakfast,” she said.

            “You need to stop worrying about me. I can take care of myself,” said the woman, shuffling into the kitchen and waving the girl off with the back of her hand. Her slippers made soft whiffing noises as they dragged along the cold tile floor. She dug through a few items in the drawers and began preparing a meal for herself.

            “You have a fever? You don’t look so good,” she asked.

            “I’m fine. It’s been a stressful morning,” Sophie said. She considered the implications of explaining the situation to Liping and could see no benefit of keeping her in the dark. “Jack and Harold are gone,” she said simply. “We found their rooms empty this morning.”

            “Is that not allowed here?” Liping asked, washing tomatoes in the sink.

            “It’s not that it’s not allowed. It’s just the way they did it, sneaking off at night. And they’ve taken many of our things.”

            “They’re just being men,” Liping said with the faintest of smiles.

            “What do you mean?”

            “My husband used to do the same thing. We’d get into fights sometimes and he’d get angry and when there was nothing left for him to do or say he’d just leave. Sometimes for an hour, sometimes more. Once he was gone for a few days before he returned home looking like a shamed dog. He never said sorry, of course, but if he had a tail it would’ve been between his legs.”

            “So you think they’ll come back.”

            “They usually do. They were talking about it just last night.”

            “What? You heard them talking?”

            “They were on the back deck. I only heard a little.”

            “What did they say?”

            “What did who say?” Charlie asked as he and Daniel entered through the swinging doors. They wore heavy backpacks lashed with ropes and various supplies.

            “Liping overheard Jack and Harold talking last night on the deck,” Naomi explained.

            “Liping,” Charlie said in a low voice, turning to the small woman with a serious look. He moved his arms as if to clasp her shoulders in his hands but stopped himself. “This is very important,” he continued. “You need to remember exactly what you heard them say last night.”

            “Just that they wanted to leave here. And I think they said something about going to a town,” Liping said, looking back and forth between Charlie and Sophie’s stern looks.

            “Did they say the name of the town?” Charlie asked.

            “No, I don’t think so. What’s the problem? Are these woods dangerous?” Liping asked, an uneasy look on her face.

            “Not for us, they’re not. But for those two... I don’t know,” Charlie said. Then, to his son, “Let’s go.”

            “Be careful, Dad,” Sophie said.

            “We’ll be fine.”

            In another moment, they were gone.