I blink a few times and push myself to the hatch’s edge. Enough daylight leaks in to make out the ladder and the floor below, but not much beyond it. I force my hands and feet to do their jobs, and I descend the ladder. I gag on the stench of mold and decay—a Pyrrhic victory for my sense of smell—but all basements smell this way. Cobwebs and rat carcasses. It’s just a basement.
I reach the bottom and peer into the shadows. “Abram?”
There’s no answer, but as my eyes adjust, I see the glow of his flashlight leaking through a stack of empty crates. I move forward, noting that the basement is bigger than the cabin itself, an expansive concrete chamber lined with work tables and shelves and a partially walled bathroom, and I wonder if the cabin was merely an afterthought to this bunker.
A few tools and medical devices lie scattered on these tables and shelves, along with inexplicable oddities like a stack of traffic signs and a box of wigs. But for the most part, the bunker is stripped clean.
Abram is sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of what appears to be a walk-in freezer missing its door. His flashlight illuminates his face ghostly blue—eyes blank, mouth tight—and beyond that, the interior of the freezer.
“It’s all gone,” he mumbles. “The food, the medicine, beds, blankets . . . the fucking toilet paper. All they left was this.”
The freezer’s shelves are bare, but it’s far from empty. Neatly stacked corpses rise halfway to the ceiling in a slow gradient of decay: dry bones on the bottom, leathery skeletons in the middle, and brown, bloated meat on the top. Some have holes in their heads, but most don’t. Most seem to have died of obscurer causes.
“What were they trying to do?” I ask, unable to tear my eyes away from the mass grave.
“No idea.”
A rat wriggles out of a rib cage and crawls up onto one of the fresher corpses. It bites into the oozing nub of an earlobe. The corpse twitches.
Abram stands and marches stiffly back to the ladder, leaving me in total darkness. I hurry after him, trying to ignore the moist squirming behind me.
Sprout is waiting at the edge of the hatch, but I don’t see Julie until I emerge into daylight. She’s standing in front of a small cabinet in the far corner of the cabin, looking down at something. Reading something. A large pink card. She holds it behind her back as she turns to us. “What’d you find?”
“Nothing,” Abram says.
“Nothing?” She looks at me, sees the lingering horror on my face. “R, what did you—”
“What is that?” Abram says, striding toward her with his palm out. For some reason, Julie hesitates—just for a second, but I feel tiny questions rising like goosebumps.
“You tell me,” she says, handing him the card. “Looks like notes for a meeting or something.”
I move up behind Abram to read over his shoulder. The text is so thick with abbreviations and jargon that it hits my brain like monkey chatter, and for a moment I wonder if I’ve slipped back into illiteracy. But with great concentration, I’m able to parse it together.
Full sweeps, MT, ID, WY, 87 spcm. cllct
Roamers: ^fresh ^resil. ^cog. activity v. Hivers
Roamers Ornt. response rate: 45% Hivers: 5%
Rec. cease hive raids, incrs. street sweeps
Street sweeps avg. 10-30 spcm per day, ^60% over 3 mnth
Spcm. ids. indicate extended migration, up to 300 mi. v origin
Cause unknown but rec. capitalize
New Ornt. mthd “de-id” ^20% effct
65 spcm: X
12 spcm: 40% coop.
8 spcm: 76% coop.
2 spcm: 100% coop.
Rec. all facil. adopt “de-id” in comb. w. Detroit “de-edu” mthd, cont. study of NY “pink drink” mthd
Rec. close all Helena facils, trnsfr staff + spcm. to Detroit + NY, consolidate mthds + rsrcs
1 yr projection: 100% coop, begin mass prod.
Abram stares at the card for a lot longer than it should take to read it.
“Does any of that . . . mean anything to you?” Julie asks. Her tone contains more than simple incomprehension. A hint of sediment disturbed, of drowned thoughts rising.
Abram shakes his head. It’s unclear if he’s answering Julie or some shouting inner voice. He grabs Sprout’s hand and marches out of the cabin.
“Hey!” Julie chases him out. “Abram!”
The sun is a little lower, the sky a little paler. The trees look lifeless in the still air. Abram lifts Sprout onto his bike and climbs on behind her. He says it like a bitter concession: “I’ll fly the plane.”
Julie stops on the porch, cocking her head. “You will?”
“I’ll go to town till I find a safe place to settle. Maybe that’s a year from now on the other side of the world, maybe it’s tomorrow in Toronto. Either way, that’s where I get off, whether you’ve found your utopia or not. Is that clear?”
Julie doesn’t answer.
“Is that clear?”
“Yes,” she says. “It’s clear.”
Abram starts his bike, spins it around, and disappears into the trees.
We stand on the porch steps, listening to the engine noise dwindle. “What did you find down there?” Julie asks quietly.
The engine’s harsh growl gives way to the sounds of the forest. The birdsong fades to a few lonely calls as the sun slips below the trees.
“Corpses,” I reply, staring into the dark maw of the trail. “And nothing.”
“Oh.”