Morning people, as Kit understood them, belonged to a breed of humans who derived unending joy from the horrors of emerging from one’s bed.
Monty and Dakota were “morning people.” Most mornings, Lakie and Kit would stumble down the stairs of the Paradise Twin to find their counterparts in the kitchenette, having finished breakfast, already discussing the day’s plans. Inevitably, either Monty or Dakota would make a snide comment about early worms or the day being half over, et cetera and so forth.
The only thing “morning people” enjoyed more than morning was telling everyone else about it. It was a badge of honor, apparently, to be a “morning person.”
Kit wore no such badge.
As such, when he woke the following morning to find he was the first one up, his initial thought was that something had gone horribly wrong. This was immediately followed by relief that nothing had, which was then followed by four quick realizations:
One. For the first time since departing the Paradise Twin, he’d slept through the night without his recurring dream. No bright-as-sun room. No person on the other side of the table. No speaking in thoughts. No buzzing-black fog rolling in like a storm. Nothing but deep, peaceful sleep.
Two. Harry was right beside him. Thinking back, Kit was sure the dog had fallen asleep beside Nico.
Three. The sunshine through the windows seemed quite a bit brighter than usual. Closer to an afternoon sun than a morning one.
And four. When Kit had fallen asleep, Nico and Lennon had been separated by six aisles of floor space. Now, still asleep in their respective sleeping bags, there was only a few feet between them. Each had a single arm outstretched toward the other, and in the middle, their hands met, fingers interlocked.
Beside him, Harry yawned, and looked at him like, Can you believe this?
Kit smiled, scratched behind the dog’s ears. “It’s all very healthy and normal, according to Emil Johansson, MD.”
By the time everyone was awake and packed, and breakfast had been had, the sun was much higher in the sky than they would have liked. Still, it seemed their evening in BAM! had bonded them to the point where squad was hardly the right word.
Family seemed more appropriate.
A quick perusal of the map correlated against the roads running through and around the BAM! parking lot confirmed what they’d suspected last night: they were in the city of Concord. And because the river took a few detours through the city, Lennon decided it would be more direct to simply follow the compass south and slightly east for a while, before picking back up with the Merrimack.
Concord, as a city, was beautiful; a unique mix of wildlife and civilization, as if the humans of old—or the Concordians of old, at least—had figured out how to grow and thrive without destroying the natural beauty around them.
Somewhere south of the city, they found an enormous movie theater tucked back in the woods. It was nothing at all like the Paradise Twin. Probably had a dozen screens or more.
“I once read a book about the early days of movies,” said Kit. “It said one of the first films ever made was called The Horse in Motion, which was three seconds of nothing but a horse running. Another was called Roundhay Garden Scene, and it was two seconds of people walking around a garden. And there was a third one called Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, which was literally fifty seconds of a train pulling into a station. This was back in the 1800s. But according to the book, the people who saw these movies were shocked and amazed. Unleashed psyches all over the place.”
“Unleashed psyches,” said Lennon.
“When that down-deep part of your soul feels free and easy.”
Nico and Lennon smiled at each other. They thought he couldn’t see them, but he could. Normally it annoyed the ever-loving bejesus out of him when people treated him like a little kid. But this particular smile seemed like something else, maybe.
“Anyway,” he said. “The book made it seem like those people were silly for thinking how amazing it was to watch a train pull into a station, or a horse run for three seconds, or people walk in a garden. But I get it. If I saw a photograph move—”
“My psyche would unleash so fast,” said Nico.
“Hard same,” said Lennon. “A little magic is better than no magic at all.”
Nico glared at him. “Says the boy who’s never read Harry Potter.”
“I mean, he has to get the ring to Mordor before Voldemort turns him to stone.”
“Oh my God, enough with the talking.”
Later, when Lennon and Harry had started a game of fetch, Kit dug around in his bag and pulled out the best of last night’s sketches. He was never able to get the room quite right, but that was the way it went. His art never felt “good” or “done.” It was always just . . . enough.
“Here,” he said, handing the folded-up paper to Nico.
“What’s this?”
“I drew something for you. Last night.”
She started to open it.
“Not yet,” he said.
“What?”
“Just—don’t open it in front of me.”
“Got it.”
“It’s probably not very good. But it’s part of me. My beginning. Anyway. Maybe someday you’ll find the perfect spot to hang it.”
“I’m sure I will.” Nico tucked it away. “Thank you, Kit.”
Eventually they were reunited with the river and the old train tracks, as with old friends. And even though they tried to avoid roads (thereby avoiding the possibility of others), there were sections of the river that ran right beside the road, and still other sections where houses lined the water, and they found themselves walking through the high grasses of what had once been maintained yards.
“You guys hear that?” asked Nico.
They stopped and listened: a thrumming drone in the distance.
“A waterfall,” said Lennon.
Farther south, the rushing sound intensified, and they saw the outline of a wooden structure built across the river like a bridge, but fenced off, clearly meant for some other purpose. Approaching it, a sign read DANGER: NO TRESPASSING, and a tall barbed-wire fence ran between them and the Merrimack.
And then the waterfall came into view.
Having never seen one in real life, Kit walked right up to the fence. “Look at that.”
Behind him, silence. Turning, he found Lennon and Nico had continued walking, only to stop at a bend in the path some twenty paces ahead. At first, after catching up with them, he thought they were staring at the large brick warehouse by the riverbank. But as he rounded the corner, he saw what had stopped them in their tracks: adjacent to that warehouse, probably the size of two Paradise Twins stacked on top of each other, was a steel cage-like construction, with cables and antennae and power lines running in every direction.
“What is it?” he asked.
Lennon shook his head. “No idea.”
“Garvin Falls Hydroelectric Station,” said Nico.
They both looked at her.
“How in the world would you know that?” asked Lennon.
“Oh, I’m quite brilliant.” She rolled her eyes, pointed to a sign posted nearby.
“So the water . . . made electricity?” Kit turned a slow, full 360 degrees, taking it all in. The power lines, the electrical station, the train tracks, the warehouse, the waterfall, the structure built like a bridge over the river.
“I won’t pretend to understand how,” said Lennon. “But yes.”
A constant enigma, these humans of old. To build things like this. To invent things like a smartphone and a room with two machines, one for washing clothes, one for drying. To lay miles of train tracks so people and food could get from one place to the next.
He would never understand how humans could be so entirely smart and so entirely stupid at the same time.
Not 50 percent one and 50 percent the other.
They were 100 percent smart and stupid.
He turned back to the waterfall. Existential was a word he knew, which he found a bit confusing, but which he thought was in the same family as the unleashed psyche. When you feel deep things you can’t explain or see something that makes you wonder at the meaning of life.
The river was wide, the water fell fast and hard. And even though the drop wasn’t nearly as steep as it sounded, Kit watched the spray at the bottom as water hit rock, and he felt like he was standing in a second-story window staring at mountains, wondering of breezes from far-off places.
He wanted to paint this place. He wanted to have a conversation with it. Hi. My name is Kit. Where are you from? How were you made? Tell me all about your genesis . . .
And if finding your voice as an artist meant listening to your art, then maybe feeling existential was like that too.
Hi, Kit. We are the waterfall. We were made at the beginning of all things, by the Master of Breezes. What about you? Where are you from? How were you made? Tell us your genesis . . .
Kit turned, found Nico and Lennon staring at the waterfall too. Maybe they were having their own conversations with it. Maybe there were other languages, not just of art.
The language of loss, which sounded like a hollow breeze through a dead tree.
The language of sacrifice, which sounded like tying a red bandanna in your hair or buttoning a yellow plaid shirt.
The language of friendship, which sounded like a steady river, and soft footsteps at your side.
One thing was for sure.
“Good thing we decided against a boat,” he said.
Late in the afternoon, somewhere north of Manchester and south of Garvin Falls Hydroelectric Station, they passed a sign welcoming them to the town of Waterford.
WELCOME TO WATERFORD, NEW HAMPSHIRE
FOUNDED IN 1822
POPULATION 2,023
The first thing they noticed about Waterford were the murals. They were everywhere. Colorful images plastered across storefronts and signs, walls of brick and stone, the sides of houses and banks, and, yes, even a movie theater.
It was real mural mania.
Some of the images depicted in these murals were strange but harmless: a car at the bottom of the ocean; a rabbit on top of a cannon; a house in the shape of a man’s face. Others were far more frightening: an enormous empty eye socket; humans with animal heads dancing around a fire; a woman giving birth to a smartphone.
“This town is unpleasant,” Kit said.
Lennon shook his head. “You are not wrong.”
The main road had no name, or the sign had long since been torn down. It felt like an old place, but not old like Town, where the streets smelled of nostalgia and hugs.
Here, the streets just smelled like street. No fancy shoes, no fancy cars or dresses. Aside from the murals, it was all crumbly and forgotten, either side of the road lined with ramshackle shops, unreadable signs, and a thin layer of snowy rust. Even the trees grew at haphazard angles, twisty and turny in all the wrong places. Overhead, clouds filled the sky, and suddenly late afternoon felt like early evening.
Waterford was the kind of place where a person might believe there were no other places. When you’re here, there is no there.
“Where are all the marrowless bones?” asked Kit.
“The whats?”
“You know. People-bits.”
Every other town they’d cut through: people-bits everywhere. But not here. Which meant the town had been completely cleared out prior to the Flu, or else someone had moved them since. They shifted to the center of the road, as if the missing marrowless bones might jump out at them from one of these abandoned shops.
A faded sign in a bookstore advertised a local author event.
A pub. A bakery.
No windows, just gaping holes of darkness.
In the front yard of an old church, a sign read:
BLESSED CHURCH OF THE RISEN SAVIOR
BE FRUITFUL, AND MULTIPLY, AND REPLENISH THE EARTH.
—GENESIS 1:28
Lennon mumbled something about it being a weird thing to put on a sign, when—
“Stop!” The word rang through the street, the gaping shop windows, the twisty trees. “Just the three of you?”
The Blessed Church of the Risen Savior was on their right, a run-down mess, with cloudy stained glass, chipped white paint, and heavy-looking wooden front doors; on their left, a row of equally dilapidated houses.
“Yes!” said Nico, turning in a slow circle. The voice had been too echoey to be sure which side of the road it had come from. “Plus the dog.”
Lennon yelled, “Just passing through!”
The clunk of a lock being turned, and the heavy doors of the church swung open, and two men—one old, one young, identical aside from age—stood in its frame.
The younger one held something like a gun, pointed right at them.
“Tell you what,” said the older one. “Come on inside, and we’ll have a nice chat about who’s going where.”