The following day marked a drastic change in the weather.
According to Ananda, the angle of the sun indicated they were still in winter, but the temperature didn’t agree. It was hot. Not Let’s figure out how to air-condition the building before we die hot, but definitely I didn’t need a jacket to go outside hot. It melted a lot of snow, and very quickly.
All of this was great news, because it was also the day Paul and Win were expected to return with fresh meat.
To celebrate the first occasion in which all seven of them were in the same place since the start of winter, the Apocalypse Seven planned a big party. That the weather appeared to be in a similarly celebratory mood meant they could expand that party to the only open, guaranteed land-animal-free space available: the roof.
This was Touré’s suggestion. Bethany had to give him credit, because it was a good one.
She’d begun to appreciate that he maybe wasn’t one hundred percent of a total asshat one hundred percent of the time. Her opinion was probably affected by the couple of weeks in which she thought he was dead—she surprised herself by tearing up when she first saw him alive, and on a horse somehow—and also by the change in circumstance.
He’d stopped calling her kid, too, and stopped treating her like one. Those were both big steps forward.
The party took an extra day to plan and execute. Thankfully, the weather didn’t turn again in that time. For all any of them knew, warm weather meant another tornado was on the way.
But dammit if they weren’t going to party first.
Robbie and Touré had a charcoal grill. They’d evidently been eyeing it for a while, as it had been a part of the window display at the hardware store only a couple of blocks away, which happened to be the same hardware store they’d looted for the axes.
They brought that up to the roof, then the charcoal and the lighter fluid. Win and Ananda scrounged up some chairs and a table, as well as some plates, forks, and knives.
Then Paul asked about something to drink other than water, and soon enough he and Bethany were making a beer run.
There was a liquor store on Massachusetts Ave.—it seemed to Bethany like everything was on Mass Ave., and maybe that was true—only a few blocks away. They took the same wheelbarrow previously used to ferry the unconscious Paul around and headed toward where the booze was.
“So how have you been?” he asked. They were walking down the middle of the street. Around them, the snow had turned into rivers of water, the trees were showing buds already, and in a few days, they’d probably hear birdsong again. It was nice.
“I’m fine,” Bethany said. “How’s the shoulder?”
“About as good as it’s gonna get.”
Paul stopped to take a look at the gun she had strapped to her hip. She’d spent two weeks making a holster out of old cloth for it. It wasn’t perfect—it was really just a pouch with a second strap for stabilization—but it worked well enough so she didn’t have to carry around the gun in her hands. She could also store it in her bag, but didn’t like how long it took to reach it when it was in there.
“Cute,” he said. “You wear that everywhere?”
“Only when I leave the castle,” she said.
He laughed. “The castle,” he said. “I like that. Touré?”
“Of course.”
“He’s special, that one. So, is the safety on?”
“Of course it is. It bounces all over the place when I run. Maybe we can find a real holster.”
“There’s a sporting goods store downtown,” he said. “Win loaded up her quiver there. Maybe next time we can find a holster for you.”
“That’d be great.”
Paul was also armed; he had a shotgun in a sling on his back. It looked a thousand times cooler than what Bethany was packing. She wondered if he’d let her try it someday.
“You been running around a lot out here?” he asked.
“A little. Why, are they worried about me?”
“They are. Don’t take it personally. It’s everyone’s prerogative to worry about everyone else now. Don’t think any of us have really come to grips with what’s happened. It’s too big. Much easier to concentrate on the little stuff, like Where’d Bethany get to?”
“Yeah,” she said.
Bethany didn’t know how well she was coping either, so she could hardly judge how everyone else went about it. And her trips away from the castle, sometimes overnight, clearly did alarm the others. Carol, in particular, had tried to talk to her about it on multiple occasions.
Bethany knew how it looked, but had no interest in explaining it to anybody—she’d been going back home . . . and preferred to keep that information to herself.
The idea was to find out all she could about what had become of her family in the years since her disappearance. It was something none of the others could really do. Touré maybe could, but while he was raised in the same area, she didn’t know if his parents still lived there by the time of the whateverpocalypse. He probably didn’t know either, but he never showed an interest in checking.
The thing that stuck with Bethany the most was that her brother, Dustin, grew up, got married, moved to Tucson, and had a kid. Seeing his family portrait in her mom’s bedroom was incredibly disturbing, because Dustin’s son looked exactly like she remembered him looking last time she saw him.
On the same day she made that particular discovery, Bethany spent that night in her old bedroom, which was a phenomenally bad idea. She got almost no sleep and what little she did get was full of nightmares involving strange men in the shadows who smelled like pee.
Worst of all, when she woke up, the whateverpocalypse had still happened; it didn’t all turn out to be a dream.
“I think that’s the store,” she said. She was in charge of the wheelbarrow because of Paul’s various possibly permanent injuries. She steered toward it.
There was a metal gate pulled over the front door with a big padlock.
“Well, no wonder those two never tried to get in here,” Paul said.
“I don’t think alcohol was high on anyone’s list of priorities.”
Paul pulled down his shotgun, meaning to use it to open the door.
“Hold on, hold on,” she said. She lifted the padlock and took a look. “Yeah, I got this.”
“Ha. Just as well. I don’t know if I have enough shot to put a dent in that lock.”
“It’s always brute force with you guys,” she said, pulling out some bits of wire she’d been using to open doors. It had already turned into one of the more useful skills the team had, especially when a quarter of the doors in the castle came up locked. Robbie and Touré were talking about bringing her along to pick some of the ones they couldn’t get open themselves. It would have been a whole lot easier if they just figured out how to pick a lock—it really wasn’t difficult—but she didn’t mind being needed.
Paul put away his gun and waited. “You had water,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“I said, ‘You had water.’ That’s why nobody brought up alcohol.”
“I guess.”
She had a joke about Paul turning the tap water into wine so they could skip this expedition entirely, but she kept it to herself. She found Paul really interesting—of all of them, he had the best stories—but the God stuff made her uncomfortable.
“There it is,” she said.
The lock popped open in her hands. She tossed it to the ground and pulled the gate back. The door on the other side was glass in a metal frame with another lock.
“Okay, you can break the glass if you want,” she said.
“You can’t pick that lock?” he asked.
“No, I can, I just don’t want to be here all day.”
He shrugged, and shattered the glass with the butt of the shotgun, then reached through and unlocked the door.
“Not sure you’re even supposed to be in here, miss,” he said. “You’re a little young.”
“I’m over a hundred years old, mister,” she said. “Let’s find some booze.”
He laughed and held the door for her.
“After you.”
Touré burned himself twice while trying to cook the venison steaks.
When they set up the grill, he was under the impression that someone who had manned a barbecue once in their lives might take the lead. Specifically, he’d expected Paul to step up, seeing as how he was the closest thing they had to a dad. (Ananda was the closest to a mom. Both appeared to be somewhere between their late thirties and mid-fifties, at least to Touré, who, again, was bad at guessing ages.)
But since it had been officially his idea, everyone stood aside and let him burn himself repeatedly. Never mind that the whole concept of a party came out of Touré and Robbie brainstorming the best way to ease the group into the idea that Robbie had recently punched an alien in the face. They couldn’t very well share that thought process, and so apparently everyone went in assuming this was something Touré was familiar with in some concrete way.
He was not. When Touré tried to get the fire started, he ended up with flames that either shot up past his head or threatened to go out entirely. When he put the steaks on the grill, he didn’t have any tongs, because he didn’t know he’d need them, so he made do first with his hands and then a dinner fork. He eventually added a towel, so whenever a steak caught fire he had something to put it out with.
It wasn’t going well. A couple of times he turned around to see half of the Apocalypse Seven with alarmed expressions on their faces and trying to hide it. He finally recognized that they were just trying to be polite.
“Guys, I do not know how to cook,” he said. “If anyone here does, please step up.”
“Oh, thank God,” Win said. “We were about to have Roasted Touré for dinner.”
“You’re going to burn the meat,” Paul said. “Step out of the way.”
Other than that minor hiccup, it went really well. They all got their own bottle to drink—because they forgot cups but fortunately remembered a bottle opener—and ate too much.
The meat was delicious, but the highlight was definitely the surprise dessert Ananda unveiled: a gigantic can of peaches.
“I know this isn’t much,” she said, holding it up, “and we’re going to have to address the balance in our diet soon. We have hardly any starches or greens. The Noot bars are somewhat balanced, but we’ll need to find a long-term source of vitamin C . . .”
“Hey,” Bethany said, “are you going to open that can or what?”
“Sorry, I’ll save the speeches for later. Let’s dig in, shall we?”
After the meal came a number of orders of business, which essentially just meant everyone took turns standing up and delivering a little speech.
Touré started by thanking everyone for coming and for stopping him from setting himself on fire, and then compared them to a Dungeons and Dragons party. The metaphor clearly made a lot of sense to him but probably not to anyone else.
He ceded the floor to Bethany, who surprised all of them by talking eloquently about how everyone felt like family. Touré thought this sentiment was leavened at least partly by the wine bottle she was in the middle of finishing on her own, but it was still really nice.
Win was more businesslike. She gave a rundown on how the hunting was locally and discussed plans for an expedition back to the part of the state where she’d discovered Elton to see if there were any other horses out there. Considering how useful Elton had been, it made good sense, but Touré didn’t think that was why she wanted to do it. She was trying to find Elton some company.
Paul followed up Win by thanking everybody for the party, describing what the outer reaches of their domain currently looked like, and saying a blessing. “I would have said grace before we started,” he said, “but you all looked awfully hungry.”
Next came Ananda . . . and a long lecture. She’d clearly been saving up a few revelations for when they were all together again, and she was going to lay them on everyone all at once. With drinks in their hands, no less. It had long been Touré’s opinion that alcohol made everything Ananda had to say easier to deal with.
The presentation included data written on a whiteboard. Touré flashed back to every classroom experience he’d ever had and not in a good way.
Her talk began with the other ways in which the world ended.
“As we know, the planet reached one of the points of no return climate-wise around 2039,” she said, pointing to one of the numbers on the whiteboard. “That was when we hit the plus-two degrees threshold. Does everyone know what that is?”
They did not, and thus began the lecture. When it was over, they learned that some of the things the world went through while they were away included famines, which led to wars, which led to refugees, which led to more famines. Touré lost focus several times—again, just like those childhood classes, now with alcohol thrown in—but he did find it interesting that the invention of the Noot bar was likely in direct response to famine conditions. “Taste would have been a secondary consideration,” she said.
There were also coastal floods—Carol was alarmed to learn her family’s home in South Florida might be as underwater as the Boston piers—and a marked increase in extreme weather events.
“Extreme weather events like, say, tornadoes in Cambridge?” Robbie asked.
“That’s a trivial example,” she said, “but yes.”
“It wasn’t trivial when we were a few feet away from one.”
The part that Ananda found interesting, in that way of hers that made her sound like a cyborg, was that five years later, the increase in atmospheric carbon levels stopped.
“As if everyone on the planet decided at the same time to stop contributing to global warming,” she said. “Because . . . well, as you know, everyone appears to have died. The statistics bear out the year 2044 as being when that happened.”
“Jesus,” Win said.
It was all anyone had to say for a few seconds as the full magnitude of what Ananda was showing them really sank in.
“I’m sorry,” Ananda said. “We did know this already.”
“Nanda,” Paul said. He was the only one who called her that. Nobody had asked why or if they should do it too. Touré thought he just started doing it on his own and Ananda hadn’t figured out how to tell him to stop. “The problem we’re all having, I think, is that it looks like you just proved what we hadn’t been able to prove before now. Everyone died that year. Everyone.”
“Except for us,” Carol said.
“Yes,” Ananda said. “I guess that is what it means.”
They all fell silent again. Ananda didn’t look like she was sure whether or not to continue. Maybe she was mentally reviewing the rest of the presentation for other facts bound to upset non-cyborgs.
“Hey, guys,” Touré said, holding up his bottle. It was an Italian red with a big price tag that tasted like every other wine he’d ever had. “To the human race!”
“To the human race,” everyone said. They drank.
“All right,” Ananda said, after a suitable pause. “Should I continue?”
“Go ahead,” Win said. “We can always go out for more alcohol if this gets worse.”
It didn’t get worse, just more confusing.
Ananda shared the photograph Touré and Robbie found of the weird object everyone had spent the past couple of months pretending didn’t exist—at least, that was how it felt to Touré. An object with no power running to or from it was producing a light show that followed them around; it should be dominating every one of their conversations until they figured out what it was and what it did. Instead, they’d ignored it and had more or less done the same with the shimmer.
After displaying the photograph, Ananda went on about how the marks on the top somehow got erased if you hit them very hard and asked for opinions on what that could mean.
“Let me see if I have this,” Paul said, in his own deliberative style. “When was that picture taken?”
“We can’t be sure,” Ananda said. “Whenever the object was unearthed, which could theoretically be anywhere between 2020—because it wasn’t here when I was—and 2044.”
“Well, it wasn’t 2020,” he said. “Just look at the scene. You’ve got a hastily built fence, an army cordon that doesn’t look like it’s all that hard to go around, and only covers two directions. You’ve got a building they never finished taking down. Everything about it says they didn’t have long to look at it before . . . well, you know.”
“Whateverpocalypse,” Touré said.
“Right,” Paul said.
“You’re skirting the point,” Ananda said. “It’s a photo taken before now showing evidence of damage that didn’t occur until recently.”
“Yeah, that doesn’t make sense to me,” Paul said.
“Oh, I understand!” Bethany said. “It’s going in reverse!”
Ananda smiled. “Yes, cause and effect seem to be reversed, pertaining specifically to this object. Which effectively means that it’s temporally inverted.”
“Well . . .” Paul said. “That’s . . . interesting. Dunno what it means.” He looked around for some help.
“I’m gonna go on record as agreeing with Paul,” Touré said. “That doesn’t make a single bit of sense without using the word magic. And you probably don’t want to do that.”
“No, I don’t,” Ananda said.
“You said before that when you hit it, you healed it,” Robbie said. “Now you’re saying you’re causing the damage after it was already . . . Yeah, no. I think Win’s right, we’re going to need another alcohol run for this.”
“Cheers,” Win said, holding up her own bottle. “You all sound like a college keg party at two in the morning. Oh, hey, am I the only one who gets that?”
“I never went to college,” Paul said.
“We were just starting,” Carol said, speaking for both herself and Robbie.
“I didn’t go to the parties,” Touré said.
Ananda laughed. “Neither did I,” she said.
“You’re all nerds,” Win said, with a laugh.
“Hey!” Bethany said.
“Except for you. Sorry, Ananda, please continue. But if you start asking How high is up? or whatever, I’m not going to be able to control myself.”
“How high is . . . ?”
“Sorry,” Win said, “never mind. Keep talking.”
“Uh, yes,” Ananda said. “As I was saying, the evident cause-effect inversion is complicated. I’ve been afraid to draw any real conclusions from it, absent additional data. It’s possible, in the twenty-four-year gap, that we developed technology that could make such a thing exist. Mind you, I don’t know what it’s for, and as long as that’s the case, I can’t know why it was important to build. But first, it would be good to know if its creation was within the bounds of the possible for the human race. My conclusion, however tentative, is that I don’t think so.”
She took a moment, perhaps to allow everyone to posit their own conclusions before rendering hers.
“I think,” she said, “that this might be an alien object.”
There was another long silence. It was considerably less ponderous than the first one.
It ended when Touré started laughing, then Robbie, and then the others fell in.
“I don’t understand,” Ananda said.
“Oh, hell,” Touré said, “we all figured that was the case a long time ago.”
“The shimmer,” Win said.
“Yes,” Robbie said. “So the device is probably alien; that’s fine. What about the shimmer? Do you know anything about that yet?”
“No,” Win said, pointing. “I mean, there’s the shimmer.”
It was hovering off the edge of the roof.
Christmas tree lights in a washing machine, Touré thought.
He’d seen it three times already, possibly four, if the memory of what he saw during his fever was to be taken seriously. Often enough that he felt justified in observing that something seemed different about it this time. It was a weird idea, given this was just a cloud of lights.
But this time it looked angry.
From the edge of the roof, it swept forward and dive-bombed Ananda. She yelped in surprise. Then it went from surrounding her to examining everyone else: passing through Touré; hovering menacingly over Bethany, who looked ready to take out her gun and shoot it; bouncing between Win and Carol; knifing into Paul.
“What’s it doing?” Carol asked, in response to the yelps and yips everyone around her was uttering.
“It’s acting like it’s pissed off at us,” Touré said.
“Well, that’s different,” Carol said, at the same moment the shimmer traveled through her. That she didn’t know it was passing through her was the best proof that any sensations they might think they were having because of an interaction with the light show was probably all in their heads.
The encounter ended with the shimmer spinning above them for several seconds before zipping off toward Boston.
“Well,” Paul said, after a decent moment of silence, “I’d say producing that light show is one of the things that alien machine of yours is doing, Nanda. Maybe we should figure out why.”
“Soon,” Bethany said. “I didn’t like that at all.”
“I agree, of course,” Ananda said. “It may take some time. I need access to the research conducted on it prior to the . . .”
She stared at Touré, as if saying, Please don’t make me say it.
“The whateverpocalypse,” he said.
“Yes, prior to that. It was studied in detail. Even if they only learned enough to conclude that evacuation was a wise decision, in 2044 they had access to technology I don’t have and some technology I don’t understand. I’m saying it may be a while before we have concrete answers.”
Touré looked at Robbie, nodded back. It was time.
“We might have a shortcut,” Robbie said.
“Oh?” Ananda said. “Did you find something?”
“Kind of.”
“What we’re thinking,” Touré said, “is that the best way to find out what the alien device does is by asking an alien.”
“Sure, dude,” Bethany said. “Next time you see one, go ahead.”
“I think I will, thanks.”
Ananda flashed a somewhat condescending smile.
“You’re talking about how the lights sometimes look human?” she asked. “Because there’s a great deal of work in human pattern-recognition tendencies that could explain this.”
“No, no, no,” Robbie said. “That isn’t what he meant.”
He stood up next to the whiteboard like a kid taking over the class midlecture.
“We want to tell you guys something,” he said, “if you’re done, Ananda. For now. We can go back to you if you want after.”
“Please,” she said. “Go ahead.”
She sat down. Her expression suggested it was not fine.
Robbie looked nervous. He took a sip from the can of beer he was working on, put it down, and did a little pacing.
“Well, go on,” Paul said. “We’re all friends here.”
“Thanks. I’m not sure how to put this delicately, so I’m . . . I’ll just say it. I think—we think, Touré and I—the reason the seven of us didn’t die with everyone else was because we were abducted by aliens. We also think—we know—we’ve been visited by those same aliens since then.”
Ananda looked somewhat exasperated. “How could you possibly know that for a fact?” she asked.
“We know this,” Robbie said, “because a couple of days ago I punched one in the face.”
He was met with a lot of stunned silence.
“Way to sell it, Robert,” Touré said.
“I think I need a bottle of stronger alcohol,” Carol said, “before I’m ready to hear more.”