“I’m sure it’s fine,” Elijah said. “That’s a backup anyway, right? The primary wasn’t broken.”
“Broken, no. Stressed? Absolutely,” she said.
She stood up slowly and allowed Elijah to help her to her feet.
“Ready for a test?” she asked.
He smiled.
They removed all the equipment from the top of the lift. It was a slow process. Elijah did most of the work. Every tool had to be handed down through the hatch to Jacob’s outstretched hands. Then, with everything put away, Elijah helped Madelyn down until her foot was on the ladder. Jacob kept a hand under her armpit until she was down to the floor.
She was grateful that there had been work for her to do. With the men always hovering, her recovery had moved slowly. Once she had a task, she drove herself hard. She felt like she was almost at a hundred percent.
Elijah came down after her and moved the ladder out of the lift.
Jacob moved to the panel and put power to the unit. The doors slid shut.
Elijah smiled as he hit the button. The doors slid open, working in harmony. They looked perfectly trustworthy.
Jacob moved forward. Madelyn put out her hand and stopped him.
“Just me for the first trip,” she said. “Until I know it’s safe.”
Jacob and Elijah consulted with each other silently. Madelyn didn’t wait for their decision—she moved forward, turned, and hit the button. The doors slid closed. They were trapped in her tomb and she was ascending to the real world.
The trip only took a couple of seconds. The stairs rose in front of her, welcoming her up to the light above. She flipped the switch on the door, locking the lift in place, and began to climb. She was out of breath by the time she reached the living room.
Her grandmother’s cabin almost looked normal. Here and there, the light sparkled on stray grains of sand. She would probably find them for years to come. Madelyn passed by her wall of skulls and exited through the front door. Dusk was falling on her patch of lawn. A fog was moving in from the south. It was normal for the spring. The warm air rose away from the setting sun and hit the cool air that slipped over the mountains. At least that was the story that Madelyn told herself. It was the mythology she had created to explain the phenomenon.
She had a decision to make. The locked lift wouldn’t hold the men forever.
She had to decide if they were worth the trouble. The world was spread out before her. In five minutes, she could be deep enough into the woods that they wouldn’t track her down. In an hour, she would be a ghost. She could compose her own mythology to explain why she had left them behind.
Madelyn took a deep breath and closed her eyes.
If Elijah was right, science had died at the hands of its creators.
The artifacts it had left behind would become enveloped in mystery over time. Maybe mythology was the only constant.
She turned her back on the creeping fog.
Chapter 28
{Decision}
The doors slid apart.
Elijah had his hands clasped behind his back. Jacob had his arms folded across his chest.
Their expressions were interchangeable. They wore equal parts of irritation and disappointment.
“I heard a noise. I had to check it out,” she said.
“First thing in the morning, Jacob and I are leaving,” Elijah said. “You can come with us or not. This place is as good as new. I suppose there’s nothing stopping you from staying here.”
The two men slipped by her and occupied the lift. There wasn’t room for all three of them at once. Besides, Madelyn didn’t trust the thing with that much weight. After everything it had been through, the lift wasn’t trustworthy.
She watched as the doors closed on them. The motor buzzed as it carried them upwards. She couldn’t remember if it had always made that noise or not. She moved to the control panel and watched the two men cross the living room. Elijah went to the kitchen. Jacob went outside to the darkness.
She used the button to call the lift back down to service.
They exchanged very little conversation over dinner. Madelyn could sense the question that they weren’t asking—was she going to come with them? She would have volunteered an answer, but she really didn’t have one.
When she slowly climbed up to her loft, Jacob was offering to take the couch. Elijah refused. Madelyn was glad for it. She wanted to listen to Elijah fall asleep again. The rhythm of his breathing was growing on her.
She wasn’t disappointed. Madelyn fell asleep in the pause between his exhale and inhale.
# # # # #
They were packed and ready to go when Madelyn climbed down from her loft. Both men paused their breakfast to watch her. They didn’t offer help, but they waited to make sure that she was safely on the floor before they exhaled.
“I’m fine,” she said. “I feel better than ever.”
Elijah barked out a skeptical laugh.
“We made you toast,” Jacob said. He pushed the plate towards her.
“No, thanks,” she said.
“It’s synthesized,” Elijah said. “It’s not homemade.”
“Oh,” she said.
He smiled at her as she crossed to the counter and picked it up. Jacob shook his head and looked down at his own plate, smiling.
“What?” she asked. “It’s not that I don’t like his toast. I’m just not going to let synthesized bread go to waste.”
Elijah laughed too.
“We have enough fuel to make it halfway down the mountain,” Elijah said. “After that, we’re on foot.”
Jacob nodded.
“Or, we’d be happy to hike if you want us to leave the truck here for you?”
Madelyn looked between them. These were the only two options they were allowing themselves to believe in.
“What am I, an invalid? You don’t think I could hike down to Fairbanks? I could do that in my sleep,” she said.
“It’s more practical for two to travel on foot,” Jacob said. “We’d be there to help each other out. If you’re going alone, I would feel more comfortable if you had the assist of the truck.”
Madelyn thought about it while she chewed.
“I don’t suppose I could convince one of you to stay here with me?” she asked. Her eyes bounced off of her nephew and landed on Elijah.
He held her gaze.
Elijah blinked slowly while he formed his answer.
“I care for you, Madelyn,” he said. She held perfectly still while she waited to hear the next sentence. “But the future is down there, with everyone else.”
She exhaled. He was right and wrong. Madelyn put the last piece in her mouth and brushed her hands off. She turned and regarded the cabin.
Jacob broke the silence.
“Do you want us to leave the truck?” he asked.
Madelyn shook her head.
# # # # #
She sat sandwiched between her nephew and Elijah.
The whole hike down to the truck, she had held herself together.
As the vehicle rumbled down the road, Madelyn realized that she had been barely holding herself together for years.
Jacob looked out his window, happy to be traveling again.
Elijah focused on the terrible road, trying to keep them safe.
Madelyn stared straight ahead.
She let her tears fall for all the people she had lost. She hoped that they had all forgiven her, and hoped that she could eventually forgive herself. There was something else in her heart besides the sorrow. She closed her crying eyes and tried to focus on it. When she opened them again, the world looked brighter.
Madelyn wiped her eyes.
Jacob looked at her and smiled.
# # # # #
Ike Hamill
December, 2015
Topsham, Maine
###
About Madelyn’s Nephew
I hope you enjoyed meeting Madelyn as much as I did. She w
as lost out there in the woods and her nephew helped her find the way back to the world. When I started this book, I knew what she was up against, but I didn’t know what she would do. Madelyn is unpredictable, at best. Even when I thought I had a good sense of what was best for her, she would surprise me.
This isn’t the end of her story. This is the first book of three. In the next one, you’ll see more of the world that she lives in and meet some new people. My initial ideas of Madelyn’s story came when I was thinking of my own nephew. What if the first time I met him he was already a grown man? The idea took hold as I began to imagine those circumstances.
Please let me know what you thought of this book.
If you have any questions, complaints, or compliments, please send them to me. You can find me on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/ikehamill), Twitter (@ikehamill), or eMail (
[email protected]). I’d really appreciate a review wherever you picked this book up. Sign up for the mailing list at the bottom of my website (https://www.ikehamill.com) and I’ll give you a chance to download a free copy of my next book before it’s announced to the public.
Read on for descriptions of my other books.
All my best,
Ike
Excerpt from Madelyn’s Mistake - Book Two
“SHUT UP AND TAKE it,” the young woman said.
Liam stared at the thing. It looked like one of those old Quiver remotes, but with a bird’s nest of wires poking out of the business end.
She shook it at him again. The young woman was confident, insistent, and stubborn. As far as Liam could tell, all the young people were. It felt damn strange to be taking orders from them. Liam finally took the device and spun it in his hand so that the emitter was pointing towards the young woman. She didn’t seem to care.
“Good. You’re going to head over that hill, stay on the right side of the path for as long as you can, and then break for the tall building. It’s marked with a big TWO. You want unit seventeen. Once you get to the west window, you should be able to make contact,” she said.
Liam nodded. Everything she said sounded like a horrible idea. He looked in her eyes. She seemed to take measure of him and then she finally nodded back.
“You’ll know when it’s over,” she said. “Then make your way back to the courthouse as best you can. There might be strays.”
She turned and ran. Liam blinked and admired her balance and agility. Gravity didn’t seem to matter much to young people. They bounced and climbed and floated over debris like it wasn’t even there. He would have turned his ankle on that section of toppled concrete.
He looked back towards the hill. Liam frowned and wondered if they had overestimated his physical abilities. He wondered if the mission they had given him was actually achievable by a man in his condition. It was starting to get dark. He had to get moving before he was blind.
Liam trudged up the hill. It had been a lawn once. The ground was firm. Now the hill was lightly wooded. Nature took back some areas vengefully. It tore at the landscape and rendered it impassable. Other areas, like this hillside, were gently colonized by bushes and trees. Liam wondered if the difference had to do with the type of soil, or maybe the groundwater.
He stopped and shook his head. His mind had been wandering. If he wanted to survive the day, he was going to have to keep his focus. Over the hill, right side of the path, and then break for the tall building marked TWO. Liam started climbing again.
As his head crested the hill and he saw what was on the other side, he stopped in his tracks.
# # # # #
Liam put out his hand to steady himself on a tree. It was the hand with the Quiver remote. He remembered his mission. Regardless of what those lights were, people were counting on him. He saw the path. It wound around the circumference of what looked like a dried up old pond. The lights were circling each other down there in the gravel.
When he was little, his parents would take all the kids to the park to chase fireflies. These weren’t those. These lights were big—bright enough to cast shadows—and they didn’t blink. They were steady and they circled around, like glowing planets orbiting an invisible sun.
Liam didn’t want to, but he moved towards the path. The young woman with all her stubborn confidence had suggested that Liam would be safe if he stayed on the right side of the path. Who was he to question? He was nothing more than a foot soldier on this mission.
The glowing orbs didn’t notice him.
When the outermost one floated by, it was no more than twenty meters away. He heard its hum. Liam quickened his pace. His legs were already sore. His heart was already pounding. The orbs circled. It was impossible not to stare at them. The girl should have mentioned them. Liam felt unprepared for this mission. He was clearly the wrong person to entrust with a crucial part of the plan.
With all his attention on the orbs, he never saw the broken patch of asphalt. His foot hit the tree root, turned to the side, and his weight transferred to an ankle that was in no way prepared to support him. This realization raced through his head as Liam fell towards the ground. Compounding his troubles, his knee bent to the side, stretching his ligaments painfully before his elbow impacted the turf.
Liam’s head whipped on his neck. The air was driven from his chest. The Quiver remote rolled off into the dark. Stretched out on the ground, like a toppled statue, Liam didn’t move. He had no memory of how much noise he had made during his fall, but it had certainly not been quiet.
The humming swelled.
He turned his head to see the outermost orb approaching again. When its orbit brought it as close as it would get to Liam, the ball of light stopped.
Liam held himself perfectly still and studied the thing.
He tried to gauge the distance—fifteen meters? Maybe a dozen? Twelve good strides might bring him close enough to touch the strange light. The girl hadn’t mentioned them. In fact, Liam had never heard of such a thing. He wondered for the first time if maybe they were a new phenomenon. Perhaps he hadn’t heard of them because he was the only person who had ever witnessed them. Or, maybe other people had witnessed them but none had survived the encounter.
The next ball, slightly closer in its orbit to the invisible center, approached. The sound of its hum joined the first. When it was directly in line with the first ball from Liam’s perspective, it stopped too.
The two orbs hovered a couple of meters apart.
The third one was coming.
Liam rolled to his side and tried to push to his knees. Every part of his body registered a complaint. Amongst the troubles in his legs, he might have also cracked a rib. He sucked in an experimental breath and waited for the sharp jab of pain. He reached in the dark until his hand found the Quiver remote.
When the third orb snapped in line with the other two, Liam forgot to worry about whether or not he had cracked another rib. He got to his feet and stumbled into a jog. He had to get to the building marked TWO. He didn’t even see any buildings yet.
A quick glance to his left showed him that the glowing orbs had moved slightly. The line was still pointing towards him—tracking him.
He whispered a curse and got his feet moving faster. The fourth orb was closing in on the other three. Moving through its smaller radius, it would be in line with the others in no time. After that, he could only see two more orbs. Liam didn’t want to find out what might happen when all six were aimed at him.
Just beyond a stand of trees, Liam saw the outline of a couple of buildings against the night sky. One was taller than the other. It had to be right. His pace wasn’t going to hold. His knee and ankle were giving out. A limp worked its way into his stride. Liam turned in time to see the fifth orb line up with the rest. The sixth was nearly there.
They should have never sent an old man on this mission. Liam knew that he was useful in a lot of ways, but running around in the dark was a stupid waste of his talents. Liam was slowing down—giving up—when his injured legged scuffed the ground and sent anothe
r bolt of pain up his leg.
He shuffled to a stop and turned towards the glowing balls. The sixth one took another quick loop through its orbit and then it locked in place.
They hovered over the dry lake bed in a perfect line.
Something was about to happen. He could feel the electricity in the air.
One by one, the intensity of the glowing balls flared. It looked like they were sending a wave of energy in Liam’s direction. He looked down at the Quiver remote in his hand. They hadn’t told him what it was for. He was supposed to get to the west window of unit seventeen and make contact with the others. The girl hadn’t even instructed him on how to use the damn thing.
The pad near the top of the remote had a faint purple glow. He hadn’t seen that before. Then again, maybe he could only see it now because it had gotten so dark out. There was no way to know for sure.
Another bright pulse rippled through the orbs. It definitely felt like they were gearing up for something. Liam glanced at the outline of the buildings, knowing he should run for them but sensing the futility of the action.
He raised the Quiver remote, pointing it at the line of lights and put his thumb over the pad. Maybe it would save him from whatever was about to happen. He stopped his thumb when it hovered no more than a millimeter away from the pad. He shook his head. He wouldn’t betray his mission just to save his own skin. Maybe they had chosen him because he was wise enough to know the difference between success and failure.
He turned away from the threat and limped towards the buildings.
Liam refused to look as a crackling burst of energy flowed through the glowing balls and then shot in his direction.
For a second, the left side of his body lit up with searing pain. It was boiling heat followed by a million tiny needles. Liam couldn’t help but flinch away from the pain. After the flinch, he simply added the new complaints to the catalogue of injuries that his body was reporting. He continued to limp towards the buildings, giving the glowing orbs no more of his attention.
As he passed the group of trees, he heard the crackle of energy from the line of orbs again. He didn’t turn. The second burst didn’t really catch him. He heard one of the trees burst into flames as he continued to limp towards the dark building.