The Hike

  He swam. He could swim like a master now.

  III.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CRAB

  Fish parts. He discovered that fish parts were the best. They usually settled down on the ocean floor after the sharks were done with them. Other fish would scavenge the bits on the way down, but there was always just enough left for Ben to gobble up. That’s the way the ocean worked: plenty of dead stuff for everyone to share.

  There were more parts to snack on at night, when the sun didn’t sell him out by illuminating every last piece of food (including himself) floating around in the water for all takers to see. When it was particularly bright, he would sink deep and bury himself in the sand for hours at a time, burrowing forward and occasionally bumping into stonefish, or isopods, or other ghastly sea creatures. Here, under the whitecaps, he couldn’t speak, and no one else spoke to him. But he was too concerned about predators to make any kind of noise anyway. They could hear everything. They didn’t even have to see, they were so good at sensing everything around them.

  He lived in a nearsighted fog, scrambling and swimming around in the current until random things popped into his limited field of vision. In a single day, he might encounter food (good), monster-jawed anglerfish (bad), whales (terrifying yet astonishing), coral (annoying), and any number of random, squishy invertebrates crowding the ocean floor (whatever). Anything that could kill him out here could do it quickly. He felt bad he’d eaten crab so many times himself. But it’s what everyone in Maryland does!

  Swimming was the best part. When Ben was a kid, his mom would take him to the community pool—a hot, swarming place for all the families that weren’t rich enough to join one of the proper country clubs—and he would try to stay underwater forever, floating spread-eagle just above the bottom of the pool, pretending he was drifting off into outer space. But of course, he couldn’t hold his breath for very long, and soon he would rise to the surface and be surrounded by all the other kids operating at peak obnoxiousness. Then he would drape his arms over the soaked concrete lip of the pool and rest his head on it, taking in the sun and feeling the water in the concrete pores grow as hot and thick as human sweat.

  But now he was a crab, and oxygen intake wasn’t an issue at all. He could dance and shimmy underwater all day long if he felt like it. In fact, that was pretty much all he could do. Entertainment options were limited down here. There was swimming, and there was eating, and there was not being eaten. He planned his days accordingly, knowing that the path would deliver him to the beaches of Courtshire at some point. Right? Right?

  It was taking a little bit longer than Ben would have liked. He spent weeks tunneling through muck and dodging sharks. On those rare occasions when he would venture up to the ocean surface, he never spotted dry land. He grew antsy, his confidence in the path wavering as he became, day by day, a prisoner of the endless sea. This is all some big fucking joke. Fight off a bunch of monsters and survive being imprisoned twice (twice!), and all you get for your trouble are these lousy crab claws.

  And then, one night, he was trudging across the sand when he found himself tripped up. He tried swimming up to the surface but bounced against a mesh barrier. It was a trawling net, sweeping the floor clean of everything: lobsters, clams, eels, shrimp, tuna, scrod, boots—you name it. Ben tried to snip the rubberized nylon with his pincers but it was no use. The net drew tight, pulling him up with his seaborne colleagues and lifting them up out of the water. Then the net swung over and dumped them all on a rolling conveyor belt. He saw a gauntlet of hands in chain-mail gloves sorting through the fish, discarding pieces of driftwood and tossing inedibles overboard.

  Ben was not an inedible. A mighty hand plucked him off the belt and held him against a measuring caliper. He was big enough to keep. Into a barrel he went with a bunch of other crabs.

  “Psst!” Ben whispered. “Any of you shitheads talk? Anyone? Anyone?”

  They did not. He was the only magically transformed human forced to serve an existential tour of duty there among them.

  “Just my luck.”

  He tried scrambling up the side of the barrel but it was hard to find sure footing among the teeming crustaceans. A man in a yellow slicker picked up the barrel and carried it into the galley of what appeared to be a massive freighter: all iron, belching exhaust out of every possible opening. The galley had plain white walls and black rubber mats all over the floor. Ben could only see out of the top of the barrel, but what he saw wasn’t comforting: a range top, and a pot of boiling water the size of a trash can. The steam was racing out of the pot, coating the white walls and making them sweat. These kitchen walls probably hadn’t been dry in years. He could hear one man shouting instructions at the rest.

  “Remember: If you are caught smuggling any extra food for yourself, you will be tossed overboard. Failure to adhere to rationing is punishable by DEATH.”

  A chorus of voices responded in unison. “SIR, YES, SIR.”

  “Freezer number one is now stocked full. All rations are to be vacuum sealed and packed into freezer number two. Load back to front, side to center. Do not block the front of the freezer or I will personally put my foot in your ass. Is that clear?”

  “SIR, YES, SIR.”

  “Yo!” Ben cried out from the bucket. “Can anyone get me out of here?”

  No one replied. Instead, another chain-mail hand reached into the barrel and started grabbing crabs by the handful, dumping them in the pot. Ben dodged the hand again and again, wishing he was in the company of friendlier giants. The barrel was growing empty now. The hand dug deep and swept around the bottom, finally plucking up Ben and a few other stragglers. But before it could lower Ben into the steaming pot, he wriggled free and dropped down to the black mat on the floor. There was just enough room under the range for him to fit, so he bolted across the mat and tucked himself under the enormous appliance.

  “God dammit,” he heard a voice say. Now he saw a broom handle come sweeping across the floor under the range. Ben skittered, dancing under a steel shelf and then an industrial fridge, spotting a pair of double doors with black flaps only five feet away. There were two lines of white tape running out from the bottom of the fridge and under the door. Ben looked down and saw that he was sitting in between them. The path.

  He made a break for it, walking across the open galley floor and dodging a good number of angry footfalls. He was faster than all of them. Smarter, too.

  Outside the galley, he emerged into a bustling hallway lined with screaming cooks, janitors, stewards, and passengers. Everyone looked haggard and disheveled. Whatever clothes they had on appeared to be the only clothing any of them possessed. Ben bobbed and weaved around everyone, staying within the white tape lines. An excited toddler knelt down for a closer look and Ben whispered, “Hey kid, can you get me out of here?”

  The kid screamed bloody murder. Ben just barely dodged the little boy’s mother trying to stomp him to death.

  There was a single swinging door at the end of the hall with a little porthole window. The passengers were streaming in and out of it without any rhyme or reason. Many people were crying and consoling one another. All of them looked freezing, desperately covering their faces with their sleeves or with heavy scarves. They all had multicolored armbands and on those armbands they could project a display in front of them that showed them anything they liked: games and text messages and photos. Mothers kept children occupied by screening movies for them in midair. They all seemed so destitute, and yet clad in the most wondrous technological wear.

  He scrambled out of the door and found himself outside on the main deck. Men in camo garb patrolled the outside area with big, powerful rifles. Again, he was far too conspicuous.

  “Mommy, a crab!”

  Another kiddie hand went for him and this time, he gave the kid a firm pinch. The kid whined and mewled like he was dying. Jeez kid, get your shit together.
br />   He looked up at the bridge of the freighter and saw that there was no captain. The ship was steering itself. The LED fog lights scanning out from the conning tower were brighter and more concentrated than any lights he had ever seen.

  There was a steel lip that curled around the freighter deck, and Ben couldn’t see past it. The two taped lines ran up and over the side, off the ship. He made his way to the railing as people randomly gave chase and eventually he was able to climb over the lip and hang off the side of the freighter. The two white lines extended down the hull into the water below.

  The wind caught him. He had no clue they were going so fast—40 knots—until that moment. He was barely hanging on, about to drop back into the sea, when he looked out and saw land. The ship was cruising across a bay, at the mouth of a wide river. It was the Hudson, lower Manhattan on the right and New Jersey on the left.

  Even from this distance, and with his crippled eyesight, Ben could see that the entire city was dead. The buildings were submerged up to twenty stories up, some of them halfway coated in fresh volcanic rock. Whole spires had come dislodged and were floating in the water. Anything that wasn’t wet was burning. Ben grabbed the hull and stretched out farther to try to see more, but the sky was still so dark and cloudy. Or were those even clouds? They were so black and menacing that they should have been dumping rain all over them.

  No, they were plumes of ash, hanging over the water and blotting out the sun entirely, even as the morning came. It was as if one of Voris’s Smokes had imprisoned the world. On board, Ben could hear people crying and begging each other for food among the bloops and blorps coming from whatever technological wonders they had strapped to their forearms. The freighter cruised past the ghost of New York City with no thought of stopping. The land was dead and fallow. This freighter was all that was left of the world: all the people and food and fuel. All of it was here on a single ship that was just holding out a little bit longer, delaying the inevitable.

  No. This is not . . .

  Suddenly the sun grew bright, alarmingly so. Ben looked up and saw it burn through the ash cover and turn an angry shade of red, spewing out flares and intensifying until seconds later, it was extinguished, turning eclipse black. A chorus of screams came from the deck as a Kelvin-scale wind swept over the freighter and froze everyone in place. Below Ben, the sea was quickly crystallizing into permanent ice. A whirlpool formed right beneath him, tight and fast, with a cone in the center that seemed to go down into the Earth’s core. The air was growing so cold that he felt it through his thick shell, so he dropped off the side of the freighter and fell into the great sucking vortex, spinning around in the black iciness until he passed out. Can crabs pass out? They could now.

  When he awoke, he was floating in the shallows, the sun sitting safely up in the sky, the way it was supposed to. He could feel sand now, soft and movable. He buried himself back down in the ocean floor and shuddered at the vision of the entombed skyline and all the screaming passengers witnessing the sun’s last gasps. It’s not real. I didn’t go through all this just for that to be the ending, just for everything to be so black and meaningless. Why would anyone show him that? What did he need to see of the absolute end of humanity that he couldn’t already guess on his own? Fuck that. There was a little space of history that he was trying to crawl back into, and whatever came before it or after it didn’t matter. That boat? That was a part of the future that he would never have to participate in.

  The waters grew shallow and Ben skittered up onto a sandy spit of beach lined with summer vacation homes on stilts and two parallel lines in the sand that led to a house that was a story taller than the rest. Ben didn’t have to crawl up those steps to know what was in the attic. Sure enough, along came a thirty-eight-year-old man with a scar that looked like a running tear and a backpack slung over his shoulder. Crab buried himself as the man walked by and went into the house with the extra story. He could hear the Younger Ben trashing the inside of the place in a blind fury. And then, for twenty minutes, there was silence. After that came a struggle up in the attic, and then the Younger Ben flying out of that house bleeding and screaming like a fucking horse on fire.

  “Hey. Hey, you.”

  “Hello?” the Younger Ben asked.

  “Here. I’m over here, Shithead.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  THE TWO BENS

  It was amazing how much the Younger Ben annoyed Crab. He was an embarrassing yearbook photo come to life. Crab wanted to poke him in the eye. He had learned so much about maritime exploration from Cisco, and yet he could barely apply any of that knowledge to his travels with his past self, because the thirty-eight-year-old Ben was such a comical dolt: gunning the hovercraft before unmooring it, trying to unmoor it without cutting the engine, going to fucking sleep and leaving a tiny crab in the cockpit to keep them on course. (Try as Crab might, he eventually had to wake up the Younger Ben because he couldn’t turn the steering wheel enough to keep them from veering off the path.)

  Everything that Crab said to Ben was a word-for-word recital of everything Crab had said to him years ago. It was as if he were reading off a script he had memorized: every warning, every insult, every clue he gave to the Younger, oblivious Ben. Every time he tried to think of something new and different to say, he found himself saying Crab’s exact words anyway. It was automatic. They were the correct words. And fucking with Younger Ben was half the fun. When they came to Fermona’s mountain, Crab magically stuck to the side of it, and so he had a marvelous time skittering up the peak while the Younger Ben clung desperately to his ice axes. He could laugh at him because he knew how things would turn out.

  Soon they reached Fermona’s cave, and the Older Ben discovered a new appreciation for all the things Crab had done for him when he was trapped in the hole. Crab left Ben alone in that hole for a full week, but only because he was scavenging Fermona’s pile for hours at a time as the giant slept, looking for the seed bag despite his limited eyesight.

  “Where is it?” he whispered to himself, scouring through the pile one agonizing piece at a time, the cans of food as massive as boulders to him. One time the giant stirred, and Crab settled down and became part of the enormous pile, impossible to detect. The giant went back to snoring loudly, and Crab resumed his tedious work. Once he unearthed the seed bag, he dragged it over to a corner of Fermona’s chamber and buried it out of sight, where he could easily get to it during the surprise dwarf fight. He had to retrace the layout of the cave virtually from memory because his eyes were getting so bad. He explored the other dungeon cells as well, each one housing a naked prisoner who was hairless and deranged, babbling nonsense.

  “Hey, you!” Crab whispered to one of them. “Do you need help?”

  “Gdsfkjhsadasdlkfasdfdsjlk!”

  They were barely human. He couldn’t bear to look at them for very long.

  The day of the fight, the Younger Ben commanded him, “Go into that pile and find me a weapon.” But the Older Ben had already found something. He had it in place and ready to deploy, like a good soldier. When he saw the Younger Ben fight the dogface and win, he beamed like a proud older brother.

  The hardest part of mentoring his younger self—aside from letting the hovercraft smash into that iceberg because the path led directly into it—came after they defeated Fermona and were walking along the open prairie, when they saw the mirage of Ben’s old house. With his lousy crab vision, he could barely make out the blurry sight of little Peter out on the stoop in his jammies, smiling broadly. From that unreachable distance, he may as well have been looking at a small pet rock. But Crab knew what he was looking at.

  That’s your home, but it’s not really your home anymore.

  Don’t say that.

  You know it’s true. It’s your former home now. The path is home.

  Shut up.

  He watched the Younger Ben howl in grief and envied him for being so d
etermined, so frenzied in his mission to get back home. He wasn’t like that anymore. There comes a point in life when you’ve seen so much that hardly anything surprises you or bothers you, and that’s a shitty moment. Wisdom is so terribly overrated.

  They came to the split in the road and now it was time for Crab to find out what was down the left-hand side of that path. He waved a pincer at the younger, more annoying version of himself, just as Crab had to him all those years ago.

  “Do you want to take anything?” the Younger Ben asked him.

  “I don’t need anything,” the Older Ben said. “One day, you won’t need anything either.”

  Right on cue, he abandoned his younger self in search of the end, passing through the invisible barrier to the path without hindrance. He had served his time. He should have been close to the end by now. That’s what would have been fair.

  He should have known better.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  THE TRAIN

  Across the prairie Ben skittered, eyeing the split-rail fence for a sign of whatever might come for him next. But all he saw in his limited scope of vision were tiny yellow buttercup flowers and the shores of ponds that, thankfully, were filled with plain water instead of blood. A colossal thunderstorm swept across the fields and Ben had to dig into the side of the path to prevent getting swept away.