Just Plain Weird (24 page)

    
    
“I could live with that,” Doc finally said.

    
    
“Then you agree it’s a good idea,” Eliza asked.

    
    
“Yes,” he said. “It’s an excellent idea.”

    
    
“You’re certain.”

    
    
“Yes.”

    
    
“Absolutely certain?” Eliza double-checked.

    
    
“Yes.”

    
    
“Good,” she said. “Because we tried it and it didn’t work.”

    
    
Doc frowned. “You tried it without telling me?”

    
    
“I seemed like the perfect solution,” I said.

    
    
“And it didn’t work?”

    
    
“Nope?” Eliza said.

    
    
“Why not?”

    
    
“We’re not sure,” I admitted.

    
    
“But there were consequences,” Eliza added.

    
    
“What kind of consequences?” Doc asked, lowering his voice, guarded; you could just tell he didn’t like the word ‘consequences.’

    
    
When neither Eliza nor I said anything immediately, he repeated the question, this time his voice filling with anxiety. “What kind of consequences?”

    
    
“Well…” I started, and then hedged.

    
    
“We broke the moon,” Eliza blurted out.

    
    
“You broke the moon!” Doc roared, jumping to his feet faster than I would have thought him capable. “You broke the moon?”

    
    
“Well, we didn’t actually break the moon,” Eliza explained. “But, for some reason, what we did change something, and the moon is now broken.”

    
    
“Fractured, really,” I put in.

    
“Oh, it’s only fractured,” Doc said, sarcastic. “Well, that’s different. That’s not so terrible. I’m sure I have a tube of moon glue around here somewhere. We’ll get that fixed up right away. Did you break or fracture anything else?”

    
    
Eliza and I looked at each other.

    
    
“Well…” Eliza started.

    
    
“Everything isn’t looking too good outside,” I said.

    
    
“But that’s just around here,” Eliza pointed out. “That doesn’t necessarily mean the whole world is the same.”

    
    
Doc’s eyes darted back and forth between Eliza and me. They were beginning to fill with pure panic.

    
    
“The whole world isn’t the same as what?” he demanded as though he really didn’t want to know.

    
    
“As outside here,” Eliza said, and started chewing her thumbnail.

    
    
“It’s sort of deserted,” I explained, watching Doc’s eyes start to bug out of their sockets.

    
    
“Yeah, deserted,” Eliza agreed quickly, “And, um, dark.”

    
    
“Yeah, and cooler,” I added.

    
    
“It’s just generally messed-up,” Eliza summed up the matter as though she were talking about a school schedule.

    
    
Doc was already pushing past us through the doorway, and heading upstairs. We followed him meekly as he clumped through the house toward the front door, which he threw open in a fit of despair, and beheld the world outside as it now existed. He slowly took in the gloomy tableau of the street-- the treeless, grassless, flowerless ground that surrounded the houses that were shadowed with soot and grime. He stared up at the unnaturally black sky, then, and when he looked at us; his eyes were glazed with shock.

    
    
“What could possibly have happened?” he murmured.

    
    
“No idea,” I said.

    
    
“Not a clue,” Eliza concurred quickly.

    
    
It took a long while before he spoke again, but as the initial shock wore off, his reasoning returned.

    
    
“It had to be something catastrophic,” he commented, and then asked me, “What does the artifact say?”

    
    
“It’s not communicating with me at the moment,” I said.

    
    
“It’s not?”

    
    
“It seems to be very frightened,” I said.

    
    
“Well, it’s not the only one,” Doc said. “This is just awful. Look at the sky, will you… and that chill in the air… if all of this doesn’t appear to be what was once called ‘nuclear winter’ I don’t know what does. When Krakatoa erupted, it was the most devastating volcanic eruption in history. Countless tons of volcanic ash was spewed into the atmosphere, creating a pall around the entire planet. The sun was blocked out to such an extent that temperatures dropped, crops were affected. It took years for the ash to clear out of the atmosphere.
 
This has to be a thousand times worse…. Have you searched around for people, or are you just assuming-- because of how everything looks-- that nobody is still here?”

    
    
I told him the only place we checked was my house.

    
    
So the three of us spilt up, and for the next hour, went door to door up and down the streets. When we regrouped to compare findings, it turned out that none of us ran across another human being. All the houses-- that must have totaled more than a hundred-- seemed deserted. Eliza had run across a house whose mailbox still held letters; the last postmark on any of the letters was dated April 16th, 2003, over three years ago. Doc, having checked down the nearest main street, had run across a newspaper box and purchased the local paper, which was dated April 13th, 2003. The headline of the paper didn’t scream out of any impending disasters, though, but rather covered the relatively dull story of how a looming autoworkers strike might affect the local economy. However, on page thirty-nine, just opposite the daily obituaries, Doc found the most intriguing story in the entire issue; it was entitled “Io Mystery Baffles Astronomers.” The story-- probably just thrown in at the last minute prior to printing in order to take up empty space-- was no more than three hundred words long. It was basically about how astronomers around the world struggled to determine what had happened to Io, one of Jupiter’s moons, which appeared to have suddenly vanished.
 
The article also mentioned that this was the second solar system mystery in as many months; it had been discovered that Pluto, for reasons yet to be determined, was not circling the sun in its established orbit but instead was thousands of miles too near the sun.

    
    
“Isn’t it just like a newspaper to bury the most important story in the back of the paper,” Doc commented wryly. We were sitting shoulder to shoulder on the sofa in his living room, with Doc in the middle, the three of us repeatedly going over the skimpy story. “It makes you wonder how these editors think, always putting up front what they believe people will think is important-- auto worker strike, hah!-- while never bringing to the public’s attention those stories that people ought to worry about. Think about it. You have a planet, my god, that has strayed from its orbit. Didn’t anybody realize how significant that is? And if that’s not bad enough, you have one of Jupiter’s moons-- which is just about the size of earth, if I remember right-- you have it suddenly and inexplicably vanish.” He folded the paper, and in disgust, tossed it onto the coffee table.

    
    
“Doc, where does this leave us?” Eliza asked.

    
    
“It leaves us precisely nowhere,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong-- we’ll be all right. The artifact’s energy source is intact. We’ll have electricity and water and food and everything we need to survive-- that’s not a problem. But look outside… where are we?-- we’re in limbo, some place just this side of purgatory. We don’t have a clue how all this happened. We don’t know how much of the world is affected. We don’t know whether we’re the last humans on the planet. Unless the artifact starts talking to Travis, the only way were going to find out anything is if we discover it ourselves. Now, I can dig out my old Hamm radio equipment and get it up and running.
 
My operator’s license expired years ago, but I hardly think the FCC will mind. Maybe I can reach somebody somewhere-- I don’t know. Basically, though, we are all alone in the dark. What we do know is dismal. We know the utilities are down, at least locally. We know that none of the nearby television and radio stations are transmitting. It boils down to this: we do whatever we can to gather information.” He pushed himself up off the sofa, and looked down at us. “I’m going to dig out the radio equipment, and see if the antenna is all right. You two,” he said, as though a reluctant general taking command of an army of pathetic troops, “you two I want to go out and check the emergency facilities-- the police stations, fire stations, hospitals, any place that might have a fall-out shelter-- schools, public buildings…. I’m assuming they will all be deserted, but you might find something to give us a clue what happened, where the people went, emergency orders left lying around.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a set of keys, which he tossed to Eliza, saying, “Those are to my last vehicle. It has no scratches on it and a full tank of gas. Please do not drive it off any cliffs. And, Travis, if the artifact starts communicating to you, even in the vaguest way, come home right away. Now, everyone has something to work on, right? Just be careful out there.”

    
    
We split up, then, Doc retreating to the basement to dig out his old Hamm radio, and Eliza and I going out to the car.

    
    
Becoming mobile wasn’t going to be very easy. The vehicle, a late model black four by four, although scratch-less and fully gassed up, was layered with black gunky material. Also, its tires were flat and its battery dead. It took an entire hour of scrubbing with a stiff bristled brush just to clear the junk off all the windows. While I scrubbed until my arms ached, making first small circles and then large circles with the brush, until the blackness finally eroded off the glass, Eliza labored to fill the tires with a bicycle pump. Once or twice, I accidentally splashed her with warm soapy water, and she shot me a dirty look and literally growled. When all the windows were clear and all the tires fairly filled with air, I pushed the four by four back into the garage, where electricity, supplied from the artifact’s power source, ran through the sockets. Doc had an AC jumper, which I plugged in and used to jump start the car. Mercifully, the engine hadn’t seized from lack of use; it started, running very roughly at first but then slowly smoothing out into a healthy hum.
 
We let the car idle for about twenty minutes, so that the battery would become somewhat charged, before we climbed inside and started out on our mission.

    
    
“You know the air pressure on these tires is still very low,” Eliza warned as she shifted into drive and we started to roll. “It’s not like I have the arms of a gorilla and can get it up to forty pounds with a bicycle pump.”

    
    
“Just try to avoid potholes,” I told her.