Just Plain Weird (27 page)

    
    
“So you went hunting?” she asked.

    
    
“Yeah.”

    
    
“Hunting?” She still couldn’t believe it.

    
    
“Yup.”

    
    
“You went out in the woods or something, and shot tiny defenseless animals?”

    
    
“No,” I said simply.

    
    
Eliza was clearly confounded now, barely able to keep her eye on the road.

    
    
“No?”

    
    
“The closest I came to shooting anything was when I nearly shot my foot by accident,” I explained. “My father-- he took a shot at something, and missed. He swore it was a deer. He swore he saw the antlers and everything, but I think it was actually a tree branch. That was the highlight of our outing-- how the old man nearly shot a buck. No matter what I said, I couldn’t convince him it was just a tree branch he must have seen, not antlers.
 
I even showed him on the tree trunk where the buckshot ripped through the bark. Anyway, we never got a chance to shoot at anything else. We had to cut the trip short when I lost my boots.”

    
    
“How did you lose your boots?” she asked, smirking.

    
    
“Well, we were walking along this river, and we came to this spot where the path was broken by water coming off the river. It wasn’t nearly big enough to be called a branch, but just a small area of water that seemed to spill off onto the ground. The water didn’t seem deep-- I could see the gray muck at the bottom. But when I tried to step through it, I found myself waist deep in water. My feet were stuck fast in the mud at the bottom, and I started sinking. It was like there was quicksand at the bottom. I couldn’t even move my legs. The only way I could get out was to slip out of the boots, so that was that.
 
You know, it was one of those really sucky father-son experiences-- I’ve had quite a few of them,” I said, not wanting to talk about it anymore.

    
    
“So what’s with the gun?”

    
    
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Seemed like a good idea to grab it. Just in case we run into trouble.”

    
    
“Run into trouble. Have you seen anything that looks like trouble?”

    
    
“No,” I said, “but that’s exactly the time you should expect trouble.”

    
    
Eliza just rolled her eyes, as though she thought I was nuts. And maybe she wasn’t wrong. After all, what could we possibly run into that we would need a big honking gun to protect ourselves? The danger-- whatever it had been-- had clearly passed long ago. I found myself feeling foolish as I sat there, looking down at the now fully loaded Mossberg, wondering what had been going through my mind. There had been dozens of other things I could have grabbed from the store, things that were a million times more practical. But something compelled me to grab the gun. It hadn’t been like a little voice whispering in my ear-- take a gun; you might need it… no, it hadn’t been that direct, but seemed to be something almost instinctual, something that for the moment seemed totally rational. Maybe it was because we weren’t seeing any other human beings. There is comfort in the presence of other people-- comfort and the promise that everything will be all right-- and without that comfort, the world seemed like a very lonely and dangerous place. Or maybe it had been the sound I’d heard as the wind whistled over the crater that had been downtown-- that creepy clacking sound that might have just been my imagination. Or maybe it had been the artifact trying to contact me through throes of fear, trying to send a subconscious message or warning in the form of clicks, clacks, and cackles. I concentrated hard now to contact the artifact, thinking,
Come on, old buddy, I know you’ve had a shock-- I know something awful has happened to you-- but I need you now. We need to know what happened here. We can’t fix anything without your help. Where did everything go wrong, anyway?
 
It was all supposed to be so simple. Put everything back where it belonged, and then hightail it for home. So what went wrong? What has you so scared? What happened to our planet, to our people? If you can, give us a sign, a clue, a vague hint, because we are all alone in the dark, and our species doesn’t thrive under those conditions, our species tends to fall apart. Do you understand what it means to “go goofy?” That’s what human beings do under certain situations. They go goofy, even the sanest of human beings. You isolate them from other people, they go goofy. You take away their sunlight, they go goofy. Even if we on earth have a long string of dreary days, you can see the crankiness or depression in people, in the way they act. If you block out the sunshine indefinitely-- I’m telling you-- it’s a one-way ticket to Goofyville.
 
Look at me. A fairly simple and rational human being, sitting here now with a huge honking gun just in case I have to shoot something that may not even be here….
I waited for some response, but none was forthcoming-- not a feeling, an idea, or an inkling.
Who would build such a thing as you, anyway? I wondered. A spaceship, a station, whatever you are-- basically, a machine-- who would build a machine that can become afraid, so afraid as to be nonfunctional? Where is the logic in that? Machines with feelings. And does that mean you refuse to operate when you’re in a bad mood? Or depressed? “Oh, boo-hoo, woe is me, how can you possibly expect me to comply with your orders.” Is that the way you think? How did the people who built you ever get you off the ground, then? It’s time to buck up, bucko; it’s the bottom of the ninth and things aren’t looking to good….
I waited, but still received no response, not the slightest reaction to all the heartfelt information I was shooting toward it. Yet I knew it was there, could feel its presence as it huddle shivering in some shadowy nook of my mind.

    
    
“It doesn’t make any sense, does it?” I said. I said it aloud, but also as though to myself.

    
    
“That’s an understatement,” Eliza said. “I still don’t understand: was that a meteor crater or not?”

    
    
“I think not,” I said, and then finally explained to her, “I really think if it had been a meteor strike, there would be a lot more damage to the surrounding area-- a lot more debris, too.”

    
    
“Then what?”

    
    
“I don’t know,” I told her. “I might just be a dumb jock, but for the life of me, it looked as though everything within that area had been-- scooped out of the ground, just scooped out of the ground and carried off--somewhere.”

    
    
Eliza blanched at the suggestion. It was too much to comprehend.

    
    
“What could possibly cause something like that?”

    
    
“I have no idea.”

    
    
“Whatever it was must be gone by now, though, right? It must be long gone.” When I didn’t answer, she looked at me and said, “If it isn’t gone…well, we’re probably going to be needing a bigger gun then that.”

We returned home to find Doc working.
 
Long before we reached the doorway to his office, I could hear him muttering to himself. I could hear, also, the whine of his short wave radio, that eerie whine the radio makes when you are searching for signals, that high-pitched
woooooo-wooooooo
sound, like an earthbound ghost crying out to be heard by the living.

    
    
Doc was hunkered over the radio. He had cleared his desk of piles of papers and books, and it was now littered with electronic things: parts and bulbs and precision instruments. He had the back off the radio, and was tinkering with something inside. When he noticed us standing in the doorway, he plopped down in his chair and looked up at us with eyes that were weary and frustrated.

    
    
“Is it working?” Eliza asked.

    
    
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I’m afraid to turn the dial. What if we don’t pick anything up? What would that mean exactly?”

    
    
“Just try,” she urged him.

    
    
He leaned forward in his chair, and reached for the radio. He turned up the volume, so that the woo-wooing sound grew louder and seemed to be coming from all directions. He slowly turned the tuning knob. When no signals were in evidence, he paused and looked up at us. “Not a thing,” he said dismally. “Not a single signal coming through in all of North America-- at this time of day, there ought to be hundreds of signals strong enough to tune into, from Nova Scotia to Galveston, Texas.”

    
    
“Well, try Europe,” Eliza suggested.

    
    
Doc turned the dial more. The woo-wooing the radio made remained unbroken. Just as there seemed no one was broadcasting in Europe, we all heard a distinct noise come through the radio speakers-- it sounded like
snick
as he passed the live signal.

    
    
“Hey, we got something,” Doc said brightly, trying to isolate the signal. “Sounds pretty strong, too.” But when he was fully tuned into the signal, it sounded like a coded transmission; there was nothing but the sound beeps in a continuous series-- like the dots and dashes of Morris code, only much more complex. “Must be military,” Doc commented.

    
    
“Well, that means someone is out there,” Eliza said.

    
    
“Might be automated,” I said.

    
    
“Oh, please--” she began to protest.

    
    
“He’s probably right,” Doc told her.

    
    
“Can’t you guys ever think happy thoughts?”

    
    
“You’ve seen what it looks like out there,” I said.

    
    
“Well, I refuse to believe we’re the last living human beings on the whole planet,” she said. “There has to be somebody out there-- somewhere.”

    
    
“Eliza, whatever happened,” Doc said, “happened three years ago. It’s entirely possible we are the only ones here.” He leaned back in his chair, and looked up at us with woeful eyes, as though in the back of his mind, he tried to calculate the chances the human race reestablishing itself with Eliza and me as Adam and Eve, and concluding the obvious: if the human race even had a chance to go on, everybody would end up being nuts or half-nuts. “But,” he said finally, “we will keep looking-- no matter how long it takes. We have all the time in the world, such as it is.”

    
    
We were silent for a while, then, as the radio receiver relentlessly emanated an odd series of beeps.

Beepbeepbeep…beepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbebeepbeep…beep…beep…beepbeepbeep…beep…

 
        
The only thing I could think of at the moment was the strangeness of our situation: the world had ended, and we missed the party. Everyone had grabbed their coats and went who knows where, and here we sat in the world that had been left in a shambles. I wondered at the unreality of it all.

    
    
The radio signal suddenly stopped, beeping its last beep, and left a channel of dead air.