The Only Ones (8 page)

D
arla’s house, a stately four-story Victorian in the middle of town, would be the first one wired for electricity. It took Martin all day, but it was relatively easy. With Henry’s and Felix’s help, he mounted some solar panels on her roof and created an electrical hub in her pantry from which she could run extension cords.

“You’re only going to be able to use a few things at a time,” Martin told Darla. “Some lights at night. Maybe a toaster oven.”

“I want hot water, a fridge, and surround sound, Martin,” she said, pouting.

“How many houses are there left to do?” he asked.

“Well, there are now forty-one kids in town, including you,” Felix told him.

“Do they all have to live in their own houses?” Martin asked. “I mean, couldn’t everyone move in together and—”

Henry stopped him with a shake of his head and a look that said, “Don’t even think about thinking that.”

“Fine,” Martin responded. “But with the number of solar panels we have here, we have to ration.”

“Rationing is for lifeboats, silly,” Darla said. “The world is ours to take. We can siphon some gas from cars on the highway, fuel up Kid Godzilla, and go looting. I do it all the time.”

“For now, don’t you think it’s fair if we simply distribute what we have?” Martin said.

“Fair is fair,” Darla said. “Everyone gets their share. That island you came from, it wasn’t Cuba, was it?”

“No, I don’t believe so,” Martin said.

“She’s teasing you, Martin,” Felix explained.

“Oh,” Martin said.

“Cuba’s full of Mexicans,” Henry added.

“It is?”

“Ignore him,” Felix said. “Geography’s not his strong suit. Let’s decide whose house is next. You can skip mine for now. I have big plans to revamp the entire Internet. Electrify it. Spread it through town. But I need to set up the mainframe. Much work to be done. Plenty, plenty of work.”

“I don’t need no electricity,” Henry said. “Do fine without it.”

“Okeydoke,” Felix said. “So then I guess you should just start from one end of town and make your way across.”

A question had been festering in Martin’s mind since the moment he had arrived in Xibalba. It was a long shot, but he had to ask.

“Is there a guy named George who lives here?”

The others thought about it for a moment.

“There’s a Greg,” Henry said.

“Gabe,” Felix said. “You mean Gabe.”

“No, we don’t have a George,” Darla assured him. “Quite sure of it.”

“That’s fine,” Martin said, trying to hide his disappointment. “Thought I’d ask.”

“What’s done is done and who’s gone is gone,” Darla said with a wink.
“C’est la vie.”

The portly, peanut-eating boy’s name was Chet, and he was the first on the list. Chet lived on the edge of town, in a farmhouse that might as well have been a junkyard. The boy was a pack rat, and his home was a nest of clutter—broken toys, piles of rusty farm equipment, swords and helmets, and Lord knew what else. As Martin surveyed the house to determine where to feed the electricity, he could hardly tell where the walls were.

“Rather use them sunlight suckers for the greenhouse, anyway,” Chet told him. Then he led Martin out and down a short path to a small dome made almost exclusively of wooden dowels and clear plastic sheeting. Chet peeled back a few layers of the plastic, creating a door, and he ushered Martin inside.

Rows of plants were lined up in rectangular trays suspended above the ground. White plastic pipes created a latticework ceiling, formed frames around the trays, and angled down like beams into the soft earth.

“You did all this without electricity?” Martin asked, amazed by the complexity.

“Wasn’t easy. Still isn’t.” Chet thrust his greasy fingers through his wavy hair as he spoke. “But folks want tomatoes outta season. King Kelvin wanted those darn fine peanuts.”

“How did you do it?”

“Hydroponics,” Chet told him. “I may be a slob, but I’m no doofus. And you want someone to get their knuckles in the dirt, you’re gonna need a slob.”

“Can you—”

“Don’t even ask. I don’t harvest that junk.”

“No. Can you tell me how you built it?” Martin said.

“What’s this? A little friendly competition? Haven’t you learned the deal? You do somethin’ for me; I do somethin’ for you. You hook up the panels; I keep you in the taters. I don’t have time for a price war.”

“I’m curious is all,” Martin said, bending over to run his hand across a patch of beet greens.

Chet swatted his hand away. “Chet’s Farmer’s Market is Friday in town square. Tickle the veggies then.”

“Sorry.”

“You’re really just curious how it’s built?” Chet asked. “You’d be the first.”

“Did Felix and Henry help?”

“The geek and the mouth breather?” Chet laughed. “I wanted this thing to work, didn’t I? No, Lane was the only one.”

“She’s the pudgy girl?”

Chet furrowed his brow and pointed to his own round belly. “How ’bout some sensitivity, dude?”

“Sorry, but I’m still learning who everyone is,” Martin said.

“Good luck with that,” Chet said. “Lane’s cool and all, but …”

“But?”

“But she has a way about her.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just sayin’.” Chet shrugged. “Be careful. Everybody’s got an angle.”

“What about that guy Nigel?” Martin asked. “He has a tiger.”

“He most certainly does,” Chet said with a nod. “You know, you look a bit like him.”

“Really?”

“In the eyes,” Chet said. “Same intensity. But that dude … that dude is the real McCoy.”

“The real McCoy?”

“Genuine issue, bona fide. A prophet. I kid you not. The one thing King Kelvin should have respected.”

“I see.”

“Tell you what,” Chet said, peeling open the plastic door. “Electrify this place, and you get veggies for a year. Heck, I’ll even let you touch the Declaration of Independence.”

“The real McCoy?” Martin asked, hoping he was using the term correctly.

“Straight from Independence Hall,” Chet said with a grin. “Swiped it on my way up here. I signed it too. Right next to Ben Franklin. Chet Friggin’ Buckley. Sweet, right?”

Martin smiled nervously and stepped under the plastic to escape the boggy humidity.

A
t each house he visited, Martin met one of Xibalba’s residents. They were all either thirteen or fourteen years old. Most were welcoming, if a bit suspicious. A few were surly, like Chet. All were thoroughly disinterested in what Martin was doing. The only thing they cared about was that he was giving them electricity. They were willing to trade almost anything for it.

A girl named Riley offered to tailor any clothes Martin had, as long as he got her sewing machine working. “Ninja gear, a superhero suit, a cowboy getup,” she told him. “Whatever you fancy, Martin. I’m just sick of hand-stitching everything.”

A boy named Hal promised to mow Martin’s lawn, rake his leaves, and shovel his driveway in exchange for enough power to play video games. “It’s certainly a good deal for you. I may even let you come over and sit in sometime,
assuming you know how to undo a paralysis spell on a level seventy-one druid.”

Martin had no idea how to do anything on a level seventy-one druid, but he soon understood that this was how things were accomplished in Xibalba. Give and you shall receive.

What Martin wanted more than anything was their stories. So he would make up excuses to have them join him on their roofs or at their fuse boxes. He’d say he needed their help, and when they would begrudgingly join him, he’d press them for the details of their lives.

They recited their Arrival Stories, the tales of how they’d come to Xibalba. They told of months-long journeys along highways or up the coast, of hiding in flooded and fire-eaten cities, in spookily deserted villages. Some had traveled by bike. Others by boat. None could really explain why they ended up where they did. They were looking for someone, trying to make it somewhere, or just keeping on the move. Xibalba got in the way.

The common strain in all the stories was that none of the kids ever actually saw anyone disappear. They had all been hiding away somewhere, too consumed in their own private lives to notice what was happening … until it had already happened.

One of the more fascinating tales came from Sigrid Hansen. Sigrid was Xibalba’s resident messenger, a one-girl postal system who ferried messages throughout town in addition to maintaining a rigorous jogging regimen. A world-class junior-division runner, she had been born and raised in Norway but had been invited to an international cross-country meet in the United States. Because of her fear of
flying, Sigrid traveled with her parents on a transatlantic cruise that would take them from Oslo to Scotland to New York and on to Florida, where the race was to be held. They arrived in New York on the Day.

Rather than go sightseeing, like everyone else from the ship, Sigrid stayed aboard, put on a pair of headphones, and dedicated two hours to the treadmill. When she finally left the ship’s gym, she noticed that everyone was gone. And when they didn’t come back, she walked down the gangplank and into an empty Manhattan.

“It should have been my day off, you know? I did not need to train that day,” Sigrid told Martin, throwing her hands in the air. “New York City was out there. My first time to visit it. And I choose to be in a room without a porthole. It is a cruel trick, yeah? Like an … irony, I think. I am staying in place for once, and it is everyone else who is now running away.”

“Do you really think they were running away?” Martin asked.

She shrugged and choked back some tears. “There is a hospital in this town. On rainy days, that was where I used to train. Kelvin never liked me going there, but who cares, yeah? It has long hallways, good for a stride. I kept the doors closed, because I didn’t like to see empty beds. The sheets still messy, you know? Made me sad. Still makes me sad, thinking about it. An empty hospital should be a good thing, yeah? I don’t go there anymore, of course. You don’t have to see ghosts, you know, to believe in them. You only have to feel them.”

Martin thought it might be appropriate to hug her, but he didn’t. He was beginning to wonder if when people reached
out to him, it was only an act. It was because he, quite literally, held the power. Sigrid had asked him to provide electricity to, of all things, a treadmill.

At night, Martin would go to Felix’s house and log on to the Internet. The house was still without electricity, but Felix was up at all hours, working alone in his kitchen, wiring together circuit boards and getting his mainframe prepared for its launch. He did it all by the dim illumination from a series of tiny lightbulbs tucked into his headband. The bulbs weren’t attached to batteries of any sort, and Martin couldn’t figure out how they worked.

Felix proudly revealed his secret. “Fireflies,” he said. “Extract their luminescent chemicals and use them to fill Christmas lights. Voila.”

The solution astounded Martin. Fireflies were thick on the island every summer, yet he had never thought to harness their abilities. Felix, and every other kid in Xibalba, seemed to possess a unique ingenuity. Yet almost all of them lacked curiosity beyond their own insular interests. They were clever but guarded. They were relentlessly suspicious. They had little to no interest in playing games together or telling stories, in discovering anything new. These kids were so different from George.

As Martin searched the Internet, learning all he could about Xibalba and its inhabitants, he watched kids come and go from Felix’s house. Of all of them, Darla was the most frequent visitor. Every time she entered, she slipped a piece of paper in a mailbox marked
Updates & New Page Requests
. Then she would touch her fingers to her lips and blow Martin a kiss. He never knew how to react. Most of the time, he
gave her a wave and she let out a loud, knowing laugh, then headed for the door.

The rest of the kids ignored Martin. Mostly they came in and asked Felix for access to their personal pages. Using his master key, Felix would unlock the pages and lead his guests into empty closets, where they could be alone with the contents, sometimes for seconds, sometimes for hours.

Martin wasn’t sure why these children needed to keep things locked away from each other, but he decided that if he was going to be one of them, then he needed a personal page too. So he approached Felix one evening, and the two had a look at the block in the Internet that featured Martin’s brief biography:

“Who wrote this?” Martin asked.

“Anonymity,” Felix said. “Essential in the process. It’s all fact-checked, of course. On occasion, I reject slanderous entries. And there are some things from our past that some of us would rather forget about. For better or worse, we keep that sorta noise out of it.”

“Can I add anything?” Martin asked.

“Not to your biography, but you can spruce up your personal page all you like,” Felix said. “Put whatever you want in there.”

He unlocked Martin’s block and handed it to him. “I’ve set you to private access, okay?”

Alone in an empty closet, Martin opened the door on the back of the piece of wood. Into the hollowed-out interior, he inserted the mottled and muddy pages of the book his father had given him. Beneath them, he hid the address from George. He had yet to tell anyone about these two valuable items. Chances were they wouldn’t care.

The block was nearly full, so Martin closed it and returned it to its spot hanging from a hook in a cluttered corner of the former living room.

Felix was waiting there for him. “Can I have your ear for a sec?” he asked. “Security is important. Passwords and locks are great, but I can’t get that day from a couple weeks ago out of my noggin. Darla and Henry shouldn’t just barge in here and do what they want. And I have my suspicions about others and their monkeyshines. You’re good at building things, Martin. Is there some way you could offer a smidge of help on this?”