Chapter Nine
Philip pushed hard and drove straight through, but even so it was nearly two o’clock in the morning by the time they reached Rockport. Mike had had his doubts about returning to a place where someone might possibly remember him, but then dismissed it. Rockport was the closest town to the Containment Zone, and they didn’t have time to dally.
There was no way they could drive the car through the woods as Mike had done with his Jeep, so Philip bought two secondhand dirt bikes from an ad in the newspaper.
“You do know how to ride a bike, don’t you?” Philip asked.
“Of course I do,” Mike said.
“Okay, just asking. Better to be sure,” Philip said.
They headed west on the highway, and then, when there came a time with no other cars or people in sight, Philip darted off the road and into the woods.
“Are you sure we’re going the right way?” Mike asked when they stopped.
“Yeah, I got directions from the GPS grid a couple days ago,” Philip said.
“You don’t think anybody noticed, do you?” Mike asked. It seemed unlikely, but when dealing with the NADF one could never be too careful. They had a way of getting curious when people started looking up information like that.
“No, I used a public computer and downloaded the information for this whole quadrant. There was nothing for them to be suspicious about, I don’t think. As for right now, I gave the computer a fix on our location as soon as we got to Rockport, and then I switched over to inertial sensors only so we wouldn’t have to link up with the satellites and give away our position. I’m sure they could still find a way to track us if they knew we were here, but I don’t think they do,” Philip said.
“Good,” Mike said, relieved.
They didn’t talk much as they rode steadily southward through the woods, and after about two hours Philip figured they had to be approaching the fence.
“Should be any time now,” he said, looking at their position on his GPS device.
And so it was. Not ten minutes later they came out onto a grass-grown access road very much like the one Mike remembered seeing on the south side of the Containment Zone. The fence was just like he remembered, too; twelve feet tall and topped with razor wire.
“How long do you figure it’ll take to get down there to Arkadelphia?” Mike asked, staring at the fence.
“I figure about eight hours on foot,” Philip said.
“We’re not taking the bikes?” Mike asked, surprised.
“Not inside the Containment Zone. The satellites would spot the heat signatures from the engines immediately and then we’d be caught,” Philip said.
“They didn’t catch us when we drove the Jeep out that first night,” Mike said.
“No, but the place was full of red hot bomb craters and swarms of NADF vehicles then. You had a chance to blend in, to some extent. That won’t be the case this time,” Philip said.
“Oh. Then won’t they see the heat from our bodies, too?” Mike asked.
“Yeah, but we’re not near as hot as a dirt bike engine, and we don’t move near as fast, either. They’ll just write us off as animals moving around in the woods,” Philip said.
“Yeah, I guess so. Just didn’t expect a fifteen mile hike today,” Mike said.
“Oh, it’ll do you good to get some exercise, boy. You sit on your tail in that lab too much, anyway,” Philip said.
“No doubt,” Mike agreed dryly.
“Well, come on then. We don’t need to get caught here,” Philip said, getting off his bike. They quickly hid the motorcycles under some heavy brush in a dry ravine, and Philip marked the spot on his GPS grid so they could find it again on the way back.
Then they attacked the fence with a pair of cutting dikes, and soon had a slit in the chain link big enough for a man to slip through. They did so, and then Philip used some thin pieces of baling wire to tie the sides of the gap back together.
“Good enough. I don’t think anybody would notice that unless they looked really close,” he said, scrutinizing his work carefully.
They talked now and then in low voices to help pass the time during the long walk, and about four o’clock that evening they finally reached what had once been the outskirts of Arkadelphia.
The tachometer had only taken the central core inside its bubble, of course; the rest of the town had been left behind. But there was precious little to see, nevertheless. A hundred years of wind and weather must have been awfully hard on whatever was left. Here and there was a bit of a stone wall or a weathered piece of brick-work or concrete, but that was all there was to even hint at the fact that there’d once been a city in that place. Mike didn’t doubt that there were all kinds of things buried out there under the leaf litter, of course, if anybody cared to look. Metal, glass, maybe even some tough plastic. But that was of no interest to anyone except future archaeologists.
They were more or less following what had once been University Avenue, since even though the road itself had vanished, the grade was still there and the trees couldn’t grow quite as big as elsewhere. But when they reached the top of a certain ridge, Mike stopped.
“This is where the ring should be,” he said.
“Are you sure?” Philip asked.
“Yeah, I’m definitely sure. I saw it with my own two eyes. Pizza Hut ought to be right there beside the road, and that’s where the cut-off was,” he said, staring at the place. But there was no sign of the restaurant, or the wrecked Lexus he’d seen, or anything else except more woods. It seemed to confirm his worst fears.
“So does that mean Annabelle was right?” Philip asked.
“I’m not sure. Let’s go on ahead a little bit and see what we see,” Mike said.
There was nothing else to be done, so they trudged down into the valley and then up the next hill. Then Mike saw something at long last, and his heart sank.
“There it is,” he said, pointing ahead through the trees.
They stepped across the ring just short of the university’s baseball field, nearly half a mile south of where Mike remembered seeing it eleven months ago. Other than that it didn’t look much different; the same razor-sharp division between the woods and the town, gently curving out of sight in both directions.
It was much easier going, after that. The weeds were thick in spots, but at least the streets were still paved and the buildings were still standing. Those that weren’t bombed or gutted with fire, at least. There were an awful lot of those.
“It looks like a war zone,” Philip commented as they rode along.
“I guess it was, there for a while,” Mike said, remembering that first night when the NADF soldiers invaded. The memory didn’t normally bother him too much, but here, among these quiet red-brick ruins, it was hard to keep the hairs on the back of his neck from standing up just a little.
“It’s sad. I spent the summer here when I was seventeen, you know. It was a nice place back then,” Philip said.
“Summer camp?” Mike guessed.
“Not exactly. We came up here with Matthieu Doucet to take scuba lessons and learn how to dive. It was the closest place we could find where there was some deep water,” Philip said.
“Seems like I remember Zach telling us something about that one time,” Mike agreed.
“You make it sound like it was such a long time ago, Mikey,” Philip said, sounding amused.
“It was a long time ago. For me, at least; Joey and I were just kids when he told us all that stuff,” Mike said.
“It was only three years ago for me,” Philip said softly.
“I’m sorry, Cam. Didn’t mean to pour salt in your wounds,” Mike said.
“Eh, well. I knew what the price would be when I came here, and I’m not sorry for the choice I made. Just miss everybody sometimes, that’s all. I wish Justin and Eileen could’ve been there when I got married, and when Chris was born, and all those things like that,” Philip said.<
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“If it’s any comfort to you, I know they watched all those things on the tachometer, back when it still worked. Zach told me so,” Mike said.
“Did they? Well, that’s good to know. I’m glad they got to be there in spirit, at least,” Philip said.
They cut across the grounds of the aviation building and eventually came to the end of the university campus. Barely a block past that, they reached the southern edge of the bubble ring.
“There’s barely anything left,” Mike muttered.
“How fast do you think it’s shrinking?” Philip asked.
“I’m sure we could measure exactly how far it’s contracted in the past eleven months, but I don’t think it would do us any good. The rate might be speeding up or slowing down as it progresses, and in that case a simple measurement wouldn’t tell us anything. I can see just by looking that the whole thing will be gone in less than a year if it keeps on shrinking as fast as it has been,” Mike said, and the thought brought a cold lump of fear and sorrow to his heart.
“So what do you think, then?” Philip finally asked.
“I think Annabelle was right about the bubble ring being unstable; the shrinkage we’ve seen is pretty good evidence of that. But we still don’t know if that means it’s reverting back to the past or not,” Mike said, trying to suppress his misery by focusing on facts.
“What else could be happening?” Philip asked.
“I don’t know. Everything could suddenly age a hundred years without ever going back to the past at all. It could just disintegrate into dust. It could be lots of different things,” Mike said.
“I don’t think that would explain what happened to Joey. He didn’t suddenly turn into a skeleton, which is what you’d expect if he suddenly aged a hundred years,” Philip said.
“No, but he did leave a little pile of dust behind. He might’ve disintegrated,” Mike pointed out.
“I don’t think so. There was nowhere near enough dust to account for all the mass in his body, even if you didn’t count the water. People are 70 percent water, and if Joey weighed about 150 pounds then that’s still almost 50 pounds of dust there should’ve been, if that’s what happened. But it was no more than a handful or so. There’s got to be a better explanation than that. I’m still in favor of the reversion to the past idea,” Philip said.
“But then where did that little bit of dust come from? Why should there have been any dust, if he reverted back to the past?” Mike asked.
“That I don’t know,” Philip admitted.
They came to the ruins of the courthouse, like an ancient castle of red brick lost in the woods, and from there it wasn’t too hard to figure out where Mike and Joey’s house had once been. There was nothing there at all now, not even a clearing in the woods.
“This is where you and Joey lived?” Philip asked.
“Yeah, close enough. I’m pretty sure that gully down there used to be Third Street, so this is where the house would have been. I was hoping there might be something left; maybe even part of my computer or Dr. Garza’s lab manuals,” Mike said.
“There’s no telling what happened to all that stuff, Mikey. The house might have been bombed to smithereens even before the ring contracted,” Philip said.
“Yeah, I know. It wasn’t much of a hope; just a little bit,” Mike said.
There was nothing more to see, so Mike and Philip turned away from the empty lot and headed back toward the center of town.
“So if none of this proves reversion, how would you ever prove it?” Philip asked after a while.
“We just need to find some kind of evidence that Joey still existed sometime in the past, but after the point when I activated the tachometer. That would be enough proof for me,” Mike said, after thinking about it for a minute.
“Yeah, but how can we do that when all the records have been destroyed?” Philip asked.
“Well, it’s true the public records have been mostly destroyed, but surely there might still be some private ones left, like in old houses or such. Newspaper clippings, photos, anything like that. Let’s say Joey really did make it back to the past in good shape. What would he have done next? I know he wouldn’t have come back to Arkadelphia with it wrecked like this,” Mike said.
“No, he probably would’ve gone home to Texarkana, if I had to guess,” Philip said.
“Couldn’t we go look down there at Justin and Eileen’s house, then?” Mike asked.
“I don’t think so, Mikey. That whole area was bombed pretty badly during the Union War; it’s doubtful there’s anything left to see. I know the house is gone, from the last time Joan and I came up here. Besides that, you’re forgetting that everything past the Red River is in Brazoria now. The government would never let you leave the country like that,” Philip said.
“They wouldn’t have let me come here, either, if they knew anything about it,” Mike pointed out.
“True enough, but I still think we should try to come up with something else first before we add illegal border crossing to our list of crimes,” Philip said.
“Like what?” Mike asked.
“Maybe we’re looking at things the wrong way. We keep talking about ways to find Joey, but surely if he did survive, he would’ve wanted to let us know it some way or other,” Philip finally said.
“Yeah, probably, if there was any way he could have,” Mike agreed.
“He could have written you a letter and left it somewhere he knew you’d find it a hundred years later,” Philip said.
“But where would that be? He knew your address in Tampa, and he knew that’s where I was going. He could’ve left a message there, if he really wanted to. How come he didn’t?” Mike asked.
“Maybe he did. None of us ever thought to look for one,” Philip said.
“Okay, so how would he have done it, then? I’m sure he would’ve known it might not be the same structure later on as it was way back then. So what would you do, if you wanted somebody to find a message in that case?” Mike asked.
“The only thing I can think of would be to bury it in the ground somewhere on the property, maybe in a metal box or something like that so it could be found with a detector when the time came. And then hope the people were smart enough to think to look for it,” Philip finally said.
“So let’s go look, then. It can’t do any harm,” Mike said, and Philip shrugged.
“Sure, I guess. Are we done here?” he asked.
“Yeah. We’ve already found out everything we needed to know,” Mike said.
“We won’t have time to hike back out to the fence before it gets dark this evening. We’ll have to stay somewhere overnight and then hoof it tomorrow,” Philip said.
“Well. . . there are beds and such, in the dorm rooms at the university,” Mike said. He didn’t much like the idea of spending even one night in the ruins of Arkadelphia, but if they had to then he’d have to just grin and bear it.
They quietly picked their way back through the woods until they reached the ring and stepped over, and then Philip hesitated.
“Which dormitory building do you think we should use?” he asked.
“Let’s go to the one closest to where my lab used to be, if it’s not bombed out. If we’ve got to be inside the ring then I’d like to be as far away from the edge as possible, just in case it decides to suddenly shrink again overnight. I’m not sure what would happen if it did, but I don’t want to find out the hard way,” Mike said, and Philip nodded.
“Sounds good to me. Lead the way,” Philip said, and together they crossed the remains of the campus.
A bomb must have landed squarely on the library at some point, because the quad was littered with books lying everywhere amid chunks of brick and mortar. Pages fluttered here and there in the light breeze as Philip and Mike passed by.
“I used to spend a lot of time in there,” Mike said sadly, glancing at the ruins of the library, and Philip only nodded.
&n
bsp; They crossed a foot bridge over a deep ravine, passing by an enormous oak tree with one huge branch that was close enough to touch. Students had taken the opportunity to completely cover it with multicolored wads of used chewing gum, which had dried out hard as stone. Mike had added a few wads of his own now and then over the years, if the truth were told. It was called the Gum Tree, and seeing it brought back a wave of nostalgia and more than a little regret. He reached out to run his fingers along the lumpy surface as they walked by, but said nothing.
Gosser Hall was a four-storey residential building located just on the far side of the bridge, and it seemed to be more or less intact except for a few bullet holes and broken windows. But at least it hadn’t been bombed or burned, and that was as good as they had any right to hope for.
“You don’t think there’ll be any dead people in there, do you?” Philip asked when they reached the front doors.
That was a nasty thought, especially since Mike had known several people who actually lived in that building. He didn’t want to think too much about what it might feel like to stumble across the remains of one of his old classmates. He wished he’d thought of that possibility sooner.
“I hope not. We haven’t seen any so far,” he finally said.
“No, but we haven’t been inside any buildings, either,” Philip pointed out.
“It was late on a Friday evening when the accident happened. A lot of the kids went home every weekend, so the place should have been almost empty,” Mike said.
He certainly hoped so, at least.
Unfortunately, they did in fact find quite a few skeletons inside the building, sprawled out in the hallways or the common rooms. Mike didn’t recognize any of them, for which he thanked the Lord. Every door in the place was shot or kicked open, and there were several more dead folks inside the rooms. Whatever else one might say about the NADF, they were definitely thorough.
Mike tried not to look too closely, or even to think about it. It only fixed his own blame in the situation that much more firmly. He didn’t want to know who those people were, or what kind of lives they might have had ahead of them if not for Micah McGrath and his tachometer.
“If I remember right, I think the fourth floor was closed for renovations. Maybe there won’t be any skeletons up there,” Mike said quietly.
That seemed to be the case; there were still ladders and painting supplies in the fourth floor hall when they made it up there. They soon found a double-bunked room as far from the stairs as possible whose windows were unbroken, and set their packs down in the middle of the floor. Neither of them said a word about what they’d just seen on the lower floors.
“I think this’ll do,” Philip said.
Nothing disturbed them during the night, but they were both eager to get up and leave as early as possible the next morning. Mike felt almost like he’d spent the night in a graveyard.
“Does it look any smaller than yesterday?” Philip asked when they reached the ring.
“I don’t think so, but it’s hard to say for sure. If it is then it’s not by much,” Mike said, scrutinizing the line. He wished he’d paid closer attention the day before to the exact location of the ring; even movement of an inch or so would have been good to know about. But there was no use worrying about it now.
The journey back out to the fence was uneventful, and as soon as they got there, they uncovered the bikes and rode back to Rockport to fetch the car.
They stopped somewhere in Alabama for the night; Mike was too preoccupied even to notice the name of the town. He wouldn’t have admitted it to Philip, but after seeing the remains of Arkadelphia, Mike was privately convinced he didn’t have much time left. A few months, maybe a year, and then he’d be gone just like Joey. He might possibly find himself back in the past where’d come from, but what did he care about that anymore?
He lay wakeful and sad that night, barely sleeping at all, and it wasn’t till almost daylight that he finally closed his eyes.