A Different Alchemy (6 page)

What was the point of it
all? How many acres of forest were chopped down just so Jeffrey had a barrier fortress of boxes for when Lieutenant Miller came by with water balloons as part of a surprise attack?

Other officers were resigning their posts and leaving in the middle of the night with their families. From the limited news he heard across the country, the same thing was occurring all throughout the military: a colonel or a major snuck away one night and the remaining lieutenants drew straws to see who would be lucky enough to move from a cubicle to a private office. One by one the lower ranks filtered into the luxurious carpeted offices of former generals until even the lowly sergeants could close their doors and put their feet up on their desks for a post-lunch nap.

There was a time when personnel were categorized as essential or non-essential. Essential personnel had to perform their duties even during the most severe weather emergencies or other unplanned crises. Jeffrey’s feelings weren’t hurt by the knowledge that there was nothing about his job that could ever be twisted to make it be considered “essential.” These days, it was an outdated category anyway; no one was essential anymore. The guard post’s practice of checking badges to get on base was no longer enforced. A man in shorts and a t-shirt had walked past his office the previous week. Jeffrey had never seen the man before. The man walked around the base for a while before disappearing. No one had even bothered to detain him and ask who he was or why he was wandering the base.

There was no reason to keep the planes fueled or to continue performing maintenance on them. No one did their morning jogs or push-ups. Marching was completely extinct. No one bothered saluting anyone else. All around the base were men who knew they were only biding their time until they packed up with the rest of the city and moved south.

The schools were already closed. The teachers were either building generators and food processors as part of the Survival Bill or enjoying early retirement. The last students through the high schools’ halls had become young adults and were working alongside the previous generation until the Survival Bill’s provisions were complete. One of Jeffrey’s old math teachers, a seventy year-old man who couldn’t stand not working (doing nothing meant you might as well be dead) was working on roads crews to keep the highways patched and functioning. Every day on his way to work Jeffrey passed his old Algebra teacher manning a paving machine and laying fresh blacktop.

The roads were in better shape than the runways. An F-14 trying to take off from the main Fort Dix runway would blow out its tires and skid into a fiery heap before ever getting off the ground. Any planes that still resided on base were destined to remain there for the rest of time.

The constant paving of roads, though, made people feel safe because it kept them reassured that travel was still possible. God help the fear mongering that occurred each time a car’s tire went flat because of a pothole. The nightly talk shows put up a picture of a Porsche with a flat tire, as if anyone should be driving a small sports car these days.

What they really needed, Jeffrey thought, was for the road crews to abandon the constant paving and re-paving and focus solely on clearing abandoned cars from the sides of the road. A family of four that owned three cars only needed the largest vehicle for their trip south. The other two cars would be put to better use, the family thought, if they were left with the keys in the ignition on the shoulder of the highway. The only problem with that practice was that abandoned cars started piling up on the freeways. It wasn’t long before not only the shoulder of the highway was blocked, but also the far right lane, and then the middle lane. Some nights on his way home from work, traffic was still as slow with only a hundred cars on the road as it had been when there were thousands drowning each lane.

What genius designated a major highway as the dumping ground for fully functioning automobiles? Why not some place where the remaining people weren’t inconvenienced, like Fairmount Park? He knew the reason. Everyone did: people were, by their very nature, inconsiderate and selfish. They wanted to feel like they were doing something good by leaving their cars for whoever else needed them, but instead of taking them someplace out of the way, they were in a hurry to get further south and resettle ahead of everyone else. They didn’t care that their shitty little car was blocking the middle lane of the goddamn highway, they were just happy to be able to say “Well, that was my good deed of the day!” before driving south and leaving the state forever.

The reserve of available cars, along with the lack of any meaningful police force, also meant there were as many traffic accidents as there had been when the city’s population was at one hundred percent, even though only half the city was occupied. With backup cars readily available and no fear of receiving a ticket or getting a higher insurance premium, drivers used their vehicles like bumper cars. One night on his way home from work, Jeffrey saw an old woman side swipe a middle-aged man for no better reason than she didn’t feel like using her turn signal. Another time, he saw two drivers caught up in a bout of road rage trying to drive each other off the highway on their way home from work. If any of their cars became damaged too badly, they could just get out and get in any other car they wanted.

Only a month earlier, a black Lamborghini had pulled into the Becksten’s driveway across from Jeffrey and Katherine’s house. Charlie Becksten got out, saw Jeffrey, and waved to him. The week before he had been driving a white sedan.

“I’ve always wanted one of these,” Becksten called across the street, a dumb grin plastered to his face. “Found it out on 295. Figured I might as well upgrade.”

Becksten was the one man dumb enough not to realize the Great De-evolution made the deteriorating roads a nightmare for luxury cars. Jeffrey was sure he would find a white sedan parked in the middle of 295 the next day, sitting in one of the lanes where the black sports car had been previously. Everyone was doing the same thing. Hopper, the lieutenant who worked down the hall from Jeffrey, had shown up to work the week before riding a Harley Davidson that he had found in an abandoned shopping center.

“Always wanted one of these,” the man had said to Jeffrey with a smile so big he had a hard time pronouncing his consonants. It was the happiest Jeffrey had ever seen the other man.

Jeffrey’s eyes opened. It was easy to fall asleep these days, even at work. He missed the days when he would get to the base with a list of too many things to get done. Those were the days that would fly by—it would be time to go home to Katherine before he knew it. Now, there was never a day when he actually had to do anything. Not that day, that week, or, really, ever.

Officers were sneaking away one by one. No one was going to care if an Airman First Class reported for duty or not. One day, Jeffrey and five other officers had gone to the supply room and catalogued every piece of clothing that still existed on base, doing so for no better reason than they were bored. The six men spent the day checking off boxes for boots, belts, shirts, and pants, by color, size, and camouflage pattern. It only took them ninety minutes. The rest of the day they stayed in the storage room and took bets on when they thought the base would close down permanently.

One of the men had thrown his hands in the air and said, “Whatever. No one cares about this place anymore.” Another man chipped in: “There was a day when every base probably had a Russian spy. You couldn’t pay the Russians to care about this place now.”

Previously, before the Blocks appeared, the same chore of cataloging gear would have been assigned to one man to supervise and to four others to perform, and would have lasted two weeks. Everything had been so extraordinarily and unnecessarily complex back then.

No one even cared about maintaining the barracks; everyone had vacant houses to choose from. Even people who had been homeless before the Great De-evolution now had a place to call their own. One of the few feel-good stories on the news from the previous month showed a man who had been living on the streets for forty years, now in his sixties, moving into the abandoned mansion of the Eagles’ star wide-receiver. Of course, the same station reported three days later that the man burned the mansion to the ground before disappearing in the night. Such was the world.

**

The tank continued north along the beach. He passed signs for places he had heard of but never been to, places like Long Branch, Sea Girt, Spring Lake, Shrewsbury, Avon-by-the-Sea. When he passed a sign for Loch Arbour, he thought back to a girl he had known in college who had grown up there. Sarah was her name. Or Stephanie. Something with an ‘S’. It was a long time ago—before he married Katherine, before Galen was born. A different lifetime. The girl, whatever her name had been, had dated Jeffrey’s best friend in college until, both of them drunk at a party one night, his roommate punched the girl right on her mouth in front of everyone. Jeffrey had leapt over Katherine’s chair and, with one swing, broken his roommate’s nose. When news of the fight made its way back to the school administrators, Jeffrey had actually been forced to attend two weeks of anger management classes, proof that the world’s priorities had been jumbled even before the Great De-evolution. Jeffrey and his old roommate never spoke again.

At Monmouth Beach he pulled over, filled the tank with gas, making sure the reserve canisters were also full in case he got stuck too far away from the next functioning gas station. It wasn’t until then that he thought about what other supplies he might need. All he had with him were the clothes he was wearing and the tank. He had no toothbrush, no other pairs of pants or t-shirts, no extra socks or underwear. Not even a roll of toilet paper. These were things he was going to need if he was serious about making his own way.

He left the tank outside Granson’s Seafood Buffet before wandering away from the main strip to find a hardware store. The place he came across was the size of an ice cream shop, with nothing more technical than hammers and screwdrivers. He took a couple of simple tools, put them in a duffle bag, and looked for whatever else he might need. He took a container of industrial cleaner and some clean rags. Behind the counter he found a stack of blankets and took two of those as well.

A dog was sniffing at the tank’s tread when he went back outside. He saw two possible outcomes: either the animal would want his companionship and follow him around, or it would be wild and attack him. But neither of these things happened. When it saw Jeffrey, the dog merely turned, walked away, and disappeared.

He put the tools in the tank before walking in the opposite direction to find personal hygiene supplies. He expected to find someone in the stores he went past, but each one was empty and quiet. Not a single person watched him from a store window or met him in the street. There was a drug store at the end of the next block. Other than the dog, there wasn’t a sign of life in the little town.

Compared to the hardware shop, the drug store was picked over. The batteries were all gone. The packs of rubber bands were even gone, although he could think of no reason for someone to have hoarded them. Even the condoms were gone. At least whoever headed south was being responsible. He picked up a tube of toothpaste and a toothbrush. Almost all of the soap was still there. Whoever took the condoms and rubber bands was going to smell like absolute shit, but they would never run out of various forms of rubber. He took a bar of soap. There was only one pack of socks left. He took those as well.

Even though he hadn’t seen a single person since leaving Fort Dix, he kept feeling like it was a matter of time until he would see someone else. All he was presented with was barren land without another living person, but he kept expecting the opposite. If there was a man or a family still in one of the towns he had driven through, though, they were keeping to themselves. Tanks were supposed to mean destruction, invasion. An armored machine appearing in town wasn’t very inviting compared to a cute little Volkswagen or a convertible.

He wondered if Griggs would tell anyone about the missing tank. What was there to say? It wasn’t like they would come north just to reclaim their property. He wondered how the preparations for the drive south were going, and as hard as he tried not to, he wondered what Katherine was doing. She might have gone over to her parents’ house after the call with Jeffrey and the disaster at the stadium. What kind of comfort did she think they might be able to provide? When he thought about her getting ready for the trip, he imagined Galen there with her.

He also found himself thinking of all the things he would say to Galen as they passed by each beach town, as if the boy would be there with him the next time he made a similar trip. Sometimes he actually said these things out loud.

“I used to know a girl from there… It looks like it might rain… For coming out of a freezer, that was a pretty good steak.”

Other times, he had a quiet conversation in his head. But always, he was thinking of Galen being there by his side, just like they had been on the porch together all those nights.

After stocking up on supplies, the engine came to life again. The tread began moving. A minute later, he was leaving Monmouth Beach, heading north once more.

Chapter 5

Three more people were missing from Fort Dix when he went in to work on Monday. One was a second lieutenant who had remained in the military over the years even though he got passed up for every possible promotion. Another was the last remaining colonel. The few remaining men all wondered what the point was to showing up anymore. They certainly weren’t required to be there, they just kept appearing each day as if it were the only thing they knew to do.

No one in Washington cared if the base was open or not. There were no battles to fight, no borders to protect. There were no secrets worth guarding anymore. The televised meeting of spies had proven that. Jeffrey wasn’t sure which rumors coming out of Washington could be trusted and which were make-believe. He imagined a room full of generals bickering over the future of the Pentagon.

One general, much more forward thinking and progressive than the rest, would suggest the entire five-sided superstructure be opened to the public and turned into a Block shelter. The other generals would all laugh.

One of the generals would groan, “Christ, is he serious?”

Another of the men would rub his eyes to show he was running out of patience. “You want to relegate this building, where the Secretary of Defense has led the armed forces through some of our country’s most important wars, to nothing more than a nursing home for thousands of Blocks?”

The man saying this wouldn’t mention the fact that the acting Secretary of Defense had supposedly loaded a private helicopter with his family, headed south, and would never be heard from again.

Maybe a similar conversation was what had led Washington to open Area 51 to the public. After the fears caused by the Russian spy at the end of the TV special, the goodwill gesture would show people there was nothing to be afraid of. Jeffrey could see how the room full of generals would think it was a good idea: it would give everyone something to take their minds off the fading population. Maybe they finally realized it was a matter of time until the last guards would abandon their posts and every single military installation would go back to nature anyway.

The evening news was happy to have something to talk about other than the end of the world. After the Area 51 announcement was made, the exodus toward the clandestine base was discussed every night.

The people in Reno were so excited to see what secrets were there that they stopped waiting for the Portland community to join them. Two months later, when the people of Portland did finally arrive at Reno, the entire city was already empty. The people of Grand Junction drove straight through Utah without restocking on supplies because they wanted to see what secrets were so incredible the government had to hide them all these years. Even one of Jeffrey’s neighbors would leave the neighborhood suddenly because he wanted to see an alien for himself.

The government, thinking it had been doing something nice for the people, something to offer a distraction, didn’t realize the effect the news would have on everyone; even people in the cities that would one day become the final southern settlements packed up for spontaneous road trips. A series of vans left Los Angeles to see what was in the Nevada desert. The same thing happened in Houston and Miami, the news giving people a different kind of madness to take their minds off the insanity of a species slowly dying off. At no other time during the Great De-evolution would so many vehicles head north instead of south.

After hearing of legendary expeditions to map the western frontier, of gold rushes out west, of races to the moon, people couldn’t resist one last adventure, and they paid for it. Families that had already safely relocated amongst large groups of people found themselves back on the roads again, stuck on the side of the highway with flat tires once more. A group of three minivans became stranded in the middle of Death Valley National Park. All of the passengers died. Countless cars were abandoned on the long, barren stretches of Route 40. Two men, excited to see what was fact and what was fiction, disappeared near Yosemite National Park and were never seen again. A husband and wife and their two Block children all died of dehydration outside Flagstaff when their car broke down and no one else stopped to help. Hundreds of stories cycled through the country. Everyone knew someone who had gone to see what was in Area 51 or had a friend that knew someone who died on the way.

The mysterious base that everyone had seemingly known the location of when it was a secret, suddenly became hard to find. A trio of men took a wrong turn and died on a desert road just outside Caliente, Nevada. A woman, her Block sister sitting idly by in the passenger seat, drove back and forth between Reno and Las Vegas three times before her car finally broke down near a lake with no name. Trapped in the woods surrounding the anonymous lake, the woman was attacked and killed by a bear. Her sister was eaten an hour later by a pack of wolves. A couple from San Diego got stuck on the side of the road and thought it best to attempt the hike straight through Death Valley. Surely, they couldn’t have thought they would make it, but memories of old episodes of “The X-Files” drove them forward anyway. Their sun-bleached skeletons would remain in the desert over the final decades, without another person ever setting eyes on them, until even the final settlements eventually died out.

The people who did successfully arrive at the abandoned base faired little better. Most of them had driven the last stretch of road on flat tires. A few were forced to walk the final miles after their car couldn’t travel any further. None of them had a way to leave the remote facility once they were there. The base’s Humvees had been taken when the last government personnel abandoned the facility. Everybody was stuck there. And for that reason, the super secret Area 51 became an unofficial final settlement, and the first of the final settlements to eventually go quiet when the last person there no longer took another breath.

They did die satisfied, though. Every night, a web cam allowed them to be interviewed on the news about the various things they were finding, all of which had previously needed a Top Secret clearance to see. They told of a hangar full of experimental aircraft. One of the ships, they said, looked like a futuristic car with tiny wings on either side. Another was almost completely flat, a sheet of flying metal, except for a bulb where the pilot would sit. These and all of the other advanced prototypes were completely black, as though a black UFO in the sky would be harder to spot than one which was painted white or blue.

In one of the empty offices, people found schematics for what appeared to be a series of long-range missiles. Another office had documents discussing theoretical equipment to control the weather. A file cabinet had folders containing experiments with mind control.

And then, in the basement of the basement, level 2LL, was a large open room with a green body floating in formaldehyde. The body was not of this earth. Many of the people thought a joke was being played on them because the body looked exactly like the generic space aliens they always saw on cartoons and “Unsolved Mysteries”—large eyes, tiny hands, no hair. After spending their entire lives being sure that something was hidden there, then finding it, they momentarily refused to believe it was real. For these people in the desert, it was proof that Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t the lone shooter, that Bigfoot did exist, that something otherworldly was happening in the Bermuda Triangle. Each night, the stranded Area 51-ers would give another interview on the news, then eat dinner together and talk about what it must have been like for that alien to crash so far away from home. All of them hoped it had died in the wreck so it didn’t have to know the types of experiments men would perform on it.

Jeffrey didn’t want to think about Area 51 or the generals in the Pentagon, though, because he had his own problems. He was sitting amongst a table of his peers, half of whom suggested they just “get it over with” and close Fort Dix as well. It wasn’t serving any purpose to the city, to the country, or to anyone else.

One of the men said, “We can’t just close up, can we?”

“That’s what they did in Fairchild Air Force Base in Washington. They didn’t even tell anybody else they were going to shut the base down. They all agreed amongst themselves and left the Pentagon out of it.”

“I heard they did the same thing in Grand Forks,” another man said.

Phones still worked. Email still worked. Any one of them could have picked up a phone or sent a message asking what the present condition was at either of those bases or any other base, but they were all content with repeating what they had heard.

One of the men said his wife was sick more often these days than she used to be. The lieutenant colonel didn’t have to say he believed the rumors that Blocks might make you sick, but everyone knew that’s what he was getting at. It was better left unsaid since half of the men in the room had Block daughters or sons, or had a brother or sister with one.

Corporal Rawicz asked if anyone knew when the relocation to Washington was going to take place. “Can you believe this shit?” the man said. “Don’t you think the military should at least be in the loop? If we don’t know what’s going on, who does?”

Someone else added, “Why can’t they make a schedule for everyone? At least that way we would have a weekly countdown instead of always wondering if today will be the day.”

The room fell silent. One of the lieutenant colonels farted and the rest snickered. They were boys at heart.

It was an hour later when Jeffrey walked back to his office. No decisions had been made. The group of men, used to being given orders, couldn’t make one for themselves. Jeffrey sat at his desk with his feet propped on top of a stack of three boxes. He could close his eyes and go to sleep and no one would bother him the rest of the day.

He wondered why he kept showing up to work when it wasn’t necessary. It wasn’t for the camaraderie. It wasn’t out of a sense of duty. What was it then? He shrugged his shoulders. Times were changing. It would be important to learn how to discard all of the things you used to hold dear that no longer had importance. If he couldn’t let them go, they would weigh him down in his new life.

On the television that night, the tall, slender man said, “When asked again today for a relocation date for our city’s move to Washington, do you know what our beloved Mayor said? He said he doesn’t know! Can you believe that? If the Mayor doesn’t know, who does?”

The other man pulled his shirt away from his neck so it didn’t suffocate him. “Don’t you think the Governor should have something to say about it? The Governor shouldn’t be putting our Mayor in this position.”

“We didn’t elect the Governor to run our city, we elected the Mayor for that job. And, by the way, when was the last time anyone saw the Governor? He might already be in Mexico, for all we know.”

Katherine flipped the television off. With the room dark, she turned on her side to face Jeffrey. He could see her outline and a glimmer, a diamond, of glowing light on her eyes. Everything else was invisible.

“Why haven’t we talked about what we’re going to take with us?” she asked. “It’s strange that the move is coming up soon, but we haven’t talked about which things we’ll take.”

Even in private, he hadn’t given thought to what was important and what could be left behind. Each time he sat in his office, surrounded by useless boxes, not once did he wonder what the equivalent useless objects were in his house and if he would be upset to leave them behind. There hadn’t been a time when he had passed through their bedroom and seen a photograph or a coffee mug or an old tie and thought,
I really want to make sure I take that with me to Washington when the time comes to pack all of our things.

He didn’t want her to feel alarmed: “What would you like to take? We can take whatever you want.”

“We’ll take as many changes of clothes as we can fit in three bags. And we’ll take our laptop so we can stay in touch with people when we move.” She had obviously been thinking about it without him.

He said, “We can scan all of our old photo albums and take a disc. That will save a lot of space. We can have all of our old photos from high school and our wedding on a CD that doesn’t take up any room.”

Her mouth turned into a pained smile, her cheeks looking like they wanted to assist in the smile but her mouth refusing to curve up at the ends. It was the look she gave when she was suddenly so upset that she might cry.

“You’d be willing to leave the originals here to rot? What if we left them here and some family from Canada moved in and threw the albums in the backyard to get rained or snowed on?”

What will happen
, he thought,
when we die? The pictures will end up as trash, either now or later
. But he didn’t say anything.

“I’ll need to take my mother’s jewelry box.” She looked at it sitting atop her dresser. “And my grandfather’s coin collection.”

“Just pack whatever you want,” he said. “We’ll see how much space we have after we’ve narrowed it down some.”

She squeezed his arms to let him know that answer was to her liking. “Are you going to check in at the Pentagon or Bolling Air Force Base when we get to D.C.?”

She had no idea what Fort Dix was like anymore, but if he told her she would only panic and say they needed to move south right away. More and more, he wasn’t sure what he should tell her and what he shouldn’t, and because of it he said little or nothing at all.

“If we turn the TV back on, you have to promise we won’t watch that damn show. All it does is upset you.”