Flare (14 page)

“We’re here!” yelled Heather. “Follow us!”

Courtney fired two more times and then ran with them, letting off one more round blindly as Heather and Ash joined her. They had parked their RV close, but it was still painfully far away, and they could hear the Father barking orders, along with gunshots coming from behind, interspersed with the Niece’s shrieks.

Two women were close behind, and now Heather, Ash and Courtney were running three abreast, with Courtney pointing the gun behind her and firing without looking. Ash heard Courtney fire, and then heard another yell, and it sounded like she had hit one of them.

They got to the RV and ran in. Heather started the engine and it sprang to life, and she pulled away. Courtney let off one more shot out the window, and they started to put some distance behind them. The sound of gunshots got fainter and fainter as they drove, and then Heather pulled the RV onto a real road, and they were safe.

/***/

“Thank you,” said Courtney as she looked out the RV’s window and watched the night pass by. “I mean it.”

“You’re the one who saved us,” said Heather.

“I almost shot you by accident,” said Courtney. “I don’t have the best aim.”

They drove in silence for a moment.

“You’re not a prisoner, are you?” asked Heather.

Courtney laughed, and Ash marveled at how someone could be so relaxed after being held hostage.

“I’m not a prisoner,” said Courtney, “and I’m not a guard either. I was a volunteer at the prison.”

“A volunteer?” asked Heather.

“Yeah,” said Courtney. “I was teaching them wilderness survival. Ropes courses, outward bound, things like that.”

“Wouldn’t they like you, then?” asked Heather.

“The gang that liked me isn’t around anymore,” said Courtney.

They drove for a minute in silence while Courtney gathered her thoughts.

“Women’s prison gangs have a family structure, and I befriended the wrong family,” said Courtney. “That group you saw survived and took power, then punished everyone else, including me.”

Courtney paused for a moment and then laughed, so quietly that Ash barely noticed it in the darkness.

“In any case, I’m safe now, so thank you,” said Courtney. “Be warned, though; this is prison country. There’s a men’s penitentiary forty miles up, so don’t pick up any hitchhikers.”

Ash looked around at the surrounding land, clean and empty under the night sky, with husks of trees remaining and some foliage that had found a way to survive the daylight. It wasn’t completely lifeless around them but it was close, and Ash had a hard time imagining a hitchhiker out here. But if he was wary before this evening, he was twice as wary now and wouldn’t pick up anyone, prison country or not.

“We need water,” said Heather. “The sun’s coming up and it gets hot in here. Do you know of any place to stay?”

“Yeah,” said Courtney. “The warden has a big house about twenty miles north of Boden.”

“Boden?”

“
Pigville
,” explained Courtney. “Boden is where the guards live, and the warden lives twenty miles north of that, in a big compound. He invited me there before I volunteered here.”

“Is it safe?” asked Heather.

“From the prisoners, yeah,” said Courtney. “It’s twenty-five miles away from the prison in total, and they don’t know where it is. Could be some squatters, but it’s pretty isolated, so probably not. It’ll probably be good for us because it’s like a palace with a lot of underground rooms, and I remember there was a lot of bottled water in one of them. Could be looted by now, but might still be there.”

“Underground rooms sound promising,” said Heather. “Ash, what do you think?”

“Worth a shot,” said Ash. “Is the warden there now?”

“No idea,” said Courtney. “The warden might have escaped, maybe with some guards. If we find some, they’ll probably be sympathetic to us.”

“All right,” said Heather. “I say we go.”

Now we’re three
, thought Ash,
and we’re headed to the King of Pigville, to beg for safe haven in his castle.

/***/

They reached the warden’s compound thirty minutes before sunrise, when the sky was just beginning to turn red. The stars above were fading into a rosy hue, growing fainter every moment, as if they feared the incoming morning light and could no longer keep up their night’s watch.

The outer gate was closed, a ten-thousand-dollar entryway monogrammed with the warden’s initials and rendered useless by a lack of electricity. The rest of the compound was encircled by dead hedges over a wire fence, sturdy as the prison’s but without the razor wire on top. Courtney walked around outside and inspected the place and came back nodding.

“Do you have bolt cutters?” asked Courtney.

“We do,” said Heather.

Heather walked back to the tool compartment in the rear of the RV and came back with a pair of bolt cutters for Courtney.

“There’s an entryway out back for trucks,” said Courtney. “Could be locked, but if we have these, it won’t be a problem.”

They drove around back, and the gate was locked with a heavy chain. Courtney took out the bolt cutters, cut the chain and opened up the gate, and Heather drove through. Courtney walked them to the main house and Heather drove quickly, because the sun would be coming up soon.

Heather took them to the back of the main building, and there was a sliding door. It was locked, the kind of door that locked with a pole stuck horizontally along the bottom rail. Heather didn’t want to smash the window, just in case they’d have to camp out in the place for a while. They found another door, which was also locked, and then another window that was open. It was small, but Courtney could fit in it and crawled through, and then opened up the main door.

They scoped out the place with haste, finding a body in the living room, an adult burnt by the sun, indistinguishable except for the fact that it had a gold necklace around its dried neck. Ash thought that it was probably the warden’s wife, caught by the living room’s glass window when the flare hit. Regardless, it didn’t matter now because the sun was about to come up, and they had to secure their place in the basement.

Courtney took them downstairs to a set of three rooms that were something between a den and a wine cellar, with a flat-screen TV and walls made of imported grey stones that were cool to the touch. The place had one set of small windows in the third room, a guest bedroom. Its windows could easily be covered up and even if not, the third room could just be closed off. The basement would do.

Courtney took them upstairs again, across the living room towards the side of the house and opened a door to show a massive indoor garage. The garage was clean, though a bit dusty, and Ash shone his flashlight on the walls and they saw cases of water and soda. They took a pallet of water and brought it downstairs. They then went back to the RV and put the curtains up inside, just so that nothing inside would get damaged, and brought out their clothes, tools, food and some extra curtains and hand-cranked flashlights.

They went downstairs and duct-taped the extra curtains to the small window in the guest bedroom, and that was that. Ten minutes to go and they were done, relaxing with giddy relief as if they had set up a party just in time. They were safe and cool, and they had plenty of water.

/***/

The sun rose, but they didn’t know it. It was dark in the basement and they couldn’t see a thing without their flashlights. Courtney began to poke around the place and eventually found a closet with batteries and more flashlights: both the heavy-duty torches the size of a radio and the smaller LED bulbs that weren’t as bright but would last forever. They took out the smaller LED lights and lined the walls with them, lighting the room with a pale, soft glow. It still wasn’t as bright as the moonlight to which they were accustomed, but it was lit well enough to see everything. Ash saw a piano on the opposite side of the room, a small spinet pressed flat and barely visible against the far wall.

“Hey, guys,” said Heather. “Come here.”

They found Heather in the bathroom, playing with the faucet. She turned it on and off, and water came through each time, with no sign of slowing down. She turned on the shower and water came out there too, in thin, vertical streams from the flat, oversized showerhead pointing down from the ceiling. Heather turned off the shower and let out a curt, but genuine laugh.

Whatever we just saw, however we came here,
thought Ash,
coming to the warden’s compound was a good decision.

/***/

Heather slept immediately, but Ash wanted to stay up a bit and take it all in. New environments, even stressful ones, could be good for the mind. They forced new neural connections and taught you lessons that you tended not to forget. Ash had studied data on trauma survivors and noted that if they remembered the traumatic event at all, their memory was often complete. Time always “seemed to slow down” before their accident, before their loved one’s sudden death, before finding out their wife had been cheating on them. They could remember every detail leading up to the event, every detail after the event, perhaps even the temperature, scent in the air and what they had been eating for dinner.

Time doesn’t slow down during traumatic events.
It just seems to.

Ash had concluded from the neurological data on these trauma survivors that we’re always recording everything we see, but only certain memories are important enough to get stored in our long-term memory
.
The experiences learned from traumatic events might keep you alive in the long term, so those memories always went “directly to your hard drive,” whereas everyday moments would not.

Life always slows down
,
it just takes an intense experience to realize it
.
New experiences help you realize this too, and they’re a lot easier to take than traumatic ones.

The past couple of days had been spiked with trauma, but every experience had been new, and all of it had gone to Ash’s hard drive. He knew he’d be able to remember them in great detail if need be. The feeling when he woke up to the flare, the first blast as a ray hit his eyes, the hospital, Raj, the RV, the prison and now this place. It felt healthy somehow, and Ash smiled as he thought of it all. He wasn’t happy and he definitely wasn’t secure, but he was
alive
. My God, was he
alive
.

/***/

Ash played Courtney two of his favorite pieces on the piano
, Ecco la Primavera
and
Angelica Bilta
.

“It’s amazing,” she said. “I’d like you to play another one, but are you sure your sister won’t mind?”

“No,” said Ash with a small laugh. “It’s our thing. I’d play piano in her basement while she slept. She’s fine.”

Ash played one more of his favorites,
Adiu, adiu dous dame.

“That’s beautiful,” she said. “Who wrote those pieces?”

“Francesco Landini, one of my heroes,” said Ash. “The music’s over seven hundred years old.”

“Why is he your hero?”

Ash thought about this for a moment. He had always loved Landini but had never thought
why
he had.

“I guess I love the understated simplicity of his songs, but I’m also enamored with him,” said Ash. “He was blind because of childhood smallpox back in the 1300s. It says something about both him and society that someone without sight could live a life making music, music that survives seven hundred years.”

“Yeah,” said Courtney. “It sounds good. Really good.”

“Music translates well as time passes,” said Ash. “You put on a Shakespeare play, most people won’t get it. But you play a piece like this, people get the music. They might not like it, but they
get
it, because music doesn’t get obscured with age.”

Courtney looked at Ash and smirked.

“What?” he asked.

“Just a thought,” she said. “You played those Landini songs from memory? How many do you know?”

“Most of them,” said Ash. “I hear them in my head and then I play them.”

“Maybe the sun destroyed all of this guy’s work,” said Courtney. “That would mean his songs have survived seven hundred years, through wars and floods and everything else … and now they exist only in your head.”

Ash nodded in understanding. He hoped she wasn’t right but knew that she could be.

“I bet there’s a lot of stuff that now exists only in your head,” said Courtney. “So many little pieces of the world’s efforts, hopes and dreams have survived so much … and now exist … with you.”

Though the thought scared him, Ash still let out a small laugh at the notion.

“You’re smart, right?” asked Courtney.

“I guess.”

“Don’t be humble,” said Courtney. “I’m good at what I do, and I say it. But you, I’ve sensed from my time with you guys that you’re smart, I mean
really
smart. Is this true?”

“Yes,” said Ash. “It is.”

“Good,” said Courtney. “Now tell me about yourself, and leave nothing out. I want to know.”