Flare (9 page)

“We’re close to solving these things.”

“And we might get visitors when night falls. If they come, I’ll need you alert.”

Ash knew he could work for a long time when engaged in a task like this, running on fumes and going until he couldn’t go anymore. But he also knew that Heather was right; though the big answers to the flare might exist on the papers in front of him, small problems might be coming after sundown in the form of looters.

“I still need to make sense of all of this,” said Ash. “I’ll do one more sheet, and then I’ll go to sleep.”

“Fine,” said Heather, too tired to fight.

She went downstairs while Ash went back to the piles of sheets. He found one with several grids of letters, and before he started he snapped his head to the side to get his second wind.

/***/

There was a strange icon at the top of this sheet. It was square with a dot on the lower left corner, and below it groups of letters were laid out, five on each side of the paper. The first grid read:

Next to each of these blocks was a mathematical problem. Ash recognized the first grid as a list of names and wrote them out:

Tommy, Eugene, Jim, Dustin, Will, Roy, Federico, Greg, Lateef, Jay, Sami, Ben, Dany, Peiffer, Santos, Gabe, Alon, Frank, Andrew, Mitch, Mark

He thought for a minute, and then concentrated on the math problem next to it. It was quite dense, filled with a series of variables, numbers and operation symbols, and Ash dove into it. As he worked through each step of the function, his thoughts drifted to the strange power that tests held over a young person.

Tests are meaningless and arbitrary but they can get you far,
and they got me far. Sit in front of a paper, fill in the right ovals, and they give you thousands of dollars and free meals to attend their university, often fighting amongst themselves for the privilege of having you. They give you more tests in the university, and if you do well on those they bring you into their graduate school. Do well on those and they might send you to another graduate school, and then …

Ash got to the last part of the problem and shook his head.

And then it all stops. You can ride tests for the first three decades of your life, but sooner or later they stop putting them in front of you. And yet …

Ash smirked as he realized that the world had found a way to put one more test in front of him. And once again, he had solved it.

/***/

The function yielded a geometric shape, a square with pieces missing.

This figure doesn’t seem to have any correlation with the names, but—

Ash took a piece of paper from Heather’s notebook, drew the shape out to match the size of the block of letters, and punched holes where the pieces were missing. He placed it over the original block of text, and it fit perfectly. He recognized the logic of these coded messages from his days in graduate school and smiled now that he actually got to solve a real one.

This is a series of grille ciphers. The names are irrelevant. Basically, the answer lies jumbled up within this grid, and the shape shows which letters to see.

Ash took a look at the remaining letters with the shape placed over it.

Ten degrees north.

The first clue was answered, nine more to go. Ash recognized that the mathematical problems got progressively harder as he went down the page, but he wasn’t worried. If he’d had a computer, these problems would be solved in an hour. Without a computer, he guessed that it might take him four.

/***/

Heather had awoken shortly before nightfall and was now preparing a meal of semihealthy food. She was doing her best with the materials from Raj’s store: a sack of flour, beef jerky and a powdered orange drink that was purported to prevent colds. She made two glasses of the orange drink and beckoned Ash to take one, claiming that it had vitamins. He drank it, and it did indeed make him feel better.

“I’ve solved my sheets and think I have the answer, but I want to test it,” said Ash. “Fill in the rest of your questions.”

“I don’t know them,” said Heather.

“Try,” said Ash. “I have a theory, and I want to test it.”

“I don’t know these, they’re not in my field—”

“Mark all the answers that you feel might be wrong, and then guess.”

Heather did so reluctantly, and Ash took the paper after she was done.

“All right,” said Ash, pointing at the group of sheets with the basic map. “This is the only set of papers with words, numbers and symbols. I looked at it, and it’s not a puzzle in and of itself. It’s a
guide
for the other puzzles, a key to make sense of them.”

Ash pulled out an atlas that he had taken from Heather’s closet and opened a page to their area.

“This is a more detailed version of the map that they put on the key paper,” said Ash. “Now, the solution to each sheet has meaning on this key. Each paper has a different way of doing it, but all the answers fit on this sheet. Now I know my two problems are solved, and I know they’re solved correctly, because I can check them.”

Ash took out a blank sheet of paper.

“The music problem is straightforward,” said Ash. “It spits out a predictable series of notes. If I translate these notes through the key at the bottom of the sheet, I get a number—”

Ash scribbled on the paper, looking at both the map sheet and his music sheet.

“I can read this number as coordinates,” said Ash. “Map coordinates.”

Ash pointed at the atlas and marked where the coordinates led.

“Where’s that?” asked Heather.

“The middle of nowhere,” said Ash. “And a long way from us.”

Heather didn’t respond, so Ash kept going.

“Now, I solved this other problem with grids of letters, and it yields a series of instructions. Ten degrees north, six degrees east, four degrees north, two degrees east, one and three-fourths degrees north, and so on. At the top of the sheet is this square with a dot on the lower left corner, and this tells me to begin at the southwest corner of the map.”

Ash followed the instructions north and east, one step at a time, until he reached the location he found with the musical notes. He pointed at the atlas and marked the exact same spot as before.

“Now look at your sheet,” said Ash. “Let’s plug your results into the key that turns the answers into directions.”

Ash took all of the answers and wrote them out on his scratch paper. Some of the question answers were labeled
a, b, c, d
, but many had bizarre letter equivalents, like
q, B, rr,
or
t
. He plugged them all into the system and ended up at a place on the map about a hundred miles away from the previous two points.

“Close,” said Heather.

“Indeed,” said Ash. “Now go back through your exam and find all the questions you were fifty-fifty about, and switch those answers.”

Heather did so, Ash put the letters in, and the new coordinates were sixty miles from the other two marks.

“Closer,” said Heather.

“Precisely,” said Ash. “And look at the title of this sheet.”

Ash pointed at tiny lettering at the top of the map.

“
The Salvation
,” read Heather. “This place in the middle of nowhere is called
the
Salvation
.”

/***/

“I don’t know what this Salvation is,” said Ash. “They don’t give any clue in that regard. But they’ve given us plenty of opportunities to find it.”

Ash took a sip of his orange drink.

“My piano sheet was either right or wrong, but the sheet with the grille ciphers was a little more forgiving,” said Ash. “The math problems at the end were extraordinarily difficult, but the previous problems got me on the way at least, and in the right direction. Yours was the same. If you get an answer wrong it places you farther away from the Salvation, but still along a path moving towards it. This gives you a better chance of seeing others along the way.”

“Other doctors.”

“Exactly,” said Ash. “A group of doctors find each other, and they could collectively get all fifty questions correct. Since we have seven copies of this paper, it’s not unlikely that these medical questions are out in a higher frequency.”

“
The
Salvation
wants to attract doctors,” said Heather.

“Everyone wants doctors, and this place is no different,” said Ash. “I figure that they want a handful of exceptional specialists, like musicians and people skilled at logic. They also want a lot of pretty good doctors. From my grille cipher, I can deduce that they also want a few mathematicians as well.”

Heather studied her sheet for a moment.

“The first fifteen problems are all about obstetrics,” said Heather.

“Thirty percent of all the questions,” said Ash. “Everyone needs doctors, and this place needs obstetricians first and foremost.”

/***/

It didn’t take too long for Ash and Heather to agree that they had to get to the Salvation, or at least try. They couldn’t depend on the flare to just go away, and they couldn’t depend on looters leaving their house alone. Sooner or later, someone would come into their place and steal their curtains, and perhaps murder them just because they could. There weren’t too many people left on this earth, but those that remained were a varied lot, and some of them were killers.

The question of
how to get there
remained though. The location was more than a month’s walk away, and they couldn’t wrap themselves in lead curtains for thirty days, let alone survive in the wilderness without food or water.

Ash knew they had to get a vehicle up and running. They hadn’t seen any automobiles that had been kept underground, and even so, most cars wouldn’t last a day in the sun. Could he even bypass an engine’s circuitry? Ash figured he might, but that would take time.

Find an old car, like Raj said.
An old car that has no circuits to destroy in the first place. Keep opening up garages, and you’ll find one
.

He brought this up with Heather, and she agreed.

“The vehicle we choose needs to be big,” she said, “because we’re going to have to live in this thing. This Salvation is five days’ drive from here, and that’s assuming everything goes smoothly. It may take us weeks. We’ll need it to be durable too, because the last leg of the journey has no roads. We need to find a big, tough van, and it’s got to run well.”

/***/

They biked through the neighborhood passing car after car, each one of them modern, dependent on electric circuits, and now useless. Ash and Heather passed more dead bodies in the streets, and there were dogs picking at them.

They occasionally saw survivors in the windows, some of them young and strong, some of them just shadows, but none of them appealing enough to approach. They saw houses as protected as Heather’s, boarded up with wood instead of lead curtains.
The airy, big-windowed houses have been burnt clean,
thought Ash,
and only the small, boarded-up ones hold life.

They found their vehicle two hours later, an extremely old but well-preserved RV found in a standalone garage next to an abandoned house. The garage was windowless and they had inspected it on a fluke, but both Ash and Heather immediately knew they were on to something. There were even four five-gallon drums of gasoline behind the vehicle, all at least three-quarters full.