John picked up a chunk of debris. "Looks like obsidian, feels like gla.s.s, but seems like ... wood. I don"t think this is Ground Zero. If this is what caused it all, the forest wouldn"t have been so green just a few miles back."
"He"s right," Desmond said. "Stuff would be scattered away from here, not gathered here if this were the point of origin. I"ve never seen anything like this."
Paola stared past the horizon. Mary wondered what kept her from crying. Her father cried like a baby when touched the right way. She"d seen it happen during commercials and sporting events. Especially when a player he liked did something historic.
"How long do you think all the black goes for?" Paola asked Desmond.
"No way of knowing," Desmond rose from his knee, dropped the hunk of rock, wood, or whatever it was, into the pile with a gla.s.sy thud, then looked at Paola. "But if I"m telling you what I think, I bet black crashes into green again just a few miles up the road."
"Do you think the Army Base will still be there?" Paola asked, her voice surprisingly strong. Mary was proud.
"You"re old enough for me not to lie to you, so I won"t say yes. I think the base and the people in it are probably gone like the rest of everything. I figure it"ll be empty or worse. Whatever happened was probably something the Army couldn"t have prepared for even if they knew it was coming. Might even be something we can"t fully understand. What I do know is that it"s our best hope at the moment. Even if there"s no people, there may be supplies. And it could offer some safety."
"Safety from what?" Jimmy asked.
"Every environment has its predators, and predators like easy prey. We need to stick together. Our number is already too small and we can"t afford to let it shrink."
"Mr. Desmond," Paola said, "Can we find someplace to sleep? I don"t want to drive after dark."
"Great idea," Jimmy said.
The sun was already a mean shade of orange, and it felt just a few feet away. It would be gone in minutes, even though it couldn"t have been later than mid-afternoon. Desmond"s chest rose and his nostrils flared as if he were going to let loose with a decisive NO. It was clear he wanted to keep driving. He opened his mouth, but closed it quickly. He opened it again, but before he could speak John interrupted.
"It"s not a democracy. If the guy with the guns and supplies says GO, then around the board we shuffle."
Desmond smiled. "No need for that, John. Yes, of course, Paola. We"ll stay at the first safe place we can find. Might as well take advantage of the full End-Of-Creation discount." He offered a wan smile at John and got into the van.
The Suburban followed Desmond for seven miles, then chased it down the first offramp with a bank of hotels waiting. Just as Desmond predicted, total devastation had ended just three miles past the pileup, meaning the obsidian rubble and mammoth pileup was definitely the evil eye of something.
The hotel was a Drury Inn, a nice one. And to their rather wonderful surprise, the electricity was working, with all locks set to "open."
They chose four rooms, next to and across from one another, all on the first floor. The five weary travelers took a much-needed three-hour rest, then showered, dressed in clean clothes, and met in the lobby bar for drinks. Four hours later, everyone was drunk, including Paola in a virgin Shirley Temple sorta way. Everyone was still wearing the shock, but the last few hours had stretched the fabric.
Mary sat with her daughter and Jimmy, but her attention was on the bar, a few feet away, where Desmond approached John.
"How"re you doing, man?" Desmond placed his back to the bar and looked into John"s fully toasted brown eyes with his slightly tipsy green ones.
John shrugged. "What can I say? We stared into the soul of absolute emptiness and it just stared right back." He poured some fire down his throat, then emptied the rest of the bottle into an oversized gla.s.s.
"I won"t tell you to stop, just remind you once more that every one of us matters right now. I"m sure I speak for the group when I say I"d prefer to not leave the hotel one man shy in the manana."
John"s face softened. "I"ll be fine. A man has a right to grieve without the entire world getting in his way."
Desmond poured some of John"s drink into his own gla.s.s, nodded at John, swallowed the fire in one large gulp, then set his gla.s.s on the bar and approached Jimmy, Paola and Mary. The kids were cracking up.
"What"d I miss?"
"Paola says I smell like a marijuana skunk."
"She has a point," Desmond said.
"She always does, whether I like it or not." Mary laughed. Her wine gla.s.s was near empty, so she went to the bar to fill it. "It"s getting warmer in here," she said walking back. "Do you feel that?"
"I do," Paola said. Jimmy nodded.
"Might be five degrees," Desmond said, "but the difference is definitely there."
They ignored the climbing thermostat and fell deeper into their drinks. Eventually, Paola made herself a bed by pulling two lounge chairs together. She was asleep seconds after her head touched the pillow they"d grabbed from a room. Jimmy managed a few minutes of small talk, then offered to pa.s.s the peace pipe with the rest of the grownups. When they declined, he smiled and slipped away to enjoy his stash, saying, "More for me," with a giggle.
Mary smiled at Desmond and said, "So, we"re all alone and it"s the end of the world where money doesn"t matter. Will you finally tell me how you made all yours?"
Desmond laughed. "I"ve told you before."
"How about telling me in a way I understand?"
"I use the Internet."
"So do I, so does everybody. My cards were wholesaled across the world on my own dot com. I know how I do it. How do you do it?"
"Well, there"s no easy answer. Cool thing about the Internet is it"s still mostly frontier. There"s plenty of treasure for anyone who knows how to dig. Best part is, you can even learn how to make the treasure yourself."
They"d been down this road before. His answers, no matter how thorough, usually left her more confused then when he started, and sounded more like a rousing speech about online potential than a solid business model. "You make it sound like magic."
"It is, sorta. Just like any illusionist, Internet entrepreneurs can make the impossible look like downright inarguable." Desmond took a drink. "Money isn"t hard to make. You just need to find a river and dip your bucket. But the Internet makes finding the rivers a whole h.e.l.l of a lot easier."
"I don"t care what you say. It"s not that easy."
Desmond blushed. "Okay, it"s not that easy. But it"s easier than you think. People go online to look for stuff, right? If you have what they"re looking for, can lead them toward it, or help them keep it organized once they get it, then there"s good money to be made - and a never-ending supply of leads."
"But what do you do?" Mary figured it had to be shady if he couldn"t say what it was in 10 words or less.
"I don"t do anything illegal, if that"s what you"re thinking."
Mary laughed and shook her head, "I never said that."
Desmond smiled with a blush, "I make a lot of stuff. I have a company that builds "roads" that help users get from A to B quickly, software that helps people organize the growing a.s.sault on their digital lives, and a publishing company that releases heavily-researched white papers and reports. It used to be mostly Buyer Beware-type consumer lists we wrote for," he looked at Mary seriously. "People will pay to be informed, so we used to do a lot of work at the consumer level, but we"ve moved into science and alternative research. The dollars are exponentially larger and some of our papers have commanded ... well, staggering fees."
"So what do you do all day?"
"Look for and evaluate new information, talk to my team, read, write, watch movies. Sometimes I play Call Of Duty." He smiled.
"Why don"t you live someplace else? New York, Los Angeles, Sydney even! Why Missouri?"
"Missouri"s where I grew up. It"s my home, a great place to disappear and get lost in the quiet. But I love to travel, and fly out often. I get my fill of adventure, then come home to s.p.a.ce and silence. My mom and dad lived over in Festus, close enough to visit, but far enough to leave me mostly alone."
Desmond noticed the final swirl sitting at the bottom of Mary"s nearly empty gla.s.s. "May I?"
"No," Mary said. "Terrible idea. I can"t believe I"m still standing as it is. But I"m glad we did this. Thanks for letting us stay here. It"s nice to get off the road, and get some sleep in a decent place. And I think I might actually sleep." Paola snored loudly. Mary and Desmond traded a quiet smile.
"I didn"t "let" us do anything. We"re a team, and I"m sorry about the democracy comment." He looked over at Paola. "Just know you"re doing great. I can"t imagine how hard it must be, worried about another life full-time like that."
"Thanks. It"s the uncertainty that makes it so hard. I just want to know what she"s thinking. It kills me to have no idea, and to feel so powerless to help her."
"She"s doing great too. You should be proud. She"s strong and smart, just like her mom." He yawned, then said, "Ready for tomorrow?"
"Only if I get the sleep I need tonight," she said, following his cue again, and quietly thanking him for making it so easy.
Jimmy had his head against the wall, asleep in the corner. John was pa.s.sed out, his cheek against the polished wood, fuel leaking from his open mouth. Paola was asleep in the middle of a row of chairs. Desmond made a bed to Paola"s right; Mary stayed on her left.
"Good night, Mary."
"Good night, Desmond."
They were asleep in less than three minutes.
When Mary woke, her daughter was gone.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
EPISODE THREE.
PAOLA OLSON.
October 16 Early morning Belle Springs, Missouri Paola jolted awake as if she"d been falling in her dream. Only it wasn"t gravity which snapped her back to reality, but rather the sound of her name being whispered in her ear.
She woke expecting to see somebody standing over her. However, n.o.body was there. The voice must"ve been an echo of her dream world which followed her to her waking life.
She strained to listen, in case someone had actually called her name. The only other sound in the eerily still hotel lobby was a low growl rolling from her mother"s open mouth; a baby soft bark so familiar it was more lullaby than irritant to Paola. The world was a blur and her mother was barely visible in the shadows which floated through the room like a dark cloud.
She blinked her eyes, trying to figure out which side of the dream she was on.
Must be a dream, the real world isn"t so... murky.
Paola laid her head on the pillow and closed her eyes. 99... 98... 97... 96...95... On other nights, she rarely made it past 65 or so before sleep claimed her. 94... 93... 92... 91...90...
"Paola!" This time the voice was louder, and she had no doubt she"d heard it.
Paola sat up straight in bed. It was her father"s voice, coming from the far side of the still-murky lobby.
"Paola, are you in there?"
This has to be a dream!
"Paola, please! Are you there?"
This was definitely a dream. She was sure of it now. Her father wouldn"t be able to find her out here in the middle of nowhere unless it was a dream.
"Paola!"
Paola pushed the cushions aside and rose to her feet. It would be nice to see the real him, but that was okay if it wasn"t. The Dream Daddy would have to do for now. Though the shadows scared her, she knew she had nothing to fear. When bad stuff happened in dreams, all you had to do was wake up. And she knew how to do that well; she did it all the time. It"s how she could sometimes dream about the stuff she wanted to dream about, without having to dream about the stuff she didn"t.
"Paola? Shortcake?"
Paola stopped at the side of her mom"s makeshift bed. Up close, she could see her better through the shadows. Mary"s eyes fluttered beneath their lids as she pulled the fat pillow in her arms and cradled it to her chest. Another low rumble came from her throat. It flirted with leaving her mouth but ended up whistling through her nose instead.
This is like the hide-n-seek dream. That was a good one.
Paola tiptoed toward her father"s voice, past her mom and Desmond, past John, his face still pasted to the bar, then past Jimmy and into the dining room.
Paola loved the hide-n-seek dreams. She looked forward to them, even tried to make herself have them sometimes as she lay in bed counting down to the possibility, starting from 100.
She always played this in her dreams with Daddy, just the two of them. And in the dreams, she always felt a few years younger, before she began to feel too old to call her parents mommy and daddy. Before good feelings were replaced with the realization that her parents weren"t the perfect people she used to idolize.
He"d usually call for her while she did her best to stay hidden. The longer she was gone, the more desperate he"d get to find her. He would call and call and chase her through the house, looking through windows and opening doors. "I love you, Paola. Please let me find you so we can be together. Don"t make me wait any longer. As soon as I find you, we can go and find Mommy together!"
And they always did. He would find her first; under the bed, in the closet, behind the oak tree outside, behind the hot water heater in the bas.e.m.e.nt, or in the pantry. Once he sniffed her out, he would open her hiding place door with a playful loud roar, then they would spend a few minutes laughing before holding hands and adventuring off together on a quest for Mommy.
He never took more than a few minutes to find her, and no matter how different the hide-n-seek dreams were, they always had the same sort of ending: the three of them eating ice cream, watching a movie, or doing any one of the million-and-one things Paola had gone from doing to missing each day in the real world.
Something was different about this dream, though.
The hide-n-seek dreams always started good and kept getting better. This one had just started and was already turning into a creeping kind of terrible. The shadow of something ugly twisted the familiarity of the usual dream, souring her warm nostalgia into something wretched.
Paola could"ve sworn she was in the kitchen, but was confused by the long hallway now in front of her. That made what was happening feel like even more like a dream. She was always retracing her steps in her sleep.
I was in the lobby, then I walked through the restaurant and into the kitchen. But now I"m in a long hallway. And it looks like it goes for miles, like the hotel in Vegas where we stayed when we were still a family.
Paola spun around. The endless hallway was mirrored on both sides, with 100 identical doors crowding each direction.
No, this was not the hide-n-seek dream. This was one of the other repeating dreams, where her daddy wanted to show her something, but never got around to it. In these dreams, she always felt lost and alone as she tried to keep up with him, following him for what felt like forever, through twisting halls and endless, winding stairwells. The buildings were always weird and never stayed the same shape for long.
This felt mostly like that, but this world wasn"t soft like her dreams.
That"s how she usually knew she was dreaming. Whenever she wondered whether or not she were dreaming, she could push hard on a wall, tree, or other inanimate objects to know for sure. If the object gave under pressure, she was dreaming.
The world she was walking through now was not soft, though. Despite the changing, impossible architecture, nothing budged under her touch.
"You"re doing great, Shortcake. Almost there. Just a few more steps."
The hallway disappeared and the doors went with it. Paola blinked and was back in the kitchen, standing in front of a long, steel table, a lot longer than it should have been. On top of the counter, directly in front of Paola, lay a large butcher knife, almost cartoonish in size.