In fact, distance did not only exist between me and them. The rift between Neil and I had widened to the point of fracture, like tectonic plates bursting apart in a cataclysmic quake.

  “Is Neil coming?”

  Burke glanced back toward me.

  “He didn’t ask for Neil.”

  We continued up the street. The day was warming. Windows were open and curtains were flapping in the soft wind rolling in from the Pacific. If one could forget the previous year and a half, the serene moment would seem almost normal.

  But what had transpired, be it in the past eighteen months, or eighteen hours, was indelibly etched on every fiber of my being. Neil’s too, I was certain as we passed the house he shared with Grace and Krista. Down the side I could see the child running across the yard, dirt where a putting green lawn had once been. Her bare feet kicked up puffs of the dusty earth as my friend, my best friend despite recent events, chased her, both giddy with the moment. With some semblance of what passed as normalcy.

  I also saw Grace. Standing just inside, staring out through the fine mesh of the screen door, her gaze set upon me. Staying with me as I continued down the street. I turned away first and did not look back.

  She’d been the skeptic, originally, when it came to deciding whether to seek out Eagle One. My refuge was a place of safety. Until it was not. Now she saw Bandon much as she had the place we’d fled from. As did Neil, though I knew, I believed, that his embrace of this serenity was based more upon his love for Grace than it was on a rational review of circumstances.

  Part of me did understand their desire to accept the stability of the community we’d come to. It was the closest thing to the old world that we’d experienced. Or that we were likely to experience.

  But it was not that world. Not that time. And it would not be that just by planting our flag in a locale and wishing blindly that it would be so. Comfort was not interchangeable with progress. Bandon was a place in waiting. Just like every other spot on earth where human beings still drew breath. Death was marching toward the town, and it was getting closer. Not in the form of psychotic hordes from the next state up, but from the simple concept of inevitability.

  Wishes did not fill stomachs.

  To be certain, Micah, and Martin, and even Burke, along with most of the town, had done a wondrous job at creating a community of like-minded souls who had seized on the good ‘now’ to the exclusion of the terrifying ‘tomorrow’. A sort of shared amnesia toward the future. I didn’t understand my place in that. I, we, had come to this place, to Eagle One, wanting it to be where the new world would begin. Instead we’d found a sort of living mausoleum, of people meaning well, and doing good, but with no way to spread that beyond the border they’d established, or beyond the fleeting moment of plenty they now enjoyed.

  I had to get away from that. I had to find a place, or make one for myself, that pushed toward some larger salvation. The hope that Neil had long ago made me believe in, I had to carry that to an actuality. The future, one not limited by dwindling stores of food, must be made. And if it could not be, I wanted to die trying to make it happen.

  This would be the moment I declared that to Martin. I would be leaving, striking out on my own. There would be no attempt to stop me. Nothing beyond words, at least. Bandon was not a prison, and the people, as misguided as they were, did not fancy themselves as sentries necessary to keep the unwilling within any metaphorical walls.

  “Go on in,” Burke said as we reached the Meeting Hall.

  I paused before entering. The guard seated just outside on a plastic patio chair stood and opened the door for me.

  “He didn’t say anything?” I asked.

  “No,” Burke said, a caustic tinge to his tone. “But apparently you’re the one he wants to say something to.”

  It wasn’t jealousy that was fouling Burke’s mood. It was reality. At his best, the man was muscle. In this place, facing the threats that were prevalent in the dying world, Burke Stovich was recognized as an asset.

  But every situation did not require a fist, or a bullet. Sometimes a word would suffice, and Burke did not know how to operate in that arena.

  “He’s waiting,” Burke said, and I entered the Meeting Hall.

  The single light burned within the empty space. Across it was the door that led to Martin and Micah’s house. It was propped open, which seemed odd. Though it did not lead to the sanitized clean portion of the living quarters beyond, it had always been closed to maintain a sort of seal between the Meeting Hall and the house. I passed through it and down the plastic tunnel that crossed the street, mounting the steps as I had before. Once inside I walked down the hallway and through the strips of plastic, emerging to the room where the transparent barrier cut the space in half.

  Only it was not there.

  “Come in,” Martin said, standing near Micah’s radios and computers, just air between us.

  “Martin, what...”

  I didn’t know what to ask. What to say. The sturdy plastic that had maintained an environment of cleanliness for Micah was gone, left on the floor to my left, rolled up haphazardly. Remnants of it still clung to the ceiling and walls, rough edges showing. It had been cut down and discarded.

  Martin stared at the array of electronics, humming quietly in some digital slumber.

  “Martin, where is Micah?”

  The man, the father turned to face me, and without a word led me to his son’s bedroom door and opened it for me.

  Micah lay on his bed, still and silent, his eyes closed, hands clasped lightly upon the top of the blanket that covered him to the chest, softly clutching the flower Krista had made him. Its false green leaves and hand colored petals were forever.

  He was not.

  “I knew it could happen,” Martin said, looking at his son’s body, no tears or grief yet apparent. “He wasn’t supposed to live past two. That’s what the doctors told us when he was born. They just didn’t know what a tough little guy he was. I mean, really, he beats those predictions, does all he’s done to help us, survives a heart transplant under the conditions we’re all having to endure...the will this kid had to live leaves me in awe.”

  Now the first hint of tears came. Martin’s eyes glistened as he looked from his son’s body to me.

  “I’m so sorry, Martin.”

  The sympathy I expressed, and the grief I was witness to, made me feel very connected to the man. And very alone. Because I was. No one else was here, and it seemed to me that none had come before me.

  “I’m the only one you’ve told,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  Martin composed himself. A look of apology, maybe shame, washed over him.

  “People believed too much in him,” Martin said. “That was my fault. And now that he’s gone...”

  “He was a child, Martin.”

  “I know. But they expected him to be more. They expected him to provide. To have the answers.”

  That was too much to lay on one person. Micah, from what I had seen, never felt burdened by the vague worship bestowed upon him. It drove him, I thought. Corroborated his genius.

  “I wish he was here,” Martin said, looking to me now. “He’d be so much better at this than me.”

  “Better at what?”

  Martin looked to the electronics room beyond the door.

  “Come with me.”

  We left the boy’s room and stood once again before the devices which had helped Micah work his magic.

  “Do you know what fast scan TV is?” Martin asked me as he moved to a monitor hooked to one of Micah’s radios.

  “I can’t say I do.”

  The screen was blank on the powered-down device, though the radio’s digital display was lit up, with glowing blue and green readouts pulsing. It was receiving a signal. This much I knew from observing Del’s obsession with his similar gear.

  “It’s a way of transmitting video signals over amateur radio frequencies,” he explained. “In essence, your own personal television station. Any radio operator with the right gear to receive it can watch whatever you decide to broadcast.”

  I understood the concept, but wondered as to the usefulness of such a thing, particularly in the world as it was now. Was Martin hoping to send out video messages from Eagle One, much as Micah had simple voice transmissions? If so, to what purpose?

  Unless...

  “Did you pick something up?” I asked, realizing that we could be on the receiving end as much as the sending.

  “Micah did,” Martin said. “Just before you arrived in Bandon. Someone out there was transmitting a video stream, and Micah was trying to zero in on where it was coming from.”

  “Another group of survivors?” I asked.

  Martin shook his head.

  “Just an image,” he said. “No voice. No sound at all. Just the image.”

  “Of what?”

  He reached to the monitor and powered it up. The screen fuzzed to life from a single point at its center, image upon it resolving through intermittent bursts of electronic noise. But even with the interference, I had no difficulty making out what I was seeing. My pulse quickened.

  “Oh my God...”

  Martin nodded, looking with me.

  “I know.”

  The image came to us not in grainy black and white, but in color. And that color was green.

  Green leaves. Green stem. The green of a plant. A living plant.

  Maybe...

  “How do you know it’s real?” I asked. “We have a park two blocks away plastered with fake greenery.”

  “We know,” Martin said.

  He took a few steps to where a computer was running. I followed, standing next to him as he clicked an icon on the screen.

  “That feed has been recording since Micah first picked it up.”

  The image that was on the live feed appeared on the computer monitor, mirrored there. Martin moved the cursor to the bottom of the screen and clicked on the digital equivalent of the REWIND button. The picture began tracking backward, time running in reverse. He clicked the same button again, speeding up the trip into the past. And again, and again, time receding at ten times normal speed. Then twenty. Thirty. Forty.

  And that’s how I knew. How he knew. We watched together as the green miracle on screen grew smaller, and smaller. Days passed, columns of sunlight sweeping across the space where the plant grew, over and over, night following, only to be replaced by the previous day. It was like looking into a time machine. Bursts of moisture periodically sprayed onto the soil where the plant had sprouted, that process witnessed in reverse now, leaves curling back into stems, stalk shrinking, a flash of something, until finally we were at the beginning.

  “Watch,” Martin said, stopping it there and playing it again as it had happened, at normal speed.

  At first there was dirt. And light. The warmth of the sun drizzling down from above. And then there was a hand. Little more of the person it was part of than that and a few inches of forearm.

  “This was six months ago,” Martin said.

  The hand was gaunt. Thin skin over emaciated flesh, both barely concealing the bones they covered. It reached to the dirt and scooped a small hole, then withdrew. A moment later it reappeared, index finger and thumb pinched together. Holding something. It shifted position closer to the camera to reveal what it held.

  A seed. A single, solitary seed.

  It gingerly placed the seed into the hole and filled the void once again, patting the dirt flat over what it had just planted before it withdrew from sight.

  “We never saw the hand again,” Martin shared.

  A moment after the hand’s disappearance, a trickle of water from above moistened the soil.

  “It’s some sort of automatic watering system,” Martin said. “Micah calculated out the timing, the amount of water it was dispensing. He said it was set to deliver precisely what the plant needed as it grew.”

  “What kind of plant is it?” I asked, my past knowledge of horticulture limited to how many potted plants I could kill in a year’s time.

  “Tomato,” Martin said, looking to me and nodding. “Food.”

  He advanced the image again, speeding it up, pointing out details as we watched the plant grow.

  “See the leaves move?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Micah figured this is in some kind of greenhouse setup, with openings for ventilation, but protected overhead with a glass covering, or something similar. Watch the sunlight track across the space. You can see the shadows of thin frames on the ground.”

  I did. And then the image stopped its rapid advance. We were back watching a live feed of the transmission. A view across the miles to a here and now that was wondrous in its simplistic reckoning of the old world.

  “Tomatoes,” I said.

  “Slow growing,” Martin observed. “It’s something different. Maybe that’s why the blight doesn’t affect it.”

  Martin reached out and put a finger to the electronic image. He wanted to put a hand through the monitor and seize the once ordinary plant. Seize it and bring it here. He wanted that desperately. Needed it more than anyone knew.

  Except, maybe, for me.

  “The food will be gone in eight months,” Martin said, easing his hand back, fingers curling, a fist forming. “Eight lousy months.”

  He thumped his knotted hand against his hip, softly, some muted form of punishment. The admission he’d just made mirrored what I’d come to understand. Bandon was dying. Slowly, quietly, certainly.

  “I knew,” he said.

  “Everyone knows,” I told him. “They just don’t want to see it.”

  He looked to me, embarrassed. Ashamed. Weak. It was a state I had never seen infect the man. Not even moments before, when he stood stoically over his dead child.

  “We have to find that plant,” he told me, the words edging toward a directive. “Where it’s growing, there might be more. Whoever planted it might have found a cure for the blight.”

  “They’re already dead, Martin.”

  He knew that. It was plain from the image of the hand, and the automatic setup of watering, that the person who’d planted the miracle seed had known they would not live to see it mature. Would not see it bear fruit. Would not taste the bounty of the singular crop.

  “Micah had been working on locating where this is,” Martin said. “He said by measuring the angle of the shadows at specific times on the feed, then comparing it to conditions in Bandon, he could do just that.”

  Once more, the emotion rose in the man. The father. It choked him up.

  “He never finished,” Martin said, settling into Micah’s chair at the computer table.

  I stared at the image. The amazing green image. Even fouled by pulses of electronic noise, it was mesmerizing, rivaling even the vast fields of cool grass and swaying trees that filled my dreams. Except this was real, and it was out there.

  “You said he never finished. But he started. Right?”

  “Right,” Martin confirmed.

  “Did he get anywhere with what he had? Did he have a general idea?”

  Martin thought for a moment, the question seeming to puzzle him. Then he stood and walked past me, back into Micah’s bedroom. I followed after a few seconds.

  On the far side of the bed, just beyond his son’s pure and peaceful body, Martin bent over the boy’s bedside table, searching through notepads and individual slips of paper, scouring them with his eyes. Searching.

  “You had to have something,” Martin said, the words, the certainty offered to whatever ethereal trace of his son that might remain. “I know you. You had to have something.”

  He tossed papers aside after studying them. Pushed notepads to the floor.

  “Martin...”

  He grew more determined. More frantic. Wanting, needing to find that last bit that his son had accomplished.

  “Martin, stop...”

  But he couldn’t. He continued, scanning every sheet, every notebook page, until finally he stopped. His hands each held an edge of a piece of paper, calculations covering it, lines and arrows intersecting, numbers jumbled in equations. All meaningless.

  All except two words. A name. A place. An oval circle drawn around it. Marking it as important.

  “Cheyenne,” Martin said, looking to me, tears over the proud smile on his face. “Cheyenne, Wyoming.”

  He held the paper out to me and I took it, eyeing it for a moment as I stood next to the body of the child who’d come to this conclusion. I looked to Micah, wondering if this was the last thing he’d done, or just another in a string of incredible acts beyond his years. Beyond what any of us could have accomplished in ten lifetimes.

  “He chose you,” Martin said.

  I lowered the sheet of paper and puzzled at the statement.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The day you came to talk to him, about the French pilot, he told me after that that you were the right one to find where the plant is.”

  So, as I’d suspected, it hadn’t been just an odd debrief. Even then the little guy had been thinking, planning, choosing.

  “He was the one to say we had to find a sustainable source of food,” Martin said. “Long before you arrived. The broadcast of the plant images gave him the starting point to make that happen.”

  “Why me?”

  “He said you were honest.”

  The child is a liar...

  I’d told Micah that, giving him the answer when asked, choosing truth over avoidance. I still didn’t know what the purpose of the French pilot telling us that was. It was as likely a lie as what it purported to be fact. Supposition instead of truth.

  We walked back to the gathering of radios and computers.

  “Someone has to get to it,” Martin said, staring at the image of green on the screen. “You won’t have to do it alone. I know others will volunteer. But Micah wanted you to lead the search.”

 

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