Night Beyond The Night (22 page)

“Hot damn,” said Fence. “That’s me. Fresh fucking blood.”

“Wouldn’t that be fresh blood
fucking
?” Lou said with a laugh.

Elliott snorted. He was really beginning to appreciate the elderly man’s sense of humor and pragmatism. Considering what he’d lived through, and how much of a hand he must have had in the evolution of this new society, he was very practical and energetic. It could have been much different if the wrong person—or people—had survived.

Three months After

Have settled into life, such as we know it.

It’s clear that no one from the outside will come to help. Whatever happened has happened everywhere. No planes, no sign of any human life besides us.

Number has grown to 765—survivors from Vegas and others that have wandered until they found us. Have made the hotel’s Statue of Liberty visible. A new role for her.

Emergency and urgent task teams have now turned into day-to-day operations intent on creating a communal life. Everyone seems to have found a place of expertise: Food, Clothing, Cooks, Clean-up, Foraging, Power. (I’m working in Power and Theo and I are stocking up any electronics we can find.) He’s working with Entertainment too. Need to have something to think about other than what’s happened. Movies each night on a big screen. Very surreal.

Theo calls it sitting around the campfire, post-apocalyptic-style.

Some smart people have scavenged food from what’s left of the grocery stores and are working to cultivate plants from seeds. Others have gone off in search of farms, trying to find anything that can be saved and grafted or otherwise propagated. Talk about thinking ahead. What a bitch it would be if someone ate the last strawberry, and we didn’t have any way to grow them again.

There’s talk of creating an official governing body. Makes sense as there have already been some incidents. Last night, looters came through to steal what they could—don’t know where they came from, or what they think they’re going to do with the money they took from the casino cash office.

Where do they think they’re going to spend it? Boneheads.

Heard a strange noise last night. Sounded like someone groaning, calling for Ruth. Chose not to investigate.

All the bodies are gone, scavenged by animals. Or something.

—from the journal of Lou Waxnicki

Sage seemed a bit less annoyed today when Elliott and the others followed Lou into the computer room. She glanced up at them briefly and noticed Elliott. “You’re back. Where’s Jade?”

“She’ll be along in a bit,” Elliott said.

Sage gave Lou a disgruntled look as if it were his fault they were interrupting her, then returned to her work.

“If looks could kill,” Lou muttered with a grin. “She’s really good at that.”

“Don’t you ever let her out into the sunshine?” Wyatt asked in his off-handed manner. He didn’t have the greatest way with women. In fact, Elliott had always wondered how the sonofabitch had managed to get married.

Sage gave Wyatt a dark look from deep blue eyes, but said nothing as she presented them with her rigid back. Her fingers began to tap away again on one of the keyboards.

“Quent, you wanted to see the satellite images,” Lou said. “We still have them, and others. Theo and I monitored them until the satellite burned out about forty years ago.”

“I’d like to see them too,” Elliott said, wondering if actual proof of the worldwide destruction would make it easier or more difficult for him to accept it. “And then I have some things to show you that Jade and I picked up from a Stranger.”

“What? From a Stranger?” Lou stopped.

“We surprised him and managed to get away unscathed, and with not only his knapsack, but his vehicle as well.”

“Well, that’s a story I want to hear,” the old man said as he sat at one of the computers in a corner. It had two big screens and a keyboard so well used that all of the letter markings had faded away, but the elderly geek didn’t need them; he sat and typed rapidly, and with no indication of arthritis. “There aren’t too many people who are accosted by a Stranger and live to tell about it. But let me pull these images up for you first. I know you really need to see them to believe it.”

Elliott sat in a chair next to him and looked around. The room was empty of any decoration other than computer boxes and monitors. He saw no printers either, and wondered at that. On the plain white wall above Lou’s computer hung a California license plate that said
WIXY
97, which happened to be the year he’d graduated from pre-med.
Wixy?
Elliott couldn’t help a smile. So that’s where that had come from. It was the only thing hanging anywhere in the room, and it roused his curiosity.

“What’s the license plate for?” he asked. “Is it from your car?”

Lou glanced up as his fingers continued to move, and he gave a little laugh. “Not
my
car. Just a plate we found. It’s hanging here as a memorial. Way back when we first started to put together this network”—he gestured to encompass the room—“we knew we had to keep it secret. Underground, so to speak.”

“Why would a computer network need to be kept secret?” Quent interrupted.

“Because the Strangers don’t want we mortals to become powerful again. Or to learn about them and overthrow their control. They want to keep us simple and ignorant. Aside from that, if they don’t know it exists, they can’t hack into it.”

It sounded so paranoid, but Elliott no longer questioned it. He’d seen enough in the last two days alone for his mind, even if it had been closed, to crack wide open.

Lou continued. “We were trying to think of a password or phrase we could use to identify people who were part of the Resistance. One of our first Runners, Rick Halpert—who was killed by the Strangers about a year ago—happened to see that plate and suggested using the word ‘wixy’ as our password. So we tried it at first, but now it’s sort of leaked out into regular conversation as a slang word—you’d try it out on someone to see if they recognized it and responded, and the next thing we knew, it had been picked up. Most passwords aren’t such unique words that catch the attention of people—they’re just phrases. But now you’ll hear kids talk about something being ‘wixy,’ which means it’s good or cool . . . whatever it is they’re talking about. Like, that’s a wixy jacket or a wixy tune. And if something’s really cool or awesome, it’s ‘van halen.’ ” He gave a little chuckle.

Then he stood. “I can see that you’re having trouble believing all of this, which is why we refrained from dumping it all on you before. Believe me, there’s a lot to know. But I’ve had fifty years to figure it out, to learn and understand and believe it. You five . . . well, I can’t imagine how you must be feeling.”

PTSD
,[_ anyone_]?

“Here. Take a look. These are the first images we saw after Theo was able to hack into a couple satellites—almost a year after the Change. They speak for themselves.”

Elliott took Lou’s place at the computer, his palms suddenly sweaty, his heart pounding. Quent and the others moved to stand behind him, and together they looked at the images, which were clearly time-stamped, 14.05.2011.

It didn’t take long for Elliott to see that Lou hadn’t been mistaken, nor had he exaggerated. It really was the Pacific Ocean spilling over what had been California and the Baja Peninsula. And there was a large land mass, maybe the size of Colorado, about two hundred miles west of where California’s coast had been.

The rest of the images left Elliott just as shaken.

“Jesus,” Wyatt breathed.

“Everything I know about plate tectonics says that the legends about Mu and Atlantis and Lemuria sinking into the ocean are impossible,” said Quent, his voice bleeding with disbelief. “Which would mean that continents rising
from
the depths would be equally impossible. But there it fucking is. It certainly wasn’t there when I flew to Hawaii.”

When Elliott turned away at last, he met Lou’s gaze and saw sympathy, and a bit of hope there. How must he feel, to have more people who actually understood the gravity of what had happened? “Unfuckingbelievable,” he said. “It’s just . . . incomprehensible.”

“Yeah. That’s about what we thought,” Lou replied.

“And you think that the Strangers somehow did this? How? Do you think they’re aliens?”

Hell, maybe the so-called landmass was a huge spaceship that had landed on the ocean. Why not? If there were zombie-like
gangas
in this strange new world, there could be continental spaceships and aliens to go along with them.

Lou drew in a breath, hesitated, then let it out. “I have my theories about that as well.”

“Lou,” Sage interrupted sharply. “An email from Theo.”

Elliott stood, needing to get away from the satellite images, and wandered around the room. Nervous energy ticked through him.

“Let me see it,” Lou said, his tone equally raw. He moved to her side so quickly it belied his age, and moments later, he said, “About damn time. . . .” His voice trailed off and the angry clicking of keys ensued.

Sage moved quickly to give over her chair, but still hovered behind, leaning over the elderly man with his blond ponytail and worried mouth.

“Well, at least he’s okay,” Lou muttered to himself, still typing furiously. “He’s close to finding a way to hack into Chatter . . . says that he’s not leaving until he does.” He sighed, smoothed his hand over his ponytail. “Next time, don’t leave us hanging for days,” he added, keying in what was obviously an annoyed reprimand.

Elliott came to stand next to Sage, behind Lou, far enough away that they wouldn’t feel crowded, but close enough that he could watch the five screens in a half-moon array in front of them.

Two of them held text that scrolled through, black on a white screen. A third one looked like a regular Windows-based email program, a fourth was, amazingly, Google.
Google?
No, wait . . . it was
Yahoogle
. The Waxnicki brothers had a hell of a sense of humor.

And the fifth screen. . . .

Elliott frowned and leaned closer to look at the image. “Hey, that’s the symbol we found in the Stranger’s book,” he said, pointing to the screen and what looked like a crude drawing carved into stone. “Quent, take a look at this. Have you seen it before?”

Sage looked up, tension on her delicate face. “We’ve been trying to identify that symbol,” she explained dismissively. “The Strangers use it to identify themselves, and we’ve been looking for other uses or history that might tell us more about them.”

“I know exactly what it is,” Quent said, standing up straight. His face looked pale. “It’s the symbol for the Cult of Atlantis.”

“The Cult of Atlantis.” Lou’s fingers froze on the keyboard. He turned to look up behind him, and their eyes met.

Elliott could almost hear what they were thinking. He was thinking it too. No way.

Atlantis. In the Pacific Ocean.

Jade wasn’t able to find Geoff, which bothered her more than it should have.

But surely he wasn’t foolish enough to make another mistake like he had only three days ago. And his parents didn’t seem to be concerned that they hadn’t seen him since early that morning, at breakfast. School wasn’t in session, and he and the other teens spent their free time doing odd jobs or learning trades, which often included discovering ways to reuse or remake scavengeable items found elsewhere and transported in to Envy.

After leaving Geoff’s home, Jade thought about making a quick stop to try and find Rob Nurmikko . . . just to see if she could glean anything from him. But she decided that might be best left to someone who couldn’t be recognized by a Stranger or a bounty hunter. Someone who didn’t have a reward on her head.

So she went to see Flo, because she knew the older woman worried about her whenever she left Envy. It was a good thing she didn’t know exactly what Jade was up to when she went on her Running missions, for then she’d worry even more.

“Vaughn was looking for you yesterday,” Flo said after her greeting hug. She was shorter than Jade, but soft as a downy pillow, and she always smelled like the roses she grew in a tiny courtyard. Roses, and whatever cosmetics or beauty aid she was experimenting with on that particular day. Her short strawberry blond hair still retained its brilliant color except for an inch-wide stripe of blond coming from one side of her part—the result of a dyeing experiment gone wrong two years ago. Her current favorite style was that of the movie star Marilyn Monroe, with a deep sweep of bang over one eye and the ends flipped up all around in what she called a pageboy. Jade felt that was an improvement over the last trend Flo had attempted to imitate—something called feathering, which had been popular in the 1970s.

Despite the fact that Flo was more than a decade older than Jade, an array of freckles spattered over her round cheeks and pug nose—which was why many of her cosmetic experiments revolved around finding a way to fade freckles.

“What happened?” Jade asked, grimacing. Vaughn had had a lot of questions after her performance the other night—where she’d been, what she’d been doing, and why she hadn’t rehearsed that afternoon. She’d had to evade his question by making up an excuse about taking care of Flo’s granddaughter.

“I just told him you had a bad headache and had gone to rest. Thank goodness you’re back already—I was wondering what to tell him if he came by again today. You’d think the mayor of Envy would be too busy to be checking up on you.”

Jade smiled and shook her head. “Vaughn’s very hands-on. I mean, he’s more than a figurehead mayor. That’s why everyone admires him so much, because he doesn’t just sit around and give orders. But he’s going to think I’m the sickliest thing ever. Didn’t you use that headache excuse three weeks ago?”

“Now don’t worry about that,” Flo said, patting her hand with a small, pudgy one, beringed within an inch of its life. She wore eight rings and five bracelets on that appendage alone. “I just told him it was your time of the month, and he skedaddled before I could give him any further details. As far as he knows, when your aunt Pearl comes to visit, you get it bad.”