Transcription (37 page)

T
HEY
FOUND
ANOTHER
ROUTE
around the blocked road and left the highway for a few miles. James described what happened while Bo drove.

“The flames seemed to draw them and entrance them,” James said. “I honestly don’t know if it was the smoke that affected them, or something else. There might be some other environmental characteristic that carries the story. It might not be the wind.”

“Do you think we should change our plan?” Danielle asked.

James shrugged. “I don’t see any reason to,” he said. “You saw—I let them get pretty close before I lit the story. That said, we still need to be careful. It’s not going to do us any good to have all these copies if we don’t get a chance to use them.”

Bo got off on the exit for their neighborhood. The streets were empty. The fires on the horizon gave everything an eerie glow. Some of the buildings were burned to the ground. Other houses appeared fine. Danielle kept her eye on one as they passed. The house didn’t appear to have any damage, but every window was wide open, and the door stood open a few inches. It was as if the house was inviting them inside. Danielle didn’t like the look of that house.

Bo rolled through a stop sign and came to a halt in the middle of an intersection. Off to the left, they could see the cluster of apartment buildings where they had lived. Most were gone—only black patches of rubble and ashes remained. The one closest to their position looked fine on either end, but the center of the building had burned out, leaving a U-shaped hole cut through it. The interior of the apartments were exposed to the weather, like a doll house with the side taken off so everyone could see what was inside.

“Go to the high school,” Chloe said. “They had an emergency center there. I bet people will be around.”

The deeper they got into the community, the more abandoned cars they saw. Bo rolled over a black spot in the middle of the street. The car’s tires nudged away a gas can that someone had left in the road. Danielle spotted a bunch of bodies curled up under the bushes in front of a church. She nudged James and pointed at it.
 

He didn’t respond, but he lit a copy of the story and held the burning papers out the window as they passed. When the flames were well established, he flicked the papers into the air. They came down and scattered as they seesawed to the ground.
 

Chloe was the only one still copying. Danielle and James were busy watching for threats.

When Bo pulled up in front of the high school, James got another story ready to burn. He was about to light the papers when a spotlight emerged from a second-story window of the school. It lit up Chloe’s battered car. An amplified voice came out of the dark.

“No stopping, and do not approach the building,” the voice said. “This is your final warning.”

“Go, Bo,” Chloe said when he didn’t pull away immediately.

“Yeah, okay,” Bo said. He drove down the street and around the corner.
 

There, James lit the papers and let them go. The sun was beginning to color the horizon and the wind was picking up. The papers blew down the street as they burned.

“How are we going to know if it’s working?” Chloe asked.

“If we’re still alive by noon, I’d say it’s working,” Bo said.

He turned at the next intersection and headed downtown.

Danielle lit the next batch of papers in front of the police station. Next, Bo drove to the top of Shepherd’s Hill and pulled up at the curb, next to the cemetery. Below them, most of the town was dark. The sun crested the trees and illuminated the scene slowly.

“I wish we had a copy machine,” Danielle said.
 

Chloe was sitting on the wrinkled hood of the car, keeping watch, while the others produced more copies.
 

“Would that work?” Bo asked.

They looked at James. He glanced up when he realized they were waiting for an answer.

“I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head.

“What about one of those little battery-powered typewriters,” Bo said. “I used to have one of those, way back when.”

“Where would we even find one?” Danielle asked.

“I don’t know,” Bo said.

They kept writing.

James finished another copy. He got out and handed it to Chloe. She burned it one page at a time, holding onto each corner until the last second, and watching the wind pull at the smoke. It carried the smoke directly towards the town below. She imagined it finding its way through open windows and between the cracks around doors. She hoped that it would do its job, and restore empathy to the citizens below.

When she saw a man appear out of the morning light to her left, Chloe nearly fell off the car. She slapped her hand down on the hood several times.

“Bo? Bo!” she said.

Bo dropped his writing and emerged with the shotgun.

“Whoa!” the man said, raising his hands above his head. “I’m unarmed.”

Bo lowered the barrel so it pointed at the ground, but he didn’t put the shotgun down.

“What do you want?” Chloe asked.

“I’m just curious what you’re doing,” he said. “I haven’t seen anybody moving around in the open for a bit. I wanted to see. I thought maybe you needed help with something.”

“Go back where you came from,” Chloe said.

“Sure,” the man said. He kept his hands up and began backing away. He glanced behind himself several times to make sure he wasn’t going to walk into any of the headstones.

“Wait,” Bo said. “What’s your name?”

The man stopped. “I’m Geno.” He lowered his arms to his side.

“I’m Bo. You live around here.”

“Yeah,” Geno said. He gave a head nod in a vague direction.

“What have you been doing the past twenty-four hours?” Bo asked.

Geno’s eyes moved from side to side. Then, he looked down and to his left. When his gaze returned to Bo, his face showed confusion.
 

“I’m not entirely sure,” Geno said. “I know I was at home yesterday. We were hiding our food. Then, I remember talking to my wife…”
 

Geno trailed off and reached up to scratch his eye. Bo lifted the barrel of the shotgun at the sudden movement, but lowered it again when he saw that the action posed no threat.
 

“Look,” Geno said, “if you guys don’t need any help, then I think I’m going to head home. I think maybe my family might need my help. It just occurred to me, and I would really…”

Bo cut him off. “Yeah, go ahead.”

When the man had backed up a few more yards, he turned and picked up his pace.

Bo waited until he was out of sight and then he leaned against the car. “What do you think he did?”

“About what?” Chloe asked.

“I’m just assuming that everyone around here did something terrible,” Bo said. “They all must have been affected by one of the stories, right? You think he’s going to get home and find out that he murdered his whole family?”

Chloe shrugged. “Maybe. If you’re right about that, this is going to be a terrible place. Guilty people discovering profound empathy? I’m not sure I want to be around for that.”

“Yeah,” Bo said. “Of course, there might not be a whole lot of people to worry about.”

Chloe nodded. She went back to her burning.

Bo got back in the car and resumed working.

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They were still alive at noon.

Around town, they burned a dozen copies of the story. A couple of people watched them from a distance, but nobody else approached. When they were driving through a neighborhood behind the shopping mall, Bo stuck his head out the window and followed the sound of a thrumming engine in the distance. When he found the source, they pulled up to the back entrance of a hospital. The sound was coming from a big, caged generator.

“It wasn’t running earlier,” Bo said. “We were just a block away a few hours ago. We would have heard it.”

“It could be on a timer,” Chloe said.

“Or someone could be inside, trying to provide emergency services,” Bo said.

“There are a million possibilities,” James said. “Only one way to find out.” He was out of the car as he finished his sentence. James walked towards the rear entrance.
 

“Here,” Bo said. He pushed the shotgun towards Chloe.

Danielle had the rifle they’d taken off the man who broke into the cabin. Bo took only a copy of the story and a lighter. They followed James.

The rear door was propped open with a can of spray paint. They saw why a few steps down the hall. An orange arrow had been marked on the floor, beckoning them to come deeper into the place. In the overhead lights, only one bulb was lit, and only every fourth light was on. It was minimal lighting, powered by the generator.

James followed the buzzing lights. The others followed him, swinging their guns to point towards open doorways as they passed.

Until they reached the other side of the building, they found no life. Once they pushed through the heavy doors, they discovered a room full of activity. A handful of people, dressed in scrubs and wearing gloves, rushed from person to person. Blood was everywhere. More miserable-looking people waited in rows of plastic chairs. The waiting room seemed to contain every stage of care—triage, diagnosis, and in the corner, surgery.

A man split off from the others and approached. He peeled off stained gloves and replaced them with fresh ones from his pocket. He spoke through a mask.

“Please stow your weapons. We’ve got no use for violence,” he said. Chloe and Danielle lowered the guns, but that was as far as they were willing to go. The man’s hospital garb was stained with blood from his ankles to his shoulders, and most of it looked dried and pretty old. “You have a medical emergency?”

“No,” James said. “Do you need help?”

“Do you have training?”

“No.”

“Then please stay out of the way. You can find blankets. We still need blankets,” the man said. Over towards the windows, two people were attending to a man stretched out on a gurney. When he screamed, the man covered in old blood turned and ran that direction.

James turned back to the others.
 

“I’m going to go look for blankets,” James said. He turned and tilted his chin towards the admissions counter. “Bo?”

“What?” Bo asked. Then he saw it. Behind the counter, there was a desk with a computer and a lamp. Right next to that, there was a copy machine with a glowing green light. “Oh,” Bo said. He headed for the machine. Chloe and Danielle followed.

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They left the hospital with dozens of copies. After a few sets, Chloe realized that the copier had a function to reduce the original and fit eight pages per sheet. That produced tiny, but legible replications of the original.

Eventually, one of the workers took a minute away from the patients, and asked them to stop wasting power. They took their new copies and drove to the site of their apartments. Into the smoldering ashes, they threw the story, and watched the smoke as it blew towards the woods.

When Chloe’s car ran out of gas, Bo broke into the garden shed of an abandoned house and found a five-gallon can. When they felt like they were starving, they stepped over the broken glass of Annie’s Foodway and found enough to fill their stomachs.

They sat on the bench in front of the Foodway and ate their snacks while they looked at Chloe’s car. It seemed like every inch of the vehicle had a dent or a scrape. The plastic bumper was split in two, and a big piece was missing. One of the headlights hung by a wiring harness.

“I think maybe it’s time to move on,” Bo said.

“To where?” Danielle asked.

“Anywhere that’s not here,” Bo said. “We haven’t seen anyone violent all day. Everyone we’ve run into seemed perfectly sane. Maybe we should take this show on the road, you know?”

“If we could find a little portable generator and hook it up to a laptop and printer, I could type that story and we could have as many copies as we need,” Danielle said.

“Exactly,” Bo said. “And the best place to do that would be at that office store in Gilbert. That’s only ten miles from here.”

James lowered his head and scratched the back of his neck. “Yeah, you guys should do that. I’m going to stay here. I can get a few hours of sleep before I have to start thinking about writing tonight. I don’t have anything to transcribe tonight, and that’s always a little bit harder.”

“No,” Danielle said. She took his hands in hers. “You’re done with that, aren’t you? The story is positive now.”

“That was last night,” James said. “Every night, a new story comes. They’re different every time. If I don’t write it, I could do something terrible. I won’t go through that again.”

“There has to be another way,” Chloe said. “I refuse to believe that we went through all of this, just to have the damn curse march again.”

“What if you don’t try,” Bo said. “What if we just get out of here and take our chances.”

James stood up and took his trash to the can. He stuffed it through the opening and returned to the bench. Looking up at the parking lot, he realized the futility of what he’d just done. Abandoned and twisted shopping carts littered the lot. Trash from looters was scattered everywhere. Just beyond Chloe’s car, a big Ford truck had been burned out. It stood on black spots of melted rubber.

James returned to the bench. “If I do decide to not write, and take my chances, it won’t be safe to be around me. I could turn on you guys and not even realize I was doing it.”

“We’re not going to abandon you,” Chloe said.

“That’s right,” Danielle said.

“We’ve been burning these stories of empathy all day,” James said. “You guys aren’t being pragmatic. There’s only one safe course of action here, and that’s for me to keep writing. You can move on. You’ve done more than enough to help restore the world the way it should be. Hold on to that story, and when there’s an internet again, post the story to the world. It might only be really potent on anniversaries of this date, but who cares. It certainly won’t hurt for people to read this.”