The Second Wave Page 9

  The horses were nervous, John saw as he and Peter entered the stable, but not hysterical like the goats. There were roughly a dozen, each in their individual box. Peter led him to a rack with bridles; he took two, handing John one. Pointing at a box in the back, he said, “Take her out. She’s deaf, she won’t give you any trouble. The saddles are in the back.” He was already opening the hatch to another stall, bridle slung over his shoulder.

  “How do you know she’s deaf?” John asked.

  “I can tell by the way she moves.”

  The manchado in the last box was visibly calmer than the rest. It neighed softly, seeing the distress of its fellows, but since it couldn’t hear the thunder, it wasn’t scared of it.

  John carefully unlatched the hatch and slipped inside the stall. The mare let him bridle and saddle her without complaint, then followed him out obediently. John liked horses; they were strong, honest creatures. He trusted them instinctively, something the animal sensed now.

  Peter was already outside, ready to dash off. “I ride east, you west!“ he bellowed over a crack of thunder. “We’ll meet northward and herd them back here!”

  John nodded when the shadow of a movement caught his eye. Movement that wasn’t coming from the other people or an animal. Someone ducked inside the stable, keeping out of view.

  Curious as to who would use the downpour to hide in a barn instead of their house, he followed the figure back inside. The silhouette of a person just took cover in the back of the building.

  John rode nearer, took a look around and saw a tuft of wet hair sticking out behind a saddle rack. He slowly eased the mare back to see what was going on. There was no hurry, the person was effectively cornered. John simply rode up, expecting one of the kids he’d seen earlier, but was surprised to see a soaked young woman in a hospital nightgown, who glowered back at him with no sign of fear, or even surprise in her eyes.

  Before he could say anything, she demanded, “Hide me! Or I let everything drown!”

  “Try the hayloft,” he replied without thinking. “The ladder’s over there.”

  He took a hat and a rope from a rack. The latter he slung round his torso on his way out.

  As Peter had asked him to, John rode westward into the forest, which surrounded the colony on two sides. The trees stood wide apart, making it easy to manoeuvre through them, even for panic stricken cows, who weren’t exactly adroit at the best of times.

  The moon shone through the rain clouds and the tree tops, and the lightning bolts provided some illumination, albeit randomly, but it was hard to see anything through the shadows and the rain. He strained his ears and fancied he heard something moo frantically in the distance; it could be a cow, or a trick of his ears. It was the best shot he had, though, so he took off in that direction.

  The manchado was easy to handle. The flashes of light disquieted her, but she quickly adapted to John’s commands and proved to be a light-footed, secure guide through the undergrowth. As he rode on, the cries he heard became louder, definitely sounding like a cow in distress now.

  He reached the animal just as the thunderstorm stopped as quickly and abruptly as it had begun not an hour ago. The clouds vanished, the moon now shone clearly, showing John one solitary, surprisingly small ox next to a tree. It didn’t move, just kept on crying out. John had to circle it once to find out why: one of its enormous horns was pinned to the trunk of the tree, haplessly stuck in a knothole. Even if it wanted to run away, it couldn’t.

  The first thing he did was fasten the rope he’d brought with him around the ox’s thick, furry neck, so it couldn’t run away once it was free. He needn’t have worried, though. Now that the storm and the thunder was over, the animal was calm and obedient, all previous hassle seemingly forgotten. It munched on a handful of grass, while John chipped away the wood around the horn with his dagger, as simply pulling it out didn’t work.

  When he was done, he tied the other end of the rope to his saddle and lead the ox out of the forest. It was a miracle the animal had made it this far into the woods at all with its massive horns and its stubby legs.

  At the stables, he saw that Peter was already there, too, handing a couple of small cows over to protector Niman and another man. They all seemed relieved on seeing the ox.

  “Nice work, man!” Niman gave an impressed whistle as he walked up to John. “We feared he might be long gone by now.”

  John handed him the rope. He leaned down to pat the animal’s back reassuringly, then told them in few words what had happened.

  “Aw, poor you,” Niman addressed the ox. “Come on, Leroy. Your wives are waiting.”

  John raised an eyebrow at Peter, but Peter merely shrugged.

  “We’re still missing two calves,” he said. “Help me?”

  They rode back into the forest together.

  * * * *

  Chapter 19: The Beasts in the Woods

  The wee hours of the morning approached, tinting the world a lighter shade of gray as the moon began to fade.

  “I think I heard the calves on my way back, but I couldn’t check it out with the cows in tow,” Peter said.

  He and John were riding side by side, not in any hurry now that the downpour had stopped and chances were good that the cattle was just standing around somewhere grazing, waiting to get picked up. They were both too absorbed in the task and each other’s company to make haste now.

  “I want to show you something I found.” Peter beamed. “It is on the way. Do you know why they picked this reality out of the many they found?”

  John shook his head.

  “One of the main reasons was that this Earth has never been inhabited by humans. We’re the first people on this planet. At least that is what everybody thought, but I believe I found something.”

  He picked up speed, obviously keen to get to whatever he wanted to show John. They ventured deeper into the forest than John had previously. The trees were closer to each other now, the undergrowth thicker. No paths at all the horses could trod along; they had to make their own way, and did so with increasingly more effort. After a while, they came across a brook, a mere trickle to be accurate, but that wasn’t what Peter wanted to show him, and that wasn’t what made John’s eyes widen in astonishment.

  The brook led to a small clearing, albeit not a natural one. No trees or shrubbery grew there. The moonlight fell unhindered onto the remains of a building that took up all the space. Once a vast structure John assumed by the size and layout of it. The ruins were now overgrown and corroded, but still impressive. Sleek curves and erect walls spoke of grace and a long lost greatness. It was impossible to see if it was one building or part of a bigger structure, a city perhaps, or a housing complex, or something else entirely. The ruins were tall, but the trees were taller, thus obscuring the clearing and the remains in it from view completely.

  Something was wrong with it, though, John thought. He had lived in remnants and skeleton cities long enough to know ancient buildings when he saw them. This wasn’t ancient. It was incredibly old, but the building material was completely strange, far more advanced than anything John had ever seen on Earth. The surface was glistening from the wet, it was smoother than concrete, although to the touch it felt like concrete; it shimmered like metal, but was much warmer than any metal John had ever known.

  Peter dismounted. He walked up to the building and climbed on a jutty, to get a better look. “This stretches out far into the forest!” he told John, excitement in his voice. “It could be a temple of some kind. Look at those markings! Incredible, isn’t it?!”

  No, John decided, it wasn’t a temple. If it was, there would have been holy engravings or hieroglyphs somewhere. But the markings Peter pointed out now, which stretched across a whole side of the inner wall, looked more like graffiti.

  John tied their horses loosely together to prevent them from walking away, then he followed Peter. He was right, he saw on closer inspection—the markings looked indeed like graffiti. They were definitely pain
ted on the walls: words, simple drawings, short phrases, or what John assumed were phrases; there seemed no higher meaning or informational value to the writings. He climbed through something that must have been a door at some point, to look at the inside of the structure. It looked oddly familiar. He’d seen structures like this before, even if it was hard to tell in this light; he’d have to come back and take a closer look during the day.

  “Have you got any idea what it is?” asked Peter. He leaped over a gap and walked up a decayed staircase to stand beside John.

  “I think I might have. See those tracks in the middle? Two different sets that run parallel to one another but don’t meet. I bet there used to be an aisle in the middle.”

  “Do you recognize it?”

  “Not specifically. But I’ve seen this sort of layout before in Shanghai. I think it’s a subway station.”

  Peter gave a wolf whistle that echoed back from the walls. Their further exploration was cut short then by a menacing growl which came, by way of an answer to Peter’s whistle no doubt, from an opening in the ground that probably led to another, deeper level of what once indeed had been a subway station.

  “We should go now, Peter. It appears we are in something’s territory.”

  “The other reason they chose this planet,” Peter lectured him, “was the complete absence of larger wildlife.”

  “And seeing that they weren’t entirely spot on with their first assumption, the second one is probably debatable as well.”

  “Point taken,” Peter granted. “It sounded like something large.”

  “Large and irritated.”

  They quickly made their way back to the horses.

  Up and down the forest they sought, but only found the calves when dawn was already breaking. Two tiny animals with shaggy, brown fur; asleep, curled up against one another under a shrub Peter and John had passed by twice before without seeing them. When they finally made it out of the woods, the two men were half-frozen, drenched to the skin. They were laughing at an anecdote Peter narrated, from when he grew up on his mother’s farm. The first beams of sunlight were a welcome sight as they stepped out of the shadows of the trees. It immediately felt warmer.

  “You know, Ian, I may be freezing and starved and utterly exhausted,” Peter laughed, riding the high of finding a lost city and the missing cattle in one night, “but I haven’t had this much fun since, well…” Within the blink of an eye his mood turned around completely. A solemn look crept back into his eyes. He was going to say since a week before Duncan’s death, but the words never left his lips. An awkward silence settled between them.

  John watched as two farmers took the calves and led them into the cote. The door was now back in its hinges; the repairs at the chicken pen had begun. The thousand individual puddles had merged and now looked like one giant lake; the sunlight glistened on its surface, giving it the appearance of depth.

  Without thinking twice about it, John rode up to Peter and extended his hand, “My name is John.”

  Peter didn’t reply to that, but he took the offered hand.

  As soon as they were in the house they put on a change of clothes. Peter was hanging their things up to dry, while John kindled a flame in the stove and put a kettle on to boil water for tea. The kitchen was only equipped with the bare essentials, but Peter had brought a box of black tea with him from Earth.

  There was no use getting back to sleep now—the sun was quickly climbing over the horizon. Peter had given John a hard time about going to this morning’s orientation speech by the village mayor. So as he waited for Peter to re-emerge from the bathroom dry and clean, John leafed through the information brochure that lay on the counter. Personalized information package // House #23 it said on the first page. John skipped the entry about Peter’s (and Duncan’s) new workplace at the Geo & Bio Lab // Building #J16, and went straight to the general information on the colony.

  He was surprised to find a school and a kindergarten on the map of the compounds, along with a library and an open-for-all canteen.

  “Sally says they have a marvellous chef in that canteen,” Peter announced when he strolled into the kitchen and saw John with the menu-plan for the first week. “A twelve-year-old culinary wunderkind. I believe we’re all supposed to eat there until we can harvest our own crops.”

  John remembered seeing large barren fields when they arrived at the village the first time. It would be a while until the first harvest.

  “Why is the name of the program Second Wave?” John was curious. “Was there a first one?”

  Peter got two mugs from the cupboard. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “Maybe it’s just a name. I’m sure they’d have told us if there was another colony nearby.”

  He waited until John had poured them the tea, then drew up two chairs next to the stove to sit by the fire. They were both in need of warmth, on the inside as well as the outside.

  “Thank you for still talking to me,” John confessed after a comfortable silence. He was surprised to realize that he meant it. For the first time in a long time he was glad someone knew his real name. Peter may not know about what he did, or, more specifically, what he had done, but John felt like one layer of his carefully constructed lies had been lifted; it was a little easier to breathe now.

  “Tabula rasa, remember?” Peter replied. “Besides, after all that’s happened, I am still grateful to you.”

  “How can you hold feelings of gratitude to the person who lied to you about almost everything and then left you without even saying goodbye?”

  “Put like that it does indeed sound rather pathetic.” Peter smiled. “I loved you, John. And, yes, you broke my heart. But if it hadn’t been for you, I wouldn’t have spent a month at my sister’s, crying my eyes out. I wouldn’t have met her flatmate and my future husband, who was then just leaving to move to Finland forever.”

  John’s gaze flickered to the ring on Peter’s hand. After a year he was still wearing it to honor his marriage vow. He couldn’t help but be impressed by that kind of devotion.

  “He never made it to Finland, of course. Today, I think everything happened the way it was supposed to happen. It had reason. At least for me,” Peter added solemnly. Then his mood lifted. “So. You lied to me about almost everything?”

  “Don’t go there, Peter,” warned John. A warning that wasn’t just meant for the other man. There were things John didn’t want to ponder again, feelings he didn’t want to revisit. It was better that way for both of them. He needed to stay detached, or else… he needed to stay detached.

  “Fair enough. But you do know what tabula rasa means, don’t you?”

  John shrugged. He didn’t know what it meant for Peter.

  “It means no more lies from now on. Or you can walk out of that door right now and never come back.” He meant it, John could tell from his voice. “I’m too tired for games.”

  John nodded. “No more lies.” He wasn’t sure, though, if that wasn’t a lie in itself. After all these years, he wasn’t sure where the truth ended and the lies began anymore, and he wasn’t sure if he cared enough to change that. Lies worked. Lies helped him to stay alive.

  His gaze flickered across the room, and he wondered briefly what he was staying alive for in the first place these days.

  * * * *

  Chapter 20: What the Rain Washed Up

  In the small waiting area of the hospital sat Dr. Paige and Captain Eleven in uncomfortable, wooden chairs around a low table with information brochures. They watched Mayor Rochester pace up and down, a cup of by now cold coffee in his hand.

  “My team is looking for her right now, Heath. They’ll contact me as soon as they find something. Please. Sit down!”

  “How is that even possible?” he asked for at least the tenth time since he’d been called out to the hospital.

  “I am so sorry,” Paige uttered, for at least the fifteenth time since she’d found Eugenia Gust’s bed empty on her last round. “I didn’t think she’d run away.
”

  Rochester calmed down enough to pat the doctor on the shoulder. “Nobody thought that.”

  “I did,” Eleven pointed out.

  “Yes. Not helping, Emily.”

  “It’s okay,” Paige amended. “She’s right. I should’ve listened to her all along.”

  “Look. I have to hold the orientation meeting in a few minutes,” Rochester announced with a glance at his watch. “But let me know as soon as you find her. Or as soon as you learn anything new, anyway.”

  When he left, Eleven geared up to join her team in their search. Before she could leave, nurse Vasquez burst into the room. Her eyes were wide. “Doctor Paige! She’s back!”

  Paige raised a confused eyebrow. “Who?”

  “Miss Gust.”

  Eleven stopped dead in her tracks.

  “I just walked by the observation panel to her room,” the nurse told them. “She’s…just sitting there.”

  “Are you sure?” Paige was already up and hurrying out into the corridor, followed by Eleven. Vasquez had to scramble to keep up with them; her physique didn’t allow for high speed movements. She looked mildly offended by that last statement, “Dr. Paige, I have brought her lunch every day since I came here. Sure I am sure.”

  To everyone’s surprise, Eugenia was indeed back in her room. She sat cross-legged on the bed, hair and clothes still wet from the rain, dripping all over herself and the sheets. There were tiny puddles on the floor where she had walked, tracing back the way she came in: through the back door, apparently.

  Eleven radioed her team to stop the search, then went to tell Mayor Rochester. Summer Paige fetched towels. She dried Eugenia thoroughly and helped her into a fresh nightgown.

  “Where have you been?” she asked, not really expecting an answer. But she’d grown accustomed to talking to her, like she had done when she was unconscious. In a way, it was still like treating a coma patient.

  “You had us all worried, Eugenia. You had me worried! Don’t run off like that again, especially not in a storm like that! The Gods know what might have happened!”