The Space between Atoms 51

 It wasn’t sunrise.  They’d been walking west all night.  The light came from a small town.  Rather like a candle in an otherwise darkened cathedral, it had appeared bright in the sky because beyond it lay miles and miles of undeveloped land.  “Up there,” Lindsey pointed toward a point in the darkness that seemed “down there” to Terah, “is St. Grosseteste.”  A few security lights, pinpoints in the distance, outlined the building like a constellation made mostly of darkness. 

The ghosts and demons seemed far away with the prospect of a home.  Terah wanted to throw an arm over her shoulder, but knew it was out of the question.  “You’re sure it’s abandoned?”

“No.  I know the order left it a few years ago.  The building may’ve been sold—how would I have found out?  The best we can do is hope.”

“Should we try to get there before sunrise?”

“No point.  Let’s find a place to get a few hours’ sleep.  And we gotta set some ground rules.”

“Like?”

“Like, if it’s still empty we gotta be very discreet comin’ an’ goin’.  Police in rural areas patrol abandoned places to keep the kids out.  An’ we’ll need to replenish supplies.  It’ll be tricky ‘cause Scotrun’s a small place an’ people’ll notice us.  I’m not sure how long we’ll be able to say.”

Terah’s spirits fell.  The weariness of the past several months fell heavily on him.  His arms weighed a ton each.  His feet were lumps of uranium at the bottom of solid lead pillars.  He didn’t want to keep roaming around.  He wanted to settle.  God help him, he wanted a nine-to-five job.  A house.  Lindsey.

“I don’t know this area as well,” she said.  “There are bound to be some caves or somethin’ on this hillside.  We wanna make sure it opens to the north or south, though.  If we build a fire to the west, we could be spotted.  Come on.”

With the moon behind the clouds the slope was still dark and going was slow.  “I don’t know how they do it,” Terah said.

“Who?  And what?”

“I used to work in New York City.  I’d see homeless guys older than me.  How’d they manage to live like this so long?”

“Maybe they got started later.  Or maybe they’re smarter than people think.”

Everyone seemed smarter than Terah.  His childhood of naive realism, suffused with religious dogma, had stunted him.  He’d gone to school like a soldier following orders.  Even when things didn’t seem right to him he knew not to question authority.  He’d thought he was a critical thinker—he asked questions in college, but the underlying narrative was one of compliance.  Here was this young woman beside him, half his age, who’d figured out it was a lie long ago.  Not only that, she’d acted on it.  She’d seen through the false image society projected on the screen.  Even now Terah believed everyone played by the rules.

“I missed the first day of school,” he said.

“That’s tough.”

“They must’ve covered something that day that answers all of the unknowns that followed.  You know, when I was in seventh grade I failed reading.”

“I thought you got a Ph.D.”

“I did, but junior high school was so traumatic, I got sick.  When I staid home a week with the flu, I enjoyed it so much I didn’t want to go back.  So I had a relapse.  Then I caught chicken pox.  Another bout of the flu.  All told I missed about seven weeks.

“My other teachers gave me make-up work to do.  They were impressed.  I could and did study on my own.  But my reading teacher—I don’t remember his name, but I remember his haircut and how he always smelled strongly of cigarettes.  He kept saying, ‘How can I pass him when he missed so much school?’  It was the first and only F on my report card.  As much as I disagreed with him, I do wonder what I missed in all those long days at home.  I’d do my schoolwork, listen to Alice Cooper’s Welcome to My Nightmare over and over with headphones on, and think of death.”

“And you give me a hard time about seein’ ghosts and shit.”

“Fair enough.  It’s weird, though.  My mother didn’t seem to see anything wrong with me listening to horror rock with a cross-dressing lead.  That album even had the word ‘Hell’ in one of the songs.”

“So Alice was a guy?”

“Hey, this was in the days of David Bowie and Lou Reed.  Heady times, the late seventies.”

“I think I see a shelter.”  Lindsey headed northward.  By this point Terah was simply following.  Hungry and inexplicably tired despite his long sleep, he was ready for some rest.  Although they might not be able to stay long, he was looking forward to human-made shelter the next night.  Constant uncertainty had worn him down to a stub.  By his age most guys were thinking about retirement.  Slowing down and resting on their accumulated wealth.  All he had to show for his misspent youth earning a Ph.D. he carried in a backpack.  The person he wanted to settle with was too young and uninterested.  A cave felt like a gift from heaven.  This certainly wasn’t what it’d looked like in grad school days.  Even the privations of those times were better than this.

Building a fire with cold fingers had become a special skill.  Most of his colleagues wouldn’t survive a single night like this, let alone living in this world.  “Do you think Wednesday’s still with us?”

“Demons don’t just leave.  If we’re lucky the convent will keep him at bay.”  They found a couple granola bars buried deep in Lindsey’s backpack.  The cave, as most in this region, was simply a fortuitous tumble of aging rock rather than an underground system carved out by erosion.  As they pulled out their emergency blankets yet again—these weren’t meant to be used regularly, Lindsey suddenly doubled over in pain.  Terah reached out to help.  A hand on her back and his pulse exploding in his throat, he feared the worst.  They needed a doctor and they couldn’t expose themselves.  Or was it an attack by Wednesday?  Either way, he couldn’t lose Lindsey.