Charles Sheffield - Aftermath

Some, of course, would not make that statement. I saw burned-out wreckage of old accidents, still uncleared. Someone had placed wreaths at three roadside points, where blackened earth showed the first sprouts of new green. As we progressed farther north, off to the left of the highway I saw the tail of a crashed aircraft, jutting into the red afternoon sky like a giant silver memorial to the dead.

As we left the finished roads and began to ascend a gravel track, the evidence of death became more immediate. Our car passed three crosses formed from cut saplings. The soil of the graves that they marked was ruddy and newly turned. They could be no more than a few days old.

I don’t think that Seth even noticed them. His attention was on his map.

“Turn left at the top,” he said. “And that’s it.”

That’s what? My apprehension mounted. I drove at a snail’s pace along the rough dirt road, until a small wooden house came into view, set back into the hillside.

“Stop a few yards short.” Seth was studying the house, but at the same time managed to keep one eye — and his gun — on me. “Then we’ll go take a look.”

“What about the telomere monitoring materials?”

“They can stay in the car. They’ll keep awhile, an’ I don’t see raccoons an’ deer takin’ too much interest in ’em.”

Which meant that Methuselah had to stay there, too. I made sure the doors and windows were closed before at Seth’s bidding I stepped out of the car and walked in front of him toward the house.

I mentioned that my sense of observation had been heightened from the moment we left my home. Now I saw Seth in the same super sensitive mood. In front of the house, he made me stop.

“No car tracks. Nobody has driven this way. But lots of boot marks. Recent. And both ways.” He motioned me forward again.

I noticed that one set of imprints was identical to those of the boots I had been wearing when I awoke at the syncope facility. That didn’t tell me much, and I did not mention it to Seth. In any case, I could see three different sizes and style of footprint. Not one of them looked like a woman’s shoe.

It was at this point that, as I remarked, chance seemed ready to undo my plans. I had been prepared for three people: Seth, and his two still-anonymous colleagues. My hope was to dispose of them, and to vanish. No one else would have any idea where to look for me.

Now I faced an uncertain number of adversaries. At a minimum there were three men and one woman, plus Seth. Disposing of all of them, however desirable, seemed impossibly difficult. That was even more the case since the woman had not been at the house, and she could be anywhere. She would be able to direct others here. My earlier hope, for their death and my disappearance, had been destroyed.

Chance favors the prepared mind. I looked even more closely at everything. We entered the house, me a step ahead of Seth.

“This gets a bit annoyin’,” he said, when we were both in the dim interior. He had a gift for understatement. “They’ve been here, sure as shootin’. Door not locked, footprints all over the place outside. But where the hell are they? It’ll be dark in another couple of hours.”

He did not expect an answer from me, so I was free to form my own impressions of the house. As Seth said, there were footprints outside, and not inside. But in places near the entrance, the wooden boards of the floor were slightly damp. Someone had recently been cleaning there. At the same time, the interior had the clammy, unused feel of a building unoccupied for weeks or months. A plate sat on the table, and the cup next to it contained a dried-out brown material. I bent over and sniffed. “Coffee,” I said to Seth. “But not made today — or yesterday, either.” When I straightened up I held hidden in my hand a little paring knife from the table. It was sharp enough but of no use as a weapon. The blade was barely an inch long.

“I don’t think so,” Seth said. “Put it back.”

Apparently he saw everything, even when he didn’t seem to be looking. I laid the little knife back on the table. Then I walked in front of him as we carried out an inspection of every part of the house.

“Not a thing,” Seth said at the end of it. “Not a sign, not a note, not even a callin’ card — not that I’d expect them to leave one, because for all they know, you might have arrived without me.”

Not a sign, he said, meaning not a sign of the owner, but I very much disagreed with that. I saw many signs. The house was sturdy and built of wood throughout. Although it was furnished with electric power, I also saw propane tanks, an oil stove, and kerosene heaters. The little bathroom had an old-fashioned hand razor and men’s aftershave lotion. The pantry was amply stocked with dried foods. The owner, whoever he might be, had apparently been rehearsing for Supernova Alpha long before the star exploded.

We ate a quick and simple meal, lighting the gas stove with matches that Seth found in a kitchen cupboard and using it to cook rice. The combination of boiled rice and canned sardines tasted execrable, but neither of us complained. As we finished eating, Seth stood up.

“Sorry about this, but I got no choice. I need to take a look around, see if I can find out where they are. I wouldn’t recommend you take off an’ run while I’m gone, though, ’cause if you do I’ll be after you ’til I find you. I really need to know how to use them telomod kits. But just in case you did feel like runnin’, we’ll rule out any crazy ideas like that.” He walked across and picked up a coil of rope from a storage cupboard in the corner, came back, and gestured to me. “Go on through there.”

We went into the bedroom. It faced east, and already the room was dark and gloomy. The bed, as I had already noted, had solid iron rails at foot and headboard. While he tied me, hands and feet, I waited for a moment when I might be able to grab the gun. It never came. Seth was too smart and too wary.

He stepped back, studied his efforts, and retied a couple of the knots. “There. That should do us. I don’t know how long I’ll be, but I’ll come back soon as I can. I told you, it won’t do no good to get loose an’ run, even if you can. I’d be right after you ’til I found you. I need to know how to run them tests. An’ don’t go callin’ for help, neither. Other people won’t look after you near as good as I do.”

I forced myself to wait for three minutes after he left. Then I stretched. It would do no good to pull directly on the ropes, that would only make the knots tighter. I had to get my hands around the top bed rail and pull on that directly.

Chance favors the prepared mind. I must stop repeating that cliche, or I will become a bore.

However, in this case it is relevant. The exercises that I had performed at night, quietly, locked away in the subbasement of my house, were both boring and unpleasant; now they also proved to have been necessary.

I stretched, grabbed, and heaved until my joints cracked. A bed, even a well-constructed one, is not designed to withstand such deliberate force. The headboard bent toward me, giving at the place where bolts secured it to the bed frame.

It did not come loose at a first effort; nor did I expect it to. I alternated pulling and pushing, relying on the fact that the bed was an old one. I did not know if the frame was wood or metal. If the former, the bolts would chew their way through it; if the latter, the bolts would themselves weaken from continued bending.