Methyl drags Eric’s stuffie snake behind her as she descends the public access ramps into the cavern. In a dark punctured haphazardly by swung floodlight beams, the worried murmurs of hundreds echo above a crowd that streams down ramps and staircases carrying backpacks, pulling roller suitcases and dragging coolers toward an opening in the earth. Methyl hears shouting and turns to watch as a family drives a golf cart into the mass, managing only to merge with the arterial plug edging slowly toward the visitors’ entrance. Beside Mehtyl, Hannah steers Eric’s sleepwalking form. There’s no more begging Eric to wake because, Methyl realizes watching them, Hannah doesn’t want Eric to see the chaos unfurling deeper than the floodlights can reach.
“Believers to the front,” a voice yells through a bullhorn.
A chorus of shouts comes, agreeing that they should be the first.
“Keep the demons out.”
“Stay back from the cave.”
“Sophia, aren’t we believers?” Hannah pleads in a whisper to Methyl.
Xavier, just ahead of Methyl, keeps disappearing and appearing again in the crowd, shouting into his phone. A minute earlier, he sent Jarhead to the sky to escort Gabbyella’s flatbed to the caverns. Methyl wants to know: how did they plan on getting her down here, through this distraught mass, this tossing of elbows and stumbling confusion, the crystalline mass encasing her and the team plugged into her prison?
“Sophia, aren’t we believers?”
Methyl can’t answer Hannah. She’s locked, frozen in her throat by indecision. All her thoughts are dead. Flatlining feels like an easy way out right now. Sleepwalking.
Xavier cuts in front of Methyl, waving his phone and saying what? It doesn’t matter to Methyl, as long as he says the lies they need to get inside.
Fact: At 01:09 The Francesca ascended. She didn’t lift off or blast off, trailing plasma. The Francesca rose up on mist, became a star in the black that holds up the moon, and vanished.
Fact: Then came the talk. The witnesses and deniers.
It led them to this hole. It’s cool inside, even chilly, and apparently the same something-degrees year-round, Methyl didn’t pay attention because she was listening for whispers about Richard and The Francesca, and how they had been the cause of this warfare, the shouting of this in spitting distance of the man, you know the man. Methyl thought, of course he’s not here, and never was anywhere, but blended in as a standout, and as an extra, too.
Hannah grasps Methyl’s shoulder. “Do we believe? Yes? No? They’re asking me, men with guns. Tell me what to tell them. We’re believers, right?”
It is this from Hannah above all else, above the explosions at the wall, the ambush in the e-waste pits, Richard and Francesca’s transformations and disappearance, the glowering war, it’s this that lowers a mantle of adulthood over Methyl’s shoulders and she can say, pure of heart within a useful lie so near to Eric’s swaying, sleeping body fierce with its desire to survive, that she has an answer.
•••
“Make him say it again.”
“Again?” Methyl says.
The grin on Eric’s face spreads.
“You like my tricks,” Methyl says. “And you like playing like you’re still a little boy.”
“Today I learned basewater breaks into two hydrogens, one oxygen—and a cave cult.”
“You should thank the caverns, Eric.”
“Every day.”
“Me, too.”
“That’s settled.”
“You’re seventy-five years along but somehow less mature.”
“Make him say it again.”
“Mercy me, Eric.”
“Please. Come on. Jack would say, si.”
“Don’t talk Esperanto.”
“I have to practice—”
“Because you and me talk English to each other.”
“Why?”
“So that we don’t forget how.”
“Suspect.”
“Shut up. Voices travel in caverns. Reason number two we’re sticking with English.”
Methyl lowers her hands from the radio and places them in her lap. The fact that someone opposed to Xavier could still suspect her of Angela’s death and use that to get to him through the rumored Carlsbad Cavern judicial system was something she felt she would probably need to guard against for decades more. Witnessing what Angela did to herself was the last Dayton murder mystery before the end of the world. Someone had to solve it.
“No one’s a suspect,” Eric says. “Suspect is a game we used to play, in the world.”
“In the world? You sound like Jack. Who played with you?”
“Jarhead did,” Eric says.
“Jarhead came at the end, Eric. Jarhead brought us here.”
Methyl concentrates on Eric’s eyes.
“What?”
“You don’t remember,” Methyl says.
It’s dark and cool inside the Big Room, where the two usually wind up this time of the day. Gabbyella turns on the basewater lights for eight hours per twenty-four, then lowers them to an unsteady glow with just enough dull blue to filter through the cavern’s crystals and lead the way to the latrines.
Methyl and Eric know the count by heart. Seven hundred and seventy-one shelter in Carlsbad after what Xavier has been calling the spasm war, which was followed by whatever’s going on out there these days. Jack, elected Emergency Mayor of the Caverns, and a Park Ranger before the war started, was only twenty-one when Xavier’s vaccine hit New Mexico’s water supply. He’s gangly, competent, and a little bit amazing, Methyl once told Hannah but now regrets having admitted. Eric’s mom teases about a date with the mayor in the Queen’s Chamber. The kid, or whatever Methyl wonders they’re going to call themselves, wanted Esperanto after the murmur among the caverners got unruly, and English and Spanish speakers seemed to be choosing chambers with language loyalty oaths required for membership. She was in favor, but not in favor of quitting the language of her thoughts.
Methyl opens a wood crate’s top and front panel. Inside is Eric’s grandmother’s radio, now close to one hundred and fifty years old.
“Make him talk,” Eric says. “I need to practice my English.”
“A radio, a thing, an it,” Methyl says. “A voice, a person. At least here. Except Gabbyella and Jarhead. They are an it. And this radio, sometimes.”
Eric needs to hear any different voice, Methyl knows this. It’s his only exploration, until he’s wise, enough to carry his tiny body on hunts and reconnaissance missions. Flush the game or the raiders from the brush for Jarhead to destroy. And because he can’t remember being in the world, these sparks, as she has started calling them, bring light into his ninety-three-year-old eyes that are thirteen biological years old.
It takes something from her, sparking up the old radio. Going back to the first time, when she bricked Gabbyella inside a sheath of shocked quartz, the sparks she throws, no matter how small, give her an eerie sense of being watched. She passes it off as guilt for listening what comes over the radio, the kids talking to each other, the radio DJ’s, all of it, ruined her hours and brightened Eric’s. Over the years in the cavern, Hannah, a birth doula to a growing cohort of babies that don’t birth. Hanna’s there to take them through the interminable arrested second and third trimesters until Gabbyella, still encased in quartz, can edit the vaccine. Growth went with death, went with eternal life, went with—No, Methyl thinks, turn on the radio for the kid.
“Don’t turn it up.”
“Yes!”
Methyl traces her fingers across the top of the radio, smells the familiar smoke: dust burning off the crystallized wiring inside. It’d been weeks since they listened. Last time, Eric cranked up the volume, so Methyl had to pretend for the others in the cavern that they were only putting on a play. A radio show, like how it used to be.
It’s twelve forty-five, Tuesday, January twenty-fifth.
Eric, scrawny still in his thirteen-year-old’s body, pumped his fist and silently uttered, “Yes!”
Methyl set the volume barely above a whisper. Eric mouths the words he’s memorized as they come through the speaker.
Fifty-five now, forty-eight degrees expected for the overnight low. The Number Four Lane is closed today. Exit Ten, Eleven and Eleven-B are closed until the twenty-fifth. Praise Him today, tomorrow, always. Now let’s get it on with the top one-hundred countdown through the Thirties.
It always ends there. Not cut off with a wash of static, just the end of the broadcast, as far as Methyl can tell.
Eric whispers, “How did people know which lane was number four?”
“I told you, I didn’t drive yet, before.”
Eric sits back into the shadows hugging their nook in the cave.
“It’s a person,” Eric says.
“It’s old, but it’s not a person.”
“It’s hundreds of years old. It’s a person.”
“Think more like 150 years.”
“Who’s him?”
“It’s God. Don’t make me explain it again and again.”
“Sometimes, you say it’s Christ. Hannah says, Christ.”
“Your mom and I don’t disagree.”
“I think it’s Richard.”
To be continued
Bummed that it’s almost over. Where do we buy the hard copy?
very imtriguing!