(The third in the series of Otherwise fantasy adventure novels)
By Christopher Bernard
Chapter Six: Crash
Minutes? Hours? Days? . . . Who could say? The storm seemed to batter the balloon forever. And now Petey knew exactly what “forever” felt like.
The three boys clung to the sides of the basket, Petey and Chace’s arms around each other above the crouching Bumper, as barrage on barrage of wind sheered and shifted, savagely, chaotically, playing with the balloon like a playground bully, tossing it from cloud to cloud like a beachball, from flash to flash of lightning in thunder like sarcastic laughter.
After one of the fiercer pummelings of wind, the air turned ice cold, as if winter had decided to return vengefully against cocky spring, and the boys shuddered as the basket swung in lunging arcs, shaking like a bag of candy in a running child’s hand.
At one point it swung them in a perfect circle, and they were briefly above the balloon, upside down, pressed inside the basket by centrifugal force, though they were also kept from being tossed out of the basket like dice from a cup by their cable vests. Though that was cold comfort. It was only a question of time when the balloon would crash out of the sky. In the meantime the storm played with them like a cat with trapped mice.
When the balloon popped, Petey managed to think, in that little corner of sanity that seems to remain, cool and appraising, even in the castle of anarchy—when it popped, would it be like when a smaller balloon did—suddenly, though in this case with a pop with a sound like thunder?
And of course the storm immediately obliged with a lightning flash and thunder crack that seemed about to shake the basket from its moorings and send it tumbling across the sky.
He tried not to think about the fall. Though he had not seen the landscape below them since the storm had embraced them in its turbulent arms.
Then he heard it.
It was not a big pop—it was more like a deep, long hiss, the sound of the air escaping from an enormous tire.
Petey looked up and saw the tear in the balloon’s side.
Chace caught his gaze and looked up too.
“If we survive,” he called out over Bumper’s head, “it’ll make a ripping yarn for sure.”
Petey couldn’t help laughing in the very teeth of the wind. He had never felt so grateful for his friend’s sangfroid.
Bumper stared up at the two older boys from below, wondering how anyone could possibly laugh as they dashed about the clouds.
They froze as they felt the descent as the air escaped the balloon.
“Bombs away!” Chace called out.
Petey felt his stomach fall almost as precipitately as the balloon. How high up were they? How long would it take before they hit the ground? How hard would they hit? Would they survive the fall? How could they survive? Was this it? Was this the end of his brief life? Suddenly all the miseries of being thirteen didn’t seem so important anymore . . .
He was woken by the feeling of rain on his face, hard and fierce.
He was lying at the foot of a massive oak tree; above him were the remnants of the enormous balloon draped across the boughs in wedges of red, white, and blue, the image of the swallow and the fair’s name folded in big deflated wrinkles, and a mangled harness attached to the wrecked basket not a dozen feet above the boy’s face.
Petey heard a groan to his side and looked over to see Chace nursing his head between his hands.
A pair of eyes peeped over the side of the basket above Petey’s head. At first he thought they were an owl’s. Then Bumper gave out a little, depleted squeal.
“Curling up in a fetal position on the stroke of disaster has its uses,” Chace said brightly. “But please try not to squeak quite so loud.” He glanced over at Petey. “Last time I had a head like this, old son, was after I drank half the pater’s Veuve Cliquot the day before New Year’s Eve two years ago. Falling out of the sky is nothing compared to a Champagne hangover to the tune of pater’s deranged ranting.”
Petey woozily pulled himself up. It was raining hard, and he and Chace (Chace bracing Petey against the oak’s trunk while trying not to slip on the wet acorns at the bottom of the tree) helped Bumper climb out of the suspended basket. Then all three contemplated the wrecked balloon.
“What goes up . . .,” said Chace philosophically.
“Must break its neck,” said Bumper. “That’s what my mom always says.”
“Q.E.D.,” said Chace, gazing at the mass of Dr. Sazerac’s forever grounded dreams.
The boys gave their surroundings a closer look.
They were at the edge of a thick wood. A macadam road passed nearby; across the road was a farmer’s field. Another blacktop road ended not far off, and a sign gave the road’s name: “Carezas Rd.”
Petey stared at the sign. There was something odd about the name, but he couldn’t put his finger on just what. He shook his head.
There wasn’t much time to think about it. A high-pitched rumbling came toward them down the road, and suddenly an enormous green-gray vehicle riding on a pair of flat chain-like treads, with a squarish, cloddish looking swivel top and a long cannon barrel sticking out its front like the huge proboscis of an antediluvian bird roared full blast down the road, splashing a wall of mud above the boys’ heads. It vanished as quickly as it had come, leaving behind a sickly sweet smell of diesel, a cloud of gray smoke, and a fading roar long after.
The boys had dashed for cover behind a screen of brush.
Bumper blinked and rubbed his eyes.
“Did I see what I think I saw?” he asked.
“What do you think you saw?” asked Petey.
“A tank,” said Bumper. “In the woods.”
“If you saw what you thought you thought you saw,” said Chace sagely, “then you saw what you thought and you thought what you saw.”
Bumper stared at him. He opened his mouth to speak but nothing came out. Chace sometimes had that effect on people.
“What would a tank possibly be doing near Halloway?” said Petey.
Chace shrugged. “Who knows how far away we’ve been blown? We might be in Canada for all I know. Though I don’t think I ever heard of tanks scouring the Kanuck countryside, unless they really don’t like being called the fifty-first state!” he added, alluding to a painfully embarrassing remark made by a recent American president. “Anyway, we must be near a military base.”
That at least seemed plausible and, whether Canadian or American, would be someplace they could get help, so the boys set out in the wake of the armored beast.
The rain did not stop, and the boys pulled their shirts up over their heads to keep the rain from stinging their eyes.
Petey pulled his phone from his back pocket.
Rats! he thought.
The screen looked like a spider’s web of shattered glass, and the phone was bent like a thin cake of black soap. When he fell from the balloon’s basket, his bottom had struck a rock. The cell phone had protected his bottom, but his bottom had not protected his phone.
Chace had a similar idea, with better luck: he was tapping away on his phone under the relative protection of his Polo shirt.
He scowled down at the silent amalgam of plastic, rare earth minerals, and turbo-charged attention deficit.
Bumper piped up, knowingly, “No signal?”
Bumper was especially proud of his use of cell phone vernacular because he had been denied possession, by his parents, before he was twelve. And twelve looked as far away as the stars. The injustice of it rankled profoundly. He watched other people’s hypnosis by their phones with the bitterest envy.
“Yes, we have no signal,” Chace said as he slipped the cell into his trousers pocket.
A rattletrap of a tractor appeared around a curve just ahead and coughed past them, battered and ancient, a rusty heap of corroded metal, mud-splashed glass, torn leather seat, cracked wooden handles and enormous tires, with an old farmer in a dirty yellow raincoat and hat pulling at its levers and wheels.
It looked like a museum piece even to Petey.
The tractor drew behind it an even more ancient-looking cart piled with straw and covered with a futile rag of tarpaulin.
The farmer glowered down at the boys, his face half furious, half frightened, as he passed without a wave or a nod. This was extremely strange: around Halloway, whenever a farmer passed someone on the road, he usually gave a wave, a little hail-fellow-well-met. It was just good manners, a friendly gesture in the social sparseness of country life: the fewer the people one sees, the more each encounter matters. City life might make one naturally wary of every person one met, but country life had the opposite effect: every person who crossed your path, whether friend or stranger, was an opportunity for a little moment of shared acknowledgement.
But not this time.
After the farmer passed them, in another cloud of diesel, the old man kept looking back at them.
“I wonder what he’s afraid of?” Petey asked as they watched the tractor diminish down the road.
“Of landing in a ditch,” said Chace. “Or the blame fool ought to be. But it looks like his own shadow.”
Bumper nodded wisely, though he had no idea what Chace meant. Then, as the two other boys turned forward, he called out, “Hey! Look at that.”
“What is it?” asked Petey.
Bumper stared and leaned his head to the left, then to the right.
“I could swear I saw someone looking out of the straw.”
“Oh?”
“And not just one, but two. They were boys like us! But as soon as they saw I saw them, they hid again.”
“Hm!” said Petey. “Maybe the farmer thinks we belong to them . . .”
Bumper frowned.
“Why would he care?” he asked, sensibly. “Canadians are weird!”
Chace gave Bumper a frosty look, such as he did whenever he felt like recalling his Canadian roots.
“We’re about as much in Canada as we are in Timbuktu,” he said drily.
But Petey was thinking: Why would he care indeed? The farmer’s reaction was beyond the nuisance of a few hitchhikers cadging a ride in his cart. He had looked genuinely terrified.
There was something very strange going on here . . .
As they walked the rain had slowed to a drizzle and was now a haze that felt almost dry but wasn’t. The sky had partly cleared, dividing into white cloudy arcades above slants of distant rain moving toward the horizon.
Petey shook his head. There seemed to be something wrong with his vision. The colors seemed too dim. The greens were almost gray. He looked up at the sky; it too looked almost gray. For a moment he panicked; it was like being in a black-and-white movie.
“What color was the tractor?” he asked.
“Orange,” said Chace. “Like your hair.”
Good. Maybe it was just him. He shook his head again as the three walked ahead, hoping the colors would come back.
Then Bumper said, “Is Petey’s hair orange? It looks kinda . . .”
“Kinda what?”
“I don’t know . . . less orange?”
Chace gave Petey’s head an appraising look. Then he looked strangely around him, and shook his head.
“It’s just the rain,” he said, unconvincingly. “It’s gotta be the rain.”
So they were seeing the same thing, Petey thought. But that was weird: he had known that on rainy days colors were often deeper and brighter; he had never seen the opposite. Even the skin of his friends looked, well, gray.
It was a little like being inside a black-and-white TV show from the 1950s. He’d seen old episodes from Leave It to Beaver on YouTube. He wasn’t sure he wanted to be locked in with the Cleavers for the rest of his life. But there was nothing to do about right now, so he trudged forward with his friends.
At the next turn, the road left the woods and led straight ahead between two enormous fields. One of the fields lay unbroken across rolling landscape; the other, behind which Petey could see a farmstead—a battered silo next to a barn that had lost half its roof, a stable, an array of barracks-like outbuildings and sheds, and a farmhouse skulking behind a clump of trees—was half broken by a plough and prepared for seeding corn or alfalfa probably, depending on the rotation, as his father had told about the farmers outside Halloway.
Half way across the field, a small crowd surrounded a man standing on the back of a pickup truck similar to the one belonging to Bumper’s parents though it looked much older; the man was evidently telling them something of some importance, as the crowd was silent and still and the man made motions with his arms that suggested strong emphasis and emotions, even anger. Then Petey thought he saw the man take a stick and strike one of the people in the crowd.
“Did you see that?”
“See what?” asked Chace.
“That man just hit someone.”
The three boys stopped.
What surprised Petey even more than the blow was the abject silence and stillness of the crowd. It looked as though everyone had frozen the moment of the blow. The man continued speaking and waving his arms, if anything even more violently than before, sometimes pointing to the field around them. The shifting wind carried the shouted words “You have work to . . . I don’t care if it’s . . . And you’ll do as I . . .”
The man stopped abruptly, got down from the back of the truck and got into the cab, then drove off, fast. The crowd dispersed across the field. It was only then that Petey noticed that the crowd was made up almost entirely of black people. The man on the truck had been white.
Those colors were clear enough, even here.
Petey watched as what were clearly farm workers spread across a small area of field. There were a few white men among them. But they stood apart from the rest. They stood about slackly, holding long sticks under their arms as the blacks began to work the field.
A shiver ran down Petey’s spine. If he hadn’t known better, he might have thought the blacks were slaves, the men with sticks were overseers, and the man on the truck was their owner. But that couldn’t be true. Slavery had been illegal for over a hundred years. There had been a bloody civil war to end it.
The idea was too horrible, and Petey shook his head to drive it from his mind.
Then he noticed Chace looking across the field.
Petey waited for a sarcastic remark from his friend, but Chace was silent and just stared.
Bumper looked puzzled, then asked, “Why are they carrying guns?”
Of course! That’s what the sticks were.
“To shoot crows,” Chace said shortly, and began walking fast down the rigidly straight road.
But there were no crows to be seen across the miles and miles of fields around them.
Chapter Seven: Nevahwen
The sun was beginning to set hours later as the boys reached the edge of a town with the curious name of Ytima, according to a sign in black and dim yellow at the outskirts. They had seen no traffic on the road, and no pedestrians, no other farmers or workers, and few houses, business, or signs until the town crept up almost without their noticing it.
Their lack of attention was hardly surprising: by now the boys were very cranky, hungry, thirsty, and tired despite the rest they had taken a few hours before under a sumac just beginning to flower. But the lack of any stores or shops, diners or rest stops, even of gas stations, was strange, Petey thought, though he was too tired to bring it up to the others. The only sign of life since the events at the farm had been the periodic passing of military planes overhead, propeller planes in all cases, which made Petey wonder, Where were the jets? For a place with so many planes, he would expect to see at least a few contrails high in the sky: long trails of cloud-like haze across the azure, thinning and widening like long straight roads across the high stratosphere. But there was nothing like that.
The only propeller planes Petey had seen around Halloway were pontoon planes for hunters and tourists and old-fashioned biplanes at the air show held yearly in McCallan. Even the few fighters he had seen passing overhead looked like props used in movies about the Second World War. One very odd thing: Petey didn’t recognize the planes’ insignias. They were nothing like those of the U.S. Air Force or of any other nation’s air force he had seen in books and magazines about planes, an enthusiasm of his when he was eight.
Chace and Bumper made a game of pretending to shoot at the passing planes with imaginary guns, and Petey was just joining them when one of the planes caught sight of the boys and flew back over their heads in a frightening roar. The boys threw themselves into a roadside ditch, trying to hide as the plane swooped and rocked its wings before soaring away. Petey thought he could see the pilot in the glassed-in cockpit looking down at them through an insectoid gas mask.
As Petey lay in the ditch, watching the plane fly away blackly across the gray patchwork of fields and woods surrounding them, he had a tingling feeling as a thought that he had come to dread crossed his mind.
What if he was once again, though this time with both Chace and Bumper, in . . . ?
“An O’Hara’s! At last!” Chace blurted out half an hour later.
“O’Hara’s?” Bumper asked faintly. He was the hungriest and thirstiest and tiredest of the three. He looked up wistfully from where he had been staring at what felt like hours of blacktop.
O’Hara’s? thought Petey. Well, that buried the suspicion he had had in the ditch. Any world with O’Hara’s in it can’t be entirely in another world. And he looked where Chase was pointing with obvious satisfaction.
Except his reassurance was premature.
It’s true the name was familiar. But little else was. Where was the famous logo, where were the trademark colors and shapes, the unique design, the passthrough for cars, the specially designed windows and doors and all the details assorted with the chain? And where the customers?
In their place was a modest looking diner, painted in dim red (a very dim red, to Petey’s eyes, but at least it wasn’t completely gray) and white, with a tiny parking lot and a sign with the misleading name printed in type that looked like what Petey had seen in Chace’s German textbook (Chace was taking first-year German in school).
“Before we go in,” said Chace, “let me try my phone again. They must get a signal here. And we can fill our bellies while waiting to get rescued.”
“Sounds good to me!” said Bumper.
Petey readily concurred, with a relieved sigh.
But, once again, when Chace tried calling “the pater,” there was the dreaded message “No signal.”
Somewhat subdued, the boys entered the diner and took a booth near the entrance, and a timid-looking girl, not much older than Bumper and with a strange bump on her forehead, gave them menus.
Petey had never seen someone so young working at a diner.
“Looks like we can have anything we want,” Chace said, interrupting his thought, “As long as it’s sausages.”
Bumper opened his mouth as if to speak, but once again, nothing came out.
“For better,” said Chace, “or for wurst. Sorry. Never could resist a pun.”
“It’s our punishment for inviting you in the first place,” said Petey, though he was in anything but a joking mood. But his friend had asked for it.
“Watch it, or you’ll end up in a punitentiary.”
“There’s bad puns, there’s worse puns, and there’s wurst puns.”
“Stop it! You’re ruining my appetite!”
The boys’ nerves were stretched beyond bursting, and bad jokes are the most universal of juvenile defense against a bad fate.
But in fact various wursts were all the diner seemed to offer for savories: knackwurst, knockwurst, bratwurst, blutwurst, mettwurst, weisswurst, teewurst, and of course liverwurst. .
“There aren’t any hot dogs!” Bumper said in dismay.
“Looks like we’ve landed in the town’s Teuton zone,” said Chace, “meine kleine Schmetterling.”
Or (Petey thought) in a world where everything happens that might have happened in the real world, but didn’t. What had happened in this world was not yet clear, though Petey was beginning to have some disturbing ideas. He didn’t want to exacerbate Chace’s sarcasm, so he kept the thought to himself.
After all, it wasn’t certain. Yet how could you explain all of the peculiarities of this world otherwise . . .?
That word! That curse! . . .
“Anything wrong, old son?” Chace asked. “You look like a poster child for the latest purple state.’
“No,” said Petey. “I just bit my tongue.” Which was more true than he had intended.
“Well,” said Chace cheerfully, “as long as you don’t swallow it.”
“Like the fair!” said Bumper, with a sly look.
Chace glared at him. “Bumper, if you’re going to start committing jokes, please make sure they at least make sense.”
Bumper looked crushed. It had made perfect sense to him!
The boys ordered sausages and cokes from their timid child waitress, ate and drank in voracious silence, and left after admiring the check (the cost of the three meals was less than ten dollars; in Halloway, it would have been ten dollars apiece at least). They left a tip. But a few moments after they left, the child waitress came flying after them.
“We aren’t allowed tips to have!” she said with a frightened look as she returned the tip. “What you thinking were?”
There was a ferocious shout from inside the diner, and the girl looked back in panic, then, flustered, she touched the bump on her forehead and ran back into the diner.
The three boys looked at each other. They had heard of bad tippers and generous tippers, of saintly tippers and angelic tippers—but they had never of having a tip rejected, and not only that, but refused in a kind of terror.
Also, clearly there was something seriously wrong with the young lady’s mind, displayed by her tangled syntax. Which they were too polite to remark on.
Petey remembered the bump on the girl’s head and cringed. Had her boss hit her? And what was a girl as young as that, anyway, doing working in a diner? Didn’t they have child labor laws here?
Then Bumper said, “I didn’t know you could spell Coca-Cola with a k.”
“You can’t, actually,” responded Chace.
“Well, that was how it was spelled on my glass.”
The boys stopped and looked hard at each other. Chace and Petey hadn’t noticed the spelling on their own glasses, though they had noticed the reassuringly familiar design of the glass.
“You’re sure about that?” Chace asked skeptically.
Bumper blinked, suddenly not so certain.
“Well,” he said, “I think so.”
The boys continued on their way, bemused.
Petey sighed heavily, though he tried to hide it from the others. If it was true, it could wait. But all of this seemed yet more proof they were not in Howtiz—in the real world—anymore.
As the boys walked through the darkening streets of the vacant town (though Petey thought he saw an occasional face peeking through curtains in the eerily lightless windows and vanishing as soon as it saw them—like the little girl at the diner, they seemed terrified, but of what?), he heard a guttural coughing and sputtering sound unlike anything he’d ever heard. He turned just as a big open truck coughed and roared past them. It was black with a canvas awning; dozens of soldiers were crammed inside, armed with rifles from another era, and splashing the boys with mud from the recent rain.
“Hey!” Chace shouted after them. “Eat your own mud pies, you babies!”
One of the soldiers glared and pretended to aim his rifle as the boys ducked and huddled behind a trashcan shelter. Petey could see a cluster of faces burst into laughter.
“Please,” Bumper whimpered as he crouched against a large metal can, “don’t say that again.”
Chace responded by raising a rude finger above a fragrant garbage pail in the direction of the departing sound. “I promise,” he said.
They took turns wiping the mud off each other until Chace quipped, “Look out, Met Gala!”
Bumper snickered and leaned over to Petey.
“I know what that is!”
Petey shrugged.
“That’s where they wear naked dresses!”
“You’re thinking of the Grammies.”
Chace glanced over the trashcans as they left.
“Just what I guessed.”
“What’s that?” said Petey.
“They don’t recycle.”
Which was true, from the absence of the special bins used for such. But Petey was bccoming reluctantly sure that this, and anything like it, was an irrelevant issue; there was no such thing as “recycling” here. But again he kept his thought to himself.
The town’s street lights suddenly flicked on as though someone had thrown a switch. Petey was stuck by how strangely dim they were, a thin dull yellow, unlike the harsh bright white he was used to on the night streets at home.
“Sodium,” said Chace. “Very old fashioned. The pater says they still use them in little towns in Quebec.”
“The whole place seems old. Like it’s been locked in time.”
Bumper considered. “Like it’s still like when I was five?” he asked.
“Older than that,” said Petey. “Think of your grandparents.”
Bumper looked owlish as he contemplated the idea. That wasn’t a different time, that was a different universe!
There was still very little traffic; what there was, was made up of cars painted black and a few trucks that looked like those Petey had seen in movies from the 1940s on his mother’s favorite film noir channel. There were almost no pedestrians, and the few he saw moved furtively, almost fearfully, from shadow to shadow as the evening sky darkened. The women wore old-fashioned dresses and thick shoes, the men wore fedora-like hats and suits or workers’ outfits, mechanics’ overalls, farmer’s hats and jeans. One or two pedestrians passed the boys and looked about to speak to them; there was a look of warning in their faces, but they said nothing, and moved quickly away.
The boys passed another sign, in dull yellow and black, lit by a small light, that read: “Nevahwen, Kolonie Tucitcennoc.,”
Bumper tried several times, unsuccessfully, to pronounce the words on the sign.
“Don’t get lockjaw, Bumper,” said Chace. “It’s not worth it. Though I don’t like how they spell ‘colony,’”
Petey motioned ahead of them.
“Look.”
In the middle distance, a building stood under a sign saying “Polize Central.” A mass of soldiers stood in military formation around the building. They were fully armed and wore gas masks and riot gear.
Bumper shook his head.
“I didn’t know ‘police’ was spelled with a ‘z.’”
“It isn’t,” said Petey.
The boys watched as the soldiers marched in what was clearly a planned maneuver around the station. Then, leaving a remnant behind, the rest marched at double time into the neighboring streets.
What was uncanny was how silent they were: the boys couldn’t even hear the sound of their boots, as though they were cushioned, or the street itself refused to acknowledge their presence.
“I never saw soldiers in the street before,” said Petey.
“Neither have I,” said Chace hollowly.
“Is that strange?” asked Bumper.
Neither Petey nor Chace knew quite what to say to that.
Then Petey said what they were all thinking:
“I don’t know where we are, but wherever it is, something very wrong is going on here.”
Chapter Eight: KZ Elay
It felt as though weeks had passed since the boys had last slept in a warm bed.
“I’m. So. Ti. Red,” Bumper moaned.
Petey had been running on adrenaline, sugar, and caffeine from the diner’s coke, but felt he couldn’t last much longer without curling up and crashing, no matter how many soldiers had him in their sites.
But they agreed on one thing: they needed somewhere to hide. “And I think I see where that might work.” Chace motioned toward the distance, past the Polize Central.
Whatever his friend saw was not obvious to Petey, but, whatever it was, getting there would require a detour around the police station. Which required energy they were quickly running out of.
Yet, if they stopped now, they would collapse like a collection of empty bags into a blissful but possibly fatal sleep; they might well wake up on the business end of a bayonet (the rifle aimed at the boys from the back of the truck had been topped by a thing with an ominous gleam).
So, Chace leading the way, the boys snuck down a nearby alley, lit by a few dim lanterns hung from several back porches, for several blocks, then turned right onto a one-way street lit, if just barely, by the dim yellow street lights. The utter lack of life—still no traffic or pedestrians—felt uncanny; the lack of lights in the windows, the lack of sounds (were they all dead? or just too terrified to show signs of life?), was even stranger. A dog started barking furiously at them from a lightless yard, and the boys froze. Which only seemed to encourage the dog. Chace ran a few yards ahead.
“Bumper!” Petey hissed at the little boy, who seemed paralyzed.
“I’m. So. Sc. Ar. Ed!” Bumper got out in little bursts.
Petey grabbed him and pulled.
Bumper seemed frozen to the pavement, and Chace ran back and grabbed him by the other arm; the ice seemed to break, and Bumper staggered ahead. A few steps more by the boys, and the dog lost interest as quickly as it had found it.
The boys walked with as little noise as possible for several blocks until Chace pointed down a cross street toward the Polize Central with its contingent of soldiers, hanging out, looking bored. And trigger-happy, thought Petey.
There was no hiding from the street light, directed like a circus beam at the intersection, so the boys crept toward the middle of the block and cautiously jaywalked across the street.
“And whatever you do,” Chace cautioned, remembering more than one thriller he had seen in the movies, “don’t even think about running.”
They crossed one at a time, at long intervals.
The streets felt to Petey, as he waited to cross, even eerier here, where there were traffic lights turning green, yellow, red, green, yellow, red, over and again in perfectly timed sequences, despite the lack of traffic or pedestrians other than a trio of boys who weren’t supposed to be there in the first place. It was, of course, exactly like back home, and yet here, in the still night, with nothing and no one moving on the streets but the three boys, it seemed uncanny.
A full moon had risen and stood laughing sadly down at them (Petey thought). The town’s lights were so dim Petey almost gasped when he looked up: he was able to see more stars than were ever visible from the artificially lit streets of Halloway: hundreds on hundreds of tiny points of light seemed to deepen into the night’s darkness and silence infinitely far above them.
“Petey!” Chace hissed from the other side of the street.
Petey shook himself and, crouching to keep himself as hidden as possible in the darkness, crossed the street as slowly as he could without falling.
After another two blocks, they turned down another cross to the next major thoroughfare.
Chace pointed toward what he had surmised in the distance. Petey could now clearly see, maybe a quarter mile away, a hulking, shadowy silhouette, against a slightly less dark sky, of massive buildings and clumps of trees, with a few small lights randomly scattered among them; it looked like a park or a campus.
Maybe they could hide there. It looked promising. But almost anything not raked by staring street lights looked promising to Petey’s exhausted eyes.
Far away, Petey heard a long hollow moan, the sound of an old steam locomotive, then the regular ringing of a bell at a distant crossing. They were lonely sounds, especially at night in an empty town. Yet there was something almost comforting, familiar, in their loneliness. Down a street, half a dozen blocks away, he saw lights flashing in time to the bell, then the flickering of a passing freight train, rushing, then disappearing, complete with a lightless caboose, in the heavy blink of a sleepy eye. He imagined the sound more than he heard it.
He shook himself. He was so tired, he was hallucinating!
“Trainspotting?” Chace asked.
He didn’t miss a trick, that guy!
“It looks like a college campus,” said Petey. “Maybe they’ll let us sleep under the trees?”
However, the sign above the big iron gate, chained and locked, was not welcoming. It read:
KZ Ylay
Study du kill, werk du free.
It wasn’t very informative, to say the least (though he could relate to the “study kills” part), but he cared less about that than about finding somewhere to sleep. Though he was also beginning to feel a kind of lightheaded indifference, almost a second wind, something he had heard of when his father had to pull an all-nighter for work.
Bumper, on the other hand, looked like he was about to keel over at any moment, swaying in the street lights and only kept upright by planting his legs in a rock-solid A-formation, as taught by his Little League coach.
Chace stared at the sign with an expression that seemed to change, as Petey watched his friend, from puzzlement to alarm, to actual fear. Even in the dim light, his face seemed to go white.
“Is there something the matter?” he heard himself asking, stupidly. Of course there was something the matter! If there wasn’t anything the matter, would they be standing here in the middle of the night in a vacant city wondering where they’d find their next bed?
They had reached the compound of buildings and parkland seen earlier, hopefully, in the distance. And indeed it looked, in the moonlight and random patchwork of lights dotting it, very like a university campus or a specially designed park: a self-consciously old-school array of eccentrically designed buildings and halls stood along the other side of a spacious green criss-crossed with walkways and ancient trees—one ivied hulk had castle-like, crenellated turrets and faux loopholes; another had an elongated façade, pole-like, green-topped towers, and an immense stained-glass window, looking like a church in search of a religion. A great gothic pile dominated the whole. Yet there was something deeply strange about it, as though the buildings were little more than a screen: there were holes in the screen showing it was little more than a wreckage of buildings, a Potemkin college, half surrounding the immense quad.
Unlike the town, there were people in the quad, moving seemingly at random, without obvious purpose or intent. Petey looked more closely: they were of various ages, from early to late adulthood, some only teenagers, some very old. A middle-aged man walked while vigorously taking notes; he kept bumping into other people, seemingly surprised at each encounter, but then going back to walking and burying himself in his notes. An old woman on a bench seemed to be arguing with herself or a crowd of phantoms she looked around her piercingly, but not a sound came out of her mouth. A young woman kept counting on her fingers over and over, always dissatisfied with the result and always starting over again. A young man paced broodingly under a tree, stopped, raised his arm and seemed about to give a speech, hesitated. then paced again, stopped, raised his arm, hesitated and paced again, over and over.
The people paid no attention to the boys at the gate, and little attention to each other. They made little or no sound. A number moved in silence, in great circles across the green.
Petey noticed they all wore the same uniform: gray, without collars, for both men and women, and their feet were bare. The hair of many had been cut short, some had been shaved bald.
“Look up there,” said Chace, gesturing toward the top of the iron fence surrounding the campus or park. The fence was topped with layers of barbed wire, corroded and rusting from years of weathering.
Chace fiddled with an old padlock on the gate.
“Look at this,” he said.
Petey and Bumper looked at the lock.
There were words on it: “YLAY LOCK.”
“What’s strange about that?” asked Bumper.
“This is a Yale lock,” said Chace. “There’s no such thing as an ‘Elay lock.’”
Bumper pondered this.
“If there is an ‘Elon Musk,’” he said, remembering the name of a famous rich man he had heard a lot about on the internet, “why can’t there be an ‘Elay lock’?”
Chace gave him a look.
“Do you know what the ‘KZ’ stands for, smarty?”
“No,” said Bumper, with a modest look.
“It stands for ‘Konzentrationslager.’”
Bumper looked befuddled, then, recognizing the word “lager,” said brightly:
“Is that a kind of beer?”
“No,” said Chace. “It’s not a kind of beer.”
“It means ‘concentration camp,” said Petey, hollowly.
They stared through the locked iron gate at the convicts in the university turned into a prison.
“Ja wohl, mein Herr” was Chace’s response.
“Achtung!” a voice shouted commandingly behind them.
Why was someone shouting at them in German? Petey thought in a panic as he turned.
At the moment the boys turned, a blindingly bright light was turned on and all three boys, unable to see anything but a soupy plasma of glare, raised their arms against it.
The voice poured out a flood of what sounded to Petey like German, and there was a confused sound of clanking metal and boots. A second voice started arguing with the first. Petey knew no German and looked to Chace for guidance. Then the light flicked off and Petey could see the soldiers arguing.
Petey was now completely awake. He smelled the fragrance of something he had long known at home and saw a juniper bush growing thickly against the fence a few yards off. He poked at Chace and Bumper and, motioning toward the bush, ran to it in a low crouch. The boys dug themselves in between bush and fence, the stems gouging Petey’s eyes until they teared. He cursed to himself. Chace prudently pushed his chest against the fence so his back faced the bush. Bumper, in his own little world of prickly woe, kept bravely quiet.
The glaring light went back on, and the soldiers gabbled away incomprehensibly. Fortunately, none thought of the bushes thickly growing along the fence; they seemed too busy blaming each other. After a few more minutes of arguing, they moved away at a quick march.
“We need to get out of here,” Petey whispered.
When the noise of the soldiers had faded, and all the boys could hear were the sounds of the bare feet of the prisoners on the other side of the fence moving through the grass, Petey pulled himself from behind the bush and, seeing no signs of the soldiers, instinctively moved along the fence in the direction of the train tracks he had seen earlier. Chace and Bumper followed.
“Skull and bones!” someone called from the fence.
Petey looked back and caught sight of the old woman he had seen earlier arguing silently with the air around her; she was leaning against the other side of the fence and watching them with a half-mad grin. “Skull and bones alma mater lux et veritas beat old Hahvahd!”
“We really do need to get out of here,” said Chace, echoing Petey. “Now.”
A beam of the light they had seen earlier flashed against the sign above a closed grocery store across the street. And the boys began running, their exhaustion replaced with panic.
Past parked cars from decades ago, past shops asleep behind dark display windows (manikins in the sleek dresses and stylish hats of 1947 posed in the shadows), past closed bars and small restaurants with names like Cross Keys and Tito’s, Hamburg’s Hamburgers and The Last Tap, two of them with weird signs: “Guessin’? Essen” and “Drinken ohne Enden”; past a boarded-up bookstore, an abandoned art gallery, a gas station with two forlorn pumps and a hand-painted sign “Gas Oil Maps” (“What are ‘maps’?” asked Bumper in a loud whisper as he ran just behind Petey; “GPS before smart phones,” Chace hissed just behind him), past a small parking lot covered with crushed clam shells and a five-and-dime store with a name that was familiar but not quite right: “Woolswort”, the boys ran, stopping frequently to see if they were being followed.
When they reached the railroad crossing, Petey saw the tracks turn the length of a football field away, and there he could see what looked like three or four freight cars on a siding under a brightly lit billboard, high on a hill behind them. The billboard advertised a huge red Volkswagen “beetle,” with a gigantic blond woman draped over the top and leering down at the sleeping town. The words “Wagensvolk – für Loyal Volk!” appeared in red at the top.
Seeing the picture of the car was jarring because Petey knew the company had retired the famous design decades before. His mother, who had once owned a “beetle” – keeping it till it practically fell apart beneath her as she drove it into the ground through the quiet streets of Halloway – never ceased to lament its loss: it was the only automobile she had ever loved. She had even given it a name: Twinklebell, after the Peter Pan stories. For her desktop background (where Petey had first seen a picture of the car), she used a photograph of the little, battered, canary yellow auto that she took the day she left it at the junk yard. Petey also knew the origins of the bewitching “bug” (it looked like an over-sized lady bug, and was just as irresistibly charming to a little child) in the for-once (and perhaps only) life-affirming act of imagination of a genocidal Austrian dictator.
Petey led the boys toward the freight cars. The second wind (or was it the third or fourth by now?) and the shot of adrenalin were beginning to fade; the bone-deep fatigue was returning. And the same thing seemed to be happening to Chace and Bumper as they limped behind him. The steel tracks gleamed in a rhythm of light and shadow from the narrow, regularly spaced cross streets and alley dead ends that led like the rungs of a ladder laid flat on the ground straight to the cars.
He was so, so tired, but maybe, maybe, just maybe, he hoped, and he even prayed, though he had never been really religious, though they celebrated the holidays, Christmas and all that, religion was not his family’s faith, which was devoted, though they didn’t seem to realize it was a faith (which seemed very ironic suddenly to Petey as he swam through a soup of ideas that in his exhaustion seemed to come at him from all sides like a swarm of fish), to science and rationality and technology and the power of the human will, “You can be anything you want to be,” I mean, really? I can be a Volkswagen beetle “if I really want to be”? I don’t think so! it seemed as bizarre as any religion, but wait, I need to focus, on what? oh yes, on getting to the freight train, where maybe, maybe, maybe, just maybe, we’ll find somewhere to hide so the soldiers won’t find us, though why do they want to find us? Who are they anyway? And why do they spell it with a “z”? and above all sleep sleep sleep sleep, I’ve never felt so tired in my life, but I have to keep awake now now now now now? NOW no matter what no matter what no matter what no matter . . .
But he must have fallen asleep on his feet anyway, because Petey jarred awake just as he was about to hit his head on a piece of metal jutting from what looked like a metal wall. Chace and Bumper crashed against Petey’s back and nearly fell.
“Hey,” said Chace, to both Petey and Bumper. “Look where you’re going.”
“Be quiet,” whispered Petey, waking up completely and looking up at the end of the first of three freight train cars with their best years behind them and standing on a siding far beneath the brilliantly glowing billboard. “We’re there.”
“Where’s there?”
Without answering, Petey walked down the side of the freight car and tried to open a sliding door in the middle. No luck, but it seemed rusted shut, not locked. Then, followed by the others, he went along the side of the second car and tried the door in the middle. This one yielded almost a foot to Petey’s yanking.
“Help me here,” he said to Chace, who took a grip on the door and started heaving. After a few minutes, it opened another foot, and the boys squeezed inside.
The first thing Petey felt was an enormous sense of relief: he felt safe, the first time he had felt safe for hours that felt like years. He couldn’t be seen, and so he couldn’t be caught.
The second thing was an almost unbearable stench.
“What’s that smell?” Bumper asked in an appalled voice. He too had come violently awake.
“Keep it down!”
“It smells like a dead cow,” Chace said, also fully woken.
His uncle was a dairy farmer, so he would know.
“It’s probably some animal that crept in for shelter,” Chace continued, “then somebody closed the door on it.”
There were a number of burlap bags bunched against the walls, with just enough room for the boys to lie down.
“Well, maybe if we keep the door open, it’ll air out,” said Petey.
“It’s a chance,” said Chace. “But they look like they haven’t been moved in decades.”
“I could sleep for decades,” said Petey as he stretched out near one of the bags.
“Me too,” said Bumper. Then he asked, “What’s a decade?”
“Your age!” said Chace.
Soon all three had curled up near the bags and fallen into the deep sleep of childhood and oblivion.
You would think nothing could wake the three boys after their exhausting day, but Petey’s eyes opened, with weary reluctance, at a sound of voices outside, then a rusty noise of metal joining metal, then, a few minutes later, the car seemed to squeal, and began moving. The other boys didn’t wake.
Am I dreaming? Petey thought woozily, half way between sleeping and waking. I must be dreaming. Please make it a dream. Please please make it be a dream, as he saw, through the still open door, shadows, then lights from cross streets and alley dead ends, pass by, slowly at first, then more and more swiftly, until he saw the starlit night and the descending moon.
____
Christopher Bernard is a prize-winning author of both poetry and fiction. The two earlier stories in the “Otherwise” series are If You Ride A Crooked Trolley . . . and The Judgment Of Biestia (winner of the Independent Press Award in Preteen Fiction and short-listed for the K M Anthru International Literature Award).
