Another Bubble One

Alone but noticed,

Theorized but not tested,

Too afraid of the shakes…

Ten miles north of Andy’s house:

He ran away from home, but he was only fourteen, so he was having to walk. How long until they found out? How much of his routine hasn’t happened? He hadn’t gotten far, and because he was just now running away, he didn’t have a direction. He just picked a random direction and went. It happened to bring him through the woods. That was good. He could hide then. Not just from his parents, but from the rest of the world. No matter what, kids were always wrong. Grownups were always right, and to make things worse, to make him that much more the new enemy to society’s rules, grownups always banded together to hunt the enemy down. Those recruits didn’t even have to be relatives or neighbors. Any responsible adult would do. Total strangers that, once aware of the mission, were sure of how guilty he was. Like they instantly knew him and his family.

But wait. Were even the trees betraying him? He was soon entering a clearing, an accidental emergence from a bumbling security. He stopped and gazed ahead. This stretch was one of those paths laid out for a line of power line poles, which he wanted to see as a sudden convenience. No one ever came to areas like this. Not even the people who set up the poles. In a way, this area was just like the woods. Instead of being buried in vegetation, he was lost in obscurity.

Besides, the trees might have hid him from everyone, but they also hid him from himself. He had been taking random steps with nothing but trees passing by. No real progress or lack thereof. He at least had a path now, but he also knew he’d eventually hit the end…like he felt at home. Lost and at the end of everything.

But at least he had some distance to go before he reached this end. He didn’t walk too close to the power line poles, not because he was afraid of them, like there was a possibility he would get electrocuted if he touched them or walked on the ground around their bases, some strange electric power lurking underneath the dirt just because that’s where the power line poles stood, but because they were walking their path. He wanted his own. He would just walk along side them for now, sharing the trail.

Yet, already something barred his way. Something small. A curiosity….on his path. He chose this path, didn’t he? Well, he couldn’t exactly say that. He stumbled here, but if he were to pull from the fact that it was his decision to leave his house that brought him here, he could justify his claim on this path being his. Regardless, he was too angry to choose another. He wouldn’t go around this curiosity either. He would throw it out of his way. So, he walked up to it.

And he stopped.

It was a wrench. A big wrench. He didn’t know what kind of wrench because the business end was stuck in the ground. The rest of the wrench was sticking up at a slight slant. The end came up to his knee, probably would have gone past his knee if it was standing straight up.

Okay, so it was a wrench sticking up out of the ground. Some utility guy dropped it from high up. Dropped it and forgot it. It just happened to land this way, stabbing the ground like a knife.

Nevertheless, it was blocking his path. So, he reached down and gripped it with one hand. He pulled. The sound he heard he wrote off as thunder, because the sky was cloudy and there was a chance it would rain today (perfect) and because he was surprised at how stuck the wrench was. It couldn’t have been in the ground that deep, and the wrench couldn’t have been that long.

He pulled again, listening to the echo of that previous thunder overhead.

The wrench was really stuck. But there was just dirt there, right? Was it wrapped around a root or something? Funny thing was, the dirt around the wrench wasn’t even disturbed, as though the wrench just grew out of the ground.

Before he pulled again, he tried wiggling the wrench, but the wrench didn’t even move. The tool might as well have been stuck in dried cement, but there was no cement, just dirt.

He forgot about why he was here, and the wrench was a curiosity now. He squatted down to get a closer look, as if that would help. Nope, just the neck of the wrench disappearing under the dirt.

Perhaps this wrench had been forgotten for a long time. The rain washed the dirt around the neck, but that wasn’t what secured it. Maybe the worker was doing something to a pipe running the length of this clearing. Convenient. But the wrench got caught or just wouldn’t release the bolt or whatever, and the worker just abandoned it.

Gave up. But he wouldn’t give up. He took the wrench in both hands now and pulled hard.

The vibration wasn’t noticeable at first, but the longer he pulled, the more time there was for the vibration to settle into its gyration. The thunder rolled overhead again.

It didn’t take the boy long to notice the ground was actually shaking. Then he wasn’t worried about whether or not the wrench was stuck on a pipeline or that it was standing in his path. He was looking at the possibility that he was standing in the middle of an earthquake where earthquakes never happened.

But sure enough, the ground was a blur, but he had a suspicion that if the ground was looking back at him, he’d be a blur, too. The two of them were shaking against one another. He felt it mostly in his feet. His feet were singing. They tickled inside his shoes and felt like butter.

Never mind that, though, he was in a clearing, but the clearing was only so wide. It was lined with trees that hissed now. He thought about what happened every year around Christmas when his family went to the Christmas tree farm. After the farmer cut one down for them, he took it to this machine where the tree was shaken for a couple of seconds to rid itself of all the loose leaves and dead limbs.

It only lasted a couple of seconds, he remembered, and maybe because he remembered it that way, this earthquake played by the same rules and stopped seconds after he realized it was happening.

Now silence. Was this a trick, or did that really happen? Waiting would reveal what was to come, so he did, feeling a flutter in his chest. That flutter was the only sound he heard, and he was surprised at how loud it was. It drowned out everything else which was ridiculous since a real life earthquake just happened…didn’t it?

He glanced about the clearing, remembering where the heart of the town was, waiting, listening. There were no alarms or people screaming. Nothing. He thought he might’ve heard something like blaring car horns followed by traffic collisions. Stuff like that usually happened in times like this, right? People just go nuts.

But no. He heard nothing.

So, was that it? One tiny little earthquake? An explosion somewhere then? Did some factory blow up? Who knew why? What factory, though? He knew there were some in this town, but as for where they were, what they were, and how many, he never knew. Never paid attention to stuff like that, really. He just figured there had to be factories in this town because towns had factories.

He glanced back the way he had come from. He guessed he emerged from the woods somewhere along the middle of this path. Perhaps it branched off from a power plant. That was probably what exploded.

But he saw no smoke rising from the trees in that direction. It had to have been a big explosion. It shouldn’t have taken any time at all for a black cloud to belch its way into view. All he saw was the gray unmoving sky.

Something exploded somewhere. He’d already written off the earthquake scenario. A plane crash? No smoke. Well, none that he could see from where he was standing, other than in either direction to which this path led. He’d have to get to the end of it to get a view or hear what had happened.

He turned in his original direction once more and made up his mind…but first, there was the wrench.

“Stupid wrench.” he muttered, wondering why it irked him so. Forget the wrench. He reared one foot back and kicked it forward, connecting the toe of his shoe to the short metal stalk…and felt a bolt of pain spark from the edge of his toes and shoot all the up his leg and on up his spine.

He gasped and hissed at the pain, yanking his foot back. He wanted to step backward, away from the object that caused him pain, but he couldn’t bring himself to put his wounded foot down, so he hopped backward with his other foot and bent down, grasping his shoe in both hands.

“Ooooohhhh, that suuuuuucked.” he groaned. After a moment he glanced up at the wrench and a possible explosion somewhere was farthest from his mind. What was in the forefront was the…

“Stupid…” he scoffed, released his foot to stamp it on the ground, and snatched the wrench with one hand. He leaned forward and readied himself. He wanted to rip it from the ground and let it fly free after that, so he lowered his head, closed his eyes, took in a deep breath…and yanked.

He roared, but not because he was throwing all the effort he had into that one action. 

A thunder rolled overhead. The ground vibrated for a breath of a second, and then his hand slipped free of the wrench. He twisted around, lost his footing, and fell to sit facing the secured tool.

Now what was he supposed to think?

Despite his sudden flare of rage, he wasn’t blind enough to miss the tiny quake that occurred before he was forced to sit down. He gazed at the wrench. He shook it. Only his arm and wrist moved. The wrench was frozen in place.

He let go of it and got to his feet. He was standing beside the wrench now, looking down at it, curious. For some reason, probably a last-minute snatch at sanity, he glanced down either direction of the clearing, checking off the possibilities. Then he looked down at the wrench. He bent down and took it in one hand. He waited, blinked, and then he gripped it with his other hand. He took in a deep breath and pulled.

It didn’t take long at all for the vibration to settle into its full on rhythm. The ground buzzed. He buzzed, and the trees hissed.

He stopped pulling. Everything settled. He didn’t bother to glance down either direction of the path. He didn’t even check the trees. He was staring wide-eyed at the wrench.

He yanked.

The ground shook.

He stopped.

Everything stopped.

Yank.

Rumble.

Yank. Yank. Yank.

Rumble. Rumble. Rumble.

He cried out, releasing the wrench and stumbling back. He stared at it, panting hard. After a moment, he shook his head, “What…what is it?”

This Bubble Two

A scenic route,

Traveled often,

But never this quiet…

Two miles southeast of the wrench.

Everything stood still, except for Andy and his car. The houses lining the highway he’d known all his life wouldn’t move, of course, but under that gray blanket they looked frozen. Not cold, just still as anything could have been.

He was glancing at them while he traveled at sixty-five miles per hour, but each glimpse showed him more than he thought he would see. Normally, houses and things passed in a blur with generalized shapes and color enough to know what was what. Now, they passed with every detail exposed.

They weren’t just houses. They were impressions in his eyes, more than houses, more than people’s homes. More than the materials used to make them. They were alive. With voices and everything, but they said nothing. They just presented themselves.

He didn’t know why, but he appreciated them more now than he had ever considered that he might. He wondered what Kathrin would have thought if he told her about that.

He would be glad to talk to anybody at this point.

He was coming up to a four-way red light. He had to stop because the intersecting road was given the green, but there was nobody there. No one pulled up beside him. No one waited on the other side to go south while he was waiting to go north.

He looked left and right, but whoever triggered the lights for those ways were long gone now. He wished he could have seen them and wondered why he wished it. The answer came to him, unintended, in the form of the word: clarification.

To clarify what? That there were other people there before he arrived to trigger the green lights? Because he wanted to see other people? His whole trip so far had been a lonely one. A ten minute drive lacking bozos who pulled out in front of you or drove really slow in the left lane or jumped in front of you to go around the ones driving really slow in the left lane, et cetera, et cetera.

He had stayed in the right lane the whole time, just cruising. His MP3 player was hooked up to his car speakers by way of a cassette tape adapter, playing easy classical music. Seemed like the right sound for what he was seeing. Classical music could always paint worlds or moods in his mind. Now, it gave life to the undead world just beyond the windshield and windows of his car.

He had a choice of switching the MP3 player over to the FM radio. It would have been another voice in this voiceless world. Yet, he had an eerie notion that if he tried listening to the radio, he’d hear nothing but static on all the stations. Even the AM side. As ridiculous as he thought that was, he didn’t switch over. He just let the classical music trick him. He wanted to believe something else, to stop his mind from conjuring up another form of paranoia that was convincing him this peace was too good to be true. A peace like that hurt the mind. Instead of relief, there was an invisible weight, an indescribable weight. Well, he could think of one way to describe it. It was a mood. One he wanted to change.

What mood was it? He was trying to describe it with one word, but other words kept running through his mind, hitting close but missing the mark. Words like: asleep, dead, gone, frozen, lazy, tired, jaded, indifferent, apathetic. Then he thought he got it when the word ‘empty’ settled in his stomach.

No coffee. No fried eggs. He just got up, put on his clothes, got his gear, and went out to the car. He was running on a completely empty stomach.

“That’s it.” he muttered loud enough to hear himself over the music, which wasn’t turned up all that loud. “It’s all…empty.”

There were two gas stations at the four-way light. One to his left, on the south side of the light. The other was on his right and on the north side of the light. There were no cars at any of the gas pumps. No cars parked along the outer edges of the buildings. He stared at the one at his left since it was a bit closer. The whole front wall was nothing but glass windows showing everything inside. Of course, it would have been easier to see everything if the interior lights were on.

Weren’t they on? The store had to be open. He assumed the daylight, as dim and gray as it was, would have messed with his eyes, and the inside of the store would have looked darker than it was, but he was convinced that the lights were off. That the store was closed.

He looked over at the other store, but there was no way of knowing about that one. The door was mostly glass, but the windows to the right of the door were obscured by blinds rolled down three quarters of the way. They were always dark. To the east of that gas station, sharing the same large slab of potholed cement, was a small stretch of stores, one of which Andy knew was a liquor store. The other ones, he didn’t know, but all of them were dark inside, and there were no cars parked outside. Not even the cars of the clerks who worked the stores.

This area, it was dead. Both stores were convenient, never dead. No, not dead at all. He wasn’t alone here. There were three living things here. Himself and the two gas stations. They were presenting themselves without words just as the houses along the highway had done. A tingle went up his spine. The more he stared at one gas station, the more he felt like it was staring back.

Yeah, too many people in one spot.

He glanced up at the light and saw it was green. Whether it had just turned green or it had been green while he was discovering this lack of loneliness, he didn’t know. He pressed the gas and continued on, feeling the two gas stations watching him go.

Overhead, the sky didn’t move, holding the world under a gray grip while being held captive as well.

Next Chapter: Another Bubble Two