Infinity's Reach (11 page)

A sudden chill came over me, and I dug my hands into my pockets to keep warm. When I did so, I felt something small in the bottom of my right pocket. Curious, I pulled it out. It was a small slip of paper. On one side it had mark of a sideways 8:  ∞

I immediately knew that it was the sign for Infinity: my sign. I used to use it as a signature in school when I passed notes. But th
is couldn’t be one of those notes. It had been years since I was in school, and I wasn’t even wearing my own clothes anymore.

Mystified, I turned it over and found two lines of numbers:

1-19-31-24

2-4-14-3

I stared at the numbers for a long while, trying to figure out where they had come from, wanting to gain some solace from them. But I finally gave up.

I sat on the cold ground and hugged my knees, straining to listen to the sounds. There were human voices, but they were muffled as if they were a long way away. I heard that same howl I’d heard two nights before—and then it was cut off abruptly. Suddenly there was shouting by a couple of people. Then I heard a gunshot. And then another. And a third. Then there was silence.

To me, the silence was scarier than the sounds. The sounds gave me an indication of who was out there and what was happening. The silence told me nothing.
Had they left? Were they watching me right now?

I sat there for another half hour, waiting for something to happen when I saw something—a form or shape—within the fog. It was on the water, coming in the direction we had come, but it wasn’t swimming. Instead, it looked like someone was walking on the surface of the water. I strained to see who or what it was, but all I saw for a long time was a dark figure in the gray.

Gradually, the figure took shape and I realized that it was a tall man standing on the top of a flat-bottomed boat. He was using a pole to push himself along. And as I continued to watch, the dark figure turned into someone I knew.

“Evangelist,” I breathed, almost crying when I saw his approach. And then tears did come. It took him another couple of minutes to reach the shore, but in that time, I cried and cried like I’d never cried before.

He pushed the square end of the boat up onto the shore, and stepped out onto the clay. He reached out and grabbed me to hug me, but instead I reached up and slapped him. The move startled him and we stared at each other for a long moment before I did hug him.

“I suppose I deserve that,” he said. “Two days can be a long time out here.”

“You bet it can,” I said, still clutching him.

“First things first,” he said, pulling away. “This is yours, I believe.” He turned to the flat-bottomed boat and pulled out my backpack. He reached into a side pocket and drew out a large container of water. I’d been very close to drinking the water around us, even though I knew I’d regret it. But fortunately I hadn’t, and wasn’t sick because of it. Now I had clean water and I downed it quickly.

While I drank, Evangelist took out a couple of apples, some granola and a roll of salami. He lay down a tarp to make a clean place in which to eat. I stopped my drinking long enough to sit down and begin eating.

“Ellie’s gone,” I told him, matter-of-factly. I reached for the salami.

“I can see that,” he said.

“We need to go get her,” I said.

He sighed. “Go where? I followed your path and didn’t see her.”

“She talked about going back to that burger lady in Harmony.”

“Her? If she went back to her, Ellie’s already gone. That woman works with the Coalition.”

“Then we have to go rescue her,” I said. I started to get up, dropping the salami back on the tarp. Evangelist sighed and reached up to grab my arm.

“Are you always this big of a pain in the rear?” he said, then shook his head. “Listen to yourself, Pilgrim. She chose to go back. We don’t know where she is now. And chances are, she got grabbed by the military.” He sighed. “And you remember what happened the last time I tried to rescue someone from the military.”

I smirked at him. “I thought Secret Service could do anything.”

He smiled in response. “Maybe some of them can, but I’m still somewhere early in the learning curve. I will tell you this, though.” He stood and started putting food back in the backpack. “I never give up. It took me two years to find you, but I did. And then when I lost track of you two days ago, I found you again.”

I stared at him seriously. “And I’m glad you did. But why are you putting the food away? I just got started eating.”

“You can eat in the boat. We have a ways to go. This place isn’t safe.”

“Didn’t you kill those crazies back there? Wasn’t that your gun that I heard?”

He nodded, throwing the backpack in the boat and handing me an apple to go with my stick of salami. “It was. I killed six. But there are always more out there. And the thing you’ll need to remember about using a gun is that it makes noise that others can hear. Now get in.”

I didn’t ask any more questions, but obeyed him. Now that I could remember the first time I saw him—that day in the classroom—I felt embarrassed that I’d ever caused him grief. As I looked at this handsome man standing in front of me, poling our boat through the shallow water, apparently completely oriented despite the thick fog, I grew more and more fond of him. Two years seemed like a very long time, and now I wasn’t the little girl of 15, but was a woman of 17. The only problem was that I’d missed two years of experiences in there, and my body, due to malnutrition, still didn’t look the part of a 17-year-old.

But the world had changed—and was continuing to change. I’d started out life not caring about what was happening in the world; nothing was important but what was happening to me on that particular day. Now I realized that the world was a very big place, but many things that happened in it affected me very significantly. It was time to do something about my ignorance.

“Evangelist,” I said. “Tell me what you know about what’s going on. Tell me about the war.”

He cleared his throat, looking around, always aware of our surroundings as he spoke.

“Well, you remember the EMP, don’t you?” he asked. “There were actually several EMPs on that same day, across the U.S., up above the stratosphere. That’s the way they were able to walk into the U.S. without us fighting back or even knowing they were here.”

“Who are they?” I asked. “Who attacked us?”

“Well, because of the EMP, we didn’t have a lot of information available to us. A few pockets here and there weren’t affected by the Event, such as St. Louis and Minneapolis, and that’s where most of our first information came from. At first we thought it was the Chinese, or the North Koreans, but it turned out to be a Coalition of several groups who didn’t like us very much.

“Right now, we have armies fighting us in North America from six different Asian nations, as well as Americans who have decided to join the other side and cartels down south.”

“Cartels?” I repeated.

“Yeah, apparently they were in on the surprise party. When the EMP rolled over the U.S., they decided to take over Texas. They’ve gotten as far north as San Antonio, and every Texan who is serving with the National Guard is itching to jump ship and go fight for their home state.”

“How do you know all of this?” I asked.

“I…well, it’s classified,” he mumbled to me.

“You can share all of this information about the world, but you can’t tell me where you got it?”

He stared at me, apparently wanting to tell me more. Finally he nodded.

“The messages come from a variety of sources. I have a hand-cranked radio that I attach to a balloon to get my messages. Once a week at sundown I run up the balloon. Other times, runners bring the message. We have a whole network of runners. The message is coded numbers and usually comes on a small slip of paper.”

A flash went off in my head and I reached into my pocket.

“You mean, sort of like this?” I asked him, holding up the paper I had found earlier.

He stepped forward and took it from me, looking at it intently.

“This is from your father,” he said finally. “I can tell.”

I wondered how Evangelist could know so much about my father, more than I even knew. And I realized that they must have spent time together—before and after The Event. I envied him.

“How do I decipher it?” I asked.

“It’s a book cypher. Each Cabinet member chooses a book to base his encryption on.”

“How do you know which book they’ve chosen?”

He smiled thinly. “That’s what keeps it secret. You have to know the person well enough to know which book they would have chosen.”

I stared at Evangelist, knowing that he knew the answer, but not knowing my Father well enough to be able to answer the question. Finally I guessed.

“When I was little, he used to read to me from a book called
Pilgrim’s Progress
. Is that it?”

Evangelist shook his head slightly. “Try again. It’s the book that
Pilgrim’s Progress
is based on.”

I frowned, thinking, then guessed again. “The Bible?”

In response, he reached into his backpack and handed me a small black book with the words “Holy Scriptures” marked in gold on the cover. And then he turned away.

“So how do I use the code?” I asked.

“Figure it out,” he said. “It’s not a difficult code and you’re relatively smart.”

“Thanks,” I said, flatly. I looked at the black book, and lay it down next to me.

He looked up, surprised. “You’re not even going to try? I’d think that a message from your Father would motivate you some to figure it out.”

“Later,” I said, my stomach rumbling. “Now I’m starving and I want to know what is going on. Why did they invade in the first place?”

He cringed. “If you knew the Asian way of thinking, you’d realize that every plan is part of a larger plan, which in turn is part of an even larger plan. As far as we can tell, their army in the U.S. really isn’t that big. Not big enough to occupy and control a country with 300 million people—at least that’s how many there were when they attacked. We think they were just wanting to keep us occupied while their main force was somewhere else.”

“So why don’t we kick them out?”

“We’re trying. But we had all of our forces overseas fighting in two wars, and it takes a while to get untangled from that mess. And the people we’re fighting over there aren’t helping things. Believe me, our troops are on their way.”

“On their way? It’s been two years.”

“I know. But there’s stuff going on that’s above our pay grades.”

“Top secret. I know,” I grumbled.

“So secret that they don’t even tell me,” he said. “See, I don’t know everything.”

“You know enough,” I said. “Speaking of which, when do I get a gun?”

Evangelist turned and looked at me strangely.

“I never thought of you as the gun type.”

I stared back at him. “Sir, I am no longer the girl you rescued from St. Eloise’s Academy for Girls. I am a modern woman.”

A slight smile came over his lips. “More like post-modern. You’ll get your gun when I’ve had a chance to train you on how to use it. Soon enough.”

I noticed that the sun was going down behind us. “Uh, Evangelist, I know you know everything, but it looks like we’re going east.”

“We are,” he said. “East, then north. We are going to spend a time with some friends just a little north of here. I thought I could just escort you to Camp Zion by myself, but plans have changed.”

“I know,” I said, interrupting. “Classified.”

He grinned. “How did you guess?”

And as I watched him, I realized that he looked pretty good when he smiled.

I wasn’t sure how I felt about the message from Father. I loved him and missed him, but still felt a little angry about the fact that he wasn’t around when I needed him most. I was sorting through those mixed feelings, and so I didn’t want to share those feelings with Evangelist. Not yet, at least.

That night we camped on a rise overlooking the river. It was the night that Evangelist usually got orders, so he was out sending up a balloon to see if he could learn anything new. That gave me some private time to figure out how to decipher the code.

It turned out to be pretty easy. The two numbers I had gotten were: 1-19-31-24 and 2-4-14-3.

The first number in each sequence was either a one or a two. That meant it was Old or New Testament. From there, I figured out that the numbers meant book, then chapter, then verse. Using that strategy, I determined that the first verse was Psalms 31:24: “Be strong and take heart, all you who hope in the Lord.”

The second one was from the New Testament, John 14:3: “And I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.”

It wasn’t much. It didn’t tell me how to get to Camp Zion. But it was a message of hope from my Father, and that was enough. As Evangelist returned to the campfire, I fought back tears and put the Bible and the slip of paper in my pocket.
  
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