Madelyn's Nephew (34 page)

“Did you get the welder?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

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She flipped up the mask and waved the smoke out of the way.
 

“I’m not sure it’s as safe as it was. I don’t think my weld has the same capacity as the original braid,” she said.

“I’m sure it’s fine,” Elijah said. “That’s a backup anyway, right? The primary wasn’t broken.”

“Broken, no. Stressed? Absolutely,” she said.

She stood up slowly and allowed Elijah to help her to her feet.

“Ready for a test?” she asked.

He smiled.

They removed all the equipment from the top of the lift. It was a slow process. Elijah did most of the work. Every tool had to be handed down through the hatch to Jacob’s outstretched hands. Then, with everything put away, Elijah helped Madelyn down until her foot was on the ladder. Jacob kept a hand under her armpit until she was down to the floor.

She was grateful that there had been work for her to do. With the men always hovering, her recovery had moved slowly. Once she had a task, she drove herself hard. She felt like she was almost at a hundred percent.

Elijah came down after her and moved the ladder out of the lift.

Jacob moved to the panel and put power to the unit. The doors slid shut.

Elijah smiled as he hit the button. The doors slid open, working in harmony. They looked perfectly trustworthy.

Jacob moved forward. Madelyn put out her hand and stopped him.

“Just me for the first trip,” she said. “Until I know it’s safe.”

Jacob and Elijah consulted with each other silently. Madelyn didn’t wait for their decision—she moved forward, turned, and hit the button. The doors slid closed. They were trapped in her tomb and she was ascending to the real world.

The trip only took a couple of seconds. The stairs rose in front of her, welcoming her up to the light above. She flipped the switch on the door, locking the lift in place, and began to climb. She was out of breath by the time she reached the living room.
 

Her grandmother’s cabin almost looked normal. Here and there, the light sparkled on stray grains of sand. She would probably find them for years to come. Madelyn passed by her wall of skulls and exited through the front door. Dusk was falling on her patch of lawn. A fog was moving in from the south. It was normal for the spring. The warm air rose away from the setting sun and hit the cool air that slipped over the mountains. At least that was the story that Madelyn told herself. It was the mythology she had created to explain the phenomenon.
 

She had a decision to make. The locked lift wouldn’t hold the men forever.
 

She had to decide if they were worth the trouble. The world was spread out before her. In five minutes, she could be deep enough into the woods that they wouldn’t track her down. In an hour, she would be a ghost. She could compose her own mythology to explain why she had left them behind.
 

Madelyn took a deep breath and closed her eyes.

If Elijah was right, science had died at the hands of its creators.
 

The artifacts it had left behind would become enveloped in mystery over time. Maybe mythology was the only constant.

She turned her back on the creeping fog.

T
HE
DOORS
SLID
APART
.
 

Elijah had his hands clasped behind his back. Jacob had his arms folded across his chest.

Their expressions were interchangeable. They wore equal parts of irritation and disappointment.

“I heard a noise. I had to check it out,” she said.

“First thing in the morning, Jacob and I are leaving,” Elijah said. “You can come with us or not. This place is as good as new. I suppose there’s nothing stopping you from staying here.”

The two men slipped by her and occupied the lift. There wasn’t room for all three of them at once. Besides, Madelyn didn’t trust the thing with that much weight. After everything it had been through, the lift wasn’t trustworthy.

She watched as the doors closed on them. The motor buzzed as it carried them upwards. She couldn’t remember if it had always made that noise or not. She moved to the control panel and watched the two men cross the living room. Elijah went to the kitchen. Jacob went outside to the darkness.

She used the button to call the lift back down to service.
 

They exchanged very little conversation over dinner. Madelyn could sense the question that they weren’t asking—was she going to come with them? She would have volunteered an answer, but she really didn’t have one.

When she slowly climbed up to her loft, Jacob was offering to take the couch. Elijah refused. Madelyn was glad for it. She wanted to listen to Elijah fall asleep again. The rhythm of his breathing was growing on her.
 

She wasn’t disappointed. Madelyn fell asleep in the pause between his exhale and inhale.

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They were packed and ready to go when Madelyn climbed down from her loft. Both men paused their breakfast to watch her. They didn’t offer help, but they waited to make sure that she was safely on the floor before they exhaled.

“I’m fine,” she said. “I feel better than ever.”

Elijah barked out a skeptical laugh.

“We made you toast,” Jacob said. He pushed the plate towards her.

“No, thanks,” she said.

“It’s synthesized,” Elijah said. “It’s not homemade.”

“Oh,” she said.

He smiled at her as she crossed to the counter and picked it up. Jacob shook his head and looked down at his own plate, smiling.

“What?” she asked. “It’s not that I don’t like his toast. I’m just not going to let synthesized bread go to waste.”

Elijah laughed too.

“We have enough fuel to make it halfway down the mountain,” Elijah said. “After that, we’re on foot.”

Jacob nodded.

“Or, we’d be happy to hike if you want us to leave the truck here for you?”

Madelyn looked between them. These were the only two options they were allowing themselves to believe in.

“What am I, an invalid? You don’t think I could hike down to Fairbanks? I could do that in my sleep,” she said.

“It’s more practical for two to travel on foot,” Jacob said. “We’d be there to help each other out. If you’re going alone, I would feel more comfortable if you had the assist of the truck.”

Madelyn thought about it while she chewed.

“I don’t suppose I could convince one of you to stay here with me?” she asked. Her eyes bounced off of her nephew and landed on Elijah.
 

He held her gaze.
 

Elijah blinked slowly while he formed his answer.

“I care for you, Madelyn,” he said. She held perfectly still while she waited to hear the next sentence. “But the future is down there, with everyone else.”

She exhaled. He was right and wrong. Madelyn put the last piece in her mouth and brushed her hands off. She turned and regarded the cabin.

Jacob broke the silence.

“Do you want us to leave the truck?” he asked.

Madelyn shook her head.

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She sat sandwiched between her nephew and Elijah.
 

The whole hike down to the truck, she had held herself together.

As the vehicle rumbled down the road, Madelyn realized that she had been barely holding herself together for years.
 

Jacob looked out his window, happy to be traveling again.
 

Elijah focused on the terrible road, trying to keep them safe.

Madelyn stared straight ahead.
 

She let her tears fall for all the people she had lost. She hoped that they had all forgiven her, and hoped that she could eventually forgive herself. There was something else in her heart besides the sorrow. She closed her crying eyes and tried to focus on it. When she opened them again, the world looked brighter.
 

Madelyn wiped her eyes.
 

Jacob looked at her and smiled.

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Ike Hamill

December, 2015

Topsham, Maine

About
Madelyn’s Nephew

I hope you enjoyed meeting Madelyn as much as I did. She was lost out there in the woods and her nephew helped her find the way back to the world. When I started this book, I knew what she was up against, but I didn’t know what she would do. Madelyn is unpredictable, at best. Even when I thought I had a good sense of what was best for her, she would surprise me.

This isn’t the end of her story. This is the first book of three. In the next one, you’ll see more of the world that she lives in and meet some new people. My initial ideas of Madelyn’s story came when I was thinking of my own nephew. What if the first time I met him he was already a grown man? The idea took hold as I began to imagine those circumstances.

Please let me know what you thought of this book.
 

If you have any questions, complaints, or compliments, please send them to me. You can find me on Facebook (
http://www.facebook.com/ikehamill
), Twitter (@ikehamill), or eMail (
[email protected]
). I’d really appreciate a review on Amazon. Sign up for the mailing list at the bottom of my website (
http://www.ikehamill.com
) and I’ll give you a chance to download a free copy of my next book before it’s announced to the public.

Read on for descriptions of my other books.

All my best,

Ike

Excerpt from
Madelyn’s Mistake - Book Two

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“S
HUT
UP
AND
TAKE
it,” the young woman said.

Liam stared at the thing. It looked like one of those old Quiver remotes, but with a bird’s nest of wires poking out of the business end.

She shook it at him again. The young woman was confident, insistent, and stubborn. As far as Liam could tell, all the young people were. It felt damn strange to be taking orders from them. Liam finally took the device and spun it in his hand so that the emitter was pointing towards the young woman. She didn’t seem to care.

“Good. You’re going to head over that hill, stay on the right side of the path for as long as you can, and then break for the tall building. It’s marked with a big TWO. You want unit seventeen. Once you get to the west window, you should be able to make contact,” she said.

Liam nodded. Everything she said sounded like a horrible idea. He looked in her eyes. She seemed to take measure of him and then she finally nodded back.
 

“You’ll know when it’s over,” she said. “Then make your way back to the courthouse as best you can. There might be strays.”

She turned and ran. Liam blinked and admired her balance and agility. Gravity didn’t seem to matter much to young people. They bounced and climbed and floated over debris like it wasn’t even there. He would have turned his ankle on that section of toppled concrete.
 

He looked back towards the hill. Liam frowned and wondered if they had overestimated his physical abilities. He wondered if the mission they had given him was actually achievable by a man in his condition. It was starting to get dark. He had to get moving before he was blind.

Liam trudged up the hill. It had been a lawn once. The ground was firm. Now the hill was lightly wooded. Nature took back some areas vengefully. It tore at the landscape and rendered it impassable. Other areas, like this hillside, were gently colonized by bushes and trees. Liam wondered if the difference had to do with the type of soil, or maybe the groundwater.

He stopped and shook his head. His mind had been wandering. If he wanted to survive the day, he was going to have to keep his focus. Over the hill, right side of the path, and then break for the tall building marked TWO. Liam started climbing again.

As his head crested the hill and he saw what was on the other side, he stopped in his tracks.

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Liam put out his hand to steady himself on a tree. It was the hand with the Quiver remote. He remembered his mission. Regardless of what those lights were, people were counting on him. He saw the path. It wound around the circumference of what looked like a dried up old pond. The lights were circling each other down there in the gravel.
 

When he was little, his parents would take all the kids to the park to chase fireflies. These weren’t those. These lights were big—bright enough to cast shadows—and they didn’t blink. They were steady and they circled around, like glowing planets orbiting an invisible sun.