The Only Ones (29 page)

They couldn’t have been more different in appearance—Kelvin pale, tattered, and gaunt; Lane dark, sleek, and curved. She held her tears back, a battle that quivered through her cheeks. She reached forward and touched him lightly on the ribs.

“Hey, kid,” Kelvin said.

“Hey, kid,” Lane said back.

“I’m not sure how I got here. I can’t say I understand what’s going on,” Kelvin said.

“I can’t say I do either,” she said. “But you’re here. Standing right in front of me.”

“I am.”

“I got some peanuts inside,” she told him.

As Kelvin followed Lane into the room, Martin hovered in the doorway.

“Hello, Martin,” Lane said. “I’m glad to see you’re still around. Crazy world you dug up out there.”

“I’m …,” Martin started, but what he saw beyond the door derailed his train of thought.

It was a scanty low-ceilinged room, the antithesis of Lane’s previous abode. The walls were brick, and the floor was concrete. Candles in glass vases decorated ledges, and trunks, and wooden crates. A Ping-Pong table, with a stack of boxes on it, was pushed into the corner. The boxes held kits for model cars and boats and trains. Lane pulled a woven wool blanket off a grimy plaid sofa and draped it over her shoulders. She patted one of the seat cushions.

“I can’t believe it,” Kelvin said as he spun in circles, marveling at every object in the room. “It looks just like my basement.”

“We had a fire,” Lane told him. “Your house didn’t make it. It took some looking. It took some lugging. But I found stuff that matches pretty closely.”

“It’s perfect,” Kelvin said. “You did this for me?”

“No, not really,” Lane admitted as she picked up a wooden bowl full of peanuts. She gave it a shake in front of Kelvin’s chest, and the peanuts scuffed and scraped the wood. “I did it for myself. Those nights hanging out in your basement were some of the best times I’ve ever had.”

“They were?” Kelvin said, reaching for some peanuts.

“Of course.”

“They were for me too.”

“I missed you, more than I’ve missed anything.” With a hunter’s stare she watched him chew the peanuts. “Thank you, Martin,” she said, not turning her head.

One of Trent’s cousins met Martin outside the school. He pushed Martin back through town and helped him into the machine.

“We’ll be outside for you, Mr. Maple,” the boy told him. “Just let us know if you need anything.”

“Thank you,” Martin said. “Sleep is what I need.”

The boy nodded and left him alone, and Martin lowered himself onto the inflatable bed. He pulled the covers up to his neck, and he let his mind linger on a thought. He remembered that night months back, when he was alone on the ocean, rowing the boat away from his island. He remembered thinking that on the mainland there was a world where all the books he had read were born. The books told stories, and the endings to the stories that still stuck with him weren’t always the ones filled with happiness. They were the ones that could end only one way.

MARTIN MAPLE
lived in the town of Ararat, in a sturdy brick library a short walk from a machine his father taught him how to build. The machine hummed and whirred every day, and it brought forth laughs and people. When they arrived, the people were shown a movie in the local movie theater and they were told that the world was new.

Not far from Ararat, up and down the river and east and west into the mountains, were other towns waiting to be sparked back into existence. It wasn’t as easy as some had hoped. Even adults, capable and confident ones, knew little about what starting from scratch really meant.

Clearing roads was a priority, and the monster truck named Kid Godzilla was nearing retirement. It still traversed the country with Darla Barnes at the helm, and it came back every three weeks, packed to the scales with objects. Once families had been reunited, they called forth friends, and
neighbors, and coworkers, and teachers. They brought back anyone who had left pieces of themselves behind in the form of gifts. They brought them back one at a time, but occasionally two people would appear in the machine. Babies, and toddlers, and kids who were just too young to have had a chance to make their mark would materialize alongside someone they loved and trusted.

“Innocence is their gift,” was Trent Bethany’s explanation for the anomaly.

Martin had a slightly more pragmatic answer. “Until someone is ready to survive alone, they’re inevitably bound to someone else.”

When other doctors volunteered to work at the hospital, Dr. Bethany, her son Trent, and their family went on their way. This left Martin as the only person in Ararat permitted to run the machine. It was one of the rules. There were many rules.

At night, Martin would remove a few essential pieces from the machine, rendering it useless. He would sleep with the pieces hidden beneath his pillow while a series of trustworthy guards patrolled the town and protected the machine and its master. In the mornings, Martin would return the pieces to their designated places and cater to the swirling line of eager folks who waited with their trinkets and their
WELCOME BACK
signs.

Darla brought her parents back on a brilliant summer afternoon, when the clouds were hearty but white, and the soggy ground had firmed up from a spat of blazing days. She used a jump rope and a necklace.

“Don’t laugh,” she told Martin.

“Why?” he asked.

“Because they’re regular,” she sighed.

Martin didn’t know if they were regular, but the Barnes were a quiet couple, in sweatshirts and nylon pants, and when their daughter saw them, her impious smile disappeared and she became a mush of sniffles and giggles. Martin couldn’t join them in the theater, but he assumed that Darla sat next to her parents and watched them as they took in her movie. When they left the theater, Darla held both their hands and showed them Kid Godzilla, and they listened intently as she chattered nonstop. Martin heard there was something close to awe in Darla’s father’s eyes. Finally, she brought them to the bowling alley to eat lunch.

They would leave a few days later. Ararat couldn’t hold everyone, nor should it have. With the roads opening and nearby communities coming to life, Ararat was merely a gateway, and Martin a gatekeeper.

“Come with us,” Darla pleaded to Martin.

He wanted to, more than anything, but the rules paralyzed him. Until he allowed someone else to operate the machine, he was committed to it. “I can’t,” he told her.

She understood why, and she didn’t argue, but Darla being Darla, she made a proclamation. “I’m going to come back for you, Martin Maple. And I won’t let you say no again.”

Then she kissed him on the lips and he didn’t have time to think about it. He could only experience it. It was a fragile and lovely thing, like ocean fog at dawn. It bloomed and it held and it was gone.

Tiberia Davis still lived in Ararat, but with the influx of adults, her strength was less in demand and her knowledge of medicine and vitamins was no longer unique. This didn’t
bother her, however, because through her experiences with Marjorie Rice, she learned that she possessed a hidden talent. She could talk to people, set them at ease. Almost everyone needed someone to talk to these days. So she convinced her family to stay in Ararat with her, where she could do the world some good. At least for the time being.

Every once in a while, Tiberia would visit Marjorie in the hospital, but doctors and Marjorie’s son, Kelvin, and his girlfriend, Lane Ruez, provided the primary care. Marjorie was medicated now. Her mood swings and delusions were kept mostly at bay, but her survival would always depend on the help of others. It consumed much of Kelvin’s and Lane’s free time, so they rarely stopped by to see Martin. Neither of them had much interest in the machine.

A few people posed an obvious question: how exactly had Kelvin come back if he had never disappeared on the Day? Martin didn’t get into details. He didn’t talk about the Birthday Dials. He simply said that the machine brought Kelvin, and he left it at that.

“Can it bring back dead people too?” was often the next question. And they trucked in gifts from the deceased. No matter what they tried, it never worked. The dead were gone, and gone for good.

Martin sometimes found himself thinking about the boy named Nigel Moon and wondering about the night of the fire, when he had sprinted back into his burning house. They had never found Nigel’s body. Had he burned away in there or had he escaped into the woods? Was he still alive?

The question mattered less and less as the summer went on, until it didn’t matter at all. Nigel was both dead and alive. He was both a con man and a prophet. He was a nurturer
and he was a murderer. He was almost anything you wanted him to be. But he had never been one of them. Gifts, the kids’ links to people from the past, were more than simple objects. They were symbols of connections. Nigel never had any real connections, at least not with humans. There were probably no gifts in Nigel’s past, given or received.

The only gift Martin had was the one he thought he’d never see again. It was that piece of paper with his father’s address.

A few nights after Darla left, Martin decided not to return to the library after his long day of work. He stayed in the machine instead, and when he was sure the line of lonely souls had been led away, he finally did something for himself. He placed the piece of paper in the basin. He summoned George Hupper.

Martin was nearing his fourteenth birthday, but George was still a ten-year-old, fresh off his summer visit to the island and as confused as everyone else who had been funneled into the future by the machine. Rather than showing him Darla’s movie, Martin walked the scared boy down the trail past the mine shaft and up a hill to a clearing, where the moon held them in its snug light. There he told George the story of his last three years.

Over the next few weeks, a fleet of trucks went into service and set out on reconnaissance missions, including one that would stop in George’s hometown. Meanwhile, George remained in Ararat, and every night, he and Martin met in that clearing on the hill, and Martin told him everything he could about their new world. The Internet might have been ash, but it still lived in Martin’s mind. So he enlightened George about Chet and Felix and Sigrid and the greenhouse
and Impossible Island and the Arrival Stories and the marble and the Diggers.

“You ever think about why no one found the Diggers’ bodies in the mine?” George asked one night.

“Sure I do,” Martin admitted. “It’s because they never died in there. I’m going to bring them back someday.”

“How you gonna do that?”

“We know the date and time the mine caved in. Ask Kelvin. He can give you the exact moment. The Diggers left things behind, and some of those things are probably gifts. Those gifts will help summon people, and those people will provide us with gifts that will help summon the Diggers.”

“But the Diggers didn’t disappear on the Day, right?”

“Neither did Kelvin,” Martin said. “Let me show you something.”

Martin led George down from the clearing and to the trail. They walked past the entrance to the mine shaft and back into town. Martin’s guards patrolled the empty streets, but there was an anxiousness in the air. As dedicated as these kids were, they were still just kids. You could see it in their tentative steps. You could hear it in their stutters. They wouldn’t be able to handle their duties for much longer.

They accompanied Martin and George to the machine and opened the door to let them in. Once inside and alone, Martin showed George the control panel.

“The machine has levers and switches and all sorts of things to make it work. But it also has a calendar, a way to set a date.” But Martin didn’t reveal what that calendar was. He didn’t show George the Birthday Dials. As much as he trusted his friend, he knew that it was best if only one person knew how to set the machine’s date.

“Why would you set a date?” George asked.

“Because you have to pinpoint the exact moment in time from which you want to summon someone. When my father and I built the machine on the island, the date was supposed to be set to when I was born. And I’m pretty sure it was only supposed to summon one person.”

“So what’s different about this machine?”

“Well, first of all, it’s summoned a lot of people. And second, I’ve set it to other dates. I’ve set it to the Day.”

“You never told me what caused the Day.”

“I’m telling you right now,” Martin said in a calm but somber tone. “I caused it. This machine caused it. It started when I summoned Marjorie. Then Henry’s father, Keith. Then Christianna. And it kept going while Trent was at the helm. And it will keep going, well into the future, whether I’m running this machine or thousands of other people are running thousands of other identical machines. We’ll keep bringing people back, one person at a time, until everyone is here again.”