The Only Ones (3 page)

Defeated, wet, and cold, Martin returned to the cabin. He lit a fire in their wood-burning stove. Sadness didn’t sit with him. Anger did. To be teased by the skiff! His father was an experienced mariner. Was Martin to believe he had fallen overboard? As soon as Martin was dry and warm, he went to the back room, where the machine was hidden. He hoisted it onto the dollies and brought it out into the yard.

He turned all his attention to the machine. By studying it, he hoped that he would understand what exactly his father
was seeking, why it was taking so long to find it, and why the skiff had appeared on Martin’s birthday in the guise of a gift when it was merely an empty box. He took the machine apart, and he put it back together. He searched the book his father had given him, underlining passages about machines, hoping they would reveal something. They revealed nothing. The blank spaces in the machine were blank spaces in his mind, and he realized the painful truth: he didn’t have the ability to know what might fill them.

Martin fell into a deep depression. Every day he regretted his decision to stay on the island instead of leaving with George. As the winter winds blew in and then blew out, the only thing that kept him going was the knowledge that when the days got long, the boats would show up, and so too would his friend. He would have his second chance.

“Of course I’ll go with you,” he would tell George. “My father’s not coming back. I have this machine, but I don’t care about that anymore. You were right. You’re always right about everything.”

So he waited again, only this time he waited for George. He climbed the rock outcropping and looked for boats. He watched the horizon for a long time, but no one came. It was hot, but there was no music playing across the open water. The sun was high, but there were no families fumbling along the rocks with picnic baskets in their hands. It was summer, but the summer people just weren’t there.

The lobster trawlers should have clued him in. He hadn’t seen them since before that horrible eleventh birthday. While his father used to tell him that “someday the lobsters will run out and the trawlers will disappear,” he’d probably meant they would trickle away, with fewer trawlers appearing every
year, until one day there would be none left. He probably hadn’t meant it would happen all at once. But that was what happened. One day they were there. The next they weren’t.

Now the summer people hadn’t come, and this went against everything his father had predicted. “They will keep coming,” he had said. “There will be more and more of them, until the place becomes a theme park.”

“What’s a theme park?”

“It’s torture, son. With roller coasters.”

His father was wrong.
This
was torture. Alone, clueless, Martin was trapped. His body throbbed with anxiety. He slept very little. As strange and cruel as it might have seemed, the loss of Martin’s father paled in comparison to the loss of George. Devastation was worsened by desperation. He needed to know what had happened to everyone. When the summer ended, he had to make a choice. He could go on just as he had been, wallowing in self-pity. Or he could prepare.

He thought about something George had once told him: “There are all sorts of people in the world. With all sorts of ways of seeing stuff.”

With this in mind, Martin formulated a plan. He would start breaking into the island’s houses. He would search them front to back. He would gather every book he could find. From that point on, he would do little else but read.

So he did. He went from house to house, living in each until he finished every title inside. He continued fishing, gardening, and trapping, but only for a couple of hours a day, only for long enough to keep himself going, to keep himself reading.

From the books, he came to realize that the world had
plenty of joy in it, but also some terrible things. Bombs that wiped out cities. Savage landscapes full of people willing to fight you at the drop of a hat. Diseases and vengeful gods and science gone mad. Whether it was fiction didn’t matter. This was how the people out there saw their home. If he was going to survive among them, he needed to speak their language.

Eleven years old became twelve years old. Fall tumbled into winter, and winter raged into spring. Another summer arrived and Martin still hadn’t seen a single person, but his head was now rattling with a hoard of stories and dialogues. And when that summer neared its end, he confronted a fateful day. He read the last of the books on the island.

So he returned to his cabin. He grabbed the grubby mass of paper that was the book his father had left him. He found the sheet with the address George had given him and slid it into the pages of the book. He placed it all in a canvas bag, which he slung over his shoulder. And he didn’t think much about what he did next. Thinking often leads to second thoughts, and he certainly didn’t need those. He simply headed straight across the island.

Martin’s body could have withered during his year of bookish solitude, but a recent growth spurt had gifted his muscles with an unexpected bulk and had forced him to scavenge a new wardrobe from cardboard boxes in the summer peoples’ closets. It had also granted him the strength to drag the rowboat out from behind George’s house and over the rocks. He placed it into the ocean. With oars on his shoulder and the bag on his hip, he climbed inside. He looked up at the sun. He looked back at the island he had called home for as long as he could remember.

“They come from where the sun sets,” Martin’s father had once said about the summer people. “That’s why we do our fishing where the sun rises.”

Martin leaned an oar into a rock and pushed off. He would head toward the sunset. If he wasn’t ready now, then he never would be.

PART I

“They were frozen stiff. I think we mighta killed ’em. There was that blondie, layin’ out past those stupid palm trees. I don’t think she was breathin’.”

“Don’t worry about that. Keep running.”

“We need to go back for it. We need to check on them.”

“You’re done with that bunch. We’ll find other folks. People we can trust.”

“I keep tellin’ you. There’s nobody else.”

“Nonsense. Lies.”

“He wasn’t lyin’ ’bout that. In the mornin’, you’ll see. It’s a totally different world out there.”

“Well, if that’s true, then … it’s our world. Isn’t it?”

T
he stars melted away. Martin had rowed through the night. The next time I see stars, he thought, it won’t be from the island and it won’t be from the ocean.

For through the first spits of morning sunlight, he spied the mainland only a few hundred yards ahead of him. The island had ten houses, while the mainland had hundreds. Dozens of docks lined the water’s edge, and countless boats bobbed quietly in a harbor. Many of the boats were half submerged. A few were almost entirely covered in water. Broken masts stuck up through the froth like stubborn little birch trees.

Seagulls circled above him as Martin guided the boat up to a dock. He climbed out and scanned the surroundings. Streets and paths wound their way through the town and into hills in the distance. Cars were strewn everywhere—along the streets,
in
the streets, even in the grass, which was as high as Martin’s shoulder. Martin had never seen a car before, but
he knew that they were “boats with wheels and windshield wipers,” as his father put it, and in nearly every book Martin had read, they were the preferred manner of transportation.

Many of the buildings near the dock were decorated with signs announcing things like
THE COLDEST BEER IN TOWN
or
FINE DINING FOR FINE FOLKS
. Martin hadn’t eaten in a day, and while he was accustomed to going without a meal or two, the row from the island had left him ravenous.

He made his way down the dock and entered the first building he came upon, a modest construction with a hand-carved sign above the door that read
THE BARNACLED BUTCHER
.

The first things he noticed were the red stains on the floor. Then a scattering of meat- and marrow-picked bones. Lingering scents of rot and feces hit him next. It had seemed a reasonable place to find a meal, but he had read far too many books about murderers and monsters. He wasn’t going to risk meeting such things.

For now, he would explore the rest of the town. Perhaps he would meet someone. Perhaps someone would know where to find George. It had been almost two years since he had seen a soul, and he desperately needed to see one now.

But there wasn’t anyone anywhere he looked.

Without even a sliver of warning, a fog hustled in. Martin became blind to everything more than a few yards away. So he kept to the winding streets, hiking for more than a mile and dodging car after car—some with their windows open and their seat cushions torn into tidy little nests; all abandoned and splattered white with gull guano.

If there’s not
someone
, he thought, then there must be
something
that can tell me where I am and where I should go.

For now, the best the world could give Martin was a pile
of waterlogged books, pouring out onto the street. He stepped over them and onto a wild, dewy lawn, where he found a series of plastic tables overturned on the ground, their legs sticking up and hugged by weeds. Next to one table, he found a sign. He lifted it, wiped away the mud, and read:
GENTLY USED BOOKS—SUPPORT OUR RENOVATIONS THIS SATURDAY AND SUNDAY
.

He placed the sign down and squinted through the fog at a building across the lawn. He could barely make out a line of steel letters on the brick entryway.

LIBRARY

It was chillier inside. And dark—so dark that Martin had to let his eyes adjust for a minute before taking a step beyond the doorway. There was an odor, a mustiness, but nothing like in the butcher shop. The floors were relatively free of debris, and as he made his way past a large wooden desk, Martin drew in a breath of relief.

Thousands of books filled dozens of shelves. A few books lay open on the floor, but for the most part, everything seemed in good shape. Martin placed his hand on a line of bindings, then ran his fingers down the row, releasing flurries of dust and listening to the beautiful
thwap
,
thwap
,
thwap
.

He lifted a book off a shelf and stared at its glossy cover, adorned with a photograph of the moon. It would take a lifetime to read every book in the library, and Martin began to wonder if maybe it wasn’t such a bad way to spend his days. Maybe he wasn’t ready to go on. Maybe he was meant to see the world through the filter of books.

Something in the world had changed, though. It couldn’t always have been like this, and the books couldn’t answer the most important questions.

What happened?

Where is everyone?

Why is something pressing against my knee?

Martin looked down to see a dark mass at his feet. A black nose rubbed gently against his right knee, then moved down his shin until it came to his sock, where it tried to work itself inside with an inquisitive snuff.

Instinctively, Martin reached his hand down to pet the animal at his feet. Its fur was thick and course, like slightly damp hay. He had petted dogs on the island but had never felt one like this. As he pulled his hand away, the nose followed his fingers. Martin got a closer look. It had a snout like a dog’s, but its head was rounder and its ears were stiffer. It raised a paw and placed it in the bend of Martin’s elbow. Its claws were as thick as Martin’s fingers. The pads of its feet were as big as his hands.

“Hello,” Martin said softly.

The creature let out a low rumbling sound—soothing at first, then more anxious.

“I’m Martin Maple. From the island. I’m here for a visit. To have a look around.”

The creature answered by pulling its head away from Martin. It opened its mouth in what looked like a yawn. Small daggers for teeth, hot breath. It lifted itself until it was standing on two feet. Even standing straight up, it was shorter than Martin by a good foot and a half, but Martin’s body still tensed in recognition.

“You’re a bear.”

The bear blinked.

“I’ve read about you. You’re smaller than I expected. You don’t seem
so
mean.”

Martin eased his hand back toward the bear, planning to calm it by petting its head. But just as his hand reached the snout, he felt a warm, damp breeze blow onto the top of his neck.

Then he heard a rumble.

It was similar to the rumble the bear had made, but it was coming from behind Martin. It was also deeper and louder. Vibrations crept across Martin’s scalp.

He turned around in time to see another bear moving slowly toward him. It was three times as big as the first and had a fox dangling from its jaws. The fox was jerking violently, but the bear didn’t seem to notice. Its eyes were locked on Martin.

All at once came a flash of teeth and nostrils as the bigger bear tossed the fox into the darkness and lunged at Martin. Martin threw himself against the bookshelf. A cascade of hardcovers raged out, and the entire thing crashed to the ground.