Forgotten

Chapter 2-1

Two

Her mind was reeling. She’d carried the small black box in her backpack every time she ventured out from the small clapboard building that had once housed U.C. Riverside’s wildlife research station, but she’d never really thought it would work. It was just a kind of lucky token, a bit bulkier than a rabbit’s foot but serving basically the same purpose.

Really, it was all because of the voice on the radio.

The voice belonged to a man whose name was Miles Odekirk, and apparently he was based in Los Alamos, New Mexico. For more than two months, ever since the Heat swept over the world, he’d been broadcasting his message, telling of a group of survivors based in the small mountain town, warning anyone who might still be out there listening about the djinn, and how they were intent on killing any people who’d survived the deadly fever that had destroyed most of humankind.

Deirdre had seen firsthand what that dread disease could do. The wildlife station was usually staffed with a rotating complement of grad students and upper-division students, but no more than four or five at a time. She’d been there with three others — Leland, who was getting his master’s in forestry and was studying the bark beetle infestation in the San Bernardino National Forest; Kate, getting the last bit of research done on her dissertation about deer populations in extra-urban areas; and Sean, who’d been a senior like Deirdre herself, and was there more as an assistant and general jack of all trades rather than to further any particular field of study.

Kate had left less than a day in, as soon as the first reports about the dread disease began to pop up on the internet. Leland and Sean and Deirdre had tried to convince her to stay, since they thought their isolation here at the station could only help them to avoid getting sick. That isolation hadn’t mattered in the end, though — Deirdre never knew what happened to Kate, but both Sean and Leland were dead within twenty-four hours of her departure. Deirdre had done what she could, dispensing aspirin and trying to keep them hydrated. Not that it mattered. At the end of it all, they were gone, killed by a fever that burned so hot, it left only ashes behind.

She supposed she should be glad for that. Burying her compatriots would have been difficult, given how parched and hard the earth was at that time of year, in late September. And because conditions had been so dry, cremation would have been out of the question as well. One errant spark could have set the entire forest ablaze. It had been easier to focus on the practical aspects of disposing of their remains rather than the sorrow and horror she’d felt at their passing, the ever-present worry that she might be next.

Afterward — after she’d gathered their ashes and scattered them below the pine trees near the research station, and murmured the Lord’s Prayer because it was the only thing she could remember from the Bible — Deirdre sat alone in the station’s front office, wondering what in the world to do next. She didn’t know why she wasn’t dead, and kept waiting to come down with the deadly fever herself. Except she remained as healthy as the day she’d come up for her weekend at the station, her only real health issue the allergies that always seemed to get worse when she was deep in the pine forest. Still, the Flonase she always carried with her seemed to take care of the worst of her symptoms, and she knew she could get more at the convenience store down in Running Springs.

While she was taking care of her companions, she’d used the satellite phone at the station to try to call home, to check to see if her mother was all right. The first time the call went through, but no one picked up. After that, all she got was a fast busy signal, no matter how many times she hit redial. She knew what that meant. The lines were overloaded.

The day after that, there was nothing at all, not a fast busy signal, nothing coming through the satellite TV, either. Even so, she’d sat there with the shortwave weather radio, scrolling slowly through the bands, trying to find some evidence to tell her she wasn’t the only person left in the world, too frightened to leave her current place of refuge. After five days, she determined that she had to leave, if only to go into Running Springs to scrounge some food. The station was supplied with enough rations to last about a week — and in her case they would last even longer, since she was the only one left and the pantry had been stocked to feed four people — but sooner or later, she was going to run out.

Besides, there might be survivors in Running Springs.

Just as she was about to head into town, however, she’d taken one last pass with the radio, one final search of the bands to see if anyone still was alive out there. And when she’d heard Miles Odekirk’s voice come through the speakers, she’d cried, tears rolling down her cheeks as she realized she wasn’t completely alone.

True, he was in New Mexico, which might as well have been on the dark side of the moon — especially after she heard what he had to say.

Strange creatures that looked human but weren’t. Djinn. Elemental beings that even now were sweeping across the face of the earth, looking for all the immune survivors so they might finish the job they’d started. Deirdre hadn’t wanted to believe any of it. She wanted to think that Miles Odekirk was a madman, someone immune who’d been driven crazy by his isolation and the losses she assumed he must have suffered.

However, there was something about the way he spoke — calm, dry, almost pedantic — that seemed to tell her he wasn’t crazy. He didn’t rant or rave. In fact, his no-nonsense delivery reminded Deirdre of her Botany 101 professor, although this Miles person sounded much younger than old Professor Barton, probably no more than forty at the most. He warned against venturing out alone, but said that at the very least anyone wishing to avoid the djinn had to stick to whatever cover they could find, whether that was an abandoned house or a thick stand of trees.

And he spoke of the devices he’d created, the ones that supposedly could repel the djinn and weaken them to the point where they were no stronger than an ordinary human.

Deirdre had taken his advice to heart. No, she couldn’t stay in hiding forever, but she’d done her best to wear neutral colors when she ventured outside. Because of this, she’d been able to make several foraging trips to Running Springs, and had also ransacked the pantries of some of the houses in the area. She refused to allow herself to feel guilty about these petty thefts, since the small piles of gray dust she’d encountered in those empty homes and businesses told her that the people who’d owned them definitely didn’t need those supplies any longer.

And once she knew she had enough supplies to survive on her own for a good while, she got to work.

The wildlife station had solar and its own well and a propane tank, so she was set in terms of power and water and gas for cooking as long as she was frugal about her usage. Heat hadn’t been too much of an issue so far, although she worried about what she would do when the true snows of winter came. It wasn’t a lack of firewood that had concerned her — the station also had a wood-burning stove, and a large stack of pine in the wood bins out back — but the very real fear that smoke coming from the chimney would certainly attract any djinn in the area. For the time being, she’d bundled up and piled extra blankets on the narrow bed in the room she would have shared with Kate.

Miles Odekirk kept repeating his instructions over and over, slowly and patiently. Deirdre had wondered whether it was frustrating for him to be sending his words out into the ether with no idea whether anyone could hear them. Possibly there were survivors somewhere who had access to a ham radio and could reply, but she wasn’t so lucky; the broadband radio had been mostly for keeping up with weather reports, and anyone staying at the station had used the sat phone for actual communications. She hadn’t found a ham radio during any of her foraging expeditions…not that she would have known how to operate it even if she had. It almost physically hurt to not be able to talk to Miles Odekirk, to cry out that she was here all alone and desperately needed someone to come help her. Then again, what could he have done? He was more than a thousand miles away, and there had to have been plenty of djinn haunting the miles in between the San Bernardino mountains and Los Alamos, just waiting to pounce on any hapless humans who dared to venture out into that desert wilderness.

But at least she would try to build one of his devices. She knew her way around a soldering gun, thanks to having an older brother who’d always been into electronics and model rockets and other kinds of science geek stuff. Whether or not Douglas had survived was moot at this point; he’d known she was going to spend the weekend at the wildlife station, so surely if he’d lived through the Heat, he would have come in search of her. That he’d never appeared seemed to prove he was just as dead as everyone else.

She hadn’t wanted to think about that. It had been better to sit in the small lab located at the back of the building, next to the area with the various cages that had once held injured wildlife, and use the pieces of Kate’s laptop — she’d left everything behind when she fled the station, right down to her computer and her clothing — and Sean and Leland’s iPads to put together the device that Dr. Odekirk had invented. Deirdre hadn’t pretended to understand the mechanics of what she was doing; she just patiently followed the scientist’s extremely precise instructions, using the touch screens from the pilfered iPads to construct several faces of the small, cube-shaped machine. Once she was done, it seemed to function — at least, lights went on and off when she moved her fingers over it in the places that were supposed to control its strength and intensity and range. However, without any djinn around, she couldn’t really say whether it worked or not, and she wasn’t about to go in search of them just to test whether the device was truly functional. She might have felt some days as though she was dying of loneliness, but it still wasn’t worth risking her life to find out.

Still, Deirdre had found some reassurance in carrying the device in her backpack with her when she ventured out from the station to forage. Supplies weren’t so low that she’d yet thought of hunting to supplement the items in the pantry. The forest might teem with life, but that didn’t mean she was ready to kill and dress a deer, or even a rabbit or a squirrel. She’d found a shotgun and a .22 rifle in one of Running Springs’ empty houses, and she’d brought the guns back to the station with her, although she doubted she’d be able to hit the broad side of a barn with either one of them.

This final trip to the lookout station had been her way of forcing herself to make a decision…any kind of decision. At this point, she really only had two options. She just needed to pick one and go with it.

Rationally speaking, there was really no reason to go down the mountain. She had her refuge at the research station. So far, she’d survived her various trips to gather supplies. No one had bothered her here yet, and she guessed no one would. There was probably enough nonperishable food in Running Springs’ pantries and stores to keep her alive through the winter. She could get over her squeamishness, teach herself how to hunt and fish and dress an animal. None of this sounded terribly appealing, but it was better than her other option, which was to gather her courage and leave the place that had sheltered her for the past few months, a plan of action that was terrifying on its surface, now that she knew what waited for her out there.