As they stepped into the large, glass-encased lobby, at least a dozen people were milling around. The four of them wandered in slowly, trying not to look out of place.
As Lucas tried to blend in, he was reminded of his younger days when he and Jilly had to transfer to yet another school because the foster home they were in wasn't working out for one reason or another. It would be weeks of keeping their heads down and trying not to stand out so no one noticed them and started asking why they had come to the school mid-year. He learned to keep to himself and not make friends since he probably wasn't going to be there for more than a couple of months anyway. He concentrated on getting good grades in hopes of making a better life for him and Jilly.
He looked over at her now, such a vibrant and funny teenager. Never letting on how much pain was under that smile. Anyone watching would think she was fine. But Lucas knew better. He knew about the nights she cried herself to sleep, trying to be quiet so no one would hear. Feeling the pain of abandonment when their mother had walked out with her drug dealer boyfriend ten years ago and never came back.
He knew she felt the uncertainty of their future being bounced around from place to place all those years. He made himself a promise that no matter what happened, no matter where they ended up, he would look out for her and try to create a better place for the two of them.
And now all this happened. And he was pretty sure he wasn't going to be able to put on a smile and pretend it was all going to be OK. But he would do his best and he was deeply grateful that he had Carolyn and Rob with him on this wild ride.
Jilly sidled up to him. “I'm smiling at everyone and they are smiling back at me, is that good?” Then she did a double-take and asked “Why are you looking at me like that?”
Lucas realized he was getting misty-eyed as he was reminiscing. He blinked and rubbed his eyes. “Must be something in this air making my eyes water. Yes, it's good that they are smiling at you. Keep looking around, see if you can get any clues as to what's going on.”
She nodded seriously. "All we need is Scooby-doo and it'll be just like the cartoon."
Rob wandered towards the guard's desk and realized that Clarence, the guard he saw every morning when he got to work, was sitting perched behind the desk staring at a computer.
“Well hello, Rob,” Clarence said easily. “Good to see you, my man.”
Rob hesitated. “Hey… Clarence. What’s up?”
“Oh, nothing much. Just playing a little solitaire. Nothing going on today. Very slow. No visitors to the building. Are you working today?”
“Well, um, maybe. I was thinking about putting in a few hours. Um, is anyone else here today?” He was trying to think of a way to hold a conversation without it being as strange as it was.
“Haven't seen almost anyone from your department lately. A few came in a couple weeks back, but they haven't been in since. Oh look,” He glanced back at his computer, “I think I may win this game.” And that was the end of the conversation.
Rob walked away confused. Obviously, Clarence didn't think it was odd that no one had been in to work for weeks. He looked for Carolyn to tell her what happened and he found her near the elevators chatting with a lady wearing pajama bottoms, an oversized baseball t-shirt, and flip flops. As Carolyn caught his eye she excused herself and the PJ wearing woman grabbed her hand as she started to leave, patted it gently, and then walked away smiling.
“Well,” Carolyn said under her breath as Rob reached her, "that was just as weird as I thought it might be. She was telling me all about how she came downtown to have lunch with a friend but she wanted to go buy a hat that matched her pants first. She knew of this nice little shop a few blocks over. She was heading over there when she thought she saw a friend of hers sitting in the lobby here, so she came to say Hi but it wasn't her friend so she was going to go and get that hat now. She was talking to me as if she was normal but obviously, she wasn't normal at all.”
“Well that's not nearly as weird as what just happened to me,” Rob said “That guard sitting over at the desk is THE guard who used to sit there every morning when I worked here. And he KNEW me! Remembered my name and everything. But he was more interested in his game he was playing on the computer. He said he saw some of the people who used to work here a few weeks ago but not since then. He wanted to know if I was working today.”
“I think we should get out of here and see what else is going on.”
“I definitely agree with the getting-out-of-here part,” Rob said, nodding.
They slowly made their way over to where Jilly and Lucas were standing by the front door, surveying the room. They casually walked past them smiling and in low tones said “Let's go for a walk”.
Carolyn pushed the glass door open and the four of them stepped outside. Random people scurried by, heading to nowhere in particular. Everybody smiling. They turned right and strolled down the sidewalk, trying not to make too much eye contact with other people. Block after block they walked. They looked for something, no matter how small, that might give them an idea of what exactly was going on. What was the point of keeping everyone confined and drugged?
“I don't like any of this,” Carolyn whispered.
“Neither do I,” Lucas replied. "There is obviously more going on here than just creating a giant zoo of humanity.”
Rob was looking into windows as he walked past, noting that each store had several people inside, eating or shopping or just standing. “Where is the food coming from?” he wondered.
“I never thought about that,” Lucas said. “I don't see any delivery trucks unless that's what those other humvees were doing. Bringing in supplies. But there weren't enough of them to feed all these people.”
“Great,” Jilly huffed. “Another mystery. And another thing: I was watching the people over there getting hot dogs from the cart. No one is paying for anything.” As they walked by a small vendor parked on the corner she reached out and grabbed a doughnut and took a bite.
“Hey,” Lucas said, sounding panicked. “Don’t do that.” But the lady running the cart just smiled. “Thank you. Please enjoy!”
“See?” Jilly said. “They don’t care. Man, this is getting weirder by the minute.” She ran back and grabbed another doughnut. Lucas rolled his eyes.
Rob looked back over his shoulder contemplating if he wanted a doughnut too. As he was thinking about it, he noticed a man standing across the street. The man who was wearing faded overalls and a cowboy hat was not smiling or talking to anyone else. He was staring right at them, watching them. Rob turned slowly back to the group. “Don’t turn around or look behind us. Just keep walking. I just saw someone across the street who doesn’t look like he belongs here any more than we do.”
Jilly’s head spun around. “Where?” Lucas grabbed her by the arm and yanked her forward. “Criminy kid, could you not?”
Carolyn looked down at the sidewalk and whispered, “What is the guy doing?”
“Just watching us,” Rob reported. “I think he knows we're not under the influence. The question is what is he going to do about it. Is he a good guy or a bad guy?” He glanced casually behind him. “Oh, great. We’re going to find out, because here he comes.”
Carolyn could hear the sound of a man's cowboy boots hitting the pavement and just as she turned the man was stepping up onto the curb near them. He smiled and brushed past them. “Pretend we’re all just out for a nice stroll and keep walking and smiling,” he said brightly.
The four of them stared at each other briefly then fell in step next to him, forcing smiles.
“I knew you bunch weren't affected,” He said “I could tell the minute I laid eyes on ya. Y'all have too much going on on your face. Them affected ones only smile. Y'all looked concerned and worried and confused. I haven't seen y'all around these parts and I pretty much know all the unaffected after all this time stuck in here.”
“We’re not from in here,” Jilly immediately said.
The man stopped dead. “What?” The group halted with him. "Not from in here?"
Lucas gave her a sharp shove. “What is it with you and your mouth?” he hissed.
“How did you get past the barrier?" the man wanted to know "Did you hitch a ride in one of them trucks? Why would you go and do some damn fool thing like that?”
Since it was too late to retract the information, Carolyn sighed and said, “We came inside driving our own truck to see if we can get some answers about what's going on. Have you been stuck in here this entire time?”
“Shore have,” he said. “Wife and I was downtown here at the court filing paperwork for a building permit on the farm when this all happened. Can't get out no matter what.”
“Are there more like you?” Rob asked.
“Shore is, me and the wife are staying over at a hotel on the edge of town. There are others living on the outskirts as well. I come down here every few days to look around, collect supplies, and see if anything has changed. You have to be careful because sometimes the military trucks come through and if they suspect you aren't under the influence, they'll scoop you up and take you off somewhere. I've seen them grab people, shove them in their truck and I never saw those folks again.”
Rob shuddered at the thought that while they were in their own truck waiting to get inside the wall they were one mistake away from getting hauled off to who knows where and never being seen again.
“I’m Manny, by the way,” the man said, “and we're pretty much sitting ducks out here if one of them trucks come through. None of the affected stay with any one person for very long. We need to get inside if we wanna talk.” He took a pen and paper out of his pocket and wrote down an address. “This is where the wife and I are staying. She's gonna wanna hear about what's happening outside the walls.” He handed over the paper.
Carolyn took it, looked at it, and handed it to Rob. “Do you know where this is?" she asked. Rob said he did and Manny plastered a fake smile on his face, lifted his hand to wave goodbye, and strode off across the street.
“Now what?” Rob asked quietly. “Do we trust him? What if it’s a trap?”
“I doubt that,” Carolyn said. “If anything, he’s the one taking a risk by trusting us.”
“And since we're not bad guys,” Jilly explained, “we need to go to see what's going on.”
“I think so too,” Lucas agreed.
“All right, let’s do it. How far away is this place, Rob? Can we walk? I'm not sure we should drive the truck over there because we might give his wife a heart attack if we pull up in the same vehicle they are scared of.”
“It's maybe half an hour's walk. Do you think we're safe without guns?” He couldn't believe he just asked that.
“I think we’re going to have to be,” Lucas said. “We can’t be seen walking around with rifles. We’ll be too obvious.”
“Right,” Rob sighed, “Obvious but vulnerable. Great combination.”
“Well, it's not like any of these affected people are a danger. All they want to do is say Hi and tell you about their day. And by the looks of it, no one is starving or in need of anything in here so there shouldn't be any thieves.”
“Oh, Lord, I hope not.” Rob drew in a breath and started walking. “Come on, it's this way.”
The sun was dipping lower between the buildings and casting long shadows across the streets. The air was clean and fresh without the thousands of cars that would normally be spewing exhaust in what would normally be rush hour traffic. Rob had called it a perk of an otherwise dystopian reality. Jilly wasn’t entirely sure what that meant—but she was pretty sure he was right.
She also thought another perk was being able to spend all this time with Lucas. Before all this happened she hardly got to see him because he was always studying or working and he often came home after she went to bed. In the mornings he was always hurrying her to get ready for school making sure she had all her homework, food to eat at lunch and wasn't late to her first class. She knew he did it because he felt responsible for her after their mom left and was only trying to make a better life for the both of them but she had felt lonely a lot of the time.
And now he was with her every day and even though he still told her what to do, she didn't mind all that much. She had every confidence that all of them were going to figure out what was going on and they alone were going to fix it and her brother would be a hero not only to her, but to the whole world.
Lucas looked over at Jilly as they walked and she had a silly half-grin on her face and he was going to ask what she was thinking about but thought the better of it and let her continue enjoying whatever thoughts were making her smile.
“Not much farther,” Rob said, adjusting his pace. Noting that he was huffing and puffing less as the weeks went on. He also buckled his belt one notch tighter last time so at least that was a positive. Though he thought he would rather have lost weight by going to the gym and walking on a treadmill in the air conditioning without worrying if someone was stalking him with a gun. He had several gym brochures back at home on his bedside table and it was only going to be a matter of time before he had decided on one and joined up. But that was a distant memory at this point and dwelling on it wasn't getting him anywhere except slightly depressed.
“How’re ya doing there?” Carolyn asked as she fell into step next to him.
“Hanging in there,” he said. “How about you?”
“The same. Hoping maybe we get some answers beyond what we know so far. I feel like we don't know almost anything more than we did the first day.”
“Me too,” he said with a deep sigh.
It wasn't much longer before the group arrived at the address Manny had given them. It was a moderate-sized square brick building, probably at least 100 years old, built back when the city was just getting started. It had an older cloth awning stretched out over a red carpet that led to the front door of the lobby.
“Do we go in,” Lucas murmured, “or knock?”
Before anyone ventured a guess, an older lady carrying a very impressive shotgun pushed the front door open and leveled it right at them.
Rob was silently counting how many times he'd had a gun pointed at him since this all started.
Carolyn raised her hands immediately. “Manny sent us,” she said. “He gave us this address.” The woman’s eyes narrowed.
“I've seen all the folks here that ain't under the influence of the fog and I don't remember ever seeing any of you all.”
“We're not from in here. We just came in from the outside earlier today.”
“That's not possible unless you're with the military since they're the only ones who go in and out.”
“We're not with them but we did sneak in driving one of the trucks.”
“That doesn't make any sense at all. Most of the unaffected in here have been trying to get out of this jail and you show up saying you broke in?”
“We're looking for answers,” Carolyn explained. “Answers we can't find outside. We can see the ships flying in and out and we can see people walking around but we had no idea about what's happening. We finagled our way inside by pretending to be one of them and driving a military truck in with the other ones.”
She held out the paper Manny had given her. The woman took it and looked it over.
“…yeah. That’s Manny’s chicken scratch alright. But I still can't figure out why you're here.” She lowered the rifle.
“Name’s Natalie,” she said. “Come on in and sit a spell before somebody notices you standing out here.” She stepped back and held the door open.
They filed one by one into the cool dark lobby. Rob felt like he had been taken back to the 1920s noting the art deco style columns and furniture, the ornate tile floors stretching back to the elevators and tall plants dotting the corners.
“Wow,” Lucas said, craning his neck to look at the intricate ceiling details. “This place is gorgeous.”
“Yes, it is son. They don't make buildings like this anymore.” She ushered them towards a small grouping of couches. “Have yourself a seat. Manny should be back anytime now.”
“Thank you so much,” Rob said. “We really appreciate it.”
“We've got cases of bottled water and canned and boxed food behind the front desk,” Natalie said pointing towards the check-in area.
“Where do you get it all?” Rob asked.
“The trucks bring it in and deliver it to the businesses and restaurants every week. Enough stuff to keep each one going until the next shipment. We don't know why or where they are getting any of it but after the soldiers drop it off we can go in and take whatever we need because none of the people care.”
“That is the weirdest thing I have ever seen,” Carolyn said. “I mean, aside from spaceships descending from the sky, force fields erected around cities, and zombie people.”
Everyone nodded in agreement as they settled onto the old cloth and wood sofas. They could feel the tension sliding away just a little. The sun had sunk below the horizon and Natalie bustled around the big room turning on individual stand lamps with large stained glass shades. Everything was bathed in a soft white glow. Jilly leaned back on the couch and felt like she could go to sleep for about a month.
Down the elevator hall, the sound of a large metal door opening and shutting echoed off the tile floor. “Manny's back,” Natalie announced.
Manny came in hauling a small wagon stacked with boxes, his boots clicking across the tile.
“Well howdy howdy howdy!” He called out when he saw everyone. “I see you've met Natalie. And she didn't shoot you on sight so that's a positive. Now don't get up, just stay relaxed” he said as Rob and Lucas started to stand. They sank back down glad they could stay off their feet.
“So did these folks tell you they're from the outside?” He asked Natalie.
“Yes they did and I still can't wrap my head around why anyone would want to break in here.”
“Me neither, but they seem to think they can get a better idea about what's going on inside here than out there. I'm hoping they're right.”
“Tell us what's it been like in here since this has all happened. You said the trucks bring supplies but what else? And is there any indication of why this is happening? What is the purpose of locking up and drugging all these people? AND not to mention WHO is behind it all?” Carolyn rattled off all the questions at once.
“When it started and everyone got stupid under the influence of whatever that was, most of us who weren't affected by it hid. Looking back we all should have run then because after all of the, what did you call them, zombies? got here the force field came down and we were stuck.” Natalie explained.
“It wasn't necessarily better out there,” Rob said, “no one is bringing supplies and most of the stores are completely looted and a lot of the immune people are really bad and will shoot you just to get whatever meager supplies or food you've managed to find for yourself.”
“Well that's true,” Natalie said thoughtfully. “We haven't had to fight for food and no one has tried to chase us out of this hotel. But most people that we met in here have family outside the wall and they don't know if any of them are somewhere in here affected like everyone else or they are out there trying to survive.”
“Someone we talked to, a lady who is running a safe haven for the immune on the outside said that it looks like there might be a genetic component to whether or not you're affected because she said several family members have shown up there together. Just like Lucas and Jilly who are brother and sister.”
“That's very interesting,” Natalie said. "I met two brothers here right after it happened. They are holing up in an apartment above one of the stores a few blocks over. And to answer your other questions, we've only seen the trucks bring supplies. Probably once a week. They come by, drop the boxes and supplies off and leave. That's all we've seen them do. We don't know where they go afterward because we can't follow them.”
“Have you seen anyone else? Anything that looks alien?”
“The only people we have seen are just people. The ones affected and the military ones. They all look like just run of the mill humans. But those ships, the big giant ones that first appeared and the other ones that come and go every day, those are nothing like I've ever seen before. They look very alien.” Natalie shivered at the thought.
“How many ships come and go every day?” Carolyn wanted to know.
“Oh, there are little ones that I can't see unless I'm all the way on the edge of town so I got no idea about how many of those there are. But I can see the bigger ones from anywhere. First one leaves about 8 AM, one comes back around noon and another leaves mid-afternoon and another comes back just after sunset. Could be the same one coming and going.”
“And no idea what they’re doing?” Rob wanted to know.
“I reckon I don't got a clue,” Manny said. “It may have something to do with the alarms that go off every morning.”
“Alarms?” Rob said, trying not to sound alarmed.
“Every morning 'bout 7 AM they release more gas and at the same time an alarm goes off. A high pitched whine sort of like an air raid siren. We don't know what it's for but I reckon it's got something to do with keeping the people under the influence.”
“I guess we should get up early and check it out,” Carolyn suggested. “And maybe see if we can find out where the trucks go after they drop off supplies. We've got a truck just like theirs so maybe we can get around without being too obvious.”
“Where’s your truck?” Natalie asked.
“We stashed it in a parking garage downtown. We'll walk back to it in the morning.”
“Let's get you all settled into some rooms so you can get a good night's rest. Grab some water and food and I'll grab room keys.” Natalie headed to the front desk where she pulled a few keys out of the pigeon holes and headed towards the elevators.
The group each took some water and a couple items of food and followed her across the lobby.
As they waited for the elevator, Natalie glanced back at them.
“If you end up not being able to sleep,” she said, “there’s a ballroom downstairs. Giant roll away big screen TV, stack of DVDs. We watch movies.” A small shrug. “Not much else to do when you’ve been stuck here this long. I’ve seen my favorite movie twenty-five times already.”
The elevator arrived with a soft chime and the doors slid open. The elaborate doors slid open revealing an intricate wooden interior with a beautiful mirrored rear wall. Jilly hopped right in and started trying to fix her hair “Oh my god! Look at me! I look awful. Don't I look awful?"
“You look absolutely lovely,” Lucas said.
“Ew,” she shot back. “Stop it!! You're my brother!”
“Would you rather I told you the truth—that you’re ridiculous and just this side of annoying?”
Jilly squinted at him. “…rude.”
“You’re not awful at all. You’re very pretty,” Rob said. “Unless the old guy’s opinion doesn’t matter either.”
“OH Rob, you're not old! And thank you.” If he didn't know better Rob thought he saw her blush a little.
The doors slid closed and everyone stood crammed together in silence as the old lift slowly and noisily made its way up to the third floor. The doors opened to a long beautifully carpeted hallway with dark wood accents lit by small leaded glass lights.
Natalie walked down a few rooms and used a key to open one of the doors. “This room has double beds and also has an adjoining room with the same. There should be plenty of room for all of you. Rest up and I will see you in the morning.”
They each thanked her sincerely and split off to claim beds. Lucas and Rob in one room, Carolyn and Jilly in the next
No one said much. Morning would come early.
And with it… whatever came next.