Project Aquarius (The Sensitives Series Book 1) (25 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Sammy

“
It can’t be much farther,” the blonde girl said.

She had said that before. Three times. Sammy was counting. He was also counting rocks in his shoe. There had been nine today alone. So many things… to count… when walking everywhere…

They had wandered their way out of the deep woods and were following the signs for Route 27. Twenty-seven was a good number. Taylor said she knew it had to be somewhere off of this road. Twenty-seven would lead to safety.

Walking on pavement again had made Sammy uneasy. He preferred the squish and the smell of decaying leaves underfoot. The asphalt was hard, crumbly, and unforgiving. Everyone else complained about the pavement too. Sammy complained about the rocks in his shoes. Drea had scrapes on her legs. And Darnell had hunger pains. Darnell was always hungry it seemed to Sammy.

Sammy was getting hungry too. He couldn’t tell the exact time, but the light filtering through the tall trees had progressed from an orange glow to a blue dimness. Darkness was coming. It would be dark before the tenth rock.

Sammy looked over at Taylor, his new best friend. She had her eyes closed. Maybe she was counting too.

Suddenly, Taylor opened her eyes and exclaimed, “There it is!”

She pointed to a dirt road up ahead, peeling off from the left hand side of the highway. Right before the entrance to the dirt road, there was a carved sign. In the dim light, it had blended in with the shadows. Sammy squinted it into focus and read, “Welcome Home.”

“Thank you Bird Guide,” Taylor murmured to herself. “We’re here,” she said to the whole group.

“We ain’t nowhere,” Darnell retorted.

Darnell got cranky when the sun went down.

As the sign came into full view, Taylor reassured the group, “We’re home. I’m absolutely sure this is the right place to be.”

The wooden sign reminded Sammy of summer camp, not home. Summer camp was a bad place. He went once and it did not go well. Summer camp had no place for his routines.

“Home is that busted up sign?” Darnell questioned. “It looks like a bird pooped on it for ten years and then a bear ate it for lunch and vomited it back up.”

Taylor smiled. “You can’t see all the good things in life from the road, Darnell. Come on.”

There was renewed energy in Taylor’s gait as she approached the entrance to the compound. Sammy was apprehensive so he slowed down and hung back behind the others. He didn’t want to be the first one to find other people. He wouldn’t know what to say.

The driveway was extremely long and it took a few minutes to wind their way back into the woods. There were fresh tire tracks worn in the bumpy gravel.

Taylor shared, “Earthbound Peace Collective is one of the only truly sacred places I have ever been on the planet. I like that it feels so private and untouched.”

But as they rounded the corner, Sammy observed that The Earthbound Peace Collective wasn’t much to look at. It was a small collection of shoddy outbuildings, barns and cabins. A crooked bumpy place.

“How old is it here?” Sammy asked Taylor. Old places bothered him. They smelled bad and they weren’t comfortable.

“Some of the buildings are original to the farm property built in the 1800’s. The rest were handmade by Collective members, mostly in the 1980’s.”

“Nothing matches,” Sammy observed. It bothered him. Made things uneven.

“That’s part of the charm!” Taylor delighted. “The first building visible from the drive is the Chow House,” she said pointing at an old crooked shack. An untrustworthy building.

“It’s large enough to sit and feed almost forty people, but you can’t tell by looking at the outside,” she said.

Dark curly-cues of smoke puffed out the chimney of the Chow House.

“Smoke,” Sammy said reporting his observation. He hated the smell of smoke. It got stuck on his clothes and in his nostrils.

“That means the wood stove is on. That means people are here!” Taylor skipped as she shouted, “Hello?!?”

No answer.

She called out again, “Hello?”

Taylor motioned for the group to stay behind her and to the right. Sammy didn’t have to be told twice. They stood by a collection of ten tiny cabins in a row, adorned with chipped white paint and crooked doorframes. The first had a hand-painted sign on the door that read Visitor Welcome Center.

“I remember checking in here with my parents at the beginning of the retreat last summer.”

Taylor knocked on the decidedly unwelcoming Welcome Center.

“Hello? Anybody home?”

“Hello!” came a muffled reply. “I’m out in the garden. In back!”

Taylor perked up at the sound of a human voice and ran toward it. Sammy felt a knot in his stomach. The last adults they had seen were bad adults. Dressed in black. Kidnappers.

Gingerly, Sammy peered around the back of the cabin. An older woman with stark white hair stood on a raised bed of freshly turned soil. She was wearing a pair of well-used gardening gloves and ripped overalls. She was old enough to be Sammy’s great-grandmother, but her skin radiated with a youthful glow.

“Well, hello there! Are you folks checking in?” she called out.

Checking in? Was this a hotel? Sammy hated hotels. The rooms smelled like stranger sweat and the elevators dinged all night.

Taylor responded, “No, we’re not checking in… we were hoping to…”

“Oh hello, sweetie. Didn’t see you at first. Good to see you again. I’ve been expecting you.” The woman beamed at the sight of Taylor.

“Beverly, right?”

“Last time I checked, dear.”

“You remember me? I’m Taylor. I was here last summer with my parents.”

“Of course, I remember you,” Beverly overflowed with joy. “A little birdie told me to expect you.” She winked.

“But there are no more birds,” Sammy whispered to Drea.

Drea shushed him.

“But she winked,” he continued. “What did she really mean?” Winking was a strange concept. He would never understand it. Why didn’t people say what they meant?

“Guests? Do I hear guests?”

An enthusiastic younger woman bounded out from behind the potter’s shed. Knotted ropes grew out of her head. They bounced behind her, landing just above her butt. She swung out her arms haphazardly and embraced Taylor. Sammy hoped she wouldn’t try to hug him. She looked like a hugger.

“Welcome home, sweetie,” the second woman crooned.

The woman was overweight and sweaty. Sammy could smell her B.O. from several feet away. Her big toe poked out from her torn canvas sneakers, but her confidence made her glow in a pretty way. The rope-haired lady seemed nice enough.

Drea whispered under her breath, “Check out the old ripped yellow T-shirt and cut-off shorts. She looks like a character from a Jack Kerouac novel.”

Sammy didn’t know what she meant. But the woman did have hair on her legs like a boy.

“Hi everybody, I’m Peace Frog. Welcome to Earthbound.”

Weird words. A frog was an animal, not a name. Kingdom Animalia. Genus Rana.

“I’m Taylor, and these are my friends,” she said gesturing to the group. Sammy looked down. He didn’t like to have people look at him right away.

“Yo, your name is Peace Frog?” Darnell asked, pronouncing the woman’s name like a swear word.

“Yeah, what’s yours?” she countered.

“Uh… you can call me Little Man.” Darnell smirked.

Another smile that didn’t mean a smile.

“Nice to meet you Little Man. Welcome home. And who are your other friends, Taylor?”

“This is Drea and Sammy, they’re brother and sister.”

Drea put her arm around Sammy’s shoulder pulling him close. Sammy winced. Drea nodded at the new people.

“And y’all are traveling without parents? We’re not supposed to rent a cabin without parental permission. But I suppose we could make an exception for an old friend.” Peace Frog winked.

The rope-haired woman was really confusing.

“Oh yes, I think we should rent them a cabin. They came all this way just to see us,” said the old woman, her striking cerulean blue eyes sparkling next to her shock of white hair. She walked toward the Visitor Welcome Center and removed her gloves. “I’ll get the paperwork ready.”

Taylor put her hands together in front of her heart in what Sammy knew was a prayer position. She bowed slightly. “Namaste. Thank you, that would be really nice of you.”

Weird words. Weird gestures.

“Paperwork?” Drea said through gritted teeth in Taylor’s direction. “Do they think we’re going to pay for a cabin?”

“Oh no, I don’t think so.”

Peace Frog acknowledged Drea’s concern, “Of course not sweetie, we’ll send a bill to your parents and they’ll pay. No need to worry about it.”

Darnell jumped in the air. “Parents? You think we still got parents? Ain’t no parents left on the planet, Toad Princess. You and your hippie hair need to get in the way back machine and—”

“— Darnell, don’t be rude,” Drea interrupted. “What he means to say Peace Frog is that something terrible has happened. And we… well, we were able to… and not many people… we’re surprised to see you here.” Sammy’s sister shook and stuttered.

Taylor continued, “Peace Frog, you came to me in a meditation. So I knew that you were alive. But you should know that the rest of the world is… Things are different now… Something terrible happened…”

She had a hard time getting the words out. Sammy knew what that was like.

Darnell jumped in, “Dude, you tryin’ to tell a hippie who owns one outfit and never washes her hair, that the world is different, but look at this place! They ain’t got a clue.” Sammy could see he was trying to help.

Peace Frog’s face scrunched as she said, “Are you kids in some kind of trouble? We can’t take in runaways here.”

Beverly interjected, “No, I think what they’re saying is that the world as we know it will never be the same. Is that what you were trying to say Little Man?”

Darnell’s eyes flicked back and forth over the old woman.

“That was your point, wasn’t it Little Man? A well made one I should say. Funny too, about the way-back machine. Wish I had one of those sometimes.” She raised her eyebrows pointedly.

Everyone was speaking in riddles. Sammy had no need for metaphor. He preferred to be direct. “The world is not the same,” he said softly, “because everyone is dead.”

Drea jabbed him in the ribs. “Sorry about my brother. He has no tact. He has autism… sorry.”

Sammy wasn’t sorry about his autism. It helped him. He had used his words to tell the truth. “What? Most people are dead. It’s a fact.”

Peace Frog and Beverly stared at him with doughy expressions. Sammy stared back without blinking.

“What does he mean?” Peace Frog asked.

“We can tell you about what happened later. We’re just so glad to be here,” Taylor effused.

“Anyway… what is this place? Looks like a bunch of hippies from Scooby Doo to me. Just sayin’,” Darnell said.

Beverly laughed a hearty belly laugh. “You’ve got something to say about everything, don’t you Little Man? You’re very quick on the draw, so you must be able to tell that this is an intentional community and spiritual retreat center.”

“A wha—?”

Drea piped up, “It’s a commune you idiot.”

“A wha—?” Darnell reiterated.

“We’re a self-sustainable community. We grow our own food and recycle and repurpose everything we get our hands on. Even electricity. We’re totally off the grid.”

“So… hippies. Just like I said.”

Beverly smiled. Darnell was apparently right.

“Off the grid? As in no electricity?” Drea exchanged a glance with Taylor.

“That’s why I brought you guys here. This place was designed to survive.”

“Now, we don’t live in the Stone Age dear ones, we have solar panels and we generate just enough electricity for the basics. But we use it sparingly.”

“And it’s still working?” Drea asked.

“Oh yes. But the Internet is down I’m afraid. That satellite stuff is temperamental.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Drea

Drea was on all fours in a cage. Bars, made of thick heavy metal, started halfway up the white plastic wall. The whole place smelled like a barnyard.

    Was she in some kind of psych hospital?

Hello?
She squeaked. The sound that emanated from her was inhuman, high-pitched, and horrible. The floor shook beneath her feet in response.

Footsteps approached.

One, two, three, four, white-faced furry rats appeared in the cell. They were as large as she was! They rushed at her with ferocity, their beady red eyes penetrating her skull.

The high-pitched sound came once again. Drea’s scream made the other rats freeze and they returned the sound while sniffing and twitching in her direction.

Drea smelled their apprehension.

Abruptly, an itch tickled behind Drea’s ear. In response, her leg sprung up to scratch, thrumming away at the spot. Strangely, Drea observed a scrawny pink paw in her periphery. She, it appeared, was a rat, too.

Suddenly, a dark shadow eclipsed the cage. A blurry figure came into view, as big as a skyscraper. The figure peered into the cage from above and muttered something unintelligible. Drea stood on her hind legs to try to get a better view of the giant. He morphed, before her eyes, into a two-dimensional paper-thin silhouette. For a split second, he came into sharp focus–– gold crown, long white beard, holding a golden staff–– The Emperor. It was an image Drea had seen many times in her tarot deck. But rather than the traditional royal robes, this giant Emperor was wearing a lab coat, aqua shirt, black pants, and plastic gloves. As he reached his two-dimensional arm through the bars, the rats snarled and bit his hand.

Drea joined in, her sharp pointy teeth ripping the soft papery flesh…

***

Drea sat up in a panic. Her head spun around trying to find a foothold in reality. A dusty afghan clung to the sweat on her skin and her face burned red hot from the heat of the Earthbound wood stove. She threw the blanket off, letting the cool air bathe her moist skin.

The last thing Drea remembered before she fell asleep was Beverly sitting next to her on the couch. The old medicine woman had offered to heal her wound. Beverly’s presence had been oddly comforting, so Drea had agreed.

She remembered feeling warm energy streaming out of the old crone’s hands, washing over the gash in her side. The pain had subsided almost immediately. Even through the fabric of her sweatshirt, she had felt the healing happen. Then Drea had the urge to sleep for a thousand years…

“Welcome back to the waking world, sweetie. Ah yes, bad dreams are gifts in their own way. We all have gifts, you know,” the old woman said ominously from somewhere behind the couch.

Ugh, that word again. Gifts. Drea didn’t feel gifted. The dreams were burdensome. Honestly, Sierra had been the gifted one, not her. She was the one who had gotten Drea into all the paranormal stuff.

The fleeting memory of her best friend made her head hurt. Drea reached up to hold her throbbing temples.

“Tea?” Beverly offered from her place at the kitchen counter. She was sipping from an oversized mug clutched in her knobby hands.

The sight of the old medicine woman made Drea touch her side. No pain. She lifted the corner of her shirt and found that her wound had closed significantly and nearly all the discoloration had vanished. She was still injured, but the gash had done weeks worth of healing in a matter of hours.

Drea was both grateful and a bit scared of the woman. She avoided Beverly’s question and scanned the open Chow House for her group. She found Sammy asleep, curled up in an aging armchair–– Darnell passed out on a floor mat below. But Taylor was awake, covered in a blanket, having a hushed conversation with Beverly in the kitchen. The old woman was working steadily on knitting a scarf between sips of hot tea.

“So, you going to tell us about your dream, or what?” Beverly asked without looking up from her knitting.

“There’s no point. It was just a weird dream.”

The only person Drea could trust with this stuff was Sierra. She had come to trust Laura too, but that had been a mistake. She was gone now. Trusting people was a painful risk Drea wasn’t willing to take so soon again.

“No point? I hear your dreams are often prophetic. There might be useful information in there,” Beverly encouraged.

Drea rubbed the sleep from her eyes. “I don’t want to talk about it. Just drop it.”

***

In the morning, Beverly and Peace Frog invited the group to brunch in the Chow House. The warmth comforted Drea. It was the closest thing to home she had experienced in weeks. She was feeling better after a full night’s sleep uninterrupted by nightmares.

    Over the smell of fresh vegetable soup, Drea expressed her gratitude. “Thank you so much for taking us in. It means a lot to us, considering the state of things…”

     “You’re welcome. It’s our pleasure really. We don’t get visitors much in the off-season. We talk to people outside the Collective only once a month or so. Pleasant human contact is much welcomed,” Beverly shared.

     “Wait up. You sayin’ you got no cell phones and no TV?” Darnell asked disbelievingly. “Ever?”

     “That’s what we’re saying sweetheart,” said Beverly.

     “But how do you like… know what’s up?”

     “Well, we have the old slow Internet connection when we need it for business. And when we really need something, we gas up the old Ford pickup with some vegetable oil and take a trip into town,” Beverly explained.

     “Weird.”

     A basket of warm homemade bread made its way around the farm table. Peace Frog shared, “For the past three weeks, we’ve been gearing up for the busy season— planting the garden, tending to the greenhouse, clearing the trails, and making repairs in expectation of tourists. No trips to town have been necessary.”

     “So you really got no idea what’s been goin’ on?” Darnell asked. “What’s it like out there?”

     “No, I suppose not,” said Beverly.

     “However, I thought it was pretty strange that our two seasonal interns failed to show up last Tuesday…” Peace Frog said, tilting her head in a way that made the beads in her dreads clack together.

     “Yeah, I remember you saying that babe,” said Izzy, the resident cook, and one of the founding members of Earthbound. He rubbed Peace Frog’s back lovingly.

    Izzy’s temples were gray, his beard was thick, and he spoke in an erudite fashion. Drea knew the type. She had met plenty of societal dropouts turned Harvard professor, but none of them went by a name as bizarre as Izzy. Drea actively tried to practice non-judgment, but the guy was easily twice Peace Frog’s age.

     Growing up in Cambridge, Drea had seen people like Peace Frog panhandling in Harvard Square. Her mother had always held her hand tightly as they passed and urged her to cross the street as quickly as possible. So Drea had learned to keep her defenses up around people who looked different and subsequently, to loathe her own eccentricities.

The soup had melted some of Drea’s defenses. She was happy to be eating a warm meal with kind people, even if they were a bit odd. It was time to tell the story.

“You need to know what happened on April 11,” she began. “The world as we know it, will never be the same.”

She filled them in from the recording studio on, recounting the gritty details of the cataclysm. Beverly Heartsong, Peace Frog, and Izzy sat in rapt attention.

After half an hour, Drea was discouraged. The three adults were listening, but they didn’t seem to get the full magnitude of the situation. Izzy had said, “Let’s go volunteer for the Red Cross to help survivors!”

And Peace Frog had said, “No, we need to intervene on a global level. The United Nations will hold a summit with world leaders. Watch.”

As if the Event was something they could watch on the news— as if the Event was something to volunteer for. Drea fumed with frustration. For intelligent progressive people, they seemed so out of touch. Didn’t they understand that ninety-out-of-a-hundred people were dead, maybe more?

Darnell was the first to raise his voice, “Dude, you don’t get it! We all there is. They ain’t no rescue centers or nothin’. While y’all here munchin’ on grass and singin’ Kumbaya, they are dudes out there with machine guns in helicopters. Ain’t nobody comin’ to help. We runnin’ from the help. We came to you ‘cause… we need your help.”

It was the first time Drea heard Darnell admit vulnerability.

“He’s right. We walked for two weeks. Haven’t seen many other survivors. It’s bad. In the cities, there are dead bodies in the streets,” she said for the tenth time.

“And no one came to help?” Izzy was stymied.

“No one,” Taylor said, backing Drea up. “There’s no one left to help.”

Peace Frog turned to Izzy, tucking his unruly hair behind his ear. “They’re saying that the government finally fell, just like we knew it would, honey. Someone got mad enough that they took action. I bet it was an anarchist group.”

Izzy swayed back and forth as he let the enormity of the situation hit him. “So that’s why my Mom hasn’t called?”

Drea was glad he was finally catching on.

“And that’s why the interns were no-shows?” Peace Frog added.

“Ding ding ding!” Darnell said mockingly.

“Everyone can’t be gone. Maybe it’s just the big cities…” Izzy said as he staggered over and half-sat on a stool by the kitchen counter.

“They walked all the way here— from Boston,” Beverly reminded them.

“Ding-dong everyone you know is gone!” Darnell sing-songed for effect.

Drea shot him a disapproving glare. He shrugged.

“There must be pockets of survivors.” Izzy was swaying back and forth on his stool, tapping his foot wildly.

Taylor gently took Beverly’s wrinkled hand in hers. The two women leaned on one another in a gesture of compassion and understanding. “You are the pocket of survivors. That’s why we came,” Taylor said.

“Oh, dear…” said Beverly.

Izzy scratched his full beard as if it would give him answers. “Why didn’t we die? Why we were spared?” he asked while pacing.

“Ding! Ding! The question of the century. Why ain’t we dead too? Now you totally caught up. Welcome to reality.”

Darnell finally returned to seated. He grabbed a bread end and munched with satisfaction.

“We weren’t spared,” Beverly Heartsong said sweetly as she took her knitting needles in hand and began to gently rock the chair. “We were in contemplation.”

“What do you mean?” Izzy asked.

“That day. Two Mondays ago we were in our morning contemplation session. We were in the meditation hut,” Beverly said as she made steady progress on the scarf.

“That’s right,” agreed Peace Frog. “Beverly led our morning visualization. She instructed us to cover ourselves in protective white light and feel pure love radiate out from our cores. We were surrounded in a bubble of love and acceptance at the time of the disaster.”

Drea watched the wise old woman knit, her breathing even and unalarmed. She caught her eye and the crone winked.

“You saved yourselves that day and didn’t even know it,” Taylor said. “I knew you would be here. My guides led me right to you.”

“So we protected ourselves from the Evil…” realized Izzy.

For an instant Drea swore she saw the three members of the Collective radiate a soft yellow-white glow like nightlights in a dark room. It was a warm comforting glow with the faintest hint of pink. Drea also felt warmth in her abdomen, a pleasant sensation like an all-knowing peace. Yet, a confusing mixture of emotions continued to swirl around in her brain.

Beverly maintained eye contact with Drea and beamed. “It’s no accident that we survived. And it’s no accident that you survived either. If your guides led you here, this is your destiny.”

The room suspended on Beverly’s words. Destiny.

The feeble light around the old woman swiftly telescoped into a bright spotlight. For a second, Drea and Beverly were the only two people on stage in an empty auditorium, bathed in the spotlight. Then quickly, the room snapped back to reality.

Satisfied that the news was finally shared, the boys went outside to play and Izzy excused himself to go lay down. Only the women remained.

“How do you talk to your guides anyway?” Drea asked Taylor. She still didn’t understand how it worked. She was so curious. Her heart ached to know.

Taylor answered eagerly, “You know how you use the tarot to seek guidance? There are other ways to do that too. I don’t just talk to dead people. I talk to angelic beings that help me out. That’s how I found you. That’s how I knew things about your friends.”

Drea’s face flushed. She felt like she was an extra in a supernatural movie— talking to dead people, using protective bubbles, believing in destiny. Yet, there was something familiar about it all, a gut feeling. Drea had believed in angels when she was a kid. And she had seen ghosts in her old house in Cambridge many times. Maybe her sensitivity was really something after all…