Flare (8 page)

When they arrived the store was empty, and after a search they found a note.

If you guys get this, I’ve gone. I’ve figured out the sheets. Couldn’t wait up for you because I didn’t know if you were coming back. But please, take everything you want in the shop, it’s yours.

- Raj

Ash passed the note to Heather. She read it and then let out a dry laugh.

“The sheets?” she asked. “How did he figure them out?”

Ash didn’t quite know, but he knew what to do.

“These sheets are all around,” he said. “We need to find some and bring them home.”

Heather agreed. They refilled their backpacks with both food and water and walked out.

/***/

The papers were everywhere. They appeared to be trash from the outside and only revealed themselves at close range, but they were everywhere.
I thought there was just litter all around, but it would have burned up in the flare,
thought Ash.

They picked up the sheets by the fistful, feeling strangely
rich
as they did so. The papers were in trees, under bridges and inside of cars. They were flying through the air and stuck on top of abandoned houses. They were caked in mud and wrinkled, but they were never torn, and all of them were ultimately legible. Ash noticed that they all seemed to have a different set of words, numbers or symbols on them.

They had stuffed their backpacks full of the sheets and Heather wanted to return home, but Ash wanted to stay a little longer.

“We should search the dead bodies,” said Ash. “I don’t know why, but we should.”

/***/

They searched body after body and found nothing, but Ash wanted to continue. Perhaps one of them had written a clue down on the paper, or perhaps someone had written a note that these sheets were all a hoax. Whatever the case, Ash felt he had to continue searching the bodies until he found a piece of paper. They weren’t under any time pressure and it felt right to do this, like checking to see if every door was locked before you went to bed.

There weren’t a lot of bodies near the store, and neither Ash nor Heather wanted to go back to the hospital, so it took some time for them to find anything. They found a paper an hour later on the burnt remains of a man, and the man left no other clue as to what he had been or what he had been doing. The paper was in his pocket, and it had an electrical engineering diagram on it. Ash recognized the pattern from a class he took in graduate school: a question concerning parasitic capacitance in a transistor circuit. But there were no markings on it, and nothing on the man that would tell them anything.

They found one more sheet of paper, this one on a woman who was lying face down on a patch of insulating cloth that was shiny on one side. Ash also recognized that the paper might have been a duplicate of another sheet he had picked up earlier in the day. He stuffed the woman’s paper in his bag and wanted to leave, but once again Heather stayed there, lost in thought.

“We should take this cloth,” said Heather.

Ash picked up the cloth beneath the woman. It was a patch of fabric cut from something larger, and it was black on one side and a reflective silver on the other.

“Couldn’t hurt,” said Ash.

He put the cloth in his backpack and they headed back towards the house. The sun wouldn’t come up for another three hours, but Ash wanted to go home. He hadn’t slept much in the closet the night before, and they had gotten enough information for one day.

/***/

They returned to find the front door of their house open. Nervous, Heather and Ash crept backwards until they were out of the house’s sight, and talked under their breath.

“We have no weapons,” said Heather. “If they have a gun—”

Heather’s voice trailed off, and Ash realized they didn’t have an answer to this. They didn’t have a weapon, and whoever was in the house could be dangerous. They might not let Ash and Heather stay in the closet this time.

“We’ll proceed cautiously,” said Ash. “Go room by room, try to see them first. If they’re friendly, they’re friendly; if they’re hostile, we spend the day in the closet or a room in the hospital, and figure out our next move from there.”

Heather agreed, and Ash thought for a moment.

“Is there any way we can get a weapon?” he asked. “Not a gun, but something makeshift.”

“I might have something in the back,” said Heather.

/***/

They got a small shovel and a sledgehammer from her shed and crept into the house. Ash carried the sledgehammer but didn’t know what he would do with it if he found someone. He practiced his speech in his mind over and over again as they scoured the house, room by room.
We mean you no harm,
he’d say in a calm, clear voice.
Just tell us what you’re doing here, because we mean you no harm.

They found no one, but Heather’s place had been looted. Her bedsheets were taken, some clothes from the closet were missing, and all of their food was gone.

Ash shot a look of relief at Heather and whispered, just in case the intruders were near and somehow hiding.

“They didn’t take our curtains,” said Ash. “At night the curtains look normal, I guess.”

/***/

The evening turned a deep red, and Ash ate a package of dried ramen noodles and drank a bottle of water as he sat on Heather’s porch. They had made one more run to Raj’s store and loaded themselves up with food, and though the meal was empty calories, Ash ate heartily. Heather gave Ash a vitamin pill for dessert, and that was all he needed.

He thought of how much had happened since he’d awoken from the coma.
Everything’s gone by so quickly,
but it also feels like it’s lasted a month. When you have a routine, there’s comfort, but the days stay indistinguishable. There’s no routine here, and I’ve remembered everything since I woke up.

The sun came up over their sealed house and though Ash was exhausted, he wanted to read what was on the sheets of paper. Heather did too, and they spread them out on the living room table. The curtains behind them glowed at the edges, but Ash felt safe.

The sheets held riddles that were either strings of text, numbers, or indecipherable symbols, all of them quite difficult. They didn’t hold open-ended thought-based questions like
Design an alarm clock for astronauts
, or
Why are manhole covers round?
These sheets held high-level, intricate problems with specific answers, and they concerned everything from number theory to philosophy.

Heather got two spiral-bound notebooks and several pencils from a drawer and placed them on the table.

“How many of these can you solve?” she asked, smiling. “I’m already assuming it’s at least one.”

“I don’t know. A few.”

“What will solving them yield?”

“I don’t know,” said Ash. “I think we should start by organizing them first. Some are duplicates. They seem to fall into different …
genres
. We’ll find out what we have, and that will give us a better place to start.”

They spread the papers out on the kitchen table. Except for one group, there was a clear focus of each sheet, so they divided the papers into rough piles: words, numbers and symbols. The final group had an equal combination of the three, and even included a map.

After all the papers were sorted, the words pile ended up being forty-two sheets, the numbers pile thirty-two, the symbols pile seven, and the final group had five. They broke down the symbols pile first and found two pairs of identical papers and three singles.

The words pile held ten singles, eight pairs, three triplicates, and one paper that was repeated seven times. The numbers pile had eight repeats, two instances of triplicates, one paper four times, and the rest were singles. The symbols group were all different and the final group were all identical: five pages of words, numbers, symbols and the map.

“I still don’t see a pattern,” said Heather.

“Me neither,” said Ash. “But there’s got to be some logic to the distribution. We don’t have to find it now though. Let’s try to solve a sheet or two and go from there.”

“This is
your
domain,” said Heather, smiling. “You’re the genius.”

“You’re the doctor.”

“But puzzles aren’t my thing—”

Ash pushed the pile that was repeated seven times towards Heather.

“These ask medical questions,” said Ash. “Straightforward, in multiple-choice format.”

Heather examined the top paper and agreed, albeit reluctantly.

“I’ll give it a shot,” said Heather.

“Try as best as you can,” said Ash. “We’ll compare results.”

/***/

Ash solved one sheet in two hours. It held a series of strange symbols and had a key at the bottom giving each symbol a numerical value. Though he didn’t immediately recognize what the markings were, they weren’t alien to him. He relaxed his mind, thought about the paper, and then lay down on his back. He closed his eyes and let the images of the symbols dance in his head, just
thinking
about them and letting his subconscious figure out the rest. He didn’t know what the symbols were but felt connected to these shapes as if …

They’re supposed to be musical notes.
They’re sharps and flats, quarter notes and whole notes, on both a bass and treble clef.

Ash transposed the symbols to their corresponding notes and then wrote them out on a separate piece of paper. Heather had an old piano under a cover, but Ash didn’t want to play it now. Even though they were protected by the daylight, the piano would be loud and might still attract unwanted attention.

Ash played the music by tapping his fingers on the table in front of him and listening to the sounds in his head. It was a simple piece in the style of Vivaldi, with a straightforward cadence and a relaxing melody.

But some of the notes are missing.
Sometimes it’s a high note, sometimes it’s in the chords, but there are missing notes.

Ash played the piece on the table and in his head over and over again until he had it down, and then he wrote the music out. He filled in the missing notes and circled them, played the music in his head once more, and it was complete. He wrote out the missing notes in a row, transposed them back into symbols and then put them through the key at the bottom. It gave him a long number. He checked his work again and—

That’s the answer. That’s all there is.

He triple-checked his work and he had indeed solved it, but he didn’t know where to go from there. He had a number, and nothing else.

He lay on his back and let his subconscious work on the problem of what to do with the number, but he couldn’t come up with anything.

/***/

Ash found Heather surrounded by medical school books she had gathered from the closet downstairs. She was halfway through her sheet.

“These are difficult problems,” she said, happy to take a break. “But not overly so. Just hard medical school questions.”

“How many do you think you’ll be able to answer?”

“Maybe seventy percent. The rest are out of my field of expertise.”

“Let’s see what you have,” said Ash.

There were fifty medical questions split across both sides of the paper, and they didn’t look fun. The first fifteen problems involved obstetrics, asking very specific questions about placentas, vaginal exams and postpartum bleeding. One of them was a diagram of a uterus and asked the test-taker to identify both the main artery that fed it and the primary vein that would drain it. Heather had answered these problems and many others, but not all.

“There’s also a key at the end of the sheet,” said Heather. “It turns my answers into directions, instructing me to move about by a series of degrees. I don’t understand what it’s for.”

“Interesting,” said Ash. “Could you even
guess
at the remaining questions?”

“I’d need help,” said Heather. “Many are in the field of neurology, and that’s not my specialty. I don’t have the right books.”

Ash considered this for a moment.

“Would
anyone
be able to answer all of these questions?” he asked.

“Probably not,” she said. “They’re in too many disparate fields. Maybe if someone had access to a medical school library, but even then—”

“Maybe you don’t need to answer every question,” said Ash. “I just solved a sheet with one answer, right or wrong. I still don’t know what this means, but maybe some sheets allow for a gradation of results. The more you get, the better—but you don’t need to answer everything.”

“Maybe,” said Heather.

“We’re almost there. Just try to complete the remaining questions,” said Ash. “I’ll do one more sheet, and we’ll compare results.”

Heather looked at the curtains and then yawned.

“I don’t know if we should continue,” she said. “I think we should get some rest before the sun goes down.”

“There’s no time, we’ve got to figure this out now, and—”

“I need to rest, Ash,” said Heather. “And so do you.”