Madelyn thought about shutting off the recording. She wasn’t accustomed to speaking out loud so much, and she certainly wasn’t comfortable with the idea of other people finding her recording and watching her confessions. But the process had created a warm spot inside her. For once since finding herself trapped underground, she didn’t feel quite so lonely. She had created an invisible link with the outside world, even though it was one way. She wanted to keep that feeling. She wanted to strengthen that bridge.
“I want to tell you about the time my grandmother taught me and my brother to clean fish,” she said. “Actually, let me first tell you about the time that I almost killed myself.”
Madelyn nodded at the idea. That was a good place to start an autobiography.
“Yes. Let me start with that. I was struggling to put my world in order. I had lived alone up here for more years than I could count, and I was out of things to do. I had figured the best way to minimize my energy expenses. The woods were well-maintained. My equilibrium with the world was established. I had solved the problems of the day. With that, there was nothing left for me to do. It was time for me to make a soft exit. That’s when my brother showed up. He should have been dead. If anyone was unsuited for survival, it was him. One time when we were kids, he got a paper cut that became so infected that he had to go to hospital. That’s the kind of person he was—helpless. Only constant care from his family and the kindness of strangers kept him alive. At least that’s how I knew him. I suppose that after I lost track of him, he became his own person.”
She smiled.
“That’s a generous way to think of it—after I lost track of him. In reality, I divorced myself from society. When it seemed like society had turned on itself—consuming itself from the bottom up—and I decided that my husband had beat me for the last time, I took a powder. I fled up here and closed the door. I saw the final moments of our infestation from a distance. This place was already wrapped around me, like a cocoon. There was nothing out there for me anymore.”
Madelyn cleared her throat and kept talking. She had a lot more ground to cover.
#
#
#
#
#
Each time she started a new video, the counter at the bottom of the screen reset. It wasn’t long before Madelyn lost track of how long she had been telling her story. She fell into an unconscious pattern. She woke, drank some water, and started recording. At some point, she would get so hungry that she stuffed some food into her face between sentences, but it was never much.
Most of the time her stomach was quieted by the water. She grew accustomed to the burning feeling of stomach acid that didn’t have anything to break down.
The image of the talking woman on the screen grew more and more foreign. The woman wasn’t just old, she was bone thin. She was like a talking ghost, and then like a talking skeleton.
Madelyn made no effort to keep track of what part of the story she was telling. Some facts came out in scrambled order. Some clever turns of phrase brought a smile to her lips until she realized that she had already told that part of the story. She was composing her own epic poem. It refined and grew with each telling.
One part came back again and again—the taste of her father’s city gun in her mouth. That was the end and the beginning. That’s where her entire life pinched down into the tiniest moment. With the smallest twitch of her finger, she would have been gone. It was the true moment of her birth. The first one—the one where she had been ripped from her mother and wiped down by jaded hands—was just an accident. Some random cells had collided and split and grown. There was no decision there. It was just the way life happened.
Her real birth had come when she took her father’s city gun from her mouth without pulling the trigger. Life from then on had been intentional. She had made all the same mistakes, but they had been conscious decisions. There was no randomness in her life since then. Everything was planned and plotted.
Right or wrong, she owned her life.
Madelyn leaned forward and looked closer at the screen. The talking skeleton was reminiscing about her time down in Fairbanks. It was obvious now—Elijah had been in love with her. Maybe it was just wishful thinking. There had been a spark there though. It was undeniable. Why had he left her? Why had he let her stay at the cabin?
When the skeleton stopped to take another sip of water, Madelyn looked down and saw the bottle in her own hands. She was the skeleton. Of course she knew that, but it was strange to remember it all at once like that. She put down the bottle and continued her monologue. She needed to eat more. Her body didn’t demand it, but her eyes did. There was almost nothing left of her.
M
ADELYN
BLINKED
UNTIL
HER
eyes cleared.
The counter said that the recording had been going on for two minutes. It couldn’t be right. The thing must have reset itself. As far as she knew, she had been talking for hours, telling about the time that Gabriel had shown up and chased Jacob away.
Madelyn quickly forgot her confusion.
She thought of another story she wanted to tell.
She started to reminisce about how she had finally gotten away from her abusive husband, Austin. When she started to cough, she opened her eyes and realized that her mouth was so dry that her lips were stuck shut. Her cough rattled around in her hollow chest. Madelyn focused on the screen and saw the counter flip over to three minutes. She had dreamed the beginning of the story. She took a sip of water with fingers that looked as skinny and brittle as twigs.
On the screen, her face was just bones wrapped in translucent skin. Even more of her hair was gone.
It was time.
She looked up at the screen for the last time and saw the darkness in her own eyes.
“It’s time. I’m going,” she said.
The trip through the control room to the lift doors was a monumental trek. Madelyn swayed as if there was a strong breeze down in her bunker. When she finally reached the opposite wall, she braced herself and caught her breath. She remembered how the doors had bent inward with the weight of the sand. Her plan wasn’t going to work.
Still, she hit the button.
The metal screeched and ground, but the doors began to slide apart. As the sand spilled through the doors buckled and stopped. There was a good flow coming in, filling her space with sand. Madelyn backed away when it hit her feet.
The doors groaned and the one on the left tore free at the top. The sand ripped past it, gathering speed. It hissed like an angry wind. The static of the flowing sand sounded like all possible noise combined together. Madelyn imagined voices in the hissing. Then, she imagined shouts.
The torrent of sand pulled her feet out from under her and she went down in the tide. It carried her a few meters before it washed over her and buried her. She prayed for a quick end to what was left of her life.
The sand roared as the other door tore from its tracks. Behind her, the control panel blared some alarm. It sounded like more confused shouts to Madelyn. The sand washed over her chest and began to push the breath out of her.
She got her arm up just before the sand covered her face.
She breathed in the space of the crook of her elbow.
Madelyn smiled at her body’s effort to cling to life. It was time to let go.
#
#
#
#
#
Madelyn kept her eyes closed against the sand. She didn’t hear the hiss of it flowing anymore, but still heard the alarm from the control panel and something else. There was something in the sand with her. She could hear it moving.
Madelyn struggled against the weight. She had made her peace with dying under a blanket of sand, but she couldn’t stand the thought of The Wisdom finally getting its claws into her. It was too late—she was pinned down by the sand. Her diminished muscles were no use against it.
Her lips were pressed against the arm of her shirt. Using it as a filter, she was barely able to suck in enough breath to satisfy her lungs. Still, she supposed that she couldn’t be that deep if she was able to breathe at all.
Something grabbed her arm.
Madelyn fought.
It pulled on her. She couldn’t resist it. The force was about to rip her arm from its socket.
By the time Madelyn’s head breached the surface, she found enough air to curse at her attacker.
“Let me go! I’ll kill you!” she croaked.
She was half-buried in the sand.
“Oh, lord, what’s happened to you!” the man asked.
She managed to open her eyes. The light from his headlamp blinded her. When he pushed it away, she saw her brother. He had waded through the drift of sand and was standing over her.
That couldn’t be right—her brother was an old man now.
“Wait,” she said. She still wasn’t right—her brother was dead.
“I saw your memoir,” her brother said. “You still looked okay in that. How long has it been since you’ve eaten anything?”
Another man waded up behind him. He didn’t make sense alongside her dead brother. It was Elijah. He looked just the same as when she had left him.
“Let’s get her out of this place,” Elijah said.
Madelyn lost consciousness as they dug her out of her grave.
#
#
#
#
#
She opened her eyes and took in the picture.
After a second, she figured it out. It was Jacob, her nephew, who was crouched next to the couch. Elijah was over in the kitchen.
“You’re making a mess,” she said.
Jacob followed her eyes and smiled. They had tracked sand everywhere in the cabin. There was a deep trail that led to the front door. It was bisected by the tire tracks from her cart.
“Yeah,” Jacob said. “It’s like a beach in here.”
“The Wisdom tried to bury me,” she said.
“I know,” Jacob said. “I watched your memoir.”
Elijah came from the kitchen carrying a mug. He crouched next to Jacob. Her nephew propped her up while Elijah helped her get the mug to her lips. The concoction was impossibly sweet. Madelyn’s mouth rejected all but the tiniest sip. She was able to take in more with the second swallow.
“You’ve got to get your strength back,” Elijah said. “You’re somewhat of a celebrity now.”
Madelyn shook her head. She didn’t know what he was saying, but she couldn’t take in more information now. She had too many unanswered questions for him to be raising new ones.
“Where?” she managed to ask.
“We’re at the cabin,” Jacob said.
Madelyn shook her head again. “Where did you come from?”
The two men looked at each other.
“We saw your stream on the ether and figured out that you had been buried. It took a few days, but we got you most of the way dug out. It was really slow work to dig out the shaft of your lift. You really helped us out when you let the rest of the sand down into the control room. You must have heard us working, right?”
Madelyn looked in his eyes. He had no idea that she had given up. The sun still rose every morning for her nephew. He didn’t know what it was like to be stuck down in eternal darkness.
“Yes,” she said. “Heard you.”
“Save your energy,” Elijah said. “You have to get your strength back. Drink some more of this.”
He forced her to take in more of the liquid. She felt its cold fire burn down into her stomach and then radiate out into her veins. She didn’t know what kind of magic he was putting in her mouth, but it was already starting to work. Her extremities were waking back up with the new fuel. The sensations were mostly painful.
Jacob smiled at her and then stood back up.
“The sun will still be up for a few hours,” Jacob said. “I’m going to rig up the bucket so we can finish digging this place out.”
Elijah nodded at the young man, but kept his place next to Madelyn.
As her eyes drifted shut, he nudged her to take another drink.
T
HE
SOUND
OF
THEIR
effort was comforting. The cart squeaked as it rolled across the planks. The door creaked and then Elijah grunted as he pushed the load over the threshold. Madelyn kept her eyes shut and listened to it. She had a specific image in her head for every sound.
She heard Jacob carry more buckets up the stairs and wondered. She heard the distant sound of him shoveling.
She drifted back to sleep.
When she woke up again, they were taking a break.
Elijah was sitting on the cushion next to her feet. Jacob was perched on the ottoman. As soon as he saw that her eyes were open, Elijah moved to force her to drink more of his potion.
“Please,” she said. “Give me a minute.”
He nodded.
She cleared her throat. “Did The Wisdom go to Fairbanks?”
“Not yet,” Jacob said. He covered his mouth as he spoke. He had just taken a bite of his apple. He swallowed before he continued. “The wind seems to have blown it to the east, but there is talk that it might roll back in over town. People are ready. There are underground shelters for the people who will stay and the rest have an evacuation plan.”
She shook her head and started to push herself up.
Elijah guessed what was concerning her.
“Don’t worry—the underground shelters have multiple exits. Nobody is going to be buried.”
Madelyn exhaled and settled back down to the couch.
“Here,” Elijah said. “You need to drink this.”
She took a sip and felt the familiar burn and flow of energy.
“What is this concoction?” she asked. “It burns.”
“It’s tea with a little sugar,” Elijah said. “Later today I hope to get you to consume an actual piece of food.”