The Great Big One Page 15

  “Call if you need anything,” he said, giving a small wave.

  Jonesy chirped his tires, roared away.

  Three-mile walk. The cliffs went straight down with no guardrail and it would only take a second to decide to fall—so Griff walked on the other side with the tall pines, boughs still dripping from the rain, hours ago. Droplets landed like little shivers on the nape of his neck, bringing him back. Here you are, the shivers told him. Still alive.

  He took out his phone. Could not process words, notifications, so he just said:

  “Call Thomas Mortimer.”

  The phone rang once. Twice.

  “You’ve reached Thomas Mortimer,” Thomas said. “Please speak.”

  “Hello? Thomas? Are you there?”

  A pause.

  “Yeah. No one ever calls me. I forgot what I was supposed to say.”

  “Just hello,” Griff said. He looked up at the needles. “Do you still have the tape?”

  “Yeah, buddy,” Thomas sighed. “I still got it.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  IT WAS FINALLY TIME TO KNOW IF THEY’D LOST THEIR MINDS.

  Down at the slack tide near the southern jetty, Griff and Thomas toted the giant copper poles to the foamy edge of the water and stuck the flat bottoms in the mud. They wore rubber boots, chest-high waders, padded black headphones. Each pole stood around 5 feet high and had a curved shepherd’s-crook top. They looked like big, brassy question marks with periscope handles. Hyperconductive copper, designed to intercept the transmissions of hypothetical Russian submarines cruising the Oregon coast.

  “Do you have it?” Griff asked. Thomas moved off to the left, headphones already on. Maybe he hadn’t heard.

  The flats slurped at their boots. Waders did not breathe, already damp at Griff’s lower back. Sweat, trickling down his legs. Meanwhile, the whip of cold Pacific wind made his head throb. In this outfit, you are two microclimates. Amazonian swamp below, unsheltered Alpine forest above.

  “Right after he comes,” Griff shouted. “Right? We can listen?”

  Thomas nodded but was quiet.

  They tuned in to the 30-kHz band. At that depth of frequency—like in the deepest, blackest part of the ocean—not much survived. The awful trill of navigation signals. Coded transmissions. Hypothetical submarines. The tide pushed and pulled with long slow jerks. You fought to stand still. On the ride home, Griff knew his legs would jitter uncontrollably.

  How had Leo done this three nights a week?

  “Thomas!” Griff called. Thomas was ignoring him. Maybe too many texts.

  Dunbar came during their first hour. Because he did not have his lights and siren blaring, he clearly fancied himself a stealthy little barracuda. After parking, he swept the beach with his searchlight. The beam bleached the sand, fried the landscape hot white and hit Griff’s eyes with twinkling blotches. A bullhorn, tin-can voice:

  “Keep it up, boys!”

  Thomas and Griff blinked at the swarm of lights until they dimmed to taillights, a blinker. Dunbar was gone.

  “Okay, we ready?” Griff said.

  Thomas shook his head. Griff moved closer.

  “Thomas. Do you have the tape?” he asked.

  Thomas shook his head.

  “You don’t?” Griff asked. “Thomas, you don’t have it?”

  “Charity called,” Thomas said. “You saw her?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She told me to wait.”

  “Fuck!” Griff said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I thought you’d skip out on SubWatch.”

  Water slapped the waders. Schalop, schalop.

  “Don’t worry,” Thomas said. “It’s safe.”

  “Where?”

  “In the car.”

  Griff and Thomas looked at the car.

  “You don’t lock your car,” Griff said.

  “Who’s coming out here?” Thomas asked. Griff looked at Thomas and back at the car. When Thomas’s expression changed, Griff ran.

  Slow-motion nightmare, running in waders, like up to your calf in melted marshmallow, and Thomas behind him like a boogeyman. Griff dropped the pole on land and Thomas struck him from behind, a tackle that tipped his balance too far forward. They collapsed on the sand, Thomas shouting—

  “Chill, man!” Thomas said. “What’s one more day?”

  Griff stood up. A squirrelly part of his mind gauged the distance again—but he didn’t know where the tape was.

  “I can’t wait.”

  “It’s been eight months,” Thomas said. “What’s one more day?”

  “I need to know it’s still there,” Griff said.

  “I promised Charity we’d wait.”

  Thomas stepped between Griff and the car. Thomas didn’t break promises. Griff turned back, picked up his copper pole. Thomas got his. They walked back.

  “Did you hear that crowd?” Griff asked. “Last night.”

  Thomas nodded. “Yeah.”

  “It sounded big, didn’t it?”

  Thomas nodded. They put their headphones back on, waded into the dark water. The moon hadn’t risen yet—it would be big and bright just shy of full but for now the dark line of water curved beyond the strength of his eyes. Still a big world. He looked at Thomas.

  “I want to hear the crowd,” Griff said.

  Thomas took off his headphones.

  “What?”

  “As much as the music,” Griff said. “I want to hear that crowd again.”

  Thomas looked at him. He might’ve been crying.

  “We’ll make it out of here, Griff,” Thomas said. “I promise.”

  THIRTY-SIX

  “WHAT ARE YOU SO WORRIED ABOUT?” THOMAS ASKED CHARITY.

  In the Rat’s Nest, three of them clustered around the cassette tape player. It sat surrounded by old analog RCA wires snaking into speaker towers stacked so high Griff imagined when they hit PLAY, they’d go catapulting out of the room.

  “It’s because of Leo,” Charity whispered.

  “What?” Thomas asked. “Why are you whispering?”

  “He said he knew when the Band would play again. Said we’d catch the biggest fish there was. The Great Big One. But we weren’t supposed to record it.”

  “What?” Thomas asked. “Why?”

  “No recording, no preserving,” Charity said.

  “That’s spooky, Charity,” Thomas said. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Leo said there was a voice on the broadcast before the Band played. It said ‘no recording.’ That’s why he needed me to hear it live.”

  She eyed the tape.

  “Maybe it didn’t record anything,” Thomas said.

  “This whole thing feels cursed,” Charity said.

  “Are you going to play it?” Griff asked.

  Thomas carefully reached forward, pressed the REWIND button. The little knobs jumped to life, white teeth of the cassette blurring. The tape halted so quickly Griff feared the ribbon would snap.

  Thomas pressed PLAY.

  The current came through the speakers. Like an ocean sound, the wash of the crowd. Griff leaned into it.

  “Still there,” Thomas whispered.

  Their music from the night before. Better than he remembered. Like fingers prying at hidden knots in his shoulders. His body loosened. Something brushed his back and he flinched. Charity. She’d reached out and he’d jerked like a frightened dog. Sometime since October, he’d forgotten how to be touched.

  The music soaked into them. They nodded along to the beat. Leaned closer to the speakers, and each other. Five minutes. Six. Griff held his breath. Please. A little more tonight. He gasped when the sound cut out. A dull hiss. Flatline on the equalizer. Over.

  “So it’s real,” Thomas said. He smiled.

  “It’s amazing,” Charity said. “Leo thought they were recording in a hidden studio. He wanted to go find it.”

  “With you?” Griff asked.

  Charity nodded.

  Thomas rewou
nd the tape and played back the crowd. Stopped. Played again.

  “Wrong,” Thomas said.

  Thomas flipped on a desk lamp. Went to his mixer. He fuzzied the music, submerged the vocals and strings to a faint burbling, and teased out sharp rat-scratching sounds that softened to—

  “Voices,” Griff said. Emerging from the crowd like ships in fog.

  Hey—sure, wow, wow, omigod—

  “No one talks like that in a studio. You can hear the distance between them, I mean—based on these acoustics that’s a big crowd. I’m talking stadium.”

  “Yeah,” Charity said.

  “That’s what it sounds like,” Griff said. “Leo wouldn’t have missed that.”

  “Nope.”

  “Then why would he say that?” Charity asked.

  “Because he wanted to find it first,” Griff said.

  And it made sudden sense. Griff had shared Leo’s mental maps and schematics. Ducts and vents. Half of his brother’s plan flashed into his mind—and Griff knew where to find the rest.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  GRIFF CAME INTO HIS BEDROOM WITH TWO CRESCENT WRENCHES. Unlocking the Unifying Theory of Everything was a challenge. Unlocking the TOE Box was simple. He knelt by the painted mailbox and clutched the wrenches gingerly, like fine-boned birds.

  He stood up and double-checked the door. Locked.

  When he knelt, his right knee brushed the butcher paper on the closet door. To bust a padlock, you used oppositional force. Pressed heads of twin wrenches together like toothless gears within the narrow window of the hasp.

  He took a breath for accuracy, the way Leo claimed to do when shooting.

  Griff squeezed. Wrenches slipped. His elbow glanced off the papered mirror with a tearing sound. From the corner of his eye, half a face.

  “No,” Griff whispered.

  He looked again. The eye winked.

  Griff gasped. Grabbed the paper, pressed it to the mirror. With his other hand, he probed for tape, something. The only thing he could reach were the wrenches. He tucked the side of the paper beneath the tear and picked up the wrenches.

  Lazily, the paper flopped back down. Griff turned to the mirror.

  It was Leo.

  “Hey, bro,” Leo said.

  His face in the mirror, cast in a torn paper frame. They blinked at each other. Both breathing. Trembling, Griff reached up and Leo’s eye flicked toward his wrist.

  “Nice bracelet,” Leo said. “Reminds me of something.”

  “I’m so sorry, Leo,” Griff whispered. He could barely find the words.

  “Give me a hand here?” Leo blew up at the torn paper, like he had hair in his eyes. Griff extended the tear, revealing his complete face.

  Another long stare.

  “What could you do?” Leo shrugged. “You screamed my name. Right? Jumped right in? You’re a strong swimmer. I imagine you did everything you could.”

  “I made a line. I tried—”

  “Little late, though. Right? Always been a little late, Griff.”

  Griff looked back at the lock.

  “I need to open the box,” Griff said. “You’d be fine with it.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Yes,” Griff said. “You would be. We worked on this together.”

  “I put a lock on the box, Griff. That’s pretty clear. And I’m telling you not to.”

  “That’s questionable.”

  “Also,” he said, looking up, “that shit is cursed. From my watery grave.”

  Leo did the curse fingers.

  “Please stop,” Griff said.

  “Spiders, too. Crawling. Breeding. It’s actually a spider farm.”

  Leo knew he hated spiders.

  “Okay,” Griff said.

  Griff crawled across the carpet and returned with Scotch tape. Ripped a strip. Leo watched with determined eyes and said nothing as Griff papered over his reflection. He lifted the heavy wrenches from the carpet. His blood felt thick. Arm wobbled.

  Griff inserted the wrench heads and made a fist.

  The lock shattered. It felt loud as a gunshot. Griff sat, panting, staring at the lock’s broken pieces. What had he done?

  KNOCK KNOCK

  “What!” Griff spun.

  “Okay in there?” his father called.

  “Jesus, Dad. I’m fine!”

  Footsteps plodded off. Griff shut his eyes. When he opened them, the box was listing open, just a crack. The smell of low-tide sulfur. He pulled open the heavy, swinging door.

  Griff exhaled.

  The TOE Box was packed. Fuller than he’d imagined.

  Cassette tapes. Radios. Headphones. Waterproof notebooks. A thick white cardboard tube, deadheaded with tamper-proof tape.

  KEEP SEALED

  “No recording, huh?” Griff said. He took the cassettes out and stacked them click, clack. Over twenty tapes, labeled with longitude, latitude, times. Coded like the Preppers had taught them, don’t make anything easy. Griff split the tube’s tamper-proof tape with a soft pop. He reached his fingers inside. A tickle.

  Spiders!

  No. Two tight rolls of graphing paper. He spread them out on the carpet. Leo’s cramped, meticulous handwriting clustered in the corners, slashing across great, wide swaths of geography.

  One of the maps was of Oregon. Even with coded labels, Griff recognized how the banks and cays fit together like the loops and sockets of a puzzle. The first map was casually marked.

  The second map was much more detailed. Dotted arrows. Interlocking circles, drawn by a compass. Meticulous elevation lines. The markings depicted a vast plateau between crisscrossing mountain ranges. If Griff understood the scale, the landform was too massive to be unknown to him.

  Where could it possibly be?

  If Leo’s map was scaled at 20 miles to an inch—as it appeared—the plateau was hundreds of square miles wide. There couldn’t be many such spaces on Earth. Griff went to his computer. He searched California, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, Nevada for an elevated landform that size, between 250 and 300 feet high. The Midwest. Russia. Siberia. Africa. Europe. What was he missing?

  He texted Thomas: I NEED YOU TO FIND SOMETHING FOR ME.

  ON IT CHIEF, Thomas responded. SHOOT.

  Griff sent him the rough dimensions. Hundreds of square miles, a few hundred feet high.

  Hours later, Griff lay exhausted on his bed. Lights on. Still dressed.

  NADA, Thomas texted. SURE YOU’VE GOT THE MEASUREMENTS RIGHT?

  “Where?” he said out loud. He looked at the paper on the mirror. He rolled around in his bed. Punched his pillow. Flipped it.

  He looked at Leo’s bed, neatly made.

  “Whoomp,” Griff said.

  Griff remembered the first night, when Leo had locked the TOE Box. Griff scooted to the foot of the bed and hung his head upside down, from the bottom. He stared at the box. Looked up at the pebbled ceiling.

  The realization struck his body first. Goose bumps up the back of his neck, nipping at his hairline.

  “Upside down,” Griff whispered.

  He sat so suddenly the world jerked, tilted him sideways out of bed, and he stumbled up to his computer. Tapping the screen. Then grabbing the map.

  No plateaus of that size 250 feet above sea level.

  But Leo’s elevation lines were 250 feet below.

  “Atlantis,” Griff whispered.

  Leo had tracked the radio signal to the bottom of the ocean.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  GRIFF, THOMAS, AND CHARITY MET THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON at Spawn Drive Peak. Just within city limits, the park’s wide strip of sloping grassland hugged sheer sandstone cliffs. Terraced picnic benches, a few BBQ pits, and the town’s best inland ocean view. Wind whipped tall reed grass in great gusts. Tourists often marveled at the vacancy of coastal picnic benches until the moment they tried to eat their club crackers in 40-mile-per-hour winds.

  “Sperm Drive Peak,” Thomas said, claiming a table with his bag.

  Charity looked at him
. “What did you call this?”

  “Sperm Drive Peak,” Thomas said. “This is our classic small-town make-out spot. Do you even live here?”

  “I thought they called it Swan Dive Peak” Charity said, looking down. “Because it was the classic small-town suicide spot.”

  “It’s both,” Griff said. “Like my mom says—in small towns everyone just has to wear two hats and do more.”

  Charity laughed.

  “Okay. So what else did you learn?” Thomas asked.

  Griff removed a handful of cassettes from the backpack and slapped them on the picnic table. Then another. Another. Twenty-two, all told.

  “One,” Griff said. “Leo had no trouble with recording or preserving.”

  “Wow,” Charity said.

  All the late nights with muddy boots—he must’ve logged almost a hundred hours.

  “Hold the corners,” Griff said.

  He unfurled the map in the wind. Thomas got down close and pulled a ruler from his bag. A flat magnifying sheet. He measured the notches.

  “See?” Griff said to Thomas, pointing to the large depression.

  A flat-bottomed crater between mountain ranges.

  “Atlantis,” Thomas said, lifting his hand. The corner of his map beat the table in the wind, tickatickaticka, fluttering like cards in spokes. “Looks like it.”

  “Can you explain?” Charity asked.

  “This is all hundreds of feet below sea level. Griff thinks Leo was looking for something underwater.”

  Tickatickatickata—

  “How does that make sense?” Charity asked.

  “It doesn’t,” Thomas said. “It makes no scientific sense. Radio waves can’t penetrate water. It’s physically impossible. Think about SubWatch. Even those monster receivers can only get a whisper, and that’s if the subs are close to surfacing.”

  A shadow fell across the table. Charity shivered. Zipped up her coat.

  “How is this June?” Charity said. “God.”

  “Oops,” Thomas said.

  “I’m not cursing, I’m asking the Lord a legitimate question.”