Chapter Twenty Two: Vacation Eternal — Part 4

Thursday morning for Joe, Blake, George, and Jude proves quite different an experience from that of Jynx and the others. The four, with Gryphon in tow, have formed a loose scavenging alliance, traveling across Tó Naneesdizí and its outlying areas, scouring the land for fuel, food, and materials. They have had small successes, and have been very polite to build up their reserves at the hospital, so that the generator can be spooled up, as needed. Except diesel fuel: Joe is particular about hording it, though he is also more than willing to surrender it, should the need arise.

On one of their trips out, the four of them stumble across a compound whose primary purpose is unknown, and whose internals are shielded by an absence of windows. Externally, the compound is fenced in like a government facility, though it is currently not marked with a sign at the entrance they find. Nobody is around when they arrive, so Joe and Blake drive into the fenced in structure, parking in front of a lone building set next to a massive antenna reaching into the sky. He opens the doors, left unlocked, apparently, and starts looking around, his flashlight darting about the room. The equipment is hardly digital, nor is it mainstream, and the equipment is marked as government property.

“Whose government?” Blake wonders, considering the location of the facility.

Joe can’t see him to answer, even when his single beam is joined by three more as George and Jude step in behind him. Gryphon follows the light beams out, playing, apparently, with the whole notion of light in dark patches. The room has tables along all the walls, and rows of tables with broken down equipment and what seem to be testing stations here and there. The center must have been extremely busy at one point, because the linoleum tiles are worn in places as if by hundreds of footsteps over time. Joe is the first to react to the fifth flashlight beam, coming in on them from behind. He can’t see who it is because the person is backlit in the doorway, but he’s hoping that the person is kind, rather than simply taking the time to aim a weapon of some form before firing it.

“Oh, the visitors. I should have known you would find the repair center while looking around town.” The voice is low, old, rattled, but cautious.

“What exactly are you repairing here?” Joe asks as politely as he can.

“Curious, like a child.” The man reaches up, adjusts something, and the emergency lights come on, making the room bright enough to see in, and encouraging everybody to turn their flashlights off. “Shortwave receivers and transmitters. I have been rebuilding the coils, one by one, as time and energy permits.”

“Energy?”

“I’m not as young as I once was. Besides, the hospital needs the generator more, and there aren’t enough working solar cells to trust either facility to the sun.” The man looks old enough to have been working on radios since the late seventies, but isn’t so old that he’s ready to retire. “Fortunately, we had a dozen sets hardened.”

“Hardened?” Joe asks, mostly for Blake, who has signed a question.

“Against nuclear attack. We used to talk to our sister facility in Canada, and a small facility in Europe. We’d talk for hours while testing them with the antenna.”

“Got any noise lately?” George asks, curious.

“We don’t have long range yet. We have to degauss the antenna, and wire it back up for use, since its grounding switch over and send receive cables are completely burned out. The sick need the power more. Kia says maybe two weeks before we can get the generator back out to the tower.” He seems to be considering something. “Are you four staying, or leaving?”

“We’ll be heading out North, toward Washington.” George says.

“Good.” It sounds like an insult, almost, but the power of the voice guiding it is such that nobody feels a need to talk just yet. Even Blake’s hands are steady, calm.

The old man, his darker skin pale with age, moves over to a couple of strong looking carry boxes, sealed up tight against the elements, looking like they were made in the fifties. Each of them is freshly painted a drab olive gray and sealed with a red tie wrap that has a date on it spanning back a little less than a week. He carries the odd looking cases to Joe and sets them down. They seem light as air in the man’s hands, but when Joe tries to pick them up, the weight is enough that Joe decides to swallow his pride and set them back down.

“I’ve tested those, they work.” The man says quietly. “Your ears work?” He asks Blake, who nods quickly.

He walks to a table where a pile of books are organized in three neat rows, and picks up two books with dark green instead of light blue covers that have been set aside. He hands one book to Blake, “You hear, but don’t talk, so now you have words, people will listen. This book is your Bible now. These are the codes, like Morse, and others. Also, there are tuning instructions, and all you need to know about building and raising an antenna, and repairing a bad unit, even building up a coil set from scratch parts, in a pinch. These are my frequency lists. Every day of every month is different and random, and if you try to reach me with the wrong frequency, using those codes, I will be forced to believe it isn’t you.”

He leans in close to Blake, who has opened the cover of the book. The front cover is stamped as Top Secret as are several pages on the inside. Under the stamp is the word ‘Handles,’ and under that word, text is written neatly in three columns, spanning five pages. On each page, the first column is filled with what must be the handles, sometimes ending in letters and numbers that are strangely reminiscent of passwords Jude has stored in a spreadsheet on his computer. The man’s hand is steady as he points to the first row, his finger moving as he explains the marks on the page. Next to each code, in the second column, are days listed, or the word ‘all.’ The third column is mostly blank, except where twenty codes have been written in by hand. Eighteen of them are marked out in red.

“These Handles are lost people. Each one of these is a person that I have trusted with my handle, and these marks designate which days I gave them frequencies for. The ones that have been crossed out are gone. The ones that aren’t are Kia and Tomas.”

“Now you must write in your Handle, here. Don’t make it your name.” The man says.

Blake writes in the first part of an old email in both books, BLACKB1RD.

“What is his name?” The man asks Joe.

“Blake.” Joe answers.

“My name is Walker.” The man pauses as he thinks, and Blake is so focused he’s forgotten about his friends, forgotten about Gryphon. “Only use your name or mine over the waves if the book has been compromised. Use this code to communicate. Master this second code, as well, for emergencies. Read every page. Get a student, the younger the better, and train with them. Teach each other every page of this book.”

“Why are you doing this?” George asks suddenly.

“So I have somebody to talk to.” Walker smiles gently.

He walks over, shuts down the emergency lights so as not to drain the batteries, and heads on out, leaving Joe to lug the cases back to the van.

“Treasure.” Joe says greedily. “This is more precious than gold.”

Jude picks up Gryphon, feeling suddenly full inside, and not knowing why. “I’d say that it is.”

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