A clear, breezy summer day beckoned the pair out into the sunshine. They had just returned from a week-long scrounging trip to several smaller towns, and their shelves were well-stocked, so they just grabbed sun hats and day packs. As they neared the middle of town, sea gulls seemed to call them out onto the docks where big ships once unloaded their cargos, but which now stood empty.
Teina was unusually quiet, glancing at warehouses, but feeling no temptation to explore them.
Jimox noticed a lunch counter they hadn’t searched, but decided to go with Teina’s mood. He knew that scrounging in other towns, and leaving most of the goodies there, was not her first choice, but she was doing it because it needed to be done. Today, he would follow her lead. They could peek at the lunch counter on the way back if they felt like it.
On the big deep-water dock, the two huge cargo cranes, silhouetted against a light-blue sky, creaked slightly as the two little monkey mammals passed beneath their shadows. A massive cold-storage building sat nearby, but they had already agreed to never even open the door, considering what would be growing inside after more than a year without electricity.
NEBADOR Book Eight: Witness 45
Beyond the dock and warehouse area, they came to a fence. Where the road ran through, a sign said Harbor Master — Official Business Only.
Several plain gray buildings clustered at the very end of the road. One bristled with weather instruments and a radar antenna, no longer turning. Another was about twenty feet up on stilts.
“I’ve never been out here,” Jimox admitted.
“Me
neither.”
They both smiled slightly as they passed the Official Business Only sign.
“Kind of fun to be able to ignore all the rules,” Teina said.
Jimox nodded. “One of the few advantages of being the only people alive.”
Teina chuckled as they walked toward the building on stilts.
The little gate across the stairway piqued their interest. Meant to keep out people without a key, it had little chance against two determined kids with bolt cutters, but was still able to do its job against dogs.
Even so, Teina ascended the steps with pistol drawn.
At the top, sea gulls completely owned the outside balcony, with nests and droppings everywhere. They shrieked at the intruders, but gave way when Jimox waved his arms.
NEBADOR Book Eight: Witness 46
After walking all the way around the building, both monkey mammals pressed their faces to the dusty glass. They beheld one large room with tables and chairs, couches, a little kitchen, and several electrical devices with glowing lights.
“Electricity?” Teina wondered aloud with wide eyes.
Jimox’ face suddenly lit up. He dashed back to a section of balcony without windows, then climbed a little ladder up to the roof. “Yep. There’s a solar panel up here,” he reported as he climbed back down.
Teina tried the door, and discovered it wasn’t locked. “They must have figured the gate at the bottom was enough.”
Without discussion, they went to work making it theirs. The only ghost stayed near a telescope in one corner and ignored them. Out of respect, they didn’t touch the telescope.
The working electrical devices were radios, Jimox found, with every possible chart and reference book handy.
Teina checked the little toilet room, and found a rack of four big batteries.
No water ran in the plumbing, but bottled water and paper towels allowed them to give the place a good cleaning.
NEBADOR Book Eight: Witness 47
They knew not to open the little refrigerator, as it wasn’t part of the solar-power system.
Eventually they settled onto a couch, and could see the entire bay, sparkling in the afternoon light, spread out before them. Both young survivors fell silent, and their earlier thoughtful mood returned.
“You said something on the way here,” Teina began after watching sea gulls walk around on the balcony railing for a few minutes. “I haven’t been able to get it out of my head. You said we were the only people alive. That made me remember how you and me were practically neighbors for most of a year, but never knew about each other. How can we ever know if we’re the only people alive?”
Jimox pondered her question for a long minute. “You’re right, we can’t.”
He thought about it further. “If a large group of people was living somewhere, they’d change things enough to give themselves away. You know, heavy scrounging, fixing up buildings, burning things to stay warm, growing gardens
. . .”
“Or a small group that was really noisy and careless,” she added.
“Yeah. But a small, careful group, or a single person, could stay hidden for a long time. We’d have to scrounge in the same places to see the signs.”
Teina thought for a minute. “In all our scrounging, or yours before we met, have you ever seen anything that made you think someone else was alive?”
He considered her question carefully. “After the middle of last summer . . .
and not counting things animals did . . . no.”
After several slow breaths, she said, “Me neither.”
Jimox carried the little refrigerator outside and Teina opened it with a broom handle. They saw the puff of green mold spores, and quickly ran back inside and closed the door.
Jimox tried the radios. They seemed to be in working order, but he could find nothing but the hiss of natural background static.
Teina pulled some snacks out of her day pack, and they returned to the couch.
NEBADOR Book Eight: Witness 48
“I think I see the answer to your question,” he said after chewing a fruit bar. “At least . . . the only answer I can give you.”
She looked at him with anticipation.
“We can never search the whole world for people. Even if we spent our entire lives doing it, we could walk right by a house where someone was hiding. But we can watch the harbor for ships, like from here. We can watch the sky for airplanes. Nothing can take-off or land at this airport without being visible from our house and some of the camps. We can use battery radios, like here, to see if anyone is transmitting anything.”
Teina nodded. “And we can do all that in the big cities too.”
“Right. We can watch the motorways and the train tracks, maybe stretch threads across like they do in spy movies so we’ll know if anything came by while we weren’t looking . . .”
Teina
chuckled.
“We can probably do other things I haven’t thought of yet. We’ll get a pretty good idea of what’s going on in the world, even though we can never know for sure.”
Teina nodded with understanding, but didn’t otherwise respond. After a minute, she got cleaning supplies and went outside to tackle the little refrigerator.
Jimox hadn’t expected a response. He grabbed a trash bag and went out to help.
“That was the biggest question that haunted us in those early years,” Teina shared, “but there were others, and that harbor control tower became our thinking place.”
Jimox slowly nodded. “The next biggest question, for me, was exactly what happened to cause the plague. Even as kids, we knew that the people were never told the whole story about stuff like that.”
“That made us start searching . . .” She paused to catch her breath. “. . .
through mayors’ and governors’ offices whenever we went to the big cities.”
Jimox nodded. “Fire chief, police chief, emergency services, any place they might know the real story.”
“And we started making more rules,” Teina added, “about what we’d do if
NEBADOR Book Eight: Witness 49
we ever found someone alive.”
Jimox smiled. “By then I had learned to listen to Teina, even though she was just a girl.”
They grinned at each other, and all the listeners laughed.
“Actually, it was pretty easy,” Jimox went on, “because the truth is, she’s a lot smarter than me in things that really matter . . .”
Teina snuggled close and hid her embarrassment in Jimox’ gray fur.
“Maybe I could do technical stuff, but she could imagine situations in which we’d have an eighth of a second to make a life-or-death decision, our life or death!”
Teina suddenly raised her head. “But none of our rules did us much good when the Nebador ship arrived.”
