Extinction Point: The End

“We missed you so much baby. And now you have been brought back,” said Mrs. Lacey reaching out to touch her resurrected daughters cheek. “It’s a miracle,” she added in a tight whisper. “A miracle.”

* * *

Rebecca Lacey did not believe that her resurrection was a miracle. Her parents were good people; salt of the earth would have been a descriptive cliche if it were not for the fact that it applied to her parents one-hundred percent.

Her father was a lineman for the local power company; her mom drove one of the school buses that ferried children from the north end of the valley to the high schools in the south. They led a below-average lifestyle on a below-average income.

Bringing up a child was a hardship for anybody, it was doubly so in this small, poor town. But this hard- working couple soon learned that their young daughter was anything but below average.

She had aced her aptitude tests from the first grade up and it wasn’t long before her parents received a call from the school. Informed that their daughter was special, bright beyond her years; the school councilor had recommended that Becky be placed on the academic fast track. It was the councilor’s recommendation that she move from the public school to one that would challenge her intellectually, a private school with personal educators. They recommended a school where her full potential could develop and where the very best teachers would coach her, allowing her nascent intelligence to flourish and grow.

She would receive the best education that money could buy, the councilor had said with a smile.

Her father had quietly informed the councilor that they could not afford to do that but the woman had looked at him sympathetically over the rims of her glasses and said don’t worry about the funding, there were scholarships available for individuals in their financial situation and she would be happy to give them the forms. With their daughter’s, test score averages they would have no problem. Money would not be a consideration.

Rebecca had not wanted to leave her school and her friends. The other children liked her and, unlike most geniuses, she had the social graces to match her intelligence. She had spent many years being brilliant at not showing that she was brilliant. However, even at the age of ten she heard the call of something else: numbers, figures, formula. Mathematics.

While other kids watched MTV and read the umpteenth Harry Potter, she was watching Nova on her local PBS channel and reading Sagan and Hawking, devouring anything by Gian-Carlo Rota and Julian Barbour.

She appreciated mathematics as others loved poetry: she could hear the meter in a constant, feel the rhyme in an integer, and sense the prose hidden in quantum foam. It combined to create a stunning sense of wonder in her, a wonder that never diminished. With the wonder came an awareness of something intangible, of something beneath mathematics something just outside intelligibility that, just as a molecule consisted of electrons, protons and neutrons, made mathematics something more. Gave to it a rhythm and a meaning.

To Rebecca, it was a sense of God.

No formula could express what she was experiencing. Like a woman who lived in a two dimensional world trying to grasp a third new dimension of reality, she did not possess the senses needed to interpret the undercurrent that she felt rippling through each and every equation. Its ineffableness at once frustrated, terrified and excited her.

And now, in this reconstituted world, here it was again, the same sense that something was at work behind the scenes of her life, an undercurrent pulling at her mind again, catching it in its tow and sweeping it out into a sea of uncertainty and mystery.

No. She did not believe that this was a miracle at all.

Twenty

If you didn’t know the path was there, you could easily drive right past it. It was just a dirt track, not even a gravel road, which led through the forest to the lake. Simone had asked Jim several times to get the path paved, but he had steadfastly refused, he liked the fact that the place was off the beaten track — literally. Instead he had agreed to spread gravel the last hundred yards or so to the house so that they wouldn’t track mud inside when the ground was wet.

As Jim turned off the main road and onto the rough dirt track that led to the lakeside cabin, he truly felt that he was leaving his everyday life behind. It was a boundary between work and relaxation, a living fence of birch and oak that separated him from reality.

Safe. Secluded.

Of course, Simone was not with him this time. She most likely had been dead for the past year or so since the Slip — the event had finally gained its own sobriquet as civilization had re-exerted its hold. She and lark were undoubtedly one of the estimated five million people who had lost their lives in the U.S. alone on that day.

As the days had passed with no word from his ex-wife or his daughter, Jim had volunteered for clean-up duty, in the hope that he might find some clue to whether Simone and Lark had survived. With each body that he pulled from the burned out shell of a vehicle, he wondered if it was maybe his Simone or his daughter.

It took eight months to clear the freeways and streets of Los Angeles, to remove the bodies from the cars and trucks and bury them in mass graves. It fell to the operators of the mobile cranes and heavy-lifters to clear the tin-can-corpses of the hundreds of thousands of vehicles from the roads and freeways.

The work had been soul destroying, painful, heartbreaking and horrible… but… it was also a test of fire for Jim; a bridge from the old reality to the new and Jim had made his way through it and come out the other side more complete than when he entered.

He pulled his truck in front of the log cabin, half expecting it to be occupied by some down and out or one of the many transients that the Slip had created in its wake.

Instead, he found it empty and just as he remembered it, sitting on the shores of Shadow Lake, the water lapping at the supports of the old wooden dock, their paddleboat bobbing languidly on the waters ebb and flow, just as it always had.

Surrounded by thick woods on all sides save for the lake, they had bought this colonial style log cabin within a year of getting married and escaped to its tranquility every chance they could.

After Lark’s death, it had become his hide-away for a year. It was also his bar and his confessional, but mostly Jim liked to think of it as his pupae where he had entered as a broken, disheartened, self-hating child-killer and emerged as an almost-whole human and critically acknowledged novelist.

Right now, it was just somewhere to be.

Its creosote stained logs looked welcoming and familiar after all the disquiet and horror he had experienced in the months after the Slip. With the smell of sap and dry leaves redolent in the air, he pushed the key into the lock and opened the front door. Finally, he felt at ease

“Home,” he said as he stepped over the threshold to the accompanying Brak-rak-rak of a woodpecker somewhere deep in the surrounding forest.

* * *

Dust sheets covered the furniture and the scent of undisturbed air hung heavy in every room. In the kitchen, the refrigerator hummed patiently.

Well, at least the electricity is on, he thought as he carried his bags into the front room. Tomorrow, he’d need to take a trip down to the store and grab some supplies.

There is an odd emptiness to a house that has been vacant for a long period of time, an echoic air that goes far beyond the empty rooms and silence. It’s temporal, as though the very walls have gone into hibernation, waiting