TWENTY
The next day, while Rey and Nate went on a data search, Finch went back to the high school. Since the buggy had to charge for eight hours, they walked. It was almost two miles, but the temperature wasn’t too hot and a slight breeze came in from the west.
Usually, Finch didn’t think twice about weather, he was always under the belief there was nothing that could be done about it. Yet, when they first arrived in the future, it seemed the weather had it out for the crew of Omni-4 and he was no longer taking it for granted. He’d be more aware of any changes. Planet X, even at a distance was already wreaking its havoc.
Was it necessary for him to go to the school and the area where they’d burned bodies? Yes.
He had to see for himself.
“The light of day makes everything clearer,” his mother used to say. And it held true when Finch stepped into that stadium.
When Tucker and Sam entered the day before it was still somewhat light. Nothing like it was when Finch got his second glance.
The clear sky and bright sun truly showed the massive amount of human devastation.
Nothing remained of the bodies that made up the top third of the mound. The ones on the outer areas were also nothing more than rags of clothing. He assumed the mound was only being held up by the bodies on the inside.
They were skeletons. He guessed tens of thousands.
What a grand movement it had to have been to bring those bodies into the stadium. Apparently, they were dead when they were brought in. Loaded into trucks and lifted by a crane like some sort of game found in an arcade.
Finch had once read a fiction novel which depicted something terribly similar to what he was seeing. He dismissed it as farfetched and beyond the suspension of disbelief, until he saw it firsthand.
There was nothing in the stadium or around it to indicate what had happened that caused such a massive amount of death.
It happened fast.
It had to.
To accumulate that many bodies, and for them to pile so high that it got ahead of those collecting them, whatever caused the event occurred in weeks, if not days.
His mind went immediately to Nate.
Nate lost his father, his mother, and daughter in a freak natural disaster. The type that decades earlier had been called rare, yet, when it happened with Nate, they were commonplace.
A limnic eruption occurred in the small town where Nate’s family lived.
An eruption that wasn’t volcanic. They happened when CO2 erupted from deep in a lake causing a toxic cloud that killed everyone and anything alive instantly.
Finch thought of that. There was a small lake in Fort Collins, but was it big enough to cause that much death?
Nate’s family lived in a town of three thousand. Fort Collins was bigger, much bigger.
It had to be something like that.
Unless it was an illness. A virus perhaps that swept through town.
Something like that would be worldwide and, hopefully, Rey and Nate could find answers.
As he looked upon the huge number of bodies, he wondered if Earth was just doomed to die. Even though they went as far as one hundred and seventy-five years into the future, was it truly done?
Had nature decided mankind wasn’t worth having and was doing everything possible to rid the planet of the human disease, much like the body fought infection.
There were no answers at the stadium, nor were there any answers when Finch visited the areas where they’d burned bodies in huge pits.
Nothing remained in those pits.
The fires had burned so hot and with so much intensity, the ground was charred.
Blackened like charcoal.
It was depressing to think of that large loss of life.
The only consolation Finch found was knowing somehow, someway, the people of Fort Collins died fast. They suffered less than the rest of the world that was crushed in earthquakes, burned by volcanoes, or had starved to death.
Still, in the back of his mind he needed to know why. He couldn’t accept that they all just died, that someone or some organization just collected bodies.
The answers were there.
They just had to find them.
<><><><>
“How do a hundred thousand people die all at once?” Rey spoke her thoughts out loud as she walked with Nate.
“They could have died over the course of weeks, too.”
“But how?”
“Illness, chemical accident maybe,” he said. “Attack.”
“Is there a bomb that could do this?”
“Yeah, a thermobaric bomb, but there’s still going to be damage,” he said. “Thermobarics suck all the air out with a highly intense bomb, but it leaves tops of buildings charred.”
“It’s just strange, like watching a movie. It’s not real because it’s not affecting us.”
“What if it could?” Nate paused in his walking. “What if whatever killed these people is still around?”
“Fuck.”
“Yep.”
They walked across the small parking lot to the urgent care. “This,” he said, “should give us answers as to what it isn’t. Or even what it is.”
Like most business the windows were gone, and they climbed through the busted doorway.
“Okay, so…” Rey looked around. “Either they had the most diligent staff or nothing happened. I’ve seen more chaos first day of shingles vaccines.”
Nate chuckled at her and walked behind the check-in counter.
“I’ll head to the back,” Rey told him.
Other than the typical ‘things grew over time’ look, it was evident the waiting room of the urgent care had been left impeccable. Nothing was out of order.
She turned on her flashlight and walked down the hall toward the examining rooms. The doors were open and each room that she passed looked the same. Nothing was out of order at all. “Anything?” she called out.
“No paper trail,” Nate replied. “They must have done everything on the computer.”
There were three doors in that hallway that weren’t wide open: the men’s room, the ladies’ room, and another room labelled
