203

September 12, 2012

You hold the black box display in hand, your trembling, sweaty hand. It has read similar figures for hours: NW000.421, W000.213, N000.335. In narrowing circles you walk through the forest, the beeping light pushing you forward, as the digits fluctuate with each anguishing step. You stop on a dirt path and sit in the shade of a spruce. Taking the last tube of food paste from your backpack, you squeeze out the final morsel of brown gel into your mouth and suck the end of the tube for any drop of the substance. You slice the tube open and dig your finger into the insides, peeling back the layer like skinning a fish. You smear the residue on your gums like a drug user with his last fix. Nothing left. "We've been at this for hours," Heather says, her eyes worn, skin waxy and cold to the touch. He hasn't eaten in a day. "We can't go on like this. We need to find a place to rest and get food."

"It's around here; it has to be."

"What? What is it?" Mindy yells. "We've been searching and searching, but we won't even know what we're looking for."

The display reads E000.019. So close yet no hint of anything at the end of this mystery, no payoff to walking 270 plus kilometers across the dead lands of the former civilization called the United States of America.

"Where are you leading me?" you cry out, and the woods soak up the noise with no answer. You lift the black box, the source of your hope for weeks, and reel your arm back to throw the device. You bring your hand forward but don't release. Angry, you draw back again, waving your arm through the air. The box beeps, and in the distance, something answers back—a tone in the dense thick of the forest, longer than the box's sound but clearly similar, like long-lost twins calling for one another. The box's display changes to grid lines and a zoomed-in perspective of the forest with a central red light and a second one at 2 o'clock. You rise and turn, walk a few steps, adjust, rotate, and line up the dots.

"What? What is it?" Heather asks, rushing to your side.

Forty feet, thirty feet, twenty, ten. The beeping grows louder and faster until it stretches to a constant tone then fades. The display clears and a symbol fills the screen: the line drawing of a hand with a five-point star embedded inside. In front of you, a fallen tree, dark brown and rotted hard with gold-and-green moss carpeting the base. You wave the black box; the display remains the same. Fervently, you push the tree, try to rock it, run your hands along the rough sides, tear the moss. Heather throws her shoulder into the tree, screaming out as she pushes. Nothing happens.

Your stomach growls. Your mouth is too dry to swallow. Your head aches, and tears sting your eyes. A type of panic sets in, as weeks of plodding across the sliver of country ends with a dead tree in the middle of nowhere. All of your resources are used up. All of your hope and humanity lost. You take the black box in hand, preparing to bash it against the side of the tree trunk.

And then you spot it… a depression, the shape of the box, in the face of the trunk.