CALEN

  "Bear attack." Mr. Isaacson whispered. "Stay here."

  Calen eyed the grisly tableau of violence and churned mud in the firelight, and tried to keep the amount of skepticism in his voice polite.

  He failed, but he tried.

  "Are you freakin' seri—"

  A distinct metallic click interrupted him.

  "Shhhhhh." Mr. Isaacson said, drawing a heavy-looking antique revolver from his coat pocket and pointing it at the door.

  The ten foot high door someone had clearly dragged some sort of animal carcass through recently enough that the blood was still wet, smeared over—

  "Those aren't even human footprints, and they don't look like bear claws either." He whispered to Emma while their neighbor crept up to the damaged door.

  "When have you seen a bear claw that wasn't part of brunch?" She hissed back.

  Which was a fair assessment.

  Except for the part where whatever had actually left the marks didn't even look like it had paws.

  "Fine, it was a bear attack." Calen grumbled. "Isn't wandering into the den a bad idea?"

  "We don't know that it's inside, and we'll freeze outside." Emma argued, shivering. "He has a gun. We'll be okay. And whoever's in there might need help."

  With the bang of a rubber sole on wood, the reinforced door creaked open, swinging into the empty darkness beyond the threshold.

  Mr. Isaacson had stepped back and pressed himself to the wall outside.

  "Hello? Anyone in there? We're here to help." he called out. "Call out, or tap on something. I'm gonna come in thinking it's the animal inside if not."

  Calen found himself checking behind them, even peering into the darkness past the shattered gateway. The only eyes he found were the empty sockets in the giant cow skeleton spitted over the dying bonfire.

  The keychain flashlight clicked, and Mr. Isaacson slowly panned his way around the doorframe, gun braced on the wrist that was holding the light. Calen was too far away to see what he was looking at, but clearly none of it looked like a threat, because the man gave the door another firm nudge with his foot to swing it wide, and stepped through.

  "I guess we follow?" Emma whispered.

  Another chill wracked Calen as the wind blew, reminding him that his pants were still soaked through.

  Em couldn't be doing much better, she hadn't even wrung out her shirt.

  "Fine. I just really don't want to see a body on my birthday." Calen grumbled. "Take a look at those 'bear' tracks on your way by, too."

  He tried to step around the splashes of blood, but he felt the rabbits on his feet sticking to the ground more and more as he crested the threshold. Someone had at least dragged a tarp or something through the doorway, so it was a thin layer there, but what Calen saw on the rest of the steps only made him more certain.

  Either someone was playing a really high-budget prank in the middle of the apocalypse, or people with feet that didn't look even remotely human had marched through the mess.

  "Four clawed toes, and a fifth pointed backwards. Almost like a bird." Calen muttered.

  "Birds have three front toes, Calen. And some of those marks look... rounder?"

  Emma at least had the decency to sound uncertain, as they crossed the threshold. Her eyes were fixated enough to turn her head, trailing behind them to examine the steps.

  "So it's not the world's largest chicken bleeding to death inside. It's something else." Calen prodded her. "C'mon Em, you've gotta be at least a little curious about the real answer, instead of the made up one in your head."

  "There's nothing bleeding to death down here. Just broken furniture, a smell like the petting zoo from hell, and the barbecue from outside." Mr. Isaacson interrupted the debate. "Keep that door open for light while I check upstairs."

  Calen scowled into the darkness, and was ignored. The slightly dimming cone of light proceeded up a set of steps in the corner in time with the thunking of boots on wood.

  Wishing his eyes would adjust to the darkness a little faster, Calen scanned the space in the minimal light spilling through the incredibly wide doorway.

  The back wall of the space bulged inwards, with another ridiculously oversized door set in the curvature of the stones, this one firmly shut. Beside it was a hooped barrel that stood almost to Calen's shoulders, and the remnants of a chair, or maybe three chairs, were splintered all over the floor beside a tipped over table.

  All of it looked like it had been roughly hand-carved, but the various nicks, scratches, and outright broken pieces made it hard to tell. Someone with an axe might have just really hated the interior decor.

  It was probably some combination of the two.

  There was a slightly more normally sized door set below the stairs, half-open and marred by strange triangular gouges. As his eyes continued to adjust, Calen could almost make out the outlines of shelves inside what he hastily dubbed the closet.

  Brass fixtures with little palm-sized bowls on them studded the walls at irregular intervals. Calen smelled something like cooking oil when he sniffed the residue surrounding the spike in the center of one. They were probably lamps, or candle holders of some kind.

  Something thumped upstairs, and Mr. Isaacson cursed when something metallic-sounding slid along the floor, but there was no gunfire, or further shouting.

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Just the continuous tread of a single set of boots on the wooden ceiling whose beams stretched just a little too far above their heads.

  Emma's breathing was regular enough to count along with, which was both a good thing and a bad thing. She was freaking out, but not all the way.

  Calen was pretty sure he was freaking out a little too.

  "Who builds something like this?" Emma said, still whispering in the darkness.

  "Aliens." Calen said back. "Ow."

  Her elbow had dug into his ribs a little too hard.

  "Be serious." She hissed. "Please. I don't feel like I'm falling apart yet, but you need to—"

  "Fine. Fine." Calen mock-surrendered, and started ticking off events on his fingers.

  "The shockwave threw us hundreds of miles, perfectly safe, to all land together on private property." He started.

  The words came pouring out after that. A long, damp walk up the hill in the dark while the smartest person he knew ignored reality had ground Calen's patience a little thinner than he was willing to tolerate.

  "Then, some eccentric rich guy with the best groundskeeper in the world and money to burn decided to cultivate acres and acres of a bunch of weird plants before he and his fellow cultists sacrificed a cow outside. They attracted the world's last grizzly bear all the way down from Canada with the smell of blood, and they all rode away on a chicken the size of a horse when the apocalypse started. Someone threw an asteroid from the orbital mining operation at Earth, and it got shot down and broken up, so there's a meteor shower outside while the pieces burn up. And the moon is hiding, because it got shy."

  Calen finished ranting, throwing his hands in the air to turn around and deliver the coup de grace.

  "Is all that serious enough for you, or do you maybe thing the bright flash of light that put us somewhere totally unfamiliar and fixed your eyes might have been something we can't explain?" He asked. "Because there was no gap, for me. We were in the kitchen, and then we fell in the river, and then we woke up. In the river."

  Emma was scowling furiously down at him with her arms crossed when he turned around.

  Or maybe not scowling. Her chin had begun to quiver, and her eyes were a little too shiny in the limited firelight. Her arms weren't crossed either, she was hugging herself tightly and shivering in the cold blowing in from the door.

  "I liked it better when I thought you were joking about the aliens." She said, her voice quavering.

  Which was why Calen had been doing it. Before he started to think maybe he was right, during their walk up the hill. Earth hadn't just suddenly acquired a second moon without extraterrestrial interference either.

  "Em, I was at first, but the evidence is starting to—" He began to apologize.

  "Stop freaking your sister out and get those matches ready. Until little green men walk out of the woods, you have no evidence, just an incomplete picture." Mr. Isaacson snapped, tromping down the stairs with his flashlight lowered. "Tone aside, you were almost making sense there for a minute. Go back to it. This place ran on lamplight, they'll have the supplies here. And I want to see this whole place in the light before we bunk down."

  Calen rolled his eyes and made a show of patting down his pockets. He knew for a fact he had thrown the matchbook on the kitchen table, but maybe the aliens had been generous.

  His fingers only found lint, and the little plastic caltrop from under the bed, with the sides numbered one through four.

  "It's on the kitchen table, or in the river." He admitted defeat. "But there's a bunch of burning coals outside. And wouldn't they have a way to light candles anyways?"

  "Only if we find their lighter before my battery dies. Miss Ward, your brother has finally had another good idea." Mr. Isaacson addressed Emma. "Would you mind seeing if some of that broken furniture will catch, get yourself warmed up while we look for the wicks and oil?"

  Emma she put herself in the way, crouching down, and began to pat at the floor, as if she were mostly blind. Which she might have been, in the darkness. She had looked right back at the fire when it was mentioned.

  Calen stepped around her, and started sweeping some of the larger chunks together in front of her. He kept the weird little metal disk that glinted in the firelight, shoving it in a pocket when he stood.

  "Come on kid. We don't have all night, she's got it."

  Mr. Isaacson had found the closet as well, and turned the flashlight on the shelves, peering over them one at a time.

  "Yell if you see something." Calen told Emma as she scooped up an armful of wood.

  She just nodded, and turned away.

  The closet was somehow warmer than the rest of the building. Which was much warmer than outside, despite how the front door had been hung open, half off its crude iron hinges. His left arm actually felt warmer than his right, as he peered into the shadows.

  Almost like there was a heat source nearby.

  The fuzzy glow surrounding the weird, boxy thing in the corner behind the door drew Calen's attention while Mr. Isaacson rustled through a rough-spun bag of something and moved on to the next shelf.

  He knelt, and waved the back of his hand closer to the metallic box.

  It was still warm, as was the rounded pipe stretching up from the top into the ceiling.

  "This might be a stove, or something." Calen said. "I can't read the display, though. The letters are all fuzzy."

  Which wasn't strictly true, but the lightly glowing symbols circling the top of the box only resolved themselves to legibility when he squinted. Like the world was staticky, until he focused through the darkness.

  Something clattered behind him.

  "What are you even looking at over there?"

  "A warm box, with glowing letters on top. You didn't see it?" Calen said, pointing. "I think it's the heating system. Is there charcoal or something in one of those bags?"

  Mr. Isaacson shone the light at the shelf next to Calen, where a half-open sack was filled with round-ish stones.

  "Thing looks inert to me, but be my guest, if you think you can get this place warm. About time we found some sort of modern convenience in here."

  "Really stretching the definition of modern." Calen grumbled back, pulling a fist-sized chunk of... something that definitely wasn't charcoal from the bag.

  It was too regularly cut, with each side shaven down irregularly until the edges came together in points. The crumbly-feeling rock was pale even in the darkness, and as his eyes continued to adjust, Calen even saw it was leaving residue on his fingers where he handled it.

  He immediately set the maybe-fuel aside to look for the opening in the box, tapping at the fading letters of the 'display'.

  The touchscreen didn't respond, or feel like glass at all. In fact, it felt just like metal, with clean grooves carved out of it.

  Calen tried tracing the symbols, following the throughline that connected each of them with his finger.

  The glow intensified where the dust on his fingers met the lines. Calen squinted harder, trying to figure out what was causing it. None of the lines were getting any hotter, but something was making the dust light up when it met them.

  "Come on. One of these things has to be the power button." He muttered, feeling more and more like a caveman trying to figure out a microwave. "Turn on. Light. Fire."

  At the last word, he hissed in pain, and almost stuck his finger in his mouth at the sudden surge of heat that seared his skin.

  The glow he had managed to impart to the symbols had faded in a singular, flashing spark. Even as he watched, the rest of the 'display' faded from visibility, leaving the string of symbols entirely dark.

  But the box was a little warmer, just for a second, before a warning echoed over his shoulder.

  Apparently he had made more noise than he thought.

  "Don't cut yourself on that thing. And be careful how much coal dust you throw around, don't want a spark of static to light it in your face."

  "Yeah, thanks. I got it to spark a little." Calen said, waggling his tingling fingers to get the circulation going again.

  Mr. Isaacson sighed.

  "Keep at it. Try again when you find out where to put the fuel, maybe once we have some light. I found lamp oil and wicks, I'm gonna go see if your sister managed to borrow some fire."

  Calen chose not to comment on how out of place the clay amphora being hoisted past him was. He just mentally adjusted how certain he was that something strange had happened upwards a few notches.

  If the 'smart' people in the room were busy convincing themselves everything was fine, someone else needed to keep an eye on the oddities.

  Empiricism is the philosophical stance that the mind is a blank slate, and knowledge is derived from sensory experience and reflection on that experience. It was popularized by John Locke, and expanded upon by David Hume, who argued that the mind observes consistent patterns between events and expects certain outcomes based on experience.