The Snail Turbine
The guy actually still had pretty white teeth. My dad mentioned it, and I hadn’t noticed, but he was right. We were doing our best to keep brushing our teeth with the old toothbrushes we carried, but even though we were careful, we had run out of real toothpaste some time ago. Uncle Joe had found some baking soda in an empty convenience store and he was using that, but it left my mouth feeling that I ate dirt all night, so I was using an empty brush, which I tried to use gently so it wouldn’t get more frayed-looking. Obviously we couldn’t go to a dentist now, so getting cavities or whatever was something we were trying to avoid. Maybe it was the psychology of mintiness or the lack of it, but my mouth never felt that clean anymore even though there wasn’t any risk of rotting my teeth out with candy or soda at this point.
We were following the man and woman after they had talked at length about how no one had to be on the move, that everything we needed could be found here. They gave us enough space so we could mutter to each other. Uncle Joe was totally opposed to following them and we were all worried that they could be leading us into a bad situation, but we also couldn’t come up with any good reasons not to see what they were talking about. There were more of us anyway, and Bob, the neighbor, was and remains a pretty big guy, even with the slimming we were all taking. We let them lead us a good ways ahead, which would hopefully give us a reverse lead if their setup looked untoward.
After a good part of the morning had passed, we turned a corner and the man and woman were stopped in front of a nondescript building. It was not a home or a residential apartment block like the ones we had passed along the way, it was institutional-looking. The exterior was mostly opaque glass, and it was probably 3 stories or so high. My dad stepped toward it, fully furrowed. “How do they have lights on in there? Or am I imagining it?” he asked. I looked toward where he was pointing, at a lower level, and it did look like the banks of fluorescent lights set deep in a foam ceiling were actually lit.
My dad asked us to stay where we were and he walked cautiously to where the man and woman were standing, near an inconspicuous door without any windows in it. He talked to them for a long time, and he gestured, always facing them, with a little distance between them. Eventually he laughed and then fell silent. I could tell from his posture that he was trying to be respectful but that he didn’t believe what he was hearing. He listened a little longer and then nodded, and then he turned around to talk to us.
He gestured at me, saying “you and I, we’re going to go in and see this. And we’ll come back out in half an hour, but I think I need to wrap my head around this.”
“What for? What’re they doing in there?” asked Uncle Joe.
“Chemotaxis. In the deep sea. For power.”
I charged off with him.
“We won’t wait any more than half an hour,” yelled Joe through cupped hands. “Any longer than that and we’re coming in.”