Lemuria by Burt Clinchandhill (epub e ink reader TXT) 📕

It’s a kid’s bed.” Ignatowski pointed to two slightly larger beds a few feet away. “But where are they?”

“That’s why we’re here.” She approached the cloth separating this room from the next. Carefully, she pulled the fabric a bit to the side and looked behind it. She sighed deeply as she pulled the cloth all the way to the side. Another room, very much like the first one, was also empty, with the exception of a clay oven, primitive kitchenware and some wool clothing. The room seemed intact.

In three big steps, she walked to the next curtain and opened it with one big pull. Empty again. She then walked through the shabono and out to the center of the inner circle, followed by Ignatowski. She fell to her knees. With her head to the ground, she looked around the circle, peeking under the rooftops. No legs or feet, she thought.

“What are you doing?” Ignatowski asked.

“Confirming your earlier findings from the satellite images.”

Ignatowski frowned. “How?”

“I was looking for legs, but it seems that you were right. There’s no one left. The place is completely abandoned. Just as before.”

“Just like on the satellite images,” Ignatowski confirmed. “All gone, but probably still alive.”

“Alive?” Lindsey asked.

“If not alive, where are they? Where are the bodies?” Ignatowski quickly turned his head around the circle. “Not here, I’d say.”

“We need to look outside, in a bigger circle.” Lindsey quickly walked through the shabono and some distance away from the slanted roof. She looked left and right, but everywhere she looked, the ground was bare and untouched. “No graves. If you go right, I’ll go left. Let’s circle the outside of the shabono and see if there are any clues as to where they could have gone. Look for signs of digging, footsteps, tire marks.”

“Tire marks? Out here?” Ignatowski shook his head.

“You never know, Iggy. Maybe dirt bikes or quads. Who knows? Just look for anything that stands out. I’ll meet you halfway. See you in a few minutes.” She started walking left, step by step, looking left and right, up and down, inspecting every inch of the surroundings.

Ignatowski watched her for a few seconds and then turned in the other direction and started circling the shabono.

Sand, branches, more sand, more branches, Ignatowski thought after a minute or two walking, looking at the ground and listening to the Red Howler, whose crying noise indicated its return to the location.

Suddenly, a loud sound, like a cry of fear, sounded over the shabono’s rooftop. Ignatowski instantly stopped, and instinctively turned his ear in the direction of the sound.

There it was again, this time followed by Lindsey’s voice crying his name. “Iggyyyyy.” Lindsey’s voice sounded loud again.

Ignatowski looked left and right for a second. He was over halfway around, so he rushed as fast as he could, circling the shabono. Even in his condition, it took him under ten seconds to reach Lindsey. As soon as he saw her, he stopped dead in his tracks. He froze as a darkly tanned man—dressed solely in a loincloth—wielding a wooden spear ran toward Lindsey.

“Stop,” Ignatowski cried out as loud and fiercely as he could.

Chapter 1 – 10 Sachem Street

New Haven, CT, 6 Months Ago

It had rained for almost fourteen days without interruption. Water now ran through the streets of New Haven’s Yale University campus. With darkness setting in early this afternoon underneath the black clouds, the big raindrops lit up golden from the orange streetlights. On Sachem Street, the banners used at yesterday’s demonstration were soaking wet, dripping, hanging from the facades of some of the old buildings. ‘This is an emergency,’ ‘No more delay,’ ‘Divest Harvard’ and ‘Fossil Free Yale.’ Students and climate change activists from Yale and Harvard had disrupted last night’s annual Yale-Harvard football game. They had stormed the field at halftime to call the university’s attention to divest their investments in fossil fuels. Some five hundred protesters sat midfield, chanting John Denver’s “Take me home, Country Roads.” After thirty minutes, police cleared the field again and placed forty-two demonstrators under arrest. Both universities had declined to divest on fossil fuel for years now. Yale had made some pledges over time but up until now without any significant change.

Two signs, ‘Harvard & Yale complicit’ and ‘Our future demands action now,’ hung from the balcony of the historic Hill House Mansion at 10 Sachem Street, which sat directly across the street from the Peabody Museum of Natural History. The black-painted letters on the banners trailed out and dripped on the floor, obscuring the text and smudging the marble entry to the building.

Originally, the building had been a private mansion built in 1835, but it had been converted and had been used for academic purposes for decades. The original entrance at 158 Whitney Avenue, with its almost neo-classical architecture, reminded of its colonial past, with its yellow stones, large windows and four columns baring the traditional balcony. The newly added expansion was straight and more Bauhaus style, giving the building its current ambivalent look. Next to the Sachem Street entrance, the lights dimmed behind the large steel-framed windows. In the room behind it a focused beam on a projection screen read:

Linguistic Anthropology and

Artificial Intelligence

~~~

One Step Beyond

~~~

Dr. Jennifer Porter

The conference room looked old with its open fireplace in the back and antique oak floor. On two rows of seats, some thirty young men and women talked loudly and exchanged papers.

“Good afternoon.” A woman’s voice sounded from the front of the room behind a wooden lectern. The woman, in her mid-thirties, wearing a yellow dress, looked younger. Her narrow eyes, long blonde hair, and the constant slight lift of the corners of her mouth gave her an open and friendly look. She had been a little under the weather the past few days but felt too proud not to show up for a presentation of what felt like her life’s work. “I hope you can all hear me because we don’t have a sound system available. I’ll try to speak up.