Entropy

“So that’s what twenty thousand dollars looks like,” John Denison mused as he squinted through the money blizzard. Struggling to make out his surroundings from his current position—supine on sandy terrain—he wondered at his conviction that he was, in fact, seeing $20 000 cash fluttering around. How would he possibly know that?

Heaving himself into a sitting position, he felt the audio-visual asynchrony of an impending hangover. He patted himself down, searching his pockets for clues: wallet, keys, notebook, as usual. He pulled out his seen-better-days money clip and sucked in a breath when he saw it jammed to the gills with banknotes. Small bills, but a shitload of them. Sighing, he took a real look around. A black briefcase laid open and empty nearby. Is this the desert?

A number of questions presented themselves simultaneously:

1. Where the fuck?

2. How the fuck?

3. Why the fuck?

4. Who the fuck?

And, of course,

5. Now what?

John hazarded a deep breath of the scorching air and decided to make a decision. He creaked unsteadily to his feet, shaded his eyes with his hand, and took stock of his situation.

A. The sun is almost directly overhead, so it’s either late morning or early afternoon. Which way is the sun moving? Damned if I know. What if this is some alternate universe where the sun sets in the south or some shit? Fuuuuuuck.

B. Those look like buttes over there. Is that the word I want? Buttes? Sounds wrong, but also kind of right. Bittes? Buttes? Yeah, buttes.

C. I don’t feel sunburned, so I can’t have been out here that long… but aw shit, alternate-universe-weaker-sun-no-way-home—can I even breathe the air?! What if there’s no oxygen in the atmosphere here, oh wait no, yeah, I can breathe fine, okay.

D. Is that a road? It could be a road, but it’s pretty far….

The decision was made: John would head towards the maybe-road. He took a single step in the right direction and plunged unceremoniously into the sand. Not onto, into. In the fraction of a second of darkness before a bone-jarring impact, his mind pulsated with a single thought:

“Oh.”

Of course it wouldn’t be that easy. When had he ever solved a problem with a simple and obvious choice?

The contact between the soles of his feet and the floor of his new environment sent a shockwave through his spine that culminated in his face landing evenly in a thin coating of goo.

Another deep breath then, this one filled with a mustiness that seemed at once unpleasant and unpleasantly familiar. What am I remembering?

“Oh hey, John,” said a voice to his left. He peeled his cheek from the sludge and snapped his head around, searching for the source of the sound. A 100% average-looking guy in roughed-up, slime-fouled office attire crouched on the edge of the sunlight beaming through the hole he’d just made in the ground above. “You ready?”

John scrutinized the man and scanned his memory. Nothing.

“Sorry, do I—“

The guy chuckled and shook his head. “Nope, technically you do not. I might as well just tell you. Go that way, and get on with it. No sense dicking around in the muck, am I right?” He pointed behind John and held his gaze with a giant shit-eating grin on his face until John felt uncomfortable and hauled himself to his feet.

It felt like an unwise decision to turn his back on the man, but John wasn’t inclined to push his luck with underground weirdos. He suppressed his panic reflex and trudged off into the absolute blackness of the direction indicated, noting that he didn’t feel any better about his choice the further he went. The darkness was vast and suffocating. He might be falling through space and time, or he might be—wait, yes, in fact he was—jammed painfully into a tight crevice in the rocky underworld.

‘’Oh,’’ his mind reminded him helpfully.

He wriggled, to no avail. Alright, end of the line, nothing for it but to go back and give Mr. Grins-a-lot a chance to redeem himself. He leaned backwards, attempting an about-face, and felt sharp points in all his squishy bits before the wall to his left suddenly gave way.

The sunlight strobed as he tumbled head over heels, ending up facedown yet again. This ground, he noticed, was as rocky as before, but now there were spiky tufts of green stuff growing from it, and sandy patches, and also that goddamn sunshine. He waited for his eyes to stop stinging, remarking how different the scenery looked from the last time he’d been not-underground. He appeared to be on a small ledge jutting out from an otherwise sheer wall of rock.

Looking up, he estimated he’d fallen a good twelve feet from where the tunnel had cracked open. That explained the generalized body pain. There must be another twenty feet above that to the top of the ridge. Inching forward, he could see that the cliff continued at least a hundred feet straight down, ending in yet more rocky terrain with a cartoon-perfect stream zigzagging along the bottom of the canyon. So, he thought, down is not an option. Deep breath, fingers crossed, all chips on up.

He eased himself upright, found a handhold and heaved. The rock in his hand detached from the cliff in a puff of dirt and came with him as he sailed backwards, cracking his spine on a pile of stones and barely avoiding rolling off the ledge. He tried again, with the same result, except this time his ankle twisted sickeningly as his foot slid over the precipice, taking a sizable chunk of his ledge with it. He flopped forward and seized a tuft of sharp-edged grass with both hands to prevent himself following the chunk.

‘’Oh.’’

John was suddenly parched. No one had ever been so thirsty in all of history. This was definitely it. The end. Nothing to do but wait for the warm embrace of sweet, sweet death, or whatever. He checked on the sun: still directly overhead. Not a hint of a shadow offering respite from the punishing heat.

John shrugged himself up against the cliff, leaned back to glare at the endless blue sky, and resolved to man up and die of thirst stoically, valiantly, like a goddamn viking. He thought of all the people who must be missing him.

No one.

Not even one person. Well, maybe his mom, but even that was probably a stretch. She’d maybe eventually notice he hadn’t asked for money in a while, but wasn’t likely to make much of a stink about it, if recent interactions were anything to go by. This realization filled him with so much despair and self-pity that he felt a tide of unfamiliar emotion rising in his throat, a prickling behind his eyes.

Fuck it, someone has to know what happened to him. Even if nobody cares, he must make the story of his untimely demise known. He fished his notebook and pen out of his inside pocket and ran his fingertips over the smooth black cover, imagining some future archaeologist discovering it next to his sun-bleached skeleton and weeping at his heart wrenching last words. He’d be famous worldwide, held up as the ultimate example of the melancholy eloquence of mid-late 20th century poets. John the Truthspeaker, they would dub him, and there would be graduate theses written on him; every high school student would recite his self-eulogy from memory.

Racking his brain for synonyms for courageous, he turned to a fresh page. But hang on, what’s this? Someone had written on every page. The book had been only half used when he’d jotted down something this morning, but now every single page was filled with words, diagrams, strange sketches. Even the margins were stuffed with scribbles. He flipped through to the last page, where a word caught his eye: blood. He looked closer. Could it—no… It almost looked like… could it be his handwriting? But how? He would definitely remember cramming an entire notebook with words in less than a day… wouldn’t he?

He leafed his way back to the page he’d filled that morning, a scribbled schematic for some game idea that had hit him on the plane on the way to… Vegas? Is that where this all started? His drawing was there as expected, right underneath the previous entry, but the rest of the page was just as crowded as the rest of the book with urgent, almost illegible scrawl.

"I, John Denison, have not had a particularly remarkable life, but it can be said that I am about to have a somewhat remarkable death. I expect that stories will be told about me for generations to come, and I will be extolled as a hero of my era, perhaps even THE hero of my era…"

It rambled like that for three pages, and conveyed all the grandiosity he’d planned for his eulogy. His heart pounded, and a shrill ringing blocked out the hum of the desert heat. His cheap dress shirt was drenched. Sweat dripped from his brow onto the page, and he noticed the numerous similar blotches, now dried, distorting the ink and rippling the paper.

John dragged his eyes from his auto-homage and focused on the notes in the margins, flipping through pages as his brain chugged along trying to synthesize it all.

Butte = wolves!!!

Where there’s smoke, there’s fire

Lightning strikes twice

The road goes nowhere. You won’t make it past 2 days out there.

Some pages were stained with maroon smudges, and sections had been ripped out. One page contained a detailed map of what John guessed must be the area. A crude helicopter hovered over a large X in the centre, with squiggly lines and patterns for geographical indicators. Butte was scrawled in the top right corner, and Road wormed along the bottom edge. Could the dotted lines around the X represent the underground tunnels? If so, they were a lot more elaborate than he’d suspected in his brief time there. One of the dotted lines ended abruptly at a solid line: Cliff. Next to the label was written:

Don’t even try to climb.

Yeah, no shit. But what was he supposed to do, wait for someone to come rescue him? Lying flat on his stomach, he shimmied to the edge of his ledge and peered over the precipice, hoping to find a hand-hewn ladder or a set of concrete stairs. Directly underneath him, the faraway ground looked different from the lush green of the riverbank. Lumpy, in a way, with grey and white shapes tossed in a pile. He stared, straining his eyes to focus. When it suddenly came together, he leapt back, detaching another piece of the ledge in the process. Arms, his mind screamed at him, heads, hair, shoes… He recognized the grey and white lumps below as the colours of his bedraggled shirt and slacks.

The panic overtaking him was eclipsed by a new sound in the air. A distant engine, a buzz that could only portend an aircraft. John scanned the opposite edge of the canyon as the sound grew louder, holding his breath in anticipation. A black helicopter burst over the ridge high above him and executed a sloppy one-eighty before John could even get to his feet. It headed directly back the way it had come, but John saw a square black shape tumble from the open door, then burst open, confetti-ing uncountable rectangles of paper into the jetties stirred up by the rotors. Just before the copter zipped out of sight, John saw the unmistakable figure of a human launched from the same door, a man in a grubby white dress shirt and grey slacks. He followed the limp shape’s trajectory, leaning back to keep it in sight, until his foot stepped to the crumbling edge, and kept going.