The Guadeloupe Squadeloupe

Chapter XVII: Perry

"No matter what people tell you, words and ideas can change the world." ~Robin Williams

Where am I? is my first thought as I drift awake. It's bumpy and uncomfortable, so I'm clearly in a car (I've been on enough road trips to identify the feeling).

Beside me is Bob. His reddish-brown hair is a shaggy mess, not that mine is much better. Guad and Diana are still in the back, and I'll be the first to say that I hate how much time they're spending together. Janis and Alice must still be in the front seats.

"Want to switch?" I whisper, leaning forward to see who's driving. Janis rubs her eyes like she's going to fall asleep.

"Sure," she whispers back, and starts to bring the car to a stop. "I suppose you've slept enough for now."

"How long did I sleep?"

"Like nine hours. It's 7:30 PM right now."
That explains why I feel so great, well, as great as I've felt since the crash.

She puts the car in park, and we switch seats. After about five minutes, I can already hear her softly snoring in the back seat.

I can now see that I'm the only one awake. Alice is curled up in the passenger's seat, her head resting on the window. So much for conversations.

After a few minutes of unpleasant silence, it begins to lightly rain. Awesome, now it's getting dark and there's rain, which makes for extremely low visibility. The rain provides more sound than the rubber-on-gravel, but it's still too quiet for me. I've always focused better to noise.

I flip through radio stations, trying to find something not in Spanish. The volume is down pretty low, since I don't want to wake anyone, so I could be missing something in English and not even know it.

There's a station playing classical music, which is the best thing I'm going to find.
I drive for an hour before someone wakes up. Alice sits up straighter now, stretching her arms.

"You jamming out to Tchaikovsky without me?" She says, laughing softly.

"I thought this was Beethoven," I reveal, sending her into a fit of whisper laughter.
"I know you're a boy, and have probably never seen The Nutcracker, but still I..."
She doesn't finish her thought. Did I do something wrong? No, I couldn't have, considering I haven't done anything.

I take my eyes off of the road for a second, to glance in her direction. Alice is staring intensely out the left corner of the windshield. Following suit, I look in that direction.

At first, I don't see anything. There are some houses, but nothing special or out of the ordinary.

"Watch the lights," she whispers from my side.

Instructions in mind, I stare at the windows on the houses. Maybe I should be watching the road, since I'm driving, but I seriously doubt there will be anyone else driving out here.

The lights on the houses we are to pass are off, but when we get a little closer, they flick on. After we drive past, they turn off. If it were just one house, I wouldn't think anything of it. But over 30 houses in a row? That's suspicious.

"Is there a pattern?" I inquire. "Because if there is, I don't see it."

"Well, some seem to stay on slightly longer than others, but I can't tell what that means."

"It must be a code then. Could it be... Morse code?"

"That's genius!"

Alice pulls her geology textbook out of the bag at her feet, along with a pen. She flips to a random page, and pulls the cap off with her teeth.

"Can you tell me if the lights on a house are short or long?" She says with a glint of excitement in her eyes. "Short is dot, long is dash."

"Dash...dot...dot...dot," I answer, hoping I'm not getting anything wrong. It's unpleasant watching Alice scribble frantically in a book; books should never be abused like that.

"What happens when there's a blank house?" I question, stopping the car. "Is that a space between letters?"

"Honestly, I don't know. We can try it."
I start driving again.

"Dash...dash...dash...space."

We drive past what seems like a hundred houses all with either a dot or a dash applicable. Then all the lights stop.

"So do you know Morse code?"

"Yeah," she shrugs like its normal. "Janis and I learned it when we were 13 or so."

"Huh, fair enough."

I turn the classical music back on while I wait for Alice to decode the message. It's anxious waiting to see if we were right, or if we were just seeing things. How could we see something like that and it not be real? It was at least 120 houses, and the odds of it being a coincidence are outrageously small.

"Okay, I think I got something," she says, snapping my attention away from my thoughts. "The first word is...Bob. Um, that's...wow."

"There's no way that's a coincidence," I whisper, and she nods before returning to her work.

The light rain turn into a heavier rain, making the situation seem even eerier than before.

"So, I finished decoding it," Alice mutters, closing the textbook. "I don't think you'll like the message, though."

"It can't be that bad-"

"It's says...it says Bob I see you."