The Treasure Map Read online

  His father climbed up after him and reached for a barely visible string that turned on a set of rather powerful lights. Jack covered his eyes with his forearm as the brightness overwhelmed him. He beheld for the first time their oft-forgotten storage chamber and quickly agonized over how he could see every spot of dust that had fallen through the years.

  “When was the last time you came up here?” Jack asked. “This place has more dust than the Grand Canyon.”

  “Last Christmas,” his father answered. “That’s the only time I come up here most years. I store the decorations in here after Christmas each December. Everything else in here hasn’t been touched by a member of this family since I was at least your age.”

  “I can tell,” Jack said as he looked around with a mixture of wonder and grief, knowing that whatever his father had for him, it involved this graveyard of family relics. “But why are we up here now? It looks like you already got all the decorations out of here.”

  “I did,” his father grunted. “Which will make things easier for you than if we had done this earlier in the year. I know how smart you are, how well you think things out when you are inspired, but you have no idea what it’s like to work hard when you don’t want to do it. But life doesn’t work like that. Sometimes you have to do things that you don’t want to do so you can do the things you care about most. You’re going to be spending your vacation cleaning up this attic. And I don’t mean some haphazard job where you sweep in circles for ten minutes and call it good. I want everything looking just the way it did before grandpa filled it up all those years ago. Better, actually. You have more free time on your hands than he did.”

  Jack looked around the room again and tried to hide the growl that naturally came from his stomach. “How am I supposed to do it?” he asked. “I’ve never done anything like this before. I don’t even clean my room like what you’re saying.”

  His father looked back at him and nodded his head knowingly. “Some things you have to learn by experiencing them for yourself. This is your job until the work is finished and completion of your task will be subject to my approval. You can come down from here to eat, to sleep, and to get cleaning supplies. Nothing else. And I don’t want to catch you slacking off.”

  Jack watched as his father climbed down the steps, then sat on a dusty box as he thought about where to start. This wasn’t going to be like some science fair project that he could whip together at the last minute and hope for a passing grade. This was going to take serious work. He suddenly wished he hadn’t rushed home after playing with the Santos brothers. That was the last bit of fun he was going to have for the rest of his so-called vacation.

  While he thought about these things, a broom and a dustpan jumped up through the hole in the floor and landed next to him, followed by a spray bottle, a roll of paper towels, and a trash bag.

  “Let me know if you need anything else!” he could hear his father say.

  “A magic wand would be nice,” he muttered to himself, knowing that saying it any louder wouldn’t make his punishment get any easier for him. “But I guess the broom is a good start. I don’t need to get my feet any dirtier than they are already.”

  Jack began at the spot where he was standing and without much thought or direction swept the space around himself as he began his journey to a clean attic. Although he wanted to scream, he held back. He was still grasping at the thought that perhaps, if he remained calm, and worked diligently, a remnant of a Christmas vacation might remain when he was finished. However, much like when he was in class at school, it didn’t take much to distract him from the task. Jack’s mind wandered around the room as his broom work became slower and slower and slower until it hardly moved at all.

  “A skylight would freshen up the room,” Jack thought, having watched a few too many house fixer-upper shows on television with his mother. “These old chandeliers aren’t doing much for the aesthetic.”

  Jack set aside the broom after he realized that it wouldn’t do the work for him. He instead decided to rummage through the maze of antique furnishings and dust-laden boxes that filled the attic floor to nearly full capacity.

  “Could have been worse,” Jack told himself as he dug his way through a dresser to see if he would find anything inside besides long lost sweaters that he thought should never have been in style. “At least dad took down all the Christmas stuff first. That would have taken ages to go through on my own.”

  Jack, after rifling through the drawers, realized that it wasn’t going to be the jackpot he had hoped to stumble upon while sifting through the wreckage of his grandfather’s younger years. The house had been with the family for ages, beginning with his father’s grandfather, who had built their home with his own two hands, before it was passed along from son to son. Jack’s parents moved in when his mother was pregnant with him and he hoped one day it would be his.

  Jack went from box to box, wondering if he might find any valuables, some hidden treasure, or at least something cool that his father might have played with when he was a kid. Although technology had grown by leaps and bounds through the generations, Jack was one who thought more about adventure and reckless abandon than the next electronic craze his friends might try to bring to his attention.

  Jack’s eyes lit up for the first time since entering the attic when he spotted an old rocking chair, which had been tossed up on top of a cabinet in the far corner. It took a bit of a balancing act, as he shifted his weight from one box of suspect sturdiness to the next, but he managed to clasp it with one hand and tug it down before watching it clumsily bounce from one corner to the other and land precariously next to the hole that led to the second floor hallway. Jack himself narrowly avoided a more serious fate, though he somehow managed to roll his way down the pile without hitting anything sharp or pointy.

  “That was lucky,” Jack chuckled as he hopped back up without the faintest concern for the condition of anything else in the room. After all, he thought, it wasn’t like anyone was missing any of this stuff all that much. It had been sitting there long enough that his father hadn’t bothered to ask him to keep an eye out for anything specific.

  Nevertheless, something specific caught his eye immediately. When he was younger, Jack’s mother would read him a bedtime story nearly every night before he could fall asleep. For years, the only books that would entertain him contained heroes that went on daring adventures, climbed dangerous mountains, survived the thickest jungles, and fought swashbuckling pirates. What always fascinated him most was the reward they would receive for overcoming their fears, which was nearly always a treasure of some sort or another. It could have been a bag of jewels, artifacts from a long lost village, or in most cases a chest filled to the brim with silver and gold. He always wondered what it would be like to be the one to reach the treasure first.

  So when Jack caught a glimpse of an ancient green trunk, held together with bronze brackets and buried under stacks of faded newspapers, he got a gleam in his eye. It was such a wonderful vision that if one could have seen Jack at the time, they would have thought he had gone mad, but in his heart he hoped to be like one of the heroes he had heard about in those bedtime stories.

  Retrieving this intriguing chest, unfortunately, would take even more work than the relatively accessible rocking chair had been. He knew it might take pure grunt work (the thing he least wanted to do in the coming days) to reach his prize. Jack, undeterred, moved box after box out of his way to clear a path to the chest, desperately hoping something valuable would meet him for his efforts.

  Sweat dripping from his brow, his lungs weighed down by the dust, Jack tossed stack after stack of newspapers to the side, then heaved the surprisingly heavy trunk over his shoulders. Nothing rattled inside, but he was more careful with the chest than he had been with anything else in the attic, hoping that whatever was inside would have significant worth. Jack then crept his way back to the rocking chair, set the chest on the floor beside him, and whipped the chair around to have a
seat.

  It was locked. LOCKED! Jack shook it in disgust. He fiddled with the handles and tested the edges. He turned it upside down and let out a sigh of relief.

  “The key!” Jack said in hushed excitement, seeing that it had been taped to the bottom. He grabbed it, turned the chest right side up, and turned the key stiffly inside the lock with his eyes squeezed closed until he was free to lift the top.

  When Jack opened his eyes to look inside, his heart sank, and he nearly wanted to pound his fists against the floor. No gold inside. Not a single jewel. Silver trinkets and cherished antiques were nowhere to be seen. Instead, he saw a dusty old parchment wrapped up and tied with a thin piece of string.

  Still, after all his emotional investment into the treasure chest, he was intrigued enough that he picked up the parchment and loosed from it a set of papers that had dwelled inside for unknown ages. He quickly unrolled them to discover they contained a map with markings of a place of unknown origin and names of unfamiliar locations.

  “What is this?” Jack wondered. “A treasure map? Maybe there was something valuable in the chest after all.”

  He then began to flip through the set of pages that had been tied together with the map to further his investigation. What happened next I cannot tell you for sure, for some insist even now that Jack had merely fallen asleep, while others will tell the story of a vision that had entranced the young boy, and there will always be those who hold tightly to the belief that Jack Monroe had been transported to another time and place and personhood altogether.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Vespasian

  MY NAME IS Niko Monroe. Dust from the infield settles in my lungs as the guard unshackles my wrists. The closest thing to freedom I’ve felt in months. I shake them off and let them fall to the ground. I clear my throat, but the guard swats my hand back down the instant I try to cover my mouth. It must be the gravy from this morning’s breakfast. Swallowing is difficult now. They want us to look like we’ve been fed well enough leading up to today. They don’t want the people to know how the twelve of us, the tortured men and women who will be standing before them shortly, have been treated while we await their applause. They can’t know the truth. They can’t consider that we’ve been dealt with inhumanely. They can’t think us to be human at all. They don’t want us to be pitied on Independence Day.

  It wasn’t always like this. And not just the olden days when we were powerful in number and prominence. That was before my time and hardly mentioned in approved history books anymore. But when I was a child there was still some hint of decency among the people of Ariel to what we call the Faithful. Some of them would spit on the ground whenever I walked by, and the brash ones would call me vulgar names under their breath, but at least we were safe from harm for the most part in my younger days. And there was nothing like this.

  The guard in charge of me today is a young cadet who is seeing his first action outside of the prison walls. Everything is under tight lock and key inside the menacing gates of Justice Hall. It’s been six months to the day since my capture. It was more like a kidnapping than a proper arrest. Without warning, I was stolen from the streets in broad daylight, bound, gagged, and thrown in the back of a military truck. No explanation came my way for days. I doubt anyone noticed. No one ever does. They locked me up in Justice Hall, that rat-infested penitentiary that I was forced to call home. Food was scarce during the day. Rain trickled down into my bed at night.

  Then came the trial, if that’s what they want to call it. There was no opportunity for defense. There were no witnesses. Only a prosecutor and a judge. I was sentenced to die just like the rest of them.

  Most of my fellow prisoners don’t get the pleasure of rotting for so long. They have been saving those of us in line for a special occasion. We are not a hidden statistic like so many others. We are a statement. But to this cadet, I’m a terrifying assignment, though his neatly pressed white uniform, decorated with three blue stripes on each sleeve, barely hides the layer of armor that would protect him from anything I could do to him. Of course, he’s scared, but only because he believes every word they tell him regarding my crimes against the State. He thinks I’ve been feigning weakness all this time. I haven’t.

  Cadet James prods me in the back to inch me forward. I have little choice. It’s either comply with his every command or be struck with fifty thousand volts of electricity. Not that I’d feel the pain come tomorrow morning. I know where I’m going. I know what lies before me. Some will say I’ve been waiting all this time to receive justice. But I’m here to collect my freedom in front of a capacity crowd at the Vespasian, the largest arena in Ariel City, the capital of the State.

  I hear nervous whispers in front of me. Some of my fellow prisoners receive more leeway from those who have been guarding them than I have. Not every guard follows the book, or even agrees with our sentence, but none want to lose their jobs. And none of them would be eager to stand in our place if we were to escape. Chatter from the guards grows stronger. They’re checking for updates from the watchtower. It’s almost time to proceed.

  “This is your last chance,” I tell the doe-eyed cadet. I hit the ground faster than I expected. The shock hurt more than I expected. I grab for my back as I am jerked up to my feet. I didn’t think he had it in him. Cadet James had been hearing me babble for weeks, twelve hours a day, seven days a week. I thought I might have gotten through to him by now. I guess I’m nothing like my father.

  I hear the sound of trumpets playing the song of the State of Ariel. The people chant along with “The Anthem of Peace” as it is called. Every line brings a nudge closer to the gallows. Every chorus squeezes us forward. I’m last in line to meet our maker today, but I’d give anything to be first. I can’t bear to witness my fellow workers suffer for their crimes. Not everyone is resolved to die like I am. Some of them believe they have work left to do here. I’m not so sure I deserve such an honor.

  The song ends and I hear a very young woman toward the front begin to wail. I’ve heard her screams in the middle of the night from a cell across and down the hall. She’s only been in lockdown for two weeks. She hasn’t processed it all. Instinct leads me to take a step toward her, but a quick shock in my lower back sends me to the ground once more.

  “That hurt,” I say, spitting blood from the cut I received on my lip from the first fall. He doesn’t flinch. They weren’t assigned to us for light conversation. Guards aren’t allowed to talk to us with anything but tasers, batons, or guns. Firearms are typically their last resort, but off-limits today, as they have grander plans for us now that the ceremony has begun. There isn’t time to round up more victims.

  “Ladies and gentleman,” I hear a man’s voice saying over the speakers surrounding the stadium. “Today is a day of great peace and prosperity for our humble nation. Every day the honorable servicemen of Ariel apprehend more heinous criminals, murderous terrorists such as the ones you will soon witness as they receive their just due. With each passing day, our streets become safer and our homes more secure. Your children and your children’s children will grow up to only know a world where harmony is promoted through the glorious wisdom of our most honorable leader, President Shah.”

  I wish they would have saved the speech until after my part of the ceremony had come to its conclusion. At least I wouldn’t have to stand through this vile rhetoric. It’s the same speech every year. It’s on everywhere. The entire world watches in solidarity with the president’s fight against our cause. This is why we do most of our work through an underground network. But the Faithful are never safe. Just look at me, if you can stand the sight. I made one mistake and now I’m here.

  “Liar!” a young man shouts from near the front of the line. He screams out when he is hit with electricity and quickly falls to the ground. I can barely see his face hitting the dirt. His guard is a cruel one I had seen near my cell in my earliest days as a prisoner. The young man must have received a double portion from the taser. It works quic
ker than the baton and doesn’t leave bruises. That’s why none of us have been clubbed in the past two weeks. They don’t want us to be spoiled for the show.

  The voice from the speakers stops in the middle of his diatribe. The guards are asking each other why they are delayed. They all want to get home to their families. Independence Day guards are each rewarded with a vacation when their assignments are complete. Everything is paid for by the State as a reward for successfully contributing to our execution. I’ve overheard publicly that it’s considered to be a well-deserved benefit. I’ve heard in the dark the secret of its terrible necessity. No amount of rest can cleanse their minds from what they are trained to do to us.

  Feedback stretches through the hallway as a woman’s stern voice addresses the crowd. “Welcome to this year’s Independence Day opening ceremonies,” she says to great applause. “There has been a slight disturbance with some of our equipment, but please be assured we will get this sorted out and commence in short time. Please, enjoy a refreshment from our vendors while our workers get this technical anomaly sorted out.”

  The crowd is restless. I crack my knuckles. I can see the sun has been out for some time, and while they’re likely worried about sunburns in the stands, it’s frigid in this corridor. Maybe it’s just me. My hands are pale. Cadet James looks fine. It has to be me. I notice my breathing patterns have changed. Sweat drips down my brow. My throat is dry. Maybe I’m not ready for this. I need more time. I should have done so much more.

  The crowd murmurs. Cadet James taps his baton against the palm of his hand. My fellow prisoners look ahead knowing the inevitable is imminent. One of the Faithful falls to the ground, but not by electric shock. It’s the same young woman who had cried out earlier, but this time she fainted, I think. The youngest of us all. Barely eighteen when they picked her up. It didn’t take long for her body to waste away. They fattened us up this morning, but after going days without water, she’s probably still dehydrated. And they dare to call us animals.