Some time, after the blasts began to fade, or he began to go deaf from the noise, Dylan nodded off in his father’s arms.
~~~~~
He awoke in his bed with sunlight burning past his eyelids. His drapes were open to the outside world, for anyone or anything to look into. Before the panic registered in his mind, Dylan had already jumped out of bed and slammed the curtains shut, almost ripping them off the rods with the force of his fear.
Nothing hummed outside. He could hear a few muffled voices outside his window, possibly in the street. Some murmuring as Violet said something to their mother in the main living area. But there were no crashes, no explosions, no rumbling or growling or grinding of engine parts against building material.
Dylan opened one side of his curtain. He gripped the rough fabric as his hand began to shake.
A layer of yellow dust had settled over what remained of the town — a few buildings, crumbled stone, plaster chips, and wood beams, several of which lay across the road, giving the destruction a sense of direction and order. Crystal and Judith stood next to one of the beams, murmuring to each other and taking notes into tablets. Dylan’s father and brother, Henry, stood in a circle with some other men, conferring with the mayor, faces pulled tight and rimmed with sweat.
Both the Evrards’ and the Saro-Wiwas’ homes had been completely destroyed, Dylan saw on either side. Any building that had no cover was gone in a pile of rubble too small to salvage. None of the town’s children were out, picking through the debris. Normally, after larger windstorms, the children were the first to pick up scattered trash and belongings, reclaim debris from fallen antelope enclosures or garden fences.
Despite his mother’s objections from the kitchen, Dylan slugged a glass of water and ran outside. Several buildings that had been covered were also demolished, but in much larger hunks of twisted metal and brick and splinters. The mayor’s office still had one wall standing, but any sign of the roof was gone, glass from the windows sparkled up and down the road, the door torn in half and laying across the pile of the other three walls, as if placed there with care.
The hot breeze blew a hint of dust into Dylan’s eyes, which he scraped away with his fingers. His tears made the destruction clearer in his sight, the blue of the mid-morning sky a surreal punch of color against what was left of the drab, off-white town.
Dylan’s father placed a hand on his arm, bent over to look into the child’s eyes. “You should go back inside for awhile,” he said.
Dylan blinked up at him. His father’s beard was matted with sweat and dirt, and a tiny cut formed a scab just under the man’s left eye. “What happened?” he asked.
His father’s classic, care-worn sigh escaped, and he sat on the porch step with some effort. “Dr. Wright thinks the last wave of balloons were smarter than she anticipated. She thinks they picked up her phone’s signal as the first wave left, they maybe recognized her phone from previous towns, and followed her as she went from house to house.”
“How could she know that?” Dylan asked.
“Well,” his father’s voice wavered and he coughed. “She says the buildings that were destroyed in the second wave ... were all houses she had visited before coming to see us.”
Dylan looked out over the destruction. Debris was strewn everywhere, but the larger pieces of debris were collected at the northern end of town, while the southern end seemed to have escaped with only unoccupied buildings razed.
Unoccupied buildings.
“The people inside...” Dylan started, when his father gripped his arm harder.
“We’re doing the best we can,” he said, cutting Dylan off. “I need you to go back inside now.”
~~~~~
Over days, remains were found and identified. Blankets were donated and a mass grave was dug outside of town. Each name was lovingly inscribed into a tombstone, made from the beams and brick of fallen houses, which was rooted deep into the ground so that no windstorm or Smart Tech event could take it away.
Penelope had died in the final attack. Because Judith had been staying with her, it was the first house the balloons traced her signal back to, and the first to be leveled by drones. Something stirred behind Dylan’s rib cage when he saw her name in the tombstone, but he pushed it away. Nothing since the Smart Tech event felt like anything anymore. A dividing line, wider and darker than the black river-road behind his house, marked the boundary between the Dylan before, and the Dylan now.
The townspeople tolerated Judith’s help with cleanup with tight lips and shifty eyes. No one felt remorse or loss when Mayor Sandoz announced she was leaving, nearly a month after the tech rolled through town.
The morning was quiet and cool, purple sky fading into pale pink as the sun rose. Dylan woke from fitful but indistinct dreams, events felt in his bones but hidden from his mind’s eye. The rubble outside his window had been mostly cleared, but vacant lots stretched into the distance on all sides. He avoided the windows in his house, now.
Violet was still asleep, Henry was helping gather food for the cleanup crews, and his parents were on rubble duty and out the door before the sunrise. Dylan poured a glass of water and nibbled a dried apricot left out from the previous night’s desert.
A knock on the door caused Dylan to jump, spilling water from his glass across the floor. When the sound finished echoing through his imagination, he set his glass down and crossed to the front door, opening it enough to see with one eye who stood on the doorstep.
“Hi, Judith,” Dylan said as he surveyed the bicycle and the figure attached to it.
“Hi, Dylan,” she replied.
“You’re leaving town today, right?”
“Yeah, I’m all packed.” She lovingly patted the rusty metal beast. “I came to say goodbye, and thank you for helping me ... when all this started.”
Dylan nodded but said nothing.
“I’ve left a monitoring program with Crystal,” she said when she realized the depth of his silence. “I hope it will help you see if the Smart Tech comes back.”
Dylan nodded again.
Judith coughed. “I bet you could train in it. You could be the official monitor for the town’s safety. You’re one of the few in this town who even knew about Highway 15, let alone traveled it. You’re smart and you’ll pick up what to look for in no time.”
Judith’s eyes pleaded with Dylan for a word. He knew he should have said thank you, or nice to meet you, or some other pleasantry his mother had unpleasantly drilled into him a hundred thousand times before. But none of those words came to his lips. The only thing that came to his lips had been circling his mind for days, picking up speed and echoing now like thunder.
“Nothing good ever came down the highway,” he said, and shut the door.
~~~~~
~~~~~
L. Nicol Cabe is a science fiction nerd of many stripes - writer, playwright, performer. This is her first officially published short story, but she has a novel published in blog form called "Europa Dreams" at europadreams.blogspot.com, and will also perform a dystopian sci-fi one-woman show at the Seattle Fringe Festival in September 2014.
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I'll Go With Her, but Not Yet
by Sean Ealy; published August 26, 2014
The first time I saw the little girl was in the field.
Appearing out of the wheat, she came to me like an apparition, and I almost hit her with the combine.
“What’s the matter with you?” I said, wiping sweat out of my eyes. “What are you doing out here?”
Her eyes were as black and as indifferent as the dress she wore, her blonde hair pulled back from her scalp in tight braids. Her skin was the color of winter moonlight. She might have been ten or maybe eleven, but something about the way she inspected me seemed mature beyond her years. Almost ancient.
She opened her mouth to speak and I felt something cold slide into my mind. That coldness slithered through me like a snake until it reached my heart and coiled the
re.
“Not yet, Joseph,” the little girl said. “You will come to me, but not yet.”
The corners of her pale lips slowly rose. Not quite a smile. Her arms hung lifeless, her shoulders stiff. The breeze caught the wheat behind her and tossed it about, shaking those million tiny heads and making them whisper.
“What does that mean?” I asked, but she turned away, back into the wheat, a small black dress against a backdrop of honey. Eventually she disappeared. Two crows burst from the last place I saw her, rising high, ink-stained wings beating at the relentless sky, and then they too disappeared.
I climbed back into the cab and I didn’t think about the little girl again until Danny died a couple days later.
~~~~~
My brother Danny was a true farmer’s son. Dad made him go to college, but he was back every summer, baling hay. As soon as he graduated, he terminated his affair with the world and was employed on the farm for good.
We weren’t the best of friends, but it wasn’t always friction between us either. I remember fishing for steelhead down the Deschutes and catching snakes in the alfalfa fields, or twisting off at the quarry underneath an endless summer sky. We worked hard and we played hard and we fought hard in between. That was the glue that made us stick.
Did I love him? I wouldn’t have said so until he died.
One thing about my brother, though. He could make Dad’s old equipment sing. He was far better with it than I was. Farming wasn’t a second language to Danny; it was the only way he knew how to communicate.
It was that reason alone I wouldn’t believe what happened to him until I saw with my own eyes.
Around eleven in the morning Dad’s old Ford came burning up the dirt road, dust trailing from the rear tires in a cloud. There were only a few things that would take Dad out of the field during harvest. I started across the field, and as I drew closer to the road I saw it wasn’t Dad behind the wheel, but Edgar Jenkins, a field hand Dad hired sometimes to help out with harvest.
“Edgar,” I said.
“Get in the truck, Joseph,” he said. “There’s been an accident.”
He took his hat off and swiped his dark brow with it.
“It’s Danny,” he said.
I slid into the passenger seat with my heart in my throat, and Edgar turned the Ford around.
Danny had been in the west field that morning. Nobody could figure what had caused him to get out of the combine and stick his arm in the header while it was still turning, but that’s what he did. The thing sucked him in all the way to his waist before it stopped moving.
“They’ll be picking pieces of him out of that field for days,” Edgar said.
I wanted to vomit, but I stood there like a straw man listening to Mom howl instead. The engine on the combine was still clicking and making noise.
“Somebody turn that damn thing off,” my dad shouted. His eyes met mine and I saw the old man was crying too. Danny had been his favorite son, I suppose, and now there was only me.
Later that night, Edgar found me out in the barn, watching a fly circle around the dim light hanging from the ceiling. I couldn’t stomach sitting in the house with my parent’s grief hanging in the air like some kind of chemical stink. It sounds plain childish, but I felt guilty. Like Danny’s blood was on my hands.
“Catch ya dreamin’?” Edgar asked.
He almost startled me right off the stool I had parked myself on.
“What?” I said.
Edgar put a shaky hand to his neck. He licked his lips and swallowed hard, as if he were choking on something he wanted to say.
“You remember how we found Danny,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said, standing up. How could I forget?
“There’s something else, Joe.”
“What is it, Edgar?”
“I don’t think Danny was alone out there.”
My pulse began to throb in my temple. Bang bang, like a steel drum. “What are you saying?”
“I was the first to come upon him,” Edgar said. “You know that. The one who found him all cut up like that.”
“Yeah.” I closed my eyes but the image of Danny’s mangled body was tattooed on my mind.
“I saw someone out there, Joe. A little girl. Walking through the field. I think she was singing.”
I shook my head.
“I called out to her,” Edgar said, “but she disappeared. I thought maybe I was seeing things, you know? But now, well I don’t know.”
“My brother’s dead, Edgar,” I said.
“I know.”
I wiped my eyes and made for the door. Edgar caught my shoulder.
“I’m sorry for what happened to your brother,” Edgar said.
“Me too,” I said, and slipped away into the night.
~~~~~
There was a memorial service for my brother at the Lutheran church, an hour of tears and reflection before everyone went back to work. That’s life in a small farming town. Danny was liked well enough, and most of the town turned out to hear the preacher speak, but there was still wheat in the fields.
Mom and Dad tried their best to put on a good face, but I couldn’t hide the train wreck taking place inside my head. Ever since seeing Danny’s body in the field, I was a complete and profound mess. There’s a whole lot of time between waking and sleeping, and there ain’t no relief when even your dreams are plagued with images. All I could do was think about all that blood.
They’ll be picking pieces of him out of that field for days.
I told Dad I’d stay on until harvest was over, but after that I was done. He nodded, as if that was the very thing he expected me to say.
“Where will you go, Joseph?” Mom asked me.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Will you be coming back?” There were tears in her eyes again, and it made me feel dirty to look at them.
“I don’t know,” I said, but that one was a lie.
~~~~~
I left my family’s farm in the middle of September. I told myself and some of my buddies that I was moving on to the next chapter of my life, but I was running away, fair and square. Running from something I didn’t understand, something that haunted me every remaining hour I spent in those fields. An idea had sunk its teeth into me, you see. That little girl was still out there somewhere in those fields, waiting for me. She had taken my brother and if I didn’t move on she would take me, too.
I wanted to go someplace that was outside the limits of the small town life I had always known. So I went to Portland and rented a studio apartment with the money I had been saving. I got a job at a downtown bookstore. I filled my little kitchen with groceries, filled my shelf with books, and went to work on erasing every memory about farming and my brother and the little girl in the wheat field. I busied myself with strange faces and exotic foods, letting the chaos of sound and the moving patterns of a combustive city envelope me until eventually I forgot everything. It was all so good.
And then I fell in love.
~~~~~
Sarah Gray came into the bookstore with a stack of books in her arms, piled to her chin. Her expression was so painfully serious I couldn’t help but lose myself in it.
“What?” she asked, setting the books down on my counter.
I realized I was grinning like an idiot and put a hand over my mouth. “I’m sorry,” I said. “You just look—“
“Like I’m the biggest nerd in the city?” She pushed brown hair out of her eyes with a finger and shifted her weight to one foot. “You think that just because I’m pretty I can’t read all of these books? Too many big words, right?”
“No,” I said, my grin fading with all the color in my face.
But then she smiled, and I felt my heart take a nosedive. That sounds like a freshman thing to say, but it’s the closest thing to the truth.
“I am too pretty, you know.” She stuck out her tongue.
I got her number that day. Best thing I ever did.
Aft
er a month of seeing each other, she took me home to meet her parents. That was the test, you see. The imaginary line in the sand. If we were to go any further in our relationship, I had to gain the approval of her family. It was the unspoken condition, and I accepted it eagerly.
Sarah’s father was in real estate, had done well enough with it to retire early, before the floor fell out of the market. He was a casual guy with a face that didn’t betray his age and an open disposition that I immediately felt comfortable with. Her mother was short and warm and had an affection for hugging. They could have been characters out of an all-American novel, and they would have fit in well back home.
Sarah’s brother, however, was a page ripped out of a completely different style of book. He was the smudge on an otherwise spotless piece of glass, the watermark on a newly stained piece of furniture. He watched Sarah make her introductions from a distance, clung to the wall like he was a piece of it, and didn’t say a word when I offered my hand. His handshake was limp and his palm was sweaty and his eyes hardly left the floor. Whatever was on his mind, I wasn’t part of it.
We were swept to the dining room by Sarah’s mom where the aroma of potatoes and roast beef had my mouth watering like a dog's. You’d think I hadn’t eaten in a century, but the truth was I hadn’t even been in the same zip code of a home cooked meal since coming to Portland, and I didn’t realize how much I missed it until I sat down at the Gray’s table.
“Do you get home often to see your folks, Joseph?” Mrs. Gray asked.
“Not often enough,” I said. I was staring at the slab of meat on my plate and something in my expression must have changed.
“Joseph, are you okay?”
Everyone was looking at me, and I could feel the heat rising in my cheeks. Something unspoken exchanged between Sarah and her father, and I gripped my knee with a shaky hand, suddenly sure that I had blown it.
“Joseph’s brother died in an accident,” Sarah said.
“Oh dear,” Mrs. Gray said. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I said, forcing a smile. “It was a long time ago.”
“Not that long,” Sarah said. “Not even a year.”
Sarah’s honesty was raw and sometimes brutal but I loved her for it.
“You don’t have to talk about it, Joseph,” Mr. Gray told me.
But for the first time I found myself wanting to talk about it. Something about Sarah’s parents made me feel safe. So I told them about Danny, and halfway through my story, Sarah took my hand under the dinner table.