Cory has arranged this by pleading and begging, by crying and cajoling and calling in every favor and every friend she could think of. People at the college know her. She taught there before Bennett’s birth, before she saw the need here and began the front-room school that serves all the children of the neighborhood. Dad was all for her quitting the college because he didn’t want her going back and forth outside, exposed to all the dangers that involved. The neighbors pay a per-kid fee, but it isn’t much. No one could support a household on it.
Now Cory will have to go outside again. She’s already drafting men and older boys in the neighborhood to escort her when she has to go out. There are plenty of unemployed men here, and Cory will be paying them a small fee.
So in a few days, the new term will start and Cory will do Dad’s work—while I do her work. I’ll handle the school with help from her and from Russel Dory, Joanne and Harry’s grandfather. He used to be a high school math teacher. He’s been retired for years, but he’s still sharp. I don’t think I need his help, but Cory does, and he’s willing, so that’s that.
Alex Montoya and Kayla Talcott will take over Dad’s preaching and other church work. Neither is ordained, but both have substituted for Dad in the past. Both have authority in the community and the church. And, of course, both know their Bible.
This is how we will survive and hold together. It will work. I don’t know how long it will last, but for now, it will work.
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 30, 2026
Wardell Parrish has finally dragged himself back to his people—to the part of his family that he lived with before he and his sister inherited the Sims house. He’s stayed with us since his sister and all her children were killed. Cory gave him some of Dad’s clothes which were too big for him. Much too big.
He wandered around, not talking, not seeming to see anything, not eating enough… Then yesterday he said, like a little boy, “I want to go home. I can’t stay here. I hate it here; everyone’s dead! I have to go home.”
So today Wyatt Talcott, Michael, and Curtis escorted him home. Poor man. He’s years older than he was a week ago. I think he may not live much longer.
2027
❏ ❏ ❏
WE ARE EARTHSEED. We are flesh—self aware, questing, problem-solving flesh. We are that aspect of Earthlife best able to shape God knowingly. We are Earthlife maturing, Earthlife preparing to fall away from the parent world. We are Earthlife preparing to take root in new ground, Earthlife fulfilling its purpose, its promise, its Destiny.
14
❏ ❏ ❏
In order to rise
From its own ashes
A phoenix
First
Must
Burn.
EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING
SATURDAY, JULY 31, 2027—MORNING
LAST NIGHT, WHEN I escaped from the neighborhood, it was burning. The houses, the trees, the people: Burning.
Smoke awoke me, and I shouted down the hall to Cory and the boys. I grabbed my clothes and emergency pack and followed Cory as she herded the boys out.
The bell never rang. Our watchers must have been killed before they could reach it.
Everything was chaos. People running, screaming, shooting. The gate had been destroyed. Our attackers had driven an ancient truck through it. They must have stolen a truck just to crash it through our gate.
I think they must have been pyro addicts—bald people with painted heads, faces, and hands. Red faces; blue faces; green faces; screaming mouths; avid, crazy eyes, glittering in the firelight.
They shot us and shot us and shot us. I saw Natalie Moss, running, screaming, then pitching backward, her face half gone, her body still impelled forward. She fell flat on her back, and did not move again.
I fell with her, caught up in her death. I lay there, dazed, struggling to move, to get up. Cory and the boys, running ahead of me never noticed. They ran on.
I got up, felt for my pack, found it, and ran. I tried not to see what was happening around me. Hearing the gunfire and the screams didn’t stop me. A dead body—Edwin Dunn—didn’t stop me. I bent, snatched up his gun, and kept running.
Someone screamed near me, then tackled me, pulled me down. I fired the gun in reflexive terror, and took the terrible impact in my own stomach. A green face hung above mine, mouth open, eyes wide, not yet feeling all his pain. I shot him again, terrified that his pain would immobilize me when he did feel it. It seemed that he took a long time to die.
When I could move again, I pushed his body off me. I got up, still holding the gun, and ran for the wrecked gate.
Best to be in the darkness outside. Best to hide.
I ran up Meredith Street away from Durant Road, away from the fires and the shooting. I had lost track of Cory and the boys. I thought they would go toward the hills and not toward the center of town. Every direction was dangerous, but there was more danger where there were more people. In the night, a woman and three kids might look like a gift basket of food, money, and sex.
North toward the hills. North through the dark streets to where the nearby hills and mountains blotted out the stars.
And then what?
I didn’t know. I couldn’t think. I had never been outside the walls when it was so dark. My only hope of staying alive was to listen, hear any movement before it got too close to me, see what I could by starlight, be as quiet as I could.
I walked down the middle of the street looking and listening and trying to avoid potholes and chunks of broken asphalt. There was little other trash. Anything that would burn, people would use as fuel. Anything that could be reused or sold had been gathered. Cory used to comment on that. Poverty, she said, had made the streets cleaner.
Where was she? Where had she taken my brothers? Were they all right? Had they even gotten out of the neighborhood?
I stopped. Were my brothers back there? Was Curtis? I hadn’t seen him at all—though if anyone were going to survive this insanity, it would be the Talcotts. But we had no way of finding each other.
Sound. Footsteps. Two pairs of running footsteps. I stayed where I was, frozen in place. No sudden moves to draw attention to me. Had I already been seen? Could I be seen—a figure of darker darkness in an otherwise empty street?
The sound was behind me. I listened and knew that it was off to one side, approaching, passing. Two people running down a side street, indifferent to the noise they made, indifferent to woman-shaped shadows.
I let out a breath and drew another through my mouth because I could get more air with less sound that way. I couldn’t go back to the fires and the pain. If Cory and the boys were there, they were dead or worse, captive. But they had been ahead of me. They must have gotten out. Cory wouldn’t let them come back to look for me. There was a bright glow in the air over what had been our neighborhood. If she had gotten the boys away, all she had to do was look back to know that she didn’t want to go back.
Did she have her Smith & Wesson? I wished I had it and the two boxes of ammunition that went with it. All I had was the knife in my pack and Edwin Dunn’s old .45 automatic. And all the ammunition I had for it was in it. If it wasn’t empty. I knew the gun. It held seven rounds. I’d fired it twice. How many times had Edwin Dunn fired it before someone shot him? I didn’t expect to find out until morning. I had a flashlight in my pack, but I didn’t intend to use it unless I could be certain I wouldn’t be making a target of myself.
During the day the sight of the bulge in my pocket would be enough to make people think twice about robbing or raping me. But during the night the blue gun would be all but invisible even in my hand. If it were empty, I could only use it as a club. And the moment I hit someone with it, I might as well hit myself. If I lost consciousness for any reason during a fight, I would lose all my possessions if not my life. Tonight I had to hide.
Tomorrow I would have to try to bluff as much as possible. Most people wouldn’t insist on my shooting them just to test whether or not the gun w
as loaded. For the street poor, unable to afford medical care, even a minor wound might be fatal.
I am one of the street poor, now. Not as poor as some, but homeless, alone, full of books and ignorant of reality. Unless I meet someone from the neighborhood, there’s no one I can afford to trust. No one to back me up.
Three miles to the hills. I kept to the starlit back streets, listening and looking around. The gun was in my hand. I meant to keep it there. I could hear dogs barking and snarling, fighting somewhere not far away.
I was in a cold sweat. I had never been more terrified in my life. Yet nothing attacked me. Nothing found me.
I didn’t go all the way to the hills. Instead I found a burned out, unwalled house a few blocks before the end of Meredith Street. Fear of dogs had made me keep an eye open for anything that might provide shelter.
The house was a ruin, a plundered ruin. It wasn’t safe to walk into with or without a light. It was a roofless collection of upright black bones. But it had been built up off the ground. Five concrete steps led up to what had been the front porch. There should be a way under the house.
What if other people were under it?
I walked around it, listening, trying to see. Then, instead of daring to crawl under, I settled in what was left of the attached garage. A corner of it was still standing, and there was enough rubble in front of that corner to conceal me if I didn’t show a light. Also, if I were surprised, I could get out of the garage faster than I could crawl out from under a house. The concrete floor could not collapse under me as the wooden floor might in what was left of the house proper. It was as good as I was going to get, and I was exhausted. I didn’t know whether I could sleep, but I had to rest.
Morning now. What shall I do? I did sleep a little, but I kept startling awake. Every sound woke me—the wind, rats, insects, then squirrels, and birds… I don’t feel rested, but I’m a little less exhausted. So what shall I do?
How is it that we had never established an outside meeting place—somewhere where the family could reunite after disaster. I remember suggesting to Dad that we do that, but he had never done anything about it, and I hadn’t pushed the idea as I should have. (Poor Godshaping. Lack of forethought.)
What now!
Now, I have to go home. I don’t want to. The idea scares me to death. It’s taken me a long time just to write the word: Home. But I have to know about my brothers, and about Cory and Curtis. I don’t know how I can help if they’re hurt or being held by someone. I don’t know what might be waiting for me back at the neighborhood. More painted faces? The police? I’m in trouble either way. If the police are there, I’ll have to hide my gun before I go in—my gun, and my small amount of money. Carrying a gun can win you a lot of unwanted attention from the police if you catch them in the wrong mood. Yet everyone who has one carries it. The trick, of course, is not to get caught carrying it.
On the other hand, if the painted faces are still there, I can’t go in at all. How long do those people stay high on pyro and fire? Do they hang around after their fun to steal whatever’s left and maybe kill a few more people?
No matter. I have to go and see.
I have to go home.
SATURDAY, JULY 31, 2027—EVENING
I have to write. I don’t know what else to do. The others are asleep now, but it isn’t dark. I’m on watch because I couldn’t sleep if I tried. I’m jittery and crazed. I can’t cry. I want to get up and just run and run… Run away from everything. But there isn’t any away.
I have to write. There’s nothing familiar left to me but the writing. God is Change. I hate God. I have to write.
There were no unburned houses back in the neighborhood, although some were burned worse than others. I don’t know whether police or firefighters ever came. If they had come, they were gone when I got there. The neighborhood was wide open and crawling with scavengers.
I stood at the gate, staring in as strangers picked among the black bones of our homes. The ruins were still smoking, but men, women, and children were all over them, digging through them, picking fruit from the trees, stripping our dead, quarreling or fighting over new acquisitions, stashing things away in clothing or bundles… Who were these people?
I put my hand on the gun in my pocket—it had four rounds left in it—and I went in. I was grimy from lying in dirt and ashes all night. I might not be noticed.
I saw three women from an unwalled part of Durant Road, digging through what was left of the Yannis house. They were laughing and throwing around chunks of wood and plaster.
Where were Shani Yannis and her daughters? Where were her sisters?
I walked through the neighborhood, looking past the human maggots, trying to find some of the people I had grown up with. I found dead ones. Edwin Dunn lay where he had when I took his gun, but now he was shirtless and shoeless. His pockets had been turned out.
The ground was littered with ash-covered corpses, some burned or half blown apart by automatic weapons fire. Dried or nearly dried blood had pooled in the street. Two men were prying loose our emergency bell. The bright, clear, early morning sunlight made the whole scene less real somehow, more nightmarelike. I stopped in front of our house and stared at the five adults and the child who were picking through the ruins of it. Who were these vultures? Did the fire draw them? Is that what the street poor do? Run to fire and hope to find a corpse to strip?
There was a dead green face on our front porch. I went up the steps and stood looking at him—at her. The green face was a woman—tall, lean, bald, but female. And what had she died for? What was the point of all this?
“Leave her alone.” A woman who had a pair of Cory’s shoes in her hand strode up to me. “She died for all of us. Leave her alone.”
I’ve never in my life wanted more to kill another human being. “Get the hell out of my way,” I said. I didn’t raise my voice. I don’t know how I looked, but the thief backed away.
I stepped over the green face and went into the carcass of our home. The other thieves looked at me, but none of them said anything. One pair, I noticed, was a man with a small boy. The man was dressing the boy in a pair of my brother Gregory’s jeans. The jeans were much too big, but the man belted them and rolled them up.
And where was Gregory, my clownish smartass of a baby brother? Where was he? Where was everyone?
The roof of our house had fallen in. Most things had burned—kitchen, living room, dining room, my room… The floor wasn’t safe to walk on. I saw one of the scavengers fall through, give a surprised yell, then climb, unhurt, onto a floor joist.
Nothing left in my room could be salvaged. Ashes. A heat-distorted metal bedframe, the broken metal and ceramic remains of my lamp, bunches of ashes that had been clothing or books. Many books were not burned through. They were useless, but they had been packed so tightly together that the fire had burned in deeply from the edges and the spines. Rough circles of unhurried paper remained, surrounded by ash. I didn’t find a single whole page.
The back two bedrooms had survived better. That was where the scavengers were, and where I headed.
I found bundled pairs of my father’s socks, folded shorts and T-shirts, and an extra holster that I could use for the .45. All this I found in or under the unpromising-looking remains of Dad’s chest of drawers. Most things were burned beyond use, but I stuffed the best of what I found into my pack. The man with the child came over to scavenge beside me, and somehow, perhaps because of the child, because this stranger in his filthy rags was someone’s father, too, I didn’t mind. The little boy watched the two of us, his small brown face expressionless. He did look a little like Gregory.
I dug a dried apricot out of my pack and held it out to him. He couldn’t have been more than six, but he wouldn’t touch the food until the man told him to. Good discipline. But at the man’s nod, he snatched the apricot, bit off a tiny taste, then stuffed the rest into his mouth whole.
So, in company with five strangers, I plundered my family’s ho
me. The ammunition under the closet floor in my parents’ room had burned, had no doubt exploded. The closet was badly charred. So much for the money hidden there.
I took dental floss, soap, and a jar of petroleum jelly from my parents’ bathroom. Everything else was already gone.
I managed to gather one set of outer clothing each for Cory and my brothers. In particular, I found shoes for them. There was a woman scavenging among Marcus’s shoes, and she glared at me, but she kept quiet. My brothers had run out of the house in their pajamas. Cory had thrown on a coat. I had been the last to get out of the house because I had risked stopping to grab jeans, a sweatshirt, and shoes as well as my emergency pack. I could have been killed. If I had thought about what I was doing, if I had had to think, no doubt I would have been killed. I reacted the way I had trained myself to react—though my training was far from up to date—more memory than anything else. I hadn’t practiced late at night for ages. Yet my self-administered training had worked.
Now, if I could get these clothes to Cory and my brothers, I might be able to make up for their lack of training. Especially if I could get the money under the rocks by the lemon tree.
I put clothes and shoes into a salvaged pillow case, looked around for blankets, and couldn’t find a one. They must have been grabbed early. All the more reason to get the lemon-tree money.
I went out to the peach tree, and, being tall, managed to reach a couple of nearly-ripe peaches that other scavengers had missed. Then I looked around as though for something more to take, and surprised myself by almost crying at the sight of Cory’s big, well-tended back garden, trampled into the ground. Peppers, tomatoes, squashes, carrots, cucumbers, lettuce, melons, sunflowers, beans, corn… Much of it wasn’t ripe yet, but what hadn’t been stolen had been destroyed.
I scavenged a few carrots, a couple of handfuls of sunflower seeds from flower heads that lay on the ground, and a few bean pods from vines Cory had planted to run up the sunflower stalks and corn plants. I took what was left the way I thought a late-arriving scavenger would. And I worked my way toward the lemon tree. When I reached it, heavy with little green lemons, I hunted for any with even a hint of paling, of yellow. I took a few from the tree, and from the ground. Cory had planted shade-loving flowers at the base of the tree, and they had thrived there. She and my father had scattered small, rounded boulders among these in a way that seemed no more than decorative. A few of these had been turned over, crushing the flowers near them. In fact, the rock with the money under it had been turned over. But the two or three inches of dirt over the money packet, triple wrapped and heat-sealed in plastic, was undisturbed.