Writers of the Future, Volume 28 (38 page)

Gage’s parents had given in to his pleas and let him stay up and watch even though he had school in the morning. With a wink, they said it was so late he might not have to go to school, but they’d see. Sitting within an arm’s length of the television’s glow, his stomach tingled with excitement, roiled with fatigue. His parents felt like a warm, comforting presence at his back.

Though it was a clear night, the footage wasn’t much to see. A dot like a miniature shooting star shimmered into view amongst the spill of constellations. Gage could only tell it was the craft they had been waiting for because a little special effect centered it in a highlighting circle. The camerawork was a bit shaky as it zoomed in and tracked the craft. A reporter said something about the footage being taken from the deck of a naval destroyer, one of many positioned throughout the Atlantic. His mic crackled with the heavy wind billowing his jacket. Picture after picture showed rows of fighter jets at the ready.

Gage felt like he was joining history.

The dot continued across the high atmosphere at a flat angle. Tiny pieces of it broke free and fluttered away like a faint tail of sparklers. Someone said something about ablative shielding, nothing to worry about; mankind and the aliens had found similar ways of dealing with heat shielding. It was an encouraging sign; human technology was on the right course. But the point of light kept going, kept shedding and getting smaller. The camera panned from one horizon to the other, following the shining dot as it passed overhead. A reporter said something about a splash in the ocean detected by the destroyer’s sonar, and orange, powdery snow. Then the camera went inside. The destroyer’s feed ended, replaced with two speechless talking heads back in the studio, their faces professional masks that stretched between worry and dignified composure.

The warm presence of Gage’s parents went chill at his back, then cold. Gage wanted to turn around and tell them it’d be all right, wanted to turn around and have
them
tell
him
it’d be all right, too. He knew he shouldn’t be watching television. He was sorry. He should be asleep, resting for school in the morning. He felt like he should apologize. There was no television anymore, anyway. He shouldn’t have asked to watch. There hadn’t been television in almost six years. He wanted to turn around and warn his parents about it all. The dark urine wasn’t the result of dehydration or the vitamin C they took to prevent seasonal coughs. What they had was already in them, everywhere. Doctors didn’t matter anymore. Rumors about clean zones were untrue. Trade winds distributed the crud worldwide. They weren’t resistant like he was. It wasn’t their fault. He wanted to hug them and tell them he loved them. He wanted to tell them it wasn’t fair he’d spend the rest of his time with them in noisy mobs in grocery markets, pharmacies and hardware stores, exchanging worried glances with other people’s healthy kids; and at quarantine checkpoints standing by while they squabbled with officials over valid clean papers; and slowly marching in lines for experimental vaccine shot after experimental vaccine shot which would leave bruises but make no difference. The rushed transfer of everything they owned to him would be misguided. All he would gain from them in the end would be what he could carry, along with a doting neighbor’s daughter named Adah his parents had arranged to take before her parents succumbed to the crud.

He knew it was a dream. He had had it before. He knew he should just turn and face his parents. They’d be cocooned in what looked like murky yellow ice. He’d see others in the gem-like coffins before he’d see his parents in them. He’d hear reporters say they weren’t dead, just preserved. He’d hear people say it didn’t hurt. He would turn and see his parents’ faces, heavy eyelids closed over their demonstrative eyes, mouths opened as if to say they loved him, too, yet filled with crud-amber. He wanted to take his eyes off the talking heads as they fish-mouthed without words on the television screen. He wanted to turn around and see his parents. It couldn’t be worse than what had happened since. It couldn’t be.

But it was.

M
onk insisted he should help repair the obstacle course blocking Lost Pine’s drive. Gage put his foot down. Monk acted put out, but after a day of rest, his swollen stings showed little sign of shrinking, and Gage could tell he was relieved. Monk stood shakily on the porch. Adah held him steady by an arm.

“I’ll keep an eye on him,” Adah said.

Gage made sure she had her broken bottle, in case Monk suddenly found his strength.

“I’ll be all right,” she said.

Gage dressed in layers of thick, long-sleeved clothing and leatherwork gloves. He secured a helmet he had made out of material salvaged from the screen door under his collars. The outfit made him clumsy and slow and hot. It was the only way he knew to keep the bees from swarming him that didn’t involve smoke, which might signal their presence from a distance.

Looking at the path Monk had torn down the drive, Gage angrily set his jaw. To someone who could read the land, it was an arrow pointing to the front door.

Gage had designed the obstacles as would a madman by adding thorny catches and springy trips at random, offering no pattern for the eye to catch on. It had taken him the entire month since he and Adah had arrived at Lost Pine to arrange them the way he wanted. Yet they hadn’t stopped Monk, and Gage couldn’t imagine they’d hold up against crud-kids when they got desperate enough to wander down the valley en masse. His mind set on redoing them before Monk’s departure, he expanded them.

He worked his way from the road toward the house. Even in the shadowed understory, summer heat sapped his strength. Bees buzzed and climbed over his helmet and occasionally burrowed between the folds of his clothing to lodge stingers where he couldn’t get at them. The stings swelled and left sore bruises that made him question if he should be doing all of what he was doing. He imagined it was Monk who stung him.

After setting a log atop a wedge trigger, he stepped back to inspect its camouflage when his foot slipped into the trigger hole. Pain knotted in his ankle, splintered into his shin. The log teetered above him. He didn’t know how much it weighed—far more than he could lift; he could only roll it. He scrambled away over crosshatched brambles, then faced the log with disappointment. It remained stable. It wasn’t good enough. It should’ve careened onto his shin and broken it cleanly where the hole held it in place.

He put weight on his ankle and hissed. Tried again, hissed.

Limping back to the house, he wondered if he should make the traps so mechanical. If they didn’t kill intruders, as they hadn’t killed Monk, they’d signal the presence of a designer and draw attention to Lost Pine.

Pain screwed into his ankle with each step. He pressed through it and decided mechanical traps may not be prudent, but deterrents weren’t enough. Traps had to be perfect and deadly.

He found Adah and Monk behind the house, cleaning out the chicken coop. Adah had crawled inside. Monk sat on a stump nearby.

“Adah keeping you busy
?
” Gage asked.

Monk said she was. She was quite the homesteader. First, it was laundry, then making soap with ash and fat saved from the chickens that had died, then filling in the night hole and digging a new one, then setting raccoon traps, then the coop.

Listening to the list, Gage smiled. He had taught himself each activity, having read how from books, then had taught Adah.

Adah emerged from the coop with a pail of feathers and stinking feces for the compost, a look of accomplishment on her face.

Monk asked what had happened to Gage’s leg.

“It’s nothing,” Gage said, his voice firm.

Adah’s brow scrunched with concern. “Let me see.” She gestured for him to sit beside Monk. Monk scooted over.

“I’ll be fine,” Gage said. He limped to the house.

Monk said it looked bad.

“Let him be,” Adah said. “He’ll come around.”

Gage let the empty screen door snap shut behind him.

The full weight of his fatigue settled on him once he undressed. The cool, dim house chilled his sweat. He changed clothes, drank from a rain catcher and rolled its taste of iron on his tongue—a constant reminder of the crud; it was even in his thirst. Descending the stairs to the cellar, his ankle tightened. He angrily eyed it, balanced on it and hopped down. It painfully gave out. The railing bore his weight with a groan. One-legged, he cautiously hopped to the gun safe.

Seated in a musty armchair, he pressed an ear to the safe’s steel door. It drank warmth from him. Leaning against its sure solidity, he closed his eyes and fingered the notches of its dial. The oiled gears whispered to him. Gage interpreted meaning from the whispers, which he believed foolproof until the door resisted his tug and he sought a better translation. The B&B fell away. Portland faded into the distance. The world beyond became as remote as a star.

Fatigue melted off his bones until noise from inside the B&B shocked him with thoughts of electricity and adults and others elsewhere working to reconstruct what had been lost to the crud.

But it was just the piano. It was just music.

A repetitive, classical duh-duh-dah grew louder and faster as he approached the piano room. He stopped outside its doorway, out of view. The music stopped.

Monk said Gage should come in. He laughed when Gage didn’t reply. He said he couldn’t have missed Gage clomping closer. He should join them. Music might distract Gage from his ankle.

Gage entered. “It’s out of tune. And a few keys are broken.”

Monk said he didn’t mind. The gist of the piece came through. It was a beautiful piano.

“He took lessons,” Adah said, “for years before the crud. He’s amazing.”

Monk smiled, and said his pacing was off. He hadn’t played in quite a while, and it was difficult reading the unfamiliar music. He stumbled with the footing, though it was coming back to him. He was going to be a concert pianist, before the crud.

“There aren’t many people left who could do what you can do,” Adah said.

Monk thanked her.

“Don’t take it too seriously,” Gage said. “She hasn’t seen anyone even play ‘Chopsticks’ before.”

Adah’s wide eyes narrowed. “Any luck with the safe
?
”

“No,” Gage said, “just progress.”

He returned to the cellar.

The music stung, but the laughter stung worse. Gage tried to close his senses to it, to hear only the whispered turning of the heavy gears through the steel door. He told himself he wasn’t hungry, he didn’t need to go upstairs. He told himself it’d only be a few more days with Monk. He told himself nothing mattered more than opening the gun safe and protecting Adah. She depended on him. It was all that mattered, what had kept him going and given him strength to fight and make hard decisions.

He fell asleep.

When he woke, he was cold and hungry and sore from how he had slumped against the safe. Adah hadn’t woken him to watch the stars from the roof, but he was sure she was up there. With Monk. He imagined Monk counting the intermittent shooting stars and undoing the work of years as he talked about what they represented. The shooting stars would no longer be nothing to worry about. He’d remind Adah the crud craft had been the first in a long line, each larger than those preceding it, with the behemoth at the end.

He limped to the fridge for a hardboiled egg before heading up to bed. Inside the fridge, Sue’s body formed a dark shadow inside her murky yellow cocoon. Rigor from the final stages of the creeping crud had frozen her in a horrible retching pose. He preferred it when she had had no name.

Gage lay under the bed covers and stared into the darkness. When Adah tiptoed into the room and slipped under the covers, she spoke, her back turned to him. “I know you like to act like you’re big and scary so you won’t have to follow through on your threats, but, really, you’re taking it a little far. You shouldn’t be so mean to Monk.”

“That’s not his real name,” Gage said.

She huffed, then her breath settled into a deep rhythm. Gage’s followed.

A
s far as Gage could tell, the only part of Monk to regain strength was his mouth.

Each day, Gage woke with the sun, trudged into the obstacle course and returned when the loss of light made it dangerous. With thrown stones, he tested his traps. Each day, he ended a little farther from the road, a little closer to Lost Pine. He gained bruises and stings and stumbled home from the growing chaos in near delusional sweats to find Monk sitting and talking while Adah worked. She listened to him and built raised beds for their future gardens, collected kindling, and wove baskets from the limber creeper vines strangling the surrounding pines.

Monk said he had survived because he knew how to respect people and how to gain respect in return.

Monk said he had a theory why the creeping crud had broken out. It wasn’t an accident. It was a purposeful blight sent to replace adults’ “sophistication” with the truthful innocence of children. We were just fouling it up.

Monk asked if Gage had considered burying Martin and Sue. It didn’t seem right to put the dead to work, like they had.

“They’re not dead,” Gage said.

Monk said that may technically be true, but either way, it would honor them to continue their traditions. They should be buried.

“Have you buried others
?
” Gage asked.

Monk’s pinched features stiffened. He said he had.

Gage eyed Monk’s scrawny arms. “How deep
?
”

Gage’s arm stung from Adah’s pinch as though from a bee sting.

“We’ve all lost people,” Adah said. “And we don’t talk about it. It’s personal.” She glared at Gage.

Alone in the kitchen, listening to Monk play the piano for Adah, Gage cut rancid bits from dried strips of raccoon meat and ate the clean remnants. Music continued after he finished eating. He went to the safe.

Dismissed combinations filled the pages of his ledger. He was getting close. He felt it.

Adah cooked meals of edible wild roots and flowers Gage had taught her to identify. On the seventh day, they shared raccoon stew, dandelion salad with sunflower seeds and a bowlful of tart blackberries.