by Orion, W. J.
Kim sat the dish down on a tattered oven mitt and stepped back. She shrugged at the sight of the meal, then sat down.
“Dig in. Eat quick before Owen and Liam devour it all.”
“EAT IT ALL!” they chanted.
Yasmine and Knox were back on the couch, both rubbing distended bellies, full of the delicious meal. Across from them Kim sat in a lopsided, cut-up leather recliner. In her lap were both her sons, eagerly listening to the book she read to them. Yasmine had blanked out for most of it, but it had something to do with a princess and a trash bag. Or paper bag. Something like that. There might’ve been a dragon too. Sounded cute.
“The end,” she finished. “Now you two go pee in the jug and brush your teeth, make sure your windows are closed and the blinds drawn, then crawl into your bed.”
The boys kissed their mother, gave hugs to both Yasmine and Knox (more to Yasmine), and headed down the hall to the bathroom and then their bedroom. Kim again smiled.
“They’re awesome,” Yasmine said to Kim.
“They are. They’re always so happy to see you. Lights in their eyes.”
“Well, it goes both ways. How’s Owen’s breathing been?”
“Great. The nebulizers you found for us have been big in managing his difficulties. You know, they’re going to be sad when you leave.”
“I’m sorry,” Yaz said. “But I have to go. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I didn’t see this through to the end.” I’m also going to be sick to my stomach knowing I keep breaking these kid’s hearts.
“I know that feeling,” Knox said. “And I’m gonna be so glad to get this over with.”
“What?” Yaz asked her. “What do you mean?”
“I’m going.”
“The hell you are. You only have one leg.”
“I travel light. I bring half the shoes, and my leg probably weighed twenty pounds on its own,” Knox said, pointing at the bandage just below her knee. “Look at the bright side: I lost the slow leg; still got the fast one.”
“What exactly can you do better with one leg than someone with two legs can do? Why would they let you come?”
“They’ll bring me because I’m the best driver in the wastes,” she said flatly. “Because no one knows these roads like I do, and because if they don’t, I’ll start biting people and kicking ass with my one good leg.”
“You’re savage, you know that?” Yasmine said.
“It’s all the comics I’ve read. Too many unrealistic heroes making me feel obligated to help my people. I consider it a positive personality trait. I forgot to mention I’m A+ with a shotgun.”
“I agree,” Kim said, “on all points. This world needs heroes, more than ever; I think I’m sitting in the room with two of them right now.”
“Well I don’t know about that,” Yasmine sighed. “We just need to figure out a way to get some of our water back. All of it would be nice, but I might settle for a few ponds’ worth. Can you imagine swimming? What that’d be like….”
“It’s nice,” Kim said. “You feel almost weightless, and cooled off head to toe. Refreshing. Not much you can do that feels better on a hot day.”
“All we have are hot days now,” Yaz said.
“Yeah… So the plan is to drive north in a few vehicles to this town where your crab friend says there’s a crab spaceship?”
“Pretty much,” Yasmine said. “Hit the Tower for my uncle, then some place called the Station. After that, we do a couple days in the cars, then we go to space and try to figure out a way to get the water back.”
“You need a much better plan than that,” Kim said, frowning.
“Huh?”
“What happens when you leave the planet? How big is this ship? Who’s going on it? Where are you going to fly? Does this ship have guns? Does it have enough guns? Are those guns big enough to take out a bigger ship? Are you ever coming back?”
“I, uh… think we’re just gonna worry about the getting-to-the-ship part right now. Everything after that we’ll figure out as we go,” Yaz explained.
“What she said,” Knox added in.
“I guess you have nothing to lose. If the least that comes of it is finding more sympathetic crabs that’ll help us time to time, that’s worth it.”
“That’s not enough,” Yasmine said to Kim, leaning forward. “The only two things that are acceptable now are getting our water back or making sure the crabs don’t ruin any other worlds. That’s it. Without that water we’re screwed. This planet has no future for us.”
“Maybe one of the scenarios you need to think about, and plan for, is once you get up into the stars… you might want to ask around about other places we could go,” Kim wondered.
“Moving us to another planet?” Yasmine thought aloud.
“Why not? This planet is broken, for sure. Even with the water we might not be able to fix it. They dropped nukes on more than one of the crab ships back during the battle; ruined a rather large portion of the world with radiation.”
“Not here, praise Stan Lee,” Knox joked.
“But they trashed a lot of other places. A whole lot,” Kim said. “A fresh start somewhere else might be what we need. When do you leave on this grand journey to the great north?”
“Two days. Then we’re heading to the city for Monolith business, and we need to go to some place called the Station,” Yasmine said.
“That could really suck,” Knox said. “The Station is an old oil and gas distribution facility on the old north shore. It’s the only place arguably safer than the Tower, on account of the wealth their fuel refining brings in, and some savvy scavenging early on.”
“How are they still making fuel?” Kim asked. “No one is pumping crude.”
“Bio diesel. The place was set up to refine it, and they’re able to make it with soy or corn or whatever they know how to grow in their fields, or whatever people bring to them. For years the Monoliths have been growing a specific crop in hydro just to bring to them for fuel. They’ve also been traveling far and wide in their armored fuel semi-trucks, recovering all the fuel from hundreds of miles around. They reclaim it, make it useful again somehow. The Monoliths are badass, but the men and women of the Station are just as badass.”
“So why could going there suck?” Yaz asked.
“Bandits hit almost every vehicle going there or coming back. They know they either have fuel or goods to barter for fuel. Monoliths have tried to keep the roads there clear but it’s been too much with the crab patrols passing through, never mind keeping the Tower safe. A bunch of the older military veterans in the Monoliths called the road there Route Irish.”
“What’s that mean?” Yaz asked.
“Long before the crabs came there was a war in a country on the other side of the world called Iraq. Big ugly mess, and in the worst of the worst of it, in the capital city of Iraq, a place called Baghdad, there was a road that if you drove on it, you got attacked by terrorists without fail.”
“Bag-dad? Why not Box-mom?” she laughed at her own joke, then got serious. “I read about terrorists. I can’t believe people just hurt other people like that,” Yaz said.
“Yeah, well, different world with different problems back then. And the terrorists did kill a lot of people, most of them innocents. Anyway, that road was codenamed Route Irish. The more you know…” Knox said.
“It’s worth the risk,” Yaz said, convincing herself. “Maybe the Monoliths can send a big escort there with us. With so many vehicles they can’t dare to attack us.”
“Might work. Just might work,” Knox said. “Talk your uncle into making it happen.”
Kim sat forward and rubbed her hands. She thought of how to say whatever she had on her mind, then committed. “You two go. You two be the brains of the outfit, understand? I know you trust this crab friend of yours, and I know we’ve trusted Trader Joe for years now, but it’s a new day, and what used to make sense, and be safe, might not be anymore. You protect the people you’re with. You
do what you set out to do, and you give my three kids a future.”
“Three kids?” Yaz asked. “Owen, Liam, and? You got a kid under this couch you haven’t told anyone about?”
Kim sat back in the recliner and put a hand on her tummy. “Four more months, give or take. Sometime in April. Ezra if it’s a boy. Hope if it’s a girl.”
Yasmine leapt off the couch, screaming for joy as she ran to Kim to embrace her.
Knox sat on the couch, on account of the misplaced leg, and clapped.
Chapter Four
Lock and Load (Only with Ear Protection)
They stood in the parking lot to the elementary school. The sun was a half hour from setting, and the heat of the day had lost some of its sizzle. You could breathe without finding shade.
“For the record, Yasmine,” her uncle began, “I vehemently oppose you making this trip with us.”
“For the record, Uncle, I vehemently oppose the idea that you think I’m joining you on this trip. This was my trip to make. You’re coming with me.”
“You sound like your mom,” he said. “And your dad. They were perfect for each other, you know. Same senses of humor, same wit. They made each other laugh like no other couple I’ve ever seen.”
“I miss them so much,” Yaz said. “I barely remember my dad and I still miss him.”
“Good, I think. You should miss him. He deserves to be missed. True quality person. Keep your mother’s phone in good shape, and look at those pictures. Listen to their voices if you can. Protect those memories.”
Yasmine felt the weight of her mom’s old cell phone in her thigh cargo pocket. The weight had been there for years. Three years. Every day since her mother died.
“That’s why this is happening,” she said. “Because of their memory. I can’t just… read their messages on Mom’s phone anymore and do nothing. I can’t watch their videos and hear them without thinking of all the other kids who lost more than I did when the crabs invaded. I can do something for those kids. I can’t get their parents back, but I might be able to give them a shot at a future where they can be good moms and dads to their own kids. Maybe they can listen to their parents for real, instead of watching videos they took before they died. Ghosts, Uncle Caleb. I live with ghosts, and I don’t want them gone. No other kid should say stuff like that.”
“That’s brutal, kid.”
“That’s the world we live in,” Yaz said. “Now, you came here to teach me about guns, so teach me about guns.”
“You’re damn right I came here to teach you about guns,” he said, clapping his hands together and rubbing them. “And here on this old-ass table I dragged out of the school library, you’ll see I brought an assortment of weapons for you to train on.”
“We’re gonna shoot?”
“Only after you learn how to safely handle them.”
“The guards are going to lose their minds if we start shooting guns. We gotta tell them we’re practicing.”
“Brent already knows. I told them we were going to be shooting.”
“Okay, where do we start?”
“Two issues at hand: we now know that your friend Trader Joe can make bullets that hit crabs like a truck; I also know that he can only make pistol bullets like that, and he can only make a limited quantity. Which means… we will train you to use rifles and carbines against people, and pistols against crabs.”
“I think I got that second part. Not sure I’m okay with shooting people though,” Yasmine said, feeling knot form in her belly.
“Get used to that idea if you want to make this journey. You already unloaded a machinegun at bandits who tried to kill you and my Monoliths, and you came out psychologically unscathed, I think. I’m not saying we’re gonna go jerk hunting I’m saying if we get hit again, you need to know how to fight. And believe me, if anyone sees us traveling with Trey in his armor, we’re gonna get hit.”
“If you say so…”
“I say so. Uncle Caleb knows best. Now, let me introduce you to my close friend, the 9mm handgun. We’ll be spending a lot of time with this fella, so settle in.”
He handed her the black pistol, and she looked at it as he began to teach her.
The sun had set, and only the cold of the approaching night and the blue horizon were in the air.
That and the smell of gunfire. A large amount of gunfire.
“I think I’d be deaf if it weren’t for these earplugs,” Yasmine shouted as she sat down the carbine her uncle gave her. She pulled the soft foam plugs from her ears and let the fresh air in.
“What?” Caleb almost hollered back at her.
“I said,” she shouted again, “I’d be deaf if it weren’t for these earplugs.”
“I heard you. Gun range humor.”
“Oh, I see,” Yaz said, then laughed a little. “I’m a bit of a rookie with gun range humor. Just out of the minor leagues.”
“We’re gonna do this tomorrow before we leave, too. Practice, practice, practice. That’ll get you in the majors.”
“Thank you for the help. The way I shot today, I feel like I could definitely warm the bench in Pawtucket,” Yaz said. She added a sigh.
“Your dad did love his Red Sox. Not sure why he didn’t root for the Brewers,” her uncle said, wiping the sweat from his brow with a cloth. He squeezed the sweat out of the rag into a large-mouthed plastic bottle and screwed it tight.
No water left behind.
“Bandwagon fan, clearly,” Caleb said.
“They had many years when they weren’t that good,” a strange mechanical voice called out from nearby.
Yasmine and her uncle spun to face the voice, and both had miniature heart attacks when they saw the white-armored Trey standing ten yards back, juggling baseball-sized chunks of debris with the tentacles hanging from his vehicle’s chin.
“Wait, when did you learn how to talk?” Yaz asked him. “And have you always been this quiet?”
“Well,” Trey said, and strode forward in his suit until he reached the two of them; he sat the suit down on its haunches, “Trader Joe had some parts he’d picked up over the last couple years that I was able to reverse engineer into a speaker. Hangs behind the manipulator tendrils,” he said, lifting his armor’s chin and tentacles. He revealed a small speaker box mounted in a hidden corner of the armor. “Takes me an extra second to get the translation working, but it’ll get faster as I practice.”
“You’re a gifted engineer,” Yaz said.
“Hell yeah,” Caleb added.
“I try. I am considered… slow, or I guess backwards, by the true scholars of my race, if that gives you any impression of how advanced crab technology is.”
“I’ve seen your weaponry often enough to appreciate the level of advancement your people have,” Caleb said. “It helped wreck my world.”
“And I am so damned sorry about that,” Trey said in his mechanical voice. “But we’re going to try and make it a little right, aren’t we? At least, more so than a few of us rebel crabs helping survivors scour for supplies have.”
“What percent of crabs are… rebels? Crabs that don’t like the harvesting, world-destroying tactic your race uses,” Yasmine asked him.
“Hard to say. I would guess that perhaps five percent of us are against our racial pogrom on the universe. Perhaps that number again are against it, but aren’t communicative about their feelings. Being on the outside of crab society is tough for many. A lack of connection to the whole affects mental stability.”
“Are you saying you’re crazy?” her uncle asked.
“The Core Collective would say so, but those of us in the fringe would argue the opposite,” Trey said.
“Core Collective?” Yaz asked. “Is that capitalized?”
“It would be, yeah. The Collective is the largest connected masses of colonies. Squid personalities a thousand times larger than I am. Tens of thousands of individuals in a single personality. Gather a few hundred of those in agreement, and you have a rather substantial mass to
control the rest of my race,” Trey said, returning to the juggling of his stones with his tendrils.
“Voting blocks?” Caleb asked.
“Something like that,” Trey agreed. “The Core Collective powers our society with their energy, and powers our ships as well. It’s not just political numbers; in crab society, population creates literal power. The more squids in a single entity, the greater the power it can create, and it’s an exponential increase. Let’s say ten squids make ten units of power. But twenty squids make twenty-five power, a hundred squids make a hundred and fifty power, and so on. The larger entities create vast amounts of bioelectrogenic energy. Enough energy to power capital ships large enough to store entire oceans in. We’re talking colonies of a hundred thousand squids.”
“That’s scary. How the hell are we going to fight those?” Caleb pondered. “We don’t have any experience fighting in space, or weapons big enough to take out anything that large. How far away are they by now? It’s been thirteen years since the invasion started.”
“Quite a ways, but the capital ships move very slow and can’t use wormholes. Our smaller ships are much faster, and there are shortcuts that can be taken.”
“Wormholes?” Yasmine asked him. “I read about those.”
Trey made his suit move in a manner that suggested a shrug. “You’ll see when we get there, if we get there. We have many problems to solve, not the least of which is how to take out an entire capital ship.”
“I got the impression Trader Joe might have a few ideas for us,” Yasmine said. “I mean… your people are afraid of his people, right?”
“They are the reason why our chassis systems are designed to self-destruct,” the squid explained. “They are why we have the largest tank-sized chassis systems. His people can infect us with a… psychic malady. Their region of space is a safe haven from my people’s ravaging. We don’t dare enter their sectors for fear of a second great infection.”
“Sounds like we need to learn about the first great infection,” Yasmine said.
“The crabs at the resistance cell in Sturgeon Bay are older than I am by far. They know more about it than I do,” Trey said. “I’m sure they’d be glad to tell the stories about it.”