It Came from Anomaly Flats

by Clayton Smith

  Miranda gasps, and more of her flies escape. They buzz into the farmer’s eyes, and now he is blinded by insects as much as by rage. Marshall Dawes leaps onto Farmer Buchheit’s back with a wild cackle, and some of the others take his cue. Maude Jones grabs the big man’s wrist; Trudy whacks at his knees with her bag. The scientist steps up behind Farmer Buchheit and takes out a knee. I hear a sharp crack, but I don’t know if it’s the farmer’s leg shattering or the pop of his arthritic joint. Either way, he goes down hard, and then the crowd is over him, planting their feet on his heaving shoulders triumphantly as he cries into the dirt and screams, “Leave it alone! Leave it alone! You sons of bitches, you leave it alone!”

  The crowd is all grins and handshakes. They congratulate themselves for felling the giant.

  We came here for the time capsule. We want to see what’s inside, and we will not be put off.

  Even though we’re nervous, we will not be put off.

  And, if I’m being honest, it doesn’t take much encouragement to give this particular horse a kick when he’s down. Farmer Buchheit grows no fewer than four poisonous strains of wheat on his land and is responsible for the deaths of we-don’t-know-how-many Anomalians. And that’s without touching the number he sends to madness by tending his horrific Fields of Insanity. We all hate Farmer Buchheit, and we all hate what he’s done to the Flats, but he’s the only one who knows how to farm, and we need bread, and we need vegetables, so what can we do?

  We can drag him down into the mud the first real chance we get.

  So that’s what we do, I guess.

  The mayor looks down on this scene with a charming grimace that is a lie. She hates Farmer Buchheit as much as anyone, but he is also her biggest campaign donor, and so after a few minutes of watching the assembled masses stomp and kick the old bastard, she raises her hands and says, “All right, all right; enough.”

  The aggressors retreat in a sulk, and Doc Mason appears from the throng and drops to one knee beside the farmer. “Jesus,” the doctor whispers, taking in the wounds and feeling for a pulse. “You all really did him in.” A cheer goes up from the crowd, a buoyant, gleeful thing unfettered by remorse. I allow myself a small smile. I’m no champion of violence, but my cousin Lara got trampled by one of Buchheit’s heifers some years back, when she was just a kid, and it damaged her for good. Ruined her leg, and made her thoughts slow. When he found her out there, crushed as she was, he didn’t send for the doctor. No. Instead, he grabbed her by her good wrist and dragged her mangled body across the field, down a drainage ditch, and through the runoff, then heaved her over the fence to get her off his property and off his hands. My aunt found her there like that, face-down in the gravel alongside Route 12, leg askew, head partially stamped in. When they called on Farmer Buchheit to atone, he demanded reparations for Lara scaring his blue-ribbon milking cow. His lawyer fixed it so my aunt had to pay, too.

  Now he’s lying in the dirt, bleeding and crying, and I don’t begrudge myself the smile.

  Doc Mason enlists the help of three other men, and with some difficulty, they manage to drag Farmer Buchheit away. He is still mumbling about the time capsule. “Keep it buried. Keep it secret.” And as his hulking form melts through the crowd, the air of victory turns with a chill. Doubt collects over the assembly like droplets of rain, and soon I feel a mist of discomfort permeating the field. Everyone is fidgeting now, giving each other nervous, sideways glances, because Farmer Buchheit might be right. We don’t know what’s hidden inside this time capsule. No one does. Because this isn’t an ordinary time capsule. It wasn’t filled by our parents or buried by our ancestors. This time capsule doesn’t come from our past.

  This one comes from our future.

  That’s something else stamped on the iron plate beneath the mayor’s wagon: the date of burial. The time capsule we’re all waiting anxiously to see won’t be filled, sealed, and buried for another forty years.

  And we’re supposed to open it today.

  I guess that’s why today is a nervous day. But if I think about it too long, it’ll be a frightening day, too, and there are too many frightening days in this place. Hope is a thing best avoided in Anomaly Flats, but it’s something we’re all bound and determined to have today.

  I don’t know what everyone else is here looking for. Not specifically. Maybe Mrs. Myers is looking for peace in a brighter future. Maybe old man Seymour is looking for a cure, that maybe science will progress enough in the next four decades, even here in the Flats, that someone has sent him back a pill or a serum that will end his sickness, end his suffering. Maybe Marshall Dawes is looking for evidence of a life not lived alone.

  Whatever it is, we’re all looking for hope, I think.

  I’m looking for hope. I want to hope for the future of our town. I want to hope for all of us. For Mrs. Roach, bitter and alone in her drafty old house since the untimely death of her husband years back. For Colleen Branch, the sad, drunk hermit who lives on the portal farm on the outskirts of town. For poor Rufus, who went into the Walmart one day and came out a drooling mess. For all the sadness that hangs over us and presses down like wet cotton. I want to see that there is a future for Anomaly Flats. I want to see that it’s not all scattered plastic and scraps of paper ripped from the ground by animals and spread to all ends of the wind.

  But still, I know.

  I know that hope is a thing best avoided.

  The mayor looks purposefully at her watch once more, and this time she holds up a single finger on her other hand, her smile spreading wide. It is almost time. She ticks off the seconds with her finger, twitch, twitch, twitch, as the time counts down. “Five!” she says. “Four! Three!” A few of the people gathered take up the count and chant along with her, “Two...one...” Then time ticks down to zero, and there are no more seconds left to count. The mayor claps her hands together and cries, “Shall we begin?”

  A roar goes up from the audience, but it’s a nervous one. I can tell.

  The mayor hops down from the wagon, and a member of her Administration hands her a shovel made of solid gold. It gleams in the sun, and I imagine it must be heavy. I’m not surprised to see such extravagance. As mayor of Anomaly Flats, she has unfettered access to the town’s gold deposits, picked and hammered out of caves that are supposedly as rich as they are deep, though none of us would know it. “We who toil” are never granted access to places like that, not unless you’re a criminal who gets sentenced to the mine camps. No; the gold is reserved for the controlling interests.

  The mayor takes up her shovel, and she holds it high, smiling to the audience. If we had cameras, we would all take pictures—“For posterity,” we’d say, though I doubt anyone here knows what posterity means, and anyway, we don’t have cameras. If we did, we’d take the pictures, and we’d develop them, and maybe forty years from now some prankster would include one or two in the time capsule that gets buried and sent backward in time, just for the irony of it. But cameras are electronic these days, and electronics don’t fare well in the Flats. They say it’s because of our magnetic fields. They say they’re unique and powerful and always changing.

  They say a lot of things. Almost never anything good.

  The only person who owns a camera is Nellie Pram, Editor-in-Chief of The Anomaly, the only thing that passes for a newspaper around here. It’s more of a newsletter, stamped out on an old printing press Nellie’s father salvaged from the town dump sometime back in the 80s. Nellie prints issues when she wants, and it’s not often. She’s the only one with a camera, an old Nikon F, one of those mostly-metal deals with the clunky casing. But she didn’t bring it today. She almost never brings it to the momentous things that happen. The Anomaly’s a shit newspaper, and she’s a shit editor, but she’s the only one we’ve got.

  The mayor holds the shovel up high for another few seconds, and you might expect her arm to start shaking fr
om the strain and the weight, but it doesn’t. She drives the point of the shovel into the earth, just inches from the iron plaque, using just that one arm, and the head sinks in down to the neck. She places one foot on the shoulder of the blade and smiles out at the assembly, another fine pose for a picture that won’t be taken. The crowd cheers, and it agitates Miranda’s flies. They buzz off into the sky, but they’ll be back. They always come back.

  The mayor tilts up a chunk of earth and tosses it casually to the side. There is more applause, more cheering, and the mayor waves as she hands the shovel up to the closest member of her Administration. The man in the blue suit takes the shovel, pulls out a blue paisley kerchief from his inner jacket pocket, and wipes the dirt from the blade. Meanwhile, another Administrator, the one at the back right, produces a bundle of shovels from behind the cart and tosses them onto the ground near the mayor’s divot. These shovels aren’t made of gold, of course. These are workman shovels; battered metal heads and rough, splintery handles. “Dig,” the Administrator commands. Several people near the front of the crowd instantly leap forward, like they were just delivered a hard shock, because when the Administration speaks, you listen, and when they say go, you go, because the alternative is not worth risking. Four men and one woman pick up the shovels and get to work, kicking the broken blades into the ground and pulling up what clumps of dirt they can. The rest of us crowd around closer, and I am pushed and pulled into a tight confinement along with the rest. The air is suddenly thick and hot once more, and I want to be out of this knot, free from the crush, to hell with the capsule, to hell with hope, but there’s nowhere to go. I’ve lost Miranda, and I doubt her buffer still holds anyway. Such is the desperate need of Anomaly Flats to see what the future holds.

  The laborers make slow work, but no stronger folk move forward to take their positions. We’re all plenty happy as spectators. After some minutes, one of them strikes metal, and a brief whoop! rises from the crowd. The laborers converge, and they scrape away the dirt still covering the capsule, and am I crazy, or can I still hear Farmer Buchheit screaming a warning against the wind?

  Leave it alone…why won’t you leave it alone?

  But we have to open it. We have to see.

  The diggers dig, searching frantically for the edges of the thing, sweat dripping off of their faces like rain from a blocked gutter. Finally, one of the men—Lisa Faze’s brother, Ned—stamps his shovel twice on the capsule and cries out, “Found a corner!” The others double their effort, because no one wants to be the last one to uncover a piece of the puzzle. The mayor and her Administration look on from above, the mayor nodding slowly to herself, her hands absently rubbing themselves together, almost greedily, almost hungrily.

  “It’s huge!” the woman cries as her shovel strikes another corner. And she’s right; her corner is about eight feet away from the first.

  Some people in the crowd gasp. I don’t think I do, but I don’t know for sure. I might. The size is a shock. I don’t know what I thought it’d be—somewhere between a shoebox and a coffin, I guess. But this?

  What could they have sent back that needs a box that size?

  I think of my old time capsule, ruined by wolves. I think of Farmer Buchheit’s terror. I think of the strangers in my mausoleum.

  I push these things from my mind.

  I try, anyway.

  The crowd is practically vibrating with excitement now. Everyone pushes forward to get a better look, and I’m swept forward with them. The vanguard swarms the laborers and makes it hard for them to work, so the Administrators jump down into the crowd to impose order. The people at the very front recoil on instinct, scrambling away from the men in the blue suits. But the force of the populace is at their backs, urging them on, and the lucky ones peel off to the side and skirt the far edges of the crowd. The unlucky ones are propelled forward, and the crunches I hear when their faces meet with the gloved fists of the Administrators is sickening. It’s all too much. Something clenches in my stomach, and I want to sit down. I’m dizzy, I’m suffocating, I think I might be dying, but the crowd jams me in and scrapes me forward, and somehow, tortuously, bit by bit, the vanguard breaks down, and the middle emerges to the front, and I am carried forward with it. I dig my feet in and skid to a stop. A litter of broken and bloodied neighbors makes a low wall between us and the maw in the earth, but I can peer down into the open sore. The laborers have found all four corners now and are almost done clearing away the dirt, their strength renewed by excitement. I look down at the time capsule, and this time, I do gasp.

  No chance of wild animals digging up this box and ripping it apart. The exposed wall is made of heavy, corrugated steel.

  I’ve seen something like this before.

  But where?

  The mayor licks her lips as she stares down into the hole, her eyes round with longing.

  Two of the men crawl out of the hole, breathing hard, their strength sapped at last, but the other three laborers keep digging, frantic to uncover the full surface. They haul the clumps of dirt and rocks from the center of the platform, the blades of their shovels sparking against the steel. They clear away the earth, and then they, too, climb out of the hole, and together, we stare down at the time capsule, at its corrugated steel, and at the pair of padlocked doors that seal the thing shut.

  With the full view of the platform, I now recognize the box. The construction is unmistakable. The storm cellar doors cinch it. This time capsule from the future...it’s not just a box. It’s a shipping container. One of those mammoth steel crates you see piled high on trans-Atlantic ships in old photographs. The people of forty years from now have filled a shipping container with something and buried it down into the earth for us to find.

  Don’t open it. Leave it alone.

  My chest ices over, and my heart seizes as it pumps frozen blood that spreads beneath my skin with a long, slow chill. “Bury it!” I want to scream. “Put back the dirt!” But the words don’t make it past my brain, and even though the others seem to be thinking it too…they’ve all gone quiet now, the whole crowd, even the ones in the far, far back who can’t see what we’ve uncovered. No one dares question the mayor’s decision to open the capsule. No one dares it.

  The mayor practically shimmers. “Very good,” she chirps down at the laborers, and they’ve all gone pale with the weight of something done that can’t be undone.

  She signals to her Administrators, and one of them steps down into the hole. He grabs a shovel and strikes down at the padlock, hard. The steel holds, and the ancient shovel blade shatters against it. Shards of thin, rusty metal explode out from the crater, and a piece strikes Cheryl Montmoor on the cheek, and she falls back, bleeding beneath the eye, but she doesn’t cry out. She puts her hand to the wound and holds it there, staring down at the capsule, hypnotized like the rest of us, as blood seeps through her fingers and drips onto the grass.

  A second Administrator steps down into the hole. He taps the first Administrator on the shoulder, and the man steps aside. The second man crouches over the padlock and examines it carefully. He works his mouth, then purses his lips and spits. A thin stream of saliva streams out and splatters on the lock, coating it like a viscous membrane. Then the steel begins to sizzle, and the Administrator’s fluids eat through the metal, spring rain against melting snow. A thin line of white smoke wisps up from the disintegrating steel, and then the lock is gone, burned through, and the Administrator wipes his mouth on his sleeve. He steps out of the hole, and the first Administrator resumes his place over the doors. He grasps the heavy bolt that seals the doors shut and, with a grunt, slides it back. Metal squeals against metal, then the bolt hits its end with a thunk.

  I lean over the edge of the hole. I stare down at the capsule.

  And I hope.

  “Let’s see what we’ve got!” the mayor cries cheerfully. The Administrator grips the door and heaves
, straining against the incredible weight. He lifts the door an inch, maybe two, and his pale face burns crimson with the effort. The second Administrator steps back into the hole and adds his strength, and then the third Administrator joins them, and then the fourth. Together, they pry the heavy steel door and haul it up, slowly…slowly, until they can get their shoulders under it and force it all the way open. The door teeters straight upright for two seconds, and it seems like it might come crashing back down. But then it gives way, falling back against the raised earth with a soft, sickening thud that shakes the world.

  The Administrators step out of the hole. We crowd closer. I look down into the shipping crate.

  I see nothing but a well of deep and total blackness. I can’t see anything inside.

  But the stench hits me like a storm. The decay, the must, the sickly sweet tang of rotting meat is thick, palpable. It burns the hairs in my nose and sets my eyes watering. I bury my nose inside my shirt, but the flimsy cotton can do nothing against the smell of death. Miranda’s flies buzz through the crowd and zip down into the crate, sensing a feast. The man next to me, a man I don’t recognize, doubles over, his hands on his knees, and pukes into the grass. The smell of the vomit mixes with the stench of decay, and now I’m going to throw up…I can feel it rising, and I try to push back, to escape, but the people behind me still don’t know what’s inside, and they’re pushing forward to get a better look, and it’s all I can do to keep myself from skidding over the lip of the hole and plunging into the fetid blackness of the shipping container below. I dig my fingers into the sleeve of the woman behind me, and she cries out and swats my hand, but I cling to her, and I manage to stay on solid ground. The bile forces its way up my throat, but it’s a thin stream. It could have been worse. I spit it onto the grass.