Chrysalis in Sunlight

by Sarena Ulibarri

  “We’ll get back there eventually,” I said, but I knew she wasn’t actually talking about the highway. I wasn’t sure whether or not I was.

  A few miles later, the highway disappeared behind scrub oaks, and a little adobe restaurant appeared to the right. I pulled into the driveway. There was no charging station, but the sun was strong enough now that the panels were supplementing fine. A small herd of free-roaming goats grazed along the edge of the parking lot.

  “Do you want to go in?”

  Aunt Melissa slowly shook her head. I stepped out, stretching my arms to the sky.

  The restaurant turned out to be more of a bar, sparsely populated with hard-faced locals who all turned toward me as I blinked my way into the dark room. I negotiated two non-alcoholic drinks to go and gained assurance the highway ramp was only a few miles down the road.

  Outside, I carried the drinks back toward the car, rolling my shoulders to work out the ache. A black goat with a white beard trotted up to sniff at the cups I held. The rest of the herd had wandered out onto the road, picking at the tufts of greenery growing in between the asphalt cracks.

  I set the cups in the car and dug in my bag for another pain pill. The sudden growl of a gas-powered engine drew my attention back to the road. A rare sound for the last decade, it split the quiet afternoon like a scream. A massive black truck sped down the road in the opposite direction we’d come from. The goats scattered to either side, tramping into the ditch or darting between the trees. One spotted goat darted in a confused circle until the truck’s grill stopped its dance. The truck screeched to a stop and I shut my eyes and turned away as the goat sprawled.

  Aunt Melissa’s door snapped open. By the time I turned back, she was already halfway to the road. I left the car door open and ran after her, calling her name. If she’d switched to an upswing, she would surely get into a fight with the driver.

  The truck door opened and a man stepped out: hat, boots, the full cowboy getup. He saw us running and yelled, “These damn goats were in the road again!” I swiped at Aunt Melissa’s back but only brushed her shirt with my fingertips.

  But then, rather than confronting the cowboy, she dropped to her knees beside the dead goat and let out a mourning wail that stopped me in my tracks. The cowboy and I exchanged a confused glance.

  I’d never seen Aunt Melissa cry before. Even when we’d gotten the confirmation that my parents, grandparents, sister, and so many others had been lost in the Denver attack, I had blubbered on Aunt Melissa’s shoulder while she kept her hard soldier face.

  Now, her back heaved with sobs over an unfamiliar animal in an unfamiliar place. The bartender came out of the restaurant and stood beside the cowboy. I hesitated before approaching them.

  “She fought the aliens,” I said, keeping my voice low. “She has...hallucinations, sometimes.”

  “Flashbacks?” the cowboy asked.

  “Sort of, yeah.” It wasn’t that simple; the few times I’d managed to get her to describe her experience, it was as nonsensical as a dream. Still, the hallucinations usually seemed to include some elements of the war, some bits of memory.

  I knelt beside her and rested a hand on her back until her wails subsided.

  “All the tissues are in the car,” I said.

  She sniffled and choked a laugh. The gravel crunched behind us as the cowboy approached. Aunt Melissa stood, rubbing a hand across her face. “Can I bury it? Please?”

  The men glanced uncertainly at each other. In rural high desert like this, with hard ground and large predators like bears and mountain lions, I imagined they probably preferred to burn bodies rather than bury. After a moment, the bartender nodded and retrieved a wheelbarrow and two shovels from behind the building.

  Four strangers buried a goat in the woods in silence.

  Aunt Melissa tired halfway through, so I finished the job for her while she sat cross-legged and slumped between a patch of prickly pear and a piñon tree. I would ache later from the effort, but that was a different kind of ache than my usual pain, and far more tolerable.

  I wanted to wash the dirt from my hands and the sweat from my neck in the bar bathroom, but it was an effort just to get Aunt Melissa back into the car, and I didn’t care to linger there any longer. The men were certainly ready to see us leave.

  Once we were back on the highway, I asked, “Can you tell me about what happened back there?”

  She didn’t answer. Her forehead pressed against the window. I had always avoided asking about her experiences in the war, to avoid triggers or reopening old wounds, and the gulf between her experience and mine now felt bigger than it ever had. I’d always assumed that someday, after time had softened the immediacy of the trauma, she’d be able to tell me about it. For the first time, I began to worry that she would never be able to tell me. Or that we wouldn’t have that time together after all. The webbing had grown across her hand again, all the way up to her wrist. We’d need to stop again soon so I could clean it, but we also needed to keep moving to get to San Diego as soon as possible.

  We made it well into Arizona before I stopped to find a room. I had to practically carry Aunt Melissa inside, then came back for our bags and plugged in the car. The motel had a pool, but it was a vacant, dusty pit with a sign citing seasonal water rationing, so I settled for doing all the yoga stretches I could remember on the coiled motel carpet. After showering, I pawed through my bag looking for my nightshirt, but realized I’d accidentally opened Aunt Melissa’s bag instead. My fingers brushed cold metal, and I knew what it was before I pulled it out.

  A pistol. How long had she had this? They were hard to come by, and nearly impossible for an Exposed. Had she brought it with her to the airport too? We both could have been arrested if security had found it.

  Her head rolled in her sleep, muttering incomprehensible strings of words. I stuffed the gun into my bag instead.

  I woke up to Aunt Melissa yelling my name. Groggy and disoriented, I groped for a light switch.

  “Erin, I’m stuck!”

  “Hold on, it’s okay.” I found the switch and winced against the brightness.

  “What’s happening to me?”

  She stood on the bed, wrapped tightly in a sheet. Then, my eyes adjusted. It wasn’t a sheet. The webs from her hands had spread across her upper body, pinning her to the wall above the bed. I scrambled to my feet and dug in my bag.

  “Erin, help me!”

  “I’m coming.” I pulled the gloves onto my shaking hands. There was only one pair left.

  The webs were tougher than I expected, but I managed to rip down one side and pull her out. She stumbled toward the shower, while I bundled the webs in a blanket and tossed it out the front door. I ripped off the gloves and dialed Dr. Acacia. It was only after her voicemail answered that I glanced at the clock and saw it was just after three AM. I left a brief message, then turned my phone over and over in my hands until Aunt Melissa came out of the shower.

  “I’m not going to make it to San Diego, am I?” She rubbed a towel roughly over her arms as though she still felt the webs there.

  “Of course you are.” Tears bit at my eyes, but I held them back. I needed to be the strong one right now, even though it wasn’t me at all. “We should get a head start on the day, though.”

  I couldn’t imagine sleeping again, and if the webs came back in the car, I would see before they pinned her to the seat. Keep moving—that had always been my solution.

  The car had only half a charge, but the sun would be up in a few hours. Aunt Melissa was alert enough to carry her own bag to the car, but she fell asleep almost as soon as I started driving.

  I had never seen dark like Arizona dark. Even the blackout following the Denver attack had been punctuated with the glow of fires and the spotlights of helicopters. With only my headlights and the swath of stars overhead, this felt like the depths of space. I kept glancing over at Aunt Melissa, watching for the webs to return. I had mostly made my peace with the alien attacks, had even
tried to listen to the pundits who claimed we may have provoked them, but now, driving through the pitch dark of nowhere, while an alien parasite tried to consume my last living relative, a fresh new wave of anger and fear surged through me. What the hell had been the point of any of it? Why had they traveled so far through the dark just to hurt us?

  The miles until San Diego ticked down on the car’s display screen, but so did the available charge. I looked up at the still-dark sky. We had to keep moving. The charge was low, but I convinced myself it was enough to last until sunrise.

  It wasn’t.

  The car came to a dead stop at the edge of a wind farm. The sky was just light enough I could see the outlines of the white turbines staggered across the hilly desert. Their propellers whooshed in slow circles, red lights blinking in unison through the whole field.

  Electricity, electricity everywhere, but not a spark for me.

  Aunt Melissa was still asleep, so I quietly shut my door and walked behind the car to face east. Any minute now, the sun would be up. All I had to do was wait until the world turned. I raised my arms overhead and began a sun salutation on the silent, empty road.

  I didn’t hear the passenger door. I didn’t hear her rummaging through the bags. I didn’t hear the crunch of her feet on the desert dirt. But I did hear the shot as I stepped into a warrior pose, and my heart nearly seized with the sound. Then a second shot. By the time I spotted her outline, she was over the fence and halfway up the hill toward the closest turbine, with the gun aimed at it. I vaulted the fence and ran toward her. The third bullet ricocheted off the turbine’s tower and zinged past me. I dropped to the ground as she fired off several more.

  Peeking up in the half-light, I could almost see what she saw: the great stilt-legged machines the aliens had used to crash through our cities.

  “They’re only turbines!” I yelled when she’d emptied her clip. “The war’s over!” Except I knew the war wasn’t really over. It still raged in Aunt Melissa, and in the cells and minds of everyone who had been Exposed, everyone who had been affected, everyone who had lost something important because of it.

  Brushing dust from my clothes, I got to my feet and looked around for her, but the dips and mounds of the uneven land, the towering saguaros, and the thick turbine towers made it difficult to see where she’d gone. The sky was paling, but the sun still lingered below the horizon. I wandered beneath the turbines, a blubbering mess, shouting her name.

  The sun reached a single ray across the horizon, and then a second, and a third. But to what purpose, now? I wasn’t leaving without her. When the top rim of the sun appeared and I still hadn’t found her, I wandered back toward the car. At the base of the turbine she’d fired at, I found the gun in the dirt beside a creosote bush. I bent to retrieve it, and blinked up into the sunlight.

  That’s when I saw her.

  The webbing had grown across her whole body, attaching her to the side of the turbine. Her face looked serene behind the thin veil, as though she were asleep.

  I was too late. The only thing to do was call Dr. Acacia and tell her I had failed.

  The phone was already ringing when I pulled it from my bag. The doctor’s face appeared on my screen. “We almost made it,” I told her. I smeared the tears and mucous off my own face as best I could, and then walked back over to show her Aunt Melissa in the chrysalis.

  “The location is inconvenient, to be sure, but the process is identical to what we’ve been seeing for the last couple of days.”

  She put me on hold for a moment, and when she came back on screen she assured me an emergency team would be there to meet us in about an hour and a half.

  “Is she dead?” I croaked.

  “There are several here at the EERF currently encased. We’ve been monitoring their vital signs and they are alive. They seem to be undergoing some kind of transformation. It is possible they could break free of the chrysalis when it’s complete.”

  “As…an alien?” I could think of no crueler irony than her emerging transformed into one of the very beings who had attacked us. My eyes flicked toward the car, where I’d tossed the gun onto the back seat. I didn’t know how to use it, didn’t even know how to check if it still had ammunition. Could I bring myself to use it if she came out transformed?

  The doctor’s frown deepened. She ran a hand across her face. “I wish I could put your mind at ease, Erin, but the truth is we don’t know.”

  She encouraged me to go to the closest town to eat and rest, but I shook my head. “I’m not leaving her. Especially now.” She was still my last living relative until I had definitive proof otherwise.

  The wait was excruciating. I walked in circles for a while, then jogged half a mile down the highway and back, stretched quads and calves against the side of the car, but none of it brought me any relief. So I sat cross-legged on the ground, and tried to embrace the one part of yoga class I had never enjoyed or understood: silent meditation.

  Movement had meant healing for me, but I knew that wasn’t always the case. Bones needed to set, blood cells needed to clot. My shoulders ached, my hips begged me to get up and walk around, but I stayed. All around me was movement—the hot desert air spun the propellers of the turbines; the world turned, sending the sun across the sky. I sat, as still as the rocks, as rooted as the cacti, watching Aunt Melissa. She appeared still as well, but if what Dr. Acacia said was true, there was movement happening beneath those webs: blood pumping, breath flowing, perhaps cells growing and rearranging.

  I heard the helicopter blades beating the air, but I waited until the engine dulled and boots crunched on the earth before I stood to greet them.

  The pain was a tight fist gripping my upper back like an animal carried by the scruff, radiating down through every nerve in my body. I stood, stretching, twisting, and rolling to bring it back down to a tolerable level. My head, aside from the base of my skull, was surprisingly spared.

  Eight soldiers in full Hazmat suits formed a half circle around the turbine, rifles clutched in gloved hands. I turned away, hands on my knees, suddenly sure I was going to be sick. A hand gently touched my back and I looked up. Dr. Acacia’s eyes were full of sympathy. She led me toward the helicopter. I reluctantly followed, and after a moment, the nausea passed.

  She handed me a fresh orange. I peeled and ate it while she ran tests on me, checking to see if I had been Exposed. The citrus tasted sharp. It was an effort to swallow, but when I was finished, I craved another.

  Dr. Acacia held up a vial, squinting at it in the light. “You seem to be clear.”

  I jutted my chin toward the chrysalis. “How long will she be like that?”

  She tucked the vial into a case and snapped it shut. “Some of the Exposed at the EERF have been encased for several days.”

  “And when they break free, the war starts over again.”

  “We have almost all of them under EERF supervision,” she said, as though that was supposed to be reassuring.

  She gave me a list of nearby places I could stay, but I waved her off, unwilling to leave until I absolutely had to. I hobbled toward my car. I dry-swallowed one pain pill, and held a second between my fingers for a moment before putting it back.

  The soldiers yelled, and I nearly hit my head on the car door turning to see what was happening. I raced toward the turbine. The webs stretched from the inside. One of the soldiers pushed me back.

  Then, an arm broke through. A distinctly human arm. I let out my breath, bounced on the balls of my feet. A second arm appeared, and then a bald head. I was too far away to make out facial features, but she was human, and that was a victory in itself.

  The soldiers lowered their weapons. I tried to rush forward, but they blocked me again and let through the doctor, suited up now.

  “Several days,” I called after her with a laugh. “Aunt Melissa never was the patient type.”

  They took me back by the helicopter to wait. The air grew warm, but it wasn’t the unbearable heat I had expected from the
desert. After nearly another hour, Dr. Acacia returned and sloughed off her suit. It had been enough time for my joy to have cycled back around to fear.

  “Is she alive?”

  “Yes, alive and human. In fact, the chrysalis appears to have been a healing process, initiated by the alien microbes.”

  “Healing?” I nearly choked on the word.

  “She has almost complete cell regeneration.” Dr. Acacia sat on the helicopter steps, peeling the suit off her legs.

  “That’s great, right?”

  “It is,” she agreed. “But, Erin…” She paused, eyes darting back and forth in thought. “I have a hypothesis. I need you to come with me to test it.”

  She headed back toward the turbine, motioning me to follow.

  I jumped up from my seat and hurried after. “Can I take her home?”

  “Let’s reserve that decision for a little while.”

  The soldiers moved aside to let us through. Aunt Melissa sat on a folding chair, wrapped in a silver shock blanket that reflected the sun so sharply it was nearly blinding. This close, I could see the slightly uneven bone of her skull beneath smooth skin, and stubbled tufts where her eyebrows had been. Her bare feet were crossed at the ankles, swinging below the chair. She looked about ten years younger.

  “We need to get you a hat,” I said. Her eyes turned to me, but her expression was fearful.

  “More new people,” she said.

  “Um.” I swallowed hard, my stomach sinking. I knelt in front of her. “Aunt Melissa, it’s me, Erin. Don’t you recognize me?”

  She stopped swinging her legs and shook her head. “I’m sorry. I just woke up. Everything’s new.”

  I stumbled away as though she had slapped me. I ran until I reached the car, and leaned my head in my arms, heaving great, shuddering breaths.

  “I’m sorry.” Dr. Acacia’s voice came from beside me a few moments later.

  “Does she remember anything?”