by L. E. Howel
He sighed, turned off the computer, and walked toward the door. He passed quickly through the gray halls and down the gray steps into the foyer. Karla was already there, standing in the doorway ready to leave this scene. The light streaming through the doorway seemed to promise a portal to better things. They were going to get out of this place and leave its death behind.
The two quickly escaped through the doors and out into the desolate streets. A single thought pressed into both their minds, get out. Like an ancient plague house they felt the infectious influence of this decaying city seeping into their very bones and they wanted to be free, out from its shadow. Together they moved eastwards, half running in their anxiety to leave this place behind. At times they stumbled and faltered, but they did not stop. In their desire to beat the sun they continued without rest through the remainder of the day.
The rusting remains of skyscrapers soon gave way to a long street lined with small, dingy shops. Pawn shops with old forgotten junk, clothing outlets, and greasy restaurants all stood abandoned. These in turn gave way to the out of town mega stores and finally to the scattered buildings edging on the open countryside. Everywhere the broken windows and yawning craters in the walls seemed to open wide in invitation to draw them in to investigate their contents, but their course stayed true. They would not stay here another night. They had taken everything this place could offer and now they were leaving it alone.
The walking was hard. Debris was everywhere, but they had maintained a good speed and with determined effort they had made it out into the open plains before nightfall. They didn’t stop. It wasn’t a fear of the Ares or any visible thing that drove them on, but just a desire to be free from this place. In Birch’s mind he still seemed to hear the hollow screams of despair aboard that doomed helicopter as it had plummeted to earth. To him it had become the sound of the city dying and even now the whisper of it seemed to echo about him in its empty streets. This was why he hurried, even after they had left the last of the buildings behind them.
Finally they stopped. The sun had long set, but they had pressed on for another hour in darkness, wishing to get as far as they could before they rested. They lay wearily in the long, cooling grass. It was some time before either of them spoke. Karla had questions. Birch had said very little about what he had seen, and she understood from the look on his face that it hadn’t been the time to ask. But now, in the starry darkness, under the open sky, she wanted to know.
At first Birch had been reluctant to answer, he had left it behind and didn’t want to return to it. When he finally did speak it was to give only the barest of details. He explained the technical aspects of the destruction but left unsaid all of the humanity behind these events. It was history now and the only part that interested him was the technique and the meaning of these things. He told her of the Ares involvement.
“Do you think they’ll do that again?” Her voice wavered in the darkness. Birch shook his head.
“That’s the funny thing. I don’t even see how they could have done that in the first place. Look at what they were like when they attacked us, fierce and mindless. Their attack plan was to trample their own comrades to get to us, and then use that savage force to destroy us. It doesn’t make sense that they could ever have used a technology like that. Still, it seems the best answer for now.”
“Maybe we’re missing something,” Karla’s voice was thoughtful. “There may be more to them than we’ve seen.”
“We’re definitely missing something. I don’t know what it is, but something’s not right. I don’t know where we’ll find the answers, perhaps from the Ares themselves, but I think if we can find the answer to what happened here we’ll really know about what’s going on everywhere. That’s the only way I can see us knowing everything.”
Karla unpacked her sleeping bag and curled into it. “If you figure that one out let me in on it. I wouldn’t mind knowing ‘everything.’”
Birch snorted as he pulled himself into his own bag. “I’m sure you wouldn’t,” he replied moodily. “I already feel I know too much.” Karla didn’t respond and Birch lay back, staring silently at the stars above. He did know too much, and he would have gladly forgotten much of it, the useless baggage you carry around in your mind, the stuff that weighed you down like ballast, but you can’t seem to lose it. If he could trade it all like baseball cards on the playground for the truth of what was going on here he would have done it. If he could have given it away for nothing he would have done that too, gladly.
“Major,” Birch had just been drifting into sleep when Karla’s voice brought him back to the grim night. He grunted a response and turned over. Karla went on undeterred. “I want to go home.” It was a plea, like a little lost child wanting to reunite with her family. Birch turned to her.
“We all do,” he lied, “but we can never go home again.”
“I can.” Karla’s voice came still in the night air. “We’re almost there now. It’s just another few days’ travel from here. It wouldn’t take us out of our way to go through it, toward the east. Could we go there?”
Birch sighed. The last thing he wanted was to reminisce with Karla about her old times, to be taken to some weathered, rotting buildings that meant something to her but were really just old abandoned junk, like the rest of the places out here. He wasn’t even sure it would be the best thing for her either.
“I’m not sure that would be a good idea,” he answered. “You seemed to take it pretty hard in the city. Think what it would be like to see your own town like that.” They had both taken the city pretty hard, and he wasn’t sure that he felt capable of handling that sort of thing again himself, much less Karla in her own home town. “I think we’d better avoid it.”
“No,” Karla’s voice came back with perfect clarity. “I need to go back. If I’m this close then I can’t just walk by without looking. I know it will hurt, and that I’d rather remember it the way it was, but still I want to see it again and know what happened there. It’s a part of me and I need to see it this one last time.”
Birch was irritated by her words and by her request, but he couldn’t find it within himself to refuse her. Finally he agreed. Karla was going home.
THIRTY-ONE
The days that followed had been ones of anxious anticipation. Karla always awoke first and was impatient to get going. In the darkness before dawn she would noisily pack up and prepare to go. Birch wasn’t sure, but he guessed she was trying to wake him up so they could start earlier. It’s like Christmas to her, he thought to himself, though he didn’t think she was going to like what she found under the tree this year.
Finally the last day’s travel to her home arrived. After a quick breakfast of canned food they started toward the east. Karla’s town wouldn’t be hard to find, it was straight off old I70, just over the boarder into Kansas. As they walked she told him all about the place. It was called Goodland, apparently the settlers had been impressed with the farming there and had taken root, literally. She described it in glowing terms as an example of the great American tradition of small towns. Friendly, hopeful and, above all, quiet. It was the kind of place unaffected by the changes of the years, except that farmers drove better tractors and the TV’s got bigger.
Like many small towns, it was insular. The outside world was an alarming place, lying somewhere down their arterial road, Interstate 70. Some people left, youngsters seeking adventure, or displaced families looking for work. Most stayed. The rest of the world could go on without them. They had made a deal. They would feed the earth with their grain, soy, and seed, and in return the world would leave them alone, its exposure left to be filtered down to them for the price of a cable package or a glossy magazine from the local drugstore.
There was certainty; their way of life was best, and those outside were missing something in their fast-paced, overpopulated existence. Their world did not center around Washington DC, New York, or any other major metropolis. They were the center themselves, and the fact
that their preferred world map placed the United States at the very center of the earth seemed to confirm this, for right in the center of the country, and therefore in the center of the whole world, lay Goodland, Kansas. To the locals this was a truth they already knew. They produced the bread; they kept America true to what it had once been. They felt as though they were truly the custodians of an important truth that would be needed again some day. When that day came they would still be there, or so they had believed.
Birch had listened patiently. To his ambitious mind Goodland sounded small and constricting. The simple fact that Karla had left seemed to indicate that she had felt the same way, not that you could tell it from her words now. He indulged her for a time, taking in her descriptions of the calming summers of nature and sunshine, or the crisp winters with the cloudless sunny sky lighting up the pure white fields beneath. Karla was in a whirl of nostalgia. Soon harsh reality would jar her back from her dreams. He decided to bring her down more gently before they arrived.
“So, if it was so good why did you leave?” Birch’s words hadn’t been harsh. At least he hadn’t intended them to be. He had judged that a reminder of what had inspired her to leave might bring her back from the idealized version of her past and make the grim reality they were about to face a little easier to bear. From the look on her face he could see that she had taken his words as an attack. She stopped walking. For a moment she fell silent. When she finally spoke again the words seemed to come through pain.
“I had to go,” she almost whispered, “I had no choice.”
“There are always choices,” Birch muttered. Secretly he still wished that the farm girl had stayed here, only now it wasn’t anything to do with the mission. It was all about Karla. From her words he felt he knew her. Perhaps she would have been happier with a simpler life and death out here on the plains. This new world was nothing like the old one that she had cherished so much.
“There are always choices,” Karla repeated, “but, you know, as much as we complicate things and imagine a world full of total free will, our options are pretty limited. Life has a way of often giving you two simple alternatives, two ways, the right one and the wrong one. I could have stayed here, but it would have been the wrong choice. I chose the right one.”
“That’s a pretty stark way to see the world. Two ways?” Birch shrugged dismissively. “Who knows what’s right anyway? And what’s so right about the choice you made? You don’t seem any happier for it.”
“What’s right doesn’t always make you happy,” Karla responded doggedly. “It’s about more than just what you want. I didn’t say I did what I wanted. I just did the best thing. I loved this place and the people in it, but I had to go.” She looked wistfully out to the long, wind-blown grass on the open plain.
“Have you ever felt like you didn’t belong, like you were out of sync with everything around you, even with yourself?” She paused for his answer.
Birch shook his head.
“That’s what it was like for me here. I don’t think I ever felt like I really belonged anywhere. Once you get that habit the whole world seems like an alien place. Maybe that’s where my thoughts of the Hypnos missions began, the idea that I was an alien already in my own world. If I joined a mission to another planet for once I’d have company. We’d all be aliens together. It didn’t work though. It only made it harder because I found I still loved a lot of what was here.”
Birch nodded, that was the hardest thing about the Hypnos missions. This, in fact, had been the very reason he had used to oppose Karla’s placement on the crew. He had argued that someone so young couldn’t cope with that kind of pressure, with the loss of family and future. It gave him no pleasure to discover that for once he had been right.
They started walking again.
“So what was wrong?” Birch asked absently as they trudged through the swaying grass. He wasn’t looking at her but toward the distant eastern horizon. It was empty. Nothing was coming into view and it almost seemed that they were stationary as they walked under the expanse of open sky.
“I just didn’t fit. I never did. I could have put on the cowboy boots and listened to the country music, or I could have worn the pretty prom dress and joined the cheerleading team, it didn’t make any difference. I was tagged as different as a young girl and once you get a label like that it’s hard to rub it off. It seemed to show through, no matter what clothes you wear over it.”
“Sounds like typical teenage angst to me,” Birch remarked sourly. Her conversation seemed trite, he thought, like so many other girls before her. She was young enough that some of the adolescence hadn’t rubbed off yet. Given another five years he might have liked her. For now all he could do was endure her.”
“So you were different,” he concluded scornfully. “What’s the big deal? Everybody’s different one way or another, so what does it matter?” He was regretting opening the floodgates on the subject.
Karla shook her head. “It matters a lot more than most of us want to admit. The way we play up to everyone’s expectations. A lot of what we do is just to fit in with what they want from us. How many of your choices in life do you think you based on wanting to look good to others? More than you would ever admit, or even recognize I bet.
“That was me. I was stuck. I was labeled as ‘gifted’ or ‘different’. In a small town a tag like that kills, but I found out later that it’s no different anywhere else. In a small town there’s just fewer people, so it’s harder to hide our feelings from each other. People everywhere hate difference. Because I was smarter than others they ignored me, tried to avoid me, I was a threat somehow, and so I didn’t belong. Even my own family couldn’t relate to me.
“We were on a farm on the eastern side of town and my younger brother took to it like he’d been born in that barn. From the age of five he was wearing the boots, talking crops, and trying to drive the tractor. He was born a native in this land, and I didn’t belong. I tried, I fished, hunted, and did whatever seemed right, but I never could break through. They loved us both, but they understood him and felt comfortable with him. I knew I had to leave.
“I could tell you about all the petty snubs, all the times people unintentionally let me see their true feelings with their actions, but what would be the point? I loved this place, but it didn’t love me, so like anyone who has been rejected I looked elsewhere.
“You’ve seen my records. You know that I was in college by thirteen. I thought it would be better there, among the best and the brightest, but it wasn’t. I was younger than any of them, and again I made them uncomfortable. It’s always the same, people look through you. It had been better back home. At least there people smiled at you. In the city they pretended you weren’t there at all.”
“I’m sure it wasn’t that bad,” Birch suggested hollowly. “So you went to college early and some of the geeks were intimidated by your age. It’s not like people would look at you on the street and start shouting, ‘unclean’, or anything.”
“It feels that way sometimes, Major. What did you think of me when I was first signed up for the mission?”
Birch kept his eyes firmly directed to the horizon. “I thought you were young,” he admitted, “but that had nothing to do with your education or how smart you are. I was just worried the mission wouldn’t be good for you at your age. Leaving everything behind is a hard thing to do, no matter how old you are. But as young as you are, you have a whole life ahead of you. Why waste it?”
This was largely true, though if he allowed himself to think about it he recognized some of himself in what Karla had said. Her reputation had made him uncomfortable, but he had told himself that this wasn’t the true reason for his opposition to her.
“I’m glad about that,” Karla smiled at his words, “on this mission above all I need to feel a part of the team, a part of a family.”
“A pretty dysfunctional one,” Birch mused bitterly.
“Oh I know,” Karla stopped and Birch turned to wait for
her, “but we still felt things. It wasn’t like anything I’d ever had before. I was a part that mattered, not something that didn’t fit in anymore. I loved my family, but at the time I never thought that I belonged. That’s why I left. When I finally joined the Hypnos mission it seemed the perfect answer. I wouldn’t be around to make anyone uncomfortable again, and my income would be transferred to them for the next thirty years. The farm would be safe. They would all be secure for life. I could finally do something for them.”
“It sounds like the perfect answer, so what are you so wrung up about? They all lived happily ever after, right?”
“That’s the problem,” Karla’s voice faltered and she began walking again to cover her emotion. “It did seem like the perfect answer, but it wasn’t. A week before I was supposed to leave my mom finally phoned. We hadn’t talked for years, it wasn’t like we were mad or anything, we just never had that much to say to each other; it was uncomfortable. She told me that she missed me. It shocked me, she told me I was her special girl and she didn’t want to lose me, she asked me to come off the mission.” Karla pulled in a sob. She turned her head so Birch couldn’t see the tears welling up in her eyes.