The Seventh Day

by Scott Shepherd

Sayers and Fixer looked at Joad as if he had just asked if they had ever gone dancing with a spaceman.

  Not Laura. She answered truthfully and innocently. “I think so. But I was really, really, young.”

  “Well, sometimes, after you rolled the ball down the lane, it wouldn’t come back. The pins scattered all over the place, the ball got stuck, and the machine that picked up the pins and returned the ball would jam. The problem was it happened usually in the middle of the game and you could just let the pin and balls stay there. Or push this button, a reset button, that would allow you to start all over again.”

  “So, what you’re saying is The Strangers decided to reset everything,” said Fixer.

  “Pretty much.”

  “What gave them the right to do that?” asked Sayers. The doctor was clearly coming around to the theory, and not pleased by it in the slightest.

  “Nothing. They just went and did it. Just like they swooped down and took everything for themselves. Nobody gave them permission to do that either.”

  “It could have been worse,” said Laura.

  Everyone turned. Her eyes were deadly serious; filled with conviction. Joad could tell she had bought his explanation hook, line, and sinker.

  “They could have left the pins and ball where they were. And it would have all been over, right?”

  Joad nodded. “I think that’s the way things were headed. Everyone was at everybody’s throats before The Strangers showed up. There only seemed to be one possible outcome.”

  “You think the world was going to end anyway?” asked Fixer.

  “Certainly felt that way. No matter how much some of us tried to fight it.”

  “Like the tank,” Laura suggested.

  “After the tank,” Joad said. He gave her an enough of this look; indicating that it was a story left for another day.

  “You sound like you’re condoning what The Strangers did,” accused Sayers.

  “I just don’t think we had a choice in the matter.”

  Joad hoped that put a lid on the conversation, but Fixer wasn’t finished asking questions.

  “If The Strangers wanted us to start over, why let men like those brothers survive? Why not begin with a couple of good people and go from there?”

  “Yeah. Because that worked out so well the first time,” snorted Sayers.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Adam. Eve. All by themselves in the Garden until the snake came by and ruined everything.”

  Fixer threw up his hands, frustrated once again by the pessimistic physician.

  “It’s the necessary evil,” Joad said.

  “What the hell does that mean?” demanded Sayers.

  “You need evil because it’s what you measure good by.”

  “You honestly believe that?”

  “For the better part of my life. It’s just been a question of what side one’s on.”

  “Well, I think The Strangers are rooting for the bad guys,” said Sayers.

  “What makes you say that?” asked Laura.

  “Primo making it rain, for starters. Seems to me like they stacked the deck.”

  “Maybe the sides are more equally matched than you think,” said Joad.

  His eyes drifted toward Laura. She shook her head almost imperceptibly—enough to tell Joad that it was his turn to back off.

  “All I know is they killed the best person in the world and left me behind instead,” said Fixer. “I’ll never be able to forgive them for that.”

  No one, not even Joad, could argue the point.

  But that night, as he drifted off to sleep, Joad found himself hoping the day would come when Fixer would change his mind and find a way toward forgiveness.

  Hopefully they all would.

  Otherwise, they were no better off than before the Purple.

  Not long after they saddled up and left the campfire by the stream, the mist swirled around them once more. Laura had insisted on giving the jet-black horse a whirl, but Joad was reluctant to let her try her hand at taming such a magnificent beast. But she kept pushing him until he finally agreed to let her ride in front and guide the horse by its mane, knowing full well he was positioned to take over should the steed make a break for it. When Laura proved herself to be more than capable, Joad found he was actually able to exhale.

  When they emerged from the fog, the terrain had changed dramatically. The lavender fields were long gone, replaced by a surface that made them feel as if they had come through a cave and landed on the moon. Crevices and craters dotted ground that had a metallic rusty sheen. Craggy spires the color of autumn towered toward the sky; deep hollowed canyons of white clay rolled in front of them. Plateaus, buttes, and mesas stretched toward the horizon and presumably beyond, comprising a landscape best described as otherworldly.

  Sayers brought the gray mare to a halt at a crater that dipped into a valley of stone a half mile below. “It was crazy to head up here. What if these nags break down?”

  Fixer, riding alongside on Joad’s horse, shook his head. “Ain’t gonna happen.”

  “How the hell did you become so positive? You been living in some sort of vacuum the last seven years?”

  Fixer indicated Joad, who was edging his way around the crater rim on the jet-black horse. “I just trust him.”

  Laura seemed to find the scenery so breathtaking, she had a hard time keeping her eye on the crater’s edge.

  “Easy,” said Joad. “That’s a long drop.”

  “This is the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen.”

  “That’s The Fields. I’ve heard some men were so taken with its beauty that they were never heard from again.”

  Laura got the message and kept her eyes on the rim, making sure the horse continued to sidestep it.

  “Is your wife beautiful?”

  “Yes. Yes, she is.”

  “You must miss her something awful.”

  Joad nodded. He couldn’t have put it better himself.

  They continued to ride. Laura moved far enough from the crater edge that she was able to glance back at Joad.

  “You going to tell me what you were doing on The Other Side that kept you away from someone as beautiful as Becky?”

  “Not yet.” His voice drifted off. He was no longer looking at Laura; his gaze had traveled past her. This caused her to turn and look for herself.

  She gasped.

  “Oh, my God.”

  Sayers and Fixer brought their horses to a stop beside them. They also stared straight ahead with equal expressions of astonishment and trepidation.

  They had come upon another crater—a massive one, at least a thousand yards in diameter. But this one didn’t spring up from nature and years of erosion.

  It had been formed by a single gigantic object. An object that still lay in the dead center of it.

  A spaceship.

  EPISODE 4

  18

  The cover of the first Led Zeppelin album.

  That was what Joad recalled the few times he’d seen one of the Strangers’ ships.

  Back when he was a child, it had been the first CD he’d owned. Told it was next to impossible to wear out a CD, Joad sure as hell tried. Those first pounding beats of “Good Times, Bad Times” were a wake-up call to a young man floundering without purpose. The music drove his father crazy; he was always screaming upstairs for Joad to turn the damn thing down. On days Joad felt particularly rebellious, he cranked up the volume and rejoiced in Bonham’s beats and Plant’s plaintive wails. Then he’d spend those nights nursing welts courtesy of the buckle of his father’s belt.

  Good Times, Bad Times, indeed.

  Now, almost a decade after The Seventh Day, Zeppelin was only a memory, music nonexistent, and it took a spaceship to remind him of childhood joy and the corresponding pain.

  He didn’t imagine the Strangers had heard of Led Zeppelin. Or the Hindenburg, the Nazi airship that blew up in the skies over New Jersey many years ago, crashing on the tarmac (illustrated
on that first album’s cover). They never saw its cotton skin burning to a crisp, leaving only its elaborate latticed shell standing in the wreckage before completely collapsing.

  It was the Hindenburg’s innards exposed to the world in the infamous newsreel footage that popped into Joad’s head every time he saw one of the Strangers’ spacecrafts. They were otherworldly architectural wonders—their framework exposed to the naked eye, the workings whirring and moving, so one could appreciate the brilliance of the massive ships the Strangers had traveled in across the universe.

  On The Seventh Day, hundreds of these crafts had descended upon the world in a blast of purple light. They wreaked havoc, changed the earth forever, and most disappeared in the blink of the Remaining’s eye. But like that ill-fated German airship, some crashed and burned, embedded forever on a world they practically swallowed whole. They were a constant reminder to the frailty of the human race.

  Fixer, Laura, and Sayers wore equal looks of incredulity as they stared at the Strangers’ handiwork. Fixer was the first to find his voice.

  “No wonder we never stood a chance.”

  “I remember seeing them in the sky,” said Sayers. “But never up this close.”

  “I don’t think a whole lot ended belly-up,” replied Fixer.

  The four of them dismounted. They walked slowly around the crater’s perimeter, realizing it might take the better part of an hour to complete a full circuit. The ship was that damned big.

  “What are those arms?” asked Laura. She pointed at humongous hollowed-out tentacles that hung off the spaceship like the appendages of a behemoth-sized beached octopus.

  “Retrievers,” Joad answered. “The Strangers used them to strip the Earth bare.”

  “For oil?”

  “Oil, minerals, precious metals. Pretty much anything that could be of use.”

  “Sucked ’em up like a giant Hoover vacuum,” added Fixer. “I remember seeing them on the last broadcasts after wandering out of the hospital. Back when there was television.” He sighed, clearly thinking back. “And electricity. Heat. All those other things we took for granted.”

  “Is that why there aren’t any more guns?” wondered Laura.

  “They went for those first,” said Sayers.

  “I say good riddance.” Fixer started listing: “Gunpowder, rifles, ammunition. Some things we’re better off without.”

  “But there’s still violence.”

  All eyes fell on Joad. He was looking past the spaceship, back toward the mountains through which they had traveled.

  “It’ll always be in some men. Whether they have the proper tools or not.”

  No one brought up the brothers. But the pursuing trio of siblings was obviously on their minds.

  “Has anyone ever been inside one of them?”

  Laura’s fascination with the spacecraft wasn’t lost on Joad. It troubled him.

  “Not as far as I know. And I don’t think now is a time to begin.”

  “Why not? It’s been here all these years, right? How could it still be dangerous?”

  Before Joad could respond, Laura’s stepfather offered an opinion.

  “The people … the … things this belonged to—we never learned anything about them. We don’t even know what this is, let alone how it works.”

  For once, Joad was surprised to be in complete agreement with the physician.

  “Doc makes a good point. We’re better off getting settled for the night.”

  Disappointment flashed across the young girl’s face. But she nodded and got back atop the horse.

  But as they continued through the Fields, Joad couldn’t help but notice that Laura looked back at the spaceship at least a half dozen times.

  He should have known better.

  Later that evening, the questions started up again.

  Joad wasn’t surprised. The way-past-the-witching-hours chats with Laura had become a ritual. Long after her stepfather and Fixer had conked out, the girl was still wide awake, pummeling Joad with queries as if he were the teacher with all the answers.

  If only that were true.

  Joad may have spent seven years traveling halfway around the new world, and gotten a good look at what The Strangers left behind. But when it came to a real understanding of their conquerors, why they took what they did, and why certain people were allowed to Remain, Joad was as much in the dark as the day that Purple lit up the skies.

  Initially, Laura had been caught up in the pursuit of dinner. Joad was happy to see the girl take up the rabbit chase. He taught her how to corner their prey, and was pleased that she had no qualms about it becoming the evening meal. Joad presumed that a childhood dominated by the need to survive overcame basic instincts to cuddle creatures, name them Peter, and make up tales about them.

  “What did they look like?” Laura asked literally two seconds after Joad closed his eyes.

  “I’ve no idea. I don’t think anyone ever saw them.”

  As far as he knew, that was the honest-to-God truth. None of the Remaining that Joad had come across remembered actually seeing The Strangers. The ships swooped down, pillaged the planet, and left the world forever altered. He had once come across a couple of drawings, but they looked like people’s imaginations working overtime or a childhood memory from War of the Worlds. He told this to Laura.

  “War of the Worlds?”

  Joad smiled sadly, reminded again of how this girl had been deprived of the type of childhood that the world’s youth had known before The Strangers came and wiped that from existence as well. It wasn’t just movies and television that vanished with electricity and power; The Strangers had swept up every book, leaving the world without its written history or legacy. Had they done it to study the race they’d practically obliterated, or were paper and bookbinding just valuable resources on their distant planet?

  Whatever the reason, the stories that writers had spent centuries compiling, like the songs composed by musicians such as Joad’s beloved Zeppelin, were now left in the memories of the Remaining. What Joad wouldn’t give to flip through the pages of his favorite novel or drop a needle onto the vinyl track he had played umpteen times. But with so many obstacles facing them, the tales and songs were fading into the Land of the Forgotten, where Joad feared they would eventually disappear forever.

  So, he told Laura the H. G. Wells story and watched her eyes widen in the campfire glow. She was amazed by the alien attack that had threatened the world, only to have the invaders die out at the last possible moment, unable to survive in Earth’s atmosphere.

  “Maybe that’s what happened to The Strangers on that ship,” she said.

  “Probably not. Otherwise you’d see them all over the place. I’d think it must’ve been some kind of system failure.”

  “You mean it stopped working?”

  “Even an advanced race can turn out a few lemons.”

  This gave way to a flurry of questions regarding the connection between aliens and bright yellow fruit. By the time he finished explaining the auto industry’s assembly line and how a few clunkers made their way to the car lots of days gone by, Laura was yawning.

  As she settled down to sleep, Joad realized he had begun to look forward to the late-night question-and-answer sessions. It comforted him to look back on the past, on the things everyone would never see again. It was gratifying to share his memories with someone so inquisitive, and it filled him with hope that the future might not be so dim. Especially if there were bright lights like Laura to lead the Remaining out of the darkness.

  Most of all, he had been glad to steer her away from the Strangers, knowing that nothing worthwhile could come from asking about them. Feeling content for the moment allowed Joad to close his eyes.

  He should have known better.

  His dreams were a jumble, as they typically were. Composed of recent conversations, experiences, memories of one’s past, and ruminations on the days ahead, Joad’s nocturnal reveries were more vivid than usual. He could feel
himself twisting and turning all night long, trying to settle his imagination down.

  He was fighting off a bizarre hybrid of plant and alien; long winding vines with faces embedded in budding flowers that would be best described as something from a Hollywood creature shop. Their sharp-toothed jaws snapped at his feet as he lopped off their heads with a machete. He woke up with a start, relieved it had only been a nightmare and that Sayers, Fixer, and the girl were still fast asleep around the dwindling campfire embers. But the moment he drifted off again, he was thrust back into the horrible landscape—gathering the decapitated heads from the lunar-like surface they had found just past the lavender patch, and placing them in a sack.

  Then, the location suddenly switched for no reason (except, of course, for Joad being trapped in a dream he couldn’t escape), and he found himself in a huge stone-walled room that felt like the dungeon of a castle. A gargantuan red-haired man stood behind a table of ebony marble and ordered him to dump his trove of alien heads on it.

  This time Joad woke up for good. He didn’t know what disturbed him more.

  The fact that the man in the dungeon had been his father.

  Or that Sayers and Fixer were up on their feet calling for Laura.

  Joad stowed the dream away in a place where it could sit with all the other demons that haunted him, and jumped to his feet.

  “What happened?”

  “I woke up and Laura was gone,” said Sayers.

  Joad cursed to himself. He should have seen it coming. At least the physician seemed worried instead of annoyed, he thought. “How long ago?”

  “A few minutes. We’ve been yelling her name,” explained Fixer. “Man, when you’re out, you’re out.”

  Joad ignored this and raced for his horse. “Damn it.”

  “What?” asked Fixer.

  “I know where she went.”

  Joad was encouraged that Laura had set off on foot. He hoped she hadn’t gotten too far, and with each of them being on their own horse, he figured they’d catch up before she got back to the spaceship. He had no doubt she was headed there. Her fascination with the craft, the many questions the night before—he knew by now the girl didn’t give up on things so easily.