I tried to swallow the sudden large lump in my throat, but it just wouldn’t go down. “Julius, there has to be another way. You just can’t go in there. Who knows what will happen?”
“It is… the only way. I’m already dead. If… I die out here… it means nothing. But if I go in there…” He looked toward the corn. “It means everything! I… I won’t let Zena or Vigo die… because I was too weak… like Zeek was.” He gazed back from the corn up to me. “Lily, might die… Angus might die. If… I don’t, go in… who will? Who… will die for this caravan? Please… help me to save everyone. Please, Jack, in the name of God, help me.” His raised his arm, hand open, reaching out for mine.
God forgive me, but I took it. I put his arm around my body and helped him to his feet. And then I led him to the edge of the corn and let him go. For a moment, I thought he would fall. But I watched as Julius summoned up all that was left in him and slowly stumbled into the corn.
The whispers from within the corn grew louder, now chanting in a language I still didn’t understand, and was grateful for that fact, as the words made my stomach twist, and my mind shuddered in revulsion. I shut my eyes tight, but the chant only went on for a few seconds.
When I opened them again, Julius was gone. I didn’t even hear the rustle of corn from someone moving through it. Just silence, not even the whispers. I turned, tears in my eyes. I walked back into the caravan to wake Angus and let him know what had occurred.
***
Angus had quickly awoken the rest of the caravan. If Julius’s sacrifice had indeed freed us, he was not willing to wait till morning to find out. Zena had remained quiet, her eyes red from tears as she now took over the position of head of her family. Somehow, I think she knew what he had planned. Perhaps he had told her. No one asked; no one wanted to know.
Zeek had chosen to stay. He was unsure if Julius’s sacrifice had paid for him as well. He would not risk cursing us twice by traveling with us. He would wait an hour and then follow. If he was free, he would meet us on the outskirts of the corn fields.
Before we left, Angus walked over to Zeek, who was busy packing up his own rig. I watched as Angus placed an old revolver and a single bullet into Zeek’s hand. “In case you can’t get out, lad, don’t let them take you.”
Zeek just nodded, loaded the revolver, and jumped into his rig.
We drove for hours, the sun starting to creep into the sky, our hope dwindling. But the roar of Lily and her scouts flew back through the caravan, howls of joy erupting from them. They spun around, driving past us and pointing. Up ahead we saw in just a few minutes what had brought them such joy—the end of the corn fields. Just ahead of us they ended and were replaced by rolling hills covered with green grass and sparse trees and shrubs. Off in the far distance upon a prominent grass covered hill, civilization appeared. A small town, most likely the outpost Zeek had mentioned to us. But to me and I am sure others in our caravan it was the sign of our victory over the dark forces within the corn, a victory bought with blood, but a victory nonetheless.
As we exited the corn, I gave one last look back toward what could have been our prison and tomb, the seemingly unending fields of corn. I wished I hadn’t. Dark figures stood among the stalks, watching us leave: dark shadowy figures with red glowing eyes, eyes that never blinked, eyes that always watched as we one by one left their domain. Those eyes looked hungry. They looked angry.
SHORTED
Patrick Freivald
Barry couldn't breathe.
He stumbled, dizzy, chest squeezed by a sudden, inexplicable panic. The world hazed from the bustle of a New York City crosswalk to red to black. A creeping, omnipresent dread brought him, shaking and sweating, to the asphalt. Legs bumped against him as the crowd skirted his fetal body, other seventy and eighty-year-olds rushing to and from jobs as meaningless as their lives.
He crawled on hands and knees toward the shoulder, desperate to get out of traffic before the light turned. The thought of tires crushing his bones and rupturing his organs brought a new wave of panic. Nobody would stop for a Short; he wouldn't have.
Once on the curb he sat back, squeezed his eyes shut against the flashes of sunlight on passing cars, hummed to himself to drown out the rustling shuffle of a million feet, like spiders casting webs across his brain. He forced himself to recall the Professional Development training for dealing with Shorts, a seminar the government required over thirty years earlier after the first chips failed: Shorts may become confused, anxious, irrational. Desperate. After decades with the regulation chip, they'll be at a loss what to do with a world they find suddenly strange and terrifying, and may become violent. Standing protocol: ignore them, get on with your business, and let the police deal with them.
The police!
They'd picked him up sixty years ago for stealing a car, a stupid act brought about by nothing more than boredom. Compassionate but firm, they'd brought him in and given him his chip, and everything had run like clockwork since. With his help they found—
My sister! He hadn't thought of Sasha since, his moods and concerns regulated by the neural implant. She had had brown hair like his, and blue eyes. She must have gone gray long ago, and would look just like their mother.
Mama! She couldn't still be alive, not after all this time.
Lying on the curb, he wept for her.
***
“Why did scientists seed the sky?” Miss Schotts surveyed the room before calling on Barry, to the disappointment of Jayden, who pouted and crossed her arms.
“To increase the albedo of the Earth!” A new word, learned only that day; Barry tasted it on his tongue. Al-bee-dough. A lumpy word, it sounded like a town in Arizona, or a disease that left huge warts all over your skin.
“That's right,” his teacher said. “By upping the reflectivity of the upper atmosphere—making it shinier—climatologists like your dad are going to save us all from global warming.”
Over the following months, as a way to teach percentages to Barry's fourth-grade class, Miss Schotts had incorporated the numbers into her lessons—0.7 increased to 0.76, an increase of 8.57%, made by dispersing reflective nanoparticles into the upper atmosphere. His pride at successful calculation—on paper but without a calculator—locked the numbers into his mind. They followed the results through the months, adjusting their figures on a paper chart Miss Schotts had pinned up next to the Smart Board. Barry got to adjust the chart every day at the beginning of class, his reward for being the son of the man who led the project that would save mankind.
He remembered her frown when 8.57% became 9.2%, her furrowed brow at 10.1%. When they hit 12.8% Barry leaped up onto the stool before the class bell had rung to add more construction paper to the chart, and almost slipped off at the coughing sob that had erupted from the teacher's throat. He turned, tacks in one hand, paper in the other, to find her curled up in her chair, shaking, face buried in her knees. She'd shrieked when Becky tried to comfort her and didn't stop until school security dragged her away—and Barry hadn't missed the wet streaks down the guard's cheeks, either.
***
On the curb, he kept his eyes squeezed shut and sobbed, unable to contain the anguish of never seeing again the loved ones he hadn't thought about in six decades, unable to process the nightmare world around him, billions of citizens acting out the death throes of human existence until their pointless bodies crumbled to dust. Those years flashed through his mind: punching a clock to shuffle countless medical records for the National Health Board and pass them on to someone else, collecting a check of useless money to pay for an apartment where he sat and watched live feeds of other people doing the same kind of work on his giant television, marking off the days on his electronic calendar because the chip found time important enough to notice, jobs important enough to do. He'd exercised to stay in shape, and for a few decades read United Nations updates on the plight of countries who had refused chipping, until he realized they'd been sending the same, recycled updates for at least
ten years.
Strong arms wrapped him, and he cried into them, muttering fractal despondencies into their unyielding embrace. They lifted him, set him down on a soft surface.
He opened his eyes when the world jerked. A van, the cab separated from the passenger compartment by a cage. Thick padding covered the floor and walls, the off-white color of clouds choked by smog. Sitting up, he steadied himself against the wall as the driver careened through the streets, barely glimpsed through the window of the passenger's compartment.
Her wizened face a mass of wrinkled, semi-transparent skin, gray hair tumbled in wondrous curls to spill across the padded shoulders of her police uniform. The police had to wear armor because Shorts could turn violent in a moment. The chipped had nothing to gain, but Shorts had nothing to lose; the difference in behavior couldn't be more stark, according to the sixty-something who'd given the lecture. He'd be dead by now too, his estate turned over to the government for caretaking.
Caretaking for what?
Barry shuddered, consumed by childhood memories no longer filtered through a dispassionate lens built of P-N junctions and microscopic solder joints.
***
His parents had pulled him out of school, taking Barry and Sasha into the mountains to a home Dad had bought “in case things went wrong.” A log cabin on the surface, it had a basement six times bigger than the house, all of it given over to hydroponic gardens and rabbit cages. Sasha loved the garden, and loved watching wolves and deer and the occasional elk with their father's binoculars, especially the wolves. She worked without complaint but refused to kill rabbits for their meals; his father hadn't spared Barry that kindness. They home-schooled as winter set in early, early enough to bury crops in California under first inches of snow, then feet. People fled the mountains as the snow piled high, and their father's telescoping rods thrust solar panels ever higher in search of every spare watt.
In the Sierra Nevadas, February stretched into June, and the news spoke of famine, of ships ice-locked in New York Harbor, of a mass exodus toward the equator, of bodies piled a hundred high at closed borders. It spoke of hydroponics projects beyond a scale mankind had ever dreamed.
And it spoke of Nyloxx.
Recipients determined by anonymous lottery in the Western world, by fiat elsewhere, the drug would sterilize millions, take pressure off of dwindling resources and give the rest of the human race a fighting chance. A year became two as they ate rabbits and watched old TV shows and learned from books in Dad's library until the day Dad didn't come out of his study. Mom couldn't bring herself to look, and Sasha wouldn't do it, so Barry had put the revolver back in the hidden compartment in the bottom drawer, dragged the body outside where the snow could bury it, and cleaned up the mess—he'd killed and butchered enough rabbits by then that the blood hadn't bothered him, not all that much, and nothing had struggled under his hands as he broke its neck.
He only cried later, at night, biting on a finger so they couldn't hear him.
***
The back door opened to a blast of sunlight, snapping Barry from his reverie. Two blank-faced policemen flanked the driver. Salt-and-pepper hair, good muscle tone, they couldn't have been more than sixty-five. LGs—the last generation.
“Get down, please,” one said.
He did, joints aching as he clambered over the bumper and trailer hitch onto the broken asphalt parking lot.
“What's going to happen to me?” It came out a blubbering mess, a tumor of worry unleashed across his mind in an orgy of unwanted emotion. Standing straight, he sniffled, wiped his nose with the back of his hand, and repeated himself in a calmer tone. “What's going to happen to me?”
“Do you understand that your regulator has failed?”
He nodded.
“And that the neural interfaces are too delicate? That once failed it cannot be repaired or replaced?”
Another nod.
“Do you understand that we cannot allow the de-chipped to live among the normal populace?”
He hesitated. For the first time he wondered why; but because he understood the fact, he nodded again.
“We have an area for the de-chipped. You'll not be allowed to leave, but as long as you don't try to escape or commit violence you'll be allowed to stay as long as you like. You'll enjoy all government services uninterrupted.”
“Okay.” He cast his eyes down and allowed the officers to lead him through the door. It closed behind him, and through the wall he heard the crunch of tires on gravel. He looked up.
Men and women sat at tables in an outdoor yard, watching ancient programs on televisions hung on the walls or talking in small groups. They ignored him, so he returned the favor to sit at an empty picnic table and wait for whatever would happen to happen.
He hadn't meant to cry, but he wiped tears from his eyes and shoved down memories of his family.
***
As ultraviolet light pulverized the nanoparticles and the snow melted, survivors drifted back to their homes or dug out from where they'd holed down. A billion people had died, and it would be another several years before crop levels could even hope to return to normal. Nyloxx in genetically-modified food had prevented millions of births, and would prevent billions more if all went to plan. A reduced population could, over time, be managed by the dwindling resources of an exhausted planet.
It took three years for things to return to normal, or a veneer of normal stretched over regret and loss. Barry and Sasha watched the renewed news broadcasts from the safety of their mountain refuge, Barry itching to get out of their icy tomb, Sasha already planning how best to help people. On their TV screen they watched the survivors go back to work and rebuild their lives as if they hadn't just dodged the apocalypse, as if they hadn't murdered and stolen their way through the Long Winter, as if they hadn't “done what they had to do” at the expense of anything and anyone that got in their way. Billions of monsters fell grateful into banality, seizing the opportunity to forget. Then, given the chance, these people elected the same politicians, who vowed greater oversight over the same scientists, who in turn said they were very sorry and vowed to be so much more careful in the future.
His mother enrolled them in private school, and booked them tennis and golf lessons, and went back to work at the charity, now overseeing the stunning number of orphans created by the savagery of the past half-decade. Barry read and learned and golfed—he had no aptitude for tennis, and no desire to gain one—and with the help of tutors and teachers climbed to the top ten percent of his class. Sasha volunteered at a refugee camp until the day she took a beating for being her father's daughter. They'd broken her nose and bruised her kidney, and six weeks later the sixteen-year-old girl went back, defiant and fearless in her search for a better humanity.
***
Wood creaked next to him.
“Hi, I'm Janice.”
Barry opened his eyes to a face he could have recognized. Wizened, liver-spotted, with papery skin stretched too thin over a freckled skull sporting wisps of yellow-white hair. Her lips pulled back to expose her teeth, an awkward tic on the verge of hideous; it took him a moment to recognize a smile.
“Barry,” he said, just able to choke out the word.
She reached out and grabbed his hand. Too stunned to react, he didn't pull away as she flipped it over and ran her fingers down his. Rheumy wetness rimmed her light green eyes.
“We've met, you know.”
He shook his head. “When?”
“Last year, after a meeting with your boss. We shared an elevator, and I shorted on the way down. You left me there on my knees for the police.”
He opened his mouth, closed it.
“You don't have to apologize. I rode that elevator for hours before they showed up. You had a lot of company.”
“Then how do you remember me?”
“We were talking when it happened.”
“I don't—” Only he did remember. She fell on him, screaming and crying, and he'd turned to face the
doors. “I'm so sorry.”
“You didn't know any better.”
He closed his eyes. “But now I do. And I'm sorry.”
***
Crawling under the façade of normalcy, one critical thing had changed.
Neonatal wards dwindled and died, their empty halls abandoned or repurposed to other ends. Even a five-year-old could do this math—Nyloxx administered to sixty percent of the population should have reduced new births by sixty percent, not a hundred.
As birthrates collapsed to zero, scientists far too like his father wrung their hands and tried to explain. Words like “systemic” and “persistent” did little to assuage a race faced with their self-caused extinction. Years of research caused eventual pregnancies. They rejoiced along with the rest of the world at the first pregnancy, and thousands more induced with drugs and in vitro fertilization. They cried together at her miscarriage. A second miscarriage followed, then thousands, then millions. In desperation, children carried to twenty-three weeks were extracted via C-section; none survived.
Smothered under the blanket of impending oblivion, many killed themselves, sometimes taking their families with them in poison or car crashes or hot, red shotgun blasts, sometimes slipping away alone under the embrace of opiates or narcotics. Some turned to God, reconciling their unanswered prayers with a just punishment mankind must have somehow deserved. For a few years art thrived, turning ever darker before collapsing under the inevitability of the end.
Many wandered, not bothering to bathe or work, shuffling from soup kitchen to park and back. Sasha stayed out later and later as their numbers grew, choking the streets and emptying factories, collapsing production and shifting ever more burden onto those few who would still provide for others. At Barry's behest, she gave it up, gnawing at the bit in their solitude, sullen rage spiked by occasional bouts of despondent impotence.
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