by Pamela Jekel
“Can we rotate our shifts?” Miranda asked.
“You don’t like yours?”
“I’m gonna miss breakfast every day.”
“I’m gonna miss dinner every night,” Sky said. “You get too sleepy to take the afternoon shift. I say we leave it like your father planned it. This won’t last forever. They’ll come like locusts, and then they’ll pass. Right?” She nodded to Jack.
“Right,” he said. “I don’t think this will go on more than a few weeks, but we have to be ready for defense as long as it takes. None of us lasted this long just to die at our own gate because we were stupid or careless.”
“But these are Americans,” Leda said. “Our own people.”
“That’s what makes it so hard,” Jack said. “If they were aliens, it would be easy. These folks will look like us and sound like us, and we understand them.”
“I never did understand what the aliens wanted,” Miranda murmured.
“Well, if you could understand alien, it wouldn’t be alien,” Sky said. “The point is that we can’t let our compassion get us killed. If you can’t shoot them, then shout at them to keep off and shoot over their heads and pull that alarm. Maybe when they see all our guns, we won’t have to shoot. Miranda, you can see at least a half mile in each direction down the road. Don’t wait until they’re on you. The minute you see anything, you pull the rope, and we’ll come running.”
“Carl, you were raised to fight back,” John said. “I expect you to do your duty to protect your family.”
“Yessir.” Carl’s face was calm.
Later that night Sky said, “We haven’t got a chance. If they overrun us, we’re screwed. We’d be better off hiding in the river, breathing through reeds until they pass.”
“Well, we have to try,” Jack sighed. “I’m not giving up this bed again.”
She burrowed next to him, found her favorite place under his arm, and they fell into grateful sleep.
Four days later, the skillet exploded against the signal tree at dusk. They all grabbed their weapons and ran to the gate. Jack got there first to find Skylar hunkered down behind the car, her shotgun pointed at a young woman, screaming at her to back up or she’d shoot. As the others ran forward brandishing their guns, the woman ran down the road in terror, her bare feet slapping the asphalt.
The moment she was out of sight, Skylar burst into tears. “She just wanted something to drink,” she sobbed. “She was just thirsty. She just wanted to get to the river.”
Miranda hugged her. “You did good, Mama,” she said. “If you let one in, you have to let them all in.”
Skylar stopped weeping and hugged her back. She said to everyone, “This is going to be a lot tougher than you think. Now go ahead on back to dinner. I’ll finish my shift.”
A day later, the alarm went off near midnight. Everyone bolted to the gate, weapons ready, and together, they watched a crowd of refugees shambling by. Not one stranger approached their barricade and guns, and no one spoke, but all heads turned in their direction as they stumbled up the road, some of them holding children by the hand, others holding onto each other. Most of them were barefoot; all of them looked thin and exhausted, shuffling and looking older than their years. After they went off into the darkness, Carl said, “Twenty-eight. I counted twenty-eight. Where are they headed?”
“Probably some side road to Athens,” Jack said. “Maybe somebody’s got a farm somewhere, and they’re all headed there, I don’t know.”
“I think we should at least offer them some water,” Leda said. “My God, the children! We have plenty of water, at least we should give them that.”
“There’s no way I could give twenty-eight people water,” Miranda said. “I couldn’t watch that many, and somebody will grab me.”
“You’re right, kitten,” Jack said. “And you’re right too, Leda. What about if we set up a water station up the road and direct them to it to help themselves? Maybe put a jug out each day? They can drink out of their hands; they don’t need cups. That way if they ask for water, we can send them on up the road, and they can help themselves.”
They all agreed that was the best compromise, and so to each detail was added the duty of refilling the water jug they set on the other side of the road, two hundred feet up from their gate.
“Just don’t start saying we got to put out a plate of cookies for them too,” Carl teased Miranda.
“Cookies? If I had cookies, I wouldn’t even share them with you.”
That was the largest group they saw. Over the next month, the stragglers became fewer and fewer, and never in the numbers they saw in the first week. Half a dozen times, they heard gunshots in the distance, and everyone raced to the gate, but they were always farther away, towards Athens. “I think most everyone went back to wherever they came from,” Jack said. “That would be their first instinct. Or maybe to team up with a friend or another couple and try to make it together. We’re not on a main road, and if they want the river, it’s easier to access by the tracks. I think we’ve seen the worst of it.”
They moved the guard station back to the barricade surrounding the house, where a loud shout would summon all hands. Everyone still slept with their weapon close at hand, however, and it took another month before they began to believe that the siege was actually over.
One September night, Jack was sitting on the porch, watching the moon. He was thinking about Chase, wondering if he watched the same moon on his side of the world. It was time to try to find him, Jack thought. The siege was over, and it looked as though the survivors were beginning to figure out how to keep surviving. There was even going to be a harvest barter festival in Watkinsville next week when the moon was full. Somebody came by and posted a flyer on their gate. People were gathering to trade what they had for something they needed more. It was a good sign, something of civility left. He had decided to take the deed for his parents’ house and trade it for a rooster and some hens, if he could. Maybe he could trade the bags of silver coins for some rabbits or a goat. It was time for Chase to come home. Surely, some ship was bound for Mombasa, if not the Naval ship than another one. When would planes begin to fly? He was thinking about what he might be able to trade for passage, when Sky came out and took the rocking chair next to him.
“Beautiful night,” she said.
He took her hand, enjoying the peace. No matter what he might have thought before, he knew in his heart that they were of the stuff of this planet. Not stardust but earth dust. They were born here and belonged here, earth’s children. Children and fools and drunks, stupid and clumsy and selfish at times, but born of this place, brought to salvation through it, just stumbling to some sort of understanding of the miraculous world that was their inheritance from God.
“Miranda in bed?” he asked.
“Finally. Dinner was good tonight.”
“It’s amazing what Leda can do with kudzu and frogs,” he nodded.
“Have you seen the squash? They’re enormous.”
“Must be the fish head tea she uses on them.”
She looked at him in the moonlight, her eyes glimmering and hopeful. “I’m pregnant,” she said.
* * *
The red fox slipped over the fallen log with ease, despite the wood rat in his mouth. His nocturnal vision was not as good as a cat’s, but he still could see the game trail in the moonlight without difficulty, and his sharp ears could pick up the sounds of the kits in the den below him. It was his second successful hunt that night. The four kits in the den needed food every six hours, and his vixen, their mother, was ravenous with their demands on her body.
The fox, vulpes vulpes, was a small canid of the forest between Athens and the Oconee river. Because he had evolved to withstand and even thrive on lands with heavy human populations, he had survived. Most animals in the forest had not. The deer were the first to disappear, hunted by men and their guns and finally by feral dogs. The rabbits were next to go; slow and stupid, they were no match for man’s hunger
. Finally, even the ducks and larger birds were either eaten or flew away, and now the only animals in the woods were the smallest mice, voles, and shrews. And the rats. Always the rats. They were the only species which had increased in numbers. Fortunately, his vixen was partial to rats, and so he had been able to maintain his mate and her progeny.
At twenty-four inches and twenty pounds, the fox was small, compared to those of his kind in Canada or Alaska, even smaller than those in England, where he had originated. Not native to these regions, he had been introduced into the Southern states in 1650, part of twenty-four foxes imported for the sport of hunting them. But he had bested man and escaped. He had thrived, and now when so few native animals were still alive, the fox was the top predator in these woods. His red coat and bushy tail with white tip blended well with the red earth and shrubs of these woods, and his eyes, gold with vertical slits like a cat’s, caught every movement of his prey.
The fox set down the rat and called his mate with a distinctive yip of announcement. At his call, the four kits immediately began to bark and yip in turn, for they knew that their father’s arrival meant food. The vixen stuck out her head, snatched the rat, and dropped it back into the maternity den for the kits to worry. She emerged for a moment to rub her head against his, panting slightly. The kits’ eyes were open now, and in a week they would take their first exploratory steps outside the den. By ten weeks, they would be weaned. That was the fox’s favorite part of fatherhood, for it was his job to teach them to track game, hunt, and fend for themselves, and no small amount of play went into the job.
The vixen whined softly, reminding him that she was still hungry. He set off immediately to search for something to feed her belly. An omnivore like man, the fox was able to satisfy his hunger with everything these woods offered, including insects, worms, crayfish, frogs, blackberries, bird eggs, snakes, and of course, mice and rats. He was able to use his long, bushy tail to execute large jumps and complex twists, and he could hear the rustlings of rodents under the ground from several yards away. His stomach was small for his size, however, so he could not eat as much as wolves or dogs, but he had evolved a solution for that limitation as well.
The fox cached food in shallow holes all over his territory, scattering them across the woods rather than in one single location, in case a rat or other animal should find his store. Because of his cleverness in this time of hunger and death, the fox had survived, while most of his enemies had not. The badgers had been killed, the bears were long gone, and even the larger hawks seemed to be missing from the sky.
The fox ranged to the edge of his territory, and a new odor called him even past his boundaries. He followed the scent to an open field, around a man’s building, and then he found the source. A pen of chickens, sleeping quietly in the shadows. The smell of man was everywhere, and he slid into a crouch, hiding and watching while he decided his strategy. He had been in this field before. The chickens were new. It could be a trap, for man was expert at devising ways to kill his kind. No matter what, he could not risk his life until the kits were weaned, else they’d perish. Rats and moles and mice were safer prey. Yet the smell of the fat sleeping birds made his eyes narrow with hunger and his flanks tremble. He sniffed around the wire fence. The smell of man was strongest at the latch which held the fence shut; weakest at the bottom near the earth. He began to dig. A fast and powerful excavator, the fox soon had a small hole under the fence, and he popped inside the wire, crouching down in silence. This was the most dangerous part. If this was a trap, he was now inside it.
A chicken mumbled softly, and the fox froze, listening for the sounds of man. He did not fear dogs; he had seen few of man’s dogs in his lifetime. He could scarcely recall their smell, but his genetic memory told him that dogs meant danger. Nothing moved in the darkness. The fox padded up the wooden ladder to the place where the chickens slept under a wooden shelter, four of them in a row. He crept back down again and pushed at the opening of the fence, for he knew that pulling a chicken through the hole he’d dug would be difficult. It would not give. He sniffed it cautiously, found another opening, and pushed at that. The opening of the fence gave, wide enough for him to slip through with his mouth full. He went back to the sleeping chickens, bit one swiftly in the neck, and yanked it off its perch. Holding it high off the ground with his jaws, he pushed through the fence gap and out into the night.
The chicken had never made a sound. All was still silent in the man’s field. Nothing stirred. The fox stood with one paw on the dead chicken’s neck, surveying the potential. He could cache this food and go back for more, or he could slip away now, take his kill, and come back again another night.
The fox knew that man was desperate. There had been little for him to scavenge around the farms and houses of man for many seasons, and his instinct told him that the loss of a chicken might well rouse men to seek him out. To seek out his den and his kits. Desperate men alarmed him. They were apt to do anything. He picked up the chicken in his jaws and hurried through the darkness. Better a sure meal tonight. In another moon, he might come this way again.
Chapter Eight
Jomo and Asha Maathai
Nyeri, Kenya
2028
“In Wildness is the preservation of the world.”
Henry David Thoreau, “Walking”, 1862.
Jomo was driving to the District office, when the news came over the Nairobi station. He called Asha on the mobile immediately.
“The most brilliant news!” he said, as soon as she picked up. “The aliens have left the planet! They’ve pulled up stakes and gone!”
“What! The whole world? Every ship? Is it on the radio?”
“Likely on the television as well. They just disappeared last night with no warning, left some sort of farewell message, it seems; I’ll download that just as soon as I get to the central computer. Chase will likely hear about it the moment he gets out of the jeep.”
“Ah, the poor lad!” Asha said. “He’ll want to find any news of his family, of course, will you be able to help him with that?”
“I can try, but you know just because the tossers have gone doesn’t mean there’s any mail delivery yet. But surely aircraft will begin to fly now, so we should see improvement fast enough, and now our markets can begin to creep back to normal. No immediate cure, of course, but one has to say this is good news.”
“It’s wonderful news! I'm checking the television now, love, and we’ll plan a celebration tonight.”
At the office, Jomo gathered with a group of staff who were discussing the message which glowed from the green screen. He printed up a copy though he had no doubt that Chase would have already seen it at school. Likely want to get on the computer the moment he got home. For the first time in four years, there was no button on the screen to click that said, “I have read and understood this message.”
“What does it mean?” a secretary asked. “Only the last line makes any sense. That’s frightful enough, but what does the rest of it mean?”
“It’s a warning of some kind,” another co-worker insisted. “’We will return.’ Can’t be any plainer than that.”
“Well, I got that much,” she said, “but what’s the rest of this lot?” She pointed to the printed paper before her. “Are these the places they’ll invade when they come back? Because if so, it’s good of the sods to give us some warning at least. I’d hate to own property in those locations!”
“No,” Jomo murmured, “that’s not what it is. One can certainly recognize many of these. The Obelisk at Assuan in Egypt, Ramesseum in Thebes, the Pyramid of Khafre, Easter Island, the Rock of Gibralter, Stonehenge. They’re all massive stone objects . Perhaps the rest of this list is the same. Now then, one of you research this. What do these have in common? And what do they have to do with the aliens’ message?”
“I wonder,” Jomo’s assistant said, “if there’s not some significance to their choice of departure date? June 24th? That’s summer solstice in many parts of the wor
ld. They arrived on December 26th, right? When’s winter solstice?”
“December 22nd, so that can’t be it,” one of the clerks scoffed.
“Well, pretty bloody close, I call it,” he said. “Longest day of the year, longest night of the year, could be something to it.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” Jomo said. “Sheila, you take a bit and see if you can find out about the rest of these names; report back, right? Now, let’s get to work, we’ll have plenty of time to chat about this, and that drainage report needs to be on Commissioner’s desk by the end of the day, yes?”
Jomo went to his office and began his day, but in between phone calls and paperwork, his mind went back and back again to Chase. He had presented him with four hectares, about ten acres, for his sixteenth birthday, and in the last six months, the boy had cleared a site for his shamba, buried a pipe from the river to a stone foundation, and accumulated an impressive pile of recycled wood, block, tin, old solar panels, and rubbish with which he obviously intended to build. It had become rather a Sunday tradition for the family to walk to Chase’s land after dinner to see what had developed during the week. Now that the long rains were past, he’d likely begin the walls. He clearly intended to make himself a home. Would this news change his mind?
An hour later, Sheila came to him with the results of her research. “They’re all ancient monoliths,” she said, handing him the list with her notations. “Most of them thousands of years old, all over the world. I put them in order of antiquity.”