Phytosphere

by Scott Mackay

  And then it happened. What she had been dreading, but also what she had been expecting. The obvious outcome to all this buildup. Because hadn’t it been a long time now, and wasn’t the food situation just a bit much to take, especially when no one knew when it was going to end? Yes, the inevitable happened.

  Gunfire—like the barking of dogs—erupted from next door. It was a sound she at first didn’t want to admit to herself, because it escalated the situation to an entirely new plane. The rifle shots made her skin crawl and her throat tighten, but at last she shook all feeling away because she knew she had to look after her children.

  “Jake, will you hurry up?” she said in a small, panicked voice.

  “I can’t see where I’m going.”

  “Shhh.”

  “Mom,” said Jake, “they’re not going to hear us over all that gunfire.”

  How easily Jake accepted it all.

  “Just move quickly and quietly to the back. Jake, grab onto my sleeve, and Hanna, you grab onto Jake’s.”

  Forming a human chain, they walked in the darkness until they came to the back. More gunfire came from next door, and then a lot of shouting. Then there was one final shot, and all the shouting stopped.

  They listened for a while. Nothing.

  The phone rang upstairs. Her body stiffened. Who could that be? Maybe somehow Gerry had managed to get back, and he was phoning from somewhere on the “ph” phone. She was terrified because she thought the men next door might hear the ringing. She was eager to go answer so she could see if it was Gerry, but hesitant to move from her safe basement refuge.

  At last, Glenda bolted from her crouched position on the floor and, feeling her way through the aisle of junk, came to the foot of the stairs. She crawled up the steep steps on all fours.

  She came to the kitchen, rose to her feet, and got no farther than the table when someone shone a flashlight in through the front window. She froze and quickly backed up against the wall.

  The flashlight beam penetrated through the living room to the dining room, and into the kitchen, where she saw it brightening first the cupboards, then the sink, then the floor. And all the while the handset part of the vidphone continued to ring on the dining room table, set to sing like a cardinal because she loved the sound of the cardinal so much.

  The flashlight beam swung away, and its peripheral glow grew dimmer and dimmer, until finally the kitchen was dark again. She sprang from her hiding spot against the wall, and headed for the dining room table, where the phone continued to tweet like a cardinal. She got halfway there when the phone stopped ringing. Even though her good sense told her she had lost her chance, she lifted the phone anyway.

  “Gerry?”

  All she heard was silence.

  She selected the call list to see who had phoned but the little screen remained blank. Who could it have been? Neil? Louise?

  She rested the handset on the receiver and went downstairs, disappointed and close to tears. She felt her way through the dark to the back. Her kids sat crouched next to the downstairs refrigerator.

  “Was it Dad?” asked Jake.

  “I didn’t get it in time.”

  Her kids said nothing.

  She sat down.

  “Are they still out there?” asked Jake.

  “One came to the window and looked inside.”

  All three lapsed into silence. She thought of all the other people hiding in the dark, in similar situations.

  And then thought of the Western Secessionists, now making everything a lot harder.

  14

  At what point does a man lose faith in himself?

  This question gnawed at Neil as he sat in his Coral Gables dining room with the rest of his family, listening to the gunfire outside. They sat in the dark. Candles flickered on the table. Ashley read a magazine on her waferscreen, the glow of the thing lighting her face. Melissa sat on the chaise longue painting her toenails pink. Morgan, his precious Morgan, had her chair pressed right against his. He had his arm around her, and she was scared—constantly frightened now, morbidly terrified, as if the dark were a monster that was just waiting for the chance to kill her.

  At what point did a man lose faith, and realize that the problem he had decided to solve was simply too big to solve?

  Louise gazed at him stoically, enduring the gunfire outside, but with a look in her eyes that told him it was unendurable. The dark outside was like a thing alive. It pressed in on them with the unstoppable force of a bad weather front. A day, a week, even two weeks, okay, they all knew it was going to be dark for a while. But a month? And now even more than a month? He was second-guessing himself constantly, and he knew it was because of the dark. He didn’t know what to tell his family about his progress, and he felt like he was letting Louise and the kids, the president, even the whole world down.

  Outside, it was the haves against the have-nots. And damn those Western Secessionists. It wasn’t that there was no food; it’s just that there was no distribution. And everybody knew—yes, right down in their stomachs—that the existing food, the hoarded food, was indeed finite, and that next year’s crop was gone. People fighting over an ever-shrinking pile of food. The equation was simple. Why hadn’t the government prepared for it?

  He got up and walked into the sunroom. He looked out across his swimming pool and saw flames reflecting on the water—a neighbor’s house burned up the street. Where were the firemen? He walked out the big French doors onto the patio. All his exotic shrubbery was dead. The ground stunk like rotten hay. He rounded the fountain and found the maid, Eva, boiling MREs on the barbecue because there was no electricity, at least not right now. He hoped that the neighbors wouldn’t smell them and come over for a handout.

  He approached her. “Eva, I want you to know—you can go home to your people any time you like.”

  Eva looked up. Her face was a mask of fear. She was neither young nor old, and yet her fear made her look ancient. “You want me to go?”

  “Only if you want to.”

  Even his manner of speaking had grown halting and unsure, and it was because he was always creeping around in the dark; he wasn’t a man who liked creeping around in the dark.

  “What does ma’am say?”

  “I just thought… a lot of people want to be with their families…”

  “My family is in Colombia. And things aren’t so good there right now.”

  The barbecue flickered and he saw the reflection of the flame dance on her face. The black pall of the phytosphere hovered in the sky. “You’re welcome to stay.”

  Tears clouded her eyes. “Thank you, sir.”

  As if he had offered her an ironclad guarantee that she would survive the phytosphere.

  He turned and walked back to the house. He pushed his way in through the French doors only to find his wife coming out into the sunroom with that special phone they had given him, the one that sent its signal through a squadron of communications aircraft that were constantly aloft.

  “It’s Bob Cruz,” she said, and hope danced in her eyes like a sad childhood remembrance.

  He took the phone and pressed it to his ear. It was bulky and big, like a combat radio, and had a nubby black antenna. He had his usual reaction—a tightening of his esophagus, a spray of acid over the lining of his stomach, and a premonition of yet more bad news.

  “Bob,” he said, the name dropping from his mouth like a dead bird from the sky.

  “We’ve got Luke Langstrom on board. He’s working on the omniphage.”

  Here was a border—one between good luck and bad, and for a split second he was balanced on the infinitesimal edge of either. The cards had again been dealt in his favor, and he felt within himself the distinct quality of good luck, elation mixed with relief, like a chill mixed with a fever.

  “How soon does he think he can do an initial workup?”

  “He says a few days.”

  “And Gerry’s reaction?”

  Bob paused. “No word.”

/>   Neil hesitated, but then got down to business. “Does Langstrom have any preliminary ideas?”

  “He’s already selected a designer organism from his old files. Apparently he’s designed dozens of omniphages like this. He uses them as surgical tools to study the guts of modern-day Aresphyta.”

  A little more talk about the chemical teeth of potential omniphages, just so when he briefed the president and the secretary of defense he could give them a cohesive overall picture, and then he thumbed his special phone off. He looked at the phone, contemplating it the way he might a strange artifact. He put it on the table.

  “Good news?” said Louise.

  “Langstrom is working for us.” Neil shook his head. “I hope Gerry’s not too mad.”

  Melissa looked up from her toenail painting. “Does that mean it’s going to get light again, Dad?”

  How to answer his eldest daughter? He gazed at her in the candlelight coming from the table, and he momentarily wondered about her inner life, how she was dealing with the phytosphere, second by second, minute by minute—how she was coping with that sporadic and unnerving gunfire outside. Just who the hell was shooting? And did Miami really have so many guns? Melissa was losing her tan. Even that was something she would have to deal with.

  “It’s a step in the right direction, hon.”

  He heard a strange sucking sound from the kitchen. His wife and daughters glanced that way, their heads flicking in unison. He lifted the flashlight, walked past the dining room table, and entered the kitchen. The sucking sound came from the sink. He walked over, and further pinpointed the sound to the faucet. He recognized the sound. It was the sound of water pressure fading away.

  Louise and the girls came into the kitchen. He turned on the cold-water tap and the sucking intensified.

  He tried the hot-water tap, and the pipes below gurgled and burped, and the sound grew more and more distant as the pressure reversed itself and drained away into the main pipe outside.

  He turned to Louise. It was a strange scene, Louise’s blond hair backlighted by the glow coming from the candles in the dining room, her face barely illuminated by the flashlight, and the three girls gathered around her, watching him expectantly, looking to him as the authority on all things technical.

  He could only state the obvious. “The water’s…gone off.”

  He took a few seconds to connect in his mind the series of events that might have led to this circumstance. How did water get to his house? He wasn’t even sure. Only that during either the filtration or actual pumping process, power was needed, and power, at best, was an intermittent resource these days.

  “We have the pool,” said Louise.

  Yes. And so they would drink pool water, and it would taste too much of chlorine, and it might make them sick, but what choice did they have? Pool water and army rations. This was the way it would happen. A slow and steady reduction, until the reduction was complete and life couldn’t continue. Had to dig in. The thought came to him suddenly. Find a defendable position, stock it, and dig in. Flashback to medieval times, when might made right, and those who survived were the meanest motherfuckers in the valley. Go up to his home in northern Georgia, Marblehill—even its name was tough—and protect his wife and girls for as long as he could until the reductions reduced them to the final repose of death.

  He shook his head. He had to stop thinking that way. Negative thinking never got anybody anywhere.

  In the next moment he stopped thinking anything at all, was only an organism reacting, not even necessarily interpreting what he was reacting to, just jerking to the floor at the sound of all the windows breaking, ducking instinctively even as he saw his family do the same, and only in that moment, as he felt the cool surface of the ceramic tile against his hands, did he understand that the house had been peppered with a hundred or so rounds of machine-gun fire despite the Morrison fighting vehicles protecting them out front. Who the hell were they up against? A question of the haves against the have-nots. A question of either starving to death or not starving to death. Especially now that the Western Secessionists had fouled things up.

  “Louise?”

  “Neil?”

  “Girls?”

  “We’re here, Daddy.”

  “Ashley? Morgan?”

  Responses from daughters number two and three—“I’m here, we’re here, I’m okay, we’re okay”—that he couldn’t really hear, because at that moment there came the chat-a-chat-a-chat of return machine-gun fire from their front drive, the gunner phrasing his counteroffensive with a nearly calypso rhythm, little bursts of fifty-caliber rounds for the next twenty seconds until it finally stopped, and the only sound was some people yelling far in the distance.

  “Everybody stay here,” he said. “I’m going to see what’s going on.”

  He crawled through the glass of the broken kitchen window, cutting himself, acknowledging the wetness of the blood on his hand, but too pumped up to feel the pain.

  In the dining room, he got to his feet and ran hunched over to the den.

  He got his gun, and he thought that this was the last thing he would ever have seen himself doing, skulking around his own house with a gun in his hand. He heard another burst of machine-gun fire, only this time it was several streets over—maybe gangs, maybe cops, rumors from the Morrison fighting vehicles out front, cops forming gangs, anarchy thriving in the growing lawlessness of the thickening phytosphere. How long before the Marines out in the Morrison fighting vehicles turned against them?

  How long before things broke down completely?

  He left the den, walked back into the dining room, then turned right and went into the sunroom. Shards of glass littered the floor. He scanned the backyard down to the canal and saw the Coast Guard vessel at his dock, the Escapade puny next to it, but couldn’t see any Coast Guard sailors aboard. Where had they all gone? AWOL? The flames from the house fire the next street over were bright now and, glancing to the right, he saw that the conflagration was flaming out of control. And the dark. An aging Martian scientist. That’s all he had to offer against this darkness.

  He opened the French doors and stepped onto the patio. The patio was like a jigsaw puzzle of broken glass. Goddamn it, his family was a priority family. They shouldn’t have to live like this. Marblehill. Stock it. Block it. And dig in. Maybe phone some of his old Air Force buddies. He glanced at the pool and saw something floating in it. An alligator. Animals were acting bizarrely, boldly, because of the phytosphere.

  He saw the flick of a reptilian tail, the glow of alligator eyes; funny, the way the eyes glowed like that, even in the blackness of the phytosphere. And maybe, just maybe, the alligator smelled blood, because wasn’t that blood over by the barbecue, and wasn’t that Eva lying amid a constellation of glowing coals?

  He rushed over. Called her name.

  But she didn’t answer, couldn’t answer, was too badly torn up to answer—frightening, the damage machine-gun rounds could do. She was hit somewhere in the chest but he couldn’t tell where. Her blood looked black on her black uniform, and the only blood he really saw was a spray of the stuff on her white collar. But he knew it had to be bad because a sucking sound came from her chest. Just like the sucking sound from the faucet. Alarm threatened to overwhelm him.

  He had to grab onto her clothes because she was so limp, slippery with blood, and unable to brace herself. He carried her into the house, and as he entered the sunroom he heard splashing in the pool, the alligator now agitated. His family came out of the kitchen. Morgan cried. From the other two it was, “Oh my God,” the all-purpose refrain of their teenaged lingua franca. Louise immediately dug through the drawers of the buffet and pulled out linen napkins to use as pressure dressings, her petite ballerina’s body quivering like a leaf in the wind.

  Neil felt as if he were in a dream, and that in this dream the things people said and did made no difference, that all the knee-jerk survival responses of the human race to this sinking ship of a calamity were goi
ng to add up to nothing. Nonetheless, he kept going. Even as Eva’s chest sputtered weakly, and even as blood got all over the expensive Persian carpet out in the front hall. The maid’s feet knocked over a vase. He opened the door.

  What he saw before him was a scene of devastation. The soldiers had dug pits and were burning all the dead vegetation, so that, at the four corners of his once carefully manicured lot, smoldering craters sent ash and smoke into the air. Bullet holes riddled his sports car and the cherubs of the Italianate fountain now presided over basins that had been damaged by gunfire. In the light of the various neighborhood fires, his grass looked pale—not pale like the pale grass of August, but exsanguinated, as if the chlorophyll-carrying phloem within had been bled dry of their life-sustaining processes. The carefully stuccoed walls surrounding his property, painted an evocative shade of Tuscan gold, were now cracked and pocked, and great sheets had broken away to show the concrete underneath. Out beyond the gate he saw the Morrison fighting vehicles. Marines hid behind the vehicles, some on their stomachs, their rifles ready, another on one knee, all of them peering in the same direction, as if an intensely interesting spectacle unfolded down the street.

  He walked with Eva in his arms, and he realized that he was tired. Physically exhausted, yes, but also spiritually drained, as if, like the phloem in his grass, he, too, had been bled dry. He glanced over his shoulder and saw his wife following, daintily picking her way down the steps, past the cars. He wanted to tell her to go back, but he found he didn’t have the energy. He put one foot after the other and kept heading for the front.

  “Sergeant?”

  The streetlights were out. A barricade of burning cars flamed three blocks away, where the neighborhood of the have-nots began. The sergeant turned, a black man he had gotten to know fairly well named Baskerville, grim-faced and scared, and not much older than Melissa. He turned so quickly that the red pinpoint of laser light from his scope skidded across the outside wall of the compound like a maniacal scarlet fairy.