Phytosphere

by Scott Mackay

  “I don’t know. This freeze-up action happens faster each time. It might reach a point where the seeding will stall the minute it hits the phytosphere.”

  “But generally speaking, your brother’s had at least some initial success.”

  “Given what I’m seeing here, I would say yes.”

  The mayor stared at the images on the monitors. “And what about…you know…your own research?

  Ira was asking about it.”

  “He was?”

  “He hasn’t entirely dismissed you, Gerry.”

  Gerry’s eyebrows twitched upward. “That’s just the shot in the arm I was looking for, Malcolm.”

  “He wanted to know about the… uh… anomalous band.”

  Hearing this, Gerry had to rethink his opinion of Ira. He motioned at the monitors. “You can see the band a lot better using infrared.” He pointed. “It runs all the way from the north pole to the south pole.

  On the infrared scale, it fluctuates into yellow, even into orange near the equator, and that means it’s generating a lot of heat. Heat means stress.”

  “Stress?”

  “Whenever things are under great pressure, or great stress, they heat up. This heat band from north to south indicates that the phytosphere comes under global cyclical stress. I’m still trying to understand it.”

  “But it has nothing to do with your brother’s poison?”

  “No. It was there before my brother used the hydrogen sulfide. I’m working on some models to explain it. It’s definitely not weather, like I first thought.”

  “And as for the hydrogen sulfide thing? Come on, Gerry. Let’s try to be positive. Give me some good old Moon-spirited attitude.”

  Gerry shook his head. “Malcolm, science isn’t a matter of positive or negative attitude. It’s simply a matter of…careful observation. You don’t want to cloud things up with any kind of attitude.”

  They brought Gerry a cot and he stayed at the observatory around the clock. All the good food was gone, and he ate emergency rations, what the Moon had on hand in case of war, famine, or political unrest on Earth: mostly soup packs, rice cakes, and a dozen different pill supplements.

  Members of the committee drifted in and out to watch the monitors, and Gerry could tell from the tightness at the corners of their eyes that they were anxious, still rooting for his brother, but nervous because it seemed to be taking so long.

  Mitch Bennett came in and made a show of checking over the equipment, but his eyes kept drifting to the monitors, his small lips pursing, his brow settling. He seemed angry at the shroud. He finally left after saying in a sullen tone, “It’s like watching a piece of cheese ripen.”

  The mayor came and went in various states of sobriety—and it wasn’t funny, because Gerry knew what it was like to be a drunk—always smelling of booze, for the most part holding it together but then slipping up with a slurred word or two, running off to the observatory washroom for a quick nip, joking about what they were going to do when all the booze ran out, and finally staring at the main monitor as if it were an oracle.

  “Do you think you’re going to need a second Smallmouth still?” asked the mayor.

  “Why? Is Ira changing his mind?”

  “I’ll talk to Ira. He’s not…above fear.”

  When the mayor left, Gerry spoke to Glenda again, because that was one great thing about Neil’s attempt: With the holes in the phytosphere, the lines of communication were open again.

  “It seems to be stalling,” she told him. “At least from what I can see in Old Hill.”

  “Any sign of Maynard?”

  “No. But Buzz drove by again.”

  “I had some good times with Buzz. Except for Marblehill. Marblehill was a disaster.”

  “I wish he’d stop driving by. He came by last night. I heard his truck a mile away.”

  Ian came in a number of times and, surprisingly, he took only a few nips from his flask.

  Gerry commented on it.

  Ian motioned at the monitors. “All this…makes a man think. I always told myself I’d sober up by the end of it all. I’m cutting back as much as I can.”

  Stephanie came to visit him.

  The minute she saw the monitors she said, “It’s not working.” And it was funny because Stephanie, nothing more than a showgirl, seemed to cut through the crap better than anybody else. “We’ve got to come up with something different fast.”

  He studied the monitors and realized Stephanie was right.

  Each new seeding brought no more than a pinprick of deterioration, tiny points of stasis where the hydrogen sulfide was trying to gain a meager toehold. It was as if the phytosphere was now putting up its best guard against the attack.

  He was with Stephanie when he first noticed a change around the existing holes. In infrared terms, it was manifested as a rim of yellow forming along the edges of the green, like the finger of God reaching out and breathing a new spring into the dormant foliage, yellow being an indicator of warmth, and therefore, of life.

  His shoulders sank.

  He showed Stephanie, and together they followed the growth for the next hour. He remembered the weeds in his Old Hill backyard, particularly the dandelions in spring; of how quickly his too-big lawn had been covered with a galaxy of ragged yellow stars, and how dozens of other green miscreants, genus unknown, had sprouted up between the patio stones and along the edges of the house. The phytosphere seemed vicious in its will to live. The yellow rims at the edges of the various holes seemed to pulsate as if with golden blood, and the holes themselves grew noticeably smaller. He took measurements, and electronically conveyed them to the mayor’s office, Mitch’s office, and even Ira’s office.

  The measurements spoke for themselves.

  Attitude had nothing to do with it.

  20

  Neil’s girls got up early at Homestead because they wanted to see the sunrise. Neil opened his eyes and watched them get ready at the sink. He would have smiled if the awful truth hadn’t been revealed to him last night in a special drop from the Moon. Dr. Gerald Thorndike has confirmed new growth in the phytosphere. Mechanism of defense: dormancy. In other words, Neil had unleashed a toxic winter, and the xenophyta had survived by lapsing into a state of suspended animation.

  And all the gunfire on the base last night. What had that been about?

  He swung his feet out of the army cot he shared with Louise and glanced around their fairly large officers’ barracks. He heard the rise and fall of jet engines on the tarmac—pilots gearing up for maneuvers. His head pounded. A hangover, but not an alcohol hangover—a stress hangover. Because what was he going to do now? Develop a virus? A plant disease? But how? He wasn’t used to working like this, with scattered personnel and diminished resources. He was used to working with the full and generous backing of the United States government, and not in a place where things were breaking down.

  And now Gerry.

  Telling him he had failed.

  “Let’s see you do something, Ger,” he mumbled under his breath.

  “Huh?” said Louise.

  “Are you going to get up and see the sunrise?” he asked.

  This was their ritual now; sun worshippers, the lot of them.

  “I’m thinking of painting the barracks. I’d like it yellow, Neil. See if you can convince Greg to get us some yellow paint.”

  “Isn’t it enough he can feed us?”

  She glanced at the girls. “Shall we let the girls go first?”

  They hadn’t had sex in a while.

  “I have a few things to talk to Greg about.”

  “Yellow paint?”

  He grinned. “Sure. Yellow paint.”

  They all got dressed and had their rations, and went outside in their shorts and T-shirts and sandals because even at this time of morning it was sweltering. It was glorious to see the sun slanting through the morass of melting green xenophyta. The entire parade ground was alive with light and shadow.

  “There’
s Greg,” he said.

  “You’re not telling me everything, are you?” said Louise.

  He paused. “We’re going to be fine.”

  “So can I come and talk to Greg with you?”

  “I’d prefer if you didn’t.”

  He moved off.

  Colonel Gregory Bard was in uniform, but without his jacket. He was tall, and had pools of sweat soaking the armpits of his blue Air Force shirt. He was as skinny as everybody else. He cast a nervous glance over his shoulder as he approached Neil; that’s what Neil remembered about Greg from all those years ago when they had been in the Air Force together, that he always seemed like a man who knew secrets, or who was involved in conspiracies up to his eyeballs. Greg’s caginess dissolved as he watched the girls appreciate the sun. These girls. And Louise. In sunshine. His family. He was lucky to have them.

  “So?” he said to Greg. “Is the place still standing?”

  “It’s still there.”

  “Any sign of damage?”

  “Someone’s broken in.”

  “They have?”

  “But the place doesn’t looked wrecked or anything,” said Greg.

  “So everything’s okay? All the vehicles and so forth?”

  “Everything looks fine, Neil.”

  “And you were able to land two choppers on the lawn okay?”

  “That’s quite a place. I had no idea you’d done so well for yourself. And right next to Chattahoochee.

  What a great location.”

  “And you’ve got some guys up there right now?”

  “The best. Harmon, Earl, and Scott. You remember those guys? Then I got some young guys.

  Fernandes, Rostov, Douglas, Nabozniak, and Sinclair. All top-notch.”

  Neil gestured toward the west. “So those guys down at the other end of the base—”

  Greg shook his head, a slow shifting of his chin from side to side as his eyes seemed to seek out an indeterminate spot on the tarmac. “Just some disgruntled airmen who think with their stomachs, not with their heads.”

  “How many are there?”

  “Enough to make a nuisance of themselves.”

  “So, like a… a mutiny?”

  “A mutiny? I wouldn’t call it a mutiny. I would call it more a disgreement. About the way I’ve decided to ration the food. Especially now that we have a dwindling number of stores.”

  “But they have guns.”

  Greg squinted up at the sun. “And a few other things.”

  “Greg, I have to make sure my family is safe.”

  Greg looked away from the sun and focused on Neil. The change in attitude, though not profound, was signaled by a locking of his neck, a thrusting of his jaw, and a give-me-a-break narrowing of his eyes.

  “You don’t have to worry about them, Neil. We’ve got a perimeter set up. And we’re bleeding all the stores to this end. If those guys don’t want to play by the rules, then it serves them right.”

  “Maybe you should just airlift me and my family out now.”

  Greg motioned up at the sky. “We have the second line to think of. I was speaking to Assistant Secretary of Defense Fonblanque personally about that. Once that’s done—”

  “Are they sending more troops to deal with this…this little base insurgency?”

  “Insurgency? Come on, Neil.”

  “Whatever it is.”

  “A bunch of young cadets playing with guns who don’t know any better. That’s what it is. We’ll have it mopped up in no time.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Neil, work on the virus thing. Let me handle everything else. There’s no point in inventing problems for yourself when you’ve already got this big one to solve.”

  21

  The shadow of the mending shroud closed in on Wake County, and to Glenda it was like a vise closing around her soul. Her forehead was moist with perspiration. She was wearing her lightest cotton dress, material so thin it hardly weighed an ounce, but the heat now seemed to have a physical presence, a touch that was soft but insidious, and the temperature quickly drained a person’s energy.

  She got up from bed and closed her hand around her cool rifle. Why didn’t they just get it over with?

  The sheriff’s brother drove by every couple of hours now, his rusted hulk of a vehicle bumping and rattling along the road like a mechanical ghost. She knew that they knew about the extra food, and she also knew that they were going to make a try, so why didn’t they just do it? She listened, but heard no vehicle. Outside, a phantom green dusk settled over the dead, brown land. The quiet was like the breath of an old man expiring at Cedarvale in the middle of a sleepy afternoon.

  She left her bedroom and stopped at Hanna’s door. Hanna sat by the window, leaning into the waning light as if she were a plant starved for sunshine. She held a book in her hands, couldn’t use the electronic reader, which she so often preferred for her school texts, but held an honest-to-God book, made out of honest-to-God paper; and it wasn’t just any book, but one of Hanna’s old books, a children’s book.

  Hanna was holding it up to the remaining light with a far-off look in her eyes, and she looked so stoned on the medication from Cedarvale that Glenda was worried about her, and wondered if she was abusing the medication as a way to deaden her daily existence. When the medicine ran out, what then? Would Hanna literally cough herself to death? Would her body finally grow so weak from the racking coughs and lack of food that she would slip into a coma and die?

  Day at a time, day at a time, day at a time—her mother’s mantra came back with an urgent and panicked clarity. “Hanna?” she said.

  Her daughter turned in the slow and lugubrious way of a heroin addict riding the horse full speed.

  “Jake’s asleep. You know that, don’t you?”

  “What?”

  “He was sleeping when I went for a pee.”

  “But it’s only eight in the evening.”

  “He’s been sleeping a lot.”

  Glenda hurried to the living room.

  In the dim green light coming through the picture window she saw Jake sprawled on the sofa, his arm hanging over the edge so that it touched the floor. The gun was next to his hand, its barrel angled off toward the front door, a box of bullets open beside it with a few cartridges, like scattered gold nuggets, on the floor. Yes, sleeping all the time, fourteen to sixteen hours a day, like the depressed old people at Cedarvale. Maybe she should have raided the Cedarvale dispensary for some happy pills as well.

  She walked over and shook his arm. “Jake? Jake, honey?”

  His head shot quickly to one side, and he was insensible for a few seconds as he clutched wildly for the gun.

  Once he had it, he sat up. “Are they here? Are they here?”

  “No, Jake, no. You fell asleep.”

  Jake cast an anxious glance out the window. “Is that Buzz’s truck I hear?”

  She listened, her paranoia taking hold like a bad fever. All she heard was the quiet. Not even any gunfire up in the hills anymore, as if they had all killed each other.

  Jake got up and walked to the window. The fear came off him like sparks from a pinwheel—fear only a kid of twelve could feel. She walked to the window and joined him. She looked at the sky. The light of an August sunset seeped through the ragged hole in the green thing up there, and the edges of the hole, as it closed up, weren’t so much green as turquoise, as if hailstones refracted the light. The road was empty.

  There was no sign of Maynard, Buzz, or Brennan—bastards, the lot of them.

  “I’m going to one of the stashes to get some food,” she said. “You need something to eat. Eat something, then go to bed.”

  “Which stash are you going to?”

  “By the sycamores. Stash one.”

  “Can I go?”

  “You’ve got to stay here. In case they come.”

  “You think they will?”

  “They’d be fools to when it’s light like this. We’d mow them down. But then Sheriff Fult
on’s always been a fool.”

  “I’ll use the binoculars.”

  “Don’t drop them this time.”

  “Mom, that was an accident.”

  “They’re your father’s good pair.”

  “When are you going to learn to trust me?”

  She walked to the kitchen and out the back door.

  All the dead things in the forest—animals that had starved—were rotting in this heat, and the whole county smelled like roadkill up close. She trotted over to the fence, painfully aware that any of Fulton’s men could be taking a bead on her from up in the hills, and used the cover of the dead cedar hedge to make her way to the back.

  She paused next to Leigh’s shed and looked into the woods. With the light coming down in this eerie way, and the shadows gathering in the lifeless trunks, it didn’t even look like Earth anymore, but like some weird and suffocated version of Earth.

  She ventured more deeply into the woods. She came to stash one. She dug—and she dug and she dug until she had uncovered stash one. As she was hauling it out of the warm, dead earth, she heard the bump and rattle of Buzz Fulton’s truck coming along the highway, but only for a moment before it died at the top of the hill, to the east of the house. Her heart jumped as if with booster cables and her shortness of breath worsened, and she listened and listened, and tried to hear the truck, but the silence, after the usual signature cacophony of his vehicle, was like a death writ. He wasn’t passing by this time. He was stopping. Up at the top of the hill. And it couldn’t be good, oh, no, it had to be bad, because if he was stopping at the top of the hill, it meant he had plans.

  She shoved the stash into its hole.

  She ran out of the woods into the yard, conscious of the thump of her sneakers against the dead grass.

  She entered through the back door, and locked it manually because the console didn’t have power anymore.

  The front door was open and, getting closer, she saw Jake standing on the slab of concrete they called

  the porch. He held the binoculars to his eyes and stared up the hill.

  She stepped out onto the stoop beside him.

  He took the binoculars away. “I think they’re here, Mom. I think this might be the night.”