Eden's Root

by Rachel Fisher

  “Smart girl,” his smile was sad. “So smart. Smarter than a bunch of scientists and politicians and lawyers...smarter than a bunch of stupid grownups, I can tell you that from experience.”

  He touched her hand and continued. “So, at the same time that all these changes were being made, we all were slowly getting sicker and sicker and there was no way to stop it because there was no escape from the altered food supply.” Mike reached out for her hand and gripped it hard, so hard that she winced. His eyes were hard and dark.

  He shook her hand as he gripped it. “That is what is so diabolical, so insidious, Fi. That is what makes it so very bad, the fact that there is no escape. Nearly all the food that we are eating is seriously altered in some way and we can’t do anything about it!”

  Fi’s her heart pounded and her mind raced. What if everything she ate was killing her, was breaking something inside of her irreparably? But I have to eat to live, she thought. There’s no choice! And what about Kiara? And Maggie? Her teeth began to chatter again as she thought of everyone she loved. Her father was right. It was the worst thing that she could possibly imagine. As Mike continued, his eyes grew distant and his grip loosened. He didn’t seem to notice Fi’s shivering.

  “And that was what Louis was always fighting for in Diaspora, and what he fought for in Eden. Louis was smart enough to know that our food was making us Sick. He knew that we had to give the residents of Diaspora heirloom food strains, the ones that predate our tinkering; in order to be sure that the food they were eating was safe. Only now it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because beyond just dying slowly like me and Lukie,” he choked, “They’ve completely screwed up everything now. Now death will come for us all very quickly.” His face crumpled, “Because this time they blew it all up.”

  Acceptance

  ----------- Fi -----------

  As she lay on her cot trying to rest, Fi shivered, thinking about her father’s words. Though she was not cold, she could not control the shaking. She knew she was having some kind of panic attack, but she just stayed quiet. She didn’t want to wake her father. Over the beeping of the monitors, she could hear his soft breathing. She wished she could believe that he was kidding, or worse, that he was losing his mind as he weakened, but she knew that wasn’t true. He’d shown more force than she’d heard from him in months, and he’d looked her straight in the eye, his own eyes dark and stormy. His intensity was all the convincing she needed. No matter what she thought about it, she knew that he believed what he told her.

  That almost all the grasses and food crops around the world were suddenly dying very young and not growing back. That all the crops that fed the world were dying at once.

  When he showed her the video that Louis had sent him, of that field in Canada dying, it had made her stomach drop. There was nothing to really compare to the visual of an entire field of grass shoots starting to yellow, then blacken, and then crumble away to nothing. Once the grasses died all that was left was a dry dusty field where nothing grew, like a desert. The video had been time lapse, but it was only six months time. Six months and a beautiful meadow turned into a desert before her eyes.

  “This is happening all over the world at once Fi,” Mike had explained. “People all over the world rely on the wheat, corn, and rice crops to survive Fi,” he had said, “Even soy, which isn’t a grass, has been affected. The plants all grow for a while and then very early, they start to die.”

  “Why?” Fi had asked him. “What’s causing it?”

  Her father had shaken his head. “We aren’t a hundred percent sure. There are so many different problems with what we’ve done, one of the worst being that we don’t have a good record of all the changes we’ve made. The other is that you never know what will happen when wild species cross with our genetically modified ones. The recombinations can be surprising. But what Louis told me was that it appeared that the plants that had been studied up in Canada showed a new genetic marker. They think the genes in this section code for early senescence.”

  “What’s senescence?” she’d asked, confused.

  “Early aging,” he’d answered. “The plants are basically aging as if they were old plants. A single famine in Africa or Southeast Asia can cause millions of deaths. If all of the grains disappear, if there is continued sterility so that they disappear for years to come or the strains are lost forever,” he shuddered. “The estimated losses to starvation would be staggering. We could lose more than two-thirds of the world’s human population, maybe more, in just months to a year.”

  When he’d told her the numbers, the expected losses, she’d felt completely overwhelmed. He hadn’t been kidding when he’d said ‘end of the world as we know it’. She lay in the dark, replaying his words. He had said that the death of the grasses alone would be enough to send the world into a global famine that would kill hundreds of millions, but with so much else in the food supply tainted or dying, this famine was going to kill nearly everyone. It could be a year, it could be months, but the Famine was coming. Feeling the fear getting the better of her as she shivered, she wrapped her arms around herself beneath the blankets.

  Fi felt haunted as she remembered his words, his strangling grip on her arm, “You’re the one Fi, no one else. You must keep Kiara safe.” Jesus, what was he thinking? He must be hallucinating. ‘I’m only thirteen years old!’ she screamed inside her head. She made no outward sound or change in her breathing to draw attention. Fi breathed deeply, feeling the release with the scream, even though it had been soundless. It helped to scream, even inside your own head.

  Squeezing the anxiety out, she screamed internally a few more times, forcing herself to avoid the real tears that pricked at the edges of her eyes and ears, inside her, just below the surface. She didn’t even understand why she couldn’t tell Maggie, why she couldn’t work with her mother to prepare. Why just me, she thought angrily. But her father had been insistent. It had to be her. He probably thought that since she was the youngest and fittest…her thoughts stopped. The fittest…she thought again.

  Suddenly, her mind raced through a serious of pictures in fast-forward: Maggie pulling on an extra sweater even when it was warm in the house. Maggie, having another headache and saying that she was tired again. Maggie, picking at her food and hardly eating as her frame grew thinner with each passing day. Maggie, constantly going to appointments that she didn’t explain to Fi. Maggie, with growing circles under her eyes, creases in her forehead, and greys at her scalp. Oh God, Jesus No, she thought. No! No! Really, she thought angrily. Really?

  She remembered Louis’ letter to Mike, the reference to ‘illness in your family’. Of course I have to be the one, she thought. All this time she’d ignored the warnings because she had just thought Maggie was in mourning. But of course that wasn’t it, she realized. Maggie was also Sick.

  Fi felt a cold seeping through her as if it has originated within her heart and been pumped slowly to every inch of her body. Once the cold had crept over the last few millimeters of her fingers, scalp, and toes she realized that she was empty. It was too much. There was no more room to feel. Not tonight…maybe not ever again. She rolled over on the cot feeling numb and closed her eyes. Exhaustion won over near dawn and she drifted off to sleep.

  The dream came like a fever. Her father ran ahead of her through a barren field.

  “C’mon Fi!” he shouted, gesturing for her to hurry. He was thin and shuffling like a small, frightened ghost. Her mother, carrying Kiara, ran ahead in the distance, her dark hair streaming behind her. Fi was the last.

  “Fi, C’mon!” her father yelled, his eyes wild. Fi could see sunflowers on the edge of the field ahead of them, but something about them was strange. As she ran, they seemed to be falling away, like a waterfall. She ran as hard as she could across the bare field, the dust rising in her face as her feet hit the dry ground. With each step she could feel it crumbling beneath her.

  “Papa!” she yelled as she started to lose her footing, “Papa!
” she screamed as the Earth gave beneath her and she tumbled, surrounded by dust and sunflowers, her stomach hitting her throat. “Papa!”

  Fi jerked awake in her cot. Realizing where she was, she cursed and sat up. She panted and gripped the sides of the cot, working to slow her breath. She listened as she breathed, but the room was quiet, her father had not been disturbed. She exhaled and sank back onto her pillow. She pushed her damp hair back, pulling it out from beneath her sweaty neck.

  “Well, shit,” she finally said into the quiet. “Shit. Shit. Shit.”

  She continued to lie in her bed and a feeling of calm settled over her. It was a wasted thought now to wish that she hadn’t gone to sleep before she’d made her decision. There was no need to have this silly nightmare. Life had already presented her with a real one. She knew what she had to do. When her father stirred, she wrapped the blanket around her cold shoulders and walked over to him.

  “Good Morning Papa,” she said warmly, already feeling the sense of changing roles. “You had a good sleep, that’s wonderful.” She tucked his blanket around his arm and touched his face. He reached for her wrist with his hand and encircled it.

  “My Fionnuala Marie,” he sang and kissed her hand.

  “It’s going to be ok Papa,” she said. “You were right. I’m the one, and I am ready. Now I just need you to tell me what to do.”

  The Day After

  ----------- Fi -----------

  After her Uncle John dropped her off, Fi went through school the next day in a complete daze, her mind spinning. How the hell was she supposed to pay attention after the night she’d had? Now she found herself sneaking glances at all the other students, the teachers, even at Samantha and her group of thugs, and feeling horror. How long would they all be living? When was everything going to come to an end? She tried to focus on what her father had told her so far. The most important thing, he said, was that she could tell no one, betray nothing. Her father only had enough information and resources to save her and her sister.

  At first, Fi was appalled. “Papa, the Skillmans are family too!” she’d protested. “We have to tell them, we have to bring them with us!” She’d cried, suddenly angry with him. She couldn’t leave them, her brother, sisters, and extra parents. Though Fi could see the remorse in his tear-filled eyes, Mike had shaken his head.

  “We can’t Fi,” he’d insisted. “We can’t. Believe me, I have thought about it over and over again, but it can’t be any other way. I have no actual guarantee that you’ll be able to get into Eden when you get there, but I know they will be much more likely to take a couple of children than an entire extended family.” Fi nodded painfully when Mike said a ‘couple children’. It was his only outright reference to Maggie’s condition, and Fi knew that they would never talk about it. Of course he was right, Maggie’s condition was a game-changer. It meant that her family, her sister, was in grave danger not just from the Famine, but the other things that would come with it.

  “Besides Fi,” he continued. “Many people will survive who do not make it to Eden, but the world is going to be changed, it will be hard. The Skillman children have both parents and all of them are healthy. They can work together to survive. If you stayed with them, you would be a burden on them. If you tried to take them with you and then can’t get them into Eden or you can’t find it, then they become a burden on you. It’s going to be easier for small groups to survive and it’s going to be a world where it’s every person for him or herself.”

  There was no choice. She was not even allowed to tell her mother or sister for fear that they would think she was losing her mind or that they would tell others.

  “But Papa,” she’d protested, “Why don’t I just tell Maggie and we put Kiara in the car, drive to Quebec and then look for Eden from there right now? You have those coordinates you figured out from Louis’ code in the note.”

  He’d smiled. “I was planning to do something like that before I got sick,” he’d said, his voice tightening, “Before Louis disappeared and our access to Eden with him.”

  Mike’s tone had been regretful. “But I could always tell your mother that we were taking a surprise vacation, a long weekend, and then get her nearly all the way there without her knowing the truth. But that plan isn’t even feasible for you. The only way you’d get Maggie to drive you and Kiara all the way to Quebec with a bunch of stuff is if you told her the truth…”

  Fi had nodded in understanding. There was no option to tell Maggie anything, because no what matter the circumstances were, she would not have accepted leaving the Skillmans behind. She would have insisted on bringing them along too.

  Mike’s gaze had been firm and serious. “Fi I need you to promise me.” She remembered that she had looked away, unwilling to absorb it all. “Fi?” In the end, she’d turned back and held his gaze. “I need you to promise me that you will tell no one and betray nothing until it’s time to go.”

  “And how will I know that it’s time to go?” she’d asked, frustrated.

  He’d closed his eyes. “As soon as you can, when it starts to get warmer. The cold is too dangerous and difficult for Maggie right now.” He was right of course. She couldn’t drag them out there right now while it was freezing. She would have to wait until spring. Fi didn’t admit to herself that she also didn’t want to leave her father.

  Then he’d added, “But if the government comes to town then you run no matter what, do you understand? We don’t know what they will do. So, do you promise me then?”

  Of course, she had acquiesced. “Yes Papa, you have my promise. I will tell no one and betray nothing until the time has come to go.” As she’d said it, she’d seen him relax just a bit and she felt the weight settle on to her own shoulders. He knew that she would never break a promise to her dying father, no matter how difficult it was.

  As she left, he warned, “You’re going to have to make hard decisions to protect Kiara and your mother. You will have to endure hardships.” She’d nodded, realizing that she felt ready for hardships. All of the losses in her life were already hardening her, already preparing her to suffer. Her coping skills would serve her well.

  Now she just needed to develop more of them, she thought as she pretended to pay attention to her math teacher. Never in history had a school day dragged so long. Today was the first day that she was thankful that Sean was not in school with her. She wasn’t doing that well at covering her shock and anxiety.

  The worst part of the day was lunch. Every piece of food that she put into her mouth sent shivers down her spine. She watched the kids eating happily around her…so many that were so overweight eating so much crappy food. No matter, she thought. Her father had told her that pretty soon starvation would be the greater threat so today I will eat the Sickfood, she thought and she smiled. Calling it Sickfood was her own way of having a little internal rebellion, a little “middle finger” to the companies who marketed this stuff as healthy and the government who looked the other way.

  When the bell finally rang at the end of the day, Fi grabbed her stuff and buried herself in the corner of her bus seat with her headphones and sunglasses on her head and arms crossed. Her whole demeanor said, ‘Leave me the hell alone,’ and everyone did. No one sat next to her and Samantha and her crew completely ignored her. When she got home, she scarfed down a snack and gave her mother a hug. Maggie seemed tired, she noticed. There were a few more wrinkles starting around her eyes.

  “Mama, is it ok if I ask Aunt Lucy to drop me off to see Papa on her way to the gym?” she asked. “I just want to spend as much time with him as possible and I know you’re waiting until after Kiara’s dance class…” her voice trailed off.

  “Of course it’s ok, if it’s ok with Lucy.” She gave Fi a kiss on the top of her head. Fi was still so petite that at 5’9”, Maggie could do that.

  “Thanks Mama,” Fi smiled. “I already texted her and she said it was ok if it was ok with you. I just have to go upstairs to offload my books and get a few things t
o read to Papa.” She turned and ran up the stairs, taking them two at a time as she flew into her room and shut the door.

  Fi opened her backpack and dumped it out her school stuff into a pile on her bed. She tucked her father’s journal back into the pack and opened the door to her room and peered down the hallway. Maggie was downstairs in her studio whistling, the sound temporarily catching Fi’s attention. Maggie only whistled when she was happy and when she was really sad. Fi sighed. She knew which whistle it was today.

  She tiptoed down to Kiara’s room and went to the bookcase. Fi quickly cleared the books from the bottommost shelf and set them on Kiara’s bed. She bent down and squinted at the surface. A tiny fabric tab stuck up out of the wood. Fi stifled a laugh of surprise. Despite Papa’s instructions to find this tab, it hadn’t seemed real until she saw it herself. It was so small that no one who wasn’t looking for it would ever notice it. She grabbed the tab and pulled, gasping when the shelf bottom lifted to reveal the secret compartment.

  She reached inside and began pulling out the items that had been stashed there by her father. There was an LED compass, a bunch of field guides, binoculars, a large hunting knife with a sheath and a sharpener, and at the bottom, large rolls of cash tied with rubber bands. She quickly stuffed all the items into her backpack and then reached into the compartment one more time and felt cold, smooth metal under her fingertips. Her hands shook as she pulled out the Glock 9mm and held it in her open palm for a minute, feeling the weight of it in her hands.

  “Wow,” she whispered to no one. “Is this really happening?” The gun felt heavy, cold, ominous. She put it into her backpack carefully. Thank God Papa had assured her it wasn’t loaded or she might have been terrified to touch it. She reached back into the compartment for the packs of ammunition and quickly jammed those into her backpack as well. She could hear Maggie’s footsteps on the stairs.