by Hickey, Greg
He rolled onto his stomach, dug the six pieces of paper out of his pocket and laid them out on the ground in front of him. He had partially deciphered one of them already, the one indicating the crisis with the river water. Perhaps all of them were somehow related to the recent incidents in the colony. He picked up the drawing of the bed. This one might have something to do with the sleeping halls, but there was no other image on the scrap besides the bed. Samuel sorted through the other fragments and found one whose torn edges fit those of the bed image.
But even joining these pieces left a tear on one side of the combined picture. And the previous problem with the sleeping halls had nothing to do with people lying in beds; rather, the locked doors prevented the colonists from even reaching their beds. Samuel scanned the pictures once more and found one with a rectangular drawing on it. When he turned the torn edge to the right, it clearly resembled a door.
But the ripped edges did not line up with the person-bed picture, nor with any of the other drawings.
Samuel considered the remaining three pictures. Each showed one or more circular images with lines extending outward from the edges. The one that depicted the poisoned river water he understood. He studied the other two pictures, and one of them immediately became clear.
Two circles, one larger than the other. Two pointed lines between them about to stab into each other. How could he ignore the significance of this image after so much time spent dealing with circular meal cakes of different sizes, with colonists attacking one another over these inequalities?
Samuel grabbed the river image and held the two drawings together in his hands. There could be no doubt now. Someone knew. Someone knew about these disasters before they occurred. Someone had made these pictures and left them throughout the colony, and then the incidents had happened just as the pictures indicated. Because the same person who drew these pictures had poisoned the river and locked the sleeping halls and changed the sizes of the meal cakes and…The colony was under attack. Samuel could not imagine why, but it was. It had been for days and days and days, all the way back to the First Hero and the broken food machines. And then she had disappeared. All the heroes had disappeared. Samuel had never known true malice before, but he sensed it now behind these attacks. And even as he groped for answers, there was a part of him that was afraid.
But above the fear, he felt the relentless urgency that dragged his heart on at breakneck speed, the poor, valiant thing thup-thup-thupping dreadfully as it struggled to catch up. The meal cakes, the river—the attacks were getting worse. Samuel focused on the drawings. The answers must be in the drawings. He could not believe otherwise. But he did not know what to make of them. They seemed incomplete, yet he knew he could not merely wait to find the right pictures to complete them. The next attack could come at any moment. Samuel gathered the pictures to his chest and lay back in the grass. The morning chill had worn off and he felt the sun’s heat full on his face. Through his half-opened eyelids, its rays shimmered in blurry, soft lines of light that quivered as the wind fluttered through his eyelashes. His vision throbbed and whitened, but he forced his eyes open until the light washed away the sky and the clouds and the trees overhead. He closed them and the imprint of the sun remained on the backs of his eyelids, little, hazy stars floating outward from the edges of the faint orange sphere. He watched them trickle off into darkness while the bright orb at the center pulsed out an endless trail of the flickering beacons.
His eyes snapped open. He shuffled through the pictures until he found the three with the mysterious circular symbols, held them up to the sky and looked at them through squinted eyes. They were suns. Samuel turned to the scrap of paper with the two suns, the river and the face. He recalled finding it the first time he had distributed meal cakes from his handmade box. The next day, he installed the other two food boxes, worked three meal halls at the evening meal and had grown so disgusted at dealing with the other colonists that he slept outside by the fence. He awoke from his nightmare before dawn with an idea for repairing the bridges. He had worked through the rest of the night and continued into the next day. He had completed his repairs on the first bridge that day and was in the middle of the second bridge when he saw the male colonist drink from the river and collapse on the spot.
Two suns. Two days. Two days had passed from the time he found the scrap of paper predicting the poisoned river to the actual incident. Samuel looked at the paper with the different-sized meal cakes. Three suns. He could not recall the exact amount of time between his finding the paper and the malfunction with the meal cakes, but three days seemed about right. So not only had someone known about these attacks beforehand, that same someone had planned and executed them on a precise day. On these papers, in these actions, Samuel had encountered a villainous mind far superior to any other in the colony, a mind well beyond even his own. In the other colonists, he faced a collective instinct with no more rational capabilities than a herd of cattle. But this new mind was that of a hunter, cold and systematic and calculating. Yet however ignorant they might be, the colonists did not deserve to be terrorized this way. Samuel sensed this fact at once. But they would not protect themselves.
Each day Samuel drew closer to his shadowy foe. Yet he knew he might wake tomorrow to find that a new disaster had occurred overnight. And then Samuel realized how this someone had caused these catastrophes without any witnesses. He had worked in the darkness, while the whole colony lay curled up in bed. And so to catch this person, to break the secret, he too would have to work at night, standing guard over the darkened meadow while all the other colonists were helplessly asleep.
* * *
When the sun set that evening, Samuel began his new task. Within a few hours the moon rose pale blue and a sliver shy of full against the violet sky. Samuel walked the colony, traversing different paths across the meadow, the constant motion keeping his mind awake and alert. But nothing stirred in the colony that night, save for the grass and the leaves in the cool night breeze and the shimmering moonlight in the slowly churning river. When the sun rose, Samuel worked his three food halls, asked Penny to wake him in time for the midday meal and fell into bed in an empty sleeping hall.
When he explained to her that he had been awake all night, she offered at once to join him the next night, though he was not sure she fully grasped his reasons. Thereafter, she became his companion every night. In early evenings, when they both were not yet tired, they would walk together, sometimes talking, sometimes not. As the night wore on, they slept in shifts, waking each other every few hours. Samuel allowed Penny to sleep longer than he did, and slept fitfully during her turns on watch, for fear she would either fail to notice something amiss or be unable to wake him in time to stop it.
On the third night, when the moon had just risen and the other people of the colony had settled into their beds, Samuel and Penny were walking along the edge of the colony when Samuel paused for a moment to look out at the wide, empty meadow beyond the fence. The moon was full now and cast the land in a pale silver light, illuminating a vast, lonely space, seemingly so far from the colony, though it lay just beyond the fence, mere steps away. He thought he had only stopped for an instant, but it must have been longer than that, for he felt Penny’s arm encircle his, saw her head turned up to him with a worried look on her face, heard her ask “What is it?” in the distant, muffled voice of one speaking underwater.
He could not take his eyes off the steely meadow. The dark mountains came alive in the moonlight, layered and jagged like uncut gems. “Did you even wonder…” he began, then stopped.
Her frown intensified. “Come.”
She tugged gently but firmly at the sleeve of his tunic. He looked at her, at her wide, glossy eyes and creased brow, then back at the meadow. He could have stayed there all night, let his mind wander out across the open plain. But he had no good reason for doing so, and at last he turned to follow her. They walked on in silence until they moved away from the fence line and neared the cen
ter of the colony.
“Why did you stop?” Penny asked.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “It was just so… beautiful… Do you ever think about what might be out there? Outside the fence?”
She stopped and stared at him with narrowed eyes. “I can see what is out there,” she said. “Grass and more grass, all the way to the mountains. It’s the same as it is here.”
“But then why is the fence there?”
She did not seem to understand.
“I mean, if things are the same outside the fence as they are inside, then why is the fence there at all?”
She began to walk again. He followed, waiting for her response.
After a moment, she answered grudgingly, “Whoever built it must have had a good reason.”
“But what is it? Don’t you want to know?”
“No. I never thought about it. It doesn’t matter. What if there is something bad out there?”
“There could be. But what if there’s something good?”
She hesitated. The moonlight shimmered in her eyes and made them all the more dark and empty for that glimmering, silver sparkle. She was about to answer when Samuel quieted her with a quick hiss and a hand over her lips. She started, but he rested his other hand on her back reassuringly and removed his grip from her mouth to point across the colony toward one of the meal halls. There, next to the low-lying building abutting the hall, a pair of pale shadows flitted about in the faint light.
“Who are they?” she whispered.
But he hushed her with a wave of his hand and was gone, scuttling across the meadow toward the distant figures, stooped low to the ground as he darted from tree to hill, doing his best to go unnoticed. She followed him, less gracefully and rather less quietly. Yet their efforts at stealth were in vain, as all at once the figures turned and seemed to glimpse Samuel’s approaching form. In a flash they were gone, racing headlong across the meadow. Samuel stopped for a moment and marveled at their grace, the raw, smooth motions of their bodies as they ran, the sharp edges of their limbs as they sliced through the dark sky and flashed dimly in the moonlight. Then he took off after them, his strides somehow just a bit less refined.
The two darkened figures reached the fence, and each of them vaulted it in one smooth motion from an all-out sprint, placing a hand deftly on the uppermost cross pole as they leaned sideways to swing their legs over, then landing softly on the other side and rebounding instantly into a new stride. Samuel vaulted the fence nearly as well, but it was clear that he could not gain on them. Almost as soon as he landed, the figures split up abruptly and raced off across the meadow in different directions.
Samuel knew the chase was over. He slowed to a stop and stared after the figures as they fled across the wide-open meadow. In a minute they were gone, lost in the darkness and the shadow of the mountains, but in that instant Samuel knew with absolute certainty that these shadowy figures were the foes he had sought these past weeks. They were responsible for the attacks on the colony. They were responsible for the drawings he had discovered. And as Samuel recalled the way they split off so suddenly in a burst of perfect synchronicity that recalled the same degree of order and detail in the pictures on the little scraps of paper, he guessed that these drawings were not merely portents of barbarous things to come, but a carefully devised system of messages by which these people communicated their plans to one another. And now it fell to Samuel to decipher their messages and stop their attacks before further damage was done.
XIX
From that night on, Samuel and Penny focused their vigils on the colony’s seven meal halls. They patrolled the meadow under darkness, rarely sleeping at all now, and remained awake through the morning meal to distribute cakes at the three halls. Then they fell asleep in a vacant sleeping hall or the shadiest spot in the meadow. They awoke again for the midday meal (Samuel oftentimes rising from a restless sleep even before the sound of the bells), slept through the afternoon, awoke for the evening meal and waited for the sun to set before they began their nighttime rounds once more.
Two uneventful days passed after Samuel and Penny sighted the shadowy figures lurking around the meal hall. On the second evening they distributed meal cakes together at the three halls. They had further developed their complementary working rhythm in the past few days, one bending to remove a cake while the other passed one out, each setting aside broken-off portions to be combined with others to make whole cakes, each of them silently attuned to the actions of the other. Together they had managed to cut the time required for the entire process nearly in half.
When their work was done, they exited the hall together, their own cakes in hand. A white rain fell from a slate gray sky. On some unspoken signal they began to run, racing across the meadow toward the nearest sleeping hall for a brief rest before their long nighttime vigil, their bare feet skimming over the slick matted grass, eager to be free of their burden once more, if only until the next day. Dampened colonists coagulated around the hall door ahead of them, and they slid to a stop and gulped greedily at the sweet, wet air.
“Look!” Penny grabbed Samuel’s arm and pointed into the crowd.
Before Samuel had a chance to pick out anything, she darted toward the sleeping hall door, snaking through the funneled queues of putty-colored flesh. He lost her for a moment as she stooped to the ground and he stumbled forward numbly. Then her arm shot out of the crowd and her bright face bobbed above bare heads and her crystal teeth flashed in excitement as she jumped up and down to find him. She wove her way back against the current, waving aloft another scrap of paper.
Samuel did not wait for Penny to reach him. He raced past her to the hall, careening through the crowd and into the doorway. The colonists entering the hall filtered throughout the room and mingled instantly with the others inside, like molecules of gas dispersing into empty space. Samuel stopped inside the door, unsure of whom to chase. Colonists shuffled about all around him, their shoulders stooped and heads bowed. He leapt after the nearest one, an elderly male. The man made a half-hearted attempt to scurry away but Samuel was on him in an instant, seizing him by the cloth of his tunic and spitting out a flurry of questions.
“Who are you? Where do you come from? Why—”
The man stared back at Samuel, eyes wide and mouth quivering. His knees buckled, and Samuel felt the man’s entire weight supported in his arms. His voice trailed off and he let the man go. He slumped heavily to the ground, his rear end striking the floor first, his limbs falling limply about him to thunk against the hard floor.
Samuel stood over the man, not even seeing him. Around him, the other colonists had scattered into corners and behind beds. All eyes rested on him. A few tears seeped onto the cheeks of the man at his feet. Samuel left him splayed on the ground and walked back to the entrance of the hall. Penny held out the drawing she had recovered. It was another person.
Samuel fished the other scraps from his pocket. He had found a similar picture already. And as he held them in his hands, he was able to piece together these two images, along with the drawing of the bed, to form a complete picture.
Yet even this whole drawing remained meaningless. A person in a bed and a person standing next to it. One with a large head and one with an arrow pointing at his. But no indication of any forthcoming attack, other than a vague reference to the sleeping halls. Penny had nothing to offer either. Samuel was exhausted. He tucked the papers back in his pocket and stepped out into the twilit meadow. The rain had slowed to a soft mist that coated his face in tiny sparkling droplets. A few hours remained before darkness fell and he knew he needed to sleep. The other colonists had already turned their backs on them as they reentered. They napped or chattered to no one in particular or played silly, apathetic games under their bedsheets. Samuel fell into bed in a vacant row, Penny in the bed beside him. He would have plenty of time to ponder his latest discovery during the long night.
* * *
They slept a few hours and woke again as the
sun set and the rain ceased. When darkness fell, they began their vigil. Samuel studied the papers intermittently by the light of the waning moon, his ears always pricked up, eyes searching the meadow at every hint of sound or motion. But it was an uneventful night without even the slightest sign of anything amiss in the colony. And still Samuel made no headway on the mysterious drawings. At daybreak they rested again and waited for the morning meal. They passed out meal cakes and ate their own and fell asleep out by the fence line. About an hour later they were awakened by the sound of distant screams.
XX
Samuel awoke with a start, shook groggy sleep from his head and raced off in the direction of the screams. Penny became tangled in her bedsheets in her haste, but she unraveled herself and followed as fast as she could. As he approached the nearest meal hall, the point from which the cries seemed to emanate, Samuel slowed to a stop, stunned into stillness by what he saw before him. All around the meal hall, a group of strange, large brown creatures plodded about on all four legs, bending their necks toward the ground to bite off hunks of vegetation. Their legs were extremely thin and knobby, with joints that seemed to bend the wrong way, and the creatures’ heavy, cumbersome, swaying bodies appeared disproportionately large by comparison. Each creature was slightly longer from the end of its rear to the front of its chest than Samuel was tall, and had a long, thick neck and a triangular-shaped forehead with prominent brows that slanted down toward its nose and mouth. They had eyes mounted on the sides of their heads, so that it seemed quite difficult for them to look directly ahead, and their entire bodies were covered in some thin, fibrous substance, almost like dense, brown, fine-bladed grass. Beyond these creatures, he could see a handful of terrified colonists fleeing across the meadow.