The Distance

by Jeremy Robinson

  My finger slides over the trigger. A moment of panic sets in when I think I haven’t loaded the weapon, but I replay sliding the cartridge in and shoving the bolt forward. It’s in there. Just don’t miss. I breathe out and pull.

  The shot goes wild as I shout in surprise and cover my ears. But it’s not the cough of the rifle or its kick that has surprised me, it’s the indistinct, deafening twang that is suddenly everywhere, an explosion of sound, like the breaking of one, loose guitar string. The deer darts away. I should, too, I think, but I have no idea which direction the sound is coming from.

  Quiet returns as cold seeps into my backside. I’ve fallen backward into the gray slush. I stand up, lean the rifle against a tree and brush off the icy chunks clinging to my pants. I’m wet through and the gray sky unleashes a fresh surge of rain. Was that thunder?

  I search the gray sky for flashes, but see nothing.

  It was them. What else could have made that noise?

  Fear rolls up my back to my neck. I need to get out of these woods.

  As I pick up the rifle, the noise blasts again, so sudden I cry out and bend at the waist, one hand over my head, one across my belly. When the wail keeps going, the guitar string not breaking, not giving in, louder, longer, I run.

  34

  POE

  Slushy mud clings to my boots, making them slick, adding to the chaos of my flight. Before getting pregnant, I ran marathons, and had planned on continuing to do so, one of those crazy women who keep running right through the ninth month. But now, what the hell was I thinking? Was my life so bland that I had to create painful experiences for myself? Pregnant running. So stupid. The bottom of my extended belly aches with each bounce of my body, the muscles stretching with Squirt’s growing heaviness. I have to pee, and it might happen without my consent.

  I’m running and tripping through the woods, confused and desperate and surrounded by horrible sounds, when I come across a slush and mud covered trail I know leads back to the house. The twanging resonance ceases, and I stop running, catching my pregnant breath for a second. The hell was that sound? You would think that the amount of weirdness I’ve experienced already might have prepared me for more, or made me immune to it, but that’s not at all what happens. Mental numbness enters my brain, my body physically cold, rain dripping off the tip of my nose and running down my back. My hood fell back. Too late now. The cold will keep me sharp.

  I start walking toward home, and then stop when I hear a metallic twang, distant this time. Maybe it is lightning? Maybe they did something to the air? Ellen Ripley returns to my mind. What do science fiction movies call it? Terraforming? Could they be changing the atmosphere to suit them? A soft hissing, like something hurtling through the air, follows the distant sound, growing louder. A red-tailed hawk screeches out of a pine tree above me, making me jump. The hissing increases, urgent. I scan the sky through the cross hatched lines of countless pine needles.

  Lights flash in the clouds beyond. Silent. The gods awakening.

  And then, waging war.

  The voice of battle—what else could the electric explosions and bright lights above be—descends over the woods, sound chasing light. Stupefaction roots me to the spot. The hissing returns, from several different directions, a patchwork of layers intersecting. Fifty feet away, a projectile, trailing smoke, plows into the forest, chopping through branches before colliding with one of the tallest pines in the area, severing the top of the tree and sending splinters in every direction. Branches tumble and crash through the trees. The sharp crack of wood breaking startles me into movement, and I bolt.

  I’m off the path, away from the falling tree. Roots still buried under the snow catch my boots and I stumble, off balance, and land on my hands and knees with a splash. I glance down. My belly hovers above the earth, untouched.

  I squint through the downpour. A surprising mammalian instinct circulates through me. I am an animal. I protect my young and run from danger. The simplicity of this shift hyperfocuses my senses, bringing all things clearer. On my knees in the slush, I see the miniscule details—the small pock marks made by each raindrop, the contrast of green pine needles against white snow and the blink of my own dripping eyelashes.

  All around, debris zips through the woods, hitting trees and ground. With a loud chop, like the sound of an axe blade sinking into wood, a bit of black, the size of a golf ball, embeds itself in a nearby pine’s thick bark. That could have been me. The sounds grow sharper as I focus on them. This shit is coming down everywhere.

  And then, I move.

  I run, Squirt clutched in one arm.

  Rain and energy spill over me. Branches creak through the forest, wind through leafless winter limbs. I stop, gasping for air, eyes darting. Which way? Which way?

  Bright light flashes through the forest. It’s followed quickly by a strange twanging explosion and the thunderous clap that rattles the ground beneath my feet. An unnatural blast of air, hot and sudden, bends the rain-pelted saplings around me. Another explosion, further away, sends more branches plummeting to the ground with a thunderclap. And then another, closer this time. I smell smoke.

  The forest is burning. Even with the rain.

  The explosions burst quicker and lighter now, one on top of the other, firecrackers at a parade, and I plummet through the pouring rain deeper into the woods. Pine branches rake across my cheeks as I fight through the trees and undergrowth, pummeled by this battle, this attack, this fight.

  Am I a part of this? Or just a casualty of it? It feels like the very forest is resisting my flight. Holding me back.

  I pause in a clearing, out of breath, and try to get my bearings. The rain and the explosions slow like they’re on cue, in syncopation with me. Smoke drifts through the air, and I can hear the crackle of nearby fire. My nose stings and my lungs burn from breathing smoky air.

  A loud creaking to my right signals a tree about to fall. I can see it, a middle-aged pine, descending with more grace than I would have imagined possible. It snaps the branches of other trees as it goes, and lands with a squishy thud on the melting, muddy ground.

  That final thud marks the end of the chaos. The rain falls, undaunted.

  I wrap my arms around a sugar maple and place my cheek against its bark. I’m still alive, I think, and I note that I’m slightly disappointed by the realization. A part of me would like for this solitude, this nonsense, this terrible work, both boring and exhausting, to reach a limit. Apathy cycles through me. And then, after a time, when my breathing is normal, I feel my mind’s emotional fracture present once more. Alive, but broken. It would be so simple to take the three necessary steps forward to plunge, free-fall, into despair. I think it would feel cool there, a soothing darkness, like a dry cave meant for long hibernation. These thoughts feel more real, and normal, than what I just experienced.

  But then I feel a kick from inside, a reminder. She’s wary, and reminds me that we both need to keep an eye out for danger, the interior peril. I’m watching you, Squirt says, and I imagine her doing that two-finger eye point thing, her miniscule fingers extended, crucial levity that obligates my retreat from the edge. If things are funny, I can endure.

  A small crackling draws me away from the maple and my introspection—a low, quiet fire, almost sweet, soon to be extinguished by the rain and general sloppiness of the spring thaw, creeps bright against the gray snow and leafless scrubby twigs of the forest floor. Saplings are burning. I watch it, loving its aliveness; it’s an indication of oxygen and normalcy, the planet still functioning, physics still somewhat intact. The flames smell wonderful.

  A distant pop resonates through the woods, loud, and then a buzz, like when a transformer blows during a heavy storm in a suburban neighborhood, everyone wondering what that sound was, followed by a flash of light in the sky. Whole, not linear like lightning, but a sheet, a blast, covering the air above the trees. I’ve never seen anything like it.

  Milliseconds later, a huge crash, shaving the forest. The sna
pping is so loud I know it’s trees breaking, not branches. A pressure wave follows, knocking me back and bending the tall trees above, their great bodies leaning away, trying to flee. The ground ripples like water, chasing this pressure wave, knocking me off my feet again, back down into the slush.

  Then, quiet.

  Again.

  The drizzle dwindles to a mist. The freezing wet has reached my underwear, and I just let it, imagining myself as part of the ground. I could spread out, my cells mixing with all this slush and mud, a painless surrender.

  Squirt, as usual, literally kicks my butt into gear, her squirms switching my brain back on, reminding me of my responsibility. For the first time, the word mother materializes.

  I wait in the silent trees, and then curiosity gets the best of me. This most recent phenomenon, while loud, startling, and potentially life threatening, still feels less scary than everything else that I’ve experienced lately. Explosions and lights in the sky seem benign, almost commonplace compared to people turned to powder in seconds. I need to see what that was. It could be important. Could provide answers to any of a million different questions.

  It’s worth the risk.

  Inside my thoughts, sloshing through the woods, I can almost see the house’s windows through the tunnel of trees. As I walk, the slush and mud give way to surprising dryness, like autumn ground, crisp leaves under my boots.

  A few more feet ahead, the trees are blackened, parched. The woods in this space seem dehydrated. I look down—the forest floor resembles a dry lake bed in Africa, undulating cracks in the packed dirt, all the snow and slush gone. Ahead of me, in a shallow crater, surrounded by toasted, broken trees, is the thing that crashed.

  35

  POE

  My first thought is UFO, but I discount that with practiced efficiency. And then, with widening eyes, I reconsider the notion. My parents knew this would happen. They built a pod that protected me, that neither of them should have known how to build. What I always thought made my parents crazy and embarrassing was real. It was all real. The lights in the sky. The flashes of memories, of abductions, of operations, of dead-eyed captors.

  I hesitate, crouching behind a parched tree, alternating between telling myself that’s ridiculous and being convinced that what I’m seeing is real. I briefly wonder what a famous explorer would do in this situation. The only female adventurer I can conjure is Amelia Earhart, and look how things turned out for her.

  With my fingertips, I brush at the bark of the tree I’m hiding behind and black ash flakes off like ancient paper, crumbling in my palm. My belly flips over with the thought that perhaps I am standing in the center of some radiation ring, or some weird, otherworldly, ghostly chemical floating through the air. But I haven’t survived this long to turn my back on what’s ahead. “I’ll be quick,” I tell Squirt, and I push forward, through the moisture-sapped forest.

  I tiptoe to another tree, blackened and crispy, but closer to the crashed craft. It is a craft. What else could it be? I hesitate, listening, for another minute, and I hear nothing.

  If I hadn’t seen the light in the sky, the flash like a bright blanket, I wouldn’t have considered the object before me to be some kind of vehicle. It’s more like a modern art sculpture. Two huge rings, stainless steel looking, maybe thirty feet across, intersect each other, like the diagrammed rings of an atom around a nucleus. It reminds me of two Ferris wheels, one tucked inside the other at a jaunty angle, and where the seats would be, there are eye-shaped transparencies, like windows or portholes, lines of them circling the rings’ circumferences.

  Against the parched and dehydrated ground, colorful, stringy material, plastic or rubber in appearance, lies strewn through the trees. When I look up into the pine I’m hidden behind, I can see some of it, blue and red, stuck in the branches. I stand from my hiding, crouched position and reach up into the branches on my tiptoes. When I grab a low branch, it shakes the tree enough so that the colorful stuff tumbles down on top of me, disturbed and heavy from the higher branches, slippery. I let out a small squeal, just a gasp, as the unknown, ropey substance drapes over me. I stand stock still, heartbeat fast.

  When I realize I’m still breathing and am unharmed, I gingerly grasp a bit of the bright cables, and pull it away from my body. The texture is rubbery, flexible. It bends only to bounce back to its original shape, hexagonal spaces between the colorful lines. Around the forest, clumps of this dangle from dry trees or lie in clumps like my mother’s knitting, and the bizarre parallel gives me goose bumps.

  From the heavy piece that landed on me I can see frayed edges, not frayed like yarn but like electrical wire. Another glance at the enormous rings of the craft, and I see that a large carpet of the blue and red rubbery mesh is underneath it all. Perhaps some kind of protective landing material? Like our car airbags? Reduced to smithereens upon impact?

  A sudden bout of pregnancy nausea whirls through me, and my vision tunnels. The stress of...well, everything…doesn’t help. I need to get home soon, but not before finding out what this is. I’ll never forgive myself if I don’t investigate. So far, I have been spared, for unknown reasons. The fact that right before Leila killed me, she was reduced to powder is not lost on me. My parents’ protection of me, in the form of that pod, made just for me. The note, meant for me, written into the ceiling of it. The rose-scented Blur in the grocery store—it didn’t hunt me down or follow me or harm me in any way. Perhaps I’m getting cocky, but a new sense of blessing, of protection, flickers in my periphery, the small flame of a new idea. How have I made it this far?

  Mercy. That’s how.

  There’s no other explanation. Aside from luck. But luck does not include a weird survival pod. August, being so far below ground. That was luck. But me? This all feels intentional, like Mark’s note telling him to find August. Is there a mind behind all this? And if so, what does it want?

  I think of wings, of Amelia Earhart, and step into the clearing, my boots thumping now, crackling nature to dust, instead of squishing. Everything is completely bereft of moisture.

  In the middle of the massive rings, I notice a metallic silver sphere, like a nucleus, attached by a web of cables. Some have snapped. The sphere lolls to the side a bit, off balance. I go in for a closer look, trying to tiptoe, but with the arid ground, my feet still crunch, tiny sounds, like the feet of fairies.

  Stepping over the lower three-foot-tall, three-foot-deep ring blade, I approach a hatch door that hangs open from the sphere in the center. Like in the grocery store, I press my body against the sphere and slide toward the opening, ready to peek with just one eye visible. I have no idea if I’m good at sneaking.

  The sphere is empty. Nothing living, or dead. No seat. No machinery, either. Just empty darkness. The eight foot diameter looks like just enough space for one really large person, or maybe two people? People. Aliens? Beings? If something or someone occupied this before, they’re gone now.

  Or not.

  I stand still, listening.

  And then, sniffing.

  No roses, but there are traces of something sharp and chemical, which I suppose makes sense for any kind of crash site.

  It’s gone, I think. Or was never here. We have drones, why can’t they...whoever they are? The lack of seating and controls supports this theory. Standing on my tiptoes, clutching the metal rim with bent arms, I can almost see inside. I’d like to climb inside it, which I realize is a ridiculous idea, but I decide that I’m being watched out for, and head quietly back into the woods to find something to stand on.

  I head past the dried out woods and trudge back into the slush. It’s like walking out of a picture book about the desert and into one about snow, the illustrations side by side. I spend a few minutes searching before coming across a shattered pine, its trunk burst into large chunks. One of the logs is short, just three feet across, and while I can’t lift it, I can roll it. It’s slow going at first, the muck clinging to everything, but once I reach the parched earth, the log r
olls as though on pavement.

  When I reach the slight incline leading to the craft, gravity does the rest, pulling the log down until it clangs against the ring. The three foot tall ring. I’ll never lift it over, but don’t have to. The ring curls up and away. After circumventing the ring, I’m back at the sphere, log positioned below, sweating profusely and feeling even hungrier. I think of Squirt, but don’t worry. Just because I’m hungry, doesn’t mean she is.

  I climb onto the log, balancing, and I end up at boob height in front of the sphere. I try to swing myself in, but I’ve forgotten my big pregnant belly, which seriously impedes my progress. If I didn’t have a watermelon under my shirt, I could just land on my abdomen and crawl in, shimmying over the edge. I have always been able to lift my own tiny weight.

  As I’m struggling, elbows and head and chest inside the dark sphere, my eyes adjust, and all I see are tendril-like appendages extending from the rounded walls. There really is no up or down, right or left, ceiling or floor. Just many ringlets or wires, rainbow-colored—and alive. The cables start to shift and wiggle. Several of the bright tendrils stretch toward my body. Something inside me tells me to climb down, but I don’t, still convinced of that divine protective quality at work, which a part of me knows I am intellectually using to validate my stupidity.

  When one of the tendrils brushes my arm, I remember petting a boa constrictor at one of those wildlife shows as a child, being surprised by how smooth and lovely it was. The tendril coils, fast, around my forearm. A soft blue light emanates from it, illuminating my face and hair. When another tendril touches my forehead, I yell and tumble backward out of the sphere, off the log. I land hard, tailbone first, on the dry ground.