She leaned forward, her freckled peach cleavage pushing against her navy polyester tunic uniform. Her even blond bangs swept into her eyes. “You all right, dear?"
Those baby blues shone at Fan. It took a heartbeat to realize Mrs. Huckabee looked—what?—grateful?
Fan forced her lips into a sick smile. She left the food and the Mrs. Huckabee and the faceless folks in the line. Was that Denny three back—was it? He still had on his football jersey, grass and dirt dug into the left shoulder, and he was a senior and now he would never go out with her again—once had been enough, hadn't it?—and didn't this happen to his last girlfriend too?
Her sneakers squeaked on the beige linoleum. She stepped out into the fading sunshine, the asphalt of the parking lot damp and steaming from the July rain. The steady chill of the air conditioner crept after her through the open door, swept the backs of her knees. She wanted to throw up.
They said:
/The woman becomes two beings in one body, and the child takes her voice, marking her. The woman becomes part of the earth, and the earth accepts her sacrifice. The child becomes part of the Web. And the Web becomes vaster and vaster—an underground network of children./
People stared. She felt it on her shoulder blades like a force.
They all knew.
She thrust her hands into her pockets and set out down the store's front walk like she had purpose. Places to go. Didn't want to look weak.
Couldn't go home. Couldn't go back to school.
She cleared the store windows; glass became brick. A relief not to feel all those eyes on her.
Gone in a flash of red and blue reflected in the evaporating puddles as the cops pulled up next to her. Real casual-like. No siren.
Hub half got out the driver's side, one foot braced on the frame. “I'm sorry, Fan."
She'd have kept walking or launched into an all-tilt run, but Hub used to be on the track team in high school and her idea of exercise these days was walking to the corner store for rolling papers. Also, there'd be a back-up car. Always was.
She'd never even make it down the block.
He frowned like he felt genuinely apologetic and rested his forearms on the roof of the cruiser, his eyebrows doing that inverted-V thing that always made him look somewhere between confused and worried.
She didn't much feel like giving him any credit. How many times had she seen him do this?
Yesterday—or ten minutes ago—she'd have given him a piece of her mind. Now, because she couldn't speak, she glared at him.
"You gonna get in the car, Fan?"
She folded her arms across her chest.
He sighed. “So it's gonna be that way?"
She shifted her weight. Got her center as low as it could go.
"Fan, please."
She couldn't answer him.
"Fuck.” He came around the car, boot heels clocking a funny rhythm on account of sticking to the asphalt. A sweat stain slicked the front of his shirt.
His partner got out of the cruiser. She didn't know him. She didn't look at him. She kept her gaze on Hub, who'd grown up down the street. She'd been friends with him since she was five years old.
All the times they played flag football in the front yard and Marco Polo at the swimming pool and all the times he teased her about reading girlie books under the shade of the ash tree in her front yard and the first time she saw him kiss Ashley McGee on his front porch when he thought no one was looking and he always smelled like his daddy's Old Spice and....
He tried to get around back of her.
She backpedaled flat against the wall.
Hub inched his fingers in between her and the brick.
Fan threw an elbow into the soft meat of his armpit.
"Goddamn!” He fisted his hand in her hair. Lifted her off the ground.
She tried to scream.
"Get her legs, Jerry."
She kicked and punched and got a needle in her arm for her trouble. The world washed away in angry tears.
* * * *
Registration. Such a simple word.
Fingerprint.
DNA print.
Digital picture.
Wire your jaw shut (so you couldn't bite).
Wait all night. (There are prescribed times for the planting. Charts and graphs and Laws.)
Sign here. Sign for the last time. Before the muscle memory of how to write leaves you. (Eventually the meanings of words will slip away like a shadow around the corner. A kind of death.... An unkind death.)
Fan wondered what her mother would think; she could imagine Hub's car pulled up a few inches too far away from the curb, the grass in the yard too long and the flowerbeds overgrown with that pointy-leaf ground ivy and the smell of the dirt so soon after a rain. How her mom would open the door and the puzzled expression on her face would morph into horror.
Hub wrapped his fingers around her arm above the elbow. “C'mon, Fan.” He led her away from the lab, down the darkened corridor toward the back door of the station. It was a long way.
Their footfalls on the concrete floor filled the empty space. No one came to stare; too much superstition. Like seeing a bride before the wedding.
She shook off Hub's grip.
"You don't gotta be that way."
Sure I do.
He cleared his throat. “They say it's an honor, what's happenin’ to you."
They say. The mysterious They.
"They say you should be proud."
Yeah. That's why you have to take every one of us by force except the couple a year dim enough to actually be proud.
"I'm gonna miss you, though, Fan."
She stopped walking and stared at him.
He held her gaze for a heartbeat, studied his shoes for another. When he raised his eyes again, he didn't look at her face, just scanned the rest of her until he lighted on the gold pinkie ring her grandma gave her when she turned fourteen. The one she nearly lost down the sewer grate after she threw long on fourth and twenty from Max's front yard. Flicked off her finger in the snap of fall cold.
Hub had got it back for her, just barely.
"Can I have that?” he asked. And then took it, scraping her knuckle.
"Thanks, Fan.” He grabbed her arm again. Pushed the silver button by the door.
The siren blared over the speaker system and Hub made sure to face the security camera in the corner. He took her chin between his thick fingers and made her show herself too.
The automatic door clanged open. Sunlight flooded the end of the hall, bounced off the concrete. Blinded her.
Hub marched her out into the morning by her hair. She squinted at all the dirt and the sparse, dew-soaked grass. At the mounds. None of them looked fresh.
"You think you're seeing spots now? Give me any trouble, Fan. Any.” He reached for the shovels leaning against the side of the building and pressed one into her hands. He took the other.
Half a mile to the end of the patch. She balked. He punched her in the cheek with the handle of his shovel. Drove her to her knees.
What the hell'd he do that for?
She could hardly look at him, she hurt so bad; what she saw turned her cold. His gaze, a shifting mix of guilt and ... hate?
"No concessions, Fan. It can't work that way. You understand."
It took a minute for what he said to sink in. He did hate her now. Because they were friends. Because he didn't want to be her friend anymore. Not if he had to do this to her.
She had no idea if her face was broken; the thought captured her like a siren song. She'd rather die than do this, but there was no way that would happen. Hub would be careful.
There were rules.
He could break every bone in her body short of causing her enough shock to miscarry. And he would. If it would make him forget he ever knew her.
When she could get up again, she followed him the rest of the way. They stopped fair close to the fence line. They were going to have to move that gleaming chain line out some more, a
nd—talk about your urban sprawl—how long before they pushed up against the boundaries of St. John's Town?
The other side of the fence, grass grew man-high. Black-eyed Susans nodded in the breeze. Live oaks stretched tall, limbs swept wide and low, graceful arms. A thousand yards before the St. John's fence line. With its own collection of mounds.
She caught a flash of blue. Heard a jay call three times.
"Dig,” Hub said.
She shouldn't have to.
If she didn't, he'd force her. She lifted her fingers to the sharp ache in the side of her head.
It took a good hour to get the hole just right.
When they finished, Hub pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped the sweat off his forehead and the back of his neck. He hesitated a moment, then cleaned Fan up some too. Like she was some child who needed the dirt scrubbed off her face.
"You want me to knock you out before I put you in?"
She shook her head.
"You sure?"
She nodded.
"Brave, huh?"
She spat on his shoes.
"Guess so.” Hub smacked her mouth. He cocked his head toward the hole. “Get in."
She sucked in a breath and took in all the old mounds and the colors and the smell of the fresh-turned earth and the trees out beyond the fence.
"Now, Fan."
She sat in the dirt and slid as slow as she could, wedging against the sides. The hole was an inch taller than she was. She made it halfway before the earth she was bracing against gave way. She fell the rest of the way.
The first rain of dirt came down over her head.
"You hold still in there now,” Hub said. “It'll go quicker."
Her eyes filled.
She refused to cry. ‘Least not until the earth filled in around her chest. She might cry then. She could make it that long, couldn't she?
Hub acted like he didn't see. He moved around back of her, maybe so he didn't have to.
"You know this is for your own good. And you oughta be proud. You're gonna keep us all safe. You're a hero, Fan."
She wished she knew what would happen next.
No one knew what came after the planting. Except the Mysterious They.
Them and their underground network of children.
A big deal. Because no one was having them the normal way anymore—not healthy babies, or preemies, or even stillbirths. Not here or anywhere else, for the last seven years.
They said it was because of pesticides. Or because the California Legislature had finally legalized gay marriage. God's wrath? Her ass. It could've been anything, like on those late-night infomercials: this bullshit brought to you by EVOLUTION. And if you act now, you get this spiffy set of kitchen knives for only nine ninety-five!
The important thing was continuation of the species.
None of the new children lived above ground—that she knew of. No one she knew had ever seen one. Maybe some scientist somewhere had.
Of course none of the mothers survived. Their bodies died and they became food for their babies.
The soil filled in and settled around her shoulders. Her neck. She looked up at the summer-blue sky and the wisps of cloud that'd congeal later on when the temperature rose high enough, and there'd be thunderstorms and the rain would drive into the dirt and turn it slick. She'd be buried in mud.
The shovel missed her forehead by a couple inches.
The next load splattered her face. It got into her eyes. She blinked furiously.
Pretty soon she couldn't even do that.
And then she couldn't see anything but black or smell anything but earth or hear anything except the rhythm of the digging and filling. Then the sun and shadow at the crown of her head cooled for good.
Hub covered a couple more inches. To be sure.
She couldn't move. Not even a wiggle.
She waited for her breath to labor. To start sucking in dirt.
Clang clang thump thump. Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump. Hub gathering the tools and leaving her?
She waited.
She didn't want to die.
* * * *
Some time later, she must've stopped breathing.
In the silence—no, that wasn't the right word for the absence of human noise—she could hear the most extraordinary things: slither of worms, droning of cicadas, shifting of the soil.
The thunderstorm swept in (in the middle of the afternoon?). Rain slipped through the dirt. Ran in icy rivulets through her hair, down her neck, between her breasts. Her tears mingled with it.
She sang songs in her head, with the memory of her voice and the ghosts of guitar and bass, drums and keyboards, like she used to do when she was afraid of her mother. She'd go sit out in the backyard on the green and white lawn chair and smoke cigarettes and watch the patterns the smoke made against the night and sing.
Dusk fell like a dream. Twilight. Between. Some time after that, she dreamed that Denny Ford and Chuck Hanson and Lloyd Hagel dug her up—at least as far as her head.
Sometimes people did that once or twice, with their loved ones. Or sometimes it was for kicks.
"That her?” Lloyd said. He didn't know her real well. She knew everything about him she ever wanted to know, like how he'd run track until he broke his ankle falling down a flight of stairs in the rain and he was out of school for two weeks. He could still run like a hurricane wind. She didn't get why he'd never gone back to sprinting.
He didn't have a lot of friends. And he sounded more awake than he usually did in homeroom. He smelled good, too.
Chuck turned his head and spat. “Yuh-huh."
She'd had a crush on Chuck when they were five. He'd colored her a valentine on wax paper. She still had it pasted in her scrapbook.
Denny didn't say anything.
She wanted to look up at him, but they hadn't hollowed out enough behind her neck for her to tilt her head.
"I wonder when she'll start to stink.” Chuck knelt at her flank.
Lloyd shrugged—she couldn't see it but she could hear it in his voice. “Another day or so, maybe?"
"Heat and all,” Chuck said.
Denny still didn't say anything. She could feel his words reaching max velocity, though. Like they could explode out of him any minute now.
They buried her again before that happened.
No breakthrough. No mercy in retreating steps. No fucking mercy.
* * * *
Lloyd came back after midnight. Thank God.
He dug her up, this time as far as her waist. It took a while; all the time she smelled nothing but earth and his spicy cologne. Stubble shadowed his cheeks. He sucked on the insides of them the couple of times he rested.
He wore an open maroon button-down with the sleeves rolled up. When he stopped digging, he shrugged it off and balled it up and tucked it in the back pocket of his jeans—they hung on his hips, threatening to fall down. He was awful wiry.
Lloyd speared the shovel into the ground with a grunt and hunkered down to where she could look him in the eye. He wiped the sweat from his brow with his dirty forearm. “I know you can hear me, Fan."
Yeah. So?
"Can't leave you here."
Really?
"My mom's in here,” he said. “And my sister. All my women."
The way he said that, she'd have laughed if she could. All my women. Jesus.
Did you dig them up, too, Lloyd?
He knocked a clot of dirt out of her hair. “Nope."
Huh?
"Couldn't get to them in time."
For what?
He swallowed and didn't answer her.
As fucking if. As if he could hear her thinking. As if they could have a regular conversation. What bullshit.
"Ain't,” he said.
How?
"That's not important, Fan.” He got on his hands and knees and crawled in close. “I gotta finish this now, and I need you to help me. You game?"
How come you can hear me? What happened to
your mom and your sister, Lloyd? (What the fuck was happening to her?)
"Yes or no, Fan?"
Yes, oh, yes.
"All right, then. You don't pay any attention to me or what I'm doing, understand? You mind your feet."
My feet?
"See ‘em in your ‘magination, Fan."
She didn't get it, but she'd do it.
"What're you wearing?” Lloyd asked. He picked up the shovel again and hacked at the earth around her. “Sneakers?"
Cross-trainers.
"Your feet still in ‘em?"
Yes.
Sweat ran down his back. Down his neck and chest and belly, into the waistband of his jeans. Through the trail of black hair descending from his navel. She wondered—
"Cut that out, Fan. That's what got you in this mess in the first place, ain't it?"
Not my fault for being human.
"No,” he said. “Guess not.” He dug some more.
What's with my feet?
"After a while, they're gonna sprout roots. Once you get rooted, it'd be too late to take you out."
She wanted to move her toes. To have some physical way to check. She couldn't move or talk or breathe.
Am I dead, Lloyd?
"Mostly."
What's that mean?
He wouldn't answer any of her questions (especially about what happened to his sister and his mother). He dug down to past her knees.
He wrapped his arms around her waist. To pull her out. She knew that was why. But it felt like he was copping a feel, too. His touch, slick of his sweat, grit of the earth stuck to his skin—she could feel every molecule, every millimeter of surface contact like electric shock.
Hypersensitive.
Her nipples tingled.
"You'd'a been a fine woman, Fan,” Lloyd said. And pulled.
She popped out of the ground. Like a turnip. The force of it felled them both.
Lloyd rolled to take the brunt of her weight. Not far to fall, but still they smacked the ground with enough juice to knock the air out of him.
And halogen lights flashed on all around them, at the edges of the field.
Lloyd scrambled to his feet.
Hub marched out of the back door of the jail with a shotgun slung in the crook of his arm.
GUD Magazine Issue 1 :: Autumn 2007 Page 8