by Jason Parent
PEOPLE OF THE SUN
JASON PARENT
SINISTER GRIN PRESS
MMXVII
AUSTIN, TEXAS
Sinister Grin Press
Austin, TX
www.sinistergrinpress.com
March 2017
“People of the Sun” © 2017 Jason Parent
This is a work of Fiction. All characters depicted in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without the publisher’s written consent, except for the purposes of review.
Cover Art by Matt Davis
Book Design by Travis Tarpley
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Beth, who encouraged his explorations into this dark, science fiction/fantasy realm when his own cowardice might have made him shrink away from it. He would also like to thank Kimberly and Evans, Ken and Elsie, Connie, Abby, Alicia, Rob, Adam, Nev and Jo, Becky, Scarlet, Andy and Matt, and all the other wonderful people who have supported his writing from first publication to the present and his sadistic urges to blur boundaries between genres. Of course, special thanks is also owed to his publicist, Erin, whose work cannot be over-appreciated and to Matt Davis, Matt, Travis, and Sinister Grin for turning his words into something black-rose beautiful.
Dedication
For all the readers, intellects, poets, renegades, visionaries and artists, who forego complacency and continue to, um, rage against the machine.
CHAPTER ONE
Connor Gaudreau plodded through dense mist. It had formed mere inches over the sandy beach, rose high above him as fluffy as clouds and blotted out the sky. He couldn’t remember a time when the fog had been as thick and warm, much less recall an instance when he’d been stupid enough to walk blindly through it. Walking through sand in loafers was troublesome enough without the fog. He was thankful the beach’s downhill slope was gradual, its obstructions few and far between.
He wasn’t entirely without direction, although he might as well have been. His leader, State Trooper Matthew Simpson, seemed as lost as he was. Connor followed the officer so closely that he bumped into his back each time Matthew stopped. Minor collisions were a necessary evil, a far better alternative to walking alone, aimlessly.
“Are you sure you know where you’re going?” Connor asked.
The heavyset man clad in a forest-green button-down didn’t turn around to respond. With his shirt tucked in, Matthew’s back fat hung over his belt. Connor laughed, remembering the term he had overheard one of his students calling it, a “muffin top.” His stomach groaned. The memory brought cravings for the breakfast he had skipped.
And for what? Connor shrugged. He wiped a sleeve across his brow. I’m too old for field work.
“Is it much farther?” he asked. “It seems like we’ve been walking all morning. It’s as humid as a jungle out here.”
Matthew laughed. “You sound like a kid. ‘Are we there yet?’”
“Well, are we?”
“Are we what?”
Connor took a breath. “There yet.”
“It’s just up ahead,” Matthew said. He disappeared into a blizzard of billowing clouds.
Sweat caught in the grooves of the crows’ feet that formed beside his eyes as he squinted to see through the dense air. At fifty-four years old, Connor’s idea of physical exertion was walking up his basement stairs or mowing his lawn. This trek might have qualified for one of Hercules’ twelve labors. The muscles in his legs ached with every step. The heat made things infinitely worse.
Why is it so hot? He patted his forehead with the bottom of his shirt. He was working up quite the sweat for a mid-April morning. I swear to God, Matt, there had better be a point to all of this.
“It’s hard to believe we’re still in New Hampshire,” he said. “It feels like the Sahara out here, and it’s not even summer. To think some scientists laugh at global warming.”
Connor stopped. “Matt?” He could no longer see Matthew in front of him. He heard footsteps, but they were faint, and he couldn’t pinpoint the exact direction from where they came. Great. Just how I wanted to spend my morning: lost in a fog.
The sound of tapping on glass reached Connor’s ears just as he was about to call out. “The compass says we’re heading in the right direction,” Matthew said, only a few feet away.
“When was the last time you used one of those things?”
“I was an Eagle Scout. We had to learn how to use them. It’s like second nature now.”
“So, thirty years ago?”
“About that,” Matthew responded, chuckling. His muffin top rose and fell with his laughter. “Don’t worry. It’s like—”
“Riding a bike? When was the last time you did that?” Connor laughed at the thought of his overweight friend’s buttocks engulfing a bicycle seat while his small feet tried to rotate the pedals.
“About thirty years ago, come to think of it.” He adjusted their course. Connor hoped it was a direct route. He’d settle for anything straighter than a circle.
“Besides, you really can’t get lost. Just head toward the heat.”
“Wait, what?”
Matthew mumbled something, but he had already started walking again, and Connor missed it. He struggled to keep up with the officer’s brisk pace.
He endured their single-file walk over what seemed to be the length of three football fields. He wondered how many more he’d have to traverse. The shoreline seemed much longer than Connor remembered. He had canoed in New Hampshire’s Second Connecticut Lake dozens of times as a kid, pulling out bass the size of his forearm or bigger and releasing them back into the water. For him, it was bittersweet. He loved the thrill of the catch, but hated himself for putting the fish through such trauma.
Being at the lake reminded him of a simpler time, when his stomach didn’t protrude and kidney stones seemed only as real as the Boogeyman. A lifetime ago, he thought, sighing.
A low grumble escaped him. Back at Second Connecticut Lake… humph. Even as a child, Connor found its name bothersome. Second Connecticut Lake was located in the town of Pittsburg in the state of New Hampshire. He shook his head, wondering if his country’s forefathers lacked originality.
The atmosphere blanketing the lake that day veiled its familiarity, its features hidden in mist. The fog had changed as he walked, now so fat with water that it was almost liquid. It saturated his clothes, weighed them down along with his feet. He felt like a man pushing forward through hurricane winds, though the air was as still as the sand. With so much resistance, he wondered if the lake was trying to tell him something.
As much as he hated the sauna-like conditions, Connor couldn’t expel his curiosity. Everything about the lake seemed unnatural, tantalizing to his scientific mind. Its mysteries were all riddles begging to be answered. Spring had been as rainy as usual, so he assumed his memory of the shoreline was faulty. They hadn’t had a drought in New Hampshire for as long as he could remember, if ever during his lifetime.
A drought might explain all the growing shoreline, but not the humidity.
He swiped his foot across the dirt. At some point, the ground beneath him had gone from shifting tan sand to dry and cracked earth. I think I would have heard something about a drought of this magnitude. Confused, he wracked his brain for answers. Lakes don’t just dry up overnight. And by the looks of this sediment, there hasn’t been a lake here since before I was born. Connor half-expected tumbleweeds to roll by him. The last time he had seen dirt like that, he had been visiting the bottom of the Grand Canyon, many yards away from the riverbed. But this seemed even drier, desert-like, an anomalous l
andscape that close to a lake. In all his years as a geologist, he’d never seen anything like it. A sudden immeasurable blast of heat, a solar flare perhaps, might have been able to cause such a dramatic climate change. But if that had happened, he wouldn’t still be around to ponder this enigma.
He hurried forward, shuffling Matthew along with him, moving ever closer to whatever was radiating all that heat. He couldn’t guess what it was, but he knew that somehow, it was the culprit. Connor assumed he’d know more once they reached the water’s edge.
He took a few more steps and trampled on something that was simultaneously crunchy and squishy. He looked down to see the remains of a sunfish beneath his brown loafer. It smelled as though it had been dead for a while, roasting in the warm morning sun. Bags resembling poached eggs sat where eyes once had been. Blister bubbles oozed steaming fluid on what few scales remained, the exposed bone a clean white. He checked the bottom of his shoe for guts. Gross, he thought as he used a pen to pry unidentifiable fish parts from the grooves in his sole.
The moisture in the air had become so thick it was nearly suffocating. It was like trying to breath in a steam room yanked up to its highest setting. Connor pulled his shirt’s neckline up to cover his mouth.
He found more dead fish with every step. After another hundred yards, he found only skeletons, bass stripped so clean that even a starving man wouldn’t pause to inspect them. Some of the fish looked boiled, their eyes bulging from their sockets. He wondered what had killed them, how they had come to die so far from water. He had heard of tornados sucking whole schools of fish out of the ocean and dumping them miles away. He vaguely recalled a series of cheesy shark films with a similar premise. We don’t really get tornados… or cyclones or hurricanes or any other extreme weather this far inland, but I suppose it’s possible. But how long had they been exposed to the sun? They all look varying degrees of cooked.
“Underwater volcano?” he muttered. He had a feeling he was nearing the truth.
“What?” Matthew asked, wheezing. Connor had forgotten he was there.
“Nothing. How much farther?”
“It’s around here somewhere.” Matthew pressed forward.
“Does that mean you don’t know?” Connor called out to the back of that absurd brown hat state troopers were required to wear. Its circular shape always reminded Connor of a flying saucer from an old Outer Limits episode. It belonged on a park ranger, not New Hampshire’s finest. Then again, at that moment, Matthew’s duties seemed more akin to park rangering than actual police work.
“I think I see it,” Matthew said. “Just a few more yards. Damn, it’s like the goddamn apocalypse out here.”
“What are we standing in? Is this a portion of the lake that dried out years ago? Why did you really bring me out here? And what happened to all these fish?” Connor asked as he stepped on yet another carcass. “God, they stink something awful.”
“One question at a time. This is Second Connecticut Lake.”
“The word ‘lake’ implies water, Matt.”
Connor’s impatience had budded the moment he’d stepped on that first fish. It grew with every stride he took since then. Matthew’s illogical answer annoyed him. He considered Matthew a friend, but not a close one. He wasn’t afraid to ridicule him despite his position of authority, particularly if it turned out that Matthew was playing some stupid game.
“I’m missing office hours for this?” Connor snapped. “Did you just want me to play hooky so that we could go hiking?”
“Be patient,” Matthew said, turning back with a smirk. “As I told you when we started, you have to see this for yourself. Can’t you feel that heat? We’re almost there.”
Connor did feel the heat, a whole lot of it. His skin was turning pink. His contacts had dried out, causing him to blink repeatedly. He felt as if he were walking into an active volcano or maybe the sun itself.
Searing pain shot through his wrist. He removed his gold watch and hastily dropped it into his pocket. Growling, he blew on his fingers to cool them. This had better be worth it.
Matthew halted. His curiosity trumping his impatience and any notion of peril, Connor hurried beside the officer. Matthew blocked his path.
“Not too close,” he warned.
“Not too close to what?”
A faint sound like that of steaks sizzling on a grill came from a gigantic shadow in front of them. Connor moved a bit closer, and the shadow began to take form. Soon, it had a definite shape. Something big, something magnificent, stood before them like an Arabian temple rising out of the sands.
The object appeared to be a rock formation. Connor’s mouth dropped open. An active volcano? He rubbed his hands together. This unknown, unexplored behemoth of rock sparked all his scientific inquisitiveness, but the first thing Connor did was kick a hollowed-out turtle shell he found near the base of it. As good as any method to test its surface.
Instead of ricocheting off the object as expected, the shell clung to it. Then it melted and slid down the formation like a pickle smeared in ketchup thrown against a window. Connor had won a lot of pickle races at McDonald’s as a kid. Do kids still did that?
“Who are you supposed to be?” Matthew asked. “Mario or Luigi?”
Connor didn’t understand the reference and was too distracted by the find to care. Heat radiated off what he presumed to be volcanic rock. He approached the formation for a closer look but dared not touch it. Rivulets of sweat poured off his temples. Dampness formed in the shape of a cobra along his shoulders and down the middle of his back. He wondered how the big man beside him was still standing, but his concern was fleeting.
“What is it?” Connor asked aloud, more to himself than to Matthew, but accepting all reasonable responses.
“I have no clue,” Matthew said, shrugging. “Isn’t this what you went to school for? To study rocks? What a waste of money, if you ask me.”
“I don’t recall asking you. Besides, whatever this is… it’s not supposed to be here.”
Connor had received his doctorate in geology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, only to use his acquired knowledge mostly to help contractors build retaining walls. Sieve and proctor tests were his life. Selling his services, and perhaps his soul, to lawyers as an expert witness had also been lucrative. But his one career move that brought him joy was exploring the theoretical with his students as a tenured professor at the Concord, New Hampshire campus of the ironically named Granite State College.
His education and years of experience afforded him a few guesses at the rock’s composition, but none of them made any sense. This rock, meteorite, volcanic formation or whatever it was, it was the reason he went to school to become a geologist in the first place. He wanted to explore and analyze the unknown, not sift through gravel and three-quarter-inch stone all day.
The mystery mountain lured him closer. He reached out to touch it.
“That’s not a good idea,” Matthew said, slapping Connor’s hand as if he were scolding a child. “We are not supposed to touch the rock. So sayeth my captain. We aren’t supposed to do anything until the government expert gets here.”
“The government, as in the federal government?” Connor frowned. “What possible interest could they already have in this?”
Matthew rolled his eyes. “Beats me,” he said. “Isn’t that what it means to be the government, though? Where would we be without politicians sticking their noses into everyone else’s business? Maybe NASA wants it for something.”
“Why do you think that?”
“This thing fell out of the sky.”
“How can you be so sure? It doesn’t look like any meteorite I’ve ever seen.”
“Jesus, Connor, where the hell were you last night? The headline on every news station was ‘Giant Meteor Crashes into Second Connecticut Lake.’”
“I went to bed early,” Connor said. He stroked his chin. “Anyway, what harm could I do to this thing? It looks to be solid rock.” More like quar
tz or onyx. It’s not all that similar to volcanic rock even if it smolders like one, but a meteorite? Its ignition when it had entered the atmosphere could explain the heat emitting from it, but shouldn’t the lake have cooled it? Instead, the entire lake evaporated? That’s impossible.
“I’m not worried about the harm you could do to it, Connor. I’m worried about the harm it could do to you. If you touch that thing, you may spontaneously combust.”
“I doubt I’d spontaneously combust, but you’re right. It’s probably far too hot to touch. And this baby could be emitting radiation.”
“What, you mean like giving us cancer?” Matthew backed away. “What the hell are we doing so close to it then?”
“Relax. Besides, it’s too late to worry about that.” Connor scanned the ground. He saw nothing but dead earth covered in fissures as if water had been absent there for centuries.
Still, he had an epiphany. “Maybe I can find a stick or something to poke it with.”
“That must be the famous ‘scientific’ method,” Matthew said.
Connor ignored the officer and moved as close to the object as he could handle. The last of his deodorant liquefied and dripped from his armpits.
For nearly half an hour, Connor inspected every inch of the meteorite he could inspect without touching, climbing, prying or excavating. Its form lacked randomness, like a diamond that had already been cut and set. From his vantage point, it even looked symmetrical.
“Connor,” Matthew called from the other side of the object. “Come have a look at this.”
Connor circled to the officer’s location, brimming with excitement, arms swinging. When he reached Matthew, he saw nothing unusual except the even-more-dumb-than-normal expression on the officer’s face. He looked shocked, as though someone had just told him he’d been born a girl. His gaze was focused on a piece of the meteorite that had apparently broken off on impact.