by Jack Lothian
While the children cheer, my mouth goes so dry the pasta I’m chewing tastes like cardboard.
* * *
Gloria put the kids to bed early while I cleared the table and washed dishes. After losing their beautiful home in South Pasadena three years ago when the stock market plunged to mid-earth, they were lucky to rent this 800-square-foot house in Monrovia. No dishwasher, but I don’t mind hand-washing dishes and letting God tend to their drying.
Gloria and Thomas brush past me and walk out to their small back yard. The kitchen window is open so I can’t help but hear their conversation.
“Next Monday, Thomas? That’s fast. Maybe now I can use the car sometimes.”
“Gloria, I’ll still need the car to make personal collections.”
“What about my mom? Now that Amy’s in school and you’ll be working from home—”
“Exactly! She’s useless now, isn’t she?” Thomas lowers his voice. “Besides, Steven’s going to nominate me for President of our Chapter at the next NIOT meeting. How will it look for me if I have Deadwood living in my own home?”
“Tell me you did not report her to—”
“Last week. I called them last week. It’s done, Gloria.”
Thomas strides past me, Gloria in his wake. I hear their bedroom door slam and muffled tense voices as I rinse and rack the last pan.
* * *
Thursday afternoon Gloria comes home from work early so we can walk the children to the local thrift store for school clothes. Thomas is waiting for us when we return. I’m barely in the door when he hands me a government-issued neon yellow envelope.
“They needed a signature so I signed for you. You probably should open it right away,” Thomas tells me.
I read the two-page letter and stare at it for a few seconds.
“What does it say, Jill?” Thomas asks.
Ignoring her husband, I tell Gloria, “It’s my Relocation letter. I’m assigned to Mohave Sanctuary.”
“When?” they both ask.
“Eleven o’clock tomorrow night.”
“But that’s only one day, Mom,” my daughter says while glaring at Thomas.
“There’s also an instruction sheet.” I fold the pages and shove them back in the yellow envelope. “And it doesn’t take long to pack one suitcase.”
“Old suitcases are in the garage. I’ll go get one for you,” Thomas offers.
“Why are you leaving, Grandma?” Mark lisps through his missing baby teeth.
“Grandma won a long vacation. Isn’t that exciting?” Thomas tells my grandchildren before dashing out the front door toward the garage.
“Where are you going?” Joel shouts as all three children jump around with excitement.
“To a big hotel in the desert,” I lie.
* * *
Friday morning I scrub the dingy suitcase Thomas found in the garage and clean the house. By noon, my daughter’s home is spotless, so I treat myself to a long hot bath before packing.
First, I stuff in all the recommended clothes and hygiene items. Then I go through my photos and select the ones that truly touch my heart. I pack some books, my journal, two pens, and I’m done.
Gloria comes into Amy’s tiny room. I hand my daughter a shoe box containing the few things of value I still have.
“The jewelry is for you and Amy, and these old silver dollars are for the boys to share. The big box stored in your garage is filled with photo albums. I wish I had more to leave you, Gloria.”
Tears fill my daughter’s eyes so I hold her close and whisper, “If you hadn’t taken me in eighteen months ago, honey, I would have been out on the streets then. This time with you and the children has been a blessing. Please don’t cry.”
We have our favorite dinner that night—spaghetti tacos. We keep it festive for the children. I pretend to be looking forward to my vacation in the desert. No tears, only smiles and laughter. I give each grandchild special hugs and kisses at bedtime. I can’t let them see or know that my heart is breaking.
Thomas went to bed an hour ago. Gloria is in the kitchen fixing us another cup of tea.
I’ve never been a very brave or adventurous person, and now I’m so terrified I can hardly breathe. My eyes keep drifting to the suitcase by the door.
My daughter sits beside me and holds my hand. “Remember the time I lost my cuddle blanket and cried for days, Mom? That was nothing compared to this.”
“I love you so much, Gloria, but we need to say goodnight. If you go to bed now, this will be easier for me.”
Ten minutes before my assigned pick-up time, I slip into a jacket, wheel my suitcase out onto the porch, and lock the door behind me.
Darkness surrounds me as I stare up at the waning moon and listen for the whisper of dry leaves rustling across asphalt.
Heathfolk
Mary Victoria Johnson
“Shame. We could’ve been good friends, you and I,” sighs Jack. “They say it’s better when you’re not alone. Oh well. Too late now.”
Her voice is muffled by the ill-fitting gasmask, but it won’t make any difference to her companion. A wild pony, covered with a shaggy winter coat, lies keeled at her feet. A good portion of its throat is missing. The blood hasn’t yet dried—had she been mere minutes earlier, Jack might have caught the pony alive.
She straightens and scans the moor. Dust makes it impossible to see more than a few miles, settling into the valleys like a heavy sea fog, and caressing the empty expanse of gorse, heather, and bracken that swallows the hills. Nothing breaks the ringing silence. Aside from the corpse, Jack decides she is alone.
Although leaving the pony to rot feels wasteful, she’s never been good at butchering, even with small hares and pheasants. And looking into its shining, black-marble eyes, Jack can’t shake the memory of feeding herds of Dartmoor ponies apples as a child—they’d come right up to her garden fence, inquisitive and unafraid, lingering for hours.
So, she leaves.
Besides, the responsible predator is probably diseased. The heath doesn’t hold much food anymore, and only madness would cause an animal to risk taking down the area’s largest inhabitant for nothing.
Of course, there aren’t any predators left. No foxes, no wild dogs. She tries not to think about it.
Walking back to her cottage, Jack fiddles with her gasmask. It belonged to her grandfather, a relic from last century’s war, and doesn’t stop the chemical smell of Dust from reaching her nose, but it’s better than nothing. It’s kept her alive this long, after all.
“You’re weak,” her grandfather used to say when showing off his war trinkets. “When I was your age, I’d seen things that would’ve made your eyes bleed right out of your head. You don’t even have the courage required to make friends.”
“Well, screw you,” she wishes she could say. “I survived when no one else could.”
Whether that’s due to skill or pure chance, it’s hard to say, but the circumstances don’t matter. What matters is she’s still alive.
Her cottage emerges from the Dust, whitewashed exterior long ago stained grey. In a previous life, it had been a hunter’s lodge, a retreat for townspeople searching for temporary solitude. The nearest house is over five miles away, and aside from a megalithic boulder on a nearby hill, it’s the only structure over a foot high in the area. For Jack, who never felt comfortable around others—a damnable trait for a twenty-something—it had, quite simply, been an escape.
Inside, the cottage doesn’t contain the expected kitchen and bedroom. Sure, a futon claims some space in a corner, and a camping stove sits discarded in another, but most of the single room is claimed by less conventional items. A corkboard of pinned butterflies, moths, and dragonflies hangs like a tapestry on one wall, and entire tanks of pond specimens and notebooks eat up almost half the cottage’s floor. Every now and then, a wing twitches, or an antenna waves. An assortment of radios and walkie-talkies cover anywhere left over.
Jack removes her gasmask and shakes her
hair free of its scarf, cringing at the acidic scent still lingering in the curls. Not dropping the repulsed expression, she reaches for the nearest personal radio set and turns its dial.
“Hello? Can anyone hear me?” she asks in the robotic tone of someone expecting no answer. “This is Jack Sinclair, Hunter’s Cottage, Dartmoor National Park. Is anyone out there?”
Static.
“Please. It’s getting kinda lonely.”
Nothing. Only an empty crackle and the scratching sound of something—a bird, maybe?—crawling across the roof.
* * *
Trees are scarce on the moors, so Jack burns thorny brambles as firewood instead. The Dust makes the flames burn a darker, almost bloody red. The thorns cause weird shadows like reaching hands to twist over the cottage.
Jack lies on her back, staring up at the moonless sky stretching above. She’s more than accustomed to emptiness, but there’s something about the density of the darkness beyond the fire’s red glow that unnerves her—she prefers looking upward. Occasionally, she’ll see the smoky trail of a commercial starship heading into the oblivion.
“Stay!” she wants to scream. “Don’t leave me here!”
Not because she necessarily wants company. But the idea of being the last one left behind fills her with a paralyzing dread.
That’s the problem with people, though; they lack resolve. After all, it hadn’t been the plague that ended the world. It had been the aftermath. The panic. The wars. Maybe, if they’d pulled together and kept a cool head, Jack would still be getting her weekly eggs, milk, and newspaper. Instead, they’d run headfirst into self-destruct mode.
And Jack is marooned with nothing but her brain and a Springfield rifle for help.
Her eyes slip closed.
Moments later, something screams. Not a human scream. The scream a deer might make when shot, or that of a devil haunting crossroads. High, guttural, and unnatural.
Jack stumbles to her feet, grasping wildly for her rifle.
A shape darts into the darkness on two legs.
She stares after it, heart pounding. Perhaps she’s imagining things.
Lowering the rifle, she realizes her arms are covered in goose bumps. Shouldn’t the fire be warmer? Shouldn’t the glow reach further?
All of a sudden, the flickering red flames make her feel sick. She tosses a bucket of dirty water onto the thorns, covering her nose with her scarf as smoke billows across the heath, and runs as fast as she can toward the cottage.
“Can anyone hear me?” she says into the radio. To her dismay, she realizes she's crying.
As if in answer, something shrieks again. It sounds far too close, like whatever it is is standing right outside her window.
“Is anyone . . .?” she begins, but trails off. She’s not sure she wants to know the answer anymore.
* * *
The outside world never quite managed to touch the people of the moors. Long after such things were frowned upon, locals celebrated their holidays with bonfires and dancing instead of gift exchanges and solemnity. They left salt on windowsills, carried bunches of dried lavender, and turned their clothes inside-out before walking alone.
Even as a child, Jack never believed such nonsense. She knew good sense kept accidents away, not silver bells. Tylenol cured headaches, not herb poultices. She remembered sleeping over at her best friend Lydia’s house in total silence—her family never spoke from sundown to sunrise to avoid accidental cursings—thinking she’d prefer living anywhere else but the moor.
Of course, even she couldn’t escape its strangeness entirely.
When she was four, a baby bird fell from a tree and broke its neck. Jack carried it inside to show her grandfather. No sooner had she crossed the threshold, the bird beat its wings again and wriggled from her hands.
When she was nine, she stepped on a snail, and after a few minutes, watched it continue moving as though its shell wasn’t shattered.
When she was thirteen, she ignored her grandfather’s warning and attempted to visit her parents’ graves in the village cemetery. He caught her before she could find them and dragged her home by the ear. He seemed more upset than angry.
“Don’t you understand?” he kept repeating. “Don’t you understand?”
That evening, when she was supposed to be asleep, she’d crept downstairs and watched her grandfather skin a hare. Without even stripping meat from bone, he’d taken the carcass outside and laid it at the edge of their property. Then he’d locked all the doors and turned out all the lights.
The next morning, the hare was gone.
When Jack graduated, she left Dartmoor to study biology at King’s College in London, and returned with her head full of science rather than superstition. She hadn’t planned on returning at all, but after four years of city living, coming back to the empty heath felt more like a necessity than a choice.
Within six months of moving into Hunter’s Cottage, the plague hit. Jack shut herself away, something she’d perfected, and let radios be her only human interaction. She listened to accounts of virally transmitted sicknesses that destroyed organs in a matter of days. She listened to accounts of riots and opportunistic terrorists, of order crumbling and anarchy in the streets. She listened as martial law was imposed, as stories of the wealthy abandoning Earth altogether for extra-terrestrial colonies surfaced. Of something labelled ‘Dust’, a by-product of the wars and chemical attacks, swallowing entire countries. Then, gradually, the radios fell quiet.
And Jack knew she was alone.
* * *
The morning after the bonfire, Jack finds a dead field mouse on her doorstep. Given the circumstances, there shouldn’t be anything odd about this—except, like the pony, the mouse is missing most of its throat.
Which means something must have dragged it to her doorstep. A cat, maybe? Surely, there are still cats left?
Without the strange colors and sounds of night time, Jack’s apprehension has evaporated. She nudges the mouse into the grass with her toe, pulls the straps tighter on her gas mask, and sets out to find food. There’s a town with a Co-Op Foods roughly an hour’s walk away, but she’s hesitant about re-entering civilization. She’s not strayed outside a two-mile radius of the cottage since the outbreak, and she’s terrified of what she’ll find. Besides, Jack Sinclair has never needed modern conveniences to survive.
It’s a dark day. Black clouds swallow the heath’s endless skies, and wind races unchallenged across the spread of heather. The Dust dances with the imminent weather, forming ephemeral shapes: a crucifix; a ball of unspooling yarn; a human, with the skewered proportion of a child’s drawing.
As Jack watches, the last form doesn’t evaporate with the wind. The hair on the back of her neck prickles. She has the feeling the not-human is watching her, too.
Thunder rumbles, and the form vanishes.
Jack blames the faulty gasmask. She’s inhaled too much Dust.
Down in the valleys, the air is cleaner. The ferns and sparse trees are less warped than the plants on the hills, and the tadpoles, water skippers, and newts continue to display almost natural behavior in the ponds. Occasionally, Jack comes down here to collect specimens like her research still matters. Today, there’s something menacing about the gathering clouds, and she doesn’t stop to observe anything unnecessary.
“Shit,” she says when a blackberry disintegrates in her hand.
Her fishnet boasts nothing more than a collection of black algae.
Her small animal traps are entirely empty. The snare of one is covered in dried blood, but the animal must’ve crawled away.
Giving up, she hikes back up the hill toward a well, making to fill up her canteen. There’s a crude lid to keep out the acid rain, and after removing it, Jack lowers the pail.
“Shit,” she says again, louder this time, when the bucket comes up empty.
Lightning accompanies the next roll of thunder, and the air begins to buzz with pressure. The lightning, like the fire, flashes red,
accompanied by a smell like singed hair. Hoping to beat the rain, Jack abandons her venture. The glass eyepieces of her mask are fogging up. The heath blurs with the sky. She can’t justify or discredit the idea of the not-human continuing to watch her.
* * *
In the middle of the night, Jack wakes to a sound she never thought she’d hear again.
A voice. A real person’s voice.
“He—any—moor—over?” The words are buried in static. “Copy—no—any—noise—over.”
Jack nearly falls out of bed in her haste. Blindly, she tears through the pile of radios until she finds one with a blinking light.
“Surv—three—moor—any—cry—over.”
“Hello?” Jack cries, twisting the dials in a fruitless search for better reception. “Can you hear me? Hello?”
The words keep coming, but they’re broken. Drowned out by the thunder and the static and the pounding of Jack’s heart.
“Hello? Do you copy? Hello?”
“Many—no—rep—”
Then the world falls silent.
Jack crumples, leaning her head against the wall. Her fingers curl around the radio, knuckles white.
There are no more sounds but the thunder and her muffled sobs.
* * *
This is your fault.
The thing is outside again. Jack can’t tell if it’s morning or not—the sky is too dark. There is no sun, but no moon either. Her watch broke long ago. Her clock stopped. There is no time. Just Dust, just darkness, and a creature scratching at her door.
Your fault.
Jack hugs her knees to her chest, watching the butterflies squirm on the corkboard.
“You seem to have an aversion to killing things,” her anatomy professor used to say.
Not true. Killing doesn’t bother Jack.