Gage hugged her.
Shooting stars streaked overhead.
Gage gave Adah his machete, saw them off at the road and returned to the gun safe. His hand flicked over its dial.
He assured himself Adah was smart. She knew when to run. She knew where her parents were. She’d waste no time. On clear roads, three hours separated Lost Pine from Portland. He eyed his watch.
Martin’s and Sue’s cocoons enlarged in his mind like flaring beacons.
He removed Sue’s cocoon from the fridge, Martin’s from the rain catcher, and dragged them to the yard out front. It pained him to think the water could now become tainted and his food would rot. But if the spiders came, he hoped they’d take what they wanted without damaging the house.
He returned to the gun safe.
Combinations tumbled in his mind and piled in a jumbled heap. Spindly yet gargantuan, Gage’s imagined spiders climbed over them and into the dark, neglected territory occupied by his parents. He imagined his parents stacked with others inside a return ship, shooting through space toward a faint star, their thin cocoons cracking under the stresses of the journey. Deep down, like a fault line shifting along tectonic plates of guilt and regret, he felt responsible. But for what? Did Monk’s stories reach at the truth? As cattle, those taken would prove old and mostly beyond breeding age. As pets, they’d act willful and uncooperative. As slaves, they’d fight. It didn’t add up. Those left behind were the better choice. What else could motivate the aliens to take so much care to preserve lives they planned to displace to another world?
The daylight angling down the stairs into the cellar faded. Gage climbed to the roof to watch for returning headlights and found his eyes drawn toward the shooting stars. They numbered more than on previous nights. None seemed to reach the ground.
Gage worried Monk could have persuaded Adah into trouble neither could handle. Or the cocoons had been moved. Or someone wanted their truck. Or . . . Gage didn’t want to think about it. In some ways, it felt better to believe Monk had duped them with theatrics and a fast tale and there were no aliens—Monk had kidnapped Adah. Even entertaining the idea sapped Gage of strength. Adah and Monk had left to fight something greater than them. He wanted to turn back time and have convinced Adah to stay. He murmured conversations he wished he had had with her. Let the spiders take your parents; you and I are all the family that matters. Together, we’ll make as large a family as we want. We’ll be the parents that were taken from us. No, we’ll be better. I love you.
The longer the road remained dark, the angrier he was at himself for not saying what needed to be said, the deeper his fury at Monk burned for returning to Lost Pine. He imagined setting out after Adah on foot. Any way he looked at it, the road stretched too far, and he moved too slowly.
Unable to watch the dark road under the active sky, Gage returned to the gun safe. He made his way through the dark by muscle memory.
He tugged at the safe’s handle in wild fits, screaming at it. He had dedicated everything to it. He blamed it for Adah leaving. He deserved its treasure. He told it he’d only do good with whatever it held, whether a single gun with a single bullet or a thousand guns with thousands of bullets.
Gage punched the safe for a dull, flat crack, and cradled his swelling hand in his lap. He threw his shoulder against it and kicked it until his toes felt like smashed masses, then kneeled and struck it with his forehead. A taste like iron shocked his sinuses and spread down the back of his throat, the taste of crud. He imagined if he broke himself against the safe, the crud would overtake him. So what if the spiders never found him and his cocoon was left behind? So what? Eventually, the crud would overtake him, regardless of how he felt about it, so why not just let what was planned happen? He had nothing more to lose in the terrible place the world had become. It was all he could do not to curl up and wait for the crud to take him when he heard clucking from the hens outside.
The hens knew nothing of the world. Everything living wanted to eat them. They wouldn’t make it a week roaming free. Cooped up, they’d only last as long as their diminished feed held out, unable to forage for slugs and grubs. But what kind of life would that be, unable to escape, food dwindling, their waste mounting and always waiting for the door to open, hoping freedom wouldn’t mean death? Small as his duty to them was, he couldn’t abandon it. It was all either of them had.
He cooped them for the night and returned to the safe.
Listless, he dialed a combination and tugged on the handle. The safe opened.
As though watching himself from outside his body, he shut the safe door, his muscles so trained in pulling and pushing on it. Breath caught in his throat. Cold ran through his body. Turning the dial had been a wild, unthinking gesture, everything in him attuned against what hadn’t worked. The numbers were a finger-painted mess in his mind, made messier the longer he groped for them. He trembled uncontrollably and backed away from the safe as if he could make it worse. Tears streamed down his cheeks. He whispered “No,” reached out, then withdrew his hand. His legs gave out under him. He stared into the darkness.
Cold aches spread from his gut. He was sure it was the blow that would finish him—the crud would take him. He lay on the dusty floor, sniveling. Lost Pine, Portland, Adah, Monk, the hens, his obstacle course, the spiders, the crud, return ships, space, Gliese 876, all of it now as far away as a dream after waking. All of it insubstantial and meaningless.
A cold shiver spasmed his shoulders. Another. The cellar floor was cold. He was cold. His body wouldn’t let him quit.
Slowly, he rose and approached the safe as though it could kill him if he startled it. He gripped the handle, gently turned it and pulled. It opened, the combination still set, the dial unmoved.
He leaned into the safe’s dark cavity. Blubbering thanks to the safe, to God, to everything, he hugged the contents to his chest and frenziedly identified each item by touch. A smooth, slender barrel rang as he ran his hand from the muzzle’s borehole to its stock, where the heady scent of gun oil had been rubbed into its crosshatched grip. A flimsy cardboard box hinged open, revealing the ridged butt-ends of organized bullets. Envelopes rattled with seeds. Odd-sized, tacky-faced papers cluttered a shoebox—photos. He pulled one out and stared at it, unseeing in the dark. He felt like he should apologize. Even at the end, whoever had stocked the safe thought to preserve their memories, and he had opened the door on them. Slowly, time and temperature and the air would erase them.
Gage returned the photo to its shoebox, closed it, and returned it to its shelf. After he had retrieved a candle and emptied the remainder of the safe, he closed the door and spun its dial.
With the contents of the safe arrayed before him, his body trembled and tears returned to his eyes. It was so little: two rifles, a shotgun, a revolver, ammunition, gun care kits and seeds. It could secure his present situation, but could not alter his course other than in the grimmest way.
His trigger hand swollen and aching, he carried the guns to the roof, where he loaded them and painfully fired at the shooting stars. Immaculately maintained, then untouched, they worked beautifully.
Night faded into day. Fatigue dropped on him like a net. Repeatedly, he told himself he saw movement on the road. Maybe Adah and Monk missed the covered entrance and drove by, the dash of movement he thought he saw not just a trick of his unsteady gaze searching through a thick forest brushed by breeze. Time proved him wrong. Heat shimmered from the roof. Gage found it best to remain still instead of pace the rough shingles his body didn’t shade. Continuously, he checked his watch until enough time had passed for the crud to have fully cocooned Adah and Monk had they been hurt soon after leaving.
He let the hens out, returned to the roof and restrained himself from looking at his watch but for every hour, then, as the sun passed midday, he considered only intervals equal to Adah’s round trip journey. He dozed and woke with a cotton-mouthed start and u
rinated off the roof in a dark orange stream. He felt clumsy and stupid. He aimed a rifle at a hen as it dumbly scratched and pecked the yard, then tracked it until it rounded the house out of sight.
He climbed down to a rain catcher and drank and took the day’s eggs from the coop. Feeling guilty, he ate all three raw, afraid of their shells’ muck, yet hopeful it would do the harm to his insides he wasn’t willing to inflict from the outside.
Slowly, he limped through the house. He felt the embossed fleur-de-lis on the hallway’s wallpaper, ran his fingers down the staircase’s smooth wooden banister to the carved pineapple finial crowning its newel post, and tapped the piano keys as Adah would’ve done. He pulled down the folding ladder to the roof and let it noisily retract into the third-floor ceiling.
He told himself he should’ve gone with Adah and Monk.
He found his lips forming the words “She will return.” Over and over. His breath failed him when he tried to give them voice.
He found himself on the couch in the piano room, planning to crank the stove burners to high and blow it all up. But there was tomorrow. Tomorrow. Maybe. Tomorrow. He fell asleep.
Half in a dream state, the faint honking made no sense. Adah knew the safe route through the obstacle course. She wouldn’t call him out. She’d come in. By inches, the incessant honking dragged him toward clarity, then it stopped, and he dropped back into the deep well of his fatigue. A scream tore him from it.
It was Adah.
Gage rushed from the house, his feet hardly touching the ground as he homed in on Adah’s voice. No more than a hundred yards from the drive’s entrance, she lay on her back, whimpering, an apologetic smile on her face, a huge log where her shin should have been. Her whimpering became sobbing laughs when she met his shocked stare, then her lips stretched over her teeth for a slow, restrained cry. Gage put his back to the log and rolled it off her. Where the log had been, Adah’s shin fitted securely in a trigger hole. Broken cleanly, her shin hung at a right angle to her leg. With sharp, surprised cries, she freed it, and shuffled back. Gage rolled the log over the berm where it had rested.
Dumbly—he couldn’t help himself—Gage asked, “What happened?”
Adah collected her breath, her face flushed of color, gathering herself for the pain Gage saw her adrenaline had held off but couldn’t restrain forever. Wordless, she gestured in a way that encompassed her journey, the absence of Monk and her return. Her hand swelled, purple and broken. A gash rent her side. Dark blood pebbled in her hair. Old wounds. She knew the way through the obstacles. She just hadn’t had the strength. She had been hurt. Gage took her into his arms. She screamed from the jarring of her leg.
“Why didn’t you wait for me to come out?” Gage asked.
“I thought . . .” she said, “I was gone so long. And you didn’t answer.”
“I’m sorry,” Gage said. Tears rushed to his eyes and choked his throat as he carried her inside. The pain splinting his hand and toes faded from recognition.
On the couch in the piano room, Adah’s breath came in swift, battling gasps, which she pressed through her teeth for words.
“They’re not spiders anymore,” she said. “It’s only meteors now. They’re getting big enough to reach the ground. There haven’t been spiders touching down for at least a day.”
“You’re going to be all right,” Gage said.
“We were wrong about the crud,” Adah said, fighting for breath. “Wrong to fight it.”
“You’re going to make it,” Gage said. “You’re a survivor.”
Suddenly, a numb look slackened her face. “They were right,” she said. “It doesn’t hurt.” A yellow, viscous tear gathered in her eye and rolled down her cheek. “Don’t touch me,” she said. “Let it happen.” Her heaving chest calmed. The hand Gage held became sticky. He unlaced his fingers.
It took less than twenty-four hours. Before the end, Adah removed her clothes in a fit of discomfort, then her strength left her. Crud thickened over her, lost its plasticity, and hardened. The roof drummed as though pelted with singular grains of hail. A window shattered inward. A puckered stone smoldered on the carpet amongst the glass. Outside, the hens raced about, clucking madly. Intermittently, something crashed in the forest.
The supposed mother ship, the massive moon-sized vessel hurtling in line behind the smaller objects before it, vanished from Gage’s mind. It was not a ship. His desire and ignorance had let him see what he wanted to see when even sophisticated imaging only showed blips. It was nothing more than an unfeeling meteor led by debris, so large that insectlike efforts to move it failed to affect its attitude. He felt trapped. Suddenly, the spiders and their return ships seemed loving, the crud a plague of mercy—disorienting and painful in the short term, but in the long run, aimed at preserving humanity’s best, its past, its knowledge.
Gage peered at Adah through her murky yellow cocoon and kissed the crud over her lips.
He holstered a revolver in his belt, strapped a shotgun across his back, pocketed ammunition, then carried Adah to the porch. Spread out before Martin’s and Sue’s cocoons, his obstacle course churned with ghostly motion set off by small meteors. His throat tightened. Pityingly, he looked at the hens, then started for the road. Metallic pings sounded from the propane tank beside the house. Heavy thumps pounded the earth. Dodging a springing branch, he toppled into a wooden spike, which gouged his thigh to the bone. Pain stole his breath. Adah fell from his grasp. The propane tank burst, sending a shockwave through the forest which set off all the triggers. Dizzy, Gage stumbled to his feet. Heavy, spiked objects he could not stop swung and rolled and dropped out of range around him. Fire had splashed the trees and bathed the side of Lost Pine. The rain barrels had broken. Their contents frothed and surged down the slope from the house toward the propane tank, but coursed under its support saddles. The fire blazed, rushing black smoke skyward. He heard no clucking. He heard nothing, a ringing so loud the only sounds to reach him beat his chest and reverberated up through his feet. A pair of hens lay burning in the yard, another above him, thrown into a tree. Adah’s cocoon lay beside him. Seeing her, his purpose returned—get her to the spiders. With them, maybe, she had a chance under a different sun.
Adah’s cocoon bit into Gage’s shoulder as he limped through the stilled obstacle course. His leg felt wet, his foot sticky from the blood running down his thigh.
Panic crackled through Gage as he approached the rusted red pickup truck—had Adah pocketed the keys? He looked inside. They dangled from the ignition. Gage hefted Adah into the passenger seat and glanced at the truck bed for more fuel. His eyes watered from the rising mothball vapors. Five cocoons crowded each other, held in place with tension straps—Adah’s parents; his parents; Monk. He swore at Adah for being so loyal, so thoughtful, so courageous.
The fire spread into the forest.
The truck started, and Gage peeled off toward Portland. His heart ached seeing the fuel gauge. It touched F. Adah had gotten fuel for another round trip. There was no telling what it had cost her, what it had cost Monk.
“You had everyone,” he said. “You shouldn’t have come back for me.”
Smoking contrails scored the blue sky, falling, falling, then vanishing out of sight. Then a contrail rose, rose, rose. The spiders were leaving, their return ships ready.
Pits erupted in the road before him and pelted the truck with debris. Gage bucked against the raised shoulder, corrected away from the opposite side’s dropoff, and veered onward. His mind dilated to the task, his every fiber clumsily imbued with muscle memory from when he had driven after the crud outbreak.
Gage passed turnoffs and skidded onto others and gritted his teeth. It was a convoluted route to Portland. Road signs had been scavenged for easily pliable metal. Gage told himself he still remembered the way.
The fuel gauge needle dipped. Explosions destroyed the road behind him. Meteors came in
waves.
He crested a high hill, which descended into the valley and left the steep, twisting backcountry roads. Before him, smoky contrails arced into the sky from the horizon.
“They’ll take you,” Gage said to Adah. “I’ll get you to them.”
The speedometer needle trembled near 100. Gage’s body fought between bracing and controlling, more aiming than steering. His gas pedal foot went numb, his leg like a paddle. Divots burst in the road. He aligned them between his tires. He touched his thigh. His hands felt sticky on the wheel. Blood? Only blood?
The gas gauge dipped below half. Like a flash of lightning, a meteor shot through the truck’s hood, leaving a pebble-sized hole, which spat smoke against the windshield and clouded his vision. The engine roared, the steering wheel shook. The speedometer dipped to ninety, eighty, seventy, and came to rest on fifty, the accelerator rammed to the floor.
Gage screamed and coughed and slammed the steering wheel with a swollen fist. He punched the wound in his thigh and gouged it with a thumb. Pain quickened to his toes, curled hard against the accelerator. He smiled. His leg still cooperated.
“You can’t do this to her and not take her,” he said.
The rising contrails gained detail, small candle flames below slender bodies of such pure black they looked like silhouettes against the blue sky. The silhouettes gained detail and shape, not slender, but massive, sleek, elongated teardrops, falling upward.
Ahead, a murky yellow dot punctuated the roadside, a cocoon, one of those who had given up on life and walked away from Portland until dropping. Gage let up on the gas. Who was he to sentence someone who had suffered so much to obliteration? The truck sputtered. Gage’s jaw tightened, and he trembled as he pumped the accelerator, hoping the truck wouldn’t die. In starts and fits, he regained speed and sped past the cocoon. Another cocoon appeared ahead.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
The cocoon disappeared in the rearview.
Another cocoon appeared ahead, then another, and another, closer together.
Writers of the Future, Volume 28 Page 33