An End tst-2

by Paul Evan Hughes

  “Cigarette?” She held her metal case out to him, but he shook his head and waved her off.

  “So what brings you down?”

  He looked away from her, at these blank walls carved into rock, at the generally-featureless home of this non-woman. Eventually his gaze swung back to her face, that perfect, beautiful face that he loved and feared.

  “Mr. Pierce, what is it?” Her voice had taken on an edge, and he knew that if he insisted on his silence, she would further hone that voice to cut into his mind.

  “It’s the child, ma’am.”

  Her eyes narrowed as she sat forward in the chair. “What about the child?”

  “She’s starting to realize—Well, she knows that she’s different.”

  “Of course she’s different.”

  “Yes, but…Have you been contacting her?”

  She tapped her fingertips in succession across the desktop, each nail issuing a crisp rap that echoed in the cold stone expanse. “What do you mean?”

  Pierce cleared his throat. “One of our angels reports that Lily says she hears voices in her head. In her dreams. She knows far too much already.”

  “No. She doesn’t know nearly enough. It’s time that we introduce her to her purpose in life.” She took a thoughtful sip of tea. “It’s time I meet with her.”

  Pierce swallowed nervously, sat upright in his chair.

  “Bring Lily to me.”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “What?” She looked as if she had been slapped at the utterance of the appellation.

  Pierce immediately turned a deep shade of red. He sat up in his seat, his hands instinctively wringing together once more. “I’m sorry, it just slipped out. I—”

  “What did you call me?” She knew full well what he had said, but simply wanted to hear it again.

  Pierce swallowed hard, the old man folds of flesh at his neck bobbing up and down. “Mother.” His voice was a whisper.

  “And what is my name?”

  “Maire.”

  “And what will you call me from now on, Mister Pierce?” She leaned toward him, silver swirls clouding her irises as she frowned.

  “Maire.”

  “Thank you, Mister Pierce. Now go.”

  He grabbed his hat, awkwardly bowed, and nearly jogged out the open door, held by the Artificial. Maire signaled the machine to leave her alone, and the door shut.

  It was time that she met the girl. After centuries of waiting, it was time.

  The Widow Windham fumbled with the key in the lock, fumbled, fumbled, dropped the keychain, retrieved it, finally succeeded in insertion, twist, and entry into her home. She accomplished this all as her son stood at her side, carefully holding the brown paper bag that held their daily allotment of food rations. He said nothing, and made no move to help his mother open the door. Although he was only seven, he knew that he should simply stand in silence and allow her to solve the problem of shaking hands and slippery key all by herself.

  Hunter followed his mother into the dark flat, dark because of the forever twilight of the dying skies and dark because of the heavy drapes that she never pulled back from the windows anymore. He lugged the bag into the kitchen and waited patiently until his mother took the meager supply of groceries from him and placed them on the tabletop. As soon as his burden was gone, he pulled back a chair and sat at the table while his mother opened cupboards, arranged new cans with old, new boxes with old, and he wondered if they would ever eat that can of lima beans or that box of instant mashed potatoes. He supposed that if the Troubles continued long enough, all they would have to eat would be lima beans and mashed potatoes.

  His mother took the long, lean loaf of bread from the grocery sack and placed it on the counter, folded the sack neatly and put it in one of the cupboards along with a stack just like it, shut the cupboard door, sat down at the kitchen table, put her head down on her arms, and proceeded to sob. Hunter’s small hand reached out, paused for a moment above his mother’s mousy, drooping locks, and withdrew. He knew that she needed to fall within for a while.

  It was always the same, day after day after day, at least during the week. The weekend afternoons were spent at the community center or the church, each of which were experiencing rapidly-dwindling populations as the war machine cranked into full production. It stripped away entire demographics at a time. First, the young men had gone, then the young women, then layers of society in increasingly-older strata were sent to the stars to fight a war that no one truly understood.

  Hunter walked to the living room, in shadows as it was, faint bands of grayish light falling on the floor and somehow dying there, coughing little last breaths on the plain charcoal utility of the carpet. He sat in one of those bands of light, not bothering to turn on the radio or the television. Both technologies had for the most part been abandoned, and they were much too poor to upgrade to silver.

  The sobs of Helen Windham were not loud anymore; she had lost her passion long ago, about the time of the Birth. When things fell apart, when the orders had finally come through and the one man she had ever loved was sent to the stars to fight a war for a creature at the center of the planet…She had broken.

  Each day it was an exquisite agony to walk by the compound, to see that horrid little girl and her angel staring at them through the fence. Each day she wanted to throw herself against the shield that she knew surrounded the compound and end her life, but she was always brought back to reality by the feel of the little hand in her own, the hand of the little boy who was now her only friend and family left. So she always dragged him past that awful place, and she knew that sometimes the little girl waved at her son, and she knew that sometimes her son waved back. It broke her heart to see that interaction, but she knew that the little girl probably had no idea that she was the last child born of humanity, and that it was her fault that the world was dying.

  Hunter sat cross-legged on the floor, leaned to one side to see down the hallway, where his mother still sat in the kitchen, face now covered by weary hands. He pulled his one prized possession from underneath the couch: Honeybear Brown, tattered and one-eyed and abused by five years of love. Hunter knew that he was now the man of the family, had been for a year now, but he just couldn’t give up Honeybear. He grasped the stuffed animal tightly and rocked back, forth, back, finding more comfort in that mindless act than he had been offered from his mother in the year since Papa left.

  He heard it in the sky then, another transport, shot into the sky from the same giant trebuchet tube across the ocean that had launched his father off to war. The sonic boom came, shook the picture frame on the wall, set the heavy curtains to swaying at the window, causing the lines of light to shift, leaving him in darkness and then light, darkness and then light. Mommy began sobbing again in the kitchen. There were always reminders, always something to bring those emotions back to the fragile, raw surface.

  Hunter Windham held Honeybear as tightly as he could, and wondered when he would be called off to war.

  Don’t cry, Mommy. Don’t—

  —cry, Lily. Please don’t cry.”

  The child was shaking in her embrace, and there was absolutely nothing that the angel who was Nan could do about it. She had known for years that this day would come, that finally Lily would leave this compound forever and ascend to her future. Mr. Pierce sat across the table from her, looking around the room, trying to find something interesting upon which to fix his gaze so that he would not inadvertently stare at the angel and the child.

  “Are you sure?” Nan stroked Lily’s hair, the child’s face buried in her chest, her body sending second-hand sobs into the projection’s periphery filter.

  “Of course I’m sure. I spoke with Mo—I spoke with Maire myself. It’s time for the girl to begin.” He absent-mindedly picked one of Lily’s dolls from the floor, a buxom lass with impossible features, made even more ridiculous by the fact that almost every female that had even remotely resembled her had died a horrible death at the hands
of the silver affliction. The doll was one of a dead breed.

  Lily turned from the safety of Nan’s embrace and walked calmly over to Mr. Pierce, defiantly tore the doll from his grasp, walked back to Nan. “Mine.”

  Mr. Pierce was taken aback for a moment. It had been decades since he had actually interacted with a child. “I see you’ve taught her how to share.”

  Nan scoffed. “Leave her be. She’ll be sharing enough once you get your hands on her.”

  He couldn’t believe the gall of the projection, talking to him in that condescending manner. “This isn’t something I want to do, Nan. This is something I have to do.”

  Nan pulled Lily closer, kissed the top of her head. The child had finally stopped sniffling, and she was engrossed in her doll. “She’s just a baby.”

  “And you knew all along that we’d have to send her away. You’ve become attached, Nan. Never should have become attached.”

  She watched the girl, and Pierce saw that look in her eye, that empty, longing look of the projected machine. How she yearned to be constructed of beautiful, awful, mortal flesh. She looked at the girl as if she herself had given birth to her.

  “She’s not yours, Nan. Never was.” Pierce leaned back in his chair, smug and proper.

  Nan grinned. She stood up, picked up Lily and doll and walked to the door to the child’s bedroom. “She’s not yours either.”

  Pierce frowned his objection at the projection. “I need to take her—”

  “Mother can have her tomorrow. For now, she needs to sleep.”

  Nan took Lily into her bedroom, shut the door behind her. Lily watched Pierce the whole way from over Nan’s shoulder, the chesty doll still held in her tiny hands. Pierce feared that gaze, feared everything about this little girl, and the job that she would begin in the morning.

  As for Nan, once the girl was gone, she would be switched off. There was no need for a Nanny in a world without children.

  She had fallen asleep at the kitchen table again, no doubt, although it was now too dark in the flat to be able to tell for sure. Hunter knew that if he turned on the light in the living room, it would rouse his mother from the fragile and necessary escape that sleep gave her. He didn’t want to wake her up, because he knew that she wouldn’t be able to fall asleep again for a long time if she did. No real reason to turn the lights on anyways. He found all the entertainment he needed for the evening inside of his head, and outside of the thick wide window behind the thick wide drapes.

  A gnawing hunger spoke in his belly, and although he was certain that there was food in the kitchen, his sleeping mother gave him all the reason to avoid it for a few more hours. He did not have the luxuries that other children had: two parents with a steady income, three meals a day, education, toys. He was content with Honeybear Brown and the window. He knew that there was a reason for all of this; there was a reason that his father had been taken from the planet and shot into another corner of the sky, and there was a reason that other kids’ fathers were still here. His Papa had been fortunate (unfortunate?) enough to prove his worthiness of such a divine mission at the outset of the Troubles. Other kids’ fathers would die here on Planet One.

  “We all gotta die someday, Windy.”

  Hunter hated when Honeybear Brown called him that. But of course, Honeybear Brown hated it when Hunter called him “Honey” or “Browny.” Nobody called Hunter “Hunter” except his mother and his father and Father Tristan. The children with whom he once played before the outbreak and quarantine had called him Windy because of his last name. He had called them buggers and crazies and harlots, a word that he did not understand but Father Tristan used to describe the dirty naughty ladies who did not wear enough clothes on the street corners, those dirty naughty ladies who grabbed men’s hands as they walked by and put them where men’s hands shouldn’t go on ladies, that place that you don’t talk about. Hunter felt sorry for the street corner ladies, their once-pretty faces now glittery with the silver, not that that made them less pretty, but once the silver set in, it was best to stay away.

  “Hungry, Windy?”

  Hunter glared at the bear, glared because of that voice he used, a high-pitched, shrill happy awful voice. Honeybear Brown always talked about the things that Hunter did not want to talk about.

  “No. I can wait.”

  Honeybear Brown shook his head, causing his one remaining eye to swing back and forth on the strands of thread that served as an optic nerve. “You need to eat, boyo.”

  “I can wait.”

  The house began to shake with the distant resonance of another transport launch, and Hunter ran over to the window, pulled the drapes back for the first time all day. It was not truly dark yet, more of an awkward twilight, but the few remaining streetlights were on, and the few remaining “harlots” were underneath them, smoking cigarettes, drinking from bottles in brown paper bags. They looked up in unison at the transport in the sky, flashing by faster than any of their heads could track, then went back to business as usual, smoking and drinking and looking for men to touch where they shouldn’t touch.

  Honeybear Brown joined Hunter at the window. The boy looked out into the nothing of the world, his only friend climbing up onto the sill.

  “Something’s gonna happen.”

  Honeybear Brown looked up in silence.

  “The little girl. She won’t be there tomorrow.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know. Something’s gonna happen.” Hunter picked up Honeybear Brown and pulled the drapes shut again, plunging the room into a darker dark.

  “Where’s she going?”

  Hunter thought for a while, sat back down on the floor in front of the dead television set, the bear on his lap, his mother muttering something in her sleep from the safety and non-comfort of the kitchen tabletop that would leave a faint criss-cross pattern on the side of her face whilst she slept.

  “She’s going to the stars. Just like Papa.”

  Honeybear Brown hugged the boy, nodded.

  “Just like me.”

  “It’ll be okay, Windy. They won’t make you go yet. It’ll be a few years before—”

  Honeybear Brown slumped to the floor at the sound of Helen Windham’s footsteps coming down the darkened hallway. In one heartbeat, the stuffed bear had been animated, vital, the only link Hunter had to communication with the world, and in the next, the bear was nothing but a tattered toy again. Hunter shoved his fabric friend underneath the couch, where his mother wouldn’t be able to find him. She never looked under the couch. She never looked at anything anymore.

  “Hunter?” Helen broadcast her quiet inquisition into the black room, just in case the boy had fallen asleep. She squinted her eyes, tried to excise his form from the tangle of void that was the living room. “Television on.”

  The ancient television snapped to life, although there was nothing but white static on the screen. It was enough illumination for Helen to be able to find her son, sitting quietly at the edge of the couch as he always did. It was always unsettling to catch his gaze from across the weakly-lit room…He had old eyes.

  “You hungry, baby?”

  She felt it then, that gaze in combination with something deeper, something ineffable. She felt the touch of his mind: such calm, such reassurance. He loved her, she knew, even through her depression, her naps at the kitchen table, the way she would sometimes purposefully drag him painfully around the Catalyst Compound gates. She knew that he understood, and he forgave her for being the young bride of a soldier. He forgave her for giving birth to him, although somehow he knew he fucking knew what that meant for him. He would die somewhere out between the stars, just like his father. He knew, somehow, and she saw that, felt that, in the brief moment of silverthought that he projected at her.

  Hunter nodded.

  She picked him up, held him close, saw the arm of that old ratty bear sticking from underneath the couch, but she said nothing. She knew that he needed that bear more than he needed her most da
ys.

  “Come on. Let’s have some supper.”

  He squeezed her around the neck, and she felt him smile. They went to the kitchen, where she made him a hot dog. He would sleep well that night. She would not. She would be too busy thinking about her husband, somewhere out there in the black. She would think about the days before it began, those simple days when

  the trucks drove through the town, filled with soldiers with stern faces and jaunty berets and scars and sometimes even blood. In the last days of the war, the trucks drove through the town, stopped for fuel and water and food for the soldiers, and sometimes those soldiers with jaunty berets and stern faces would turn into innocent boys on the wrong continent, just boys with big guns and insatiable appetites both for the local delicacies and the local “delicacies.”

  Helen Lofton did not consider herself a sexual being, besides losing her virginity to an overeager prick when she was sixteen just so that she could get the act over and move on to bigger and better things. She didn’t understand what the big deal about sex was until after the war when the trucks started rolling into town, and the soldiers took over.

  Walking down the street to the cafe, her copy of “The Stillness Between” clasped in the brown leather gloves that concealed her fragile and shaking hands, she turned to look at the rumble that approached from behind, a great olive green military transport, wounded and tired boys hanging from the canvas walls of the back, wrapped in bandages soaked through. Most of the boys stared at her with a nonchalant desire, more concerned about not bleeding out on the trip to the triage than with getting their dicks wet with a local.

  She could feel her heart in her chest, the beats crawling up into her throat and shaking tears into her eyes that threatened to spill over. She was just a schoolgirl holding a paperback on a sidewalk in the dying days of a continental war that had spilled over to include the impossibilities deep within the planet. These boys had been to the front. They had seen their own torn apart by silver fire and armies of light. She felt so young. So sanitized. In their eyes, she saw the human condition in these fading years: resignation and submission to a higher power.