by Ike Hamill
“You guys watch my back,” the guy with the gun says. “I’m going to sweep the area.” He starts to move forward with his gun pressed to the side of his face. When he glances back, the others are still near the ladder. “Seriously,” he says.
They glance at each other. Another guy, appears at the edge of the roof. How big is this mob? I’m surprised this man even made it up the ladder. His shoulders look too wide to have fit in the cage. With his arrival, the others begin to mobilize. They move in a group behind the gunman and they begin their “sweep.” I’m looking at the ladder, wondering how I’m going to get down when I hear the yell.
I turn towards the sound and then follow the pointing fingers up towards the sky. There’s a fiery meteor streaking across the sky above. For a second, they’re all staring at it with their mouths hanging open. Finally, the guy with the broad shoulders speaks.
“Shit. They’re early.”
Everyone runs. They forget the bear, and forget about me. They’re all trying to be first to the ladder. Maybe they’re going to try to get underground before the impact. I see them in my peripheral vision as I’m tracking the rock. It must be pretty high up, because it barely appears to be moving. Before it gets to the opposite horizon, it has broken up and petered out. I’m not sure if anything actually made it to the ground. None of the mob would know that. They’re fighting over who gets to descend first. The woman sneaks in there, and she’s moving slow. The gunman muscles his way in next and his progress is hampered because he keeps having to wait for her. The big-shoulder guy climbs over the side and makes his way down the awning that the bear climbed up.
With the mob leaving, I decide it’s a good time to hide. If I can just escape their attention for a minute, maybe I can sneak away after they run. Personally, I’m not interested in fleeing the meteor. Like I said, I think it already petered out. It can’t be the big one. It must just be an offshoot or something. A warning shot.
I come around the side of the little building and see the bear with his back pressed against the wall. He puts a claw to his lips in a shushing gesture.
“They’re gone,” I say.
He turns his nose to the air and it wiggles around as he sniffs. “You sure?”
I nod.
“You people are docile ninety percent of the time, but when you get riled up,” he says. He pushes up and stands erect. This bear really is huge compared to the other one. He’s craning his neck, looking over the side of the building. “I guess I scared them off.”
“No,” I say, “there was a meteor. That’s what scared them.”
“Uh huh,” he says, nodding.
---- * ----
“I’m almost a hundred-percent sure,” I say, pointing at the shadows between the buildings. Of course, it’s later now. The shadows aren’t nearly as deep.
The bear walks forward and sniffs around. He spends some time on the bricks and the pavement.
“You said there was a vote on the asteroid?” I ask. He holds up a paw in my direction. He’s been doing this the whole way from the grocery store to here. Every time I ask a question, he has something more important to attend to.
A window on the townhouse opens and I see a woman’s face. “Hey! Get out of there!” She disappears for a second and then comes back holding a pot. Before the bear can move, she has dumped the water on him. He shakes and the growls at her. The woman disappears and the window slams shut.
“He hasn’t been here for hours. Did he say where he was going?” the bear asks me.
“Hold on,” I say. “You said you would answer my questions. How about you explain to me why there are suddenly talking bears everywhere. Let’s just start there.”
He shakes again, sending up a cloud of droplets. They catch the sun in a momentary rainbow.
“It’s not sudden,” he says. “You just never noticed us before.”
“Bullshit. A thousand-pound talking bear is not something I would overlook.”
“You spend a lot of time in Alaska?”
“No.”
“Then how exactly would we have run into each other?”
I throw up my hand in frustration. “The entire world doesn’t know about talking bears. If you existed, then how come I never heard of you?”
“I never heard of you either,” he says.
“It’s not the same thing.”
“Agree to disagree,” he says. He puts his nose to the ground and starts sniffing down the sidewalk. When he gets to the next driveway, he stops, raises his nose, and looks left and right. “You have a truck?”
I shake my head.
“Van?”
“I don’t own a vehicle,” I say.
I stand there as he lumbers down the street. I peel my hand away from my side. Through the hole in my shirt, I can see the open wound. The edges are crusted with dried blood. The flesh underneath is shiny, but it doesn’t look like it’s still bleeding.
Chapter Twelve
* Argument *
“COULDN’T EVEN GET THROUGH the door,” I say. I have a little bucket in front of me with warm water. I suck in a breath every time I touch the pink towel to my chest.
“I think stitches are only cosmetic,” Adam says. “It will heal over, given enough time. You just have to worry about infections.”
“You think?” My voice drips with sarcasm, but he ignores it.
“Yeah, you’ll be fine. Do you have some of that antibacterial cream?”
“No. The line at the hospital was bad, but I couldn’t even get near the drugstore. There were looters everywhere.”
“Huh,” he says. “The news said that everything was calm. They said that people are staying at home.”
I shake my head. Now that I have my wound cleaned up, it’s not as bad as I thought. It clearly only went through a couple of layers of skin. Comparing it to pictures I found online, I can tell that my wound is considered superficial. It’s just a word, but it makes me feel better. They gave me some surgical tape for my chest bandages. With that, I’m able to pretty much pull the sides together when I dress my cut.
“Just another scar, I guess,” I say.
“I can’t believe you let that bear get away,” he says.
“Which one?”
“Either. It sounds like they have answers.”
“About what? I found both of them to be incredibly unhelpful animals.”
“Well, you said that the grizzly mentioned that the vote was about redirecting the asteroid. Then, when a meteor happened to fall right when the grizzly needed a distraction, he said that he scared them off. Wouldn’t he have seen the meteor?”
“Sure.”
“But he said that he scared them off. You see what this means?”
“No,” I say, shaking my head at the grate. Sometimes Adam’s logic eludes me.
“The bears have control over the celestial bodies,” he says.
“What?”
Adam is crazy. I’ve always known that. I mean, he lives his life in a prison that he created by carving out a space between spaces. He never sees the outside world, and I’m pretty sure that I’m the only person he communicates with. At the very least, he has some kind of severe disorder. But I’ve never heard a theory this crazy from him before. Of course, I’m the one who brought up the concept of talking bears. Who am I to judge?
“The black bear said you were going to die, but he voted against it. The grizzly said that the vote was about whether to redirect the asteroid. Then, a meteor saves him and he takes credit for it. It’s not an incredible leap to assume that the bears think that they’re controlling the asteroids. And, since these are unknown creatures with unknown abilities, I think we have to make the leap that maybe they are in control.”
“It doesn’t make any sense,” I say. “They’d be killing themselves, too. Nothing is going to survive if the asteroid strikes, right?”
“Well,” Adam says. “Maybe.”
I’m done with my new wound. The stitched up lacerations from the bear-att
ack are looking pretty good. It seems like the edges are healing together. There’s a tiny bit of swelling and pink flesh, but it doesn’t really hurt and it doesn’t itch. It’s just pure luck that nothing tore apart during the day’s stressful events. I wonder how I’m going to get the stitches out. If the world’s still in turmoil in a week, I don’t know if I’ll be able to find a doctor. What am I concerned about? We’re all going to be dead by then.
“Maybe they just want to knock out civilization,” Adam says. “You know—a glancing blow that takes us back to stone tools and small tribes. Bears would probably like that world better.”
“The grizzly seemed to be enjoying the hotel bed and TV when I met him,” I say. “I’m not sure that bear is big into the outdoors.”
“Regardless of the circumstances of one individual, what if we assume that these bears are part of a cabal that wants to bring destruction down on Earth. They’ve voted and now they’re going to execute the plan.”
“The black bear is not allowed to vote. The grizzly was very adamant about that,” I say.
“You’re missing the point,” he says.
“I’m missing the point? The point that there are talking bears who have a secret society and the ability to control interstellar objects and destroy our entire planet?”
“Asteroids are not interstellar. They orbit one star—our star, in this case.”
“Who cares?” I shout.
“Humans do,” he says. “Listen—you have to go find that bear and find out who voted. If you can convince them to change their minds, maybe they can still reroute this asteroid. You can save…”
I cut him off. “Why don’t you come out of your in-betweens and go find the bears? Every time I interact with them, I end up losing blood.”
I get up with a grunt and walk away before he manages to form a response. It’s early, but I go to my room and lie on top of the covers. The world is too noisy outside. If you live in the city for long enough, the sounds of human life become like a blanket. My security inside is defined by what I hear through my window. In here I’m separate, untouchable. But some nights there’s too much. Gunfire echoes a few blocks away. A couple of people shout at each other. A car creeps down the street and it sounds like it’s dragging a dozen shopping carts behind it.
I’m honestly surprised that anyone cares about an impending asteroid. We’ve polluted the sky with streetlights, and blotted out our view of the stars. Most days it feels like everyone has forgotten that we’re part of the food chain. Global warming? That’s why we have air conditioning. I knew this guy in college who used to say, “Don’t think of it as looking up into the heavens. Consider that you’re clinging to the surface of this floating ball, suspended over the infinite depths of the universe below.”
He thought it was deep. It never did anything for me.
But I saw a picture from space one time. Maybe it was taken by Voyager and beamed back.
Just for clarity—the Voyager probes were humanity’s first decent attempt at immortality. Two probes were designed and launched as part of a “Grand Tour” of the solar system that never quite happened. Before missions to all the planets could be arranged, Congress cut funding to the project. Still, we learned a lot from Voyager. Maybe if we had followed up with more missions to Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, we would have a colony there. Maybe we would have a floating city on Venus. Instead, we have two dying spacecraft, wandering away from our solar system. They carry a tiny amount of information about us. Everything that could fit on a gold record. Not that it matters, but it’s staggering how much more information we could store on a device the size of a grain of rice now.
Now that I think of it, the picture I saw wasn’t from Voyager. It was a much more recent mission—something on the way to Jupiter. Anyway, imagine a golf ball sitting on a black floor about three feet away from a marble. That’s what the picture looked like, but the golf ball was Earth, and the marble was the moon. First, I didn’t realize that the moon was so close in size to Earth. I always figured it was tiny. Second, they’re so far apart. It’s staggering how much distance there is between the two. I’m not making this up—you could take every single planet in our solar system and stack it between the earth and moon with room to spare.
That thought never ceases to amaze me. All the giant orbs in our solar system don’t even make up the space between us and our little brother. And still, we’ve conquered that distance. Brave people climbed into a tiny metal box and were propelled through the emptiness by barely-controlled explosions. Everything we want to do, we find a way to do it with an explosion.
Maybe this whole thing was planned.
If the US had kept working at it, I bet we would have a colony on the moon by now. When was the last mission to the moon, 72? Surely we could have built a base there in the last forty years. We probably could have built a base on Mars by now, for that matter. Then, the idea of losing Earth to an asteroid wouldn’t seem nearly as tragic. We would have a place to go. Hell, if we had invested in ourselves as a race, we might have already developed the technology required to avert the strike.
A crash from my kitchen snaps me from my meditation.
I sit up too quickly and feel the sting in my chest.
One of the looters must have broken in.
---- * ----
With a golf club in my right hand, I make my way to the kitchen. I hear a pan clank on the floor and skid into one of the cabinets. I flip on the lights.
His ass is in the air and his head is buried in one of the lower cabinets.
When the lights come on, he pulls back quick and I hear the frame of the cabinet creak. I’ll be lucky if he hasn’t broken the frame. I lower the club.
“What are you doing?”
He turns around. A cereal box is stuck on his head. He pulls it off with his paws and Rice Krispies scatter on the floor.
“These are stale,” he says. There are little bits stuck to his black lips.
“I think the last owner left those under there. I’m not even sure they make those anymore. But, seriously, what the hell are you doing in my house?”
“The door was open,” he says. He pushes his bulk past me.
“Bullshit,” I say.
He pauses at the door to the TV room, glances in, and then continues to my bedroom.
“Hey! That’s my room.”
I sigh as he pushes the door open with a paw.
When I get through the door, he’s climbing up on my bed and leaning back against the wall. I hear the plaster crack as he settles in.
“Can you get out of here?”
“Forgive me. You don’t have a lot of comfortable places to sit around here.”
“Maybe because this apartment was built for people? Maybe you could find a nice park with a cave or something? Maybe the zoo would take you back?”
“Huh,” he says, with an expulsion of air. “I would sooner go back to Florida. At least it’s warm down there. Hate the snakes though. Too many snakes around these days. You know how many foreign species of snakes have been turned loose into those swamps? People just don’t respect the importance of…”
“Stop!” I yell. “This is my house. I need you to leave.”
“Can’t do it,” he says. “I’m going to hang out here for the night. I saw a couch in the other room. That looks like it would fit you. I’ll stay here.”
“No. You have to get out. Right now. Come on—get.”
I think about the woman who dumped water on the grizzly. Do bears hate water? No, I think that’s cats. Besides, if I threw water on this bear, I would just get my bed all wet. What good would that do?
He’s not moving, except to wriggle even more down the wall. He’s getting comfortable.
“Hey, you know what? I’m going to go get that grizzly bear. He seemed pretty intent on finding you, and he’s goddamn huge compared to you. I bet he would get you motivated.”
It’s mostly a bluff, of course. Unfortunately, the black bear doesn’t
take the bait.
“Oh, you wouldn’t want to do that. If you think having one bear in your place is bad, try having two. Two bears in the midst of a bear fight will fuck a place up pretty bad. Regardless of who wins that fight, this place is not going to be inhabitable after the dust settles. Then what are you going to do? Good luck out in the world, buddy. The world is a tough place at the moment.”
As I listen to him talk, I start to want to go get the grizzly anyway. I want to see this bear afraid. If I owned a gun, I might be inclined to use it on him. I start to think about what else I could use as a weapon. He reaches down and starts to scratch the bottom of his foot with one of his claws. They’re not retractable, those claws. I would never be able to hurt him before he would tear me to shreds. I suppose I could call the cops, but that would be a useless exercise. If there are still cops around, I’m sure they’re really busy.
He’s looking at me. I realize that he asked me a question, but I was lost in my thoughts and I didn’t hear him.
“What?”
“I said, would you mind fetching me a glass of water?”
“For what?”
He cocks his head. “Because there’s a miniature forest fire and I want to put it out before it ravages the homes of my tiny compatriots.”
I just stand there, looking at him.
“Because I’m thirsty,” he says, forcefully.
“Oh.”
I hate being bullied.
I grew up as the older brother, so I know the concept well. Bullies are missing something in their lives, and they take it out on the weak.
“Get it yourself,” I say.
The bear grunts.
“Look,” he says, pushing himself off the wall and sliding to the edge of the bed, “the only reason I asked you to get it, is that I’m not too dexterous. I’m just as likely to break half of the glasses in your cabinet. I can drink okay, but manipulating glassware is not my strong suit.”
He’s standing on all fours in front of me, waiting to pass.
“I’ll get it,” I say, giving in.