by Steven Bohls
“So squishy…” he whispered, clenching and unclenching his fingers into a fist.
Even the sound of his own voice was peculiar…foreign…fake.
Who am I?
He tried to think. The image of a burning heat melting his mind surfaced. He shook his head. Memories felt buried and looked blurry—dreams he could not remember.
What am I?
I have a name…don’t I?
He tried to remember—anything. His home? His face? The harder he tried, the soupier his brain felt.
He searched the darkness. He was in a cave. No…not a cave. An empty water tower on its side. Wooden windmill blades obscured the entrance. Through the gaps, he saw bits of the outside world. The ground was compressed junk. The sky was a dusty black expanse.
Near the entrance of the water tower sat a raft, quiet and still. He stared at it. A vibrant green tree with bright yellow lemons sprouted from its center.
“Odd. Boats don’t grow trees…do they?” Jed whispered to himself.
This was all wrong. This wasn’t where he belonged. Was it?
He didn’t live under dark mist that tasted like oil and metal. He lived in a three-bedroom home, with color and smiles. Didn’t he?
He twisted his neck. To his left was a sleeping girl—her small body curled into a ball. She had copper hair that glinted in the dim sliver of light, and her tiny mouth sipped quick breaths of air. She shivered and pulled her legs closer to her chest. Then she sighed and twitched her nose.
To his right was a sleeping man, tall, gangly, and sprawled out sloppily. He drew slow, heavy breaths and released low—almost silent—snores.
Who are they?
“They’re dangerous…” a voice whispered in his ear.
Jed’s heart thumped at the sound. It wasn’t his own voice. It was a man’s. Someone he knew.
“Who…are you?” he whispered back.
“A friend,” said the whisper. “And I’m going to help you escape.”
“Escape from what?”
“From those two. They stole you. They are thieves. Get away from them. Hurry!”
“I don’t remember you. I don’t…I don’t remember anything.”
“I know,” the voice whispered. “I’ll help you remember. Now, crawl away.”
The gangly man beside him rolled onto his side and snorted.
“What’s going on?” Jed whispered. “This isn’t right. I’m not supposed to be here.”
A thought floated into his mind of warm beds…warm carpets…birthdays and laughter. There was no laughter here. Only darkness and strangers.
The whisper returned. “The connection is fading. You must find me. Look for the red flares. Go. Quickly!”
Icy needles prickled up Jed’s spine. Fear welled in his chest, and his thoughts shattered in a frenzy of panic.
Run.
Get away.
Hide.
Carefully, he crept out of the water tower and into the darkness.
Jed
Ships hung heavy in the sky like storm clouds. Dreadnoughts. Jed knew the word, he knew he’d seen them before, and he knew they were deadly. He scanned the horizon for a clue. A flickering red light streamed through the sky. Look for the red flares, the voice had said.
“Are you there?” Jed closed his eyes and searched for the whisper. His mind was a vault of locked memories. The whisper was the key, he imagined. He was in a strange place with strange people. I was taken? By them?
He moved from cover to cover, toward the flare. Above, the dreadnoughts flew in jumbled fleets. The ship hulls were twisted hunks of metal. An eerie jaggedness framed the bodies of the beasts, and orange furnaces burned in the heart of each ship, leaking a dull glow.
As Jed watched, a distant fleet began to change course, turning until they were pointed directly at him.
They can’t see me from that far away…can they?
Their engines flared, making the air ripple with heat and bringing the dreadnoughts closer.
Jed’s heart thumped. He stumbled away as the ships powered through the sky.
Up ahead, another fleet turned and faced him. They, too, began to accelerate.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Jed said.
Faster and faster he ran, avoiding deadly misstep after deadly misstep on the uneven terrain. The ships were gaining on him. Jed shifted direction and sprinted left, away from both fleets. The ships maintained a steady course, and that’s when he realized—the ships weren’t heading for him. They were heading for each other.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
Orange fire shot into the air and junk rumbled under Jed’s feet. He followed the shatterfire with his eyes as it arced through the sky. Flames trailed the blasts as they slammed into one another, and explosions erupted from the broken hulls.
Jed ducked behind a tire as metal rained down and impaled the ground around him. The fleets continued firing and more metal slashed through the debris. Watching the destruction, Jed sensed a problem. The battle was off-kilter; it was strange…it was wrong. Why were the dreadnoughts firing at each other?
More scrap pelted the ground nearby, embedding itself in a fridge and leaving jagged metal chunks shivering upright in the junk. He swallowed nervously. The shatterkegs rumbled above him. “I need to get out or I’ll be buried here.”
Something cracked over Jed’s head. Engines sputtered and wailed from one of the dreadnoughts. The storm paused, almost as if the enemies were taking a deep breath. Jed peeked out to see a dreadnought slowly being torn in half.
And then it began falling.
He leaped from behind the tire and sprinted away. He stole quick glances upward as both halves of the dreadnought sunk toward the ground. Jed’s feet hit the junk faster and harder as a shadow swelled around him and the dreadnought fell closer. The nose of the ship pierced the ground first, metal shrieking in protest and debris shooting into the sky. Jed watched as the rest of the ship plummeted down.
“Go, go, go!” he yelled to himself.
Everything shook.
His lungs burned, but Jed kept running. Junk ripped, screeched, creaked, and shattered around him as smoke billowed up from the broken vessel. Figures emerged from the smoke. Black dots poked out and skittered in all directions. Before long, they swarmed the deck and crawled to the ground. They were twisted, misshapen scraps of flesh and metal.
Dread. The word lurked in the corner of Jed’s empty mind just like dreadnought had.
He stumbled backward.
Dread from both sides met in the center of the battlefield, giving Jed a sliver of a chance to escape. He backed away until he thought it was safe, and then he ran until he could no longer hear the sounds of tearing metal. Distant ships flew in clusters toward other fleets. Dots of orange shatterfire speckled the dark sky. This was war. But it isn’t right. Why are the dread killing one another? They aren’t supposed to do that. They’re supposed to kill humans…meat sacks…aren’t they?
Jed dropped down behind a grimy couch to catch his breath, and the unfamiliar—yet familiar—whisper returned. “Traitors…”
“What?”
“I gave them life, and they turned into feral dogs.”
Jed stared at the distant warring dread. “You created those things? Why?”
There was a long pause. “To survive.” Another faint red flare shot up in the distance. “Quickly,” the voice said. “Before they find you.”
“Who?” Jed asked. “The dread?” But he could feel that the whisper was already gone.
The desolation was endless, mirroring the dark hole his questions had dug within him. Where was he? What was this place—this strange land of charred, squished-up junk and metal creatures?
A thought pricked the back of his mind: This isn’t land at all. It’s a giant ship. A barge.
He shook his head. That was ridiculous. A ship? The horizon on all sides of him ended in a distant gray fog. This couldn’t be a ship. That was impossible. It was too enormous; ships this b
ig didn’t exist. But, even as he tried to shake the thought from his mind, something told him that this was, indeed, a ship.
He looked up. Ships were flying above him, blasting each other to scrap. How could he be standing on one? It didn’t make sense.
Why couldn’t he remember? What was wrong with him? He stared at his hands again. Who am I? The skin was too soft and too pink. It didn’t look right. Wasn’t his skin…gold? He flexed his fingers one by one. “Who am I?” he said again, this time out loud. “I have a name. I know I do. My name is—” he spoke, as if the answer would somehow spring free on its own by doing so.
It didn’t.
“My name is—” he tried again.
Nothing.
A dull ache throbbed in the center of his chest. Carefully, he pulled off his T-shirt. A long white bandage had been wrapped around his chest, and red oil seeped through the gauze. He unpinned the two aluminum clasps holding the wrap in place and let it unravel. When it reached its end, the fabric tugged against the dried red. He winced, pulling it off.
A ring of skin had burned away, revealing the delicate gears that spun inside his chest. Golden gears.
Panic ignited in the pit of his stomach. The gears inside him whirred faster as the terror clawed through his mind.
“What…what am I?” he whispered. “What’s happening to me?”
His heartbeat quickened even more, and so did the golden gears. They hummed so silently that he might have never noticed them. The machinery spun around a golden plate with a keyhole in it. Jed ran his shaking fingers over the indentation.
Taking a deep breath, Jed leaned back against an old trunk and stared up at the sky, dropping his hands. He couldn’t think about everything so much. He didn’t want to. He had to worry about one thing at a time, and there were plenty of things to choose from.
The fog gave no indication whether it was morning, afternoon, or the middle of the night. Jed’s stomach grumbled. Whatever time it was, he was hungry.
What did people eat here? People? He laughed at the word. Whatever those things crawling from the dreadnought were, they weren’t people.
But they were at least partially alive, so that meant they had to eat something.
Jed stood and searched the ground around him.
A checkered pillow…a ladder…a painting of a dolphin.
The longer he walked, the more his stomach grumbled. But amidst doorknobs, stuffed bears, and a weed whacker, he couldn’t spot anything to eat. What if there wasn’t any food at all around here? What if the dread didn’t actually eat food and instead ate junk? Jed touched the burned hole in his chest. Did he eat junk?
It had been hours since he’d seen a dread. Every so often, another red flare would launch into the sky. He was getting closer, little by little.
His stomach rumbled again.
Just as he decided that there was no food in this wasteland, his tired eyes spotted a torn label with a muscly, green-skinned man standing in a meadow. Green Giant French Style Green Beans.
Jed grabbed the can. “Of course,” he mumbled, “I’m in a world of junk with a can of green beans and no can opener.”
He searched until he found a screwdriver to pry open the lid. He pounded and pulled until at last, he pinched one of the squishy green beans. The moment it touched his tongue, a memory popped open. Crisp green beans, pan-seared in olive oil and rolled in a bed of minced sautéed garlic cloves…hot turkey that steamed on a chrome platter…buttered broccoli, yams, and cranberry sauce. He was back home, sitting at the kitchen table for a Thanksgiving meal. As he chewed the cold, wet canned green beans, part of him wished the memory hadn’t returned. It hung there, taunting him with safety and comfort.
He tipped the can to his chin and slurped the last few drops of water. Jed closed his eyes and thought of his warm home and warm meals once more. It was filled with shadows, but the outlines were there. Then, a new scratchy voice entered his mind.
“Wake up, Sleepy Mouse.”
Jed’s vision flickered. He sat still, focusing on the image. He was seeing double—a second sight overlaid on his own. He was looking through two sets of eyes at the same time.
“Wake up, Sleepy Mouse…wake up,” the voice said again.
The vision saturated his sight until it was all he could see. Even with his eyes closed, the second pair of eyes revealed a new world to him. The voice grew louder. And then, all at once, everything that he was disappeared. Jed was in another mind.
Shay
“Wake up, Sleepy Mouse, wake up.” Shay shook Ryan’s shoulders with both hands. He flopped and wiggled more like a stepped-on mouse than an alive mouse. “Wake up!” she squeaked, pulling extra yankingly.
“Wh-what’s going on?” Ryan asked, groggy from sleep.
Shay folded her arms and showed him her serious eyes. “Broken Mouse scampered away. That’s what’s going on.”
“Broken…huh?” In half a squeak, Ryan’s eyes widened in panic. “What happened? Where did he go? He’s gone!”
Shay didn’t unfold her arms and didn’t stop showing him her serious eyes. “That’s what I’ve been trying to say while you were pretending to be a stepped-on mouse.”
“Where is he?”
She smooshed her finger to his lips. “Hush. Unless you want a scritcherling nest to hear you.”
He nodded, but his eyes were still panicky.
“What did you see?” he squeaked, quieter this time.
“Hmm…well…I was having a dream about golden skies and blue puddles—puddles so big that little mouselings need little boats to cross them. I was on a yellow boat. It had yellow doors and yellow floors and green doorknobs. And then I woke up.”
“And then what?”
“And then I woke you up. And then you asked me what happened. And then I told you that I was having a dream about golden skies and blue puddles—puddles so big that little mouselings—”
“You didn’t see where he went?”
Shay scrunched her brow. “I already told you what I saw, and then I told you again. This isn’t a time to be a forgetful mouse. It’s a time to be a thinking mouse.”
“We have to find him.” Ryan cupped his hands to his mouth, about to shout.
“Hush!” This time Shay covered his mouth with all her fingers. “Do you want scritchmites to find Broken Mouse and break him even more?”
Ryan shook his head like an obedient mouseling.
She nodded. “Good. Then help me search the ground for Broken Mouse scamperings.”
Ryan and Shay searched for a trail leading to Broken Mouse—for some sign of his whereabouts or movements. Ryan’s face grew more and more wrinkly.
Suddenly, a sharp whistle sounded overhead. Shatterfire burst across the sky, soaring from one dreadnought to another. Explosions crackled between the two ships.
Ryan ducked as a hunk of metal crashed to the ground. “I don’t understand,” he said, tight frustration in his tone. “Why are they killing one another? We’ve been stuck hiding here for nearly three weeks waiting for the dread fighting to end, but it’s just getting worse.”
“My guess? Hmm…I’d bet a basketful of cheese that mouse king isn’t mouse king anymore,” Shay said.
“And so suddenly all the dread in the armada want to kill one another?”
“Little scritchbugs squeak and nibble at one another’s tails, all trying to be new mouse king. But new mouse king is coming….” she said. “I can smell it. Can’t you smell it? It smells like sneakery. And pineapple.”
“Huh?”
“It’s a pokey fruit,” she said. “Yellow and shiny. Tangy and sweet. Prickly and juicy. Squishy and—”
“I know what pineapple is,” Ryan said. “It just doesn’t make sense. How do all the dread know what’s happened to Lyle?”
She leaned in close and whispered in his ear. “Maybe someone told them.”
Ryan rolled his eyes and shook his head. “Never mind.” He stared into the sky, watching the battling ships. “
If only the coppers and the irons knew the dread were in the middle of a civil war, maybe they could cooperate long enough to launch an offensive all the way out here.”
Shay gave Ryan a sly smile. “You’re a sneaky mouse. You’d make a devious little mouse king, wouldn’t you?”
“Or maybe the dread will kill one another on their own,” Ryan mused. “That could work too.”
Shay inhaled a deep breath through her nose and then shook her head. “Nope. Smells like a new mouse king to me.”
“You seem awfully sure of that.”
Shay gave him a confident shrug. “Before scritches ever knew how to make new scritchlings, I made lots and lots and lots of them with my very own two paws. And a mama mouse knows her mouselings.”
Jed
The vision faded, and Jed was back, the empty can of green beans still in his hands.
What just happened? It was like he had become that girl…Shay.
“I escaped from them,” he said aloud. “And now they’re looking for me.”
The first whisperer in his head had said that they were dangerous. But the man didn’t seem dangerous at all. The girl, maybe. But neither was angry that he’d left. Only worried.
More sealed memories jiggled in Jed’s head, itching to open. There was something about the face of that man and the voice of the girl that had sparked recognition. He focused on the man’s face, straining his memory. It felt so close.
The whisperer said they’d stolen him, but Jed didn’t know who to trust. The voices in his mind and the visions in his eyes made him wonder if he could even trust himself. Clutching his head in both hands, Jed’s thoughts jumped from Ryan to Shay to the mouse king. What did that last one mean? He pictured a giant furry mouse scurrying over the junk, eating passersby.
Nothing made sense. If he could just remember something. Anything.
Unsure of what else to do, he stood and kept walking. Another flare lit up in the distance—the lights were getting closer. The longer he walked, though, the more tired he became. Sleep…he thought. He shook his head to wake himself up. It was too dangerous to sleep here.