Never Never Stories

by Jason Sanford

  “Have you seen my doll?” she asked. “Mom gave it to me on her last visit.”

  I didn't know what to say. How do you explain to a child who can't grow up, or even change, that her mother was long dead? That the doll had existed only in her mother's mind and, with her mother gone, there's no way to find it. Because of the thorn connection, for the briefest of moments Jackie understood what I was thinking. “My mother's not dead,” she cried, before the built up static of time returned her to the fresh-faced nine-year-old she'd been moments before. “Have you seen my doll?” she asked innocently.

  “No,” I said gently. “But I'll keep an eye out.” I pulled my arm away and wiped off the blood before returning to work.

  At lunchtime, I sat in the middle of the grove eating my sandwich. The wind blew the silver trees to the sound of a thousand begging whispers, but I resisted the urge to talk to any of them. I thought about visiting Mom's tree, but decided to wait until I was off work in case Mrs. Blondheim came by. Mom turned thorn when I was nine. Even though we hadn't the money to put her in a fancy grove like this, the thought of Mom growing here had obsessed me. Dad tried to tell me that Mom was dead; that her thorn tree was merely an echo of Mom's soul. But I begged him until he made a deal with Mrs. Blondheim, trading a cut in pay in return for her taking Mom's tree. At the time I'd been thrilled. Now, I wondered if I'd done the right thing.

  I also wondered about the people who'd created the phage which caused all this. A few fanatics like Mrs. Blondheim still praised the gened virus's creators for giving beauty and eternal life to our world. Most, though, cursed them as simple enviro terrorists. Whatever the intention, the phage had removed that most basic component of human culture – touch. Almost 90% of humanity carried the phage, but it only activated if you touched someone with the same phage combination. Since the phage continually changed versions like a madly spinning lock, the odds that touching any one person would turn you thorn were not extremely high. However, a person you could safely touch one day might be untouchable the next.

  I thought about Seanna. Despite the treatments my father gave me, I wanted so badly to touch her. To hold her. To kiss her. If we married, we could be tested to find a safe day or two in which to touch. If she bore my child, it would be safe for her to touch the baby as long as she breast fed the child and shared the same phage combinations, but I wouldn't be allowed such tenderness. Maybe someday my child and I could be tested so we'd share a hug like my father and I did after Mom died.

  As I constructed my life to come, I shook my head. The people who created this curse deserved the worst hell humanity could imagine.

  Maybe that had been their intention.

  * * *

  I finished my work by four and drove home with Dad, trying not to notice the crystal dust coating his pants. He hated killing thorns and would probably retire to the living room tonight to watch old movies and drink whiskey.

  After dinner, I checked the solar panels on the roof and the batteries in the basement, then reset the motion detectors and fluorescents. Once everything checked okay, and with darkness still an hour away, I figured I had enough time to visit Elleen. I grabbed my shotgun and told Dad I'd be back by sunset.

  Elleen grew at the far end of our land, just past the corn and wheat fields. Unlike most thorn trees, her crystal limbs shone with a faint blue hue. While Elleen and I had been friends since childhood, I'd only truly gotten to know her after she and Brad ran away when they were thirteen. Brad returned nine months later, infected and nearing his end. No one knew where Elleen was until I found her tree growing on our property. She later told me she'd been trying to reach Brad when her guts exploded and she fell to the dirt, screaming and begging for more time.

  I sat beneath Elleen's limbs, closed my eyes, and eased my palm onto a thorn. She suddenly appeared beside me, smiling, and leaned over and hugged me. While I knew the forbidden touch existed only in my mind, I still shivered with excitement. I was also amazed at the clarity of Elleen's connection. She never showed the fogginess most thorns fell into after a few days alone. Even my father, who refused to talk to thorns – including Mom – said hello to Elleen once, remarking later that she was indeed different. He'd also noticed that a few of Elleen's thorns still appeared to be growing, something most thorn trees stopped doing a few months after their first burst of creation.

  “How's Brad?” she asked.

  I opened my memories of Brad. Elleen frowned when she saw that Brad's father hadn't been watering him. To survive, thorn trees needed more water than ordinary trees. Since the drought began I'd hauled water to Elleen twice a week.

  “It's my fault,” I stammered. “I didn't know his father had his water cut off. I'll stop by and water Brad from now on.”

  Elleen thanked me. “Anything new with Seanna?” she asked.

  “She blew a kiss at me yesterday. But her mom's still mad at me for holding her gloved hand.”

  Elleen laughed. “That'll make Seanna want you even more. Nothing turns a girl on like a bad boy.”

  I started to question whether Elleen was the best one to give advice about a ‘bad boy' since Brad had turned her thorn, but I liked Elleen too much to say that. Of course, since our emotions and thoughts were coursing as one through my veins, she knew what I was thinking almost before I did. She laughed and cocked her head sidewise in my mind.

  “For what it's worth, Mr. Miles Stanton, you're too nice a guy to ever be bad. But it'll still help if Seanna sees you as forbidden fruit. Not that what you feel for her is anything more than base horniness and minor infatuation.”

  I sighed. It was pointless to argue over what I felt or didn't feel toward Seanna – Elleen would simply say she saw my motives with more clarity than I could ever muster.

  To change the subject, Elleen and I talked about Brad's reaction to her story. Back in school, Elleen had been the best writer around, with some of her romances picked up by the larger net zines. She still created stories but now Brad and I were her entire audience. I'd once tried to write the stories down, but the pictures she crafted in my head refused to match the words I knew.

  I asked Elleen if she had any new stories; in response, she sang a beautiful tale of a princess lost in a big city. But halfway through the story, just as the princess was about to find the magic key to take her home, Elleen stopped. “Someone's near us,” she whispered in panic.

  I tried to wake up, but Elleen's thorn trance was so strong I couldn't. Suddenly, Elleen's trunk vibrated and the thorn in my palm shattered. I fell into the dirt with a start. When I looked up, the sky above was dark except for a few moon-lit clouds scudding by. I jumped up, afraid.

  The only people out at night were thorn die.

  Elleen's limbs and trunk glowed with the slightest of bioluminescence. I cursed softly, grabbing my shotgun as I wished I'd brought my full-spectrum flashlight. It wouldn't stop determined thorn die, but it might scare them. Being killed rarely scared thorn die; pain usually did.

  I edged away from Elleen until I reached the dirt road. The road ran between my father's fields and the scrub forest that'd grown up on the abandoned suburban lands. Perfect place for an ambush. Still, I had no choice. I ran down the road as quickly and quietly as I could.

  I saw the porch lights of home, saw my father standing outside looking for me, and I started to relax – until three people stepped from the dark shadows beneath a nearby tree. I turned to run, but more people surrounded me.

  I aimed the shotgun at a woman standing in front of me. She was half-naked, her breasts showing the faint glowing streaks of the infection snaking through her body. “Hold me,” she moaned seductively before laughing. The man next to her giggled and hugged the woman. He was naked, as were most of the others around me. The phage drove thorn die almost insane with a desire to touch other people. But what made this man stand out were the tattoos of numbers across his chest and arms. Prime numbers and base pairs; quadratic equations and Einstein's famous e=mc2. The tattoos' dyes had attr
acted the phage infection so the numbers glowed faintly as he moved.

  I had never seen this many thorn die at once and I aimed the shotgun from one to the next. If I shot one, the others would be on me before I could pump another shell into the chamber. One of the thorn die reached for me, but the tattooed number man pulled him back.

  “My apology,” the number man said. “The phage screams at us during end stage, especially around uninfected like you.”

  I nodded in false sympathy. “I understand. If you'll just get out of my way . . .”

  The group tightened around me. “First, I'm curious about the thorn tree you were talking to a few moments ago,” the man said.

  “She's a friend. I take care of her.”

  That obviously wasn't what the numbered man wanted to know. But before he could be more specific, the half-naked woman beside him jumped at me. I fired the shotgun at her chest, seeing an afterimage of blood and glowing tissue as the numbered man screamed and tried in vain to stop the other thorn die from attacking me. I knocked one thorn die away with the gun's butt, dodged another and started to run when someone grabbed my right leg. I stumbled to the ground, trying to pump the next round into the chamber, but the thorn die were almost on me.

  Suddenly a shotgun blast rent the air, then another, then a third. I rolled over to find my father shooting the thorn die. I grabbed my own shotgun and crawled to him. By the time I'd pumped in a new shell, the remaining thorn die were gone, my last glimpse being of the number man as he bolted through the darkness. The shot ones screamed on the ground as their injured bodies raced to take root before death.

  “Come on,” Dad yelled as he grabbed my arm and dragged me to the house. “There're too many of them.”

  We ran as fast as we could, still hearing the yelling and screaming even after we'd bolted the front door. Once my father had made sure the thorn die weren't attacking the house, he grabbed my face in his ungloved hands and asked if I was okay. “Did they touch you? Did their blood splatter on you?”

  I shook my head, shocked at my father touching me for only the second time in my life. He asked again if they'd touched me, but all I could think about was how warm his flesh felt on mine. I tried to remember if any of the thorn die had touched me. The one who'd grabbed me had only gotten a hold of my pants and boots. And I couldn't see any of their blood on me. But maybe someone had touched me. I couldn't be sure.

  Dad hugged me tightly, and mumbled a prayer as he picked up his shotgun. “I'll stand first watch,” he said.

  Outside, the screaming continued as the wounded thorn die rooted their damned bodies to the ground.

  * * *

  The sun rose silently, the wounded thorn die having truly died as the phage rebuilt their bodies into silicon and cellulous. Now that the sun was up, the thorn seedlings would grow quickly, reach their full height within a month or two as their bodies and the sunlight were absorbed by a matrix a hundred times more efficient than a leafy plant's chlorophyll. As I walked around our house, I wondered where the other thorn die holed up. Once you were infected with an active phage, exposure to the sun sped up the painful change, which was why thorn die avoided sunlight and houses equipped with full-spectrum spotlights.

  Dad was hung-over from drinking too much last night. He also felt guilty about being too drunk to realize I hadn't come back by dark, and worried that I'd gotten an active phage from either the thorn die or his own touch. He opened our safe and took out all the money we'd saved.

  We drove downtown to the pharmacy, where Dad explained what had happened. “You need to tell the sheriff about this,” the Doc said sympathetically as she took the money from Dad's gloved hand and counted it. I knew we didn't have enough for a single test, let alone two. But to my surprise the Doc handed back some of the money and told me to step over for my blood sample. Dad obviously wasn't getting a test, even though he'd touched me.

  I protested, but the Doc whispered for me to shut up and act like a man. “Odds are, you'll have the same results,” she said.

  The test took four hours to run, so Dad and I walked down to the sheriff's office.

  Sheriff Alice Koffee said she'd heard reports of several large thorn die groups moving through the area. “Been bulletins about this all over the security nets the last few months,” she said. “Groups of thorn die move through an area and attack any memorial groves they find. Evidently they're undergoing some revival-like movement which preaches that memorial groves are sinful, but it's difficult to discover specifics on what they're up to.”

  The sheriff suggested we move closer to town until this passed, but Dad said we'd be fine. We then drove uptown and landscaped the memorial grove until noon before driving back to the pharmacy. I tried to stay calm while we sat and waited for the Doc, but my guts clenched and I could barely breathe. When she told me I was fine, my body shook so hard Dad had to help me stand back up.

  Figuring I needed some time alone, Dad said he'd finish landscaping the grove. I drove over to Seanna's house, wanting to talk to someone, but her mother eyed me suspiciously and said she'd gone shopping. I then drove home. I saw the thorn die bodies near the fields. They looked like shrunken mummies, each desiccated body centered on a half-meter silver seedling reaching for the sun.

  I walked over to talk to Elleen, but words were worthless for what I found. Elleen's truck was severed and almost all her limbs and thorns destroyed. Only a single limb remained, attached to a bare sliver of trunk. Her roots lay half-dug out of the ground.

  Crouching beside her, I gingerly pressed a finger to one of her remaining thorns. She appeared in my mind – hazy, delirious, but alive. At first she couldn't remember who I was, but as she accessed the memories in her remaining branch she smiled. She said the thorn die had attacked her last night; that they'd torn her apart piece by piece as they giggled and impaled themselves on her needles.

  I ran home and returned with my work tools. I carefully dug up Elleen's roots, the shovel cracking through her sun bleached bones. I then wrapped her in a wet burlap sack and carried her to the greenhouse behind our house.

  * * *

  I fussed over Elleen for the rest of the day, and Dad joined me when he arrived home. We placed her under the greenhouse grow lights and soaked her in nutrient rich soil. Dad figured it was touch and go, but said she might pull through.

  “It's weird, the thorn die doing that,” he said later, as we sat on the porch watching the sun set. I held my shotgun, while an automatic rifle I'd never seen before rested on Dad's lap. “And I don't understand why they're attacking the memorial groves. I mean, they'll all be trees in a few weeks or months. Why attack their own?”

  Dad said that as he'd left town, the sheriff and fire departments had called up their auxiliary officers and were preparing for the worst. The National Guard was also out.

  But Dad and I didn't get hit that night. On the horizon, we saw fires in the direction of town and heard a number of gunshots. If the phones and general nets had still been up, we'd have known what was happening. But they'd been gone for the last decade in this part of the state and the security nets were so overloaded we couldn't log on, so we sat on the porch all night long, slapping mosquitoes and waiting for first light.

  The next morning the smell of smoke strangled the air as Dad and I drove to town. We first rode through the outlying subdivisions so I could check on Seanna. We found hers and Brad's houses burned to the ground. There was no sign of Seanna and her family, but one of their neighbors said Seanna and her mother had been hurt and were in the hospital downtown. When I walked next door to Brad's house, I found his father's charred body in what had been the living room. Brad's old German Sheppard, Sarge, lay dead near the body, as if he'd tried to protect his master.

  Out back, Brad's tree looked like it had survived. But when I touched a thorn to give Brad the bad news, the crystalline structure shattered to shards. Dad shook his head and said the fire's heat must have killed Brad, too.

  While I cried, Dad patted
me on the shoulder with his gloved hand. I understood that even with Brad's death it wasn't worth us risking another touch.

  We buried Brad's father and Sarge beside Brad and I said a few words, telling Brad how much I'd miss him and how much Elleen loved him. We then drove to town. Burned barricades blocked most of the roads, with dozens of thorn die bodies lying around, some trying to root into the asphalt of Main Street. The National Guard still manned the barricades. A weary sergeant waved us through. We stopped at the hospital to check on Seanna and her mother, but the docs and nurses were overwhelmed with the injured and refused to let us in.

  Unable to help, Dad and I drove on to the memorial grove. Turned out the thorn die attack on the barricades and houses, no matter how bloody, had only been a diversion. A larger group attacked the town's memorial groves, smashing machetes and axes through the silver trees. Two groves in the poorer, outlying parts of town were totally destroyed, every tree missing branches and thorns, while the rich memorial grove Dad and I worked on had been partially damaged. We found the Sheriff near several of the grove's oldest thorn trees, all of whom were Blondheim relatives. The old trees had half their branches hacked off and several were burned.

  “Hundreds of them attacked the grove,” Sheriff Koffee said, “led by some thorn die named Chance with glowing numbers on his skin. Security nets say he used to be a math professor before the last universities shut down. Anyway, we beat them off before they torched the whole grove. But that Blondheim woman is still screaming at me for not doing more.”

  At the mention of the thorn die with the tattoos, I told Sheriff Koffee that he'd also attacked me, but she was distracted by the return of Mrs. Blondheim, who begged my Dad to save her trees. We inspected them. Several were obviously goners, while a handful might be saved with quick action. I started to tell Mrs. Blondheim that no matter what we did the trees had already lost any memories stored in their severed branches, but a stern look from Dad made me hush. I looked around the now damaged grove, located Mom's tree, and walked over to talk with her while Dad and the Sheriff hashed things out with Mrs. Blondheim.