by Jane Yolen
~*~
Heat infused the small apartment.
Beebe dialed down the dim switch on the wall above the dresser and, at first, a sense of relief washed over her. Mister Malouf from next door had stopped his solitary conversation, unaware his novenas were being heard by ears other than those of saints; Nelida slept, dreaming of a far-off place where a merry-go-round spun within a dense, protective wall of cedar trees according to the stark images Beebe saw secondhand; and the steady thrumming undercurrent cast by the Pillars pushed Mister Ulmer’s mean thoughts from the front of the girl’s memory.
She settled back on the blankets and again slipped her head between the pillows.
Hello.
Beebe’s eyes shot open. At first, she waited, hoping the voice would go away.
Can anyone hear me?
Beebe held her breath.
Please, I don’t know where I am. It’s dark but I can see you there. My name’s Margaret.
Beebe tossed the covers aside and hurried over to the Pillar. She set both hands on the dense transparency. Warmth crackled over her palms and fingertips.
“I’m here,” Beebe whispered. “Only I can’t talk too loud or I’ll get in trouble.”
Where am I?
“Our place, far from the Ragglands. You’re in the Pillars now.”
I don’t understand.
“High-yield energy collector and distribution cylinder—that’s what Mister Ulmer says. He’s our maintenance man. I think you’re the energy.”
What? Margaret’s voice broke on a sob.
“Don’t cry,” Beebe whispered to her new friend.
But why?
“Because, I think you’re like the flame of the candle, Margaret. One of the stars in Heaven. Only the Pillars reached up and pulled you down.”
I don’t want to be here. How is it that I can hear you, see you, and that you can hear me?
“Like my Grandma Ella, I have a gift. I… I can release you… ”
Beebe drew in a deep breath and waited for what she knew would follow.
Little girl, will you use your gift and help me escape from these Pillars?
“Yes,” Beebe eventually said. “I will.”
She gripped the Pillars and willed her new friend free.
“I want to fight.”
“You have to live to fight!”
Brenda Cooper
Heroes
Brenda Cooper
It took a long time, many miles, and a death for me touch my daughter, Lucienne. That morning, the one after the Russians overran Vancouver, Canada, there was three feet of distance between us but it felt like miles. She and I sat side by side on a hard wooden booth in the Sacred Brew Coffeehouse, my coffee cup and her hot chocolate both empty.
We both watched Juliette closely. Her lashes curled dark against her coppery skin, her gray-green eyes looked past us both. Lucienne fidgeted, glancing furtively at each of us, looking by turn angry with me and like she might want to jump into Juliette’s skin and be her.
Juliette and I had already said the things we needed to. It felt awkward but sweet, like the mornings after she and I dumped our fear and stress in long, sweet lovemaking. I had used her to feel touched and noticed. She had enjoyed it. It had been release, never forever. One knows. We even said so. But in that moment the pending loss of her made me soft and frightened. I reached over and took her hand. “Stay safe,” I said for the third time, as if I could charm the words.
“You, too.” She took Lucienne’s hand in her free hand. “Keep your mom safe.”
“I will.” She looked quite serious for a twelve-year-old, but then she had been a serious infant.
The threat of war intensified whatever we were to begin with. For Lucienne, it was being angry and serious and deeply thoughtful. I had become worried and flighty, forgetting things and sleeping badly. Keeping my emotions in check had become hard.
Juliette became brave.
Now, the threat bore down so hard my focus felt as sharp as a hawk’s talon and I quivered with the need to flee. The border between Canada and us had never been defensive. It started as a quiet nod to neighbors who liked each other. It gained some teeth in the early terrorist years, and it still had those teeth. But there was nothing about that thin line between big countries that would stand up to a wall of robotic tanks or waves of battle drones.
Lucienne and I had our packs ready, locked in the trunk of the car. Everyone else who had stayed might have their cars loaded, too. Every moment we waited crawled up my nerves. I set my empty cup down. “Now.”
Lucienne refused to look at me. She wanted to stay. She held her slender wrist up and touched her wristlet to Juliette’s, her eyes staring at her as if she could change the world with the force of her gaze. “Stay connected. Promise?”
“Yes.” Juliette’s voice sounded thick with unsaid words. She leaned down and kissed us, Lucienne first and then me, on the forehead. Right after, she left, dropping her cups and ours in the bus bin just before she closed the back door quietly.
She had chosen to fight, picked a job as a sentinel and a relay, although I knew she had acquired a few knives and found unseen places to strap them. Pointless against a war of machinery. Half the city planned to fight.
I hadn’t even bothered to hope she would see reason.
Maybe if we had been married or something, but we weren’t, and Lucienne and I weren’t hers to protect. But Lucienne was mine, and we were leaving.
Outside, the sky was the color of June, a tapestry in shades of gray, some parts light with sun and others pregnant with rain. Right after we climbed into the car and doors closed, Lucienne said, “I hate you.”
“All twelve year olds hate their mothers.”
“I hate you more than anyone.”
“I know.”
The car lurched forward. We settled into silence and devices, as if this were any trip to school or work in spite of the fact that emergency supplies and far too many pre-teen sized clothes filled every spot in the car that we didn’t.
To my surprise the car was able to cross Lake Washington on the 520 bridge and catch side streets to interstate 90. National Guardsmen in bright orange vests with guns and knives waived cars forward and forward and forward again in spurts, letting new vehicles in from the side roads and the onramps in clumps and then letting the main group of us inch forward again. They appeared to be getting silent instructions from the same emergency traffic control that fed the cars, as if perhaps they were as extraneous as Juliette would surely be.
I packed and unpacked our packs, succeeding in making them feel bigger. Mostly, I berated myself for staying too long. My company had paid me a generous bonus to stay, Juliette had been a sort of bonus, and Lucienne had been working on a final project.
Besides, the Russians hadn’t seemed real.
Lucienne alternated between glaring at me, fiddling with her wristlet, sleeping, and talking to her friends, most of whom had already left. Only two hid in Seattle: Lisa on a boat in Lake Union and Scott in a warehouse near the docks.
From time to time Lucienne narrated the news for me, and all of it seemed to be about numbers. Her voice came out flat and calm. “Forty thousand people have left the city this morning. All lanes of I5 southbound are stopped. Two northbound lanes have been opened for southbound traffic.” A few moments later. “Thirty-two hundred people in Vancouver are reported dead.”
While I gasped at that, Lucienne did not. She might as well have been playing a video game. “You know this is real?” I asked in spite of my better judgment.
She rolled her eyes.
Just after we crested the pass and started heading down toward Cle Elum, she gave a little gasp. “Juliette saw one. She sent me a picture.”
The car braked and we swayed and then it started more slowly. I peered out, but there was nothing to see but lines of cars with dimmed lights and tall trees and stars. “Saw what?”
“A Russian tank. With robots. On the freeway. She sent me
a picture.”
“Can I see?”
She held her wrist up. The image had been taken at an odd angle, with a street light askew so it looked like it was about to fall down. The tank was light gray against a dark gray sky, all hard angles and sharp lines looming over the optically tilted light pole. It struck me hard, but I swallowed and squinted at it, trying not to be frightened. “I don’t see the robot drivers.”
“They don’t look like people.” She stared out the window, lying down so her view had to be mostly sky and the occasional tree. “We could walk faster than the car is going.”
“We can’t leave the car. We need it to sleep in.”
“I don’t want to live in the car.”
I pointed a thumb at the mounds of stuff all around us. “Do you want to carry all this?”
She dug a piece of paper and a pencil out of her backpack, changed her seat so she sat up straighter, and started writing things down.
“Is that a list?”
“Hmmmhmmm.” Her head bobbed up and down, her soft red curls catching a ray of afternoon sun. As usual, the weather had changed when we crossed the spine of the Cascades. Here, the sky was a dusty blue just darkening toward the gray-blue of dusk. The sun, behind us, would fall over the mountains soon.
“What is it a list of?”
“Everyone back home.”
“We should start looking forward.”
She practically snarled at me. “Isn’t it bad enough that we left?”
I grit my teeth, clamping down on my anger. After I had taken enough breaths to feel back in control, I changed the subject. “Is the Times broadcasting anything?”
“Bellingham surrendered.”
Such a strange phrase. It stuck in my heart, making me heavy with something deeper than fear. Dread? Bellingham was part-way between Vancouver and Seattle, a medium-sized town full of artists and tourists and expensive houses.
“There’s fighting in Lynwood.”
Even closer to Seattle. We had friends in Martha Lake, which was near Lynwood. But they had left three months ago, urging us to go. I had wanted to wait for Lucienne to get out of Junior High. Better to move between High Schools. I laughed, bitter. Better to pretend everything was fine. Until you couldn’t any more.
The traffic in front of us stopped.
A woman in an orange vest rapped on the window.
I opened it a sliver, peering up at her. She was my age, or maybe older, with a grim smile. “Are you two okay?”
I nodded.
“Do you have food?”
Again, I nodded. Lucienne watched us quietly.
“Get off at the next exit.”
“There’s nothing there.” I knew that. We needed to go one more exit to get to the stores or restaurants in Cle Elum. It was downhill. But I nodded, fully intending to ignore her.
“We’re pulling everyone who is okay off the road to let babies and sick and the like have a head start. Take the opportunity to sleep.” She rattled a can and an orange spot appeared on my windshield, some of the spray coming back to dust the edge of one of the other windows. “Hey!” I yelled at her.
She ignored me.
I watched her back, fuming. “We should have left a week ago.”
“We shouldn’t have left at all.” She pointed at the other side of the highway. It had periodically filled with military trucks, but I hadn’t seen any cars on it for hours. “We could go back home. That way is clear.”
I’d read analysis that suggested if the Russians controlled Vancouver and Seattle they could run the whole Northwest. “We have to go east.”
Lucienne glared at me again and went back to staring at her wristlet. Her anger filled the small car, washing against me, tempting me to rise to it and say something I’d regret later. I fought to stay silent, watching the sky roll by.
After a while she said, “Juliette is fighting. She has a gun. I didn’t know she had a gun.”
“How do you know?”
“We’re friends. When her friends post a picture of her, I see it.”
“What about your friends in Boulder?” That’s where we were going. I had social media friends there. One had said he’d take us in for a few weeks. It was something. “Are they on your list?”
“They’re not in any danger.”
“Neither are we.”
“That’s the problem.”
I sighed. It wasn’t, not to me. Lucienne hadn’t lost anyone close to her. Death was movies and a video games and books, but it wasn’t real.
She pointed up. “Planes.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t look at pictures of Juliette. Not if she’s fighting.” Did I have to tell Lucienne she might see Juliette die? Did I have to spell out as if she were two?
“The planes are going into Seattle.”
“What direction are they flying?”
“They’re coming from the south.”
So they had to be ours. The lines of cars started moving again. A blond teen girl in an orange vest made everyone with orange paint on their cars get off the highway. We were in an abandoned ski area lot, the pavement overgrown with weeds but serviceable enough. The car followed directions, and parked us in a mob, with just enough room between cars for doors to open. It felt like concert parking. The concert of war, maybe.
We slid out of the car and followed the pointing finger of an old woman with shocking green-gold eyes who said, “Don’t leave your car for more than an hour. Be back in your car before first light. We don’t guarantee your safety or anyone else’s, anything you have could get stolen.” It sounded like a chore for her to say all those things, like she’d repeated it so often she was running out of voice.
“Is there a bathroom?” I asked.
“Latrine—that way. Bring a light.”
“A light?” But I did. I understood after we waited until after dark for our turn. All around, men peed in bushes. We might have if they weren’t doing it, but when one of the women in front of use went off to the bushes, Lucienne and I glanced at each other and shook our heads. Two days ago I had sat in front of a computer screen helping people who wanted to have their dogs walked while they were at work. The deluded helping the deluded, the last ones out of Seattle except the fighters.
Some people in the line talked to each other but we didn’t. Lucienne stood and stared at her wristlet and I poked at mine from time to time, but I was not good with it. Not really. I could get the headlines but not read the stories.
The latrine stank so badly we walked away fast after we used it. We huddled in the car in the dark, packs for pillows, jackets for blankets. Even after the seats folded themselves away there wasn’t much room. We ate food bars and nuts. Lucienne let out a small squeak and then said, “Mom?”
“Yes?”
“Lisa’s boat just blew up.”
I closed my eyes, seeing a girl just Lucienne’s age, with dark hair and eyes and a propensity for wearing yellow. She’d come to our house for dinner once. Last year. “Is she okay?”
“She’s running through the streets. There’s no one with her. I don’t see anyone, anyway. All I have is her stream and her track.”
That would be a live stream of shots taken every few seconds and discarded, and a bunch of orange points that looked like video game trails showing where Lisa was and had been. She would have it; they were friends. I wouldn’t.
I hadn’t even location-friended Juliette. I didn’t want to see her die.
Lucienne, her eyes fixed and wide, watched Lisa run for her life, staring at a screen that was two inches wide and one inch high. Her lips were a thin line. Her pinky shook so hard it made her screen quiver. She grabbed her hand with her other hand and stilled it.
I wanted to hold her. She’d stopped even letting me touch her a year ago.
I whispered. “Is Lisa still okay?”
She nodded.
I watched her, afraid for her friends, afraid for her. In what world was the United States attacked?
“Her li
ght stopped.”
“Maybe she’s catching her breath.”
Lucienne shook her wrist. “Maybe she ran out of battery.”
“I hope so, honey.”
“We should be there.” She turned away from me, staring at the wall, and after a while her breath stilled into sleep.
Even though they were bulletproof, the windows were made to hear things through. An owl hooted somewhere outside and two men talked nearby, their words too thin for me to make out meaning. I wanted to stay awake, but I had barely slept the night before, and I drifted off into strange dreams.
I woke to find Lucienne gone.
No note. No nothing. One of the packs was gone as well.
The car had grown cold. “Car,” I commanded it, “Let me out.”
I checked my wristlet. I had location-friended my daughter. Clearly she had blocked me.
I raced through the cars toward the latrine, watching for her. She wasn’t in line. I ducked under a tree, peed, and went back the other way. I had a flashlight in my pocket, but no coat, no pack. I went back and gathered those things, left her a note that I’d gone to find her. Told her I’d return to the car in an hour.
Surely she couldn’t walk to Seattle.
More cars drove in along the long road, passing us, going who knew how far. Everywhere that I saw people out and about, standing between cars and talking, I asked after Lucienne. “Have you seen a twelve-year-old? Red hair. Black shirt. A little skinny?”
They all shook their heads.
Three men agreed to help me, and then a woman. Soon there were ten or more people fanned out in the dark, calling her name.
My breath was fast and hard, my heart racing. I thought about texting Juliette, but surely he had other things on his mind.
The hour passed, with nothing. My helpers agreed to keep looking and I made my way back to our parking place, eyeing the barely lightening sky. We were supposed to be ready at dawn.
She wasn’t back there. I added to my note, and then found I couldn’t get up. I didn’t have the strength. Tears fell onto my hands.