by David Arnold
Above it all, the cold mountain sky . . .
“Kit.” Lakie put a hand on his shoulder. “You okay?”
“Do you feel it too?” he asked, but he barely heard his own words, and everything from the road to the synthetic houses, from that peculiar chirping bird to that gust of wind—even Lakie’s response . . .
“Do I feel what?”
. . . all of it was part of the feeling, which he now had a name for: familiarity.
“I’ve been here before,” Kit said.
Far off, there was a rumble of quiet thunder, low and steady.
“What?” asked Lakie.
He looked up at her. “It’s coming.”
Just then, far down the road, a person appeared out of nowhere. He was yelling something, running right for them.
“Get behind me,” said Lakie; she started to raise her rifle, but Kit reached out, pushed it down. “Kit.”
“Just wait,” he said.
Monty was by their side now, ax at the ready, and only when the person tripped and fell, an armload of supplies scattered everywhere, did they even notice he’d been carrying anything. He got up again, holding his arm, and kept running, content to leave his supplies behind.
“What’s he saying?” asked Monty.
As the person neared, the rumbling thunder grew, and they realized it wasn’t thunder at all.
“I told you,” said Kit. “It’s coming.”
And in that place on the wide horizon, where the road wound up into the mountains, the low rumbling twisted and turned into form: a black tidal wave crested the peak, rose high into the air, almost paused as if in slow motion, before crashing down the mountainside toward them, a great droning aliveness descending on the earth like a breathing blanket.
Kit caught his breath—Look at it, he thought, tears in his eyes, only vaguely aware that he would be dead in less than a minute.
And now the stranger was with them, so much shouting, and Lakie had him by the wrist, pulling him, dragging him backward. He stumbled, half ran to keep up, but it didn’t matter, his feet were no longer his own, they belonged in the calmness found on the other side of terror, when you’ve made peace with your fate.
It was beauty and discord at once. Nature unleashing her global psyche.
Kit pulled his wrist out of Lakie’s grip, content to stand and witness this wave in the final moments before being swept up in it. “Look at it . . .” The swarm was darkest in the middle, where the Flies gathered like a coiled octopus before exploding outward, filling his entire field of vision, tentacles flailing, regrouping, flailing, accelerating forward, always, toward them. “Just look at it.”
Monty picked him up, slung him over one shoulder, and followed Lakie and the stranger in a sprint toward the nearest of the pastel houses, where a second stranger held open a door, yelling for them to move their asses.
they bring the night
They crouched on the carpet of the empty basement. No candles, no sounds, no motions, nothing that might give them away.
Linked through his, Lakie’s arm shook.
A small window at the top of the wall (ground level outside) was boarded up, but through the cracks, where sunlight should have been, there was only darkness. And Kit found himself thinking of the homemade sign back in the library of Taft Elementary.
Know your enemy . . .
He knew enough. In the archives of the grown-up library, he’d seen the photos, read the reports from those first weeks. He knew how swarms operated as one, could carry you off into the sky like some enormous mythical crow, devour you in midair, and when he imagined this, he saw Flies filling his mouth and stomach, eating him from the inside out until he had evaporated into them, had become part of the crow’s mythology.
Bad as that was, it wasn’t even the worst-case scenario.
The Flies’ other method, far more common, was to burrow into their prey, plant their own feces into the skin like a seed, and the disease right along with it. Fly Flu developed at different rates in different people, a little embryo of death content to incubate for a while. According to those same reports, the incubation could last anywhere from days to weeks, and symptoms ranged from the more common—hallucinations, dementia, severe fatigue, blindness—to things Kit had to reread, reports he wasn’t sure he understood, and then, once he did understand them, wished he didn’t.
Inexhaustible hunger. Accounts of people trying to eat their own arms, hands, and feet.
Extreme rectal prolapse. Accounts of people passing their own organs, effectively emptying themselves, So yes, Kit thought now, staring at the boarded-up window, being eaten in midair by a giant cloud of Flies is terrifying, but not the worst of the worst.
There were other theories about how the Flu was contracted. Some said indirect contact did the trick. People had sealed themselves up in their homes, boarded up vents and windows, when nine times out of ten, someone in the house already had the Flu and didn’t know it.
But then—his Dakota may have had the Flu. And he’d touched her.
The problem, as best Kit could tell from these reports, was that the very scientists and doctors whose jobs it would have been to research theories surrounding the contraction of the Flu had all died before they’d had a chance to do so.
“It’s good to be scared.” Across the room, three new people huddled in the corner. One of them, the girl who’d let them in the house, was eating dried fruit from a bag. All eyes were on her, the sudden newness of a voice in a quiet, dark place. “Scared means you’re not dead yet.”
Outside, the swarm raged.
similar fates & strange encounters
When it was clear the Flies had passed, they emerged from the basement and stood in the kitchen, each group waiting for a member from the other to speak first. The girl who’d been eating dried fruit pulled a roll of bandages from a cupboard, tossed it to the kid who’d been sprinting up the street. “Your elbow’s bleeding.”
“Shit.” He removed a scuffed-up army jacket, inspected the wound. “Must’ve happened when I fell.”
“You find any?”
“Yeah, but I dropped it all.” He unwound the roll, started wrapping his elbow. “You wanna go get it?”
“Later.” The girl turned her attention back to them, squinted, and sighed. “Okay, well—we’ve been here longer than you, and I definitely just saved your lives, but I’ll blink first. I’m Loretta.”
Loretta was older than the others. Maybe even in her twenties, thought Kit, trying not to let this impress him too much. She was white with long dark hair and bangs just over her eyes. “That’s Pringles,” she said, pointing to the kid wrapping his elbow in bandages. “And Lennon.”
Lennon stood quietly in the corner, twisting what looked like a wristwatch. Kit didn’t know anything about watches, other than the broken ones he’d found during scavenges. Reminders of a time when time mattered.
And yet—
Something about this watch mattered to Lennon. It was a gift, thought Kit, unsure how he knew, but knowing it was true. He took Lennon in—tall, brown skin, dark hair that went in waves like a sideways S, a large birthmark on one cheek—and under it all, he saw a boy who’d cared deeply for a person. Only now, in place of that person, Lennon cared deeply for a watch.
“I was three when the Flies hit,” said Loretta; she nodded toward Lennon and Pringles. “They were still babies. Our families all happened to be vacationing on the same campgrounds. Just before the attack, apparently, a group decided to go hiking. Two women volunteered to stay behind and babysit. Lucky them.”
Loretta explained how, after the initial attack, when it was clear everyone else had been killed, those two women—Jean and Zadie—had loaded the kids into a camper and driven to a secluded spot in Pin Oak Forest, where they began stockpiling from a nearby town. “This one, actually. This place used to be a touri
st stop back in the day. Mountain homes for rich people. Shops with gear and survivalist equipment, and a parking lot full of campers. Those early days, when fuel was still a thing, Jean and Zadie drove a few of those campers right off the lot. Parked seven of them in a circle in the forest, front to end. Planted a garden in the middle, couple of firepits on either side. That was our life. For years. And then Jean and Zadie got sick.”
“Sick how?” asked Lakie.
“Shit,” said Pringles. “How weren’t they sick?”
Loretta put up a hand. Pringles’s cheeks, already a ruddy white, turned a deeper shade of red. “We’ll talk more after you guys take a turn,” she said.
Guess we know who’s in charge.
Monty outlined the bare bones of their story, how his and Lakie’s parents had been killed by a swarm, how Kit’s mother had raised them in the Paradise Twin. Kit waited for the inevitable, It was all Kit’s fault, see. His mom was exhausted trying to take care of him as a baby, so she was asleep outside when a swarm came, can you believe that? And then my parents died saving her, and now I can’t look at Kit without seeing their faces . . .
But it never came. Monty ended by explaining how Kit’s mother recently got sick.
“Extreme confusion?” asked Loretta. “Hallucinations?”
Monty hesitated, looked at Lakie, who nodded. “Yes.”
“Fever, sweat, constant babbling?”
“Yeah.”
Kit thought of his Dakota’s grave in the park, that little purple flower standing guard, and he realized he’d been gripping her necklace under his shirt.
“When was this?” asked Loretta.
“Few days ago. We burned the place down and left.”
“You burned it down?”
Monty’s eyes were acting weird, Kit noticed. Like they were trying to communicate something on the sly. Like his eyeballs had a message for Loretta, something secret, something they didn’t want Monty himself knowing.
“We’ll talk more after you take another turn,” said Monty.
“After we buried Jean and Zadie, we assumed we’d stay in Pin Oak. But then . . .” She pushed herself up on the counter, boots dangling, and turned to Pringles. “You wanna take it from there?”
Pringles looked like a balloon someone had let the air out of. “I was just trying to make Zadie’s chutney. She used to mash up cherries and fresh-squeezed lemons from that tree. Mix it with onions and garlic, then rub it on any kind of meat, really. Delectable.”
“It was,” said Lennon. “Assuming you use cherries.”
“They looked like cherries, dude.”
Apparently, Pringles had spread his concoction on their dinner one night, only it wasn’t long before they realized something was very wrong.
“Whatever they were,” said Loretta, “they weren’t cherries. Pretty potent, too. Pringles passed out first. I don’t remember much after that, but—”
“I’m not the only one who saw him,” said Pringles, staring at Lennon.
Lennon kept his head down, fidgeting with his watch.
“Sorry,” said Lakie. “Saw who?”
Loretta rolled her eyes. “Pringles thinks we were abducted.”
“Not abducted. But yes, I do think we were the product of . . . some kind of experiment.”
The kitchen was quiet for a beat, until Monty cleared his throat. “Like—by aliens?”
Pringles described the experience of struggling to breathe, then not being able to breathe at all, and eventually blacking out. “And then at some point, this—spaceman, I don’t know what else to call it, was leaning over the top of me and had something jammed down my throat.”
“You didn’t see a face?” asked Lakie.
“Whoever—whatever it was, they had this black helmet with, like, a tinted visor. They saved our lives, I know that.” He looked over at Lennon. “You got anything to add here?”
“I’m good.”
Pringles shook his head in frustration. “Loretta didn’t come to until whatever saved us was gone. But you saw it, Len. I know you did. Why can’t you just admit you saw this completely unexplainable thing?”
“I thought I was dying. I don’t know what I saw.”
Another few seconds of silence passed before Loretta cleared her throat, slid down off the counter. “We’re going to Boston. That’s where Jean and Zadie were from before the Flies hit. They always talked about going back someday, but it just . . . never happened. Whoever or whatever saved us, the near-death experience made us realize there was no future for us in Pin Oak. We’re hoping to find one elsewhere.”
“We buried my mom when she died,” said Kit.
Throughout this conversation, he’d begun to feel a bit like Pluto, in that he wasn’t sure the rest of them knew he was there, and even if they did know, they weren’t sure what to do with him. Is he a planet? Nah, too small, too peripheral, not gravitationally dominant. Don’t pay him any attention, he’s just a dwarf planet.
Dwarf planet or not, Kit could spot an unleashed psyche a parsec away.
“That’s what you do when someone you love dies,” he said, and suddenly, slowly, the room shifted until he felt each of them in his orbit. “The Paradise Twin was our home. We loved it. And we couldn’t bury it. So we burned it down.”
Loretta smiled, looked at Lennon, who nodded—and then Pringles, who nodded too. “Okay,” she said. “I’m gonna go retrieve the toilet paper Pringles dropped in the street, and when I get back, I want to hear where you guys are headed. Also, am I the only one who’s starving?”
oh, humanity’s indulgent spirit!
In the olden days, humans required an entire room to clean their clothes. In this room, one machine (the “dryer”) dried the clothes after the other machine (the “washer”) was done washing them. Kit could only assume these wacky humans of old, having invented such machines, were too tuckered out to name them. He also assumed, given the enormity of the machines, that humans had once walked around in six or seven layers at a time.
The whole thing was a ginormous cacophony of unfathomable luxury.
The owners of this house, however, had put their machines to more practical use: the hiding of freeze-dried ice cream. Back in Town, during early scavenges, they often found rotten foods in odd places. People stored things away like squirrels, looking for imaginative ways to keep their stuff safe from looters. But food in a washer and dryer? Kit had to commend the brain in the head of the human who’d thought that up.
“It’s good,” said Lakie between bites.
“Yes,” said Monty. “Thank you for sharing.”
They sat around a table in the dining room (humans of old and their separate room requirements!), slowly eating the freeze-dried ice cream. They’d already eaten one jar of Dakota’s beans, one of pears, plus a smorgasbord of dried fruits and meats, which Kit had approached hesitantly, but too hungrily to deny, and which wound up being quite good. The other group seemed to have dried foods in droves.
“You guys hunt?” asked Loretta.
Lakie eyed Kit. Shortly after entering the woods, she’d mentioned the idea of possibly hunting for dinner, to which Kit had flat-out refused. He didn’t put his foot down often, but when he did, it was a thunderous clap. “When the majority of the world has been wiped out, Lakie, you don’t kill what’s left,” he’d told her. And that was that.
“We’re vegetarians,” he said now, taking a very large bite of dried deer meat, chewing loudly.
Loretta smiled. “Well, I’m a pretty good hunter, so lemme know if you change your mind.”
They talked about the house itself, and why it didn’t smell like a woodstove casserole of death and farts when so many others did. Apparently, since this was a vacation town, lots of the houses weren’t in use when the Flies hit. People owned them. Kept furniture and nonperishables in them, et cetera and so forth. B
ut only lived in them for a couple weeks a year. (Some humans needed more than separate rooms. They needed whole other houses!)
When talk turned to the Isles of Shoals, Monty pulled a rip of paper from his pocket, handed it to Loretta. “This is the message I picked up. It’s six miles off the coast of the Maine–New Hampshire border. Based on my research, once we reach the shoreline, there should be plenty of transportation options. They were tourist towns too, like this one. Only instead of campers and tents, it’s kayaks and fishing poles.”
The ice cream was strange. Fine, but not the drippy-sweet, legendary treat Kit had imagined. “I wonder how they made these,” he said quietly.
No one answered. No one said anything at all until Lennon pulled out a map, spread it across the table, and showed them a highlighted route from Pin Oak, east to a river, and then south to Boston. “It’s not the most direct walk,” he said. “But sticking to rivers gives us a constant water supply, and fish. How long it takes depends on any number of factors. We’re more concerned with getting there in one piece.”
“We’re headed east too,” said Monty. “Basically, the same route all the way to the river.”
Kit knew Monty well enough to know what he was getting at. And while he liked these new humans (and their unleashed psyches) just fine, he wasn’t sure about traveling with them.
Also, was it possible to fall in love ten minutes after you met a person? The way Monty and Loretta kept looking at each other made him wonder. In books, people seemed to fall in love instantly, but then, books were mostly better than real life.
“What are you thinking?” asked Pringles. “You wanna join up?”
Monty shrugged. “I mean, it’s whatever. But we’ve probably got a couple of days where we’ll all be walking the same direction. At least as far as”—he pointed to the spot on the map where Lennon and Loretta and Pringles would turn south for Boston, while Monty and Lakie and Kit would continue east to the coast—“here. The Merrimack River.”
The table was quiet for a second, each considering.