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Each day, the tensions nationwide escalated with news reports of hospitals overrun, and children and the old dying in droves from sickness related to malnutrition. Urban centers were hardest hit, though rural counties in the arid south were reeling. Riots and looting broke out across the country, strict curfews instituted in New Orleans, Dallas, Kansas City, and Seattle. A bloody conflict, killing nine, erupted over the last gallon of milk in a minimart outside of Boston. A man in Utah was beheaded protecting his cellar’s shelves of preserved peaches.
Mayhem abounding, the Novae Terrae was hardly an afterthought. Then, one bright Sunday morning, white trucks pulled up before all the local churches. One can imagine the chorus of famished prayers emanating from the steeples, and the subsequent hallelujahs when congregants walked out into the sunshine to find White Sleeves unloading corn and beans, peppers and melons and leeks and berries, plentiful and free for the taking.
Memory was as fleeting as a hunger fed. We passed through the mirror’s glass, Jo Sam no longer the shadow of a toothless cult, now hailed a savior, the streets of San Pilar teeming with white-sleeved penitents ambling into Sunday service in their crisp gold coats, armed with rifles and righteousness, and singing hymns of praise unto the Lord of Might and Mercy.
THE WHITE SLEEVE BOUNTY was delivered to churches for five straight Sabbaths. With the ranks of the Novae Terrae swelling nationwide, the president’s approval numbers at a historic low, Sergeant Nazari detailed our mission to disperse throughout the region, intercept the White Sleeve trucks, and commandeer their cargo. The order had come from the top. From here on out the relief effort would come from the United States government or not come at all.
The spin out of the White House was that this was a matter of public health, which was clearly a lie because all we did was drive the White Sleeve trucks to be unloaded at the San Pilar armory, where a woman wearing a Food and Drug Administration badge inventoried the stock and used us soldiers as laborers to set up the building as an official distribution center.
This was about power. Power and control. We expected the same angry crowds as during the famine, though now with uniforms and rifles. We planned for riots, wore full battle gear, but on the Wednesday the center opened we found the streets of San Pilar eerily empty. All of the shops closed, not a soul roaming about, it was like a scene straight from the quarantine days of the pandemics.
The air held a damp chill, the sky the putrid green that precedes a storm. At first, I thought the lights were just pops of heat lightning. But these lights, round and fuzzed, didn’t flash and vanish, and moved through the clouds as if mechanically steered.
The first raindrops pattered down, lifting dust off the pavement. Through the gloom of rain and dust, we saw the headlights coming up the road. Like a funeral procession, car after car passed in front of the armory and trolled through the business district’s brownstones to turn into the parking lot of the elementary school.
With the crawl of vehicles, the clouds filled with lights, I looked to Nazari, who’d turned his back to us while speaking to someone on his radio. Then Nazari called for our fire team to come with him. The rain falling harder, we piled into our tactical vehicle.
We didn’t drive to the school, but parked at the edge of the strip, near enough we could surveil, but far enough away as to not provoke. The Novae gathered in front of the school building. The children were dressed in white shorts and gold vests and caps. Those who’d brought them seemed to be their parents and relatives, as they knelt in front of the kids, hugging their necks and bidding them farewell as if they were parting for a week at sleepaway camp.
An older woman in a gold gown and a wide-brimmed hat lined up the children on the sidewalk, checking off names on a compad. Sergeant Nazari called it in to Higher, but we were ordered to not engage, to remain in our vehicles and do nothing more than use our external cameras to document what was happening.
Do not engage? Remain in our vehicles? From my seat in the rear, I peeked at the monitor mounted on the front console. The rain drumming down, the woman in the gold gown was leading the kids out into the open field beside the school.
My spine stiffened, a shock of pain shooting up the back of my neck. I looked to the others in my fire team, all men, all with their chins tucked into their tac vests, hands folded in their laps.
“They’re taking the children,” I said.
No one looked up or responded. A buzzing rose in my ears, what I thought was inside my head until the interior lights of our vehicle fell dark. The front console gone black, we had no camera, and the rain on the windshield bleared our view.
“They’re taking the children,” I said again, louder, now pleading.
The rain drubbed harder, cracking like gravel on the truck’s roof. No one budged or said a thing. A boy named Lashaun sat directly across from me. I called to him, but he didn’t look up.
Had my voice been emptied of sound? Had I become but an imprint of air? I felt the lines of my form fading, and panicked that I’d soon vanish if someone didn’t acknowledge me.
My back clenching, the rain pounding and the droning buzz and the darkness, I could’ve cursed or screamed, but instead I shoved through their knees, Sergeant Nazari only shouting when I threw wide the rear hatch and scrambled out onto the road.
I bolted through the rain and off toward the school. I was just beyond the strip when they materialized as if from the clouds, combat drones lowering like spiders around me.
I stopped and turned a circle in the road. The drones like a cage around me, I noted the White Sleeves on the roofs of the brownstones with their rifles trained down on me.
My squad remained in our vehicle, though I heard the turrets engage and saw the truck’s guns swing to cover the schoolyard and one tilted toward the rooftop snipers.
Then the blustery sky grew all the darker. An enormous shadow, perfect and rectangular, lowered into the clouds above the field. The air became heavy, like breathing smoke. From the rectangular vessel burst light like sunlight, the raindrops within glittering with a thousand tiny prisms.
The Novae parents roared a cheer. The children in the field all lifted their hands to the light. The woman in gold was the first to drift skyward. Then the children rose from the earth as if bound by a collective coil, levitating en masse, like a mobile of golden ornaments hoisted by invisible wires.
I struggled to process what I was witnessing. As I squinted against the brightness and rain, the children’s gold-vested bodies grew small in their ascent, and the woman high above them passed into the rectangle’s mercurial blackness.
The combat drones peeled away to follow the cargo up into the gathering dark. It was primal and irrational, like a child trying to shoot the moon with an arrow, but I raised my weapon to fire upon the monolith in the clouds.
Before I could tap the trigger, and though I heard no shots, bullets ripped the flesh of my upper back. I shrieked and bucked. My carbine flew from my grip to clatter onto the road. Then Nazari was behind me, hooking his arm around my shoulders and dragging me back toward our vehicle.
The fire team’s gunners unleashed a torrent of cover. Nazari hauled me around the rear of the vehicle and shoved me inside. I lay in the darkness between the boots of my team and the sergeant hopped in and slammed shut the hatch.
I shrieked I’d been shot. Lashaun shone his helmet light over me, asking where I’d been hit and saying he didn’t see anything. Liquid fire bubbled up my spine. I willed my trembling hand up over my shoulder and down under my vest, but no blood came off on my fingers.
I’d felt the impact. How had I not been shot? I bit my chin strap to ride the pain, a pressure on my shoulder blades like blazing irons boring through the skin. Then the truck’s interior lights flickered and held and the buzzing that had become the ambient noise of the world fell hushed.
Nazari yelled for the driver to go. Lashaun yanked me off the floor and threw me into my seat. As we sped away, I braced my helmeted head against the rain-streaked window and grimly eyed the field beside the school, the children gone, as was the chute of light and the portal of shade, the parents in gold rushing the road, victoriously thrusting their rifles at the green spitting sky.
MY BACK SHOWED NO SIGN OF INJURY, though a throbbing lingered, the disks of my spine like heated pinions. The medics were confounded. As they had after the incident at the fairgrounds, they deemed my body was physically manifesting a psychological trauma. All they could do was recommend me for counseling.
Sergeant Nazari was furious with my stunt in the road. He pulled me into a back room and said he’d write the After Action Review himself, and I’d sign whatever he wrote, then never utter so much as a goddamn word about what happened at that school.
What happened at that school? What would I say even if asked? What was the enigmatic vessel in the clouds? How could children float through the air? Why had they taken the children? Where did the children go?
The storm gained intensity on into the night and then we lost all power across the base. The internet and cellular also down, we figured it was merely local, a disruption caused by the weather. We thought it would all be restored soon enough, but the next morning the sky cleared and nothing had changed. Nazari finally received word the outages were general across the nation.
Some posited it was an electromagnetic-pulse attack. Others speculated the Starlink satellites had been disabled, while others argued the web’s root servers had been compromised, which rendered the digitally controlled electrical grids useless.
The base had backup generators for electricity, but with no internet, no phone, the base fell into disquiet as no one was able to get in touch with their loved ones. I obsessed about Mama and Ava Lynn back home, worried about Mama fending for herself against the White Sleeves, worried Ava Lynn would be taken into the sky.
In the days to follow, we halted our patrols of San Pilar and abandoned the armory in town. With no duties to fulfill, no news from outside the base, and nothing to keep our minds from troubles both real and imagined, our doldrums became a pox.
The base sat out in the West Texas desert, in an old defunct church camp now encircled with pickets and concertina wire. The land crawling with scorpions, the soldiers began wandering the grounds and catching them under helmets and boxes and bowls.
That was what we did to pass the time. We drank too much and bet on scorpions. Bug fights, we called them. We’d drop two bugs into a plastic tub and slap them together with a stick and they’d just go at it. One bug would live and we’d pin the dead one on a door. A door just covered in bugs.
Most of us were hungover, had been up all night, when at daybreak on Sunday morning Nazari announced we were going, yet again, to intercept the Novae Terrae food trucks.
The order made little sense. Why provoke an enemy we didn’t understand and had woefully underestimated? Why take the food trucks if we’d abandoned the armory? The mission was petty and malicious, clearly another taunting stab for power and control.
My back began to throb as I rode in the chase vehicle in a convoy of two fire teams covering a two-lane stretch of highway that cut through the dusty rolling hills. The plan was to trap the White Sleeve truck inside a span of tunnel blasted through a hillside, which would allow us to commandeer the load without worry of drone attacks from above.
A gray day whittled in wind, my fire team hid behind an outcropping of rock. When the White Sleeve truck passed, we pulled out to follow at a safe distance. The truck had a white tractor like the others we’d seen, though this trailer wasn’t the traditional box, and instead had a long flatbed and a large mounded load covered in a gold tarpaulin.
Snaking around a bend, we radioed the second team that we were near. The White Sleeve semi drove into the tunnel’s mouth. We followed the truck into the darkness. We saw its brake lights flash and then it stopped mid-tunnel, our second vehicle having blocked the road at the other end.
Our rooflights flooding over the semi and trailer, Sergeant Nazari called through our vehicle’s external speaker for the driver to step out with their hands on their head. We waited, but nothing moved from the cab. The sergeant repeated the command, but there was still no response.
Nazari radioed the team at the far end of the tunnel, ordered gunners into their turrets and the rest of us to our positions. I switched on my helmet’s light and scrambled with my team out into the tunnel’s darkness to my spot at the truck’s rear bumper.
Nazari gave the order for the fire team at the far end to advance. Three soldiers stepped around their vehicle and approached the idling cab, carbines trained on its windshield. The point soldier hopped up the truck’s nerf bars and peeked into the driver’s-side window, then called down that the cab was empty.
The truck was automated. Sergeant Nazari warned us to keep all eyes on the trailer’s bed and be wary of an ambush as we didn’t know what was under that tarp. He signaled for three men to help him uncover the load.
As the men unlatched the tarp lines from the truck’s bed, the muscles down the back of my neck hardened, my hand on the carbine stock trembling. I had to calm myself. I forced my breathing to slow. Nazari and the men quickly drew away the tarp, and the tunnel air filled with the stench of rotting fish.
There on the truck bed lay the decomposing carcass of a white-gray whale. Longer than the trailer, its pectoral fins had been shorn, its tail fluke pinned by straps to the massive fuselage of its body. Skin peels hung down, exposing the gelatinous sheen of its blubber. Barnacles like cancerous growths encircled its blowhole, the grand sweep of its mouth filled with slats of algae-green baleen taller than our tallest man.
I stepped directly beneath the leviathan’s eye. An oily black sphere rimmed pink and as large as a washtub, maybe it was the reflection of my helmet’s light, but through the glass of its pupil I glimpsed the movement of its soul and its life in the sea.
Nazari hopped up on the bed, and joked that those church folk were going to have one hell of a potluck. The others climbed onto the truck, too, slapping the whale’s bloated sides, clacking their rifles against its baleen, jabbing fingers into its ventral grooves.
A sharp twinge in the spine of my upper back coincided with a trilling; not a mechanical buzz like at the school, but a sonorous and slightly musical sound.
The whale was singing. Then the trilling rose to a piercing volume. The floodlights atop the trucks abruptly faded and died. The whale lit only by our headlamps seemed to inhale. Its sides expanding ever so slightly, its enormous eye widened and emitted a gentle reddish glow that brightened by the breath.
The men of my team were not bad men, not unkind or disloyal, were brave enough and some quite clever. But like most soldiers, they weren’t easily swayed off a position once taken. Though I saw what they either couldn’t see or refused to acknowledge, and cried out for them to flee, they didn’t move from the truck bed.
Then I was once again running, not toward danger as at the school, but away from that unnatural cetacean cargo, passing our tactical vehicle, sprinting toward the open light of day at the tunnel’s mouth. Nazari hollered after me, indignant and cursing as he ordered me back to my post, his livid shouts echoing down the tunnel, only to be snuffed by the explosion.
The blast snatched me off my feet, slammed me to the pavement. Fire lashed the flesh of my back. I threw off my vest and rolled until the heat felt extinguished. Then I sat upright in the road, clutching my head, breathless and bewildered.
The tunnel now thrummed in flickering blue, the blue flames of blubber oil rioting around me, blue fire ringing the tunnel walls. The Novae Terrae trailer rocked onto its side, our tactical vehicle scorched, the haze of smoke trembled over the whale viscera and bones and helmets strewn across the dark tunnel road.
SURVIVING WHILE OTHERS PERISHED, I donned the crown of guilt and sorrow. The blast should’ve killed me. I should’ve been incinerated. A sergeant who wasn’t Nazari said I’d be recommended for a commendation. I didn’t care. None of it mattered anymore. I told him I just wanted out, wanted to go home and see my mother and sister.
If only I could’ve called Mama, heard her voice, known that Ava Lynn was safe and well, I might have steadied myself. But I was all alone, sequestered in my misery. I wandered the fire base drinking wine and hoping to blur myself black.
Even through the numbing daze of alcohol, I could feel the pressure at the knob of my neck. Staring into the latrine’s mirror, I pulled off my shirt to inspect my back. The medics had cleared me. It was a mystery how I’d taken no burns from the blast. But now veins the width of worms branched down between my shoulders.
I didn’t know what to make of them, and tapped one with a finger. The vein was tender, and like a slender cut of rope that seemed to push against my touch. I found the queer state of my back disturbing, and winced shrugging on my shirt.
Then I saw Hercules there at my feet. On the floor of the latrine crawled a scorpion as long as my hand. It was the largest bug I’d ever seen. Overcome with drunken aspiration, I trapped the scorpion under a mop bucket.
I paraded Hercules around the barracks, saying my bug would beat all comers. This asshole named Burkhold said his bug hadn’t ever been beat and how he’d shut my mouth about it. I told Burkhold to bring his bug and we’d see what was what.
There were more boys in that room than could fit. All these screaming fools, most couldn’t even see the tub. Burkhold’s bug was this little albino thing. Tiny bug. I dropped in Hercules and they slapped them together and it wasn’t but a flash and that little bug put its stinger into mine and my big old bug was just shut off.
With everyone shouting, Burkhold pointing and laughing, and my spine like a kinked wire, I wanted to kill that boy and was maybe about to act on the impulse, when I reached my hand into that tub and grabbed up his little albino bug and crushed it dead.
