Future Days Anthology, page 22
part #1 of The Days Series
Outside, the screams were growing fainter, growing fewer. The seekers had stopped falling, but the storm had been heavy, even for the season, and it would be hours before it was safe to be on the streets again. Height, I thought. Stairs. Unspent seekers can linger on the ground for longer than you’d think, but they lose their buoyancy very quickly. They might find me in the upper reaches, but they wouldn’t be able to get to me, and they can be quite beautiful as they die: fading like cooling glass from bright yellow-white, like an earthbound sun, to burnt amber, to coral, to hazy salmon pink before the shadows creep in to snuff them out. I wouldn’t have to climb high – two flights would do it; three to be safe – and then I could find somewhere sheltered by the stairwell to wait it out and watch them pool and swirl and dance themselves to death in the darkness below me.
I got four stories up before the cold took me. Most of that was curiosity. From the bottom of the stairwell, it was impossible to tell how high the building reached, and the higher I went, the higher I wanted to go. It wasn’t smart, but that’s the trouble with chill vests: there’s a fine line between seeker-friendly and hypothermia, different for everyone and every situation, and a hypothermic brain doesn’t often make good decisions. I don’t even remember lying down to sleep. I just remember the tiredness, like a black fog, and the way the remnants of old carpet on the treads below me felt like sponge beneath my feet; like cushions or pillows. In my dreams, Ally was yelling for me from the bottom of a cave; I knew I couldn’t go down to him, but he wouldn’t come up to me, and the next thing I remember is a voice, right beside my ear, shouting at me to wake the hell up right now; wake up.
I slitted my eyes.
She was slight and dark-faced: the sort of girl who looks ten years younger than she is. Her eyes were black, sunken into her face, and her lips were pinched, drawn back across her teeth. She looked furious, but that, I discovered later, was just how Aileen always looked.
“Lady!” she hollered. “Lady, you’re about thirty seconds away from a cardiac arrest if you don’t open your stupid eyes and dial up your core. And I’m not dealing with any more dead bodies in this hole; you can lie there and rot where you fall, for all I care. Hey, lady!”
I tried to raise my left hand in the direction of the noise. It wouldn’t move. Hypothermia is a state of transcendental bliss, but, even through the haze, I was aware that this was wrong.
“I lost him,” I said. At least, I think I did. It felt as though he was right beside me in those minutes, but hovering out of reach, and it was important that she knew this. Maybe I just made sounds; all I wanted was to go back to sleep. Whatever it was; whatever I said, it softened the edges off her anger, but that wasn’t saying much.
“Get up, lady,” she said, more gently this time. “Get up and fix your core temp or you’re going to die.”
✽✽✽
She stood by the window as the sun disappeared behind the ragged city skyline, and her skin looked gray in the fading light. I huddled in a corner, chill vest dialed up as many degrees as I dared, and sipped from a mug of instant soup that Ally had made me pack before we left the house this morning. Once the shivering started, it wouldn’t stop, and Aileen, content that I wasn’t going to litter her stairwell with corpse, had directed me to a small suite of rooms a little way along the fourth-floor corridor, where I’d found blankets and mildewed cushions among the detritus of a life lived just out of sight.
It was impossible to guess how long she’d been squatting here. Her belongings had the dank, grimy sheen of far too many nights on the street, and Aileen herself had a lean, hungry look to her, though she’d refused my offer of a second pack of soup. A moth-eaten blanket lay crumpled on a chaise longue by the window, curtains partly drawn, and she knelt lightly on it as the flames below licked golden shadows across the sharp lines of her cheeks.
“Who’d you lose?” she asked at last, and, broken, I realized just how loud the silence had become.
“What?” I muttered. My teeth had locked together; the word would barely come out.
“You said you lost someone.” A sharp glance back into the room, towards me, darkened her profile in shadow. “On the stairs. Who’d you lose?”
“Oh.” It was strange to hear it spoken out loud: to hear him moved so carelessly from person to unperson. “My friend. He was my friend.”
Silence. She turned back to the burning streets. Then, quietly, she said, “Sorry.”
“Yeah,” I said. He’d have done the same for me; we’d long ago agreed as much.
Without looking around, she said, “Did he have a name?”
“Ally,” I said. “Alisdair. But only his mother called him that.”
“He still has a mother?
“No.” I shook my head. “Not for years. She died in one of the early storms.”
“Right,” she said. More silence. And then: “Did she come back?”
Her words made me think of my sister. I hadn’t thought of her for years, not since we lost her the third and final time, but I thought of her then. “For a little while,” I said. “Not long. A couple of weeks, on and off.”
Aileen nodded. I wondered who she’d lost; how many. “That’s not so bad,” she said. “Did she know she was gone?”
“Yes,” I said. “Of course. We made sure of that.”
The shadows dancing across her face were weak and listless. Whatever was burning, it wouldn’t burn for long. Even the heaviest storms must end.
“Do you remember,” she asked softly, “when dead meant dead?”
I did. I was twelve when the first storm hit, and that’s plenty old enough to build a worldview so comfortably solid that it takes a pounding before it shatters. A hail of seekers came down in a quiet New Brunswick mining town as the sun was rising one late February morning, out of a clear and cloudless sky, and for three whole days the world called it a massacre and tried to find somebody to blame. Then they came to the southwest coast of Ireland, and then Mauretania, and then Laos and the Seychelles. It was days, in the chaos, before anyone began to realize that the storm-ravaged bodies were only bodies: empty, broken cases, nothing more. It was days before anyone realized that there was anything else going on.
It took much longer than that before anyone was prepared to say it out loud.
“Dead is dead,” I told her. I don’t believe in ghosts. I don’t believe in the immortal human soul. I’ve seen too many people come back for that. “What gets left behind by a seeker isn’t alive. It’s just...separate. It’s energy set free.”
She glanced back at me. “But tomorrow,” she said, “you’ll go back out onto the streets and look for your friend, won’t you?”
“Yes,” I said, “I will.”
“You’ll go back out onto the street and you’ll look for him, and you’ll find him, wandering about in the smoke. And he’ll look like the man you used to know, and he’ll recognize you. You’ll see it in his eyes.”
My mug was trembling, and it wasn’t from the cold. “Yes,” I said.
“You’ll call him to follow you, and he’ll follow you, and you’ll bring him home. You’ll tell him that he’s dead, and he’ll stare right through you like he doesn’t understand, and he’ll reach for your hand, but he won’t be able to touch it. His hand will pass right through yours, and if you’re lucky, it won’t even leave a mark. And he’ll stay with you, and you’ll let him stay with you, as he gets softer and softer, until one day he’ll just be a breath of air against your skin. And the next day he’ll be gone.”
Tears were burning the corners of my eyes. “Yes,” I said. “But it won’t be him. It’ll be energy set free. It’ll look like him, because his body contained the energy in that shape for so long, and it’ll seem to remember me, because the energy has been following the same pathways for so long. The seekers separate the energy from the shell when they destroy the body, but the energy isn’t the person. The person dies. My friend,” I said, “is dead. Whatever I find on the streets tomorrow.”
Aileen was quiet for a long time, head resting on her hands as the sun set gold and pink on her razorblade face. Into the heavy silence, she said quietly, “Listen.”
I listened. There wasn’t much else I could do. Below us, I could hear sirens, shouting voices, the sounds of noisy chaos on the streets. And a low wail, closer by, below the panic and the rage, that I’d taken for somebody’s far-off despair. It fit with what I was feeling. But now, in the face of Aileen’s furrow-browed scrutiny, I listened again and realized that it wasn’t coming from outside the building, but from somewhere else. Somewhere nearer.
“That’s Theresa,” said Aileen. “She walks the second floor. Back and forth, and back and forth: over and over and over again. You’ll meet her on your way back out again; she’ll want to see you, to know who you are. She died here eighteen years ago, and she has no idea that she’s dead.”
✽✽✽
No one knows where the seekers come from. Back when they came in ones and twos, silent and secretive, people called them globe lightning and said they didn’t exist. My father was part of the team that built the first defenses – a small part, a white coat in a lab running lines of code through a simulator eight hundred feet below the surface of the earth, but it kept us safe for a while. It’s because of him that Ally and I were able to build a cool room in our basement, ready to run for cover when the klaxons wailed, and it’s because of his team that we know to wear chill vests when the storm comes. They’re drawn to body heat. The magnetic nets in the upper atmosphere sift the baby seekers from the air before they’ve finished growing, but the adults, the strongest two-thirds of a seeker storm, punch right on through and drop towards the warm spots: the cities, the clusters, the conurbations.
Nobody knows where they come from. Back when we lived underground – back when we were safe – that used to scare me most of all.
People said they were aliens. People said they were a weapon. People said they were God’s wrath visited upon a sinful earth. People said they were malevolent spirits. People said they were a magnetic aberration caused by abnormal solar activity, but that was twenty years ago, and there’s only so much abnormal you can have before you need to take away the ab.
I don’t believe in ghosts, but I saw the flesh shrink from my sister’s bones in a blaze of blue-white heat, and I saw her scream and die. Then I saw her sit up and look around, tight-jawed with confusion, from a scattering of smoking dust and bone fragment, and the clock on the wall behind her was clearly visible through the shimmering haze of her head. It was three-fifteen exactly when she died. Ally had been in love with her since we were children, and he was never going to love anyone else the way he loved Joanne, so we had that in common from the start. Living together was just a natural progression, so easy and so seamless that it wasn’t until he was gone that I even noticed I couldn’t remember how to function on my own.
I left Aileen sleeping the next morning and crept out into the chill darkness of the corridor. Her face had the sort of closed-off, barricaded look of someone who didn’t care to be touched, so I didn’t, but I scribbled a note of thanks on some scrap paper and pinned it to the damp floor with a couple of cans of tinned fruit. She looked like she could do with the calories, or maybe just the kindness.
Theresa met me on the second floor, stepping out of the shadows to bar my way as I descended onto the landing.
“Who the hell are you?” she demanded. Her voice wasn’t the voice of a dead woman, but the eyes gave her away. Her hair was black and dropped in lank curls around a high, proud forehead; the scarlet of her dress hadn’t faded in the decades since her death; she’d pulled a crocheted black shawl as tight as a noose around her shoulders, and I wondered if she imagined that she still felt the cold as I did. But her eyes were milky white and limpid. But for the eyes, I wouldn’t have known.
“I was lost,” I said. “The seekers came, and I needed somewhere to hide.”
One eyebrow arched. Her face wasn’t kind. “You see that?” snapped Theresa, nodding towards the stairwell.
I shrugged, but Theresa wasn’t a woman to be ignored, so I followed the direction of her glare and peered into the darkness pooling at the base of the stairs. Two floors below, a faint light moved in lazy circles, too dim at first to make out what I was seeing. And then, slowly, it resolved itself into pale blue spheres: one, then two, then three and four and five, before I lost count. I met her stare with panic in mine.
“They’re seekers,” I said.
“Hundreds of them,” said Theresa. “You ever see them that color before?”
I shook my head. I couldn’t speak.
“They go that color when they can’t go out,” said Theresa. “You know why they can’t go out?”
“No,” I whispered, and she laughed.
“The dead,” she said. Her grin showed straight white teeth, perfectly aligned. “Seekers pool up around the dead and they can’t un-pool. So many dead in this damn building: the seekers can’t get out and they can’t get up, and they got nowhere to go. Energy’s drawn to energy, see? The seekers can’t go out, and neither can the dead. Heard you talking to Aileen last night.”
“Yes,” I said. “She saved my life.”
“She’s a good girl,” said Theresa. “Surly way about her, but kind as an angel. Died here eighteen years ago, and the poor kid’s got no idea she’s dead. Go on, then – get on with you. She doesn’t need you messing up her head and giving her ideas. You don’t mind those seekers down there, either. They’re too weak to get you, and looking at you, I’d say you’re colder than the damn grave anyway. Go on, you – get on.”
✽✽✽
I found Ally where I left him, insubstantial as the smoke that danced above the asphalt, pacing the streets where he’d fallen, with his eyes turned towards the road as though he were searching for something he’d lost.
“Ally,” I called, and his head snapped up in search of me, in search of my voice. When he saw me, he smiled, his face collapsing into relief.
“There you are,” he said. “I thought the seekers had got you.”
Maybe they did, I wanted to tell him. I left the building surrounded by a haze of pale blue light, and it was all I could do not to break into a flat run as soon as my feet hit the pavement, but I couldn’t risk raising my core, not with the storm still settling. Maybe they got me after all. Maybe I fell beside my sister’s old lover, my oldest friend, the one person I don’t know how to live without. Maybe I died, and maybe I lived. Maybe there’s no difference anymore. How the hell would I even know?
I don’t believe in ghosts. I believe in the living. I believe in being alive.
“Better luck next time,” I told him, and smiled. “Come on, mister. Let’s get you home.”
###
About RB Kelly
RB KELLY'S FIRST NOVEL, THE Edge of Heaven, was a winner of the Irish Writers' Centre Novel Fair Competition and was published in 2016. Her short fiction and non-fiction have appeared in magazines and journals around the world, and her short story, Blumelena, was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize. She lives and works in Northern Ireland and is currently completing her second novel.
Connect with RB here: www.castrumpress.com/rb-kelly.
Mother
Rick Partlow
Mother stood on the edge of her world and watched the last of her children depart.
After all these years, she still felt the strangeness of watching the ships depart, both from the mechanical sensors on the exterior of her superstructure and through the eyes of her cloned biological body. She had, after all, worn the metal skin for almost a thousand years, and the flesh for only the last thirty.
Somehow, the simple pleasure of the touch of her children’s hands on hers seemed so much more significant than the centuries of wonder spent between the stars, or the awesome spectacle of transforming the world beneath them into something quite like the Earth she’d left behind. But now her work was done, its fruits evident in the blues and greens of the hemisphere that loomed in the viewport, and in the silvery glint off the shuttles heading down to that new Eden.
She was, once again, alone.
“Mother?”
She turned away from the image of the Promised Land and saw one of her children approaching from the doorway to the observation deck. But he wasn’t a child anymore; none of the Firstborn were. He was a man now, tall and strong and handsome, with a nobility about him that made her swell with pride.
“David.” She took his hands in hers, looking up into his eyes. “I thought you would be gone already.”
“Jainna and the children are on their way,” he said with a nod. A lock of his brown hair fell into his eyes, just as it had when he was a child. She brushed it aside automatically with a gentle flick of her fingers. “But I couldn’t leave without saying goodbye...” He hesitated, then blurted out, “And trying to convince you again to come with us.”
“You know I cannot, David,” she said gently, shaking her head.
She had known that leaving would hit David the hardest. He’d always been closer to her than even the other Firstborn, the first generation of clones she’d produced once the planet’s new ecosystem had been stabilized, the ones she’d taught at her knee how to be human.
