Bastion Science Fiction Magazine - Issue 7, October 2014 (4 page)

The tug of the water is stronger now. The shingle roars away. Luca is heavier than I, and the water draws him down. He is not used to the sea, and suddenly fear blooms for him in my chest, and for me too, should the sea pull him away. It is my fault he is out here. I grab his hand as his head goes under and lean against the pull of the tide. He splutters and gasps as he fights the pull of the ocean.

The water drains away but there is another wave building, a grey wall driven by the howling wind. I yank at Luca’s arm, urging him to hurry, pulling with all my strength back to the hut. I am strong. I know this island and the sea that traps us here.

Luca gets his feet under him and then it is easier. Arms around each, other we splash back to the hut.

Luca slams the door, plunging us into darkness. I am standing ankle deep in water. In the darkness, my vision flickers and dances with tantalising shapes.

“Tell me what you want from me,” I shout at them.

“Gemma,” says Luca, but I hiss at him and he falls silent. It’s not his words I am waiting for.

But there is nothing in the dark. The stars burst, helices dancing their serpentine dance in my sight. Only mine. Frustration is a knife inside me.

Luca is silent now, though I can hear his breathing. I find my way to the small bedroom by touch and collapse onto the bed, tired and empty. He can join me or not, as he chooses.

#

This morning the wind is still. My visions are quiet, too. Luca is sleeping on a bench, awkwardly balanced. I admire the curve of his jaw, the shadow of stubble, the strong hands. My dreams of kissing seem so childish now. Like my dreams of escape. Something that I read in a book, once, perhaps. Not real.

My dress is a sodden mess on the floor. I pull it on anyway.

Dad’s bike is gone from the wall. The shingle is spotted with seaweed, washed up by a furious sea. The sunlight makes diamonds on the waves. Behind the house the mountain rises stark and sharp against the sky. A lone flower blooms from the tip, spreading to cover the vastness of the sky in a pattern of shadow and light.

I am not leaving here with Luca. Maybe I will never leave. My mother came and went, and I never knew who she was.

But this is a special place. The universe is closer here, closer than anywhere else in the world. There is a reason I am here. There must be. I am meant to be here, listening to the universe. Maybe one day I will understand what it is telling me.

I am Gemma Glass. This is me, standing under the hole in the sky. This is me, stretching my arms up to the stars. I am strong. I can wait.

###

Meryl Stenhouse lives in subtropical Queensland with her family, a weed-infested garden and far too many characters. She has been a research scientist, call-centre operator, auditor and environmental officer but now writes fiction for a living. Her stories have appeared in
Shimmer, Shock Totem, Extreme Planets Anthology, Space and Time Magazine
and
A capella Zoo
.

Waterman High Speed Axials

William R. D. Wood

Parson had a clear view of the parking lot thirty feet below. The façade at the peak of the metal roof provided excellent cover and he'd managed to work a cinder block free, giving him the perfect hole to get a bead on any newcomers.

Weeds, brown and scraggly, had pretty much claimed the lot. They were tall and grew fast despite the scarcity of water. His dad would have known what kind they were. Probably even the scientific name. A few cars peeked out above the weeds, like crouching lions on a flat, dry savannah. Someday they'd be reduced to mounds of rust and sun-bleached plastic, but those days were a long time out. The boogers didn't care about metals and plastic.

Just the water.

Parson's head hurt. He rubbed the silver chain around his neck between a thumb and forefinger. His skin was rough, and even the gentle motion generated pinpricks where the skin had recently cracked. He couldn’t feel the grit bunching up and rolling between his fingers and the chain, but he could hear it. Like sandpaper.

The boogers were everywhere, drying everything out. They were too small to see individually—microscopic, his dad had said. And pretty evenly distributed across the globe, though they clumped into a fog that hugged the ground and drifted on the breeze. When a cloud of them blew by, all you could do was hunker down deep in a building and hope none of them wandered in. Eventually all of them would settle to the ground. Then all you'd have to do is find a nice place with no wind and avoid stirring them up. Dad had said they couldn't wait since the cars would probably rust out before those days came.

How long had the boogers been at it anyway? Everything in his head was such a jumble. Days or months, hours or years, he wasn't sure anymore.

His dad would have known. He had been good at keeping track of time. “Mister Schedule,” his mom had called him. Planning family time, game nights, visits to the doctor. Always updating calendars and making sure Parson and his mom had whatever they needed, whether it was honey ham for sandwiches, a new baseball glove, or a prescription from the pharmacy.

He really missed his dad, but not his mom so much. She should have stayed.

Think with your head
, his dad had told her. She'd just stood there shaking her head as he begged her not to go. Over and over. Parson rubbed at the chain around his neck and then his temples trying to force the headache away. It didn't work. His mom had given him that chain when he was little. He should have thrown it away.

A clatter rose nearby. Tendrils of grit hung in the already heavy afternoon, oozing a few feet above the ground, making it hard to see the whole lot clearly. Probably nothing. A marquee had fallen over down the road yesterday, or last year, and made a similar noise. Everything falls eventually.

Of course, maybe the sound had been an accident and someone was hiding in the weeds.

Parson tightened his grip on his rifle and licked his lips, immediately regretting it. The air sucked the moisture away and the chapped sections of skin pinched the tender spots in between. He scanned the road, quartering off sections the way his dad had taught him. From the edge of the lot, across the King Highway, to the bank of the dusty Kalamazoo riverbed on the other side, all clear.

No one. Not yet, anyway.

If someone were lying low, they’d come. The factory beneath him was too big to pass up. The name of the place probably played a role in drawing folks in. Waterman High Speed Axials. The word
Waterman
was six feet tall, emblazoned in red on the side of the building with the rest of the name below in much smaller letters.

Waterman
. A cruel joke if there ever was one. Why else would everyone who happened along this way try to get in, if not because they thought they'd find water at Waterman's? People were desperate and the few who remained getting more so every day. The end of the world hadn’t been quick and merciful after all. Folks had had lots of time to suffer. To pillage this and ransack that. Mostly for survival. Sometimes just out of meanness.

Fortunately for Parson, dozens of palletized tanks filled with distilled water were staged deep inside the building near the centrifuges. Process water, his dad had called it. Not enough to last forever but enough to last a very long time, especially if he could add more to them. Anyone who came now never got close to the centrifuges. They didn't find water. Or supplies. Or hope.

What they did find, without fail, was Parson.

Think with your head
. Parson heard is dad's voice in the back of his skull, behind the ache. He wiped grit from the corner of his eyes, feeling the chain brush the back of his hand, and tucked it back in his shirt. The air was cool and still, tinged with ozone, like the first few minutes after a storm. That was cruel in the way only natural, unfeeling things could be.

He remembered the sweet tang from when he was just a boy. As soon as a good rain would pass by, his old man would yell down to him and he’d grab the gloves and ball. They'd run and stumble out onto the field, grass up to Parson’s waist, and they’d toss that piece of old leather around until the sun went down or his mom yelled for them out the kitchen door. Sometimes he and his dad would ignore her, laughing like idiots as they tried to catch the ball in the dark. His dad sure did love that smell. That electric smell that followed a good thunderboomer. Parson did too.

The world smelled that way all the time now. Storms were few and getting fewer, though. The boogers were responsible for that. The charge they carried bound up any free water they came into contact with. Didn’t much matter how they did it. They just sure as shit did.

His dad had explained it. Someone had created a biochemical that clamped around water molecules like a glove around a baseball. Locked them up tight in a tiny piece of sand. Dad had known a lot of stuff.

Parson had always hated science.

He still did.

Dead trees stirred along the edge of the road. Now he was in business. Settling the butt of his rifle into his shoulder, he sighted in on the newcomers. Two of them. A woman and a man. They looked haggard and filthy and he immediately wondered what they were carrying in their packs. The woman carried a walking stick. Glints of light betrayed her position. A chromed knife, assorted metal buckles and buttons, he was sure.

Other than that indiscretion, they were pretty good. Survival of the fittest had weeded out the dumb ones. They moved cautiously into the lot, keeping low, stopping behind one of the cars. They looked around, talked mostly with hand signals, but occasionally spoke in hushed angry tones.

He felt sorry for them. You couldn't let yourself get emotional. You couldn't lower your guard. You had to think with your head. Plan for the future.

They continued to argue. Didn't they know the way sound carried? Not using your head was the fastest way to wind up dead. The keys to survival were remaining cool, collected, and, above all,
quiet
.

Their loss. His gain.

He could probably drop them both right where they were. Shoot through the windshield. The glass might knock the bullet off. He’d seen it happen. If he missed, they’d bolt out of range and he couldn’t let himself be drawn out into a chase. Maybe they'd seen him and that was their plan. They wanted to take him down, take the water for themselves and share his roost at the peak of the roof. They were down there right now getting a bead on him.

No. He needed to use his head. That didn’t make sense. They wouldn’t have come in arguing loud enough to be heard if they'd known about him. Too much to lose.

His finger tightened on the trigger. The skin tugged at a crack on the tip, exposing another millimeter of flesh beneath to the air. The tiny wound stung like ants were trying to bite and burrow into his flesh.

If he only dropped one of the intruders, the other might be skilled enough to figure out where the shot came from. They could make cover and wait for him to expose himself when he had to go inside. His jaw muscles tightened. They were trying to even the odds. That might have been okay before the boogers had taken everything away. His head ached something fierce. Parson didn't want a fair fight.

He'd let them cower behind the car until they felt cozy enough to move. He’d taken a nice long swig before coming up. He could wait.

When they moved, they were his.

Parson settled more deeply into his prone firing position, careful not to stir up any telltale wisps. The roof was warm against his skin and the barrel of his rifle virtually invisible in the hole left by the missing brick, taken purposefully from the gap at the top of the
e
in
Waterman
.

Waterman High Speed Axials.

His old man had worked in this place for twenty plus years come rain or shine. He hadn’t been the plant manager but he’d sure acted like it often enough. He and Parson's mom had argued about that a lot, and other things, too. The night before she left, Parson overheard them. His mom called his dad an emotionless monster, but Parson didn’t think his dad was like that at all. She said she was scared to death of him, like he hadn’t been standing right there with her. That was crazy. If she believed his dad was dangerous, why would she tell him? And when she left, why didn't she take Parson with her, to protect her little boy?

Instead she just left, abandoning them both.

His dad had been a rock, all schedules and plans, as always. Even when the boogers had worked their way halfway to the Atlantic seafloor, his dad had still gone to work. Doing whatever needed to be done to keep the place going. Supporting the scientific community even as the whole world fell to pieces. He'd been that way long before the boogers had probably even been dreamed of. Whenever someone had called in sick, his dad had been there to fill in, any day, any time.
You do what you’ve gotta do
, he’d always said.
Think with your head, and for God's sake, plan ahead.

Once the power company had blown a substation clear to kingdom come. His dad had driven all the way to Lansing to bring back generators so
Waterman
could keep running. Mostly, the same dull routine repeated day after day. Parson didn't know how his dad had done it without going crazy. You couldn't survive like that anymore, looking out for anyone but yourself. Maybe you never could.

His dad had proven that. And if he hadn’t, Parson's mom sure had.

But that wasn't why his dad was dead.

No, Parson had done that.

He hadn't wanted to. He really, truly hadn’t. You had to think with your head, though. Plan ahead. The water would last twice as long now.

He and his dad had come back to the plant after looking for his mom for a few days. The news was crazy, the Internet in shambles, the economy replaced by bullets and bottles of water. China was to blame, somebody said. Others said North Korea. Both of those countries blamed the West. Like it really mattered who started it.

The boogers had been everywhere all at once and that sort of thing doesn’t happen because somebody tripped in a lab and broke a beaker of apocalypse.