Christmas Trees & Monkeys (21 page)

* * *

The sail flapped uncertainly in the wind. On his knees, Carl leaned against the railing and stared at the sea. Now and then the sleek body of a dolphin broke the surface as it swam westward, following the receding tide. Not for the first time, Carl wondered why it was Margaret he searched for among the waves, rather than his own family. He tried to imagine what his parents went through in those final moments, but all he could summon was a still image of his front yard. The only reality he could imagine at the moment was Margaret, and he knew now she was gone forever. He thought about a discussion they had two weeks ago. Did she believe in the Rapture, when God would take his chosen ones body and soul to heaven before sending his punishment? She laughed at the question. The way she saw it, why would God choose so many people for this grand adventure then spoil their fun at the last minute?

Now Carl wondered once more. Milling around the ship, the passengers gazed across the water, or kept their children busy with games and stories. No one prayed. No one seemed to know what they should be doing. At that last moment before he dropped the ramp, Carl looked at Margaret and her children sitting on the grass and thought
They’re the only ones who deserve to be on this ship and they’re sitting on the ground waiting to die
. Now they were gone, leaving the survivors to sort things out for themselves.

Maybe the Rapture had come after all.

“
You should sleep for a while. If there’s anyone out there they can get you to a hospital and set this arm right.” She didn’t say the rest (“If there are any hospitals left”) but he could hear it in her voice nonetheless.

The baby lay on its belly and sucked on the edge of a blanket. The woman checked the splint on Carl’s arm. She had been a nurse after all. When the ship stopped its rolling and broke into daylight, she immediately took charge of setting the bone back into place. Since then she hadn’t left his side. She even fed young Connor on her breast in front of him. It was a fitting penance for taking the Carboneaus’ place, Carl assumed. He turned from the railing. The deck was still wet and soaked his pants when he sat. With the baby at his feet, Carl tried to sleep.

Across the new landscape, the makeshift fleet turned its bows toward the sun. They followed its burning light as it fell behind the eastern horizon. Reds and yellows spread like fire across the water. The people sailed the ships as best they could against the wind, and waited for someone to come.

— — — — —

About “The Storm of Generations”

I love Ray Bradbury. OK, so I’ve never actually
met
Mr. Bradbury, but I love his writing, both in content and style. I keep one particular non-fiction book of his on the fireplace mantle beside my bed. It’s a tiny collection of essays called
The Zen of Writing
, a must-read for anyone who strives to do the fantastic-fiction thing.

In one particular essay, Bradbury talks of how he would think of a word or two and let it roll around in his head. He would type the word on a piece of paper. Then, he would type a few more related words, seeing what comes of it (go buy the book and read it yourself before I completely bastardize the Master’s essay).

One night I decided to try it. It was
literally
a Dark and Stormy Night, lightening flashing behind the window shades, Big Booms of Thunder, rain, rain, rain. I typed “Rain”. I typed “Storm”, then “Clouds”. I wrote an introductory paragraph about a young couple sitting on a hillside watching a storm roll towards them. Since I’m a mondo Spielberg fan, I had the boy mention that something was coming for them in the clouds. The storm rolls over them, and I continued with a twisted alien abduction scene which never made it into the final draft of the story. I stopped when the girl wakes up on the hillside and the boy is gone.

I had no idea what came next, except that I wanted this to be a quiet story about a quiet invasion, so I shelved the story and waited. One day, out of the blue, I think,
She’s Pregnant. All the men are gone and all the woman are pregnant
. I eventually changed the concept to only having sixteen-year-old girls being pregnant, because otherwise there would be mass chaos nine months later.

Like “Lavish,” I have a feeling that this story might someday become a novel. For now, though, here it is:

The Storm of Generations

Distant electricity turned the grass a shimmering green. On the hillside, the young couple sat among the foot-high blades. Clouds bulged, rolled and collapsed, perhaps a mile out.

“
They’re coming,” Jared muttered as he bit off another chunk of bread. An avalanche of crumbs fell into his lap.

“
No one’s coming. It’s a thunderstorm. Nothing special about it.”

Jared didn’t reply, but stared with a growing restlessness at the thunderheads. They loomed closer, a moment later seemed to pull away. A vague sense of vertigo washed over him. He looked at Serena, wanted to touch her again. Just her shoulder, hard skin through the cotton blouse. No sense starting something he couldn’t finish. Not with whatever lurked inside those clouds getting closer.

He shook his head and took another bite of bread.

The air smelled faintly of iron. It reminded Serena of the time she licked the end of a C battery. Living metal. According to Jared, a ship sailed in those clouds. Maybe more than one.

“
I was right about passing the physics final,” he said, “wasn’t I? Same way I know about this. Dreams, Sen. Dreams don’t lie.” He leaned back in the grass, as if offering himself to the approaching invaders, and folded his arms behind his head. “Don’t you smell it? I can feel the things from here.”

Serena couldn’t tell how serious Jared took his premonitions. She pulled her legs up, locked them in place with her arms. The act wasn’t born out of any insecurity around her boyfriend’s prediction, but, rather, from a sudden gust racing up the hillside. It was the middle of June. The humidity atomized from the approaching electricity, the barometer crashing into its bulbous cellar.

Jared had a dream he would be taken away this afternoon. Serena’s father woke up last night. He may have shouted. Layers of sheets and the half-closed door muted her parents’ voices. She thought she had heard her father crying.

Gooseflesh on her arms. What made pre-thunderstorm air so cool, so clean? The two sat in silence on the grass, waiting for the first blade of lightening to break their reverie and send them scurrying for cover. She rested her chin on denim knees and stared at the storm. It dropped down on them like a rogue ocean wave.

White.

A blank wall. Or a ceiling.

She’d been hit by lightening. This was a hospital. But where’d she been three minutes ago? One, six. No existence before this. Was it only a dream, sitting on the hillside with Jared, watching the clouds? The room spun. Serena watched herself come apart, fall back together.

She was sixteen. What did that have to do with anything?

Fuzzy shapes flittered about. She tried to kick. Nothing moved. She had no legs.

“
Serena.” Jared’s voice. She couldn’t feel her hands. Had they been stolen, too?

Jared was close.

As soon as this thought came to her, the sensation disappeared forever.

* * *

“
Grandma?” Serena looked up. She’d been dozing again.

Lucille stood on the single step leading from the porch to the front yard. Her dress already bore three new stains since breakfast. Serena checked her watch. Church started in twenty minutes and Alice’s little girl already looked unkempt. Serena smiled at her great-great-granddaughter and shuffled forward in the wicker chair.

“
Come here, Cutie.” She smoothed the dress over her lap. Lucille skipped onto the porch and clambered up. Serena held her close. Reverend Corinne wouldn’t be happy, seeing the Daws clan skulk into their pew, once again after the procession was already up the aisle.

Nothing to do about it now. Lucille snuggled against her Grandma’s neck. Down the sloping lawn, the silver spaceship sat all but ignored at the bottom of the hill. It crouched, an echo of a nightmare never fully dissipated. Six legs jutted in right angles from the body, straddling Barber’s Brook. A massive bug forever poised to strike, unchanged in every way for the last fifty-one years.

“
Grandma?” Lucille referred to all her grandparents that way. Everyone did. “Grandma” or “Nana.” Serena preferred “Grandma,” so that’s what they used. “Grandma Serena,” “Grandma Jane.”

“
Grandma Maura.” Maura had marked the half-way point in the line. Little Lucille’s grandmother, Serena’s grand daughter. Maura died in a plane crash when she was eighteen, finally taking her belated post-natal vacation. She’d chosen Washington. The government complied, even paid her way. A small price for her contribution to the population. Fate, however, did not comply. Fortunately, the Line wasn’t severed. Baby Alice, then two years old, was the continuation. And continue it did. Lucille was talking. Serena looked at her and tried to recall what the girl had just said. No use. She smiled instead.

“
Hmm?”

“
I said, are you coming to my recital? Mommy bought me a new dress.”

* * *

Cool grass on her face. Rain drops across her back. Dizzying, this sensation of water falling in minute explosions on and around her. She lay prone on the hillside, among tall blades of grass, taking inventory of her body. Jeans in tact. No socks anymore, white tennis sneakers. Had she worn socks today? Maybe not. Muscles felt heavy like her wet clothes.

Details of the clouds blurred to an undefined haze as rain stretched across the town.

“
Jared?”

How long had she been out? Hit by lightening. Yes, of course. But not dead. Serena squinted away the rain and looked behind her, up the short distance to the rise. Two intertwined hemlocks offered futile shelter from the storm. She looked back down through the haze. Something long and silver squatted in the distance, near a cluster of trees at the curve of Devonshire Road. Something fluttered in her belly, like the loose edges of nerves she tried to tie before each year’s dance recital. Serena looked once more around the hillside, trying to remember what she was looking for.

Then it came to her. Jared was gone.

* * *

“
Is that a man?” Jane let go of her mother’s hand, shuffled towards the painting as if hypnotized. Before them, a sixteenth century orgy spread out, all motion and color. Four men and five woman lounged among each other’s limbs, all naked but for an occasional loose tunica—a celebratory salute to the pleasures of the flesh. Always the ode to Bacchus, Serena noted, a whisper of melancholy playing across her face. She missed Jared. Not just because of what they’d shared together. Physically, it wasn’t a whole lot. What would their world have been like, if things hadn’t gone to shit? What would have happened, if the two had reached this dream-like point? Jared holding her, like the Bacchus-image holding the woman. Was this scene real, or some painter’s lurid fantasy? Men and woman. The possibilities seemed endless.

“
Mommy?”

Serena swallowed. “Yes. Those are men.”

Jane paused for a moment, then pointed at a flailing penis. “Is that a —”

“
Yes,” Serena said, hoping the interruption would throw some discouragement her daughter’s way, at least with this particular topic. Maybe later. Not in front of the painting.

Jane stared for a while, moving now and again to a new vantage point. Nine year-old girls had their own methodical rhythm. They seemed to ponder everything, turning things over inexhaustibly, finishing in their own time. “Did Daddy have one?” she finally said.

Daddy; meaning Jared, of course. As if a virgin birth were some horrifying label to be peeled away. As if it didn’t happen to every sixteen year-old girl these days. As soon as she could listen, Jane learned about her father, about Jared. Serena even named her after him, as close a name as she could come up with. She never truly explained to her daughter what “father” meant. What did it matter? It wasn’t a necessary part of the equation anymore.

“
Yes, he had one.”

Jane made a face and turned away. “Gross.”

* * *

Women gathered on the south end of Devonshire Road, to get a better look at the wonder everyone called “the bug.” Serena’s nausea abated, retreating after a reluctant breakfast of butterless toast and water. The fourth morning waking up like this.

No word from her father. No word from her brothers. And no Jared. All gone. Every man on the planet replaced, it seemed, by these squatting alien monuments.

Serena’s mother refused to come out of the bedroom.

With nothing else to do, only CNN and the local PBS station back on line, Serena followed the growing crowd as it moved purposely along Marjorie Drive, then Devonshire. Leading the mob, the woman who tried to get her mother into Amway two years ago. Mrs. Kyle stood an easy four inches over the next tallest woman in the group. Black hair shot tightly back in a bun, she looked like an old-fashioned school marm searching out delinquent students. She shrieked, “They’re in there!”