H Romero - The Girl Who's Made of Leaves - Post Apocalyptic Science Fiction

The sensation isn’t like the time that Dr. Shaw gave her the medicine. It’s different because his medicine made her feel all heavy on the inside. It weighed her down and stapled her body to the gurney. No, now she imagines she can fly far away from here. Rose is very, very happy. As she had been the night, she sensed the rain.

Oh, only if she could fly away, but even if she could sprout wings and lift from the ground she could never leave the others. The overpowering feeling that she must care for them that they are family would prevent her from leaving. Her wings are clipped. She’ll never fly without the others. She can’t bring herself to imagine leaving the children behind. Ever.

Rose, Hawthorne, and Ivy stand chained to one another. Rose, only slightly aware of her surroundings, fading in and out of reality, perceives the others swaying as if they are stalks of corn blowing lazily in a gentle summer’s wind. And she sways too. Three small faces against the blue sky, like young birds in a nest, take in the power that the dark prison of Camp Able has drained from them.

The doctors, Shaw and Dr. Valentine, come into the courtyard with the soldiers and the children. They settle in for what promises to be a long, but interesting observation of the children’s reactions to the Sun.

One thing in particular that Dr. Valentine notices, not immediately because this particularly remarkable observation can be made only with the passing of some time, is that the children are purposefully tracking the sun.

She isn’t sure at first, perhaps it’s a minor shift in the stance the children take, as their inner ears collaborate with the remainder of their adolescent brains to maintain a delicate balance, as they sway to and fro. If one might come along now the children might appear as if they are listening to some music unheard by anyone else in all the world.

But as hours tick off, one by one, and the golden orb arcs from east to west, the children’s faces, now sunburned by solar radiation, follow it across. Their postures shift to absorb the abundant solar energy warming the Earth. Their bodies’ rock gently, their faces stay fixed to the sun. The children dance and swoon, nearly imperceptibly, hypnotic metronomes are they.

Merna marvels at their movements which sync in time with the heartbeat of the solar winds, a slow-motion ballet. She would rather write it off as a balancing mechanism that makes them rock in place like marionettes. And then she says, “They are just like… I don’t know… just like…,”

“Just like plants ,” says Shaw.

“I’ve seen this. Well, not this, exactly. But a collective reaction to stimulus. Last night, during the storm. Not one, but all of them.”

“Subjects.” Shaw corrects her once more. He is unforgiving in his want, to beat this thought they these are innocents.

Dr. Valentine remains silent. She maintains her doctrine. These are children with a right to be freed from this terrible, terrible thing that’s happened to them. A small part of her wonders if they can ever be what they were ever again. The thing inside of them has scooped out what they used to be and has made them something entirely new. How could anyone come back from this? “They were all standing in front of the boards, reaching out for rain that they couldn’t see.”

“I made the same observations, weeks ago before you arrived. There’s a strong reaction and pull toward anything that would sustain plant-life.”

Bastard . A taste of rotten garbage slips past her tongue and dribbles into her throat. The sourness of the realization of his out-and-out betrayal scrapes her palate raw. Her cheeks flush, not from the sweltering heat, but rather her resurfacing anger towards him. Her blood pressure rises. Her ears go from pink to scarlet, bilaterally, across the scaphoid fossa and helix.

The sun sinks in the western sky, and as it does the hospital building which houses the children, casts a grey shadow, slowly skulks across the courtyard, inch by inch, caressing sand and pebbles as it goes until the intense evening light dims around Hawthorne, cloaking him in the colors of his inner spirit of greys and deep lavender-blue.

His swaying becomes mildly spasmodic, losing the smoothness of the swaying motion. His tilt from side to side slows in comparison to the other two children. Something is happening, but just what is not certain. Valentine senses a change coming over the boy. She surmises it must be being brought on by the casting of the shadow onto his body. He’s emerging from his pseudo-hypnotic state, of that, there’s no doubt. Lightly, he begins to whistle as he often does, softly at first, then the whistling grows steadily louder.

When the shadow falls across Rose, her sway becomes more animated, and Dr. Valentine can see that an area of her brain, the vestibulocerebellum is auto-correcting itself, so the child doesn’t fall. Amazing that the creature she saw laying on the table in the operating room, with all its digging and tunneling and hollowing out of the brain had left the hosts critical neuro functions intact. Of course, there was a plan all along. If it planned to use the host’s body, then it was only logical for it to keep areas of the brain intact that it would need to control it and keep it alive.

Rose’s sticky eyes flutter open, but she still isn’t completely lucid. She wakes confused and mumbling. She remembers being brought to the courtyard, and then her mind drifting away, and there was nothing she could do to stop it. She was helpless to the seduction to which she found herself subjected.

Hawthorne is whistling his tune somewhere behind her. The drowsiness is wearing off, but the sweeping energy is still present; the pleasure of it threatens to overwhelm her again, but she’ll resist its calling to her. The whispers and promises of fulfillment. She could bust from its presence in her, but at the same time, wants it to never end. Never find its way out of her body. How long it will last, she doesn’t have a clue.

There’s another person whistling… it’s started off slow, but gradually it picks up both tempo and pitch, to match Hawthorne. She has memorized Hawthorne’s tune, and the second whistler matches Hawthorne perfectly, note for note.

She searches for the source of the accompaniment, and there, outside the fenced courtyard, the green man who always seems to find Hawthorne’s tune so infectious. He is performing maintenance on a jeep. The hood is propped open, and he’s hanging over the radiator so that he can see way down into the engine.

The man wipes the sweat of a long, hard day from his gritty neck with a greasy, green rag. The rumble of a vehicle grows closer. Rose pays it no mind. She fights to keep her eyes open.

She focuses on the whistling green man who stares off into space, lost in deep thought, ill-focused and disoriented.

The shadow is now falling across Ivy, and the girl is swaying from front to back, bumping into Rose occasionally. She is waking too. Rose is aware that Dr. Shaw, Valentine and the green men are in the enclosure along with them, but for some reason that she can’t understand, she feels an undesirable omen is lingering over them all; a foreboding sense of doom. A thin invisible tendril connects Hawthorne to the whistling green man’s mind.

Rose heard Dr. Shaw asking the green men to return the subjects to their cells. That’s a funny word, cell , but that is exactly what it is. Not her room, with the little light hanging from her ceiling with the Milky Way encircling it, but a cell. She’s a prisoner, she does not belong here, and she doesn’t like it at all. But she will stay here with the other children because they belong together, wherever they are.