Eric Stever - Non Metallic

A baby lay there, its face black and screwed tight, as if turned to stone in mid cry. It did not have the implants, and so was not affected by the attacks. It had simply starved to death, while its brain dead mother sat only a few feet away.

Another blessing for the mother, Emma supposed. To not understand what had happened.

“I’m gonna be sick,” Emma said, but she knew it wasn’t true. She couldn’t be sick anymore. She was a survivor. And Jeanine’s tears… they would dry too. The desert would take that water. They’d been through this so many times.

Jeanine reached out and closed the door of the Smart-Cart. Emma was aware of her sister’s hand, warm against her lower back as they walked back to the police cruiser.

“There’s no time for this,” Jeanine said in a soft tone. “If we don’t reach our quota for the day, they really will put us on the mine. The elders say we have to keep quiet, keep the Droolies happy for now. And Mom says…”

Emma looked up at her sister, not bothering with words. She wore her down with cold, tearless eyes.

“I’ll get the shovel,” Jeanine said finally, her voice a half-sob.

Emma turned back toward the vehicle, opened the door and took the dead infant from its slumbering mother. She cradled the tiny husk in her arms, placed it on the ground and then began to dig.

There were twenty-one cookies left when they returned to town, their uniforms covered in dirt, their nails brittle and broken. As Emma and Jeanine drove toward the station they passed the town elders, seven dour men gathered around the clapboard covered front entrance of the community center.

Mr. Ferguson was mumbling to Mr. Catton near the old fire bell that had not rung for one-hundred-and-seventeen years. Major Fleishmann was talking, as always, gesturing with his cane and then pausing to rest on it before winding up again. Reverend Holloway noticed Emma and stepped off the curb toward the vehicle, with his Sunday morning smile plastered on his plump face. He’d taken to wearing his purple robes all days of the week, as if anyone didn’t know what he did for a living. Emma just drove on, ignoring him.

Once inside the station, Emma signed in, and began to undress. On the water stained tally sheet, Emma scrawled in big block letters: “ONE VEHICLE, 2.5 DEAD. I QUIT.”

Emma stepped out into the wide roadway near the bottom of the copper pit, squinting her eyes against the low-angled sun. The warmth of the day had started to fade and the sun had almost dropped behind the waste rock walls, drawing long lines of shadows, like searching fingers.

She carried a bucketful of promising ore, each rock carefully arranged to hide the false bottom. Emma tried to jiggle the bucket with each step, to cover the metallic clank of the object hidden inside, but her arms tired of this after only a few steps.

Her sister Jeanine trudged behind her, grumbling. This was the fourth trip on her shift. Emma had two more today before she would lose her chance.

“What the hell year do these Droolies think it is, 1872?” Jeanine said through clenched teeth. She re-gripped the handle of the bucket, and struggled down the road toward the waiting maw of the crusher. “Making us single-jack the copper pit, like people still do this work by hand? For low-grade copper? What do they think all that machinery is here for?”

“It’s still better than the road cleanup,” Emma reminded her.

They walked on a raised berm that led to the crusher building, a massive solid concrete structure with three openings that could supply ore to the crushing machinery. At the entrance to the first crusher was a moving belt with raised sides leading into a square opening. The ore beneficiation started here and continued, Emma knew, with the help of various milling and chemical processes. Or at least it used to before the Droolies took over.

A shimmering acrid dust emanated from the entrance, and caused her eyes to tear up even at this distance. The old-timers who had worked at the mine before the Droolies came said that the “fairy dust” as they called it, was new, and would violate every OSHA rule in the book.

Above the crusher’s entrance two men stood on raised wooden platforms. The wood creaked under their steps as they moved from console to console, checking the machinery.

Emma glanced up and saw three green specs in the sky. Two were drifting away on some unknown Droolie business, but one stayed where it was. One of the men on the wooden platforms nodded to her and then went back to his work. This was the sign the Reverend had told her to wait for, just before he gave her the weapon that now lay hidden in her ore bucket. Emma stopped.

Jeanine stumbled into the back of her and in an instant the Droolie’s disc had moved from its distant position and was hovering just above their heads. The odd whistling sound waxed and waned as the disc rose into the air and then fell.

The oblong silvery disc was larger than Emma expected, almost 30 feet long and half as much wide. The metal of the disc curved up at the end like old paper, obscuring how boxy it was. On the deck was a single pedestal, with wires and tubes running from the Droolie pilot into the body of the disc. The Droolies never came too close but Emma knew the recesses that pockmarked the sides of the disc held arsenals of renewable weapons, enough to take out entire armies if needed. Emma could smell electric current coming from the exhaust and a stench that was both sweet and decayed.

Jeanine turned to look at Emma, her face was colored green as the last rays of sunlight reflected through the disc’s force shield. “Don’t run,” she said. “Or we’re both dead.”

“We have to run,” Emma said. That was the plan anyway, to draw the Droolie closer to the crusher.

The Droolie shifted his disc to their left. Emma saw that it was the same Droolie from the parade day, the one who had removed half an inch of Mrs. Kiltmers scalp when she’d saluted the wrong flag.

But that had been almost a month ago. The Droolie’s beard was filthier now, and a waterfall of white pus oozed from one of his eyes, covering the American flag sewn on his uniform shirt. Emma recognized him. And he recognized her.

They’re dying, Emma thought. If she could just keep going through the next few months, she’d bury this one and maybe the rest. There couldn’t be more than twenty or thirty of them. Emma would bury them all right next to the place where she’d buried that infant on the highway, because they all had about the same understanding of what had happened. She could blame the machines that kept him alive she supposed. Or the photons that ran them.

The Droolie’s good eye moved from Jeanine back to Emma. Its head lolled to the side, almost parallel to the disc on which it stood. She felt the cold air of the pit pass through the gap where her coveralls did not quite reach her ankles. The Droolie paused in his jittery dance for only a moment and their eyes met. She knew what that look meant. He was a man after all… or had been.

“Don’t run,” Jeanine said again. Her mouth was drawn tight with fear.

Emma leaned in toward her, so that her blond hair covered her face. “We have to get it closer to the crusher,” she whispered. “We have to run.”

The Droolie lifted his flying disc higher into the air. A red and blue light set on the bottom of the disc began to flash. Jeanine struggled with her bucket but lost hold of it, and its contents fell to the ground.

Emma put down her load and began to throw the rocks back into her sister’s bucket. She gouged the skin of her palm on one of the large rocks, and drops of blood flew at the ore bucket as if baptizing it.

“We have to move, Jeanine! You know what those lights mean.”