Scott Mackay - Phytosphere

She left her bedroom and stopped at Hanna’s door. Hanna sat by the window, leaning into the waning light as if she were a plant starved for sunshine. She held a book in her hands, couldn’t use the electronic reader, which she so often preferred for her school texts, but held an honest-to-God book, made out of honest-to-God paper; and it wasn’t just any book, but one of Hanna’s old books, a children’s book.

Hanna was holding it up to the remaining light with a far-off look in her eyes, and she looked so stoned on the medication from Cedarvale that Glenda was worried about her, and wondered if she was abusing the medication as a way to deaden her daily existence. When the medicine ran out, what then? Would Hanna literally cough herself to death? Would her body finally grow so weak from the racking coughs and lack of food that she would slip into a coma and die?

Day at a time, day at a time, day at a time —her mother’s mantra came back with an urgent and panicked clarity. “Hanna?” she said.

Her daughter turned in the slow and lugubrious way of a heroin addict riding the horse full speed.

“Jake’s asleep. You know that, don’t you?”

“What?”

“He was sleeping when I went for a pee.”

“But it’s only eight in the evening.”

“He’s been sleeping a lot.”

Glenda hurried to the living room.

In the dim green light coming through the picture window she saw Jake sprawled on the sofa, his arm hanging over the edge so that it touched the floor. The gun was next to his hand, its barrel angled off toward the front door, a box of bullets open beside it with a few cartridges, like scattered gold nuggets, on the floor. Yes, sleeping all the time, fourteen to sixteen hours a day, like the depressed old people at Cedarvale. Maybe she should have raided the Cedarvale dispensary for some happy pills as well.

She walked over and shook his arm. “Jake? Jake, honey?”

His head shot quickly to one side, and he was insensible for a few seconds as he clutched wildly for the gun.

Once he had it, he sat up. “Are they here? Are they here?”

“No, Jake, no. You fell asleep.”

Jake cast an anxious glance out the window. “Is that Buzz’s truck I hear?”

She listened, her paranoia taking hold like a bad fever. All she heard was the quiet. Not even any gunfire up in the hills anymore, as if they had all killed each other.

Jake got up and walked to the window. The fear came off him like sparks from a pinwheel—fear only a kid of twelve could feel. She walked to the window and joined him. She looked at the sky. The light of an August sunset seeped through the ragged hole in the green thing up there, and the edges of the hole, as it closed up, weren’t so much green as turquoise, as if hailstones refracted the light. The road was empty.

There was no sign of Maynard, Buzz, or Brennan—bastards, the lot of them.

“I’m going to one of the stashes to get some food,” she said. “You need something to eat. Eat something, then go to bed.”

“Which stash are you going to?”

“By the sycamores. Stash one.”

“Can I go?”

“You’ve got to stay here. In case they come.”

“You think they will?”

“They’d be fools to when it’s light like this. We’d mow them down. But then Sheriff Fulton’s always been a fool.”

“I’ll use the binoculars.”

“Don’t drop them this time.”

“Mom, that was an accident.”

“They’re your father’s good pair.”

“When are you going to learn to trust me?”

She walked to the kitchen and out the back door.

All the dead things in the forest—animals that had starved—were rotting in this heat, and the whole county smelled like roadkill up close. She trotted over to the fence, painfully aware that any of Fulton’s men could be taking a bead on her from up in the hills, and used the cover of the dead cedar hedge to make her way to the back.

She paused next to Leigh’s shed and looked into the woods. With the light coming down in this eerie way, and the shadows gathering in the lifeless trunks, it didn’t even look like Earth anymore, but like some weird and suffocated version of Earth.

She ventured more deeply into the woods. She came to stash one. She dug—and she dug and she dug until she had uncovered stash one. As she was hauling it out of the warm, dead earth, she heard the bump and rattle of Buzz Fulton’s truck coming along the highway, but only for a moment before it died at the top of the hill, to the east of the house. Her heart jumped as if with booster cables and her shortness of breath worsened, and she listened and listened, and tried to hear the truck, but the silence, after the usual signature cacophony of his vehicle, was like a death writ. He wasn’t passing by this time. He was stopping. Up at the top of the hill. And it couldn’t be good, oh, no, it had to be bad, because if he was stopping at the top of the hill, it meant he had plans.

She shoved the stash into its hole.

She ran out of the woods into the yard, conscious of the thump of her sneakers against the dead grass.

She entered through the back door, and locked it manually because the console didn’t have power anymore.

The front door was open and, getting closer, she saw Jake standing on the slab of concrete they called

the porch. He held the binoculars to his eyes and stared up the hill.

She stepped out onto the stoop beside him.

He took the binoculars away. “I think they’re here, Mom. I think this might be the night.”

“Did you make a head count?”

“Three for sure. But there could have been four.”

“So you remember what I said?”

“That the old rules don’t apply, and it’s okay to kill if I have to.”

“Just pretend it’s one of your Handheld Sport games.”

“Mom, it’s a little scarier than that.”

“I know… I know. Take up your position in the back. Don’t come forward unless I give you the signal.”

“I feel a little sick.”

“Are you going to throw up?”

“I’m just really scared.”

“Let’s get ready.”

They went into the house. Glenda walked to Hanna’s room.

Hanna had now put her book aside and was looking out the window. “Is it them?”

“Buzz stopped up the hill. I think you and Jake should go to the woods, like we planned.”

“I never liked Buzz. He was such an asshole at Marblehill. He actually came on to me.”

“He did?”

“I never told you.”

“But you were only twelve.”

“Like I said, he’s an asshole.”

They left Hanna’s room.

Jake and Hanna went to hide in the woods out back.

Glenda stayed alone in the house, on her knees at the front window, her rifle ready, scanning the highway, hoping Jake would give her a whistle if Maynard and his crew came from the back. She waited and waited, and slowly the hole in the sky got darker until finally it shone with the eternal blue of

nighttime, a shade a hundred times darker than indigo, a ragged continent shiny with stars in the pitch-black of the shroud.

She crawled back to the coffee table and groped for her high-powered flashlight, glad Leigh had stashed away so many extra batteries. She struggled back to the window and looked out at the front lawn. It was now a shade brighter than it had been a moment before—and looking at that hole in the shroud, she saw that its edges were growing brighter as well.

After another fifteen minutes, a pale fingernail of Moon peeped out at her from behind the shroud, and she couldn’t help thinking of Gerry.

When Sheriff Fulton finally came, he didn’t show his face, but megaphoned from somewhere out in the dark.

“Glenda?” He waited for a response. “Glenda, we know you’re in there. And we know you have food.