Scott Mackay - Phytosphere

“Goddamn it, Glenda, why don’t you let me kill you easy?” called Buzz.

The sound of a rifle shot rocketed through the air.

That’s when lights exploded everywhere on the Tarsalan Landing Vehicle. Shaped like a clamshell, the TLV now glowed with a mother-of-pearl mix—violet, green, silver—and this light coalesced into a single beam, which quickly pinpointed Buzz’s ramshackle old truck, while a smaller, separate beam outlined Buzz. She saw Buzz clearly in this small beam. He lifted his arm to his forehead to shield his eyes from the light, and squinted at its glare. Then a series of blue and green embers floated away from the alien landing craft and drifted, in no particular hurry, toward Buzz and his truck.

“Get off the road!” she cried.

She and Jake dragged Hanna up a small incline to the other side of a hummock. She got on her stomach and watched things unfold. As the blue and green embers got closer to Buzz they began to whine with a rising pitch until finally the sound was so painful that she had to cover her ears. Buzz figured things out quickly and, after a moment of drop-jawed scrutiny, ran away from his truck, rifle in hand, and disappeared into the forest on the other side of the road. Five embers drifted toward his truck and burrowed into it like hot little drills. A few seconds later, his truck exploded and was left a flaming heap on the asphalt.

Other embers pursued Buzz into the forest. She watched in horrified fascination. With all the underbrush dead, she kept fairly good track of Buzz. He ran from tree to tree as if pursued by a band of malevolent fairies. The embers cruised after him, closing the distance quickly. When they were a yard away, they pulled back, then dove into his body with the ferocity and quickness of bullets. Buzz cried out, an awful throaty scream. His limbs went stiff, his fingers splayed so that he dropped his rifle, and it was as if he was illuminated from within by high-voltage electricity. He shook violently. His shirt burst into flames, and he fell to the ground so that half his body was hidden behind a tree trunk, the other half still visible. Then came a small explosion and she got the distinct impression of a detached leg flying into the air. She turned away. She was saddened that it had come to this, but she was also relieved. And terrified that she now had to elude the Tarsalans herself.

At that point, the alien spacecraft descended to the road. It was wacky, a scene out of a science fiction movie, something she had never expected to see; visitors from another star at last landing on her planet, the spacecraft settling on the road like a giant glowing egg. It made a creepy sound, a sudden buzz with low-frequency harmonics that vibrated through her whole body, then that sucking sound again, like the last bit of water in a bathtub going down the drain. Then all sound faded.

In the ensuing silence, her body took over. She got her kids to their feet and helped them through the forest. Hanna didn’t have to be dragged—fear was a great motivator. Glenda got all kinds of scratches from the thick, dead bushes, but continued to cajole her kids through the dark forest past the spaceship, and finally back out onto the road. Her mind, in its own separate universe, reeled from the terror of it all.

With Hanna in such a debilitated state, it took them a long time to get the rest of the way to Marblehill.

Glenda looked at her watch in the dim glow of her flashlight, and wasn’t sure if it was one o’clock in the afternoon or one o’clock in the morning.

When they finally reached Marblehill, she looked up at the three-story mansion and saw lights burning in

four windows. In the glow of these lights she saw a helicopter sitting on the big front lawn. The building itself looked as if it had been under prolonged attack, with the east turret demolished and the rest of the various walls, dormers, and cornices badly shot up.

The three Thorndikes stood outside a big stone wall. There was a path outside the wall that led into the forest. In happier times, she had walked along this path, hand in hand with Gerry, down into the rugged limestone ravine that abutted the property where the trees used to grow. Hanna lay on the ground outside the wall. Her coughing sounded different: still persistent but not as strong, as if she had long ago ripped all her abdominal muscles to pieces and no longer possessed the muscular mechanics to cough the way she used to

“Jake, stay with your sister. I’m going to the gate.”

But beyond that? She didn’t know. What if this whole thing turned into a bust? What if everybody was dead inside? Shut up, Glenda. Live a minute at a time…minute at a time…minute at a time…

She reached the gate and turned her flashlight on and off three times. She waited, then repeated the signal, terrified that, somewhere out in the dead forest behind her, Tarsalan refugees watched her. She repeated the signal a third time, then saw someone run from the house, across the lawn, and toward the helicopter.

As the figure got closer, she saw that it was recognizably human, with normal human proportions, not short legs and long arms like a Tarsalan. She was so overwhelmed with relief that she felt dizzy and pressed her hand against the gate for support.

The figure resolved itself into a man. “Mrs. Thorndike?”

“Yes…yes, it’s me. Call me Glenda.”

“Where are your kids?”

The man closed the distance between them, and she saw the name FERNANDES stitched above his left breast pocket.

“Just down here.” She peered into the darkness. “Jake? Hanna? Come on.” She saw movement in the shadows along the stone fence. She turned to Fernandes. “My daughter’s really sick. I hope you have medicine.”

Fernandes nodded. “We have all kinds. Let’s get them across the lawn… before the Tarsalans come.”

New anxiety shot through her chest like a lightning bolt. “It’s bad?”

“We have five dead. Six including your sister-in-law.”

“My sister-in-law?”

Fernandes nodded. “It’s just three airmen left, Dr. Thorndike, and his three girls.”

“Louise is dead?”

“One of the VMs got her a few days ago.”

Her children appeared out of the shadows.

“Kids, Aunt Louise is dead. Just so you know.”

“What?” said Jake. “Really? What happened?”

Fernandes was looking at the gun in Jake’s hand. He then turned to Glenda. “He know how to shoot? I mean, really shoot?”

But Glenda was too upset about Louise to respond.

“I’m getting better,” said Jake.

“Ever handle a Montclair?” asked Fernandes.

“A Montclair? What’s that?”

Fernandes’s face sank. “Come on. Let’s get everybody inside.”

Fernandes hustled them across the lawn.

The lawn was brown and had the texture of a piecrust, the sod seeming to have come loose in a single piece from the underlying soil, as if the lawn’s root system had died at the same time, en masse . In a world where things kept getting worse and worse—where the sun could be extinguished by alien plankton, where Glenda could become a cop killer, and where mass famine took the lives of millions every day—Louise was just one more catastrophe, and it was hard for Glenda to immediately feel grief.

She just felt shocked. How was Neil handling it? How were the girls handling it?

Fernandes led them under the great stone portico and up the steps. They went through the front door, and…there they all were, Neil and the girls, waiting for them, just like any other Marblehill visit, only this one was so different.

Neil was smiling in the oddest way. “Welcome to Marblehill.”

His face was lit by a light that was hanging on a hook, a bare bulb in a cage, the kind mechanics used to look under cars. The greeting came out in a stiff, formal way, and the man standing before her didn’t sound like Neil at all.