Scott Mackay: Phytosphere

Around five o’clock, the sun began its descent, and though she was made anxious by the approach of night, and was even illogically apprehensive that dawn might never come again, she still thought the sunset was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. Despite her desolation over the deaths of Neil, Louise, and Ashley, she felt buoyed by it. Light. Was there anything so miraculous? In all its various permutations of color and shadow, was there anything so surprising, mood-altering, or restorative?

Morgan lay with her head on Glenda’s lap, and Glenda stroked the child’s brown hair. Jake ate like a pig in the corner, opening can after can of Irish stew—not rationing, as they had to celebrate their great find in the basement storeroom of Marblehill. Fernandes also ate. The sun would come up tomorrow, she decided. They would get through this. They would survive. Maybe they would survive in a vastly changed world, but they would go on. Gerry would come home. And her two children and two remaining nieces would live long, full lives. And Fernandes would go on as well. He would reconnect with his wife, Celia, in Denver. They would go on to have their family. She could sense this positive outcome in the light that was filtering down from the sky.

A placid and hopeful grin came to her face. She leaned over and kissed Morgan. She glanced at Melissa. She had two new daughters, and she would treat them like daughters, not nieces. She would have to do her best to be a mother to them.

Jake collected up his empty cans of Irish stew. “I’ll throw these in the garbage.” He went over and got Fernandes’s cans as well.

“Come right back and get some sleep,” said Glenda. “You’re on at midnight tonight.”

She watched him go. He now moved with a sureness of step that reminded her of a man’s step. And though his clothes hung on him, she detected a new broadness to his shoulders. He ventured out into the maudlin tints of the sunset and turned left up the hill toward their midden. A breeze entered the cave and she smelled the charred scent of the forest. Her new sense of peace made her sleepy, and she closed her eyes. A comforting doze wrapped its fuzzy hand around her mind, and she nodded off with the rapidity of the truly exhausted. But not for long. Through the fog of her doze, she heard Jake cry out. Her eyes jolted open. His cry was oddly broken, coming in a series of yelps, breaking on the cusp of his changing voice, a cry not only of pain but also of annoyance. She sprang to her feet, at first thinking Buzz had miracuously returned from the dead. But as she hurried from the cave, with Melissa and Fernandes now behind her, she saw that her son had fallen from the cliff to a wide ledge below, and that the point of a broken sapling had skewered the extreme left portion of his abdomen underneath his rib cage.

Fernandes was quick with the orders. “Melissa, get the rope. Mrs. Thorndike, we need some pressure dressings, and some rubbing alcohol.”

Melissa was off instantly to get the rope, but Glenda felt anesthetized. So far, she had dodged all bullets.

But that was her son down there. And he had a sapling coming through his gut. And it wasn’t Buzz or the aliens who had done it; it was just an accident, a stupid, stupid accident, one that could have been treated easily in a hospital. But they were out in the middle of nowhere. And who was coming to get them?

Fernandes was already climbing down the rock face through the ash. Melissa came back, and she had the rope, the pressure dressings, and rubbing alcohol.

“Aunt Glenda?”

Glenda snapped out of it. “Let’s get down there.”

Aunt and niece picked their way down the cliff, coughing in the disturbed ash.

When Glenda got to her son, she saw that the wound was serious, bleeding badly, and that Jake was more or less stuck there because he was so thoroughly skewered. He was crying. He wasn’t a man anymore. He was just a boy who had hurt himself.

Glenda tried to get her panic under control. “What happened?”

“I… I thought I saw a chipmunk.” His voice was high, and his eyes were so wide with hurt amazement that they reminded her of Tarsalan eyes. “And then…” His emotion boiled over. “And then the edge of the cliff gave out and I fell.” He cried again, gazing in horror at his wound, looking as if he wondered how something like this could happen to him. “And it didn’t even turn out to be a chimpmunk. It was just a rock.”

Fernandes got down on one knee, took a wad of dressing from Melissa, and wiped some blood from around the wound. Glenda saw, to her relief, that the sapling, snapped perhaps by a falling tree, its point then tempered by the heat of the fire, had penetrated at the extreme left edge of her son’s abdomen, just below the rib cage, not further in.

“Is it a flesh wound?” she asked Fernandes.

“I think so,” said Fernandes. “We don’t want any internal bleeding. Not out here.” Fernandes looked at Jake and smiled reassuringly. “You’re a lucky man, Jake. You’ve got a flesh wound—a serious one—but I think you’re going to live. Another inch the wrong way, and it could have been much worse.”

Fernandes looked at Melissa. “All right…let’s lift him off. Mrs. Thorndike, get ready with the pressure dressings.”

Jake’s wound, though, was a lot more serious than they first thought. Once they lifted him from the

sapling and got him back to the cave, there seemed to be internal bleeding after all. They gave him morphine to control the pain. He weakened through the night, and no matter how many pressure dressings they put on the entrance and exit wounds, he still managed to soak them fairly quickly. Glenda desperately wanted to stabilize him, and couldn’t believe that after everything they had gone through he would end up like this because of an accident, but he kept on deteriorating.

His condition worsened through the next day. Fernandes characterized the problem as a “slow leak somewhere,” and was worried that if they couldn’t stabilize him soon, they might run into “serious trouble.”

Glenda was frantic to get proper medical attention, and called Gerry on the fone again and again—but the service remained down. She lifted Neil’s special phone and punched in numbers randomly, but the phone kept flashing its message: Preauthorized Numbers Only. She finally gave up on the bulky government device.

Later, a ripe harvest Moon emerged from the east, reminding her of a pumpkin, rising into a spectacularly clear sky. Did the Moon look bigger? Perhaps it did. Were the tides along North Carolina’s Outer Banks larger? Was her husband up there, in Nectaris, staring down at the Earth and admiring his great success? Or was he, too, a casualty?

The night was cool. Morgan came to her a little past midnight and slept beside her. Unexpectedly, so did Melissa, as if accepting Glenda as her new mother.

Around three in the morning, Jake began to cry, and she gave him another morphine shot. He felt clammy, and when Glenda re-dressed the wound, it looked angry and red. She had enough nursing-home experience to know he needed antibiotics. Searching through the scavenged supplies, she found a bottle of Daprox tablets, one of the new broad-spectrum bacteria-fighting drugs, and gave him one.

After that, she slept.

At least until Melissa shook her by the shoulder.

“Aunt Glenda, it’s my dad’s phone… it’s ringing.”

It took her a few moments to rouse herself, but when Glenda heard Neil’s special phone burbling away, she sprang up instantly.

She grabbed the bulky apparatus and pressed the engage button.

“Hello… hello?”

A pause on the other end of the line, then a woman’s voice. “Dr. Neil Thorndike, please.”

She had no choice but to be the bearer of bad news. “I’m afraid Dr. Thorndike has passed away.”