Them #3
He went around the bed, stepped over one of the fallen exercise machines, and traced his fingers along the edge of the splintered opening to check for ashes.
Folks used candles when the grids started to go, and the man had seen the remnants of more than a few house fires along his northward journey.
No ash, not today. This was monsters’ work.
Three-legged devils that had climbed the home and poked their fat chitin jaws inside and plucked out Mr. and Mrs. Carolina Farmhouse and taken them to whatever pond or stream or river or bay waited nearby.
Even the sea. The man wasn’t sure how close that was.
Perhaps they’d been Mr. and Mrs. Virginia Farmhouse.
Had the couple, after two-too-many weeks of hiding like mice, finally snapped and broken out in a daylight verbal brawl?
Was it ten? Twenty? Thirty years they’d been married?
Yet still not enough to stave off the stir-crazy and keep their voices down when the sun was up.
Or could’ve been they hadn’t believed in all the “mumbo jumbo.” It was all a hoax.
It would never be them. Or maybe they’d felt invincibly human, like most everyone else had.
The man couldn’t say for sure, the details of such stories long expired.
The man undressed. He thought he’d try Mr. Ambiguous-State Farmhouse’s clothes on for size. Replace everything but the backpack, jacket, and hat. His jeans, borrowed from a forgotten house not too long ago, were cancerous with dust and much too snug.
Perhaps, the man considered, the homeowners did everything they were supposed to do. They were cautious and wise and slept during the day, but the Scorpions and their coiled stingers came for them anyway. As if some of the monsters had learned not to be afraid of the dark.
For a brief moment, he imagined himself as a tiny bumblebee, watching as the walls of his hive were torn asunder by the claws of a hungry bear.
Were humans so sweet as honey? Or did something else drive their hunger?
As far as the man knew, the creatures consumed only two things: people and each other.
There was a crusty stain on the hardwood floor beneath the gaping gash. A red-and-brown tint. No one had been back to clean it. The man used to catch himself wiping up water he’d spilled or picking up knickknacks scattered upon the ground, but those old habits died eventually. Everything did.
The stars through the roof. There were so many. Why did people ever build streetlights when the unpolluted night shimmered like this? The man did not know. Was it not enough? What we were given? Was it never enough?
There came no answer, so he turned away from the jagged hole and shuffled off to find a bedroom with more privacy. Not that it really mattered.
The sun, its purple warning flares now crawling upon the horizon, no longer disturbed his sleep. The light would wash into the house, but he would not stir.
The waking moans of monsters singing their sunrise songs filled what was left of the ancient abode. As always, their melodies were unbeautiful. Garbled, gravelly voices crept toward him from river and lake and pond and creek, as if the stones themselves had come to life to usher in a new day.
This, too, would not bother his rest. He slunk down the hall and into the bathroom, where he brushed his teeth with chalky, expired toothpaste.
Then he found the guest room, drew the blinds, and settled into the lopsided bed.
His eyes traced the textures within the popcorn ceiling for a few minutes, then he turned onto his side and let sleep take him.
Hendrick Moe was, as you may have suspected, a fake name. The face, body, and mind, however, belonged to a man who was quite real.
Jeremy Weisbrot, also thirty-four, was not from Jericho Hill, Maryland.
He was “born and raised in the humble suburbs of Connecticut,” as he loved to tell people, though no one could’ve called those kinds of towns anything but opulent.
He fulfilled parental dreams of a collegiate experience in New Haven (premed, he would’ve added were he still alive) and kept his nose in the books.
He was a gifted student in biology, the author of a research thesis that was to be locked away in some Ivy League basement full of other students’ lost works about hypothetical accelerated photosynthesis or whatever other ideas a twenty-two-year-old could scrounge up and say to themselves, “Yes, yes, this is original! This is something I can work with! Be proud of!” but ultimately were declared to be no more well thought-out than a C+.
But not Weisbrot. No, he was what folks would’ve called a prodigy, a rare talent of mind and determination.
His senior thesis was a trebuchet that would soon launch him into a career in government research.
I never read it. No point. I wouldn’t have understood half of the jargon. That was never my realm.
But Lord, did I have to hear about it.
Weisbrot’s paper detailed how aliens—though I was always corrected to use the term “extraplanetary life”—could be conditioned to survive on our Earth. He theorized a way to genetically engineer nearly any carbon-based life-form to breathe in God’s given atmosphere.
Shortly after the thesis’s submission and the Yale commencement ceremonies concluded, the nature of Weisbrot’s genius was brought to our attention.
The original paper was confiscated from the New Haven campus, photocopied exactly two times, and distributed to three sites: Maryland’s Jericho Proving Grounds, the Pentagon, and a sleepy airbase hidden away in the sands of New Mexico.
A few months later, after an internal scientific review concluded his logic was sound, Weisbrot was approached by Dr. Andrew Brown, a Yale graduate himself, not to mention one of our most tenured civilian researchers at Groom Lake, Nevada.
I don’t know how the conversation went, but I imagine that there was much talk of dreams and musings on reality with very few distinctions between the two.
Weisbrot accepted Dr. Brown’s job offer without hesitation.
To him, it was confirmation that he wasn’t wasting his time with futuristic fairy tales.
To me, it was just another example of our country’s lowest minds still chasing that Cold War thrill, that impulse to push with all our weight against thin air that offered no resistance.
A wild goose chase. A waste. Weisbrot was one more kid who got reeled in by the allure of hush-hush secrets, a smart brain with a bad back from too much time slumped over keyboards and science fiction.
When I first interviewed him, a process that my superiors suggested was merely obligatory, he was polite and well mannered.
A nice kid with exceptionally steady eyes.
I felt bad for him. He could’ve been the one to cure AIDS or cancer.
Instead, we lured him away with promises of glory and wild dreams. Hook, line, and sinker, just like all of the other bright-eyed recruits.
And how they all would sink, sink, sink into the confines of windowless basements and contractually obligated lies when asked “What was work like today, dear?”
Weisbrot was twenty-three when we first met.
Nineteen years ago, by my count. He only lasted eleven.
I was right to feel bad, just not for any of the reasons I originally suspected.
In the shadow world where people slave to forge lies into truth, I had committed the first error of stripping the truth down to a lie.
The truth of Project Artemis.
The theories go back nearly eight decades, but America’s best and thirstiest scientists failed to make any headway for the first sixty-odd years.
I’ll tell you the same thing my predecessor told me: The issue with teleportation is always distance.
Imagine this: The average piece of paper can be folded only about seven times by hand; to try to go any further is like trying to fold cold steel.
This was reiterated to me with great enthusiasm as Dr. Andrew Brown hounded me to approve funding of Project Artemis.
He didn’t have to kiss my ass about it. As the New Mexico black site’s newly minted chief scientist, he had the power to start tinkering with any invention he fancied, but the science guys never had a good grasp on hierarchy.
They scavenged for approval, no matter the source.
Brown explained that the problem they’d had back in the ’50s was that they were aiming too small. A couple of feet, a couple of rooms, even a couple of miles all added up to folding that piece of paper hundreds of thousands of times; it simply couldn’t work.
He spared me the details, the humbug. I was an old Army guy, through and through.
The only science I understood back then was the science of winning, so I always begrudged being tasked with equal treatment of the founded and the fantastic.
Nowadays I don’t understand much at all, except maybe myself.
Everything else came to matter a lot less when I finally considered the possibility of losing.
My point is that, contrary to intuition, it was a helluva lot easier to fold the spirals of the universe just once or twice.
“Don’t you see?” Brown would ask me. As if it mattered, as if his vision depended on my willingness to believe.
“We’ve always thought too small. The only way to make this work is to go big, to go huge, to span light-years like the wings of cosmic giants.
” He told me that exploration didn’t have to wait for starships and astral engines.
He told me that we could probe the planets we thought to be habitable right now.
We could shoot an arrow into space, catch whatever it impaled, and reel it back home.