Them #6
The night following the stay in Mr. and Mr. North Carolina Farmhouse’s bed was full of nothing. The sole disturbance was the audible trickle of a running creek somewhere to the east. The sound of water babbling over rocks and falling onto itself was as faint as a whisper, but refused to disappear.
The man’s steps slowed, both in thought and out of caution. Plans had a time and place, he supposed, but they came easiest and quietest when coupled with immediate need. So, he would wait. He would walk and wait.
The overhead moon was waning. This was good. This reassured the man. The world moved faster in total darkness. The earth dug its oars deep into tar-black water and paddled forward, toward pink skies and glassy waves, eager to escape the absence of Brother Moon.
We lose. We really lose. That sticks with me.
When I began reading, I looked up online lists of best books.
Objective declarations of them. It’s not like I had anyone to ask.
I found Faulkner. Morrison. Shakespeare.
Jackson. García Márquez. War and Peace and Moby-Dick.
I loved a few, enjoyed most, but some were slick things.
Slick things that didn’t hang their hats on my head or stay for a cup of joe.
Nothing that challenged the fear I held over myself.
I learned to doubt myself, yet couldn’t find the courage to see the man in the mirror as anything but large and frightening. As a soldier.
But we lose. Mice-people clinging to fake words forged from radio static, because what else do you do when you lose? We lose and three-pronged plagues sleep in my bed and cook me breakfast because I gave them my one and only spare key.
The man eventually came upon another house, one largely untouched by the elements.
This time, there was a note on the front door. He cupped a hand around his lighter, shielding it from the wanting forest beside the property, and read:
Izzy, we going to Uncle Glen’s. Not safe here. Cell phones not working anymore. Sorry to leave last minute. Remember to drive at night. See you soon. We love you, Mom the moon was now a paltry thing.
He had little knowledge of lunar cycles other than what had been required of him in high school science classes.
It waned to nothing and waxed to full. Tidally locked.
One half in eternal sunshine, the other in some forever night.
Or maybe it just rotated at the same pace as Earth. He wasn’t sure.
The man was suddenly grateful for belonging to a planet with an axis of rotation. What happened in Alaska? Where it could be day for days and night for weeks? The bunker’s Wi-Fi hadn’t lasted long enough for him to find out.
What did they think of the cold? Could it be safe in the Arctic reaches? If they were blue-blooded beasts who sunbathed? There had to be a safe place somewhere. The man thought he might like to find one of those.
But then his mind wandered to their insectoid joints and hardened scales, the way they repelled bullets like the bow of some bulging darksteel battleship.
How they waded through mighty river currents as if the rapid water were no more than a shallow puddle.
The way they moved in those old news clips, immense weight ignorant of gravity.
Living weapons that frolicked through the streets of Boston without mercy or consideration. Death incarnated in a steel stinger.
The moon would soon be new and absent, likely not tomorrow, but within two or three days. Big blue eyes would have a harder time picking him out in such conditions, even if there were six of them on each head.
The moon knew the man was studying it. Its sleek crescent seemed to open up and chat with him.
Why, yes, it said, I will be gone in a few days.
Well, not gone, little mouse, but my eye will turn in and close and you will have your run of the void.
Have you been eating your carrots? Have you developed night vision yet? Have you the ocular vigor?
The man considered the moon’s points. He saw well in the dark, but seeing was easy at a walking man’s pace.
He might have to run, and without the moon, even jogging could be dangerous on a flat and open road.
How dark would it be under the trees? Traveling in thick forest or without moonlight was feasible without his own torch—he’d done both before—but all at once?
He knew they liked sleep, needed it just as he did, but he didn’t know how easily they would stir.
Would a flashlight or lighter wake them?
Attract them like moths? Did they have adrenaline?
Cortisol? Could they snap from their creek-sleep lull and pounce?
Were they really hesitant in the dark, as the populace was once advised?
Or did they merely go to sleep like everyone else?
He wasn’t sure, but knew that he never would be.
The man made up his mind. He would move on the new moon, at the witching hour, but neither his decision nor the moon’s suggestions offered him any comfort.
The only thing he took solace in was their eyes. He was fairly sure they glowed. If Scylla and Charybdis awoke and opened their alien sight, the water would light up neon, and he would be impaled by their slick spears and dragged into their blue shimmer.
But at least he would see them coming. Before they ate him alive. That was good. That would leave enough time to shoot himself.
The man’s eyes had wandered to the ground in contemplation. He returned them to the moon, which looked more like a wink than a mouth now. It had nothing left to say.
In a stranger’s bed, the man affirmed his decision. Two or three days at this house. Maybe four. Cross over the creek at the witching hour when it’s darkest, when even six blue searchlights will have difficulty spotting him. Until then, sleep and wait and eat and take inventory.
He was glad the moon was waning. The man hoped it was two days. The man had spent many days waiting. He yearned for the privilege of impatience.
The man stilled for some time, appearing to sleep, when suddenly he sprang out of the sheets and into the bathroom.
He returned with a bottle that jingled in medicinal tunes.
In the dim heat of his lighter, the label confirmed that the drug would help him sleep through the sun. Three cheers for Izzy’s parents.
He swallowed two pink tablets, left the bottle on the nightstand, and let the chemicals take him. He would be deep by sunrise. Their cries, metal xylophones that said Hello, sun, we’ve been waiting, would not wake him.
Two or three days.
Maybe four.
And he slept.
Artemis’s first arrow reeled back rocks from a distant, dead planet. It worked on the first try, can you believe that? Took Brown half a decade to build the damn thing, but still: first try. Makes you think it might’ve not been an accident after all.
I never was religious. Grew up going to church but my mind was always outside the stained glass walls. Wandering. When I was fighting, I wore a cross, but most guys do. It gives your mom something to hold on to if you get shipped back in pieces. But now, I wonder.
They were just rocks. I wasn’t there for that first firing, Project Artemis being in the dreaded basement.
Brown told me the initial test was happening, but I thought it most likely that the austere observatory would be coated in mechanical soot after a few small explosions.
So I’d stayed away, even gotten a head start on filing the closure paperwork.
Put down a McCarthy hardcover to do it: The Road, I think it was, but maybe I’m projecting.
But rocks are not soot, nor are they nothing.
Brown called me right after. He was manic. I didn’t believe him. Didn’t believe him until, five minutes later, I received another call from an unlisted number. They were my orders to fly to New Mexico and pack a bag, a big one.
“Dress for the desert sun, Buxton; your one-way leaves in six hours.”
But they were just rocks. Inside that giant underground dome, a spherical chamber huddled beneath a fifty-foot cannon, bathing in the glow of blinking lights and whirling gauges—gray rocks. Piles of sandy dirt. Geological reds and browns as ordinary as our own.