The Future Is Short (11 page)
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23.
Marianne G. Petrino
The droning rulers of summer hibernated. Carried by a light breeze, snowflakes silently drifted across a moonlit, barren field and covered the burrows that gave the enemy refuge from the cold. Summer meant resurrection for the aliens, whose renewed hunger would cull humanity once more in the continuation of their life cycle.
Miranda rubbed the returning frost from the window with her frayed sleeve. Although hidden by the grey night, the glittering stars of Orion still
shone, the symbol of the Women Who Hunted, upon a diminished Earth. In a broken-down garage in what used to be Ishpeming, one of the sticky traps had finally captured a specimen, bringing hope to her drafty cabin.
The fretful chirp of a battered timer drew her attention to the plastic bottles that gently rotated over pots of boiling water. Duct tape and chicken-wire science now helped secure the possibility of a future. She removed the makeshift spit and studied the cloudy contents. Preparing the injections was an easy task; choosing the vector children would earn her hatred and praise.
Miranda moved the spit to a wall rack. “Taffy and a corn dog.” She tapped a container that held death, a heartbeat to the lost past. “What I wouldn’t give. . . .” But the pleasures of those easy summers had gone extinct.
Years back, scientists had worried about the growing numbers of mosquitoes that had carried unprecedented viral threats. Research into insect control had jumped, but the miasma of politics, and the bickering that shaped it, had kept funding limited. Money, and the biological discoveries it bought, could have helped them gain an edge in the beginning of the invasion.
The absurd stories of alien visitors to the Earth had been true all along. And with a tiny hitchhiker, evolution had taken an unexpected leap in an interstellar nursery.
The returning invaders inside the armada of one-way-only spaceships were an outwardly distressing twin to the buzzing, biting terrestrial insects, but man-sized. In the tropical regions, the swiftly reproducing spacesquitoes had eaten themselves out of prey and had died. Like an unexpected ending, only the cooling days of autumn in the temperate regions and the ultimate frost of winter had saved what was left of pest-shocked mankind. The remaining aliens had retreated deep underground, for they and their progeny were equally victims of their own biology. Yet their limitation gave their food source time to multiply.
A gust rattled the window pane. Miranda shivered. The fattened children, juicy with virus-plagued blood, drugged and scattered like seeds in a field, would feed the gluttonous emerging females during the spring lust. But all of their newly fertilized eggs would rot under the biological assault she had created.
A clock chimed softly four times. She reached for a kettle to keep a ritual to prop up her sanity. The Women Who Hunted had provided the specimen for her to study and manipulate, but the game may have always been lost.
One nagging doubt made it all seem futile and added to the insomnia born of the sacrifices she must commit: What if these were engineered beings created by a superior race to scour a world clean? These spacequitoes exceeded the spiracle-bound limitations of any insect found on Earth, through morphological mutations too precise for nature. But their victories over mankind came from their numbers, not their intelligence. If her hypothesis were true, why hadn’t their masters already come to finish the cleansing of Earth?
A bit of blue poked out of the snow. Could this be the crocus of a final spring?
Miranda sipped her tea.
Marianne G. Petrino (aka Marianne G. Petrino-Schaad) was born in the Bronx, NY, in 1955, and that single fact has shaped her entire life. She has survived too many professions to count. She currently resides in Arlington, VA, with her husband and her cat, and enjoys a freelance lifestyle writing novels and pursuing voice acting.
[email protected]
http://www.ninetiger.net
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24.
W.A. Fix
It was one of those moments that imprints into the collective memory of an entire family. Everything was perfect. A full moon reflecting on the lake, clouds floating like puffs of smoke on a light breeze, and there were so many stars one truly felt the awesome vastness of space. The mountain air was crisp and held a chill that the campfire offset. The four sat around the fire in silence enjoying the warmth that came from the moment, more than the fire. Wayne poked at the coals with a green sapling that he had used earlier to cook his hot dogs. Without warning, another sapling invaded his space and pushed his away from the fire. He looked up to see Kathy, his thirteen-year-old daughter, smiling and ready to dual for ownership of his spot in the coals.
“You little creep, that’s my spot,” said Wayne.
She pointed the flaming tip of her sapling at him and said, “On guard.” As she squinted and set her jaw with determination, they touched swords briefly, chuckled, and then went back to tending their own section of the flames.
“Mom, can I have a Coke?” said Billy
“No, honey, it’s too close to bedtime,” said Jennifer. When she saw the frown on his face, she added, “Sweetie, that’s too much caffeine and sugar, this late. If you’re thirsty, there is plenty of bottled water.”
“Knock,
knock. . . , hello! I’m sorry to bother you folks.” The woman entered the campsite from the dense forest that surrounded them. “I’m so sorry, but I got separated from my friends and it started getting cold. Do you mind if I just warm up?” She walked up to the fire and extended her hands, palms out, over the flames.
Surprised by the intrusion, Wayne stood. “Where on earth did you come from?” he said to her. “Billy, get a blanket.” The woman was slender and middle-aged and wore hiking boots, blue jeans, and a light sweater. “How long have you been out there?” he said. Billy arrived with a blanket, and Wayne draped it across her shoulders. “Are you hungry?”
“Thank you, I’m just fine,” she said. She extracted a phone from her back pocket and began dialing.
Wayne smiled and said, “That won’t do you any good up here. There’s no phone service for at least fifty miles.”
“Yes, I know,” she said, pushed a final button, smiled and met his eyes for the first time. “It isn’t a phone.”
The campsite was instantly flooded with bright white light. Wayne felt euphoric and a tingling swept over him. He was transfixed by the woman’s black eyes and, in them, he could see the countless years of her existence. He heard whimpering and knew it was Jennifer. A piercing scream sent chills through him but he couldn’t tell who it was. “Mommy, help me mommy”—that was Billy. Wayne tried to move and could do nothing. He felt pain in his abdomen, yet somehow it didn’t hurt. Another scream and he still could do nothing. He began to cry, tears welling in his eyes, streaming over his cheeks and into his ears. When did he lie down? Then Kathy yelled, “Daddy!” There was another scream, but this time it was his.
It was one of those moments that imprints into the collective memory of an entire family. Something was wrong. The moon had set. The fire had burned down and now cast a sinister light on the scene. He held the smoking sapling that was inexplicably only a foot long.
“Mommy, I don’t feel good,” said Billy.
“I know, sweetheart. Let’s go to bed. Maybe you’ll feel better in the morning,” said Jennifer.
Wayne watched the vacant eyes of his daughter and saw consciousness slowly returning. Kathy glanced around confused,
then met his gaze and he saw darkness in her that had never been there before.
W. A. Fix (a.k.a. Bill Fix) is a retired information technology manager, who lives with his wife and three cats in the suburbs of San Diego, California. He has “toyed” with writing all his life and recently became more serious about the craft. Other interests include photography and golf.
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25.
J.J. Alleson
“So … we right direction.” Jerala’s statement was more accusation than question. The accused watched him with eyes like black ice. The other three circled them, still a loose-knit group after six days in close company. The women were Nye and Kismet. The men: Jerala, Thomas, and Olain.
In the murderous
fahrenheit of an endless summer, it was Kismet who stood toe to toe, if not eye to eye, with Jerala. Nye stepped in, cooing mediation. “Please. Our quest is almost over.”
They were five strangers whose paths had crossed on the way to Syti, the place where Earth’s population converged as one corporate laboratory. Four had left behind the braying scorn of their people.
One had left a pile of unbleached bones.
“You all sure?
We close?” Jerala was a pedantic nit-picker; an outcast who had offended bio-engineers with no time for clinical validations. As they travelled, he spoke of better days three hundred years ago.
“Big fuss ’bout oil once. ’
Til one company found ways to make hydrocarbons. Used corn starch, sugar cane … even grasses. All happy-happy. Couldn’t save ’zone layer, though. We overheated. The UVs came. Rogues took over. Stole those catalytic conversion techniques and put melanin in the mix for the staying-alive market. Not like the polka-dots from chemo, but all over smooth-smooth.”
They all knew the history. The black-body scramble had, overnight, turned pariah-paupers into the Untouchable Dalit Gods of Afrik-Syti, protected day and night from contact with desperadoes seeking skin-scrapes. When wealthy clients demanded more customised physiques, biochemists had simply added another transhuman DNA string. The procedure, a powerful injection known as “The Mosquito”, was aggressively promoted.
Until a glitch began to throw up terrifying foetal deformities.
“Mosquito wiped out billions.
Made billionaires. Many more in Syti, waiting to become.”
But not everyone cared for Jerala’s protocols. In a private moment, the ultra-slender Olain expressed concerns. “He’s completely paranoid.”
“Should we eat him?” Twelve-year-old Thomas had been alone a year. Like many facing starvation, he had learned pragmatism at the dinner table.