Oblivion
Page 24
“One of us must win,” Britt said, softly.
Cross didn’t reply. There was nothing to say.
Epilogue
August 17,2018
6:21 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time
85 Days Until Second Harvest
Danny Elliot slipped out of the house and onto the quiet street. All of the adults were still asleep. His mother had been up forever last night, drinking and laughing and celebrating for the first time since the black dust came. In the last few months, they had managed to put their lives back together, but his mother hadn’t laughed.
She said the aliens got what they deserved.
Finally.
Danny watched the bombs hit the tenth planet over and over again. The images made him a little sick inside, but he wasn’t going to say that. Instead he sat, quiet, wondering if that’s what the aliens saw when they dropped all that stuff on San Luis Obispo.
He adjusted his backpack and crossed the street, past the still-full houses and into the Zone. The patrols didn’t happen as often anymore, and the dust had long ago turned to a thick black mud, solid from the rains. It had packed down into something like concrete, except in areas closest to buildings or under trees where the wind had blown it.
He knew of a couple of places like that.
Maybe he should have called Nikara, but he didn’t. Their friendship didn’t feel the same anymore, not without Cort. The three of them balanced, but when Cort died the day the dust fell, the balance died, too. Nikara and Danny fought a lot, and there was no longer anyone to referee.
Danny’d said something about that to his mom, and she had looked at him sadly.
“It’s not the fighting,” she said. “Cort’s presence will always be a ghost between the two of you.”
Maybe.
But yesterday, Cort had been avenged.
Atomic bombs had been dropped on the aliens.
In all the stories Danny heard, in all the vids he saw, ghosts went to their final rest after they’d been avenged. And even though he didn’t want to lose Cort—the living, wonderful Cort—Danny didn’t mind losing the dead one.
He wanted to get the image of Cort, lying on the couch sick with the flu, melting under the black dust like those people on TV had, out of his mind. He needed to think about the friend he’d known, not the way Cort had died.
And this morning, he’d woken up with a way to do it.
It didn’t take long to reach the house that he and Nikara had climbed up to, that day in April. It was easier to get to now that the military wasn’t patrolling that much. They weren’t as afraid of the dust. They knew what it was, knew that it wouldn’t hurt anyone, or so they said. So they didn’t really guard it anymore.
The rhododendron bushes no longer had flowers. Instead, thick green leaves covered them, making one side of the white house look like a forest. The trellis they’d climbed a few months ago was hidden by climbing roses and out-of-control growth.
He slipped past all of it, catching a bit of ocean breeze, inhaling the salty scent.
Cort had loved living in this part of town. Cort would stop them sometimes and make them smell the ocean, or look at the way the roses had grown over the summer. Cort said it didn’t matter what kind of house you lived in, or what neighborhood you lived in, as long as you noticed what nature provided nearby.
What nature had provided here was a shelter.
Danny went around the house and into the backyard, right up to the beginning of the black dust. A giant rhododendron grew right on the edge. It would provide what he wanted.
The blackness looked less threatening now. Maybe because he was used to it, or maybe because he knew it would never come again. But he still wasn’t going to walk on it. Walking on it would be like walking on Cort.
Danny took off his backpack and reached inside. He had taken ajar that Cort had given him last year. It was obsidian and smooth, a magic jar, Cort had said. They both didn’t believe in magic anymore, but it was nice to pretend.
Danny’d had the jar beside his bed ever since Cort died.
Danny pulled the stopper and carefully set it on the top of his backpack. Then he grabbed a ladle he’d stolen from the kitchen, and slowly lifted a branch on the rhododendron. A branch on the side toward the destruction.
There was real black dust underneath, blown there by the winds off the ocean. Black dust and bits of other things, things that Danny’d always imagined were bones.
Ashes and bone.
Bits of Cort.
Carefully, using the ladle, Danny scooped up as much of the dust as he could and poured it into the jar. It was painstaking, disgusting work, but it was important.
Too many people had died in April. Too many went unaccounted for, and too many had just disappeared. Cort’s entire family—his dad, and his mom, and his dog—had died that day, too. And when entire families went, no one bothered with a funeral. Danny had heard that Cort’s grandparents, who lived in Minnesota, had had a memorial, but that had been too far away. No one in Minnesota even knew Cort.
But Danny had. Danny and Nikara and a lot of other kids. And it wasn’t right that they didn’t really get to say good-bye.
Danny stoppered the jar, and then took out one other container. He felt weird using his mom’s Tupperware, but the guys would understand. He filled it, too.
That container he would take to the ocean. They’d have a service, and he’d throw Cort’s ashes into the sea where Cort would want them.
But Danny was going to keep some in the jar, for remembrance.
For Cort.
Danny finished and climbed out from under the rhododendron. Then he leaned up and stared at the cloudless blue sky. He held the jar aloft and, imagining that black alien planet, the one where the bombs hit, he said, “Yesterday was for Cort, you bastards.”
He wondered if, somewhere deep down, they had known that. He imagined that they did.
He put the jar and the container in his backpack, then he stood. For a moment, he stared at the blackness.
Then he turned his back on it.
Forever.
85 Days Until Second Harvest
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