Liminal States

by Zack Parsons

  “Ostrov Gallya is last hope,” Sokov later explained at an early-morning conference. “It was built to survive world war. Nuclear missiles. If they tell me to go there it has already become very bad in Vladivostok. Maybe everywhere.”

  “Then we find who we can in Seattle,” said Polly. “Robin’s children are my priority, but we pick up any survivors we can, along with provisions, and sail for Ostrov Gallya. How many can they accomodate?”

  “All.” Sokov was holding his thick glasses and massaging the bridge of his nose between thumb and fingers. “Was built for thousands.”

  They reached Seattle that afternoon. Captain Fellows navigated the Republic through a refugee fleet of fishing trawlers, cargo ships and pleasure craft fleeing for the false safety of the ocean. The port was packed with those who could not find a ship. There were so many that Captain Fellows anchored the Republic a half mile from the Port of Seattle. Polly, Rukundo and a detachment of armed crewmen were ferried to shore by launches. The boats would return to pick them up when Polly fired a signal flare.

  Order was crumbling in the city limits. There were few signs of the spores or any of the alien life—some black birds and the deflated bells of aero plankton - but entire blocks were consumed in flames and the downtown appeared to be a warzone. Crazed looting was going on. Polly and Rukundo moved among the chaos unnoticed. The military units meant to hold the city were joining the looters or already fleeing along with most of the civilians, their tanks lashed with furniture, televisions and cases of booze.

  They witnessed vile crimes of opportunity. Murders, executions, beatings, mob justice and attacks on women. Some of this violence was too much to bear. They came upon the steps of a public library where a group of policemen, both black and white, seemed to be preparing to execute a number of young black men. Polly motioned for the others to stop and began to formulate a plan of attack.

  “We cannot help them,” said Rukundo. “This place is in darkness. Now men turn to beasts and there is no place for the righteous. We must go.”

  Rukundo seemed to speak from firsthand knowledge. Polly obeyed the calm peacekeeper and they followed him down an alley and away from the miserable scene. Shots echoed from the library plaza behind them.

  It wasn’t much longer before they found the UN safe zone. Polly felt sick. The gate and guard posts were demolished. The geodesic dome of the central building was hardly more than a metal frame. Smoke poured from the upper floors of the brick outbuilding and a long, glass-fronted welcome center was being picked over by looters. Glass crunched underfoot. Polly fired her weapon and scattered all but the most determined looters.

  “What do we do now?” asked one of the type twos from the Republic.

  “Their names are Clay and Evie,” she said. “They’re the reason we’re here. Search in pairs.”

  The dead and dying were everywhere, victims of the sudden brutality consuming the city. Horrors lurked behind almost every door of the compound. The worst were the children. When Polly came upon some of the men responsible Rukundo could not restrain her. She gunned them down where they lay and left their bodies sprawled in empty bottles of booze.Night was falling. The fires in the outbuildings were worsening and the automated spore sirens were beginning to wail an uneasy dirge to the south. Polly was become more frantic with each passing minute.

  “You will go back to the Republic now,” said Rukundo. “I will remain and will find them and bring them to you.”

  She appreciated Rukundo’s courage. She showed him the pictures once more to remind him of their faces.

  “I will not go back without them,” she said.

  Five minutes later Rukundo found them, along with fifteen other terrified children, herded into a maintenance space beneath the floor. One of the UN guards had hidden them there before fleeing. The children were dehydrated and scared beyond tears, but once they realized Polly and Rukundo were not like the looters their tiny hands reached out for comfort.

  Clay was the oldest boy among the children and probably the worst off, because he understood more of what was happening. He didn’t speak, but Evie, her eyes bright, took hold of Polly’s hand and asked, “Can we go away from here?”

  “Far away,” said Polly. “Somewhere safe.”

  COMINTERCEPT – MILITARY UHF/VHF – IN THE OPEN – BLACK LABEL

  08/01/06 - 07:01:39 PST - Machine Transcription Subjects: ??? (Unidentified subjects)

  Signal received in the open. Standby recording engaged.

  ???: Hello? Is anybody there? Hello? Please help us. My daughter is sick. I don’t know if—hello? Is anyone there on this frequency? We found this radio in an Army truck. There are four of us alive. The shelter in Springfield is not safe. Do not go to Springfield. Please, if you hear this, please come rescue us. There’s a big hill here. We’re gonna climb it. We’re going to high ground. We’re going to ...

  ???: (unintelligible)

  ???: I love you, Mom. I love you. I know you can’t ... I hope you’re okay. I love you.

  ???: So long, everybody.

  EPILOGUE

  Her promise to Robin Burns was fulfilled. Evelyn and Clay Burns were safely ensconced in the immense biological vault beneath the black horn of Cape Tegethoff. They were joined by the other children from the UN safe zone and the survivors of St. Philomena’s. They would share the vault with the archivists and villagers from the nearby work camp. The isolated arctic geography and winter glaciers might keep the vault safe from the alien species. It was a sealed system, producing its own food and purifying its own water. It derived its power from geothermal turbines.

  No duplicates were allowed inside. The Republic had set sail toward Alaska, following the Aleutians to the mainland in search of other survivors. Captain Fellows had not been optimistic. Even the NOAA weather beacons were quiet.

  Polly Foster slept soundly beneath the trackless, dim blue sky of Ostrov Gallya. Her teeth chattered, and her face, exposed to the elements, was stiff with the cold. It was almost midnight. The frigid rock beneath her had worked its way through the insulation of her sleeping bag.

  She clambered to her feet and groaned at her soreness. The sound of her own voice startled her. She tried to stoke the embers of her last fire back to life. No luck. She would have to gather more wood and start a new fire.

  Her pre-pack food was gone. Her water was nearly gone. She searched her bag and found a sugarless sweetener packet. She savored the powder as it dissolved in her mouth. Sitting on the mossy earth beside the pack, she watched the puffins circling over the eastern cliffs.

  Her vigil outside the vault was nearing its end. If she remained sitting, watching the birds, she would freeze to death in hours. She could feel the insidious cold beginning to numb her entire body. Soon she would feel warm. Happy. She could die that way.

  No.

  She got to her feet again and gathered up her belongings. The emergency sleeping bag, the flare pistol, the radio, the plastic sheeting dripping with condensation, and the extra clothes she’d brought over from the ship. The machine pistol was heavier than she recalled. She thought about shooting one of the puffins and starting a fire to roast the bird. She thought about pounding on the heavy door of the biological vault and begging for Konstantin or Rukundo to let her inside. Rukundo might do it if she begged enough.

  That line of thinking was dangerous. She had to go before she succumbed to desperation. She shouldered her bag and her gun and set off in the direction of the Tegethoff settlement. Spore grass was taking over the rocky slope down to the sea. The needles of the pines were white, the trees dead or dying, festooned with the gossamer strands of alien vines. Here and there the crab rats scurried underfoot, turning over saltlick quartz and scraping off the colonies of bacteria beneath.

  The fecund mycotic jungles would swallow the island soon enough. There were pale stalks rising among the trees, glowing caps, curling fronds and fleshy cycads that dripped with poisonous sap. The cold was no match for the febrile pulse of alien vegetation
.

  No sign of the pale men. Somehow, she knew, they would find their way to the island. To every corner of every map.

  The settlement of Tegethoff, originally built to contain the biological vault, had changed dramatically in the few days she’d spent camped outside the vault. White encrusted buildings up to the second floor. The outlines of the streets were disappearing beneath the blanket of spore grass, pale red fungal fruits, stalks and glow plums, and the pods of the floaters, waiting to launch their dust into the air and give birth to the gas bag colonies.

  The movement of a door caught her eye. It was only the wind, but she approached anyway. She found a tiny library, walls taped with drawings from children, varicolored carpet partly overgrown with mycelium. Papers gathered in drifts. The shelves were stuffed mostly with books for children. Letters cut out from construction paper and taped to the wall spelled out WELCOME in English and Russian. Canadians and Soviets had once worked together in this settlement.

  A sheet of paper crumpled under her boot. She picked it up, then brushed off the spore dust. It was a schedule of library events. Yesterday Mary Tologanak had demonstrated kakivak fishing spears for the children. In two weeks Fedor Chernienko, the author of Skies of the Mother’s North, would be conducting a reading from his book on amateur astronomy. There it was, printed on that discarded paper: the last bit of future waiting to play through the reels.

  Polly searched the librarian’s desk—paper clips, rubber stamps, ink pads, pens, pencils—it was full of little human things that would never be made again. She found a Goodnut bar in the drawer. It was frozen hard, so she put it down the pocket of her inner layer of trousers. She gathered some books she thought she might like to read and stuffed them into her pack. She considered taking some of the political books for kindling but could not bring herself to burn any book.

  She went out into the street and watched the sun that never left come up over the eastern coast. The cold wind off the ocean blew her hair behind her head in copper limbs that burned with the sunlight. Gold spilled over the shore and the powdered carcasses of dead whales and sea lions. They seethed with the scavenging crab rats. Gulls circled above, crying with hunger but afraid to land on the shore. The tide was thick and writhing with the entrails of alien eels. Spore grass was everywhere, breaking through windows, growing up rain spouts and onto the roofs of the houses. A spore fog hid the horizon, and above it stretched a vast cloud of translucent aeroplankton moving with the air currents.

  There was a sense of passing. It was the loss of man’s dominion but also of all the beauty that had once inhabited the world. She was a stranger to this place. The gulls and puffins were as doomed as the whales and sea lions and the trees. It was only a matter of time.

  Polly wandered the streets, calling out to the translucent creatures passing high overhead and beckoning to the pale men that never came. A noise brought her to a house clinging to one of Tegethoff’s rocky slopes. Here the cape was so steep that the foundation was built on timber pilings like the pier at Sugarside. She climbed the staircase to the door. It was torn from its hinges. Gone. The frame of the door hung broken, and pieces of aluminum siding were scattered amid the white grass. From within she heard a loud clicking followed by a clatter of dishes and pans.

  She entered with caution, the machine pistol at her shoulder, unsure if she sought death or sought to inflict violence on some alien creature. She stepped as lightly as she could, thankful of the heavy carpeting. She was careful to navigate around an overturned end table and the fragments of a broken flower vase. More debris. A Soviet-style television and photographs of a Slavic family. Unopened letters with Cyrillic writing and a child’s raincoat. More clattering from the kitchen on the far side of the house. The thudding, careless movement of something large. Her heart strained in her chest.

  She rounded the corner down a hall and nearly fired her gun at a skittering family of crab rats. They scampered across the carpet and disappeared into a floor vent. The ceiling light fixture was broken and strewn across the hall. Despite her best efforts, glass crunched beneath her boots. Something wooden snapped in the kitchen. The house groaned under the weight of whatever was in there.

  She reached the end of the hall, pivoted, and flattened her back against the kitchen cabinets. It was only a few feet away now. She used her teeth to pull off the glove covering her shooting hand. The creature emitted an earthy odor. She could hear the thrum and hiss of its breathing. It was rooting through the food, looking for something to eat. She searched for its reflection in some object so she could see what it was and where it was in the kitchen.

  The dirty chrome of a toaster reflected just enough that she could see the dark bulk of it, beside the table, standing amid the upright skeleton of a wooden chair as though it had tried to stand on it. It was so large and black, for a moment she thought it might be a bear of some sort. No. The legs: long and too many joints. Something familiar about it. She flicked the safety of the machine pistol, took a deep breath, and stepped out to face the creature.

  A short, startled intake of breath. It froze, a chewed corner of moldy bread caught in its mandibles. The deflated sack of bread was held pinched by segmented tarsus. Black pupils moved within the rusty red hemispheres of its eyes. Its head cocked to one side, and it regarded Polly.

  She projected human emotions onto its reaction. Surprise, for certain, but there was something else. It lowered the bag of bread to a table strewn with domestic debris. It took two heavy steps to turn to face her. The chewed corner of bread still dangled from its mouth. It looked embarrassed.

  Polly couldn’t help herself. She lowered the barrel of the gun, and she laughed. She laughed so goddamn hard, she had to lean against the kitchen counter for support. It was the most ridiculous thing she had ever seen. A twelve-foot, gray-black grasshopper, fat body and awkward limbs completely filling this wrecked kitchen. Caught eating bread. As ashamed as a little kid caught with his hand in a cookie jar.

  It watched her work through the paroxysms of her emotion. She hunched over, wiping tears from her eyes. She gasped for breath through the last convulsions of her desperate laughter. She let the folding machine pistol hang from its strap, and she reached into the waist of her pants. She brought out the body-warmed Goodnut bar.

  “I’ve never seen one of you before,” said Polly. “Is this what we do now? Raid someone else’s pantry?”

  She pulled off her other glove and unwrapped the candy bar. The chocolate was soft and parted easily as she divided it with her fingers. The alien watched intently.

  “Will I be rooting around some poor little space man’s kitchen?” She avoided more laughter. When she blinked, tears were still falling from her eyelashes. “Here, have some.”

  She held out half of the Goodnut bar. She could feel the snuffling of air through rigid holes on its face. The chewed bread fell from its mouth, and it cautiously leaned its head down toward her, the projected shapes of its pupils never looking away from her face. Its mandibles delicately grasped the candy bar. It lifted its head and raised a limb to its face to support the melting morsel.

  Polly found an overturned chair amid the smashed cereal boxes and tins on the floor, and she set it upright. She sat down, facing the insect. It was holding the Goodnut bar as if uncertain it was edible. She made a show of unwrapping her half, holding it up to her face, and sticking it into her mouth. Almost, but not quite—too much to be chewed at once.

  The warm candy was the sweetest thing she had ever tasted. It was the past in every speck, and she appreciated it in its fullness. She was aware of the generational efforts conspiring in its production, the strata of techno-ingenuity to breed and plant and gather and shell and boil and salt and sweeten and blend and robe in milky chocolate and wrap in glistening, impermeable, brightly-printed polymers. One-time thing. Now unwrapped, discarded, floating away on the wind, dissolving in her stomach and becoming a part of her.

  She chewed with her mouth open, showing the alien thick steam g
usting up from her gullet with each breath. She swallowed the tacky lump and gestured for the alien to do the same. The candy disappeared into its mouth as though hoisted up by ropes. There was no chewing or outward sign of pleasure. Could it know the taste?

  “It’s good,” she said.

  After a moment the alien raised a forelimb and reached out a three-tipped claw to her. It wavered in the air a few inches from her knee. The alien moved its fatter, hindmost legs in a strumming motion across setae on its back. The vibrating bristles produced a sound between the shrill chirping of a cricket and a dissonant human voice.

  “Tk clk crrrk crrk,” it said.

  “I don’t understand you,” she said.

  “Tk clk crrrk crrk,” it repeated. “Trr ssrrk llk.”

  The massive insect seemed intent on making her understand. She shook her head, still not grasping its meaning.

  “Tk clk crrrk crrk.” It reached up its other forelimb to a pattern of iridescent chitin between its eyes and traced the shape with its claw. For the first time she noticed the pair of small, round eyes set between the larger facetted domes. “Tk clk crrrk crrk. Tk clk crrrk crrk.”

  She slid the machine pistol off her shoulder and laid it on the nearby counter. She stood and took the creature’s extended claw in her cold-pinched hand. The claw was hard, but not as hard as she expected. The many segmented plates allowed it to flex and flatten. She smiled up at the broad wedge of the creature’s face and shook the claw up and down. Whether or not it understood the gesture did not matter.