"Then the sun lowered in the west and cast a gossamer, golden light across the land. Everything—every creature, every blossom, every stone and atom—held its breath in peaceful awe and—" Harper winced, expecting her to fade out again. But Gran's eyes were lifted to her granddaughter's, glinting in perfect cognizance of the beauty her words would loose. "For once, all was still."
* * *
If only it were so, Harper kept thinking to herself as she and Gran hobbled in their painstakingly plodding way towards the plaza for the dome's daily opening. It had to be done by eight in the morning and only held until eleven. By then, the direct sunlight's intensity would pose too much of a threat to Sewer City's people. Harper sometimes liked to smirk to herself and imagine how appetizing Sewer City Soup sounded, which is exactly what she pictured overcooking the locals with all that sun would create. But today was too heavy. Her heart was harrowed by too many memories, too many unspoken things and what-ifs.
"It's a shame those whiny little pantywaists in charge of that damn neighborhood association my Adeline's always chirping on about had to run their mouths to the Grand Oligarchy," Gran sighed, shuffling past Ms. Beeter's rubber yard dotted with a multitude of expensively colored faux flowers and shrubs. Beeter stuck her nose up as they passed and did not return their amiable grins. Some egos, even in dire times, desperately seek any excuse to think themselves superior to others. Ms. Beeter's "garden" was hers.
Harper, snickering from Gran's comment, nudged her elder and chided softly, "Careful, there, Gran. I think she heard you."
"Well, good! It's 'bout time somebody started speaking some good sense around here! What are we doing, here in this place? We're supposed to die in a hole, not live in one!"
Harper, by instinct that her mother engraved in her, tried to hush her grandma as she raised her voice. But all her disciplines just came out as concurring laughter.
"It's because of people like her and her damn fool's 'garden' that there's a demand for the ceiling to stay shut, even all through the night! Disrupts their lighting or endangers their plastic lawn moldings!" Gran spat quite literally into another showy yard. Luckily, this one's owner was absent. Harper didn't even try to suppress her, just chortled again, keeping her arm locked with Gran's.
"I think they really only do it to give themselves something to live for, Gran. Not everyone has your good memories to fall back on," Harper said.
"They're not living, dear, they're surviving—buried like this, we all are." Harper noticed the severity in her grandmother's voice. She frowned concernedly at her fragile, wrinkled, perplexed face.
"Gran, don't get that way. Look! We made it. And the sky's already opening up!"
That usually cheered her right up, igniting her eyes with a vibrant flame only kids on birthdays could come close to emulating. But today wasn't really turning out to be such an ordinary day. Gran's demeanor and voice only sank further with her eyes to the scuffled floor.
She muttered, "Oh, Harper. If you'd've seen the nighttime sky…you'd never want to sleep again, knowing what you'd be missing…"
Ponderously, longingly, Harper watched with worry as tears welled up in her grandma's eyes. She felt silence was her best option but wanted so badly to be able to return the favor of healing words to Gran's aching heart. But she knew no stories. No rhymes. No songs. She had no memories of gentle sunsets or friendly beasts or happy adventures. Only metal walls and artificial lighting and dehydrated foods and blackness. Suddenly she realized she hadn't lived all that much. No one in Sewer City had.
Drawn from her own brooding cloud by the horrified screams of her townsfolk, Harper snapped back into reality. She found herself and Gran being jostled side to side by their neighbors as they hustled past. They wound in-between and over each other, shouting cries of surprise and fright, all the while pointing and gawking at the ceiling.
"Gran, what is that?" Harper gaped skyward, eyes set wide in childlike joy.
Gran stared very seriously up at the glass being pummeled with heavy beads of liquid, some solid enough to drum out an ominous, powerful beat against the dome's top.
"Rain…and hail."
"Wow!" Harper drew in a sharp breath, a bubbling sensation welling up inside of her. "It's so much more beautiful to see it for myself! I can't believe—Gran, it's just like your stories! This is so exciting!" A bright streak tore across the sky, ripping open the deep gray of the clouds that rolled above, closely followed by an earth-shaking clap of—"Gran! What was—!"
"Thunder. And lightning, dear," her voice came slow and heavy, so fragile Gran appeared to regret uttering it at all. Harper opened her mouth to cheer again, but Gran cut her off with, "Nothing to celebrate today, Harper." Gran spat on the ground once and tapped a bony fist to her chest thrice.
Harper gawked at Gran in disbelief. The only time anyone made that gesture was in the face of dauntingly hopeless situations. Or death.
"G-Gran…wh-what's…what's wrong?"
"Nature sends storms like this when She's angry. And anyone caught out there—" Gran sealed her eyes slowly and imagined the rain hitting her face to alleviate the pain of knowing—
"Daphne's out there!"
* * *
Harper, Gran, and Mother were rushed and crammed into Town Hall's main meeting room, locked away in soundproof walls that helped to hide the ensuing sounds of chaos breaking from outside their very doors. Sewer City was in a tizzy, to say the least. Everything was turned onto its head. Walls shook, and rock crumbled from above, peppering Ms. Beeter's precious yard with rubble. She was among the frantic shriekers in the front vestibule of the Hall, proclaiming sheer cataclysm at the loss of her fiberglass rosebushes. Moments later, the doors burst open, letting in the pandemic of shouts as well as two armored guards escorting the trembling family group of the young man who went on the Run with Daphne. Melba Johnston and her young daughter, Shelbah, clung to each other while their protector, Pedro, wrapped his arms around his wife's shoulders. His stern face was betrayed by the shattered sheen in his dark eyes. There was no calm, inside or out. Only storm.
From behind the triangular desk in the room stood Sewer City's primary, North Weston of the Grand Oligarchy, one of nine across the sparse continent of North America. She was accompanied by three other stoic-faced, formally dressed agents of her cabinet, all complementing one another in shades of gray. Her square and lanky face was framed by angular glasses, strict collar, and a tautly drawn bun. The stress-induced wrinkles lining her mouth and furrowed brow gave years to her otherwise youthful body.
"Greys—Johnstons," North spoke with rehearsed precision, her austere expression unflinching as some of her companions herded the terrified families closer to her. "As you may be very well aware, we have been hit by a devastatingly brutal storm. It swelled up so suddenly, I'm afraid our radar tower was knocked out before we could even translate the signal. That's why we were in the dark about it this morning when we sent Daphne Grey and Paolo Johnston out on what we presumed would be a standard expedition."
Harper cringed and silenced a yelp as her mother's nails dug mercilessly into her shoulder.
"We have received no correspondence from the helicopter sent from Roote, our partner city, since three this morning. Currently we are unable to pinpoint their location, let alone receive any transmissions of distress from either the Roote couriers or one of our Runners."
"Wh-wh-what's going on, then? Where are our children?" demanded Mrs. Johnston.
"This freak storm has quite literally left us blind to all goings-on above," Weston explained, "and no search and rescue team can even risk going out under these circumstances—as you all can understand." Harper felt something wet and warm fall upon her cotton T-shirt—the first of Mother's tears. "I have never been a believer in sewing false hope—" North's face scrunched up in an expression that Harper believed was a stab at commiseration. "So I must be brutally honest with you. The conditions in which your loved ones are lost are extremely difficult and dire. All their
training and equipment is not made to withstand something such as this." Melba lost it there, falling to her knees in desperate sobs. "Please, don't worry—we will do all we can to retrieve their bodies and give them proper burial—" Gran's tears let themselves cascade down the divots of her pallid skin. Pedro buried his in his hands. Adeline's grip only began to tremor Harper herself, its tense coil unfaltering. Shelbah, the littlest Jonhston, blanched noticeably in her swarthy skin, weeping into her mother's curly hair. "But I wouldn't count on seeing them alive again."
"You bastards!" Adeline snapped. She lunged at Weston, hands out like talons, slashing at the companions who threw themselves in front of their primary. "That's what you're telling us now?! Our children are out there in this—disaster and all you can say is—FORGET ABOUT THEM?!" Harper was stunned by the frenzied scene unfolding. She didn't recognize the animalistic bellows emitting from her savage-faced mother. Pedro joined in the attack, accompanied by Melba's helpless shrieks. Gran even started whacking at the primary with her prized sequoia walking stick. Finally, every last inch of the city was raging with storms.
Except Harper. Remarkably, she noted that she was the only one keeping herself together. No tears, no fire, no pity. Nothing. She saw before her only one truth: Daphne was still out there.
And Harper was going to find her.
By the time North Weston's frazzled scream for order calmed the room, her bun had already been pulled out into a rat's nest of tangles when one of Adeline's claws struck home. "ENOUGH! WE'RE DOING ALL WE CAN! I'M SORRY FOR YOUR—"
"Harper?" Gran called, noting a coldness at her side where her granddaughter once stood. She swatted one of the agents off of her brusquely, craning her neck around the room, breathless and bewildered.
"Where is my other daughter?" Adeline lunged like a lioness back into the primary's face, causing the henchmen to flinch away from her fury. "Where is my Harper?"
Only Shelbah had an answer, pointing a shaky finger to the door, wheezing out, "G-g—gone."
* * *
Harper was pretty sure she could feel her mother's cry for her reverberating off her bones as she stepped into Daphne's excess pair of battered boots. She stuffed a backpack full of water bottles, skin protectors, misters, antibiotics, and bandages—she was riding on a wave of madness and adrenaline. She was about to embark into the Otherside. The Great Surface. The Only Frontier. The Wild. No training, no mentor, no words of wisdom from Gran to give her comfort or cause her to turn back. Stumbling twice on her steel-tipped boots, Harper zipped her weatherproof jacket shut tight and strode determinedly towards the abandoned backstreet. She and Daphne had unearthed it over the years. Only once had Daphne taken Harper out with her and, even then, with her brave sister to protect her, Harper was too frightened to remain above ground for more than a mere minute.
That was six years ago. Things had changed. In one instant, one flash of sky-breaking light from the vengeful clouds, Harper had changed, too. She was tired of surrendering all she loved to the gluttonous world that showed no remorse, no hint of holding back. She was tired of being too weak to protect and keep the only ones that made life alive. Bumbling down the dark, dirt-coated path, Harper hurled herself and the daunting weight of her supplies up the rusted metal ladder, each echoing footstep down the crumbling well reminding her there was no turning back.
Her choices quite literally sealed her fate. As soon as she squeezed out from beneath the girth of the industrial vault door, the harsh winds snapped it shut and refused to let it budge until the storm would blow itself away. Harper tried not to let that harrow her as she stood, panting, taking in the desolate landscape. She was lucky in two senses—one, the sun that would have reached fever pitch heat by then was hidden by a blanket of thick, growling clouds. Her second blessing—it had stopped raining. The scent of petrichor clung to the air, but at least all this strange water from the sky pinned the dirt and dust down enough to keep it from stinging in Harper's throat and nostrils. Still, just to be cautious, Harper whipped out her goggles and put them over her eyes. Vision was vital in a strange, new world. And this was a world she'd only ever known to exist in story and legend.
The crunch of the earth felt both unfamiliar and surprisingly welcoming as she pulled out her father's compass and pressed northward, the direction Daphne always said the Mountain Maw Peak lay in. If the helicopter made it all, it would also be harbored there. And if Daphne and Paolo had anchored their travel tank anywhere along the route, it'd be north. She had her motivation. Her direction was set. Harper pretended she was Daphne on an adventure right then—a heroine destined for a happy end. And that seems to be enough to get the feeling back in her legs and keep her walking onward.
How long she journeyed before she came across her first stand-out sight, she wasn't sure. Perhaps minutes. Perhaps hours. When all around you looks like flattened brown sugar, and all you hear is a spiteful wind hissing in your ears and tugging at your hair, time stops carrying such sensible value.
But there it was—a graveyard. A resting place for what Gran called cars. All makes and models were strewn about like skeletons picked clean by decades of erosion. Gran said the disposal of such machines was humankind's first last ditch effort to restore balance to the way of the world, to make amends with the poison they'd pumped into Mother Earth's belly. But by then it was too late. No one ever cares until it's far too late. It wasn't long after the disposal of their vehicles that the people began to give up the Earth itself by hiding within Her skin. Anyone left behind upon the surface seeking peace or a chance to fight back with gritted teeth were dried up long ago. If the searing sun didn't slay you out here, the bitter cold of the night would. Nature had turned its back on mankind, but mankind had turned its back first.
Harper shuddered, crossing her arms. She then saw a strange flying creature with a long, naked neck and an oddly bedecked beak sweep its black wings over the wreckage. It was Harper's first encounter with a real beast. A smile flickered on her lips as it cawed down at her. She thought it was the most beautiful, wretched thing she'd ever seen.
"Wait!" She called out to it, reaching for its receding figure. Even just sensing the spirit of another living thing nearby was a much needed bolstering to her own morale. But the bird vanished beyond the hazy horizon just moments later. Harper turned around and realized why.
A massive cyclone wall of dust, rock, and sand was making its steady way toward her. Harper gasped and stumbled backwards. Oh. That. If only she'd listened when Daphne tried to tell her about weather patterns and changes of the seasons, perhaps she could've read the signs and hunkered down into some of the automobile ruins in time to void being blown away. Instead, she tumbled down into the ditch. Reverse somersaulting along the steep incline, Harper's clunky body seared in sharp pains with each smack into the ground. The compass slipped from her grip, and a few odds and ends broke out of her backpack and raced down with her, adding more obstacles to make for some interesting bruises. Her vision shattered first. She screamed as her eyes split into shards, and it took her the whole tumble down to realize it was just her goggles that were broken. She was throttled with intense shock as her back went crashing into the windshield of a truck. Her shoulder stung bitterly, eliciting a yelp from her mouth. Warmth oozed down her left arm. Her instincts buzzed with only one word: impaled. Dazed, she summoned up what little medical training Daphne had tried to impart to her and wrenched out a dagger she'd brought from home. Oh. That. She almost wanted to laugh. Till the adrenaline began to die down. Then she registered the throbbing in her right thigh, undoubtedly caused by the rusted metal rod sticking through it. Oh...that... No laughing now. Horror-stricken, she put quivering hands on her quickly reddening pants. Harper loosed terse wailings that sounded more animal than anything. Not that—!
But she'd unwittingly challenged the desert when she took those first steps into its barbaric clutches. And that meant war, in Nature's eyes. Harper felt herself losing consciousness as her heartbeats and the wind in her
ears pounded on all the harder. This is it, she convinced herself, letting the life leak from her as it pleased. There's no coming back—and Daphne's still out there…
At least she knew she'd see her soon, in one sense or another. Death was a doorway. One in which her father stood waiting for her. Dying couldn't be so bad. And that thought comforted her, even caused a dry laugh to take off from her lips. She closed her eyes softly, forgetting the gritty terror swirling about her. She imagined her father reaching out to take hold of her till she actually swore she could feel a pair of hands swooping her up in its everlasting arms.
"Death," she murmured, opening her eyes to find the face of her rescuer huffing as he carried her hurriedly amongst the wreckage, out and away. Harper blinked hard at him. Death looked a lot like Jonas Bolt. The boy's bright eyes cast down at her as he tossed off her broken goggles, his wavy hair silhouetted by a sudden flash of light. Harper fearfully stroked his face, her cognizance fading all the faster. "Impossible—!" she whispered to this new protector as he lifted her into a sling and began to lower her down a deep, dark hole.
"It's alright." He smiled, his strangely familiar voice echoing as she found herself slumping into belief of him. Maybe dying, if that's what this was, wasn't so bad at all. She felt a dozy sleep trying to claim her.
Winds of Change: Short Stories about Our Climate Page 13
