Winds of Change: Short Stories about Our Climate

by Robert Sassor

  The band's readout blinked itself into an angered red once more. On its face, the numbers 2 and 4 glowed. Tana used the syringes respectively while the thumper continued working. Thump, shhwwew, thump, shhwwew. She gave him a few more breaths.

  And then the band changed again. The numbers 1 and 6 were revealed, a dash in the middle. Tana had never seen that before. Did that mean that she was supposed to give all six syringes? She had no more of the number 2s, she had used them all already. So she pushed in the remaining syringes and then gave him some more breaths. The band read out numbers 2 and 6 yet again, but it was no use. Neither vial remained in her arsenal. Thump, shhwwew, thump, shhwwew.

  Tana tried to stand up when her right foot slipped out from under her. She inspected the auto-gel square adhered to Cormac's left abdomen. Blood rebelliously oozed around the square's edges with each thumper compression. And she realized, at that moment, it was hopeless. The sealing gel was not strong enough to control Cormac's hemorrhage, and he would die right there where he lay.

  She pushed the thumper's singular control and then turned it off. For some time Tana stared at the man she once called Cormac, his body wrapped and saturated, his face anemically whitened and sunken in. She stared and then looked around the great library, the thousands of books stacked and piled and tossed about. Tana did not hear anything at all inside that dust-borne tomb save for the IV pack's blip, a three-second signaling that its contents had run dry. It was a shame, she thought, that he had died without knowing what he really meant to her. She threw books onto his body until it could no longer be seen. Not much of a burial she supposed, but maybe it was appropriate. He died doing what he loved, and that was that.

  Tana stripped the soldiers of anything valuable that she could find. The first dead soldier, blood-stream guy, had a cinch of Imperial Tens in his left pants pocket, not usable as actual money to her, but they were almost seventy percent silver. Balcony man had a flare, two flash-bangs, and a belt of nines meshed around his waist. She could probably cash in on those somehow. She didn't find a radio among the three of them, which was odd. Perhaps the soldiers were forbidden from entering this lost grave site of books from their very own emperor. Well, they got their wish, Tana thought. Unrestricted admission to the great forbidden library, now and forevermore.

  She pulled Cormac's roll-along bag back to the library's entrance. It felt heavier to move than it should have been. Among the food bricks and the water boxes, there were five books that Cormac had selected for salvage. Those would be going home with her, for they were the objective of her assignment. She mounted the bag onto the rear bracket of her solar-bike.

  The wind pushed in. It was hot and moist, and the smell suggested deterioration. Tana looked toward the southwest. A super-storm's edge tickled the horizon from one edge to the other. She would probably beat it before making it back home. The storm looked to be a slow mover, and that was a good omen.

  She jumped onto her solar-bike and started it up with a smack of her ankle bracelet against its frame. The library's entrance-way reflected in her mirror. She looked and then thought about the time, only hours ago, when the two of them crouched against the twin oversized doors while she worked on breaking the library's electromagnetic seal. She remembered when Cormac said something about being escorted by a twenty-something girl across the new desert and into hostile ground. Tana never knew if he meant it as a compliment or not.

  But she guessed that it probably was.

  As the great lost library shrank and diminished in the glass, she thought that perhaps she would come back out here again. Not so soon, and not officially, but in the future, yes. Tana raced towards her home and thought about her comfy bed back at the barracks, her floppy pajamas, and maybe, if time allowed, she would find a good little story to fall into.

  Panta Rhei, Christopher Rutenber

  The book was glossy white with an Irish elk on the cover, its horns spread from edge to edge, and its hooves created ripples on a woodland river. The title read, Beasts of the Past: Interactive Edition. Dakota read it eagerly, making lists of the animals inside and mapping where they could be found using his personal, interactive account. Afterward, he would spread out sheets of paper and draw direwolves and primitive horses and mammoths. But his favorite was the mastodon, not as glamorous as the mammoth, or as fierce as the sabre tooth, but more real than them all.

  As a citizen of the country, Dakota learned to orient himself to the world from the bigger cities around him—Chicago, Detroit, Grand Rapids—but as he looked through Beasts of the Past he saw his county, his town. In the 1920s, several bones of Mammut americanum were uncovered where a river had formerly flowed. Now there was only a stone with a bronze cap on it from a forgotten zoological society. Dakota would bike out to see it when he finished feeding the cows and gathering the eggs, when he had finished his daily part in keeping BC Farms alive.

  His two older brothers had done their parts for eighteen years apiece; one was in Afghanistan, and one was a dentist in Ypsilanti. They had milked the cows for BC Farms, fed the hens for BC Farms, slaughtered the beef and chicken for BC Farms, and tended to the meager corn crop while Bruce Connell looked forward to subsidies and a better year. The corn was still strong, but so were the insects, and Bruce had no heart to purchase pesticides; the people of the county who came to the little red tent in the park in the middle of the town counted on Connell to be true to the BC Farms legacy of all natural, all local, all family. But the hens wouldn't lay, and the pests were thick in the sky. Bruce didn't know if the world was really getting warmer, but his land was. His farm was smothered. As a child, Bruce had seen the Oakland's farm go to the machines that moved across the fields like glaciers. His father held him and said that Oakland would never really benefit. He would pay and pay and pay for more workers, more tools, and more land, and in the end he'd be no richer than BC Farms. Now Bruce wondered.

  But now was the time to push away the bills, the advertisements, and time to mute the arguing voices on the television, because his son was there with his face covered in dust and a smile and Amy was shouting about supper and "clean your damn face up." Now was the time to think of things that endure.

  Dakota washed and climbed into his chair. His father did not have a smile. If he had time to walk to see the plaque he would've had a smile; Dakota knew this. While the sun was still high and cool, he left his bike at the top of the hill and crawled through the Black-eyed Susans and the Indiangrass that covered the place where the old private road had been. The county bought the land and turned it into a wildlife sanctuary, and Dakota hardly noted the white signs that warned against hunting. He found a trail and followed it to a clearing and curling, rusted barbed wire, white cockle, jewelweed, bee balm, and thistle. He found the stone, the size of a dog, white and speckled with gray, with a bronze cap and a laminated sign beside it, with a couple black and white photos yellowed with age. The signs said little that interested him; he already knew this land had been under water, which the glaciers moved slowly across it and, like a cat's claws, dug into the world. He knew that the field had been a lake and then a swamp. But seeing the stone incarnated these facts and set in his mind an egg-like idea, incubating in his head on the ride home. And he told his father about the mastodons and the books he had read, and how the mastodons traveled in herds. "There might be a ton more out there. I'm gonna dig around and find them. Where can I dig?"

  With a fwisk Amy's fork broke into pot-pie crust. "You got time to dig?" Bruce asked his son. "I don't want you puttin' shit off just 'cause of some bones." But Bruce's reluctance masked his fascination. In the summer of 1979 his father had taken him to Chicago, and he saw the dinosaur bones and how the world was changed. His father said, "Ain't none of this true, but doesn't it make you feel small?" But Bruce could see the future by looking into the past, at the way Damon was satisfied with hunting, but needed to go to war. God bless him for it, but they promised him college when he got back and no one who goes to college comes back. Dan
didn't, not when he could sit in an air-conditioned room and clean people's teeth. It's good work, needed work, but so was BC Farms, and in his mind's eye Bruce saw Dakota digging and pulling up rocks, not from his own field, but in South America or China, with a computer that could see into the earth and register if that patch of ground would yield a crop of fossils. How much time was there time to train him, to prevent? Enough, Bruce decided, and there must be time for fun. "You can dig around in the gully where we were gonna put the hogs. I don't have use for it."

  In the dark, Dakota's flashlight illuminated the plan he would begin after church. He would take some wooden stakes and twine and make a perimeter like they did in the picture in the book. He would get a shovel and a trowel and—the arguing voices of professional mouths on the television swelled and oozed into his room and interrupted his plotting. "There's no conclusive proof!...Thirty year cycles…Scientists agree….Nah nah, listen to me…No, screw the talking points!...It's peddling, dear, at the expense of honest workers…Well what about…" Eventually it didn't matter who was saying what. The words all held together, congealing into one frustrating, overwhelming mass, and the boy was too tired to try to listen, or the listening was too tiresome. What's bigger, he thought: the men on the TV, the facts his teacher and the internet told him, or was it true when Uncle Matt said, "You don't think this is any surprise to God, do you?" And Dakota wondered.

  He sat quietly through the service, and the stories of King David competed with the joy of uncovering a mastodon. David was tempted by God to count the people. Or was it by the Devil? Dakota was having trouble paying attention, and when the prophet gave the king a multiple choice punishment, Dakota wished he was young enough to be back in the little kids' church where God was simple and helped the good people and put the bad people under the water or sent wild hornets on them. With this God, there was no good option. A bunch of people were killed because David wanted to be safe. He couldn't stop it, and then he paid for a field to plead to God to remove the plague David chose.

  At least Dad gave him his piece of land. And then his mind was all mastodons and dirt under his fingernails and finding a jawbone or a backbone and scraping it with his old X-Men toothbrush. His mind was on the land, and Dakota didn't hear the pastor's conclusion, which Bruce listened to with care, about the need to sacrifice, about the need to live uncomfortably for God. Bruce wondered if that meant losing his land, or going hungry, or watching his last son become a professor in Lansing, or even out of state. Was that God's will? Were the cool summers, the dry spells, then the gradual increase of heat and the gauntness of his cows part of a call to live without?

  Losing sight of his son as soon as the afternoon meal was over, Bruce looked out to the fields and sat on the porch, a beer pinched between his fingers. Up on the hill the dust gathered up and blew over the line of oak trees that hid the west cow pasture. The rain-like sound of Rick Platt's new truck came close and soon the hulking obsidian vehicle stopped in the driveway. The closing of the door silenced the robins and the goldfinches. Rick Platt strode up the cement pathway, and he smiled under his green and blue denim cap and sunglasses. Bruce smiled back, and Amy was already out with a spare beer. Rick Platt, was not the biggest farmer in the township, not compared to the Oaklands, but he'd grown up quick and you'd be a fool to tell him he wasn't. As much money as came in went out to landscaping, new machinery, and most recently a horse stable. The Oaklands looked for land; Rick Platt looked for looks.

  "How're the apples coming, Rick?"

  "Best crop I had yet," Rick Platt replied, and Bruce could never be quite sure when he was bullshitting or not. His thoughts were hidden somewhere under his shades and his smile, and the habitual way he sat in chairs with his knees and feet pointed out wide, accepting both paths at once as if that was the way of all men.

  They talked about the summer, and Rick Platt joked about harvesting beets in February. "Since '18 I ain' seen a good snow."

  "I know. Ain't none of it true. Yeah, but remember '14?"

  Rick Platt laughed and took the spare beer from the white wicker table. "I'm pullin' your leg, Connell. But I'm thinking ah getting them new monitors, the ones you stick in the soil, sends readings to your email. Damned if I'd be able to read it, but Ricky can. He's staying around to handle the north land and all these new technical things. So maybe I'll get those beets after all."

  Bruce nodded and let his mind soak in the silence that followed before he said, "You ever been to a dinosaur museum?"

  "Nah, I been to the Air Zoo a few times with Ricky when he was a kid," Rick Platt said and rubbed his belly. "We got a kick out of the simulator. They got some fucking huge jets, and you feel fucking huge flying them. Hell, now that you mention it, I think that's what got Ricky into computers and machines, more than anything on the farm, but you keep that to yourself."

  Bruce laughed and squinted to make out what was under the newest dust cloud.

  Dakota hooked up the trailer to the back of the four-wheeler and was lost to the woods before the shortcake had settled to his stomach. He squinted as the dry air whipped around his face and savored the jolts from every root and rabbit hole. Catbirds cried from up in the canopy, and the red-wing blackbirds joined in with sharp warning cries, louder and louder as he came down to the gully. The view was park-like, with oaks and sedges growing down one side toward the small stream that fed the marshes. On the opposite side, the trees gave way to grasses, chicory, and the last of the milkweed. The canopy of the woods was broken, and all the area was sun-filled. The stream parted as the four-wheeler barreled through it and soaked the boy's calves and ankles. He set to his work at the rise of the meadow-hill, driving the stakes into the earth and running a blue rope into a square around them. The creeping roots of the sedges and the deep roots of the native grasses contested with his shovel. Crickets scattered away while sky-blue dragonflies with ruddy-brown bands upon their wings came to observe, and Dakota remembered that once there had been dragonflies over three feet long when the world was very warm.

  He paid close attention to the rocks he found. Anything might be a bone. There was sandstone and little chunks of petrified wood, and these were interesting, and he put them in his backpack, but they were not the goal. The pleasant feeling of the sun on his skin was not the goal, nor the swallowtail that landed on his shovel, neither were the sudden jolt of a locust bursting upward from his foot in a saffron explosion or the heron rising from the stream. These were the unexpected gifts to cling to, though each day proved fruitless, and to think about while he milked the cows by hand because grandfather never believed in milking machines. These joys would not allow him to give up the mastodons.

  Dakota was hitting bedrock, and each stroke of the shovel was careful, aimed at the softness. His digging site moved nearer to the stream as the mastodons had moved nearer to the lake that had been there and over most of the township fifteen thousand years ago. The world was getting warmer, and the bright eyes of the pachyderms passed from bull to cow to bull to cow. The glaciers were melting rapidly, and waterfowl gathered around them, and flycatchers and phoebes pecked off the black flies that threatened to draw blood through the hairy hides. This new lake was to be their home, and Dakota looked towards the hill and the house that was beyond it. The sky was tinged with yellow. Food would be on the table soon, so his hands slipped into the water of the stream the way the rocks and silt gave way from the sun-drenched hill above, suddenly, fifteen thousand years ago. His hand felt something smooth and hard; with a hope, he ran to the trailer for his trowel, dug into the shore and, from the mud, withdrew a dappled triangle with a circle in the center, and he knew what it was.

  At dinner there was only one subject: the vertebrae laid out as a centerpiece, Amy's Black-eyed Susans set aside. She saw it as a symbol for life and death and thought of her days picking wildflowers from that same place and the things she and Bruce had done there in the stream, as children, as teenagers. "It sure is something. Hell, we had no idea." But she knew i
t had always been a special place. And if anyone asked to buy some land, as the Oaklands or Richard Platt might, Bruce could never give them that, nothing else either, but not that.

  Dakota sent an email that night to the University of Michigan, a picture attached and a promise that he'd look for more. He was not around when the reply was sent. Dakota was widening the stream and finding more backbones. And the spine led to ribs, massive and sharp and just out of sight. These he sent too and with excitement he found that a professor was coming.

  A professor was coming. Each day, Bruce was reminded of this and pictured a man with curly dark hair placing his hand on Dakota's shoulders, on his son's shoulders, and telling him that he was needed out there in the world, finding bones. The boy had found so many: a complete backbone, and further upstream a tusk. How many monsters were hiding under his land? The thought shrunk him; he could see them marching in his mind. He could hardly reach them to pat their sides, and they would not regard him. He looked up again and saw only the children swinging in the park, dousing themselves from the stone and mortar drinking fountain, and begging their parents to buy pastries from the Amish. Down he looked to check the totals for a Thursday afternoon's labor, the profits so far. Could be more, could be less, so his father would always say before he'd quote from the Proverbs: Lord don't make me too small so I steal; don't make me too big so I forget this whole world comes from you. He looked up again to see a stranger, skinny, with streaks of silver in his thinning blonde hair, and dressed like a man trying too hard to be casual.

  He was standing in front of Bruce and the little red tent in the park in the middle of the town with one of Bruce's tomatoes in his hand. "How much for a dozen of these?"