Europa Affair

by M. D. Thalmann

  Halloran’s people grew food and raised livestock. Other than that, they mainly just fought the Apes—who weren’t great apes, but human savages—to keep that food.

  Halloran wiped his cheeks with the back of one hand and used the other to run his fingers through his shaggy chestnut hair, pull­ing it back out of his face. He began climbing the wrought iron fencing, his hair flowing in the breeze. He had a heavy pack slung across his back and a week’s worth of dried meats and a dense loaf of bread. No water, though. He didn’t want to be weighed down.

  There was a stream that ran across the ridge of mountains sur­rounding the Men of Faith’s stronghold where he intended on filling his waterskins as needed. His largest waterskin was made from the urine pouch of an old Hereford cow he’d fed, milked, brushed and eventually killed and eaten. His small one was from one of her calves.

  It had taken him longer than he’d expected to reach the stream, and when he had, he’d found the water brackish and hard. He’d regretted not bringing a bladder of the fresh well water from home.

  After drinking his fill, he’d charged only one of his skins in order to carry less weight and followed the stream until dark fall. The waterway had become more and more obviously manmade the farther he followed it. There were rusted poles with holes throughout them from which were suspended rectangular sheets of featureless metal. Occasion­ally they bore almost visible symbols under the patina, but they’d meant nothing to Halloran. Instead, he’d looked at their shadows to help determine his heading and how much daylight re­mained.

  Now the shadows were growing longer, and he needed to rest. He sat in the shade provided by a small tumbledown building flanking the stream. It had a broken placard over the door with a crudely drawn image of a man with circles for legs and the word “MEN,” like the lavatory at the Academy, but he didn’t recognize the hieroglyph.

  He ate some of his dried meat and drank the horrible water.

  His feet were sore, and he removed his boots. In the fleeting light, his feet were mother-of-pearl. The heels and balls of them were starting to blister. The cool evening air felt good on his nacre­ous toes. He examined his surroundings. The roof of the building was littered with holes, and beyond its entrance were sinks and stalls for excreting waste.

  A poem was etched into the wall in there. It contained words that were strange to him.

  Here I sit all brokenhearted, came to shit but only farted!

  Halloran opened his pack and removed his bedroll and lay down.

  He didn’t sleep well. He’d made no campfire, so his body was forced to expend much of his energy to keep him warm somehow. He shivered and let his imagination run wild. He figured it to be his nerves talking, but something had told him a fire was an unnecessary gamble.

  When he finally did doze off, he was haunted by dreadful nightmares of the terrible plague that God had sent to try and save the people of Earth. Eli had told him all about it, the Proxy Virus. It had wiped out many of the heathens who’d refused to adhere to God’s will, he’d said. It hadn’t worked, though, so God had been forced to do much more abominable things in his attempts to save the humans.

  God didn’t like to smite but hated confrontation. Since human beings were so confrontational by nature, he found it easier to avoid face-to-face conversation and instead smote from home. It also saved him the commute, so there was that to consider.

  He’d simply receive a report of how poorly people were behaving and wave his finger in a loose circle, pointing towards Earth and say something like, “Eh… pestilence,” or “tsunami,” or “genital warts.” And so on.

  No one understood the motives of the Creator of the Universe.

  His whole life—what he could remember of it, anyway—Halloran had been trained to fight, survive in the wilds, and go outside the walls to find her, but Eli had said he still wasn’t ready yet.

  “Why do you want to go out there and fight when we have this place?” Eli had said, referring to the Academy of the Men of Faith. Halloran had known he was just terrified. What he wasn’t sure of anymore was if Eli was terrified of losing Halloran the way he had lost Jolie, or if he was terrified of finding Jolie.

  The next morning Halloran awoke to a small furry ring-tailed animal that he couldn’t recognize rummaging through his bag. He tried to shoo it away, but it snarled at him. He tried once more to no avail, then was reminded of a rule he’d been taught since early childhood, “If it has four legs and walks with its back toward God, you can eat it.”

  He bashed it to death with the white stone plate that had topped the commode tank.

  He produced a long hunting knife from the very same pack and skinned and quartered the critter on the spot. But he didn’t cook it right then. Something was telling him that he needed to get moving.

  Instead, Halloran placed the beast in a leather pouch and stuffed it in his pack.

  “Well, you wanted in here,” he said to the deceased ringtail, and closed up the pack and continued along his way.

  When his thirst and hunger became paramount, he moved out of the sun and satiated himself with a chunk of the dense bread he’d brought along. It tasted fine, but he remained curious as to what flavors the animal would offer.

  He walked more, still following the concrete stream from which he’d been gathering his drinking supply.

  Halloran gradually noticed a faint thrumming in his mind. It was as if his brain was being massaged and stretched by a fluctuation in gravity. When he moved in certain directions, the massaging became too much to bear. It became less severe when he followed one specific heading, so he gravitated in that direction. It was so slight at first that he assumed it had been there his whole life, like the buzz-hum of the electric fence at the compound, but it had gained amplitude. Though a little scared, he wanted, needed, to keep going towards whatever was causing the kneading susurrations, but wasn’t sure how he knew this. He assumed at this point that everyone could hear it, and figured that its rhythmic pumping had been dampened by the cement walls within the Academy and that the pumps and generators and buzzing electrons had muffled it. Or that maybe he’d simply grown accustomed to it and had forgotten about it until now, because its anthem had awakened memories of him and his sister from over one hundred jaars ago. A jaar was twelve maands, no more, no less.

  Halloran was wrong, of course, in assuming that all creatures could hear the thrumming, but he wasn’t wrong in assuming it had been there his whole life. He and his sister had played near the source when they’d been children. The source wanted him to play there once more.

  As Halloran continued, more and more of the landscape gave way to cinderblock walls and rusted metallic outcroppings. The structures were growing taller, and the piles of rubble were gaining mass as well. These buildings belonged on Earth, but a few had survived the journey to Alles Aarde, which had taken hundreds of jaars but had required no locomotion.

  Ahead, there was a glimmer from one of the taller structures and Halloran stopped moving in order to get a better look at the shiny moving thing. He had tremendous vision.

  Halloran saw a long metal tube, and saw it move in a slight angle tracking his movement, but didn’t know what to make of it. He felt a sudden tingle which started at the base of his skull and whizzed down his spine into his asshole, which instructed him to drop to the ground immediately. He didn’t have time to argue with the tingle, and just as his body slammed into Alles Aarde he felt the vibrations from the air and heard the whistling of something fast buzzing overhead, like an angry wasp. The bug impacted the concrete channel just behind him at great velocity. The wasp had this to say about the impact: “Zing.”

  It was the strangest bug he’d ever encountered and for reasons unknown, he was somewhat petrified.

  A small distant thunderclap followed. It doesn’t look like rain, Halloran thought, looking for clouds.

  The tingle now brought him back into the moment and made him jump to his feet and run.

  He darted to his left towar
ds an opening in the brick wall at first, but for no apparent reason, that tingle told his body “no,” so he jerked to his right, back towards the creek, and rolled headfirst down the embankment. His legs were now burning from the intense bursts. Just then, another zing, but this one accompanied by a crunch as another angry wasp buried itself into the cinderblock wall. A second thunderclap and Halloran thought, I guess maybe it will rain. I’d better get inside.

  The second wasp had buried into the wall right where he’d been heading before having decided to change course. This evidence told Halloran that the wasps were definitely mad at him for some reason, and he wondered if the small ring-tailed meal in his pack had anything to do with it.

  He felt warmth on his forearm, his hand was wet and heavy. He looked down to find he’d been stung by the wasp. It seemed like a pretty deep one, but he didn’t have much time to look before he felt the tingling tell him to move erratically, and now.

  He decided to swing back to his left once more, climbing up the embankment towards the wall and dove through an open window of the cinderblock building. He’d known it was time to jump because the tingle started in his asshole and went the other way this time, which seemed to propel him farther and faster than he’d ever moved up to that point. It was exhilarating.

  “Wow!” he shouted as he tucked and rolled into the building.

  Another angry wasp buzzed overhead, having chased him through the window, but this one didn’t zing or crunch when it hit. The walls inside were crumbly and soft. The wasp just went right through with barely a “puff” and fell asleep. A third thunderclap and he thought, Well at least I’m dry, but then checked his pants to make sure that that wasn’t just wishful thinking.

  Turns out he hadn’t pissed himself, so now he had two things going for him. It was a load off his mind.

  He inspected the cut on his forearm and was relieved to see it was little more than a scratch. He was shocked as to how much blood had come from the tiny wound but assumed it might have been his elevated heart rate from the vigorous exercise. In any event, he felt fine.

  The tingling was everywhere now, radiating out from his back, through his ribcage, and into his extremities. He hunkered down and went deeper into the darkness within the building, keeping an eye peeled for that third wasp. He could see just fine, somehow.

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