Earth Fire (Earthrise Book 4)

by Daniel Arenson

  She shook her head. "No." She was sobbing. "We can escape this. We . . . we can still save money. Buy that house in the suburbs. With the hockey. With the trees. With—"

  "It was a dream, Addy. Just a dream."

  He left the apartment.

  Late in the morning, most people in Haven had already gone to work, and the subways had seats to spare. Marco took a rattling train, then another, then a third, just moving randomly, not choosing a route, until he stepped out at a distant stop. It was one of the city's rich neighborhoods, a place with guards outside the buildings, keeping the riffraff out. Marco walked through the tunnels, passing by jewelry stores, cinnamon bun bakeries, and clothing shops. He took an escalator into a shopping plaza, a place where he could never afford to shop, and found a sprawling bookstore, two stories tall.

  He was still hungover, probably stinking. A rat from the slums. The bookshop was well lit, filled with rich patrons, and they moved away from him. One girl gave him a sneering look. Marco ignored them.

  I used to be a librarian, he thought. I used to work among books. Now you look at me like I don't belong here.

  He wandered between the shelves, inhaling, savoring the smell of the books. A librarian? Yes. He had been once, but he could barely remember that person. It was a different lifetime. How old was he now? Twenty-four? Twenty-five? No. He was ancient. He had lived a thousand lives. He had died a thousand times.

  He passed his fingers along the spines of books. Hardcovers with glossy dust jackets. The authors' names written in gold. Fantasy novels. Science fiction. Thrillers. Mysteries. Romances. Literary fiction, award winning, profound.

  He thought of Loggerhead, languishing at home, rejected by every publisher in the cosmos. He thought of Le Kill, already collecting rejections.

  This is what I wanted to be, he thought. A novelist. This is what I thought I could become after the war.

  "Excuse me, sir." A bookshop employee. "This is a bookshop. If you're looking for the center for addiction down the street, I—"

  "I know it's a bookshop." Marco glared at the young man. "Do you think I'm an idiot?"

  "Sir, there's no need to raise your voice. I would be happy to—"

  "I want this book." He grabbed one off the shelf, not even knowing which one it was. "And this one. And this one." He bought them on his credit card. He could not afford them. He stepped down the street, found a bench under a tree in a tube, and he read. He read until night. His eyes kept blurring, his mind kept racing, but he forced himself to keep reading. Just to move his eyeballs, line by line, to try to be the person he had been. To try to remember Marco Emery.

  When he returned home, Addy was waiting for him, sitting at the table. A pizza lay before her, uneaten, misshapen. Several hot dogs topped it, not even sliced into pieces.

  She looked up at Marco. Her eyes were damp, and wet napkins lay on the floor around her.

  "I made us a pizza," she said. "I made the dough myself." She gave him a shaky smile. "Hot dog pizza. I tried to serve it on the rake, but it kept falling off. I brushed off the dirt, though, don't worry."

  He knelt before her, and he laid his head on her lap. "I'm sorry, Addy."

  She stroked his hair. "I know, you idiot." Her voice was barely audible.

  He laughed. "Hot dog pizza. Perfect."

  She laughed too. "Help me slice it."

  The pizza was cold. Half the dough was burnt, the other half soggy. But it was the best damn pizza Marco had ever eaten, and Addy and he stayed up late, watching B movies on their tablet, and she slept in his bed that night. They did not make love. They did not sleep holding each other. But it felt better than a thousand nights of sex with a thousand other girls.

  I love you, Addy, he thought before drifting to sleep. I don't know who I am. I don't know what I can still become. But I'm glad you're with me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  He had been in Haven for twenty months when he realized he was dying.

  He walked into work, legs shaky. The subway had broken down again, crammed with commuters, stuck in the tunnels. Another suicide on the tracks. Another hour trapped underground. Another hour back in the scum hive. As Marco walked between the desks in the call center, his head spun. His breath ached in his lungs. His hands shook, and he spilled his coffee, and people laughed and pointed and somebody clapped.

  "You look worried," somebody called his way. "Who'd you kill today?"

  A girl gasped and giggled. "You can't ask him who he killed. He'll probably shoot you too." Her voice dropped. "I heard he killed his own friends in the war."

  "I heard he fucked an alien," somebody whispered. "Real horror story stuff."

  Marco reached his desk. He sat down, shaky, struggling to collect himself. Late. Late to work again. More money docked from his paycheck. An email waited on his computer. His boss wanted to speak with him. Urgent. Urgent. A red flag over the email. Urgent.

  Sirens.

  Sirens wailed.

  Scum attacking!

  The pods rained. The aliens attacked. The aliens swarmed over Fort Djemila, and Caveman died on the tarmac. The aliens slammed into the HDFS Miyari, and they plunged down toward the moon. Lost. Lost in the hive.

  His chest ached.

  He rose to his feet.

  "Emery!" his boss shouted.

  He rushed between the desks, made it outside, and stumbled into the stairwell. He sat, breathing heavily, head between his knees. His skull was constricting, crushing his brain, and his ribs were digging into his heart.

  A heart attack, Marco thought. I'm having a heart attack.

  It was an hour before he could walk again.

  He sat for hours in the clinic's waiting room. It was as crowded as anywhere in Haven. A hundred people, maybe more, sat here on plastic chairs, coughing, sneezing, some looking barely alive. Some wore masks; others coughed in the open. Every cough sounded to Marco like the croak of a dying soldier.

  Finally they ushered Marco into an examination room, where a silver-haired doctor saw him, where a nurse slapped EKG probes onto his chest, where they told him, "Nothing's wrong. Just stress. Go home."

  "But—"

  "Time's up. You're fine. Go home."

  That night, Marco only slept for two hours.

  He sat in the crowded waiting room.

  He saw another doctor.

  "It's my head," he said. "My skull feels too tight. It keeps hurting."

  X-rays clattered.

  Needles poked.

  "Nothing wrong with you, kid. Go home. Get some sleep."

  Another doctor, a woman with curly hair.

  "My heart won't slow down. Sometimes I can't breathe."

  "Your lungs look fine, Marco. Here, try these vitamins."

  Another waiting room. Another doctor, an old man with wispy hair.

  "I think I have cancer, doc," Marco said. "I've lost weight. I can't sleep. I can't eat. My hair is falling out. I threw up yesterday."

  "Take these for anxiety," said the doc.

  "I'm not crazy, doc. I think I might have cancer. Everything hurts."

  The doc nodded. "You're suffering from shell shock, son. Post-traumatic stress disorder. I've seen it a thousand times. You're a veteran, right? Most think that wars wound only the body. But the human mind can only take so much punishment before it too scars. Take the pills. They'll take the edge off. Go home. Sleep. And eat something."

  "But it's my body too, doc. My chest hurts, and—"

  "I'm sorry, son. Your time is up. I've got a lot of patients to see."

  Marco hid these pills in his pocket, not letting Addy see them, fearful she would flush these too down the toilet, would call him crazy.

  He let the pills languish in his drawer for two weeks. One night, when his chest kept aching, when his head kept spinning, he took a pill.

  He didn't sleep at all that night. Not even an hour. The next day, he could keep nothing down. He spilled the pills into the toilet and flushed.

  He drank.
<
br />   He hid the bottles under his mattress where Addy wouldn't see them, and he drank, and he went out to pounding bars where music blared, and he drank again because it was too loud.

  He woke up in his bed. A woman lay beside him, naked. He could not remember her name. He could not remember meeting her, bringing her home. He could not remember putting on a condom. He could not remember if he had slept with her.

  "You'll call me tomorrow, right?" she said. But he didn't know who she was.

  He waited in the cluttered waiting room, because he was dying, he knew he was dying. He could see it in the mirror—a dying wretch. But all he got was a doctor rolling his eyes, a placebo of some vitamins, and a bad cough caught from another patient. For a week, Marco lay in his bed, coughing, vomiting, trembling, his fever blazing. For a week, he felt close to death.

  "You better come back to work tomorrow, Emery, or you're fired."

  He walked between the desks, lightheaded.

  "Marco, talk to me!" Addy said. "You look like shit. Have you seen yourself in the mirror? You look like fucking Gollum."

  "I'm fine."

  "You need to eat!"

  "I'm eating, Addy. For fuck's sake, leave me alone!"

  He rushed out of the house. He sat outside in his atmosuit, the storm swirling around him. With gloved hands, he held his pen, and he wrote. He wrote another chapter in Le Kill, a chapter about Tomiko fighting the spiders, but the ash stained every page, effacing his words.

  He went back home late at night, and he sat on his bed, and he wrote Lailani a letter.

  Please, Lailani. Take me back. I'm sorry.

  His tears splashed the words.

  I want us to be together. Like we used to be. I can't live without you.

  Foolish. The words of a foolish boy! He tore up the letter, loathing himself.

  He stared out the window, hoping to see the stars, but could see only the brick wall and the storm above. And like everywhere on this world, he felt trapped.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Anisha Morgan was twenty years old, a pretty girl with curly black hair, brown skin, and large green eyes. Those eyes were soft as she gazed at Marco.

  "You did all that on your own?" She leaned over her plate of sushi. "You moved here after the war, penniless, found work, and you're writing a novel?"

  "It's not that much," Marco said, sitting across from her.

  It was a small restaurant, not even in the tunnels—a nice place on the thirtieth floor of a glass tower. Through the windows, they could see the storm of Haven, but from up here, it seemed like a Van Gogh, all swirling colors and beads of light. Inside the sushi bar, paper lanterns glowed like a thousand stars across the ceiling.

  "And after everything you did in the war, what you saw . . ." Anisha reached across the table and touched his arm. "You're very brave."

  "I was scared most of the time."

  "I missed the war. It had just ended by the time I turned eighteen. I didn't serve. I just can't imagine . . ." Anisha stared into the distance, reflective, then back at him. She smiled and bit her lip. "I'm buying you ice cream after dinner. My treat for the brave war hero."

  Anisha paid for the sushi. She insisted on paying. She took him to the top floor of the building, and they stood on the observation deck, surrounded by a glass dome. It seemed like they floated in the atmosphere of this distant world. She bought them ice cream—vanilla and strawberries, actual fresh strawberries, grown in the greenhouses outside the city.

  "My dad used to take me here when I was little," Anisha said, watching the roiling colors with him. "I used to love watching the clouds. We don't come into the city much anymore. My dad hates leaving the burbs now. He said the city has gotten so bad since the war, since refugees came here. But he doesn't know. He doesn't understand how bad it became on Earth. How much you fought." She leaned against Marco. "Tell me about Earth."

  "You've never been?" Marco said.

  Anisha shook her head. "My parents were born in Haven. My grandparents too. We've been here since the beginning a hundred-and-five years ago. What's Earth like? What does the sky look like? Is it really blue like they say?"

  "Sometimes," Marco said. "But it can be a thousand colors more. Golden and red and orange in the sunset, pink at sunrise, gray and indigo and deep purple in a storm."

  "And trees really grow in the open, not just in bulbs or domes?"

  "Millions of trees," Marco said, "all rustling in the wind."

  She slipped her hand into his. "You've seen so much. The farthest I've gone from the burbs is this tower in the city."

  They kissed on the observation deck. They caught a subway to his apartment, and she handed out coins to every beggar on the way. At home, they lay on his bed, watching old B movies, and she laughed. She laughed truly, fully, her eyes sparkling, her teeth white, the most honest laugh Marco had ever heard.

  The next weekend, Anisha took him to see the latest Star Trek movie, and she dressed up in a Star Trek uniform and gave him the Vulcan salute, and she laughed and slapped a Starfleet insignia she made onto his shirt. She insisted on paying, and the next week, when Marco was sick with the flu, she drove to his apartment with homemade soup.

  "My poor hero." She stroked his hair. "I'll nurse you back to health."

  She became good friends with Addy. When Addy turned twenty-five that fall, Anisha gave her a signed hockey puck she had ordered from Earth. Addy displayed it proudly on the shelf, declaring it the best gift she had ever received.

  "This one's a keeper, Marco," Addy told him. "You better marry this one." She mussed his hair. "Happy for you, little bro."

  And for the first time since being drafted into the army years ago, Marco was happy. Truly happy, and it seemed to him that despite his dead-end job, despite his poverty, despite his failure as an author, he was finding joy in this world, finding a relief from the pain. He slept well, and he was no longer too thin, and he laughed every day.

  "Come meet my parents," Anisha said on their six-month anniversary. "You really need to meet them already! We're cooking crab legs for you. Do you like crab legs?"

  "I've only had it once. I think I liked it."

  "You'll love the way we make it! My dad gets it fresh from Earth, delivered in an actual tank." She grinned. "And my mom is baking you a cake with strawberries. I told her all about how you love strawberries."

  The day before meeting her parents, Marco stood in his apartment bathroom. He stared at his reflection. His reflection stared back, and Marco saw a stranger.

  He saw the librarian's son, the studious writer.

  He saw the soldier at war, lost in darkness.

  He saw the veteran, poor, hungry, shell shocked.

  And he saw somebody new, somebody he didn't recognize. Somebody he was afraid of. Somebody he didn't know if he could become. If he deserved to become.

  He lifted his bottle of whiskey from the cupboard. Another bottle. One of countless bottles he had stashed away these past few months. His hand shook.

  I'll go to her house, and I'll get nervous, he thought. I'll remember the war. I'll have a flashback. I'll mess up. I need to drink. No. No, I can't. I promised Addy.

  His eyes dampened. He shut them. He unscrewed the bottle, took a sip. Sipped more. Drank too much. He ripped the bottle away, heart pounding, and poured the rest down the sink. It had cost him a full day's pay, and he watched the precious, costly liquid swirl away. He brushed his teeth. Again. Again. He washed his hands until they bled. He got dressed and he stepped downstairs, and Anisha was waiting there in her car, smiling.

  She drove, playing The Rolling Stones, singing along and teasing Marco for not joining her.

  For the second time since arriving in Haven, Marco left the inner city. The first time, he had rented a car, had driven south along the highways to the farms. This time, they drove north. The road was wider, smoother, and enclosed in a silica roof, a transparent tunnel through the storm.

  After an hour of driving, Marco saw giant turbi
nes ahead—large as buildings. They hummed, blowing back the storm, raising clouds of gray, umber, and dusty gold. One by one they loomed, an army of them, great machines rumbling on the surface.

  "Fans," he whispered in awe.

  Anisha nodded. "Airdome, they call them. They help keep most of the storm out. They were just meant to be temporary, until they built a proper dome over Haven." She sighed. "They were supposed to build that silly dome fifty-something years ago. Then the Cataclysm hit Earth. Then just five years ago, when they were about to build it again, the Second Scum War happened. I don't think they'll ever build our dome. So century-old fans it is."

  "At least the dome still exists in the real estate magazines," Marco said.

  "They should be sued for false advertisement, but I think all the lawyers must have died in the scum wars."

  "Not all of them," Marco said, remembering the lawyer who had threatened him on Earth. "But we can always hope for a third war."

  Anisha looked at him, frowned, then laughed and shook her head.

  They drove between two of the towering fans, entering the burbs. Indeed, the storm was lighter here. A few flurries rose along the streets, but the atmosphere here seemed almost Earthlike, eerily calm. Marco gazed through the car window, clasping his fingers in his lap. He struggled for breath.

  The burbs were beautiful.

  Oaks, elms, and maples grew in airy glass tubes, glittering with lights. Mansions—he could not think of them as mere houses—rose alongside the quiet streets, each one unique, built in the old style of Earth's glory days. Domes enclosed them and their yards, and they shone like snow globes, their lights warm. A few children were playing outside, wearing expensive helmets like space heroes, flying a drone. Down one road, a huge dome rose over forested paths and a glittering lake, and residents played ball on the beach.

  "It's heaven," Marco said softly. "It's like Earth before the Cataclysm. It's like the magazines said. It's real. It's only an hour away from Haven's inner city. It's a different universe."

  Driving down the peaceful streets, Anisha squeezed his knee. "It's luck, Marco. It's just luck. My great-grandparents moved here at the right time. Everyone got these nice houses then. I'm just lucky." She looked at him, eyes soft. "Don't ever think otherwise. You're stronger, braver, and smarter than anyone who lives here. Just less lucky." A grin split her face. "And when we get married, and you're a famous author, we'll live here together." She laughed. "I'm kidding. Don't jump out of the car and bolt!"