Reincarnation Blues

by Michael Poore

  “It’s what they want,” Carver whispered. “You don’t line up, you could get shot or kneecapped or blinded or—”

  “Quiet,” the commander boomed.

  “We need fruit,” said one of his deputies. “Those of you not on shift, go get whatever you have stored, and gather half a ton more.”

  The Hall of Famers broke ranks and headed for the trees.

  “A half ton?” said Milo.

  Carver walked off, pretending not to hear.

  “Is that a problem?” crackled the deputy, leveling his burp gun.

  Milo didn’t answer. He just walked away. Lazily. Insultingly, he hoped.

  When he got to the trees, though, he gathered fruit alongside the others.

  “Has anyone thought,” he asked, “what we’re going to eat, the next month or so?”

  No one answered him.

  —

  Piling fruit on the beach later, Milo saw that the cartel fleet had been busy, too.

  They weren’t just there to eat fruit. Something big was happening.

  Enormous ships had descended on skyhooks and sat over the waves many miles out, forming a distant semicircle.

  “They’re testing again,” said Carver.

  “Testing what?” asked Suzie.

  “A weapon. I heard scuttlebutt about it before they took away my lab.”

  “Atomics?” asked Milo.

  “Worse,” said Carver. “It pulls space through itself, like a needle going through its own eye. They call it the inside-out bomb.”

  The Monitors over by the sled took notice of the conversation.

  “Work!” they all boomed simultaneously. One of them started walking over.

  The Hall of Famers bent low, arranging the gathered fruit.

  “So,” said Suzie, “whatever’s in the affected area just disappears?”

  “That would be great for mining,” said Milo, “if you could control it.”

  “No,” whispered Carver as the Monitor approached. “It’s for getting rid of lots of people without a trace. Without evidence.”

  “There’s an awful lot of nothing going on here,” crackled the Monitor, pushing his way between Milo and Carver.

  They gave him their best dumb looks and dispersed.

  —

  They tested the bomb early the next afternoon.

  Milo was clambering around on the pump when it happened. Something up on the submarine was leaking oil. They were going to have a fire sooner or later if it wasn’t stopped. So he happened to be looking at hose fixtures, and not out to sea, when the bomb went off.

  Still, he was momentarily blinded.

  The flash penetrated everything, as if they’d been cast into the sun. Milo cursed, throwing his arm across his face. The rest of the day shift did the same.

  Except for one, a kid named Christmas Break, who had been looking due south when the thing exploded. He screamed horribly and wouldn’t stop.

  Milo found the boy by sound, stumbling around in a universe of kaleidoscope-like spots. He grabbed the boy and held him close, restraining him. Christmas Break wanted to poke and claw at his eyes, but Milo held him until he calmed down, his screaming reduced to a steady moan.

  In the meantime, Milo’s own eyes cleared, and he looked seaward. He couldn’t look away.

  Out beyond the cartel ships, a crater had formed in the ocean. A perfect half dome, as if a bowling ball the size of a small world had been sitting there and had vanished. Above this impossible emptiness, a dome of clouds formed and whirled to fill empty space.

  Wind rushed in from behind Milo, from everywhere, pulling waves and sand and clouds and birds toward the ball of…nothing…out there.

  Water and wind smashed in from all points, booming and roaring.

  Milo’s jaw hung loose. The spectacle was something on the scale of gods or giants, something human eyes and minds weren’t ready for.

  The storm settled, leaving something like a wobbly star hanging in the air, a scar left by the bomb’s quantum arm-twisting.

  Christmas Break whimpered.

  “You’ll be all right,” Milo told him (lying?). “Your eyes should get back to normal before the day is out. Let’s get you to your family. Why’d you pick the name ‘Christmas,’ by the way?”

  “Because my parents named me Melissa,” said the boy. “They wanted a girl.”

  Milo kept him talking and not rubbing his eyes until they all got downhill.

  —

  The star hung pulsing over the ocean until the next morning. When it finally burned out, the cartel ships headed for the island.

  The fleet, Milo sensed, was in the mood to party. And his stomach went dark and sour.

  “Will they leave us alone?” he asked Carver, when they lined up on the beach.

  Carver didn’t say.

  The first of the big ships hovered overhead, eclipsing Jupiter and the sun. Other ships, big and small, followed it like a pack of wolves.

  —

  Sleds and cargo heavies landed. Soldiers spilled out. Not just armored Monitors, but soldiers in jumpsuits. The soldiers seemed amused by the naked islanders lined up on the sand.

  “Go about your business!” hollered some kind of command figure, dismissing them. “We need you, we’ll call.”

  The Hall of Famers broke away and headed for their huts, for the woods, anywhere but that beach.

  Milo and Suzie watched from the edge of the woods as the soldiers set up tents and generators. More sleds arrived, spilling cartel people ashore. People in all sorts of uniforms. Military, engineering, corporate types in suits.

  Voices grew rowdy. Glass shattered. Music wailed.

  Now and then, soldiers marched into the village and forced islanders to go pick fruit or narcotic froojii leaves or “some of that colorful firewood shit.”

  A knot of Monitors broke away from the party and found Jale at her tent.

  “Where’s your redfish?” asked the tallest of them. “Show us what you’ve got, and bring sacks to carry it.”

  Milo and Suzie, two huts down, listened without breathing.

  “We haven’t gone out lately,” Jale replied. “We’ve been fixing leaks up at your pump. There’s no fresh.”

  “Dried, then,” said the Monitor. “We know you’ve got dried.”

  “We need the dried,” Jale said. “You’ve got our month’s fruit. The trees are picked over.”

  A hard sound, as if someone was getting hit.

  Milo and Suzie got up and walked over, without discussion.

  Jale lay on the sand in front of her hut, cupping a bloody lip with her hand. Chili Pepper crouched over her.

  “Can we help?” asked Milo.

  The Monitors said, “Fish.”

  “We’ll go look,” said Milo, buying time. “But we may have already given the fish out, put it out there with the fruit—”

  The Monitor smashed him in the head with the butt of his burp gun, and Milo fell down and went dark.

  —

  When he awoke sometime later, things were even busier. Airships and watercraft growled in the air and growled in the surf. Music pounded.

  The Hall of Famers kept to their huts, still.

  Suzie dabbed Milo’s cheek with something wet. Jale and Chili Pepper sat nearby.

  “Jale took them to the fish pantry,” Suzie told him. “Otherwise they were going to shoot you.”

  “What the fuck,” Milo asked, “are we supposed to eat this month?”

  “We get through tonight,” said Chili Pepper, “we’ll worry about that.”

  Suddenly, shouting from among the huts out near the trees.

  “No!” bellowed a woman’s voice. One of the Hall of Fame women went running by, wild-eyed.

  Looking after her, Milo saw the source of her distress. Two men in suits had a preteen girl by the leg and were dragging her toward the trees. The girl thrashed and screamed. The woman reached the suits and pulled at them, shouting.

  The suits appeared to be inter
ested in whatever the woman was saying.

  They dropped the girl, and the woman walked into the trees with them.

  Milo stood, fists clenched. “I think I’d rather be dead than—”

  “No,” said Jale and Chili Pepper together.

  “You’ll make it worse,” said Chili Pepper. “It can get a lot worse.”

  They heard the woman cry out from the woods. They stayed where they were. Milo’s eyes stung. Suzie gripped his wrist hard enough to hurt. He let it hurt.

  Thunder rolled. Far off, it seemed. From around the side of the island.

  He searched the sky, which seemed clear.

  The thunder became a steady pulse.

  “That’s not thunder,” said Chili Pepper, standing. “It’s the tsunami drum.”

  —

  Chili Pepper grabbed both Milo and Suzie roughly, shoving, shouting,“Go!”

  Down on the beach, Milo found the Fish Committee dashing to get the outriggers in the water. The drunks on the beach seemed confused by the sudden rush of bodies and boats; they milled around and laughed, staggering out of the way. Someone turned the music up.

  “Something spooked the moon niggers,” Milo heard as he dodged between suits and splashed into the surf.

  Dark figures came flying out of the trees: the night shift from the pump, descending on hidden zip lines. They hit the sand and sprinted for the boats.

  The fishing outriggers were full, Milo could see, and steering into the surf. Downbeach, Hall of Famers dragged other boats out of the trees. Huge, simple boats, great logs tied into catamarans, with rough masts and sails. There were three of these, and it took hundreds of hands to get them into the water.

  “That way!” Milo urged Suzie. “Look for the twins!”

  One of the cartel spacecraft flashed lights as the island boats left shore.

  Whoop-whoop! Sirens and alarms drowned the music and the shouting.

  Finally, soldiers went running for the sleds and heavies, eating bananas as they ran or straining to finish drinks.

  —

  On the catamarans, hundreds of hands raised the masts. Sails stretched, finding the wind. Milo leaped aboard the second catamaran, gripping wet wood with his toes. Hands steadied him, steadied Suzie as she followed.

  “How many islanders can you fit on a boat?” someone called out.

  “One more!” they all shouted. “Always one more!”

  They found an open place on the woven netting and sat scrunched together, taking up as little space as possible.

  Overhead, cartel ships blazed and screamed. The smaller craft rode their rockets into space. The giants waited for their skyhooks to tighten and pull, nosing them upward like rising whales. A few heavies smoked and steamed on the beach still, engines flexing impatiently, awaiting stragglers.

  Suzie poked Milo in the arm and pointed seaward.

  The horizon had darkened.

  “It doesn’t look like a wave,” she said.

  “It won’t be a real wave,” said someone sitting nearby, “until it gets to the shallower water. Then it’ll stack up.”

  The voice was familiar…

  “Carver!” cried Milo. “Have you seen my brother and sister?”

  Carver shook his head but said, “They got aboard somewhere, I guarantee it. Sharp cookies, your bunch.”

  Milo had to be happy with that for now.

  “Anyhow,” continued Carver, “there’s a steep drop-off farther out. We’re trying to sail past that before the wave gets there.”

  “We’re not going fast enough,” growled a woman with a tumor swelling behind her left ear.

  Three men adjusted a mighty rope. The catamaran leaned sideways, causing its passengers to dig into the netting with their fingers. The boat gained speed.

  Then the ocean dropped out from under them.

  The catamaran seemed to nosedive, and Milo understood that the tsunami’s trough had reached them.

  A mile away, the hump he had seen speeding along the horizon had begun building into a mountain.

  “Holy God,” said Milo.

  Before another breath passed, it was on them. Suzie squeezed his arm as the sea ballooned under them, tilting them up and lifting them into the sky.

  Several islanders lost their grip and tumbled into the crazy water. They did not reappear.

  Looking back toward the island, Milo saw that the cartel heavies were all clear, their engines torching hard, zooming straight up out of the atmosphere. All except one, which just now seemed to be wallowing in the sand.

  The wave intervened as they passed over the crest. For a second, the catamaran might as well have been flying; below them lay the edge of the world and far-flung islands. Out to sea, the ocean was like a dark army—ranks and ranks of swells racing across the blue.

  They slid down, gaining speed, their stomachs in their throats, and were thrown back up again as a larger wave took them, lifting. From its peak, they watched the first wave slam across their island.

  The last cartel heavy, lifting off, trying desperately to gain speed, was swallowed up without a trace. In an instant, the trees and hills vanished underwater. Only the highest hill and the massive pump machinery remained untouched, surrounded by raging foam and whirlpools like jaws.

  “Madness,” whispered Milo. “This planet is mad!”

  Suzie shut him up with a long, wild kiss. The kind you feel in your throat.

  —

  A day later, in the evening, they sailed back ashore.

  Not their familiar shore. Who knew where that was? The village was out in the sea somewhere or splintered among the trees in the forest. The tsunami had chewed the island a new shoreline.

  They found a wide beach, and two of the great catamarans sailed ashore. They muscled the boats into the shelter of the trees first, before collapsing in the sand. Members of the Rebuilding Committee built a fire and began gathering shore debris for shelters.

  “The twins,” Suzie said.

  Carlo came plowing through the crowd, towing Serene. The two of them looked at Milo. Only looked.

  “Good,” they said, simply, simultaneously. And they looked at Suzie, too, and said, “Good.”

  They all roamed the edge of the forest together, gathering whatever looked useful.

  —

  The third catamaran didn’t come back.

  “The outriggers?” Milo asked Carver.

  “They’re fine. They’re faster, so they go farther out, take longer to return. They’ll find food while they’re out.”

  Incredibly, they found the tsunami drum, wedged between boulders, its skins and ribs intact. They rolled it to the nearest bluff and assigned a watch—a woman named Jane Eyre, whose husband was missing—and left her there.

  The Rebuilding Committee took an inventory of tools they had and tools they needed to make. Milo and Suzie volunteered to dig the new latrine. Cracklin’ Rosie, Red Wine, and Matthew left to scout for freshwater.

  High tide and low tide came again, and went.

  At sunset, they remembered the dead.

  “Polly Wolly,” read Carver. “Jim Shunk. Justinian the Third. Bead Woman. White Chick. Mr. Henry. Caspar. Big Brad. Old Brad. Shakespeare. Sarah the Librarian. Siamese Cat. Conan the Avenger. Leave Me Alone.”

  Out of the weird golden twilight, the outriggers rode in and slid ashore. The sailors walked up the beach and came among them without a word, except to join in the litany.

  “Boo-Cherry. LoopsyDoll. Captain My Captain. Vaughn Gillespie. Indigo. Demon Rum. Word Salad. The Last Scientologist. Doris Fubar. Danny Bo-Banny. Good Grades, McDonalds, and Pookie of Nazareth…” and it went on, seventy names, spoken and repeated and not spoken again.

  —

  Things got back to normal.

  Things changed.

  Like their name. The Rock ’N’ Roll Hall of Fame became Sly and the Family Stone, after a famous ancient band.

  Seven days after the tsunami, a cartel sled came burning down from space. The Famil
y Stone barely had time to gather on the beach before the Monitors emerged.

  “Line up!” barked the commander. “Everyone!”

  Uuuuuu­uuuuu­rrrrrrrrp! He fired his burp gun into the air. Empty cartridges rained on the sand.

  They came running from everywhere.

  This isn’t about fruit, thought Milo.

  “We lost a ship,” the commander said. “Where is it?”

  Sounds of confusion up and down the line.

  The Monitors were not playing. All four of them aimed their guns at a little girl named Mango.

  “I saw it go down with the wave,” said Milo. “It waited for stragglers, and it got in the air too late.”

  “Where is it now?” asked one of the deputies.

  Milo shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Chances are it was swept into open water,” said Big Bird, right behind him. “At least three waves washed over this island.”

  “Shut up!” yelled the commander, stepping through the front line and pressing his muzzle against Big Bird’s forehead.

  “Why didn’t you warn us?” he asked. Then, screaming: “Why didn’t you fucking moon niggers warn us?”

  An angry buzz rose up and down the line.

  “You heard the drum, same as everyone else,” someone said. “You know damn well what it means.”

  Aw, shit, thought Milo.

  Uuurrp! Big Bird’s head came apart in a red cloud. Her body hit the sand.

  Because, Milo wanted to say, the cartel suits and their nerds and goons had been too busy yelling and drinking and trying to drag kids into the woods.

  The commander stepped back.

  “Because you chose not to warn us,” he said, “a disciplinary action will be levied, beginning at sundown.”

  Fearful muttering in the line.

  The Monitors climbed back into their sled, rocketed into the air, and burned out to sea.

  —

  Carver and Jale stepped over Big Bird’s body, through the front line, and turned to face the Family Stone.

  “Listen,” said Carver, “those of you who know what’s going to happen and know what to do, go do it. If you’re new or not sure, listen up.”

  About half of the population left and walked back to the huts.

  “Here’s what’s going on,” Jale told the rest. “It’s not going to be easy. The cartel goons are going to be here in an hour, and they are going to come into our homes and force us to hurt each other.”