The Fate of Nations Book II The Harvest

by Laura Watson

  It was loud and nerve rattling no matter where the sound came from, unnerving because the mere sound of it implicated the death of some unlucky soul who had ventured outside.

  Leslie shook with unused adrenaline, her nerves taut and spring loaded. Leslie had planned to take an inventory of the food she had today, but it took her a good hour before her hands stopped shaking enough to write a list.

  Leslie carefully made a list of the food she had, relying on memory, she didn't dare walk around in the daylight to check, she would have to wait until tonight to double check her list. She knew she would have to ration her food if she was going to make it through the next three months.

  She estimated that she had around forty two cans of assorted foods, a one pound bag of dry beans, a two pound bag of rice, a bag of flour and a small bottle of cooking oil. If she had to, she could eat the beans raw, she could live on them, but it wasn't just her in the house. She had to feed her cats, and she was almost positive they couldn't choke down a handful of dried beans. Leslie would have to save them the canned vegetables and soups, and live off of the rest.

  The water was still on, but it was only a matter of time before the City's water system failed, and she had gathered and filled every container she could find with water. In every corner of the house there were bottles, cans, plastic jugs, bowls, pots and pans full of water. She had filled the bathtub. The power was out, but she wouldn't have dared to use it day or night, anyway, they could smell electricity.

  She thought that she had done a fair job of estimating her supplies, but as soon as it was dark, she would take her candle into the pantry and kitchen and double check her list. For now, all there was left to do was wait for night fall. She sat quietly, her eyes closed, leaning back against the wall in her bedroom, in the exact position she had awakened in earlier.

  She could hear her heartbeat. She could hear an insect scuttling across the floor and stop just before one of the cats pounced on it. She could hear the blood coursing through her veins. She was afraid. She was afraid all of the time now. The window blinds were all drawn, giving the house an eerie twilight look during the day and made it pitch dark at night. She had a fish eye view of her front porch and yard from the peep hole in her front door, but it was all she needed to see.

  She really didn't want to see what was going on out there. Her neighbors were gone, they just had to go outside, to see what the ships and the aliens looked like.

  She watched as they were sucked up into the air, screaming and flailing their limbs, their eyes wide and astonished. She remembered how she ran into her bathroom and vomited after witnessing it. All of them were gone now. They had vanished into the ships. Sally and George, Marie, and Evelyn, Bill and Samantha, and the worse part for her, was that she'd had to witness it.

  There would be no more dinners out with them, no more lazy afternoons playing spades, no more chats over the fence about the weather or how to grow the biggest roses or where they were going for vacation this summer.

  Leslie had warned them when the ships first arrived, warned them not to go outside, to stay quiet, to avoid being seen, of being detected by the Grays. Her neighbors had been careful for the first two or three weeks, but as the streets grew quiet, boredom or their own curiosities got the better of them. Now they knew all too well what she had been trying to warn them about.

  Leslie thought about her son, Bert. Had he listened to her? Was he alright? She made herself believe he was, she had too. She hadn't heard from him since her brief call to warn him to stay indoors, to stay hidden. He was on one of his many visits to his Grandmother's farm in Maryland. He loved the large rambling farm that was far enough from the city limits to be country, but not too far from the civilized world to be too country.

  “Oh, Mama,” Bert said, laughing, “you don't believe all of that bullshit in the paper do you?” Come on Mama,” he said jokingly, “you're smarter than that.”

  “Just promise me that you'll stay inside Bert, at least until we see what's going to happen, okay?” Leslie pleaded. “Oh, alright Mama,” Bert said, not the least bit convinced that Leslie was right, but to placate her, he added “I promise, ok?” “Okay, then sweetie, I love you,” Leslie said and slowly placed the cell phone on the kitchen counter. Now it just lay there, with its' dead screen and its' batteries drained. It was just another useless reminder of her world before the Grays' arrived.

  The phones had stopped working almost

  immediately after their arrival, the orbiting satellites were the Grays' first targets, and their destruction effectively severed the communication lines world wide. As they entered the atmosphere, the power grids were destroyed.

  The massive ships descended, with powerful, arcing bolts of electricity emanating from the undersides of their crafts. This static discharge galloped along the power lines blowing transformers and shooting out of the wall sockets three feet or more.

  Houses and apartment buildings burst into flame, gutting out large swathes in the densely packed cities and suburbs. Firefighters were out in full force and the wailing of sirens filled the air during those first two days. The world cried out in unison. Tales of destruction filled the news channels and radio.

  The solar powered radio Leslie kept for

  emergencies broadcasted static on every station now and the television was useless without power. There was no news from the outside world except for the old newspaper she had picked up from her yard the day before she stopped going outside at all. That had been almost two months ago now.

  Each day was as long as a lifetime to Leslie. She woke up to the terrifying sounds of thunderous crashing sounds and bloodcurdling screams, some nearby, some far off and distant.

  The sound traveled farther now that there wasn't any traffic in the air or on the ground.

  Sometimes it was hard for her to tell just how far away the noises were coming from. It was so eerie not to hear the old familiar sounds of the cars on I-64 that passed behind of her house, or the steady stream of traffic on the Little Creek Highway going into Norfolk.

  The somehow comforting and annoying mixture of sounds that came out of the city were absent now. It had been replaced by a waiting silence that erupted into chaos and then silence again. Two months had passed this way and Leslie was terrified beyond much rational thought.

  The mall bathrooms were never the cleanest of places on any given day, but now they were dark horrors with an odor emanating from them that smelled like death itself.

  Kevin opened the door to one of the stalls and promptly puked. Feces and someone's brains laid splattered across the toilet seat and on the wall. The former owner of both laid crumpled on the floor in front of the toilet, a large bloody hole in the top of his head where the bullet had exited. The gun lay in the next stall where it had skidded to a stop after delivering the man's saving grace.

  Kevin let the flame of his lighter die out as he backed slowly away from the stall, wiping the vomit from his mouth with his dirt crusted sleeve.

  The darkness enveloped him, sinking into his eyes, into his mind. He imagined the man with the bullet hole in his head crawling out of the stall, grabbing his pants leg, pulling him towards him.

  Kevin flicked the lighter. The flame popped out neatly from the plastic case, illuminating only a foot in front of his face. Kevin's skin prickled and goose bumps erupted painfully over his flesh.

  He looked around wild and disoriented. Where is that fucking exit at? he thought. Panic rose in his throat, stretching it's dreadful steely fingers towards his horrified mind. He whirled around, nearly losing his balance in the dark and fetid wasteland of the men's toilet and located the door just to his right. Kevin quickly exited the bathroom.

  Kevin hugged himself tightly as he reemerged out of the blackness and into the dim light of the hallway.

  He ran unashamedly away from the putrefying horror, down the long, narrow hall to the welcoming expanse of the mall.

  Kevin fought to regain control over the terrible trembl
ing that had settled over him. He stood facing the hallway from the other end of the mall. He sat down hard as his legs gave one final weak tremble and gave way beneath him. He sat in that spot, unable to move.

  He stared fixedly down the hallway, half expecting the dead man to appear in it, the bloody hole in his head gaping and red. A lunatic grin on his face as he reached towards Kevin.

  “Snap out of it my man,” Kevin heard a familiar voice in his head say. His rational mind was taking over again. “You're gonna go bonkers waiting for that goon to come out of there.” Kevin dragged his eyes away from the hallway. “That's more like it,” the rational, reasonable Kevin spoke up. “Just take a deep breath, and calm down pal.”

  Kevin calmed himself enough to stand up and start walking through the mall again. He didn't care where he went, as long as it was in a direction away from that bathroom.

  The farther away the bathroom got, the better he felt. By the time he reached the escalators, halfway through the mall, he had regained most of his composure. Kevin then remembered, that this mall, as most malls do, had a fountain in it somewhere. Now, if he could just find it.

  Day 62—

  The city water was off now. Leslie knew it was only a matter of time, she was surprised it had stayed on for as long as it had. She had been living off of her emergency supply for the last week. She not only had to ration it for herself, but for her cats as well. She sipped it sparingly and gave them small sips. They had to survive another two months on what she had managed to put up.

  The bathtub was still full but she had used some of it to flush the toilet at night. Shaking her head at the thought, but knowing she couldn't keep wasting the water she might need to drink, she decided that she would just have to live with the smell of the overflowing toilet. Keeping the bathroom door closed helped contain the foul odor. Leslie hated going in there now. She held her nose tightly, but somehow the smell always managed to creep into her nostrils or worse, in her mouth as she gasped for air.

  The cats raced to the door of the bathroom every time she opened it, uncaring of the reeking odor coming out. They perched on the edge of the bathtub and lapped up water thirstily before she could herd them back out.

  Leslie stuffed towels under the door in a futile effort to keep the pervading stench confined to the bathroom, with little success. The whole house was beginning to reek.

  The cats, normally the most fastidious of beings, now squatted to do their business wherever they took a notion to, scratching at the floor as if there was invisible dirt there to cover their droppings. The cat litter had run out after the first month and the litter boxes were empty.

  Leslie cleaned up after them using the cleaning supplies she kept under the kitchen sink. She used the pine oil sparingly to make it last, mixing one part pine oil to ten parts water in a plastic spray bottle. The pine oil didn't mask the smell very well, but it was, she thought, better than nothing, as she scrubbed up the latest little pile of droppings that one of them had left for her. They weren't eating as much now, so that helped. She deposited the waste in a the half full garbage bag that sat next to the useless litter boxes. There were two full garbage bags of cat droppings in the laundry room.

  Leslie squeezed out a small blob of hand sanitizer and rubbed her hands together briskly. Thank God she had remembered to pick up more hand sanitizer. It saved having to use her water to wash her hands. Water was a precious commodity here on the outskirts of the city. She couldn't afford to waste even a drop of it. She fanned her hands dry and walked to the pantry, holding her candle carefully as she walked, careful not to let the flame gutter out. She walked inside and looked at the dwindling supply of canned goods on the shelves. She looked wistfully at a can of pork and beans, her stomach growling painfully.

  Leslie sighed and picked the can of beans up.

  Since the beans had pork in them, the cats would be more likely to eat them. She opened the can and carefully scraped out the contents into a large bowl. The three hungry cats had been weaving in and out between her feet as she prepared their food and pounced on it as soon as she had placed the bowl on the floor. Leslie cleaned the inside of the can with her index finger, relishing the flavor of the pork and beans. She poured some water in the can and swished it around to get the remainder of the contents that her finger couldn't reach.

  She drank the watered down pork and bean juice, and it quieted her growling stomach. Leslie was used to fasting for a day at a time, sometimes she fasted for several days at a time. She'd never had a healthy appetite. The cats had been on a healthy eating schedule before, however, and were beginning to show early signs of malnutrition.

  They had become listless and slept more, she'd noticed, worry creasing her brow, over the past two weeks. They had very little food left and Leslie supplemented their diet with canned soup and the canned vegetables she could get them to eat.

  Leslie's meals had consisted of dried beans for the last week, to save the canned food for the cats. The bitter taste kept her from eating as much as she needed, which was probably a good thing for her, since she had to stretch them out for another two months. The beans were filling, though, and although they were dry and bitter going down, they swelled as they absorbed the fluids in her stomach, and quieted it.

  Leslie diligently marked off each day on the calendar. The days began to blur together, each one was a carbon copy of the one before it. She slept two hours at a time, sometimes not even that. The daylight hours were filled with listening, watching, and thinking, thinking, thinking. The night time hours consisted of cleaning up after the cats, feeding herself and them, and reading her old Bible, or the yellowing newspaper and of course, with thinking, thinking, thinking.

  So much time to think. She had always wanted to slow down and just have time to think, time to live in her own skin again. Her job was hectic and stressful.

  Working nine to sometimes ten o'clock at night, every night, took its' toll on a person. It wasn't that she didn't enjoy her job as a writer, but the pressures of article deadlines and the rush to polish her stories for the final draft kept her on a dead run on most days.

  Leslie had always wanted to just have some time to relax, some time to think without rushing to the next appointment, the next meeting, or the next story, but this was ridiculous.

  Every moment was filled with thinking. Thinking about the past, thinking about the present, thinking about the future, thinking about the mistakes she had made, of the people she had loved, about going outside, about being at the beach or in the mountains and the feel of the cool fresh air on her face. She thought about Ralph, and she wondered if he was alright. Silent tears slid down her cheeks. The irony of her situation didn't escape her. There was time enough at last all right.

  Leslie picked up her journal from the nightstand where she had kept it to write down her thoughts or any story ideas that she thought of as she lay awake at night.

  She traced the embossed lettering on the cover with her fingertip. The soft brown leather was coming loose from the binding at the corners, showing small patches of off white through the fraying material. She used to love to write.

  Leslie was a fiction writer, and a good one if she had to say so herself. Her work at The Journal was regularly praised by her editor. “Keep this up, Leslie, and you'll get a raise,” he always joked as one of her stories gained recognition. The Journal's patrons loved the creative twists on her stories and articles. Writing earned Leslie a modestly nice paycheck, but she would have written for the sheer pleasure of it.

  In the words of a story, Leslie could pour out emotions she normally kept reserved. In a story, anything could happen. In real life, it wasn't always the case. There were actual limits to the real life, limits that she'd had to discover, sometimes painfully, over the years.

  In a story, a novel or even an article, Leslie could push beyond the confines of reality. She could transport herself to other places, other times, even other worlds, with the mere flick of a pen, or by tapping out a few word
s on the keyboard of her laptop.

  She turned the pages of her journal, waiting for that flash of inspiration, that jolt of anticipation that she always felt when she sat down to write. She snapped the journal closed. Nothing.

  Fuck, she thought, I don't even know where to start anyway. She was living in the wildest true story of all time. She doubted that any fiction she could write would top this. Writing, for her, was now as useless as her cell phone, her television and her laptop. Useless.

  She tossed the once beloved journal, carelessly, in her nightstand drawer and picked up her Bible.

  It was growing quieter outside. Days were

  passing by without any sounds at all and then suddenly the air would erupt with terrible screams and shouts, the scraping of metal on metal and then, quiet again.

  Someone went outside.

  She tried to read one of the novels she had on her bookshelf, but she couldn't focus on it. Her favorite stories, by those famous authors, held no interest to her now, not with the knowledge that some of those same authors were probably on one of those overhead ships.

  Leslie hadn't spoken a word for two months. Her cats looked at her quizzically, but quickly learned the hand signals she made. They sensed that they too had to be quiet. They didn't make their normal mewing sounds anymore. They had stopped rough housing and scampering all over the house. They existed in silence.

  Mystery, or The Mystery Cat, Leslie had nick named her, because of the strange location she had found her in when she was a kitten, (a parking garage, of all places) didn't even make her chattering sounds to the birds and squirrels that ran and fluttered around in the yard like she used to, venting her frustration and showing her indignation at the little trespassers on her turf. Mystery watched them now as silently and as solemnly as she watched the comings and goings of the Grays.

  Kevin walked down the frozen escalator to the ground level of the mall. A drug store ensconced the left side of the intersection as he reached the bottom of the escalator.