by Kyle Noe
“Don’t look at that,” Eli said, nudging her as to the bodies. “Y’ hear me? It is not good to focus on the bad things, girl.”
“What else is there?” she asked.
“You always been a professional crepe hanger?”
“What does that mean?”
“A glass half empty kind person,” Eli explained.
“I’m just being realistic.”
“Well, it ain’t all bad, okay. I mean, we’re alive, aren’t we?”
“For now.”
“For now is the only thing that matters at the moment. We’re alive, and we’ve got a chance. You saw what happened back there. We walloped those suckers good. We hurt one of their ships!”
She nodded, recognizing the truth of this. “So… where are we going?”
Eli shrugged and smiled. “Hey. I’m just along for the ride.”
She leaned back and lay her head down against her backpack. Her gaze wandered to the sky as she focused on a smattering of stars and what might be the engines on a spacecraft as it drifted up into space. She wondered whether her mother was somewhere up there, and then, after counting dozens of stars, she drifted off against the sound of the trucks as they drove on into the night.
SAMANTHA WOKE as the truck came to a grinding stop. Squinting, she blinked and looked up to see that it was early morning, the sun rising faintly in the distance. Glancing back, she saw Eli was awake and in a crouch, staring at something on the horizon.
“What? What is it?” she asked.
Eli didn’t respond, he just pointed. She pushed herself up and looked over the edge of the truck’s bed to see that the convoy had stopped in the middle of an intersection. To the left and right was more blacktop, asphalt that spooled off between vast expanses of fields that had gone to sea. Dead ahead, however, was a small town. There were figures visible on the road into the town. The small frames of what looked like children.
Samantha turned and traded glances with Hawkins. “What do you think?” she asked.
“I think we need fuel,” Hawkins replied, scanning the road ahead.
The trucks pulled forward, driving slowly over a pockmarked section of road that bisected clusters of small homes on smaller lots, a bunching of small businesses, a church, and several municipal buildings connected by a wooden boardwalk. Samantha noted that a handful of children were working on what looked like a crude metal statue near the end of the boardwalk. They were busy stacking and inserting pieces of metal into the statue.
The trucks thundered ahead and Samantha took in the faces of the children standing on either side of the street. Some were on the boardwalk, others were peering through windows on the buildings. Perhaps two-dozen girls and boys were close by, most ranging in age between seven and fourteen, several waving as if the trucks contained victorious soldiers just coming home from a war.
“I’m gonna ask the obvious here,” Eli said under his breath.
“Where are the adults?” asked Samantha before he had a chance.
The trucks pulled to a stop at a deserted gas station at the far end of town. Samantha grabbed her backpack and dropped down from the truck with Eli, stretching her legs while the resistance fighters checked the pumps and did a quick circuit of the station lot and the only building still standing.
Hawkins emerged several seconds later, carrying a handful of junk food. He tossed a few bags of chips to Samantha and Eli who quickly devoured every last morsel. Samantha watched one of the resistance fighters rise after checking the gas pumps and shake his head, telling them there was no gas available.
“Awesome,” Hawkins said. “No fuel.”
“Not true,” said a girl’s voice.
Samantha pivoted to see a young girl, maybe eight or nine years old, with unruly, brown hair, dressed in jeans and a dirty, thrift store T-shirt that was two sizes too big. The T-shirt read “Maybe the hokey pokey is what it’s all about.”
“You’re wrong,” the girl said. “We’ve got fuel.”
“Your folks around, young lady?” asked Eli.
The girl smiled. “Nope, but Marcus is.”
Before any other questions could be asked, the girl turned and began skipping back down toward the houses and shops Samantha and the others had driven past. Samantha hustled after the others who were clipping behind the girl. Everyone traversed a gravel verge that lay aside the main street. Samantha watched the girl throw up a hand.
“It’s just up here!” the girl shouted, gesturing at one of the houses, a two-story, brick residential home, that the trucks had passed on the way in.
“What’s your name?” asked Hawkins.
“Lilly!” the girl said, preening before turning back and bounding toward the house.
Samantha stopped. She spotted something shiny on the ground. Stooping, she plucked up a piece of metal that was as long as a man’s finger. One end of the metal had a little vaned tail, while the other end had been sharpened to a point.
“Ouch!” Samantha said, pricking her finger on the point.
Dropping the piece of metal, she looked and noticed something she hadn’t seen on the drive in. Through gaps between the houses and buildings, open lots and fields could be witnessed. Some of the fields were cluttered with cars and various machines, while others were filled with large stones and wooden posts jutting haphazardly out of the soil. Before she could process this, Eli whistled and she followed the others up onto the sagging front porch of the brick house.
There were several other children milling about on the deck, but they soon melted away as the group moved through the front door. Samantha’s nose scrunched as foul odors assaulted her. The inside of the house, which was choppy with a low-ceiling, smelled like rotten food and old socks. Sounds arrested her attention, and she glanced to her right where there was a sunken living room with a bevy of couches and chairs and a large plasma-type screen bolted to one wall.
A group of kids—three boys and two girls in their teens—were busy playing an old-school shoot-em-up style video game. Samantha listened to the sounds of the game and watched the kids high-five each other and talk smack while blasting apart the cartoonish bad guys on the screen.
“That’s him,” Lilly said, pointing at one of five, a rangy, fair-haired boy who was bumping fists with one of the girls after having mowed down a half-dozen baddies. “That’s Marcus,” Lilly added. “He’s sorta in charge.”
Samantha was alongside Hawkins and Eli. The three moved forward until they were standing aside the five teens who barely seemed to recognize their presence.
“You Marcus?” Hawkins asked.
Marcus nodded, grunting as he tapped at his controller, blasting away at the villains on the screen.
“We could use a little gas,” Eli said.
Marcus looked over and yawned. “Who are you?”
“We’re from the resistance,” Hawkins said.
Marcus pointed to the screen at the soldier he was manipulating who was firing an imaginary machine-gun. “You like them? You soldiers?”
Hawkins nodded, and Samantha blurted out what everyone was thinking. “Where are your parents?”
“Oh, they’re gone away,” Marcus said, returning to his controller.
“Where?” Samantha asked.
“The spiders took ‘em.”
“The aliens?” Eli asked.
Marcus cocked his head and flung a look at Eli. “Nah, fucking Santa Claus took ‘em. Course it was the aliens, bro. Haven’t you noticed they took the adults away? Everyone ‘cept for old people and kids. They just sent down those metal machines and the shiny hoses, or whatever they are, and just snatched ‘em all away up into the skies one night.”
“How long ago?” Samantha asked.
Marcus shrugged, and Hawkins cleared his throat. “Yeah, so… about that fuel...”
Marcus waved a hand. “There’s a garage at the far end of town. Take as much as you want.”
Samantha, Hawkins, and Eli exited back onto the porch where Lilly was waiting
for them.
“So, you talked to him, right?” she asked giddily. “Did Marcus totally hook you up with whatever you needed or what?”
Samantha nodded in silence and Lilly squealed. “He’s awesome, isn’t he?”
“How long’s he been in charge?” asked Hawkins.
“Since the bad things happened.”
Eli and Hawkins trudged back to the trucks, but Samantha paused. She spotted several children darting into buildings.
“Where do you sleep?” she asked.
“Wherever we want,” Lilly replied.
“Where do you get food from?”
“We trade… y’know… barter.”
“With what?”
Lilly’s face fell, and Samantha noticed a single droplet of sweat drop down from her forehead and meander down her cheek.
“Marcus said I’m not supposed to tell.”
“How come?”
“On account of it being a secret and all.”
The wind cooed, blowing Lilly’s pin-straight hair that shrouded her face. Samantha lowered her backpack and opened it. Inside was a collection of dolls and a few photos and myriad trinkets and keepsakes. She pulled out a small mirror and a bright red hair clip and pulled back Lilly’s hair and secured it with the clip. Then she turned the mirror around so Lilly could see. The young girl gave a bright smile.
“You like it?” asked Samantha.
“I love it.”
Samantha smiled, and Lilly hugged her.
“What’s your name?”
“Sam.”
“Thank you, Sam. It’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever given me.”
Samantha waved and then turned and ran after Hawkins and Eli.
AT THE TRUCKS, Samantha climbed aboard as Eli looked back to see a dozen children standing in the street, watching them.
“I think there’s something wrong here,” Samantha said.
“You ever heard of an old book called Children of the Corn,?” asked Eli.
Samantha scrunched her nose. “Nope.”
“Good. Forget I mentioned it.”
The trucks drove off down the street. Samantha caught looks from the other children who were watching her from the windows in the building while others ducked down into storm doors at the rear and sides of the houses.
The trucks took off, but had only driven a few thousand yards when they jolted to a stop again. Hawkins rose and looked up, and his face fell. “What the hell?”
Samantha looked out to see that the road ahead was blocked with debris. Pieces of rusted-out farming equipment, strands of barbed wire, lengths of wood and other scrap. And the ground on either side of the road was similarly choked with trash such that it was impossible to drive any farther.
Hawkins pointed to the end of the road where a half-dozen buildings were visible. “We’re gonna have to hump it,” he said.
Samantha and the others dismounted the trucks and dodged the debris on the road. They were soon standing before a collection of municipal buildings. There were two metal-roofed, one-story structures, several old sheds, along with three tractors, and two dump-trucks, and a menagerie of metal snow-clearing equipment that was beginning to rust.
Hawkins popped a lock on one of the sheds to reveal a handful of fifty-gallon fuel drums. Several of the resistance fighters entered the shed and tipped the drums over and began rolling them outside.
“We good to go, captain?” Eli asked Hawkins.
Hawkins nodded. “Should be enough to get us to Shiloh.”
Samantha’s nose scrunched. “What’s Shiloh?”
“It’s in a relatively safe zone. We lay low there between runs. It’s one of the few places that hasn’t been hit by the Syndicate.”
“How come?”
Hawkins smiled. “You’ll see.”
Minutes later, Samantha and Eli helped roll one of the drums back down the road as several of the other fighters cleared a small lane through the debris. Soon, Hawkins and his men were siphoning gas from the barrels into their trucks. They were making good time, but it would likely take another fifteen minutes before all the trucks were filled. Bored, Samantha wandered off into an adjacent field, one of the ones drowning in debris and marked by wooden posts and large stones.
Samantha began hopping from stone to stone, counting as she went, playing a game. She alighted onto a collection of wooden pallets that afforded her an excellent view of the small town and the surrounding lands. She could see the downtown area, including the roofs of almost every building along with what lay out beyond the main street, a small airport complete with what looked like a metal Quonset hut. She squinted, surprised to see that all the small aircrafts were badly damaged.
She took a step, and that’s when she noticed it.
The roofs of the buildings were marked by holes, lots of holes. And the streets and everything in sight were gouged as if some torrential storm with gigantic hail had recently battered the area. She wondered why she hadn’t noticed any of this before.
Small forms were visible down in and around the buildings.
The town’s children.
Dozens of them could be seen hastily crawling down through storm doors, then slamming them shut. Where the hell were they going?
Samantha stepped from her perch and lost her footing and fell to the ground. She landed next to one of the stones, and the impact jarred loose a collection of dirt and gravel to reveal a body. Samantha bit back a scream, unable to tear her eyes away from the corpse of a recently deceased woman who was lying before her in a shallow grave.
The woman’s flesh had the pallor of bleu cheese and had been punctured in numerous places. Samantha noted a piece of metal jutting up out of one of the wounds. She eased down to her left and clawed at the earth by another stone and recoiled when she spotted a flesh-ragged hand hidden under a few inches of dirt. She rose up, realizing the field was a graveyard. A hand suddenly grabbed her shoulder, and Samantha screamed, turned, reflexively ready to throw a punch at—
Lilly.
The young girl from before. The one who was still wearing the red hair clip in her hair. Lilly’s omnipresent smile had melted away. Her eyes hopped from the dead woman to Samantha.
“What’s going on, Lilly?”
Lilly looked into the sky, her tiny eyes sparkling with fear. “They come at all hours now. Not every day, so you never know when. The ones from the sky. At first, they came to take… to take the older ones away, but now they just come to kill.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I wasn’t supposed to tell, but that’s how we survive, Samantha. That’s how we get the things we need to trade with other towns. It’s the stuff that’s left behind after the ‘Unluckies,’ that’s what Marcus calls them, are killed in the storm.”
“What storm?”
“The metal storm,” Lilly replied, her voice barely more than a whisper.
Samantha’s mind snapped back to the piece of metal she’d found earlier. The one that had pricked her finger. Before she could connect that with what Lilly was saying, a bell started ringing in the distance. A loud, clanging sound that caused Lilly to place her hands over her ears.
“RUN!” she screamed at Samantha. “THEY’RE COMING! RUN AND TAKE SHELTER!”
Lilly galloped in one direction and Samantha in the other. She fumbled through the field, running raggedly back toward the trucks, tripping over what she could see were the graves of other people who’d died in the town and been dragged up here and buried.
She jumped onto a boulder and saw that Eli and the others could hear the bell, but seemed nonplussed.
“We need to leave!” Samantha shouted, jumping down, running forward.
“We’re not finished,” Hawkins replied.
“SOMETHING’S COMING!” Samantha screamed.
Eli glanced at her. “What’s gotten into you, girl?”
Before she had a chance to respond, the sky was ripped by a howling sound as some large, unseen craft knifed by overhead. Sam
antha and the others gaped up and caught the faintest hint of an alien glider rocketing through the clouds. The vessel swung forward and then began a slow circuit, headed back toward the town.
“LET’S GO!” Hawkins shouted.
Eli grabbed Samantha, and they boarded the trucks that smoked off back down the street. Samantha crawled toward Hawkins, pointing toward the airport.
“That way! You need to go that way!”
The driver reacted, monkeying the wheel and roaring down a side street. Two of the other trucks responded, but one failed to notice and drove in the other direction. Samantha grabbed the side of the truck and watched the airport coming up fast.
A subsonic BOOM! echoed overhead as the alien glider returned.
One of the other resistance fighters raised his rifle, but Hawkins shoved the barrel down.
“THEY’RE TOO HIGH!”
Samantha watched something on the craft’s underside open, and then the sky filled with an innumerable number of black objects. For an instant, the sky was so full of what looked like hundreds of thousands of black spikes that midday was turned to dusk.
“METAL DARTS!”” Eli screamed.
Samantha had never heard that word before, but she saw the spikes as they fell out over the town, raining down over the houses, crashing through roofs and tearing holes in the roads.
WHUMP! WHUMP! WHUMP!
The spikes thudded down, atomizing everything in sight.
Samantha watched, too terrified to speak, as the spikes gained on the last truck, the one that had fallen behind the others. The truck’s engine thundered, but it couldn’t make up enough ground, and soon it was overtaken by the black rain of flechettes.
The metal pierced every inch of the truck. Samantha saw the driver die, his body slumped over the wheel as the truck veered sideways, clipped another car, and burst into flames.
She looked up and realized it was only a matter of seconds before the metal spikes dropped down over her. Eli saw this too and slammed his hand against the truck’s side panel.
