by David Arnold
“The earth is 4.54 billion years old,” said Kit. “Humans have been around for 200,000 years. The planet could blink and miss us. Our extinction would be a return to the status quo.”
Across the table, Nico winked at him; he winked back, and he felt tears coming on, as if his heart was too full of heart-juice, so now it was leaking from his eyes.
“I’ve been around my own kid too long,” said Bruno. “Forgot how goddamn arrogant you guys are.”
“Last chance,” said Nico. “Tell Gabe to stand down.”
“You think you’re the first eligible bachelorette to stumble into town? Don’t get me wrong, given all the things that have to go right in the baby-making department, a second option is not without value. But we already have a primary candidate. You’re expendable.”
The knife held steady in Nico’s hand. “You’re lying.”
“He’s not,” said Kit, and in his mind, he saw the town from an aerial view, as if watching from the window in his projection room: the sign welcoming them to Waterford, the street they’d entered it on, little murals all over, and run-down houses . . .
“What’s the reload time on a slingshot?” Nico asked.
Suddenly Kit knew what she was about to do. And if the panicky look on Bruno’s face was any indication, he knew too.
Lennon reached out, put a hand on her shoulder. “Nico—”
Time slowed, and when Kit closed his eyes, he saw his Dakota’s final hours, saw himself at her bedside, watching sweat pour out of her, wishing he could give his life for hers, as the Mackenzies had done for them. Just sit there, said his Dakota, over and over. Just stay where you are. And he held her hand, told her he wasn’t going anywhere. And now, eyes still closed, he saw himself at this table, saw Nico take a breath, knew she was about to lunge for Bruno, and like so many words this evening, Kit saw the path of the rock before it arrived: from the woods, zip, through the hole in the back of the church, it would pass over his shoulder, zip, across the table, and Nico, mid-lunge, would be hit in the gut. Unless . . .
Just sit there, Kit.
From the open window of his art classroom, he saw his Dakota across the street, on the roof of the Paradise Twin.
Please. Just stay where you are.
That face he loved, in a world so impossibly big.
Please.
In her hands, a potted flower, still growing.
Just sit there.
He smiled at her.
And then stood up.
the brightest room
The church dissolved, melted like snow in spring. The mural, too, everything gone, washed in light, an infinite vacuum of blinding brightness in every direction . . .
In the middle of it all, Kit sat at a table.
A woman sat across from him.
This is from my dream, said Kit, looking around.
The woman put her arm on the table, pulled up a sleeve to reveal a tattoo: Dreams are memories from past lives, it read.
He tried to shield the light behind the woman to get a better look at her face. At first he thought she might have been his Dakota, but she was too young. Then he thought she was Nico, but she was too old. She seemed both strange and familiar, like walking into the Paradise Twin only to find it filled with someone else’s stuff.
I think I’ve lived many times, he said. The same life, over and over.
The woman did not move. She did not speak.
Only—everyone dreams. So why am I the only one who remembers?
She raised her other arm to reveal a second tattoo, this one an image of concentric circles, too thin and too many to count. She pointed to the smaller circles in the middle of the tattoo—and then pointed to Kit.
I’m a small circle, he said.
She lowered both arms, said nothing.
Like eidetic memory. The smaller the circle, the easier it is to remember each lap. So then . . . they remember things too, just not as well.
Still, she was silent.
Where are we?
Slowly, the woman reached across the table, took Kit’s hand in hers. On the back of her hand was a tattoo of an old cinema marquee. Her other hand reached across the table now, and on it, a tattoo of a road winding up into the mountains. Kit looked into the woman’s eyes, and there he saw his beginning and his end, not Nico or his Dakota, but the two combined. The opening and closing of his circle.
Around them, the brightness imploded, broke into pieces as color flooded in.
I’m scared, he said.
As the woman began to dissolve, she smiled at him, turned her hand over, and just before she and the room both melted away, he saw in her palm one last tattoo: a small purple flower.
the completion of spacedog & computer
There was no pain.
Or it was something else altogether: his body was thunder, a radiant shock of I’m here and then I’m there, back and forth. Nico was leaning over him now, he was on the ground, I don’t remember falling. She lifted him into her lap, and when she pulled her hand back, he saw blood, cadmium red. “It’s a natural pigment,” he said. “It lasts forever,” and Nico was crying, told him not to talk, not to worry, and he felt like laughing—he wasn’t worried at all.
Behind Nico, the mural loomed large. That big bright moon lighting up the sky, technology from the olden days shining like stars, and out of nowhere, Harry trotted up, sniffed Kit’s face. “Good boy, Spacedog,” said Kit, the thunder receding in his chest. Harry turned, looked up at the mural, and Kit thought how he’d always loved painting the dog best.
Just like this.
Nico cried, held him in her lap like his Dakota had held him before bed, telling him his genesis story, her dangling necklace brushing his face. “She was on a bad date,” he said. “She was a midwife, and she was there for the baby.”
“Shhh,” Nico said. “Don’t talk.”
From under his shirt, he pulled out her necklace with its bright silver key. “Oh,” he said, lifting his hand, holding the key between the painted moon and the boxy computer and the black dog at the bottom. He closed one eye so the key was part of the mural, giant and shimmery. And he wished Nico would stop crying. He wanted to tell her how wonderful it was, how perfect that it had taken a piece of his Dakota to finally complete his painting. It’s okay, he tried to tell her, but when he opened his mouth, a thick flower bloomed, not purple but red, and he died, the first and only artist to ever truly finish anything.
NICO
Birthrights
In the Age of the Fly, there are many laws. Love, but do not fall in love. Sing songs, read books of lives fulfilled, but do not wish to fill your own. The world is large, the mile long, and time stands still. Here, in the ancient gasp of trees, rocks, rivers, sky, the young are left to their own devices. Their cities are ruin. Their families are dust. Their histories lost. And in the dark woods of the world, they find a parasitic element embedded in their most basic code: You will hurt others, and others will hurt you.
It has always been this way.
And while Nico’s brain had long accepted her birthright, her heart had not—until now.
Faces
She watched Kit’s eyes pass, blood on her arms and hands, the feeling of owing somebody your life and watching the death that paid for it.
He knew where he’d been sitting. He knew exactly what he was doing.
“Goddammit.” Bruno stood from the table, walked around to where Nico and Lennon had crawled to be with Kit. “Now see, if you’d listened to me, this wouldn’t have happened.” He turned to the woods, yelled for Gabe to open the hatch. “We need to get underground, a swarm will be here soon. And this mess is on you, you’re cleaning up whatever the Flies don’t get.” He pointed to the pool of blood still spreading on the floor.
Through tears, Nico saw the key in Kit’s hand; she took it, tucked it into her sid
e pocket, unsure why, but knowing he’d kept it safe for a reason, and so now she would too.
Harry whined, licked Kit’s face, as if the love of a dog might bring him back.
“We need to get out of here,” said Bruno, but before he could say anything else, a gunshot echoed in the woods.
Not a zip.
A bang.
Beside her, Harry tensed, growled. And while all eyes were drawn to the woods, hers were drawn to Bruno. “Gabriel!” he shouted, and she stared at him as he scanned the trees, his eyes full of fear. Again, he shouted his son’s name, and ever so gently, she shifted Kit’s head out of her lap, laid him on the stone floor, never taking her eyes off Bruno . . .
Now.
Do it.
She’d dropped the knife when Kit went down—
You don’t need the knife.
“Gabe!” Bruno yelled again, not noticing Nico begin to stand.
You are the only weapon you need.
“Gabriel!”
She made no noise.
Go.
He inhaled to call out again—and she went. Lunging fast, she grabbed his ponytail, jerked his head back—a split second of confusion in his eyes, a veiny pulsing throat—and then she punched it, hard, the base of her palm sinking into his Adam’s apple like a loose leathery-skinned drum. His body tried to fall, but she held his hair tight, and Harry was barking, trying to attack, Lennon beside her now, pulling the man back up, and Nico watched Bruno’s eyes become two dark moons. Vaguely, she wondered if she would hear the bullet or the rock from the woods before it would hit her, and when a second shot did ring out, she braced herself for pain, but felt nothing, only the anticipation of her birthright. As Bruno coughed for air, she leaned in close to his healthy ear, whispered, “Stronger than I look, motherfucker,” and when she bit, she found the muscle of the neck to be tough, stringy, raw, and something about the salty mess made her bite harder. She felt Bruno try to scream, but all she could hear was a sweet voice asking if she’d ever had a really good tomato. She bit harder, and now, another voice, new and closer and real . . .
“Hey.” A hand on her shoulder . . .
The touch of another person pulled her out of things; Nico unclamped her jaw, watched Bruno fall to the ground, hand on the side of his throat, eyes wide, body convulsing. What pieces of him were still in her mouth, she spat on the floor.
“It’s okay,” said this new voice.
When Nico turned, she found a girl with a red bandanna tied around her face: one eye was completely covered; the other stared at her with the look of someone well acquainted with pitch-dark places.
Dominions
In the dwindling flames of the firepit, light reflected off Kit’s blood, his body lit in strange ways. Across the floor, in the corner, Bruno lay in a pool of his own blood, one hand against the gash in his neck, the other against the wound in his leg, spewing raspy, animal-like noises.
That explains the second gunshot. The reason Nico had felt no pain: the bullet hadn’t come for her; it had come for him.
The new girl leaned over Kit’s body, pushed his hair off his forehead, tried to rub some of the dirt from his face. “We need to go,” she said quietly.
Her tenderness toward Kit, the way she touched his head . . .
“You’re Lakie,” said Nico.
A heaviness seemed to weigh this girl down, the unmistakable sign of having a hole where a person used to be. And Nico thought of her father: If he could see her now, would he regret his decision to send her to Manchester? How far had the un-blossoming progressed? Was he even still alive? She’d considered the inside-out darkness of living alone in the Farmhouse, but it was certainly better than dying there alone.
“We need to go, right now.” Lakie stood, wiped her eyes, pulled a torch off the wall. Then, to Lennon: “Can you carry Kit?”
“What about the other one?” Lennon pointed to the woods. “Gabe—”
“I shot him,” said Lakie. “Gabe’s dead.”
And that explains the first gunshot.
In the corner where Bruno bled, he gave a gurgling cough, his eyes glassy and wide at the news of his son’s death.
Gently, Lennon picked up Kit’s body, but when he started for the door, Lakie said, “Not that way,” and proceeded to lead them to the blown-out hole in the back wall. Harry ran ahead, jumped through first; the rest of them followed, and just as their feet stepped from stone to dirt and snow, behind them, those raspy, animal-like noises turned into a voice . . .
“‘Have dominion . . .’”
In the far corner, Bruno was on all fours, half dead, soaked in sweat, blood, urine, every ounce of his insides in a mad rush to escape. “‘. . . Over the fowl of the air . . .’”
A deafening boom went off beside her, and in the church, a bullet whizzed by Bruno’s head, cracking the mural behind him.
Mere feet away, Lakie had sunk the bottom end of the torch in the ground, and was aiming her rifle, steadying herself, and even though Nico didn’t know anything about guns, she could spot the stance of someone who did. “He’s going for it,” Lakie muttered into the rifle.
Going for it?
Lakie shot again. This time, the bullet caught Bruno in the shoulder, flinging him backward onto the ground. He groaned—and pushed himself back up.
“This fucking guy.” Lakie cocked the rifle, tried to pull the trigger, but nothing happened. “Shitty four-round magazine.”
In the church, Bruno fumbled with something on the floor.
“Okay.” Lakie pulled the torch from the snow. “Now we run.” She turned for the woods, and in the receding light, Nico saw the look on Bruno’s bloody face, heard the turn of a key in the trapdoor—a familiar metallic click—and she understood what he was going for.
Turning, she ran, Lennon just ahead of her, Kit’s little body flopping around in his arms, and in the lead, the bobbing light of Lakie’s torch cut their path through trees. On the ground, the quick image of a passing body sprawled at unnatural angles, Gabe’s head opened up, and in his hands, Goliath had fallen.
Behind them, a whirring . . .
Lakie’s torch stopped on a dime, and when Nico caught up, she found Lennon and Kit descending into earth, Lakie holding open the hatch door of the underground bomb shelter.
“I’ll go,” said Lakie. “You lower the dog.”
She scurried down the ladder as Nico picked up Harry. It was awkward, getting a good hold on him, but he tucked his tail and let it happen, and she said, “It’s okay,” and promised double-rationed granola as she lowered him into Lakie’s waiting arms belowground.
“Okay, come on!”
And now the whirring exploded; Nico was about to climb down into safety, but over the top of the hatch door, she caught a glimpse of the swarm fully released from its tomb, and she could not look away. It was what had happened to the whitetail, multiplied beyond measure, as Flies poured out of the catacombs in a feverish upward spiral, flailing all over the place but never too far from its core. Like an octopus, she thought, one brain to control the nervous system, and one for each tentacle, the swarm operated as one, with more noise, more rage, more organization than she’d ever imagined. Untold years of breeding with each other, eating each other, in the darkness of the catacombs, they’d patiently waited for a chance at resurrection. Now they had it, they were wasting no time.
Somewhere buried under all the sound, the voices of Lakie and Lennon, telling her to climb down . . .
The swarm spun in cylindrical fury, forming shapes around Bruno: a giant arch over his head; a revolving waist-high hoop; occasionally it broke apart, each to its own, a freestyle fly, before reshaping itself into a tornado with Bruno in its eye. She could see him in outline only, as if the Flies had formed a full-body suit, covered every inch of his skin. And his dark, pulsating form raised its arms to the sky, opened its mout
h as if to speak, but before words came, the Flies found this curious new opening. They filled his mouth, descended into the hell of Bruno, his body twisted into odd, alien shapes as the Flies filled him up like a balloon. And when he began to lift off the ground, Nico’s first thought was of some divine miracle, an ascension to heaven, that God had seen fit to spare him.
It happened slowly at first—as if the Flies needed a running start—but once they’d filled him substantially, it didn’t take long. The swarm carried Bruno straight up into the air, past the mural of twinkling technologies, through the hole in the ceiling, and his body became like the Flies, melted into its hive mind. Up and up the swarm carried him into the sky, and together, this nightmarish creation painted the night darker than it had been moments ago. Behind her now, in the distance, a second swarm on its way, drawn like sharks to blood, the smell alone is enough to make them crazy. Nico climbed down into the shelter, closed the hatch, and it occurred to her that she had witnessed an ascension, though not to heaven, and certainly not by the business of God. Wherever Bruno had gone, he’d been dragged there by his own fucking business.
PART SIX
IN
THE
GREAT
GLASS
DOME
NICO
Tombs
The shelter was cold and musty but clean, shelves stocked full of paints and brushes, a first aid kit, tents and gear, a few jugs of fresh water, jars of vegetables, even a few Metallyte pouches. There was a cot in the corner, which currently held Kit’s featherweight body.
Aboveground, the on-again-off-again sound of swarms, varying factions drawn to the blood of Bruno, Gabe, Kit. Nico lit some candles; Lakie passed around bottles of water, downed her own, and opened another. Lennon quickly caught her up on all that had happened since they’d last seen each other: finding Nico, the cabin, Echo, the parting of ways with Monty and Loretta.
