CHAPTER ONE
Dammerung 0 – Avan
He opened his eyes but they were already open and burning, grit rolling under his lids when he blinked them shut, catching and tugging at the dry skin of his corneas when he scrubbed at them with the flat of his palms.
He breathed, a shocked, desperate inhale. His chest constricted around the heavy pouring gush that was not air, forced it out and gobbled in more. He sank to his knees and pawed at his mouth to clear it, slumped onto his side and drew his knees close. His eyes bulged open, seeing no form or color or shape, and abruptly, there was air. It rode in on one agonal hitch, and then he sucked it down, unfolding his legs to drink at it fully with his mouth stinging. It was rank with smoke and a tattered ribbon of something terrible riding along its underside, but it was air.
Color burst at him by the third breath, a tumult of knuckled yellowish green legs punching up right near his face from a hash of brown floor, a flurry of deep green tongues wagging beneath heads of honey and purple hair. He cringed as they bent without warning over him, licking dry scrapes up his arm, and then they retreated to an agitated huddle above. A single blue eye, almost completely shaded by tangles of hair, and without a pupil, took no notice.
He was surrounded. They bent again and rubbed at him, then drew back. The eye did not focus. He turned, muscle by breath, until he was on his stomach. Once more they touched him and lifted, undecided, and he slithered forward an inch, another, and froze when they bent over him and fell away. He slid his arms in front, fingers digging into the loose, crumbly floor until he found traction, and dragged himself.
More legs. More tongues. More tousles of hair. Occasional eyes. He moved down a channel between two rows of legs, and he could see many more rows behind them. After a while he moved onto his knees and crawled, but there was no end to the channel in sight, and the tongues only questioned at his skin, the eyes never focused or the legs moved, and eventually he stood. Reaching out to a faceless, eyeless head, jutting out like the others at a strange angle, he ran his fingers down cool, papery skin. Part of the skin was missing just under a thatching of purple hair, and a small copper bulge gleamed in its absence.
He tore at the light green peelings and shoved the end of the ear of corn into his mouth, biting and swallowing, not chewing. He ate the filaments when he could not scuff them away fast enough. He gnawed at the skeleton when it was all that was left, threw it aside, and ripped another from the stalk. Acid churned up into his mouth from a stomach too ravenous to wait. He took a third in his hand and stripped it of its sheath, one with an eye, and realized the smell was still there, a suggestion of rancid in a declaration of smoke.
He finished stripping the raw, unripe meat from the cob, and dropped it with a flick of his wrist. His watch was gone. He looked at his wrist in disbelief, but it was gone, even the tan line it usually left behind. He kicked at the piling he had made on the ground, turned about, ran back the way he had come and walked back again, slowly, searching.
He was in a cornfield, and he did not know what time it was.
The watch was nowhere to be found. He had to get out now, right now before dusk fell, and find cover. He could feel stupid later about mistaking crops for some sort of one-legged monster, but he had never been in the fields, in any field, in fact had only seen them once on a career video Farming…Is It For You?, in which after countless, stultifying pan-sweeps of the camera over the fields, and the droning voiceover of an agricultural worker, he had determined it wasn’t.
He would have plenty of time to feel stupid later.
He looked up and down the row he was in, but each way trailed into the distance in a smear of green. The corn reached several feet over his head, and the sun was not in view. In the east and he would not have a problem. But the day just felt old, used up, the spent blue of the sky where it was not white or gray meaning it was afternoon, possibly late afternoon, and he was in the fields.
Shore I been stung, the gnarled agricultural worker had said, a hunnerd times. It was the only part of the video that had lifted them from fifth period stupor, amidst the freeze shots of tractors and flow charts of innovations in Earth irrigation. Their eyebrows lifted in sleepy disinterest at a hunnerd and were just settling back to their quarter-inch noddings to convince the teacher they were awake, when the agricultural worker rolled up his shirtsleeve. “Take it off, baby!” Yushua cheered, to giggling and a warning rumble, as the camera moved in with dramatic slowness, and then everyone fell silent at the knobbed scars protruding all over from his bicep like heads of nails.
Just gotta be in before dusk, he said, rolling his sleeve back down. And don’t be so eager at dawn.
The air changed from rancid to a thicker, soupier texture, and his lungs gave a warning heave. It was coming from behind him, so he wouldn’t head that way. Breaking into a jog, he ran down the channel and then pushed between stalks into another row, to see if the vantage was any better. The air lightened, returned to the manageable recoil of smoke and that other, undefined smell. It was growing stronger, but he could deal with it, just as long as it wasn’t that poison, and then he saw the hand.
He stopped mid-stride, caught himself on the plants.
“Hello?” he said. He could feel the word go out of him, the thrust of air around the syllables, the burn on his palate. But he could not hear his voice. Until then, all of this had had the telescopic focus of a bad dream, which it was, but the hand did not jerk at his unheard voice, when by rights the hand should have flickered up, attached itself to the arm of a figure saying something nonsensical to him. He would fly away over a gibberish of images, and wake up in bed.
The hand stayed, splayed in the dirt, a thick gold band on the fourth finger. A parenthesis of dirt opened under each blanched nail to a scattering of large red freckles along the flesh on the back of the hand, bracketed by the dark material of a sleeve covering the wrist.
“Mister?” he asked, feeling the vibration along his tongue and in his ears, “Ma’am?” he added, just in case. There was the slightest trembling at the pad of the thumb, and he almost laughed with relief and pushed into the next row to the form huddled there.
Sometime later, sound came back to him with the same dizzying explosion as color. The cornfield had scooped up into a hill toward a cooling sky, and he had climbed it, step after step, leaving the stickiness of sick on the plants he grasped for support. Just as he had stepped onto an impression of road in the dirt, two parallel ruts leading each way, and noticed the first flank of yet another cornfield on the other side, a detonation went off behind him. He whirled around and saw the jeekes behind him (east, he was headed east) and screamed at the blasting in his ears, the hot, poisonous gale that nearly whipped him from his feet, the sight of the jeekes falling in. The thud of one layer falling into the next, the heavier thud of both layers piling onto the third, the reverberation as they nose dived in on the next and the smoke and dust flew up over the setting sun, just above where the top layer of the jeekes had once been. He could hear it, behind the brown congestion of the air, the jigsaw of the jeekes collapsing in.
He heard the humming, moments after the smoke blotted the sun from view.
They were waking up. He did not hesitate. He ran south down the road, his skin tingling with the soft hum all around him.
Yushua had pierced his left ear with a serrate during Basic Composition. The acquisition of the serrate had resulted in his permanent dismissal from lab section, which had been his intention, and the perforation of his lobe had finished him for the only other class in which he was still enrolled. Residual poison in the serrate, which he had not removed from his ear after poking all the way through it, numbed the left side of his face to a drooling slackness, drawn up in lopsided cheer at the screaming, the blood, and the strong-arm the teacher used to push him out the door.
A small figure shot out of the corn and across the road to the other field. Avan ran.
Fong had wanted to be a flopper for Costume Day, and Avan had made the serrate out of cardboard, covered in gray tape, a foot long and rippled with nasty looking serra. It kept falling off the headpiece, the faceted eyes nudging it loose, faceted, which was one of Zoo’s words, until he cut a tight hole in the plastic and wedged it through. The wings were easier, the flying gray lengths made of sheets stretched over his shoulders by a thin wire frame, and the breeding set (red, Fong always picked red) dangling free down to his knees. Avan had been a flopper himself, but his costume was store bought, with a wind up noise pack in his pocket that would hum. He had done the best he could with what was in the house, and luckily Fong was content to do the humming himself.
“We’ll save it for Sadie,” he told Zoo, still giddy with the baby, tucking the costume into a box with a picture of Fong wearing it, smile stained orange with the candy he would be vomiting up all over himself in bed that night.
The humming of the floppers resonated down to the recoiling marrow in his bones, rattled at his teeth. It was growing louder by the minute, and soon the swarms would lift over the corn and drop down on him. They had watched Flopper Attacks!, during one of those endless nights when he and Zoo took turns bottling Sadie, and witnessed the hapless secondary characters and bit players being taken down while somehow the muscled main character and her strategically-undressed male companion had thrust their way through the buzzing hell unscathed.
“Follow them,” Avan had stage-whispered to Zoo, “I hear they live.” She snorted at him.
It wasn’t funny now, that dumb made-for-telly movie, because he knew he wasn’t the main character of anything, even less someone’s sexy consort, just a boy in a field who was going to die in less than twenty minutes if he didn’t find cover.
Take stock of your situation. Use what you have with you. And most of all, don’t panic! All of it useless, this advice from Youthful Adventurers, but the troop guide had been talking about bullies, strangers with candy, getting lost in the mall without ID. He had nothing to cover himself with, nothing that an inch-and-a-half long serrate could not pierce straight through with a quick and evil efficiency.
He could dig a hole, or try to cover himself with uprooted plants. He might as well learn to fly. A second and third figure jumped into the air in front of him, and he could see them now, dark figures crowded on the flapping leaves, warming up their wings to join the humming roar everywhere. In the darkened light, spangles of half-grown amber, turquoise, and red breeding wings refracted off the blue eyes on the corn. He hurtled past them, on this road that led stubbornly nowhere, although at least it led him there speedily as it sloped down.
He saw a building.
The ground shuddered under him as the hum reached a new pitch, sending electric shocks into the balls of his feet, up his legs and trunk, the hairs of his body standing straight up and each making painful connection with his clothing. He reached a new speed when the road rounded to the left and the cornfield there fell away to a deep cut of strata going straight down with the road curving under it, and there was the building, there was the building, there was the building!
The floppers jumped into the air, lifting from the rusted tractor he passed by, the pilings of tires, the span of dirt and yellow grass that spread out in a skirt of neglect around the building. The road had become so steep that his legs were pinwheeling, the weight of his chest leaning forward dangerously, ready to topple, but he could not fall, he absolutely could not, he didn’t care if he fell at his wedding or holding a baby or with a tray of sandwiches in front of a conference of godly 1 importants, he could not fall now. His mind was clean of anything but the door he was bearing down upon, the knob, no windows, one step up to a porch covered in a black rubber mud catcher, the kickings of dried dirt on the bottom third of the pale green paint, don’t trip. The humming changed to a buzzing, a purposeful sound, and he could see the floppers in the air beginning to swirl.
He leapt up the step and fell heavily on the door, his fingers sliding, finding purchase, turning the knob.
It was locked. He turned it once more in disbelief and then threw himself at the door, screaming, shaking, the sound lost not because he couldn’t hear again, but because the buzzing had simply grown that loud. He jumped off the step and ran around the back of the building, but there was no other door, only a garage door with a heavy metal cover, and that was locked too. He whirled around, saw the sky black with insects and gray with smoky dusk, and almost missed the trailer in his panic.
He was going to be like that man in the field.
No. He flew to the trailer, an old cream-and-dirt ‘Yago, wheels stuck in muddy ruts, an empty laundry line stretched from an antenna to a pole ten feet off. The floppers dived down upon him.
He went into the trailer bent double and rolled hysterically on the tiny space of the floor, beating and slapping at his face and arms and hair, slamming the door shut with his foot, the slap-slap of flopper bodies striking it from the other side. The door had been reinforced inside with a heavy covering, pinpricked with millions of stabs that bulged the last hard plastic layer of it but none stabbing all the way through.
A rain of carcasses fell from him when he stood up. There were more floppers in the dark of the trailer, he could hear them but not see them, and he ran his hands over the walls for a light switch. They dove at him and he fought silently so that they would not fly back into his mouth, his tongue numbing as he swatted and crushed and backed into a cabinet to kill the one that had just gouged into his back. The fingers of his left hand were cold with numbness, and he whacked flaccidly at a flopper sawing at his ear. He banged his ear into his shoulder and felt a vicious joy at the crunch.
They left him for a moment to regroup. He found the light switch and flicked it up, but no light dazzled the floppers into sleep. No electricity, and there was that smell again. The trailer was almost black but he could just make out a form on the bed, a settled heap in the kitchen area. The smell couldn’t matter now, he couldn’t let it, because there was nowhere else to go. Crazed floppers were pounding on the trailer from all sides, rocking it back and forth like a breeze.
He found the can of spray, attached to the wall by the light switch. He knew it by shape, the cubed plastic with the ribbed nozzle and safety key. The hum increased as the floppers grew excited, and just as they covered his head and hands again with the dry pullings of their legs and began to pierce him, he ripped the safety key from the can.
The discharge knocked him flat against the cabinets and temporarily lit the inside of the trailer. The can jerked from his hands and fell, spinning on a table and then plunging to the floor, where it smacked into a chair and careened over to the bed. The seething of floppers in the air stopped, dropped, and died. He jumped to his feet and stomped on them, spraying spit from his slackening mouth.
The light and gas fizzed with one last eruption from the can, and then there was silence. The floppers outside backed away, he could hear their humming fading. He stood there, shaking uncontrollably.
The smell. He considered the bed, remembered in the flash of light the round tube that had been on the table. He reached over and it was indeed a flashlight, with batteries that worked. He guided the bright yellow light to the bed and the outthrust of leg was just a twist of blanket, the bulge of head only a lumpy puff pillow. His feet broke over the backs of floppers as he went to the huddle by a small food cooler.
“Mom,” he said, for no reason but fear.
Magazines. Only magazines. The smell was coming from the cooler, but there was no electricity, he realized, the food must have spoiled within it. It was just the smell of rotten food, nothing more.
“Mom, Momma, Mom,” he gabbled, the pain in his back and face and hands and mouth swelling. He pressed his arms around him like an answering hug and sobbed without tears. He was too thirsty to make tears. He sniveled to the sink and turned the faucet, but there was no water. Of course. He opened a cabinet and found crackers, but there was no room in his body for food, only water would do.
There was a toilet. He popped open the lid and saw thin skids disappearing into the bend, but just as he reached out his hand in disgust and despairing to the water, the light trembled and he saw the tank. He slammed the lid shut and removed the top of the tank. The water there was clean, or was at least for a toilet, without skidmarks. Unbelievingly, he watched his hand go into the cold water and he drew it up to his lips and drank.
It tasted so good that it hurt. He drank and then he went to the bed and fell on it, with the flashlight flicked off and clutched to his side like a boar teddy. He breathed lightly of the foul air and thought he might sleep, or maybe he did for a while.
The bed had a musty smell when he buried his nose in it, but it was better than the smell of perished tuna, milk curdled with cheesy white droppings. He thought of that popped man in the field, seething with the fat larval bodies of a hundred species of insects.
He would not let himself think of it again, ever. He would leave after the dawn scurrup, find a map, find a road, and get home. Zoo had Sadie and Fong, Becky and Thecha too, and Becky would be no help with the little ones. He had no idea how he had gotten here, in this cornfield, but it didn’t matter. He had to get home.
Every time he closed his eyes, the darkness wiggled.
He wouldn’t make work the next morning either, he guessed, so the movers and shakers of the Skyline would have to do without their sandwich boy. He wondered if they could cope. They were blimps, all of them, with stuccoes of sticky notes in melted layers all over their cubes, their computers vanished under with heavy, spilling files, and chairs groaning at the thick seal of posture comfort seat pillows pushing at the side slats. Some called down to Mr. Grocer for his ‘Wichin Chips, number one, two, or three, and others called down for one and two, or two and three, (usually not one and three), and the rest ordered the Sampler, which was one, two, and three all together, a mass of a meal. Mr. Grocer had gotten tired of them calling down one, two, then three times in a morning to make a single order each time, so that the uniformly fat people in the other cubes would not hear them ordering three giant meals all at once, even though many of the others were doing the same. So he added the Sampler to the next menu for Avan to pass out, and Avan had had a hard time keeping a straight face as the movers oooh’ed over the Sampler’s print “three finger sandwiches, tuna on rye, peanut butter on whole wheat, boar strips on white with mustard, a small square of buttered cornbread with thinly-sliced Earth ham on the side and a full-size neighbor bag of chips, large soda and bottled water included” and the shakers picked up their phones right away to call downstairs.
It was funny for a lot of reasons, because Avan always did the “trash included!” service as well, and he knew not one of them shared the neighbor size bags of chips. Trash was included because movers and shakers felt bad at the mountain of wrappings that crested over their trashcans, slowly pickling in the afternoon hours, it made them feel like they had gorged, pigged out, it made them slink past the first floor gym on their way out to the rail home. And they weren’t gluttons, they were just so tired, they would go tomorrow. It was funny because the three “finger” sandwiches in the Sampler were the same size as the single- or double-order sandwiches, and everyone from Avan to the Skyline’s Board of Directors pretended they were smaller, just-for-taste servings. Everyone pretended the mayonnaise was that terrible negative-calorie spread that ruined the tuna, and what really made Avan giggle to Zoo was that it was still a pound of ham no matter how thinly you sliced it. Drinking water didn’t somehow magically dilute the soda. When Avan found himself resenting the movers and shakers for telling him off at the wait, for saying one day his metabolism would change too, for pondering with vague jealousy that it must be his genes, he fantasized in the service elevator about telling them that he might not have a political or economic or social opinion worth two flutes, he might not tap at a computer or make important phone calls, and he most definitely did not have a crucial business meeting with so-and-so of the Bureau at four-thirty sharp. He didn’t even have a high school diploma. But he did know his pants weren’t stretch, his shirt buttoned cleanly, and that it had nothing to do with his metabolism or genes, it had to do with the fact that he worked, worked, and they didn’t. If they didn’t like the wait, then they could waddle down the dusty staircase to Mr. Grocer’s counter and get immediate service instead of giving Avan the workout for them. Maybe they figured it was exercise by proxy, but you’d think for people with plaques and commendations in their files and so much money that they just didn’t think to tip, that they could figure out their exercise plan had, well, hit a plateau.
It was sad really, but they were 2s, and 2s liked to feel important, even when they just pushed papers on the trolley (no one walked) from one cube to the next all day long. When he was Becky’s age he had resented seeing their school buses go by on another field trip to the jeekes or the capitol or wherever. Now when he saw them, he just felt sorry for the kids inside, because those blue Promise buses led to nowhere but posture comfort pillows and Avan’s laden food cart. It was funny, through the eyes of a school kid and then the eyes of a workingman, how different the same things looked. When Becky sneered that one day he would be serving her sandwiches, he could only smile at her gently.
He closed his eyes then, thinking of the man on the top floor who had one day ordered two Samplers, and told Mr. Grocer they were for a meeting. He had learned the gentle smile from Mr. Grocer. “Of course, of course, they’re very popular for meetings,” Mr. Grocer said, so that the man could feel enormously clever, and then he had that smile as he hung up. It had Avan in fits.
So he’d miss work tomorrow, and maybe the day after. His body was swelling. There were lumps on his chest that didn’t hurt yet. His left hand was so numb he couldn’t move his fingers; they itched, coldly. Lying down was making the bulges on his back ache, and his right shoulder was freezing into paralysis. And his face, he’d been stung in the eye. He couldn’t remember it, but he shivered when he forced his right arm up, heavily, and ran his fingers over the pulpy slop. No flopper bites on his throat, a relief, since he didn’t have any antihistamines, but the one on his tongue could be a worry. He wiped slobber from his chin.
The humming dropped to a murmuring, then to a whisper. It died a few minutes after that, and Avan knew it must be full night. He clambered out of the bed, drank more water from the toilet tank, and opened the door. In three ungainly loads, he carried the spoiled food from the cooler and dumped it outside. A crescent moon sailed across the deep blue of the sky, dodging trenches of smoke in unbroken lines from the jeekes.
On the third trip, he realized his thighs were warm with wet. He had peed himself. Dumping the slithery plastic wrappings of stinking meat by the garage door, he headed back to the trailer. There had to be a change of clothes in one of the cupboards under the bed, and he was in too much discomfort from the flopper bites to be very angry with himself.
The clothes may have belonged to the man in the field. Or not. He went in and propped the door open, intending to air the place out a little. He turned the flashlight to the cupboards and bent down, feeling a fresh wave of liquid spill from him. Something wasn’t right. He snapped open the latches and dragged a handful of clothing up to the bed.
There was a mirror above the sink when he righted himself. His reflection wavered in the black-cracked glass, and he squinted at it with his one good eye, but the dazzles of light off the splintered bits in the mirror made it hard to see himself properly. A jumbling of bottles and tubes edged the circle of sink when he lowered the light. Some he recognized, a hydro-based cort cream that he could rub on the bites, disinfectants. He shifted the flashlight, letting the dead weight of his right shoulder pin it to his side, and carefully scooped up what he needed. Shuffling to the bed, he dropped medication and light to the mattress and began to work on his clothes.
The shirt was buttoned, it wasn’t his, and it was impossible to remove with the fingers of a hand numbed now past the elbow. He cursed and fumbled at them for a while, then yanked at one side hoping to pop the buttons off. Useless, and the exertion let loose yet another stream from his bladder, which headed down both sides of his pants. He worked at the button on the pants with no more success than the shirt, but he could at least do the zipper. He shambled to the toilet, thought better of it, and went to the door. Just because he wasn’t thirsty enough now to drink skid water didn’t mean he wouldn’t be later.
He reached into the gap of the zipper to pull himself out, but couldn’t find the y-front. Frustrated, his nails scratched over the skin of his underwear and found no purchase. He tugged at the top of the elastic, and then forced his fingers under the thigh band.
His penis was gone. He groped at himself, sifted through the hair, popped open the button of the pants by accident in his alarm. He yanked the pants and underwear down, ground his stiff muscles into a leap out of the clothes, toward the bed and the flashlight.
It made a yellow circle on his skin there, empty.
He screamed.