Authors: Paul Hughes
A gnawing hunger spoke in his belly, and although he was certain that there was food in the kitchen, his sleeping mother gave him all the reason to avoid it for a few more hours. He did not have the luxuries that other children had: two parents with a steady income, three meals a day, education, toys. He was content with Honeybear Brown and the window. He knew that there was a reason for all of this; there was a reason that his father had been taken from the planet and shot into another corner of the sky, and there was a reason that other kids’ fathers were still here. His Papa had been fortunate (unfortunate?) enough to prove his worthiness of such a divine mission at the outset of the Troubles. Other kids’ fathers would die here on Planet One.
“We all gotta die someday, Windy.”
Hunter hated when Honeybear Brown called him that. But of course, Honeybear Brown hated it when Hunter called him “Honey” or “Browny.” Nobody called Hunter “Hunter” except his mother and his father and Father Tristan. The children with whom he once played before the outbreak and quarantine had called him Windy because of his last name. He had called them buggers and crazies and harlots, a word that he did not understand but Father Tristan used to describe the dirty naughty ladies who did not wear enough clothes on the street corners, those dirty naughty ladies who grabbed men’s hands as they walked by and put them where men’s hands shouldn’t go on ladies, that place that you don’t talk about. Hunter felt sorry for the street corner ladies, their once-pretty faces now glittery with the silver, not that that made them less pretty, but once the silver set in, it was best to stay away.
“Hungry, Windy?”
Hunter glared at the bear, glared because of that voice he used, a high-pitched, shrill happy awful voice. Honeybear Brown always talked about the things that Hunter did not want to talk about.
“No. I can wait.”
Honeybear Brown shook his head, causing his one remaining eye to swing back and forth on the strands of thread that served as an optic nerve.
“You need to eat, boyo.”
“I can wait.”
The house began to shake with the distant resonance of another transport launch, and Hunter ran over to the window, pulled the drapes back for the first time all day. It was not truly dark yet, more of an awkward twilight, but the few remaining streetlights were on, and the few remaining “harlots” were underneath them, smoking cigarettes, drinking from bottles in brown paper bags. They looked up in unison at the transport in the sky, flashing by faster than any of their heads could track, then went back to business as usual, smoking and drinking and looking for men to touch where they shouldn’t touch.
Honeybear Brown joined Hunter at the window. The boy looked out into the nothing of the world, his only friend climbing up onto the sill.
“Something’s gonna happen.”
Honeybear Brown looked up in silence.
“The little girl. She won’t be there tomorrow.”
“How do you know?”
“I know. Something’s gonna happen.” Hunter picked up Honeybear Brown and pulled the drapes shut again, plunging the room into a darker dark.
“Where’s she going?”
Hunter thought for a while, sat back down on the floor in front of the dead television set, the bear on his lap, his mother muttering something in her sleep from the safety and non-comfort of the kitchen tabletop that would leave a faint criss-cross pattern on the side of her face whilst she slept.
“She’s going to the stars. Just like Papa.”
Honeybear Brown hugged the boy, nodded.
“Just like me.”
“It’ll be okay, Windy. They won’t make you go yet. It’ll be a few years before—”
Honeybear Brown slumped to the floor at the sound of Helen Windham’s footsteps coming down the darkened hallway. In one heartbeat, the stuffed bear had been animated, vital, the only link Hunter had to communication with the world, and in the next, the bear was nothing but a tattered toy again. Hunter shoved his fabric friend underneath the couch, where his mother wouldn’t be able to find him. She never looked under the couch. She never looked at anything anymore.
“Hunter?” Helen broadcast her quiet inquisition into the black room, just in case the boy had fallen asleep. She squinted her eyes, tried to excise his form from the tangle of void that was the living room. “Television on.”
The ancient television snapped to life, although there was nothing but white static on the screen. It was enough illumination for Helen to be able to find her son, sitting quietly at the edge of the couch as he always did. It was always unsettling to catch his gaze from across the weakly-lit room... He had old eyes.
“You hungry, baby?”
She felt it then, that gaze in combination with something deeper, something ineffable. She felt the touch of his mind: such calm, such reassurance. He loved her, she knew, even through her depression, her naps at the kitchen table, the way she would sometimes purposefully drag him painfully around the Catalyst Compound gates. She knew that he understood, and he forgave her for being the young bride of a soldier. He forgave her for giving birth to him, although somehow he knew he fucking
knew
what that meant for him. He would die somewhere out between the stars, just like his father. He knew, somehow, and she saw that, felt that, in the brief moment of silverthought that he projected at her.
Hunter nodded.
She picked him up, held him close, saw the arm of that old ratty bear sticking from underneath the couch, but she said nothing. She knew that he needed that bear more than he needed her most days.
“Come on. Let’s have some supper.”
He squeezed her around the neck, and she felt him smile. They went to the kitchen, where she made him a hot dog. He would sleep well that night. She would not. She would be too busy thinking about her husband, somewhere out there in the black. She would think about the days before it began, those simple days when
the trucks drove through the town, filled with soldiers with stern faces and jaunty berets and scars and sometimes even blood. In the last days of the war, the trucks drove through the town, stopped for fuel and water and food for the soldiers, and sometimes those soldiers with jaunty berets and stern faces would turn into innocent boys on the wrong continent, just boys with big guns and insatiable appetites both for the local delicacies and the local “delicacies.”
Helen Lofton did not consider herself a sexual being, besides losing her virginity to an overeager prick when she was sixteen just so that she could get the act over and move on to bigger and better things. She didn’t understand what the big deal about sex was until after the war when the trucks started rolling into town, and the soldiers took over.
Walking down the street to the cafe, her copy of “The Stillness Between” clasped in the brown leather gloves that concealed her fragile and shaking hands, she turned to look at the rumble that approached from behind, a great olive green military transport, wounded and tired boys hanging from the canvas walls of the back, wrapped in bandages soaked through. Most of the boys stared at her with a nonchalant desire, more concerned about not bleeding out on the trip to the triage than with getting their dicks wet with a local.
She could feel her heart in her chest, the beats crawling up into her throat and shaking tears into her eyes that threatened to spill over. She was just a schoolgirl holding a paperback on a sidewalk in the dying days of a continental war that had spilled over to include the impossibilities deep within the planet. These boys had been to the front. They had seen their own torn apart by silver fire and armies of light. She felt so young. So sanitized. In their eyes, she saw the human condition in these fading years: resignation and submission to a higher power.
“Excuse me?”
She turned and looked into him then, those engulfing, all-encompassing eyes that reached out at her, and she felt the touch for the first time, the touch of those exposed to the creature at the center of the world. He was in bloodied battle dress, dirt-caked face the perfect canvas upon which his blue-white eyes were painted.
She was horrified to find her voice locked up just as her hands often would, and she stumbled over nonsense syllables before she finally found her eloquence again. “What?”
He grinned. He was holding something in his hand, two somethings that she identified as envelopes. Letters. Dirty white envelopes held in outstretched soldier grasp.
“I’m sorry, but... Could you mail these for me? I don’t know if—”
The concussion of the explosion threw them both to the ground as shrapnel tore apart the storefront beside them. The transport that had been driving by had been hit by a rocket. Helen was screaming, her eyes useless because of warm liquid copper pouring into them from a gash on her forehead. Other transports screeched to a halt, able-bodied soldiers pouring out, weapons raking the building from which the rocket had been fired. Another explosion down the street, another transport torn apart before the sniper was dispatched.
He helped her to her feet, wiped the blood from her eyes, wiped matted hair back from her face. She smiled through the shock, and he returned in kind.
“Let’s get that wound taken care of.”
She reached down, picked up the blood-spattered letters. “I’ll—I’ll mail them as soon as—”
He took the letters from her, wadded them up, threw them into the street, into the tumult of soldiers and fire and corpses.
“Let’s get that wound taken care of.”
The street was a tumult of activity in the aftermath of the rocket attack. The trucks had stopped rolling along its length, now mostly abandoned as the boys from the war searched the building from which the sniper had struck. His body was thrown from the window and made a hideous splash of vitality on the pavement below.
Helen wiped the blood from her eyes, wiped, kept wiping. The young man with the letters was holding her up, her legs threatening to buckle with each hesitant breath she took. Shouts, gunfire, the world becoming confusion. She wanted to sleep, but he held her.
“Medic!” She heard him shout from somewhere out there, somewhere that was on fire and silver. She also heard the barked reply that alluded to forces first, civilians second if ever. He held her, held her up, and her eyes swung back, forth, back in an arc that she could not control, finally settling on a vision from across the street, a man with a wound not unlike her own, extending a pistol and
firing three times, the satisfying ratcheting click shuddering through his outstretched and locked arm as nickel needles tore through the mind and soul but mostly the skull of the sniper’s wife. She fell to the sidewalk, lifeblood a geyser that went well with some child’s chalk Picasso attempt, washing over it and dissolving that morning’s pre-lunch activity.
Jean Reynald turned the gun to the two children, the older boy holding his brother before him, their faces tear-wet and blank at the sight of impending end. He could dispatch them both with one shot, the way they were standing. He could have, and he should have, but he did not. He holstered his weapon.
“Take them in. Send them up.”
He noted with a disconcerting satisfaction the widening of the older boy’s eyes as he heard his fate. He seemed to grasp the younger boy even tighter, and the younger boy responded by crying loudly, confused and alone and about to be sent to the stars.
Reynald surveyed the city street before him, soldiers running hither and thither, civilians peering from doorways and storefronts and more cautiously from apartment windows on the second third eighth seventeenth floors. Men were talking to him, but he was not listening. The medic was trying to press a bandage to his head, but he did not feel it. He saw his second Windham across the street, tending to a wounded civilian girl. He saw the remains of the shattered troop transport and its inhabitants smeared across the street. He thought it was a beautiful time of day, the street itself mostly in shadow from the angle of the sunlight, and he thought about another time and another place, somewhere he had never been but somewhere that he could always remember, a beach, kneeling in the sand, shaking his fist up at some shapeless black thing