by Lucy Taylor
Anikka hunkers against the empty water tank as Baris twists the lock on Salvation’s inner door, two feet of reinforced concrete and steel leading to a mudroom with a twelve-foot ladder leading topside. He starts to climb.
Outside the scraping and cracking have begun again, just like last night after the generator failed. Persistent, rhythmic. Something or someone trying to get in?
“Wait!” she says.
He looks down. “What?”
“We don’t know what’s out there.”
“You’re right. But we don’t have a choice.” His lightly accented voice drifts down to her, pure Gujarati, and she’s reminded why she loves him, his steady, calming voice and fierce black eyes, his stoic acceptance of the unimaginable. They’d met at the lab where Anikka’s father worked (works she tells herself) in Los Alamos, New Mexico. It was Baris who’d helped them design Salvation, the name her father gave to the forty-two feet of galvanized corrugated pipe buried fifteen feet down in the mountains near Raton Pass west of Chama.
“The end has to come at some point,” her father said, while he was laying out the plans for Salvation. “The only question is what form it comes in.”
Lucky us, Anikka thinks, now we’ve got the chance to find out.
Outside the sounds are sharper, more invasive. Anikka looks up at Baris on the ladder. “If it’s something horrible, something we can’t survive, remember what you promised.”
He pats the .9mm Luger on his hip. “You first. I’ll be right after.”
She feels absurdly comforted.
He engages the automatic lift mechanism. The camouflaged blast hatch powers open to a cacophony of snapping, creaking. Bones breaking on a torture rack, Anikka thinks.
As Baris exits, she begins to climb. A moment later, his laughter shocks her. “A tree fell across the hatch. Just branches, that’s all it was!”
She exhales.
Topside, strands of hazy light filter through dusky, dog-turd clouds, but around them spread the piñon-juniper woodlands, unchanged as far as she can tell. She takes a shallow breath. Frowns. The air has an acrid taste now, a pungent smoky scent, richly fertilized soil underlain with the tang of decay. Baris sniffs cautiously, his right eye twitching as it does when he’s confused.
“Smells strange,” he says.
“Maybe the fires around Denver.”
“Yeah. Chemicals.” He mutters something in Gujurati. A prayer, Anikka thinks, and wishes they’d had time to stock the gas masks.
Once it started, there wasn’t much time for anything. The first wave of bolides struck the northern hemisphere the day after Memorial Day in the States, late May of 2021. Fireballs at -14 brightness, twice as bright as a full moon, rained like missiles over huge sections of the planet, even as debate still raged whether they were rocky or metallic asteroids or something intelligent, an alien attack. No one agreed. Locked inside Salvation, while the ham radio still worked, they got news of inconceivable destruction—central Asia, Alaska, everything from Minnesota down to Mexico and east was sheeted in walls of fire hundreds of feet high.
Annika has steeled herself to emerge into a charred moonscape, the Old Earth reduced to ash and bones. What she sees now is so contrary to her expectations that her reeling brain struggles to accept it—darkly verdant hillsides thick with Ponderosa pines, junipers and aspen whose silver bark glows like polished pewter.
“How is this possible?” she gasps.
“Who knows? We got lucky. Let’s find your dad.”
They hoist their packs, check the compass, and head southwest toward Los Alamos. If Anikka’s father’s still alive, he’ll be waiting for them.
A few miles on, they find a road that the topo map tells them will intersect with 285 just west of Chama. A breeze picks up. The swirling air grows dense with tiny particles. Anikka tells herself it’s pollen from the golden chamisa that crowd the verge. Baris starts to cough, which is when she hears the voices. She grabs his arm, signals him to hush.
People coming.
A woman’s querulous voice and then a harsh male one. Anikka can’t make out the words, but she knows anguish when she hears it. They slide among the trees and crouch as a small band, four men and a woman, crests the hill. They trudge single-file, armed with rifles and AK-47’s. All wear black bandannas over their mouths and noses, but for the stooped man in the lead. His bandanna is a startling green and appears to cause him pain, judging by how he shakes his head back and forth. Still he makes no effort to adjust it.
The group halts on the roadside, and a heated argument ensues—two of the men bellowing invective back and forth. A third man intervenes. Green Bandanna starts limping toward the trees, alone. The woman, young and burly and heavily tattooed, pulls out her pistol, racks the slide, and fires. Green Bandanna’s head explodes into scarlet and smoke.
One of the men douses the body with accelerant and throws a match. The woman lingers a few minutes while the others leave. Then she crosses herself and follows.
Anikka and Baris whisper together and adjust their plan, taking into account the danger from other travelers. They’ll avoid the roads and bushwhack whenever possible, staying within the shelter of the trees.
They make their way in silence, each stunned by the execution they’ve just witnessed.
Finally Anikka says, “That man they killed, he must’ve had plague.”
“We don’t know that.”
“My father said first impact might not be the worst of this. He said the bolides could bring contaminants that would disperse when they hit.”
“That makes it sound like there was intelligence behind this, like something or someone planned it. There wasn’t, Nikka. Shit flies through space all the time. Earth just happened to get in the way.”
“But they burned the body.”
“Maybe he didn’t deserve a decent burial. Maybe he was an enemy. Somebody from the wrong tribe.”
“So already we’re dividing into tribes?” The possibility makes her throat constrict. “What’s that, the first step on the way to the Stone Age?”
He laughs and kisses her neck.
She rips cloth from her shirt tail to improvise bandannas. Again she laments the gas masks they forgot to stock. Other things, too. Like guava jelly and macadamia nuts and caviar and Brie. So many things she longs for now and wishes she could taste again.
Something flashes in her peripheral vision. She’s just fast enough to glimpse a covey of quail, lightning fast as they dart for hiding. She permits herself a tiny gust of pleasure. She’s always liked quail. Glad to see that some survived.
The afternoon looks much like morning, hazy under a parade of low-hanging clouds that pass ponderously, like tame elephants. At a pond, they purify some water and rest in the shade. Beneath the trees, Anikka notices the soil is soft and spongey, although there’s no sign of recent rain. Gazing into the maze of trees, she spies an odd growth, a mottled, oval flower with a striking emerald center that appears to sprout from a juniper trunk. She blinks, trying to reconcile what she’s seeing with what she’s not seeing.
She nudges Baris.
“What is that?”
It takes him a moment to spot what she’s pointing at and become concerned enough to tell her to stay there while he investigates. She goes with him, of course. And when he sucks in his breath and looks away, she studies more intently, willing herself to see something else, to realize it’s just a trick of light that causes her to think the spine of the man slumped there is fused with the tree and that the outline of a juniper branch isn’t visible through the papery skin of his throat.
He leans against the tree in a way that suggests sleep, except for the roots that snake around his legs and the glimpses of exposed femur that disturb the architectural balance of flesh and root system.
“It looks like the tree’s absorbing him,” she says, her tone replete with the awe and wonder of one who comes upon a nature god inside his leafy temple. But then the ruined legs spasm down and up, a croak issue from the mangled throat, and Anikka claps a hand across her gut and doubles over.
In a surreal display of effort, the head raises, lolls, fights to find a balance point on the engorged neck. The mouth twists and contorts, and a hand paws the eyes where thin green shoots have knit themselves among the brows and lips and lashes, handiwork of a sadistic seamstress or a darkly comic one.
“Who would do this?” Baris says as what once was human fights to breathe, and Anikka doesn’t answer, not knowing how to tell him no one did anything, that this is now the nature of the world.
“We need to clear his airway,” Baris says and slides his thumbs inside the corners of the man’s mouth, trying to work free the obstructions. When this fails, he grabs his knife, flicks out the blade.
“No!” Anikka says.
Baris strokes the man’s forehead and talks soothingly, as though what he is about to do is normal. “Don’t be afraid. I’m only going to cut some of this away.”
Bunches of tightly-clumped, dark needles fall to the forest floor, but so does blood—a lot of it. Anikka yells, “You’re cutting him!”
The man convulses, legs kicking out as far as the roots allow, then planking, quivering, and going limp.
“What—?”
“It’s part of him. Or he’s part of the tree. You can’t cut one without cutting the other.”
He stares at the blood dripping from the blade.
“We’ve got to do something,” Baris says, even as pliant green filaments weave shut the lashes, sewing off sight, and Anikka only understands the one kind of help they have to offer. She unholsters her Sig Rimfire and tells Baris to move away. When she fires, the air explodes with whirring, agitated life, pollen that’s insectile, comet-shaped. She runs to join Baris, holding her breath as long as she can.
Now instead of staying in the trees, they search for roads. A highway’s what they’re hoping for but dirt will do, anything to keep some space between them and the forest.
Evening’s coming on. They find a meadow wide enough to offer some distance from the trees and shed their packs, unfold their sleeping bags. Baris spots deer tracks, says they need food and there’s still enough light to make a shot. He seems angry, eager to bring down a doe or a buck. Anikka, who’s just shot a man to death, feels spent and sick and not keen for killing anything. She waves him off, crawls into her bag, and slips into murky sleep.
And wakes up dreaming that Baris is inside her, thrusting furiously with a cock carved from burled wood and tipped with a black stone arrow. Her twilit brain is trying to make sense of this, when she feels the warmth between her legs and smells the blood.
Baris’ sleeping bag lies empty, but she pounds it with her fist, anger and panic released with every punch. Calm descends. She lies back down, unsnaps her jeans, struggles them down over her thighs. The flashlight shows pale green, six-inch stalks and a clutch of narrow, braided roots. When she runs a finger along the tips, she feels an answering quiver deep inside, a tiny tongue-flick sensation followed by an electric jolt of pain. Her breath hitches and she sinks her front teeth into the meat of her lip, clinging to the pain for sanity.
Gingerly she pinches a stem between two fingers and tugs, praying that this parasite will slide out easily, but the thing holds fast and more blood pours.
She wraps the pliant blades around her fingers, fists her hand, lets out all her breath and yanks before she can change her mind. Her vision pinpricks. She screams to keep from fainting.
If Baris heard her cry, she knows he’d come to her. Since he doesn’t, she takes the gun and flashlight and moves shakily across the meadow, into the woods.
At first it’s just bark and leaves and branches she sees, the junipers and piñons, regal aspen nodding in the breeze, but the farther she goes the more nuanced her sight becomes, the more adroitly she can parse the liminal threshold of this realm.
She wants to call out Baris’s name, but remembers too vividly those melded vertebrae, the throat crammed with juniper and bits of bark and prefers to keep her silence.
Beneath her feet, lichen-furred roots protrude from loamy soil; they forge meandering, unnatural paths, contrive to cut her off. A twisted juniper, lightning-struck and blackened, dangles grotesque seeds, each composed of five elongated rows, white beads that clink and shake. Then eyes and brain coordinate to give a meaning to this horror, flensed hands and tiny fingerbones, the trellis of a wrist. Root systems from surrounding trees intertwine with carpals, skulls and shanks, the basin of a pelvic girdle garlanded with ropey coils of greyish purple meat.
She shuts off the flashlight and pads from one splash of moonlight to the next, wandering these charnel-house woods with gun in hand, shuddering each time something drips from overhead.
That Baris is the most recent addition to this tableau is evidenced by his relative intactness and the still new look of his tactical jacket and barely scuffed Wolverines. His face, once so unspeakably dear to her, is now just unspeakable. She turns away, hating him for what he’s done, but hating more the loss of him. Of everything.
For a moment she sways between gusts of grief and fury.
You said I’d go first. You’d be right behind.
The forest trembles, although there is no wind. She hears the mourning of an owl and wonders if animal life is somehow immune to this, if it’s no accident she sees no skins or feathers, paws or fur. Perhaps the plants are sentient now and can distinguish among types of prey. Perhaps that is the point.
Baris’s gun lies in the underbrush beside him. She starts to leave it, then goes back and tries to pick it up. Vines fight her for possession, but she wins this time, only to discover that the muzzle, trigger guard, and rear sight are already clogged with coarse and tangled weeds. She throws the gun away and tries to find her way back to the meadow, but her halting progress quickly becomes a gauntlet, she’s lashed and buffeted, caressed and enmeshed, a spider in a flytrap.
When she stumbles, her foot becomes entangled. Within minutes whole portions of her throat and brain are being colonized. Adrenaline floods her bloodstream. Her heart syncopates, and she goes blind and deaf in seconds. Her brain waves spike, even as a deadly languor surges through her. Only at the last, when she feels the forest infiltrate every damp and puckered pore of her honeycomb skin does she recall the magic she still wields, the quick death Baris promised and denied her, and reaches for the Sig. Brings it to her head only to find her mind contains no memory of what this object is or how she is supposed to use it or why it even matters.
There are no words.
A sound builds within her and she tries to give it voice, but other life-forms own her now, the rich nutrients of her bone and blood divvied up among a million microscopic mouths as her body is repurposed for a grander destiny.
Lucy Taylor is an award-winning author who has published seven novels and over a hundred short stories in anthologies and magazines. Her most recent work can be found in the anthologies The Big Book of Blasphemy, Cutting Edge, A Fistful of Dinosaurs, and Vagabond 001, 002, and 003. Her Stoker Award-winning novel, The Safety of Unknown Cities, was recently reprinted in German by Festa Verlag Publications and is currently being translated into Russian by Poltergeist Press. Taylor lives in the high desert outside Santa Fe, New Mexico.