30 Dec Verminous

I imagine that the folks in the city didn’t see anything at all. Out here we’ve got fewer lights. The sky’s a lot clearer at night. Gives a man something to think about, looking up at all that space. I know it’s no deep philosophy, but still. Every one of those stars is a sun. Maybe every one has life.

Of course, I suppose now I know at least one other one does. They must’ve come from somewhere.

Not that there was any “they” at first. I know I said that the city people must not have seen anything, but honestly that’s all I saw, too. Nothing, where there should have been something. I was out on the porch rocker, enjoying the night breeze and thinking my little philosophies, when I noticed that a patch of the stars just… wasn’t. There was a hole in the sky maybe the size of my outstretched fist where there should have been a scattering of stars.

I figured it was a cloud at first, but then I saw it was moving faster than any I’d ever seen. Aside from tornadoes, I suppose, but this was nothing like a tornado. It was just a black spot where the stars weren’t, something so dark that it didn’t reflect a speck of light. It was moving in a straight line across the sky, blocking out bits of stars as it went, fast and accurate as an arrow. I didn’t know where it was going, but it sure looked like it did.

Then I noticed there were more. All told, I counted six, and I couldn’t make out a single detail on any of them. They were all identical, fist-sized absences zipping by overhead. I decided maybe they were drones. Plenty of the neighbors had them these days, after all. It could be some sort of contest or game.

Thing is, the drones I’d seen before all had lights. And I could usually hear them whirring by, though I was on my oxygen that night and the sound from the mask could’ve been hiding any noise they made. So I told myself it was drones–but I went to bed troubled.

I asked my neighbor Jimmy about it the next day.

“My boys been buzzing your property?” he said. “I warned them about that. I’ll give them a talking-to tonight. It won’t happen again.”

“Don’t go too hard on them, Jimmy,” I said. “We got up to a fair bit of mischief ourselves as boys.”

Jimmy laughed. “That’s why I know I’ve got to nip this in the bud. I know what I would’ve been like if I’d had a drone at their age. A bit of fear will do them good.”

I didn’t hear any more about it after that. When I went out stargazing that night, there was nothing but uninterrupted sky, with no more odd black patches to disturb it. I figured that Jimmy’s talking-to must have had the desired effect.

One of the boys, Corson, knocked on my door the next day.

“Sir, Pa told us you got buzzed by a drone. I just wanted to say it wasn’t us.” He was an earnest-looking lad, not yet twenty. Old enough to be offended if he knew I thought of him as a boy. Young enough to call me ‘sir,’ which kind of offended me in turn. I didn’t like to think of myself as being that old yet. I still remembered being a boy myself. The oxygen tank I had to drag around these days said maybe I was older than I liked to believe, but that was still no reason to go around calling me ‘sir.’

I took it in stride, though.

“Well, whoever it was got your pa’s message,” I said. “No more flybys last night.”

“It wasn’t us, though. Honest.”

“I believe you, son,” I replied, and I suppose I did. Corson had no reason to lie about it, and especially none to come over just to tell me. There was no point in telling Jimmy that, though. I knew what he’d say: “Well, if they didn’t deserve to be yelled at for this, they deserved it for something else I didn’t know about. It all works out.”

His boys were turning out strong, independent, and respectful, so there must have been something to his parenting method. It was good to see someone raising a new generation to be proud of. The news these days was all about the degeneracy of society and the way things were falling apart. If I hadn’t been able to look out my window and see the folks around me thriving, I might have been in danger of believing it. As it was, I tended to just keep the television off and get the news I needed from the people around me.

That said, when I went into town two days later, I started to think maybe the TV news folks had a point after all. Getting the weekly groceries was usually a social affair. I’d say hello to whoever I ran into in the store, chat for a bit with William as he scanned my groceries, and maybe bump into a few more of my neighbors as I was loading up the truck or filling the tank. It turned a half-hour trip into a half-day outing, but that was part of the point.

Usually.

This time, it was all I could do to get folks to nod hello. My attempts to start conversations were met with shrugs and grunts. One person might’ve been having a bad day, but this happened with six or seven in a row. I remarked on it to William as I wheeled my cart up to the register, but even he seemed hostile.

“Everyone’s busy these days,” he said shortly. “Don’t have all day to chat.”

“I’m just saying hello,” I said.

“Yeah? Would you let it end there if they said hello back?” William’s eyes flashed with a suppressed fury. Surprised by his vehemence, I said nothing. He grunted with muted satisfaction and swiped my food aggressively across the scanner. “Thought not. You’d ramble and get in their business.”

“That’s hardly fair, William!”

“So? Since when has life been fair?”

I winced as William bagged the groceries with violence. I could see him practically daring me to say something about it. I kept quiet. I didn’t know why he was angling for a fight, but I knew I wasn’t going to give him one.

No one stopped to exchange pleasantries in the parking lot, either. Everyone just hurried by with mean, furtive expressions on their faces. The whole town looked like a pack of feral dogs scared they were about to get kicked. The air was charged and dangerous.

Jimmy’s boy Corson was at the gas pump when I pulled up. I tried to avoid eye contact, but he spotted me and called out, “Morning!”

He sounded as cheerful and open as ever. I got out of the car and approached him tentatively.

“Morning, Corson. You and your family doing well?”

“No complaints! You?”

I tapped my portable oxygen tank and shrugged. “Better than some, I suppose.”

At this, Corson leaned in and dropped his voice. “Specially round here, am I right? Seems like everybody had second helpings of mean last night, and it’s coming back up today.”

I grinned. “Not you, though, I guess?”

“Not you, either. It seems we’re special.”

“Looks that way,” I agreed. Odd that it should be two neighbors who weren’t affected, I thought. We were way on the outskirts, though, so it made sense that if something had happened in town last night it wouldn’t have impacted us. Maybe there had been a storm that kept folks up all night. Could something so close have missed us entirely? It was possible, I supposed. I’d seen weather do stranger things.

I didn’t find out the truth of the matter for another week, on my next trip into town. The grocery store’s lot was packed full, and before I even got through the door I could hear a crowd yelling inside. I couldn’t make out what they were saying until I opened the door and William’s voice rolled out over the din, strident and angry.

“You can each get two cases of water! I don’t want to hear any excuses or pleas or whiny stories about how you’re buying two for your friend. If you’re here, and you can buy up to two cases. If you’re not, you get nothing. Don’t like it? Leave!”

The crowd was jammed into the drinks aisle. They eyed the bottled water greedily, each person trying to figure out how to escape the crowd, reach past William’s interposing body, and make off with as much water as they could.

The cash register had a letter taped to it, printed on official government letterhead. It read:

WARNING: TAINTED TAP WATER

Your tap water is not safe for bathing or drinking. Boiling is insufficient to remove the contamination. Do not allow prolonged contact with any tap water.

Accidental ingestion of the tainted water may cause symptoms including irrational anger, paranoia, claustrophobia, and hallucinations. Severity increases with larger doses. Symptoms will fade after 1-2 weeks without exposure to the contamination.

Government supplies of bottled water will be delivered shortly. In the meantime:

• Remain calm
• Seek alternate water sources
• Report anyone acting irrationally to the non-emergency police line

Remember that those affected may not understand their behavior to be irrational. Do not confront. Do not engage.

I looked at the furious crowd, currently surging toward William as he used a full plastic bottle of water to swat at the people in front.

“That’s it!” he shouted. “If you can’t play nice, you’re all banned from my store! Ha, now none of you get any water! Get out! Out, I say!”

The crowd snarled with one voice. With one mind they surged forward, slamming through William and toppling the rack behind. Bottles and jars flew everywhere, shattering and spilling on the ground. The crowd slithered, slipped, and fell. Suddenly, it was no longer a cohesive unit, but rather, fifty individuals all scratching and clawing for bottles of water.

I knew William was somewhere under that mass, lying on his back. From the shrieks and screams, more than one person was being trampled. Those on top didn’t seem to care. They grabbed the blood-spattered cases of water and ran for the door. I hurried to get out of the way before they crushed me as well.

As the victors streamed past me, I thought about going in to help. The sign had said not to, though. Do not confront, it read. Do not engage.

I stayed against the brick wall of the store as the enraged water thieves raced to exit the parking lot, denting and scraping each other’s cars as they went. I dialed the local police to report what had happened.

“They just trampled him?” asked the sheriff. “Unbelievable. Absolute animals. Who was there? All of those vermin ought to be rounded up and shot.”

“It all happened so fast. I didn’t recognize anyone,” I lied. They were all locals, people who I’d known for decades. William had known them, too. That hadn’t stopped them from stomping him into the shelves of his own store.

“Wait there. I’m going to want to talk to you when I get to the store,” said the sheriff.

“I will.” Another lie. The sheriff had drunk just as much tap water as anyone else in town. I hoped he could help William, but I wasn’t going to be here to find out.

My groceries were going to have to wait. They wouldn’t do me any good if I wasn’t alive to eat them. I waited another minute for the demolition derby in the parking lot to die down, then hurried to my truck and got back on the road out of town.

I’d never locked the doors to my house before. It never seemed worth it. But when I got home, I secured both the front and back, and checked all of the windows, too. It was only a matter of time before the folks in town thought about those of us out on the outskirts still using well water and came knocking. I didn’t mind sharing, but the mob I’d seen had been a lot more interested in just taking.

I turned on the television to see what the news had to say. If folks had gotten a letter from the government, this was bigger than our little town. I hoped maybe they’d have more information about what had happened, or at least the timeline to fix it.

The news anchor seemed to be barely holding it together. His hair was mussed and his makeup blotchily applied. He had an angry grimace on his face instead of the neutral expression he used for everything from pageant winners to industrial accidents. He spat the words from the teleprompter, staring into the camera as if daring the viewer to come up and fight him. Just listening to his voice was enough to raise my heart rate and make me go check the doors and windows a second time.

The worst part was that he had no information that I hadn’t already learned or figured out. This was happening everywhere, not just nationwide, but globally. Every single municipal water supply had been tainted simultaneously. Groundwater was fine. No one could explain what had happened. Governments everywhere were scrambling to distribute emergency supplies.

A knock at the door sent me scrambling for my shotgun. That exertion in turn left me gasping for air and grabbing for my oxygen. I was in a sorry state to face any sort of angry crowd, and so it was fortunate for me that the only person at the door was Jimmy. He waited politely for me to make my way over.

“You’re in no shape to stop them if they come for your water,” he said without preamble.

“If they’ll just ask—”

Jimmy waved that ridiculous idea away. “I’m sending Corson over to stand watch. News says they’re acting like animals. Hopefully a bigger animal will be enough to chase them off if they come.”

“Is he okay? Are you all okay?”

“We’re on the same well system as you. We’ll be all right.”

“I feel like we ought to help.”

He shook his head.

“Right now we can help the most by keeping ourselves safe.” He gestured back toward town. “Smell that smoke?”

I didn’t, not through my oxygen mask. I could see a faint grey smudge rising up in the distance, though. I didn’t know what was burning, but it was a fair bet that whatever it was wasn’t supposed to be on fire.

Jimmy nodded as if I’d agreed to a plan. “So Corson’s coming over here, and hopefully him being here means neither of you will need to use those guns.”

I didn’t like the idea of pointing firearms at my friends and neighbors. It was a sight better than having them point them at me, though.

“I’ll make up the guest bed,” I said. “You let me know when you need him back.”

For the next couple of weeks, Corson and I took turns keeping a quiet guard inside the house. I figured there was no sense in advertising our presence any more than necessary, so we watched from behind closed curtains and hoped no one would even come to look at an empty house. The power went out at some point, which didn’t really change much for us. We hadn’t been turning the lights on regardless.

Even before the power went out, the news hadn’t said anything substantive, and the anchors weren’t always on when they should have been. We made our own guesses about how things were going based on the smoke smudging the sky. There were a lot of fires at first, but by the end of the second week they had all died out, and there weren’t any new ones.

On the first night after the skies were fully clear of smoke, I went outside to look at the stars. They were still there, calm and majestic and totally unaffected by the chaos around us. Then a patch of them disappeared, and I realized that what I thought were drones were back.

That couldn’t be what they were, though. There was no one to fly them. It had to be something else.

I looked up at the empty sky, at the things I couldn’t see that were blocking out the stars. It occurred to me that maybe what I had thought was something fairly close and fairly small was in fact quite a long way away, up near the top of Earth’s atmosphere, or even beyond. To cover a patch of stars the size of my fist from up there, though, it would have to be truly titanic.

I thought about the way every manmade water facility on Earth had been infected at once. I wondered just what I was looking at, up there between me and the stars—and what it wanted with Earth.

The next morning when I went to wake Corson up for breakfast and the watch, he swatted irritably at me from the bed.

“Shove off, old man,” he muttered.

I blinked. “But the watch—”

“Screw your watch, too!” He suddenly leapt out of bed and swung a fist at me. I staggered back, dodging his fist but tripping over my oxygen tank. I stumbled two awkward steps before my feet tangled in each other and I fell heavily to the floor.

Corson stood over me, his face torn between rage and pity. He held this mismatched look for a long, uncomfortable second before his mouth twisted into a sneer and he turned away from me.

“I don’t know why I wasted two weeks here anyway,” he said. “You’re useless. I say let the townies have you!”

He snatched up his gun and stormed out of the house, leaving the front door open. I clambered back to my feet and headed after him, but stopped in the doorway, uncertain. Something had changed. Was he even safe to have around? Maybe it was better to just let him go.

I watched him enter his own house, and I was still standing in the doorway when the shouting started. The argument going on at Jimmy’s house was loud enough to be heard across the small field separating us. I couldn’t make out the words, but the tone was vicious.

Suddenly, there was a gunshot. I slammed and locked my door without even thinking about it. There was another blast, and another–and then a pause, while I listened to my heart hammering. Then two shots almost at the same time, followed by three in a row, and one final one.

I could almost put the scene together. Corson and Jimmy had begun arguing. Corson had the gun in his hands already. The first shot was for his father, the second and third for his mother Carrie, maybe, as she ran to her husband, or maybe to protect the three littler ones. The pause, as he reloaded and went on the hunt for the rest of his family. Twin shots as he entered a room where the children were hiding, and he and his brother Daryn fired at one another.

Daryn missed. Corson did not.

Three shots for his younger siblings as they cowered, and one final shot from Daryn, his dying act ending Corson’s rampage too late to save any of his family.

I didn’t know if I was right about any of this, of course. But I watched from the window for a very long time, and no one ever came out of Jimmy’s house again.

I couldn’t understand what had changed. We had been fine, and safe. Had they altered the well water, too? I had drunk a glass just an hour ago. I felt no different.

As my heart calmed and my breathing eased, I almost took off my oxygen mask. I was loosening the straps when I suddenly realized that that was the difference between Corson and me, why his behavior had suddenly shifted while mine stayed the same. The last time the dark shapes had come by, they’d poisoned the water facilities. Apparently that hadn’t done a good enough job. They’d come back to poison the air.

I abandoned the upstairs and moved to the cellar. I blocked the edges of the door with quilts. I sat there in the dark for almost two days, listening to the hiss of air through my mask, staring at nothing.

I breathed as shallowly as possible. I used each tank until it was completely empty. They still emptied too quickly, lasting no more than a few hours each. When my meager store of tanks was gone, I closed my eyes, removed my mask and took a deep breath.

I waited. I felt no different. The air smelled faintly of smoke, but otherwise seemed perfectly normal. Slowly, reluctantly, I made my way back upstairs.

The fires were back, worse this time. The skies were grey with ash clouds. They were almost a blessing, though, for they partially hid from view the horrifying, inhuman architecture of the invaders’ ships.

Things walked below the ships, organic masses that rolled and writhed. They stood as tall as the grain silos, but I saw them squeeze through spaces no bigger than the doorway of a house. I thought at first they were hunting for survivors, but I soon realized that there was no pattern to their movements. They were not hunting. They were exploring.

They were moving in.

I have a barn on my property. It has mice in it. I know this. But they are small and distant, and I don’t think about them much. I even know that some get into the house, and although I don’t like it, it’s rarely worth my time to worry about.

But if I find evidence of many, I put down poison to solve the problem. Does it get all of the mice? Almost certainly not, but the few that are left are out of sight and out of mind.

I am here. I am forgotten. And I desperately hope to remain that way for as long as I can.