Erin's sci/cli-fi piece

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Joel's Apocalyptic Sci-Fi

Birds of a Feather--working draft

Gus

Chapter I

           Spring had come to the city, but you couldn’t tell.  Gus only knew because it was his birthday.  April 12.  His twelfth birthday. He’d been told every year on his birthday how the flowers had all been in bloom.  The tulips at the hospital had been a riot of color.  His Dad always reminded him how the cherry tree before the bridge had looked like a snow globe.

           Now, as they approached where it had been on their way across the campus to the footbridge over the river, the cherry tree was nothing but a stump.  Once, it had been a center piece of ornamental design—it had been planted with plenty of bare ground, not grass, so that it had adequate ground area from which to soak up water and nutrients in its roots.  As he looked at the stump now, Gus wondered if its roots had stretched deep enough to reach the river, and whether it might have been able to survive on its own, without humans to water and prune and add mulch it.

           It didn’t matter.  Like so many other trees in what had once been called “The City of Trees,” it had been hacked down and burned.

The man and his son pedaled past the bone-white stump of the cherry tree.  As he did every time, the boy asked to stop and search for cherry pits.  He was convinced that the tree was a direct analogy of the tree in Minas Tirith in the book Lord of the Rings.  If he could just find a seed and replant, things would change.  Despite the fact his father had assured him the tree had been produced from a graft, and was sterile, the boy had long believed the words he heard by Dr. (Goldblum) on Jurassic Park--"life finds a way."

Though realistically pragmatic, the father also harbored a similar hope.  Why not?  If life could find a way after the ultimate cataclysm, the big bang, in the harsh environment of the pre-Earth, then why couldn't one of those cherry pits, if his son could find one, harbor a genetic anomaly that would allow it to grow, despite the best efforts of the tree engineers who had sought to protect the investment they'd made in creating the perfect ornamental cherry tree.  And maybe, the reborn tree would in fact be the perfect tree.  Maybe that was the point of this current cataclysm, to find the survivors; to test the seeds of man and find out which ones could evolve closer towards perfection.  In that, he shared his sons optimism.

However, pragmatic realism won this day.  The man told his son no.  There was not time.  They needed water, and so continued towards the river.

           As they approached the narrow footbridge across the river, his Dad put up his hand.  Gus stopped in his tracks and instinctively crouched down.  He could hear the river softly slipping by.  A lone bird chirped in the predawn light.  Three  gently descending whir-whir-whirs.  Then silence.

           His Dad motioned for him towards the bridge.  It was an arch-bridge, wide enough for three people, or two bikes.  Gus was pushing his bike, but his Dad hadn’t.  A working bicycle with two tires that held air was more valuable now than any car had been when Gus was six.  His Dad’s bike was back at their house, a mile up from the river, locked to a piece of exposed rebar in the crawlspace of their house, it’s front tire removed and further hidden in a different location for good measure.  You couldn’t be too careful.

           Instead of a bike, his Dad carried a plastic five gallon jug that had once been an iridescent blue, like the blue of the ocean at the Great Barrier Reef that Gus had only seen in pictures.  Now the jug had paled.  Gus wondered how many times they’d carried it to the river in the last six years.  Wally probably would have said something like “A thousand hundred.”  He smiled to think of his brother, and stole a glance at the quickly fading last stars in the dawn sky, wondering.

           Halfway across the bridge, at the top of its curve, his Dad stopped.

“I’ve got a fever.”  His Dad spoke the words almost as a question, yet they still seemed loud to Gus.  He glanced downriver nervously.

The willows on the far side rustled, and then an answering voice rang out, unabashed and loud:

“And the only prescription, is more cowbell.  Huettig you old bastard!”

A large shape emerged out of the willows on the far side of the bridge and scrambled up the bank and on to the bridge.  It was wearing an old green military fatigue jacket, and incongruously, a yellow sarong with floral motif.  A banjo was strapped across its back, and a cowbell, not making any noise at all, was slung from a piece of orange baling twine around its neck.

The giant grizzly of a man came striding across the bridge.  Gus’ Dad put down his water jug, unslung the battered yellow backpack  he was carrying, and turned his back.  He crossed his arms across his chest as if he was praying, and took a deep breath.

The big man picked up his father from behind and shook him.

His father grimaced.  Gus couldn’t hear it, but he knew the routine.  The man, whose given name had been an incongruous "Troy" on his birth certificate, but who went by Chewy now, had been stretching his father’s back like that since the old days, the days when they had guided river trips together.  The days when they had been paid to carry around heavy jugs of water and other camp equipment, because it had been something people did for fun.  Though he’d heard the stories a million times, Gus still couldn’t imagine how people had considered camping a vacation.  They had to carry water a mile just to survive now.

“Where you been, Huettig,” Chewy questioned his father.

“The rain farming has been good this spring.  Haven’t needed river water, thank god.  Might even get a bit of a garden, if we’re lucky.  You like kale?”

“Kale? Is that a vegetable?  One of those things food eats?  I'll stick to squirrel burgers, thank-you very much.”

"River's up."  The man spoke to Chewy.  It was as much a question as a statement.

"No shit.  Beck says it's going over the top this time."

"Can't anyone figure out how to work that damn dam?  Cheese and rice," he said, borrowing one of his friend's favored phrases.  "Never enough water, and now it's going to be too much.  What are you going to do?"

"I'm not leaving the river.  Where would I go?  If it busts, fuckit.  I'll grab a log and ride to the sea.  Go big and go home.  You?"

"I have no idea.  Maybe the house is high enough.  Shoot, maybe that would mean we wouldn't have to come so far for water."

"What about the canal?"  Gus interjected.  "If the dam broke, wouldn't part of the flood funnel through the diversion?  It would be like a tsunami."  He said the last with a hint of pride; he'd researched tsunamis for an inquiry project when he'd been in first grade.  Which had been his last grade.

"I hadn't considered that," his dad spoke.  "I guess it would depend on where it broke over, if it did.  We're a ways downstream from the diversion dam.  It's a risk."

From here the father and son get separated.  The boy makes his way to a safe compound they’ve heard of in Arizona by parasailing, emulating the migration of hawks.  The father rides his bike to the headwaters of the Green River in Wyoming and then floats down the Green and Colorado to Arizona, possibly blowing up a couple of dams along the way.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________

Wally

The boy stared out into the impossible emptiness of space, as he did every day.  The view never changed, always the same stars wheeling around Polaris.  Though no sun ever rose or set, the same stars came into and out of his view with the same predictability.  Every 24 hours they made a lazy spin around the same dim star that was always on his right as he stared out the window.  

The captain, or whomever it was that pretended to be the captain, the person who spoke on the loudspeakers at ever diminishing intervals, continued to hew to the pretense that they were traveling through deep space and had left the Earth far behind, but the boy knew better.   They weren't heading towards a utopia, but instead trapped in purgarory, circling the Earth above the North Pole, spinning in circles, spinning their wheels.  The boy, somewhat ironically named Wally, was quite certain that if he could break through the restricted area and find a porthole on the other side of the ship, he would see the Earth below, the Polar Ice Cap, or whatever was left of it, the invisible strings of gravity tethering their ship to it like the strings of a marionette.  It was hard to decide which was the puppet, the ship or the planet.

They had made it seem like they knew what they were doing.  The ships had emerged from the deserts of Nevada, the pictures streaming out not on the lobotomized nightly television newscasts, but rather on clandestine YouTube videos that sprouted back up as quickly as the government lopped them off.  The public quickly and un-creatively dubbed the ships arks, and masses of survivors began streaming towards the desert launch sites.  The videos of those slaughters, conducted by corporate mercenaries in unmarked black helicopters, also made their way out via obscure back-channel URL's.

(Maybe this next part can be "shown" later, rather than told here...)

Wally's mother, a veteran of the pipeline wars, the ones that when the black helicopters had first came into view, also an acupuncturist.  After years of ruefully hoping to win the lottery as a means to be able to financially afford the otherwise rewarding job of being an acupuncturist, she had finally won it.   The helicopter came and hovered just high enough to ward off jumpers from the ground, the armed men shouted their take it or leave it offer.  "Come with us," they had barked from behind their faceless shatterproof helmet masks.  "Only you and one child."  They had given no reason why her, only a laminated sheet with a picture of the ship and the scantest of writing, words Wally's parents hadn't had time to read.  He'd caught a glimpse, though, which had always and ever been just enough.

Acupuncturist Needed:

Join the crew of the Spaceship Daedalus

or perish on Earth.  

Crew accommodations for You and one child.

Reply Respectfully Required Immediately

Wally's first thought was that they needed a professional writer, too.  He didn't even consider the possibility that his parents would even consider the offer, until he saw the look on his dad's face. Utter calm.  His mom's face was shock, and then he heard the anguished "no!"  even over the staccato whump of the helicopter rotors.  His father, gently pushing his mother into the arms of the uniformed gunmen.  His mother almost in shock, and then struggling, dropping the garden hoe and tearing at their hands.  And suddenly his father's gentle hands on his shoulders, whispering "take care of your mother..."  it had seemed a whisper, but it must have been shouted.

As the men holding his mother moved towards the helicopter, it  unleashed a fusillade of machine gun fire at no one in particular, and then dipped towards the ground.  One last look at his dad, whose eyes bored into him, smiling and immensely sad.  His father’s last words, most definitely shouted this time, saying with the same corny movie line he used every morning when Wally and Gus left for school on their bikes, but with a calm and confident intention that was belied by the shouted way he said it: "You stay alive!  No matter what it takes!  I will find you!"  

Wally, the boy gets curious, sneaks into the safe zone, and sees he is right--they are still over Earth.  He gets spotted, and in a very Star Wars like fashion escapes in an escape pod, landing on Earth, where he will eventually reunite with first one of his family and then the whole family.  Since his brother is traveling by air, his dad by water, I want to think of something unique for him.  Maybe he’ll harness up a pack of feral dogs that he tames and get pulled in a cart.  How their paths intersect is at yet unknown.

The mom, thinking she has lost her whole family, starts plotting to bring the whole ship full of .2%ers out of orbit as both revenge, which she does.  Eventually, a tearful reuniting with her family will occur.