Phytosphere

right, he saw that the conflagration was flaming out of control. And the dark. An aging Martian scientist. That’s all he had to offer against this darkness.

He opened the French doors and stepped onto the patio. The patio was like a jigsaw puzzle of broken glass. Goddamn it, his family was a priority family. They shouldn’t have to live like this. Marblehill. Stock it. Block it. And dig in. Maybe phone some of his old Air Force buddies. He glanced at the pool and saw something floating in it. An alligator. Animals were acting bizarrely, boldly, because of the phytosphere.

He saw the flick of a reptilian tail, the glow of alligator eyes; funny, the way the eyes glowed like that, even in the blackness of the phytosphere. And maybe, just maybe, the alligator smelled blood, because wasn’t that blood over by the barbecue, and wasn’t that Eva lying amid a constellation of glowing coals?

He rushed over. Called her name.

But she didn’t answer, couldn’t answer, was too badly torn up to answer—frightening, the damage machine-gun rounds could do. She was hit somewhere in the chest but he couldn’t tell where. Her blood looked black on her black uniform, and the only blood he really saw was a spray of the stuff on her white collar. But he knew it had to be bad because a sucking sound came from her chest. Just like the sucking sound from the faucet. Alarm threatened to overwhelm him.

He had to grab onto her clothes because she was so limp, slippery with blood, and unable to brace herself. He carried her into the house, and as he entered the sunroom he heard splashing in the pool, the alligator now agitated. His family came out of the kitchen. Morgan cried. From the other two it was, “Oh my God,” the all-purpose refrain of their teenaged lingua franca. Louise immediately dug through the drawers of the buffet and pulled out linen napkins to use as pressure dressings, her petite ballerina’s body quivering like a leaf in the wind.

Neil felt as if he were in a dream, and that in this dream the things people said and did made no difference, that all the knee-jerk survival responses of the human race to this sinking ship of a calamity were going to add up to nothing. Nonetheless, he kept going. Even as Eva’s chest sputtered weakly, and even as blood got all over the expensive Persian carpet out in the front hall. The maid’s feet knocked over a vase. He opened the door.

What he saw before him was a scene of devastation. The soldiers had dug pits and were burning all the dead vegetation, so that, at the four corners of his once carefully manicured lot, smoldering craters sent ash and smoke into the air. Bullet holes riddled his sports car and the cherubs of the Italianate fountain now presided over basins that had been damaged by gunfire. In the light of the various neighborhood fires, his grass looked pale—not pale like the pale grass of August, but exsanguinated, as if the chlorophyll-carrying phloem within had been bled dry of their life-sustaining processes. The carefully stuccoed walls surrounding his property, painted an evocative shade of Tuscan gold, were now cracked and pocked, and great sheets had broken away to show the concrete underneath. Out beyond the gate he saw the Morrison fighting vehicles. Marines hid behind the vehicles, some on their stomachs, their rifles ready, another on one knee, all of them peering in the same direction, as if an intensely interesting spectacle unfolded down the street.

He walked with Eva in his arms, and he realized that he was tired. Physically exhausted, yes, but also spiritually drained, as if, like the phloem in his grass, he, too, had been bled dry. He glanced over his shoulder and saw his wife following, daintily picking her way down the steps, past the cars. He wanted to tell her to go back, but he found he didn’t have the energy. He put one foot after the other and kept heading for the front.

“Sergeant?”

The streetlights were out. A barricade of burning cars flamed three blocks away, where the neighborhood of the have-nots began. The sergeant turned, a black man he had gotten to know fairly well named Baskerville, grim- faced and scared, and not much older than Melissa. He turned so quickly that the red pinpoint of laser light from his scope skidded across the outside wall of the compound like a maniacal scarlet fairy.

“Get down, sir. They’ve made a flanking move.”

“Who?”

“We’re not sure. Some renegade officers from Miami-Dade, we think. They’ve got military-grade weapons. This whole neighborhood is sitting on a shitload of food, and I guess they want some.”

“Eva’s been shot. She needs a doctor.”

Baskerville crouched and loped over to the gate, his buddies letting go with a sudden and heart-stopping fusillade of gunfire to cover him.

Baskerville forcefully dragged Neil by the shirt back inside the compound. “Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to stay in the house. At least until we get this situation under control.”

“She’s bleeding to death. And the sailors from out back are gone.”

Baskerville looked at Eva. The soldier unclipped a flashlight from his belt.

“I knew they were going to bolt. Put her there.”

Neil put the maid on the ground. As he did so she quivered in pain. Baskerville shone the flashlight down the front of her uniform. He put the flashlight next to his knee and unbuttoned her blouse.

Louise approached from the house, and as she finally reached them she put her hand on Neil’s shoulder.

The sound from Eva’s chest wound grew fainter. At what point did a man lose faith in himself? The sound from her wound stopped. At what point did he realize that the forces ranged against him were far too large to handle? Marblehill. Stock it and lock it. The immense stillness that could only mean the cessation of life crept over Eva the way the shroud had crept over the Earth. At what point did a man come to realize that the concerns of the world at large were of secondary focus, and that his main objective should be his family?

Baskerville looked at him just as his troops fired a field flare into the sky. The flare lit Neil’s front yard with a flickering white glow and, as it sank in the direction of the poor neighborhood, gunfire erupted from beside the Morrison fighting vehicles, the age-old music of war, the beat and rhythm of things breaking down.

“We’ll look after her, Dr. Thorndike.”

“Look after her?” he asked. “How?”

In the light of the flare, Baskerville’s face changed, hardened, his eyes narrowing, his lower lip curling a fraction of an inch, a hint of disrespect in his eyes as if he were wondering how Neil could ask such a stupid question. Neil sensed a schism between himself and Baskerville now.

“You know. Deal with her remains.”

Louise gave him a tug. “Neil, let’s go back in the house.”

“You listen to your wife, Dr. Thorndike,” said Baskerville. “Ain’t nothing to see out here.”

15

Glenda got up from her basement floor once the truck drove away.

“Stay here,” she told her children.

She had to argue with them, because kids wouldn’t be kids if they didn’t argue, but at last she left them on the floor next to the refrigerator and moved through the darkness, touching her way along the piles of junk to the foot of the stairs, clutching her rifle in one hand and feeling her way up the steps with the other.

In the kitchen, she listened.

Usually there was the hum of electricity coming from the refrigerator, or the sound of cars out on the highway. But except for the ticking of the battery-powered clock in the dining room and the hush of fresh snow falling against the windows (yes, more snow, just in the last few minutes), all was silent.

She crossed the kitchen floor, now used to navigating in darkness. She veered left around the kitchen table, maneuvered to the right, went through the dining and living rooms, then stopped short, exactly at the front door, and clutched the doorknob.

She went outside.

She saw a light burning in Leigh’s dining room window.

Using it to see her way, she crossed the yard to the hedge separating her lot from Leigh’s. She squeezed her way through, the stiff, dead branches snagging her sweater. She walked down Leigh’s driveway toward his house, pausing often to listen, the snowflakes crash-landing on her face.

Up in the hills she heard gunfire.