simply surveyed the surrounding devastation, as if he expected Tarsalans to emerge from the ashes at any second.
To Glenda, it was more than just the phytosphere falling to pieces. It was Gerry at last succeeding. After so many small and humiliating defeats throughout his life, he had achieved this biggest thing of all.
The hail continued for several hours, but finally tapered off around six o’clock. Clouds moved in under the thin green veil of the disintegrating phytosphere, but they were strange clouds because they were tinged with green.
After a while it started raining green rain. It pounded on the Chattahoochee Forest, and a green flood roared down the path and rushed past the cave. They had to rearrange sandbags to divert the flow from the cave. The sky darkened, and night—just a normal night, not a phytosphere night—came at last.
She tried calling Gerry on her fone, reasoning that if the phytosphere was falling she might get through.
But there was no service, not even a message, as if all the people who operated AT&T Interlunar had indeed gone home to be with their families in this time of crisis.
She pulled out Neil’s special phone, the one he used to communicate with various government officials, and tried to get through to an operator, any operator. This time she got something, but frustratingly, it was just a message telling her that service had been temporarily suspended during the current national emergency, and that only preauthorized numbers would be connected.
She looked for numbers in Neil’s backpack because, yes, Gerry might have saved the world, but she was still stuck out here, amid the burned-down forest and possible Tarsalan hostiles. She had no car, and her ammunition was running low.
As much as she looked for preauthorized numbers in Neil’s pack, she couldn’t find any.
Dawn came, and it was an Earth dawn. The sky was blue, the sun yellow, and only stray wisps of phytosphere remained, like emerald floss way up high. The Chattahoochee was a wasteland of ash coated in green slime. In and amongst the black-sparred tree trunks, she saw nine burned-out Tarsalan
Landing Vehicles, looking like tin cans that had been left in a bonfire all night. She saw no survivors.
She and Fernandes conferred for a while about what they should do and, when they were done, Glenda told the kids, “We’ll stay here for a while and see if anybody rescues us. I’m going to keep trying the Moon. And I’ll try Neil’s phone as well. In the meantime, Fernandes thinks we should dig through the house to see if we can salvage anything.”
After a breakfast of baked beans, Glenda, Fernandes, and the Thorndike kids marched down to the house. They had nothing but their hands to clear the rubble away with. The sun was bright, and it stung Glenda’s eyes after so long in the dark, but she took great joy in it. The uneasiness of having something drastically wrong with the world eased from her soul, and the quality and quantity of the sunshine increased her hope tremendously. Hanna, still not in the best health, sat out much of the time, taking guard duty while the others did the heavy work.
They spent the rest of the day digging into the basement supply room, where they found many crated provisions intact, enough to last six months if they rationed stringently. This was a great relief to Glenda, as it bought her a measure of time she hadn’t been counting on. They lugged the supplies up to the cave and packed them into the second chamber.
Now that all immediate danger had passed, her nieces again grew weepy at the loss of their parents and sister, and Glenda spent much of the afternoon comforting them.
Around five o’clock, the sun began its descent, and though she was made anxious by the approach of night, and was even illogically apprehensive that dawn might never come again, she still thought the sunset was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. Despite her desolation over the deaths of Neil, Louise, and Ashley, she felt buoyed by it. Light. Was there anything so miraculous? In all its various permutations of color and shadow, was there anything so surprising, mood-altering, or restorative?
Morgan lay with her head on Glenda’s lap, and Glenda stroked the child’s brown hair. Jake ate like a pig in the corner, opening can after can of Irish stew—not rationing, as they had to celebrate their great find in the basement storeroom of Marblehill. Fernandes also ate. The sun would come up tomorrow, she decided. They would get through this. They would survive. Maybe they would survive in a vastly changed world, but they would go on. Gerry would come home. And her two children and two remaining nieces would live long, full lives. And Fernandes would go on as well. He would reconnect with his wife, Celia, in Denver. They would go on to have their family. She could sense this positive outcome in the light that was filtering down from the sky.
A placid and hopeful grin came to her face. She leaned over and kissed Morgan. She glanced at Melissa. She had two new daughters, and she would treat them like daughters, not nieces. She would have to do her best to be a mother to them.
Jake collected up his empty cans of Irish stew. “I’ll throw these in the garbage.” He went over and got Fernandes’s cans as well.
“Come right back and get some sleep,” said Glenda. “You’re on at midnight tonight.”
She watched him go. He now moved with a sureness of step that reminded her of a man’s step. And though his clothes hung on him, she detected a new broadness to his shoulders. He ventured out into the maudlin tints of the sunset and turned left up the hill toward their midden. A breeze entered the cave and she smelled the charred scent of the forest. Her new sense of peace made her sleepy, and she closed her eyes. A comforting doze wrapped its fuzzy hand around her mind, and she nodded off with the rapidity of the truly exhausted. But not for long. Through the fog of her doze, she heard Jake cry out. Her eyes jolted open. His cry was oddly broken, coming in a series of yelps, breaking on the cusp of his changing voice, a cry not only of pain but also of annoyance. She sprang to her feet, at first thinking Buzz had miracuously returned from the dead. But as she hurried from the cave, with Melissa and Fernandes now behind her, she saw that her son had fallen from the cliff to a wide ledge below, and that the point of a broken sapling had skewered the extreme left portion of his abdomen underneath his rib cage.
Fernandes was quick with the orders. “Melissa, get the rope. Mrs. Thorndike, we need some pressure dressings, and some rubbing alcohol.”
Melissa was off instantly to get the rope, but Glenda felt anesthetized. So far, she had dodged all bullets.
But that was her son down there. And he had a sapling coming through his gut. And it wasn’t Buzz or the aliens who had done it; it was just an accident, a stupid, stupid accident, one that could have been treated easily in a hospital. But they were out in the middle of nowhere. And who was coming to get them?
Fernandes was already climbing down the rock face through the ash. Melissa came back, and she had the rope, the pressure dressings, and rubbing alcohol.
“Aunt Glenda?”
Glenda snapped out of it. “Let’s get down there.”
Aunt and niece picked their way down the cliff, coughing in the disturbed ash.
When Glenda got to her son, she saw that the wound was serious, bleeding badly, and that Jake was more or less stuck there because he was so thoroughly skewered. He was crying. He wasn’t a man anymore. He was just a boy who had hurt himself.
Glenda tried to get her panic under control. “What happened?”
“I… I thought I saw a chipmunk.” His voice was high, and his eyes were so wide with hurt amazement that they reminded her of Tarsalan eyes. “And then…” His emotion boiled over. “And then the edge of the cliff gave out and I fell.” He cried again, gazing in horror at his wound, looking as if he wondered how something like this could happen to him. “And it didn’t even turn out to be a chimpmunk. It was just a rock.”
Fernandes got down on one knee, took a wad of dressing from Melissa, and wiped some blood from around the wound. Glenda saw, to her relief, that the sapling, snapped perhaps by a falling tree, its point then tempered by the heat of the fire, had penetrated at the extreme left edge of her son’s abdomen, just below the rib cage, not further in.
“Is it a flesh wound?” she asked Fernandes.
“I think so,” said Fernandes. “We don’t want any internal bleeding. Not out here.” Fernandes looked at Jake and smiled reassuringly. “You’re a lucky man, Jake. You’ve got a flesh wound—a serious one—but I think you’re going to live. Another inch the wrong way, and it could have been much worse.”
Fernandes looked at Melissa. “All right…let’s lift him off. Mrs. Thorndike, get ready with the pressure dressings.”
