kaolin fire presents :: writing :: fiction

"PockmarkedCement.0"

words

http://www.rustybarnes.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=2485

It's the midpoint of the story: Henry Narendran is in the field, juggling ears of corn while the locusts swarm in. Contentment has settled in. There's a sepia glow to the sky, or at least what's not being swiftly swallowed by darkness, and there's still the ozone smell of promised rain, though a wind had gone and tossed that far away, as if trying to move it out of reach of the approaching bugs. Here, it said--someone else should take this, what can use it right; my lips are parched but death I'll know 'fore freedom. Henry scoffs at the wind, regretting a bit the loss of rain.

The locusts had been approaching for half a week, cutting across the eastern states without so much as a by-your-leave. Ten days afore harvest they'd risen out of ground parched harder'n pavement, or that's what reports decided. The locusts, they didn't leave much by the way of witnesses. Entire towns got et before anyone outside knew something was up, nearly half a state before the airforce reported positive a cloud of biomechs.

They'd traced the devastation back to what looked like an unfinished lot, the pavement filled with emptied pockmarks. Maybe it was a lab project gone awry. Maybe it was them Ussers, or the Norkees. Maybe even it was the OPEC cabal trying to get back in the game. Only crackpots mentioned the Leonids. Whatever it was, it was sudden, it was harsh, it was fast.

Henry doesn't care. He dances his little jig in the field, massaging the air with runes, corn kaleidoscoping in his vision.

Martha was the one that cared. She'd taken the kids, left him with the mortgage, and a double payment to her. Henry doesn't have that sort of money, but what was owed to the bank. This, he feels, is just the next step in the downfall of civilization. A bit bizarre, but there you are. A practical man takes the bizarre in stride.

He does hope Billy and Jess, and especially Little Henry, he does hope they don't have too hard a time of it. Maybe they'll find their way home, some day. Maybe there'll still be a home, even if'n he isn't there to greet them. The locusts would be greeting him soon; he'd missed their pattern five times by just a few miles, but he was the only bite left if'n they didn't deviate further than fifteen percent from his models.

He'd analyzed their movements for a while, laying their trail over GIS data, plotting farms and roads, waterways and air patterns. They were nothing if not methodical, unless it was unpredictable. They hit everything, no path was wasted, but there weren't no telling one spot from the previous where they'd go. In specific. Generalities, probabilities, those could be reckoned. How long a place had left to live.

In their tiny chitinous skulls, or at least in the bounds of so many swarmed, roamed the full mysteries of the universe, fluid dynamics applied; Shiva made real.

He half expected to see the god appear, miragelike under the clickety blanket.

Each individual critter a drone, purpose unknown but still somehow fulfilling that purpose unerringly. Drone, the sound of millions, self-replicating, pushing silicon-derived wing against air.

Coming.

Closer.

Henry juggles the corn and dances, and tries to imagine what it must be like to be so perfect, the essence of a cog in a wheel; progress.

He'd tried before--to be a cog. Never'd had his heart in it, or maybe he could have succeeded. Maybe she wouldn't've left him. Maybe the world wouldn't be ending. There were always maybes, and sureties, and they all came out and danced the night away when endings and beginnings came.

Now he'd be a cog. His bits'n their bits, all mixed together.

And if he planned things just right--if he'd read the signs--if what he'd tasted was real--if Shiva was coming, then behind him would be Brahma--his bits eating up their bits, becoming a swarm, becoming new consciousness, birthing from destruction.

If he isn't just crazy, or just suicidal. There is that tiny piece of him afraid, but it just adds a bit of fervor to the dance. There is that tiny piece of him that welcomes ends, and that worries him more than death. Change--too much change had come for it to stop, too much pain; he hopes to push the wheel 'round again.

They're descending on him; his flesh is dancing in their teeth, nanoflesh dancing in their bellies; gestating.

Henry is gone, and the bugs travel on, but his patch of farm stands. And maybe--just maybe, if it's not an odd glint of sun in the country of darkness, maybe one of the bugs just birthed something white.