The two girls. One was sixteen. The other wasn’t quite a teenager yet, trapped in that awkward physical state when the body has experienced a growth spurt but the face hasn’t quite caught up. The older gripped the younger by the sleeve of her brightly colored T-shirt. The youngest, cradled against the mother, slipped free and down to her feet, the mother no longer able to shoulder her weight. That girl’s face was scrunched into worry lines that might never straighten out, even if given an entire lifetime.
They marched together, one holding onto another in a line, like elephants in a circus parade.
“There’s the next exit,” somebody, a woman, said. A woman, because most of the refugees were women, the men and boys above a certain age drafted into service for a war that had, by all measures that mattered, already ended.
The highway sign pulled free of the horizon and hovered in a shade of green brighter than the lime-colored new leaves undulating at the sides of the pavement. The Bedford exit didn’t offer much in terms of hope; it wasn’t the germs that killed the sinister Martians inside their tripods or the computer virus that deactivated the shields so the jet fighters could take down the colossal alien motherships in those other, fictional invasions. Had it been days or weeks since they’d seen a jet in the sky? And that one was disintegrating high overhead, in pieces at the tip of a sonic boom.
But the Bedford exit offered a break from the walk. A place to relax and rest and, most importantly, learn the latest information from what remained of the world’s governments. At last report, the Canadians were coordinating the global response. How far down the line had things fallen so that the military in Montreal was making the key strategic decisions, the mother absently wondered.
Parched and sore in a way she’d never known, every joint feeling exposed and swollen, she cycled through the information for the umpteenth time, no longer sure what was real or the result of her frazzled imagination. Purple-black vortexes, over three hundred of them in the sky, and then… silence, darkness, on the heels of a terrible, destructive thunderclap.
Another sound, one equally terrible, jolted her out of the fog and back to the moment.
“Do not attempt to exit—keep moving! Bedford is sealed to all non-residents at this time per order of the mayor’s office and the board of selectmen. I repeat—”
The baritone bullhorn voice boomed the same announcement, this time louder. Not really louder, the mother realized. Closer. They passed underneath the green traffic sign. A cacophony of angry shouts and expletives laced the air.
“What do you mean, closed?” somebody shrieked, swears lobbed with the question at whoever held the bullhorn.
In another time, another life, the mother’s instinct would have been to shield ears with hands, to spare the young ones the vulgarities launched at the voice—and, among the colorful insults, the voice’s parents.
“They’ve paid off the military,” said the woman plodding at the family’s left.
The mother recognized the woman. She was younger, in her twenties if the mother had to hazard a guess, though recent time had aged her considerably.
Paid off the military? With what, she could only imagine. Not money. People were using hundred dollar bills to wipe themselves behind trees at the roadside. Money wasn’t an effective incentive any longer. Food, shelter… flesh, perhaps.
“What do you mean, go back?” another voice shouted. “Back to what? Concord isn’t there anymore, and they’ll be swarming all over the suburbs by now!”
The procession briefly logjammed and the mother felt a rush of lightheadedness after being on the move for so long. A swarm of imaginary black flies buzzed around her head. Sweat, bitter and powerful, filled her next desperate breath.
“Per order of Mayor Stanislaus Sherwood, you will not be allowed access to the town of Bedford, so move along!”
The mother caught sight of the exit through breaks in the crowd. Military vehicles lined the curve, blocking the ramp at a diagonal angle. Men dressed in sand camouflage lurked behind the vehicles, with guns aimed at the highway. The mother imagined snipers in the trees, their scopes trained on the mostly women and children, focused on their fellow humans during the worst time in the world’s history. Rage ignited in her blood.
But it quickly cooled in the madness of a deafening thunderclap and the panic the pop of the bullet unleashed. Another followed, and the head of the young woman made old beside her blew apart, there one instant, gone from her shoulders the next. The mother screamed, as did her small brood, though the cacophony of cries that rose up into the unsympathetic heavens swallowed their voices.
Bullets raced at them. The mother felt the displaced air molecules and a rush of heat as one ripped to within inches of her face. They couldn’t go forward, because the war mongers at the Bedford exit were now firing at anything that moved. They certainly couldn’t risk going back.
She grabbed the youngest girl in one hand, the oldest in her other, and hoped the oldest’s grip on the middle child was firm enough to keep them all together. And then she turned toward the other side of the highway and ran. Military troops and police vehicles guarded the on-ramp there, and they, too, had opened fire on the refugees.
The family unit, which would be down by one by the time the shooting stopped, had barely reacted to one horror when another unfolded. The first came at them from two sides of the road; the newest opened up directly overhead.
The shrieks of frightened women and children vanished into the personified roar above. Fresh terror rippled over the mother’s skin, laying icy scales on top of her sweat. She glanced up to see the same monstrous image all had come to know in recent weeks. Only this one was being born right before her eyes, eyes that refused to blink and started to sting even worse than her throat, now screamed raw.
The sky churned and a bruise formed in its fabric, purple-black at the edges with crimson woven throughout. The wound expanded; as it grew, the nearest clouds fell into its pull. A funnel tip clawed its way out of the vortex. Running blindly, aware that the men at the roadblocks were still firing—still, in the face of yet another unholy visitation by the enemy—she dared look up, into the whirls. And, for an instant, she swore she saw something beyond that bruised patch of sky; a hint of a reflection, a glimpse into the alien world where their mysterious opponents originated.
She only saw the vista briefly; saw that it was a surprisingly light and soft-looking view of snow-capped hills sitting beneath not one sun or even two, but three dim, distant lights. And then she saw a hateful face staring back, and all illusions of softness and light being representative of that alien realm glimpsed through a hole in the Earth’s sky evaporated.
A terrified voice reached above the chaos. “Over there!”
The mother hurried toward the voice, where her surviving section of the crowd had diverted. She ran blindly, going only on hope. The giant twister unfolded out of the sky. She felt its pull on her spine, its dragging influence and hunger in the rising wind. And there was a smell she hadn’t noticed before but was now acutely aware of, synthetic, not quite like cleaning fluid but in that vicinity. Caustic and industrial, whipped into a fury by the cyclone.
“Quickly, up here!”
The other lane appeared beneath their feet, and then they were crossing gravel, climbing over sedge and litter at the opposite side of the highway, and scrambling toward the tree line. Here was the cement shell of a dilapidated building scarred with graffiti. The structure wouldn’t offer much protection if the cyclone came down near it, the voice in her thoughts declared. But it was their only option, their only chance.