Immortal Clay

Chapter 4

Chapter 4

I WALKED in silence, Alice trotting an arm’s reach ahead of me. Impatience pulled her forward, fear kept her close. She looked back, seemingly afraid that if she left me behind I’d just go home. Maybe I would have. I didn’t want to be on the street. I didn’t want to be anywhere.

I didn’t want to be at all.

The neighborhood looked like we’d had a bad summer storm, or maybe a three-day power outage. Fallen branches lay beneath trees. Too many front doors stood open. Grass—or an alien thing that looked a lot like grass—had grown to a couple inches everywhere, tall enough to have set the Neighborhood Association thugs knocking on doors.

In the years between the destruction of the Southern Hemisphere and Absolute’s final attack, Kevin had attended innumerable training sessions about the alien. Supposedly the alien ate every kind of biomass, that every piece of it was a complete living creature. Those lawns were millions of stalks of independent alien life. Was each blade a copy of a specific blade of grass, or had Absolute just made a generic template called “grass” and stamped them out by the billion? Absolute had copied Kevin in detail—as far as he knew. Was each blade of grass replicated? Each sparrow? If not, where was the line?

We’d bought a home in this part of Frayville because each house had its own character. Our ranch sprawled next to a drab gray colonial with spectacularly colorful landscaping and across from a Spanish-style concrete stucco-ish thing. But now the houses, blocky Colonials and towering Tudors and everything, all shared a shroud of emptiness. A front door stood half-open to reveal vacant shadows.

Scattered white clouds scudded through a hazy blue sky, revealing a bright sun tinted orange by lingering fallout and distant smoke. The breeze carried pine and balsam from the cluster of trees at the back corner of our lot.

Robins and sparrows chirped. A dove cooed.

Pebbles and dead leaves crunched underfoot.

The gleaming concrete of Ducasse Street had been replaced only three years ago, right before they glassed the Southern Hemisphere. Nobody did much road work after that, too busy with the whole decentralization thing and the checkpoints and blood tests and all of the rest of the Building the Future programs that hadn’t done a damn bit of good. We walked a block west, crossed Horse Stall Street, and kept going.

Alice glanced back at me, lips twitching, face pale, then turned forward again.

I kept walking. I had vague memories of the Tander house, a couple blocks west and a couple blocks north. Julie had wanted a ride there more than once, when it was snowing or raining or foggy or clear and sunny.

Kevin had sworn to defend Frayville. The Defense Department had warned us that Absolute was massing to invade. I—Kevin—had taken the flamethrower and the machine pistol, grabbed his family, and ran for the Utah desert. And here was the hometown he’d abandoned, a month or so later, neglected but intact. Strands of relief made my guilt even less comfortable.

Somewhere behind us, a car engine revved. I looked, but the noise came through the trees separating these empty houses from the main drag. Fuel, I thought. Governments had limited gasoline production, converting necessary vehicles to more efficient diesel. Nobody would make more gasoline or diesel. How well would these houses work without transportation? Natural gas? Water? Would we all spend next winter in the nearest tenement, huddled together eating tinned bologna while the Arctic wind knifed down?

“How many people have you seen?” I asked. My body didn’t want to talk. I didn’t want to talk. I did anyway. I didn’t want to be out on this street, breathing the smells of flowers and trees and old fires. I didn’t want to follow Alice. But my inner detective had raised the question when I hadn’t been paying attention.

“Not many,” Alice said. “A few? I mean, there’s Dad and I.” The words bubbled out as if under pressure. “My friend Ceren is next door, I’ve been hanging with her. Her folks haven’t shown up yet. Missus Peterson, the social studies teacher? I saw her. And there were a bunch of people down at the lake a couple days ago. And there’s people walking around, some of em I’ve seen before but a bunch I hadn’t. Some of them were kind of whacked out. And there’s things that just aren’t—” Alice’s hands flapped—“just aren’t people.”

“Aren’t people?” Absolute had let copies change form. Could we still do that? I blinked, rummaging through my brain. A fragmented memory of running over concrete, legs stretched to eat more distance, two steps and gone. I couldn’t remember how I had changed, only that I had been repulsively changed. Maybe I couldn’t. Memory or fantasy?

The draping greens on the willow tree at the corner of Ducasse and Oak hung too heavy. I squinted against the piercing sunlight, but at this distance I couldn’t see anything except thick viridian tendrils drooping under some burden.

I stayed in the middle of the road, away from the grass and the tendrils and everything that might suddenly change form and rip my face off.

The car engine stopped revving. Tires squealed, maybe a few blocks away, making me grit my teeth. I reached for a ticket book, even though I hadn’t carried one in years. The gesture, useless. We could race cars now. On the sidewalk. Through the park. Running over toddlers and old ladies as we went.

Toddlers and old ladies. I didn’t want to think about them. Would the duplicate of a child grow up? Would someone aged to fragility ever get to die in peace? How long would we copies live?

I wrenched my eyes towards the sky, trying to find something else to think about. No contrails. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen a sky without lines of white. Frayville sat square in the Selfridge ANG flight path. When sabers rattled, so did our windows.

“Once we saw the eye thing,” Alice said, “Dad asked me to stay home. He’s been trying to sort out what happened. There’s streets you can’t walk down because someone’s shooting at everyone. He’s figuring it out.”

The car engine suddenly grew loud enough to make me tighten my spine. I looked over my shoulder. A low-slung blue Corvette rocketed down Horse Stall, crossing my field of view in less than a second. The driver wore dark sunglasses, both hands on the wheel, mouth open in a shout that couldn’t overcome the engine’s dinosaur shriek. I thought he looked about twelve years old.

Alice’s father had gone out to see what he could do to help, while I’d sat at home. He was a better man than I was. Then again, he still had family. A rusty blade of jealousy stabbed my gut.

“Then there’s that,” Alice said. Her voice had a wistful tone. “It’s be pretty stupid to get through the end of the world and run over by Timmy driving like an ass—a jerk. So I’ve mostly been staying home. I figured out the Blu-Ray player and got into Dad’s movies. There’s no data, you know? Any idea when they’ll get it back on?”

“No idea, kid.”

“They’ve gotta. I’m halfway through Synners, can’t wait to see the rest of it. I’m going into data, you know? Maybe programming, but I like the protocol security stuff? You know, breaking SCTP?” Her conversation degenerated into a nervous babble that washed over me. I didn’t recognize most of the computer terms she used, but I recognized the pattern.

Alice was scared. Like any other teenager, she wouldn’t admit it. She’d admit to absolutely anything, except being utterly terrified.