Eight years, five months, seventeen days.
That was how long Hersh had been trying to move a glass with his mind.
He sat each day for two hours in a small room in his home. The room had been emptied of everything save for a fold-up chair and an empty glass which rested on the floor. Hersh sat in the chair and tried to make a psychokinetic connection with the glass. He had dozens of books about the subject and studied everything he could find online. He knew it was possible, and so he practiced.
“WAH-CHOO!”
The blast, coming out of the nearby darkness as it did, startled me considerably. Matters did not improve when the source of the explosion came under the influence of a streetlamp and I beheld the vampire.
He was traditionally clad, which made for easy identification. His pallor was interrupted by a bright red nose, which he blew into a silk handkerchief.
Vampire or no, my manners remained unruffled.
“God bless you.”
He gave me a nasty look.
“Oh. Right. Sorry.”
“Neber mind,” he replied sourly.
Had I possessed any quantity of sense, I would have taken advantage of his debilitation and fled. Instead, I struck up a conversation.
The little knot of camouflaged humans sat quietly among the bushes and waited for their prey to come into view.
Finally, one raised his rifle and took careful aim at the deer. He gently squeezed the trigger. The deer, hit, staggered and finally fell to the ground.
Wordlessly, the five in the hunting party stood up and moved toward the animal.
“Look at that,” one whispered. “A big 10-pointer.”
“Quite a trophy,” another agreed.
“Let’s get him dressed,” said a third.
The marksman bent down and plucked the tranquilizer dart from the buck’s shoulder as the others performed their well-learned task. They took a large covering from a backpack and unfolded it. It was striped: safety orange and clear. They grunted as they worked to get one of the straps under the enormous animal.
Soon, they were done and the deer began to awaken. They scampered back to their place of concealment to watch. The sniper had another dart ready, just in case.
The buck stood and shook himself a little, throwing off the lingering traces of his brief, unexpected nap. He looked at the strange blanket he was now wearing and shook himself again. The blanket remained in place. It smelled of humans, but there didn’t seem to be any harm in it. He wandered farther into the woods, and the humans turned in the other direction.
“That’s the last of the foolers,” one noted.
“Those won’t stop the hunt,” another said, “but when a hunter sees that orange maybe he’ll think twice or even three times before shooting.”
“Best way to hide a deer during hunting season is in plain sight,” the shooter said. “If our covered deer look a little like another hunting party, they might just get away.”
“And if some hunters get wise to the trick and shoot anything that moves, orange or not, that’ll thin their herd.”
The members of Bambi’s Bushwhackers, a secret anti-hunting group, chuckled about that as they headed for their pickups.
I hadn’t known anyone could keep talking while taking a breath. The woman across the way from me on the bus could do it, though.
She filled the aisle seat as full as could be. With the bus being at capacity, that meant she had a trapped audience in the window seat. He was a young man — younger than my 35 years then — and was dressed neatly enough. I sat by the window across from them; your grandma dozed on and off next to me. We were headed home after going to a funeral on her side of the family.
After the first two minutes the young man across the way didn’t so much as grunt to encourage the woman to keep talking or to make her think he was listening. He closed his eyes for a while, either trying to feign or attain sleep. She didn’t mind at all and he gave up on that and stared out the window.
Natalie watched and then made another hash mark on the whiteboard. It went next to three others that were gradually making up the next set of five. The board was nearly half full of such bright green marks, each about an inch and a half tall, as uniform in size as freehand could make them.
She was very careful about that. It mattered. Each mark was a compromise she and Mason had agreed upon. Too big and not enough marks would fit on the board; too small, and too many marks would fit. She had practiced with the marker until she could neatly fill the board with one hundred marks, in tallies of fives.
She looked over at Mason and watched. Then she made the five-bar gate to signify the fifth attempt of that set.
“That’s fifty,” she said, more distinctly than was absolutely necessary.
Mason frowned and nodded. Then he made himself smile as he got back in his chair.
“That was a good morning’s workout,” he claimed. “Lunch, a little rest, and we’ll be ready for the blue pen this afternoon.”
Natalie also forced a smile and nodded at him.
Mason looked at the German shepherd sitting by the door; the dog was leashed, and the hand loop was hooked over the doorknob. That kept Schultz from running to his master’s side during the counting process.
“Ready to go out, Schultz?” Mason asked. The dog’s face brightened, and Mason rolled his wheelchair around the soft mats he had fallen on fifty times that morning. He took hold of the leash and opened the door. Schultz, mindful of his master’s needs, slowly led Mason through the doorway and outside.
Natalie walked around the mats and closed the door behind them. She told herself not to sigh but did so anyway.
Fifty times Mason had fallen this morning. And it was almost a given he would fall fifty times this afternoon as she filled the rest of the whiteboard with blue marks. Then he would stop for the day.
They had begun to work it out just before he left the hospital.
“Mason, it would be a miracle if you ever walked again. How many times are you willing to fall in one day to try for that miracle?”
“I’m willing to fall a thousand times a day to make that first step on my own.”
“I’m not willing to watch you fall a thousand times a day,” she had told him.
They had compromised on one hundred.
Just fifty to go, in the middle of the afternoon, and they could both call it a day.
Millicent’s coffin sat at the top of the stairs inside the Broadmanor family mausoleum.
Jeremy Broadmanor, Millicent’s nephew, sighed. He had been expecting this. “Gentlemen, your assistance, please.”
The pallbearers carrying the coffin of Jeremy’s father, Frederick, set their burden down and took up the handles of Millicent’s coffin. Jeremy led the way into the crypt.
“Aunt Millicent,” he said, “this is the third time in the past year you have done this. First when we brought cousin Arnold here. Then, eight months later when poor little Theodore died of the measles. And now again as we bring your dear brother to his final rest. It’s just too bad of you, Aunt Millicent, to play this game at such times.”
He shook his head as he looked at the empty space next to the coffin of his other late aunt, Marvela, Millicent and Frederick’s elder sister. He silently directed the pallbearers to place Millicent’s coffin against a wall on the far side of the crypt, then nodded that they should bring his father down.
“I am very sorry, Aunt Millicent,” Jeremy said to the coffin, “but this is as good as it gets. You are as far from Aunt Marvela as it is possible to be in here. You are part of the family and here you will remain. Surely a lifelong feud was enough; you don’t have to carry it on after your deaths, as well.”
The pallbearers returned and placed Frederick next to Millicent, blocking her in her new resting place. Frederick had always tried to make peace between the sisters.
“Thank you, Father, and good luck,” he said.
As Jeremy trod the steps upward, he heard a small noise. He pondered for years afterward whether it was a final huff from his Aunt Millicent or a sigh of relief from someone else entombed there.
They lay in bed, on top of the sweat-soaked sheet, carefully not touching each other. The air shimmered in the moonglow and thickened with unspoken accusations.
Ronnie sighed, which irritated Clay afresh.
The only breeze came down the short hallway from the other side of the house. It was warm and wet, but it was the only moving air they had. It brought the scent of garbage from the kitchen, and they wrinkled their noses in disgust with each new feeble waft.
They wanted to blame each other for that but it was pointless. The garbage can outside the back door was full and fermenting with the lid tied on to keep the roving packs of dogs out of it. Two nights ago, some dogs had tipped the can over and tried to scratch their way inside. When that failed, they turned on each other, filling the night with sounds of primal anger and pain.
Clay moved his eyes to see Ronnie’s pregnant belly, huge and white in the moonlight. Like his, her breaths were shallow, and the hump barely moved. He silently cursed her for getting pregnant, and the heat helped him to overlook his own contribution to her condition. The two of them were barely making it on the irregular government handouts; there was never any telling when the next truck would come by. Another mouth to feed would make things worse.
It would be better if the child were never born, he thought. Hell, it would be better for Ronnie if she didn’t have to live through any of this, let alone another human life in this mad world.
There were no stairs to push her down. He couldn’t easily drown her; there wasn’t much water, and even when the power to the pump was turned on he couldn’t hoard enough. The government truck didn’t bring bullets, and he needed what few he had in case the mad dogs or some lunatic or — Clay’s special nightmare — one of those enormous, mutated snakes got inside the house.
Clay knew he didn’t want Ronnie to suffer as he killed her. She was the best thing ever to happen in his life, and he had to take that into account. So how to…
He chuckled. It was a feeble sound, but Ronnie heard him.
“What could possibly be funny?” she whispered.
“I was thinking of how to kill you gently to put you out of your misery.”
She let that hang between them for a moment, in the thick air.
“You’ve always been too good to me, Clay,” she finally said. “Always thinking of my happiness.”
Then they both laughed, ever so briefly. Their hands touched and they suffered the extra heat for the tenderness.
They did not sleep. They dozed fitfully in the thick, stinking atmosphere of their home. But for the rest of the hot night, it was good enough.
Kris’s big green fuzzy dice hung motionless in place.
“They don’t look half bad there,” said Kris’s father.
“No, they don’t,” Kris’s friend Darren agreed.
“I was skeptical, but they work,” Kris’s grandfather said.
“I still don’t think they’re appropriate,” Kris’s mother said. “But I’m not going to argue the point. I suppose they’re not hurting anything, either.”
“I think they’re appropriate,” Kris’s little sister said quietly.
They finally turned away and walked down the little aisle. A man in a dark suit smiled gravely at them and nodded a good night; they would all be back in the morning.
The big green fuzzy dice — which alone had survived the wreck — swung a little as the man closed the casket, and they came to rest on Kris’s chest.
A man stood at the viewing window, pretending to be interested in all the newborns lying on display. He occasionally smiled at the nurse taking care of them.
He was interested in only one of the babies, though, and when the nurse was occupied with another child the man stared malevolently at the particular baby. He kept one hand in his jacket pocket, fondling the warm weapon there.
He suddenly felt the heat slipping out of his weapon, its titanium housing swiftly cooling. His shoulders sagged and he turned.
In the visitors’ waiting area sat another man, watching the first. The newcomer shook his head.
“Max, the Council said ‘no.’”
Lisandro hadn’t seen a cockroach for a couple of hours, but he knew they were still around. Soon, they would be all that was around.
He chided himself for being so pessimistic. Other life forms still wandered the surface of the warm, wet planet and swam in its seas and flew in its skies. They would adapt and survive and evolve. Perhaps the planet’s next sentient race would take better care of it.
And although he did not realize it as he died, Lisandro was the last human on Earth.
Hovering in and out of the Earth’s plane of existence, a formless Being took back the last spark of life It had deposited on Earth and became whole again for the first time in many millennia.
The Being that had been every human ever to live reflected on Its multitude of experiences. It thought about the lives and loves and losses of the nearly 200 billion individuals it had been. About how some parts of itself warred against other parts. How some parts were bold and others timid. How some parts created and other parts destroyed.
Long, long ago the Being had realized that It was being changed by Its human experiences — that even as increasing numbers went out, the sparks that returned had mutated ever so slightly. The changes had been subtle at first, and by the time the Being thought to worry those experiences within demanded that humanity be allowed to continue. And so it did, one lifespark of the Being at a time.
Now it was over.
“Are you finished?” another Being asked.
“With being human … it seems so,” Being One replied. “But I’m not sure what to think about what I have known and felt when so much of me was human.”
If Being Two had had a body and lungs it would have sighed. “Think while we travel. We only stopped here to indulge your silly, antiquated fascination with eating, remember?”
Being One remembered. “Only by being corporeal could I enjoy all that this beautiful planet had to offer as food.”
“And all the humans you were eventually ruined it,” Being Two said.
Being One paused. “Yes… I don’t understand why I let that happen.”
“Let’s go. You can ponder all you want while we catch up with the others.” And Being Two moved in time and space and material plane away from the Earth.
Being One regarded the planet It had dominated only too well, and was sad as It left.
The apples were especially good, It thought.