Thirty Seconds
“Do you have any twos?”
Mia has one eye on her cards and the other on the window. The yellow polka dots on her nightgown are shaking like popcorn. Mine is white as a shroud. I glance at my hand.
“No. Go fish.”
I watch her adjust her glasses. There’s a big scratch on the left lens that she sometimes has trouble seeing around. Her brows furrow.
“But… I have a two,” she says, “and we already matched a pair of twos…”
“So?”
“There are only four twos in the deck, and we drew all the cards. You must have the last one.”
I slide my rightmost card aside with my thumb, discover the errant deuce, and turn it over. “Sorry. Here.”
Mia fumbles for the new card, spilling her hand all over the carpet in the process. “Oh…”
Wordlessly I retrieve her cards and slip them back between her fingers. In the process I see all of them, and notice she doesn’t have any sevens.
“Got any sevens?” I ask.
Mia scratches her neck when she’s nervous. I rarely see her without red marks there now.
“Hey,” I repeat. “Sevens?”
“Wha—?” She pops back to life, nearly dropping her hand again. “S-sixes?”
“Sevens.”
“Oh, uh… no. Go fish.”
“There aren’t any cards left,” I remind her.
Mia peers at the sharp cards from the safety of her auburn curls. “I… don’t wanna play anymore.”
“I don’t think we’re playing it right anyway,” I say with carefully placed laughter as I take up the deck. My grandfather taught me how to riffle shuffle, and I’m proud to say I’m not half bad at it. “How about some Crazy Eights?”
Mia’s hands wring the hem of her gown as if she might squeeze the butter out of her popcorn. “I said I don’t wanna play anymore.”
“Okay, then how about War?”
Bad choice of words. Mia’s expression quickly darkens.
“How can you be so calm, Edie? Can’t you hear them?”
It’s not a quiet night. There hasn’t been a quiet night in Juniper since summer ran out on us. A steady growling keeps pace with hammering blows on the shutters, accompanied by talons screeching against the aluminum siding like toenails on a chalkboard. Myriad cloven hooves and tentacles crunch their abnormal patterns in the fallen leaves. Occasionally something on the street lets out an unearthly bellow.
I’m not calm. Juniper is on the Everglades, just far enough into the wetlands to be considered remote. It’s a tiny, out of the way place that is easily forgotten by the world, though I’ve started to wonder if there’s any world out there to forget. Meanwhile, like everybody else, I’m going through the motions of life as I await salvation. To do any less is to be torn apart on my way down the slippery, toothy maw of insanity.
Mia hugs herself and rocks on her knees. “Make them stop… make them just go back into the swamp and never come out again…”
It doesn’t matter if there’s a full moon or none at all, so long as there’s a sun to go down. The bayou coughs up enough misshapen things to fill every house, garage, and shed in town to standing room only, if ever they can get inside. The only reason Mia’s not running around screaming is this card game.
The only reason I’m not running around screaming is because of my secret. I’m the only one who knows how many times the things beating on our walls have made it into the house. I’m the only one who can protect us when they do.
They might get in tonight. If they do, I’ll be ready.
On the afternoon of the first day, an explosion destroyed the only bridge heading out of town. The things came out of the marsh on day two. We weren’t ready then. We didn’t know the rules, and so a lot of us didn’t make it to day three.
On the morning of the fifth day, after the blood had dried around the homes of those departed souls still in denial, old man Fahy set out for help on his airboat with a couple friends in tow. The boat floated back to us in chunks. So did old man Fahy and his friends.
Fast forward from summer to fall. By day we exist like ghosts, repeating the actions of our lives to no good purpose. By night we cower behind our makeshift bulwarks. I haven’t seen the moon or the stars since it all began. For all I know they could be gone.
“You’re safe here,” I assure my friend.
“You don’t know that! Remember Billy Coulet from math class? They said somebody at his house left a window cracked. The next day when they broke the door down, there was so much blood on that one policeman’s shoes that it went all the way up his socks. And he was wearing knee-highs.”
“That’s not true. Danny and Chris were just trying to scare you.”
“Who cares? Billy and his whole family are still dead!” Mia glances around nervously. “Did you leave any windows cracked?”
“No.”
“Are you sure, Edie? You shampoo twice in the bath because you don’t remember if you did it the first time, and I’ve seen you lose your pencil because it’s in your other hand.”
Just as I’m about to re-reassure her, somebody starts screaming downstairs. At first, I think it’s the TV, since mom turns her old movies way up to pretend the world isn’t on fire, but that was definitely her real scream. I know I didn’t leave anything open. I checked it all twice.
Didn’t I?
“Oh god, they’re here!” Mia rakes new marks in her neck. “I told you! They come out of the swamp every night and they never give up and now they’re here and now we’re gonna die!”
Thirty seconds. I’ve got thirty seconds.
I toss the deck in a jumble, yank Mia to her feet by the wrist, and pelt barefoot down the hall towards the stairs. She’s dead weight and it won’t matter in less than a minute, but I can’t bear to leave her alone. I practically leap off the landing and burst through the door to Dad’s study at a run.
He’s there—like always—sprawled in the old leather recliner staring at the clock on his desk. Dad was the sheriff of Juniper. On the seventh day he led a mob with guns in their hands and hymns on their lips into the swamp. When they found him the next day, he was missing a leg, an eye, his mob, and his mind. Now he lies there, muttering to himself and staring at the strange clock they found in his grasp. I feed him porridge. Mom changes his bedpan.
I lose my grip on Mia, who is too hysterical to keep up. The front door that I may or may not have locked is hanging from its hinges; the slimy, bloated, vomit-green thing leaking swamp water in our once-white living room looks like a drowned gorilla. Mom’s not screaming anymore because her head is in its mouth. I turn away just before the crunching noise, but Mia watches the decapitated corpse fall to the floor. I leave her standing in the foyer, waiting in stunned madness as a misshapen mass of tentacles reaches out from the front yard.
I’ve borne witness to mindless brutality against everyone I care about more times than anybody in town; so often that I barely notice anymore. I wonder if that makes me insane.
“Thirty seconds…” Dad mutters, as he tries in vain to reach the clock he found in the swamp all those months ago that now sits patiently on his desk. It’s pretty in gold with a silver glass frame, but there’s so much more about it that I’ve never been able to understand. I tried to tell my mom about it, but nobody believes me, and nobody cares. The grand pursuit of knowledge in Juniper has been wiped clean by a chronic addiction to survival.
“Thirty seconds… thirty seconds… thirtysecondsthirtyseconds—”
I pull the key from its groove and start winding.
click… click
My whole world is washed up in the clock’s spinning pendulum; colors swirl like water going down a drain. The growling of beasts can be heard all over the house.
click… click
Mia’s screams aren’t human anymore. They’ve got her.
“…hurry up dammit…”
click… click
clack
tick… tick… tick…
“Do you have any twos?”
Mia has one eye on her cards, and the other on the window. The yellow polka dots on her nightgown are shaking like popcorn. I don’t have time to sit through this again. I throw my cards on the floor and race downstairs with her in tow.
In the white living room, Mom’s watching Sixteen Candles with the volume way up. I dash for the front door and lock it.
“Edith? Is something wrong?”
For good measure, and with no small amount of grunting, I drag a couch in front of the door, then plop myself down and sit there until the gorilla-thing goes looking for easier prey.
“Edith…?”
“Nothing, Mom!”
Mom has that ‘you’re up to no good young lady’ look on her face. I wish to God I was. The exchange is so utterly normal that for a moment it makes me disbelieve my entire reality. When I come back to terms with what’s real, I just want to smash my face into a wall until the world around me dies.
Mia trots into the room, and mom promptly changes the subject.
“Are you sure your father is okay with you staying here tonight, Dear?” Mom asks her.
Mia’s house is more than thirty seconds from here. I can’t protect her there. She’s my best friend—my only living friend. I need her to be here.
“It’s fine, Mom, we cleared it with him this afternoon. Right, Mia?”
“My dad’s fine with it,” Mia confirms before looking away. She doesn’t like lying.
Mom takes a long drag from her cigarette in lieu of a reply. She quit smoking three years ago and was proud of it, but that was back when we used to be able to go outside at night without being cut into bloody hamburger chunks.
“Try to get some sleep. You’ve both got school tomorrow.”
Yes, we still go to school. You can either go to school, pretend to learn something, chat like you’re not climbing the rubber walls inside your own brain, have dinner at home, then blast your TV loud enough to drown out the world until the sun comes up again, or you can isolate yourself until you slit your own wrists in the bathtub. The latter is getting more popular every day.
I pat Mia’s hand and walk her back upstairs. My bedroom is two stories up, but Mom won’t let me move it. The last time I tried to take the clock out of Dad’s study he wailed like a banshee and fell on the floor. It took her an hour to clean him up, calm him down, and yell at me. What I can’t make her understand might be the death of us all someday.
“So how about Crazy Eights?”
Juniper used to be a part of Florida. When I listen to the creatures thundering against my wall every night, I think it’s part of Hell.
#
In history class, Mrs. Galverson is teaching us about the Battle of Trenton. My desk is far from the baseboards, so I’m huddled in my teal windbreaker. There are more empty seats today, but I heard through the grapevine that no masticated chunks were found near anybody’s home last night. Whoever made a run for it packed their family up in the daylight hours. You’d think we’d all have done that by now, but nobody who tries to leave town is ever heard from again, help never arrives, and if you look around town enough, eventually you find chunks that weren’t there the night before.
In Juniper, freedom is just another form of suicide.
The weak sun shines over a graveyard of scrap cars, shattered telephone poles, and cracked up asphalt outside. There’s a spilled bag of groceries on the corner, where rotted fruit lies drying in the sun next to red-black pavement stains.
“Does anyone remember the name of the Hessian commander?” Mrs. Galverson asks robotically. She has deep bags under her eyes and her lip is twitching. I can see faint red spots where tufts of her hair have been torn out by the root.
“Anyone?”
Jeff Billingsley, the carrot top in the Jaguars jersey, raises his hand. He always says the same thing. Nobody wants to hear it.
“Anyone?”
“When are they gonna come help us?” Jeff calls out. Mrs. Galverson shifts her weight uncomfortably while Jeff proceeds to skewer the elephant in the room to death with a pitchfork.
“They gotta come help us! Why won’t they come? I… I think my dad got hurt… mom says he’s sleeping… she took him down to the basement and she takes food down there… but it’s all rotting and it stinks, an’ she won’t let me see him…”
The teacher’s eye twitches; she takes in a long breath. I huddle deeper into my jacket and stare at the wall.
“Nobody’s coming, Jeffrey!” Mrs. Galverson erupts. “Can’t you read a goddamn calendar? It’s been weeks! Do you know why they’re not coming? It’s because Satan’s keeping them out! Satan took this town all for himself and us with it! Now tell me who the fucking Hessian commander was or I’ll fail you! Do you know what happens to kids who fail? They get their hands and feet nailed to trees and are left outside all night! Outside with the Devil’s spawn!”
Jeff’s crying. Annie Thorpe is sharpening pencils into stakes with a pocketknife and whispering to herself. The Melbourne twins are biting each other and playing with the little blood smears, while Tommy Reynolds looks on laughing. Betty Lerser runs screaming out of the room.
The bell rings, and we all scurry like mice for the safety of the door.
“Go home and lock yourselves up before he gets you too!” Mrs. Galverson shouts as she pounds on the chalkboard.
The road home runs parallel to a flood plain. There’s a narrow swatch of forever-soaked peat by the pier. Smoke is coming from the water, bathing everything in the kind of murky fog that makes your imagination run wild as you contemplate what might come rushing out.
“Rall,” Mia says out of nowhere.
“What?”
“Colonel Johann G. Rall was the Hessian commander at the Battle of Trenton.”
“No kidding?” I reply. Her nervous eyes are darting. I try to keep the conversation up. “He’s the guy who surrendered to Washington, right?”
Mia shakes her head. “They killed him. Shot him right off his horse. Suffered for hours before he died.”
“…you don’t say.”
“He didn’t speak English and ignored a warning that he couldn’t read. He died because he didn’t know what was going on. Just like us.”
“Mia—”
“Do you think we’ll suffer for hours before we die?”
“Stop it. We’re not going to die.”
We stop outside of Mia’s green rancher. She hasn’t been home in days. I watch her walk up the path like she’s in irons, then tug on her sleeve.
“Hey. I need help with my biology homework.”
“We don’t have biology anymore. There’s nobody left to teach it.”
“Yeah. So, I need lots of help.”
Mia won’t look at me. “I can’t stay at your house forever, Edie. Remember last time?”
Mr. Fitzgerald thinks he’s a father because he knocked somebody up once. He never left a mark, so Dad was never able to stop him, even when it almost came to blows. Everybody is too busy with their own survival to care about Mia anymore. I’m all she has left.
“That was before all this,” I point out. “Your dad spends so much time drunk now that he doesn’t know where you are anyway. Let’s just go, before—”
As if on cue the front door opens to reveal a man with runaway whiskers and a beer-stained undershirt, who smells like he shimmied out of a sewer. In his left hand he’s got a stranglehold on a bottle of whiskey; from his right dangles a shotgun. Mr. Fitzgerald was never a clean-cut man, but he used to hold down a job on the mainland and at least seemed to be alive. I can’t say I’m sorry that the beasts devoured that person, but what they left behind is even worse.
“Dad… I’m home.”
Mr. Fitzgerald grunts. Mia tries to wriggle under his arm, but I’ve still got hold of her.
“Hey… my biology homework, remember?”
“I can’t do that every day…”
“Where you been, Mia?” her father slurs. “You git inside ‘fore the sun goes down.”
I can’t leave her here. I can’t protect her here. Mr. Fitzgerald notices me, and his brow darkens.
“You agin? What the hell you been doing with my girl, you little dyke?”
I’ve seen scarier things in the last few weeks, and I made them all go away. I don’t have any fear left to spare on him.
“I’ve been keeping her safe,” I announce.
“The only person at yer house that could ever keep anybody safe was yer daddy, and now he’s dribbling slop an’ peeing in a bucket.”
Dad can’t hold me in his arms anymore, yet this son of a bitch is still kicking. Just thinking about what he might do as soon as the door closes and I’m off his lawn makes me want to come back here later with the clock, take that gun from him, and--
“I’m keeping her safe,” I repeat.
Mr. Fitzgerald’s grip tightens on his weapon. There aren’t any police left in Juniper and all the other homes on this street are empty.
Well played, Edith. Shit.
My knees are knocking and my throat just went dry. I close my eyes, but he only belches a foul reek at me.
“Yer old lady can’t do shit ‘cept wipe up yer old man’s. Get outta my yard. Mia, you git in the house.”
“I’m sorry, Edie…” Mia whispers. She turns to leave.
I can’t let her go in there. If the monsters from the marsh don’t get her, the one she lives with will. When Mr. Fitzgerald turns away, I snatch the bottle out of his grasp and bring it down over his head. A piece of glass embeds itself in my knuckle, and though his hair is soaked when he hits the floor, I’m wearing most of it.
“Edie? What did you do!”
It’s a good question. What did I do?
“I… I couldn’t just… let him take you,” I sputter, but Mia scowls at me.
“I know what I’m doing, Edie! I was okay!”
“No, you weren’t! You never have been! It was bad enough before, but we’re all different now! The people who are about to do something crazy get that look in their eye. Haven’t you seen it? He had the look. You can’t be alone with somebody who has the look!”
“It’s not your decision to make.”
“Do you really want to stay here?”
Mia opens her mouth, but nothing else comes out. She’s seen the look. Mrs. Galverson has it. Everybody has it just before the end.
“What will we do when he wakes up?” she asks as I pull her out the door. She reaches out to lock it, but I hold her hand.
“It’s getting late. We should go home.”
“…Edie, let go of me…”
“Let’s go home,” I repeat.
Mia goes into her script; the one she uses on our teachers and the cops: “There’s nothing wrong at home… everyone’s just under a lot of stress.”
I pull her away from the door and tune out the rest. She trips on the porch stair, and we both go down in a jumble on the lawn. She looks back to see the door still slightly ajar, hesitates, then bursts into blubbering tears as I lead her carefully away from the house.
She won’t ever have to come back here again.
#
The meatloaf on my plate is underdone and full of blood.
“Would anyone like dessert?” Mom announces over the din. She’s got an apron on over dad’s service weapon and is bent over the stove with mitts on her hands. “I have bread pudding, rice pudding, banana cream pie…”
Mom’s too much of a mom to get upset. Instead, she bakes. And smokes. I think there are some ashes in my succotash.
“How was your day, girls?”
“Mrs. Galverson taught us about the Battle of Trenton,” I reply.
“Didn’t you already go over that last week?”
It was the last lesson plan before the swamp came to life. Now it’s the only lesson plan.
“There was… a lot to learn,” Mia says.
I peer through a tiny slat in the boarded-up window, past the shapes lurching through the darkness. You’d think people would be looting one another, but there’s no need. It’s just a matter of picking out a house that’s had its lights on all day, then avoiding the rooms that smell like death when you go in to raid the pantry.
“How’s your father, Mia? I thought he might want you home tonight.”
“Dad, uh—”
“—wasn’t feeling good,” I interrupt. “Hit his head or something. Asked if we could keep Mia until he gets better.”
Mia puts her empty cup to her lips and drinks from it until mom shrugs and turns back to her baking. The puddings smell nice.
After dinner, mom parks herself on the couch and turns up The Breakfast Club. She spent all day pulling planks off a house down the street to add to ours. She’s got splinters, there’s dried blood under her nails, and I can smell faint traces of gunpowder.
Mia makes me double check all the locks, but every door and window is covered with so much wood it’s like they were never there. All except the front door. I check that one three times before we head upstairs.
“Colonel Mustard?” Mia asks half an hour later. I reveal him from my hand, and she rolls her eyes in despair. “Still wrong? You’d think this would be easier with only two players. I know it was in the conservatory with the candlestick, but I can’t figure out who did it.”
“I don’t think you’re supposed to tell me all that.”
Mia laughs—the noise is like wooden windchimes swinging from dead branches. She stares at the board. Her cards fall out of her hand.
“Edie. This game is about murder.”
“…yeah.”
“We murdered my dad today, Edie.”
“I didn’t hit him that hard.”
“We left the door open.”
I see that man’s face in the picture on every suspect card. I can’t help but wonder what it looks like now, in pieces all over his living room. He’ll never hurt her again.
“They’ll find out what happened,” Mia continues. “Then they’ll come and get us.”
“Nobody’s going to figure out anything.”
“God will. He’ll send those things to get us. We can’t keep them out forever.”
I hear a boom downstairs and prepare to jump up, but there’s nothing else. False alarm.
“I can protect you from God,” I tell Mia with confidence.
Then I hear the screaming again. I jump to my feet and grab Mia’s arm, but she pulls away from me.
“Come on!” I roar. “There are only twenty-eight seconds left!”
I pull at her, but there’s nothing of my friend on that mask of primal terror. “They’re coming! They’re coming!” She shrieks, biting into my hand until she draws blood.
“Ow!”
Twenty-five seconds… twenty-four…
“Mia—”
She’s under my bed; hissing, spitting, digging at her neck and gargling black laughter at me. I can’t make her come out.
Twenty-three… twenty-two…
I run downstairs alone, where Dad is waiting for me.
“Thirtysecondsthirtysecondsthirty—”
I pull the clock key out of its groove and start winding.
click… click
clack
tick… tick… tick…
“We murdered my dad today, Edie.”
I hear a boom downstairs. I jump up, take the stairs in three great jumps, and rush to lock the door.
But there is no lock.
There’s no jamb. No bolt. No knob. Instead, a jagged hole shows a clear view of the front yard, where a man stands with a shattered whiskey bottle and a smoking shotgun.
“Y’little bitch!” Mr. Fitzgerald bellows. “You think you c’n steal my girl from me? This next one’s fer your whore momma, then I’m comin’ to get you!”
The things are all around him, and it occurs to me how I’ve never really looked at them before. My brain can’t parse the wrongness.
Horns, claws, talons... welts, wisps of matted hair, grasping tentacles and scarred flesh. Some of them are vaguely humanoid, while others are serpentine or insectile. Still more are nothing but boiling shapes, dissolving the dead leaves as they spill along. Some are the size of my doorway, while others look like they could envelop my house.
Mr. Fitzgerald raises his last barrel and points it straight at me, but they get to him first. I want to hide my face in my hands and scream, but I’m caught in the headlights.
Oh god, why can’t I close my eyes?
The drowned gorilla that ate mom’s head yesterday takes a swipe at Mr. Fitzgerald’s back, and a hunk of steaming flesh comes off with his shirt. Three wolf-like things with huge jaws and external intestines that jiggle with villi knock him to the ground and break through his ribs from behind; one of them pulls out a lung that the pack fights over. A kraken with more tendrils than I can count wraps up his left arm and slowly wrenches it out of the socket, while a flock of tiny abominations that look like parts of birds and wasps stitched together peck out his eyes. The gorilla digs out a length of spine with gore still attached and feasts on it like prime rib.
“ghhllkgghh—gaakkghhhkk… M-miaaaaaaagghhhk—”
Mr. Fitzgerald’s last act on this earth is to squeeze his trigger finger. The wild shot plows right into our heating oil tank, and the next thing I know, I’m lying flat on my stomach in the yard.
My house is on fire.
Twenty-nine… twenty-eight…
A slug-like thing the size of a sedan that was crawling on my roof is knocking over trees while writhing like an ant burnt by a magnifying glass.
Twenty-seven… twenty-six…
The wolves are burning. The gorilla is burning. In the house I grew up in, two people are burning—one taller than me, and one just my size.
I can’t stop him from destroying our door. But if I could stop the shot that starts the blaze…
Twenty-three… twenty-two…
Dozens of splinters buried under my skin crucify me with every move I make. I wrench myself to my feet, pull my shirt over my nose, and run into the inferno. My arms turn bright red, and the pain turns my reason inside-out. I’m a machine, running entirely on instinct, with only one place left to go.
Nineteen… eighteen…
There’s a raging fire rapidly engulfing the second floor and I’ll never climb the stairs again, but the flames haven’t reached the study yet. Dad is sitting in his chair. I scoop up the clock and shake his shoulder.
“Dad! Please! Come with me!”
Sixteen… fifteen…
“Thirtysecondsthirtysecondsthirty—”
“Dad… please…”
Fourteen… thirteen…
A burning beam falls across the doorway, and the room fills up with smoke. I cut my fingers fighting with the window latch and dive outside, the clock under my arm. Dad dies in the fire.
Eleven… ten… nine…
Back on the lawn, I jam the key in the clock and grind as fast as I can make it go.
click… click
clack
CRACK
Part of the key is in my fingers. The rest of it is jammed in the hole.
Seven… six… five…
I can’t… I c-can’t…
Four… three… two…
The clock. I’m winding the clock. There are flies on my skin. The monsters are calling my name. The puddings smell good. I’m safe from God and the Devil, so long as I keep winding. Mia’s safe. She’s smiling at me. We’re going to school tomorrow. Dad’s a good cop. The maggots are under my eyelids. The stove is too hot. Turn the stove down.
…one…
Mom, please turn the stove down.
…zero
I run past the creatures the fireball is eating and plunge into the midnight underbelly of Juniper like a fork into a raw sausage casing. The key is in my hand, and I’m still turning it. In thirty seconds I’m going to save the world.
It’s obvious why nobody who tries to leave town is ever heard from again. They’re not being killed—they just want to get away, because they don’t give a fuck about the rest of us. Well, I give a fuck, and when I finish winding the clock everything will be fine. Mia will be fine. Mom and Dad will be fine.
I run barefoot down the lane by the glow of the silver moon, old screws and bits of windshield glass lacerating my feet. All the way I’m winding the clock, leading us all to freedom.
click… crack
click… crack
The moonglow triples in intensity, and I look up. A helicopter pushes air currents down, billowing my singed clothes and hair. Great nozzles are mounted upon it—enough to hose down my home and save us all. I wave frantically, emitting a noise like a feral cat yowling over a boiling cauldron.
The chopper turns. The nozzles come to bear. From each emit jets of pure napalm that incinerate the bus stop shelter just to my left, and the murderous things bearing down on me to my right. Three other choppers join in, bathing Juniper in fire. Nobody can go outside, so the fire spreads from disaster to calamity, and from calamity to cataclysm.
People are being burned alive inside their homes, but it’s going to be okay. I give a fuck, so I’ll come back with help.
I make it to the edge of town, but the edge of town is gone. Instead, the bullfrogs chirp longingly to each other from both sides of a ten-foot chain-link fence, topped with razor wire and marked by sentry points. There’s a sign mounted on the fence. It’s not facing me, but I catch its reflection in the windshield of a black SUV purring on the other side:
BB-601 Military testing grounds. No trespassing beyond this point. Photography is prohibited. Use of deadly force authorized.
I’m seen, and flashlights turn my way. The gate opens, and the SUVs are rolling towards me. Soldiers raise their weapons. They have no intention of asking questions first.
I hold up the clock and scream:
“Thirty seconds! THIRTY SECONDS!”
The men pause, as though I hold aloft the Ark of the Covenant. Black suited men are holding a conversation. They think I can’t hear them over the din, but I pick up snippets.
“—that the clock?”
“—mutate every goddamn bug and frog and housecat, even the fucking crickets, then get our people out with the clocks. Biological warfare on a whole new scale if these tests play out—”
“—broken? Did that girl break it?”
“—timetable all messed up, total loss—pulling the plug, there’s another junk town marked off in Oklahoma nobody will miss—”
“—can’t let word get out, kill anyone who tries to escape—”
One of them approaches me gently and holds his hands out. “Hey kid, can I have that? Don’t worry, everything will be fine. It’s all over now. We’ll take care of you. Just toss me the—”
I slam the clock into the sharp rocks at my feet over and over, until the glass shatters and shards of it are buried in my face. “Thirty seconds! Thirty seconds! Thirty seconds!”
“Fucking brat—”
Shots ring out. I’m bleeding and my arm won’t move anymore. I turn from the men and run down to the creek where dad and I used to fish.
In the bog, I see Mia smiling at me. Mr. Fitzgerald is a nice man in a business suit who picks us up from school every day and never forgets my birthday. Mom’s baking pies down there, while Mrs. Galverson reaches the end of the war in our studies. As it turns out, we won.
They open their mouths, gurgling at me through the water that pours out. Dad reaches out to hold me, and I run into his scaly arms.
It’s so nice to finally see the stars again.