Family Solution

The outside world was unknown to her, but she could see a glimpse of it through the window in his room. She hadn’t been in her father’s room since the calamity was announced thirty-five seconds before the lights went out. Consistent thirty-year 10.5 earthquakes would have been a softer destabilization than the abrupt cosmic visitation basked in enlightenment dragging behind them a pet Basilisk. They carried, upon their arrival, a grudge of misappropriated rage that spread like a wild virus similar to the infectious common cold equivalent they forced humans into hiding. Clarity came too late, decimating the land with fire and chemicals poisoning the soils recklessly before the realization led the extraterrestrials to exclaim in a great somber mass-translated announcement, ‘our bad.’ Though they were in trouble with some galactic federation that only a small group of humans met and hopefully pushed in the right direction, they were left on a dying planet waiting for reparations to revive the planet. Outside of constructing gargantuan turbines filtering the air to be breathable once more, Humans were on their own.

Francesca’s family, The Zalos, hid in the family’s panic bunker of an inherited house when she was three years old, twenty-six miles from civilization beyond non-volunteer fire stations, gas stations, and school districts. Seven years after the Federation claimed we would be avenged, the sky-scrapping turbines let out a siren, unmistakably foreign in tone, yet why can’t be understood, playing in every earth language. Meaning if you didn’t speak the top five languages according to google, you’d be waiting a while for the much needed all clear. Relatively speaking, but as she made her way to what was her father’s childhood bedroom against her aunt’s best interest, the outside world missed her, and the call could not be ignored. The lush greens, whilst leaving their city loft, straining to survive the heavy onslaught under the blue skies before they greyed into a coal-black, stayed plastered behind her eyelids. She always believed in holding out for the day she’d expand on what little memory of her home she retained over the last twenty-eight years. Truthfully any new view would do, having dealt with nothing but a makeshift inner garden and playing card games that don’t age well with only three people. Only after pulling back the curtains of the window leading into the acres of land the property occupied like a dinghy in the ocean was she suddenly overwhelmed by the reality.

There was no green. Grey ash replaced the golden wheat fields of intermittent trees with clouds mirroring them as they crept across the vast black and pale white skyline. While this didn’t occur to her immediately, the lack of squawky crows and chirping fowls made for eerie wind passing through the last of the dead wood, flaking branches off with a summer’s breeze. No sun to speak of, prompting Aunt Nancy to look out of the front door, complaining about the crops she’ll never grow on this land, regardless if she technically inherited it. Generations of families kept the land profitable, flush with several outputs that would be ripe for rebuilding the small town at their door, useless except for the dwindling supply of topsoil in their basement. It was Gregory, who woke late to the news, who provided the words Francesca tried to ignore, fighting the pessimism coming up the stairs brought. “Isn’t anything going out there?”

To his credit, he was only meant to be here for the two-week spring break that felt like an extinct mindset flickering with the last of its kind. The lack of contact ten years in, not only across hundreds of acres but across seas, meant he would never see his parents or friends again. Mass infrastructure collapse put simplicity behind them, but Aunt Nancy did her best to educate them with the outdated textbooks and her brother’s library with surviving T.S. Elliot, F. Scotts Fitzgerald, Charles Bukoski, and others. All frantically saved, one by one, during periods of quiet with each of Nancy’s risky ventures on the surface. As rare as they used to be. She focused on the agriculture textbooks from her wild eighties college days and wished she had more to offer in providing them entertainment through the nights that still didn’t feel over. Being a novice caretaker of two kids after a series of car accidents, authority attacks, and, more recently, intoxicated aliens on gap years from their wrongly initiated war, she felt freshly prepared to breathe deep. As startlingly fresh-faced as the day her sister-in-law left her in charge to grab her husband, Francesca’s father, from the shops. There was no way she knew what she was sending him when handing him a list and address for a place in the city that created niche things no one would ever remember.

Their drafty house spent two decades collecting rogue battle scars and nearly another collecting dust, both of which were on the agenda in the grey-lit morning amongst a dissipating fog. Aunt Nancy put work into testing the three fields and the backyard for soil quality in hopes of aiding their dwindling supply. Nothing about the weapons and contaminants brought by the extraterrestrials had funneled its way to the sticks and stalks of northern England. Keeping and renewing stocked and rationed for so long wasn’t easy, but she felt she could breathe for the first time in her short time away from them. Alone at last. All the bad news in the world paled in comparison to exploring the grounds as she did as a child with her father and sister. She hadn’t adequately missed her sister since. Crying with a smile could easily be misinterpreted as terrible news to come but to not be so vital for the kids, now strangely raised adults, was as important as the discovery she slipped into following a trial from her youth. “What could be this violet?”

Hours of fresh air had reached Francesca’s breaking point of tedium, and what more could she do with half of a broom? Ash that’s not quite ash but exhaust remnants of dirty invasion transport and explosives, stained furniture, and walls proving Gregory’s theory correct. The noises could’ve been conversations in alien dialects amongst themselves at some point in the past during their epic battle of what had to be ground assault. Several weeks of sleepless nights counting down the day had put the road in her eyes, and the stove couldn’t get any cleaner. Matter of fact, the five-bedroom red wonder with a draft that could chill during a heat wave was becoming ripe for cots in front of the fireplace with whatever Aunt Nancy brought home. The sunlight was fading, and Francesca couldn’t relax until this issue was addressed as if seeing the empty husk of heritage under her feet called out with a dare to prove this world wrong. But it had been hours since she rode off with her makeshift cart attached to her ten-speed from when she was in grad school.

Gregory finished moving creature comforts from the cellar away from the creatures scurrying behind the thick walls, digging tunnels in the dirt. If only they knew how thick. They weren’t in place a full five seconds before she was packing a survival bag with their last first aid kit. “Can we talk about this?”

“Should we pretend she didn’t fly over the handlebars and break a hip? She did the last time she rode a bike.”

“And the time before that, I know. None of us know what’s really happened, who’s alive—we need to build what we have.”

“I’m going to find some—”

“That’s a big bag, Fran.” As great as camouflage green duffel bags are, he could see a photograph frame putting a sharp edge on the crumpled capsule; he didn’t need to look in it to know which one it was or what lay under it. Her head sank for about the same amount of time it took her to finish tying off the top with twine. “It’s like you’re only waiting to say goodbye.”

“What’s the problem?”

“Jesus, Fran, do you hate us that much?”

“No, but…. I’m too old; we’re too old for wasting this.”

“And what about Aunty? Are you really willing to leave us?”

“Yes. If we catch her while she’s out, I can keep her away and—”

“Would you slow down! Can you please think about how far we are away from—”

“I knew she was trying to keep the map from us. Anyway, I have it. Regardless of what’s left of it, we’re about sixteen miles from the Great Pee Dee River, and if we take it north will lead to Badin Lake, and we start there. That’s where we begin looking for people.”

“What’s the rush?”

“Rush to do what?”

Nancy returned with a kick of the door and a dirt/soot combination flaking from every inch of clothes. The pile on the welcome mat spoke to how much work it took her to get to the level of filthy she felt was worth undoing Fran’s sweeping with the coat she discarded alone. It landed with a thud, centralized around the waist pocket, something he took note of as she claimed no new find, only water. She sat down in a chair of cobwebs fused with bodily fluids of unknown origin to a horrified Greg, who did his best and classified it as a lost cause. Staring at the ceiling, each breath refused to sit in her lungs long enough to oxygenate the brain cells needed to understand her last forty-one minutes. They first wondered where she acquired the trench coat, equally disgusting and soaked in a thin ooze merging with the fabric. Second was why she had lost everything else, including the bike. She had no problem admitting the handlebars got away from her at some point, but her focus quickly snapped to the packed duffle bag.

“Good. You’re ready; we leave in the morning,” she said before shooting up to her feet to lock the door.”

“Sold,” Fran stated, running upstairs for the backpack her mom used during her continent-jumping exploits.

“You too? What’s going on?”

“Greg, help me with the windows.”

Taking apart that massive display of delicate dishware to use the cabinets to reinforce the vulnerable positions had been on Nancy’s bucket list since her brother began filling it with his overseas tours. It wouldn’t have been an issue if their mother didn’t seem to think it was a unique and fascinating style of parenting that made her feel the third best of two. Greg noticed her limp as she went to the hall closet for the toolbox that couldn’t be considered helpful to the beings who trashed the house. Fran returned to hammering and smashed thumbs echoing from the kitchen while Nancy dropped her heavy coat with a thud only Greg seemed to notice so she could really focus on her swing accuracy. He cleared the device from one of the pockets and joined her side to end her barrage of hurry-the-hell-ups. They had done the living room and used the kitchen table to double-layer the back door leading to the fenced-in yard where chickens once roamed freely. The focused calm from before seemed to grow more and more frantic, and not only from hitting her fingers in so many painful ways. If she could just get the dining room sealed, she started thinking, they may not have to retreat back to the unholy recesses holding a smell of human compost and mold with rust peppered in to deaden the lungs.

“What did you find?”

“Here’s a brick for the nails. Remove the hinges for the bay windows.”

“Are they out there?”

She didn’t want to stop blacking out the room to fit the warm lighting of an open flame, but Fran remained defiant when addressing her fears, locking up if she couldn’t put a name to the anxiety causer. Nancy’s determination turned impatient as they fought her in every room she made them board up. “NO More questions. When we’re sitting in front of the fire in the cellar, you can speak.”

“I’m not going back—” Nancy lunged at her throat in a surprising jolt that took more than Francesca off guard and got a grip of her chin. The moment her eyes swelled with flabbergasted tears, Nancy’s rage felt idiotic.

“One more night. We have to do one more night, then we can never come—” yet Gregory only caught the lunge before reaching for a table leg of the antique, former mahogany wealth holder to strike her in the back of the head.

“Greg!” Francesca yelled, supporting her limp body to the floor. The thud intensified at the sight of blood at the impact point, and she quickly assumed the blow was fatal. With a minuscule of wit left, she carefully flipped her over and sat hauntingly over her torso for— “Phew, she’s breathing. Greg, what the—”

“I’m sorry she’s been acting crazy the last hour, I thought she finally snapped. Was—was I wrong?”

“She said one more night. I think she found—”

*Thump. Thump. Thump.*

“WHAT was that?” The house was barely lit as it is, and something above with creaks for speech patterns did what they thought was tip-toeing over their head, shaking candles with more fear than lit flames can give. They, and by them, the entity on the roof included, seemed to notice each other’s presence simultaneously, meaning someone was using their excessive arguing to get in close.

Francesca whispered with the utmost devotion to silence, “which rooms do we have left?”

“Umm, father’s old room and umm—”

A crash on the bathroom tile from the destroyed sink left them with option one, slam the door of father’s room and lock it but option two, the one Greg initiated without warning, was run back to that massive mahogany table. He couldn’t form the words Help me! But it took her a second to remember the placement of the bathroom door, and she joined his side to help lift it. As the door began to open inward, they charged at the opening blindly. A sound vibrated then for a second, absent the sound to identify the origin, but Greg was on the ground writhing after that visceral sensation ended. When she heard what sounded like getting ones footing prepared on the bathtub’s side, she launched the table the best she could. It made it far enough to shut the door and hold the knob.

“I know it hurts, but I need your weight!”

“We have to make un—unopenable.” His abdomen was soaked red, but from exactly where would’ve to be a mystery until she could find something in arm’s reach to bind a door in place. She grabbed a hammer with an extended claw on the back. The prongs went under the door, and thuds continued like it was pulling on the knob with the frantic force to escape an evil of its own. Greg only had a second to help Fran put a weighted chifforobe balanced over a second hammer locked in the same way. She helped him away from the door upon his collapse, and the noises behind it stopped in a fashion as frightful as a wound between Greg’s ribs and hip. An injury of half slice half burn that didn’t cauterize enough for the amount of pressure he could apply while she dragged him into the room where Nancy lay dazed, too dazed to wake beyond open eyes and shallow breathing. She wanted to help him more, but that last window could desperately use a door drilled over it.

Nancy’s exhaustion problem that vigorously demanded she take advantage of this freebie, surprise nap would have to wait until Greg quit grunting from the pressure Fran placed on his wound. She took a summarized but thorough look at the room, assuring herself with the placement of the odd noises that seemed to have no equal nor a visible source. “There should only be two of them,” she said, getting in close to examine the severity of his wound. If it had been a hollow point and anything larger than a nine-millimeter, he would have died from a slow creeping crawl through internal and external bleeding to his sweet release, but this was unlike anything they had ever seen. Its flesh wound size and depth only worsened with every second the residue from the electrode wire that sliced through spread from the skin to the closest internal organs. His bloodstream filled with poison or infection, darkening his veins centimeter by centimeter.

“We have to get him to the cellar,” Fran said, fighting back every urge to display her unyielding angst.

Fran helped Nancy to her feet so she could help Greg to Fran’s shoulder to limp him towards the steps. “I have to get to my coat.”

“We were just near Mom’s closet—”

“It was in the pocket. I need it.”

She spotted it from the top of the stairs and took half a second to make sure Fran could support the writhing Greg before darting to the bottom. “Stop, please….”

Luckily, she caught what Fran was afraid to warn any louder about and the crash in the attic above their heads. The back door was taking some heavy thrashing, forcing them to disregard the stealth in their steps. Fran was ripping at the steel trap, leaving Nancy fumbling through her jacket, and felt utter terror as her frantic search came up empty. The barricaded back door wouldn’t hold much longer than it would take the escapee from the bathroom to lock eyes or antennae with her as the last cluster of biology meant to be a living thing looking back at her. The lock was latched tight, but roars shook the entrance violently up and down. It had to be the handle that gave way before their anger toward their future meals that stopped them. Their language from four steps away from the crack of candlelight sounded like a tray of forks and spoons in a front-loader washing machine filtered through a digitizing auto-tune pitched high. It only lasted a few seconds before the two creatures of the stars left the door and the house. Nancy had gotten a glance at their sharply amorphous form, and the singed image propping her eyes open locked her feet with Fran cautiously arriving with a key.

The cellar had a table for these sorts of injuries, but they had never used it for a bloody olive-green ooze like this. Agony stopped coming from the gash that heals with an inverted attitude toward the human genome. It became transfixed to the cracking taking place agonizingly slowly, bending him in curled-up shapes in the stainless-steel slab. Every minute or so, a new joint would bend in some excruciating fashion, with each contortion creating a new curve in Greg’s human form. Fran held his hand as every first-aid option cracked and popped out of the depth of their capabilities until even that was a task best left for the straps holding him down that Nancy was insistent on applying any means necessary. Greg’s snotty snarls layered atop growls functioning like howls at the moon put Fran’s skepticism on the back burner, at least for the two minutes they spent fighting his twisting limbs.

“We just need to wait for the sun,” Nancy said.

“What’s happening to him?” Fran asked.

“We need to talk about what happens next; they’re gonna want him when it’s over.”

“I’m not letting him go to those things.” The device in his pocket began to radiate pink, burning its way through his pocket mid painful, jerky neck extending twinge.

“Yes!” Nancy shouted. She crept close enough to retrieve it from where his right ankle was reaching diligently for his left hip. With a quick grab, she backed away, holding it tight in her fist to sit near the sink as far as she could get from the table. The light dimmed with said distance, and although Greg jerked slower, the pile of the former human-shaped body remained twitchy. “Whatever this is, it kills them, and I think they know I have it. We last until the sun rises, you and me; we can put some distance between us in this house of nightmares.”

Fran pulled a seat up next to her aunt, changing the gap between them in anticipation of her question. “Where did you find it?”

Nancy chugged the last bottle of water they had since Fran had brought it all upstairs in preparation for her long walk along with most of their supplies. Throwing the bottle over her shoulder caused Greg to jolt, but he quickly simmered down. “There was this old trail your father and I used to follow to a clearing between plots three and five, where the pond peters out into a creek. Inside the gully, there’s this World War two bunker, with only the stairwell saved from a cave-in that could’ve been decades old when we found it. He ever mention it?” Fran shook her head. “I didn’t think more than the rusted door would survive, but inside, two were sleeping without armor or anything.”

“And you robbed them?” Nancy’s eyes shot to her coat, but she laughed a little to justify the sudden seriousness baked into her nervous handling of the transformation happening amongst sounds, muffled by the thick outer shell and dried dirt. It was being displaced one blast at a time from the repeated shelling that could have easily been some futuristic digger that morphs the atoms into a quantum state turning five gallons into a set of dirt dice to be stacked for later. What mattered was how Nancy planned to deal with them.

“I’m sorry, Francesca. But I have to be honest with you because we may have to run sooner than expected. Greg is going to be bait so we can—”

“No. No, we can’t leave him. How could you—”

“Look at him. Go ahead, here’s a light.”

Something in her Cool Hand Luke demeanor brought hesitation that subsided in the subsequent awe of olive-green ooze cocooning him, table and all spreading down the steel legs dripping like it could control where it lands. She moved, and Greg’s self-made casket moved or screeched out a noise paring with claws testing the tensile strength of his elastic encasing. “What’s happening?”

“We might not make it if it continues this fast.”

“Are we all the—”

“No. No, it’s a bio-infectious-recruiter, weaponized—something probably late in the war-- He’ll draw them in, we bolt,” And Aunty clapped, shooting her shaking hand forward with a wink. It was her way in situations that required quelling two tragic orphans, but her knee never used to bounce like that when the food would only last one more night for all three of them.

“Sunrise in two hours.”

“Don’t look at it no more.”

A hum came from it, only mildly distracting from the distinct sensation of steel claws dragging on the exterior walls. Were they attempting the expose the entire safe house bunker to the sun? Nancy struggled to keep Fran’s eyes on the growing center fixture, and the stress of it seemed to feed it, whether by their growing anxiety or Fran’s attention was most distracting of all. Using a glass against the wall, Nancy listened for their placement and around them and remembered their only exit. She wasn’t having that damn hum no more and started cutting the fresh stems attempting to bind with the cement floor, finally getting Fran on her side. As secrets go, Nancy had a track record of keeping the best ones for the most inopportune moments, so Fran decided to beat her to the punch and protested putting the cocoon against the far wall.

“I’ll tell you as we push, grab that broom. Don’t touch it.” It seemed maturity hadn’t quite hit her, and she took the most reluctant-looking route into position to push the thing off the table. Putting her oversized coat back on, she pulled a picture from her pocket and placed it on the table where his former feet would have been. It slid and landed with the momentum to crawl like a gelatinous blob that had a scream that made their ears bleed. That sent the invaders blasting twice as hard, twice as fast, and the iron-cladded wall began to show it. Nancy backed away, the device in hand ready for it to make contact with the flesh that will set it off.

“Where did you find this? Where did you find this picture?!”

“Can you come away from the wall, dear? Probably not best we shout, might piss’em off even further.” She turned to address the BANG! BANG! BANG! Altering her foot patterns with every step. “Come on, Lil’ Franny. I’m bout to throw this thing….” Nancy had no intention of waiting and did her damnest to bank it off the table just to settle for a roll-in that would make contact with the cracking cocoon threatening their internal organs with a frequency unheard of. She waited by the steps, waving Fran to her with a sturdy grip on the railing. Fran’s tune and her direction switched and sprinted past Nancy, who didn’t seem like the type to slow up for her benefit. She only turned around to spit in her face and throw the picture back but what she faced, although made of Nancy, gargled the tentacle that snapped through the back of her spine, spouting gibberish from its rectangular spout, except for the word,

“Stay.”

Fran never turned around again. In her sprint, she stopped to grab one of the four bags packed before heading out of the door. The explosion ripped through the house in a violently stuttered, breaking, mal-forming the structure of its mold, disintegrated within the flames.

Waking in a startling mist, so thick nothing existed outside herself in dust, entering and exiting the space between her face and the photo of her mother and father that was taken before she was born. The sky cleared as her tears dried from the morning sun, taking control of the dense fog.