Serenity

The redwoods were the most beautiful sight Jack had ever seen. Their kingdom covered the dewy slopes of yellow grass for miles and miles and miles, surrounding the Sea of Galilee, sentinels under a synthetic sky. Not one measured under ten feet across, and the oldest trunks rivaled the breadth of Jack Breyer’s old apartment in Bethel North. The redwoods were home, and Jack was leaving them today.

He stared up at the blue tones barely visible beyond expansive canopies a hundred feet or more above his head. His sleeping bag was perfectly placed to catch rays of faux morning light streaming through the branches, and he savored each beam as it crept across his face and outstretched hands. No one had a view like this anymore. No one besides Jack had ever appreciated just how glorious this place was.

Jack’s family had come to the forest often during his childhood, whenever his parents could get a permit. They would hike the softly rolling hills, and Jack would run and play and hide from his sister among the giant trees. It was about an hour’s walk from Bethel North to the thin strip of white sandy beach where they picnicked. Jack’s father would smile when they came to the beach. Jack swore he could still remember each grin, and decades later, he knew his face looked almost the same.

~

Mitchell Breyer was a harbor worker who loved his family through long hours at the treatment plants that kept Bethel Station alive. Each morning he operated one of the large sluices that moderated the flow of water into and out of the Sea of Galilee. Between one and four o’clock in the afternoon, he combed through large troughs to remove fragments of metal or sand from the water before it fed into the nuclear reactors. Then he went back to the sluices and directed freshly irradiated water back into the sea. Eventually it would be cycled out and replaced by fresh water gleaned from mineral deposits outside the station.

Jack had nearly thrown up in his bowl when he learned about that last part. It was fine, his father assured him; Bethel Station had been slowly and purposefully irradiated over the last two centuries, and its inhabitants had built up a strong immunity through careful exposure.

“Besides,” Mitchell said between bites at the dinner table one late night after work, “this whole station isn’t shielded. There’s so much radiation in space it could make your eyes pop right in their sockets and ooze down your cheeks.”

Jack clamped his hand over his mouth as Mitchell laughed. “Whether it’s in here or out there,” he preached, “it’ll always get you in the end.” That had proven true for him.

Until his early twenties, Jack had stared apprehensively at the waters of the Sea of Galilee during each subsequent beach trip, as if some horrible radiation-infested creature of the deep were waiting to flop onto the shore and drag him under. Now, he visited the beach every day to collect water for drinking and washing.

~

Jack tipped his bottle up and swallowed the last few drops of warm liquid. It was good. Familiar. He considered heading to the sea for one more drink. Then he dismissed the idea. He had already said his goodbyes to Galilee.

His last memory of the sea would be much like his first: staring at the gentle waves in silent appreciation, marveling at the blues and greens that passed playfully over each other. The first time he had seen them, he had only been three years old. He held that first impression in his mind, as much story as memory, amazed that this much water could exist in one place. His mother had been holding him in her arms.

~

There had not been a single woman on the station with a peace like Tabitha Breyer’s. Before marrying Mitchell, she had been raised by clothing merchants who liaised with other stations, selling fine fabrics and cheap polymers alike from a shop in Bethel West. When her parents fell ill and her business dried up, Tabitha adjusted. By the time her parents passed away, Tabitha had already married Mitchell and settled into the life of a wife and mother in the poorest part of the station.

Every year, Tabitha would sew a new jumpsuit for Jack from recycled fabrics on his birthday. The outfits were somewhat patchy and asymmetrical, but Jack loved them anyway and he always told her so. She was a gifted seamstress; the quality of the jumpsuits always depended on whatever scraps she could find throughout the year. She would also make dresses for Jack’s sister, who complained loudly about it every time.

“Why do you keep making dresses for her?” Jack asked her one morning long ago. “She doesn’t want them.”

Tabitha looked up from her sewing and smiled. “Because she wears them,” she said. Then she returned to her work.

When Jack moved out, Tabitha began making clothes for others in their neighborhood, trading her services for scraps of fabric and food vouchers. After the first riot, she never left the apartment.

~

Jack wouldn’t be seeing the old family apartment on his trip today. It was close to the main highway that encircled the station, and that was several blocks past the edge of the redwoods. He wouldn’t get that far.

Within minutes he found the path, a hard-packed dirt road overgrown with weeds and shrubs. This was the trail his family had taken all those years ago, and it wound through the forest in ponderous curves towards the gate that separated Bethel North from nature.

Jack followed that path for nearly two hours. He took small steps and stopped every few minutes to smell the air and stare up at the treetops. These were no ordinary trees. Every plant in the station had been genetically engineered to produce nitrogen and oxygen at unnaturally high levels. They kept the station alive and functional, and they had done the same for Jack ever since he had moved out here.

Lira had suggested it first. She traded Tabitha’s dresses for a white coat and joined the bioengineers working in Bethel East before her nineteenth birthday. Her team maintained optimal oxygenation and saturation levels throughout the station and developed new varieties of flora and fauna to improve the lives of its inhabitants. Better vegetables for nutrition, better livestock for rations, better herbs for medications, and better trees for radiation regulation. Jack never understood what she was talking about.

~

“You’re not supposed to understand, Jacky,” Lira said, smirking up at him from her desk in the laboratory. It was late, and dark, and they were the only two souls in the building. “That’s my responsibility. Everything we do is designed to keep the station alive indefinitely. To keep us alive.”

“Then why has it failed?” he asked.

Lira’s lips tightened. “Honestly? I don’t know. The calculations are off somewhere. Someone misplaced a decimal point. Or maybe we just didn’t do enough. I didn’t do enough.”

Jack knelt and placed a hand lightly on her shoulder. “Hey. It’s not on you.”

And it wasn’t. It couldn’t be Lira’s fault that people had started getting sick. Something about a mutation that spread through an entire quarter’s worth of potato crops, then through an entire quadrant of the station. Thankfully none of Jack’s family lived in Bethel South.

But the riots had started there, and anger proved more infectious than the disease. Everyone wanted answers that either didn’t exist or didn’t satisfy. Jack understood that.

The barricades at Bethel South broke down after three months of radio silence. First the violence spread west, and Jack left his job and possessions behind to find his parents. Bethel North was crowded with refugees from across the station, but his parents were safe.

“We have to get to East,” he told them on the night he arrived. “Lira’s work is important. She can find a safe place for us. Maybe even get us a shuttle off the station.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Tabitha whispered as she traced an indentation on the table. She was old, but her wrinkled fingers were as strong as ever.

“Of course it is!” Jack said. “You’ve talked about Jireh Station. Maybe we can reach them. Maybe they can reach us. What other choice do we have?”

“Jack,” Mitchell said softly, threateningly. “Listen to your mother.”

Jack met his father’s unsmiling eyes and saw hope, almost. A different strain of hope.

“I’m going to the plant tomorrow,” Mitchell announced. “I’m picking up my rations and trading in as many vouchers as they’ll let me. Then we’ll hunker down here until the authorities get everything under control.”

“They’re not—” Jack cut himself off at his father’s glance and sank down into a chair next to his mother. “Yes sir.”

Mitchell didn’t come home from work the next night, but Lira stumbled through the door a little before eleven o’clock, a gash on her cheek and two bags of rations under her arms.

“It’s chaos out there,” she said, ignoring Jack’s outstretched hands and dumping the rations on the table. She stuffed the bag into the trash chute. “But they’re not going into the forest. That’s our only hope of survival.”

“Why the forest?” Jack demanded. “Why not try to escape the station? What happened in East?” He reached for Lira’s shoulder, but she pulled back.

“Overrun,” she snapped back. Then, more softly, “This isn’t just a disease. People are changing.”

“What do you mean, changing?”

Lira ignored him. “Mom, where’s Dad?”

Tabitha met her daughter’s eyes calmly. “He’s getting rations from the plant. He’s been delayed, but he’ll be back.”

“Okay.” Lira ran her fingers through the knots in her long black hair. “First thing tomorrow morning, we go to the plant to meet Dad, then we head for the forest. But I need to sleep.”

The next morning, Tabitha wouldn’t leave the apartment. “He’s coming back here,” she insisted calmly. “I’m waiting for him.” Nothing Jack or Lira said would change her mind.

“Fine.” Lira threw her hands up. “But you need to come to the forest as soon as you can. Tomorrow morning at the latest. Promise me.”

“I promise,” Tabitha said.

Lira motioned to the rations and turned to leave. “Jacky, let’s go.”

Jack picked up a bag and stepped out after his sister and turned back to Tabitha. “Mom,” he said shakily, “I love you. Very much.”

Tabitha smiled. “I love you both. Go on now. It’ll be fine.” Jack nodded and closed the door.

~

After all this time, his mother’s face was the clearest image remaining in Jack’s mind. It was the same smile she had offered him thousands of times. On his sixth birthday, proudly marching out the door for school with a newly recycled jumpsuit. When he wondered aloud why Tabitha would make an unappreciated dress. And now, as their world came to a chaotic conclusion, she was the same. Mitchell had been a benevolent hurricane of emotions; Tabitha was a solid rock.

Jack reached the edge of the forest far too quickly. A ten-foot-high wall of smooth titanium separated the tree line from the urban jungle beyond, but a double gate of rusted carbon steel hung slightly open on its hinges in front of him. Jack thought, given the circumstances, that it should have been swinging gently, eerily, back and forth with the wind. But there was no wind in a space station.

If there’s no wind, Jack wondered, why do the tides of the sea ebb and flow? What makes them move? He didn’t understand. He wasn’t meant to understand, and that was fine.

A hundred feet to his right lay the edge of the harbor, where the blackened husks of water treatment plants rose high above the forest wall, almost as high as some of the younger redwoods. Jack studied the buildings, trying to remember which of them had hosted his father. He could no longer tell, but once, long ago, he had been starkly aware.

~

The plant was on fire when Jack and Lira arrived. Smoke poured from every door and every ground floor window. Glass crunched under the feet of dozens of workers running around the building. Some attempted to douse the fire. Others clutched ration packs to their chests. A few stood completely still, staring wide-eyed at some invisible horror contained in their outstretched hands. Jack and Lira watched from a distance for a few minutes, searching for any sign of Mitchell Breyer’s broad shoulders and cropped brown hair.

“He didn’t make it,” Lira finally whispered.

“He has to make it,” Jack said faintly. “He’s going to be fine.”

“Jacky, look at me.” Lira reached out to touch Jack’s arm as he turned, but she quickly pulled back. “Our dad didn’t make it. No one at that facility is going to make it out okay.”

“But Mom—”

“Jack.” Lira’s voice shook with the weight of their loss. “She knows. She already knows.”

Jack’s shoulders heaved with sobs that wouldn’t come out. Lira bit her lip and glanced around at the chaos, then turned to the intersection behind them.

“We need to move,” she said. “The forest gate is down that street.”

“Okay.” Jack straightened. “You’re right. We need to move.”

They kept close to the buildings as they ran to the intersection and turned left. The streets were filled with open-air civilian cars and heavily armored police vehicles. None were going anywhere; the streets were too packed with people, and debris, and motionless shapes twisted at odd angles.

“It shouldn’t be happening here,” Lira hissed. “Not yet. There should still be time.”

“Time for what?” Jack asked. Lira ignored him.

The gate was closed when they arrived. A uniformed guard watched them warily from inside a reinforced glass cubicle. Lira held up an identification badge from the lanyard around her neck as they approached, leaving behind the throngs of people crowding the main highway and its side streets.

“Engineering,” she said. “Let us through. Now.”

“Can’t do that,” the guard replied. His voice fuzzed through a plastic speaker set into the glass. “Orders from the top. We’re locking this quadrant down. Return to your home immediately.”

“Oh yeah?” Lira snarled. “When’s the last time you heard from the top?”

“Ma’am, I—”

“Answer me!”

The guard fell silent, and Lira nodded.

“Listen to me,” she said calmly. “Right now, this glass cubicle is the safest place you could possibly be. But my brother and I, we don’t get a cubicle. So, we’re getting away from the crazies and finding shelter in the forest. Do you have a problem with that?”

The guard hesitated, then shook his head. He turned a key set into the console to his right, and the gate began to swing outward into the forest. “Quickly now,” he said. “Once it closes, I’m not opening it again.”

“Thank you,” Jack said as Lira rushed to squeeze through the narrow gap between the moving doors. Jack followed, and they started down the familiar path to the Sea of Galilee. He took the lead without meaning to, as he had when they were children, running and hiding among the redwoods.

“What do we do next?” he asked, scanning the trees around them. “Do we need to find a hideout, or…”

Jack trailed off as he turned to face Lira. She was frozen in place twenty paces back, staring at her own hands as they made rigid claws in front of her, grasping onto something.

“Lira?” Jack said hesitantly. He stepped towards Lira.

“Don’t,” she snapped. Her voice was breathy and strained. “Don’t. Come. Closer.”

“Lira, what’s happening?”

Lira’s hands jerked down to grasp her stomach as she bent and vomited on the dirt path. “I knew it,” she coughed. “Screw everything, I knew it.”

Before Jack could come closer, she held up her hand. “If you touch me,” she said, “you’ll be infected. It spreads by skin contact, we think.”

“What spreads by skin contact, Lira?”

Lira offered Jack a weak smile, her mouth still caked with specks of puke. “Something that’s not my fault. A mutation. A virus. Whatever it is, it’s feeding on radiation. And it’s contagious.”

“Are you…” Jack couldn’t finish his sentence.

“I’m not okay, Jacky,” Lira said. “I’m changing. And I never got to see any of the late-stage subjects, so who knows what’s going to happen to me? But the trees, the redwoods. They’re making me sick. If I stay here, I die.”

Jack set his jaw. “And if you go back in there, you die.”

Lira smirked. “Or I change.”

Jack stared at his sister. Streaks of gray extended up from the collar of her shirt, tracing the sinews in her neck. Were those her veins?

“It’s a new world,” Lira said quietly, almost to herself. Then, to Jack, “You have to stay here. I don’t know if you’re safe here, but you will become infected if you go back to Bethel North. Or any quadrant.”

The gate creaked fifty feet behind them. It was almost shut, but a man had tried to wedge his way through the gap. He was pushing through, straining, sweating, fighting the squealing efforts of the gate pistons. His skin was gray.

“Jacky, I love you so much.” Lira smiled at him. “You’re an awesome big brother.”

Then she turned and sprinted towards the gate. Jack gasped and took off after her, but he was too far behind.

Lira reached the gate and swung her fist into the man’s face. Jack heard a crunch, and the man fell limp. Lira shoved him through the gate and let his body collapse onto the street. She squeezed through the now closing gap and turned back. The last thing Jack saw before the gate shut for good was Lira, blowing him a kiss before disappearing into the chaos.

~

Jack stood at the gate and remembered. It had been twenty years, maybe thirty, since Mitchell and Tabitha and Lira had been lost to him. The days since had faded into each other in his mind. He built shelters, made weapons, planted a garden, foraged at the edges of the city. He speared fish from the shallows of the Sea of Galilee. He patched together a new jumpsuit once a year, or whenever it felt like it might be his birthday again. Once he spent two whole days prying at the gate until the rusted panels finally buckled and split. He had wandered almost a whole block into Bethel North before the sounds from the shadows drove him back into the forest.

Not this time.

Jack pulled the gate aside and strode onto the pockmarked metal streets of the city. The bodies had decomposed completely, or else been removed from the road, but the debris remained just as he remembered. He could have been here yesterday.

This street crossed over the main highway up ahead. Several blocks beyond that lay his family’s old apartment.

“Why not?” Jack asked. His throat creaked with the effort of speaking out loud. He chuckled.

Heh-uh-heh-uh-heh-uh.

Jack tried to ignore the sound, the perverted echo of his laughter that emitted from one of the buildings on either side. He couldn’t tell where it came from. He bent down and set his water bottle on the ground. The soft clink of metal on metal was lost in the cavernous silence of Bethel North.

Jack set his sights on the highway ahead. One block at a time. It would be here soon.

Heh-uh-heh-uh-heh-uh.

That came from somewhere behind him. He was certain of it. No matter.

Heh-uh-heh-uh-heh-uh.

The highway intersection had been barricaded at one point in time, although the remains of concrete blocks and metal fences had toppled or split or crumpled. A massive vehicle – Jack thought it must have been a tank – lay upside down in the center of the road.

Heh-uh-heh-uh-heh-uh-heh-uh-heh-uh.

More voices joined in softly, distantly. Jack skirted the barricades and stayed on his path.

Hehuhhehuhhehuhhehuh—

The discordant pulses gained a steady rhythm. His brain conjured the word moderato. Interesting. He’d forgotten that he once tried to learn the flute.

The fluorescent lights still burned high above Jack’s head. They had never gone out. Eternal daytime reigned in the empty city. He saw shadows moving at the edge of a shop to his left.

HEHuhHEHuhHEHuh—

Louder now. Like a panting dog.

Jack smiled. “Go on now,” he told himself softly. “It’ll be fine.”

Footsteps padded behind him. It would be better if he didn’t turn around.

Jack stopped moving and looked up at the bright lights. On a hunk of metal flying through space, humans had lived and worked and dreamed and died, in search of…something. He didn’t know, but he thought he may have figured it out.

HEHUHHEHUHHEHUH—

Serenity. Peace beyond circumstance. An invulnerable strain of hope and happiness.

HEHUHHEHUHHEHUHHEHUH—

He didn’t look back, but in his mind’s eye, he fixed the image of a redwood, standing alone in the forest, forever growing tall and strong. What a life.

HEHUHHEHUH—

The trees gave him what his mother always had.

HRGHUHHRGHUH—

Jack had found it. What were a few unpleasant moments now?

A stab of pain.

And a bright light that outshone the artificial suns of Bethel Station welcomed him home.

~

This is my first Vocal story, and I would love your feedback!

Want more stories from Bethel Station? Let me know!