Duckling

Everything was ending. First, Kelly moved away. That was three months ago, and that was normal. That was right. That was what they’d raised her to do. Rachel had to come to terms with the idea of there being a ten hour drive between them. Of course it was harder for her than it was for Kelly, but she still worried. She didn’t want to say Kelly was fragile. Just sensitive. She took things to heart. And then she spiraled. And then she sank into deep depressions. They’d navigated this cycle all through her teens. Rachel had held Kelly in her lap while she cried, well into the night, listening to her one and only beautiful child say how she wanted to die, to leave everything behind, not just her mother and father, who loved her, but the whole vast beautiful world that lay there waiting,  as if it had been made for her. And each time it broke her heart, but that was part of the gig. She knew what to say, how to lead Kelly carefully along the crumbling edges of that precipice, to keep her from hurtling down into panic and despair.

And then Kelly went away to school. And Rachel was glad for her. It would be good for her. She needed to stretch her wings. Out of the nest. Her little duckling.

And while she had hoped the change of environment would flip some switch in Kelly’s brain, hoped that she might find her people and create a safety net of friends--maybe even lovers--anyone to help her along, it hadn’t quite happened that way. She grieved for Kelly, alone and overwhelmed, but she also took a terrible kind of pleasure in the late-night calls and frantic texts. Kelly still needed her. It wasn’t what anyone would call healthy, but at least Rachel was there for her. And counterintuitively, the constant barrage of messages telling her that Kelly was foundering, that she might even now be sinking, also told her that she was still there, still above water. There was still time.

And then the world fell apart.

At first, the news had talked about the weird red growths in the gulf of Mexico as just another in a long line of ecological disasters. One more product of climate change. One more nail in the coffin of our already fragile oceans.

By the time the red lichenous growth began to creep up the beaches and swallow coastal towns, it was clear that this was something more. It devoured everything, growing exponentially, dissolving trees and buildings beneath its expanding mass, its surface rippling like iron filings waving toward a magnet. Images of livestock being consumed, their bodies dragged to the ground beneath sinuous vine-like growths, the flesh being torn away from the bones even as the animals screamed, created a panic. The National Guard was deployed, not to fight the encroaching growth but to maintain order in the cities of Eastern Texas and Louisiana.

And even as Kelly was calling and talking about giving up and coming home, and even in the same breath saying how she could never stand such failure, that she would die, the first signs of the red growth appeared off the west coast of the United States. Two days later it appeared in Japan.

It happened so fast. Not quite the nuclear annihilation she’d imagined when she was a child in the eighties, but faster than the disaster films about pandemics or zombies or rising sea levels led her to expect. By the time D.C. fell to the swarming growth, the U.S. government was already effectively disbanded. There were no bombs dropped, no missiles launched. Just a whimper as the seemingly unstoppable organism spread and grew, turning the whole South-East into a vast, pulsing mass, the color of fresh blood, swallowing everything it touched.

Rachel called Kelly, but there was no answer. Dave wanted to go, drive to collect her. Almost a thousand miles inland, Kelly was almost certainly safer than they were, perched there at the very western edge of the continent, watching the bay fill up with the bristling, pulsing mass and finally spilling over the concrete sea breaks, up into the scrub grass and dirty yards of the little shacks that dotted the jetty. Just drive, Dave said.

And she’d agreed, and they’d packed up the truck, taking only what they could not leave behind. The house they had to abandon. It wouldn’t be there if they ever returned. It would fall under the unceasing advance of the red lichen. Its beams would dissolve, and the roof would be nothing but an almost indistinguishable hump in the crimson field that stretched now across whole swaths of the planet.

Rachel looked into Kelly’s room, at the child’s bed and the plushies and the piles of clothes, and she was almost overcome. There was nothing here that Kelly needed, but every piece of it was strung with an invisible thread over three states, hooked into her child’s body. It was all part of her, part of a long story that made up Kelly. But in the end, she was strong, and she closed the door, and they climbed in the truck.

Dave started the engine, and the radio hissed static. He flipped through the stations: more static, more pre-recorded PSAs, more dead air. Finally he turned it off.

They backed out of the driveway, and started down the road. The neighborhood was empty. Garage doors stood open, and garbage cans rolled in the wind, but it was more a feeling than anything she could see. Empty. Deserted. A desert. Their town was a desert.

A mass of gulls rose up above the houses and then dropped again, floating on the air currents off the water. Would even the birds remain after they were gone, or would they too be driven ever inland?

They drove down the hill to where the road crossed the highway and stopped. To the right, the road would carry them into town, and to the left, the highway would run inland, but that same eerie stillness was here, too. Dave put the truck in park and climbed out. Rachel followed.

They stood in the middle of the road, the truck engine ticking, and looked out ahead. The bay ran parallel to the highway, stretched out before them. Usually gray and featureless, it now heaved and seemed to expand like a massive red bladder. The sunlight glared off of the bristling surface, making Rachel squint, and there was almost a sound, a deep susurration, as if the sea were breathing, or--worse--the red blanket itself were drawing in air and expelling--what? She didn’t have any idea. Didn’t care about delving into the science of the end of the world. She just cared about getting to her baby.

Something white flashed in her periphery, off the side of the road, down in the poppy-thick ditch along the shoulder. She took a step closer. Another flash.

It was a wing. A gull, down in the ditch, flapping and twitching, one wing beating at the air in spasms, the other seemingly pinned to the ground in a mass of       red lichen. Its eyes, bright black stones, seemed to strain out of its head, its black beak open in a perpetual and silent cry.

Rachel looked up and down the ditch. No other sign of the lichen. The gull must have carried it inland. That answered that. And that also opened up so many other concerns. How far did gulls travel? And other birds? Again, her rational, scientific brain reverted to elementary knowledge. Ducks flying south for the winter, returning home in the spring. It was November now. She imagined all of the geese in their jagged vees, drifting down across the vast expanses of the country, to find nothing but a seething mass of red. A desert of lichen and bones. A breathing, heaving mass.

What might they carry home?

And where might home be? By spring? She thought of Kelly. Tried to imagine her safe, behind locked doors, conserving water and waiting for them to arrive. But there’d be no return. By then, this whole coastline would be overgrown and dead.

Maybe they would all head north, up into Canada, then further still, well up into the arctic. Surely, this thing, whatever it was, couldn’t survive such a bitter cold? Surely.

Rachel watched the gull beat itself against the ground, panicked and already starting to fade into exhaustion, and then David was beside her, looking down. They watched in silence for a while and then climbed back into the truck.

They didn’t drive quickly. There was no hurry. They followed the paths that had been cut through the hills and mountains by generations, toward the interior, their backs to the sea, and Rachel thought of Kelly, thought of the birds. The ducks Kelly used to feed at the pond, throwing them fist-sized pieces of bread. The little babies following behind their mothers in perfect lines. Where would they fly for the winter?

She imagined the little ducklings, struggling to climb out of the pond as the red slime clung to their fluffy backs. Thought of them beating their tiny wings in terror. She had to stop, but she couldn’t. Somehow, the birds were making her sadness manifest. It became a physical thing that sat there in the cab between them. Sometimes it was shaped like their daughter, sometimes like a seabird. And she realized that she’d somehow always imagined that the birds would outlast her. That they were permanent. She’d thought that long after she was gone and had been ground to dust beneath the earth’s weight, that some wings might raise her up on sudden currents, maybe cast her into a beam of sunlight. That was the only grace she’d ever thought to hope for. But now there would be no birds, no dust, no empty windows in old factories, staring like hollow eyes from along the road. Soon it would all be worn down smooth and red and pulsing. The whole planet, like a trembling ball of blood suspended in space. Glistening.

They took the turning that led them up into the mountains, heading east. Toward Kelly. Toward the last graceless days of a world past its prime. Outside her window, above the trees, tiny black birds rose in a shocking murmuration, whipping like a sheet caught in a breeze.

Rachel smiled, and leaned back, letting her eyes close, allowing herself to be drawn along the road, toward the last lodestone left, somehow downward, even as they rose.

Author’s Biography

Josh Hanson (He/Him) is the author of the novel, King’s Hill (forthcoming from Wicked House). He lives in northern Wyoming where he teaches, writes, and makes up little songs. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in various anthologies as well as The HorrorZine, Siren’s Call, The Chamber, BlackPetals, and others.