These Lifeless Things Read online

  This could work. She wants the data too. I need to keep a closer eye out in the journal for things that could be useful to the others.

  It’s harder to focus now. There are things I desperately want to check, but don’t want to go alone, and I can’t ask the others. I’m getting paranoid that there are things still left in the city. Things? I don’t know. I don’t want to call them anything specific. There are certainly rats and mice. Maybe deer; you sometimes see leggy elegant things at night that turn and flee when they hear you. And you see their hoofprints, like posed droplets of water in the mud. What else lives here? Dogs? Wolves? Are wolves roaming this dead city? I mean, I know nothing can get into the pod, but still.

  We’re all having nightmares; no one talks about it. But you can hear it through the thin divisions, the sudden cessation of the long steady breath, then the snort, the gasp, the moan, the whimper. We all cry at night and in the morning we say ‘God, this dust!’ to explain our red eyes. Darian is snappish, short-tempered. In someone his size that’s a little scary. I listened in while we got our seats calibrated for our flight here, and I think now: Okay, I’m not very good at math, but he is exactly twice as heavy as me.

  I think: He wouldn’t lay a finger on me.

  I also think: Don’t piss him off, though.

  July 2

  Couldn’t go back to the old town today. I fret, I froth, I seethe.

  Yet there are still miracles. It still seems like a miracle. I don’t say V. himself. I mean: him, at my side, silently working, in the sun. It seems impossible that he is still here. When so much else has been taken from me.

  Unwanted, unsummoned, this morning I looked at him peacefully eating his lunch out of a tin can and thought: Is it for now or for always. And it was a blow, a physical blow, as if an invisible fist had punched me right in the sternum; I think my heart even skipped a beat. I didn’t want that line to appear.

  I don’t remember the rest.

  Is it for now or for always...

  That book that M. got me when we first started dating. No: before. Before either of us said anything, when we were friends, shy. But the whole book was love poetry in English. Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? he said, and I said, Only if I can compare you to a winter’s day... And we laughed, not merely because we were so opposite, of course.

  But he was, wasn’t he? Looking at him was like the brightest, clearest day in February, when the ice was thick on the lake and you could throw New Year’s parties on it, dine and dance on it, and you could see forever, all the way across the lake, to the far side of the globe, it seemed; everything about him was like that, clear and pure, like the crystal drops that fall from icicles.

  I never told him that, of course.

  And then coming home that day, when we thought the worst was past, the city was destroyed, the boys were gone, things stalked the street at night, that day, coming home alone into the cold flat where the fire had gone out, and he was gone, and there was nothing but an enormous red lace shawl on the wall, carefully pinned in a beautiful curved shape, and for a long time I did not even recognize what it was, till I noticed the dripping, still liquid, even still a little warm.

  And I thought both: They left me nothing to bury, and: But that cannot be his blood. His is bright and clear. Like melted ice. Like a white, fair winter’s day.

  Nothing to bury. Nothing, I told myself, to mourn. Not like the boys. Maybe, I still find myself thinking, he is alive somewhere in the city, having lost both a tremendous amount of blood and his memory. Maybe he survived, and will find his way back to me one day; maybe they all will.

  I don’t know what else to mourn. You can’t do it properly, it’s all haphazard, in the five spare minutes you get between running, scrounging, fighting, guarding. My career? Can I say that died? I guess I won’t get that back, so that’s dead, yes. My home? Yes, that too. My plans to retire, to travel, to have a warm comfortable future? How trite. Those too. Add them to the list. My books, my clothes, whatever in the flat could burn in the bombings. Thank goodness we never had pets, I suppose.

  I said goodbye to everything while running and that is not a proper goodbye.

  July 10

  Dreaming last night, those sickly half-dreams we all seem to get now, where you can see the wall and the glimmerings of the fire but you can’t move or speak... we’re close to death every day but I dreamed about the night I almost did die, and could never explain why I didn’t.

  We were out too late that night, we were caught in the open. I fell while the statue was chasing B. and A. and me and the others; I remember the fall but I didn’t remember hitting my head, and indeed afterwards there was no mark, no blood in my hair, not even a headache, but I must have knocked myself out, I remember... I dreamt... consciousness swimming back through murky water, a layer of gray, a layer of white, a layer of black, then darkness, then focus. A square of starry sky. One eye open, the other glued shut with blood. The gap in my memory was brief but absolute.

  But last night I remember: I stayed still. My body hummed with recent impact.

  A bronze snout near me, passing inches from my unblinking eye. I thought: Don’t blink. Of course, the overwhelming impulse is to do just that... but I held it back for long enough, and it moved on. Metal snout, hanging with iridescent tentacles like a catfish, a stench of greenblack breath, the eyes flat, clumsily cast, already cracked, apparently as unseeing as mine. But they can see.

  And then the snout lifted, a flash of white crystalline teeth, a dangling black tongue. Since when do statues have tongues? And the legs moving past me, one two three four, all different lengths, in the shape of an X, so that it should have moved clumsily or at least unevenly, but it picked its way through the rubble and was gone.

  I lay there, unmoving, listened for it to leave. It was a long time before the sound of its footsteps finally moved off. Perhaps as much as an hour. And other sounds... finishing off survivors. The choked-off gurgle, a hastily-ended scream. A bluish shimmer, as of a sudden reflection, like someone closing a car door. And then darkness again.

  I awoke this morning with my heart pounding, clutching my chest. I slept in my jacket (the jacket of a dead man!). Maybe it opened something inside me, let something out. That memory, I had forgotten about that.

  V. fussed over me when I came back in the middle of the night, and I let him. I was so tired. I had carried everything I could, painfully, step by step, often retreating into buildings, stopping to touch my bloodless head.

  What was it? he said.

  I don’t know, I told him.

  I couldn’t remember. But now I do.

  It’s not just that, as we said in those first days, They’re something that we hadn’t discovered before. The ocean is full of strange things, people said stubbornly. Or maybe They beamed down from a superior civilization.

  But close to, I felt the true explanation was neither of those things. Nothing so prosaic as something that evolved, that lived in a place and made a place its home. I felt intensely, if inaccurately, seeing that thing up close, that They are not from here, in any sense, any, that a human mind would understand as ‘here.’ Nowhere is ‘here’ for Them. Or everywhere is here. They stepped through from somewhere else, I am sure of it.

  And maybe that’s why my mind knocked me out again, trying to protect me before I thought the inevitable next thing, because there it was: We cannot live with these things. We cannot fight Them. We are not on the same level as these things. Maybe They are not all-knowing, or all-powerful, but They are similar enough to gods that we are doomed. We, as not just humans but mortals, are doomed. There will be no resistance except in our minds. And maybe They can see that too, and will root it out and end it.

  We will never know Them because we cannot know Them.

  I hear thin screams sometimes, in different neighbour­hoods. And I rush to empty buildings, warehouses, schools, expecting to find—what? A room full of captive children? But I know the cries of children and how they
differ from adults, and I know I’m hearing them. What can I do, where are they? I am torn between giving up looking for them and thus losing what few shreds of sanity I have left, and enlisting the entire city in the search.

  It has occurred to me (O cynical Eva!) that They have learned to mimic the cries of children, the way the ravens near my work used to imitate the coughs of smokers outside, and are... what? Luring me into a trap?

  No, V. would say, if he were here. They’re like wasps.

  But some wasps are intelligent, you know. I read it somewhere. I don’t know. If we’re talking about intent, that statue with the little boy, it had intent. Or even Intent, capital I. And it is a war. And terrible things happen to children in war.

  Give up? Press on?

  CAN’T SLEEP, CAN’T sleep, can’t work, can’t sleep.

  A strange thing. The camera film I found in the museum, a single dropped roll in the corner by the door, buried in a little snowdrift of dirt and broken glass, was confirmed by my scanner to be intact and undeveloped. And precious, of course—by the time the Invasion occurred, practically nobody was using film cameras. But someone at this museum had one. I’m sure it’s nothing more than shots of the statues and the grounds outside. But I checked it again this morning and the film is corrupted, blurred, as if some kind of... fungus or spore has grown on it. Just in the couple of days. I’m stunned, horrified. Maybe once I get it back to the university lab I will be able to recover it.

  But I wonder now: Are there lingering effects in these siege cities? Is there something still here, like an echo, screwing things up? Maybe it’s the film. Maybe it’s the scanner. Maybe it’s both. I should see if the others are experiencing anything like that.

  Early this morning I sleepwalked and sort of got fixated on the constellations over us, before the sun came up, and nearly fell off my concrete block, which I was barely aware I had climbed. Winnie rescued me. I said, “What are you doing here?” and she said “I can’t remember.” We stared at each other for a minute. So awkward.

  Even now I think: That can’t be what Eva meant, that ‘pull,’ can it? God. What have we gotten ourselves into? That’s never happened at any of my other research sites.

  Under Darian’s quiet, relentless pressure, every day now I debate changing my research route, rewriting my project plan. Something harder. More scientific. What kind of thesis am I going to have at the end of this? A fluffy romance novel, like Darian says. Maybe I should surrender the diary to someone else so they can work with it when I get back. I mean, it’s only a once in a lifetime chance, with limited funding, in an area that surprisingly few places are willing to sponsor, that’s all. I might never be able to come back here and check all the details. That’s all. If people are figuring out what happened to the world, of course they need numbers, measurements, graphs, charts, statistical analyses, and those horrible black-and-white photos of broken metal that Darian takes with his laser ruler that give me a headache to look at.

  I’ll never be able to come back here and maybe that’s for the best. Let that money go to the others, I don’t know.

  I’m concerned at the mention of ‘joining.’ Will Eva or V. knuckle under? I suppose I shouldn’t care. Whoever they are, they died a long time ago.

  And yet, I do care, I can’t help it. It’s torture to not know. What would I have done? I ask myself, but it’s an unanswerable question; the world we live in is not the world they, or They, lived in.

  I find myself sick with the suspicion that they both died before the end of the Setback. And they never even knew it was so close. That all they had to survive was about another year.

  The Army did abandon them, of course; I secretly dug in Darian’s data and found a ton of drone flight data over the sunflower fields outside the walls, and buried military detritus. Some of it is so close that if we leave out one side of the city we could walk for five minutes and climb directly into a tank. But I’m not doing that on my own. Anyway, it would require me to admit I’ve been snooping. Absolutely not.

  I looked up the whole poem that Eva referenced this morning and now I find myself on a rooftop, sitting alone, while the others poke and scrape below on their various pursuits. These people, we know in our heads that they were real, and whole, and had hopes and dreams and goals and visions. But how cruel of us, how thoughtless, to not see them as real people, and not just primary sources, till we find something like this. I wish I could find the flat with the blood on the wall, but it would take forever to search.

  Winnie and I fight about this sometimes. Her methods are mostly noninvasive, and leave everything in the ground after the scan, but sometimes she digs up bones and puts them in jars, and we look at each other defiantly. Those bones are going for analysis. They won’t come back here for burial. We rob the dead, and we say, “Well, that’s research for you,” but... the husband’s death, that lacy shawl of blood on the wall. Nothing was left for Eva to bury.

  I’m so upset. I don’t know what I can do. Maybe at the end of the trip, I will put the book back where I found it—I still have the plastic bags, the cinderblock it rested in. I have the full scan, after all, which does isotope and chemical analysis and is in some ways better than the book. But still. I cradle it to me, I touch the delicate old pages, I sniff it hungrily. It’s over a hundred years old, this book. It means something to me to be able to touch it. But perhaps I shouldn’t be touching it. The others wouldn’t understand.

  I’m confused, still, about the statues. All the other primary sources are no help either. Is the bronze they always speak of (sometimes brass, iron, copper, stone) the metal, or the colour, or both? Who made the statues? Are they robots or automatons of some kind, programmed by the Invaders to keep Their order in the cities? I simply cannot understand ‘comes alive at night,’ but everyone said it, and most people saw it once or twice and survived.

  July 14

  Still searching. Went out first thing at dawn, after a night of screaming, nightmares, and unseasonal, awful aurora. Filling the whole sky, like a silk scarf. Roar and chant and burn and howl from constellations whose names I’ve never known.

  I admit (don’t tell V.) that I felt the pull again, and nearly toppled out the window. Snatched the sill at the last moment, and cut my fingers on the broken glass. I still hear it, that thin, high whine from the stars. I don’t dare look even long enough to try to figure out which constellation it might be (how clear they all are now!). I want to open the shutters and bellow Fuck off!

  God, can you imagine.

  Endlessly, as if performing penitence, I think about that child, dangling in the brass jaws of the statue. When I find myself not thinking about him, I force myself back to it.

  From all those science fiction movies I knew: People took to the road to get away from the end of the world, and they found new communities together, and eventually things got better. Not like this, pinned down, terrified, exhausted, in a world no one can understand. Where all the rules are broken and no one is coming for us.

  I miserably confess that I think more about that dangling child than I think about my own boys. Both memories are raw wounds, but one is so deep and welling with pain that I feel that I cannot even touch it, lest, like a broken bone, something shift and puncture me and I bleed out on the floor at the thought of it. (They’re all right. They’re together. They’re all right. I have to keep telling myself.)

  I should never have let the boys go. I should never have let them go.

  I know they would have gone no matter what I said, but... I could have tried harder.

  And they went with so much unsaid, so much not even hinted at. That they barely knew my own parents before the accident, that I was plunged so deeply into grief that M. parented all alone for almost a year, I never apologised for that. They were old enough to hear it. And grieving for their grandparents too, poor little things.

  I tell myself it was all right, that losing my parents wasn’t the same disaster for them as it was for me. The boys had each ot
her, and they had M. And I had myself... if we are being honest, here on this thin paper, on which my pencil might glide like a confessional whisper, if we are, I had begun to fret, already, even though they were perfectly healthy (God forgive me) about Mama and Papa moving into the flat with us, that the day would come when they could not manage stairs in that huge ridiculous house any more, that one day inevitably on the phone I’d say, Why don’t you just come live with us? and it would be the end of whatever little life, whatever little personality, remained in myself, that I would be pulled too many ways...

  And then the world ended and the veil dropped from my eyes and I saw that yes, I was always mediocre, as daughter, student, wife, mother, friend, employee. That I was dull and dutiful and the girl who laughed at poetry and chased the boys on the frozen lake was not actually dead and gone, as the cliché would have it, but buried alive, and still screaming, quietly, under the monumental weight of grown-up responsibilities. And now I only have one—to survive.

  Can I do any better?

  I don’t know.

  It is infuriating that I have turned out to be one of those Mad Max people, a born survivor, impossible to kill; I have watched in despair as people stronger, bigger, faster, smarter, luckier than me died or were killed or starved. I shouldn’t be here, but here I am.

  I wish I weren’t. Oh God! That little boy, alive in the mouth of the monster.

  What can I do?

  I am so angry at the Army for abandoning us, I am so betrayed. I never thought of it in those words before. I thought, at the time: Well, of course they are going outside the wall to fight. Only then can they turn to the ones in the city, which are fighting guerilla style and killing thousands every day. They are being resupplied from the outside. If we were not cut off, we could be rescued; we learned that from the failed evacuation, in which everyone was massacred down to the last flea.