From the Indie Side (8 page)

“Hold on,” she coughed, hearing raspy mucous
rattle deep in her throat. Blood continued to fill her mouth, and
by the sixtieth step, the wooziness weighing on her head was more
of a threat than the poisonous fog. The strength in her legs was
failing, and her feet became heavy. She gripped her brother, and
Justin wrapped his arms and legs tighter, complaining in her ear
that it hurt to breathe. And before she could answer him, a flash
of lightning filled her eyes. They’d crashed into the tall glass
doors, bouncing backward.

A sudden warmth spread over her middle and
dripped down her arms. It was liquid and runny, going cold almost
at once. The heavy flow continued and she thought that she’d
started bleeding, or maybe Justin was bleeding.

“I’m sorry,” Justin cried, squirming. He’d
peed, and she thought that the fog burns on her arm oddly felt a
little better.

“It’s okay, buddy. We’re here, anyway,” she
croaked, hugging his little body as he shook from the wet cold.

Emily grabbed the long metal handle, the
touch burning her skin, and rushed them inside. Justin pulled off
his plastic bag, grabbing at the back of his head. His face was
swollen and red, burned. Emily wondered how bad she must look; how
badly she’d been burned. She darted her eyes around the inside of
the mall, finding dozens of faces staring back at them. Some
familiar, some not. But all of them wearing the same expression—the
same one she’d often seen on television after a disaster.

“Emily!” a woman’s voice called out. Ms.
Parks, her ninth-grade English teacher, ran toward them. “Honey,
you two are burned. Come on, we set up some help in the food
court.” Emily set Justin down and fell to her knees, vomiting.
Pools of red splashed onto the large brown tiles.

“We were in a car accident,” she was able to
say before another wave of nausea hit her. She wiped her mouth with
the back of her hand, searched the empty faces. Her father wasn’t
there. “My father?”

“Phone!” Justin said. Her phone was buzzing.
It wasn’t just a text message. It was actually ringing. A call was
coming through. She scrambled to answer it.

“Hello?”

“Emily, baby?”

“Daddy!” she nearly screamed. “We made it,
Daddy! We made it to the mall.” The faces around them grew dim, and
her father’s voice began to break up. More people offered to help
her to her feet. She waved them off, intent on listening.

“Justin, and your mom?” he asked. “I can’t
reach your mom’s phone!” Emily bit her lip. An image of her
mother’s face came into her mind. She couldn’t bring herself to
tell him what had happened.

“Justin is here with me,” she said, beginning
to blubber. A babble of unintelligible words came next. “You can
see us when you get here!”

“Emily, I’m so sorry,” he told her, his voice
cutting in and out. “I’m so sorry this happened. It was all my
fault. All of it.” She held the phone away from her head, trying to
understand what he was saying.

“But the fog was an accident. Right, Daddy?”
A moment of confusion and doubt snapped at her heart.

“I love you guys. Remember that, okay?” Her
father’s voice went quiet then. She could hear him crying. And in
the background, she could hear something else. It was the sound of
a car horn. A horn that was stuck, blaring, and immediately her
heart went still. Her arms and legs tingled, and she struggled to
breathe.

“Daddy, what’s that sound?” she was able to
ask before the first sobs set in. “Daddy… Dad, where are you?”

“Baby, I love you. But I’m not going to make
it to the mall.” The car horn’s wail mixed with her father’s words.
Visions of curious faces began to spin around her.

“Why?” she yelled at him. “Why aren’t you
coming?”

“I hit something. It’s bad, baby. Got me
trapped inside. I love you guys—”

The phone cut out a final time.

The view in front of her turned over, and she
heaved. It turned again, and she was vaguely aware of being lifted.
The faces that had stared were now carrying her, saving the
daughter of the man who’d released a poison monster upon the world.
Comfort came when she heard Justin’s voice, encouraging her to stay
awake, like she’d done with him earlier. Her arm fell, and she felt
his tiny warm fingers wrap around hers, tugging on them.

“Dad will be here soon,” he told her. “Daddy
will be coming, just like you said, Emily.” And in that moment, she
decided to never tell anyone what her father had done. She’d never
say a word about the catastrophe he’d caused. Instead, the story
she’d tell would be about the tragedy of two lovers, dying
together, yet separated by a disaster. And she’d tell of the great
accident, and how a young brother and sister fought and survived
the day when the skies first went gray.

I am in awe of writers who’ve mastered
the short story.

I’ve always had stories to tell, but
until this past year, I never gave any consideration to the length.
And when I started putting my stories out there for others to
read, they tended to naturally run to about the length of a novel.
So last year, when the opportunity came along to write a
Silo Saga story set in Hugh Howey’s world of
Wool
, my
initial plan was to again write a story that was novel-length.
But as I worked out a plot, I reconsidered, and decided
that I’d like to pull back and give a short story a
try.

I discovered that it was a difficult
challenge. We’ve all seen connect-the-dots puzzles; imagine trying
to design a full-page connect-the-dots puzzle, but shrunk down
to fit in a space the size of your palm. Compression. The
short story presents the writer with a similar constraint: somehow
you must fit all of your story elements, your relationships,
your structure, into a very tight package.

“Going Gray” is my second published short
story, and I hope I’m getting better at it. I wanted to tell the
story of an accident—an accident with catastrophic consequences.
“Going Gray” is about a disaster that changes everything
we know and everything we do, and hints at the great
accident referred to in my
Gray Skies
series.

I greatly enjoyed writing “Going Gray,”
especially since I’d never planned on visiting what exactly
happened centuries before
Gray Skies
takes place. But as in
Gray Skies
, the story really isn’t about the accident at
all; it’s about how people react, how they change, adapt, and
become someone else completely.

In fact, now that “Going Gray” is
written—now that Emily’s world has been transformed—I’m already
considering writing more “Going Gray” stories. (You see, even
when I write a short story, I still can’t help but wonder what
happens next!)

Website:
writtenbybrian.com

Twitter: @WrittenByBrian

Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=833244111

The thick, white
damask and heavy beading of her wedding gown was no armor against
their hate. She could feel their loathing burrowing into her back
like a dagger. It was not just her corsetry which crushed her
breath from her breast. Their silence there in the king’s chapel
was more chilling than the screams of war. Still, the wedding
continued. She looked up at the carved statues of strange saints
over the altar, their long and sharp features judging her wrongful
presence, just like every stone in the castle whispered back in her
echoing footsteps that she should fly. She glanced at her
bridegroom: this king, this widower, this enemy. How could she look
upon this day with anything but the heaviness of duty? But she
would do her duty, no matter the cost.

But what cost! She was the daughter of a dead
king, the man who killed the family and friends of these, her new
subjects. Peace was her pitiful dowry, but peace bitterly bought by
abdicating her rule, stolen from her by her uncle who would take
over the northern throne while she ascended in the southlands as a
despised queen. Here, she would be no more than a figurehead, a
pretty bird in the courts with no more power than a sparrow.

She glanced once more at this King Stephen,
the man whose command was responsible for killing her father, whose
armies slaughtered thousands of fathers and sons of her own people.
The back of his rough, hairy hand was cold beneath her resting
palm. It sought no warmth or comfort from her. In fact, it seemed
to repel it. Or perhaps it was her own revulsion which thought it
so. She was gladdened that he had no interest in her, that he did
not even meet her carriage at the gate upon her arrival. There
would be no pretense of affection. Only duty.

There were whispers that King Stephen had
once been a mighty king. His dark, blonde curls caused women to
swoon, and his bear-like physique caused men to quake. But now he
was broken. There were rumors that he still longed for his
long-since-dead wife, unnaturally so. They said his cries for his
Queen Mary could be heard echoing through the halls late at
night.

They said that the old queen went mad. That
her death was by her own hand. That this king who was to be
Joanna’s husband drove his wife to such ends with his cruelty and
wickedness.

The priest interrupted Joanna’s thoughts,
murmuring the words which bound these two royal lines, these two
people, Joanna and Stephen, together for eternity. King Stephen
turned and took a necklace from a velvet pillow. He placed it over
Joanna’s head, letting it dangle from her long, pale neck, his
brown eyes still never meeting hers, his face blank and joyless.
His tanned and weathered hand slid a large golden ring with a stone
the color of blood upon her finger. He kissed her chastely upon the
cheek when instructed by the cardinal, his coarse brown beard
scraping against her delicate skin.

And then the ceremony was done. Their guests
broke out into polite, half-hearted celebration. It was only noise.
All spirit was dead. Keeping her hand atop his, Joanna and this man
made their way through the mirthless court, more actors in a
pageant than new husband and wife.

Thus begun the rule of The Mad Queen
Joanna.

* *
*

She sat stiffly in her bed waiting for him.
Her long black hair had been braided and arranged by her assigned
handmaidens, every fold of her gown placed, the candles lit so that
they highlighted her beauty and cast the rest in shadow.

Her uncle swore it would be her head if she
failed in this stately pact of marriage. He controlled her father’s
armies, and so he controlled her. Thus she found herself sitting in
this empty bridal bed waiting unwanted for a king.

She wondered how many times Stephen came to
this chamber when the old queen was alive. What passion had these
walls seen? What was it about Queen Mary that caused him still to
mourn?

She knew his advisors used logic to convince
him to take Joanna as his wife. The line of succession was barren
and unclear. “What better way to ensure the peace than to have a
child born with two bloodlines, of north and south, a child to heal
the wounds of a centuries-old rift?” they had urged.

Her uncle’s face had boiled red when she
refused this plan. “You shall bend to the will of the state or else
find yourself without! The lives of thousands of your subjects
depend upon this. Do you forget your duties to those you lead? Your
anointed duty to protect those who have pledged their lives to you?
You shall win his heart, and if you cannot, we will find a woman
who can!”

The wind began to blow and howl outside, and
suddenly her window swung open. She leapt up, undoing the enticing
picture her ladies had painted for the king. She reached out and
grabbed the lead-paned glass before it could smash against the
stone of the building and break. She pulled it back into place and
double-checked the latch, then grabbed the purple velvet curtains
and drew them tight.

As she turned, she caught her reflection in a
looking glass over the dresser. She seemed a stranger. Who was this
woman, she thought to herself, this new queen of the southlands?
She stepped forward. Her face was tired from the travel, tired from
the ceremonies, tired of all.

“Do you think you can really make this king
love you?” she asked her image, leaning until her nose almost
touched the glass.

Out of the corner of her eye she spied a dark
figure at the edge of the mirror. The king! She turned quickly. But
no. There was no one there. She looked again at the glass, pressing
her forehead against its cool surface. She was alone. She climbed
into bed, blew out the candle, and pulled the covers to her
neck.