Harvest Earth (5 page)

9    Gabriel

Startled by the realization that his daughters might be in danger, the first thing that Gabriel checks is his cellphone. It is off. When Gabriel tries to power it on, nothing happens. In a frantic panic, Gabriel’s thoughts are overwhelmed by the sudden need to get in contact with his daughters. He reaches into the pant’s pocket of the dead man in the alley. He finds the man’s cellphone and flips it open. Gabriel frantically pushes the “on” button but it too doesn’t respond. His mind races.

Gabriel finds himself inside a department store. The doors have been unlocked and so all he has to do is pry them open. There are no lights on inside, but fortunately the store’s large windows let in plenty of light. Just like the streets outside, the store is empty. Also like the streets there are holes, more places where some spherical object has carved out space where something else had once been. A carpeted floor, a rack of hangers and a showcase of jewelry, all replaced by the same impressions. Gabriel pushes these mysteries aside. His only thoughts are for his children. Dark thoughts for their safety creep up and Gabriel fights them. He knows he has to get to them. Gabriel focuses on this and this alone.

There is a phone on the wall behind one of the cashier’s counters. Gabriel tries it but there is no dial tone coming through the receiver. Gabriel tries several others in the department store as well but all with the same result. His final attempt is a display of cellphones. He attempts to turn on every one. Each give him the same dead blank screen as a reward for his efforts.

Gabriel shouts and raves. He throws the phones across the aisles. They shatter as they struck the walls and floor. He is losing his sense of control. Gabriel is losing any sense of reality.

His daughters are the only thing on his mind. Gabriel needs to reach them, but in order to do so he will need to stay focused. Five deep breaths are all it takes to regain his composure.

After trying the phones Gabriel takes advantage of his brief moment of clarity for a slight detour. His first objective is clothing. Just as Gabriel had noticed when he had first woken up, he still reeks of urine. Gabriel stinks. He peels off his overalls and hangs them over a dressing room door. He then changes into a pair of jeans and a flannel shirt. Gabriel also procures a belt and from it he hangs his keys and flashlight. In the back of his waistband he tucks in the barrel of his empty revolver.

On everything he takes off the racks, Gabriel saves the clothing labels with the prices. Gabriel tears them off and shoves them into his pocket. If whatever is happening ever ends and things returned to the way that they were, Gabriel hopes to repay the store for the things he is taking.

After leaving the dressing room Gabriel debates whether or not to leave his work uniform or carry it with him. He had worn the same overalls nearly every day for two years. He knew every stain and every home-mended stitch. On the chest of Gabriel’s overalls his name was embroidered in red thread. Over the years, Gabriel had thought about asking for a new pair. At least one additional set to ease his laundry bills. However, Gabriel had stayed quiet. He figured that he would be a given a new one before long. Some CEO or high powered executive would see him passing in the halls and complain to the building manager. They would make a stink about how it looked to have someone so filthy wandering the halls. Then they would have to get him a new pair. It wouldn’t be for him, and not because he had asked, but because someone whose voice mattered had made them listen.

The holes, the dead buildings and the empty streets. These images and the one of the large shape he had seen in the sky, all of them come to Gabriel. He leaves the overalls where they are.

Gabriel only briefly allows thoughts of what he is already considering “the old world” to creep into his mind as he raids the gourmet food section of the department store. Handfuls of nuts pour into his mouth. The surreal nature of the world and Gabriel’s actions in them is conflicting with Gabriel’s need to see his daughters again. The need to rationalize and his love for children compete for his attention. Love wins out as Gabriel finds a backpack in the school supplies section. He fills it with all the food he can find. He chews on macadamia nuts as he packs. Each bite subsides the painful feeling in his stomach that had threatened to overwhelm him before.

As the chewed up bits of nuts make their way into Gabriel’s gut he can feel his nauseous feelings become less frequent. But he still needs water, something to soothe his aching throat and tongue. There is a water fountain near the department store’s restrooms but they don’t work. Instead, Gabriel finds his way into the employee break room. There is a refrigerator. The temperature inside is equal to that of the room without. It is yet another jarring experience that Gabriel pushes aside. He tries not to think about how long the refrigerator has been without power as he grabs a half-finished bottle of chocolate milk and pops it open. The sweetened milk feel so good in Gabriel’s mouth that he let out an audible sound of relief after letting it run down his face and throat. Gabriel is even more grateful that the milk product is still runny and lacks any coagulation or the smell of rot. There are other items in the refrigerator as well.

These items have names on them. Names like “Bobby”, “Susanna” and “Mark”. Names of people who have left their lunches with hopes of returning later to open and enjoy them. They are the names of people that had once worked in the store. People that are now missing. Gabriel shuts the door to the fridge forcefully and pulls himself away. He pushes his children to the forefront of his mind.

With a belly full of gourmet nuts and lukewarm milk, Gabriel’s body is recovering, even as his mind is slipping. After relieving his bowels in the department store restroom and feeling guilty when he can’t get the toilet to flush, Gabriel pulls himself back out into the empty streets. Gabriel has forty-five blocks separately him from the department store and where his children go to school. More focused on this, he concentrates on the distance and draws a map in his head. From his daughter’s school it is another ten blocks to his apartment.

Putting one foot in front of the other Gabriel begins his march. He ignores the signs of death all around him. Instead he focuses on the promise of two young lives up ahead.

10    Madison

Fighting off the urge to drift off to sleep Madison and Dale talk to one another for what turns into hours. They sit in the dark, his head on her lap, as they wait for time to pass. The hope of help arriving unexpectedly is ever on their minds. Besides each other their only other company is the darkness and sounds of shifting rock. The distant moans that Madison had heard earlier have stopped a long while ago. Madison conserves their flashlight’s battery by keeping it off.  Their stomachs are empty and Madison can feel her bladder on the verge of exploding. But the airman pushes these urges aside, just like she pushes aside the urge to yell and scream frantically for help. Claustrophobia is setting in. But instead Madison talks and she listens.

While they had “known” each other for two years the two coworkers really
knew
nothing about one another. Dale told Madison about his life back in Georgia.

He told Madison about how he had grown up in a suburb outside of Atlanta in a well-off neighborhood. His father had been in the film industry and had enjoyed the boom that came to the area in the early part of the century. His mother had been an artist, a painter, who was well-known for her landscapes. They used to travel the world in search of new hillsides, seashores or sunsets for her to paint. That was how Dale had become interested in new cultures and languages. By the time he was ten years old he could speak Mandarin and some dialects of Hindi. His parents encouraged his passion. They got him tutors after school, sent him to special language camps and provided study abroad opportunities for him whenever they had the chance. Dale had grown up an only child. His pen pals in Japan, India and China were his siblings.

When Dale was eighteen years old he left home and spent a few years traveling the world. He used his boyhood contacts to get jobs teaching in countries all over Asia. It wasn’t until Cambodia that he had heard the call to join the Air Force.

He was at a bar in Phnom Penh having drinks with the locals when a group of U.S. Marines came in. They were all on leave and clearly already drunk. The marines were loud, rude and itching for a fight. They found the confrontation they looking for. As the violence broke out, one of the Marines punched a hole in the wall of the bar. He shattered the bones in his hand. It was then that the fighting stopped.

One of the men that Dale had been drinking with was a doctor. He wanted to help the soldier but the Marine refused, unable to understand what the doctor was saying. The language barrier was too great. It was then that Dale stepped in serving as translator between the two people. The Marine had his hand splinted and placed on ice. He and his friends apologized for their behavior. One of them even left money behind to pay for the repairs to the wall. Three months later when Dale returned to the United States he signed up for the Air Force.

Dale’s parents paid for college while he was serving in the Air Force’s ROTC. But the time he graduated he was an officer and was quickly deployed to serve as a translator for an intelligence gathering unit in Guam. He was only serving there six months before he was pulled for a secret assignment at their current base. When speaking of his placement, Dale said, “It was the luckiest thing that ever happened to me.”

There was some irony there of course. A mountain of debris had crashed down onto Dale’s leg. There was likely massive bleeding and no hope of escape. None of which would have happened had Dale stayed in Guam. Madison suspected that Dale’s mention of “luck” was an illusion to his feelings towards her. Like most things uncomfortable, Madison ignored the feelings that she felt in the moment. She resolved to overcome them and remain strong.

Still, there was no denying that Madison liked the way that Dale talked. The way he phrased things and how he spoke about his experiences. The airmen knew full well how fortunate he had been to see and do all the things he had. He had never taken any of it for granted. Dale’s whole life was so much different than Madison’s own, and yet both of them were there in that moment. Two coworkers in the same department who were trapped together under the collapsed ruins of a secret base located in an isolated mountain in New Mexico.

As they waited for rescue, or death, whichever came first, Dale talks less about himself and starts probing Madison for information about her own life. Dale has to pry the details out of her. Which was good, the effort on Dale’s part, because it keeps him from drifting off. Madison fears that her coworker is at risk of passing out any moment due to the inevitable blood loss that is coming from his leg. It is trauma hidden by hundreds of pounds of rock.

In some ways, Madison is much the same way. She is like that leg, only instead she is a whole wounded person. One who hides her injuries under years of callouses built up over time.

Dale is persistent in his questioning. Eventually he wears Madison’s callouses away.

While still maintaining the bulk of her secrets, Madison does reveal that she had grown up in the Midwest. Madison’s grandmother had raised her most of her life. She was a stern woman and expected a lot from Madison even as a child. Madison’s grandmother had emigrated from Germany and insisted that Madison learn to speak the language. Which after a while, Madison didn’t mind. Like Dale, she found she enjoyed learning how words were formed in other languages. She liked the sounds of them on her tongue and the way strange words felt in her mouth. Every opportunity she got Madison was in her local library learning something new.

Madison didn’t have the opportunity to travel the world like Dale had. Instead she learned languages from books and by listening to tape recordings. When she got older, at the age of fourteen, Madison worked at a restaurant where the servers only spoke French but the kitchen staff only spoke Spanish. Madison loved and absorbed it all.

At home Madison was far removed from the paradises she sometimes read about in her foreign language novels. Madison’s grandmother often chastised her for staying out too late or criticized Madison for the friends she had. Friends, Madison didn’t have many. By the time she was sixteen she had hardly any at all. It was shortly after Madison’s seventeenth birthday that her grandmother passed away. A sudden case of pneumonia took her one winter and Madison’s grandmother never woke up. She left Madison a small heritage. It was just enough to help Madison leave her small Midwestern town.

Madison, seventeen years old and with a small fortune in her pock, arrived in Spain and spent the next six months backpacking around Europe. It was only when her funds ran out that she started looking for other options. It was at an embassy in Germany when Madison was poor, alone and hungry that she signed up for Air Force. Madison didn’t have a guardian present so she forged what she imagined her mother’s signature might have looked like. Nobody ever asked any questions and before long Madison was shipped off to boot camp.

From there, Madison climbed the ranks. She took courses online between drills, earned her GED and soon a college degree. She then took the officer’s aptitude test and was almost immediately reassigned to the post in the mountains. Madison got three meals a day, a bed to sleep in and the opportunity to work with the languages she loved.

“Do you miss it?” Dale interrupts Madison’s stream of thought. His voice is faint. Madison knows his strength is fading.

“Miss what?” Madison replies. She readjusts her legs both to increase her circulation and to jostle Dale’s head to keep him awake.

Dale grimaces in pain as she does this but then his face melts into a smile. “Miss people?” He says.

Madison couldn’t quite fathom the question. Her finger runs across a jagged piece of skin by her nail. She bites the flake of skin off with her teeth. It is a nervous habit. “I don’t understand.” Madison says with her finger still in her mouth.

“Sure you do.” Dale replies in a whisper, his voice growing weaker. “All day, reading and listening to people’s stories. Don’t you miss that? Being connected?” He closes his eyes and takes in a deep breath followed by a heavy exhalation. Madison runs her hand across his forehead, smoothing back his hair.

She is connected. Isn’t she? Madison worked for a large military structure of one of the world’s most powerful nations. She is assigned to a top-secret project that she was told was of the “utmost importance” for national security. All of that meant Madison mattered, didn’t it? It meant that her actions had a role in the outcome of the world’s narrative. It meant that she was connected to something.

But Madison knew what Dale truly meant. It was a feeling that had been with her since she’d started her assignment at the base.

Dale wasn’t talking about her role in the larger tapestry of life. He was talking about the private moments. The intimate connection that occurs between two people huddled up in the dark. The connection that exists between two people that allow themselves to know what the other is thinking. To trust in someone else implicitly despite having been hurt in the past. It is the ability to be vulnerable. The ability to open up a closet of skeletons and say “here they are”. To know that the other will accept that darkness and in exchange reveal their own secrets to you. It is the pact of best friends, partners, brothers and soldiers. There is nothing deeper. Perhaps there is nothing more important in all of human existence. Yes, Madison realized, she had missed it. Madison missed the connections. They were the connections she had never allowed herself to have. Her personal walls were built up so high that Madison thought she could provide for herself. Now, cradling this head of a man who had been open and honest with her in her lap, Madison finds she had been so wrong.

In the darkness Madison cries as the man in her lap dies.