MANNA

Red, purple, and white stretched across the desert night sky like the strokes of a paintbrush dropped from a tired hand. Heavenly light flickered across the sand, mixing to form patches of pink and mauve, in parts illuminating a fossilized tree branch, sleeping lizard, or even the occasional glass boulder, transforming it into a crystal chandelier. Explosions created the boulders, and the more boulders around, the higher the danger, something Michel had mentioned when the boulders first appeared, just occasional glass pebbles to start, but then quickly becoming gleaming domes the size of shipping containers. Don’t be so damn neurotic, his brother had said. This was formerly the state of Kansas. Michel tried to envision cornfields and rolling green hills, but could not, and this alarmed him; sometimes he felt like desertification had entered his mind as well, reducing his once formidable intellect and imagination to formlessness—just a collection of particles linked only until the next gust came to fan them into new configurations. They had been moving by night across the desert, watching their footprints disappear behind them for seven days, and they were lost. They were hunting for baskets and trying not to be hunted themselves.

“Can you see the fragments?” said a hoarse voice drawn taut against the dry desert air from a face that scanned the sky. This was his brother, Daniel, known to most as Jackal, and together they had wandered across scorched plains, through sprawling storms, over acidic seas, and above melted forests for six years, or maybe it had been seven? Had they left before the Battle of Des Moines or after? Time becomes relative during the apocalypse.

Michel surveyed the sky and then stifled a cough with his hand. “For a minute,” he choked, “I thought I could identify some paneling, but…” he said as his voice trailed off, subsumed by coyote howls, insect rattles, and the coarse, grating hiss of wind against ochre sand. The sky above was now still—its evening light show over—and they were alone in a small ramshackle encampment, ready to finally rest after a long day. Daniel had managed to prop a thin tarp against an embankment of strange black rock, scorching by day, but cooled to obsidian ice by night. “Nuclear basalt” people called it when they began using it to cook food. Michel, a former physics student, failed to grasp how such heat exchange was possible, but he had given up his quest of understanding the physical universe long ago: the apocalypse breaks all the rules. Besides the tent there was a small fire and their two rucksacks piled against one another like twin guardians. Looking around their paltry bivouac, it was easy to believe that this may have been the only habitation in the universe.

“Well,” Daniel croaked, “wake me up if another ship is scorched trying to get through the stratosphere. I’m heading in.” He rose and shook the dust off his tattered pants. “Oh, and don’t let the fire go out, but don’t let it rise far enough to become visible beyond the dunes.” Michel nodded and watched as his brother plodded off to urinate twenty feet away, a black silhouette framed by sand, sky, and stars. Bear-like and over 6’3’’, he walked with a rolling, broken gait, his footprints a patchwork, just a few degrees off their axis, suggesting he was slightly pigeon-toed, but it was hard to see them clearly in the inky dark. Michel was sad that their ersatz meteor shower was over, even if it signaled a profound loss of life. It was the first time he had seen Daniel relax in some time.

SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSH!

A sound—a man-made sound—erupted from the encampment. Daniel immediately dropped to the ground. His eyes caught the fire embers and flashed his rarest of feelings: fear. Over the years, the brothers had developed a sign language for just these situations. Daniel gestured for Michel to douse the flames, and he did so. Michel was now also flat on his stomach in the sand, nostrils suddenly choked with dust, tiny craters erupting before him with every frantic breath. Daniel was telling him to control his breathing, which always made it more difficult and exacerbated his cough. He counted the seconds for inhalation…1…2…3…4, held for two, and then exhaled for 1…2…3…4…5…6.

Daniel withdrew his gun and held it with both hands clasped before him, unsure where to aim, eyes darting around the surrounding dunes. Tendrils of smoke rose from the fire, and Michel became concerned about breathing in the fumes—a deadly mistake when all Earth wood was irradiated. He counted in his head, but he was losing control and felt a very familiar wooziness begin to take hold. He let out a cough that dissipated sand grains like dandelion seeds. Daniel motioned for silence.

Again, the sound.

And then, bad timing notwithstanding, a memory appeared, one from before the Exodus. Michel was seated beside his mother throwing pellets to some ducks. She was explaining how certain foods were too rare and water-taxing to give them, but he wasn’t listening. All he could hear was the rush of the water—that beautiful yet indescribable sound of flowing water.

More static from the radio. His breathing slowly returned to normal, allowing him to focus on the object of the sound where it sat beside the rucksacks seated in its usual place of honor. Its name was Conch. Michel had taken the name from his mother’s habit of collecting seashells and holding them against her ear. An unusual item, Conch was a dull, chipped, heart-shaped locket left to Michel by his father six years ago. You’ll need this, he had said. At the time, Michel had no idea that it doubled as a radio or that it would become his single most important possession.

Fears momentarily allayed, Daniel carefully returned his revolver to his side holster. “When was the last time Conch picked up anything on this channel?” he whispered, eyes glued to the locket.

Michel thought about it. That was his job—to think. “It could be from the crashing ship or from someone trying to jam that ship’s communications?”

Daniel carefully rose, sand spilling off his broad shoulders in fine rivulets, and collected the locket. Both brothers were seated at their extinguished fire studying their tiny travelling companion. Daniel turned the locket over in his hand as if trying to coax it back to sleep like a colicky infant. “It can’t be another basket,” he said from across the fire, “We haven’t had a drop in two years.” The saved people began dropping giant supply containers soon after they left, and for a time, things ran well—life was almost imperceptibly different. Then the shipments, or baskets as they called them, became spotty, and everything changed. Now, Michel and Daniel spent most nights scouring the airwaves with their locket-radio for the merest rumor of an untouched basket. That is what brought them to the desert in the first place.

Michel felt his anxiety returning as they sat fixated on Conch, his heart fluttering as his brother weaved the locket in and out of his fingers, causing him for a second to feel as if the locket was his own heart, shaking in his brother’s powerful grasp. “Daniel, may I hold the locket?” he asked weakly, his mouth suddenly very dry.

“Shut up, stupid!”

It always hurt when his brother called him stupid. It caused him to shut down and forfeit any argument, a fact his brother knew and exploited. And in the next moment, Conch sprang back to life.

“Greetings, boys,” came the woman’s voice from the locket. It was a voice Michel had not heard in six years and one he did not want to hear ever again. The locket sat perfectly still while it broadcast its message. Daniel’s face was stone, his grip on the locket tight, knuckles white, his beetle-brow transfixed, concentrated, keen, like a man hearing his sentence before a judge. “How’s that cough, Michel?” the voice continued.

Daniel raised the locket to his mouth like he was about to bite it in half, “He’s doing fine, no thanks to you. Now what do you want?”

The customary several minutes, and then an answer. “Sounds like someone woke up on the wrong planet this morning! You know, if you had only worked on that temper a little bit, things might have gone differently for you, and you could have been up here with us and not down there eating mud and fighting freaks. But let’s not let our past family squabbles ruin a golden opportunity.”

The voice belonged to Dawn Almorzar, the Secretary General for the Free Democratic Peoples of Earth and the supreme architect of the Mass Martian Exodus. She was their grandmother, and six years ago she had left them behind on a dying world. For a time, the baskets brought news from Mars, mostly holograms, for most of Earth was illiterate, and for years, the brothers had seen snippets of their grandmother when they visited refugee camps, natural springs, mountain passes, de-radiation stations, markets, and depots. Michel had watched his grandmother hold genetically perfect Martian infants, harvest wheat and millet that grew taller than oak trees, and ride crystal elevators to the top of buildings whose spires were invisible from the ground. He had also seen her face explode from the baskets onto cliff sides, magnified a thousand-fold, voice booming, warning Earthlings to halt their attempts at escape, ordering them instead to await their next basket because the next one would provide for all they needed. In this way, first the brothers, and then the entire Earth had learned not to trust Dawn Almorzar.

“What could we possibly do for you?” Michel asked, with a sudden cough acting like punctuation for his question.

“My, my…” said Dawn after several minutes with exaggerated solicitude. “Sounds like it has progressed. Good thing you boys picked up. Could be over for you in a few weeks to months. You know on Mars, disgusting lungs like yours can now be cleansed in two hours. Isn’t that wonderful? I can drop a basket anywhere on Earth. I can drop one with the right treatment for you if you just get the locket to my son. Not even you, clever Michel, can truly understand what a miraculous thing your father wrought.”

Dawn’s voice cut out, somehow making the desert night louder than before. Michel broke the silence between them, “Daniel, we should talk about this.”

But Daniel had already grabbed Conch, “Why should we trust you?”

Static from the locket, louder than before, with bursts of their Grandmother’s voice interjecting. “Only—have—seconds—before—blockade—restored…”

And suddenly it all made sense. That was not just another escaping ship that Mars had destroyed minutes before.

“Daniel, I don’t think that was an Earth ship we just saw…I think Dawn destroyed their own Martian communications blockers so she could speak with us…”

Daniel snorted, “So what? You think I trust her? She left us here to die with the others. She’s a crazy dictator, and she is not our grandmother anymore. We’re not doing this, not for her. And you know what else? I think the only damn use we have for that locket is catching Martian ball games. We should bury it in the desert and be done with it.” Angerly, he took the locket and tossed it into the night. The next sound was the tarp door opening and then the plop of his brother’s massive frame collapsing into the sand like a basket from above. There he would toss and turn all night like a sidewinder—his brother never got a good night’s sleep.

Michel sat upright beside the fire for the rest of the night, alone and lost in thought, watching the last cooling ember before him as its remaining freckle of fire faded into the enveloping dark and listening for the locket.