Iceling Read online

  The pods are all withered and dead-looking, like crushed empty cans, like broken boxes, like corpses. I’m not the botanist in the family, and I don’t know how this alien crop is supposed to look, but right now all I can think of is that time Dad bought me a cactus to take care of as a way to help me and Callie bond, and how I was so scared of killing that cactus so I made sure to water it all the time, but then the cactus died anyway because I didn’t know that feeding a plant too often could drown and kill the roots. One of the pods starts to open. I think, Maybe this’ll be fine, maybe it’ll be all right. But it’s not. The pods are shaped like footballs. They each have four seams, and they’re sort of opening from the middle point out, and you can see how they probably should open, how the pod should peel back in quarters, rising toward the sun that’s emerging, shining down right on this trembling expanse, the clouds actually moving aside right now as if to make that happen, the sky all around them gone purple, the clouds this steely gray, and you can see in your mind’s eye how this should play out.

  But it doesn’t. The plant shudders, like it’s coughing, and only one quarter of the football seam peels back, and it’s more that it dries up than opens. The whole pod droops, and when it touches the ground, it just turns to dust.

  “Lorna,” someone whispers, and the sound of my name spoken by another human being feels so foreign right now that for a second I wonder if I’m dead and this is the place my body has chosen to go.

  But then I feel a hand on my shoulder, and I turn to see Emily standing beside me, and all around us is everyone else. The rest of us, of the siblings, have come down from up above while I was too engrossed to notice.

  Somebody asks what’s happening in a desperate voice, and someone else asks it again, even more desperately, and I’m screaming it over and over again in my head, but no one can say anything. All we can do is watch.

  The soldiers too. All they do is watch. The drones are moving overhead, and down below more soldiers are setting something up in what looks like a van. Someone’s in there, and people are going in and out, like it’s a command post or something.

  And then suddenly the air is full with that smell, the one other than the green one. The smell of lightning. So this is what lightning smells like. It had been lingering this whole time, but I’d gotten used to it. But now it’s stronger, and everywhere, the air is choked with it. I remember Dad, after dinner, saying, “That day . . . that day, it . . . just. It just wasn’t what we were expecting to find out there. But mostly what I remember was the sky. My God. It was purple and yellow, and it smelled like lightning, but I couldn’t see any. Do you know what lightning smells like? Don’t. Don’t know that. And the clouds were so low and heavy and with a mind of their own, opening a hole in the sky to let the light in.”

  The smell is more than I can bear, I think, and I wonder if human lungs were built to breathe this stuff in, and then a sudden snap of motion ripples all across the field, and I look. The pods—not dead—start to open.

  Oh God.

  And then I gasp and choke back tears, because I can’t believe how stupid I am not to have seen this all along. Because this is where he found them. This is where they came from. Not some war-torn nation in Eastern Europe or the Balkans, shoved in a boat and swaddled in desperate blankets and left to drift to safety. But here, on a field of trembling ice, in a pod that pushed its way up through the ground. This is where they were born. This is where the sky turned purple and this lightning smell scarred my father and stayed with him forever. Here. Right here. Of course this is where Dad found them. The sky is just like he said, and this smell in the air, like it’s electrified, like it’s charged with something so of the earth that it’s alien, and if this quaking, trembling ground isn’t basically the definition of strange seismic and meteorological activity, then I don’t know what is.

  This is where they came from. This is where and how they were born. And then I almost have to laugh because my sister is a plant person.

  And then I don’t laugh, of course, not at all, because if she’s a plant person and this, right in front of me, is how she was born, then what’s happening here is that she and her Iceling siblings, they’re here to welcome the next generation.

  The pods are opening more and more, and I try to speak, to tell Stan that this is it. This is what happened to them, this is where they were found. It wasn’t a boat, but the most I can get out is a whisper that I’m not sure he even hears, because like everyone else he’s just standing there, staring.

  And then I hear him whisper, “This is where they came from,” and I know that he knows and everyone around us knows, even though none of us understand any of it.

  We just keep staring at the field, at the pod plants rising up all shriveled and choked. I notice a few kids have their eyes trained on the sky, and then I notice one guy a few people back who’s just shaking and peeing himself. Some people are fainting, either again or for the first time. Five people turned and ran but couldn’t make it back up the hill the way they came and just sort of slid back down and slumped themselves in balls on the ground. But I’m done with that now, I think. The worst thing that can happen here is Callie dies and so do I. And at least we’ll be together.

  The pods are almost all the way open now, and as they gape into a field of horrible yawns, a new ripple of fear passes through our group, and the ground, and then the ice, is finally still. They’re fully open now, and the Icelings are all closing their eyes, turning their heads away. I try to get closer to see what’s happening. I brace myself for the image I’ve been dreading ever since these pods started opening: a field of perfect, sleeping infants cradled in the maws of these weird blossoms, a flashback to what my sister must have looked like when she was born. But that’s not what I see. Not at all.

  At first, I don’t see anything inside those pods. But then I squint and look closer, and what I see is dust and some gray and clingy substance that looks like mold, and then my view of them is all swallowed up by the icy air whipped up by helicopters and drones. And the Icelings . . . the Icelings are . . .

  Some of them, including Callie, fall down to their knees, their mouths open in soundless howls, weeping and weeping and weeping and weeping, their tears hitting the ice and just turning to more ice. The others who aren’t wailing like this look just wrathful as hell, their faces and bodies snapping toward the ridge, where the soldiers are, like they’d like to uproot their lives. This was supposed to be the birth of a new generation, I think. They were coming here to welcome the next generation of Icelings into this world, and instead they found a hostile army and a field of dead babies. The leader closes his eyes. His whole body goes limp. Then his head snaps up, and his eyes look for someone on the ridge I can’t see. I’m holding on to Stan’s hand again, and I squeeze it, and he squeezes harder, and that’s when I see Ted.

  Ted has broken the circle. He’s lumbering forward and straight into the middle of the once-trembling, now-still ice field of shriveled pods, which are so much more than shriveled pods, of course, but what they really are is just . . . unspeakable. Ted lunges violently and picks up a pod, and he hurls it up at the drones, which are hovering low now, flitting in and around as if following him. He makes contact, and one of the drones veers into the rocky hillside it was hugging, and then down and down it tumbles.

  But the truly scary thing, the thing that’s more shocking and upsetting and so far beyond the word “surprise” that it’s actually almost funny, the thing that makes Ted hurling a pod and hitting this drone with such force that it crashes into a small mountain seem like just nothing at all, is that Ted is screaming, has been screaming this whole time. The sound is unlike anything I’ve ever heard, like death whistling through the leaves of a tree, but magnified a thousand times. Blood is falling from his mouth in awful streams.

  One of the remaining drones rears up, but instead of aiming for Ted, it’s heading right to the Iceling leader. It hove
rs for a bit, but then we see its gears moving, and it releases a small rocket, which comes soaring out, its aim terrifyingly true. And this is it, I think. This is as far as we go. My name is Lorna Van Allister. I’m seventeen years old. I was born and raised in Abington, Pennsylvania. My sister’s name is Callie. I have a boy I won’t call my boyfriend named Dave, a mom named Judy, and a dad named Tom, and they probably work for the government, and this is where I’m going to die.

  “LOOK OUT!” so many of us shout as we either scatter or lunge toward the Iceling ring to try to drag our siblings to safety, knowing they won’t understand but needing to scream all the same. But somebody does understand. The Iceling leader seems to hear us, which I only say because he looks at us, then at the missile hurtling toward him. It’s him they were aiming for, we can see the path of the missile clear enough as it’s hurtling death through space, and then the missile hits. It smacks his foot against the ice until it breaks, sending violent shards of broken ice and the last remaining shreds of the withered-up pods flying. The Iceling leader—definitely injured but probably not dead—dives down and disappears under the surface of the field.

  Callie’s down there. My Callie. Where that missile hit. I start to run to her, but I fall back and down, and everything hurts.

  TWENTY-TWO

  AND THEN EVERYTHING starts to come apart.

  When the missile hit, we flinched and took cover, only peeking out from the shields we created with our arms or by curling completely into ourselves when the world-shattering noise from the first missile started to quiet down. It’s good the Icelings were in a kind of horseshoe around their leader, because it’s only the specific place where he was standing that’s completely gone now. In its stead is a smoking craterlike hole. The ice is holding, but who knows for how long.

  For a moment, I let myself pretend I live in a world where I get to interpret the lack of an immediate follow-up missile as a sign that the soldiers have decided to lay down their arms and acknowledge the limits of violence to solve anything. But then one of the soldiers shatters that illusion by hollering something I can’t make out from here, but by its tone and cadence I can tell it’s an order, and my stomach goes sour and drops. I can’t make out what the commanding officer said, but immediately after it's said, the troops scatter and fall back into a new line. It’s increasingly obvious that everything they’re doing is going according to a plan we’ll never be a part of, and they file back into the jeeps and start the engines.

  The jeeps full of soldiers turn their noses straight for the field, for us and our brothers and sisters, and they drive as a fleet down the hill. Callie, Greta, Tara, and a whole bunch of other Icelings are running to the pods to try to shield them. I want to shout out that they’re dead, that there’s nothing they can do, but of course I can’t, for too many reasons than there’s time to explain. Besides, this isn’t my world anymore. It’s Callie’s.

  The jeeps go slowly down the hill. All the Icelings who aren’t guarding pods are standing defiantly in front of the ones who are.

  The jeeps brake and park in much the same formation they had at the top of the hill, and the soldiers, rifles ready, file out of them in less time than it takes to draw breath. They’re standing in small groups, their guns trained on whatever they can see. They’re moving out, I guess to maximize the area they’re covering, to maximize the number of things they can kill.

  We have no idea what’s coming, but we can guess. I flash back to all the conversations Mimi and I have had while marathoning movies about the end of the world, the conversations about how stupid it is that, when people think about the end of the world, they imagine themselves in the shoes of these characters who are surviving despite all the plagues and zombies trying to wipe them off the face of the earth. When in reality, it’s so unlikely that the people who are sitting around in the suburbs watching end-of-the-world explosion-death dramas are the same ones who would have what it takes to fight through an actual disaster. So Mimi and I made a pact that in the event of a zombie apocalypse, we’d just do each other in, because there’s no way in hell we’d make it past the first wave. But now that I’m here, staring at what looks very much like the opening of the gateway to hell, there’s no part of me that thinks anything other than surviving—for my sister, for myself—is an option. And I know that if I give in to the terror being forced upon us, if I end up like that guy wetting himself and going into shock, then I’m done. Callie’s done. It’s over. So I push all that fear to the deepest part of my soul, and I clear my head and let go of Stan’s hand, because it’s time to think our way out of this. I know that I might die. That this sad little act of bravery might be my last sad little act ever. I’m not okay with that, not at all, but at least I know I’ve tried hard to be a good sister to Callie, to this plant person whom I love more than I really know how to say.

  But none of this—not my love for Callie, who might not love me back, nor my proving that love by driving all the way up here to face this awful massacre—matters to anyone but me, because to the rest of the world, Callie isn’t a person. Any love anyone has for her or anyone like her is rendered invisible, misplaced, insane. And that thought has never been clearer than now, as this wing of the U.S. military calmly walks past us with their assault rifles raised. They make their way through us, shoving us aside and ignoring our cries of surrender. They are, essentially, ignoring us.

  “Stay back,” one of them says, shoving at us. Nobody does anything about it. You want to think you’d fight back, but they’ve got assault rifles and U.S. flags on their arms, with the letters E.T.R. stitched underneath. They march onto the ice field and start firing, small mechanical bursts aimed toward the ground, at what remains of the pods.

  The drones are backing off, maybe because the soldiers are down here. And it actually seems like maybe someone made a mistake, which is the only reason the soldiers are down here now. But maybe that’s just wishful thinking. The soldiers are unloading what I recognize as flamethrowers. They’re tossing them on like they’re backpacks or some kind of trendy vest. Through the smoke and the chaos I can see some of the Icelings wringing their hands as they watch, tears streaming down their faces and turning to ice before hitting their mouths. Stan taps my shoulder and points. I follow his hand, and my eyes find Ted again. He’s still fighting back, and now he’s got a gang of likeminded Icelings with him, all lined up with their fists clenched, running at those troops like they’re about to tear their heads off.

  Because I guess what happened here is that the Icelings were coming home to greet the new generation. To welcome them into this world like no one else was able to welcome them. And they got here, and they were ready. They knew, their bodies knew, what they needed to do. And they got here, and all the babies were dead dust.

  And now there are soldiers marching among the corpses of the next generation and shooting them and burning them. Ted and his gang are hitting these soldiers in the faces. I don’t know whether the soldiers were prepared for what happened here today or for the strength of these Icelings who are pissed about what didn’t happen here today. The first wave catches the troops by surprise, but then, once the surprise is over, they start firing. Ted’s gang starts picking up the fallen bodies, soldier and Iceling both, and hurling them at the troops, trying to knock them down.

  Stan can’t tear his eyes away, but I feel like I have to, I have to see what else is going on, so I look to the sky—the drone that fired the missile is long gone, and so are its companions. Hovering in their places are several more drones, smaller than the first ones, that look like roving eyeballs with helicopter blades.

  Think, Lorna! Okay. Okay. Okay, okay, okay. There has to be some sort of Wi-Fi or cell network or something going on here that the army is using. How else could these drones work, transmit images? I pull out my phone, and, lo and behold, there is a signal. I open up Twitter and hit record, and all I can do is hope this signal holds long enough for me to broadcas
t this. Unless this is some secret territory under some secret governance, we’re in Canada. And the soldiers have U.S. flags on their shoulders, they’re obviously American, and so are we. Someone’s watching with those drones. There’s no way off this island, or if there is, they’re there waiting for us, and we can’t hide, because they’ll find us. It’s not that big of an island. And the Iceling leader came from below the surface, but there’s no way we’ll figure out how to go down there like he did before they capture or shoot us.

  So we need to run right up to the soldiers. We need to tell them we’re Americans—not for them, not because they don’t know it. But for our phones and whoever might end up seeing this.

  I grab Stan and Emily and Jayson and everyone else around and tell them what to do.

  “What?” someone says. “Are you kidding? That’s the plan?”

  Stan stares down the girl who said it, and then another girl opens up Snapchat, and a guy opens up Periscope, and down the line they go, with Facebook and Instagram and Twitter.

  And right when we rush out, phones in front of our faces to try to save our siblings’ lives like we’re all in some ridiculous ad about how my generation is selfish and ruining everything, someone nearby calls out.