A Fortress of Pebbles

As the days passed, the small refugee community grew in and around the house. Why people were drawn here of all places, Orion wasn’t sure – but fake-Cassandra’s theory was that people were like objects in space, drawn to each other by a kind of gravity. No one wanted to be alone at a time like this.

There were a handful of people living in the bunker, another handful on the main floor, and even some in the attic. Dad insisted on living in the bunker’s master bedroom, which he called the “base of operations.” Here, by decree, Orion also had to sleep – on a cot next to the pile of guns, kept awake late into the night by the sound of Dad’s sleep apnea machine playing an endless duet with Mom’s snoring. He slept atop his pebbles like a dragon.

During the days, Dad walked around the property with two firearms holstered at his belt and an unknown number of backups concealed elsewhere. He had deputized Mom and a couple of the other parents, too, allowing them one gun apiece. When he gave orders, people followed them – either because of the guns, or because they liked the idea that at least someone was in charge. The terms “friendly martial law” and “benevolent dictatorship” were often tossed around like jokes, accompanied by laughter, but people also seemed to like the ideas.

Mostly, Orion followed Dad around, watching him recruit what he called “teams” to accomplish what he called “objectives.” One team hauled in fallen trees from the ruined forests, while another team chopped and sawed them into usable lumber with the assortment of tools excavated from local garages and workshops. One of the objectives was to build rickety sheds and houses that looked to Orion like they’d survive one, maybe two, huffs or puffs from a big bad wolf before becoming objectives once again.

Orion’s objective, apparently, was to watch. Dad pulled him aside exactly once to say, “If anything ever happens to me, I need you to take care of Mom. Understand? And when things settle down, find Cassandra. Stay close, and never close your eyes.” Then, he pressed into Orion’s hand not a gun, but one of the keys to the bunker’s master bedroom – the village armory. The keys to the kingdom.

Orion did watch. Sometimes he watched Dad being a friendly town martial with a dash of benevolent dictator. Sometimes he watched Mom’s more subtle work, flitting like a butterfly from group to group – working some kind of magic that always seemed to result in her becoming someone’s best friend.

“Weird,” said fake-Cassandra. “If I’d known she was such a social butterfly, I’d have asked her for tips about how to fit in at school.”

“No, you wouldn't,” said Orion. “And you’re not real.”

Usually, he tried to ignore fake-Cassandra. He was less successful when it came to Keely. Luckily, she rarely noticed him staring because her mouth tended to be locked onto the Parrot King’s – as if the boy was an apparatus required for survival. Like a sleep apnea machine.

When it came to watching, Orion was particularly fond of the bone dragons. When he wasn’t with dad doing objectives, he spent hours atop the roof watching them patrol the perimeter. They always perked up and looked into the sky when aircraft passed overhead.

Sometimes they themselves flew, rising into the air with a flap of the wings, breaking all laws of aerodynamics. When this happened, it was fun to watch helicopters veer away, hightailing it toward the horizon. Even the jets kept their distance, remaining high in the atmosphere. If it came down to a battle between the dragons and military aircraft, Orion had his money on the military, but then again, who knows?

After the first few days, agents from homeland security stopped coming by to chat with Dad. It was probably because he exploded at one of them, lecturing them about his “rights as an American” and threatening to call upon the dragons to attack. Orion didn’t know if this was a bluff, but the dragons sure had gotten excited, shooting blasts of blue flame into the sky and flying menacingly low over the government vehicle as it retreated across the surrounding wastelands.

“If there wasn’t so much else going on,” fake-Cassanrda had remarked from her perch next to him on the roof, “they’d come back with a lot more firepower.”

“You’re not real,” said Orion, pushing her off. She screamed as she fell, hitting the ground with a thud.

She was right, though: there was indeed a lot going on. The television in the living room was always on, surrounded by anyone resting between objectives. The entire North American continent seemed to be affected by a variety of “invasive phenomena” – the technical term settled upon by experts.

Sightings of bone creatures were becoming more frequent, with authorities urging citizens “not to engage” and airing hastily-produced public service announcements detailing how to retreat to a safe distance. “They won’t attack unless threatened,” said the experts (though Orion didn’t understand how anyone could be an expert in something that didn’t exist a week ago). The mechanism powering the creatures appeared to be the small brown stones at their core, the experts announced confidently from little squares embedded in newscasts. Citizens were advised that such stones were likely to be radioactive and that anyone in possession of one should report it immediately through a hastily-made website that, Orion discovered, was usually unreachable.

Unlike the bone creatures, the other invasive phenomena were dubbed “extremely dangerous.” In spite of experts’ insistence that the flaming creatures that came shrieking out of the sky to carry people away be referred to by some technical term that Orion had forgotten, everyone on the internet just called them “the demons.” They seemed to enjoy infesting the skies around large metropolitan areas, having been sighted from Quebec to Buenos Aires. No one knew how or why they chose their victims, but there were lots of theories. Profiles of the departed could be found on several websites, with internet slooths using social media to uncover the names, addresses, friends and family, vices and virtues, and life stories of anyone who had died by demonic decree.

The official government stance regarding the demons was mixed: use extreme caution under the open skies, especially on cloudy days; but also, don’t stop going to work. This last part was very important, the economic experts stressed. Without work, the world as we know it ends.

Martial law had been enacted pretty much everywhere. The national guard had been deployed to most major cities, and all branches of the military had received similar objectives. “We want you to feel safe going to work,” was the official position of the American government. One social media clip of a United States Marine unloading an assault rifle at a demon and seemingly deterring it from snatching up an old lady was being aired every few minutes these days. Presumably, this was to make people feel safe going to work. Rumor on the internet, however, was that the heroic marine and the cameraman had been snatched up later.

And then there were the bees. These invasive phenomena received less coverage than the skeletons and the demons, but experts said that they were “multiplying rapidly” and “affecting the genome of the North American flora and fauna.” Not so bad. Footage of a purple tree and a two-headed deer had briefly surfaced and then been buried under more reports of metropolitan demon attacks.

Unlike the demons, Orion had seen a few of the bees with his own eyes – after dark, vibrant green streaks in the distance, like emerald shooting stars. Sitting atop the roof one evening, he realized that the more he watched these streaks, the closer they got, as if the act of observing them was also calling to them.

Even as the sound of the television wafted out of the house beneath him, mixed with the sound of Keely and the Parrot King making out louder than usual in the attic, a fat bee zipped by his ear. With a burst of green, it landed on his arm and he flinched, certain that it would sting him and turn him into a two-headed deer.

But it didn’t. Fake-Cassandra observed that he was like a “Disney princess.” He didn’t push her off the roof because he didn’t dare move.

“It has a small life pebble inside,” she said. “Maybe we could harvest the bees and use life magic to solve the food problem. Sorry, I mean, ‘objective.’”

Orion couldn’t quite figure out why there were tears in his eyes or how long they had been there. Maybe it was the stress. Maybe it was because the visions of fake-Cassandra wouldn’t leave him alone. Maybe it was because Keely sounded like she was laughing and crying at the same time, but mostly crying.

But one thing was certain, he thought, as two more bees joined the first. If he could solve the food objective, lots of people in the ever-growing “Johnson Village” would call him a hero. The bees meandered on his arm, lighting the roof with a soft green glow. Careful not to disturb them, he reached into his pocket for one of his blue pebbles.