2051 Chapter 1: Halley's Comet
2051
Chapter 1: Halley's Comet
Series: Transformers (2007 movie)
Characters/Pairings: Gen as of right now, eventual SamxMikaela. Current characters: Sam, Judy and Ron Witwicky, Miles. Eventual ensemble.
Rating/Warnings: T for various things, not really pushing the rating. Kind of dark, AU, no robots as of right now.
Summary: AU, 2007 movie. In the post-apocalyptic world of 2051, the Autobots land. They are alone. The remains of humanity are scattered and marginalized, struggling. There are no leads on the location of the Allspark. And what happens when the Decepticons arrive?
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
FFnet link
2051 Chapter 1: Halley's Comet
oOoOoOo
“I’m the boy in the white flannel gown
sprawled on this coarse gravel bed
searching the starry sky,
waiting for the world to end.”
--from “Halley’s Comet” by Stanley Kunitz
oOoOoOo
Judy had always known that she wanted a child. That was just who she was.
And now… Now, the answer as to whether or not she’d ever have one had been taken out her hands.
She was pregnant. A surprise. Four months along. At least she wouldn’t have to choose between her job and her child: she’d already been fired. The college she’d been teaching at was about to go under, everyone knew it. The staff was, continually, morbidly surprised it had lasted as long as it had. And a degree in classical Spanish literature hadnever been a highly marketable job skill, had it? At least Ron still had his job, which was a lot more than most people had, and it looked stable, despite the economy and the layoffs. She should count her blessings.
Blessings like the child she was carrying. She was going to be a mother.
But she felt guilty, too. It wasn’t a stable time. Nothing was certain. Everyone followed the news with a nearly religious regularity. Who knew what was going to happen next? Despite the obvious, which was more layoffs and hunger riots and food shortages. It seemed things were getting worse, although Judy thought that things probably felt that way toeveryone, at any point in time It was historical perspective that really made the difference. She wondered if this would be seen as the second Great Depression and Dustbowl Era, only on a global scale. Or maybe the third World War. International relations were… Tense.
The matter was out of her hands now. She’d have her child. Abortion wasn’t an option-or it was, but she wasn’t going to consider it-and adoption… The system was falling apart. There were too many babies that families couldn’t support, what with the economy, and far too few people willing to take them in. She couldn’t put her child into that sort of a situation, even if she wanted to, and she was pretty sure she wouldn’t.
Maybe things reallywere as bleak as they seemed.
But she’d always wanted to be a mother. She thought she might be good at it. She’d try her hardest, regardless. She was positive it was going to be a baby girl, and she’d plant a rose for her birth, out in the garden; she’d been meaning to start a little patch of flowers, anyways. Ron kept on telling her to keep an open mind, but she felt certain. Women’s intuition, as her grandmother would have said. She’d always liked the names Danielle and Angelica. A little old-fashioned, maybe, but pretty.
Still, though. She wondered what would happen if Ron lost his job when the baby was still an infant, or a toddler, or a preteen, or a teenager. How long would their savings last? And what would they do after that?
oOo
A son! She was a mother!
Little Sam. Her Sammy. It was like-a bolt from the blue, a sudden meaning and calling. She loved him, more than she could say. He was perfect.
She’d been wrong about him being a girl-Ron would never let her hear the end of it-but she didn’t care. She couldn’t imagine anything, anyone, better than what she had.
oOo
At least Judy had found a way to make a little more money. She’d looked for work, but there weren’t any places hiring that would provide care for little Sammy, or let her do it, and they just couldn’t afford daycare or preschool. In a few years he’d start kindergarten-she could find something then.
In the meantime, she was watching her Sam and some other neighborhood kids, for a small fee. It really wasn’t much-it just covered snacks, really, with a little left over for the family-but nobody could afford much now, could they? And every bit helped.
Plus it let her work on the vegetable garden she’d put in. At first, it had been a casual experiment: plunk some seeds and starts into the ground, water it every day (at least, if she remembered to) and weed it when she had the time.
But she’d done the math, figured out how much money she could save by growing her own produce, done a little research and then started over. Now most of the back yard produced vegetables or fruit, and she’d started canning. Who knew what new disasters winter would bring, after all.
Judy had been thinking about chickens, more recently: fresh meat and eggs. She’d just have to make sure the kids-and especially Sam, who really was a sweet little boy-didn’t get too attached to them. She could see how that could go: ‘What’s for dinner?’ ‘Roasted Fluffy.’ Maybe she could get a dog-a puppy-at the same time, as a distraction.
Once Sam started school, maybe she could find some sort of retail or waitressing job during the day, and do afterschool care in the afternoons. She already had a few kids doing that, and she’d started getting calls from parents in other neighborhoods, as word went out. But that would all bank on whether or not she could find a job, let alone one with flexible hours. She’d probably need to start weeding in the dark, to keep the garden going. At least the timed drip hose she’d installed-buried under the mulch to prevent excess evaporation!-meant she didn’t need to spend time watering, and that she wouldn’t need to remember to do it, which invariably meant she forgot to do it, a good portion of the time. The timer had made all the difference to her tomatoes.
Which reminded her, she needed to go find that recipe for tomato sauce. Another day or two and the ones she’d picked a few days ago would be beyond recovery.
oOo
Judy was quite happy with herself when she was only half an hour or so early to pick up Sam from his first day of kindergarten. She hadn’t wanted to be late to pick him up on his first day of school, after all, and she’d erred on the side of caution-not even as badly as she’d been afraid she was going to!
So she was waiting by the classroom door, the one leading outside, when the bell rang, giving her a perfect view of her son, who looked quite happy but was dripping wet. -Especially his hair, which looked as if it had had something tacky washed through it as well.
Judy was speechless.
She gathered Sam up into her arms for a slightly damp hug, which he ignored, just tolerating it, greeting him and asking how his day had been and whether he was making friends or not before she asked him what had happened. Sammy looked at her blankly.
“You’re all wet and there’s something in your hair,” she explained gently, trying to keep from sounding angry on the off chance that it wasn’t actually his fault.
“Glue got in it,” he said matter-of-factly. “Can I go play?”
“Yes,” said Judy looking around for his teacher.
Ah-hah. “Excuse me? Mr. Frances?” she asked, coming up behind him.
“Please, call me Thomas,” he said, shaking her hand firmly. “How can I help you?”
“I’m Judy Witwicky, Sam’s mother-”
“Ohhh. Yes, I understand. Sam is a good kid, participates in class, seems bright, gets along well with all of his classmates-except Miles Gillon. They… He’s a little less socialized than Sam is, a little more reserved, more of an individual, if you want to be polite, but otherwise he gets along with all the other kids as well-and I have my suspicions that he’s very intelligent. But for some reason, Sam and Miles, they just-Don’t get along well.”
“And the glue?”
“Well… Miles was threatening to pour glue on Sam because Sam had stolen his seat and started drawing all over his project, so Sam pushed him and Miles lost his grip on the glue container and they both ended up covered in it-that was at around two-thirty, so I didn’t have much time, but I tried to get them as washed-up as possible, and it’s a water-soluble glue, so things shouldn’t be too bad.”
“Do you think this is going to continue?” Judy asked. It sounded like a fairly even-handed enmity the two boys had going on, but that didn’t mean she wanted it to happen.
“Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re fast friends within a week. I think it’s equally likely to go either way-and if it’s the latter, I’ll do my best to keep them apart and out of trouble. I can’t guarantee anything, but with a little luck it won’t come to that.”
“Thank you, Mr. Fra-Thomas.” Judy smiled at the man-he looked young, but he was clearly a competent teacher. “I’m glad you’ll be teaching Sammy this year.”
oOo
The day nuclear war broke out, 2:30 in the afternoon, Judy was at home trying to finishing up the laundry before she needed to pick Sam up from school.
At first, she couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
Most of Europe and the Middle East. Just… Gone. A continent that wasn’t there anymore. Countless numbers of people dead. A tragedy on a scale she couldn’t possibly conceptualize.
She was already at Sam’s school, picking up her son, before she thought to call Ron, but the call wouldn’t go through-too many other people on their cell phones too, trying to do the same thing.
She lived close to the school, only a few minutes away: the teacher hadn’t heard the news yet.
She took Sam home, and Miles, too-the teacher had been right about that, the two boys had become best friends; she had been going to watch Miles that afternoon, while his father was working-because she didn’t know if he’d heard. She’d give herself a few minutes to calm down, and then try to track him down at his work. Or maybe if she could get a hold of Ron, he could try to find him while she stayed home with the boys.
Oh God. She couldn’t deal with this.
And Sam… He was too young. Six years old, and what would his geography lessons look like?
oOo
Sam knew Miles said his parents argued a lot, too, but he didn’t think this was the same. They didn’t argue like they didn’t love each other anymore. Instead, it was about the news. Sam didn’t like how his parents turned it on every day, right after dinner. It made his dad frown and his mom’s face go all tight, like how she’d looked when he’d broken a marker by jumping on it-on accident!-on the living room rug.
He tried to be good these days, because Mom and Dad were really tired all the time. They worried too much. He wished they wouldn’t watch the news in the evenings. It just made everything worse.
oOo
“My dad says that the president is stoopid and he’s gonna get us all shot by the terrorists.”
“Yeah, mine too. But then Mommy tells him to not bother my head with all that stuff and then they glare at each other and sometimes he calls her an over-optimistic neo-liberal and then they glare some more and then they laugh.”
“Ha! You still call your mom ‘Mommy!’”
“Do not! I mean, so?”
“I think we’re going to deserve it.”
“Shut up, stupid, youalways think you know best.”
“My big brother thinks that! He’s sixteen and really smart. So nyah!”
“My big brother’ll beat yours up!”
“Will not!”
“It doesn’t matter ‘bought the president. Everybody knows that it’s God who’s gonna save us all and our trials on Earth are to test our will so the sinners and, and the heathens the-the-w-wor-worshippers-”
“Shut up, you can’t even talk! If God does this it’s ‘cause he hates us. That’s what my uncle says.”
“God loves us! He does! And I just st-stutter!”
“Awwww, little baby’s crying!”
“It doesn’t matter,” Sam said, speaking up at last. “Let’s play tag.”
“Of course it matters.” The other boy’s voice was scornful. “Last one to the tree is it!”
“Hey, no fair!”
“God loves us ‘cause we’re his sons and daughters,” said the last boy to leave-except for Sam-quietly. He wiped determinedly at the last of his tears, and then ran off to join in the game.
oOo
It was Miles’ thirteenth birthday-and he was going to take every chance he could to lord it over Sam that he was a teenager and the other wasn’t for the four months until Sam’s birthday, Sam knew-so his dad had given the two of them some money, so they could get pizza and soda to eat in the park before they had a sleepover at Miles’ house. His dad had even rented them a movie, saying that it’s not every day that you turn thirteen.
The first protestors had shown up at the park just after them. The place had started to feel too crowded by the time they finished eating. Now it was starting to get dark, and they wanted to go home, and they could barely move. The crowd’s voice was a threatening murmur, and Sam couldn’t see through or over the mass of people.
There was the squeal of a microphone being turned on, and the people around them were suddenly deathly quiet.
“Let’s go,” said Miles, tugging on one of his hands. Sam followed him, glancing nervously behind and around himself as he wiggled through the maze of people. Someone started talking, their speech broadcast through the crowd, but he paid more attention to the silent, grim faces around him. They all looked half-starved.
“This is the police,” came a louder voice, through a bullhorn. “You are obstructing traffic. Please return to your homes peacefully.”
Someone jeered loudly, and then it was quiet again. The people weren’t moving. Sam tried to push Miles forward, but he seemed frozen. The air was so charged with tension that Sam felt as if he was having to struggle to breathe.
“Stand down,” the policeman repeated clearly, voice sounding nearly panicky.
The world dissolved into chaos.
Sam lost Miles almost immediately. He tried to run after the way he thought he’d gone, but it was too crowded, he was blocked out. He tried another direction, and squeezed his way through. This was the street-someone had broken a shop window, one of the abandoned ones. It was slightly less full than the park, people moving along it in waves. There was Miles!
He grabbed his friend. Both of them were shaking, just slightly, with adrenaline.
“Sam?”
“Yeah. Come on, run!”
Sam had never made it home so fast in his life. His mom was waiting for them on the front porch. Judy threw her arms around both of the boys, and cried out of sheer relief. They both cried too, even though they were both too old for that now, Sam thought privately. Ron joined them, the four of them huddled on the porch, hugging each other desperately.
“You should call your father,” Judy told Miles, finally standing up. The others followed her into the house; she locked the door and drew the deadbolt home behind them.
Police are recommending staying home tonight as the third riot this month continues, blared the radio. Sam snapped it off.
“Are you two okay?” Judy asked.
“I fell,” Miles volunteered. And, yeah, Sam realized, his pant leg was torn open, and there was a bleeding cut and a scrape there.
Judy winced sympathetically. “Sam, go call Miles’ dad for him,” she said quietly, firmly. “Miles, we need to wash that cut clean. What was it from?”
“Glass from a broken window, on the ground. Somebody pushed me.”
“Children,” hissed Judy, quietly, to herself. Her lips were drawn and pursed, and her eyes looked, to Sam, infinitely sad.
It wasn’t until later that night, as he lay in bed trying to go to sleep, that Sam realized he was covered in bruises.
oOo
Miles was moving away, to Alaska. None of his arguments with his dad had worked, not even that they were leaving in the middle of the school year.
“And your sophomore year’s important!” Miles had squawked indignantly. Then, more depressedly, “Oh, God, Alaska. Land of crazy loggers and snow and sunless winters and frigging polar bears. I’m never going to get a girl now.” Sam had laughed until Miles had hit him.
But Alaska was supposed to be safer. More open space, and things were quiet-or at least quieter than everywhere else-up there. And nobody bothered with it anymore. The government didn’t even try to run things. Hawaii was supposed to be even better, but you needed money to get there, enough for an airplane or boat, and gas on top of that. Cars were cheap and plentiful, now that nobody could afford gas for everyday things, and easy to steal, if you wanted to, and they didn’t take as much energy.
So Miles was moving. Sam couldn’t imagine life without him. They’d been best friends since Kindergarten.
oOo
For the first time that year, including the first day, the teacher had no problems getting the class to quiet down. Sam was surprised.
Although maybe it made sense. This was the first day of school after winter break, the first day since Australia had isolated itself. And he was in third period Modern Social Studies.
“Today we’ll have a discussion,” said the teacher, facing the twenty or so students-somewhere between five and ten more than there usually was, depending on how nice of a day it was. “About Australia closing its borders-and a brief warning, the next essay subject is a comparison and analysis of the situation and Japan’s during its period of isolationism. Does anyone want to start us off?”
Sam didn’t. He barely ever spoke in class discussions-just twice, enough to earn a passing participation grade. It was more interesting to hear what other people had to say, anyways, and it was less likely to get him in trouble.
Mikaela did, though, and Sam felt his heart thump painfully as she started speaking.
oOo
Sam Witwicky dropped out of high school one month before he finished the tenth grade. He simply told his parents that he wasn’t going to go anymore, and that there wasn’t anything they could do about it.
Ron Witwicky had argued until he was hoarse and realized he still wasn’t getting anywhere.
“Judy! You deal with it! No son of mine is going to be a high school dropout!”
“Where do you get the bruises from, Sam?” Ron’s wife asked their son quietly.
“One of the gangs doesn’t like me,” Sam said, more loudly, in response. “There’s only, like, a third of the teachers they need there. Maybe a quarter. Half of the kids have left already. And since Miles moved… He really wanted to keep on going to school, and it’s better if you have a friend there, so I went. But I’d like to stop. Maybe I could find a job. And then the government’s started getting more aggressive. I think I’d be better off ignorant than in my social studies class-we just watched a movie called ‘The Glorious Mandate of American Freedom.’ And the army’s started showing up all over, and watching the PE classes.”
Judy was shocked. “I didn’t know things had gotten so bad…” She really hadn’t, too.
“Alright,” sighed Ron. “Alright. I just don’t know what to do…”
oOo
Everyone was talking about the plague, in the sort of hushed whispers that usually mean the speaker was afraid whoever he was talking about might overhear. Every day, more and more people decided to barricade themselves inside their houses. Almost everyone did their best to avoid other people as much as possible.
The Witwicky family was better off than most. They had the garden-and they’d gotten two dogs, to wake them up when, inevitably, at least once week, someone tried to get into it. Judy felt badly about it, honestly, but her family needed the food, too, and so she didn’t do much other than feed the people who thought to ask a little before sending them on. She wanted to do more, but…
She always had the news on, nowadays, even though Sam kept on asking her to turn it off. He’d had a job, but he’d quit once they’d reported an in-state case of the plague. He hadn’t wanted to, of course, but she’d insisted, and now they were always tripping over each others’ feet-figuratively speaking. He helped in the garden, and didn’t even complain about it, except occasionally, to joke-he knew how badly they needed the extra food, and the price of vegetables had skyrocketed; nobody could afford them, now-but it didn’t keep him occupied, entertained. Even Judy felt restless now and then, and she’d been unemployed for, well, about 17 years now.
Ron had set things up so he could work from home, which was for the best, but at least he still had something to do. And he could help around the house as well: this weekend she was going to ask her boys to move the chicken coop to a new patch of ground. She tried to keep the rotations regular, because fresh ground meant more scavengeable food, and chicken feed was another expense, and they couldn’t afford much of anything at this point. At least they could support it well with kitchen scraps-she got them from quite a few of the neighbors, even, in exchange for a few eggs during the summers, when she always had too many. They even put up with the rooster with good grace-although that had more to do with her giving away the extra chicks, when she let one of her hens go broody.
So they were managing, and better than most people. She just didn’t know how long things would be… Stable.
She was worried all the time, now. A few days ago she’d realized she’d been chewing on her nails again-and she’d thought she’d broken that habit in the ninth grade. That had been the year 2015; she’d been fourteen years old. She’d written an essay about what the future would look like, and forgotten about it almost immediately afterward. Going through some old boxes she’d found clearing out her parent’s house had turned it up again, and she’d sat there on the attic floor, reading it, and cried.
oOo
Judy had been hoping, desperately, that it was just a normal flu, especially since all reports had it that the plague was starting to die down, that things were getting better, and they’d all made it through so far with nothing happening, the three of them-and she’d been amazed that she’d been right when she recovered without much fuss after a week or two.
Then Ron had come down with the same thing, and he’d been much, much worse. She’d been wrong; she was just the lucky percentage who was resistant to it. Sam never got it at all: Judy was-she didn’t have words to describe her relief, her joy. It consumed her. He felt guilty about it: as if that fraction-of-a-percentage-point should have gone to someone else. Judy disagreed, fiercely.
But Ron-he was dying. The hospitals weren’t admitting new patients, definitely not new plague victims, even now that the outbreak was banking itself, burning itself out.
Nobody knew how many people had died. After she’d come down sick, after she’d been fully immunized, Judy had joined a grave-digging team. She’d gained ten pounds of muscle, and started having nightmares even though she never saw any bodies, as a volunteer, a strange sort of moment of civility-although you saw them in the streets, sometimes, the corpse usually wrapped in a sheet, or at least with something covering its face. She’d quit once Ron had come down sick; he needed constant watching. She fought desperately to keep his fever down, and to keep him hydrated.
She didn’t know what she’d do if he died. They’d married the summer after he’d graduated from college, two years after she had: that had been twenty-five years ago. This year was their silver anniversary.
Judy still loved him, with all of her heart. She couldn’t imagine life without him.
She’d started praying again, for the first time since she’d been thirteen, the year her dog had been run over and she’d found him dead in the street.
oOo
Sam didn’t know what to do. His dad-
He’d had to face the fact that his dad might have been dying. He’d thought he had.
But now that it had happened… Now that…
Now that his dad was dead, now that his body had been taken, now that they had a bag of ashes-only partially his, because they had to keep the ovens going constantly, couldn’t cremate the bodies one by one anymore-a bag of ashes and little fragments of bone sitting on the kitchen table, because his mom couldn’t face them-
He didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t think anymore. It didn’t feel real, none of this did, but it still hurt more than he’d thought anything could.
oOo
Her husband had been dead for two weeks.
She was a widow. Widowed. Her husband was dead. Three months short of their twenty-fifth anniversary. Almost a quarter of a century, but he was dead now.
Judy couldn’t seem to stop crying. But she needed to. It had been two weeks, and Sam was starting to look frightened, not just heartbroken.
She needed to be strong, now. Because, somehow, the world had gone horribly, horribly wrong, and now Ron was dead. Her husband.
But her son was still alive.
She’d always wanted to be a mother. She’d done her best to be a good one, even with the world falling apart around her.
She could be strong, for Sam.
oOo
It was midday, the sun bright overhead.
The road was lined with people, all dead silent. Main Street. It had been-normal, once. Sam could barely remember it like that, now. It had just been abandoned for a long time.
Now it was lined with people, a double row: one down one side, and one down the other. They were all blank-faced, solemn and slightly empty-gazed, with the hollow, hungry cheeks almost everyone had now.
One woman was on her knees, sobbing quietly. The preacher standing next to her had one silent hand on her shoulder.
“You waited too long,” a man told Sam. He shifted uneasily, and sped up a little.
A meteor was coming. NASA had tried to stop it, blowing it to pieces. It hadn’t worked. And now…
Now the world was going to end.
“Brothers and sisters,” the preacher said quietly, and nobody had to strain to hear him. A few streets away there was a banging sound, someone playing a radio, a crying baby, but here was just silence. Sam saw another person walking by start to turn onto Main, then change his mind and walk in another direction. The religious freaks didn’t see it-they had all turned to focus on him.
“Brothers and sisters, this is the end times. The sky is raining down in fire. Is there enough time to repent now? Only God will decide, but He is merciful.”
“Amen,” muttered the crowd, the soft sound rippling through them like wind through cornfields.
“He is merciful, and so hope that he has pity on your soul when you have only these last few hours with which to purge your sins from your soul with His divine and loving light, that which will heal us all of our sins-”
Sam walked faster.
oOo
It was over. The new government had fallen, but not before it had dragged the old one down with it. Sam was shaky with shock and leftover adrenaline.
They’d stripped the garden and taken his parents, and told him to pray for his safety. They’d taken the chickens-but not the eggs still in the incubator, so he could always start up the coop again, if he repaired the door and the rips in the fencing.
What did he do now?
They’d said his mom was disobeying God because her ‘manner of dress’ was ‘suggestive.’ They’d almost taken him with her for ‘failing to discipline her properly.’ He was pretty sure they’d chosen them, out of all the people in their neighborhood, because of the garden and the chickens-other people had them, but theirs was-had been-the most productive.
He’d need to see what he could salvage from the garden. He didn’t think they’d recognized the potato plants for what they were. And he thought his mom had put seeds away, in case something failed for whatever reason, so they could plant again the next year.
Where were they? His mother. Were they even still alive?
“The end of the world,” they had called it. So what was this?
--end Chapter 1--
Chapter 1: Halley's Comet
Series: Transformers (2007 movie)
Characters/Pairings: Gen as of right now, eventual SamxMikaela. Current characters: Sam, Judy and Ron Witwicky, Miles. Eventual ensemble.
Rating/Warnings: T for various things, not really pushing the rating. Kind of dark, AU, no robots as of right now.
Summary: AU, 2007 movie. In the post-apocalyptic world of 2051, the Autobots land. They are alone. The remains of humanity are scattered and marginalized, struggling. There are no leads on the location of the Allspark. And what happens when the Decepticons arrive?
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
FFnet link
2051 Chapter 1: Halley's Comet
oOoOoOo
“I’m the boy in the white flannel gown
sprawled on this coarse gravel bed
searching the starry sky,
waiting for the world to end.”
--from “Halley’s Comet” by Stanley Kunitz
oOoOoOo
Judy had always known that she wanted a child. That was just who she was.
And now… Now, the answer as to whether or not she’d ever have one had been taken out her hands.
She was pregnant. A surprise. Four months along. At least she wouldn’t have to choose between her job and her child: she’d already been fired. The college she’d been teaching at was about to go under, everyone knew it. The staff was, continually, morbidly surprised it had lasted as long as it had. And a degree in classical Spanish literature hadnever been a highly marketable job skill, had it? At least Ron still had his job, which was a lot more than most people had, and it looked stable, despite the economy and the layoffs. She should count her blessings.
Blessings like the child she was carrying. She was going to be a mother.
But she felt guilty, too. It wasn’t a stable time. Nothing was certain. Everyone followed the news with a nearly religious regularity. Who knew what was going to happen next? Despite the obvious, which was more layoffs and hunger riots and food shortages. It seemed things were getting worse, although Judy thought that things probably felt that way toeveryone, at any point in time It was historical perspective that really made the difference. She wondered if this would be seen as the second Great Depression and Dustbowl Era, only on a global scale. Or maybe the third World War. International relations were… Tense.
The matter was out of her hands now. She’d have her child. Abortion wasn’t an option-or it was, but she wasn’t going to consider it-and adoption… The system was falling apart. There were too many babies that families couldn’t support, what with the economy, and far too few people willing to take them in. She couldn’t put her child into that sort of a situation, even if she wanted to, and she was pretty sure she wouldn’t.
Maybe things reallywere as bleak as they seemed.
But she’d always wanted to be a mother. She thought she might be good at it. She’d try her hardest, regardless. She was positive it was going to be a baby girl, and she’d plant a rose for her birth, out in the garden; she’d been meaning to start a little patch of flowers, anyways. Ron kept on telling her to keep an open mind, but she felt certain. Women’s intuition, as her grandmother would have said. She’d always liked the names Danielle and Angelica. A little old-fashioned, maybe, but pretty.
Still, though. She wondered what would happen if Ron lost his job when the baby was still an infant, or a toddler, or a preteen, or a teenager. How long would their savings last? And what would they do after that?
oOo
A son! She was a mother!
Little Sam. Her Sammy. It was like-a bolt from the blue, a sudden meaning and calling. She loved him, more than she could say. He was perfect.
She’d been wrong about him being a girl-Ron would never let her hear the end of it-but she didn’t care. She couldn’t imagine anything, anyone, better than what she had.
oOo
At least Judy had found a way to make a little more money. She’d looked for work, but there weren’t any places hiring that would provide care for little Sammy, or let her do it, and they just couldn’t afford daycare or preschool. In a few years he’d start kindergarten-she could find something then.
In the meantime, she was watching her Sam and some other neighborhood kids, for a small fee. It really wasn’t much-it just covered snacks, really, with a little left over for the family-but nobody could afford much now, could they? And every bit helped.
Plus it let her work on the vegetable garden she’d put in. At first, it had been a casual experiment: plunk some seeds and starts into the ground, water it every day (at least, if she remembered to) and weed it when she had the time.
But she’d done the math, figured out how much money she could save by growing her own produce, done a little research and then started over. Now most of the back yard produced vegetables or fruit, and she’d started canning. Who knew what new disasters winter would bring, after all.
Judy had been thinking about chickens, more recently: fresh meat and eggs. She’d just have to make sure the kids-and especially Sam, who really was a sweet little boy-didn’t get too attached to them. She could see how that could go: ‘What’s for dinner?’ ‘Roasted Fluffy.’ Maybe she could get a dog-a puppy-at the same time, as a distraction.
Once Sam started school, maybe she could find some sort of retail or waitressing job during the day, and do afterschool care in the afternoons. She already had a few kids doing that, and she’d started getting calls from parents in other neighborhoods, as word went out. But that would all bank on whether or not she could find a job, let alone one with flexible hours. She’d probably need to start weeding in the dark, to keep the garden going. At least the timed drip hose she’d installed-buried under the mulch to prevent excess evaporation!-meant she didn’t need to spend time watering, and that she wouldn’t need to remember to do it, which invariably meant she forgot to do it, a good portion of the time. The timer had made all the difference to her tomatoes.
Which reminded her, she needed to go find that recipe for tomato sauce. Another day or two and the ones she’d picked a few days ago would be beyond recovery.
oOo
Judy was quite happy with herself when she was only half an hour or so early to pick up Sam from his first day of kindergarten. She hadn’t wanted to be late to pick him up on his first day of school, after all, and she’d erred on the side of caution-not even as badly as she’d been afraid she was going to!
So she was waiting by the classroom door, the one leading outside, when the bell rang, giving her a perfect view of her son, who looked quite happy but was dripping wet. -Especially his hair, which looked as if it had had something tacky washed through it as well.
Judy was speechless.
She gathered Sam up into her arms for a slightly damp hug, which he ignored, just tolerating it, greeting him and asking how his day had been and whether he was making friends or not before she asked him what had happened. Sammy looked at her blankly.
“You’re all wet and there’s something in your hair,” she explained gently, trying to keep from sounding angry on the off chance that it wasn’t actually his fault.
“Glue got in it,” he said matter-of-factly. “Can I go play?”
“Yes,” said Judy looking around for his teacher.
Ah-hah. “Excuse me? Mr. Frances?” she asked, coming up behind him.
“Please, call me Thomas,” he said, shaking her hand firmly. “How can I help you?”
“I’m Judy Witwicky, Sam’s mother-”
“Ohhh. Yes, I understand. Sam is a good kid, participates in class, seems bright, gets along well with all of his classmates-except Miles Gillon. They… He’s a little less socialized than Sam is, a little more reserved, more of an individual, if you want to be polite, but otherwise he gets along with all the other kids as well-and I have my suspicions that he’s very intelligent. But for some reason, Sam and Miles, they just-Don’t get along well.”
“And the glue?”
“Well… Miles was threatening to pour glue on Sam because Sam had stolen his seat and started drawing all over his project, so Sam pushed him and Miles lost his grip on the glue container and they both ended up covered in it-that was at around two-thirty, so I didn’t have much time, but I tried to get them as washed-up as possible, and it’s a water-soluble glue, so things shouldn’t be too bad.”
“Do you think this is going to continue?” Judy asked. It sounded like a fairly even-handed enmity the two boys had going on, but that didn’t mean she wanted it to happen.
“Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re fast friends within a week. I think it’s equally likely to go either way-and if it’s the latter, I’ll do my best to keep them apart and out of trouble. I can’t guarantee anything, but with a little luck it won’t come to that.”
“Thank you, Mr. Fra-Thomas.” Judy smiled at the man-he looked young, but he was clearly a competent teacher. “I’m glad you’ll be teaching Sammy this year.”
oOo
The day nuclear war broke out, 2:30 in the afternoon, Judy was at home trying to finishing up the laundry before she needed to pick Sam up from school.
At first, she couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
Most of Europe and the Middle East. Just… Gone. A continent that wasn’t there anymore. Countless numbers of people dead. A tragedy on a scale she couldn’t possibly conceptualize.
She was already at Sam’s school, picking up her son, before she thought to call Ron, but the call wouldn’t go through-too many other people on their cell phones too, trying to do the same thing.
She lived close to the school, only a few minutes away: the teacher hadn’t heard the news yet.
She took Sam home, and Miles, too-the teacher had been right about that, the two boys had become best friends; she had been going to watch Miles that afternoon, while his father was working-because she didn’t know if he’d heard. She’d give herself a few minutes to calm down, and then try to track him down at his work. Or maybe if she could get a hold of Ron, he could try to find him while she stayed home with the boys.
Oh God. She couldn’t deal with this.
And Sam… He was too young. Six years old, and what would his geography lessons look like?
oOo
Sam knew Miles said his parents argued a lot, too, but he didn’t think this was the same. They didn’t argue like they didn’t love each other anymore. Instead, it was about the news. Sam didn’t like how his parents turned it on every day, right after dinner. It made his dad frown and his mom’s face go all tight, like how she’d looked when he’d broken a marker by jumping on it-on accident!-on the living room rug.
He tried to be good these days, because Mom and Dad were really tired all the time. They worried too much. He wished they wouldn’t watch the news in the evenings. It just made everything worse.
oOo
“My dad says that the president is stoopid and he’s gonna get us all shot by the terrorists.”
“Yeah, mine too. But then Mommy tells him to not bother my head with all that stuff and then they glare at each other and sometimes he calls her an over-optimistic neo-liberal and then they glare some more and then they laugh.”
“Ha! You still call your mom ‘Mommy!’”
“Do not! I mean, so?”
“I think we’re going to deserve it.”
“Shut up, stupid, youalways think you know best.”
“My big brother thinks that! He’s sixteen and really smart. So nyah!”
“My big brother’ll beat yours up!”
“Will not!”
“It doesn’t matter ‘bought the president. Everybody knows that it’s God who’s gonna save us all and our trials on Earth are to test our will so the sinners and, and the heathens the-the-w-wor-worshippers-”
“Shut up, you can’t even talk! If God does this it’s ‘cause he hates us. That’s what my uncle says.”
“God loves us! He does! And I just st-stutter!”
“Awwww, little baby’s crying!”
“It doesn’t matter,” Sam said, speaking up at last. “Let’s play tag.”
“Of course it matters.” The other boy’s voice was scornful. “Last one to the tree is it!”
“Hey, no fair!”
“God loves us ‘cause we’re his sons and daughters,” said the last boy to leave-except for Sam-quietly. He wiped determinedly at the last of his tears, and then ran off to join in the game.
oOo
It was Miles’ thirteenth birthday-and he was going to take every chance he could to lord it over Sam that he was a teenager and the other wasn’t for the four months until Sam’s birthday, Sam knew-so his dad had given the two of them some money, so they could get pizza and soda to eat in the park before they had a sleepover at Miles’ house. His dad had even rented them a movie, saying that it’s not every day that you turn thirteen.
The first protestors had shown up at the park just after them. The place had started to feel too crowded by the time they finished eating. Now it was starting to get dark, and they wanted to go home, and they could barely move. The crowd’s voice was a threatening murmur, and Sam couldn’t see through or over the mass of people.
There was the squeal of a microphone being turned on, and the people around them were suddenly deathly quiet.
“Let’s go,” said Miles, tugging on one of his hands. Sam followed him, glancing nervously behind and around himself as he wiggled through the maze of people. Someone started talking, their speech broadcast through the crowd, but he paid more attention to the silent, grim faces around him. They all looked half-starved.
“This is the police,” came a louder voice, through a bullhorn. “You are obstructing traffic. Please return to your homes peacefully.”
Someone jeered loudly, and then it was quiet again. The people weren’t moving. Sam tried to push Miles forward, but he seemed frozen. The air was so charged with tension that Sam felt as if he was having to struggle to breathe.
“Stand down,” the policeman repeated clearly, voice sounding nearly panicky.
The world dissolved into chaos.
Sam lost Miles almost immediately. He tried to run after the way he thought he’d gone, but it was too crowded, he was blocked out. He tried another direction, and squeezed his way through. This was the street-someone had broken a shop window, one of the abandoned ones. It was slightly less full than the park, people moving along it in waves. There was Miles!
He grabbed his friend. Both of them were shaking, just slightly, with adrenaline.
“Sam?”
“Yeah. Come on, run!”
Sam had never made it home so fast in his life. His mom was waiting for them on the front porch. Judy threw her arms around both of the boys, and cried out of sheer relief. They both cried too, even though they were both too old for that now, Sam thought privately. Ron joined them, the four of them huddled on the porch, hugging each other desperately.
“You should call your father,” Judy told Miles, finally standing up. The others followed her into the house; she locked the door and drew the deadbolt home behind them.
Police are recommending staying home tonight as the third riot this month continues, blared the radio. Sam snapped it off.
“Are you two okay?” Judy asked.
“I fell,” Miles volunteered. And, yeah, Sam realized, his pant leg was torn open, and there was a bleeding cut and a scrape there.
Judy winced sympathetically. “Sam, go call Miles’ dad for him,” she said quietly, firmly. “Miles, we need to wash that cut clean. What was it from?”
“Glass from a broken window, on the ground. Somebody pushed me.”
“Children,” hissed Judy, quietly, to herself. Her lips were drawn and pursed, and her eyes looked, to Sam, infinitely sad.
It wasn’t until later that night, as he lay in bed trying to go to sleep, that Sam realized he was covered in bruises.
oOo
Miles was moving away, to Alaska. None of his arguments with his dad had worked, not even that they were leaving in the middle of the school year.
“And your sophomore year’s important!” Miles had squawked indignantly. Then, more depressedly, “Oh, God, Alaska. Land of crazy loggers and snow and sunless winters and frigging polar bears. I’m never going to get a girl now.” Sam had laughed until Miles had hit him.
But Alaska was supposed to be safer. More open space, and things were quiet-or at least quieter than everywhere else-up there. And nobody bothered with it anymore. The government didn’t even try to run things. Hawaii was supposed to be even better, but you needed money to get there, enough for an airplane or boat, and gas on top of that. Cars were cheap and plentiful, now that nobody could afford gas for everyday things, and easy to steal, if you wanted to, and they didn’t take as much energy.
So Miles was moving. Sam couldn’t imagine life without him. They’d been best friends since Kindergarten.
oOo
For the first time that year, including the first day, the teacher had no problems getting the class to quiet down. Sam was surprised.
Although maybe it made sense. This was the first day of school after winter break, the first day since Australia had isolated itself. And he was in third period Modern Social Studies.
“Today we’ll have a discussion,” said the teacher, facing the twenty or so students-somewhere between five and ten more than there usually was, depending on how nice of a day it was. “About Australia closing its borders-and a brief warning, the next essay subject is a comparison and analysis of the situation and Japan’s during its period of isolationism. Does anyone want to start us off?”
Sam didn’t. He barely ever spoke in class discussions-just twice, enough to earn a passing participation grade. It was more interesting to hear what other people had to say, anyways, and it was less likely to get him in trouble.
Mikaela did, though, and Sam felt his heart thump painfully as she started speaking.
oOo
Sam Witwicky dropped out of high school one month before he finished the tenth grade. He simply told his parents that he wasn’t going to go anymore, and that there wasn’t anything they could do about it.
Ron Witwicky had argued until he was hoarse and realized he still wasn’t getting anywhere.
“Judy! You deal with it! No son of mine is going to be a high school dropout!”
“Where do you get the bruises from, Sam?” Ron’s wife asked their son quietly.
“One of the gangs doesn’t like me,” Sam said, more loudly, in response. “There’s only, like, a third of the teachers they need there. Maybe a quarter. Half of the kids have left already. And since Miles moved… He really wanted to keep on going to school, and it’s better if you have a friend there, so I went. But I’d like to stop. Maybe I could find a job. And then the government’s started getting more aggressive. I think I’d be better off ignorant than in my social studies class-we just watched a movie called ‘The Glorious Mandate of American Freedom.’ And the army’s started showing up all over, and watching the PE classes.”
Judy was shocked. “I didn’t know things had gotten so bad…” She really hadn’t, too.
“Alright,” sighed Ron. “Alright. I just don’t know what to do…”
oOo
Everyone was talking about the plague, in the sort of hushed whispers that usually mean the speaker was afraid whoever he was talking about might overhear. Every day, more and more people decided to barricade themselves inside their houses. Almost everyone did their best to avoid other people as much as possible.
The Witwicky family was better off than most. They had the garden-and they’d gotten two dogs, to wake them up when, inevitably, at least once week, someone tried to get into it. Judy felt badly about it, honestly, but her family needed the food, too, and so she didn’t do much other than feed the people who thought to ask a little before sending them on. She wanted to do more, but…
She always had the news on, nowadays, even though Sam kept on asking her to turn it off. He’d had a job, but he’d quit once they’d reported an in-state case of the plague. He hadn’t wanted to, of course, but she’d insisted, and now they were always tripping over each others’ feet-figuratively speaking. He helped in the garden, and didn’t even complain about it, except occasionally, to joke-he knew how badly they needed the extra food, and the price of vegetables had skyrocketed; nobody could afford them, now-but it didn’t keep him occupied, entertained. Even Judy felt restless now and then, and she’d been unemployed for, well, about 17 years now.
Ron had set things up so he could work from home, which was for the best, but at least he still had something to do. And he could help around the house as well: this weekend she was going to ask her boys to move the chicken coop to a new patch of ground. She tried to keep the rotations regular, because fresh ground meant more scavengeable food, and chicken feed was another expense, and they couldn’t afford much of anything at this point. At least they could support it well with kitchen scraps-she got them from quite a few of the neighbors, even, in exchange for a few eggs during the summers, when she always had too many. They even put up with the rooster with good grace-although that had more to do with her giving away the extra chicks, when she let one of her hens go broody.
So they were managing, and better than most people. She just didn’t know how long things would be… Stable.
She was worried all the time, now. A few days ago she’d realized she’d been chewing on her nails again-and she’d thought she’d broken that habit in the ninth grade. That had been the year 2015; she’d been fourteen years old. She’d written an essay about what the future would look like, and forgotten about it almost immediately afterward. Going through some old boxes she’d found clearing out her parent’s house had turned it up again, and she’d sat there on the attic floor, reading it, and cried.
oOo
Judy had been hoping, desperately, that it was just a normal flu, especially since all reports had it that the plague was starting to die down, that things were getting better, and they’d all made it through so far with nothing happening, the three of them-and she’d been amazed that she’d been right when she recovered without much fuss after a week or two.
Then Ron had come down with the same thing, and he’d been much, much worse. She’d been wrong; she was just the lucky percentage who was resistant to it. Sam never got it at all: Judy was-she didn’t have words to describe her relief, her joy. It consumed her. He felt guilty about it: as if that fraction-of-a-percentage-point should have gone to someone else. Judy disagreed, fiercely.
But Ron-he was dying. The hospitals weren’t admitting new patients, definitely not new plague victims, even now that the outbreak was banking itself, burning itself out.
Nobody knew how many people had died. After she’d come down sick, after she’d been fully immunized, Judy had joined a grave-digging team. She’d gained ten pounds of muscle, and started having nightmares even though she never saw any bodies, as a volunteer, a strange sort of moment of civility-although you saw them in the streets, sometimes, the corpse usually wrapped in a sheet, or at least with something covering its face. She’d quit once Ron had come down sick; he needed constant watching. She fought desperately to keep his fever down, and to keep him hydrated.
She didn’t know what she’d do if he died. They’d married the summer after he’d graduated from college, two years after she had: that had been twenty-five years ago. This year was their silver anniversary.
Judy still loved him, with all of her heart. She couldn’t imagine life without him.
She’d started praying again, for the first time since she’d been thirteen, the year her dog had been run over and she’d found him dead in the street.
oOo
Sam didn’t know what to do. His dad-
He’d had to face the fact that his dad might have been dying. He’d thought he had.
But now that it had happened… Now that…
Now that his dad was dead, now that his body had been taken, now that they had a bag of ashes-only partially his, because they had to keep the ovens going constantly, couldn’t cremate the bodies one by one anymore-a bag of ashes and little fragments of bone sitting on the kitchen table, because his mom couldn’t face them-
He didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t think anymore. It didn’t feel real, none of this did, but it still hurt more than he’d thought anything could.
oOo
Her husband had been dead for two weeks.
She was a widow. Widowed. Her husband was dead. Three months short of their twenty-fifth anniversary. Almost a quarter of a century, but he was dead now.
Judy couldn’t seem to stop crying. But she needed to. It had been two weeks, and Sam was starting to look frightened, not just heartbroken.
She needed to be strong, now. Because, somehow, the world had gone horribly, horribly wrong, and now Ron was dead. Her husband.
But her son was still alive.
She’d always wanted to be a mother. She’d done her best to be a good one, even with the world falling apart around her.
She could be strong, for Sam.
oOo
It was midday, the sun bright overhead.
The road was lined with people, all dead silent. Main Street. It had been-normal, once. Sam could barely remember it like that, now. It had just been abandoned for a long time.
Now it was lined with people, a double row: one down one side, and one down the other. They were all blank-faced, solemn and slightly empty-gazed, with the hollow, hungry cheeks almost everyone had now.
One woman was on her knees, sobbing quietly. The preacher standing next to her had one silent hand on her shoulder.
“You waited too long,” a man told Sam. He shifted uneasily, and sped up a little.
A meteor was coming. NASA had tried to stop it, blowing it to pieces. It hadn’t worked. And now…
Now the world was going to end.
“Brothers and sisters,” the preacher said quietly, and nobody had to strain to hear him. A few streets away there was a banging sound, someone playing a radio, a crying baby, but here was just silence. Sam saw another person walking by start to turn onto Main, then change his mind and walk in another direction. The religious freaks didn’t see it-they had all turned to focus on him.
“Brothers and sisters, this is the end times. The sky is raining down in fire. Is there enough time to repent now? Only God will decide, but He is merciful.”
“Amen,” muttered the crowd, the soft sound rippling through them like wind through cornfields.
“He is merciful, and so hope that he has pity on your soul when you have only these last few hours with which to purge your sins from your soul with His divine and loving light, that which will heal us all of our sins-”
Sam walked faster.
oOo
It was over. The new government had fallen, but not before it had dragged the old one down with it. Sam was shaky with shock and leftover adrenaline.
They’d stripped the garden and taken his parents, and told him to pray for his safety. They’d taken the chickens-but not the eggs still in the incubator, so he could always start up the coop again, if he repaired the door and the rips in the fencing.
What did he do now?
They’d said his mom was disobeying God because her ‘manner of dress’ was ‘suggestive.’ They’d almost taken him with her for ‘failing to discipline her properly.’ He was pretty sure they’d chosen them, out of all the people in their neighborhood, because of the garden and the chickens-other people had them, but theirs was-had been-the most productive.
He’d need to see what he could salvage from the garden. He didn’t think they’d recognized the potato plants for what they were. And he thought his mom had put seeds away, in case something failed for whatever reason, so they could plant again the next year.
Where were they? His mother. Were they even still alive?
“The end of the world,” they had called it. So what was this?
--end Chapter 1--