Strangers (eBook)

Ed Falco (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
315 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
979-8-3509-7648-9 (ISBN)

Infos

To inhabit the the planet, they had to eliminate the Earth's indigenous human population. Trouble was, they missed a few.

Ed Falco is the New York Times bestselling author of a dozen books, including novels and short story collections. His work has been published in the Atlantic Monthly, Playboy, and Ploughshares. He won the Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction for Acid and has received many other awards and fellowships, including an NEA Fellowship in fiction, the Emily Clark Balch Prize for Short Fiction, the Robert Penn Warren Prize for Poetry, and the Mishima Prize for Innovative Fiction.

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To inhabit the planet, they had to eliminate the Earth's indigenous human population. Trouble was, they missed a few. When Severn Price awakens during a violent storm to find his wife dead beside him in bed, he ventures out for help, only to find himself in the midst of an apocolypse that wipes out the Earth's human population except for him and a few others who escape the purge. In the months that follow, they encounter aliens who look and behave like the humans they've replaced. Though the aliens who have repopulated Earth are peaceful, they bring with them something fierce and savage that the human survivors will have to face and defeat if they don't want to be the last of their species.

Textauszug

 

 

For the first few months, they feared every gathering storm. Eventually, as summer turned to fall and fall to winter and each storm was nothing more than a fluctuation in the weather, they came to accept that the events were over. Severn settled on a theory of the lurchings as a natural phenomenon, an unknown occurrence of a sort that perhaps happened periodically, with intervals of millions of years; though it also seemed possible that the lurchings were the result of some cosmic chaos, some mysterious event perhaps occurring somewhere off in space and producing this murderous effect on Earth. Still, the inexplicable nature of the events, the way they killed only those who were awake, the way they killed only human beings and no other form of life––all that continued to mystify Severn. The nights when he couldn’t sleep, when accompanied only by Sage he’d walk through the fields and woods of the hundreds of acres surrounding their farm, were many.

They had found the farm abandoned. Sarah’s parents had probably been off traveling somewhere, as was usual for them. They hired others to attend to whatever needing attending while they were on the road––but Severn and the kids hadn’t found a single body anywhere on the farm. In the weeks after they settled into the house, when they had driven to each of the surrounding farms, they had found and buried a dozen bodies. With bulldozers and backhoes readily available, the burying had not been physically difficult––but the bodies, by the time they found them––were horribly decomposed, and that was difficult. The nearest town was Millersville, some thirty miles away, and the nearest city was Lynchburg, which was more than an hour away. Millersville was a decent sized town, with a population of 9,000 or so, and they’d been able to find everything they needed in its various stores and shops. Severn taught both Vi and Tommy to drive, and they had made several trips to Millersville with pickup trucks to load up on supplies. Throughout those first months, Severn had kept himself and the kids busy. Days they worked stocking up on everything from hay and seed to tools and feed. Nights they spent reading books they found in the Millersville library, books that explained how to do things ranging from slaughtering animals to making butter to building shortwave radios.

By the time winter arrived and the first snows fell, they had fallen into a daytime routine of assigned chores and responsibilities. They ate their meals together, and in the evenings they sat together in the living room, around a potbellied, wood burning stove, where Sage and Sterling curled up on a square of plush carpeting. Those winter evenings mostly they talked about the day, and about the past and future. Tommy had joked once about Vi and he being the new Adam and Eve, and Vi had told him not to get any ideas, that she was still only thirteen years old. Severn had changed the subject, seeing Vi’s awkwardness––but he thought that, if nothing changed, eventually Vi and Tommy would start a family. It was possible that they were the only three people left on Earth.

Possible, but not certain, maybe not even likely––and because of that Severn and Tommy and Vi still talked about searching for others. Early that winter, Vi turned fourteen and then a month or so later, Tommy turned sixteen. Severn turned forty but didn’t mention it to the kids. Both Tommy and Severn had grown lean and muscular from the hard physical labor of establishing the farm. In Tommy’s case, he had put on weight. He remained wiry in build, but his frame was now sleek with a layer of knotty muscles. At five-eleven, he was still a couple of inches shorter than Severn, but he looked like he might grow a bit before he reached his full height. Severn had lost weight, maybe as much as twenty pounds, though he wasn’t bothering to check. There was hardly any fat left on his body: he was as solid as he’d been in his late teens and early twenties when he played football in high school and college. Vi had filled out in the ways of a young woman. She took to wearing dresses occasionally and experimenting with makeup. One Saturday afternoon, she disappeared for a few hours with one of the pickup trucks. When she returned with several boxes, she explained that they were feminine supplies and that she needed them, and she wasn’t about to go get them with Severn or Tommy. Nonetheless, she promised never to go anywhere alone again. It was too dangerous. They all understood that she was too important. The way things were at that time, she might have been the most important person on Earth. She was also, thankfully, extraordinarily capable of taking care of herself. She had become an excellent shot with a both a rifle and a handgun. All three of them spent many afternoons at target practice, often devising competitions, and Vi was near as good a shot as Tommy, who was an excellent marksman. Severn wasn’t bad, but after winning a few competitions in the earliest weeks, he never again beat either of the kids.

Both Tommy and Vi had learned to drive motorcycles soon after learning to drive pickups. Severn had brought back several dirt bikes, ATVs, and motorcycles from a dealership in town, and they used them for getting around the farm and making short trips to neighboring farms, or, when necessary, to Millersville. For the most part, though, they only went to town when it couldn’t be avoided, because of the bodies. All through the spring and summer, when they had to go to Millersville, they could always smell the place long before they got there. Then there were the dogs, and they were always a danger. For that reason, no one went anywhere without an assault rifle on his or her shoulder, and Sage and Severn were confined to the house or an area of the front yard, off the front porch, that Severn and the kids had carefully fenced in. After the first storm in mid-December had dropped a couple of feet of snow, packs of dogs pretty much had disappeared from the farm. The rest of the winter had been unusually severe, with lots of snow and two storms that Severn counted as blizzards. For the last weeks in January and all of February, Severn and the kids hadn’t traveled beyond the farmhouse and the surrounding fields and barns.

Severn, during those winter months, had fallen into a dark state of mind. He wanted to walk off along a wooded trail and just keep walking until the elements or the dogs put an end to it all. Sometimes, the only way he could get himself out of bed in the morning was by thinking about walking into the hills and not turning back. That picture of himself following a trail into the deep woods became a sustaining image. Then, late in March, when the snow was all melted and the roads were messy but passable, he took the Comanche, one of the ATVs, into Millerville by himself. The rule was that no one traveled anywhere off the farm alone, but the day was sunny and warm, and the winter had been unusually severe and long. He wanted to get away from the kids and the farm, from the mud and his routine chores. There were some things he needed from town, work gloves and overalls, and a new ratchet wrench; but that, he understood, was just an excuse to get away for a couple of hours. He had spent that morning cleaning up the dairy barn with the kids. After lunch, when they went off to spend some time skeet shooting, he told them he was going to work on repairing fence. Instead he took the Comanche and started for Millersville.

The road to town was riddled with cracks and potholes and littered with rocks and tree limbs. Severn was taken by how quickly nature was overwhelming anything made by man. How long, he wondered, before the natural world swallowed up every sign of civilization. In his mind’s eye, as he drove slowly along the debris-littered road, he imagined fires burning through towns, earthquakes leveling cities, tsunamis washing away villages. He imagined the human world day by day being worn down and blown away and washed off into the sea until all that remained was a wilderness that had consumed every effort and effect of every human being who had ever lived. Part of him felt the tragedy of that erasure, and another part of him felt the glory of it. He imagined the greenery of the trees and brush interspersed with wildflowers and mosses and multi-hued groundcover and grasses and it all seemed to him then like the skin of an elemental force, a power eternal and unending and endlessly varied. For a few moments, piloting his ATV along a wrecked roadway surrounded by trees, he felt a powerful urge to take the Comanche off road and drive into the woods as far and fast as he could until the thing ran out of gas and left him alone in the middle of nowhere––and from there he would just keep walking until he joined all the others, his family, his friends, and Sarah.

In the grip of that urge, Severn pulled up the Comanche next to a toppled highway sign and cut the engine. At first the silence felt complete. Once the roar of the engine ceased, there seemed to be no other sound in the world to replace it. Then, slowly, the smaller sounds emerged: a breeze through the woods . . . then a bird started up, calling on and off, and then . . . something else. Faint, in the distance, a drumming sound, irregular, maybe woodpeckers . . . The sound seemed to be coming from over the hill, toward the outskirts of Millersville. Severn started up the ATV and took it off road, weaving his way around trees and straight up a steep hillside, toward the sound. Halfway up the hill, he came to a rock ledge and had to turn back and weave his way parallel to the rocks until he found a grassy slope that was steep but looked possible. He gunned the engine and the front wheels lifted as the back...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 1.10.2024
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• ISBN-13: 979-8-3509-7648-9 / 9798350976489