Aleks

The father kneels in the street. His eyes are cast down, his chin lowered, neck protected. His bare knees scrape against the stone. All around him is noise – chaos, people running to and fro, shouting. But he stays, kneeling in the street, waiting for it to pass. Better not to move. Maybe the children will wake up. Maybe if he stays here the crowd will not trample them – or him. Maybe –

He wakes up.

Before the end

And when he wakes up, there is a sandy-haired boy, a boy of short stature, sitting on the edge of the street, watching him. The crowd has gone. The cobbled stone of the streets are mostly empty of footsteps – except for the unfortunate few who did not make it out of the press of humanity in time and lay, stunned or worse, on the ground.

He does not know the children lying in front of him, but he knows that no one else will keep them safe if he doesn’t. The sandy-haired boy is only watching. His long leather jacket trailing out in a broken circle around him does not stir, his hands are together, but he stares intently at the father. The father stands up.

The children are still breathing, but they do not wake up. The boy watches, even when the rain begins.

When the first avian bodies drop to the street, the father does not react. Then he recoils. He knew this would happen – eventually. He does not expect it to come so soon. It’s the birds first – not because they are the first to fall, but because they fall the fastest. Then come the insects, the high-flying ones with so little weight they don’t even know how to plummet. They are falling far from the father – in between him and the sandy-haired boy. The birds fall on the edges of his long jacket, but he does not move. The father’s eyes widen as he finally meets the boy’s eyes. His hands scrabble on the cobblestone for a grip, and he finds none except the wrists of the shallow-breathing children. Have to get to safety. The sandy-haired boy stands up and the father pulls the children to their feet. They groan, almost in unison – semiconscious, stirring even as they are forced to run. The sandy-haired boy gasps and turns, his coat whirling around him, and he runs into the alleyway behind – further into the oncoming desert, the eye of devastation itself.

The father runs – paying little mind to the paths he would normally follow. He knows these streets, but he does not know the buildings between them, he does not know the little paths and the alleyways, but he finds them because he has to. Desperation brings him tumbling over fences, shouting in the ears of these children whom he doesn’t know but whom, he knows, will die if he does not help them get out of here. And he will die too, the father knows, if he is not quick – and if he dies, then he will never find the others, and then –

He does not want to answer the question “then.” He runs, and he makes sure the bleary-eyed children know that they have to run too. He cannot carry them, not fast enough – he does not have the strength. He runs between buildings, throws open a front door where it looks slightly ajar, dashes through the home of an old knitter rocking by the fire. He doesn’t bother to warn her about what’s going to happen, what’s already happening, and she doesn’t – for her part – seem alarmed. She certainly must know.

He pushes through the back door just as he hears the windows at the front of the house shatter and the hot wind rush in. He finds himself in the middle of another street – people are still scrambling to leave even now, people but so much more sparse – some of them have broken into abandoned cars and are desperately trying to make them start. The vehicles are parked against the curb near restaurants – life lived as usual, mundane life even in the midst of the greatest danger, because no one wants to give up what little joy they find simply because the threat of death is always looming. There would be no joy, then –

But there is a strange sort of joy now, if only the joy of still being alive when others are not as lucky, the joy of having a plan.

The children keep close to him, now – fully awake after what must have been only seconds. He is glad that they have become wise to what is happening.

“Will it be actually safe out of town?”

“For a little while, yes. Not forever. But for a little while.”

The buildings become more sparse nearby and a road stretches out, a single road like a ribbon unfurled over the land where it gives way from sparse buildings to real rolling hills and open country. “Come on. Just a little further. Keep running.”

“But they’re blocking the road!”

“Wh –“ but the child was right. Large trucks, pulling into the space. They did not cover the whole road, although no car could have gotten out without veering off the road. Which is exactly what one driver does, swerving around and only getting back onto the road once well clear of the trucks. They don’t make any move to stop that one. So the father and the children continue to run.

They run between the trucks, just as the doors open and things that must be men underneath all of that heavy gear (hazard suits or armor or both? He doesn’t know things like that) step out of the back. The children run on.

But the father stops, when his arm is grabbed from behind.

One of the children turns to look at him – and the father’s eyes meet the earth-brown, tired, angry eyes of the child. The child keeps running. But an awful knowledge comes over the father as he is dragged backward down the street.

“You shouldn’t be here,” the voice above him says. “You shouldn’t be in this place or time. Stop this at once.”

“I don’t understand,” the father says, and he isn’t lying.

“But you will.” The voice is obscured by helmet, echoing about within. The man in the suit throws the father to the ground and kneels beside him. He reaches behind himself, for what the father assumes to be a gun. But it isn’t a gun, it’s a small round object attached to a rounded handle. Wooden, beautifully finished so that the grain shines through. He turns it around. Silvered glass – and it shows the father’s face.

And when he sees his face, his own sandy hair, his own perpetual smile, he realizes the source of his awful knowledge. He strains to raise his body to look at the fleeing dead boy, living in this time and in this dream, even though he will not be born for another three hundred years.

“Why are you doing this?” he says to the man in the suit, realizing he has seen this man many times before, and will see him again. He stares into the mirror still, unable to look away.

And next to the mirror, the voice says, “because these are not your memories to retread, and you have no right to be here.”

“Who are you?” the father – the boy – asks, although he already knows the answer, as meaningless as it is to him.

“Just an old soul from an age of glass,” the man in the hazard suit says, the same way he always does. “Now wake up proper this time, and stop dreaming someone else’s dreams when you still have so many of your own left in the true world.” And then the man in the hazard suit shoots him in the forehead, the same way he always does.

He tries to speak before he fades and his body jolts awake, but he doesn’t get the chance to say the words he wants to say. But you don’t understand! I need to learn everything I can about what happened, or it’ll happen again! For the sake of the world – please! But he supposes that the man in the hazard suit just knows something he doesn’t, or that he does not care. He settles back into liquid and mist for that comfortable half-second of utter warmth before the fast-cooling real world is sure to return. Just before his sight fades, the still husk of an insect lands in the entry wound on his head. He thinks he can hear its wings flitting one final time as it tries, fruitlessly, to rise against the hot desert wind.