The Feeders (Part 2)
Stabilize if possible. Replace if necessary.
Check out Part One by J. Michael Thomas - Author here.
(Part Two by Miles Carnegie )
I didn’t plug him back in.
Not right away.
M4rv1n crawled across the floor toward the hose, his arms shaking beneath him. His gown dragged behind him like an old rag. The hose lay across the floor, wet and twitching, still dripping that gray mush.
“Please,” he said. “Please, please, please.”
“You said you had a family,” I said.
His fingers closed around the hose.
“A wife,” I said. “Two children.”
He froze.
For a moment, his face changed. Not much. Just enough that I knew some part of him had heard me. His mouth hung open. His eyes watered in the light coming through the window.
“What are their names?” I asked.
“My wife is…” He blinked hard. “My wife is…”
The house hummed.
“My wife is…” he said again.
The goggles on the floor flickered. A soft blue light moved across the inside of the glass.
M4rv1n stared at them.
“Put them back on me,” he whispered.
“What are their names?”
“I don’t know.”
The words came out small.
His shoulders shook. He dragged the hose closer to his mouth.
“I don’t know their names.”
Outside, another drone passed over the roof.
Then another.
Then many.
Their shadows crossed the window one after another, dark shapes sliding over the floor, over M4rv1n, over my bare feet.
“I have to go,” I said.
He shoved the hose into his mouth.
A wet choking sound filled the room. His body stiffened. His hands clawed at the table until he pulled himself back up onto it. The goggles blinked faster, blue light dancing against his cheeks.
I stepped toward him.
His eyes found mine one last time. Red. Wet. Begging.
“Please,” he said around the hose.
I picked up the goggles.
They were warm.
For a moment, I held them above his face and looked at him. Without them, he looked old. Sick. Lost.
With them, he looked like everyone else in town.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
I lowered the goggles over his eyes.
M4rv1n’s body went still.
His hands fell open on the table, and the blue light moved behind the glass.
The front door stood open behind me. I backed out of the house and ran.
The town was waking up, but not the way a village wakes. No doors opened. No chickens scratched in the road. No voices called from window to window. Every house had a pipe on the roof. Every pipe had a drone attached to it or waiting above it.
Through one window, a woman smiled at nothing with a hose in her mouth.
Through another, a child lay beneath goggles too large for his face.
In the next house, two old people rested side by side, their hands close together but not touching.
All of them were Feeders.
All of them were real.
A drone dipped low above the road.
I ran harder.
The hill back to the village seemed longer than it had before. My lungs burned. My feet slipped in the grass. When the fence came into view, I nearly cried from relief.
Mother would be angry. She would yell. She would maybe swat me with a towel or send me to bed without supper.
For once, I wanted that. I wanted ordinary trouble. The kind with chores at the end of it.
I climbed the fence and dropped into the village.
The world went quiet.
Too quiet.
No insects buzzed in the tall grass near the fence. No birds moved in the sky. Even the wind had stopped.
At the top of the hill, Mother stood in the garden.
Her shovel was in her hand.
She was not angry.
She was not surprised.
She looked tired.
I walked toward her, my legs weak and muddy. The bag of seeds still sat where I had dropped it the day before. The candle from that morning rested on the porch rail, still burning, though it should have gone out hours ago.
“Mother,” I said.
She pushed the shovel into the dirt.
“Get your bag,” she said.
“I went to town.”
“I know.”
The words stopped me.
Mother dug a small hole. Same as before. Same size. Same place. Her hands moved slowly.
“I saw one,” I said. “A Feeder.”
Mother did not answer.
“His name was M4rv1n. Or Marvin. I’m not sure.”
The shovel scraped against a stone.
“He had a hose down his throat,” I said. “He thought he had a wife and children. He thought he had a home. He didn’t even know where he was.”
Mother bent down and pulled the stone from the soil.
It was smooth and white. Too smooth to be a stone.
She slipped it into the pocket of her apron.
“Are they real?” I asked.
Mother’s fingers tightened around the shovel.
“Real enough,” she said.
My stomach felt hollow.
“What does that mean?”
“It means keep planting.”
“No.”
The word came out before I knew I had it in me.
Mother closed her eyes.
“Maria.”
“Are they real?”
“I told you.”
“No. Are we?”
The shovel stopped.
Nothing moved.
Not the grass.
Not the candle flame.
Not even Mother’s dress.
Her face turned toward mine, but her eyes didn’t quite reach me.
“Some fences are there,” she said, “because the field ends.”
I stepped back.
The fence at the bottom of the hill shimmered.
Only for a second.
The wooden posts blurred, then sharpened again. Beyond them, the valley looked painted too carefully. The same bird crossed the same patch of sky, wing for wing, just as it had that morning.
My mouth went dry.
“What did you say?”
Mother pulled the shovel from the dirt.
“You were never supposed to go that far.”
“The town?”
“The lower place.”
The lower place.
I thought of M4rv1n on the floor. The hose in his hands. The way he begged for the thing killing him because he believed it kept him alive.
“What is this place?” I asked.
Mother looked at the garden.
Rows and rows of small holes waited for seeds.
The dirt was dark and soft.
Too dark.
Too soft.
No worms curled beneath it. No beetles ran from the light. No roots tangled under the surface where last season’s crop should have been.
Only dirt.
Only clean, obedient dirt.
“This is home,” Mother said.
“No, it isn’t.”
“It is if you let it be.”
A sound came from overhead.
A drone.
It floated above the garden, lower than any drone had ever flown over our house. Its metal belly opened. A thin glass arm unfolded from inside.
Mother’s face changed then.
Fear came into it.
Not for herself.
For me.
“Maria,” she said. “Don’t fight.”
The drone arm clicked.
The garden vanished.
Not all at once.
The sky went first.
Blue peeled away into white light.
Then the hills.
Then the fence.
Then Mother.
Then I was somewhere else.
I lay on a table.
Cold air touched my skin.
A hose filled my throat.
Straps crossed my wrists, my ankles, my chest.
My hands were not sixteen-year-old hands. They were thin and pale, with blue veins under loose skin. Brown spots marked the back of them. The nails were cracked. The fingers twitched like they belonged to someone else.
Beside me, another body lay on another table.
Mother.
Her hair was gray and thin against the metal. A hose ran down her throat too. Goggles covered her eyes. Wires disappeared under the collar of her gown.
Rows of tables stretched beyond her.
Hundreds of them.
Maybe thousands.
Some held children. Some held grown men and women. Some held bodies so old I could not tell what they had once looked like.
Drones moved along the ceiling on silver tracks.
A person in a pale suit stood at the foot of my table, reading from a flat screen.
“Pastoral instance contaminated,” the person said. “Subject has cross-tier exposure.”
Another person sighed.
Like someone had dropped a cup and now had to clean it up.
“Revert her,” they said.
“What about the maternal anchor?”
“Stabilize if possible. Replace if necessary.”
Mother’s hand moved.
Just a little.
Her fingers strained against the strap.
The person in the pale suit glanced at her screen.
“Maternal anchor response detected.”
Mother’s head turned toward me.
The goggles hid her eyes, but I knew.
I knew she was trying to see me.
I tried to speak.
The hose held me silent.
The drone arm lowered toward my face. A pair of goggles hung from it, clean and waiting.
The person in the pale suit leaned over me.
Then the goggles came down.
Darkness.
Dirt beneath my fingers.
A warm sun on my back.
The smell of the garden.
Mother knelt beside me, digging little holes with her shovel.
I blinked.
My bag of seeds lay in the grass.
“There goes another one,” I said, looking toward the sky.
A drone passed over the hills and out of sight.
Mother did not bother to look up.
“Pay them no mind, Maria,” she said. “It’s just them drones again, taking food to the Feeders.”
My hand slipped into the seed bag.
The small seeds rolled between my fingers.
Something scratched at the back of my throat.
Not pain.
Memory.
The hole in the dirt waited.
I dropped the seeds in and covered them with my palm.
“Surely no one lives like that,” I said.
Mother’s shovel trembled.
I pressed the dirt flat.
“All day, every day,” I whispered. “Plugged into machines. A whole population of people.”
Mother’s face had gone pale.
The drone was already gone, but its shadow still seemed to lie across the garden.
I looked at the fence.
Then at Mother.
“Yes,” I said softly. “Yes, they could.”
Mother stared at me.
For a moment, her mouth moved like she wanted to say my name.
Then the shovel slipped from her hand.
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