MAY 8, 2020

Invasion ~ A story written with Bill Kirton

Sssssilence

“Hello darkness my old friend…”

This is how R.B. Wood begins his prompt for episode #95 of R.B. Wood’s WordCount Podcast.

The theme of animals continues, and this is a good one – green mamba!

For this story, author Bill Kirton and I are collaborating again.

I started the story and wrote part 3, while Bill wrote part 2 and the conclusion. If you’d like to learn more about our process, feel free to read Bill’s post on it. It’s a great summary of what we do in case you want to collaborate on a project with another writer.

Listen to Bill and me reading the story here You can also learn all the latest from the Please DO LIKE the page. It will give us more visibility and increase our listening audience. Thank you!

Hope you enjoy the story. You’ll see it’s inspired by current events.

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My husband opened a bottle of wine and poured us each a glass. I nodded a quick acknowledgement of thanks and continued ranting.

“You’ll like this wine,” he said.

“Oh?” I raised a brow. “Why?”

“It pairs well with rage.”

My words caught in my throat, and I scowled at him. “Very funny, this is serious.”

“So is dinner and eating in peace. Should I put on some music?” Dan went into the other room and turned on the radio.

I sighed. “Look, we’ve been cooped up here for nearly a month. I need to talk about this to make sense of it. This could be the end of life as we know it.”

Dan returned to the table and sat down. “Nothing on but the news, not one station is even playing dinner music.”

I leaned over and patted his hand. “We’ll survive this—we will. We’ve been very good about doing as we’re told.”

He cut into his pork chop, hesitated, then set down his utensils. He picked up his glass and took a gulp. “I’ve lost my appetite. I’m tired, and I’m not sure how much longer I can keep this up.”

His dejected look tugged at me. I’d been living in a fog because I didn’t want the reality to sink in. We had been invaded; now we had to deal with it. As instructed by our government, every crack around our house’s foundation had been sealed, every window closed and taped shut. No more watering the lawn, the garden was flattened to the ground. That was the hardest for Dan. He loved his garden, full of shrubs and flowers and rocks. It was the envy of the neighbourhood.

Now, it looked like a field of hay.

One month the government said. Stay inside one month, and then they would begin spraying the country—one area at a time.

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OK, my quip about the wine complementing her rage was more or less guaranteed to double it, but I just wanted to jump start us out of the same old same old. It’s bad enough living in this now seemingly perpetual silence, indoors and out, but when the only apparent counterpoint to the relentless, doom-laden statistics of death and the end of civilization as we know it… well, that’s getting the priorities in a bit of a twist. We can’t beat the thing, but most of us’ll survive it.

Probably.

And I want the us that comes out the other side of it – Jen and me, I mean – I want us to be the same couple that met on that dance floor way back, honeymooned in Rhode Island, sailed that Westerly Fulmar on Lake Ontario. Christ, we’ve got this far, twenty-odd years of marriage, without pissing each other off too regularly. She gets so wound up by it all, all the bad news. And she can’t leave it alone. She sits there, gnawing away at her lip – which, by the way, is still gorgeous as far as I’m concerned – not the gnawing, but the lip – but she’s miles away, in some internal war zone, out of reach. Oh, I know, I’ve read enough about what the poor sods who get bitten goes through – most of them, anyway – the pain, the blood, the airless agonies, and seeing their husbands, wives, kids, suffering as they wait for them to die. It’s brutal, and I’m not pretending it’s not, far from it. In fact there’s more – unbelievably, unthinkably, one of the side-effects is how many women shut up with frustrated men are victims not of the disease, but domestic violence. How can Jen think there’s any sense to be made of it all? There is none.

I used to be able to come out into the garden and get myself together. Used to. Before it was a wasteland. Plants are so uncomplicated – months as seeds or just dormant roots, down in the dark, damp silence, and they just need a hint of warmth and up they come, waving about, splashing colour everywhere, spreading their perfume. Then they either die or shrink back down until next year. They live life while they’ve got it. That’s what we should be doing.

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It’s night time, so I’m able to look outside and not see the horror in the streets. I can’t see clearly without my glasses more than five feet anyway. That I’m nearsighted is suddenly a blessing.

My rants are driving Dan crazy, I know. He’s been tolerant, but he’s getting impatient, both with me and the situation. I hate my own negativity—it’s not who I am. I’ve always been the “glass half full” and “look on the bright side” type of person. But right now … I feel like saying, “This is the end, fuck it, we’re all going to die.”

How did this happen?

Frogs, bugs, locusts, they were historical plagues—to be believed or doubted, but not something to expect in modern times. And yet, here we are, shut inside our homes for fear of green, venomous killers who have taken the lives of hundreds in our town. They slither rampant in the streets and have spread to every part of the United Kingdom. The news today says they’ve traveled as far south as Spain. Italy and Hungary have reported areas of invasion as well. How they are travelling across Europe is a mystery. I don’t remember them falling from the sky, but I first saw them in the trees, camouflaged by the leaves until they slid boldly down tree trunks, gliding in the grass, disappearing into sewers. Now, I can’t even look outside during daylight because the roads are a sea of writhing serpents.

We are safe in the house, and we cannot go out. Nothing is open, not even the food shops. Some residents have taken a chance and left their homes kitted up in ridiculous gear—rubber boots, gloves, goggles, wet suits, and other protective clothing. There have been fatalities, though I haven’t seen any outside our home. The news has reported people dying in the streets after being bitten.

We are lucky to have had time to buy two months worth of supplies before we sealed ourselves in our home—the home that Dan now calls our tomb.

Our prime minister has scheduled the poison for Monday. This could be our last weekend together. I wish to god we were not the first section of the country to be sprayed. I don’t trust the chemicals won’t seep inside the house. I don’t trust that it is a hundred percent safe for humans. I don’t trust our government with my life, but there is little I can do.

I feel helpless.

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No denying it any more. Jen’s fears are real – and justified. Like all the other couples holed up together, we’re being tested. And it doesn’t feel as if we’re passing. I’ve been way behind her, personalizing it, asking all the wrong questions. I couldn’t see beyond the usual efforts to reassure her. My habitual lazy thinking. Trying to reduce it to … well, I’m not sure what. Trying to make it simple. Making it about whether we really loved one another. Asking how strong we could be. Stupid, irrelevant questions. Fuck-all to do with the threat.

But what else could I do?

Nobody knows where it’s all come from. It’s all new. None of the old rules apply. It’s happened so quickly. I tried reassuring her but soon we could both see that she was right. It wasn’t just her usual apprehension about politicians’ games. It’s over a week now since I’ve been outside in the garden… used to be a refuge. Well, before it became a slithering wilderness. But now… We’re cheek by jowl all the time. Can’t avoid one another. And out there, nothing. Well, except that perpetual green carpet. No traffic, no planes, no people. Just silence. A whole new ball game. With no rules.

Everything’s new – but how long will it last?

The spraying starts next week, and the scientists have warned us it’s pretty corrosive. They’re confident it’ll get rid of the creatures … but what else? Everywhere’s supposed to be hermetically sealed, but who knows?

I can’t get that Eliot poem out of my head. The Hollow Men.

‘This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.’

So true. We’re sitting here, comfortable, enough wine in the cupboard to get us to and even beyond next week, all our time-saving electronic stuff catering for our needs, and what’s it all worth? Fuck all. What use is the sapiens bit of homo now, with that scaly green infestation effectively suffocating us, even without contaminating us with its venom. Everyone, everything needs a tomorrow.

The rest is silence.