Skylights – First Chapter

If I published Skylights, the next story in the Stargazers saga, it would be my first novel at about 53K words. You only get one first novel, and I have a proper, 86K word project going on sub (hopefully) soon. So, Skylights will simmer as The Last of Our Kind makes its way. Meanwhile, here is the first chapter for those who are interested. I have so many ideas for this universe.

Chapter One – You Deserved Better

Restraining Judith was like hugging a sack of cats. She clawed at Jean’s flesh, gnashed her teeth, the enamel splintering. Ol’ Reliable tossed a spray of gravel at the women as it careened out of the parking lot. For half a second, Jean caught sight of the eyes, somehow bright in the low morning light, of a girl she had only just met but already loved.

Pennies. Her eyes shined like pennies.

Jean smiled, relaxed her grip without realizing it, and it was all the space Judith needed. She broke free, planted her bare foot on glass and gravel and took off as if the shards buried in her heels were springs.

“Shit!” Jean hissed, hugging the air Judith occupied a moment ago.

Judith’s arms were pistons. If she felt the pain of her pulverized flesh, it was not apparent. She was halfway across the parking lot by the time Jean reached the motel room doorway. Judith would not catch up to Ol’ Reliable. She would not fulfill her purpose, to eradicate her family. And she would not stop trying. Even as the glass and gravel punched deeper into the tissue, until it was flush with the surface of the skin. She would run trailing a river of blood until there was not enough for her heart to pump. On her knees, she would crawl, the river dwindling to a trickle until its headwaters expired.

Jean ran into the parking lot. In half a dozen steps, her lungs felt like the dryer lint trap when her husband, Marcus, was in charge of laundry. She took a painful breath and held it, muscles like spaghetti in a boiling pot. Judith would not stop. Maybe she was a passenger in her own body, seeing, hearing, and feeling everything. Maybe she understood her purpose and had no power to stop it. Maybe there was nothing left of her inside this walking shell.

POP

Judith shuddered but did not fall. A rosebud blossomed above her hip to the left of her spine.

“Hope y’all are far enough away you didn’t hear that.”

Another breath. The trigger was slick with sweat despite the chill in the air. She centered the crimson rose in the rifle’s sights, then aimed above it and to the right a couple inches. Her finger squeezed the trigger, not enough to fire.

The blood spread across Judith’s back, a continent erupting from the baby blue sea of the jacket, the one Henry forced her into the night he found her staring at the stars. Jean thought of her own husband, of turning the corner onto the soda aisle to discover him facedown, as if he had tripped while holding red paint cans. Killed in cold blood. Was this any better? Judith was a Stargazer, true, but that was not a choice.

The blossom swelled in size but shrank in the rifle’s sight as she staggered away, movement slowed but no less determined. Jean found the trigger again, still warm to the touch.

POP

Judith took another step but found no earth beneath her. She crumpled as if her bones were made of sand.

“Goddammit,” Jean whispered as Judith’s arm lifted like a periscope. It plopped on the road, and she dragged herself forward half a foot at a time. The motherly instinct to protect Penny at any cost was corrupted inside of her. Now, it propelled her forward by inches to make up an impossible distance. She writhed leaving small, steaming puddles of herself on the asphalt.

Jean walked forward, an old memory unfurling.

“If you catch it, you kill it,” her dad said.

That was fine. Jean never caught any fish worth keeping, until she did. The catfish bent her kid fishing pole into a rainbow but held on long enough for her dad to scoop it out of the water with his net. Her elation turned sour when the fish was dumped in the plastic bucket with two other keepers. Throughout the drive home she fretted about the fish, the echo of her dad’s words louder than the George Strait tape blaring through the truck’s speakers. Each pothole reminded her of the THWOCK of the cleaver, the once living fish converted into a twitching thing, mouth wide in the hopes of one final breath.

The catfish squirmed on the cutting board, lips puckering as it searched the unfamiliar environment for oxygen. How long before the fish suffocated? Jean held the cleaver in one hand while the other hid her mouth.

“Come on, sugar, just like cuttin’ a watermelon!” her dad said, mussing her hair and helping himself to a beer.

Minutes passed, but how many more before it stopped puckering like that? Wasn’t it worse to die that way? Wouldn’t a quick death be preferable?

That was a problem, though. Jean did not know if the death would be quick. What if she didn’t cut all the way through, or missed and severed a fin instead?

“I can’t do it, Daddy,” she said with tears in her eyes. Not only did she not kill the fish, she made him drive her back to the lake to set it free.

“You deserved better,” Jean said, hefting the rifle. 

Judith’s breaths were raspy, like loose teeth rattling inside her lungs. Fingers turned to claws gripped the asphalt, nails cracking and tearing. She no longer had the strength to pull herself.

Unlike the catfish, which was granted a second chance at life, Judith’s ended in the street. Her fingers relaxed and her body stilled, eyelids closing halfway so that only a sickle of brown showed. Jean sobbed and lowered the rifle. She knelt over the woman, Penny’s mother. She grasped the corner of the item peeking from Judith’s back pocket.

“Oh my. Oh, my goodness,” Jean said.

Penny smiled at her in picture form, a year younger, perhaps. She sat on the floor beside Henry, whose chest served as a table for her plastic tea set. He smiled as well, though his eyes stared ahead rather than at the camera. Penny held up a teacup as if offering it to the photographer, Judith, most likely.

She pressed the photograph to her chest and eyed the unwavering road. They were gone. Henry and Penny were gone. Misfit, too.

Would Henry turn around and come back for her? 

Probably not, and for good reason. Either his wife was dead, or she was still intent on killing their daughter. 

SKRICH

SKRICH

Jean’s spine stiffened, joints popping as she turned her head to confront the noise. There had been two of them, two Stargazers who peeled away from the herd to patrol the motel parking lot. One was dead by her hand. The other ambled toward her, hobbling on a leg that could not support the weight of its body. The foot was a mangled clot of blood and cotton. It squelched under the slightest pressure, printing its strange shape on the asphalt. 

What’s your purpose? Judith wondered this as she reclaimed the rifle from the road.

The Stargazer, a young man in a Texas Rangers shirt and flannel pajama bottoms, was not looking at her. His purpose was beyond the horizon.

SKRICH

SKRICH

His patchy beard accentuated the purple hollows of his cheeks rather than disguising them. He stepped around Judith’s body, the ruin of his foot crunching wetly. He hesitated, injured leg spasming, and Jean swung the barrel toward him.

She swallowed, finding the trigger again.

The pajama bottoms were snagged on a crack in the asphalt. He tripped and did not brace himself for the fall, nose an explosion of blood and bone. At once, he lifted his head, shattered teeth like broken eggshells on his lips. His breaths formed bloody bubbles as he fought to stand, hem still snagged and foot as stable as a rotten tomato.

“How many times am I going to have to do this?” Jean whispered.

Less than a week ago she had not heard the word stargazer used outside of its conventional meaning. In that world her biggest concern was nicotine withdrawal. Marcus was alive and excited by the thought of a summer road trip to see America’s national parks.

POP

No more. And never again.

This was a new world, and Jean wasn’t sure she belonged in it.

The road was a black river, straight save for the almost imperceptible curve pulling it west. There would be no road trip for her. Only chaos and suffering. Jean released the magazine and popped the top round free. 

“Almost out,” she mumbled.

If, she thought, it wasn’t worth it, she would only need one.

***

By midday, the clouds threatening rain hitched a ride on a quickening wind, revealing a sun that seemed incapable of warming the world beneath it. Jean left the bodies in the street. Though they deserved better, she did not have the strength to give it to them at the time. She returned to the motel, shattered glass like diamonds spilled in a jewelry heist gone wrong. The power was out, and she had no fuel to refill the generator. 

She sat on the bed in what had been Henry and Penny’s room. The curtains billowed, growing pregnant with wind then collapsing only to balloon again moments later. The chill in the room, and the uneasy serenity of mayhem’s aftermath played tricks with her mind. Had she dreamed it all? Conjured the kind man and his daughter to cope with her own loss?

Penny’s books were scattered across the comforter, but perhaps they’d been there before. Jean knelt to the carpet and retrieved Misfit’s leash, discarded during the turmoil of Judith’s return. She wrapped the fabric around her fist and chewed the inside of her cheek. 

“No, I didn’t dream you,” she said to the leash before tucking it into the pocket of her jeans. 

As she pulled her hand free, she held the picture, the one stolen off Judith’s corpse. They were not related. They barely knew each other, the girl and her father.

Jean laughed dryly at the memory of Penny barking into the phone, her way of saying good night to Misfit. She ran her thumb over the photograph and wondered what life would be like for that little girl. There would be no more tea parties, no mother to take her picture.

To her right was the rifle, one path for her.

Ahead was an open door and the world beyond.

Jean returned the picture to her pocket. She would have to find a way to keep it safe until she saw them again.

***

In this part of Texas there were two things in abundance, guns and gas-guzzling vehicles. Jean confiscated the former when she encountered them but searched for an alternative to the latter. The neighborhood behind the grocery store across the street from the motel was a ghost town lacking only tumbleweeds. Front doors were left wide open. Detritus blanketed the sidewalks and lawns, as if vomited by the homes themselves. There was a Toyota Corolla idling in the middle of the street, a pool of oil spreading beneath it, operator nowhere in sight. 

“Jesus,” Jean whispered.

Scanning the driveways for a potential new ride, her eyes landed on the body of a woman. She lay on her side, clothes sodden with rain, death-stiffened limbs outstretched with fingers forming two Cs, as if she had died strangling someone. In place of her left eye was frozen vortex of gore. A Stargazer killed while attempting to fulfill its purpose? A domestic dispute taken to extremes on the precipice of the apocalypse?

Jean kept walking.

The wind rattled dead leaves in the trees, fastened to their branches by brittle stems. It was no longer Texas coldbut just cold. The kind that made your fingers ache and your eyes water at the slightest gust. Jean’s new jacket, pilfered from the foyer closet of a house still decorated for Christmas, was meant for a much larger woman. It swallowed Jean’s thin frame but served a second purpose, hiding the two pistols she now wore against her ribs. Her backpack, taken from the same closet, was half-filled with protein bars and trail mix. 

She breathed ghost clouds as she walked down the sidewalk. Lungs prickling, she cursed every cigarette she had smoked in her life while wishing she had one just then. 

A dog barked, more as a question than a warning. Jean pirouetted on the spot, scanning fence lines. Another bark followed by a solemn tattoo of a tail on wood. She jogged across the street, an arm keeping the pistols still against her body.

“Hello?”

The knocking sound increased in urgency.

“It’s okay. It’s okay,” Jean said, pinpointing the fence and then unlatching it.

The dog wedged its dewy, black nose into the space created as Jean cracked the fence open. 

“It’s okay,” she said again, then gasped when she saw the animal in full. “What are you, a polar bear?” 

The dog’s head was as big as an engine block, ears like white pizza slices. The backyard looked as if it had been invaded by spiders, webs of fur hanging like tinsel from tree branches, floating in the air like dandelion puffs. He had probably been trapped in the backyard for days, the sounds of civilization fading to wind in the trees.

“Hold on. It’s okay,” Jean said, hooking a finger under the collar and finding a bone-shaped identification tag. “Gunny.”

His ears perked at the sound of his name, and he sank into a playful stance, front paws splayed and hind raised.

“Oh boy, you’re gonna be a handful, huh?”

As if demonstrating the truth of the prediction, Gunny headbutted the fence door the rest of the way open and barreled through it. In a breath he was gone, with the only evidence of his existence floating in the air like discarded tufts of cotton candy.

Stunned, Jean closed the gate. As she was considering the possibility freeing the dog was better than adopting him, she rounded the corner of the house to find Gunny there, hind raised and tail wagging.

“Oh, you are trouble, aren’t you!” Jean said, only then remembering the leash in her pocket. It was intended for a dog hardly bigger than a house cat, but for the moment it would have to do. Gunny’s demeanor changed the moment the leash was clipped to his collar. He dragged Jean to the sidewalk and began to trot as if she was not a complete stranger, as if this walk was a daily routine between them. Together, they toured the neighborhood, Gunny marking mailboxes and fire hydrants, Jean testing car door handles. She found a small SUV with a nearly full tank of gas, the keys hung just inside the open door of the house.

“Wanna go for a ride?” she asked.

Gunny did. He hopped across the driver’s seat and sat shotgun, head scraping the ceiling. 

“You’re like a white lion, aren’t you? Look at all that fur!” Jean said, scratching the mane of longer hair encircling his neck.

She drove to the supermarket, Gunny pressing his nose to the window and grunting until she rolled it down for him. Jean could have searched for another supermarket. The Stargazers event happened so quickly few had time or the presence of mind to prepare. There would be other stores, pantries in abandoned houses. But she had a final task, one box to check before moving on.

Jean huffed, her fingers pooled in her lap like melted candle wax. She would never come back to this town, to this store. Whatever her destiny, it was beyond the horizon. Marcus’ body was inside that building, the stain of his spilled blood on the tiles. Jean knew his body was not him, the man she loved. It was a vessel he used to navigate the world. But it was the vessel she loved, the vessel whose hands she held when she said I do for the third time but the first time she meant it.

“No free lunches, Gunny. You gotta job now, understand? You protect me and I’ll keep you fed.”

Gunny followed her out of the SUV. The doors did not open automatically as she approached but offered minimal resistance as she pried them open. The power was out here as well. Jean sniffed. By the smell in the air, it had been out long enough for the milk to turn. Gunny sneezed, his much more sensitive nose reporting the same information. 

“Alright, bud, let’s find the most expensive shit they have. This one’s on me,” she said, wrangling a shopping cart free.

Gunny’s claws, bred for gripping soil on steep mountainsides, screeched and squeaked over the tiles. Jean stopped before the toy section. A ghost of a chuckle passed through her lips as she recalled Henry showing her a doll in his shopping cart as proof he was just a dad out on an errand, that he wasn’t a threat. Jean helped herself to a card game and coloring book.

Pet food was the next aisle over. Jean hoisted a forty-pound bag into the cart and dumped cans of the most expensive wet food she could find on top of it. She eyed the sign hanging above the aisle to her left.

Water Soda Sports Drinks

She turned the corner and stopped. Marcus’ bloodstain was like a black hole in the middle of the aisle. She could smell it, above the reek of spoiled milk, somewhere between burning wires and freshly turned soil. She tried to swallow and choked in the effort, tickling her lungs with saliva.

“Goddammit,” she wheezed, eyes watering. “Not the way I wanted to say goodbye to you.”

Gunny whined and backed away, pulling Jean with him.

“Hold on, boy. Just a second,” she said, wrapping the leash around her knuckles. 

Jean walked no closer to the site of her husband’s death. She had memorized this exact scene without trying.

“Marcus, I’m leavin’. I came close to joinin’ you. Awful close to it. Ain’t a lot worth livin’ for from what I can see of this world,” Jean said, then dabbed her eyes. “Ain’t a lot, but not nothin’. If I get to the point where there’s nothin’… well I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it. Found this furry fella, and he’s gonna keep me safe until I find Penny and Henry. Misfit, too. I don’t guess she’s gonna care for him much, but he’ll have earned his place by then.”

As if aware he was the topic of the conversation, Gunny rested his head against Jean’s thigh and accepted her pets and scratches with almost cat-like purrs.

“Our story was only a few chapters in. But it was my favorite story. All those blank pages. We had so much more to do. So much more to see. I guess I’ll see what I can and then tell you about it when I get to where you are. I love you, Marcus. Dyin’ doesn’t change that. Just means it’s gotta be one-sided for a while.”

***

Jean dragged Judith’s body to a field beyond the motel parking lot, then did the same with her companion. The stiffness of their muscles beneath her fingers stirred the bile in her belly. Judith’s arm felt like a bundle of rigid garden snakes. She draped them in blankets and anchored those in place with rocks. Easy work for a hungry scavenger, but with millions of dead bodies to choose from, maybe the inconvenience of the blankets would be enough. 

“Said it before, but I mean it no less. You deserved better.”

In the SUV, Jean adjusted the rearview mirror so that the motel was no longer visible. It was early in the afternoon by then, the sun beginning its decent to the west. She lowered the visor then turned on the radio, forgetting, for a moment, about the end of the world. Static mixed with emergency tones and silence. Toward the end of the dial, she found a station playing Spanish music, probably picked up from the other side of the border. The singer’s voice was powerful, pained. Though she understood none of his words, Jean bit her lip to keep from crying. He was dead, most likely, as were the musicians, their talented fingers fat with bloat.

Two hundred thousand years of progress and one of the final testaments to mankind’s soul was a dead man bellowing ranchera ballads from across the desolate Mexican desert.

Jean lowered the volume, stripping the urgency from the singer’s voice, and pressed the gas. Gunny’s interest in the outside world dissolved within a minute. He tilted to his left, eventually collapsing over the center console to rest his head in Jean’s lap. His belly bulged with expensive kibble and a can of wet food more aromatic than the Dinty Moore meals Marcus favored. 

“I’ll join ya in a bit, Gunny. Just gotta put some miles under these tires.”

She hoped she would find Ol’ Reliable parked in front of a motel but didn’t think Henry would take that option a second time. It was too close to the road, too exposed. His first motel stay nearly killed him twice over. He wouldn’t put Penny in that sort of danger again. Likely, he would find a house well off the highway and park Ol’ Reliable in a garage or behind a barn. It would not be easy to find them, but one thing Jean had in abundance was time.

An hour down the road the gas gauge showed its first noticeable movement, ticking to the left a hair. There were fewer trees and steeper hills, mesas like furry anvils in the distance. Cattle glared at her from behind barbed wire. Had they noticed the change in the world? 

How many animals were trapped behind fences, in zoos separated from a non-existent public by an insurmountable distance? Jean swallowed, clammy sweat speckling her brow, as she considered the plight of the dolphins in that theme park back in the city. One day the crowds, their trainers, just weren’t there. Did they know the ocean was more than one hundred miles away? Could they sense the distance, or would they attempt, mad with hunger, to reach it?

Gunny woofed softly in the midst of a dream. She couldn’t help the dolphins, but at least she freed a polar bear.

This part of Texas felt as if it had already been abandoned, as if the apocalypse came and went. Sun-bleached barns like giant tortoises that died in a fruitless search for water dotted the landscape. Nature invaded the architecture, ripped it apart, a split board here, nail rusted to dust there. This was a land in stasis, a land waiting for the continents to shift and offer a new possibility. One of those in-between places on the map, a distance to cross to get to something better.

“Jesus Christ!” Jean screamed, slamming the brake pedal to the floorboard and wrangling the SUV onto the shoulder.

Gunny roared awake, barking at the ceiling as he writhed to right himself.

As she rounded a curve, hardly sharp enough to require adjusting her speed, she met an ocean. The SUV’s bumper nudged a Stargazer’s knee. He collapsed, disappearing beyond the hood.

“Oh my God!”

Jean’s chin hovered over the steering wheel, the herd moving away from her like a tide in slow motion. Gunny showed his teeth, a growl so low in his throat it was barely audible. The man appeared, swaying for a moment, calves striped with dirt from the bumper. He walked forward, a drop of water returning to the sea.

She had passed dozens of dead Stargazers, each facing the direction the herd was headed. They walked until their final breaths and died on the asphalt; arms outstretched to bring them inches closer to their final goal. They were so common Jean no longer saw them, like the mile markers and oil derricks that melted into the background of the world around her, there but too insignificant to notice, to pull a mind out of its daydreams.

“It’s okay, big guy,” Jean said, giving Gunny’s mane a thorough scratch. He licked his lips, accepted the affection, then flashed his teeth at the mass drifting away from them.

Jean eased off the brake and the SUV crawled forward. The Stargazers were about fifteen bodies across, leaving, she hoped, enough room for her to skirt around the edge. As they approached the herd, Gunny began to growl again, flecks of spittle pebbling the window glass.

“You’re okay, buddy.”

She navigated the SUV to the culvert straddling the road, gently pressing the gas.

“Ugh,” Jean said, the smell of blood and unwashed bodies filling the cabin. It was a sick smell, like garbage water and burning plastic. She shut off the heat and tugged her shirt over her nose, revealing the fact at least some of the sour odor was her own. She sat taller in her seat but could not see the end of the herd, only the few hundred bodies immediately in front of her. They walked dreamlike, arms slack and eyes unfocused.

A man just beyond her door appeared to have been mauled, the fingers of his right hand like wet ribbons. Flies clotted around the meat, black bodies shiny with blood, little of which flowed then. Unless his purpose was to die belly-down, mouth full of asphalt and broken teeth, he would not fulfill it.

Shadows an unnamed shade between purple and gray stretched from the twisting fingers of mesquite. Jean flipped on the headlights, washing out the color of the Stargazers’ sleep attire. She gave the engine a little more gas, challenging the SUV to live up to its name. A thought occurred, a snapshot elbowing aside the reality outside the window. She imagined the Stargazers turning their heads in unison, thousands of unfocused eyes finding a new purpose. 

Jean shuddered as if a spider dipped beneath her collar to explore the ridges of her spine.

Then she saw it, a quick wink of fire within the crowd. A cigarette cherry. She knew it at once.

A smoking Stargazer? Jean lifted her foot off the gas pedal, allowing gravity to pull the SUV forward at a walking pace. She craned her neck, searching the haggard faces for the smoker.

“Can’t see shit,” she whispered.

Maybe it was the sunlight reflecting off a metal roof miles away. That made more sense than a Stargazer smoking. As this thought planted roots in her mind, she saw it again, and caught a fleeting glimpse of his face, his shifting eyes. He was not dressed like the others. He wore a visor hat, red most likely but the color was difficult to distinguish, and an apron, possibly green. His gait was different as well, not the hypnotized shuffle of the others but something more deliberate. He looked at the ground, matching his steps with the Stargazer in front of him so as not to entangle their feet. 

“Is he …”

Different and familiar. She did not recognize the young man, but felt she knew something about him. Jean could just keep driving, put the young man and his plight in her rearview mirror as she had done throughout her life. It felt better to leave, to move on and build a wall between her present and the hidden memories turning to fossils. There were many versions of Jean who would have done just that.

But not this one.

She pressed the horn. If the Stargazers intended to kill her, they would have done it. If what she suspected about the young man was true, this was how she would know. He flinched. The cigarette tumbled from his lips. Then he turned and looked at her.