X-80 Oppenheimer

Part 1: Taken

         Alsoomse was already tired of the day’s work, and the mist hadn’t yet lifted from the cool, quiet waters of Aquia Creek. As all the Patawomeck women and young boys did each morning, she had risen early and prepared for another day of tending the tribe’s nets. It wasn’t the most arduous task that the elders and the Dictates had laid down but neither was it the least. After a winding trudge through the Silver Maple trees that grew so thick on the banks of the Potomac river, she had shucked out of her patchwork of skins and salvaged old-world cloth and slid down into the icy waters of the creek. Since then she had spent her time half-wading, half-swimming between the tall catchpoles, checking their nets. They stood like thin, boughless, aquatic trees, marking where each net was set and anchoring its possible contents. Now, shivering and with numb fingers, she rested, lay back on the relative dry of the bank, and looked up as the sun began to flicker through the lighter patches of mist. She watched as a samara, disturbed by a squirrel or a gust of wind floated down spinning a drunken jig towards the creek. 

        The Patawomeck survived. It is what they had always done. Alsoomse had been taught that after The End there had been years of great turmoil for all peoples. The Patawomeck, as they had done though the Years of Technology, endured. As other survivors found that their knowledge meant little in the New Time, a number gravitated to the tribe. Some of these were accepted and assimilated, and some were turned away. Without the technology that had previously rendered the tribe’s long-treasured knowledge obsolete, the Patawomeck once again thrived.

        As her mind wandered trying to imagine a time before the life she lived, Alsoomse heard a turkey call from up the creek—low, then high, then low again. It was the call of danger. Like a startled rabbit, Alsoomse was up on all fours, awkwardly worming her damp body into her clothes and scanning for danger through the mist. She ran low, back into the tree line and the undergrowth, and began to pick her way, trunk by trunk, up to where the others of the tribe had worked. Each time she stopped to suck down lungfuls of air, she scanned her eyes across the creek. She saw figures mirroring her movement, like wraiths fading in and out of the mist on the opposite bank. She couldn’t make out details but the figures looked heavyset and moved without the careful, well-trained woodcraft of the tribe. Who were they? The tribe had had scant contact with outsiders since the immediate years after The End. They believed that most other people who didn’t embrace the old ways, as they had, were doomed to struggle and eventually pass on from this world. As she thought this she came across the women and boys huddling on their bellies in a depression at the tree line. 

        Like scared fawns, they shook, clutching at one another, one boy stifling his scared sobs. She slithered into the depression and across to one of the women holding two younger boys. “Who are those people?” she whispered, keeping her voice low. The woman, Chepi, just shook her head and clutched the boys closer to her. “We need to run to the tribe and warn them of these people,” Alsoomse whispered, looking from scared face to scared face. Chepi shook her head and tried to slip deeper into the depression, as if to burrow right down into the mud. A light rain had started to fall, and as it did the mist, began to dissipate. Alsoomse turned on her belly and slid through the sucking mud to the rim of their hiding place, slowly parting the undergrowth. Through the last tendrils of mist she could make out the figures, closer now, beginning to wade the river. Her keen nose, used to the fresh smells of forest and stream, caught at something on the wind. A fetid scent of illness and rot like a hunted deer, wounded but not found until the flesh had begun to putrefy, set her mind reeling. She knew in her heart that these figures crossing the creek meant the Patawomeck harm.

        She let herself slide silently back down to where the others lay and again pulled herself close to Chepi. “They will be on us soon, Chepi! I will run up the creek and draw the outsiders away. You must get the children back to the tribe and warn the elders.” Again Chepi tried to shy away from her gaze. Alsoomse reached out and held the woman’s chin in her mud-smeared hand, bringing her face back under her gaze. “You must!” she growled, louder than she had intended. The woman, shocked out of her fugue by the authority in the girl’s voice, turned and began to usher the others towards the side of the hole nearest the deep woods. Looking back, she locked gazes with Alsoomse, tears of shame and fear but also pride stood in the corners of her eyes. Alsoomse readied her muscles, bunched like a wildcat about to pounce, and leapt out of the depression.

        No longer crouching low, but in full, long-limbed flight, Alsoomse shot away from the hole, bare feet pounding the soft, wet earth. The rain had done away with the last of the mist, and she saw the wide, dark surface of Aquia Creek stretching past on her right, speckled with the kisses of raindrops. To her alarm, the figures that had seemed so ethereal only moments before were now solid, tall men, dressed in rags and dragging themselves onto the bank. As they gained their feet, she turned her head for a split second to see the other Patawomeck disappearing into the woods, driven on by Chepi, still clutching one of the boys to her chest. A crack like thunder shook Alsoomse, and suddenly her mouth was full of leaves and mud. She tasted blood, and her vision swam. She tried to rise, but a pain like nothing she had ever felt before stopped her. She managed to roll onto her side, but the forest was growing dark. Another booming sound—closer this time—and she saw Chepi fall. As if hit by an invisible arrow, Chepi had tumbled face down in the leaves and did not move. As Alsoomse lay there in the mud, rain softly massaging her back, she heard the last boy’s cries abruptly stop. Then, nothingness overtook her.