Parallel U: The Words—and Worlds—Of Dakota Rusk: December 2013

Here’s the first chapter to PARALLEL U. - FRESHMAN YEAR. You can read the rest by buying the ebook (just 99 cents!) or the trade paperback. Not a shabby gift idea, either. Just sayin’.

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Oh, it was a beautiful day!

The sun pushed past the tar-black clouds, spilling golden joy like honey from a jar. The winds had slowed as well, to just under 160 kilometers an hour—not even enough to uproot a tree. There was far less cinder and ash in the air than usual, so I could make out the blasted thicket across the soybean field—a thicket I couldn’t ordinarily see unless I was close enough to throw a rock at it. And the thermometer outside my window read 51 degrees, making it the warmest August morning I could remember.

Why, oh why did it have to be so gorgeous on the day I had to go?

I sat on my bed and packed the last of my clothes into my suitcase, trying not to look out the window. It would be my first time leaving home—the first night I’d spend away from my parents, my brother, the house where I was born. I kept telling myself, You’re seventeen, it’s time you went out into the world; but that was just the problem.

I wasn’t going out into the world. I was going someplace else entirely.

There was no mistaking how big a deal this was. I hadn’t even left yet, and it had already changed my life. My parents had become noticeably shy around me, as if I was already the stranger I might soon become.

It was hardest on Cody. He was three years younger than me and very much a baby brother, even though he was now a teenager himself. I’d had to spend my childhood studying my parents, trying to make sense of the world from the confusing, contradictory clues they gave off; but when Cody was a kid, he never needed to do that. He’d had me to explain everything to him. And he’d depended on me ever since.

Now I was going away, and he was only just starting to realize what that meant. Suddenly he was shy around me, too, not sure of what to say to me, what to think about life without me. We used to spend our days together, inseparable, but lately it was almost like he hid from me. I missed him. And I hadn’t even gone yet.

I sighed and looked out the window again. The winds had torn open a hole the size of a tractor in the clouds, and one whole section of the farm was all yellow and glowing. When we were kids, Cody and I would whoop with happiness at such a sight, quickly suit up, and tear outside to jump around and dance in the warmth and the light before the clouds closed up again.

But I wasn’t a kid anymore. Something was different now. I could feel it inside—something restless, something reaching. I was sorry to be leaving Cody; but I was ready for new challenges, new experiences that he couldn’t be part of.

A rustling at the door made me turn away from the window; and there he was, leaning against the jamb. How long had he been standing there? I felt a stab of guilt, like he might have been reading my thoughts.

“Hi,” I said.

He dragged one toe across the floor. “Still packing?” he asked listlessly, like he wasn’t really interested.

“Figured that out, huh?” I said, nodding at my open suitcase.

But he didn’t laugh, or tease me back. Instead he crept in and sat on the edge of the bed—lightly, as if at any second he might change his mind and run back out. He watched as I folded up one of my old radiation suits, and when I was about to put it in the suitcase he said, “That one doesn’t fit you anymore.”

I looked down at it, like I was seeing it for the first time. “No, I guess it doesn’t.”

“Plus,” he added, “you won’t really need it where you’re going, right?”

“Right,” I said. I dropped the suit back on the bed.

I was afraid to say or do anything else; this was the closest we’d come to talking about my leaving since the day the letter came. Then, everyone had been excited and proud; it was only a few weeks later that the doubts and worries had set in.

Outside, the hole in the clouds closed up and the big bowl of sunlight disappeared.

“Tell me again why you have to go,” Cody blurted, with a catch in his voice that took me completely by surprise. I was afraid he might cry, and I couldn’t allow that. Not on such a beautiful day. Not on the day I was going away.

“I don’t...have to go,” I said, choosing my words carefully. “I want to.” He looked at me, not understanding—or not letting himself understand. “It’s an honor. I couldn’t say no. Plus, it’s so...I mean, it could open up so many...” Agh! It was crazy hard to talk with him looking at me this way—eyes wide, almost begging me to make it all make sense to him. “I have a chance to do something, to improve all our lives—not just mine.”

“You won’t know anyone there,” he said. “They won’t get you at all.”

“Only at first. That’s the whole point of the place. Bridging the gap that divides us. Learning about each other.”

“Parallel U.,” he said with a sneer in his voice.

“Yes,” I said, tossing it back at him, but without the sarcasm, “Parallel U.” He scowled and pulled at a loose thread on my blanket. To cheer him up, I said, “You might go there yourself, someday.”

He looked up at me with an expression that said, We both know I’ll never leave Kansas. And it was true; I was the exceptional one in the family—the one whose mind moved like lightning, whose curiosity expanded beyond the framework of the tiny life we knew here and grasped for something bigger, something grander.

I closed my suitcase. Another awkward silence fell over us that Cody broke by saying, “Are there any other parallels like ours? Where there was The War, and everything?”

I’d already considered this; investigated it, in fact. I tried to phrase my findings so he could understand them. “There are some parallels where something like The War happened; but mostly the people all died.”

“So there really won’t be anyone like you,” he said, a tone of bitter triumph in his voice.

“Probably not. But there’ll be people there who are as different as me. That’s the whole point of Parallel U. Ever since the Veil was pierced, and they discovered all the different parallels—all the alternate Earths where history took different paths—they’ve been trying to bring people together to share their experiences and to pool their knowledge.”

“I know,” he said defensively. I had to watch myself; I didn’t want to come off like I was lecturing him.

I began again. “I may meet people from parallels where America was colonized by the Spanish instead of the English. Or where Christianity never took hold and western civilization is still pagan. Or where the Nazis won World War Two. Though in that case,” I added with a smile, “I hope not.”

“How are you even supposed to talk to them?” he asked, desperate to find some flaw in my plans, some reason for me to give up at the last moment and stay home.

“It’ll be easy,” I said. “I already speak English. And since the physicists who first pierced the Veil were British, that’s the school’s official language.”

Cody had used up all his arguments. He turned away and sulked.

“Don’t,” I said. “Come on, Cody. It’s not like I want to go. I mean, I do; I want to go, but I don’t want to leave. Not you. Not Mom and Dad. If only I could split myself in two!”

He refused to look at me. “I don’t care if you leave or not. I just think you’d be happier at home.”

“Cody...” I stopped myself; I didn’t want our last talk together to be an argument. “Listen, I’ll be home for holidays. And probably for the summer.”

He whirled. “Probably for the summer? You’re not sure?”

“Well...no. A lot of the students come from parallels where schools don’t have a summer break. Of course the university accommodates them. And since I’m only on a two-year scholarship, I might take advantage of that and apply for classes during June and Jul—”

“You can’t wait to get away from us,” he interrupted. “You can’t wait to forget you ever knew us and be embarrassed when anyone reminds you of us.”

My shoulders slumped. “Cody, you know that’s not so...”

He fled the room.

I sat numbly on the bed for a while. Inky, the family cat, slid up onto the covers and rubbed against my arm and purred, as though this were just another day and so would be tomorrow, and I surprised myself by bursting into tears and clutching him to my chest. He panicked and scratched my arm, and when I loosened my grip he propelled himself away from me.

I was upset, and I knew why. Cody’s accusation had hit a nerve: I did want to leave. I didn’t want to waste my life—waste my mind—on this scorched, barren world, where the most anyone could hope for was to stumble along from season to season, scratching out the barest living possible from the hot, irradiated soil. I felt such a whirlwind of possibility and hope, so many feelings and ambitions, and there was nowhere in this parallel where I could act on any of them.

I wanted to go away, and never come back.

Except...I didn’t. I was born here. I grew up here. The only people who loved me, in all the dozens of parallels on record, were right here.

I brought my knees up to my face and clutched my ankles, and cried some more. And that’s how Mom found me, twenty minutes later.

“Merri, honey, it’s time to go,” she said, and from the swollen look on her face I could tell she’d been crying too. We hugged, and she added, “You’re going such a long way away.”

I sniffled and gazed up at her. “Depends on how you look at it,” I said. “In one sense, I’m just going to England.”

“An England. One of many. And one I’ll probably never see.”

“I know,” I said, suddenly feeling the weight of my decision. Apparently Cody had gotten to me after all. “Mom,” I said, and I didn’t need to go on; the terrified tone in my voice said it all.

“Hush, now,” she said, squeezing my shoulder. “You’ve gotten this far, so it’s no time for doubts. Besides, you know what I always say: Better to give it a try than to miss out and cry.”

I laughed in spite of everything. “I can’t believe one of your lame expressions is actually making me feel better.”

She pretended to be shocked. “Who says my expressions are lame?”

“Everyone,” I said, and she put her hands around my neck and mock-strangled me. I cracked up.

Then she kissed me on the forehead and checked the seams of my radiation suit, and said, “You’d better get going, your father’s waiting.” And her voice sounded funny, like those were the last syllables she was going to be able to manage for a while. So I picked up my suitcase and went to the garage, where I found Dad loading my bags into the back of the truck.

He looked up brightly and said, “Guess my little girl’s really heading off to college!” I started crying again, and he looked guilty, like he didn’t know what he’d said wrong; then he very thoroughly double-checked the boot’s radiation seals. It should’ve taken him about five seconds, but he kept at it until I reined in my bawling, which took quite a bit longer.

He gently helped me into the truck, climbed up after me, and shut and sealed the doors. He started the motor and pressed the button to lower the shield behind him; the garage door noisily scrolled back and the truck pulled out onto the gravel drive.

I braced myself for the first slam of the wind into the vehicle; with that out of the way, I craned my neck for a final look at the only place I’d ever called home: the tiny farmhouse, built into the side of a hill to protect it from the worst of the ion storms, and surrounded by the acres of blasted fields that had, with tireless effort, day in and day out, yielded up just enough sustenance to keep the family going all these years. Suddenly I had a “grown-up moment,” as Cody called them—one of those sudden realizations where I grasped something terribly important that never occurred to me as a kid. I realized how fragile our lives had been, and how one small miscalculation, one injury or spell of bad luck, might have ruined us entirely. And there was no more government to bail us out or even lend a helping hand.

I looked at Dad as though seeing him for the first time, and tried to imagine the load he shouldered every day. I wondered why it was that I never appreciated this about him till now, when I was saying goodbye. And almost as quickly I knew the answer: It was only because I was saying goodbye that I could see him this way.

I wanted to say something, to let him know I understood and respected and loved him for it. And I was trying to find the right words when, at just about the point where our property ends and the Loughlins’ begins, he didn’t watch where he was going and hit a nest by the side of the road, and as he was backing up, about a hundred cockroaches came spilling out of it and swarmed over the truck. Dad cursed, using some pretty blunt words I’d never heard him use before, and scrambled to activate the grid on the truck’s exterior that repelled the roaches with an electric charge.

I looked out the window as the roaches fell to the side of the road, sizzling and smoking. Dad said, as he always did whenever we encountered them, “Damn filthy things—big as dogs.” Because apparently when he was a kid, cockroaches were no bigger than your thumb, and it was only after The War that radiation mutated them to jumbo size. Dad liked to tease Mom by saying there’s no reason we shouldn’t use them as a food source—they were so plentiful, and they were pure protein, and he knew people who treated them like livestock and had recipes for them and everything, which would make Mom go very quiet and shut herself in the bathroom till he changed the subject. But I know he was never really serious about it, because he was always unnerved by the roaches too, no matter how many times we ran into them; and also, the stink of them was just awful. You’d never, ever want it in your kitchen. Even now I thought I could smell it leaking through the radiation seals, but that was impossible; it was just my traumatized brain filling in the stench I knew was outside.

Dad seemed pretty shaken up; in fact, a lot more than usual. And come to think of it, it wasn’t like him to hit a nest like that. He was usually the most careful driver ever. And all at once I realized he was upset about my leaving too, and it was distracting him, affecting his focus.

He checked the truck’s battery level; it was now dangerously low. Activating the repellent grid had seriously depleted it. He’d have to stop for a charge after dropping me off, and maybe even before. And I wondered if maybe he even hit the nest on purpose, so he’d have an excuse for running out the truck’s power and missing my appointment at the Terminus Dock, which would mean keeping me home a while longer.

But no, that was silly; it wasn’t like him at all.

Was it?

I reached over and placed my hand in his. He closed his fingers around mine and gave me a smile. Then without letting go of me, he used his free hand to steer the truck back onto the gravel road, and we drove the rest of the way in silence.

I wonder now, many months later, about what he did after he left me—whether he stopped to recharge the truck, or took a gamble that he could make it home and charge it overnight in our own garage. Either way, I like to think he made it back in time to see Mom and Cody; I like to think he reached them first, so that they were together when it happened. But I’ll never know for sure.

I spent Thanksgiving week in the wilds of rural North Carolina, so I wasn’t aware of the tumult that reigned on Black Friday until I got back home and saw some of the astonishing clips online. The metaphor I once used for these kinds of nationally incited mass-shopping binges was that of lemmings, racing to collective suicide by drowning. But the level of violence has escalated since the idyllic days of, say, 2004. Now, a different metaphor comes to mind: the undead, brain-eating variety.

I think you can tell a lot about a culture by the genre fiction it embraces. For a long while, vampires ruled; and not just vampires, but hot vampires…vampires as dream lovers. That made sense to me, in a society in which sex had been so completely commodified that it had lost all its primal aura of mystery and menace. People missed the element of risk that used to come with falling in love or lust; they longed for the feeling of one kiss being worth torching the rest of their lives to cinders. Vampire fiction (and movies, and TV shows) supplied that, even as mainstream culture continued to streamline sexual behavior into a series of Add to Cart products and hook-up apps.

The recent rise of zombie fiction to spectacular prominence (starting a decade ago with 28 Days Later and culminating in The Walking Dead and World War Z) seems to me to have a similar societal prompt, one that becomes especially apparent around the holidays. Our culture has become increasingly predicated on consumption—on reflexively grasping for the newest and hippest and most tech-forward products dumped into the marketplace; and since our major corporate players have turned planned obsolescence into a science, they’ve pretty much guaranteed we keep buying the same things over and over again. (“You need Beta tapes…no, VHS…no, DVDs…no, Blu-Rays…no, you need digital downloads…no, you should be streaming.”) The result is a kind of sustained hysteria. We never feel like we have enough, and we’re always being exhorted to get more, more, more. And we respond with mindless, relentless obedience.

Enter the zombie apocalypse. This represents our current worst cultural nightmare: the idea that even in death, we won’t be done consuming. We’ll still have to get up and go stalking around in search of more. And every brain we eat will just create another zombie who’s then our competitor for the diminishing supplies that are left.

That’s why I think most zombie fiction out there still hasn’t hit the right angle. It’s not the living survivors who should be the focus: it’s the zombies themselves. We should be seeing things through their eyes, and face, with them, the unimaginable horror awaiting them at the logical end of their rampage—the same one facing every patriotic red-blooded shopper in America:

What happens when there’s literally nothing left to consume?

Wednesday, December 25, 2013

Merry Christmas...

Friday, December 20, 2013

Chapter 1

Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Trade paperback now available

Monday, December 16, 2013

Prologue

Sunday, December 15, 2013

Merri Terryl

Friday, December 13, 2013

Gerrid Selk

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Darius m-1119

Saturday, December 7, 2013

Fabia Terentia

Wednesday, December 4, 2013

Meet the Parallel U. crew

Tuesday, December 3, 2013

Black Friday and the Zombie Apocalypse