We—my family, I mean—were in bumper-to-bumper traffic on our way to my mother-in-law’s house for Sunday lunch when our phones flashed red and the Alert sounded overhead for the second time that day. Like the other drivers on the highway, I slowed to a stop and yanked up the parking brake. Once the three of us were safely crouched down on the hot road beside the car, Neal distributed the headsocks—our name for the gas masks—and I turned around to make sure Sarah had her straps tight enough for a good seal.
She shrugged me off. “I can do it myself, Mom,” she said, already irritated, because the mask would ruin her makeup and also because she’d missed church that morning. I was sympathetic—about the makeup, at least. “My knees are on fire,” she shouted, lifting one at a time off the asphalt.
“Mine, too,” I said. “I’ll try to remember to keep a quilt in the car from now on.”
We were going to be late for lunch. No way around it. We made this trip every other month, a ritual going back to the early years of our marriage: Sunday lunches with Neal’s mother, Edina, and his twin brother, Cecil, and Cecil’s unfortunate daughter, Mira.
[audio url="https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/196827065"]
Neal was on all fours behind me, his head hanging low. I shouted back to him, “Maybe we should call your mother and let her know?”
I wasn’t sure if he could hear me over the noise: This is an Alert. This is an Alert. This is an Alert.
Have you ever wondered whose voice it actually is? Did they pick a random guy off the street to record the Alert, or did they listen to a thousand audition tapes before settling on that relaxed, bassy timbre? It’s a voice that surrounds you, wraps you up like a soft blanket. The AlertBots blasting the message at you are way up in the sky—I realize this—but sometimes it sounds as if the voice were right there beside you, or even inside your own head. It’s a voice that drowns out all other thought, which, it occurs to me now, maybe the intended effect. Perhaps the voice was designed this way, to make us cattle-brained. So as to prevent pandemonium?
Ahead of us and behind us on the road, shining in the sun, were hundreds of cars, and even more passengers, all of them frozen just like us, families on their hands and knees and with monstrous black insectoid silicone masks strapped over their faces. Even after we’d lived this way for a full year, it was an otherworldly sight. I often think we look like an alien race preparing for conquest. Preparing to be conquested, is what I mean to say.
“This is absurd,” Neal said. He stood and looked up at the sky with his hand shielding his goggled eyes from the sun.
“Get down!” I yelled.
“I don’t hear or see anything.”
“Of course not. It’s all too far up.”
Somewhere up there, above the clouds, in the high hazy blue-black atmosphere, the war is being fought, always—by swarms of Snakes (the long skinny drones that drop bombs) and Jailbirds (the ones that carry germs and gases) and of course Sweepers and Guardian-Zs (which keep the bombs and germs and gases from reaching us) and all the other drones and micro-drones and nano-drones the cable news hasn’t come up with fun names for yet. I’ve seen the photos that show up in the newspapers and on the countless drone-watch sites, but those images could be of almost anything: fast-moving birds, streaks of light, a bug on the lens, a flying saucer.
“I’m sick of it,” Neal said, once we were in the car and (barely) moving again. “Look,” he said, and twisted in his seat to show me the back of his head.
“What am I looking for?” I asked, both hands on the wheel, because I am a cautious driver, if nothing else.
“The straps,” he said. “The straps are rubbing my head raw.”
He was right. I could see the faint banded outline across the back of his head where his straw-blond hair had been thinned to a fuzz.
“Oh, you look fine,” I said. “You’re just being vain. No one will ever notice that. Have you tried loosening the straps some?”
His mask was in his lap, looking up at him. “They’re as loose as they’ll go. I’ve just got a fat head, I guess.”
I pattered my fingers along the back of his neck. It’s something I do when he’s agitated.
“Not now,” he said, swatting my hand away.
“Whatever,” I said.
We’d been sniping at each other recently. I’d been after him for trading in his truck and leasing a new one without consulting me. Neal had been irritated over some texts between me and my high-school boyfriend—I’d been a little too cavalier with the “x”s and the “o”s. I’d like to believe that the low-wattage stress of all the Alerts was responsible for these flare-ups.
We were off the highway now, driving along a small road that ran parallel to the train tracks. Edina lives in a town an hour away from us. We were getting close to her house when all our phones flashed red and it sounded again: This is an Alert, on repeat, ad nauseam. Neal smacked the glove compartment with his palm. “We’re never going to get there if this keeps up,” he said. I stopped the car across the street from a white clapboard Methodist church. The sign out front said, “You know how to interpret the face of the earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?” Inside the church, all the congregants were no doubt down on their knees, praying in their headlocks.
I’d caught Sarah doing this before, praying during the Alerts. Theoretically, we were members of a Lutheran church (theoretically because we hardly ever went), but recently Sarah had started attending services, plus Wednesday-night meetings, at a nondenominational church along with a friend. A boy, I should say. His name was Marcus, and for her birthday he’d given Sarah a study Bible that she’d since highlighted and marked up with so many notes. I didn’t know what to make of it. Pills, liquor, unprotected sex, ugly death by biological weapon—these were the things I’d feared for her. Never study Bibles.
“Marcus says there are drones in the Bible,” she’d told me once. “The stars will fall from the sky at the end of days.”
“And what else does Marcus say?” I asked.
“Don’t be like that,” she’d said. “You should look it up for yourself.”
Sarah didn’t appear to be praying now. We were in position alongside the car. My shoulder was touching the front tire. Brake dust-smudged my dress. I could feel the heat of the car and the road and the sun. I was wearing too much perfume. All of us were sweating profusely.
Beneath the omnipresent boom of This is an Alert, the church bells pealed. At first, I wondered if this might be an act of defiance if the person responsible for the tolling was doing it as some sort of protest, but then it occurred to me that the bells were likely automated and set to a timer. Just beyond the steeple, high up in the air, I saw what looked like one of the AlertBots sweeping across the sky, trumpeting the voice at us. I know that’s unlikely, but they are known to fly at lower altitudes than the rest.
As expected, we were late for lunch. Edina was upset. She met us at the door, barefoot, arms crossed.
“You know you got to add thirty minutes to your trip,” she said. “Always, always.”
Like most of the houses in the neighbourhood, hers was a one-story brick place, set about a hundred feet off the road. The neighbouring yards were littered with broken trampolines, motorbikes, that sort of thing. I’m not being snobby—that’s just what it’s like. Our own house is only a little nicer. (Neal teaches economics at the high school and paints interiors in the summer. I do billing for a dentist.)
Edina is a no-nonsense woman, wiry and strong, a breast-cancer survivor. Her hair returned feathery and gray after the chemo, and she keeps it short and likes to wear a do-rag. We followed her through the small house, across the recessed shag-carpeted den, and into the cramped kitchen. The oven clock was blinking, needing to be reset. The wall behind the stove was splattered with yellow cooking grease. She’d made us a proper Southern lunch: collards, mac-and-cheese casserole, fried chicken, the whole deal. Neal had grown up eating like this, and though he claimed not to mind my flaxseed pancakes and whole-wheat spaghetti with black-bean meatballs, I couldn’t help noticing how high he loaded his plate anytime we ate at his mother’s.
The four of us helped ourselves to what was on the stove and then sat down at a card table on the small screen porch off the back of the house.
“Your brother couldn’t be here for lunch, but he’s coming over with Mira in a while,” Edina said to Neal. “You got your bathing suits with you, right?”
Edina had recently added an aboveground pool to her backyard. She’d called me over the phone at least twice to remind me about the bathing suits.
“Dang,” I said. “I knew we forgot something.”
“I’ll call Cecil and tell him to bring one of Mira’s extras,” Edina said, undeterred. “For Sarah.”
Mira and Sarah are cousins. They’re both fourteen years old, but Mira—and I really don’t know how else to say this—is fat. And it’s no wonder: the girl slurps up tubs of Mello Yello all day long. None of her suits would fit Sarah in a million years.
“Don’t worry about it, Granny,” Sarah said, diplomatically. “I’m not really in the mood to swim anyway. I’ll just watch today.”
“Just watch?” Edina said. “This is a pool party. Try to enjoy yourself or you’ll never—”
The voice boomed: This is an Alert. This is an Alert.
Neal took one more bite of mashed potatoes and gravy before pulling the duffel off the back of his chair. He removed our headsocks. Edina had left hers in the kitchen. Neal, the dutiful son, marched into the house and grabbed it for her.
We slid down to the floor. I could barely see anyone’s eyes through the plastic lenses. How many times had we sat looking at one another like this? Waiting for something terrible to happen? We looked just like every other family in the country, of course. Everywhere you go, it’s the same. The old couple watching sitcom reruns, in masks. The yoga class holding child’s pose, everyone in spandex and masks. The football fields full of players in masks instead of helmets, the scoreboard timers paused, entire stadiums packed with fans wearing foam hands and masks that smear their face paint.
Neal reached up for his iced tea. He pulled his headsock sideways, away from his mouth, and sipped.
“What time will Cecil and Mira be here?” I shouted at Edina over the Alerts.
She shrugged. “He said after lunch. So anytime, I guess.”
I don’t much care for Cecil. He’s Neal’s identical twin, but you’d hardly know it anymore. Recently, he has begun to look like a man with a barely concealed illness: pronounced cheekbones, sunken eyes. Sometimes I think of him as Neal’s mean corpse. Years ago, he slipped into my bedroom one night and tried to pass himself off as Neal—as a goof, he later claimed—but I knew it was him by the way he kissed me. That’s not the only reason I don’t like him. He has a habit of taking jokes too far, of making them unnecessarily cruel or perverse. “I love this rabbit so much I could marry it,” I remember Mira saying once, as a chubby little girl, about her new pet bunny. “She loves it so much she’d just about rape it,” Cecil said, looking at all of us, expecting a big laugh and getting none. I tried to spend as little time around Cecil as possible, though I did feel sorry for Mira—so fat, her father so snide, her mother so dead.
This is an—
The voice crackled away, finally, into nothingness, and we were alone again with our lardy lunches. We clambered back up to our chairs, arranged our paper napkins on our laps.
“I swear,” Neal said, forking his collards. “Can’t we get through just one meal? It’s bad for my digestion.”
As if on cue, the voice started right back up. Neal let go of his fork, and it clacked down against his plate. Of course, the Alerts weren’t usually like this, so excessive, so many in a single day, and it was easy to feel irritated. We crawled under the table again with our masks, but as soon as we had them on our faces the Alert was over.
“Next time I’m not even bothering with it,” Neal said, taking his chair.
“You don’t mean that,” I said.
“Be honest,” he said. “Don’t you ever wonder what the point is?” [cartoon id="a19014"]
“The point, you idiot, is that it might save your life one day,” Edina barked at him. “Ruthie Roble, down the street—a man her daughter used to work with at the fishery, he was living in Nebraska, and his whole family got sick and died after they forgot their masks in the car.”
“Somehow I doubt that,” Neal said.
“If that’s true, it’s terrible,” I said.
“Why would Ruthie lie about such a thing?” Edina said. “Of course it’s true.”
“I’m not saying she lied, Edina,” I said. “Just that it sounds awfully secondhand. Surely it would have been in the news.” The truth is that we were always hearing stories like this one: the guy in California who got blown up on his way to work; the Sweeper that crashed right through some poor family’s roof at dinnertime; the anti-mask group in Oklahoma whose members all died holding hands when a Jailbird dropped a chemical bomb right into their compound. So many almost believable rumors.
Edina waved me off. “That’s the world we live in now. A whole war right over our heads. Who knows how many countries are involved. And if anything gets through, if anything does manage to come all the way down, that’s it for us.” She snapped her fingers. “We wear the masks. We take cover. It’s what we do. It’s the price we pay for staying alive.”
This is an Alert. This is an Alert.
Edina, Sarah, and I all slipped on our headsocks and lowered ourselves down to the floor on our hands and knees. Neal stayed in his chair, sitting up even straighter than usual. He nibbled on a fried chicken leg, tearing away a dark, greasy sliver and chewing on it viciously, happily. I couldn’t believe it. What if he died? What if he started bleeding from every orifice, right there in front of us at the lunch table?
“Get down here,” I yelled, tugging at his shorts.
“I didn’t raise you to be so stupid,” Edina said.
It was odd, Edina and me being on the same side of an argument, and I’ll admit that it did make me reconsider my position, a little bit. We watched Neal chow down on more chicken. Then, without any warning, Sarah yanked off her mask and climbed back up into her chair. She squeezed some lemon into her tea. She seemed proud of herself.
“No,” I said. “Not you, too.”
“If Dad doesn’t have to, then why should I?”
“Because you’re only fourteen. Because you’ve got your whole life ahead of you,” I said.
This is an Alert. This is an Alert.
Sarah slumped back in her chair. “Marcus says they use a voice instead of a siren because it’s supposed to remind us of God.”
“I don’t want to hear what Marcus says,” I said.
“It’s literally a voice in the sky!” she said, laughing.
She started pecking at her food again, ignoring me. I might have resisted more if it weren’t for the fact that the Alert was bringing on one of my headaches. I could feel it, just behind my eyes, that bulleting throb. I dug through my purse for the aspirin. I slid my mask up to swallow the pills. The sweat cooled on my face, and I could breathe again. If my family was going to die, I didn’t want to be left alone. Not with Edina.
I climbed back up into my chair and joined them at the table.
“That’s the spirit,” Neal said, smiling at me. “Life continues. We will not be afraid.”
I flattened my napkin and draped it across my lap. Never had such a small gesture felt so daring—so bold. I don’t know how to describe it. After so much ducking and covering, it was liberating to hear the alert-voice and simply ignore it. Edina was still on the floor, her mask snug over her do-rag. Looking at her, I began to pity her, this poor woman: she’d survived cancer only to live like this? In a perpetual state of fear? And to think that I’d been living the same reality until only a few moments earlier.
The voice broke off midsentence, and Edina emerged from under the table. She sat there, quietly, not even touching her food.
“You know,” Neal said, “I think I’m in the mood for a swim after all.”
He pushed away from the table and began unbuttoning his shirt. He kicked off his boat shoes. He dropped his shirt on the floor and then stepped out of his shorts. He was standing there in his underwear.
“Gross,” Sarah said, laughing, amazed.
We watched him open the screen door and descend the wooden steps to the yard. The pool was a giant squatty cylinder, just a few feet from the house. Neal climbed the metal ladder and fell into the water face first, belly flopping. He stayed underwater for a long time and then started doing the backstroke. “Feels fantastic,” he shouted to us.
I wasn’t sure what had come over him—or me. I had a sudden urge to strip down and join him in my bra and panties. But right then, unfortunately, Cecil and Mira came around the corner of the house, already in their bathing suits. Mira had a long pink foam noodle over her left shoulder and a little white dog under her right arm. The dog’s name was Yoda, a bichon frise, and he peed in the grass as soon as she set him down.
“Don’t even tell me you’re skinny-dipping in there,” Cecil said to Neal.
Neal swam to the edge of the pool and spat some water at his brother.
“Watch it,” Cecil said. “Hey, now.”
Mira waved at Sarah through the screen. “I’m not swimming,” Mira said, in a monotone. “I just want to tan some.” She held up a brown bottle of tanning oil.
“I didn’t even bring a suit,” Sarah said. “But I guess I could sit in the chairs with you.”
I helped Edina clear the plates off the table and take them into the kitchen.
“Don’t be upset,” I told her. “We’ll wear the masks again. Of course we will. Everyone’s just feeling worn down, that’s all. It’s like you said—it’s a party.”
She grimaced and started scrubbing the plates.
When I went back out in the yard, Cecil was in the pool with Neal. Both of them were guzzling beers from a Styrofoam cooler Cecil had brought. Cecil looked even thinner than the last time I’d seen him, his ribs poking through his moon-white skin. He and Neal crushed the empty cans and tossed them over the side of the pool into the grass. Cecil asked if I would bring them two more from the cooler. Predictably, he splashed me.
And you know something? I didn’t really mind. I wasn’t bothered by it. It was so hot out, and there was something in the air—a crackle, an electricity, a vibe, whatever you want to call it. It’s that feeling you get before you jump off a train trestle into a lake you don’t know the depth of. The feeling you get when a man who’s not your husband gives you a look, from across a restaurant or a party, and you just know that if you wanted him (and you sort of do) he’d be yours.
“Neal says y’all are done wearing the masks,” Cecil said. “He’s says you’ve had enough.”
“I’m not sure it’s a permanent thing,” I said.
“Well, he sure has me convinced,” Cecil said. “I always thought it was a bunch of bullshit anyway.”
A few minutes later, it was back: This is an Alert.
Cecil and Neal each drank another beer.
Sarah and Mira were lounging in beach chairs next to the house, flipping lazily through magazines from Mira’s bag. Mira’s phone, nestled between her legs, flashed red.
This is an Alert. This is an Alert.
Yoda ran circles and yapped. Mira said that the dog did this every single time there was an Alert. Through the kitchen window, I could see Edina in her mask, watching us, her face elongated by the black silicone proboscis, like some kind of praying mantis. The sight of her gave me a shudder. I wasn’t sure what to do with myself. The urge to find a spot and crouch welled up in me. I wondered if this was just a Pavlovian response. I walked around the perimeter of the pool to be closer to Neal.
“You think this is a good idea?” I asked him.
He smiled and ducked under the water, his hair fanning out across the surface. He kept his right hand, the beer hand, raised in the air, above the water. When he came back up, face dripping, he reported that he could barely hear the voice under there. I took off my dress, dropping it in the grass, and got into the pool. The water was warm, almost hot. My bra stuck to my breasts. Cecil’s eyes darted at me. I stayed away from him, but I won’t lie: I may have been taunting him a little. I hugged Neal and wrapped my legs around his waist. I kissed him hard and tasted the beer in his mouth. I tugged him underwater, and we sat on the bottom with our eyes open. Faintly, I could still hear the Alert, but it was like a voice from another world. Under the water we were safe and protected. Nothing could harm us down there. We were still underwater when the Alert ended.
Edina was waiting for us at the edge of the pool when we surfaced, her face imprinted with red creases. “At least protect your girls,” she pleaded with the three of us. “You can act like fools all you want, but it’s your job to make sure your kids are safe.”
“They’ll be fine, Mom,” Neal said. “Just relax. It’s a pool party, for God’s sake. We all deserve a little bit of fun, from time to time.”
I saw Edina’s point, of course. It was one thing for Neal and me to behave this way, but Sarah was just a teen-ager, and it was on us to protect her. I watched her spray tanning oil across her legs and arms, something I normally would have forbidden. All our rules were disintegrating at once, it seemed. Mira had pop-country music blasting on her cell phone.
I floated on my back for a moment, gazing up through the pine-tree limbs at the sky. I was searching, I guess, for any evidence of the war up there. Supposedly, people have spotted exhaust trails, puffs of smoke, and even explosive bursts of light on clear nights. Maybe, if we’d seen something like that, the danger would have seemed more real to us.
“You know what irks me?” Cecil said. “They never even asked us if we wanted the warnings. Maybe I don’t want to know every time my life’s in danger, you know?”
“It’s true,” Neal said. “There was never any real discussion about it. It all happened so fast. One day things were normal and the next we all had to carry masks around.”
Cecil sloshed out of the water, his skinny legs dripping, and he ran around the corner of the house in his sagging-wetsuit. A few minutes later he returned, grass stuck to his feet, hair slicked back. In his hand he had a small black gun.
“What on earth?” Edina asked. “Not another gun, Cecil, please. What’s it for?”
“I got a permit for this one,” he said, as if that answered her question.
“That a Glock?” Neal asked, almost scientifically, his arms hanging over the lip of the pool. At home we had a hunting rifle but no handguns.
“Glock, yeah,” Cecil said, serious-faced. He pointed the gun at the sky and squinted. The dog sniffed at his feet. “Stop it, Yoda,” he said, shaking his leg in a small circle, not bothering to look down.
Neal climbed out of the pool. His boxers suctioned his legs and crotch until he peeled the fabric off them with his fingers. He stood by his brother in the yard. Side by side, gazing up toward the sun, their chins raised and hair wet, they resembled each other more than they had in years, a fact I found slightly disconcerting.
Edina reached for the gun. “Don’t you dare fire it,” she said. Her hand fell over the end of the barrel.
“Oh, just let him shoot it,” I said. “If it’ll make him feel better.”
Cecil’s index finger was on the trigger, and for a moment I thought he might shoot a hole through Edina’s hand. But he shook her loose and marched ten feet away from everyone. Mira started giggling, and I wondered if she’d seen her father do this before, if this was a familiar stunt. The stunt being, I suppose, Get Drunk and Shoot at Armed Robots in the Sky. I was the only one in the pool now, Mira’s pink noodle between my legs like a horse.
Sarah abandoned her magazine at the end of her chair and came over to the pool to stand near me. She had her arms crossed. “You don’t think he’ll actually hit anything, do you?” she whispered, and looked up into the sky. “How far do bullets go?”
“Not far enough,” I said, uncertainly.
Right then, the voice returned for what seemed like the hundredth time that day: This is an Alert. This is an Alert. [cartoon id="a19022"]
I know this isn’t possible—because the voice never changes—but it sounded angrier to me than usual, a noise with teeth. Like God was upset. Edina sprinted up the wooden steps and into the house. All the daring had left me now. Maybe it was the introduction of the gun that had killed my nerve. I could feel the euphoria of the afternoon lifting, evaporating, and what was left was the bottomless apprehension that we were all going to die. I wanted us back in our headsocks. I wanted us safe again. I climbed out of the pool and looked around for a towel. My pubic hair was dark through my panties. I could feel Cecil watching me.
“Come on,” I said to Sarah, and grabbed her hand. “Let’s get inside.”
She slipped away from me. “You don’t need to worry about me, Mom. You don’t. I’m not afraid of dying.”
I stared into her eyes and saw that it was true: she had no fear of death. That frightened me more than the Alerts ever had. I was the mother of a child hungry for the end times. Is there anything more tragic?
“But you should be afraid,” I managed to say. “We all should.”
“Well, I’m not. Why should I be afraid when I know what comes next? Marcus says if Jesus was here—like, here right now, in this very back yard—there’s no way he’d put on a gas mask and stick his head between his legs.”
I didn’t know what to say. Sarah wasn’t Jesus. She was a fourteen-year-old girl with a study Bible and a self-righteous boyfriend. “Jesus didn’t have to deal with all this,” I said. “He didn’t have to deal with any drones over the Sea of Galilee.”
“Well, I guarantee you there are drones over the Sea of Galilee at this very moment,” she said, a bit smugly. “Because they’re everywhere. And it’ll be this way forever.”
And she was right, of course. The war was everywhere, all the time, invisible but constant, and its position overhead had cut us off from all that was beyond it, from the stars, from the universe, and possibly even from God. I imagined our prayers—mine, Sarah’s, everyone’s—as scraps of paper shredded in the high atmosphere and falling back to earth like pitiful confetti.
Cecil fired the gun, and we clapped our hands over our ears. Then he fired it a second time. All of us were looking up at the sky, even Edina, who’d come back outside and was now kneeling down beside her house, wearing her head sock.
This is an Alert, the voice shouted. This is an Alert, the voice beseeched. Repent, the voice seemed to scream. Treat each other better! While there’s still time!
“Let me see it,” Neal said, holding his hand out for the gun.
Cecil happily gave it to him. I’d never seen my husband fire anything but his hunting rifle. He stuck his arm up and out as though the handgun were a piece of high fruit that he was picking from a tree, as if hoping to shorten the distance between the bullet and the sky. He lowered it again, finger still on the trigger. “What if we hit one of ours?”
“None of them are ours, per se. Not anymore,” Cecil said emphatically, scratching his chest hair. “We lost control of them months ago. They’re A.I.—artificial intelligence. They’ve evolved to the point where they no longer need us. They’re operating on their own now. They’ve got their own agenda.”
I’d heard this theory before—on certain talk-radio shows, but never on any reputable news outlet. I couldn’t tell if Cecil really believed it or not. If the drones had their own agenda, I wanted to ask, then why weren’t we all dead already?
“Please, don’t—” Edina shouted. “Please.”
The Alert ended, though my ears continued to ring. Yoda stopped yapping and charged into the shrubs. We stood there for a few seconds adjusting to the silence, or to what felt like silence in the absence of the Alert: birds singing, leaves rustling, the low hum of the pool pump, a distant lawnmower revving back to life.
“I think that about does it,” Neal said.
Slowly, we got dressed and filed back into the house to cool off in the air-conditioning. Cecil locked the gun in his car. From the bathroom doorway, I watched Sarah wash the tanning oil off her arms. I’d decided I was going to love her harder. I was going to find her a new boyfriend.
“Let’s have Marcus over to the house for dinner,” I said.
“You mean it?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said. “And don’t feel like you have to hide it from me when you’re praying.”
“I’ve never hidden it.”
“You know what I mean.”
We went into the kitchen to help with the rest of the dishes and pots and pans. Mira poured some water in a coffee mug for Yoda. When the dog peed on the linoleum, she popped him on the rear end and sent him scampering into the den, where Cecil and Neal were setting up a game of checkers. Then Mira arranged a dry square of paper towel over the pee puddle and left the room. I was ready to go home. The pool party was over. I gathered our masks into the duffel and set it down at Neal’s feet.
“Few more minutes,” he said.
Yoda jumped up onto the couch. He clawed at an afghan blanket and started yapping.
“Shut up,” Mira said, and flicked him with her finger. “This dog is driving me crazy. He’s just not trained right.”
“And whose fault is that?” Cecil asked her.
The dog kept on yapping, even after Mira knocked him off the couch. He jumped up and down at her legs. “Stop scratching me!” she yelled.
“I think something is wrong with him,” Sarah said.
That’s when we heard it. I don’t exactly know how to describe it. A scissor-whistling or a whistle-scissoring, out in the back yard. Something chopped down through the pine-tree limbs and thudded against the roof. It bounced and rolled toward the back of the house. Neal rushed over to the window for a better look.
“Everyone put your masks on,” he said, and we all did, even Cecil and Mira. Mira dug a tiny mask out of her purse and strapped it over Yoda’s snout.
“What the hell was it?” Cecil asked. “Sounded like a chopper.”
“I can’t see anything,” Neal said.
Cecil opened the back door and stepped onto the porch. Stupidly or not, we all followed him. He led us down the wooden steps and into the yard. I was still wrapped in my towel. I motioned for Sarah to stay behind me. The soil was soft, and the object had left a messy divot in the earth where it had touched down. It wasn’t a Snake or a Sweeper; those I would have recognized from television. It wasn’t shaped like any craft we recognized. It was a small glass cylinder, like one of the cannisters you put your checks into for the teller at the bank drive-through, only this one had a metal cone, and at the top of the cone were three long plastic blades, one of which had snapped in half. The blades were still trying to rotate, and weakly rocked the cannister back and forth in the dirt.
“What if it’s a bomb?” Edina yelled. “We should all be running, shouldn’t we?”
Cecil leaned down and picked it up with both hands. The blades started turning again with a rattled, ratcheting sound. It looked as if it were trying to escape his grip. We studied it, this thing from the sky. The glass—if that’s what it was—had cracked on one side. Without saying a word, Cecil marched it over to the pool and dropped it in the water.
“Why’d you do that?” Mira yelled through her mask, which, I now noticed, had pink bedazzled eyebrows over the goggles.
Cecil was very quiet. He wiped his hands across his bathing suit. The cannister had come to a rest at the bottom of the clear water that we’d been swimming in only thirty minutes earlier. We crowded around the pool to watch it. The blades stopped moving. After a few seconds, the canister started to bubble from one end, where it was cracked, and we stepped back. Then a deep-reddish liquid swirled around it like blood.
“Go,” Neal yelled. “Run!”
We ran back up the stairs and into the house and slammed the door shut. Edina gave Cecil and Neal rolls of duct tape and they got to work sealing the doors and the windows. I called the phone number you’re supposed to call in these situations. Through my mask, I could barely hear the automated voice on the other end of the line, but slowly I realized: It was him, the voice from above. I couldn’t believe it. I pressed 1 For English and then 2 To Report a Crash and then 4 Possible Biological or Chemical Agent. His instructions for us were simple: we were to remain calm and to stay in the house and to keep our masks on until help arrived. I relayed this to the rest of the group and sat down on the couch.
Cecil scrubbed his hands with soap and then Clorox in the kitchen sink. Neal turned off the air-conditioning and checked all the windows again. Mira put Yoda in her lap and rubbed his pink belly. He seemed to be having trouble breathing in his dog-size headsock. He scratched at it some.
Sarah sat very still in the recliner. She may have been praying. I didn’t want to interrupt. I reached over and gave Edina’s arm a gentle squeeze, though whether this brought a smile or a frown to her face I couldn’t say, because of the mask. We didn’t know if we were going to live or die, if we’d been infected or exposed. For once, I was glad we were all together, as a family. Cecil, still shirtless, plopped down on the floor at my feet. Without thinking, I dabbled my fingertips across his neck. He let me do this for a full five seconds before twisting around to smile.
“That was some quick thinking out there, Cecil,” I said, as a way of maybe explaining the physical contact, pulling away my hand.
“Not sure it’ll do much, but thanks,” he said.
He patted my bare foot a few times before letting his hand come to rest there. I slid my foot loose and crossed my legs.
“We’ll be fine,” Neal said, confidently, striding back into the room.
“Yoda’s shivering,” Mira said.
“Doggy in the coal mine,” Cecil muttered.
“He’s probably picking up on our energy,” Sarah said. “Dogs can do that.”
“He’s got a bad heart,” Mira said. “The vet says it’ll probably be his heart that kills him.”
“It looked so low-tech,” Neal said, about the machine. “I always expected something much more advanced.”
“I don’t think it worked like it was supposed to,” Cecil said. “I think it malfunctioned.”
“What I don’t get,” Edina said, “is where was the Alert?”
We all turned to her, so small on the couch, hunched forward, her hands in her lap.
“Huh?” Neal asked.
“When that thing came down in the yard,” she said, “shouldn’t there have been an Alert?”
Nobody said anything for a moment.
“But wasn’t there?” Cecil asked.
Edina shook her head back and forth.
“I’m pretty sure I heard it,” Cecil said.
“No,” I said. “She’s right. There wasn’t one.”
We’d been too busy and panicked to realize it, but we’d had no warning at all. We’d been entirely on our own. Maybe we still were.
“Marcus says when—” Sarah began.
I shook my head. “Honey, please, not right now.”
The clock on the mantel chimed three times. That morning, Neal had promised me we’d be home by three. Mira let Yoda down onto the floor, and he promptly rolled over onto his back, legs pointed at the ceiling fan. Cecil started setting up a new game of checkers. “You got any leftovers?” he asked his mother. “I’m absolutely starving.”
“I could eat,” Mira agreed, through her mask.
“Me, too,” Neal said, through his.
I’d brought along a dessert, a store-bought peach cobbler, which I’d deposited in Edina’s fridge and forgotten. I started to rise from the couch but then sat back down. How were we going to eat the cobbler through the head socks? To demonstrate the problem, I mimed eating a forkful of something, the imaginary fork knocking my mask’s large filter.
“Well, shit,” Cecil said.
Yoda was still on his back and had gone very still. Mira moved to the floor and scooted toward her dog. “I need to brush him so bad,” she said. “He smells like pee.”
He was such a silly-looking creature, a white mop in a dark mask, the straps compressing his curly fur. His paws began to wave at us, all four paws, as if he were politely bidding us farewell. If he died, it seemed likely that we’d all be on the floor with him before long. We watched the movement in his paws travel down the crooked columns of his legs toward his belly, becoming more and more spastic. He was jerking wildly now. These were worrisome, twitchy kicks. These were the paroxysms of a dying animal. Unless, of course, they weren’t. Unless, of course, he was fine. Unless the poor thing had only fallen asleep, chased forever through a dog dream.