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The Pioneer Seed Corporation

Brent Joseph Johnson

    It wasn’t much of a surprise when her classmate fell off of the ladder, eighty some-odd feet above the earth. Something in his face just kind of slumped and gave out, and when he went, he just sank without much spark left in him, as if his awkward toadlike body had abandoned his spiritual self right up there next to her on the silo.
    Farther up the ladder, closer to the top, the voice of another classmate exploded across the morning: “Move. Goddamn it. Hurry.”
    And reflexively she bent towards the sound.
    “Chad, goddamn it. Let’s go.”
    And with that, or because of that, the carnage she’d just witnessed on the school bus suddenly stirred across her eyes, and once again she began to climb the rest of her way in a panic.
    At the top of the ladder Itsy hoisted herself clumsily onto what she thought would be a flat circular roof only in its place a circular shaft sank a hundred and fifty feet back to its concrete flooring where the ruins of its silver dome lay buried in the unsunned darkness. Quickly she tossed her right leg over the two-foot rim, and gripping the truncated ladder rail that slouched towards the wreckage, she leaned back over the deserted farm. Along the bottom of the grain silo, surrounded by those horrible black creatures that’d been hagging them from the school bus, Justin lay violently compressed onto himself. One of his legs was twisted up behind his head while the other was twisted ghoulishly at the knee. As he caught sight of her again though, he tried to lift himself off the ground like a partially crushed animal trying to revive itself in the wake of a car.
    From beyond the eastern edge of the farmyard, itself bordered on three sides by a cornfield, its brown stalks, nearly ten feet high, began to quake. Soon several of the rows broke open and what looked to be humanoid tar or some breed of ambulating darkness appeared in the lesser shadows of the corn. “There’s more of them,” Itsy busked. Her voice sounded muffled and disconnected from her throat. “They stopped down there at the field.”
    To the south sat another eighth-grader, Danny Noah, and beyond Danny, hugging the rim of the silo, lay the two Bishop kids: Chad, followed by Chad’s older sister, Robin.
    “Where, Itsy?” Danny twisted back to the ladder. “What are you talking about?”
    Pressing her fingers to her cheek she turned towards the terrible sunlight that issued laterally from beyond the horizon. Another warm breeze came and took up the black strands of her ponytail and went on again. Then she dropped her eyes back to the ground and without really thinking about it, she patted around her jeans for her phone. “He was trying to pass me on the ladder,” she said at last. “Then I don’t know what. He just started to fall.”
    “Who, goddamn it?” Danny lifted his legs and began to spin recklessly towards her.
    “Justin...Justin Haley...”
    Then he clamped his knees against both sides of the silo and dragged himself closer. “Can you see anything else?”
    “They got him down there. Their moving him right now.”
    “Itsy, goddamn it. Focus.” Then he swore in what sounded like German.
    Once he’d gotten within several feet of her, she tried to scooch back a ways, but the seat of her jeans kept catching on the damaged concrete, and this awkward, uneasy movement made her feel so dizzy, the open country and the pale blue sky warping deliriously about her, that she was forced to stop altogether and like Robin and Chad lower her face to the rim. Danny otherwise stopped when his thighs neared her temples. Then he grabbed the jut of the ladder rail and carefully leaned back over the edge. Along the bottom he could now see several of those tarlike creatures clustered together. But their schoolmate had disappeared entirely.
    “He’s under those black things,” she said, her face still pressed to the concrete. “I think they got him.”
    For a moment Danny cast his eyes about the grounds. To the west, maybe thirty yards off, stood two very large, disfigured barns and the overgrown rubble of the farmhouse. And closer to the silo he found a little farrowing shed with a half-gabled roof of rusted corrugated iron that sloped down towards its open stalls, two-by-fours and planks eructing out of its dutches. To his right, beyond the cornfield, he then followed the trend of the narrow gravel road where farther to the south, in the direction of the kosher slaughterhouse, sat the school bus that the four of them had fled minutes ago. In the meantime, along the edge of the field, several more of those creatures had arrived, clicking and squealing, and after some delay, as if they were unsure about the transfer from the claustral rows, they groped into the bewildered daylight.
    “Maybe he got away,” Danny offered. But neither one of them really believed it.

    It was Willy the substitute bus driver who got it first when he brought the kids to a halt several yards from a swarm of those scuttling black creatures that’d remained in his path after the incitement of their mirage towards his vanishing point. “Christ almighty,” he railed at the windshield. Then he holstered his coffee and swung open the door, thinking it was some kind of a prank. “Get outta the damn road.” And as if ejecting itself through itself, one of them poured up along the rubber steps, over Willy’s hand still on the opener, and enveloped him so fast that it was only Willy’s head that managed to escape above the onslaught. And as the head rose and turned—still completely surprised—and as it sank—now slightly less so—and as it struck the floor, severed brutally near the jawline, the kids began rising and screaming.
    Itsy was by far the fastest to make it off the bus and although she was hungover from the night before, she still managed to outstrip the rest of them, maybe twelve kids in all who’d clustered together like a shoal of dull-colored fish. The cottonwoods rising like tentacles out of the creekbank. The sun glowering from its hinge on the trembles. Their perverted little bodies in perverted little motions. And when she’d gone about fifty yards, Danny’s voice rose from the others and broke through the panic. “The farm,” he hollered. “Itsy, the farm.” And with that, Itsy turned towards the sound. Along the road, through a large pale rift in the cluster, she could see two or three of those weird fetus-shaped creatures collapse onto little Eric Metzger who was already covered in blood and tissue matter and patches of Jeremy Dunn’s bowl cut that clung to his cheeks and neck like a beard. Then they hit the ground en masse and skidded off a ways with Eric’s hand reaching out in front of them, only as they came to a stop, his arm continued to skid along the road til something shot out of the blackness like a spider leg or a long articulated fang and piercing it, dragged it back into the melee. All the same Danny hollered again and this time cutting west over the shoulder he fled through the corn.
    And one by one Itsy and whoever was left alive followed after him.
    Several steps along the row, the stalks had completely swallowed her up, and several steps after that, the urge to throw herself onto the ground and hunker into a ball had grown so powerful that if Itsy hadn’t heard another little voice shatter from the direction of the bus, she might’ve actually done it. For a time she kept mostly to the same tightly packed furrow that she set off down, the heavy brown ears and the long rough leaves slapping bitterly at her arms and face, til something came at her in a flash and a blur, and together they crashed to the ground. Crows lifted noisily above them, craking and yawping, and as he—Justin Haley—began to scream, she crawled over to him and brought her hands down on his mouth. “Shhhh,” she hissed. “Shush.” Thrashing about he tried to break loose, so she pulled herself on top of him, and with her elbows helter-skelter against his biceps and her hands grappling at his stupid pudgy face, she was able to get a better hold. “Shut the fuck up,” she hissed again. This time the message finally sank in and he rolled his stupid little eyes up at her. Along the corn they lay there for a moment, Justin staring at Itsy’s head in astonishment and Itsy muffling her hard breaths against her sleeve, and when the crows finally settled again and she could better hear the movements about the field, she lifted herself partway up and carefully searched the gloom. She couldn’t see more than five feet beyond the row but as she relaxed her hands, somewhere nearby, she could hear one of the grade-schoolers start to bawl. Then almost immediately something crashed through the field and the bawl shifted into a scream. And then everything went quiet again. And the moment was returned to the crows and their deformed shadows that wound among the tiny glades of sunlight. Below her Justin started to squirm again. “Lemme go,” he blubbered through her fingers. His voice was high-pitched and annoying and she’d always hated him for it. “Lemme go.” Still she managed to take hold of him again, and fighting his chubby arms with her elbows and slapping his cheeks, she pressed back down on his face. “Justin, goddamn you. Shut your fucking mouth.” And with that—roughly two minutes before he’d go on to have his spine fractured at the base of the silo now anyways—any fight left in him just sort of drained from his body.

    Near the top of the ladder, the rest of their day—Itsy, Danny, Robin and Robin’s little brother—came and went in a daze. Every now and again from Itsy’s cellphone, lost out in the cornfield, her dad’s Illmatic ringtone would rise feebly among the caws of several hundred pissed-off crows, but nobody bothered to go down there and look for it. How twelve hours managed to pass in this fashion remained a total mystery, but still they did, vastly impartial to the four kids marooned on top of that dilapidated grain silo and a couple dozen of those hideous black creatures that by noonday slowly stopped their ramblings about the farm, and with their arm-bones cantilevered out in a cross, their tarlike skins hanging to the ground in tatters, and their horrible annular mouths retracted beneath their cowls, they distributed themselves evenly around the silo like congregants at an oracle.
    Danny and Itsy meanwhile continued to wave frantically at the few cars that passed along the highway about a mile to the north, Danny with his blue flannel and Itsy with her hands. But nothing came of it. The cars were just too far off to notice them and none bothered to venture down the gravel road where the school bus sat abandoned. By three o’clock the traffic had disappeared altogether. And by five they watched for the slaughterhouse to let out where Itsy’s and Danny’s parents used to work before the big immigration raid. But by six, when traffic still hadn’t reappeared in any direction, all hope was absorbed back into the terror of their siege. And by six thirty, during the last hour of daylight when the tassels along the cornfield seemed to catch fire, even Danny’s theory that these creatures had come from the meatpacking plant, either as an agent of biblical wrath or an ecological one, started to take on greater and greater dimension. By seven o’clock the sun was setting in earnest. And by seven fifteen the western sky was so overwhelmed with unconscionable red light that from their spot above the countryside, it should’ve held them in such an awful trance if those horrible black creatures hadn’t uncowled their slimy serrated mouths and their circumoral mouthparts in unison and bellowed so terrifyingly and malignantly against the heavens that little Chad started to wail in counterpoint. Then shortly after that, the dusklight quickly faded, and the kids and the creatures were left to the bright white glow of the full moon and half a degree below it, some 1.8 billion miles away, Uranus in retrograde.
    “Why hasn’t anyone come for us yet?” Robin asked. She’d been praying almost continually since morning, and Danny, surprised at her voice, flinched like something had stung him. He twisted around and scrutinized her. She was still stationed farthest from the ladder, right above the big red CO of the painted sign, and she still looked oddly prim in her pinafore and black ankle boots. Itsy herself had a better view of her chordwise across the arc. “I just—” Robin shook her head, still unable to wrap her mind around any of it. “—thought there would be the police by now or another school bus or a...dang farmer or something. Just anything.” Like Danny she then turned towards the south where the lights of New Bremen sagged beneath the horizon. “How can they forget about us like this?”
    “Well they’re probably out there looking right now,” Danny lied. “It’s just a matter of time.”
    Itsy lit the cigarette in her mouth and restlessly pulled it out again. “Something doesn’t add up though. Somebody should’ve come and found the bus by now. We could’ve just waved them down.” She raised her hand impassively in an wavelike gesture, then dropped it back to her lap.
    “No one’s going to see us now,” Robin said.
    “Maybe,” Danny added, “but if they come by close enough, they’ll hear us when we scream.”
    “Maybe...but...” Robin turned back to the others.
    “Well none of us know,” Itsy flared. “None of us know anything.”
    “What are those things? What do they want with us?”
    “Robin, just try and take it easy.”
    “I want to go home.”
    “We all want to go home. We want to eat a bunch of food. And we want to go home.”
    “I want my family.”
    “Danny.” Itsy gave up and hugged her shoulders. “Can I borrow that flannel now? My arms are starting to freeze.”
    Wordlessly he peeled the shirt over his head.
    “How are we going to sleep like this,” Robin pressed. “How are we going sleep at all?”
    Then he balled it up and handed it to her.
    “We just will.”
    “What if we fall?”
    “We’re not gonna fall,” Itsy snapped. “Just...leave your feet over the sides like you already are.” Then she caped Danny’s flannel around her shoulders. “Then you’ll stay balanced and you won’t go anywhere. I promise.”

*

    Around six thirty the next morning when the sun had returned from its lesser wanderings across the globe, they didn’t so much as awaken alongside the daybreak as they just kind of roused from out of some defective sleep mode. The eastern sky meanwhile had begun to turn violently and horribly red, but as they sat there, groggy and disoriented, quietly searching the ground for any sign of those creatures, none of the schoolkids seemed to notice.
    “Christ fuck almighty,” Itsy fretted. Smoke rose from her mouth. “I think they’re gone. I can’t see them anymore.”
    Danny stubbed out his own cigarette and pitched it over the side. “Yeah,” he said, “I can’t see them either.” Then he took his flannel and balled it up and pitched it over the side too. It came apart almost right away and fluttered and twisted a hundred and fifty feet to the ground where from their perch on the silo they waited for those creatures to return.
    “Goddamn it,” she said after a time. “Goddamn it to hell.”
    He dropped his head and undid his belt around his calf and around the broken jut of the ladder. “All that and more, hoss, but you know as well as me that this is the only chance we got.”
    “Screw your chances, Danny.”
    He started to thread it back through his jeans. “I’ll take that as a yes.”
    “You can take that as a fuck you too.”
    Over his shoulder he caught sight of Robin who was staring glassily down at her little brother. Her hands were clasped near the top of his messy blond hair and her lips were moving softly.
    “They’re gone, guys.” Danny called out. Then he quickly buckled his belt. “We’re gonna have to make a run for it.”
    When nobody said anything Danny repeated himself.
    “Well where’d they go?” Robin finally stopped praying.
    “To shit in the fields, Robin. How the hell do I know?”
    She looked down at her hands again and unfolded them.
    “But they ain’t here right now so we gotta make it fast.”
    “Maybe we should just try waiting again. Maybe someone’ll come along this time.”
    “Robin, if anybody’s coming, they’d of done it by now. That other farmhouse is the best chance we got and I’m not sure we’re gonna get another one.”
    Behind him Chad lifted his head from the vee of Robin’s legs. He’d shit his pants during the night but nobody seemed to notice.
    “Because if we don’t do something now,” he pressed, “we’re gonna die up here for sure.”
    With that, Chad sat up all the way and started to sob again, and when Robin drew him into a hug, the sobs grew harder and louder. Danny accordingly twisted back and scruffed the seven-year-old by his hair and shook him. Chad’s shoulders rose and his neck telescoped into the grasp. And Robin letting out a tiny little yelp hugged her brother even tighter.
    “Listen, you little shit. We’re gonna make a run for it. And we’re gonna do it goddamn now. And you’re gonna keep your fucking mouth quiet so those fucking things don’t fucking hear us, all right?”
    Chad’s face went dark red. More out of pain than fear. And he began to sob even louder.
    “You got that?” Danny tightened his grip and shook him even harder. And again Robin yelped. “He’s got it, Danny,” she begged him. “O please, let him go. He’s got it.”
    Releasing his grip Danny turned back to the north again where beyond the cornfield, maybe a mile away, a white gambrel roof rose above a thick grove of pine trees, and among them stood a single dead oak whose barkless arms as blanched as old bones stretched throughout their spires. Farther still, half a dozen other towering silos straggled here and there about the offing. Unlike this one, those still had their domes intact. “All right,” he said, a bit more softly. Then he turned back again. “But I need you to be fast, okay? You follow me and the girls like you did before.”
    Chad rubbed his eyes and looked down into the balls of his fists. His chest was still rising and falling with tiny little jerks. But at least he’d shut up.
    “I need you to say yes.”
    A mumble rose from his throat.
    “Say it out loud.”
    “Yes,” Chad finally said.
    “Ok. Good. And if something goes wrong, you just keep on running and don’t stop for anything. That goes for all of us.”

    The day before the bus attack, Rickie Orr, still unemployed from the federal shutdown of the meatpacking plant where he’d clocked in as a beef grader for half a decade, picked up his daughter and Sandy Noah’s youngest boy from the only public school left open in the district. Danny Noah climbed into the back of the truck while Itsy swung open the cab and slid her bag onto the floor. “My stomach hurts,” she fetched. Then she hoisted herself up by the windshield pillar and slammed the door. “I forgot to eat today and all that coffee gave me diarrhea.”
    “Why’d you skip lunch?”
    “Because the lunch lady’s racist.”
    Rickie shifted into first and cranked the wheel towards the exit. School had let out nearly forty minutes ago and now the parking lot sat empty. “She’s still giving you problems?”
     “Pretty much. Also the food there’s shit.”
    “Well here,” he said. Then he reached below the seat and pulled out a thirty-two ounce can of PBR with the cashier’s sloppy math penned along the paper bag. Steering with his knee he cracked it open and handed it to her. “Try this for now.”
    Near the eastern edge of New Bremen, the street gave up its street name and unceremoniously transformed itself into a highway, and as Rickie continued past the armory and the deserted fairgrounds and finally the fallow breakland that stretched from the ditch up past the folly of its hill, the town abruptly ended and the cornfields abruptly began as high and impenetrable as castle walls. “If you want we can still stop at the Kum & Go and grab you a burrito.”
    “The burritos there are shit. I want tortas. With Mom’s salsa.”
    “They got salsa there.”
    “That’s not salsa. They only use tomatoes. It’s shit.”
    At an unmarked intersection Rickie punched the gas crossing over the oncoming lane and fishtailed wildly onto an unpaved road that branched acutely from it. Gravel and sand spit back at the highway. And a long plume of white dust trailed after them. “What about the Dairy Queen?”
    From the back of the truck Danny started to fix a bandana around his mouth and nose.
    “No,” Itsy said, “this is all right.”
    Rickie studied her for a moment. The massive can looked hilarious in her hands. “You sure?”
    “Yeah it’s fine,” she said. Then she braced it against her knee and lifted it to her mouth.
    Several miles later Rickie turned onto another two-lane highway and continued west until the farmland grew hillier and hillier and channeled them slightly towards the south again. Soon, however, as he was nearing his Fomalhaut exit, the red warning lights along the train tracks began to flash and the gates began to close and one of the last IC&E freights ever to pass through the state brought him pissing and moaning to a halt. “Goddamn it,” he pissed and moaned. Then he slammed on the brakes, nearly crashing into the barrier.
    “Jesus, Dad. Watch it.”
    “I am watching it.”
    “Well...do a better job.”
    For several minutes the two of them just sat there quietly and stared at the grain hoppers that juddered past the windshield. Occasionally Rickie would reach up and ply the radio dial back and forth, looking for some background noise to fill out the space in his brain that the beer had evacuated, but all he could find was country music. At some point he finally gave up and pushed in his 36 Chambers tape. “Hey Itsers,” he slurred. Then he cleared his throat and tried again. “When’d you realize the sun always goes in the same direction?”
    “What do you mean?” She lifted the beer to her mouth.
    “For the longest time I just figured it moved around and around at random but it all fits a pattern, you know? Day after day. Month after month. Kinda weird huh?”
    “Not really. Everybody knows that.”
    “Ahh,” he said. Then he leaned out the window and screamed over the freight train, “Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh.” From the power line a number of starlings took to the air, squawking and chittering, but among them a lone blackbird stayed where it was, scanning the cornfield for whatever it is that blackbirds scan a cornfield for. “Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh,” he screamed again, this time just at the blackbird. But still it ignored him. Rickie drew his head back into the cab. “Hey wait a second. What the hell are you doing?” He reached over and snatched the beer from her hands. “Gimme that.” Then he sloshed the swill around in the can and polished it off. “Damn, Itzel,” he said flipping it out the window. By now all of the grain hoppers had moved on and the black ethanol tankers were rumbling in their place. “How the hell did it get so hot this late in the summer?”
    “Because God hates you.”
    He grabbed his Camels from off the dash. Then he took one out and lit it. “I thought—” He tossed back the box. “—you don’t believe in God.” Exhaling against the windshield.
    “Yeah but you do.”
    “That’s up for debate.” He reached below the seat for another beer. “Boy, your mom does though. Jesus.” Then he brought it up and cracked it. Foam sprayed across his hands. “She can really thump a Bible when the mood fucking strikes her.”
    “Yeah but I still miss her though. I miss her like crazy.”
    “I know you do, pickle. I miss her too.” From about a hundred yards off he thought he could see the end of the train.
    “When can she come home again?”
    “I don’t know. That’s up to the courts.”
    Behind them Danny Noah rapped his knuckle against the little sliding window so Itsy turned onto her knees and opened it. Then she took her dad’s beer with both hands and passed it back to him. “Rumspringa,” she belted. A warm dry breeze came along the cornfield and lifted their hair and went on again. With his eyes on his magazine, Danny pulled down his bandana and started to guzzle the beer. Animatronics and gore. How to make your own squibs.
    “You know.” She slid the window shut again and sank back against the seat. “If you stare at the sky long enough, you can see the moon move?”
    “Really? Like how do you mean?”
    “I mean you can actually see it creep across the sky. It’s pretty amazing.”
    “Horseshit. Nobody can see the moon move.”
    “It’s true. You just have to focus long enough and wait.” Rickie looked at his daughter full on. Then a bit from the side. “Christ heaven almighty, girl, you are fucking weird, you know that?” He took another drag off his cigarette and pitched it out the window. “Certifiably fucking weird.”
    “Maybe. Now ask me if I give a shit.”
    “Itsy, do you give a shit that you’re weird?”
    “No,” she said, “not particularly.”
    “Good,” he said. “And never let them make you feel otherwise.”

    What had woken Itsy up from the scritch-scratching of her fever dream sounded remotely like an old klaxon siren had erupted inside of New Bremen. After their second night on top of the silo when the scattering of towns and townships had failed to brighten at all, Itsy briefly trusted that the rest of the county had either accepted that the spirit of the earth had slumped from its own invisible axis and now sank through an incommensurable void of its own horrors, or that help was finally on its way.
    But she knew they were goddamn lies.
    She lifted herself up off her back to find that behind her Chad had disappeared from where he’d been sleeping with his cheek mashed against the rim and that Robin clenching her fists near her sides was making the noise. Itsy quickly scoured the rest of the silo but Chad wasn’t up there either.
    “Danny,” she croaked, still half-asleep. His bad leg, she noticed, now had a glassy layer of black barklike scabs grafted over its calf and part of its shin. One of those tarlike creatures had attached itself during their doomed escape yesterday and dissolved the denim and skin right off it. “Danny, wake up.”
    She turned towards the south again where Robin had quietly and deftly risen to her feet and was now moving in the other direction.
    “Robin,” Itsy called out, reaching for her belt. “Robin, get back here.”
    But Robin, with her hands poised delicately over the sides like she were stepping through a garden, didn’t seem to hear her.
    “Danny, get up...Robin. Robin.”
    Once her belt was undone Itsy grabbed part of the broken ladder and swung her left leg over the outer edge. The entire world tilted this way and that. And for a second she thought she was gonna spill into the air. “Danny,” she screamed. Then she lifted her fist and clubbed him on his good leg, belted to the other rail. “Robin, goddamn it. Hold on.”
    From the other end of the silo, above the ER and the SE, Robin stopped and leaned precariously over the farm, but seeing nothing at the bottom, she continued along her circuit fifteen yards back to where Danny was lying. Itsy meanwhile swung down onto the top rungs of the ladder.
    “Itsy,” his voice caught, “my leg...”
    Then she clubbed him on his hip. “Move. Goddamn it. Hurry.”
    After several more swats Danny blinked slowly and dryly and started to work himself up onto his elbows.
    “Move. Goddamn it. C’mon.”
    Finally when he’d shifted far enough out of the way, she was able to scrabble up over his left leg and back onto the rim.
    “Chad,” Robin continued to call out, “Chad.”
    “Robin.” Itsy bit into her words. “I need you to sit down for me.” Then she planted her hands on the rough concrete, and with her feet dangling over the sides, she lifted and dragged herself towards her.
    “Itsy, where’d he go? I can’t find him.”
    “Robin, please. I don’t know where he went but he’s gone.”
    “But we had him.”
    “Robin...”
    “He was sleeping right next to us and then I don’t know what.” Finally she turned dizzyingly towards the east where the thickening dawnlight had begun to retrieve the monstrous shapes of the hills. “I want to go home.”
    “Robin...”
    “I’m too tired to be up here anymore.”
    “Sweetheart, just...”
    Robin didn’t so much as leap off the top of the silo as she just kind of tilted forward and sank noiselessly towards the earth, her cobalt blue dress belling slightly on the go, but before she disappeared below the arc, she still managed to reach down and press the back of her dress to her thighs.
    And that was it. That was the entire moment. All of it. Something dark and heavy seemed to well inside of Itsy. Something she cosseted against her sticky abdominal wall like a twin in fetu or something that’d metastasized into teeth and hair and bones. “Danny,” she said. Then she turned herself carefully back towards him. “I need you to wake up for me.”
    Slowly he opened his eyes again.
    “Robin’s gone. She jumped over the side.” At the ladder Itsy took hold of the broken rail again and looked down the outer wall to where the creatures, having reified darkly along the twilight, began squealing and scuffling towards the blue clump of Robin’s broken body. “They’re distracted now. We gotta go.”
    He bent his face up to her.
    “Danny, c’mon. Time to sit up.”
    “Okay,” he said. Then he nodded and lifted his head again. “All right.”
    “When we hit the ground we just go for it like we talked about.”
    Danny sat himself up and shifted painfully towards the ladder.
    “You’re leg ain’t all that bad.” She quickly undid his belt. “We can get it cleaned up at that house.”
    He twisted down onto the rungs.
    “And once we get moving, your adrenaline’s gonna kick in and we’re gonna beat them just like we did before.”
    From the base of the silo she could now see one of the creatures dragging Robin by her long blonde hair and the others coagulating noisily about her. Her dress, despite them, had straightened out again and recovered her thighs.
    “All right,” she said, “they won’t see us now.”
    Danny hopped from one rung to the other, leaving his bad leg in the air. The black bark of his skin had started to crack and bleed, but once they got about a quarter of the way down, he clumsily tested his weight on it.
    “South then west,” she whispered above him. “You just follow me.”

*

    When Itsy got out of bed the first morning of the siege, her stomach lurched so woozily that her startled legs perforce took over the rest of her dazed body and bore it through her bedroom door, through the half-light of their tiny living room where her dad lay snoring, rigwelted to the couch, and into the tiny bathroom where she’d barely knelt in front of the lime-green toilet when her stomach abruptly purged itself of all the beer she’d drunk the night before. Beyond the wall, from inside the next-door cabin, every now and again she could hear her neighbor’s TV set, and from it she could hear either a laugh track or several dozen dipshits in the studio audience laughing wildly. Itsy however, with her legs now folded beneath her, never caught what any of the jokes were, but apparently the sound of laughter, regardless how muffled, was an appropriate response to them—and in no way was it tasteless or meanspirited or insane. Finally when she was pretty much sure she wouldn’t puke again, she lifted herself back onto her feet and staggered over to her bedroom where she threw on some high-waisted jeans, a black bombazine blouse that she’d stolen from the Salvation Army, and a pair of beat-up checkered sneakers.
    Outside she found Danny Noah lounging on top of the picnic table and reading his copy of Fangoria. He passed her his one-hitter.
    “How you feeling this morning?” She sat beside him.
    Beyond the parking lot the sun was beginning to rise.
    “Like shit sucked through a shit-tube.”
    She pulled out her lighter. “Your mom ever make it home?”
    “Nah,” he said, flipping the page, “the show didn’t let out til bar-time so she just spent the night in CR.”
    She lit the one-hitter and cleared her lungs: “Thank...god for small miracles.”
    “Yeah,” he said, “thank god for that.”
    By seven ten the school bus still hadn’t arrived, and by seven twenty Itsy was fixing her dark lipstick again when from beyond the windbreak that partitioned the coral pink cabins of their repurposed motel court from Fomalhaut Street, the bus appeared in snatches through the thick wormy boughs of the white firs. At the entrance to the parking lot the driver already laying on the horn hit the brakes and skidded to a stop.
    “Fuck this shit,” Itsy mumbled. Then she crammed her lipstick and compact back into her bookbag. “I can’t wait until one of us gets a car...”
    They started down the driveway.
    “Yeah well don’t hold your breath.”
    Near the rear of the bus she took a spot next to the aisle and pressed her knees against the vinyl bench in front of her, blocking anybody else from taking the window. Behind her however Justin Haley with his big dandelion hair leaned over her backrest and flicked her earlobe. “Hey tube socks,” he said.
    She reached up and swatted at him.
    “Why do you smell like cigarette smoke?”
    “Because your mom’s a fat bitch.”
    Justin twisted partway down to his seat and whispered something to the kid sitting next to him. Both of them snickered. “Hey Itsy.” Justin had leaned over her backrest again, his words just kind of dribbling onto her head. “Is it true that Tommy Skelton fingered you at the Wasserbahn or am I just hearing things wrong?” Near her face Justin started to make exaggerated fingerfuck motions through an okay sign, but when Itsy cocked back her hand and slapped him on the face, he sank stupidly to his seat again.
    Several minutes later, after their last stop in town, Itsy was listening to her iPod and rifling through the pictures on her BlackBerry when a text came in from her dad: “Hey pickle where u put my wallet?”
    She thumbed back: “I threw it n the toilet, u fucking loser.”
    Soon another text arrived: “Its not n there.”
    “Pobro-fucking-cito,” she texted back. Then quickly she added: “LOL. Jk jk. Idk.”
    “Ok.”
    “Try the cushions.”
    From the seat cattycorner to her Danny was turned towards the aisle with his elbows on his knees, reading his magazine. Itsy reached out her shoe and pushed him on his shoulder.
    “Bingo,” her dad texted back. “Also did I write u that check for choir or did I forget again?”
    “No but I’m quitting anyways.” She hit send, then typed, “So it doesn’t matter.”
    Outside, the same decapitated silo that’d been greeting her bus for nearly three years loomed above the cornfield, and as the road began to curve towards the south, she tilted towards the window and bent her face up at it. Painted along the top, she could now see the sign scrolling rightward through its ring of skinny red letters. First the D disappeared, then the two Es, and an S, followed by an empty space, an R, and then two more Es, and as the road straightened out again and the bus continued on to New Bremen, ION PION appeared beyond the grimy brown window of the emergency door. Tycho Brahe, her mind drifted. Then she lifted herself back up. Fuck, I’m stoned.
    “Alright—” Another message came. “—text me if u need anything.”
    “OK,” she typed, “10 4.”
    From the back of the bus, through her feet, she could feel the gears grind in the transmission. Then the bus lunged violently and she almost fumbled her phone. But it was only when saw the other kids tilt into the aisle and rise from their seats did she pull out an earbud and glance towards the front to see what they were looking at.
    “I love u,” her dad texted, “and don’t take any shit from those lunch ladies.”
    She looked down again. “I won’t,” she texted back.
    The driver swore and shifted violently again. And the bus came skidding to a stop.
    “And if they give u anymore hassle,” he wrote, “I’ll come up there and handle it myself.”
    “OK dad.”
    “Don’t let anybody hold you back sweetheart no matter what.”
    “OK I won’t.” She yawned loudly and grotesquely. Then added, “no matter what.”

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