Fall of Vanaheim

      You would think that the day the Matriarchs first showed themselves, we would have been warned by the ominous feeling in the air. A rainstorm had been forecast two days before, and now on the third day, a nasty, gray gloom had settled. The wind whispered in the trees around our house the warning of the coming storm. On Vanaheim, rain never came gently.

      It was about five in the afternoon on one of Vanaheim’s cool summer evenings. My nearly obsessive compulsive mother, Kristan Lowell, was meticulously cleaning up my father’s workstation. His name was Isaac, and this afternoon my sister, Macy, and I watched him talk anxiously on the phone. His tone and expression didn’t comfort us, and though he tried to hide it, we could sense it well enough.

     We knew he was talking to his long time friend, Owen Bell, who was a contractor who lived closer to the colonist camp than we did. My father had answered the phone at first with a casual, “Yeah, Owen?” but I watched his face morph into a confused wrinkle after Owen spoke on the other end. After that my father started pacing while my mother started cleaning. Both actions were nervous ticks to relieve pressure that I had picked up on over the years. Macy and I waited on the edge of our seats, listening to the rising and falling voice of my nervous father. Outside, the first ticks of rain started to hit our roof.

     “It’s safer here…” I heard my father say. “Is everyone at your house? Okay. Pack your things quickly. There’s room here for you all to stay. Trey and I are coming in the truck. Keep your phone handy.”

     He slipped the phone in his pocket and walked into the back room of the house, where Mom was scrubbing away at the lab counters and computer screens. I couldn’t make out anything but their faint whispers. It seemed like the thumping of my own heart made the most noise in the house. Something was definitely wrong, although I didn’t know what, and my father had somehow got it into his head that he would need me to come with him.

     Macy sat across from me on the couch and looked at me with widened eyes. “Why did he say your name?”

     Scared as I was, I didn’t give her my idea. I held my finger to my lips and told her silently to hush.

     A second later Dad came into the living room with a duffle bag, walking at a brisk pace toward the door. He patted my shoulder and said “Come on, bud,” as if we were just going to pick up groceries back on Earth. Mom’s expression as she watched us walk out into the rain told me otherwise.

     “The campsite is being evacuated,” Dad said once we had gotten into the SUV. The duffle bag rested between us, and he unzipped it and pulled out two pistols. “You know how to use this?”

     I nodded. My heart started pumping twice as fast and twice as hard.

He noticed my fear and touched my shoulder gently. “Don’t worry. I don’t think we’ll need them, but just in case. We’re not even going near the camp. I told Owen that we would pick him up with his family and bring them to our house. It will be safer.” He push started the SUV and backed away from our house. I peered into the duffel bag. Not only had he brought pistols, but our hunting rifle as well.

     “What are they evacuating from?”

      My father shook his head. “I’m not really sure, son.”

      He spun the wheel around and accelerated down the worn dirt path that ran up to our house. By now the rain was pouring on top of us and our windshield wipers were whipping back and forth in quick, methodical thumps. The trees that hung above us swayed and bent in the wind. For the drive out of our forested area, which lasted about five minutes, my father and I silently rocked back in forth on the bumpy terrain until we came out on the smoother, more worn road on the mountainside.

      From there, we drove around the mountain as quickly and as carefully as possible. The rain made it nearly impossible to see, and it was the first time we had actually tried to go out and drive in Vanaheim’s cruel rainstorms. Dad bent over the wheel, squinting through the windshield as if there were a bug on it he was trying to study for his research. As for myself, I mostly stared at the pistol lying in my hands, feeling the metallic weight of it and trying to imagine what exactly I would need it for.

     “It’s some sort of animal,” Dad said suddenly, after a length of time. “Actually, from Owen’s description, it might be more than one.”

     “You don’t know what kind?”

     “No. I don’t think so. I can’t think of any animal that we’ve studied thus far like these.”

     “What do they look like?” I asked, but my father, once again, left me without an answer. We had come around a bend in the road that we usually come to when we head towards the main camp. When the view to the camp cleared and our conversation ended, we became aware of the panic below. Dad slowed down almost to a stop, taking a long look at the camp beneath. Unnatural sounds rose up to us. Faintly we could hear the screams of man and beast and the sound of gunfire popping below.

      Ordinarily, the camp was set up in squares with four tents per square. Each tent, big enough to house a family, was only a temporary home while construction on actual buildings were underway. Behind the camp, the colonist ship, The Pilgrim, rose up like a black mountain. Around this time, people would be going inside to get ready for dinner.

      It was not so on this day. Headlights of ISF trucks were speeding in panicked, circular directions. Some of the tents were on fire while the flames struggled against the down-pouring rain and most of the houses that were nearly finished in construction now lay in shambles upon the ground. There was a long line of people, seen only by the flashlights that they were carrying, running up to The Pilgrim. Its ramp had come down to let them in, but to my dismay, I began to see some of the flashlights in the back of the line spin wildly to the ground, and they no longer gave their light.

     I looked at my father. His face had turned deathly pale. “We need to go,” he said absently, and he started down the road again, much faster this time.

     We skidded to a halt in front of Owen’s house: one of the first ones built on the new planet. Dad grabbed the rifle and stepped out into the rain, prompting me to come with him quickly. I followed him to the front door, shielding my eyes with my hand. Mrs. Christina Bell opened the door first. She looked terrified and flustered, but welcomed us in.

       “We’re just getting our bags together,” she said. Behind her Owen was yelling desperate orders.

       “Nick! Lauren! Hurry, they’re here!” he yelled. On the coffee table there was an open luggage bag. I watched him open it and stuff several things inside. Of the assortment he had thrown in, an emergency flare was included. After that he walked briskly back toward the kitchen.

        “Where’s Emmy?” Dad asked Mrs. Bell.

        “Lauren is helping him with his bag. They should be out in a moment.” She started walking back toward their rooms. She called for their names.

Dad threw the rifle sling over his shoulder and went to talk to Owen. I was left standing in the foyer, holding a pistol at my side, dripping wet in rainwater and trying to seem confident. I wasn’t.

       A few seconds later, Nick, Emerson (Emmy), and Lauren came filing out with their bags with their mother behind them. I shoved the pistol in the back of my pants and took Lauren’s bag first, then little Emmy’s.

     “What’s going on, Trey?” she asked me.

      I shook my head, just like my father. “I have no clue.”

     We all left together. None of us carried umbrellas, so we all were soaking wet when we piled into the SUV. I threw their luggage in the back as quickly and carefully as possible then jumped inside myself. My Dad and Owen came jogging out together after us. Owen took the passenger side.

      He sighed when he first got in. “Trey, you’re a real trooper,” he said. “Thank you for coming along.”

      I chuckled. “I was forced to come.”

      “Well, your dad is pretty scary,” he joked. “Be glad you inherited your mother’s face.”

Most of us laughed quietly. The relief of tension was nice. My father, who hadn’t heard what was said, didn’t bother asking what we were laughing about when he finally got behind the wheel. He just cranked it and started driving.

     “Thank you, Isaac,” Owen said.

     “Don’t mention it. Did you bring your shotgun?”

     “Yeah, yeah I did.”

      I stopped listening to them for a while. Nick, a very quiet kid my age, sat beside me. He hardly ever talked. Most of the time he was reading some sort of book about history or engineering, or he would be coding on his computer. I had tried talking to him many times, but never connected. Now, I noticed as he looked quietly out the window, he was carrying his right arm in a curious way, as if he were hiding it from me. I would find out much later that this was his arc caster: a weapon that he himself had created, and one that he would teach me to use.

      Lauren sat with her mother and Emerson in the very back. Emerson looked around him with absolutely gigantic blue eyes, looking as innocent as a kid could look. As for Lauren and Mrs. Bell, they searched outside the windows with a curious anxiety.

      “What do you think they are?” Lauren asked me.

      “You do realize that I was pretty much pulled into the car and handed a gun, right?” I said.

       She frowned at me. “I was serious.”

      “So was I. I don’t know anything, and neither does Dad.”

       Little Emerson looked up at me. “Who’s they?” he asked softly. Lauren hushed him gently.

       “We’ll talk later,” she said.

       I understood, and I turned back to face the front. My father and Owen were still talking it up, exchanging ideas of what might have been happening to the camp at that very moment. It was very strange to hear them having the conversation. No fifteen-year-old (I don’t care how macho they think they are) wants to see their father look genuinely scared of the unknown.

       “They’re…animals?”

       “Of some sort,” Owen replied quietly.

       “None of the animals we’ve studied just…attack like that.”

       “Maybe something was amiss. Maybe we accidently started camp on their breeding grounds.”

       “No,” my father said. “They studied it for years. You can’t leave a colony of human beings to chance. They searched for every possible danger and found nothing of the sort.”

Owen shrugged.

        “I just…it’s all so strange. What would make—”

        Dad slammed on the brakes. I, who had forgotten to put my seatbelt on, rushed forward and face planted into the seat in front of me. The SUV slid on the mud a little ways and stopped cockeyed on the road.

        “What on earth—”

        “Shh!” my Dad hushed everyone in the car and pointed ahead.

         I moved my head so I could look out of the windshield. Down the road, crawling slowly out of the trees was a large, black, four-legged creature with a bristling back. Its hind legs appeared to have been wounded, so it slid onto the road with its front limbs.

         “It looks like a wolf…” Owen whispered. “That’s what I saw, Isaac. It looks just like it.”

         My dad didn’t respond. He just kept staring ahead at the creature. It continued to crawl, looking as if it were straining with every movement. Then, as suddenly as we had first seen it, it stopped moving and relaxed in the road, breathing heavily.

Dad opened the door.

        “What are you doing?” I asked.

        “Quiet, son,” he said, grabbing his rifle. “It’s all right.”

         He closed the door and started walking toward the creature. Owen grunted. “Isaac, I hate you,” he mumbled. Then he opened the door and followed. From within the car I watched them as they approached the beast. As they moved closer, I could see that the “wolf” was nearly the same size as a man, maybe larger. The headlights of the SUV hit its eyes as it turned to look at Mr. Bell and my father, and its eyes reflected like two glowing orbs.

         Then it started to squirm. The closer my father got to the animal, the more it writhed. It was as if it had gained some sort of newfound strength from hatred or cruelty, and it started clawing its way toward Dad, biting and snarling as it did so. My father kept his distance, watching as the helpless animal wasted its energy trying to attack him.

My father was as still as a rock, holding his rifle pointed down at the mud. The creature just kept crawling and snapping its white, jagged teeth in the air at him. Dad turned around and looked at us, held up his hand, and then covered his eyes with it. I knew exactly what he meant.

          “Cover your eyes, Emmy,” I said.

          “Why?”

          “Just do it, buddy.”

          Just about the time that he did, Dad fired the gun.