by Joseph Evergreen
Papa didn’t want them to go up the road, but Eden talked Gabriel into it every day when they went scavenging. There weren’t any bushes for picking berries, but there was scrap metal of all sorts, old electronics that might still turn on.
Gabriel shifted a metal container that had fallen from a derelict building. “It’s heavy.”
“Let me help.” Eden had always been stronger than Gabriel, and she was almost a foot taller than him. She took the container and flipped it over. There were silver objects jutting out of it.
“What is it?” Gabriel asked, giggling.
“A sink,” Eden said.
“It doesn’t look like a sink.”
“I’ve seen one of these before,” Eden said, “off to the east.” The east had been scavenged clean a year ago, back when Gabriel was only seven. They hadn’t been out that way in ages. “Our sink at home has one handle. This kind of sink has two, one for hot and one for cold. And look, the faucet detaches.” She tried to pull it free, but it must’ve been rusted in place.
“Can I try?” Gabriel asked eagerly.
“Sure.” Eden let him pull on it for a while before he gave up.
Gabriel thought they were farther up the road than they’d ever been. It excited him. The buildings here were brick, and the ones ahead appeared to be concrete. They were near a warehouse, which was always good for scavenging. Once they’d found something Eden called a forklift, but they hadn’t been able to bring it back.
“Let’s go further,” Eden decided, and even if Gabriel was nervous, he never said no to his big sister.
The bad clouds were in the sky again today, but they weren’t coming this direction. Eden skipped along, the breeze in her long hair. Gabriel was watchful. Sometimes they came across coyotes, but those never caused any fuss. More likely they’d find bunnies and Eden would bring yet another one home. Papa had laughed the first few times, but then he’d started calling them pests.
Eden stopped skipping. “Do you hear voices?” she asked.
Gabriel listened. “I do.” He got scared. They were supposed to hide if they ever saw strangers. One time, strangers had almost come onto their farm, close enough that Gabriel had seen their silhouettes on the moonlit hill. That was the most scared Gabriel had ever been in his life. Now, it felt like it had been a big adventure, and he actually remembered it fondly.
The voices were faint on the wind. Gabriel knew he should be running to hide, but he was frozen to the spot, listening with all his might. Eden listened too.
“They aren’t close,” she told him. “They’re somewhere over the hill.”
Gabriel was too nervous to move, but Eden went walking. She was going up the slope, getting closer to the voices. Gabriel didn’t know why she would do something so stupid. He didn’t follow her.
But then she beckoned. “Come look. I saw something.”
“Do you see them?” Gabriel asked. Carefully, he crept forward.
The road crested the hill, but Eden didn’t go entirely over. She stayed low, and Gabriel stayed lower. He had his arms and knees on the black asphalt. They could barely get a view of the other side from where they stopped.
“They’re headed away,” Eden told him. “They came off that dirt path, and now they’re going further up the road.”
It was three men on foot. They looked tall. Their skin was light, as if they didn’t spend much time in the sun.
Gabriel whispered even though they were too far now to hear anything, “Could you hear what they were saying?”
“I think so,” Eden said. “I don’t know. But what’s that?”
Gabriel looked, but she wasn’t pointing at anything in particular. “Where?”
“On the horizon. The white.”
Against the blue sky was a white cube that stood on the horizon, like a tall warehouse that had been freshly painted. Except… it looked really far away. It must’ve stood extremely tall.
“How big is it?” Gabriel asked.
“Huge.” Eden squinted and wriggled a little as she moved further over the hill. “That must be where the people are going.”
The three men were far enough away now that they had turned into specks. Gabriel didn’t feel so scared anymore. “What do you think it is?”
“It doesn’t look anything like a farm.” Eden bit her lip. “Maybe it’s a house.”
“That’d be a really big house.”
Eden didn’t say anything for a while. They watched the men disappear. “Let’s go back,” Eden decided. She seemed upset.
Gabriel didn’t feel right. He checked the sky to see if any bad clouds were near. “We haven’t found anything yet. Should we go back to the buildings over there?”
“No,” Eden said. “Let’s just go home.”
Gabriel could sense Eden’s mood, and he was in an odd mood too. It wasn’t often they got that close to strangers. Neither of them spoke until they were more than halfway back to the farm.
“Are you happy?” Eden asked her brother.
“I guess,” Gabriel answered.
“You guess?”
“I’m not unhappy.”
“I think I’m happy,” Eden said. She didn’t sound certain.
Gabriel tried, “If we go back to those buildings, we might scavenge something fun to play with.”
“I don’t think we would,” she replied.
Gabriel wondered if her mood had something to do with the white box they’d seen on the horizon. Eden always knew what things were. Televisions. Refrigerators. Grills. She knew everything, and if she didn’t know something then Papa would. But Gabriel got the sense that Eden didn’t want to tell Papa about what they had seen. After all, they’d gone further up the road than they were really supposed to.
They were nearly to the farm when Gabriel dared to ask again, “Did you hear anything that the strangers said?”
“I’m not sure,” Eden said too fast. She was lying, and Gabriel wanted to know why.
They heard the chickens before they saw them. It hadn’t been a full day of scavenging, because Papa hadn’t brought the cows back in yet. Usually Eden was quick to check the chicken coop for eggs. This time she walked right past it. That left Gabriel to gather up the eggs, and throw out some seed. Eden had gone straight inside, so Gabriel jogged after her when he was done, passing the rusty tricycle he liked to play on.
“Hey, Papa!” Gabriel said as he opened the front door. It always went the same way when they got back from scavenging. Gabriel and Eden would call out and Papa would ask, “You find anything good?” and then Gabriel would show him what they’d found. If they didn’t find anything Eden would say, “Nothing this time,” or if she was feeling playful, she’d say, “We found a spaceship and went to Mars,” which always made Papa laugh, no matter how many times she said it, no matter how sarcastic she sounded.
This time Papa didn’t answer when Gabriel called out. He was seated at the kitchen table and Eden was seated across from him. Eden had her arms crossed and Papa was stroking his beard, his big, tan arms bare. He looked like he was struggling to remember something.
“Why is it wrong?” Eden asked.
“It just is.” Papa shook his head as if getting pestered by bugs.
Gabriel walked to the table. “What are we talking about?”
“The box,” Papa said. He stood and fetched a beer from the cooler. He sat back down and cracked it open. Took a sip. “That damned box.”
“You said it makes people happy,” Eden mumbled. “And the strangers we saw were talking about it. Why would it be bad to be happy?”
Papa was looking away, arms crossed. He sipped his beer again. Gabriel noticed that he was staring out the window, right in the direction they’d seen it.
“I saw it once, a long time ago. The inside of it.”
“Inside the box?” Eden pressed.
Papa nodded. “It was when they first built the thing. The place was empty, then. Now it must be packed full of people like sardines.” He raised his hands as if to gesture, then seemed to think better of it. He sipped his beer. “They had a man plugged in. It was supposed to make him feel endless pleasure. Pleasure comes from the brain, you know, and they had a machine on his head that could feed chemicals into his brain.”
Gabriel asked, “Chemicals like the bad clouds?”
“Very different,” Papa said. He moved in his chair, unable to sit completely still. “They had a helmet on the man’s head, to pleasure his mind. And they had a tube that they attached to his groin, to pleasure his body. The tube was making this awful grinding noise and doing something to him that made him thrust his whole body. He kept twitching up and down, like being pulled by the string of a marionette.”
Gabriel thought it sounded scary. Yet Eden was nodding thoughtfully. Five years older than him, she always seemed to understand things in a way Gabriel couldn’t.
Papa leaned back. Finished his beer. “That’s it. I imagine that man is still hooked up to the machine to this day, unless he’s starved to death.”
Gabriel asked, “Why would he starve to death? Is there no food in the box?”
“I’m not sure anybody cares about food once they’ve gone into the box. I don’t know. I saw what was happening there and I never went back.”
The kitchen was silent for a moment, until Eden asked, “Why?”
“Hm?”
“Why didn’t you go back?”
Papa scoffed. “That’s what everybody asks. Why wouldn’t I go back? When I was your age there were people in this town. Thousands. People of all sorts.”
Gabriel struggled to picture that. Thousands of strangers? It was too big of a number to imagine.
“They all went to the box,” Papa said. “All of them. And people from far away lands came to the box too. I wager they built other boxes elsewhere, to fit all those poor folks.”
“They’re happy,” Eden interjected. “They’re not poor folks.”
“They are lost,” Papa said.
Eden frowned. “What does that mean?”
He said it again, enunciating. “They are lost.”
Eden insisted, “You said they were happy!”
“Wait,” Gabriel said. “You said the people were stuck in that box, attached to machines and starving to death.”
“Maybe they pour food into them, maybe they don’t,” Papa said, dismissive. “It doesn’t matter. They aren’t living. They lay there, plugged in, trapped in a blissful haze, and then they die. It’s not life.”
Gabriel thought of it like sleeping and having really good dreams. It sounded confusing.
Eden was scowling at Papa. She raised her chin. “You’ve been hiding this from us.”
Papa glanced at the cooler, but he didn’t get another beer. “Yes. I’ve been hiding it from you.”
“Why?” Eden’s eyes were thin slits.
He scratched his head. He rubbed his chin. His mouth opened, yet he couldn’t say anything for a time. “Everybody left me. They all went into the box.”
“And why wouldn’t they? They—”
“Everybody left me!” Papa repeated angrily. Gabriel thought he might be crying. “Your mother left me, Eden. And Gabriel’s parents left us too. Everybody left the chickens to starve in their coops. Left the cows to wander the fields. Left the roads to crumble and the buildings to fall to pieces. They gave up on the world and left it to rot.”
Gabriel was certain now. He’d never seen Papa cry before.
“You can’t go,” Papa whispered. “You can’t leave me too. You won’t, will you?”
Eden didn’t answer him. She was frowning, transfixed on Papa’s face. Gabriel doubted she’d ever seen him cry either.
“Maybe there’s nothing in there anymore,” Papa said. “Maybe it’s all a ruse. Maybe they lure people in just to kill them.”
“They don’t and you know it,” Eden accused.
Papa exhaled, his body shaking. “Don’t go into the box. I love you too much. I couldn’t bear it.”
“But I could go,” Eden said, the words flowing easily.
Gabriel felt a need to intervene. “Why don’t we all go? Isn’t it supposed to be fun?”
Papa’s head spun toward him. He was angry now. “Fun? There’s a difference between being happy and having fun.”
“Is there?”
“Yes. There is.” He sounded childish as he said it, crossing his arms again in the same way Gabriel did when he was feeling stubborn.
Eden leaned across the kitchen table. “If I wanted to go, you couldn’t stop me.”
Papa looked at her. “No,” he said slowly. “I couldn’t. How could I? I can’t just tie you up in the crawlspace, can I?” His lips quivered. “People who go into the box never come back out. They don’t want to. You’d never see your brother again.”
Eden’s gaze moved away as she considered that.
“You’d never see the chickens,” Papa continued. “Or the bunnies. Or the blue of the sky. And you wouldn’t care, because you wouldn’t be alive anymore. Not really.”
Gabriel looked at her. “You’d be asleep forever.”
Eden didn’t seem to hear him. “What was it like before? Before the box? With all the people?”
“It was a better world back then,” Papa said. “I believe it was a happier one. And that world is gone now, because of that damned box. It’s an evil thing.”
“Evil, huh?” Eden mumbled. She pushed her chair back and got up from the kitchen table.
Papa was alarmed. “Where are you going?”
“I’m going for a walk.”
“You can’t!” Papa said, jumping to his feet. “You can’t go there!”
“I said I’m going for a walk.” Eden crossed to the door. “I have a lot to think about. What’s so wrong with that?” She let the screen door slam as she left.
Papa stood there staring after her, fists clenched. His gaze fell to Gabriel. “Go after her,” he said. No, he begged it.
Gabriel did. He followed Eden outside. She was going past the chicken coop, walking fast with her head down and her arms tight around her body.
“Eden! Come back!”
“I’m going for a walk,” she said again.
Gabriel said, “Don’t go to the box! Papa’s right. It’s a bad place!”
“He’s wrong. Everybody else went to the box. Everybody but him. How could so many people be wrong?” She had stopped walking, but she wasn’t looking at him.
Gabriel said, “Don’t go.” He realized there were tears on his face. “You can’t leave us here without you!”
“I’m not going to the box,” Eden told him. “I’m just going for a walk.”
But Gabriel saw that she was headed toward the road Papa never wanted them to go down. “And you’ll come back?”
Eden looked at him over her shoulder. “I’ll come back.”
“You’re not lying?”
She sighed. “If I am, you’d know where to find me.”
Eden walked away.
“I’ll wait for you here!” Gabriel called. She didn’t react. “Dinner will be ready soon!”
She kept on walking.
After she was gone, Gabriel went to check on the cows. They were happy to see him. He went to throw more seeds at the chickens in the coop. There was a bunny hopping around behind the house, one of the bunnies Eden had brought home a few weeks ago. It had been around long enough that it wasn’t scared of people anymore.
Gabriel picked up the bunny and sat down on the front stoop. The bunny was warm in his arms. He stayed on the stoop, petting the bunny and waiting for Eden to come home.
Joseph Evergreen is a novelist primarily writing science fiction and speculative fiction for both children and adults. His stories have appeared in Idle Ink, Piker Press, and Underside Stories.
Joseph’s short story “Maximum Efficiency” was featured in Winter Solstice: Without Pause.