Chapter Three: The Everlasting Shadow

She had been happy once, until one day her partner all but disappeared. He had left for a job, a real W-2 wielding corporate job. She hadn’t told him yet of their pregnancy. She had wanted to give him a hand sewn onesie to surprise him with the news, but that plan disappeared into the reality that she was now a sole parent-to-be.  Her partner left her behind instead of including her in something that could have given their baby a better life. He could have been born into one of the systems that oppressed so many; a company baby. But she was alone, pregnant, and had absolutely nothing to her name. 

She traveled for a while trading with labor, knowledge, and illegal copies of digital books from her personal library. Eventually she found haven with an elderly gender fluid person in a west coast collective. At first it was room and board for labor in the garden, and some handyperson work. The next thing she knew she was a part of that community and had been offered a small place of her own. Everyone did their part for the good of the many, even the children. As her belly grew, her happiness began to return, and one day in a warm October, she became a mother. 

Some said that humanity had regressed, but she always thought it was the lull before evolutionary advancement. The way humans had been living was obviously not working, and instead of everyone killing each other for survival,  they band together and share what they had, even if it was never enough. She felt like everyone was clinging to humanity and holding their collective breath for the other shoe to drop on all the corporations and puppeted governments. Humans were proving they had what it took to be better than their greedy, grubby-pawed, self-centered ancestors. 

One afternoon during a chicken harvest, she was under an awning prepping chicken for the smokehouse and the elder next to her dropped dead, his blood fresh on her face. She froze like a hunted rabbit and saw in the corner of her vision, three unearthly drones. They were smooth, without any panels or screws, like they were built from a single piece of metal, and they didn’t have any visible flying components; nothing like the ones traded on the grey market. Screams and crying erupted as they continued their assault on the sleepy, peaceful community. She dropped to her knees behind the plastic table and in a hushed voice called for her toddler. Heart pounding, she crawled over the body next to her, toward the familiar crying under another table. He was sitting there, feathers still in his tiny sticky fist, crying from the shock of the onslaught. Whisking him up, she tucked his small body into her overalls, she hushed him and crawled carefully from the communal cooking tent to their little home nearby. 

They weren't bullets, but something was being fired into the crowd by the alien drones.  The partially prepared food was splashing, the heaps of feathers being blown into the air, and a few chickens who had escaped the pen were running around clucking in fear. She was crying at this point as the bodies of her community kept falling. Crawling on one hand and two knees, holding her babe with the free arm, she went inside her cabin, grabbed a bag, and threw together some things her baby would need. She grabbed a long piece of cloth and knelt upright and wrapped it around her baby and their bodies to hold him to her chest, briefly checking for signs of life. She sighed shakily, he was breathing, still scared and crying.

Making it back outside, she ran for the forest dodging in and out of hiding spaces. Others were running now too, being mowed down relentlessly. There was an explosion nearby as some of the projectiles hit the power storage shed and she was knocked down in the blast. A sharp snap echoed in her brain and nerves, as she rolled to not land on top of her toddler. A popping crunch came from her shoulder. Screaming in pain she forced herself to keep crawling to the forest edge, trying to disappear in the undergrowth. She woke up somewhere deep in the forest, an arm dangling useless by her side, and her babe sleeping against her chest. Listening carefully to the sounds around her, she heard nothing at all, except for the forest. She was covered in mainly mud and leaf litter, with a little blood mixed in, some hers some from the elder who had died close to her. Tears streamed down her cheeks as images flashed in her mind of her friends and found-family laying lifeless. Were there other survivors? Pain was coursing through her body as she checked the arm.

Dislocated and her forearm bone was broken or sprained. Her good arm searched in the bag and pulled her pad out and she brought up a video the community doctor made for education. She was always a hoarder when it came to information. “You never know when you’ll need it.” She had told the doctor. She was in too much pain to see the irony or the wisdom in her past actions. Watching the video through tears, she bit down on a stick from the forest floor, and using the tree, forced her shoulder into the socket. Another pop-crunch sound and she screamed through her teeth and the stick. She held her breath for a minute startled at her own sounds and  scared it would attract the attackers if they were still nearby.  Breathing heavily, she twisted her head side to side scanning for movement, and her toddler began to cry, woken by her noise.

Hushing him, she pulled a shirt out of her bag and made a makeshift sling for her damaged arm. She attempted to check the news on her pad; no connection. Had the attacks been everywhere? What were those things? Where were they from? Who was behind this blatant slaughter of her friends and found family? She needed information. Thinking about the direction she ran,and where she could go from here, she remembered there was another community that they had traded with in the hills. An odd community where they had banned tech and lived very hierarchically. Maybe they were safe? Maybe she could get information and food there. Standing up, using her good arm against the tree,  she  decided they would go West.