Seeds of Foreverland: A Science Fiction Thriller Read online

  Seeds

  of

  FOREVERLAND

  THE PREQUEL

  Tony Bertauski

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  Good people do bad things.

  Good people do bad things.

  So do bad people.

  1.

  Flies are stupid.

  They were drawn to windows like addicts, pounding their brains against a pane of glass until they died on the windowsill, their short, useless lives spent wishing for freedom but never finding it.

  Occasionally, one would get smart and turn away.

  It landed on a spiral-bound notebook between two faded lines. Harold sat absolutely still. He’d seen enough Discovery Channel documentaries to know a good predator was patient. They rarely blinked until the kill was made.

  Musca domestica. The common housefly had two wings instead of four, and compound eyes that wrapped around its head, with four thousand lenses that gave it multifaceted, three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vision. Some of those lenses were watching Harold, his hand unfurling like a sunflower, coming to rest on the desk’s edge.

  And there it sat. There it waited.

  Like a good predator.

  The housefly cleaned its legs and flicked its head. Did Harold look like a tree? Did the fly smell death? Did it know that a five-finger death punch lay twenty inches away?

  Of course not. Because flies were stupid.

  What good were they? They licked crap and annoyed the world. Nobody liked flies. They were pests.

  The trick to catching flies was to aim where they were going, not where they are. They were built for quickness, their eyes picking up the slightest movement. The sweet spot was four inches above their resting place.

  And that was where Harold aimed.

  A quick swipe, fingers clamped. In the fleshy pocket of his hollow fist, he felt the light touch of membranous wings. The cheetah had downed its prey, blood dripping, mouth salivating. If not for his sleeve, the kill would’ve been flawless.

  It caught his notebook and splashed it on a book bag.

  Mr. Long was jotting a long string of symbols on the board. No one seemed to notice, especially John Lively, whose book bag was buried under Harold’s notebook.

  Harold shook his hand like a high roller, stunning the fly inside his fist. He needed the prey to relax, needed it alive for the next step. John woke up long enough to notice the notebook sprayed across his book bag. He slapped it away and retrieved the half-empty bottle of Coke from the side pocket.

  “Douche,” he hurled at Harold.

  The plastic cap swirled off the top. He took a swig.

  “John.” Mr. Long pointed. “No drinks in class.”

  Everyone turned toward the back corner. Harold took cover behind the overdeveloped sixth grader. John had full sets of armpit hair but still hadn’t discovered the magic of deodorant. He took his time screwing the cap back on and sighed with the satisfaction of a Coke commercial before stowing the plastic bottle back in the mesh pocket.

  The unrelenting march of algebra continued.

  Harold bided his time while the prey settled inside his clammy hand. Escape was impossible. John began wilting into a nap around the time Mr. Long was solving for x. Harold took cover behind his slumping shoulders and dug a binder out of his book bag.

  A very special binder.

  Carefully, systematically, he stacked textbooks to block views coming from the right. Karen Duluce wasn’t paying attention. She was all about As.

  Girls getting in his business were rarely a problem for Harold, but he stacked the books anyway. With the window on his left and John already a bobblehead, he laid the binder on the desk. The white cover was gray and ragged with monstrous faces inked on the cover, fantastical gods from another universe. Not gods, really.

  Harold liked to think of them as servants.

  He pried it open, the stale smell of funk and rot wafting out. In the left pocket were Ziploc baggies. Tucked into the right pocket was a single page of card stock smudged with a variety of bug parts.

  The operating table.

  Mr. Long had moved to the left side of the board, eraser in one hand, marker in the other. John, in a stroke of good fortune, was listing to the left and provided a perfect screen. Harold pried open a Ziploc with his free hand and inserted his fist.

  This was the hard part.

  How many times had he watched a fly escape between his fingers before the bag was sealed? Invariably, the stupid thing would land on the window and he’d catch it again. Still, it bothered him.

  After several violent shakes, the fly sufficiently stunned, he masterfully zipped the prey inside with a swift, satisfying snap. The little dummy was trapped. Once that cheetah got its mouth around the windpipe, it was all over.

  Harold debated saving it for next period, but there was still twenty minutes left in algebra. And this was the best class for cover. Besides having a seat in the back corner, John was a master napper, somehow keeping himself upright in deep sleep with only the occasional twitch.

  Anticipation melted his stomach like hard candy on summer concrete as he retrieved a hard plastic case from his book bag. Steel implements rattled inside. It snapped open, revealing tweezers, pins and other pointed tools.

  The fly was buzzing. Perhaps, he thought, it suddenly realized what was coming. The thing wasn’t suffocating. He’d kept bugs in plastic bags for weeks. They never ran out of air.

  Harold licked his lips.

  Karen glanced over. She couldn’t see what was happening, but he straightened up, smiling at her. She smiled back. Another warm, sweet feeling melted in his stomach, this time wicking into his chest.

  She went back to her notes and for a time Harold pretended to look at Mr. Long, squinting and mouthing nonsense like he was trying to solve for x. He caught himself looking at her from the corner of his eye and noticed her lips silently moving the way his did when thoughts slipped down to his tongue. It was how he made sense of this complex world. As if that were possible.

  Harold got back to work.

  He trapped the fly between two fingers, the plastic pressing against its wings, then pierced the thorax with a needle, effectively mounting it to the card stock.

  The fly continued buzzing. It was like it couldn’t feel it. What would it be like to not feel pain, to just go through life with no fear of agony, no threat of death? Everybody dies, that was a given. We would all lose out, that was a heavy fact Harold carried at a very young age. He didn’t want to die.

  With scalpel in hand, he sliced open the plastic bag, laying the flaps open like skin. The insect spun circles on the steel pin, the fresh air invigorating hope. The buzzing was loud.

  Saliva pooled beneath Harold’s tongue.

  Two more pins stabbed the insect in place. No longer spinning, the tweezers were next. He removed one of the wings, tearing it out like a tooth. Most insects had four wings. Flies only developed two. Lucky for the fly. He pinned the wing alongside the flailing specimen, now a useless detached appendage he would later sketch. Once the other wing was in place, he’d pluck one of the compound eyes—

  “Harold?”

  It wasn’t his name that stopped him. It was the silence that followed. Everyone was looking at him. Mr. Long pointed at the board expectantly.

  “X equals eight,” Harold said.

  “That wasn’t the question.”

  “Oh. Then C.”

  “
Eeeeeew.” Karen pushed back in her chair, the legs scraping the floor. She was staring at the notebook. The textbooks were out of place, his paper mausoleum on full display. It wasn’t the sound of disgust she made, or the snarl or the horrified whites of her eyes.

  She was looking at him. Because he was gross.

  He was a monster.

  Everyone in the room had squashed a thousand bugs. Everyone hated flies, swatted them down without a thought, watched them struggle on sticky flypaper, but he was the monster.

  “Holy crap.” John twisted in his seat. Before Harold could slam the door on his experiment, John snatched the card stock up for everyone to see. “Holy, holy crap!”

  “John,” Mr. Long said.

  “Look at this!”

  A collective sigh inhaled the room’s oxygen. Chair legs scraped the floor, hands went up to mouths. The girls went ewwwww. The boys stood up for a better view.

  “Class,” Mr. Long attempted, “sit down.”

  Harold swung for the card stock, the needle poking out like a spine. John stiff-armed him and hauled the prize around the room, the thick paper crumpling in his fist. He shoved it at the girls, presented it to the boys.

  Mr. Long caught him by the wrist and lifted the hefty sixth-grader onto his toes, plucking the card from his fingers. He told John to sit down and got the boys and girls to turn around and get back in line. They straightened their desks and put them in rows with a slight bowing around Harold like a repellent invisible force field surrounded him.

  Or he was contaminated.

  “This is not biology.” Mr. Long held the paper at arm’s length. “This will be at the office, Harold. If you want it back.”

  He dropped it on his desk and finished filling the board with numbers until class ended.

  Harold was the last to leave.

  2.

  Harold was at his locker, face half-hidden behind the metal door, one eye watching a group of girls. They were three classrooms down the hall, talking about whatever sixth-grade girls talk about. Music? Basketball games? The war on drugs?

  He had no idea.

  He just knew when he was near them, his stomach stirred. It was their smell, their eyes and rosy cheeks. The smoothness of their skin. It twisted him all up. Especially that Karen with her blonde ponytail and fair eyebrows, the way she bounced when she laughed.

  Now she was looking in the mirror taped inside her locker. Harold moved behind his locker door, just his right eye beyond the edge of it. It looked super creepy, yeah. It was.

  He didn’t care.

  There were mirrors in all the lockers, glued down from former students. Harold taped a picture over his. He didn’t want to see his face. When Karen looked in the mirror, she had to like what looked back. What did she see when she looked at Harold?

  A prepubescent doughboy with blotchy skin and perennial bedhead; a mouth-breather that picked his nose in the morning and rolled the boogers into tight little balls he’d drop on the carpet; a precocious only child of academically ostracized parents, whose hobby was pinning insects to poster board.

  That was what she’d see.

  That was why he’d plastered a photo over the mirror in his locker. Palm trees. He’d printed off a photo of palm trees and glued it over the mirror to remind him that one day he’d get out of New England’s dreary weather and reinvent himself, become whatever he wanted.

  One day, he’d move to the tropics, maybe buy his own island a million miles from anywhere. He’d build a house out of palm fronds and power it with solar panels. Clothing would be optional. Maybe someone like Karen would move out there with him.

  He’d wait until they were older, of course; give her time to forget about the kid torturing houseflies in math class. Maybe when they were in their thirties he’d send her a mysterious invitation, one she couldn’t resist, tell her he was changing the world, his inventions were ground-breaking, original, mind-shattering.

  How could she say no?

  He had to invent something first. Something no one had ever thought of. Shouldn’t be too hard. And if he couldn’t think of something or afford his own island, he’d still move anyway. Because the weather sucked.

  CLANG.

  A banana slammed against the back of his locker, the metal backing ringing like a gong of sheet metal. The gooey insides squished from the blackened peel, the rotten banana sticking like a magnet.

  “That’s for your collection,” John said. “They’re probably hungry.”

  The ape stopped in the hall. His shadow, Blake Masterson, was there, too. They sort of laughed the kind of mirthless imitation of good cheer that was more cutting than joyous.

  Harold just stood there.

  “What’s wrong with you, Ballard?” John said. “You got a screw loose?”

  “No.”

  “Why you so weird?”

  “I’m not.”

  “You think you’re normal?”

  “Depends.”

  “On what?”

  “What’s normal?”

  “Not pulling apart flies, I can tell you that.”

  John pulled the Coke from his book bag and slugged down the remains before tossing the empty bottle into the locker.

  “There’s a new house for all your friends.”

  The hallway was thinning out. Harold slowly peeked around the edge of his open locker, watching Blake and John jog out the front doors.

  All the girls were gone except one. Karen pretended not to be watching.

  He slammed the locker shut and went in the other direction.

  The banana would stay there for weeks.

  3.

  Both cars were in the driveway.

  They hadn’t moved, not since Harold caught the bus that morning. Actually, they hadn’t moved in weeks.

  The back door was unlocked because he’d forgotten to lock it that morning. He sort of wiped his shoes in the mudroom and dropped his book bag.

  “Mom? Dad?”

  The house was quiet. The refrigerator clicked on.

  Harold moved down the hallway. The basement door was below the staircase, the knob brassy and dull. He wrapped his fingers around it, the metal hard and cold. It wobbled slightly, but didn’t turn far before catching the latch. Sometimes they forgot to turn the lock, instead using a deadbolt. Harold was sure he could barrel through the locks like an adrenaline-jacked cop, throwing his shoulder into it linebacker style. But then what? His father would have a cow, then send him to his grandparents.

  The last place he wanted to be.

  HOME, he texted. The word lined up beneath all the other texts he’d sent to Mom and Dad.

  HOME.

  HOME.

  HOME.

  He dragged the book bag into the kitchen. The milk and orange juice were still on the table, next to a soggy bowl of cereal. He forgot about those, too. Usually, Mom put things away. Obviously, they hadn’t left the basement.

  Harold grabbed a milk crate in the pantry and loaded it with granola bars, a box of Lucky Charms, a bag of marshmallows, and a fresh jug of milk from the refrigerator, nice and cold. The cabinet was nearly void of clean bowls; the silverware drawer was down to three forks and a spoon. He took the last spoon and two bottles of Coke before hauling the cache to the steps.

  The front door was ajar.

  A quick chill rode up his back, thinking maybe Babadook or some other malicious spirit was waiting for him upstairs, but that was probably his fault. He’d run out the front door to catch the bus and couldn’t remember if he closed it.

  His phone buzzed and nearly made his heart stop.

  Busy a bit longer, hon. Order pizza.

  Harold looked at the basement door, wondering if they’d want him to slide two slices under the door. He didn’t text back. They rarely read it when he did. Instead, he trundled up to the third floor.

  Didn’t bother ordering pizza.

  \\\\\\\\\\////////////////////

  The third floor belonged to Harold.

 
It was an attic at one time. When he was born, his room was on the second floor, right next to his parents’ bedroom. He had foggy memories of his mom coming in at night and rocking him to sleep. She would sing these soft tunes that always made him feel good. She had a great voice. He was convinced it would kill on America’s Got Talent.

  There were glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling. He remembered staring at them, wondering if that was the sky. He wasn’t quite two years old and he was already dreaming about the universe. About what was possible, if this was all that existed.

  When he was five, his father finished the attic room. That was when he was between jobs and didn’t have much to do. It was Mom that convinced him to make the third floor Harold’s.

  It had been ever since.

  The room was hot. In the summer, it was nearly unbearable. He’d wake at night sweating through the mattress. Now that it was autumn, he could sleep beneath the covers.

  The lack of insulation didn’t help, but it was the computers that made it such a problem. There were six towers and two laptops, all of them networked on a series of overlapping desktops. His father helped him connect the first two computers (between careers this time; whoever heard of a neurosurgeon becoming a computer analyst?), but Harold had done the rest.

  The desks were littered with half-empty bowls of cereal, cups of fermenting milk and flat soda, and plates with hardened globs of ketchup. He stacked them in the corner, where flies lapped up the leftovers. (He’d catch them later.)

  Milk dripping from his chin, he slurped spoonfuls of Lucky Charms while tapping spacebars. Monitors woke up with the latest social media streams. No one had posted anything about Mr. Long’s class. Not even John. Karen had posted a photo of her sleeping cat with a pair of sunglasses teetered on his head.

  Next, he checked the stock market.

  His father had set him up with a beginner’s account, something that would teach him the value of investing. Harold learned about algorithms in math class (Mr. Long’s class, actually) and how it applied to investing. Algorithms seemed to apply to everything nowadays. Seemed stupid not to catch the wave.