NewBorn

By K. Bird Lincoln

Under a canopy of amber tinged clouds, Sara found Patel on her front stoop, lying motionless. 

For a moment, Sara thought it was a joke. Standing there, the twilight casting strange shadows, it slowly came to her that Patel was truly dead. 

She stepped onto the porch and lightly stroked her friend's perfectly preserved skin. It was flushed, as if Patel had just come in from a duty walk around Lake Chabot.  

Can't leave her here. Sara struggled to pull the heavier woman from the porch. When she dragged her out into the yard, a vial clasped in Patel's limp fingers skittered down the steps. Collapsing on the bottom step, Sara lifted the vial to her nose. It was probably poison, although Sara can't be sure. Patel knew far more about botanicals then Sara, or even Rascal, could ever hope to learn in their short lifetimes. Known far more. Past tense.

Sara brushed a stray length of black hair from her eyes, her mouth frowning at the woolgathering. There was little time. How long had Patel lain here, the Blessing reviving mitochondria and kick-starting her hypothalamus and limbic system? Sara had to burn Patel's body, as difficult as that was with flesh still warm and responsive to the touch. Patel is dead, chose to die, Sara reminded herself. Nothing left now but keep Patel from becoming a Zombie. 

When Sara pulled the body into the summer firepit, a flutter of something slipped from Patel's jacket pocket. Sara rescued it from the ashy, banked coals. The familiar face of Patel's daughter stared up at her from another time. Sara slid into unwilling memory of the first time she saw the photo, seven years ago.  

Mama had brought her across the bay. Because of a slight sniffle, the adolescent Sara stayed with Patel instead of foraging in the foggy, coastal redwoods and cypress for mushrooms.  

"Aren't you afraid of Zombies living out here all alone?" Sara asked. 

"No. They don't bother the Living. Surely Rosa Vasquez hasn't been scaring her daughter with stories about Zombies?" Patel laughed. "You must have outgrown bedtime stories 100 years ago." 

Oops, Sara had forgotten to pretend again. It was so hard to fake the teen Living's mix of immaturity and experience.

"Ay, Mamacita doesn't tell me bedtime stories. I just read something on the Newsnet about a Zombie attack in Cleveland." 

A color photo in a handmade, wood frame caught Sara's wandering attention. She wiped her dripping nose with a sleeve of her cardigan and reached for it. Fascinated by the little girl's face, she almost forgot she wasn't alone. 

"My daughter died with all the other pre-adolescents when the Breen came," Patel said.

"Do you miss her?" 

Patel moistened the corner of her ragged handkerchief with her lips and polished the photograph in Sara's hands free of accumulated neglect. 

"You look a little like her, Sara. You have the same mischievous, brown eyes." Patel avoided the question.  

There was an awkward moment of silence. Then, she had pulled Sara into a fierce embrace, releasing her just as suddenly, the corners of her thin mouth tight with embarrassment.  

"I'm--I'm sorry. It's just that, you look so fresh--not like a Living at all. I thought for a moment--" 

"But I'm not Living, Patel. I'm NewBorn." Sara spoke the words without thinking. Mother had drilled into her over and over that no one outside their little Marina neighborhood was to know. It was too dangerous.

An older and sadder Sara finished stacking Patel's winter cache of deadwood around the fire pit. You are not honoring Patel's life by dawdling. Get on with saving her. She felt inadequate for this task. Patel's real daughter should be here, honoring her courageous mother for Living and redeeming the Earth. 

The San Anselmo and Berkeley reservoirs were remediated years before Sara brought Rascal to this cabin to live with the scientist. Yet, solitary, stubborn Patel could not let go. She clung to her lake as if it was her will, and not the Breen technology she used, making the water clear and the trout edible. 

This wasn't Patel's only legacy. There was also the matter of the observatory. Sara would gladly give that burden to Patel's real daughter, as well. Guess you're stuck with me, old woman.

Suddenly, the body, the pyre, and her memories were too much. Gorge rose in Sara's throat. I carried your secrets for four years. Now who will tell me what to do? Sara headed back into the cabin, brushing her hands clean against her hemp trousers. The crisp smell of cedar chips jarred with the memories still threatening to overpower Sara's fragile calm. 

She sat on Patel's bed, smelling the woman's scent, wanting Patel herself to coalesce from the shadows and take back that trip to the observatory, take back the heavy knowledge weighing Sara down. Another, later memory overtook her instead. 

It was the day of her fifteenth birthday. "Don't tell your Mama, little one," Patel had said when Sara found her waiting at the East Bay station. Patel lured her in with a conspiratorial wink. "She would never forgive me for putting you in danger. But what she doesn't know, won't hurt her, eh?" 

"I promise I won't tell anybody," Sara said. "Mama worries too much, anyway." 

They used Sara's handpush-car to get as far North as possible on the overgrown, decaying subway tracks. Then, Patel led the way through a haunted landscape of crumbling concrete, skeletal Queen Anne's lace and stinging nettles. Sara remembered the acrid smell of burning rubber and polycarbons, then Patel's arm around her waist pulling her roughly into the cover of a rusted out car.  

Zombies. It was only the second time Sara has seen them. They stumbled through the cracked asphalt, dragging their reanimated, unconscious flesh rosy with the false life of the Breen Blessing. 

"Shh, little one," whispered Patel, "they don't want to hurt you. They don't have any personality left to want to hurt you, only primitive instincts. They can't help that the Curse drives their crocodile brains into a frenzy at the smell or sight of a NewBorn." 

She knew Rascal would tease her later for cowering with Patel instead of using her revolver. That would have stopped the Zombies' hearts long enough to burn their bodies. Rascal always talked about the heroic things he would do, making Sara feel somehow inadequate. 

When the last Zombie disappeared from sight, Patel led Sara down more streets until they reached a small hill.  

"This is where the university had its observatory in the old days. I think it's too far away from the city center for Zombies." 

It was a hard hike uphill. Sara cut her hand against a willow sapling, reaching for a hold in the slippery moss. When Patel saw the blood, her panicked look almost made Sara laugh.

"It's nothing, Patel. I won't bleed to death!" 

"But without the Breen virus to help your cells rebuild, you might faint or get blood poisoning or something--" 

Sara did laugh then. Wise and brave Patel, whose life spanned centuries, all agog at a little blood. The Living always seemed to react badly to injury, as if they couldn't remember when they, too were vulnerable, before the Breen's Blessing. 

"Just tie something around it, Patel. It will stop bleeding. I've been cut lots of times before, it's nothing, I promise." 

Patel finally calmed down and consented to continue their trek. It was the work of scant minutes to break through the rusted, iron lock, and then they found themselves inside a round, brick building. 

Sara was a little disappointed to find a large, empty room covered in dust and smelling of mouse droppings. The only thing that looked interesting was an oblong, metal tube affixed to a slender, rotating stand.  

"What's that, Patel?" 

"It's a telescope, little one. We can see out into space with this." 

"But there's nothing to see! Mama says the Breen built a big bubble around us so nothing could get in or out." 

"Yes, they did. But even the Breen's work isn't infallible. Look at you, you're living proof. They thought their Curse made us sterile." Patel's laugh was bitter, "but they didn't count on our obsession with making babies, did they?" 

"So Mama made me out of frozen sperm and ova." Sara didn't really understand what Patel went on about half the time, she just wanted Patel to snap out of her pensive mood. "What about it?" 

"I remember," said Patel, her gray eyes staring past Sara, "when the news came about the first NewBorn, in Finland I think it was. We all held our breaths until it was confirmed the Breen curse hadn't reactivated its infection phase." Patel stepped onto the platform and craned her neck to look through the telescope. 

"If this really is a star, it means maybe the Breen made a mistake. Maybe they weren't infallible or perfect, after all."  

She picked at her ragged fingernails for a few awkward moments and wondered why Patel seemed so upset about a hole in the Breen shell. Wasn't that a good thing? 

"It's true! It's true. Raj wasn't lying." Patel's face came away from the eyepiece smudged with dust. 

"Lying about what?" Sara was eager for Patel to start talking again. 

"My damn-fool brother sent me a Newsnet message that someone in the Himalayas had seen a star. I thought it was impossible. But it's here, I can see it. Not a star, but good old Venus." 

Patel stepped down so Sara could look. The tiny point of white light didn't really seem all that exciting, but Sara dutifully tried to look impressed anyway. When she looked away, she heard a strange, strangled sound. 

"Those self-important bastards!" Patel, face and arms covered with dust, was crying. Grief shook her thin shoulders. "Did they have to deny us the stars, too? Didn't the Breen punish us enough, already? They took our babies, made us work to undo all the damage we did to the earth, isn't it enough? When will it be enough?" 

With all her naïve, young heart Sara tried to take in Patel's grief. She held the frail woman in her sun-burned arms, awkwardly stroking her hair, willing Patel's long, solitary years into her own body to ease the pain.  

Sara brushed the painful memory away. Her hands convulsively gripped the bedsheets. She was still unable to face burning Patel. She wasn't strong enough. She hadn't been able to assuage Patel's century-old grief when she was fifteen, and now at nineteen, she has failed to stop Patel's suicidal spiral. Sara looked wildly around the cabin, trying to find some clue, some sign of Patel's state of mind. The walls were stubbornly silent.  

Sara didn't feel worthy of earth-shattering secrets. How could you leave me now, how could you give up? she accused the dead woman. Anger made Sara feel her loneliness more. How could you abandon me with this vow like a wall between me and Rascal, between me and the whole goddamned world! 

Her vow of silence: Sara thought it would last forever, just as surely as she thought her own death would come before Patel's. Death was a shadow cast over every moment of a NewBorn's life. That was something Rascal had told her when he still confided in her, still was excited by the novelty of talking to another NewBorn. He was so good at putting into words the vague feelings whispering in Sara's brain. 

It was no use thinking about Rascal now. He wasn't here to help. Sara pulled the sheets from Patel's bed and walked out the door to confront the body in the yard. It no longer made her feel queasy, just sad. Kneeling beside Patel, her own body felt light and inconsequential.  

She folded the last corner of the makeshift shroud over Patel's face. Patel never betrayed her to the outside world. That's why two weeks ago, before the Solstice, when Patel showed Sara Raj's incredible journal and made her vow silence, Sara couldn't betray Patel, either. 

No more procrastination. You are stuck with your promise to Patel, and now you are stuck with her body as well. It's time to burn one of these things away.  

The pyre took only a few minutes to construct. The burning itself took longer. It was difficult enough to watch funeral pyres through the Newsnet, but seeing it in person was worse. Sara hated the red flames licking maliciously over Patel's skin. 

She wanted to scream her rage into the darkness that was gathering over Lake Chabot, adding her voice to the crying of the black-crested herons. It was hard to imagine the world without Patel. It was easier to imagine the sky without a sun or Civic Center without concrete.

Stomach muscles tightened against a sob, and Sara turned away from Patel's body. 

After a few minutes, the smell of roasting flesh coated the inside of her mouth and nostrils. Rascal said NewBorns should study death, embrace it, even. She couldn't do that tonight, instead, she turned back to the cottage.  

The journal was under the bed Sara stripped of sheets for Patel's funeral shroud. A kind of fierce longing held Sara for a moment. Is the information here? Does Patel trust me? Could she trust a NewBorn? So many of the Living treat us as afterthoughts, pretty pink ribbons on an empty package. She opened it to the last pages, almost trembling. 

It was there. Among rants against the Breen for their judgement and the old-time humans whose waste and pollution brought that judgement down, are Raj's observations. A print-out of his last Newsnet message--sent just before he killed himself --was folded between the last two pages. Sara touched the fragile paper. This was the proof Rascal and the other NewBorns were waiting for. 

Rascal and the others were obsessed with the legend of the Escaped. Sara has heard the tale repeated at Winter Solstice council for eighteen years. This year the legend was especially powerful because of what Patel told her about Raj the morning of the celebration.  

Two weeks ago, Sara went to the East Bay to bring Patel back for this year's Solstice celebration, but found Patel weeping on her doorstep instead. 

She thought Patel was crying because her brother had killed himself. It wasn't just Raj's death, though, was it? It was his atmospheric holes and messages from Mars. It was all those years Patel denied herself even the idea that the Breen had been cruel. 

Sara had just stood there, a packet of Solstice chocolate turning mushy in her sweaty palms, unsure of how to comfort a person suddenly brother-less. When the tears were done, Patel's face had taken on a tired resolve.  

"Swear to me, Sara." Patel took both of Sara's young hands in her weathered ones. "Promise me you won't tell anyone about Raj's notebook. It won't destroy anybody else." 

"But why not? Can't I at least tell Rascal?" 

"No, especially not him. Since he left my house, Rascal has been spending far too much time scheming on the Newsnet. That boy doesn't understand. How could any NewBorn understand? You think the Breen are gone in their spaceships forever, that we can do anything now." 

Sara wanted to defend Rascal, to explain to Patel how terrifying it was to know your body was going to grow old, breakdown, and die. It made Sara irritable that a time would come when Sara or Rascal would no longer exist--and the Living envied that.

Rascal dug into things and pulled them apart. Sara knew that Rascal's scheming was his way of trying to slip from Death's shadow.  

"They are watching out there, somewhere. We have to be careful, very careful. If we start trying to get back into space, what do you think they will do?" Patel let go of Sara's hands to run one coarse finger over the binding of Raj's journal. 

"No. Humanity can't live through another coming of the Breen. We couldn't stand against their judgement when we had nuclear weapons and satellite early-warning systems. What chance do we have against them now? So few of us survived, we responsible ones." Here Patel gave a sharp laugh. "They sentenced us to life in service to nature and banished us from space as our punishment for ruining this planet, and it's on Earth we will stay." 

Despite Sara's pleading, Patel refused to come to San Francisco with her. 

"No, little one," Patel said. "You go on back to San Francisco. I have the lake to keep me company, and some memories that need putting away." 

Sara left then, probably a little more abruptly then Patel deserved, but she wanted to get back to San Francisco before dark. 

She arrived at United Nations Plaza just in the nick of time. It was the last night of council, and the lights were being ceremonially doused all over the peninsula. Then, Khadafy Patterson, dressed in his faded Keeper's three-piece suit and old-fashioned spectacles, turned off the main server. Only in the complete darkness and electronic silence of the Solstice would the Living speak of the Escaped.  

Khadafy Patterson's voice broke the silence, gathering the huddled Living in the ruins of Market Street into a single ball of fervent humanity.  

"A few days before the Breen came, NASA sent its third expedition to the space station circling Mars. There was no way to tell if those humans had managed somehow to escape the Breen. Humanity's judges left no space administration building standing, nor launch facility undestroyed." Here Khadafy Patterson always paused for dramatic effect, then finished the story by repeating those precious, desperate words, "Mars Station survived! Mars Station lasted the centuries!"  

The lights came on one-by-one, and someone turned on the Newsnet server's main switch. Sara stood with the others in the chill night and breathed defiance for a few minutes, Khadafy Patterson's words holding the crowd in a palpable moment of hope before they turned to each other with tears and hugs. 

Sara was passed from one Living to another like a lucky token, her very existence a celebration of what the Solstice meant to humanity.  

Rascal was nowhere in sight, and Sara felt a little subdued from Patel's news this morning.  

"Mamacita, I'm going to get some food."  

"Okay, mija, my little test tube milagro. Happy Solstice," said Mama, kissing her on the cheek. Then her mama's petite figure was hauled back into the general jubilation.  

Rascal caught her by the shoulders on her way to the food stalls, laughing at her surprise.  

"Sara, Sara, Sara," he sang to her, eyes gleaming with some great secret. Sara loved him, had known he was a NewBorn like her since she found him, a little starveling, huddled inside a decrepit street car at the corner of Mission and Polk.

"Why are you so happy?" 

"In Arizona, Butternut found something in Arizona!" Rascal gathered her into the softness of his greatcoat for a quick hug. Sara breathed in the cinnamon-smoke scent of him, then felt his energy quickening her blood. 

"What? What did he find?"

"Metal and fuel and sealing wax, sugar and spice and everything nice!" Rascal pulled her down the steps into the plaza fountain. People still threw coins into the depression at the bottom for good luck, and Rascal gathered a handful of pennies to sprinkle over Sara's head. 

Sara could guess the secret Rascal was teasing her with. Rascal's NewBorn contact lived close to old military bases in the desert. There was only one thing that could make Rascal this happy: Butternut must have found an intact space vehicle. 

Even then, she didn't tell Rascal about the other dancing pricks of white gradually joining Venus in the telescope's lense, or the faint signals coming from Mars that Raj's last message said had to be man-made. Sara bit her lower lip and stayed silent as Rascal bought steaming hot corn on the cob and raw oysters from vendors around the plaza. 

She laughed into Rascal's bitter-bright eyes and waited for his confidences. He made her feel so important as he talked of Butternut's discovery. For a few moments Sara felt the old closeness. Her smile was powerful and wise as she held the steaming corn in her cold hands. 

The words "atmospheric bubble disintegration" and "signals from the Escaped" waited on her tongue, drops of gold to rain down on Rascal's incomplete, ungilded visions. He would be so awed, amazed by her revelations that he would gather her in his arms, spin her over the chipped concrete in joy and hope, and then finally set her down to tenderly kiss her.  

But she couldn't tell him. 

Looking at Rascal's glorious, expectant face that Solstice night, Sara understood how hope could crush a person just as surely as despair. She had seen it happen to Patel just that morning, but didn't know in her own heart how it felt to be afraid and yet desire something so deeply.  

In the uncertain present, Sara watched sparks from the dimming funeral pyre crackle and disappear into the gloom, her longing for some flash of brilliance accompanying them into the black sky.  

Why did you show me hope, and then make me keep it a secret? Sara hadn't thought to ask Patel two weeks ago at Solstice. She was too busy thinking about Rascal. Now for the Sara who stood alone, watching the embers glow red against Patel's dead bones, it was too late. Sara envied the easy way those bones rested against the earth. She felt cold, the chilling coastal air finding its way through the layers of Mamacita's hand-knit sweater. The cold smothered her shoulders and her chest. Maybe Patel was right. If Rascal and the others tried to reach whoever was signaling from Mars station and the Breen did return...

Then, a hand grasped her arm roughly as something pulled her legs out from underneath her. 

Sara hit the grass hard. More hands pulled at her hair and clothes as the unmistakable smell of too-sweet rotting flesh penetrated her dazed brain. 

Zombies. 

Sara tried to reach for her revolver, but there were too many hands ripping at her clothes, and too many wide-empty eyes holding her gaze. 

One female Zombie ripped Sara's trousers completely open at the seams. The evidence of Sara's unBlessed state hit the air as a copper smell. Her menarche, her liquid fertility drove the Blessing virus in them to a frenzy. 

Sara managed to get her hands underneath her and half-pushed, half crab-walked away. The respite is long enough for Sara to reach the emergency revolver strapped to her back. Panic made her fumble, but then the long hours of practice Mamacita required took over. She cocked and fired from her prone position five times before she realized there was only the female Zombie left. 

Sara arched her back and rocked herself to her knees. With one knee braced against the ground, she shot the last Zombie, spattering her brains onto the brown grass. The female Zombie windmilled to keep her balance, shock making the remains of her face look almost human again, then she teetered and fell.

The sizzle and snap of burning coals were the only sound besides Sara's rapid breathing for long, terrifying minutes. Then Sara began to shake, the faint heat from the dying funeral pyre not enough to stave away the chill darkness inside and out.

When Sara can stand, she walked slowly to Patel's cabin, gauging each step as if the ground itself might disappear. Once inside, she found a pair of Patel's pants and pulled them over her bruised and blood-streaked thighs. She had to bend over to roll the cuffs up. When she sat up again, she started to cry. 

Careless, careless, careless. Her mind wouldn't stop showing her the Zombies' eyes or the convulsive grasping of their hands. Why did they suddenly choose to leave their usual paths and come to Patel's isolated lake? Maybe the fire sprang some ancient instinct, and when they came near, the Breen virus in them detected Sara's UnBlessed flesh.  

UnBlessed flesh. That was the sum of her existence. She was going to die, almost had died tonight, and Mamacita, the others, and even old Khadafy Williams will go on living, go on measuring the toxins in the seawater until they, too, gave up.  

I am surrounded by Death. It smirked at her from the last expression in the female Zombie's eyes.    

I cannot escape Death's shadow. That fact had never seemed real to her before, not the true death of her own flesh. The finality of it reached the deepest level of her heart. It crystallized there, leaving no room for anything else. Patel's choice to give up is not my choice. Patel had the luxury of centuries to worry about consequences, Sara barely had eighty years. She wasn't going to waste it on fear. 

It all depended on the journal. In a panic, Sara tossed aside Patel's carefully maintained records and the detritus of her solitary life to find the little, brown book. It was still on the bed. She almost cried for joy when she found the slips of Newsnet printouts containing Raj's precious messages still tucked into the back pages.  

Sara tucked the journal into her jacket's front pocket and timidly opened the door. Even when she carried more logs from Patel's woodshed over to the pit for a new fire, her mind was only flirting with the image of Rascal. The decision was only a hazy image of burying her face in the spicy warmth of his neck when he hugs her in his strong, living arms with surprise and happiness.  

The Zombie corpses burned more quickly than Patel's body. The heat felt good against Sara's face, cleansing the Zombies of their false, Breen-given reanimation. Sara wished she could cleanse herself in the fire, too, because guilt was already tearing at the images of her vision.  

I'm sorry, Patel, she said to the black ashes and the blue heart of the fire. I can't keep the vow. I can't protect the Earth with silence. Now her hands turned into fists at her sides. And I hate death too much to use it as an escape.

Dawn was blossoming in pink and scarlet cloud ribbons over the Oakland Hills. Sara started down the path leading towards the old BART tracks where her railcar is waiting to take her back to San Francisco, and to Rascal. In her front pocket, Patel's journal burned like the nucleus of a star against her heart.