The Shell - Part Seven (Finale)

Short Fiction - Science Fiction

This is Part Seven (the finale) of a short fiction tale called The Shell.

Thank you so much for joining me on this longer-than-expected journey, my friends!

By reader request, I am hoping to share a little behind-the-scenes debrief about this story in the coming days. If you have any particular questions you would like me to answer about the writing of this story, please drop them in the comment section below. Enjoy!

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And now, on to the story…

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Photo by Kseniia Rastvorova on Unsplash

The summer air carried the weight of impending rain, swollen clouds hanging low like a full belly, and Burgess sat alone in the windowless office in Index.

Somewhere in town, blocks away, music was playing. Distant, yet it filtered through the thin walls of the office. Stirred a memory. Asked a question he no longer felt the need to answer.  

The clock declared the end. 

Burgess glanced up and sighed. He filled out his timecard, turned off the computer, tidied up as usual. The stacks of boxes watched him, stamped PROPERTY OF WASPEP. He maneuvered around them, steady at his tasks. He pushed the two bins to their proper places: preserve at the front, discard at the back. 

He opened the office door and let it remain agape in surprise as he walked carefully down the rickety stairs to his truck, parked a safe distance away, unusually so. He retrieved something heavy from the front passenger seat, then returned to the building. 

The office—the computer, the boxes, the bins—observed him carefully as he screwed open the lid of the can of gasoline and began to pour, focusing the sharp liquid under the desk and around the feet of each stack. He worked quickly but with intention. He only had one chance to get this right. 

He had spent all of his other chances. It was now or never. 

With only a few inches of fuel left in the can he crossed the threshold and poured the last of it around the doorway, the landing, the stairs. The outside walls of the building were scored and scribbled with angry graffiti, the stain of the red paint, a silent confession to the rising anger of the small town. He hoped it would be enough. Question asked, question answered. 

He screwed the lid back on, stowed the can safely away in the truck. Then, he pulled the box of matches out of his shirt pocket.

Firm strike, one pull. The tinny smell of sulfur, the flutter of a tiny flame. 

Burgess gave it a gentle toss onto the stairs, and the fire paused, inhaled, and took. 

He hurried away from the heat, circled the truck, pausing to glance once into the bed of the pickup, and then climbed in.

He did not turn to look. No need. It would burn.

Burgess drove away from the little town of Index for the last time as the flames received the building like an offering, blood-soaked jaws mouthing the door, the walls, the roof, ashes rising like birds into the rain-pregnant sky. 

********

The mountains opened their arms in sleep, in stretch, and Burgess did not feel his shoulders relax until he was safely across the pass. He left the highway, winding around and around to the little place nestled against the lake that he called home, the dirt roads of the community he had built with his own hands, almost by accident. Hidden away. 

As a matter of habit he waved to Widow Rogers’ house as he passed it, and Jemima was outside pruning the patch of hydrangeas in her front yard. The houses along the row felt especially watchful, curtains twitching as Burgess passed, but there was hope and expectation in the wondering, and curiosity. They had all agreed, together. It was decided. 

Question asked. No easy answer. 

He passed the Cross house, knowing that Bill and Hannah were sitting inside with their son, sipping lemonade in clumsy quiet, learning how to be a family again. The Valdez children ran alongside the truck on their way to the playground, laughing and waving, unaware of what had ended and what was beginning. 

From a distance, as Burgess neared his own house, he saw Naomi emerge from her front door, slim hand shielding her eyes. Within moments Paul joined her there, clasping her hand as they watched Burgess approach. The two of them had been turning Naomi’s lonely house into a home for them both, tidying and mending and replacing. They had been working on Burgess’s house, too, with fresh coats of paint on the trim, the fences, the chicken coop. It all looked quite handsome, renewed.

In spite of himself, the old man’s heart leaped. 

Son and daughter. Son and daughter, and by accident. 

You nearly missed it, you old fool.  

He pulled the truck up as close to the house as he could get it, and Naomi and Paul descended the porch stairs and crossed the path to meet him, chickens scattering from their feet with hearty rebuke. 

Paul opened the truck door for Burgess, mountain air slipping in to replace the stale smell of the gasoline can, and Naomi said, careful, “It’s done?”

“See for yourself.” Burgess smiled with uncharacteristic mischief as he climbed down. He rounded the back of the pickup and untied the strong cords holding down a heavy blue tarp. This he threw back to reveal a couple of black garbage bags, appearing very ordinary, appearing very unsuspicious. No one, just looking, would know what they held within. 

Burgess opened one of the bags and let Naomi peer inside. Her eyes widened.  

“There’s so many,” she breathed.

“Damn,” Paul said, looking over Naomi’s shoulder, awed. “That must have been a real chore.” 

“Had to be done,” Burgess replied, with modesty. But it had been a chore, a whole day’s work to move all of the program’s remaining shells from their WASPEP boxes into these bags, then fill the WASPEP boxes—and the preserve and discard bins, too—with newspaper, kindling, wood shavings, straw. Whatever would burn. Whatever would be thorough, quick.

He thought of the little town of Index. He hoped the rain had started, there. He hoped it would stamp out the final embers of whatever he had done, start the cleansing. He hoped that all of what remained of WASPEP’s legacy was nothing but ash and smoke, as it ought to have been so long ago. 

Proprietary genetic material. The corporate phrase he simply could not forget, that haunted his dreams. How many souls he might have saved, if he had only acted sooner. He knew there would still be those he could not bring back, those he could not print, too degraded for kindness. But he wasn’t willing to gamble on the rest, anymore.

It had been decided. The community had room, still, for more. List or no. Whoever remained they would help to find another home. It was the right thing to do. 

Empty’s only empty until it fills back up. 

“Will they come after you?” Paul asked. “If they don’t believe the town did it?”

Burgess shook his head, closing up the bag again. “WASPEP did nearly everything without a paper trail on purpose, and the address they have on file for me is years old. No one there knows about this place. It’s done.” 

His own words shivered in the air. It’s done. He didn’t know how it was all going to work. He was an old man, and this was going to take weeks, months, more days than he could count. But for the first time, he had help.    

Burgess, Paul, and Naomi unloaded the bags from the truck, the chickens following their footsteps like a reverent procession. The three of them carried the shells to the small room in the back of the barn where they stowed them beside the computer console. 

Once all were unloaded, Naomi went into the house to make coffee, and Burgess showed Paul how to start the machine up. The switches, the toggles, the displays. Showed him the screen, what to look for. Degradation numbers, identification, filtration, status. Burgess didn’t realize how much he knew until he heard himself explaining it, and Paul watched carefully, listened well, an eager student.  

When Naomi returned, it was Paul sitting at the computer with Burgess standing over his shoulder. Naomi handed each of them their coffee and then settled herself on the stool nearby, cradling her own cup in her capable hands, face tilted up at the empty tank. She was not a child, but she had the confidence of one.

To Naomi, the questions—voiced and unvoiced—carried one answer: all would be well.

As he surveyed the room, Burgess’s heart leaped again. It was an unfamiliar feeling. He figured himself a fool, an old fool; he wouldn’t know a good man if one fell out of the sky and landed at his feet.

But this, whatever this was—this home, this life, this strange little family—felt right. While he still caught glimpses of Christopher’s ghost out of the corner of his eye, sometimes, and still heard Colleen’s song of grief in the wild calls of the night-woods, the distant heavy dark, he held this new reality close to himself. He didn’t know how to truly see it clear, yet, but he was going to try.

Burgess leaned down, reached into the nearest black bag, and pulled out a shell at random from the pile, marveling at the otherworldly lightness of it. The feather weight of a human soul.

Outside, the rain had made its fleet-footed journey across the mountains. It began to fall in whispering earnest, rattling on the roof of the barn, a sweet-smelling gospel of new things, new worlds. 

Burgess handed the shell to Paul.  

“Well,” the old man said. “Let’s get started.”

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Thank you so much for reading!