Выбрать главу

“’Specially Murph,” he added.

Cooper turned his gaze skyward, where the stars were showing them something that didn’t happen that much anymore. A show worth staying up for. He could pick out the Seven Sisters and Orion’s belt and the dim, faintly red orb of Mars. Humanity had been headed there, once. He had been headed there, or at least that had been the general idea.

“We used to look up and wonder at our place in the stars,” he said. “Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.”

Donald’s expression was sympathetic.

“Cooper,” he said, “you were good at something, and you never got a chance to do anything with it. I’m sorry. But that’s not your kids’ fault.”

Cooper knew he didn’t have anything to say to that, so he didn’t even try. He just continued watching the slow wheel of the night sky, the thousands of stars he could see, the trillions he couldn’t due to atmosphere and distance. Men and women had been out there. Men had gone to the moon, and no rewriting of any textbook would ever change that reality.

No matter how inconvenient a fact it might be for the caretakers.

SIX

Something in the face of the old man shifts. His eyes are looking at something we cannot see. Should not see.

“May 14th,” he says.Never forget. Clear as a bell. You’d never think…”

Another man’s face, also old, and his expression is close kin to that of the first.

“When the first of the real big ones rolled in,” he says, “I thought it was the end of the world.”

* * *

The crack of the bat brought Cooper’s wandering mind back to the game, at least for a moment.

He watched the ball shoot up, like a rocket determined to break through the stratosphere, only to slow, briefly stop, and arc sharply back down to the mitt waiting to catch it. He gazed around at the half-filled stands, where a smattering of applause didn’t seem to really add up to enthusiasm.

“In my day we had real ball players,” Donald complained. “Who’re these bums?”

The pop fly was the third out, and the team on the field started in—“New York Yankees” printed plainly on their uniforms.

“Well, in my day people were too busy fighting over food for baseball,” Cooper reminded him, “so consider this progress.”

Murph reached a bag of popcorn toward Donald.

“Fine,” the old man grumbled, looking at the bag as if it might contain manure. “But popcorn at a ball game is unnatural. I want a hot dog.”

Cooper watched his daughter’s face frame her confusion.

“What’s a hot dog?” she asked.

Cooper glanced at Tom, sitting next to him. They hadn’t spoken since his conversation with the principal, but it was probably time to address it. So after a moment, with some hesitation, he put his arm around the boy.

“The school says you’re gonna follow in my footsteps,” he told the boy. “I think that’s great.”

Tom offered him a skeptical look.

“You think that’s great?” he said.

“You hate farming, Dad,” Murph piped up. “Grandpa said.”

Not helping here… Cooper sent a frown back toward Donald, who just lifted his shoulders in a half-assed apology. Not helping at all.

Feeling a little of the wind go out of him, Cooper turned his attention back to Tom.

“What’s important is how you feel about it, Tom,” he said. The boy was silent for a moment, as he thought about it.

“I like what you do,” Tom said. He wasn’t joking, or trying to be ironic, but answering sincerely. “I like our farm.”

Cooper heard the bat crack again, but this time the crowd didn’t respond at all. In fact, the players on the field didn’t either—no one was running bases or trying to catch the ball. Instead, one by one, their gazes were turning upward.

Cooper looked up, as well.

* * *

“You’ve never seen the like,” the old man says, his voice thick with remembered fear. “Black. Just black.”

* * *

The storm was building itself on the horizon, a wall of dust churning toward them. Cooper always thought they looked more like tsunamis than storms, and this one more than most. The air was sharp with ozone, and already the wind was picking up as the dry, cold front that drove the storm shoved the warm evening air before it and away.

The temperature had already dropped a few degrees. The hairs on his arms stood, as crooked lines of blue-white fire danced in the Stygian tempest like the demons of some ancient mythology, come to demand sacrifice.

Maybe that’s next, Cooper thought. Burnt offerings to appease the dust, to ease the blight. Why stop at rejecting the last century-and-a-half of scientific achievement? Why not claw it all the way back to Babylon and Sumer?

The game was over, that much was sure. Already people were streaming from the stadium, kerchiefs over their faces ready for when the dust hit.

So much for the family evening out.

“Come on, guys,” Cooper said.

* * *

Cooper had hoped to outrun the dust storm at first, but that hope was dimming along with the light from the sun. Donald and the kids were frantically stuffing rags into vents, cracks, and anyplace the insidious dust might enter the truck.

He knew from experience it wouldn’t be enough.

Through the rearview mirror he saw the monster advancing, watched buildings and roads vanish into it. The truck was beginning to jerk and rock.

Then the wall hit them, and everything went dark. The wheel tried to wrench itself out of his hands as Cooper fought desperately to stay on the road—if he was even still on it. He couldn’t see more than a yard past his windshield, and the pavement was so cracked and eroded, it felt scarcely different from open ground under his tires. It would be easy to stray. Like Jansen, who had driven right into an old stream bed and been buried in a drift. Of course, Jansen never had much of a sense of direction in the best of times.

“It’s a bad one,” Donald noticed.

No shit, Cooper thought. The storm that had buried Jansen hadn’t been half as bad as this one. There couldn’t really be any doubt that they were getting worse as the years went on. Mother Nature reasserting her superiority with ever-increasing enthusiasm.

“Mask up, guys,” Cooper said. Murph and Tom both obeyed immediately, pulling surgical masks out of the glove compartment and fitting them onto their faces.

The truck shuddered as the storm moaned around them. Cooper navigated through the brief breaks in the darkness. Visibility could be measured in feet, and on two hands. Wind belted the truck, again and again.

Cooper’s one advantage was that the land around his place was pretty flat—no hills to pull, no downslopes. If he felt anything like that, it would mean he was way off target, and he would know instantly to slam on the brakes and wait it out.

In the end, it was mostly muscle memory that got them home. He’d made the trip from town so often that the distance and turns were furrowed into his brain. As they crept up to the farm, he finally had time to worry beyond the moment, to wonder what the damage would be this time, how many solar panels would need replacing, how many windows had been shattered. How much of the crop he was going to find flattened.