James Jaros ’ new novel Burn Down the Sky declare oneself a worrisome take on the post - global - warm dystopian setting . Our culture is no more , thanks to rocket temperatures and a catstrophic water shortage — and then there ’s the deadly “ Wicca ” computer virus .
learn out the first chapter of Jaros ’ horrifying post - apocalyptic novel below .
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Sweat drop from the point of Ananda ’s olfactory organ , darken the dust . The girl stir a shovel of dirt from the cracked seam of an empty reservoir and topped off a sandbag . Her mummy tied a quick knot , heaved it aside , and snarl open another hand - stitch sack . Two gentleman’s gentleman upraise the wall behind them .
“ Do n’t stop , hon . We ’re almost there . ”
Her female parent had catch her gaze at the steep sides of the drainage area - rising like drop-off , crumbling like chalk - before poke at the spadeful with her foundation . Ananda dip it back into the hard ground , the sun brutal on her back . Every fib she ’d ever find out about calamity call for grey skies , tempestuous skies , but there had never been a catastrophe like this one - that ’s what her pappa said - and the sun seldom stray . The grounds surround them in ring upon halo of shimmery , deadly heat . There was the reservoir on which she stand up , a moat of parched earth and insects extending mile from the ingroup in every instruction . Then high above her at the top of those clumpy cliff lie the shoreline where immense summer homes had once peer down at unthinkably coolheaded blue water before the flaming claim them , too . And beyond the roundabout of charred houses rested the unsounded woods , burn off to limbo by the same relentless forcefulness that had gutted those lavish homes - the beast orb that would not waffle .
Ananda had never known the world beyond the fall forest , but she imagined the fiery rings radiate all the way to the sun itself , set off those death rays in the sky .
The bulwark now rose to her female parent ’s eyes ; only a few foot remained before the refugee camp was enclose . They ’d been progress it for seven sidereal day , but what could it keep out . What ?
Her mother had been vague , her Padre less so . Before go away to reconnoitre the border this morning , he ’d said it would keep out coyotes , wolf , panther , bears , predator .
He ’d bring up the predator almost as an reconsideration , but Ananda knew better : Another picket had tell apart them be active south from Knoxville ten twenty-four hours ago . They ’d always intend the camp was isolate , far from the plundering . Plans for the wall had begun directly .
As she shoveled , she glanced through the narrow-minded opening to the camp garden , shaded by a patchwork of old clothes , torn blankets , tattered tarp - anything that could hold up the sun , even weakly . sun in only the smallest doses , and each plant watered by hired man , by trickle . The greens - chard and kale and prickly-seeded spinach - hung withered as the font of the quondam men and women who look after every leaf , pick off the never-ending bugs and demolish them with fingers turn the dun color of world .
Ananda and her female parent imprint half of a work crew that include the manpower who raised the actual paries and plastered it with a mud mixing more cherished than the gem of old . Her father ’s brother , Uncle Rye , tall and lean like him , stuff the final sandbag into place as the sun slipped behind the distant drop-off , briefly backlighting the ruins .
Always the tang of Natalie Wood smoke in the air , acerbic and sweet , even when the fire could n’t be seen , as if the flames had haunt the last breath of the land deep underground , burn the root word and rocks and worms until the humans above collapsed into the world below . Making a hidden hell to fit the one they ’d go out to the middle .
Even the cracks in the lake bed appeared to smoulder , though they ’d built the summer camp as far as potential from the combustibles that formed the reservoir ’s towering , char border . Nothing hold out down here but what they tended - the garden , themselves . metric grain of promise .
“ Is Dad get to make it back tonight ? ” Ananda always worried when he was extend , saying good - bye to him at morning with pleading in her center .
“ Yes , he ’ll be back . ” Her female parent ’s script fell to her back , rubbing it briefly as they walk past the picked - over berry patch by the camp ’s lone spigot , its lip dry as encrustation at the end of the day . It was drawing the last of the groundwater , and even the littlest children make out this . It might last another year . It might dry out up tomorrow . No one desire to contemplate the next step because it would be a step , maybe a million of them , each more dangerous than the last as a Modern search began .
Ananda looked around . At least here , she recall , we have the bulwark , now . Water , now . nutrient , now . Out there - beyond the cliffs and detritus and burned Tree , beyond the empty cities - were only hearsay of the speculative the public can offer .
“ Reduced to rumors . ” Her father had once said that while staring at the sky , as if bewildered by the breathless weight of his own Scripture , no more believing them than the absence of clouds or rainfall . He ’d put his hand on her articulatio humeri and enounce , “ I ’m dark . ”
She and her mom sat outside their tent on a sheet of pinkish plastic scavenge from the long journey here , a report she first heard as a toddler . Everything they owned held a taradiddle , for nothing had come well , so a piece of charge card , bleached by the blazing sky to the sick hint of color , had a account and an imagined past tense in a better sentence .
A centipede crawled toward her foot . Her female parent crushed it so quickly that Ananda only glimpse it moving .
“ venomous . ”
Her mom did n’t postulate to tell her about centipede or snakes , or the barbellate toxic plants that could sprout in the cracks of the lake bed . Her parents had been postgraduate students in wildlife biology before the final dip forced them south . They taught endurance classes in the camp , though only days ago Ananda had hear the other grownup argue for a gentler name . But her female parent had say the children needed to know “ the stake . ”
Her mother ’s eyes were never easy , always searching , like they ’d seen too much , and having seen too much were forced to reckon for even more .
Looking now for Bliss . On the same day Ananda had been assign to bulwark construction , her sure-enough sister was given cistern obligation . Critical work . Her female parent ’s eyes calculate through the long gloam for Bliss to come back .
The camp had four large cisterna buried in the lake seam , and a web of gutter to reap the rare rainfall . Not a drop could be run off . Everyone grabbed cup and bowling ball and piece of paper of credit card and ran around get it , sore with relief and laughter , and drinking their fill while they could . festal , like a vacation . rainwater ! Without its sparse offer , they would have dried up the groundwater long ago and been driven to the Gulf , deadened and heating still , dark with velvety oil slicks and derrick long vacate .
They ’d come to Alabama ten eld ago , though the public figure of nation mean nothing now . Droughts knew no borders . Neither did the gritty wind or the thunderhead that devour the sky before battering the land with vicious bursts , flood it , washing away the fat soil until every remaining Panthera uncia became a hoarded wealth greater than atomic number 79 . hate the waste of so much water , and hating the passing of those clouds , too , the remote promise of their furious anvil shapes vanish like a import ’s rage .
Bliss and her work crew had been hiding the openings to the cisterns , drawn down to a nine - day supply . Rationing had begun with the edifice of the wall , a struggle for Ananda , who perspired heavily . Her female parent had shared her rations .
“ If vulture come , we ’ll claim the drouth like a friend , ” her Father of the Church had say last Nox , “ because having nothing might tug them on without a fight . ”
“ They want more than water supply , ” her mother had reply . “ They want- ”
Before her father could speak , her female parent silenced herself . But Ananda knew what she would have enjoin : “ They want little girl . ” And she knew why her mother had stopped talk : the fear of Wicca .
Her parents had told her about the virus a small more than a year ago . They ’d sit her down in their tent after the evening communal repast and shut the flaps . Bliss had stand outdoors to verify the small nestling did n’t overhear what was about to be said . Her mother had told her to listen cautiously , that they did n’t require to live on what they had to tell her , “ but you ’re older now , and you need to know . ” Her mom began by saying that Wicca had a scientific name : Immune Disintegration Disorder , or IDD , but that “ Wicca ” had come into far greater usage after enraged fundamentalist of all faiths started anticipate it the “ devil ’s disease . ”
Ananda had sat still as the air in the tent as her mother pronounce that the Wicca virus confine dependable sex between men and women to the twelve month after menarche . “ After that , sex will almost always kill you . So sex ca n’t happen , Ananda , ” her mother had said in her easy voice . “ Ever . ”
“ But you have sex . You had me and Bliss . ”
“ No , not any longer . gender is too mortal now . And it ’s a horrifying death , Ananda . It ’s so bad it makes the great unwashed kill themselves . It ’s madness . ” Then her mom stared at her so intensely that it frighten her .
“ Meaning ? ” Ananda whispered .
Her parents had glanced at each other . Ananda watched her father shake his head .
“ Can you just consent that for now ? ” he asked her . “ That it ’s the most horrible disease ever ? ”
Her parent never talked to her about Wicca again , but every daytime since then the disease had palpate as real as the ravage terra firma . Even Bliss would n’t talk about it . “ The more you fuck , ” her sister told her , “ the less you ’ll wish you knew . ”
Now , Ananda watched everyone in the camp return to their tent , sitting as she and her female parent were , by the front flaps . Fatigue quelling boredom , as it did every solar day . They numbered almost 140 people , about half of them child , and were join not by a common religious belief , other than a shared understanding that organized religion had fail them as surely as other earthly instauration ; or by a common hope beyond survival , because promise in its most magisterial realms - home and estate live with the abundant yield of labor - had failed them , too .
But endurance itself was a potent unguent , solace their unremarkable differences and holding them together like the mud they made from sand and clay and compost , which turned fifty - pound sandbag into a wall . Joined also by the weaponry they shared . Ananda , along with the other children ten or older , bang how to use their eclectic collecting of revolvers , tongue , swords , chain , autoloading side arm , scattergun , and three fully automatic rifle . Firepower looted from an armory , back when armories still stood brazen against the universe .
Well - armed for a camp , but not like the marauders who had the richest redoubts shower them with food , fuel , weapon , and armour - plated fomite - all they needed to hunt girls . That was the chilling rumour Ananda had ever hear : that crew roamed the dry land “ harvest home ” girls like her for sex .
Her parents would n’t say , and neither had Bliss . But Ananda sense that everything the girls whisper about sexual activity harvesting was true . She ’d glimpsed it in the eyes of her sister , turn cold when one of the older son in their own camp get his gaze linger on her chest , which had originate in the past year . Ananda had also noticed Bliss ’s diminished boob , and above them , always rattling , her arctic profane eyes .
Her female parent was still appear for her .
“ What if Dad does n’t get back tonight ? ” The sky was darken .
“ I tell you , he ’ll be back . ”
Empty words . One way or another they said empty words every Clarence Shepard Day Jr. , until they could have filled the source with their bunk .
Ananda stand up , jumping up to look over the wall to prove to overtake passel of her founder first . Nothing but the vast knit of lake bed . Her father had stay by at nighttime only twice before , both times after he ’d sight piranha and could n’t risk capture . The predator had little interest in mankind , she ’d overheard her mother telling Bliss , but rendered their bodies for their dogs .
Dusk , gratefully , was wearisome this time of year , one of the few clues to the season . “ You canvas the slant of the sun to have intercourse wintertime from summer , ” her dad had told her . But it seemed a offence to have to measure angles to make out the season .
“ It is a offence , ” her father consort .
“ Then someone ’s got to pay , ” she said .
“ In the best of public , someone would . ”
Still , she receive the slant because when she jumped again , the late light revealed dust rise above a removed hammock in the lake bed . A wisp , that ’s all , and it might be no more than a rubble Beelzebub dancing tauntingly . But it was her Fatherhood .
Running .
“ Dad ! ” she holler . “ He ’s die hard ! ” She raced to the bulwark , hurtle herself up to the top . He was running with Hansel , their mastiff mix , by his side . Hansel looked behind them .
Ananda hear her female parent yelling , “ enter the logic gate . Open it , ” before pull off the chains herself .
Her father was a half statute mile aside . At least . She ’d never seen him head for the hills so severely . His rifle was strapped across his back and his bandoleer undulate against his bare chest . His hair , farseeing and band , bounced behind him .
He screamed at Hansel . Ananda could n’t hear him , see only the hand gesture that make out with the dictation “ plate . ” The huge Canis familiaris slowed , as if deplume between his master and the ordering , then raced ahead .
Ananda sickened when she saw her father ’s command , even more when her mother screamed “ No ” as an armour - dress motortruck yaup around the hummock , churning up a hurricane of rubble .
Her ma pulled her down from the paries . “ You are not to watch . ”
Ananda broke free and hoisted herself back up . She saw Hansel nearing the logic gate , her father still so far off .
Her mother pulled her back down again , shouting , “ Go to the concealing stead now . ”
“ But Mom , ” she plead , “ Dad’s- ”
Her mother pushed her into the arms of a char who rushed her to the rootage wine cellar on the other side of the refugee camp .
Ananda travel rapidly down the steps and slipped into the darkness carved out of the earth behind a false wall , cover with other fille - nine- , ten- , eleven- , and twelve - yr - olds . Even a fifteen - class - old . But not Bliss . One twelvemonth after menarche , Bliss had been freed from have to hide . She would be at the wall with a pistol . Everyone had take aim for this .
Ananda see the radical cellar doorway faithful . Not locked . Too obvious . But the entrance to the false paries would yield only to force .
“ Nanda , ” whispered Imagi .
Ananda drew the fille close . A nine - year - old , but untried than the three years that separated them . “ Down syndrome , ” Ananda ’s father had told her . Imagi had a big orotund face , widely - opened eyes .
“ We have to be quiet , ” Ananda say .
Imagi giggle and shouted , “ still . ”
The other girls hush her at once . Bella , another twelve - class - old , said “ You ’ve get to keep her under ascendency , Ananda . ”
They waited . So few auditory sensation reach the root wine cellar , then the cracking of bullets .
Imagi stiffened . So did Ananda , but she put her deal over the girl ’s lip .
“ Remember the game ? ” she read to her .
Imagi nod in the blackness .
“ It ’s starting now . ”
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