Homesteader
by Deborah SacksI knew my job was going to kill me from the moment I enlisted, seven years ago. Some people called me a suicidal environmentalist for joining, but personally, I call myself a family man. Every day I get up and stand in the sunshine with my chemicals and think about my family, living in a dark, congested lab an ocean away. I know I’m never going to see them again, and that hurts, though not as much as it did in the beginning. The knowledge that they're going to live in this large, safe house that I've cleaned up for them more than compensates for the pain.
I don't have many memories left, but I can still recall cresting the far hill, almost five years ago, and catching sight of this house, standing alone in the distance. It was less than five miles from the drop point where they launched us, raw recruits fresh from our two years of training, out of helicopters in our biosealed suits with wagonloads of equipment. From my first glimpse I knew that this house, was where I wanted my wife to raise our girls.
The building is almost two hundred years old and made of granite, which is easier to clean than wood or brick. Maybe it's just the Toxin rotting out my system, but as I stare at it now, orange in the sunset, I can almost see my wife leaning out of the upstairs window, wearing a pink-striped dress and waving a scarf at me, like my mother used to do when I was little.
When I saw this house, I waved good-bye to the other members of my drop group, knowing that would be the last I’d ever see of them. I strode across the dead lawn to nail my name plaque to the front door. It will remain there forever, naming this house as the house that I cleaned, my little plot in history.
The government promised that when every house in New Eden has been decontaminated, they’ll build a big wall engraved with each cleaner's name, but that's less important to me than this plaque, S. Diriger, right across the front door. My wife will see it every day when she comes home from work, and my girls will have something tangible to remember their father by.
Along with the scanning and medical equipment, the government gave each of us a DU, which stands for Disintegration Unit, and taught us how to use it. The DU has a fairly large chamber, a perfect cube six feet to a side, with a shredder machine in back for the really big things.
After staking my claim, I cleaned out the house, taking everything outside and depositing it all into the DU, piece by piece. The little things went first: dolls and frilly dresses from the little girls’ rooms, books, magazines, the complete works of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Then knickknacks from the parents’ room: little glass fawns from the mother’s dresser, spare change and a small gold soccer trophy from the father’s nightstand. After that I moved on to pots and plates from the kitchen, and delicate silverware with little flowers on the handle. The DU ate it all.
I wanted to keep the photographs and science-fair projects from the living room as a memorial to the family who used to live here, but I couldn’t, not if I wanted my family here in their stead.
It took me nearly a week to clean out all the little, easily movable belongings. After I’d finished, I started on the mismatched furniture: a heavy Tibetan sofa, a stylish Japanese dining table, piles of colonial bookshelves. Even the yellow velvet curtains, threadbare from too many admiring fingers, had to be carried out into the sunshine and tossed into the DU.
Last to go was the family itself. I stood in the master bedroom as the last rays of sunshine crept over the windowsill behind me, and examined them one by one. They were misshapen from the Toxin’s work, but strangely preserved, even thirty years post mortem. After the Toxin had done its work, there weren’t any bacteria left to finish decomposing them.
Their expressions were frozen at the moment of death, yet none of them looked afraid. The two sisters curled together between their parents, sleepy looking. One of the girls had her jaw set defiantly, an expression that reminded me of my Mags, or maybe Chrissy, whenever I told her to go to bed.
The father faced his wife, his expression sad yet hopeful, as if he expected to meet her in some afterlife. But the mother faced away from them, towards the sunset. Was she waiting for the invisible Toxin to creep over the sill and steal her family? Or had she just wanted to catch the last rays of sunshine on her face, feel their warmth one final time?
Very carefully, I zipped the black body bags around them, carried each one outside, and laid them side-by-side on the dead lawn.
In the end, all that remained of the family were twelve canisters of toxic dust, four corpses, and a single photograph.
The picture was one of the 183 snapshots that I'd found on the bed with the family, scattered all around, along with several old crosses made of wood and metal, and even one of crystal. They must have known they were doomed. They were too close to the Contaminated Zone to get underground in time. But instead of giving in to hysteria, they'd decided to snuggle together and review their lives before passing on. I often find myself wondering what they prayed for in those last hours.
I wanted to keep the pictures most of all, even though they’re as contaminated as everything else. I’m not really sure why they seemed so important. Maybe it's because the two girls in them remind me of my own daughters. This little girl with the pig tails and the smile could be Chrissy on her sixth birthday, or this one here with missing teeth and green eyes could be Mags, spinning a soccer ball on her finger. Those pictures are all I have left of my family, except for my few memories.
Or maybe I cherished those old photos because they showed me life as it was meant to be—bright, sunny and spacious. Humans weren't supposed to live packed fifteen to a room the size of a shack, eating food dried and stored four decades ago, intended for astronauts and scientists without taste buds. I'm not an old man, even if my body is wasted away; I have few memories of a time when the Earth was still alive, yet I spent the last eighteen years of the hibernation secretly doubting that the sun--a huge, natural light in the sky--was any more real than the other myths of my childhood, like the boogieman or the Easter Bunny.
Maybe that's the real reason I was the first of thirty thousand to volunteer when the government promised a free piece of New Eden to whoever would clean it up, despite my wife’s objections. To me, a few years in the sun, and knowing the exact shade of blue in the sky, really was worth dying for.
My wife never understood that. She hardly remembered the sun, and the idea of the sky frightened her. She called me a coward and said I betrayed her and the girls, running off and dying. I tried to explain to her that I was doing it for the family, but she didn’t believe me. In the end, I just had to leave them. Recovering what I had lost, being able to share it with them, mattered more to me.
And yet, that final decision still keeps me awake at night, tossing with regret.
After emptying the house, I purified the grounds, just as I’d been trained. First I pulled up all the dead grass and shrubs and fed them to the DU. That job cost me my thumb, index, and middle fingers on my right hand. The Toxin decayed my biosuit to the point where it got right through to my skin, forcing me to amputate the digits before the Toxin could spread further, faster. I had no intention of dying before the job was done.
When the plant remains were gone, I drowned the soil in the Antitoxin, neutralizing it for animals, at least for limited exposure. Years will pass before grass or anything else will grow there again, and my girls won't be able to make mud pies without getting sick like I used to, since the very last traces of the toxin won't fade 'til they're teenagers. Still, that's a fine price for life in the sun. Besides, my wife can install some synthetic grass, and that will probably be just as good. I won’t get every last particle of Toxin; that would be impossible. But I can reduce it to a non-lethal concentration, only 0.001 parts per billion. My scanners already tell me that I’m way past the safety limit, but even if I wasn’t, my family could get treatment before the Toxin destroyed them. Treatment exists even now, though it’s useless against a cleaner’s level of exposure.
I like to look at the gray soil and imagine it covered with lush green, under a warm sun, while my girls laugh and play outside, maybe watching a kitten chase an imaginary bug through the grass. There won't be any real bugs of course—not until we can generate a new generation from DNA samples. Not even roaches survived this one.
Cleaning the grounds took me the rest of my first year, and that wasn't even the hard part. The really tough phase--the actual scrubbing--came last. The Toxin doesn't penetrate stone, but it certainly coats it. The only way to get the house clean enough for human habitation is to get down and scrub each stone with the Antitoxin, until every millimeter is clean.
That was the part that really destroyed me, the part that we spent more than half of our training preparing for. I lost my right leg entirely, and my left foot. Then went my right arm at the elbow (fortunately, they'd equipped us with prosthetics beforehand, so that didn't slow me down much, aside from the time needed to get accustomed to them), along with my hair and my sense of smell. Time has altered the Toxin; it used to kill on contact, rotting out the brain fifteen seconds after inhalation. Now, it just rots the body, like some form of mutated leprosy. These days, it’s death by attrition, starting from the moment it gets into your system. In the last ten days, working on the roof, I didn’t even bother to wear my biosuit anymore. Its trivial protection wasn’t worth forsaking the sunshine on my shoulders.
I'm finished now. The house is clean, the grounds are safe, and the sun is beautiful. It's taken me five years to clean up a tiny piece of what Europe did to itself in five days. Now, there's only one thing left to do before my family arrives next year.
I've spent the past day just looking at the one photo I’d saved from the pile on the bed. It shows a little boy with shaggy, sun-bleached brown hair standing in a field, the smell of summer all around him. He holds a soccer ball in one hand and a trophy in the other, a huge smile lighting his face. He’s just kicked his first goal, winning the season for his friends. He’s young and he’s whole, and in that moment, invincible.
As soon as the photo is snapped, he'll tear off his shoes and shin-guards and race around the field, waving his arms over his head, shouting at his friends to chase him.
That night, he and his family will eat chocolate-swirl ice cream sundaes topped with nuts and whipped-cream in celebration, and tomorrow morning, before the sun rises, his mother will drive him to the airport and cover him in kisses before he boards a plane to America. He’s going to visit his cousins, all by himself, his first real adventure.
The boy is happy. He doesn’t know that a week later, exactly ten years after the last nuclear bomb was dismantled, terrorists will unleash a chemical so unexpected and fierce that it will paralyze the world. He doesn’t know that the 73,000 people working in or touring NASA’s underground laboratories would be trapped there for the next thirty years while the particles slowly sink from the atmosphere and their hordes of supplies slowly dwindle away. He has no idea that he'll one day have to sacrifice his own life to clean up a tiny piece of rural, southern France where the toxin first fell. There, where it’s weakened the most, he will create a microscopic modern day Eden so that his daughters can know all the joys that he took for granted as a child. All he knows is the happiness of watching a soccer ball soar towards the goal, and the thrill of his family screaming his name when it flies past the goalie’s fingertips.
Now I close my eyes, enjoying the cool, moist air brushing my skin. I put the ruined biosuit on the floor of the DU chamber, and place my photograph on top of it. I’ve already put the bodies of my parents and the little sisters I barely remember inside, leaned up against the walls. There’s just barely enough room left for me.
I take one last look at the glorious sun, red-orange now that it's setting, surrounded by pink clouds. I hope my girls will some day cherish this sight as much as I do.
I push the delayed-activation button on the DU, step inside, and pull the door shut behind me.
©Deborah Sacks
Deborah e. Sacks is a full-time student in her senior year at Beloit College in WI, where she majors in creative writing. She spent four years studying science fiction writing with award-winning author Michael A. Burstein. Ms. Sacks is a native of Boston, MA; this is her first published work.