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The old farmhouse survived the second alien harvest. Kate wanted to make sure it survived the third one. The 17-year anniversary was coming up and Kate sat at a dining room table covered in materials scrounged to make shells for her father’s shotgun.

She always thought of it as her father’s shotgun instead of hers, though he’d been dead for over thirty years. Killed in the first arrival. Just like she thought of it as his house and his table. The china in the cabinet was her mother’s. The silver and the crystal water goblets were her grandmother’s. The only things that she thought of as her own were the post-harvest additions. The maps of the county pinned to the walls. The metal shutters. The supplies and pre-harvest books stacked up the walls almost to the ceiling. And the bunker. The storm cellar under the house that she and her neighbors had strengthened and stocked to hide from the attacks. These were the things that she would pass on one day.

Her daughter, Jean, burst into the room. “Mom, there’s a man coming up the drive. Never seen him before.”

“Run to Boyce’s farm and raise the alarm,” Kate told her, taking up her father’s gun.

She waited until Jean was safely out the back door and into the fields before she stepped off the front porch. They’d converted it to a wheelchair ramp when they rebuilt it after the last harvest. Boyce’s farm was miles away. They wouldn’t get here in time to help, but at least it would get her daughter out of the way. (more…)

Sweat stung Trish’s eyes and she scrubbed her face with the hem of her threadbare shirt. When the shirt was new, it stretched taught over her soft belly. Now it hung limply and revealed the hollowed dimples of her ribcage as she lifted it.

“Why’s it called the Library?” Susannah’s youthful tones cut through the silence of the barren wasteland.

“In the old days, libraries housed thousands of books,” Lani responded as she stirred the pot of what would have to pass as soup—cactus water flavored with old bones, cactus chunks, and whatever insects, snakes, and rodents happened across their path.

They were a ragtag bunch that she held together with little more than hopes and hollow promises that things would be better once they reached the Library. Most people thought it was a fairytale. They weren’t far off. It existed. At least, it did eight months prior when she dropped off her last group of survivors.

“What’s a book?” Thomas cut in predictably. Though they were siblings, he shared few features in common with bright-eyed Susannah.

“It’s how people used to pass along knowledge before the turn of the century. Before information went digital.” Lani couldn’t have been more than a child before the digital era began, when physical books were recycled as passé and replaced with space-saving tablets. Even Trish herself could count on her fingers how many times she’d seen an actual book, much less held one. (more…)