Story Excerpt

Cicada

by Will McIntosh & Matt Mikalatos

Snowflakes hit the windshield and immediately melted, as if they were dying. A few more hours and they’d begin to survive, and bind together. Strength in numbers.

 

“We don’t know where they will appear this time,” the newscaster on the radio said. “All we know is, they’ll come. As they’ve come every year.”

 

“Every four hundred twenty-seven and a half days,” I corrected.

 

“Why are we even listening to this if you know more than they do?” Pol asked.

 

I turned the radio up.

 

“. . . if you hear the horn, lock your doors, stay in your home, and call the government hotline. Help is on the way.”

 

“Terrible advice,” I said. “You should run.”

 

Pol clicked the radio over to music. “What about people who have, like, a bunker?”

 

“They should run.”

 

“And guns?” Pol said. “If you had a bunker and a gun—”

 

“Dad had a gun.”

 

Madonna sang on the radio as an awkward silence stretched. I’d gone too far. I wasn’t used to talking to people for more than a minute or two at a time. I stared out the windshield.

 

Pol glanced at me from behind the wheel. He could only afford a quick glance on this slick, curvy road.

 

“What?” I asked.

 

“Nothing.”

 

“Whatever it is, say it. You won’t hurt my feelings.”

 

Pol sighed. “It used to be easy to hurt your feelings. You used to jabber on about nothing, you used to have friends. It’s as if my sister’s been replaced by this person who rations her words like they’re a precious commodity.”

 

I nodded. Fair enough. There was a chasm in my memories, with everything from before the first incursion belonging to some other person, as if some distant acquaintance had left them there by mistake.

 

Pol put on his signal, even though the nearest person was probably twenty miles away. He eased his Civic down the steep, familiar driveway of the lake house. The old Diana, the sister Pol remembered from their childhood, had a lot of good memories here.

 

“Shit,” Pol hissed, as the car slid a couple of feet before coming to a stop at an angle.

 

“Can’t believe you didn’t bring chains,” I said.

 

“I didn’t think it would be icy.”

 

A freezing wind pelted me as I stepped out of the car. The air smelled like pine trees and numbed the edges of my nostrils.

 

Pol popped the trunk. “Look, it worked. We’re here.” He gestured toward the frozen lake, the dock and boat house, stretched out below us.

 

“How have you survived this long without someone to think for you?” I asked.

 

“Charm and good looks.”

 

“Good looks are doing some heavy lifting,” I shot back.

 

Pol grinned, his face lighting up. “There’s my sister! A Diana sighting at last.”

 

We paused for a minute, saddled up with bags, and took in the lake house, where so many of old Diana’s best memories had been made, back before the cicada. Not our house—it was Uncle Hank’s—but when Mom and Dad were alive, we’d gone three or four times a year, sometimes alone, sometimes meeting Uncle Hank and Aunt Diane and our cousins. Staring up at that house, for a moment those memories felt like mine again. Taking the boat out on the lake. Morning runs around it. Mom making pancakes. During holidays we’d sometimes pack in with the whole family: us and Mom and Dad, Uncle Hank and Aunt Diane, and our cousins Bethany (amazing!) and Cammie (terrible!). Those memories were like a window to another world, not just another time.

 

And it was another world. The pre-cicada world. They were coming back tomorrow, always right on time. Four hundred and twenty-seven days. Plus a few hours, minutes, seconds. We could predict it down to the millisecond. Tomorrow was the day. My blood grew cold as the air. One would come for me. I just knew it.

 

“Thank you for coming with me,” Pol said.

 

It took me a half second to know what he meant. Coming to the lake house. Right. “Yeah. Uh. Thanks for twisting my arm. It’ll be good. Just the two of us. To catch up, I mean.”

 

“And nothing’s going to happen,” Pol said. “No cicada incursions in Colorado. Not once.”

 

“Not yet,” I said.

 

Pol folded his arms and huffed. “How many portals open in an incursion? Fifty?”

 

“Sixty-eight, on average. It varies each time.”

 

“So the odds of one opening here, in the middle of nowhere, are astronomical.” Pol spread his arms wide.

 

I shot him a look. “What are the odds of one opening near you five times? A billion to one? A trillion?”

 

I leaped over a big fallen tree, barely slowing, and high-stepped through skunkweed, my breath clouding in the cold air. There was a trail, but I never ran on trails. When I had to run for real, there was no predicting which way I’d have to go, and I wasn’t ever going to be one of those people in movies who trips on a damned tree root at just the wrong time.

 

Thorns ripped at my running pants; I spun a three-sixty to avoid the worst of it, raised my hands to shield my eyes from low-hung branches until I broke out of the brush, into the open space surrounding the lake house.

 

Voices drifted toward me; the sound of a vehicle door slamming.

 

I stopped short.

 

Pol was hefting a suitcase out of the back of Uncle Hank’s truck.

 

Oh, no. No, no, no.

 

Aunt Diane pointed at Pol. Her voice traveled like a loudspeaker. She was wearing a floral muumuu that I swear she had when we were kids. Orange flowers on a blue field. “Don’t you drop that, Apollo. Six hours I’ve been in that truck, I’m not in the mood to have broken glass in my bag.”

 

“Why do you have glass in your bag?” Pol asked, laughing. He’d always been immune to Aunt Diane, he thought she was hilarious.

 

“I don’t buy wine in boxes.”

 

Pol stopped short. He’d spotted me, must have seen the fury on my face. He hurried over.

 

“They had the same idea. Wait out the cicadas at the lake house. I guess we should have checked with them.”

 

“You said you did,” I said. I had the distinct feeling this had been Pol’s plan all along. “This was not the deal.”

 

“Diana?” My cousin Bethany—the good one—ran toward me, arms wide, grinning. She braked hard at the last instant and hugged me fiercely. “It’s so good to see you. I missed you.”

 

“It’s good to see you, too,” I said. And it would have been, any day but today. We’d been as close as sisters growing up. I turned to Pol. Seeing Bethany made this worse. A confusing riot of emotions welled up in my chest. I was glad to see her, but terrified something would happen to her when the cicadas came for me. Which they always did, even if no one believed me. And them not believing made it worse. Just being here was putting them in harm’s way. “We have to go.”

 

Pol gave me a be patient gesture.

 

“Now,” I said.

 

Bethany grasped me by the elbows, tried to turn me back around. “It’s okay. We can roll with this.”

 

“We can’t roll with this. This is not something you roll with.”

 

Near the truck, Aunt Diane and my terrible cousin Cammie were talking in low, urgent tones. Cammie was wearing a crop top and Daisy Dukes with her snow boots and a knit cap, an outfit that made absolutely no sense until I saw a skinny, ratty looking guy come around the truck. Probably her new boyfriend. She blew through them faster than Kleenex. Cammie glanced at me. I couldn’t help but notice the badly executed tattoos on her bare legs.

 

“Dallas,” Bethany said, her voice dripping with judgment. “Guess what he does for a living.”

 

Oh God. “Not tattoos.”

 

Bethany blocked my view of the relatives, forcing eye contact. “That’s right, Diana. Tattoos. He’s just starting out, and he’s terrible. You cannot leave me here alone.”

 

She managed to get a laugh out of me. She always could. But there was nothing she was going to say that would keep me here. The cicadas were coming, and when they did, Bethany would be wishing I was nowhere near her or her family. Which was okay. Smart, even. I wasn’t going to be within ten miles of another person if I could help it. Let the cicadas waste a portal coming after me, and me alone.

 

Bethany wrapped her arm around me and urged me toward the house. “At least stay for dinner. You’re not leaving without seeing Haley, are you?”

 

“Haley’s here?” Oh God, this was worse. Bethany’s daughter. One of the only family members that could bring me out of hiding. I’d even gone to see her in the hospital when she was born. I just assumed she’d be with her father—Bethany’s ex—during the incursion.

 

I checked my timer. The portals wouldn’t open for another twenty-nine hours and seventeen minutes. I could eat dinner, catch up, give Haley a big hug. So long as I got going a couple hours before the horn blast I could be far enough away that the cicadas wouldn’t come after my family. I was almost certain.