Be Home by Dark
Flash fiction, 900 words. For IAM's May 1 prompt. Sorry for the hiatus, but Spring has many cares!
When the star is black, the snows will come.
Mark Meter thought about his kids’ mock prophecy with a chill that had nothing to do with the weather. Sonia (8) and Lane (6) loved princesses and dragons and Merlin and fairies. In their enchanted world, everything was an omen. Their bad (good?) luck that the planet topside was a frigid, barren wasteland thanks to the ominous black Dyson sphere that encircled its artificial star.
He shifted gears on the ice grinder as the tread-mobile vehicle struggled up a slick hill. Four hours until the next storm. Maris was a water world – of sorts. There was precipitation – of sorts. It was a successful experiment – of sorts.
One of the men in the back grunted something as Mark’s rough handling jostled them. He paid them no mind, he never did. He was here to drive, not to dig. The diggers weren’t allowed to bring their families, if they even had them. Sometimes, Mark wondered if they weren’t just snowmen, Jack Frost abominations clumped together by the largesse of the Federal Government. They certainly melted away every evening. He didn’t know what became of them.
“Four minus twelve,” muttered Pat Grant, his navigator. She was staring at her watch and not at the expanse. Why would she? He was the driver.
“We’ll make it, I can see the Home Disc from here.”
“Lot of ice between us and those lights.”
“Two hours, tops.”
When the star is black, the snows will come.
The girls’ prophecy was right, it had no way of being wrong. The star was always black, and the snows fell like clockwork, at local 9:00, 19:00, and 21:00. Good digging work could be done in the long intervals. Everyone stayed put in the Dig Disc for those three hours. And every third day, Mark Meter brought the ice grinder to deliver new diggers and take the exhausted ones.
10, 3, 12. 10, 3, 12. 10, 3, take a ride. A digger’s life for three days out of seven. And never the same three days.
Mark had 12 hours to go from the Home Disc, make the switch, and return. It was usually only three each way. No problem. Not if they all wanted to live.
The snows only lasted minutes, but in that time they could bury a mountain and brought with them a chill that could shatter bone. This was the rhythm. The Federal Government saw to it that it never deviated. The sphere’s pulse dictated their lives, they were all just along for the ride. With Mark driving.
The ice grinder protected them from Maris’ normal freezing temperatures. It could dig out of a mountain, climb angles up to 78 degrees, or 60 on pure ice. Ice was the worst. Every fourth day, the sphere would open just a little, for just a minute, to excise pressure, releasing a stream of cataclysmic warming that melted up two twelve feet of snow.
Then it closed. Then the ice formed. Mark hated driving late on that fourth day. This fourth day.
Bad luck, that the ice grinder had broken a tread and needed servicing at the Dig Disc. Just a few minutes to exchange it, just a few more to fit it, a few more to check it. A few to recalibrate. A hour lost, total. He had eight to make the three-hour drive.
He didn’t like cutting it so close.
He cut through a patch of ice so resistant that the shrieking sound made him flinch. He squinted out of reflex, remembering his boyhood days ice skating on Lake Michigan. When the sun had been bright and cold, the trees bare, their sinuous limbs winking with sparkling snow because spring was promised. Maris was so dark.
“Hey, Meter?”
“What?” He cut a road as only a professional ice grinder driver could do. “Kind of busy.”
“Why’s it so dark?”
“It’s the ice, just …”
“No, the sun. the sun’s dark.”
Mark looked up, his blood chilling for the second time that ride.
The faint yellow lines in the sphere that marked the drive safe had disappeared. The sphere was a formless void, a dark star, a black hole that ate hope.
The sphere was going to pulse.
“It’s not time yet!”
Pat Grant was too busy staring to respond, her own dark eyes mirrors of doom.
An extra-cyclical pulse? The Federal Government had quoted a chance of that in one in a million. In a million years, it could happen once. Could.
No one had warned them, who could have? It wasn’t planned.
But Mark Meter had been warned. He’d laughed and patted the heads of his pint-sized Cassandras.
When the star is black, the snows will come.
Mark refused to be swallowed by the sea. He angled the ice grinder and began to dig, dig down, and down, and down. He knew from his boyhood that snow was an insulator. That it could protect you in a blizzard. He learned in that moment what it meant to be a digger.
And he prayed that this was not the day that fate took hold of him and laid him out at last.