Storms of Future Past Books One through Four

Chapter 4-1

Chapter 4

Anne opened her eyes inside a massive library, the biggest one she’s ever seen, even bigger than the one at the university in the city. The wood and metal shelves stretched away in all directions as far as she could see. Even when she leaned her head back far enough to feel dizzy, she couldn’t see the tops of them or the ceiling.

Only hundreds, thousands, millions of books in every shape, size, and color.

Well, stacked impossibly high and forever out of reach in what she was starting to suspect was a dream, they were still books. More than she could read in her life, in a hundred lives. Anne smiled and hugged herself, turning in a circle to look at as much as she could. She breathed in the warm, welcoming scent of all that paper without even a hint of the dust or sharp cleaners that made her eyes and throat hurt in a real library.

There was no door or checkout desk, not that she could see. A few scuffed and scarred tables were shoved together in a clear spot beside her, with green cushioned chairs poking up here and there. She walked on thin gray carpet that made her footsteps silent, running her fingers along the row of books closest to her.

Warm scratchy fabric. Cool slick plastic. Rough bumpy paper. None of the spines she touched had any words on them, only flashes of color and pictures she couldn’t make out. They all had a feel to them, a hit of sensation. She didn’t have to read the titles to know which books would be scary, sad, boring, or exciting.

Anne wanted to find something happy to read. She’d been feeling very unhappy lately, even in her dreams, filled with something she could only call dread. She couldn’t say why, but asleep or awake, she was sure something bad is going to happen. She wanted to escape, just for a while.

A huge book caught her attention, almost too heavy for her to pull off of the shelf she has to reach up to. The book was almost as long as from her waist to the top of her head, but it didn’t weigh nearly as much as she thought it would. She managed to get it down and stagger toward one of the beat up tables. Even with her arms wrapped around the warm, pebbly surface, Anne couldn’t tell how this book would make her feel besides curious.

The book landed with a huge, echoing bang, but no one shushed her. No one else seemed to be in this giant building but Anne.

She stared at the book, wondering why this was the one she had to read. Bound in well-worn leather, dark brown and fragrant. She smelled the old, slightly uneven paper when she ran her fingertips across the closed pages, one of her favorite smells in the world.

There was no picture on the cover, but she finally saw writing. Two words embossed in heavy gold took up most of the space.

The Future.

Anne grinned, hoping she’d found a new science fiction book. That was her favorite thing to read by a long shot, that and fantasy. Anything with spaceships and robots and dragons and magic sent her right into another world, so deep that she wanted to stay there forever.

She lifted the cover, wanting to get a look at the table of contents so she could try to guess what the stories were about. Instead of single pages she could turn, half of the book fell to each side. In the middle was a screen as long as Anne’s arm. She could still see the edges of the pages on either side, but a strange, tiny, flat TV seemed to be jammed inside somehow.

She wasn’t sure how to read it, but she was even more curious than before. The outside still looked like a normal book. She ran her fingers all around the sides, but she couldn’t see any way to make the book work. She hoped the battery wasn’t dead, if it even had a battery like a flashlight or a toy. She finally touched the middle of the screen.

Anne drew back as the screen came to life. She couldn’t see any images, but the black was illuminated, a brighter version of nothing. She put her ear close to the book and heard the faintest hum. She remembered how her Gemaw’s old television had to warm up sometimes, but Anne was sure a tiny flat television like this didn’t exist.

The screen finally lit up.

A swarm of bees, crawling all over honeycomb, in and out of the picture.

Anne jerked her hands away even though she was sure it was only a movie. Even in her dream, she knew the things on the screen couldn’t hurt her.

She’d never liked bees since she got stung a few years ago, one of the earliest things she still remembered. That bee had been on the rim of the glass Anne was drinking out of, and it crawled up into her nose and stung her before she could react. The pain had been horrible!

Her mother and father both tried to tell her that was a yellow jacket, not a bee, but the damage was done. Anne didn't kill bees. She just did not want to be around them.

The image shifted down in a fast movement that made Anne dizzy to show the ground at the bottom of the hive. There were piles of bees, drifts of them, and all of them were dead. Anne didn’t see a single one stirring now.

The movie pulled back, and now she saw two hives with dead bees.

The image doubled to four, then again and again and again until the whole screen was filled with piles of dead bees. Despite her fear, Anne was terribly sad. Even though she didn’t much like them, she knew bees did a lot of good.

What had killed so many of them?

The next picture showed a small green plant with tiny purple flowers, rows and rows of them. The flowers were moving, changing. They came out, dried up, and fell off, over and over again. Nothing ever sprouted from them. They just died. Eventually the plant turned brown, then it crumpled into the soil.

The same thing happened with different kinds of plants, this time with white and yellow blooms. They looked healthy, but the flowers just shriveled up.

People stood in huge crowds, and these people weren’t real like the bees had been. They looked like drawings that moved, like old cartoons Anne and Even watched sometimes in the afternoon.

The cartoon people watched the plants trying and trying to make fruit and vegetables, but nothing ever grew. The people were silent for a long time.

Now all Anne could see was that crowd of people, but they were shriveling just like the flowers. Each person got smaller and smaller, thinner and thinner, then they crumpled up and blew away.

When blank spots opened up in the crowd, they started shouting at each other, screaming, clenching their fists, drawings of blue veins standing out on their necks. Anne wanted to close the book and make the movie stop before someone got really angry.

She was too late.

One drawing woman pushed a man and he fell down. Then the whole crowd was fighting, punching and kicking and clawing and biting. Some of the people had guns then, and when they shot, whole groups of people puffed away into dust.

Anne needed to close the book. She needed to put it back on the shelf and run out of the library and never come back again. But she couldn’t move.

The scene shifted again, and she saw a lake. Not a regular lake, not like the one she went swimming in sometimes.

This lake was inside a big metal circle, a giant one, and bunches of other little round lakes were all around it. Some kind of machinery worked away in the middle of the groups of round lakes, and she could see the water moving. It flowed from one circle to another, getting less cloudy and dirty and more clear and sparkling with every move.

A low, droning noise grew, drowning out the noise of the machines, getting closer every second. The camera tilted up, making her stomach roll. Anne wanted to shield her eyes from the harsh light.

An airplane flew out of the sun, a huge plane, bigger than she’d ever seen. It seemed to hang in the clear blue sky without moving. When it was overhead, the belly of the plane opened up and dust fell into the water.

In just a few seconds, the water in every one of those lakes turned from clear, cool blue into a sickly, diseased green. The machinery strained, then chugged, then it finally fell silent with smoke floating around it.

A little girl much younger than Anne, maybe only two or three years old, walked along the edge of the lake on a metal sidewalk. The lake held real water, but the little girl was a drawing just like all the dead people.

She stopped and lay down on her belly, reaching her hands into the foul water.

“No! Don’t drink that!” Anne shouted, her voice echoing in the vast library. “Can’t you see it? It will make you sick!”

The girl drank anyway, but before she could sit up she clutched her throat. She coughed and clawed at her neck, then that little girl curled up on the metal sidewalk. She turned to dust and floated down into the water.

Anne moaned as the camera drew back to show hundreds of children around each of those lakes, all curling up and dying.

And she saw hundreds of lakes, round metal lakes and real, outside lakes.

And she saw thousands of them, blending into rivers and seas and oceans.

Around every single one of them, piles of dust as high as the dead bees were shifting and moving. Fish floated up to the top of the real lakes, drawings of fish with Xs for eyes. The fish turned into dust too, cartoon dust that covered the real water.

Anne knew that wasn't dust. That was dead things, dead things the poisoned water had killed. The dead things made the poison worse.

The screen went blank for a second, and Anne wiped her eyes, hoping the horrible movie was over. She didn’t ever want to come back to this library again.

Then she saw dots slowly lighting up and glowing, coming to life scattered around the screen. There weren’t very many, not even twenty of them. Lines formed on the screen, and after a second Anne realized those were the lines of the continents. The dots were on the land.

She could see a few on each continent, and only five in all of North America.

Her fear drew back a little as her curiosity started to recover. What was she looking at? They weren’t near any of the cities she knew.

“What is it?” she whispered.

The lines of the continents faded in the middle, right around the Atlantic Ocean, and words floated to the surface. Pale blue words.

Remaining Human Population.

Anne gasped. She knew enough from school to recognize the vast, empty stretches where great cities were supposed to be. Millions and millions of people weren’t there anymore. Chicago was gone, and so was St. Louis. The single, pale dot of her town was the only thing left in the whole Midwest.

Anne closed her eyes and shook her head, then covered her eyes with her hands to make sure. That was enough. Whatever this book was, she didn’t want to see anything else it had to show.

Not now. Not ever.

She stood, keeping one hand over her eyes, the other held out to make sure she didn’t run into anything. She backed away until she felt the shelf behind her. She walked slowly, hoping she could finally find the door in this awful place.

Sometimes in her dreams, she could run and run without ever getting anywhere. Anne was afraid she’d go crazy if that happened now, if she got trapped in this horrible place. The kind of crazy that waking up wouldn’t even solve.

When she’d taken about ten steps, she peeked through her fingers.

She did see the door, a long way off through the stacks and tables and chairs. She lowered her hand and walked as fast as she could. The walkway out of this row of books and tables was getting more crowded by the minute. More chairs, desks, and even tables were everywhere, and she kept having to push them out of the way.

When Anne got to the end of the row, she stopped. She didn't want to look. She didn’t want to see any more.

She had to look. If she didn’t, she felt like she’d get trapped in this dream forever.

She held on to the shelf with one hand and a table with the other, and she turned her head slowly enough that she heard her neck creaking.

The huge book was still on the table, but it was closed now. Anne let out a breath she’d forgotten holding. A worried voice inside her head muttered that she should have put the book back in its place on the high shelf, but she didn’t care. As long as it was closed, she wouldn't have to see anything else inside of it.

When she turned back toward the door, the path was even more full of chairs. She squared her shoulders and started walking, moving things out of her way, climbing when she had to.

If she didn’t have to look at that book anymore, she wasn’t going to let a little thing like getting out the door scare her. Sweat ran down her face and arms and legs, and all her muscles ached, but Anne kept moving faster.

When she finally jumped over one last chair and grabbed the cold metal handle with both hands, tears joined the sweat on her face.

The door to the outside closed behind her with a bang.