The Last Flight
The Earth is dying. An interstellar Ark will carry creation into the stars, but time runs short to collect the final specimens—time that Father James Lewis doesn't have.
Written by Jake Theriault
Edited by Yuval Kordov
A wingless dragonfly in a glass jar, clattering about, with no light behind its ommatidia.
What you do for the least of these…
***
Father James Lewis checked the readout on his wrist-comm: four days, six hours, twenty-four minutes. Four days until the Ark pushed off from the space elevator. Four days to search through the bombed out, irradiated husk of Old Chicago for his quarry. Four days to find what God had entrusted to him.
At this distance, far to the south, the Ark’s enormous cylindrical hull faded into the pale blue of the mid-morning sky, and the glimmer of an observation drone keeping watch over the Illinois/Indiana border drew his focus. A final patch of brittle vegetation marked the edge of his destination: no-man’s-land, the Great Lakes Exclusion Zone. The soil here was sour, and the air still shimmered with latent ionization–a land made waste in the blink of an eye.
So much damage in so fleeting a moment. Disasters of the natural order were often preceded by warnings of one form or another: Doppler detecting the eerie swirl that heralded a tornado, seismologists listening to the groaning of continental plates to anticipate an earthquake, a web of satellites detecting the formation of a hurricane, or God telling you that He was going to flood the Earth. But man-made horrors came all too quickly.
James checked the status of his radiation suit, and the onboard computer pinged back a series of affirmations. Seals, filtration–both good. Nothing left to do now except cross the threshold. He took a deep breath of recycled air and stepped into no-man’s-land.
***
A half-day’s walk brought James to the edge of what had once been the greater Chicagoland metropolitan area. The skeletal husk of the city loomed large on the horizon. Remnants of polished metal and glass bloomed with the reflected light of the setting sun, like desiccated arms raised in a plea to heaven. Still, there was life amidst the ruin—flora, at least. Orbital photography suggested as much, which was why James had insisted on the EZ as a potential site for zoological requisition, despite the doubts of his superiors. The new growth was highly irradiated—a sample taken from a bright, red berry patch spiked his portable Geiger counter the moment he pointed in its direction–but for all its corruption, the Exclusion Zone held something special: untamed wilderness. Three decades worth.
As James continued to hike north, he gazed in wonder at the new growth that had begun to creep along the dusty hills: little ferns and mosses, the odd wisp of a wildflower—even the rivers looked a clearer blue than at the last survey, five years prior. And yet, kingdom animalia remained elusive. The Requisition Committee had been reluctant to allow a mission into the EZ, especially so close to the launch. Risk was high, likelihood of success low. But he was sure that, if plant life had returned, so too must have some of the Midwest’s native creatures. Such had been the case in Japan and Ukraine after their nuclear disasters, so why not here also?
The bones of Chicago still loomed large on the horizon, even as a smaller skeleton emerged over the next hill: the remnant of one of Chicagoland’s outlying villages. With the sun low on the horizon, it was a welcome refuge for the night. A meager river split the skeleton of the city down the middle, and a ribcage of mossy, stone bridges joined the two halves of the dead place. A small, concrete path ran along the riverbank, connected to the nearest bridge by a small staircase. James wandered down the stairs and pivoted into the shadowy twilight beneath the bridge. Slender threads of algae billowed in the current, dancing without music as the world grew darker, but nothing else stirred. He peered down into the water, to discern what other life might be lurking there, but the coming darkness of night made searching a fool’s errand.
As the stars emerged overhead, James assembled his camp, quickly and neatly. He pulled a small box from his pack, set it on the ground, and watched as a two-chambered inflatable pod ballooned out from the side. He staked it in place, then stepped into the first chamber and sealed the door flap. Setting his pack down on the plastic floor, he retrieved a decontamination grenade from a smaller inner pouch. In a perfect world, he would incinerate his radiation suit each night and don a clean one come morning, but the urgency of the mission necessitated traveling light, leaving fumigation decon as the only option. James pulled the pin on the device and let it fall to the ground, reflexively holding his breath as a thick, yellow cloud filled the entry chamber. He counted to ten, and then flicked a switch on the pod wall to activate the purge mechanism. Once he was certain the chamber was clear, he slipped out of his suit, and carried his pack into the hermetically sealed inner chamber.
The isolation was cloying, at first. Only after continually reminding himself of the ugly death outside his minuscule habitat did his breath calm. After a light meal of bland protein bars and indistinct vegetable mash, he began his final ritual of the day: checking in with Elijah.
“Sojourn 621 to Elijah,” he spoke into his portable comm relay.
A few long seconds of static, then a garbled voice in reply. “We hear you, 621. Subject update?”
“Negative. I’ve found a few potential habitats, but none that I could explore before nightfall. I’ll make a proper study of the nearest tomorrow.”
“Copy. Weather is still holding down here. Launch timeline is unchanged.”
“I’ll be there. With two more passengers, God willing,” James said, and clicked off the line.
Four days. The timing was critical. Elijah’s launch window represented the ideal time at which the cosmos would be aligned to exit the solar system—something to do with gravity assists and stellar drift, concepts that made his brain hurt. But if they didn’t launch as planned, it would be years before the next opportunity; time and resources they didn’t have.
James pulled a small book from his pack, An Illustrated Guide to Midwestern Insects, and flipped to a dog-eared page. A brightly-colored dragonfly stared back at him: a twelve-spotted skimmer, brilliantly photographed by a local entomologist decades ago. This photograph was an act of worship, an acknowledgment of the beauty of Creation, and exactly why the Ark was different from every other extrasolar colonization effort. Establishing a human presence on Mars and the Moon was fine if the express goal was simply to keep humanity from extinction, but humanity was not God’s only creation. Mankind may have been given dominion over the Earth, but that also made them responsible for it—not just the physical space, but everything within it. As Noah had been mandated, so too did the Church of today assume a similar mantle of responsibility. If mankind was to leave Earth, so too must all of God’s creations travel with them.
Noah had been blessed, for two by two, God’s creatures had come to him, but this time Creation needed to be found and captured—gently, and with the awe it deserved. Collecting a pair of every animal on Earth was no small feat, but luckily science had progressed a great deal since the Flood. Compatible pairs were desirable, but if mating was unsuccessful, there were facilities aboard the Ark capable of extracting the relevant materials necessary to artificially reproduce said creature. Though it caused some controversy within the Church, these facilities were already working to create viable embryos of animals that had gone extinct in the years since Earth’s unbalancing took hold.
James had asked for this assignment specifically, to find two twelve-spotted skimmers for the Ark’s menagerie. He’d been lucky enough to sojourn with the team that found a female giant oceanic manta ray off the coast of Thailand, and had been able to successfully negotiate the release of a pair of pangolins from a rehabilitation center in Taiwan, but this effort was much more personal. And though time was not on James’s side, he knew that his mission would succeed, if God so willed it.
“Preserve me, O Lord, for in You I take my refuge,” James whispered. “You make known to me the path of life… please reveal Your creation to me. Bless these efforts, and the passage of Your people through the stars. Forgive us for what we have done to this place You gave us, and allow us to begin anew, to Your glory. Amen.”
James checked a final readout on his wrist-comm–all good according to his implanted biomonitor, radiation absorption negligible–settled into his sleeping bag, closed his eyes, and drifted into a fitful slumber.
***
A wingless dragonfly in a glass jar, the sound of children laughing.
“Look at it! The dumb idiot. Why doesn’t it use its legs to walk? Why does it even have legs?”
A child shook the jar with great force, and a knot tightened in James’s stomach. This was more than simple curiosity.
“Walk, you little creep!” another child said, giving the jar another shake.
James looked down at the tweezers in his hand, and the delicate swoop of spotted, translucent wing held within them. It looked just like the stained-glass windows at church.
“I think you killed it,” said the first child.
“How would you know? It didn’t move at all after Doctor Bugs here plucked its wings.”
“Let’s find another.”
The two children dropped the jar at James’s feet, and wandered back into the woods. James knelt down.
A wingless dragonfly in a glass jar…
***
Hope came with the morning. At the edge of a small pond several hours further east, James found his first sign: a molt. There was no way to know which species of dragonfly it belonged to, but it meant that—with resolute certainty—life had returned to this place, and if it was within the Lord’s providence, he could find the creature he so desperately sought. As much as time pressed down on him, patience was key, in case the dragonfly that molted here returned.
An hour of solitude passed, and there was no movement on the water. Perhaps this is what it was like on the fourth day of Creation: an empty Earth, full of light and dark, morning and evening; a vast expanse of flowering fields and fruiting trees, but no one to appreciate it except He who made it.
Something shimmered at the edges of James’s visor, obscured by the fog of his breath. His head swiveled fast enough to elicit a sharp pain in his neck, but his eyes caught the blur; its long, slender body; four delicate wings; and big, round, compound eyes. In the directness of the midday light, it was difficult to tell what kind of dragonfly had arrived at the pond. He stood more suddenly than he meant to, and the blur darted away—over the water, just out of reach. He knelt down, with care this time so as not to alarm the creature, and rummaged through his pack for his net assembly. His heavy gloves made clumsy work of it, but half a minute later he emerged with an assembled bug catcher.
James crept toward the water. The unknown dragonfly darted about, diving down to the water and then rising back up—seeking invisible prey. As he neared the water’s edge, James realized this was not the dragonfly he was looking for. Similar, but not quite right: a widow skimmer, bright yellow stripe down its abdomen, and two great black and white spots on each wing, as opposed to the twelve-spotted skimmer’s—as the name would suggest—twelve. He sighed with disappointment. Though the widow was no less majestic, rules were rules. The Ark could take nothing more than was absolutely necessary. Widows were already accounted for, so this one would need to continue its life in the EZ, and hopefully make even more widows in the future. Perhaps life would continue in one form or another once the seas finished rising, the air finished boiling, and the trees stopped dying. James would not be here, but maybe this creature’s offspring would. He settled back onto the shore and watched the widow continue its hunt.
An hour later he found another pond, slightly larger than the last, with a great wall of reeds arcing along the shore. Patterns of light flickered overhead: wings, more than one set. The first flashed bright red–definitely the wrong species, maybe a rubyspot or an Eastern amberwing. But the next was larger, and fast. It soared overhead for several moments before alighting upon a reed several feet away, swaying back and forth. There it was: a blue-brown body, yellow stripe, black and white spots on each wing… the twelve-spotted skimmer! A male, judging by the pattern. James’s heart began to race. Though he’d come all this way and requested this mission specifically, doubt had eaten at him. It was so small, and the EZ was so big; finding such a needle in this haystack could only have been the result of divine blessing.
“Thank you,” James whispered, his voice trembling with emotion. “Please keep him safe.”
Finding the skimmer was one thing, safely capturing and transporting it was entirely another. It was simple in theory: stage the net just above where the dragonfly had landed, so that it would be captured the next time it lifted off. So long as James didn’t spook it in the process, or while trudging through the reeds.
His prayers continued, as under-his-breath as he could manage as he set to it. Miraculously, the skimmer remained still. God had stopped the sun for Joshua; surely, He could keep this dragonfly in one place for another minute. James maneuvered behind the dragonfly’s reed, and extended the net out into the skimmer’s blind spot. Once it was directly overhead, he gingerly poked at the base of the reed with his free hand. The skimmer darted upward, directly into the net.
Success!
***
James lost count of the number of times he’d looked at the dragonfly as he walked. It had remained surprisingly calm when transferred to the small, glass container that would be its home until arriving at the Ark, and in its stillness had allowed him myriad opportunities to admire its beauty. Humans were capable of great works of art, but truly nothing compared to that which God had made. The painterly composition of the wings, with their tasteful splashes of white and black; the bold line of yellow along the side of the skimmer’s body; the air of fragility of the whole thing… It was perfect.
He lifted his eyes once more to the horizon, and noticed something that hadn’t been there before: smoke. A thin trail of black rising in the sky. Not enough to be a wildfire, but maybe a camp. A nervous growl rumbled in his stomach. The satellite reports had shown no sign of human activity within the EZ, but people were wily creatures. He shifted on the spot, one leg trying to carry him forward while the other wanted to run. His mind spun with indecision, contemplating alternate routes, when a shot rang out.
Something fast and hot passed through his body.
His biomonitor screamed an alert into his mind: Massive trauma.
His legs buckled, and he began to fall. He cradled the dragonfly’s container, trying to keep it steady as he collided with the ground. But it escaped his hands, spiralling out of reach.
Alert: Blood loss.
Dust bloomed all around him. A warm wetness pooled around his skin.
Alert: Radiation.
His suit was compromised. His wound was filling with the outside: irradiated, poison. His mind was static, struggling to find the right frequency to direct his limbs. He needed to move, to get away from whatever, or whoever had shot him, to get away safely—with the skimmer. Purpose eclipsed pain.
James craned his neck to seek out the lost container. Hurried scans revealed it atop a bed of gravel several feet away, blessedly intact, its startled occupant darting around inside.
“Thank you, Lord.” James strained, and reached for the container. The movement pulled at his wound, awakening the pain in all its fury. It was too far. He cried out, coiling into a ball.
“Got him!” came a shout from behind.
James tried to force himself up onto hands and knees, to crawl the remaining distance, but a heavy boot on his back pushed him back into the blood-soaked soil.
“This one of Madison’s guys?”
“Doesn’t look like it. Look at the suit.”
Something hard jabbed at his shoulder–the barrel of a gun.
“Where you from, guy?”
“Watch him.”
The boot kept him pinned while one of the men pulled off his pack.
“Look at all this. Government issue shit.”
“Grab the food and the tech. I want to get back before nightfall.”
“What’s this?”
A figure moved into James’s view–hunched, wearing a patchwork rad suit composed from who knows how many other victims–and bent down to pick up the specimen container.
“A bug?”
“What’s a spook doing here collecting bugs?”
“Who cares. Grab the goods.”
“Wait,” James croaked, unsure if his captors would hear him.
“You say something?”
“It’s for… the Ark.” He pointed in the general direction of the space elevator. “Be careful with him, please.” He could barely breathe. There was more he wanted to say, an offer of safe passage away from this place, an olive branch. He’d already forgiven them. He was the interloper in their domain, such as it was–a stranger in their midst. Fear made men do terrible things, and surely these men were simply afraid, choosing fight over flight. Who was he to judge while the world fell all around them?
Still, it hurt. He hurt. Sparks of anger flared and died with every surge of pain, threatening to undo his charity.
“You’re part of that thing?” a voice asked. “Trying to leave the world you ruined? Well guess what, buddy, some of us aren’t cowards. We’ll take your supplies as penance—use them to rebuild what you couldn’t. But you can have your bug back. We don’t need it.”
The container clattered back to the ground as the scavengers marched off, churning up a fresh cloud of dust. James couldn’t see into the tiny window.
Alert: Severe blood loss, the biomonitor repeated.
He tried once again to press himself up, but the pain was too much. Instead, he screamed. After a four count of ragged breaths, he made it to his knees and awkwardly unlatched his suit, tossing the helmet aside. Another wave of pain tore through his gut. The rest of the suit fell down around his shoulders, revealing an undershirt soaked crimson with blood. He peeled it up, slowly, gagging as he saw the alien hole in his body, still spilling its contents. He pressed a shaking hand there, but it did little good. Craning around, he found his pack and crawled to it, jaw clenched against all the worst sensations he had ever imagined.
It was empty. The scavengers had left nothing but the collapsible net and spare specimen containers, though several were cracked. His food, comms, sleeping pod, emergency beacon, positioning equipment, and medical kit were all gone.
With great effort, he slipped his shirt all the way off and tore at the sleeves, tying the two lengths of fabric together into one long bandage. He detached one zippered pouch flap off of his pack, forced it against the gunshot wound, then wrapped the cloth around himself. His hands felt like someone else’s, the sight of his own body unfamiliar. Still, it calmed his biomonitor somewhat.
Alert: Radiation.
James attempted a deep breath, doubled over, then tried some moderate ones until he too felt halfway calm.
It was a day and a half back to the border at regular pace. Back to where he’d scheduled the dropship pickup back to Elijah. No, no—retreat was not possible. Not yet. He couldn’t go back to the border. Not while he only had one dragonfly.
He clambered over to the discarded container, gritting his teeth, urgently hoping, wishing, and praying that his skimmer was alright, that the scavengers hadn’t harmed it. Cradling it in his hands, he saw only a smidge of blood on the window, and a still form behind it. He opened the lid, half hoping the creature would see its freedom and escape, but it remained still. He extended a trembling index finger, and as it made contact with the body of the skimmer, one wing fell off.
I think you killed it, said the child in his memory.
How could this be happening again? Would God not allow him to atone for past mistakes? How much more guilt could a man carry?
James buried the dragonfly under the setting sun, and cried himself to sleep.
***
Progress northwest was punishingly slow the next day. The hunger was fine, welcome even, but lack of medical attention was taking its toll. Prayer reinforced his purpose, drove him forward despite the hole in his flesh. There was still time for James to do what he came here to do.
Alert: Seek medical attention.
“I know,” James said to no one.
Alert: Critical radiation poisoning.
“I know,” he repeated.
The blighted forest grew more dense as he walked, patches of bright green peeking from the char of decades-old flames. Broad leaves danced in the wind, moss clumped along the coarse bark, and once—just once—James swore he heard a bird singing somewhere in the canopy. The regrowth expanded as he traveled. Vines snaked along the ground, mushrooms burst from the loam, wild flowers and spry grasses spread out their soft blankets along the forest floor. Time had redeemed this place–partly.
Eventually, the trees fell away, and the hard, cracked ground returned, rising into a steep incline. Everything blurred as he climbed, the soft jingle of foliage replaced with wheezing breath. There was no telling how much blood James had lost, but he knew exactly how much food he hadn’t eaten. Fatigue, pain, and hunger all conspired to pull him back down the hill, but he pressed on, each step slow and deliberate. He collapsed at the peak, the wheezing becoming a shallow gurgle, but he forced himself back to his feet, and looked east. A small valley was laid out before him. At its center, adjacent to a moderately-sized stone building, was a lake–not a toxic pond, but living water. Fighting the pain, he broke into a loping run.
The building seemed unoccupied, but he wasn’t interested in that. Maybe he’d double back to check for food or medical supplies, but not now. He stumbled toward the water, where dozens, no, hundreds of dragonflies and dancers alighted over the pool of crystal blue. A plethora of wildflowers hugged the shore, tended to by an army of bees: common bumble bees, eastern carpenters, turret bees, honey bees, sweat bees, and others James couldn’t identify from memory alone. Other pollinators joined the effort: cabbage whites, orange sulphurs, red admirals, swallowtails, eastern tailed-blues and commas, and at least one monarch. But at the water’s edge, skittering amongst the reeds, were the real beauties. Dragonflies, more than James had ever seen in his life: amberwings, dancers of all colors, widows, pondhawks, dashers, forktails, and—in their painterly perfection—dozens of twelve-spotted skimmers.
It felt like a dream. Decades ago, all of this had been rendered to ash, but now life had returned, filling the void made by war. How odd that God had ever told man to have dominion over the Earth, when surely the inverse was much more true. Man could till the soil, harness the waves and wind for power, burn the land with Oppenheimer’s fire, but the world would continue. What man abandoned, Earth would reclaim. This place was a testament to her resilience. Which begged the question, was leaving the right thing to do?
James broke down into sobs. He didn’t have the resources to protect all of this holy beauty. He could catch his two skimmers, and maybe three or four other creatures, but how could he leave this behind? How could anybody? And when the rest of the world finally fell, what would become of this place?
He’d often heard Church astronauts talk about the “overview effect”, wherein seeing the whole of Earth for what it is—a single celestial body upon which all of humanity lives (or lived)—instilled the deepest connection to humanity itself. But did people really need such a macro view to alter their perception? Could one’s heart not be changed by watching a solitary dragonfly resting on the water’s edge? By watching a bee, its spindly legs laden with golden pollen, floating from flower to flower? Could humanity be so blind to the world around them? To the perfection of Creation?
Pain came now like the lapping of the water against the shore, but James found his quarry in the space between: two skimmers, contently buzzing within their new steel and glass home. He’d even accidentally caught, then released, a massive pondhawk. If only he had a camera to document this place before he left. The idea that it might only live on in his memory hurt even more than the gunshot. James looked up to the sky. Maybe one of the overwatch drones could see him. Maybe it had taken its own pictures. Maybe they could be downloaded before the Ark left. Yes, that was something he could suggest to the launch committee once he got back. He packed away the dragonflies, with as much care and reverence as he could manage, then—with his net-turned-walking stick firmly in hard—pivoted south, and made his way for the border.
***
Alert: Significant blood loss.
Alert: Critical radiation poisoning
Alert: Seek medical attention.
The pain had vanished from his chest–or perhaps in its omnipresence it had become like white noise within his flesh, everywhere and nowhere all at once, screaming yet silent–but the fatigue mounted. James was fading; he could feel it. He didn’t need the biomonitor constantly reminding him. Drawing simple breath had become a challenge, and each step felt like trudging through molasses. The messages his brain was sending to his legs took longer and longer to get there; soon, the connection would be lost altogether.
Without his positioning equipment, he had no way to know how close he was to the border, but he could see Elijah, and the thin strand of the space elevator rising up above the horizon. So close and yet impossibly far. The sound of flowing water had begun to creep into awareness, and soon its source became clear.
Before him was a river, a hundred feet across. Its current was lazy, gentle even, but if it were too deep in the middle, he wouldn’t be able to make it across. Even if not, In his present condition, swimming was so far outside the realm of his capabilities that he might as well have been made of stone. Darkness encroached at the edges of his vision, followed by dire certainty. Even if he somehow made it across, he wasn’t going to make it to the exfil site. The dropship would not carry him to Elijah. His dragonflies would have to find another way home. Maybe one of the trawlers doing their last explorations of the Great Lakes would pick them up, or a drone would spot them and carry them home. But such things were for God to know. All James had was faith.
He eased himself down onto the muddy bank, and set down his pack. Gently, reverently, he lifted the two dragonfly containers from within, removed a lace from his boots and tied the containers together at their handles.
He spoke a quiet prayer, from the Psalms, for the safety of these creatures, for the care of whoever found them, and for the future of the world. “You have multiplied, O Lord my God, Your wondrous deeds and Your thoughts toward us; none can compare with You. I will proclaim and tell of them, yet they are more than can be told.”
Perhaps these were the final days of Earth, and perhaps God’s creation would only live on in the stars. But perhaps life would one day return to the places man destroyed. Perhaps dragonflies would fly through Midwestern skies once again, even if no man were there to observe them.
James carefully set the two containers down in the river, and pushed them off into the current. He watched them as they floated down the stream, and for several minutes more after they faded from his view.
“As for me,” he whispered, “I am poor and needy, but the Lord takes thought for me. You are my help and my deliverer; do not delay, O my God.”
James lay down onto the muddy shore, closed his eyes, and rested.
Jake Theriault is an author, screenwriter, and science-fiction enthusiast living in the Chicagoland area with his wife Hazel and dog Waffle. When not writing fiction Jake’s words can be found in book reviews for SFF Insiders, videogame analyses for Subpixel, and the occasional personal newsletter.
Jake is the author of A Goddess Trapped in Glass and A Slow Ship to Oblivion.
Twitter/X and Insta: @_jaketheriault
Copyright © 2024 Jake Theriault & Incensepunk LLC
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No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Beautiful!!