I’m expecting Haven to be published in early 2024. In the meantime, here’s a tantalizing excerpt. As an aside, I’m pretty impressed with myself after spelling “excerpt” correctly multiple times without having to spell check it.
Anyway, here we go…
Eli hated guarding the goats.
Truth be told, he hated everything about them. He just hated guarding them the most. He’d read about sheep and thought that they’d have been a lot easier to manage, and he often wished that the ship had been carrying some of them instead.
Every so often he panned his rifle’s scope along the perimeter fencing. You could never tell when a bear might try to get through it. What they called bears, anyway. He’d seen pictures of real bears in the Library, and in his opinion, the ones here bore only a passing resemblance.
The scope glitched as he inspected the fence, and he silently cursed it along with the antique rifle that went along with goat guarding. At least up at the Gap, the guards had modern weapons, which the old folks claimed weren’t necessary for his job and anyway, they couldn’t afford the cycles on the printers.
Eli finished his perimeter scan when the scope came back online, noting a Weed starting to encroach on the south side. He’d report it when he got back to the Village, and someone would come and burn it out. Last week Jerry had missed one and it’d got at one of the goats, which was now recuperating after being stitched back up. The goat would be okay, but Jerry had extra barn duty for two weeks.
Eli cradled the rifle in his arms and went back to what he did every day during guard duty: daydreaming about everything he’d rather be doing other than guarding goats. He was, after all, now eighteen. Not a kid anymore, and surely there was something he could do that was, well, important.
His mind bounced between the possibilities. “Explorer” would be his top choice, but exploration hadn’t ever been a priority for the Village. Too much other work to do just to keep things running. Science and Admin didn’t appeal to him at all. Ag would be more of the same kind of work he was doing right now. He didn’t think he had the aptitude for Engineering. Pilot was out of the question. That left him, aside from other menial jobs, with Security. Which he thought he’d be pretty good at and would probably enjoy. And it was important work.
His phone chose that moment to ring, interrupting the daydream. He picked it up. CENTRAL was displayed on the screen. He sighed and answered it.
“Hello?” he said.
“Eli. One of the drones is reporting motion near you. See anything unusual?”
Eli was about to answer ‘no’ when he noticed what looked like a shallow, circular hole in the ground, close to the east fence where the goats were browsing. He’d swear that it hadn’t been there on the last scan he did. “Just a second, Central,” he answered, and set down the phone, bringing up his rifle to have a more detailed look through the scope. Of course, the scope glitched just as he brought it up to his eye, and when it cleared, he saw that both the hole and one of the goats were gone.
He could feel his heart beating faster as he lay down the rifle and picked up the phone, Central still waiting on the other end.
“There was a hole in the ground,” he said, “but now it’s gone, along with a goat.” He said this calmly, factually, just like Security would.
No answer. “Central?” he asked. No response. “Central?” he asked again, again getting no response. Great, thought Eli, now his stupid phone was acting up. He hit the red END CALL button and sighed, standing up and pocketing the phone. He’d better round up the goats and get them back to the Village before whatever was going on got worse.
Eli walked to the paddock and entered it through the gate. The goats paused and looked at him, then began meandering over, creatures of habit that they were. Eli noticed another hole forming as he watched, and brought his rifle up. The hole disappeared as quickly as it had appeared. This wasn’t looking good, thought Eli as he tensed in anticipation.
Sure enough, another hole appeared nearer to the approaching goats. Eli brought his rifle up again and fired a round into it. He heard a high-pitched squeal and the hole disappeared again.
“Hurry up, you stupid goats,” he said as the nearest animal reached him. He shooed it through the gate and waved an arm at the rest, willing them to move faster. He watched a hole appear directly under one of the lagging goats, dropping the animal slightly before it disappeared into the ground without a trace.
“Crap,” said Eli, and he ran towards the back of the herd, yelling and flapping his arms, driving the animals out the gate to the relative safety of the road outside.
Goats being goats, the animals continued to be oblivious to the danger around and underneath them and to the panic of their guardian, and slowly moved through the gate, as if they were reluctant to have their meal interrupted.
“Move it!” yelled Eli, physically pushing the last goat through the gate, just as one of the holes began to open less than a meter from him. He was aware of the herd milling patiently—waiting for him dully, some still chewing on the last mouthful of grass they’d grabbed—on the fused-earth road surface. He brought his rifle to the ready, fascinated by the hole’s formation, captivated by a combination of curiosity and dread, and waited to see what would reveal itself. His mother, he thought, would be horrified by the risk he was putting himself in, but he was, after all, now eighteen, and he had a responsibility to identify any new threats to the Village.
Eli didn’t have long to wait, before the bottom of the hole—which, he could see, was a perfectly circular funnel—turned into an equally circular tunnel lined with rings of very sharp-looking teeth. That’s enough of that, he thought to himself, raising the rifle, switching it to burst and thumbing on the RECORD option on its scope.
He fired directly into the maw and was rewarded with a loud cross between a squeal and a roar. This time, however, the hole didn’t close back up, and after waiting a few moments he edged closer, still pointing the rifle towards it both for his protection and for the video footage he was shooting. A new creature, he thought as he looked down into the tunnel of teeth. And he had discovered it. That should earn him some points.
An impatient sounding bleat interrupted his thoughts, and he remembered the goats. Well, he thought, might as well take them back to the Village—who knows how many more of those things were lurking around. Central would need to figure out a way to interdict them from the peninsula before any more herds went out. Or unwary people, for that matter.
Eli reluctantly turned from his discovery towards the insufferable goats. He walked through the gate and closed it behind him, then stepped onto the glassy road surface where his charges stared at him expectantly.
“All right, you stupid goats,” he said, “back to your barn we go.”
He had just started the frustrating herding process when he realized that he’d never heard back from Central after the call had dropped. It had only been five, maybe ten minutes, but he was surprised that they hadn’t phoned back. He decided he’d better check in and had just slung the rifle and taken out his phone when he heard the siren.