The following is an excerpt from Katie M. Flynn’s novel The Companions, available now from Gallery/Scout Press.

Rolly

Del Norte County, California

The woods were a place we went, Andy and me, when the smell was too much,
the roasting plastic and hair stink of slaughter day. It stuck to you far
into the forest, through the curled sea horses of giant ferns, around the
thick puzzled trunks of the redwoods, over “the bog,” we called it, a muddy
creek bed dotted with fresh bear tracks that wound its way to the river.
The smell—it followed—and I followed Andy, squelching loudly in the mud,
not at all concerned about running into a bear. I tried to warn him they
were dangerous, but all his books said otherwise. He thought they were
fuzzy and loveable and fond of flowers and little boys. If we ever ran into
one Andy would probably try to give it a hug.

We didn’t get far before we saw the brown coasting in like clockwork—we
could count on it, just as we could sunup. Fires burned east of us, in the
Shasta and Six Rivers and Klamath forests. It seemed like they could go on
forever—as one fire went out, another blazed new. The smoke that blew our
way usually came in faint gusts or a gentle brown haze, but sometimes it
would get heavy and thick and could turn to soup quickly.

With each step through the bog, I felt a sucking sensation, pulling me
earthward to the inside bits, the under-the-surface place. I wondered how
far you’d have to go to hit liquid. I knew from school it was burning magma
below us, but the surface was cool thick mud, and oh crap, Andy was crying.

“What happened?”

A boot. He’d lost one of his boots in the mud and the smoke was thick now,
wisping past us. Head back, he let out a hopeless cry. We both knew Pa
would be upset. Deliveries to our far-off address were expensive.

I put a mask over his nose and mouth, my own, told him to stay put. Ducked
low to the ground, I traced the mud with my hands, moving in growing
circles around him.

I was thirteen by the time Ma got pregnant with Andy, our miracle baby. I’d
assumed they’d given up; no one had talked about babies in years. But
suddenly she was pregnant, and I had the feeling it wasn’t so sudden, that
behind the thick curtain my parents cast between us had existed some great
drama, with many trials, and I, on the other side, had gone totally
unaware. When the baby came, I was in the delivery room despite the nurses’
concerns about what the experience might do to a teenage boy. Ma was old
for a pregnant woman, labeled “at-risk,” and she knew she’d need me, that I
needed to know from the very start just what it was we were getting
ourselves into, and I saw it—the pain, Ma torn apart from the inside, all
for this screaming red mush of a creature they put into my arms. It was
mine, a miracle, and terrible too, a terror, all that crying. Pa had the
farm to run, Ma would sleep for hours at a time, and it was my job to make
sure Andy didn’t wake her. She was so tired, her belly bloated, wrists like
twigs, gone before Andy could sit up on his own.

Finally I stumbled on the boot half-sunk in the mud, only when I turned to
show Andy all I saw was brown. I broke out in a slick sweat, calling for
him, pawing at the smoke, following his cries.

The way Ma told it I was my own version of a miracle. They flew all the way
to Senegal to fetch me after my birth mother passed. This was when such a
thing was affordable for a middle-class farmer and his wife (though I
learned much later that they took out a third mortgage on the farm to pay
for the trip and transaction).

It wasn’t until the smoke thinned that I found Andy, and ugh, he’d crapped
his pants. I didn’t shame him—he was only three and a half. We removed his
underwear and buried the accident in the bog with a stick, and I cleaned
him with a trio of leaves. He liked that part, wriggling his bottom at me,
nah-nah-nah-nahing. I spanked him good and he was crying again, but he had
no idea how worried I’d been, and I told him so and he cried harder. Then I
said I was sorry to get him to stop, and really I was sorry—I hated to make
him cry. I plucked him out of the mud and delivered him to the far side of
the bog.

When Ma was alive, she made sure I stayed in touch with my blood relatives,
especially my older brother. But, at seventeen, I was no longer cute,
hamming for the screen. Their connection was weak, our conversation stilted
and spotty. My brother often made an excuse to step away while one of the
cousins told me about life in cramped Thiès, where they’d gone when their
home in the Saloum Delta went under in flood, or asked me questions about
life in the US of A. I could tell my descriptions of farm life were not
awe-inspiring. We talked less and less, and I felt it, how easy it was to
lose people, Andy too, always getting into mischief. He liked to climb.
Luckily redwoods were impossible. He had to make do with fallen trunks,
hopping rocks on the edge of the river roaring by. Once we saw a pair of
kayakers wearing masks glide past us on the water. They waved their oars
hello, or maybe to tell us to get back, hard to say, but Andy nearly jumped
in the water after them he so craved human connection.

We were headed back toward the house, Andy just starting to get over his
fit, when I saw something moving in the mud. At first I thought it was a
frog or a lizard, but then its little wings flapped open and it fell over
onto its side, too covered in mud to steady itself. Andy saw it too,
yelping and running. He was out of my reach, and I shouted at him not to
touch it. Amazingly, he listened, stopping short, dropping to his knees to
inspect it.

We brought it home, the baby bird, and got an old shoebox, filled it with
shredded toilet paper. Then we brought Ma’s droopy flower-shaped lamp into
our bedroom, removed its shade, and placed the baby bird under its warm
bright light. She squinted and squawked at us and we agreed she was a girl,
so delicate. We named her Winifred for our great-great grandmother who
bought this land more than a hundred years ago. It had once been a grand
farm, organic before there was organic, produce grown with love. In our
farm’s heyday, I’d go with Pa on deliveries clear down to Mendocino. We’d
leave before sunup and Pa would let me doze until we were coasting down the
One and the sky was the perfect many shades and he’d wake me and say,
“Would you look at that?”

I washed my hands at the kitchen sink and reheated the venison stew, set
the table. Andy was singing a song to himself from beneath his chair when
we heard Pa call from out back, “Help me with this, would you, Rolly?”

“Stay inside,” I told Andy.

The companion was struggling on the conveyor belt. It was a young adult
model, female, with loads of hair.

Pa had managed to get its legs in the metal clamps, but it was sitting up,
arms swinging wildly, trying to free itself.

“Turn it off, Pa.”

He raked a hand through his thinning hair. He was gaunt, cheekbones like
mountain ridges, eyes like caverns. Sleep—he needed to sleep. “Don’t you
think I tried that? The damn thing’s broken.”

It was babbling, no speaking another language—was it Russian? As I
approached it lunged for me—God they were fast—seizing me by my shirt. We
were staring at one another and its eyes, they didn’t look like a child’s
eyes, and I wanted to ask, how old are you in there?

Pa thwacked its shoulder with a hammer and it squealed a machine frequency,
huddling small on the conveyor belt.

“Take its arms,” Pa said, and I did, shushing it the way he taught me, into
its ear, like the inner workings of a woman’s womb. Pa did a lot of
shushing on the way to slaughter. This one had a blistered face—it was one
of the main reasons they were disposed of. The skin, it started to
deteriorate, just a blemish at first, then a sore. It didn’t matter how
close you were to a companion, you wouldn’t want it around once its face
had started to fester. Lots of people paid for a clean reboot, moving a
consciousness to another body, but it was expensive, much more than a
replacement. Whatever they decided, the bodies came here. Usually they were
powered off, drained of battery, but occasionally we got a livewire, one
that couldn’t be switched off, like this one here.

It was swinging its arms wildly, and no matter how I tried, I couldn’t get
them into the clamps. Anger thumped hot everywhere, and I lunged for its
wrist, grabbed hold of it, pressing into the seizing spot. It flapped like
a suffocating fish for a full minute, and when it was spent, I eased its
arms into the clamps, making the mistake of meeting its eyes. It pleaded to
me in what sounded like Russian, and I couldn’t understand a word.

“I know,” I told it, “it’s going to be fine,” Andy curling around my leg to
gawk—he never listened. I turned my back on the companion and plucked him
up. He fought me some, crying and screaming, wanting to watch as it was
carried into the chamber.

We incinerated at the beginning of the month but I could see by the
gathering of compact boxes waiting at the top of the ramp for pickup that
we’d hit our carbon cap. When that happened the machine switched
automatically to compact mode. I knew this because shortly after my
sixteenth birthday, Metis trained me to do the job in case Pa ever needed a
sub, though he’d never once taken a sick day.

From the kitchen, we heard the scream as the machine compressed the
companion. It would be barged with the others, buried somewhere, forgotten.

“Well, that was something,” Pa said as he washed his hands at the kitchen
sink. He always liked the livewires, more action, more responsibility. I
think it made him feel important. I had an itch to say something, but he
was in a rare good mood, so I decided to enjoy it. Even Andy seemed to
catch on, giving up his tantrum and climbing into his chair at Pa’s elbow.

Pa didn’t believe in prayer but he liked for us to take a moment to
silently appreciate our bounty. It was an old farmer’s ritual, the best way
to ensure a good harvest, he’d told me once, long before quarantine killed
our farm, before the virus killed many of our patrons, before Metis figured
out how to upload our dead and lease them back to us. Pa gave us a nod.
Then we dug in.

Pa barely touched his stew, guzzling ale. “Did you do your schoolwork?” he
asked me.

“Yes.” Andy said it with me, my echo.

“Your chores?”

“Yes,” we said again.

“Good.”

I spooned food into Andy’s mouth. Otherwise he’d forget to eat, humming and
bouncing in his seat, doing silly dances to make us smile. Pa poured me
some ale, laughing when I hiccupped. Andy never once mentioned Winifred,
which was good because I was pretty sure Pa wouldn’t let us keep her. He’d
have something to say about birds as disease carriers, you can’t be too careful these days. Besides, it was a good meal—I
didn’t want to wreck it. We were all happy.

After dinner Pa went back to work, or so he said—I didn’t hear the machine.
He was probably digging into his shed for another bottle of ale, drinking
his mind soggy, prepping for blackout sleep. I tried to feel sorry for him
instead of angry. I mean it wasn’t his fault they’d shut down the farmers’
markets, restricted travel. We’d had no choice but to let our crops die,
all save what we needed to live. Pa argued on the screen a lot and sold off
pieces of our property. That’s when he was approached by Metis. Until
quarantine was lifted, they needed a local disposal facility for their
Crescent City Companion Center. They wanted to buy our remaining land
outright, but Pa said he’d only agree as long as we could keep the house,
our few remaining acres of forest, and they hired him to run it.

At first, it wasn’t very time consuming. “A new product, well-conceived,”
Pa said, “designed to last.” We’d get maybe one shipment every couple weeks
and it’d take Pa a few hours of work to get through it. “Easiest job I’ve
ever had,” he’d say, smacking his hands together. “Now what?”

We’d play card games and watch old movies and go into the forest with Pa’s
rifle to hunt deer, and for a while there it was just fine.

Until the defects started popping up, first gens replaced by newer models,
more advanced, more human. The work got to Pa, shipments coming in
regularly, more than he could handle. He got accustomed to working long
days, he got quiet and drunk, and we were alone again, Andy and me.

Once Andy was asleep in his pen, I started in on my homework. I’d lied to
Pa, sure, but it was a small lie. I completed my lessons on the screen, and
for kicks, checked to see if I could access a newsfeed. Nope, a parental
control warning flashed across the screen. All Pa let me see were the
school feeds; he said everything else was filth and violence.

I washed the dishes, set the laundry going, and went out into the yard to
hunt worms. Winifred needed to eat.

In the morning, the worms were still there, limp and shriveled, and
Winifred wasn’t moving. Andy was snoring in his pen, so I took her out back
where we had a whole cemetery, four generations of dead, and dug her a
grave. When I came into our room, Andy was standing over the shoebox,
sucking on his pacifier—no matter what I tried I couldn’t get him to give
it up. Everything I read said he was developmentally delayed, but Pa told
me not to worry—Andy lost his ma, he’s got no friends, what do you expect?

Andy jabbed a finger at the empty box.

“She’s gone,” he said between sucks. Then his face crumpled and he was
crying. It was not a weak cry, not one he would give up on easily. It was a
real and good one, so I offered him the only thing I knew would make him
feel better: an adventure.

I watered and weeded our garden, and Andy waited, wearing his boots. His
mind was set—we were going back to the bog. I knew what he was
thinking—we’d find another baby bird, as if they were falling from the sky.
I wanted him to enjoy this fantasy. Soon he’d start school, and like me
he’d have daily screen sessions, homework, placements and evals.

We found new bear tracks in the mud, a sow and cub, maybe two. Resistant to
our diseases and appreciative of the quarantine, the bears were coming
back, overtaking our shuttered towns, eating up our refuge. Pa said they
were a nuisance, a danger; if we were to see one, we should turn around,
head home straightaway. But Andy, he was so happy here—laughing and sinking
and sucking himself out of the mud.

I made like a monster and chased Andy screaming into the trees. Once we
were free of the mud he was fast and got ahead of me. I spotted his boots
abandoned on the rocky beach of the river and I scooped them up, calling
for him over the water’s roar.

I found him on the rocks, pointing and squealing. “It’s better! It’s a Pa!”

As I drew closer, I could see that it was indeed a Pa, a man lying face
down on the rocks. Dead? I went to Andy, plucking him up, as he kicked and
whined about his new friend. The man opened his eyes, shot a hand out,
grabbing me by the ankle.

I was falling, Andy falling, when the man let me loose and I righted myself
on the rocks, dropping Andy onto his knees.

“You gave me a start.” The man wobbled to standing.

“This is our land you’re on,” I told him. We wore masks at our
necks in case of a brownout, and I bent to fix Andy’s over his mouth and
nose, to slip on my own.

“How far am I from Oregon?”

“Another twenty miles if you head due north.”

Without so much as asking me, Andy handed the man our canteen. I wanted to
scream, Germs! But the man had it to his lips, drinking deeply.
We’d have to sterilize it now. Thank goodness I had on my gloves. I
snatched the canteen back and whisked it into my bag.

The man dug a hand through his patchy beard. He wore jeans and running
shoes, a slick black jacket, though I could tell by his oily skin and the
frayed filthy neck of his t-shirt that it’d been a while since he’d
showered.

“Where are your parents?” he asked.

“Ma is dead, dead, dead,” Andy screeched in his terrible singing voice. He
didn’t know to miss her, but it made me angry, and I took hold of his
wrist, squeezed it good.

“Our pa is at the farm working.” I pointed in the direction. “Not far. He
can hear us if we shout.”

“Would he be willing to feed me, do you think?”

“I don’t know. How about you stay here and we’ll go ask.”

The man picked up his pack, hefted it onto his shoulder. I could tell by
the way he sagged under the weight he was tired of carrying it. “How bout I
join you,” he said, “what with that coming in.” He pointed at the wall of
brown blowing in from the east. I knew Pa would be angry with me for
bringing back a stranger, but what else could I do? Fight him off?

As we trudged toward home, the man asked, “What’s he to you?”

“My brother.”

“So you were adopted.”

“Why do you assume I was the adopted one? Why not Andy?”

The man turned to watch Andy pluck up a slug and pretend to lick it. “My
dad never wanted me, so I’ve always been kind of jealous of adopted kids.”

“Why?”

“They got picked.”

Pa was out front, watching a Metis van drive off. I expected him to freak
out. Instead he asked calmly, “Who’s this?”

I told him about running into the man at the river. “On our land,” I added
to see if he’d say anything about that.

But he wasn’t angry. He didn’t bother with a mask, sticking out a bony
hand, not even wearing gloves. The man took it, introducing himself as
James.

“Come on,” Pa said. “You look like you could use a meal.”

While Andy showed James his rock collection in the living room, Pa and I
went into the kitchen to prepare dinner. Venison stew. Again.

“If he’s a carrier,” Pa said in a low voice, “we’ll all know soon enough.
No sense in being rude. Plus, aren’t you curious? We haven’t had a guest in
a long while.”

I could hear the tinkle of Ma’s music box from the living room and I stuck
my neck out the kitchen to get eyes on Andy. He was dancing, James spinning
the crank, our Ma’s music coming out the tiny gilded box.

James ate his first bowl of stew in under a minute and I brought him a
second, a third.

“Where you coming from?” Pa asked.

“I was shelving groceries in Crescent City for a time. Before that I worked
at an elderly care facility.”

“Is that old Jedediah Smith?”

“That’s right.” The man’s eyes slid up Pa. I tried not to stare at his
fingernails with their dark moons of dirt. “You work for Metis?”

“How’d you know?”

“Saw the van leaving.”

Pa explained what he did, only he made it sound a lot more interesting. “I
do what I can to make sure their passing is calm, and if possible,
ignorant. Better they not know, less suffering.” This sounded wrong to me
given the livewire we had last night, struggling and burning to the touch
she was so revved up. I’d seen something in Pa, and only now as I watched
him offer James some ale did I understand: he liked his job—he was proud
even.

Pa leaned back in his chair, patted his narrow chest, already a little
drunk. “Where you headed?” he asked James.

“I have a connection in Eugene. I’m hoping to get a job, whatever he can
hook me up with.”

“Sounds pretty loose,” Pa said and I could feel a speech coming, so I
asked, “What’s it like? Out there I mean.”

James smiled. He had nice teeth. I thought maybe he was pretty young under
that beard, not much older than me. “Mostly trees. I don’t see too many
people even now that quarantine’s lifted.”

“Lifted?” I bigged my eyes at Andy, and even though he didn’t really know
or care about quarantine, he bigged his eyes back at me.

“About a year ago. You didn’t hear?”

I looked to Pa. “Do we got any dessert,” he asked me.

We didn’t but he made me follow him into the kitchen anyway. “You didn’t
tell me,” I started, my heart stuttering, hardly able to breathe.

“What difference does it make?”

“We could leave, visit town, go back to farming!”

“Not with the acreage we got.”

“Sure we’d be small, but—”

“We’ve got a good thing going here.” He headed for the back door, so skinny
he’d had to pound a hole through his belt to keep his pants up. He called
for James to find him out back and I listened long enough to hear him ask
where the closest town was.

“Fort Dick’s a few miles west of here. Not much of a town. What do you
need?”

“Just a place to crash for the night.”

A place to crash—he was lying! A man that dirty wasn’t going to get a room
in a hotel. He was a grifter—I was sure of it—and Pa was the one who told
me to watch out for grifters. But Pa wouldn’t hear of it, wasting credit on
a hotel, and I was so angry I nearly flung open the door and threw the man
from our stoop. Hell, I wanted to throw Pa off too. They were both liars.

I went into Pa’s closet and got his handgun and tucked it under my pillow.
I tried to stay awake, Andy asleep in the pen he’d grown too big for.

Maybe I slept some. It felt like waking when I heard the thunk from
downstairs.

I got Pa’s gun from under my pillow and took the stairs in my socks,
another thunk, tiptoeing through the kitchen. Pa was struggling with James,
hands around his neck. They fell onto the coffee table, Pa on top, gripping
James by the neck, choking him. James’s hands fumbled along the floor,
fingers wrapping around one of Andy’s rocks. He slammed it against Pa’s
temple while I watched as if I wasn’t really there, floating like some
useless apparition.

“Ah, shit,” James said, peeling himself out from under Pa, and I couldn’t
move, couldn’t say a word. James hadn’t seen me and it was then that I
remembered the gun in my hand. I raised the thing, cocked it, my ears hot
and thumping blood.

James turned with a start. “Jesus,” he said when he saw me, the gun.

“Get away from him.”

James lifted his hands. I kept the gun trained on him as I checked Pa’s
neck for a pulse, his wrist, put my ear to his chest.

“You killed him.” I said it, a sweaty sick feeling coming over me. Then I
sucked in air, sucking it back inside just as I had Ma and getting trapped
here and finding out Pa was a liar.

“Did I?” James fretted the dingy sleeve of his shirt. Sticking out his
jacket pocket was Ma’s gilded music maker, the only sound we had left of
hers.

I’m not certain I meant to pull the trigger. But the crack
awakened Andy. I heard his cries from the bedroom.

I dropped the gun, stood over him, listened for his breathing, a stain
forming on Ma’s rug. She’s gonna be so mad! Then I remembered with
fresh pain that she was gone. Above me Andy wailed and I stood there
longer, taking it in, what I’d done—I don’t know how long.

The wailing, Andy—I hiked up the stairs and scooped him up. “Just a pot
falling to the floor,” I said, “nothing to fret about.” I rocked him until
he was asleep, nestled him into his pen. He held tight to my hand as he
sucked on his pacifier. I could see his open mouth through the clear latex,
his little tongue pulsing even as he slept.