Asymmetry

The Lewises were finishing dinner — a light meal before the summer evening’s soccer games commenced — when the first drone exploded through a second-story window of the Old Town townhouse across the back alley from them. Dana had just stood up to clear the table for her family and turned, confused, to look at the event unfolding outside their window. She looked back to her family briefly, in time to see her husband Martin turn his gaze out the window in what felt like an inexorable slide off a cliff. 

Dana watched as her teenage son James, flinching and confused, turned 180 degrees to follow his sister Moira’s horror-stricken gaze. Dana thought wryly that he did not so much hear the blast as feel the concussion through the open window, as he had just turned on his music — most likely much too loud, as usual — to go take out the garbage.  

The second drone appeared quickly and hit as they all watched together, slipping in through the shattered glass of their neighbors’ window a few seconds before exploding its primer-grey payload, the concussion of the blast again partially reflecting across the alley off of their own home. Dana screamed as a dish slipped unnoticed from her hands. The sound of the plate shattering broke Moira’s stunned silence. Mother and daughters’ screams merged in apocalyptic harmony, heralding this new, terrible reality.

A third drone now hung still in the air — this one larger, matte black, and heavy — waiting its deadly turn in front of the shattered window. All screams stopped in the breathless moment before this next awaited conflagration, as the drone moved first backwards toward the Lewises’ house before moving forward again, like someone resolutely diving headfirst into a dust storm.

Dana felt Martin grab her hand, and she snapped back into motion as the smell of urine from their cowering golden retriever hit her. She grabbed Moira’s hand in turn just as Martin shoved them ahead into the cover of the kitchen, knocking James to the floor in the process. She felt their dog slink in beside them where they lay sprawled in a protective pile as the third — and final — drone detonated.

The Lewises’ normal American life was now behind them.

As the smoke blew into their home and started to obscure the scene, Martin tapped her and the kids, saying, “Stay down, go!” Shocked into action, Dana pushed the kids, and they began to belly-crawl through to the kitchen toward the basement door he was gesturing at. Once there, out of sight of the big back windows, they rose to throw the door to the basement open and flew down the stairs. Dana risked precious seconds to glance back over her shoulder out the small kitchen window to see if they, too, were being visited by the anonymous, jet black flying bombs. Seeing nothing, she pulled the door shut behind her and quickly descended the stairs.

Martin and Dana ran to cover the small ground-level back windows of the brownstone's basement. She heard him hiss in a raspy whisper: “No lights. No lights until we can seal up. Don’t give these things a reason to do the same thing here. James, get your climbing helmets just in case, and get them on you and your sister. You’ll have to help her. No unnecessary noise, and keep your voices low if you have to talk."

Moira, after making it down the basement steps, had dropped cross-legged to the floor with a catatonic expression on her face. The dog came off the stairs and slunk around her, going to each family member in turn for solace as well as to provide it. Dana, noticeably pale and with voice shaking, whispered gently to her daughter, "Maybe they were not home yet, sweetie. You know they run so late."  Moira had been due at the now-destroyed house in an hour to babysit their young daughter. They began to hear a number of sirens in the distance.

Dana placed an old hard hat from one of her archeological digs on her own head and set about looking for protection for Martin as he tried to get through to 911. As she was rummaging quietly and cautiously through boxes, James took his earbuds out and whispered in a bewildered voice, “The song just ended. I only got through one song.” So much had changed in so little time.

Her hands now violently trembling, Dana pulled an old hockey helmet from a bin and handed it to Martin, who put it on his head. She went to sit with Moira, who was now wearing the helmet her brother placed on her head, and held her hand. James handed his mother one of the bandanas he had found in with the climbing gear. "In case there's dust," he said shifting a bit from his sister's other side. Dana nodded, taking the bandana, and noticed the one James had stuffed into Moira's clammy hand. The dog, with its tail between its legs, curled up to Moira, softly whimpering, and put its head in her lap.

Martin finished replacing batteries in an emergency radio he found on a shelf, having given up on getting through to 911 for the time being. After first turning the volume all the way down, he turned it on and edged the sound up bit by bit until it was barely audible and tuned it to a news station. Then, he sat down next to Dana, completing the circle with his family, and waited for news from the outside world as the sirens closed in on their once quiet neighborhood.