Part 1 Leila

The wind carried the sand through the mountain air scarring everything in its path. Mixed with the sand was a fine concrete dust, all that was left of the tall buildings pulverized over twenty years ago. The strange blend of particles turned the morning sky into a deep orange canvas with long wispy streaks of gray crossing the horizon as if an angry god had dragged his dirty fingers across the opus.

Leila covered her face with the wool scarf but the wind carried dust found ways to penetrate the fabric, stinging her face over and over.

She held her eyes shut tight as she bent forward against the mighty wind, making slow progress across the barren land. Leila didn’t need to see to get where she was going, she had traveled the short distance hundreds, no thousands of times since the Day of Desolation. She wouldn’t need to see until she was in the old greenhouse. Inside, sitting on a small oak table was the only thing she longed to see.   

They hadn’t bothered to destroy her home or the greenhouse when they had demoished everything else. Built by her husband the greenhouse was half the size of her home,a graceful tudor cottage. The greenhouse was his place of refuge, a hideaway from the corporate world of international finance. He developed the green thumb of a master gardener. The final years of his life were spent loving his plants, caring for them.More care than he had shown his own children. Of course he saw the nursery dwellers more than his children, his world travel had consumed the early years of their childhood, leaving Leila to raise them alone. She didn’t complain; his career provided everything she needed or wanted. More than eighty acres of land in Roanoke, Virginia just east of the Blueridge, a splendid home that was more than a hundred years old and the solitude she had always longed for. All this the results of his relentless drive to succeed. But none of it mattered now. Land has no value, money no purpose and solitude is everyone’s way of life.

Russell had died fighting to protect their home, that was before they came, before the desolation. Leila never imagined her husband as a fighter but he had stood his ground when so many others ran away. She remembered her husband's last words as he lay dying in her arms,  “Nellie”. He spoke with his dying breath about a plant instead of about her or their children! At first this had bothered her greatly, until she began to care for the Nivellie Myrtus, Nellie; then she understood.

The Nivellie or Saharan Myrtle was the most beautiful plant in his green house. Russell had smuggled it back into the United States after a trip to Tassili ‘Ajjer, Algeria. He had spent three weeks in the Saharan Desert trying to convince two very rich Egyptian businessmen to invest in his company. All he walked away with was a plant. Russell believed there was something special about this very rare myrtle. It was the only plant he would ever actually give a name to,” Nellie”. He had even rebuilt the greenhouse, upgrading it all because of Nellie. Special lighting and irrigation systems were added. A solid oak table built just for the Nivellie to sit upon. Leila thought she should be jealous, but constantly reminded herself that it was just a plant.

That was more than twenty years ago, the plant should have been dead by now. But it wasn’t. So every day, in the morning and then again at dusk Leila made the trip to the greenhouse to look at the plant and remember. She pushed open the reinforced door to the greenhouse and entered, quickly closing the door behind her to keep the wind out. She opened her eyes for the first time in almost twenty minutes; they adjusted slowly to the low light of the room She lit the small lantern she always kept by the door, electricity a thing of the past. Most of the plants in the nursery had died many years ago; the ones that were still alive were planted by her or by Rockrider over the last few years, as a source of food. The irrigation system had been operated by electricity, now it was nothing more than a tangle of empty tubing, so Leila would water each plant by hand, saving Nellie for last.

She stood before the table (it reminded her of an altar), looking at her husband’s prized possession. The plant looked as it had the day Russell had brought it into their home. The sessile leaves were a dark green, the single bloom a brilliant white, surrounded by small black berries. The air was filled with a sweet fragrance that could be bottled as an expensive perfume. The myrtle was three feet across but only stood eight inches high. Russell had thought it may be some rare dwarf variety, but Leila had researched the library and the Internet and never found any evidence of a dwarf species of the Nivellie. The plant was simply beautiful and strange.

“No wonder he loved you so much” Leila spoke to the empty room.

The door behind her flew open; wind carried the hostile dust into the room covering everything in its path. Leila dropped the watering can and turned to close the door.

She screamed.