The Hendersons & The Great Black Dome

Week 31: Written August 4, 2016

When the Hendersons reached the desert retreat, they found it difficult to find a parking spot. There were cars everywhere. It was like a shopping mall on Christmas Eve.

“There’s one over there, dear!” Eva Henderson told her husband, pointing to an empty space. But it was only for compact cars, far too small for their SUV.

“Nobody knows how to park anymore.” Harold shook his head. His face seemed frozen in a state of perpetual frustration. Even when he smiled, his well-worn wrinkles gave the impression of angst. In truth, his now permanent facial expression belied his true feelings only a quarter of the time. Ask his wife and she’d agree; Harold was a dyed-in-the-wool grump.

“Why didn’t we come earlier?” Tessa asked. The Hendersons were notoriously late to things. The more important the event, the later they were. It was unintentional, but also seemingly unavoidable.

George Henderson, Tessa’s younger brother, just stared out the window. After the eight hour drive, he was exhausted. And even full of energy, he was usually the quietest in the family. He was pensive, all too often driven to silence and thought by his loud and boisterous relatives. To top it off, he didn’t even know where they were or what they were doing there, so he was busy soaking up the surroundings.

At first glance, it looked like an ordinary parking lot. It was large, expansive, stretching out to the horizon, just like those lots outside the amusement parks. But this was no amusement park.

In the center, far, far, away, stood a big black dome. George imagined that, from space, it looked like a giant mole on the surface of the Earth. And even in the terribly bright sunshine, the dome was pitch black. You could see the outline against the clear blue sky, but no other details were visible. No texture. No reflections.

It was completely unnatural looking, but also hard to believe that it was manmade.

“Ah ha!” Harold yelled, slamming his foot on the gas. He spied a spot. It was farther away from the entrance than he liked, but it was a spot.

“Harold, please!” Eva grabbed the roof of the car with one hand, and reached back to keep little George safe with the other.

George was fine, though a bit uneasy. He started to notice something strange about this parking lot. There weren’t any cars leaving.

In malls, cars were always coming and going, in a semi-steady flow. If you couldn’t find an open spot, you could always just sit in one place and wait for someone to leave. Here, nobody was leaving.

And everybody had luggage, too. George had packed himself a little goodie bag, with some toys and snacks, but his parents had a fairly stuffed suitcase sitting in the trunk of the car. It was bulging at the seams, and he had overheard his mother complaining about they were only allowed one full-size bag.

“We’re gonna walk all the way from here?” Tessa said with a groan.

“Consider yourself lucky, young lady,” Harold said. And he was right, too. The parking lot went on for ages, going back so far that it was impossible now to see where it even began.

George tried to think back to when they arrived, tried to picture what the entrance looked like, what the sign had said. But he couldn’t. Try as he might, he could remember nothing of their journey but their recent search for a parking spot.

Just as Harold slowed down to turn into the empty spot, a tiny little red sports car darted over from a neighboring aisle and snuck in.

“God dang it!” Harold slammed his fist on the dashboard. “Son of a bitch.”

“Language, honey,” Eva said, sternly. “We’ll find another spot. There are plenty.”

“You’ll burn to a crisp by the time we get there. Did you bring sunscreen?”

“It’s in the bag.”

“Perfect.”

Tessa tapped the window. There was a bug on the other side. It was small, but as she stared at it, it grew bigger, just like a tick would as it sucked on your blood. She tapped the window harder, trying to force it to go away, but it just sat there, getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

“What are you doing?” George asked.

“Shut up!” she screamed. When she turned to look back at the bug, it was gone. It must’ve gotten so big it couldn’t hold on to the glass anymore.

There was tension in the car, but George didn’t understand why.

People were walking from all parts of the parking lot toward the dome, the mole, in the center of the desert. None of them looked happy, like they were taking a vacation or seeing a show. But they were all dragging bags behind them, all sporting neutral expressions on their faces — except for a few that were so upset they made Harold look happy.

They kept driving, and after a couple more close calls, everybody just fell silent. George had never seen anything like it. His father was driving 20, maybe even 30 miles per hour down the aisle — the dome getting smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror — and there were no spots anywhere. And the parking lot just kept going. They sped passed cars upon cars, and streams of people all dressed in black clothes marching, in no hurry, toward the black dome.

George looked down at himself and saw that he was wearing all black, too. To make the mystery even greater, he remembered picking out his own clothes that morning, by himself.

The others in the car were dressed in all black, too. Did they also recognize just how odd that coincidence was? No, everyone else looked like they were going to the mall, ready to go shopping, ready to eat in the food court and buy some new sneakers.

“Hello?” George said, finally, just to break the silence, just to see if the rest of them could still hear anything.

Nobody replied.

“Tessa, come on. Stop playing.”

He tapped his sister, but she still didn’t say a word.

He tapped her again and she slumped to her side.

She was just a doll now, her skin nothing but pale canvas filled with cotton. She had no eyes, nose, or mouth.

George gasped, leaning up against the door, pulling away.

“Mom!” he yelled out. “Mom! There’s something wrong!”

But she didn’t say anything, either. And when he looked to his father in the rearview mirror, George saw the same blank, featureless face staring back at him. He was all alone.

The car kept moving, at a steady speed now, and the images through the glass window just looked like a pattern playing on repeat, a pattern of cars and people that now looked like little more than black silhouettes against a plain, blue sky. Even the cars now looked the same, their colors and styles blending together until they were all identical models.

Hours passed and nothing changed. The sun remained high in the sky, and the big, black dome sat in the same place behind them. Though, looking now, George saw that it was bigger than before, taller and wider than before. Maybe even darker than before.

And for the first time, he saw texture to it. Initially, he thought it was heat from the ground making the edges of the dome look wavy. But then he saw that the waves were actually people, hundreds or thousands of them climbing up the dome. Making the dome. Comprising the dome.

George didn’t like it. He was scared.

But the longer the car drove — seemingly on its own — the closer it got to the dome, even as it headed in the opposite direction. Or maybe the dome was just getting so much bigger so much faster that it was catching up. Maybe it was eating everything in sight.

George tried to undo his seatbelt, thought that maybe he could open the door and jump out of the car while it moved. But the belt had no latch. He was sewn into the fabric of the car.

Soon, he gathered, the rest of him would be fabric, too. Black fabric, no longer George Henderson, but just another thread in the giant, black dome.