Our town smells like cactus jam, and thank god for that

I loved my grandma Rachela, but I didn’t respect her. Not really.

That sounds ugly, I know.

But you didn’t live in our town.

You didn’t see what I saw.

Our town was in the scorching desert, after the Great Maelstrom. Not a pretty desert. Not golden sand and sunsets. Just cracked dirt, dead cars, old solar panels, dust in your teeth, and heat that made people mean. Or dead.

We had one thing keeping us alive.

The solar machine.

That was what everyone called it. Nobody really knew its real name, was lost with a lot of other things in the Great Maelstrom, or at least that’s what the Oldfolk say. It’s this huge old station outside town, full of mirrors and panels and pipes. It gave us water from the deep pump. It gave us light. It kept the cooling room running so babies and old people didn’t cook alive during the day.

It kept us alive.

The town was cut off, same as probably every settlement after the Maelstrom. No grid. No pipes. No trucks. No one coming to fix things or take the garbage away.

The Oldfolk say that used to be normal. Water came in. Power came in. Trash went out.

Sounds like heaven (or a maybe just kids’ tales, if you ask me).

The closest town, Brairetown, was a few dozen miles north, which, in the desert, meant too far.

So the solar machine wasn’t important. It was everything.

Then it started dying too.

Every week we had less power.

The pumps coughed. The lights blinked. The cooling room shut down for hours.

Happened right when the damn NecroAngel started coming.

NecroAngels were old war weapons from before everything went to hell. Part human. Part AI. Part machine. Part corpse. Metal wings. Grey skin. A face that looked almost human, until you got close enough to see it wasn’t.

The stories said they didn’t need food or water. This one just came out of nowhere, dropping from the sky every few days, and every time it came, it left death and wreckage behind.

You couldn’t kill them. Shoot them, burn them, cut them, crush them, they healed. They just put themselves back together.

And they never got tired. Strong as hell, too.

Thank God they were rare. The Oldfolk said the last one anyone saw near us was decades ago.

This one came a few months ago.

Sometimes it killed one person. Sometimes five. Sometimes it just broke things. Pipes. Doors. The Radeeo tower. The roof of the cooling room.

It knew what mattered.

That’s why we… why I hated the Oldfolk.

They kept saying, “Hide. Wait. Watch it. Don’t waste lives.”

And my grandma Rachela said it too. Hell… most of the Oldfolk listened to her. I never understood why. She was just my grandma to me, always messing with those useless jams. Always speaking so low and quiet you had to lean in just to hear her.

When I was very young, I loved her, I looked up to her. My grandma raised me after my parents died. She was not a hard woman. She was not cold.

She loved me.

She made me cactus jam from the red fruit that grew outside the old fence, she made a dozen kinds and somehow they didn’t taste the same. She sang when she cooked. She kissed my forehead even when I was too old for it. She told me stories about my mother until I could remember her voice even though I was too young when she died.

But she also talked all the time about strength.

“Strength is not screaming first,” she used to say in her quiet voice.

“Strength is bending and not snapping.”

Bullshit.

Sometimes bending just means letting the boot stay on your neck.

Then the NecroAngel came, and all those pretty words turned to shit.

People were dying, slaughtered.

Kids were dying.

And Grandma Rachela was still making fucking jam.

One day the NecroAngel hit the food reservoir.

It was bad.

It came through the roof like a metal bird dropped from heaven by someone who hated us. It smashed the water barrels. It tore through sacks of flour. It ripped open cans, bags, boxes, anything. There were people hiding in there. Three guards. Two kids. One old woman who had gone in to count dried beans.

It cut through them like they were nothing.

Its hands… his hands, I guess, burned red when he did it.

A few quick swings, and people came apart.

While it was doing that, it also shoved its face into the food.

Oil. Powdered milk. Protein paste. Dried fruit. Old wrappers. Spoiled grain.

At one point, it picked up some torn little shiny wrapper from the old world. Maybe chocolate. Maybe candy. I don’t know. It pressed it to its mouth. That was the strange part. He didn’t need to eat, I knew that. He didn’t swallow anything. But he still went for that old chocolate candy wrapper for some weird-ass reason.

Then it threw it away and killed Daarn’s little sister.

So yeah, I was done waiting for the Oldfolk to do something. They were too weak. Too scared.

Or maybe just too tired to admit they had already given up.

That night Grandma Rachela gave out cactus jam on hard bread. Probably to make people forget our food was running out by the minute.

People cried while eating it.

That made me sick.

I knocked the bread out of her hand.

“You make jam while children die,” I said.

Everyone heard me.

Her face changed. Just a little. Like I had hit her somewhere soft.

“Juliand, your mother would…” she started.

“No,” I cut her off. “Don’t Juliand me. Don’t bring her into this. She’s not here. Don’t tell me to wait. Don’t tell me this is strength.”

The few Oldfolk standing there looked away. That told me I was right.

Grandma just stood there, holding the empty plate.

“You think dying angry is better than living scared?” she asked.

“I think living like this isn’t really living,” I said.

I wanted proof she wasn’t just one big ball of coward, that she actually cared enough to fight for our lives.

But she only said, “Please don’t throw your life at that thing.”

Then she touched my face like I was still a kid.

“We used the old Radeeo to call Brairetown. They may know how to handle a NecroAngel. Just wait a little longer, Juli. Please. I need you alive, my boy.”

And that was when I knew.

I knew she loved me. I knew she loved everyone.

But love without action is just a blanket on a corpse.

So we made a plan.

There were nine of us. Young idiots, maybe. But at least we were doing something.

We would hit the NecroAngel at the old solar field. The mirrors still moved if you kicked the gears. There were service trenches. Cables. Hooks. Broken battery towers. Enough junk to make a trap.

The Oldfolk said no. I knew we shouldn’t have asked them.

Grandma Rachela begged me not to go. She cried.

That broke my heart more than I want to admit. But it also made me sure. She was too afraid to understand what had to be done. This was for all of us. For the town. For whatever future we had left. Because if we didn’t fight, we weren’t people anymore. We were just lambs waiting for the knife.

She actually grabbed my arm.

“Juliand… Juliand, listen to me. Not yet.”

Not yet.

I hated those two words.

“People are dead NOW,” I said.

I pulled away.

The NecroAngel came near sunset.

It flew low, wings cutting the red sky into pieces.

And for one minute, we were heroes.

I swear, we almost had it.

Sava got a cable around one wing. Naria dropped a mirror array right into its face. I ran under it with a metal spike made from a pump rod.

There was a seam under its ribs. A blue glow there, like some sort of pure energy.

I drove the spike in with both hands.

The casing cracked.

Light spilled out.

The thing screamed.

Not like an animal. Like a dozen radeeos all dying at once.

We cheered.

That was the stupidest sound I ever made.

Because then it healed.

It healed around the spike.

It tore the cable loose and took Sava with it, bending him like a twig until we heard the sickening snap. Naria ran. It caught her. J.J. tried to pull me back, but one metal wing sliced through him and sprayed his blood across my face, hot and metallic in my mouth. Before I could even blink, it caught Naria and threw her into the mirror wall, where she came apart.

After that, there was no battle.

Just slaughter.

It moved through us like we were weeds.

Then I saw Grandma.

She had followed us.

This old woman, this sweet little jam-making woman, was running across the solar field with a hook in her hand.

She was screaming my name.

The NecroAngel had me pinned, and I could smell its breath: hot metal, burnt wires, and rotten meat.

Grandma hit its leg with the hook.

She actually tried to pull it off me.

For one stupid second, I forgot everything.

I forgot the Oldfolk. I forgot the fights. I forgot the jam.

She was just my grandma.

Then the NecroAngel kicked her away.

She rolled across the dirt and didn’t get up.

The thing grabbed me.

Its wings opened.

We went up.

Fast.

The town got small under us.

I knew then that I had killed everyone.

Not with my own hands. But still.

I had pissed it off. I had cracked it open. I had made it mad enough to finish the town. It would kill Grandma, if she’s not dead already. It would kill the kids in the cooling room. It would rip the solar machine apart just because we had dared touch it.

And now it was going to rip me apart in the sky.

It started doing exactly that.

One hand on my shoulder. One on my hip.

Pulling.

I felt something tear.

I still had a broken piece of spike in my hand. I don’t know how. I jammed it into the cracked glowing place under its ribs.

The NecroAngel twitched.

Its grip slipped.

I fell. Hit hard then tumbled.

I think I landed in the ravine east of town.

I should have died. I didn’t.

Lucky me.

It took me hours to crawl and limp back. I knew I had to find shelter before the sun came out.

My arm hung wrong. My mouth was full of blood. I kept hearing wings even when there were none.

All I could think was: the town is gone.

Grandma is dead.

My friends are dead. I kept crawling and stumbling. I had no choice.

I reached the ridge above town as night was turning into morning.

I almost didn’t look.

I didn’t want to see fires.

But there were no fires.

There were lights.

Real lights.

The main street was glowing. The pump house was lit. The cooling tower had power. Windows shone yellow.

For a second I thought I was still dying in the ravine and this was some weird form of near-death hallucination. So I continued crawling to the nearest building… the solar station.

Then I smelled it as I came close.

Cactus jam.

Warm. Sweet. Thick.

Coming from the solar station. From the solar station? Maybe I WAS dying.

I crawled and limped down there like a drunk ghost.

Grandma Rachela was inside the control room.

Alive.

Burned on one side. Hands wrapped in cloth. Face grey with pain.

But alive.

“You came back,” she said.

I didn’t hug her.

I couldn’t. She stood up and slowly walked toward me.

“What did you do?” I asked.

She pointed down.

There was a cable hatch open behind the main console.

She hugged me and helped me move closer to peek into the hatch.

The NecroAngel was in the engine chamber. I jumped back by instinct.

Grandma caught my arm and gave me half a smile.

“It’s fine,” she said.

Chained.

Clamped.

Folded into the old machine like someone had stuffed an angel into a furnace.

Its metal wings were crushed against the walls. Its body kept healing and tearing and healing again. The light in its chest was wired into the solar station with copper, ceramic, old battery rods, and things I didn’t even know the names of.

Blue light pulsed through the cables.

The whole town hummed with it.

She mumbled something about “fusion power,” whatever the hell that meant.

I didn’t know.

I didn’t care.

The NecroAngel saw me.

It spoke with a hundred broken voices.

I backed up so hard I hit the stairs.

“You caught it,” I said.

“No,” she said. “We both did.”

I turned on her.

“What?”

“You cracked the casing. In the field. And again when you somehow escaped it.” She looked at the thing, not me. “Before that, it was too strong. Too careful.”

“It was the jam,” she said. “The green-dotted one. It came for it and… well…”

She gave a tired little smile.

“It got jammed.”

I just stood there, trying to make my brain accept what she had just said.

I remembered the food reservoir. The oil. The paste. The wrapper.

“You knew.”

“I guessed.”

“For how long?”

“Since the first month.”

“And you didn’t tell us?”

She looked at me.

“Would you have waited?”

I wanted to say yes.

But I had blood on my clothes that answered for me.

She went on.

“It was human once,” she said. “Not fully now. Maybe not even mostly. But enough.”

She looked toward the chamber.

“The AI part smelled food stores, sugar, fermentation, all that old-world stuff. But the human part…”

She swallowed.

“The human part wanted something sweet. A taste of before. Nostalgia, maybe. God knows what was left of him in there.”

“So you used the jam.”

“I heated every jar I had in the vents. Made the whole station stink of sugar and cactus fruit.” She gave a small, sad laugh. “Strongest sweet smell for miles.”

“It came here.”

“It came here wounded, angry, hungry, and confused.”

“And you were waiting.”

“Yes.”

I wanted to hate her.

Part of me still did.

“My friends died,” I said.

“I know.”

“You let us think you were doing nothing.”

“I was doing something.”

“You let people die.”

Her face broke then. Not a lot. Just enough.

“Yes,” she said.

Then she put her burned hand on my cheek.

“My dear, I was scared every day. I am scared right now.”

“You always told me to be strong.”

“I did.”

“You looked weak.”

“I know.”

The lights flickered above us.

The NecroAngel screamed below.

Grandma said, “Strength is not never being afraid. That’s child talk. Strength is being afraid and still keeping your hands steady.”

I started crying.

She pulled me close. I let her.

She smelled like smoke, blood, and cactus sugar.

Above us, people were cheering because the water was running.

Kids were laughing in the cooling room.

Old people were touching light switches like miracles.

Under us, the NecroAngel’s core fed the town.

A monster. A human. A machine. A weapon. A power source.

And somehow, God help us, a sweet tooth.