“That’s a beautiful idea.” His voice softened practically to a song. “You’ll be the one who got away, Nayima.”
She couldn’t remember the last time anyone had called her by name. And he’d pronounced it as if he’d known her all her life. Not to mention how the word beautiful cascaded up and down her spine. While her hormones raged, she loved him more with each breath. Nayima was tempted to jump into her PT Cruiser and drive away then, the way she had learned to flee all hopeless scenarios.
Instead, she pulled her car within fifteen yards of him and reclined in the driver’s seat with her door open, watching him play until he stopped. The car’s clock said it was midnight when he finally slept. Hours had melted in his music. She couldn’t sleep, feverish with the thought of losing him.
At first, she only climbed out of the car to stretch her limbs. She took a tentative step toward him. Then, another. Soon, she was standing over him while he slept.
She took in his bright guitar strap, woven from a pattern that looked Native American. The wiry hairs on his dark beard where they grew thick to protect his pink lips. The moonlight didn’t show a single gray hair. He could be strong, with better feeding. Beneath his dusty camo jacket, he wore a Pink Floyd concert shirt. He could play her all of the old songs, and she could teach him music he didn’t know. The moonlight cradled his curls across his forehead, gleamed on his exposed nose. He was altogether magnificent.
Nayima was sure he would wake when she knelt beside him, but he was a strong sleeper. His chest rose and fell, rose and fell, even as she leaned over him.
Was the stone rolling across her chest only her heartbeat? Her palms itched, hot. She was seventeen again, unexpectedly alone in a corner with Darryn Stephens at her best friend’s house party, so aware of every prickling pore where they touched. And when he’d bent close, she’d thought he was going to whisper something in her ear over the noise of the world’s last dance. His breath blew across her lips, sweet with beer. Then his lips grazed hers, lightning strikes down her spine, and the softness . . . the softness . . .
Kyle slept on as Nayima pressed her lips to his. Was he awake? Had his lips yielded to her? It seemed so much like Kyle was kissing her too, but his eyes were still closed, his breathing uninterrupted even as she pulled away.
She crept back to her PT Cruiser, giddy as a twelve-year-old. Oh, but he would be furious! The idea of his anger made her giggle. She dozed to sleep thinking of the gift of liberation she had given Kyle. Freedom from masks. Freedom from fear. Freedom to live his life with her, to build their village.
By dawn, Nayima woke to the sound of his retching.
She thought she’d dreamed the sound at first—tried to will herself to stay in her happy dream of singing “Kumbaya” with well-groomed strangers in the horse stalls, hand in hand—but she opened her eyes and saw the guitar player hunched away from her. He had pushed his guitar aside. She heard the splatter of his vomit.
Nausea came first. Nausea came fast.
Shit, she thought. Her mind was a vast white prairie, emptied, save that one word. She remembered his laughter, realized she would never hear him laugh again now.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought for sure you were like me. An NI.”
She wished her voice had sounded sadder, but she didn’t know how. She wanted to explain that he might have contracted the virus somewhere else in the past twenty-four hours, not necessarily from her. But despite the odds and statistics on her side, even she didn’t believe that.
It’s only a mistake if you don’t learn from it, Gram would say. Nayima clamped her fingernails into both palms. Her wrist tendons popped out from the effort. Hot pain. The numbness that had thawed with his music and 4-H stories crept over her again, calcified.
The man didn’t turn to look at her as she stood over him and picked through his things. His luggage carrier held six water bottles and a mountain of candy bars. The necessities. She left him his candy and water. His 9mm had no ammo, but she took it. She left his guitar—although she took the strap to remember him by. She might take up guitar herself one day.
The man gagged and vomited again. Most people choked to death by the third day.
“I’m leaving now,” she said, and knelt behind him. She searched for something to say that might matter to him. “Kyle, I found that Rescue Center over in Farm Land—Farm World—and it looks nice. Somebody really thought the whole thing through. You were right to come here. Where I grew up, they just burned everything.”
Even now, she craved his voice. Wanted so badly for him to hear her. To affirm her. To learn her grandmother’s name and say, “Yes, she was. Yes, you were. Yes, you are.”
The man did not answer or turn her way. Like the others before him, he was consumed with his illness. Just as well, Nayima thought as she climbed back into her car. Just as well. She glanced at her visor mirror and saw her face: dirt-streaked, unrepentant. She blinked and looked away.
Nayima never had been able to stomach the eyes of the dead.
Asked to write a story about the end of the world for The End Is Now, edited by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey, I decided to imagine what the end of the world would feel like to one character. My answer: isolation.
Carriers
Republic of Sacramento
Carrier Territories
2055
Nayima’s sleep had turned restless as she aged, so the rattling from the chicken coop outside woke her before her hens raised the alarm. The intruder was likely either feline or human, and she hoped it was the former. A cat, no matter how big, wasn’t as dangerous as a person.
Nayima ignored the sharp throb in her knee when she jumped from her bed and ran outside with her sawed-off in time to see a hound-sized tabby scurrying away with a young hen pinned in its teeth, a snow globe of downy white feathers trailing behind. The army of night cats scattered in swishing bushes and brittle leaves. The giant thief paused to look back at her, his eyes glowing gold with threat. The cats were getting bigger.
Nayima had been saving that hen for Sunday dinner, but she was too winded to chase the thief. Now both knees throbbed. And her lower back, right on schedule. She fired once into the dark and hoped she’d hit him.
Fucking cats.
The dark was thick to the forsaken east, but to the west she saw the gentle orange glow from the colony in Sacramento, the fortress she would never enter. The town folk had electricity to spare, since their lights never went fully dark anymore. They were building a real-life Emerald City from the ruins, with bright lights and fresh water flowing in the streets—literally, after the levees flooded back in the ’20s.
By contrast, her tract, Nayimaland, was two-hundred acres of dead farmland she shared with feral cats made bold because food was scarce—taken by drought, not the Plague. The late State of California had yet more dying to do.
Nayima felt thirsty, but she didn’t stop at her sealed barrel to take a scoop. She couldn’t guess how long her standing water would have to last. Sacramento owed her water credits, but she would be a fool to trust their promises.
At the rear of the chicken coop, Nayima found the hole the cat had torn in the mesh and lashed loose wires to close it. The hens were unsettled, so she could expect broken eggs. And she couldn’t afford to cook one of her reliable laying hens, so she’d have to wait for meat at least another week, until trading day.
By the time Nayima came back to her porch, her two house cats, Tango and Buster, had gathered enough courage to poke their heads up in the window. For an instant, her pets looked like the thief cat, no better.
“It’s okay, babies,” she said. “One of ’em got a chicken.”
Buster, still aloof, raised his tail good night and went to his sofa. But Tango followed her to her bedroom and jumped beside her to sleep. Nayima preferred a bare mattress to the full bed that had been in this room—fewer places for intruders to hide and surprise her. She slept beneath the window, where she could always open her eyes and see the sky.
Tango rested his weight against her; precious warmth and a thrumming heartbeat to calm her nerves.
“I can’t feed you all,” she told Tango. “I’m crazy for taking in just you two.”
Tango slowly blinked his endless green eyes at her, his cat language for love. Nayima returned Tango’s long, slow blink.
Nayima thought the jangling bells outside soon after dawn meant that a cat had been caught in a cage, but when she went to investigate, she found Raul’s mud-painted red pickup slewed across the dirt path to her ranch house. He was cursing in Spanish. His front tire had caught a camouflaged cage, and he was stooping to check the damage. At least a dozen sets of cats’ eyes floated like marbles in the dry shrubbery.
“Don’t shoot!” Raul called to her. He knew she had her little sawed-off without looking back. “You’ll blow off your own culo with that rusty thing one day. ¿Es todo, Nayima?”
Despite the disturbance and his complaining, Nayima was glad to see Raul. He looked grand in morning sunshine. Raul’s eyes drooped slightly, giving the impression of drowsiness, but he was handsome, with a fine jaw and silvering hair he wore in two long braids like his Apache forebears. Since reconciliation and the allotment of the Carrier Territories eight years ago, Raul looked younger every time she saw him.
Nayima had turned sixty-one or sixty-two in December—she barely tracked her age anymore—and she and Raul were among the youngest left, so most carriers had died before the territories were allotted. In their human cages.
Captivity had been their repayment for the treatment and vaccine from the antibodies in their blood. They were outcasts, despite zero human transmissions of the virus after Year One. The single new case twenty-five years ago had been a lab accident, and the serum had knocked it out quick.
The Ward B carriers Nayima had barely known still lived communally, or close enough to walk to each other’s ranches. But Nayima had chosen seclusion on an airy expanse of unruly farmland that stretched as far as she could see. In containment, she’d never had the luxury of community, except Raul. She had enough human contact on her market trips, where she made transactions through a wall. Or her hour-long ride on her ATV to see Raul, if she wanted conversation. Other people wearied her.
“Sorry—cat problem,” she told Raul. “Did it rip?” She had a few worn tires in her shed from the previous owner, but they were at least forty years old.
Raul exhaled, relieved. “No, creo que está bien.”
She squatted beside him, close enough to smell the sun on his clothes. She had not seen Raul in at least thirty days. He had begged her to share his house, but she had refused. She needed to talk to him from time to time, but she remembered why she did not want to live with him, and why she had slept with him only once: Raul’s persistent recollections about his old neighborhood in Rancho Cucamonga and his grandparents’ house in Nogales were unbearable. He always wanted to talk about the days before the Plague.
But after forty years, he was family. He’d been a gangly fifteen-year-old when the lab-coats captured him. Shivering and crying, he had webbed his fingers to reach toward her hand against the sheet of glass.
Nayima missed skin. She felt sorry for the new children, being raised not to touch. She absently ran her fingertips along the dirt-packed ridges in the tire’s warm rubber.
“Do you have meat?” she said.
“Five pounds of dried beef,” he said. Nayima didn’t care much for beef, but meat was meat. “In the back of the truck. And a couple of water barrels.”
Water barrels? A gift that large probably wasn’t from Raul alone, and she didn’t like owing anyone.
“From Sacramento?”
“You’re doing a school talk today, I heard. Liaison’s office asked me to come out.”
Nayima’s temper flared. She could swear she’d felt a ping at her right temple an hour before, waking her from fractured sleep. The lab-coats denied that they abused her tracking chip, but was it a coincidence she had a school obligation that day? And how dare they send so little water!
Nayima was so angry that her first words came in Spanish, because she wanted Raul’s full attention. He had taught her Spanish, just as she had taught him so much else, patient lessons through locked doors. “Que me deben créditos, Raul. They owe a lot more than two barrels.”
“You’ll get your créditos. This is just . . . ” He waved his hand, summoning the right word. Then he gave up. “Por favor, Nayima. Take them. You earned them.” He tested the air pressure in his tire with a pound of his fist. “Gracias a Díos this is okay.”
Nayima’s shaky faith had been shattered during the Plague, but Raul still held fast to his God. He told us the Apocalypse was coming in Revelation, he always said, as if that excused it all. Nayima still believed Sunday dinner should be special, but only to honor the memory of her grandmother’s weekly feasts.
Two new orange water barrels stood in the bed of Raul’s truck. Large ones. She needed more credits to get her faucets running, but the barrels would last a while. Nayima climbed up, grabbing the bed’s door to swing her leg over. She winced at the pain in her knees as she landed. She treasured the freedom to move her body, but movement came with a cost.
“¿Estás bien, querida?” Raul said.
“Just my knees. Stop fussing.”
Nayima fumbled with an unmarked plastic crate tied beside the closest barrel.
“Don’t open that yet,” Raul said.
But she already had. Inside, she found the beef, wrapped in paper and twine. Still not quite dry, judging by the grease spots.
But she forgot the jerky when she saw two dolls, both long-haired girls, one with brown skin, one white. The dolls’ hands were painted with blue plastic gloves, but nothing else. They had lost their clothes, lying atop a folded, obscenely pink blanket.
“What the hell’s this?” Nayima said.
Raul walked closer as if he carried a heavy sack of across his shoulders. “I wanted to talk to you,” he said, voice low. He reached toward her. “Come down. Walk with me.”
“Bullshit,” she said. “Why is Sacramento sending me dolls?”
“Bejar de la truck,” Raul insisted. “Por favor. Let’s walk. I have to tell you something.”
Nayima was certain Raul had sold her out in some way, she just couldn’t guess how. Raul had always been more willing to play political games; he’d been so much younger when he’d been found, raised without knowing any better. So Raul’s house had expensive solar panels that kept his water piping hot and other niceties she did not bother to covet. His old pickup truck, which ran on precious ethanol and gasoline, was another of his luxuries for the extra time and blood he was always willing to give the lab-coats.
Nayima climbed out of the truck more carefully than she’d climbed in, refusing Raul’s aid. Living in small spaces for most of her life had left her joints irritable and stiff, even with daily exercises to loosen them. If she’d had the energy or balance, she would have shoved Raul down on his ass.
“Start talking,” she said. “What have you done?”
“Put the gun down first.”
Nayima hadn’t realized she was pointing the shotgun at him. She lowered it. “Tell me ahora, Raul. No hay más secretos.” Raul’s secrets stung more than anyone else’s.
“I won a ruling,” Raul said.
“About what? Free toys?”
Raul stared out toward the thirsty grasslands. “I have a library portal at my house . . . ” he began.
Of course he did. Toys and gadgets. That was Raul.
Raul went on. “I did some research on . . . the embryos.”
Nayima’s cheek flared as if he’d struck her. During Reconciliation, she and Raul had learned that dozens of embryos had been created from her eggs and his sperm, more than they’d known. They had been the cocktail du jour: something about their blood types. Her heart gave a sudden sick tumbling in her chest, as if to drown him out.
“There’s a bebé, Nayima,” he said, whispering like wind.
“One survived.”
The world went white. Her eyesight, her thoughts, lost.
“What? When?”
“She just turned four,” he said. “She’s still in the research compound.”
There was a she somewhere?
“How long have you known?”
“Six months,” he said. “When I got the portal. I saw rumors of the surviving infant, did the research. She’s one of ours. They never told us.”
Now Nayima’s sacrifices seemed fresh: the involuntary harvesting of her eggs, three first-trimester miscarriages after forced insemination, a succession of unviable embryos created in labs, and two premature live births of infants from artificial wombs who had never survived beyond a day. Pieces of her chopped away.
“We can’t reproduce,” she said.
“But one lived,” Raul said. “They don’t know why.”
“You’ve known all this time? And you never told me?”
He sighed. “Lo siento, Nayima. I hated hiding it. But I knew it would upset you. Or you might work against me. I didn’t want to say anything until I got a ruling. As the biological father, I have rights.”
“Carriers don’t have rights.”
“Parental rights,” Raul said. “For the first time—yes, we do.”
Nayima despised herself for her volcanic emotions. How could Raul be naïve enough to believe Sacramento’s lies? If there was a surviving child—which she did not believe—they would not release their precious property to carriers.
“It’s a trick,” she said. “To get us to go back there.”
Raul shook his head slowly. Impossibly, he smiled. “No, Nayima,” he said. “They’re sending her to us. To you. She’s free under Reconciliation to be with her parents. All you have to do is sign the consent when they come.”
Nayima needed to sit, so she ignored her sore joints and sat where she’d been standing, on the caked dirt of her road. The air felt thick and heavy in her lungs.
“No,” Nayima said. Saying the word gave her strength. “No no no. We can’t. It’s a trap. Even if there’s a girl . . . ” It was so improbable, Nayima could barely say the words. “And there isn’t . . . But even if there is, why would they offer her except as a weapon against us? To threaten us? To control us? Why do they keep trying so hard to make children from us? She’s not from my womb, so she doesn’t have the antibodies. Think about it! We’re just . . . reserves for them. A blood supply, if they ever need it. That’s the only reason we’re still alive.”
Ghost Summer, Stories Page 31
