Out of the Ruins

by Preston Grassmann

  * * *

  One woman. A religious leader, with a flock of fifty trailing behind her, all dressed in white. For three days, I made them wait around the edge of the property, and after I checked their eyes, I permitted them to stay. They all camped around the cottage: on the lawn, on the beach. They had their own supplies and only needed a place to lay their heads, the leader said. She wore robes that made her look like a wizard. Night fell. She and I circled the camp in our bare feet, the light from the bonfire carving shadows into her face. We walked to the water’s edge and I pointed into the darkness, at the tiny island she could not see. She slipped her hand into mine. I made her a drink—“More or less moonshine,” I said as I handed her the tumbler—and we sat at the table. Outside, I could hear people laughing, playing music, children romping in the surf. The woman seemed exhausted. She was younger than she looked, I realized, but her job was aging her. She sipped her drink, made a face at the taste. “We’ve been walking for so long,” she said. “We stopped for a while, somewhere near Pennsylvania, but the virus caught up with us when we crossed paths with another group. Took twelve before we got some distance between us and it.” We kissed deeply for a long time, my heart hammering in my cunt. She tasted like smoke and honey. The group stayed for four days, until she woke up from a dream and said she’d had an omen, and they needed to keep going. She asked me to come with them. I tried to imagine myself with her, her flock following behind us like children. I declined. She left a gift on my pillow: a pewter rabbit as big as my thumb.

  * * *

  One man. No more than twenty, floppy brown hair. He’d been on foot for a month. He looked like you’d expect: skittish. No hope. When we had sex, he was reverent and too gentle. After we cleaned up, I fed him canned soup. He told me about how he walked through Chicago, actually through it, and how they had stopped bothering to dispose of the bodies after a while. He had to refill his glass before he talked about it further. “After that,” he said, “I went around the cities.” I asked him how far behind the virus was, really, and he said he did not know. “It’s really quiet here,” he said, by way of changing the subject. “No traffic,” I explained. “No tourists.” He cried and cried and I held him until he fell asleep. The next morning, I woke up and he was gone.

  * * *

  One woman. Much older than me. While she waited for the three days to pass, she meditated on a sand dune. When I checked her eyes, I noticed they were green as sea glass. Her hair grayed at the temples and the way she laughed tripped pleasure down the stairs of my heart. We sat in the half light of the bay window and the buildup was so slow. She straddled me, and when she kissed me the scene beyond the glass pinched and curved. We drank, and walked the length of the beach, the damp sand making pale halos around our feet. She told about her once-children, teenage injuries, having to put her cat to sleep the day after she moved to a new city. I told her about finding my mother, the perilous trek across Vermont and New Hampshire, how the tide was never still, my ex-wife. “What happened?” she asked. “It just didn’t work,” I said. I told her about the man in the empty house, the way he cried and the way his come shimmered on his stomach and how I could have scooped despair from the air by the handfuls. We remembered commercial jingles from our respective youths, including one for an Italian-ice chain that I went to at the end of long summer days, where I ate gelato, drowsy in the heat. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d smiled so much. She stayed. More refugees filtered through the cottage, through us, the last stop before the border, and we fed them and played games with the little ones. We got careless. The day I woke up and the air had changed, I realized it had been a long time coming. She was sitting on the couch. She got up in the night and made some tea. But the cup was tipped and the puddle was cold, and I recognized the symptoms from the television and newspapers, and then the leaflets, and then the radio broadcasts, and then the hushed voices around the bonfire. Her skin was the dark purple of compounded bruises, the whites of her eyes shot through with red, and blood leaking from the misty beds of her fingernails. There was no time to mourn. I checked my own face in the mirror, and my eyes were still clear. I consulted my emergency list and its supplies. I took my bag and tent and I got into the dinghy and I rowed to the island, to this island, where I have been stashing food since I got to the cottage. I drank water and set up my tent and began to make lists. Every teacher beginning with preschool. Every job I’ve ever had. Every home I’ve ever lived in. Every person I’ve ever loved. Every person who has probably loved me. Next week, I will be thirty. The sand is blowing into my mouth, my hair, the center crevice of my notebook, and the sea is choppy and gray. Beyond it, I can see the cottage, a speck on the far shore. I keep thinking I can see the virus blooming on the horizon like a sunrise. I realize the world will continue to turn, even with no people on it. Maybe it will go a little faster.

  John Skipp and Autumn Christian

  JAX was sure they would’ve been destroyed a long time ago if it wasn’t for the Midnight Miracle Hour. A murder was always happening nearby. To the north of their tiny island, and the old studio they took over, The Orbital had built a temple that always needed a fresh supply of alts for their sacrifices. To the west and east was a wasteland full of hunters that captured and tore apart any ex-human being they found for parts and software chips. And to the south was a village of The Sane, who on principle did not like monsters like Jax.

  By the time they hit a stretch of barren Oklahoma plain, it was just Jax and Delta and Jojo and TechX. He couldn’t even count the ones he’d lost along the way. Companions came and went, by death or difference of opinion. And nobody was in charge anymore. The world was on its own.

  In the open, Jax was hard to miss: eight feet tall, equal parts flesh and alloyed armor, all heavily weaponized and still in the uniform of an army long dispersed. He’d been torn apart and rebuilt in the lab to strike terror into the hearts of all who surveyed him, and it worked. You had to be crazy to fuck with Jax. He had the body count to prove it.

  Jojo was terrifying, too, one of the manimals set loose in the wild just to stir shit up. He was crazy-fast, crazy-strong, and insane even by ape-man standards. But he knew Jax could waste him in a second, so that worked out okay.

  TechX wasn’t a battle-bot, though her armor was second to none. She was a six-limbed cyborg mutant who hailed from the Texas Institute of Technology (or, as she liked to say, in her sardonic drawl, “A proud graduate of T.I.T.!”). Her expertise—the reason she’d been deployed to the hinterlands—was repairing damaged systems. She could fix anything. Which made her great to have around. And up close, the tools she extruded from her limbs—screwdrivers, soldering irons, dextrous fingers that doubled as clamps and claws—could turn a man into a meat-pile in seconds flat. Jax was happy, if such a thing still existed, to have her on his team.

  And then there was poor Delta. Who was a whole other thing entirely.

  * * *

  The day they stumbled upon the island, the forked river surrounding it, the rain fell in oily drops that poisoned the land. But nature was adapting. Some plants died, while tougher new ones grew.

  Through the downpour, Jax spotted the building first, a squat double-decker that might have looked more at home in an industrial park. Like somebody built a bunker in the middle of nowhere.

  “Whaddaya think?” Jax said, binocular eyes boring in. “No lights. No visible movement.”

  “No power,” TechX said. “But movement, yes. I’m tracking six humans, and dozens of little critters. No alts.”

  “Humans don’t mean shit,” said Jojo. “And I am fucking cold.”

  It didn’t take long to find the bridge, blow through the tiny obstacles. Once inside, it went down fast. One got away, but that left five. So they had plenty to eat for days.

  The building was a revelation: full of valuable scrap and metal, and technology that’d been mostly lost in the outside world. Evidently, the original owners had been radical resistance fighters, based on the y
ellowed books that still lined their shelves or lay pissed-on, scattered and torn across the floor. There were still photographs of them, mostly shattered in their frames, also strewn. The squatters who followed were clearly not fans.

  But there were mattresses, and linens, and cooking utensils. All filthy. But what wasn’t, in this world? Most of all, there were solid walls, and a roof that still held. Which was more than they had known in ages.

  TechX got it all up cleaned up and running in a matter of days. Water and power flowing. Even a little garden in the back.

  And so they settled in.

  Delta often asked Jax to carry her out to the studio balcony when the dark clouds looked like bloody ribbons draped across the moon. She couldn’t hunt anymore, and her poisonous glands had been scraped empty long ago. But she still wanted to stick out her studded tongue and taste murder on the air.

  Jax was way past used to hearing all the screams of night. Smelling corpses left to rot on crucifixes, spare limbs dumped into pits or roasting on an open fire. He’d push Delta’s chair to the edge, as if she could stick her nose into the bleeding clouds. She’d sigh, and close her eyes with her jaw distended, and imagine what it’d be like to have legs again to kill.

  It almost became a comforting ritual. At least they weren’t out in it. And nobody dared come near. At least so far.

  It felt almost like home.

  * * *

  In the studio’s live recording room, they’d found the broadcasting technology still worked. They could catch the signals of abandoned satellites still ringing the earth and broadcast whatever they wanted. There were still people who had augmented brain implants or owned a computer. People who still surfed empty channels out of habit.

  Jax figured the recording room was a gift. If only they knew how to use it. But they were tired and worn out, and didn’t have much to say. None of them were musicians, so the guitars and digital keyboards and random percussion instruments still intact had nothing to offer them. JoJo used to get on air occasionally when he was drunk, bang on bongos and scream about all the fuckers he knew who deserved to die, before they finally had to kill and eat him for attracting unwanted attention.

  They hadn’t touched the recording equipment again until Urchin arrived.

  It was Urchin who made the Midnight Miracle Hour.

  * * *

  Urchin probably used to be a Forever Girl, or one of those living dolls pumped full of miracle goop and happy juice to keep them numb and fuckable for all eternity. Or maybe she’d been human. Jax didn’t know much about her except that she used to sing.

  TechX said that she recognized Urchin’s foam-green eyes, what remained of that lilting upturned nose. She’d been one of the winners of that old reality show Sing For Your Freedom. At twelve years old, her voice could’ve knocked out an angel.

  Jax didn’t know if that was true. But whoever she was, she had been beautiful and someone couldn’t stand that. They’d ruined her skin so it looked like a knotted pink coral reef. They’d forked her tongue so it couldn’t quite fit in her mouth and she drooled across the front of her dress. Instead of human arms, she had eight machine-like octopus limbs. She walked hunched over as the arms waved and squirmed and swam through the air around her.

  Jax couldn’t believe that she’d managed to survive so long in a body designed for pain. When she showed up at the compound, dehydrated and rasping, Jax thought they’d have to mercy-kill her.

  But she went straight into the recording studio, fiddled with the recording equipment like she’d seen it before, and went live.

  Jax tried to stop her. He didn’t want more people showing up after another JoJo incident, but one of her limbs casually pushed him back through the door.

  The sound that came out of her made Jax stop.

  He sat down on the floor outside the studio.

  Urchin couldn’t even speak without her tongue getting in the way, but her body could sing. Her octopus limbs warmed against the keys and her body became a symphony. It was a sound like she’d hacked the universe. A music unlike anything Jax ever heard. Warm at the edges. Cool and throbbing in the center. It was a pulsing desert wind and an underwater abyss. It was snowflakes on the tongue and hot food in your belly.

  For the first time in forever, Jax thought of being in the creche with all the other children and Auntie Abna, the only person who ever consoled him when he cried. Before the soldiers came and ripped the feeling out of him because they needed monsters and not little boys.

  An emotion Jax thought long dead pulsed within him. And he knew the others felt it too. The household floated along with the music. Calm. Swirling deep within themselves.

  The next night Urchin did it again. And again. It became the Midnight Miracle Hour.

  If it wasn’t for the Midnight Miracle Hour, they wouldn’t have rigged the outdoor speakers that lined the balcony, the weather-proofed sconces on the roof to every side. Would have spent every day in defensive red alert, as they’d spent the whole of their previous forever.

  They would not have seen the lost souls gather by the river, from every side. They started coming every night. The hunters. The Sane. Even Orbital cultists. Not in assault mode. But—at least when the music was playing—in what appeared to be worshipful prayer.

  If it wasn’t for the Midnight Miracle Hour, they would’ve killed the baby.

  * * *

  One of TechX’s seeker drones found an injured woman running by the river. She clutched an old shoebox to her chest, and wherever she stepped left bloodied footprints that swelled in the riverbed. Before TechX could dispatch another robot to investigate, the woman lay down beneath a tree and died, still clutching the box.

  TechX sent Jax out to investigate. By the way she held the box so tightly, even in death, Jax thought it was probably what was left of her food, or a family heirloom, like a photograph of her ancestors or a piece of hair tied around a locket. People who died in stupid ways often had a tendency to be sentimental.

  But when Jax pried the box from the woman’s fingers, he found a baby inside wrapped in a stained blanket. It couldn’t have been more than a few months old. It looked healthy. Human. It squinted up at Jax and balled its fists upwards, reaching. It didn’t cry. It had lived long enough to know that crying was useless.

  They stared at each other for a long time. The sun winked in between them.

  Jax took the baby back to the bunker. Only once he’d crossed the threshold and sat down on the floor—he’d already broken one of the couches with his weight—did he realize how stupid that was. He should’ve suffocated the baby and buried it. A baby couldn’t survive in a world like this. Especially not without its mother.

  Especially not with monsters.

  From her pile of blankets on the floor, Delta stirred from slumber, moaned with hunger at the fresh baby smell. Her cracked gums peeled up over her yellow fangs.

  “No,” he said sharply. “Not food. Not yet.” Delta squirmed but reluctantly obeyed.

  Jax sat the baby in the shoebox down and left it on the ground as he paced the floor. His huge body made the floorboards groan. The baby’s eyes followed him around the room, but it remained quiet, except for a single gasp.

  TechX came in. He was sure when she saw the thing, she’d want to get rid of it too. But she just sat down on one end of their remaining couch and stared at it, placed one hand underneath her chin and leaned forward like she did when she was looking at a busted machine.

  It was Urchin, with her octopus arms, who came in and scooped the baby up. She held it close and rocked it. The baby made a little hiccupping noise.

  When Urchin bent down the baby’s face reflected in her own. Soft and unbroken brown against Urchin’s cracked angel green. Eyes within eyes.

  “Itttthh a girl,” Urchin said to them with her swollen tongue and too-small mouth.

  That’s when the “it,” the “thing,” became something real to them. Something that could be named.

  A “she.” A baby gir
l.

  * * *

  “We have to get rid of it,” Jax said.

  Urchin shook her head, smiling. “We don’t haffff. To do. Anything.”

  Jax moved to take the baby away from Urchin. He was so big he could’ve crushed her with his shadow. But Urchin just joined her free arms together and began to hum. A softened low-level frequency that pulsed outwards.

  The dead mother’s face flashed in his mind’s eye. The bloodied footprints. He stopped and took a step backwards.

  Urchin turned, still humming, and crossed the room to the studio, locking the door behind them.

  Jax’s insides clenched. The nanites surged upwards in his blood, pushed themselves into his limbs to strengthen them. Squeezed his heart to beat faster. Move, they told him. Move or you die. The killing impulse with which he’d been trained.

  “We gotta do something,” he said.

  “Yeah, we do.” TechX talked to the wall without making eye contact. “We don’t even have anything to feed her with. I’d have to talk to Marl, down south. He keeps powdered milk. I’ll trade him some repairs…”

  “We are not talking about feeding it,” Jax said. “We’re getting rid of it.”

  “Don’t say ‘it,’” TechX said quietly. “She’s not an ‘it.’ We’re the ‘it.’ She hasn’t done enough wrong to lose that.”

  “God damn it, no,” Jax said. “Delta is already enough trouble as it is…”