Partholon

by D Krauss

  John was a good gardener, one of his few natural talents. He’d grown corn and watermelons on a small patch of ground at the family house in Alabama when he was a kid. He’d been in 4H and knew the Extension agent and entered the contests and seriously considered studying agriculture, before the world pushed him in other directions.

  Theresa was a bit amused by his hobby, “Big tough guy like you, gardening?” she’d chuckle.

  “That assassin in Three Days of the Condor painted little tin soldiers, you know,” he pointed out.

  “That was a movie,” she countered. True. But she never complained about the fresh cucumbers or Chinese beans or eggplant. A hobby that served them both Before. Now, just him.

  He did mostly greens through the summer, string beans and kale and turnips, highly nutritious and very dense for the small area he used. They also canned very well, a talent he picked up from his grandmother and supplemental reading at the library. He actually had a root cellar, the area in front of the crawl space in the basement, where he stored his cannings. He didn’t really eat them because cannings weren’t exactly the tastiest of foods and he still had a huge stock of store-stolen goods (not stolen, paid for, dammit). Should all that Libby’s stuff go bad, he could get through the winter on the cannings, high vinegar content and all. And on deer.

  He thought about a greenhouse. The Whitings had one in their backyard, but John wasn’t big on greenhouse vegetables. Too grainy and thin. Greenhouses were better for flowers, and those seemed frippery now. Pass. Stick with the cannings. Besides, a greenhouse presented power and water problems. He just didn’t need any more problems to overcome.

  So many problems to overcome.

  Like, right after waking, right after gaining the strength to actually step outside and shuffle weakly down the street knocking on doors, opening doors, breaking down doors as he got stronger, finding everybody dead, at least one body per house, realizing he was alone.

  The average was about one Survivor per block, taking into account all the square mileage and spreading it over the typical size of a city. Of course, random distribution wasn’t so neat, and there were several city blocks where no one survived, like in Springfield, and then several more where three to four did.

  Chaos theory could better explain the pattern. Bill told him some mathematicians at the Geological Survey actually mapped it but the then-government shut them down. Too morbid.

  John buried everybody, after the Magnum project. He had the backhoe anyway, so what the hell. Took him a week and a half. It was winter, so the bodies stayed pretty preserved, except in those houses with automatic thermostats and electric heat, one drawback of the power staying on so long. Not that bodies bothered him, except for their damn open mouths. Crime scene bodies, though, were anonymous and these were people he knew or at least recognized and, in one case, loved. The Zone was one massive crime scene, but it wasn’t faceless.

  He buried Theresa first, of course, within a day or two of his getting up. The silence of the world convinced him there were no hearses to call, and he damn sure wasn’t going to leave her to rot in bed. That was a few weeks before he got the backhoe, so he used a shovel.

  He was still pretty weak and it took him all day just to dig the requisite six feet. He trimmed and squared the hole and made sure it was as perfect as possible. He laid her in gently, using some rope. It was cold and there was a steady wet wind blowing. He had shed his coat and shirt while digging because it was sweaty work, but the sweat dried and froze over his dirt-layered skin and he didn’t want to put his clothes on over that, so he shivered and quavered his way through an off-key rendition of “Amazing Grace,” everybody’s favorite hymn, just the first verse, the only one he could remember, over and over. He was too exhausted to cry. Afterwards, he slept for another three days. That wasn’t recovery; that was grief.

  He held a similar ceremony for each grave he later dug with the backhoe, putting the neighborhood to a decent rest. He did economize, digging just one hole for everyone he found in a house. If they weren’t family, oh well, they at least knew each other. Imagine the surprise of some window salesman who wakes on Judgment Day beside the husband and wife he was hustling when the Flu got them all. Funny.

  John varied the hymns, using “Nearer my God to Thee,” “The Old Rugged Cross,” and even the Doxology, all the Baptist standbys. He hummed over the parts he forgot, but at least made the effort.

  He didn’t sing for the Jewish family, or the Buddhists, or Muslims, who were all very well represented on this very diverse street. He didn’t know their music and didn’t want to insult them with Christian themes, so he just prayed, asking that their souls be consigned to whatever Paradise their teachings described. The God he used to know wouldn’t begrudge that.

  Their graves were pretty much invisible now, except for the telltale crosses, which he put on everyone, regardless of faith. C’mon, how do you make a Star of David? Or a moon and crescent? The mounds dissolved in the rain and wind and melted into the undergrowth. Only some trained archaeologist could spot them. That was actually good because the neighborhood now looked just like every other dead neighborhood around here. Dead street, dead town.

  “Look upon my works and despair... tremble?” John stood beside the garden and frowned, trying to remember exactly how that went. The sentiment remained, either way. The Hittites, the Assyrians, the Romans, wild and thriving and swollen with strength and power, Ajax tall and arrogant before Troy... reduced to overgrown mounds dissolved by rain and wind.

  Hundreds of years from now, some bespectacled geek with a doctorate and a bush hat will squat beside John’s graves and brush at the dirt, trying to figure out what the dickens happened. It’ll probably drive him nuts – why did graves show up on the front lawns of these dwellings and not others? Geek’d write dissertations on post-Event ritualistic internments associated with street names or sun orientations or magnetic displacements or whatever cockeyed idea someone can cook up just to get published.

  He’d never consider it was just John being decent. Maybe that’s all any ancient ruin was, some local being decent.

  Springfield as ancient ruins. John shook his head. You’d never, in your wildest dreams, ever consider that. Even a hundred years from now, it should be bedroom, playground, rest from the hard world. Walk down the streets or ride the sidewalk escalators, whatever they had by then, go to stores, eat in restaurants, see friends and strangers and know it was all safe.

  Safe.

  Just to be safe. To take safety as a given, to feel so safe you think nothing of leaving a door unlocked or a car unattended or a child playing alone... well, okay, that was more of a ’50s-’60s model, but John was a child then and remembered it and grieved that Collier didn’t grow up that way, safety dissolving into dread and caution sometime in the ’70s. Now, John’d kill, give up a major limb, just to have the dread and caution days back. Beats the hell out its state-of-nature replacement.

  For the thousandth time tonight, he checked the .357, the .25, and the tanto. For the ten-thousandth time, he stared off to the woods and felt the sense of wrongness. No, foreboding. And not confined to this specific place or time, but over everything. No matter what he did, no matter how hard he fought, he’d end up a calcium deposit in some odd area of these tumbled ruins, or a piled-up set of bones lying next to a rusted Zap bike on the collapsed pavement of 395.

  Enough of this crap. It’s about what, 8:30, 45? John glanced at the moon and headed inside.

  19

  “You know, Snuff,” John said as he dialed through the cameras, the dog’s lazy tail waving beside him, “one day, I might have to take this stuff back.” He just might. You never knew, AU could reconstitute, form a student body, start holding classes again.

  Not in his lifetime of course, but he didn’t want some future administrators labeling him a thief. Yes, he did take the control panel, and video processor, and monitor, from the dispatch office, as well as the cameras, but without power, they were just
going to waste. Since their purpose was university security, and he was a university employee, they were now fulfilling their mission. Think of John’s home as a satellite campus, you future deans.

  They were pretty good cameras, motion activated. Back Before, Gary, the Grants Administrator, and he had spent a couple of weeks setting them up to catch whoever was stealing projectors out of the classrooms in Ward. They worked great, kicking on when the thieves walked in one morning and ripped the projectors out of the ceilings, stuffed them inside giant backpacks and casually strolled past first-arriving students who, of course, didn’t remember a thing.

  Great video. If they’d ever identified the bastards, woulda put ’em away. That was one problem with photos – you had to have a name to go with the face. No doubt, the bastards had dissolved down to bone now. Or they’d become Raiders and John had already shot them.

  Either way, he could take comfort.

  The control panel had audibles, a really annoying bell, which John activated to coincide with any motion detection. Necessary, because Snuffy hated buzzers and bells and any kind of technological noise – crawled under the bed when the cell phone beeped – and John needed to spur the dog into a frenzy of barking so he’d wake from his nightly coma.

  The plan was to stumble over and take a look, see how many, how armed, their distribution throughout the house, which Claymore to trigger, all that stuff. John did a daily inadvertent test when he went next door to start the Magnum, walking out and hearing Snuffy going crazy until he ran back inside and cleared the alarm. “Silly dog,” he said and patted him good-naturedly. Snuffy wagged at him and John was grateful he hated bells that much. Otherwise, John’d probably sleep right through an invasion.

  There had been a real-world test about a year ago. A raccoon got into the Magnum house about 3:00 a.m. and set off a camera. Snuffy freaked and then John freaked, falling out of bed and just about somersaulting down the stairs, dragging the Mossberg and shoes with him, heart pounding, oh shit, this is it, this is it. He flipped through the cameras with one hand while keeping the other nervously over the Claymore switches until he spotted the little bastard playing around some chairs. John went over and herded him out the door. Why kill him? It’s his world now.

  He should site the processor in the bedroom, but there was still the power issue. So, yeah, then he should sleep in the living room next to the panel or, at the very least, in the basement just one room away, but he loved Big Iron, his monster four-posted queen size bed, the only one he ever had where his big flappy feet didn’t hang over. These days, you take your few comforts seriously.

  Besides, the bedroom formed an excellent defensive position. The only way to come at John was through the easily covered lower doors and stairs. Only one or two Raiders at a time could approach, funneled into a shooting gallery. Little chance it would come to that, though. Even with the Laws of Unfortunate Timing guaranteeing a Bundy busting in next door at 1:00 a.m., when John was unconscious, there was enough buffer between the alarm sounding, John waking up, arming up, seeing what was going on and taking care of it before the Bundy figured out it was a trap.

  He switched through the various cameras again.

  Okay.

  John grabbed three pails and went back outside, Snuffy following and giving off a couple of warning barks to whoever was out there to watch his ass. John shushed him. No response from Hairbag and Lupus, hmm, where’d they get off to?

  He cocked his head and listened for distant baying, a deer chase, but, nothing.

  Odd.

  It was getting close to doggie dinner time and those boys loved their Kibbles and Bits. Dogs supposedly couldn’t sense time but those two were always waiting at the gate when he brought out the dishes about fifteen minutes from now. Maybe they were around and had decided to ignore Snuffy. Dogs were like that. John listened a bit more, but nothing.

  Hmm. Check again in a bit.

  He filled the buckets and grunted them back inside, hoisting them up on the counter. One for the toilet, one for the dishes, one for the shower. Thank God for the low tech of toilets; they pretty much ran on gravity and stayed pretty clear with a periodic snaking of the pipes. He’d hate to go the outhouse route as many were now doing – seemed the end of all true civilization. If you couldn’t luxuriate with a book and a cigar while downloading into your porcelain convenience, then the barbarians already owned the gates.

  Yeah, eventually, roots and broken pipes would render the toilets unusable, but not yet, not yet. Dishwater bucket, stationed and ready for use, the heavy chlorine making it almost sterile.

  John did the dishes every night, not only for the hygiene but Theresa’s love of her plates. She considered them art and not utensils, often begrudging their use, so he took care of them. They were pretty valuable, a set they’d picked up in Okinawa. Little chance you could go pick up a set there anymore, what with the Japanese and the Chinese using it as their DMZ. Too bad, was a pretty place. Once.

  So were they all, John, so were they all.

  The last bucket was for the shower and would stay out all night evaporating chlorine. Hot chlorine-laced water tended to leave marks. Boiling the water before pouring it clumsily into the camp shower also left marks, but there was no other way to do it. The microwave wasn’t big enough and the gas stove didn’t work so he used a Hot Pot, trying to be careful when he filled the bag but, always, burning his hand. Think he’d be used to it by now, but skin reacts to boiling water the first or five-hundredth time. Helped wake him up, he’d give it that. It was one of the first things he did in the morning so that by the time he finished breakfast, the water’d be cool enough. Well, not fatal, at least, and he always yelped when he released the stream and the first bit of superhot water smacked into his back.

  But now it was spring, soon summer, so he wouldn’t need that hot a shower anymore. No longer the need to feel warm. Winter did that to you, created a craving for warmth, and about the only way to satisfy it was risking third-degree burns from the near-boiling water. And it seemed the cold bothered him more these recent years. Gettin’ old, gettin’ old. Maybe should get a condo in Florida. Yeah.

  Spring, soon summer, meant his fruitless efforts to heat the house would end, too. Cooling the house was easier than heating it. Without central anything, both were problematic, but heating, well, that was downright impossible, at least to the Pre-Event levels of toasty warm. Above freezing was about the best he could hope for; during the worst of winter days, barely that.

  And, geez, these past winters hadn’t really been that bad so what was going to happen when a true ball-buster showed up? Freeze to death, probably, despite the space heaters arranged around his lounger in a circle while he shivered under twenty blankets in front of a frozen TV. He wondered why getting warm was much more work than getting cool; they were just opposite dynamics.

  Maybe because the house itself had to get warm before he could get warm, while cooling was personal. Well, there was just no way the house would get warm. There weren’t that many space heaters left in the world. Forget core heaters, they’re just too damn noisy, and absolutely forget the two fireplaces. You can smell fire a mile away.

  In winter then, shiver, curse it, and do what he was doing now, wish spring would get here. He grinned. Now you know how spring fertility rites got started.

  Ah, April, with its cool winds and comfortable days and all-night open windows – bliss. Still needed a blanket or two to stave off chill but, overall, very comfortable. Sleepin’ weather, as they used to call it. Bundy weather, as he called it now, the seasonal increase of risk. But risk was worth not shivering.

  Of course, when the brutal DC summer roared down and booted spring to the corner, he’d yearn for a little shivering. John hated hot, the sweat streaming down his armpits, flowing into his eyes and chafing his neck, that horrible, uncomfortable wetness underneath his T-shirt, which was exactly how he arrived at work even during winter.

  It was so bad in summer he immediately dumped a
bucket of water on his head and sat in Dispatch, naked, fanning himself before even thinking about patrol. That’d be a sight if someone walked in, wouldn’t it? No need to shoot them; they’d laugh themselves to death.

  Could centrally cool the house. There was enough power to do so and his unit still ran great, even though it was about 35 years old (American craftsmanship at its finest), but it sounded like a Space Shuttle launch, so no way. Should have replaced it for something more modern, far quieter, when he had the chance but, really, why spend unnecessary money?

  Besides, he always got a kick out of the mechanic standing there staring at the antique, shaking his head in admiration as the unit roared and shook and put out great gobs of cold air, “Man, they just don’t make ’em like that anymore.” No, they didn’t. Back then, people were proud of their work and John had been proud of his rusty, bent, airplane-loud unit. It was like owning a Model T in a world of Ferraris, different, hopelessly out of date, but workable.

  Didn’t really need to cool the whole house, though. The floor air conditioners, a couple of Delonghi PAC210 Pinguino Portables he raided (bought) from Fisher’s Hardware, worked just great. He left one running in the bedroom and tooled the other around the house as he moved, balancing a little fan on top and turning both on wherever he happened to park, the hose out the window, and the vents pointed right at him. Plenty cool, especially after a bucket of water over the head. Bedtime, haul it up to the room, set it next to the other one, and self-created sleepin’ weather. John was looking forward to it.

  An eighteenth-century life, eased by the comforts of the twenty-first. If you’re going to live through Armageddon, then you deserve it. Electricity and satellite TV and movies and music and refrigerated food. Booby-trapped houses and Claymores and M16s.

  Man.

  Trade it for just an hour of Before.

  He stilled. Yeah, an hour, just that, cars going by on Old Keene Mill with those damned big bass radios blasting that stupid rap crap for ten blocks around, speed demon bikes roaring past at about ninety, Snuffy and the neighborhood dogs chorusing, a helicopter flying too low, a 727 flying too high, Collier and his buddies screaming and splashing in the pool... God, give me an hour. Then take me.