We’re going to be all right.
• • • •
Asset rides in a cattle car from L.A. to San Diego, and her fare costs more than mine. I pay it gladly; I won’t need the ammunition where I’m going. When I get off the train in my hometown, I can’t believe how quiet it is. The smell of the sea, the coolness of the air, the palm and coral trees swaying beside the streets.
No cars. No airplanes. Just pedestrians and a few carriage horses repurposed for dray.
I walk through the streets slowly, six miles home. From the bowl of the city up into the hills, where our house is. It takes two hours, and the idea of walking for only two hours and then stopping leaves me breathless with gratitude.
Our house was never fancy, never much by Southern Californian standards. Pricey enough—living in San Diego is anything but cheap—and not one of those modern stucco things with the red tile roofs that are all garage from the street.
It’s just a simple yellow ranch, overgrown with bougainvillea and bird of paradise. But it’s on top of a hill, and you can see clear to the next hill. There was a swimming pool in the back yard: From the front, I can see that you’ve tarped it, and I bet you’re using it as gray water. You were always provident.
I hitch Asset up to the queen palm by the front door, ease the cinches on her pack saddle, and put my key in the lock. I open the door.
You’re sitting on the sofa with a woman I don’t know, your arms draped over each other along the sofa back. Casey is curled up between you, leaning on the woman, her soft hair frizzed around her face. She’s holding a copy of The Black Stallion and the Girl, one of her favorite books. I can tell she’s been reading out loud to you, and I’m grateful that you’re keeping up with her education, even under the circumstances.
You jump out of the cushions and run to me while I stand frozen. Casey is a half step behind you, the book thudding unheeded to the carpet. You stop three feet away.
She flings herself into my arms.
Whatever we say, it’s meaningless. Just to hear the sound of each other’s voices. I crouch and she squeezes me breathless and we’re both crying, and you’re just looking at me, at the woman, at me.
I meet your gaze over Casey’s head, her sweet scent lifting me like helium. I want to hug you, squeeze you tight. I know . . . this is going to be more complicated.
I can’t blame you. It’s been almost a year. You’re no Penelope, and how could you have been sure that I was ever coming home? And these things are hard to do alone.
I can’t blame you. But I still do.
The woman says nothing. She comes to stand behind you and places a hesitant hand on your elbow. You let it remain.
“I brought a burro,” I tell Casey, long before I can bear to let her go. “Her name is Asset. You should run out and meet her.”
The door bangs behind her. I guess a burro is as good as a pony after all.
“Alyce,” you say.
You are weeping, those silent pearl-like tears that never robbed you of dignity. I, by contrast, am red-eyed and dripping.
“This is Claire,” you say, turning so you bridge the gap between us. “She’s from Hawaii. She was stranded.”
“I’m not angry,” I say. “But it’s our house and our daughter.”
“Stay,” you say.
I look at Claire. She’s tall, good shoulders, laugh lines in olive skin. She nods.
It’s a different world, isn’t it? I don’t know her yet. I can’t judge.
I think of the stolen food and water that got me here. I think of hiding in the desert from those men.
You’ve never seen everything. Maybe I’ll like her if I give her half a chance. Casey does.
I realize I’ve been holding my breath and let it go.
“Fine, but I’m taking our bed.”
“I’ll change the sheets,” says Claire.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. When coupled with a tendency to read the dictionary for fun as a child, this led her inevitably to penury, intransigence, and the writing of speculative fiction. She is the Hugo, Sturgeon, and Campbell Award-winning author of almost a hundred short stories and more than twenty-five novels, the most recent of which is Steles of the Sky, from Tor Books. Her dog lives in Massachusetts; her partner, writer Scott Lynch, lives in Wisconsin. She spends a lot of time on planes.
BRING THEM DOWN
Ben H. Winters
BRING HER TO ME, says the voice. BRING HER TO ME.
God’s voice is an alarm bell in the night. God’s voice is a rattle of bones in a box. God’s voice is a grinding rusted growl.
Robert clutches his forehead and grits his teeth and God says it again: BRING HER TO ME.
And then silence.
Robert releases himself and exhales and keeps walking. He is trailing his friend Pea by a couple of paces, as he has been for most of the time they’ve been walking, all these hours of fitful giddy wandering. Following their feet, going this way and then that, under the vast star-littered late-night sky, through winding and crooked alleyways, up half-paved streets, along the empty sidewalks and the broad avenues of the little city.
It was very late and then it was very early, and now at last it is becoming day. Pale yellow light seeps between the buildings. Pea turns and gives him a tired, bleary smile, and Robert finds a way to smile back.
Through all of these hours, Robert has had it, over and over, the voice in his head—now soft, now loud, now an imploring whisper, now an accusatory shriek. God’s voice on occasion grants him an interregnum of silence: a minute . . . ten minutes . . . and then comes roaring back, louder and more insistent on each return:
BRING HER TO ME.
BRING HER TO ME.
BRING HER NOW.
There is no ambiguity. No confusion. What God wants is for Robert to kill Pea. God wants her to go through, like everyone else has, by now, gone through.
BRING HER TO ME, says God. BRING HER NOW.
Robert screws his eyes shut as tightly as he can and then releases them slowly. He will not do it; he will not obey; and he cannot allow Pea to see what is happening. He will not. He steps up beside her, gestures for her to wait a moment, and goes first, emerging now from the alley into one of the wide streets.
Apartment buildings tower on either side: Building 16 and Building 17. Robert and Pea stare up at them with astonishment. There are no lights turning on inside the buildings, no day beginning. No morning bustle evident in silhouette through the shades, breakfasts being made, clothes selected.
Pea turns to him suddenly. Her palm is clapped over her mouth, and she is blinking her big black eyes rapidly—blinking back tears? No; she is thinking. Considering something. He can see it buzzing in her eyes, busy movement, rapid thoughts. (She’s so pretty. The thought stabs Robert, freezes him in place. She’s so pretty!)
“I think . . .” she trails off, bites her lower lip. “I was thinking, I would like to go back and see my parents.”
“Your parents?” says Robert. God’s voice, a bullhorn blare, BRING HER TO ME. He ignores it, fights against it. Talks softly to Pea. “Are you sure that’s what you want?”
Pea nods forcefully, her brow furrowed and her mouth set and solemn. She’s got her thick black hair tied back in a ponytail. He thinks again—as he’s been thinking since he barged into her bedroom last night, with his crazy idea—thinks how lucky he is to be with her. Just the two of them in the whole world. He’s so lucky. She’s already on the way, walking quickly down the street toward Building 49. Robert rushes to keep up, tripping a little on the stump of a broken hydrant.
Everything went just as Robert had hoped. He had convinced himself over a period of months to defy God’s instructions, and then last night he convinced Pea to defy them, too. And it looks like everyone else in the city—which means everyone else in the world—accepted what God has been whispering or shouting the last 17 years: that this worl
d had fallen into sin and had to be rebuilt. Everyone else followed God’s dictums to the letter: bought the meat and poisoned the meat and ate the meat and died.
But not Robert and his new friend Pea, not lucky Robert and the sweet girl he’s always watched and loved from afar. Now it’s him and Pea stumbling, weary but glad, through the dead quiet streets of the city, washed in morning sunlight.
He’d imagined it happening just this way. He’d dreamed of this scene.
Except—except—
BRING HER TO ME. Like the pounding of a fist on a length of pipe.
BEAR HER AWAY. Like bullets being fired into a wall.
Stop it, hisses Robert into the chamber of his own mind, Stop it, please!—and then after the briefest of silences, after no silence at all this time, God does answer—tauntingly, smirkingly, like a peacock flaunting his omniscience, God answers—
I WILL NOT STOP.
I WILL NOT STOP UNTIL YOU BRING HER TO ME.
The voice is with him, dogging his steps like a wolf following the track, sometimes hidden but never gone. Pea turns down into the fourth circle; they’re almost there.
BRING HER TO ME.
I will not.
IT IS WHY I LET YOU LIVE.
I decided to live.
YOU DIDN’T DECIDE ANYTHING.
I am deciding right now to keep walking. To keep living. I will ignore you forever, if I have to. I will learn to live with you, like a handicap. I will bear you like blindness. I will live my life.
IT IS NOT YOUR LIFE I AM INTERESTED IN.
• • • •
Pea doesn’t really feel sad at all.
Last night when she realized she was never going to see her parents again, she had felt sad, but just for a little while.
Running away with Robert, slipping out the cracked window, leaving them behind. It was like she knew she was supposed to feel sad, so she did, but then she forgot she was supposed to, and she stopped.
By now they had really done it, and she didn’t feel anything. Running away didn’t matter. If she had stayed, she’d be saying goodbye to them anyway. If she’d stayed, waited for morning and the feast, she’d be dead too. She’d never see them—or anything—ever again.
Unless she believed what God said—unless she believed what they said that God said, since she had never heard him herself—unless she believed that they would be reunited on the other side.
She had never really believed it, though. Never in her heart. And now she is free.
She doesn’t feel sad at all.
The world is beautiful this morning, as she and Robert make their way from the fourth circle in to the third, back toward Building 49. The scattered leaning trees that line the sidewalks and the windows of the buildings and the tattered awnings. It is more than beautiful. It is like everything is washed in beauty. Varnished in it.
There are specific small things that Pea knows she will miss, that she sort of misses already. Her friend Jenna doesn’t like pudding and always saves hers for Pea, has been doing so since they were tiny kids. She and her cousin Ruth invented a language one summer; they would whisper-sing made-up words to each other during star-night, when the whole city gathered out on the big lawn, looking up at the distant planets—she and Ruth would lie with foreheads just barely touching, giggling secret silliness.
Jenna is dead now too, and Ruth too, and her parents. But Pea doesn’t feel sad at all.
She climbs the narrow stairwell of Building 49, pausing now and then to let Robert catch up. He’s a bit heavy, a bit out of shape. He huffs and puffs along behind her. Just the two of them! The thought sets loose a clamor of birds in her stomach. Just the two of them of all the people in the world!
On floor sixteen, Pea’s floor, they walk down the hallway. Every apartment has a glass window that lets out onto the corridor; that’s how they were built—more communal, more friendly.
Now, as they pass down the corridors, they see in each window a frozen picture of death.
Families seated in semi-circles around kitchen tables, slumped or staring, mouths open or closed, hands clutching hands, chins tilted at unnatural angles, drinks mostly finished or just started. On every table the joint of poisoned meat, mostly eaten. A few stray slices still clinging to the remains.
Pea knows all the people in all the windows. Her neighbors; her schoolmates; her friends. Arranged like dolls, frozen in place, suicides in the service of the Lord.
Like dioramas, Pea thinks. Like projects from school.
She slows her pace long enough to let Robert catch up, and she places a reassuring hand on the sweaty small of his back. He grins at her nervously, and they keep walking, abreast now, down the center of the hallway. It’s funny, about Robert. At school she barely knew him. But now she feels this responsibility, this burden. To make sure he’s OK. He seems so shaken—so pale. He is silent and his face is drawn.
“I don’t blame you,” she says to him suddenly, and takes one of his hands. His eyes widen in surprise, and she squeezes his hand. They have stopped now, where the hallway bends. Around the corner will be Pea’s apartment—and Pea’s own dead parents.
“You were right,” she tells him. “We did the right thing.”
“Yeah . . .” he says, and looks not at her but at the floor. “I know.”
But he doesn’t know. He doesn’t believe her, she can tell. He must be blaming himself. He’s wondering what they will do, how they will live. How the world will go on. We will handle it together, thinks Pea, and is pleased with herself, pleased at the maturity and the correctness of such a thought.
They will. They will handle everything together, for they will have no other choice.
“Come on,” she says, and takes Robert by the hand and they go around the corner.
This scene is like all the others: Pea’s mother and father are seated across from each other at the kitchen table, still and silent, eyes like the eyes of dolls. The third chair—Pea’s chair—is empty. The plate of meat is at the center of the table, very little left on it. The poisonous meat. The electric slicer with its curved end lies by her father’s still fingers. Does it still work, Pea wonders idly? Anything left in the battery? Or is that dead, now, too?
Only now, only looking into her mother’s empty eyes, does Pea feel a pang of grief. A momentary wash of sadness. Were they waiting for her to come back? Or did they assume that she had been found out? That someone from the Center had at the last minute discovered her family’s secret, their daughter’s deafness to the will of the Lord, and that she was therefore not permitted to go through?
Her mother would have been devastated, surely, to think the whole world was going on to gladness and permanent harmony, the whole world except for Pea. Surely her mother would protest—surely her mother, if she really believed they were going on to paradise, wouldn’t go without her daughter.
And yet here she is. Her thin arms lolling at her sides as if weighted. Here she is. She ate. She died.
Pea shakes her head tightly, back and forth. Never mind. Never mind.
“It’s going to be okay,” she says again to Robert. “One way or another, it’s going to be okay.”
Grief is gone again. There is no time for it. No time. What comes to Pea now is a sudden sense of mission. It’s as if a voice speaks in her head and tells her what to do: Bring them down. Bring them down.
But it is only as if a voice is speaking to her. No voice is really speaking. She hears no whisper of God, no echo of his voice, even now—even now her head is still and silent, and the voice that speaks clearly up from that stillness is her own, announcing calmly and with purpose what is to be done. She has spent her whole life waiting for God to give her instructions, and now she is not. She doesn’t need to be commanded. She knows what to do.
“Let’s get to work, Robert,” she says, and he looks up, startled, from his trancelike contemplation of her dead father and mother.
“Get to work?” He steps back from the table, trips on a chair le
g and almost falls. “Doing—doing what?”
“We have to bring them down,” says Pea calmly. “We have to clear the bodies.”
“The . . .” He scratches the side of his head, squints at her through his glasses. It’s like he can’t hear. “The bodies?”
She nods. “We’re going to bring them down to the outskirts. We’ll start with these, but we need to do all of them. Get rid of them. It’ll take time. We have to.”
Robert gapes back at her, and she turns away, back to her parents. Pea is suddenly impatient. This is it. This is right. This is absolutely what must be done. The world has to begin again. The bodies must be gotten rid of. They will draw animals. Maggots. They will stink and spread disease. There will be many problems, but this is the first. It has to be dealt with, right away.
“Okay,” says Robert at last, slowly, uncertain. “Sure.” He pushes his glasses up on his nose and rolls up his sleeves.
Together they go down to the basement of Building 49 and find a hand cart. They wrestle the stiff bodies away from the table and bump them laboriously down the stairs, one by one, and tie them into a cart they find unsecured, parked on a sidewalk in the fourth circle. Pea says, “More,” and back they go, back into the building, and take a pair of neighbors, and then another. So that by the time they set off for the outskirts, four hours later, with the cart secured haphazardly to two bicycles, they have six people on the cart—six bodies—a flat, rolling cart full of corpses.
They grunt and moan and labor to pull the cart with the bicycles. Halfway there they hit a curb and four of the corpses topple out, into the road.
They load them back on. Pea gives orders, as gently as she can, and Robert obeys. The world would have to be made new. One difficult chore at a time, one corpse at a time. Last night they had been two scared, giddy children, slipping out from under the doom of the world. But now they are the world. They are the future. There is no time to be sad.
• • • •
The world is just the city and the outskirts, that’s all that it is. And the outskirts are not even that far away. They ride slowly because of the load; they stop frequently to catch their breath and rest their muscles; but it’s only a few miles—five miles? Six miles?—from the heart of the city to the ring of stone walls and glass doors dividing it from the uninhabitable world beyond.
The End Is Now Page 21
