Wasteland Blues

by Scott Christian Carr

  Wasteland Blues

  By

  Scott Christian Carr

  & Andrew Conry-Murray

  WASTELAND BLUES © 2014

  by Scott Christian Carr & Andrew Conry-Murray

  Published by Dog Star Books

  Bowie, MD

  First Edition

  Cover Image: Bradley Sharp

  Book Design: Jeremy Zerfoss

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2013956318

  www.DogStarBooks.org

  Foreword

  Five years ago I edited my first anthology for Shroud Publishing—Beneath the Surface, 13+ Shocking Tales of Terror. I had acquired a chilling piece of cover art that depicted a Cthulu-esque creature submerged in the murky, virescent depths of some unknown sea. The image inspired the title, and although the anthology did not have a specifically-stated oceanic theme, one of the first stories I received was about a doomed submarine, The Paramus, and its lone suffering survivor stranded on the ocean floor. The story was Thorguson, and it was written by Scott Christian Carr.

  So stricken by the tale, I accepted it immediately and made it the flagship of the anthology (which went on to receive a Bram Stoker nomination for “Best Anthology” by the Horror Writers Association). Thus began my relationship with Scott, which continued through our collaboration on the Scandalous Misadventures of Hiram Grange. It was Scott that truly captured the frenetic, tortured, drug-addled vision of Hiram in his book Hiram Grange and the Twelve Little Hitlers. Scott has gone on to write several more stories about Hiram, and I am always impressed by his wild imagination, uniqueness of voice, and dark, intelligent humor. I am both his friend and his fan.

  In Wasteland Blues, Scott is joined by his college friend, Andrew Conry-Murray, in crafting an inventive post-apocalyptic adventure that features an array of deeply-realized characters, striking plot twists, and a wholly new vision of life after the fall of modern civilization. Andrew and Scott are effective in writing in a singular voice, where it seems that Scott’s chaotic pacing is tempered by Andrew’s sensibilities. This is mere speculation of course, but I believe it’s bolstered by the fact that while Scott penned wild stories of diaper-clad Hitler clones, Andrew wrote The Symantec Guide to Internet Security.

  Andrew is the editor of Network Computing, where he leads the site’s reporting on technology issues. Technology plays a leading role in Wasteland Blues. Technology manifests as a lurking revenant in the shadows of the parched, and sand-covered towns that Wasteland’s motley quartet of protagonists travel through. It is both sought after and cursed. It lies dead in the rusty, jagged piles of The Heap like a memory one begs to be forgotten; however, in the end, technology may also bring salvation...

  It is no secret that Scott and Andrew are in some way inspired by T.S. Eliot’s experimental poem, The Waste Land. Just as Eliot’s poem reflected and refracted the dismal and dismantled conditions of post World War I Europe, Wasteland Blues similarly makes a statement about the violence and excess of the 21st century. Where Eliot creates an amalgam of voices and visions, both modern and ancient, Scott and Andrew congeal those voices and visions into a handful of unique points of view—each thirsty for the realization of their own hopes, and dreams of survival. In the end, both The Waste Land and Wasteland Blues deliver bleak, dry, landscapes populated with rich mythical images.

  It’s fitting, somehow, that five years after Thorguson haunted me deep below the surface of a vast ocean, Wasteland Blues would desiccate me and taunt me with the promise of water.

  Tim Deal, 2013

  Chapter One

  The world had slid backward since Old Scratch pissed radioactive fire down on the righteous and unrighteous alike. Derek Cane, one of the unrighteous, understood this every time he gazed across The Heap—a hundred-acre dumpsite piled high with the detritus of another age.

  Derek hunched in the cab of the wrecking crane, 150 feet above The Heap’s auto yard. From this vantage he could see the warren of paths that a generation of scavengers had carved through the sprawling mounds of trash and rusting, motionless cars.

  Derek and his younger brother, Teddy, had been coming to The Heap for as long as he could remember—playing in the auto graveyard, scaling the wrecking crane, and sifting through mountains of junk in search of salvage. Teddy loved the place.

  The Heap was the economic center of San Muyamo, the tiny refugee village that, until today, the brothers had called home. The village had sprung up after the biotoxin cloud had blown in off the Pacific and draped itself like a funeral shroud over the coast.

  San Muyamo’s stock-in-trade was copper wire, car parts, batteries and other small components—washers, O-rings, gear heads, screws and belts, nuts and bolts. Things that meant the difference between scrap metal and a functioning machine. The village’s clients were traders (Bedouins mostly, in their shrouded faces and covered wagons) that kept the rusty goods flowing among the struggling towns and villages as far north as Corvallis, Oregon and as far south as the fallout border near San Diego. Derek’s father had laughed at the irony of the salvage trade. So much effort spent ’afore-The-War in centralizing the waste, piling it all into one place, and now here they were scattering it all outward again, like seed pods blown from a clump of dandelions.

  But the traders and caravans along the old road had grown fewer, of late. Derek’s father, David Cane, had supposed that a better route to the coast had maybe opened up, but Derek thought otherwise. The elder Cane believed that over time the world would rebuild itself, each generation constructing on the foundations of the last. But Derek had been born after the Rendering, and he knew better—a new world couldn’t be built from the junk of the old.

  The cracked plastic of the crane’s bucket seat stuck to his back. Derek toyed idly with his father’s wedding band—he’d taken it before wrapping the dead man in a dirty white sheet. The sun rode high in the sky, a shard of angry light bouncing off the broken glass that littered The Heap like diamonds. It had been less than an hour since Derek had led Teddy down a seldom-used path to a moldering heap of mattresses, where they’d dumped the body of their murdered father near a nest of radar rats.

  The cab shifted, rocking in a great creaking arc, pushed one way and then the other by slight breezes. Derek had only ever seen the crane in operation once, maybe nine or ten years ago, back when the tank still held muddy diesel and the engine hadn’t been picked clean. He and Teddy had been halfway up the slope of a two-story mound of trash in the southeast corner of The Heap when they’d heard the engine bark and sputter. Derek had dropped the extension cord he’d been trying to free from an unseen snarl somewhere in the innards of The Heap and watched as the crane roared into life, lurching clumsily to the right and then to the left. A plexiglass window popped open in the crane’s cab and they saw an older boy waving frantically.

  “He musta found the key!” shouted Derek to his brother.

  The boy had also found the lever that released the jaws that lifted cars into the crusher. The gaping metal mouth fell the length of its line and tore through the cab of a battered Toyota pickup with the joyful noise of destruction.

  Derek pumped one fist into the air and shrieked with delight. Teddy thrust his hamfist toward the sky, emulating his brother. Ragged children scrambled over the heap toward the crane from all points of the dump. Derek pushed Teddy onto the round metal saucer they used to collect their haul and then leapt on himself. With a whoosh they slid down the side of the mountain of trash and nearly impaled themselves on the rusted end of an uprooted STOP sign at the base of the mound.

 
By the time they had clambered through the constellations of junk to join the others, who’d gathered a prudent distance from the machine, the boy in the cab had mastered the crane’s basic operations. Again the huge jaws fell onto a car like a hawk dropping on a pheasant. Talons locked into the metal frame. With a grinding whine of motors and shriek of tearing metal, the car was lifted into the air. Rusty, threadbare cables strained as the boy drew it to the very top of its line, and then held it in a moment of shivering anticipation.

  “Drop! Drop! Drop!” chanted the adolescent scavengers below, and, with a painful shriek, the crane’s jaws sprang open. The car was released more than one hundred and twenty feet above a lot of tightly-packed vehicles that had been waiting nearly half a century to be scrapped. Teddy pressed his oversized hands to his ears and clenched his teeth—but Derek did no such thing. He wanted to hear the crash. Feel the punch of the impact in his scrotum and the bottoms of his feet. And for one wild moment he thought he might fling himself into the center of the bull’s-eye, a fleshy wet target for a 2,000-pound gravity bomb.

  The car landed squarely on the back of a minivan and obliterated it. Glass shards shotgunned outward as all its windows exploded. The noise was immeasurable and righteous, like the boot-heel of the Virgin crushing the head of the serpent.

  And then the young scavengers were running for the base of the crane. Older kids shoved younger children aside in the mad scramble to mount the ladder and take a turn at the controls.

  Derek had never gotten a chance. The crane had run out of fuel long before he was able to push and fight his way into the cab. That’s the way it was in San Muyamo—the last bits of life got squeezed out of the relics of the past, got squeezed until nothing was left for you.

  Derek’s father had never understood this. To David Cane, The Heap was compost upon which to grow a new civilization, a map to circumvent the long ages of Bronze, Iron, and Steam and reclaim combustion engines and electricity. He’d pop open a cell phone and trace the printed circuitry of its guts and say, “We don’t have to lose it all. We don’t have to fall all the way back.”

  Derek knew better. The world had slid backward. The world was a corpse without the good sense to know it was dead.

  Derek popped the window of the cab and took a last look at the only place he had ever known—the alluring filth of The Heap and the hovels of San Muyamo beyond, just over the hill. He looked down on his older brother, sitting at the wheel of his favorite car, a Cadillac El Dorado whose Mary-Kay-pink exterior had improbably rebuffed decades of blazing sun, acid rain and bird shit, and whose driver’s seat could barely contain Teddy’s muscle-bound girth. Derek couldn’t hear his brother, but he knew that Teddy would be making p-bbb-bb noises as he pretended to drive.

  Teddy. Weak in the head, strong in the body. Get him mad enough and he could probably flip the El Dorado without breaking a sweat. Get him mad enough, and with just two fingers he might snap his own father’s neck.

  Derek took his last look at the dump and climbed quickly down the rusting ladder. He and Teddy had to get on the road. Someone was likely to come across the body of their father because the good citizens of San Muyamo weren’t above a little rat hunting to supplement their larders.

  “Time to go,” Derek said, interrupting Teddy’s automotive fantasy.

  “Go?” asked Teddy, looking up from the driver’s seat. “We goin’ home now, Der?”

  “No. We’re going away. But first we have to get someone.”

  ***

  They waited at the corroded aluminum picnic table that stood across from the Church of the Word, a doublewide construction trailer jacked up on concrete blocks. Derek knew John would be inside—John never missed Bible instruction.

  The rusty door soon squeaked open and a dozen or so folks exited, John among them. John stood for a moment on the rickety steps chatting with Elder Hale.

  Derek rose but didn’t approach the church. His family was one of the few that didn’t attend services. Neither he nor Teddy had been baptized—better to save what little kerosene they had for more practical purposes. Derek’s father had tried to raise his boys to believe in technology, not an invisible spirit in the sky. God was not going to rebuild the world, but human ingenuity might.

  “Those kids can quote the Bible front to back, but they can’t do simple algebra!” This was one of David Cane’s favorite complaints, and he had rehearsed it often.

  Most of the churchgoing people of San Muyamo had little to do with the Canes—their infidelity hung about them like a cloud of fallout.

  John saw the brothers and waved. Elder Hale turned to regard them, his wispy white hair a corona around his sun-scorched face. He frowned and put both hands on the boy’s shoulders and spoke a in hushed, disapproving whisper, gesturing toward the brothers with a flick of his white cotton robe.

  Derek guessed that Hale was exhorting John to bring them the Word of God, as was his duty.

  Hale went back inside the church trailer and John strode across the dust to his friends. John was a scrawny young man with an awkward gait. He walked with his shoulders perpetually hunched, as if expecting a blow. He wore loose white robes in imitation of Elder Hale and had sandals made from old tires on his long feet.

  Derek watched him approach, his argument ready on his tongue.

  “Hi fellas,” said John. “What are you doin’ out here? You want to come inside? Elder Hale would be happy to see you.”

  “I had the vision again,” said Derek. He put an arm around John’s shoulders and steered him away from the trailer.

  “The same one?” asked John.

  “Yes,” said Derek.

  “And the angels? They spoke to you?”

  Derek nodded. He wouldn’t call the flying things in his dream “angels,” but it was the right word to use on John.

  “And they showed you the same thing? The buildings are still standing?”

  “Yep. But there was more this time.”

  John was breathing a little more quickly now.

  “I saw the road,” said Derek. “Like I was floating above it—or maybe the angels were carrying me. And I saw shadows. Shadows of people walking, the sun at their backs…Our shadows….”

  “You and Teddy?”

  “Three shadows,” said Derek. He looked at John, eyes flat and expressionless, letting John do the counting for himself. He let John digest his lie. There’d been more than three shadows, and Derek wasn’t entirely sure the shadows were theirs, but John didn’t need to know that. It was John he wanted.

  John’s hand trailed up to the celery stalk of his neck, one finger flicking absently at his Adam’s apple.

  “And you’re sure,” he asked quietly, “that it’s New York?”

  “What else could it be?” said Derek.

  “The Third Prophet came from New York,” said John. “He planted seeds—seeds that would bloom after the fire.”

  Derek said nothing. He’d heard all this before—the prophet who had predicted the destruction of the world and the believers who would renew the earth. The Church of the Word was built on two books: the Bible and the Book of Joseph. The latter was a collection of sermons from a man, Joseph Crier. Believers called him The Third Prophet. Derek had skimmed through the book. It was a bunch of nonsense, but John bought into the whole thing. Derek was willing to get what he wanted by using his friend’s faith.

  “You remember what the prophet said, don’t you?” asked Derek.

  “Sure I do,” said John. He assumed his recitation posture, lifting one finger in the air. “I saw the angel, dressed in robes of white. And the angel stood above a great city to render the Word. And I recognized that city, the most famous of all cities, the city at the center of the world. After the days of fire, the angel said to come here and renew the city, remake its foundations to stand on faith, a fou
ndation more secure than bedrock. And we shall lay the foundations for the New Jerusalem, here in this place.”

  “You believe those words?” asked Derek, though he already knew the answer.

  “Course I do!”

  “OK then. Let’s go.”

  John thought for a long moment. “When are you leaving?”

  “Today. Now.”

  John’s eyes grew wide. “Now? Why?”

  “It’s time,” said Derek, unable to stop himself from glancing over his shoulder toward the distant crane that rose up out of The Heap, looming in stark silhouette against the ultraviolet sun.

  “Derek, I—” began John, but Derek cut him off.

  “Look,” he said. “Teddy and I are goin’. Today. And I think you should come with us. But if you won’t, then that’s fine. Walk away right now. We’ll understand…the angels will understand.” Derek didn’t fail to notice the sharp pang of hurt in John’s eyes. Without moving his lips, Derek smiled.

  “What about your father? You’re going to leave him all alone?”

  Derek looked at the ground.

  “I know you don’t get along,” began John, “but sons should honor—”

  “He doesn’t need us,” said Derek sharply.

  “Okay, okay,” said John.

  “Then it’s decision time,” Derek pressed. “Will you make up your own mind, or do you need to get permission from Daddy Hale? Sorry, I mean Elder Hale?”

  John’s parents had died when the boy was seven. He had been one of many orphans raised by the Elders, though he had spent nearly as much time living with Derek and Teddy, scavenging junk for David Cane, as he had in the common house.

  “I’ve already spoken to him about it,” John admitted, daring Derek to get angry with him. “I went to him the first time you told me about your vision.”