The Post-Apocalyptic Tourist's Guide to Utah's Deserts

by Dustin Steinacker

  She nearly grabbed the wheel. “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shitshitshitshit!”

  “What’s got to you?”

  “Pull over. Pull over now. No, not just on the road, hide us somewhere!”

  Emmie watched Alva with concern as Thursday turned the wheel and took them over some rather bumpy terrain. Though tied to the seat by his chest and thighs his head bobbed far too much, hung too limply. Even these days, she could tell the difference between Alva, present but passive, and Alva, retreated for reasons unknown to some corner of himself. His eyes weren’t focusing.

  It’s been too long... I haven’t kept track of time.

  Thursday was still rolling the car to a stop when she threw her shoulder into the door and ran to the back. She opened the hatch and ripped off the false panel, rummaging inside, scratching her elbow and drawing a line of blood. “Delcena, bring him out into the sun, would you?”

  “Who are we hiding—” Thursday began, and then saw the urgency in her eyes.

  She set Alva down on a stone and propped up his back. She pressed the xeno disc into his palm, and it settled into its place like a strong magnet. Alva’s head pulled back slightly with the kick, and his eyes focused. She could feel him sitting upright more and more under his own power. He met her eyes and for a moment Emmie imagined he might say something. But he only licked his lips.

  “He’ll need a couple of minutes like that. Then we’ll give him a little water. He doesn’t need very much.”

  Thursday seemed to be digesting what he was seeing. “How did this happen?”

  She nodded her head at the disc. “That’s why I wrap them. Had an accident two weeks ago, and he’s getting worse.”

  “I mentioned treads and you’d have thought I was discussing plans to drive us off a plateau. Who are we hiding from?”

  She shrugged. “Nobody in particular. I just thought, you know, anybody who might have an engine, they could be dangerous. There aren’t very many out here, if you haven’t noticed.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Emmie turned her attention back to Alva.

  “But bullshit. I don’t buy it. You’ve got somebody in mind. Somebodies. Probably somebodies looking for the three of you.”

  She shook her head. “Not for us. For the car. But I didn’t think they’d be out this far.”

  “They?”

  “We’ll talk on the road. You watch ahead, I’ll watch behind, be sure we aren’t kicking up any dust with our tires either.”

  ~~~

  They were ACNUS Technologies. More than one of the meaner gangs of the wilderness, more than bandits, cut from finer cloth. An organization with the same name had existed before the fall of the world, but those bosses had fled or been put against the wall, in the early days of the chaos. Fresh owners had moved in, permanent squatters with a paramilitary bent.

  ACNUS was a new monster now.

  There were rumors of miracle advances performed by their captive researchers—and, in recent years, promising youths they’d raised to be researchers. Tales of buildings lit by xenotech, without Swarm-calling electricks. Fiendish energies birthed in some other atmosphere, in some other place, taken and put to new purpose. Impossibilities harnessed.

  Emmie was honest in the broad strokes. She told Thursday that the artifacts were ACNUS’s property, a truth, as was the car, a lie. That she’d stolen from ACNUS and now the organization was after what they’d lost. True, essentially. She mentioned nothing of the man and the boy.

  Near dusk they passed another driver, a lone man in goggles driving an open steam-powered buggy, some massive wrapped-and-roped payload tied across the back. Judging by the smoke it was a wood-heated affair, not even coal. This made Emmie relax.

  “Interests of full disclosure,” he said, raising his goggles, “I’ve got a smoothbore in quick reach. Really quick reach, all right? Hands in sight and it won’t come out.”

  Emmie turned and hung her arms out of the window. “I understand.”

  “If you got somebody crouched in the back there, just know my bead’s on them before they even catch my face. This range, the ball don’t miss.”

  “Got it.”

  The buggy man grinned. “I like to get that out of the way. What brings you to the Interstate?”

  “You from around here?”

  “No. But never far from somewhere I can sleep without worry. You follow.”

  “I follow. Anything, well, interesting back the way you came?”

  He cracked his knuckles thoughtfully on his chin. “Lower St. George truce-camp is having a commemoration, I saw. Open to the public. Food and drink and diversion if you got something to trade, didn’t go myself but they’ll hold your weapons for you and give ‘em right back after.”

  “We’ll keep that in mind.”

  “And then that roadblock is on about a third-hour south.”

  Shit.

  Emmie yawned conspicuously. “They taking tolls? Or looking for something?”

  “I thought more looking for something, just because of who they were. I see them now and again, them in the soft clothes and the cooled tents. They search you but they don’t take anything. Presumably I never had anything worth taking.” There was an odd pause, and his eyes flitted in a quick one-two-three motion to the roof of the SUV, to Thursday, to the car’s hatch. “Not a bad vehicle you’ve got. Rare I pass somebody else traveling like me. Run on seed oil?”

  “Yes,” she lied. Whatever she’d been funneling into the tank from those canisters in the back, she was pretty sure it wasn’t vegetable in origin. “Expensive barter. Probably be trading it soon.”

  You hauling anything?”

  “Just ourselves.”

  He nodded and licked his lips. “Just yourselves. Me? Fruit and water. You need any water?” He leaned forward and peered into the backseat. “I could hand you off some.”

  “We’ll be fine, thank you.”

  “It’ll be no trouble.” The man untied the release to his harness and leapt over the windscreen to the hood. He bounded their way in broad strides, a strange urgency in his face. “Let me just take a look and I’ll—”

  “Drive!” Emmie shouted, and her head whipped forward as Thursday released the clutch and jammed the accelerator, nearly stalling but lurching forward.

  She looked back to see the buggy man removing his hands from the handle of the rust-dulled musket looped to his waist. He tracked them with his head for a moment and then stepped back to his buggy. It chugged forward.

  “Book it!” Emmie yelled, as Delcena screamed.

  But Emmie held an arm across Thursday’s chest—the buggy man was on his way. Before their view was occluded by a rising dune, he was little more than a sharp glint and a faint plume of road-dust on the horizon, the way he’d been going.

  “Keep an eye out for him,” she said. “Maybe he’ll be watching, seeing which way we go.”

  “Which way are we going?” Thursday braked and watched the road ahead warily.

  “Dammit. I wasn’t counting on them being wise to our path. Interstate’s gonna be a problem.”

  “Somebody saw you? Tipped them off?”

  “No, no. ACNUS doesn’t work that way. They keep their aims on the down-low. And if they’d been the ones to see us we’d already be caught.” She remembered seeing their soldiers, once in a rare while, come in to the blockhouse to barter. To let slip only that which pertained to the current transaction was their way. They didn’t chat; they didn’t fraternize. If they saw something of interest—and who knew what would catch their eye—they’d point at it and name a price. No indication what it might be used for, no guess as to their purposes. They might as well have been xeno.

  “They know which way we’re going,” she said and felt the weight of it as she said it, “because everyone goes this way. They’ve done this before, again and again.”

  She marinated in this, and hated how it turned her thoughts, made the bright road ahead some predator’s lure. The Summon, what if it was
all a sham? A glass bottle with an open tapered bottom, designed to catch flies by some trick of insect psychology and then expend their energy.

  Get us out in nowhere’s center, she thought. A convoy of one, equal to defenseless, with what they’ve got to put against us.

  The car was getting too small for her. She threw open the door and staggered out onto the hot and cracked tar of the road. She wasn’t getting enough air, she wasn’t...

  No, September. No. Just no.

  She’d seen it, only once, as a child, when she went out with that month’s Mawmaw and a couple bowmen to make trade, for peel powder from lemons grown easterly, for sickness. She’d seen red paint on the side of a building. She couldn’t yet read then but there were no sentences written there. Just symbols for food and shelter and water, and a line pointing down the road, southwest.

  And that word, whose shape she recognized a decade later when she finally left home and saw it again: “TEMPE.”

  Well before ACNUS was a regular presence in her part of the wild.

  She bit the fat of her thumb, hard.

  The Summon couldn’t be theirs. It couldn’t.

  Delcena was calling after her, just under the din in her mind. She missed the words.

  Endless glaring baking parching desert at each side, a heat-world, nowhere on Earth a cool spot, nowhere rest...

  She half-sat, half-fell onto flat ground, covered her face and breathed back at the volume. Nostrils closed but pushing with her lungs, putting up pressure to match the pressure outside pushing in on her, like the creatures of the deepest trenches of ocean, who found a way to live in bleakest Hell because they were armored enough to give the finger to their maker—

  She knew when Thursday was near. He was going to let her speak first and she resented the consideration. She drew in the dirt with her finger. “We can’t keep on. We have to turn back.”

  “You all right?”

  “Doesn’t matter. I’m the best off of us four, it seems.” She watched him, wobbly-legged, shifting his position in perpetual imbalance. “If we mix up with these people, we aren’t the ones winning out.”

  “Sure.”

  “I can’t watch myself and play nanny to a child and one invalid, going on two.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “Well, it’s true, isn’t it?”

  “About my sickness? Or about the limits of your nannying abilities?”

  She looked at him and he was smiling, just in his eyes. She allowed a tiny smile back.

  “When we get to Seattle, I’m sure they’ll have something to take care of the kid.”

  Emmie shook her head. “No, we’re going to Tempe.”

  “Well, unless that car’s got wings—”

  “Don’t be a smart-ass. There’s another way, it’s just not the way I wanted.”

  “Longer, I’m guessing?”

  “No, shorter, at least if we’d took it in the first place. But a bad way. Now we’ve got to double back, we’ve got to take the old 89.”

  “And there’s something wrong with the old 89.”

  “Yeah. This way, you’ve got to watch out, but as you get closer to the truce-camps down St. George way, it’s safer. At least I hear. Bandits don’t shit where they eat. Campers are protected travelers—the camp bosses hear about people picking them off, they’ll hunt them down and you don’t want to hear the stories of what they do.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “No, you really can’t.”

  There wouldn’t be a way to slip past them here, she knew. They’d be good at picking their chokepoints, and they’d have sight over any path their vehicle might take to get past. So that left the 89, no road any helpless convoy of one would ever take by choice. She knew of its darkness by reputation. Slave-runners, bandits, bandits of bandits. Try as she might, she could not just imagine it as similar road, another path across the earth. No, there shined a different sun, there blew malign winds.

  ~~~

  At dark they were at the mouth of their new road.

  In these few hours alone Alva’s influence had spread. The rear windshield was nearly covered, and a solid line of that dulcet blue now coated the back door on the side where he sat and it could not be opened. The hatch as well—Emmie had moved the relics to the space beneath Thursday’s seat and tied them into place.

  “Wrap your feet, Delcena,” she said.

  “I’ll be fine. I’ll just tuck my legs up.”

  “Not that. If you have to run, if something happens to—” she corrected herself quickly “—to the car, I’m going to want you able to run. I’m in no shape for it.” She showed her foot-wrappings, which were crusted over at the heel with dried blood. Her heel was swollen and she felt its throb body-wide.

  “We live and die by His pleasure,” Delcena said, as if reciting. She produced a relatively pristine roll of rough cloth from her dress-pouch and wrapped it around her grungy feet. “He could remove us from His Earth like we would an ant from our arm. Whither shall we flee from His presence?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean, maybe it doesn’t matter which way we go. We’re watched all the same.”

  Delcena, Emmie thought, had a way of taking comfort from words which set Emmie on edge. This talk of hands with unknown purpose rolling in from the sky. Still, the girl’s confidence was bracing.

  They found the other road going east off of Cove Fort, and then the thicker, cracked and stained asphalt concrete which put them on their new Route, the old 89.

  The first person she saw made Emmie wonder if this road’s legend wasn’t just so much myth. An old woman, sitting flat on the raised porch of a shack made of disparate wood and corrugated iron panels, which sent smoke up its chimney so thick and dirty the place seemed to be on fire. Her feet hung loose in the air. Emmie could hear dogs baying but not see them. They saw no other people before dusk.

  “I’d like to drive through the night,” Emmie said, “but truth told I’m not up for it and we can’t risk going off the road. We’ll leave at first light and hope bandits sleep late.”

  They came upon a ghost town and their road turned right into its Main Street. With great care Thursday climbed a building by its collapsed wall to survey and on his return reported that he didn’t see any smoke rising up anywhere, though that didn’t mean the place was empty.

  “No people-sounds or motors either,” Emmie said with an equal lack of confidence.

  They hid the SUV in the garage of an old fire house and there they overnighted. Emmie shook the dirt from a filthy green tarp and folded it into a sort of army bed for Alva.

  “Now you just crawl under this flap here if you get cold, all right?” she asked him, not expecting a response but gasping when he held onto her slightly as she lowered him down. But he was looking at the ceiling. His dilated pupils moved as if he were tracking a housefly.

  She checked him. His belly and upper flesh were embossed beneath with an eerily regular texture, one which gave his skin the appearance of grey and stretched out like veins near its edges. She could only imagine that it was the same impossible substance that was now blanketing their vehicle, and would cover it entirely before long, would cover Alva inside and out before long.

  “I tried washing it out of his clothes, at first,” she explained to Thursday after setting up a similar sleeping arrangement for Delcena, when they were settling down. “And it came out, but it seemed to, I don’t know, tire him. As if he had to replenish it. So I left it alone. I focused on getting where we were going. Finding the car was, well it was a godsend. We’d have died otherwise.”

  Thursday was lying on his side on the hallway’s mildewed wood, his folded arm his pillow. “Doesn’t seem like you’ve got any particular connection to these two. Why are you helping them? You could find somebody else to take them, then offer up one of those artifacts to these people in Tempe to show you’ve got ‘em, bury the rest and give up where you’ve put them only after they give you a hand.”

&nb
sp; “I could at that.” She thought of the man and the boy. “It’s not for me, sanctuary. I’ve had it before. I’m in no illusion about some golden city anymore. Everybody would be there already, if it was so great. But these kids, they shouldn’t have to be at the mercy of jackals.”

  “You’re good-hearted.”

  She laughed, short and bitter. “No. No, no. I’m just another reason the wasteland’s so damned cruel.”

  “You’re being hard on yourself.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  It was strange, being indoors. She’d grown up surrounded by walls but even the communal sleeping-rooms in the blockhouse had had walking-around space. Whereas this hallway gave her the impression of being underground, a long and thin configuration, unnatural. Almost she thought she’d wake up Alva and Delcena and try one of these side-rooms instead, but she didn’t have the heart to cut into their sleep. They’d had so little decent sleep.

  “Thursday?”

  He grunted an acknowledgement.

  “When we get there, if you want, you can have my sanctuary. Three artifacts, three heads. That’s how they do it.”

  “No way that’s a promise that lasts through to morning.”

  “No, really. Give their medicine a try, at the very least, then give your sanctuary to someone else and work it out in the wastes. Better than slavery.”

  Thursday said nothing, and she knew what he was thinking. Whatever bug he’d been given, his malefactors would not have made it easy for him to heal it without their help.

  The man envisioned a lifetime of servitude, he thought that was a poor but reliable outcome. She knew better, of course. There were possibilities she hadn’t brought up with him. For one, these Seattle ciphers were counting on Thursday being strong, if he survived this journey of his. A strong body would mean strong organs. More likely he’d be the victim of some immediate and awful harvest—they’d have been certain their sickness would leave the prime cuts unaffected. No need to even bother with a cure then. He’d just be another body on the pile.

  That seemed the likeliest. If you wanted slaves, or even guinea pigs, there were better ways to go about it.

  Instead of any of this, Emmie said: “You know what’s funny?”