“The body of Christ is powerful,” Paula said. They knew: all of them had taken part in feasts and had been saved through them. “But there’s also power in the blood.” She dealt out the driver licenses, two to each woman. Rosa’s old contacts had made them for fifty bucks apiece. “One of these is all you need to donate. We’re working on getting more. With four IDs you can give blood twice a month.”
She told them how to answer the Red Cross surveys, which iron supplements to buy, which foods they should bulk up on to avoid anemia. They talked about secrecy. Most of the other women they lived with were too bound by tradition to see that they were only half doing God’s work.
Women like Steph. Paula had argued with her a dozen times over the months, but could not convince her. Paula loved Steph, and owed so much to her, but she couldn’t sit idly by any longer.
“We have to donate as often as possible,” Paula said. “We have to spread the host so far and so fast that they can’t stop us by rounding us up.” The incubation time depended directly on the amount consumed, so the more that was in the blood supply the faster the conversions would occur. Paula’s conversion had taken months. For others it might be years.
“But once they’re exposed to the host the conversion will happen,” Paula said. “It can’t be stopped. One seed crystal can transform the ocean.”
She could feel them with her. They could see the shape of the new world.
The women would never again meet all together like this—too dangerous—but they didn’t need to. They’d already become a church within the church.
Paula hugged each of them as they left the restaurant. “Go,” she told them. “Multiply.”
* * * *
XIII
The visitor seemed familiar. Paula tilted her head to see through the bars as the woman walked toward the cell. It had become too much of a bother to lift Paula out of the bed and wheel her down to the conference room, so now the visitors came to her. Doctors and lawyers, always and only doctors and lawyers. This woman, though, didn’t look like either.
“Hello, Paula,” she said. “It’s Esther Wynne. Do you remember me?”
“Ah.” The memory came back to her, those first days in the hospital. The Christian woman. Of course she’d be Paula’s first voluntary visitor. “Hello, Esther.” She struggled to enunciate clearly. In the year since they’d seen each other, Paula’s condition had worsened. Lips and jaw and arms refused to obey her, shaking and jerking to private commands. Her arm lay curled against her chest like Merilee’s. Her spine bent her nearly in half, so that she had to lie on her side. “You look—“ She made a sound like a laugh, a hiccupping gasp forced from her chest by an unruly diaphragm. “—good.”
The guard positioned a chair in front of the bars and the older woman sat down. Her hair was curled and sprayed. Under the makeup her skin looked healthy.
“I’ve been worried about you,” Esther said. “Are they treating you well?”
Paula almost smiled. “As well as you can treat a mass murderer.” Some facts never escaped her. The missionaries had spread the disease to thousands, perhaps tens of thousands. But more damaging, they’d completely corrupted the blood supply. New prion filters were now on the market, but millions of gallons of blood had to be destroyed. They told her she might be ultimately responsible for the deaths of a million people.
Paula gave them every name she could remember, and the FBI tracked down all of the original eighteen, but by then the mission could go on without them. A day after the meeting in the restaurant they’d begun to recruit others, women and men Paula would never meet, whose names would never be spoken to her. The church would continue. In secret now, hunted by the FBI and the CDC and the world’s governments, but growing every day. The host was passed needle by needle in private ceremonies, but increasingly on a mass scale as well. In an Ohio dairy processing plant, a man had been caught mixing his blood into the vats of milk. In Florida, police arrested a woman for injecting blood into the skulls of chickens. The economic damage was already in the trillions. The emotional toll on the public, in panic and paranoia, was incalculable.
Esther looked around at the cell. “You don’t have anything in there with you. Can I bring you books? Magazines? They told me they’d allow reading material. I thought maybe—“
“I don’t want anything,” Paula said. She couldn’t hold her head steady enough to read. She watched TV to remind herself every day of what she’d done to the world. Outside the prison, a hundred jubilant protestors had built a tent city. They sang hymns and chanted for her release, and every day a hundred counter-protestors showed up to scream threats, throw rocks, and chant for her death. Police in riot gear made daily arrests.
Esther frowned. “I thought maybe you’d like a Bible.”
Now Paula laughed for real. “What are you doing here, Esther? I see that look in your eye, you think I don’t recognize it?” Paula twisted, pressed herself higher on one elbow. Esther had never been infected by the host—they wouldn’t have let her in here if she didn’t pass the screening—but her strain of the disease was just as virulent. “Did your Jesus tell you to come here?”
“I suppose in a way he did.” The woman didn’t seem flustered. Paula found that annoying.
Esther said, “You don’t have to go through this alone. Even here, even after all you’ve done, God will forgive you. He can be here for you, if you want him.”
Paula stared at her. If I want him. She never stopped craving him. He’d carved out a place for himself, dug a warren through the cells in her brain, until he’d erased even himself. She no longer needed pharmaceuticals to suppress him. He’d left behind a jagged Christ-shaped hole, a darkness with teeth.
She wanted him more than drugs, more than alcohol, more than Richard or Claire. She thought she’d known loneliness, but the past months had taught her new depths. Nothing would feel better than to surrender to a new god, let herself be wrapped again in loving arms.
Esther stood and leaned close to the bars so that their faces were only a couple feet apart. “Paula, if you died right now, do you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you’d go to heaven?” The guard told her to step back but she ignored him. She pushed one arm through the bars. “If you want to accept him, take my hand. Reach out.”
“Oh, Esther, the last—“ Her upper lip pulled back over her gums. “—last thing I want is to live forever.” She fell back against the bed, tucked her working arm to her chest.
A million people.
There were acts beyond forgiveness. There were debts that had to be paid in person.
“Not hiding anymore,” Paula said. She shook her head. “No gods, no drugs. The only thing I need to do now—“
She laughed, but it was an involuntary spasm, joyless. She waited a moment until it passed, and breathed deep. “I need to die clean.”
* * * *
LIFE ON THE PRESERVATION
Jack Skillingstead
New writer Jack Skillingstead works in the aerospace industry and lives with his family near Seattle, Washington. He made his first sale in 2003 to Asimov’s Science Fiction, with “Dead Worlds” (which was also in our Twenty-first Annual Collection), and since then has become something of a regular there, with more than twelve sales in the last few years, as well as placing stories with On Spec and elsewhere. He is at work on several novels.
In the melancholy tale that follows, he demonstrates that when you’ve only got one day, you’d better make it a good one.
* * * *
Wind buffeted the scutter. Kylie resisted the temptation to fight the controls. Hand light on the joystick, she veered toward the green smolder of Seattle, riding down a cloud canyon aflicker with electric bursts. The Preservation Field extended half a mile over Elliot Bay but did not capture Blake or Vashon Island nor any of the blasted lands.
She dropped to the deck. Acid rain and wind lashed the scutter. The Preservation Field loomed like an immense wall of green jellied glass.
&nb
sp; She punched through, and the sudden light shift dazzled her. Kylie polarized the thumbnail port, at the same time deploying braking vanes and dipping steeply to skim the surface of the bay.
The skyline and waterfront were just as they’d appeared in the old photographs and movies. By the angle of the sun she estimated her arrival time at late morning. Not bad. She reduced airspeed and gently pitched forward. The scutter drove under the water. It got dark. She cleared the thumbnail port. Bubbles trailed back over the thick plexi, strings of silver pearls.
Relying on preset coordinates, she allowed the autopilot to navigate. In minutes the scutter was tucked in close to a disused pier. Kyle opened the ballast, and the scutter surfaced in a shadow, bobbing. She saw a ladder and nudged forward.
She was sweating inside her costume. Jeans, black sneakers, olive drab shirt, rain parka. Early twenty-first century urban America: Seattle chic.
She powered down, tracked her seat back, popped the hatch. The air was sharp and clean, with a saltwater tang. Autumn chill in the Pacific Northwest. Water slopped against the pilings.
She climbed up the pitchy, guano-spattered rungs of the ladder.
And stood in awe of the intact city, the untroubled sky. She could sense the thousands of living human beings, their vitality like an electric vibe in her blood. Kylie was nineteen and had never witnessed such a day. It had been this way before the world ended. She reminded herself that she was here to destroy it.
From her pocket she withdrew a remote control, pointed it at the scutter. The hatch slid shut and her vehicle sank from view. She replaced the remote control. Her hand strayed down to another zippered pocket and she felt the outline of the explosive sphere. Behind it, her heart was beating wildly. I’m here, she thought.
She walked along the waterfront, all her senses exploited. The sheer numbers of people overwhelmed her. The world had ended on a Saturday, November nine, 2004. There were more living human beings in her immediate range of sight than Kylie had seen in her entire life.
She extracted the locator device from her coat pocket and flipped up the lid. It resembled a cellular phone of the period. A strong signal registered immediately. Standing in the middle of the sidewalk, she turned slowly toward the high reflective towers of the city, letting people go around her, so many people, walking, skateboarding, jogging, couples and families and single people, flowing in both directions, and seagulls gliding overhead, and horses harnessed to carriages waiting at the curb (so much life), and the odors and rich living scents, and hundreds of cars and pervasive human noise and riot, all of it continuous and--
“Are you all right?”
She started. A tall young man in a black jacket loomed over her. The jacket was made out of leather. She could smell it.
“Sorry,” he said. “You looked sort of dazed.”
Kylie turned away and walked into the street, toward the signal, her mission. Horns blared, she jerked back, dropped her locator. It skittered against the curb near one of the carriage horses. Kylie lunged for it, startling the horse, which clopped back, a hoof coming down on the locator. No! She couldn’t get close. The great head of the animal tossed, nostrils snorting, the driver shouting at her, Kylie frantic to reach her device.
“Hey, watch it!”
It was the man in the leather jacket. He pulled her back, then darted in himself and retrieved the device. He looked at it a moment, brow knitting. She snatched it out of his hand. The display was cracked and blank. She shook it, punched the keypad. Nothing.
“I’m really sorry,” the man said.
She ignored him.
“It’s like my fault,” he said.
She looked up. “You have no idea, no idea how bad this is.”
He winced.
“I don’t even have any tools,” she said, not to him.
“Let me--”
She walked away, but not into the street, the locator a useless thing in her hand. She wasn’t a tech. Flying the scutter and planting explosives was as technical as she got. So it was plan B, only since plan B didn’t exist it was plan Zero. Without the locator she couldn’t possibly find the Eternity Core. A horse! Jesus.
“Shit.”
She sat on a stone bench near a decorative waterfall that unrolled and shone like a sheet of plastic. Her mind raced but she couldn’t formulate a workable plan B.
A shadow moved over her legs. She looked up, squinting in the sun.
“Hi.”
“What do you want?” she said to the tall man in the leather jacket.
“I thought an ice cream might cheer you up.”
“Huh?”
“Ice cream,” he said. “You know, ‘You scream, I scream, we all scream for ice cream’?”
She stared at him. His skin was pale, his eyebrows looked sketched on with charcoal, and there was a small white scar on his nose. He was holding two waffle cones, one in each hand, the cones packed with pink ice cream. She had noticed people walking around with these things, had seen the sign.
“I guess you don’t like strawberry,” he said.
“I’ve never had it.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Okay, I’m lying. Now why don’t you go away. I need to think.”
He extended his left hand. “It’s worth trying, at least once. Even on a cold day.”
Kylie knew about ice cream. People in the old movies ate it. It made them happy.
She took the cone.
“Listen, can I sit down for a second?” the man said.
She ignored him, turning the cone in her hand like the mysterious artifact it was. The man sat down anyway.
“My name’s Toby,” he said.
“It’s really pink,” Kylie said.
“Yeah.” And after a minute, “You’re supposed to lick it.”
She looked at him.
“Like this,” he said, licking his own cone.
“I know,” she said. “I’m not an ignoramus.” Kylie licked her ice cream. Jesus! Her whole body lit up. “That’s--”
“Yeah?”
“It’s wonderful,” she said.
“You really haven’t had ice cream before?”
She shook her head, licking away at the cone, devouring half of it in seconds.
“That’s incredibly far-fetched,” Toby said. “What’s your name? You want a napkin?” He pointed at her chin.
“I’m Kylie,” she said, taking the napkin and wiping her chin and lips. All of a sudden she didn’t want any more ice cream. She had never eaten anything so rich. In her world there wasn’t anything so rich. Her stomach felt queasy.
“I have to go,” she said.
She stood up, so did he.
“Hey, you know the thing is, what you said about not having tools? What I mean is, I have tools. I mean I fix things. It’s not a big deal, but I’m good and I like doing it. I can fix all kinds of things, you know? Palm Pilots, cellphones, laptops. Whatever.”
Kylie waved the locator. “You don’t even know what this is.”
“I don’t have to know what it is to make it go again.”
Hesitantly, she handed him the locator. While he was turning it in his fingers, she spotted the Tourist. He was wearing a puffy black coat and a watch cap, and he was walking directly towards her, expressionless, his left hand out of sight inside his pocket. He wasn’t a human being.
Toby noticed her changed expression and followed her gaze.
“You know that guy?”
Kylie ran. She didn’t look back to see if the Tourist was running after her. She cut through the people crowding the sidewalk, her heart slamming. It was a minute before she realized she’d left the locator with Toby. That almost made her stop, but it was too late. Let him keep the damn thing.
She ran hard. The Old Men had chosen her for this mission because of her youth and vitality (so many were sickly and weak), but after a while she had to stop and catch her breath. She looked around. The vista of blue water was dazzling. The city was awesome, madly perfe
ct, phantasmagoric, better than the movies. The Old Men called it an abomination. Kylie didn’t care what they said. She was here for her mother, who was dying and who grieved for the trapped souls.
Kylie turned slowly around, and here came two more Tourists.
No, three.
Three from three different directions, one of them crossing the street, halting traffic. Stalking toward her with no pretense of human expression, as obvious to her among the authentic populace as cockroaches in a scatter of white rice.
Kylie girded herself. Before she could move, a car drew up directly in front of her, a funny round car painted canary yellow. The driver threw the passenger door open, and there was the man again, Toby.
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection Page 78
