Voyages: A Science Fiction Collection

by Carol Davis

  Modern was best, he decided, as long as it wasn’t too stark.

  He didn’t want too many bedrooms or bathrooms. Two of each would be okay—that would give him an option, a way to switch off. (He liked being able to choose, but didn’t like the echoing emptiness of places with too many rooms.) A well-stocked bar would be good, and maybe a pool table.

  A nice, big, comfy couch.

  Maybe a workout room. He’d always liked staying in shape.

  The day after Valentine’s Day, he made his final selection: a two-bedroom place with a wall of windows that faced west. It was on the 24th floor. The view was nothing short of spectacular, especially at sunset, which he could see easily from either the big, wide terrace or the beige leather sectional in the living room. The master bathroom offered a massive shower with a dozen shower heads, something he was smitten with the moment he saw it. Best of all, the pantry was fully stocked. Fully, ridiculously stocked with stuff that hadn’t spoiled after the power went off: crackers and cookies, canned salmon and tuna, lots of soup, pasta, cans and jars of all kinds of fruits and vegetables.

  Oh: and there was a garden. In a big sunroom on the east side of the apartment, there were hundreds and hundreds of plants of every conceivable kind. Roses and lilies and orchids. Something with tiny, bright yellow flowers something like buttercups. Fancy ferns. Ficus trees. Cacti. A whole row of tomato plants, peppers in all three colors (green, yellow, red, like a traffic light) and even some lettuce. It was freaking deluxe, he decided—the kind of garden you might see spread out over an acre or two up in the Central Valley, all up here, four hundred feet above Wilshire Boulevard.

  He’d been living there for two days, enjoying that view of the ocean and eating his fill of cherry tomatoes, when Bill Carter Schmidt suddenly came home, looking sweaty and harried and scared.

  His greeting to Cando was: “Shit.”

  Simultaneously, Cando thought the same word.

  Thankfully, Bill (who was a tax lawyer, Cando found out later) didn’t put up much of fight—though he did scream for an impressively long time as he plummeted those 24 floors down to the middle of Wilshire Boulevard.

  With that little glitch taken care of, Cando was free to continue touring the building, collecting things that caught his eye. A pretty painting of the mountains. A soft rug he could curl his toes into. Six bottles of Johnnie Walker Blue Label. An actual Oscar, which he pumped like a free weight as he made a gleeful acceptance speech to the wall of mirrors in the master bath.

  Guns.

  An eye-popping number of guns.

  And that stupid TV, the one Vanessa had been whining over for the last three days, the biggest damn TV Cando had ever put his hands on. Seventy inches, he thought, and confirmed that with a measuring tape he found in another apartment’s utility room. It didn’t weigh anything like the old Sony set he’d grown up watching, but still, it was heavy and awkward. A serious dog to carry up eleven flights of stairs.

  Why had he bothered grabbing it?

  Hell, why bother with anything? He’d never owned a TV this big. That was the only explanation he needed to give.

  That, and it looked good next to the pool table.

  He would have liked very much to turn it on. To sit down on that sweet leather sectional with a drink and some munchies to—what did they call it?—binge-watch some good TV. Maybe a season or two of Breaking Bad or Dexter or Sons of Anarchy. Or maybe The Price Is Right. For no reason he could ever explain, he’d always liked The Price Is Right. But as he’d told Vanessa, everything was down. Local channels, cable, the streaming services. And the power was off more than it was on. When it was on, he supposed they could watch a DVD (an apartment four floors down had a whole wall of them), but he didn’t think he could sit still that long. The only things he could stand to do for any extended period of time were sleeping and working out.

  Climbing up and down the stairs.

  And walking. He took a walk every couple of days, just to see what was going on, with something chosen from his new gun collection tucked into the small of his back.

  Shopping.

  Sitting in the sunroom, admiring all those plants.

  And there was Vanessa, of course. For somebody who probably weighed no more than a hundred pounds, she was a powerhouse in bed.

  Both beds. And on the kitchen countertop, the floor, in the shower, and out on the terrace in the sunshine.

  She’d found him, not quite two weeks ago. She’d come running up to him in what used to be the cereal aisle in Safeway (in which there was no longer any cereal; at least, not any decent kind), yelping that she needed somebody to look out for her. Somebody she could hang on to. Who she’d been before Safeway, whether she’d been married or had kids and what kind of job she’d had—he hadn’t asked, and she hadn’t volunteered. It didn’t make any difference any more. That life was over.

  All there was now was waiting.

  ~~~

  He held her for a while, sitting on the couch, stroking her hair while she cried. For a few minutes she was still, and he thought she might have fallen asleep, but then she reached up a finger and scratched the side of her nose.

  “It ain’t up to me, you know,” he told her.

  “What’s not?”

  “The TV.”

  She breathed in hiccups for a minute, then shook her head against his chest. Her hair was softer than that cashmere blanket, he thought, brushing against his skin. It got him interested, but this wasn’t the time, not when she was upset like this. Carefully he moved her aside, padded back into the bedroom and pulled on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt. When he got back to the living room he found her sitting cross-legged on the couch. Her face was splotchy, the way it always got when she cried.

  “We can go find you something, if you want,” he offered.

  She sniffled. “Like what?”

  “Jewelry. Clothes.”

  It had taken him a while, but he’d figured out how to secure every entry door on the ground level of the building. With thick chains and padlocks, mostly, though he’d also used packed-full filing cabinets and big desks as barricades. The squatters were all gone, either by their own choice or his, and nobody new was getting in, no matter what their intentions were.

  Which wasn’t to say there were a lot of people around trying to get in anywhere. The ones he could see from the terrace were wandering around like sleepwalkers. Sometimes, they’d sit down in the middle of the sidewalk or the road and cry, like Vanessa. That was one of those stages of grief, he figured.

  Giving up like that.

  So the building belonged to him and Vanessa. Twenty-eight floors, all theirs for the taking. Food, booze, drugs (mostly prescription, but some coke, too, and a little baggie of weed). Jewelry that had to be worth a fortune.

  “I want to go home,” she said.

  “You are home,” he told her.

  That got her crying again, in fat shiny tears that streaked down her cheeks and plopped off onto her blouse.

  He had no idea where her home had been. Whether there was still anyone there, or if there’d been anyone there in the first place. Whether anybody had bothered looking for her. What she’d been doing when the news about the comet came out, and where she’d been doing it. He’d decided during one of his workouts that she’d been a hairdresser, because her hair was beautiful, and she liked fussing with his. Helping people look nice—that seemed like something she’d do.

  “You could give me a haircut,” he offered.

  But she said, “Why would I do that?”

  “I don’t know. For something to do.”

  She shook her head slowly, sadly, wearily. Another tear broke loose, but she wiped it away with a fist.

  “Baby,” he said.

  “Do me,” she said. “It makes me forget.”

  For a couple of seconds, she wore what she probably hoped was a seductive expression, then it melted away like something left out in the sun too long. She sagged back into the couch cushions, cove
ring her face with her hands, and it flashed through his head that today was something important: her birthday, maybe, or the birthday of somebody she cared about—though how she’d been keeping track, he didn’t know. There were no calendars in the apartment, no clocks that showed the date.

  “C’mon,” he said. “We’ll have a picnic out with the plants.”

  He’d almost said Let’s watch a movie, but he was afraid the power wasn’t on, or that it would cut out in the middle of whatever movie they picked. That might make things worse. Only a few months ago, the power going out had been nothing more than an inconvenience. Now it was a reminder that nothing was like it used to be—and it wasn’t even going to be like this for much longer.

  Vanessa blinked at him. For what seemed like a long while, she simply stared, almost expressionless.

  Then, as if she was dredging up something that’d been buried deep in the muck, she shoved together a smile and said in a small voice, “I’m gonna take a bath. And put on my dress with the flowers. You like that one.”

  He did. They’d swiped it together, a few days ago.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “I love you, Cando.”

  The Cando Reilly who’d existed before the news came out would have shrugged that off. Would have ignored her entirely, maybe. Or snorted, like she’d made a joke that wasn’t particularly funny. Half a dozen women had said they loved him at one time or another. Maybe it was even more than that. He’d even believed that one of them had honestly meant it. Not his mother; his mother had loved a bunch of things, but he wasn’t one of them. He’d been an inconvenience to her, like a power outage.

  Yeah, there’d been just one, and thinking of her made his heart clench and turn over like an old dog.

  Now there was Vanessa.

  “Okay,” he said softly. “Yeah. Okay. Me too, all right?”

  “Really?”

  She sounded doubtful, like she’d been somewhere like this before and the guy had let her down.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  She didn’t seem encouraged. For a minute she sat picking at the hem of her shorts, then she got up and trudged off toward the bathroom. A minute later he heard the water kick on and he felt a surge of satisfaction. The water was still running, at least. It might not be an hour from now, but he told himself not to worry about that. Even if it went off, they had water. Almost every apartment in the building—the still-furnished ones, at least—had big blue plastic water bottles lined up in the pantry, and one of the storerooms on the ground floor had three or four dozen of them.

  It’d last. It’d last long enough.

  She came out after a while wearing that pretty dress they’d swiped from a store over near the campus, her hair lying damp and curly on her shoulders. She was a pretty girl, even without makeup, one of those California girls from that old Beach Boys song. Somebody who wouldn’t have given him a second look a few months ago. With regret swelling until it filled his whole chest, he walked over to her and held her head gently between his hands, remembering the grimy, frantic girl who’d run up to him in Safeway.

  My life, he thought. Damn my whole fucking life.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she said in a soft little moan. “It’s gonna be bad, isn’t it? When it happens.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes you do. Will it be fast?”

  “Don’t think about that.”

  It would be nice not to. To just step into some sort of alternate reality where things could go on and on in a dreamy, unreal sameness. He was sure he wouldn’t want to live like this for an extended period of time—wandering around the apartment, sleeping, taking walks around Westwood and West L.A. and the edge of Santa Monica, welcoming rain as something radically different, pretending that choosing between peanut butter and canned salmon for dinner was an exercise worthy of bothering with. Really, even prison had offered more variety. But it would be awfully nice not to have that goddamned comet hanging over their heads.

  A lot of things would be nice. But that one thing most of all: to be rid of the frigging Burton-Davidson comet.

  He remembered movies. Deep Impact. Armageddon. Tidal waves. People being swept away, cities being leveled by the sheer force of what had to be trillions of tons of water. He didn’t think it would be anywhere near quick—at least, not nearly quick enough. He had the idea that drowning would take what felt like forever.

  Maybe they’d be lucky and the comet would hit right here, in the middle of Westwood, and flatten this building like it was made of paper.

  “I’m scared, Cando.”

  She was looking up at him, her small face trembling. Her damp hair felt cool against his fingers. Not for the first time, he was sorry he hadn’t simply left her there at Safeway, that he hadn’t abandoned her so she could find some other doomed guy to take care of her, maybe one who’d have more answers than he did.

  I can’t help you, he thought for what was nowhere near the first time. How am I supposed to help you?

  But he couldn’t admit to her that he was scared. That he wanted to do anything but die.

  ~~~

  He woke up in the middle of the night unsure of where he was. Over the years he’d learned not to panic when that sensation struck him; at best, when that happened, people laughed at him. At worst, they used it as an excuse to beat the crap out of him because they took it as confirmation that he was weak—and he had been, years ago. A scrawny kid, nervous and easily scared. Like Vanessa, he’d looked high and low for somebody who’d be willing to protect him, someone who could be bothered to care. All he’d found was the opposite: people who wanted to take advantage of him, abuse him, hurt him.

  More than one of them had laughed while they were doing that.

  Even with only a little light (he supposed it was coming from the moon) he was able to pick out a few things in the room, enough to tell him he was in Bill Carter Schmidt’s big master bedroom, that Vanessa was nowhere nearby, and that the power wasn’t on, because the little clock on the night table wasn’t running.

  This place, he thought.

  Because it bothered him that he couldn’t see Vanessa, he struggled out of bed and stumbled to the bathroom doorway. No, she wasn’t in there either, so he moved on to the living room, the kitchen, bumped into one of the leather-topped bar stools facing the kitchen pass-through, swore softly but vehemently, then noticed that the door to the sunroom was halfway open.

  He found her in there, sitting on the floor near the roses with her knees pulled up to her chest. She didn’t look up when he approached her; her attention seemed to be fixed on the plants.

  “Hey,” he said quietly.

  She shook her head a little and hid her face against her knees. The light was a little brighter in here because of all the windows, enough to let him see that she was trembling. It made her look pale, ghostlike.

  “Come on to bed,” he said.

  “I can’t sleep.”

  “There’s some stuff in the bathroom. Medicine cabinet.”

  “What good will that do?”

  At first he thought it was a rhetorical question. Then she lifted her head a little and peered at him. At least, at the middle of his chest. He thought she might take the extra step and look up at his face; instead, she went back to looking at the roses. They looked good, he thought—she’d been diligently watering them, along with all the other plants, and he hadn’t found it in him to suggest that maybe she was wasting water.

  Finally, he sat down cross-legged close to her and joined her in studying the roses. He didn’t know whether Bill Schmidt (or his gardener, or decorator, or whoever) had picked them particularly for their scent, but they smelled rich, heady, a little spicy.

  “It’s going to be bad,” Vanessa said after a while.

  “No. It’s just—”

  “It is. You know it is.”

  “I don’t know anything about it, and neither do you. All we know is what they put in the movies. Nobody knows, because it’s
never happened before when somebody was around to take notes.”

  “You don’t have to be like that.”

  “Like what, Vanessa? What? Honest? No, okay, I don’t. I could sit here and make up some fairy story.”

  “Just admit it.”

  Shoulda just walked away, he thought. Shoulda turned around and walked right the hell out of that store before she could catch me.

  “What?” he rasped. “Say it’s gonna be over in a second? Ten seconds? I don’t know, Vanessa. I’ve never drowned. All I ever do at the ocean is walk along the edge. I don’t go in there. I don’t swim. I don’t know what it’s like. So, no, I don’t know what’s gonna happen. It might take a second. It might take ten minutes. It might take all night. Do I look like the answer man to you?”

  She stared at him fiercely, glowering.

  It was the best she could do, he supposed, but instead of being threatening, she looked kind of comical. Like a kid, pretending. Or a cat.

  That was it. She looked like that grouchy cat on the Internet.

  “Gimme a break, wouldya?” he sighed.

  “Because it’s all about you, isn’t it?” Before she had even finished saying that, she scrambled up to her feet, small hands balled into fists as if she intended to let him have it, to pummel the uncooperativeness right out of him. But it wasn’t ferocious; it was still comical, and before he could stop himself a big, loud yelp of laughter had jumped out of him. It hung there in the air between them like a giant, noxious fart.

  “You shit,” Vanessa snapped.

  He couldn’t help it. He could no more stop himself than he could fly. Big gurgling whoops of laughter kept spilling out of him, accompanied by a whole cascade of tears. He laughed and laughed until his stomach began to cramp and seize so badly that he had to press a palm against it for fear that it would burst right out of him like that alien thing in the movie.

  There’d be blood then, he thought: lots and lots of blood.

  He went on laughing even when Vanessa stormed away from him. She couldn’t slam the sunroom door because it was on a track, but he could hear her behind him, wrestling with it. There was a moment of silence after she gave up.