There had been fewer people every year, since the Eschaton. Now Yana wondered if there were any at all, except her and Yulianna, and the army men holed up in the bunker. Maybe they were all that was left in the whole world.
Probably not.
But maybe.
They would do what the biologist had suggested, Yana decided. They would walk south. To Africa. They would be part of the future of humanity. The next step in evolution. If they were tough enough to survive.
If they could prove their fitness. It could still turn out to be a good thing for everyone.
Yana wondered how many thousands of kilometers it was, to get to Africa. Once, it would have been easy to look that up.
She turned off the road at the moss-covered boulder that was shaped roughly like a giant tortoise, and picked her way around to the tumbledown old fishing shack that looked like it was about to melt into the landscape. If you even happened to notice it, weathered gray as it was and wedged between two great, wind-break stones, you’d never think it anything but a ruin.
She paused, assessing, as the shack came into view. It seemed undisturbed. It was considerably more sound than it appeared — they had made all their structural improvements on the inside. They had spent the first summer after the Eschaton reinforcing, insulating, and weatherproofing it — but leaving the exterior treacherous and abandoned-looking.
It had mattered more at first. When there had been more people.
Yana’s feet hurt. Her shoulders burned. She hurried down the little dip to the shack, wishing she could call out for Yulianna but too careful to give their position away that easily. Besides, she wasn’t worried. Yulianna would be fine. She’d left Yulianna the gun.
The quiet and the closed door were good signs. Peaceful signs.
She broke into a trot, careful of the gravel underfoot. If she shattered her ankle, it would not get a chance to heal. She paused by the boulder, listened. Everything quiet, everything good.
She stepped up to the shack’s little crooked door, which was better hinged than it seemed to be, and tapped lightly. The latch string was out, but she still called, “Sweetheart? It’s me, don’t shoot,” softly before she opened the door.
It glided on the hinges she had oiled, and she stepped inside.
It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the dimness. She used that time to shrug out of both packs and set them down by the table made of planks resting on salvaged plastic crates. Jars wrapped in cloth knocked against one another, muffled. She straightened up with relief and turned.
Yulianna was on the plank bed, curled on her side as she always slept, the blanket pulled up to warm her. The rifle leaned against the wall beside the bed, in exactly the position where Yana had left it. That was good, very good; Yulianna hadn’t even needed to move it.
Yulianna watched Yana with her gray eyes as Yana came in. Yana picked up the bag of dried apples and a canteen of water and went to sit beside her.
“Hey, sweetie,” Yana said. She rested her hand on Yulianna’s shoulder and stroked her faded, straw-stiff ginger hair back from her cool, firm brow. “I got food. Will you eat some?”
She placed a piece of apple in her own mouth and chewed, then carefully scooped the moist pap into the corner of Yulianna’s lips. She gave her a little water, but it ran out between her teeth.
“Sweetie,” Yana said, “You have to swallow. There’s fish too, beef jerky. Some pemmican. So much food, we’ll get fat. And I have trade goods. We can find a town.”
Yulianna didn’t answer. She stared ahead unblinking.
Yana wiped the corner of her sister’s eye, and the skin crumbled. She pulled her hand back and resolutely reached for another bite of apple.
“You have to get strong,” she said, stroking her sister’s hair again. The stiffness was bad today, she thought. “You have to eat. You have to get strong. So we can travel. So we can be the ones who make it.”
She leaned down and kissed her sister’s cheek, rubbing soft lips against hard, papery skin.
Yulianna made no answer.
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.
JINGO AND THE HAMMERMAN
Jonathan Maberry
-1-
Kind of hard to find yourself when everything’s turned to shit.
Kind of hard, but when it happens . . . kind of cool.
That’s what Jingo was trying to explain to Moose Peters during their lunch break. Moose liked Jingo, but he wasn’t buying.
“You are out of your fucking mind,” said Moose. “Batshit, dipso, gone-round-the-twist monkeybat crazy.”
“‘Monkeybat’?” asked Jingo. “The hell’s a —”
“I just made it up, but it fits. If you think we’re anything but ass deep in shit, then you’re off your rocker.”
“No man,” said Jingo, stabbing the air with a pigeon leg to emphasize his point, “your problem is that you don’t know a good thing when you see it.”
Moose took a long pull on his canteen, using that to give himself a second to study his friend. He lowered the canteen and wiped his mouth with a cloth he kept in a plastic Ziploc bag in an inner pocket of his shirt. He was careful to not dab his mouth with the back of his hand or blot it on his shirt.
Jingo handed him a squeeze bottle of Purell.
“Thanks,” said Moose in his soft rumble of a voice. The two of them watched each other sanitize their hands, nodded agreement that it had been done, and Jingo took the bottle back. Moose stretched his massive shoulders, sighed, shook his head. “Not sure I get the ‘good’ part of things, man.”
Jingo, who was nearly a foot shorter than Moose, and weighed less than half as much, got to his feet and pointed to the crowd of people on the far side of the chain link fence. “Well, first,” he said, “we could be over there. I don’t have a college degree like you and I haven’t read all those books, but I’m smart enough to know that they got the shit end of the stick. Tell me I’m wrong.”
Moose shook his head. “Okay, sure, they’re all fucked. Everyone knows they’re all fucked. Fucked as fucked will ever get, I suppose.”
“Right.”
“But,” said Moose, “I’m not sure that sells your argument that we have it good.”
“I —”
“Just because we’re on this side of the fence doesn’t sell that to me at all, and here’s why. Those poor dumb bastards are fucked, we agree on that, but they don’t know they’re fucked. At worst, they’re brain-dead meat driven by the last misfiring neurons in their motor cortex. At best — at absolute best — they’re vectors for a parasite. Like those ants and grasshoppers, with larvae in their brains or some shit. I read about that stuff in Nat Geo. Either way, the people who used to hold the pink slips on all those bodies have gone bye-byes. Lights are on but no one’s home.”
“You going somewhere with that?” asked Jingo as he rummaged in his knapsack for his bottle of cow urine.
“What I’m saying,” continued Moose, “is that although they’re fucked they are beyond knowing about it and beyond caring. They’re gone, for all intents and purposes. So how can you compare us to them?”
Jingo found the small spray bottle, uncapped it and began spritzing his pants and shirtsleeves. The stuff had been fermenting for days now and even through his own body odor and the pervasive stench of rot that filled every hour of every day, the stink was impressive. Moose’s eyes watered.
“We’re alive, for a start,” Jingo said, handing the bottle to Moose.
The big
man shook his head. “Not enough. Give me a better reason than us still sucking air.”
“A better reason than being alive? How much better a reason do we need?”
Moose waggled the little bottle. “We’re spraying cow piss on our clothes because it keeps dead people from biting us. I don’t know, Jingo, maybe I’m being a snob here, but I’m not sure this qualifies as quality of life. If I’m wrong, then go ahead and lay it out for me.”
They stood up and looked down the hill to the fence. It stretched for miles upon miles, cutting this part of Virginia in half. Their settlement was built hard against the muddy banks of Leesville Lake, with a dozen other survivor camps strung out along the Roanoke River. On their side of the fence were hundreds of men and women, all of them thinner than they should be, filthy, wrapped in leather and rags and pieces of armor that were either scavenged from sporting goods stores or homemade. Dozens of tractors, earthmovers, frontend loaders and bulldozers dotted the landscape, but most of them were near the end of their usefulness. Replacement parts were hard to find. Going into the big towns to shop was totally out of the question. Flatbeds sat in rows, each laden with bundles of metal poles and spools of chain link fencing.
On the other side of the fence, stretching backward like a fetid tide, were the dead. Hundreds of thousands of them. Every race, every age, every type. A melting pot of the American population united now only in their lack of humanity and their shared, ravenous, unassuageable hunger. Here and there, stacked within easy walk of the fence, were the mounds of bodies. Fifty-eight mounds that Moose and Jingo could count from the hill on which they’d sat to eat lunch. Hill seventeen was theirs. Six hundred and fifteen bodies contributed to the composition of that hill. Parts of that many people. Though, to be accurate, there were not that many whole people even if all the parts were reassembled. Many of them had already been missing limbs before Jingo and Moose went to work on them. And before the cutters did their part. Blowflies swarmed in their millions above the field and far above the vultures circled and circled.
Moose shook his head. “If I’m missing anything at all, then please tell me, ‘cause I’m happy to be wrong.”
-2-
As they began prepping for the afternoon shift, Jingo tried to make his case. Moose actually wanted to hear it. Jingo was always trying to paint pretty colors on shit, but lately he’d become a borderline evangelist for this new viewpoint.
“Okay, okay,” Jingo said as he wrapped the strips of carpet around his forearms and anchored them with Velcro, “so life in the moment is less than ideal.”
“‘Less than ideal’,” echoed Moose, smiling at the phrase. “Christ, kid, no wonder you get laid so often. You could charm a nun out of her granny panties. If there were any nuns left.”
Quick off the mark, Jingo said, “What’s the only flesh a zombie priest will eat?”
“Nun. Yeah, yeah. It’s an old joke, man, and it’s sick.”
“Sick funny, though.”
Moose shook his head and began winding the carpet extensions over the gap between his heavy gloves and leather jacket. It was nearly impossible to bite through carpet, and certainly not quickly. Everyone wore scraps of it over their leather and limb pads.
“Okay, okay,” conceded Jingo. “So that’s an old joke. What was I saying?”
“You were talking about how life sucks in the moment, which I’ll agree about.”
“No, that was me getting to my point. Life sucks right now because we’re all in a transitional point.”
“‘Transitional’?”
“Sure, we’re in the process of an important change that will shift the paradigm —”
Moose narrowed his eyes. “Where’s this bullshit coming from?”
Jingo grinned without shame. “Books, man. You’re always on me to read, so I’ve been reading.”
“I gave you a couple of Faulkner novels and that John Sandford mystery.”
“Sure, and I finished them. They were okay, but they didn’t exactly speak to me, man. What’s Faulkner got to say about living through a global pandemic? Nah, man, I needed something relevant.”
“Uh huh. So . . . who’ve you been reading?
The little man’s grin got brighter. “Empowerment stuff. Dr. Phil, Esther Hicks, Don Miguel Ruiz, but mostly Tony Robbins. He’s the shit, man. He’s the total shit. He had it all wired right, and he knew what was fucking what.”
“Tony Robbins?”
“You know, that motivational —”
“I know who he is. Or was. But, c’mon, he was all about business and taking charge of your career. Not sure what we do qualifies as a ‘career.’ I mean, I could build a stronger case for this being all of us working off our sins in purgatory. If I believed in that sort of thing, which I don’t. Neither do you. So, tell me exactly how Tony Robbins’ books — or any empowerment books — are useful for anything except toilet paper?”
“You say stuff like that because you haven’t read them,” said Jingo. “Empowerment is what it’s all about. Look, history goes through good and bad moments. Transitional moments, you dig? Going from what was to what will be.”
“I understand the concept of transition,” said Moose, reaching for his reinforced cervical collar.
“Right, so that’s what this is.” Jingo gestured widely to include everything around them.
“A transitional period?”
“Sure.”
“That’s how you’re seeing this?” Moose asked.
“It’s what it is. The world as we knew it is gone. We know that. We all know that. The plague was too big and it spread too far. Too much of the systems we needed — what do you call that stuff? Hospitals and emergency services and shit? People we’re used to being able to call — ?”
“Infrastructure,” supplied Moose.
“Right. The infrastructure’s gone, and that means the world we knew is gone. And it’s so totally gone, so completely fucked in the bunghole that we can’t put it back together the way it was.”
“Is that a Tony Robbins quote?”
“You know what I mean.” Jingo picked up the two football helmets and handed one to Moose. “Everything that was is for shit. Right now things are for shit, too, but in a different way.”
Moose hooked the chinstrap in place and adjusted his helmet. The visor was scratched and stained, but he could see through it. “Not in any version of a good way.”
“No, but that’s what I mean by transitional.” He picked up the sledgehammer, grunting with its weight and handed it to Moose. “The world’s still changing.”
“Changing into what?”
Jingo pulled his machete from the tree stump where he’d chunked it before lunch. He slid it into the canvas scabbard on his belt.
“Into something better.”
“Better?” Moose snorted. “Look around, brother, ‘cause that’s setting the bar pretty low.”
“Sure, but that means that things can only keep getting better.”
“Jesus.”
The shift whistle blew and they began walking down the hill toward the gate.
-3-
Because neither of them had premium skills, they worked cleanup. Before the plague, Jingo — born James Go — had been a third-generation Chinese American who mostly fucked around on trust money left to him by his software developer dad. He had some school, even a degree, but not a lot of what he’d studied had stuck. It was only when the trust was beginning to dry up that Jingo had started reading self-help and empowerment books to try and grab the future by the horns. The apocalypse had mostly, but not entirely, short-circuited that process. He knew that he would never be a great man or a great doer of things, but he had plans.
Michael ‘Moose’ Peters was different. He’d been a high school football coach and health-ed teacher. A college graduate with a degree in education, a constant reader and small-scale social activist in his community. Unlike Jingo, Moose had been a family man, but his wife and two sons were long gone. Taken by the first
wave of the plague as it swept through Bordentown, a narrow spot on the map in Western Pennsylvania. Bordentown was notable only for being next door to Stebbins, where the plague began. Some of the guys working the fence thought that was kind of cool, and it gave him low-wattage celebrity. A few of the men, though, seemed to hold it against him, as if proximity to the outbreak somehow made him part of the problem.
Neither of their skill sets were of prime use. They weren’t doctors, scientists, military, police, EMTs, or construction workers. Neither of them could cook, sew, hunt, or survey the landscape. Nobody was playing football anymore, and Moose didn’t think it would make a comeback. It was as extinct as accounting, software development, infomercials, TV producing, the real estate industry, reality show competitions, taxi service, pizza delivery, cosmetic surgery, valet parking, car detailing, investigative journalism, secret shoppers, and ten thousand other things Moose could name. Putting together a list of useful skills was easier and quicker. A lot of people, including movie actors, famous models, politicians, CPAs, advertising executives, pet therapists, comic book writers, professional athletes, lawyers, and many, many more were now part of a mass of unskilled labor. Some were so unsuited to the survival of the collective that they were quietly shoved out of the gate at night. Those who made the cut, like Jingo and Moose, survived because they had — if nothing else — muscle.
Both men were fit. Jingo was small and fast and had good stamina. Moose was huge and strong and could work all day. Neither of them complained. Neither was overtly insane, at least not in any way that made them a security risk or a danger to their co-workers.
They worked support for the fence project. More highly-skilled men built the fence. Less skilled men washed dishes and clothes. Those without even those basic skills threw parts on the mounds. Everyone worked. Idlers were starved out or pushed through the fence. Same for thieves, especially food thieves. Steal someone’s meal and you become a meal for the dead beyond the fence. Courts and lawyers had all died off, too.
Jingo and Moose worked as a team. Jingo was a cutter and Moose was the hammerman.
The End Has Come Page 26
