Grants Pass

by Cherie Priest

  Suck it up, the Kayley in her pocket stoically advised — and not without some measure of irritation. You’re here to find water, supplies. So find them.

  Louise doubted that there would be anything close to an REI anywhere in the resort. For perhaps the first time since leaving her sanctuary in the hills, she wondered exactly what she thought she was doing. Yes, she needed the water, that was a given. But it didn’t explain the vice around her chest; it didn’t explain the Kayley in her pocket — in her head — or the frenzied sense of urgency that suddenly saw her leave the Terrazza complex at too fast a run, in spite of the heat, in spite of the danger. In spite of the dropping sun, and the memory of those screaming, whooping, fiery nights.

  The smell was somewhat diluted on the Avenida. Louise stopped running only because her own body betrayed her. The heat was incredible: it seemed to scorch even her lungs, forcing her to a wheezing, breathless standstill close to a deserted crazy-golf enclosure on the old beach road.

  There were very few bodies here — although Louise was not fooled for an instant. People were, by and large, creatures of habit. Those unable or unwilling to flee the resort would have sought familiar refuge. The barricaded villas and apartments were evidence enough of that, even ignoring the mottled, moving curtains of insects inside them. In the oppressive heat, Louise shivered to her feet and back again.

  Still she kept going. Playa Grande gave way to Playa Fariones. Its empty deckchairs and sun-loungers had fallen foul of the rising Atlantic. Many swept relentlessly back and forth in the high tide; many more were stuck low in the shallows, thrusting stranded arms and legs upward in silent and unanswered cries for help.

  Louise drew close to the main crossroads to the Old Town. Climbing over a crude barricade of overturned barrels and traffic bollards interspersed with charred oil drums; she wondered again what she thought she was doing. The sweat ran in sticky rivulets down her back and thighs, though the sun had all but disappeared behind the high cliffs in the west.

  She still needed water — that much was now truer than ever. And there was the rest of Kayley’s checklist. Fuel, food — maybe even weapons. But Louise had already passed a great many shops and restaurants — barred or no — and not once had she stopped. That queer crawling started up in her belly again, almost nullifying whatever urge still kept her going; kept her moving further from Calle Lapa. Or her better sanctuary in the hills.

  She suddenly thought of the friends that Kayley had arranged to meet in Grants Pass. She fingered the hard corners of paper again. Louise had had no-one for a very long time. Only now that the world had turned on its head — only now that she found herself shuffling alone through what should have been the busiest thoroughfare in the whole of Lanzarote — did she suffer such isolation so acutely.

  It was perhaps fitting that she should then come across the round white lanterns and dark-stained balconies of Casa Siam. Here she had spent many an evening in the long months before the divorce: its obsequious Thai owner sequestering her in the darkest, quietest corner, commiserating with superb prawn curries and free shots of Maekhong whisky.

  But it was not the eerie, empty desolation of Casa Siam that made Louise stop. It was the sheer number of bodies inside its entrance. There were dozens littering the space between bar and tables: a tangle of grey limbs and pulpy flesh spread liberally over a dark red floor that once had been black and white checkered tiles. The door to the kitchen had been ripped almost off its hinges, and there were bloodied handprints smeared across both it and the nailed wooden beams that now hung uselessly from its frame.

  These men and women — and God help them, children — had fallen prey to perhaps the worst plague of them all. Louise backed up, her fingers splayed across lips that tasted of her own blood. The battered remains of Kam Pramoj sprawled close to the neighboring Perspex-fronted amusement arcade — the left side of his head horribly concave and writhing white above a deflated, bloody eye socket.

  Her sob echoed too long in the hot, deserted vacuum — and when she started to run again, she hardly cared that the sun had sunk so far beyond the cliffs in the west that its reflection had turned much of the breakwater blood red.

  It is better to travel in groups, I think, Kayley reminded from the damp corner of Louise’s shorts pocket. Louise gave that pocket an angry, frightened squeeze before looking away from the road and back out towards the choppy Atlantic.

  Where were they? Where were the riotous mobs; the perpetrators of such mindless horror? The shouting, jeering engineers of every barricade and fire these past endless weeks? Where were they?

  Keep going, Kayley admonished. Having a plan can make the difference between life and death.

  “Shut up. Shut the fucking hell up.” Louise snatched her hand out of her pocket. She was beginning to dislike that earnest, pitiless whisper in her ear. She was beginning to loathe it. Daydreams of Evergreens and pines, summer’s night concerts and Christmas carnivals — of green and trees and river and cool — were all very well when there was no whisper in your ear. No righteous purpose. No diaphanous promise of a plan.

  Yet still she did not turn back. As she headed further west, past the tropical-fringed colonnades and tax-free designer shops of the new Biosfera Plaza, she waited for that whispered Run away. It didn’t come. Instead she made do with a long and forlorn glance towards those empty, white-tiled buildings and the darkening way back home beyond them, before she stepped down into the Old Town proper. The cobbled, shadowed walkways of La Tiñosa.

  Here, that crawling dread — that relentless niggle — found her too fast. And this time without any warning at all. It stripped her of the very last of her denial; it prized its fingers from the rock face before dropping her into the empty abyss beneath. She careered into a white stuccoed archway — and then backward into the cobbled road. She clutched at herself in panicked misery. A cockroach crawled over her exposed legs. Her voice was a reedy whisper.

  “Hello?”

  Louise managed to stand again with sobbed effort, clutching at a lamppost. She saw that her palms were studded with grit, smearing blood against the hot metal — and she snatched them back to her chest with another moan.

  She looked back up the steps. Back towards the static summits of the palm trees on the Avenida; towards its promenades and squares, and then the wilted flags of the bureaux de change and basement nightclubs beyond. The sun was an angry red ball sucked slowly beneath the horizon.

  Was it so inconceivable to imagine that out of an island population of almost 130,000 she might be the only one now left alive within its largest resort? Perhaps it was. But the desertion of that whisper at her back suggested otherwise. As did the silent dusk that she shared with the dead.

  She reared up from the warm cobbles with another plaintive cry, half-running, half-crawling her way back up the steps. The main road stretched east and west into empty shadow; upon her right, beyond the palms and their squat wide bodies, the Atlantic had swallowed Playa Fariones completely, the ocean’s back and forth wash now an ugly, malignant sound. The only sound.

  Louise stepped into the road, walked right to the central median, and drew in a shaky breath. This time the question came out as a half-strangled scream that shot through her like electricity.

  “Hello?”

  It echoed unanswered in the darkening silence, and the panic that rushed stinging bile into her throat was dampened only when her fingers found that sharp-edged square of paper in her pocket.

  “What do I do, Kayley? Oh God, what the fuck am I supposed to do?”

  Kayley didn’t answer. A long swollen finger of gold sunset followed Louise’s resumed and limped progress towards the old harbor; her thirst suddenly choking shut her throat. Close to the vast banners wrapped around lampposts that advertised boat and catamaran cruises, Louise collapsed again. Her scream was raw and savagely afraid.

  “Kayley, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean what I said before. Please come back! What do I do? Please!”

  The appr
oaching night mocked both her screamed plea and futile efforts to stand again. She truly was alone. That knowledge terrified her. Not even pressing the damp and battered square of paper to her mouth helped dilute its horror anymore.

  Likely all that saved her from herself was the sudden recognition of a sound she had missed beyond that of the roaring, closing Atlantic. She looked up at the dim outline of the vast balcony that stretched above the length of promenade — from the shadows of New Town to Old. A generator. A light.

  You’re going to go back down to La Tiñosa, Louise. You’re going to go down to the harbor, and you’re going to find a boat. You’re going to sail to America. You’re going to find Grants Pass.

  Even in her hysteria, Louise struggled to disguise an incredulous snort. But she couldn’t risk antagonizing Kayley again. It was enough that she had come back. A boat was maybe the best idea after all. She glanced back up at the invitingly bright oasis above her head. But she needed to rest first. She needed to drink first. Perhaps she could sail to Africa instead. Perhaps—

  I’m only a voice in your head, Louise. That voice had taken on a hard, brittle edge that was somewhere between fury and petulance. I’m not here. I’m far away, and I’m getting tired of waiting. I’m getting tired of waiting for you.

  Despite the warning; despite the snide threat of desertion, Louise sped towards the spiraling stairs that led up from the promenade. Toward the light. Hope — even hopelessness — was too easily defeated by something else. Something that was more than just thirst or the need to rest. Or the need to placate her only remaining friend. The bar was everything that Louise had lost. Everything that she had been in danger of forgetting.

  At the top of the metal steps, she veered right, running into an easel depicting a chalked outline of a grasshopper above a scrawled promise of Big Screen Football and Fishbowl Cocktails for €12.

  The bar was in darkness apart from a long tube of UV that ran the length of the bar and the neon cycle of its jukebox. Louise ran for the jukebox first, her fingers stabbing at the scroll buttons too furiously. The track lists snapped over and over in the silence. She forced the last of her change into its plastic slot. To hear a voice — one outside her head. Just a voice.

  In the end, she chose more carefully. Her hands had stopped shaking when she lifted the hatch of the bar; when she liberated a cool Corona from a fridge beneath a poster advertising Ladies *Nite* at Caesar’s. Free entry before 11pm had been scrawled underneath in Sharpie ink.

  She perched on a stool overlooking the darkening street as she sipped her beer in steadier-still hands; as Billie Joe Armstrong sang about a Boulevard of Broken Dreams; as thoughts of plague and death and apocalypse left her momentarily behind.

  A faint, almost imperceptible breeze came off the salty Atlantic, and she breathed it deep — for a moment pretending that this was just another balmy Canarian night in high season. The crawling dread in her belly almost abated. Almost quietened.

  Until she thought of the stubbornly silent and folded square of paper inside her pocket. That last frightened voice on the radio. Kayley’s too easy faith in her friends and in her sanctuary. In survival.

  The last of the sun’s rays sunk deep inside the slick black surface of high tide, and the promenade and its palm trees vanished into darkness. Louise trailed her arms over the balcony and closed her eyes. The heat clung to her like a shroud. In the distance, she could hear the whined return of insects doubtless still the size of her fist.

  Louise remembered the eerie cornfields ahead of Mother Abigail’s rocking chair; she remembered that ugly pink neon slash. She remembered Patrick. Her fingers suddenly twitched for her pocket again.

  Obviously, not everyone who reads this would survive an apocalypse. Maybe I would not survive it. My want for immortality says I would but that’s just me.

  That breeze suddenly whistled through invisible palm trees, snatching the hair from her face and tickling the flesh on her stretched out arms. The paper fell away over the balcony, its careful folds opening like wings as it caught the bar’s illumination in the last breath of updraft. As it winked away into absolute darkness, Louise stared in horror at her open palms, their steady spread-out fingers.

  The jukebox settled back into hummed expectancy. Louise’s moan was a low, sobbing, childlike plea. “Kayley?”

  There was only silence. Silence and dark empty windless space. No more than that.

  Biography

  Carole Johnstone

  Carole was born in a small town east of Glasgow. She now lives with her fiancé, Iain, in the southeast of England, working as a radiographer and medical dosimetrist.

  A relative newcomer to the world of published fiction, she was first featured in Black Static Magazine in early 2008, and is to appear in the anthologies: In Bad Dreams Vol.2, Scenes from the Second Storey, Voices, Dead Souls, and In the Footsteps of Gilgamesh.

  Her website can be found at http://www.carolejohnstone.com.

  Afterword

  There are few things more effective or powerful than the beginning of a certain type of post-apocalyptic story. Into a scene of utter devastation — or more often desolation — a character wanders invariably alone. Confused and afraid. And — we’re pretty certain — in a whole world of trouble. Whatever the setting: a slum, a hospital, an overgrown metropolis, an isolated mountain retreat, the intention is always to shock. To frighten with the altered familiar. To make us think of ourselves and wonder, What If?

  I chose Lanzarote as a setting only partly because it is an island in a comparatively isolated archipelago. Lanzarote is an island of volcanic origin. In contrast to its few coastal resorts, its interior is made up of vast mountain ranges, desert landscapes and volcanic tunnels. To stand upon the Montañas del Fuego and look down upon alien fields of rock and solidified lava streams is to imagine another world. Or the ending of our own.

  I wanted to write a story that begins with monsters and ends with worse. A story where the protagonist is left alone, confused and afraid. Maybe I’m alone in feeling a little disappointed when the crazies do finally come out; or when that lone survivor meets others like him and sets about rebuilding their version of civilization. For me, no monster — human or otherwise — can ever match that initial skewed perspective; that wonder that is part adolescent fantasy and part innate terror.

  I believe that. Maybe you don’t. But one thing we probably can agree on is that we all need hope. Even if it’s lying. And we all need someone. Even if it’s just a voice in our head. No more than that.

  Newfound Gap

  Lee Clark Zumpe

  JOURNAL ENTRY, MONDAY, SEPT. 4, 0001 AE:

  Five weeks since last airplane spotted flying overhead — pretty sure that it was military, heading southeast, probably to Charleston Air Force Base. It’s been two weeks since the last sign of traffic along US 441, heading north out of Cherokee towards Gatlinburg. I’m running low on packaged food but there’s plenty of game to make up for that. It rains daily: The storms move north out of the Gulf of Mexico. Tropical activity should peak in the next few weeks. Last night, the skies to the east glowed red. This morning I saw smoke lingering low on the horizon. I think Asheville may be burning.

  JOURNAL ENTRY, SATURDAY, OCT. 14, 0001 AE:

  Winter will come early. Temperatures have been falling steadily at night and I expect to see snow next week. Tomorrow I hike over to the road, just in case. It’s been too long. I don’t expect to see anyone, really; but making the trip every week gives me something to look forward to.

  ****

  Everyone Ethan knew was dead.

  Friends, family, co-workers — all dead. Distant relatives living all over the country, all over the world; acquaintances he had made online, in chat rooms; sons and daughters and wives and husbands of former school friends — all dead to the best of his knowledge.

  “Told you the place was deserted.” Lamar walked down the middle of the road, eyeing the vacated tourist shops and art galleries. His boots shu
ffled across the pavement, his long black coat billowed in the breeze. Normally, Gatlinburg would be teaming with vacationers drawn by the changing seasons and the colorful autumn leaves. “It’s been a ghost town for months, just like Pigeon Forge, just like Sevierville and every other town I’ve been through.”

  “There must be someone…” Ethan glanced at a newspaper resting in the gutter. The headline simply read PLAGUE.

  He missed Hannah the most, of course. Though their intimacy had never evolved into a more permanent romantic attachment, he considered her the closest thing he had to a partner. They shared secrets, complained about the world in general as if kindred spirits. He confided in her, confessed both his fears and his weaknesses.

  He missed his brother, too, and his bowling partners and the elderly lady who lived down the hall and the guy at the gas station on the corner. He missed hearing music on the radio in the car. He missed the group of kids that played football in the vacant lot by the grocery store.

  “I’ve been getting supplies here,” Lamar said, pointing his walking stick at a nearby market. “Door was wide open when I showed up. There was a rotted corpse in back. I hauled it out and left it next to the dumpster.” In his fifties, Lamar had managed to survive in the midst of metropolitan Atlanta. He had lived in the house his father had built half a century earlier, during the height of the Cold War. Lamar spent months underground in an old fallout shelter, rationing his food and monitoring the demise of civilization on shortwave radio. “There’s still plenty of bottled water and canned food in here. We should stock up before we head north.”

  Following a late season hurricane that devastated much of the Carolina shoreline, Ethan had relocated to the mountains of western North Carolina, leaving behind his beloved ancestral home in downtown Southport. Nothing really remained of the coastal town — a thirty-foot storm surge had obliterated most buildings, scattering debris through the tangled lowlands of the Green Swamp or washing them back to sea as the wall of water receded.