Grants Pass

by Cherie Priest

  I let her go. There’s some things you don’t do. You don’t even think about having done doing them.

  Stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid.

  I can’t do nothing else, so I give her a Chinese funeral, and push her body into the flames. That’s a kind of letting go, isn’t it? The sick, sweet, crispy pork smell is so familiar it makes me cry and puke, and I stumble to the edge of the bridge and throw up over the rail.

  Then I see the Guy watching me. He’s got a funny look on him, like he thinks I’m crazy.

  Now, on top of everything else, I’m scaring off my boyfriend.

  “Hey,” I say, and start toward him, but his face gets real twisted and he runs off. I turn around, and my boot prints are bloody dark.

  I got to go call Dr. Macushla, real bad.

  Stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid.

  DAY ZERO PLUS SIX AGAIN

  Down at the Circle K off Mesa Hills Drive, I talk to the clickie-click on the phone behind the clerk’s counter. I’m not crazy, I know Dr. Macushla’s been dead long as everybody else, but it is her phone and her phone number. It’s almost like talking to her. And it helps me. So shut up, if you’re reading this.

  She’s real sad with me. Says my heart is black as night. Says she’s tired of me, and can’t work with me no more. Says I’ve used up my welcome here in Austin, that I’m a danger to myself and others.

  Or maybe it was the judge who said that. When I’m real stressed out I don’t remember so good.

  Maybe the end of the world isn’t as hot as I like to think it is. Maybe I made some mistakes. Maybe I’m not as good at all this as I like to pretend.

  I whisper to her how sorry I am. I tell her I’m going to make amends. The social workers always like those written apologies. I can use my journal, make this entire thing an apology.

  Maybe everybody’s dead and nobody cares what I do. Maybe I’m crazy. Except I can’t be, because I still remember everyone and everything.

  It’s coming on a storm outside. The sky is the color of an old bruise, swollen and leaky. The wind has that crackle smell like it was lightning’s cousin. I put down the phone and go outside and apologize to the raindrops.

  Rain.

  It rains in Oregon, I realize. Like, all the time. As if God meant the place to be the world’s drain.

  My heart might be black as night, but that can be washed away in water. That’s what the Bible Belters say with their baptisums baptisms. And water is the opposite of fire, right?

  Right?

  I make a big space in my journal, and use really giant letters:

  WATER IS THE OPPOSITE OF FIRE

  For the first time since the nurses got sick on the psych ward, back when this all started, I feel hope.

  DAY ZERO PLUS TEN

  I’m ready now.

  I found a nice little 1985 Geo Metro. Old, so I might be able to fix it if it breaks. Here’s what I got in the car:

  My journal

  My dictionary

  A box of ball-point pens

  A 24-pack of sanitary napkins in case this takes weeks

  Forty gallons of siphoned gas in the back seat in five gallon plastic containers

  A full tank

  My stupid battery stand in case the Geo dies and I need to start another car.

  Cables to charge the batteries every night when I stop

  A toolbox I got from a Midas Muffler shop

  The green sheet and the map of Oregon from the Escalade

  A trucker’s atlas of the United States from the Circle K

  More Hostess snowballs and twinkies than I can keep track of

  Four cases of Slim Jims

  Ten gallons of water

  A blanket

  A dozen white sheets in case of Chinese funerals

  Matches, lots of matches

  There’s just enough room for the Guy in the front seat, if he don’t mind all the food stuck under where his legs will go. If I don’t find him, I’ll just burn cars along the way so he can follow my pillars of fire and smoke through the wilderness. My heart might be black, but I’ll cover it in white mourning until I get to Grants Pass. That girl Kayley will take me in.

  And if she doesn’t, well, fire is the devil’s only friend.

  There’s a lot of miles between here and there. Lot of cars to burn.

  Last thing I do before I go cruising for the Guy is drive up to my bridge of cars and say good-bye to the kid I killed didn’t kill.

  “I didn’t mean to be stupid,” I tell her charred bones all quiet like, where she lies under the Bentley’s back bumper. “And I’ll make it up to you by being a better person.”

  That’s what I have to tell the world, I guess, and all of everyone in it that’s died and rotted away.

  I’m leaving this journal with her. I’ll start another one on the road. I won’t need an Austin phone book on the way to Oregon anyway.

  If you’re reading this, good-bye. And if you’re not reading this, good-bye anyway. Watch for the fires. You’ll recognize me because I’ll be the only living person wrapped in a white sheet.

  I’ll make it up to all of you by being a better person.

  Biography

  Jay Lake

  Jay Lake lives in Portland, Oregon, where he works on numerous writing and editing projects. His 2008 novels are Escapement from Tor Books and Madness of Flowers from Night Shade Books, while his short fiction appears regularly in literary and genre markets worldwide. Jay is a winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and a multiple nominee for the Hugo and World Fantasy Awards.

  Afterword

  I lived in Austin for 18 years, from the time I moved there to go to college until I left to move to Oregon, not terribly far from Grants Pass, at least as seen from Texas. When I heard about this anthology, I really wanted to write about the story of my relocation, through the lens of this concept. I’ve written a couple of my old cars into it, and a former workplace of mine, so you could say the piece is autobiographical. Except for all the parts which aren’t, of course. Differentiating the two is left as an exercise for the reader. Hint: I am male, and have never killed anything more neurologically complex than a cockroach. I have, however, messed up a few cars in my day.

  By the Sea

  Shannon Page

  Elizabeth Barnett stood on the veranda, lifting a wiry hand to shade her eyes as she watched Christos sail away. The sun gleaming off the Mediterranean assaulted her, but the light was beautiful all the same. Sometimes the loveliness here made it hard to remember how thoroughly everything had gone wrong.

  Or maybe she was just being an old fool. Sunlight, kilometers of pale beaches thrust against bright blue water, hills covered with scrubby brush, khaki-colored rocks, and the occasional dark green cypress tree — it was not enough to hide the fact that she was very likely the last person left on the island. The last living person, anyway.

  She snorted and turned away from the sea before Christos, in his little white sailboat, had moved out of sight. No point in watching him go. He wouldn’t be back. She’d seen to that — they’d fought for weeks like rabid dogs. Or plague—infested weasels, more like. In the end, she’d set her teeth and scratched his lovely face with her long fingernails until the blood touched his chin. And still he stood, pleading.

  “Beth, come to Grants Pass, I know it’s real.”

  “It’s a lie, and you’re never going to get there on that damn fool thing anyway.”

  “This is our only chance.”

  “We have no chance.”

  He’d simply stood there, looking at her.

  “I have no chance,” she’d finally added, her voice bitter and dry. “I’m seventy-eight years old, and you know my health. I’ll die out on the water.”

  “You’ll die here.” He’d leaned forward, almost touching her, but holding back.

  That was when she’d scratched him, digging in with every last shred of strength she had. It was either that or touch
him in a different way, and she’d held on to at least that much dignity, through it all.

  Now she would not watch him go. The world had died; what difference would one more person make?

  ****

  “Kayley’s journal,” Beth said out loud as she heated a slab of halloumi over a wood fire she’d built in the stove. Bitter as it still was, at least her voice had lost its edge of testy near-panic, she thought. Three days Christos had been gone, and although she was growing accustomed to the terrible silence, she still felt the need to speak to the air from time to time.

  She’d made this batch of the cheese herself, and she was proud of it, even if it didn’t have the tenacity of the stuff she’d been able to find at the market when she’d first bought this property, fifteen years ago. Or even the weaker but still salty-sweet cheese that Christos had come up with, using the thin milk they’d managed to glean from the last goat.

  “Bunch of adolescent fantasies.”

  She might as well talk aloud. There was no one to hear, no one to judge. No one to answer.

  ...No one to brush her thinning grey hair, to stroke her hard and ropy shoulder muscles, to clear the weeds from her front walk. No one to argue back to her. To bring her a drink when the sun went down. To glance up from his work in what passed for her garden, his dark eyes smoldering at her as he...

  “Stop it, you stroppy old cow,” she muttered to herself. She finished toasting the cheese and then stood over the stove, eating it with callused fingers that hardly felt the heat of it.

  Then she stood, staring unseeing out the window as she remembered.

  ****

  Elizabeth Barnett, international best-selling author of The Caged Sword series of dark and twisted romantic fantasy novels. Elizabeth Barnett, the toast of London, New York, and Prague literary circles — at least, those circles civilized enough to consider the genre of romantic fantasy. Elizabeth Barnett, who shocked the world by retiring at the height of her fame and purchasing a three-million-pound estate in the hills outside Larnaka, Cyprus, with her third husband, James — seventeen years her junior and famous in his own right as the developer of those ridiculous computer games that children played, instead of reading decent fantasy novels.

  “The writing was on the wall,” she said to the window. The sea shimmered far below her, and Christos was not coming back.

  ****

  James had been one of the first to die. Maybe he had even brought the plague back with him, on his last trip to France...but if he hadn’t, someone else would have. The plane had been full of people, and there had been ten more flights after that, before all air traffic had stopped. Beth had sat with him in the Apollonion Hospital on the Greek side of Nicosiap — even then, with the wall down, the city was still deeply divided between Turk and Greek — holding his hand as he coughed blood, sobbed, and finally choked out his last breath. The sad-eyed doctors had searched their stub of what remained of the Internet, pumped him full of expired antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, and steroids, and mopped up the effluent that had poured from her beautiful husband. He had died all the same.

  “You filthy bastards! You swine, you cowards, you Mediterranean cretins!” she had shrieked at them, wailing and beating at the chest of the infuriatingly calm chief resident. He’d stood and listened to her, blinking his large dark eyes, waiting for her to wind down.

  It was those Greek eyes that had prompted her to move here in the first place, when she could finally afford it. Not this doctor’s eyes per se, of course; but dark Greek eyes in general, remembered from some long-ago junket she’d taken with her editor and her agent. Three middle-aged British women on holiday, slumming in a sea of sweet Greek manflesh. Beth had always remembered that trip, long after she’d married reedy blond James. She’d always intended to end her life here.

  Just not like this.

  Beth shook her head, still standing at the window, the fire gone cold in the stove, the uneaten bits of halloumi sticking to her fingers, cloying. She felt sick to her stomach, and wondered for the thousandth time if the plague had finally found her as well.

  “No, nothing can kill you, old loon,” she said aloud, half-affectionately. She turned away from the window, taking the greasy pan from the stove. She set it in the sink without rinsing it. There wasn’t much water left in the bucket anyway; she’d have to go to the stinking well for more.

  Instead she went to the basement, or what passed for one. It was a low space half-dug into the rocky hillside, intended for a wine cellar. But Cypriot wine was harsh and sour, and her English palate had never adapted.

  She stood blinking in the dim space, waiting for her old eyes to adjust, and pulled down a fresh bottle of Bombay gin. She stocked the large bottles — 1.75 liters — even though they were hard to maneuver above her glass, especially as the evening progressed. Before leaving the cellar, Beth counted the bottles. There were eighteen, not including the one she had in her hand.

  “That’s all you’ve got,” she said. “After that, it’s all over.” Her words were swallowed by the earthen walls.

  ****

  Seven weeks after Christos sailed away, Elizabeth Barnett sat in a leather chair with one of her own books in her lap — book seven of The Caged Sword series, and her personal favorite: Man and His Weaknesses. She could hardly stand to read books written by anyone else. They were never written as she would have done; they were over too soon, or too late; the relationship between the hero and heroine never rang true; and the endings were always contrived, seemingly invented merely for the purpose of making a good story.

  Well, of course they were, she knew that. But other people’s imaginations, to Beth, just seemed...inferior.

  So she read her own work. And certainly there was plenty of it. When twilight fell, she lit a fire in the hearth and a small candle by her chair, refilled the glass of gin, and picked up the book again, chuckling to herself as Larion prepared to storm the Fair Castle Rhuligel and save Marleena. Naturally, Marleena would refuse to be saved; that was when the fireworks would start. “Oh, you minx, you little vixen,” she murmured.

  That was when she heard the crash from the back yard.

  Beth froze, holding the heavy hardcover on her lap. What was it? Definitely something large. Another goat?

  She heard another noise, not a crash this time, more like a bump. It was closer to the house.

  She slowly got to her feet, leaving the book on the chair. A goat would be good news: it would mean milk, or at least meat. She walked over to the doorway and peered down the hall, craning to see the back of the house, but it was too dark inside. A small window was set high on the back wall of the living room for cross-ventilation.

  She sidled over to the window and stood on tiptoes, but could not reach to see out.

  She could hear, though. She heard footsteps.

  “Who’s there?” she called, making her voice strong, projecting to the rear of the audience as she had done for years.

  The footsteps stopped.

  A goat would have kept on, ignoring her in its desperate search for food. What other animal could it be? The dogs were all long dead, eaten mostly by one another, and then by the remaining people.

  And the people were long dead as well. Most of them, anyway. If one in ten thousand humans had survived the plagues, that would have left Cyprus with a population of eighty. Not counting tourists, of course...but the tourist trade had slowed greatly before the final plagues. The last ten flights in had been matched by as many flights out before the planes were grounded for good.

  Moving quietly, Beth left the living room and went into the hallway that led to the back door. It was darker here, and there was still a little light outside. She made her way to the window in the door, staying back a bit so as not to be seen.

  A man stood in her back yard. He was staring at the house, the roof. The chimney. He must have smelled the smoke from her fire.

  Ignoring the clutch of fear in her chest, Beth studied the man. He looked terrible; he wa
s clearly starving, and filthy. But he didn’t seem plague-bit. He was about fifty, maybe, though it was hard to tell in his condition — no, she corrected herself. It was impossible to tell. He could be thirty or seventy, who knew?

  Anyway, he appeared weak. Frail as Beth was, he was likely not a significant threat.

  By the looks of him, he was not Greek or Turk or Armenian or any of the other more customary inhabitants of the island. He could be at least as English as she was.

  What were the odds?

  As she watched, the man suddenly became animated. She sucked in her breath and pulled back farther from the window. He took a step toward the house, then stumbled and pitched forward.

  “Oh,” Beth said, as the man landed on his face on her cobblestones.

  ****

  He lay on a narrow bed in the guest room, still unconscious. Beth cleaned and bandaged his bloody forehead, and had brought in some more halloumi — the last she had, it would be canned food after this unless she found more milk — in case he woke up. He was breathing, but unsteadily; his temperature seemed high, but she was no doctor. Beth had never been a mother either, had never wiped a fevered brow as people did in her novels. Maybe he was plague-bit. But no, there were no buboes, there was no swelling. And the only blood was from his cut.

  She sat in a hard chair beside him, biting her lip. It had taken much of her strength to drag him here, and lift him up onto the bed. She wouldn’t have been able to do it at all if he hadn’t been so emaciated.

  The man’s eyelids flickered and he gave a small moan.

  Beth leaned forward, peering into his face. “Are you awake?”

  “Ah...” One eye fluttered open, then shut. He gave a long, sour exhale.

  Beth touched his shoulder, giving him a light shake, and touched his forehead again, next to the bandage. “Wake up.”

  He was silent a moment, then both eyes opened. “Wh...mou...uh...”