After the End: Recent Apocalypses

by Kage Baker

  The audience swayed in time with the music, high atop the pile of rubble we played on in the welcome cool of sunset, when the workday was through. They leaned against long poles, which made me think of gondoliers, except that our audience used their poles to pry apart the rubble that the bombers had created, looking for canned goods.

  Steve handed Hambone a solo cue just as a bomber flew by overhead, which was his idea of a joke. He didn’t like Hambone much. “Take it, Hambone!” he shouted, an instant before the roar began. It got a laugh. Hambone just grinned his blissed-out smile and went gonzo on the cans. The roar of the bomber faded, and he played on, and then settled into a kicky lick that set me on an expedition on the bugle, that left me blue in the face. Steve gave us dirty looks.

  Then a stranger started dancing.

  It was pretty shocking: not the dancing; people do that whenever they find some booze or solvents or whatever; it was the stranger. We didn’t get a lot of strangers around there. Lyman and his self-styled “militia” took it upon themselves to keep wanderers out of our cluster of rubble. She was dirty, like all of us, but she had good teeth, and she wasn’t so skinny you could count her ribs. Funny how that used to be sexy when food was plentiful.

  And she could dance! Steve skipped a verse, and Timson looked up from the book he keeps on his music stand and gawped. I jammed in, and Hambone picked up on it, and Steve didn’t throw a tantrum, just scatted along. She danced harder, and we didn’t break for the next bomber, kept playing, even though we couldn’t hear ourselves, and when we could, we were still in rhythm.

  We crashed to an ending, and before the applause could start, we took off on “Diggin’ My Potatoes,” which Steve sang as dirty and lecherous as he could. We hopped and the stranger danced and the audience joined in and the set went twice as long as it normally would have, long after the sun set. Man!

  Steve made a beeline for her after the set, while I put away the bugle and Timson tied a tarp down over his piano. Hambone kept banging on his cans, making an arrhythmic racket. He only did that when he was upset, so I helped him to his feet.

  “C’mon, Ham,” I said. “Let’s get you home.”

  Hambone smiled, but to a trained Hambone-ologist like me, it was a worried grin. The stranger was staring at Hambone. Hambone was looking away. I led him to his cave, guiding him with one hand at the base of his skull, where he had a big knot of scar tissue—presumably, whatever had given him that lump had also made him into what he was. I made sure he went in, then went back, nervous. Hambone was a barometer for trouble, and when he got worried, I got worried, too.

  The stranger had peeled Steve off of her, and was having an animated conversation with Timson. Uh-oh. That meant that she was a reader. It’s all Timson ever talked about. He was a world-class bookworm. He’d moved into the basement of what was left of a bookstore-café, and was working his way through their stock. You never saw Timson without a book.

  “Anemic Victorian girlybook—that’s all that was,” he was saying, when I caught up with him.

  The stranger shoved his shoulder, playfully. Timson is a big one, and not many people are foolhardy enough to shove him, playfully or otherwise. “You’ve got to be kidding me! Are you some kind of barbarian? Emma is a classic, you bunghole!” My sainted mother would have said that she had a mouth on her like a truck driver. It turned me on.

  “Hi!” I said.

  Timson’s retort was derailed as he turned to look at me. He said, “Brad, meet Jenna. Jenna, meet Brad.”

  I shook her hand. Under the dirt, she was one big freckle, and the torchlight threw up red highlights from her hair. Mmmm. Redheads. I had it bad.

  “You blow good,” the stranger—Jenna—said.

  “Hell,” Timson said, slapping me on the back hard enough to knock a whoosh of air out of my lungs. “Brad is the best trumpet player for a hundred klicks!” Jenna raised a dubious eyebrow.

  “I’m the only trumpet player for a hundred klicks,” I explained. Talking to a stranger was a novel experience: we got to recycle all the band jokes. She smiled.

  I don’t know where she slept that night. She was pretty good at taking care of herself—there weren’t hardly any wanderers around anymore, and I’d never seen a solo woman. When I retired to my shack, I was pretty sure that she’d found herself shelter.

  “This is how all of you survive?” she asked me the next day. I’d taken her out prospecting with me, going after a mountain of concrete rubble that had recently shifted after a baby quake. I had a good feeling about it.

  “Yeah,” I said, wedging my pole in and prying down hard. If you do it just right, you start a landslide that takes off a layer of the pile, revealing whatever’s underneath. Do it wrong, you break your pole, give yourself a hernia, or bury yourself under a couple tons of rebar and cement. I’d seen a movie where people used the technique after some apocalypse or another. A plane went by overhead and stopped the conversation.

  “But it’s not bloody sustainable,” she said. Her face was red with exertion, as she pried down hard.

  I stopped prying and looked around pointedly. Mountains of rubble shimmered in the damp heat, dotting the landscape as far as the eye could see.

  She followed my gaze around. “Okay, fine. You’ve got a good supply. But not everyone else does. Sooner or later, someone, somewhere, is going to run out. And then what? Turf wars? The last thing we need around here is another fucking war.”

  It wasn’t the first time I’d heard that theory. Lyman and his buddies were particular proponents of it. They drilled half-ass military maneuvers in their spare time, waiting for the day when they’d get to heroically repel an invasion. I told her what I told them. “There’s plenty of rubble to go around.”

  Another plane went by. She went back to her rock with renewed vigor and I went back to mine. After several moments of grunting and sweating, she said, “For this generation, maybe. What’ll your kids eat?”

  I leaned against my pole. “Who said anything about kids? I don’t plan on having any.”

  She leaned against hers. Actually, it was my spare—two-and-a-half meters of one-inch steel gas-pipe—but I’d let her use it for the day. “So that’s it for the human race, as far as you’re concerned? The buck stops here?”

  I got the feeling that she had this argument a lot. “Other people can do whatever they want. I’m not gonna be anyone’s daddy.”

  Another plane passed. “That’s pretty damned selfish,” she said.

  I rose to the bait. “It’s selfish not to have kids I can’t look after in a world that’s gone to hell?”

  “If you took an interest in the world, you could make it a livable place for your kids.”

  “Yeah, and if I wanted to have kids, I’d probably do that. But since I don’t, I won’t. QED.”

  “And if my grandma had wheels, she’d be a friggin’ roller-skate. Come on, Brad. Live like a savage if you must, but let’s at least keep the rhetoric civilized.”

  She sounded like Timson, then. I hate arguing with Timson. He always wins. I pushed against my pole and the chunk I’d been working on all morning finally shifted and an ominous rumbling began from up the hill. “Move!” I shouted.

  We both ran downslope like nuts. That was my favorite part of any day, the rush of pounding down an uneven mountain face with tons of concrete chasing after me. I scrambled down and down, leaping over bigger obstacles, using all four limbs and my pole for balance. Jenna was right behind me, and then she was overtaking me, grinning hugely. We both whooped and dove into the lee of another mountain. The thunder of the landslide was temporarily drowned out by the roar of another plane.

  I turned around quick, my chest heaving, and watched my work. The entire face of the mountain was coming down in stately march. Lots of telltale glints sparkled in the off-pour. Canned goods. Fossil junkfood from more complex times.

  “Tell me that that’s not way funner than gardening,” I panted at Jenna.

  She planted her hands on h
er thighs and panted.

  I loved going out prospecting with other people. Some folks liked to play it safe, nicking away little chunks of a mountain. I liked to make a big mess. It’s more dangerous, more cool, and more rewarding. I’m a big show-off.

  I went back and started poking at the newly exposed stratum, popping cans into my sack. The people who’d lived in this city before it got plagued and dresdenned had been ready for a long siege, every apartment stuffed with supplies. I kept my eyes open for a six-pack of beer or a flask of booze, and I found both. The beer would be a little skunky after a decade of mummification, but not too bad. The tequila would be smooth as silk. I found it hard not to take a long swallow, but it was worth too much in trade for me to waste it on my liver.

  Jenna joined me, scooping up the cans and stashing them in her pack. I didn’t begrudge her the chow: there was more than I could carry home before the day was through in this load, and whatever I didn’t take would get snapped up by some entrepreneur before morning. I wandered off, selecting the best of the stuff for my larder. I heard Jenna throwing up on the other side of the mountain. I scampered over to her.

  It was what I’d expected: she’d turned up some corpses. Ten years of decomposition had cleaned them up somewhat, but they weren’t pretty by any stretch. The plague bombs they dropped on this town had been full of nasty stuff. It killed fast, and left its victims twisted into agonized hieroglyphs. I turned, and pulled Jenna’s hair out of the way of her puke.

  “Thanks,” she said, when she was done, five planes later. “Sorry, I can’t get used to dead bodies, even after all this.”

  “Don’t apologize,” I said. “Plague victims are worse than your garden variety corpse.”

  “Plague victims! Damn!” she said, taking several involuntary steps backward. I caught her before she fell.

  “Whoa! They’re not contagious anymore. That plague stuff was short-lived. The idea was to kill everyone in the city, wait a couple months, then clean out the bodies and take up residence. No sense in destroying prime real estate.”

  “Then how did all this—” she waved at the rubble “—happen?”

  “Oh, that was our side. After the city got plagued, they dresdenned the hell out of it so that the enemy wouldn’t be able to use it.” After the War, I’d hooked up for a while with a crazy guy who wouldn’t tell me his name, who’d been in on all the dirty secrets of one army or another. From all he knew, he must’ve been in deep, but even after two years of wandering with him, I never found out much about him. He died a month before I found my current home. Lockjaw. Shitty way to go.

  “They bombed their own fucking city?” she asked, incredulous. I was a little surprised that she managed to be shocked by the excesses of the War. Everyone else I knew had long grown used to the idea that the world had been trashed by some very reckless, immoral people. As if to make the point, another plane buzzed us.

  “Well, everyone was already dead. It was their final solution: if they couldn’t have it, no one else could. What’s the harm in that?” I said. Whenever my nameless companion had spilled some dirty little secret, he’d finish it with What’s the harm in that? and give a cynical chuckle. He was a scary guy.

  She didn’t get the joke.

  “Come on,” I said. “We gotta get this stuff back home.”

  That evening, the band played again. Our audience was bigger, maybe a hundred people. Steve liked a big crowd. He jumped around like bacon in a pan, and took us through all our up-tempo numbers: “South America, Take It Away,” “All the Cats Join In,” “Cold Beverages,” “Atomic Dog,” and more. The crowd loved it, they danced and stomped and clapped, keeping the rhythm for us during the long rests when the planes went by.

  We played longer than usual. When we were done, I was soaked with sweat, my lips and cheeks were burning, and the sun had completely set. Some enterprising soul had built a bonfire. We used to do that all the time, back when booze was less scarce: build a big fire and party all night. Somewhere along the line, we’d stopped, falling into a sunup-to-sundown rhythm.

  That night, though, I lay on my back beside the fire and watched the constellations whirl overhead. The planes counterpointed the soft crackling noises the fire made, and I felt better than I had in a long time.

  The crowd had mostly gone home, but the band was still out, as were Lyman and his boys, and a few other die-hards. And Jenna. She’d led the dancing all night.

  “That was fun,” she said, hunkering down with me and Timson and Hambone. Steve was fondling one of his groupies, a skinny girl with bad teeth named Lucy. In my nastier moods, I called her “Loose.” She was dumb enough not to get the joke.

  Jenna passed Timson the canteen and he swigged deeply. “It sure was,” he said. “We haven’t been that tight in a while.”

  “You know, I’ve been all through the southland, but you guys are the only band I’ve seen. Everyone else is just scratching out a living. How’d you guys get together?”

  “Hambone,” I said. He was rappity-tappiting some firewood.

  “Hambone?” she said. “I gotta hear this.”

  “I got here about seven years ago,” I said, taking a pull from the canteen. “I’d been wandering around for a while, but for some reason, I thought I’d stay here for a while. Hambone was already here—near as anyone can tell, he’s been here since the War. He managed to keep himself alive, just barely.

  “I’d been here for a couple of weeks, and I’d spent most of that time building my house. I spent a lot of time hanging around out front of my place, blowing my horn, thinking. I didn’t have any friends around here: I didn’t want any. I just wanted to blow and watch the flies.” I paused while a plane howled by.

  “Then, one morning, I was blowing ‘Reveille’ and watching the sun come up, and I heard this crazy beat behind me. I looked around, and it was Hambone, sitting on top of the hill out back of my place, keeping time. I didn’t know about him, then, so I figured he was just one of the locals. I waved at him, but he just kept on pounding, so I picked up my horn and we jammed and jammed.

  “It became a regular morning gig. Once I ran out of steam, he’d get up and wander away. After a while, he was playing right on my doorstep, and I noticed how skinny he was. I tried to talk to him, and that’s when I figured out he was special. So after we finished, I gave him a couple cans of Spam.” A plane flew past.

  “After a month of this, I decided I’d follow him when he left. He didn’t seem to mind. We came to a ladder that led down into a big, bombed-out basement, all full of books. And this big asshole was playing a piano, just pounding on it.”

  I nodded at Timson, who picked up the tale. “It’d been tough to get the piano down there, but when I found it, I knew I needed to have it. I’d been going nuts, looking for a chance to play. Hambone had been coming by regular to jam around, and I tried to make sure he got fed. I figured he was shell-shocked and needed a hand. Then, one day, he shows up with this guy and his horn. Next thing you know, we’re all playing our asses off. It was the most fun I’d ever had.” He waited for a plane to pass, and built up the fire.

  “The rest, as they say, is history,” he continued. “Steve heard us jamming and invited himself along. He kept after us to play publicly.”

  Jenna looked over at Steve, who was lying on his back with Lucy twined around him. “Well, he can sing, anyway,” she said, and grinned wickedly.

  We all nodded.

  “So,” she said, stretching casually. “What are you guys gonna do when you run out of cans?”

  I groaned. She’d been picking at the subject all day.

  Timson poked at the fire, and Lyman sauntered over. He said, “Our supply will hold out a while yet,” he said, “if we keep interlopers out.” He loomed threateningly over her. Timson stood up and loomed back. Lyman retreated a little.

  “How about gardens?” she said. “A decent garden could really stretch out your food supply.”

  “Who,” I said, lazily, “is going t
o work on a garden when there’s all this food just lying around?”

  “I will, for one. Think about it: fresh vegetables! Fruit! When was the last time you had a tomato, a big fat red one?”

  My mouth watered. Lyman said, “When we run out of cans, we’ll just move along. Gardens’ll only tie us down here.” His boys all nodded, the way they did when he made a pronouncement.

  Jenna glared at him. “That’s pretty goddamn short-sighted. How long can you live off the past? When are you going to start living for the future?”

  Lyman’s rebuttal was cut off by another plane.

  Timson slapped her on the back. “ ‘When are you going to start living for the future?’ You’ve practiced that, right?”

  She pretended she didn’t hear him. “How come the planes don’t run out of fuel?” she said.

  I said, “They’ve got an automated maintenance station somewhere around here. They land there for scheduled repairs and refueling. It’s supposed to re-stock their ammo, too, but it looks like they’ve run out. Lucky for us.”

  Jenna’s ears pricked up. “You know where this station is? They’d have power? Radios? Maybe we could call for help.”

  Everyone looked at her like she was nuts. “Where, exactly, are you going to call?” Timson asked.

  “New Zealand. They didn’t get into the War at all. They’re probably sitting pretty. Maybe they could help us out.”

  “On the Beach, Neville Shute,” Timson said. “You’ve been reading too much science fiction, girl.”

  She slapped his shoulder. “It was The Chrysalids actually. John Wyndham. Kiwis and Aussies always come out okay. Seriously,” she continued, “what else are you doing around here? Aren’t you getting bored of slipping back into savagery?”