by Kage Baker
There’s always the buttoning, though, isn’t there? There’s always rearranging your clothes around your damp self and shaky knees, zipping, buttoning, belting. There’s always turning from the bed and the girl, or the fence and the yowling and the skip there, and being only you in the lane or hallway, with no one missing you or needing you, having paid your fee. You’re tingling all around your edges, and the tingle’s fading fast, and that old pretend-you floats back out of wherever it went, like sheets of newspaper, blows and sticks to you, so that then it’s always there, scraping and dirty and uncomfortable.
I turned out the lamp and crawled into bed. Now stars filled the window. In the old days of full power and streetlights, Sydneysiders saw bugger-all of those, just the moon and a few of the bigger stars. They say you couldn’t see the fifth star of the Cross, even. Now the whole damn constellation throbs there in its blanket of galaxy-swirl. People were lucky, then, not knowing what was out there, worse than a few gays poncing about the place, worse than power cuts and restrictions and all these “dire warnings” and “desperate pleas”, worse than the Environment sitting over us like some giant troll or something, whingeing about how we’ve treated her. Earth must have been cozy then. Who was it, I wonder, decided we wanted to go emitting all over the frickin universe, saying, Over here, over here! Nice clean planet! Come here and help us fuck her right up. That was the bloke we should have smashed the place of. The gays, they weren’t harming anyone but themselves.
I jerked awake a couple of times on the way down to sleep. My life is changed! I am a new man! They’ll show me proper respect now, when they see that DNA readout. To get to sleep, I tried to fool myself I’d dreamed Fen visiting. Passing those billboards every day, and Malka’s baby this evening—everything had mishmashed together in my unconscious. I would wake up normal tomorrow, with everything the same as usual. Fen’s scabby lips, the proper kisses, full and soft, we’d had behind the cupmaker—thinking about those wouldn’t do any good. Push them into some squishy, dark corner of forgetting, and let sleep take me.
Margo Lanagan has published five collections of short stories—White Time, Black Juice, Red Spikes, Yellowcake, and Cracklescape—and two dark fantasy novels, Tender Morsels and The Brides of Rollrock Island (published as Sea Hearts in Australia). She is a four-time World Fantasy Award winner, and her work has also won and been nominated for numerous other awards. Margo lives in Sydney, Australia, maintains a blog at www.amongamidwhile.blogger.com and can be found on Twitter as @margolanagan.
After the End, much of what remains of true civilization inhabits in the now-balmy Arctic and Antarctic circles. Survivors still live in the rest of the world, though—the exploiters and the exploited, and loners like Bear Jessen, who isn’t sure why he’s still hanging around . . . except for a silent promise made to his dying wife.
TRUE NORTH
M. J. Locke
On the last day of March 2099, on the rocky, parched slopes west of Rexford, Montana, Lewis Behrend Jessen met Patricia de la Montaña Vargas.
Jessen was sixty-seven years old. Everybody who mattered called him Bear. He had been American by birth, back when that sort of thing mattered, and Danish by ancestry. He was so pale his skin had peeled and burned in successive layers over the years, always revealing deeper, ruddier ones. Each layer also added freckles and age spots, too, till now he looked like a ruined patchwork man. His eyes were blue, like a cloudless sky. His hair, when he’d had any, had been red as rubies. His belly, when he’d had one, had hung over his big sterling silver horseshoe belt buckle. (Tacky? Damn straight. It had belonged to his father, as had the Colt .45 revolver with ivory grips. The Browning 9mm, and the shotgun for scaring away the megafauna, he had bought for himself.)
Bear was seven feet tall, broad-shouldered and big-boned. These days he looked more like a giant human walking-stick, ninety percent bones and one hundred percent wrinkles. He lived in an aging ranch-style house he and Orla had built in Rexford back when they moved up here. That was in the late sixties, maybe twenty years before the collapse was officially acknowledged, but by then everybody who had a lick of sense had seen it coming.
Rexford was just south of the Canadian border. A lot of people had moved through over the years, trying to make it across into Canada. Bear and Orla had talked about trying for it themselves. But at first they thought they wouldn’t need to, this far north, and later it just seemed as if it were too late to try.
Bear had just celebrated his forty-second anniversary the night before, over a trout he had caught that very evening, at a fire he built in his back lot, on the banks of the stream. Maybe it had been the fire that attracted the girl.
It was a miracle anyway that that seasonal wash could house a living fish, choked as it was with algae and weeds. The fish was certainly an endangered species. But hell; who wasn’t, these days?
Here’s a curious thing: when Bear cut the fish’s belly open he found an aluminum ring, a soda can pop-top. They didn’t make soda cans anymore—never mind the kind of pop-tops you can wear. Bear washed the blood off the ring in the stream, kissed it, and put it on his pinkie finger. As he did so he had to shake his head at his foolishness. Orla would have been amused. They had had to barter the real ring away long ago, along with Orla’s. The reason had seemed important at the time, and it wasn’t as if their marriage had suffered for want of a wedding band or two. Now that she was dead he rather wished he hadn’t.
With her gone, truth to tell, Bear didn’t mind much whether he lived or died. He’d had his share of living, and was ready to be done with it all.
Orla had not approved of his thoughts of suicide.
“Why?” he had asked. Seeing her on her deathbed (it had been late last fall; lung cancer, Orla believed, though they weren’t sure—anyway, it didn’t matter, since they had no way to treat it), he had made up his mind. Bear did not want to outlive his wife. He had gotten out his Colt .45 and thumbed cartridges into the cylinder, one by one. “I figure it’s better to go out together. Don’t you?”
She had wheezed, “Lewis . . . ” A pause for air. “Behrend Jessen. Put that . . . thing away.” She was glaring at him as fierce as the day they’d wed. “Don’t you . . . fucking dare.”
He eyed the gun with a sigh. Where did she get the energy to pick a fight at a time like this? Damned woman. “Now, Orla, for cry-eye—”
She clutched her mother’s blue cross-stitched coverlet that she loved so much. “Don’t . . . bullshit me, fool. Put it . . . away.”
He started to argue; she coughed up blood. You can’t trump bloody gobbets for settling an argument. He put the gun away, intending to get it out later. He was baffled by her obstinacy.
The next night, he held her hand and said again, “Why not?”
She did not answer right away, and he thought maybe that was it, that she was gone. But she squeezed the words out between inhalations. “There’s . . . a . . . reason.”
He did not reply right away. He felt her implacable gaze, felt her grip on his hand.
“Promise . . . me.”
He scowled. “Orla Jessen, you have never believed in God. If you are going to tell me the Lord Almighty has a plan for me, I swear I’ll put a bullet in my brain right this minute.”
“Reason,” she said again. It was quite literally a gasp. And it was her last word. Perhaps an hour later, perhaps two, her breathing ceased.
When he thought about it afterward he figured Orla would have been glad that was her last word. She was an atheist from way back. The reason she spoke of would be logical. Not metaphysical.
Bear still believed in the Protestant God of his youth (he’d been brought up Methodist), but it was not a worshipful relationship. Oh my, no. He was furious with God, who had promised salvation and had delivered hell on earth. Refugees passing through had spoken of the die-offs. Faithful or no, people were dying—had died—by the billions. By the billions. God was a big fat eternal asshole, and Bear had stopped caring long before who heard him
say so. His pastor, Desmond Marcus, had kicked him out of the church, ten years back, and had said some hurtful things about Orla. That was hard; they had been close friends. Des and Gloria had moved on a few years ago, headed to Seattle, Bear had heard, to apply for entry there, or perhaps north to Victoria, where the summers were still tolerable.
He fingered his Colt, thinking about Des’s opinion of suicide. There had been waves of them over the years, and Des had been quite vocal about how we mustn’t succumb to despair. The man knew how to inspire you, for sure. How to keep you hanging onto hope. But in the end, Des had given up, too, in his own way. Bear had seen it in his eyes.
This isn’t despair, Bear thought. I’m just done, is all. I’m done.
Bear could have gone ahead and offed himself then, as Orla lay cooling in their bed. But in the face of her earlier implacability, it seemed too violent. Disrespectful. And after Bear had buried her he lost whatever spark of initiative he had had. That had been four months ago, now.
Truth was, Orla was wrong. There was simply no reason he was still living, when so many had died. Billions meant thousands of millions. A hundred New Yorks. Loads of Londons, a plethora of Parises, trainloads of Tokyos, whole basketsful of Beijings, Torontos, Jakartas, Mumbais. If you stacked the bodies, Orla had told him once, they’d reach to the moon and back four times over. (She’d always been the one with the head for figures.) All gone. In two short generations human civilization had collapsed under its own weight, the way Ponzi schemes do. Now even the greatest cities were in their death throes. The people out in the big empty middle of the U.S. had been on their own for decades. Last he heard, scientists were saying human population would stabilize at somewhere under a hundred million, worldwide, once the resource wars and genocides died down: most of them within the Arctic and Antarctic circles.
A hundred million starving, miserable people. Of every hundred people, ninety-nine dead, within a hundred years of humanity’s apex. Might as well call it extinction and be done with it. No reason he should still be hanging around.
Bear fingered the ring. He felt as though he had made his wife a promise, though he had never spoken the words. Happy goddamn anniversary.
Orla would only have laughed and kissed him. Eventually, he figured, he’d either get over being mad at her for dying first, or die too, and end the argument that way.
Thanks to the fish with the ring in its belly, hunger didn’t wake him early the next morning. And that changed everything.
The morning after the fish dinner he awoke to a cool breeze blowing through the window. The sun was up. The window screen was gone, and a girl was exiting Orla’s closet. Bear lay still and observed her through slitted eyes. She had dark, tangled, dirty hair that went down well past her skinny butt. She had pulled on some clothes of Orla’s: a shirt, a pair of jeans. They hung off her. She was struggling into a pair of Orla’s walking shoes, biting her lip and grimacing. Bear could see the crusted sores on her feet from where he lay. She couldn’t have been more than thirteen years old.
Next she moved over to his chest of drawers, not three feet away from the bed. He breathed through his mouth, shallow and quiet.
She must have climbed the dead aspen. He had left the window open to let the breezes in. These days you didn’t say no to a cool breeze, not even at night in winter. It was a screened, second-story window on the slope of a steep hill, and the aspen was dead: brittle and as skinny as she was. A difficult climb. Anyone bigger wouldn’t have been able to pull it off.
He was not sure why he had awakened. She was quiet as a whisper as she emptied his drawers and pocketed the few items she seemed to find useful. It may have been the stink: she reeked of feces and body odor.
He spoke finally. “You won’t find much in there, I’m afraid.”
She spun to face him. She had a petite face with big eyes as dark and clear as obsidian. Sunlight glinted on the knife blade in her hand. It was a long blade, a serrated one. A fine hunting knife. It would gut him as easily as he had gutted that trout last night.
“Stay where you are,” she said. She stood just beyond arm’s length. From her accent he could tell her native language was Spanish. Orla would have known what country she was from. She had been in Central America back in the sixties. Medecins sans Frontieres. But the girl’s English was sharp and clear as broken glass. “Try anything and I’ll kill you.”
“Fair enough.”
A tense silence ensued. He felt a twinge—it wouldn’t be breaking his promise to Orla if someone else did him in. But his intruder, she was just a kid. She did not want to harm him, or she would have killed him at the outset. He didn’t want to make a murderer out of her for his own convenience. Besides, she might muff it, and sepsis was an awful, lingering way to go.
“I have provisions downstairs,” he said. “I’ll show you where I keep them. You look like you could use some, young lady.”
She eyed him suspiciously, but the left corner of her mouth twitched at the “young lady.” After another long pause, she shrugged. “All right. Get up. Don’t get cute.”
He swung his legs out of bed and stood. His joints were always stiff in the mornings.
She stared as he stood, and stepped back. “Usted es un gigante!” He remembered a little of his college Spanish: You are a . . . what? Oh. Of course. A giant.
It was true. Even in his current state he could easily have overpowered her. But he did not. He felt a deep pity. A dreadful fate, to be alive so young at the end of the world.
He led her into the kitchen and showed her the hidden door in his pantry. It led down into the cellar. As she stepped over the threshold and headed down the complaining stairs, he shone his flashlight in across the shelves onto Orla’s hand-labeled Mason jars.
The entire underside of their ranch house was filled with food. Jars of pickled turnips, potatoes, peppers, carrots, green tomatoes, and a hundred or more different kinds of jams. Sealed carboys, filled with beans, rice, and corn.
It’d been at least two decades since they had had access to groceries shipped from elsewhere, and maybe twelve years since the local open-air market that replaced the grocery store petered out. Since then, he and Orla had lived off wild game, water hand-pumped from their private well, and supplies they had stored up before the collapse. Orla had spent years preparing. All the years of their marriage. She had dedicated herself to their survival—even before it was clear to most that collapse was imminent; well after everyone else had died or moved on. Cured hams and chickens and turkeys hung from the rafters, and a rack held jalapeño jerked beef. Bear figured he had a good three or four years’ supplies left, if he continued the way he had. After that it was the bullet, dammit, whether Orla liked it or not.
What caught the girl’s eye, he could tell, were the medical supplies. Orla had been an ER doctor till the town had shut down ten years back, and had stocked up on bandages, antibiotics, medicines, and whatnot. All kinds of whatnot. There were vitamins and supplements, cold remedies, and the like. Most of these were post-date by now. After the last and biggest Deflation in ’84, even the mercy shipments had stopped coming in.
The girl stood on the bottom step, silhouetted by the light he shone—fists tight little balls, shoulders stiff. Then she turned and darted up the stairs, past him into the kitchen, where she pulled the tablecloth off the table. One of Orla’s handmade vases shattered on the floor. Bear looked at it. His vision went red. He roared—grabbed the girl’s arm, wrenching it—yanked her off her feet. Her eyes went wide.
“You little shit!” he yelled in her face.
Then he felt the sharp bite of her knife blade in his gut and dropped her. She backed away, knife at the ready, eyes wide, breathing fast. Mentally, he revised her age upward. She was more like eighteen. He lifted his torn, bloodied shirt and checked his belly. Just a scratch. The folds of skin there had protected him.
He ignored the girl—maybe he’d get lucky and she’d slit his throat while his back was turned—and knelt to pick
up the pieces of broken vase. These he carried gingerly into the study. He laid the pieces out on the hearth. Maybe I can glue them back together. But pain squeezed at his heart and he knew he never would. He just didn’t have it in him.
He heard the girl clattering around, and after a few moments he sensed her watching him. He turned. She stood in the kitchen doorway. Orla’s tablecloth was slung over her shoulder like a hobo bag. Medical supplies and jars and bags of food stuck out between the hastily tied knots. The burden of living had never been heavier on his shoulders than it was in that instant.
“Sorry,” she said finally.
Bear passed a hand over his eyes. “Just go.”
She stood there silent for another moment. When he looked back next she was gone.
Two mornings later when he went downstairs, he found the vase glued back together, its cracks all but invisible. It sat on the kitchen table next to his now-empty, second-to-last bottle of Super-Glue, with the now-slightly-soiled tablecloth beneath it.
