by Kage Baker
“Help me,” she says. “Help us.”
The woman shakes her head. “We corresponded with a military man—”
“Sanders. He knew me.”
“I don’t know you from jack shit.”
“But his wife and son should be here.” Kingston peers past the woman—all she can see is an industrial-sized conveyor belt leading down into darkness. “Ask her, she’ll know my name.”
“Really.”
“We were crew members at Fairchild. He died on the way here.” Kingston points to the duffel bags. “His ID and papers are in there. And I brought weapons, medicine.”
“We already have weapons and medicine. We weren’t expecting a pregnant woman. This isn’t a hospital or a spa.”
Kingston bristles. “I’m a technician—a mechanic. I can work with anything you have down there—generators, water, air, electrical systems. You need me.”
“She can fix things.” A man behind the woman moves forward, speaking up for the first time. “We can use her.”
“We don’t need a baby.” The woman is emphatic.
Above their heads, dark clouds roll in an unbroken wave, blotting out the sun. This is her last chance. Kingston keeps her voice devoid of emotion, even though she’s swimming in despair. She thought she couldn’t go lower, deeper, but she can. She always will.
“Neither do I.”
The woman doesn’t blink. She’s harder than the ground.
“All right,” Kingston says. “But you know you can’t just let me walk away. Take me in or fucking shoot me. It’s what I’d do.”
Kingston and the woman stare at each other. Wind rattles against the entrance, rolling bits of gravel down the ramp. Particles of radiation already float around them, nestling into cells, blooming like flowers in their bones. How surprised they’ll be when they reach her heart, and find it’s already gone.
The man moves forward, whispers something in the woman’s ear. She sniffs and pulls a frown. “Give him all your weapons,” she says, “then get inside. Hurry.”
Kingston disarms, handing the four weapons and both duffel bags over to a young Hispanic man. The older man pats her down. Kingston’s breath catches in her throat as the man finds the photo. He steps aside, his dirt-creased fingers still caressing its worn edges. She walks into the corridor, turning to watch as they push the thick door shut. Slowly day fades, reduces to a single line of hot white light, the wind to a thin scream.
“Why’s he running,” the man says.
“What?”
The man holds out the photo. “What was coming after him? He’s riding for his motherfucking life.”
Kingston takes the photo. And she sees.
“Oh god,” Kingston says over the screech of metal slamming tight, to the sun, the wind, the world. At her fingertips, the officer rides his pale horse into the unknown.
Desolation
Famine
Black
. . . bugs flutter in loops around the ceiling light. They dip and dive away, return and dance again. Kingston watches them from her cot, amazed to see proof that beyond the concrete walls and press of earth, there’s still life in the world. What lies sleeping beside her is too horrible a joke to be proof enough.
As if reading her thoughts, one tiny hand uncurls and reaches out. Kingston recoils, then tucks the arm back under the blanket—an unkind gesture. The stale air is stifling hot. But Kingston can’t stand to be touched. Especially by the child.
“Knock, knock.” It’s Ephraim, behind the curtain. There aren’t any doors down here, except on cages and lockers that hold medicine, weapons, and electrical equipment. The rest is all open corridors and rooms, constructed from fifty gutted school buses that were lowered into a hole and covered with concrete. This is the shelter Sanders had spoken of with hope: half-finished, filled with faulty plumbing and wiring, and silence. Sometimes it’s so quiet, Kingston hears the land shift about the ceilings. She hears the far-off boom of thunderstorms, the sifting of metal as it rusts and flakes away. She hears herself grow old.
And that thing they cut out of her womb, that creature, grows old with her.
“Come in,” Kingston whispers as she sits up. Loud noises and swift movements horrify the girl, send her into fits that last for hours. Not that Kingston has the strength to yell or move quickly, nowadays. Neither of them do. They’re on strict rations, semi-starvation amounts, with most of it going to the girl, at Ephraim’s insistence.
Kingston watches Ephraim slip his satchel off a bone-thin frame. His hands shake more than usual as he pulls out a carton of soy milk. It’s the one thing they had in abundance—cloying, vanilla soy. Despite her howling stomach, the thought of that taste in her mouth makes Kingston’s gorge rise. She stopped drinking it months ago. Just as well. There’s almost none left.
“Alice, Uncle Ephraim’s going to stay with you for a while, while Mommy goes for a walk.”
“Stop calling her that. Stop calling me ‘Mommy.’ ”
“Sorry, I forgot. Alice, your monster is going for a walk.”
“Whatever.”
Their voices are flat, monotonous. Is this the first or fiftieth time they’ve had this fight? It doesn’t matter. It always ends the same.
“And I told you, she doesn’t have a name.”
“She’s your daughter, she’s almost three. She needs a name.”
“She came out of me. That doesn’t make her my daughter.”
“That’s exactly why she’s your daughter: she came out of you.” Ephraim’s voice catches. “She is you.”
“Shit comes out of me, too.”
Ephraim turns away.
Kingston watches the girl rub her eyes and yawn. Does she understand a word? Her face, as always, is a luminous cipher, her mind a mystery. She made a beautiful baby, that’s for sure, her and that Nez Perce. And all fucked up inside, just like her mom.
“Something funny?” Ephraim glares at her.
“No.” Kingston turns away, biting her tongue. He doesn’t know she lied to him. She did give the child a name, one she’s never said out loud. It’s what she sees every time she looks at the child, what she wants to draw over her, a sign for the world to remove its mistake. She calls her Ex.
“Get her off the bed. I need my jacket.” She doesn’t like to touch Ex, if she can help it.
“Fine.” Despite his diminished strength, Ephraim lifts Ex easily, handing her the teddy bear. As always, Kingston feels a momentary imbalance whenever she watches Ephraim hold Ex, as if some vital part of her has fallen away, never to be found again. She doesn’t know what that feeling is, and it frightens her.
“Which areas did you check?” Kingston asks as she slips her jacket on, willing the feeling away.
“Most of the middle section. I gave up after the toilet. I just don’t—” Ephraim breaks off. He’s young enough to be her son, and he’s wrinkled and aged, with sunken eyes. “I’m tired,” he finishes. He sounds just like the woman sounded, after her husband died. Whatever’s eating away at them gnaws at Ephraim more quickly than Kingston. Radiation poisoning, no doubt, although the defective dosimeters can’t confirm it. She knew they couldn’t escape it, even down here.
“We’re all tired.” Kingston pulls her satchel strap over her shoulders, and a wave of dizzy nausea hits her—low grade, nothing new, she can take it. “Take a nap. You don’t look so good.”
“You’re no beauty queen.”
“Never was.” She smiles—a tight-lipped grin that hides the holes left by those loose teeth of long ago. No matter. It’s been months since she’s felt sorrow or self-pity. Years.
Ephraim sings a Spanish lullaby as Kingston limps into the corridor. Almost immediately, a weight drops from her thin shoulders. Looking in the girl’s face is like looking in a mirror held by a cruel god. After the woman hacked Ex out of Kingston, silent and swollen, Kingston had hobbled out of the room without so much as a glance back, dragging placenta and bloody strands behind her. It wasn’t her fault.
Four months in, she knew it was wrong, but the man wouldn’t let her abort it. He’d kept her under close watch, him and the teenage Ephraim, who they’d found wandering the scablands on their way to the shelter. Maybe it’d have been different, if Sanders’ wife and child had showed up. The man wouldn’t have fixated on that lump in her stomach, “our future” as he put it once. Then again, maybe they did show up. Kingston heard knocking, once, maybe . . .
But maybe that was just a machine—in all the years they’ve been down here, no one’s broken through those steel doors. Now, in every hour of this endless night, Kingston prays that someone will. Because no matter what she’s tried, she can’t break out. The keys are missing, secreted away by that old country bitch in a fit of grief after her husband died. Maybe she figured if her man could never leave the shelter, none of them would. Whatever her reasoning, she damned them all.
Kingston walks into the library—a few crates of books stacked next to a moldering upholstered chair. Kingston points her flashlight at the first crate, and pulls out a large photo album. Has she checked this before? The pages crackle with age as she opens them. The album is old, but some of the photos are recent—picnics and holidays, births and weddings. Kingston sighs. Tables laden with Kodachrome-colored meals. Children, radiant and laughing in sunny rooms. Thick-furred dogs, plump cattle, glossy mares—
The album slips from her hands. Quick, before the thought races from her head like a horse slipping its reins. She lopes into the hallway, heading to the farthest end of the shelter, where the storage rooms sit. Several times she pauses, hands trembling against crumbling walls. She took a journey like this, once before. All she’s ever done is race down empty highways, with no destination in sight.
In the last room, next to a half-dug exit tunnel, the man lays on a cot, dead almost two years now from the cancer that ate him down to nubs. The last time Kingston was down here, the woman’s weapon had just fallen from her mouth. She’d refused food and water for days, just sat there in silence after he’d died. Kingston had left her alone, figured she’d stop mourning eventually. She couldn’t. A bullet did it for her.
Kingston’s fingers feel for the light switch, click it back and forth several times. The bulb must have burned out long ago. Kingston gives her flashlight several shakes to reactivate the cells. A circle of faint blue pops onto an empty chair.
“Shit.” Kingston falls back against the door. “No fucking way.” Steadying her hand, she points the beam over the man’s desiccated body, then moves it down. The light hits a pair of withered feet.
A shaky laugh erupts from her mouth. The body slid off the chair onto the floor, that’s all. No ghosts or ghouls here. Kingston pushes the chair aside, then kicks the body with her boot. It rolls back, revealing a wizened face, empty eye sockets, and a broken nose to compliment the teeth.
“I hope you’re in hell.” Kingston kicks the body again as she turns to the man—skeletal and crippled, with a face locked in pain. She and Ephraim had listened to his screaming for days. Oddly, the sounds hadn’t upset Ex at all. She’d been the most well-behaved she’d ever been. Kingston should have recorded his death howls, to play them back for her as lullabies.
Kingston pats him down. “Please let it be here,” she says, as she pushes his body over and rips the stiff fabric from his flesh. The old photo of her relative—Kingston had hidden it away in her room, but it vanished not long after. She told herself he’d stolen it, an easy lie to live with. Easier than thinking she’d lost the one thing that meant more to her than anything else in the world.
“No.” It wasn’t anywhere on him. And this was the only place she hadn’t searched. Kingston sits on the edge of the bed, her shoulders slumping as she runs the light over the woman. She stares at the weapon. The woman’s finger still laces through the trigger—one brown digit has separated from the hand, pointing to the woman’s head like a twiggy arrow. Kingston reaches down, and the flashlight catches the glint of the barrel, a silver filling, and—
No, not a filling. A beaded chain—two, created for one purpose: to hold something.
Like keys.
“You swallowed them. You shot them into yourself.”
Kingston tugs at the chains. They run deep into her head, where the bullet rammed them. She hears the faint clink of metal, and a strange rasp—she’d swear the woman was choking even now. Well, fuck her. Kingston pulls, hard. The woman’s head lifts, and inside, cartilage and tendons crack. It sounds like the saltwater taffy pulls her mother used to buy for her at the fair, the ones that broke in sharp pieces if you whacked them just the right way. Kingston lets go of the chains. All that hot metal and blood and brains have fused into a single stubborn mass.
Not a problem.
Kingston brings her boot down, hard. A satisfying crunch fills the room as bones and tissue grind beneath her heel. “Someone walking on your grave, bitch?” She raises her foot, and stomps on the head again. A loud crack: the entire jaw breaks off, and the rest of the face caves inward. Kingston smiles.
Her boot comes down again. The head is pulp now, a sticky-dry mash of brain and bone slivers. The woman’s hair lies on the floor like silver-threaded silk, beaded with ivory teeth. Kingston admires it as she reaches down.
This time, the chains lift freely, clusters of keys swinging from looped ends. Most will open electrical lockers, weapon and drug caches—keys Ephraim and Kingston already have duplicates of. But six of them should unlock the entrance door. Kingston runs a ragged fingertip over serrated edges. She thinks of the town she and Sanders drove through, the sleepy houses and the soft sound of leaves rustling in the cool night air.
Maybe it’s not too late.
Kingston’s halfway back to her room when she stops. Flakes of concrete crinkle onto her face as she listens. At the end of the hall, Ephraim sits behind the curtain, holding that thing she birthed. She hear snatches of words and phrases, and an occasional squeal or grunt as Ex replies as best she can.
Kingston’s fingers steal up to the tangle of dog tags and launch keys resting between her flat breasts. They’ve rubbed the skin down to red cuts and rashes, thumping at her chest every time she breathes or moves. A vision of the girl as she might have been hovers next to them, staining her soul. She’s always there, inescapable.
Unless . . .
Before she has a chance to ask herself could I? her feet are backtracking away from Ephraim, away from—Away. Kingston glides in quiet steps past the decontamination rooms, past a reception area that’s never received anything other than dust, and up the conveyer belt ramp to the thick metal door. After so many years, this is it. She’s free.
The locks are dusty, but undamaged. Kingston picks out the cleanest key, trying to work it into the lower lock. It doesn’t fit the first keyhole, or any of the others. She moves to the next key, slightly bent but intact. It fits the fourth lock. Kingston turns the key and the sound of the tumblers clicking fills her with such joy that she almost passes out. One down, five to go.
And then the rest of the keys, and then—
She doesn’t know how long she’s been leaning against the door, sweat dribbling into her boots. She only knows that at some point, the only keys left are the mangled lumps of metal that the bullet destroyed. If she could rip the bones from the woman’s body and whittle them into the two missing keys she needs—but, it’s no use. They’re here now till they die, and long after.
Kingston she slides to the floor. The thought of walking back into that maze, back to that child, of spending her final days trapped in the earth—she can’t do it. Kingston wraps the chains tight around her fingers until they turn blue. She stares at them, blinking hard.
“Two door keys on each chain. Two chains.”
She pauses, the headache dissolving.
“There should be three chains, each with two keys. One for the man. One for the woman. And—” Kingston stands.
“And one.”
Decay
Death
Pale
>
. . . skin floats up through the dark, as if a swimmer is breaking the surface of the ocean. Kingston tightens her grip on her weapon. Hold onto that, she thinks, don’t go away again. There’s nothing for her in that mindless black.
Ephraim stands before her, stripped bare, skeletal. Black and purple bruises smudge his decaying skin. He’s at the end.
“Satisfied?” Tears trickle down his face, but his voice is calm. At his feet, Ex clings to her bear. “I told you, the keys aren’t on me. Or in me.”
“But you have them.”
“I had them.”
“If you had them, what the fuck where you pretending to look for all this time?”
“It doesn’t matter. There’s nothing for us out there.”
“That’s not the point.”
“Then what is the point? All we’ll do out there is die.”
“But we’ll die outside, under the sky—we’ll be free!”
“We stopped being free the day a bunch of assholes in uniform dropped the bomb.”
Kingston’s finger jumps against the trigger.
“Fine. You and that—” she points to Ex “—can stay here as long as you like. Give me the keys.”
A peaceful look steals over Ephraim’s face, giving him an almost sculptural beauty. He’s preparing himself. She can tell.
“No.”
“You tell me where those motherfucking keys are or I’ll kill you, you fucking fag piece of shit!”
The girl begins crying, howls that make Kingston cringe. Something hot and hard burns in Kingston. Columns of smoke and flame, pluming up—
“No.”
“Tell me!”
“No.”
It’s like he’s already gone, and she’s still stuck inside the rotting cunt of the world. Kingston points the weapon up, and fires. Sparks shower over them like fireworks. Ex convulses against Ephraim’s leg.
“TELL ME!”
Silence, then:
“All right.”
Kingston feels a cold finger press against her soul.
“I’ll tell you on one condition.” Ephraim touches Ex’s head.
“Give your daughter a name.”
Kingston opens her mouth.
