After the End: Recent Apocalypses

by Kage Baker

  But you clung to what dignity you could. Gage did, anyway. Killing people when you didn’t absolutely have to lacked dignity, in Gage’s view.

  “Don’t come no closer,” the man said. He hefted the ax-handle warningly. It was missing its ax blade but he’d found a stiff blade from a kitchen knife somewhere and he’d pushed it into a crack at one end of the handle and wrapped it in place with black electric tape.

  “You were a soldier,” Gage observed. “Where’s your weapon?”

  “I got it, real close,” the man said. After thinking laboriously a moment, he said, “My partner’s got it trained on your ass right now.”

  Gage laughed. “No one’s got a partner. I saw some people try it, before I came here—watched from a roof for two days. They tried partnering by staying twenty feet away from each other. But eventually they would fuck that up, get too close—and you know what happened. Every time. You haven’t got a partner—or a gun.”

  The man shrugged. He wasn’t going to waste his breath on any more lies. He looked at the dog, licking his lips. Finally he said, “You knock that dog in the head, push it where I can get it, I’ll go away for good.”

  “That dog’s worth ten like you,” Gage said. He made up his mind. It’d be pretty ironic if the AggFac had worn off, finally, and he and Brenda were staying out of reach for no reason. Of course, there was no reason to think it ever wore off. But everyone, as far as he knew, hoped it would, eventually. They didn’t know what caused it, exactly—there were lots of theories— so maybe it’d wear off as mysteriously as it came. For no good reason, the brain would revert to normal.

  Yeah right. But for Brenda’s sake he stepped closer to the stranger, within The Nineteen, to see if the AggFac was still there in him.

  He felt it immediately. The clutching up feeling, the hot geysering from the back of his skull, the heat spreading to his face, his arms. The tightening of his hands, his jaws, the background humming; the tight focus on His Enemy. And the change in the way things look—going almost colorless. Not black and white, but sickly sepia and gray, with shadows all deep and inky.

  Since Gage had come within The Nineteen, the stranger was seized by the AggFac too, and his face went beet red, the veins at his temples popping up. As if propelled from behind he came rushing at Gage, stopped only by the fence, hammering at the chain links with his ax handle, making that Eeeeee sound in the back of his throat they all made—the sound Gage might’ve been making himself, he could never tell somehow. Hammering the ax handle to splinters as Gage shoved the barrel of the shotgun through a fence link and pulled the trigger at point blank range . . .

  The stranger fell away, gasping and dying. The AggFac ebbed. Color seeped back into the world.

  Gage heard the dog barking, and saw it start for the hole in the fence. Wanting to get at the stranger’s body.

  “No, Gassie,” Gage said, feeling tired and empty and half-dead himself. He grabbed the dog by its short tail, pulled it back before it was quite through the hole. It snarled at him but let him do it. He blocked up the hole with rocks, then started toward the end of the fence, where it projected over the cliff. He’d have to go down by the rocks, about fifty feet south of the fence’s end, thread the path, climb the other cliff, to get the body, drag it to the sea. A lot of work.

  But he didn’t want to leave the bloody corpse there for Brenda to find. He wanted her to come to the fence . . .

  So he trudged off toward the cliffs.

  November 2nd, 2023

  My face hurts from scraping at it with that knife. Used up a lot of soap in place of shaving cream. Hope the contusions go down before she sees me up close. Not too close, of course.

  Will she come? She’d be foolish to come. She doesn’t know me. She can see the fence from across the river but she doesn’t know if it’ll keep her safe from me. I might have a gate for all she knows. She’s never been out to the point.

  She says she’s coming. We agreed on high noon. She’s got a longer-range weapon than me. She doesn’t seem stupid. She’ll be smart about it. She’ll get close enough to take stock of the situation, with that gun right up against her shoulder, but not so close I could rush her.

  I think she does understand that outside the AggFac I’m not some thug, some rapist. But she may decide not to take the chance. Or someone may kill her before she gets here. I think it’s almost noon . . .

  “Hi! Can you see me okay?” Gage called, spreading his hands so she could see he didn’t have the shotgun. She was still about a hundred feet off, on the other side of the fence, assessing the situation from cover, like he’d figured she would, the rifle propped on the top of a big tree stump and pointed right at him.

  Dangerous, not to bring the shotgun. But it was meaningful. They both knew that. Not carrying your gun was like, in the old days, bringing a bouquet of flowers.

  Still, this could be a setup. She could be after his goods. She could want his cabin, maybe. She could shoot him, and Gassie, if she had the ammo. Shoot him from safety where she was. Nothing to stop her. A couple of rounds, one’d get through that fence. Down he’d go . . .

  He kept his arms spread. Standing in the open, a little clearing with just rock-strewn dirt on the ground, so she could see he didn’t have the shotgun anywhere near—like, hidden behind a rock close to him. His gun could be somewhere in the brush, of course. But at least it wasn’t in easy reach.

  Slowly, she got out from behind the stump and walked toward him. She glanced right and left now and then. Looked at the dog, sitting there wagging its tail, beside him. She smiled.

  “Hi Brenda,” he said, when she got to about twenty-one paces, and stopped. Slowly, she lowered the gun, holding it cradled in her arms.

  Then she sat down, her legs crossed, deciding to trust him that much. He sat down too, on his side of the fence. The dog put his head on Gage’s lap.

  “I’m embarrassed to tell you his name,” Gage said, patting the dog. “It’s Gassie.”

  “Gassie!” She laughed. “After Lassie, right?” She had all of her teeth, which was unusual in itself. Her face had lots of roundness to it, but she wasn’t pie-faced. Her eyes were dark brown, he saw, and the shape of them suggested she had some American Indian blood. She’d put her hair up, in a simple kind of way, and she seemed clean.

  “What now?” he asked, as mildly, as casually, as much without pressure as he could.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I just needed to see someone up close as I could, and you seemed nice.” She shrugged. “As much as anyone can be, with the—you know.”

  He nodded, deciding he needed to be as completely honest with her as possible. “I tried it, yesterday, when a stranger came up to the fence. I deliberately stepped closer, just to see. I always hope it might go away some time.”

  “I’ve never heard of it going away.”

  “No. Reports on the radio say it never has for anyone. Kids don’t outgrow it, old people don’t get over it. It hit me the same as always.”

  She nodded, not having to ask what’d happened.

  “I don’t feel too bad,” he added. “Guy was trying to eat my dog.”

  She nodded again. That she understood too, both sides. “You fish?”

  “Sure.” They talked a long time about practical things like that. He told her about his water filter, the crabs, the fish, the wild plants he knew—she knew them too—and about the forays to the food drops.

  “They’ll drop food to us sometimes, the foreign people,” she said, “but they seem to have just . . . given up on curing it. Unless—you said you had a radio? You heard anything?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing new. One guy—hard to get the signal, I think it was from the Virgin Islands, I had to move the radio around—he said the Japanese thought it was some kind of nanotech-creation that got out of hand, like an artificial virus, supposed to alter your brain wiring in a good way, does it in a bad way instead, jumps from person to person. Then there’s the biowarfare theory, the mutated
virus theory . . . ”

  “The one I liked was about the schizophrenia virus. Back in the twentieth century some people thought a lot of mental illness is caused by a virus that gets in the brain. They think this is a mutation of the schizophrenia virus. They thought schizophrenia was something you could get from cat shit, once.”

  “I always knew there was some reason I didn’t like cats.”

  She laughed.

  “Whatever it is,” he went on, venting, “you’d think someone would make some damn progress by now. No vaccines, nothing. It is like they’re just waiting for us to die. Won’t let anybody come to their perfect little countries. That blockade in Panama, shoot down our planes . . . ”

  “Can you blame them?” she asked.

  He knew what she meant. The world had watched, as the “Aggression Factor” rolled over a hemisphere; as millions of people had killed one another: people in North America and Mexico, all the way to the geo-quarantine at the Panama Canal; the world had watched as millions of longtime neighbors had killed one another; watched as an unthinkable number of husbands had killed their wives, and wives their husbands; as unspeakable quantities of children were murdered by parents, by siblings, by friends; as others murdered their parents. As women throttled babies freshly plucked from the womb—and then wept in utter bafflement. He remembered a boy walking through the ruins of Sacramento, weeping, “Why did I kill my mom? Why did I kill my mom?” And then the boy had come within nineteen steps and . . . without meaning to, Gage had put him out of his misery.

  “Nah. I don’t blame them. I just . . . ” He didn’t have to say it. She smiled sadly and they understood one another.

  “Nice not to have to shout.”

  “Yeah. I . . . have some dried fish for you, if you need it. I’ll leave it at the fence. I thought maybe I’d loan you my solar radio, too, if you wanted. The dog dug a hole under the fence a ways down. I could push it under there . . . leave it for you to get later. You can see me walking a good quarter mile off from there.”

  “That’s so sweet. You look like you carved your face up a bit . . .”

  “Best I could do with what I had.”

  “You’re still a nice looking guy.”

  Probably not when the AggFac hits, he thought. But he said only, “Thanks.”

  “I’ll borrow the radio, I promise to bring it back . . . ”

  November 6, 2023

  I’ve seen her every day but yesterday—I was really worried yesterday when she didn’t come but she had to duck a guy who had gotten wind of her. He was stalking her. She finally managed to lure him up to a hill she knew real well and she shot him from cover. Smart, cool-headed girl. I’m crazy about her. Of course, I can’t get within nineteen steps of her but . . . I’m still crazy about her.

  She told me about a girl who’d lived down the street from her, they talked from rooftops, sometimes. The girl would trade a look at her naked body to guys who’d come around, look at her naked up on a second floor balcony. She had a gun up there in case they started up. They’d leave her food and stuff and they’d look at her naked and masturbate. It worked for awhile but of course some predator got wind of it, some guy who was always more or less AggFac, even before it came along, and he busted in and jumped her. Killed her, of course, the AggFac won’t be denied, but I figure her body was still warm afterwards. Lot of bodies get raped now.

  Why did Brenda tell me this story? Maybe suggesting we trusted each other enough to get naked, if only from a distance? I’m too embarrassed to masturbate even if she’s doing it too. That desperate I’m not.

  I wrote her some poetry I’m going to leave for her. She might blow me off for good after she reads it, if she’s got any taste . . .

  “Feels like it might snow,” Brenda said, hugging herself against the morning mist, the occasional gusts of cold wind.

  “Kind of cold. I could go back, get you a blanket, toss it over.” They were sitting in their usual spot, fence between them.

  “Oh, it’d probably get stuck on the wire,” she said.

  “I could send Gassie over again to keep you warm.”

  “Last time he came over he humped my leg.”

  “He did? I didn’t see that.” He was only momentarily tempted to say, I don’t blame him. Even now he could be slicker than that.

  “There’s something I wanted to talk to you about,” she said. She chewed her lip for a moment, then went on, “Look—you ever hear about someone being cured of, like, a phobia, before the AggFac, by getting used to whatever they were scared of, little by little? Scared of flying, they made you go to airports, sit in a plane, but then get off the plane before it flies, look at pictures taken out a plane window, till you’re ready to fly . . . all that kind of thing. You know?”

  “Yeah, I forget what they call that. But . . . you don’t think the AggFac would work that way. It’s not a phobia.”

  “No it isn’t. But it’s a kind of compulsive aversion for people . . . when they get physically close. Right? What if a person could sort of inure themselves to the presence of another person within nineteen steps—by slow degrees? Make the brain accustomed to the other person . . . the wiring of the brain itself acclimated to them.”

  “How? It’s so powerful that even if your eyes are shut and you can’t see the person, soon as you know they’re close, the AggFac hits and you kill them. Whatever you do, the murder reflex comes out. I mean—I could probably find a way to restrain myself, somehow, for awhile, so I couldn’t get loose too easily. So you could get close—but then, let’s face it, you’d kill me. I mean, mothers killed children they loved all their lives . . . ”

  “Sure. But . . . suppose we both restrain ourselves somewhat. With rope, whatever, the weapons off somewhere, we keep the fence between us at first, but we’re basically within reach. I don’t think I could even bite you through those links. But we could have some contact . . . ”

  The idea made him breathless. His blood raced as he thought about it. But then he shook his head. “Even if we didn’t hurt one another—we’d hate one another, within The Nineteen. There’d be no pleasure in it—just rage.”

  “Our brains would feel that way—at first. But our bodies! Our bodies would . . . I think they’d respond. It’d be a kind of . . . counter force in the brain. Maybe enough, after awhile, to . . . Oh, Gage, I can’t take this distance from people much longer. I’m . . . I’ve got skin hunger. It’s bad. I have to try something.”

  “Hey. Me too. And I really, really like you. I’d have liked you before all this stuff, I swear it. But—even if we couldn’t hurt each other, how would the encounter ever end? We’d be smashing at each other through the fence!”

  “That’s the risk. There has to be some risk. There always was some risk. But Gage—I want to try. I think that . . . if I’m starting to hurt myself against the fence, I’ll finally manage to back off and the AggFac’ll go away. Then we can try again. We can inure. We can accustom. We can . . . acclimate. Maybe you’ll stop seeing me as . . . the other. Maybe I’ll be, like, an extension of you, after awhile, so the AggFac won’t come any more, at least when it’s me.”

  “You mean . . . you want to get naked, on either side of the fence . . . ”

  “Yeah. Well, I’ll keep my coat on, and some boots. Won’t look too elegant but . . . I’m burning to touch you. I want to love you. I want you to love me . . . ”

  She was crying now. Finally he said yes.

  November 11, 2023

  The weather cleared up some, and, partly naked, we tried it. We each had our guns put way out of reach but where the other could see it. She had some rope, left some for me—she’d pushed it through the mesh, inch by inch, while she was waiting for me. We took turns, measuring it out carefully. The rope went from a tree behind me to the fence, just enough so I could press against it, but restraining me so I couldn’t start to climb over it easily. My arms were tied to my sides. That was tricky. Had to work with our teeth, use a fork in a tree to pull a knot taut
, stuff like that. Laughing a lot back and forth as we worked out how to do it, all alone, each on their side of the fence. Of course we knew it was still possible to get out of the rope but it would take time and the other could get away or get their gun . . . We thought maybe we’d be too frenzied with kill lust or the other kind to really work out how to attack the other person with all that stuff in the way. The AggFac isn’t about thinking or planning, god knows.

  I used up the last of my soap, getting ready for this. She had cleaned herself up too.

  We came close, the fence between us, the rope restraining us. The AggFac hit and there was no remembering how we’d said we’d loved each other, there was no remembering how we wanted to trust.

  He tried to nap at her nose through the mesh, envisioned tearing it off in his teeth, but couldn’t reach her. She tried to bite into his chin, couldn’t reach it.

  But their skin touched, through the links, and he did get a hard-on under the rope—it was roped to his belly, no way it was going to be free to go through that fence, she’d bite it off for sure. They writhed and snapped and snarled and then she managed to back away.

  Still, I swear something did get through the AggFac, some other feeling—it really did get through. Just enough.

  We both got bloody on the fence but we’re going to try again. We have a plan, a way to try it in the cabin.

  His heart was slamming in his chest, so loud he could hear it in the quiet of the cabin. He just lay there on his bunk listening to his heart thudding, trying the ropes, hoping the self-restraint system he’d worked up was going to hold him long enough. He could get out of the ropes, afterward, but it’d take time. The dog was tied up in the woods. He was ready for her to come. Maybe she wouldn’t show up. He’d lie here like an idiot and some son of a bitch would climb over the fence and find him here, before he got loose, and he’d be helpless. Then dead.

  Big risk, trying it in the cabin this way. Risk from her too. She said she was getting some control over the AggFac, but how long would it last, in close proximity?