Desert Angels

by George P. Saunders

  December 31

  No change. Greenhouse Effect worse than previously anticipated. Minor power failure on generator 2. I read and pace; Laura cleans her guns.

  January 5

  No change. We sleep most of day.

  February 11th

  Nothing to report. Thought we had something on the radio on a military frequency; but it fizzled. Still alone.

  February 12th

  Ferocious winds; frightening. Structure still secure; outside shelter for Ball Job still intact. We try to sleep despite the wind.

  February 14th

  Valentine's Day. I pull out candy from rations; first time I see Laura smile since End Day. Still dark out; winds died down; but now hail.

  February 28th

  I write again today. I have a beard. Skies clearing; but no sun. Don't expect to see one for awhile. Strange lights outside; they come and go; an anomaly. Radiation still too high for closer observation. Laura stares out the window most of the day. As if she's expecting something. I tell her not to expect anything. She mentioned something about a shadow moving independently across the land. An optical illusion.

  She doesn't believe me, I think.

  March 1

  Life! Incredible (see Official Entry; Analysis). Creatures; fantastic; a whole new strain of human, I think. Mutations on a different order; they've attacked facility, but appear uncoordinated and sluggish. I tell Laura not to worry; again, she does not believe me. She conducts target practice in the garage. She has taught herself to be a crack shot. Something I never wanted for her.

  March 2.

  Vampires, Laura calls them, as she reports large fangs, incisors. We disagree. I count 10 or 20. Amazing; accelerated mutation. Nothing on radio; all quiet except for mutant activity. Skies clearer; still no sun. Outside temperature around 20 degrees centigrade. I shaved beard; decide that I like it; plan to grow it back.

  March 3

  Same as yesterday; we're restless, irritable.

  March 23

  Three month anniversary of End Day. Not much to celebrate. Radiation levels dropping; I talk to Laura about going outside.

  We argue.

  March 31

  I walk on the moon for five minutes. Attacked by vampires; Laura kills three. I decide to construct deterrent.

  April 14

  Tax day. I decide not to file. Fence completed. I electrify it; holds up fine; vampires hate it.

  May 1

  I take soil samples (see Background Digest/Analysis). I worry for Laura; she's getting wild, so soon.

  June 15

  Vampire population, around 30. Beard is back.

  July 31

  God, I just now realize how alone we are! Still no sun; I worry about Ozone collapse, potential exposure threat (See Background; Analysis Digest).

  August 30

  Laura kills vampire inside wire; I dissect. (See Background Digest; Analysis). I am confounded by findings.

  Vampires are animated corpses.

  Incredible.

  September 15

  Vampire tissue practically indestructible; gamma and ph levels off scale; brain activity negligible; all physio-neuro response unmotivated.

  I feel sadness. And horror.

  These are people.

  All dead.

  October 3

  Laura insists I learn how to shoot. She teaches me. She kills vampires at random, against my wishes.

  November 15

  The days pass; we are well, but despondent. Glowing lights return (See Background Digest; Analysis). The world has changed. So much I do not understand. I worry for Laura.

  I say a prayer.

  December 23

  One year since End Day. Fencing fails; over twenty vampires in compound. Laura fights bravely; we kill almost all with flamethrowers. I am sad; we kill so many. No other way; creatures incommunicable.

  December 25

  Merry Christmas.

  December 26

  Laura's birthday. 25 years old.

  God, I love her. Have I done right?

  What have I saved her for?

  The strange lights come back again; anomaly.

  January 14

  My birthday. Too damned old.

  We're bored; we sulk, we argue; Laura has changed.

  So have I.

  February 3

  I have begun to read Robinson Crusoe; sounds familiar.

  March 15

  The Ides are upon us. We hang on still.

  * * *

  "One day you'll have to leave this place," Victor Talbot told his daughter. "Find other people."

  Laura snapped a butane canister to her flamethrower. The gun had a custom look to it; a creation personal to Laura Talbot. It was light, ugly and effective.

  "Everyone is dead," she said, watching a particularly active little Stiffer pace back and forth against the fence two hundred feet away. It growled and slobbered and stared at Victor and Laura with mad, diseased hate. Laura smiled; you're mine, dog meat, she told it with her eyes. Hate, pure and clean, filled her mind.

  "No," Victor protested. "Not everyone. It can't be."

  "A year, daddy," Laura said. "It's been over a year. No people. Only them," she nodded toward the vampire. "Better get used to it."

  Victor watched his daughter and he shook his head. He sometimes thought Laura enjoyed civilization's collapse; or rather its consequence – a less crowded world.

  "Laura?"

  Laura walked away from her father. She moved to within ten feet of the fence and the screaming mutant. It's bulbous eyes seemed to roll uncontrollably in its head; spit and drool sprayed everywhere. It began to gnaw at the wire and was promptly thrown back several feet by the substantial voltage.

  "Laura, please –" Victor said and didn't finish.

  Laura aimed her flamethrower and released a steady burst of white fire. The vampire howled and writhed, a non-living living torch. It thrashed for the better part of a minute, then stilled, smoldering.

  Laura turned back and looked at Victor.

  Her face was not cruel or angry. Merely impassive.

  "We're alone, daddy. Get used to it."

  * * *

  PERSONAL LOG, TALBOT, VICTOR

  February 14 - 2nd Year

  Valentine's Day again. Maybe Laura's right.

  We are alone.

  I do very little these days.

  I envy Laura.

  At least she has something to hate.

  * * *

  Laura stared up at the ceiling above her bed.

  Hate.

  Even in her dreams, she could hate.

  And remember.

  * * *

  Sweet Sixteen.

  Laura stared up at the blue sky and closed her eyes; this is my day, she thought; the best of all days.

  "We'll wait for Victor here, Laura honey," Charlie "Peanut" Davenport said to her, when he opened the front door of his home. The recent hurricane which had swamped Victor and Laura's house had left Uncle Charlie Davenport's house virtually untouched. "Just like a women," Charlie had commented a week before, just after the storm's passing. "Unpredictable and destructive."

  It had been a joke; like Charlie's nickname, Peanut. Everyone had laughed. Charlie Davenport was a confirmed bachelor who purportedly hated women; a harmless misogynist who could never really hate anyone. A brilliant M.D. – just not a lady's man.

  Laura loved him almost as much as her own father.

  "He said he'd come here, Uncle Charlie?" Laura had asked. She thought it vaguely strange that Victor hadn't called the home of Sally Davenport, where Laura's surprise birthday party had been staged. Sally had found it odd herself.

  "Just left him at the base," Charlie had said, shrugging. "That damned shuttle is acting up again. And you know how Victor is with his baby?"

  Everyone knew alright. The NASA Mars program was Victor's child; it had suffered some major setbacks of late, mainly budgetary cuts. Several years of repeated funding cut-backs had not h
elped; from a technical standpoint, it left NASA and its manned Mars mission program emasculated and virtually defunct.

  "Poor man," Sally Davenport had nodded half an hour earlier. "Couldn't even make his daughter's birthday party."

  "No prob," Laura had quipped. "We'll have dinner tonight."

  That's when Charlie had mentioned Victor's desire for Laura to stay with him.

  Sally Davenport had shrugged and nodded.

  Laura thought it a grand idea.

  Charlie walked in the door first. Laura followed.

  "Uncle Charlie –"

  But Laura, at sweet sixteen, didn't finish.

  Dr. Charlie "Peanut" Davenport had his hands around her throat.

  * * *

  She screamed.

  But she did not hear herself or know that she was screaming; in a moment, she knew that her mouth was being covered, muffling her terrified moans.

  Her clothes were being ripped.

  And her legs were being forced open.

  The world was light and twisted and Laura fought for breath.

  And then she felt the pain, radiating from below, shooting up into her stomach. The pain increased, then magnified itself into white agony.

  But even with the pain, there was sound.

  Uncle Charlie's sounds.

  "Not a peanut, not a peanut, you bitch –"

  And then he yelled and rolled off of her.

  Laura gagged and sucked in air. She noticed blood on her legs and on the floor. Her blood. And smells she had never smelled before. Smells of discharge, smells of sickness.

  Smells of hate.

  Her eyes found Uncle Charlie's.

  He was staring at her blankly, like a newborn baby; she had worked down at Canaveral Medical for a summer in obstetrics – she knew babies, loved them, had cared for them. She loved their innocence, their dependency. Their sense of clear wonder at everything around them.

  All of these things could be seen in the eyes of a baby.

  All of these things now registered in Uncle Charlie's eyes.

  He reached out to her.

  Laura pulled back, a hiss escaping her, though she was not aware of any sound she made.

  "Baby, I'm sorry –"

  Laura stared, her eyes forever changed.

  Laura watched him get up, his pants trailing almost comically on his ankles. He looked down at himself, wiped the blood from his penis and began to cry. Without looking at Laura, he staggered to the kitchen.

  Laura didn't follow.

  She heard the small scream. And then the sound of a body falling to the floor.

  Pain still dominated her body; but she fought it, hated it, refused to give in to it. She crawled part way to the kitchen, then stood and walked.

  She found Charlie Davenport sprawled on the floor, a large butcher's knife imbedded in his throat. Both his hands still clung to the hilt, the reflex of death freezing them in place as he had ended his own life.

  Laura stared at the corpse without feeling.

  Slowly, she knelt down and withdrew the blade from Uncle Charlie's neck.

  The pain was gone, she noticed; so was her terror.

  Something else had replaced it.

  When Victor Talbot found her one hour later, Laura Talbot was still plunging the knife into Charlie Davenport's lifeless body.

  * * *

  Nine years.

  And the hate was still there. Channeled, Laura thought, into her vampire-liquidation campaign with satisfactory effectiveness.

  In two years, she had killed one hundred and eight mutants. If her father allowed it, Laura would have been delighted to go outside of the fence and hunt them down.

  She could not imagine hating the vampires more than she already did.

  Not yet, anyway.

  * * *

  She woke up from the dream to screams.

  Her father's screams.

  She sat there in her cot for just a moment; the shadows of her dream - her past - weighted her down. They would dissolve in a few seconds, she knew; but they could not be rushed.

  By the time she did react, Victor Talbot lay half devoured.

  She found him covered by three of them; they looked up from their feast and stared at her with a collective expression of horror.

  In the vampire community, Laura Talbot was a recognized enemy; one that had so far always prevailed with the power of flame.

  "Get away from him, you bastards!" Laura yelled, and released the fury of her weapon at two mutants lunging her way.

  The flame blasted into the vampires and sent them hurdling to the ground, screaming and burning. The last vampire took one more enormous bite out of Victor Talbot's already shredded leg and retreated to the torn fencing where it had gained entrance with the others.

  Laura released a controlled burst of fire; just enough to embrace the vampire's head in flame and nothing more. It would take the thing longer to die, Laura knew; it's pathetic excuse for a brain would be the last thing to cook.

  The vampire was still screaming five minutes later, as Laura was dragging Victor Talbot back to their fortified compound.

  * * *

  LOG, PERSONAL; TALBOT, VICTOR

  No date

  I'll be dead soon. Laura will be alone.

  God forgive me.

  * * *

  Victor Talbot's breathing was short, raspy, flooded.

  Laura had finished the bandaging – and the necessary amputations, per her father's instructions. Now she had time to cry.

  "The generators," Victor struggled. "They are your life. Without them, you die. Remember that. If you must, go out into the world in the Ball Job. It will not let you down."

  Laura nodded, tears running down her face.

  Victor Talbot wanted to say so much to her; but, of course, he knew this was unnecessary. And so he only looked at her crying, holding her hand.

  "Your mother – she would – be angry with me," he said in a broken whisper.

  Laura's mother, who died giving birth to her, had been a small women with quiet manners and a fierce capacity for giving. Victor Talbot had, in the past, talked of her often to Laura. Laura, who did not believe in god, prayed to the memory of her mother in times of trial. She prayed to her mother now, begging her for the life of her father.

  "It's time – to leave here," Victor Talbot said.

  "I'll go, daddy. When you're better."

  Victor had to smile.

  "Laura."

  "What, daddy?" Laura said, her face ashen with misery. She expected him to tell her that he loved her, or to be careful, or to eat regularly – it is what he had told her always since she could remember anything about her father.

  But Victor Talbot only smiled and winked at Laura.

  "Give em' hell," he said.

  Laura laughed then kissed him, loving him more than ever.

  * * *

  She burned her father’s body, because she knew that the smell of it would drive the vampires to desperation; she was not afraid of them coming into the compound (in fact, she almost relished the prospect); but her thinking had suddenly become more sober, more careful. It would be wiser not to aggravate the mutants too much.

  Because now she was truly alone. And that aloneness made her feel, for the first times since the war, afraid.

  But fear she had once known – and killed. Laura killed it now. Again. She would not give in to madness. She would survive.

  Somehow, she would survive.

  * * *

  But because the aloneness was so monumental, Laura knew that she would have to keep busy. She did not have to do this before.

  Not when her father was still alive.

  He could stay occupied for them both; he would fix the machines, worry for their safety, hypothesize on what was happening to the world around them. Thus, she was always afforded ample time to hate and kill.

  Now, things had changed.

  The things her father had once done, she would now have to do. There would be less
time for hate and killing; the vampires, for awhile anyway, would enjoy a reprieve of sorts.

  And so, after she burned her father's body, Laura began to function as her father had done. She began to read Victor Talbot's books, to fix his generators, to monitor his various experiments concerning earth and air. She took care of the heavily corrugated habitat of two inch steel, and maintained the brain child of Victor Talbot, the mobile fusion rover that Victor had nicknamed the Ball Job.

  In short, she began to learn.

  She continued to learn for the next few months.

  But she did not learn to believe.

  Like one Jack Calisto, she accepted the simple truth that Earth had become a living hell.

  And for her, despite her father's faith and hopes, there was no escape.

  THE FEMALE OF THE SPECIES

  IS MORE DEADLY

  THAN THE MALE

  Rudyard Kipling

  NINE – MARRIAGE OF TWO WORLDS

  Two hours into the trip, Jack took a radiation reading.

  Rad levels had already risen twenty points on the meter – well above the safety limits for human beings. Exposure to this kind of balmy, atomic climate for more than a day would be deadly. If he turned around now, he could reach the safer sands of the lower desert in and around Eden's known borders, with little or no contamination. On the other hand, if he continued south – toward Laura – and according to the Angel's directions, he might find himself deeper in radioactive territory, with the point of no return long passed and immaterial to his own chances for survival.

  Turn back now, his conscience hounded him; listen to old Blackie on this one. Save yourself like you've always done.

  Jack swore quietly to himself and floored the Humvee. He had not begun this journey with the idea he was always going to be safe. For the next hour he argued with himself, as the radiation levels continued to rise, whether he should get out while the going was good. He had traveled far beyond the familiar hills surrounding Eden. He looked to Walter occasionally, as if half expecting some sound word of wisdom or advice to be delivered his way by the bird. But Walter was unusually quiet and subdued.