Writers of the Future Volume 28: The Best New Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year

by L. Ron Hubbard

  Listening to the list, Gage smiled. He had taught himself each activity, having read how from books, then had taught Adah.

  Adah emerged from the coop with a pail of feathers and stinking feces for the compost, a look of accomplishment on her face.

  Monk asked what had happened to Gage’s leg.

  “It’s nothing,” Gage said, his voice firm.

  Adah’s brow scrunched with concern. “Let me see.” She gestured for him to sit beside Monk. Monk scooted over.

  “I’ll be fine,” Gage said. He limped to the house.

  Monk said it looked bad.

  “Let him be,” Adah said. “He’ll come around.”

  Gage let the empty screen door snap shut behind him.

  The full weight of his fatigue settled on him once he undressed. The cool, dim house chilled his sweat. He changed clothes, drank from a rain catcher and rolled its taste of iron on his tongue—a constant reminder of the crud; it was even in his thirst. Descending the stairs to the cellar, his ankle tightened. He angrily eyed it, balanced on it and hopped down. It painfully gave out. The railing bore his weight with a groan. One-legged, he cautiously hopped to the gun safe.

  Seated in a musty armchair, he pressed an ear to the safe’s steel door. It drank warmth from him. Leaning against its sure solidity, he closed his eyes and fingered the notches of its dial. The oiled gears whispered to him. Gage interpreted meaning from the whispers, which he believed foolproof until the door resisted his tug and he sought a better translation. The B&B fell away. Portland faded into the distance. The world beyond became as remote as a star.

  Fatigue melted off his bones until noise from inside the B&B shocked him with thoughts of electricity and adults and others elsewhere working to reconstruct what had been lost to the crud.

  But it was just the piano. It was just music.

  A repetitive, classical duh-duh-dah grew louder and faster as he approached the piano room. He stopped outside its doorway, out of view. The music stopped.

  Monk said Gage should come in. He laughed when Gage didn’t reply. He said he couldn’t have missed Gage clomping closer. He should join them. Music might distract Gage from his ankle.

  Gage entered. “It’s out of tune. And a few keys are broken.”

  Monk said he didn’t mind. The gist of the piece came through. It was a beautiful piano.

  “He took lessons,” Adah said, “for years before the crud. He’s amazing.”

  Monk smiled, and said his pacing was off. He hadn’t played in quite a while, and it was difficult reading the unfamiliar music. He stumbled with the footing, though it was coming back to him. He was going to be a concert pianist, before the crud.

  “There aren’t many people left who could do what you can do,” Adah said.

  Monk thanked her.

  “Don’t take it too seriously,” Gage said. “She hasn’t seen anyone even play ‘Chopsticks’ before.”

  Adah’s wide eyes narrowed. “Any luck with the safe?”

  “No,” Gage said, “just progress.”

  He returned to the cellar.

  The music stung, but the laughter stung worse. Gage tried to close his senses to it, to hear only the whispered turning of the heavy gears through the steel door. He told himself he wasn’t hungry, he didn’t need to go upstairs. He told himself it’d only be a few more days with Monk. He told himself nothing mattered more than opening the gun safe and protecting Adah. She depended on him. It was all that mattered, what had kept him going and given him strength to fight and make hard decisions.

  He fell asleep.

  When he woke, he was cold and hungry and sore from how he had slumped against the safe. Adah hadn’t woken him to watch the stars from the roof, but he was sure she was up there. With Monk. He imagined Monk counting the intermittent shooting stars and undoing the work of years as he talked about what they represented. The shooting stars would no longer be nothing to worry about. He’d remind Adah the crud craft had been the first in a long line, each larger than those preceding it, with the behemoth at the end.

  He limped to the fridge for a hardboiled egg before heading up to bed. Inside the fridge, Sue’s body formed a dark shadow inside her murky yellow cocoon. Rigor from the final stages of the creeping crud had frozen her in a horrible retching pose. He preferred it when she had had no name.

  Gage lay under the bed covers and stared into the darkness. When Adah tiptoed into the room and slipped under the covers, she spoke, her back turned to him. “I know you like to act like you’re big and scary so you won’t have to follow through on your threats, but, really, you’re taking it a little far. You shouldn’t be so mean to Monk.”

  “That’s not his real name,” Gage said.

  She huffed, then her breath settled into a deep rhythm. Gage’s followed.

  As far as Gage could tell, the only part of Monk to regain strength was his mouth.

  Each day, Gage woke with the sun, trudged into the obstacle course and returned when the loss of light made it dangerous. With thrown stones, he tested his traps. Each day, he ended a little farther from the road, a little closer to Lost Pine. He gained bruises and stings and stumbled home from the growing chaos in near delusional sweats to find Monk sitting and talking while Adah worked. She listened to him and built raised beds for their future gardens, collected kindling, and wove baskets from the limber creeper vines strangling the surrounding pines.

  Monk said he had survived because he knew how to respect people and how to gain respect in return.

  Monk said he had a theory why the creeping crud had broken out. It wasn’t an accident. It was a purposeful blight sent to replace adults’ “sophistication” with the truthful innocence of children. We were just fouling it up.

  Monk asked if Gage had considered burying Martin and Sue. It didn’t seem right to put the dead to work, like they had.

  “They’re not dead,” Gage said.

  Monk said that may technically be true, but either way, it would honor them to continue their traditions. They should be buried.

  “Have you buried others?” Gage asked.

  Monk’s pinched features stiffened. He said he had.

  Gage eyed Monk’s scrawny arms. “How deep?”

  Gage’s arm stung from Adah’s pinch as though from a bee sting.

  “We’ve all lost people,” Adah said. “And we don’t talk about it. It’s personal.” She glared at Gage.

  Alone in the kitchen, listening to Monk play the piano for Adah, Gage cut rancid bits from dried strips of raccoon meat and ate the clean remnants. Music continued after he finished eating. He went to the safe.

  Dismissed combinations filled the pages of his ledger. He was getting close. He felt it.

  Adah cooked meals of edible wild roots and flowers Gage had taught her to identify. On the seventh day, they shared raccoon stew, dandelion salad with sunflower seeds and a bowlful of tart blackberries.

  Monk said it was a fine farewell feast. He looked forward to what they were sending him off with. He didn’t know where he’d head. Summer weather didn’t last forever. Maybe south, along the coast. There was always fishing. Or he’d head back to Portland. Things could’ve cooled off there. Gangs so rapidly shuffled membership and leadership it was likely no one would even recognize him. He’d just be a new face. If he had to, he’d join a gang, he guessed.

  “You should stay,” Adah said.

  “Adah,” Gage said.

  “Monk hasn’t been able to work for the food he’d be taking,” Adah said. “He’s been too weak. He can work now. He should stay until he does his share.”

  Gage glared at her as though it was unfair to argue about it in front of Monk. She was ambushing him. He wanted to tell her he wasn’t being stubborn or jealous. Monk just had to leave. That was the agreement. But she looked at Monk with an open expression that took the f
orce out of him. He had taught her well, and now she wanted to care for someone who would appreciate her talents. She was young, though. She saw what she wanted to see in Monk, blind to how he took advantage of her.

  Monk said he wouldn’t get in the way. He’d help Gage with the obstacle course. He’d mend the roof. Whatever. Heights didn’t frighten him. He’d gather roots and flowers, too. Identifying what was poisonous from what was healthy came as second nature. His mental catalog expanded every day. He had already been helping Adah with the pickings for the past week.

  Knowledge that he had been eating Monk’s food without knowing it settled in Gage’s stomach like a brick of ice.

  “One more week,” Gage said. He looked at Adah, and her closed expression told him it wasn’t enough.

  Monk stayed.

  One week became two.

  Then three.

  When Monk said dinner was served, Gage went to the cellar. During the night, he dreamed of unlocking the gun safe, removing a handgun loaded with a single bullet and shooting Monk. Upon waking, it was difficult for him to determine whether he felt disappointment that his dream hadn’t been real, or relief. The obstacle course lay untouched while the gun safe ledger filled with cramped rows of numbers. Pencils wore down to nubs. Hunger pangs lessened the less he ate, and he took comfort that his body adjusted to a deeper hunger than he was accustomed to. All the while, there was music. To Gage’s dismay, he could tell Monk was getting better.

  In bed beside Gage in the dark, Adah said, “You’re only hurting yourself.”

  “I’m fine,” Gage said.

  “I hate seeing you like this. I know you don’t like him, but even Collin wants you to eat. He hates seeing you like this, too.”

  “Collin?” Gage rose up on a shaky elbow and stared at Adah in the dark. Her body formed a shadowed shape under the covers. Gage rose from the bed, grabbed a candle and headed for the cellar.

  Before he exited, Adah called out to him, “Gage.” Her voice was soft and pleading and pitying.

  He paged through the gun safe ledger. Thousands of combinations were scrawled between the lines and between those lines and vertical along the margins. They were not enough. Not by far. He needed hundreds more ledgers. It would take years, if it ever worked. He snapped his pencil nubs. He should’ve paid attention to the threat before him, the threat in his home, instead of the one lingering like a phantom beyond its drive, somewhere, sure to arrive, someday. There was no telling what the safe contained anyway. Martin and Sue could’ve traded their whole armory for the food and seeds and supplies that had sustained them until he and Adah arrived to find their cocoons. It was only a gun safe in name. It could contain anything, nothing.

  The front of the ledger contained entries from Lost Pine’s guests. Gage read them with deepening sadness; they were so thankful and hopeful. Life used to be easier. Tourists took trips to places they never intended on staying, for fun. Even as the tone of the entries changed with those written by people who had passed through Lost Pine after the crud, there was hope. They ended at his cold, unfeeling numbers.

  But the last entry. Gage’s heart quickened, and he grabbed his machete off the top of the gun safe. Before he knew it, he was upstairs outside Monk’s room, pounding on the door with the butt of his machete. Adah was saying something he couldn’t quite pay attention to, but only made him madder because it sounded like she was trying to protect Monk. It took four kicks to break the old doorjamb. Monk stood beside his bed, a knife he had snuck away gripped in a reddened hand.

  “What did you do to them?” Gage asked.

  Monk’s pinched features contorted with puzzle-ment. He said he didn’t know what Gage was talking about.

  “You didn’t expect to find anyone here, did you?” Gage asked. “It was why you came unarmed. You expected the place to be empty.”

  Monk looked at Adah, who stood in the doorway holding a broken bottle by its neck. She waved it back and forth between Monk and Gage.

  “You did something to Martin and Sue before you left,” Gage said. “Did you poison them? Is that why your hands were covered in a rash when you arrived, why they’re breaking out now?”

  Monk faced Adah, his pinched features stiffening. He said Adah had been eating what he gathered for weeks and she was fine. Even Gage had eaten what he gathered for a week.

  “I found your guestbook entry, Collin,” Gage said. He tossed the guestbook at Monk’s feet. “You ‘wished things didn’t have to end this way’?”

  Monk’s eyes widened. He said he didn’t write that.

  “You’re right,” Gage said. “It wasn’t you. It was Marta. She had been with you then. She wrote it. She signed it and included your name. She dated it, too, the same time you were here.”

  Monk said the entry didn’t mean what it sounded like.

  “You mean a threat or an apology?” Gage asked.

  Monk said Gage didn’t understand.

  “Marta was the one with the conscience, wasn’t she? What happened to her? Did you go to Portland looking to sell her, but the gangs took her and beat you up? Did she leave you? Did you kill her because her conscience was getting to her, and she was going to tell about Lost Pine and ruin everything?”

  Monk said Gage’s imagination was running away with him. He needed to calm down.

  “You wanted to bury Martin’s and Sue’s cocoons,” Gage said, putting it together as he spoke. “You wanted to hide your evidence.”

  Monk’s rock-tumbler look churned on high. He said it wasn’t like that. Gage hadn’t been there.

  “You’d better start telling me what it was like,” Gage said, “or I’m gonna cut your smug mouth right out of your head.”

  Monk said it had been an accident with Martin and Sue. It was how he had discovered what he gathered was poisonous. They got really sick. He left before the crud overtook them. They made him leave. It could’ve happened to anyone hungry enough to try things they weren’t sure about. He thought they might’ve survived. He never tried to hurt Marta. After they got kicked out, she despaired. She snuck into his pack one night and ate the same stuff that poisoned Martin and Sue. He knew he shouldn’t have kept it. But it could’ve been useful with the gangs in Portland. Monk looked at the rash on his hands. He said he never would’ve hurt Adah.

  Gage lunged at Monk. Adah screamed, “Stop!”

  Gage froze, machete above his head. Monk crossed his forearms over his face.

  “Get out, Collin,” Adah said. “We’re honest people.”

  She packed Monk’s slack pack with a hardboiled egg and dried strips of raccoon meat and a pair of socks and a blanket.

  In the dark, at machete point, Gage led Monk along a safe trail through the obstacle course to the road.

  Monk asked what he was supposed to do now.

  Gage glared at him in the moonlight. The road was a silent strip of weed-tufted gravel rounding far bends in both directions. His knuckles whitened around his machete. He figured if he killed Monk, he’d have to bury him; otherwise the body would attract coyotes or bigger animals, which might attract people. The food they had given him would have to be buried, too. As much as it pained him to see it go, Adah would see it as evidence. She’d never forgive him.

  “Leave,” Gage said. “If I see you again, I’ll kill you.”

  Back at the house, trembling weakness pervaded Gage’s body. He chuckled. Monk would’ve killed him had he begun a fight. He hadn’t had a full meal or full night’s rest in weeks.

  Adah eyed his wry grin as though frightened by it, and he couldn’t tell whether she looked at him as though he was a babysitter, bodyguard or boyfriend.

  Adah’s parents got the crud. There was no avoiding it, even during quarantine. She knocked on the front door to Gage’s parents’ house, shuddering with tears, hiding her reddened eyes behind unwashed curls. Her words squeaked out. Her parents could
n’t stand up anymore. She needed help. Gage’s parents told him to go. All the radio reports said it wasn’t affecting children. He was safe. He just needed to thoroughly bathe before he returned. Boiled water would wait for him inside the porch, with a washcloth, soap and razor. He’d have to shave his head. A change of clothes would be there for him, too. His old clothes would go in the barrel, the washcloth, as well, with a little kerosene and a match.

  Adah led Gage into her house, a neighboring mystery until then. Cellophane covered the windows inside, coloring the daylight as though it passed through old cooking oil. It smelled like someone had rubbed the stink of cabbage into the walls with a damp rag.

  Adah led him to the master bedroom, where her parents lay on top of the bed’s covers like two factory mannequins, their bodies coated in what looked like yellowing plastic, their features blunted to blank, closed-eyed stares. The smell of ammonia overpowered Gage, stinging his eyes and driving him back into the hall.

  Gage glared at Adah as though she should’ve warned him. Her wide, dark eyes were glassy and red, though she seemed used to the cocoons’ vapors.

  On television and in photos, the crud seemed like something that would eventually be cleared up and go away. But there it was, in the next room. When Gage returned to the master bedroom, he could tell Adah’s parents were naked beneath the crud.

  Adah said they had only started crudding over that morning, and it was barely noon. Gage asked if she had done anything to them, because the radio said it was best to let the crud run its course. Attempts to scoop the crud from their mouths or scrub it off their skin only harmed them, causing their bodies undue strain as they worked overtime to make more. They’d deplete bodily stores used during the crud-induced stasis.

  Adah said she knew. She hadn’t touched them. She wouldn’t.

  Gage asked what she wanted him to do. She said her parents had told her to go to his parents before they couldn’t talk anymore. They were supposed to take care of her. She had done all she knew to do, what she had been told. For the time being, she guessed she just wanted someone to be with her, then she didn’t care. She’d go her own way, if she had to.