by J. Thorn
"Remember, folks, in our brave new world, dogs are no longer man's best friend," Jones declared over the sough of the surf. "It's potatoes. An acre or two of potatoes can keep a man alive for a year. Plant 'em early and often and you won't be eating each other come winter. Have you ever tasted human meat? Much too fatty in this country. You'll die of cardiac arrest before you get the chance to die of good ol' fashioned cholera. God may not be watching, but with all those eyes, you can be sure the potatoes are."
Weeks went by in a soft blur of gardening, gathering, and jury-rigging the house for the long haul: filling the garage with extra jugs of water collected during heavy rains, testing the fireplaces for the couple weeks in winter when they'd need them, digging a proper firepit and lining it with stones taken from the walk of the home next door. After another dinner of rice and beans, Raymond crumpled his paper plate and dropped it into the firepit.
"I miss meat," he said.
"I miss ice cream."
"Let's get some meat."
Mia nodded. "Let's get some ice cream first."
"I'm serious. We should get chickens or something. We can have eggs. Grow more chickens and eat those chickens."
"Look, we can't just go 'get' chickens. We'd need things. Cages. Chicken food. It'll be work."
"And with these high-stress jobs of ours I'm sure we can't find the time." He plopped down on the couch they'd dragged out to the back porch. "There used to be this place on the PCH that was like a bulk pet store but for farm animals. I doubt anyone's looted that."
"We could use dog crates for coops." Mia frowned in thought. "So where are we going to find the chickens?"
"The Chicken Depository should have a few."
"Of course." They picked up crates and heavy bags of seed from the supply store. In their free time, they parked in the valley in the middle of the peninsula's hills and roamed the silent yards. It had been a horse-heavy community, with crossing signs posted on many of the main roads, and Raymond had hoped that some of the people who'd been willing to husband animals as big as horses would have raised some chickens as well because why not, but over two weeks of searching they only found two coops. Both were closed. Inside, mounds of feathers ruffled in a breeze of faint decay.
Once they saw a curtain swirl in a window. Another time, while they tramped up a grassy ridge, a car pulled up alongside theirs. Mia watched through the scope of her rifle as two men tried the doors, exchanged a few sentences, and drove off.
Summer arrived. They left the windows open at all hours, retiring to the shade beneath the deck during the afternoons of a week-long heat wave. As the garden wilted, they tapped the jugs in the garage to keep their food alive; when the jugs dwindled, they drove to the ocean, filled them with seawater, and boiled huge pots under tarps slanted to catch the steam. Raymond wiped ash from his hands, sweat tickling his ribs. How did plants turn water and sunshine into bananas and peppers and blueberries? It was magic. True-life alchemy. Every day, Raymond played apprentice to this sorcery, watering the spreading leaves, plucking thorny weeds. He learned the difference between a thistle sprout and a budding cilantro or basil plant.
Mia talked him into driving to a surf shop on the PCH, where they grabbed a few boards and a couple wetsuits. On days when the work was light, they walked down to the beach and taught themselves to surf. They grew tanned, lean, taut-muscled, bobbing on the breaks. Dolphins paralleled the shore, dark fins cutting the water. Pelicans tucked their wings and splooshed into the waves. They fished from the shore. Often they caught nothing. When they brought home a catch, they fried it over a fire lit with eyeglass lenses, eating the fish skin and tails along with the meat.
"Rumors have flowed from New York for weeks about a secret government vaccine," Josh Jones reported. "And isn't it just like the feds to slam the barn doors after the horses have run off? First, they made us take off our shoes in airports after a single failed shoebombing that would never be repeated. Now, they funnel their resources into a cure for something that's already killed everyone who could die from it. Do they even know how viruses work? Do they think infections just chill out when their hosts die? Wrong. Wronger than a Noah's Ark carrying two of each wrong. When the host dies, the virus dies. Oh, the Panhandler was a great virus, all right: it got everyone. Not one in a hundred was immune. But it was a very stupid virus, too. It burned down every house it could possibly live in. Now it's gone. If, God forbid, you pop a kid out into this wasteland, you can sleep easy knowing that whatever else the little tyke has to face, he won't have to worry about the Panhandler.
"Well, that's all moot now. The government hideout on Staten Island got blowed up. Witnesses report soldiers fleeing in lifeboats and helicopters. They were not headed in the same direction. Are there other government holdouts out there somewhere? Oh, no doubt. But if you're waiting on them for salvation, well, you better be wearing comfy shoes."
"Because you've got a long walk ahead of you?" Mia said. "That doesn't really make sense."
Raymond stretched his sore legs. "I am not sure this man is a professional."
Mia kept track of days on a kitchen calendar. On August 13, on a trip to the rambling homes near the south of the hills, Raymond heard clucks and cackles from a fenced yard. Five scruffy chickens pecked beetles from the grass.
"How do we get them in the car?" he said.
Mia laughed. "We probably should have brought a sack. That's what chicken-thieves use, right? A big sack?"
"Um." Wind tousled the grass. "We'll just sort of drop them in through the sun roof, how about."
"Wow. We're going to die, aren't we?"
He hopped the fence. Chickens milled, pecking and cooing. He lined up behind a white one and leaned in for the grab. It squirted away, kicking dirt.
"I just want you to know you're being foiled by a chicken," Mia said.
"Let's see you do better."
"No, I think watching is more fun."
Another scooted away. Raymond adjusted his tactics, squatting down and leaning in as slowly as a stalking cat. Rather than striking, he just reached in and grabbed the body of a brown-feathered bird. It flapped its thick wings, yellow feet kicking, then settled down in his arms.
"Who's the king?" he said. "Now take this chicken and throw it through the roof of my car."
Mia grinned, grabbing the bird without incident, and deposited it through the sun roof. Raymond had a second waiting for her by the time she got back. They loaded up the others and turned home, birds clucking, whuffing their wings, scrabbling around the seats, stirring up a smell that was half sour and half pleasingly alive. At the house, Mia hopped out and opened the gate. He pulled into the garage.
"You definitely need a new car," Mia said.
He craned around. White liquid streaked his seats. "I look forward to killing them some day."
They transferred the birds into dog crates and carried the crates beneath the deck and scattered seeds in the crates.
"Now we just need a rooster," Mia said.
Raymond didn't know where everyone had gone or whether they'd ever see anyone else, but he didn't think he would mind. They ate eggs by the end of the week, the rich yolks sopping into their rice. Some days he didn't change out of his track pants. During the next hot spell, he and Mia didn't dress at all unless it was time to work, lying naked in the shade of the deck, her slim brown body filmed with sweat.
Once a week, they broke into a house and pulled dry goods from pantries and shelves, snagging batteries and books and clothing; they drove to movie theaters and collected cases of M&Ms and Coke and unpopped popcorn, some of which they planted to see what would happen. Beyond foraging, tending the garden, and their water-gathering, they had little work. With no insurance payments or oil changes, no junk mail to sort or Facebook to update, no jobs or dental appointments or dry cleaning, Raymond marveled at how little time it took to survive. The days stretched as broad as the ocean beyond their window. They surfed, went on walks, picnicked in the grass in the shadow
of the lighthouse, fucked on the sand in the open sunlight. They napped and read and explored. One day, Mia surprised him with a carload of paints and brushes and canvases. He converted one of the empty bedrooms to a studio and started painting: the bay, the silent smokestacks of the power plant in Redondo, the misty hills of Malibu.
He was simply happy, and so was she. Find a partner. Find a piece of land and make it your own. That's all it took. This was more or less what people were trying to do pre-Panhandler, too, but that had been complicated by the pursuit of money, which was necessary to obtain all the things you couldn't do for yourself (such as, for almost every first-world citizen, grow your own food) and to support yourself into old, old age—80, 90, 100 years old!—in the midst of a world of 7 billion people, all of them seeking a plot of good land for themselves, with most of the best stuff already owned by a small fraction of humanity. No wonder life had sucked for most of them, self included. There just wasn't enough to go around. Not if a happy life required working toward watching a 59" 1080p HDTV after 27 years of retirement at age 92.
Not that returning to subsistence farming and dying at 64 would have solved all Western woes. Raymond recognized that much of what he and Mia had now was the result of the labor of millions who were no longer around to need it. He sure as hell couldn't have been able to forge himself a shovel, let alone build the batteries they used in their flashlights and radios. Some day, possibly within his lifetime, there would come a time when all these materials would be used up, leaving the next generations to relearn how to navigate by sea and extract metal from dirt. Their life by the sea would no doubt be much meaner if they had to grow enough not just to feed themselves, but to barter for all the goods they were currently lifting from the empty homes and stores.
Whatever, though. No matter how you broke down the causes and what-ifs—and he had all the time in the world to do that—he was happier than he'd ever been just gardening, surfing, fishing, foraging, and having sex. The only technological entertainment that entered the picture was listening to AM radio at night when the broadcasts were clearest and it was too dark to do anything else.
"And now," Josh Jones said, voice carrying over the wash of the surf and the warm, moist air of an early September night that would change everything all over again, "the report that will ruin whatever credibility I've built with you fine survivors of Southern California. I know you're out there. We dealt with way too many earthquakes, mudslides, floods, and fires to be done in by a silly old plague.
"To business, then. Really, I don't even know how to put this. Do I just come right out and say it? Because it's going to sound crazy. It's going to sound as if I am a crazy person, or at least a person who is capable of saying crazy things. Beautiful women—if there are any left in the world—will refuse to sleep with me. Dogs will laugh as I pass. Even the kindest of flowers will turn their heads in embarrassment. Maybe some of you out there are recording these broadcasts for posterity or because you know your kids won't be able to read. In that case, there would be a permanent record of my madness. I'll be mocked for generations."
"He sounds like he has gone crazy," Mia said.
"So you know what, I'm not going to say it. Not explicitly, anyway. I'm just going to tell you to go to your windows and look towards the ocean. It doesn't matter if you can't see the ocean because you were too dumb to move to Venice Beach after all its former residents checked out. Just go to the window, look west, and try to find a soft place to faint."
Raymond grabbed the radio and jogged upstairs, Mia on his heels, and opened the door to the deck. Above the dark bay, points of light hung in the sky on graceful strings, as if the stars had lined up and learned to dance. A great black orb drifted toward the city, blocking the stars behind it. Individual lights cruised below its mass. A low, penetrating whirr fought with the crash of the waves, a gusty roar like the wind of a semi on the highway. Against the dark background, the vessel was too high to get a good sense of scale, but its simple presence was enormous.
"Seen it yet?" Josh said over the radio. "Does that thing look human to you? I've seen just about everything human there is to see, and that does not look human to me."
Raymond dropped a step back. "What's he talking about?"
Mia raised her hand to her throat. "That thing is huge."
"First spotted in Japan a few hours ago," Josh said. "You might want to batten down the hatches."
"What the hell is going on?"
"The plague," Mia said. "It all makes sense."
II:
CONTACT
14
On Route 40 nearing Amarillo, Texas, Walt saw a mile marker for a town called Panhandle. Maybe that's why he detoured the opposite way just minutes later, angling south from the highway towards something called Greenbelt Reservoir. More likely he diverted because he already had a collapsible fishing pole and hadn't seen anything more exciting than a soaring hawk for well over a hundred miles, and if he didn't change it up soon, the boredom would do what the plague, riots, U.S. Army, and 1,500 miles of bandits and madmen couldn't: strike him dead.
The same green-yellow prairies and soft hills followed him south. He sweated lightly, then shivered as it evaporated in the cooling dusk. By nightfall, he still hadn't reached the reservoir, but a full moon lit the disused road well enough to continue. He would go on until he got tired, then camp and sleep a ways from the road; if the reservoir wasn't visible when he woke in the morning, he'd turn back and get back on track for LA.
He couldn't have planned it better. After another hour's walk through the dark grass, he crested a modest hill. Moonlight rippled on the surface of the wide, low lake. Birds cooed from shifting reeds. He descended slowly, smelling the mud of the shore and a humid sweetness he hadn't encountered since somewhere east of Oklahoma. The ground stayed hard until he reached the banks. The breeze was too soft to trouble the waters, but small ripples arose from breaching fish.
He spread out his blanket and unfolded his rod and dug out his jar of bait, ridiculous, garlic-stinking, nuclear-colored artificial marshmallowy goo that supposedly brought the fish leaping straight onto shore. He cast, somewhat poorly, then squinted at his bobber, losing it repeatedly amidst the black water.
Either the nostril-hair-withering bait lived up to its billing, however, or the fish had been screwing their fish brains out in the few months since there were no longer any humans around to catch them, because Walt landed two within twenty minutes. He cleaned them inexpertly, flinging the guts back into the water. He slipped the cleaned fish into a Ziploc bag and walked away from the green shore, flashlight in hand, to gather dry grass, twigs, and small sticks, which he tented on the bare ground and lit up with a faltering lighter. He'd shot enough small game along his walk to have picked up a couple pointed metal rods which he used to skewer and roast the fish.
He slept under the stars. That was nothing new. He slept outside more than most dogs. The constellations had grown familiar to him, though he didn't know what they were: the tiny kite, the squashed W. When he got up he ate some stale Rold Gold pretzels, then stashed the bag and pulled up a handful of cattails instead, stripping away the husk around the base and chewing up the clean, pulpy stems. Minnows flicked in the shallows, retreating when his shadow crossed them. Red-tailed blackbirds chirred from the reeds. For a while he simply wandered along the lake's edge, overturning stones, poking at waterstriders and snails with a stick, staring beneath the surface for trout. Flies buzzed disinterestedly. By noon, it was warm enough to drive him to peel off his shirt and wrap it around his forehead.
He suppressed the nagging feeling he should get back to the highway and on toward LA. A line weaved through the grass; he froze, waiting for the snake to slip away. Ahead, a short, flat spit of land projected into the lake. Weeds swayed in the shallow water between it and a minor island some thirty feet from shore. If he lived here, he could build a simple bridge to it, or find a rowboat somewhere and paddle to it at night to stay safe from animals and survivo
rs. It was an idle thought. Still, he could swim there right now. See what there was to see. But he'd get wet. He might step on something sharp. Anyway, it was just a little circle of land. It wouldn't be any different from everything else around him.
He snorted, peeled off his clothes, stepped into some flip flops, and, otherwise naked, waded into the water. In the shallows, it was calm and warm. Slimy fronds waved around his ankles. Rocks ground underfoot. A school of minnows turned and beelined for the shore to his left. The water rose to his thighs; another step dropped him to his hips. Two more and he was forced to swim, the water warm around his shoulders and neck and frigid when his feet kicked too deep. A few feet from the island, he halted to paddle and extend his legs. Stones turned in the mud. He waded ashore and wiped the extra water from his body.
The air cooled his wet skin. He walked the perimeter to work off the water, turning over riparian stones. Worms squiggled into the mud. Nymphs waved pincers and paddled away. Waterstriders skimmed over the ripples. Red glinted from the mud. Walt poked it with a stick, dislodging a tarnished, algae-swamped Coke can.
Besides a bird's nest containing three ruffle-feathered gray chicks, the can was the most exciting thing he found. He pulled up two more cattails and ate the stems. Fish rose lazily. He swam back across and toweled and dressed.
It wasn't yet noon. He shouldered his gear and circled the lake until he found its source, a modest creek oozing between a jumble of smooth rocks. Trout as long as his palm swatted sunlight from their tails. He cast his line a few times, but the fish did little more than glance the neon bait's way. Light woods surrounded the stream, fuzzing the short hills. After a couple miles of tramping along the trickling water, he stopped to build a fire, fill a pan with water, and fish while he first boiled the water, then moved it off the fire to cool. He gazed at the hills where the creek must source. When the boiled water stopped steaming he refilled his empty bottles and started back for the lake.
