World After Geezer: Year One

by Penn Gates

  Margaret and the Apostles are busy digging up grass and weeds that have grown around the house foundation for as long as Nix can remember. Her friend is in a plain blue dress, legs covered by black stockings ending in sensible athletic shoes. Nix still can’t imagine wearing a dress every day, let alone gardening in one.

  Margaret is planning on transplanting some of the herbs that grow wild in the meadows to create a medicinal herb garden, a natural pharmacy of sorts. Right now she’s preparing the slopes on both sides of the root cellar to seed the area with marigolds. At the moment, they’re the closest thing to a wonder drug they’ve got. Or close enough. The plant saved Cash’s life.

  Nix puts her hands to the small of her back and stretches a little to relieve some of the pressure. She thinks she sees a movement farther down the drive and wonders if it's some sort of flashback thing. She’s not sure she'll ever again be comfortable on this spot. People died here. But maybe the marigolds will cheer it up and exorcise some of the bad memories.

  Suddenly Margaret straightens up and stares long and hard down the drive. “Mein Gott!” she cries, throwing the hoe to one side.

  There's definitely a man walking up the drive, Nix thinks, squinting. Someone who looks like a lopsided scarecrow. As he comes closer, she sees that he has a very young pig draped over his shoulder. Is the guy crazy—or just acting that way?

  Automatically, her hand slides into her pocket to touch her gun. She heaves a sigh. Couldn’t fate put trouble on hold—just a few more weeks—until I have the baby?

  Other Books By This Author

  Also by PENN GATES

  The Value of Damaged Things

  Author’s Note

  I’ve always half-believed that the wheels would come off or the sky might fall on our increasingly complex world at some point in the near future (I’m still waiting). Perhaps it’s the family story I heard as a child, about the grandfather who foresaw the Great Depression and moved his family to the country so they'd always be able to eat. Or maybe it’s my life-long love affair with history: sooner or later, every civilization collapses under the weight of its own miscalculations. Could be either, or both, but the question still fascinates me: what if the orderly civilization we count on just vanished? What would it take to survive? Not as in, having superior fire power (although that certainly wouldn’t hurt) but survival with our humanity intact. In our tech-heavy society, individuals have become more isolated, not less, even as they’re surrounded by an ever-increasing population. The answer may well be community. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, If we don’t live together, we’ll surely die separately.