Ghost Summer, Stories

by Tananarive Due

  “What happened?” Nayima said.

  Sanchez’s shoulders dropped with a sigh. He looked at her. His eyes said: You know.

  Nayima took a running step toward the house, but her knee pulsed with pain. Instead, she plopped down hard on the bench. She held the edge of the table to keep her balance when the bench teetered, nearly falling.

  Sanchez sat on the other side of the bench, righting it beneath his weight. He planted both elbows on the table, stripping meat from the bones with his teeth.

  The smell of his sweaty days, the smell of the smoky sky and the cooking bird, the smell of Gram’s hair on hers from Gram’s hairbrush, made Nayima feel sick. Her food tried to flee her stomach, but she locked her throat. Her grasping fingers shook against the picnic table’s rough wood. She could not breathe this thick, terrible air.

  “It’ll be dark soon, so it’s best to get on the road,” Sanchez said. “The 210’s pretty clear going east. Then you’ll want to go north. They say the Five is still passable, for now. You don’t want to be anywhere near here tomorrow.”

  She wanted to float away from his voice, but every word captivated her.

  “Where?” she whispered.

  “Anywhere but San Francisco. My family headed to Santa Cruz. I’ll be going up there too when all this is done.”

  He reached into his back pocket and laid a smudged index card on the table, folded in half. She didn’t touch it, but she saw a shadowed Santa Cruz address in careful script.

  Then he ate in silence while Nayima sat beside him, her face and eyes afire with tears of rage and helplessness.

  “Where’s your car keys?” he said.

  “In the car,” she whispered past her stinging throat.

  “You need anything in the house?”

  The question confused her. Which house?

  “My backpack,” she said.

  “Your gun in there too?”

  She shook her head.

  “Then where is it?”

  She told him.

  “I’ll go get it,” he said. “Thanks for the chicken. Real good job. I’ll get your stuff. Just go around and wait in front of the house. Then I’ll open the garage, and you can get in your car and drive away. One-two-three, it’s done.” His voice was gentle, almost playful.

  Nayima was amazed when she realized she did not want to hurt Sanchez. Did not want to lunge at him or claw at his eyes. The index card on the table fluttered in a breeze. The air was so filled with smoke, she could almost see the wind.

  “No,” she said. “Just go. Please.”

  Any sadness in his eyes might have been an illusion, gone fast. He left her without a word, without hesitation. He had never planned to stay long.

  When he left, Nayima ripped up the index card into eight pieces. Then, panicked at having nowhere to go, she collected the pieces and shoved them into her back pocket.

  When a coyote howled, setting off the chorus, she heard the ghost of Gram’s screams.

  A sob emerged, and Nayima howled with the coyotes and lost dogs and sirens.

  Then she stopped. She thought she’d heard a cat’s mew.

  A scrabbling came, and a black cat bounded over the wooden patio fence. The cat had lost weight, so she would not have recognized Tango except for the V of white fur across his chest. The sight of Tango made her scratch her arm’s old flea bites.

  Maybe it was a sign. Maybe Tango was a message from Gram.

  Tango jumped on the patio table, rubbing his butt near her face as he sniffed at the chicken bones. Nayima cleared the bones away—chicken bones weren’t good for pets, Gram always said. Instead, Nayima grabbed a chicken thigh from the grill and tossed it to the patio floor. Tango poked at it hungrily, retreated from the heat. Mewed angrily. Poked again.

  “Hey, baby,” Nayima said in Gram’s voice, scratching Tango behind his ears. He purred loudly. Nayima stroked Tango for a long time while he ate. Slowly, her thoughts cleared.

  Nayima went into the house, took a blanket from the sofa, and draped it over Gram in her bed. Nayima kept her face turned away, so she did not see any blood, although she smelled it. She wanted to say goodbye, but she had been saying goodbye for weeks. Months, really. She would have the rest of her life, however long or short that would be, to say goodbye to Gram.

  Instead, Nayima gathered the remaining chicken, her gun, and her backpack. She didn’t need the meds now, but they were in the car. They would be valuable later. She also had endless cans of Ensure, which would soon be her only food.

  Tango followed Nayima to her car; she left the back door open for him while she packed the last of her things. If Tango jumped in, fine. If he didn’t, fine.

  Tango jumped into the car. She closed the door behind him.

  As she pulled out of the driveway, she took one last drive around the green belt, although she purposely did not look at Gram’s house and the jacaranda tree. The pool’s blue waters were as placid as they’d been when she and Shanice lived in chlorine all summer, with Bob yelling at them to keep the noise down. She noticed a flat basketball at the edge of the court. The shirt and jeans still flapped in the tree.

  Tango did not like the car. Nayima had not finished rounding the green belt before he began complaining, a high-pitched and desperate mew that sounded too much like crying. When he jumped to the large cooler on the front seat, she knew she’d made a mistake.

  Nayima stopped the car. She opened her door. Tango bounded across her lap to get out of the car, running free. He stopped when he was clear of her and stared back from his familiar kingdom of grass, the only home he wanted to know. He groomed his paw.

  Tango was Nayima’s last sight in her rearview mirror before she drove away.

  Her old life receded, tiny as a flea.

  “Removal Order” is the first of three linked Nayima stories I wrote for an apocalypse trilogy edited by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey: The End Is Nigh, The End Is Now, and The End Has Come. The caretaking imagery in the story comes from the experience of watching my late mother, Patricia Stephens Due, suffer the effects of bedsores late in her life. The horror of losing a loved one feels as terrible as watching the world fall apart.

  Herd Immunity

  A man was far ahead of her on the road. Walking and breathing. So far, so good.

  That he was a man, Nayima was certain. His silhouette against the horizon of the rising roadway showed his masculine height and the shadow of an unkempt beard. He pulled his belongings behind him in an overnight suitcase like a business traveler. Maybe she trusted him on sight because of the unmistakable shape of a guitar case slung across his back. She’d always had a thing for musicians.

  “Hey!” she screamed, startling herself with her bald desperation.

  He paused, his steady legs falling still. He might have turned around. She couldn’t quite make out his movements in the quarter-mile or more that separated them. The two of them, alone, were surrounded on either side by the golden ocean of central California farmland, unharvested and unplowed, no trees or shade in sight as the road snaked up the hillside.

  His attention gave her pause. She hadn’t seen anyone walking in so long that she’d forgotten the plan that had kept her alive the past nine months: Hide. Observe. Assess.

  But fuck it.

  She waved and called again, so he would be certain she wasn’t a mirage in the heat.

  “Hey!” she screamed, more hoarsely. She tried to run toward him, but her legs only lurched a stagger on the sharp grade. She was dizzy from heat and modulated hunger. The sky dimmed above her, so she stopped her pathetic chase and braced her palms against her knees to calm the cannon bursts from her heart. The world grew bright again.

  He walked on. She watched him shrink until the horizon swallowed him. She remembered a time when terrifying loneliness would have made her cry. Instead, she began following him at the pace her body had grown accustomed to. He didn’t seem afraid of her; that was something. He hadn’t quickened. He was tired and slow, like her. If s
he was patient, she would catch up to him.

  Nayima hadn’t planned to stay on State Road 46 toward Lost Hills. She had wanted to follow the last highway sign—one of the few conveniences still in perfect working order—toward a town just ten miles east. But she decided to follow the man instead. Just for a while, she’d told herself. Not so far that she’d run too low on water or go hungry.

  Nayima followed him for three days.

  She wasted no energy or hope checking the scattered vehicles parked at odd angles for fuel or food, although most still had their keys. She was far too late for that party. Cars were shelter. Handy when it rained. Or when it was dark and mountain lions got brave, their eyes glowing white in her flashlight beam. (“Bad, bad kitty,” she always said.)

  The cars on SR-46 weren’t battered and broken like the ones in Bakersfield, witnesses to riots or robberies. For a time, carjacking had been the national hobby. She’d jacked a car herself trying to get out of that hellhole—with a sprained ankle and a small mob chasing her, she’d needed the ride more than the acne-scarred drunk sleeping at the wheel. On the 46, the pristine cars had come to rest, their colors muted by a thin veil of burial dust.

  Nayima missed her red Schwinn, but she’d hit a rock the day before she’d seen the man on the road—the demon stone appeared in her path and knocked her bicycle down an embankment. She’d been lucky only to bump her elbow hard enough to make her yell. But her bike, gone. Crumpled beyond salvage. Nayima didn’t allow herself to miss much—but damn. And this man, her new day job, meant she didn’t have time to peel off to look for tucked-away farmhouses and their goodies. Too risky. She might lose him. Instead, Nayima walked on, following her ghost.

  She imagined how they would talk. Testify. Teach what little they knew. Start something. Maybe he could at least tell her why he was on the 46, what radio broadcast or quest had beckoned. She hadn’t heard anything except hissing on radios in three months. She didn’t mind walking a long distance if she might arrive somewhere eventually.

  Each morning she woke from her resting place—the crook of a tree, an abandoned car that wasn’t a tomb, in the cranny beneath the inexplicably locked cab of an empty eighteen-wheeler parked ten yards off the road like a beached whale—and wondered if the man had gone too far ahead. If he’d walked the whole night just to shake her. If he’d found a car that had sung him a love song when he caressed her and turned the key.

  But each day, she saw signs that he was not lost. He was still walking ahead, somewhere just out of sight. Any evidence of him dampened her palms.

  He left a trail of candy wrappers. Chocolate bars mostly, always the minis. Snickers, Twix, Almond Joy (her favorite; that wrapper made her stomach shout at the sight). Her own meals were similarly monotonous, but not nearly as colorful—handfuls of primate feed she’d found overlooked at a vet’s office outside Bakersfield. Her backpack was stuffed with the round, brown nuggets. Monkey Balls, she called them. They didn’t taste like much, but they opened up her time for walking and weren’t nearly as heavy as cans.

  On the third morning, when the horizon again stretched empty, and sinking dread bubbled in her stomach, the road greeted her with a package of Twizzlers, six unruined sticks still inside. The Twizzlers seemed fresh. She could feel his fingertips on the wrapper. The candy was warm to her tongue from the sun. So good it brought happy tears. She stood still as long as she dared while the sweetness flooded her dry mouth, coated her throat. Feeling anything was a novelty.

  She cried easily over small pleasures: a liquid orange sunset, the wild horses she’d seen roaming a field, freed to their original destiny. She wondered if he had left her the Twizzlers in a survivors’ courtship rite, until she found a half-eaten rope of the red candy discarded a few steps away. A Red Vines man, then. She could live with that. They would work it out.

  By noon on Twizzlers Day, she saw him again, a long shadow stretching only half a mile ahead of her. Time was, she could have jogged to catch up to him easily, but the idea of hurry made her want to vomit. Her stomach wasn’t as happy with the candy feast as the rest of her.

  So she walked.

  He passed a large wooden sign—not quite a billboard, but big—and when she followed behind him, she read the happy script:

  COUNTY LINE ROAD FAIR!!!!

  June 1-30 2 MI

  Beneath that, cartoon renderings of pigs with blue ribbons, a hot dog grinning in his bun, and a Ferris wheel. A dull fucking name for a fair, she thought. Or a road, for that matter. She vowed that when the renaming of things began, she and the man on the road would do better. The Fair of Ultimate Rainbows, on Ultimate Rainbow Road. A name worthy of the sign’s colors.

  She was nearly close enough to touch the sign before she made out the papers tacked on the right side, three age-faded, identical handbills in a vertical line:

  RESCUE CENTER

  Stamped with a Red Cross insignia.

  Red Crap. Red Death. Red Loss.

  Nayima fought dueling urges to laugh and scream. Her legs nearly buckled in rebellion. The sun felt ten degrees hotter, sizzling her neck.

  “You have got to be goddamn kidding,” she said.

  The man on the road could not hear her.

  She cupped her hands to her mouth. “Do you still believe there’s a Wizard too?”

  Moron.

  But she kept the last word silent. She shouldn’t be rude. They needed to get along.

  He didn’t stop walking, but he gave her a grumpy old man wave over his shoulder. Finally—communication. Candor was the greatest courtesy in the land of the 72-Hour Flu, so she told him the truth. “They’re just big petri dishes, you know! Best way to get sick is in evac camps! Was, I mean. Sorry to bear bad news, but there’s no rescue center here!”

  Nine months ago, she would have believed in that sign. She’d believed in her share. Back when the best minds preached hope for a vaccine that would help communities avoid getting sick with precautions, she’d heard the term on the CDC and WHO press conferences: herd immunity. As it turned out, the vaccine was a fable and herd immunity was an oxymoron.

  Only NIs were left now: naturally immune. The only people she’d seen since June were other NIs floating through the rubble, shy about contact for fear of the attacks of rage and mass insanity. Nayima had escaped Bakersfield, where anyone walking with pep was a traitor to the human experience. Nayima had seen radiant satisfaction on the face of an axe-wielding old woman who, with her last gasps of breath, had split open the skull of the NI nurse offering her a sip of water. No good deed, as they say. This man was the first NI she’d met on the road in the three months since.

  The formerly populated areas would be quieter now. That was the thing about the 72-Hour Flu: it settled disputes quickly. The buzzards were building new kingdoms in the cities, their day come at last.

  “The dead can’t rescue the living!” Nayima shouted up the godless road.

  Her new friend kept walking. No matter. He would be stopping in two miles anyway.

  She could smell the fair already.

  She thought maybe, just maybe—not enough to speed her heart, but enough to make her eyes go sharp—when the rows of neatly parked cars appeared on the west side of the road. A makeshift parking lot, with rows designated in letter-number pairs on new cedar poles, A-1 through M-20. Because of the daylight’s furious glare across the chrome and glass, the cars seemed to glitter like fairy-tale carriages. It was the most order Nayima had seen in months.

  Then she saw the dust across their windows.

  Everywhere she went, too late for the party. Even at the fair.

  Buzzards and crows sat atop the COUNTY LINE ROAD FAIR—FREE PARKING banner, bright white and red, that hung across the gravel driveway from SR-46. The Ferris wheel stood frozen beyond, marking where the fair began, but it was so small it seemed sickly. The cartoon had been so much grander. Everything about the sign had been a lie.

  The sound of mournful guitar came—picking, not strumming. She had never hear
d the melody before, but she knew the song well. “The 72-Hour Blues.”

  In the parking lot, she glanced through enough rear windows to start smiling. The Corolla had a backpack in plain sight. A few had keys in their ignitions. One was bound to have gas. This was a car lot Christmas sale. The cars on the road were from the people who’d given up on driving and left nothing behind. These cars were satisfied at their destination, although their drivers had left unfinished business inside. A few cars with windows cracked open stank of dead pets; she saw a large dog’s white fur carpeting the back seat floor of a Ford Explorer. A child’s baseball cap near the fur made her think of a pudgy-cheeked boy giving his dog a last hug before his parents hurried him away.

  The cars screamed stories.

  She saw her own face in the window. Hooded. Brown face sun-darkened by two shades. Jaw thin, showing too much bone. You gotta eat, girl, Gram would say. Nayima blinked and looked away from the stranger in the glass.

  Tears. Damn, damn, damn.

  Nayima dug her fingernails into her palm, hard. She drew blood. The cars went silent.

  The guitar player could claim he’d found the treasure first, but there was enough to share. She had a .38 if he needed convincing, but she hoped it wouldn’t come to that. Even the idea of her .38 made her feel sullied. She didn’t want to hurt him. She didn’t want him to try to hurt her. She wanted the opposite; someone to keep watch while she slept, to help her find food, to keep her warm. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d wanted anything so badly.

  The music soothed the graveyard in the parking lot. The guitarist might be the best musician she would ever know; just enough sour, not too much sweet. He was playing a song her grandmother might have hummed, but had forgotten to teach her.

  Dear Old Testament God of Noah, please don’t let him be another asshole.

  He was out of sight again, so she followed the music through the remains of the fair.