Aftermath a-1

by Charles Sheffield

  Art sat down on the floor opposite Seth, stretching his stiff leg out in front of him. “You went there, didn’t you?”

  Dark eyes gleamed. “Now why’d you think a thing like that?”

  “If you hadn’t, you’d have an itch inside worse than ours. You’d be keener than Dana to get out of here and over there.”

  “That easy to read, am I? Well, maybe I’ll surprise you yet.” Seth dumped a measuring cup of rice into boiling water and threw a pinch of salt in after it. “But you’re quite right. I went over to the Institute late last night.”

  Art sipped sweetened black coffee. He felt his whole body beginning to wake up. “What did you find?”

  “Nothing worth mentionin’ — or I’d have mentioned it already. The Institute was the way it ought to be at night. Locked. I tried the doors. Dead bolts. I tried the bells, and they didn’t work. No surprise, the automatic guards and security systems aren’t functioning. I didn’t try shouting, and I won’t try shouting today. Were you thinkin’ of shouting?”

  Art shook his head. “No way.”

  “So why not?”

  “Just listen. It’s completely quiet outside. We’re strangers here, but it shouldn’t be this quiet without a good reason. Where are the people, and what are they doing?”

  Seth raised himself from his crouched position, walking about the room to stretch his legs and leaving Art and Dana to make sure that the cooking rice did not boil over. “Where are the people, eh? You been livin’ in the city the past week and a half?”

  “No. Far from it.” Again, Art felt a reluctance to give details to Seth.

  “Well, if you had you’d be able to take a good shot at answerin’ your own question. Maybe you can anyway.”

  Art said nothing.

  Seth was over by a window, staring out at snow that fell as heavily as ever. After a moment he went on, “I’m in the shipping business — or I guess I should say I used to be. ’Til eleven days ago Supernova Alpha was givin’ us wild weather, but nothin’ that the system couldn’t handle. Shipments from South America and South Africa were spotty an’ gettin’ worse, but the freight monorails were bringing supplies in regular from anywhere on this continent. Some folk were even sayin’ it was no bad thing if food stockpiles were comin’ down. The recom ag protocols can grow strawberries on a salt heap, so they say, and we’ve had gluts an’ more and more long-term storage for the past decade. Be nice to pull ’em down a bit.

  “Then, twelve days ago, March 14, Day of Infamy ’cept we had nobody to blame an’ flame, Nature stopped playing around an’ crapped all over us.

  “When the gamma burst hit an’ all the microchips went belly-up” — it was Art’s first confirmation that what he had told Ed O’Donnell and Joe Vanetti was correct — “I knew we were in trouble, but I don’t think anybody had any idea how much. I sure didn’t. I mean, power went out, but we’ve had outages before. The Antifed blowout in ’16 shut the whole damn grid down for eight days, how could anything be worse than that? Next day, though, I couldn’t get a telcom working, or a van, or a credit machine. There were a dozen big holes around the city, where heavy lifters just dropped out of the sky. Nobody knew what the government was doing — if it still existed. I chose my place, stockpiled all I could, and went to ground. I might be there still, if Dana hadn’t called. Though I have to say, I was gettin’ awful itchy to find out what was happenin’ at the Institute.” Seth pulled back his sleeve to reveal three spots of light blue. “There’s the reminder, my treatment session comin’ up in six weeks — not that I need reminding, any more than you do. That’s why we’re here. It’s why we’re even alive, when logically we ought to be dead. Lazarus Club members might not like each other much” — Seth winked at Art, as though he knew more than he was saying — “but we can rely on each other for one thing: a strong interest in living.

  “But what about the rest of the people? I don’t mean the whole continent. I don’t give a damn about that. I mean this city and the area around it. There’s fifty million people here — no, forget that. Let’s say, twelve days ago there were fifty million. It’s been twelve days now without power. Twelve days since water came out of the faucets, twelve days since food supplies came in from outside, twelve days since a news broadcast system existed, twelve days since money or government could do anything for you.”

  “It takes longer than twelve days—” Dana began. But she stopped, and turned her head back down to the little stove.

  “Longer than that, for people to die of starvation?” Seth walked to where Art had snagged a few grains of rice with his knife and was tasting them to see if they were cooked. “Yeah. It does. But it only took three or four days for some people to figure out that no one had any idea how long the problem would go on — we still have no idea, least, I don’t. An’ I live — lived — half a mile from the White House. Wouldn’t you think it ought to be safe there, if anywhere could be? But by the sixth day I decided to get out. Too many corpses for my taste. An’ I could hear gunfire around the clock. Most guns have smart circuits for automatic aiming and target motion compensation, so they won’t work anymore. My guess was, for every shot I heard there must have been fifty people stickin’ each other with knives or bangin’ away with clubs and axes.”

  “So how did you get out of there?” Dana asked. “I mean, if it was so dangerous.”

  Seth grinned at her. “I’m not always the high-class gent you see today. I had to do a little slice-and-dice of my own before I was out of the city. No big deal, nothin’ to get excited about. But I managed. That rice cooked yet?”

  Art nodded to Dana. She began loading it onto flat pieces of hardboard made by breaking a ruined painting into three parts. The kitchens had been emptied of all the plates, and the hardboard fragments were her best approximation. The original picture had showed a group of pirates burying treasure. Art, turning his piece over before Dana loaded it, found he was looking at a bearded bare-chested man, a sandy strip of beach, and the prow and foredeck of a sailing ship in the background.

  “So what’s your answer?” he asked. “Where are the people?”

  Seth took a load of rice and went back to the window. “What do you think, maestro? I already said my piece.”

  “I’ve not been close to things, the way you have, but nothing you’ve said surprises me. A lot of people are dead, maybe thousands, and everyone else is going to lie low until the government gets hold of things again, or folks become so starved and desperate that they think they have nothing to lose.”

  “Not far off.” Seth was eating rapidly, with no sign of reduced appetite at the thought of heaps of corpses within twenty miles. “But you’re too optimistic. I’d say you got a few thousand dead where there’s big food warehouses and the pressures are less. In the inner cities, though, it’s more than that by now. And the starvation and disease are just startin’, not to mention rats and flies and “polluted water and no food. Things are going to get a lot worse before they get better.”

  Art glanced across at Dana, wondering how all this talk of death was affecting her. She was nodding thoughtfully and eating as heartily as Seth. When it came to the crunch, she in her own way was as tough as anybody.

  “From what I saw coming over here,” she said, “you might both be optimistic. I must say, I didn’t waste time stopping to look — the first sign of trouble, I was up to seventy miles an hour and long gone — but I saw plenty of dead bodies. And I passed through whole subsections in the suburbs where the smell was just awful. I only saw one cleanup group, and they were pulling a wheeled trailer by hand.”

  “Not today, though.” Seth laid his emptied makeshift plate on the broad windowsill. “This snow is the best thing that could have happened to us. Nobody’11 be outside who doesn’t have to be. How long ’til you’re ready to leave? We don’t know how long it’s goin’ to stay this way, might as well take advantage.”

  “Two minutes.” Art swallowed a final mouthful of rice, washed it down with coffee, an
d followed Dana out of the dining room.

  “I don’t know how you felt,” he said softly, when Seth was safely out of hearing, “but I think he may have more to do with the number of dead bodies back in the city than he wants to admit.”

  She turned to him and dropped her voice. “I’d bet on it. There’s something I ought to have told you last night, but I didn’t because we’ve never talked about other group members before. Did you know that Seth was once put on trial for murder?”

  “He told you that?”

  “No, and I never asked him. When I first met him I remembered reading about it. He was accused of blowing up three of his partners on a boat off Cape May. They were planning to push him out of their business.”

  “He was acquitted; he must have been.”

  “Right. Good lawyer, tainted evidence. But that doesn’t mean he was innocent.”

  “I’m sure he wasn’t. You heard that ’a little slice-and-dice.’ Did you see the gun in his belt when he stood up and his coat was open? I’ve never seen him wearing clothes before that looked anything like that — and his coat’s too big for him.”

  Dana, who had reached the top of the stairs, turned to look down on Art. “Honey, you know my views on Seth. I’m not his number one fan, and I’ll take you over him any day of the week. But last night he’s not the one who arrived wearing somebody else’s rubber boots. And I let you into my bedroom.”

  “That’s different. Those boots were loaned to me by Joe Vanetti.” But her point was valid. Seth might have friends, too, though he had the guarded, watchful eyes of a natural loner.

  Dana, before she went into her room, added to that idea. “Forgetting the gun and knife and coat,” she said, “I’ll tell you one thing about Seth. I’ve never seen him look as much at ease anywhere as he does here and now. He seems right for this situation. He’s at home. That’s scary, but it may be just what we are going to need.”

  As Art went into his own room he wondered if he would be able to protect Dana from Seth if the need arose. He doubted it. He might be ruthless enough — he believed he could be — but Seth was better armed, younger, and fitter. Art pulled on the outsized boots. More agile, too. Could you walk through snow in these damned things, or would it all be hopeless floundering?

  He donned the purple raincoat and the blue baseball cap, but drew the line at tying the mohair scarf over it. Instead he knotted it around his neck under his coat. The handgun went into the raincoat pocket, baggy and shapeless enough that one more bulge made little difference.

  By comparison, Dana was a fashion plate. She wore a form-fitting jacket and pants of slick dark blue kevlon, black knee-high boots, and a jaunty black cap with built-in earmuffs. Art met her at the top of the stairs. He looked at her appreciatively but dubiously, until she said, “Fully thermal, though they don’t look it. Don’t worry, Grimaldi, I’ll be a lot more comfortable than you will.”

  Her words were reassuring. Seth Parsigian’s expression, when they joined him in the dining room, was not. Art wondered what Seth would have done had he not been there. And then he knew. Until they had been to the Institute, and determined the status of the telomod treatment program, nothing would sway Seth — or Art himself — from pursuit of the main purpose.

  At stake was something more important than sex. At stake was life and death.

  8

  Seth led the way as they emerged from the inn. Since early morning a wind had arisen. Instead of falling vertically the snow formed drifts along the side of the building and had buried the hedge of flowering forsythia. Overhead, the sky glowed with a leaden, heavy light. If old weather patterns still meant anything after Supernova Alpha, more hours of heavy snow were on the way.

  The highway was deserted. Snow piled against the wheels and doors of abandoned cars, while smaller humps by the side of the road suggested more ominous possibilities. Art felt no urge to investigate. He noticed that last night’s sickly odor had vanished from the air, cleansed for the moment by the snow cover.

  The bulk of the Institute for Probatory Therapies formed a faint gray outline through the swirling flakes. Its twenty stories loomed far above the surrounding buildings. Art recalled, with no pleasure at all, that the telomere research center was on the fifteenth floor. Even if they could find a way in, the elevators would certainly not be working.

  “We can try the ground-level entrances again, like I did last night,” Seth said softly. “But I think it’ll be a waste of time. Our best bet’s a fire escape. Dana, you’re the lightest and the nimblest. If the two of us give you a hoist . . .”

  “I get it. Then I’ll be the one guilty of breaking into government property.” But she sounded cheerful at the prospect, and as they approached the building she pulled a long, heavy wrench from the pocket of her pants.

  “You had that thing with you last night?” Art asked.

  “I certainly did.” She gave him her sunniest smile. “Be prepared, as my old troop leader used to say. You only asked if I had a gun.”

  They had all been speaking in near whispers, keeping sounds to a minimum. As they moved around the Institute, looking up for the black metal filigree of a fire escape, Art realized that the silence was about to end. Entering the locked building could not be done quietly. The sound of breaking glass would carry far across the hushed landscape. Their only hope was that no one would decide to come and investigate.

  The snow-covered bottom of the fire escape was at least ten feet above ground level. Art planted his feet firmly and braced himself with his hands on the wall of the building. Seth stood by his side, using his own interlocked hands to provide Dana with a first foothold. She went up easily, first to waist level, then to place one foot on Art’s shoulder and the other on Seth’s.

  “I’m not quite high enough.” Her voice came from above their heads. “I’ll have to jump and grab. Are you ready?”

  Art grunted assent. There was a sudden and painful increase in weight on his shoulder and a shower of dislodged snow. He looked up. Dana was hanging from the bottom of the fire escape, which swung lazily downward under her weight. He and Seth grabbed it as it approached ground level. As soon as her feet touched the ground, Dana stepped around the descending ladder and started up it.

  “I’m past this,” she complained. “You need a junior gymnast, not an old lady.” But she was already two floors up.

  “Go on.” Seth gestured to Art. “It will swing back up as soon as we’re off it. We don’t want to leave anybody with a ready-made entrance.”

  Dana was up at the third floor, crouched by a window. Art hated heights, but he knew he would get no sympathy from the others if he stopped to explain that. He climbed, approaching Dana as she swung her wrench. The sound of breaking glass was incredibly loud. It went on and on, ringing out into the distance as Dana broke away the jagged edges of the hole she had made. Art, just below her, turned to stare out through the falling snow. It had eased off a little. He could see for maybe half a mile. On all that white plain, nothing moved. He followed Dana, scrambling carefully past the jagged edges of the broken window to land on all fours on top of a metal desk. The surface was icy to his hands, and his breath frosted the air. It was as cold inside the building as outside.

  He climbed down, feeling his heart pounding. Was it relief at escape from outside danger, or fear of what they might find on the fifteenth floor? If the telomod treatment was no longer available, he and Seth and Dana were dead. Not dead immediately, not maybe for six months or a year, but dead.

  Without a word, they left the room. It had been some kind of administrative center, with cabinets and lifeless terminals and blank displays scattered in among the broken file trays and desks. Useless junk, Art thought. Objects from a past age, which looters hadn’t even thought worth stealing. Would they ever have value again?

  No lights showed on the central bank of elevators, with their smashed-in doors. It was going to be stairs, then, twelve more stories of them. Art put his head down, ignored his knee, and
climbed steadily in the lightless stairwell. It was a consolation, when they came at last to the fifteenth floor and emerged into the building’s dim interior light, to see Dana and Seth panting as hard as he was. His daily walks on Catoctin Mountain were paying off.

  “Now we find out,” Seth grunted, and hurried forward. Dana went after him. Art, much more slowly, followed. He had given up hope of finding Doctors Lasker, Chow, and Taunton, the three key members of the telomod research group, here at the Institute. Now it was a question of discovering where they had gone, following them, and persuading them to continue treatments.

  And then that was no longer the question. Art knew the truth before he entered the lab. Even in the freezing air, the scent of corruption filled his nostrils. He stepped forward, to where Dana and Seth stood in silence at the open double doors.

  The lab had always been messy, but with the organized messiness of a medical research facility. Now it was a chaos of broken glassware, smashed electronic equipment, and overturned furniture. A pitched battle had taken place here, in among the long workbenches.

  What had they been fighting over? Probably something as simple as food or fresh water. There were plenty of genome readers, scanning probe microscopes, and gas chromatography units, but the big jars of distilled water on the lab shelves had all vanished.

  In any case, the reason for the fight did not much matter. And the outcome had been inevitable. With fists and improvised clubs against guns and knives, the staff of the Institute hadn’t had a chance. It had been a planned attack, too, with assistance from someone on the inside, because the doors and windows of the Institute showed no signs of an earlier break-in.

  Seth stepped forward and paced the cluttered space between two of the benches. He stopped halfway along. “Here’s Dr. Mackerras,” he said, softly and without emotion. “And here’s Janina — she was the lab technician who gave me my treatment. I always liked her.” He took two more steps and leaned over a body. “I think this is Dr. Chow, but his name tag’s gone. And half his face has been blown away.”