She took the hand towel from the oven handle and swabbed the dust from her feet, cleaning it from her cuts with what little spit she had to spare. Upstairs, three bodies lay tangled in the master bedroom bed, starlight exposing the skin dried to their skulls. Tristan checked their drawers. The wife’s panties were hopelessly large, but the man’s Wranglers fit when belted. So did his plaid button-up shirts. His socks, too, but her toes waggled inside his shoes. She’d blister. Have a hard time running. She went to another bedroom, hoping the third body in the bed was a teenage daughter with normal feet, and immediately rammed her little toe into a dresser corner. Pain sparked across her eyes. She collapsed, holding her foot tight.
It was too dark and she was too tired. She made sure the bed was empty, then undressed, climbed beneath the covers, and slept.
Sunlight snuck through the window. Her feet hurt. Her eyes were gritty. She didn’t have to pee. Not a good sign.
The house had already been looted. Possibly more than once. The fridge was a mess of sludge in plastic bags. It held no bottles of water or cans of soda. No drinkable liquid of any kind. The pantry contained one can of garbanzo beans, one six ounce can of tomato paste, a box of Kraft macaroni, a bottle of A1, a half-empty bottle of sherry, assorted spices, packets of dry gravy, and powdered Gatorade. She couldn’t find a can opener. She took the garbanzos and tomato paste to the garage, laid their rims against the concrete step, and hammered open the garbanzos. Gooey fluid spurted the dust. She yanked the can straight and drank the bean syrup inside. It was salty and sweet and ran out far too fast.
She smashed open the tomato paste, scooped it out with her fingers, and mixed it in with the cold garbanzos, eating it all. No sense rationing. Food wasn’t her worry now. What she needed was water. Her plan was simple. Find a town, enough food and water to rest and recover, then find Alden.
She got a backpack from the daughter’s room and spent the daylight gathering gear. Extra clothes and socks and shoes. Cutlery. The hammer. A bar of soap and a roll of toilet paper. A couple of sheets. A thick-bladed kitchen knife. Scissors. A roll of string from the garage. An empty plastic bottle in case she found water.
That filled the backpack. The day’s heat cooked the house. Miles across the plain, vehicles stirred the dust at the alien settlement. Tristan descended to the cellar to wait out the heat. A tall white water heater took up the corner. She found a crescent wrench in the garage and cranked open the valve, but nothing came out. Her tongue was dry again, bumping over the rough ridges of her mouth. She went upstairs and gazed out the eastern window. The road rolled on for miles, its shoulders blank, a useless expanse of killing desert.
She was going to have to do it, wasn’t she.
She got a bowl from downstairs and, for reasons she couldn’t quite explain, went to the bathroom, where she squatted over the bowl. Her urine was yellow and odorous. She waited for the metal bowl to leech her body heat from the fluid. She wanted very deeply to open the window and fling the bowl into the dust and sun.
But those were the old instincts. The old prejudices. Vestigial revulsion left over from a time when water just poured out of taps. She didn’t know how far away the next water would be nor how to coax it from the mummified soil. If she was going to find Alden, she’d likely have to do far worse along the way.
It tasted brackish and foul, a salty poison. She gagged, but held it between her teeth and lips, refusing to spit or spill. She swallowed, breathed hard, and chugged the rest, trying to get it down before the taste could taint her brain. After, she wiped her tongue on a towel. Her eyes tried to water but couldn’t.
Much later, she might tell Alden this story, as much to gross him out as to make him laugh. For now, she was glad no one else had seen.
She slept in the cellar until twilight. Her mouth was completely dry. Her head ached and her stomach twisted. She made another pass of the grounds to make sure she hadn’t missed a gun, then grabbed a pitchfork from the barn, hoisted her backpack, and set off down the road.
Bugs sang in the night. She thought about trying to catch some, but it wouldn’t be worth the bother. She needed water. Badly. And treatment for her feet, which were so sore she couldn’t manage more than a plodding walk. The road unspooled through the empty hills. A sliver of moon crawled up the sky. Tristan stopped to rest. She took three shells of macaroni from the box and tucked them into her cheek, hoping to remind her saliva glands how to work.
Dawn came far too soon. She watched the eastern hills with tired anger, wishing she could push back the sun with the strength of her gaze. She’d put several miles and hills between herself and the aliens, but there would be no escape from the daylight. Blue-gray dawn drew the weeds from the darkness. The sun climbed above the mountains, its itchy heat needling her skin. She stopped sweating after an hour.
She laid one of the bedsheets in the dust, draped another between two clumps of sagebrush, and did her best to sleep, dreaming of featureless faces and gleaming tentacles creeping from the cracks in the desert floor to drag her through the thorns. When it grew too hot to sleep, she gathered up her sheets and continued east.
It was amazing how fast she fell apart. Her legs weakened, going noodly. Her feet landed in strange ways, straining her ankles. Not that she felt it. Her eyelids stuck to her eyes when she blinked. When she stopped to rest, it took her several minutes to remember which way she’d been going. At one point, she stopped and turned back, convinced she’d passed a farmhouse, but the vacant desert stretched from hill to hill.
Past another slope, a town baked in the heat. Trailers and single-story homes with yellow yards. Her right knee went out. Tristan sat down hard, right hand resting on the boiling asphalt. She could smell the tar. Her chest rose and fell. Her breath felt like a drug. She just needed a moment. She lowered herself to her elbow. Something hard and hot rested beneath her head. Was it the road? How odd. She hoped her brother would have a happy life.
21
Ness ran across the bridge, cool air wafting from the river. Water trickled over itself and lapped against the broken rocks of the far shore. The idling U-Haul kicked into gear, headlights swooping behind the plant. It passed through the gates and headed south. Its engine was a low murmur by the time Ness reached the chain link fence.
He scaled it and dropped to the other side. Floodlights illuminated the lot where the men had made their exchange. Men pulled machine guns from the wooden crates and examined them in the hard white light. One of the troops whirled on Ness with a shout.
Ness stopped cold, heart threatening to batter its way from his ribs. “I want to see Larsen!”
“On your knees!” The man stutter-stepped forward, pistol pointed at Ness’ face. “Hands behind your head!”
Ness obeyed. They handcuffed him, yanked him to his feet, marched him to the same room where they’d imprisoned him and Shawn when they first arrived. He had several minutes to feel very stupid.
Larsen entered, his flat eyes bloodshot and puffy. “You’re lucky you weren’t shot.”
“Why did you do that?” Ness said.
“Specifics.”
“You took my fuel. You took what I made and you sold it for guns.”
Larsen pulled his chin to the side. “No, I didn’t.”
“Well, somebody did. I just watched them do it. I needed that ethanol for the harvest. Do you guys even care what it’s like over there?”
“Get calm. I’ll be back.”
Larsen left for a long time. Ness’ head beat with a dull and useless anger. On Larsen’s return, he beckoned Ness into the hall. “If you want answers, ask questions.”
“Why—”
“We’re asking Daniel.” He brought Ness upstairs to a conference room. Daniel faced a black window, hands clasped behind his back. Larsen shut the door and stared at Daniel, his thick hands hanging by his sides. “Did you trade our ethanol for guns?”
Daniel turned, frowning in distaste. “No. I did not.”
Larsen didn’t move. “
Then we have a thank-you note to write whoever donated those crates.”
“I traded our fuel for safety.”
“From what?” Ness said. “Dust devils?”
Daniel removed his glasses and scowled at a recalcitrant speck on the lens. “The aliens, for one.”
“Funny you start caring about them now. Have you even started on the bombs?”
“Of course. But this exchange isn’t just about the aliens. Those men represent a group settled beyond what used to be the Oregon border. Most are ex-soldiers. They control the Umatilla chemical weapons depot.”
“Appeasement,” Larsen said.
Daniel nodded sharply, a small smile on his mouth. “The power lines through the hills are dead. I had to find another way to convince these men we’re reasonable. Friendly. Meanwhile, they have armed us, making us even less attractive as a future target. I thought it quite an elegant solution.”
Ness’ shoulders sank. “But we needed that fuel for the harvest.”
“You can make more, can’t you? I thought that was the whole point of this enterprise.”
“Yeah, with all that extra corn I don’t have. It will go perfect with all the time I don’t have, either.”
Daniel ran the nail of his index finger through his beard. “I’m sorry, but fuel was the only thing they wanted. Perhaps we could divert you some of the gasoline stores for the harvest instead. Would that work?”
“I guess,” Ness said.
“Why didn’t I know about this?” Larsen said.
Daniel’s brows flickered. “Do you know how fast this came together? Anyway, if I’d known you were going to raise such a fuss, I would have made sure to consult you.”
“Consult.”
“Yes, consult. What more do you want?”
“I don’t remember the vote that put you here.”
Daniel rolled his eyes. “Listen, get someone to drive him back to the farm, will you? If you must yell, let’s do it in private.”
Larsen’s eyelids drooped. He nodded and brought Ness outside. The plant’s men had disappeared, taking the crates and guns with them. “What do you think?”
“I don’t know,” Ness said.
“Yes, you do.”
“No, I don’t?”
Larsen rubbed one eye. “Everyone has an opinion at every time. When they don’t share, it’s because they’re polite or scared.”
“He should have asked first,” Ness said. “I’m the one who made it. Everyone across the river helped grow the corn, too. Who made Daniel boss?”
“No one.” Larsen smiled. “Does that scare you?”
Ness went back to work, but his enthusiasm had been lost somewhere across the river. He was starting over from scratch. With less than two weeks till the start of harvest, he’d be lucky to get in two good batches, and that itself depended on collecting enough fallen apples from the northern orchard to fill the stills with mash.
“It’s not that big a deal,” Nick said. “You know this stuff grows right out of the ground, right?”
“Wrong,” Ness said. “It grows out of next year’s ground.”
“So we spend one year picking by hand. Who cares?”
“If I have to eat spaghetti one more time, there is a nonzero chance I will kill myself.”
Nick examined the thermometer in one of the vats of mash. “Can you shoot yourself in the head? If your body’s intact, I can make some pretty good meatballs.”
Ness watched the skies for aliens, but saw nothing. If he hadn’t seen them for himself, he’d suspect the whole thing were a lie, a boogeyman invented to keep people scared. To prevent them from protesting when Daniel allocated them just twenty percent of the gasoline they needed for the harvest, and declared there would be no fuel for any more trips into town.
The old man woke them earlier than usual for the first day of harvest. Ness tried to take to the fields with them, but a hefty man named Erasmo shook his head and barred Ness’ way. “Those bony little arms won’t do no good. You want to help, you get those tractors running.”
Ness followed them out anyway, raking up any fallen or discarded cobs and lugging them back to be smashed and boiled. It was pointless, really. He’d be lucky to have twenty gallons ready before they finished up a few weeks from now. It would hardly be enough to run the tractors for an hour. The combines grumbled through the early part of the morning, but burned through their fuel rations before noon. Men and women pulled wagons through the fields, yellow corn piled so high it spilled with every bounce of the wheels, and rolled their loads to a warehouse to be binned and dried.
“How goes the great chopdown?”
Ness startled, dropping wormy cobs onto the warehouse floor. Kristin stood in the doorway in sweatpants and a tank top that showed no obvious stains, which was more than Ness could say about any of his own clothes. Her hair was combed and ponytailed. Ness had the urge to duck below the table. Their water heaters had been acting up and he hadn’t showered or washed his shirt in days.
“Laboriously,” he said. “Someone had the bright idea to run the harvest with fleshy, people-shaped machines instead of those great big metal ones.”
“I heard about the ethanol. That’s so weird. We’ve got guys with guns just standing around in the hallways.”
“I thought everyone on your side of the river was a nuclear scientist or something.”
She shrugged. “I don’t recognize these guys. I think they’re new.”
“Did they show up in a U-Haul?”
“I didn’t see. Just one day and wham, the whole plant looks like an airport on September 12.” Her eyes locked on a stack of small green bottles in the corner. “Hang on a minute. What is that?”
Ness followed her gaze. “Beer.”
“Beer?”
“The hops were old. It’s not very good.”
She walked forward slowly, as if in a dream. “You’re talking to a girl who happily bought things with ‘Lite’ and ‘Ice’ in the name. Who thought Steel Reserve belonged on the middle shelf.”
Ness’ pulse picked up. “Want to try some?”
“With you?”
“I guess I could just give you some.”
She rolled her lip between her teeth. “No. If there’s something wrong with it, I’d like to be able to stab you before I go blind.”
Ness laughed. “Well, I share a room with five other guys.”
“Tempting. Why don’t you just bring some over to the plant instead.”
“Tonight?”
“Sure. We could all get hypernuked by Martians tomorrow. Better drink all the beer while we still can.”
He watched her go. Nick chuckled from the other side of the floor.
Ness scowled. “How long have you been there?”
“Long enough to know you need to hit that.”
“‘Hit that’?” Ness said. “I was hoping the one good thing to come out of the apocalypse would be the death of that phrase.”
“Sorry.”
“Anyway, I don’t even think she likes me.”
“Man, you’re dumb.”
“What?”
“No,” Nick said. “You’re hopeless.”
After dinner, Ness loaded twelve bottles of the label-less beer into a backpack and walked across the bridge, pack clanking. At the gate, two men with machine guns waited in the shadows of the guard station, smoking cigarettes.
“Business?” one said.
“I’m here to see Kristin,” Ness said. “She’s expecting me.”
“Kristin’s last name?”
“I don’t know. Do you have a lot of other Kristins here? Did that particular name protect them from the plague?”
The man gave him a long look, then muttered into his radio. A moment later, he buzzed Ness through, gates sliding back with the rattling of chain. Ness walked to the open space around the control center and drifted to a stop. He had no idea where Kristin lived. He turned in a circle, straps of his pack digging into his shoulders.
&nbs
p; “Ness!” In the last of the light, her face appeared from a third-floor window in a nearby outbuilding. “Stay there. I’ll be right down.”
He adjusted his pack. In a field between her housing and a windowless metal structure, chain link fence lay in tightly stacked rolls. The October night was this side of chilly. Kristin emerged in a hooded sweatshirt, grinning at his backpack.
He jangled it. “Where to?”
Her eyes darted between his. “The river, obviously. That’s the only proper place to drink moonshine.”
“What about in the back of a moving pickup?”
“But one of us would have to drive. Illegal!”
“That never stopped my brother.” Ness started back east toward the river. The reactor thrummed under his feet. Cold air rolled from the water. Green grass lined the banks, overhung by thick trees with browning leaves.
“Should have brought a blanket.” Kristin popped down in the grass. “Oh well. Everything’s a hardship these days.”
Ness unzipped his pack and handed her a beer. It was air temperature, cool but not truly cold. He’d fitted them with twist-off caps. Kristin palmed hers open with a hiss. She sniffed, gaze darting between him and the bottle, and drank.
“Any good?” he said.
“It’s beer,” she said.
He opened his and had a drink. It was strongly bitter and lightly metallic. “I don’t even like beer.”
“Then why did you make it?”
“To see if I could.”
She grinned, teeth white in the moonlight. “I thought so.”
He drank, bubbles tickling his throat. “This is weird.”
“Tastes pretty much like beer to me. You did great.”
“Not the taste.” He gestured the bottle at the river. “Like, if you’re just sitting here, and here’s the river, and there’s a fission reaction rumbling behind us, and there’s the lights of the farm on the water, and there’s a beer in your hand—you can forget that any of it ever happened.”
The Last Days: Six Post-Apocalyptic Thrillers Page 127