“Would you want to go back?” She laughed, holding her bottle in front of her mouth. “Wow. Has there ever been a dumber question? Besides ‘do you want another beer’?”
“I’d only go back if I could know what I know now.”
“You weren’t happy before?”
“I didn’t do anything. I didn’t know what to do.”
“Don’t tell me you lived in your mom’s basement,” Kristin laughed.
“Ha ha,” Ness said.
“So what do you know now?”
He shrugged. “That you can learn to do just about anything. Most things aren’t that hard if you put in the time.”
She finished her beer. Ness passed her another bottle and chugged his to catch up. By the time he drank his second, he was half drunk. Kristin asked him about the harvest and floated the idea of grabbing up the computers at the campus and setting up an internet server.
Ness tipped back his bottle. “Assuming anyone else has power.”
“Sure they do. We hear them on the radio sometimes. They’ve probably got solar or whatever.”
“I thought radios were a security risk.”
“Not if you don’t transmit anything back. Sounds like the aliens have mostly stuck to the cities, anyway. I don’t think they place a high priority on bombing a guy with a windmill and a CB.”
“What about a guy with a nuclear power plant?” Ness said.
Kristin grinned. “I always knew working here would be the death of me. I don’t know. I think Daniel’s hoping to keep a low profile and wait for someone else to take care of our unwanted guests.”
“That sounds like a good way to wind up atomized, sucked into the upper atmosphere, and distributed over several thousand square miles of land.”
“Well, I’ve always wanted to travel.”
He laughed. She was easier to talk to than most girls, and not just because she would get his WOW references. He reached for another beer. Had she kept coming across the river because she was interested in him? Or was she just curious about his projects? He wished he could have met her before. Texting, instant messaging—with an electronic buffer between him and the girl he was talking to, it had been so much easier to be explicit, in all meanings of the term.
But with a live person in front of him, he felt trapped in a block of ice, knowing what he wanted, but physically unable to take the steps to achieve it. If he leaned over and kissed her, what was the very worst thing that could happen? What was the worst she could do? Besides drowning him in the river, scattering bottles around the shore, and writing his suicide note. At worst, she would push him away, he would go back to the farm, and she could stop coming to see him. In many ways, that would be better than the confusion he’d grappled with for the last few weeks.
One more beer. That would do it.
Stars glinted on the river. Short waves lapped between the rocks. Kristin wedged her bottle into the grainy dirt, leaned over him to fetch another beer from the pack, and pressed her mouth to his.
She withdrew a moment later. “Good?”
“Good.”
“Thank God,” she laughed. “You went so tense I thought I missed and was making out with a tree.”
He shifted to hide the bulge in his pants. “I was just kind of surprised.”
“You brew a girl homemade beer, take her and the beer down to the river at night, and you’re surprised?”
“By the moment.”
Her eyes darted between his, metronymic. “Do you want to stop?”
“Hell no.”
She grinned and drank her beer and kissed him. She tasted like bitter hops and sweet skin. After a few minutes, he moved his hand over her shirt to her breast. She laughed and unzipped his pants. Ness hadn’t had sex in more than two years since responding to one of the Craigslist ads he used to peruse, but he lasted a good five minutes. She made him pull out. He wasn’t sure she’d come and couldn’t quite ask. He offered his socks for her to wipe off with.
“How romantic,” she said, still breathing hard. “Do you feel like cavemen?”
“It wasn’t too rough, was it?”
“I’m talking about the grass under my butt. The wind in my everything.”
Ness smiled. “Next time I’ll bring a club. I’d hate to be interrupted by a mammoth.”
She pulled her beer from its makeshift cupholder in the shore, muck slurping from its base. “We should do this again. Clubs optional.”
He agreed, then saw her to her room and went home, beer in hand. He stopped halfway across the bridge to piss into the river. His head felt very clear. He resolved to go see her again tomorrow after harvest wrapped up for the day. It had been fun. He liked her, and she liked him, too. Life could be so easy when you let it. All you had to do was decide Hey, this is what I want, and I’m going to take my shot. That’s all it took. That was the entire secret right there. He grinned and chucked his empty beer into the river. The bottle spun end over end, catching the moonlight and taking it under the black water.
When Ness woke, it was to the same shame as always. The vague yet pervasive sense he had done something wrong. He raked in corn and brought it back to the warehouse to boil. They were still in the throes of the harvest and he worked so hard he often forgot all about her. Four days went by. He doubted he would see her again. It was better this way. Easier. It was tough enough to work out your own life. Add another person to the mix, and it became downright impossible.
She came across the river on the fifth day, finding him in the warehouse amid green husks and white-yellow silk. “This place is a mess.”
He stirred fresh-boiled mash, steam rising into the cool air. “It’s been really busy.”
“Too busy to do any brewing?”
“I bottled some new stuff last night. But I think it’s even worse. It tastes like I filtered it through an old sock.”
“Not the one you keep beside your bed, I hope.” She grinned. “Well. Want to take that stuff down to the river with me again?”
He glanced at her. Was it that easy? Should he tell her he was too busy? It would be so much simpler. Get lost in the work. Forget it all. He felt stuck, trapped inside the same old block of ice. Kristin smiled, eyes tick-tocking between his, asking for a decision. But he was capable of movement, wasn’t he? It was the ice that was stuck. He just had to will his limbs to move.
“I’ll be there,” he said.
He spent the night with her and returned to the harvest at dawn. Day by day, they cleared the fields, hacking down swaths of green and baling them into wagons to be dried. He saw Kristin every second or third day. At night, the desert air grew so cold he thought the dew would crust into frost, but the weather held through Halloween. One day, he realized he hadn’t seen Shawn in weeks. He wasn’t sure if he missed him.
At the plant, the lights stayed on late. Sometimes, when he wasn’t too exhausted, Ness took his binoculars to the river’s edge and watched men with guns patrolling the grounds. Rains came and went. At sunset, dust set the horizon aflame with orange and pink and red.
Larsen’s heavy hand stirred him from the middle of the night. Ness startled, scrabbling to the edge of his mattress, back pressed against the cold wooden wall.
“Get up,” Larsen said.
“Where are we going? Do I need my shoes?”
“Only if you like your feet.”
Ness dressed and got his shoes. Larsen strode through the cornfields, crunching through dried stems and broad, striated leaves, cutting to the banks of the river where the water would smother his words.
Larsen stared at the silvery ripples for so long Ness began to shiver. The tall man planted his foot on a rock and heeled it into the river. “There are no bombs.”
Ness hunched his shoulders tight against the wind. “Is that a Zen thing?”
“Daniel doesn’t think they’ll work.”
“He doesn’t think high doses of radiation will kill things made out of flesh and blood?”
“Do we know the
y have blood?”
“Okay then, flesh and goo.”
Larsen gazed across the river. “Daniel thinks two things. First, that the fact they were able to survive a trip of unknown light-years proves they’re radiation-resistant. Second, that we shouldn’t fight.”
Ness breathed into his hands. “Sooner or later, they’ll come for us.”
“Unless they don’t.”
“Yeah, they’re probably perfectly cool with us running a nuclear reactor. Just so long as we keep our yard trimmed and don’t let any missiles pee on their rose bushes.”
“Again, he sees two things. Someone else drives them off. And we’re fine. Or the resistance fails, and we’re dead no matter what we do.”
“What if we could have made a difference?” Ness said.
Larsen swiveled his flat-cheeked face toward Ness. “He thinks the chances of that are so low that it’s not worth antagonizing the invaders.”
“I don’t get why you’re telling me this.”
“To do with it what you wish.” Larsen sniffed and turned from the river. Ness followed him for three steps, then fell back. The conversation was over.
He returned to the river and sat down. He watched the ripples until his mind was ready to move. Larsen wouldn’t have come to him to prompt him into speaking to Daniel. Ness had no special evidence. No proof of concept in the bombs. If Larsen couldn’t talk the old man into action, Ness wouldn’t have a prayer.
The tall man could be coming to him to vent. Ness had the impression few people liked Larsen. Maybe he didn’t have any friends. Or maybe he’d come to Ness because he knew Ness had no power nor the will to grab it, and that he could spill whatever he pleased without fear that Ness would use it against him, to discredit or betray him to Daniel.
No, he didn’t think so. Larsen wasn’t so different from the farmers and locals back in Moscow. If he had a problem, he’d do something about it—or keep it to himself.
He had given Ness this information so Ness would put it to use. So Ness would go on strike? Stop producing ethanol until Daniel started producing bombs? Daniel would just get Brandon to do it. Or bribe Nick.
Ness went still. He knelt and tapped a wave-lapped rock, reassuring himself with its solidity. Daniel could replace one person. He couldn’t replace a hundred.
Ness went home. He woke so nervous he couldn’t eat breakfast. He spent hours rehearsing what he would say, discarding one phrase after another, searching for the perfect line of logic. He still wasn’t sure he’d found it when the workers came home from the fields for dinner.
He waited until most had finished but few had left the tables. Then, heart beating so hard he thought his heart would squirt from his ribs, he climbed on top of his picnic table and cleared his throat.
“My name’s Ness. I’m the guy who was so lazy he had to be literally whipped.” A few people chuckled uneasily. His entire body itched. “Since then, I’ve tried to get my head on straight. Because I thought we were working toward something important. I thought we were working to kill the aliens who took our families away. Who are still fighting to wipe us out. But I don’t think we are fighting back. I think we’re working toward something else instead. Something the people running this place don’t want you to know about.”
Nick looked up at him like Ness’ teeth had fallen out one by one while he was speaking. “What are you talking about?”
He almost lost his nerve. “We’re not working for our safety or our future. We’re working so the people in the plant can take what we make and sell it for themselves.” He described the arms deal, the meat they ate, the radios they had access to, the computers and the trucks and the hired soldiers. “That plant isn’t just across a river, it’s in a different world. One where everything we create gets sent to them and we’re left with the scraps.
“Daniel tells us all this hardship is about fighting the aliens. But someone in his camp just told me he doesn’t plan to fight back at all. Therefore, I can only conclude that we are being used—and will go on being used until we do something to stop it.”
He broke off; he’d had more, but he forgot it abruptly. He stood on the picnic table, biting the skin around his thumbnail, their sunbeaten faces watching him from under the shadows of the tarps.
“Is that true?” Erasmo said to the old man who woke them every morning, who still hadn’t moved. “They get to just drive into town?”
The old man shrugged. “How should I know? Don’t tell me shit.”
“This whole time they said they were building bombs,” said Ellen, a hefty woman who swore every time she rose from tending the rows of crops. “If they’re not looking to give the squid a taste of what we did to Nagasaki, just what the hell are they doing over there?”
Ness shrugged. “Selling our stuff for other stuff we’ll never see.”
“So what do you want to do about it?” Nick said.
Ness could have hugged him. “Nothing. I want to do nothing. Quit working. Go on strike.”
Ness hadn’t known what he expected. Cheers? Applause? Boos and a hail of tomatoes? Instead, they met his proposal with blank silence, looking away when he climbed down from his perch. He walked to the river and wandered the banks until long past dark. He thought about going to Kristin, but it wouldn’t do any good. He’d failed.
In the morning, the workers rose, ate breakfast, and stayed at the picnic tables, watching each other, as if waiting for someone to break rank and Ness’ spell with it. The old man stood with his arms folded, toothpick wiggling from his teeth. He caught Ness staring and nodded.
A half hour after they were scheduled to start the day’s harvest, the people dispersed. Some went back to their bunks. Some went to the river to wash their clothes. Others walked south, packs on their backs, to spend the day foraging in town. None went back to the fields.
At the tables, Nick sipped his water and laughed. “It’s like we’re all skipping school. Know what happens next?”
Ness shook his head. “I never skipped school.”
“They send security to get you.”
Ness laughed through his nose. His humor was as short-lived as his rebellion. The next morning, while the workers were still waiting on their oatmeal, trucks rolled onto the bridge. They crossed the wide gray waters, wheels spitting dust, and came to a stop at the end of the road to the farm. Men with rifles leaped from the backs and advanced on the workers. Ness stood and prepared to run.
22
Teeth swam above her head. Two white rows of teeth. Teeth divided by narrow gray seams. They sank toward her neck, a pink tongue-tip protruding from the incisors. Tristan tried to scream.
Water touched her lips. She swallowed. She had done this before. She choked and sat up, water dribbling down her shirt.
“It’s alive!” said the woman who owned the teeth. “Glad to see we’re not just wasting the stuff. Starting to feel like I was pouring it down a pretty little drain.”
Tristan sat up, taking in the plain white sheets, the bare and water-spotted walls. “Where am I?”
“Williams,” the woman said. “Williams, Arizona. Former United States of Earth.”
“So you know about them.”
“We’re not living in a basement just to keep cool.”
Tristan reached for the water glass, finishing it. The water was room temperature and tasted like dirt. “They’re trying to wipe us out. I didn’t know anyone was left.”
“Oh, was there a plague or something?” the woman said. “That would explain why all my friends dropped dead.”
“They’re working on a second plague. A final strike.”
The woman pressed her lips together. “Doubt there’s enough of us left to kill.”
Her name was Jen and she was gently plump. His name was Mikel and his brown eyes were as bright as his smile. They were married, both in their late thirties. They lived in the basement of a former Grand Canyon gift shop and diner beside a large blue lake. Mikel had found Tristan on the road while scaveng
ing their designated sector of the town—even before the Panhandler hit, Williams had just three thousand people, most of whom knew each other by face if not name. After the Panhandler hit, it was reduced to 22. One Sunday after the dust had settled, a former volunteer firefighter went door to door to invite the survivors to the Lutheran church to learn who’d lived and hash out what to do next.
After the meeting, six survivors left town to seek different fates. The sixteen who remained in Williams split scavenging rights between themselves as equally as possible—although it had taken more than a few arguments to settle who got what share of the propane shop on the north end of town—including shared and unrestricted passage to the two lakes and two reservoirs. There hadn’t been a single significant squabble since.
Jen told her all this over a breakfast of potatoes, eggs, and homemade bread. Tristan held the velvety yolks in her mouth before swallowing. “So you just split up the whole town? Is there anything left?”
Mikel poured her more water. “Food, guns, gas, and Coke? That’s all been hauled back to our lairs, which ought to tell you a thing or five about a people’s values. Nonessentials haven’t been picked quite so bare.”
“Where’d you come from?” Jen said. “You looked like a scarecrow come to life.”
Tristan dug into her potatoes. “West. I ran out of food. I meant to restock along the road. Turned out the road was out of water, too.”
After another day of rest, Tristan felt well enough to get up and do some wandering. Like Mikel said, the town had been picked free of food. She found a duffel bag upstairs in the gift shop and walked to the sporting goods store on the east end of town, which still carried a few things deemed too common or useless to be worth hoarding: a canteen, a compass, two silvery emergency blankets, two Swiss army knives, a radio, a collapsible fishing rod, artificial bait. All the guns were gone. The biggest knives, too. Tristan shouldered her bag, climbed onto a bike, and rode back to the house, dropping the bike off the bushes down the street and stashing the bag in the passenger side of a dust-caked Cadillac.
The Last Days: Six Post-Apocalyptic Thrillers Page 128