2013: The Aftermath

by Shane McKenzie

  All this was expressed in Riddo’s silence, as thick and cold as the air around them.

  “If the compound works, people will remember us.”

  “They’ll forget again,” Riddo said.

  “They’ll learn from their mistakes.”

  “They’ll make new ones.”

  “We’ll be heroes,” Fitz said. “Save the human race, prevent extinction. We’ll do what the dinosaurs couldn’t sixty-five billion years ago. Doesn’t any of this mean anything to you?”

  Riddo rode the wind and was silent for a long moment as some subconscious image of Sarah as an infant, too distant and unrecognizable to hold meaning to him now, slipped quietly by.

  “No,” he said.

  He’d promised Sarah, before the radioactive cancer had taken hope from her eyes and the pink from her lips, that he’d save them. This was the fulfilling of that promise, nothing more. After all, what good would it do, Riddo thought, even if the compound actually worked? And what were the chances, seeing as all the others had failed to dissolve the ash clouds or to bring out the forgotten warmth of sunlight? What good was finding the sky, when humanity had lost it willingly in the first place? The human race was a virus to their chronically-ill planet, and anyway, most of them would be dead of their various post-apocalyptic cancers within the year, he thought.

  “The closer we seemed to peace, the quicker it all fell apart,” Riddo said.

  “What?”

  “Peace,” Riddo said. “It was an illusion. Eight-and-a-half billion people aren’t capable of peace. We all hated each other. Christ, we weren’t even separate countries anymore when it happened. Did you forget the lies they fed us? When all the borders fell, and they convinced us the oceans between us were getting smaller, even as they rose. But we obliterated ourselves before the Continental Union was even in place a full year. Did you ever think that maybe we aren’t supposed to survive? The world was ours, Fitz. We blew it up.”

  “Maybe. But what’s any of that mean to the children down there in the dark? What do they care about wars they never fought? Don’t they at least deserve a chance to live?”

  Riddo laughed. It was not a cruel laugh, as Riddo was not a cruel man, but when he’d lost his emotions he’d also lost the ability to spare the emotions of others. In its place had grown an apathy of petrified ice. “The children that are burning and mutating and dying slow and agonizing deaths?” he said. “Look around. They’re better off dead.”

  “Their parents wouldn’t think so.”

  “Then they’re selfish.” Riddo sped ahead, as fast as the rocket boots would push him, quickly widening the distance from Fitz’s kite, and from the possibility of a creeping memory of Sarah’s pale, gently-forever-closed eyelids, or the final rigid rise of Hailey’s scruffy chest as she lay motionless on her side, her crystalline blue eyes glazed with finality.

  “Slow down,” Fitz shouted. “You’re going to hit a downdraft and snap your wing in half. I can’t get to you at that speed.”

  Riddo ignored his partner’s pleading in the side of his head. As the computerized lenses informed him he was approaching the drop point, he cut sharply up, maintaining his speed. The lenses blinked transparent red to inform him of the rising temperature of the jet boots, and warn of an impending stall-out.

  In Riddo’s ear: “Wait, I’m not close yet. If you release your payload too soon before I release mine, synthesis will be impossible.”

  The temperature of Riddo’s boots had risen to eighty percent of critical failure when he switched them off completely, and floated there for what seemed an eternity, frozen in the soot clouds, a hundred meters over the drop point. Then he cut the nose straight down and dove.

  “I’m almost there,” Fitz said. “Hold on.”

  Riddo plummeted toward the Earth he couldn’t see, plummeted with the drop point targeted in his cross hairs, the wind vibrating his body like the tines of a tuning fork, and meters blurring by.

  He could no longer hear Fitz over the wind. It sounded like he might have said, “Almost there,” and maybe, “Hold your payload a second more.”

  And then, whether Fitz had made it or not, the drop point had been reached and the payload had to be released. So Riddo pulled the chord and a fine crystal powder poured from behind him, like the tails of comets no one had seen in decades. It hung in the air, expanded, and began to dissipate. Suddenly Fitz was there, rushing sideways through, and expelled his own powdery payload, the reactive substance. If the reaction occurred, it was invisible to the naked eye, even to the fliers’ computerized eye lenses.

  Riddo was expelled from the bottom of the cloud-line before he reignited his jet boots and leveled off in the empty lower sky. The buzzing and whirling in his head slowed. “Well?” he said after a moment.

  Though at first imperceptible, the reaction they were looking for was actually the absence of visible substance, specifically, a small pocket in the planet-wrapping ash cloud that would occur almost immediately, according to Fitz’s mathematical hypothesis. The pocket would produce the same effect as a balloon expanding in a cloud of smoke, Fitz had explained to Riddo, but without the balloon. And then there would be other pockets, and in a week the cloud would boil and burn away from the Texas sky like nitrate film. In a month America’s snow would melt under noontime rays of brilliance. Next Canada then South America then Europe then Asia would turn to slush, to soil, to green grass. The Sahara, the outback would dry up and smolder and fry again. Fitz had stood outside the camp bunker in the dark, closed his eyes, and tilted his head heavenward, as if he could actually feel the Australian sun warming his face. Wouldn’t it be something? he’d said.

  “I don’t see anything,” Fitz said. “I’m going to make another pass of the drop zone.”

  Riddo flew silently below the clouds and waited for Fitz’s response. Finally it came.

  “I don’t understand. These are the coordinates, but there’s nothing here. I’m right in the middle of it.” Fitz’s voice was anguished with disappointment, but Riddo had expected the experiment to fail like the others before it.

  Fitz began to sob. “It was supposed to work. The numbers said it would work. This doesn’t make sense.”

  Riddo lowered his altitude and glided back to camp.

  ***

  In the dim lamp light coning down on them in the bunker, Fitz and Riddo sat hunched over an old oak table. Pencils and equation-riddled papers strewn in front of him, Fitz went over the numbers. Then he went over the numbers again. Then again.

  Riddo drank his beer. He’d found the six-pack months ago in one of the few areas of Amarillo that wasn’t completely demolished by the Mega-Bombs or aftermath opportunists. It was the first bottled alcohol he’d seen since the war ended. He’d kept the beers in a metal safe beneath his bunk, which was otherwise empty. He kept no baby pictures of Sarah or other potentially painful mementos, and he’d burned his birth certificate years ago; with no Continental Union or other government body to recognize him as its citizen, documentation was as useless to him now as individual constitutions had once become under the CU merger of nations.

  He’d drank a beer for every attempt, sipped the bitter-warm froth when each new chemical compound failed.

  This was the last bottle.

  Fitz removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I can’t find a mistake.”

  “The whole thing’s a mistake,” Riddo said.

  He was leaning back in his chair, his legs propped on the table, sipping the beer when Fitz leapt up and shoved him to the ground. The chair back and his skull smacked the concrete with an echoing slap, and the beer bottle exploded into bits of emerald glass and an expanding puddle of brownish, suddy liquid. A lump quickly began to form on Riddo’s head, even before he realized what had happened.

  “To hell with you, Riddo.” Fitz glowered over him, huffing air and balling his fists. “Get up.”

  Riddo rolled from the chair and pushed his palms slowly to the ground to raise hims
elf. The right one stung, the one that had held the beer. He looked. It was bleeding badly. A jagged green shard protruded from the skin, which he carefully tugged from his hand. He stood.

  Fitz shoved him, causing a slight stumble, but not a fall this time. He didn’t move. That’s it, he thought. Get angry. Get as angry as I’ve been all these years. Let it wash over you and cook you alive until your heart is rough and you can’t feel a thing pumping through.

  Fitz was stomping across the room, reaching into a filing cabinet. “If you’re so sick of being human,” he said, taking a black six shooter and a box of bullets from the drawer, sliding a bullet into the chamber, spinning it, “maybe you should just do the planet a favor.” He slammed the box of bullets on the table and pressed the gun into Riddo’s hand.

  Without hesitation Riddo placed the gun to his temple and squeezed. There was no life flashing before his eyes, no memory, no feeling, no bright light. Just the soft click of an empty chamber. “All this time,” Riddo said, “I never took you to be a gambler.”

  Fitz had turned pale and sat. “How could you gamble your own life?” he muttered.

  Riddo again put the gun to his head, looked Fitz in the eyes. “When there’s nothing to lose, it’s as easy as breathing,” he said, and pulled the trigger. The next empty chamber clicked by harmlessly.

  Fitz jumped up. “Jesus! Put that thing down!”

  Another soft click. Riddo kept eye contact with Fitz as he approached.

  “Listen, Riddo, don’t do something stupid. Please. I was only proving a point.”

  “Calm, steady, detached,” Riddo said. “Like a surgeon.” The fourth chamber clicked. Empty. “Playing with life and death.”

  Fitz swung, breaking Riddo’s nose and his own hand. Blood streaked Riddo’s face. He stood dazed by the blow, long enough for Fitz to tackle him to the ground. As the two wrestled for the gun, Riddo’s hand clenched and squeezed the trigger, causing the bullet to explode from the fifth chamber and ricochet across the bunker in a flurry of sparks.

  The two lay beside each other, bleeding, broken, breathless. Sticky with beer. They lay that way a long time before either moved. Riddo stared into the bulb of the overhead lamp, until its impression burned into his retinas. The sun, he thought. The round, warm, burning, yellow sun. The sun that could melt and evaporate the tired coldness, disintegrate shadows, fill the horizon with broiling reds and oranges and pinks and violets. Bradbury and Yeats’s golden apple. He got up, wiped the blood from his lip and left the room. Fitz was quickly after him.

  They stepped into the snow, Riddo still several meters ahead.

  “Where are you going?” Fitz said.

  Riddo had walked five hundred meters and was standing in front of their makeshift aluminum hangar before he realized Fitz had been shouting his name.

  “Hey,” Fitz yelled. Riddo turned. No one from camp was outside but the two fliers, and suddenly Riddo felt the wind that filled the black wooly silence around them. He turned back to the two jetglider kites setting under the hangar, their poly-synth fabric wings ruffling sleepily over the gusting air currents.

  “Even the dinosaurs had the sky in their bones,” Riddo said. “They must’ve known that. Even all the ones without wings. You know what I think? I think they looked up and felt the same way we do. The way I used to feel, before everything died and anger seeped into every space like concrete, and I couldn’t move an inch.”

  Fitz was quiet.

  “You said it yourself. We’ll do what the dinosaurs couldn’t. I don’t know if people will ever see the blues and reds and starry blacks of the sky again, or the sun that makes all the colors, but if I’m going to die anyway I’m going to see it all, Fitz. I’m going to reach out and touch it.”

  Riddo knew Fitz wanted to warn him that the wind indicated an oncoming storm, which was unbelievably dangerous with a wingman, suicidally reckless without one. He knew Fitz would normally have reminded him that no flier had reached the top of the ash cloud because of its high altitude, that such a mission was, undeniably, fatal in nature. But the two had been each other’s wingmen long enough to know when one of their calloused minds was set, so Fitz stayed quiet.

  Riddo turned back to him. “We used to be people,” he said. “I used to have a daughter to play with, an ex to fight with, to miss sometimes, a dog to be lonely with, a pilot job to thrill and exhaust me, a condo to wander around, a window to watch the city glow from, a bed to collapse onto. Air to breathe without perpetual ash and radioactivity and darkness and cold. We can’t even remember our pasts anymore. They blow away into nothingness like everything else.”

  “There’s no other way for you, is there?” Fitz said. “It’s Icarus or nothing.”

  The flier stared at Fitz a long moment, imagining the glow of sunlight radiating across his face, the warm air that could erase the fatigue and brittleness cold had burned into his skin. “You’re a good wingman,” he said. “Under a bluer sky we could’ve been friends.”

  Fitz shook his head. “We are friends. I hope wherever your flight ends you get to see that. We need a different story, at any rate. We’ve been hearing this doomsday narrative for so many years that, by the time it finally came, we didn’t know any other stories. We accepted the world we were told about because we were too tired to do anything else. You think you’re dead inside, but the truth is, you’ve got more life left in you than any survivor down here. At least, you’ve got enough fire to push you higher than any flier’s gone before, which is more fire than I’ve had in a long time. And it might just be enough.”

  Riddo wanted to say thank you, but hadn’t said the words in so long that it felt unnatural. His lips parted slightly but no sound came, so they closed again.

  “I have the cancer,” Fitz said suddenly. Before Riddo could speak he continued. “I’ve had pains in every part of me for as long as I can remember, but we all do, it’s always cold, there’s no sunlight, and radiation is rampant. It’s easier to ignore, it’s easier to pretend we don’t all have it even if we do. But about a month and a half ago I started coughing up blood. I saw a doctor in a camp in Bishop Hills. She gave me six months. She called it a ‘liberal estimate.’ Really there’s no telling.”

  “Jesus. You’re dying and you didn’t tell me?”

  “We’re all dying, Riddo. You have the cancer too, and if you don’t you will eventually.”

  “So what was the point of all this? The chemical compounds, the tests, saving the world, doing what the dinosaurs couldn’t? Why are you so intent on saving the damned?”

  “Because,” Fitz said, “even the damned need to believe there’s a happy ending. Even if the happy ending is a lie.”

  Riddo unlocked the storage shed where they kept their flying equipment and suited up. He began locking the jet boots around his calves. Fitz touched his shoulder.

  “Even you need a happy ending to believe in. And I really hope you find it.”

  ***

  The wind cut and tore and ripped and shredded as Riddo flew into the path of the approaching storm. The laser display contacts informed him of the intensifying meteorological conditions with numbers and wave charts, which he stared past, into the whirling clouds ahead.

  He thought of what Fitz had said to him. About friendship and happy endings in a dark hell. About dying. About the sky. Icarus or nothing. The words echoed in Riddo’s mind. After Fitz had gone back to the bunker, before takeoff, Riddo used a utility knife to carve the Etruscan spelling of his given nickname, Vikare, into the control bar of the kite. He couldn’t see it now in the darkness, but that didn’t matter. It was the ‘thank you’ he couldn’t conjure earlier. Later, when Fitz would follow the tracking signal from the jetglider kite’s wreckage, hopefully there would be enough of it left intact to deliver the message Riddo had been unable to in life.

  Riddo tried not to think about it, cutting the nose of the kite sharply up. He ascended several hundred meters fairly quickly, continuing to climb turbulently but steadily. The sto
rm had him on edge, his nerves frayed and his stomach knotted from the howling wall of air pressing against him, sandpapering his skin, straining the frame and fabrics of the kite, but after a few minutes of climbing he forced himself to relax and narrow his focus.