Generation Z

by Peter Meredith

  Mike refused. He stayed at the helm all night and kept them pointed north even as nature did its best to pound them and the Calypso into pieces. At daybreak the seas were as high and as rough as ever and yet the murky light gave them hope. It made everything from tying knots to ducking waves just a little easier.

  They took turns sleeping. They ate, and they lived.

  By three that afternoon, they didn’t so much as break free of the storm as they were spat out of it. In the light airs north of the storm the waters were choppy and hard, but compared to what they had gone through it seemed like a vacation. Somehow Mike still had energy enough to take a run along the coast to find out where they were.

  There were very few towns of any size along that stretch of the Pacific shore. They found only miles of empty beaches until they came to an inlet which everyone assumed was the mouth of a significant river. Carefully Mike piloted them into the mile wide opening and toward a series of jutting piers, all of which were crumbling into ruin.

  He picked out the sturdiest-looking dock and slid in next to it. Five minutes later, Jenn threw herself down on a small hill at the end of the dock, where the tall grass swished back and forth with the breeze. “Does anyone mind if I just lie here for a bit?”

  “No,” Mike said. “Stu and I will explore.” The only exploring they did was in a single house down the beach. They went with crossbows at the ready, but the place was deserted, even by the dead. All the seaward-facing windows had been blown in long before and the two walked on a fine carpet of glass and sand. The place had been ransacked and stripped of anything of immediate value. Still, there were dry clothes to be had and they quickly tossed aside their old soggy, rank outfits and redressed in sweaters and jeans. There were no coats left in the house so the two settled for blazers found in the master closet. Shaggy and dirty, the two looked like bums who were playing dress-up for the day.

  As Mike looked for clothes that would fit Jenn, Stu went to the garage in search of a map. He found one sitting stuffed down between the driver’s seat and the console. When he opened it and realized where they were, he stared for such a long time that Mike came looking for him. He had two shirts in his hands, one blue and one green.

  “What are you doing?” Mike asked, forgetting the shirts.

  “I’m…I’m just trying to figure something out. We overshot the Columbia. We’re ten miles north of the mouth of the river.”

  Mike shrugged. “That’s not a problem. The wind is straight out of the west. It should be smooth sailing back. Which one do you think Jenn will like?” He held up the two shirts.

  “Sailing isn’t the problem. I just…I just don’t know how Jenn knew, you know, how she knew to keep going north into that storm. We could have ended up anywhere, but we ended up almost exactly where we needed to go.”

  “She has a gift,” was Mike’s simple reply. “She knew about the journey, she knew about that horde back in Oakland. Face it, Stu, the signs are real and so is she.”

  Chapter 22

  Stu Currans

  They boarded the Calypso and with the storm they had escaped from swinging inland, they had plenty of wind to shoot them down the coast to the mouth of the Columbia River and from there the gale swept them inland along what had once been some of the most beautiful land in the world. Now, the north bank of the river was a wasteland of ash and fallen trees. There was nothing left standing. A fire greater than Stu had ever heard of had swept over the land turning it into a desert where nothing lived, not even the dead.

  There was some life on the south bank only it wasn’t what Stu would call normal life. He could only describe the land there as “infected” but by what he didn’t know.

  “Look at that,” Jenn said, pointing at a seagull struggling to lift off. Feathers dripped off of it as it flapped its misshapen wings. Beneath it hung stumps instead of webbed feet. It flew overhead and they could hear its breath wheezing in and out.

  Even the dead were affected by the disease. The few they saw in the light of the setting sun were a horror of running pus and slagged flesh. They seemed to be melting into the earth as they walked and their moans were so filled with despair that for a moment Stu forgot they were evil monsters and felt bad for them.

  “People actually live here?” Jenn asked, sniffing the air and wrinkling her nose. It smelled of metal in a way none of them had ever experienced before.

  “Oh, yeah,” Stu said. “That’s what the traders say. Though they never actually go to Portland. They meet somewhere south of it at a place called Salem.” This was a normal practice, even the Hill People met the traders across the bay to keep them from knowing the exact location of their complex.

  “Maybe they did this on purpose,” Mike mused. “You know, to keep people away.”

  Stu didn’t think so. It might have started out as part of someone’s plan, but clearly the fire had gotten out of hand. The tortured landscape went on for miles and when the sun set, the darkness couldn’t hide the destruction; even the shadows were bent.

  Sailing in the dark on an unknown river was exceedingly dangerous, but they pressed on and not because of the urgency of their mission. They braved the water out of fear of the land.

  The further inland they went, the worse the destruction and the sharper the smell. They wrapped damp scarves around their heads as a protection against the stench and whatever germs lingered on the air. It was a forty-mile trip up the Columbia to Portland, but after only an hour, the wide river branched left and right around an island a mile wide and several miles long.

  A fifteen-foot high wall made from what looked like the scraps from a junkyard had been built around the island. There were stacks of old cars, refrigerators lined up like rusting teeth, ovens piled on dishwashers, lamp posts and tree trunks wrapped in cables, cargo containers set end to end, farm tractors and cranes interlocked in complex puzzles. Oddest of all was the back half of a naval destroyer half-in and half-out of the water.

  As they sailed up the west side of the island the rain came back in a deluge, soaking them again. Mike ordered the sail shortened as a precaution, while next to them the crazy wall went on and on without a break or a gate. At the far end of the island, Mike swung the boat around and turned down river to inspect the long south side. Midway down, they discovered a canal that that led through an arch in the wall. The canal was all of twenty feet across; too narrow for a sailing vessel. Mike looped around and let out the anchor just upstream from the arch.

  There they waited to be hailed or even noticed. “Hello?” Stu called when they grew tired of waiting. There was no reply and the only noise was the patter of rain and a metallic grinding coming from the wall as the wind blew against it. Stu turned to Jenn. “Um, what do you think? Any signs?” He couldn’t believe those words had come from his mouth, but he had a bad feeling about this island.

  She glanced up, squinting into the rain at the dark clouds blanketing the sky from one end to the other. “I don’t see any, sorry.”

  It was just as well. He wouldn’t have believed a good sign and things looked sketchy enough that he really didn’t need a bad one. “I want you to stay with the boat,” he told her. “Keep hunkered down and if there’s any shooting move down to the far side of the island and anchor as close as you can to the shore. Don’t wait more than fifteen minutes for us. If we don’t make it by then, just…just head back home.”

  “But it’ll be okay,” Mike said. “We’re on a trading mission. People respect that.” It was a fine lie that calmed Jenn’s sense of rising panic. Generally, people didn’t respect strangers coming unannounced through their gates after sunset.

  Slow and carefully, Mike maneuvered the Calypso almost to the edge of the island near the canal. They were only a few feet away when there came that soft rasping sound as the keel ground on the riverbed. With M4s in hand and crossbows across their backs, the two men leapt out of the boat.

  The icy water came to their chests, turning them numb from the nipples down. Together t
hey pushed the Calypso away from the bank and out a little further into the river. It floated past them. “Good luck,” Jenn said.

  Stu worried they needed all the luck they could get. It was one thing showing up uninvited in Sacramento—they were neighbors, after a sort—but these island people were utter strangers. And strange strangers at that. He couldn’t help wonder what sort of weirdos would live in a wasteland like this.

  They ducked under the arch and found a muddy trail with muddy prints, fresh and human. They were the only things fresh. There was a strong scent of urine and feces coming from the canal which was a stagnant stew that had their stomachs rolling. They hurried through the wall to a little slope leading to someone’s backyard. The canal was lined with houses, some which had been there from before and others of the mobile sort which had been dragged up the banks sometime in the last twelve years.

  They all looked utterly miserable. Whatever paint had been on the houses wasn’t just faded, it was gone, turning everything into a uniform grey color. This included the shingled roofs. These weren’t just weathered, they had been eaten away exposing the roof itself. In places this had been eaten away, too and there were tarps held down by bricks or cinderblocks.

  “What do you think?” Mike asked. “Do we just pick one and knock?”

  “Would a doctor actually live here? In all this? Maybe we should look around. Maybe there’s a nice area that…” He was cut off by a high, piercing cackle. It was a woman, though Stu pictured a crone with warts and yellowed teeth.

  “I get the feeling there isn’t a nice part,” Mike whispered. “Let’s get away from this canal. It’s awful.”

  Stu was all for the idea. They trudged up the hill which was covered in dead grass. Passing between two mobile homes, both of which leaked light through cracks in the walls, they came to a trash-lined road that paralleled the canal. There were more mobile homes lined up along the other side of the road. Beyond these were empty fields where nothing grew.

  Everything was crap as far as the eye could see.

  “Let’s go with that house,” Stu said, pointing at the largest home in sight. In the before, it had probably been worth close to a million dollars. Now he wouldn’t trade a bullet for it. They were passing another of the shoddy little homes when someone coughed not ten feet away. It was a lung-scraping cough that sounded like it was pulling up something big.

  They both jumped, pointing their rifles at a shadow of a man. He cocked an ear. “Someone dere?” he asked, in a quavering voice. “Who dat? Middie?”

  “No,” Stu said softly, stepping closer. “We’re just looking to do some trading.”

  “Hmmm,” the man said and then coughed again. This time he spat. “Trading or stealing? Hmm? Traders don’t noways come out at night. Only raiders come in the night. Dats in the bible. You can look it up.”

  Stu nodded. “Most of the time you’d be right, but we’re not here to take anything. We’re looking for medicine and we’re willing to trade for it. We have…”

  The man let out a bark of laughter that turned into one of his awful wet coughs. After spitting out something that sounded like it had the size and consistency of a crushed frog, he said, “Medicine? Dere’s no medicine what’ll cure us. You knows dat as well as any, so why pretend?”

  He was sick, that was obvious even in the dark, but with what, Stu couldn’t tell just by a cough. “We’re not normal traders. We came up out of San Francisco looking for medicine and a doctor.” Any doctor would do and if the girl doctor was just a myth or a joke, he didn’t need to be laughed at.

  “Y’all gots problems, too? I guess the fallout got ‘round just like I knew it would. Well, if so, ain’t no doctor gonna clear up what you got a-coming.” He struck a match to a homemade cigarette. Mike drew in a sharp breath. The man had wet black holes where his eyes should’ve been and there were several odd bulges the size of golf balls pressing up under the skin of his grey face.

  “Wh-what’s wrong with you?” Mike asked, leaning back.

  The man, who wasn’t nearly as old as his voice made him seem, snorted bringing up something green. “The fallout from the bombs got me same as ever-body else.” Mike looked to Stu who shrugged; he didn’t know what fallout was either. Somehow the man sensed their ignorance. “Y’all came up the river, didn’t y’all? Y’all saw what them bombs did to the land, right? Well, it’s doing the same to us, only slower.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Stu said. “I take it you tried antibiotics.”

  “Thems for germs. Ever-body knows that.” The man paused, shrugged and grinned, showing only a few isolated teeth growing up out of red gums. “But yeah, we all did. Ya gotta try sometin, right? Ya just don’t lay down and die. Hell, I fought the dead all the way up from Mobile an’ I’ll fight all the way into the ground.”

  “That’s brave,” Stu said. “Say, could you maybe talk to whoever’s in charge for us? We have three very sick people who are desperately in need of antibiotics and a doctor.”

  At the question, the man went into what Stu thought was a fit that seemed to be a prelude to his death. He shook and made a gurgling sound deep in his chest. One of his hands went up and down smacking his own knee. Gradually, Stu came to realize the man was laughing.

  When he could speak, he told them, “The pills are all worthless. Like all of us, dere falling apart. Dere just little bits of powder now. An’ dere ain’t no doctor here. Dere ain’t no doctor anywheres.”

  At this, Stu felt gutted. His entire body sagged, drained by the disappointment. Mike wasn’t ready to give up just yet. “What about the girl doctor? We heard she was up here.”

  Stu expected more laughter from the man, however he made a growly noise as a prelude to another hacking cough. “Dat’s nothin’ but a scam. When the fallout came a few years back and people got sick, we went to see dat girl. We went all the way to Seattle and ya know what she said? Dere ain’t nothing what could be done, sorry.”

  He hacked up something big and spat it angrily to the ground, where the rain began to disintegrate it. “Sorry! Dat’s what she says. Well, we was like you, you know desperate, an’ so we’s start begging but she only stares at us like we was bugs or sometin’. I gets really mad an’ I start a-yellin’, tellin’ her ‘bout the pain our folk were in, an’ you know what she says to dat? If the pain gets too bad, I suggest you kill yo-self. Tell me that’s not fuc…”

  Someone in the mobile home a few feet away yanked open a window and said, “Will you shut the hell up Kyle Taylor? I swear you’re always running your gums and I always have to hear it. Who are you talking to anyways?”

  Stu was about to answer when Kyle held a finger to his lips. “Never you mind who it is,” he said. “Go back to scratchin’ your ass, Bob. It’s what y’all do best.” Bob grumbled and shut the window. Kyle waited a few seconds with his misshapen head cocked, before whispering, “Y’all should git gone while you can.”

  “Why?” Stu asked. “We haven’t done anything wrong.” Despite the “fallout” in the air, Stu wanted to ask at least one other person about the girl doctor. There was a good chance that Kyle was not quite right in the head. If he had lumps growing outward, he could have some growing inward as well.

  “It don’t matter what you done,” Kyle whispered. He was now so quiet that Stu had to lean in to hear. “All dat matters is dat y’all is fresh meat. Y’all ain’t tainted yet.”

  A cold shiver went right down Stu’s back. In the post-apocalyptic world, cannibals were a reality. They weren’t a story to scare the kiddies around a campfire and they weren’t some far-off threat that could be easily dismissed.

  “We have to get back to Jenn, now!” Mike hissed, grabbing Stu’s arm and pulling him away from the mobile home.

  “Y’all have a girl?” Kyle asked, a look of longing on his tortured face. “Is she young?”

  There was a rusting creaking noise as Bob stepped out into the rain. He was wearing a wide-brimmed cowboy hat that cast dark shadows across his fac
e. The poncho he wore draped over sloped shoulders made him shapeless.

  “Who has a girl?” he asked, his voice couched low. “Who is that?”

  He stepped closer, but stopped and did a little jump when he saw Mike’s M4 pointed at him. “Get your hands up,” Mike demanded.

  “It’s not my hands you have to be worried about,” the man said, lifting them to shoulder height nonetheless. “It’s my voice that should make you nervous. If I say the word you’ll be surrounded by a hundred men, so be cool with that gun.”

  “He’s cool. We all are, except you,” Stu said, speaking quietly. “Now, hush up so we can work this out.”

  “I’ll hush up when I’m good and ready,” Bob said, even louder than he had been and if anything, he sounded as off-kilter as Kyle. “Do you think you scare me? Do you think a gun can possibly scare me now? Take a good look and tell me what you think.” Stepping closer, he pulled off the cowboy hat.

  Like the seagull they had seen earlier, his hair grew in little patches. Where he was hairless, his scalp as well as his face was covered in sores and more of the same lumps that plagued Kyle.

  “Take a good long look at the freak.” It was hard not to stare and Mike gaped, his lips drawn back in a look of disgust. Stu pulled his eyes away just in time to see that Bob had an ulterior motive for showing off the horror that his face had become. While his left hand held the cowboy hat out, his right had stolen into a slit cut into the side of the poncho. He had a Glock halfway out before Stu even saw it.

  “Don’t you…” Stu started to say but by then the gun was free and coming up. He fired his M4 from five feet away. Bob’s poncho seemed to inflate as the bullet blasted through it and Bob. The gunshot was shockingly loud and the echoes from it carried on and on. Bob fell flat on his back, let out a final gurgle and died with rainwater collecting in little pools in his open eyes.

  Kyle had his hands out and was waving them around. “Bob? Was that you? Who was shot?”