Wastelands 2: More Stories of the Apocalypse

by John Joseph Adams

  I seen it every year when we plow it under for the new crops. When I was a boy, before father let me drive the John Deere, I’d play in the loose soil his plowing left behind. Acres and acres for a sandbox. The dust he kicked up would blot the sky and dry my mouth, but I’d kick through the furrows and dig for arrowheads until my fingernails were chipped or packed full of dirt.

  Where he hadn’t yet plowed, you could see the dead stalks from the last harvest. The soil there was packed tight from the rains and the dry spells. Pa used to laugh at the newfangled ways of planting that kept the ground like that by driving the seeds straight through. It weren’t the way the Samuels tended their land, he told us. We Samuels dragged great steel plows across the hard pack and the old stalks and we killed everything in the ground. That was what made the land ready again.

  When I was younger, I found half a worm floppin’ on top of the ground after a plow. It moved like the tail on a happy dog, but it was already dead. Took a while for it to realize, was all. I pinched it between my fingers and watched it wind down like the grandfather clock in the great room. When it was still, the worm went into a furrow, and I kicked some dirt over it. That was the whole point. The little things would feed the corn, and the corn would feed us, and we would all get taller because of it. Pa, meanwhile, drove that tractor in great circles that took him nearly out of sight; the dust he kicked up could blot out the whole Montana sky, and my boots would fill up with gravel as I kicked through the loose furrows he left behind.

  * * *

  Pa only believes in things he can see. He didn’t believe in the meteor until it became brighter than any star in the sky. Before long, you could see it in the daytime if you knew where to look and squinted just right. The people on the TV talked to scientists who said it was coming straight for us. They had a date and time and everything. One of them said you could know where it would land, but that nobody wanted a panic. It just meant people panicked everywhere. And then it leaked that the rock would hit somewhere between Russia and China, and Pa reckoned those people were panicking a little worse.

  He called it a rock, not a meteor. Like a bunch of people, Pa don’t think it’ll amount to much. Folks been predicting doom since his grandpa was a boy, and the world outside still looked pretty much the same.

  This was before we got “First Contact.” That’s what they called it even though the rock hadn’t set down yet. It was nothing but a phone call from what I could tell. On the TV they said it was coming from the other side of the rock. That’s when even the scientists and all the smart people started acting a little crazy.

  First Contact happened back when Mrs. Sandy was still our teacher. We listened to the news at school, I talked to her, and I didn’t tell Pa any of what I learned. It made him angry hearing about the demands, but Mrs. Sandy said it was the best thing that ever happened to our planet, them deciding to come here. She told me a lot before she left and the substitute took her place. She was going to be one of them that welcomed the invaders, even sold her house and bought a pickup with a camper back. I eventually reckoned Pa was right to call her some of those bad things.

  But I did sort out a bunch between the TV and what Mrs. Sandy said. The rock weren’t no accident like the scientists used to suppose. It was aimed. Like the stones I chucked after a plowing, trying to hit one rock with another. The invaders, they was right behind the big rock.

  Mrs. Sandy liked to say that our governments would make the right choice. And all of a sudden, the same channels on TV that I watched for news showed new people. They wore headphones and spoke funny and argued over what to do. My brother wouldn’t stop asking about the little flags in front of each of them, and I had to tell him to shut up so I could hear.

  The invaders were giving us a choice, it sounded like. All they wanted was half our land and for us to get rid of all of our weapons, and they would leave most of us alone. They gave a date. It was the same one the scientists had already figured. The rock could be moved, they said. It didn’t have to hit. It could go into orbit, and then we could have it for our own.

  On a different channel, men with suits and ties argued real loud over how much the rock was worth. They used words I’d never heard of before, something more than “trillion.” I knew what gold and some of the other valuable things were, but some were called rare and sounded like they were from Earth. I couldn’t sort out how something that could kill us one day could be worth so much the next, but the invaders said the rock only needed a nudge.

  * * *

  When I turned thirteen, Pa said I was finally old enough to drive. He taught me in the old pickup with the missing tailgate and the tires that were always starving for air. It was a shifter, which seemed a hard way to start driving, but Pa believed in learning the worst to begin with. I had to yank up on the steering wheel to push the old clutch all the way in. Damn thing made it so my arms would be as sore at night as my legs. Pa cursed every time the gears growled, and it was hot in the truck even with the windows down. But I got to where he would send me to fetch the mail. And once I’d mastered the old pickup, he taught me on the John Deere, and I learned to plow. Pa was right that it made driving the tractor easier. But it was still scary as hell.

  The first time you drive something so big, you wonder if one man ought to be able. There was a red lever that went from rabbit to turtle, and Pa would stand in the cabin with me and yell for me to nudge it up. But we were already bouncing around something fierce. The noise was terrible. And looking back, I couldn’t see the house through the haze I was stirring. It weren’t even like we were moving so much as the great big tires of the tractor were spinning the earth beneath their knobby treads. Pa would bend over the seat and knock the red lever up, and the bucking would grow worse. The steering wheel jittered side to side, and I had to clutch it just to stay in my seat.

  But like the truck, my fear of the tractor didn’t keep. Before long, Pa hitched the great plow to the back, twenty-four feet wide, and I learned how to kill the soil to make it ready for planting. The seat would bounce me along like I was in a saddle, and the radio would blare in the little cabin that smelled like my dad when he was sweaty. I did circles like I was mowing grass, but twenty-four feet at a time. The mesa behind our house would disappear behind the dust, and it got so I couldn’t see the cliffs along the back of the homestead. But I could see the soil in front packed hard and tight, and I could see out the side where I’d already been. Plowing was a lot like mowing—I just had to overlap where I’d been before.

  “Not too much overlap,” Pa would tell me. The price of gas had gone way up since First Contact, and too much overlap meant an extra run for no good reason. And so I bounced along and put death in the soil. I cut the worms in half and made things ready for planting. Now and then, a deer would startle across the loose furrows, legs having a hard time of it, and white rabbits would dash from the thrush. The rabbits were the dumbest little things. They would dart back and forth in front of the tractor—they could see me coming, but they couldn’t make up their minds. I would yell and yell at them, but they would just jitter back and forth until the tractor went over them and then the plow. Turning in my seat, I always expected a tuft of white to spit out somewhere, but the soil that kicked up would just turn a little red.

  “That’s where the corn will grow the tallest,” Pa would say when I told him how dumb the rabbits were. The blood in the soil was a good thing. That’s when you knew it was ready.

  * * *

  The cliffs behind our house were a source of constant play, and they had a funny name. Too Close for Comfort, they were called. I reckoned kids made up that name, but it was a real thing. Scientists called it that. Men who were supposedly smart had come up with it.

  When I was a boy too young to drive—before I turned thirteen—they came from the university and dug in the dirt at the base of the cliffs that rise up behind our land. They found so many bones beneath the dirt that they couldn’t take them all. Steve Harkin and I plotted to sneak in
one night and nab a skull or two, but the men in the shiny city trucks with no 4X4 put a stop to that by giving us a skull each. It weren’t as fun without the danger and flashlights, but we got our skulls.

  I remember cradling that great hunk of bone as heavy as stone and asking one of the university men there why they were digging there.

  “This here was a buffalo jump,” the man told me. He reminded me of Mrs. Sandy, and he had this clipboard with all kinds of little squares full of numbers and was the smartest man I ever spoke to ’cept for my Pa.

  “The buffalo used to come over this cliff and smash into the rocks down here,” he told me and Steve Harkin. “That’s where these bones came from.”

  Steve thought that was pretty cool. We gazed up at the cliffs that I had known all my life, the ones that delayed the sunrise in the morning, and I saw them different for the first time. I asked this man from the university why buffalo were so dumb.

  “Oh, buffalo aren’t dumb,” he claimed. I was about to argue with him, but then he explained. “Indians used to chase the buffalo to the edge of the cliff in great herds,” he said. They tumbled off hundreds at a time and smashed their legs so they couldn’t walk. While they squealed and snorted and tried to pick themselves up on busted bones, the Indians would run in with spears and jab ’em in the neck.

  Steve whistled. I asked the man if that was real.

  “Very real,” he said. “The people who used to live here long before us called it pishkun.”

  “Pushkin,” Steve Harkin said. “What does that mean?”

  “It means ‘deep blood kettle,’” the man told us. He pointed to where the men and women were digging in these funny squares with ropes and stakes marking everything off. “You can still see the blood in the soil,” he said.

  I didn’t know if that man from the university was playing with us or not, but I told him we needed to go. That skull he’d given me was getting heavier and heavier the longer he talked.

  * * *

  The people on TV with the little flags and the headphones reminded me of white rabbits in the plow season. You could watch ’em go back and forth on the screen. Everyone wanted the gold and the trillions and trillions and trillions and all the rare Earth stuff. But nobody wanted to give up their land. And the invaders insisted on half. They wanted half or they would take it all.

  People on the TV argued about why the aliens would do something like this, why they would let the rock hit us and kick up the dirt and make things cold, but I knew. I reckon I knew better than most. Just the year before, I’d watched a movie about invaders coming down. They’d made a different kind of contact. There were fights with lasers and explosions and our side found a way at the end to lick them for good.

  It was a good movie, but those invaders were dumb. I tried to picture us Samuels taming our plot of land something like that. Pa and Riley and me would take to the soil with guns and shoot the worms one by one. And the worms would fight back with the rabbits, the deer, the turtles, and the foxes. And I could imagine them swarming us and licking us good. They were dumb, but there was an awful lot of them.

  Which was why we used the plow. It was why we throw the dirt up into the air. We make all things die in the soil so when we put in our own seed, that’s all the life there is. And where the ground is reddest, that deep blood kettle, the corn reaches up so high you think it might leave us behind. And that’s what the rock will do, plow us under. It weren’t going to be like that movie at all.

  Mrs. Sandy used to say before she left town that the dust would kick up and blot out the sky if the rock fell, but she didn’t think we would let that happen. Mrs. Sandy always thought the best of people. She even liked my Pa, no matter what he called her. Me, I wished she would come back from wherever she went. I’d like to have her sit in the John Deere with me and feel it buck and buck and chase down those rabbits too dumb to move. I’d take Mrs. Sandy by the hand and lead her to the cliffs on the edge of our land and show her the piles of bones and see what the Indians had done.

  But Mrs. Sandy was gone, and nobody went to school no more. And outside, the spot of light in the sky had grown so bright that it was like a star in the daytime. The people on the TV moved like rabbits. They were chased like buffalo. And you didn’t need to know where to look no more to see that something bad was coming.

  ANIMAL HUSBANDRY

  SEANAN MCGUIRE

  The city of Clayton was burning. I saw the smoke from over fifteen miles away, but I kept riding towards it, less from hope that the fire was a sign of civilization than from sheer, cussed stubbornness. My instructions said I needed to go this way. Since all the GPS systems failed around the time the networks and satellite uplinks died, I really didn’t think that deviating was a good idea. Not if I was actively interested in living, anyway.

  Fortunately for me, the wind was blowing out to sea, carrying the bulk of the doubtless carcinogenic smoke with it. I left the trailer about a mile down the road from the lookout point, choosing the minor risk that one of the other poor souls left in this godforsaken world would stumble over it—you can’t exactly LoJack a draft horse—over the greater risks of smoke inhalation and panicked animals rocketing out of my control. My mare, the unimaginatively named Midnight, would put up with just about anything I asked from her. She’d be able to stand the heat as long as I could.

  Even with the wind in our favor, the air was so thick with ash that I could practically chew it by the time we got to the top of the lookout point. I shielded my eyes to block the flames, squinting through the smoke as I strained to see the city beyond. There wasn’t much left to see. The fire had almost burned itself out, but it was still vigorous enough to make that particular route impassable.

  There were two choices. We could try to find another route. Or we could backtrack twenty miles to the superstore I’d seen in San Ramon, resupply, and let the fire finish burning itself to death.

  “We need a break, don’t we, Midnight?” I asked, running a hand down the anxious mare’s throat. She snorted, front legs dancing a half-panicked tattoo against the gravel. She was ready to bolt, holding herself in place solely because she assumed I wanted her to stay.

  There was no need for that. We’d seen everything we’d come to see, and it was just more devastation. Tugging gently on the reins, I turned Midnight towards the caravan, and the road.

  * * *

  Before we rode out of the region completely, I stopped at the sign marking the city limits, pulled out my staple gun and another of my precious flyers, and set to work. Even if we didn’t come back this way, even if the store managed to yield a better route, I would have done my self-imposed duty by the people who might still be living here. Wherever they were. When we finally turned towards San Ramon, white copy-paper ghosts glared from the city sign behind us, eye-poppingly clean in a landscape gone to ash.

  It would never be enough, but it would have to do.

  IMPORTANT—IMPORTANT—IMPORTANT—PLEASE READ YOUR SURVIVAL COULD DEPEND ON IT

  “If you’re alive and reading this, there are a few things you should be aware of. Firstly, those diseases everyone died of? The ones that barely had time to make the papers before it was over? They weren’t natural, and that means there’s no way to estimate their out-of-body survival rates. Be careful. Keep contact with the dead to an absolute minimum. If you must handle human remains, wear gloves and be prepared to dispose of your outer garments immediately afterwards. Avoid closed-up spaces where people died, especially those which have remained moist. Diseases survive better in dark, warm, moist places.

  “Stick with bottled water whenever possible. Boil everything when you can’t. All that plastic they said we needed to keep out of the landfills? Forget it. Bottled water could save you. (Not just from the manmade toxins. Cholera, dysentery, lots of other nasty things could be lurking in the water by now. Drink Crystal Springs or shit out your intestines. The choice is yours.) When selecting canned foods, check to be sure that the cans are whole and have
not been dented. Exterior rust is fine. Interior rust is not.

  “On the bottom of this flyer you will find a list of basic nutritional supplements which are likely to be missing in your current diet. All items on the list can be found at any large grocery store or moderately-sized health food store. I recommend you begin taking them.

  “Watch out for dogs and other previously domesticated animals, as they may have turned feral in the absence of human custodianship. I have also included a list of standard poison baits and their doses. I do not recommend their use. They may still provide a measure of security while traveling.

  “I am on my way to Grants Pass, Oregon. I recommend you do the same as soon as you can. Time was short before the pandemics, and there’s no telling how much we have left.

  “Hurry.”

  * * *

  My name was at the bottom: Mercy Neely, Doctor of Veterinary Medicine. Possibly the last vet in the world. Possibly the last medical practitioner of any kind in California.

  I really wish I’d paid more attention in class.

  * * *

  The San Ramon superstore showed signs of moderate looting, which was reassuring. I’ve come to see looting as a sort of hopeful omen, a little piece of proof that the human race will manage to recover from what it’s done to itself. I was less pleased to see that my would-be looters had focused their attentions on the junk food aisles and cosmetics, almost completely ignoring the canned goods and well-stocked pharmacy. Maybe that was better for me, but it didn’t bode well for the survival of the species.

  After my brief solo reconnaissance was done, I cranked up the loading bay door enough to drive the wagon inside and parked it in what used to be the stock room. Midnight wandered off to investigate while I was unhitching the other horses and pouring their oats out on the concrete. I don’t know what their names were originally; I call them Tweedledee and Tweedledum, and that seems to work well enough for everyone involved. The goats were hard at work trying to chew through their ropes again. I set them loose to wreak what havoc they could inside the closed superstore ecosystem. Goats can do a lot of damage, but even they can’t chew through walls.