Wastelands 2: More Stories of the Apocalypse

by John Joseph Adams

  Miranda looked unsure. “How come she isn’t traveling with you?”

  “Well, see, Linda’s daddy and I didn’t think it was a good idea for us to live together anymore. So Linda was with her daddy when everybody got sick, and she had to start without me. I’ll catch up to her sooner or later.” I tapped the syringe, easing out the bubbles. “She promised to meet me there, and she takes her promises seriously.”

  Linda takes everything seriously, and has since she was born. So we sat down with the maps of the state, and we worked out four routes that we could take to get to Oregon. The Route Where They Closed the Roads. The Route Where Quarantine Kept the Roads Open. The Route Where There’s Been An Earthquake and We Have To Go Around. The Route Where Too Many People Survived and We Need to Avoid Them. Even after the earthquake that took out most of the Los Angeles metro area, the bulk of California was mostly somewhere between routes one and two. Linda wouldn’t have had any problems if she’d avoided the coast roads and skirted the area around Red Bluff.

  “Can we come with you? Me and my daddy?”

  “We’ll talk about it when you wake up,” I said soothingly.

  She didn’t even cry when the needle went in; she bore the brief pain like a trooper. Domesticated animals always do.

  * * *

  There are a lot of ways for people to die in the post-pandemic world; I’ve seen most of them. The human race was domesticated a long time ago, and like the cows that need someone to milk them, or the sheep too dumb to run away from a predator, the humans forgot how to stay alive without the trappings of their civilization. So they stagger along pretending they still have some quality of life while their teeth get loose from scurvy and their bowels get scarred by parasitic infections. Most of the people who lived through the sicknesses shouldn’t have. They’re just suffering now, without all the little luxuries they were so accustomed to.

  Euthanasia is kinder. It’s quicker. It takes the pain away. If we don’t let our pets suffer, why should we let people do it? Part of being a vet is knowing that the thing to do with suffering is end it, not prolong it just for the sake of being able to say that all your patients survive. I’m not a moralist. I see suffering, and I end it. It’s that simple. Human doctors aren’t allowed to have that luxury, but there’s a reason I never wanted to work with people.

  Miranda’s eyes fluttered shut in a matter of seconds as the drugs took effect, her body effectively sliding into a comatose state that was deeper than any sleep. I put the syringe away and took her hand, my index finger pressed against the pulse point of her wrist. Her heart sped up, fighting against the lidocaine. Her fingers tightened on mine with no more force than a kitten’s jaws.

  She gasped once, sighed, and was still.

  “See?” I said, slipping my hand out of hers. “Nothing to be afraid of.”

  * * *

  Nathan returned about ten minutes later, clutching a bag that bulged with medical supplies. I met him at the office door, motioning for him to be quiet. “She’s sleeping,” I whispered. He looked past me to where she was stretched out on her bed, expression peaceful, and believed me.

  Outside, in the hall, I offered him a sympathetic smile, and said, “It’s bad, but she should pull through. I’ve given her something to help her sleep, and I can show you which medicines to give her. But there’s a fee for my help.”

  The hope in his eyes died like a switch had been flipped. “What’s that?” he asked, warily.

  I held up my bag. “After spending a year scrounging in all this rust? You need a tetanus shot. Let me give it to you, and I’ll stay as long as it takes to get her better.”

  Nathan laughed, sounding utterly relieved. “I think I can stand a shot if it gets my baby girl better.”

  “Good.” I smiled. “This won’t hurt a bit.”

  “…FOR A SINGLE YESTERDAY”

  GEORGE R. R. MARTIN

  Keith was our culture, what little we had left. He was our poet and our troubadour, and his voice and his guitar were our bridges to the past. He was a time-tripper too, but no one minded that much until Winters came along.

  Keith was our memory. But he was also my friend.

  He played for us every evening after supper. Just beyond sight of the common house, there was a small clearing and a rock he liked to sit on. He’d wander there at dusk, with his guitar, and sit down facing west. Always west; the cities had been east of us. Far east, true, but Keith didn’t like to look that way. Neither did the rest of us, to tell the truth.

  Not everybody came to the evening concerts, but there was always a good crowd, say three-fourths of the people in the commune. We’d gather around in a rough circle, sitting on the ground or lying in the grass by ones and twos. And Keith, our living hi-fi in denim and leather, would stroke his beard in vague amusement and begin to play.

  He was good, too. Back in the old days, before the Blast, he’d been well on his way to making a name for himself. He’d come to the commune four years ago for a rest, to check up on old friends and get away from the musical rat race for a summer. But he’d figured on returning.

  Then came the Blast. And Keith had stayed. There was nothing left to go back to. His cities were graveyards full of dead and dying, their towers melted tombstones that glowed at night. And the rats—human and animal—were everywhere else.

  In Keith, those cities still lived. His songs were all of the old days, bittersweet things full of lost dreams and loneliness. And he sang them with love and longing. Keith would play requests, but mostly he stuck to his kind of music. A lot of folk, a lot of folk-rock, and a few straight rock things and show tunes. Lightfoot and Kristofferson and Woody Guthrie were particular favorites. And once in a while he’d play his own compositions, written in the days before the Blast. But not often.

  Two songs, though, he played every night. He always started with “They Call the Wind Maria” and ended with “Me and Bobby McGee.” A few of us got tired of the ritual, but no one ever objected. Keith seemed to think the songs fit us, somehow, and nobody wanted to argue with him.

  Until Winters came along, that is. Which was in a late-fall evening in the fourth year after the Blast.

  His first name was Robert, but no one ever used it, although the rest of us were all on a first name basis. He’d introduced himself as Lieutenant Robert Winters the evening he arrived, driving up in a jeep with two other men. But his Army didn’t exist anymore, and he was looking for refuge and help.

  That first meeting was tense. I remember feeling very scared when I heard the jeep coming, and wiping my palms on my jeans as I waited. We’d had visitors before. None of them very nice.

  I waited for them alone. I was as much a leader as we had in those days. And that wasn’t much. We voted on everything important, and nobody gave orders. So I wasn’t really a boss, but I was a greeting committee. The rest scattered, which was good sense. Our last visitors had gone in big for slugging people and raping the girls. They’d worn black-and-gold uniforms and called themselves the Sons of the Blast. A fancy name for a rat pack. We called them SOB’s too, but for other reasons.

  Winters was different, though. His uniform was the good ol’ U.S. of A. Which didn’t prove a thing, since some Army detachments are as bad as the rat packs. It was our own friendly Army that went through the area in the first year after the Blast, scorching the towns and killing everyone they could lay their hands on.

  I don’t think Winters was part of that, although I never had the courage to flat-out ask him. He was too decent. He was big and blond and straight, and about the same age as the rest of us. And his two “men” were scared kids, younger than most of us in the commune. They’d been through a lot, and they wanted to join us. Winters kept saying that he wanted to help us rebuild.

  We voted them in, of course. We haven’t turned anyone away yet, except for a few rats. In the first year, we even took in a half-dozen citymen and nursed them while they died of radiation burns.

  Winters changed us, though, in w
ays we never anticipated. Maybe for the better. Who knows? He brought books and supplies. And guns, too, and two men who knew how to use them. A lot of the guys on the commune had come there to get away from guns and uniforms, in the days before the Blast. So Pete and Crazy Harry took over the hunting, and defended us against the rats that drifted by from time to time. They became our police force and our Army.

  And Winters became our leader.

  I’m still not sure how that happened. But it did. He started out making suggestions, moved on to leading discussions, and wound up giving orders. Nobody objected much. We’d been drifting ever since the Blast, and Winters gave us a direction. He had big ideas, too. When I was spokesman, all I worried about was getting us through until tomorrow. But Winters wanted to rebuild. He wanted to build a generator, and hunt for more survivors, and gather them together into a sort of village. Planning was his bag. He had big dreams for the day after tomorrow, and his hope was catching.

  I shouldn’t give the wrong impression, though. He wasn’t any sort of a tin tyrant. He led us, yeah, but he was one of us, too. He was a little different from us, but not that different, and he became a friend in time. And he did his part to fit in. He even let his hair get long and grew a beard.

  Only Keith never liked him much.

  Winters didn’t come out to concert rock until he’d been with us over a week. And when he did come, he stood outside the circle at first, his hands shoved into his pockets. The rest of us were lying around as usual, some singing, some just listening. It was a bit chilly that night, and we had a small fire going.

  Winters stood in the shadows for about three songs. Then, during a pause, he walked closer to the fire. “Do you take requests?” he asked, smiling uncertainly.

  I didn’t know Winters very well back then. But I knew Keith. And I tensed a little as I waited for his answer.

  But he just strummed the guitar idly and stared at Winters’ uniform and his short hair. “That depends,” he said at last. “I’m not going to play ‘Ballad of the Green Berets,’ if that’s what you want.”

  An unreadable expression flickered over Winters’ face. “I’ve killed people, yes,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean I’m proud of it. I wasn’t going to ask for that.”

  Keith considered that, and looked down at his guitar. Then, seemingly satisfied, he nodded and raised his head and smiled. “Okay,” he said. “What do you want to hear?”

  “You know ‘Leavin’ on a Jet Plane’?” Winters asked.

  The smile grew. “Yeah. John Denver. I’ll play it for you. Sad song, though. There aren’t any jet planes anymore, Lieutenant. Know that? ’s true. You should stop and think why.”

  He smiled again, and began to play. Keith always had the last word when he wanted it. Nobody could argue with his guitar.

  * * *

  A little over a mile from the common house, beyond the fields to the west, a little creek ran through the hills and the trees. It was usually dry in the summer and the fall, but it was still a nice spot. Dark and quiet at night, away from the noise and the people. When the weather was right, Keith would drag his sleeping bag out there and bunk down under a tree. Alone.

  That’s also where he did his timetripping.

  I found him there that night, after the singing was over and everyone else had gone to bed. He was leaning against his favorite tree, swatting mosquitoes and studying the creekbed.

  I sat down next to him. “Hi, Gary,” he said, without looking at me.

  “Bad times, Keith?” I asked.

  “Bad times, Gary,” he said, staring at the ground and idly twirling a fallen leaf. I watched his face. His mouth was taut and expressionless, his eyes hooded.

  I’d known Keith for a long time. I knew enough not to say anything. I just sat next to him in silence, making myself comfortable in a pile of fresh-fallen leaves. And after a while he began to talk, as he always did.

  “There ought to be water,” he said suddenly, nodding at the creek. “When I was a kid, I lived by a river. Right across the street. Oh, it was a dirty little river in a dirty little town, and the water was as polluted as all hell. But it was still water. Sometimes, at night, I’d go over to the park across the street, and sit on a bench, and watch it. For hours, sometimes. My mother used to get mad at me.”

  He laughed softly. “It was pretty, you know. Even the oil slicks were pretty. And it helped me think. I miss that, you know. The water. I always think better when I’m watching water. Strange, right?”

  “Not so strange,” I said.

  He still hadn’t looked at me. He was still staring at the dry creek, where only darkness flowed now. And his hands were tearing the leaf into pieces. Slow and methodical, they were.

  “Gone now,” he said after a silence. “The place was too close to New York. The water probably glows now, if there is any water. Prettier than ever, but I can’t go back. So much is like that. Every time I remember something, I have to remember that it’s gone now. And I can’t go back, ever. To anything. Except… except with that…” He nodded toward the ground between us. Then he finished with the leaf, and started another.

  I reached down by his leg. The cigar box was where I expected it. I held it in both hands, and flipped the lid with my thumbs. Inside, there was the needle, and maybe a dozen small bags of powder. The powder looked white in the starlight. But seen by day, it was pale, sparkling blue.

  I looked at it and sighed. “Not much left,” I said.

  Keith nodded, never looking. “I’ll be out in a month, I figure.” His voice sounded very tired. “Then I’ll just have my songs, and my memories.”

  “That’s all you’ve got now,” I said. I closed the box with a snap and handed it to him. “Chronine isn’t a time machine, Keith. Just a hallucinogen that happens to work on memory.”

  He laughed. “They used to debate that, way back when. The experts all said chronine was a memory drug. But they never took chronine. Neither have you, Gary. But I know. I’ve timetripped. It’s not memory. It’s more. You go back, Gary, you really do. You live it again, whatever it was. You can’t change anything, but you know it’s real, all the same.”

  He threw away what was left of his leaf, and gathered his knees together with his arms. Then he put his head atop them and looked at me. “You ought to timetrip someday, Gary. You really ought to. Get the dosage right, and you can pick your yesterday. It’s not a bad deal at all.”

  I shook my head. “If I wanted to timetrip, would you let me?”

  “No,” he said, smiling but not moving his head. “I found the chronine. It’s mine. And there’s too little left to share. Sorry, Gary. Nothing personal, though. You know how it is.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know how it is. I didn’t want it anyway.”

  “I knew that,” he said.

  Ten minutes of thick silence. I broke it with a question. “Winters bother you?”

  “Not really,” he said. “He seems okay. It was just the uniforms, Gary. If it wasn’t for those damn bastards in uniform and what they did, I could go back. To my river, and my singing.”

  “And Sandi,” I said.

  His mouth twisted into a reluctant smile. “And Sandi,” he admitted. “And I wouldn’t even need chronine to keep my dates.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. So I didn’t say anything. Finally, wearying, Keith slid forward a little, and lay back under the tree. It was a clear night. You could see the stars through the branches.

  “Sometimes, out here at night, I forget,” he said softly, more to himself than to me. “The sky still looks the same as it did before the Blast. And the stars don’t know the difference. If I don’t look east, I can almost pretend it never happened.”

  I shook my head. “Keith, that’s a game. It did happen. You can’t forget that. You know you can’t. And you can’t go back. You know that, too.”

  “You don’t listen, do you, Gary? I do go back. I really do.”

  “You go back to a dream world, Keith. And
it’s dead, that world. You can’t keep it up. Sooner or later you’re going to have to start living in reality.”

  Keith was still looking up at the sky, but he smiled gently as I argued. “No, Gary. You don’t see. The past is as real as the present, you know. And when the present is bleak and empty, and the future more so, then the only sanity is living in the past.”

  I started to say something, but he pretended not to hear. “Back in the city, when I was a kid, I never saw this many stars,” he said, his voice distant. “The first time I got into the country, I remember how shocked I was at all the extra stars they’d gone and stuck in my sky.” He laughed softly. “Know when that was? Six years ago, when I was just out of school. Also last night. Take your pick. Sandi was with me, both times.”

  He fell silent. I watched him for a few moments, then stood up and brushed myself off. It was never any use. I couldn’t convince him. And the saddest part of it was, I couldn’t even convince myself. Maybe he was right. Maybe, for him, that was the answer.

  “You ever been in the mountains?” he asked suddenly. He looked up at me quickly, but didn’t wait for an answer. “There was this night, Gary—in Pennsylvania, in the mountains. I had this old beat-up camper, and we were driving through, bumming it around the country.

  “Then, all of a sudden, this fog hit us. Thick stuff, gray and rolling, all kind of mysterious and spooky. Sandi loved stuff like that, and I did too, kind of. But it was hell to drive through. So I pulled off the road, and we took out a couple of blankets and went off a few feet.

  “It was still early, though. So we just lay on the blankets together, and held each other, and talked. About us, and my songs, and that great fog, and our trip, and her acting, and all sorts of things. We kept laughing and kissing, too, although I don’t remember what we said that was so funny. Finally, after an hour or so, we undressed each other and made love on the blankets, slow and easy, in the middle of that dumb fog.”