Wastelands 2: More Stories of the Apocalypse

by John Joseph Adams

  “Why do you suppose that Google Maps doesn’t even list any super-secret labs?” she complained.

  Angelo toyed with the wheel, inching the car across the gravel, waiting patiently as a midnight slew of cars blasted from the darkness down Highway 6. “That’s easy. I mean, I’m a dropout from Stanford… and Sergey and Larry are both dropouts from Stanford, too. But unlike me, they’re covering for the Man! Because they sold out!”

  “Oh, wait,” said Rabbiteen, “Google just linked me to a nutcase map site with tons of great info. Hmm. The Tonopah Test Range is just past the Tonopah airport. It butts into Groom Lake where people see, like, aliens from other dimensions. And, get this, the Test Range has their own secret part, and that’s Area 52.”

  “Wow,” said Angelo. A raging eighteen-wheeler pattered gravel across their windshield. “That’s one digit higher than 51.”

  Rabbiteen’s iPhone emitted the stunning clank clank of a steam-hammer. She’d once missed a vitally important instant-message, so her alert preferences were set to maximum stun.

  She bumped her head on the grimy dashboard as she lunged for her sleek device. “It’s Cody! Cody is trying to hit me!”

  “Hunh,” said Angelo. “Don’t read it.”

  “I hot 2 c u 2 n4k3d,” read Rabbiteen. She glared at Angelo. “Hot to see you two naked? What does that mean? What on earth did you tell that guy?”

  “I had to social-engineer him so he’d help us break into the Black Egg. Like I said, Cody is a very lonely old man.”

  “You told him that you’d post photos of us naked?”

  “No I didn’t say that exactly,” said Angelo, his voice almost wistful. “It’s worse. I told him I’d stream us having sex on live webcam video.” He straightened his shoulders. “I had to tell him something like that, Rabbiteen. I lied to him. And, really, at this point, so what? What possible difference does it make? The whole universe is about to melt.”

  Rabbiteen frowned down at her pistol, turning it over in her hands. She was momentarily tempted to shoot Angelo, but stifled the impulse. It was amazing how many user-friendly little clicks and snicks the pistol had.

  “Anyway, my gambit worked on him,” said Angelo. He patted the iPhone, which lay on the seat, its message still showing. “See the digits on the bottom of the screen? Cody also sent you the GPS coordinates to the site.”

  He punched tiny buttons on a squat plastic gizmo suction-cupped to the dash of his hearse.

  “Continue Highway 6 through Tonopah,” said the genteel female voice of Angelo’s GPS navigation unit. “Turn right at unmarked dirt road number 37A.”

  Jaw set, Angelo peeled out of the lot and barreled through the crumbling heart of the stricken desert settlement. Knots of drunken, flare-wielding marauders were barricading the streets with smoldering debris. Angelo accelerated through a flaming police sawhorse, and Rabbiteen braced her heavy pistol in both hands, firing wildly and shrieking flamewar abuse through the open window.

  Overawed by the style of the loons in the hearse, the rioters let them pass.

  Then they motored sedately through the eastern outskirts of blacked-out Tonopah, past burning tract homes and empty desert shacks, past the silent airport and the abandoned mines.

  As they turned off onto the dirt side road, Rabbiteen mimicked the feminine voice of the GPS navigator. “Suggestion. What if I posted naked pictures of myself with this gun?” She shoveled in a fresh chew of betel. “What kind of user response would I get?”

  “You mean if your users weren’t torn apart into their constituent quarks?” Angelo smiled and took her hand.

  He was feeling buoyant. The world was definitely ending, in fire and blood just as he’d always guessed, yet he’d finally found a woman meant for him. With that sweet, frank way she had of cutting to the core of an issue without ever delivering anything useful, Rabbiteen Chandra was the very soul of bloggerdom.

  His last night on Earth felt as vast and endless as a crumpled galaxy, while the full moon had gone the shape and color of a dry-squeezed blood orange. The clumps of sage were pale purple. The world Angelo inhabited had finally come to look and feel just like the inside of his own head. Incredible to think that he and Rabbiteen might be the last human beings ever to witness this landscape. It was as if they owned it.

  “Isn’t that a guard house ahead?” said Rabbiteen. “If you want to crash through that, I can lay down some covering fire. At least till I run out of bullets.”

  The GPS crooned sedately from the dash. “Proceed though Security Gate 233-X, traveling twenty-two miles further into the Tonopah Test Range to destination Area 52.”

  “I’d hoped Cody would be waiting for us at this security gate,” said Angelo, slowing the hearse. “But I guess he never leaves his supercomputer console.” His nerves were fraying again. “The guards around here are brainwashed killing machines. Mindlessly devoted to the fugitive neoconservatives of the Area 52 escape pod. If I stop, they’ll extradite us to Guantanamo. If I pull a U-turn, they’ll chase us down with Predator aircraft. If I barrel through the gate, we’ll smash head-on into their truck-bomb tank traps.”

  “Oh, stop talking like that,” said Rabbiteen. “It’s three a.m. on their last night on Earth! How devoted to duty can those guys be? Don’t they have any girlfriends? Or kids?”

  The glum little concrete guardhouse that defended the Test Range was in fact deserted. The razor-wire chain-link moaned in the wind and the striped traffic arm pointed uselessly at the starry sky.

  The hearse rolled into the empty desert compound, the narrow military road gently curving around peaks that sat on the sand like giant Zen boulders. Here and there old war-gamed jeeps had been shot to pieces from helicopters. Except for this ritualized military debris, there was only the moon and the mountains, the silence broken by periodic updates from the GPS unit.

  To cover his growing embarrassment, Angelo propped his laptop on the dash. Automatically he clicked for his blog. “Oh my God!”

  Terror gripped Rabbiteen’s heart. “What? What now?”

  “Look at my traffic spike! My Webalizer stats are right off the charts! Drudge Report, Boing Boing, Huffington Post, they’re all sucking my dust! I rule the net tonight! Everybody’s linking to me!”

  “How about my blog?” she asked. “I blogged the Big Splat before you did—”

  “This is fantastic!” continued Angelo. “I’m finally fully validated as an independent citizen-journalist!”

  Rabbiteen jealously moused around his screen. “Dammit, my own site has totally crashed! Why doesn’t your traffic max out when you get Slashdotted so hard?”

  “My ‘Ain’t It Awful’ site is scalable, babe. I pay full service on the Amazon web-cloud and they just keep adding servers. This is the last night on Earth. No one will ever beat my post for traffic. I’m the greatest blogger in the history of the planet.”

  Rabbiteen considered this boast. Though galling, it had to be true. Her boyfriend was the greatest blogger in the world. Except nobody would really call Angelo her boyfriend, because they’d never even kissed.

  Feeling letdown, she stroked the glossy screen of her iPhone, scroll-flicking her way through a rolling list of friends and landing on, why not, Prof. Dr. Hintika Kuusk, the Estonian string theorist. Dr. Kuusk was a kindly, grandmotherly scholar; a woman of the world who’d always been very kind to the gawky physics enthusiast named “Rabbiteen Chandra.”

  Rabbiteen pecked out a text message on the phone’s eerie virtual keyboard. “About to have sex with Angelo Rasmussen inside Area 52.”

  She thumb-smeared SEND and launched her confession into cellphonespace. She was glad she’d told a confidante. Blogger that she was, it always felt better to tell somebody than to do something.

  Moments passed, and then the phone emitted its signature clank. A sober incoming reply from Hintika Kuusk: “Fare thee well, Rabbiteen.”

  “Farewell 4ever Dr. Kuusk,” typed Rabbiteen, her heart filling. She slid a glance over at Angelo, who
was steering with one hand while trying to type with the other. She considered cozying up to him and working her wiles, but just then, with another clank, here came a mass-mailing to Hintika Kuusk’s extensive buddy list: “OMG OMG OMG! Rabbiteen-Karmic-Reality is hooking up with Angelo-Ain’t-It-Awful!”

  Within seconds, a follow-up fusillade tumbled onto Rabbiteen’s phone display and laptop screen—from handhelds, from Twitterstreams, from MySpace pages—gossipy whoops and snarks, cheerful shout-outs and me-toos, messages from half the women Rabbiteen knew.

  Angelo glanced over, his eyebrows kinked. “What’s the excitement?”

  “Oh, it’s just my silly, romantic women friends. Don’t let me distract you from fondling your famous blog.”

  Angelo was gentlemanly enough to close his laptop. “We’re being fools. What do you say we pull over now?”

  He tapped a button on the GPS unit for a distance update. “Area 52 is now twelve miiiii—” The robotic voice twisted into a sudden anguished squawk. The device sputtered, chirped, and went dark.

  Reflexively concerned about any loss in connectivity, Rabbiteen lifted her cell phone. Its display had gone black. “Those wonky Apple batteries…”

  “Try your laptop?” said Angelo.

  Rabbiteen read from its screen. “You are not connected to the Internet.” And then, like a cranky, spoiled child finally falling asleep, her laptop, too, went dark.

  And then—oh dear—the car died.

  Wrestling the stiff power steering, Angelo guided them to rest in a curved billow of roadside sand.

  It was quiet here, so very quiet. The wind whispered, the red moon glowed.

  Rabbiteen spoke aloud, just to hear her own voice. “I was sort of expecting this. Electrical circuits can’t work any more. Too much drift in the fundamental constants of electromagnetism.”

  “Like a power failure affecting the whole Earth?” said Angelo.

  “It’s much more than a power failure. And it’s not just our sweet little Earth. It’s the entire universe.”

  Angelo sighed. “For years people called me paranoid. Now I finally know I was a realist. I was truly perceptive and insightful. I was never a fringe crank intellectual, I was a major public thinker! I should have had a wife, kids… I should have had tenure and a MacArthur Grant.”

  Should Rabbiteen declare her love for him? It was on the tip of her tongue. He was oh so close in the rosily moon-dappled car. She reached out and touched his face.

  “There’s one important part I still don’t get,” said Angelo doggedly. “Aren’t our nerves electrical? We should be fainting or passing out. But I’m still thinking—and my heart’s still beating… It’s beating for you.”

  “Human nerves are mostly chemical,” said Rabbiteen, her voice rising to a squeak. She made a lunge for him. At last they kissed.

  “We could lose our ability to think and feel at any moment,” Angelo said presently. “So it’s the back of my hearse, or it’s the sand. Unless you want to get out and hunt for Cody’s Black Easter Egg.”

  Rabbiteen turned and gazed behind herself. The hearse did have white silk ruffles. In the weirdly altered moonlight, those were kind of—romantic.

  As they bucked against each other, bellies slapping, vivid and relentless, it occurred to Rabbiteen that she and Angelo were just like the two cosmic branes.

  It could be claimed that the once-distant branes were violently colliding, but that was a very male way to frame what was happening. If you laid out your twelve-dimensional coordinate system differently, the branes passed through one another and emerged reenergized and fecund on the other side of that event.

  It was like the urge to have sex, which was loud and pestering and got all the press, as opposed to the urge to have children, which was even more powerful, obliteratingly powerful, only nobody could sell that to men.

  Afterward came the urge to abandon all awareness and slide into deep black sleep, which no one could resist. Cuddled in the sweaty crook of Angelo’s arm, Rabbiteen tumbled straight over the edge of nightmare.

  She saw a lipless, billowing, yellow-eyed face peering into the side window of the hearse. Its enormous mouth gaped in woozy appetite, yawning and slamming like some drug-drenched door of perception. The otherworldly visitation of a Hindu demon. Had she dreamed that?

  “Angelo!” She poked his ribs.

  But he was offline, a blissful, snoring mass. She retrieved the gun from the front seat, and stared with grainy-eyed, murderous intent into the moonlit desert. Despite her fear and wariness, she couldn’t keep her lids open.

  Red distorted sunlight woke them through the windows of the hearse.

  “Oh no, here it comes!” yipped Angelo, sitting up with a start. He’d mistaken the rising sun for the final cosmic conflagration, and not without reason, for the solar disk was ten times its usual diameter, and the light it shed was as dim as the clouded gaze of a stroke victim.

  The world outside their hearse was rendered in faded Technicolor. The skewed interaction between light, matter, and their human retinas was tinting the sage red, the sand a pale green, the sky canary yellow.

  With icy, tingling fingers, Rabbiteen grabbed Angelo’s wrist, trying to read his watch. “It can’t already be time for the end, can it?”

  “My watch has a wrecked battery now,” said Angelo. “But if the sun’s coming up, then it must be about six a.m., right? We’ve still got, what, four hours to hunt for the Black Egg.”

  Rabbiteen’s bare belly rumbled. “Do you have any breakfast?”

  “Of course! Angelo Rasmussen is the Compleat Survivalist. I don’t always have great sex with gorgeous Californian tech chicks, but I always have food and water.”

  As she preened a little, he dug into the wheel-well. “Here we go. Fruit-leather and freeze-dried granola.”

  They munched companionably, sitting with their legs dangling out the hearse’s open back door. Rabbiteen felt happier than ever before in her life, out of her mind with head-over-heels, neck-yourself-silly romantic bonding. It was beyond ironic that this would happen to her just now.

  “Do you really think a lame stalker like Cody could dodge the Big Splat?” she essayed. “I’d love to hope that’s the truth. I mean, now that we’re together, it would be such a great ending if somehow—”

  “Not looking good,” said Angelo, staring into the particolored desert gloom. “If Cody’s story was for real, we should see scads of black helicopters flying in here, with all kinds of fat cats saving themselves from destruction.”

  “Even your black helicopters can’t work today,” said Rabbiteen a little impatiently. “It’s not just the batteries, Angelo. It’s spark-plugs, ignition, control chips—everything. No electrical machine will ever function again.” Seeing his stricken look, she tried to soothe him. “Maybe all the refugees are here already. Maybe they’re all crowded into the brane collision survival pod. Imagine the fun when they see us.”

  “The Black Egg of Area 52,” said Angelo, drawing fresh strength from the idea. “Let’s walk there.”

  “I’m ready. We’ll walk to the end of the earth.”

  Angelo loaded a stained khaki knapsack with food and water, daintily lotioned his skin, and even produced a couple of wide-brimmed hats, blister packs and a telescoping metal walking-stick.

  “Rabbiteen Rasmussen,” he murmured as they gamely trudged the sandy road. “What a fantastic name. That would be a king-hell blogger handle.”

  Rabbiteen’s heart glowed with joy.

  They came to a fork in the troubled road—with both alternatives equally bleak. “My compass is useless now,” Angelo griped. “Also, I think the sun is exploding.”

  Indeed the swollen, ruddy sun was spiky with fractalized flares. Its face was mottled with dark writhing sunspots, vast cavities into the star’s inner layers. Old Man Sol was visibly breathing his last. It was like seeing a beloved parent succumb to a disfiguring disease.

  They picked the road to the left and slogged forward.

/>   Rabbiteen’s love-smitten psyche was bubbling over with happy thoughts, yet the fear goblins ran fast behind, eating them. Compulsively, her mind returned to that demonic toad face she’d glimpsed in the midnight of her soul—but she didn’t share this inner terror with Angelo. He’d only make fun of her, or worse, drive himself frantic with speculation.

  Their few remaining moments of togetherness were passing all too fast. There was no sign of any secret base, or of any human beings at all. They were trudging endless, badly colored terrain in utter forlornness, like the last two holdout players in some outdated Internet game.

  Angelo was stumbling, leaning heavily on his fancy high-tech walking-stick.

  “My feet are asleep,” he complained.

  “Me too.” Rabbiteen rubbed one tingling hand against another. “I guess—I guess the changes in the electrical constants are finally getting to our nerves and our bodies.” Against her will, a sudden wail forced itself from her. “Oh, Angelo, do you love me?”

  “Did I forget to say that? I get so distracted sometimes. Yes, I love you. I do love you. I’d post it in letters of fire bigger than the sun.”

  This declaration revived her a little; they wobbled on, teetering on their rubbery ankles.

  Angelo was thinking hard. How strange it was that a woman’s welcoming body could nail a man to the fabric of space and time. This was a mystical proof to him that sexual intercourse was an inherent part of the fabric of the universe. His brain was working very fast—as if some kind of electrochemical friction had vanished inside his skull—but the fringes of his nervous system were fading. It was terrible to know he would soon die, and worse to know that Rabbiteen’s kindly, ardent body would smear across the cosmos like a spin-painting.

  “Look!” she cried. Another unguarded, open gate. They tottered through, their knees wobbling. In the fractured, crystalline distance they could see sun-blasted buildings and a sandy airstrip. “It’s too far,” added Rabbiteen, bursting into tears. “And we’re too slow! We won’t make it.”

  They sat in the shadow of a boulder, arms around each other, awaiting the end—or the strength to rise and slog on. But now a deep rumble filled their ears. Sand rose into the air as if blown by an impalpable gale; rocks flew off the mountains with the ease of tumbling dice.