Wastelands 2: More Stories of the Apocalypse

by John Joseph Adams

  “Gone? Ed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “Out. Skedaddled. Left for parts unknown.”

  “My God. What happened?”

  She turned her attention to the eggs, scooping at them and wiping her eyes with the backs of her hands. I pulled the pan from the burner and set it down where things wouldn’t burn, and then I caught her up. “Talk to me,” I said.

  “He left before dawn.”

  “Did he think something happened between us?”

  “No,” she said. “No. Nothing like that.”

  “What makes you think he’s not coming back?”

  “I know he’s not coming back.” She shook her head. “Listen, I’ll be okay. Best thing is for you to eat and head out.”

  “Tell me why,” I said.

  “I’ve already told you. He felt trapped here. I warned him what it would be like, but he wouldn’t listen, or didn’t really understand. When you came, last night, when he saw that we had been friends, maybe more than friends, he saw his chance.”

  “To bolt?”

  She nodded.

  “Knowing that I wouldn’t leave you here alone?”

  “I’m sure that’s what he thought.”

  “A creep with a conscience.” I sank into a chair.

  “That’s not true,” she said. “He waited. He stayed for years. Most men would have just walked out. Jeff, he never committed to this.”

  “Sure he did,” I said. “When he moved in, he made a commitment.” But I could see it hurt her. She wanted to think well of the son of a bitch, so I let it go.

  We abandoned the kitchen, left breakfast in ruins, and wandered into the room with the fireplaces.

  “Okay,” I said. “What happens now?”

  She shrugged. “I’ll manage.”

  “You can’t stay here alone.”

  “Why not?”

  “Alone? Rattling around in this place?”

  “It’s my home.”

  “It will be a prison. Close it up and come back with me. To the Forks. It’ll be safe for a while. Give yourself a chance to get away from it.”

  “No.” Her voice caught. “I can’t leave here.”

  “Sure you can. Just make up your mind and do it.”

  She nodded and took a long breath. “Maybe you’re right,” she said. “Maybe it is time to let go.”

  “Good.” I saw possibilities for myself. “Listen, we’ll—”

  “Take my chances.” She was beginning to look wild. “There’s no reason I should have to be buried here—”

  “None at all,” I said.

  “If it gets loose, it gets loose. I mean, nobody else cares, do they?”

  “Right,” I said. “If what gets loose?”

  She looked at me a long time. “Maybe you should know what’s in the basement.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that.

  I tried to get her to explain, but she only shook her head. “I’ll show it to you,” she said.

  So I followed her down to the lobby. Outside, the snow cover ran unbroken to the horizon. I looked at the Native American display. “Corey’s idea,” she said. “He thought it provided a counterpoint to the technology.”

  We went downstairs, down four more levels in fact, into the bowels of the building. At each floor I paused and looked along the corridors, which were dark, illuminated only by the lights in the stairway area. The passageways might have gone on forever. “How big is this place?” I asked.

  “Big,” she said. “Most of it’s underground. Not counting the tunnel.” As we got lower, I watched her spirits revive. “I think you’re right, Jeff. It is time to get out. The hell with it.”

  “I agree.” I put an arm around her and squeezed, and her body was loose and pliable, the way a woman is when she’s ready.

  “Jeff,” she said, “I meant what I said last night.”

  During the time we had known one another, I had never told her how I felt. Now, deep below the Tower, I embraced her, and held her face in my hands, and kissed her. Tears rolled again, and when we separated, my cheeks were wet. “Ellie,” I said, “for better or worse, I love you. Always have. There has never been a moment when I would not have traded everything I had for you.”

  She shook her head. No. “You’d better see what you’re getting into first before you say any more.”

  We turned on lights and proceeded down a long corridor, past more closed rooms. “These were laboratories,” she said, “and storage rooms, and libraries.”

  The floor was dusty. Walls were bare and dirty. The doors were marked with the letter designator “D”, and numbered in sequence, odd on the left, even on the right. There had been carpeting, I believe, at one time. But there was only rotted wood underfoot now.

  “Doesn’t look as if you come down here very much,” I said.

  She pointed at the floor, and I saw footprints in the dust. “Every day.”

  She threw open a door and stepped back. I walked past her into the dark.

  I could not immediately make out the dimensions of the room, or its general configuration. But ahead, a blue glow flickered and wavered and crackled. Lights came on. The room was quite large, maybe a hundred feet long. Tables and chairs were scattered everywhere, and the kind of antique equipment that turns up sometimes in ruins was piled high against both side walls.

  The blue glow was on the other side of a thick smoked window. The window was at eye level, about thirty feet long, and a foot high. She watched me. I crossed to the glass and looked in.

  A luminous, glowing cylinder floated in the air. It was a foot off the floor, and it extended almost to the ceiling. Thousands of tiny lights danced and swirled within its folds. It reminded me of a Christmas tree the Sioux had raised outside Sunset City a couple of years ago. “What is it?” I asked.

  “The devil,” she said softly.

  A chill worked its way up my back. “What do you mean?”

  “It’s a result of the research they did here. A by-product. Something that wasn’t supposed to happen. Jeff, they knew there was a possibility things might go wrong. But the bastards went ahead anyway.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Slow down. Went ahead with what?”

  “With what we were talking about last night. Smashing atoms. Jeff, this was state-of-the-art stuff.” She moved close to me, and I touched her hair. “Do you know what protons are?”

  “Yeah. Sort of. They’re made of atoms.”

  “Other way around,” she said. “The thing about protons is that they are extremely stable. Protons are the basic building blocks of matter. There is nothing more stable than a proton. Or at least, there used to be nothing.”

  “I’m not following this.”

  “The people who worked here knew there was a possibility they might produce an element that would be more stable.” Her voice was rising, becoming breathless. “And they also knew that if it actually happened, if they actually produced such an element, it would destabilize any proton it came into contact with.”

  “Which means what?”

  “They’d lose the lab.” I was still watching the thing, fascinated. It seemed to be rotating slowly, although the lights moved independently at different speeds, and some even rotated against the direction of turn. The effect was soothing. “In fact,” she continued, “they were afraid of losing the Dakotas.”

  “You mean that it might destroy the Dakotas?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ridiculous.”

  “I would have thought so too. But apparently not. Not if the records are correct.”

  I couldn’t figure it out. “Why would they make something like that?” I asked.

  “They didn’t set out to make it. They thought it was possible. A by-product. But the chances seemed remote, and I guess the research was important, so they went ahead.”

  I still couldn’t see the problem. After all, it was obvious that nothing untoward had occurred.

  “They took steps to
protect themselves in case there was an incident. They developed a defense. Something to contain it.”

  “How?”

  “You’re looking at it. It’s a magnetic field that plays off the new element. They called it Heisium.”

  “After its discoverer?”

  “Yes.”

  “So it’s contained. What’s the problem?”

  She stood with her back to it, looking away. “What do you suppose would happen if the power failed here?”

  “The lights would go out.” And I understood. The lights would go out. “Isn’t there a backup?”

  “It’s on the backup. Has been for almost two hundred years. The Crash took out their electrical source, and it’s been running on the Tower’s solar array ever since.”

  “Why do you come down here every day?”

  “Check the gauges. Look around. Make sure everything’s okay.”

  That shook me. “What do you do if it isn’t?”

  “Flip a circuit breaker. Tighten a connection. Rewire whatever.” She inhaled. “Somebody has to do this.”

  “Jesus.”

  “They kept this place manned for forty years. Then, after the Crash, the son of one of the people responsible for the original decision, Avery Bolton, the guy the Tower’s named for, stayed on. And kept the place going. When he died, his daughter succeeded him. And brought her family. In one way or another, that family has been here ever since. Until Corey. And his brothers. His brothers weren’t worth much, and now I’m all that’s left.” She shook her head. “Seen enough?”

  * * *

  “Ellie, do you really believe all this?”

  “I believe there’s a good chance the threat is real.” We were sitting in the lobby. “Why else would I be here?”

  “Things get twisted over a long time. Maybe they were wrong.” Outside, the day was bright and cold. “I just can’t believe it.”

  “That’s good,” she said. “You should continue to think that. But I’m going to have to continue to assume that Corey knew what he was talking about.”

  “My God, Ellie, it’s a trap.”

  She looked at me, and her eyes were wet. “Don’t you think I know that?”

  I looked up at an oil of a Sioux warrior on horseback, about to plunge a lance into a bison. “There’s a way to settle it,” I said.

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “Ellie. We can shut it down. Nothing will happen.”

  “No. I won’t consider it. And I want you to promise you won’t do anything like that.”

  I hesitated.

  “I want your word, Jeff. Please.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Not ever. No matter what.”

  “Not ever.” She looked fragile. Frightened. “No matter what.”

  She looked out across the snowfields. “It must be time to go.”

  “I won’t leave you,” I said.

  * * *

  That evening was a night to kill for. The consummation of love, denied over a lifetime, may be as close as you can come to the point of existence. I took her, and took her again, and went limp in her arms, and woke to more passion. Eventually the curtains got gray, and I made promises that she said she didn’t want to hear, but I made them anyway. We had a magnificent breakfast, and made love again in the room with the fireplaces. Eventually, sometime around lunch, we went down and looked again at Bolton’s devil. She took along a checklist, and explained the gauges and circuit breakers and pointed out where the critical wiring was, and where things might go wrong. Where they’d gone wrong in the past. “Just in case,” she said. “Not that I expect you to get involved in this, but it’s best if someone else knows. Edward hated to do this. He rarely came here.”

  She showed me where the alarms were throughout our living quarters, and how, if the power supply got low, the system automatically shunted everything into the storage batteries in the lab. “It’s happened a couple of times when we’ve had consecutive weeks without sunlight.”

  “It must get cold,” I said. The temperatures here dropped sometimes to forty below for a month at a time.

  “We’ve got fireplaces,” she said. “And we’ll have each other.”

  It was all I needed to hear.

  I stayed on, of course. And I did it with no regrets. I too came to feel the power of the thing in the lab. I accepted the burden voluntarily. And not without a sense of purpose, which, I knew, would ultimately bind us together more firmly than any mere vow could have.

  We worried because the systems that maintained the magnetic bottle were ageing. Eventually, we knew, it would fail. But not, we hoped, in our lifetimes.

  We took turns riding the buckboard over to Sandywater for supplies. Our rule was that someone was always available at the Tower. In case.

  And one day, about three months after my arrival, she did not come back. When a second day had passed without word, I went after her. I tracked her as far as the town, where I found the buckboard. There was no sign of her. Jess Harper, who works for Overland, thought he’d seen her get into a buckboard with a tall bearded man. “They rode west,” he said. “I thought it was odd.”

  That was almost a year ago. I still make the rounds in the Tower, and I still believe she’ll come back. In the meantime, I check the gauges and occasionally throw a circuit breaker. The power in the living quarters shut down once, but I got through it okay. We got through it okay.

  What I can’t understand is how I could have been so wrong. I know who the bearded man was, and I try to tell myself that they must have been very desperate to get away. And I try to forgive them. Forgive her.

  But it’s not easy. Some nights when the moon is up, and the wind howls around the Tower, I wonder what they are doing, and whether she ever thinks about me. And occasionally, I am tempted to break my promise, and turn things off. Find out once and for all.

  FOUNDATION

  ANN AGUIRRE

  I don’t remember how the sun feels.

  It’s an abstract concept for me, something I know exists, but doesn’t have the meaning it once did. When we first came down, my mom and dad said it was just for a few weeks, just a precaution. The outbreaks in the city came from some biological agent released in Times Square, I guess, and the news was full of conflicting reports on whether it came from North Korea or Iran. Other sites had other theories, but it was a coordinated strike, targeting cities all over the world.

  At the time, I didn’t know why—or even what—was happening. I was thirteen when my parents quietly bought a unit in the bunkers. By that point, the city was bad enough that my mother no longer went out to do the marketing. Instead, she called a service that brought our food, and she didn’t let the courier come into the apartment, either. He left our groceries in the foyer with the doorman, who then scanned to make sure there were no foreign objects in the boxes or suspicious contaminants present.

  By this point, I had stopped attending school. I was nine when they declared a state of national emergency and the country went to martial law, trying to contain the damage. Whole sectors of the city were designated hazardous and quarantined accordingly. My dad said the heavily armed soldiers in the streets patrolled to protect me, so I wasn’t to worry about them. They would soon restore order and things would get back to normal. Though I didn’t know it at the time, he was totally wrong.

  For us, normal ended on May 5 when the chemicals exploded in Times Square.

  The world never recovered.

  It’s funny, but when I look back over my childhood, I see a progression of my world getting smaller. At five, I went on a plane with my parents and the whole universe lay open before me. There was a white beach with sand soft as powder and an endless blue ocean; the air was balmy, and it was an island, covered in mountains. I remember asking if this was heaven, and my mother laughed. She said, “It’s not heaven, Robin, but it is paradise.”

  There were other wonders on that trip, but I was so young that they’ve begun to fade, colors running tog
ether like a painting left out in the rain. I mind this fiercely because it feels like time is stealing what little I have left. After we came home, I went to school, and my world was my teacher and twenty-four other students. Then it narrowed further to my parents and the walls of the apartment with the occasional supervised trip outdoors.

  And when I was thirteen, they took away the sun. I argued. I sulked. I tried to convince my parents they were overreacting—we didn’t need to go live underground like rabbits, but they were afraid. The streets teemed with people who had been infected with the Metanoia Virus, and public services couldn’t cope with them all. My parents told me these unfortunates were unable to hold a job; their health and mental abilities had been permanently compromised. In time, they promised, the government would help the sick. I wasn’t sure shooting them or rounding them up in trucks counted as help, but I got used to hearing automatic-weapons fire and the rumble of large engines as I fell asleep.

  That morning, the bunker company sent an armed escort to take us from our apartment. We put on special clothing and masks that would allegedly protect us. I rode in an armored vehicle for the first time—and the last—that day. We went into a tall building, down some stairs, and through a heavy, heavy door. My parents signed some documents, and then we took possession of our new home.

  “It’s so small,” my mother said.

  My father put an arm around her. “We’ll get used to it. We’ll make do. This is just a precaution, just for a little while, until they get things back in order.”

  Now, I wonder if he knew, if he suspected.

  For the first year, we maintained contact with the outside world. The air we breathed was regulated and filtered, our food was expensive and packaged “like the astronauts eat,” according to my mother. That was supposed to make it more exciting, but I had to force mine down. Sometimes I wondered what the point of survival was, if this was what we had to do; it seemed there was nothing in the world worth saving.

  Then silence fell. Reports stopped coming. I was fourteen years old. My mother spent all day weeping when the news sites went quiet. Another day, she pressed random keys on the terminal, trying to get anyone to respond. And that was when we found the local intercom.