Wastelands 2: More Stories of the Apocalypse

by John Joseph Adams

  But after endless turns, endless twists through a dark world, we found a place that welcomed us. They were a fairly new settlement, calling themselves the College enclave, because of a nearby subway stop, I guess. And when they found out we had a doctor among us, they drew back the barricades and welcomed us. On the surface, most had been homeless, drug addicts or alcoholics, those that society threw away. Down here, they had the power.

  In a heartbeat, everything changes.

  “They’re evacuating the city,” one of the settlers told us. “Apparently it’s uninhabitable up there right now.”

  Another shrugged. “We wouldn’t have qualified for evac anyway. They’re shortlisting those who can contribute to society.”

  A dusky-skinned man with dreadlocks said, “Down here, we all can. We do. Doctor, do you mind checking out my little girl?”

  Because he always did, my father said yes—and the rest of us found a little piece of ground to call our own. It was dark, cramped, and smelled a bit, of smoke and other, less pleasant things. I felt sure I’d get used to it. Life had already shifted so much.

  Austin laced his fingers through mine and drew me away from the others. “It’s better than the bunkers,” he said softly, his tone more hopeful than certain.

  “I hope so. At least we’re not at the company’s mercy. Let them try to find us here.”

  His expression became exultant, defiant, even. He put a hand on my shoulder and pushed me against the wall, then kissed me with such surety and promise. No more waiting for cues, apparently. Since he had been for me, almost from the moment I heard his voice in the dark, I curled my hand into his hair. There had been one touch of lips to mine before this, but this was the kiss I would cherish and remember, a kiss to obliterate all others. I was breathless when he stopped.

  “I wasn’t sure if you…” he started, then he shifted to, “I was afraid.”

  “Don’t ever be. Not with me.”

  That night, the original settlers decided we needed some rules to follow; each of us should serve a purpose. Austin was confident that night, possibly because of us. And so he said, “You should divide up jobs like an old-school tribe. Some people hunt, others build.”

  Most people laughed, but the chief said, “What about the rest?”

  “They breed to keep numbers up, naturally. But not too much. We want to survive, not overpopulate.”

  To my surprise, they ratified his idea. And it worked well for a long time. My father lasted ten years down there; Mrs. Shelley passed on shortly thereafter. The Markowitz girls had sons and daughters. And Austin? He was a builder, even down here; oh, he crafted the most marvelous things. I helped him in that. Austin Shelley was also the love of my life.

  I lost him two years ago.

  And I am so very tired now. My name is Robin Schiller, and I have come to the end of my life. In this final recounting, I entrust my tale to you, my pupil; you are the first Wordkeeper. In this world, words matter. Sometimes they’re all we have. So I entrust mine to you. Let them be remembered.

  Let it be so.

  BEAT ME DADDY

  (EIGHT TO THE BAR)

  CORY DOCTOROW

  We were the Eight-Bar Band: there was me and my bugle; and Timson, whose piano had no top and got rained on from time to time; and Steve, the front-man and singer. And then there was blissed-out, autistic Hambone, our “percussionist” who whacked things together, more or less on the beat. Sometimes, it seemed like he was playing another song, but then he’d come back to the rhythm and bam, you’d realise that he’d been subtly keeping time all along, in the mess of clangs and crashes he’d been generating.

  I think he may be a genius.

  Why the Eight-Bar Band? Thank the military. Against all odds, they managed to build automated bombers that still fly, roaring overhead every minute or so, bomb-bay doors open, dry firing on our little band of survivors. The War had been over for ten years, but still, they flew.

  So. The Eight-Bar Band. Everything had a rest every eight bars, punctuated by the white-noise roar of the most expensive rhythm section ever imagined by the military-industrial complex.

  We were playing through “Basin Street Blues,” arranged for bugle, half-piano, tin cans, vocals, and bombers. Steve, the front-man, was always after me to sing backup on this, crooning a call-and-response. I blew a bugle because I didn’t like singing. Bugle’s almost like singing, anyway, and I did the backup vocals through it, so when Steve sang, “Come along wi-ith me,” I blew, “Wah wah wah wah-wah wah,” which sounded dynamite. Steve hated it. Like most front-men, he had an ego that could swallow the battered planet, and didn’t want any lip from the troops. That was us. The troops. Wah-wah.

  The audience swayed in time with the music, high atop the pile of rubble we played on in the welcome cool of sunset, when the work day was through. They leaned against long poles, which made me think of gondoliers, except that our audience used their poles to pry apart the rubble that the bombers had created, looking for canned goods.

  Steve handed Hambone a solo cue just as a bomber flew by overhead, which was his idea of a joke. He didn’t like Hambone much. “Take it, Hambone!” he shouted, an instant before the roar began. It got a laugh. Hambone just grinned his blissed-out smile and went gonzo on the cans. The roar of the bomber faded, and he played on, and then settled into a kicky lick that set me on an expedition on the bugle that left me blue in the face. Steve gave us dirty looks.

  Then a stranger started dancing.

  It was pretty shocking: not the dancing; people do that whenever they find some booze or solvents or whatever; it was the stranger. We didn’t get a lot of strangers around there. Lyman and his self-styled “militia” took it upon themselves to keep wanderers out of our cluster of rubble. She was dirty, like all of us, but she had good teeth, and she wasn’t so skinny you could count her ribs. Funny how that used to be sexy when food was plentiful.

  And she could dance! Steve skipped a verse, and Timson looked up from the book he keeps on his music stand and gawped. I jammed in, and Hambone picked up on it, and Steve didn’t throw a tantrum, just scatted along. She danced harder, and we didn’t break for the next bomber, kept playing, even though we couldn’t hear ourselves, and when we could, we were still in rhythm.

  We crashed to an ending, and before the applause could start, we took off on “Diggin’ My Potatoes,” which Steve sang as dirty and lecherous as he could. We hopped and the stranger danced and the audience joined in and the set went twice as long as it normally would have, long after the sun set. Man!

  Steve made a beeline for her after the set, while I put away the bugle and Timson tied a tarp down over his piano. Hambone kept banging on his cans, making an arrhythmic racket. He only did that when he was upset, so I helped him to his feet.

  “C’mon, Ham,” I said. “Let’s get you home.”

  Hambone smiled, but to a trained Hambone-ologist like me, it was a worried grin. The stranger was staring at Hambone. Hambone was looking away. I led him to his cave, guiding him with one hand at the base of his skull, where he had a big knot of scar tissue—presumably, whatever had given him that lump had also made him into what he was. I made sure he went in, then went back, nervous. Hambone was a barometer for trouble, and when he got worried, I got worried, too.

  The stranger had peeled Steve off of her, and was having an animated conversation with Timson. Uh-oh. That meant that she was a reader. It’s all Timson ever talked about. He was a world-class bookworm. He’d moved into the basement of what was left of a bookstore-café, and was working his way through their stock. You never saw Timson without a book.

  “Anemic Victorian girly book—that’s all that was,” he was saying when I caught up with him.

  The stranger shoved his shoulder, playfully. Timson is a big one, and not many people are foolhardy enough to shove him, playfully or otherwise. “You’ve got to be kidding me! Are you some kind of barbarian? Emma is a classic, you bunghole!” My sainted mother would have said tha
t she had a mouth on her like a truck-driver. It turned me on.

  “Hi!” I said.

  Timson’s retort was derailed as he turned to look at me. He said, “Brad, meet Jenna. Jenna, meet Brad.”

  I shook her hand. Under the dirt, she was one big freckle, and the torchlight threw up red highlights from her hair. Mmmm. Redheads. I had it bad.

  “You blow good,” the stranger—Jenna—said.

  “Hell,” Timson said, slapping me on the back hard enough to knock a whoosh of air out of my lungs. “Brad is the best trumpet player for a hundred klicks!” Jenna raised a dubious eyebrow.

  “I’m the only trumpet player for a hundred klicks,” I explained. Talking to a stranger was a novel experience: we got to recycle all the band jokes. She smiled.

  I don’t know where she slept that night. She was pretty good at taking care of herself—there weren’t hardly any wanderers around anymore, and I’d never seen a solo woman. When I retired to my shack, I was pretty sure that she’d found herself shelter.

  * * *

  “This is how all of you survive?” she asked me the next day. I’d taken her out prospecting with me, going after a mountain of concrete rubble that had recently shifted after a baby quake. I had a good feeling about it.

  “Yeah,” I said, wedging my pole in and prying down hard. If you do it just right, you start a landslide that takes off a layer of the pile, revealing whatever’s underneath. Do it wrong, you break your pole, give yourself a hernia, or bury yourself under a couple tons of rebar and cement. I’d seen a movie where people used the technique after some apocalypse or another. A plane went by overhead and stopped the conversation.

  “But it’s not bloody sustainable,” she said. Her face was red with exertion, as she pried down hard.

  I stopped prying and looked around pointedly. Mountains of rubble shimmered in the damp heat, dotting the landscape as far as the eye could see.

  She followed my gaze around. “OK, fine. You’ve got a good supply. But not everyone else does. Sooner or later, someone, somewhere, is going to run out. And then what? Turf wars? The last thing we need around here is another fucking war.”

  It wasn’t the first time I’d heard that theory. Lyman and his buddies were particular proponents of it. They drilled half-ass military maneuvers in their spare time, waiting for the day when they’d get to heroically repel an invasion. I told her what I told them. “There’s plenty of rubble to go around.”

  Another plane went by. She went back to her rock with renewed vigor and I went back to mine. After several moments of grunting and sweating, she said, “For this generation, maybe. What’ll your kids eat?”

  I leaned against my pole. “Who said anything about kids? I don’t plan on having any.”

  She leaned against hers. Actually, it was my spare—two-and-a-half metres of 1” steel gas-pipe—but I’d let her use it for the day. “So that’s it for the human race, as far as you’re concerned? The buck stops here?”

  I got the feeling that she had this argument a lot. “Other people can do whatever they want. I’m not gonna be anyone’s daddy.”

  Another plane passed. “That’s pretty damned selfish,” she said.

  I rose to the bait. “It’s selfish not to have kids I can’t look after in a world that’s gone to hell?”

  “If you took an interest in the world, you could make it a livable place for your kids.”

  “Yeah, and if I wanted to have kids, I’d probably do that. But since I don’t, I won’t. QED.”

  “And if my grandma had wheels, she’d be a friggin’ roller skate. Come on, Brad. Live like a savage if you must, but let’s at least keep the rhetoric civilised.”

  She sounded like Timson, then. I hate arguing with Timson. He always wins. I pushed against my pole and the chunk I’d been working on all morning finally shifted and an ominous rumbling began from up the hill. “Move!” I shouted.

  We both ran downslope like nuts. That was my favorite part of any day, the rush of pounding down an uneven mountain face with tons of concrete chasing after me. I scrambled down and down, leaping over bigger obstacles, using all four limbs and my pole for balance. Jenna was right behind me, and then she was overtaking me, grinning hugely. We both whooped and dove into the lee of another mountain. The thunder of the landslide was temporarily drowned out by the roar of another plane.

  I turned around quick, my chest heaving, and watched my work. The entire face of the mountain was coming down in stately march. Lots of telltale glints sparkled in the off-pour. Canned goods. Fossil junk food from more complex times.

  “Tell me that that’s not way funner than gardening,” I panted at Jenna.

  She planted her hands on her thighs and panted.

  I loved going out prospecting with other people. Some folks liked to play it safe, nicking away little chunks of a mountain. I liked to make a big mess. It’s more dangerous, more cool, and more rewarding. I’m a big show-off.

  I went back and started poking at the newly exposed stratum, popping cans into my sack. The people who’d lived in this city before it got plagued and Dresdenned had been ready for a long siege, every apartment stuffed with supplies. I kept my eyes open for a six-pack of beer or a flask of booze, and I found both. The beer would be a little skunky after a decade of mummification, but not too bad. The tequila would be smooth as silk. I found it hard not to take a long swallow, but it was worth too much in trade for me to waste it on my liver.

  Jenna joined me, scooping up the cans and stashing them in her pack. I didn’t begrudge her the chow: there was more than I could carry home before the day was through in this load, and whatever I didn’t take would get snapped up by some entrepreneur before morning. I wandered off, selecting the best of the stuff for my larder. I heard Jenna throwing up on the other side of the mountain. I scampered over to her.

  It was what I’d expected: she’d turned up some corpses. Ten years of decomposition had cleaned them up somewhat, but they weren’t pretty by any stretch. The plague bombs they dropped on this town had been full of nasty stuff. It killed fast, and left its victims twisted into agonised hieroglyphs. I turned, and pulled Jenna’s hair out of the way of her puke.

  “Thanks,” she said, when she was done, five planes later. “Sorry, I can’t get used to dead bodies, even after all this.”

  “Don’t apologise,” I said. “Plague victims are worse than your garden variety corpse.”

  “Plague victims! Damn!” she said, taking several involuntary steps backward. I caught her before she fell.

  “Whoa! They’re not contagious anymore. That plague stuff was short-lived. The idea was to kill everyone in the city, wait a couple months, then clean out the bodies and take up residence. No sense in destroying prime real estate.”

  “Then how did all this—” she waved at the rubble “—happen?”

  “Oh, that was our side. After the city got plagued, they Dresdenned the hell out of it so that the enemy wouldn’t be able to use it.” After the War, I’d hooked up for a while with a crazy guy who wouldn’t tell me his name, who’d been in on all the dirty secrets of one army or another. From all he knew, he must’ve been in deep, but even after two years of wandering with him, I never found out much about him. He died a month before I found my current home. Lockjaw. Shitty way to go.

  “They bombed their own fucking city?” she asked, incredulous. I was a little surprised that she managed to be shocked by the excesses of the War. Everyone else I knew had long grown used to the idea that the world had been trashed by some very reckless, immoral people. As if to make the point, another plane buzzed over us.

  “Well, everyone was already dead. It was their final solution: if they couldn’t have it, no one else could. What’s the harm in that?” I said. Whenever my nameless companion had spilled some dirty little secret, he’d finish it with What’s the harm in that? and give a cynical chuckle. He was a scary guy.

  She didn’t get the joke.

  “Come on,” I said. “We
gotta get this stuff back home.”

  That evening, the band played again. Our audience was bigger, maybe a hundred people. Steve liked a big crowd. He jumped around like bacon in a pan, and took us through all our uptempo numbers: “South America, Take It Away,” “All the Cats Join In,” “Cold Beverages,” “Atomic Dog,” and more. The crowd loved it; they danced and stomped and clapped, keeping the rhythm for us during the long rests when the planes went by.

  We played longer than usual. When we were done, I was soaked with sweat, my lips and cheeks were burning, and the sun had completely set. Some enterprising soul had built a bonfire. We used to do that all the time, back when booze was less scarce: build a big fire and party all night. Somewhere along the line, we’d stopped, falling into a sunup-to-sundown rhythm.

  That night, though, I lay on my back beside the fire and watched the constellations whirl overhead. The planes counterpointed the soft crackling noises the fire made, and I felt better than I had in a long time.

  The crowd had mostly gone home, but the band was still out, as were Lyman and his boys, and a few other diehards. And Jenna. She’d led the dancing all night.

  “That was fun,” she said, hunkering down with me and Timson and Hambone. Steve was fondling one of his groupies, a skinny girl with bad teeth named Lucy. In my nastier moods, I called her “Loose.” She was dumb enough not to get the joke.

  Jenna passed Timson the canteen and he swigged deeply. “It sure was,” he said. “We haven’t been that tight in a while.”

  “You know, I’ve been all through the southland, but you guys are the only band I’ve seen. Everyone else is just scratching out a living. How’d you guys get together?”

  “Hambone,” I said. He was rappity-tappiting some firewood.