Wastelands 2: More Stories of the Apocalypse

by John Joseph Adams

  She rejects it. Rejects it all so viscerally that she stops and for a moment can’t walk to the people in the rest stop. She doesn’t know if she would have walked past, or if she would have turned around, or if she would have struck off across the country. It doesn’t matter what she would have done, because Nate and Franny walk right on up the exit ramp. Franny’s tank top is bright, insistent pink under its filth and her shorts have a tear in them, and her legs are brown and skinny and she could be a child on a news channel after a hurricane or an earthquake, clad in the loud synthetic colors so at odds with the dirt or ash that coats her. Plastic and synthetics are the indestructibles left to the survivors.

  Jane is ashamed. She wants to explain that she’s not like this. She wants to say, she’s an American. By which she means she belongs to the military side, although she has never been interested in the military, never particularly liked soldiers.

  If she could call her parents in Pennsylvania. Get a phone from one of the soldiers. Surrender. You were right, Mom. I should have straightened up and flown right. I should have worried more about school. I should have done it your way. I’m sorry. Can we come home?

  Would her parents still be there? Do the phones work just north of Philadelphia? It has not until this moment occurred to her that it is all gone.

  She sticks her fist in her mouth to keep from crying out, sick with understanding. It is all gone. She has thought herself all brave and realistic, getting Franny to Canada, but somehow she didn’t until this moment realize that it all might be gone. That there might be nowhere for her where the electricity is still on and there are still carpets on the hardwood floors and someone still cares about damask.

  Nate has finally noticed that she isn’t with them and he looks back, frowning at her. What’s wrong? his expression says. She limps after them, defeated.

  Nate walks up to a group of people camped around and under a stone picnic table. “Are they giving out water?” he asks, meaning the military.

  “Yeah,” says a guy in a Cowboys football jersey. “If you go ask, they’ll give you water.”

  “Food?”

  “They say tonight.”

  All the shade is taken. Nate takes their water bottles—a couple of two-liters and a plastic gallon milk jug. “You guys wait, and I’ll get us some water,” he says.

  Jane doesn’t like being near these people, so she walks back to a wire fence at the back of the rest area and sits down. She puts her arms on her knees and puts her head down. She is looking at the grass.

  “Mom?” Franny says.

  Jane doesn’t answer.

  “Mom? Are you okay?” After a moment more. “Are you crying?”

  “I’m just tired,” Jane says to the grass.

  Franny doesn’t say anything after that.

  Nate comes back with all the bottles filled. Jane hears him coming and hears Franny say, “Oh, wow. I’m so thirsty.”

  Nate nudges Jane’s arm with a bottle. “Hey, babe. Have some.”

  She takes a two-liter from him and drinks some. It’s got a flat, faintly metal/chemical taste. She gets a big drink and feels a little better. “I’ll be back,” she says. She walks to the shelter where the bathrooms are.

  “You don’t want to go in there,” a black man says to her. The whites of his eyes are yellow.

  She ignores him and pushes in the door. Inside, the smell is excruciating, and the sinks are all stopped and full of trash. There is some light from windows up near the ceiling. She looks at herself in the dim mirror. She pours a little water into her hand and scrubs at her face. There is a little bit of paper towel left on a roll, and she peels it off and cleans her face and her hands, using every bit of the scrap of paper towel. She wets her hair and combs her fingers through it, working the tangles for a long time until it is still curly but not the rat’s nest it was. She is so careful with the water. Even so, she uses every bit of it on her face and arms and hair. She would kill for a little lipstick. For a comb. Anything. At least she has water.

  She is cute. The sun hasn’t been too hard on her. She practices smiling.

  When she comes out of the bathroom, the air is so sweet. The sunlight is blinding.

  She walks over to the soldiers and smiles. “Can I get some more water, please?”

  There are three of them at the water truck. One of them is a blond-haired boy with a brick-red complexion. “You sure can,” he says, smiling back at her.

  She stands, one foot thrust out in front of her like a ballerina, back a little arched. “You’re sweet,” she says. “Where are you from?”

  “We’re all stationed at Fort Hood,” he says. “Down in Texas. But we’ve been up north for a couple of months.”

  “How are things up north?” she asks.

  “Crazy,” he says. “But not as crazy as they are in Texas, I guess.”

  She has no plan. She is just moving with the moment. Drawn like a moth.

  He gets her water. All three of them are smiling at her.

  “How long are you here?” she asks. “Are you like a way station or something?”

  One of the others, a skinny Chicano, laughs. “Oh, no. We’re here tonight and then headed west.”

  “I used to live in California,” she says. “In Pasadena. Where the Rose Parade is. I used to walk down that street where the cameras are every day.”

  The blond glances around. “Look, we aren’t supposed to be talking too much right now. But later on, when it gets dark, you should come back over here and talk to us some more.”

  “Mom!” Franny says when she gets back to the fence. “You’re all cleaned up!”

  “Nice, babe,” Nate says. He’s frowning a little.

  “Can I get cleaned up?” Franny asks.

  “The bathroom smells really bad,” Jane says. “I don’t think you want to go in there.” But she digs her other T-shirt out of her backpack and wets it and washes Franny’s face. The girl is never going to be pretty, but now that she’s not chubby, she’s got a cute thing going on. She’s got the sense to work it, or will learn it. “You’re a girl that the boys are going to look at,” Jane says to her.

  Franny smiles, delighted.

  “Don’t you think?” Jane says to Nate. “She’s got that thing, that sparkle, doesn’t she?”

  “She sure does,” Nate says.

  They nap in the grass until the sun starts to go down, and then the soldiers line everyone up and hand out MREs. Nate gets Beef Ravioli, and Jane gets Sloppy Joe. Franny gets Lemon Pepper Tuna and looks ready to cry, but Jane offers to trade with her. The meals are positive cornucopias—a side dish, a little packet of candy, peanut butter and crackers, fruit punch powder. Everybody has different things, and Jane makes everybody give everyone else a taste.

  Nate keeps looking at her oddly. “You’re in a great mood.”

  “It’s like a party,” she says

  Jane and Franny are really pleased by the moist towelette. Franny carefully saves her plastic fork, knife, and spoon. “Was your tuna okay?” she asks. She is feeling guilty now that the food is gone.

  “It was good,” Jane says. “And all the other stuff made it really special. And I got the best dessert.”

  The night comes down. Before they got on the road, Jane didn’t know how dark night was. Without electric lights it is cripplingly dark. But the soldiers have lights.

  Jane says, “I’m going to go see if I can find out about the camp.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Nate says.

  “No,” Jane says. “They’ll talk to a girl more than they’ll talk to a guy. You keep Franny company.”

  She scouts around the edge of the light until she sees the blond soldier. He says, “There you are!”

  “Here I am!” she says.

  They are standing around a truck where they’ll sleep this night, shooting the shit. The blond soldier boosts her into the truck, into the darkness. “So you aren’t so conspicuous,” he says, grinning.

  Two of the men standing a
nd talking aren’t wearing uniforms. It takes her a while to figure out that they’re civilian contractors. They aren’t soldiers. They are technicians, nothing like the soldiers. They are softer, easier in their polo shirts and khaki pants. The soldiers are too sure in their uniforms, but the contractors, they’re used to getting the leftovers. They’re grateful. They have a truck of their own, a white pickup truck that travels with the convoy. They do something with satellite tracking, but Jane doesn’t really care what they do.

  It takes a lot of careful maneuvering, but one of them finally whispers to her, “We’ve got some beer in our truck.”

  The blond soldier looks hurt by her defection.

  * * *

  She stays out of sight in the morning, crouched among the equipment in the back of the pickup truck. The soldiers hand out MREs. Ted, one of the contractors, smuggles her one.

  She thinks of Franny. Nate will keep an eye on her. Jane was only a year older than Franny when she lit out for California the first time. For a second she pictures Franny’s face as the convoy pulls out.

  Then she doesn’t think of Franny.

  She doesn’t know where she is going. She is in motion.

  THE TRADITIONAL

  MARIA DAHVANA HEADLEY

  I

  By your first anniversary, the world’s stopped making paper, and so you can’t give your boyfriend the traditional gift. You never would have anyway, regardless of circumstances. You’re not that kind of girl. You pride yourself on your original sin. It’s the hot you trade in.

  So you give him the piece of your skin just beneath your ribcage on the right side, where the floating ribs bend in. It’s a good part. Not the best. You’re like a food hoarder who pretends her larder’s empty, all the while running her finger along the dusty ledge that leads to the trick shelves that hold the jars of Caspian caviar. You’ve always been the kind of liar who leans back and lets boys fall into you while you see if you can make them fall all the way out the other side. You want them to feel like they’ve hit Narnia. You traffic in interdimensional fucking, during which they transcend space and time, and you go nowhere. When they fall in love, you Shun & Break™ them. Their poor plastic hearts are Pez dispensers topped with copyright violation Mickey mice.

  Your boy’s not falling for this shit. He simply refuses. He sees through your methods. You met him in a bar on the night of the first apocalypse, just prior, and both of you somehow lived through the night.

  He clocked you from moment one, when you bought him a drink and brought it to him, fresh lipstick on your mouth, altering your walk to cause him pain. He drank it. He then took the cherry out of yours and drank your drink too, looking at you the whole time like he was a prime transgressor who was going to rock your world until it broke.

  “You gonna try to make me love you now?” he asked. “That your thing?”

  “Brother,” you said, taken aback by the way he’d just needlessly whacked the rules of flirtation, “I don’t even know you exist.”

  This would have been the end of it, except that five minutes later there was a rending, and everyone was screaming and trying to get away, and buildings were falling down, and the streets were full of the unimaginable.

  You were out of your element. You loved the Woolworthing of the world before the apocalypse, the shopping mall fluorescence of flirtation, the IKEA particleboard pushing together of things that would shortly fall apart. You loved paper parasols and plastic monkeys. Everything was your toy. You killed men, but they never got anywhere near killing you.

  But he grabbed your hand, and you grabbed his, and you took off running together, dodging crazy, jumping holes in the streets, not stopping to look at the people who were down on the ground already, vomiting up important parts of anatomy.

  You didn’t actually see the worms that night, though other people did. That was the first anyone heard of them.

  When you finally got indoors and safe as you were likely to get given the stakes, given the world situation—sex, you informed him, was necessary, because minus sex? This shit was just monsters and the end of the world.

  He wasn’t so sure. He’d sobered up, considered lighting out on his own, but you insisted you were better off together. Then you tore off his clothes and climbed him like a firefighter reversing up a pole.

  Maybe you love him now, maybe you don’t. You don’t trust him, but there’s nothing new about that.

  The apartment you share has big windows, and no curtains. You don’t look out. The floor beneath the window has an old bloodstain, but whatever happened there happened a long time ago. In bed, you’re rubber and he’s glue, and it’s hot enough to keep you going.

  “This is so you can write on me instead of paper,” you say, thrilling at your own fin du monde generosity. The rest of the world’s in mourning, but you’re celebrating your survival.

  You roll over to face him. You’ve outlined the page with a razor blade. The rest of you is unmarked. There’s the promise of a quarto. Back before all this, you were both, weirdly, the kind of people who footnoted fucks. You prided yourselves on your grasp of gory details of the philosophical arguments of the 1300s. Now you don’t know what you are. Your dissertation is stalled. You used to be the cool girl. Now you’re just a live girl.

  Your boy presses his cheek to your hipbone.

  “You feel like a fossil,” he says. “Like a pterodactyl wrapped in fabric.”

  “As long as I don’t feel like a worm,” you say.

  You know very well that you don’t. The people out there who’ve died, the ones eaten by the worms? First everything liquefies. Then the worm emerges. While it’s happening, you feel it like an earthquake inside your soul. There’s a reason you’re in here. A year of that, and the worms are getting bigger all the time. They start out the size of pencils.

  He cuts a word into your skin, and then another, and you gasp when the knife touches you, because here’s something you’ve never done before, and you’re a girl who does everything. You have a flash of worry about yourself. There is a distinct possibility that you’re flipping backward, your head upturned, everything sweet you’ve kept hidden sliding out into his hands.

  Outside you can hear one of the worms moving through the streets, a big one, about the size of a motorcycle. You blow out the candle. It’s not like you’re scared.

  “Do you remember mimeograph machines?” you ask him. You do. Your grade school had one. Once, because you couldn’t stop talking, you were exorcised in the mimeograph room by a substitute teacher using Diet Sprite as holy water. Back then, you couldn’t stop anything once you started. You revolved like a bent top, twitched, and bit boys. You cast spells. None of them worked. Now, if you were out there, it would be worse than mimeograph ink. People believe in things they didn’t.

  “Yeah, I remember mimeographs,” he says, and smiles. “The purple ink. It smelled like a hot skillet.”

  You flip over so you don’t have to look at him, and then you roll across the sheet to print the words he’s written, grabbing the fuck out of random religion, but isn’t everyone?

  Hallelujah, Holy, Glory, Be, God, Gone, Gotten, Begat, Bore, Bear, Beginning: in the. End of days.

  Out in the street there is a scream, high and wavering, which you both totally ignore.

  II

  For your second anniversary, he gives you two teeth, wisdom. The traditional gift is cotton, but you’ve sold most of your clothes. He gives you ivory instead. The teeth aren’t quite white, because of the drinking of tea, back before it all. They’ve been out of his mouth for a while. The world’s shifted away from dentistry, or rather, the world’s shifted from cosmetic dentistry into tooth-retention, but his were removed before all that. He’s lost other things, too. He has no appendix. He has no tonsils. He still owns both his kidneys, though. You only have one.

  The thought that he purposefully had organs removed, and didn’t even sell them, makes you pissed off with the waste (wastrel, you compulsively think, over and ove
r, wastrel wastrel) and so you carefully don’t imagine his tonsils twitching on a tonsil heap. His appendix like a tiny harp, strumming inside a bath of alcohol.

  There is, by now, a black market trade in vestigials, and the wisdom teeth are worth their weight in something. Some people have their mouths studded with other people’s teeth. It’s become a status symbol. The worms, however, don’t care. People are entirely in hiding by now, and still, sometimes, a worm gets in. No one sleeps with an open mouth anymore. There are masks and door seals. If you see a worm, even a tiny one, you’re supposed to shine a light on it and stomp on its head. This is not always possible. It takes time, but eventually, the worms get their way.

  “Do you love me?” you ask him. It’s bullshit to hear yourself. Your voice sounds wobbly. You sound like what you never were.

  “I gave you my teeth,” he says, but he doesn’t say he loves you. You are now plastic in a world where no one needs anything but metal.

  You don’t say you love him, either. You met during an apocalypse. What kind of fool are you?

  “What are your teeth for?” you ask.

  “To pay tolls,” he says and then he closes your fingers around them. You hide the teeth beneath your pillow. One morning there are coins in their place. Some old traditions, apparently, linger in the world. Or maybe you did that, to try to make him love you. You place the coins on his eyes as he sleeps, and he wakes up laughing.

  “Not that kind of toll,” he says.

  You aren’t laughing. You hide his teeth, in case they’re ever all that is left of him, and you have to find something to bury. You curse yourself. Even at the end of the world, you’re still trying to rig the system. You don’t want to talk about love, and so you talk about worms. You casually relate anecdotes of people who died, listing their agonies like ingredients in a complicated recipe, waiting for him to tell you he loves you, waiting for him to tell you he hopes the worms don’t get you.