“Night. Maybe around oh one hundred hours,” he said, like I was supposed to be impressed. “Anyway, so long. Maybe I’ll run into you somewhere, after the war is over.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“I’d like that. You seem like a real nice girl. Good luck to your family.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Aren’t you scared? Now that you might have to really fight?”
“I wish I’d stayed home in Oklahoma,” he said. “Now go on. Get your peanut butter and powdered milk.”
• • • •
As soon as I got home, I went to Dad.
They’d been planning to launch the rebellion tonight, attacking lone soldiers and small patrols, raiding the ration stations, disrupting supply lines, sabotaging the movie theaters that played the propaganda reels.
But now they had my intel, they could go so much bigger.
Dad slapped me on the back. “See? I knew it. You’re a fighter, just like us. I’m proud of you, hon.” Then he called the rebels around. “New plan,” he said, and they began arguing about whether they should set a trap with the grenades as the military caravan rolled out of town, or if they should use the rifles to pick soldiers off one by one from the side of the road, or if maybe all that would be better suited as a distraction to cause pandemonium while the rest stuck with the original plan. They weren’t exactly master military strategists; the only war they’d seen was on TV.
I felt a little guilty for selling out my soldier, but he should have taken me seriously. I knew what I’d seen.
The rebels, and Nicole, set out just before midnight. Before they left, Dad gave me one of their two-way radios, so I could listen in.
The house was dark, to conserve fuel. I sat alone in the basement with a single candle, cradling one radio in my hand and listening to the other, tuned to the news. Jane sat upstairs, watching the babies while they slept, and listening to her own shows, the way she always did now. The preachers testified into the empty stretches between rural towns and lost lengths of highway; they spoke of Jesus and the devil, brimstone and blood. No wonder the kids had nightmares.
It all happened at the same time, just a little past one.
The big attack came, but it wasn’t St. Louis or Chicago or Des Moines—it was Oklahoma City. I listened as they narrated the fireballs, the melting asphalt, the endless flame. It was worse, not being able to see it, just hearing the voices as they described the worst thing they’d ever seen.
The soldiers who’d been headed to St. Louis turned around and headed south, along with most of the other soldiers in town. When I sat very still I could feel the rumble and quake of their tanks headed for the highway.
Our rebels primed for battle met their force armed for war; instead of a few prowling soldiers and peacekeepers, it was half an army.
“Run away!” I screamed into the radio, hoping my dad would hear. “Go home! Hide! They’re leaving! We can still be free!”
Maybe they couldn’t hear me. Maybe they didn’t have time to answer because they were fighting for their lives. I heard them, though; their screams and gurgles and shouts, their gasping cries for reinforcements, their pleas to fall back, their rattling breaths, just before death.
And then I understood. I was alone now, we were all of us alone, me and Jane and Larry and Sylvie and Tim. And we were fighters, too, except we were smart. Not like Mom. Not like Dad. We weren’t traitors, or collaborators; we were just going to do whatever it took to survive.
I went upstairs to tell Jane what had happened. The kids were fast asleep, the radio preachers droning on, but Jane was nowhere to be found.
I came downstairs again just in time to see her slipping in the front door, wild-haired and wild-eyed, her face smudged with dirt and ash, grinning like a jack o’ lantern, smelling of lighter fluid and flame. “My gosh, Jane. Where have you been?”
“I was lighting Ruth’s house on fire,” she said. “Ruth is a witch. This new world will be built on the ashes of the old, and in the new world there is no room for satanic practices and pagan corruption. So witches must burn.”
I stared, shocked into silence.
“Come here,” she beckoned, and I joined her in the open doorway, where I could see the crackling tongues of fire rising high above the roof, engulfing the ancient sycamores in flames.
“There will be no more war but holy war,” she said.
Part of me wanted to throttle her. But I didn’t, because she was my sister, and I knew we would need each other in the end. She was my deranged, murderous, starry-eyed sister, my mother’s daughter, but blood runs thicker than water and we would hold onto our own until our fingers bled.
“Never mind about Ruth,” I said. “I was just listening to the radios. I think Dad’s gone.”
“Not gone. Dead. I’m not a child anymore, you know, Annette.”
“I know,” I said. “Now go pack up whatever food is left. I’m going to drain the fuel from the generator. Then we’ll wake up Larry and Timmy and Sylvie. We’ve got to get out of here if we want to survive.”
“What about the other babies?”
“Jesus will take care of them,” I said. “We’ve got to care for our own. Let them sleep.”
Jane understood, as I knew she would.
I stood there with my sister at the crossroads, ready to call on goddesses vengeful and bloody, selfish and cruel . . . whatever it took to live. It didn’t matter what name she went by; for us she was the goddess of now, and we would make her power our own.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Desirina Boskovich’s short fiction has been published in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Nightmare, Kaleidotrope, Triptych Tales, PodCastle, and more, along with anthologies such as The Way of the Wizard and Aliens: Recent Encounters. Her nonfiction pieces on music, literature, and culture have appeared in Lightspeed, Weird Fiction Review, Wonderbook, and The Steampunk Bible. She is also the editor of It Came From the North: An Anthology of Finnish Speculative Fiction (Cheeky Frawg, 2013), and together with Jeff VanderMeer, co-author of The Steampunk User's Manual, forthcoming in October of 2014. Find her online at desirinaboskovich.com.
IN THE MOUNTAIN
Hugh Howey
“Carry on,” one founder would say to another. To Tracy, it had become a mantra of sorts. Igor had started it, would wave his disfigured hand and dismiss the other founders back to their work. What began as mockery of him became a talisman of strength. Carry on. Do the job. One foot forward. A reminder to forge ahead even when the task was gruesome, even when it seemed pointless, even when billions were about to die.
But Tracy knew some things can only be carried so far before they must be set down. Set down or dropped. Dropped and broken.
The world was one of these things. The ten founders carried what they could to Colorado. An existing hole in the mountain there was burrowed even deeper. And when they could do no more, the founders stopped. And they counted the moments as the world plummeted toward the shattering.
The rock and debris pulled from the mountain formed a sequence of hills, a ridge now dusted with snow. The heavy lifters and buses and dump trucks had been abandoned by the mounds of rubble. There was a graveyard hush across the woods, a deep quiet of despair, of a work finished. The fresh snow made no sound as it fell from heavy, gray clouds.
Tracy stood with the rest of the founders just inside the gaping steel doors of the crypt they’d built. She watched the snow gather in yesterday’s muddy ruts. The crisscross patterns from the busloads of the invited would be invisible by nightfall. Humanity was not yet gone, the world not yet ruined, and already the universe was conspiring to remove all traces.
Anatoly fidgeted by her side. The heavyset physicist exhaled, and a cloud of frost billowed before his beard. On her other side, Igor reached into his heavy coat and withdrew a flash of silver. Tracy stole a glance. The gleaming watch was made more perfect in his mangled hand. Igor claimed he was a descendant and product of Chernobyl. Anatoly had told her it was a chemical burn.
Between Igor’s red and fused fingers, the hours ticked down.
“Ten minutes,” Igor said to the gathered. His voice was a grumble of distant thunder. Tracy watched as he formed an ugly fist and choked the life out of that watch. His pink knuckles turned the color of the snow.
Tracy turned her attention to the woods and strained one last time to hear the sound of an engine’s whine—the growl of a rental car laboring up that mountain road. She waited for the crunch-crunch of hurrying boots. She scanned for the man who would appear between those gray aspens with their peeled-skin bark. But the movies had lied to her, had conditioned her to expect last-minute heroics: a man running, a weary and happy smile, snow flying in a welcome embrace, warm lips pressed to cold ones, both trembling.
“He’s not coming,” Tracy whispered to herself. Here was a small leak of honesty from some deep and forgotten place.
Igor heard her and checked his watch again. “Five minutes,” he said quietly.
And only then, with five minutes left before they needed to get inside, before they needed to shut the doors for good, did it become absolutely certain that he wasn’t coming. John had gone to Atlanta with the others, had followed orders like a good soldier, and all that she’d worked to create in Colorado—the fantasy of surviving with him by her side—had been a great delusion. Those great crypt doors would close on her and trap her in solitude. And Tracy felt in that moment that she shouldn’t have built this place, that she wouldn’t have wasted her time if only she’d known.
“We should get inside,” Igor said. He closed the lid on that small watch of his—a click like a cocked gun—and then it disappeared into his heavy coat.
There was a sob among them. A sniff. Patrice suddenly broke from the rest of the founders and ran through the great doors, her boots clomping on concrete, and Tracy thought for a moment that Patrice would keep on running, that she’d disappear into the aspens, but she stopped just beyond the concrete deck, stooped and gathered a handful of fresh snow, and ran back inside, eating some of it from her palms.
Tracy thought of grabbing something as well. A twig. A piece of that bark. A single falling snowflake on her tongue. She scanned the woods for some sight of John as Anatoly guided her inside, deep enough that the founders by the doors could shove the behemoths closed. Four feet thick, solid steel, streaked with rust where the weather had wetted them, they made a hideous screech as they were moved. A cry like a mother wolf out in the gray woods calling for her pups.
The white world slimmed as the doors came together. The view became a column, and then a gap, and then a sliver. There was a heavy and mortal thump as the doors met, steel pressing on steel, and then a darkness bloomed that had to be blinked against to get eyes working again.
Though the doors were now closed, Tracy thought she could still hear the sound of the wolf crying—and realized it was one of the founders making that mournful noise. Tears welled up in her eyes, brought there by a partner’s lament. And Tracy remembered being young once and sobbing like that. She remembered the first time a man had broken her heart. It had felt like the end of the entire fucking world.
This day was something like that.
• • • •
The mountain was full of the confused. Nearly five thousand people asking questions. Their bags were not yet unpacked; their backs were still sore from the rutted, bumpy ride in the buses. And now the myriad excuses for bringing them there—the retreats, reunions, vacations, emergencies—evaporated as conflicting accounts collided.
With the doors closed, the founders set out to explain. First to family. Later, to all of the invited. Tracy had been given an equal allotment of invitations, and she had used most of them on practical people. Soldiers. Tools of retribution. When the world was clean, all she wanted was to see a bullet in the people who had done this.
Of friends, she had none. Most of her adult life had been spent in Washington or overseas. There was a doorman in Geneva who had always been kind to her. There was the guy who did her taxes. Which was to admit that there was no one. Just her meager family: her father, her sister, and her sister’s husband. Three people in all the world. Maybe that was why John’s decision hurt so much. He was almost all she had. All she’d thought she had.
At least it meant a small audience as she dispensed the horrid truth, the nightmare she’d held inside for more than a year. Tracy hesitated outside the door to her sister’s small room. She raised her fist and prepared to knock. Truth waited for her on the other side, and she wasn’t sure she was ready.
• • • •
Her father sat on the bed and wrung his hands while Tracy spoke. Her sister April sat next to him, a look of slack confusion on her face. Remy, April’s husband, had refused to sit. He stood by his wife, a hand on her shoulder, something between anger and horror in his eyes.
They were all dressed for the camping trip they’d been promised—a week of backpacking, of living in the woods. Their gear sat by the foot of the bed, would never be used. The bags and the garb were reminders of Tracy’s lies. She listened as the words spilled from her mouth. She listened to herself say what she had rehearsed a hundred times: how the tiny machines used in hospitals to attack cancer—those invisible healers, the same ones that would’ve saved Mom if they’d been available in time—how those same machines were as capable of killing as they were of healing.
She told her family how those machines were in everyone’s blood, in every human being’s on Earth. And curing everyone might be possible, but it would only be temporary. Once people knew that it could be done, it was only a matter of time. A switch had been invented that could wipe out every man and woman alive. Any hacker in his basement could flip that switch—which meant someone would.
Tracy got through that part without the wailing or hysterics she’d expected, without the questions and confusion from her dad, without anyone pushing past her and banging on the door, screaming to be let out. No one asked her if she belonged to a cult or if she was on drugs or suggested she needed to take a break from whatever work she did in Washington, that she needed to see a professional.
“It was only a matter of time before someone did it,” Tracy said again. “And so our government acted before someone else could. So they could control the aftermath.”
Remy started to say something, but Tracy continued before he could: “We aren’t a part of the group who did this,” she said. She looked to her father. “We didn’t do this. But we found out about it, and we realized we couldn’t stop it. We realized . . . that maybe they were right. That it needed to be done. And so we did the next best thing. We created this place. We invited ourselves along. And those that we could. We’ll be okay here. You all were inoculated on the way. You probably felt your ears popping on the bus ride up. Now we’ll spend six months here, maybe a year—”
“Six months,” Remy said.
“This can’t be real.” Her sister shook her head.
“It’s real,” Tracy told April. “I’m sorry. I never wanted to keep this from any of—”
“I don’t believe it,” Remy said. He glanced around the room as if seeing it for the first time. April’s husband was an accountant, was used to columns of numbers in black and white. He was also a survivalist, was used to sorting out the truth on his own. He didn’t learn simply by being told. Igor had warned that it would take some people weeks before they believed.
“We are positive,” Tracy said. This was a lie; she had her own doubts. She wouldn’t be completely sure until the countdown clock hit zero. But there was no use infecting others with her slender hopes. “I realize this is hard to hear. It’s hard even for me to grasp. But the war we were bracing for isn’t going to come with clouds of fire and armies marching. It’s going to be swifter and far worse than that.”
“Did you do this?” her father asked, voice shaking with age. Even with his encroaching, occasional senility, he knew that Tracy worked for bad agencies full of bad people. There were classified
things she had confided to him years ago that he had been willing to shoulder for her. They would likely be the very last things his dementia claimed, little islands of disappointment left in a dark and stormy sea.
“No, Dad, I didn’t do this. But I am the reason we have this place, a nice place to be together and wait it out.”
She flashed back to that night in Milan, to the first time she’d laid eyes on the book with the word Order embossed on its cover. It was the same night she made John forget about his wife for a brief moment, the night when all those years of flirtations came to fruition: the bottle of wine, the dancing, that dress—the one she’d gotten in trouble for expensing to her company card. And in his room, after they made love, and hungering for more danger, she had gone to the dresser where she knew his gun would be tucked away, and she’d found that book instead.
If John had stayed in bed, she wouldn’t have thought anything more of it. The book was full of the dry text that only lawyers who had become politicians could craft. Emergency procedures. An ops manual of some sort. But the way John had lurched out of bed, it was as if Tracy had let his wife into the room. She remembered the way his hands trembled against her as he asked her to put it away, to come back to bed, like she’d grabbed something far more dangerous than a gun, something cocked and loaded with something much worse than bullets.
After he’d gone to sleep, Tracy had sat on the edge of the bathtub, the book open on the toilet lid, and had turned every page with her phone set to record. Even as she scanned, she saw enough to be afraid.
Enough to know.
“I’m sorry,” she told her father, unable to stomach the disappointment on his face.
“When—?” April asked.
Tracy turned to her sister, the schoolteacher, who knew only that Tracy worked for the government, who had no idea about all the classified blood on her hands. April was four years older, would always be older than Tracy in all the ways that didn’t matter and in none of the ways that did.
The End Is Now Page 35