Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF

by Mike Ashley

  "You want to be Minister of Health, Rosa?" he said.

  "Boys," she said. "Playing games. How about this. I'll help out however I can, provided you never ask me to call you Prime Minister and you never call me the Minister of Health?"

  "It's a deal," he said.

  Van refilled their glasses, upending the wine bottle to get the last few drops out.

  They raised their glasses. "To the world," Felix said. "To humanity." He thought hard. "To rebuilding."

  "To anything," Van said.

  "To anything," Felix said. "To everything."

  "To everything," Rosa said.

  They drank. He wanted to go see the house - see Kelly and 2.0, though his stomach churned at the thought of what he might find there. But the next day, they started to rebuild. And months later, they started over again, when disagreements drove apart the fragile little group they'd pulled together. And a year after that, they started over again. And five years later, they started again.

  It was nearly six months, then, before he went home. Van helped him along, riding cover behind him on the bicycles they used to get around town. The further north they rode, the stronger the smell of burnt wood became. There were lots of burnt-out houses. Sometimes marauders burnt the houses they'd looted, but more often it was just nature, the kinds of fires you got in forests and on mountains. There were six choking, burnt blocks where every house was burnt before they reached home.

  But Felix's old housing development was still standing, an oasis of eerily pristine buildings that looked like maybe their somewhat neglectful owners had merely stepped out to buy some paint and fresh lawnmower blades to bring their old homes back up to their neat, groomed selves.

  That was worse, somehow. He got off the bike at the entry of the subdivision and they walked the bikes together in silence, listening to the sough of the wind in the trees. Winter was coming late that year, but it was coming, and as the sweat dried in the wind, Felix started to shiver.

  He didn't have his keys anymore. They were at the data-center, months and worlds away. He tried the door-handle, but it didn't turn. He applied his shoulder to the door and it ripped away from its wet, rotted jamb in with a loud, splintering sound. The house was rotting from the inside.

  The door splashed when it landed. The house was full of stagnant water, four inches of stinking pond-scummed water in the living room. He splashed carefully through it, feeling the floor-boards sag spongily beneath each step.

  Up the stairs, his nose full of that terrible green mildewy stench. Into the bedroom, the furniture familiar as a childhood friend.

  Kelly was in the bed with 2.0. The way they both lay, it was clear they hadn't gone easy - they were twisted double, Kelly curled around 2.0. Their skin was bloated, making them almost unrecognizable. The smell - God, the smell.

  Felix's head spun. He thought he would fall over and clutched at the dresser. An emotion he couldn't name -rage, anger, sorrow? - made him breathe hard, gulp for air like he was drowning.

  And then it was over. The world was over. Kelly and 2.0 - over. And he had a job to do. He folded the blanket over them - Van helped, solemnly. They went into the front yard and took turns digging, using the shovel from the garage that Kelly had used for gardening. They had lots of experience digging graves by then. Lots of experience handling the dead. They dug, and wary dogs watched them from the tall grass on the neighboring lawns, but they were also good at chasing off dogs with well-thrown stones.

  When the grave was dug, they laid Felix's wife and son to rest in it. Felix quested after words to say over the mound, but none came. He'd dug so many graves for so many men's wives and so many women's husbands and so many children - the words were long gone.

  Felix dug ditches and salvaged cans and buried the dead. He planted and harvested. He fixed some cars and learned to make biodiesel. Finally he fetched up in a data-center for a little government - little governments came and went, but this one was smart enough to want to keep records and needed someone to keep everything running, and Van went with him.

  They spent a lot of time in chat rooms and sometimes they happened upon old friends from the strange time they'd spent running the Distributed Republic of Cyberspace, geeks who insisted on calling him PM, though no one in the real world ever called him that anymore.

  It wasn't a good life, most of the time. Felix's wounds never healed, and neither did most other people's. There were lingering sicknesses and sudden ones. Tragedy on tragedy.

  But Felix liked his data-center. There in the humming of the racks, he never felt like it was the first days of a better nation, but he never felt like it was the last days of one, either.

  > go to bed, felix

  > soon, kong, soon - almost got this backup running

  > youre a junkie, dude.

  > look whos talking He reloaded the Google homepage. Queen Kong had had it online. The Os in Google changed all the time, whenever she got the urge. Today they were little cartoon globes, one smiling the other frowning.

  He looked at it for a long time and dropped back into a terminal to check his backup. It was running clean, for a change. The little government's records were safe.

  > ok night night

  > take care Van waved at him as he creaked to the door, stretching out his back with a long series of pops.

  "Sleep well, boss," he said.

  "Don't stick around here all night again," Felix said. "You need your sleep, too."

  "You're too good to us grunts," Van said, and went back to typing.

  Felix went to the door and walked out into the night. Behind him, the biodiesel generator hummed and made its acrid fumes. The harvest moon was up, which he loved. Tomorrow, he'd go back and fix another computer and fight off entropy again. And why not?

  It was what he did. He was a sysadmin.

  THE RAIN AT THE END OF THE WORLD

  Dale Bailey

  Dale Bailey is a professor of English at Lenoir-Rhyne College, North Carolina. His novel The Fallen (2002) was a nominee for the International Horror Guild Award, an award he went on to win with his 2002 short story "Death and Suffrage". His short fiction has been collected in The Resurrection Man's Legacy (2003). He is also the author of a study of contemporary horror fiction, American Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in American Popular Fiction (1999).

  This story and the next one form something of a related sequence looking at how individuals may react to a global flood.

  * * *

  THEY DROVE NORTH, into ever-falling rain. Rain slanted out of the evening sky and spattered against the windshield where the humming wipers slapped it away. Rain streamed from the highway to carve twisted runnels in the gravelled berm. Raindrops beaded up along the windows and rolled swiftly away as the slipstream caught them up. All about them, only the rain, and to fill the voiceless silence, the sounds of tires against wet pavement and rain drumming with insistent fingers all about the car. And in these sounds, Melissa heard another sound, a child's voice, repeating a scrap of some old nursery rhyme: rain, rain go away, come again some other day.

  For forty-nine days, nothing but rain, everywhere, all across the United States, in Canada, in Mexico, in Brazil, in England and France and Germany, in Somalia and South Africa, in the People's Republic of China. It was raining all around the world. Rivers of water flowed out of the sky, tides rose and streams swelled, crops rotted like flesh in the fields.

  Weathermen were apologetic. "Rain," they said during the five-day forecast. "Just rain." Statesmen expressed alarm, scientists confusion. Religious fanatics built arks. And Melissa - who once, in a year she could barely remember, had fantasized making love in the rain - Melissa saw her life swept away in the rain. They drove north, to the mountain cabin -three rooms for her and Stuart, her husband. And all about them the unceasing rain.

  Melissa sighed and studied the book she had tried to read as they drove east out of Knoxville that afternoon. A failed effort, that, defeated by the swaying car. She glanced at Stuart
and almost spoke, but what could she say? The silence was a wall between them; they'd lost the rhythm of conversation. They hadn't exchanged a word since they had changed highways at Wytheville, when Stuart snapped at her for smoking.

  Staring at him now, Melissa thought he was changing, a subtle transformation that had begun - when? days ago? weeks? who could say? - some time during the endless period after the clouds rolled in and rain began to descend like doom from the heavy sky. In the dash lights, his once-ruddy features were ghastly and pale, like the features of a corpse. Pasty flesh stretched taut across the angular planes of his skull; his mouth compressed into a white line. Shadow rippled across his tense features, across his hairline, retreating from a sharp widow's peak though he was only thirty-five.

  "Do you have to stare at me?" he said. "Why don't you read your book?"

  "It's getting dark."

  "Turn on the light then."

  "I don't want to read. It was making me sick."

  Stuart shrugged and hunched closer over the wheel.

  Melissa looked away.

  At first, it had been refreshing, the rain, lancing out of the afternoon sky as she drove home from her art history class. She parked the car and stood in the yard, staring up at the gray sky, at lightning incandescent in swollen cloud bellies. Rain poured down, spattering her cheeks and eyelids, running fresh into her open mouth, plastering her garments close against her flesh.

  By the thirteenth day - she had gone back by then and added them up, the endless days of unrelenting rain - the haunted look began to show in Stuart's eyes. His voice grew harsh and strained as discordant music, as it did when she tested his patience with minutiae. That was his word for it: minutiae, pronounced in that gently mocking way he had perfected in the two years since the baby. Not mean, for Stuart was anything but mean; just teasing. "Just teasing," he always said, and then his lips would shape that word again: minutiae, meaning all the silly trivia that were her life - her gardening, her reading, her occasional class.

  By this time the pressure had begun to tell on them all. You could see it in the faces of the newscasters on CNN, in the haunted vacancies behind the weary eyes of the scientists on the Sunday talk shows - vacancies of ignorance and despair. How could they account for this rain that fell simultaneously over every square inch of the planet? How could anyone? By this time - the thirteenth day - you could detect the frayed edges of hysteria and fear. Evangelists intoned portentously that the Rapture was at hand. Certain government experiments had gone awry, a neighbor, who had a friend whose brother-in-law worked at Oak Ridge national labs, confided ominously; flying saucers had been sighted over an airbase in Arizona.

  On the twenty-seventh day - a Saturday, and by this time everyone was keeping count - Stuart walked about the house with the stiff-kneed gait of an automaton, jerkily pacing from window to window, shading his eyes as he peered out into the gloom and falling rain.

  "Why don't you call Jim?" Melissa had said. "See if he wants to do something. Get out of here before you go crazy." Or drive me crazy, she thought, but didn't say it. She was reading Harper's and smoking a Marlboro Light - a habit she had picked up two years ago, after the miscarriage. She had always planned to quit, but she somehow never did. It was too easy to smoke at home alone. Stuart had discouraged her from going back to teaching. Take some time for yourself, he had said. And why not? They didn't need the money now that Stuart had made partner. And it would have been too hard to be around kids.

  "I don't want to call Jim," Stuart had said. He peered out into the rain. "I wish you'd quit smoking. It stinks up the whole house."

  "I know," she said. And she had tried. But as soon as she quit, she started putting on weight, and Stuart didn't like that either, so what was she to do? Smoke.

  Now, driving through rain across the ridges separating Virginia and West Virginia, she fumbled in her purse for a cigarette. The flame of the lighter threw Stuart's angular face into relief, highlighting a ghostly network of lines and shadows that brooded in the hollows around his eyes and beneath his cheeks. For a moment, before the flame blinked out and darkness rushed back into the car, she knew what he would look like when he was old. But he was handsome still, she thought, distinguished even, with the first hint of gray in his dark hair.

  Still handsome after twelve years, still the same Stuart. He had noticed her at a time when few men did, had made her feel beautiful and alive, as if she shared his color and energy, his arrogant charm. And just then, leaning over beside her in freshman composition, he had been boyishly vulnerable. "Look," he'd said, "I'm not very good at this kind of stuff. Do you think you can help me?"

  That was a long time ago, but the old Stuart was still there; sometimes she could see vulnerability peeking through the cool and distant resolve he had woven about himself after the baby. She had talked about adoption for a while and she had seen it then - the ghost of that insecurity in the hard curve of his jaw, in the brazen tone of his voice. As if the miscarriage had been his fault.

  She cracked her window and blew smoke into the downpour. Stuart coughed theatrically.

  "Leave it alone, Stuart," she said.

  Stuart grimaced. He flipped on the radio and searched for a station with one hand. Most of the stations had gone off the air by now, same as the television networks. Why, no one could be certain.

  Hysteria, Melissa suspected. The government had shut them down to prevent hysteria. In the last week or two news reports had become increasingly disturbing, often bizarre: floods of epic proportions in the Mississippi and Ohio River valleys and just about everywhere else, roving gangs in the sodden streets, doom cults who practiced human sacrifice to appease angry weather gods, videotapes of the giant toadstool forest that had erupted over miles and miles of empty western territory. In many places, money was no longer good. People had taken to bartering for canned food, gasoline, cigarettes.

  By day thirty-six, Stuart had himself begun to stock up on gasoline and the non-perishable food crammed into the back of the Jeep. He had wanted to buy a gun, but Melissa had drawn the line there; the world might retreat into savagery, but she would have no part of it. At night, the two of them sat without speaking in the living room while the rain beat against the roof. They watched the news on television, and then - on the forty-second day of rain, when the airwaves rang with commentary about surpassing Noah - the cable went dead. Every channel blank, empty, gray. The cable company didn't answer; radio news reported that television had gone out simultaneously across the country; and then, one by one over the next few days, the radio stations themselves started to go. Without warning or explanation they simply disappeared, static on the empty dial.

  Stuart refused to give up; every hour he turned on the radio and spun through the frequencies. Static, more static, an occasional lunatic babbling (but who was a lunatic now, Melissa wondered, now that the whole world had gone insane?), more static. But the static had a message, too:

  Roads are washing away, the static said, bridges are being obliterated. The world as we know it is being re-made.

  Now, driving, Stuart spun through the channels again, FM and then AM. Static and static and then a voice: calm, rational, a woman's cultured voice in an echoing studio that sounded far, far away.

  They paused, listening:

  "It's over," the woman was saying.

  And the interviewer, a man, his voice flat: "What's over?What do you mean?"

  "The entire world, the civilization that men have built over the last 2,000 years, since Homer and the Greeks, since earlier — "

  "For Christ's sake," Stuart said, stabbing at the radio; Melissa reached out to stop him, thinking that anything, even lunacy, was better than this silence that had grown up between them in the last years and which seemed now, in the silent car, more oppressive than it ever had.

  "Please," she said, and sighing,

  Stuart relented.

  " —apocalypse," the man was saying. "The world is to be utterly destroyed, is that what you're
saying?"

  "Not at all. Not destroyed. Recreated, refashioned, renewed -whatever."

  "Like the Noah story? God is displeased with what we've made of ourselves."

  "Not with what we've made," the woman said. "With what you've made."

  A lengthy pause followed, so lengthy that Melissa for a moment thought they had lost the station, and then the man spoke again. She realized that he had been trying to puzzle out the woman's odd distinction, and having failed, had chosen to ignore it. He said: "What you're saying, though, is that God is out there. And He is angry."

  "No, no," the woman said. " She is."

  "Christ," Stuart said, and this time he did punch the search button. The radio cycled through a station or two of static and hit on yet another active channel. The strains of Credence Clearwater Revival filled the car -"Who'll Stop the Rain?", and that joke had been old three weeks ago. He shut off the radio.

  All along, he had been this way, refusing to acknowledge the reality of their situation. All along, he had continued to work, shuffling files and depositions though the courts had all but ground to a halt. It was as if he believed he could make the world over as it had been, simply by ignoring the rain. But by yesterday - day forty-eight - the pressure had truly begun to tell on him. Melissa could see it in his panicked eyes.

  That day, in the silent house with Stuart gone to work, Melissa stood by the window and looked out across the yard at toadstools, like bowing acolytes to the rain. Pasty fungoid stalks, cold and rubbery as dead flesh, had everywhere nosed their way out of the earth and spread their caps beneath the poisoned sky.

  Melissa went about the house on soft feet; she shut curtains in the living room, closed blinds in the office, lowered shades in the bedroom. All about the house she went, shuttering and lowering and closing, walling away the rain.

  When Stuart came home that afternoon, his hair was plastered flat against his skull and his eyes glowered from dark hollows.