Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF

by Mike Ashley

  "Oh, damn," the doting granddaughter exclaims.

  But the old woman falls like an expert, crumbling without complaint or noticeable damage. The man with the bad back pulls himself off his bench, getting in our way. Everybody is tugging on the limp arms and up from under the shoulders, and May says, "Try to stand, Grandma." She says it several times, her voice not angry but insistent. Then she turns, suddenly shouting into the vehicle's cab. Somebody else, someone I hadn't noticed, sits behind the steering wheel, watching the drama with utter indifference.

  "Get off your ass," the girl tells him.

  The man is barely adult, maybe a couple years younger than her, and judging by appearances he is a close relative to the others. But where grandma has bulk, the boy has muscle. If I have ever seen a bigger, stronger fellow in my life, I can't remember it. He fills the huge leather chair, enormous hands clinging to the armrests. And he has no intention whatsoever of moving.

  Now the girl's father says, "Help us."

  But the strong man shuts his mouth in a defiant fashion, delivering his answer without making noise.

  "Goddamn it, son. We need your help here!"

  My dislike for the boy is immediate and scorching. But anger has its functions, and I'm not exactly weak. As if to show the idiot what courage and determination look like, I grab grandma under both arms and grunt, lifting with my legs, dragging her limp body up to where the others can help, pulling her skyward until those puffy legs remember that they're supposed to walk.

  "This way, grandma," the girl coaxes.

  "Who are you?"

  "Your granddaughter. I'm May."

  "Where are we, May?"

  We've made it to the steps. That's where we are. I've taken over for everyone but the girl. I'm holding the old woman under her damp cool armpits, keeping a couple steps above her as I steer her out into the open air.

  May keeps saying, "This is home, grandma. You're at home."

  Saintly people talk this way to the senile. Home is a magical place of rest and security, and I assume that the girl is misleading the old woman with a small, sweetly intended lie.

  The first slipper hits the ground, and the old woman nearly collapses again. But I jerk hard, holding her steady until the second foot finds its way. Then with an exhausted smile, May says to me, "Thank you. You've been such a help."

  I'm gasping and my back burns, but I feel proud of myself just the same.

  "Winston's such a dick," she confides.

  "Your brother?" I guess.

  "So they tell me." She says that, and like you do with any new audience, she feels free to laugh hard at must be a very old family joke.

  "I'm Noah," I tell her.

  May doesn't just smile. She repeats my name, making it sound better than it normally does, and she offers a little hand that feels warm and comfortable, shaking my hand and then letting her fingers linger inside my grip.

  Inspired by sunshine or the fresh air, grandma stands without aid. The good residents of Salvation come close and look at her and study the machine. The old woman looks at their faces, and then she turns and stares at the RV with what might be a flickering curiosity. "What is this thing?" her eyes ask.

  I'm not holding hands with May anymore but we're standing close. Her grandmother does one slow turn, majestic in its own way. Then her gaze fixes on one of the closest homes - a three-story mansion built to eat sunlight and wind while wasting nothing - and with a voice as clear and certain as any can be, she asks, "Where is this? Where am I?"

  I nearly laugh at her harmless confusion.

  And May shows me a big wink while calling out, "This is Salvation, Grandma. Just like you described it. And doesn't it look wonderful... ?"

  My father was gone. He was never officially shunned and certainly not banished, and the other adults began treating me with an uncommon amount of consideration. Warm voices asked about my state of mind. People I barely knew offered words of encouragement, friendly pats delivered to my shoulders and back. I was the man of the family now, and what a good young man I was. Yet those same voices began to whisper. Our community was better off without that very difficult soul. Nobody missed my father. Nobody wanted his return. The man's peculiar ideas and attitudes were problems, yet his enemies preferred to laugh at his lousy carpentry and his inability to grow tomato plants. Cooperation and competence were what the world demanded, and how would a man with so few skills manage to survive?

  One day, a teacher warned my class that the easy pickings were running out. Good water was harder to find, and bad water was rusting away the last of the canned goods. Then she looked at me. With a glance, she told me that she was thinking about my father. Then with a winner's grin, she promised everybody that soon, very soon, the last of the wicked people would face God's justice.

  Salvation was built without an official school. Its original children were taught at home using the Internet and smart software. My school was the local organic grocer, stripped of its refrigerators and freezers, the empty space divided into simple classrooms. My teachers were women with little experience and uneven talents, but who nonetheless volunteered to stand in front of a mob of kids, giving us an opportunity to do something besides tending crops or running errands.

  One lady tried hard to teach history. Our random textbooks covered a few periods in suffocating detail, while most of the past was as empty and unknown as the far ends of the universe. She liked to show movies even older than her. Using aging DVD players and televisions, she educated me about those black-and-silver days when everybody smoked and everybody could sing and dance. But more useful were her memories of life as it stood in the recent past. She was a natural talker blessed with an audience just old enough to remember bits and pieces about the world before, and she spent entire days rambling on about her lost life, how she and her husband had four cars between them and a big beautiful house that they didn't have to share. The woman had little family and no children. She and her husband had survived the worst, but he died of a heart attack days after their arrival here. Few could talk as easily about the end of the world. Just mentioning the topic made most of the adults quiet and strange. But our teacher hadn't lost as much as the others, and blessed with a tenacious optimism, she could claim total confidence in God's mercy and the existence of heaven.

  More than anything else, we wanted to know about the plague and its aftermath. She listened to our questions and warned that she was no medical expert, but in the next moment she carefully defined the plague's miseries: blisters and bleeding lungs, the high fevers and painful, suffocating deaths. China was halfway around the world but new diseases often came from there. Twee in two years, the Chinese government barely contained the viral monster. And that's why the world was terrified: what if the bug someday climbed onboard an airplane or bird, and what if it was carried across the helpless world?

  This was grim odd rich fun, sitting in that quiet room, learning about horrors that would never hurt us. One day, our teacher arrived with an unexpected treasure. The original residents in Salvation had left behind furniture and clothes, plus fancy machines like sky-watching dishes and digital recording equipment. Also abandoned was a nondescript box tucked into a tornado shelter in the basement of one house. The box was full of hundreds and maybe thousands of hours of news reports. Somebody had worked hard to record the end of civilization. Each one of those bright silvery discs was carefully marked with dates and the network of origin. Not all of the disks worked, and most were surprisingly boring. But our teacher had made it her mission to hunt for the most interesting survivors.

  The old player began to run. The room was full of patient, enthralled children. We watched the Chinese plague flare up twice and then die back again. Nearly ten per cent of the stricken had died, and maybe half of the rest were left with scarred faces and shrunken lungs. If that virus got loose, as many as ten million people would die, and a hundred million more would be left as invalids. That's why the hard push for a vaccine. And that's why there was
celebration when a pharmaceutical company mass-produced an injection that would protect everybody who rolled up his sleeve, offering a willing arm.

  Some nations did better than others. To me, Canada was that big green splotch at the top of a favorite old map. But it was also country with money and an efficient health care system, and the Canadians achieved a nearly perfect inoculation rate. Finland and Denmark and Costa Rica were equally successful. Japan and much of Europe exceeded ninety-seven per cent compliance. But the United States was falling behind in this critical race. Too many of us were poor or isolated. Empty rumors and misguided beliefs were huge problems. In the end, emergency laws and the National Guard managed to bring up the totals. Every doctor and nurse, teacher and law enforcement officer was inoculated. Every soldier and prisoner and hospital patient was inoculated. But there were always stubborn people who refused, and in the end we never even achieved ninety-five per cent saturation.

  I remember being five and sitting in my bedroom, listening to my father and mother arguing. Mom didn't want to obey Caesar's Law. She didn't want the government to force her to do anything. Dad didn't want to hear about prayer and God's decency staving off illness. But mom kept insisting, batting aside dad's logic until he finally found his own way out the trap: if everybody else was inoculated, then we would be safe too.

  As a family, we visited a fat little man who only seemed to be a doctor. The man took our money and filled out the proper forms, and in the eyes of the state, we were inoculated. Then we went home, and dad came into my room, sitting on my bed while explaining that this was what married people did. They compromised. And despite what he knew to be best, we could sleep easy because so many of the people around us had done the smart right noble thing.

  China, where the murderous plague was born, managed to do better than the United States. India did less well, and parts of Latin America fell behind. But even those poor places managed to beat that ninety per cent mark. The meanest, saddest corners of the world were the most exposed. Africa and the wild nations in Asia achieved one-third compliance, if that. But charities and volunteer doctors didn't stop fighting. Brave defenders of the public good, they tirelessly pushed needles into little brown arms, even as word began to find its way to them that the first people who had received the vaccine - the subjects in the hurry-up trials - were beginning to shake, growing weaker by the day and profoundly confused.

  According to the dates displayed on the recordings, the world's fate was decided on my sixth birthday. An old man stood before the cameras, the seal of his doomed nation behind him. With a worn sorry voice, he admitted that mistakes had been made. Who was responsible wasn't known and might never be, but the rush to market was a blunder, and a horrific tragedy had been unleashed, and every citizen who had tried to do something good was now infected.

  That old broadcast triggered memories. Suddenly I was six again, sitting between my parents, watching the president talk. I hadn't understood most of the man's words or grasped even the easiest part of what he was saying. But mom was praying hard even when she was crying, and dad was weeping like I'd never seen before, and I sat there with my hands in my lap, staring at the birthday gifts wrapped in all that bright colored paper.

  "When will this be done?" I asked impatiently. "When can I open up my presents?"

  A boy's voice calls out to the visitors. Abrasive and impatient, he asks, "So where'd you people come from?"

  Then Old Ferris adds, "The south, if I'm not mistaking that accent."

  Grandma's eyes jump from one face to the next. People surge toward her, some running and everybody talking, and the old woman begins to panic. She gives a little gasp, spinning until she finds her granddaughter standing beside me.

  "I'm here," says May.

  Grandma's mouth opens, waiting for a name to be recalled.

  Once again, the girl introduces herself, taking hold of a puffy hand before telling the rest of us, "Florida."

  To the little ones, the word sounds made-up. Senseless.

  Old Ferris nods. "Thought so."

  Half-remembered maps pop into my head. On the fringe of the continent, an orange leg sticks out into the colorless ocean.

  "How is our Sunshine State?" Ferris inquires.

  "Wet," a new voice declares.

  Gazes shift. Even May turns, as surprised as anyone to see her mountainous brother filling up the RVs door.

  Something here is worth laughing about. "Florida's half-drowned," Winston warns, his round face full of delight and big teeth. "Live there, and you're lucky to be one step ahead of the ocean."

  "That's not true," his father insists. "Maybe the Atlantic's a few feet deeper, but there's plenty of land left."

  Kids ask about Florida, but most of their parents are younger than me and even more ignorant. Arms lift, pointing toward random spots on the southern horizon. Someone says mentions alligators - another word that means almost nothing to this gathering. Then Butcher Jack finally asks the most important question: "But now what brings you good folks all the way up here?"

  "My grandmother," the girl admits, tugging on one of the big arms. "She wanted to see her old home again."

  The doughy face hears those words, considers them for a moment, and gives a slight nod of agreement.

  "She's from where?" Jack asks, as if he doesn't trust his ears.

  "From Salvation," says May.

  "And I am too," the father announces. "In fact, when I was a boy, mom and I lived right over there."

  He points at the mayor's house. Some of us look, but most people can't pull their eyes off these unexpected, astonishing strangers.

  Once again, I move close to May.

  She smiles at me, nothing about this girl shy. "It's a cold day," she observes.

  "The worst winter in forty," Jack jumps in.

  I ask, "Have you ever seen frost before?"

  She laughs. "Not until two weeks ago."

  "When did you leave home?" I want to know.

  "Last summer," her father reports.

  "Florida is cooler than usual," says May. "We've got a shortwave, and sometimes we'll talk to friends. There have been some nights when the thermometer dives below sixty."

  "Maybe this is a sign," says Jack, twinkling eyes full of hope. "Maybe our climate's turning cool again."

  Winston lets out a loud, disagreeable laugh. "That's not it at all," he says. "A pair of volcanoes blew up last year. In Indonesia and Colombia. Right now, two mountains' worth of dust are hanging up in the stratosphere, and they'll keep chilling things down for the next year or two."

  May and her father exchange quick tense looks.

  "All that water," I say to May. "I've always wanted to see the ocean."

  But Winston doesn't like ignorance, and he won't let anyone keep his little dreams. "Believe me, you don't want to see the Atlantic. That water is hot and acidic and half-dead. The reefs are gone, and the shellfish. But not the jellies, no. Those bastards are doing great."

  I'm not sure what a jelly is.

  "The Gulf Stream still runs," he continues. "Maybe not as hard as it should. But at least the oceans haven't suffocated yet."

  May frowns, but she won't take her eyes off me. "The sea is beautiful," she insists. "And there are a lot of fish and some whales even."

  "Yeah, some," says her brother.

  "Summer," I repeat. "A long time on the road."

  "And we didn't know if we would make it," she says cheerfully. "Dad and his friends built this truck. We've got great tires and a special suspension and the motor burns almost anything. But you can't trust bridges anymore. And even if you find people, sometimes there isn't any fuel."

  "People give up their alcohol?" Ferris asks skeptically.

  To nobody in particular, she says, "We barter for it. Trade news and goods from other places. When we started out, we had fruit and dried fish strapped on top, and every cubbyhole was filled with some little treasure."

  And they stole their fuel too. I don't see them as th
ieves, but there is no way to come this far and not take what charity won't surrender.

  May's father stands on the other side of the old woman. He has to bend fonvard to look around her, asking me, "Would it be all right? Mom and I would love to see our old house."

  Crossing half of the continent to tour one building. That might be the most unlikely story that I've ever heard. Yet the mayor leaps to the cause. "It's my house, and please. You'd be my welcomed guests, yes."

  Except grandma isn't in the mood. She watches her arm lift when her son pulls at it. Yanking her hand free, she snaps, "I don't want to be here. I want to lie down."

  Her son doesn't seem like the patient kind. "Mom," he says with a complaining tone. "Don't be difficult please."

  But the woman starts to drop again, seemingly melting into the dull red bricks underfoot.

  May jumps right in. "There's a good bed in that house, grandma."

  "What?" she asks.

  "A fine place to sleep, and warm too."

  Perhaps the woman reconsiders her decision. More likely, she has already forgotten her planned collapse.

  "Come on, grandma. Show me which room was yours."

  And just like that, we start to walk. May remains close to the slow, stately woman, and I'm taking sluggish little steps to keep my place beside her. The present mayor is the gray-haired son of the second mayor - my mother's old ally. He normally can't look at me without showing his contempt. But on this exceptional occasion he manages to smile in my direction, showing the world his friendliness. "We have the biggest distillery in two hundred miles," he boasts. "And you're certainly welcome to take all the fuel you can carry."

  May looks at me and says, "Thank you." As if I am the gracious one.

  I match her smile, my step growing lighter. When was the last time a young woman gave me this kind of undeserved attention? It was Lola, of course, and a small, bearable guilt gnaws at me.

  "Unless of course you want to remain here in Salvation," the mayor continues. "We're always looking for good neighbors."