Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF

by Mike Ashley

  "Is it military?" the woman asked. "Maybe the Chinese built it?"

  "Certainly not. That's absurd. The Chinese are dying as fast as the rest of us."

  "Then who is responsible?"

  "Private hands," he said mysteriously.

  Nobody was happy to hear this.

  "Evidence," the woman demanded. "We need hard evidence."

  "I wish I could offer some," he confessed. "I have to assume ... what the scant evidence shows ... some group with skills and a quality laboratory produced the virus and infected a few people. Those were the original epidemics. But those events were just to get our attention. These plotters understood that we would ... that someone had to ... generate a quick cheap vaccine in response ..."

  A man at the end of the table began to stand, one arm clumsily swinging at the sky as he shouted, "Prion."

  The witness quickly corrected him. "This is something else, Senator. Something we have never seen before. Prions manipulate a different protein. This particular agent ... well, it's a natural component of the phage's protein shell. It was hiding in plain sight, and we never imagined that it would have such devastating effects on the human nervous system."

  The room buzzed with voices.

  Someone called out, "Quiet."

  Then the woman leaned forward, hands shaking. Voice shaking. Into her little black microphone, she asked, "This is a great conspiracy. Is that your explanation?"

  "Yes, Senator."

  "And your company is blameless.

  The dying man hesitated. Then his face dropped as he admitted, "I'm not sure how to answer that, madam."

  More voices, more pleas for silence.

  "This was a crash program," he continued. "We hired consultants, experts from around the world ... and it is possible that some of those people were part of a secret group ..."

  I looked over my shoulder again. The coldest woman in the world was weeping, mopping up tears with a handkerchief cut out of one of my father's left-behind shirts.

  "You're blaming ... " the woman began. Then her voice failed her.

  An ancient man was sitting beside her. The Shakes didn't kill the elderly as quickly as most. Maybe that's why he didn't have symptoms. His voice was level, his mind clear. With a rich voice, he pointed out, "Conspiracies demand goals. These people must have had some purpose. What do you think it was?"

  "I can offer nothing but guesses," the witness replied, looking down at his own hands. When they stopped trembling, he looked up and said, "Power is one possibility. The survivors of this nightmare will be left with the entire planet at their disposal. But my better guess ... what seems more reasonable and even more awful to me ... is that an environmental group might have take these steps. If they felt that human overpopulation and pollution were putting the earth at severe risk. If they convinced themselves that this was for the best..."

  "How many would it have taken?"

  "Excuse me, Senator?"

  "This shadow organization you're describing. I want to know how many of the criminals we should be chasing today."

  "I don't know, Senator."

  "Dozens? Hundreds?"

  "Perhaps hundreds," he said. "But keeping an enormous secret would be difficult. A handful of likeminded individuals could probably achieve the desired results, if they were clever enough."

  "In your company, sir ... "

  "Yes?"

  "Who didn't receive the vaccine?"

  An assistant leaned close, whispering a few words.

  The advice was waved off. "No, I want to answer this." The witness leaned close to his own microphone. "I've asked myself that same question, sir. I have. But my company has almost vanished. I insisted that my people were first to receive the vaccine, and that included our contractors. Most of us are already dead. That I'm alive is a small miracle. I can't count all of the suicides ... of friends and colleagues ... yet in all good conscience, I can't tell you that a few people haven't managed to slip away in the chaos ..."

  The Senator considered his next question.

  But the dying woman beside him rose to her feet. With a ragged, ugly voice, she asked, "But why? Even if it's as you claim, a small group trying to save the world —?"

  "I didn't claim anything, madam. I'm just speculating."

  Behind me, our mayor jumped to his feet, his squeaky voice ordering the television to be turned off.

  "I don't care about the reasons," the Senator continued. "Reasons are excuses. This is a cruel, vicious assault on humanity, and believe me, whoever's responsible is taking great pleasure from our misery and terror."

  The television went black.

  I turned. Mom was standing beside the mayor. The crying was finished, replaced with the old steel mask that I knew by heart.

  To the class, the mayor said, "Obviously, this is a very painful subject."

  But we weren't crying. This was ten times easier than watching shaking people fighting over poison pills. My mother whispered something to the mayor, and he nodded and came forward, unfolding one of the green sacks leftover from the old grocery. The DVD was removed from the player. Then Mom helped collect every other disk, and while she carried the full sack out into the parking lot, the mayor explained that these items were going to be burned. The oldest kids were surprised, and our teacher seemed puzzled, even hurt. But to give the action purpose, he explained, "Yes, people did play a role in what happened. But what is important - what you need to remember, children - is that only the hand of God can move this world. No other force has such power or majesty. A judgment as enormous as the one we have lived through demands Our Father, and we should be thankful. He has given us the gift, this new Eden, and we are more blessed than any people to ever walk the earth."

  With that, he retreated.

  We soon smelled smoke, ugly black and probably toxic.

  My teacher wandered to the front of the class, offering clumsy words of support for this disagreeable policy. Most of the students got busy making paper gliders and passing notes about small, fun nonsense. But I remained busy: closing my eyes while holding my breath, I wished that my mother would breathe in those fumes, grow sick and die.

  Winston stands in the cold bright sunshine, hands at his side, eyes down and his mouth clamped shut, chewing hard at nothing. He isn't as red as I imagined, but it doesn't take any special skill to see the anger under his skin. Passersby want to talk to this newcomer, but they see his face and steer clear. Even a couple children approach and then think again, retreating past me, one asking the other, "What demon is in his heart?"

  I put myself in front of Winston, and I wait.

  He doesn't react.

  Nobody else is close, just him and me standing in the open. I don't know what to say, but once I start talking, my mouth finds words and logic. I say, "Families," with easy scorn. I tell him, "Families aren't easy." Then I offer up a few curse words, laying the groundwork before admitting, "My mother was an extraordinary bitch."

  He blinks, eyes focusing on me.

  I wait.

  He starts to turn away.

  "What about your grandmother?"

  I want him to look at me again, reacting to my open-ended question. But he avoids my eyes and the topic, big legs carrying him back toward the RV.

  Walking beside him, I talk about the recordings of those old news stories. In a few crisp sentences, I try to recapture two days in class and the reaction of the important adults, plus my own raging scorn. "I mean, we had this window on the past. And what did the adults do? Destroy it. They didn't see any value in the disks, only danger, and they destroyed them before anybody could figure out how to make copies. So these kids here today ... they don't know anything about what happened, except what their parents choose to tell them."

  Winston seems to listen, but he refuses to even glance at me.

  "Here's something funny," I continue. "When I was twenty-one, I left Salvation. There was this local girl named Lola, and I loved her as much as my mom hated her, and we dec
ided to move into a solid old house up in the hills. Live with each other and our dogs, no idiot Believers within miles of our front door."

  We reach the wheeled house. Winston grabs the door handle and pulls, the hiss of compressed gas helping it swing open. But as he takes one step inside, he hesitates. He can't help but look at me, asking, "Why in hell should I care about any of this?"

  "My wife's smart, but in odd ways."

  The boy is just a little curious now. But that's enough. He steps back down to the bricks and looks at the top of my head, asking, "So what?"

  "We talk," I say. "All day long, we chat. But since we don't see other people, and since nothing important changes day by day, our best topic is the past. Our childhood. She didn't go to school with me, but she remembers the day when they burned the disks. She heard all about it from me. And a couple years ago, after talking it over a thousand times, Lola turned to me and asked, 'Don't you think it's strange? Why would an ordinary person go to all that trouble?'

  '"Because it's history,' I told her. 'That's why.'

  "'But it wasn't history yet,' she pointed out. 'It was just a plague in China when it started. Most of the world was still safe. Yet somebody started saving news stories about that disease. And they recorded everything about the vaccine, even when everybody else in the world thought that this was the answer to all of our troubles. Which is a crazy thing to do, isn't it? Unless of course you knew all along what was going to happen.'"

  I stop talking.

  Winston looks more like a boy than ever. His face is empty and pale, his mind pulled back to some private place, leaving me almost nothing to see. But before I go on with my tale, he asks, "Where were those disks?"

  "In a box," I tell him. "Unmarked and probably left behind by mistake."

  "No. What house were they in?"

  "I don't know."

  "My grandmother's?"

  "Probably not," I admit.

  He gives a deep snort before telling me, "You don't know anything."

  "I know the old lady saved the world."

  Winston moves closer, looming over me. "She's nuts."

  "No, she isn't."

  He licks his lips and says, "Forget it."

  I say nothing.

  Then he remembers where he was headed. Again, one of the big feet steps up into the RV, and just to be sure that I know it, he tells me again, "Grandma is crazy."

  "Was she a scientist?"

  He keeps climbing.

  "It must be tough," I say, stepping up after him.

  He turns, surprised to find me sticking with him. "What's tough?"

  "Being stuck with them: a senile woman who saved the world, and your father who grew up with a legend. Because he's always known, hasn't he? Families can't keep secrets. And you grew up hearing how grandma helped build the bug or the vaccine, which were good things. Great things. Without them, there would have been too many people in the world, and civilization would have crashed just the same. But with the climate in every worse condition, everything was falling apart in ways a lot worse than what we got."

  The boy's face grows red again. I make plans about what to do if he takes a swing at me. I'll jump down the stairs and run - that's my heroic scheme. But he doesn't lift a hand. Instead, he says, "You don't know shit."

  "Billions murdered, and that old lady is partly to blame." I smile and halfway laugh, adding, "It's got to be hard, sleeping under the same roof with one of the world's great criminals and her proud son and a sister who thinks that old grandma is just about the best, most special person ever."

  Winston sighs.

  A moment later, he straightens his back and lifts a hand, that broad hard palm driving once into my chest, pretty much wringing the breath right out of me. Without trying.

  I want to run and don't.

  "No," he declares. "That's not it."

  "Oh yeah?" I ask doubtfully. "What is 'it'?"

  A smirk rises, and he laughs. "I'm not telling you anything. But if I did know somebody like that - I'm just saying 'if - the killing wouldn't be what pisses me off. No, the trouble is that the wrong people got killed. If you've got this wonderful weapon in hand, you don't just slaughter your own. You don't save the world just to fill it up with idiot Christians and black savages. That's a dumbshit waste, if you want my honest opinion."

  Butcher Jack would have brought the news but it was summer and scorching hot and his main freezer was in some kind of trouble. That's why Old Ferris made the journey instead. I was out back in the junkyard, hunting for pipe that I could splice into our growing irrigation system. The rattling roar of a little motor brought me back to the house. I came around to discover Lola standing on the porch, flanked by several dogs, her favorite Bushmaster assault rifle propped just inside the front door. Our visitor was straddling his little motorcycle, the dust of his arrival finally settling on top of the heavier dust. Lola was talking. With a voice friendlier than any she used on me, she told the visitor that he was welcome to come inside or at least into the shade of the porch and would he like a drink of water because we had plenty, it was no trouble, and he looked hot, did he feel hot, and how was the ride out from town?

  Ferris was pleasant about his silence - no grimaces, no uncomfortable looks at the cloudless sky. But even miles from Salvation, he refused to speak to any person who had been officially and permanently shunned.

  I called to him.

  He brightened instantly. One stiff leg swung over the seat, and he propped up his bike and looked at me, forgetting for a second or two why he had come. Then he remembered. A fresh sorrow went into his eyes, and that's when I knew that he'd brought bad news. It was easy to guess what he would tell me but there was still shock in the words. "It's your mom, Noah," he began. Then with a slow shake of the head, my old friend said, "She died this morning. Just before sunrise."

  I didn't say anything.

  So he answered the questions that I might ask, put in my place. "It was the cancer. She didn't suffer too much. The right prayers got said. In the end, I don't think she even knew where she was. Which isn't a bad way to be, all things considered."

  He paused and stared at me.

  "What else?" I asked.

  "She was talking about you. These last days, she kept asking where you were. She didn't remember."

  I stepped up on the porch, one sweaty hand pushing into my wife's damp back. "Well," I began. Then after some consideration, I admitted, "I guess I should know she died. So thank you."

  He wanted to look only at me, but his eyes kept jumping back to Lola.

  "Want some water?" I asked.

  He almost said, "Yes." But he had so thoroughly ignored the earlier offers that he couldn't agree now. So he took a deep breath, pushing into the rest of his important news. "She planned her funeral. Weeks ago, before she was real sick, she told us that it was important to her that you come and serve as one of her pallbearers."

  "No," I said, out of reflex.

  Lola moved against my hand.

  I shook my head and stepped off the porch, suddenly angry with this man that had never said one cruel word to either one of us. He was a simple decent creature who helped my family many times over the years. But there was a lot of emotion to deal with on a day best spent in the shade. I approached and stopped short of him, and he watched me. His little mouth looked as if it was holding something sour but nothing in his eyes was worried. I wasn't scaring him. He was sorry and wished that somebody else had come on this tough errand. But he was brave enough or stubborn enough to wait, and when my emotions simmered down, he said, "It's your choice, Noah. The funeral's tomorrow morning, and it starts in the town center."

  "Won't be there," I promised.

  He nodded and climbed back on the bike and kicked it twice and left again -a wiry little man vanishing into a fresh cloud of dust.

  Exhausted, I returned to the porch. To Lola. But the only affection and understanding that I got were from the licking, panting mutts at her feet.

 
"What?" I asked.

  She turned and went inside.

  I followed, again asking, "What?"

  Cleaning up the kitchen was important just then. Lola started pushing plates into cupboards and sorting the silverware and cups, and I watched until I didn't think there was any chance that she would volunteer her thoughts. So I took a shot, saying, "You think I should go."

  Her response wasn't to agree with me. Because saying, "Yes," wouldn't say half enough. Instead it was important to throw a handful of knives into the wrong drawer and then turn, lifting a china plate over her head as if ready to bust it. We have very good dishes in our household - fine work from Germany and England, some of it older than the old farmhouse that we took over for ourselves. Maybe that's why she held her hand. Or maybe she wasn't all that upset but it was important to get my attention before saying, "She was your mother."

  "I think I know that."

  Lola bit her bottom lip. Then she offered up a few words that must have lived inside her for years, never mentioned and never even suspected by the man who slept with her every night. "She was your best parent, Noah. So yes, I think that mean old bitch deserves to have you at her funeral."

  Leaning against the nearest wall, I asked, "What do you mean? My best parent how?"

  "Your father left you. Your mother didn't. Your father could have taken you but he chose not to."

  "Life on the road? He didn't want to put me at risk."

  "And for that matter, why the hell did he leave in the first place?" If anger was a race, Lola was in the lead now. "He wasn't banished. He wasn't even shunned."

  "He would have been," I said.

  "Shunning isn't death," she pointed out. "How many years did my family live in that miserable town, not one Believer offering us anything more than some secret whispered words?"

  Never in my marriage did I feel like hitting Lola.

  That was the nearest that I've ever been, and there was still a good gap between the urge and the deed. But my hands closed, and I was breathing hard with my heart pounding, doing nothing else while she watched me.

  "What else?" I finally managed.

  "Your mom stayed. Believe me, she would have talked your father into taking you, if that's what she wanted. But she thought it was best for her and for you that you stayed behind. And bad as she was as a parent and a human being, she probably did her very best. Which is enough reason for you to go into town and do the service like she wanted. Make yourself believe she's really dead, and then you can do whatever you want to the bitch's grave. But come back to me afterwards. All right, Noah? Will you do all that for me?"