21st Century Dead

by Christopher Golden

  Debbie grabbed my arm, urged

  “The fence, over there, it’s cut, come on.”

  And led me to it. I could hear screams, cries from the truck, but couldn’t look back. Through the fence and flat out running, until I saw the camps of the military. Muttered

  “Thank Christ.”

  The distinctive black tent, Fitzroy’s, came into view. I said to Debbie

  “The Command Center.”

  As I rushed up to it, I could see a figure moving inside. My relief was palpable. Debbie behind me as I tore open the flap.

  Fitzroy lunging, sinking his teeth into my outstretched arm.

  A thought burning in my head

  Debbie. Run.

  ALL THE COMFORTS OF HOME

  A BEACON STORY

  John Skipp and Cody Goodfellow

  I.

  LIFE WAS NOT TOO SHABBY in room 4037 of the former Le Meridien Hotel. Luxury accommodations had been the name of the game long before Bryce Hatfield took over the City, and in that respect very little had changed, even after the building had been entirely repurposed.

  Same king-size bed, soft sheets, and warm blankets on a pillow-top mattress sweet enough to kiss. Same thirty-two-inch LCD HD flat screen and fully stocked minibar. Same pervasive AC, only slightly more filtered, comfort-adjustable within three degrees of Fahrenheit seventy-five.

  Tom had built bookshelves to make 4037 feel more like home, adorned them with Godfrey-Huft family photos: his wife and kids, his mom and dad, his brother, his niece, his wife’s parents, and so on. He’d designed them to match the decor, secured management approval. It was, after all, his home now. The result, as intended, was cozy as all get-out.

  He’d definitely gotten a lot of wear out of the complimentary robe. Was wearing it now, over crisp navy drawers and freshly scrubbed skin. After a day like today, the hot shower alone was worth the price of admission.

  If only he could get the lingering stink out of the air.

  The million-dollar view wasn’t quite what it used to be, either. He kept his thick curtains closed almost all the time. And had specifically requested a room with no view of the bridge.

  But tonight, if he could have opened the windows, he would have. The panoramic expanse of city ending in the new workers’ housing compounds at Pier 9 was ugly, but they made him think. Not everybody in the new San Francisco was nearly as lucky. Hard work paid off in the new regime as it never had before, but the winners in the New Deal had come by their cozy creature comforts the old-fashioned way—by dumb, cussed luck.

  Le Meridien San Francisco had become the de facto family building at Embarcadero Center. Very smart move on Emperor Hatfield’s part. The school for kids grades K through twelve, the library and rec center, the gym and basketball court had all been reconstituted from stately ballrooms and vast high-tech conference halls down on the lower levels.

  Just part of the incentive program.

  The restaurants in the lobby, as well, had been converted into family-style feeding grounds: an immense salad bar stocked with fresh produce from Embarcadero Three; an all-day breakfast-cereal bar, long on granolas, woefully short on Cap’n Crunch; co-op kitchens where hot meals were served from 6:00 A.M. to midnight.

  Round-the-clock room service was a thing of the past. But you could go down and whip up some leftovers 24/7, if you had the proper clearance, kept a record, and cleaned up after yourself.

  From the mezzanine up, Le Meridien was all family dwellings. So far, only the first six floors were in use, with room to grow as more families arrived, or more singles decided that breeding wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

  Not that the Hyatt was a dump. Far from it. There were times he wished he lived there instead. The noise of endless parties and kids jamming on guitars at all hours was less a nuisance than a loud reminder that life went on, with or without you.

  But there were definite perks to family life. In the thick of the parental herd, he could finally afford to let his guard down. To believe they could be safe.

  And that their lives might be worth living.

  On weeknights, the father-daughter deal was that nine forty-five was lights-out time for Molly, next door in room 4039 (her own room, as the crotchety nine-year-old never failed to remind him). She’d wanted to finish her chapter—she was reading Heinlein’s The Door into Summer again, and he couldn’t fault her taste—he’d loved that book as a kid—but a deal was a deal.

  Tonight’s round had ended, with a hug and a kiss, in just under fifteen minutes; and now it was Off-duty Daddy Time. An hour at most, before his own lights-out.

  One beer. One smoke. And a little TV.

  Before having to face his dreams.

  II.

  IN THE WORST ONE, he’s walking through a field of deep mud in an endless green-black night. He doesn’t know how long he’s been walking or why, but he knows he’s in trouble. Kristin will be angry when she comes home, will be devastated because of something he’s done or hasn’t done, something so enormously, unacceptably wrong that it won’t fit into his head.

  The gelid air crushes him down and the mud holds him back. But he struggles forward, thrashing and gasping, until he sees someone standing alone out on the plain.

  The resistance grows worse, but he fights it now with new strength, because he’s saved, the bad thing he did is undone. Hot tears of relief streak his face as he comes closer and sees that yes, it’s Geoff, looking up at him with his backpack in his little shaking hands.

  His son’s eyes go wide and white when he sees his father coming. He raises his arms, holding out the backpack. It tilts in the frigid wind so that Tom sees Geoff’s face through a hole in the bottom. All his art stuff is gone, but that’s not why Geoff looks so frightened, so utterly unhinged and, yes, even a little angry with his father.

  “Geoff, where did you go?” he asks, but the words won’t come. His mouth won’t make sounds.

  Geoff drops the gutted backpack and reaches out for his daddy. When he opens his mouth, his blue lips frame a stream of silver bubbles that shoot upward like a swarm of ghost jellyfish.

  And even though he’s had the dream more times than he wants to count, Tom is shocked once again to find his son at the bottom of San Francisco Bay.

  III.

  TOM GODFREY HAD BEEN IN THE NAVY for seven years—Amphibious Construction Battalion 1, stationed in Coronado—when he met Kristin Huft. He was an earnest young career man with a minor in bourbon and a yearning for stability, meaning, and purpose. She was one of the first enlisted women to serve on a submarine, a straight arrow with her eye on the prize, secretly battoning down the hatches on her fierce mommy-urge.

  They were both short and burly—neither of them beauties—but they looked good together. And felt that way, too. He hailed from Missouri. She was born and raised in Kansas. They had a lot in common.

  Both of them had dreamed of oceans from the time they were born.

  She got pregnant with Geoff on their honeymoon. They told their friends they had a rock-paper-scissors tournament to decide who’d stay home with the baby, but it was no contest. His enlistment was up, and all the fun jobs were being subbed out to private contractors, anyway. There were plenty of companies in the market for a former Seabee but not many jobs out there for a former submariner.

  His real friends kidded him about it and a lot of others simply dropped him, but Tom didn’t lose anything staying home with his son. They set up housekeeping in Richmond, and Tom carried Geoff in a sling when he went out to oversee the new fuel-storage facility at Alameda, or to the new sewage-treatment plant the city almost ended up naming for Bush the Younger.

  Kristin was out with her crew in three-month rotations, playing hide-and-seek with the Chinese just as they’d been trained to play with the Russians. He missed her, and he worried that Geoff did not miss her enough.

  She took leave when she had Molly, but she came back to find herself promoted to fire control officer and even longer duties away.

&n
bsp; But somehow, it worked. He fretted that maybe it was he who didn’t miss her enough; that maybe he’d needed the idea of Kristin more than the reality. As their children grew up, they called him Mommy and Daddy interchangeably. When Kristin came home, they treated her like a goddess.

  Time flew. Geoff started school. Tom went independent, opening his own engineering-consulting firm. Kristin applied for an instructor’s position at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center. When her next tour was over, they planned to move to Newport, Rhode Island.

  Tom was looking at houses on a Realtor’s Web site when the news about the outbreak reaching America first broke through Game 6 of the World Series.

  IV.

  THERE WAS NO MORE WORLD SERIES, of course. No more world. No more series.

  But looking at the screen always threw him back. Sometimes, it even let him forget.

  Tom scrolled down the menu of stations and shows. It was amazing, how much of the old world was still available in digitized form.

  There was, in fact, a World Series Channel, with every championship and playoff game ever broadcast on file. It was right next to the Super Bowl Channel (itself bracketed by all Olympics, all the time). A couple of dozen other slots were devoted entirely to basketball, tennis, poker, pool, horse racing, car racing, boxing, and wrestling, and a raft of channels dedicated to all things Xtreme.

  Tom had a few minutes to kill before Beacon News came on. He slipped past sports to the multiple science and technology streams. Again, Hatfield had smartly had his teams sift through gajillions of Discovery, National Geographic, and History Channel programs for useful data, as well as produce original shows. As such, there was very little bad science left in the programs they aired, except in context, and only to show how far we’d come.

  This was genuine public education, the kind of programming he generally preferred. The world was full of stupid stories. Tom just wanted the facts, wherever they might be.

  There were dozens of stations devoted to movies and sitcoms and other fanciful relics from the bygone days, subcategorized by geeks who knew and cared way too much about it, and were determined that not a speck—from Citizen Kane to Three’s Company—was lost.

  Because this was San Francisco, there was a lot of weirdo stuff that Tom did not approve of, although the hyper-V-chip security-clearance systems did a great job of screening it from the kids. There’d been only one recorded case of porn getting leaked into scholastic feeds; quickly corrected, the clown responsible got reassigned to the sewage-reclamation plant.

  He couldn’t get over the prevailing tone of hedonism and licentiousness, any more than he could blame them, after all they’d been through. Ads for weed and worse on most adult stations, not to mention the Cannabis Channel. Personals and pros put their assets on the glass on the Hook-up Channel. Way more hippie nonsense on the San Francisco History channels than he cared to have shown to his nine-year-old. Gladiator stuff on other channels—where contestants dispatched defanged dead folks with flamethrowers and monster trucks—that he blocked so he didn’t have to see it himself.

  Which led him to the religious and spiritual section. This was where the whole thing got murky for Tom, and also simultaneously fascinating.

  He’d been relieved to find that they did not have a thousand Christian stations endlessly rerunning the 700 Club, the long litany of televangelism from Billy Graham to the end. He was a Methodist himself, and that was not how he wanted to remember Jesus. Or have Jesus remembered.

  In the same way as Bryce Hatfield—CEO of the City and lord of all that he surveyed—had urged his media staff to weed out the bad science, he had also insisted they weed out the bad religion. No hateful, money-grubbing ministers made the cut, no fire-breathing talk of the Rapture or the Last Trump summoning the dead to judgment.

  Instead, the God and Oneness streams were widely representative. There were Christian streams, Islamic streams, Jewish streams, Confucian streams, Buddhist and Hindu and Taoist streams, and so on, down the road.

  But they were all presented as relative options of faith—different ways of approaching the ineffable—flensed of primacy, with an emphasis on the cuddly love-and-cooperation bits.

  That was kind of okay with Tom.

  Much like the political parties had been dissolved—and good riddance to that two-headed nonsense machine—the churches had also been taken down a peg. There was only one line left that truly needed to be toed.

  The City was not a democracy. It was a corporation.

  You learned to work together.

  Or you were on your own.

  In the eighteen months since Hatfield’s people had gassed the dead-infested City and begun reclaiming it block by block, Tom had seen it mushroom from a few hundred sailors and tech geeks to a stable and diverse city of nearly ten thousand. They grew their own food, used the ocean’s currents to generate their own power, and they even had a decent chunk of the old Pacific Fleet. None of that would’ve gotten done, Tom believed, if someone had stopped to take a vote.

  He rubbed his eyes, overwhelmed by the bottomless pit of programming—a trillion trails to distraction—but it was less than a minute to ten, and there was something he wanted to see.

  He punched 001 into the remote and was rewarded by Bryce Hatfield’s ubiquitous face. Fearless Leader was not a handsome man, but he was impressive in close-up: the once-doughy features chiseled by crisis and gravity, his eyes far too blue, windows into his exorbitant IQ.

  “We are all,” Hatfield was saying for the umpteen millionth time, “in this together. That’s why we count on Beacon News. The live local news network that connects San Francisco, 24/7. Letting us all know where we stand. Shining a light on a world gone dark.

  “A light you can trust.”

  The staring contest dissolved to a fancy CGI lighthouse, blazing lamplight endlessly rotating behind the words:

  BEACON NEWS.

  SHINE THE LIGHT.

  Only then could the news begin.

  Tom popped his beer with his lighter, watched the bottle cap flip and land in his lap. One of the last Sam Adams in captivity, and cherished as such.

  He had a salvaged pack of Lucky Strikes in the left pocket of his robe: twelve left, as of this moment. The second the City ran out of Luckies would be the day he quit.

  One cigarette a day was not a big deal. Based on his current stash, he had at least 312 days to go.

  Then “Hello! And pee-yew!” said the beautiful woman on the screen. “It’s ten o’clock, and this is Beacon News. I’m Trini Dee. And these are today’s headlines.”

  Tom took a swig of Sam, lit his smoke, and settled back to watch the City’s last remaining golden goddess deliver the spin.

  Trini had the six-to-eleven slot Monday through Friday. She was stupidly gorgeous and alarmingly smart, with wheat-blond dreadlocks and cocoa skin, almond eyes, and lips that knew just how to grin and win you over, whether you believed what she was saying or not.

  Yet another brilliant choice by Hatfield.

  That lucky son of a gun.

  “The big local story today,” said Trini Dee, “will hardly be news to anyone with a nose.” A snarky Photoshop graphic flashed a headline over her shoulder: THE REVENGE OF THE TURDS. “It was black and came gushing out of the ground, but it sure wasn’t oil. A critical drain blockage sent tons of raw sewage up through toilets and sinks in the Hyatt food court, ruining lunch for hundreds of second-shifters and leaving a stink that Central Air is still trying to disperse.

  “Here with a report is Zach Chassler, our man in the underground. Zach, how are you doing?”

  The image split-screened to Trini on the right, gas-masked Zach on the left. In the background, someone was laughing.

  Tom sucked hard on his smoke, took half the bottle in a swig, closely watching the infotainment.

  “Well, Trini,” Zach said, “as you can see, things are almost back to normal down here. The block is cleared and City engineers have already restored water and sewage service
. Now it’s just a matter of venting the lingering, unbearable stench.”

  “Tell me about it!” Trini pursed her lovely lips. “Any word on how it happened?”

  “Trini, no official statement has been released, but rumor has it that a combination of old-city pollution build-up and last night’s burrito buffet were to blame.”

  “And there you have it,” said Tom, weary of the fun already.

  He didn’t blame them for skirting the real cause of the backup. The truth was often too horrible for TV.

  What they couldn’t say was what hurt him most.

  Stuck, as he was, with the facts …

  V.

  TOM HAD BEEN HALFWAY into his eggplant parmesan when the kitchen staff came hopping over the counter, screaming and cursing in four languages.

  At first, he thought it was a bomb.

  Hot on their heels came the ripe brown stench he’d come to know so well of late: rich as a symphony in its ugly aromas, like a padded brown fist between the eyes.

  A moment later, people came sloshing out of the restrooms, shrieking and tracking the awfulness behind them.

  Tom swallowed fast, threw down his fork, and began to push upstream against the panicked crowd.

  This looked like a job for Sewerman.

  * * *

  Ten minutes later …

  “Yeah, it’s blocked,” said the Jeep.

  In his rubber hip-waders and matching slicker, the Jeep looked more like the Gorton’s Fisherman than a master civil engineer. But he knew the City’s tangled underworld of tunnels, sewers, and shafts better than anyone alive before Z-Day.

  Tom looked up at the stout outflow pipe that clung to the ceiling of the service tunnel beneath the mall. “But this is just toilet drainage, right? We switched all these things over to the new network last month.”

  “Yep. And she’s already clogged. I told them, but nobody listens.” The Jeep cracked three nuggets of Nicorette gum into his mouth, hidden under his full, white beard and curly handlebar mustache. The Jeep normally smoked his pipe like a locomotive, but methane hung thick in the air. “You got rubber boots?”