by Неизвестный
Suddenly he smiled and he was Mickey again. He ran his hand through his hair and said, “I have a theory. All of the last sixty years is going to get cut off, right? It’ll be like a closed loop, and you’ll be outside it. So you’ll be free again. What could the machines know about someone in another universe? That’s probably why they were so vague about you. Maybe no one will ever invent a machine to predict deaths. It’ll probably be impossible in the normal flow of time. So everyone will be free!” He was grinning.
I wasn’t convinced, but I didn’t argue. He seemed happy to have it figured out. We talked for a while about what it was like when we were younger, before everything. Then Mickey said, “You should get some sleep,” and he left. I didn’t sleep that night. I haven’t really slept since.
We left the next night, making our way on foot through the darkest of the deserted streets. We held close to the shadows, afraid even though we knew we wouldn’t fail. Billions of predictions depended on our success, and the machines were never wrong.
By the time the sky began to grow light, we were crossing a field of weeds and broken glass out in the suburbs. The Professor led the way, picking among the skeleton silhouettes of electrical transformers crowding against the dawn like dead trees. “We’ll need a lot of power,” he explained as we walked. “When we pull the switch, the lights are going to go out all over the neighborhood.”
He stopped at the door of a tiny shed built of cinder blocks and corrugated tin. With a flourish, he pulled a ring of keys from his pocket and unlocked the door. When he pushed against it, the heavy steel door refused to shift, so he stood back frowning as Mickey kicked it open. Inside was nothing but the top of a flight of stairs leading down into darkness. The three of us held back on the highest steps until the Professor switched on a light overhead and closed the door behind us.
Underground was a whole set of rooms holding beds, worktables, ancient machinery, and the Professor’s prototype. Mickey looked around and asked, “What is this place?”
Victor shrugged. “Something from the old days. No one was using it.”
We have been here three days. We each have our own room again. The Professor has been bustling around, getting his prototype back in working order, but there’s nothing for the rest of us to do. We asked.
So we’ve spent our time trying not to think about what’s coming, talking a little, playing cards. One time we started speculating about the Speaker’s death. He never made it public, but he must have been read. People like him care very much what happens to them. The only thing for certain is that he didn’t draw NA. But we know how the machines love their mind games, so we guessed. MURDER, OVERDOSE, or AT HOME IN BED SURROUNDED BY FAMILY would all be technically true. Delia suggested FOR THE GREATER GOOD, which is also true, but I don’t like it. It would only feed his self-righteousness.
I don’t want it to comfort him. I want him to stay awake thinking of it, afraid just like his victims who lay awake waiting for the Bureau to knock on their door. He should suffer with the knowing; it should be specific. It could name me, give him my picture and address. It wouldn’t matter. Knowing ahead of time doesn’t change the fact of death, as we’ve learned.
But all the philosophical discussions, the speculation, the games—they’re just ways of taking our minds off the real thing. Sometimes it’s okay; sometimes we laugh at the smallest things, just as if we weren’t planning the end of the world. But the strain is there. I look at Delia and I see the sadness in her eyes, always.
Delia was just here. I was writing when she came in, sat on the bed, and stared at the wall just like Mickey had done. I pulled my knees up to my chest. She turned toward me and asked, “Do you remember the wedding?”
“Yes.” She meant Mickey’s.
“Remember the rain?”
I smiled. “I remember Mickey standing there, barefoot in the mud. He had his shoes in his hand and that stupid grin like he had no idea what came next.” It was pouring, our clothes were all soaked through, the water was running down our faces. The day was so hot that the rain was warm on our skin, and it washed the sweat from our foreheads so we could taste the salt on our lips.
“We said to him, ‘You’re married now! Get used to it.’ ”
“Then we danced out in the rain. We jumped in the puddles. There was thunder, remember? But we didn’t care, we just sang along.”
“There were so many people there.”
“Everyone was there.”
We were quiet a moment. Then Delia took my hands in her hands. “Don’t forget,” she said. There were tears on her face and tears in her eyes. She leaned close and all I could see was her eyes and she was crying and she said, “Remember this.”
Remember this:
Mickey on the day he got married, with the rain pouring down. That look he gets when he has a puzzle to solve. The way he’s always pushing his hair off his face.
The woman in the red scarf. Remember her in the street with the scarf under her head. And Jeremiah. Remember what happened to them.
Delia. When we were kids we used to go swimming; we would run across the grass barefoot in a race to the water. She stood there shading her eyes with her hand, looking out over the lake like she was the first person ever to see it. Remember Delia. She is the last honest person, she says, and it’s true. I am in love with her. I think she knows.
This is why I’m writing. Tomorrow it will all be over. I’ll be the only one to remember them.
We don’t know exactly when I’ll arrive, but we know almost to the minute when I’ll do it. When the world will change. I’ll have a syringe; I’ll have an address; I’ll have these words and these memories.
I know perfectly well that I could be caught afterward and locked up. I don’t care, as long as it’s done. I’ll deserve to be locked up. Mickey says I’ll be setting the world free, but what does Mickey know? He pretends like he isn’t terrified. Delia isn’t as good at pretending. Neither am I.
All these years, people have been reading their own deaths without ever knowing what the machines were really telling us. If the Speaker had known, he would have destroyed them all. Because they were telling us how to beat him. They told us when it would happen; they told us who had to do the act; they even promised us success. And the machines are never wrong.
Sometime tomorrow, the last person will die. Then we’ll pull the switch, the lights will go out, and the machines’ last prediction will come true. NOT APPLICABLE. I’ll have my whole life to think about that.
* * *
Story by Kyle Schoenfeld
Illustration by Chris Schweizer
PEACEFULLY
THERE’S A BEAR IN THE CLEARING, its muzzle deep in the torso of a zombie.
Ben stares at the scene from behind a mossy tree trunk. It’s kind of like those nature documentaries his mom used to like, back when there was such a thing as nature documentaries. Like the bear’s ripping bloody mouthfuls from some big fish it’s just slapped out of a river, and Ben’s got a front-row seat to the natural wonder that is the food chain.
Part of him is a little bit smug at this proof that, other evidence to the contrary, horde aren’t necessarily at the top of that chain. Part of him’s fascinated—and, weirdly, relieved—to see nature still capable of taking its course, in this day and age. Part of him’s taking clinical notes about the damage to the zombie, because hell, bears are probably a great resource for tips on how to take down horde.
Part of him watches the bear’s questing snout jostle the corpse’s head to the side, floppy like a rag doll’s, and has to swallow against rising bile and hysteria of the sort he hasn’t felt in years.
Beside him, Louisa whistles low through her teeth. “Somebody needs to post a sign: do not feed the animals.” She’s smiling; he hears it in her voice. When he doesn’t answer, she jabs him with her elbow, right in the kidney. “Hey. How does it die?”
The joke stopped being even remotely funny long ago, but the routine of it grounds him, replac
es the hysteria with a distant kind of calm. He plays along automatically. “The soon-to-be-zombie bear?” He pretends to give the matter serious thought. “I’m gonna guess violently.”
“You think?” she says. She gives him her handgun to hold and swings her shotgun off her shoulder. When she steps out from behind the tree, the bear looks up from its meal, right at her.
Her aim, as always, is good. The bear does not get up.
The echoes fade out, leaving the forest shocked into silence. The noise of Louisa’s foot snapping a twig as she strides from their hiding place to stand above the corpses seems almost as loud as her gunfire. Ben follows slowly, staring at the bear. He’s seen plenty of dead horde; the bear is different, something thoroughly wild and natural and other. He watches the stillness of its huge body, its dirty fur ruffling in the breeze.
Louisa’s attention is on the gaping carcass of the zombie. “New rule,” she says, reshouldering the shotgun and reclaiming her automatic from Ben. She doesn’t holster the handgun, but then, she never does. “Anything with teeth gets shot on sight.”
They leave the sun-dappled clearing and its musky, fresh-blood stink. The forest closes in around them, lush and serene, untouched by the chemical and radioactive wastage of the remains of civilization; it’s more beautiful than any place Ben’s seen in the seven years since the bombs. The longer they walk without incident, the more he thinks he could almost believe they’re there because they want to be.
In fact, they’re there because of Castor.
“The place you want to be,” Castor said, conspiratorial blue eyes shining in the candlelight like the glass of the bottle dangling from his hand, “is up north.”
They were sprawled across the furniture in Castor’s suite—the penthouse of his compound, a tricked-out basement with one obvious entrance and one hidden exit and enough munitions and nonperishables to last a month—drinking home brew and eating meringues. It was obscenely decadent, by far not the best use of the two fresh eggs Castor had presented them, with a wink and a bow, when Ben and Louisa returned from a week of scavenging across the border. But Louisa had lit up at the sight of them, and she’d dug through Castor’s private pantry until she found half a bag of white sugar, and Ben didn’t want to know how she’d got hold of a lemon, but somehow she had, and this was how she wanted to use it. Faced with her near-childish glee as she arranged her ingredients in Castor’s kitchen, he couldn’t bring himself to suggest a simple scramble.
The meringues were delicious. Light, sweet, sinful zests on their tongues. A taste of another time.
Ben paused in the middle of sucking sugar off his fingers. “Okay, but if we get there and Santa’s elves are all horde, I’m coming back to eat your brain.”
Louisa snorted. Three fingers still wrapped around the neck of his bottle, Castor mimed shooting Ben in the head. “Not that far north. There’s a place up by the bay that’s been turned into a hell of a compound.” He leaned forward in his torn-leather chair, amusement giving way to earnestness. “It’s an honest-to-God village up there: self-sufficient, fortified. They’ve even got gardens. Friend of mine told me about it last week. Impeccable source,” he added, because even higher than angels on sugar and booze, he saw the glance Ben sent Louisa and knew what it meant. “Wouldn’t go spreading false hope. Especially not to me.” He grinned, showing his gums. “Jeannie likes me.”
As reassurances went, it was lacking: everybody liked Castor, either genuinely or out of necessity. The more concrete proof was whether he liked you. Ben measured the stretch of his smile, the softness around his eyes that had nothing to do with the indulgences diluting his bloodstream, and decided he could probably trust this woman with the world.
The world as it had been, anyway. When it was something worth entrusting.
Louisa picked up a meringue and stared at it as if searching out flaws. “And this haven of isolation is open to new members?”
“The right kind of new members.” Castor’s grin faded. His eyes slid from Louisa to fix on Ben. “They test you at the gate,” he said evenly, “twice. First, for infection, and if you’re infected, they shoot you. Then, if you’re not gonna go peacefully…” He shrugged and leaned back again, deceptively casual. “Depends what else you have to offer.” After a moment—and another pull from his bottle—he added, “Notice how, out of everybody under my roof tonight, I’m only telling you two.”
Later, Louisa slipped unsteadily through the door to their room—at Castor’s place, everyone was paired or grouped off, because everyone wanted to stay at Castor’s and Castor only had so many rooms—and climbed into bed with Ben, curled up at his side with her arm wrapped across his belly. Hugging him like a little girl with a teddy bear. She smelled like sweat and liquor and lemon and Castor.
“What do you want to do?” she asked.
Ben curved his arm around her shoulder, settled his hand on her hip. The taste of meringues was long gone from his mouth. “You think we could make it?”
“Cas said he’d give us a truck. Driving ’til the gas runs out should get us into the middle of nowhere, and there’s a lot fewer horde in the middle of nowhere. We could hike the rest.”
“And if we make it?”
“Then whatever happens, happens,” she said firmly, and shifted closer to him, tucking her head more comfortably on his shoulder. “We’ll worry about it when we get there.”
Ben noted the “when.” “They’ll have to take me,” he said, just as firmly, because it was true. “And if they want me, they’re taking you.”
It was rare, these days, to meet someone who’d drawn “peacefully” from the predictor machine. The theory was that most of them had been killed quietly in their beds during the bombs or had since barricaded themselves in Greenland. Those still wandering the hellscape were sought after, tended to be treated like lucky talismans in the bunkers; before Ben stopped wearing his pendant—after he lost Joseph, the simple, clean-lined P his parents gave him when he turned sixteen had become much too heavy—he got used to warm welcomes and clingy hosts. Violents who assumed they would be at least marginally protected from most postapocalyptic dangers if they had a Peaceful with them.
Most of those Violents were dead now. Ben had watched far too many of them die.
Ever since he’d met her, Louisa had shortened it to Peace. “I spell it with an i, too,” she’d told him once, fondly, out of nowhere. “My very own Piece.”
Like I’m one of your weapons, he’d wanted to say, but hadn’t.
Louisa was succumbing to whatever she’d drunk, her body listless and heavy against him. “You’re sweet,” she mumbled into his shirt. He could feel the hard V shape of her pendant trapped between them.
Six days later, their truck was stocked, their packs were full, and Castor kissed them both good-bye.
Their campfire seems little more than a flickering orange pinprick in a dark, empty world.
Ben’s used to cities, to enclosed rooms and the knowledge that there are people thinking and acting and living—or, on bad days, frantic and fighting and dying—on the other side of every solid wall. Three nights into their wilderness trek, as every animal cry that echoes suddenly through the trees reminds him of the horde-eating bear, as open space presses insistently on him from all sides, he’s still on edge.
Louisa, lying on her back on the other side of the fire with stars reflected in her eyes, looks more relaxed than he’s ever seen her.
“This reminds me,” she says to the sky, her voice a lilting, human sound in the forest’s immense, inhuman quiet, “of when I was a kid. My aunt used to take us camping, me and my sister.” A little smile plays at the corners of her mouth. “Just in her backyard when we were really small, but as we grew up, we did a bunch of the provincial parks. And when I was fifteen, we went portaging in Quebec.”
Her openness surprises him. He’s pretty certain he knows more about Louisa’s life pre-apocalypse than anyone—except maybe Castor—but that’s not saying much. She doesn
’t often talk about her past. Some people just don’t, or can’t, and Ben understands why; there are times, increasingly frequent, when he feels that disinclination too, the feeling that whatever he could talk about is so decisively gone, so thoroughly disconnected from who he is now, that to try to share it would be meaningless. Still, he and Louisa talk. She knows all about his family, and after Joseph’s death, Ben had found himself sharing the most random stories with her: about the mandatory science class they’d shared in first-year university, which Ben had passed only because of Joseph’s tutoring; about Joseph’s near-giddy enjoyment of perpetual motion gadgets, regardless of their actual perpetuity; about how Joseph had teased Ben mercilessly for being nervous about meeting his parents.
And yet, Ben realizes, before this moment, he never knew Louisa had a sister.
He watches the firelight play, warm and friendly, on her face, and forgets his nighttime uneasiness in a fierce swell of affection. “Those sound like good memories.”
Her tiny smile broadens for a moment into a flash of a grin. “Yeah.” But then she catches herself: her body tenses, her lips press into a thin, dry line, and the shine in her eyes goes hard. Ben feels the end of her unguarded moment even before she speaks. “My aunt died in the bombs,” she says, her voice flat and blunt, “and then my sister got infected. Her son had just turned two. He didn’t have a chance.”
Ben feels sick. And angry. And horrified and sorrowful, and he moves to go to her. “Louisa—”
But she’s already turning away, curling up with her head on her pack and her back to the fire. “You take first watch,” she says, and Ben sits back down, defeated.
He can always tell when Louisa’s sleeping; she doesn’t do it well, her rest always either too light or broken by nightmares.
That night, he watches her hold herself still for hours.
A few years after the bombs, a group somewhere across the border started broadcasting a TV signal. There wasn’t a television industry anymore, of course, so all the group had to broadcast was whatever they could make.