As I walk through the compound, the enormity of what I’m facing starts to intrude on my facade of strength. I don’t want to lose Lynn, but I don’t want Lynn to die.
I approach the building with the waiting area doing my best to conceal my emotions. The door opens and she runs up to me. Her face and eyes are red. “How did it go?” she whispers.
“I love you,” I say.
“No. No. No. Goddammit, no!”
“Lynn . . .” I touch her arm, but she pulls away.
“No! You are not going to die.”
“Lynn . . .” I reach out, and she falls into my arms. She is sobbing into my shoulder, and I am calm. I am her rock. I will save her.
She pulls away. “You can go in my place.” She stares in my eyes—the intensity I know and love is back—but there is nothing to be done. I just shake my head. She knows it’s not allowed. It’s impossible. She shoves me away and turns toward the car. “I’m not going. I’ll stay with you.” She pulls the keys from her pocket and starts walking.
It’s what I fear the most, her sacrificing her life for no reason. “That’s not going to happen,” I say. “I won’t let you.”
She ignores me and keeps walking to the car. I catch up to her as she gets in. I slide into the passenger seat and put my hand on her hand holding the steering wheel.
“Lynn, please. It makes no sense.”
She turns to me, and all her anger, all her fear, all her desperation is just gone. Her face is glowing. “You know, I’ve been stupid. The asteroid. The lottery. The fucking Star News. All this shit.” She waves her arm. “It’s distracted me from the one thing—the one single thing—that I’ve wanted my whole life. Nothing else matters.”
“What are you talking about?” She doesn’t sound crazy, but her clarity is frightening because I don’t understand it.
“You said it yourself, Em. You said, ‘I love you.’ You were just told that your life was over. Goodbye citizen, in six months you will be dead. And the only thing that mattered to you was telling me that you loved me.” She takes my hand. “Don’t you get it? I love you, too. With all my heart. With all my life. All I want is for us to be together. Fuck this asteroid. Fuck the lottery. Let’s just get married and be happy for whatever time we have left.”
There are tears in her eyes and I know they are tears of joy. How can they be tears of joy?
“It doesn’t matter how long my life is,” she says. “I just want to end it with you as my wife.”
She looks directly into my eyes. And I understand.
• • • •
It took us a long time to get to the Davis Mountains in West Texas, but we made it. It is cold, but the sky is clear. My mom is there. Lynn’s parents won the lottery, and we are happy for them even if they have to miss our wedding. Dad’s girlfriend won the lottery, too, and after a quickie wedding before it was made illegal, dad stopped returning my calls. It’s for the best. Lynn’s friend Max is officiating. He’s a Baptist minister, and I rather think that a lesbian wedding is on his bucket list, but I’m not crass enough to ask him.
Lynn is resplendent in her dress. My mom cries as she walks me up an aisle of wild grass and stone. She hugs Lynn very tight and then kisses me. Lynn and I say our vows; we exchange rings; and Max declares us married. We kiss, and I can’t help but cry.
“I’m so sorry,” I whisper, and Lynn shakes her head.
“No, no no. Don’t be. I wanted to live the rest of my life with you as my wife.” She touches my cheek with her hand. “Now I will, and I’m so incredibly grateful.”
I pull my wife close. Our cheeks touch, and I am grateful, too.
There is only one other guest at the wedding. The sky is dominated by a streaking ball of fire that looks nothing like the ugly rock I saw on TV. Today it looks glorious, a celestial benediction that couldn’t be more beautiful.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jake Kerr began writing short fiction in 2010 after fifteen years as a music and radio industry columnist and journalist. His first published story, “The Old Equations,” appeared in Lightspeed and went on to be named a finalist for the Nebula Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. He has subsequently been published in Fireside Magazine, Escape Pod, and the Unidentified Funny Objects anthology of humorous SF. A graduate of Kenyon College with degrees in English and Psychology, Kerr studied under writer-in-residence Ursula K. Le Guin and Peruvian playwright Alonso Alegria. He lives in Dallas, Texas, with his wife and three daughters.
REMOVAL ORDER
Tananarive Due
Tiny black dots speckled Nayima’s white-socked feet as she shuffled across the threadbare carpet in her grandmother’s living room. Gram’s four cats were gone, but the fleas had stayed behind. Nayima had learned to ignore the itching, but the sight of so many fleas made her sick to her stomach. The flea problem had seemed small compared to Nayima’s daily ever-growing list of responsibilities, but she would not keep her Gram in filth.
“Shit,” Nayima said to the empty living room, the fleas, and the slow, steady whistling of Gram’s sleep-breathing in the next room.
Gray morning light beckoned her. Nayima flung the front door open and sat on the stoop, breathing fast to try to beat the nausea, which felt too much like death. Fledgling panic gnawed the rim of her stomach. She could make out the headline of the bright electric pink flyer Bob the groundskeeper had dutifully posted on the community bulletin board across the green belt from Gram’s house: REPORT TO THE NEAREST HOSPITAL IF . . . and the litany of symptoms. Stomachache was high on the list, beneath persistent headache and double vision.
That had been a month ago. Bob was gone, and the hospital’s doors were chained. Even the bright flyer was nearly obscured in the gray-brown haze that had settled over her neighborhood like a sepia camera filter. The San Gabriel mountain range that stood a few blocks from Foothill Park was nearly hidden beneath a sheet of brown clouds. Sunlight bled through the sky in a fuzzy ball, but less light than yesterday. So much for Southern California sunshine. Nayima had gotten used to the smell, the eye and sinus irritation, the coughing at bedtime, but she hated the way the smoke had changed the daylight. Each morning she hoped the day would be a bit clearer and brighter, but the sky was always a little worse than before, like eyesight slowly going dim.
But she could manage the flea problem. That she could do.
The irony wasn’t lost on her: she had only remained because she didn’t want to move Gram. Now she would have to move Gram after all, without the help of neighbors, soldiers or police officers. The infestation was too far gone for insecticides—and she’d already emptied a can, making it harder to breathe in the house. Gram had taught her how hard fleas were to kill, with her menagerie of pets in the house Nayima had been raised in since she was four. Nayima had felt like just another of Gram’s adopted creatures.
The street spread before Nayima with its alien coloring and emptiness, her neighbors’ windows dark and sleeping. Most of the driveways were clear except for a few vandalized cars left behind. The week before, a daytime marauder had come through on a loud motorcycle, raising a racket and tossing clothes into the trees. Kids, she guessed, but she’d stayed out of sight, so she wasn’t sure. A long-sleeved shirt and ratty blue jeans still hung from high fronds in the neat row of palm trees in front of the green belt.
Nayima used to walk her neighborhood for exercise, rounding the green belt and pool area, the basketball court, the rows of stucco exteriors in carefully matched paint. This day she scouted for a new home—testing the door-knobs, sniffing the air inside, assessing the space. She had visited them all before. Most had been damaged beyond usefulness by looters.
She chose the house on the opposite corner from Gram for its proximity and the bright yellow roses blooming in front, lovely and clueless. Mr. Yamamoto’s house. Inside, its Spartan decor had given looters little to muss, although broken glass glittered in the kitchen. But the house had double doors large enough to push Gram’s bed through. The loc
k was intact. No windows broken. No terrible odors. No carpeting to hide nests of biting fleas.
Sanctuary.
“Thank you, Mr. Yamamoto,” she said.
Mr. Yamamoto had offered to drive her and Gram to the high desert in the back of his SUV, though she’d seen relief flicker in his hollowed eyes when she’d refused. He’d had a carload already, with his daughter and grandchildren from Rancho. Instead, he had given her a box of spices, most of them characteristically useless: every Halloween, he’d handed out clementine oranges instead of candy. Before Gram got sick, she and Mr. Yamamoto had walked their dogs together. Like Gram, he was retired. Like everyone, he had left most of his belongings behind.
Gram’s old digital wristwatch told her it was 7:30 in the morning. From the dark sky, it could be evening. The day had already wearied her, and the hard part had not yet begun.
Gram was asleep. She lay slanted on her side where Nayima had left her at 4 a.m., after her careful ritualistic padding of pillows to keep her from slumping on to her back. Studying Gram’s quiet face, Nayima marveled again at how the cancer had stolen the fat from her cheeks, shrinking her grandmother to a smaller husk each day.
The usual thought came: Is she dead?
But no. Gram’s chest moved with shallow breaths. In the early days, when cancer was new to them both, she had fretted over every moan, gasped at every imitation of a death mask on Gram’s brown, lined face. Gram was nearly seventy, but she had never looked like an old woman until the cancer. Her white hair was still full and springy, but now her face looked like she would not last the day, which was how she always looked.
But Gram always did last the day. And the next.
The bell was always on Gram’s mattress, though she had not had the strength to ring it in a long time. The hospital-grade bed had cost a fortune, equipped with an inflated mattress that was gentler against Gram’s breaking skin. It didn’t work as well without its electric pump, but Nayima kept it inflated with an old bicycle pump. Not enough, maybe, but it was inflated. The county had shut off the power to the entire area after the evacuation.
Nayima felt the magnitude of her impending tasks. Should she dress and treat Gram’s sores before or after the move? Damnation either way.
Later, she decided. She didn’t want to face the sores with the move still waiting. The move would irritate Gram’s sores with or without a cleaning and dressing first, but maybe after was best. She wished her cell phone worked, not that there was anyone to call for advice. An internet search would have felt like a miracle. The lack of advice wearied her.
As if her loud uncertainty had awakened her, Gram’s eyes flew open. Gram’s eyes had once been the brightest part of her, though they were milky now.
“Baby?” Gram said.
Nayima stepped closer to the bed. She could smell that the wounds needed cleaning—the dead flesh odor she hated. She slipped her hand over Gram’s dry palm. Gram squeezed, but did not hold on.
“I’m here, Gram,” she said.
Gram stared with the same eyes that had probed Nayima when she came home late from “movies” with her first boyfriend smelling of weed and sex. But this time, the questions were too big and vast for words, with answers neither of them wanted to hear. Nayima hadn’t let Gram watch the news or listen to the radio in weeks, so Gram didn’t know how many others were facing illness. She didn’t know the neighbors had left.
“We have to move to Mr. Yamamoto’s house,” Nayima said. “Too many fleas here.”
“The . . . cats?” Gram said.
“They’re fine,” Nayima said. That was probably a lie. She had stopped feeding Gram’s four cats and locked them out after the evacuation, so the cats had left too. She’d cried about it at the time, but at least cats could hunt.
“Tango too?” Gram’s eyes grew anxious. Maybe Gram had heard the lie in her voice.
“Tango’s still mean and fat,” Nayima said.
Was that a smile on Gram’s face? Gram had asked her to keep a single framed photo displayed on the table beside her bed, snapped the first summer Nayima came home from Spelman: the overfed black cat, Tango, was in Gram’s lap while Nayima hugged Gram from behind in her powder blue college sweatshirt. Nayima’s best friend, Shanice, had taken the photo. The glowing pride on Gram’s face haunted Nayima now.
Gram’s eyes started to flutter shut, but Nayima squeezed her hand and they opened again, alert. “I’m going to push you in the bed, Gram,” she said, “but it will hurt.”
“That’s okay, baby,” Gram said. That was Gram’s answer to every piece of bad news.
Nayima had stockpiled pain pills with help from Shanice, who was an R.N. and had raided the meds as soon as she caught wind of how bad things were going to be. Thanks to Shanice—who had moved next door when they were both in the sixth grade—Nayima had a box of syringes, hundreds of oxy pills, saline packs for hydration, ointment and dressing for bedsores, bed pads, and enough Ensure to feed an army. But Gram hadn’t been able to swallow anything on her own since before the neighbors left, so all Nayima could do was crush the pills in water and inject them. Gram’s arms looked like a junkie’s.
The smell was worse when Nayima leaned over Gram to inject her crushed pill. Nayima’s throat locked. How would she clean her and scrape away Gram’s dead skin later if she could barely stand the smell now?
Gram’s eyes were flickering again, ready to close.
“Are you hungry?” Nayima asked.
Gram’s lips moved, but she didn’t say anything Nayima could hear.
Nayima didn’t smell feces, so she would postpone the rest—the changing of the urine-soiled bed pad, the gentle sponge cleaning, the bedsores, the feeding. All of that would wait until they had moved to Mr. Yamamoto’s flea-free home.
He always had been meticulous, Mr. Yamamoto. Even his roses were still on schedule.
“I love you, Gram,” Nayima said, and kissed her grandmother’s forehead. She allowed her lips to linger against the warm, paper-thin skin across the crown of Gram’s skull.
Gram’s breath whistled through her nose. She whistled more now, since the smoke.
Luckily, the cancer wasn’t in Gram’s lungs, so breathing had never been a problem. But breathing would be a problem for both of them soon. It hadn’t occurred to Nayima to ask Shanice for oxygen, not back then. She hadn’t known the fires were coming. Even the dust masks Nayima wore outside had just been in a box left untouched for years in Gram’s garage. She wore them until they fell apart; she only had twenty-two more.
When Nayima fitted a new dust mask across her grandmother’s nose and mouth, Gram didn’t even open her eyes.
The first scream didn’t come until they were well beyond the front door, when Nayima had lulled herself into thinking that the move might not be so bad. One of the wheels wandered off the edge of the driveway, rattling Gram’s bed. Her scream was strong and hearty.
“Sorry,” Nayima whispered, her mantra. “I’m sorry, Gram.”
Gram’s eyes, closed before, were wide and angry. She glared at Nayima, then turned her gaze to the sky. Even with pain lining her face, Nayima saw Gram’s bewilderment.
“It’s smoke,” she said. “Brushfires.”
The bewilderment melted away, leaving only the pain. Most of Nayima’s life with Gram, there had been wildfires every other summer. They both had grown accustomed to the sirens and beating helicopters that were still Nayima’s daily and nightly music. She heard a far-off helicopter now, and a choppy, angry voice from an indistinct loudspeaker. She braced for popping gunshots, but there were none. Not this time.
“Mr. Yamamoto took a trip with his grandchildren, so he said we could use his house,” Nayima said, trying to distract Gram, but a bump elicited a shriek. “I’m sorry, Gram. I’m sorry.”
At the edge of the driveway, it occurred to Nayima that she could pull the car out of the garage instead. She’d packed the passenger side and trunk solid, but she’d left the back seat empty for Gram, layered with blan
kets. She could wash, dress and feed Gram right outside and then carry her into the car. Would the screams be any worse? What difference would it make if Gram was screaming in Foothill Park or screaming somewhere down the smoky interstate?
Nayima’s tears stung in the smoke. She had to stop to wipe her eyes dry with a section of her thin shirt. When she looked at her clothing, she realized she was only wearing a black tank top and underwear, the clothes she slept in. And white socks. She had so much laundry to do.
Gram’s shriek melted to a childlike, hopeless sob.
Nayima gave Gram’s hand another squeeze and then carefully, very carefully, pushed the rolling bed across the bumpy asphalt, toward the beckoning yellow rose blossoms.
“Look, Gram,” she said. “Mr. Yamamoto’s roses are blooming.”
Gram coughed a phlegmy cough behind her dusk mask. And screamed in pain again.
Gram was crying by the time Nayima finally brought the bed to rest in its new home beside Mr. Yamamoto’s black sofa and artificial palm tree.
Nayima cursed herself. Why hadn’t she found a way to kill the fleas at Gram’s house instead? What had possessed her? A fierce headache hammered Nayima’s temples, bringing paralyzing hopelessness as bad as she’d felt since the 72-hour flu took over the news.
So they were both crying while Nayima pulled Gram’s bandages away to reveal the black and red angry stink of her wounds, the yawning decay that cratered her back. Nayima could nestle a golf ball in the cavern that grew above her grandmother’s right buttock. Infection had found the sores despite Nayima’s steady cleanings.
“Fuck,” she said. “Fuck.”
Her hands were shaking as she debrided the wound in a clumsy imitation of what Shanice had tried to teach her—the cruel, steady scraping of Gram’s most tender flesh.
The End is Nigh (The Apocalypse Triptych) Page 11