She held up a warning finger. “Don’t even start up on me again.”
Timo couldn’t help grinning. “Wouldn’t dream of it, partner.”
Lucy began dictating the beginnings of her story into her phone, then broke off. “They want our first update in ten minutes, you think you’re up for that?”
“In ten minutes, updates are going to be the least of our problems.”
He was in the flow now, capturing the concrete canal and the dead Texan on the other side.
The dogs leaped and jumped, tearing apart the man who had come looking for water.
It was all there. The whole story, laid out.
The man.
The dogs.
The fences.
The Central Arizona Project.
A whole big canal, drained of water. Nothing but a thin crust of rapidly drying mud at its bottom.
Lucy had started dictating again. She’d turned to face the Phoenix sprawl, but Timo didn’t need to listen to her talk. He knew the story already—a whole city full of people going about their daily lives, none of them knowing that everything had changed.
Timo kept shooting.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Paolo Bacigalupi is the bestselling author of the novels The Windup Girl, Ship Breaker, The Drowned Cities, Zombie Baseball Beatdown, and the collection Pump Six and Other Stories. He is a winner of the Michael L. Printz, Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Compton Crook, and John W. Campbell Memorial awards, and was a National Book Award finalist. He currently lives in Western Colorado with his wife and son, where he is working on a new novel.
LOVE PERVERTS
Sarah Langan
On Display at the Amerasian Museum of Ancient Humanity, 14,201 C.E.
I’m checking my Red Cross crank phone when Jules walks up. We’re the last American colony not to get implants, which places us pretty firmly in the technological third world. My pipeline town in Pigment, Michigan might as well be a flood plain in Bangladesh.
“Ringing mommy dearest?” Jules asks.
“The Crawfords remain indisposed,” I tell her.
“Sucker-boy,” Jules says, not in a mean way, though she’s capable of that. She’s got Schlitz-sticky hair down to her hips and her cheeks are covered in glitter from last night’s rave. Colony Fourteen’s heat and electricity got shut off last week, so her nips push through the spandex cat-suit she’s wearing, hard as million year-old fossils. We’re all about energy conservation here at the dawn of apocalypse.
“I’m just curious,” I say. “I mean, I don’t even know if they made it to Nebraska.”
Jules hip-checks my locker so it rattles. She’s got this rage she doesn’t know she’s carrying—it’s made her heavy-footed and graceless. “Here’s what you do . . .” She pretend-cranks a gear at her temple. “You just delete. Done! They’re dead.”
“Yeah. Okay,” I say. Like that’s possible. They’ve been my parents for seventeen years. Not to mention my baby sister Cathy, who they totally don’t deserve. And by the way, I know it’s whom. I’m just not an asshole, like you.
“Chillax! You think too much. I did the same thing with my ex until I figured it out. Then I just pretended he died and it was his robot clone I had to sit next to in Mrs. Viotes’ art. Delete!”
“Colby Mudd?” I ask.
“Don’t even say his name. Can you believe he’s still here? I mean, half the town is dead, but he’s still noshing turkey jerky? Jeez! My God! What does he see in that spoiled princess? You’re bringing me down. Point is, fuck your family! I’m your family!”
“Sure. I’ll just change my last name or some nonsense. How was the rest of last night?”
Jules blushes, giggles. Glitter abraids the whites of her eyes, making them red.
“That good?”
I left around midnight. Home brew drugs are for hicks, case in point: As soon as Avery Ryan from the bowling team broke out the meth, everybody went native. They dragged this black-light-painted hunk of granite to the middle of the factory floor and prayed to it like it was weeping Jesus on the cross. For the big finale, a mirror-clad priestess offered herself up. She shattered her mirrors against it, cutting herself bloody. Then everybody started screwing. Clothes off in negative-ten degree weather, spilled corn whisky turned black ice on the floor. Kids, grown-ups, pipeline scabs and militia, all partying together like some prediction straight out of Revelation.
I mean, what the hell?
Growing up, my dad’s job in resource excavation took us all over, and every place was the same: falling apart. It got a lot worse two years ago, when an astronomer played with some numbers and reconfigured Aporia’s trajectory. He predicted a direct hit somewhere near Chicago. We’d all known a big one was due, give or take a billion years. But nobody could agree on what to do about it. Since the Great Resources Grab of the ’20s, the colonies weren’t talking to each other. Asia was all messed up. And you know the French. I mean, they see a problem and they step over it and blame the dog.
Anyway, some private multinationals got together, which goes to show you they’re not all bad. They tried redirecting Aporia by attaching rockets. They tried spattering its far-side with black paint, so the sun’s rays altered its trajectory. They tried opening a black hole, which wound up swallowing most of Long Island before it collapsed.
Then President Brett Brickerson, the former child actor from Nobody Loves an Albatross, got on the Freenet last month and announced that we had one last hope: shooting a nuke rocket at it, head on. He laid down Martial Law in all of America’s sixteen colonies. Pipeline towns like Pigment saw the heaviest military occupation. It’s supposed to be our job to siphon every last drop for the rocket.
Pretty soon after that, the refinery guys striked. They said the government wasn’t playing fair. President Brickerson accused them of holding the entire planet hostage. Next thing, they were all dead and buried in mass graves. The scabs took their place—guys from all over, paid in gold bars. Like the hired guns, they did whatever they wanted, to anybody they wanted, for the simple reason that nobody was around to stop them.
The locals started leaving for Antarctica and Australia. The ones stuck here once the law clamped down got hysterical, suicidal, and shot, not necessarily in that order. “What’s the point of going on like this?” I overheard my mom asking my dad, which I found pretty insulting. I mean, I’m the point, right? Me and Cathy. We’re the whole goddamned point.
The stores sold out of supplies and the school’s cafeteria just served jerky and canned corn, a donation from the heartland. You can’t be seen on the streets without the militia messing with you for vagrancy. Non-compliants hide in their shelters at the old Chevy Factory. It’s quiet during the day, while everybody sleeps off their rave.
Last night’s theme was cosmic mirrors, hence the shattered priestess. I didn’t bother with that nonsense. I just wore my uniform: jeans and an ironic Dead Man’s Plaid t-shirt, plus two denim jackets since some burnout stole the winter coat out of my locker. Jules wrapped herself in tin foil and glitter, teeth chattering the whole walk there. Some of the really popular kids showed up in fancy stolen cars they’d made the underclassmen push. Total Mad Max shit.
Used to be, only the locals knew about the raves. But then the militia and scabs started showing up. They’re bad people. I read my Faulkner and I know what you’re thinking: nobody’s absolutely good or absolutely bad. But ask yourself this: what kind of sociopaths occupy America’s fourteenth colony, imprisoning its citizens inside ground zero, under the pretense of “maintaining order for urgent oil extraction?”
Let me explain something to you, because I’m taking basic physics this year, so I know. Aporia is one mile-wide and more dense than iron. Nukes will crack her, but at this point, she’ll hit Earth no matter what. Only, if she breaks into pieces, she’ll be more democratic about impact. She’ll slide into the President’s bunker in Omaha, or the shelters in Rio, or the Sino-Canadian stockpiles under the glaciers. So what do you think? Do you
think that’s the plan?
Or do you think President Brickerson and all the other world leaders are lying, and there is no nuke rocket? Do you think the governments and corporations joined forces, and built escape shelters? Do you think the pipelines are heading straight for those shelters, for use after the apocalypse, for the lucky survivors with tickets to the show?
Thanks, Mr. President.
Thank you, too, dear reader.
No, wait. Scratch that. Fuck you, dear reader. Seriously, Fuck you.
So, yeah, back to the militia and pipeline scabs. What kind of morons suck the oil from a dying civilization’s veins for a few worthless pounds of gold? They show up at high school parties and screw girls thirty years younger. Screw guys like me, too, when they can get me loaded enough. How many prisons did they crack open to staff this operation? How many pedophile dormitories did they raid? You think I’m kidding, but seriously, who else do you think they could get?
So yeah, I read my Faulkner. But did that dude ever live in Pigment three days before human annihilation?
I used to be so into the zombie apocalypse. I figured I’d be this hero in a society risen from ashes. Me, the phoenix of the new world order. But the real thing sucks. Because I’m going to die, and I can’t figure out which is more cowardly; resigning myself to that fate or fighting against it.
At my locker, glittering Jules grins. It’s eerie. Why’s she happy? “Last night. After you left. Here’s what happened,” she says, then lifts her fuck finger at me, holds it. Then her index and thumb rise as she mouths: one, two, three.
“What?” I ask, but I already know. Jules is such a wreck.
“A three-way,” she says. “One of ’em stuck a rifle up my cooter!”
“I guess you can scratch that off your bucket list.”
“Right on the dance floor. Everybody was clapping. Don’t give me that concerned dad look, Crawford, he shot it empty first . . .”
“Discharge.”
“Vocab king!” She winces, lowers her voice. “I think Colby was there . . . Like, clapping.”
“He’s not worth you.”
“Jeaaa—lous?” Jules grinds me in her gauze-thin cat-suit.
“Don’t,” I say. She grinds even freakier, which means she’s pissed off. Because a machine gun up your hole probably sounds okay when you’re high, but not the next morning when your female parts and what-have-you probably hurt. But there’s no point talking about it. Aporia’s hitting in less than three days, so who wants to spend the time crying over sexual violation by blunt object?
I realize I’m mad, too. At myself, for leaving her alone with those scabs. At her, for being so stupid. At colony fourteen, for buckling so easily. At everybody. Especially the people on the other side of my crank-phone, who won’t tell me where they are, or how I can find them, or even if my baby sister—whose stuffed bunny they forgot—survived the trip.
“Faggot,” Jules sneers. She’s gone completely radioactive. It’s about the machine gun. It’s about the asteroid. It’s about her denial-blind mom and sister who think Aporia’s a hoax. Mostly, it’s about me. Because I love her in every way but the way she wants.
“Don’t be mean to me,” I tell her. “You’re my only friend.”
“I’m not mean; I’m honest! You’re a faggot orphan and once your family got their tickets, they threw you away,” she shouts with veiny-necked rage.
“You’re trash. Your sister’s a stripper. You’re dumb as . . . toast?” I shout back. This last part isn’t true. She’s one of the sharpest people I know.
Nobody’s listening, not even the militia or my old gym teacher or Colby Mudd, who trifled with Jules to make another girl jealous, and she’ll never see that, because she uses men like spikes to stab herself against.
“They’re not trash. One of ’em said he’d marry me!” Jules flashes her hand. She’s wearing a small, yellow-gold engagement ring. It had to have come from a dead body. Some salt-of-the-earth old lady, a suicide pact with her true love after fifty good years.
“God, Jules.”
The homeroom bell rings. The halls clear like mopped-up jimmy sprinkles. Front and back door militia in desert fatigues bang the butts of their guns against cinderblock. They’re like orangutans at mealtime.
“It’s jewelry from a man,” Jules says, and I can tell she hates it, and the hand that wears it, and herself.
“Throw it away, Jules. It’s garbage!” I tell her.I’m so upset about all this that I go a little crazy. I imagine cutting her up. Peeling her skin off and poking out her eyes.
Jules squeezes out a pair of tears. “You’re just mad because someone loves me, and nobody loves you.”
And the guns are banging, and my homeroom teacher is waving for me to come in. Only it’s my gym teacher, because my real homeroom teacher is gone. Faces keep dropping away. No one knows what happened to them. It’s like a visual representation of Alzheimers. “That’s an awful thing to say,” I tell her.
Jules starts laughing.
I’m walking away. The sound of her gets louder as it echoes.
“Hospital tonight?” she calls.
I hate her.
“Sorry, Tom Crawford,” she calls. “I suck, literally. I’m a spooge-whore-bitch.”
I keep walking with these iron-heavy feet, imagining the whole world on fire. I am the asteroid. Dense and without feeling. I am the destroyer of all in my path.
She flings the ring so it skates past me down the hall. I turn back and there’s Jules. She fluffs her hand out in pretend-pompousness as she bows, then blows me a kiss. “I’m your dumb-as-toast best friend.”
I pretend-twist a gear along my temple. “Forgotten. Forgiven. Everybody but you is dead, you big skank.”
• • • •
Mr. Nguyen is the only real teacher left, and he’s taking it seriously. He passes out a physics quiz, which he’s written by hand because there aren’t any crank printers. We’re supposed to convert joules and calculate work. There’s only four other students here, and none of us have pens.
I crank, then send a text on my phone: Where are you? Is Cathy OK? If you only have two tickets and she’s not allowed in, I’ll come get her. Does she need Baby Bunny?
Nguyen hands me five ball point Bics and gestures for me to pass the rest around. The guy’s relentless. He wears dirty polyester button-downs and his parents were refugees from Vietnam. Last plane out and all that. He probably wishes he was still there.
“Focus,” he says. But I can’t. My paper’s black letters on white. They could scramble and rearrange, and then what would they be?
Nguyen perches on the edge of his desk. He’s got three small kids at home. His wife is fat. Not like Orca. Happy, well-fed Hobbit fat. “Young ladies and gentlemen,” he says. “What if it’s not the end of the world, and you’re still accountable for your actions? Did you think of that? Take your test.”
In my mind, everybody in this room goes bloody. They’re just meat, and I’m wondering: Where’s the stunt camera? I mean, really. Death by asteroid? I thought I was more important than this.
The loudspeaker clicks on. Everybody twitches. Maybe it’s a militia-led public execution. They happen often enough that I’m starting to look forward to them. The routine comforts me. Which is fucked up, obviously. I know that, so don’t take notes or underline this or whatever.
The assistant principal or vice-secretary or some jackass’s voice pipes through. “This can’t be right,” she says.
“Just read it!” some guy demands.
“Darlins, I got some bad news,” she says. I realize it’s Miss Ross, a native Colony Eight who teaches auto shop. She gave me a C-, which I hated her for but deserved. “Aporia’s gonna interrupt satellite communication pretty soon, so don’t be surprised if your phones stop working. Also, new research tells us that impact is thirty-six hours away; not three days. Angle’s closer to 70 percent. They’re saying Detroit—what’s that, about a hundred and fifty from here?—can that be
right?”
“Keep reading,” the other voice tells her through a muffle of static.
“Dang it! I heard you the first time!” she says. “About ten minutes ago, President Brickerson sent out a last communication. Since most of your crank phones don’t have Freenet, the militia wants me to pass it along . . . Brickerson says not to worry. The rocket will . . . eviscerate? Sure, okay, that’s a word. It’ll eviscerate Aporia before impact. Until then, we gotta stay put. So there’s no looting, transgressors between colonies’ll be shot. Anyone caught stealing fuel’ll be shot . . . . Anyone messing . . . . Ah, forget it. Run, darlins’. Just run. Get as far away as—”
Nguyen clicks off the loudspeaker. It doesn’t spare us. We still hear the gunshot. I go hard in a place that ought to be soft over something like this, which doesn’t mean I enjoy it. I’ve also been known to fantasize about drowning puppies, and I kind of like puppies.
Nguyen lets the reverb settle, then takes the quiz from my desk and crinkles it into a ball. Tosses it like a hoop-shot but misses the garbage. “Who wants a lesson in falling bodies?”
Twenty minutes later, he’s got it all written out. Seventy degrees, density = 8000kn/m3, speed at impact: 30km/s. Force = a trillion megatons. He’s not smiling or pretending to be brave. He touches the word megatons on the blackboard, totally freaked out.
“Meg-A-Tons . . .” he says. The guy’s a Tesla nerd—he figured out how to turn garbage into gasoline and there’s rumors he siphoned the refinery’s generators to power his house. “Would you ladies and gentlemen find it comforting to have me describe impact to you?”
I’m not ready to be comforted. There’s still tricks in this pony. But everybody else seems relieved, like, Thank God. They can finally all surrender to the awful truth.
Nguyen squints, picturing the whole thing. “If it collides with Detroit, we’ll see the blaze in under a minute. Brighter than the sun. The whole sky will be red. Don’t worry. It won’t hurt. Our nerves will go before our minds . . . . It’s like the distance between thunder and lightning during a storm. It should be quite beautiful.”
The End is Nigh (The Apocalypse Triptych) Page 41