Stars: The Anthology

by Janis Ian

  Another recliner that matched the one in the living room sat in front of a massive picture window that looked out over the Willamette River. Beyond the river he could see the snow-capped peak of Mt. Hood.

  Sometimes he sat there and read when it rained, watching the patterns of the water between chapters. When the world had still been alive, he never would have been able to afford a place like this. Now he figured he deserved it. Besides, who was left to tell him no?

  The beeping continued, drawing him toward the computer room he had installed in the west corner of the big penthouse. He had been an electrician by trade before everyone had died, and specialized in security cameras. In fact, he had been installing a bank camera the day the city died. He and Jenkins had been down in the vault when suddenly everything went silent on the comm link with the boss in the truck.

  Jenkins had gone up to investigate, leaving Toby in the vault. Toby had never seen him again. By the time Toby had given up waiting, left the vault open, and went to investigate, Jenkins was gone, and everyone else was dead. The only thing Toby could figure, in hindsight, was Jenkins had seen everyone dead and had freaked and headed home to check on his wife and kids.

  At first Toby thought that something airborne had killed everyone, and it would soon get him, so he had gone back inside. But after a short time of staring at dead bank customers and tellers, he knew that was stupid.

  After that he had started to wander the streets, shocked at how people had died, staring at bodies, not really heading anywhere in particular for the first hour or so. Slowly it began to dawn on him that maybe he (and Jenkins, wherever he had gone,) were the only ones left alive.

  His parents lived in Bend, a little resort city over the Cascade Mountains at the foot of Bachelor Ski Area. He had managed to make the six-hour drive in just under twelve, using six different cars when he came upon areas of the road that were jammed with wrecks. He had simply left the car and hiked until he found another car on the other side of the blockage.

  All the way he hoped they had been outside the influence of what had happened, that he would find them alive and worried about him. As he got closer the evidence told him that would not be the case.

  He found his parents both dead, as well as everyone else in the small town. For an hour he had sat in the middle of the main intersection, with the light changing from green to red over his head, honking a car’s horn. The sound seemed impossibly loud, echoing off the buildings and the pine-covered mountains.

  No one came and told him to stop.

  He was alone. Really alone, and the thought scared him more than he had ever been scared before.

  The next few days were a blur. He had buried his parents next to his grandparents in the town’s cemetery. Then he had gone down to his favorite bar and dragged all the bodies out onto the sidewalk and sat them at tables he had put there, posing each body as if it was still alive and enjoying its drink.

  Then he had gone inside, alone, filled the top of the bar with bottles of booze, and got so drunk he couldn’t think.

  It was finally the smell of rotting human bodies that had driven him away from the town and out to a cabin ’way up in the Cascade Mountains, where he stayed for a long winter, waiting for Nature to clean up the mess.

  Then for a year he had wandered the Northwest, looking for anyone else alive, returning to Portland two years ago.

  The computer alarm kept beeping, getting louder as he entered the room.

  "All right, all right," he snarled. "I’m coming."

  He expected to see nothing on the monitor, and to have to rewind a tape to see what had triggered the alarm. He had set up the system of motion detectors two years ago. The sensors triggered cameras and ran off batteries that he recharged every six months. He had installed the system when he realized the lights from the generator running his penthouse apartment could be seen for miles around the city.

  And if anyone else was alive out there, he figured it would be better to know when they were getting close. The cameras surveyed some twenty different ways into the city. Deer triggered the alarms a couple of times a day—but once, six months earlier, a ragged insane-looking man armed with machine guns had come through, heading north.

  The man clearly did not bathe often, was dragging a pack in a wagon, and talked to himself constantly. No matter how much Toby had wanted another human back in his life, he couldn’t bring himself to approach the guy. The man was just too dangerous. Toby had watched him for two days with hidden cameras, but never let him know he was around.

  The man had done one good thing for Toby. He had proven that there were others out there, alive and surviving in some fashion. And ever since that day Toby had been trying to figure out where they might be.

  "All right," he said, dropping his nude body into the chair in front of his monitor. The motion had been on the old Interstate 5, heading south. Deer often went through there, since it was between the hills and the river.

  He flicked up an image from a camera he had hidden on a pole, expecting to see either deer, or nothing at all. The sight of a woman, standing on an overpass, shocked him to his very core.

  His fingers fumbled over the controls for a moment before he brought up the zoom.

  A woman, by herself!

  He wasn’t seeing things. She wore a black, sleeveless tee-shirt, jeans, and tennis shoes. She had short, brown hair, light skin, and a lean, muscled body. He stared at her image as she finished putting lotion on her arms and then took a drink of water. He would have been attracted to her even when everyone was still alive.

  As he watched, she headed off the overpass, a small rifle in her hand, walking with the assured gait of someone who had confidence to spare.

  He wanted to shout at the screen that he was here, that she should wait for him.

  It took only a moment before she was headed down the freeway toward town and out of his camera range.

  The moment she disappeared he felt a jolt of panic go through him. His hands scrambled over the massive control board he had set up for the security cameras. Finally he managed to activate the next camera, which covered a section of the old Interstate 5 south of town. For a long moment he thought he had lost her, but then she came around a large pile of wrecked cars and kept walking, right at him, as the motion-sensor alarm for that area started to ring.

  She was too good to be true, an impossible dream.

  He flipped off the alarm and sat back in silence, watching her stride toward him.

  This couldn’t be happening!

  Almost all of the entire population of the planet seemed to be dead, yet here was a woman walking right into his life.

  And just like back in his college days, he had no idea how to meet her.

  The rifle she carried so easily seemed to grow bigger.

  At least back in college, trying to meet a girl didn’t mean risking getting shot. But as he stared at this woman’s face, he had no doubt, that was a risk he was going to have to take.

  ~~~~~

  Carey kept her pace slow and easy in the hot sun as she headed down the freeway, moving in and around wrecked cars with their drivers still strapped behind the wheels, smiling skeleton smiles at her.

  She stared ahead at the big overpass and the signs directing traffic to the downtown area, or along the bridge and beyond to Seattle.

  Seattle. It seemed so far away. Still, if there was no one alive here that she could talk to, maybe she should take a look in Seattle some day.

  Maybe.

  Right now that seemed too far, too much to think about.

  She made herself focus on the city in front of her. It seemed so familiar, yet so alien. Ahead of her a half mile or so, the Marriott Hotel tower rose over the river. Her plan was to stay there, in one of the unoccupied rooms with a view. When she’d worked in town she’d never had a reason, or enough money, to stay there. It would be a treat.

  She would find a good room, set it up as a base for exploring the city, and maybe, if she had enou
gh nerve to see Sam’s body again, go back to her old apartment for some keepsakes. She planned on stocking the hotel room with food, maybe even get a portable generator in for electricity. But first of all she would have to check the water, make sure there was enough to last her for a time.

  Maybe with a little work, she could even make the place permanent. It hadn’t occurred to her until just that moment that she could have a place in the city, a place on the coast, a place just about anywhere in the world she wanted.

  After all, there was nothing to stop her.

  She moved along the off ramp that lead down to Front Street and then along the riverfront a dozen more blocks to the hotel. The grass along the river had turned to weeds, the sidewalks and streets were cracked and growing grass in places. But still the city had a beauty about it, with the blue river flowing through it, the mountains around it, and the green trees everywhere.

  The air smelled faintly of water and fish, and birds chirped and flitted from nests in the branches of the trees along the old park. She could see where they had stained the edges of buildings, building nests in windows.

  Two blocks short of the hotel, she sensed a movement off to her left. She turned, the rifle up and ready, her blood racing.

  A bird flittered away. She sighed and lowered the gun. "All right," she said out loud, "calm down and don’t go shooting every little thing that moves."

  "I’m very glad to hear you say that," said a deep, rich voice.

  She spun around, the rifle again up, her heart pounding so hard she thought it was going to jump right out of her chest.

  She found herself face-to-face with a man about her age, with brown, unruly hair, twinkling brown eyes, and a friendly smile. He had his hands raised in the air like prisoners in days of old. He had stepped out of the shadows near an office building and was no more than ten steps from her.

  She kept her gaze locked on his, the rifle pointed at his chest. She had hoped to find someone else alive, but she had never expected to—and she had certainly never expected to find someone so damn good-looking.

  "I’m not going to bite," said the man. His voice stayed level and didn’t shake, even though she could tell he was worried about the rifle. Then he laughed. "Sorry for the cliche. I didn’t know what else to say. I am unarmed and alone. In fact, until you showed up, I thought I was alone in the universe." Another smile. "Or at least the sovereign state of Oregon."

  She didn’t lower her gun, and he didn’t lower his arms. "How did you know I was here?"

  "Security cameras," he said, pointing up at the top of a pole on Front Street. "I have them on all the main thoroughfares. A person living alone can never be too careful. But to be honest, I was also hoping to find someone else alive, perhaps passing through."

  "And you sit all day and watch your cameras?" she asked.

  "Not hardly. In fact, you woke me when you stopped on the overpass. I have motion detector alarms."

  She could feel herself starting to relax just a little, and her little internal voice wasn’t screaming that this man was dangerous. She would have set up security cameras like that if she had known how.

  She forced herself to think and give herself time to calm down. One mistake, one slip, and she could find herself in a very bad situation. He was shorter than Sam had been, but still clearly very strong. She had to be careful, no matter how much she just wanted to lower her gun and hug this stranger and just talk to him.

  "So where do you live?" she asked.

  "The Baxter Building," he said. "Been there for two years, in the penthouse. How about you?"

  "On the coast," she said.

  He nodded. "Yeah, I was up in the Cascades, in the forest, until the smell cleared."

  "How did you survive?"

  "I installed the security system in a bank in Beaverton. I was down in the vault, but I have no idea why that protected me."

  "So, do you have a name?" she asked.

  "Toby," he said. "Toby Landel. An actual, native Oregonian, born and raised."

  She actually laughed at that, since something like that mattered only to Oregonians.

  "I’m Carissa Novak. People call me Carey—or the did, back when we had people. I’m Oregonian through and through,"

  It felt strange using her full name after four years. Strange, and yet somehow, normal, as if having and using a full name returned a little civilization to the world.

  "How about I cook us both breakfast?" Toby said. "My stomach is starting to sound like an earthquake, and I bet you haven’t had a good omelet since you left the coast."

  "Omelet?" she repeated, trying to hide her enthusiasm.

  "Yeah, real eggs and everything," he said. "Honest."

  "How? Here in the city?"

  He nodded, smiling as if he was very proud of having eggs. "It seems chickens survived whatever killed everyone. So I went out into the country and trapped some, including roosters, and set them loose in the Rose Garden."

  "You’re kidding!" she said. The Rose Garden was the big basketball arena where the Portland Trailblazers basketball team had played.

  "I’m not," he said, laughing again. "It does seem strange, now that I think of it. I just figured the seats would make great nests for them, plus it’s big enough to hold a lot of birds."

  She laughed at the idea. The Rose Garden as a chicken coop. How perfect! "What do you feed them? How many do you have?"

  He shrugged. "Every few weeks I scatter a truck-load of grain from sacks I get in a warehouse down by the river. Every month or so I trap some more birds and turn them loose in there. The population seems to be growing. I try to go get the eggs I can find every few days, but there are always more than I can use. I take a bird every few weeks for a special dinner. I bet I have five hundred birds in there now, if not more."

  "Amazing!" she said.

  "Thanks," he said, smiling. "I’d be glad to show it to you, right after breakfast—and I would love to have someone to talk to while I’m cooking."

  She stared at him for a moment. She had come back into town with the hope of finding someone else still alive, but she had never expected a great-looking guy who could raise chickens and cook.

  "All right, Mr. Toby Landel," she said, swinging her rifle up on her shoulder, but making sure her pistol was within easy and quick reach in her belt. "Let’s go see how good a cook you really are."

  The smile that lit up his face almost melted her right there in the street. She had been lonely for so many days and weeks and months and years, and clearly he had felt the same way.

  She moved beside him, matching him stride-for-stride, feeling just like a junior high girl faced with talking to a boy on a first date.

  She really hoped that she wouldn’t have to kill him.

  ~~~~~

  It had gone better than he had hoped. She hadn’t shot him. On top of that she had actually accepted his invitation to breakfast..

  It was also a fact that his cameras had not done her justice. Up close, her deep brown eyes and intense gaze melted him like no other woman had ever done before. Now granted, he hadn’t seen a live woman in four years, but he was pretty sure she would have had that effect on him even before everyone died.

  Now all he wanted to do was talk with her. He had not realized until he started speaking just how much he had missed interacting with humans.

  "This is the place," he said, his arm sweeping around the penthouse that no one else had seen in four years. "And that’s Buddy."

  Buddy was his big gray-and-white cat that had adopted him when he moved into this building. Now Buddy hated going out, loved sitting with him while he read, and was a great companion.

  Buddy walked up to Carey as she knelt down to pet him. "I’ve got two—Stingy and Betty."

  "I bet you miss them," said Toby. "How long have you been gone?"

  "Eight days," she said, petting Buddy as Toby went into the kitchen area and opened the refrigerator. He got out the eggs and some fixings.

  She stood and d
ropped her pack, putting her rifle on top of it. Then she moved over and looked at his kitchen. "Wow, you have everything in here!"

  "The advantage of not having to pay for anything," he said. "Feel free to look around while I get this started. The computer monitor room is up front in the corner, the bathroom is back there on the left."

  He watched as she hesitated, then decided to go ahead and look at his place. She poked her head into the computer room, then nodded. "You’re good at electronics, aren’t you?"

  "Not as good as I used to be when I worked with it every day," he said, breaking six eggs into a pan. "I’m afraid my omelets are basically eggs mixed with green peppers and onions from my rooftop garden, and some ham. I haven’t had the courage to try any mushrooms."

  "That sounds wonderful," she said, smiling at him as she ran her hand across the back of the chair he had facing the window. "This is some view."

  "No one seemed to be using the place, so I figured why not," he said.

  "I know that feeling. I’m using three different houses on the coast." She moved to the edge of the island kitchen and leaned on the counter. "You know, for four years I’ve been hoping to find someone alive, have someone to talk to, and now that we have met, I don’t know what to say."

  He stopped cutting and looked into her deep brown eyes. "I’m feeling the same way, to be honest. Like a high school kid afraid to talk to the girl in the chair beside him."

  She laughed. "I’m feeling more junior high."

  "I didn’t notice girls back then," he said. "I didn’t start paying attention until my sophomore year."

  For some reason that admission seemed to break the ice. He could feel it, and the sound of her light laugh filled the room.

  As he cooked, they went through their backgrounds, his in Bend, hers in Beaverton. He had been a year behind her in school, and for some reason, even though they were both at the University of Oregon at the same time, they had no memory of ever seeing each other.

  When they were done eating, and he had refused to let her help clean up, she asked if she could use his bathroom. When he agreed, and warned her about the hot water being a little too hot, she had smiled like he had given her a perfect Christmas present.