First New Year's After the Apocalypse

by Jessica Payseur

  “Maybe it’s the wrong Rose Matthews,” said Wade, but Jaxxon shook his head.

  “The name before hers was her boyfriend. It’s her.”

  She was dead. But though they stayed by the radio while the names were read through two more times, Maddy’s name did not come up.

  “IN TOWN for the night?” asked a voice to Wade’s right, and he turned to see an older, brown-skinned woman climbing over a twisted heap of scrap that had to have once been a car of some sort.

  “Town?” asked Wade, willing his words to not sound so desperate. He’d finished the last of his water hours ago and was seriously considering the odds he’d be dying somewhere in the middle of nowhere, no one the wiser for it. He hadn’t yet progressed to cursing Jaxxon for his role in it all.

  “Yeah, you are,” she said. “Come on. Keep three feet away from me.”

  Wade didn’t ask. He didn’t care, really, as long as she knew the way to water. It would be good if the place had food too, since he was running low.

  The sky was completely dark when they reached the town, which looked like it hadn’t been all that large before it went to hell. It had seen at least one tornado, and as they walked through it, Wade could make out people, sometimes families, living in various rooms and nooks. The woman led him to a building that somehow still seemed to have a functioning water system and pointed to a jar full of coins and bills.

  “How we pay to keep the water running,” she said, and Wade added a couple bills before filling up his bottles.

  “Where can I sleep?” he asked. She shrugged.

  “Have any food?”

  Wade held back a sigh and gave her a packet of peanut butter crackers. She pointed him in the direction of what she claimed was the safer section of the town and went back home with whatever she had salvaged off the debris in the road. Wade found what looked like a secure enough place and settled down, thinking about survival.

  He’d had to cut Jaxxon off or he would have drunk the entire bottle of brandy the night they’d heard Rose was dead. Wade half carried him to bed too, Jaxxon stumbling in Wade’s arms into the house and back to the bedroom. Wade stripped off Jaxxon’s wet clothes and rolled him into bed. He stayed up until the pockets of services aligned and he could get on the Internet.

  “That wasn’t all a nightmare, was it?” asked Jaxxon when he finally woke the next day. He groaned, hungover, but rolled over in bed to accept the mint tea Wade had made him. Coffee was for special occasions only now, but mint grew like weeds in all the rain.

  “Rose is really dead,” said Wade. He slid into bed and wrapped an arm around Jaxxon. “I waited for the Internet and checked. She was at work. I can’t find any information about Maddy. I checked Rose’s relatives—also listed as dead.”

  Jaxxon said nothing for a while, then drank his tea completely and set the empty mug aside. Wade assumed he was in shock.

  “Maddy’s still down there,” said Jaxxon at last.

  “Jaxx….”

  “Did you charge my phone?” asked Jaxxon, struggling out of Wade’s embrace and then out of bed. Wade sighed, followed him to the bathroom, and leaned against the doorframe.

  “Yes,” he said. “But you should take it easy today.”

  “Screw that,” said Jaxxon, finishing up and grabbing a pair of boxers on his way out of the bedroom. He then proceeded to spend the entire day calling around to hospitals, to emergency centers, to Maddy’s daycare, searching for her. Wade let him be.

  He let Jaxxon be the next day too, and the day after that, and again, until Wade woke one morning to a knock on the door from a neighbor who also brought products to the farmers’ market, chickens and eggs, mainly, and herbs.

  “He’s not dead, is he?” she asked. Wade swallowed. Everyone he knew had grown too comfortable with death. He hesitated.

  “No. I—the hurricane cut off contact with his daughter.”

  “Hurricane?” asked the neighbor, but she didn’t look remotely interested. Wade sighed.

  “I’ll get him back to hunting.”

  “Right, well, tell him Jeff down at the food pantry says it’s fine at the moment, harvest is coming in, but if he’s not going to be able to provide long-term, Jeff’s going to have to train one of the kids, and he’d rather start that now.”

  “Jeff’s asking about you,” said Wade, returning to bed. He wondered whether there was time for sex before kicking Jaxxon’s ass out of bed and getting him back to work. But Jaxxon rolled over, and when Wade touched him, he was tense.

  “She’s really gone, isn’t she?” he asked. No place had indicated they knew anything about Maddy, and yet Wade couldn’t bring himself to say the words.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered instead, and Jaxxon pushed Wade’s hand away.

  LIGHTS, NOISE, shouts. Wade woke confused, drones buzzing through the air above him, whirling red-and-blue lights around him. For a moment he thought he’d overslept and it was Christmas, and then his senses came to him.

  “Hands up,” voices were saying. Cybernetically enhanced police enforcement swarmed the town, lights flashing on their helmets. They were well armed. People churned around them, running away or seeking cover. Someone stood up and shouted.

  “Go away! We don’t need you here!”

  “Reports of drugs through here,” said an enhanced cop, voice projector making their words sound gravelly and mechanical. Wade shuddered. When did this become normal? He’d forgotten. It had just happened. And there were far fewer of them back home in Wisconsin.

  Wade collected his things, conscious of the drones zipping around, circling the town from above. Logically he knew he couldn’t just run off. They had heat sensors—the cops did too—and the drones could shoot him down. But he didn’t want to stick around for whatever was going to happen here, not when he could see a cybernetically enhanced cop ripping apart what remained of a building to get at a person. Wade’s mind didn’t allow him to use logic. He ran.

  He was almost surprised when the drone that followed him peeled off and returned to the town rather than cut him down, but not by much. Fractured government using drones that could scan and identify a person also knew a thing or two about you, and Wade was guilty of walking along the interstate, not anything associated with this town. He only stopped running when the fear passed, and then the guilt took over, but he shook his head. If he had stayed, he couldn’t have done anything anyway.

  That feeling of being unable to do anything was a detestable one.

  He hadn’t truly felt it until he’d been with Jaxxon, and he’d thought he’d felt it when the superbugs arrived, when what remained of the Wisconsin government passed new laws and cracked down on them. But no. Real helplessness was seeing the man he cared about completely eaten up by the loss of his daughter, by not knowing. Wade hadn’t been able to stand it.

  “Think you can get any bills for these?” Jaxxon would ask, bringing him shit he’d pulled out of his car, or old expired pills, or extra spoons and other utensils from the kitchen. Wade tried to be patient.

  “Doubt it,” he said. “And I don’t make good bargains anyway, Jaxx, you know that.”

  “You know anyone who’ll pay me to help them in the garden or hauling shit?”

  “Not for bills,” said Wade, focusing on stirring his mead. He’d gotten his hands on a small supply of honey and was fermenting it the old-fashioned way, water and honey and air, a clean bucket. He had a large glass jug and airlock for later. When he looked up at Jaxxon he saw a man so confused, so broken, that he stopped what he was doing and pulled him closer. “Hey,” he said. “It’s fine. We’re fine.”

  Jaxxon pulled away, looking angry.

  “I’m going to need the money. We’re going to need it.”

  Jaxxon didn’t say why and Wade didn’t ask, but he knew. Jaxxon grew distant, kept scrounging for things to trade. He began bringing home more paper money for meat than other items, and Wade had to scrape together eggs for the week or other supplies more often than not. />
  “Those done?” asked Jaxxon as Wade was pouring his mead into old clean wine bottles. Wade nearly spilled the alcohol all over, startled.

  “Yeah,” he said, then, “You need to get laid.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’re not, and I’m on edge. We haven’t since the hurricane.”

  Jaxxon ignored him, instead picking up a screw cap and twisting it on a full bottle.

  “You’re fine figuring it out alone.”

  “Yeah, but I like fucking you.” Wade filled four and a half bottles and went to check on his second batch of mead. Jaxxon trailed him, gaze wandering around the basement. “That was almost two months ago.”

  “How good is this mead?”

  “We’ll share the half bottle tonight,” said Wade, deciding his second batch could stand to ferment a while longer. When he turned back to Jaxxon he saw him frowning at the bottles. “What?”

  “Or we could sell it with the rest. Half-price.”

  “Well, I wanna try it,” said Wade. “Let me honey wine you and dine you.”

  “You could get cash for these. Everyone likes alcohol.”

  Wade frowned at Jaxxon, who was pointedly ignoring him. At first Wade had been all right leaving Jaxxon be, allowing him to work through his grief, but after so many weeks he just wanted to get naked with him again and get off, hard.

  “You’d sell everything we have,” said Wade. He took the half bottle from Jaxxon and set it aside, pulled Jaxxon to him. Wade’s kiss was not returned. “Jaxx. We have to keep going.”

  “With enough money we can get down there,” said Jaxxon. He glanced at the mead, as though that could make them rich. Wade almost laughed in his face.

  “You want to move to Florida.”

  “They never found her body.”

  “They never found her alive either,” said Wade, releasing Jaxxon. He was frustrated. Jaxxon called every week, searching, finding nothing. “You have to let her go.”

  “Maddy’s still down there, Wade,” said Jaxxon, words firm. Wade gaped at him. All this time he’d thought Jaxxon had been working through his loss, and instead he’d been plotting.

  “You can’t just move all our shit across the country anymore.”

  “Why not? Rose did it. We just need the money for—”

  “For what, Jaxx? Have you seen a big electric-powered moving van anywhere? Because that’s what we’d need. And we’d have to pray that the roads would be clear and we could buy a charge every time we needed it. Have you researched the laws here or there? Do we have to pay a fee to be allowed to live there? States have been passing weird shit.”

  Jaxxon stared at him blankly.

  “Rose did it,” he said, as though undoing it would be so simple. Wade wanted to scream at him but forced himself to pull Jaxxon close instead.

  “That was ages ago,” he whispered into Jaxxon’s ear. He tried to not feel sick that only nine, ten months ago constituted ages. Jaxxon pulled away.

  “She can’t be dead,” he said, but his voice was hollow.

  HE MOSTLY stayed away from little towns after that. If he needed water, if he met someone friendly, Wade would go in and refill, but he slept away from groups of people. It felt safer. He’d heard some people died in that raid. He’d heard no drugs were found. He didn’t want to hear any more tales of woe, not when he dreaded what he’d find when he finally got to Florida.

  Some of the roads got clearer. Wade bummed a ride, and another, and another, until he was finally passing the border into Florida in a car with a mother and her two kids. They were black and he couldn’t imagine why they felt safe picking him up, but he gave them his last packet of gummy bears.

  “Where are you headed?” the woman asked when he got out.

  “Looking for hurricane refugees,” he said, and trudged off in the direction she pointed as she drove away. Pressing on. He’d been doing that from the start. Going through the motions that needed doing for survival, continuing on. He’d been wanting to change that with Jaxxon, turn what they had into something more than just scraping together the will to keep going after the Apocalypse, but after the hurricane, the promise of anything more was just pain to Jaxxon.

  They’d had sex again after a while, of course. Wade eventually initiated, starting with kissing long, deep, gently, harshly, until he found what Jaxxon responded to. They’d had the mead after all, after Jaxxon gave the what-the-hell go-ahead. Wade was reminded of the night he’d driven Jaxxon home, so distant now it could have happened generations ago.

  The mead tasted good on Jaxxon’s lips, sweet still from the honey, but it had been strong enough to get a buzz. Wade felt calm as he pulled off Jaxxon’s clothes, slowly, then his own. He pushed Jaxxon to the bed and straddled him, kissing still, enjoying the feel of Jaxxon’s hands as he grabbed Wade’s ass, tenderly at first, then greedily. Jaxxon thrust himself up so Wade could feel him pressing against his ass.

  “You want it over fast?” asked Wade, interpreting Jaxxon’s motions as impatience.

  “I want something normal,” he said, and shifted position. When Jaxxon took Wade into his mouth, tugged and rolled Wade’s balls, he didn’t argue. He didn’t try to draw it out either, letting Jaxxon work his magic until Wade couldn’t hold it in any longer and came, gasping, kneeling on the bed.

  Immediately Jaxxon rolled him onto his back and reached for the lube. They’d run out of condoms a while back and, when they hadn’t been able to find any anywhere, gave up. It wasn’t safe, but nothing was safe any longer. Wade had decided he had to simply trust that Jaxxon would have told him if he wasn’t clean.

  Jaxxon was surprisingly gentle, running his hands along Wade’s sweaty skin in a caress before pulling him down on his cock. Wade relaxed, allowed himself to enjoy Jaxxon’s motions, the feel of him inside. From his position on his back, he could watch Jaxxon’s expression as he came, and despite everything, the rough time they’d been having, he realized he felt closer to this man than he had with anyone before. They had something more than intimacy. They had survival.

  WADE DIDN’T know which town he started at, but at some point he began asking after Maddy. People shook their heads at him mainly, having heard his sad story over and over again from everyone they’d met. Everyone had lost someone, and who wasn’t looking for hope in someplace like this?

  The weather was hot, even in mid-December, and Wade drank all the water he could get his hands on, prayed every time he took a piss behind a building a drone wouldn’t catch him at it. He’d been warned by residents that Florida was very strict on that sort of thing. They would tell him they’d never seen Maddy before, wish him luck, and give him a tip on how to not get himself arrested or shot, and at night Wade found himself trying to remember how life was before all this.

  He finally got the courage to ask a cop. With their vast array of data and facial recognition abilities, Wade hoped the picture of Maddy he had would be enough information to go on, even if it was outdated by over a year.

  “Hey,” he said, waving one down along a patrol. The cybernetically enhanced police officer moved over, helmet down, and Wade wished he could believe the person inside the suit was still human.

  “Yes,” said the voice, gritty, unreal. “Do you have an incident to report?”

  “No,” said Wade, pulling out Maddy’s picture. “I’m looking for this girl. Do you have any idea where she—”

  He stopped as the cop turned from him and went about normal business. Too many people probably asked for help finding someone. Wade wasn’t surprised he wasn’t going to get help here, but he didn’t have to be pleased about it. He swore under his breath.

  The cop turned back.

  “Turner, Wade P.,” said the enhanced officer, and Wade froze. His brain screamed he should run. “Thirty-five years. Former bartender. 8801 West Badgertree—”

  Wade’s feet caught up with his brain and he bolted. Whatever that was, it wasn’t good. For a terrifying moment he thought the cop would simply shoot him
down—he’d been cautioned about that too—but apparently he wasn’t interesting enough because, when he finally stopped running and turned around, he was alone.

  Panting, he flopped down in the shade of a building to stop the world from spinning. He could stand to drink more water. He could stand to eat something. He was shaken from the thought the cop had been accessing his information, including Jaxxon’s home address, indicating everything about him was up-to-date. Somewhere locked up in the police force was enough information about Maddy for Wade to find out what happened to her.

  Damn, he was hungry.

  He rummaged through what was left of his food but didn’t want to eat any of it yet, considering how hard he’d found it to come by. It was easier to buy a meal at a shitty café in a town than to find items he could haul around without them going bad. Getting to his feet, Wade moved off in search of shelter instead, trying not to think about his hunger.

  Food. By the time November had come around, everything was harvested and put up, and the people who knew how to can traded with people like Jaxxon who could get meat. Somehow deer still thrived despite everything, and the main worry was keeping it good long enough in a refrigerator that only got jolts of electricity.

  Wade had begun selling his mead, for bills as Jaxxon wanted, although when he noticed Jaxxon was also selling them he made it a point to hide a few bottles. He wanted them to have something to drink for Christmas, Thanksgiving.

  “Nobody’s having Thanksgiving this year,” said Jaxxon when Wade wondered aloud what they’d cook. “It’s too depressing. There won’t be enough food to last if we eat everything now.”

  “Not even a community dinner?” asked Wade, shocked. “Some of our food will go bad if we don’t eat it.”

  But everyone he asked seemed to be skipping it this year as well. Too many families had been torn apart. It was so much work and nobody quite knew how long the harvest would last. Being the first since the Apocalypse, people would rather be secure than hungry. Wade had been reluctant about that.