The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015

by Joe Hill

  Never thought I’d get into Trollope. I’ve read ten so far.

  Beats Tom Clancy. We take donations, you know.

  Once I get someone to lend me a horse and some saddlebags.

  Mmm.

  Listen, she says, Matilda, there’s a typewriter in the back office, right?

  Was last I checked.

  Is there paper for it? Ribbons?

  Matilda regards her with a faint smile.

  I’m working on a town history, she says. August of ’15 to the present. A record. There ought to be a record.

  An oral history.

  Not quite. Just a record. Written by me.

  Who’s going to read it?

  Why, she says, it’ll stay here. In the library. For the next generation. For history.

  Did I hear right? Did you say “the next generation”? I never took you for a Resurrectionist. Matilda sits up straight in the chair. There is no history, she says. That’s over now. No writing, only reading.

  But we have a story, too.

  We had a story. She rocks vigorously. Now we’re just poor, she says, outside time. Lumpen proletariat. The subaltern. Outside history. And let’s hope history never finds us again. We’ll be squashed like bugs on a windshield.

  Then a thought seems to strike her.

  Stay here for a moment, she says. She shoulders the sawed-off and disappears inside. Carter, she hears Matilda bellowing, no pissing out the window, please. Use the latrine. Matilda reappears with a thick padded envelope. Here, she says. Inside there’s a stapled stack of white paper, a manuscript.

  Shroud of the Hills

  a novel

  by

  Matilda E. Barnstone

  COPYRIGHT 2003

  Sent it to some contests, Matilda says. A few agents, one or two MFA programs. No bites. No notice. Kept getting afraid someone would steal my ideas. Anyway, you can use it.

  Use it how?

  Turn it over, dimwit. Use the back. That’s three hundred and thirty-two pages of blank paper.

  You don’t have another copy?

  What would I need it for? Leave it in the library and eventually some poor unfortunate soul would read the thing. Got pens?

  A whole box of ballpoints. Haven’t hardly used them since.

  Make me look good is all I can say.

  At home, later, after she’s weeded the tomatoes, harvested the last of the string beans, hauled a load of wash down to the stream and spread it out over the long grass, she sits on the porch with a jar of cold well water and begins:

  Before the last blackout the power had been on and off for weeks. I came up to Burlington in 2007 after a bad breakup in Brooklyn. It wasn’t until Brian Sterling died, in February of the first winter, that we knew we were doing it wrong.

  All that paper, glorious and terrifying. She riffles the stack through her fingers. She wonders where her laptop is. Heaped in the back of a closet somewhere, upstairs, with all the other dead things they weren’t able to cannibalize: the surge protectors and headphones, Nathan’s guitar amp, their digital cameras and printers, iPods, iPads, the Rumsons’ Tivoli stereo receiver and Harman Kardon speakers. Before End Times, she’d never written anything on paper longer than a single sheet. Even when she kept a journal her hand cramped up. In college, her writing tutor told her not to think essay, not to think paragraph, just think in thought bubbles like comic strips and type them in big letters, hitting print, print, print every time, then spread them out across the floor and let the essay appear.

  God, she says out loud, not for the first or the thousandth time, the way we built everything on waste.

  Now she feels she can’t afford a single wasted sheet. It ought to just come to her. Not because she’s such a genius. No, because she’s the only one, the town scribe, the voice of the people. The living and the dead.

  For the first few months, before November came and the snow started, you’d still have people rumbling into town in cars, pickups, motorcycles—especially motorcycles, because a gallon of gas went so much farther that way. One of the occupiers would climb up and clang the church bell with a hammer, bringing people running from every direction, skidding their bikes, banging strollers along the rutted sidewalks. Mic check would come the cry, and then the waves of news in little sentence bundles, tweets amplified in waves through the crowd.

  Manhattan is almost empty there are rats running down Broadway

  I’m just on my way to look for my kid in Burlington her name’s Shelby just started at UVM don’t know what it’s like up there

  Police station torched in Hartford; all the riot gear was stolen

  The Chinese are still flying planes into JFK.

  Cholera outside Boston, must have been in the water, all southern suburbs, hundreds dead in Belmont, Watertown

  FEMA set up all these orange tents in Springfield then disappeared

  In Albany there’s a warehouse full of Wonder bread, ration cards being issued

  I’ve got three bottles of iodine here, one drop for a gallon of water should be enough

  Met a guy in Portsmouth who had a basement full of batteries for his radio—said he could get only one station, and it was just the same crazy announcer every day, jabbering about a coup

  Look out for a woman with a beetle tattooed on her wrist

  I’m a doctor if you have spare antibiotics anything empty your medicine cabinets

  It was all so random, you might hear five tendrils of the same rumor in a week, each canceling out the last, and it was almost a relief when the cars and motorcycles stopped coming. People who lived out near the highway still reported seeing vehicles flashing by every now and again, but it was one a day, at most. There was talk of throwing up a checkpoint, a barrier, of collecting tax in some form, but once December started no one had time to think about it. All you heard was the smack of ax on wood. What did people do, she thought, in the places where the old houses had been torn down, where the split-level ranches had baseboard heat and there wasn’t a woodstove to be hauled in fifty miles? Thank God for Vermont and its fucking quote rustic unquote charm, Nathan used to say. Every house had a chimney, some two.

  Families moved in together that winter; couples learned to grapple in a twin bed or a single sleeping bag. She and Nathan piled up all the comforters in the house, every Boba Fett blanket from the Rumsons’ kids’ rooms, even the decorative handmade quilts from Mississippi that lined the second-floor hallway; it took her breath away, sliding under twenty pounds of thread and batting, but then she curled up against his shoulder blades, letting him take the weight. She’d never been much for spooning before, but it was a month for counting all your advantages. George Larson converted his barn into a smokehouse and slaughtered every alpaca, llama, and goat on his property, excepting the three best milkers and one buck, walking the piles of smoked meat through town in a wheelbarrow, taking anything he could get as barter: family portraits, Rambo knives, bales of cloth diapers, canned peas, stacks of old Rolling Stones.

  In the spring there were no reports of cars anywhere.

  She wonders what it would be like to see one again. After nearly two years. A car that moved, not a rusting carapace on blocks. Her own car, a ’99 Subaru, she’d traded to Dwight Yardley; he made it into a spare chicken coop.

  It was one of those tidbits you picked up in middle-school history: the Middle Ages ended when trade began, when roads were built—or rebuilt, the Roman roads—because merchants carried firsthand accounts from town to town, hamlet to castle. BET, she had never made the connection between movement and the news, between cars and information, but how she’d loved the drive to Brattleboro, back when she was temping at Dryvins Parker three days a week, and the richness of the FM signal that boomed through the car: You’re listening to All Things Considered. I’m ­Robert Siegel. And I’m Michele Norris. In Syria today, government reprisals claimed new victims, but first we’re going to take you to Botswana for a report on new ways to treat waterborne parasites. It was one of the g
reat pleasures of the age, to be safe and warm and dry—showered, deodorized, professionally clothed in espadrilles and a linen jacket, latte steaming up the radio display, taking in the world’s troubles three minutes at a time. That was luxury.

  Dwight Yardley finds her asleep on the porch the next morning, in the hammock he built for her, the manuscript pages held down by a smooth river stone. Guess that’s why they call it a sleeping porch, he says, setting down the milk crate with a solid clump. Protein, she thinks, swimming out of her dream. Protein has arrived.

  Didn’t think you’d be here this early.

  It’s high summer now. Got to be up with the rooster, then sleep through siesta. World doesn’t stop heating up just because we’re unplugged. Hotter every year since I can remember.

  They’ve had the same conversation a hundred times. Dwight is not imaginative in his ways. Thank God.

  Eggs this week, he says. Netted some crappie and smoked those. Mushrooms. Threw some more jerky in there, too. Know you’re sick of it, but still.

  Moose are scarce now, is what he’s saying. And wickedly labor-intensive. She’s never been on one of the group hunts, but Quentin went once, with five other guys. Too big to be hauled away by anything smaller than a pickup, a moose has to be field-butchered, apportioned to the team where it falls. In practice, Quentin says, this means standing around in an inch of blood-soaked snow, like something out of Fargo, working frantically to beat nightfall. He sharpened knives all day, that was his task, wiping them against his pants and scrubbing them across the whetstone. For dinner they roasted the heart; it was enough to feed all six of them. Then they hauled the whole bloody mass out, wrapped up and lashed in tarps to the saddles of their horses. It was like Cormac McCarthy, Quentin says, crossed with The Clan of the Cave Bear. But you did it, she said, you played your part. Didn’t that make you want to cross over and become a Vore, even for a second? And he said, Are you fucking kidding me? I had nightmares for a week. Eating moose still makes me a little queasy. We’ve advanced since the Pleistocene. That’s the whole point.

  Your appointment’s this week, she tells Dwight. Want to come inside?

  Can’t we do it out here?

  In the hammock? Only if you want to repair it.

  He grins at her. I was thinking of you leaning over the rail, he says. Got to looking at some of my old magazines.

  Oh, Dwight. You know I’m shy.

  No one’s around to see.

  Being so early, it takes him a while to get going, she has some massaging and cooing to do, even puts him in her mouth for a minute, but in the end, with her skirt hiked up over her hips, elbows digging into the flaking paint, he’s done before the third grunt. Sorry, he says, pulling up his Carhartts, that’s no way for a gentleman to behave.

  We can go again if you like, she says, spreading her knees and wiping unashamedly with her bandanna. I didn’t even get out the egg timer.

  Don’t tease. You know I’m good for one a day, if that.

  Bet you tell that to all the girls.

  She wonders how many there really are. The thing about arrangements is everyone has one, but nobody wants to talk about it. That’s what Quentin says. There’s no transparency in informal economies.

  She remembers what it was like, the transparent world. Walking into a 7-Eleven and looking down the row of coolers, all that glass, all that pure water. Had a vasectomy years back, Dwight said, the first and only time they talked terms, so nothing to worry about on that score. Plus it’s only been me and Angela. How was she to know that she wouldn’t be puking in a month, heavy with another Yardley in the spring? By demanding his medical records? Asking him to go to Rite Aid and get a pack of Trojans?

  We used to say “oppression” only when we talked about the government. Having to survive is also oppression. Necessity is oppression.

  Dignity is for people who have options.

  We were working so hard to get back to the land; then the land got us back and won’t let go.

  I would give anything to drink coffee out of a Styrofoam cup. Instant coffee with powdered creamer, the kind they gave out for free at car dealerships and funeral homes. I would give anything to throw something away and never see it again. I think about taking out the trash the way we used to at home, rolling it out to the curb, the trucks passing while we were at school. We are our garbage, Mom always used to say, that was her mantra, and I guess she was right in her way.

  In the first couple of weeks there were big piles of trash outside every house. All the stuff you couldn’t find another use for and couldn’t compost. Yogurt cups, torn trash bags, dirty diapers, hair-spray cans, paper towels. Sometimes you’d see a pile that was as high as your waist. Nathan said it was a purge, a cleanse. But you could just as well say that who we were went out with the empties. We will never get our selves back.

  In those days all the terms we had were metaphors. A desktop wasn’t a desktop. Mail wasn’t mail. Dial didn’t mean to use a dial. Ringtones didn’t actually ring—

  In the winter she dreams of forced-air heating, the whoosh of the furnace starting up, the rush through the vents, the toasty smell of radiators, and in the summer she dreams of AC: the blast of frigid air in your face when you turned the key in the car, the cool seeping through a new condo with central air and wall-to-wall ecru carpets, even the oily dampness of an old window unit in an apartment on Second Avenue with sheets over the windows.

  And then she thinks, That was the government. That was America. Air conditioning of the mind. We found that out, didn’t we? Bob Perl, the Royalton postmaster, hung around the town green in an orange FEMA vest for weeks after the first blackout, showing everyone a thick binder labeled “Disaster Response in Rural Communities.” It said that the National Guard would be there within twenty-four hours. There were pictures of tanker trucks, rows of trailers, pallets of MREs.

  This isn’t science fiction, Quentin says, because if it were we’d have the answers, we’d know what happened.

  My parents saved everything I ever wrote, all my school projects, my dioramas, my research reports on alligators and elephants. That was what mattered when I was a kid. Good at art. Good at music. Good at lacrosse. Good at Tae Kwon Do. They had a closet to store all my stuff and then it turned into a separate room, the room that was Nana’s bedroom before she died. Boxes and boxes, labeled “J. Summer Camp Projects 1995.” Of course they kept Peter’s things, too. But I was older; they were obsessive about me.

  As if they were auditioning me for Jewish sainthood or something.

  There was this band that everyone listened to in high school, this creepy metal band, and when I got to Holyoke no one had ever heard of them. It must have been some kind of Westchester cult thing. All their songs were about global warming and the end of the world. This band, they were called Into Another, and their stuff was mystical, insane vegan science fiction. Robot whales and ghost pirates and how we human beings are like the dinosaurs, outdated, redundant: grown too large for our environment—I’m not saying it all made sense, but at least they were ahead of their time. They had this one song that ended, “We are the last of the loved ones.”

  That’s it. We are the last of the loved ones.

  Professor Fuller used to say that romantic love was an invention of the Renaissance because it takes so many resources and so much leisure time. Adolescence itself was basically invented by the RAND Corporation for marketing purposes in the early fifties.

  They could afford to love me because Dad worked in Hartford screwing widows out of their husbands’ life insurance. Because Grandpa Stein got the government to declare eminent domain on the Norimco Plant before the EPA designated it a Superfund site. Peter laid it out for me the night he graduated from law school. We’re a family of gangsters, he said. I mean, it’s great that Mom got Tarrytown to do municipal compost, and it’s awesome that you’re doing whatever you do up there, but just so you understand: they did a lot of dirty deeds so you could be pretend poor. Isn’t that what peop
le call it now? Vermont is like Cuba, a little socialist island saved by huge infusions of cash from abroad.

  It hasn’t occurred to her to worry about Peter until now. A snapping turtle of a human being, a ridiculer, a fortress builder, with his Land Rover, his fancy skis, his JDate profile, his condo in McLean. She visited him there only once: an empty fridge, an elliptical machine facing a TV the size of a small barn, Shark Week playing endlessly on mute. The only certifiable yuppies in Royalton, the summer people, had stayed down in their houses on the far side of McIntosh Pond for months, until someone went down to check on them after the first frost and found them all starving, barricaded in their houses, convinced the townspeople were cannibalizing one another.

  No, she decides, he must be dead. Dead for ages. Huddled by the door, still clasping his sand wedge, waiting for the lights to come back on.

  Give me a break, she wants to say, rolling out of the hammock on an airless afternoon. The clanging of the church bell rolls across the silent valley in waves: it’s something out of The Sound of Music, something Bashoˉ would have written a haiku about. There hasn’t been a peep from the churchers since last year. She thought they’d left town. Too difficult to heat the place, for starters. But someone is up in that belfry banging away. It could be a fire. That’s her best guess. Or a new outbreak.