“Ooo! Yes, let’s!” Patrick dug out his backpack and retrieved the bottle of Smirnov. “How do you feel about Russian white?” he said, handing the bottle to Lindsay.
“Well, normally I’d hold out for a sloe gin fizz, but hell, if vodka’s all you’ve got...” She cracked open the cap and took a short swig. Her face twisted up in pain, and she fought to swallow the harsh liquor. “Gah!” she gasped, shaking her head. “I used to be a lot better at that.” She handed the bottle back to Patrick, who took a shot before passing it on to Ben.
“So! You’re a journalist,” Patrick said, crossing his legs casually. “There a big market for that?”
“Ha! Less than ever. Man, I thought we were a dying breed before M-Day.”
Ben took a thoughtful drink of the vodka. “But it has to exist in some form, doesn’t it? News still happens, people still need to communicate, word has to spread. Journalism still exists if there are people to record events.”
Lindsay looked at him in surprise. “Did you study journalism?”
“’Study’ is one word for it. ‘Enrolled in classes, then decided never to attend them unless blitzed out of my mind on Old Crow’ is another one.”
“That’s at least, like, 87 words,” Patrick pointed out.
“And here I thought you were probably just a racist, homophobic skinhead, but, in reality, you’re an almost somewhat partially educated man!”
Ben leaned closer to Patrick. “Is she making fun of me?”
“Yes, that is absolutely what’s happening right now,” he nodded. Ben frowned.
“No, you’re right. I’m sorry. You’re totally right. I’ve met people who’ve gone back to handwritten newsletters. Five years ago newspapers were on the brink of extinction; now the Internet is dead and the printed word reigns supreme. It’s really glorious, in that whole end-of-the-world-irony kind of way.”
“Did any of the major publications survive?” Ben asked. “I mean, obviously they’re not powering printing presses or anything, but I don’t know...is TimeWarner still ruining peoples lives from Columbus Circle? Is CNN still making wildly incorrect statements in 140 characters or less? Is the Associated Press playing telephone with correspondents on horseback?”
“You want to know if there are any big stories being covered?” she asked.
“Well, that’s nothing at all like what I asked, but sure. We’ll go with that. Are there?”
She smiled confidently and traced her finger in little circles on the armrest. “There may be one or two especially enterprising young writers out there working on extremely vital news stories.”
Patrick slapped his own armrest and said, “Okay, I’ll bite. Lindsay, are you one of the enterprising writers working on vital news stories, and, if so, what vital news story are you working on?”
Lindsay looked up at them and grinned. “I thought you’d never ask.
“I’d lived in Manhattan for a few years before M-Day. Well, technically I was in Astoria, but it was the same thing, especially as far as my family in Dubuque was concerned. I definitely worked in Manhattan, though, eeking out a living at the New York Post as an entry-level beat writer. It was a stupid beat, really, covering the ridiculous world of American collectibles (yes, there’s a beat for that), and the pay was laughable. Still, I was the only collectibles reporter in the galley, so I never fought for inches when there was a story worth covering, which, yeah, okay, didn’t happen often. A feature story every time a new stamp was printed, fluff pieces on idiotic muscle head car shows on Coney Island, the occasional actual news coverage of a rare coin heist, God, at least those were engaging. The comic cons, ugh, they were the worst. All those fat nerds dressed up in latex and slobbering over Lucy Lawless. Let’s just say it wasn’t the investigative life I’d fantasized about at J-School.
“The beat did give me an opportunity or two, though. The editorial powers that be noticed my knowledge of antique pennies when they needed a new angle on the Peruvian copper mine disaster a few years back. Remember that? I’d written a story, okay, an admittedly mediocre story, about the potential impact on the penny, but that story had led to some really good inside info about the mine collapse itself, and when the rumors started flying that maybe the owner had set charges to bring down the mine, guess who they wanted to go investigate! Me! Well, me and three other writers, and two interns, but whatever! I was one of them! They even flew me to Peru, can you believe that? To some jungle village, and I had a translator, a photographer, the whole shebang. I’d written one hell of a piece on the disaster, one hell of a piece. I’d actually gotten a source to confirm that the owner was a documented shyster and amateur explosives enthusiast. It was a hell of a piece! Maybe you guys read it?” Patrick and Ben shook their heads. “Oh. Well, it was practically nominated for a Peabody.” Goddamn that Tillie.
“But anyway, most stories weren’t like that. Most were about obsessive introverts who couldn’t give quotes for shit. Still, it was the Post. It’s not like I was working for some art house basement press in the Bronx. Journalism was a tough nut to crack, and I cracked it. Maybe not wide open, but a little, around the edge. With hard work and determination and blah blah blah, I’d be hitting the editorial desk by middle age. Not too shabby!
“Then M-Day happened, and of course, everything changed.”
“Of course.”
“Of course!”
“Of course. I was in the newsroom when word of the Flying Monkeys started zipping around the office. At first we thought it was another stupid, baseless terrorism threat, ‘Oh my God, we’re bombing you, America, blah blah blah,’ and no one really paid much attention. We got those calls all the time. But just after 3:00, Jimmy Wilson, this old, connected pro, received confirmation from a source in Washington. ‘Confirmation’ is a word you didn’t just use in the newsroom. There was an attack coming, and, worst of all, it wasn’t just imminent, it was literally happening at that moment. There were airborne missiles on their way. So we did what everyone else probably did. We lost our shit.”
Patrick raised his hand. “I lost my shit.”
Ben nodded. “I scattered my shit all over the place.”
“There’s no shame in lost shit. Please continue.”
“Well, someone flipped the main newsroom monitor to ForceFeed, it’s the Armed Forces Data and Information Feed, this pretty direct broadcast of info from joint military chiefs, right? They only used it to transmit information about national safety, but it was so damn censored, we usually didn’t bother with it. I’d actually never seen it live before; the last time they turned it on was 9/11. I was still in Iowa then. It came through now, though; they were just broadcasting this huge mess of info.
“We couldn’t believe it! The satellite video feed was literally full of these streaking white lines. Tens of thousands of missiles screaming through the air on their way to the U.S., all launched from Jamaica. Fucking Jamaica! Everyone knew it had to be a mistake, right? Some anonymous hackers playing hell with the live stream. No one had expected Jamaica to funnel its tourism funds into chemical weapon research and development, and, Christ, the sheer number of missiles! After everything was over, I talked to this one guy, this uptight military analyst, kind of a jackass, but anyway, he said Jamaica’s biological warfare program must have been initiated in ‘63 or ’64, right after they won their independence. How they found the resources to build a world-ending arsenal of chemical weapons, where they stored them, how they kept them secret, hell, why in God’s name they designed them to look like fucking monkeys, who knows? No one knew anything, we just couldn’t believe it!
“The Post building didn’t take a Monkey, but I saw one slam into Rockefeller. They were small--I don’t think many people remember that. Did you guys see any? Up close, I mean?” They both shook their heads.
“Not really,” Patrick said. “I didn’t know what was
happening ‘til the rockets had hit, and our building was clean.”
“They were these small little rockets, so it’s not like they took entire buildings down, obviously. The one I saw ripped a hole in the Rock big enough to drive a dump truck through, but it’s not like the city was gonna get leveled. So we’re watching, just totally open-mouthed, and this rocket slams into the side, and we’re all scared shitless, and no one thinks, ‘Hey, I should duck and cover,’ but we should have, ‘cause, shit, they could have been nuclear for all we knew. Not that ducking and covering would have helped much then anyway, but still. You’d think that would be your reaction, right? But we just watched, and when it hit the building, that giant yellow cloud just exploded right out of it. We thought it was fire smoke, ‘cause fire makes yellow smoke, right? Yeah, I know. Real brilliant. But we didn’t know what to think. And rockets were screaming across the sky, you could hear them slamming into buildings all down Fifth Ave. Once we heard this massive shattering sound, like someone had just broken a window over our heads. I think that was Times Square.
“Then the yellow clouds were everywhere, thick and bright and weird, like a nuclear Big Bird was molting dust. So weird. Then it was in our ventilation system, and the whole newsroom was covered in Monkey dust. I should’ve been terrified, I don’t know why I wasn’t, I guess it was more confusing than anything. What did I know about chemical warfare? I mean, I know it now, you see a puff of weird-colored dust puff out from a bomb, you get the bejesus out of Dodge. But back then, I remember thinking, ‘Huh. This is so weird.’ Like I was numb, you know? I was covered in this dust, and I sneezed a few times, but otherwise, I was fine. What the hell, right?
“Remember how no one screamed? From the Monkey dust, I mean. People screamed their damn heads off when the bombs came, or just out of sheer confusion. Manhattan was a fucking nightmare, cars piling up in the streets, and eight million people jamming the sidewalks. It was trash day in midtown too, so you had all these people walled in by garbage bags, trying to shove their way through. I saw it all from the window; there was this one woman who got trapped under a garbage avalanche. I don’t know if she got smothered or if the dust got her, but she didn’t get up. It was awful,” she said. She paused, chewing on her bottom lip. “What was I talking about?”
“Screaming,” Ben said. “Specifically, the lack thereof.”
“Oh! Screaming. Yeah, remember that? I guess the chemical ate through the vocal chords too quickly. It all acted so fast. So I’m standing at the window, watching the chaos outside, just in total awe, you know? I didn’t notice people around me were dropping dead; they weren’t making any noise. It was probably three or four whole minutes before I turned to say something to my friend Nikki. I’ll never forget that, that milky blood goo pouring out of her nose and her ears, then just out of her pores, all of a sudden, like someone had dumped a bucket of Big Mac sauce on her head. Her eyes, geez, they just popped, and she was clutching her stomach, it got all distended, started sloshing around. What kind of powder liquefies a person’s organs? Who would make something like that? It makes me sick, just thinking about it. And no one screamed. They just...melted.
“Anyway, later, when the smoke cleared, so to speak (not literally, of course), there was practically no one left in New York. I mean, no one. They say 95% of the U.S. population died as a result from the attacks. In New York, it was easily over 99%. Easily. Manhattan was a ghost town. I stayed there for three months after M-Day, three whole months, and I literally saw seventeen other survivors. Seventeen, out of eight million. I’m sure there were more around the island and holed up in their apartments, but you get the idea. I doubt there were more than a few thousand, citywide.
“Which leads me to my story. I came across it by accident, really. So much had happened, and work was the furthest thing from my mind. The entire world had ended.” She snapped her fingers. “Just like that. Just 90 minutes, and it was over. I remember on my way out of the Post building that day, I passed this huge office full of Internet servers, and there was smoke just pouring out from under the door. Not Monkey dust, legitimate fire smoke. Turns out the super ventilating fans actually helped suck the dust into the server room. Brilliant, right? The servers got jammed, overheated, and basically melted, just like the people. And the streets were jammed with cars and rubble, there were sticky remains everywhere, you couldn’t take a step without having to pull your shoe free of the goo, it was awful. So I wasn’t thinking about work, not at all.
“I joined this little survival camp of eight other people. I didn’t know any of them, we just came across each other, but we figured it was smart to stick together. Hell, we didn’t know what was going on, if we were about to be invaded by Jamaicans, or attacked by zombies, or who knew what else? Safety in numbers, though, right? So the nine of us stuck together for a few months. You get in a group of strangers like that, it’s not long before you’re making the old small talk...old habits...and someone started asking where everyone was from. There was this middle-aged couple, Jan and Harlan, they were from La Crosse, Wisconsin. There was an actress from Baton Rouge, a stock broker from Sikeston, Missouri, a PR guy from outside Davenport, a musician from Memphis, this woman from Hannibal, Missouri, I’m not sure what she did. Then there was a waitress from Eudora, Arkansas, and I’m from Dubuque. So what, right? It was all polite nods and ‘Oh, I’ve heard nice things about Baton Rouge.’ Three months passed, and I didn’t think any more about it, ‘til some of us decided to split off and venture out of New York. It was pretty obvious by then that no one was coming to get us. The waitress made some joke about all of us visiting each other in our hometowns ‘when this is all over.’ It’s a stupid idea, but you find encouragement in the dumbest things sometimes. So we all said sure, it’s a date. I even scrounged up an atlas from a newsstand and marked the towns. When I was done, we all looked at it, I even had to double check with everyone about the geography, it was so weird. All eight towns more or less lined up in a straight vertical line running the length of the Midwest. We were all originally from the same longitude. And I’m like, what are the odds?
“I set out the next morning, headed I don’t know where. West, mostly, to try to see if I could make it home. Out of curiosity, I asked everyone I met along the way where they were from. Where they were born. They’d tell me, and I’d mark it on the map. St. Louis. New Orleans. Quincy. Cape Girardeau. West Memphis. Every single person I met was from the exactly same vertical line on the map! I mean, geez, look at this thing!” She pulled a dirty, torn booklet from her bag and flipped it open to a heavily marked page. Small red dots covered the entire Midwest. “There’s a river of red running from Minneapolis to the Gulf! You guys, I think that every single survivor of the apocalypse was born and raised along the Mississippi River.”
“Oh, come on,” Ben said. “That’s ridiculous. Every single one?”
Lindsay nodded. “Every single one.”
Patrick turned to the Red Cap who was still standing at the rear entrance of the car. “Say, chief! Where are you from? Originally?”
“Dakota, Minnesota.”
“I like it. It rhymes. Is it near the Mississip?” The Red Cap nodded. Patrick slapped the armrest. “Proof! Irrefutable proof! We’re all from Big Muddy.”
“How does that even make sense?” Ben asked.
“Exactly! And that’s the focus of my story! I’ve spent the last year working my ass off to find one single survivor who didn’t grow up within fifty miles of the Mississippi. I’ve met thousands of people. Thousands. They’re all from the river area. The train has been great, I’ve ridden out to L.A., and there’s another operational line there that goes up to Seattle. The farther you get from the Midwest, the less people there are, and all transplants.”
Patrick looked deep in thought. “So what, something in the water made us all immune?”
Lindsay clapped her hands together in delight. “Exactly!
”
“It would’ve had to have been something that made it through the various filtration systems,” he said, his eyes starting to come to light. “Let me take a look at that map.” Lindsay handed it to him, and he traced his finger to the northern-most dot of red. “What’s this place?”
“That’s Maiden Rock, Wisconsin.”
“So the survivors start there,” Patrick murmured. “Whatever went into the water must have dumped in just upriver.”
“If that really is the northernmost origin of survival,” Lindsay pointed out. “Who knows how many survivors are out there, I’ve only met so many.” She was testing him, but she couldn’t help it.
“Yeah, but if you go too far, you hit Minneapolis-St. Paul. That’s a pretty big metropolis, odds are, with your sample size, you’d find someone who grew up in that region.”
She beamed. “You know, it took me almost a whole week to reason that out. I mean, it’s just a theory, but it makes sense.”
“You could say it holds water,” Ben said, grinning. Patrick and Lindsay did not grin. “You know. ‘Cause it’s about a river. Holds water? Whatever, screw you guys.” He took another slug of vodka.
“Quiet, Ben, the grown-ups are talking.” Patrick handed the map back to Lindsay. “Have you been up there yet?”
“Yep, last month.”
“What’d you find? Please tell me there’s a hunched over bald man in a black cloak who dumps toxic green waste into the river once a day and periodically gets his ass kicked by a green mulleted superhero,” Patrick said, his fists clenched in excitement.
“Did you just mash up Smurfs and Captain Planet?” Ben asked.
“I did! You got it! High five!” They slapped hands.
“You guys are so weird,” Lindsay observed. She shook her head. “Anyway, there are four big industrial buildings on the river between Maiden Rock and St. Paul, a plastics factory, an ironworks, a computer hardware factory, and a freakishly large undertaker operation.”
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