Asimov's SF, December 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “I remember that night. Sure.”

  “Do you ever still think about that?” She stepped forward. “All that stuff we talked about?”

  He nodded and said through tight lips, “You weren't ready for a relationship.” The words had a dead sound, as though he had repeated them to himself so many times that the meaning had worn off like paint.

  “I wasn't. Then. I mean, we were in high school.” She took a deep breath. “Do you ever still feel those things? Like you told me?”

  Even before he faced her she saw pain in his face, at the corner of his eye and in the tightening of his jaw. He took hold of her shoulders without drying his hands, and the warm water soaked through her dress and trickled down the backs of her arms. With relief and terror she let herself fall into the vision she had crafted, that delicate potentiality in her soul. Derrick was kind and even-tempered. He knew how to fish and hunt. Above all, he was fit, dependable. He could teach Tom how to hunt and maintain a rifle. He would be patient with Emily. She dared, finally, to picture the image that made her vision complete: his strong, safe body holding Maya in its arms. Relief intensified to a pain that stung her eyes.

  “I'm getting married,” he said.

  If he were not holding her, she would have fallen. His fingers bit her arms.

  “My dad set it up.” The sentences fell on her as methodically as hammer blows. “She's a good girl. She's from Torrington, her family runs the trucking station there. They're nice people. We're making a deal with them, to get supplies up from the harbor.” With soft consideration that made her want to beat his chest, strike his face, he explained in a rush, “Those kinds of connections could be really good for the town. We could make this place a trading hub, Angela. It's a ... a smart match.”

  Again the words built up around her, hard and reasonable as a fortress. She shoved him thoughtlessly, twisting like a fox in a trap.

  “Angela!”

  The sound of her name died on the air behind her as she ran from the kitchen, three syllables over-articulated and alien, as automatic and empty as a word in a prayer.

  * * * *

  Angie sat under a birch tree on a hill outside town, holding her bottle of soda tightly to keep her hands from shaking. From here, seen through stalks of milkweed and milling gnats, the bustle of the market, the gray bulk of the hospital, the strand of gray smoke rising from the chimney of Toskie's taphouse, were small tokens of humanity in a field of ruins and leaves. Their smallness made them seem invulnerable, somehow, remote and safe from the world like stars.

  She gripped her soda bottle tightly, consoled by its smooth artificiality, the optimistic label with its manicured design. Cases of the stuff came from warehouses scattered around the state. The soda was inevitably flat but had become one of life's chief luxuries, not least through its association with the giddy consumption of the past. Derrick was right, trade was vital, and for trade you needed strong alliances among communities. His marriage had been a good choice.

  But when she sipped her soda those practical reflections dissolved. The sweet taste was like a distillation of another world, her mother's world. What would her mother say about Derrick's choice? About the world that had forced his choice? At thirty-six, Angie's mother had been an active, outdoorsy woman bouncing around the country as a programmer and consultant, wandering in and out of marriages as freely as she changed jobs. When a job bored her, she quit and got a new one. When a relationship went sour, she found a new lover. Even after the Crisis, she had maintained her cavalier attitude. It was an adventure, like a power outage on a grand scale, and it brought out her best quality. Not pragmatism, not dynamism, as the people who worked with and married her might have guessed, but an uncompromising, almost ruthless confidence. She had retained the glory of a child, a conviction that the world owed her joy. Her chief emotion, consequently, had been a kind of exultant rage. Rage at the husbands who disappointed her, rage at the jobs that bored her, rage at the purchases and vacations and—yes—the children that failed to instantiate her primal dreams. Rage at the Crisis and, finally, at the rotting porch steps that gave way beneath her and the infected wounds that ended her life.

  She would never have understood Angie's errand. Or rather, she would have embraced the errand, but not the motive behind it. She had never sensed the menace that kept Angie awake every night, the nameless danger that brooded in the wood around the house. At all times, while chopping wood or cooking or doing wash, Angie had an eye on that forest, spare New England forest laced with old farmers’ walls that rustled with the moltings of paper birches and hung crooked oak branches over the wire fence ringing the yard. Something terrible would come from that forest one day, as surely as winter came over the mountain in December; she knew it. It would come for Maya and Emily, perhaps for Tom, and she would be powerless to turn it back.

  She took the makeup case out of her shoulder bag and checked her hair in the mirrored lid of a rouge container. She would never be as beautiful as her mother. She lacked the requisite self-absorption, the ferocity and lust to which self-absorption gave rise. At least she had youth on her side. She snapped shut the case, capped her soda, dispersed the gnats with a wave, and marched down the hill through the milkweed to town.

  * * * *

  The men in plaid shirts were now loading the tractor trailers, heaving boxes up from the vendors’ carts. As they worked they sang foul-mouthed chants in which a gathered crowd sometimes joined. A crowd mostly of women, Angie noticed with unease. She took up a position at the periphery and studied the rhythmic swinging and flexing of the young male limbs, the sinews that fluttered in the forearms like silent arpeggios, the sweat that shone in the soft, cupped spaces between cheekbones and eyes. Their hands were so sure, their faces so confident. But something uncertain and dangerous manifested in the grinding of their jaws, in the severe shadows beneath the flexed biceps of those who had rolled up their sleeves. Not a threat, precisely, but an unrealized force, as when an animal pauses, twitching, between retreat and attack.

  A shiver ran down her spine, and it was only when it had passed that she realized consciously what her body had already detected. One of the men was watching her. He looked to be the youngest, with a thick neck and hair so black and slick it seemed painted on. He said a word to one of his friends and hopped from the truck. Before she knew what was happening, he stood facing her.

  “Hey there. You looking to buy something?”

  “What? No.” She still felt as if she were watching him from a distance, though he stood closer to her than was normal or polite, smiling and wiping his forehead with his sleeve. He was not as tall as he had seemed standing on the trailer, but his neck and shoulders were monstrous with muscle. He nodded over his shoulder at the crowd.

  “Only the wholesale guys are supposed to buy direct from us. But sometimes we make exceptions. If we take a liking to someone.”

  When his eye ran down her she felt as though her summer dress had disappeared. Speech had become a sticky substance, difficult to shape. “And have you taken a liking to me?”

  He grinned, showing even, nicotine-stained teeth. “You want to take a walk? Hold on, let me tell the boys.” He put a hand on her back as he turned and waved at his friends.

  The man—his name was Rick—talked steadily as they walked through town, so that once she had told him her name she had no more need or opportunity to speak. It always seemed to be this way with men: they did all their talking right off the bat, and the more time you spent with them the less they had to say.

  Rick was originally from Hartford. He had run track there, before the Crisis, but now his knees were bad from too much heavy lifting. (As he said this, he swung his arms so that the muscles rolled beneath his shirt.) He liked working on the trucks. You got to see a lot of people, and it felt good, with everything going to hell, to be on the road, nomadic, in the condition to which all people would eventually decline. Rick thought it was only a matter of time until civilization collapsed entirely. He
made the declaration with cheerful arrogance, as though knowing they were all doomed made him more powerful than the average person.

  He steered her through the throng with light taps on her back. His presence served as a kind of shield. The groping hands that usually harassed her were absent, and she felt a sense of security faintly magical in its consistency. He seems like a good person, she told herself repeatedly, he's young, he's strong. But when he smiled at her, her face refused to smile back.

  They passed out of the market and into a quiet area of town where each polygon of the cracked sidewalk had its own tiny fence of weeds. Vestiges of glass in the frames of townhouse windows glistened in the afternoon light like unshed tears. Rick's hand tensed against her back. “Well, this is an unfriendly looking area.” He smiled as he said it—the unfriendliness was clearly of no consequence to him; he was only worried on her behalf. “You know a place where we could sit down and talk? Out of the open?”

  “There's Toskie's.”

  “That nasty bar? We won't even get a seat. Look, here's an old house. I bet this is all right.”

  He led her through a chain fence overgrown with rose bushes, across an overgrown lawn. With a kind of self-conscious nonchalance he forced open a broken window. She followed his lead inertly, instinctually sure that if she did not give in to his will at every point, she must abandon the affair entirely. As he helped her through the window, Rick slashed his hand on a thorn and cursed dramatically. It was an odd moment, faintly portentous—it seemed to her he had cut his hand on purpose.

  In a dusty livingroom they sat on a swaybacked sofa among scattered items too heavy or useless to have attracted looters: a moldering hooked rug, a toy Hess truck, a flood of curling photographs spilled across the floor.

  “God, it must get depressing around here.” Rick spread his arms on the back of the couch. “Up in the boonies, with everyone dying off. You have anyone to talk to?”

  She knew it was too soon to mention the children. An instinct she was ashamed to discover in herself told her how these sorts of encounters proceeded. “No. No one.”

  “That's terrible. I mean that's just wrong. What do you do?”

  “I get by.”

  “You deserve more than that.”

  He turned to face her, putting his hand to the couch, and winced—the cut from the thornbush. She reached instinctively for his hand. The moment she touched him, he drew her smoothly into his arms. The pungency of his sweat invaded her, a terrible, painful odor that seemed to have lain flat against his body until that moment, waiting to ambush her like a set of quills.

  “Angie ... poor Angie.” His hand petted her hair. He did not seem to mind the wound in his palm, now. He took her head between his palms and kissed her. The meaty roughness of his lips made her turn her head away, and she found herself gazing past his sweaty cheek out the window.

  “What? What?” She gasped and leapt away from him, her feet slipping on the carpet of torn photographs. Disoriented, she looked down with a strange fixation at the images that slid under her feet—a sagging birthday cake, cypresses in Italy, a dog held still for the camera by a knot of children's arms. Her gaze went back to the window and she released a long moan of anger and despair.

  “Angie, what's up?” Rick hopped off the couch, simultaneously reaching for her and turning to follow her gaze. Two men in plaid shirts—his friends from the truck—were crossing the street.

  “Oh, you dumb assholes...” Rick put a hand on her shoulder. “Hey, I'm sorry. They must have followed us here.”

  “You waved to them,” she said breathlessly. “You signaled them.”

  “Now, why would you think that?”

  “Yo, Rick!” one of the men called. “You warming her up!”

  Rick's face sagged. “Come on,” he pleaded to Angie, taking her hand. “You've been all alone, here, all this time ... It'll be fun.”

  She scanned the room frantically, searching for weapons. But it was hopeless—three strong men! A cold part of her brain strategized: if she fought, it would only make them angry. If she surrendered, they might be gentle, might even reward her somehow. Rick seemed so hopeful, so pathetic. And what choice did she have?

  But one thought flashed in her mind brighter than all others. Rape was incidental, pain was incidental. But to be handicapped for months ... to be ill, possibly bedridden ... to require the attentions of a doctor, to compensate the doctor ... to have, finally, another mouth to feed, another ego to placate, another voice that would scream for her in the night ... a dread stronger and more calculating than the frenzied terror that anticipates pain—dread, it seemed, of helplessness itself—quickened her nerves.

  Rick advanced slowly, corralling her into a corner. Her face heated with rage, but not rage toward Rick: rage toward the unfairness that had set him there, the injustice of his calm approach, the single bright possibility that illumined her mind with foreboding. When he seized her wrist, the rage erupted as a scream.

  “Hey, hey.” He spoke petulantly as though to a child. “Stop that.”

  His friends had climbed through the window. “Yo, shut her up, man!”

  “I'm trying!” Rick ran his fingers down her cheek. “Come on, Angie. Jesus. It'll be all right. Why are you doing this?” She jerked away, screaming again, not in panic but with calm steady power, and scooped the toy truck from the floor. The weight of it in her hand thrilled her with the knightly glory of defying an inevitable fate. She lusted for the sight of Rick's face battered and flayed—not for the violence of the image but for the wounded disbelief that would soften his eyes, the childish incredulity he would evince when an event deemed impossible came to pass.

  “Angie,” he begged, raising a big sad fist. “Don't. Please.”

  She drew back her arm, prepared to swing the truck, but a voice—a male voice—called from the street.

  “Everything all right in there?”

  Rick's companions scurried away, rapid and silent as scavengers chased from a kill. She heard their boots pounding on the wood steps of the back porch, the jangle of a chain fence shaken by their vaulting bodies. Rick lingered, gazing at her with the precise expression of hurt amazement she had hoped to see. He took a step forward, his extended hand cupped like a beggar's. She said nothing, offered him nothing. In a moment, he too was gone.

  She sank onto the couch as the voice called again. “Hello? Hello?” A face appeared in the window, old, flaccid, puffy about the mouth as though with held breath—Bill Carver, the grocer. She began to cry.

  “Oh, hey,” Bill Carver said, and essayed the difficult chore of climbing into the room. Even as she wept, she went to the window and helped him. His knobby fingers curled stiffly and uncertainly, like an infant's, in her palm. She tugged with both hands, tears trickling unchecked down her cheeks. “Oh, what am I doing,” Bill Carver sighed, “I'm a fool.” He disappeared around the house, and a door banged. Presently he entered the room.

  Poor bow-legged, pot-bellied, puff-cheeked old Bill Carver. The sight of him had always aroused in her a pity bordering on distaste. But he had the voice, the malevoice—that absurd primitive charm for setting cowards to flight.

  “What's happening here?” he said, and she leaned against him, sobbing, while his gnarled hand patted her back. “Saw some trucker boys come this way,” he explained. “Couple guys promised me a deal and I thought they were skipping out. They try to hurt you? Is that it?” Her nod set him off on a chivalrous tirade: more manly words piling around her, stern and enclosing. While he ranted he stroked her back. She noticed that his hand was shaking. He was trying to console them both with his righteous words, as though righteousness were equivalent to strength. He didn't realize that her sobs were not of fear, but of frustration.

  “Stop!” she cried, “I can't—just stop, stop!” She sank to the couch, pulling him with her, and at last it was her turn to speak. Into Bill Carver's stunned silence she poured a litany composed over months of introspection, an account of loose teeth and
torn clothes and snot, of rain spraying through broken windows, of Tom telling her the head had come off the ax again, and why couldn't he fix it himself, for once?—of Emily's fits and Maya's fussy stomach, of the thoughts that could never be spoken and that consequently overflowed, filling her bedroom at home with doubt and rage like a choking miasma, with anxiety so omnipresent that she often spoke to herself without realizing it. At last she came to a question that seemed to sum up all the injustices. How had Mom done it, it had always been so easy for her, daycare and therapy and support groups and a new man every year—and so confident, always confident, that it would always be like this, that no evil thing waited in the forest to advance when you let your guard down and take the children away...

  “What,” Bill said vaguely, “what's that now? Something coming? For the children?”

  His baffled, scratchy voice recalled her to the present. She fell silent, realizing he could not see them as she could, those attendant threatening figures lurking on the horizon. And yet in her mind they appeared so clearly, prowling the distance like trolls, looting, raping, torturing stray dogs and cats: hunched, strong figures that grouped under defunct streetlights in abandoned towns, smoking and drinking, or skipped through the forest with wild cries, calling each other mocking names. A pack of teenage boys, shirtless, lupine in the moonlight, had run across the lawn one night, laughing over some savage game, and each day when the sun went down she pictured those boys returning to storm the house. In fact she pictured them, or creatures like them, propagating through the world like vermin, gathering force in the wrecked remains of the country like a wildfire in a forest that had for too long been protected.

  “I thought I could find a good one.” The words leaked from her, unwilled. But they were out now, teasing Bill Carver's curiosity. He questioned her and she tried to explain, divulging scattered reflections that aggregated haphazardly, like papier mache, around a vision she had labored to form. A vision of the one thing that seemed to promise her a happy future: a reliable male silhouette that might loom in the doorway, a deep voice that might boom across the lawn, a sort of scarecrow that could be propped at need on the porch to keep marauders at bay.