Grants Pass

by Cherie Priest

He grinned and the world seemed to brighten. Margie brushed her tears — the poisoning ink — away and felt alive. The ink was fleeing from the new light in her soul.

  “I can’t vouch for that,” he chuckled.

  “And you’re willing to extend that invite I heard on the radio? Knowing I’m a possible nutter?”

  “Don’t stress about it now. We’ll learn if you’re really crazy in time.” He gently put a hand on her shoulder and began leading her down the steps.

  His hand was warm, warmer than the sun’s teasing light. “Have you ever heard of a girl called Kayley? She made this internet post about what she’d do if the end of the world came. Gave me the idea to set up a community where we could try and rebuild the world...”

  Afterword

  I’ve always been a fan of post-apocalyptic novels and stories. What would the world be like, if humanity was all but destroyed? How would we survive?

  Then Jennifer came to Morrigan Books with the Grants Pass anthology. I fell in love with the concept immediately. I’d just seen I am Legend, and quite a few of these stories really evoked that sense of isolation and fear from the movie (despite the very different scenarios).

  Both concepts got me thinking.

  When I wrote Ink Blots, I couldn’t help but remember those two situations. I wanted to show what solitude can do to a person. Especially someone trapped in a rather poorly populated country, one that is incredibly isolated and very far from the candle flame of hope.

  Humans often crave ‘quiet time’ (I know I do); but what if that was all you had? How would you cope?

  Black Heart, White Mourning

  Jay Lake

  DAY ZERO

  I tried to write this all before. I know I done that. More than once. Every time, I am wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong.

  Stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid.

  Everybody’s dead. I don’t mind so much. They’re quiet now. At first, I thought zombies were going to get me. How many dead people can fit into a Cap Metro bus anyway? They all died like they got somewhere to go. Rushing, afraid.

  I live like I got nowhere to go. Rushing, afraid.

  Dr. Macushla told me to write it all down. That was back before everybody died. She’s dead, too. Her phone stopped ringing a long time ago. When I call I just get a quiet noise, clickie-click like when the CIA is listening in.

  I still phone her up sometimes and talk to the clickie-click. Like it was her. I always used to think therapy was stupid. I know what Grams said, I know what the judge said, but it was always stupid. “How do you feel about that, Louella?” “And how does that make you feel, Louella?” “What did the fires heal, Louella?”

  These days I know therapy ain’t stupid. Now that I ain’t got it no more. But Dr. Macushla’s clickie-click is there when I call her number, so I tell it all about the things I seen and done. Like the little white dog I saw in the street yesterday. I ain’t seen a dog in two months, on account of they all died or ate each other or run off or something. So I seen this little white dog all shaggy and muddy which goes running through the gutter like it has somewhere to go and I follow it.

  I got food, never will run out with all of Austin dead so fast people didn’t have time to burn the grocery stores. (Beef jerky and Hostess snowballs last forever). Maybe it wants food. Finally it stops and lets me come close, then I whisper sweet things like I used to whisper to the matches before Dr. Macushla cured me, then I show it some jerky then it bites me then I kick the little fucker then it cries and bites me again, then I stomp it.

  Ok, I lied. I didn’t stomp the dog. I just cried til it ran away.

  I know you ain’t supposed to hurt people or animals or nothing. Except the Black Death hurt us all, so bad we’ll never get better, so those rules don’t matter no more.

  Once someone told me white is the color of mourning in China. Like they wear white to funerals and black to weddings, I guess. So maybe the dog was in mourning or a ghost or something.

  It took me a while to clean my boots good after.

  Stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid.

  Dr. Macushla’s clickie-click tells me all nice how I ain’t stupid. Like she used to tell me herself in that little office with the flowered carpet. I tell her about this dog and lie about what I done to the dog, then I lie about lying about the dog. I can hear her nose wrinkling like she does when she knows I ain’t being all truthful, then she asks me about the fire again.

  People say fire is red, or orange, but fire is black. Really. Go look at a burned up house. You don’t see no red, do you? Black char, black ash, black smoke. It’s just red for a minute, the way people are just pink for a minute, then when they’re dead they’re all gray and black and blue and that’s how they stay. When fire is gone it’s all black, too.

  Ashes are the ghosts of fire.

  So I’m going to try to write this down again. Maybe this time it won’t get lost or the fire won’t sneak up on my pages. I’m pasting ruled copy paper inside an old phone book so no one will know it’s a journal. ‘Cause an old phone book is so useful, I guess.

  Tonight I’m going to drive a Porsche. I found a good one with not too many stains on the driver seat after I dumped the crusty, mummified woman out. And cars burn so nice when you’re done with them.

  DAY ZERO PLUS ONE

  I saw the Guy again today. I think he checks out my burning cars. I put them all in a row on the overpass from Mopac to 183, so they are already in the sky before I set them on fire. I’m like an Indian with smoke signals. And you can see halfway across town from up there, when the weather’s good.

  So the Guy comes and watches sometimes. He leaves me presents along the line of burned up cars. Well, someone does, but the Guy is the only person I run into more than once. I know there’s some church people living down by the river in the old Magnolia Cafe. They put notes around town, painted on bed sheets and tablecloths to hang from bridges and power lines.

  “JOIN US. FOOD, SAFETY, MEDECINE.”

  I don’t believe that stuff. I don’t need it anyway. I ain’t afraid of coyotes, and there’s nothing bigger here that can bite me. The other stuff that bothers me a lot I tell to Dr. Macushla’s clickie-click, and her ghost makes it go away.

  Plus I don’t trust no one who can’t spell. I keep a dictionary with my phone book on account of wanting to keep trusting myself.

  They got other notes, too.

  “JESUS STILL LOVES YOU.”

  “THE WORLD IS NOT OVER.”

  Which just proves they’re idiots. Of course the world is over. God just ain’t turned out the lights yet.

  The Guy ain’t one of them. He’s about my age, maybe he was in college when the Black Death came. He always wears this Longhorn hoodie, and I’ll bet he found a store full of them because he’s always clean when I see him. And finding a store full of Longhorn hoodies in Austin wouldn’t take a genieus genius.

  Stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid.

  That’s how I know the presents come from him. They’re always stuck inside some Longhorn bullshit. Like who cares about a football team that’s all dead and got no one to play but other dead football teams?

  Sometimes he leaves me food, like something special maybe he found around town. Hershey bars. A jar of runny peanut butter that I finally reckoned was foreign food sauce. Sometimes he leaves me a nice hat, or gloves. It’s coming on the fall here, and even Texas can be cold.

  Not that I can’t find this stuff for myself easy enough. Austin’s a big, empty place, and even I couldn’t burn it all down. He’s cute about the gifts, though.

  Today I see the Guy and he’s kind of leaning on the bridge rail down by my second BMW. That was 2010 750il, a big blue one that went real fast and the inside smelled like a shoe store with all the leather and oil smells. No one had died in it, but the keys were in a purse on the ground beside it, which I figured meant someone had dragged the lady away a long time before I found the car.
/>
  It went up in flames good, too. I opened one hundred and forty four cans of Sterno from the H.E.B. grocery store and set them around the inside of the car in puddles of camping gas. I always set fire to them with the engine running. That seems fair, like they have a fighting chance. Cars with pop-up headlights are best, because they wink at you while they’re dying, but it’s also lot of fun to burn a big pile of some yuppie’s money.

  There’s the Guy by my 750il, and he smiles at me all shy like.

  I ain’t dangerous, everybody knows that. Long as you don’t get under my boots, and there’s no fire talking to me. I’m a big pussy otherwise. In high school the guys knew this. About my pussy, I mean. I’d let them fuck do me if they’d let me put out cigarettes on their backs and stuff. You’d be amazed how many guys go for that.

  But now I take better care of myself. I don’t smoke no more, I burn cars instead of jocks, and there’s no one touches me but me. Dr. Macushla is proud.

  Still, sometimes it’s good to see another person who ain’t got a shotgun or a Bible ready to come after me with. So I give him a little smile, the kind that says “hey” even if I don’t mean it. I swipe a glance at my boots to see if there’s no white fur or nothing on them. Then I hunker down by my gold Cadillac Escalade pickup to see what he’s going to do.

  After a few minutes, he kind of waddles toward me, coming halfway between my 750il and my special edition Saab. “Hey,” he says.

  The wind is all chilly and plucking at me with a whining sound, but his words carry just fine. I had just talked to Dr. Macushla the day before, so my voice is still ok, even in the weather. “Hey,” I say back. I rock on my heels and wish I had a pack of cigarettes.

  He’d better not bite me, that’s all I am thinking.

  The Guy reaches into the belly pocket of his hoodie and real careful takes something out. I ain’t afraid of no guns, either. If my time comes, I can’t stop it. And who’d kill me? No one owns these cars any more, and there’s plenty of everything for everyone. It will all rot and rust and blow away long before we can use it up.

  It don’t matter. I appreciete appreciate his being careful.

  He’s got something skinny wrapped in a pale green paper. He skitters it hard toward me, to get the package going up the slope of the highway deck between us. It’s wrapped in twine, and the paper is clean, like he just been looting an Office Depot or something.

  I crabwalk toward his present and pick it up carefully. It takes me a moment to get the twine off. When I look up again, he’s jogging down the ramp toward Mopac. With the old highway behind him, the Guy turns and waves. I can see his smile, even from fifty yards away.

  Fuck him if he brings a present and doesn’t want to stay for the date. Not like I had any cigarettes to use on him anyway.

  Then I realize the present he has given me.

  It’s a stick of dynamite, wrapped in detonator cord. A little box of blasting caps is duct taped to one end.

  Oh, man.

  Fire talks to me, not explosions. It’s the flames, and the ashes, and the power to transform. I am whole inside where everything else withers. That’s what Dr. Macushla says.

  But blowing shit up is COOL.

  The paper’s about to blow away. I don’t like to litter, so I grab at it. The inside part has a little poster on it, with a headline reading, “The Grants Pass Hoax!!!”

  I tucked the scrap inside the ruins of the Escalade and begin the serious business of thinking through what to blow up. Gas station? Bridge pillar? Shopping mall entrance? I’ll have to hit a book store and read up on blasting safety, so I don’t take off my hand or something.

  The Guy is my new boyfriend. I know this now. Pretty soon I’ll get a chance to show him what that really means.

  DAY ZERO PLUS FOUR

  Still keeping the journal. It’s only a phone book. Those are everywhere. No more Internet, you want to look something up, it’s the best way. Maybe this one will stick. Not like Dr. Macushla or my social worker is going to read it this time around.

  I ain’t seen the Guy since he gave me the dynamite. Dr. Macushla thinks this is good, that I need to take my time with strangers. She reminds me about the dog.

  I’m feeling kind of bad about that, so I’ve started raiding white sheets and table cloths — there’s plenty up here in north Austin, so the church people must get theirs for banners from some other part of town — and whenever I find a body in my way, I cover it with white. I like to think of it as a Chinese funeral.

  I’ve burned three more cars, but didn’t want to use the dynamite on them. That would be wrong. Destructive.

  Most cars won’t start anyway, unless they’re a stick and you can get them going along a hill. A lot of them have bad tires now. When I really want a car that ain’t in the right place or is an automatic, I have a battery rig bungeed to a hand truck. I keep it charged up from other cars before I burn them up on the bridge, so I can use it to jump a new car. But that thing is a pain in the ass to haul around.

  And when I do, they don’t always catch. I figure after another wet winter, there will be too much water in the gas tanks, and the gas will be too stale. Already is, half the time. Maybe I’ll set wildfires next summer.

  For now, I’m not done with my bridge of cars. These three latest were a Dodge Viper — I can’t never tell the year on those without looking at the plate under the hood — along with a really sweet 1975 Cadillac Eldorado convertible, and a pimped out 2009 Mercedes SL550. Each of them was a pleasure in their own way. There’s a couple of stretches of Mopac where I can hit well over a hundred before I have to slow down to weave through the wrecks and abandoned cars.

  There were two dead ladies in the back of the Eldorado, their dried-up bodies gray haired with rotting silk Sunday-go-to-church dresses on, curled together like they’d climbed in there to die. Them I laid out side by side and did a Chinese funeral on. Maybe I’ll burn bodies when I run out of cars, but people smell funny when they go up.

  Well, live people do. I don’t suppose everybody who’s been dead for a year and half will. I never did tell Dr. Macushla how I know that about burning people, and the judge didn’t have enough evidence to blame me for certain, or it would have been a lot worse than therapy for me, back before the Black Plague.

  The end of the world was the best thing that ever happened to me.

  I decide to have a picnic along my bridge of cars. Spam, twinkies, diet cherry Dr Pepper, some wild onions I found in the bar ditch alongside the highway. Good eating. Getting everything spread out, I see the Guy has left me another present, tucked under a pebbled paving stone shaped like Texas.

  I check it out.

  A map of Oregon.

  This confuses me. Like, he’s always come by with practical stuff before. As if he cared. And the dynamite was a real gift, from the heart. But Oregon’s thousands of miles away in Canada or someplace. Nearly foreign.

  I look the map over anyway, to see if there’s something written on it. I used to know a kid who could read secret messages in the way the freight trains ran. The order and color of the box cars was a CIA way of telling things to spy satellites, secrets too powerful to be put on the radio or Craigslist, even in special codes. It always sounded kind of weird to me, but the messages he could read made sense. At least when he read them.

  So I scan for codes. What I find is a pink highlight circle drawn around a town called Grants Pass.

  Home of the hoax.

  Which makes me wonder what the Grants Pass hoax is, exactly.

  I go to the Escalade and find the green paper. It had been rained on a little, and was smeared with black ash, but it isn’t ruined yet. I read all the tiny crazy person handwriting at the bottom. Somehow I don’t think it was the Guy’s. He seemed like he was passing it on, not preaching to me.

  It’s all about some crazy girl and her plan to rebuild civilization without warlords or taxes or whatever, in this little town in Oregon with her friends with stupid names, and the scribbled
writing says how this is really a plot devised by Satan to trap anyone unlucky enough to survive the plagues and destruction, which had swept this mortal Earth free of the stain of sin blah blah blah.

  I quit reading after I got to the “stain of sin” part. I don’t believe in Satan anyway, he’s just a way the Bible Belters have of pretending it’s not their fault when they fuck their kids in the ass or rip off people too poor to go to the cops or hire a lawyer. And I’m lucky to survive the plagues, not unlucky.

  The thing probably wasn’t a hoax, on account of whoever wrote the little poster was so crazy I want to believe the opposite just on principle. Even so, who wants to go to Oregon anyway? It’s cold there, and full of moss and mold and bigfoots and shit.

  I tuck the green paper back in the Escalade, along with the map, and weigh them both down with the Texas-shaped stone so the wind won’t take them away in case I want them again. Then I go back to my feast.

  Oregon.

  Why?

  Who cares?

  Plenty of cars here in Texas, anyway.

  DAY ZERO PLUS SIX

  Stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid.

  Cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt.

  Dr. Macushla says I’m not supposed to say that word. Not about myself. But sometimes I deserve it. I have stubbed some lit matches on the inside of my forearm to punish myself, but I deserve worse. Far, far worse.

  I scored a 2010 Bentley Arnage today. A sweet, sweet ride, I’m telling you. It went 140 like it was in the driveway. Quietest car I ever drove. No one dead inside, as clean as the 750il had been. I got it up my ramp finally, set it in place to burn, filled it with crumpled Christmas paper from Walgreen’s, all soaked in lamp oil.

  When the Bentley went up, this kid finally comes bailing out of the trunk. I never knew she was in there. Hell, I never knew she was around at all. You don’t see a lot of people these days. Her hair is smoldering, and she is screaming, and she surprises me so bad that I stomp her like I’d stomped the white dog.