After the End: Recent Apocalypses

by Kage Baker

  “But you have to watch Des, the pastor. The man. You understand? He’s afraid of him”—he gestured at O’Neal, who glared at them from the carpeting—“and he’ll turn you in or raise the alarm, if he gets a chance. Also, don’t let Desmond get Gloria alone, or he will bully her into doing what he wants. Got that?”

  “Yes, I understand.”

  “At six a.m., bring the children and meet me near the airship hangar. You can’t miss it—it’s the giant building at the base of the hills. That way.” He pointed out the window, at the black hills that blotted out the starlight to the southeast. “Don’t be late.”

  Two guards were at the munitions shack. They were both asleep when he found them, and stank of booze. He took their flashlights and other equipment, tied them up with electrical cord, and left them a safe distance from the shed. In the munitions shack he found everything he needed. Bear might not know nukes, but as a former railroad man, he knew explosives. He spent the next several hours prepping charges and setting up a radio detonator.

  Then Bear went back for O’Neal. The warlord (Bear refused to think of him as true military) had managed to worm his way from the middle of his living room carpet to the kitchen and was on his knees by the kitchen counter . . . presumably trying to get a knife out of the drawer. Bear slung him over his shoulder and headed out toward the blimp hangar. It was almost six a.m.

  The sky was still dark as pitch. Patty was waiting for him, and so were the rest of the kids. The children swarmed around Bear and greeted him. They were all there, miraculously, in one piece, along with a few other people Bear didn’t recognize. “They needed help too,” Patty said.

  Bear dumped O’Neal on the ground and cut the bonds on his ankles. He ungagged him. O’Neal spat, and gazed at Bear with the requisite fear and loathing.

  “Don’t much like being on the receiving end, do you, son?” Bear asked.

  “There’s no way you can escape.”

  Bear put his Colt under the man’s chin, finger on the trigger. “You’re only alive because she ”—he gestured in Patty’s direction—“reminded me you might be useful. Mind your manners.”

  Patty edged over. “What now?” she asked in a low voice. “Fireworks,” Bear said. “Make sure the kids are behind the dumpsters.”

  Patty did so, and gave him the okay signal. He blew the munitions dump. The response was gratifying. It made a very big boom. Everyone in the entire camp, it seemed like, went running to help put out the fire.

  “Follow me,” Bear told Patty. “Bring the kids.” He carried O’Neal over and set the man down between himself and the soldier standing guard at the hangar door.

  “Don’t make me hurt you, son,” Bear said. The soldier stood there for a moment staring first at the gun and then up at Bear. Then he threw down his own weapon and ran.

  And so did they all run—Bear and Patty and Vanessa and Tommy, and Nabil and Margaritte and Phyllis and Angelique and Jonah and Katie and Earl and Janette and Frankie and George and Bill and Jess, and Teresa and Mimi and Sandra and Lin—except of course, the three littlest ones, Penelope and Paul and Latoya, who were carried—for the blimp.

  O’Neal’s second-in-command, Stedtler, stepped out from behind the airship as they neared it. He had with him a handful of large, well-armed men. He gestured at the rafters, where more soldiers crouched, aiming weapons at them. Desmond stood there, too, hands clasped before him and a grim, worried look on his face. Bear realized Des must have found and freed the major.

  Des, Bear thought, sad. At least you could have stayed home.

  “I should have shot you when I had the chance,” Bear told Stedtler, who gave him a gallows grin. Bear looked around for Patty. She and the children had all moved to a spot between the containers and the airship cabin, mostly out of range of snipers. Bear put his weapon against the joint of O’Neal’s jaw. “Tell your men to put down their weapons.”

  Stedtler stared hard at O’Neal. “Do it,” O’Neal said. Stedtler gestured to his men and they lowered their guns. Bear waved Patty and the children into the airship cabin.

  “I want all the weapons on the floor,” Bear said. None complied. By now the last of the refugees were scrambling up the ramp. Bear did a quick calculation, and started edging toward the ramp himself. The soldiers began raising their weapons again. Bear stopped moving. He felt the ramp’s rim against his right heel.

  O’Neal tried to look over his shoulder at Bear. “We can’t let you take our nukes.”

  “Nobody needs nukes,” Bear replied. He kept his grip around O’Neal’s chest as firmly as he could, but it had been a long night without sleep, and weariness was creeping in around the edges.

  “Give up this foolishness,” Des said. “Be a patriot, Bear. Let go of the colonel and I can guarantee you no one will be hurt.”

  Bear gave his old friend an incredulous look. Did he really believe that? “The US is gone, Des. Long gone. These men are nothing but bullies and warlords who use fairy tales to get people to listen to their ravings. The last thing our Canuck neighbors need is crazy people like O’Neal dropping nuclear weapons on their heads.”

  O’Neal gave a sudden lurch while Bear was talking and managed to break Bear’s grip. The two men wrestled for Bear’s Colt. Bear tripped on the edge of the ramp and went down on his tailbone. O’Neal pointed the gun at him, but a shot struck him in the forehead and he fell backward, looking surprised. Bear’s Colt skittered across the hangar floor. Bear bade it goodbye. Bullets started to fly—he scrambled up the ramp with hands and feet.

  Patty dragged him into the blimp and hit the switch to close the cabin door. He lay down. “You shot the colonel, didn’t you?” he asked. “Good work.”

  She was pressing her hands against his diaphragm. Blood was leaking out of him from somewhere and he realized he was going into shock. “He’s been hit,” Patty said to someone Bear couldn’t see, as she faded away.

  Damn shame, Bear thought. Just when I’d about decided to live.

  Orla came to him in a dream. There was nothing consequential—nothing he remembered later. Just that she was standing with him, smiling. Somehow their love outlived her, and he thought it might even outlive him as well, as something he passed along to Patty and the little ones. It pleased him to think so, anyway.

  He woke up in the airship infirmary. A woman there identified herself as Dr. Maribeth Zedrosky. “You missed a bit of excitement,” she said, fiddling with his bandages.

  “How long have I been out?”

  “Four days, just about.” He gaped. It didn’t seem possible.

  “How do you feel?”

  He felt like a crap sandwich with a side of crap. “I’ll live.” He sat up with a grunt. His midriff and neck were swathed in bandages, and his calf was in a cast.

  “What happened?”

  “You were shot. Three times. We had to operate to remove a bullet in your lung. Another struck your ankle, fracturing it, and a third one grazed your carotid. Luckily for you, we are well stocked with medical supplies. This airship was designed to be a field hospital, among other things.”

  “No. I mean, what happened to my friends? Are we safe? Did we escape O’Neal and his crew?”

  The woman gave him a big smile. “We are safe.”

  He blinked. He felt groggy and couldn’t think clearly. “How?”

  “Once your young friend Patty dragged you inside and sealed the cabin, O’Neal’s men tried to scale the blimp and steal the warheads. We blew a hole in the hangar door and floated away on a breeze.”

  “You’re not with them, I take it,” he said. The warlords, he meant.

  She made a rude noise. “Not by a long shot. They’ve held five of us here for months. They’ve been forcing us to work on the airship. When we didn’t cooperate, they would start killing the other prisoners. Right now,” she said, “we are about three miles up, heading northwest toward the Arctic Ocean. We’re nearly there. You should come see.”

  She helped Bear along the corridor and
down a spiral stair to a lounge that hung at the bottom of the airship, below the pilot’s bridge.

  The lounge was big enough for a whole platoon, Bear thought. Near the rear were the tables and the mess. Some of the children were there. Three adults Bear did not know were teaching some of the older children how to play cards. The little ones were tottering around in makeshift diapers. Near the front sat Patty on the floor, legs curled under her, looking at maps and out at the terrain. She wore a worried look and looked out the floor-to-ceiling windows that lined the front and sides of the lounge.

  Beyond the glass, the air was a dark, intense blue strung with piles of cumulus. The early spring sun shone behind them, casting their shadow ahead of them onto a nearby cloud. Far below lay a swatch of brilliant green. Livestock and herds of wild caribou dotted the landscape, and rivers snaked through sodden marshes that had once been tundra. The sun shone over across the Arctic Sea to the north. Islands jutted up from the sea, and their peaks cast long shadows across the choppy water.

  When Patty spotted Bear, she gave a happy shriek, bounced over the couch, and hugged him. It sent shooting pains down his side and he groaned.

  “I’m so sorry!” she said, and released him.

  The children came up too, nine or ten of them. They jumped up and down and all wanted a hug.

  “Careful, please—careful!” Patty scolded. She grabbed his hand in a tight grip. “Bear, thank God you are all right. You nearly died! Your lung collapsed and they had to do an emergency surgery—what do you call it?” she asked Dr. Zedrosky, who stood at the stair up to the main deck, arms folded, looking amused. “Oh, never mind. You are here now,” she said to Bear. “That is what matters.”

  He looked over her head toward the others. Tom was there, and Jonah, and perhaps another six of the children. “Vanessa?” he asked. “Where is she? Where are the others?” A spasm of fear gripped him.

  “No, no—don’t worry. She is fine. They are all fine. No one was hurt. Vanessa is learning to fly the blimp.”

  “It’s not fair!” Tom told Patty. “I have to watch the twins and Latoya,” he said, turning to Bear. “I wanted to go first.”

  Patty said, “Be patient, Tomás. You always nag!”

  Bear laid a hand on Tom’s shoulder. “You’ll have your turn soon.”

  Patty introduced Bear to the other scientists at the table near the back.

  “Thank you,” Bear told them. “Thanks for rescuing us.”

  A man about his age replied, “You’re the ones who rescued us.” They shook hands all around.

  “Excuse me,” Patty said, “but I need to talk to Bear.” She pulled him over to the front of the lounge. “I’m very worried. Come see.” She set him up in a cushioned seat with pillows propping up his ankle, and laid a set of maps across his lap. It’d been a long time since he’d seen working smartpaper. He wondered whom O’Neal had stolen it from.

  “I’ve plugged in my parents’ coordinates,” she said. “But they aren’t right. I just don’t understand.” She pointed out features below and before them on a mountain range. “Those peaks are right, but look out there. Where we are going, it is not supposed to be an island. My parents made me memorize, and this is wrong. What happened?”

  “The seas have risen,” he told her, “since the maps were made.”

  At the location where Patty’s coordinates said they should land, they began their descent, slow as a soap bubble, into a mountain valley lush and green. Bear should not have been surprised, but he was, when they peered at the ground through their instruments and what appeared to be ground cover was revealed to be camo netting.

  Patty could hardly stand still. She paced like a cat in the lounge, and glanced over at him with an expression that said, See? What did I tell you?

  The “fifteen minutes to touchdown” alert sounded. Patty dropped into a seat next to Bear’s. “How has it come to this?” she asked.

  She meant, Why? She meant, his generation, and all those before them. Why had nothing been done, while there had still been time to act?

  Because of men like O’Neal, he wanted to say, and the people who are afraid, and want him to tell them what to do.

  There was perhaps truth in that. But it was also a lie.

  We carry the past with us, he thought. The living and the dead, and all our past choices. No one person, no one nation, even, could have saved the planet alone. And we were incapable of working together. We were too greedy—too hungry, too afraid. Too distracted. Orla would have pointed out that there had been numerous extinctions before. We’re just clever monkeys, after all. Smart mammals, social chimps. Just not . . . quite . . . social enough.

  In the end, he just shrugged and gave her a hug.

  The entire population of the blimp crowded around the hatch when the airship alighted. The door went up and light streamed in. Bear was among the last to exit. Patty helped him down the ramp but she was wound as taut as a coiled spring.

  “Go!” he said grumpily. “I’m not a child.” With a grateful glance, she raced ahead.

  The ground was spongy and the morning air was chilly. Bear found himself wanting a jacket during daytime, for the first time in, oh, forty years.

  A group of people came out of long, low buildings. Patty cried out. A man and woman who resembled her picked her up and hugged her close. They spoke together in rapid-fire Spanish. Patty sobbed. The woman cradled her and made crooning noises. Bear had never seen Patty cry till this moment.

  The man came over to Bear. “Jesus de la Montaña.”

  “Bear Jessen.” Bear shook his hand.

  “You have returned our daughter to us. The soldados attacked and when we came back for her she was gone. We feared the worse. Gracias. Mil gracias. How can we ever repay you?”

  “Your daughter” Bear replied, “is a remarkable young woman.” He looked around. “This is Hoku Pa’a?”

  “It is. Welcome. Make yourself at home.”

  “Is it true what Patty said? You’ve stored the world’s knowledge?”

  “We have tried. Much is lost. But not all. And we have ideas for how to remove carbon from the atmosphere, how to restore and rebuild. It will be the work of many lifetimes. Perhaps next time we will do a better job of caring for the world.”

  “And each other,” Bear said.

  “De verdad,” Patty’s father said.

  Bear watched the Hoku Pa’ans welcome the travelers. They viewed the children with surprise and delight. He watched the little ones spread out across the green valley—running, skipping, shrieking— giddy with joy.

  “Fee! Fi! Fo! Fum!” Jonah yelled. “I’m a giant!”

  “No you’re not,” Angelique said. “You’re a midget. Bear is the giant!” “Am too a giant!” “Are not!” “Tag, you’re it!” Off they went.

  Bear thought at Orla, Oh, fine. You win. There was a reason. I’ll carry on for the young ones’ sake. But I’m still not ready to let you off the hook for dying first. Damn you. He glared at his pop-top ring. Then he kissed it. Of course, Orla would laugh and kiss him and call him a fool.

  Laura J. Mixon wrote YA novel Astropilots; the Avatars Dance trilogy: Glass Houses, Proxies, and Burning the Ice; and, as M. J. Locke, Up Against It, the first book of the Wave series. Her work has appeared in Analog, George R. R. Martin’s shared-world Wild Cards series, and Asimov’s, as well as anthologies Worldmakers and Welcome to the Greenhouse. An environmental engineer and information management specialist, she attended Clarion in 1981, then spent two years in the Peace Corps in Kenya. She has taught regularly at Viable Paradise, an SF and fantasy genre workshop on Martha’s Vineyard. She lives in New Mexico with spouse Steven Gould and their two daughters.

  Border skirmishes, food shortages, riots, and martial law probably played a part in this apocalypse, but it is nuclear bombs that actually bring the End. This story of the immediate post-bomb future concentrates on a few isolated individuals.

  HORSES

  Livia Llewellyn

&nbs
p; Thunder

  Conquest

  White

  . . . clouds drift overhead, faint strands against the cobalt blue of night. Missile Facilities Technician Angela Kingston presses her nose to the cool glass. Cirrostratus. They’ll burn off before morning, she’s sure of that. If anything, Kingston knows the rising eastern sun, knows the searing heat that coats the dead-brown scablands of Washington. In ten hours, deep orange will bleed from the horizon, as day rips itself once more from a star-studded womb.

  Kingston turns away from the window. Across the room, her face floats in the mirror under a cap of dark brown hair, pixie-neat against her skull. She looks like a teenager, not a woman pushing forty. Below the mirror, a rectangle of plastic balances upright on her dresser, revealing a pink line bisecting a circle of white. The alchemical wedding of urine and litmus have combined to create the line—the closest thing to marriage she’ll ever know. It’s proof that two missed periods are more than the product of stress from the looming war, the constant fear that the next twin turn of the launch keys won’t be a test, but—like that faint pink line—the real thing.

  The watch at her wrist beeps. With absolute economy of movement, sculpted by a year-old routine, Kingston inspects the apartment. She couldn’t bear to leave it for good, knowing it was a mess. In the bathroom, she slips a small plastic vial into her pants pocket, next to the stick. It contains a powerful abortive drug, military issue. In the next twenty-four hours, she’ll take the pill, or a bullet. Which one it will be, she cannot say.

  Outside, gravel crunches under tires—her ride to silo 7-4 is here. Kingston hoists a duffle bag over her shoulder, and grabs a photo before locking the front door behind her. It’s part of her routine, so much so that she doesn’t notice pausing to caress its scalloped sepia edges. The photo is of a young man in uniform, a grim-faced cavalry officer astride a large pale horse. The rider’s a distant relative, whose name on the back, scribbled in fading brown ink, is “Ensley.” That’s all she knows of him. Why he rides, what it is he and his horse race toward, is lost.