The Year’s Best Science Fiction

by Gardner Dozois

  “Well what do you want to call them?” Pete asked.

  Then the power started going out, more and more often. Pete’s shifts got longer although he didn’t always get paid.

  There were gunshots in the street and Pete told Jane not to sit out on the balcony. He boarded up the French doors and it was as if they were living in a cave. The refugees started thinning out. Jane rarely saw them leaving, but each day there were fewer and fewer of them on the sidewalk. Pete said they were headed north.

  Then the fires started on the east side of town. The power went out and stayed out. Pete didn’t come home until the next day, and he slept a couple of hours and then went back out to work. The air tasted of smoke—not the pleasant clean smell of wood smoke, but a garbagy smoke. Franny complained that it made her sick to her stomach.

  After Pete didn’t come home for four days, it was pretty clear to Jane that he wasn’t coming back. Jane put Franny in the car, packed everything she could think of that might be useful. They got about 120 miles away, far enough that the burning city was no longer visible, although the sunset was a vivid and blistering red. Then they ran out of gas and there was no more to be had.

  There were rumors that there was a UN camp for homeless outside of Toronto. So they were walking to Detroit.

  * * *

  Franny says, “You can’t leave me! You can’t leave me!”

  “Do you want to go scavenge with me?” Jane says.

  Franny sobs so hard she seems to be hyperventilating. She grabs her mother’s arms, unable to do anything but hold on to her. Jane peels her off, but Franny keeps grabbing, clutching, sobbing. It’s making Jane crazy. Franny’s fear is contagious and if she lets it get in her she’ll be too afraid to do anything. She can feel it deep inside her, that thing that has always threatened her, to give in, to stop doing and pushing and scheming, to become like her useless, useless father puttering around the house vacantly, bottles hidden in the garage, the basement, everywhere.

  “GET OFF ME!” she screams at Franny, but Franny is sobbing and clutching.

  She slaps Franny. Franny throws up, precious little, water and crackers from breakfast. Then she sits down in the grass, just useless.

  Jane marches off into the first house.

  She’s lucky. The garage is closed up and there are three cans of soup on a shelf. One of them is cream of mushroom, but luckily, Franny liked cream of mushroom when she found it before. There are also cans of tomato paste, which she ignores, and some dried pasta, but mice have gotten into it.

  When she gets outside some strange guy is standing on the sidewalk, talking to Franny, who’s still sitting on the grass.

  For a moment she doesn’t know what to do, clutching the cans of soup against her chest. Some part of her wants to go back into the house, go through the dark living room with its mauve carpeting, its shabby blue sofa, photos of school kids and a cross stitch flower bouquet framed on the wall, back through the little dining room with its border of country geese, unchanged since the eighties. Out the back door and over the fence, an easy moment to abandon the biggest mistake of her life. She’d aborted the first pregnancy, brought home from Pasadena in shame. She’d dug her heels in on the second, it’s-my-body-fuck-you.

  Franny laughes. A little nervous and hiccoughy from crying, but not really afraid.

  “Hey,” Jane yelled. “Get away from my daughter!”

  She strides across the yard, all motherhood and righteous fury. A skinny dark-haired guy holds up his hands, palms out, no harm, ma’am.

  “It’s okay, Mom,” Franny says.

  The guy is smiling. “We’re just talking,” he says. He’s wearing a red plaid flannel shirt and T-shirt and shorts. He’s scraggly, but who isn’t.

  “Who the hell are you,” she says.

  “My name’s Nate. I’m just heading north. Was looking for a place to camp.”

  “He was just hanging with me until you got back,” Franny says.

  Nate takes them to his camp—also behind a house. He gets a little fire going, enough to heat the soup. He talks about Alabama, which was where he’s coming from, although he doesn’t have a Southern accent. He makes some excuse about being an army brat. Jane tries to size him up. He tells some story about when two guys stumbled on his camp north of Huntsville, when he was first on the road. About how it scared the shit out of him but about how he’d bluffed them about a buddy of his who was hunting for their dinner but would have heard the racket they made and could be drawing a bead on them right now from the trees, and about how something moved in the trees, some animal, rustling in the leaf litter and they got spooked. He was looking at her, trying to impress her, but being polite, which was good with Franny listening. Franny was taken with him, hanging on his every word, flirting a little the way she did. In a year or two, Franny was going to be guy crazy, Jane knew.

  “They didn’t know anything about the woods, just two guys up from Biloxi or something, kind of guys who, you know, manage a copy store or a fast food joint or something thinking that now that civilization is falling apart they can be like the hero in one of their video games.” He laughs. “I didn’t know what was in the woods, neither. I admit I was kind of scared it was someone who was going to shoot all of us although it was probably just a sparrow or a squirrel or something. I’m saying stuff over my shoulder to my ‘buddy’ like, Don’t shoot them or nothing. Just let them go back the way they came.”

  She’s sure he’s bullshitting. But she likes that he makes it funny instead of pretending he’s some sort of Rambo. He doesn’t offer any of his own food, she notices. But he does offer to go with them to get their stuff. Fair trade, she thinks.

  He’s not bad looking in a kind of skinny way. She likes them skinny. She’s tired of doing it all herself.

  * * *

  The streetlights come on, at least some of them. Nate goes with them when they go back to get their sleeping bags and stuff. He’s got a board with a bunch of nails sticking out of one end. He calls it his mace.

  They are quiet but they don’t try to hide. It’s hard to find the stuff in the dark, but luckily, Jane hadn’t really unpacked. She and Franny, who is breathing hard, get their sleeping bags and packs. It’s hard to see. The backyard is a dark tangle of shadows. She assumes it’s as hard to see them from inside the house—maybe harder.

  Nothing happens. She hears nothing from the house, sees nothing, although it seems as if they are all unreasonably loud gathering things up. They leave through the side gate, coming nervously to the front of the house, Nate carrying his mace and ready to strike, she and Franny with their arms full of sleeping bags. They go down the cracked driveway and out into the middle of the street, a few gutted cars still parked on either side. Then they are around the corner and it feels safe. They are all grinning and happy and soon putting the sleeping bags in Nate’s little backyard camp made domestic, no civilized, by the charred ash of the little fire.

  In the morning, she leaves Nate’s bedroll and gets back to sleep next to Franny before Franny wakes up.

  * * *

  They are walking on the freeway the next day, the three of them. They are together now although they haven’t discussed it, and Jane is relieved. People are just that much less likely to mess with a man. Overhead, three jets pass going south, visible only by their contrails. At least there are jets. American jets, she hopes.

  They stop for a moment while Nate goes around a bridge abutment to pee.

  “Mom,” Franny says. “Do you think that someone has wrecked Pete’s place?”

  “I don’t know,” Jane says.

  “What do you think happened to Pete?”

  Jane is caught off guard. They left without ever explicitly discussing Pete and Jane just thought that Franny, like her, assumed Pete was dead.

  “I mean,” Franny continues, “if they didn’t have gas, maybe he got stuck somewhere. Or he might have gotten hurt and ended up in the hospital. Even if the hospital wasn’t taking regular people, like
, they’d take cops. Because they think of cops as one of their own.” Franny is in her adult to adult mode, explaining the world to her mother. “They stick together. Cops and firemen and nurses.”

  Jane isn’t sure she knows what Franny is talking about. Normally she’d tell Franny as much. But this isn’t a conversation she knows how to have. Nate comes around the abutment, adjusting himself a bit, and it is understood that the subject is closed.

  “Okay,” he says. “How far to Wallyworld?” Franny giggles.

  Water is their biggest problem. It’s hard to find, and when they do find it, either from a pond, or very rarely, from a place where it hasn’t all been looted, it’s heavy. Thank God Nate is pretty good at making a fire. He has six disposable lighters that he got from a gas station, and when they find a pond, they boil it. Somewhere Jane thinks she heard that they should boil it for eighteen minutes. Basically they just boil the heck out of it. Pond water tastes terrible, but they are always thirsty. Franny whines. Jane is afraid that Nate will get tired of it and leave, but apparently as long as she crawls over to his bed roll every night, he’s not going to.

  Jane waits until she can tell Franny is asleep. It’s a difficult wait. They are usually so tired it is all she can do to keep from nodding off. But she is afraid to lose Nate.

  At first she liked that at night he never made a move on her. She always initiates. It made things easier all around. But now he does this thing where she crawls over and he’s pretending to be asleep. Or is asleep, the bastard, because he doesn’t have to stay awake. She puts her hand on his chest, and then down his pants, getting him hard and ready. She unzips his shorts and still he doesn’t do anything. She grinds on him for awhile, and only then does he pull his shorts and underwear down and let her ride him until he comes. Then she climbs off him. Sometimes he might say, ‘Thanks, Babe.’ Mostly he says nothing and she crawls back next to Franny feeling as if she just paid the rent. She has never given anyone sex for money. She keeps telling herself that this night she won’t do it. See what he does. Hell, if he leaves them, he leaves them. But then she lays there, waiting for Franny to go to sleep.

  Sometimes she knows Franny is awake when she crawls back. Franny never says anything and unless the moon is up, it is usually too dark to see if her eyes are open. It is just one more weird thing, no weirder than walking up the highway, or getting off the highway in some small town and bartering with some old guy to take what is probably useless U.S. currency for well water. No weirder than no school. No weirder than no baths, no clothes, no nothing.

  Jane decides she’s not going to do it the next night. But she knows she will lie there, anxious, and probably crawl over to Nate.

  They are walking, one morning, while the sky is still blue and darkening near the horizon. By midday the sky will be white and the heat will be flattening. Franny asks Nate, “Have you ever been in love?”

  “God, Franny,” Jane says.

  Nate laughs. “Maybe. Have you?”

  Franny looks irritable. “I’m in eighth grade,” she says. “And I’m not one of those girls with boobs, so I’m thinking, no.”

  Jane wants her to shut up, but Nate says, “What kind of guy would you fall in love with?”

  Franny looks a little sideways at him and then looks straight ahead. She has the most perfect skin, even after all this time in the sun. Skin like that is wasted on kids. Her look says, ‘Someone like you, stupid.’ “I don’t know,” Franny says. “Someone who knows how to do things. You know, when you need them.”

  “What kind of things?” Nate asks. He’s really interested. Well, fuck, there’s not a lot interesting on a freeway except other people walking and abandoned cars. They are passing a Sienna with a flat tire and all its doors open.

  Franny gestures towards it. “Like fix a car. And I’d like him to be cute, too.” Matter of fact. Serious as a church.

  Nate laughs. “Competent and cute.”

  “Yeah,” Franny says. “Competent and cute.”

  “Maybe you should be the one who knows how to fix a car,” Jane says.

  “But I don’t,” Franny points out reasonably. “I mean maybe, someday, I could learn. But right now, I don’t.”

  “Maybe you’ll meet someone in Canada,” Nate says. “Canadian guys are supposed to be able to do things like fix a car or fish or hunt moose.”

  “Canadian guys are different than American guys?” Franny asks.

  “Yeah,” Nate says. “You know, all flannel shirts and Canadian beer and stuff.”

  “You wear a flannel shirt.”

  “I’d really like a Canadian beer about now,” Nate says. “But I’m not Canadian.”

  Off the road to the right is a gas station/convenience store. They almost always check them. There’s not much likelihood of finding anything in the place because the wire fence that borders the highway has been trampled here so people can get over it which suggests that the place has long been looted. But you never know what someone might have left behind. Nate lopes off across the high grass.

  “Mom,” Franny says, “carry my backpack, okay?” She shrugs it off and runs. Amazing that she has the energy to run. Jane picks up Franny’s backpack, irritated, and follows. Nate and Franny disappear into the darkness inside.

  She follows them in. “Franny, I’m not hauling your pack anymore.”

  There are some guys already in the place and there is something about them, hard and well fed, that signals they are different. Or maybe it is just the instincts of a prey animal in the presence of predators.

  “So what’s in that pack?” one of them asks. He’s sitting on the counter at the cash register window, smoking a cigarette. She hasn’t had a cigarette in weeks. Her whole body simultaneously leans towards the cigarette and yet magnifies everything in the room. A room full of men, all of them staring.

  She just keeps acting like nothing is wrong because she doesn’t know what else to do. “Dirty blankets, mostly,” she says. “I have to carry most of the crap.”

  One of the men is wearing a grimy hoodie. Hispanic yard workers do that sometimes. It must help in the sun. These men are all Anglos and there are fewer of them than she first thought. Five. Two of them are sitting on their floor, their backs against an empty dead ice cream cooler, their legs stretched out in front of them. Everyone on the road is dirty but they are dirty and hard. Physical. A couple of them grin, feral flickers passed between them like glances. There is understanding in the room, shared purpose. She has the sense that she cannot let on that she senses anything, because the only thing holding them off is the pretense that everything is normal. “Not that we really need blankets in this weather,” she says. “I would kill for a functioning Holiday Inn.”

  “Hah,” the one by the cash register says. A bark. Amused.

  Nate is carefully still. He is searching, eyes going from man to man. Franny looks as if she is about to cry.

  It is only a matter of time. They will be on her. Should she play up to the man at the cash register? If she tries to flirt, will it release the rising tension in the room, allow them to spring on all of them? Will they kill Nate? What will they do to Franny? Or can she use her sex as currency. Go willingly. She does not feel as if they care if she goes willingly or not. They know there is nothing to stop them.

  “There’s no beer here, is there,” she says. She can hear her voice failing.

  “Nope,” says the man sitting at the cash register.

  “What’s your name?” she asks.

  It’s the wrong thing to say. He slides off the counter. Most of the men are smiling.

  Nate says, “Stav?”

  One of the guys on the floor looks up. His eyes narrow.

  Nate says, “Hey Stav.”

  “Hi,” the guy says cautiously.

  “You remember me,” Nate says. “Nick. From the Blue Moon Inn.”

  Nothing. Stav’s face is blank. But another guy, the one in the hoodie, says, “Speedy Nick!”

  Stav grins. “Speed
y Nick! Fuck! Your hair’s not blond anymore!”

  Nate says, “Yeah, well, you know, upkeep is tough on the road.” He jerks a thumb at Janey. “This is my sister, Janey. My niece, Franny. I’m taking ’em up to Toronto. There’s supposed to be a place up there.”

  “I heard about that,” the guy in the hoodie says. “Some kind of camp.”

  “Ben, right?” Nate says.

  “Yeah,” the guy says.

  The guy who was sitting on the counter is standing now, cigarette still smoldering. He wants it, doesn’t want everybody to get all friendly. But the moment is shifting away from him.

  “We found some distilled water,” Stav says. “Tastes like shit but you can have it if you want.”

  * * *

  Janey doesn’t ask him why he told her his name was Nate. For all she knows, ‘Nate’ is his name and ‘Nick’ is the lie.

  They walk each day. Each night she goes to his bedroll. She owes him. Part of her wonders is maybe he’s gay? Maybe he has to lie there and fantasize she’s a guy or something. She doesn’t know.

  They are passing water. They have some so there is no reason to stop. There’s an egret standing in the water, white as anything she has seen since this started, immaculately clean. Oblivious to their passing. Oblivious to the passing of everything. This is all good for the egrets. Jane hasn’t had a drink since they started for Canada. She can’t think of a time since she was sixteen or so that she went so long without one. She wants to get dressed up and go out someplace and have a good time and not think about anything because the bad thing about not having a drink is that she thinks all the time and fuck, there’s nothing in her life right now she really wants to think about. Especially not Canada, which she is deeply but silently certain is only a rumor. Not the country, she doesn’t think it doesn’t exist, but the camp. It is a mirage. A shimmer on the horizon. Something to go towards but which isn’t really there.