by John Barnes
“And exactly what does that have to do with the way I smell?”
He curled against her; she felt dampness and realized his eyes might be tearing, so she just held him and waited.
Finally he raised his head. “Look, um… here’s the thing—”
“Oh, my god, you’ve found another gigantic Amazon woman, but you don’t think you can lift us both at the same time.”
He laughed, but then he said, “Heather, if worse comes to worst, we might only have a week—and I’ll treasure every second of it and try not to be sad—but look, Beautiful, I’m dependent on a lot more gadgets besides the wheelchair. Some of them are implanted and they have surface contacts.”
“I know, babe, I’ve stroked a few of them.”
“Jesus, yeah, you can’t imagine how amazing it is to be rubbed around that little circular plastic spot over my kidneys, the place where my skin grows up to it itches all the time—”
“Well, say so.” She pressed around it.
“I just did. And that feels good—yeah, right where the skin merges into the plastic.” He sighed happily, but then he went on. “See, Heather—if one of my plastic parts starts to decay, or if nanoswarm gets into my body, I won’t last very long. My immune system is pretty fucked up anyway, actually, that’s what destroyed some of the natural equipment, and I don’t think I’m going to develop immunity to any of Daybreak’s little pranks.”
“I’ll wipe you down as much as you need with antiseptic, peroxide, whatever we need. I hope my cats weren’t—”
“Naw. Clean as people, basically, or cleaner. I love cats and as long as the Daybreak biotes don’t breach my seals, I’m fine. And if I have to give up being touched by people to stay alive, I’m taking the next outbound to the other side.”
She shuddered. “You sound way too serious.”
“Well, look, my point is, if I have to leave the party too early, I want to remember how good you smell, because… well, look… this is going to sound ridiculous, I mean we’ve really only been together forty-eight hours—”
“If you’re about to tell me you’re in love with me, you’d better hurry up before I beat you to it.” She disentangled him for just a moment, adjusted her position, and pulled him back to her so that they were face-to-face. “The whole situation makes me feel so dumb. I enjoyed all the times we went out in the last few months, and all those other times we just talked for the hell of it. I kept thinking I should drop you the big hint about sex. I liked that you called after every date, I liked catching you for coffee now and then, I liked the way every so often you’d e-mail me something that made me smile or just phone and we’d talk for an hour and a half, and… crap, Lenny, I just thought we had a lot of time. So if we only have a week, yeah, we should probably get around to saying—”
“I love you.” He smiled. “I wanted to get that in before the world ends.”
“Hey, I love you too. The end of the world can make a person think that maybe there need to be a few less nights eating out of the fridge and talking to the cats. And you’ve made me nervous. Teach me how to clean you, ’kay?”
Heather had just finished rubbing Lenny down with sanitizing wipes, when her phone chimed. The screen said it was Arnie.
“Hey, lovebirds,” Arnie said. “I think Cam was scared to call you again.”
“We were just doing a few specially vile, filthy acts, hoping he’d call,” Heather said. “What’s up?”
“The Acting President is about to go on all channels and apparently give a speech that Cameron Nguyen-Peters, and Secretary Weisbrod, and as far as I can tell everybody, have just spent two hours begging him not to give. Nguyen-Peters called me to tell me he’d like all of ‘the extended team’—that’s what he’s calling us—to catch it and send any observations or thoughts we might have to him, pronto. He asked me to call you, and, yeah, I think he’s afraid of violating your privacy.”
“And you aren’t.”
“Hell, boss, if I wasn’t afraid my car would turn to green smelly Jell-O halfway there, I’d come over, sit on Lenny’s couch, eat Doritos, and comment on the action.” A shriek from the background told Heather that Allison was somewhere around too.
“That won’t be necessary tonight, but we’ll keep you on the list in case we ever sell tickets. Thanks for the heads-up, Arnie.” To Lenny, she said, “The end of the world is not going to leave us alone.”
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. WASHINGTON. DC. 9:30 P.M. EST. TUESDAY. OCTOBER 29.
Chris Manckiewicz wasn’t sure how he felt about being the only electronic media with functioning gear at the White House. He had to wonder how many people would ever see it, considering the problems between the availability of working transmitters, televisions, routers, links, and generators.
He stayed simple, keeping the center camera in focus and occasionally cutting to the left or right plan angle camera for visual variety. Since his computer was still working and the battery was still up, having gotten a recharge at Rusty’s house from her windmill-driven charger, he could do the little bit of editing, and the occasional small shifts of focus, with his left hand and a tenth of his mind.
His other hand was scrawling in a steno pad, against the imminent inevitable death of his computer and iScribe. He honestly didn’t see how the old-time guys did this by hand with no electronic backup.
He had always liked making up ledes that were too truthful to run, and he had a great one for this speech:
In a speech that resembled nothing so much as your creepy uncle trying to lure you down to the basement with toys and ice cream for a special game of “keeping secrets,” Acting President Shaunsen today attempted to bribe the public while revealing he had no idea what is going on.
Shaunsen’s emergency plan suspiciously resembled the budget bill last year that Pendano had killed with arm-twisting in the Senate and threats of veto, calling it “a thousand too many giveaways.” Every big plum was introduced with, “and for all you good people in….” Chris began counting them in his steno pad; at least thirty cities and counties were mentioned in a speech that clocked at less than an hour. He drew an arrow to remind himself that this would be somewhere in his story for the Advertiser-Gazette.
It creeped Chris out. Shaunsen didn’t appear to realize that there was any danger. The Vice President was ash and bone, the President was rumored to be mad, and the Acting President was giving everyone a happy-days-are-here-again, Republican’s-nightmare version of the New Deal. Shaunsen finished out by assuring everyone that a vote for Pendano would result in “getting you the good Democratic president you all deserve. So as the young people say, no biggie, just chill.”
Christ, that was out-of-date when I was in grade school—but then, so was Shaunsen.
The net was up enough for him to file the video; Anne replied that it would be showing immediately on six stations between the Atlantic and the Ohio River, and they’d be able to relay it to a few others in the next few days.
Chris dropped the rags soaked in household ammonia into his gear bag, shouldered it up, and set out for dinner and bed as his counterpart might have in Jefferson’s day—on foot. A three-mile walk would just about give him time to settle on an angle and a lede.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. ON US 285. IN COLORADO. JUST NORTH OF THE NEW MEXICO STATE LINE. SHORTLY AFTER 8:00 P.M. MST. TUESDAY. OCTOBER 29.
Jason thought, That was one long day. Beth seemed to be better; they’d found a spring pump and some apparently uninfected plastic bottles at the BLM trailhead after crossing to this side of the mountains, and risked an afternoon nap a little way up a slope of sun-warmed scree, out of sight of the trail. Sleep and water helped both of them; they made good time on the little county road west to the crossroads with US 285.
They headed north, away from the Tres Piedras country, keep moving, one foot in front of the other, just cover ground.
285 was an asphalt incision bisecting the magnificent emptiness of the San Luis Valley, shadowed by the immense Sangre de Cristos,
winding over a series of rises, visible all the way to the horizon in each direction. The sky’s vivid unmarked blue might have gone on forever.
They walked for hours as the sun went down, and it seemed only time passed; the road was the road, with nothing on it, and that was all.
In the high mountain valleys in the fall, even if the day is warm and summery, the temperature falls well below freezing at night. Jason figured they had to keep moving until they found somewhere warm to sleep, and so far nothing had presented itself; exhausted as he was, he thought he could probably walk all night by the dim starlight, but he was worried about Beth, who might stumble and fall on her broken wrist.
At first he wasn’t sure what the black silhouette against the dim gray glow of the distant mountains was. Closer, and they saw a faint rectangle of red light going ceaselessly on and off. They were almost on it when he realized it was a huge car, one of those monsters his father called “full-sized,” so old it had to be a just-gasoline model; they hadn’t made anything that big in ten years at least. A single red LED slowly flashing on and off had illuminated the back window, creating the red rectangle, dim as the starlight. Wow, it is dark out here.
They had been approaching from upwind, and in the darkness the car was just a silhouette, so he was almost on top of it by the time he smelled the stinking, spoiled tires. The car was stopped on top of the dimly glowing dashes of the centerline; Jason peered inside. The man lay with his seat tilted far back and his head lolling to the side of the headrest, lighted by the slow-blinking red glow from the dash. Jason tapped, knocked, yelled—no response. Finally, he tried the door.
It was unlocked. The dome light came on, and by its light Jason saw the man was dead, his hands still clutching at his chest. The blinking light’s label was ONSTAR ALERTED. Probably the car had pulled itself over—there was a reason they called that a “dead man circuit”—and been calling for help all this time.
Gently, Jason lifted the corpse and reached under the Western State sweatshirt. He found external pacemaker pads on the sternum and behind the left scapula, both thoroughly crusted with nanoswarm. Oh, buddy, I hope those aren’t the ones that I was spreading. I didn’t want to kill anyone anyway, and you’re so about to save our asses.
He dragged the corpse out of the car and over to the side of the road. Now I know why they call it dead weight. But we can’t bury—
“Oh, Jason, come look!”
In the back seat, Beth had found a case of Mountain Dew, a couple of sweaters, and a heavy winter coat, along with a ditty bag of medicines and a gym bag containing a sweat suit. When Jason popped the trunk, they found a bonanza—it looked like the old man had gone to a Wal-Mart to load up on cheap groceries. The bagged frozen vegetables were squishy but still cold, and they had helped to preserve the milk, bread, and lunchmeat—and to keep the beer and pop cold.
“Let’s try something,” Jason said. He turned the keys in the ignition and was rewarded with the creaky grind of the starter, and then the warm purr of the big engine. On the rims, they drove away, making a noise like the metal shop of the damned, putting about a mile between themselves and the body before Jason pulled far over into a slow-vehicle turnout.
“Almost a full tank of gas, too,” he said.
“But no tires, and it sounds like you’ve already wrecked the wheels.”
“Yeah, but now we’re far enough away from the body to not have to meet Mr. Bear or a pack of coyotes tonight. And we wanted the car, even though it’s never going to move again. This thing has a ‘keep-warm’ setting.”
“Keeping warm sounds real good. What’s it do?”
“My dad had one of these old gas-only cars when we lived in Vermont. Some of them for high altitude and cold climates could be set to idle from time to time just to keep the battery charged and the water in the radiator warm, for parking on the street when it was twenty below outside, with a detector for monoxide in case you mistakenly left it on in the garage. So we set it to keep warm, turn on the heater full blast, and every time the battery gets low or the radiator water cools off, it’ll idle a few minutes and warm us up. One long comfy warm night with food.”
“But… Jeez, Jason, aren’t we burning a lot of gasoline, polluting, you know, all that stuff?”
“One car would have a hell of a time polluting the San Luis Valley in one night. The gas is just going to turn into goop in a couple days anyway. And the car is going to die as the nanoswarm eat it, Beth, but for right now enough is working to keep us warm, and there’s more than we can possibly eat in the trunk. I vote we eat ourselves silly and sleep till the sun wakes us up.”
She shrugged. “Well, the way you say, it makes sense and all. I just feel all weird and stuff about sitting burning gasoline and going nowhere in the last running Cadillac. Feels like something my dad would’ve done.”
Beth was vegan, and Jason had always felt a little guilty that he wasn’t, and, of course, both of them were philosophically opposed to plaztatic food, but lunchmeat sandwiches with salsa from a jar, Doritos, Pringles, irradiated chili in a plastic tub, and partly melted ice cream—all washed down with milk, Orange Fanta, and Budweiser—made the most wonderful dinner date they’d ever had, with the big heater keeping the old Cadillac toasty and the brilliant stars shining in through the dark windshield.
Beth switched on the radio; the scan button ran through four hundred channels without finding a signal, but “it’s probably not seeing a working cell tower anywhere, and that cliff behind us is probably blocking the satellites. So—” She leaned forward, peering at the old-fashioned physical buttons by the light of the screen. “Hey, this thing is so old it still has FM and AM besides cell.” She flipped the toggle; there was nothing on FM, but on AM the voice leaped out at them: “—think officially at the moment we are a 130,000-watt station but it might be more if Ernie can find a way. The reason we’re doing this, of course, is that nearly every other station is off the air, but we have working generators, we’ve been able to keep one studio and our transmitter running, and we have a functioning fiber line to Washington; we just have to hope enough of you out there have radios that can pull in our signal.
“Once again, anyone with working recording and broadcasting or net-connected equipment is requested to record this broadcast and pass it on in any form possible, to as many people as you can reach with it; the Acting President has authorized compensation for your time and trouble.
“For those of you who just found this station, you’re listening to Radio KP-1, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, broadcasting at 1020 on the AM band, which is actually KDKA’s transmission facility linked by a fiber-optic line to WQED-TV’s broadcast studio, using partly hand-built tube electronics from Westinghouse Labs. Mark this spot on your dial as we think we’re likely to remain on the air permanently, thanks to technical support from Westinghouse and PPG.
“In a moment, Radio KP-1 will be carrying a live broadcast from Washington of a speech by Acting President Peter Shaunsen, who will be addressing the nation to explain current plans for dealing with the Daybreak emergency. While we are waiting, here are some other announcements that the Department of Homeland—one moment please—yes, the President’s speech is about to begin, so we now take you to the Oval Office, where the President’s speech will be reported by Chris Manckiewicz of The 24/7 News Network.”
Jason took a deep draft of Mountain Dew, and settled in to listen; he didn’t think he’d ever paid this much attention to someone talking before. Beside him, Beth was stone-still and alert.
The engine purred away on idle from time to time; otherwise the night was silent. When the Acting President’s speech was over, and the station had gone back to broadcasting orders (mostly to preserve valuable resources) and requests (mostly to report where useful material was) from Homeland Security, Jason turned the radio off.
“Don’t,” Beth said. “We can leave it on real soft, but don’t turn it off, please.”
“Sure.” He turned it back on. Something
about her tone made him reach out to touch Beth, and he found her face wet.
“You okay?”
“No. Yeah. Kind of. I—I liked hearing the president on the radio. And hearing the radio. It was like, the world’s gonna go on, that was what it was like. Like there’s still an America and everything. And I know he was just like making a lot of promises to win an election—”
“Which he won’t.”
“Which he won’t—but you heard him, Jason, he was like reaching out to the whole country, here’s what we’re going to build and do and make, let’s get going, let’s get to work—and it was just kind of… beautiful. I mean I know it’s all a fake and a lie but I was real glad that Chris Whatsisface didn’t start telling us all about how it was all bullshit and all. I just… I wanted to know someone was doing something, I wanted to know the government was trying, and I wanted to hear the radio and know we weren’t the only people left on Earth.”
“Truth?”
“Sure.”
Jason took another delicious sip of Mountain Dew, thought about how long it might be before he had more of it, looked at the night sky swarming with stars around the dim reflection of the radio’s glow. “I wish I’d never fucking heard of Daybreak, and neither had anyone else.”
Beth started to cry, harder, and he reached for her to see if she was okay. She said, “Me too, but I wasn’t gonna say nothing to you.”
He felt queasy and sick from what they’d been saying, and Beth looked like she was in more pain, so he said, “We’d better sack out.”
They fell asleep with the radio still going, under piles of clothes and coats, Beth in the front seat, Jason in the back, to give her most of the heat. The seat leather smelled good and the warmth of the heater and the soft engine turning over every few minutes were comforting; the last thing he remembered before falling asleep was the little insect voice of the announcer reading a complicated post from DHS, asking anyone who had any antique steel puddling tools, and any iron sculptors, blacksmiths, and heritage craft ironworkers to gather at Homestead, Pennsylvania, in three months’ time.