Elvis only wears the harness when they go out somewhere. He doesn’t wear it at home with the blind man. It’s too heavy, and it rubs on his shoulder, but he doesn’t complain, because he knows it’s necessary. He can see. The man can’t. The man’s dead, and these people see, so he doesn’t need the harness anymore. He gets that. He’s not stupid. That doesn’t mean these people don’t need guidance. Elvis wonders how he ended up with the last people. Must be because he’s a good boy.
When he was a puppy, there were lots of other dogs who weren’t good enough. Some didn’t even care about being good. Even when a blind man was hanging on to them.
You had to be even better if he let go, because he might need to find you.
Had to be best of all if he wasn’t there and was counting on you to be good anyway. To wait. No matter what.
Like now.
Dead means gone, never coming back.
Good is forever, now that the blind man is gone.
Darwin and Gaby decided to spend the night in the display tent where they’d made love. They’d never done anything like that before—screw a total stranger in a display tent in the Target. It was one of the big ones, two rooms. It was fun, and they weren’t total strangers. They had just shared a profound traumatic experience together. There was a syndrome or something wasn’t there? Neither one of them could remember the name. Didn’t matter now. They were both pretty happy about it.
They were too tired and drunk, and it was getting too late anyway, to leave the dead today, but they planned to get a fresh start in the morning. Their bikes were loaded up with stuff. Darwin even had a trailer hitched up to his. They both were all serious and solemn about it out of respect for the dead, but secretly, they both thought it sounded fun to ride into the country and camp. Being in scouts had been like the bikes for both of them—cut short before they got to do the fun stuff. Darwin’s parents took him out on a matter of principle. He wasn’t sure which one. They had lots. Gaby’s mom quit taking her anywhere. After Ty and Jay died. Both understood their folks’ reasons at the time, but they weren’t their reasons.
Gaby took Elvis out front, and he crapped in the bushes. He looked at her like she should pick it up, but she thought she could let it slide under the circumstances. There was howling out there. Gaby noticed Elvis didn’t waste any time getting back inside.
She removed Karin the manager’s keys from around her neck and locked the front doors. She shut off most of the lights, but Karin didn’t have the key to turn off the PA . Maybe it was always going. Maybe even janitorial had to listen to it. They needed stuff that fit their lifestyle too. Gaby always thought she would like being a janitor, buffing the big empty store.
She told Elvis he could come sleep with them in the tent. There were two rooms. He followed her back to Sporting Goods but preferred to sleep outside at the crossroads of the aisles. She gave him a big bowl of dog food, the best they had, and a big dish of bottled water. What a day, she thought.
Inside the tent, Darwin had set up a camp table with a battery lantern, and he’d found pillows and pillowcases and chocolate bars and air freshener. She was touched. They made love some more. This time it was way better, and they fell asleep.
Darwin couldn’t sleep. Busy brains. Too much going on since everyone died. Everything’s changed. Too much to process. He decided to read. He turned on the light and started reading his Kindle. He wanted to finish the first story in the dead guy’s book, then he figured he’d switch over to Mrs. Gaskell.
Gabriella, as he lovingly called her, slumbered peacefully beside him, purring like a kitten. He could’ve gone to another cashier, and he never would’ve known her. He would be alone now. He couldn’t imagine he could’ve awakened just anybody, felt compelled to shout out her name. Gabriella was special. How could he be so lucky? What had he done to deserve this? He couldn’t think about it too much. He had a tendency to do that. One of his degrees is in philosophy.
He read.
He began to worry. The first story went on and on. He paged ahead. It never seemed to stop. He skipped to the next story, and there it was, so the first one had to end sometime. He tried to page back from the second story to where he’d been in the first, so he could see how much was left, but he finally gave up and went back to where he was and kept reading.
Maybe it would get better.
Anything to take his mind off the dead people. He wondered if you could smell them yet. The tent smelled like a new car. He thought of all the cars on Broad Street. Maybe he should’ve chosen a different air freshener. His student loan payments were automatic. He didn’t want to think about it.
In the story, someone named Norwood wants to die because everyone lives forever, and he’s tired of it, so he joins a Suicide Club where everyone wants to die, and they talk about it a lot in a way Darwin doesn’t find particularly interesting, but even when they try to kill themselves, they come back to life like everyone else, so Norwood decides to go back to school to study paleontology because that’s old dead things, and he talks a lot about that, what it all means, and about dinosaurs; then he meets a woman named Lucinda studying paleontology for pretty much the same reasons, and they talk a lot and make out a little, but all the dinosaurs are coming back to life too, so the creature they dig up devours them, and there they are, alive inside this big dinosaur headed for London to kill all the people who can’t die. To be alive inside a dinosaur forges a special bond between Norwood and Lucinda …
Darwin couldn’t take it anymore. He wasn’t sure whether it was Norwood or Lucinda or the dinosaur, but he was getting seriously annoyed by the story. He wanted to give it a chance, but this really wasn’t his kind of thing. He switched to Mrs. Gaskell. Wives and Daughters. He’d watched an adaptation on Masterpiece Theatre back when his television worked and rather liked it. It opened charmingly:
To begin with the old rigmarole of childhood. In a country there was a shire, and in that shire there was a town, and in that town there was a house, and in that house there was a room, and in that room there was a bed, and in that bed there lay a little girl, who had been swallowed by a dinosaur on its way to London to kill …
That’s not right, Darwin thought. Scanned by volunteers, it said at the beginning. He paid nothing, so he had no right to complain, but still. If you were going to do something, you should do it right, not tamper with a classic. There was a comfort in a story like that. You knew who it was about—this girl—who she was going to fall in love with and marry and her friends and so forth. One young man would be more interesting than the others if you bothered to look closely enough at him. This could take a while. She was still a kid, and she’ll have friends and so on, some not entirely trustworthy. Parents, all of that. There were no dinosaurs. Not living, anyway. London hadn’t even been bombed yet. All the dinosaurs were still dead. Another one of Darwin’s degrees is in literature.
Darwin switched back to the dead author’s story. Or, rather, the other dead author’s. Norwood is lying in the arms of his fellow paleontologist inside the dinosaur. They’re discussing the future of their relationship. The dinosaur ate London while Darwin was with Mrs. Gaskell—then shit out the whole lot except for Lucinda and Norwood—and now they’re on their way to Tokyo, telling each other why they want to die and sorting out what sort of impact this might have on their burgeoning romance. They can’t decide which is more important—death or each other—without a thought of Tokyo.
The Kindle slipped from Darwin’s hands, and he fell fast asleep.
After a time, the Kindle shut itself off. It’s automatic. Don’t worry. It saved his place.
Gaby is dreaming about her brothers. They both have holes in their heads, from temple to temple, neat little cylindrical passageways. They show her. You can line up their heads and see through to the other side. They aren’t anything like the real holes, through their real heads, Ty on one side, Jay on the other in the backseat of the car. Their skulls shattered and rained down on her. Jay’s. The shot came
from his side. No glass. The windows were rolled down. The AC wasn’t working. Mom hadn’t had a chance to take it in to the mechanic.
“What are you doing in Target?” Jay asks her.
They’re in Electronics. All the televisions are showing the same thing, as usual. This time it’s real actors playing characters from an old cartoon show Gaby never watched. Mom probably did—she would watch anything when she got home from work—but Mom never went to movies. She never had time. But here she is in Electronics in her white doctor jacket she used to let Gaby play with and the stethoscope she didn’t. Not after the Barbie incidents.
Mom asks her, “What are you doing in Target, Gabriella?”
Gaby’s not sure what she means by that, what she’s asking exactly. “Are you dead?” she asks her mother. After Ty and Jay died, Mom went into a mental hospital. Maybe crazy people didn’t die. Mom blamed herself. You couldn’t get her not to blame herself. She’d always done everything. If it wasn’t her fault, then whose fault was it? This dream Mom seems to have gotten over it. She must be dead.
“Everyone’s dead, Darlin’, which is why you and your new boyfriend need to leave.”
“He’s not my boyfriend, Mom. We just met.”
“It’s okay either way, but it’s time to go. There’s nothing for you here.”
Gaby wakes up. The chirpy PA woman hasn’t given it up. She wants to make your life better, not just today, but every day. For a moment, Gaby thinks maybe everyone’s come back to life, and she’s not sure how she feels about that, but then she’s sure. She doesn’t want to go back to when everyone was alive, but dying like Darwin said. Mom would say let sleeping dogs lie, even though they never had a dog, and sleeping isn’t dead.
Elvis is panting at the entrance to the tent. It’s a new day. Her new boyfriend’s lying beside her. “Wake up, Darlin’,” she says, sounding just like her mother.
Darwin opens his eyes. “Gabriella,” he whispers.
They unzip the tent fly. Mick’s singing “Wild Horses” again.
As it turns out, it’s a lot easier to leave the dead than you might suppose. Elvis running alongside discourages the occasional dog inclined to give chase. They stop and have a meal at the last Applebee’s on Broad Street near the mostly empty office park out past the car dealers. It isn’t far beyond that before they find their pick of a dozen huge houses, each sitting on its own 10-acre lot. Most with only a couple of dead people inside. They can pitch a tent in the yard if they want or just live in one of these big houses.
They pick one of the smaller ones with a beautiful enameled wood stove in the family room and bury the owners near the gazebo in a spot with a nice view.
There are even horses at a lot of these places. Tame ones. They set them free when they go biking around the neighborhood in the afternoon, picking up a bottle of wine or bag of coffee beans, a jar of marinated artichoke hearts, chocolate bars. The trailer on Darwin’s bike comes in handy. There’s also a little lake with a dock and boats, and they like to drift around under the stars that are burning a lot brighter these days now that the power’s gone out. Not to worry. All these big places have big generators and big vehicles to siphon gas out of for as long as Darwin and Gaby are likely to live.
Unless they live forever, which doesn’t sound like such a bad idea to either one of them at the moment. They tell each other their life stories. There’s never been much demand before, so they’re fresh to the task and hold nothing back. Why should they?
“Mom was working in the Emergency Room and forgot to sign something and stopped off with us kids in the back and ran inside. That’s when some totally random guy, who had nothing to do with us or Mom, tried to shoot someone going into the hospital, and the bullet killed my brothers, and Mom was never the same. Me neither.”
Darwin holds her, kisses her wet cheeks, and they’re glad to be alive. He’s learned a lot, now that everyone’s dead, about relating to others. He tells her the names of all the drugs he’s been given and about all the different Darwins they could make him be, but what his problem was went by several names, depending on which specialist you were listening to, none of them you would want to name your kid. He was a great disappointment to his parents. He liked to learn things, though. He was good at it. Still is. He’s never found much use for the things he’s learned before, except their own enjoyment. Now he narrates them to Gabriella, who likes to hear about them while the cicadas sing and the frogs croak.
Darwin tells Gabriella about the Suicide Club story he still can’t get to the end of while they’re sitting on their new porch watching the horses they set free wander around in the woods, looking like they’re not quite sure what to do with themselves. Moscow, Los Angeles, Rio have all fallen before the dinosaur’s murderous rampage. All the content on the Kindle has been infected with dinosaurs. He’s afraid it’s a virus.
“Suicide Club?” Gaby says. “Definitely not interested. Dinosaurs are okay. Maybe we can find a copy of Jurassic Park?”
“I’ll keep an eye out.”
“I was just noticing our wild horses aren’t very wild.”
“Give them time,” Darwin says. “They’ll get there someday. Pinot Grigio or Sauvignon Blanc?”
“You choose,” she says. “Why don’t you just skip to the next story?”
“It’s about zombies.”
Gaby laughs. “You definitely don’t want to go there.”
It’s not really about zombies. He just wanted to hear her laugh. Darwin loves the sound of Gabriella’s laughter. It makes him laugh too. “I certainly don’t.” They go with the Pinot. “I think we may already have a copy of Jurassic Park somewhere. Elvis and I found quite a haul at the big Georgian.”
“They’re all big.”
“The really big one. Elvis loved that place, racing around the tile foyer.”
“I can imagine—you and that dog.”
Elvis sweeps his big tail back and forth across the porch at the sound of their laughter, the mention of his name. He lies at their feet. Life is good. He hears the howling out there, way off in the distance. He just doesn’t let it bother him. It took him a while, he’ll admit, to loosen up, to just have a little fun. But then, it was like a miracle. He was with the man when he found the thing. He wasn’t even sure the man liked him all that much up till then, not like the woman. But it was just the two of them in a big wide field where horses used to graze. They had the whole world to themselves, and he threw it. Elvis had never had so much fun in his whole life. Frisbee. Who knew? Now they have fun every day.
There’s a quiet contentment that pervades the evening, a slight chill in the air, as the moon rises in the sky, and the horses nicker in the moonlight, thinking about things horses think about.
Darwin thinks soon it will be time for a fire in the wood stove. There’s a lovely enamel scene on the side. It’s a snow-covered village on the other side of the world with reindeer instead of horses, and there’s a dog who looks a little like Elvis, but all the people are inside, safe and warm.
© 2013 by Dennis Danvers.
Dennis Danvers has published seven novels, including Circuit of Heaven (New York Times Notable, 1998), The Watch (New York Times Notable, 2002; Booklist 10 Best SF novels, 2002), and The Bright Spot (under pseudonym Robert Sydney). His first novel Wilderness has recently been re-issued with a sexy new cover. Recent short fiction has appeared in F & SF, Realms of Fantasy, Electric Velocipede, and in the anthologies Tails of Wonder and Richmond Noir. He teaches fiction writing and science fiction and fantasy literature at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia, and blogs at dennisdanvers.com.
The Traditional
Maria Dahvana Headley
I.
By your first anniversary, the world’s stopped making paper, and so you can’t give your boyfriend the traditional gift. You never would have anyway, regardless of circumstances. You’re not that kind of girl. You pride yourself on your original sin. It’s the hot you trade in.
So you give him the piece of your skin just beneath your ribcage on the right side, where the floating ribs bend in. It’s a good part. Not the best. You’re like a food hoarder who pretends her larder’s empty, all the while running her finger along the dusty ledge that leads to the trick shelves that hold the jars of Caspian caviar. You’ve always been the kind of liar who leans back and lets boys fall into you while you see if you can make them fall all the way out the other side. You want them to feel like they’ve hit Narnia. You traffic in interdimensional fucking, during which they transcend space and time, and you go nowhere. When they fall in love, you Shun & Break™ them. Their poor plastic hearts are Pez dispensers topped with copyright violation Mickey Mice.
Your boy’s not falling for this shit. He simply refuses. He sees through your methods. You met him in a bar on the night of the first apocalypse, just prior, and both of you somehow lived through the night.
He clocked you from moment one, when you bought him a drink and brought it to him, fresh lipstick on your mouth, altering your walk to cause him pain. He drank it. He then took the cherry out of yours and drank your drink too, looking at you the whole time like he was a prime transgressor who was going to rock your world until it broke.
“You gonna try to make me love you now?” he asked. “That your thing?”
“Brother,” you said, taken aback by the way he’d just needlessly whacked the rules of flirtation, “I don’t even know you exist.”
This would have been the end of it, except that five minutes later there was a rending, and everyone was screaming and trying to get away, and buildings were falling down, and the streets were full of unimaginable.
You were out of your element. You loved the Woolworthing of the world before the apocalypse, the shopping mall fluorescence of flirtation, the IKEA particleboard pushing together of things that would shortly fall apart. You loved paper parasols and plastic monkeys. Everything was your toy. You killed men, but they never got anywhere near killing you.
Lightspeed Magazine Issue 36 Page 17