“One big happy family.” Joaquin grinned.
“And don’t do it where everyone can see, just wherever you fall. Have some decency,” Mel suggested. “Take her behind the barn or something.”
Driscoll shuffled his mustache with his finger. “I have a wife,” he said. “Liana. She’s mine, and nobody else’s.” He motioned with his hands. “She’s all mine, and there ain’t no negotiating that. Also, my daughter Kristianya’s about thirteen. Nobody touches her without asking me first. She’s not old enough yet.”
Ari glanced at the others.
“Look, I’m bringing you plenty of fresh faces to go around,” Driscoll reminded them. “Girls you’ve never even seen. Some real pretty ones, too.”
This placated the men. “I think we have a deal,” Ari said, and braced his legs to stand up and shake Driscoll’s hand across the table.
His legs wouldn’t move. He struggled for a moment, slapping his hands against the table and trying to push himself back, or up, or anywhere, but his body betrayed him with each passing moment. Within half a minute, his hands were useless, flopping against the table with ever-weakening spasms. Everyone at the table watched, a circle of horrified statues, as he seized and pitched forward onto his dirty plate with a clank. He convulsed and slobbered and gasped for a few moments before slowly relaxing into nothingness.
“What the—”
“The Disease!” Alex cried, shooting up from his chair with such force that it crashed backward onto the cement floor. “He . . . he was infected?!”
“When was he bitten?” Joaquin demanded just as Mel began shrieking, pounding his fists against his suddenly paralyzed legs. “No! No!”
“Get away from me!” Driscoll roared, upsetting the table and heading for the door. He lost his footing and smashed into the concrete. “My legs! Oh God, oh God . . .” He chanted his litany to deaf ears.
“How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world,” came a dark murmur from the kitchen doorway.
Alex whipped his head to the side and saw Stella standing in the doorway, leaning a casual shoulder against the frame with her arms crossed over her deer-like, scar-marred body. She’d removed her apron and folded it neatly over one of her arms. “I’m glad you liked your supper. I’ve never made plague dog liver before.”
“B . . . bitch!” Joaquin managed to eke out as the paralysis took hold of his body. He fell to the floor and scratched at Ari’s ancient pistol he kept in the holster at his hip.
Stella easily beat him to it, slapping his stupid fingers away and retrieving the firearm for herself. As the men writhed on the floor in their death throes, she turned to Alex, who stood against the wall, pressing into it as though he hoped it would absorb him. Stella fiddled with the gun and watched them die.
“The rest is silence,” she said with a shrug, and pulled out a chair at a table for two nearby, easing down into her seat. “Alex,” she invited. “Come and join me. You may be wondering why you aren’t dead. Allow me to illuminate you.”
Alex had never heard Stella’s voice like this. Granted, he didn’t know her well, but he ate here, same as everyone else. Gone was the meek little mouse-cook. This was someone else, all hard angles and arrowhead eyes.
“Come,” she repeated when he did not move. “All of this started with people seated at a table, deciding the fates of others. So it goes.”
Alex inched forward when she lazily waved the gun his direction, and sat across from her.
“You ate a deer’s liver,” she said. “I’m glad you all kept your food to yourselves. We need you, Doc. You weren’t expendable like they were.”
“How . . . how could you . . .” he struggled.
“Ari said so himself,” she replied. “None of you know me. I just showed up, kept my mouth shut, and cooked the food. You don’t know what I was before I came here. Now you know.”
“Wh . . . why?” was his next question as he watched the bodies on the floor twitch.
“It had to end,” she said, flicking the safety on and off, on and off. “These men and their little dream of paradise after the world ended. They were the loudest and the strongest. They had the weapons and the ideas. But now they’re dead because I couldn’t watch them lay a hand on another woman. Watch another woman die in childbirth because they think we need to ‘grow the population.’ Sorry, Doc, but things aren’t like how they used to be. No hospitals. You can’t save them all.” She sighed. “If a woman wants to take a chance for a baby, it’s her choice. But we’re done. We’re done being forced.”
He swallowed hard. She got up for a moment and brought each of them a clean cup of water. “What happens now?” he whispered as he dragged his arm over his forehead.
“We’re still merging the towns,” Stella said, and sipped her water with her gun hand. “But things are going to be different around here. Do you understand me?”
He stared at her.
“You’re going to go out there and tell everyone that those men were bitten by a plague dog that somehow got into my kitchen. Probably attracted by the deer I just slaughtered. But then you and I killed it, and cleaned everything up so it’s safe again. You’re going to tell them you’re the leader now. But that won’t be true, will it?”
He shook his head just slightly, left to right to left.
“I don’t want a riot,” Stella said. “Fighting each other’s how we got into this mess. Things can’t change too quickly. If the other men know what I did, all the women will suffer. But with you as my puppet, we’ll do just fine. We’ll merge the towns and change the laws. You will do anything and everything I say, or I will find a way to end you. You know who I am now. What I’m capable of. Do you understand me, Doc? Are you hearing me, boy?”
Alex nodded.
“Good.” She went over to a cupboard in the corner and withdrew a big bag of wrinkled plastic. When she unfolded it, he could see it was some kind of whole-body suit. There was a headpiece with a little window to see out of. She shook it free of dust. The three letters printed on the chest said “CDC.”
“Now, put this on, and start cleaning up my café,” she ordered. Alex removed his jacket, and put on the suit, slowly, as though he too were slowly paralyzing. She brought him rags and soapy water. At her behest, he dragged the bodies outside and set them on fire in front of the whole town. She watched him from her kitchen as he mopped the floor for hours.
“That’s my good little Cinderella,” she said.
Appetite
Emily Devenport
Editor: The strength of human will is often underrated.
The storm and I arrived in Phoenix at the same time, but from different directions. I walked in from the north, following what was left of I-17. I had been watching the clouds brew all day as I descended through mountains into a desert heat I could barely feel. They towered in the southern sky, blowing a massive wall of dust ahead of them.
By the time the highway had taken me past the deserted discount malls on the outskirts of town, the grit blew so thick I could just make out the outlines of the buildings. I smelled rust and ozone. I heard the wind, the only voice that spoke to me with any constancy. I saw gray, brown, and tan shapes behind the blowing sand—and once, when lightning flashed inside a thunderhead, I saw the green of an ocean waiting up there to fall.
When those clouds let go, I felt my heart beat. The pulse was very slow, and I knew that it beat only for the storm. I walked buffeted by the rain and wind, until I could no longer stand upright against the onslaught. Then I crawled until the water rose around me. Finally I sought shelter in a car that still had unbroken windows. I climbed into the backseat and shut the door, savoring the change in volume and the sound of the torrent hitting the windows and the roof. I was as content as I had ever been, and possibly ever could be.
I watched the storm out the back window. It raged, then sighed, then finally stopped moving. I waited for a time afterward, hoping it might spark back to life. Instead, the ligh
t of morning drove it north and west, and I watched the dawn.
During the storm, water had risen around the car and moved it down the street. Some of it seeped into the car; I sat in it up to my waist. I opened the door and watched it pour out. It made a delightful splashing noise. Once it had all run out, I heard the faint noise of a breeze.
It fluttered and died, fluttered and died, teasing me out of the car. If it had not been there, I might have slept until the next storm came along to capture my undivided attention. I might have slept for days, for years, even for centuries. But that breeze skittered ahead of me up the street, and I followed.
The rain had washed many things clean, including me, but the pavement was buried in mud and silt. You could see places where braided streams already were carving their way through deposits. I walked on the rocks and pebbles without too much difficulty. I passed a mostly intact store window and saw a mummy reflected in it.
I was that mummy—an Undead remnant of the former world. My body was so withered, I looked like a stick drawing of a girl. I could see almost my entire skeleton wrapped inside the leather of my skin. I probably could have examined most of my organs just by looking at their outlines, except that I always make a point of wearing clothes. I have to wear the smallest sizes I can find so they won't fall off me.
I looked into my eyes. They're still brown, and they're the liveliest things about me. I like to look at them because that's the closest I can come to communication with another person. Everyone is gone, or almost everyone is, and when I look into the reflection of my eyes it's like someone is looking back.
“Hello,” I said, with my ghost of a voice. “How are you today?”
“I'm fine, thank you,” I answered back.
“Have a lovely day.” I tipped a wave and walked away from the window.
“You too,” I called after myself.
I didn't use my voice very much back then, so it sounded creaky. But even that was a sort of music, and it cheered me. The breeze that had tempted me out of the car still tugged at me, so I continued to walk up the weathered street. Time eroded it in bits and pieces, eating rusty holes into metal, melting marble and cement with acid rain, breaking bricks and grinding them to pebbles. Yet windows remained intact in many places. Some buildings still had their roofs, so whatever they covered would last a while.
I followed a stream as it wound west and then turned south again, onto a wide street with the remnants of a light rail line down its center. One of the trains had stalled on the southbound side. Its doors remained closed. The windows, scoured by the storm and many before it, prevented me from looking in. I wandered past it, hoping I might find something in particular among the buildings.
At last, I found the object of my quest on the east side of the street. My heart, which beat so rarely, lurched at the sight. The windows of the library appeared to be intact, and that meant its precious contents would be too. I bolted to the front doors in a flash—we Undead can move quickly when motivated—and I contemplated the locks.
Someone had secured them. I didn't begrudge that. Whoever had done it wanted to protect the books. Perhaps they had known that Phoenix would eventually cover itself in silt and gravel, that the bugs would be the only creatures who still lived here by the time someone came back to this library. So I blessed that long-ago protector. I broke the lock with one snap of my wrist—we can be very strong, too—and I went through the door, closing it firmly behind me.
I entered the lobby and smelled the books, the only thing besides storms that could possibly keep me from slipping into one of the dream states that seemed to last longer each time I fell into them, the only thing besides storms for which I still had an appetite.
Appetite is the best word for what I felt. But it sparked other feelings, deep in my creaking memory, that were not the least bit pleasant. Fear was no longer a constant in my existence, but once it had been. Sorrow had been too. All because of appetite, because of a dreadful, obliterating hunger.
Not this sort of hunger though. Not the love of books, my old, dusty friends who called to me from shelf after shelf, on floor after floor—four floors above this level and at least one floor below, in vaults where the rare things were kept. This is it! I thought to myself. I am home.
And where to start in such a paradise? At the nearest shelf, of course. I walked across the lobby, stirring dust that had crept through tiny cracks, and found the New Releases rack. The first book I selected was a cookbook. It made me want to laugh. How long had it been since I had eaten anything? Since I had chewed, tasted, swallowed.
I thumbed through it, looking at pictures of beautiful food, wondering which of these things I had eaten. Dimly I remembered the taste of green beans, lettuce, and cheese. I was pretty sure I remembered cake. Sweet, wasn't it? And the frosting had a different texture than the cake. It was—creamy.
“Creeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaamy,” I said, though I wasn't able to make it sound very tasty. I sounded like a door with neglected hinges.
I turned the page and saw something dreadful: a slab of red meat on a plate.
Red, dripping with blood, torn from something that screamed and pleaded, and tried to get away . . .
I slammed the book shut. If I had been in the habit of breathing regularly, I probably would have been gasping. But breathing was something I did only if I wanted to speak, so I walked down the row and picked another book. This one was titled The Universe Within: How the Science of the Very Small Will Change the World As We Know It.
“It did,” I croaked, and I wandered off to look at another shelf.
* * *
I have to be honest—who is there to lie to anymore? I relished having that library to myself. In fact I relished the entire city, even the state of Arizona. Mine, alone. I had loved people, once. But I couldn't remember who they were, and what dim memories I retained of them were colored with blood and anguish. Each storm I witnessed, each book I read, took me further away from that previous world.
I can't say how long I lingered on the ground floor, because time as I knew it no longer had meaning. But eventually, I climbed the stairs to the floors where the nonfiction books were stored. I nosed through a copy of Ancient Landscapes of the Colorado Plateau when I heard it.
“Meow?”
I froze. (Not that I was moving much in the first place. We Undead are as motionless as rocks when we're not walking up muddy streets or breaking locks.)
“Mmmmeeeeoooow?” The sound came from two rows down, to my right—the biology section. I peered around the corner. Nothing moved.
“Hello?” I enquired.
“Mmeeeee?”
Big Sister, someone is hurt!
Someone called me that, once—Big Sister.
Little Sister. That was what I called her. Don't go over there!
Someone is crying, she said, just before I lost her forever.
“Don't listen,” I whispered to myself.
“Meow.”
The sound was plaintive. The thing making the sound wanted me to come find it, to help it.
I put Ancient Landscapes back in its proper place on the shelf. And then I ran as fast as I could, through the rows, down the stairs, across the lobby and out into the street.
I stood in the blazing sunshine. Finally I turned and stared at the library. Why had I run like that? I had been terrified, but now I didn't feel that way. Now I felt only puzzlement.
“Little Sister, don't go in there!”
“I'm just going to see if someone is hurt . . .”
The sound I had heard in the library wasn’t scary. It was a harmless sound. Why did I run from it?
“Big Sister, run! It's a trap!”
The sound might be a trick, that’s why. It wanted me to go and see what it was, and then the thing making it might pounce on me. Because once living people had been eaten, only we remained, the Undead. And the hunger had still been there, not just for human flesh, but also for the thoughts and memories inside our heads. It haunted us all
. The only way to eliminate it was to deny it, and there were many who saw no reason to do that. Too many.
“Big Sister—run!”
She crouches over Little Sister, tearing pieces out of her with a red mouth full of sharp teeth. The Hungry One regards me with eyes as black as night. She says, “Yes, run Big Sister, by all means. I'll catch up with you later. I'll find you some day . . .”
And then she eats Little Sister's heart.
I walked away from the library. I almost walked toward it, because I hated to leave those books. But caution warned me to wait. Something might have attacked if I had gone to see what made the sound. And hadn't I heard a rustle when I ran for the stairs? Something behind me?
Yet the street appeared to be empty. The windows on both sides were empty too, like the train car in the middle of the street with a door that stood open because someone walked out of it years ago and never came back.
So I walked away from the library considering my clothing. It had begun to unravel in all the spots that mattered. I needed to find replacements. I headed north, against the current of the stream, which the sun had dried to a trickle. Ahead, the mountains reared their weathered peaks. I saw them every way I looked in Phoenix, surrounding it like the sides of a bowl. The sky was now clear as a bell, so it was hard to tell how far away they were.
I turned west and walked up a tributary that fed into the trickle. The sun hung on that side of the sky blazing into my face. I liked the feeling. I passed many buildings that were still intact, but none of them tempted my curiosity. After a time, I had forgotten what I was looking for, until another breeze stirred the ragged ends of my clothing. I turned my face into the wind to discover a gigantic building set far back from what was left of the road. Its sign still possessed all of its letters—even the apostrophe—Cabela’s.
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