SelectionEvent (2ed)

by Wayne Wightman

  “I had a few months,” Winch said, “back when I was a teenager, in love with Evie. That was who I married. I got my first car that summer.” He was quiet half a minute. Then, “I remember going to the lake one night in July. We sat by the boat dock and I asked her to marry me. They were playing 'Blue Moon' on the radio and she didn't answer till the song was over.” He shook his head a little. “That was a good time. I had a few good months back then.”

  The fire crackled and orange light flickered around them.

  “I had two good years,” Catrin said, “when I met my husband and when the children came. I was always surprised when I looked at them, to think that part of them was me. Then everyone died.”

  All of their everyones had died. They thought of this in the silence.

  The third bottle of champagne was emptied and the fire had burned to embers. They covered themselves with quilts and slept. Outside the moonlight turned the land the color of blue cream.

  Chapter 59

  Isha nosed through the underbrush, breathing in the new smells of bark, mosses, and leaf mold. She had left the houses and had gone up the hillside, through the trees, along one of the streams that fed the river. There she smelled wet dirt and algae-slick logs and the bright odor of fresh water that splashed through rocks, turned white and filled the air with sound.

  She trotted farther up the hillside, away from the stream and its noise, far enough away that she could almost hear the rush of the ocean waves a few miles away, down the last ridge of the coast range. All at once, she caught the smell of something different, something that didn't belong in the forest. She raised her nose and sniffed quickly, then several times slowly and deeply. People. Different people.

  With her ears turning to scan for their noises, she moved cautiously forward, and the smell came stronger.

  She finally heard eating noises. Strangely, unlike the people she knew, they didn't speak while they ate. By now, with every breath, she breathed in the smell of old meat, dried blood, and the strong smell of the people. Through the underbrush, she saw them crouching or sitting on logs, holding food to their mouths and noisily chewing at it.

  Their clothes were as different as their smell — loose shapeless clothes — and their smell was different. Isha backed away slowly, ears flattened, and when she was at a safe distance and heard no pursuing sounds, she turned and ran back down the hillside to the familiarity of the sounds and smells of her own people.

  Chapter 60

  Diaz blew into New York City like hell with a megaphone. Teeth bared, eyes wide behind his goggles, he was ready to live, ready to die. He'd pulled the baffles out of the mufflers on his bike, and in the Holland Tunnel, he sounded like a chainsaw as big as the world.

  In New York City, down Broadway, he saw people on their hands and knees, digging through garbage, feeding themselves. They were covered in gray rags, their faces the same color, and when they saw him, they paused with their fingertips at their lips, their frightened eyes dark and glittering.

  Rats, Diaz thought. Human rats, with no mission except to survive.

  He rode down the canyons of Wall Street twice until he spotted the Stock Exchange. After parking his bike, he went through the shattered doors, through the corridor, and onto the main floor.

  Money was scattered everywhere, fifties and hundreds — nothing smaller than a fifty. Musty smelling money had been heaped into pallets and then crushed flat by sleeping bodies. Many of the overhead video monitors had their screens broken out, and in the gloom, bits of glass glittered on the floor.

  From the balcony, where the signal had once been given to open and close the market, Diaz heard voices and saw the glow of lantern light. From up there, through the railing, a face turned his direction and said loudly, “You play cards? Come on up.”

  So he did. At the top of the stairway, he saw three men who had long since stopped shaving, sitting at a flimsy card table playing five-card draw. Instead of money, however, they were betting peanuts, cashews, and almonds.

  “Almond's worth two peanuts, cashew's worth five. Want in?”

  “I don't have any nuts,” Diaz said.

  The men chuckled as they continued playing. “Nope,” one of them said, “nuts don't do a man much good anymore. But all foodstuffs are playable.”

  “I can't stay,” Diaz said. “I just stopped to say howdy from California.” Already his legs were starting to jitter from standing still too long. “How are thing's going here? What's happening? Who's doing what?”

  They looked at him with mild suspicion and then went back to their cards.

  “Time passes, and it don't heal many wounds these days,” one of them said, laying down a pair. “Now you want the good news? The good news is we don't think it can get any worse.”

  “Eat, sleep, play cards, kill rats,” another said through his whiskers. He dropped his cards face down and shook his head.

  “Killed a two-legged rat the other day,” said the third man, showing three fives and raking in a dozen peanuts and almonds. “He musta weighed close to two hundred pounds.”

  The second man began shuffling the cards. “The fat boy. He used to be a Republican, didn't he?”

  “Used to be. Now he's dead. He said he deserved what he stole because he was clever enough to steal it.”

  “Food thief,” the shuffler explained. “That's the only way you get to weigh two hundred pounds around here. You got food, mister, I'll deal you in.”

  “You got food, we'll be your friends forever, till it's all gone.”

  “Thanks, I gotta go.” His legs vibrated in his pants. “Down to Florida. I gotta see me more of the land of the free.”

  When he got to the stairs, one of the men called to him, “How's California?”

  “Dead.”

  “Well, there's some hope then.”

  “Where there's speed, there's hope,” Diaz said, his feet taking the stairs faster than his eyes could register them.

  Back on the road, heading south, he thought, Rats, yeah, rats are the key. Humans are a mystery inside an enigma — until you think of 'em as rats, and then they make perfect sense. Rats eat anything, sleep anywhere, suffer, bleed and die like we do, get experimented on, die of plagues, and probably have rat gods that created humans to torment and exterminate them for being born as rats. There you go. Original sin — in two-legged rats, the lingering suspicion that we deserve what we get.

  He lay flat across the tank and cranked the throttle. He knew he knew that if he looked up, there among the radiant clouds would be the face of god, an immense rat-headed god looking down at him and remembering the endless crimes against his Chosen Ones.

  At 135 mph, Diaz wept with fear.

  Chapter 61

  Late in the balmy near-coastal summer, Winch returned on horseback from Monterey, twenty miles down the coast. He had the two horses in tow and he looked like he'd stepped out of the Old West: he wore denim pants and jacket, leather gloves, and a black flat-brim hat. But instead of a rifle holster on the back of his saddle, he had hung his saxophone, which he played at his campfire at night.

  “Two good ones!” he shouted to Martin as he slid out of the saddle and thumped to earth. “There were a couple others, ponies, but they got away. No people anywhere. How've things been since I've been gone?”

  “In the last week, I'd say we did about two good days' work, got the root vegetables planted, so no one's suffered.” Martin held the horse by the bridle while Winch pulled off his gloves and used them to knock the dust out of his clothes. “Xeng and I got the solar panels set up and now we have music everyday after lunch. Solomon found a couple hundred CDs of classical music in a duplex up the hill. And the big news — I think Land said 'dada' yesterday.”

  Winch untied the two horses he'd brought back and slapped them into the pasture. “Congratulations: He thinks you're an art movement. We're getting along, aren't we, Martin. Life at the end of the world isn't half bad.”

  “I just hope to god nothing happens
to Xeng or someone has to have an operation. I guess it will eventually.”

  Winch wiped the sweat off his face. “Got any ideas to keep us covered?”

  “We need more people. I guess that's the short of it. More people, more skills.”

  Winch nodded. “They're in short supply. I saw a few signs of life, but I didn't follow them up because I had the horses. Truth of the matter is, I was lonely and in a hurry to get back.”

  “We could go up the coast to San Francisco, see who's there.”

  “You'd go back there?” Winch scratched his chin. “Sure. We could do that. How's Jan? How's everybody?”

  “Jan's making bread from dawn till dusk. She found more flour.”

  Winch shook his head. “God, I love that woman.” Then he looked at Martin. “Something's on your mind. I can read you well enough to know that.”

  “Nothing's wrong,” Martin said. “Everybody's fine. We've been doing all right. Everybody's happy. But sometime we need to think about where we're going. Besides getting by, do we want to do something else?”

  As they walked back to the houses, Winch said, “It's crossed my mind too. What do we want Solomon and Missa and Land to do when we're gone? Devote themselves to making cars run again? Rebuilding some kind of generating plant so they can watch movies? Be farmers? Fishermen? Keep records of what they do?”

  “Exactly. How about the three of you coming over to a welcome-back dinner after you get cleaned up?”

  “I don't know. I may have to say hello to Jan-Louise for a couple hours or so.”

  “You may be a gentleman, Winch, but I'm glad you moderate it.”

  “Part of my antique charm.”

  ....

  After dinner, Martin told them what had been on his mind. “We need to think about what kind of lives our kids will have when we're gone — and what they won't have — and what direction we want to send them... if we want to send them any direction at all.”

  Solomon sat at the table with the adults. He stacked his fists on the edge of the table and rested his chin on them, his big eyes moving from person to person as they spoke.

  “Food and water and survival skills,” Xeng said. “That first of all. I know how to fish in the ocean. I should teach Solomon.”

  Solomon nodded seriously.

  “I guess we have to get past subsistence before we decide on what the extras will be.”

  “If we only scavenged,” Jan-Louise asked, “how long could we eat? How long will canned goods last?”

  No one knew for sure, but they agreed on a best guess of five years. “Past that,” Martin said, “just for safety, we should probably consider all canned food taboo.”

  “So,” Catrin said, “we have five years to become self-supporting. That doesn't sound unreasonable. I'm already getting better making food come out of the ground.”

  “We need to plant fruit trees,” Martin said, “learn how to garden during all seasons, how to can our own food, how to dry it, and any other way there is to preserve it.”

  Catrin patted his hand. “I've already looked into that.”

  Martin stuttered and then had to laugh at his surprise. “Of course you have.”

  “What about electricity?” Winch asked. “How important do we make that on our priorities?”

  “Not as important as I thought it was,” Jan-Louise said. “Speaking only for myself.”

  “I like our music in the afternoon,” Catrin said. “Music is something we shouldn't let fall by the wayside. We should collect what we find.”

  They agreed with her.

  After twenty minutes, they decided electricity was a luxury, not a necessity, but that it would be a luxury they would afford themselves, if only in small amounts and for the sake of the music.

  “Winch,” Martin said, “can you get a stationary bicycle, like an exercise bike, hook up an automobile alternator to it, and then put some kind of converter on that, so we don't have to rely on the panels?”

  Winch's face lit up. “Nothing to it. I'd forgotten about that trick.”

  “We could use it for lighting in the evenings or for emergencies—”

  “And for movies,” Xeng said, “to show medical practices to Solomon.”

  “Absolutely.”

  Solomon grinned.

  “We need a library,” Martin said. “We need to start collecting books that will tell us how to do things, build things, and fix what's broken. We need a library more for those who come after us than for us. Books to cover the sciences, to tell them what the world was like, what the problems were, what we did wrong and what we did right, how to keep themselves healthy, how to keep the world healthy.”

  “I forget the responsibility we have,” Jan-Louise said. “Women of my former occupation usually don't consider their benefit to future generations.”

  “Books need to go in a safe dry place, good-sized, that animals can't get into.”

  “How about the bank in Mariquitas?” Catrin said. “In the vault.”

  “Is it open?”

  Catrin shrugged.

  “Uh-huh,” Solomon said. “The little vault is open. I opened it.”

  “You did?” Martin asked. “How?”

  “With the combination.”

  The adults all looked at each other. “Where did you get the combination?” Martin asked.

  “Somebody wrote it on the bottom of that flat thing on the top of the desk.”

  “On the blotter,” Catrin said.

  After a moment of silence Winch said, “This is my son.” He rubbed his hand across the boy's wooly head. “Damn straight you are. We'll check it out with book storage in mind.”

  “And the last thing,” Martin said, “is the issue of looking for more people.”

  Catrin twisted the stem of her glass in her fingers. “I guess we have to do it.”

  “I know how you feel,” Jan-Louise said. “Undecided.”

  “We have a stable group here,” Martin said, “but in ten years, think what we'll have — five grayheads, Solomon will be twenty-one, Missa sixteen, and Land will be eleven. If anything happened to Missa, that would be the end of our branch of the family.”

  “I guess we have to do it,” Catrin said, “but let's do it slowly. If we brought in three or four neurotics, there wouldn't be any more sitting around the dinner table like this, saying what we think and knowing everyone will understand.”

  “We'll go slow,” Martin said. “Winch, when do you think you'll be rested up enough to ride up to San Francisco?”

  He sighed heavily. “Two days, three. Tell you what. Let me get the pedal-powered generator put together, and when that's done, we'll go.”

  “Don't bring back any snivelers,” Catrin said. “We have to protect our gene pool."

  “We'll ask for credentials,” Winch said.

  “No handsome men,” Xeng said, waving his hands in front of his face and shaking his head. “Only ugly guys.”

  “And homely women,” Jan-Louise said. “I couldn't take any competition.”

  “Okay,” Martin said. “We'll only bring back well-balanced ugly people. I'll make a note of that, Winch. We'll probably find dozens of them.”

  They finished the bottle of wine and said their good nights.

  In their bed, Catrin slept against him, holding him tight even in her sleep. He had spoken of the trip to San Francisco as though it were nothing unusual, but they all knew that away from their settlement, anything could happen, most of it bad.

  And Martin, remembering Curtiz and Ryan and Stewart, decided that this time, even though it could cause more problems than it prevented, he would go armed. Whatever else happened, he wanted to come home.

  Chapter 62

  The trip to San Francisco was uneventful. On the way, Martin and Winch stopped several hours in every cluster of houses or businesses they came to, slid off their horses to stretch their legs, and looked for signs of recent habitation. Winch had the louder voice, so he was the designated caller and every few minutes
shouted, “Hello! Anyone around?!”

  On the second day, as they ambled along between towns, they heard a voice behind them, turned and saw a boy on a bicycle with one flapping flat tire, furiously pedaling after them. When he saw them looking back, he waved and leaned over the handlebars and pedaled even harder.

  “Wait!” he shouted, skidding to a stop beside them. His grimy face was wet with sweat. “Are you guys—” and then his face contorted and he broke in to terrible sobs. Blindly, he stepped off his bike and reached up and grabbed fistfuls of Martin's pant leg and cried. “Don't go away! Please don't go away! Everybody's gone!”

  As it turned out, his name was Ross, he was fourteen, and he had been alone nearly the whole time. He had heard them calling out in the last town but he'd been several blocks away, searching through a house for food and hadn't been able to see which way they had gone when they left. So he had ridden a mile or two in the opposite direction before doubling back.

  Martin stepped down off the horse and tossed back the flap of the saddlebag. “Hungry?” he asked.

  “I don't care about that. Take me with you,” the boy pleaded. He stared into Martin's eyes as though he'd never seen a human face before. “Everybody died and then the phones didn't work, or the television—” He started sobbing again and then controlled himself. “I tried to be grown-up. I tried to drive—”

  Martin held the boy against his chest. He would have preferred to have Ross wait until they came through town on their way back, but he couldn't ask him to be alone again. He still remembered too well what that was like, how he himself had volunteered to let life pass him by.

  “Ross, you don't have to worry about being alone. You're with us now. In a week or so we'll take you where there are other people too, kids, other adults.”

  “You have a family now,” Winch said, “as long as you want us.”

  He clung to Martin. “Don't leave me here,” he begged.

  “You won't be alone again,” Martin said. “I promise.”

  For the rest of the trip, Ross never left their sides.