“Citizens! Several people have been victims of an apparent bioweapon. We are isolating those afflicted and giving them the best of treatment. Everyone is ordered to stay indoors. We have the situation under control.”
They stayed inside all day as the shots crackled in the air, near and far. Around noon, Roy spotted Mom mopping her brow. Her skin shone with sweat, and her breathing sounded labored. Roy got back to making the whiskey and pretended he hadn’t noticed. He tried to convince himself everything was OK. He told himself that Mom was only nervous. Who wouldn’t be after what she saw? All they had to do was stay inside until the authorities got rid of the sick, and then everything would be like before.
Half an hour later, a groan and a thud from the front room destroyed that illusion.
Roy’s hand froze over the bubbling pot of mash he was stirring.
The bartender screamed. A moment later Roy heard the furniture being tossed aside from where it was piled against the door. The bolt scraped and the lock clicked, and he heard the door open and the sound of running feet, receding fast.
Still Roy didn’t move. The thought kept going through his head that if he just stayed still, just remained in the back room, his world wouldn’t change. Mom and Dad were OK in the front room, and the world outside would sort itself out.
But that self-deception couldn’t last long. The sobs and ragged breathing coming from the front room shook him out of his paralysis. Quietly he set the ladle aside, stood up, stared at nothing for a moment, and crept into the front room.
Mom lay curled up in one corner, blood bubbling from her mouth. Dad held her, his forehead beaded with sweat, his breath coming in wheezy gusts.
Dad looked up and spotted Roy.
“Get out of here!” he shouted.
Roy was paralyzed for the second time. All he could do was stare at his parents, the reality of their doom slowly sinking into his consciousness.
“Get going!” Dad ordered.
“I love you baby,” Mom cried, blood spurting from her mouth with each word. Tears of blood ran down her cheeks.
“M-mom? Dad? What can I—”
“We’re gone. Save yourself. Get out of North Cape. Get far away!”
Roy edged around the far side of the room to where the door hung open. A steady roar of shots hammered the air outside.
“I love you,” Roy whispered.
“Be the man we raised you to be,” Dad said. His lips were flecked with blood and a tremor ran through his body. “Take care of Tyrone.”
The mention of his brother galvanized him into action. With a final look at his parents, he ducked out the door.
North Cape had gone insane. Bodies littered the streets, and not all of them were infected. Gunfire erupted from windows and doorways. Roy kept his hands over his head to show he was neutral and sprinted to the nearest alley. Keeping to the back streets, he headed for a neighborhood on the other side of town where he knew Tyrone and the Hellraisers hung out.
Firefights had broken out everywhere. Most were between citizens and the government militia, but groups of citizens were blasting away at each other too, and he even saw two groups of militia fighting. The plague had brought out all the divisions, and everyone was trying to grab power from everyone else. Smoke rose from a dozen burning buildings. It was a miracle that he made it to the Hellraisers’ neighborhood at all.
It didn’t take long to find Tyrone. He lay dead in a doorway, a bullet through his heart. His gun lay in his hand. Roy leaned over his brother and shuddered. His hero lay with his eyes and mouth wide open, as if surprised to discover he wasn’t immortal. His gold chain glinted as the sun briefly broke through the pall of smoke hanging over the city.
“I’ll get you one as good as mine day, little man.”
Gently Roy closed his brother’s eyes and pulled the chain off his neck and put it around his own. Then he took the pistol and slipped out of the city.
North Cape didn’t fall that day, or the day after. Soon those who had fled into the wildlands returned. Roy came back to find the shop had been burned down with the bodies of his parents in it. All the stock and equipment was gone.
Roy still had the house and the land. He took another loan on top of what his parents already had and rebuilt. A few months later another plague hit, and another revolution. That was the way things were back then. Any trace of civilization got kicked around, reformed as something more fragile, and then got kicked around again.
North Cape couldn’t take any more kicking. As people died in the streets from contagion or bullets, Roy found himself in a sorry band of a hundred or so refugees fleeing into the wildlands as the columns of smoke from the last city state anyone knew about rose to the sky behind them. They headed south. To the north lay a cluster of old industrial cities that had been destroyed in World War Four. At least one had been nuked and the rest bombed flat. Nothing that way except death and ashes. To the west lay the sea. No freighter had come from that direction for a couple of years. East wasn’t an option either. A tough bandit group that way had given the city militia a lot of trouble. If the refugees ran into them, they wouldn’t stand a chance.
So they headed south, not because of any hope in that direction, but because it was their only option. As they trudged through wasteland, avoiding the polluted shore and getting driven away from the fortified farms they found on the better land, their column began to grow. Other refugees and scavengers joined them, knowing there was strength in numbers.
They lost people too—to bandits, to suicide, to diseases Doc wasn’t able to cure, but still their numbers grew. By the time they found a good patch of land and a shoreline that had an easily defended peninsula, they numbered about two hundred. They, and the few farmers already tilling some of the land in the area, became the first citizens of New City.
He remembered the day they decided to stay. Doc had led a small group to check out the peninsula and its large, blocky concrete warehouse.
The warehouse, to their surprise, was abandoned. They found evidence that a few people had lived there on and off, and it had been stripped off all its contents and most of its wiring, but the structure still held. There was a pier that didn’t need much repair and they found a clean stream that emptied right at the base of the peninsula. The peninsula narrowed where it met the mainland and was only a couple of hundred meters wide.
Roy looked at this while standing by The Doctor’s side. He’d been working as his assistant since the very first day.
“This is it,” Doc had said, smiling. Roy remembered that Doc sometimes used to smile in those early days. The smiles had begun to come back thanks to Yu-jin.
“We’re going to stay here?” Roy asked.
“Aren’t you tired of walking?”
“Hell, yeah!”
“Look at the potential of this place. Right now it’s a mess. Not much tilled land nearby, nothing working, but we’ve brought a few things, haven’t we? With the tractors and seeds we can get a crop in, and we have plenty of wiring and other stuff, plus those solar cells we managed to salvage. First we’ll build a wall across here, enclosing the stream so nobody can cut us off from the water supply. Next step is to set up those solar cells and get some electricity in the warehouse. I’ll put my clinic in there. Want to be my assistant from now on?”
“Sure,” Roy replied. The Doctor had said he was a natural with applying bandages and mixing medicines.
Roy had beamed with pride that day. Looking back, he knew that The Doctor had become a surrogate for Tyrone. He was the cool big brother, always in control, always knowing what to do, but even better. The Doctor didn’t screw up his life and there was no one to tell Roy that he shouldn’t spend time with him. He could tag along without any parents warning him off and without being told he was too young and should go on home.
The Doctor, like Tyrone, didn’t have much time for him, but he always made Roy feel welcome. Whether working quietly mixing compounds in the lab or working by his side in a crisis, st
aunching someone’s wound, Roy knew he was needed and appreciated.
Those first couple of years were hard but rewarding. They fought off several bandit groups, killing enough of them that word got out not to mess with New City. They lost some people too, but they didn’t give up. Soon more refugees from North Cape, plus scavengers, came to join them.
The scavengers were not allowed within the walls. That rule had come in after a string of thefts and murders. The Citizens Council decided, however, to let them camp near the walls. New City needed the trade the scavengers offered, and it would have been difficult to convince them to camp outside New City’s territory and still trade with it.
Within the walls everything stayed quiet. North Cape in those final years, the only years Roy was old enough to remember, had been a place of constant tension. Faction fought faction, fuel grew ever scarcer, the food supply was unreliable, and crime rife. All that while an oppressive group of rich, well-armed oligarchs barely managed to keep it together.
But in New City you could leave your door unlocked. There were no murders, virtually no thefts, there was peace. The people of North Cape had suffered too much to risk losing everything for a bit of selfish, short-term gain.
Back in those days, Doc still managed to find time to have a bit of a life. He could be relied on for a game of football, he showed up most nights for the big communal dinners everyone had before they built their own homes and disappeared into their own lives, and he always had a kind word for Roy when he showed up at the clinic each morning.
Roy felt happy and at home. He only had two problems—no amount of peace could replace the family he had lost, and Doc had gotten weird on him.
It hadn’t started right away, at least not in any way that Roy noticed. Doc had originally been interested in other men.
Roy had found out about that by accident. He’d come into the clinic after his shift to ask Doc a question, and found him with the town electrician. They were in the back room, kissing and looking like they were getting ready to do a lot more.
Roy stopped and stared. He didn’t feel much disgust, just surprise and a bit of disappointment. His hero was a sissy?
Forty years on he couldn’t remember what was said. Him making some fumbling apology and walking out, most likely.
Roy soon adjusted. Whatever weird stuff Doc got up to in the sack, it didn’t change the fact that he was leading them all into a brighter future. Through his leadership they had rebuilt civilization, or at least a semblance of it. The lights worked. People had medicine. You got two or sometimes even three meals a day. You could sleep soundly at night knowing someone stood on the wall watching out for you. Work in the clinic went on as before.
But Doc started acting differently towards him. When the last patient had been sent on their way, Doc would find excuses to keep Roy in the clinic. They’d have a drink together or chat, or he’d lend Roy one of his books and ask what he thought about it. While Roy should have loved the extra attention, now he began to wonder about the motivations behind it.
Those motivations became increasingly clear. The Doctor would try to get him to go on walks, like he did with some of the other young men. He’d give Roy little gifts, like some extra food or an item of clothing he thought Roy would look good in. Sometimes at work Roy would look up from his task and catch him staring at him.
The Doctor never tried anything, never even said anything too direct, he just kept up a quiet, relentless pressure.
Roy tried to ignore it, figuring Doc would take the hint. After all, Roy was already catting around with a couple of the girls in town, using up the clinic’s precious and dwindling supply of condoms. Surely Doc would realize he didn’t have a chance and turn his attention elsewhere? Every time he spotted some guy heading into the clinic after hours, Roy let out a breath of relief. Maybe now Doc would give up.
He didn’t. The dumbest thing about this was that it wasn’t more than a year or two before Doc got AIDS. Maybe he got it from that electrician, or maybe he already had it and didn’t know. But once he discovered he had it, he no longer went on long walks with men. There were no more trysts after all the day’s work was done. The Doctor became more aloof, more isolated, more of the man he would become.
So why the hell would you pursue someone for decades when you can’t even sleep with them? What did he want?
“Forty years of friendship not good enough for him? He needs more?” Roy grumbled as he wiped the counter.
Roy bit his lip and tried to ignore the sidelong glances from the guys at the bar. He hadn’t meant to say that out loud.
“You OK, Roy?”
Tammy leaned on the counter nearby, concern lining her weathered face.
Roy put on his famous grin. “Sure, everything’s fine. Just fine.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Yu-jin had always avoided the sea. She’d grown up in the mountains, where the air was fresher. Sure, there was a polluted valley here and there, and some of the caves had been used as dumps in the Old Times, but it was pretty easy to steer clear of the worst areas.
Not so with the sea. It stank. She didn’t even want to touch the water. Fishermen always had raw red skin and she didn’t want that to happen to hers. They also had eye infections and lung problems from the fumes.
The gas mask would help with that, but she couldn’t wear it the whole time. She had to eat and sleep, although she didn’t see how she could do either in this filth.
The motorboat had just pulled out to sea, Reginald, Marcus, and some of the other important citizens waving them off from the pier. Pablo stood with them. The boy had given her a note for his friend on board, that Chinese kid he had saved from the riots a few weeks ago.
Pablo waved and Yu-jin waved back. The kid had come to her complaining that since he was “New City’s Chief Radio Officer” he should get to go on the motorboat to meet the freighter. This had come in a childish whine that immediately turned into a very teenaged eye roll when she explained the dangers. He had been to the wildlands, you see, and was practically almost a real scavenger. He could handle himself. It was no fair that everyone else got to have all the fun.
Standing on the pier and holding his nose, he didn’t look so jealous anymore.
She squared her shoulders and looked to the west, out across that featureless expanse of gray.
Rachel, a technician a little older than her, sat at the helm with a compass and a radio tuned to an FM band that could communicate both with the shore and the freighter. It had much less range than the longwave marine radio—something Pablo was quite smug about—but the ship was close enough that they could talk.
Rachel was the only other woman on the ship. Reginald had told her that Rachel was “solid”, one of his highest compliments. That meant he only griped about her once a week or so, not every day or every hour.
Clyde and six guards filled the rest of the motorboat, three of his men and three of Reginald’s. Both sides were armed to the teeth as usual, with the addition of gas masks and thin body suits made from patchworks of Old Times plastic bags. Yu-jin had one too. It was supposed to keep the worst of the toxins off your body, but it was sweaty and made even simple tasks awkward. She’d take it off as soon as they got on the ship. She hoped their air filtering system hadn’t broken along with their engine.
Clyde and his guards had something else with them, something no one else had seen. Yu-jin couldn’t tell what. The knowing glances and hinted double meanings of some of the things they said told her they had brought a surprise along.
Another bomb? No, she couldn’t believe they’d dare defy Reginald a second time. There would be no hesitation on his part if they did. He’d ban them for sure.
The boat was crowded and had no covering, and the foul wind hit them hard as they skimmed across the waves. While the gas mask kept out the stench, her stomach still felt queasy thanks to the strange motion of the ship, bobbing up and down and never staying still for a moment. She wiped her brow and gripped the edge of
the boat.
Clyde’s voice came out muffled from the gas mask. “Eat a little.”
“In this gunk?”
“You’re getting what they call ‘seasick.’ The way the boat moves messes up your stomach. If you keep a bit in it all the time it helps.”
Clyde stared at her a moment. It was impossible to detect expression behind the mask. Then he turned and opened up his rucksack, pulling out a stick of pemmican. He lifted his mask, tore off a piece with his teeth, and lowered the mask again. He quickly wrapped up the remainder and stowed it away.
“The taste of the sea gets on everything sooner or later,” he said in a voice made nearly unintelligible thanks to his full mouth and mask. “Hope this is a quick trip.”
Yu-jin took an oatcake from her bag and started chewing on it, holding her breath when she had to pull up her mask to take a bite.
Looking out at the bleak, choppy water, she saw little colored bits, some as big as her hand, most much smaller, dancing on the crests of the waves. Old Times plastic. The rainstorms always washed out some from the riverbanks and beaches and shot it into the sea. You’d think after so many years it would have run out, but the earth kept giving up more of the stuff.
When she looked back at Clyde she saw him holding a little laminated card from the Old Times. It had a painting of the Virgin Mary and infant Jesus on it, and a little prayer. She could hear him muttering to himself. After a moment he tucked the card back in his pocket and gave it a little pat.
The shore receded to a thin gray line, darker than the sea. She watched it dwindle, feeling more unsettled as she did. No swimming back from this distance, and she wasn’t a good swimmer anyway. If something went wrong with the motorboat, or if for some reason she ended up in the water, she’d be in serious trouble.
“Hey Rachel, does it stink this much further out?” she called.
“Never been this far out.”
“Oh.”
“The fisherfolk say it gets a little better the further you go out. A lot of the junk that gets spat out by the rivers sort of clings to the shore.”
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