A new smell mixed with the stench. It reminded Enrico of Saturday mornings when he woke to his mother cooking breakfast. She fixed up bacon and eggs with black beans and salsa, all the while chatting on her cellphone. Do you ever put that damn thing down? his father asked from the breakfast table. But his eyes lifted above a spread of El Universal. He loved to watch her, and she loved to be watched by him.
Enrico knew he shouldn’t lie to himself. Nice lies were still lies. He knew what that breakfast-bacon smell had to be, but it didn’t stop his mouth filling with saliva. At a time when there were no neighbors, no more talk of a defense effort, and no planes in the sky, could he eat people? Was it better to die like the pilgrims and go to heaven, or eat them and live, even if it would damn him for eternity?
There was a blur on the horizon. Enrico ground the heels of his hands into his watery eyes, but the blur remained. Heat distortion? Only when he switched his telescope lens did he see the hordes more clearly: endless streams of people trekking into Mexico City from the south and east. Here were the desperate from all of Central and South America. Enrico couldn’t have comprehended their sheer volume, or just how much the masses of modern Homo sapiens had grown to dominate the planet. There was no room, and yet they kept coming. Gangs couldn’t kill fast enough and were swept under the sea of crazed people and crushed. Bodies piled up, releasing a choking stench. Enrico stopped breathing through his nose, but he could still smell and taste it.
Pilgrims kept climbing on top of one another, pleading for deliverance. Too much, Enrico thought, trying to shake everything out of his head. Too many. Too much…He fainted. When he opened his eyes, with his scraped cheek resting painfully on concrete, Enrico saw a small flash. Four foil-wrapped pieces of chocolate were expertly hidden within the thick latticework of the balcony railing.
Enrico’s mother hid chocolate for him every year on the Feast of the Virgin. He must have missed these pieces. Enrico ripped off the foil and gulped down the chocolate pieces without chewing. He inspected the railing twice over before a realization struck him: he didn’t share. He hadn’t even had the inkling to do so until it was too late. Selfishness was no way to thank the Virgin, whose painted skin was milk chocolate born from both Indigenous peoples and their European conquerors. It was no way to thank his own mother, the woman who couldn’t help spoiling her precocious son with sweets, comic books, kisses, and the latest model of drone.
Enrico knocked on his parents’ bedroom door and waited. It was unlocked. His father was sitting on the edge of his bed with the loaded revolver in one hand. A cloud passed over the setting sun.
“Lo siento,” Enrico whispered to his mother and father.
There was chocolate in the creases of his frown. I am sorry.
His father hid the revolver under sweat-stained sheets. He put a skeleton arm around his son’s skeleton shoulders and leaned in until their foreheads rested on one another. Forgiveness was unnecessary. Enrico was his child. Children were the receivers of unconditional love. Even in a world staring down the nose of a bullet, they were still the means to a future.
Box springs sounded as Enrico’s mother got up and staggered to the windows on wobbly legs. Her fingers touched glass and traced a drop of rain.
“Do you see?” she whispered.
Was it a hallucination? Or was it rainfall? Drinking water might only grant borrowed time, but it would be spent with family—no fairy tale or telenovela, but real. Her most simple prayer had been answered with a miracle.
THIRTY-TWO
Off Script
Ocate Mesa, New Mexico
January 8
T-minus 24 days to launch
NED NEEDED TO sleep after clearing the southern end of the Colorado Rockies on their fourth refueling stop. They flew over a mountainous forest and landed on a high grassy hill with a clear view in all directions. They had to land in remote positions that could be easily defendable if pursuers ever caught up to them.
“I wish the Jayhawk wasn’t so damned loud,” Ned said to Gustavo, once the helicopter’s black blades wound down.
The sound attracted attention. Roving gangs of armed militias shot at them from the ground. Survivors crept from their hiding places and ran screaming and waving for help. Ned said he couldn’t wash the thought of all those desperate people from his brain. And what’s more, they made landing very dangerous; a quick-moving horde could be the end.
Ned ducked into the strap of his semiautomatic rifle and let it hang from his neck as he high-stepped around the Jayhawk and pinwheeled his arms, stretching cramped muscles. Gustavo had spent enough hours in the body of the helicopter, lying next to the extra fuel and supplies, that he was rested and not nearly so stiff.
He took out his laminated map of the Americas and located French Guiana. Ned had said that the Kourou airport, their final destination, was midway on its northern coast. Gustavo would have to trek south to reach the Oyapock River on the border of French Guiana and the Brazilian state of Amapá. Ned had a compass in his duffel bag. He wouldn’t need it once they landed in Kourou and he joined up with this Effort he kept talking about. A compass could guide Gustavo when the sky was clouded or hidden by thick canopy.
Once Gustavo reached the Oyapock River, he would follow it southwest to where it met the Camopi River. There were settlements of Other Wayãpi where the two rivers joined. Gustavo had visited these settlements many years ago. The language of these northern tribes, split from his own Wayãpi back in the age of the Grandfather People, sounded different from his own but not enough that he couldn’t understand it. Gustavo could talk to the Other Wayãpi of the Oyapock River. They might offer him shelter and even help him return to his own Wayãpi villages in Brazil by the Amapari River.
Gustavo stepped into the belly of the helicopter to check his rations. Water wouldn’t be much of a problem in a rainforest, but food would. He hoped there would be more rations to spare at the Fort Hood military base in Texas. When Gustavo hopped out onto the ground, Ned said they must be somewhere in northern New Mexico, but that didn’t mean anything to him. Outside of New York City, the North American landscape was all unknown to Gustavo. He turned in a circle and shivered in his poncho. He was used to hot, wet, green forests at the equator, but this forest was cold, dry, and golden. Long, pale grasses didn’t bend but crunched underfoot.
“How much longer until Fort Hood?” Gustavo asked again.
“Jesus, you’re like a kid on a car trip,” Ned griped. “Like I told you, little more than five hours of flight time with two more refuels.”
“What if it isn’t there—”
“I dunno,” Ned said quickly. “Pray? Probably die. We’ll deal with it when we get there. Now make yourself useful and set up the sleeping bags. I need to go take an elephant dump.”
Ned was usually cranky from hours of flying, but it didn’t take long for his better nature to resume on the ground. Gustavo carried their sleeping bags from the helicopter to a bare patch of earth and unrolled them just as he heard Ned wail. Gustavo sprinted to the other side of the hill and found Ned standing by the fly-covered remains of two people. Their clothes and meat had been stripped, leaving desiccated, sinewy skeletons with stained underwear. Gustavo tried to measure how long the dry decay had been left in the sun. He could still see lots of telltale footprints and broken turf from a struggle.
“We can’t bed down here,” Ned said. “Jesus. They look like a man and woman. Were they married?”
Gustavo turned away from the gore and told Ned he needed to sleep.
“I hate this place now,” Ned announced.
“Don’t waste your hate on places. Save it for people.”
“Is that from one of your poems?” Ned asked, sarcastic.
Gustavo ignored him and kept walking.
“What’re your famous poems about, anyway?” Ned asked as they headed back to the Jayhawk. “Dreams? Beauty?”
“War.”
Ned snorted.
“Well, that figures. W
hich war?”
“Mine,” Gustavo said.
He climbed into his sleeping bag for warmth and sat up alert. Ned stretched another minute before lying down. The rifle swung from his thick neck. Gustavo asked to hold the gun so he could keep watch while the other man slept. They were never safe unless they were in the air. Gustavo didn’t see any dangers within several miles of where they landed, but then he hadn’t seen those bodies, either.
Ned said nothing as he pulled the brim of his cap down over his eyes and shut them, twitching restlessly. An awkward silence passed, broken only by Ned’s muffled farts.
“I saw you had a Bible in your bag,” Ned finally said.
“You looked through my bags?”
“Once,” he replied, shameless. “When you set off to empty the piss jars at the last refuel. You know, I was raised on those parables. Back in Oregon.”
Gustavo had also been raised on those stories, as well as those of the Grandfather People. All peoples seemed to have their own myths of how they came to be and how they could continue.
“What about the end?” Ned asked. “I don’t remember what the Bible said about the end, but I know it’s in there. Was it like this? ’Cause—and I’m just thinkin’ out loud here, but I think we’ve gone off script. I think we’re taking a page from the Donner Party.”
“The what?”
“I’m saying that if we end up as nothing but Godless cannibals…I don’t think I wanna be part of that future. No, sir, I’m not going down like that.”
In some ways, Gustavo felt sorry for his companion. In others ways, he found him spoiled. The end was not a new threat for Gustavo’s people or any of the peoples subsisting on what was left of the natural world. The end was not new to all the animal species on the brink of extinction.
“Ever wonder if it’s your turn?” Gustavo asked, unable to contain his envy.
“What?”
“Your civilization,” Gustavo clarified. “What if it’s your turn to die out and fade from history? What if that comet is your Christopher Columbus? Your Portuguese and Spanish conquistadores?”
“What’d you mean, your? We’re in this together, Gustavo. Just because you’re not white—”
But it wasn’t race that formed a boundary. Ned didn’t understand, and Gustavo didn’t have the words to explain it.
“I’ll need your compass,” Gustavo blurted.
Ned snorted again. He gave a litany of grievances that Gustavo did his best to tune out. He hated relying on strangers. He hated that he needed this pilot, his helicopter, and his compass—and the rest of his food rations, hopefully, once they landed in Kourou.
“I know you’re just using me to hitch a ride,” Ned grumbled, “but would it kill you to crack a smile?”
Gustavo sighed but didn’t say that he used to laugh loud as a boy, before he had to grow up quick and hard.
“I could use a smile,” Ned added.
The journey had been difficult. They had witnessed unspeakable atrocities. Ned told Gustavo that he wasn’t going to look down to the ground anymore, couldn’t look down anymore, and Gustavo nodded in understanding. For hours, Ned kept his eyes on the distant horizon while Gustavo quietly absorbed the horrors for the both of them.
“I keep thinking about those people,” Ned said.
He had a habit of stating the obvious. Both men couldn’t stop thinking about survivors stretching their faces with screams.
“I keep seeing—”
“We can’t save them,” Gustavo said firmly.
He grabbed the spent bullet hanging from his neck and held it in a fist. He had the weight of his brother’s death hanging on him. He didn’t need guilt over strangers.
“I know,” Ned conceded. “Still…I think about them just as I think about everyone from Healy. I wonder what happened to my buddy Malcolm and Captain Weber. Are they okay? Are they even alive? What about Greg and Matty? Or your bunkmate, Jack?”
“You need to give me the gun and go to sleep,” Gustavo said, losing his temper.
Ned pulled his cap back and leveled his eyes at Gustavo. “You ever shot a gun?”
Gustavo squeezed the spent bullet until its warped metal cut into his palm. The answer was no and yes. It was complicated. What about Gustavo wasn’t complicated?
“I didn’t have to shoot a gun because I hired a pistoleiro to shoot it for me. I used the money from my Nobel award to murder the men who murdered my brother.”
Ned asked what the hell he was talking about.
“The rancher,” Gustavo said. “It was a rich rancher from Mato Grosso who hired men to kill me. He tried to steal land that belonged to Indian tribes. I helped the tribes protest, and I contacted reporters. He tried to have me killed, but it was my twin brother who was shot instead. So I paid for revenge. Money really can buy everything on the forest frontier.”
Gustavo had kept his hands clean and escaped to the United States to avoid extradition.
“A priest told me the death of my enemies wouldn’t bring me peace,” Gustavo added. “But I did it anyway…and I’m not sorry. Now give me the fucking gun.”
While Ned slept, Gustavo clutched their rifle and thought of his village and his fatherless nephews. He mouthed the words in Wayãpi: I will find a way to return to you. And I will strike down all who block my path.
THIRTY-THREE
Bare Bones
Kourou, French Guiana
May 8
T-minus 47 days to nuclear detonation
THREE DAYS AFTER the successful Ariane launch, Love saw a tall, shaggy man waiting by the door of the Penthouse, her utility closet in the Space Museum. He wore the same military jumpsuit as Love. His long beard was unkempt, and one of the lenses of his eyeglasses had a crack running through it.
“This is against the rules,” the man told Love immediately. “We still have the mission.”
Whether to prove a point or acting on paranoid reflex, the man checked his watch for countdown to interception and nuclear detonation.
“Then why are you here?” Love shot back.
“Amy Kowalski can be convincing.”
It was true. Amy would also lie down in traffic for a friend, no matter that she was desperately waiting for the mind of her lover to return to his body. When Love came to her at Ben’s bedside in the infirmary and begged for a favor—now that humanity had a fighting chance—Amy agreed.
“I need you to find someone,” Love said to the man, pulling her shoulders back and lifting her chin.
Love understood the Effort rules: there was the mission and nothing else. No room was left for family, country, religion, ideology, or even self. All had to be sacrificed for the greatest purpose in the history of the species. Love had followed the rules faithfully, but now she was breaking them. Letting on to her heavy guilt wouldn’t get what she wanted, however.
“Her name is Rivka Shulman. Caucasian, brown curly hair, brown eyes. She lives in the Bronx but was subletting an apartment in Harlem. Her parents live on the Upper West Side. She might have reconciled with them—shouldn’t you be writing this down, or something?”
Love stepped forward until she was less than three feet away. She looked at the man closely, under the beard and disheveled hair, under the dead-eyed stare cracked in half.
“Troy Andrews,” she said finally. “You’ve changed.”
He was no longer the handsome, smiling man from UN headquarters in Manhattan.
“It’s best to remember your home and family as it all was,” he said softly. “Trust me.”
Troy stepped past her and made for the stairs.
“Will you look for her?” Love called out.
Troy didn’t look back as he answered with a voice that was tired and sad, but resolute.
“Your girlfriend is dead, Love.”
But these were just words spoken by one man. Love shook her head. No, not Rivka. She sprinted ahead of Troy and turned to block in his path.
“You want to know?” Troy sighed. “Everyo
ne wants to know—until they know.”
But Love was ready to beat the truth out of Troy if she had to. He saw it in her eyes. Troy readied his hands for a fight as he breathed deeply to fill his lungs and say what he knew.
“New York City was a disaster zone, like the other major cities…”
Those who could get out, did. The rest, Troy said, were stranded as services shut down. Once the markets and restaurants were picked clean, there was nothing to feed more than 8 million New Yorkers surrounded by concrete. Hoarding and looting were rampant. Local law enforcement failed as officers stopped reporting for duty to stay home and protect their own families. Municipal systems and supply chains broke as more and more people stopped going to work out of fear as the murder rate spiked. And that was only the beginning.
“We were in touch with UN headquarters while they still had power,” Troy said. “Manhattan had walled itself off from most of the violence in the outer boroughs. Paratroopers dropped down in October and gave them a shot in the arm in terms of food and restored order, but it was temporary.”
Love’s jaw was moving without sound. She finally managed a small voice.
“I didn’t know—”
“You didn’t have to. You were lucky that way.”
Troy hung his head and said he was sorry. He looked like he meant it, reluctantly; there didn’t seem much sorrow left in him to give.
“We lost contact with headquarters after their power grid failed in the hurricane. That must have been around when the accident happened.”
“What hurricane? What accident?”
Troy blinked several times in a row.
“There was a nuclear accident during a hurricane on the East Coast,” he said slowly. “Our drones detected massive levels of radiation near a reactor in Connecticut. We found the explosion.”
Once the power is out, Troy said, a nuclear facility running on backup generators has a limited window to shut down the reactor. It wasn’t too surprising that something went wrong in one of many nuclear reactors clustered by the coast, given the circumstances: a good portion of the personnel had abandoned their posts after more and more police guarding the facilities abandoned their posts; the minds of the rest were clouded with existential dread; they must have figured the world was about to be smashed by an extinction-class comet anyway; and the lives of operators and their families were in danger from lawlessness and natural catastrophe with severe flooding and high winds.
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