The Company of Death

by Elisa Hansen

  He remained still for a moment, but then slipped from her and started walking again.

  “But you don’t know that either.” She stared after him. Did Time know? And want to stop it? “So you’ve never been there.”

  “Am I beyond?” Death flicked a rhetorical hand to the horizon.

  Emily’s feet moved to catch up. “You’re beyond life. You’re Death.”

  “I am the transition between life and the beyond.”

  “Well, not anymore you’re not.” She kicked a rock. This plan was going nowhere.

  Death stopped. All humor in his tone expired. “I am.” His hand snapped up as if reaching for something out of habit, but clenched thin air. “I am still the transition. If a human scheduled to die at this moment stood before me, reap her I would.”

  “Right…” The where and when were the problem.

  “The balance is already greatly skewed.”

  “So what do we do about it?” Emphasis on the “we.” She lifted a hopeful eyebrow, but his gaze remained on the clear sky.

  “I must summon my brethren.”

  “Right.”

  “They will not stand for my binding.” He started walking again. “Together we will right this.”

  Right. Okay. This might be something she could work with. “And then what?”

  “The balance will be restored.”

  And poofing. Poofing would be restored. She chewed at the edge of a fingernail as she built a mental flowchart out of his words. “And to summon them, you need space, right? Or did you mean Space?”

  “A wasted place.” He eyed the tall walls of the ravine. “I can make them come to me if enough emptiness surrounds me.”

  The Great Basin surrounded them. How much more wasted could you get? She followed his gaze to the piled rocks. “Why not go up to the top of one of the hills?”

  “Not high enough.” He flicked a pebble off a boulder they passed. “There is too much life here.”

  “What, like bugs and plants?” So he was seeking someplace completely flat and dead. Or at least less-alive than here. Emily pulled her fingernail out of her mouth with a gasp. “I know a place!”

  Death stopped and looked at her.

  “Little Salt Basin.”

  “I have never been there.”

  A place so wasted no one had ever even died there? “Sounds good, right?” Shit, where was it? “I think we’re pretty close, actually.” A few hours at most. Her team had passed it on their way back into California. Its vastness below the cliffs they traversed had struck her, and she giggled over its ironic name at the time. “If I had a map, I could show you.”

  “But you don’t.”

  She scratched her head and scraped her brain. “It was… It was…” Yes! She remembered the name of the road that ran above it. And the highway it crossed not much farther on. People definitely died at that intersection; he would know where that was. “If I tell you, will you do something for me?”

  “For you?” Somehow his eye sockets looked wider than before. “Do what?”

  “Get me to Manhattan?”

  Death pressed his hands together and studied her for a quiet minute. “How do you expect me to do that?”

  She bit her tongue to keep the word “poof” from escaping. “Are you saying you can’t?” Shit. Even when he wasn’t bound by Space and Time, she would still be.

  “No.” He tapped his fingertips and tilted his face to the sky. Clear and blue in every direction. “There is one way.”

  “Yes! Okay! Come on, then. Deal?” She started to extend her hand for a shake, but then stopped herself. She didn’t need any more shocks today. Maneuvering the gesture, she instead tucked a piece of hair behind her ear. “You’ll summon your bros, they’ll fix you, and you’ll be back in business before you know it.”

  “Yes…”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes.”

  Perfect! Everyone would win.

  16

  Jade

  “Why are you turning around?” Scott flipped back the pink washcloth keeping the sun out of his eyes. A crick seized his neck, and he grimaced.

  “We’re going back to 95,” Carol said.

  “What?” Scott pushed up his seat. “Are you scrambled?”

  “Look behind the car.”

  He twisted to peer through the back windshield. A long-dead traffic jam clotted the highway, but the desert on either side of it stretched flat and open.

  “Carol, stop. Just go around it.”

  “No. I am rerouting our map.”

  The sedan wasn’t exactly made for off-roading, but better to get it a little beat up on the shoulder than lose an entire half day’s driving.

  “I’m telling you, it’s fine. Look!” Scott stuck his arm out the window and waved it in circles. “Wiiiiiide open spaces! We can driiiive arouuuund it.”

  “It is not safe.”

  “Carol, stop the car.”

  “No, Scott.”

  “I am ordering you to stop the car.”

  “My mission objective does not require me to obey your orders.”

  Well, there was one way he could get her to obey. “Carol: Ro—”

  She released the wheel and slapped a hand across his mouth. “Look at the fuel gauge, Scott.”

  “Mmff!” He shoved her hand away. “That hurt.”

  “Look at it.”

  He did. It was low. Too low.

  “Aren’t the panels working?” He tilted his head back as if he could see through the roof to them.

  “Not enough.”

  “And you’re driving away from the cars? We could siphon—”

  “The probability that those vehicles are empty of occupants is zero. The probability that their occupants are not also lurking between the cars is zero. As my radar and infrared are both nonoperational, I cannot detect them nor determine how many miles the stalled vehicles persist. You wish to drive past them, but if our fuel runs out before we are well beyond their end, your safety will be compromised.”

  Scott rubbed at his bruised lips. So she was right, but… “You’re talking hours of backtracking.”

  “This is the safest course.”

  “And then we go north? Cause going Vegaswards is kind of the opposite of a safe course.”

  “We will test the vehicles we passed earlier for fuel.”

  Did they pass vehicles? Scott tried and failed to sleep through most of the morning. Their five-gallon fuel can was full when they left that janky town at dawn, but now it slid around in the back seat. Their plan to avoid the often-clogged interstates by sticking to side roads got a lot more difficult when suburbia turned into desert.

  Though their journey began in Pasadena days ago, getting out of the city itself and onto an open road took a lot longer than expected. So far, they’d barely even poked into Nevada. It would be weeks before they made it to New York at this rate. Carol had originally estimated a five-day drive but prepared for possible delays. Before they left the Curisa complex, she packed water bottles, purifying tablets, and ration bars to last Scott a month. He’d go crazy from having to eat the mealy things long before he starved.

  One thing he missed more than anything since the world ended was sushi. Cold, moist, succulent sushi. And he wouldn’t be finding any of that in abandoned kitchen cupboards. The first thing he would do when they got into the New York fortress was scrounge up a huge pile of sushi. They must still have sushi. Rice existed everywhere, and the city was coastal. They lived the high life out there. Someone must know how to sushi slice a fish.

  The second thing he would do was find his sister, of course. She’d want Carol back, and surely somewhere inside her twisted heart she’d be happy to know Scott was still alive.

  The third thing… The third thing would be to find Jade. Oh, Jade was definitely going to get found. Yes, Jade would not be able to avoid the…find-getting of Scott.

  He still didn’t know what he’d do when he found her; he’d been turning it over in his mind f
or months and months since he last saw her at Curisa. Almost a year now. When he imagined their reunion, sometimes he walked right up to her and slapped her in the face. But he knew he wouldn’t really do that. In other versions of the fantasy, he just stared at her, his eyes dark and full of meaning, and she would break down into tears of shame and remorse. Other times it played out like one of those slow-motion romance movie montages where the music soars and they run across a field into each other’s arms. Scott didn’t know where to find a field in lower Manhattan, but it was just the end embrace that mattered. And then he’d pull away from her and his gaze would go cold, and he’d tell her it was over. Jade would beg him to change his mind and then…well, he might. Maybe. Maybe not. He would see how it went.

  They spent their last months together at Curisa Robotics, the plant where his sister worked. It was the safest place he could think to go with Jade when emergency evacuation hit their neighborhood. The Curisa guys let them in along with a few dozen other employees’ families before the complex went on lockdown. Curisa kept them all safe and fed while the engineers did their work. Zombie-killing robots were on top order. Scott was one of the lucky ones.

  Reconnecting with Nick had been…interesting. She, Scott, and their brother were all close in age, but any emotional closeness disappeared before their teenage years. She was into numbers and machines, and Scott was into culture and history, and Eli was into humanitarian charity stuff, and that was that.

  At Curisa, Nick spent all her time working. Scott wasn’t sure she even slept. He never saw her unless he hovered in her lab while she tinkered with circuit boards and robot limbs.

  The first time he saw Carol, Nick was wrists deep into her chassis. She bent over, working on something with the tiniest wrench he’d ever seen.

  “Making yourself a friend?” he asked.

  “I didn’t make her,” Nick said. “She’s an LS model.” She gestured to another deactivated humanoid robot slumped against the wall. “I am improving her. Vastly, vastly improving her. She’s going to be like nothing you’ve seen before.”

  “Obviously.” Scott found a toolbox to sit on. “Considering I don’t exactly spend my time mingling with robots. Oh, excuse me, androids.”

  “Gynoid.” Nick gave Carol’s forehead a loving stroke, then glanced at Scott. “What? What is that face?”

  “Pedantic much?”

  Nick grinned as if it were a compliment and adjusted the claw clip thing holding the sloppy pile of hair on top of her head. It was the same sandy color as Scott’s, but much longer. She never let it out of that clip, though, so he had no idea why she didn’t go ahead and cut it short. She’d look better if she did and wore it loose. When they were young, people thought they were twins, but Scott got the better end of that deal. Nick was too boyish to be pretty.

  “Was afraid you had a problem with ‘gynoid,’” she said.

  Scott made another face. “Well, it does sound kind of dirty. Gynoid, vagina. You know.”

  Nick spun around and thrust her tiny wrench at him. “Vaginas are not dirty!” She said it so fast, it was as if she were waiting for the chance. “You’ve made them dirty in your mind by sexualizing nature.”

  Scott jerked back. “Me?”

  “You, the Patriarchy.”

  Scott rolled his eyes. He learned long ago not to take on Nick in an activism argument. He watched her close Carol’s stomach panel and then heave her up by the shoulders.

  “Need help?” he asked.

  “You,” Nick grunted, “do not get to touch her.”

  Fine. Scott stayed on his toolbox while Nick shimmied Carol onto her side. The svelte silver arm fell over the amply built chest, and with her human-replica face, she looked pretty much like a picture off an AI kink website. Nick’s exterior modifications were obvious when Scott compared Carol to the other LS in the room.

  “If you hate the Patriarchy so much,” he said, “why’d you make your gynoid so sssexay?”

  “I make what I want. For me.” Smiling, she brushed her knuckles along Carol’s cheek.

  Scott’s brain retorted, Didn’t know you were into that sort of thing, but honestly, wasn’t she? Not in a pervy website way, of course, but her robots came before human relationships any day.

  Gynoid. Scott didn’t care about Nick’s political agenda, but it bugged him when she was pedantic purposefully to seem smarter than him. “Android” wasn’t like saying “man” instead of “woman.” It was like saying “human.” Right? He was pretty sure.

  “Besides,” he thought aloud, “it depends on the vagina.”

  “What are you even talking about?” Nick muttered without looking up from her work on Carol’s back.

  “Some are dirty,” he said.

  “You would know.” She returned Carol to her back and yelled over her shoulder. “Midori!”

  “No thanks.” Scott smirked. “I’m more of an amaretto man.”

  A door at the lab’s rear swung on its hinges, and some chick popped her head through. “What’s this about dirty vaginas?” Her soft, perky voice held a hopeful note.

  “Are my batteries charged yet?” Nick asked without lifting her eyes from Carol.

  The Midori chick had one of those choppy haircuts, longer in the front and bowled in the back with a line of bangs cutting across her forehead. Blue-black, but an inch of pale roots showed. Scott stopped slouching on the toolbox as he took her in. Her heart-shaped face would be kind of cute if she washed off all the thick black eyeliner. Though it did make her blue eyes really vibrant.

  “Almost?” Midori shuffled on her feet. “I mean, I’ll check.” Her gaze lingered on the back of Nick’s head as if she would ask her something. She didn’t seem to notice Scott there at all. After a minute, she smiled to herself and ducked back into the doorway. Cute smile.

  “And give me back my wire nuts,” Nick yelled after her. “The little ones. I know you took them.”

  “Sorry,” Midori called from the other room.

  Nick flipped down her goggles and leaned into Carol with what Scott guessed was a soldering iron or something. He scratched the back of his head. “Your assistant seems…” Awkward, nervous, weird, kind of pretty, mysterious? “Nice.”

  “Midori’s in weapons R&D.”

  Hot. “Oh, cool.”

  “She’s not my assistant.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m not her boss. I’m not anyone’s boss.”

  “Funny, could never tell from how you act.” He smirked and rocked on his seat, but then felt something crack under him. He jumped up and inspected the toolbox. The plastic was bent, and Nick was glowering at him.

  “You know,” she said, “there are like a hundred other places you could go be annoying. Where’s your little girlfriend?”

  “She’s not that little.”

  “I could put her in my pocket.”

  Scott pushed on the plastic, tried to pop it back into shape. He didn’t know where Jade was. Making friends, drinking beer with the guys, avoiding him.

  “I dunno.” He gave up on the box. At least the drawer still worked. “Things are weird.”

  “Ohhhh.”

  “What ohhhh?”

  “What do you want?”

  He wandered over to her work area. “Can’t I just hang out with my sister who I haven’t seen in years?”

  She snorted. “What do you want?”

  Scott sighed and leaned against Carol’s table. “I don’t know what to do with her.”

  “Do with her?”

  “Ever since we got here, she’s been weird, touchy.”

  “Maybe because you’re avoiding her.”

  Jade was avoiding him. Definitely more than he avoided her, anyway. He shrugged and fiddled with some tiny screws on the edge of the table. “She’s been drinking a lot.” He didn’t like her when she drank. She got sloppy and inconsiderate. She left the top off the toothpaste and wet towels on the floor. Her hair got greasy. Zombies swarming over half the world didn’t mean
she got a free pass to abandon basic hygiene. Curisa still had running water and everything.

  “She didn’t want to come here,” he said when Nick didn’t reply. “She wanted me to take her to her mom’s in San Diego.” They never would have made it. It was a war zone out there. But she treated Scott like it was his fault. Like he was the only thing keeping her from going.

  “You’re too old for her.”

  “I’m only twenty-two.”

  “And she’s what? Twelve?”

  “Almost twenty.”

  “You’re a whole college education older than her.”

  “She’s graduating early.” Was.

  Scott met Jade on campus during her second year. While he was still in undergrad, dating an underclassman felt perfectly acceptable. But once he started his master’s, their domestic situation deteriorated. Maybe they cohabited too soon, but living together made more financial sense than Jade keeping her dorm. Their studio apartment wasn’t much bigger than a dorm, though, and tension compiled in the small space. Tension that only got worse at Curisa.

  He shook his head. “I don’t know what to do with her.”

  “Do you even realize how much of an asshole you sound like right now?”

  “Now you’re on her side?”

  “I don’t get how anyone would want to date you.”

  “Thanks.”

  Nick pushed up her goggles and looked at him finally. “Sorry, not sorry, but it runs in the family. Look at Dad.” She gave him a sympathetic grimace. “I’m just as bad. We aren’t good mates.”

  Scott wasn’t going to argue with that. He flipped the teeny screws onto their ends, lined them against the table’s rim. “But I can’t break up with her.” He sighed. “I brought her all the way here.” And now neither of them could leave until New York sent out the airships.

  “Sure you can.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  Nick pointed her soldering iron at him. “You’re doing that coward guy thing.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  None of his past girlfriends were this serious. He let himself be vulnerable with Jade, and that was a huge deal. To him, anyway. Most people were about using and losing; that was a fact. Shouldn’t Nick know that? Even their mom had taken Eli with her when she left a decade ago, but he and Nick didn’t warrant the effort. Scott took a leap with Jade, let her in on parts of himself he never shared with anyone. Jade wasn’t allowed to push him away now.