Clay's Ark

by Octavia E. Butler

  She continued down the slope with greater care. She did not have Eli’s or Jacob’s ability to move in complete silence, but she moved as quietly as she could, missing the rock and sand she could have knocked loose, avoiding the dry plants that would crackle underfoot, quieting her own panting.

  She paused briefly to listen. The wind, now blowing toward her from her father, brought her the sound of his uneven footsteps. He was limping slightly. His breathing, though, was even, not labored. She marveled for a moment that she could actually hear his breathing over such a distance. The organism had given her a great deal. It must have given him something too. How else could he survive being shot and losing so much blood? How else could he keep going? If only something could be done to stop it from killing so many people while it helped others.

  She became aware of a low rumble behind her. Looking back, she saw a truck—a big private hauler—probably carrying something illegal if it were daring to use a map-identified sewer. She dove for cover as the truck came over a rise. Perhaps the driver was in his living quarters and would not see her or her father. Perhaps. But what driver would leave his rig on automatic in a sewer? He would be at the wheel. And his truck would be armed and armored to fight off gangs and the police.

  The truck rumbled past her, not even slowing in spite of the fact that the rock she had crouched behind was not large enough to conceal her completely. Unmoving as she was, perhaps the driver had seen her as just another lump of rock.

  But up ahead, beyond the hill that now concealed her father, the truck slowed and stopped. Frightened, she walked toward the truck, then ran toward it. People traveling legitimately did not stop to pick up strays, did not dare. Her father had told her of a time when a person could stand with his thumb held in a certain position, and cars and trucks would stop and offer rides. But Keira could not remember such a time. All her life, she had heard stories of strays being decoys for car families and bike gangs. Real strays were people with car trouble and without working phones or people thrown out of cars by friends who suddenly became less friendly. People who picked them up might be only dangerously naive or they might be thieves, murderers, traffickers in prostitutes, or, most frighteningly, body parts dealers—though according to her father, involuntary transplant donors were more likely to come from certain of the privately run, cesspool hospitals. But for a freelancer, strays were fair game.

  Keira ran, not knowing what she would do when she reached her father and the hauler, not thinking about it. All she could think was that her father might be shot with a tranquilizer gun and loaded onto a meat truck.

  Suddenly, as she ran, there was an explosion, then several explosions. For a moment, she stopped, confused, and the ground shook under her feet.

  The ranch house. Eli had done what she had feared he would do: triggered his explosives, blown up the car people—even the white-haired one who had been kind.

  And Rane? Had she gotten out? Was that why Eli had decided to settle things? Or was it because Keira and her father had escaped so easily? Eli almost certainly did not have enough people to surround the house and fight the new gang. Were two escapees all he was willing to risk?

  Black smoke and dust boiled up over the hills. Keira stared at it, frightened, wondering. Then she heard the hauler start and saw it begin to pull away.

  Again, she ran toward her father, pushing herself, fearing to find nothing where he had been. Instead, she found her father half-crushed by the wheels of the truck. His legs, the whole lower half of him looked stuck to the broken pavement with blood and ruined flesh. He could not possibly be alive with such massive injuries.

  Her father groaned. Keira dropped down beside him, sickened, revolted. She could barely look at him, yet he was alive.

  “God,” he whispered. “My God!”

  Weeping, Keira took his hand. It was wet with blood and she touched it carefully, but it was uninjured. Clutched in it was a piece of blue cloth—a bloody sleeve, not his own.

  “I did it,” he moaned. “Oh Jesus, I did it.”

  “Daddy?” She wanted to put his head on her lap, but she was afraid she would hurt him more.

  “Kerry, is that you?” He seemed to be looking right at her.

  “It’s me.”

  “I did it. Jesus!”

  “Did what?” She could not think. She could hardly talk through her tears.

  “He was looking for my wallet … or something to steal. He hit me deliberately … had to swerve to hit me. Just wanted to steal.”

  She shook her head in disbelief. She had never heard of haulers running people down to rob them. Car families were more likely to do that. But in a sewer, anything could happen.

  “I grabbed him,” her father said. “I couldn’t help it, couldn’t control it. He smelled so... I couldn’t help it. God, I tore at him like an animal.”

  So like the blue sleeve, the blood on his hand was not his.

  He had spread the disease.

  “Please,” he pleaded. “Go after him. Stop him.”

  “Stop who?” Eli asked.

  She had not heard him coming. Enhanced senses or not, she stood up, startled. Then she saw her father’s bag in his hand. She knew how utterly useless it would be and she broke down.

  Crying, she permitted Eli to take her by the shoulders and move her aside. He knelt where she had been. When she was able to see clearly again, she saw that he was holding her father’s bloody hand. She felt something happened between them, a moment of nonverbal communication.

  Then, with a long, slow sigh, her father closed his eyes. Eventually he opened them again widely. His chest ceased to move with his breathing. His body was still. Eli reached up and closed the eyes a final time.

  Keira knelt beside her father, beside Eli. She looked at Eli, not able to speak to him, not wanting to hear him speak, though she knew he would.

  “He’s dead,” Eli said. “I’m sorry.”

  She knew. She had seen. She bent forward, crying, all but screaming in anguished protest. With her eyes closed, she could not imagine her father dead. She did not know how to deal with such an unimaginable thing.

  Eli took off his shirt and covered the most damaged parts of her father’s body. Blood soaked through at once, but at least the horrible injuries were hidden.

  Eli stood up, took her hands, and drew her to her feet. Her hands tingled, almost burned where he touched her. Confused, she tried to pull away, but somehow her desire to pull away did not reach her hands. They did not move.

  “Be still,” he said. “I just went through this with your father. His organisms ‘knew’ something mine want to know. So do yours.”

  That made no sense to her, but she did not care. She was not being hurt. She did not think she would have noticed if he had hurt her. She was still trying to understand that her father was dead. Eli kept talking. Eventually, she found herself listening to him.

  “When we’ve changed,” he said, “when the organism ‘decides’ whether or not we’re going to live, it shares the differences it’s found in us with others who have changed. At least that’s what we’ve decided it’s doing. We had a woman who had had herself sterilized before we got her—had her tubes cauterized. Her organisms communicated with Meda’s and her tubes opened up. She’s pregnant now. We had a guy regrow three fingers he’d lost years ago. You … There’s no precedent for it, but I think you may be getting rid of your leukemia. Or maybe the organism’s even found a way to use leukemia to its advantage—and yours. You’re going to live.”

  “I should die,” she whispered. “Dad was strong and he died.”

  “You’re not going to die. You look healthier than you did when I met you.”

  “I should die!”

  “Jesus, I’m glad you’re not going to. That makes up for a lot.”

  She said nothing.

  “Kerry?”

  “Don’t call me that!” she screamed.

  “I’m sorry.” He put his arm around her as soon as he could free his ha
nds from hers—as soon as the organisms had finished their communication. How the hell could microorganisms communicate anyway she wondered obscurely.

  Eli answered as though she had asked the question aloud. Perhaps she had. “We exchanged something,” he said. “Maybe chemical signals of some kind. That’s the only answer I can come up with. We’ve talked about it at home and nobody has any other ideas.”

  She did not understand why he was talking on and on about the organism. Did he think she cared? Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the column of smoke from the ranch house and she thought of something she did care about.

  “Eli?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What about Rane?”

  Silence.

  “Eli? Did she get out?”

  More silence.

  “You blew up the house with her inside!”

  “No.”

  “You did! You killed my sister!”

  “Keira!” He turned her, made her face him. “I didn’t. We didn’t.”

  She believed him. She did not understand why she believed so quickly, why watching him speak the words made her know he was telling the truth. She resented believing him.

  “What happened to her?” she demanded. “Where is she?”

  Eli hesitated. “She’s dead.”

  Another one. Another death. Everyone was dead. She was alone.

  “The car people killed her,” Eli said.

  “How could you know that?”

  “Keira, I know. And you know I’m not lying to you.”

  “How could you know she was dead?”

  He sighed. “Baby …” He drew another breath. “They cut her head off, and they threw it out the front door.”

  She broke away from him, stumbled a few steps down the road.

  “I’m sorry,” he said for the third time. “We tried to save all of you. We … we work hard not to lose people in the middle of their conversions.”

  “You’re like our children at that stage,” another voice said.

  She looked up, saw that a young oriental man had come over the hill behind her.

  The man spoke to Eli. “I came to see if you needed help. I guess not.”

  Eli shrugged. “Take her back to the camp. I’ll bring her father.”

  The man took Keira’s arm. “I knew your sister,” he said softly. “She was a strong girl.”

  Not strong enough, Keira thought. Not against the car family. Not against the disease. Not strong at all.

  She started to follow the new man back to the ranch house, then stopped. She had forgotten something—something important. It must have been important if it could bother her now. Then she remembered.

  “Eli?” she said.

  He was bending over her father. He straightened when she spoke.

  “Eli, someone got away. The hauler who hit my father. He was headed north.”

  “It was a private hauler?”

  “Yes. He got out and tried to rob my father. My father scratched him.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Eli whispered. He sounded almost the way her father had at the end. Then he turned and spoke to the other man. “Steve, tell Ingraham. He’s our best driver. Give him some grenades. Tell him no holds barred.”

  The man called Steve went leaping up the slope as agilely as Jacob could have.

  “Jesus,” Eli repeated. Somehow, he managed to lift her father and carry him back as though he were merely wounded, not half-crushed. He had fashioned a kind of sack of his shirt. Keira walked beside him, hardly noticing when a car sped by down on the highway.

  Up the hill, Steve—Stephen Kaneshiro, he told her—joined her again. He brought her food and she ate ravenously, guiltily. Apparently nothing would disturb her appetite.

  Stephen kept her away from the ruin of the house. He stayed with her, silent but somehow comforting. He found an empty car and sat with her in it. Eli’s people had apparently driven away or killed all of the second, uncontaminated group of car people. Now they were cleaning up. Some were digging a mass grave. Others were loading their newly appropriated cars and trucks with whatever they thought their enclave could use.

  “Take a couple of radios,” Stephen told a woman who passed near them. “I think for a change we’ll be needing them.”

  The woman nodded and went away.

  Jacob found Stephen and Keira sitting together in the car. Without a word, he climbed into Keira’s lap and fell asleep. She stroked his hair, accepting his presence and his youth and thinking nothing. It was possible to endure if she thought nothing at all.

  Sometime later, Ingraham returned. He had driven all the way to the edge of Needles, but found no private hauler. Everyone had gathered near him to hear about his chase. When they had heard, they all looked at Eli.

  Eli closed his eyes, rubbed a hand over his face. “All right.” He spoke so softly, Keira would not have heard him without her newly enhanced hearing. “All right, we knew it would happen sooner or later.”

  “But a private hauler,” Stephen said. “They go all over the country, all over the continent. And they deal with people who go all over the world.”

  Eli nodded bleakly. He looked years older and agonizingly weary.

  “What are we going to do?” Ingraham asked.

  Meda answered him. “What do you think we’re going to do? We’re going home!”

  Eli put his arm around her. “That’s right,” he said. “In a few months we’ll be one of the few sane enclaves left in the country—maybe in the world.” He shook his head. “Use your imagination. Think of what it will be like in the cities and towns.” He paused, reached down and picked up Zera, who had sat at his feet and was leaning sideways against his right leg. “Remember the kids,” he said softly. “They’ll need us more than ever now. Whatever you do, remember the kids.”

  Epilogue

  STEPHEN KANESHIRO WAITED UNTIL he began to hear radio reports of the new illness. Then he put on his gloves and drove with Ingraham into Barstow. From there, by phone, he tried to locate his wife and son. He had been with Keira until then, had seemed content with her, but he felt he had a duty to bring his wife and son to relative safety, though they must have given him up for dead long ago.

  Eli warned him that no one knew what effect the disease might have on a young child. Stephen understood, but he wanted to give his family what he felt might be their only chance.

  He could not. It took him two days of anonymous, sound-only phoning to discover that his wife had gone back to her parents and recently had returned with them to Japan.

  He came back to the mountaintop ranch and Keira. Her hair was growing in thick and dark. She was pregnant—perhaps by Stephen, perhaps from her one night with Eli. Stephen did not seem to care which any more than she did.

  “Will you stay with me?” she asked him. He was a good man. He had helped her through the terrible time after the deaths of her father and sister. He did not excite her as Eli had. She had not known how much she cared for him, how much she needed him until he went away. When he came back, all she could think was: No wife! Thank God! Then she was ashamed. Sometime later she asked the question.

  “Will you stay with me?”

  They sat in their room next to the nursery. Their room in Meda’s house. He sat on the bed and she on the desk chair where she could not touch him. She could not bear to touch him until she knew he did not plan to leave her.

  “We’ll have to cut ourselves off even more than we have so far,” he said. “I brought new weapons, ammunition, and foods we can’t raise. I think we’re going to have to be self-sufficient for a while. Maybe a long while. You and I couldn’t even have a house. Not enough wood.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said.

  “San Francisco is burning,” he continued. “I bought a lot of news printouts in town. We haven’t been getting enough by radio. Fires are being set everywhere. Maybe uninfected people are sterilizing the city in the only way they can think of. Or maybe it’s infected people crazy with their
symptoms and the noise and smells and lights. L.A. is beginning to burn, too, and San Diego. In Phoenix, someone is blowing up houses and buildings. Three oil refineries went up in Texas. In Louisiana there’s a group that has decided the disease was brought in by foreigners—so they’re shooting anyone who seems a little odd to them. Mostly Asians, blacks, and browns.”

  She stared at him. He stared back expressionlessly.

  “In New York, Seattle, Hong Kong, and Tokyo, doctors and nurses have been caught spreading the disease. The compulsion is at work already.”

  She thought of her father, then shook her head, not wanting to think of him. He had been so right, so wrong, and so utterly helpless.

  “Everything will be chaos soon,” Stephen said. “There have been outbreaks in Germany, England, France, Turkey, India, Korea, Nigeria, the Soviet Union. …It will be chaos. Then a new order. Hell, a new species. Jacob will win, you know. We’ll help him. And Jacob thinks uninfected people smell like food.”

  “We’ll have to help him to help ourselves,” she said.

  “We’ll be obsolete, you and me.”

  “They’ll be our children.”

  He lowered his eyes, looked at her belly where her pregnancy was beginning to show. “They’ll be all we have,” he said, “the two of us.” There was a long pause. “I’ve lost everyone, too. Will you stay with me?”

  She nodded solemnly and went to him. They held each other until they could no longer tell which of them was trembling.

  A Biography of Octavia E. Butler

  Octavia E. Butler (1947–2006) was a bestselling and award-winning author, considered one of the best science fiction writers of her generation. She received both the Hugo and Nebula awards, and in 1995 became the first author of science fiction to receive a MacArthur Fellowship. She was also awarded the prestigious PEN Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000.