Sci Fiction Classics Volume 4 (2 page)

"I think you need to eat more," said Foster with calculated malice. He
picked up a linen napkin from the tray and flipped it open. Something
white and ragged fluttered out and landed between his feet. Foster picked
the object up and examined it—a piece of paper, torn from a sheet in
the vault records. "Hamilton, Willis T.," it read. Below the printing was
a line in Mardin's nearly illegible script. "With the compliments of the
chef."

"Wise-ass," said Foster. He flipped the scrap to Connie, who read it and
looked sick.

"Don't puke," said Foster. "Or if you do, go out in the hall."

"I won't be sick. I can't. I'd just have to get another helping of
supper."

Foster ate quickly and silently while Connie stared at his face.

"I'm sorry I kept going on about that Caesar salad," she finally said.

The man smiled. "You know, you're a sweet kid."

Connie didn't hear him; her mind had skipped to something else, something
more obsessive. "Foster? Someday we'll be rescued, won't we? Won't someone
look for us?"

Foster shrugged. "Why should they? Other people must have had natural
immunities, others must have survived. But I'm sure they're too busy
keeping alive to worry about rescuing us."

"Oh," she said blankly.

All us colorless people at the end of the world, he reflected. What a
goddamned anticlimax.

Sunrise poured over the clouded eastern mountains like a spill of wet
concrete. Both Mardin and Foster went up to the observation level to watch
the morning, while Connie busied herself in the kitchen, preparing
breakfast.

"You know," said Mardin, resting his forearms on the chill metal rail, "I
don't think I'll ever get used to the world without green."

Foster was vaguely surprised. Mardin hadn't spoken to him in six days.
Sometimes he suspected Mardin didn't exist at all. "Yeah," he said,
looking out over the barren Rockies. "It isn't so much the plants I miss.
It's the things that move—the birds and animals and things." He
considered. "I never figured I'd be lonely for a goddamn robin."

Mardin snickered. "The only reason you want a robin is to roast him on a
spit."

"You're a lousy comedian," said Foster.

"No," said Mardin. "No, I'm not. I'm a bald, skinny ex-file clerk who's
probably got pellagra and beri-beri and God only knows what else; and I'm
standing out here under a starving sky talking about what I miss to a man
who isn't my friend while a girl who also isn't my friend is down below in
the kitchen frying up a fellow man I never knew, as something I'll try to
imagine is Canadian bacon." Mardin's voice stopped like a mechanical toy
running down. His lips quivered slightly, and Foster hoped the man
wouldn't cry. Mardin had been the most unstable member of the trio from
the start. Oddly, it had been he rather than Connie who had been the last
to eat the meals culled from the vaults. Mardin had held back until his
ribs etched tight against stretched skin while Foster and eventually the
girl assuaged their hunger. Then, after days of self-denial, he had broken
and gorged himself on chops and steaks and filets. But the breaking had
snapped something besides Mardin's hunger, Foster thought.

Mardin gestured toward the dark river. "What started it?" he said loudly,
and his voice echoed toward bare hills where nothing moved except the
wind.

"Not 'what,'" said Foster. "Who." He pointed downward. "Them."

Mardin looked at him curiously.

"The dead," said Foster. "The people frozen in the vaults. The ones who
didn't plan for the future—the jerks who didn't believe in birth
control or who piped their sewers into the oceans. So what else could they
expect, letting people breed up toward infinity in a wasted world? The
birth rate went sky-high and biological pressure made the death rate
compensate drastically."

"Well, we overcompensated," said Mardin.

"You have a gift for understatement." Foster chuckled. "The silent spring,
sprung. Hell—once we were worried about H-bombs and nerve gas. Then
they let the bio-bombs loose …"

"Okay, breakfast's ready." Connie's voice echoed up the concrete shaft to
the observation level.

The chill of the vault numbed Foster's fingers as he wrestled the
foil-wrapped bundle from its cradle. "Hytrek, Donald M., Jr.," the file
read. There was something special about this file, Foster reflected. The
file matter-of-factly reported a death on September 3, 1973—an
unusual cardiac arrest, but remarkable only because Hytrek had been seven
years old. Tough luck, Mr. and Mrs. Hytrek, Foster thought as he carried
the shapeless package up the steps of the storage chamber. What pathetic
hope drove you to have your dead son quick-frozen after death and placed
here in the cryogenic vault? You probably wondered if you would still be
alive when the surgical techniques would be developed that could repair
Donald Jr.'s damaged heart. Well, you're not. You're dead, your son's dead
too, and you'll all stay that way. Sorry. But we'll live a little longer—Connie,
Mardin, and me.

Foster reached the welcome warm air at the top of the steps. Clumsily
holding his burden in both arms, he kicked the door shut behind him.

"Hello." It was Connie, looking fragile and wanly pretty. She glanced at
the oblong parcel in its gleaming foil sheath.

"It's my turn," said Foster.

"Why are you so cruel to me?" whispered Connie one night in the quiet
despair of Foster's bed. The top of the girl's head was silk against his
chin. Foster couldn't see her eyes in the half-light from the lunar skull
squinting down the sky-shaft.

"Me, cruel?" Foster ran his fingers sleepily along Connie's flank and up
across her stomach. Her ribs were painfully evident under his hand and the
skin on her belly was taut, like a stretched, bloated drum-head. "I'm not
cruel. I'm just—well, me. Like you said you were you the other night
when you brought my supper."

"No," she said. "You're cruel when you bait me about the food. You're
brutal about it and you enjoy my pain."

Foster was in an uncharacteristically good mood. "At least I'm faithful,"
he said. "Sorry, you'll take that as a barb." Foster shifted his body
restlessly. "Do you mind? You're putting my arm to sleep."

Connie raised her head, and Foster moved his arm. Her chin tipped back and
he saw a shine of tears on her cheek. The girl choked on some word, then
pressed her face convulsively against Foster's chest. Foster stroked her
hair mechanically, wondering when she'd ever let him sleep.

"Sorry," she finally said, voice muffled. "It's a mood. I suddenly
remembered most of the things I promised myself not to think about ever
again."

"Nebraska?" Foster said. "The plains and the golden wheat fields under the
summer sun? Your family? Mother and father? Old boyfriends long dead now?
Trees, lakes, birds, horses, planes, cities, television shows?"

"Damn you, yes!" From the short distance between them she struck out with
her fist. The blow glanced lightly off his cheekbone, and Connie again
began to cry. Foster continued to stroke her hair.

"I feel miserable," said Connie. "I want to leave."

"And go where?" Foster said placatingly. "Mardin and you and I might be
the only people left anywhere. This may be the only shelter, and the
vaults probably hold the last edible food in a hundred miles."

Her tears were wet on Foster's chest. "God!" she cried out in frustration
and misery. "Why me?"

"Trite question," said Foster. "Maybe God likes you and the rest of us and
that's why he picked us out to survive a while. Maybe he just overlooked
us when he got the rest of the earth. Or maybe we're to provide the finale
for the last great scene at the world's end."

Connie pushed away from Foster's embrace and struggled free of the tangled
blankets. She stumbled into a dark corner of the bedroom beside the closet
and huddled there, weeping. Foster rolled onto his back and closed his
eyes.

In a while the room became colder, and Connie returned to the warmth of
Foster's bed.

She curled forlornly against the sleeping man. "Oh baby," she whispered,
no one hearing except herself. "What's going to happen to us all?"

Connie dreamed:

The day Mardin walked past her as she sunned herself by the main
entrance to the cryogenic complex. The sack over his shoulder was bulky
and stippled with cabbage-lumps.

"Ho ho," he laughed, macabre Saint Nick.

She looked up. "What's that?"

"Heads," he said. "Gonna dump 'em."

Mardin walked away, laughing softly, and behind him remained the stench.
Thick sweetness first, then

The smell. Similar, but—

The prairie stretched away to the horizon. The sod houses, board roofs
chinked with mud, were dark chocolate against the green waving grass. The
people worked at indistinct tasks, their exact actions obscure.

She was inside one of the sod houses and they
were there, all the men
and women. She saw her grandfather and father and many more whom she
didn't know. They stood around the rough wooden furniture, and their talk
buzzed in currents she could not understand.

The smell. Sweeter, more cloying.

The boy and the girl were twins, perhaps five years old, blue-eyed. Both
smiled as the people closed about them and began to tear bits of flesh
from their bodies.

Connie ate too, and it was from love, not hunger. She had wanted to have
babies, and now she ate them. And then she was younger, as young as the
two children, and the people closed in around her.

The smell. She whimpered deep in her throat. The potty-smell …

One morning Foster and Connie were jarred from uneasy slumber by the clang
of alarm gongs and the flash of red warning lights. Foster shook his head
drowsily, irritated by the clamor, and flicked the switch of the lamp by
the bed. Nothing happened. Only the intermittent crimson glare from the
hallway lit the room. The man staggered from the bed and picked up his
robe and slippers from a chair.

He found Mardin wild-eyed with agitation, fluttering his hands in front of
the access hole to the power room. Above the sealed metal port was an
obtrusive sign rapidly blinking "Automatic Systems Malfunction!" A
cacophony of bells was ringing. As Foster approached from the hallway, a
klaxon horn began to blare and the newly flashing sign—"Danger!
Radiation Hazard!"—added to the carnival aspect of the power-room
door.

"Hello, Mardin. What's the problem?"

"How the hell do I know?" The ex-file clerk's bony hands sawed the air. "I
just got here. Something's wrong with the nuclear plant. We're not getting
any electricity."

"No power?" Connie had approached unnoticed. "What are we going to do for
lights? How are we going to cook?"

"I saw some candles in a desk," said Foster. "We'll use those at night. As
for cooking, it looks like we'll just have to go outside and see if those
dead trees'll burn."

A siren wailed in crescendo behind the bells and klaxon. The new sign
flashed "CONDITION CRITICAL—PRIORITY REPAIRS AAA-1."

"Is it going to blow up?" asked Connie.

"Beats me," said Foster. "Too bad we're all ignorant tourists instead of
technicians. Maybe we ought to go outside in case it blows. Come on,
Mardin."

But Mardin stayed, seemingly hypnotized by the random patterns of light
and sound, while Connie and Foster retreated along the access corridor and
climbed the shaft to the observation level.

After five hours, Mardin climbed from the cryogenic complex into the outer
world. Humming a tuneless song, he stumbled through the dust of the
leached soil and found Connie and Foster making love in the shadow beneath
a stand of dead pine.

"Hey! You can come back now. I don't think anything's going to blow up.
The batteries must have run down or something—the alarms stopped.
But we still don't have any electricity. Looks like we're going to have to
rough it."

"Okay," said Foster, disengaging himself. "You two pick up some limbs—we
cook out tonight."

"I haven't cooked over an open fire since I was a little girl," said
Connie. "We went camping in Yellowstone Park once." Her voice sounded
happy, and Foster smiled. Mardin continued to hum his tuneless song and
walk around in abstracted circles.

"Hey!" called Connie, dropping her armload of branches. "Look, Foster!"
She pointed toward a streak of white vapor that bisected the dusk. "It's a
jet."

Foster squinted into the sunset. "I don't think so," he finally said and
felt a twinge of guilt. "We didn't hear any sound of a plane. It's just a
weird cloud formation."

But the three of them stared hungrily and hopefully into the west until
long after the white streak had vanished.

"Uh oh," said Foster, holding his candle high.

"Something's strange," said Connie, crowding close behind him.

"It's the refrigeration units," said Mardin from the rear of the small
procession. "The electricity to cool the nitrogen—it comes from the
power room …"

"
Came
from there," corrected Foster.

The trio descended the concrete steps.

"Listen!" said Foster. He stood motionless. Out of the darkness sounded
the
drip-drip-drip
of fluid splashing on cement. "You two light the
other candles."

The interior of the cryogenic vault became visible as Foster stepped from
the stairwell into the room. The reflected candle flames danced eerily on
the crinkled-foil capsules containing the hundreds of guilty dead.

"They're defrosting," said Mardin. "Like a big refrigerator when you pull
the cord."

"I wonder how long they'll last," mused Foster, "before they spoil.
Several days, maybe?"

"At least," agreed Mardin. "My wife left a roast out once when we took off
for the weekend. It was a little moldy, but the dog ate it all right after
we got back Sunday night."