The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 (47 page)

I was working in corporate headquarters in Norwalk, he's calling out. Chief sustainability officer. Still have my business card here if you want to see it. Case you think I'm some nutcase. My kids were Wilson, Mackenzie, and Dylan. I'm thirty-eight years old. I'm not crazy. Listen to what I have to say, people.

We're listening, someone calls out. Got nowhere else to be.

You've got a good thing going here, he says, looking around at the crowd. I heard as much. I heard there were places up in the mountains where people didn't completely lose their shit. Not to say that we were such a total mess. Norwalk did relatively well, actually, for the first year and a half. It turns out the Salvadorean Mafia is really good at running a city with no centralized authority. They took over the Walmarts and the supermarkets. They enforced things. But supplies finally ran out, down to the last Lunchable, seriously. I was trying to learn to track the deer in our subdivision, but all I had was my grandfather's service revolver. No dice. Our neighbors got one that was roadkill just over the wall on 95. We grilled it on my bench-press rack, tried to get the whole thing evenly well done. Then everybody got sick. Dylan went first. Lauren next. Wilson and Mackenzie—

His face swells up, a rictus of old grief.

I hit the road, he said, no reason to stay. Figured I'd come up here and see if I could find some kind of community. I made it as far as Springfield. Springfield was a mess. Big piles of trash everywhere and roadblocks of old sofas every few blocks. Came across a natural-foods store, still boarded up and mostly intact. I took some Kashi and soy-nut butter and went back up to the highway. And that's when I saw it. The convoy.

Good one, she thinks, nice timing there. Like a monologue in one of those disaster movies.
And then I saw it.
The audience leans in.

It was this line of Humvees, he says, black Humvees, far as I could see. The bigger boxy ones, troop transports, I guess, and ordinary semis, no markings, no license plates, just white numbers and QR codes on the side. Going north on 91, real slow. So I'm standing there, shading my eyes, getting my bearings, when one of the doors opens and a hand comes out and I hear this voice: Get in.

I mean, this convoy, it's rolling like a slow freight train. I have to run, but I can make it, easily. So there's two guys up on the front seat, the driver and a guy with a big gun between his knees, like something out of a movie, a rocket launcher, and they both have helmets with face shields on. Can't see their faces at all. Where are you going? I ask. No answer. Who are you guys, anyway?

Keep your head down, the driver says. Stay quiet. We're not supposed to pick up civilians.

It's half a day before we make it as far as Northampton. Some of the Humvees and trucks peel off there. Then it's sunset, evening, night, midnight, and we're still chugging along. No headlights. I'm thinking we must have gotten at least as far as Brattleboro.

The guy next to me—rocket-launcher guy? He's asleep. Or seems to be. Head tipped back, long sighing breaths.

We're going as far as Burlington, the driver says all of a sudden. Securing the major population centers first. Whatever that means up here. Then we cover the countryside.

Who are you? I ask him again. The government?

Officially we're Operation Restore Hope.

What the hell does that mean?

It means in about three months you get to eat French fries again, he says. And take a shit in an actual porta-potty. Six months, you'll be back to watching
CSI.
But first we need to reestablish central control. The rule of law. You'd be amazed at some of the crazy catastrophic shit that's been going on out there. We've gotten reports of cannibalism. Pagan rituals. Starvation cults. Hence the heavy machinery. We have to be ready for anything.

If you're the government, what took you so long?

Jesus, he says. Civilians. What took us so long? You should be asking, How'd you get here so soon? Have you noticed how radically things go to shit in this country when you turn off the juice for two hours? You ever notice how no one goes to college for electrical engineering anymore? We've been doing some serious fly-by-night MacGyver magic just to turn the lights back on in the White Zone. That's Pennsylvania Avenue to Capitol Hill.

It's all about priorities, rocket-launcher guy says, out of nowhere. Turns out he's been listening the whole time. Perimeter the strategic areas, he says. I mean, what would you do? Country's friggin' dying, man, you have to triage the motherfucker. Airway, breathing, circulation. Get power to the head. Get somebody looking out from behind those eyeballs. So what if they call it “the Executive Council” now, not “the president”? Now we get the arteries flowing again. Gas. Bleach. Sugar. TV. Little by little, stepping things up. Start from the trunk and worry about the limbs later. And if the limbs die? Well, which would you rather have, no country or a quadriplegic?

They say Vermont's all easygoing, the driver says. But look what they said about Connecticut. In Bridgeport we were fighting house to house. There aren't probably three buildings left standing. I mean, I'm from San Diego. What the hell do I know?

Enough, rocket-launcher guy says. Don't scare him. Look, he says to me, we're letting you out now. Go find some people and spread the word. Remember, it's called Operation Restore Hope. We've got free stickers and water bottles and candy bars, but they're all up in the front of the convoy. Just remember that name. And tell people, whatever they do, don't resist, for fuck's sake. It looks worse than it is.

The driver giggles. Resist, he says, and we'll pulp you like hajjis.

What is this feeling, she's wondering, this creeping numbness, knowing some disaster is happening in some faraway place when you're standing there doing nothing? Not just ordinary fear: fear of winter, fear of sickness, fear of starving.
Dread.
That flushed-my-ring-down-the-drain sensation, like you can't lift your arms. Like Bush in 2000. Wasn't that where it all began, this feeling that there was a master plan, that maybe the crazies were right after all—the assassination freaks, the Chomskyites, the Y2Kers? Remember that song, back in the nineties? she wants to ask someone. In case she imagined it. The one that goes,
We'll make great pets
?

Finally I realized the door was still unlocked, the man's saying, the passenger-side door, and as soon as dawn came up, the first gray in the sky, I opened it and rolled out onto the grass and started running. And here I am.

So what're you telling us? someone calls out.

Hide, he says. Go to ground. Be like the Vietnamese.

This is a bunch of crap, Dorrie says, but she's anxious, chomping a stalk of ryegrass and twisting it around her index finger. It's PSYOPS. Bet you anything there's a war party coming up from White River ready to steal our shit while we go hide in the bushes.

They're standing around the Caf, mostly, some collapsed into chairs. A core of twenty or so. Dwight's there, and Quentin. Matilda sits sunken in a chair, head in hands.

Oh Jesus, Quentin says, stop being such a Vore for a minute and admit you might be wrong. This guy's ID says
Connecticut.
Look, you seriously thought Washington was going to just, like, disappear?

He's trembling, she realizes. Can't keep his knees in place. His downy calves, his clean socks inside ancient, battered Doc Martens. An indefatigable doer of laundry, with a livid scar that runs the length of one forearm, from the first time he tried skimming the bubbling fat, making soap.

There are people who would bear anything, she thinks, to swipe a credit card again, to buy cut flowers, to see the straight furrows in a newly vacuumed carpet. You can't have everyone mourning quietly on a small farm. Someone has to turn a shining face to the Resurrection, to translate loss into profit. That's how we got cotton gins, and B-52s, and Tide.

Look, Matilda says. One thing we know. Someone's coming. We haven't seen the end of this. I'm proposing we arm ourselves and stay together. Who's with me?

Me.

Me.

Me.

Me.

She raises her hand, as if to say not
I agree
but
Present.

This isn't the way this story ends, she tells herself, pedaling furiously over the last knobby hill before the Rumsons' driveway. We're not like Ewoks, rolling them over with logs, trapezing the soldiers out of their turrets on vines, huddling in tree houses, or like the Cong, trapping them in shit-smeared punji pits, feeding the prisoners to rats. This isn't
Star Wars
and it isn't
The Deer Hunter
and it isn't
Independence Day.
We've got no reason to believe this guy. We've got crops to bring in, tomatoes getting soft on the vine, and we're wasting time acting out
Red Dawn.

But she'll cycle back with the gun, because she knows she doesn't want to be alone.

Mr. Rumson, who seemed like such a nice man, a mild-mannered professor of something, who evidently didn't believe in sunscreen, the way his nose peeled—she'd met him the one time she picked up the key—he'd left the place well armed, nonetheless. A whole cabinet of guns, unlocked, up in his study, in the attic. She keeps a revolver lying next to her on the bed upstairs and, because Dwight insists, a shotgun in the corner just inside the front door. If a deer comes across the lawn, he says, don't think twice. Aim for the head. And don't worry about the butchering; I'll hear the gun. That's a year's supply of meat for one skinny thing like you.

The gun she wants now is the scary one, with the folding stock and the banana clip. How does she even know those words? It's surprisingly light, when she lifts it out by the strap. The clip slides in and locks just like plugging a battery into a camera. Idiot-proof.

She writes at the table on the porch, the assault rifle laid out just within reach:

Brian was the first person I'd ever seen die, and it was my fault, or at least I contributed. I mean, I didn't get him sick, but Nathan said not to leave the fire burning so high with the windows closed.

I got better at it after that. For a while we served as the hospital, eleven or twelve patients at a time. There was no reason not to, all these big rooms downstairs and a good supply of wood, two stoves. Maxine was an herbalist and a Reiki healer and a PA, too; she stayed here three months, directing things. That was the best of it.

Then she came down with it and Nathan and I were left handling things on our own. Dwight brought food when he could and took the bodies out, but that was before the last blizzard, the March blizzard.

After Brian I got impatient with them as they died. Knowing that by the time the lips started turning blue there was no stopping it. Hurry up, I used to think, free up the bed. By the time it was Nathan's turn I was just sloppy. Forgetting to bring him water for hours. Things like that. I was never cut out to be a nurse. There was snow banked halfway up the downstairs windows. Where was I supposed to put the bodies? I laughed at him. I laughed at Nathan when he begged me for things. He was delusional at the end, begging for Klondike bars.

I was never meant to have children I never wanted to.

This isn't our story. There was supposed to be time to tell our story.

I was a decent person. I went to good schools. In my own time I would have been a good person. You can't judge the people on the lifeboats, the crashed soccer players in the stupid Andes.

This is the last time a person will be one person what do I mean I mean a woman living in a house alone Dwight offered to have me stay with them the second winter and I said no I'll cut my own wood no one stays with me this time I'll stock up properly I'm immune now I guess so this is the last time I don't know how to write without drafts I don't know how to write a declarative sentence fuck it I don't know how to declare anything at all

A boil of black smoke rises off the ridge opposite her.

The Macneils. What could they have out there—a forgotten oil drum, a pile of tires? Are they fighting already? Is it the army? The people from White River? A grinding sound, a whining sound. Machinery. Is that what it is? It's been two years; she can't be sure.

And then, trickling through the air, a sick Morse code, a demented tap dancer: gunshots.

This is it, she thinks, not the End Times, the time of the end. What makes her so certain? I have been intimate with death, she thinks, that's how I know. I can smell it, even on myself. She picks up the manuscript: fifteen pages. Scrawl. Notes. Hesitations. Matilda was right, she says to herself. We're not the beginning of anything; we're about to be pulped, right back into the ground. We're about to reenter history.

We were good people. We made it work. We weren't sad. We were proud. We didn't need an ending. We were too grateful. Living was enough.

A flicker of wind, a sudden gust across the yard, takes the pages out of her hand; she doesn't even have to toss them. White flags across the garden; perfect rectangles, perfect things, falling lightly on the gravel, resting in the tall grass. That's done, she says. Picks up the rifle and lays it across her knees.

KELLY SANDOVAL

FROM
Shimmer Magazine

CRAIGSLIST > SEATTLE > ALL SEATTLE > LOST&FOUND

Sat 23 Jul

FOUND:
Rift in the Fabric of the Universe—(West Seattle)

Rift opened in my backyard. About six feet tall and one foot wide. Appears to open onto a world of endless twilight and impossible beauty. Makes a ringing noise like a thousand tiny bells. Call (206) 555-9780 to identify.