The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25 (Mammoth Books) (75 page)

Even from his height and distance, Ask could see what had become of the hand of man in this place.

He had to look. At a minimum, he had to find food. Most of the structures were standing. The idea of looting the houses of the dead for food distressed him. The idea of starving distressed him more.

He didn’t reach the first farmhouse until evening’s dusk. Ask would have strongly preferred to do his breaking and entering in broad daylight, but another night of hunger out in the open seemed foolish with the building right in front of him. A tall fieldstone foundation was topped by two stories of brightly painted wooden house that would not have looked out of place on one of the wealthier neighboring farms of his youth.

Ask wasn’t sure if this was a deliberate revival of an ancient fashion of building, or a sort of architectural version of parallel evolution.

Chickens clucked and fussed in the yard with the beady-eyed paranoia of birds. Some had already climbed into the spreading bush that seemed to be their roost, others were hunting for some last bit of whatever the hell it was chickens ate.

Beyond the house, a forlorn flock of sheep pressed against the fenced boundary of a pasture, bleating at him. He had no idea what they wanted, but they looked pretty scraggly. A number of them were dead, grubby bodies scattered in the grass.

Water, he realized, seeing the churned up earth around a metal trough. They were dying of thirst.

Ask walked around the house to see if the trough could be refilled. He found the line poking up out of the soil, and the tap that controlled it. Turning that on did nothing, however.

Of course it wouldn’t,
he realized. No power for the well pump.

He sighed and unlatched the gate. “River’s over there, guys,” Ask said, his voice a croak. He realized he hadn’t spoken aloud in the two weeks he’d been walking.

The sheep just stared at him. They made no move for freedom. There wasn’t anything more he could do for the animals. He shrugged and walked back to the house, up the rear steps.

Inside the house was a mess. If he’d come on it in broad daylight, even from the outside he’d have noticed the cracked and shattered windows. Inside, the floors were dirty with splinters and wisps of insulation.

The lack of people was disturbing. So was the lack of blood, in a weird way.

They’d just walked outside, leaving the doors standing open, and vanished. Then orbital kinetics had plowed through the roof to disable the house’s power plant, core comm system and – oddly – the oven. He figured it had to have happened in that order, because if anyone had been inside the house when the strikes hit, there would be signs of panic – toppled furniture, maybe blood from the splinters and other collateral damage.

With that happy thought in mind, Ask walked around the house in the deepening dark, checking every commset, music player, power tool and any other gadget he could find to switch on. The small electronics were fried, too, just like the equipment in his rockhopper.

It was as if the old fairy tale of the Christian Rapture had come true, here on Redghost. Followed by the explosive revenge of the exploited electron? He hadn’t so much as looked at a Bible in over seven hundred years, but Ask was pretty sure that there hadn’t been any mention of a rapture of the batteries.

“Render unto Volta those things which are Volta’s,” he said into the darkness, then began giggling.

His discipline finally broke. Ask retreated to the kitchen to hunt for food and drink.

It took him five weeks to explore every house in this part of the Shindaiwa Valley. On the way, Ask opened all the pasture gates he could find, shooing out the cattle and sheep and horses. The llamas, pigs and goats were smart enough to leave on their own, where they hadn’t already jumped or broken the gates, or – in the case of the goats – picked the latches.

Most of them would starve even outside the fences, but at least they could find water and better pasture. Some would survive. So far as he knew, Redghost had no apex predators in the native ecology. Humans certainly hadn’t imported any.

Give the dogs a few generations of living wild and that would change, though.

It was the damned dogs that broke his heart. The household pets were the worst. So many of them had starved, or eaten one another. And the survivors expected more of him than the farm animals had. When he slipped open a door or tore a screen, they rushed up to him. Barking, whining, mewling. He was a Person, he was Food, he could let the good boys Out. And the dogs knew they had been Bad. Crapping in corners, sleeping on the furniture, whining outside bedroom doors forever shut and silent.

In truth, that became the reason he’d entered every house or building he could find. To let out the cats and dogs and dwarf pigs. Finding a bicycle meant he could gain distance on those dogs that wanted to follow him. The cats didn’t care, the pigs were too smart to try. He let the occasional birds out, too, and when he could, dumped the fish tanks into whatever nearby watercourse presented itself.

The more he walked, the fewer of them were left alive inside. But he had to try.

Thirty-nine days in the Shindaiwa Valley, and he’d visited almost four hundred houses, dormitories, granaries, slaughterhouses, tanneries, cold storage warehouses, machine workshops, emergency services centers, feed stores, schools. Even three railroad stations, a small hospital and a tiny airport terminal.

Not a single human being. Not so much as a finger bone. He’d even dug up both an old grave and a recent one to see if the bodies had been left behind. They had. Ask couldn’t remember enough about Christianity to figure out if that was evidence for or against the Rapture. He did rebury them, and said what he could remember of the Lord’s Prayer over the fresh-turned earth.

“Ten thousand sheep, a thousand cats and dogs, and me,” he told a patient oak tree. It was wind-bent and twisted, standing in an ornamental square in front of the Lower Shindaiwa Valley Todd Christensen Memorial Railroad Depot Number 2. A sign proclaimed this to be the first Terran tree in the valley, planted by one of the pioneer farmers two centuries earlier. “You’re a survivor. Like me.”

But
of what?

One small blessing of the railroad station was a modest selection of cheap tourist maps printed on plastene flimsy. Some people just didn’t want to mess with dataflow devices all the time. On a relatively thinly settled planet like Redghost the electrosphere was largely incomplete anyway.

Had been. It was non-existent now, which was the utmost form of incompletion.

Ask shuffled the map flimsies. His knowledge of local planetography was poor – it simply hadn’t been important. He’d been dropped by shuttle at Atarashii Osaka, the main spaceport and entrepôt for Redghost. He was vaguely aware of three or four other sites with support for surface-to-orbit transfer. And his assignment in the Fayerweather Mountains, for which he’d based out of Port Schumann after an atmospheric flight from Atarashii Osaka.

That was it. All he’d known about the Shindaiwa Valley was that this was his first line of emergency evacuation. All he’d known about Redghost was the semiconducting tunnels, and a notion of a bucolic paradise home to perhaps twenty million souls.

His next stop, he figured, would be Port Schumann. It was a city, at least by Redghost standards. Anyone else surviving on this part of the planet would have headed there.

In a bleak frame of mind, Ask figured that twenty million people would have about five million residences and perhaps half a million commercial structures. He’d managed an average ten buildings per day here in the Shindaiwa Valley. Denser in the cities, of course. Still, figure six hundred thousand days to check every structure on Redghost, plus the travel time between places. Fifty years? A hundred, if the buildings in Atarashii Osaka and the few other relatively large cities were too big to check so quickly?

Where the hell did twenty million people
go
? A planet full of corpses, he could understand. A planet empty of people . . .

The crashed airplane in the hills east of Port Schumann had caught his attention as he’d cycled along the rough service road paralleling a rail line. It was a fixed-wing craft with propeller engines – something fairly simply designed to be locally serviceable without parts imported from off-planet. The fuselage looked intact, so he’d gone to check it out.

Weapons hadn’t seemed to be much of an issue, and most of what he’d found in that department had been useless anyway due to embedded electronics, but he was always curious what he might find.

This craft had seated six. Small, white with pale green stripes and the seal of the Redghost Ministry of Social Adjustment on the side. Planetary judiciary, in local terms. It was missing one door, he noted as he approached.

He looked inside to see someone in the rear seat.

“Shit!” Ask screamed, jumping back.

He’d been too long without company. He was starting to regret not bringing a few of the dogs from the Shindaiwa Valley with him.

Feeling foolish, Ask unclipped the aluminum pump from his bike and held it loosely like a club. Some of the Howards were killers, dangerous as any human being who’d ever lived, but he’d never bothered with that training or those enhancements. He was strong enough to swing something like this pump right through a wall at need. At least until the wall or the pump shattered.

That had been enough.

Until now.

He approached the airplane again. Having already screamed, there didn’t seem much point in secrecy now. Still, he didn’t want to just march into the wreck.

The person was still there.

No,
he corrected himself against the obvious. The body. Who the hell would stay seated in a crashed airplane? For one thing, it was pretty cold out here at night.

A man,
he thought. Handcuffed to his seat. Ask climbed into the cabin and crept close. It was hard to tell, with the flesh mummifying in the cold, but it looked like the prisoner had struggled hard against his cuffs.

Ask stepped up to the pilot and co-pilot’s seats. Smashed instruments and windows, torn seat cushions. No blood.

They’d been gone from the plane, or at least out of their seats, before the orbital kinetics had struck the aircraft. In flight.

And the missing door? Had the pilot and guards just stepped out in midair? Ask imagined the prisoner, straining to follow whatever trumpet had called his captors away. Then shrieking in fear as the cockpit exploded in sizzling splinters, the engines shredded and died under the orbital strikes, and the plane had glided in to its final landing.

He hoped the poor bastard had died in the landing, but suspected he might have starved chained to the seat.

This also meant that people who had been unable to move from a position would not have been taken up by whatever had snatched everyone from Redghost’s surface. Prisoners? The few jails he’d visited had stood empty and open-doored. The guards had taken their captives with them. Hospital ICUs? That explained the several medical beds he’d found dragged into gardens and on outdoor walkways.

Still, he knew where to look.

Ask went back for his bolt cutters and freed the dead prisoner. He didn’t have a shovel and the ground was too cold to dig in anyway, but he spent two days making a rock cairn next to the airplane.

“The second-to-last man on Redghost,” he said by way of prayer when he was done. His fingers were bruised and bloody, several of his nails torn. “You and I are brothers, though you never knew it. I wonder if you had it better or worse than those who were taken away.”

On the sixth year of his hegira, Aeschylus Sforza entered the city of Pelleton. He had not found a living animal indoors in five years. He had not found a living animal penned outdoors in over four. He had not seen evidence of a human survivor other than himself on the planet at any time. He had found six bodies in various improbable circumstances. The hardest had been a little girl locked in a closet with a piss pot and a water bottle. She’d obviously been there a long time before Day Zero. And a long time after.

Ask devoutly hoped whoever had done that to a child had been taken directly to the lowest circle of whatever hell had opened up and swallowed the human race.

In any case, he’d buried them all. And he obsessively checked closets after that child. It took more time, but what was time to a Howard walking home all by himself?

Pelleton was located on an eastern curve of the Eniewetok Sea. It was the first city he visited with buildings over four stories tall. Some optimist had built a pair of fifteen-story office towers along the waterfront. By then, Ask had seen enough of the planet’s architecture and development to understand most people wanted it small and simple.

Not so unlike the Tasmania of his youth. People who had wanted the big city moved to Melbourne or Brisbane or Sydney. People who wanted the big city here on Redghost had moved to Atarashii Osaka or taken up a line of work with off-planet demand.

He’d taken up the habit of visiting airports first, when it was at least sort of convenient to do so. Not just for the sake of any other trapped prisoners, though he’d never found another one of those. But rather, in hopes of finding something useful. Anything, really.