Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse (35 page)

As I walked, 1 realized how much I was going to hate living a primitive life when all the machinery started falling apart. By the time I was an old man, I'd probably be walking everywhere I went. I might even be burning wood for heat, depending on how long the colony's power plant lasted. No wonder Dave was so desperate to have God come back for him.

I thought about Jody waiting for me in the car, possibly dying of injuries or exposure before I got back. At the moment I didn't mind the idea of a God watching over us, either, provided He'd actually do something to help if we needed it. Even if He wouldn't-or couldn't-keep her alive, the idea that I might somehow join her again after we both died was at least a little comfort. Not much, because I could never be sure it would happen until it did, but the possibility might keep me going for a while.

It came to me then that if Jody died, I could easily join Dave in his quest. But she wasn't going to die. All I needed was to find some shelter and we'd both be fine.

I eventually spotted what I was looking for down in a gentle valley: a house and barn set in among a stand of tall, bare cottonwood trees. There were a couple of vehicles parked out front and a long, winding road leading down to them from a highway off to my left. I kept going cross-country straight for it.

It was farther away than it looked, but I made it just as the Sun touched the mountains. The house was unlocked, so I didn't have to break in. It was also un-heated, but it felt wonderful compared to outside. I tried to call Jody on my cell phone, but when I opened it up the screen had a big crack in it and it failed to light. I had apparently landed on it in the crash. The house phone was dead, too; no surprise after four years of weather like this. But I found a hook by the back door with a set of keys dangling from it, so I took them outside and tried them in the vehicles.

There was a hover car and a four-wheeler pickup truck in the driveway. The hover car was as dead as the phone, but the pickup lurched forward when I turned the key. I pushed in the clutch and tried again, and was rewarded with the whine of a flywheel winding up to speed. The power gauge read low, but I didn't think I'd need much just to reach Jody and come back.

While the flywheel spun up I checked in the glove box for a working phone, but all I found were a bunch of wrenches and fuses. That wasn't reassuring. I let out the clutch slowly and the truck began to roll forward, though, so I steered it around the driveway and began to bounce and spin my way up toward the highway. I'd heard it was easy to get a wheeled vehicle stuck in snow, so I figured I should drive on roads as much as I could until I got close enough to try driving cross-country.

It was a good idea, and it would have worked if there hadn't been a big drift about a kilometre down the road where it crossed the bottom of the valley and began to climb the other side. I realized too late that the road didn't rise up with the terrain, and by the time the pickup nosed into the bank, shuddered as it dug itself in a few more meters and came to a stop, it was thoroughly stuck. I couldn't back out or go forward, not even when 1 left it in gear and got out and pushed.

Of course there was no shovel in the truck. I would have to go back to the house to get one. Cursing my stupidity in not thinking ahead, I followed the tire tracks back the way I had come.

It was starting to get dark by the time I reached the house again, so I prowled through the kitchen drawers until I found a flashlight that worked, then went out to the barn and found a shovel. I jogged back to the truck and started digging it out, hoping Jody wasn't too worried that I hadn't come back yet. She was only a kilometre or two away; if I was careful not to get stuck again I could be there in a few minutes.

I had just dug a path for the left wheel and was starting in on the right when I saw a bright light descending toward me from the south. It slid on past, still dropping, right toward the car. Dave.

"Well I'll be damned," I said aloud. "He actually came." I leaned back against the pickup for a moment, catching my breath. I didn't have to break my back at it now; he and Jody would probably be coming for me pretty soon.

If they could find me. My tracks would be pretty hard to follow in a hover car, and if they missed the farmhouse then they could very easily miss me out on the road in a pickup.

I reached inside and turned on the headlights. That would help. But I started digging again, too.

Ten minutes later I finished the other wheel track. They still hadn't come for me. I climbed into the pickup, put it in forward, and let out the clutch, but it didn't budge.

Back outside with the shovel, this time digging the snow out from underneath. It took another fifteen minutes. When I tried it again the truck moved a little, and I rocked it back and forth until it started rolling, then drove on up the road as fast as I could. Something wasn't right.

Dave had left his landing light on. As soon as I came up over the edge of the valley I saw it, shining straight at our overturned car. I could see a figure standing beside it, but I couldn't tell if it was Dave or Jody.

The road curved the wrong way. Cursing my luck, I gunned the pickup and swerved off the road, bouncing over rocks and sagebrush and trying to steer whenever the wheels touched ground. The tires spun and the flywheel motor screeched in protest, but I kept the throttle all the way to the floor and held on while the pickup bounced toward the two air cars. As I drew closer I could see that it was Dave standing in the light, and Jody was lying flat on the ground in front of him. She wasn't moving.

I popped open the glove box just as the truck hit a hard bump, scattering wrenches all over the seat and floor. I snatched one of the bigger ones in my right hand as I skidded to a stop beside Dave's car, leaped out with it upraised, and shouted, "What have you done to her?"

He didn't even try to defend himself. He just stood there with a beatific smile on his face and said, "Go ahead. It won't matter. I'll even tell God it was justified."

"God ain't the guy you'll be talking with," I said. I raised the wrench to cave in his head, but with him just standing there 1 found that I couldn't do it. Not even with Jody lying before us on the ground.

He'd taken off her coat and gloves. Her face and hands were white as the snow, and no breath rose from her open mouth.

"We should have realized right away that one of us would have to go get Him for the rest of us," Dave told me as I bent down to feel her neck for a pulse. "I would have gone myself once I figured it out, but Jody was already so close I figured she might as well be the one. It really doesn't matter."

I didn't see any wounds other than the one on her forehead. She must have been unconscious when he arrived, or he'd stunned her somehow. I couldn't find a pulse, but my fingers were so cold from digging snow that I probably couldn't have found my own. I bent down and felt for breath against my cheek, but there was none. Not knowing what else to do, I covered her mouth with mine and blew a breath into her lungs.

Dave grabbed me by the collar. "No, I can't allow that. You can't bring her back until we're sure she's done the job."

In one quick motion I stood up and smacked him in the left temple with the flat of the wrench. His head jerked sideways, and he fell over backwards with a thump that swirled snow up around him. I bent back down to Jody.

Five compressions of the chest, breath, five compressions of the chest, breath, over and over again. Sometime between forever and an eternity later, she shuddered, gasped a breath on her own, and moaned.

I whooped with joy, lifted her up in my arms, and carried her over to Dave's car, where I set her in the passenger seat and turned the heater up all the way.

I ran around to the other side and climbed in. She woke with a scream when I slammed the door, then she saw it was me and slumped back in the seat. "Christ you scared me," she said. "I had a hell of a crazy dre.... wait a minute." She looked around at the car, a much bigger one than what we'd been flying.

"This is Dave's car," she said after a moment. "He did come."

"That's right, and he dragged you outside to die, too." I looked out to make sure he was still lying where he'd dropped. I had just enough time to realize he wasn't when the door beside me popped open and he stood there with my wrench in his hand.

I lunged for the lift controls, but he reached across me and rapped my hand with the wrench before the car even began to move. "No you don't," he said. "Get out. We're going to finish this experiment one way or another."

I cradled my suddenly numb right hand in my left, wondering if I could clench it into a fist, and whether I could do any good with it if I could.

Jody leaned over so he could see her. "It's already finished," she said.

"What do you mean? It can't be. You're still alive."

She laughed. "I'm alive again, idiot. I was dead. I was there. I saw your precious gates to Heaven, and they're slammed tight."

"You did?" I asked.

"They are?" asked Dave.

"Yup." Jody's eyes held a spark of elemental fire as she looked at him.

In a subdued voice, he said, "Let me in. It's cold out here."

I thought about it a moment, much preferring the idea of leaving him outside a while longer, but Jody said, "Go ahead, I've got something I want to tell him," so I tilted my seat forward and let him climb in back. The moment he sat down I pulled on the lift control and took us straight up a hundred meters or so.

"Where are you going?" he asked.

"High enough to make you think twice about trying something cute," I replied.

"He won't try anything," Jody said. "Not now or ever again." "What makes you so sure?" I asked.

She grinned like a whole pack of wolves surrounding a deer. "Because if he does, he might get hurt, and if you think it's lonely on this side of the great divide, wait 'til you see what's waiting for us over there."

"What?" Dave asked, leaning forward between the seats. "What did you find?"

She got a faraway look in her eyes. "I found the place where Heaven used to be. At the end of a long tunnel of light. There weren't gates really; it was more of aa place. It's hard to describe physically. But I could tell that was where I was supposed to go, and I could tell it was closed."

"Permanently?" Dave asked.

"It felt that way. There was just the memory of a doorway, no promise of one to come. So I turned around to come back, but I couldn't find the way at first. I wandered around quite a while before I stumbled across it. If Gregor hadn't kept my body going, I don't think I would have found it."

"Wandered around where?" Dave demanded. "What was it like?"

"Like fog," Jody said. Her voice picked up a tremor as she added, "I was just a viewpoint in a formless, shapeless, gray fog. There wasn't any sound, any smell; I didn't even have a body to hear or smell or feel with. I don't even know if I was actually seeing anything. There was nothing there to see."

"Then how did you know where your body was?"

"How do you know where your chin is? It was just there." Jody turned away from him and leaned back in her seat. "Look, I'm tired and my head hurts and I've been dead once too often today. I just want to get some rest. I'll tell you all about it tomorrow."

I took the hint and flew us away in search of a hospital.

Later, after we'd bandaged her head and made sure she had no other injuries, we took the bridal suite at the top of the Fort Collins Hilton. Dave was in one of the rooms down below. I'd wanted to put him in the city jail, but Jody wouldn't let me.

"His teeth are pulled," she told me as we lay in the enormous bed, a dozen blankets pulled over us for warmth and as many candles providing light. "He'll believe anything I tell him now. Besides, we need him. The best thing we can do is treat him like a recovering alcoholic or something and just integrate him back into our lives as fast as we can."

"Integrate him back into our lives?" I asked incredulously. "After what he did to you? He murdered you. You were dead!"

She giggled. "Well, I'm not so sure about that."

"Huh? What about the tunnel of light, and the gates to Heaven and all that?"

She lowered her voice to a whisper. "That was all total vacuum. I told him what he wanted to hear. Well, what I wanted him to hear, anyway."

I stared at her in the flickering candlelight, dumbfounded.

She shrugged. "I don't remember a thing from the moment Dave knocked me out until the moment I woke up with you next to me."

"You don't?"

"No."

"You're one hell of an actress, then." "Good, because I want him convinced."

I thought about that. "Even if we aren't?" I asked after a while.

"What?"

"You want Dave convinced, but we're still in the same shape we were before. We don't know anything at all about what's waiting for us after we die."

She giggled again and snuggled up closer to me under the covers. "Then God is just, if He exists," she said. "After all, I'm agnostic. I wouldn't have it any other way."

Jill was not certain it was a bus at all, although it was shaped like a bus and of a bus-like colour. To begin with (she said to herself) Jimmy and I are the only people. If it's a school bus, why aren't there other kids? And if it's a pay-when-you-get-on bus, why doesn't anybody get on? Besides there was a sign that said BUS STOP, and it didn't.

The road was narrow, cracked and broken; the bus negotiated it slowly. Trees closed above it to shut out the sun, relented for a moment or two, then closed again.

As it seemed, forever.

There were no cars on the road, no trucks or SUVs, and no other buses. They passed a rusty sign with a picture of a girl on a horse, but there were no girls and no horses. A deer with wide, innocent eyes stood beside a sign showing a leaping buck and watched their bus (if it really was a bus) rumble past. It reminded Jill of a picture in a book: a little girl with long blond hair with her arm around the neck of just such a deer. That girl was always meeting bad animals and horrible, ugly people; and it seemed to Jill that the artist had been nice to give her this respite. Jill looked at the other pictures with horrified fascination, then turned to this one with a sense of relief. There were bad things, but there were good things too.