Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse (37 page)

"I don't know."

"Well, I do. Listen, that's our house. Dad's dead, so it belongs to you and me."

"I don't want it," Jill said; and then, when the house was out of sight, "but it's the only home we've got."

The drive was long, but not impossibly so, and the highway-if it could be called a highway-stretched away to right and left at the end of it. Stretched silent and empty. "I was thinking if there were some cars, we could flag one down," her brother said. "Or maybe the bus will come by."

"There's grass in the cracks."

"Yeah, I know. This way, Jelly." He set out, looking as serious as always, and very, very determined.

She trotted behind. "Are you going into Poplar Hill with me?"

"If we can flag down a car first, or a truck or anything, I'm going with them if they'll take me. So are you."

She shook her head.

"But if we can't, I'm going to Poplar Hill like you say. Maybe there's somebody

"I'll bet somebody is." She tried to sound more confident than she felt. "There's no picture on the TV. I tried all the channels." He was three paces ahead of her, and did not look back. "So did I." It was a lie, but she had tried several.

"It means there's nobody in the TV stations. Not in any of them." He cleared his throat, and his voice suddenly deepened, as the voices of adolescent boys will. "Nobody alive, anyhow."

"Maybe there's somebody alive who doesn't know how to work it," she suggested. After a moment's thought she added, "Maybe they don't have any electricity where they are."

He stopped and looked around at her. "We do." "So people are still alive. That's what I said."

"Right! And it means a car might come past, and that's what I said."

A small bush, fresh and green, sprouted from a crevice in the middle of the highway. Seeing it, Jill sensed that some unknown and unknowable power had overheard them and was gently trying to show them that they were wrong. She shuddered, and summoned up all the good reasons that argued that the bush was wrong instead. "There were live people back at that place. The bus driver was all right, too."

The iron gates were still there, just as she had seen them the previous day, graceful and strong between their pillars of cut stone. The lions still snarled atop those pillars, and the iron sign on the iron bars still proclaimed POPLAR HILL.

"They're locked," her brother announced. He rattled the lock to show her-a husky brass padlock that looked new.

"We've got to get in."

"Sure. I'm going to go along this wall, see? I'm going to look for a place where I can climb over, or maybe it's fallen down somewhere. When I find one, I'll come back and tell you."

"I want to go with you." Fear had come like a chill wind. What if Jimmy went away and she never saw him again?

"Listen, back at the house you were going to do this all by yourself. If you could do it by yourself, you can stay here for ten minutes to watch for cars. Now
dont follow me
!"

She did not; but an hour later she was waiting for him when he came back along the inside of the wall, scratched and dirty and intent on speaking to her through the gate. "How'd you get in?" he asked when she appeared at his shoulder.

She shrugged. "You first. How did you?"

"I found a little tree that had died and fallen over. It was small enough that I could drag it if I didn't try to pick up the root end. I leaned it on the wall and climbed up it, and jumped down."

"Then you can't get out," she told him, and started up a road leading away from the gate.

"I'll find some way. How did you get in?"

"Through the bars. It was tight and scrappy, though. I don't think you could."

Somewhat maliciously, she added, "I've been waiting in here a long time."

The private road led up a hill between rows of slender trees that made her think of models showing off green gowns. The big front door of the big square house at the top of the hill was locked; and the big brass knocker produced only empty echoes from inside the house no matter how hard her brother pounded. The pretty pearl-coloured button that she pressed sounded distant chimes that brought no one.

Peering through the window to the left of the door, she saw a mostly wooden chair with brown-and-orange cushions, and a gray TV screen. One corner of the gray screen read MUTE in bright yellow letters.

Circling the house they found the kitchen door unlocked, as they had left it. She was heaping corned beef hash out of her frying pan when the lights went out.

"That means no more hot food," she told her brother. "It's electric. My stove is."

"They'll come back on," he said confidently, but they did not.

That night she undressed in the dark bedroom they had made their own, in the lightless house, folding clothes she could not see and laying them as neatly as her fingers could manage upon an invisible chair before slipping between the sheets.

Warm and naked, her brother followed her half a minute later. "You know, Jelly," he said as he drew her to him, "we're probably the only live people in the whole world."

At dusk the back of the bedroom falls off. One minute it's a wall, exposed studs and cracked blue drywall, and the next it's snapped-off two-by-fours and an irregular fence as high as my waist, the edges both jagged and furry, as if they were covered with powder. Through the hole a sickly tree pokes upward in the narrow space between the back of our barracks and the back of a barracks in E Block. I try to get out of bed for a closer look, but today my arthritis is too bad, which is why I'm in bed in the first place. Rachel rushes into the bedroom. "What happened, Gram? Are you all right?"

I nod and point. Rachel bends into the hole, her hair haloed by California twilight. The bedroom is hers, too; her mattress lies stored under my scarred four-poster. "Termites! Damn. I didn't know we had them. You sure you're all right?" "I'm fine. I was all the way across the room, honey. I'm fine." "Well-we'll have to get Mom to get somebody to fix it."

I say nothing. Rachel straightens, throws me a quick glance, looks away. Still I say nothing about Mamie, but in a sudden flicker from my oil lamp I look directly at Rachel, just because she is so good to look at. Not pretty, not even here Inside, although so far the disease has affected only the left side of her face. The ridge of thickened, ropy skin, coarse as old hemp, isn't visible at all when she stands in right profile. But her nose is large, her eyebrows heavy and low, her chin a bony knob. An honest nose, expressive brows, direct gray eyes, chin that juts forward when she tilts her head in intelligent listening-to a grandmother's eye, Rachel is good to look at. They wouldn't think so, Outside. But they would be wrong.

Rachel says, "Maybe I could trade a lottery card for more drywall and nails, and patch it myself."

"The termites will still be there."

"Well, yes, but we have to do something." I don't contradict her. She is sixteen years old. "Feel that air coming in-you'll freeze at night this time of year. It'll be terrible for your arthritis. Come in the kitchen now, Gram-I've built up the fire."

She helps me into the kitchen, where the metal wood-burning stove throws a rosy warmth that feels good on my joints. The stove was donated to the colony a year ago by who-knows-what charity or special interest group for, I suppose, whatever tax breaks still hold for that sort of thing. If any do. Rachel tells me that we still get newspapers, and once or twice I've wrapped vegetables from our patch in some fairly new-looking ones. She even says that the young Stevenson boy works a donated computer news net in the Block J community hall, but I no longer follow Outside tax regulations. Nor do I ask why Mamie was the one to get the wood-burning stove when it wasn't a lottery month.

The light from the stove is stronger than the oil flame in the bedroom; I see that beneath her concern for our dead bedroom wall, Rachel's face is flushed with excitement. Her young skin glows right from intelligent chin to the ropy ridge of disease, which of course never changes colour. I smile at her. Sixteen is so easy to excite. A new hair ribbon from the donations repository, a glance from a boy, a secret with her cousin Jennie.

"Gram," she says, kneeling beside my chair, her hands restless on the battered wooden arm, "Gram-there's a visitor. From Outside. Jennie saw him."

I go on smiling. Rachel-nor Jennie, either-can't remember when disease colonies had lots of visitors. First bulky figures in contamination suits, then a few years later, sleeker figures in the sani-suits that took their place. People were still being interred from Outside, and for years the checkpoints at the Rim had traffic flowing both ways. But of course Rachel doesn't remember all that; she wasn't born. Mamie was only twelve when we were interred here. To Rachel, a visitor might well be a great event. I put out one hand and stroke her hair.

"Jennie said he wants to talk to the oldest people in the colony, the ones who were brought here with the disease. Hal Stevenson told her."

"Did he, sweetheart?" Her hair is soft and silky. Mamie's hair had been the same at Rachel's age.

"He might want to talk to you!"

"Well, here I am."

"But aren't you excited? What do you suppose he wants?"

I'm saved from answering her because Mamie comes in, her boyfriend Peter Malone following with a string-bag of groceries from the repository.

At the first sound of the doorknob turning, Rachel gets up from beside my chair and pokes at the fire. Her face goes completely blank, although I know that part is only temporary. Mamie cries, "Here we are!" in her high, doll-baby voice, cold air from the hall swirling around her like bright water. "Mama darling-how are you feeling? And Rachel! You'll never guess, Pete had extra depository cards and he got us some chicken! I'm going to make a stew!"

"The back wall fell off the bedroom," Rachel says flatly. She doesn't look at Peter with his string-crossed chicken, but I do. He grins his patient, wolfish grin. I guess that he won the depository cards at poker. His fingernails are dirty. The part of the newspaper I can see says ESIDENT CONFISCATES C.

Mamie says, "What do you mean, Tell off?'" Rachel shrugs. "Just fell off. Termites."

Mamie looks helplessly at Peter, whose grin widens. I can see how it will be: They will have a scene later, not completely for our benefit, although it will take place in the kitchen for us to watch. Mamie will beg prettily for Peter to fix the wall. He will demur, grinning. She will offer various smirking hints about barter, each hint becoming more explicit. He will agree to fix the wall. Rachel and I, having no other warm room to go to, will watch the fire or the floor or our shoes until Mamie and Peter retire ostentatiously to her room. It's the ostentation that embarrasses us. Mamie has always needed witnesses to her desirability.

But Peter is watching Rachel, not Mamie. "The chicken isn't from Outside, Rachel. It's from that chicken-yard in Block B. I heard you say how clean they are."

"Yeah," Rachel says shortly, gracelessly.

Mamie rolls her eyes. "Say 'thank you,' darling. Pete went to a lot of trouble to get this chicken."

"Thanks."

"Can't you say it like you mean it?" Mamie's voice goes shrill.

"Thanks," Rachel says. She heads towards our three-walled bedroom. Peter, still watching her closely, shifts the chicken from one hand to the other. The pressure of the string bag cuts lines across the chicken's yellowish skin.

"Rachel Anne Wilson-"

"Let her go," Peter says softly.

"No," Mamie says. Between the five crisscrossing lines of disease, her face sets in unlovely lines. "She can at least learn some manners. And I want her to hear our announcement! Rachel, you just come right back out here this minute!"

Rachel returns from the bedroom; I've never known her to disobey her mother. She pauses by the open bedroom door, waiting. Two empty candle scones, both blackened by old smoke, frame her head. It has been since at least last winter that we've had candies for them. Mamie, her forehead creased in irritation, smiles brightly.

"This is a special dinner, all of you. Pete and I have an announcement. We're going to get married."

"That's right," Peter says. "Congratulate us."

Rachel, already motionless, somehow goes even stiller. Peter watches her carefully. Mamie casts down her eyes, blushing, and I feel a stab of impatient pity for my daughter, propping up mid-thirties girlishness on such a slender reed as Peter Malone. I stare at him hard. If he ever touches Rachelbut I don't really think he would. Things like that don't happen anymore. Not Inside.

"Congratulations," Rachel mumbles. She crosses the room and embraces her mother, who hugs her back with theatrical fervour. In another minute, Mamie will start to cry. Over her shoulder I glimpse Rachel's face, momentarily sorrowing and loving, and I drop my eyes.

"Well! This calls for a toast!" Mamie cries gaily. She winks, makes a clumsy pirouette, and pulls a bottle from the back shelf of the cupboard Rachel got at the last donations lottery. The cupboard looks strange in our kitchen: gleaming white lacquer, vaguely Oriental-looking, amid the wobbly chairs and scarred table with the broken drawer no one has ever gotten around to mending. Mamie flourishes the bottle, which I didn't know was there. It's champagne.

What had they been thinking, the Outsiders who donated champagne to a disease colony? Poor devils, even if they never have anything to celebrateOr here's something they won't know what to do withOr better them than me-as long as the sickies stay InsideIt doesn't really matter.

"I just love champagne!" Mamie cries feverishly; I think she has drunk it once. "And oh look-here's someone else to help us celebrate! Come in, Jennie-come in and have some champagne!"

Jennie comes in, smiling. I see the same eager excitement that animated Rachel before her mother's announcement. It glows on Jennie's face, which is beautiful. She has no disease on her hands or her face. She must have it somewhere, she was born Inside, but one doesn't ask that. Probably Rachel knows. The two girls are inseparable. Jennie, the daughter of Mamie's dead husband's brother, is Rachel's cousin, and technically Mamie is her guardian. But no one pays attention to such things anymore, and Jennie lives with some people in a barracks in the next Block, although Rachel and I asked her to live here. She shook her head, the beautiful hair so blonde it's almost white bouncing on her shoulders, and blushed in embarrassment, painfully not looking at Mamie.