Writers of the Future, Volume 28 (37 page)

“I guess he’ll wonder what happened to you at first. Maybe he’ll worry. I don’t know, but eventually he’ll realize he’s better off without a girlfriend who wallops him with a hot iron.”

He looked into my eyes the way the Soul Man had. Then he looked at his watch again and said, “Close your eyes.”

Time seemed to be stretched out and my mind wandered all over then and now and the future. I remembered that first Sunday morning, floating down the beautiful stream with my shimmering black hair spread all around me. Hadn’t I seen a play with a lady floating down a stream
?
She was a beautiful lady, but the man she loved couldn’t love her . . .

I could hear everything going on around me. The grandfather did something in this part of the room, then that part of the room. Then he opened the door and called, “Yo, Igor!”

I forced open my eyes just as a disreputable-looking young man came in. Why would I use a word like “disreputable
?
”

“Real professional, Doc,” said the young man. “Keep it up and I’ll form an evil underlings union. Hey, this one’s kinda cute!”

“Just put her on the truck,” said the grandfather. “And behave yourself!”

“Whatever you say, Frankenstein.”

It was raining hard outside. I was soaking wet when “Igor” put me down between two other people and strapped me to the side of the trailer.

I
don’t know how long the ride will be. I have recited this story to myself three times, making sure I remember every detail.

“Jesus,” I whispered, thinking of the man in white and gold, “forgive me. Let me live with you forever.”

The paralyzing drugs are starting to wear off. The truck is freezing cold. Some of the others are starting to moan. Many have vomited or soiled themselves.

When we arrive, we will be taken inside to a big gray room with bright lights. We will be strapped to workbenches. Holes will be drilled into our heads so an apparatus can be attached to our brains. Each of us will be watched by a technician.

When my technician starts to watch, I will smile, if I am able. Then I’ll think of a long sequence of letters and numbers which will cause my mind to unravel and vanish before his eyes. There will be no data to be used for the next iteration. This is what Sam gave me to memorize.

Above the pounding of the dark, filthy rain, I hear the little whirly noise of the gate as it closes behind me.

On the bridge of Avignon, they dance.

Lost Pine

written by

Jacob A. Boyd

illustrated by

PAT R. STEINER

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jacob A. Boyd grew up in a cul-de-sac on the outskirts of a small farm town in the middle of Illinois. From the deck of his childhood home, he watched dark, thunderous wall clouds approach across miles of cornfield. As they passed overhead, he gaped at the nascent funnel clouds they concealed. Praying mantises, black and yellow garden spiders and mud daubers teemed in his yard and amongst the fruit trees while he helped his parents burn bag worms from high walnut branches with kerosene-soaked torches on the ends of long poles. He had a BB gun. He had a teacher who looked like a witch, mole on her nose, scowl and all. Another teacher had a wooden hand. Once, he crested the hill of his cul-de-sac and came face to face with a wolf. He got away. Few neighbors had fences; bushes and trees demarcated property lines. A clutch of towering weeping willows provided rope swings and climbing apparatus and a “fort.” When it snowed, the town’s plow provided enough of a snow bank to dig a tunnel city. Every so often, Jacob’s dog, a Keeshond named Sparky, disappeared from the cul-de-sac, only to reappear after days of tearful family searching and growing resignation, a little skinnier, his fur matted and coated with burrs. It was another world. With a go-kart and good weather, Jacob explored it as though driving a lunar rover. One time, Jacob’s dad showed him his cracked and calloused laborer’s hands and said
Don’t let yours look like this.
His parents insisted he read. They pushed him into advanced classes. Though they had little money, they were forward-thinking enough to buy him and his brother a personal computer, and with it an invitation into a new, more expansive, interconnected world. He is still exploring it.

ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR

As a child, Pat R. Steiner once found himself hanging from a nail pounded into a tree. Left there by his older siblings, he happily communed with the tree until his mother dragged the whereabouts of the missing youngster from the guilt-ridden children. This experience, which could have ended the artist’s career before he ever thought to pick up a drawing pencil, in actuality, provided him his first unique perspective (both literally and metaphorically) on the caprices of life. Since then he has had a fascination with nature (including the human variety) along with its many mysteries. His art is his attempt to explain these BIG QUESTIONS as well as those more mundane. A self-taught doodler, Pat has never been what one would call a productive illustrator. Years have passed without him completing anything new. Yet even during those periods when his sketchpad lay fallow, the artist’s mind was at work, seeing the world around him with the very same eyes as that long-ago child upon his tree, eyes that now have the beginnings of crow’s feet around their edges. These laugh lines were formed by four decades of experienced whimsy. The Illustrators of the Future Contest has been another tree for Pat. This time he’s climbed up on his own. And he doesn’t plan to come down anytime soon. He really likes the view. Pat lives in Wisconsin with his wife and two children. (No, he doesn’t live in a tree, but there is a tree house in the backyard.)

Lost Pine

S
ilence filled the narrow, musty cellar and pressed back its brick walls until the three-story house above Gage stretched into a remote, empty shell, the crud-kids up the valley in Portland shrank into a tiny, voiceless rabble and the rest of the crud-blighted world vanished behind a far, far horizon. The delicate work of deciphering the gun safe’s combination swallowed Gage whole. The safe’s cold steel door and whispering gears were all there was.

Adah’s footsteps thundered toward Gage across the floorboards overhead, and his perspective painfully contracted back to reality: they were squatters in an aging B&B, they had fled Portland and while nature slowly reclaimed much of what lay explored in between, the rest of the world grew wilder unchecked.

Gage scowled at the shaft of summer sunlight angling down the stairs from the kitchen.

With five years on Adah, Gage looked at her fourteen-year-old behavior and felt more like her father than her . . . what: babysitter, bodyguard, boyfriend
?
Six years past the crud outbreak, he didn’t know anymore. He looked at her differently from day to day.

In a storm of tromping boots and long, loose curls, Adah careened into the shaft of light, out of breath, her face flushed of color.

“Someone’s coming,” she said.

Gage dropped his gnawed pencil onto the B&B’s old guestbook, in which he had cataloged nixed combinations.

“How many
?
” he asked. “How far away
?
”

He grabbed his machete off the top of the safe, then rushed past her through the empty B&B toward the front window in the third-floor hall. Adah followed, a tremor of anxiety in her voice.

“I think it was only one,” she said. “I was out looking for pickings when I heard him near the entrance to the drive, so maybe half a mile away.”

The forest closed over the winding drive that doglegged off the backcountry gravel road. With a determined gaze, Gage followed the suggestion of its path to where the natural obstacles he had woven into the terrain obscured its entrance with fallen trees and thorny brush.

“Was he pushing through the blackberries
?
” Gage asked.

“He wasn’t stopping.”

“You’re sure it was a he
?
”

“He was cussing real loud.”

“Did he see you
?
Hear you
?
”

“I don’t think so.”

A hen rounded the house into the ragged yard out front. Gage’s stomach sank. The coop was open. Another hen joined the first, then the last. Together, they were all that had survived inside the coop with a sack of feed until Gage and Adah arrived and discovered them, all as noisy as dogs.

“Close the curtains and lock the doors,” Gage said.

He ran out through the front door. The hens sped from him, clucking. He chased them and hushed them with sharp apologies, pinning one, then the next under his arm.

The intruder crashed through the blackberries, then the obstacle course of hidden holes, unsteadily balanced logs and beehives. By the time Gage pinned the third hen under his arm, the intruder was visible—one man, staggering as if exhausted and wounded.

“Hello,” the intruder called out, his voice wavering. “Hello.”

Gage glanced back at the house. Its curtains hung shut. He tightened his grip on his machete. The intruder hadn’t gone around or looked for an easier way past. He had gone through where the clearest route to the B&B should’ve been.

The intruder clambered through the last of the obstacles, closing the distance into a stone’s throw from Gage. Taller than Gage, yet skinnier, he moved like someone who took the time to stretch. He wore a slack pack, a bedroll tied to it with wharf rope. From what Gage could tell, the intruder had been one of the lucky ones. He was maybe a year or two older than Gage, which meant he had been just under the high-water line the crud drew at fifteen years old when it hit. Crud stained his teeth orange, yet like Gage, like Adah, like all the children who had survived the outbreak, he was resistant to it. It made him amongst the oldest people alive on the planet not encased in one of the crud’s gem-like cocoons.

“Down on your knees!” Gage shouted.

The intruder threw up his hands. “I’m not armed.”

“Down!”

The intruder dropped to his knees. Blood and grime painted his pinched, starved features. A bee sting swelled on his forehead like an angry third eye.

“Remove your pack,” Gage said. “Slowly.”

The intruder’s eyes hungrily flitted from Gage’s machete to the chickens, then he unclipped his pack’s straps and let it fall from his shoulders. At the sight of the intruder’s black T-shirt, Gage’s heart raced. In gold print, a spindly pine rose from the crest of a bare hill, the all but forgotten logo of Lost Pine B&B, their home’s former business.

The front door noisily unbolted and swept open.

“Stay inside,” Gage said, his eyes fixed on the golden pine gleaming from the intruder’s T-shirt.

“I’m unarmed,” the intruder whimpered, then col-lapsed.

Adah tromped down the porch steps and stopped at Gage’s back.

“He’s been here before,” Adah said. She held a broken bottle by its neck—the unfortunate loss of a container repurposed as a weapon.

Lost Pine lay far from paved roads, a piece of the pre-crud world tucked away off maps of the wooded valley. Only a rare guidebook’s directions led to it, made rarer for the one Gage had burned after memorizing its directions. He would be damned if it didn’t stay that way. He furiously wondered how many crud-kids had seen meaning in the intruder’s T-shirt, instead of just another useless logo.

“Do something,” Adah said. She stepped forward, and Gage blocked her with the flat of his machete. He dropped the hens onto the lawn, where they clucked complaints.

“We have supplies for one more,” Adah said.

“We have supplies, Adah. How many they’re for, we decide.”

“He’s stung.”

“If he’s allergic, there’s nothing we can do. The crud’ll take the opportunity and cocoon him before he dies.”

“We should try
something,
” Adah said.

“No,” Gage said.

“Did we spend all our time preparing for the worst to come just so we could turn away someone who’s in need, someone helpless
?
”

Gage glared at her.

Adah shoved Gage’s machete aside, strode toward the intruder and crouched beside him. Gage scowled and joined her. A black eye rimmed the intruder’s pale cheek with purple and brown. Something like sunburn spread up his forearms from his hands.

“Looks like he’s been roughed up,” Gage said. “Looks like he handled something mean, too.” He indicated the intruder’s hands. “Skin’s not bubbling or dripping like it would with poison oak or poison ivy. Be careful. Could still be something that can spread by contact. If he comes around so we can talk to him, we’ll see if we want to help him.”

Adah’s fierce eyes surprised Gage.

“We’re not like the crud-kids in Portland,” she said. “You said we were better than them. ‘We deserve what we have because we’re better.’”

Gage opened his mouth to dispute her, then shut it. She had made up her mind, using his words. It would be like arguing with himself. He tried another way of thinking about it.

“He could’ve led others here, Adah, the same people who gave him that black eye and sent him climbing through our blackberries. We’re far enough away from everything that when he left wherever he was, people had to suspect he had a destination. We should dump him down the road and hope whoever might be following him doesn’t notice the trail he tore down our drive.”

Adah sat the intruder up and worked her shoulder under his armpit. “Help,” she said. The word was soft. She looked up at Gage, and he saw in her wide, dark eyes the word was laced with venom, too, if he failed it.

Gage helped carry the intruder inside.

G
age brought the intruder into his home, but he would not entertain the idea of the intruder in their lives.

For Gage, the crud should’ve overwhelmed the intruder and cocooned him. He and Adah should’ve been dealing with a man-sized cocoon as hard as murky yellow ice. Their noses should’ve stung from its mothball stink. That they smelled only the intruder’s weathered body odor upset Gage. The intruder was a survivor. But Gage couldn’t believe his scrawny body was all that had kept him alive. He didn’t weigh much more than Adah.

They laid the intruder on a couch in the piano room. Adah retrieved water from a rain catcher—filled by frequent Northwest rains—and made a mug of pine needle tea using a match and four minutes of propane for the stove. Between Gage’s questions, she tilted the steaming tea to the intruder’s lips.

“Who are you
?
” Gage asked.

The intruder said his name was Monk.

As far as Gage was concerned, crud-kids who changed their names after the outbreak were un-reliable, always trying to reinvent themselves and obscure who they were. Aliases were the opposite of alibis.

Monk said he had been to Lost Pine before. It was when he had gotten the T-shirt. The couple manning the B&B had given it to him when his time was up, as a memento. They couldn’t keep boarders for long without making the place unsustainable.

Monk’s voice remained low and steady, as though he had prearranged his words. Gage’s tone hardened.

“What were you doing here
?
” Gage asked.

Monk’s pinched features stiffened as though he was rolling words through a rock tumbler in his mind so when they came out their edges would be worn smooth.

Monk had worked for his stay, tending the chickens and washing laundry and gathering kindling. He was willing to work again. He knew the law of the land—finders, keepers. He wouldn’t dispute it. Ownership of Lost Pine had changed hands when Adah and Gage found it unmanned. They were the rightful heirs. Who was he to say otherwise
?

Monk asked where Martin and Sue, the previous owners, had gone.

“Crud got ’em,” Gage said.

Monk said it was a shame.

Gage wanted to hate Monk for his nonchalance. But six years of living with crud had changed the rules. You accepted loss at its face value—something was gone that once was there—or it tore at you and wore you down till the crud crept in and cocooned you too.

Monk asked if he could see Martin’s and Sue’s cocoons.

“We took out the shelves in the fridge and fit the woman’s—Sue’s—cocoon inside,” Gage said. Monk was appalled, and Gage explained. “It’s practical. The cocoon vapors hold off decay and mold growth. Her cocoon makes it a kind of fridge. It’s just not cold. Martin’s cocoon is sterilizing water in our rain catcher.”

Monk said it was smart, but questioned if it was wise. Bodies should be buried.

Gage glared at him. “We don’t have enough to waste for the sake of making ourselves feel good.”

“Where did you go when you left Lost Pine
?
” Adah asked.

It was a little over a month ago, Monk said. He had made his way to Portland, but the crud-kids had formed gangs he wouldn’t join. They had rolled him, then run him out of town. It was why his pack contained nothing but an old, dirty bedroll, a water bottle, and edible flowers and roots he had dug up since—nothing, really. The gangs weren’t to be trusted. They were animals. Everybody grubbed for the same meal, same drink, same housing, getting meaner and meaner. He was lucky to make it out with a beating. He had seen others shot.

“We’ve been there,” Gage said. “Portland’s far. Rough going between there and here.”

Monk said he didn’t have a choice. He didn’t know of anywhere else to go. Word was cities were all breaking down. The backcountry wasn’t safe, but with fewer people to encounter, it was safer than lingering around a city and hoping for discarded scraps. Scraps were almost all anyone started with, anyway.

“Seems like anyone with a mind to could’ve followed you,” Gage said.

Monk said when he managed to shamble out of the city, the crud-kids left him for dead. People did that, just gave up on life and walked away from the city till they dropped. He had seen the bodies along the roads, encased in the yellowish cocoons that overtook them right before they would’ve died. Nobody had foreseen a different fate for him. He had only made it because he knew he had somewhere to go. It had given him strength.

“I’ll ask you point blank,” Gage said. “Did you lead anyone here
?
”

Monk said he never even thought to tell anyone about Lost Pine. He liked the place enough he wanted to keep it secret. When he could, on his way to Lost Pine, he avoided the slightest sign of other people. But it was a long haul. He was wearing down by the time he arrived, so when he thought he had made it, he made noise. He thought he had reunited with Martin and Sue. He couldn’t believe it. It was a miracle. Gage and Adah should understand.

Gage set his lips in a hard, bitter line. Adah looked at him, pity crimping her open features, asking what they’d do with Monk now that they knew his story.

“You can stay one week,” Gage said. “Make yourself useful, and we won’t have problems. Work for your food, and you can take some with you when you leave. It’s all anyone can ask anymore. We’re not animals. But if either of us so much as suspects you led someone here, I won’t hesitate to cut you down. I don’t have to be mad to kill you, understand
?
”

Monk nodded.

“We’re not a gang,” Adah added. “We’re honest people.”

Monk smiled at her.

“Could you eat some eggs
?
” Adah asked.

Monk said he could.

T
he television transfixed Gage with its live feed. He couldn’t look away. The first interstellar craft mankind had ever encountered was streaking through the high atmosphere over the Atlantic, somewhere between the Bahamas and Portugal. It had originated from near a Red Dwarf star, Gliese 876, and closed the fifteen light-years separating it from Earth, unnoticed until recently. Deep-space imaging spotted others in its wake, each less distinct than those preceding it. They spread out over years and would arrive in waves, until the largest one at the end, a moon-sized behemoth that was still a barely visible speck. The first one approached alone, fast and far ahead of the others.