Odd Apocalypse

after you over the hill. I can show you where it is.”

“That would be great, sir. The battery’s dead, but there’s something on the front seat that I really need.”

“Then I will,” he said, and strode south along the crest of the hill.

I needed to take three steps for every two of his. Hurrying along, I felt like a Hobbit playing sidekick to the Terminator.

With warm sun on my face, listening to the songs of cicadas in the tall grass, I was profoundly grateful not to have been bubbling in the stomach acid of four porker freaks.

I said, “So my Roseland is here and yours is there.”

“Seems that way.”

“Here is here,” I said. “But where is there?”

“Thinking about it makes my head hurt, so I don’t.”

“How can you not think about it?”

“I’m real good at not thinking.”

“Well, I’m bad at it,” I said.

“Anyway, being here doesn’t happen to me every year and it never lasts long. None of it matters, because I always end up back there.”

“Back there—where?”

“Back there in my Roseland.”

“Which is where?”

“You need to loosen up, Odd.”

“I’m as loose as I need to be.”

Kenny favored me with a smile as yellow as a yield sign. “Now and then you need to take a night just to drink yourself brainless. Helps you cope.”

“Where’s your Roseland?” I persisted as we climbed out of a glen toward another hilltop.

He sighed. “Okay, now I have a big sonofabitch headache.”

“So you might as well think.”

“I saved you from the porkers. Isn’t that enough?”

“Well, I told you what to do about your cold sore.”

“It hasn’t worked yet.”

“It will if you keep your tongue away from the damn thing and don’t keep licking off the ointment.”

“You’re kind of like a cold sore yourself,” Kenny said.

“So tell me where your Roseland is, and I’ll stop annoying you.”

“Okay, okay, okay. All right. This woman I was with for a while, she never stopped nagging, just like you. I finally figured out how to put an end to that.”

Dreading his answer, I said, “How did you put an end to it?”

“By just doing what the crazy bitch wanted. It was the only way to shut her up.”

“So where is your Roseland?”

“Maybe it’s way in the future from here.”

“Maybe?”

“It’s like a theory.”

“So you have been thinking about it.”

“But I don’t care.”

“Well, I care.”

“What is is. It doesn’t matter why.”

“You’re not only a thinker, you’re a philosopher.”

He growled with disgust. “I wish some sonofabitch porkers would show up so I could shoot ’em.”

“Way in the future, huh? Sir, do you mean you have a time machine?”

He told me that he didn’t need any fornicating time machine, except that he didn’t use the term fornicating. Then he said, “It just happens. But only in Roseland. Never anywhere else. Sometimes I look up, sky’s blue for a minute, other times for a few hours, and the world’s not all crap like it has been most of my life. I’m here where the world’s not crap yet, instead of there.”

“Just look up and it happens?”

“Or turn around. Next thing, the blue goes away, the sky’s as yellow as a cat’s diarrhea, and everything’s screwed up again. It’s like something pulls me here, but then it pushes me back where I came from. It probably does the same with the porkers — pulls ’em here but then pushes ’em away.”

“That can’t be what Tesla built the machine to do.”

“What machine?”

“The pulling and pushing must be a side effect. The porkers in your time — are they just in your Roseland?”

“Hell, no. They keep popping up everywhere. They’re worse than cockroaches.”

“Why is your sky yellow?” I asked.

“Why is yours blue?”

I said, “It’s supposed to be blue.”

“Not where I come from.”

As we walked, he took the slung rifle off his shoulder and carried it at the ready.

Drawing my pistol, I said, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing yet. Relax.”

After a while, I said, “If the sky’s yellow and your future is crawling with porker freaks, it must be a pretty hostile place.”

“You think?”

“Something must have happened between now and then.”

“What happens happens.”

“But what is the what that did?”

“Who knows? Maybe the war.”

“Nuclear war?”

“A few of ’em were nukes.”

“A few nuclear wars?”

“They were little ones.”

“How can a nuclear war be little?”

“And bio. Maybe that was worse.”

“Biological warfare?”

“And what they called the nano swarms.”

“What are nano swarms?”

“I didn’t go to any sonofabitch college, you know. And I don’t hang out with a bunch of candy-ass techno geeks. Whatever the nano swarms were, the sonsofbitches ate themselves in the end.”

“Ate themselves?”

“Well, after they ate a lot of other stuff.”

I mulled that over.

He said, “And those professors.”

“What professors?”

“The sonsofbitches doing experiments.”

“What kind of experiments?”

“With pigs.”

“Nukes, viruses, nano swarms, pigs,” I said.

“Vampire bats. Nobody knows where they came from. Some say the Chinese made ’em as a weapon. Or maybe it was that weirdo billionaire in Nebraska. Then there was the big government solar- energy thing.”

“What government solar-energy thing?”