'Jer, there's something wrong with these paintings.'
'Say what?' And, incredulous, he almost laughed. 'Man, they're just so great. They're… beautiful. See? I said it. I acknowledged the existence of your kind of beauty.'
'Jer, they —»
'It's gotta be some pills or something,' he was babbling away, though. 'Pharmaceutical smack or something. Man, if I get my hands on whoever gave her
And he would not be told otherwise. He took her in a cab to the local ER in the end, bumming ten off me towards the fare.
I followed them out, refusing to glance back.
April was in a coma, though the people at the hospital could not discover why. It was not drugs. I went to see her the next day. Swore I could see flecks of surplus colour in her open, staring eyes.
The thing that keeps people like Jer going and makes survivors of them — it is their ability to just move on. It's not that he didn't care. Far from it. It's just that he realized, without having to vocalize it, that continued existence depends on — do I really have to use that old 'moving shark' metaphor?
Over the next couple of days, he hauled the five paintings — he'd taken April's back — around some dozen galleries.
'What is with it with these fools?' he now complained. 'They're supposed to be businessmen, and all they do is gawk? I couldn't get a price-tag out of one of them! And for such beautiful paintings!'
And I finally realized what this was. It was all to do with — immunity. Resistance levels.
A disease goes around, see? A plague. And most people succumb. But a few just have something natural in them that subdues the sickness, makes it less effective.
So it was with Jer. He'd always been aloof towards fine paintings. Totally immune to artistic beauty. And so, when the bug had struck, it had affected him to a degree — but had not felled him completely like the rest of us, apparently.
«Jer-» I tried to tell him for the dozenth time.
But he still wasn't prepared to listen. Maybe that was a part of the paintings' limited effect on him.
When he went home, he looked annoyed enough to do something exceptionally stupid.
Which bothered me enough to go around at ten o'clock and check up on him.
The door wasn't locked. The pungent aroma of California Gold hit me as I went into the hallway.
There were no lights on in Jer's living room. Just the glow of those three screens. That was strong enough to pick out, on the little dining table, an open jar of pharmaceutical coke and a half-empty bottle of bourbon.
Jer was hunkered over the screen of the middle computer, and there was a scanner humming beside him, and several wooden picture frames lay scattered on the floor.
His back was in the way, so I could only see the edges of the image on his screen. It was enough.
It didn't mesmerize me, this time. Maybe you needed the whole picture for that.
'Jer, what are you doing?' I asked.
When he turned towards me, I could see how out of it he was. His face like a plastic mask in the weird light. His pupils too large, his thin lips twitching. He tried to smile, but it came out as something else entirely.
'They're so beautiful, dude,' he informed me, like a stuck record. 'Beauty like I've never seen in my entire life. If those asses at the galleries won't show them — well, the whole world ought to see them. That's what art's about, right? It belongs to everyone. The entire world.'
His e-mail page was now up on the screen. He turned back to it, and started making attachments.
What the-?
'Jer, no!'
And I started lunging forwards.
He had clicked on SEND before my hand could reach him. I stopped, feeling a lot more than helpless, letting my arms drop down to my sides.
'The whole world, man,' Jer was mumbling to himself again. 'The entire teemin' world.'
It is two days later, by this time. And everything has changed.
No planes pass overhead any longer. There are far fewer cars, no trains. The mail hasn't come. The mart down the road is running at half-staff, and running out of supplies. There are hardly any trucks at all.
Not everyone has a computer, of course. Most of those people are just wandering around, trying to figure what the hell is going on.
Sooner or later, most of
This morning, a fire started up near the centre of town. And is still spreading. I can see the vast plume of smoke from my window. And I keep on wondering. Those people in front of their screens down there — do they even move when the flames start to consume them? Chill thought.
The power hasn't gone out yet. Emergency measures, I suppose. I wish it would. Although that might change nothing. It took only the space of one night to put April in a coma. And it's now been forty or so hours for most people.
I ought to go see if she's come around, but cannot bring myself, since I suspect the worst.
Jer dropped round about an hour back. He still doesn't seem to realize what's going on.
As I said, maybe that's a side-effect of his partially-immune reaction to the paintings.
He told me six more times how very beautiful they were.
There's looting.
I keep thinking of places that I've only ever seen on the TV. Craggy places. Dusty places. Places where there is not so much as an electrical wire, but people live there.
They don't even know it, but they've just inherited the earth. Does an absence of technology make one meek in any sense?
Someone just got shot, down at the corner. Is the fire heading this way? God, I wish the power would go out, even though that idea rather frightens me.
Maybe I should try to get away from here, though how or where I simply do not know.
Maybe — better, easier — I'll just go back to the old house, back to that paint-redolent room. Turn one of the canvases around.
And get lost.
The same way everything is lost now.
DAVID A. SUTTON
The Fisherman
When Stephanie first saw him, his eyes were wild yet unfocused. She found out why later.
She and Rod were waiting outside the holiday cottage in Pembrokeshire; the keys were promised any minute. In front of them huddled the building that had been converted from a farm structure into holiday lets. Not strictly cottages as advertised, but she was not going to quibble. Behind them crouched the tiny inlet of Nolton Haven and the swell of St Bride's Bay beyond. Stephanie had turned to watch the waves that caroused so very close to the dwellings. The beach itself was hidden from her viewpoint, below the shelf of land they were standing on. The twin biceps of the cliffs on either side hugged the bay close. Rugged and yet secure, she thought.
As she watched a seagull lazily ascend in the middle distance, a dark shape suddenly appeared out of the ground.
Rod pivoted around quickly, recovering his balance and hers in turn. A few yards away an old man in oilskins
