Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalipse

“You did it,” Rachel says.

“I did it for you,” Mamie says. “I did!” They stand across the kitchen from each other, Mamie pinned against the door she just closed behind her when she finally came home, Rachel standing in front of the wall where Tom died. Jennie lies sedated in the bedroom. Hal Stevenson, his young face anguished because he had been useless against five armed soldiers, had run for the doctor who lives in Barracks J, who had been found setting the leg of a goat.

“You did it. You.” Her voice is dull, heavy. Scream, I want to say. Rachel, scream.

“I did it so you would be safe!”

“You did it so I would be trapped Inside. Like you.”

“You never thought it was a trap!” Mamie cries. “You were the one who was happy here!”

“And you never will be. Never. Not here, not anyplace else.”

I close my eyes, to not see the terrible maturity on my Rachel’s face. But the next moment she’s a child again, pushing past me to the bedroom with a furious sob, slamming the door behind her.

I face Mamie. “Why?”

But she doesn’t answer. And I see that it doesn’t matter; I wouldn’t have believed her anyway. Her mind is not her own. It is depressed, ill. I have to believe that now. She’s my daughter, and her mind has been affected by the ugly ropes of skin that disfigure her. She is the victim of disease, and nothing she says can change anything at all.

#

It’s almost morning. Rachel stands in the narrow aisle between the bed and the wall, folding clothes. The bedspread still bears the imprint of Jennie’s sleeping shape; Jennie herself was carried by Hal Stevenson to her own barracks, where she won’t have to see Mamie when she wakes up. On the crude shelf beside Rachel the oil lamp burns, throwing shadows on the newly whole wall that smells of termite exterminator.

She has few enough clothes to pack. A pair of blue tights, old and clumsily darned; a sweater with pulled threads; two more pairs of socks; her other skirt, the one she wore to the Block dance. Everything else she already has on.

“Rachel,” I say. She doesn’t answer, but I see what silence costs her. Even such a small defiance, even now. Yet she is going. Using McHabe’s contacts to go Outside, leaving to find the underground medical research outfit. If they have developed the next stage of the cure, the one for people already disfigured, she will take it. Perhaps even if they have not. And as she goes, she will contaminate as much as she can with her disease, depressive and non- aggressive. Communicable.

She thinks she has to go. Because of Jennie, because of Mamie, because of McHabe. She is sixteen years old, and she believes-even growing up Inside, she believes this-that she must do something. Even if it is the wrong thing. To do the wrong thing, she has decided, is better than to do nothing.

She has no real idea of Outside. She has never watched television, never stood in a bread line, never seen a crack den or a slasher movie. She cannot define napalm, or political torture, or neutron bomb, or gang rape. To her, Mamie, with her confused and self-justifying fear, represents the height of cruelty and betrayal; Peter, with his shambling embarrassed lewdness, the epitome of danger; the theft of a chicken, the last word in criminality. She has never heard of Auschwitz, Cawnpore, the Inquisition, gladiatorial games, Nat Turner, Pol Pot, Stalingrad, Ted Bundy, Hiroshima, My Lai, Wounded Knee, Babi Yar, Bloody Sunday, Dresden or Dachau. Raised with a kind of mental inertia, she knows nothing of the savage inertia of destruction, that once set in motion in a civilization is as hard to stop as a disease.

I don’t think she can find the underground researchers, no matter how much McHabe told her. I don’t think her passage Outside will spread enough infection to make any difference at all. I don’t think it’s possible that she can get very far before she is picked up and either returned Inside or killed. She cannot change the world. It’s too old, too entrenched, too vicious, too there. She will fail. There is no force stronger than destructive inertia.

I get my things ready to go with her.

AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA by Elizabeth Bear

Elizabeth Bear is the author of several SF novels, including Jenny Casey trilogy— Hammered, Scardown, and Worldwired—which won the Locus Award for best first novel, Undertow, and Carnival, which was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. She is also the author of the Promethean Age fantasy series, and, with Sarah Monette, A Companion to Wolves. She is a prolific short story writer, with nearly 50 publications to her credit since 2003. Much of her work has been collected in The Chains That You Refuse, and a look at her website, www.elizabethbear.com, reveals several more pieces of short fiction—as well as a number of novels—forthcoming in the near future.

“And the Deep Blue Sea,” which first appeared in the online magazine SCI FICTION, is Bear’s take on the post-apocalyptic messenger story, reminiscent—without being derivative—of Roger Zelazny’s Damnation Alley. Bear’s fascination with abandoned places, and the fact that she lived for years in Las Vegas—“America’s Nuclear City”—led her to write this story. As research for this piece, she says she learned how to move safely through a radioactive zone, which should come in handy should the events leading up to this story ever come to pass.

The end of the world had come and gone. It turned out not to matter much in the long run.

The mail still had to get through.

Harrie signed yesterday’s paperwork, checked the dates against the calendar, contemplated her signature for a moment, and capped her pen. She weighed the metal barrel in her hand and met Dispatch’s faded eyes. “What’s special about this trip?”

He shrugged and turned the clipboard around on the counter, checking each sheet to be certain she’d filled them out properly. She didn’t bother watching. She never made mistakes. “Does there have to be something special?”

“You don’t pay my fees unless it’s special, Patch.” She grinned as he lifted an insulated steel case onto the counter.

“This has to be in Sacramento in eight hours,” he said.

“What is it?”

“Medical goods. Fetal stem-cell cultures. In a climate-controlled unit. They can’t get too hot or too cold, there’s some arcane formula about how long they can live in this given quantity of growth media, and the customer’s paying very handsomely to see them in California by eighteen hundred hours.”

“It’s almost oh ten hundred now. What’s too hot or too cold?” Harrie hefted the case. It was lighter than it looked; it would slide effortlessly into the saddlebags on her touring bike.

“Any hotter than it already is,” Dispatch said, mopping his brow. “Can you do it?”

“Eight hours? Phoenix to Sacramento?” Harrie leaned back to check the sun. “It’ll take me through Vegas. The California routes aren’t any good at that speed since the Big One.”

“I wouldn’t send anybody else. Fastest way is through Reno.”

“There’s no gasoline from somewhere this side of the dam to Tonopah. Even my courier card won’t help me there—”

“There’s a checkpoint in Boulder City. They’ll fuel you.”

“Military?”

“I did say they were paying very well.” He shrugged, shoulders already gleaming with sweat. It was going to be a hot one. Harrie guessed it would hit a hundred and twenty in Phoenix.

At least she was headed north.