“Don’t talk,” the little boy said to her. There was no blurring or confusing of sounds. Both children had spoken and Rye had understood. The boy looked at the dead murderer and moved further from him. He took the girl’s hand. “Be quiet,” he whispered.
Fluent speech! Had the woman died because she could talk and had taught her children to talk? Had she been killed by a husband’s festering anger or by a stranger’s jealous rage?
And the children… they must have been born after the silence. Had the disease run its course, then? Or were these children simply immune? Certainly they had had time to fall sick and silent. Rye’s mind leaped ahead. What if children of three or fewer years were safe and able to learn language? What if all they needed were teachers? Teachers and protectors.
Rye glanced at the dead murderer. To her shame, she thought she could understand some of the passions that must have driven him, whomever he was. Anger, frustration, hopelessness, insane jealousy… how many more of him were there—people willing to destroy what they could not have?
Obsidian had been the protector, had chosen that role for who knew what reason. Perhaps putting on an obsolete uniform and patrolling the empty streets had been what he did instead of putting a gun into his mouth. And now that there was something worth protecting, he was gone.
She had been a teacher. A good one. She had been a protector, too, though only of herself. She had kept herself alive when she had no reason to live. If the illness let these children alone, she could keep them alive.
Somehow she lifted the dead woman into her arms and placed her on the backseat of the car. The children began to cry, but she knelt on the broken pavement and whispered to them, fearful of frightening them with the harshness of her long unused voice.
“It’s all right,” she told them. “You’re going with us, too. Come on.” She lifted them both, one in each arm. They were so light. Had they been getting enough to eat?
The boy covered her mouth with his hand, but she moved her face away. “It’s all right for me to talk,” she told him. “As long as no one’s around, it’s all right.” She put the boy down on the front seat of the car and he moved over without being told to, to make room for the girl. When they were both in the car, Rye leaned against the window, looking at them, seeing that they were less afraid now, that they watched her with at least as much curiosity as fear.
“I’m Valerie Rye,” she said, savouring the words. “It’s all right for you to talk to me.
KILLERS
by Carol Emshwiller
Carol Emshwiller is the author of six novels and more than 100 short stories. Her short work has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines, and has been collected in several volumes, most recently in
Emswhiller can’t help but wonder if our civilization will fall apart one of these days. But being the kind of person who loves the simple life—oil lamps, walking, pumping up water for a shower, washing diapers at the shore of a lake on an old fashioned washboard—she’s hesitant to say she’s “afraid” it’ll happen. She’s not looking forward to it either, but she says it’s just as much fun writing about regression and devastation as it is writing about a future full of new gadgets and inventions.
“Killers” grew out of Emshwiller’s objections to the war in Iraq. The American people have been told that we’re fighting terrorists over there so we don’t have to fight them here. This story ponders what it would be like afterward if such a war did come to our shores.
Most people left because of no water. I don’t know where they found a place where things were any better. Some of us felt safer here than anywhere else. And even way before the war wound down, it was hard to pick up and go someplace. No gas for civilians. Pretty soon no gas at all.
After the bombing of our pipeline (one man with a grenade could have done that), we got together and moved the town up higher, along a stream and put in ditches so that the water came past several houses. We have to carry water into the house in buckets and we have to empty the sink by hand, back out into the yard. At least the water flows into our kitchen gardens and past our fruit trees. In warm weather, we bathe in our irrigation ditch, in colder we sponge off inside, in basins, but there’s hardly any cold weather anymore.
There wasn’t much to moving the town since most of us were gone already. All the able-bodied men, of course, so it took us women to make the move ourselves and without horses or mules. The enemy stole them or killed them or maimed them just to make things harder for us.
No electricity, though some of the women think they can hook the dam back up and get some. Nobody has bothered to try it yet. In a way none of this bothers me as much as you’d think. I always liked walking, and we have rendered fat lamps and candles that send out a soft, cozy glow.
Our house was already well above where the town used to be. Good because I didn’t want to move. I want my brother to have our old home to come back to. And besides, I couldn’t move Mother.
Beyond our back yard there used to be the Department of Water and Power, after that Forest Service land, and then the John Muir wilderness. Now the town has moved above me, and of course there’s no DWP or Forest Service anymore.
Our house has a good view. We always sat on the front steps and looked at the mountains. Now that everybody has moved up the mountain side, everybody has a good view.
The town below is empty. The Vons and K-mart are big looted barns. Up here there’s one small store where we sell each other our produce or our sewing and knitting. Especially socks. Hard to get socks these days. Before the war we were so wasteful nobody darned anymore, but now we not only darn but reinforce the heels and toes of brand new socks before we wear them.
We moved the little library up. Actually it’s got more books than before. We brought all the books we could find, ours and those from the people who left. We don’t need a librarian. Everybody brings them back honor system.
We have a little hospital but no doctors, just a couple of elderly nurses who were too old to be recruited. They’re in their seventies and still going. They’ve trained new ones. No medicines though. Only what we can get from local herbs. We went to the Paiute to find out more. There’s a couple of Paiute nurses, who come to help out every now and then, though they have their own nursing to do on the reservation. (They moved the rez up, too, and they don’t call it the reservation anymore.)
It’s a woman’s town now. Full of women’s arts and crafts…. Quilt makers, sweater knitters…. And the women do the heavy work. There’s a good roof repair group and there’s carpenters….
Lots of women went to war along with the men, but I had to look after Mother. I was taking care of her even before my brother left. She wasn’t exactly sick but she was fat and she drank. Her legs looked terrible, full of varicosities. It hurt her to walk so she didn’t. When the war came she got a little better because of the shortages, though there was still plenty of homemade beer, but she couldn’t walk. Or wouldn’t. I think her muscles had all withered away. Looking after somebody who can’t walk seems normal to me. I’ve done it since I can first remember anything.
Now that Mother’s gone I have a chance to do something useful. If I knew the war was still going on in some specific place, I’d go fight, but it seems to be over. Maybe. It didn’t stop exactly. I don’t know how it ended or even if it’s ended. We don’t have a way to find out, but there hasn’t been any action that we know of for quite some time. Overhead, nothing flies by. Not even anything old fashioned. (Not that we ever had any action to speak of way out here. Except for the bombing of our pipeline and stealing our livestock, nobody cared much about us.)
But that’s the way the war was, hardly a beginning and hardly an end. Wars aren’t like they used to be—with two clearly separated sides. The enemy was among us even before it started. They could never win a real old- fashioned war with us, they were weak and low tech, but low tech was good enough as long as there were lots of
