They came to a building halved vertically by an explosion. Looked like an NYU dorm, a cross section of what appeared to be, more or less, normal collegiate life, a couple dozen hive-like stories of beds, computers, desks, a
Carl consulted his handheld. “She’s human.”
“Hey you! Student!” Skinner shouted. “What are you still doing up there?”
Visibly annoyed, the girl called down, “Leave me alone! I’m studying! Midterms next week!”
“You need to evacuate asap!” Carl replied. “This ain’t the time to study! Come on, we’ll set you up in a library where you can study all you want!”
Somewhere on the island another building fell, rattling the earth beneath their feet and the teeth in their jaws. Helicopters in formation sliced across a sky too grimy and chemical-burned to be of any use to anybody.
Carl said to Skinner, “We got to get her out of there. She’s in shock, obviously.”
“Stupid bitch,” Skinner said. “Let’s save her ass.”
Skinner put Will Ferrell in charge of the unit while he and Carl climbed over the rubble looking for an entrance. The comic actor called after them. “Guys? This is against protocol, you know? Shouldn’t we all stick together?”
“Go fuck yourself, Ferrell,” Skinner said. “We’re getting this chick out of here.”
(Years in the future, in the living room, Carl said, “Not exactly how we remember it.”
“Yeah, but here it comes,” Skinner said.)
Carl pushed aside a Foosball table, found the stairwell. Walls covered in anti-newman graffiti. Skinner doubted many of the students who’d screwed and crammed and gotten ripped in these dorms had made it off Manhattan alive. Rifle drawn he kicked open the door to the second floor, exiting into a dark hallway where postpsychotherapy Metallica played faintly from ceiling-mounted speakers. In a corner beneath a fire extinguisher lay a wounded Christian American soldier. Looked like a contractor from Toys “R” Us. Hard to tell exactly where he’d been hit; his whole torso was caramelized in bloody goo. Carl bent over him with the handheld and got his vitals.
“Soldier, where you from?” Carl said.
“Huh?” the fallen man said. “Who the f-f-f-fuck are you?”
“We’re the Boeing 83rd. We’re going to fly you out of this joint.”
“The college chick—” the soldier said. “They’re using her as bait.”
“We got nooms up in this shit?” Carl said as a round pinged the fire extinguisher over his head, unleashing a cloud of white vapor. Down the hall dorm rooms cracked open and out stumbled half-obliterated newmans wearing the collegiate T-shirts and hoodies of their victims. Carl’s face assumed the intensity of a man assembling a particularly tricky piece of furniture as he raked the hall with ordnance. Skinner’s head rolled to one side and he caught sight of a Mohawked, child-sized newman wearing a Led Zeppelin
(“Here it comes,” Skinner said in the living room.)
There it came, a round ripping through his chest plate, which put the kibosh on the velocity enough so that it lodged in his trunk without splattering out his back. Then another one to the leg, a kind of afterthought. He plunged into a pool of blood where all sound disappeared.
In Carl’s memory he dragged Skinner by the leg down the hall, unloading at other newmans lurching out of dorm rooms. The memory fritzed out a second, flipped perspectives, then Skinner had a close-up view of a busted iPod, its mysterious guts revealed. Rounds whanged off metal, the elevator doors. His eyes fluttered and in the living room one hundred years later Carl squeezed his hand so hard it went numb.
Skinner trudged in tattered fatigues across the mesa, the vista meticulously hi-res down to individual grains of sand. His peeling skin and the rasp in his throat seemed to imply he’d been out here for weeks. Up ahead, far enough away that he could pinch the whole scene between forefinger and thumb, was some kind of encampment. It was near twilight, the sky awash in pollution. A wall of furnace-intensity wind. Closer still, through eyes squinty and dry, he made out a refrigerator standing inexplicably amid the desolation. And piles of things nearby, a human form bent before a meager fire. Some guy? Some weird guy with long hair and a beard, near-naked in these punishing elements? It seemed improbable, but it was true. The old man didn’t look up until Skinner was standing, bewildered, a few feet away. The man gestured for him to sit on an old bald tire. Nearby a full-length mirror reflected the sun back across the horizon. There was a pile of kids’ stuffed animals and a pile of books. Skinner tried to speak. The man waved his hand as if to tell him not to bother, then rose and opened the fridge. Wisps of cold vapor rolled out and Skinner almost cried to see it stocked full of food.
“BREWSKI?” the old man said.
Skinner nodded, tears beading at the edges of his eyes. The old man cranked the cap off a bottle of Pyramid Hefeweizen and handed it to him. Skinner trembled as the cold beer foamed in his mouth. He sucked it down so fast some came back up. The old man handed him another, then offered a sandwich. Skinner ate, moaning through his full mouth.
“Who are you?” Skinner asked finally, burping.
“I AM THE LAST DUDE,” the old man said.
“What is this place?”
“THIS IS THE END OF THE ROAD.”
“How did I get here?”
“I CALLED YOU HERE.”
“Why?”
“YOU MUST FUCK.”
“Huh?”
“REPRODUCE,” the Last Dude said. “NOW SCRAM.”
A murder of crows materialized and lifted Skinner into the sky. The old man’s encampment grew smaller beneath his dangling feet as the temperature dropped and wind scraped out the insides of his ears. As he rose sunward the desert floor widened like a spreading stain. Far below, methodically piled stones spelled what appeared to be an unfinished message to the heavens:
Here the memory faltered into a blue screen then snapped back to full resolution with the sound of a helicopter. Skinner looked around trying to find it, seeing only the digitized gray fatigues of his company colleagues, realizing before he passed out again that he was in a chopper, there was a mask pumping oxygen at his face, and the world below smelled of death.
Wood smoke curled around evergreens. Chiho followed Hiroko up the muddy path to this place of astonishment, a whole college campus suspended in the trees. Through the mist the Douglas firs appeared to wear skirts; these were circular houses built around their trunks, linked by a network of rope and cable bridges. There were hundreds of tree houses of various circumferences and elevations, whole multistory platforms held aloft in the triangulations of trunks, students traveling from one class to another by rope swing and zipline. Hiroko showed Chiho to a rickety elevator and they rose into the canopy where curious squirrels and robins perched, coming to rest on a platform that seemed to float on a pillow of fog. In this creaking, crescent-shaped, wind-swayed structure was a lecture hall where several tiers of benches faced inward toward a lectern. A couple dozen students had already gathered, notebooks ready, sipping chai, bringing the low murmur of chatter to a close as Hiroko took her place behind the microphone. Chiho found a spot in the back row.
“Let’s get settled, everyone. Today I’d like to talk about Malaspina, the Roving Glacier of Death. I’ll take questions afterward. Stragglers, please take your seats. In the early years of the FUS, with polar ice rapidly