The Postmortal

  Mrs. Smith stared at us through the window in what was now a state of terror. She screamed at the dog to get away from the car. Begged him. Ernie thought it over and brushed aside the arbitrariness of it all for my sake.

  “Okeydokey,” he said. “She lives to play another day.”

  He fired up Big Bertha, and we drove back out into the morass, leaving Virginia Smith alone with her little dog, forever confused as to why two end specialists would linger outside her house for so long. I hope she never has to find out the answer. She’s one hundred and twenty-nine years old.

  DATE MODIFIED:

  6/28/2079, 5:03 P.M.

  “A very urgent feeling”

  I sat in the way back of Big Bertha as Ernie called Matt to tell him that I had stymied the end specialization. Matt shrugged it off. I lay in the back and tried to will myself to telekinetically transport home to Solara. I failed.

  The plug-in barely moved along the Beltway. I heard the usual knocks against the side and shouts from crazies bobbing between cars to sell and demand things. It was like being in a car graveyard on a busted conveyor belt. Ernie turned up the WEPS radio, and we heard more bulletins about Khabarovsk being blown to bits, the same updates repeated every half hour. A huge book of tragedy waiting to be filled in. I’m so inured to it all that it may as well have been a report about circus seals. Ernie changed the station and Allan Atkins was busy demanding that we nuke Russia while its back is turned. Ernie tuned to the liberal station, and they demanded the same thing. The voices had become unanimous, as they do only under the strangest of circumstances. My mind played tricks on me. I felt the plug-in rolling forward, only to look up and find us stationary. I began silently counting to a thousand. Eventually, we moved.

  At the exit to Route 50, Ernie gave the signal to drop me off. I climbed to the front and shook his hand. “Thanks, Ernie.”

  “Keep your license around your neck,” he said. “No one out there knows it’s worthless.”

  “I will.”

  “I’ll work with Matt to file your termination as a resignation with two weeks’ notice. You won’t get severance, but you’ll get a head start.”

  “You think Matt’ll do that?”

  “Yeah. That wasn’t as easy for him this morning as you think it was. Now go. Save who you gotta save.”

  I grabbed two pistols and a box of SoFlo shooters; then I busted the door open and leapt out and sprinted down the exit ramp. Dusk was approaching sluggishly. The compound was five miles away. I tore down 50, running around every derelict and impromptu dead-car camp. The sun was melting into the horizon, and every movement and action I took was with the singular purpose of getting me closer to Solara. My throat grew raw. The compound came into view, and I broke into a gallop, as if trying to run out of my own body. I outran the sun and made it to the gate just before nightfall. My apartment was a mile inside. I walked to rest, then ran, then walked again, then ran the rest of the way.

  I reached my building, and when I stopped, sweat began gushing out of me. Little rivers of perspiration built up in fast currents and fell off my face and onto my bright-orange company shirt, making a large dickie of wet material from the collar downward. I went to the water machine and spent the twenty bucks for a bottle. It was empty before I even had the sensation of it touching my lips. I took the elevator up and paused at my door, dying to see her but reminding myself of the idea that she could be long gone—girding myself for disappointment.

  I opened the door calmly, and the living room was empty. The bathroom door was open. I looked to the kitchen. No one. I went to the bedroom, and Solara lay on the bed in her jean skirt and a cheap new top, aiming a gun at the door. She saw it was me and lowered it. I wanted to embrace her but fought off the urge.

  “You’re here,” I said.

  “Where else would I be?” She looked at my drenched clothes. “What happened to you?”

  “We have to go.”

  I began to pack everything worthwhile.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “Your file wasn’t closed. You’re still on the cloud. And I quit my job.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they want us to kill the elderly.”

  “Jesus.”

  “We have to go. There will be a hard ES order out on me in two weeks. Possibly sooner. We have to get away from here. Our meeting in Fredericksburg is a matter of public record now. Someone could snap our photo in this compound and we’d be boxed in. Pack what you need to pack.”

  “Why should I go with you?”

  “I have an armored plug-in. I have guns. I have supplies. I have money. Not enough to rent an electroplane but a good amount of money nonetheless. I can get you wherever you want to go. Mexico. Canada. We’ll move slow, but we’ll move.”

  “I’ve done Mexico,” she said wearily. “I’ve done Canada. I’ve done my time out in the wilderness.”

  “There’s nothing left but wilderness. This is what we have to do.”

  She grew angry. “You lied to me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You lied. It’s so obvious. You said you never mix love and death, but that’s all you do. They’re the same goddamn thing to you. Answer me this: Why do you really want to help me so badly? Out of all the lives you’ve taken, why choose me, why choose my child to protect?”

  “Because that’s what people do, Solara. They go along in life and they figure out who’s worth giving a shit about and who they can let fall by the wayside. And all they can do after that is hope against all hope that they cast their lot with the right kind. And that they didn’t let slip away someone they desperately should’ve held onto. So I pick you. It’s a gut instinct and nothing more.”

  “I don’t buy that.”

  I let the curtain fall. “You’re right. I did lie to you. But I’m not just drunk on my own hard-on. The truth is that I have a very urgent feeling around you that I haven’t felt in lifetimes. Something I thought was dead that’s come back stronger than ever. And now I know why I’ve clung to this rotting planet for so goddamn long.”

  She sighed. “I told you. I’m tired of men falling in love with me.”

  “I don’t give a shit.”

  I moved to her and began kissing her. Engulfing her. I wanted to squeeze her until her brain popped out of her head. She kissed me back, and the sky fell down and the universe got sucked into a black hole until it was just the size of us and so dense that a trillion years couldn’t even begin to erode it. I threw her on the bed and tore open her shirt and kissed her nipples and licked the numbers and slashes on her belly. She took off my shirt and pants, and I hiked up her skirt, and soon we were connected and I felt as if we were incinerating. I kissed her more and more and wished that one moment could be the entirety of forever so I could throw the rest of forever away. I fell beside her in a naked heap. She took the bottom of my shirt and wiped the sweat off me. Her body radiated.

  “I don’t wanna die,” I told her.

  “I don’t wanna die either.”

  “I know there’s no heaven. I know it all turns to nothingness. But I fear there will be some remnant of me left within that void. Left conscious by some random fluke. Something that will scream out for this. That one speck of my soul will still exist and be left trapped and wanting. For you. For the light. For anything.”

  She let her fingers dance on my chest and smiled. She spoke to me, and her deep voice ran through me like a salve, loosening my muscles. “It won’t be there, John. Take what you can get now.”

  “All right.” I kissed her. “We better finish packing.”

  She grew concerned. “So we have to leave right now?”

  “We’ll be fine. No one’s ever gonna touch us.”

  I went to my old foot locker. My father bought it for me when I went to sleepaway camp decades and decades ago. It was a big, blue, imposing thing, with brass buckles and a locking piece that felt like a paperweight when it swung down into your hand. Two fake leathe
r strips were studded down left and right of the center, like racing stripes. The locker itself was made of a cheap material, something stronger than cardboard but not by much. Carrying it required two men, both of whom would inevitably suffer deeply bruised shins any time the locker decided to bash into them, which was often. I undid the massive lock and threw open the top. The crude top shelf was full of loose bullets. I lifted it up to get at my little armory. I took out a pump-action and showed it to Solara.

  “You know how to use one of these?” I asked her.

  “Vaguely.”

  I pumped the shotgun. “You get six shots.”

  DATE MODIFIED:

  6/28/2079, 11:58 P.M.

  An Unwelcome Dawn

  We were out of the Fairfax compound by 10:00 P.M. and riding off into the endless exurbs straddling I-66 and beyond. My little plug-in would be wiped off the road by Big Bertha, but it still possessed reinforced doors and windows. Most angry vagrants and D36 members were happy to pass it up for weaker, more-penetrable cars. We passed by fires and squatters who lived along the highway wall and decorated it as if each section were the single wall of an open bedroom. Coffin-quiet electroplanes above, discernible only by their lights tracking low and fast through the dark haze, flew filthy-rich people across the sky. We were twenty miles outside Fairfax when I realized my battery was low. There was a safe-house compound five miles on, with a charging station inside. I drove off at the exit and the gate swung open for us.

  Inside the compound were rows upon rows of plug-in trucks, hooked up to charging stanchions and parked for the night. I parked the plug-in and hooked it up to a stanchion. The meter gave us seven minutes.

  A mini-mall was open in the center of the compound, with food and drinks and VIRGINIA IS FOR LOVERS shirts for people passing through and requiring the easiest gift that came to mind. I brought Solara inside and bought her the six-pack of plastic Dr Pepper bottles and box of Cheerios she picked out. There was a faux-sushi stand inside. I resisted it and got a hot dog instead. Back in the plug-in, we dined in private. She guzzled the soda, and I kissed her when she pulled the bottle from her lips.

  “You’re very sneaky,” she said.

  I held nothing back. “I want to marry you. I want to marry you and be that child’s father. You don’t have to agree to it. I just wanted to say it to you because it feels good to say it. It’s all I say in my head when I look at you now.”

  She laughed. “Who are you?”

  “Not who I thought I was.”

  She kicked back in the seat and ate a fistful of cereal. “You make me feel my age, John.”

  “I’m sorry if I do that.”

  “No, it’s a good thing. No one makes me feel that way. You look at me like you wanna share a lemonade with me.”

  “I can go back in and get one right now, if you like. Finest lemon-flavored high-fructose corn syrup you’ll ever taste.”

  “I’m fine with the soda, thank you.” She swilled the rest of her bottle and opened another. “When I was in my twenties, I always dated older men. Randall, obviously. But others too. I changed my name and moved back to LA after breaking up with him, and I dated a bunch of older guys. Not just old in years but old in looks. If a guy was forty but had a cure age of twenty-five or something, I didn’t bother. But if he had a cure age of forty or forty-five, that was right up my alley. I’m sure it was a daddy thing. One of them was this big producer named Bobby. He was, like, fifty.”

  “Did he get you work?”

  “He offered,” she said, “but I didn’t want to be ID’d. LA back then was . . . I don’t even know how to describe it. Everyone who ran out there after getting the cure wanted to be a permanent movie star, but those jobs were already spoken for. The audition lines would wrap around the buildings three, four times over. No one had any money, but everyone was young and gorgeous. People were hooking up in restaurant booths and on street corners. Just this wild, massive, intermittent orgy that creeped you out and drew you in all at once. That whole town reeked of stale sex—the sweat and wet hair and everything else. I got so tired of being around it that I didn’t bother going out, even when Bobby had some premiere.”

  “Was he a really big honcho?”

  “He was. He was a great bullshitter. He’d always say, ‘Baby! I’ll make you a star in this town!’ Like it was 1942 and I was some ingenue or something like that. He was a nutjob. But he looked older, so I felt like things were more defined with him. I don’t know if that makes sense, but that’s how I felt. You’re like that, even though you look young. You have that old-man air. But you don’t look too shabby, which is nice.”

  “Why didn’t you stay with him? Why didn’t you stay in LA?”

  “He couldn’t keep his hands off anyone. That’s men. Even when they find exactly what they want, they’ll always ditch it for the sake of variety. As for LA . . .” She lowered her head. “My sister and I were twins. Are twins. Were twins. It’s difficult to explain.”

  “Try me.”

  She sat silent, as if to summon the strength. “She went true organic, which is funny, given that I’m the one who is now considered a pro-death fugitive. But that was her thing. She refused the cure, and she shacked up with some crunchy eco-lawyer she met online. Every time I saw her after that, it was like looking at my own picture stashed away in the attic. And she’d press the issue. She’d look at me with these judging eyes and say, ‘How does it feel?’ She’d taunt me. She’d ask me why I wanted to live forever. What good did I do? What purpose did I serve? I didn’t have an answer for her. All I said the last time I saw her was that I can’t stop living. I just can’t. We never spoke after that.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s so weird. When we were growing up, we were inseparable. The twin thing. We spoke our own language. Read each other’s cues. She was my clone. That’s what twins are: clones. I was closer to her than anyone else because she was me. And when Dad left . . . Jesus, she was everything. I never thought that would go away. I thought, of everything in the world, we would be the one constant—the one thing I could count on. Then she changed, and it felt like everything else could crumble at a moment’s notice.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “She’s in a home. Alzheimer’s. They post her picture every week on the home bulletin, and I only look at it out of the corner of my eye. I can’t stand the thought of her like that. Of me like that. I suppose people like your boss will go hunting her down soon. Blast the old folks’ home to smithereens.”

  “And your brother?”

  “Dead. Hit by a plug-in.”

  “Oh God.”

  “Eh, he was an addict. There was barely anything to him by the end.” She looked up at me. “Everyone I’ve put my faith in has let me down, John. But I don’t know what else I can do but keep trying. Hope to find that one person who’ll never go away.” She put her hand over mine and squeezed tightly. “I don’t know that anyone like that actually exists.”

  “They do.”

  “Where are yours?”

  “They all died,” I told her. “Twenty billion people on this earth, and the only ones that matter are the ones that aren’t here. And you.”

  “Well, ain’t that a bitch and a half?”

  Just then the WEPS started going berserk. I threw up the screen in midair, and we saw the headline flash under the video feed:

  THREE U.S. MISSILES DETECTED APPROACHING RUSSIAN AIRSPACE

  The doors of dormant electro-semis opened up, and the truckers began streaming into the mini-mall. I saw screens pop up all over the compound and folks by the dozen making a beeline for the center.

  I turned to Solara. “Food.”

  “Water,” she replied.

  She grabbed the shotgun. I grabbed two handguns and a plastic bag. We jumped out of the plug-in and ran into the food mart, which was already being pillaged. All the water and milk had been taken. I saw parents with babies in their arms knocking each other over to get at powdered formula an
d diapers. Truckers who had already gotten what they needed were waving their key sticks at the cashier and telling them to charge them whatever. I saw a case with bottles of some fruity protein drink and threw what I could into the bag before another man elbowed me out of the way and began stocking his own supply. Solara grabbed boxes of candied popcorn and little individual cereal bowls and held on while others tried to pluck them from her arms. She ran out with a meager supply, and I joined her as we dashed for the plug-in. The line out of the compound was already growing. Everyone had gotten what they could get and wanted to flee.

  Then the power went out.

  Everything at once—every grid down, not just the usual handful. The invading glow that had been the only night I’d known for ages snapped off, and the stars above blasted to life as if thrown on by a light switch—as if the earth had been stripped of its atmosphere entirely. People screamed. I heard a window break in the mini-mall. We got in the plug-in and pulled out into the line. My WEPS.8 network had gone blank. Everyone’s had. The satellites weren’t working or had been blown away. For the first time since I was a child, the world had shrunk back to my immediate surroundings. Solara. Me. Everyone trapped inside the safe house. That was it. The plug-in was charged for the full forty-eight hours. The crummy food inside would barely last that long.

  The line crawled out to the highway. I kept one hand on the wheel and the other on my gun. Solara held the shotgun between her legs, the barrel kissing the floor mat. We made it eight miles, then the road began to choke. Maybe some folks were holding fast in their compounds, but the rest were spilling out onto the road in their plug-ins and scooters and bikes and skates and anything else that would propel them forward and farther away from the coast. After an hour or two, many of the plug-ins died in the road. Everyone began driving wherever stationary objects were not. The median filled with cars, as did the shoulder. Walkers zipped past us and made us feel as if we were besieged. Some knocked to be let in. All were refused.