They were clambering down to the beach at last, to walk in the mist that glowed pink with incipient sunrise. The woman paused and studied Yana’s face in the strawberry glow. “What I’m saying is, give it time. It’s hard now, I know. Still hard. The margins are slim, incredibly tight. But we’ve survived worse. And in another ten, twenty, ten thousand years . . . it will turn out to have been good for all of us. Except the ones who died. Infinite possibilities for everyone now. Like the Black Death.”
“I don’t understand,” Yana said.
The woman coughed, then turned to spit the result on the beach. It gleamed blackly in the night-sky glow.
“Empty ecological niches are an opportunity for evolution,” she said. “As surely in human society as in the natural world. We’ll have an opportunity as a species to become so much more than we are now. To improve. Evolve, as we haven’t evolved in millennia. And that’s what matters in the long run. Species survival. Species development. Who knows — maybe we’ll finally take that next step, become something transhuman.”
“What about . . .” Yana pointed to herself, the other woman. The sweep of abandoned rocks on the strand. “ . . . the casualties?”
You’re creepy, she didn’t say.
“Awful, isn’t it?” The woman coughed. “And yet, life finds a way. This is hardly even an extinction event, compared to some of them.” She cast her hands out wide, staggered, caught herself before she stumbled into the sea. She put her hand to head as if it ached. “And you and I have already outcompeted our rivals simply by surviving. When we start to push back from this crisis, there will be a world of opportunities.”
“You’re pretty cocky for somebody who was hogtied in a root cellar fifteen minutes ago.”
“There weren’t any roots in that cellar,” the woman said. She turned to walk backwards, smiling at Yana while the sun rose and filtered through the mist over Yana’s shoulder, lighting the woman’s hair up in shades of incredible flame.
“We can stick together,” Yana said, suddenly, feverishly hopeful. “The three of us. We’ll be safer. We can go someplace. You’re right, of course you’re right. We’re young, we can work. Somewhere there’s got to be a community, doesn’t there?”
“Maybe we should walk south to Africa,” the woman said with a smile. “That’s always been where the waves of human evolution come from.”
The stranger’s face seemed more bruised under the salt. In the morning light, as the mist burned off, Yana could see the purple stains spreading under translucent skin. Her steps began to drag, but when Yana said they should rest, she shook her head. “It’s not much farther, right? I’ll rest when we get there.”
She hitched her pack straps away from the bones of her shoulder as if they hurt.
They walked another two kilometers, but the woman was soon staggering. She hemorrhaged before they reached the broken highway that marked the place where Yana must turn landward.
The blood gushed from her — nose, mouth, down the insides of her trouser legs — as she doubled over and clapped her hands across her face as if she could somehow stuff it back inside, keep her life from running out.
Yana went to her, lifted off her pack, held her head, and tried to calm her when she begged through blood. At last she lay still, and Yana laid her down, composed her hands, smoothed her shedding hair back, and laid pebbles on her lids to close her wild, wild, white-ringed eyes.
She wanted to stay and pile the beach rocks over her in a cairn. But somewhere, her own Yulianna needed her. And there were untold riches in her bag.
She picked up the woman’s pack too, and strapped it across her chest despite the blood. She was bloody herself, from her attempts to help, though she washed as much as possible off in the sea. It might have been a hemorrhagic fever, some mutant disease. But Yana wasn’t too worried about that.
She remembered what the woman — Yulianna, call her Yulianna — had said, about camping among the rocks near the zombie lighthouse.
The reactors must be leaking after all, then.
Yana looked back once, while she still thought she should be able to see the stranger’s body. It wasn’t there, though, and Yana wondered if the tide could have so quickly rolled up the margin between sea and shore and reclaimed it.
She and her Yulianna would have to move on. Once Yulianna was strong enough. Once the food did its magic. They had two packs, trade goods now. Clothes for hiking in.
It was only a few kilometers more. Yana followed the highway on its long curve away from the beach, not leaning as far forward as she might have to make the climb because of the unbalanced weight of the packs. She saw just the stones and the sky.
There had been fewer people every year, since the Eschaton. Now Yana wondered if there were any at all, except her and Yulianna, and the army men holed up in the bunker. Maybe they were all that was left in the whole world.
Probably not.
But maybe.
They would do what the biologist had suggested, Yana decided. They would walk south. To Africa. They would be part of the future of humanity. The next step in evolution. If they were tough enough to survive.
If they could prove their fitness. It could still turn out to be a good thing for everyone.
Yana wondered how many thousands of kilometers it was, to get to Africa. Once, it would have been easy to look that up.
She turned off the road at the moss-covered boulder that was shaped roughly like a giant tortoise, and picked her way around to the tumbledown old fishing shack that looked like it was about to melt into the landscape. If you even happened to notice it, weathered gray as it was and wedged between two great, wind-break stones, you’d never think it anything but a ruin.
She paused, assessing, as the shack came into view. It seemed undisturbed. It was considerably more sound than it appeared — they had made all their structural improvements on the inside. They had spent the first summer after the Eschaton reinforcing, insulating, and weatherproofing it — but leaving the exterior treacherous and abandoned-looking.
It had mattered more at first. When there had been more people.
Yana’s feet hurt. Her shoulders burned. She hurried down the little dip to the shack, wishing she could call out for Yulianna but too careful to give their position away that easily. Besides, she wasn’t worried. Yulianna would be fine. She’d left Yulianna the gun.
The quiet and the closed door were good signs. Peaceful signs.
She broke into a trot, careful of the gravel underfoot. If she shattered her ankle, it would not get a chance to heal. She paused by the boulder, listened. Everything quiet, everything good.
She stepped up to the shack’s little crooked door, which was better hinged than it seemed to be, and tapped lightly. The latch string was out, but she still called, “Sweetheart? It’s me, don’t shoot,” softly before she opened the door.
It glided on the hinges she had oiled, and she stepped inside.
It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the dimness. She used that time to shrug out of both packs and set them down by the table made of planks resting on salvaged plastic crates. Jars wrapped in cloth knocked against one another, muffled. She straightened up with relief and turned.
Yulianna was on the plank bed, curled on her side as she always slept, the blanket pulled up to warm her. The rifle leaned against the wall beside the bed, in exactly the position where Yana had left it. That was good, very good; Yulianna hadn’t even needed to move it.
Yulianna watched Yana with her gray eyes as Yana came in. Yana picked up the bag of dried apples and a canteen of water and went to sit beside her.