“Hey, sweetie,” Yana said. She rested her hand on Yulianna’s shoulder and stroked her faded, straw-stiff ginger hair back from her cool, firm brow. “I got food. Will you eat some?”
She placed a piece of apple in her own mouth and chewed, then carefully scooped the moist pap into the corner of Yulianna’s lips. She gave her a little water, but it ran out between her teeth.
“Sweetie,” Yana said, “You have to swallow. There’s fish too, beef jerky. Some pemmican. So much food, we’ll get fat. And I have trade goods. We can find a town.”
Yulianna didn’t answer. She stared ahead unblinking.
Yana wiped the corner of her sister’s eye, and the skin crumbled. She pulled her hand back and resolutely reached for another bite of apple.
“You have to get strong,” she said, stroking her sister’s hair again. The stiffness was bad today, she thought. “You have to eat. You have to get strong. So we can travel. So we can be the ones who make it.”
She leaned down and kissed her sister’s cheek, rubbing soft lips against hard, papery skin.
Yulianna made no answer.
Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. When coupled with a tendency to read the dictionary for fun as a child, this led her inevitably to penury, intransigence, and the writing of speculative fiction. She is the Hugo, Sturgeon, and Campbell Award-winning author of almost a hundred short stories and more than twenty-five novels, the most recent of which is Steles of the Sky, from Tor Books. Her dog lives in Massachusetts; her partner, writer Scott Lynch, lives in Wisconsin. She spends a lot of time on planes.
JINGO AND THE HAMMERMAN
Jonathan Maberry
Kind of hard to find yourself when everything’s turned to shit.
Kind of hard, but when it happens . . . kind of cool.
That’s what Jingo was trying to explain to Moose Peters during their lunch break. Moose liked Jingo, but he wasn’t buying.
“You are out of your fucking mind,” said Moose. “Batshit, dipso, gone-round-the-twist monkeybat crazy.”
“‘Monkeybat’?” asked Jingo. “The hell’s a —”
“I just made it up, but it fits. If you think we’re anything but ass deep in shit, then you’re off your rocker.”
“No man,” said Jingo, stabbing the air with a pigeon leg to emphasize his point, “your problem is that you don’t know a good thing when you see it.”
Moose took a long pull on his canteen, using that to give himself a second to study his friend. He lowered the canteen and wiped his mouth with a cloth he kept in a plastic Ziploc bag in an inner pocket of his shirt. He was careful to not dab his mouth with the back of his hand or blot it on his shirt.
Jingo handed him a squeeze bottle of Purell.
“Thanks,” said Moose in his soft rumble of a voice. The two of them watched each other sanitize their hands, nodded agreement that it had been done, and Jingo took the bottle back. Moose stretched his massive shoulders, sighed, shook his head. “Not sure I get the ‘good’ part of things, man.”
Jingo, who was nearly a foot shorter than Moose, and weighed less than half as much, got to his feet and pointed to the crowd of people on the far side of the chain link fence. “Well, first,” he said, “we could be over there. I don’t have a college degree like you and I haven’t read all those books, but I’m smart enough to know that they got the shit end of the stick. Tell me I’m wrong.”
Moose shook his head. “Okay, sure, they’re all fucked. Everyone knows they’re all fucked. Fucked as fucked will ever get, I suppose.”
“Right.”
“But,” said Moose, “I’m not sure that sells your argument that we have it good.”
“I —”
“Just because we’re on this side of the fence doesn’t sell that to me at all, and here’s why. Those poor dumb bastards are fucked, we agree on that, but they don’t know they’re fucked. At worst, they’re brain-dead meat driven by the last misfiring neurons in their motor cortex. At best — at absolute best — they’re vectors for a parasite. Like those ants and grasshoppers, with larvae in their brains or some shit. I read about that stuff in Nat Geo. Either way, the people who used to hold the pink slips on all those bodies have gone bye-byes. Lights are on but no one’s home.”
“You going somewhere with that?” asked Jingo as he rummaged in his knapsack for his bottle of cow urine.
“What I’m saying,” continued Moose, “is that although they’re fucked they are beyond knowing about it and beyond caring. They’re gone, for all intents and purposes. So how can you compare us to them?”
Jingo found the small spray bottle, uncapped it and began spritzing his pants and shirtsleeves. The stuff had been fermenting for days now and even through his own body odor and the pervasive stench of rot that filled every hour of every day, the stink was impressive. Moose’s eyes watered.
“We’re alive, for a start,” Jingo said, handing the bottle to Moose.
The big man shook his head. “Not enough. Give me a better reason than us still sucking air.”
“A better reason than being alive? How much better a reason do we need?”
Moose waggled the little bottle. “We’re spraying cow piss on our clothes because it keeps dead people from biting us. I don’t know, Jingo, maybe I’m being a snob here, but I’m not sure this qualifies as quality of life. If I’m wrong, then go ahead and lay it out for me.”
They stood up and looked down the hill to the fence. It stretched for miles upon miles, cutting this part of Virginia in half. Their settlement was built hard against the muddy banks of Leesville Lake, with a dozen other survivor camps strung out along the Roanoke River. On their side of the fence were hundreds of men and women, all of them thinner than they should be, filthy, wrapped in leather and rags and pieces of armor that were either scavenged from sporting goods stores or homemade. Dozens of tractors, earthmovers, frontend loaders and bulldozers dotted the landscape, but most of them were near the end of their usefulness. Replacement parts were hard to find. Going into the big towns to shop was totally out of the question. Flatbeds sat in rows, each laden with bundles of metal poles and spools of chain link fencing.
On the other side of the fence, stretching backward like a fetid tide, were the dead. Hundreds of thousands of them. Every race, every age, every type. A melting pot of the American population united now only in their lack of humanity and their shared, ravenous, unassuageable hunger. Here and there, stacked within easy walk of the fence, were the mounds of bodies. Fifty-eight mounds that Moose and Jingo could count from the hill on which they’d sat to eat lunch. Hill seventeen was theirs. Six hundred and fifteen bodies contributed to the composition of that hill. Parts of that many people. Though, to be accurate, there were not that many whole people even if all the parts were reassembled. Many of them had already been missing limbs before Jingo and Moose went to work on them. And before the cutters did their part. Blowflies swarmed in their millions above the field and far above the vultures circled and circled.
Moose shook his head. “If I’m missing anything at all, then please tell me, ‘cause I’m happy to be wrong.”
As they began prepping for the afternoon shift, Jingo tried to make his case. Moose actually wanted to hear it. Jingo was always trying to paint pretty colors on shit, but lately he’d become a borderline evangelist for this new viewpoint.
“Okay, okay,” Jingo said as he wrapped the strips of carpet around his forearms and anchored them with Velcro, “so life in the moment is less than ideal.”