“Both of us?”
She held up a warning finger. “Don’t even start up on me again.”
Timo couldn’t help grinning. “Wouldn’t dream of it, partner.”
Lucy began dictating the beginnings of her story into her phone, then broke off. “They want our first update in ten minutes, you think you’re up for that?”
“In ten minutes, updates are going to be the least of our problems.”
He was in the flow now, capturing the concrete canal and the dead Texan on the other side.
The dogs leaped and jumped, tearing apart the man who had come looking for water.
It was all there. The whole story, laid out.
The man.
The dogs.
The fences.
The Central Arizona Project.
A whole big canal, drained of water. Nothing but a thin crust of rapidly drying mud at its bottom.
Lucy had started dictating again. She’d turned to face the Phoenix sprawl, but Timo didn’t need to listen to her talk. He knew the story already—a whole city full of people going about their daily lives, none of them knowing that everything had changed.
Timo kept shooting.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Paolo Bacigalupi is the bestselling author of the novels The Windup Girl, Ship Breaker, The Drowned Cities, Zombie Baseball Beatdown, and the collection Pump Six and Other Stories. He is a winner of the Michael L. Printz, Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Compton Crook, and John W. Campbell Memorial awards, and was a National Book Award finalist. He currently lives in Western Colorado with his wife and son, where he is working on a new novel.
Sarah Langan — LOVE PERVERTS
On Display at the Amerasian Museum of Ancient Humanity, 14,201 C.E.
I’m checking my Red Cross crank phone when Jules walks up. We’re the last American colony not to get implants, which places us pretty firmly in the technological third world. My pipeline town in Pigment, Michigan might as well be a flood plain in Bangladesh.
“Ringing mommy dearest?” Jules asks.
“The Crawfords remain indisposed,” I tell her.
“Sucker-boy,” Jules says, not in a mean way, though she’s capable of that. She’s got Schlitz-sticky hair down to her hips and her cheeks are covered in glitter from last night’s rave. Colony Fourteen’s heat and electricity got shut off last week, so her nips push through the spandex cat-suit she’s wearing, hard as million year-old fossils. We’re all about energy conservation here at the dawn of apocalypse.
“I’m just curious,” I say. “I mean, I don’t even know if they made it to Nebraska.”
Jules hip-checks my locker so it rattles. She’s got this rage she doesn’t know she’s carrying—it’s made her heavy-footed and graceless. “Here’s what you do…” She pretend-cranks a gear at her temple. “You just delete. Done! They’re dead.”
“Yeah. Okay,” I say. Like that’s possible. They’ve been my parents for seventeen years. Not to mention my baby sister Cathy, who they totally don’t deserve. And by the way, I know it’s whom. I’m just not an asshole, like you.
“Chillax! You think too much. I did the same thing with my ex until I figured it out. Then I just pretended he died and it was his robot clone I had to sit next to in Mrs. Viotes’ art. Delete!”
“Colby Mudd?” I ask.
“Don’t even say his name. Can you believe he’s still here? I mean, half the town is dead, but he’s still noshing turkey jerky? Jeez! My God! What does he see in that spoiled princess? You’re bringing me down. Point is, fuck your family! I’m your family!”
“Sure. I’ll just change my last name or some nonsense. How was the rest of last night?”
Jules blushes, giggles. Glitter abraids the whites of her eyes, making them red.
“That good?”
I left around midnight. Home brew drugs are for hicks, case in point: As soon as Avery Ryan from the bowling team broke out the meth, everybody went native. They dragged this black-light-painted hunk of granite to the middle of the factory floor and prayed to it like it was weeping Jesus on the cross. For the big finale, a mirror-clad priestess offered herself up. She shattered her mirrors against it, cutting herself bloody. Then everybody started screwing. Clothes off in negative-ten degree weather, spilled corn whisky turned black ice on the floor. Kids, grown-ups, pipeline scabs and militia, all partying together like some prediction straight out of Revelation.
I mean, what the hell?
Growing up, my dad’s job in resource excavation took us all over, and every place was the same: falling apart. It got a lot worse two years ago, when an astronomer played with some numbers and reconfigured Aporia’s trajectory. He predicted a direct hit somewhere near Chicago. We’d all known a big one was due, give or take a billion years. But nobody could agree on what to do about it. Since the Great Resources Grab of the ’20s, the colonies weren’t talking to each other. Asia was all messed up. And you know the French. I mean, they see a problem and they step over it and blame the dog.
Anyway, some private multinationals got together, which goes to show you they’re not all bad. They tried redirecting Aporia by attaching rockets. They tried spattering its far-side with black paint, so the sun’s rays altered its trajectory. They tried opening a black hole, which wound up swallowing most of Long Island before it collapsed.
Then President Brett Brickerson, the former child actor from Nobody Loves an Albatross, got on the Freenet last month and announced that we had one last hope: shooting a nuke rocket at it, head on. He laid down Martial Law in all of America’s sixteen colonies. Pipeline towns like Pigment saw the heaviest military occupation. It’s supposed to be our job to siphon every last drop for the rocket.
Pretty soon after that, the refinery guys striked. They said the government wasn’t playing fair. President Brickerson accused them of holding the entire planet hostage. Next thing, they were all dead and buried in mass graves. The scabs took their place—guys from all over, paid in gold bars. Like the hired guns, they did whatever they wanted, to anybody they wanted, for the simple reason that nobody was around to stop them.
The locals started leaving for Antarctica and Australia. The ones stuck here once the law clamped down got hysterical, suicidal, and shot, not necessarily in that order. “What’s the point of going on like this?” I overheard my mom asking my dad, which I found pretty insulting. I mean, I’m the point, right? Me and Cathy. We’re the whole goddamned point.
The stores sold out of supplies and the school’s cafeteria just served jerky and canned corn, a donation from the heartland. You can’t be seen on the streets without the militia messing with you for vagrancy. Non-compliants hide in their shelters at the old Chevy Factory. It’s quiet during the day, while everybody sleeps off their rave.
Last night’s theme was cosmic mirrors, hence the shattered priestess. I didn’t bother with that nonsense. I just wore my uniform: jeans and an ironic Dead Man’s Plaid t-shirt, plus two denim jackets since some burnout stole the winter coat out of my locker. Jules wrapped herself in tin foil and glitter, teeth chattering the whole walk there. Some of the really popular kids showed up in fancy stolen cars they’d made the underclassmen push. Total Mad Max shit.
Used to be, only the locals knew about the raves. But then the militia and scabs started showing up. They’re bad people. I read my Faulkner and I know what you’re thinking: nobody’s absolutely good or absolutely bad. But ask yourself this: what kind of sociopaths occupy America’s fourteenth colony, imprisoning its citizens inside ground zero, under the pretense of “maintaining order for urgent oil extraction?”