He sat up so that they wouldn’t think he was dead; waved a hand when the first flashlight found him. Mud dripped from his jacket. The policemen arrived first.
“God almighty, that’s a big one!” The cop trained his light on the river creature.
“Told you the fences warn’t no good,” said the other.
Everyone stayed back except the police. The first cop turned the corpse over. Laying on its back, its little arms flopped to the side, it didn’t look nearly as big or intimidating. More folk arrived: some townies he didn’t recognize, the old couple from the farmhouse across the ball fields, and finally, Caprice, the flashlight looking almost too big for her to carry.
The first cop knelt next to the creature, shoved his hat up off his forehead, then said low enough that Trevin guessed that only the other cop could hear him, “Hey, doesn’t this look like the Andersons’ kid? They said they’d smothered him.”
“He wasn’t half that big, but I think you’re right.” The other cop threw a coat over the creature’s face, then stood for a long time looking down at it. “Don’t say anything to them, all right? Maggie Anderson is my wife’s cousin.”
“Nothing here to see, people,” announced the first cop in a much louder voice. “This is a dead ’un. Y’all can head back home.”
But the crowd’s attention wasn’t on them anymore. The flashlights turned on Caprice.
“It’s a baby girl!” someone said, and they moved closer.
Caprice shined her flashlight from one face to the other. Then, desperation on her face, she ran clumsily to Trevin, burying her face in his chest.
“What are we going to do?” she whispered.
“Quiet. Play along.” Trevin stroked the back of her head, then stood. A sharp twinge in his leg told him he’d pulled something. The world was all bright lights, and he couldn’t cover his eyes. He squinted against them.
“Is that your girl, mister?” someone said.
Trevin gripped her closer. Her little hands fisted in his coat.
“I haven’t seen a child in ten years,” said another voice. The flashlights moved in closer.
The old farmer woman stepped into the circle, her face suddenly illuminated. “Can I hold your little girl, son? Can I just hold her?” She extended her arms, her hands quivering.
“I’ll give you fifty bucks if you let me hold her,” said a voice behind the lights.
Trevin turned slowly, lights all around, until he faced the old woman again. A picture formed in his mind, dim at first but growing clearer by the second. One semi-trailer truck, the trailer set up like a child’s room—no, like a nursery! Winnie-the-Pooh wallpaper. A crib. One of those musical rotating things, what cha’ call ums—a mobile! A little rocking chair. Kid’s music. And they’d go from town to town. The banner would say THE LAST O-FORM GIRL CHILD, and he would charge them, yes he would, and they would line up. The money would fall off the table!
Trevin pushed Caprice away from him, her hands clinging to his coat. “It’s okay, darling. The nice woman just wants to hold you for a bit. I’ll be right here.”
Caprice looked at him, despair clear in her face. Could she already see the truck with the nursery? Could she picture the banner and the unending procession of little towns?
The old woman took Caprice in her arms like a precious vase. “That’s all right, little girl. That’s all right.” She faced Trevin, tears on her cheeks. “She’s just like the granddaughter I always wanted! Does she talk yet? I haven’t heard a baby’s voice in forever. Does she talk?”
“Go ahead, Caprice dear. Say something to the nice lady.”
Caprice locked eyes with him. Even by flashlight, he could see the polar blue. He could hear her sardonic voice night after night as they drove across country. “It’s not financially feasible to continue,” she’d say in her two-year-old voice. “We should admit the inevitable.”
She looked at him, lip trembling. She brought her fist up to her face. No one moved. Trevin couldn’t even hear them breathing.
Caprice put her thumb in her mouth. “Daddy,” she said around it. “Scared, Daddy!”
Trevin flinched, then forced a smile. “That’s a good girl.”
“Daddy, scared.”
Up the hill, the tigerzelle hooted, and, just beyond the fence, barely visible by flashlight, the Mississippi gurgled and wept.
STILL LIFE WITH APOCALYPSE
by Richard Kadrey
Richard Kadrey is the author of six novels, including Angel Scene, Butcher Bird, and the quintessential cyberpunk novel Metrophage. His short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies, as well as the magazines Asimov’s, Interzone, Omni, and Wired.
“Still Life With Apocalypse” first appeared in the webzine The Infinite Matrix. The version that appears here is revised and slightly expanded.
Kadrey says that the story came from a dream image of horse carcasses being dragged from canals under industrial lights. He took that image and turned it into a snapshot of life after everything has fallen apart—about the people left behind and the jobs they do to fill their days, about the poor slobs who have to clean up the mess at the end of the world.
They’re dragging another horse from the canal, it’s chestnut coat sheened bubblegum pink from the freon. Each night, more pools bubble to the surface from deep underground. Freon. Old engine oil. Heavy water from forgotten nukes. Every day, a few dozen more hungry animals drown in the stagnant pools.
Loose-limbed in death, the horse sways, rag-like, as the little diesel crane pulls it noisily from the muck and sets in on the pier with the other bodies. In the blue-tinted work lights, we divide the dead into human and animal, sub-divide the animals into Mammals and Other, then sub-divide the Others into Vertebrates and Invertebrates, and so on.
I started out on Information Retrieval, looking for documents in submerged government offices, old libraries and bookstores. Once, I came up in a police records vault, surrounded by mug shots and photos of murder scenes and rapes. I came up in an IRS office where a dissatisfied citizen had gutted an auditor, then placed the bureaucrat’s viscera on a photocopier. I swam through hundreds of grainy duplicates of his liver and intestines. I came up in adult bookshops and bought back waterlogged sex toys and old issues of Wet & Messy Fun. Bring back anything useful they said, so why not? Everything I bought back went into one big pile to be sorted by Information Classification.
I wish there had been a war, a plague or some new, grand Chernobyl. Something we could point to and say, “That’s it. That’s what killed the world.” But it wasn’t like that.
It started in New York. Or London. Mumbai, possibly. A minor traffic accident—just a fender bender—and someone missed a meeting, which meant someone else couldn’t send a fax, which made someone else miss a plane. That someone got into an argument with the cabbie and was shot. No one knows by whom. Whatever happened, the shooting sparked a riot. TV cameras broadcast the riot live to a country so knotted with fury and tension that riots broke out from Maine to Hawaii. When the footage hit the satellites, riots spontaneously exploded around the world.
In the Helinski-Vantaa airport, a group of baggage handlers and striking sex workers pushed vending machines from third floor windows into the parking lot, killing a visiting Spanish diplomat. In Shanghai, farmers and students went on a rampage, destroying the newly built ocean-front casinos, burning the buildings and tossing billions of yen into the harbor. In New Orleans, children invaded the above-ground cemeteries and dragged the dead through the streets.