Ancient national rivalries and recent jealousies surfaced. Around the world, governments went into emergency sessions. Many politicians saw the sudden eruption of violence as an attack on their citizens as the work of terrorist cells. Others claimed it was a biblical plague, Ragnarok or the early return of the Rudras.
I can’t say how long its been since the world went to pieces. All the clocks seem to have stopped. A couple of kids built a sundial, but with half the cities in the world still burning the sky is mostly a swirling soup of ash. We keep warm by looting the libraries I used to wade through, burning first the old periodicals, then the card catalogs, bestsellers and self-help books, finally working our way up to the first editions.
Some days, the sky bursts open and rains fish. Sometimes stones or Barbie dolls. Last night, I cooked a sky salmon over an autographed copy of The Great Gatsby. I shared the fish with Natasha, a mute girl who runs one of the cranes, hauling carcasses from the freon pools. She’s been staying with me out by the docks, in the cargo container I commandeered. I killed a man to get the container and still have to slice and dice the occasional house crasher. Natasha’s not shy with a knife or length of rebar and has done more than a few intruders herself. I assume the ones she did were intruders. Anyway, it keeps us in meat.
I’m not sure that you’d call what we have a typical romance. I live with a girl who can make gloves from a poodle’s hide and scavenges boots and clothes for me, and they’re always my size. She grows herbs in a bathtub on the roof and decorates our home with wind-up toys and parts of smashed statues from looted museums. I miss ice cream, convertibles and going to the movies. I’m not fool enough to say that I’m happier since the world went away, but except for the rains of stones, I’m no more miserable.
They found a layer of zoo animals under the collapsed roadway of the Williamsburg Bridge. People over there have been living large on elephant steaks and giraffe burgers. The local government wants us to help gather up the remaining body parts, so we do. No one asks why. It’s something to do. Besides, the paper pushers refuse to let the world end until every form is turned in, timestamped and properly initialed. Apocalypse is the last gasp of bureaucracy.
After dinner, Natasha and I sit on top of the cargo container watching a field full of cop cars sink slowly into a newly risen tar pit. Everyone from the docks is there. We give might Whoop! as the last car slides, bubbling, below the surface.
Will the last person on the planet please turn off the lights?
ARTIE’S ANGELS
by Catherine Wells
Catherine Wells is the author of several books, including the post-apocalyptic novel Mother Grimm and the Coconino trilogy: The Earth is All That Lasts, Children of the Earth, and The Earth Saver. Her latest is Stones of Destiny, her first foray into historical fiction. Her short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s and Analog, and the anthologies Redshift and The Doom of Camelot.
This story, which first appeared in Realms of Fantasy, was inspired by a disturbing dream Wells had more than 30 years ago. In the dream, a young man shimmied up a drainpipe in a tenement to visit his friend; and although he was a good person, someone came to his bicycle shop and fired a shotgun through the plate glass window. The senselessness and injustice of that dream event haunted Wells, and years later, as she rode a tandem bicycle along the back roads of Arizona, she imagined a post-apocalyptic society involving bicycles and young man such as the one in her dream, and “Artie’s Angels” was the result.
When you set out to perpetrate a lie, I suppose it’s counterproductive to write down the truth like this. But whatever population survives here on Earth is not likely to read this, much less believe it. Most of them can’t read anymore as it is—not Book English, anyway—and it will probably get worse before it gets better. Much, much worse.
My birth name is Faye, but I have not used it since I was ten. That’s the year we moved inside the radiation shield, into a wreck of a building in Kansas Habitat. My mother cried, because my little brother died just before we got there, and she kept moaning that if only we’d gotten inside sooner, he might have lived. But you had to have either money or skills to get inside the radiation shield, and my parents had neither. So we fried our skins and our eyeballs in Earth’s unfiltered sunlight until enough rich people moved offworld to make room for us under the shield.
Artie knocked at my window the first night; he’d shinnied up the drainpipe from his apartment just below. The artificial rain no longer worked in our sector, of course, because the infrastructure was well on the road to hell, but the drainpipe was still there. Artie D’Angelo was this skinny kid, just my age, a little goofy-looking, but agile as a monkey. When I saw him hanging on that drainpipe, I was more amazed than frightened. “Hi!” he said through the glass, grinning widely. He had dark, curly hair, deep brown eyes, and big ears.
I climbed onto my bed, which was under the window, and stared at him. “You gonna open up?” he asked. “Or let me hang on this drainpipe all night?”
With a glance over my shoulder to make sure my door was shut, I lifted the sash and Artie climbed in. “I’m Artie,” he introduced. “I live downstairs.”
“Faye,” I replied. “You can’t use the door?”
“I knocked before,” he said, “but no one would answer.”
I knew the cause of that. “My dad’s scared to open the door,” I told Artie.
He shrugged. “In this neighborhood, you’re better off. But I saw you moving in, and I thought you must be from outside, so you’d probably need someone to show you around.”
During the next months, Artie did just that. Born in KanHab, he knew its grid upground and under. If not for his tutelage, I would probably have died in that first year. By the time they got around to letting dregs like my family in, half the sectors were more or less lawless, and a 10-year-old kid could easily get snuffed if she didn’t know where to run and where to hide. Artie taught me that and more. In those early days, he was my salvation; in these latter days, I shall be his.
It was while we were hiding from the Citizen Patrols in B4 that he first spoke the name I took as my own. That was back when the Sisters of Literacy still tried to run schools in B4, which was as close as they would get to B9 where Artie and I lived. School didn’t excite me, but Mom wanted me to go, and Artie insisted crossing into B4 was at least as safe as living in B9. Most of the time that was true, but not when the Citizen Patrols were out.
We knew there was going to be trouble that day, because Melissa’s desk had been empty at roll call, and word got around by recess that she’d been found in a trash bin, missing a few parts. So the Citizen Patrols were out that afternoon, looking for someone to punish. B9ers were a favorite target. Artie and I ran from shadow to shaft, upground and under, trying to stay out of their way. We watched from beneath an abandoned maintenance cart as they rousted three teenage boys playing hoops in the street.
The boys must have scanned as B4s, because the CPs started to walk away; but then one of the boys said something. Something dirty, and cruel. And a CP just shot him. With a crossbow, that is, because no pulse or projectile weapons were ever allowed in the habitats—too much danger of damaging the shielding. When the other two boys went for their knives, the CPs shot them, too.