Selection Event (18 page)

He turned his attention to the city around him. Wherever he looked, there was not a single spark of light. Perhaps he was now alone in the city. The only lights were above him, the fuzzy glow of a few bright stars through the hazy atmosphere. He wished he had brought Isha along to keep him company.

With the radio on his shoulder, he mucked his way down the outcropping and back to his car, feeling more alone than ever.

Like an Adam with no Eve. Or, more likely, he thought, like the last Neanderthal, remnant of a failed species.

Chapter 31

Diaz rode like the wind, full throttle, a hundred and ten. Around him, the desert bloomed as he'd never imagined it could. A haze of lavender colored the land near the horizon, and clumps of red and gold along the roadside blurred past him. Steel gray thunderclouds were already gathering again, and it had begun to mist, but the wind kept his goggles swept clear. Diaz leaned forward across the handlebars to lower his wind resistance and get a few more miles an hour out of the babe. Salt Lake City was no place to crash and burn. It was too flat, too much salt water. Too many negatory vibes in the air. But Denver, he was thinking, let me just get to Denver. Drops of rain hit his ears like bullets.

He had taken too long, screwed around too much in Winnemucca with an ex-whore he'd met, stayed long after his feet had healed up from a sixty-mile skate after the Indian threw a rod, spent too many cooled-out evenings on the top floor of the Winnemucca Hilton watching the rain make the desert bloom and drinking black rum with Jan-Louise, burning money in the fireplace to keep warm, smoking Cadillac joints and writing poetry.

He thought he was in heaven, above the earth like that, lightning flashing on Jan-Louise as she danced for him, freezing her perfect body in blue-white light, thunder shaking the walls like an angry god, and then he woke up one morning and knew he was on the down-side of his cycle, on a fast slide into the land of the shitrain where everything would be ugly, and all livings thing would have
DEATH
  stamped across them. While he was paralyzed by the poison his DNA arranged to be periodically pumped into his blood, he would remember all the faces of the names on his list. 

So he got out of bed, said goodbye to the bewildered Jan-Louise, put some food and his re-wheeled skates in the saddlebags of a six-cylinder Kawasaki Warpspeed, and left with a capital L.

Blazing out of the flats, along the Salt Lake shore, he knew he wasn't going to make it out of the city limits. This was the end of the trail. His thoughts had gone blank, died, and some leaden-voiced stranger in his head intoned, “Enter the land of death, detritus of civilized defecation, world without hope, garden of the euth artist, end now, done now... prepare... prepare....”

He swerved off the freeway, slid the bike into the gravel parking lot of a cheap motel, stepped off it as it spun out from under him, concentrated hard and dug out his drug kit from the saddlebags, staggered to the nearest door, number 5, slammed it open with his shoulder and collapsed on the bed, not unconscious, he was conscious enough, but he no longer saw any point in moving.

The rain began to fall in earnest, the storm enclosing the city in a cocoon of rain and thunder. Through the open door, Diaz watched the motorcycle flicker in the lightning, rain puddling around it. The heat of his body begin to dissipate in the cold room. Psychic entropy progressed geometrically.

He lay on his stomach, head crooked toward the door, and in his shirt pocket he could feel his list of names, like the flat seed of death pressing against his heart.

Chapter 32

After he had stored the drugs in a cabinet the animals couldn't get into, had lunch, and had run through the empty shortwave bands again, he stood in the middle of the living room asked himself, “What next?” There wasn't anything left to do. He knew it was unreal security, but, at the moment, with a well-provisioned living space and the protection of drugs, living at the end of the world was not all that difficult. In fact, he was bored.

He needed to plant another garden, but the ground was so wet he wouldn't be able to do that for several days. But other than that...?

He could read. The people who had lived here had all kinds of books. He took a paperback mystery down off the shelf and stood beside the bookcase and read a few pages. It was about people back in the old times going to movies and talking to each other, and it made him think of Delana. These people ate in restaurants, had wine brought to them, they kissed.... It made his heart ache to read it. He closed its covers and slid it back with the others.

He walked back and forth through the house, Isha's head turning to follow him each time he passed through the living room, but nothing further occurred to him that he could do.

He took a bottle of beer from the floor of the garage where the cement kept it cool and stood out on the sidewalk in the bleary sunlight and drank it. A cow grazed in a neighbor's yard. The water had receded from a broad path down the middle of the street, but the gutter water moved very slowly. Probably it would be several days before it was gone. So. “What next?”

He knew the answer all along, of course. But admitting it to himself, actually saying the words inside his head, meant stepping into further uncharted territory, giving himself over to something that could be either momentous, lethal, or have grindingly depressing results.

“Well, now, shall I do it?” he asked himself as he stood on the edge of the street, the waters beginning to recede. Birds chattered as they waded and fed from the neighbors' yards. “I suppose now's the time.”

Now he had said it. Now he would start looking for other people.

First thing, he strapped on the holster and pistol he'd found in the house, a .22 semi-automatic, went to a hardware store and got a small generator and a good-sized crowbar. Then, in the business area of the city, he selected one of the newer office buildings, broke in, and lugged the generator to an office where there was a copy machine. The dim, lifeless air in the place smelled of plastics and polyesters and raw cement.

He enjoyed putting the generator in the middle of the fake rosewood conference table and pulling the starter cord, bringing it to life. Then he plugged the copier into the outlet, turned it on, and watched the display lights turn from an orange
Wait
to a green
Ready
.  

He pried open a storage cabinet and took out two reams of bright orange paper and stacked them into the copy machine's feeder tray. On a white sheet, the master, he wrote,

ANYONE OUT THERE?

I'll be at Arden Park

near the Outcropping

at sunset.

He centered this on the glass, punched in 999 copies, and the machine went to work.

“Neo-post-modern living,” he said with a smile, a caveman with a copier instead of a club.

He wandered through the building while he waited. Already the roof of the fifteen story building had leaked down here to the third floor. The slump-block wall had grown slick with algae where water dribbled behind a secretary's desk.

On desks lay litters of papers and forms and blank-screened computers. Down the hallway, through a glass door, he saw the body of a man in an expensive pin-striped suit, still at his desk, slumped across an array of complex forms. The decomposition of his body was extreme and the plush carpet around his chair had stained black.

Martin felt himself grimacing as he thought of dying in such a place. The dead man must have been one of the few at the end who wanted to spend more time at the office.

How long would it be, he wondered, before mankind got this far again, building computers, information networks, and tall synthetic buildings in which to house everything? Two hundred years? Three hundred? Or maybe people would do something entirely different and base their livelihoods on something other than making money. But from what he knew of people, if it wasn't the acquisition of money, it would be the acquisition of something else that could readily be transformed into power.

He went back to the copier, disconnected the generator but left it where it was, and took the 999 sheets down to his car.

Before he left the office building's parking lot, he punctured the gas tanks of two cars, collected the fuel, refilled his own car, and went on to phase two of his project.

For two hours, he drove through Santa Miranda, mainly in the residential areas, honking the car horn — three short blasts every block — and dropping several orange sheets out the window. In the rearview mirror, he watched them spin behind the car, float down into the street or drift into the yards.

 As usual, he had to drive around the dairy cows that stood dull-eyed and helpless in the middle of streets, probably wondering in their passive, hybridized minds if something had changed. What had changed was that now they were the prey of other animals. In three places he had seen the remains of cows that had been brought down. Their scattered bones had been picked clean.

It didn't seem to him that he had seen enough dog-packs to account for this. Perhaps there were other predators out there — leopards or bears or wolves that had been released from the zoo.

One neighborhood seemed to have been taken over by magpies. Whereas in the old world, he remembered occasionally seeing only one or two, now, in this one block, there were hundreds, perched on television antennas, power lines, pecking at bugs in wet overgrown lawns, strutting and flashing their stark black and white feathers in the cottony sunlight.

Passing by a neighborhood park, he saw a coyote trot stiffly through the overgrown weeds, see him, pause in midstep, and then vanish, like magic.

Nature was resuming its reign over the earth. As soon as man let up his endless cutting, leveling, fencing, and patroling, all designed to push nature into neatly controlled parcels, it came back in a rush. Now coyotes, birds, hippos, giraffes, wandering dog-packs, and who knew what else would compete, prey and evade, and fill the niches in the redefining ecology.

He dropped the last of his advertisements out the car window and still had a couple of hours before sunset, so he drove the three miles to the appliance store where he had hooked up the freezers and found they were working fine. He refilled the generators' gas tanks, and from one of the freezers he took a frozen loaf of bread dough, and a package of bacon, and drove on to his house.

When he let himself in, Isha pranced around him and made breathy whining noises till he gave her half a dozen long, head-to-rump strokes.

“We may have company,” he said to her, putting out some food for her and the cat. They both ate heartily. He hadn't paid much attention to it, but the young cat was growing noticeably, even in the last week. Its manx body was different from other cats: its body was shorter than an ordinary cat, and its back legs were longer than the front, giving it a raked look. “Mona, what kind of beast will you be when you grow up?”

She glanced across at his feet but didn't lift her head from her food.

He read the directions for the bread, but since he didn't have an oven, he put it in a large sauce pan, let it thaw and rise, and then put it on low heat on the gas camp stove. Meanwhile, he fried up the bacon, and the house filled with a smell he then realized he had forgotten. The greasiness of the smell was sickeningly heavy, but it was also pungently sweet, and watching the bacon edges turn brown as they ruffled up made his mouth water.

The bread was not thoroughly baked, but it was hot and it smelled like bread and he loved it. With the crusts he sopped up the drops of grease on his plate but he began feeling overfull almost immediately and tossed the pieces onto the floor for the two animals. Isha wolfed hers but Mona stood over her small crust, not knowing exactly what to do with it, growling as loud as a dog and watching that no one tried to take it away from her.

Martin looked out the window for the position of the sun, thinking how he had already given up watches and precise time.

The sun didn't set these days; instead it faded into the thickened atmosphere at the horizon, and it was time now for him to return to Santa Miranda, to Arden Park, to see if anyone had found his message.

“Isha, come along.” She became instantly alert. “Maybe you can help me with this.”

Martin took the .22 from the back of a kitchen chair, buckled it on, and the two of them got in the car.

He parked five blocks from Arden Park, closed the car door without noise, and approached cautiously. Isha saw his caution and kept near him, her ears up, alert.

Once near the park, Martin scanned it for any movement or human form and then watched Isha as she did the same, waiting to see if her attention focused on anything in particular. Neither saw anything, so they took a side street, circled around, and studied the park from a different direction. Again, they saw no one.

This time he'd do whatever it took to keep from running into another Curtiz.

On the third approach, from the north side, Isha stopped suddenly, her ears erect and focused forward. She stopped breathing through her mouth and began using her nose to sample the air.

That was when Martin saw the woman. He and Isha were still across the street from the park, a hundred feet or so away. The young woman sat out in the open, on a bench next to the chainlink fence that surrounded the base of the outcropping. She sat with her legs crossed, her head bent forward, long hair covering her shoulders and most of her face, reading a book.