Selection Event (8 page)

“We can't let you do that. Our purpose is bigger than our individual quirks and desires. Ask what you can do for your country, or I'll do it to you. I'm sure you can understand that,” he said smoothly, never raising his voice. “The old corrupt civilization is gone, the civilization that let this disease thing happen to us. In our own humble way, we're just trying to bring back some of the good parts, the way life in America was supposed to be. We're just trying to do what all our departed friends and relatives would want us to do. Look, Marty, we have a place on the north side of town, got the generators hooked up this morning for when the electricity goes off, we got tvs, movies, entertainment, refrigeration, good food, conveniences, like the old days. Come on, Martin.” He winked and jerked his head sideways. “Have a look. You'll like it.”

First the man had threatened him, now he was cajoling him. Martin decided to push it a little further. “What if I don't want to join your project.”

“Ryan will shoot you, right now, before we leave.”

“I see.”

 Ryan, the tall man with the thin red hair, looked along the barrel of his rifle. He did not change his expression or blink.

If he resisted, they could kill him in the next few moments, without much fanfare or difficulty. Worse, Stewart would get to enjoy it. If he let Captain Zero know what he really felt, they would watch him every minute — lock him up, even, or shoot him. So what was left? Passive hostility. He would let them see grumpiness, but he'd cooperate, and the first chance he got, he'd be gone.

“Just to clarify, you'll kill me,” he said, “if I don't do it your way.”

“That's right. If you're not helping us, you're hurting us.”

“So. What do you want me to do?”

Mr. Curtiz was all smiles. “Good. Civilization might mean that someone is pushing someone else around, Martin, but in this case, it's for the common good. I guarantee, you're going to like what you see.” He reached out to put his arm around him, paternal, protective, and repulsive.

“Can I bring my dog?”

“We can't be bothered with pets, Martin. We've all cut our ties to the Old World. This is the New Age.”

He patted Martin on the back twice. “Let's go. You have a new life in front of you. You ride with me.”

They formed a caravan of four vehicles, the Land Rover in front, three vans following. The man named Ryan drove, and Martin sat in the back with Curtiz.

On their way across town, the Curtiz pointed and explained his plans involving gasoline collection teams, street clearance, re-establishment of a communication system, water purification, and on and on. “How many of us are there?” Martin asked him at one point, and Curtiz answered, “Seventeen.” Then he continued with longer range plans which involved wood-fueled generation of electricity, irrigation, and huge agricultural projects.

Within fifteen minutes, Martin was convinced that Curtiz had abandoned reality some months ago. His plans required hundreds of people, thousands perhaps, in dozens of support industries. The only way Martin could see this being done was with slave labor. Who would slop pigs when a person could live a life of ease, wander around, pick food off trees or out of supermarkets? Certainly Mr. Curtiz would have a cartridge to answer each objection.

When they reached the north side of town and the headquarters, Martin saw that at least the question of food had not been ignored by Curtiz. In a vacant lot next to the expansive, flag-draped house, a half-dozen people worked spading and raking the ground. Three of them were Asian, one or two were probably Hispanic, and one of them was chubby, moon-faced, and small-eyed. He lifted and dropped his rake over and over in one spot.

“Our field-workers,” Curtiz said. “None of 'em speak English, but they understand dirt. The moron there, he can talk all right, but he's got nothing to say.”

“What's his name?”

“The moron? I don't know. Ryan, do you know?”

The man shook his head as they turned into the driveway.

“This is it, Martin. Come on in and look around. It's your new home.”

Chapter 12

Through the screen door, Isha watched Martin climb into the vehicle and then it made noise and stink and then they all went away with him. But he would be back. The people always came back to her — she knew this.

She returned to the bedroom where she had waited before and looked across the bed. No one was there. She gripped the edge of the bedspread between her teeth and backed away, pulling more of it onto the floor. She lay down and waited.

Late in the day, when the sun made long blurry shadows across the front yard, Isha began pacing the house. Martin would return, or the man and woman — but when? Would she once again have to wait so long and be so hungry?

She stood at the open door, her nose against the screen, and smelled the air and waited. She smelled no other animals, but sometimes, for a moment, she would smell something dead. She pushed her nose against the screen and it opened a crack. She could go out, if she wanted. This was different from the last time.

She looked behind her at the living room and smelled its smells and then pushed the screen open and stepped down onto the front porch. After a brief survey from where she stood, she decided she would first look around where the man and woman used to take her.

Wading through the weeds in the yard, she realized how different everything had become. From the front window, the yard looked much the same, but now standing in it, the weeds dragged across the hair on her chest and belly. She remembered how the man used to walk back and forth in the yard with the loud smelly machine and then the grass would smell strong and afterwards there would be less of it. But he had not been around to do that, and now the grass was tall and coarse.

The edge of the asphalt street smelled less of tire smells than it used to, but lingering in the weeds at the edge of the street was the odor of the men who had been there that morning. She held her nose high in the air, and did not smell cars. Looking first one way and then the other down the street, she saw no cars moving. They were all quietly parked. So she crossed to the other side of the street.

It was here, Isha remembered, behind the white picket fence, that Jojo lived. When Isha walked with the man or woman, the small white dog would charge the fence and snarl and snap and Isha would smell him and the smell of the house he carried with him, and then a woman would appear at the door and shriek, “Jojo! Jojo!” and the man or woman who walked Isha would be amused and Isha would look at the hysterical, outraged Jojo and think that there must be something wrong with him.

Now she stood at Jojo's fence and waited, but Jojo wasn't there. He didn't suddenly appear and throw himself against the pickets. Isha barked twice, but still Jojo didn't appear. This had never happened before.

Isha wanted to hear Jojo bark, so she trotted around into the adjoining yard where the breeze came from a different direction, and she smelled a smell that she knew was Jojo. Jojo's house had an open window and a white curtain blew back and forth, sometimes inside the house, sometimes outside, and that was where the smell came from.

Isha backed up several steps, lowered and tensed her haunches, and leaped over the picket fence. Then, measuring the window's height as she walked back and forth looking up at it, she again positioned herself and leaped up, pushed her head through the curtains, brought her rear legs up and placed her back feet just outside her front paws — and dropped down inside Jojo's house.

The smell was strong now — it was Jojo and something else. Cautiously, Isha moved from this room the kitchen, into the living room. On the sofa sprawled the woman with the high voice, except most of her face was not there and bugs moved on her, especially where her voice used to come from. Isha skirted the woman to avoid the bugs, still looking for Jojo.

She found him in the bathroom. He was also dead, but his smell was stronger. Isha looked at him and remembered how when the man and woman had left the house, she had had to come to a room like this to drink. Perhaps Jojo had been here drinking and had got so hungry that he couldn't leave and then couldn't get up to drink. Isha remembered being that weak.

She looked at him. Jojo wouldn't bark at her anymore. And perhaps the man and woman wouldn't walk her anymore. Isha passed back through the room where the woman sat being eaten by bugs. Isha had seen dead birds and dead mice being eaten by bugs, but never a human. Perhaps the man and woman wouldn't be back to walk her again because they were somewhere being eaten by bugs.

Isha jumped back out the window and then over the picket fence and went to the street. Again she looked for cars, as she had been taught, and there were none... not even the distant noises of cars.

Halfway across the street, she saw something else new, right under her feet. Grass was growing up through swollen-edged cracks. Streets were places without grass, and now it was growing here. She nipped off a few spears, and turned and glanced back at Jojo's house.

This made her uneasy. Jojo was dead in his house with the woman with the shrill voice. Grass was growing in places without grass. Isha could stand in the street and not even hear cars. And the man and woman had been gone a long, long time. Almost all the humans had been gone a long, long time. It made her uneasy, but she could also stand in the street and not have her name shouted. She could go in Jojo's house, and no one knew. She could wander though the neighbors' yards, and no human would see. She liked this. She sat down in the middle of the street and looked in neither direction.

Suddenly, her nose caught something. It was not a cat or a dog or a human — it was different from anything. She smelled its breath, a plant and saliva smell. She moved quickly out of the street and back to her yard, scanning toward the direction of the breeze until she saw it move behind an overgrown hedge.

It was dark and huge — walking on four legs, bigger than a human, though not taller than one. It pushed through the hedge and browsed through the grasses with its short flexible nose. Its dark gray skin was covered with a thin layer of coarse hair, and it moved slowly, lazily, its short ears flicking at flies as the grazed. Its legs were thick and looked like small tree trunks. Then Isha saw there were two more of them — one not so big and another much smaller. They lined up and snuffled through the weeds as they ate.

Isha pawed at the screen door, caught the edge of the bottom frame, pulled it open, and slid inside. She watched the animals till they disappeared and night closed around the house. She was hungry again, and lay down in front of the open screen to sleep and wait.

She knew Martin would come back, but when? How hungry would she have to be this time?

Chapter 13

The house had an opened four-car garage where there was another Land Rover, a couple of small pickups, three motorcycles, and a small truck. Ryan led Martin through the double front door.

Be observant, Martin told himself. Be observant.

The carpet in the living room still retained the impressions of furniture that had been removed. On one wall was a floor-to-ceiling bookcase and on the bottom shelves there was a chaos of papers and maps. The top shelves, the ones out of easy reach, were neat. Their titles related to physiology, disease, and medicine. It could have been a doctor's house.

Ryan led Martin down the hallway, stopped and nodded to a bedroom door. Ryan hadn't said a word yet. His pale eyes were wide and staring and his eyelids drooped away from the bottoms of his eyes. Martin noticed that the large veins in the crook of the man's arms were black. An injector.

Martin went through the door, was closed in, and heard the lock click. When he turned around, there was a boy, maybe eleven or twelve years old, sitting on the edge of one of the two cots. There were bare white plaster walls, a window, boarded up from the outside with a sheet of plywood, an empty closet, and a small bathroom, its window similarly darkened. The light overhead was on.

Martin looked back at the boy. His hair was shaggy, and he held his head down, though he had his eyes turned up, carefully watching Martin. He was dressed in a dirty white t-shirt, jeans, washed-out red tennis shoes, and in his dirty hands he was turning over and over a little toy the size of his thumb, a plastic Superman. On the floor, at his feet, was a paper plate smeared with a few traces of food and a plastic spoon.

Martin sat across from him on the other cot and said, “Are we prisoners?”

The boy nodded.

“They been treating you all right?”

Again he nodded. “They won't let me out.” He had round cheeks and a little bump of a chin.

“How many are there?”

“I seen about ten.”

“I only saw men. Are there any women?”

“Maybe one. I heard a voice that mighta been a woman. Maybe.”

“What's your name?”

“Max,” he said cautiously.

“I'm Martin.” He reached across the space between them and shook the boy's hand. It was hot and grimy.

“Are we gonna excape?”

“You bet,” Martin said. He moved over next to the boy and whispered. “We're going to do whatever they want us to do. We aren't going to cause them any trouble. When I see our chance, we're out of here. And now we won't talk about escaping again. When it's time, I'll let you know. Until then, we do everything they say.”