The New Hunger (2 page)

The scanning window emits a few beeps. The guns twitch on their arm mounts. Then silence.

Julie’s father glances around expectantly. “Colonel John T. Grigio, U.S Army,” he repeats, “requesting immigration.”

Silence.

“Hello!” He lowers his hands to his sides. “I have a wife and kid with me. We came from New York by way of the north and middle territories and have much intel to share. Colonel John T. Grigio, requesting immigration!”

A red light blinks on behind the black glass, then fades. The twin surveillance cameras wobble briefly but remain pointed at random points in the grass, as if fascinated by some caterpillars.

“How old was that Almanac?” Julie whispers to her mother, gripping the seat to pull herself forward.

“Two months,” her mother says, and the tightness in her voice pushes Julie’s heart underwater.

“We have skills!” her father yells, his voice filling with an emotion that startles her. “My wife is a veterinarian. My daughter is combat trained. I was an O-6 colonel and commanded federal forces in twelve secession conflicts!”

He stands in front of the gate, waiting with apparent patience, but Julie can see his shoulders rising and falling dangerously. She realizes she is seeing a rare sight: a glimpse into her father’s secret bunker. His hopes were as high as his wife’s.

“Requesting immigration!” he roars savagely and hammers the butt of his pistol into the scanning window. It bounces pitifully off the bulletproof glass, but this action finally elicits a reaction. The red light blinks on again. The surveillance cameras wobble. A garbled electronic voice fills the air
—ARNING—SAULT RESPONSE—ETHAL FORCE—
and the guns begin spraying bullets.

Julie screams as geysers of dust erupt inches from her father’s feet. He leaps backward and runs, not toward the truck but into the grass of the park. But the guns don’t follow him. They spin on their arms, strafing the road, bending downward and bouncing bullets off the steel door itself, then they abruptly go limp, barrels bouncing against the concrete.

Julie’s mother hops out of the car and runs to her husband’s side. They both stare at the wall in shock.

FILE,
it declares in its buzzing authoritarian baritone.
RESPONSE FILE CORRU—RETINA SCAN—AILED. REQUESTING RESPONSE FROM FEDERAL AUTHORIT—ASSWORD. ASSWORD—EQUIRED. WORK VISA. DUTY-FREE. APPLE MAGGOT.

The guns rise.

Julie’s parents jump into the Tahoe and her father slams it in reverse, lurching backward just as the guns spray another wild arc across the road. When they’re out of range he pulls a sharp slide in the muddy grass, flipping the Tahoe around, and they all pause to catch their breath as Canada’s border goes about losing its mind. The guns have stopped spinning and are both pointed down at the same spot, diligently pounding bullets into the dirt.

“What the
fuck
?” Julie’s mother says between gasps.

Julie digs through the duffel bag on the seat next to her and pulls out her father’s sniper scope. She runs it along the top of the wall, past coil after coil of razor wire, scraps of clothing and the occasional bits of dried flesh. Then she sees an explanation, and herligion, an heart finishes drowning.

“Dad,” she mumbles, handing him the scope. She points. He looks. He sees it. A uniformed arm dangling over the edge of the wall. Two helmets caught in the razor wire, one containing a head. And three city-sized plumes of smoke rising from somewhere beyond the wall.

Her father hands the scope back to her and drives calmly toward the freeway, steering clear of the gun turrets that bristle from the Peace Arch. His face is flat, all traces of that unnerving lapse into passion now gone. For better or worse, he is himself again.

After five minutes of silence, her mother speaks, her voice as flat as her husband’s face. “Where are we going.”

“South.”

Five more minutes.

“To where?”

“Rosso’s heard chatter about a fortified enclave in South Cascadia. When we get in radio range we’ll check in with him.”

“What happened?” Julie asks in a small voice. Her only answer is the roar of the tires on the cracked, leaf-strewn pavement of I-5 South. There are dozens of answers for her to choose from, everything from anarchic uprising to foreign invasion to the newer, more exotic forms of annihilation that have recently graced the world, but the relevant portion of every answer is the same: Canada is gone. The land is still there, and maybe some of its people, but Canada the safe haven, Canada the last vestige of North American civilization, Canada the new place to call home—that Canada is as lost as Atlantis, sunk beneath the same tide of blood and hunger that drowned the home she fled.

Suddenly exhausted, she closes her eyes and slips into nightmares again. Graveyards rising out of the ocean. Her friends’ corpses in the light of their burning school. Skeletons ripping open men’s chests and crawling inside. She endures it patiently, waiting for the horror film to end and the theater to go dark, those precious few hours of blackout that are her only respite.

Julie Bastet Grigio has reasons to sleep darkly. Her life has seen little light. She is twelve years old but has a woman’s weathered poise. Her abyss-blue eyes have a piercing focus that some adults find unsettling. Her mother ties her hair in a ponytail but Julie pulls it out, letting it fall into a loose mess of yellow and gold. She has fired a gun into a human head. She has watched a pile of bodies set alight. She has starved and thirsted, stolen food and given it away, and glimpsed the meaning of life by watching it end over and over. But she has just turned twelve. She likes horses. She has never kissed a boy.

What city is this
? When did it die? And which of the endless selection of disasters killed it? If print news hadn’t vanished years ago, Nora could find a paper blowing in the street and read the bold headlines declaring the end. Now she’s left to wonder. Was it something quick and clean? Earthquakes, showers of space debris, freak tornados and rising tides? Or was it one of the threats that linger? Radiation. Viruses. People.

She knows that knowing wouldn’t change anything. Death will introduce itself in its own time, and when she has shaken its hand and heard its offer, she will try her best to bargain with it.

“Can I go swimming?” Addis pleads.

“We don’t know what’s in there. It could be dangerous.”

“It’s the ocean!”

“Yeah, but not really.”

They are standing onspa a new coastline. The ocean has grown tired of living on the beach and has moved to the city. Gentle waves lap against telephone poles. Pink and green anemones compete for real estate on parking meters. A barnacled BMW rocks lazily in the shifting tides.

“Pleeease?” Addis begs.

“You can wade in it. But only to your knees.”

Addis whoops and starts pulling off his muddy, shredded Nikes.

“Keep your shoes on. There’s probably all kinds of nasty stuff in there.”

“But it’s the ocean!”

“Shoes on.”

He surrenders, rolls his jeans over his knees, and sloshes into the waves. Nora watches him long enough to decide he won’t drown or be eaten by urban sharks, then pulls the filter out of her pack and kneels at the water’s edge to fill her jug. She remembers a photo of her grandmother doing the same in some filthy Ethiopian river, and how it always made her glad she was born in America. She smiles darkly.

It took only eight feet to drown every port in the world. New York is a bayou. New Orleans is a reef. Whatever city this is, it’s lucky to be sitting on a hill—the ocean has claimed only a few blocks. While her brother splashes and squeals, Nora scans the waterline for any trace of actual beach, some little patch of sand on the last remaining high ground. She remembers the feeling of sweaty toes digging into cool mud. She remembers sprinting over the thin after-waves that slid over each other like sheets of glass. When she ran with the waves it looked like she wasn’t moving. When she ran against them it looked like she was flying. She refuses to believe her brother will never know these things. Somewhere, they will find sand.

When she looks back at him he’s in up to his neck, swimming.

“Addis Horace Greene!” she hisses. “Out, right now!”

“Brr!” he squeals as he dog-paddles past the post office, through soggy clusters of letters floating like lily pads. “It’s cold!”

• • •

Nora is grateful that it’s summer. The late-July heat is unpleasant but it won’t kill them. They can sleep in doorways or alleyways or in the middle of the street with nothing more than their tattered blanket to keep the dew off. She wonders how long her parents debated their decision. If they might have waited a few months for the weather to warm. She would like to believe in this tiny kindness, but she finds it hard.

“Do we have
anything
left to eat?” Addis asks, shivering in his wet jeans. “Even some crumbs?”

Nora digs through her backpack reflexively, but no miracle has taken place. No fishes or loaves have appeared. It contains the same flashlight, blanket, filter, and bottle it always has, nothing more. Not counting the Oreos, Addis’s last meal was two days ago. Nora can’t remember when hers was.

She turns in a circle, examining the surrounding city. All the grocery stores are long since gutted. She found their last few morsels in the kitchen of a homeless shelter—five Oreos and half a can of peanuts—but that was an unlikely windfall. Actual restaurants are the lowest of low-hanging fruit and were probably stripped bare on this city’s first day of anarchy. But something on the horizon catches her eye. She bunches her lips into a determined scowl.

“Come on,” she says, grabbing her brother’s hand.

They wriggle through a tangle of rebar from a bombed-out McDonalds, climb over a rusty mountain of stacked cars, and there it is, rising in the distant haze: a wansnt hazehite Eiffel Tower with a flying saucer on top.

“What’s that?” Addis asks.

“It’s the Space Needle. I guess we’re in Seattle.”

“What’s the Space Needle?”

“It’s like…I don’t know. A tourist thing.”

“What’s that round thing on the top? A space ship?”

“I think it’s a restaurant.”

“Can it go into space?”

“I wish.”

“But it’s the
Space
Needle.”

“Sorry, Addy.”

He frowns at the ground.

“But space ships don’t have food. Restaurants do.”

He raises his eyes, hopeful again. “Can we get up there?”

“I don’t know. Let’s go see if the power’s still on.”

• • •

It’s more eerie to be alone in a city that’s lit up and functioning than one that’s a tomb. If everything were silent, one could almost pretend to be in nature. A forest. A meadow. Crickets and birdsong. But the corpse of civilization is as restless as the creatures that now roam the graveyards. It flickers and blinks. It buzzes to life.

When the first signs of the end came—a riot here, a secession there, a few too many wars to shrug off with “boys will be boys”—people started to prepare. Every major business installed generators, and when the oil derricks started pumping mud and the strategic reserves burned up on a doomsday cult’s altar, solar power suddenly didn’t seem so whimsical. Even the brashest believers in America’s invincibility shut their mouths and gazed at the horizon with a wide-eyed
oh shit
stare. Solar panels appeared everywhere, glittering blue on highrise roofs and suburban lawns, nailed haphazardly onto billboards, blocking out the faces of grinning models like censorship bars.

By then it was too late for such baby steps, of course. But at least this last desperate effort will provide a few extra years of light for the next generation, before it too flickers out.

Nora gives her brother’s hand a squeeze as they make their way toward the Space Needle. The sun is setting and the monument’s lights are coming on one by one. The tip of the needle blinks steadily, a beacon for planes that will never leave the ground.

In a remote stretch of land
that has never known human footprints, nature is witnessing a strange sight. A dead thing is moving. Crows circle it uncertainly. Rats sniff the air wafting from it, trying to settle the disagreement between their eyes and noses. But the tall man is unaware of his effect on the surrounding wildlife. He is busy learning how to walk.