Worlds Apart (21 page)

We stepped through the shattered door. The store was dark and dusty and rank with mildew. One of the boys sneezed; then I did. Somehow that made the place suddenly less sinister.

I clicked on my flashlight and checked the list. “First we ought to try to find a wheelbarrow or cart or something.” I played the light around but didn’t see anything with wheels.

“I’ll check upstairs,” Friedman said. He and I probably had the only two working flashlights in the state.

“Here’s an axe,” the younger black boy, Timmy, called out. “Din’t we want a axe?”

“Yeah.” I took the light over to him. It was a fire axe, in a box on the wall. Somebody had broken the glass covering but for some reason left the axe in place.

Timmy tugged on it and it came free with a slow rusty creak. “Prob’ly set off a bell when he break the glass, he puke out an’ run.” He tested the edge with his thumb and smiled. It occurred to me that the children had only an abstract, second-hand, notion of the destructive power of
the weapons they were carrying. But Timmy knew what an axe could do.

Friedman found a child’s wagon and a wheelbarrow upstairs. The boys helped him carry them down, then they went back up to raid the garden supplies.

There wasn’t much on the shelves downstairs. Indira and Timmy and I went up and down the rows without finding anything more useful than plastic kitchenware and spray paint. The bins that used to contain the hardware we needed had been thoroughly empt ied.

For once I used my brain. Underneath the display bins there were locked cabinets. I had Timmy bash open one of them, and lo: dozens of boxes of nails and screws. Inventory control. We stacked them up in the wagon and broke into the next cabinet. Screwdrivers of every description. Then hammers and drill bits and tape measures and levels and curious varieties of saw. We were laughing over our good fortune and I almost didn’t hear the faint sound, a throaty rasp.

“What was that?”

Timmy pointed toward the front of the store. “Fuckin’ dogs.”

There were ten or twelve of them, big ones, emaciated, teeth bared, staring in at us. One slipped through the broken glass door.

“Get down!” Friedman shouted from the top of the stairs. There was a quiet pop and the heavy sound of a grenade hitting the floor, rolling, then an impossibly loud explosion.

“Jesus Christ,” Indira said. Her voice was a barely audible whisper under the roaring in my ears. Most of the dogs lay about in bloody rags. One limped painfully away, yelping.

We got to our feet, brushing off dust. “I’ve never—”

“There’s one!” Timmy said. A big muscular hound was loping silently down the corridor toward us. I dropped the flashlight, fumbled, found the laser’s trigger and fired
blindly. The floor burst into yellow flame that immediately went out, leaving thick black smoke, and then the dog ran into the beam and fell down with a thud.

I picked up the flashlight and aimed it at his howling. I had severed both the animal’s front legs. It was still trying to get to us, jaws snapping, hind legs scrabbling for purchase.

“I get it,” Timmy said quietly, then stepped forward and split the dog’s skull. I tore off my mask and spun away just in time to keep from vomiting all over Indira.

I’m not too clear on what happened after that, but I wound up sitting on the curb outside, Indira helping me wash up with an oily rag and canteen water. She patted my head and cooed reassuring nonsense. Great White Savior of the Groundhogs, that’s me. (Predictably, though, she was on my side from then on. Most good people would rather give help than receive it.)

We overloaded the bus so much that its failsafes refused to let us take off. We had to leave behind five bags of fertilizer, just inside the door. Friedman was in favor of taking it home and then coming right back, though it would mean working after sundown. He was afraid that the grenade blast had attracted attention, and other people would be waiting to take advantage of our market research.

Here was my opportunity to redeem myself: I said I would stand guard here while they dropped the stuff off. Timmy and an older boy, Oliver, volunteered to stay with me. We loaded two bags back on and watched them float away.

I supposed our best vantage point would have been inside, upstairs, hidden by the darkness but able to cover the door. But that was too much like being in a corner, and besides, the place smelled of vomit and gore and burnt plastic. Instead we walked down the street to where a floater had collided with a ground van. The V of wreckage hid us well and gave us protection from the wind, but afforded a good view of the store. The afternoon sun had
gone down behind buildings, and it was getting chilly. We sat close together, hands in pockets, and talked quietly.

“What’s it like up there,” Oliver asked, “up there in the sky?”

“Smells better. What do you mean?”

“I mean, people get along? All you old people?”

“We have to get along,” I said. “It’s like living on an island, with no place else to go.”

“You stuck in the same place all you life?” Timmy said.

“More or less. It’s a big place. And some people are talking about leaving, going to another star.”

“That’s real far away, isn’t it?” Oliver said.

“It’ll take years.” And husbands.

“Why they don’t jus’ come down here?” Timmy said. “You come down here.”

“We’ve always lived up in the sky. We’re used to it.”

For a minute they were quiet, assimilating that. Timmy hit a piece of glass with his heel until it broke. “Indira say you live inside a ball o’ dirt, like worms.”

“Sort of. It’s a hollow rock.”

“God damn,” Oliver said. “You live inside?”

“It’s just like living inside a building. But we have a nice park, full of trees, and we can look out the windows at the stars. And there aren’t any dogs.”

“That’s somethin’,” he conceded. “You got plenty to eat an’ all?”

“Now we do. It was hard for a few years after the war.”

“Still hard here. Hard as a fuckin’ rock, it is.”

“I know.” I put my arm around his thin shoulders and Timmy leaned up against my knee. I had to clear my throat. “It’ll be better now. The worst part is over.”

We sat like that for a couple of minutes, without speaking, which may have saved our lives. Two boys snuck in front of us, creeping, intent on the emporium floor.

They had large backpacks and shotguns.

We leveled our weapons on them. “Drop the guns!” I shouted, and steeled myself to pull the trigger.

They froze. “
Do
it, mu’fuck,” Timmy said, his voice an incongruous chirp. But they set the guns down and turned, hands clasped behind their heads.

“Are you alone?” I said.

“Raht,” the taller one said. “Jus’ passin’ through.” He had a heavy Southern accent. “Heard the ’splosion.”

“Gonna hear another one,” Oliver said. “You not alone, you dead meat.”

“Talk big shit, boy,” the shorter one said. “We didn’t do nothin’ to you.”

“Button it, Horace,” the other said. “Horace, he’s a little dumb. Sorry.”

“Too dumb to live, man,” Oliver said.

“What’s your name?” I asked. “Where’re you from?”

“Ah’m Jommy Fromme. Horace my brother. We come up from Clearwater, Flo’da.”

“Florida!”

“Ten months walkin’, come up the App’lachian Trail. Flo’da ain’t no place to be now. Lotta people leavin’.”

“Did you ever meet someone named Healer?”

“Ole guy? Sure. He give us shots once.”

“How long ago?”

Jommy and Horace looked at each other and shrugged. “Couple years.” Jommy stared at me. “You an ole one too. That how you known ’im?”

“She from the sky,” Timmy said. “They all get old there.”

“You from the Worlds?” He pronounced it “whirls.”

“New New York. It’s the only one left.” Actually, Uchuden was still intact. But nobody lived there.

“That don’t beat all.”

“Oliver, pick up the guns.” I gestured toward the curb. “You two can sit. We have to figure out what to do with you.”

Jommy sat and cautiously lowered his hands to his lap. Horace kept his behind his head, staring with an unreadable blank expression. I suddenly realized he was braced to die. “You can put your hands down, Horace. Just don’t try anything.”

“He won’t do nothin’. All we want is to git along.”

“Wanna trade?” Horace said.

“Got any gold or silver?” Oliver asked.

“Nah,” Jommy said, “don’t use that shit anymore down South. Got plenny ammunition.”

Timmy laughed. “Big fuckin’ deal.”

“We really do,” Horace said, looking hurt. “We got slugs an’ shells for the shotguns and a couple boxes of .45s.”

“That won’t getcha a can of beans,” Oliver said. “We got a room full of ammo.”

“A room full?”

“Oliver,” I said, “be careful what you tell them, okay?”

You could almost hear the wheels turning in Jommy’s brain. “Look. What we really like to do is jine up with you. Couple niggers an’ a girl, you need somebody.”

“What can you do?” I asked. “Do you have any skills other than diplomacy?”

“Huh?”

“Do you know how to build things, or handle live-stock, or grow vegetables? Any useful skill?”

“I’m a hell of a good shot. Horace, he gen’rally hits what he aims at, too. Only way we could stay alive comin’ up the Trail.”

“You know how to dress game, then.”

“Oh, yeah—hell, yeah. An’ make leather, too, with jus’ piss.”

“Thrilling.” I set the laser down but kept my hand near it. Horace visibly relaxed. “We’ll see what the others say.”

“You got more of you?”

I nodded. “An army. Maybe we could use a couple of scouts.”

4

We let them join us. They were big and strong and relatively old; Jommy was twenty and his brother two years younger. Jeff had probably given them the plague vaccine but we administered it again, to be sure. They accepted the notion that they might live another hundred years with skeptical caution.

Their Family down in Clearwater had been rabid Mansonites. Their leader, who called himself Charlie, had reached the age of twenty-three before killing himself out of remorse at not getting the death. He took the two next oldest with him, to the general approval of the rest of the Family. Jommy and Horace got understandably nervous at that, and snuck out the next night.

I decided not to tell them, or anybody, about Jeff, and passed the word to the other Worlds people. If he was still alive he probably was still keeping the vaccine secret.

They had walked two thousand kilometers without seeing another soul, though several times they heard people coming down the Trail and hid away. New York was the first city they’d gone into. They had heard that it survived the war and was thriving, like in the old days. They didn’t seem too disappointed, though, to find the rumor untrue. They had only a vague idea of what people actually used to do in a city, and seemed glad to be able to apply their hunting and tracking skills. The children loved them, probably not for any positive quality. When they went hunting I let them have one weapon and three rounds apiece; otherwise I kept them locked out of the armory. They said they understood about being on probation. I wondered if I ever would quite trust them.

Apparently they forgot about my knowing Healer; at least, they never brought it up again. I struggled against the fantasy of mounting a one-woman rescue operation. It was barely possible. Friedman taught me how to fly; we had an extra floater-sized fuel cell that could get me to Florida and back. But it was quixotic nonsense. Florida and half of Georgia comprised a trigger-happy xenophobic lunatic asylum. Even if Jeff was alive and I knew exactly where to go, I’d be shot out of the sky before I got to him.

We went into the city every day for more than a week. Searching through various hospitals, we finally found in Bellevue an unopened storage area, a vault that Friedman blew open easily. It took more than a day to transfer all the pharmaceuticals and medical equipment, probably enough to keep a small town healthy for a generation.

Setting up school was a challenging problem. Tom Smith was a brilliant educator and administrator, but what we really needed was a specialist in the history of education—no one in New New had ever taught children out of books. For several generations we had all grown up taking for granted the database terminal as the primary tool of elementary education, infinitely patient and automatically individualized by feedback algorithms. I was in tenth form before I ever saw a text that simply presented information, without interacting. And I had to go to Earth, postdoctoral, before I ever had a textbook printed on paper. (We had a stroke of luck in that, finding an antiquarian book store in Greenwich Village that specialized in old schoolbooks.)

I taught English, mostly reading and writing, three days a week. It was not an overwhelming success. I’ve been able to read a couple of thousand words a minute for as long as I can remember; teaching the children to read word-by-word was excruciating. And my natural handwriting is a barely legible childish scrawl, so I had to relearn copybook script and laboriously demonstrate
it The children were enthusiastic at first but soon got bored. I had to spank them to keep them awake. The people teaching practical things had better luck.

The temperature never fell below freezing, but we followed prescribed caution and didn’t plant anything for three weeks. We got the baseball diamond all plowed and fertilized and brought the seedlings from the ship. It was a festive day. Everyone was assigned one part of the garden as his personal responsibility, though of course there were overall chores for the ones specializing in farming. (One girl said she didn’t think she could eat anything that came out of the
dirt
. Most of the others laughed at her, but a couple were obviously thinking about it for the first time.)

We had a remote terminal from the ship, and I began spending an hour every evening patching through to work on the start-up demographics. It was actually rather pleasant to return to familiar work, and of course I felt virtuous, keeping Daniel somewhat happy. I talked to him or John for a few minutes every day, before relinquishing the terminal for other people’s calls.