Machine Sickness

WATCH IT BURN

CATALLAXIS

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Machine Sickness

Book 1 of the Eupocalypse Series

Peri Dwyer Worrell

Copyright© 2017 Peri Dwyer Worrell

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without written permission except in the case of brief quotations included in critical articles and reviews. For information, please contact the author.

Also by Peri Dwyer Worrell:

The Eupocalypse Trilogy:

Machine Sickness

Watch It Burn

Catallaxis

To subscribe to the mailing list, click on the “subscribe” link at www.eupocalypse.com

“No Cook,” in Mystery Weekly

“Verge,” poem, Westerly

“Taming What Infests Us,” poem, Crack the Spine Literary Journal (upcoming)

"Safe in the Sunshine," poem, The Five Two

“Itch,” short story, HOZ Journal of Speculative Literature (upcoming)

“Tongue,” short story, Aggregate (anthology)

“Plexus,” poem, Tiny Seed Literary Journal

"We Both Know That Ain't True," The Dime Show Review

Dear Reader:

Thank you for making the wonderful choice to purchase this e-book.

Machine Sickness was my very first novel. I wrote it in in 2016 (interesting fact: I originally wrote the book with a female POTUS and had to quickly rework the relevant book chapters after the election!).

I’m revising this foreword in 2020 as COVID-19 sweeps the entire planet. There are only superficial similarities between the plot of the book you’re reading and the reality of a worldwide pandemic. The biggest difference, of course, is its focus: the machine sickness leaves people unaffected, at least directly. The coronavirus, on the other hand, affects only people, leaving untouched the machines and materials on which our common civilization rests.

On the other hand, the passages in which Dr. Davis explains how germ-covered everything is, including human hands, seem almost prophetic.

If you enjoyed it, please take a minute or two to leave a review on Amazon or the retail site where you bought it, or on the Eupocalypse website.

If you’d like to be notified when Book 2 of the Eupocalypse series, Watch It Burn, and later books are released, please visit eupocalypse.com and join the mailing list. Be sure to whitelist Eupocalypse.com so the e-mails will reach you!

—Peri

For Steve

Prologue

Huang Min gripped the railing impatiently. The approaching small cargo boat seemed to be taking forever! He walked to the other end of the platform and frowned at the oblong puddle of black oil streaming away from beneath them.  It wasn’t easy to see, unless you knew to look for it. But eventually, someone would sail through it, or spot it from the air, or one of the crew he’d paid off the books to spray dispersant on the spill would talk, and the secret would be out.

If word got out about the leak, he’d be finished! Not only his position as manager of the Bohai platform, but his career and possibly his freedom were in danger. His Party connections could only help him so much, and overlooking a major oil spill might be too much of a favor to ask.

He walked the width of the platform again and saw that the boat was much closer.

When the craft finally reached the platform, he was relieved to see his old friend Chou Yang standing on deck with the crate he’d been waiting for.

Yang set the crate down before Min, who opened it.

Inside were 72 bacterial culture plates, spotted with colonies of flourishing growth.

“These are the same type I used last time?” Min asked. “The color looks different.”

“The same. Guaranteed,” said Yang.

“Same price?” Min pulled a bundle of hard currency out of his coverall pocket and thumbed it.

“No. I had to double the price.”

“What! I can’t pay that!”

“You don’t have much choice, do you?” said Yang, patting a gun-shaped lump in his pocket.

“This is robbery.” Min pulled a second bundle from an inside pocket and began adding it to the first.

“This is the last time we’ll be able to procure this product for you,” Yang said. “Our source is drying up. So, you need to figure out how to prevent these leaks before it happens again.”

“Yes, yes. Thanks for the advice.” Min grudgingly handed him the cash.

Yang saluted him and boarded his own boat. Min watched his wake build as he sped away. He turned to a waiting spray tank of ocean water and began opening the culture plates and dropping them in, one at a time, and stirring the tank with a paddle.

Soon he was done. He extended the hose of the tank and began to spray the bacteria-water mixture directly on the spill.

“I hope this works like last time,” he muttered to himself. “Now all I can do is wait a day or two and see if the oil dissolves away.”

I.                 Valediction

She was startled as angry voices burst through the half-open door: a blustering, clearly irritated older man’s voce basso, and the higher, sharper, nasal voice of her assistant, Tim.

From outside the door, the deeper voice: “I just need to talk to her for a moment. She’ll be furious if she learns you turned me away!”

Unlikely, DD thought. She didn’t recognize the booming voice with its distinctly Midwestern accent.

She squirmed in her lumpy University-issued chair. What time is it? She had half an hour before her planned escape. A car trip to her new lab in Houston, then back—by way of Baton Rouge, where she’d give this talk.

Ignore them. She set her jaw. She needed to blow this presentation out of the water! She clicked rapid-fire through her slides on the computer.

Click! Things she loved. Click! Things she hated.

She loved microbiology with an aching passion bordering on rage; she loved the progression from dispassionate scientific process of elimination to the inspiration, cultivation, and tinkering (however much her colleagues hated that word!) to yield a finished, living technology.

But within the stodgy, constricting edifice of academia, there was no way around being forced to follow way too many rules, suffer way too many fools, and do way too many things she utterly and completely hated.

To wit: presentations.

Deirdre Davis had relentlessly practiced, but public speaking still fed her insecurities like the warm summer-afternoon thunderstorms of Northern Florida cultivate creeping patches of mold and twining Virginia creeper on walls and fences. She tried visualizing her audience in their underwear, but DD was so detail-oriented she got distracted picturing what each would wear. Matching lace bra and panties on her? Boxers on that guy? Torn cotton hipster and tank top? Colored briefs, or tidy-whiteys?

She felt small and squeaky, despite her average height and build. No matter how often she practiced the timing on her jokes, the punchlines tripped over the tension in her voice and fell flat.

She took a deep breath.

Hell with it, it’s not going to get any better than it is now.  DD dragged the presentation onto her thumb drive and pocketed it.

She glanced around her cramped office. She stepped heedlessly over a variegated nest of writhing insulated cables. Her office was in a timeworn, brick University building, handsome and elegant, but ill-suited to the needs of a wired age (unlike, say, the luxury office space attached to the new football stadium). The floors and walls were encrusted with plastic cable covers and aluminum conduits, flashing wi-fi routers and signal boosters tucked like cockroaches upside-down under shelves or perched like vultures atop “EXIT” signs.

She froze and eavesdropped on Tim, listening to him play door dragon, guarding her time. Finding an assistant like him had been providence for DD. He staved off the endless bureaucratic distractions of a large research university with ruthless efficiency—so lucky to have him! He was smart and meticulous enough to all but write her grant requests and research proposals for her.

And this! This was the entertaining part: listening to him deploy his razor-keen deportment to give someone the bum’s rush who badly needed it.

“Really?” Tim answered the visitor. “That’s odd, because she ordered me to let no one in to speak with her. What institution do you represent?”

“Now, you don’t have to make life difficult…” began Mr. Midwest in a conciliatory tone.

“YOU are the one making MY life difficult, Sir,” Tim interrupted. “I’m afraid I must insist that you leave. You are more than welcome to give me your information now, or not; that’s your decision. I’m sorry,” head toss, slight smile, “but you aren’t going through that door.”

That whipcrack in his voice even as he “Sirs,” “sorrys,” and “welcomes,” is enough to make people want to punch him.

“Fine,” the older man choked out. “Here’s my business card. Let her know it’s an issue of major importance.”

“Thank you, Sir. Have a wonderful day,” said Tim, his tone suggesting he’d prefer the visitor fall into a trash compactor rather than have a wonderful day.

DD had gotten many complaints about Tim’s curtness. She found him prickly and cold herself. She’d tried to break the ice multiple times, talking about music, games, or family. Once years ago, when he was new, she invited him to lunch. When she arrived at the restaurant, he was already there. He sat rigidly at the table with its red-checked cloth, nostrils flared, bolt upright, almost quivering. He’d brought a mini-legal pad, and one of the distinctive razor-tip markers from his desk (which he insisted—insisted!— no one else touch). On the first page of the pad, he’d neatly written the date, and under that:

“1.”.

That “1.” was as far as he got. It was also as far as DD got, prying fruitlessly at his shell. Although DD was nobody’s diplomat (Mom, may she rest in peace, said I was “always one to call a spade a goddamn shovel”), she could make friends with most people, but not Tim. She was especially curious about why he’d dropped out of a pre-med program in which, his recommendation letter said, he’d excelled.

But she couldn’t argue with Tim’s performance: once he had learned the ropes, not one grant had been turned down, not one study design had been returned for major revision, and any materials she needed were at her fingertips almost before she asked. In the years since he’d been hired, she’d rediscovered what it meant to have personal free time. If she’d had to smooth over a few ruffled feathers now and then, so what? A sensible trade-off in my eyes.

Before which eyes now, Tim held out a business card, presenting it formally with both hands, even including a tiny, almost imperceptible bow of his slender torso. DD nodded back.

“Hm. Nice card.” She fingered it. Heavy linen stock, color logo with subtle foil accents, embossed lettering: PMZ Therapeutics, Minneapolis address. “What did Mr., uh, Fleck want?”

“He wouldn’t say. I told him he could tell me anything he could tell you, but he wouldn’t.” Tim shrugged dismissively.

“Good work, Tim. He can e-mail or write if he legit needs something.” She shrugged. “Did the grad students get the cultures packed for the trip?”  She tucked the card in her purse.

She hadn’t heard of Fleck’s company, PMZ therapeutics. It wasn’t unusual for private biotech firms to try to recruit each other’s star researchers, and DD was considered tops in her specialized field of xenobiotic degradation. But they didn’t usually go about it by cold-calling in person at their intended candidate’s office.

He has to be new in town; she thought, it doesn’t take long for most people to pick up at least a slight drawl in Tallahassee. Despite being the capital of the teeming, diverse State of Florida, Tallahassee had more in common with Birmingham than it did with Miami: Live oaks dripping curling grey Spanish moss; azaleas detonating magenta in the springtime. on suburban side roads, shops posted ammunition prices on their outdoor signs; and a little further out of town, spray paint signs hand-scrawled on plywood advertised “HOT BOILED P-NUTS.”

Oh, well. I’m happy in the South; I hate cold weather. She’d studied the Lakehead oil-spill site in Bemidji, Minnesota, for her Masters’ degree, and she’d been miserable from October to April. The horror of taking a deep breath and feeling her nose fill up with ice crystals! They’d have to offer her a choice position and a thermospheric salary to lure her back to the spiteful winds of Minnesota!

Besides, DD was already—finally! —getting rewarded for her years of hard work. As her reputation improved, she’d been able to negotiate her terms of employment beyond the usual academic bargaining stance of “take it or leave it.” In her last contract with Florida College University she’d retained certain patent rights, and one of them was panning out.

Ever since the Deepwater Horizon spill, investors were keen to fund improvements in green technology for oil clean-up, and for once in her life, it looked like she was in the right place at the right time. She was leaving that same afternoon, with her back seat full of cushion-packed culture plates in insulated boxes start her new lab at Amrencorp, an oil company headquartered in Houston.

But it her career prospects in the company hinged on selling the technique to the C-suite suits at Amrencorps’s annual leadership retreat in Baton Rouge. Hence the dreaded, but obligatory, presentation.

“All packed up and labeled,” Tim said. “I put the biohazard labels on myself.” DD nodded. Even though she wasn’t shipping the cultures this time, just carrying them in the car, he had put the usual triple-circle biohazard warning labels on them anyway, from force of habit or out of his characteristic perfectionism. The biohazard labels were mandated when shipping any living material by mail, though in this case, there’s no good reason to label them as hazardous at all. These bacteria were simply genetically-modified variants of bacteria found in the soil in at least ten billion locations on the planet, right outside most people’s doors.

“The tickets...” began DD.

“...E-tickets, hotel reservation, and car confirmation sent to your phone and e-mail. Here are the paper print-outs.” He magically produced a stack of paper from nowhere, neatly stapled together, with a Post-It on top saying “DD Houston Trip October” in his own neat handwriting. DD smiled. She thanked her lucky stars again that Amrencorp had agreed to hire him to accompany her, and that Tim had agreed to move to Houston.

“Thanks, Tim!” She paused to look him in the eye sincerely. “I appreciate our good working rapport. I don’t know what I’d do without you!”

“Struggle,” he smirked, turning on his heel and tossing his head again.

True enough.

II.             Red Ring

Amit Viswanathan removed his bifocals and rubbed his eyes, displeased at the interruption. He was genetic biochemist, an internationally renowned legend in his circumscribed field, the first to be awarded a patent for a microorganism in both the U.K. and the U.S.A. He sat on the Stockholm Environmental Council, the NATO Industrial Advisory Group, and advisory boards for both the N.I.H. and N.R.C. He’d received awards from ten different national governments and been published in more distinguished academic scientific journals than he cared to count.

So, why did some clinician in China think Amit could help him with some dirty-needle problem at his local hospital? The caller was very persistent.

“Alright,” Amit told his secretary Juni via the intercom, “I will speak to him. It seems that is the only way to get him to stop calling.” He picked up the handset on his corded desk phone, turned his back on the pressing documents from the Gujarat CRISPR-Cas9-based recombinant-vaccine project, and let his gaze wander over his office’s expansive view of Chicago’s broad boulevards, as yet free of snow, but scourged by the snapping autumn winds.

“Hello, this is Dr. Viswanathan.”

The slight, stuttering lag and tinny, distorted voice confirmed the call came from far away, carried around the world by fiber-optics or beamed between satellites, perhaps both…who knows, nowadays?

“Doctor Viswanathan, I am Doctor Chin. I ask you help me.” Great, not fluent in English, and I know only one word of Mandarin, nῐhăo. Too late in the conversation for that.

“Yes, Dr. Chin. What seems to be your problem?” He made his voice soothing, abetted by his lilting British-Indian accent.

“Dr. Viswanathan, thank you help me. We have problem—” series of incomprehensible sounds from the connection, “infection nosocomial. Pseudomonas putida 45 patients infection. Urine tract, pneumonia, peritonitis, septicemia.” Static crackled with a high-pitched faint buzz behind it. At least the Latin medical terminology is the same in all languages.

“I understand you to say you have p putida infections at multiple sites in multiple patients, some life-threatening? Is that correct?”

“Correct,” the crackling voice said. “Best way pseudomonas putida?”

Stifling his irritation, Amit realized he did know something about it. He answered, “I believe there was a prior outbreak in Japan, perhaps fifteen years ago. I recall seeing the article, but I’m not sure where it was published.” Don’t confuse him, simple words for a basic English speaker. “I remember, broad-spectrum beta-lactam antibiotics worked well in that outbreak.”

“Broad-spectrum beta-lactam?” Crackle, crackle.

“Broad. Spectrum. Beta. Lactam.” Slowly and distinctly.

“Thank you, Dr. Viswanathan…advice this matter.” The Chinese took a breath and seemed about to say more, but Amit cut him off.

“You are welcome, Dr. Chin. Good luck.”

Amit was annoyed as he hung up. He wasn’t a physician. He had no desire to be one. This Chinese chap was a good illustration of why: like most health-care workers, he imagined his time was too valuable for him to waste it doing his job properly. If he’d bothered to search online for p putida infection, he would surely have found the article himself.

Amit considered searching the literature himself, just out of curiosity, and to confirm his vague memory was correct. But he was running behind already on the vaccine project. P putida rarely infected humans, so it was a novelty when it occurred. That was, perhaps, why it had stuck in his mind. Amit was quite familiar with p putida because it was the organism he himself had genetically modified to create the first patented living thing in history. Amit wondered briefly why the Chinese doctor was able to find the literature linking him, Amit, to p putida, and then to locate him in Chicago, but was at the same time unable to find the article about beta-lactam antibiotic treatment himself. It must have taken a bit of sleuthing to track down his office number.

Strange.

But anyway, that was over with. He turned to his desk and was almost instantly engrossed in the bureaucratic minutiae of the Indian Department of Biotechnology.

III.        Microbiologists: You Can Dress ‘Em Up...

Lafayette, Louisiana is not a luxury resort spot of the Southeast.

She kept her eyes peeled, watching the rear-view and side mirrors for changes in the people hanging around the gas station she’d been forced to stop at, the gauge almost on E. The name of the place was Quick Stop N Go. The two old guys in baseball caps sitting on plastic lawn chairs, sipping from paper bags, were obviously no danger. The kid (too young for adult jail and court) sitting on a milk crate by the compressed-air dispenser was just returning from his third casual stroll, each stroll taken with a different friend, in the ten minutes she’d been there.

DD frowned at her phone; it had three bars, but the little wheel kept spinning and her mail wasn’t downloading. Sitting here, sporting her white skin and her relatively new SUV, was just begging for trouble. On the other hand, she had to pee. She’d held it as long as she possibly could. She got out and locked the car door behind her, then skittered to the rear of the station. The door to the single, unisex restroom was unlocked. In fact, to her dismay, she discovered it didn’t lock. She slipped her hand in her pocket and checked the location of her KelTec, a little .32 caliber lightweight half-plastic semiautomatic, perfect for concealment under warm-weather clothing.

She entered the bathroom and, on first sight, almost turned around to leave again. But on closer inspection, it was clean, just thoroughly stained by rusty water, and poorly-lit by a single naked bulb. It appeared to have been recently hosed down, in fact. It smelled of bleach, and miracle of miracles, there was a fresh roll of toilet paper. She really had to pee. She pulled the KelTec out of her pocket and squatted over the seat, sighing in relief. As she pulled up her shorts, the little handgun happened to be hidden in a fold of the fabric.

One of the old guys from out back suddenly walked in, then startled when he saw her. He backed out the door quickly, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” he repeated over and over as he stepped backwards off the curb outside, leaving the door slightly ajar. She calmly tucked the gun back in her pocket, securing its little clip on the pocket edge. She saw no soap or towels, rinsed her hands in the stained sink, and walked out flapping the water off them. The guy was still there. He apologized again, and she answered, “Not your fault. No big deal.”

She reflected as she got back in her car that he didn’t even know how close he’d been to death.

But then, who among us knows how close we are to death? All the time. She fastened her seatbelt and turned out of the crumbling driveway of the gas station. We drive our cars as though it were the most natural thing in the world, but it’s lethally dangerous. For the young, it’s the most likely way to die. That kid back home last week, just sitting at a stoplight on his motorcycle, when a TV-van driver rear-ended him at 60 miles an hour. Gone, like that! His parents and friends weeping on the evening news. And how many accidents, assaults, overdoses has Jessica survived? I don’t even know anymore.

When she reached Baton Rouge—a huge yellow and purple banner on the side of a building urged, “Geaux Tigers”— she felt a little safer. Her phone app guided her to the hotel where she was giving her talk. She checked in at the circular front desk. While she was waiting for her key, she looked around. taking in the iridescent purple and green taffeta curtains around the orange and turquoise leather sofas of the central lobby lounge. Pretentious. She wheeled her suitcase, crate of culture plates strapped on top, up the hall to her room. She let herself in with her keycard. The room was no less ostentatious than the lobby: niches with impractical-looking vases; a room divider made of futuristic, internally illuminated glass shelving; a sofa upholstered in nubby fabric patterned in more implausibly bright colors. The bathroom was decorated in floor-to-ceiling fake-fossil tiles. The flow of water in the sink and shower was controlled by peculiarly sculpted glass-and-chrome fixtures of obscure functionality. There was no light switch in the bathroom. Instead, motion detection turned on the lights (and turned them back off after a few minutes). I can imagine stumbling home drunk to this room and being totally confused, unable to figure out how to take a shower and turn off the light to go to bed. The bed was soft but supportive, though, and the pillows were faux down, so she was satisfied.

But she was hungry. She took the elevator back down to the lobby, ducked into the table area of the bar-restaurant and accepted a menu from the waiter. Artichoke-spinach dip and arugula chevre salad were on offer, with entrees of duck and salmon grilled, blackened, or sauteed with a variety of sauces, seasonings, and vegetables from every continent. The prices lacked decimals. I enjoy a lavish meal as much as anyone. And it’s work-related, tax deductible. Maybe even expensible; I haven’t figured out how that works yet. She grinned.

She selected white wine, a Pinot Grigio, by the glass. For starters, she ordered a seafood bisque. She wasn’t in the mood for anything complicated, so she ordered a straightforward steak, rare. Just as the waiter walked away, a very large woman in a very fuschia business suit slid uninvited into the chair opposite her and stuck out a hand.

“Susan Deyle. Do you mind?”

DD found that she actually didn’t, despite being an introvert. Her rubicund sartorial flair notwithstanding, the woman had a charming smile and a pleasant voice. “Not at all, make yourself comfortable. Nice to have company.” She shook her hand. “DD.”

The waiter returned with DD’s wine, and Susan said, “Oh, I don’t drink any more.” In the awkward ensuing pause, she guffawed, “but I don’t drink any less, either!” She had red wine. The two women sipped and chatted while awaiting their food.

Susan was a corporate attorney from Des Moines, meeting with a client and a representative from her company’s German subsidiary about a series of multimedia instructional-design materials they were publishing.

“Are there international copyright issues with international publishing, like you do?” inquired DD politely, only vaguely interested.

Susan was munching on a truffle-stuffed mushroom appetizer, but she paused, holding half a mushroom on her fork, to respond, “Not as much as you might think, as long as you have someone like me to keep the jurisdictions in mind. There are international treaties and agreements to keep everything clear.”

“I suppose there are international regulations for everything nowadays. I expect Germany is a lot more cooperative than China, for example?”

“I haven’t dealt with Chinese regulations much.”

“I don’t think most Chinese deal with Chinese regulations much, either,” laughed DD. “Some of the culture shipments we get from them look like they were labeled by kindergartners using crayons.”

“What kind of samples?” Susan inquired politely around a bite of food, only vaguely interested.

“Soil and ocean bacteria mostly. There UN regulations we follow, but they’re Category 2. They could theoretically make someone sick, but not likely.”

“Sounds dangerous! Couldn’t it start an epidemic?” Susan’s eyes widened.

DD laughed again. “You obviously have the same illusions about microorganisms that most people do. Did you wash your hands before you came to dinner?”

“Of course!”

“Did you get all the bacteria off your hands?”

“I should hope so!” Susan sounded a little indignant.

“Wrong!”

“What?”

“If you used pre-wrapped soap from your hotel room, you probably lowered the number of bacteria per square inch on your hands from several thousand to several hundred. If you used a liquid soap dispenser from the bathroom, you might possibly even have increased the number of bacteria on your hands, depending on how long the soap has been sitting.”

Susan stopped in the act of surreptitiously pushing an escaping mushroom onto the tines of her fork with the side of her thumb and tucked her hand under the table instead.

“The last time your skin was actually sterile,” said DD, “was when you were still in utero.”

“I’d rather not think about that while I’m eating...” Susan was frowning at her food.

“Oh, but it’s a good thing!” DD plowed on ahead. After two glasses of wine, she was warming up to her topic with the passion of a true microbiology geek. “Your immune system needs to be constantly challenged! The bacteria on your skin and in your gut and respiratory tract are constantly conducting non-stop drills for your blood cells and antibodies. It helps to keep them sharp. Most of the bacteria growing on, and in, your body are harmless, but when a bad type comes along, your body responds immediately because it’s had constant practice.

“The really neat part, though,” she went on, ignoring Susan’s lack of interest and her growing expression of disgust, “is that the same process is going on in the dirt at your feet, and even in the ocean, at the same time.

“For example, the Gulf of Mexico has oil deposits beneath its surface—”

Susan’s eyes showed a spark of familiarity. Something from the news! “Yes, the oil wells, like that big oil spill a few years ago, the corporate oil platform that had all those legal claims for compensation!”

“Right,” agreed DD, “well, those oil deposits are seeping oil all the time. Gobs of it. Nobody’s really sure how much, because here’s the thing: there are bacteria that live in the ocean and eat the freakin’ oil!”

Susan’s brow furrowed. “Wait, but, then, why did they have to spray all those chemicals on the oil spills to dissolve them?”

“Did they?”

“Huh?”

“Well, when a huge, deep spill like that occurs, at first there aren’t enough bacteria to consume it all. Even doubling every two to six hours (which is about average), it takes weeks for a big enough bloom to occur for the natural cycloclasticus and colwellia bacteria to make a dent in the oil accumulation. But, by the time enough of the oil plume had made it to the surface for them to be able to spray it with chemical dispersants, the bacteria had already consumed a huge percentage of the hydrocarbons. In fact, it looks like the dispersants might actually have slowed down the breakdown of the oil instead of speeding it up!

“That’s what I’m working on now. There’s a variety of bacteria called pseudomonas putida which grows in the soil just about everywhere. It eats oil like nobody’s business. And it’s used in industrial processes, enough that we have a really good handle on how to breed it to do what we want.”

That’s enough. No need to go any further and breach Amrencorp’s nondisclosure. Besides, she’s obviously squeamish.

The waiter took DD’s empty soup plate. “Still working on those?” he asked Susan, who waved for him to take the half-eaten plate of stuffed mushrooms away with a distasteful expression.

A moment later, a fine strip steak appeared before DD. Susan’s came too; she looked at her pasta, redolent of parmesan and covered with thick, pepper-flecked white sauce, and turned a little grey.

DD took pity on her and changed the subject. “So, what entertainment plans do you all have for your visiting Germans? I hear they love the American South!” She picked up her wine glass and gave a lighthearted grin. Susan rose to the bait, glad to have a new topic, unrelated to contamination and decay, to discuss while she ate. She outlined a weekend of barely business-appropriate Big Easy debauchery, her appetite returning.

The conversation turned to family. “Do you have children?” asked Susan.

DD felt her smile fall off. She plastered a phony one on and said, “One. A girl. She’s gone a lot. How about you?”

Susan was off and running, proudly enumerating her three children’s accomplishments while DD died inside by millimeters. I wonder where Jessica is right now? DD changed the subject to movies as soon as she could.

At the end of the meal, chattering gaily, they agreed to keep each other’s little secret if they both indulged in the chocolate mousse cake.

IV.         Bohai Platform

That week, a joint law-enforcement project of Interpol, the World Customs Organization, and the Pharmaceutical Security Institute, code-named Operation Jupiter, struck multiple pharmaceutical smuggling and counterfeiting schemes simultaneously throughout Southeast Asia and the China Sea. Unnoticed, in the thousands of tons of hundreds of different drugs seized, was one specific, solitary shipment. This shipment was not, like the others, capsules or tablets packed in plastic-lined bulk containers to travel hundreds of miles for repackaging. It was not, like the others, included in shipments of other, legitimate goods. It was not on a vessel headed for a known transshipping port like Hong Kong or Yangon.

It was, in fact, approximately three-quarters of a ton of powdered ceftazidime, a beta-lactam antibiotic, hastily packaged in milk canisters, on a converted fishing boat, intercepted a few miles away from, and on course to, the Sheng Li 6 oil drilling platform in Bohai Bay. Certainly, no one involved in the drug seizure operation knew that Sheng Li 6 had been completely and quietly evacuated, and the well capped, the week before. The evacuation was officially reported to be due to an outbreak of unspecified illness aboard, which had supposedly incapacitated the 100-man crew, ruining the unit’s productivity for that quarter. And when a minor typhoon swept through the bay a week or so later, and the rig collapsed catastrophically and unexpectedly during the storm, no one particularly noticed except those who were directly involved, such as the accountants of the Sinopec corporation.

One of those accountants was Hen Li, who’d been working for Sinopec ever since earning his dual degrees in accounting and international business at Georgetown. Li left his desk, slipped into the courtyard and took a cheap cell phone out of the inner zipped pocket of his backpack. He'd shared his freshman dorm room, and countless bottles of craft beer, with a roommate, his buddy Lee Flatt. Lee was an extremely patriotic American, who later switched from international business to law enforcement with a minor in poli-sci. After graduation, Lee had gone into international intelligence analysis, and Li had returned to China to work for Sinopec. Li had run into Lee at a conference in Geneva a couple of years ago.

It was Lee and Li, the old act together again! After an evening of alcohol-steeped reminiscence, Lee had pressed the phone on Li.

“We need to keep abreast of what’s happening in China, on the ground. I know you’re not in on anything top-secret, but sometimes people notice changes in patterns that can tell us more than all the government press releases and hacked communications we can get ahold of. Just a quick call. It’s not traceable, I promise.”

Li had hesitantly accepted the phone and promised, for old times' sake, with a thrill at the chance of getting caught (and against his better judgment) to call Lee if he noticed anything odd.

And this was certainly odd.

V.             Not the Avon Lady

DD awakened in fright. Unsure where she was for a tick, she also didn't know what had woken her. Her eyes focused automatically on the only light in the room, the line of light from the hall (Hall. Hotel. Hotel room, right.), where it came in under the door. The light was interrupted by moving shadows. Someone was in the hall, and whoever it was pounded on the door. DD realized, then, that this was the second time for the pounding; it was what woke her. She turned the clock on the nightstand: 5:15 a.m. She wasn't expecting anyone. She was suddenly fully awake.

She opened the nightstand drawer and took the KelTec out. There was a round in the chamber; she'd racked it before going to sleep. She was wearing a loose knit nightshirt. Sitting up on the bed, the gun on her lap, finger outside the trigger guard, she shouted, “Who is it?”

Her mystery visitor shouted back, “Dr. Davis?” She recognized his voice from somewhere, even muffled by the door.

Deep voice. Accent...Midwest. Where?

Oh! The recruiter Tim had brushed off. What the Hell is he doing here? At this hour?

“Who is it?”

“My name is Ronald Fleck. I need to speak with you. It's urgent.”

“Mr. Fleck, I’m not prepared to speak with anyone right now.” Be a bitch. “You'd better get away from my door or I will call the police.”

As if the police would be any use! By the time they got here, he'd either have broken down the door, or be long gone.

“Dr. Davis, you really want to talk to me.”

Odd phrasing. Vaguely threatening.

“No. I really don't. For the last time, leave me alone!” She put as much authority into her voice as she could, trying not to slur with a tongue still thick with sleep.

He didn't answer. He didn't budge either. She could still see the shadow of his feet beneath the door. He rattled the knob. She picked up the room’s cordless phone and pressed zero with her thumb. The front desk clerk answered.

“There’s a man at my room door to who won't go away. I’m alone in the room. I need security.”

“I'll send them right up.” The desk clerk sounded bored, like this wasn’t the first time he’d dealt with this situation.

“Thank you.” DD hung up by pressing the button on the phone.

Fleck tapped on the door with one knuckle. DD was standing a few feet away, the KelTec in her right hand and the phone receiver in her left. The metal loop latch on the door was closed, but the door frame was just wood, and the screws would give way if he used enough force.

How big is he? I’ve never even seen him, just heard his voice! She wanted to see what he looked like, but she didn’t want to get too close to the door, in case he actually did kick it in.

“Dr. Davis,” Fleck said, “I’ll wait for you down in the lobby. I urgently need to talk to you,”

“Please. Leave.” She outright snarled through a dry throat. Can't be any clearer.

He paused a few moments more. She put her finger on the trigger, raised the gun.

Mercifully, the shadow of his feet moved across the doorframe in the direction of the elevators. She quickly closed the distance to the door, dropping the phone receiver on the sofa, and pressed her eye against the peephole. She saw nothing but the opposite wall of the hallway.

She realized her heart was hammering. She put the phone back in its cradle. Any hope of falling back asleep was gone. Breathing deeply, she decided to go ahead and begin her day. She attended nature's call, brushed her teeth and hair, and splashed her face in the sink.

She was patting her face with a towel when a firm knock came at the door. “Security,” a voice said.

Right on time.

She pressed her eye to the peephole again and saw a uniformed rent-a-cop who didn't look old enough to drive. She opened the door halfway to speak with him. His uniform pocket and patch said Thurston Security.

“Somebody tried to get in your room, ma'am?” The kid’s eyes darted around the room behind her awkwardly. He finally settled on looking at her face.

“Yes, he was pounding at the door. Woke me up out of a sound sleep.”

“Someone you knew, ma'am?”

Implication: boyfriend?

“No, not really. He was a guy who tried to get in to see me at my office in Tallahassee last week. Said his name was Ronald Fleck. I was shocked he'd trailed me all the way here to Louisiana. I have no idea what he wants.”

“Did he threaten you in any way?”

“No.”

“Is everything okay now?”

“Yes. Wait. No! He said he'd wait for me in the lobby!”

“I'll keep an eye out for him. What does he look like?”

“Honestly, I have no idea. My assistant ran him off at the office before I ever saw him. I do know he has a deep voice and a Midwestern accent, though.”

The rent-a-cop rolled his eyes. He assured her that he’d be around the hotel all morning; she should definitely call again if he bothered her.

Definitely. I’ll call for your heroic assistance.

Out loud, she said, “Thank you,” and shut the door behind him.

VI.         Best Laid Scheme

Tim Schneider finished his daily morning run and let himself back into the apartment.

Sam immediately approached him, arms out, but Tim adroitly side-stepped. “I’m disgusting, let me shower,” he said, slipping into the bathroom of their one-bedroom luxury apartment and swiftly closing and latching the door. Sam, left alone in the living room, immediately stripped naked, picked up the baggie of white powder resting on the glass and steel coffee table, and began to cut it into thin lines on a black-lacquer-framed mirror. He picked up a cut straw and was about to snort, when the heady odor of Dolce and Gabbana men’s cologne wafted under the bathroom door suspended in whisps of steam. He closed his eyes and savored it instead.

Out stepped the cruel love of his life, naked and gleaming with moisture, his wet dark hair slicked back, the barest trail of hair down his chest and belly.

“Your phone’s been blowing up.”

Tim glanced at it, snorted, “DD again. She can wait.” He tossed his wet hair, raining a drizzle of cool drops on Sam’s face that weakened his knees. Sam was pathetic, he admitted it; he had a weakness for anything intoxicating, like Tim’s beauty, or cocaine. He put his hand over the bruise on his own ribs. Tim was disgusted by the slightest blemish or mark, even if—especially if— he was the one who had inflicted it.

“Whoa! Take it easy!” Tim said. “That coke has to last us! How much did you do while I was gone?” His brown eyes glittered with resentment.

“Oh, sweetheart,” Sam said. “Don’t be mad at me!” He got up from the sleek Nigel Coates settee and put his hand soothingly on Tim’s forearm.

“Fuck you!” Tim said, twisting his wrist out of Sam’s grip and flinging him face down on the thick wool rug. Sam struggled to rise. Tim grabbed pulled him to a kneeling position. Tears ran from Sam’s eyes…

Tim stood up as soon as he regained control after coming. He picked up the mirror and had a small toot in each nostril, then picked up the baggie and swept the remaining lines into the bag with the razor blade. Sam reclined on the floor watching him, sniffling, red-eyed still from weeping and gagging, but still full of senseless adoration.

“I don’t see why you’re so cheap with that stuff. It’s not like you actually earn the money to pay for it,” Sam said. He didn’t know how Tim had the nerve to embezzle the way he did and still look his boss in the face every day. Sam admired Tim’s courage, cleverness, and self-discipline. He knew he, himself, would have been arrested within days, due to his transparent fear of getting caught.

“You have no idea what I do to earn that money!” Tim said. “You think it’s easy posting all the expense disbursements and invoice payments so they balance and don’t show the missing cash transfers? There’s not one person in a hundred who could understand what I do, much less do it!”

“...and that’s why you’ll never get caught. I know, I know.”

Tim pinched the zip lock with his fingers, sliding them crisply three times to be sure. “Plus: I have to put up with that arrogant bitch DD. She was going on again yesterday about how we have such a great ‘working rapport’. She gets the credit and I get the shit work, and the shit pay. As if I actually even gave a fuck about her stupid bacteria! If it weren’t for me keeping her data files straight, she’d look like an idiot.”

“Don’t be so mean. If it weren’t for her, would Amrencorp be paying us to move to Houston?”

“It IS nice to finally get out of redneck Tallahassee. But who knows what Amrencorp’s lab purchasing system is like? I’ve only just started digging around in their computers today, when she messaged me the passwords. I’ve never even worked in a big private corporation before.”

He turned and bore down on Sam, looming over him, warming to his topic, lecturing, “I do know, let me remind you, that the Sinopec people aren’t interested in buying any more of DD’s cultures. I can’t order the grey-market starter cultures in bulk anymore because we have the hybrid bacteria breeding true in its final form, and those transactions were the easiest to skim cash from.  It may be a few months until I can figure my way around Amrencorp’s accounting systems, and until I do, we won’t have any income above my salary— and whatever job you get.”

“I have four interviews scheduled when I get to Houston after visiting my sister.”

“The point is, we are going to be short on cash. So, go easy on that snow!”

“I know. Sorry.” Sam sighed. “What time do we leave tomorrow?” He knelt and reached for his boxers.

“I thought we’d pick up the rental car around two,” Said Tim. “I can spend the morning learning more about the Amrencorp system.”

“That system will be your little bitch!” Sam grinned gleefully, sidling up to Tim.

“We’ll see about that.” Tim waved him off. “I can drop you off at your sister’s in Atlanta by dinnertime, spend the night, and I can catch my flight to Jupiter the next morning to see my mother.”

“Ah, yes, Mommie Dearest.”

“She’s really upset that I’m leaving Florida. You’d think Houston was a million miles away, the way she acts!”

“Well, you are her little Timmy!” taunted Sam, sticking out his tongue and frisking into the apartment’s one bedroom. As Tim, piqued, started after him, he slammed the door in Tim’s face.

VII.     Not Candid Camera Either

Great. My big presentation is today and I’m short on sleep. She cast a wistful eye at the bed No point at all in lying back down after that.

She started the coffeepot. In the bathroom, she bent over the counter, grimacing at the dark circles under her eyes. She attempted a smile. Unimpressive. She gave up and jumped in the shower.

There, she thought about her unwelcome visitor. Recruiters in the sciences weren’t commonly so aggressive. She’d heard friends in the computer sciences, in Silicon Valley, tell stories about forceful headhunters like this, but microbiology? In Louisiana? Not so much. The warm water streamed through her hair and steamed her sinuses open. She scrubbed her face and rinsed the sleep out of her eyes. Finally, she stepped onto the hotel-towel bathmat, buffed her hair and body dry, and set to applying her makeup.

Rituals calmed her, and like most women, she had a routine that defined the start of her day. My eyes are puffy, even given the sleep debt. She blended concealer with her fingertips, then poured the coffee and set it to cool. Focus on the talk. I am amazing and enchanting. I am brilliant and confident. Eyeliner, damn, smudge. Q-tip, corrected. The data are perfect. The technology will be a step beyond anything used before. Just have to convey how excited I am, then let the data speak for itself. Lipstick. Blot. Smile. Not too much. Confident smile! Powder brush. Light mascara. Scientist, not bimbo. But this is the South.

The coffee was now perfect drinking temperature. She gulped it and poured another. The caffeine began to leach into her brain as she dressed in a grey blazer and skirt, white blouse, and black pumps. String of pearls and pearl stud earrings. KelTec clipped inside the waistband, looking like an insulin pump or cell phone clip. She walked up and down the room, swinging her arms, flexing her toes inside her shoes, breathing deeply.

Ready!

She looked at the clock. Sighed. Slumped.

It’s still only 6:53. I don’t speak until 8:00. I could have used another hour of sleep. There’s free breakfast in the lobby. She took two steps toward the door and hesitated. But that guy Fleck said he’d wait for me.

She logged into her laptop. She stuck in the thumb drive and flipped through her slides. She sipped a second leisurely cup of coffee. There was a rough spot on the thumb drive’s silver casing; it must have been scratched by keys or something in her purse. Everything on the slides looked great.

The clock said just 7:06.

Well, what the hell! I might as well get it over with and find out what he wants. Better to confront him in a public place. I need to eat a little protein, so I don’t get shaky.

She left the loop lock engaged and cracked the door slightly open, looking and listening for Fleck. No sign of him. She shut the door, flipped the metal loop, and opened it all the way. She leaned out into the empty hall and looked both ways, then stepped out, clicked the door shut behind her, and scuttled to the elevator.

In the deserted lobby restaurant, she had her choice of tables and first pick at the buffet. A bored-looking clerk, tapping at a keyboard at reception, was the only person in sight.

A waitress offered the coffeepot, but DD switched to water.

I could stand to be more alert, but any more coffee and my hands might shake. She got some eggs and whole-wheat toast and sat down to eat.

Of course, once her mouth was full, Fleck materialized, right on cue. “Dr. Davis.” Beige trench coat, grey eyes. Sandy blond hair, receding at the hairline. His build was medium. His colorless, nondescript looks fit right in with the featureless accent she’d come to know.

She swallowed.

“Mr. Fleck.” DD barely acknowledged him. She scooped more eggs into her mouth and chewed steadily. She gazed at a space about a foot above and behind Fleck’s head. She sipped her water.

Fleck broke the silence. “May I?”

I win.

“Go ahead.” DD nodded at the empty chair across from her. He sat.

“Dr. Davis, I represent a group which has great interest in the work you are doing.”

“Your firm has unusual recruiting techniques.”

He sat up straight, and his expression and breathing changed.

He’s not a recruiter? Don’t tell me he’s selling lab supplies. But he definitely didn’t seem like a salesman either.

“Actually, that’s not why I wanted to talk to you.”

No shit.

“Oh, really?”

“My group has a contract with TERI. We are aiding them in the investigation of an oil rig collapse in the Bohai Bay, off the coast of China.”

“The Energy and Resource Institute?” A well-reputed environmental NGO. “And?”

“We would like to access your cultures to see if they match the bacterial species found in that collapse.”

Do I look like I was born yesterday? “I’m sorry, those cultures are proprietary. I held the patents until last week, when I transferred them to my new employer, Amrencorp. All the cultures are now at my lab in Houston,” she lied.

“I couldn’t give you access even if I wanted to. Which I don’t.” Firmly.

Another abrupt energy change, with body language to match. He settled back, and his face went blank. If DD were green and guileless, she’d have instinctively leaned forward to recapture his interest.

She didn’t.

“Thank you for meeting with me, Dr. Davis,” said Fleck, abruptly standing.

He’d been easier to get rid of than she had expected, which led her to believe he’d turn up again. Her mouth was dry and she felt a little queasy.

Nerves.

She breathed deeply as she watched Fleck walk out the front door of the hotel. What does he want? Surely the story about an oil rig collapsing is a ruse? I can look it up online later, I guess. She breathed deeply, calming herself before signing her breakfast chit and heading down the hall to locate her meeting room. Once there, she was glad to have something to do: she fiddled with her projector and microphone until she was sure everything was working right.

VIII. The Windup. The Pitch!

“Some background,” she began.

Her first slide said BIOREMEDIATION.

“Until Viswanathan won his Supreme Court patent case in 1980, the idea of using Obligate Hydrocarbonoclastic Bacteria to clean up oil spills at an industrial scale was just a dream.”

Her second slide showed a big, blobby-looking “OHCB,” which then turned animated and began swimming around the screen, gobbling up black dots and splotches Pac-Man style. Forty men and three women in boring suits sat at cloth-covered tables, some with pads out to take notes, but most steepling their hands or sipping coffee drawn from the urn in the back of the room.

“These organisms, which destroy oil, are naturally-occurring bacteria. They live in areas of natural oil seepage and they have been subsisting on the hydrocarbons there for millions of years.”

Diagram of an underwater oil deposit seeping through the ocean floor.

“These organisms compete with one another for survival and multiply dramatically whenever a big ‘bubble’ of oil reaches the ocean floor.”

A slide showing three micrographs in succession: one with ten bacteria, one with 100, and one in which the bacteria occupied the whole circle of the picture. The slide captured the audience’s eyes as DD figured it would. That’s why she’d picked the false-color images with lots of bright yellows and oranges.

It had taken her hours to dumb down this presentation. She’d dragged four non-scientist friends out to lunch and made them watch it. Once their eyes stopped glazing over, she figured she’d gotten it right. Not that these people were stupid, but they were not scientists. They were the executives who would decide the fate of her new technology and the future of her career.

They sat erect, fidgeted, and frowned at the next slide: the iconic satellite photo of the Deepwater Horizon leak, occupying a big fraction of the Gulf of Mexico. That photo had been on the evening news every day for months and the resulting legal fallout cost, and was still costing, the unlucky oil firm in the billions of dollars.

“During the Deepwater Horizon spill, dispersants were sprayed on the oil.”

A simple chart was next: bacterial population versus dispersant concentration. A line sloping down. “The dispersants used were toxic to the naturally-occurring OHCBs living in the Gulf. In other words, the solutions we applied made the oil closest to the surface stick around longer.”

An underwater photo of a plume of oil, spiraling into the darkness of the depths. She paused for a moment to allow the audience to spot the two divers near the laser dot from her pointer. One was adjacent to the plume and the other in the foreground, but still tiny. It took a moment to comprehend from the perspective how massive the plume had to be.

“At deeper levels, where the dispersants could not reach, my colleagues and I were able to test and monitor the bacteria levels. We were searching for the bacterial species most capable of dissolving the most oil, the most quickly.”

A cartoon of a bacterium holding a trophy.

“And the winner was…pseudomonas putida. This bacterium can break down 30% more oil in a 24-hour period than the next-fastest organism.”

A dark blue slide, entitled, Problems. Bullet points appeared one by one as DD listed them:

“The problems with this OHCB are that: it has a narrow temperature range at which it can thrive; it is extremely vulnerable to the toxic effects of dispersants like Corexit; and it is vulnerable to ultraviolet light, confining it to deeper plumes and seeps.”

A new slide showed the twined strands, like strings of pearls, of colonies of a different bacterium.

“Enter Alkinivorax borkumensis. This is the most common hydrocarbon-degrading bacterium in the world, existing in 80% of the planet’s oceans. Due to its resilience in different temperatures and conditions, it out-competes the other OHCBs in most ecosystems. This bacterium is a survivor.”

Another slide, p putida and a borkumensis side by side. The images blurred, swirled in a psychedelic mass of color, and resolved into a new image:

“Presenting: Pseudoalkanivorax davisii!”

“This is a new, genetically-modified species of oil-destroying microorganism. It could not have been produced using older, plasmid-based genetic engineering, or even the newer CRISPR. The technique was developed in my lab, a highly confidential technique which now, thanks to your persuasive efforts to recruit me,” pause for polite chuckle, “belongs to Amrencorp. It produced a previously-unattainable hybrid of the two organisms, cherry-picking the genes for high oil consumption from one, and for a wide range of survivable conditions from the other.”

The next slide showed three basketball-court-sized tanks of seawater, fifty feet deep, in a gargantuan hangar-like warehouse. One of the tanks was completely wrapped in a mile or so of black plastic, producing blackness within; one had a heating unit mounted on the rim, like a Brobdingnagian hobbyist aquarium; the third had banks of ultraviolet lights suspended over it. DD pointed all these things out.

“Each tank was contaminated by 5% crude oil by volume: 1,056 barrels.”

Photo of two workers in coveralls, standing at the top of a steel staircase on a steel platform, dumping a barrel of oil into one of the tanks, a row of barrels waiting behind them.

“A standardized culture of pseudoalkanivorax davisii was introduced.”

A worker in coveralls holding a metallic hose, sort of like a pressure-washer, spraying something into a tank. The surface of the tank was mottled with black puddles of crude.

“After seventy-two hours, hydrocarbon concentrations in all three tanks had dropped below target levels.”

A smiling worker, standing next to a man in a lab coat holding a clear glass beaker of only faintly cloudy water.

“Ladies and gentlemen, this means,” DD paused for effect. She had their complete attention. “Not only can we clean up spills, we can clean them up before anyone even knows they’ve happened.”

“Questions?”

As one, the suits began clapping. Smiling faces, nods of approval, excited side chatter among them. DD could tell this was something they’d been wanting for a long time. She’d solved a huge public-relations problem for them, by solving an environmental problem for everyone. She puffed her chest a little.

Savior of Amrencorp, savior of the planet. Nice to be appreciated. I think I’m going to like this corporate gig.

She powered down her laptop and disconnected from the hotel’s projector. As the first after-lecture questioner came up to introduce himself, she pulled her USB drive out of the computer and dropped it in her pocket; her thumb came away sticky. She wiped it on her jacket without thinking, unclipped her lavaliere mike from her collar and set it down for the hotel’s AV guy. She paused to shake hands with several attendees as she finished packing up.

IX.         Ferry Tale

DD cruised down Seawall Boulevard. The architecture of Galveston’s main drag ran towards two extremes. First, exquisite Victorian houses, interspersed with charming 1930s Craftsman bungalows. Second, the architectural style, which DD privately thought of as Brick Elephant, based on Texas’s distinctive red limestone: columns, porches, turrets, gables, bartizans, all intertwined in an arbitrary, massive, ungainly red, brick-and-limestone salad.

She observed that, once one got a few blocks away from the bridge, Galveston seemed quiet, especially since it was Saturday night. Perhaps its storied days of seedy bar fights among oil roustabouts, fishermen, and merchant marines were only a ghost from the past.

Or perhaps I’m just in the wrong neighborhood to see it.

Galveston was less than an hour from downtown Houston’s grit and gaud, but the air was breezy and the climate sunny. The quiet atmosphere was vividly unlike the Gulf Coast beach cities in her native Florida, which had been gradually swallowed by commercial tourism and hemmed in by retirement condos in the last few decades.

She’d met her new lab staff when she delivered the cultures in Houston. What a pleasure that was! The people she’d be working with were cream of the crop, and motivated. The lab facility was brand-new, and her office was at least as nice as the assistant football coach’s at FCU.

She’d built some extra travel time into her schedule, just in case; DD believed in over-preparing. It left her with extra time on her hands now.

Fortunately, she loved to travel. She’d never seen the Texas Gulf Coast before, so she decided to make a weekend of it. There was a car ferry from Galveston to the Bolivar peninsula; she planned to stop for the night on the peninsula and move on in the morning.

The route to the Galveston ferry terminal was well-marked, though her phone's GPS was also fine. At the boarding station, she obeyed the ferry crew, who gestured with neon-yellow gloves for her to take lane number three. She pulled her little SUV in line, where it was eclipsed behind a customized Ford Expedition, and lilliputianized next to a Silverado 3500 (yes, I’m in Texas, truck capital of the USA). She cut off the engine. The sun was two fingers’ breadth from setting and the bay water was choppy, with steely gray waves in sharp regular rows like a bastard-cut file. The fall air was fresher, now that the sun was low. A dolphin’s supple back flashed, gleaming among the waves. Pelicans circled and dropped, lunging into the water with flapping feet.

The ferry’s motor was running, a slowly oscillating bass growl she could feel through the soles of her feet and up into her hips. She returned to her car and checked her e-mail: nothing pressing. She watched a tiny tugboat push a gigantic oil platform towards the cluster of refineries ashore. A group of laughing children ran along the beach. She glanced back down at her phone, then looked up and slammed her foot on the brake in panic, briefly disoriented to see the dock pylons moving past her as the boat left its berth. The ship’s start had been so gradual she hadn’t felt the movement.

She got out of the car again. There was an odd hole in the hem of her jacket, like a cigarette burn, and she didn’t smoke. Damn, I really liked this suit! She tossed it into the vehicle and circled the walkways around the deck. Reaching the rail at the bow, she stood next to a bronze-faced Hispanic family: dad, mom, and three girls with silky long black hair, the youngest’s in two long braids. The sunset contained utterly saturated, extravagant streaks of lemon yellow, apricot, and lavender. Another latex-shiny grey fin and back flashed and were gone, back below the whitecaps, even as she exclaimed aloud, “Dolphin!” The family scanned in vain, the little girl bouncing on her toes. DD smiled, thinking of her own innocent little girl, years ago, and a familiar pang of grief-guilt-fear shot the smile down, just as fast.

The lights of Houston twinkled to life on the horizon below the sunset. She checked her phone again; five full bars of coverage, but still no response from Tim. I’m just being a twitch. But she wanted to confirm she’d used the right data in that report. She’d changed the inclusion criteria at the last minute, and edited the spreadsheet and saved it, but she had an irrational fear that she’d used the old data file, like the niggling worry that you left the oven or the iron on when you left the house. Tim could check the save dates and tell her for sure. She shrugged; it was late, it was the weekend, he would be busy packing to move, and she wasn’t likely to hear back from him until Monday. The lay people she’d presented to would never notice, but an error in the report file that was going up on the web page could potentially come back to bite her in the ass later on.

Oh, well. She might as well let it go for the moment and enjoy a restful weekend drive up the beach. She’d never been to Bolivar peninsula before, but she figured that, like most beach towns, it would be full of hotels and restaurants.

The ferry approached the dock. Another dolphin’s fin crested and was gone. She got back in her car, turned the key, and attended the process of being ushered off the boat by costumed traffic directors. There was a park-like rest area by the dock: bathroom, small office (closed), and cement walkway along the top of the seawall. Mercury-vapor lights overhead had come on automatically, casting a pinkish tinge that melded with the sunset. A tiny yellow-white hangnail of sun remained unconsumed by the horizon. A few quiet people fished off the seawall. They’d left some things behind on the concrete picnic tables: a straw cowboy hat, a tote bag. So: petty crime, not an issue here.

She pulled in, used the restroom, got back in her car, and Googled “hotels bolivar texas.” Two. Hmm. And the lack of lighted signs on the long, straight road ahead told her she might have erred in assuming she could easily find a place to spend the night. At least I’ve already eaten. The first hotel listed was the Seaside Motel, advertising $35/night, a price which pretty much said that the price was the only thing to recommend it. Nope!

How about the Down By The Sea bed and breakfast? She tapped the number to dial. The phone rang and rang, and then what sounded by its clicks and static like an old-fashioned mechanical answering machine picked up. She hung up and drove down the long, lonely strip of highway to the Seaside Motel. The hotel was identified by a yellowed plastic light-box sign above a concrete central pool, surrounded by a chain-link fence and a few rusty steel lounge chairs. The doors and trim had been painted a distressing glossy Pepto-Bismol pink which had been slopped over plenty of wood rot. The general gestalt of the semicircular structure, considered as a place to sleep, grabbed one by the lapels shrieking, “BEDBUGS!” Two cars were parked by the office’s dirty plate glass windows at one end, and only one guest car was parked in front of the motel proper.

Meager occupancy for a Friday night.

She hesitated a few moments, her hand resting unconsciously on the gun concealed at her waist, wondering if she should see if the rooms would be as bad as they inevitably were. She felt a bit of lurid curiosity, but she didn’t get out of the car.

She pulled out and drove down the interminable highway towards the gray horizon.

Now it was getting really dark. Not many lights out here. Rather than drive around and sightsee on the peninsula, which doesn’t seem to have many sights anyway, she’d better zero in on finding a place to spend the night.

She pulled out her phone. She dialed the number for Down By the Sea again. Still no answer, still that archaic answering machine.

“Hi, my name is DD Davis. I’m on the peninsula for the night and I was hoping you had a room available.” She left her number. The turnoff for the B & B was two miles ahead.

The light had faded from all but the farthest western sky and the first stars were showing. She couldn’t see Houston’s lights from here. She followed the glowing map on her phone, turned right on Alberdie Street and almost missed the sign for Vista Boulevard, but there it was: the B & B, marked by a tiny, colorful, painted-wood sign. It was a big beach house on high timber pilings, surrounded by a weathered deck. Just as she closed the navigation app, the phone rang. She answered, and a woman’s voice said, “Is this DD?”

“Yes, this is DD.”

“This is Joanne Jebali. I’m the owner of Down by the Sea Bed and Breakfast. We do have one room available…”

DD interrupted, “Great! I’m right here!” and stepped out of her car. She sprinted up the steps to the front door and rang the doorbell.

“Excuse me, hold on a minute, I need to get the door. Then I’ll give you directions,” Joanne said. “Don’t go away!”

“No, I don’t need directions.” Joanne was perplexed as DD tried to convey that she was in front of the B & B that very minute, but the light came on in her eyes after she opened the door and saw DD holding the phone to her ear. They started their acquaintance with a laugh.

One of the best ways to meet someone new. Joanne’s sharp brown eyes crinkled in the corners with delight. Joanne was perhaps 60, old enough to be my mother.

Joanne welcomed DD into a living room with glorious picture windows facing east over a spacious deck. The overstuffed furniture was too big for the room, which was decorated for Christmas. This is late September! Early? Or Late? The artificial Christmas tree’s needles were highlighted with fake frost which had gathered grey dust on its tips. Last Christmas, then. Adding to the room’s overall clutter was jewelry: stacks of sterling silver, semiprecious stones, and beaded hand-made adornments were laid out on every horizontal surface.

“Don’t mind the jewelry. We’re getting ready for the Jane Long festival in downtown Bolivar tomorrow. It’s great fun! People dress up in pioneer costumes and we have talks and demonstrations. You must come!”

DD allowed as how she might come. Joanne swiped DD’s credit card and DD filled out a short form. Joanne gave her a metal key. Joanne pointed out which of the maze of decks outside to follow to get to her room. Her Michigan accent was touched by gravel, from neither smoking nor cheering at sports events, DD would later learn, but from a ventilator accident during her career as a nurse; a patient’s ventilator had exploded in her face, throwing spores everywhere, leaving Joanne’s chest full of the spores of a virulent fungus. DD’s room was in a separate, smaller building, connected by a high, weathered, wooden walkway to the main house.

“How much luggage do you have?” Joanne asked. “The stairs are pretty steep to lug suitcases up. I just had an elevator put in.” She pointed to an expansion-mesh cage at the edge of the deck.

“Thanks. I do have a pretty big suitcase. I’ll go get it.” DD went out the front door and pulled her car out of the narrow street and onto the slab foundation beneath the home, which was built on stilts, like many houses in hurricane-prone beach towns. The area under the house was set up as a shaded patio, with porch swing, outdoor furniture, and a grill. She wrestled her scuffed, hard-sided spinner case out of the car, and rolled it to the elevator cage. But she couldn’t see how to get the elevator to come to her. She looked all around the entrance, puzzled, and was about to give up and just lug her case up the stairs backwards, one step at a time, when a friendly male voice interrupted.

“Need to get that on the elevator?” The accent was a Texas twang with something else overlaid on it, something DD couldn’t quite place. She looked up; the deep voice was attached to a dark-haired man with a congenial smile who popped his head over the deck railing. Before she could answer, he disappeared, and the next thing she knew, he was clattering his long, muscular legs down the flight of steps at the back of the slab. He grabbed a philodendron vine climbing one of the wood stilts and ripped it down, revealing a giant red toggle switch. “Here’s the button,” he said.

“Let me guess,” she pointed, grinning, to the top of the switch, “up,” pointing at the bottom, “and down.” She found her gaze angling up at him coyly, without conscious intent.

“You got it!” He stepped back to allow her entry.

She pressed the button and held it while the elevator clanked its way down. “Thanks,” she said, suddenly awkward, “those stairs are a little steep.”

Once the elevator stopped at the bottom, the latch on the steel door clicked. He opened the door for her and set her suitcase inside. It was dark below the stairs, but she could see he had a square jaw, broad shoulders and a lean physique in jeans and work boots. Hmm.

“I’m Jeremy Robinson,” he introduced himself, offering a handshake.

She took his hand. Strong but gentle grip. Calluses. “DD,” she smiled. He smiled back. She stepped into the elevator and found a toggle switch like the one on the post.

“Thanks so much, Jeremy! Goodnight!” He shut the expansion-mesh door; she waggled her fingers at him and smiled. She pressed the button and the elevator lurched up to the patio.

She rolled her case along the deck to the room, clutching her key. There was a row of houses between the B&B and the ocean, but she heard the waves, rolling into the shore and chanting a soothing, slow song with a random, swirling rhythm. The room was snug, white wicker and a canopy bed. The bathroom had a jetted tub, which she filled with a smile. By the time she finished a sybaritic soak, she was logy and drowsy.

It was only 9:00 pm, but it had been a long day; a few of the cultures she brought to the lab had been, strangely, double-labeled in Tim’s neat handwriting. She’d had to guess at the hybrids and pure strains, based on the colony configurations on the culture medium, and so they’d taken a little more time to organize than she’d expected. She had met her new lab staff. Trying to learn their names and get a clear first impression of these people, on their best behavior in front of their new boss, had also been taxing. She smiled, though: they impressed her at first meeting, all sharp and inquisitive. Then came the evening’s drive, and despite the short length of the trip, she was beat. She cracked open the window and drifted off to sleep on top of the covers, listening to the sound of the waves.

X.             TGIF

Dr. Viswanathan pressed his intercom button. He’d asked Juni to put the international call through to Chakrindar at the Bureau ten minutes ago and hadn’t heard from her since. Ah! The intercom button failed to light up or make its usual beep when pressed. The phone system must be down. He looked up and realized the overhead light had gone off at some point. He had failed to notice because the sun’s evening rays were streaming in across Lake Michigan, which was visible as a slice of turquoise-green between the skyscrapers. It was a chilly Fall day, and if the power didn’t come back on in a few minutes, he might as well go home because it would soon be too cold to work in the office. He stepped to his office door and popped his head out. Juni was standing in the corner, feet in a spreading puddle of cold coffee on the floor, the handle of the pot warped beyond recognition in her hand. The cheap white-plastic drip coffee maker itself looked like a cake that had fallen.

“Juni?” He asked, which snapped her out of her obvious shock. She tried to put the coffee pot down, but the handle stuck to her hand. She pushed it off with the other hand, but like the American folktale someone had told Amit about a Tar Baby, it just stuck to her more. She grabbed for a roll of paper towels, but they just stuck to the gooey plastic residue on her hands. Dr. Viswanathan took a step towards her just as her left shoe came apart, causing her to turn her ankle. She sat down abruptly in the puddle of coffee, bewildered.

He strode over to her and put his hand out to take her sticky one, bringing his other hand behind her arm to help her up. Then he slipped, he thought at first in the wet coffee, but as he scrambled up he felt a squishy pulp under his knees and shoes and noted with astonishment that the false-wood laminate floor was turning semiliquid where the coffee had spilled. He was down on one knee, Juni was still sitting on the floor holding her ankle, and this could not possibly be happening!

But it was. Some bizarre solvent must have spilled. Or something. There was no smell, and his skin wasn’t burning, but anything that would dissolve two different types of plastic so thoroughly and so fast could be quite toxic and shouldn’t be trifled with. The wisest course seemed to be to get out of the office, put Juni in a cab to the hospital, and go home. He could call building maintenance from his cell phone. Then, he’d forget about it and enjoy his weekend.

“You’ll want to have that X-rayed; I’ll get you into a taxi,” he told Juni. She nodded, fixing him with her doe-like brown eyes. He asked protectively, “Can someone meet you at the hospital to take you home?”

She nodded again. “My brother. I can go to the urgent care center at the hospital a few blocks from his apartment.”

“Very good. Let’s get you up…” Awkward, with his feet wanting to slide in the liquefied laminate. He felt awkward, too, touching her, a woman and his subordinate; it grated against his traditional Indian upbringing. But he had to grasp her firmly to get her upright; Juni was a trim but solid-built black woman, only an inch or two shorter than he. With effort, he managed to help her up onto her good foot. The other shoe gave way now, fortunately without injuring her further, and she hobbled along in her stocking feet, leaning on him for support. They reached the elevators—of course, those weren’t working either, due to the power outage. Strangely, the emergency exit lights over the stairwell weren’t lighted either; he thought they were required to have a backup power supply. Into the stairwell they went, finding their way by the dim light streaming in through the narrow, east-facing windows. Seventeen stories. It would be slow.

So, they began.

The stairs were populated by a few others who had decided to leave; he presumed everyone else in the skyscraper was dutifully waiting for the lights to come on: hourly workers eager to get their full 40 hours’ pay, others too lazy to walk downstairs, waiting for the elevators to start working again, or perhaps a few people wanting to finish some item of work before the work week yielded to TGIF. Two athletic young men in khakis and matching-logo polo shirts saw Juni’s plight.

“Here, let us get you out of here!” Before Viswanathan knew what was happening, they’d locked hands and lifted Juni up between them, easily carrying her down the steps. He watched them disappear around the next landing and continued to make his own, slower way down the stairs behind them.

By the time he made it down to the ground floor, his aging knees aching a bit from the downstairs climb, the two young men were nowhere to be found. Juni’s pantyhose looked moth-eaten, shredded as high up as her knees. She had a gaping hole in the hip of her polyester skirt where she’d sat in the coffee. The right sleeve and cuff of her jacket was full of holes as well, where the coffeepot must have splashed. She was standing alone on the sidewalk, leaning against a wall, toe of her injured foot down, confused and shocked.

He flagged her a taxi and helped her in. She named the urgent care center near her brother’s house, and the driver took off.

XI.         Sand in Shoes

DD woke up with morning rays already sloping through the blinds. So much for watching the sunrise. I needed the rest! She jumped into sweatpants and tank top and strode out the door, following the deck around to the main house. Things she’d missed in the dark the night before caught her eye: low bushes covered with vibrant yellow poppy-shaped flowers, on the sand fifteen feet below; random pieces of driftwood on a steel coffee table between two deck chairs; a giant seashell set on the railing, filled with pieces of colored, smooth-polished sea glass. She opened the wood-framed glass door and stepped into the common room of the B & B.

“Good morning!” chirped Joanne. “Did you sleep well? Would you like some coffee?”

“Coffee,” DD agreed, taciturn until she had her cup, making a beeline for the carafe on the kitchen counter. “I slept well. The sound of the ocean is soothing.” She turned and realized she and her hostess weren’t alone in the cluttered, cozy living room. In a corner chair by the fireplace, half-hidden by the dusty Christmas tree, the man who’d helped her with the elevator was lounging. He gave her a charming little smile as their eyes met, and DD felt her pubic muscles twitch involuntarily.

It’s been a long time, hasn’t it? She smiled back, giving a half-wink, then flicked her eyes away. She focused on fixing her coffee.

Years.

“Breakfast is ready!” proclaimed Joanne. “French Toast and sausages!”

Jeremy rose from the chair; DD noted an athletic grace which belied the age attested by the tanned crow’s-feet by his eyes and his callused bumpy knuckles. She placed him in his mid-forties, a few years older that she. He was cradling another of Joanne’s big ceramic mugs, and he sat at the head of the table, she on his left. He heaped his plate with sausage patties and French toast; DD took two triangles of toast and one sausage patty as he spread his with a thick layer of real butter and drowned it in syrup. DD couldn’t help envying him; he appeared to be one of those people who could eat anything he wanted without getting fat, while DD had to watch every bite and exercise daily to maintain a healthy weight. Perhaps it was because he worked hard, while she was a knowledge worker. She was pretty sure he had an outdoor occupation; he was lusciously tanned and his forearms were cut with wiry muscle where the sleeves of his long-sleeved T-shirt were pushed up to the elbow. His hair, though dark and wavy, was coarsened by wind and sun.

“Are you leaving today?” he asked between bites. That accent…Texas, but also…New Zealand? Scotland? Boston? Very faint—maybe if he talks a little more—

She smiled, leaned forward. “I’m not sure. I was planning on it, but this spot is so nice, I might stay an extra night.” Yes, an answering shift in his posture, a brightening, when she said that, and her smile widened a little of its own volition. She lifted her cooled mug to her lips and took a big gulp of the bitter coffee, blotted her lips with her napkin, and sighed, appearing nonchalant, before asking, “How about you? Are you headed on down the road today?”

“Oh, I live here,” he said.

Oh. Not what I’d figure as Joanne’s type. Too young, for one thing. In response to what must have been a puzzled look, he explained, “I live in Galveston but I’m staying here at the B&B while I help Joanne fill in around the foundations, after Gertie.” DD hadn’t noticed the slabs being exposed. Hurricane Gertrude had whirled up the Texas Gulf Coast the year before, a Cat II, which all the structures in the area were built to resist, but it had hit during a high tide with a huge storm surge.

“I didn’t notice them being washed out, but then I’m a city girl,” DD offered. “So, are you in construction?”

“Landscaping,” Jeremy replied. “I don’t know if you noticed, but that’s my truck parked up by the main drag.” DD had, in fact, noticed the gravel-filled dump truck parked on the asphalt before the vacant storefront on the corner.

She’d lived in Florida long enough to know that probably meant the road shoulders were soft sugar-sand that couldn’t support a heavy vehicle. Flash back to a night in grad school, a solo impulse trip after one of her many tumultuous breakups, from Atlanta to check out the Spring Break revelry in the Redneck Riviera. She had pulled over to consult her road atlas (before the days of Google Maps and iPhones) onto what appeared to be a solid shoulder. And found her wheels useless in the loose sand. She’d tried wedging everything she could find—driftwood, lumber, her jacket—under the rear drive-wheels for traction, but wound up digging deeper and deeper holes with her tires until the belly of the car came to rest on the sand like the carapace of a sea turtle. She spent the night on the bench back seat of her ancient Plymouth Belvedere and woke up, at the moment of a glorious sunrise, to see a wrecker pull in ahead to rescue her.

She rose, raised her arms and stretched—caught him looking—and spoke up to Joanne, “Is my room available another night? I really like it here.” With the relocation bonus from Amrencorp on this culture project (not to mention the prospect of royalties if...when...it pans out for commercial distribution) I can afford a little splurge.

“Sure,” the landlady said, “I’d love for you to stay another night.”

“Great!” said DD. “I think I’ll go out for a walk on the beach before it gets too hot.” She slid out the door to the deck and headed for her room to change her clothes. She willed herself to relax and act indifferent, all the while straining her ears for a step behind her: none. She had her key out well before stopping at the room door. She closed the door and shot the deadbolt. She changed out of her tunic and leggings into quick-dry nylon sport shorts, sport sandals, and a tank top, twisted her dark hair up, and stepped back outside.

She made her way around the deck and down the weathered wooden stairs. A breeze blew landward, carrying a rich aroma. Her acute nose began to catalogue its components automatically: salt water (though of course what she smelled was the iodine, since sodium chloride was as odorless as pure water itself), decaying vegetation, feathers—interesting, with no birds in sight—unrefined petroleum, and the distinctive aroma of cycloclasticus. She walked down the short street, past RV campers and beach-retreat homes of people a great deal wealthier than she. One had a rustic sign saying, AN OLD FISHERMAN LIVES HERE WITH THE CATCH OF HIS LIFE. Seashell wind chimes hung above sculptures of driftwood and tarred rope on the concrete pads. The stilt-raised homes were status-symbol beach houses for wealthy people from Houston, but humbler lots forewent the house completely and had just a concrete pad and a high sun deck, which doubled as a shelter for a motor home.

When she got to the beach proper, she saw that the low-growing shrubs with the bright yellow blossoms formed a matrix that held low dunes in place. The tide was low, the beach wide. The sand was darker in color than that she was used to seeing on the Florida side of the Gulf. She scanned ahead of her feet for tar balls (nasty to step in barefoot) but saw none. The cycloclasticus I smell must be breaking them down. She saw a line of flotsam washed up at the high tide mark and noticed draggled feathers sticking up from the sand. Must be a nesting ground nearby. One more aroma accounted for.

Right? Or left? To her left, a jacked-up pickup truck was parked on the sand about a quarter mile away, but she didn’t see the occupants. She turned right instead. Half a mile or so south was a cheerful apricot-colored house across from a head of sand pointed into the water; that was her mark. She started towards it, savoring the sun on the left side of her face. The mid-morning temperature was just right for a walk, with a breeze that was cooling but not icy, and she settled into a soft-kneed, easy pace on the sand. Low wavelets broke with soft sighing sounds. A lone pelican cruised by, south-to-north, perhaps fifty feet above the waves. She swung her arms, making huge snow-angel circles, trying to release the road tension from her neck. She paused and shaded her eyes.

The distant truck’s occupants turned out to be a white man and woman, now seated on a blanket and watching a small beige child play with a pail and shovel. DD spotted the oil rigs, just far enough out that one could see them only on the clearest of days, like today. And there was something moving near the rigs, a boat, too far out even to get an idea if it was a small, slow, close craft or a large, fast, far one.

She reached her goal point, the orange house, and decided to walk further. She picked a wooden picket fence, between the dunes and the beach, about another half-mile along. But first, she bent and put her hands on the ground, exhaling as her thighs stretched. She shifted her weight onto her hands and felt her calves come to life, walked her hands forward, and held a plank for four deep, easy breaths. She lowered her belly to the sand, then lifted her head and shoulders, using only her back muscles. She took another deep breath, then pushed up with her hands to arch like the cobra who lent the asana its name. She stretched flat, arms overhead, before walking her hands back to her feet, standing upright, and saluting the sun with joined palms.

Her mood popped through the clouds of worry that had been shading her, clear as the sunlight, and she smiled the rest of the way down to the fence, her turnaround.

XII.     Heads Up!

The POTUS turned away from the cameras and microphones as soon as he finished signing the bill. His efficient staff led all the congressmen and lobbyists involved in drafting the bill out of the Oval Office. POTUS asked Steve, his primary handler, “Now what?” He expected to be ushered by his Secret Service detail and the rest of his retinue to the Marine One helicopter in order to be transported to Andrews Air Force Base, to board Air Force One, as usual, for a flight to...he wasn’t sure today. He’d be briefed en route. But the Secret Service agents weren’t moving. In fact, they’d formed a protective cordon around him, very close, very tense.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. This was the White House, after all. He couldn’t

be under threat in this room, one of the most secure spots in the entire world!

“Problem with the helicopter,” someone said, a Secret Service man or a Marine, he wasn’t sure. The guy turned his face into his collar and began murmuring into the microphone.

“Mechanical trouble? Terrorist threat? What the fuck? Tell me!”

“Well, we’re not sure whether to believe it ourselves. But it appears that the fuel in the aircraft has been compromised.”

“Compromised? How?”

“We’re not sure, Mr. President. But we’re getting word from Andrews that the fuel in Air Force One isn’t optimal either.”

“What? But do they even take the same type of fuel?”

“No, that’s right, they don’t, Mr. President.” He insolently put his hand up to silence the President, pressed the earbud in his ear; they all did, in fact, and all appeared to be listening intently. Just as he started to object, bodyguards grabbed both his elbows.

Steve was walking backwards in front of him. “Mr. President, we need to go to the secure room for an emergency briefing. Right now. GO! GO! GO! GO! GO!” He turned and led the way, catching up with the door sentries who were getting the same message.

Before the President knew it, the wedge of Secret Service agents had formed around him and hustled down the hall outside the Oval Office; even if he’d wanted to break free, their rock-hard athletic bodies were no match for his sedentary spread, despite his height; in fact, he could barely keep up with them without stumbling. They steered him down the hall, towards the secure White House safe room maintained for the direst emergencies.

XIII. What Happens at the Beach...

DD reached the short street back to the B & B from the beach in an ebullient mood. Swinging her arms, she reveled in the warmth in her limbs that came from a brisk walk. She pushed her hair back where it had slipped from its knot, damp in the cool breeze. As she approached the steps up to the deck, who should be leaning against the bannister but Jeremy? Too easy.

“Good morning.” Jeremy smiled. He was standing hip-slung, trying to look sexy without looking like he was trying.

“Good morning,” she whispered, taking his hand and gently tugging him after her as she mounted the stairs. Life is too short to waste time playing games. He hesitated just a moment before surrendering to her lead.

She stopped in front of her room door, smiled, and reached into her sports bra for the key, watching his eyes follow her hand. She opened the door and stepped inside, standing in the middle of the room and turning to face him. He smiled, came inside and shut the door and locked it.

She pulled off her T-shirt and wedged off her running shoes, leaving herself standing in sports bra, shorts, and socks. She stepped towards him and undid the snaps on his Western-style work shirt (only in Texas do you see men wear these for work!), one at a time. His chest was lean and lightly furred with dark hair; her pulse quickened as she flattened her palms on his bare skin.

He pulled her close and lifted her onto her toes, kissed her. Soft lips, hard kiss, just shy of painful. Her tongue as it swept over hers had a barley taste, and he wore some sort of citrusy aftershave. She grabbed his belt with her hands and pulled him tight against her, wrapping one leg around his calf, and he pivoted to fall on top of her, on the bed.

He slid his hand under her sports bra. Yeah, that’s it. She moaned and fumbled for his belt buckle. While she undid that, and then his fly, he worked his kisses down her throat, savoring her workout musk, then applied his mouth to her breasts. She sighed, reaching for his trophy, but he quickly stood and dropped his jeans. She looked him in the eyes, lifted her hips, and pushed off her shorts and panties. He gave a little growl and dropped on top of her; his skin was beyond delicious against hers from thighs to collarbone. She sucked his tongue. He nibbled her lips, jaw, earlobe. She pressed her softness against his hardness. He broke away and she felt momentarily cheated and empty, reaching out for him with blind urgency.

He stood, working his boots off so he could step out of his jeans and underwear. She lifted her head to look. What am I getting? As he stood back up, his cock was thick, curved, medium length. He slowly stepped towards her and she beamed with eagerness. She sat up and grasped it, rubbing her cheek against its velvet while squeezing the shaft and feeling the steel beneath it.

Nothing like that texture.

The aroma, male hormonal yeasty warmth, suffused her senses. He took her head in his hands, but pushed it away, then pushed her back on the bed. He fumbled with a condom (He’s taking too long). She wrapped her legs around him and squirmed her hips, rocking him against her. He paused, kneading her breasts, then backed his cock away from her clit and slowly, ever so slowly, eased into her. She sighed and squeezed, smiling at the low moan that elicited from him; he pulled back and thrust...hard!

Shit, he’s going to come too soon... but he didn’t. She found her muscles knotting up in rhythm until, abruptly, surprisingly (I never come the first time!), she climaxed in an iridescent burst of pleasure. Waves coursed through her, her shoulders shuddered against her will, and she was barely conscious of him coming as well.

Just like in the movies.

He rolled beside her to lie propped on one elbow, smiling and running his hand absently up and down her body.

Well, that was that. Simple. Purely physical, and wow! Not that he isn’t nice, but.

She smiled at him fondly and ran her hand through his hair.

I wonder if Joanne will mind if I cancel that second night?

Two hours later, she was in her car, suitcase in the trunk, driving up the Bolivar peninsula to a reggae jam with a huge smile on her face.

I haven’t done that since college. I guess middle-aged hookups are much better than college hookups because there’s no pretending; you really, truly don’t care if there’s a future.

A flock of brown birds, thrashers maybe, broke from the yellow-green bushes. She caught one in crisp silhouette against a far-off rainstorm headed her way down the highway, and the image began to echo in her brain, generating a wave backwards through time: bird, egg, bird, egg…

An old-fashioned foxtrot came up next in her eclectic playlist. She reflected that perhaps ten generations had passed, since this music was first written. Ten generations of humans; maybe 500 generations of thrashers; and how many thousands of generations of bacteria? She started to calculate in her head.

About 3 hours for one generation, eight generations a day, 240 generations a month…over half a million generations.

Half a million generations ago, the ancestor species of humans, gorillas, and chimpanzees were just beginning to differentiate from their common ancestors. Now, humans were directing the evolution of bacteria (Viswanathan had shown the way on that). Now people like him, and DD, weren’t just selectively crossing creatures for the way they looked or acted, but snipping DNA for specific genes, encoding specific enzymes, which turned on in specific circumstances.

XIV. Just Another Breakdown

After their usual breakfast picnic, Ryan and Lori were ready to start their days. Lori worked evenings at the hospital, sticking patients for labs, and Ryan, mornings at the Sears tire shop. This morning ritual, coffee and sausage biscuits on the beach, was their one time to be together for sure. They didn’t see much of each other, and once you figured in the loss of their food stamps and subsidized Lifeline phone they made a little less money, but their schedule meant one of them could always be with Missy so they didn’t have to put her in daycare. But it meant they sure depended on the old truck. When it wouldn’t start after he’d cranked it five or six times, Ryan popped the hood. The primitive engine was clean as a whistle. He’d just replaced the distributor cap his last day off, Tuesday, so he figured he must have left one of the connectors loose, causing one of the plug wires to fall off.

No, the sparkplug wires were seated on each plug where it sat in the classic V8 engine block. The battery terminals sparked when he tested them by bridging them with a quick tap of his screwdriver. He traced each spark plug wire back to the distributor, then began to flip the clips off the distributor cap. There was something sticky on the plastic of the cap, and he wiped it off on his frayed jeans. He gripped the cap and then recoiled, as if burned…the cap collapsed in his hand as though made of clay!

“What the Hell?” He exclaimed.

“What is it, honey?” Lori asked, tossing her bleach-blond pony tail and looking back over her shoulder. She was still half-in, half-out of the king cab, where she’d just buckled Missy in, her hand lingering on Missy’s soft afro puff.

“I ain’t never seen nothing like this before,” he said. The cap was still firm at its base, so he pulled it free. On the inside, it looked like cottage cheese. Some of the contacts were coated with soupy plastic, and others were sunken. Too far away from the rotor to make contact, for sure. Lori had walked around the truck and now pressed her cheek against his upper arm as she peered inside, furrowing her brow.

“What the heck happened to that?” She asked.

“I don’t know honey. But the truck ain’t starting until I get a new distributor cap. Can you call your mom to pick us up? She can take you home and me to the parts store in Galveston. Shit, I’ll have to call in to work! There goes my overtime! Sorry, baby! I know you were looking forward to having that new microwave.”

XV.     Fully Upright and Locked

At the Atlanta airport, tempers were frayed.

Long lines of people waited to receive scrawled paper vouchers for meals from harried ticket clerks who were helpless without their computers. Tim, hung over from his prior night’s partying with Sam’s old school friends in “Hot-lanta,” stopped next to one such line and listened to an expensively coiffed and bejeweled woman in her 30s raise her voice. “What do you mean you can’t accommodate me? Do you know who I am?”

Tim murmured, “She doesn’t know who she is? Why is she wasting everybody’s time?” A geeky blue-haired teenage girl standing in the line heard him. She turned around giggling, and he cut her dead with his trademark disdainful eye-roll.

The monitors showing arrivals and departures had been exhibiting multicolored confetti for quite some time. The the power to the displays was abruptly cut; they all went black. The overhead lights went out, but the big windows of the concourse admitted daylight. A flight attendant zipping down the corridor, pulling her rolling travel case, staggered as the plastic handle on the case broke cleanly in half. The case rolled towards Tim, who pretended not to see it and lifted his foot as though pulling up his sock, kicking it and sending it somersaulting. The flight attendant limped after it on a busted heel, still gripping the useless handle. It made Tim feel better for a moment.

He spun and glided towards the exit, glad now he’d been checking luggage, and so had parked his rental car instead of returning it before checking in at the kiosk. If he’d done things in the usual order, he’d be stuck here with all these idiots. He could still retrieve the car from short-term parking and drive to Miami, worry about his suitcase later. He’d picked up some Adderal from one of Sam’s buddies last night, so he should have no problem at all making the drive straight through.

XVI. Moving Out

A leisurely day’s drive, around New Orleans, through Mobile and Pensacola, and along the straightest and most tedious stretch of Interstate in the southeast, delivered DD back to Tallahassee. The lush greenery, which had so enchanted her when she first moved there, now looked more like a patina of green decay, covering the corruption and backbiting that underlay the political and academic scene. She’d stayed long enough to see what went on behind the Spanish-moss curtain, and that was really, really long enough. Then, she’d stayed longer.

She exited the freeway onto Monroe street, passing the cheap motels, dilapidated half-vacant shopping malls, and tattoo parlors. She approached the downtown, the Capitol neighborhood, with its older retail buildings, renovated into lavish offices for law firms and lobbyists. The offices were interspersed with gleaming luxury condo buildings and hotels, inhabited during the feverish few months of the legislative session by lobbyists, State of Florida legislators, and the call girls (and boys), caterers, and drug dealers who tended their recreational needs. The buildings were near vacant the rest of the year, mocking the homeless people who trundled their goods down the street beneath their windows.

She turned right onto Tennessee street, passed a few blocks north of the Capitol building (its erect towering shape flanked by the rounded domes of the two legislative houses, giving rise to decades of smirky jokes about the Governor’s hard-on) before reaching “the strip” of college bars and the vomit-flecked sidewalks in front of them. She continued past the University, turned right, and headed up one of the slight inclines Floridians call “hills” into the more upscale fringes of the student ghetto, where the faculty lived.

Her house was a 70s modern with a timbered, vaulted living room, walled on two sides in glass, and a stone fireplace. She noted, with approval, that the realtor’s sign was on the lawn as they’d agreed. The sign proclaimed, “MUST SEE INSIDE!” The interior was impressive; DD had gradually remodeled the entire place and redecorated with the finest materials over the years. Amrencorp had provided a generous relocation allowance, which meant she was in no hurry to sell and could hold out for a good price as long as necessary, even until next August’s crop of new academic arrivals. Everything was packed up in boxes, sheets of Styrofoam, and bubble-wrap for the movers, except for two suitcases in the master bedroom. The bed was still made; she was leaving the big king four-poster behind, along with a few other items, to help in staging the house (and also because there was no room for it in her sleek-but-small new Houston apartment). She plopped down on the big bed for a few minutes’ contemplation. The thumb drive in her pocket poked her hip and she pulled it out. It was sticky. She pinched it and it deformed, like stiff clay or putty.

Odd. I wonder what happened to it? I’ll have to check and see if it still works. Later, when I turn on my computer. She set it down on top of a box.

She’d lived in this house for 15 years, since her one marriage had ended in divorce, and its lights, smells, and sounds were beyond familiar to her. She’d picked the colors of the paint, the granite for the counters, the shape of the moldings, the material of the drapes. She glanced at her hands, trying to remember which nail she’d lost when doing the tiles. The garden would probably turn up the occasional Lego or Barbie limb, from her grown daughter Jessica’s childhood, for seasons to come. Thanks, old home. You were a good home. I’ll miss you.

Before she knew it, the sun had set and it was starting to get dark. The dusk weighed on her emotions. Thinking of Jessica had transported her mind down a melancholy path.

Lord, give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. She closed her eyes and sank into meditation, repeating the serenity prayer over and over until she felt the burden lighten off her shoulders like angel wings.

Her eyes popped open. She was done with her day; it was time to relax. She stripped and stepped into the bathroom. A single bar of soap and a bottle of cheap dollar-store shampoo remained, but all her other toiletries were in her car, and she didn’t feel like getting dressed and going out to get them. I can skip the skin and body care regimen just this once. Just get clean. She turned on the hot water. She brushed out her shoulder-length deep-auburn hair and stepped in. She luxuriated in a leisurely shower, purring a hum which turned into an aimless song. At long last, she toweled off and put on an oversized T-shirt which hung to her knees.

She ordered one last meal of Chinese food delivered from her favorite place, Emerald River. While she waited for dinner, she combed out her hair. When the doorbell rang with the food delivery, she opened the door and snatched the brown paper bag. “Keep the change,” she said, over-tipping the elderly Asian man who brought it. There was a stack of boxes next to the bed, and she laid out the white cardboard cartons on top. She slid her legs under the covers and settled herself in with a book, for a final cozy night in her customary, private cocoon.

XVII.                     You Have the Right

Tim was feeling the Adderal, enjoying the way it carries you when you get tired and everything is vivid and crisp on the broken-glass edge of the drug. After the long drive down I-75, through the eternally under-construction portion between Macon and Valdosta, he was exulting in cruising the rental convertible with the top down, on the sunny oceanside highway towards his mother’s house in Neptune Beach. One last visit before heading out to Texas and a raise. Not only that, but the Amrencorp purchasing system, judging by what he’d learned from his remote probing, appeared even more vulnerable than the one at FCU!

He shook his head. Why people created such insecure systems in the first place was beyond him. At FCU, over his years of service, he’d unearthed several people less adept than himself trying clumsily to skim cash or pad their expenses. That was, of course, a chance for some petty blackmail, killing two birds with one stone as he acquired small favors from others while he protected his own personal watering hole. He had been doing FCU a favor, as he saw it, by maintaining full attentiveness to their areas of vulnerability, and guarding against some outsider wreaking real havoc in the college’s finances! Now he was going to perform a similar, unrequested but vital, protective service for his new employer Amrencorp (keeping a well-deserved fee for himself, of course).

He looked in the rearview mirror and saw flashing lights. He glanced at his speedometer: 68 in a 35. He chuckled. High spirits! He grimaced at the thought of the speeding fine and pulled over, smoothing his wind-ruffled hair.

The cop walked up to the passenger side of the convertible. Tim kept his hands on the steering wheel.

“Do you know why I pulled you over?”

“No, sir,” Tim lied. “Why?”

“How fast were you going?”

“My speedometer said 35.”

The cop didn’t even dignify that with an answer. “License, registration, and insurance please.”

“Reaching into my pocket for my wallet, Sir.”

The cop took the proffered cards and walked back to his car. “Asshole,” muttered Tim under his breath, once he was out of earshot.

After a few minutes, the cop walked back up to Tim’s car door. Tim brusquely held his hand out for his papers, glancing away, but the cop snapped a handcuff on his wrist instead. “Tim Schneider, you’re under arrest. Get out of the car.”

“What? What for? For speeding? That’s ridiculous!” Tim shrilled.

“There’s a warrant for your arrest. Get out of the car!”

“On what charge?” Tim demanded.

“Grand Theft. I’m not going to tell you again.”

“You must have the wrong Tim Schneider,” he began, but the cop stepped back, opening the car door, and yanked the handcuff chain hard enough to make Tim emit a strangled scream as he was dragged out, belly down on the asphalt and gravel shoulder, losing a loafer and scraping his shin hard on the doorsill. His face was ground into the pavement by the force of the cop’s boot on his neck as he handcuffed his hands together behind his back.

He was yanked upright and put in the back of the police cruiser, the cop’s hand on his head, just like on TV. There was a second cop, who recited the Miranda warning, also just like on TV. Tim sat in sullen silence, staring daggers at the police through the mesh partition, as the cop car pulled off the shoulder. Tim looked down and saw black oily smears on the front of his expensive new designer T-shirt. Someone must have just happened to have an oil leak in their car, right over where the asshole cop threw him down. Great! Blood would wash out with the right cleaning products. This looked like it would stain permanently.

XVIII.                 Spaß und Spiele

Susan watched the Germans gyrate on the dance floor. One thing she’d learned in dealing with the company’s German subsidiary was that the stereotype of the Germans as strait-laced and repressed was only half-true; when they cut loose, they cut all the way loose. She’d switched to tonic water early in the evening and was babysitting six men as they got sloppier and sloppier.

They’d started out at some authentic local clubs playing blues and zydeco, and the foreigners had professed to be delighted, but soon enough they seemed uncomfortable with the glances their increasingly loud German conversation was earning. They made their way to the Hard Rock Cafe™, where they could have a safely familiar international experience.

Susan dabbed some lipstick on and smoothed her hot-pink sequined size-18 tank top. Gunther wobbled over and flung himself on the bench next to her, lifted his beer towards his buddies, and hooted. He turned to Susan and high-fived her. Susan grinned and slapped back, hooting along.

Friedrich and Joseph wandered towards them, and Susan surreptitiously checked her phone. Eleven forty-five. She took a breath to shout out a suggestion that they make their way back to their hotel rooms, but at that moment, the music stopped. In the ensuing silence everyone froze, awkward in the strobe lights. Murmured conversations began. A headphone-wearing tech sprinted across the suddenly quiet dance floor and disappeared into the bowels of the bar.

The four other Germans drifted over, muttering amongst themselves too fast and soft for Susan to pick up.

“Well,” she said, “looks like the party’s over for tonight!”

“Oh, let’s wait a few more minutes,” Friedrich said. “I’m sure they’ll get the music going again!” Susan stifled a sigh. Friedrich and Joseph had been flirting with two college girls since they got here, and the girls disappeared into the ladies’ room when the music stopped.

The other four, though, had no such prospects, and were more than ready to leave. They persuaded Friedrich and Joseph. Susan summoned an Uber and they headed out the front door. Just as they cleared the entrance, a cracking crash startled them. Gunther dived for the ground.

“Ha! I keep telling you the US is not guns everywhere like you think!” said Joseph.

“No, see, the sign fell!” Friedrich pointed at the plastic front panel from the Hard Rock™ sign over the door, which had shattered on striking the ground.

“Uber’s here!” called Susan, waving her phone, “Jacob, in white Honda minivan.” They stepped over the plastic shards and headed for the white minivan that had pulled into the parking lot. Susan felt her dressy heel stick to the sidewalk, “Damn inconsiderate!” she grumbled. “Gum on the sidewalk.”

Waiting for her charges to load into the van, she turned to glance at the naked fluorescent lights where the plastic panel had fallen. The lights flickered and winked out; the whole building had gone dark. “We left just in time!” she said.

Their Uber driver, Jacob, a dark-bearded man, wheeled out of the lot. “I’m going to go up Bienville to get on the freeway. I-10 is blocked up through the Quarter here because of some kind of breakdown.” They wove their way along the picturesque, gritty streets, and Susan couldn’t help noticing that there were a number of cars pulled over or parked with their hoods up, and a number of lighted signs with holes in their panels, several buildings whose power seemed to have gone out.

“How random,” she said. “All these power outages, but it’s not a whole neighborhood, just one here and one there…”

But then they were pulling onto the freeway, driving in the left lane because the right lane and shoulder were sprinkled with broken-down vehicles, and a few in the left lane too.

Just as they crossed the 17th-street Canal, the van hiccupped. Susan caught Jacob’s eye in the rearview mirror. Two little lines sprouted between his eyebrows. “I just filled up before I picked y’all up,” he said.

The van’s engine coughed, chugged, quit. Susan gasped. The driver struggled with the dead power brakes and steering, managed to coast to a stop diagonally, half-on the shoulder. The Germans were buzzing in their language in the back.

“Everybody out!” the driver commanded. “Stay together and everything’ll be fine.” Susan opened her door, shifted her weight to get out, and felt her foot slide on the floor. She looked down, and the carpet under the foot that had stepped on the gum had a hole dissolving in it, and she was sliding in a gooey mess. She lifted her foot out and found that the entire bottom of her shoe—her favorite dressy high heels! —was gone, the heel flopping loose, her bare sole on the asphalt. She turned and stepped each foot in turn up into the van, unstrapping her shoes and leaving them behind, while the Germans clambered out.

The men stood in an uneasy cluster. Susan stood on the pavement, eyeing the glints of broken glass on the shoulder with trepidation. She noticed Joseph scraping his sole on the ground, lifting his foot to inspect it. Jacob, the driver, had his hand in his pocket, holding something that looked heavy for its size. “This ain’t the best neighborhood. Stay together and we’ll be fine.”

Susan wasn’t too worried. Six big men, even if they did look like Twinkies in a tray of Yodels, wouldn’t look like easy pickings. She looked left and right. It looked like most of the drivers of disabled vehicles were vacating the interstate as individuals or in small groups. The drivers whose cars still ran were driving doggedly along in the far-left lane. One had four flats but was still grinding down the road at 25 or 30 mph.

Jacob led them towards the nearest exit, the one they’d just passed. Susan, barefoot, shortest of them all, and overweight, slowed them down, but the men didn’t complain. They were overtaken by a pair of teen boys, sagging, loc’d, and speaking a dialect of English that Jacob knew fluently from childhood, Susan could just make out, and the Germans barely recognized every tenth word of.

“You be with them?” one of the boys asked Jacob.

“I be driving them. Uber, man. You hear me?”

“They be foreign?”

“They be German. But she from here.”

“Terence. Shug. You hear me.”

“Jacob.” Fist bumps. Nods to Susan and the Germans.

“Watch yourselves, cousin.”

“You too, how.”

The lean young men strode off. Their group followed at their retarded pace. They passed a pair of police cars, lights flashing. Two cops were leaning into an empty vehicle, two were waving flashlights at the oncoming traffic. Why that vehicle, of all the dozens stopped along that stretch? Who knew? The police looked as confused as they were. Susan walked towards one of them, “What’s happening?”

“No information for you, ma’am. Keep moving along, get off the freeway. It’s dangerous.”

They crossed an overpass, and the neighborhood below arrayed itself in all its seedy glory: convenience stores, vape shops, bars, pawnshops, all lighted and glowing beneath the street lights, flashing traffic signals, strobe lights in windows of head shops and strip clubs.

As they reached the head of the ramp, the overhead freeway lights cut off all at once. They blinked in the darkness. One of the cop cars passed them, going the wrong way on the divided highway, siren screaming, lights flashing, weaving its way from the shoulder to the traffic lane among as cars pulled over between disabled vehicles to let it pass. The second police car lagged, lights flashing, but hobbled by two flat rear tires. As its lights faded in distance and the other car’s siren became a distant whine, the first sounds of breaking glass came to them. A passing car’s headlights caught the German’s uneasy glances at each other. A lawyer, an accountant, two junior executives, a QC analyst, and an IT consultant, some of them gym-fit, but Susan was willing to bet none of them had been brought up on mean streets.

A couple of them had keychain flashlights. “I’ll save my phone battery just in case,” Susan said. She took her phone out to switch it off. “Hm. No signal. Here we are in the middle of a big city and there’s no signal.” None of them had any cell signal, though their GPS still worked. They switched their phones off one by one.

Jacob led the way, Susan in the center of the group of Germans. As they reached the bottom of the ramp, they heard the chilling sound of woman’s screams. The shrieks went on and on, punctuated by abrupt interruptions that could only mean a hard blow to the face.

“None of our business,” Jacob advised. “Stay back until they’re done.”

The six foreigners glanced at each other, glanced over at the underpass where the screams were coming from. Maniacal male laughter echoed between the woman’s shrieks of pain and rage. The visitors moved together towards the ramp, Susan lagging behind.

“Do not do it, you idiots!” Jacob implored them. “You don’t know. You gonna regret it. Damn it! Come back here!” They ignored him. Jacob had pulled his firearm, flicked off the safety, and was following at a distance, reluctant.

“Fucking cops see a nigger with a gun they’re gonna shoot me and sort it out later, fuck.”

Joseph and Friedrich, the two youngest and fittest, broke into a jog and reached the tunnel first. Friedrich had a flashlight and its faint beam showed a woman, now just sobbing hoarsely, on her stomach on the sloped concrete embankment. A number of youths, five or seven, he couldn’t count, stood around watching one of them rape her. The flashlight allowed someone to draw a bead on him; a shot ricocheted off the ground near Friedrich. The cowards then ran off squawking and hooting like the animals they were.

Friedrich stood, motionless. Joseph glanced at him questioningly as the other four caught up.

“Ich habe mich angepisst,” Friedrich whispered.

Joseph laughed loudly. Jacob gave him the stink eye and walked over to the woman, raising herself to her hands and knees now, still racked with sobs.

“Hey, you’re okay now.” Jacob said. He stashed his gun in the small of his back, took off his sweat jacket, and held it out to her to cover herself. She took it without looking at him, shrugged into it. Once she’d zipped it around her tiny bleeding frame, she looked up.

“Thanks.”

“It’s nothing. Can I do anything else for you, sister?” She shook her head, knees drawn up, wiped her bloody nose on the sleeve of Jacob’s hoodie, realized her hair was a mess and tried to shape it with her palms.

“She should come with us, don’t you think?” Susan whispered.

Jacob nodded, glanced at the Germans gleaming blondly in the darkness. “Yeah.”

Susan held out her hand and the woman took it, rose to her feet. “My name’s Susan.”

“Maya.”

“Maya, lovely name. Are you hurt, Maya?” Susan lifted her little keylight and inspected the girl’s face. An eye was starting to swell shut and the scrapes warned of purpling bruises getting ready to rise under her caramel skin. She swept the light down and the girl’s knees were raw meat, a gruesome caricature of a child who’s skinned her knees skating. The color soaking through the sleeves of the grey sweatsuit suggested her forearms were the same. “Can you walk?”

“I can walk. I think my wrist might be broken.” She held out her left arm to show a hand pointing off at an unnatural angle.

“Hospital six blocks north. Safer there.” Jacob took the lead again and the group set off again, hampered by the limping barefoot women and Friedrich’s spraddled gait.

XIX. Hey Now, You’re a Rock Star!

The next day, DD rose with the sun, tossed the Chinese food containers in the trash can by the curb, and drove to the Circle K on the corner for a coffee. The movers were due at 7:30, so she sat on the steps and waited, enjoying the birdsong outside and watching the morning walkers and joggers.

Her phone rang just as the moving truck pulled up. She checked the screen: her new boss, Dr. Jack Herbert. Not a scientist, but a man who’d spent his career wrangling scientists for various corporations, mediating between their rarefied world and the more pragmatic world of business.

“Hello?” She answered.

“Hi, DD?” Asked Jack.

“Yes. Hi, Jack! What can I do for you?”

“DD, I just wanted you to know: we had the first actual field usage of p davisii today. So far, the results are great!” He trilled the R the word “great” in a jovial way that reminded DD of the old Tony the Tiger commercials.

“Really? I didn’t think the lab staff would have the cultures cranked up already! That’s fantastic!”

“Still used to the academic pace of life, aren’t you? We don’t let grass grow under us at Amrencorp!” Jack chuckled.

“Where was the spill?” DD asked.

“In the Gulf near Houston. We’re 24 hours out from the initial introduction and the oil in the samples is 20% below your projections.”

“Twenty percent? Hot damn! I hope you’re following my sampling protocols closely, so I can look at the numbers when I get there!”

“Of course, DD! You’re a rock star around here now. What baby wants, baby gets!”

DD smiled. “OK, well the movers just got here. I need to go. Keep me posted if anything else exciting happens!”

“Will do. Bye, DD.”

“Bye, Jack.” She almost did a little dance. Not just because the tests were succeeding, but because she was getting positive feedback in a way that never happened among scientists. In her old world, she’d have had to spend months writing up the results and preparing them for publication, justifying every protocol and process to peer reviewers, before getting even the most guarded recognition. She was self-motivated and cerebral, or she wouldn’t have lasted so long in academia. And she’d had her share of insincere flattery flung her way in other contexts. But this praise, backed up by action as it was, felt surprisingly good.

DD put her phone away and eyed the moving crew hopping out of the truck. Six men, from teens to mid-20’s, all in superb condition, and all already shirtless because of the heat. Nice! Now, behave. They’re here for manual labor, not entertainment. But that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy watching them load up…

She greeted the boss, older and with a pot belly, the least attractive of the men. Fortunately, he was wearing a shirt. They went inside to look over her furniture and boxes.

XX.      My Stuff!

DD slipped on her sunglasses as she turned back onto I-10, this time headed west. One more trip on this straight stretch of highway, surrounded by piney woods and cattle fields, with populated exits few and far between. Vast stretches of nothing to break the flat monotony, until Pensacola. DD gave a sigh. Just knowing she couldn’t move around made her muscles jump. She tried to find the most comfortable position to spend the next few hours in. That was one thing she would not miss about Tallahassee: despite its being the state capital, it was at least a three-hour drive from there to anywhere. Well, two, if you counted Jacksonville.

She sucked a few gulps of diet drink through a straw from a giant Styrofoam cup and parked it in the cup holder. She popped her phone cable into the stereo and started her playlist of Blues, Dixieland, and Country. The miles started to slip by. One hour passed, then two.

Just after the first exit for Pensacola, she saw a big yellow truck ahead.

That truck sure looks familiar, but it can’t be.

It was! It was her own moving truck! Stopped on the shoulder by the side of the road! She recognized the way the knots of red and blue rope were crocheted around the handle of the sliding rear door. She took her foot off the gas.

She passed it and saw the driver sitting behind the wheel, talking on his cell phone, with the door propped open. She continued ten miles to the next exit and got off, drove across the overpass, then re-entered the freeway headed east. She passed the moving truck again, going east on the other side of the divided highway. The driver was nowhere to be seen, but he’d set up hazard reflectors behind the vehicle. She reached the first Pensacola exit and re-entered. When she spotted the triangles way ahead, she braked, put on her flashers, and then pulled in ahead of the stopped truck.

She waited for a break in the traffic roaring by before opening the car door, and then got out and walked back. The driver had been standing in the shade, leaning on the side of the truck away from the road. He’d been one of the crew at her old house, and when he saw who she was, he walked to the front of the truck to meet her.

He was a lanky, dark black man with a trimmed beard and light brown eyes. His skin gleamed like bittersweet chocolate and his muscles bulged under the sleeves of his T-shirt. Damn. Down, girl!

“What happened?” DD asked.

“I don’t know. I’m not much of a mechanic, I guess,” he said, with a shrug and a fresh sweet smile. “The engine just started bucking real bad and so I pulled over. Now it won’t start.”

“Oh, no,” said DD. “My stuff!” She pitched her head back in mock dismay.

“I know,” he said. “We’ll get it sorted out. The company said they have someone on the way. He should be here soon.”

“You want a ride? There’s a truck stop at the next exit; you could at least get something cold to drink.” At least. He’s not that young. He’s got to be thirty.

“No, I’m okay. I’d better stay with the truck until they get here.”

“OK. Do you think I should stay too?” One more try. “You could sit with me in the car, where there’s AC.”

“No, you go on ahead, ma’am. Matt’s Movers is a good company. We’ll get your things to you. They’re bringing another truck.”

Ma’am? Ma’am, indeed! Hmph. Suit yourself. “Suit yourself. Thanks, um…”

“…Jordan.”

“DD.” She shook his solid hand. “I guess I’ll see you in Houston.”

“Soon, I hope, Ms. DD.”

She got in her car and drove on.

On the road to Texas, she noticed five or six more stopped vehicles, mostly cars, with the hoods up and frustrated drivers on their phones. It seems like a lot of people are delaying maintenance nowadays due to this endless recession that we’re not having.

XXI. See What’s on the Slab

Once she reached Houston, she headed straight for the lab. It was obvious there was no point in going to her new apartment, since it was empty and her stuff wouldn’t arrive until tomorrow, if she was lucky. She’d have to stay at a hotel tonight. She found a shaded parking spot in Amrencorp’s vast lot, cracked the windows slightly so nothing in her suitcases would melt, and walked inside. She pulled on a neat summer-wool blazer as she walked across the lot, and sleeked her hair back into a ponytail at her nape; she had slipped off her flip-flops and put on loafers with her jeans.

She walked through the automatic sliding glass doors into the sleek marble lobby. One entire wall was a fountain, with water running down a glass sheet etched with the Amrencorp logo, a capital “A,” italicized almost beyond recognition, with a flower-petal sun bursting up out of it.

There was a uniformed guard, barely old enough to shave, at the big black semicircular desk. His vest had the Amrencorp logo on it too.

“Hi! I’m DD Davis,” she introduced herself.

“Doug.” They shook hands.

“Do you have my badge, Doug? They said it would be ready today.”

Doug looked in a big paper notebook on the counter, found her name, and used a key on his belt to unlock a drawer under the desktop. He asked for DD’s driver’s license before passing her the badge, then whipped out a glass touchpad and registered her right index fingerprint as well.

“You can scan in with the badge or the fingerprint.” He pointed at a panel beside the doorway to the lab. “Give it a minute or so for the system to refresh.”

“Very secure. That’s great!” said DD. Up-to-date technology! It made her feel better about the probable need of working late or working weekends, which might leave her here by herself at times. She inspected the badge, with its hologram logo and her photo side-by-side. She entered the first hallway to the right of the desk, using the badge.

She was used to the perpetual budget starvation of academia, where the football coach lived in a mansion and drank aged single-malt Scotch while reviewing game tapes with the governor on his floor-to-ceiling TV, and everyone else learned to clip coupons and amuse themselves at free concerts in the park. She strode down the hall to the door of her new lab and stuck her finger against the square inch of glass in the scanner by the door. The LED turned green with a beep and the lock clicked open. Cool.

She stepped inside and puffed up with pride as her eyes swept over the gleaming lab counters, the sleek steel incubators, and the laminar-flow cabinet hoods with their UV glow. She relished the sight of spectrometers, cabinets full of virgin petri dishes, beakers, loops and swabs, and the goggled lab techs busy at work. She cleared her throat.

All five of the techs glanced up at once and stood a little straighter at their work. One, a pretty girl with dyed red hair in a long braid, (What was her name again?) was standing at a counter making notations on a sheaf of printouts clipped with a giant binder clip. She picked up the printouts and walked over to DD.

“Dr. Davis, hi, I’m Abby.” She offered one of the printouts. “Would you like to take a look at these growth rates? They’re way out of line above what we expected.”

“Yes, I remember you from the other day, Abby.” DD smiled, took the printouts and leafed through them. “Whoa! This is incredible! This is almost pure exponential growth! What happened?”

“I don’t know, Dr. Davis…”

“…Call me DD.”

“DD.” Abby smiled. “I was just looking over the nutrient specs for the different batches and I can’t find anything different. Were these cultures the same organisms the original studies used?”

“Absolutely. I had my assistant, Tim, check the lot numbers for the original cultures, and I supervised the hybridization process myself. The seals on the boxes were unbroken when I opened the shipment at this end.”

A few minutes’ silence as they stood, flipping through the printouts together. DD stole a glimpse at Abby. About Jessica’s age. Jessica was so smart, this could have been her. Jessica had a full-ride academic scholarship coming, too, before she disappeared the first time.

“Abby, I need to get to my computer in my office to look into this more thoroughly. There’s got to be an explanation. Are there any more of these printouts?”

“Yes, about 100 pages; they should be done printing now. Would you like me to bring them in to you?”

“Yes, please. And thanks…I needed to see these as soon as possible. Good judgment!”

Abby grinned, a slight crinkle in the corners of her blue eyes belying the babyish dimples that emerged on her cheeks. She was plainly one for whom a little praise went a long way, belying stereotypes of her generation. She almost skipped out of the lab.

DD walked to the end of the lab and into her gleaming office with its brand-new glass and aluminum desk, track lighting, muted pastel draperies, and ample bookshelves. She settled into the black mesh chair and wiggled for a moment in joyful amazement at how well it supported her back. Her smile faded as she regarded the puzzle before her, though. She began to arrange the printouts on her desk with a furrowed brow.

XXII.                      Eureka!

Hours later, the shining floor-to-ceiling windows had become mirrors of the interior, backed up to the darkness outside; the track lighting cast a soft glow on the walls, and DD’s LED desk lamp was spangling a tight, bright constellation that illuminated the printouts. DD sat up straight. It’s got to be.

The p. davisii normally broke the crude oil into fragments of petroleum compounds, which quickly polymerized into longer chains. These chains had to be promptly and repeatedly dispersed into an emulsion by spraying with Corexit before the bacterium could continue digesting them. However, the Corexit slowed the bacteria’s metabolism, so the breakdown was incomplete, and much slower than what they were seeing. DD had a sheet of scratch paper on the desk next to her.

It’s the only explanation.

The scratch paper was filled with pencil equations and calculations. The workers had paused the spraying of Corexit when the slick started shrinking, as they always did, but it just kept shrinking, so they never had to start again. The amount of Corexit that was used, in the end, was a fraction of what they expected.

The p. davisii is eating the polymers suspended in pure seawater. We had no indication of this in the vat trials. What’s going on here?

She tapped her pencil on the desk absently. I should go out to the site in the morning. I can sit here and speculate all night with the data I have, but there’s bound to be some factor that’s not been observed yet.

She shut off her desk lamp and made ready to leave. She was the last one there, and as she walked out through the gleaming lab, she felt a proprietary thrill. She lingered a moment by the door.

Mine. She glowed inside.

She stepped out the front door, keys in her right hand, her left hand on the KelTec in her pocket. Her car was the only one in the lot. She stopped dead as her mind made the transition back to the mundane world. I have no place to go.

She looked inside her car. Empty, but for her suitcases in the back. She entered the car, which still held heat from the afternoon sun. She turned the key and rolled the windows down a few inches to let in the Fall air, which had turned a little cooler, and pondered.

Her new apartment was bare walls and empty cabinets and closets. Her belongings were, she presumed, still somewhere on I-10. She had become so absorbed in her work, she’d completely forgotten about the stalled truck! She’d spent the afternoon and evening, which she would otherwise have spent supervising its unloading, poring over the printouts in complete absorption. She’d expected that the moving company would call when they arrived, but they never had. Her things were still in transit.

I’m sure they’ll be here tomorrow, probably first thing in the morning. But for now, I need to figure out where to go tonight!

She shuffled through the printouts and found the GPS coordinates of the ocean water where the p davisii samples were being drawn from, over the spill. She consulted her smartphone for the location. A wry smile spread across her face. Eighteen miles offshore of the Bolivar Peninsula. How about that?

She checked the time on the phone: 8:45. The last ferry ran at 9:00, so she wouldn’t make it to Bolivar tonight; it was a two-hour drive to get to the ferry. So she couldn’t stay with Joanne tonight. But it was off-season still, so she should be able to find a decent room in Galveston for the night. Then she could call Amrencorp in the morning and arrange a trip out to the platform. She buckled up and started the car.

XXIII.                 OCD

Amit watched the cab pull away with Juni in it. He stood for a few minutes with his hands in his pockets. The trickle of people leaving the building coalesced into a slow river, which merged with a flood in the street before him. Like some strange species of insects molting en masse, they left tatters of pantyhose, soles of shoes, and shredded scarves and ties behind them. One woman clutched her disintegrating dress together, trying to preserve a semblance of modesty. Others had given up and walked along nude or semi-nude. He figured out after a few minutes the degree of nudity depended on which garments were natural fibers and which were synthetic. Some were dazed, others seemed panicked, some women and a couple of men were in tears. A young man with a full beard and a surfeit of tattoos and piercings was grinning fiercely as he strutted along in nothing but his white cotton underwear briefs.

Traffic was at a near-standstill on the street, and as a passing car bucked to a stop, he realized how many components of vehicles were also plastic. But why was plastic suddenly dissolving into gels and liquids? And it was a variety of different types of polymers, too; he couldn’t think of one solvent that would liquefy all of them. He set out walking along Polk street towards his apartment. As he left the campus, he saw that the traffic lights were still working, though it didn’t make any difference, as the proportion of stalled cars had increased to perhaps one in twenty, enough to block traffic completely. People abandoned cars to walk, weaving among the vehicles trapped in gridlock. Many of the drivers leaned pointlessly on their horns as though they thought that would levitate the traffic out of the way. Others smoked, or bobbed their heads to music, trying to make the best of what they thought was just an unusually bad traffic jam in one of America’s biggest cities.

He made it to the entrance of Arriga Park without further incident and crossed the park via its picturesque paths. The fountain wasn’t running. He couldn’t remember if it had been turned off for the winter already or not. Probably so, since it could freeze pretty hard in Chicago in October. He reached the other end of the small park and saw his apartment building. He reached into his pocket, and felt his polyester pants rip silently around the pocket opening, just from the pressure of his hand. The pocket was cotton, at least, and his keys were still inside. The awning above the building entrance was intact; he fit his key in the lock on the glass front door and it turned, but he had a moment’s panic as it refused to open. He put his shoulder into the door and, with a good shove, it released with a ripping sound. The weather strip around the door had become a gooey seal which dropped onto the tile floor in moist chunks.

He approached the elevator and pressed the button, flinching slightly as his thumb met a sticky surface. The button lit up and the light above the door began showing progress: 12…11…10… As he waited, he thought about the cables and pulleys that suspended the elevator, the insulated electrical supply to the belt-driven motor, and the insulated wires carrying current to the interior of the box suspended high in its shaft. He sighed, his elderly knees and arches twinging already from coming down the office steps, and walked down the short hallway to the staircase. Six flights, to his apartment on the seventh floor. He was panting when his key turned in the door.

The door swung open. He hesitated. He stood in the doorway, inspecting his apartment for signs of dissolving plastic. The laminate floor…the telephone on the wall…the acrylic vase on the coffee table…all looked normal. He rubbed his finger and thumb together where the stickiness from the elevator button had deposited itself, and noticed it was gone, leaving only a light, slippery coating. He put his fingers to his nose. He recognized the smell…it was familiar…where from?

His eyebrows shot up in recognition as he placed the aroma. Pseudomonas putida! He’d never forget that smell from his early, thrilling days of groundbreaking success at genetic engineering. And that was the same bacterium the Chinese doctor had been asking him about! Could it be? How? But it was the only explanation that made sense. That call, followed by plastic things starting to fall apart, and smelling like p putida: were they connected?

He decided to assume the theory he’d come up with was correct until disproven. He stood in the doorway and stripped naked. Nobody came along, thank goodness, to see his stocky dark-skinned frame in the nude, his sagging skin sprigged with graying hair.

He extracted his keys from the pants pocket and then dropped all his clothing on the floor in the hall next to the door. He left the door open, not touching the doorknob. He walked warily down the wool runner in the middle of the hallway and onto the tile floor of the bathroom. He hesitated, frowning at the plastic shower curtain dangling by its plastic rings. He picked up a ceramic water cup next to the sink, tipping the toothbrush within onto the counter without touching it, and used the cup to push the shower curtain back. He stepped inside the tub and let the curtain drop closed, then used the bottom of the cup to tap on the cross-shaped spigot handles to turn on the shower, good and hot. He washed the cup first and set it at the far end of the tub, then scrubbed himself from top to toe, and back up to his head again, with hot, soapy water.

A third top-to-toe soaping was followed by a rinse. He turned off the spigots by hand. He opened the curtain. He opened the medicine cabinet mounted on the wall and took out a bottle of isopropyl alcohol he kept on hand for first aid, and poured it generously onto the strip of tile floor he’d walked across. He stepped out into the puddle of isopropyl and toweled off with a clean towel, which he then wrapped around his waist. He took a hand towel and draped it over his shoulder.

He had a pair of latex gloves on the first-aid shelf as well, and he put them on. Stepping into the hall, he rolled the carpet runner up with care, touching only its edges and back, avoiding any surface his feet might have touched. Feet straddled wide apart to step close to the baseboards, he waddled to the door, where he tossed the carpet on top of his clothing in the hall. He stripped off the latex gloves, which he then deposited on top of the pile. He walked back into the bathroom and washed his hands again, then took the remaining isopropyl and doused the segment of the entryway floor he’d crossed to reach the hall runner when he first came in. He blotted some of the alcohol up with the hand towel and used the alcohol-soaked towel to wipe the outside doorknob.

Then, and only then, did he shut the door. He turned around and surveyed his one-bedroom home. If he was right—and it was the best guess at this point—this was the only place nearby that was sure to be free of the destruction and disintegration going on outside.

XXIV.                  At Sea

DD had never felt so dainty in her entire life as she did on the boat out to the oil platform. She’d been a tomboy, and then grew up into the sort of woman many men found intimidating. Working in the sciences, she was used to ogling, sniggers, and putdowns both subtle and obvious. But the men on the boat with her, dressed in coveralls, or jeans and T-shirts, carrying backpacks or wearing tool belts, muscular and agile on the bouncing deck in the choppy water, radiated a masculine calm which made her acutely aware of her relatively weak and diminutive frame. Each one swept his eyes once from her ponytail, down past her clipboard, to her rugged hiking shoes, and back to her face. Once, and that was the end of that. No catcalls, no smirks, no posturing. All business. Guess these oil roustabouts have nothing to prove.

She was escorted to the galley of the boat, where she sat down at a small, bolted-down table with a technician, who sketched the basic process of underwater drilling for her.

“So, first we drill the well with joints of pipe, then we insert the casing once we’ve got it as far down as we want it go.”

“So, is this like the Deepwater Horizon well?”

“Nah. Those Macondo wells are way offshore, just because the tourists and the greenies up there don’t want to see the platforms from the beach. That’s what made that spill so hard to cap off. They were in, what, 5,000 feet of water?”

DD gave him what she hoped was an alert look. Considering I’ll be working in this industry I should know more about it.

“We’re in 500 feet. Big difference in pressure. What is it you said you do?”

“I’m a microbiologist. I just developed a new strain of bacteria to eat oil spills.”

“Oh, yeah, I heard about that! They said it worked faster and cleaner than any of the bacteria they’d used so far. Almost no Corexit needed, right?”

DD smiled, proud, and sat up straighter. “Yes, that’s p davisii, my baby! Actually, I’m headed out to the platform because it might be working too well!”

Jeff, the tech, tilted his head. Eurasian features, round face, sparse beard. It made him look younger than he must be, for him to be out here. “How so?”

“Well, it looks like p davisii might be able to eat other types of petroleum-based polymers.”

“Hmm. Interesting.” She could tell he wasn’t one given to thinking things through and imagining conclusions.

Well, and I’m probably being too imaginative. At least I hope I am.

“Yes, well, so…you were explaining how the drilling process works…” She steered him back on topic.

“Oh, yeah. You know, it would be easier if I could draw it. We’re almost to the platform and I’ve got paper there to draw on. Do you drink coffee?” He got up and went to the urn on the counter; she followed him. He picked up a Styrofoam cup off the top of the stack next to the urn without looking, a motion he’d repeated many times, and the cup underneath stuck to it. He gave a quiet, surprised giggle, looking at it. One side of the cup looked a little melted. The four top cups were fused. He pouted his lips in brief confusion, shrugged, tossed the warped ones in the trash, and drew them each a cup of coffee.

XXV.                      The Length of the Handle of the Pump

In the compact, functional office of the platform, Jeff drew a diagram. A box up on top of the water, “That’s us,” a long, thin, double line down to the ocean floor, “That’s the drilling pipe.”

Then a big block under the line representing the ocean floor, “Once we find the oil deposit,” he scribbled a big black oval just beneath the block, “we put a casing in at the end of the drill pipe. It’s really wide in diameter, and we keep putting smaller casings inside bigger casings, like a telescope, until we finally meet the oil deposit.” He’d drawn a fair representation of a telescope reaching down to just above the blob of oil.

“Isn’t the oil under a great deal of pressure?” Asked DD.

“Oh, yeah! It sure is!”

“Well, so,” DD asked, “How do you keep the oil from shooting out?

“That’s where these geologists and drilling experts make the big bucks. They tell us exactly how deep the oil is and warn us before we get to it. They stop just short of the oil deposit and run a production line down into the deposit.” He drew a line down through the drilling pipe and the casing and into the oil itself. “There’s a packer around the production line which seals around it inside the casing.”

“Like a ring on your finger?” DD glanced at his hands, and the young guy was wearing no ring. “Or a watch?”

“Exactly.”

“But, how do they get this packer thing to seal to the casing?”

“Oh, it expands.”

“How does it expand? Is it, like, some sort of spring mechanism?”

Jeff smiled. “Not in this depth. The deeper wells have mechanical packers because they have to hold up to really high pressure. But ours are just elastomeric donuts. They soak up oil and expand, and the endcaps are also designed to squish them vertically a little so that they expand out instead of lengthwise.”

DD looked at him. “Tell me you didn’t just say the packer is plastic.”

“Why, what’s wrong?”

“Tell me, Jeff, what is plastic?”

“Well, there are lots of different kind of plastic,” he began, but she interrupted.

“What do they have in common?” DD demanded.

“I’m not sure what you’re driving at,” Jeff said.

“They’re polymers.”

“Yeah, so?”

“I am 99% sure at this point that p davisii eats every type of polymers!”

Jeff frowned. He sat silent for a moment. DD could practically see the gears turning inside his head. “Oh, shit! If that’s true...the well could blow!”

“Not just this well; the assay ships have showed growth rates consistent with mutated p davisii throughout the entire drilling field. Any well with a plastic packer is going to start gushing oil. It’s not a matter of if, but when!”

“Shit.”

“Damn straight. You know what happens when the wells start to leak? It’s a giant p davisii buffet. Each and every oil plume is going to be inoculating the ocean for miles with a blooming colony of mutated p davisii.”

“I don’t like the sound of that.”

“I don’t either. Remember your stack of ruined coffee cups?”

“On the boat? Yes, what about them?”

“That Styrofoam was probably infected with p davisii.”

She watched the reality of what they were talking about sink in, and his eyes grew wide as he considered the implications. “There have got to be hundreds of wells with plastic packers in the Gulf alone…thousands in the world.”

DD couldn’t curse. She couldn’t speak. For a moment, she could hardly breathe.

XXVI.                  Still Beats the VA Clinic

The cab driver was an old-time Chicago native who’d wanted to exchange notes, if not entire genealogies, once he found out Juni had family in the Grand Boulevard neighborhood, but Juni was answering him in monosyllables, so he gave up. He was having to be extra-creative with his course-plotting anyway, because several major streets were blocked by stalled cars and cars with blown-out tires. Juni kept looking at her phone; it kept saying “no signal.” No signal, in downtown Chicago! What was going on? Was it a war? A terrorist attack?

Finally, they passed into an area where she had three bars of service.

Juni called her brother, who worked nights, waking him. It took a few moments to get his groggy mind to understand the situation, and she found herself barking at him, afraid the signal would drop before he got it. He got it–finally!–and said he would call her husband at work, and either one or both of them would meet her at the urgent care center.

The trip from the university to the hospital took almost an hour, twice as long as it would normally take, and Juni handed the cab driver her Visa card. He slid the card through the reader, but it sang a little tune of disappointment.

“Network’s down. You got cash?”

Juni pulled a few bills out of her jacket pocket. She was a dollar short, but the driver accepted it. “Don’t worry about it! I hope someone would do the same for my wife.”

Juni got gingerly out of the cab, standing on her uninjured foot, the toe of the sprained one touching the ground. She looked around as the cab pulled away around the semicircular driveway, but there was no one there to assist her, so she limped over to the door of the urgent care center, pinwheeling her arms for balance and wincing in pain with each step. She approached the automatic door, but the motion sensor failed to see her for some reason. She waved her arms, but the door still didn’t open. She noticed that a little door off to the side was propped open, and she supported herself with a palm on the useless sliding-glass door to totter over to it.

Once inside, apparent turmoil resolved itself into dozens of individual dramas. Children wailed and wheezed, and people held bloody towels to heads or limbs. The molded-plastic chairs arrayed around the waiting room were broken, some of them lying in Daliesque puddles, some merely broken off their metal bases. Her bare right foot and the ball of her injured left foot sunk into the putty-like substance which the linoleum floor’s traffic areas had turned into. The reception counter was abandoned by the staff. Juni turned and saw a smaller alcove next to the doorway, where the linoleum floor was still solid and people were sprawled out, curled up, or sitting; one woman coughed relentlessly into a squelchy 1rotect. Juni fished a packet of tissues from her jacket pocket and handed them to the woman without a word. The woman nodded gratitude. Another woman, very young, was pale and dull-eyed, with dry lips, panting and resting her head on the lap of a worried-looking youth who stroked her hair with desperate concentration.

Juni hobbled up to the counter and leaned on her elbows, taking the weight off her injured foot. After quite a long wait, a petite and pretty woman in teal-and-purple scrubs came out, her face cycling through expressions signaling that she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. She gave Juni a pile of forms and a lead pencil. Juni’s forearms stuck to the formica countertop when she reached out to take them. “Our clipboards and pens are destroyed, sorry. Just fill this out if you really think you want to be seen.”

“Why wouldn’t I want to be seen? I sprained my ankle.”

“Well, we can’t X-ray it, because the top of the X-ray table is now on the floor, and the X-ray unit won’t work anyway. We can’t cast it because our casting materials are all polymer and they aren’t setting up. All we can do is wrap it in an Ace bandage and send you home with Tylenol.”

At that moment a half-sobbing, half-shrieking voice ululated from somewhere behind her. “Yeah.” The girl jerked her head towards the sound. “We don’t have any hypodermics left, either, for local anesthetic,” the girl said, striving for cynical but with a waver in her voice betraying her despair. “Or Ivs. Staying or going?”

“Well, I have an Ace bandage and Tylenol at home.” Juni found herself speaking slowly. Her mind felt like honey in winter, slow-motion, unreal, trying to fit this scene into something that made sense, and failing.

The girl made an impatient half-shrug. Juni handed her back the pencil and the form and hobbled outside. A rescuing chariot, her brother in his car pulled up in the driveway. Her husband, her dear, sweet Bill, jumped out and wrapped one strong arm around her shoulders, taking her other hand, and tenderly assisted her into the back seat. She sniffled, and collapsed against him in relief.

XXVII.              Gotta Get that Gasoline

LeRoy pulled his ’77 Malibu into the Quick Stop N Go. Peewee and Jack were sitting in their usual spots by the water hose, running their daily business as usual. LeRoy didn’t need anything in that way today, and that was good because he had just enough money in his account to pay for a tank of gas to get him to work the rest of the week, plus the EBT card, and Peewee and Jack didn’t have any way to take EBT since Jack’s sister’s fish market had closed up shop because they caught that Mexican gal working there.

To his surprise, all eight pumps were blocked by cars. But the drivers weren’t pumping gas; they weren’t inside paying for gas and getting smokes or soda; they were standing around, waving their arms, talking to each other, talking on their cell phones, or talking to Buddy, who was standing there scratching his head and shrugging his shoulders.

The body language of everyone at the pumps was so clearly semaphoring, “What the fuck?” that it made LeRoy laugh. He turned off his engine and lit a cigarette, draping his wrist over the sturdy plastic of the Malibu’s steering wheel, and waited to see what happened next.

What happened next was that Buddy, who was supposedly not the owner of the station, but sure acted like the owner, and nobody’d ever seen the owner, walked over to a corrugated metal shed, unlocked it, pulled out a flat wooden block, and then walked over to one of the metal filling holes over the in-ground fuel tanks, which just happened to be a few feet in front of LeRoy’s bumper. Buddy squatted and used both hands to take the cap off the hole, then stood up. LeRoy saw that the wooden block was actually a long stick of wood, riveted end-to-end so it unfolded into a yardstick. When the stick was unfolded, it was longer than Buddy was tall, and Buddy lowered the end of it into the hole.

When he pulled the stick out, LeRoy tipped his head to the side. The last foot-and-a-half of the stick was coated with what looked like mayhaw jelly. Buddy stared at the stick for a moment, perplexed, then pulled a rag out of his belt and wiped it clean. The second time, he watched it real close as he dipped it carefully into the center of the tubular channel, not letting it touch the sides. He drew it out, just as carefully, and once again it was covered in a clotted, sticky amber substance. Buddy noticed LeRoy watching, and he pivoted, so that the end of the stick was hidden from LeRoy’s view.

Buddy looked furtively at the people standing by their cars. LeRoy watched one woman shut her cheap flip phone, climb back into her SUV, and turn the key hopefully, with no success. She slumped in frustration. A man showed up in a battered blue Kia and the woman at Pump 1, dressed in a McDonald’s uniform and scowling in frustration, locked her little Honda with the key-fob remote and jumped in with him. There was one man, tall, beefy, tattooed, bloodshot, and scarred, who was standing next to a pimped-out black Escalade with “2 Fast 4 U Niggas” lettered in script at the top of the windshield, his stare fixed on Buddy. Buddy folded the stick up and walked back towards the shed. He tossed the stick in and closed the shed. LeRoy noticed he didn’t lock it. Out of the corner of his eye, LeRoy saw the big, ugly Escalade owner start to move. LeRoy’d always found that the best way to deal with trouble wasn’t to be there when it happened. He figured that now would be an excellent time to depart. He glanced down to turn the ignition key, and when he looked up from starting the car, Buddy was gone. That fast!

In a few seconds, so was LeRoy.

XXVIII.         In Whom We Trust

DD’s hands were cold on the metal railing of the boat now ferrying her ashore from the oil rig. She zipped her windbreaker. It helped with the chilly breeze which had thrashed its way out of nowhere, but she still felt cold inside. She repeated over and over inside her head what she’d told Jeff: It wasn’t a question of if the wells would burst, but when. She resisted the urge to look behind her at the gentle waves in the Gulf; there’d be no sign of the eruption, which would occur underwater, until the oil gradually began to bob to the surface, and even that would hardly be noticeable from this angle. The floor of the Gulf of Mexico would be perforated with thousands of open oil wells, weeping black tears of crude. Would the p davisii reproduce fast enough to eat the oil? A nauseous feeling rose inside her as she calculated the volumes and realized the volume of bacteria that would result from multiple wells giving way would completely change the biochemistry of the water: metabolic by-products, heat from fermentation of unimaginably huge volumes. It would even cause mechanical changes in the viscosity of the water. A horrible thought struck her: how would that affect larger animals, as marine creatures tried to swim through goo? And what about the food chain, from krill on up to mammals?

She heard masculine voices raised in excitement from below decks. Two crew members in coveralls with the Amrencorp logo hustled to the top of the steps to look down into the boat’s innards. She heard a compressor start up: the bilge pump. “I thought the hull was inspected in dry dock last month?” She overheard one of the crewmen say. The two of them, frowning, started down the steep stairway and their dialogue was muffled.

The boat approached the pier, and though the water seemed no rougher, the craft was rocking more vigorously now. The boat wallowed as it came about, and slowly swung into place to line up beside the weathered wood. DD noticed that the ship’s rail, which had been at her eye level when she was standing on the pier before they boarded, was now only knee-height above the pier. The crew flipped the ramp out anyway, horizontal instead of sloping down, then disappeared below again. She minced across that bridge to the dock. Several oil-rig roustabouts had been on the boat with her, coming ashore for their much-anticipated months off. But instead of surging across the ramp, they’d dumped their luggage at the rail and joined the group below decks trying to puzzle out what was wrong with the boat. She looked at the belly of the craft at the waterline and was surprised to see it pitted with craters like the surface of the moon, with little shreds of fiber sticking out like mangy fur. Her mouth opened in shock as a thought occurred to her. What kind of polymer is used in that fiberglass hull? Would p. davisii be able to eat it?

Her train of thought derailed as a familiar face popped up in front of her: a man wearing a trench coat, khakis, and deck shoes. She smiled in recognition: someone she’d met at the presentation? Then she placed the out-of-context face and her smile collapsed. The sick feeling in her stomach turned into a clutching pain. Not him again! Not now.

“Mr. Fleck.” She said, noncommittal.

“DD…Dr. Davis…I have to talk to you.” His eyes were red and watering…the stiff salt breeze? But the emotion in his voice and the quivering of his lips suggested some deranged excitement instead.

“About what?” She drew back. His agitation put her immediately into fight-or-flight mode and she unlocked her knees.

He took a step closer to her, and so she took two quick steps to the side, so he wasn’t blocking her way to run up the pier towards land if escape was needed. No one was on the boat’s deck or on the pier at that moment, and all the people on shore were at least 100 yards away and not paying any attention. Still in an easy semi-squat, prepared to run, she slipped her right hand in her pocket and curled her fingers around the stock of her gun, her finger parked comfortingly on the outside of the trigger guard.

Fleck was strident, his voice cracking. “This is it. The end. It’s happening. Now. We have to get out of here!” He reached out to take her arm and she easily stepped away, shaking off his fingers as they brushed her arm, and he let his hand fall to his side and looked down at the boards of the pier.

He could definitely outrun me with those long legs. She sidled over a little farther, still facing him; she was between him and the shore now.

She eased backed a step. Two steps.

He raised his head, his face more composed. “Dr. Davis, I know how this must sound. But please believe me: you want to come with me. Things are about to get ugly, not just here but all over the world, and I can keep you safe. Your bacteria is about to cause a global disaster.”

DD snickered, incredulous, rolling her eyes, and as she did, her attention was captured by the sight of the boat. The deck was inches from the water; each wave washed over the stern and slopped over the inwale into the stairway, soaking the upholstered benches and streaming down the treads.

She watched the first crew member hurry out, cursing floridly, his coveralls wet to the waist. A stream of uniformed crewmen and jeans-clad roustabouts followed, pouring out, clattering across the ramp at a run, some grabbing their bags piled on the deck, others not even pausing. One vaulted the railing, bypassing the ramp completely to land on the pier with a thump that shook both DD and Fleck. All twelve of them lined up to stare at the craft, cursing under their breaths, but otherwise speechless. The boat rode higher for a moment with the weight of the big men off it, then resumed its accelerating sinking. The ropes holding it ashore stretched taut.

Fleck, momentarily forgotten, gently cupped her left elbow.

“P. davisii eats fiberglass,” he murmured in her ear. “It eats all plastic. And it’s spreading. Here, and in Asia, and we think in East Africa. Nothing can stop it now.”

DD turned to look at him. Something inside her shifted; she was scared and she wanted someone to trust. She dropped her hand down behind his to take his right arm and let him lead her off the dock. I am numb. Shocked. Details popped out at her with acute clarity: a pelican on a piling; a post stuck in a concrete footing, now leaning against a cement block wall; a bottle cap on the ground. I’ve never dealt with something like this before. I need help, to figure out what’s going on and how to cope with it. As they stepped off the wooden pier onto the concrete seawall, she turned to see the boat’s gunwales sink underwater, the craft listing crazily away from the pier, and the roof of the cabin being held out of the drink only by the straining ropes. One of the roustabouts who’d come ashore had pulled off one of his shoes and was sitting on his duffel, looking at the sole. The waffled tread was gone; the bottom of the shoe was melted smooth.

Fleck led her into the little canteen by the dock. They sat at a rickety table. A bleached-and-teased fiftyish waitress poured them coffee. Fleck explained. “I don’t really work for TERRI.”

No shit. “I figured that out. Who do you work for?”

“I’d rather not say. But this is bigger than my Agency. The UN, the Chinese, the Russians, and all the US intelligence agencies are all mobilizing together on this one.”

“What one? What exactly is happening?”

Fleck gestured at the TV mounted on the wall above the window to the kitchen. CNN was streaming images of pile-ups on freeways, collapsing buildings, airplane crashes, a delivery truck with milk streaming into puddles on the ground, a half-naked Asian woman running screaming through streets with Chinese signage, her clothing in tatters…

“You don’t think about how many things in our lives are made of petroleum polymers, do you?” Fleck said.

DD nodded, the implications coming fully clear to her now.

“DD,” Fleck said, “you made this bacterium. You can help us stop it.”

“I don’t know…” she mused, the microbiologist part of her mind kicking back into gear to toy with the problem, glad to have something familiar to latch onto.

If I could just regain control of the growth rate, I’d have a chance. But why is it doing this?

Mistaking her doubt for resistance, he said, “You have a moral obligation to help undo the harm it’s done.”

“Yes, yes, I agree,” DD said, too engrossed in the mental puzzle to take the emotional bait. “The other OHCBs always burned themselves out when the spill was gone,” she mused aloud. “We never thought this could happen. I still don’t know how or why it’s started digesting polymers. Especially when you consider how many different types of bonds there are in plastic substrates…”

“The fact remains, you are our best hope.” He looked solemn, but as she came out of her distraction, DD’s bullshit detector went off on the solemnity, even as molecular models twirled in her head.

There must be genes for enzymes being expressed that I somehow missed in the haplotyping. Those enzymes have to be dissolving the polymers. Is there any evidence of alkanivorax or p putida producing polymer-cleaving enzymes? How fast could they evolve them in real-world settings?

“I’ll try everything I can to figure it out, as soon as I get back to the lab. I was planning to spend the night here and go back in the morning, but I’ll grab my stuff and head back right now. Amrencorp’s shuttle was supposed to be here to take me to the hotel, but I don’t see it.”

“You can’t go back there.”

“The hotel?”

“Your lab.”

“What? Why not?” My lab! My new lab! And I need it to understand, much less have a snowball’s chance in Hell of solving this problem!

“It’s been compromised.”

“What do you mean, compromised?”

“Does the name Timothy Schneider mean anything to you?”

“Of course! Tim’s my right hand! He’s been my assistant for eight years!”

Fleck withdrew a sheet of paper from his pocket. It was a photocopied ledger of accounting transactions, headed, “FCU 00505028-99 PITHOS BIOCHEM.” Several of the transactions were highlighted.

“Did you order cultures from Standard Labs of Minnesota?” He laid the ledger on the formica tabletop.

“All the time, of course.”

“How many at once?”

“Usually forty-eight at a time. They were cheaper that way, and that was how many we’d use up before they died.”

“Why does this invoice say ‘240 pieces’ then?” He tapped the page.

She slapped her hand down and drew the paper closer. As her eyes flicked from transaction to transaction, she saw an account number that was familiar: 115, petty cash. But petty cash transactions were only authorized to $100. Why were the numbers in the right-hand column bigger? $355…$622…$1560! And all the negative transactions into petty cash…from Supplies and Equipment…one transaction from an outside company she’d never heard of, Sinopec Corporation, what was THAT about?

“I’m no accountant, but is this…”

“Our forensic accountant estimates that Mr. Schneider has embezzled about $184,000 from FCU in the time he’s been working for you, most of it in the last three years”

DD’s stomach wasn’t hurting any longer. Bad sign. Her heart was pounding and her mouth was dry. I gave him all my passwords, including to the new lab’s server.

“I have to get back to my lab.” She had tunnel vision now. “I have to get back to my lab. I have to see if this is true.” I never liked Tim. But I did trust him.

“DD, if you insist, I’ll take you to the lab. But he’s been logging into the server with your username. Believe me, you won’t want to use that lab until we find out for sure what software he’s uploaded and what it’s designed to do. It could be spyware, or even malware.”

DD torpidly stood. Fleck dropped a $5 bill on the table. Fleck stuck out his right arm and DD took it with her left hand, acting on autopilot. As they left the restaurant, DD stuck her right hand in her pocket and touched her KelTec.

To her distress, the plastic grip felt soft and sticky.

XXIX.                  Burn After Reading

Fleck patted DD’s left hand in the crook of his elbow, seemingly in reassurance. She drew a breath to ask a question, and his hand compressed hers, trapping it. Before she could pull her hand away or react at all, two other men in trench coats, jeans, and deck shoes appeared out of nowhere. One of them seized her right arm and the other stood directly behind her. Her hand was still curled around the KelTec in her pocket, but there was no round in the chamber and her other hand was trapped. Overabundance of caution. Excessive concern with safety. Should have kept a round in the chamber. She released her hold on the gun and made a token struggle; then she saw that the three men were dragging her towards a waiting car, a huge grey sedan.

Nope, not getting in there! She screamed, “FIRE! HELP!” She bent one of the men’s pinkies back and heard a satisfying “snap!” But these guys were pros, and he barely flinched at the broken finger. As they stuffed her into the vehicle, nobody nearby even looked up. I guess we’re not going back to my lab, she thought, sandwiched between two goons with Fleck in the front passenger seat next to the driver. The doors slammed and the car pulled away.

DD had just enough time to see that the car was headed west, towards Houston, before someone slipped what felt like a pillowcase over her head. She lifted her hands to pull it off and someone caught her wrists and held them together; she heard the ratcheting trill of a zip tie closing and felt the bite of the plastic. She raised her bound hands towards her covered face to pull the fabric away from her nose and mouth, and hands forced hers back into her lap. I can’t breathe! She fought the panic back. Yes, I can. The air was warm and stale from her exhalations, the fabric was getting damp from the tears rolling down her cheeks unbidden, but she forced herself to realize she was able to fill her lungs if she paid attention and breathed slowly. It wasn’t easy to breathe slowly; her heart pounded. She willed herself to relax, with little result. She puffed air through her lips with each exhale to make a small space in front of her nose and mouth.

Time was distorted by her lack of vision, but she thought it was only a few minutes later when the vehicle exited the Interstate, and she could tell by the stops, turns, and bumps it was wending its way back into a local neighborhood. The vehicle made one last, slow turn and stopped on a slight uphill slope. The man to her right got out, while the man to her left held her zip-tie bound wrists. The first man reached into the car and seized her wrists, pulling her out. He put a hand on top of her fabric-covered head as she cleared the door. She staggered to an upright position on a gravel-paved surface.

She gasped as someone (the man from the left side; he was shorter and had something in his pocket that jingled, keys or change) grabbed her waist, beginning a frisk which found the KelTec in her jeans immediately. The searcher’s hands took the little gun and then traveled up and down both her legs, goosed her crotch twice, hard (Bastard! Just like the fucking TSA!), then went under her jacket, around her back, up under her breasts, then cupped each one briefly before traveling up her bra straps. She swallowed, blinking back tears of outrage, and forced herself to focus on breathing.

The other man (or maybe Fleck, she wasn’t sure) fiddled with her bound wrists, and they came free, the zip tie cut. She shook her stiff hands and pumped them open and closed twice before they were abruptly captured again. She broke free from the captor’s grip with her right hand and, just as she began to struggle, the other man grabbed the free hand and both hands were pulled together and re-tied, behind her this time. She panted from the brief scuffle; the most chilling thing was the absolute silence in which it all took place. Should she scream? She drew a deep breath to, but a hand clamped over her fabric-covered mouth before she could. Her scream came out of her nose as a moaning whine, and the man pinched her nose shut for a moment while keeping her mouth covered, suffocating her just long enough to make her start to panic. Pulling up on her wrists, torqueing her shoulders, painful enough to capture her full attention, the man behind her let go of her face and propelled her forward. He jerked her to a short stop just before a slight step up into a doorway, then slowly nudged her forward until her toes found the sill, and she stepped up.

This is all happening so fast!

The light filtering through the pillowcase wasn’t quite as bright as she was steered forward. After they turned a corner, it was almost fully dark. Her captors let go of her and she swayed on her feet, trying to orient herself. Then the case was pulled off her head and the zip ties snipped at precisely the same moment, and before she could even begin to react, a door slammed and cut off the light in the room, leaving her in full darkness.

Alone?

She shuffled slowly forward, hands out in front of her, until her shins hit something metallic. She bent and felt it…a toilet. A sinking feeling as she identified it and realized its presence implied a cell; she might be in here a long time. She explored the whole room with her feet and fingertips.

As she moved about, her eyes adjusted gradually to the tiny, linear outline of light that came in around the tightly fit door. About eight-by-ten, the room contained the steel toilet mounted on the wall, a steel sink, and a wall-mounted steel shelf bed with a thin mattress of naked foam rubber, a roll of toilet paper sitting in the middle of it. The walls were raw wood, cut close around the bed, sink, and toilet, and attached to the studs with screws. The floor was tile. There was what seemed to be a window, which was boarded over with the same wood, which the edges revealed to her fingertips as thick plywood, screwed into the window frame and overlapping the plywood wall. There was also a cluster of faint red dots in the far-left upper corner by the ceiling: the infrared lights of a night-vision camera. Something barely discernible on the ceiling might have been a light fixture, but she couldn’t find a switch anywhere, though she ran her hands over every centimeter of wall she could reach.

The movement and stretching calmed her a little. She sank down on the bed to think, the steel shelf hard against her buttocks through the skimpy foam mattress. She pinched the foam rubber and found it to be just ordinary foam; she could rip it to fluffy pieces or cut it into a shape.

And then do what, exactly? No point in that.

The searcher had missed the tiny Swiss-army knife that was in the same pocket as her handgun, but the miniature screwdriver on it would only endure removing a few of the screws holding the plywood before breaking.

And then what?

She was forced to conclude that her available resources weren’t up to the task of getting her out of here.

She zipped her windbreaker. Her feet were cold inside her sneakers and she recognized the room was quite cold. Maybe 50 degrees Fahrenheit. She stood and paced to keep warm, her hands in the empty pockets of the jacket. The sink produced only cold water. She cupped her hand beneath it and drank deeply, then thrust that cold hand into her warm jeans pocket. Think of this as a survival situation: water, check.

Next, avoid hypothermia. Only one thing in this damned room...cell...that’s a good insulator. She picked up the foam mattress and, standing against the wall, rolled her torso up in it. She awkwardly flopped her burritoed body onto the steel mattress, yanked a corner of the mattress up to use as a pillow, and tried to rest. She repeated the serenity prayer over and over and forced her breathing to slow and deepen. As her mind relaxed, a thought emerged.

The extra shipments of cultures! The dual labeling. Maybe some of the organisms weren’t p putida? Or alkanivorax? I wish I had some way of finding out.

She imagined what steps she could take to find and isolate the new enzymes and trace their origins. She could build a plasmid which would inactivate the DNA that coded for it. She then realized the plasmid had to be administered by shooting bullets at it with her KelTec, because the bacterial chromosomes were really zip-ties.

She awakened when three naked 100-watt bulbs, overhead in a wire cage, flicked on. Disoriented, she didn’t know how long she’d slept, and she struggled briefly to free her arms from the claustrophobic embrace of the foam enveloping her before remembering where she was. She sat up, blinking and squinting and very much aware of her full bladder. She unwrapped her foam rubber cocoon the rest of the way, just as the two men who’d been in the car burst into the room.

The taller one grabbed her by the front of her jacket; she heard something rip in the lining as he jerked her towards him. She smelled his coffee-fouled breath in her face, as he demanded, “Why’d you do it?”

“What?”

“You know what! Tim’s told us everything!”

“Tim?” She struggled to get on top of the dialogue. “But Tim…”

He shook her so hard her teeth clunked together and her eyes sparked in the back of her head. She found herself saying “Hnuhnnuhnuh,” and then her knees started to buckle as he released her. She found her footing and felt her teeth with her tongue—not broken, thank God!—then stood with her hands on the front of her thighs as if frozen, her eyes once again betraying her by streaming tears.

Lord grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. She drew a shaky breath and let it out, then began another, smoother breath…

Her knees buckled as the shorter man swept a leg into the backs of them. She jammed her wrist and hit her hip hard on the tile floor. He stepped in front of her and pulled back a foot to kick her, but his comrade said, “Wait!”

He put a hand on her attacker’s shoulder, and she noticed, stifling a smile, that the last two of his fingers were taped together. The other man subsided.

The courage to change the things I can. A deep breath. She wavered to her feet.

And the wisdom...

“Sit down,” Short Jingly commanded, gesturing at the bunk. His shirt was a different color, DD was sure, so it must be the next day already. She sat with another deep breath.

...to know the difference.

“Look, Dr. Davis. We don’t believe you came up with this yourself. Tell us who recruited you and things will go better for you.”

“Came up with what? P. davisii? I most certainly did come up with it myself…”

“So, you admit it?” Interrupted Tall Coffee-breath.

“Yes, of course I admit it! It was all techniques I developed myself. It was based on the work of Viswanathan, but he had nothing to do with it directly.” The two men exchanged glances and nods when they heard Viswanathan’s name, which puzzled DD.

“Who convinced you to make it do this?”

“Do what?” DD stalled.

“Don’t play games with us. This is a terrorist weapon worse than any we’ve encountered. Tim told us about your little ‘side’ experiments!”

DD made a mental leap. She’d known a few people in the political cesspool in Tallahassee who’d been sold out to prosecutors during political witch-hunts. Her mouth gaped as the truth dawned on her. “I suppose,” she began, numb, “that you offered Tim immunity for what he told you?”

She saw red, and found herself half-lying on the bunk’s steel surface, before she felt the pain in the side of her head. She touched her temple and her hand came away with a trace of blood.

“That’s enough!” bellowed Short Jingly. He walked over to the door and opened it with a key. “Get out of here and calm yourself down!” He was talking to his partner, the one who’d struck her. Revenge for the broken finger.

Tall Coffee-breath complied. DD dimly knew it was a ploy, but she still felt visceral relief to have him out of the room, and she couldn’t help feeling absurd gratitude to Short Jingly for sending him out. She remained seated, pivoted towards her right, facing the wall at the end of the bunk, palms flat on the steel, left foot on the floor, not looking at Short Jingly as he locked the door. He sat at the farthest end of the bed, elbows on his knees, head turned towards her.

“DD…my name is Isaac; may I call you DD?” She didn’t respond. Deep breaths.

“DD, you are in a lot of trouble here. My partner wants to remand you for prosecution and let them decide whether to treat you as a terrorist or an ordinary criminal. But here’s the thing: I don’t believe you did this on purpose.” She pivoted to look at him blankly, both feet on the floor, hands in her lap. Not buying the good cop bullshit, no sir.

“I believe you were duped into this and you didn’t know what the consequences would be. You see, I know a lot about you academic types—my dad was a professor—and I know you sometimes get so absorbed in your studies that you don’t see things beyond the tip of your nose.

“You want anything? You hungry? Thirsty?” He seemed to suddenly realize she might be uncomfortable.

“No,” said DD. She was still feeling nauseous and a little dizzy after the shaking and the blow to the head. “But I need to pee.”

His eyes flicked to the toilet, then away. He got up and let himself out.

“Be right back,” he said as he pulled the door shut behind him.

DD glanced up at the corner. Yes, it was a camera up there. She grabbed the toilet paper, pulled off her jacket, and performed a sort of fan dance to preserve her dignity as much as possible. She sighed in relief as she pulled her jeans up and pressed the button, inset in the wall, to flush.

Short Jingly…his name is Isaac…came back in with a foam cup of black coffee, four sugars, a plastic stirrer, and two little plastic cups of creamer, all of which he held out to her. She took the coffee, disdained the additives, and sat on the bed, blowing on the scalding liquid so she could take a sip. The heat felt good on her cold fingers, even through the Styrofoam. Which was not melting, she observed.

“DD, I don’t want anything more to happen to you. You may think you’re protecting these people, but they don’t give a crap about you. Tell me who they are and we can make sure you’re not prosecuted.”

“Look, Isaac. I only just figured out what was happening myself. I saw the boat sink. I know that p davisii is wreaking all sorts of havoc in the Gulf and it’s obvious that it’s going to get worse. Believe me, I had no idea it would develop the capacity to eat plastic. I don’t know how it happened, which as a scientist seriously ticks me off. But it was an accident.” She was talking more than she’d intended. I guess having had no one to talk to makes me want to talk more. She sipped the coffee and winced at the bitterness.

“Pretty bad, isn’t it?” Asked Isaac with a wry smile. “Sorry about our coffeepot. We all put plenty of sugar in to make it drinkable…” he held up the sugar packets, and DD wordlessly took them from him. She shook them by one end, then tore all four open and stirred them into her cup.

“DD, Tim came clean with us.”

“About his embezzlement?”

“DD, Tim wasn’t embezzling from you.”
DD was silent. I don’t know what to believe anymore. She didn’t want to believe Tim was committing larceny. As much of a prick as he was, she’d trusted him for years and she never suspected that dishonesty was one of his faults; quite the opposite, he was honest in his criticisms of others, to the point of verbal abuse at times. But what about the dual labels on the cultures? Those Sinopec transactions? What about the printouts? Of course, the ledger transactions could have been faked. She had to consider the source.

“Let me talk to Fleck.” Since when do you trust Fleck? Since that boat sank right before your eyes? Since he showed you the ledgers? And what did that get you, trusting a government agent? Whom can you trust?

“Fleck’s not here right now.” Like some Kolkata phone-bank operator being asked for his supervisor.

“I’m not saying anything else until I’ve talked to Fleck again.”

“Since when do you trust Fleck?” Did he read my mind?

“Was I talking out loud?” she asked.

“Talking about what, DD?” Isaac asked in a strange and soothing manner.

The coffee cup, nearly empty, hit the floor and DD gaped at it.

“We were talking about the plastic.”

The Styrofoam cup didn’t dissolve but maybe that was because the coffee killed the alkanivorax. I should tell him.

But instead, she kicked her feet up onto the hard steel bunk, laid her head on the foam rubber mattress, and closed her eyes. Isaac walked to the door and unlocked it to let the taller man back inside.

XXX.                      White Rabbit: The Interview

“DD…DD…”

Deedeededee… She sang, “Deedeededee…” She laughed at the sound of her own voice. She realized her eyes were closed and she opened them. She thought she opened them.

“Just let me open my eyes…things are blurry…”

“It’s okay, DD. Let me help you up.” Isaac took her hand. She grasped his hand and pulled herself up to sitting. She rose cautiously. Her legs felt soft and rubbery; she stumbled into him. He steadied her.

She felt a surge of strength and stood upright, her hand on his shoulder.

Then she remembered he wasn’t her friend.

“What do you mean, I’m not your friend?” Isaac asked.

Did I say that out loud? Too funny!

“You know,” DD grinned slyly, looking at him from the corner of her eyes. “You know!”

She took a step away from Isaac’s side. Coffee Breath was standing by the door. She took another step back, away from both of them, and hit something hard. She realized she was against the wall. She pushed off from the wall and took a run at the door, but next thing she knew she was whirling, with Coffee Breath’s arm around her waist.

“Whee! Shall we dance?” She giggled. He took her shoulders and danced her backwards, and then she was sitting on the bed. Her hands startled her. No, his hands startled her. Her heart was beating fast and her mouth was dry. Her coffee cup was overturned on the floor, and her mouth was so dry! She felt a sense of loss over the mouthful of spilled sweet drink and whimpered, feeling tears rise to her eyes, pointing at the tiny puddle of coffee.

“It’s okay, DD, I’ll get you some more coffee.” One of them said. Said. Said.

“I want some more. That coffee is good stuff. I’m feeling much more energetic now.”

“Good! Maybe you can focus now on who gave you the cultures,” suggested Isaac.

“Tim ordered them. He does all the ordering,” DD said.

“Don’t play dumb.”

“I am dumb.” That’s not right. “No, I’m smart. If I’m dumb, you must be an idiot, right?” She chuckled and stood up. “Bye!” Time to go! She tried to sidestep Isaac and Tall Coffee Breath pushed her easily back onto the bunk.

“DD, just tell us. Who did you meet with? What did that person look like?” Isaac said. His name is Isaac.

“Isaac. Isaac who?” DD asked.

“Who did you meet with?”

“What’s your last name, Isaac? Mine is Davis.” She held out her right hand. He ignored it.

“Dr. Davis, who did you meet with about the cultures?”

“He didn’t give me any choice but to meet with him,” DD said sadly.

Isaac’s eyebrows twitched upwards. He leaned forward.

“Who didn’t?” he said, eager. “Who didn’t give you any choice?”

“The man who came to my room early in the morning.”

“What did he look like?”

“The same.”

He knows what Fleck looks like. Why would he look any different yesterday morning?

“The same as what?”

DD noticed the grain in the plywood near the ceiling above Isaac’s head was crawling. Not crawling exactly…not getting anywhere …shrinking…no, not really shrinking…pulsing. Did they put something in the coffee? Shit, that hasn’t happened to me since I was 15!

“The same as what, DD?” Urged Isaac gently. Annoying. He’s annoying me.

“Fleck. It was Fleck.” Isaac slumped.

She began to hum. “Bela Fleck, do you recognize the song?”

“Not Fleck, DD, the other one, the one who gave you the cultures,” Isaac tried again.

“There was another one! Yes, there was! Two!” DD smiled, happy to be helpful.

“Who were they?”

She blinked. Who were they? Who were I? Who were we? We… they… you… you two… you all…

“Y’all. My head hurts.” She put her hand to her temple and then stared at the blood on her hand. Dry. I’m bleeding dry blood.

She held it out to Isaac “Look it’s dry blood. Just like the movie.”

“What movie?”

“The Andromeda Strain. Before your time. Before my time. Old sci-fi.”

Isaac glanced at the taller man, who pulled out a memo pad and jotted something on it. This struck DD as funny, him thinking The Andromeda Strain was something significant, big spy stuff, and she giggled.

“DD,” Isaac said, “who did you talk to before you made the last batch of cultures?”

“Talk to?”

“Did you talk to Viswanathan?”

She was getting angry. “Look, I told you I don’t know him. He did the classic work.”

“It’s okay, DD. We know you’re not the one responsible. If you help us by letting us know who set you up, we’ll make sure the prosecutor goes easy on you. The work you did on p davisii wasn’t your own, we understand that.”

She stood up. She wanted to frame a cogent argument, but all at once she was seeing red, red and black pulsating before her eyes, and she was clawing, kicking, scratching. Something hit her head. The blow came in the same place as before, just as hard, but she couldn’t feel any pain, just the rage. Someone was screaming in rage and it was coming from her throat, and something was hitting her hard in the stomach so the scream was wobbling like a Tarzan yell, like a bellows, and she had a handful of hair and it was attached and then it wasn’t, and she was biting something soft which tasted like rust. Her elbows were pulled behind her and she thrashed and kicked, making a resonant thrum when her shin hit the bunk that should hurt but it doesn’t. Not like it used to when Daddy did it.

She was panting, her arms behind her, also in a way that should hurt but didn’t, and she screamed, “Fuck you! Fuck you! It’s mine! I made it, it’s mine by contract, and I can do what I want with it. You can talk to my lawyer if you don’t believe me. I worked for this. I worked for years in that fucking state-funded academic gutter. You don’t know how many asses I had to kiss. You have NO IDEA how many stupid political games I had to play. Stupid. Stupid…egotistical…”

Suddenly, she was sobbing. She let her body slump forward. She observed remotely that her shoulders felt better as she leaned forward, which was odd that they should feel better, because they hadn’t hurt before, but the sobs were wracking her body and distracting her from that.

She was face down on the floor and the door was slamming. She was alone in the room. She was still sobbing. She crawled over and vomited brown coffee into the steel toilet and the sobbing ceased. She gathered up the foam mattress and hugged it with her arms and legs. Her breath slowed. She slept.

Outside the door, Isaac and his partner peered at each other under their brows, shaking their heads. “Leave her here a couple of days?”

Isaac nodded. “One more round of questioning. Then dispose of her.”

“Sure we can’t just do it now? I don’t think she…Shit!” He lost his footing on the linoleum floor; his feet slid out from under him.

Isaac stifled his laughter, stepped over to offer the other man a hand up, and wound up on his hands and knees in the puddle of soupy melting plastic.

XXXI.                  Guillotined

“The declaration of emergency has gone out, but we don’t know how many units actually got the message,” Steve said, from his seat at POTUS’s right hand at the conference table.

“What does Homeland Security have to say?”

“We can’t contact them.”

“Well, get me the Secretary of Defense then.”

“We are trying, Mr. President. We’ve lost contact with approximately 67 per cent of Secret Service units, 44 per cent of FBI, and 89 per cent of Marines. Whoever’s behind this, it’s everywhere.”

“What about the secure satellite uplinks?” He directed his attention to the NSA director.

“The satellites are unaffected,” he said. “From the limited information we have been able to glean in brief moments of contact, it appears that other nations’ satellites are also unharmed.”

“What’s the problem, then?”

The Secret Service Special Agent in Charge pulled the spiral headset cord from the back of his neck. He held it out and pinched the wire with his fingertips, pulling the wire straight as it slipped through his opposed nails. The plastic insulating the wire came away in a gummy wad. He threw the headset down in disgust. “Don’t you get it? This is happening to all of us! It’s gotten into all our equipment! Even the EMP-hardened stuff!”

“This is like an EMP attack, on steroids! Every level of communication is cut off, in every geographical location. We have no contingency plan for this!”

“I suppose what will happen now,” POTUS said, listlessly, “is that everyone will try to get instructions for how to deal with the emergency. But they won’t be able to.” He looked up. “The government is like an animal with its head cut off. It will be chaos!”

The SAC and Steve exchanged glances of relief that he seemed to be catching on. Steve prompted, “But in this case, each agency has its protocols...”

A light came on in POTUS’s eyes. “They’ll break apart into cells and each will attempt to further their last stated goals and missions.”

“That’s right, Mr. President.” Said the SSSPA-in-charge. He was the one who had taught him the protocols when he was inaugurated. “And what else?” He nudged, trying not to sound like a preschool teacher.

“Make regular attempts to re-establish contact with the hierarchy.”

“Very good.” He struggled to keep any condescension from his voice; the last thing they needed was for POTUS to erupt into one of his face-saving tirades, as he tended to do when his authority was challenged. He was just glad that Congress had been on recess when this hit, or they’d have had to deal with a pissing contest as they all tried to take charge.

“So. What are my resources?” POTUS was making an effort to gear his mind up to the speed of the evolving situation, accustomed as he was to having a small crowd of sharp and driven aides and staffers to deliver the summary distillation of gigabytes of data and information, along with their well-considered recommendations. This was just him, and he felt disarmed, naked, exposed, awkward.

“Mr. President, your resources at this time are what you see in front of you, in this room. These people: your security detail and personal retinue. If you fire one, there is no one to replace him. These computers, which don’t work without power, which we may lose at any moment. And the tiny amount of information which is printed on paper in this room.”

“So.” He paused. “We wait. No other choice, is there?” He glanced around, and no one contradicted him.

“The only decision to be made is, where?”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

Steve brought POTUS a glass of water and set it beside him on the conference table. This room should be a hubbub of activity. But two-thirds of the monitors ranging the periphery of the room sat dark or displayed the manufacturer’s logo or “NO SIGNAL.” A few staffers sat at the few functioning workstations, running on back-up batteries, copying data onto thumb drives and SD cards. The high-grade laser printers in the next room were spewing mailing lists, address lists, and database spreadsheets in hard copy form at their maximum draft speed.

“No internet?” POTUS asked.

“Not in DC. One of the major cell carriers has two bars of service. For now. It looks like all the rest of the towers are infected,” The SAC said. “The cellular networks around the country are also, apparently, going down at an alarming rate.”

“And these computers?” He waved his hand to encompass the workstations lining the walls.

“Are connected in-house only. Glass fiber optic cables still use plastic connectors. No one has touched the internal White House cables since the last security sweep three days ago, so our wiring seems uncontaminated. For now. Who knows if any of these memory cards are infected?” An aide who was sitting at a computer was listening in, and his face fell. He pressed the SD card and it popped out of its socket into his hand. He held it before his face and scrutinized it closely.

“And the electricity?”

“The back-up generators are fueled by gasoline. The tanks are metal, and they haven’t been refilled or rotated in over a month, so they should be alright. Again: we think, if no one has touched the tanks with contaminated hands. We have enough of a reserve to run them for two weeks on full power, a month if we drop back to economy consumption. Basically, the White House is off-grid.”

As if on cue, a background din which he’d barely been aware of, vanished. The massive back-up generators which kept the White House in power had automatically switched to the next sequential fuel tank, and just like that, there was no more electricity.

In the silence, the big man spoke, his voice uncharacteristically tiny in the big room. “Damn. I assume it’s a priority to bring us back up?”

The SAC hesitated, glanced at Steve as if for guidance or support.

“Mr. President, we have no way of knowing that.” Steve spoke softly.

“Can’t you contact Pepco?” The President named the Washington, DC power company.

“Mr. President, landline and cellular phone service is out for the entire city.”

“Can’t we send our own techs out to troubleshoot our line?”

He sighed. “First, the line is probably shorted out at multiple points, due to the insulation and connectors dissolving. Second, our infrastructure geek gives us a 92% chance that the power station itself is contaminated to the point of being non-functional.

“And, third, no one is going out of this compound without full military and law enforcement guard details, because the streets are already bedlam. Looting, fires, and people trying to escape the city on foot. The police have no communications and few working vehicles, but there are rumors that over half of them have deserted their posts already.”

“Contaminated? What do you mean, contaminated?”

“Let Birdwell explain it to you. He’s the Army Corps of Engineer’s ecology geek.”

Lt. Col. Birdwell was, despite his WASP-like name, olive-skinned and black-eyed. He was tall and slender, his jowl just beginning to soften in middle age, his black hair gray at the temples. “Mr. President,” he began, “we believe some sort of microorganism, capable of consuming everything composed of petroleum or plastic, is spreading exponentially, turning everything it touches into water and a semi-solid polymer gel. We don’t know for sure where it began, though the NSA,” he nodded at the NSA chief, leaning unnoticed against the opposite wall, “believes they have a fix on the originator of the culture. Unfortunately, they’ve lost contact with the unit that was assigned to acquire that asset.”

POTUS grimaced at the NSA head, who suddenly found his cufflinks extremely interesting.

“Everyone: Sit!” he barked in the haranguing tone of voice that had put him in the Oval Office. “If you’re not cleared to be here, leave. Get out!”

The technicians and staffers at the monitors rose and filed out. His security detail, Birdwell, Steve, and Susan Steiner, Secretary of Education, who’d happened to be present for the bill signing, were the only ones in the room with him. He looked around the table.

“Alright, men, we need a plan. But first, we need to know what we’re dealing with. Is this bioterrorism? Is it those ISIS sons of bitches?”

The NSA head spoke up.

“We believe it may be. There are actually four possible viruses and bacteria that could be behind this outbreak. Two of them come from geographically unlikely sources, one in Iceland and one in Nairobi. The Russians could easily have developed something like this, though we had no intel about anything like it beforehand, and we’re going over the documents we still have access to, to see if we missed something. But the most likely candidate is a disgruntled academic, a gun nut from the south, DD Davis, and we think she was funded by the Chinese. I am confident we will hear back from the group that is detaining her shortly, and we will have a more definitive answer at that time.”

“Well, that’s not much to go on. But it’s better than nothing.” He waved his hand, and added as an afterthought, “Anyone else have anything to add?”

Everyone remained silent. “Alright, then. We need a plan. Thoughts?”

One by one, everyone present weighed in. The final decision was, that they couldn’t remain here, but it would be foolish to move right away. The state of mayhem in the city of DC itself would likely peak in 72 hours or so and, they assumed, then die down to a tenuous, gang-enforced peace. They would finish getting as much as they could in hard-copy form, using back-up battery power.

They would assess their resources for moving. If they had vehicles with uncontaminated gas tanks, it might make sense to use the gas in the reserve tanks to get to Camp David instead of trying to get the generators running for a few more weeks. They would also prioritize ascertaining the whereabouts of the First Lady and her children, who’d been at POTUS’s New York skyscraper residence earlier in the day. They would continue trying to establish contact with foreign leaders. In the end, there was little they could do, but they set to work doing it with diligence.

XXXII.              A Flea and A Fly in a Flue

DD tried hard not to wake up. She succeeded for quite some time. She first became aware that someone had stuffed something in her mouth, a sock perhaps? She opened her eyes and the light hurt, so she shut them. The knifelike headache from the base of her skull to her eyes told her she must have majorly tied one on; she hadn’t been so hung-over since undergrad days. She shifted position and realized she was lying on a hard surface, in a puddle of something. She’d only been plastered enough to piss herself once, in high school, her one and only encounter with chugging straight gin right out of the bottle. But her pants…she was wearing pants, good…were dry.

All at once, everything came back to her. The wells…the boat…Fleck…Isaac! She flailed upright on the metal bench, ignoring the screaming pain from her shoulders. She discovered that she was cuddling a yellow sticky lump which, on further inspection, seemed to be dissolving into the puddle she sat in: the foam mattress. The “sock” in her mouth was actually her tongue, swollen and dry as cotton. She slipped her hand into her pocket—Her shoulder really hurt! —and her baby Swiss Army knife was still there. They must have been so excited about finding the KelTec that they didn’t check any further. However, when she pulled it out, she saw that the red plastic face on each side was dissolved away like nail polish in acetone, leaving only a thin crescent shaped film around the edges. The knife blade, screwdriver, and corkscrew all still worked, so evidently there was no plastic in the pivot points. Just as well I don’t have the KelTec. It’s probably a useless wad of gunk now that the p davisii has gotten to it. Now what?

She rose, her legs still a little quivery under her, and staggered to the sink. She scooped handsful of water into her parched mouth and throat. At once, she turned and vomited water and sour bile into the toilet, gasped for a few minutes with her head down and her palms on her knees, and then forced herself to drink again, more slowly this time. Her headache pulsed in time with her heartbeat. She reached her hand out to steady herself against the wall and felt a rougher surface than expected. That was when she noticed: the plywood over the window. It’s separating. That’s why I can see in here; there’s light seeping in around the edges where it’s warping. Plywood is thin sheets of wood, glued together. Looks like the glue is PLASTIC!!!

She worked her fingers under the first thin sheet of wood in the plywood, and it ripped away from the next layer. She pulled out her little knife and worked painstakingly on the next one, and the next. She hit a chunk which just fell apart in her hands, full-thickness, then an area where it was still so firm that she had to work her tedious way around it. It was slow going, but the de-lamination, helped by the moisture excreted by the bacteria eating the glue, weakened the wood and made it flimsy.

After sustained effort, she had a pile of wet wood chips on the floor and a DD-sized hole in the plywood. But, the window was closed.

Of course.

Gritting her teeth against the pain in her shoulder socket, she wormed her hand down between the plywood and the pane. She got her fingers around the metal grip on the window sash. The window was, fortunately, unlocked and easy to open, because her shoulder felt like burning-hot knives when she pulled on it. She gritted her teeth and pulled anyway, giving a guttural cry of pain as the window opened.

She glanced back at the door, and then slithered out the window into the humid Gulf Coast twilight. She drew a deep breath and rocked on the balls of her feet. She heard crickets. Only one place to go now. I haven’t seen Akisni and Snowbear in years. But if there’s anyplace to weather this crisis, it’s with them.

XXXIII.         Body at the Door

Jacob took the lead, pretending to be alone. The group of eight stuck to the middle of the sidewalks, kept the women in the center, and puffed themselves up to look as fierce as they could. They disregarded the smashing of windows and looting of shops they passed, and as long as they didn’t bother the looters, the looters took no notice of them. They made it five of the six blocks to the hospital and reached an intersection with a bonfire fed by furniture, pallets, and cardboard in the center. A line of burly young men stood blocking their way.

“How you cousin?” one asked Jacob.

“Not bad. Not bad. Taking girl, hurt bad, to hospital.” He nodded at the group behind him, and the Germans parted shoulders briefly to show Maya.

“Two women. Nice.”

“We be going on to the hospital now.”

“Nah.”

“Yah.”

“Who the white boys?”

“Germans. Foreigners.”

“They be staying here. And we take the white ho.”

“No, we all go.”

“I’ve no time to chat with you, homie.” The leader jerked his head. A series of cracks rang out, rifle shots, and the Germans, Maya, and Susan fell to the ground.

“You got ten seconds, homie. Run.”

Jacob didn’t need to be told twice.

XXXIV.          Fancy Meeting You Here!

DD’s feet hit the ground. She felt concrete and gravel under the sole of her right foot, but her left foot slid out from under her. She almost fell as her left running shoe fell to pieces. The cotton sock was still intact, though. A quick probe revealed that the right sneaker wasn’t in much better shape, so she peeled it off her foot in pieces, stripping off her tattered nylon windbreaker as well, and stood in her stocking feet, jeans, and t-shirt, absorbing the sounds of the night. She was on a huge lot of storage silos, stretching off in all four directions in orderly rows, lit by dim yellow lights over the door of each cylindrical structure. She looked up.

The mercury-vapor lights overhead are out. Those must be emergency lights on solar batteries. No power.

She could hear the soothing sough of the ocean from only one direction. Best guess is, that’s East. Unless I’m on an island. As her eyes adjusted to the starlight and the light of the waxing crescent moon overhead, she saw the dark, mounded mass of a stand of trees outlined against the sky in the other direction. She held out her outstretched fists, stacking them, and observed that her top fist just touched the moon, two fists, or two hours, since moonrise. Picking her slow way over the cracked pavement to avoid rocks and broken glass, she walked around the silo she’d been held in. She came across the car she’d been kidnapped in, sitting abandoned, doors open, dark. She slipped into the driver’s seat; the keys were in the ignition! But she could tell before she even tried that it was useless; the key was in the “run” position and the car was dark, dead, inert. She tried anyway, turning the key all the way back, and then forward to “start,” with the expected lack of response. The glove compartment and console were empty. So was the trunk, except for a jack and spare tire. As she circled the car one last time, she realized the spare was the only tire that was intact; the other four were flat. Infected.

She decided to head away from the coast. She slid her way through the silent, fence-framed field, past silo after silo. A stray cat scurried by; a bird, startled from its roost, burst into the sky. A lone tree-frog chirruped from an elevated haven.

As she approached the woods, the song of more tree frogs trilled in her ears. Even with the beginning of the last warehouse, she saw the chain-link fence up close. She walked up to it and found it was at least eight feet tall, topped by a single strand of barbed wire. Once a city kid, always a city kid…but I’m getting too old for this! She gripped the wire of the chain link with her fingers and stockinged toes and ascended to the top fairly easily, ignoring the protests of her abused shoulders. Once there, she put her hand around the strand of barbed wire. The barbs were about ten inches apart, plain wire, not razor wire, thank God. Time to turn into a sloth. Moving with excruciating slowness, she brought one leg over the barbed wire between two barbs, holding the top of the fence with one hand and grasping the wire in between two other barbs with her other hand. The transfer of weight from one side of the fence to the other was delicate…slow…easy…until she was pigeon-toed, one toe in a link on each side of the fence, bow-legged to avoid the barbs she straddled, and her torso was parallel to the wire and the top of the fence. First, the inside hand came over, her weight shifted to the outside foot.

Ow ow ow I will not think about my toes the pain does not exist. This hurts a lot more than it did when I was 15. Now the trickiest part. Am I still fit enough to do this?

She lifted her inside leg straight out from the hip into an arabesque, and slowly swung it over to the other leg…then she was clinging to the outside of the fence!

She climbed down, springing to the ground, flush with self-congratulation, but her jubilation was cut short by the agony of a thousand needles. Sand spurs! The curse of the Gulf Coast! She picked the sharp burrs out of her abused socks. The right sock already had a hole in it, right over the ball of her foot. She got every one of the miniscule barbed pods out of her socks, not once cursing out loud when they punctured her fingertips, and rose to continue.

Aiming for the empty patches of vegetation-free sand, she headed for the salt scrub in the dim light. Once she was hidden by the palmettos and tall grasses of the scrub, she had to pick out thorn- and sand-spur-free paths, but she headed more or less straight, keeping the moon behind her. After half an hour or so, she turned to look at the moon. She once again extended her fists, but now the moon was only one and a half fists above the horizon. So, I’m headed East, not West. That means I must be on an island.

She kept going until she reached a two-lane road. The hard asphalt surface felt like luxury carpeting on her poor feet, now bare and probably bleeding, but she’d check for injuries later and deal with them when she could. Right now, the decrease in pain felt almost comfortable by contrast.

Turn right or left? Eenie, meenie, minie, moe.

She turned right and walked down the road until she reached an intersection. Road signs, barely visible in the light of the setting moon, told her she was at corner of Seawolf Parkway (Some parkway!) and Coastwide Road. Coastwide Road ran back in the general direction she’d come from. There was a sign, just a plywood panel on two fence posts, farther back off the road. She had to walk right up to the signboard and almost put her face up to it to make it out. Martin Midstream, Inc. They had an oil barge anchored next to the drilling rig. But that still doesn’t tell me where I am now.

She continued along Seawolf Parkway. It was eerie how there was no traffic. At the next intersection, she came across a truck parked on the sandy shoulder. A dump truck. It looked like…but no. All dump trucks look pretty much alike. She opened the pitiful little knife in her pocket and clutched it by her side as she padded up to the truck. She circled it, silent, twenty feet away.

No sign of movement.

She hesitated, unsure what to do next, then made up her mind and approached the cab. She put her foot on the passenger-side running board and hauled herself up on the grab bar (The shoulder!) to look in the open window. The cab was empty. She was about to try the door handle when the truck rocked and a face popped up outside the open driver’s side window. A familiar face.

“Jeremy?” She asked, incredulous. Of course, he didn’t hear her with the truck between them. She dropped off the side of the cab, forgetting about the condition of her feet, and almost crumpled at the burning pain that spiraled up her legs and wound up behind her eyes. She gasped and straightened as Jeremy (It can’t be!) came around the front of the truck.

“DD? DD?” Jeremy was just as shocked as she. “What are you doing on Pelican Island?”

DD felt a gush of relief at the sound of his familiar and friendly voice.

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Try me.” Jeremy smiled.

“Can we sit in your truck? My feet…”

“You have no shoes! How did you even get here? Here, I’ll help you up.”

He opened the door and boosted her, totally unnecessarily, but DD’s shoulder was nevertheless glad of the assistance. She sank into the cloth passenger seat gratefully. Jeremy climbed in on the other side. He held out a steel canteen of water. She took it eagerly.

“Okay, so how did you happen to be here?” Jeremy asked.

DD sipped the water and told her story. It was a long telling, since she had to start with telling him what she did for a living. Their initial encounter had been focused on other, more enjoyable things. She wound up giving the Cliff’s-Notes version of her OHCB presentation. Jeremy, despite his blue-collar occupation, was intelligent; he picked up on it better than she’d expected. She went on to describe the oil-well visit, the sinking boat, the kidnapping, and the interrogation. He began to look confused.

“So, who is this guy Fleck again?” Jeremy asked.

“I’m not sure. He’s not who he said he was, I know that much. I’m not sure who any of those guys were. I just know they were government somehow. I know I’m glad to be away from them.

“Speaking of which, can I hitch a ride with you… as far away from here as possible?”

Jeremy’s eyebrows raised a little. He set a hand on her thigh. “I’d love to give you a ride anywhere you want, DD.” She smiled at that. “But this truck isn’t going anywhere. It’s got the machine sickness.”

“Machine sickness. Is that what people are calling it?”

“Yep. And you’re the only person I’ve talked to who actually understands what happened to cause it. I was leaving Martin Midstream after dumping a load of gravel, when my motor seized up. Water in the gas, was what it looked like to me. Then, while I was trying to get my phone to work, the cowling and the boots and hoses started dissolving to pieces right in front of me.” He shook his head. “My cell phone lost signal. People kept driving by and I tried to flag someone down, but no one would stop. I spent yesterday walking over to Martin Midstream to see if I could use a landline or something, but it’s like a ghost town. Deserted. Not even a guard at the security gate. I had some battery left in the truck and I listened to the news on the radio until it died. This is everywhere. One of the talk shows said it spread from an oil rig in China, and the whole world has it now! I had some snacks in the cab here, but they’re gone now. This is my second night sleeping in the truck bed. I was planning to start walking to the bridge in the morning. You’re welcome to come with me.”

“So, there’s no cell phone service at all? None?”

“Wouldn’t do us any good if there was.” He reached across her to the glove box, his sweat acrid and masculine, and took out a full-sized steel mag light. He turned it on, blinding in the darkness, and pointed the beam at the floor, where a melted glob, recognizable as something which had once been a cell phone, lay by her feet.

“Oh, my God! Look at your feet!” Jeremy exclaimed.

DD looked, and they were admittedly frightening. The remnants of her socks hung around her ankles. They were studded with sand spurs and dyed brown with dried blood. Her toes were swollen like sausages. Streaks of dried blood showed between them. She cradled her right foot on top of her thigh to look. The sole was an indistinguishable dark mass of dirt, blood, and shredded skin. “I have a first-aid kit in the back and a full cooler of drinking water that the machine sickness hasn’t gotten to yet. Let’s see what we can do about that!” He jumped out of the cab and came around to help her down. In the darkness, she felt a tear trickle down her cheek.

Someone’s taking care of me.

She was exhausted, and all at once she felt every blow and kick she’d taken, and every sand spur and piece of broken glass she’d stepped on. Her arms felt like lead weights where they hung from her injured shoulders. Not trusting her voice to stay steady, she silently accepted Jeremy’s help up into the bed of the truck.

XXXV.               Improv

The next day, DD awoke shortly after sunrise. She was lying on her back, on a rough wool blanket, atop the folded-up canvas cover for the dump truck bed. She was embarrassed to discover she’d reached out for Jeremy’s hand sometime during the night and was still holding it. She tried to slip it away and he squeezed lightly, trapping her fingers and raising his head to look at her before letting her draw it back. She smiled. It hurt to smile, hurt at the temple where her head had been hit. She remembered the night before. He’d swabbed the blood off her feet (she looked down, and they were wrapped in stretch-gauze first-aid bandages). Then he’d sponged her face and hair before pronouncing the head wound, “Not that bad. They weren’t trying to really hurt you.”

“Could have fooled me!” she’d said. “But then, I’ve never played that rough in my life, even in karate class.”

The canvas cover for the truck bed was evidently mixed natural and synthetic fiber; it was weakening in places, to where you could pop a finger through it. The blanket, though, appeared to be pure wool, an olive drab, probably old Army-surplus. DD felt bad about destroying it, but with Jeremy’s encouragement she used her little knife to cut four big circles and two wide strips out of the blanket. This allowed her to rig up bi-layered, primitive moccasins. They both drank as much water as they could, leaving less than a gallon in Jeremy’s big drum thermos cooler, and they set off down Seawolf Boulevard, Jeremy swinging the cooler by the handle and DD carrying the flashlight, staying on the soft sand and trying to walk as normally as possible despite the pain in her gauze-wrapped feet.

It was an unseasonably warm Gulf-Coast winter day. By noon, every step was agony, and bloodstains were beginning to soak through the outer layer of her moccasins. She’d shrugged her T-shirt over her head for partial protection from the sun, giving her the look of a headless dummy, but her arms would be burned. Jeremy was better prepared for the conditions, with a baseball cap and long-sleeved cotton shirt. They passed signs for a copper distributor, a truck distributor, and a road called Halliburton Way. Oil silos and derricks were visible in the distance in both directions, and soon they saw colorful houses way ahead of them, more than a mile away.

As they walked, DD told him more about p davisii, her capture, and Tim’s double treachery, “I’ve been thinking: I figure he was embezzling, and swapping out the cultures for cheaper, unstandardized ones. Who knows what the actual bacteria are, that the last hybridization was made from?

“At the same time, he must have been selling some of the newly genetically modified cultures to someone from Sinopec. Then, when he got caught, he must have told the Feds I was a terrorist in order to get immunity for himself. I am so furious!”

She added through clenched teeth, “I never liked Tim. But I did trust him.”

She told Jeremy the whole story in excruciating detail of her torture and escape, making the drug episode sound funny enough that they both laughed out loud, and mentioned her current plan to get to the off-grid community in Indiana.

As they reached the houses, they saw that they were cheaply built townhomes painted in pastel colors to look like a beach resort. A sign said University Apartments. Cars were in the complex’s parking lots, some with the doors, hoods, or trunks open, and a few of the units had doors standing open. Jeremy walked over to the front of one of the homes and turned on the water tap for the garden hose. Nothing happened.

“PVC pipes, probably,” remarked DD. Their water situation was about to get serious. They drank the last of the water in the cooler, then walked a little farther.

A small strip mall, with a diner and several small shops was less than a quarter mile away. Again, no sign of life. The restaurant’s doors were open, there was no water in the kitchen behind the counter. They checked all three stores and none of them had water either. They walked a little farther, to the gas station on the corner. A car sat by the pump with the dispenser handle still stuck in its fuel door. The parking lot of the gas station was full of abandoned vehicles. The shop itself had been locked up, but the glass doors had been shattered. They ducked inside. The place showed signs of some light looting: the registers had been forced open and merchandise was scattered all over the floor. Every plastic container that anyone had touched was burst open and melted, but there was still plenty of bottled water, soda, juice, and tea inside the closed glass-fronted coolers.

“Hey, look! Beer!” said Jeremy.

“Are you kidding? That crap is like sex in a canoe!” said DD.

“Sex in a canoe?” Said Jeremy.

“Fucking close to water.”

The refrigerators weren’t cold, but DD took an Arizona Iced Tea and Jeremy took a Coca-Cola, and they sat in the shade on the stoop of the store and drank their tepid beverages.

“This is the best tea I ever drank in my entire life,” said DD.

“Yep.”

They rested for a few minutes. Then they spent some time opening bottled waters, trying carefully to keep from touching the mouth of the bottle, and pouring them into the cooler, filling it to the top. They stocked their pockets with Slim Jims and bags of nuts, things that wouldn’t melt or spoil. They each ate a candy bar, softened in the heat. Jeremy stashed a couple of the weak, warm beer cans despite DD’s eye roll.

“What University is this?” Asked DD.

“You are new around here, aren’t you?” Asked Jeremy. “Texas A & M, the Aggies. Galveston Campus. Marine Biology, Merchant Marine, Navy ROTC…”

“So, we’re close to Galveston then?”

“Right across the causeway.”

DD grabbed all the band-aids, alcohol wipes, gauze wrap, and antibiotic cream in the meager first aid section. She also slicked herself down with sunblock, especially her arms, which were turning a florid shade of red. She hoped at least she could prevent them blistering. She grabbed a foam sun visor and cheap sunglasses (realizing as she grabbed these plastic items that she was contaminating them and they would be melted soon), and off they went.

The causeway was beautiful, with a thin strip of sandy beach and ocean water on both sides. Derricks and shipping cranes could be seen on the horizon, but they were all still; one was toppled over. The remains of a small pleasure boat, hull half-dissolved, motor nowhere to be seen, lay at the water’s edge. The island’s eponymous pelicans soared overhead and landed on pilings. The water on the Gulf side was blue-green with soft swells breaking on the shore, and the Bay side was golden and dotted with the froth of rough wavelets.

What was no doubt a short, pleasant drive in a car now seemed interminable on DD’s wounded feet, but eventually they reached the end of the causeway and ambled onto Galveston Island proper.

They paused to survey the prospects.

Useless, abandoned cars punctuated the roadway. Jeremy set the water cooler down, careful to put it on the sand and not the contaminated asphalt. And stepped over the guardrail. DD wasn’t inclined to follow; stopping had brought the pain in her feet to the front of her mind. Instead, she plopped down on the pavement, sticking her feet straight out in front of her.

“Gonna see what I can see from high ground,” said Jeremy. He crossed the road and scrambled up a 20-foot mound of dirt and construction debris. DD looked up at him where he stood atop the hill, silhouetted against the sky, pivoting to look in all directions. The ocean breeze ruffled his hair and his eyes creased in the sun reflected off the water. Freed momentarily from the pain in her feet, she paid attention to her emotions. She felt… gratitude.

It seemed like a million years earlier that she’d driven her car onto the nearby ferry dock for the ride to Bolivar, and the B and B where they’d first met. He hadn’t said anything about their brief encounter or her abrupt departure. Should she? She’d sworn off drama years ago, had no desire to repeat the Kabuki of falling in love, being disappointed or betrayed, breaking up, licking wounds. It was draining. It was a sign of how shaken she was by recent events that she was even considering it. She closed her eyes, trying to ignore the burning soreness in her feet, her sunburned arms, and her chapped and cracking lips. She quarried deeply within herself for the self-assured scientist, the fiercely independent woman who’d hopped in her SUV to start a new life, such a short time ago.

The world went black.

Jeremy’s shadow was blocking the burning sun from her eyelids. She opened her eyes to his silhouette, and then squinted as he moved away from his spot between herself and the sun.

“See anything interesting?” She asked.

“Maybe.” He said. “Pedi cab.”

“You mean, like those bike rickshaws? I didn’t know they had them here!”

“Yep. They use them for festivals and on the tourist strip. There’s one up ahead about half a mile, flipped over on its side. Can’t tell why it’s flipped over from here.”

“But it might be working! That would be so wonderful!” Her voice quavered on the last word. Shit. I’m a basket case.

Jeremy’s face showed a fleeting micro-expression of deep empathetic pain before firming up. “How are your feet?”

“They hurt like Hell.” She blinked at his extended hand.

“Come on, not much further. Let’s see if we can get to that Pedi cab.” She took his hand and tried not to wince or gasp when she stood. There’s no way I can put my feet on the ground that doesn’t hurt! He shouldered the water and they commenced their plodding pace again. When they were within a hundred feet or so he broke pace with her and easily strode up to the bike. “Looks good!” he shouted. She limped the remaining distance.

He set the Pedi cab upright. The metal structure of the cab was fine. The tires, however, were falling to pieces, the rubber softened by the dissolution of the nylon casing underneath. The plastic reflector lenses on the back were crazed and cracked as if they’d sat out in the sun for twenty years. The vinyl upholstery on the seat was melting and cracking. So was the foam rubber underneath it. The vinyl sunshade was in tatters.

“We won’t get far on those tires,” DD said, crestfallen.

“I have an idea about that. You rest over there in the shade,” he nodded at a backhoe a little ways off, casting the only shade available for miles on this treeless shoreline. “I’ll be right back.” He strode off towards the dock, and DD helped herself to a drink of tepid water and then walked, on her knees, over to the backhoe. She hated being a burden, but she didn’t want to be foolish either; she was hurt. Once she reached the shade of the backhoe, the heat was still stifling, but the sun wasn’t beating on her anymore. She held her fists out and stacked them up from the western horizon to the sun: one, two three…about 2:30 then.

She leaned back and closed her eyes…When she opened her eyes, the sun was setting, a creamsicle-orange ball surrounded by streaks of lime and citron. The ocean was calm and steely. A fly was mountaineering on her chin and she brushed it off, which made the row of fresh mosquito bites above her left eyebrow start to itch. She smelled salt sea air, p. davisii, and most strongly, herself. Not my freshest. She sat up, her back and thighs protesting, and wiggled her toes. They felt sore as hell inside their woolen sacks, but judging by their movement, they were slightly less swollen. She had no way to rewrap them, so she decided not to take off the jerry-rigged moccasins to investigate any further.

She turned her head and saw Jeremy bent over the rickshaw bike, which was upside down on the sand. She unconsciously put her fingers into her hair, where they stuck fast in the snarls. Never thought I’d rock dreadlocks.

“Hey, you’re awake. Can you walk?” Called Jeremy, nodding at her feet.

“Tell you in a minute.” She flipped onto her hands and knees, then got her feet under her. Ow. Shit. “I think I’ll be okay,” she said unconvincingly, and hobbled over. He’d liberated a length of ship’s mooring rope, the heavy hemp rope almost as thick as her chafed, scabbed, and sunburned wrists. He’d cut a piece long enough to fit around the rim of the bike’s wheel, where it fit neatly into the groove, and fastened it on with scraps of stout wire he’d cut from the chain-link fence nearby. The two wheels on the axle under the passenger cab had received the same treatment. He flipped it over right side up. He piled the remaining length of rope on the floor of the thing.

DD was astonished. “That’s amazing! You were a Boy Scout, weren’t you?”

“Well, I don’t know about that. But it should help us get around.” But he was smiling. And looking at her. And damned if she didn’t feel something rise within her, battered and sunburnt and exhausted as she was! Whoa, girl!

But it sure is nice to have found a friend. She smiled back with cracked and bleeding lips.

XXXVI.          Material Girl

Jeremy and DD rode the Pedi cab into downtown Galveston, Jeremy pedaling and DD sitting with her feet out in front of her on the pile of rope. Here and there, a  random house appeared occupied, the door intact and closed. Some of these had hand-lettered warning signs on the gateposts, or hastily built barbed-wire, broken-glass, or thorn-bush barricades. However, most of the city appeared to be deserted, dark and subdued by the twilight. They stopped at an abandoned motel. Jeremy got off the bike and walked around cautiously, checking each and every room, but there was no one there. By the time he was finished, it was dark.

He came back to the bike. “Some of the rooms are pretty disgusting. But there’s one right there,” he pointed, “that’s not too bad inside. Let’s stop here for the night.”

“Okay,” said DD. She braced herself, took a deep breath, and put her feet on the ground. The pain was excruciating. But she thought it wasn’t as bad as it had been that afternoon. She hobbled into the indicated doorway, noting that the door itself was intact, but the furniture was randomly piled against the wall next to it...someone had apparently been barricaded inside, and then later pushed the furniture aside to get out.

Using the flashlight, they surveyed the room. The bathroom door was closed; opening it, she was hit with a stench which told her there was no water in the dwelling, but the toilet had been in use anyway. She quickly shut the door. There was a sink outside the bathroom door and the freely turning faucets confirmed the lack of water. There were two beds, both rumpled. Jeremy went outside to get the rope and water from the Pedi cab to bring inside. She sat on one of the beds, yearning to collapse into sleep, but she had her feet to attend to.

“Will you help me dress my feet?” She reached into her bag and extracted the remaining gauze, tape, and antibiotic cream, and pulled her little knife out of her pocket. She took off her crude woolen moccasins, then began peeling off the existing dressings while Jeremy held the flashlight. She took the flashlight and pulled one foot up onto her knee to inspect it. It was still pretty swollen, and there was enough dried blood that she couldn’t  see what condition it was in. Jeremy brought her the one clean hand towel still perched on the rack above the sink and wet it with water from the cooler.

Once all the blood was sponged away, her feet didn’t look that bad. “I might be able to pedal tomorrow! You’re a good nurse!” Jeremy had wrapped them up snug, but not too tight, that morning. The ointment had staved off infection. Her soles were for the most part just cracked and nicked. Though she’d felt as if they must be mutilated, there were no serious cuts or gouges, and the swelling seemed to have pushed most of the sandspur barbs from her flesh. Just seeing that the destruction wasn’t as bad as she’d feared made them hurt less already. However, the alcohol wipes she used next on the torn-up pads of her feet made them burn like Hellfire! She hissed and rocked until the pain subsided. She extended the first foot out and let Jeremy re-bandage it with plenty of antibiotic cream and gauze while she peeled and cleaned the other foot.

Once both feet were dressed, still throbbing from the isopropyl, she lay back on the bed with a sigh. Jeremy got up and walked around to the other bed and collapsed spread-eagled on his back. DD noticed his stiff gait and reflected that he’d likely not ridden a bike in a while.

“We can take turns pedaling,” she said. He grunted, doubtful.

“It’s going to be cold at night further North,” he replied after a minute or two. “Are you sure you can find this place in Indiana?”

“Oh, I’m sure. I used to visit every time I drove through on the way back and forth between Florida and Bemidji.” That was fifteen years ago, when I was twenty-seven, but it can’t have changed that much, can it?

She considered saying that out loud, but couldn’t decide: is it better to tell him the complete truth, or more important to encourage him? She ruminated on that question, but before she decided, she heard his breath sink into a light snore. The rhythm of it lulled her.

What felt like moments later, she opened her eyes to the luminosity of daybreak through the window. Jeremy wasn’t in the other bed. She had to pee, and she turned down her mouth and wrinkled her nose at the thought of opening that bathroom door again. She stood, testing her injuries. Her feet were sore, but not awful. She looked nearby for her makeshift moccasins. She located them and bundled her feet up, then went outside. She trod slowly and gingerly, watchful about her foot placement, around back of the motel. By the time she was situated in a squat to take care of business in the weeds, her bladder was about to burst.

When she came back into the room, Jeremy was sitting in one of the cheap fabric-upholstered chairs, holding a pair of... “Shoes!” DD squealed.

They were leather shoes, ballet-slipper style. Size nine, and she wore a seven and a half, but with her feet swollen and bandaged they should be about right. The soles were intact... for now. “These soles are probably plastic of some sort...they could be natural rubber, but I doubt it. I’ll have to watch where I put my feet.”

He held up two more identical pairs. “You’ve got spares for a while, anyway. There’s a shoe store across the street. My boots have—used to have—synthetic soles, so they fell apart this morning.” He pointed to two pairs of men’s shiny, lace-up dress shoes on the table. “These are leather and my size, and most important, the leather soles are sewed on.” She looked down and he was already wearing a pair of them, his feet looking oddly metrosexual in contrast to his grimy, threadbare, faded jeans.

“Yeah, they don’t make stitched shoes for women,” sighed DD. “They’re all glued, even the really expensive ones.” She frowned. “Maybe I can find some of those upscale sewn men’s dress shoes in a small enough size.” She slipped on the ballet skimmers. “In the meantime, these are perfect! Thanks!”

They breakfasted on their spoils from the convenience store. They both drank a good bit of water, bringing them down to half the cooler left, but the cooler was starting to show a few sticky spots. DD spared a small amount of her isopropyl to wet the colonies down and hoped that would do it. They loaded the Pedi cab and were on their way, Jeremy riding this time and DD pedaling, her feet doing alright, at first, on the rope-wrapped pedals. She had to stop, though when her feet began to throb after an hour or so. She pulled off a skimmer and saw a fresh yellowish stain on the gauze where the scratches had begun to ooze through. Jeremy pedaled the rest of the day while she sat in the gondola and felt sorry for herself.

I hate not being able to pull my weight—literally in this case. I did pedal for a few miles. At least it’s a start.

They stayed on two-lane back roads and didn’t see many people. Passing houses, it was hard to tell if they were occupied. The usual tell-tale signal of a car in the driveway was meaningless now since most cars were infected and remained parked wherever they’d been when their gasoline and oil was digested to water by the bacteria. Their first experience of this was when they passed an unexceptional ranch-style home set back from the road. The front door was open, the screen door was shut, and there was no car in the carport or driveway and no sign of movement. They decided to see if there was anyone home, or anything inside to forage. Leaving the Pedi cab at the bottom of the driveway, Jeremy strode up to the open front door, DD moving slowly and gingerly behind him on her still-tender feet. He stepped onto the shallow wood porch, lifted a hand to knock, and both he and DD heard the metallic clack of a shotgun being cocked. Jeremy instantly raised his hands in the air and took a step back. “Turn around and walk to your bike,” a woman’s voice commanded from within. Jeremy complied, DD leading the way, with her hands also in the air. They never saw the woman’s face.

A few motor vehicles, still fueled and uninfected, passed them the first day, but none the second day. They would greet the people they saw and tersely exchange basic information: where are you from? Where are you headed? Best way to get through? Run into any trouble? The people they saw were mostly traveling on foot, and some shied away from them, though others sat and had a conversation. Most seemed to be couples, with or without children, some groups of friends in twos or threes, and a few larger bands.

On the third day, they heard lone gunshots, five of them, a few seconds apart. “Probably hunters,” Jeremy opined. How can you know that? DD thought. Lawlessness, roving mobs; isn’t that what happens when society falls apart?

In the absence of any electronic communication, rumors swirled. Everyone they met offered an opinion: it was a terrorist attack; it was the Muslims; it was the UN getting ready to invade us for Agenda 21; rich white people’s things weren’t affected; it was an alien invasion and they’d be swooping in with their flying saucers any day. DD kept silent about her role in causing the catastrophe, and Jeremy observed that silence and kept it without having to discuss it. Partly, she was afraid that people would believe her, and would attack her for destroying their lives.

Destroying everyone’s lives.

Partly, she was afraid that they wouldn’t believe her and think her insane.

Sometimes it all seems like a vivid hallucination.

On the fourth day, they stopped just before dusk to bathe in a cattle pond. There was a farmhouse nearby, and having learned their lesson, they shouted from a long way back as they approached, then banged on the front door, but no one answered. The cows in the field herded up to the fence, lowing pitifully about their neglected state. The house was locked up tight, but there was a screened back porch with a flimsy latch-lock, easily forced.

They washed themselves head to toe and rinsed and wrung their clothing in the dark water of the pond, standing on pea gravel that the absent farmer had dumped along one patch of shoreline. DD wrapped her feet in the wet wool moccasins and they walked to the porch. After their bath, as Jeremy put band-aids on the few remaining cuts on her feet, he ran his hand up her leg, and she responded by leaning forward, taking his hand, and pulling him on top of her. He came forward eagerly. His mouth tasted good but his bristly beard stubble burned and she turned her head away. The warmth of his body felt delicious after the chilly water. They slid their hands over each other’s sides, his hand trapped in between them toying with her breast, until she wrapped her legs around his waist and abruptly pulled him in place to slip inside her. The rhythmic buffeting worked the tension out of her buttocks and belly, and the fullness of him inside her fed her in a way that she didn’t know she’d been hungry. She didn’t come, and they didn’t talk about it, but afterwards he propped himself up on his elbow and smiled into her eyes, and she smiled back. Easy. Comforting.

Late in the morning of the sixth day, they approached the entrance ramp to I-10. DD was pedaling. She’d gotten into the rhythm of it and almost didn’t stop, but something caught her eye. She was off the seat of the bike and sprinted off like a shot!

“What the hell? Come back here! DD, what’s wrong with you?” Jeremy called from his station atop the coiled rope.

She was dashing across the road towards an abandoned moving van, her sore feet forgotten. Abandoned and disabled vehicles were strewn everywhere, so much a part of the landscape they didn’t even register anymore. But she leapt with joy onto a burgundy sofa sitting on the shoulder; she sprawled out.

“My stuff! Jeremy, this is my stuff!”

“No shit?” He stood over her, amused.

“They said they were going to send a replacement truck for it. This must be it! Didn’t make it to Houston, though, did it?” She got up and peeked over the rear bumper into the truck. It looked like an explosion at a rummage sale. “Looks like they put it in with someone else’s stuff.” She looked a while longer. “But it looks like most of mine was probably in here. I wonder...”

She scrambled up inside the cargo area and located a leather storage ottoman. The lid was tossed aside and the contents had been emptied, but she grabbed a seemingly random scrap of yarn and pulled up, and the false bottom came out. “Yes!” she exulted, “my revolver!” She pulled out a silver Smith & Wesson K-frame revolver. She tilted the cylinder out.

“Five shots?” Said Jeremy. “Keeps the weight down.”

“I know, right? It’s a great ‘girl’ gun. Fires .38 Special or .357 Magnum. I’ve got it loaded with the .357 now, and these two speedloaders are .357 too.” She put the speedloaders in her pocket. “Unfortunately, the rest of my ammo was in that dresser.” She nodded at a six-drawer bureau on the other side of the truck. All its drawers were missing and nowhere to be seen. She stood up and began nudging through the debris on the floor with her toe.

Half an hour later, she had a shoulder bag full of miscellaneous items, including family photos, first aid items, and candles. They had a tent (nylon, but it might last a night or two). They had a hammock, cotton, brought home from a trip to Cancún. They had two-thirds of a bottle of vodka and even, after a little scrounging, the lid for it. She had two pairs of rugged leather walking shoes and some rigid-soled hiking boots. She looked around and started to cry.

“We can’t possibly take any more of this on the Pedi cab,” she sniffled. “But these are all my things. That armoire was my mother’s.”

Jeremy put a hand on her upper back, unsure what to say. DD took a deep breath. “Let’s just go,” she said decisively. “Now. Standing around here feeling sorry for myself isn’t going to make that armoire fit on a bicycle!”

Just at that moment, a new voice came from the square of light at the end of the truck. “I don’t think you’re going anywhere right this minute!”

Rather than raise her revolver, DD left it holstered and ran to the entrance. “Jessica?” She asked.

“Mom!”

XXXVII.      Not Bad for An Old Guy

Amit sat at his breakfast bar, typing furiously and reading intently on his laptop, an empty plate and cup at his elbow, as the light of the rising sun streamed in through the sliding glass doors. There was still electricity in the apartment building, but the internet was cutting in and out. He had no idea how the cables were routed, but the internet had told him, during brief diversions from his primary research aim overnight, that random buildings, blocks, and entire neighborhoods, were haphazardly going down; phone, internet, power, cable TV. Electrical fires were also breaking out, small ones and large, suggesting short circuits of insulated wires large and small, high voltage and low, AC and DC, throughout the system. He was uploading his notes to his cloud server in India, and pulling down published microbiology papers via VPN whenever he noticed the “Connected” icon come on in his encrypted interface. His initial breakthrough had come around midnight when he opened a new browser tab and typed, not for the first time, “OHCB AND pseudomonas putida AND mutation,” without realizing he was in the browser search bar, instead of in the biomed database search window. The results popped up as he realized his error, and just as his cursor was on the “X” to close the window, he hesitated. At the bottom of the page, the last one of the results was a Power Point presentation from an Amrencorp meeting in Baton Rouge. He clicked on the link and read the first slide: Bioremediation. He uploaded his notes to the cloud while he flicked through the slides, growing more excited each moment. This could get him started looking in the right direction!

India was lagging behind in the spread of the problem, and BBSs there were crackling with news and rumors. China was said to be overwhelmed, but no one knew, since they’d cut off all electronic communication earlier in the day. Japan’s entire population was inside their homes, obediently awaiting further news. Jakarta, and all of Indonesia, was completely unreachable. The affliction had reached Australia, Iceland, Ontario, Russia, Poland. Estonia was free of problems for the time being, and the rest of Europe was still connecting spottily. As the night wore on, the time of the last posting on bulletin boards and social media was the only way to estimate when a country or region had gone dark. The mass media ceased broadcasting or posting online around 10:00 p.m., but no one was paying any attention to their scripted speculation at that point anyway.

As silence descended, rumors proliferated among the few remaining connected: it was drones with focused EMPs! It was the global Communist revolution! It was the Kurdish militia and ISIL joining forces! It was the Rothschilds! He refrained from sharing his near-certainty about the bacterial nature of the devastation, sure no one would be convinced anyway.

Amit knew he had little time, perhaps just moments, until he lost connectivity as well. He heard the stairwell door open out in the hallway. He heard heavy footsteps…two big men? Three? He lifted his head. The footsteps stopped outside his door. He closed his computer and slipped it into its case, stuffing the cable in after it. His doorbell rang.

He pulled the strap of the laptop bag over his head and across his chest. “Open up! Police!” from the hall. In three steps he was by the terrace door. The doorbell rang again, followed by three pounding bangs on the door itself; he used the noise to mask the sound of the sliding glass door opening and then gliding shut behind him.

He walked over to the waist-high brick planter which comprised the partition dividing his terrace from the neighbors’. He pushed a plastic lawn chair to the wall, stepped up on it, and gracelessly plunged through the thick shrubs planted on top, pulling his computer bag after him. He hit the terrace floor hard, but got up and dusted himself off. He was pretty sure there was no one home; these neighbors traveled a lot and it had been several weeks since he’d heard any sound from them. He picked up a wrought-iron patio chair and flung it through their sliding door, setting off their alarm system. It began to beep every three seconds. BEEEP! He was dashing through their apartment. BEEEP! He opened their front door. BEEEP! He closed the door behind him. He trotted down the hall to the stairwell entrance. By the time the alarm’s deafening siren went off, he was clattering down the stairs onto the fifth-floor landing.

He heard shouts coming from the seventh floor and redoubled his speed, ignoring the knife-like jabs under his kneecaps. He reached the second floor, and instead of heading to the ground floor and out through the lobby, he had the presence of mind to duck out of the stairwell—he thought his pursuers were still too high up to see him—and slip around the corner to the gym entrance. As he’d hoped, the exit to the gym balcony was unlocked (he knew the building custodian smoked out there on his breaks). Amit straddled the rail. He dropped his laptop case into the bushes below, which broke its fall. He hesitated, realizing a ten-foot drop was too far for a man his age to attempt. But subtract his 5’7” height, and he should be okay. He swung his other leg over, then crouched. He dangled by his hands from the bottom of the balustrade, and then he let himself drop. He hit hard, jarring his arches and his back even though he tried to let the bend of his knees take the force. Then he fell on his butt. But when he caught his breath, he found himself, astoundingly, entirely unhurt. He looked around and discovered himself to be apparently unobserved as well. He smoothed his hair, tidied his jacket and shirt collar, strung his laptop case across his body, and strode off down Racine. The general chaos of running, walking, crying people in various stages of undress had continued unabated since the previous evening, but they were intermingled now with a calmer and less colorful stream of individuals. They had serious faces, carried light luggage or pushed carts or strollers, and many carried some sort of stick or club. He saw some families with small children: refugees who’d seen the chaos the city streets were descending into and knew they wanted to get out. He did his best to lose himself among them.

He was seriously tempted to try to reach his car, but he knew better. It was a shame. It was probably not infected because he’d last filled it up two weeks ago. He’d then parked it in his rental garage space and not driven it since. He had a pretty good working hypothesis now about y what had happened. He’d seen his name in DD’s presentation; he guessed that the men who were in his apartment, contaminating it with p alkanivorax—no, p davisii—that very minute, were after him because they’d seen his name there, too.

Amit was no wet-behind-the-ears neophyte. He’d spent his whole life wrangling with corrupt, inept, self-important, bureaucrats of one sort or another: Indian government officials, academic administrators, wages-and-hours inspectors in his role as supervisor, and high-level executive directors in NGOs who only allowed lives to be saved if it enhanced their authority. He’d no desire to become a manipulable implement for them and their blank-eyed lackeys in such a time of emergency. Fingers would be pointing, enmities avenged, and favors called in at premium rates of exchange. Amit had made his career by nimbly and silently evading their grasp; now he just needed to do so literally as well as metaphorically.

XXXVIII.  Unconditional

DD almost hurt herself, so eager was she to jump out of the truck and throw her arms around Jessica. She kept repeating her daughter’s name over and over again, tears streaming down her face. She’d release her, take her by the shoulders, look at her face, run a hand over her short blond hair, break into tears afresh, gibber, “Jessica! Jessica!” and engulf her plump body in a new embrace. This went on for several minutes.

DD calmed down enough to turn to Jeremy.

“This is my daughter,” she began.

“...Jessica.” He finished. “I’m Jeremy. Pleased to meet you.”

“How...why...” began DD.

Jessica gave her the condensed version. “I was living in Austin, working at a blood bank, when the machine sickness hit, Mom. I’m an LPN now. I thought I’d lose my job when the plastic bags of blood and plasma started bursting, so I just walked out the door and kept walking.

“Later on, I figured out what was happening. Once I saw how bad it was everywhere, I headed east. I was going to Tallahassee. I needed to find out what had happened to you.”

“Why now? Why did you care? After so long?”

“I know it’s been a long time, Mom, and I’m sorry. I’ve thought so many times about calling you, but I didn’t think you’d want to see me again after everything that happened.”

“Oh, honey! You’re my little girl! You’ll always be my child!” DD shook her head in disbelief. “I admit, I was mad when you disappeared with that low-life. So mad! That is, when I wasn’t worried sick. That was one of the worst times of my life. I never knew if you were telling the truth or if he was making you say things. I never knew where you were...”

“He was there every moment I was talking to you on the phone. I’m sorry for those things he made me say. I’m sorry I told you—he told you—I hated you and told you to leave me alone, Mom. I’ve thought about that a lot.” Her face twisted with regret. Oh, God, I so want to believe that’s true. The girl can lie, though. All addicts are expert liars. Is she really a licensed practical nurse? Who knows.

“That bastard! Is he...are you still...”

“No, I got away from him about four years ago, a few months after you and I last talked. I went to some friends’ house in Denver and called the cops; he was wanted for breaking probation. He won’t be out for a long time.

“Well, so now you’ve found us. What now?” Jeremy sounded a bit reluctant.

Jessica looked from her mother to Jeremy and sized up the situation. She tilted her head and gave her mother a look which said they would have a private discussion later.

DD said, “We’re going to Sutokata. Do you want to come?”

“Where?” Asked Jessica.

“Sutokata. You remember the community I told you about where we used to go when you were very little?” She squatted and scrambled in her shoulder bag on the ground.

“Oh, yeah, I remember. The picture of me...”

“On the goat!” finished DD, popping to her feet and brandishing a faded Kodachrome print of a blond, pigtailed toddler sitting astride a fat nanny goat and grinning.

“I don’t remember it; I was too little. But sure. It sounds like a good place to be right now.”

Jeremy interjected. “I hate to be a party pooper, but two won’t fit on that bike cab. Especially since we’ve just loaded up with a few more things.”

“Oh, not a problem,” said Jessica. “I’ll wait up for you two to catch up every now and then.” She jerked her thumb at a scooter nearby.

“Is it running? Where’d you find gas for it?”

Jessica giggled. “Mom, did you forget who you’re talking to? I modified it to run on ethanol! The carb is a little leaky and I’m not happy with the idle yet, though...”

“Hunh. My daughter the mechanic!” She turned to Jeremy. “She worked as a lawn mower mechanic all summer between her sophomore and junior year of high school.”

“That’s nice, but the liquor stores are starting to look pretty bare,” Jeremy pointed out.

“At least I can always make more ethanol,” said Jessica.

“Your great-grandpa the moonshiner would be proud.” DD grinned.

“I’ve got enough Everclear in the saddlebags to make it a long way, anyway.”

Jeremy, resigning himself to the inevitable hitched his thumbs in his belt loops and touched his baseball cap. Putting on his deepest Foghorn Leghorn, Texas drawl, he said, “Ma’am, it looks like we’ve got us a convoy!”

XXXIX.          Door Closes, Window Opens

Amit was quite exhausted by the time he reached the Walgreen’s at the corner of Roosevelt, a block from the river. He’d gotten no sleep that night, except for brief drowsing-off at the keyboard, and he was acutely aware that a man in his late 60s shouldn’t treat himself this way.

The automatic sliding doors to the big drugstore stood open, jammed on the half-consumed synthetic rubber seals of their sliding tracks before the power had failed. It was quite plain which sections of the linoleum floors were infected, as a trench of goo ran down the center, flanked by footprints spreading out like uncooked pancakes on a griddle. He did his best to avoid getting any on his shoes; the shoes were leather with leather soles, but stitched together, no doubt, with polyester thread. A few people desultorily rummaged the shelves, but he’d missed the party where looting was concerned. All the food items, water, batteries, and electronic items were gone. The cooler and freezer doors were hanging open. Someone had forced open the metal cage protecting the pharmacy proper, whose shelves were stripped bare. Amit did, however, find a few bottles of isopropyl at the back of one of the bottom retail shelves, and the bottles weren’t sticky or deformed, so he tucked two of them into his laptop case.

The sun was straight up in the southern sky. Half the day gone already. He saw no choice but to keep going. Weary, he set out down Canal Street, past warehouses and storage units, overgrown lots, and barbed-wire-topped enclosures with hundreds of trucks inside. There were no hysterical half-dressed folk dashing about here, just a grim procession, strewn along the broad streets, of those who realized a big city was nowhere to be once the trucks and trains stopped running. One foot in front of the other down Lakeshore Drive. He passed the majestic Field Museum and the Museum of Science and Industry, and continued towards the South Shore and its less prestigious sights.

Just at dusk, he heard a car, one of the few still running. A large, dark car with tinted windows, playing loud thumping music, pulled up beside him. He braced himself for the worst. A grey-haired Indian man with a computer, walking alone through a neighborhood like this at night, was a like koi among sharks, and he doubted the police were going to be much of a presence without any running cars. He walked ahead, trying to ignore the vehicle while remaining alert. He calmed himself as much as he could, thinking about how he’d never imagined his life ending like this. He had known it was too good to last: he’d considered it lucky not to have seen any of the human predators from the slums on the far side of the freeway, who would be unable to resist crossing over to prey on the refugees among whom he walked.

But it seemed his luck had run out.

Then, a familiar, woman’s voice rang out: “Professor!”

He turned around and saw Juni, standing by the driver’s door, waving to him across the hood of the car. Relief flooded through him. He bopped to the passenger side and hopped in. He settled himself into the comfortable leather seat of Juni’s Town Car with a deep and appreciative sigh.

“What happened, Professor? Are you all right?” She looked at him with a furrowed brow, deep circles under her eyes, her normally meticulous coiffure in a kerchief.

“Juni, did anyone follow you?” Amit realized he sounded paranoid, but he didn’t care.

“What do you mean? Of course not. Who would follow me?” She eyed the rear-view mirror.

“Good. Where have you been since I saw you?” Amit asked. Juni fastened her seat belt. The car was running but she hadn’t put it in gear.

“I went to the hospital in the cab you hailed for me, but their X-ray table was in bad shape, so they couldn’t X-ray my ankle—it’s fine, now, anyway, a little swollen, but not hurting to walk on anymore. So, I went home with my husband when he got there.” Her face turned instantly gloomy and greyish. She sat looking straight ahead at the windshield, lost in a private vision.

“…Your husband?” Prompted Amit. He realized the car doors were unlocked and pushed the button to lock them.

“He got out at the Jewel to look inside for food.” She spoke slowly. “He left me locked in the car, waiting, with the engine running, and made me promise to start the car, drive away, and keep going if he wasn’t back in an hour.” She glanced at Amit, then turned her eyes to the horizon again. In her silence, he inferred what she couldn’t force herself to utter aloud.

“Juni, I’m sorry.” Amit said.

She produced four sharp sobs and turned her head away. After a long pause, she drew a breath and said, “I’m sure he’s alright.”

“Where are you going, Juni?” Asked Amit, knowing when to change the subject.

“He told me to keep driving until I hit Indiana. He said the country is safer than the city. Maybe the machine sickness hasn’t reached there yet.”

“Machine…sickness?”

“Yes, when the plastic parts in the machines and the fuel starts to decay and then the goo infects other machines. It’s like a sickness. It spreads.”

“Machine sickness. Yes. Good description. I wonder who thought of it. Listen, Juni, I believe I have a place where we can go. I promise I’ll tell you as we go. But first, let me do something.”

He pulled one bottle of isopropyl out of his laptop case and, grabbing a tissue from Juni’s console, he wiped his shoes and drenched the parts of the carpet where his shoes had touched. Juni had a bottle of hand sanitizer too, and he made her slather her hands while he wiped down her tennis shoes, feet, and ankles (her ankle did look fine, just a bit swollen). She was wearing jeans, a kente cloth shirt with a hoodie over it, and a matching headwrap over her hair. He blotted isopropyl into the carpet under her feet, and wiped the trim around the car door. The steering wheel was smooth, no sign of decay in the plastic, but he wiped it down as well, just to be sure. The gas gauge showed almost full.

“When did you last fill up?” He asked.

“All the gas pumps were broken, so Jim filled the tank with gas from the shed he kept for the riding lawnmower.”

“Good, that probably wasn’t infected then. We have a shot at making it.”

“Making it where?”

“Indiana, as your husband said. Just drive.”

Juni put her foot on the gas and off they went. Amit said, “I promised to tell you where we are going. First, I must tell you the story of Sutokata.

“When I was a young man, a million years ago when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I had some hippie friends at college. One of them was Hank. Hank had been a helicopter pilot in Viet Nam and was in school on the GI Bill. He’s also one of the most remarkable people I’ve ever met. Literature, philosophy, physics, calculus, biology, economics, psychology—Hank aced every class he took, without studying. He’d attend lectures, flip through the book while the teacher talked, and bam!” Amit clapped. “He had it. Mind like a steel trap.”

“Like a lot of soldiers back from Viet Nam, Hank got disillusioned by the war and disgusted with the state of the country. Like a lot of people in his generation, he turned on, tuned in, and in his third year of college, when they were pressuring him to choose a major, he dropped out.

“But in Hank’s case, dropping out meant building something totally new. That’s just the way he is. He and his wife Suzanne took new names: Snowbear and Akisni. They bought a plot of land in the middle of nowhere and built a self-sufficient compound. They called it Sutokata, which means seed of the future in Lakota.”

“Sounds primitive.” Juni said.

Amit smiled. “In the best sense. Suzanne—Akisni, which means ‘healing’ in Lakota—was a trained midwife and has become something of an herbalist. She’s the anchor who holds Hank—Snowbear—down to earth when he starts wandering off on one of his space journeys.” Amit made spiraling movements next to both temples. “At least, that’s how things used to be with them. It’s been a while since we’ve seen each other. But we keep in touch.”

XL.      Root Beer and Everclear

DD put on her rigid-soled hiking boots from the moving truck, and with those protecting her feet as they continued to heal, she was able to take a full four-hour shift pedaling the bike rickshaw. They established a routine: Jessica rode onward on the scooter, stopping at least every hour or so, or sooner if there was an auspicious salvage site, to let them catch up. She’d perch on her scooter, helmet under her arm, and patiently wait until they reached her. DD’s heart never failed to leap when she first spotted the child whose loss she’d so deeply mourned, but she quashed the emotion, sure she was being played for a fool once again.

“You don’t trust your daughter, do you?” Jeremy asked out of nowhere one day, sitting in the back of the Pedi cab.

“I don’t trust anyone.” DD said, conserving her breath for the slight incline ahead of her.

“Didn’t think so.”

In a few spots, the way had been blocked by immovable cars and trucks, and they’d crawled their cycles on foot along narrow winding pathways that they picked through the obstruction. They were two of the few vehicles still moving. Cycles definitely had an advantage on the deteriorating roads.

They stuck to highways and interstates, which were mostly still in pretty good shape, though they hit a few stretches where the asphalt was crazed or melted into a sticky goo. These were typically in high-traffic areas where lots of vehicles used to change speed or direction, or else where there were overhead lights for birds to perch on. DD supposed that the birds were carrying the bacteria in their crops and passing it in their feces.

There were lots of people on foot, and a few had devised ways of replacing bicycle tires like Jeremy had: rope was a popular material choice, but so were rolled-up newspapers, and also sewn canvas tubes stuffed with various materials.

Then one day, shortly after a rest break, Jessica came across a woman crouching over a small child who lying supine on the ground. Two older children stood by, silently watching. The woman didn’t bother to look up as they approached, even when Jessica walked up and stood over her.

“Something wrong?” She asked.

The woman lifted her tearful face to regard her, and Jessica saw blood on the ground underneath the child’s head. It was a little girl, dark-skinned like her mother and siblings, with thick, dark, coarse hair that pegged them as mestizos or Indians. She was wearing jeans and a pink T-shirt with a unicorn printed on it. Her feet were wrapped in strips of cloth which had been stitched with care into passable shoes.

“What happened?” Jessica asked, just as DD and Jeremy rolled up, DD pedaling and Jeremy riding. They dismounted.

“This guy—she didn’t do nothing...” The woman had a mild Spanish accent. “We was walking and he walked up behind us. He just, just, hit her with a stick he was carrying. There was something wrong with him. He started yelling crazy stuff and ran off...”

“What did he look like?” Jeremy asked, suddenly watchful.

“Tall, skinny black guy, red shirt, grey hair...” Jeremy’s eyes narrowed. He spun on his heel and strode off in search of the assailant.

Jessica was already on her knees next to the girl. “She’s breathing with a good pulse. What’s her name?”

“Martha.” She pronounced it in the Spanish manner, with a hard T: Marta.

“Martha,” called Jessica. “Can you hear me? Puedes oirme? Does she speak English?”

“She speaks English.”
The little girl opened her brown eyes. “Mamá?” she asked. Her mama knelt across from Jessica.

“Martha,” said Jessica, fearing skull or neck injuries, “do you hurt anywhere?”

“My head,” the little girl said. She was about four years old. She sat up before Jessica could stop her, twisting her head to look over her shoulder at DD.

“Well, her neck seems okay,” Jessica said.

Jeremy circled around, intent on making sure the attacker wasn’t nearby. Jessica looked at the wound on the girl’s head, then went to her scooter and took out a bandanna, which she saturated with Everclear from one of the fuel bottles in her saddlebag.

“This will sting,” she warned, and Martha whimpered a little as she cleaned out the wound. “It would probably be better to sew it up, but...”

Martha’s mother pulled a spool of thread and a needle out of her pocket and held them out to Jessica. “...but I’m not a doctor,” finished Jessica.

Martha’s mother shrugged. She threaded the needle and bent over her child’s head.

“Have you done that before?” asked Jessica.

“Not on a human.” The mother’s voice didn’t shake. She pushed the edges of the wound together.

“Let me!” Jessica took the needle and thread. The little girl was stoic, not whimpering or weeping. Once, she flinched and hissed a breath in between her teeth, but regained her solid composure, and so soon the wound was closed, a little snip of white thread in her mass of black hair the only sign of it. Jessica dabbed it with a little more Everclear, then patted Martha on the hip. “All done.” She smiled as the girl ran to her mother’s side.

The sun was close to the horizon now. “Should we go on?” DD tossed out to the group. “Or stop for the night?

“Me and the kids were going to camp under this overpass,” volunteered the woman.

“My name’s DD. This is Jessica... and Jeremy.” Jeremy had just sauntered up, satisfied that the assailant was gone for now, and stood considering them. Martha was standing next to her brother and sister, all three of them watching the adults from a row of brunet almond eyes in solemn faces.

“Gabriela.” She took DD’s proffered hand. Then Gabriela leaned over and kissed Jessica’s cheek. “Thanks for stitching up Marthita’s head.”

“No problem.” Jessica shrugged. “I’m an LPN. I worked at an urgent care center where the doc was getting old. He had shaky hands. I wound up doing a lot of his wound closures after the first few months.” Jessica turned to her mother. “Let’s spend the night here.” Gabriela’s tiny smile let them know she welcomed their company after her scare. Jeremy nodded.

DD nodded too.

I wonder why she lost that job. A lot of doctors keep narcotics in the office.

The weather was fair and cool and appeared likely to remain so, so they decided the shelter of the dry but reeking, grubby overpass was unnecessary. Instead, they found a flat, dry, leeward spot where a retaining wall ran up against an embankment and set up camp there. They hung tarps and blankets overhead against the morning dew, spread more on the ground, and built a small fire. Pooling their food stores, they produced an enjoyable meal of hot dogs, canned beans, corn tortillas, sliced apples, and chocolate bars.

They drew closer to the fire as the night grew colder.

Sitting around the fire with full stomachs, DD extracted a 6-pack of glass bottles of root beer from the rickshaw. She’d liberated it from the stinking refrigerator of an abandoned home a few miles back.

“Jessica, how much of that Everclear do you have left?”

“Four gallons. Enough for a couple more days.”

“Can you spare a pint or so? I bet it would mix well with this root beer.”

“Mom!”

“Sounds like a country song, doesn’t it? Root beer and Everclear.” They swigged a few ounces from each bottle so they could top off with alcohol.

Jessica passed the Everclear bottle instead of pouring. “I’m allergic,” she told Gabriela.

“You don’t drink anymore?” Asked DD.

“No, I realized the drugs and alcohol were part of what set me off. It wasn’t easy. I started drinking when I was 13, you know.”

“No, I didn’t know that.”

Jessica laughed. “Mom, do you really want to know all this? You were so sure you had everything under control all the time, it was easy to convince you of what you wanted to see.”

“How could I not have known?” DD replayed Jessica’s late childhood and adolescence in her head: She caught her and a girlfriend trying cigarettes behind the garage at age 12 and confiscated her phone for a week. Normal kid stuff, or at least it seemed that way to DD, after her own upbringing.

She’d had no clue the rest was going on. Not until Jessica started driving. Then, she disappeared for a day, right before Christmas break of her sophomore year. Then, she disappeared in her junior year, for the entire week of Spring Break, sending a text message every couple of days saying she was out of signal, her phone was dead, she was on her way home, she’d call in a few days. Then she started showing up, nodding off or jittering on the balls of her feet. She’d appear at odd times at DD’s work, or at home, with boyfriends with eyes blue as toilet cleaner or green as snake bile in pustule-ravaged faces, teeth like the windows of abandoned houses, and homemade tattoos on wrists, neck, face. Every attempt to confront her led to a fight and withdrawal. Jessica appeared to straighten out for a while and raised her grades. But then she began cutting, neat slices in her forearms and the fronts of her thighs. Her father withdrew into silence and soothed his unacknowledged pain with online shopping, until the cards were maxed out to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars and he could no longer hide it.

The divorce, though amicable, occupied DD’s attention. Jessica appeared to straighten out; she was in therapy, and she qualified for a full-ride scholarship.

Then, Spring of her senior year, not long after her 18th birthday, Jessica moved out abruptly. Soon after, DD got a call; Jessica had stopped showing up at high school, forfeiting her graduation, her scholarship, and her future. Jessica’s phone was cut off. Her apartment was vacant, but like a tornado had struck it, childhood stuffed animals alongside sacks of rotting trash, irreplaceable family photos ruined by dripping candle wax since the power had obviously been off for weeks. The landlord hoping DD would make good the unpaid rent, and DD guiltily refusing.

This is bringing up too many painful memories. “I guess I should have listened to you instead of trying to force you to succeed according to my standards. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay mom. I only have one regret. I wish I’d been born Swiss.”

“What’s so great about being Swiss?”

“I’m not sure. But the flag is a big plus.”

Everyone was quiet for a while and sipped their drinks. DD was grateful for the silence as it gave her a chance to integrate her feelings and recollections. The children were under a blanket; one of them was snoring ever so softly. The warmth of the liquor spread through their bodies and the gibbous moon drifted higher in the firmament.

Their life stories glided out of their mouths and floated, ephemeral, like the sparks from the fire, before rising on the sinuous updrafts of heat.

Gabriela had traveled about 140 miles with her three children and she was almost home. “Home” being her mother’s house in the country, about fifteen miles from this freeway exit. Her husband had been stationed at Fort Chaffee and they’d lived off-base with the children. Two days ago, the President had declared a Nationwide State of Emergency, and the Army had shoved all active-duty personnel into trucks, with no word on their destination or when they might return. “They had underground tanks full of gasoline at the base, and he said about half of them were still good,” Gabriela said. “I don’t know how he knew, but he said he knew. I don’t know how far those trucks got, or what happened to the soldiers in them, but I figured me and the kids would be better off at my mama’s. The prison is right next to the military base, and I heard the convicts broke out yesterday.”

“We’re headed for a place in Central Indiana I know, a farm. A commune, sort of.” DD said.

“Central Indiana? In November?” Gabriela exclaimed. “It’s gonna get cold once you cross the Ozarks.”

“Yes, I’ve been thinking about that...” Don’t whine about how you hate the cold. In the face of what you’ve caused, it’s a petty concern.

“My mom’s place has a big cattle barn. I bet she’d let you sleep there, and feed you too, in exchange for chores. She’s all alone there with my little brother.”

“I’ve never worked on a farm before. I wouldn’t know the first thing to do,” began DD.

“I have. Spent time on my uncle’s cattle ranch when I was little,” said Jeremy.

“I can fix things and I’m a nurse?” offered Jessica tentatively.

“It’s settled then. We can be there by noon tomorrow.” Gabriela said.

DD started to object but stopped herself. She didn’t want to trek through the freezing cold. She told herself she was worried about her recently healed feet, but they were, honestly, looking pretty good.

Even with heavy socks and mittens and respectable boots, I just flat-out hate cold weather!

At that instant, they heard footfalls lumbering up the shoulder towards them. Gabriela sprang across the campsite to crouch over her children, no sign of her phlegmatic reverie as she transformed in seconds into a wild animal protecting her young. Jeremy shot erect to face the intruder. DD stood too, and took a step back, out of the firelight. What should I do?

Then she remembered she was armed. She drew her S&W, grasping it low at her side. The stranger moved closer to the fire, arms-length from Jeremy, and his bony build, red shirt, and grey hair left no doubt he was the man Gabriela described, the one who’d attacked Martha.

“The police can’t help you now, can they? It’s every man for himself! Police can’t help you now!” he hooted, shifting foot to foot and jerking his bloodshot gaze around the scene. DD noiselessly pulled back the hammer on the revolver. Can I do this? And, Am I doing this because he’s black?

“What you LOOKIN’ AT?” He finished the phrase in a screech and jerked back his hand, holding a rough wood walking stick, heavy and thick like a club. DD raised her firearm. He was sluggish enough, sloshed or insane, or both, that Jeremy had no difficulty seizing the wrist of the hand that held the stick high in the air, so he couldn’t bring it down. They grappled a second or two. Then, in a moment of sheer unscripted absurdity, Jessica stepped in and yanked the club out of his grasp, then stepped back; DD blinked in surprise over the sights of her gun, now centered on the man’s chest. The poor addled bastard looked at Jessica in dull confusion, then kicked Jeremy—hard—in the thigh, going for the nuts and missing, and yanked his arm free. Jeremy backed up a step, reaching for his gun, but DD was ready with her hammer cocked and her barrel level. Just like at the range...squeeze, don’t pull... She heard the bang, felt the recoil. I missed. Her first emotion was relief. She regained her sight picture, ready to fire again. But then the stranger put his hand to his side, and she realized her first shot had found its mark. She let the gun drop to her side and watched him drop, in turn, to his knees. She put her other hand up as though to say stop, just as Jeremy fired the first of two more shots into his body.

Then time speeded up again. The man was on his side. Her heart was thrashing, her ears buzzing from the sound of the gunshot, and her hands were quivering as she holstered the revolver. Jessica bent briefly over the recumbent madman. She looked at her mother, shook her head in sorrow, then stood up and turned away.

Gabriela was telling the one child who’d sat up, the boy, “Nada pasó. Duermete, amor.” Nothing happened, go to sleep. The child glanced around, bewildered, but compliantly laid himself back down, sinking into the profound sleep of the innocent.

They stood in a rough circle as the night wheeled around them, connected by some invisible rigidity to the pivotal hub of a moment. No one spoke for a time. “I guess I’ll check his pockets,” Jeremy said. DD walked back over to her seat by the fire and sat down heavily. She sucked down a long pull on her root beer and Everclear.

“Mom, are you okay?” Asked Jessica, settling next to her.

“Yes. Yes, I think so.” Numb. I go numb when bad things happen. “I’ve carried a gun for twenty years. I hoped carrying it would mean I’d never to have to use it.”

“I know, mom. You did what you needed to do. You protected us all.” She took her mother’s shaking hand, and the two of them stared into the fire. It was comforting to realize they were still alive, together, and safe.

Gabriela had soothed the children and was walking towards the fire, facing the two of them. A sharp intake of breath from Gabriela made mother and daughter look up, then follow her gaze to Jeremy.

Jeremy had been bending over their attacker, searching him for anything of use they could scavenge. Now, he was standing upright with his hands in the air. Three men wearing a motley of denim and leather were holding rifles trained on him.

XLI.  90% Of Life Is Showing Up

The next evening, the oblique sun of Autumn was nearing the horizon when Amit requested that Juni turn off US 41 in Indiana, onto an unexceptional two-lane road between two cornfields. They’d bypassed hundreds of inoperative vehicles on their way south.

In some places, they’d discerned the impediments far in advance, and diverted down side roads. Fortunately, due to his age, Amit was proficient in navigating by paper maps, so they didn’t get lost.

They’d seen only two police vehicles with their coruscating lights. The few police vehicles still running were way outnumbered by the immobile vehicles. They probably had other things to worry about too, mused Amit, as he’d noticed a gigantic irrigation outlet spouting, turning the farm’s utility yard into a lake, its PVC pipes spraying water, above-ground traps and connectors, the thickness of a man’s thigh, sagging flaccidly and ready to fall.

Probably a lot of the police had deserted, Amit thought, to save their own pelts, or their own families’.

They sped down the desolate country road. Clumps of trees broke the monotony, the only things which kept the scenery from being a featureless pancake from horizon to horizon. The wind swept without ceasing out of the west, and the trees had deformed themselves, bonsai-like, towards the bearing of the gusts. A dog, lolling in the brown grass before a brick ranch house, was the only sign of life. The anesthetizing Midwestern uniformity sped by them in a smudge. The sky was grey and overcast; a draft stirred the odd husk on the dry stubs of corn, chaff from a harvest weeks past, or rustled the dry, drab, leafy stalks of seed corn, reserved to dry in the field for a Spring planting that might, now, never take place.

The sun sank lower and began to turn the few most lofty clouds pearl-pink. At long last, as the leading edge of the ginger disc just melded to the smooth level plane of the horizon, Amit said, “Here.”

Juni decelerated and turned south onto an unmarked dirt road between two windbreaks. The road was just two bumpy ruts, which meant they proceeded at a sedate pace, a row of spruce trees like Christmas trees on their left, a row of scraggly arborvitae on their right.

“You could almost believe things were normal,” remarked Juni.
“Yes, it’s very peaceful out here,” agreed Amit. “We might as well enjoy the illusion. I don’t think things will ever be normal again.”

Juni’s face fell, and her lips writhed as she tried to maintain possession of her weeping; her eyes at least remained dry. She concentrated on the track ahead, the potholes in its corrugated surface concealed by the shadow of the windbreak on their right.

“Were you ever married?” She asked abruptly.

Amit sighed, “Yes, I still am. But my wife is in India.”

“When do you see each other?”

“The last time was two years ago. I believe that was just before you hired on at the University.”

Juni considered that. “But…how does that work? The two of you being married, I mean?”

Amit sighed. “It isn’t unusual for Indians to marry someone their parents choose. It was even more common, in fact it was the rule, when I was a young man. Things have changed since then, in India as well as here. And the way the internet, at first, allowed people to communicate across borders and around the world, effortlessly, increased the pace of change. But you asked about my marriage. I suppose… Marriage has different meanings for different people, in different places, and at different times in our lives.”

Juni digested this. A few minutes later, “Do you have children?”

“None living.”

Juni was silent after that. The windbreaks curved in parallel to the right, then to the left, the trail arching with them, and then ended. The car track continued into the twilight. There was little change in the vista as they crept along; they passed a grain silo, a barn, an irrigation rig, they passed a crossing with another dirt road, empty in both directions as far as they could see. It grew darker, and a rabbit materialized from the grass at the roadside, zig-zagged frantically before them in the headlights for a hundred feet or so, then sprang to the side at the last possible moment, just before Juni would have been compelled to brake.

When there was nothing but dreary farmland from horizon to horizon, the last light in the West was fading, and Juni had a look on her face in the dim greenness of the dash lights like there’d never be anything but fields and dirt roads ever again no matter how far she drove, Amit again said, “Here,” pointing to a track which was scarcely discernible in the brown grass, running over a shallow culvert. They crawled from here on, jostling across a field of stubble and going between two spruce trees to cross another windbreak. The track curved around a gentle rise, and then plunged into a stand of bushy forest, like a secret oasis in the midst of the flat farmland. The track jumped onto evenly spaced wood crosspieces, rounded one last curve, then fell to its finish in a clearing.

A small log cabin, its windows gleaming with warm light, perched on the rim of a shallow depression. As she approached the structure, her eyes got larger as she revised her appraisal of its size, from small, to large, to gigantic. The depression, round as a bowl, was large enough that you’d have to shout to be heard from the other side, and though it was shallow in contour, it was perhaps fifty feet deep, and the light from the house and her headlights showed it was lined at the bottom with cattails gone to puffy seed and reeds seething in gusts of wind. The house was three floors tall and had a massive stone flue with a thin tape of smoke winding from it. A man emerged in the door, carrying a shotgun low by his side, and approached the car, unhurried, as it trundled to a halt. He stopped about twenty feet away, standing outlined in the fading light, and Amit opened his door and swung out.

“Snowbear! Hank! How are you?” Asked Amit, and their host walked into the headlights. The stranger was lanky, a ruddy clean-shaven white man, with long salt-and-pepper hair, sparse on top and dragged back into a ponytail. He was wearing a denim shirt and jeans with heavy leather hiking boots. His belt buckle was in the shape of a silver bear.

He beamed. “Amit! Long time, no see! What brings you here, my friend?” He shook Amit’s right hand and they circled each other’s shoulders with their left hands in a secure masculine embrace.

“Trouble. Have you not heard?” Amit replied.

“Heard?” Snowbear asked.

“The trouble?”

Snowbear waved a hand vaguely at the house. “Internet went down last night, but no one’s been on it for a while anyway. Then we lost power, about four hours ago. What’s up?”

“May we…” He shifted his feet and nodded towards the house, aware now of his exhaustion.

“Of course! Sorry! You look whipped! Come on in. We just finished dinner but there are leftovers. Pinto beans and cornbread.”

“Sounds wonderful.”

Juni trailed the two men into the ample and abundant home.

XLII.                      Better than Nothing

Jacob huddled in his garret. He’d broken into the attic window of the condemned house the night he’d watched the Germans and the two women get shot down in the street like dogs. It’d been three days and he’d eaten nothing but some oyster crackers in packets he’d scavenged from the sidewalk outside a crawfish joint. It had rained, and he’d caught some water in plastic bottle he’d found and cut the tops off of, but then the bottles melted, like everything plastic was melting. He was hungry and scared and alone. He slept on a crib mattress he’d pulled from a dumpster, his gun in his hand, startled awake by every scampering cat or distant voice.

Yesterday, he’d heard three women walking down the alley under his window talking about the camps. FEMA had emergency camps just north of town and they still had buses that ran, apparently. He’d heard them say that a bus left every day at sunset from LaFreniere Park. He could just make it there on foot if he left now. He scrambled down the drainpipe and set out through the streets, still plumed with the smoke of hundreds of smoldering fires. He picked his way through broken glass from shattered store windows and around the cars with their deflated tires, the puddles of caustic battery acid freed from its plastic casing, and the shattered blobs of plastic signage. Anytime he saw someone, he ducked out of sight and waited for them to pass, unless they ducked into an alley or a stalled car first, in which case he warily stalked past their concealment.

When he reached the old graveyard adjoining the park, he joined a bedraggled mob by the gates. Yats and blacks, a small gaggle of devastated college kids, moms with filthy starving children, and bunches of solo men and women of varying ages just like himself, leaned against the wall, sat on the curb, or squatted in the shade of scrubby bushes.

“They got food and hot water in the camps. Diapers and clothes for the young ones.”

“I getting up under that!”

“They make everyone sleep in bunk beds.”

“I hear they make you work.”

“Farming is what I heard. Doing laundry. Like prison.”

“Better than what we got here.”

“Sure enough.”

Around 4:30, a semi-truck pulled up, its diesel motor still growling away, its huge tires replaced by wire-lashed bundles of rags. Three men and a woman in green fatigues got out. Jacob had no idea what kind of military they were, he’d never served, and none of his family had, but they had American flag patches above the insignia. The soldiers took it in turns: two would stand with firearms ready, one would search those wishing to board, and one would help them climb up into the wooden-floored trailer of the semi.

Jacob had a sick feeling when he saw that people weren’t being allowed to board with firearms. He watched an old, arthritic woman crook her finger at the soldier who’d pulled a Ruger semiauto pistol out of her cleavage, but even when she stamped her foot, the soldier remained impassive. The lady acquiesced and he dropped the magazine, cleared the chamber, and dropped firearm and clip into the slot atop a corrugated steel box. The woman allowed herself to be helped into the truck bed.

When Jacob approached, hands up, it was the woman’s turn to search, and he told her straight up, “I have a firearm in the back of my pants.”

“Okay, sir, keep your hands up and turn around.” The weight of his weapon eased from his hips and he heard a click as the trusty Sig he’d inherited from his dad was unloaded, then a clang as it dropped in the box. He hardly noticed the woman’s hands ranging over his body as he thought of his dad teaching him to plink with that gun, hitting cans atop fences at grampa’s house. He hadn’t thought of his dad in months, and he misted up a little, shook off the helpful hands of the soldiers at the rear of the trailer, and vaulted up himself.

Inside, the truck was empty except for thick hemp ropes laced back and forth across the floor, tied onto steel cargo loops. “Grab hold and hang on!” one of the soldiers shouted at his back. Jacob moved as far forward as he could to leave room for later arrivals, found a spot where he could wedge his legs under a rope, and settled down to fantasize a hot meal, a shower, and a real bed. Today’s load was only a half-full truck, and once the doors shut it was dark within. They bumped and lurched for what Jacob thought was an hour and a half or so, during which he thought about his plants dying on the windowsill of his apartment, and when they stopped in the twilight and the engine stopped and doors rolled up, he got his first look at his new, temporary home.

Ten-foot chain-link fences topped with coils of concertina wire surrounded the grounds. It looked to Jacob like what he’d seen of his dad’s old photo albums of his service in the Army: flat, treeless grounds with half-cylinder aluminum buildings. He remembered his dad called them “Quonsets” to Jacob’s great amusement. He used to jump around chanting, “Quonset, Quonset, Quonset,” until his father tossed a blanket over him and threw him shrieking on the couch for a good tickle session. Jacob shook his head. This sentimentality wasn’t like him.

The group from the truck had all assembled and were being split into childless men, childless women, and family groups with children. Each was escorted to a different area of the camp. Jacob was shown to his spot: a bunk with a clean mattress, a blanket, and a foam pillow; he was led with the other men to the shower array in the back of the dorm. They all showered, silent and embarrassed, under the bored eye of a uniformed guard. He put his dirty clothing back on, since he had nothing else, but his shoes, which he’d wrapped in strips of cloth to hold them together, had stuck to the cloth and fallen to shreds when he took them off. The dorm was only about a quarter full, so all the new arrivals picked their bunks; Jacob picked a top bunk near one of the small windows. A bell rang and a guard came in a few minutes later to explain to the newbies that this meant supper.

Jacob followed the crowd to a cafeteria building and went through the line to get a tray of food that was more or less what he remembered getting for free lunch in his high school cafeteria. But it was hot, it was edible, and there was enough for a man Jacob’s size, so he dug in with gusto. He was clean and sheltered, safe and fed. When the lights-out bell rang at ten, he fell asleep like a child.

XLIII.                  Love Strange

The expedition to Camp David, which was sixty-odd miles, had been nerve-racking for POTUS in his armored limousine. He snarled every time someone told him they’d heard nothing of his family. It was even more grueling for the Secret Service and Marine detail who trotted alongside on foot as the cars crawled along. Even so, they did everything feasible to make it easier and more comfortable for him, while still maintaining a thick cordon of protection. There was almost an entire military division surrounding him.

Once they established the fundamentals of what was coming to be called the machine sickness, and what was more important, its results, Camp David was the analytically valid choice. The Camp was a bunker, and the petroleum supplies stocked there were undisturbed and (presumably) uncontaminated, enough to last three years. A procedure of couriers travelling by foot and bicycle was contrived, to carry communications between POTUS and Site R in Pennsylvania, where what endured of the military command structure was to be bunkered. Birdwell noted that POTUS withdrew into himself when this was discussed; his eyes constricted. He suspected that the billionaire was silently scheming to use this emergency to get his hands back on the reins of his multinational business empire at the first opportunity. In a way, Birdwell couldn’t blame him; everyone was frantic with worry over the whereabouts of their loved ones and the status of their homes. He doubted that the man had grasped the scale of the dissolution confronting them, or the idea that corporations had ceased to exist when electronic communications were lost.

Birdwell shook his head; there wasn’t much military left to command; the loss of communications and the inability to feed and supply military bases had left 90% of soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines on their own, either in the US or overseas, wherever they happened to be. The communications they did receive were mostly updates detailing small groups of governmental workers, military and police, who’d achieved momentary contact and were earnestly advised to continue carrying out their previous missions. What those missions were was usually unknown to the officer giving instructions at the time of contact, but often they were able later to dig up paper hard-copy to scrutinize. It gave them a chance to make a better guess who and what was left, and make some sort of conditional analysis.

The protection-camps rescue plan was apparently implemented early on, as laid out during the early PATRIOT years after 9-11, and judging by the spotty reports they received, it functioned more or less as planned in most areas, siphoning the population out of the hellish cities into self-supporting protectee centers.

To say that the first weeks at the refuge were a shock would be an understatement. POTUS was preoccupied and irritable; he seemed stunned. He’d relied on delegating authority and there was no one to delegate to. All he could do is listen to interminable speculation: long days of dispute, uninformed theorizing over what had transpired, bored him almost senseless. He even raised his hand one day as though to strike one brave aide who told him straight-out that his family couldn’t be found.

The machine sickness was still held to be part of a larger terrorist or international political plot. This was articulated in top-level communications, transported long distances by foot or bicycle, on coded, sealed, slips of paper, to and from decoy hand-off sites, by couriers who didn’t know one another and didn’t know what news they were bearing.

One day, the protective detail assigned to the First Lady finally made it through. POTUS stood at the window and watched the eight immense men herd his wife, once an elegant model but now more like a gaunt refugee, and his son and daughter into the building. He actually wept a few tears and rushed to the entry to embrace them. Staff looked on with mixed emotions: relief at the family’s being reunited, hope that POTUS would be more emotionally stable now that they’d been found safe, and envy. All but one of the subordinates had been separated from their families on the day the machine sickness struck Washington; only a few of them had been able to re-establish connection, and that was via vague, heavily self-censored paper notes entrusted to the foot couriers.

They waited for their enemies’ nuclear bombs to drop, or for troop carriers to sail into their unprotected harbors, disgorging an invasion force on their helpless shores.

Slowly, they came to comprehend beyond any doubt that the affliction must be global. Not only were the US’s nuclear warheads sitting useless in their silos, controlled by a tangle of newly uninsulated, shorted-out wires, but so were the warheads of every other nation. Aircraft and aircraft carriers, Humvees and tanks, Blackhawks and F-35s: all depended on plastics and petroleum fuel.

There was a hushed moment of shocked distress when someone brought up the fate of submarine crews. The image of them dying in the dark in submerged coffins, alone, unknowing, wedged itself vividly into everyone’s mind, although surely the number dying in riots, plane crashes, structural collapses, and myriad other accidents worldwide was far, far greater.

The world’s supreme national military empire was just as helpless as everyone else. Its massive size and rigid structure was, in fact, proving to be a disadvantage. There might be numerous units out there acting semi-autonomously, but those units would trickle away as they starved or ran out of materiél, or else degenerate into gangs of marauding thugs as they failed to receive new orders.

The expensive, hierarchical, and complicated planning and development mechanisms the nation-states of the planet depended on were as incapacitated as a freshman at a frat party.

Unknown to them, everywhere on the planet, individuals: ten thousand, ten million—who could count?—were tinkering and fiddling, gabbing and suggesting, testing and experimenting, with new ways to make things function, to survive and thrive. Just as the airplane was invented by six or eight others at the same time as the Wright Brothers tinkered at Kitty Hawk, just as Antonio Meucci presented a working telephone decades before Alexander Graham Bell, ideas had life of their own and could not be held back, but found a way to trickle through the mesh of connections between the billions of nodes of light known as humans.

XLIV.                   Don’t Shoot or I’ll Move

One of the men had the muzzle of his long gun touching the base of Jeremy’s cranium; the other two stood farther back. Think fast, DD.

She stood, palmed her face with both hands, and let out a high-pitched gasp. She mimicked the sawtooth breathing of hyperventilation, imitating an asthmatic friend she’d once seen almost die from an attack. Jessica, brilliant, picked up on it right away, and launched into a performance of her own. Pretending not to have seen the men, she turned her back on them and began to try to “calm” her mother. She put her hands over hers, on her cheeks, and looked into her eyes.

“Mom, what’s wrong? Mom? Mom!” Jessica deserved an Academy Award for her dissimulation. “Oh, no, it’s one of her panic attacks! Jeremy, quick, her medication! Before she passes out again!” she called out, her eyes locked with DD’s. DD risked a wink.

The middle man was colossal, beefy, and well over six feet tall, his tangled beard looped into a knot mid-chest. The two slighter men’s body language telegraphed that he was their leader.

Gabriela stood uncertain, baffled and not twigging, while the two women went through their pantomime. Jessica swung around and covered the distance between her mom and Jeremy in a few galloping paces, then stopped short as she pretended to initially take in the situation.

Three things happened at once: Jessica let out an ear-splitting scream. DD lunged towards the five of them, her breathing miraculously restored to normal. And Jeremy slapped the rifle aimed at his ear away, spinning on one knee, seizing the barrel of the weapon, and shoving the stock of it up into his attacker’s face, all in one precipitate motion.

DD had her own handgun unholstered by the time she’d closed the space between herself and the menacing tableau. Jessica was inside the radius of the rifle barrel of one of the goons, so he dropped the unusable weapon and went for the semiauto in his pants, just as Jessica sprang on top of him with the paring knife she’d used to cut the apples. The knife penetrated his chest eight or ten times—oh, so fast! —in a series of tiny, wet thumps. He managed to get his gun up and squeezed off a shot, which went wild, before he blanched and dropped limp to the ground. DD was approaching fast; the third thug was vacillating between firing at Jeremy, who was pressing his advantage by forcing his gigantic but off-balance opponent backwards using the stock of his own gun, and shooting DD. He swung the weapon towards her, but over-aimed and missed, and his hesitation allowed her to get a shot off before she sprinted straight at him. She saw him jerk as the shot smashed into him, and she squeezed the trigger four more times as she closed the distance. It barely registered that the last shot made no bang and recoil, just a click. He lifted the rifle again and DD saw, in a shock like a bolt of lightning, the concentric circles of the muzzle, quivering slightly, pointing right at her face, so close she could touch it. She dropped to her knees (she would never be sure, later, if it was quick thinking to get out of the line of fire, or outright terror making her knees buckle) and heard the rifle’s report at the same moment, deafening, and saw the rifle recoil high into the air as the brute lost control of his weapon and fell. Heart pounding, she ran up to him, still holding her revolver, leapt atop him, and bashed his heavily tattooed face with the silver handgun, over and over, her cheeks pulling her mouth back into a rictus of fury as she heard the revolting cracks of breaking bones. Her tunnel visual focus shattered all at once, as Jeremy’s adversary scuffled backwards towards her; the monster had acquired the presence of mind to let go of his rifle; now he drew a curved machete from between his shoulder blades instead. Jeremy was manipulating the stolen rifle, trying to flip it around and bring it to bear on his attacker, but it was plain that he was going to be too slow to aim and fire the unfamiliar weapon.

DD found herself other than human. Her thighs became the haunches of a beast as she dove horizontally forward out of her crouch, caught Jeremy’s opponent behind his knees, and brought him crashing to the ground. All three of them bounded atop the one final man as he turned over, groping for his absent machete, which had gone flying as he fell. Jeremy stomped his face, Jessica kicked his ribs, and DD jumped up to seize his ankle and step on his knee, bending the joint sideways with a wet and appalling CRUNCH!

The three of them stood over their vanquished foes, panting, their hearts pounding in their ears. They swung around so they were back to back, observing the four would-be pillagers where they lay on the ground, alert for any sign of motion from them, or for any more confederates who might be lurking in the bushes.

Gradually, their breath slowed, and they began to feel their injuries. Jessica’s was the worst: her opponent’s handgun shot hadn’t gone wild after all, but somehow punctured the thick, heart-shaped muscle of her calf. Jeremy had skinned the thick callus from his left palm, leaving a wound like a bleeding burn. DD’s left pinkie finger stuck out sideways at a right angle, broken; when had that happened? She’d no clue. She realized there was blood running down her cheekbone and dripping on her right shoulder from a gash above her hairline, matching the healing one she’d gotten on the left temple from her captors.

And just like little Martha’s. She remembered the family and looked around for Gabriela, Martha, and the other two children. She saw no sign of them and stalked past the fire. Couldn’t blame her if she took the kids and ran. I wouldn’t have bet on us, against those hoodlums!

But Gabriela lay under the brush pile they’d collected for kindling, sheltered with a blanket, arms spread like a dove’s wings over the children, her hand clamped securely over the baby’s mouth. She saw DD padding towards her and scrambled out, holding the baby and permitting him to cry, which he did forthwith. The girls came following, and Martha’s big sister boosted her to her hip.

Jeremy, Jessica, and DD allowed Gabriela to fuss over their injuries and bind their wounds. She cleaned and bound Jessica’s leg; the bullet had gone in one side and out the other and the bleeding wasn’t heavy. Comparatively. Her leg attended to, Jessica tottered over to stitch up her mother’s scalp.

“This is becoming a habit for you,” said Jeremy to Jessica, as Gabriela wrapped gauze around his skinned hand.

“A habit I’d like to break!” she observed wryly.

The children, seeing all the adults were present and accounted for, crawled back into their bedrolls and fell serenely back to sleep. The adults settled back down by the fire.

They glanced at each other.

“We did it!” exclaimed DD.

“We sure did,” agreed Jeremy. “You were a wildcat! I thought I was a goner when that fat bastard pulled that machete!”

“I don’t know what came over me!” mused DD. “Wildcat is a good description. I just felt like a feral creature!” She turned to Jessica. “And where did you learn to fight like that?” She asked.

Jessica smiled craftily and took a breath to answer.

“Never mind,” DD said. “That is something I don’t need to know.”

“That’s right, mom. You don’t,” her adult offspring agreed.

“Well, I don’t know where any of you learned to do all that,” Gabriela interjected, “but you were awesome beyond awesome. You are my heroes!” DD could see every hair of her head, vividly, and every thread of her fraying blouse.

“Is it just me,” DD asked, “or does everything seem that much better and brighter right now?”

“It’s not just you,” Jessica confirmed.

“Is this the first time you’ve survived a fight for your life?” Jeremy asked.

“Well, yes,” admitted DD. On the streets of her childhood and youth, she was the type who either faded and hid, or talked her way out of things.

“Kind of makes you feel really glad to be alive, doesn’t it?”

“Hell, yeah!” DD recalled the laser focus, emotional but calm, that had burst into her consciousness when she saw the rifle muzzle pointing right at her.

“Wait till later. I’ll show you what really feels good about still being alive!”

DD leered at him.

“Mom! Gro-o-oss!” Jessica mimicked her own tone from back when she was a child and she saw her mother and father kissing.

DD shrugged, giving Jeremy a wicked side glance. He took her hand and they slipped off together.

XLV.                       Sutokata

Juni’d never imagined anything like it. The home was beyond rustic. Every visible surface was wood: the floors were planking, the ceiling beams were exposed, with the planks of the floor above visible between them. The wall beams were also exposed, but between them stretched bookshelves, yards and yards of them. She’d entered, via a small mud room, into a chamber perhaps 40 by 25 feet, and every single wall was lined with books: paperbacks and hardcovers; biographies, history books, scriptures, coffee-table photograph books, how-to books, classics, erotica, best-sellers...

Noting her wide-eyed gaze, Snowbear smiled. “We have a lot of time to read in the winter.”

“Why’s that?” Asked Juni.

“We are a self-sustaining farm. In the winter, there’s not as much labor to do.” Juni considered this, her fatigue making her slow on the uptake.

“Oh. How do you…” just then a willowy, pale woman, with waist-length hair in the process of turning from blonde to white, walked in. She grinned, and crinkles warmed the corners of her unadorned eyes.

“Akisni, you remember Amit,” said Snowbear. They hugged. “And this is?”

“Juni.” She stepped forward and offered her hand to Akisni, noting the other woman’s rustic bandanna kerchief, her magenta flannel shirt, rugged canvas cargo pants, and hiking boots. Her hand was callused but warm.

Juni was suddenly aware of her own designer hoodie, her onyx elephant earrings, her makeup. She felt the city girl’s paradoxical emotions, of pride in her sophistication and embarrassment at her frivolity.

“Are you all thirsty? Hungry?” Akisni asked. Juni realized she was both. The sound of running water and clattering dishes and pans from the other side of the great door at the other end of the room resolved itself in her awareness. “Follow me.” Juni was a little hesitant. She glanced at Amit, and he gestured with his open hand and followed the women into the kitchen, Snowbear bringing up the rear.

Entering the kitchen, Juni blinked. The juxtaposition of the same exposed beams and planking with modern stainless-steel counters, a commercial refrigerator and freezer, a commercial range with a huge hood, and restaurant-sized mixers, bowls, pans, and utensils was stunning.

Akisni walked to the refrigerator and pulled out two of a dozen or so identical glass casserole dishes. She popped them into the microwave to warm.

“Beans, greens and cornbread,” Akisni explained. “We always set aside a few leftovers for snackers, and if it doesn’t get eaten it goes to the pigs.”

“How many of you are there?” Juni asked.

“Twelve of us live here full-time. We usually have a few people staying here as guests. Spiritual retreats, post-divorce recoveries, hippie dilettantes, and so forth. Used to have birthing moms, but not so much any more.” The microwave beeped and Akisni settled them at the trestle table with cloth napkins, silverware, and a ceramic ramekin of butter with little beads of water condensing on top. Juni’s stomach growled. She hadn’t had collards cooked with bacon since childhood, and she found these delicious. Snowbear sopped up the liquid from the greens with his buttered cornbread, just like her granddaddy used to do, and the familiar custom made Juni feel at home. Perhaps just being alive, after the way the past twenty-four hours had gone, added an edge to her hunger, but Juni ate like this pot-liquor-soaked cornbread was the best food she’d ever had.

Amit apparently felt the same way, because he savored every bite, chewing with an intensity Juni had not seen before in her delicate-mannered boss. He ate silently, and Snowbear sat across from him next to Juni. Akisni sat next to Amit, and when they’d both finished, Gillie, a young white girl with dreadlocks and a nose ring (Juni guessed this was one of Akisni’s hippie dilettantes) swept into the room and took their dishes and napkins, swirling her ankle-length skirt as she deposited them into the dishwasher tray and left.

Once his guests had eaten, Snowbear laced his fingers on the table in front of him and asked with forced insouciance, “So, what’s all this, then? Something up?”

Viswanathan took an unfathomable breath. “Yes, something is definitely up.

“The short version is that a bacterium has been released into the world which eats everything made of petroleum. Gasoline, diesel, plastic, asphalt, everything.”

Akisni remained silent, unreadable. Snowbear grunted his incredulity. “That’s a pretty wild claim.”

“Snowbear, you know me. When you and your crew were tripping on mushrooms, who made sure you were okay and tucked you into your sleeping bags?”

“True. You have always been the sober, skeptical one. That’s why you wound up a world-renowned scientist and Akisni, Les, Brownie, and I wound up living on a hippie commune…”

“Hardly a typical hippie commune. Science groupies, instead of rock stars. But it’s important you listen to me and remember who I am, who I’ve always been. Because this sounds incredible, but it is honestly happening.

“There have always been bacteria which eat petroleum. Oil deposits seep to the surface in the ocean and on land, and where there’s a source of nutrients, an organism will evolve to exploit it. The big secret to dealing with oil spills is that, if you just give those bacteria enough time, they will consume every drop of oil. In warmer climates, it can take months; in cooler climates, years or decades.

“The problem is, people are impatient. They don’t want to look at oil slicks and tar-soaked wildlife for all the time it takes. It’s bad PR for the oil companies. So, in an ocean spill, they spray the oil with dispersants, which makes the oil droplets smaller, but also slows down the function of the bacteria.”

Akisni interrupted. “Wait a minute. So, when the oil companies treat the oil, it makes the spill take longer to clean up?” her expressive brow was furrowed.

“Well, it depends on your definition of ‘clean up.’ The big blobs of oil are gone, but the volume of seawater that’s contaminated is actually greater. But that’s not important now. I’ve always hypothesized that this could eventually force the bacteria to evolve more quickly. Several researchers have been working on developing a genetically engineered organism which could withstand the dispersant. But this is different.

“I don’t know for sure if this is a naturally evolved variant or a genetically engineered bacterium. I have reason to suspect the latter…” He described the strange call from the Chinese physician.

“That’s not much to go on.” Snowbear commented.

“True.” Amit conceded. “But there’s something else. There’s a bright—no, brilliant— young researcher who was working with alkanivorax and p. putida strains. I never had the privilege of meeting her, but she recently left academia to work in the private sector. I saw a Power Point of hers online. I downloaded it; I can show you on my laptop. I was hoping you had internet here, I’d like to finish downloading her most recent papers.”

Amit put his hand on his laptop case, by his side on the bench, ready to show them the Power Point, but Snowbear waved his hand dismissively. “Okay.” Snowbear stood up.

“Okay. I believe you.” He put both palms flat on the table and bent forward, looking his old friend in the eye. “I believe you, Amit. You don’t need to show me more proof.

“So. What should we do?”

Amit felt a knot in his chest unclench which he hadn’t known was there. “Actually, you are probably in pretty good shape out here; that’s why I came here. I did my best to disinfect before we got here, so hopefully we haven’t contaminated your dwelling. You’ll want to disinfect the tires of Juni’s car, and make sure the children…you do have children here still?”

“None younger than ten at the moment.”

“Just make sure they don’t walk across the tire tracks and distribute the germs that way. However, no matter what we do, it’s just a matter of time until it makes it to you. It’s in the irrigation rigs of the fields nearby. Animals will track it in; it might even hitch a ride on windborne seeds or pollen. There’s so much I don’t know yet about this new hybrid.

“So, longer-term, you want to make sure anything you rely on which is plastic is replaced. Electronic devices will melt, or simply stop working. Do you buy propane gas?” He nodded at the stove.

“No, it’s methane. It’s homemade biogas. We have a micro plant which harvests it from our sewage and farm waste.”

Amit’s eyebrows shot up. “Really! That’s impressive! I’d like a tour later.”

“Yes, it’s taken us years to work out the inputs; the right mix of anaerobes and how to know when to flare the gas…but it sounds like our urgently pressing concern for right now will be to figure out which components of it are plastic and how to replace them.”

“Might I suggest looking at bone and horn as hard-plastic substitutes? They were used for similar purposes a century ago. In India when I was growing up, a lot of things were made out of them that are plastic here nowadays. My biggest worry is pipes and electrical insulation. It didn’t take long at all, a matter of hours, for electricity, phones, and internet to go down in Chicago. I think the bacterium must use biofilms to migrate along the insulation.”

“We need to call an emergency meeting. We have an electrician and a civil engineer in residence. But the more minds working together on this, the better.”

Juni felt more secure, just knowing there were people here who understood the problems they faced and could work together to solve them. Juni’s eyes began to drift shut, and as her awareness sank into her belly, full of warm, wholesome soul food, she was ready to cuddle up and fall asleep. She realized she had no one to cuddle, and tears began to trickle silently down her cheeks. Akisni took note and walked around the table to lay a hand on her shoulder. “Honey, are you okay? What’s wrong?”

“My husband.” Her throat constricted in a sob.

“Is he—it’s okay, honey.” Juni’s shoulders began to shake. “Come with me.” Akisni draped a warm, soft arm around her and maneuvered her from the kitchen. As they walked through the swinging double doors at the other end, Juni lost control of her weeping and began to moan.

XLVI.                   It’s Only Natural

Each day that the internet failed to come back on was one rung further up the ladder of resignation. The people of the Sutokata Center gave up checking after about five days. They were all hard at it anyway: swathing electrical wires and PVC water pipes with pine-resin-soaked strips of felt and canvas, excavating plastic parts out of devices and connectors, carving bone substitutes, experimenting with oils and animal fats to see what would serve best as lubricants, and standing watch.

For it didn’t take long for the surrounding folk to realize that the people of Sutokata were better-situated to survive the machine sickness than anyone else. Friends from the community stopped by to ask for help: goat’s milk for a baby whose mother ran out of formula; a supply of sterile bandages for an elderly neighbor dealing with a slow-healing wound.

There were those they couldn’t help: the diabetic neighbor who showed up with his wife, asking if they knew where he could get insulin. They didn’t. They’d walked eight miles, since their vehicles were all disabled, and without being asked, Juni drove them back in her car, spreading canvas over the seats and carpet in the back so they wouldn’t contaminate the vehicle with the machine sickness. Juni stopped at the end of their half-mile-long driveway to let them out. Knowing that the man would die a slow and miserable death in front of his wife, and there was nothing they could do to prevent it, left the entire household morose for days. However, they aided anyone they possibly could, on the principle of human kindness.

But one day, a few weeks after Juni and Amit arrived, Brownie was carrying feed to the pigs when he spotted a small group of armed men roving up the track towards the compound. They were spread out, but he thought he counted eight or nine of them. He hailed them, and instead of advancing to greet him, the men ran away at a dead run, scattering in all directions. Brownie came straight back to the main house and told Snowbear, who called a consensus meeting that evening.

The residents of Sutokata were, by and large, left-wing. They didn’t like guns and they perceived that gun violence was a huge problem. However, in light of the fact that they appeared to be under imminent threat of violence and law enforcement was not accessible, they were forced to consider means of self defense.

Akisni had long insisted that Sutokata be a “place of peace,” which meant many things. One thing it meant was that anyone arriving with a firearm was expected to lock it away in a large gun safe in the sheep barn attached to the house. Akisni held one key to the gun safe and Snowbear had the other. Many people had come and gone over the decades, and not all of them had retrieved their guns before leaving, for various reasons. So, to Akisni’s chagrin, when the gun safe was opened, it was revealed to be crammed almost full of firearms of various types. If not a literal arsenal, it was at least a solid defensive collection.

All of this had been summarized by Snowbear at the beginning of the consensus meeting. All 16 residents of the collective, plus Amit and Juni, sat in the great room in chairs or couches. The young and limber sat on cushions or sprawled on the floor.

Akisni was sitting cross-legged on an oversized leather armchair. She was breathing deeply, sitting upright, but tears were streaming down her face. She was holding a ten-inch dowel wrapped in colorful string, the talking stick. “I believe in non-violence,” she stated. “I would rather not live, than live in a world where I have to be violent to live.”

Snowbear knelt on the floor in front of her, took the talking stick, and looked her in the eyes.

“I would kill and die rather than see a hair on your head harmed.” He rose to address the group. “I don’t believe in attacking other people who mean me no harm, but when someone threatens to harm me, or those I care about, I believe in striking back.” Akisni fixed her gaze towards her hands in her lap.

Gillie stood up and took the stick from Snowbear. “I agree with Akisni. There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.”

Jesse spoke up. “I grew up around guns in southern Georgia.” Gillie handed him the stick, which he took absent-mindedly. “I know how to handle guns. I like guns. They’re tools for hunting, they’re fun to play with, for plinking at bottles back in the woods. But they’re also for self-defense. You ladies say you’re against fighting. If someone was on top of you,” he looked right at Gillie, “choking you and about to rape you, would you fight him?” He held the stick out to her, but she shook her head and looked away, pressing her lips angrily together. “If you’d fight to protect your life, your body, your loved ones, then you owe it to yourself to have the best chance possible of winning.”

Murphy took the stick next. “It’s not women against men, and I think that’s kind of a sexist implication. I’m a man, but I don’t believe in warfare or aggression either. I believe in peaceful resolution of problems. But I also don’t believe in being a victim.”

The discussion went on and on. Everybody present spoke at least once, several spoke many times.

Sheila stood up, her skinny 10-year-old frame poised amongst the adults, and said simply, “I don’t like fighting and killing. They’re wrong.”

Finally, after an hour and a half or so, there was a silence. Everyone was fatigued.

“I call for a consensus,” said Josh. “The consensus is that those who are willing, will carry firearms on patrols. We agree that we will not shoot another human being unless it is clear that they have violent intentions towards one of us or the entire group.” He turned to his right, where Brittani was seated. “Do you consent?” He asked her.

“I consent.” She turned to Brownie on her right.

“I consent,” said Brownie.

Every member of the group consented until it came to the next-to-last, Akisni. “I do not consent,” she said.

Snowbear shook his head and took her hand “I consent.”

“We do not have consensus,” stated Josh, formally and rather unnecessarily.

The group took a break; some went outside to smoke in the cold night air, others did yoga poses, some went to their rooms or into a bathroom to wash up or use the facilities. Eventually they all drifted back into the room and re-assembled.

Jesse walked up and grabbed the stick. “I feel pissed off.” He stood in the middle of the room, facing Akisni. “I want to live in a world free of violence too. But that’s not the world we are living in. In spite of all the idealistic hippie stuff that makes everyone here so happy, we have to play the hand we’re dealt. With all due respect, Akisni, you’ve benefited all your life from the presence of defensive weapons around you, or just from the presence of people who were prepared to defend you. If you deny the morality of self-defense while enjoying its benefits, what does that make you? A hypocrite! We’re not talking about invading a foreign country or drone-bombing innocent children at a wedding party here. We’re talking about you, me, little Sheila, and about everything we’ve worked so hard to create and build. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?” He dropped the stick on the rug and took his seat on a wooden chair.

The discussion was directed at Akisni from that point on. Not everyone spoke this time around, but those who did, addressed their words to her.

Gillie, prattling her New Age phraseology, was kindest, “Akisni, I love you. I love your gentle spirit. I want the light of that gentle spirit to go on shining from the vessel of your body for years to come. I want you to be safe. You don’t have to be a fighter. Just let the fighters be the warriors they are meant to be.”

She held the stick out to Akisni. Akisni regarded her for a long time. Gillie was speaking her dialect, and she seemed to be mulling over what the younger woman said. She took the talking stick and unfolded from her perch in the armchair.

“I don’t like it. But I consent.”

“Do we have consensus?” Asked Josh.

Everyone was silent.

“Do we have consensus?” He asked again. Everyone looked at one another for any trace of disagreement. Other than Akisni’s face, now stony and resigned, there was none.

“We have consensus.” A collective sigh went up from the group. It was after midnight. Sheila was asleep with her head in her mother’s lap.

Ammunition was in short supply for most of the weapons, but for the purpose of defensive patrols, which would shoot only rarely and sparingly, ammunition shouldn’t become an issue any time soon.

Snowbear took one of the shotguns with him (best to use the shotgun shells up first, since the shells were plastic and sure to be infected eventually) and waited, silent, at a spot where their unwelcome invaders had been seen. He heard rather than saw them, and fired two blasts in that direction. The aggressors weren’t spotted again, but all the willing adults who knew how to handle guns took turns on guard duty from then on. The collective spent some of their precious ammunition teaching Gillie and LaDwon the basics of how to shoot. Jesse, the ex-marine, was delighted to take on that task.

The day Amit and Juni arrived, the electrical meter stopped running and didn’t start again. It didn’t matter much; the whole-house battery array kept the lights on, though they had to conserve electricity during the day to avoid being without power after midnight. “It’s not a problem in the Summer, but we do normally have to buy electricity in the winter,” explained Josh, whose adolescent-like, gangling, six-foot-five frame, smooth beardless cheeks, and slow speech belied his degree in engineering and his years of experience as a union Master electrician.

Akisni started a small countertop factory to make tallow candles from the rendered fat from their meat meals. “It’s just a matter of time until the lights go out for good,” she explained in her serene, firm voice. “I want to be ready when it happens.”

A month after Amit and Juni arrived, there came a day when they woke up to find the entire world appeared to be benevolent, enrobed in a thigh-high blanket of snow, the season’s first. The gleam of the pristine crystals dazzled like diamonds in the sunshine.

Amit spent most of the morning learning their biomethane system, studying the procedure manual Josh and Snowbear had created, and tracing the parts of the system as he read about them. The sheds where it was housed were cramped, damp, and disagreeable-smelling, and through the windows the snow gleamed, blinding in the wan sunshine, reminding him of the satisfying, sharp squeak of fresh, dry snow underfoot.

He gave in to the urge and went out for a stroll, to clear the cabin fever that dulled his head. He came upon Josh, hunched over a mass of electronics mounted inside a bulky hinged box affixed to the side of the dwelling.

“You don’t look happy,” Amit observed. His breath wafted away in ethereal clouds of steam.

“No, I’m not,” Josh frowned. “Our solar array should be putting out 8,000 Watts at noon this time of year.” He pointed to an LCD which read 7,300. “Something’s degrading the output.”

“Hm. What could it be?” Asked Amit, stepping backwards and squinting up at the black solar panels. The panels were tent-like assemblies on pivoting aluminum frames, arrayed on the roof 30 feet overhead.

“I don’t know, but I’m about to find out. You came by just at the right moment. Help me get the ladders from the shed.”

Amit was glad to have something physical to do, and so the two men carried out several aluminum ladders. Josh, who’d done this before, showed Amit how to construct a sturdy 10-foot base from the locking ladders and then extend the 20-foot extension ladder upwards from it. Josh swarmed up the ladders like a monkey, then transferred onto the roof as lithely as if he had no bones. Instantly, he was out of sight amongst the panels. Amit waited, stamping his boots to keep his feet warm and putting his aluminum-chilled hands in his armpits to warm up. He’d left his gloves in the methane shed and now wished he’d grabbed them.

He heard Josh sing out, “Heads up!”

Amit watched as a strip of black plastic, trailing a cable, came gliding over the edge of the roof. He didn’t move, as the panel was in no hazard of falling on him, and Josh skimmed down the ladder as easily as he’d ascended. His face was solemn as he picked up the solar panel he’d tossed. “See this?” He pointed out a bumpy, uneven patch on the panel. It had a tiny seed, like a choke-cherry pit, at its center. The pit looked at first glance like it had fallen from a tremendous height, or been shot from a gun: the plastic surface of the panel was spider-webbed with cracks radiating a few inches around it. But when Amit looked closer, he noticed that what appeared to be cracks were in fact channels, etched into the surface of the plastic, around the central depression, in a web-like pattern.

Josh said, “Crows.”

Amit followed his thinking quickly. “Crows will eat almost anything. Including small bits of plastic. The bacterium must be living in their crops. And their droppings are infecting the solar panels.”

Josh grinned at him. “Bingo.”

Amit pointed out the spider-web pattern. “The infections are spreading out in tendrils. It’s a common pattern for biofilm formation.”

Josh looked thoughtful. “If this infection spreads exponentially, we won’t have power in a few weeks. If we can slow it down so it grows, say, arithmetically, the power production won’t diminish so fast. The lengthening days after the Solstice will also help us out. We might be able to continue to squeeze some electricity out of the panels into the Spring, or maybe even the Summer…I’d have to do some math to be sure.”

“Slow down the growth rate of bacteria, eh? Well,” said Amit, “too bad you don’t have a microbiologist around.”

“Yeah,” Josh beamed boyishly. “Too bad.”

That night after dinner, Amit and Josh stood in the kitchen while Snowbear and Akisni took their turn washing dishes.

“The problem,” said Amit, “is that I don’t have any antiseptics, which is what one would normally use to keep the infection under control. I brought less than a gallon of isopropyl with me.”

“We have maybe twice that in the first aid room,” said Akisni.

“Still nowhere near enough,” observed Josh. “And besides, if we use that up, what would happen if someone has a wound which needs to be disinfected? First aid has to be priority.”
“I think I have your solution, gentlemen,” said Akisni. “Let me show you.” She picked up a hurricane lantern and opened the door which led down to the root cellar. Standing at the top of the steps, she picked up a candle lighter that sat on a shelf. She paused, looking at the lighter. It was an ordinary, long-necked lighter with a plastic case and trigger, such as any householder might use to light a candle or a barbecue grill. It was a brief pause, but it was one all the residents of Sutokata were familiar with, seeing it and making it many times each day. It accompanied the thought: When…not if…the bacterium makes it here, into our sanctuary, this item will not work any more.

She ignited the lamp and the men followed her downstairs. Shelves and bins of turnips, cabbage, and carrots lined the walls. Their breath steamed in the cool cellar as they ducked strings of onions hanging from the ceiling “It’s back here in the herb corner.” Hanging from a series of slender chains with alligator clips, amongst aromatic clusters of flowers and dried leafy flora hanging from the joists, were chunks of a yellowish, woody root.

“Turmeric?” Asked Amit, skeptical.

“No: goldenseal,” corrected Akisni. “Hydrastis Canadensis, one of the most potent natural antibiotics there is.” She took the nearest chunk down, holding it by one of its fibrous rootlets, and regarded it reverently. “It’s been shown to kill MRSA, h. pylori, and tuberculosis. You boil the root to make a decoction.” She gestured at the collection hanging next to her. “We have enough here to make perhaps 500 gallons. When we put in the new pig shed, the spot we picked out was literally overgrown with it, so I harvested it and dried it.”

“I don’t know about using some root…” began Amit.

“Do you have another option?” Demanded Akisni, her eyes showing a brief flare of uncharacteristic annoyance. “Just because it’s a natural herb doesn’t mean it’s not pharmacologically active.”

“Don’t get mad, now!” Amit interjected. “Even if it does kill those three you named, we don’t know if it will work on this. I’m willing to give it a try. Can you make me a small batch? Maybe one gallon?” He turned to Josh, “We can test it on the infected panel first. It’s still out under that fir tree, right?”

“Yes, I figured it was best to keep it away from the other panels, and the house, until we decided what to do about it.”

“Good thinking. Is there an undisturbed, sheltered space somewhere I can use as a lab?”

“There’s the summer retreat cottage. It’s not heated and has no electric, but it’s got a roof and four walls and a small fireplace. The windows are boarded up for the winter.”

“Perfect! It will take me a while to make it usable, I’m sure, but I’ll feel like myself again with something to do with my skills.”

“I’ll show you where it is,” said Josh, shrugging into his parka and grabbing the shotgun next to the door.

“I wonder what to use for culture medium,” mused Amit. “Kerosene? Plastic sludge? Do we have any acetone to dissolve acrylics and polystyrene?”

He and Josh commenced jointly free-associating. The two men struck off into the woods, unhurried, indifferent to the way they were lurching about in the deep snow, until they reached the cover of the trees. They set off towards the little hut, still deep in colloquy.

XLVII.              Ozarkified

It turned out that Gabriela, who was a descendant of Tejanos and Quapaw Indians who’d intermarried with south Arkansas hillbillies, had moonshiners in her family as well, and not in the distant past. One day, she took them to a barn near her home to meet her cousin Ed, an aged man with a tanned face, networked like a road map with wrinkles gleaned during years of working in the sun. Ed had given up the craft, but still owned the equipment. They explained that Jessica was modifying engines to run on ethanol and that their plan was to distill the stuff for use and sale.

“How do I know you’re not ATF?” He asked, peering at her through crowsfeet from under his straw fedora.

“There is no more ATF, Cousin Ed.” Gabriela spoke to the elder with respect. “No more phones, no more computers, no more cars.”

“There were revenuers before there were computers, phones and cars,” observed Ed.

“Yes,” interjected DD, “but they had paper systems for keeping track of things. They also had ways of getting from place to place, and ways of communicating with each other. Those are all gone now, and it’ll take time to rebuild them from scratch.”

“Hm. No authorities, eh?” Ed snorted with disdain. “Never had much use for them anyway.

“So, is that why the sheriff has been asking the young men to meet at the crossroads twice a week?”

Gabriela nodded. “Juan was talking about that. He said the county sheriffs aren’t getting any more payments from the State, or equipment from the Feds. He was saying it’s every man for himself now and we need to be prepared to fight together if big gangs come through. There’s been a lot of shooting over where those crazy prepper militia guys are wedged right in between the prison and the military base.”

Ed commented with a long declining whistle. “Sounds like a good area to stay away from.”

DD nodded. At least until those testosterone-addled idiots finish running around the woods shooting each other up and run low on ammunition. But what she said was, “I heard the first guy to go over the prison wall was a midget.”

“Really?” Said Ed.

“Yes. But I thought that was a little condescending.”

Ed blinked. “Well, if there are no more ATF guys to interfere with moonshining, I count it all to the good. But why should I let you use my set-up?” Ed, true to his Scots-Irish roots, was a canny bargainer.

Negotiations began in earnest, and they came to an agreement whereby Ed received 20% of the product and the trio were allowed to spend the winter in his drafty but safe barn with four cows, a donkey, and a handful of sheep.

Ed helped them get started with their first batch, instructing them on how to make sure their clear shine didn’t burn with a yellow flame, denoting toxic methanol, before beginning to collect it. After that, he’d stop by on occasion, sometimes to offer helpful tips, but mostly to shake his head in amazed delight that the still didn’t need to be hidden any longer. As the winter wore on, their feet wore a path leading to the outbuilding where the distilling machinery was constructed.

Finding mash ingredients was hit-and-miss at first. In the absence of trucks to receive their crops, quite a few farmers who had planted in the Spring with full confidence of selling their corn, potatoes, wheat, and sorghum to food conglomerates were stuck with a surplus. Faced with stores of perishable foodstuffs, most were willing to supply them with corn or potatoes in exchange for a portion of the end product. Over the long winter, word spread that the strangers in Ed’s barn were buying crops that might otherwise decay, and farmers began showing up on their own to make a deal: for an average 20% of the product, they kept the still supplied.

DD reflected with anxiety: Next Winter may be different. Seeds will be hard to come by; hybrid seeds, impossible, and the hybrid crops won’t breed true, bringing yields down. Pesticides, irrigation equipment, so many things depend on petroleum.

Jessica spent some time adapting two abandoned 4-wheelers to run on ethanol over the winter. She had experimented with innovative gasket materials, but she ultimately settled on felted wool, soaked in milk that had been boiled down to a thick, gluey condensate. One afternoon, Jessica went to the trading post to trade some moonshine for some milk and food, but then sent Gabriela’s son home alone with her purchases. She’d instructed the boy to tell DD she was spending the night at a neighboring farm.

“What else did she say? Why is she staying there?” The boy shrugged.

“That’s where my cousin Juan lives,” said Gabriela with an arched eyebrow. “He’s about Jessica’s age. Single.” Gabriela looked like she wanted to say more, but was holding back.

Jessica didn’t return to sleep in the barn for two weeks; DD was about to go searching for her, and then one night she showed up just before dinner, with scrapes like road rash all along her right arm and shoulder, and puffy eyes from crying. DD put an arm around her and tried to comfort her, and eventually Jessica spilled the story.

“Once I told him I had PCOS and couldn’t get pregnant, the way he treated me changed completely!”

DD took a small jar of alcohol and dipped a clean cloth into it to clean Jessica’s abrasions. Jessica winced when DD hit a few of the deeper gouges. Tears began to flow anew. After she was done, Jessica raised the jar, tinged ever so faintly red now with her own blood, and tossed it back in one draught.

DD recoiled in disgust, and at the same time she felt an emotional cold deep inside. God give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

“Are you sure you want to do that?” She asked her daughter, nodding at the empty jar of ethanol.

“It’s okay mom. Just this one time. For the pain.”

DD bit her tongue. She knew from experience, with Jessica and with DD’s own father before her, that pursuing the topic now would only spawn conflict.

Juan wasn’t a big man, while Jessica had inherited a solid frame from her father, and so DD wasn’t surprised at what she saw when she spotted Juan, a few days later. They were both in the valley at the old diner/convenience store which had become a de facto trading post, and the proprietor, whom DD had asked about Jessica when she was missing, pointed him out to her. Juan was exhibiting an icteric black eye and a healing split lip. An array of bluish asymmetric tattoos, inked roughly by hand and difficult to make out, splayed across his collarbones, peeking out above his shirt.

DD had never figured this one thing out about her daughter: Though DD and Jessica’s dad had divorced when Jessica was 16, the parting was amicable. They’d never raised a hand to one another, and only rarely raised their voices. I made sure he wasn’t that kind of man before settling down with him and starting a family. I didn’t want any children we had to go through hearing Daddy asking Mommy why she’d “made” him hit her.

DD wondered about the role of epigenetics in human behavior; more and more, her contemporaries in the field of mammalian genetics were finding that different parts of the DNA code were methylated or demethylated, depending on the parents’ experiences, and those active or inactivated loci were passed down to children, and even grandchildren, and perhaps further. DD was not that familiar with it, because it didn’t appear to occur in bacteria, but she knew that experiments had shown that behaviors of fearfulness, and reactions to stress hormones, were different in the grandchildren of mice which had been subject to stressful experiences. Or maybe it’s just plain genetics, but recessive traits. Of course it’s not that simple, not single-allele inheritance. There’s no “I Like Getting Punched by Boyfriends” gene. Behavioral inheritance is complex. Still, I just don’t understand.

DD still didn’t understand the following week, when Juan came to visit Jessica at the barn and spent the night. She didn’t understand when Jessica brought him his dinner, setting the plate down in front of him where he sat before getting her own. She understood, all too well, when Jessica tried to stand up from that evening meal and staggered, and Juan put an arm around her waist and helped her climb the ladder to the hayloft.

The next morning, Jessica lay on her stomach with her face jammed into her pillow, sprawled naked, and snoring the gagging, moaning snores of the hung-over. Juan got up and went outside to water a tree. DD rose and followed him.

He turned, tightening the drawstring on his canvas pants, but was brought up short by the muzzle of DD’s Smith and Wesson in his face.

He put his palms up. “Calmaté, 1rot. Calm down. I ain’t trying to hurt no one.”

“You won’t get another chance to.” DD said. “You go inside and get your shirt and leave. Don’t say anything. If I ever see you near my daughter again, I won’t ask questions.” She pulled the hammer back on the revolver for emphasis. “Do you understand me?”

Juan nodded. DD took her finger out of the trigger guard but lowered the gun to point at his crotch. “Go.”

Juan went. He did just as DD said. She holstered the gun and sat on a bale of hay next to her daughter, waiting for her to wake up. She was planning to have a talk, one she’d had with her before. I’ve fucked up everything in the entire world. Maybe I’m getting another chance to do this one thing right.

XLVIII.          Now You Tell Me

Amit and Josh were on patrol together as usual. They’d become almost inseparable, spending their free time together in the workshop or in Amit’s lab. The electrician had picked up the elements of microbiology quickly and become a great lab assistant; the microbiologist had learned the elements of electrical wiring and aided Josh in his projects. They were a mismatched pair: Josh tall, pale, and gangly, and Amit dark and compact.

“If you’d ever told me I’d be walking in snowy woods, with a gun in my hand, in the middle of Winter, I’d have told you you were crazy,” Amit said.

“Isn’t there a Robert Frost poem about that?” Josh asked.

“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening...” Amit recited the first seven lines of the famous poem. “I can’t remember the rest.”

“This isn’t the darkest evening of the year, though. The solstice was almost a month and a half ago.” Josh the realist.

“True. And we don’t have miles to go before we sleep.”

“How far do we walk on this patrol?”

“Let’s see...hard to say for sure...some of the paths are irregular curves...but the compound has 38 acres. The back 20 is that empty slope there,” he gestured towards the white expanse of an empty, fenced field, “so we only patrol 18 of them. An acre is about 200 by 200 feet...”

They puzzled out the arithmetic, figuring they walked about two miles per circuit, four circuits per two-hour patrol. “But it feels like more,” concluded Josh, “because of the snow.”

“You think it feels like more to you! I’ve got twenty years on you and you’ve got ten inches on me! If I break through the snow, it’s up to my waist!” Amit pointed out.

“Yeah, Shorty,” Josh joshed.

“Who are you calling Shorty?” Amit punched his arm, hard, and the two men sparred playfully for a few minutes, then called it quits, panting and laughing.

“Don’t let Akisni see us!” Amit said.

“Yeah, she’d get her panties in a wad about it, that’s for sure.”

“Akisni is one of the only true pacifists I’ve ever known,” said Amit. “Lots of people of her generation claimed to be pacifists and protested the war in Vietnam. But when that went out of fashion, and the crime wave of the late 70’s turned everyone into realists, she stayed with it. She objected to Reagan’s war build-up, and to Clinton bombing Kosovo. Most recently, when the progressives were suddenly in favor of drone-bombing the middle east because a black President was doing it, she continued to be pacifist. She truly believes the world will change if enough people like her decide to be the change they wish to see.”

“Snowbear is more of a realist,” Josh commented.

“That’s the way it usually is. Ultimately, all pacifists benefit from the protection of those who aren’t pacifists.”

“I think sometimes Akisni thinks less of him because of what he...we all have to do nowadays.”

“Yes, I heard her crying one night, saying how quickly we all degenerated into savages. I don’t like the violence either. Maybe someday everyone will learn to love one another and give up violence, and...”

Josh recited the next part in unison with him, “maybe fairies will fly around on rainbows riding unicorns.” Their favorite refrain.

After their chuckles subsided, Amit became serious again. “Yeah, and I wonder sometimes if there isn’t, all told, less violence now than there was before.”

“What? Are you nuts? We’ve killed, what, seven intruders?”

“Eight. Joe and Heidi killed one last month, remember?”

“How many people did you kill before this happened?”

“Personally, none. But as a child, my government was always, it seemed, at war with Pakistan. Since I became a US citizen, how many people were being killed on my behalf around the world in wars fought for oil? Add in the refugees drowning at sea, the poverty enforced by petrodollar governments in the third world,” he shrugged, “sickness is a way for the body to rid itself of invaders. Sometimes I wonder if this machine sickness isn’t just the planet having its way.”

“Ooh, pretty deep, man,” Josh mocked. “I don’t buy that airy-fairy lacey-spacey spooky-kooky Gaia nonsense.”

“Oh, I’m not saying the Earth is aware and consciously trying to fight us! I’m a scientist, Josh! I’m just saying that complex systems, like individual animals, often develop ways of restoring homeostasis. Systems that start out chaotic develop islands of self-organizing stability.”

“Hnh,” grunted Josh, sounding unconvinced. “Hang on, my sock is twisted.” He sat down on a stump to undo his bootlace, and Amit sat on the other side of the stump, back to back.

Amit extemporized:

My little boot must think it odd

To stop my circumscribing plod

On this forsaken frozen stump

I freeze my ancient, rugose rump...

A rattle brought them instantly to their feet, rifles leveled. It had been some weeks since they’d had any raiders. The days were getting longer, and the snow was crusted over at the end of a sunny day in a way which told Midwesterners that Spring was coming. The people who stepped out from behind the snowdrift were neither raiders, nor the thugs the law had morphed into. There were three of them: an aged black woman and two middle-aged white women. They were warmly dressed, but their faces were gaunt from weight loss and the bags under their eyes spoke of too little sleep. They carried canvas backpacks which hung almost empty on their shoulders.

The women put their hands up. “Please,” said the closest one, a short woman with salt-and-pepper hair. “Please don’t hurt us.”

The men lowered the muzzles of their weapons. “What do you want?” Asked Josh.

“We saw the smoke from your chimney. The men in town. They took our things. Our food. Socks. Everything.”

Amit and Josh looked at each other. “Socks,” repeated Josh.

“A new low,” said Amit. In the Midwestern winter, you didn’t take a person’s socks. You might as well just cut off their toes.

“Put your backpacks on the ground and hold your hands up,” commanded Amit. The women complied. Josh stood before them, gun diverted, while Amit gave the women a cursory frisk. The black woman’s body felt like a bundle of twigs, she was so stiff and thin and frail, her hair a wisp of cotton, her skin so thin it was translucent despite its pigment. The men glanced into their backpacks: a few useless, innocuous items: photographs, a passport, a wooden hair barrette.

“I’ll walk them back. You continue the patrol and I’ll meet you at the fourth fencepost,” said Josh. “Follow me,” he turned and headed for the main lodge.

Josh walked slowly so the three women could keep up, despite his long legs. They all wore homemade boots of some type. It had come as a nasty surprise to many people that even canvas or leather footwear was held together by synthetic glues which melted away with exposure to the machine sickness. They entered the main house by a side door, which opened upon a small mud room. The women sat down gratefully on the benches that lined the two walls.

“Wait here,” Josh directed. He went in search of Akisni and found her at the large loom, teaching the hippie nose-ring dilettante (Gillie, turning out to be quite capable now that her affectation had worn off) how to make a pattern with the wool threads. He told Akisni about the women and they went to the mud room together. The three were sitting on the boot benches, waiting uncomplaining.

“Sorry to keep you ladies waiting,” said Akisni, looking deferentially at the old woman. The others were about Akisni’s own age, mid-to-late 50s to early 60s.

“It’s alright,” said the salt-and-pepper woman, who’d defaulted to the role of leader. “We’re just enjoying being warm again. My name’s Suzanne. This is Deborah and Augusta.”

“Akisni.” They shook hands. “Josh said someone robbed you?”

The second white woman, a little taller and with hair that looked more blonde than grey, made an exasperated “Tsss” sound and looked away.

“The police. Or that’s what they called themselves.”

“Did they dump you on the road? Or did you walk all the way from town?” Akisni sounded concerned.

The black woman spoke up “We walked,” she said, in her rusty-hinge voice. She had few teeth remaining. “We walked the whole way.”

“Oh, my goodness! That’s twenty miles! Are you alright? Are your feet dry? Any frostbite? Come on in to the common room by the woodstove and let’s get you sorted out...” Akisni assumed her nurturer guise and the ladies followed her.

Josh went out and met Amit, who was waiting at the post, right where they’d agreed, and they finished the patrol together.

“What will we do if more people like that show up?” Amit asked.

“Take them in.” Josh answered, almost distractedly.

“What if there are hundreds of them?”

“We’ll have to build more shelter.” Josh said. Amit’s brow creased.

“Amit,” Josh explained, “anyone who comes in peace has always been welcomed at Sutokata. It’s part of what we’re about. We have more resources than we need, even now. And now, more than ever, people need the peace and safety we offer.”

They walked in silence a little further. “You know,” confessed Amit, “I always thought Sutokata was an impossible dream, a fantasy, a remnant of the 60s that would blow away one day. But you all have created something solid here. You’re not unwilling to defend yourselves...”

“The Dalai Lama himself said that if someone is trying to shoot you, you naturally should shoot back,” interjected Josh.

“Quite so. You’re realists, and even though you’re living communally, you have clear rules and obligations about shared and personal property.”

“Yes, and we make all major decisions by consensus. That’s been found to work in groups up to about 30.”

“I hated those long consensus meetings at first. But then I noticed something: when every group decision has to be made by a consensus, you realize how few decisions really, truly, need to be made as a group.”

Josh smiled. “Well, yeah. A lot of communes get hung up on voting on things, making rules and more rules, and the losers get all butthurt and leave. Snowbear and Akisni can tell you about the early days. They had a few stubborn, disagreeable, contrary people who decided to leave in that way, but there’s only been one since I’ve been here. So far Sutokata hasn’t had any decision which truly had to be made, which we couldn’t find consensus on. Of course, we have to be forgiving when someone makes a judgment call in an emergency.”

“Hmn. That’s where the trust comes in.”

“Right.” Josh stopped in his tracks for a moment. “I think I see what you’re worried about. What happens when we exceed 30 people? When some newcomer refuses to join the consensus and refuses to leave?”

“Exactly. The stakes of leaving are higher now. Also, what about real crime?”

“We go by the Non-Aggression Principle: Don’t Hurt People or Take Their Stuff.”

“Right, right.” He waved his hand in dismissal. “I know you handle thefts and fistfights by consensus hearings. And I know you aren’t afraid to kill,” he waved his hand in the general direction of the pile of frozen corpses of raiders, “in self-defense. But what if someone truly hurts, rapes, or kills someone else? What if they do something that puts us all in danger?”

“Amit, you just answered your own question. The stakes are higher now because staying or leaving here can mean the difference between dying and surviving. There’s no law to hand someone over to because the ‘law’ is now just bullies who come to take our stuff.”

“Isn’t that all it ever was? It’s just more obvious now.”

“You might have a point. Anyway, according to our principles, someone who does something which can’t be forgiven or made amends for, would be dead to us. Expelled. And they might just end up actually dead as a result. It’s no longer our concern.”

They were back at the entrance after their fourth circuit. They’d finished their patrol, so they went inside. Gillie and another man, George, were waiting to relieve them.

XLIX.                   Intervening

Jessica rolled over on her back. Her eyes were swollen and stuck almost shut from dehydration. She was panting, just from the effort of turning over. She groaned.

“Sit up,” DD said.

Jessica groaned again. DD stood up and stepped up to the straw-stuffed mattress on the floor and kicked it, hard enough to give Jessica a good shake, hard enough to send straw flying. The golden shreds fell like snow around her in the morning sunlight.

Jessica flailed upright. “Where’s Juan?” She croaked through parched lips.

“Juan’s left and he won’t be back,” DD explained.

“You can’t do that!” Jessica was instantly awake and furious. She struggled to her feet and swayed, confused but belligerent.

“Yes, in fact, I can and I did,” DD said. Jessica turned on her, and she flinched. Her girl had shown she was a capable combatant, but DD wouldn’t hurt her, no matter what. She prepared to suffer a beating.

Instead, Jessica grabbed an empty feed sack. She began moving around her little corner of the barn, gathering her few belongings and stuffing them in the sack.

“You got drunk last night,” observed DD.

“So what if I did?”

“You know what happens when you drink. You’re an alcoholic.”

“You know what, mom? No. I’m not an alcoholic. I never was. I was just self-medicating for all the stress and bullshit I’ve been through. Now I’ve found someone who really gets me. I can drink moderately without going overboard. And I’m loved. Loved, do you understand that? Can you understand that?”

Ouch. No, maybe I can’t. But focus on her, not me… “Can you understand what you’re doing to yourself? Or to me? To those around you? Now, more than ever, we need to stick together and help one another. Look how your hands are shaking!” Jessica was holding a treasured photo of her father in her right hand, ready to put in the bag, and it was fluttering like a leaf on the breeze. “If you won’t stop drinking for yourself, do it for me. Do it for your father.” She nodded at the picture and Jessica scowled as she tucked it deep inside the feed bag.

“My advice?” Jeremy said, from the bottom of the loft, where neither of the women had noticed him come in. “Listen to your mom. When someone who loves you tells you that you have a drinking problem, you have a drinking problem.”

Jessica didn’t say another word. She shakily clambered down the steps and stumbled out into the morning sunlight. DD sat down hard on the primitive bed. She leaned her elbows on her knees and watched her daughter walk out of her life. Again.

Probably for the last time.

She knew she’d done the right thing, but that didn’t make it less painful. She quivered, restraining herself from running after Jessica and throwing her arms around her neck and clinging to her, begging her not to leave. Perhaps the stakes were higher now with communications knocked out; perhaps not. Jessica had walked completely out of her world before.

L.             You Didn’t Want to Use That, Did You?

As the Midwestern winter began to turn direly cold, the raids on Sutokata by locals who heard they had food became more frequent. It was too cold to dig graves. Akisni lost her appetite, dropped weight, and became gaunt and pale as the stack of frozen bodies grew taller. By mid-December, the raids ended. When none of the raiders came back, word must have got around; even the famished and desperate determined it wasn’t worth their lives. The Sutokatans used up the shotgun shells first, before the plastic encasing them became infected, handling them with clean hands and scrutinizing them before use. They were left with a mismatched assortment of rifles and handguns with varying amounts of metal-cased ammunition.

When they went through the raiders’ pockets, they kept turning up baggies full of capsules and tablets. Reference to the PDR in the study let them know that most of the pills were amoxicillin, but there were other antibiotics, too. “Broad-spectrum beta-lactam antibiotics,” observed Amit. The words triggered a sense memory of the last time he’d hung up a telephone (perhaps the last time he’d ever speak on the phone?) in his office, when the Chinese doctor had called, and he was suddenly overcome by a sense of aching nostalgia for something as simple as a telephone. He considered that the call must have been from someone making a doomed bid to stem the spread of machine sickness in China. He mused at the way that the technological lines of communication had made the world smaller, and that thoughts and memes and ideas would have to make their way around the world hand-to-hand and eye-to-eye, the way they had in centuries past. Except perhaps, the knowledge that others were out there, and human, and the collapse of governments which enforced borders, would make it faster this time.

The way everyone was carrying the drugs in their pockets, he speculated that they’d become a sort of de facto currency, an easily portable, premium trade good which had intrinsic value.

On the bright side, the solar panels were cured of the machine sickness by Akisni and Amit’s goldenseal infusion. Spraying them lightly with a saline-goldenseal solution whenever it thawed seemed to be all that was needed for now; Amit had ascertained that p davisii died after being at -5˚C for just a few minutes. Once the weather warmed up, they’d have to spray more often, but all they needed to do through the cold months was the normal chore of keeping them free of snow and ice. Up on the roof, clearing the panels, Amit reflected that it was strange to look up at the vibrant blue winter sky and see no contrails; commercial and recreational aviation had come to a screeching halt. No pilot wanted to be the one in the cockpit when the fuel turned to water, or some critical plastic clip, hose, or bearing in the aircraft turned to mush.

Snowbear’s antiquated hybrid CB-police radio array, a dusty Frankenstein’s monster with analog dials, was resurrected from under stacks of books and papers. It appeared to be intact. It lived in a little cubby of an office off the main common room and no one was allowed to touch it but Snowbear, who dreaded the inevitable day when p davisii made its way into the electronics and wiring inside it. The wooden knobs with which he’d replaced the plastic ones on the metal face were kept always on, tuned to one channel or another, so there was always a faint static in the background, like a stream of running water. Their profound isolation sunk in a little deeper with every day that passed hearing no voices on that radio. Some of the younger ones had trouble comprehending it; Amit and some of the older Sutokatans could remember life when news came over a few broadcast channels or on printed paper. They could imagine the world recreating that without plastics, but they wondered how long it might take.

One day, Amit came into the common room beaming with delight. “Where’s Josh?” He demanded excitedly.

“I don’t know. Why, what’s up?” Asked Akisni, looking up from weaving braid. “You look like the cat that ate the canary!”

“I have to tell him about something! I isolated shewanella oneidensis!” Without pausing to explain, he ran out of the house and found Josh outside, using a maul and sledge to split firewood on a stump.

“Josh, I got it! I got the shewanella strains to culture!”

Josh stood up, mirroring Amit’s delight. “The electrically conductive bacterium? The one they use in biological fuel cells?”

Amit was bouncing on his toes, he was so excited, and Josh nodded with him. Giddy as children, the firewood forgotten, the two men walked off to the laboratory shed together, gabbing a mile a minute and waving their arms.

The long winter gave them time to work on the building’s wiring, wrapping the wires with home-made cotton braid to prevent short-circuits once the p davisii infection spread. For, Amit told them, it was an issue of when, not if. “There is no way to sterilize a space this big and varied. Every surface you touch every day is populated with bacteria. Making and maintaining a small, sterile area to work in comprises most of the daily routine of a micro lab. The world around you is an invisible ecology of microbes incessantly competing with one another.”

One day, the radio sputtered and voices were heard. Everyone inside dropped what they were doing and looked at one another for a few ticks, stunned, unsure if they’d imagined it. Then the voices returned, clearer, and Snowbear lunged for the dial and turned the volume up.

“Passing the windbreak now.” A man’s voice came on the frequency, tinny and distorted.

Another voice responded, “Any sign of activity?”

“Negative.”
“Oh, shit!” Snowbear exclaimed. “They’re coming here! Now! This isn’t good.”

“Who’s on patrol?”

“I was,” said LaDwon, a handsome young black man, coming in and stomping the snow off his boots. “Murphy was supposed to relieve me.” Murphy’s dreadlocked dirty-blond hair and pierced eyebrows popped around the corner of the doorway to the kitchen. He finished chewing and hastily swallowed.

“Don’t go out, Murphy,” said Snowbear. “The two of you, go up to the gun safe. Take half the rifles and all the handguns and put them in the crawlspace in the root cellar. Hide most of the ammo too but leave a few rounds so they won’t get suspicious. Leave the shotguns, they’re useless now.”

The two younger men stood, confused, not comprehending, shocked at the change in their mild-mannered elder’s demeanor. “Come on!” snapped Snowbear. “They’re coming for us. NOW! MOVE!” To punctuate his order, the radio began to spout communications again. The younger men vanished to do as instructed. The invaders, more organized than the random bands they’d seen so far, had found the stack of dead bodies in the snow, meaning they surrounded Sutokata on at least two sides. Meaning also, that they knew the collective was armed and unafraid to shoot; no taking them by surprise! Snowbear spotted a man’s form running by the window, silhouetted against the winter whiteness. He turned off the radio and covered it with a pile of papers, trying his best to make it look like a random mess, instead of like he was trying to hide something. He was halfway to the front door when it splintered, as a raider kicked it in.

“Aw, man!” He said the first thing that came to his head, “That door wasn’t even locked! Now I’m gonna need to fix the hasp!” Five militaristic men, in puffy black winter jumpsuits and black balaclavas, leveled weapons at him and then swung them around the room, pinning him, Amit, and Akisni in place with their hands up.

“How many of you are there?” The closest aggressor demanded.

“Seventeen.” Snowbear answered.

“Where are they at?” Snowbear hesitated, unsure how to answer, “I said, WHERE ARE THEY AT, FREAK!?” The thuggish cop… guardsman…whatever they were (they wore no insignia and didn’t bother to identify themselves), gestured threateningly with his weapon, though his finger was, at least, still off the trigger.

“Calm down. I am cooperating.” He could hear Akisni’s ragged breath, fought back the atavistic masculine urge to protect his mate at all costs. “I don’t know where they all are. Some are outside…”

At that moment, LaDwon and Murphy entered the room. They paused to take in the tableau, then put their hands up high.

A big four-wheel-drive SUV pulled up in front of the door and seven more armed men piled out. They came in through the broken front door and wordlessly began searching the house. They opened the kitchen cabinets and stuffed a few items in their pockets, mostly commercial sweets Akisni had been saving for special occasions. Then they trooped up the stairs. “Gun safe!” came a shout from upstairs. Their captor turned to face Snowbear, brandishing his weapon.

“Here’s the key, in my pocket,” volunteered Snowbear, slowly and deliberately extracting it and handing it to the thug nearest the stairs. The attacker took the key and headed up, and moments later, came down cradling four shotguns and two hunting rifles in his arms with a few boxes of rifle ammo in his hands; he carried them out to the SUV and put them in the back.

The searchers finished searching the bedrooms upstairs—it sounded like the whole floor was getting a good tossing, and Akisni’s terror was turning into anger with every crockery-breaking and fabric-ripping sound. They came down to the main level, and then five of them trooped into the root cellar. All the residents tried not to show any increased concern.

“Jackpot!” One of the raiders called from downstairs. The Sutokatans assumed their gun cache was discovered, and they were silently dismayed (except for Akisni) at the thought of being both defenseless and unable to hunt. But then a trooper came out of the basement door, weapon slung behind him, holding up a long, coiled length of hemp rope in one hand and a bundle of the reeds they used to weave baskets in the other. Two men came up behind him, carrying Akisni’s huge canvas bags of raw wool and cotton. The last two came out, one carrying two large glass jars of precious fat which they used to make candles, which they needed more and more for light over the winter, as the sun went down early and the deteriorating batteries’ charges ran out before bedtime. The last of the thugs came out, holding nothing but his own rifle.

The one still holding Snowbear at gunpoint told the other two who’d been with him, “Search this room.” To Snowbear’s relief, they didn’t make a  thorough job of it and didn’t toss it as they had the upstairs. They pulled a few shelves of books onto the floor, but he could see them decide that the chore of unshelving the whole library would have been tedious and unproductive. They barely shuffled the top layer of papers covering the inset cubby which held the radio.

“Hah!” exclaimed one of the intruders. He held aloft a big basket full of tubular braid which Akisni and Sheila, the ten-year-old, had been weaving to insulate the wiring. The leader smiled and nodded, and when all his men had exited, he grabbed the kerosene lantern, full of untainted fuel, that hung on its hook by the front door and carried it with him to the car.

The five Sutokatans walked to the door and watched them drive off. There were four more vehicles, five total. One was marked as County Sheriff and one marked Fish and Wildlife, while the remaining three were unmarked. One of the cars knocked over the low fence around the kitchen herb garden, half buried in snow. The rest of the community came downstairs or gravitated towards the main building from the barns and sheds, and soon all seventeen of them were in the main common room. Akisni was quietly sobbing; Amit held her hand.

Snowbear directed Murphy to complete his planned patrol, and Murphy clattered down to the cellar. The young man, frustrated that he’d not had an opportunity to bash the marauders, was glad to have some type of real action to take, and strutted out the door loading a 30.06. The rest of the diverse group sank down into chairs or sat on the floor. They tried to assess the damage calmly.

“We lost half our guns, but we still have five rifles and a good supply of matching ammo. We are short on handgun ammo, but the guys,” he nodded at LaDwon, who nodded back, “saved all our sidearms.”

“They also didn’t find the radio. I’m surprised by what they did take, though...”

“...Natural materials.” Observed Akisni in a tear-choked voice. “All our hard work.”

“She’s right!” exclaimed Amit. “It makes sense. Plastic has got to be becoming increasingly useless. They may have sterile fuel depots (for now) at military bases, but one thing they don’t have is a supply line for p. davisii-resistant materials. They have to take it where they can get it locally.”

“They took the cowhide,” volunteered Brittani, a young woman all dimples and lips, café-au-lait skin and sparkling eyes. “I was out in the barn when they came, and the hide that was hanging on the siding, they just yanked it down and rolled it up.”

“My cotton.” Akisni shook her head. “In a couple of months, we’ll shear the sheep and have more wool, but cotton country starts at least a hundred miles south of here. Might as well be in Timbuktu.” Sheila gravely processed this information, still crestfallen that all her handiwork had been stolen.

“I’m guessing cotton is going to be hard to come by anywhere. Cotton is a thirsty crop and they’re going to have to figure out new ways to grow it, with all the PVC piping to the irrigation rigs falling down,” observed Jesse, drawing on experiences of his youth in central Georgia. “I imagine they’ve figured that out too. That’s probably why they were so excited to get yours.”

The group sat up, planning ways to hide their natural materials against future confiscations, and speculating about ways to produce more. In truth, they went on talking even when there wasn’t much more to say, stunned by the violation of their private retreat, reluctant to abandon the sound of each other’s voices to sleep. When the battery power running the lights ultimately ran out for the night, they stumbled to bed in the dark.

LI.          Road Trip!

Even after the ethanol yield was divided among Ed, the farmers, and the distillers, they had more pure, blue-burning grain alcohol than two small vehicles could carry.

“This should be plenty to get us to Sutokata,” DD said to Jeremy. The achievement would have been more satisfying if only Jessica had been there to savor it with them. DD often caught herself staring at Jessica’s scooter where it sat in its spot by the barn door. It’d been six weeks and DD’d  expected her to come back to get the bike, even if she wouldn’t go with them to Sutokata after all. DD deluded herself (ineffectively) that she just wanted some sort of closure. She tried to pump Ed and Gabriela for information about Jessica’s whereabouts.

Ed said, “I don’t know where she is, but that reminds me of a riddle: What’s the difference between a piano, a tuna, and a pot of glue?”

“Ummm … I give up.”

“You can tune a piano but you can’t piano tuna.”

“Wait…but what about the pot of glue?”

“I knew you’d get stuck there”

#

DD tried to keep her ears open and her mouth shut, and she noticed a couple of times when conversations stopped dead when she entered the trading post, but again, it seemed that no one wanted to get involved. DD was exasperated. This wasn’t like the first time around, where it was a matter of a girl sneaking off for fun and romance away from her mother’s prying eyes. It was more like the end game, before she’d disappeared for good. This was a serious matter, tainted by addiction and violence. People avoided her. She felt unclean.

The days were starting to get longer; soon it would be spring, time for them to leave Arkansas and head for Sutokata. Jeremy and DD began to load two of the ATVs Jessica had converted to ethanol.

They scanned the skies thoughtfully. Their neighbors still farmed the hills, some of them following in the footsteps of ancestors who’d farmed here for centuries, some even before the French and Spanish came. They contributed reflections about the weather conditions and how they usually changed hereabouts as the seasons changed. They hazarded guesses as to what this waning winter’s weather portended for Spring. They began to concur, in their indirect ways, pinching a bud on a tree, gouging the leaf litter with a cane, rubbing fallen tree bark between shrunken fingers, that a drying and warming trend would probably settle over the region in about two or three weeks.

The scooter in the corner of the barn seemed to DD to grow. It appeared to be covered in flashing neon lights which only she could see. DD couldn’t keep her eyes off it as the time to leave grew near. One night she sat up out of a sound sleep and looked at the scooter. It had called her, out loud, she’d swear it! She got up and walked to the scooter, then realized she had heard something that awakened her. The noise she was hearing was a whimper, coming from just outside the barn door. Perhaps a puppy someone had abandoned, an infant beast orphaned when its feral mother was shot.

DD strained to lift the bar on the barn door, level with the top of her head. She pulled the door open a few feet. There was no snow on the ground, but the wind was bitterly cold in this post-midnight, moonless period.

Lying on the ground by the door, wedged against the barn’s foundation, was Jessica. The whining sound was coming from her. She was curled up around her hands, which were pressed into her stomach. Her hair was filthy, matted, and sodden with blood from a cut near her temple. She smelled like a locker room, a brewery, and a strong red tide in the Gulf all mixed up together. DD helped her to her feet and into the barn. She turned and slid the door shut. Jessica collapsed on a bale and curled up again.

“Stay right here. I’m going to wake Jeremy to bar the door again, okay?” DD could just bar the door in an emergency, straining precariously on tiptoe and grunting with the effort, but Jeremy with his greater height and strength could do it in an instant without even waking up all the way. DD slipped to his pallet on the other end of the living space and shook him awake.

After Jeremy barred the door, he came and looked down at Jessica, still twisted around her pain and unable to articulate a coherent word through her quivering throat and jaw.

He shook his head. “Damn!” was all he said. He walked back over to his pallet and lay down.

DD nursed Jessica through her DTs. She caught her puke and cleaned her head wound. She stripped her pants, drenched with blood-crimsoned urine, off her body and took the earliest opportunity to soak them in ethanol and burn them. It took two full days before Jessica could speak more than a few simple words: yes and no, and hungry and thirsty, and it hurts. She said that last phrase a lot. The shakes began to fade on the third day.

Gaby and her mom came by a few times to check on her, bringing herbal teas and soups. On the fourth day, when it was plain that Jessica was getting better, they spelled DD while she took a walk to clear her head, get her blood flowing, try to walk off the fury she felt towards Juan for what he’d done, towards Jessica for choosing to go back to him. There is no excuse for what he’s done, none! She remembered pulling the hammer back while pointing the gun at Juan’s craven face; although her other kills had been self-defense, she had no doubt she could murder this man in cold blood.

Yet, this was Jessica’s choosing, the path she’d elected for herself. In a way, Juan wasn’t even human to her; he was just an object, like a razor blade, which Jessica used to harm herself. DD resolved to toss him out mentally like the garbage he was, rather than embroil herself in a campaign of revenge, which could only escalate fruitlessly.

She came back from her walk, calmer than she’d been since finding her girl in the frigid mud. Jessica was sitting up, draped in a tarp, propped against a bale. Gaby was sitting at her side with a bowl of water and a comb, patiently working the mats out of Jessica’s head while trying not to pull apart the freshly stitched head wound.

“I wound up stitching up a human head after all,” Gaby smiled at DD. “Remember how she stitched up Marthita’s head when she found out I’d only done it on dogs and sheep? I got to return the favor.”

Jessica smiled, her face wan. “Mom, you were right. I should have known better. I’m a drunk and an addict. Will you take me back if I promise to stay clean and sober?” She knows she doesn’t have to ask. But it’s respectful that she did.

“And Juan?” DD asked sternly.

“He can rot in Hell forever for all I care!” Her eyes filled with tears. “If you knew what he did to me,” she faded to a squeak. I’d rather not imagine.

“I don’t understand why you chose to go back to him after the first time he beat you and raped you. I didn’t teach you to put up with that. You don’t deserve that!”

“Because I loved him! He gets me. We are both damaged inside and he gets that about me!”

“I don’t understand. How are you damaged? You had a happy, happy childhood. I gave you everything I never had and always wanted. I don’t understand why you put yourself in the same category as that, that, monster.”

“I always knew I didn’t belong in the world you raised me in. I always knew things would never be normal for me.”

“Jessica, what could I have done differently? How did I fail you so horribly?”

“Mom, it’s nothing you did. You couldn’t have changed it. It’s not your fault.”

DD sighed, allowing that absolution to sink in. I needed to hear that.

“You know you’re my child and I love you unconditionally. But I can’t let you continue to rip my heart out this way.” DD felt inside for tears to go with this, but they were plugged up in a well deep inside her. They’d been held in place by a packer of artifice for years, as life moved over it in waves like the ocean.

Jessica was silent.

She is the thing I want most of all in the world.

“Well, we can’t change the past. We can only create the future. Do you promise?” DD entreated. “No alcohol? No drugs? And no Juan?”

“I promise,” Jessica said. She was solemn and vulnerable. I know, I know. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. And this is more than twice. But I want it to be true, so badly.

“Well, good.” She said, turning away, gruff and businesslike, as though she hadn’t just exposed herself to more needless pain. “We need a mechanic for this trip to Sutokata. You’re hired.”

Jessica leaned back against her hay bale. She closed her eyes with a feeble smile. Gabriela had cleaned her face well, and the dim light of the barn hid the bruises. For an instant, DD flashed back to a different Jessica, six years old, fresh out of the bathtub, fighting heavy sleep-eyes in her lace canopy bed amidst the pink-flowered sheets.

And so it came to pass, one fine, frosty Ozark mountain morning, just as the sun was rising, Jessica, Jeremy and DD pulled through the gate in the fence around Gabriela’s cousin’s farm, rolling on tires of heavy cotton canvas stuffed with oats. The use of oats had been DD’s suggestion, based on an old family legend, of her great-great-grandfather, whose family had kicked him off their Ontario farm for the wickedness of stuffing the tires of his home-built motorcycle with oats meant for animal feed. He’d ridden that motorcycle proudly into Flint, Michigan, and down the main street, where it made a mention in the local paper. He’d gone on to be the first machinist foreman on the original Buick assembly line, and his mechanical aptitude had popped up again, generations later, in Jessica. She wondered how he’d have felt to see the urban war zone Flint had eventually turned into. She wondered how the remaining people of Flint, demoralized by unemployment, foreclosures, and exodus, and dulled and confused by lead poisoning from contamination, had fared when the workers arrived to put them in the protectee camps. Were they grateful? Did they fight? Did they even understand?

Gabriela walked over with the children to say goodbye. Marthita ran up to Jessica and leaped on the scooter, burying her face in the young woman’s belly and squeezing her waist as hard as her delicate arms could manage. The girl had been a fixture around the barn through the long winter. She was now telling everyone she wanted to be a mechanic when she grew up, “like Jessica.” DD wiped a tear from her eye as Jessica embraced the little girl, rocking gently with her eyes closed. Jeremy was closing the gate, and as he mounted his ATV, Jessica set Martha down. Their engines revved, and one by one they pulled off.

Jessica took the lead on the Vespa and the other two fell in behind.

DD reveled in the beauty of the mountains. The sun ascended and struck the frost on the tan ground, sparkling like diamonds. The trees were still brown, but a hint of green, hanging over them like a mist, spoke of the imminence of Spring. The sky was blue, stained with high cirrus clouds like the film of buttermilk left inside a glass. For a moment, the strangeness which had haunted every day since last October lifted, and she was just a mom on a road trip with her daughter and...

The feeling collapsed. She and Jeremy were friends. They had each others’ backs, literally and figuratively, and ever since their first engagement, with the poor violent lunatic, the trust of comrades-in-arms was implicit. But there was no “Honey,” “Baby,” “Dear” stuff going on. Their physical attraction was undeniable, and they’d had some memorable encounters in the woods on warm days, and in the distillery shed, and plenty of clichéd rolls in the hay of the barn, sheep baaing under the loft. But the more they were involved in other ways, the less satisfactory the sex was. Occasionally, they’d fall asleep in an embrace after sex, but DD usually had to bring herself to climax afterwards. This was normal for her, and she decided the first time had just been a fluke. They slept separately most nights.

Jessica had asked DD bluntly one day, “Mom, you and Jeremy: what’s the deal there?”

DD just shrugged. Jeremy wasn’t a thinker, but a doer, and DD was still at bottom a scientist, given to exploring ideas and concocting ways to test them. They’d be discussing the day’s plans, the need for more water in the mash, and how the sheep had been restless the night before. Jeremy would speculate there was an animal prowling outside the barn at night, and DD would start brainstorming: an animal, the wind might have changed, maybe one of the ewes was getting ready to lamb out of season (herd mammals circle to protect birthing females, she’d read), and she’d look up and Jeremy would smirk at her and go on stirring the vat of mash he was working on. She would feel momentarily silly, like someone caught talking out loud to the cat, and fall silent.

But today, they were all doers. In the crisp mountain air, they were a trio of intrepid warriors on an adventure! They crested a ridge and the ascending contours of the range of mountains, hills really, called the Ozarks, spread out before them to the Northwest. A group of whitetails, three does and a two-point buck, were motionless in the road, silhouetted against the sky, the only visible movement the gentle rising of vapor from the creatures’ nostrils. The trio braked to a stop. Life has few of these transcendent moments. Man, women, deer, sky, all hung suspended in perfect harmony. A rabbit broke abruptly from a bush on the other side of the road. Startled, the four deer ran off, their impossible, graceful, bounding steps taking them through the underbrush as they vaulted, otherworldly, down the acute slope.

DD sighed in elation and turned to Jessica, ahead to her right, but her daughter’s eyes were still glued to the eponymous flags of the retreating ruminants. She smiled a mother’s smile. The experience is new to her. I guess, always, anything we see together, I will think of how it must look through her eyes.

DD pivoted to look at Jeremy and saw him remove his hand from the rifle mounted upright on the ATV behind him. He knows we can’t carry that much meat, and we don’t want to stop our journey, just as we’re getting started, in order to dress it. But here’s the difference, right here: his country-boy instinct and my city-girl whimsy.

The weather got colder as they moved north, traveling faster than the warming glow of spring, but they were equipped for colder-weather camping. There were a number of old-time, deserted downtowns that had undergone a scraggly rebirth of sorts, as people moved closer together to avoid melting roads and long-distance walks. Some, of course, had been renovated before the machine sickness, but they no longer hosted expensively-but-casually clad crowds sampling goat-cheese wild-foraged-mushroom bruschetta and pomegranate-pear martinis. Here and there, they encountered others who’d come up with the same idea as Jessica and rebuilt small vehicles for ethanol. The smoke streams of the fires of many stills rose up across the land, no longer hidden for fear of the law. In this area, many people still had livestock when the machine sickness hit, so horses, donkeys, mules, and sometimes even cattle were making a comeback as forms of transportation. Dirt or gravel roads, or roads with wide dirt shoulders, were becoming more popular and reliable, as the machine sickness broke down more and more asphalt paving into chunks and puddles.

When the Ozarks gave way to the flat plains of Missouri and Kansas, the trip became monotonous. They passed a windmill farm, giant graceful structures like a regiment of giants in feathered headgear. Some of the turbines were turning their slow, brutal arcs. Some were turning part-circles, jamming, and swinging backwards. Many were cocked crooked at their fiberglass nacelles, where something plastic inside had given way. One turbine’s titanic blade had flown free of its steel column and sat alone in a fallow field. They stopped to investigate and found two of the three blades embedded in the earth. The one that had struck the ground first had gouged a long furrow twice as deep as Jeremy was tall and plowed up a divot as big as DD’s old house. They marveled at the destruction, felt themselves miniscule before it. Then they cast an eye at the other windmills nearby, one of them listing crazily, and hastily moved on.

One day, a drab gloomy sky blew in. They watched slow, inexorable clouds advance across the flatlands, an impressionist smear of silver rain below, and then found an abandoned metal warehouse and made camp.

“Isn’t this tornado country?” Jessica asked. “Would this warehouse hold up to a tornado?”

“There’s not much that can hold up to a tornado, if that’s your destiny,” Jeremy said.

They wound up staying there for five days, sleeping a lot, huddled around a lumber-scrap fire, as the Midwestern springtime demonstrated its fickleness. They kept one eye on the sky, fearing the yellow tinge that presaged tornadoes, but the rain was constant and the wind was steady, barely rattling the corrugated sheet metal with its worst gusts.

When the front finally passed over, they resumed their travel and headed north, a rising sun on their left and a spectacular rainbow on their right.

That night, they reached Lake of the Ozarks. They needed a bath, so they headed down a dirt road with a sign that said, “Riverview.” When they got to the end of the gravel road, they discovered they were at an RV park. The guard on watch hailed them, holding a rifle at rest across his body and obviously perceiving them as no threat. The park was occupied by residents who’d been stranded there, camping out, when the machine sickness hit; as their largely fiberglass portable homes dissolved and collapsed, they’d worked diligently to create solutions. A few collectors had antique aluminum Airstream trailers which were pretty much intact, although of course the PVC plumbing was worthless now. The metal frames of even the fiberglass trailers and motorhomes remained, atop tire-free chassis, propped on concrete blocks or chunks of limestone to level them as their hydraulic jacks failed. Some campers had already been living in “park models,” and had units encased in aluminum siding and roofing; others had been built with vinyl siding and asphalt shingles, and were in the same boat as the temporary visitors. It seemed to have been a difficult winter, and two burned-out hulks of motorhomes showed the danger of trying to heat a flammable structure with natural fuels. People had used what came to hand, which yielded a surrealistic neighborhood landscape of concrete, sheet metal, canvas, grass thatching, wood, and rope. The swimming-pool enclosure’s chain-link fence had been stripped off; they saw a corner of it peeking out as the underlayment for an RV wall someone had rebuilt by weaving strips of fabric into it. The pool itself had been repurposed as a reservoir, and DD the microbiologist was impressed at the strategies they’d come up with to keep it sanitary after their sodium hypochlorite ran out. The park had become a tribal unit, congregating at a community fire each day and sharing food. They’d survived the winter with few deaths, obtaining food by foraging local grocery stores, wildcrafting fruits and herbs in the Fall, fishing and hunting over the Winter, and trading their few items of value with the local farmers who, just like those in Gabriela’s community, had nowhere to ship their crops to once the trucks stopped running. They were turning over ground to make a huge vegetable garden with seeds they’d foraged from a nearby home repair warehouse store. They were all too aware that cereals would be the issue: the equipment to till huge tracts of land was lacking, and most farmers had been using hybridized or GMO seed, which wouldn’t breed true. Foreheads furrowed among those whose temperament tended towards planning ahead when the visitors brought the topic up, but no one had any answers other than to hoard small amounts of starches for their families when they could get away with it and hope the mice didn’t find them. DD looked at a 3-year-old toddling around her older siblings’ feet. Next Winter is going to be brutal.

The three camped by the tiny public beach on the wide Osage river, tarried a day, and took the most invigorating cold-water swim of their lives in the warm sunshine of the next afternoon.

They crossed the lake itself via a steel-girder bridge on US 54 and took it east of Kansas City to US 36, which became I-72. They had to detour way out of their path on local roads around Springfield, where the heavily trafficked freeway, rotted by p davisii, had transformed over the winter into an impassible Burren-like landscape. DD knelt to examine what was happening. The cracks in the asphalt had exposed layers of gravel, silt, and sand, in which a variety of tiny green things flourished in the warmth, producing astonishing miniature landscapes of elfin beauty.

Once they reached Indiana, DD’s memory proved faithful despite her frequent doubts. There were many times she was just about ready to turn the party around and retrace their steps, and then she’d spot some trivial landmark: a school-bus shelter with the name of a local dentist painted on it (Dr. Payne, terrible name for a dentist!); a trench which curved away from the road around a huge boulder; an intersection with what had once been a plastic molded Shell Oil box sign on the abandoned gas station, but was now just a tall metal pole with red and yellow splashes trailing down its sides. It was an overcast and chilly day when the evergreen windbreak gave the signal they awaited that this was the right place. With no little trepidation, they turned down the anonymous track that led to Sutokata.

Before proceeding, they formed up abreast, as had become their habit. Jessica was in the center on her scooter, looking down at her mother and Jeremy, on their lower ATV seats, on each side.

“Now, it’s been a while since I was here,” cautioned DD. “I don’t even know for sure the collective is still there, or that the people there are the ones I remember.”

“We should go slow then,” said Jeremy.

“And make lots of noise so it doesn’t seem like we’re sneaking up on them!” said Jessica.

They picked their way down the road as it tapered into a trail, beeping the horns on their little vehicles every so often. Two armed men—no, DD corrected herself, an armed man and an armed woman—stopped them before the compound proper came into sight. Their rifles were leveled at the three strangers, but they were relaxed and their fingers were off the triggers.

The travelers cut their motors. DD noticed the smell of rotting meat, carried from behind the defenders on the light breeze. It made her uncomfortable, the acid taste of nausea welling up in her throat. DD, Jessica, and Jeremy raised their open hands.

“Who are you and what do you want?” challenged the man. His white face was flushed with the chill under his knit cap and above his wool coat.

“I’m DD Davis. I’m a friend...” what if they don’t know who I’m talking about, “of Akisni and Snowbear.” What if we came all this way for nothing?

The weapons came down and the guards visibly relaxed. “Let’s just take you to the main house and see about that,” the woman said in a friendly tone. “Mind if we ride on the back of your vehicles?”

Jessica led the way, and the two ATVs, with the Sutokata residents perched on the cargo boxes behind the drivers, guns aimed at the sky, followed behind. They passed a side trail and DD got a glimpse of two people laboring hard, digging a deep trench in the muddy, freshly thawed spring dirt. The rotting-meat smell was especially strong here.

Maybe a horse or cow died and they’re burying it?

They entered the main house and were settled into chairs while one of their captors/greeters, who introduced himself as Joe, went to find Snowbear and Akisni. Heidi, a medium-height brunette in a Baja shirt with a wool knit poncho over it, leaned on the butt of her rifle and smiled pleasantly. Akisni was right in the adjacent kitchen, and she bustled in.

“DD!” Her voice was full of elation as she wrapped her arms around her old friend. “How did you make it here? You must tell me everything!” She released DD from her warm enveloping hug, holding her arms as she took a good look at her face. Then she turned to her companions. “Who are your friends?”

“This is Jeremy, my friend from Galveston, and this,” she paused for effect, “is Jessica.” Akisni’s eyebrows shot up.

“Jessica? Little Jessica? Buttercup?”

“The goat tamer herself!” grinned DD.
“Oh, my God! I can’t believe it. Moments like this make me feel old!”

“Tell me about it!”

“Jeremy, was it? Nice to meet you.” Akisni shook his hand. “We are always happy to get news of what’s going on outside. Let me fix you some tea.” She stepped out of the room, only to return a few moments later. She offered a choice of blends, “Mint? Chamomile? Red Clover? Cinnamon?”  and disappeared into the kitchen again. Snowbear was found outside, where he was patching fences around the summer pasturage, and by the time he came inside, they were all quite cozy in chairs with tea and rolls.

“So, that’s the quick version of how I wound up in Houston just before the machine sickness hit,” finished DD, “and a summary of how Jessica disappeared as a teenager and broke my heart.”

“I’m so sorry, mom.” Jessica pressed her lips together and looked at her mom earnestly.

“It’s okay, Buttercup. You weren’t in your right mind. What’s past is past.”

“Here’s Snowbear,” said Akisni, rising and handing him a cup of his favorite tea, which he turned to take from her after giving DD a brief hug. “Honey, I was getting caught up with DD, but I didn’t let her tell me about what’s happened to her since the machine sickness. She came all the way from Galveston and I knew you’d want to hear everything she had to say about what things are like out there.”

“Well,” Snowbear sat down. “Let me get comfortable then.”

The trio told the tale of their winter near Fort Smith, their journey, and all the people they’d connected with. The Sutokatans were pleased to hear that small communities had sprung up spontaneously to deal with the new isolation, and fascinated to hear about some of the innovative solutions other groups had come up with to the loss of plastic and oil.

Snowbear and Akisni became excited about the possibility of converting gasoline engines to ethanol. “It honestly never occurred to me to do something so simple! Is it difficult?”

“Not really,” Jessica said.

“What about heavy machinery? Like a tractor or backhoe?”

“If it’s gasoline powered, the conversion should be pretty straightforward. Diesel, not so much. I’ll look at your equipment tomorrow and see what it will take to do it.”

“I’m sure Amit and Josh will want to pump you all for ideas and information,” said Snowbear.

“Who?” Asked DD.

“Our biologist and our electrician.”

“Amit? You don’t mean Amit Viswanathan by any chance?”

“Yes, that’s Amit. Do you know him?”

“Are you kidding? I know of him. He’s a legend! He did the pioneering work in my field. He was the first man ever to patent a genetically engineered organism! Is he actually here, at Sutokata?” Her voice rose in excitement.

“Hmh. I’ve known Amit since he was a grad student and I was a freshman. I never realized you two were in the same area of biochemistry—”

“Microbiology.”

“—microbiology, until just now. How likely is it you’d both wind up at the same place?”

“You have no idea.” DD gave a deep sigh. Might as well get it over with, since the subject’s come up. “There’s something I have to tell you.”

“What?”

“I’m the one responsible for the machine sickness. I created it.”

Akisni gave a little laugh. “Don’t be silly. It came from the big oil corporations.”

“Which I work for—worked for. I actually built on Amit Viswanathan’s work to create an oil-eating microbe which would grow faster, under a wider range of conditions, than any we’d had before. It was intended for the purpose of cleaning up oil spills in an environmentally friendly way. It worked better than we could have imagined. Then, it suddenly got out of control; I’m still not sure how. I think my assistant bought some mislabeled cultures. He might have done it deliberately. I just don’t know.

“But anyway, this is all. My. Fault.”

It’s strange how saying something out loud makes it more real, DD thought as she began sobbing into her cupped palms. Even if it’s something you’ve thought inside for a while.

She took long, gasping breaths between sobs. Jessica came to her side and put a hand on her back. Something nudged her hand and it was Jeremy, offering a handkerchief.

“DD, nobody is blaming you,” Akisni said softly. “I’m sure it was an accident.” DD exploded in a new spasm of crying, and there was no other sound in the room for quite a few minutes. Eventually, the spasm of emotion began to burn itself out, and she began to catch her breath.

“DD,” began Akisni again, “every human action has the potential for unforeseen consequences. If we determine never to cause any harm, we can never cause any good either. And that’s the biggest harm of all. You did what you did because you wanted to help...”

“...And because I’m good at it,” interjected DD, giving a slight smirk through her tears.

“You are suffering the results of it just like everyone else in this country, probably on this planet. You can’t carry that. Put it down.”

Put it down. “Put it down. I should put it down!” All at once, it seemed like DD’s entire body melted. She realized she’d been carrying every blow and kick and lie and insult inflicted on her by Isaac and Coffee-Breath, cherishing it as her just retribution for the destruction she’d wrought. She was overcome by a wave of exhaustion. She leaned back in the armchair and closed her eyes.

Jessica said, “I remember just bits and pieces about this place. When I saw the rafters, I recognized them… and they brought other things back.”

“Like what?” Asked Akisni. Jessica described snippets of memory and the older woman expanded on them, or told her what had actually happened, where Jessica’s memories were half-obscured behind the veil of childhood.

Jessica looked over at her mother. “Is she...asleep?” She asked, incredulous.

Everyone sat for an awkward moment. DD solved the conundrum by beginning to snore. “It looks that way,” said Akisni. She shook her head. “Odd reaction. I guess she’s been through a lot.”

Jessica piped up brightly, “Hey, are the goats still here?”

Akisni smiled. “Sure, they are. Wanna go see them?” The two of them and Snowbear began to put on their coats. Jeremy looked at DD, hesitated, shrugged, and joined them. Out they went, as DD spiraled deeper and deeper into intense, serene sleep.

They visited the barn, where goats, sheep, and cows shared living quarters (the pigs were in a separate building). Jessica giggled and petted them like she was a pigtailed girl again, and everyone’s mood lightened a little. They took a different path back, accompanying Snowbear who said he just wanted to check on something, and when they came out in a clearing, Jessica froze.

“Oh my God!” She exclaimed. The clearing was the one by the driveway which DD had glimpsed earlier on their way in. The long, deep trench had been finished and was now already half-filled in. LaDwon and Les were wearing light jackets, open in the cool Spring temperatures. They were perspiring with the effort of their labor, but they had scarves wrapped over their noses and mouths. At the bottom of the unfilled portion, Jessica saw the remains of the winter’s raiders, at the same time she smelled the results of the recent warmer weather.

“What happened to them?” She was shocked. Akisni turned her head away and looked at the ground.

“They meant us harm.” Snowbear. “We respect life, but we have to protect what is ours. We couldn’t bury them until the ground thawed. Sorry, I forgot you didn’t know. Of course, it’s shocking.”

“So, it was self-defense?” Jessica’s voice was a little shrill, as though willing them to say yes.

“Unfortunately, yes.” Snowbear clenched the corners of his mouth and looked down, unflinching, at the reeking carrion which had once been human beings.

Jeremy took the lead to re-enter the path, “Good enough for me!” he called out heartily. “Let’s go!” The others followed.

Jessica was ten feet away at the edge of the clearing. She clasped her hair behind her head, turned, and vomited, long and hard, into the weeds with all the practiced precision of a recovering alcoholic. Wiping her mouth, she followed Jeremy down the trail into the brush. Akisni, head still down, silently took the rear.

LII.     It’s Always the Quiet Ones

Brownie grabbed his jacket, loaded his favorite handgun, a Ruger, and chambered a round. He retrieved his waterproofed leather moccasins from by the door and went out for his shift on patrol. Murphy came in and gave him a quick fist bump as Brownie went out.

Brownie started down a trail which made up one of their usual patrol patterns. This trail swung to the right around the copse of trees. It intersected a deer trail which led up from the water and fanned out into a fallow cornfield. Instead of continuing along the footpath, Brownie veered onto the deer trail, stopping where it was hidden by the trees. There, he met his connection, a short man with an irritating habit of jingling his keys in his pocket. The other man, the tall one with coffee-stained teeth, was nowhere to be seen. Sometimes, the two men came together, but usually it was one or the other.

“What do you have for me?” Isaac asked with no preamble.

“A new microorganism. Something about generating energy, something better than the biogas. Supposedly no risk of explosion.”

“Still haven’t turned up any EarthFirst! Literature? VHMNT?” He pronounced it vehement. “A group called The Justice Department?”

“No, nothing like that. Um, a book by Robert Hunter about the founding of Greenpeace.”

“Hmm. Well, bring it next time if you can slip out with it without being noticed. We don’t have access to information networks anymore and we’re trying to get a handle on the motives of these bioterrorists.” Brownie nodded.

Brownie handed Isaac a slip of paper with the word, shewanella, written on it. Only Brownie had misspelled it as “SHEWENDELA.”

“What’s this?” Said Isaac. “Some black chick?”

“No, it’s the name of the bacteria.”

“Are you sure no one saw you write this down?”

“Well, there was LaDwon. But he was reading, I don’t think he was paying attention.”

“How many years have you been undercover?”

“I—I’m sorry.” Brownie’s face fell. “It wasn’t political information so I thought...”

“Don’t you get it? The name of the game is bioterrorism, and these are major players. This could be as big as the machine sickness! First, they bring this nation to its knees, then they create a new source of power which only they control, and then they take over!” Isaac may have been a little hard on Brownie here, he realized; he was still angry at himself for leaving DD in the cell when they evacuated, planning to be back within a day or so, expecting to find her hungry, thirsty, and more cooperative. No one could have known it was more than a simple evacuation drill. No one could have known it was a global catastrophe, sweeping through every millimeter of the planet with the wildfire intensity of life itself.

Realization dawned behind Brownie’s eyes. “I didn’t realize. I thought the machine sickness was an accident.”

“That may be what Davis wants you to believe. Trust me, there are no accidents. Now, finish your patrol. We will meet again at this location. At oh seven hundred in nineteen days.”

“Nineteen days.” Brownie did some quick addition. “The twenty-third. Seven a.m. Got it.” He walked back to the main path. As he resumed his patrol, he turned to glance back, and Isaac was gone.

LIII. Best Served Cold

Tim Schneider reached the end of the row of cotton. His fingers were bleeding and swollen. His back ached and throbbed. He reached into his shirt and extracted a cloth-wrapped bundle and dropped it into the sack at the end of the row along with his load of bolls. He was halfway down the next row before the bag was retrieved. The protectee who picked it up glanced inside and grinned before throwing it over his shoulder and hauling it off. Tim knew that, once behind the truck, he would extract the special package for further distribution of the substance inside. Just like any prison, and this was a prison, no matter what they called it, this camp had ways of getting contraband inside, and a microeconomy to distribute it according to supply and demand. Sugar, which was what was in the package, was in high demand. It would buy Tim another week of protection from the Tango Blasts. Tim’s natural shrewdness, and his lack of the behavioral constraints observed by lesser mortals, worked to his favor here in the camp. Plus, he had lots of opportunity for the kind of sexual power games he preferred. Sam had always been too soft for him anyway. He was getting leaner and meaner every day. Literally. Tim tugged the drawstring on his pants, tight as it would go already. Resources were short, they said, but everyone noticed, as the months rolled by, that the administrators weren’t getting leaner like the protectees were.

The afternoon rains were about to roll in. The Gulf Coast had always had a summer weather pattern of thunderstorms which popped up every day, deluging the area and cultivating grass, mildew, and mosquitos. This summer was the worst in memory; the storms were more intense every day. The ocean itself, to the east, was covered with a constant cloud of rolling fog, which reeked of an organic stench. Every afternoon the fog grew denser, building into a mountain which fused with flat-bottomed thunderheads and surged inland. Tim had heard others say the land he was harvesting had been too dry to grow cotton before, and farmers who’d resorted to the camps said the cotton farms inland, which depended on irrigation, were all fallow since the irrigation equipment had failed.

The first peals of thunder rolled across the countryside. Tim joined the daily exodus from the fields back to the shelter of the barracks. Before he could merge with the milling crowd, a supervisor clapped him on the shoulder, gesturing towards the peacekeeper at the corner of the field. The man stood holding a rifle, wearing the same cotton pajamas as the inmates, but his were newer and in better repair, as the peacekeepers’ always were. The protectees noticed that no matter how much cotton they harvested, their own personal cotton garments weren’t replaced until they were falling to pieces.

Next to the peacekeeper was one of the Feds, someone familiar. Tim’s eyes narrowed.

“Another debriefing, Lee?” Tim asked as he came closer.

“Yes. This one is about your former boss.”

“They’ve all been about DD, in one way or another.” Tim had managed to gather by inference during these interviews that they’d had DD in custody and lost her. He wondered how she’d managed to get away. He didn’t think she had the guile to talk her way free.

“Yes, but now we want to get to know more about her personally. My unit leader thinks she may be designing another bioweapon, and we want to know more about how her mind works.”

Lightning flashed, and the second resounding din of thunder rolled over the horizon, louder this time. Tim walked ahead of the two men into the administration building and sat at the wooden table in the wooden chair facing the Fed. Tim smelled cologne on Lee, a drugstore brand. Tim hadn’t had cologne to wear since the morning he was arrested; he missed it. Funny how it was the little things you missed. The peacekeeper stood outside the door.

Lee started the conversation.

“How long has Dr. Davis known the Simpsons?”

“Snowbear and Akisni? I don’t know. She said she used to go to the commune when she was working on some site in Minnesota.”

“Was she a communist?”

Tim snorted. “No, she wasn’t really political. If anything, I’d say she was a right-wing gun nut.”

“Did she use her office e-mail to communicate with them?”

“Not that I ever saw.”

“You handled all her travel plans, correct?”

“Yes. She wouldn’t have known where to go or what to do without me.”

“Did you ever cover for her when she was visiting Sutokata? Make it look like she was going somewhere else?”

“No. Honestly, I didn’t even remember about the place until you reminded me.”

“Don’t use the word ‘honestly’ with me, Tim; I know better.”

Tim just rolled his eyes. “How many times are you going to ask me the same questions?”

“How did you ship the cultures to the Chinese?” Repetition.

“Are we doing this Chinese thing again? Look, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Tim said, for probably the hundredth time. Lee’s bovine gaze slid away from the lie.

The daily downpour began to pound on the roof. Raindrops streamed down the outside of the windows. The wind hit the building like a wet towel. Rain blanketed the view out the window in uniform grey.

“Tim, you could go to prison for a long time.”

“I’m in prison, remember? Oh, sorry. I’m in a protective camp.”

“These camps are for the citizens’ own protection. There is no law enforcement structure left since the government collapsed. Would you rather be out there?”

“Would you let me go if I said yes?” Tim retorted.

“You agreed to remain under our protection when you were 1rotected. Obviously, there’d be chaos if we let people come and go from the camps as they pleased.”

“Unlike everyone else out there, who was stampeded into being 1rotected when they were terrified that the world was falling apart before their eyes, I wasn’t 1rotected voluntarily, remember?”

“Which is exactly the point: you know that you could go to prison for a very long time, both for embezzlement, and for selling biotech cultures to the Chinese. Not to mention cocaine possession. Do you want to know what actual prisons are like now?”

From what Tim had heard, there were few, if any, actual prisons left. Most of the prisons had been secured with systems which relied to some extent on electric devices and electronic recordkeeping. They’d had redundant generators in case of power failure, but no one ever planned for the contingency of the wiring insulation rotting through everywhere, all at once, and shorting out the entire system. The weeks after the machine sickness hit had been catastrophes of brutality and deprivation for the prisoners and their keepers, and the death toll had been horrific. The ones who’d escaped had blended into the general population; the few who survived being trapped inside had been rolled into the camps. Tim had met many in the camps who were former prisoners, and they all told similar nightmare stories. No, he knew prison now was an empty threat. But Tim would allow his captors to think he was still afraid of prison, until it was to his advantage not to.

“You wouldn’t send me to prison.” He put a false note of anxiety in his voice.

“Maybe not. But how’d you like it if your sugar supply dried up?”

This was a new gambit! Tim wanted to know more; he was intrigued. “What do you mean?” He feigned worry. He doubted the authorities had the ability to cut off sugar smuggling, but he wanted to know why they thought he thought they could.

“Tim, this small-time stuff is too petty for you. How would you like to get a piece of something big?”

“I’m listening.”

“DD Davis has teamed up with Amit Viswanathan, the first microbiologist to patent a living creature. We are pretty sure the two of them created the machine sickness in order to cripple our infrastructure. They are cooking up a new organism, which we believe to be Phase 2 of their plan. They, along with their eco-terrorist confederates, are planning to introduce another bacterium. We don’t know what it will do yet, but we think it will make the machine sickness look like a case of sniffles by comparison.”

“And what does this have to do with me?”

“You know better than anyone how her mind works. Tim, we want to put you in charge of a squad to compile all the material we’ve been able to find about DD and Viswanathan’s research at Sutokata. We have managed to make contact with an undercover informer the FBI had there for years to monitor their terrorist activity. You should be able to interpret the information we get from that asset; from what you’ve told me, you were basically doing her research for her, just without a degree.”

Tim at this point sincerely believed that this was true, so he wasn’t lying this time when he nodded his head.

“I’ll need complete control over the staffing and budgeting process,” Tim said.

“Subject to my review, of course. You understand.” Lee waved his hands, somehow clearly denoting Tim’s history of embezzlement and fencing stolen goods with that gesture.

“Oh, of course,” Tim said, nonchalant. Inside, he was rejoicing. This was just too good to be true! After facing off with this man Lee several times over the past months, Tim knew that, not only was he stupid, he didn’t know he was stupid. Hiding transactions from him—on paper ledgers, even! —would be a cakewalk.

Besides, Tim’s resentment of DD had developed, since he’d been sent here, into a smoldering hatred. It must have been she who betrayed him to the police, resulting in his being in custody when the world fell apart. If not for her, he reasoned, he’d have been in Houston in a luxury apartment, snorting coke with pretty little Sam, as they’d dreamed. He lay awake at night imagining how he might get back at her. This would be a delightful revenge!

LIV.  Pastoral

That Spring was an orgy of invention and discovery at Sutokata. The commune’s normal Spring workload was imbued with new urgency by their awareness that self-sufficiency was no longer a high-minded abstract goal, but rather a necessity. That necessity was compounded by the need to develop innovative ways to cache and conceal their weapons, wool, skins, clothing and bedding, ethanol, and preserved food against, not just the odd raider, but the potential of visits by the larcenous police. The lengthening spring days were full of back-breaking work, but that work was slightly less back-breaking because Jessica had converted a gasoline tractor to run on ethanol.

They turned over the muddy earth and seeded it with corn, wheat, soy, and vegetables. The herd animals were turned out to graze on the sprouting grass of the pasture. Fences were mended, ditches dredged, outbuildings patched and rebuilt. As the days continued to lengthen after the equinox, and their bodies hardened to the labor, Amit and Josh began to pal around with Jessica in the evenings, as they inspired each other to devise new ways to circumvent the loss of plastics and oils. A 50-50 mixture of goldenseal and amoxicillin, suspended in ethanol and water, had to be carefully applied to the solar panels twice weekly to keep them from becoming infected. Jessica was working on building an ethanol-powered generator for the inevitable day when the solar panels would fail. Amit and Josh had a project going involving chlorophyll extracts and different growth and conduction media to see if they could develop a supplemental, organic solar power generator. But the real excitement came when Amit told DD about his Shewanella cultures. It turned out that DD had supervised a graduate student who was using DD’s own groundbreaking genetic engineering techniques to increase the electrical production of shewanella-based bioelectric cells. The grad student had increased the output by two orders of magnitude, and DD remembered the techniques well enough that they could, through trial and error, replicate them. Handicapped as they were by the lack of internet access to find out what research had come before them, it took hundreds of long hours of work to remake lost progress.

The work felt so much like play, Josh said one day, “I think if we had a quantum physicist here, we could make a faster-than-light biological engine.”

“As long as he wasn’t good-looking,” said DD.

“Why not?” straight-lined Amit.

“It would be too frustrating,” DD replied. “Because when he found the position, he can’t get the momentum; when he found the time, he wouldn’t have the energy!”

“Mo-om!” groaned Jessica.

“The last physicist I knew checked into a hotel with a photon. The desk clerk asked if she had any luggage, but the photon said no, she was traveling light,” said Amit.

“That’s bad,” groaned Josh. “I’d tell a chemistry joke but I’m sure I’d get no reaction.”

As the weather got warmer in central Indiana, birds returned (Josh and Amit stepped up the goldenseal washes on the solar panels accordingly). Streams thawed; the air took on an earthy aroma. The frantic plowing and seeding of Spring passed; the livestock were situated in their Summer homes, and the farm settled into its summer rhythm.

The days grew longer, and more evenings were passed outdoors. The badminton set was resurrected from its storage in a shed and found to be destroyed by p davisii; a few hours of work were required to replace the nylon net with wool, restring the racquets with gut, and make new birdies out of salvaged corks and feathers from the chickens. The Sutokatans turned into children again, batting the shuttlecock back and forth.

One day, the shuttlecock arced high into the air, paused at its apex, but never came down. The players on the ground, four on each side, stood with their racquets hanging at their sides, staring dumfounded at the sky. Something had swooped in, captured the birdie, and buzzed off into the treetops.

“What was that?” Said LaDwon.

“A hawk?” Suggested Brownie.

“No, it wasn’t alive,” said Doug. “I’m sure of it.”

The thing emerged from the trees and circled overhead. It was brownish like a hawk’s feathers, but its hum told them it was mechanical. It released the birdie from its claws, then landed on the ground near the players. Sheila picked it up.

“It’s a drone,” she said. Sure enough, the thing was built of carved wood and metal, six tiny turbofans around a central container of liquid divided into two compartments, and spring-loaded dowels for pincer arms and landing legs. Wires wrapped in fiber connected all the parts. It resembled a crane fly, but it was the size of a woodchuck. The group stood around marveling at the thing, and Josh stepped out from his hiding place in the bushes grinning and holding a curious remote control made of two pieces of fused and melted glass, one piece a socket imbedded with wires, and one a smooth round ball. On closer inspection, a cavity within the socket piece contained liquid compartments just like the drone.

“What?”

“How?”

The group began to form questions, but Josh cut them off. “Biobatteries.

“This shewanella bacterium produces an electrical current by creating two different oxidation states on the aerobic and anaerobic sides of the membrane. That makes an electrical current, which flows from one side to the other. It works!” His glee was obvious.

“Epic!” exclaimed Jesse.

“It’s interesting looking,” commented Gillie. “Kind of beyond steampunk tech. Kind of rustic pioneer tech.”

Everyone had to have a turn controlling the drone. That lasted forty-five minutes or so, until it stopped responding.

“Need to put it in a warm place and add nutrients so it can recharge itself.” Josh whisked the drone indoors.

During these languorous Summer days, they started having dinner outdoors on wooden tables when the weather was clear. Afterwards, a guitar, a banjo, a fiddle, a bodhrán, a bongo, a concertina, maracas, a saxophone, a flute, a trumpet, and a variety of harmonicas might find their way outdoors to combine with voices high and low in a tapestry of kaleidoscopic musical variety which covered almost every conceivable genre, style, and era, veering from sublime harmony to catastrophic cacophony.

The local police didn’t raid them again over the summer. Visitors and new arrivals brought rumors as to why. Rumor had it that the mysterious Federal cops had shot one of the local police over some demand the local guy made. The demand itself grew in the womb of rumor, from a simple case of ammunition in the Spring, to a helicopter and SWAT gear by Independence Day. Regardless, the local police had apparently degenerated into a squabbling pack of hyenas after that incident. Some speculated that they also were running low on uncontaminated fuel, and so the radius of their predations was shrinking. DD expected the Feds to reappear at any moment, which marred her enjoyment as Spring flourished into Summer, but they never showed up. Yet.

One July evening after dinner, DD was in the herb garden with Jessica, pulling weeds. Mother and daughter were on their hands and knees between rows of leafy, fragrant flora. The moist dirt still gave off a faint trace of heat left over from the sun, now a hand’s breadth from the horizon.

“The mint has just gone crazy with all this rain!” DD observed.

“I know, so has the pennyroyal,” agreed Jessica. “I’ve gotta go pee.” She grabbed the pile of discarded weeds next to her with her right hand to carry it off, and pressed her left hand against her lower back as she rose to a wide squat and then staggered upright. The loose, long-sleeved men’s’ denim shirt she was wearing had come unbuttoned. DD glanced up, did a double take, and then stared. How could I not have known?

“Jessica!” Sharply.

“What, mom?” She saw her mother’s gaze and pulled the placket of the shirt together, smearing dirt onto it from the uprooted herbs in her hand. An awkward, motionless moment ensued.

“Yeah, so...” Jessica began.

“You’re pregnant.” DD observed.

“I’m sorry mom!” Jessica was nine years old again, causing DD to flash back to the night she was caught climbing out her bedroom window to meet the girl next door with a pack of cigarettes and a can of beer. Her lip trembled.

Don’t let this be like that. Don’t let me lose her again. DD stood up, more quickly than her child had, and stepped over a row of fragrant basil to wrap her arms around Jessica. “It’s okay, baby. It’s okay.” She held her for a moment with her eyes closed, rocking gently, then took her by the shoulders and looked into her eyes. “In fact, it’s great! It’s wonderful!”

Then the dam burst. Jessica nestled into her mother’s neck and sobbed. It took a few minutes to purge the tear ducts. Like mother, like daughter. Nothing like a good cry to get you over something.

“Mom, I was going to tell you but there was never a good time.”
“It’s okay, sweetheart. I understand.”

“But what will we do? I can’t get to the hospital! If there even are hospitals any more.”

“You really don’t know? Oh, honey! Akisni is a midwife. She apprenticed at the Farm in Tennessee. In the 80s, women used to travel for miles to Sutokata just to have a natural birth with her.”

Jessica looked hopeful. “Really?”

“Cross my heart. Let’s go find her now. I’m sure there’s a lot she’ll need to get ready.”

Strawberries, blueberries and cream. Fresh peaches and apples from the orchard. Meadows full of brilliant wildflowers which lasted just a single day in a jar on the windowsill. Rest breaks under the trees, the vivid green of the leaves overhead sharply distinct from the inebriating blue of the cloud-spotted sky. The Summer passed as a series of haikus.

August came, and harvest began in earnest. The honey light of the sun began to slant and the sunsets were earlier and earlier. The wind blew stronger across the fields. One surprising morning, a thin coating of frost dusted the grass and their breath was visible on the crisp air of dawn. DD heard the obscene and tragic sobbing of a pig that was being slaughtered, and the smell of burning hung on the air for days as bacon and ham was preserved in the smokehouse. Flocks were culled and sausage was made. Fruit and vegetables were canned; the women (and two of the men) had a constant factory going in the kitchen, generating rows and rows of colorful glass jars with wax seals standing proudly on the shelves in the basement.

After the Fall’s raid, the collective decision had been made to create concealed root cellars to store a third of their preserved food (just enough to survive the winter on short rations, not so much that the raiders, if they came back, would know anything was missing). To make these cellars, deep holes needed to be dug, using their mini backhoe (fuel-converted, thanks to Jessica) and consuming an alarming amount of precious ethanol.

Jessica’s ankles had begun to swell to the size of softballs when she stood very long, and Akisni had frowned and ordered her to take a supervisory role–only! –over Josh and some of the others in her mechanical projects. Jessica obediently lazed around the distillery shed and directed them as they upgraded the size of the tanks and the diameter of the piping. They pretended to need her guidance, consulting her every few minutes so she wouldn’t feel the urge to get up and start working. They were determined to triple their output of ethanol by the time harvest was done.

LV.      If You Want It Done Right...

“That’s absurd. We can’t have protectees coming and going at random! There is enough chaos and disorder as it is!” Lee’s successor told Tim.

“I’m not a typical protectee,” Tim pointed out, “and it wouldn’t be at random. This program is critical, Jeff. Top secret! I don’t even know if Lee’d want me to share as many details with you as I already have!”

Jeff stood, chewing his lip, head down, and mulled it over. Jeff had contacted Lee not long after the machine sickness hit, when Jeff realized that he’d no way of contacting his own superiors. Jeff and Lee had gone to the law enforcement academy together and they still watched a game together every now and then. Jeff had figured out over the years that Lee was probably working for either NSA or DHS, but Lee was always one to play by the rules, so he never told Jeff which one, and Jeff never asked. Jeff had stayed with the FBI and never risen far in the hierarchy, but he was ablaze with a strong sense of patriotic loyalty; he wanted to remain faithful and serve his country in its hour of greatest need. He tracked Lee down, first visiting his house, then using old-fashioned plodding police work to track him to the camp. Lee was glad to have the help of someone he knew he could trust, a familiar face in a world where everything was topsy-turvy.

But Lee had stayed true to his protocols and never trusted Jeff with the need-to-know material about this program the arrogant, but brilliant, Tim Schneider was involved in. So, when Lee passed on suddenly after drinking his coffee one morning, Jeff was thrown into a position he knew nothing about. The camp physician said it was likely rat poison in his coffee that’d killed Lee. Plenty of people at the camp had reasons, both good and bad, to hate Lee; how the poison got into his coffee turned out to be a muddled question worthy of an entire detective story, and unfortunately Jeff was no Sherlock Holmes. Regarding Tim Schneider, Jeff knew only that Lee had trusted him. Tim was no ordinary protectee, not least of all because his paper protection-camp file was missing.

The Bureau’s protocols and procedures were there for a reason, and normal procedure would have been to contact base and wait to be contacted back for briefing. However, lines of communication had broken down. There was no base, no superiors, no level of secrecy above his, no one who could fill him in. So, he had to take Tim’s word for what was going on.

Fortunately, Tim had filled him in thoroughly on the whole situation, and the skills Jeff had learned during his training in interrogation told him that Tim was basically honest and trustworthy, if somewhat curt and snippy at times. So, DD and these hippies were eco-terrorists. Their plan was nefarious: introduce the machine sickness, and then, when the country had reached complete disarray, introduce a second bacterium which would allow them to control the production of energy and rule the revival of technology, which would allow domination of the world under the new order of life. Apparently, Tim and Lee had a mole in the commune and they’d had an agent, Isaac, traveling back and forth to communicate with him. But now, according to Tim, either the mole or the agent Isaac had been compromised. The only way to tell which one it was, was to allow Tim to go to Sutokata himself to sort things out. As Jeff saw it, this was plausible.

Besides, Tim was irritating, and it would get Tim out of Jeff’s face for a while.

“Okay,” Jeff decided. “You can go.”

LVI.  What a Coincidence!

The radio, which Snowbear powdered liberally with beta-lactam antibiotics on a regular basis, sat hissing in its carrel on auto-scan. No chatter had been heard on it for months, until one gorgeous June day, a voice came through. DD was sitting with Akisni in the common room carding wool; she looked up and furrowed her brow. The voice was garbled and the words couldn’t be heard, but she thought she recognized the voice. I must be losing my mind. That sounded like Tim.

A minute or two later, she was sure of it. She felt her blood rush to her head as she identified the voice of Tim Schneider. “Is anyone there? Attention, is anyone there?” It couldn’t be him!

Akisni didn’t notice that there was anything wrong with DD (funny how you can be overwhelmed with blinding emotion and the person right next to you not notice). Akisni got up and rubbed her hands with alcohol from a small bottle before picking up the microphone. “This is Sutokata. Who’s calling please?”

“Oh, thank God! I am completely lost and there is a gang chasing me!” He was panting with exertion and fear.

“State your position, please.” Said Akisni.

“I am at mile marker 6 of State Road 2332.”

“You are only a little ways from us! Look to your left and you’ll see a row of spruce trees, like Christmas trees.”

“I see them.”

“That’s the entrance to Sutokata. How far behind are your pursuers?”

“A good four or five miles. I can definitely make it.”

“Sending our people out now to meet you.”

Akisni ran out to mobilize the patrols to head down the path. DD ran after her to try to stop her, but Akisni, determined, was an irresistible force. She kept brushing DD off and shushing her until the two ATVs with four armed residents had been dispatched down the trail to meet their refugee.

Finally, DD got her attention: “Akisni, I know who that is! I recognized his voice!”

“Who is it, then?” Akisni asked.

“It’s Tim!” Akisni’s blank stare showed she had no recollection of Tim’s name. “My assistant! The one who was embezzling from the University.”

In Akisni’s eyes, her memory clicked. “But you don’t know he was embezzling. They just told you that when they were trying to get you to give them your secrets. Anyway, are you sure it’s him?”

“It’s him! Akisni, I’ve thought a lot about this. It all adds up. His spending above his means, the weird reaction of the cultures, which he ordered, that caused the machine sickness, the Sinopec transactions and Amit hearing from the Chinese. It must have been him.”

“DD, you can’t know that!

“I do know!”

“Well, anyway, he still doesn’t deserve to be beaten up by a gang. Hopefully it’s not the police chasing him and those four can handle it.”

Down the trail came a canvas-tired bicycle. Riding the bicycle was, yes, Tim Schneider. But DD would have been hard-pressed to recognize him if she hadn’t recognized his voice on the radio. His once-delicate, aristocratic nose was a twisted lump in the center of his face. His formerly clean-shaven face was covered by an unkempt beard. He wore a grimy wool pea coat and stocking cap and canvas cargo pants with wood-soled canvas shoes. Two pairs of Sukotakans on ATVs, LaDwon riding with Jesse, and George and Heidi, followed behind him at an idle; Jesse was riding as rear passenger and he held the radio Tim had been using, a small walkie-talkie model, which explained its limited range. It was covered with amoxicillin powder.

Tim stopped when he saw Akisni and DD, straddling the bike, and the defenders pulled up to flank him. DD stepped forward. She saw him act startled as he recognized her. Fake reaction. But I’ll bet the others don’t realize it’s fake. At that moment, DD knew beyond the shadow of a doubt he wasn’t here by coincidence, but she also knew that she couldn’t prove it. Given her past with Tim, she couldn’t even assert that truth without compromising her own credibility. She realized her hand was on the butt of her holstered sidearm and forced herself to release it.

“Tim Schneider.” She named him like she’d name a species of poisonous snake, striving to conceal all the fury she felt inside the words.

“Dr. Davis?” Tim responded, apparently ingenuous. “What are you doing here? How? Why?”

“Wow, what a coincidence.” DD did her best to keep the irony out of her voice. One of the patrols, George, glanced at her sharply but she kept her features impassive.

“Who was chasing you?” Asked Akisni sympathetically.

“Just some of those kids who set up camp under the overpass,” Darwin said. “They stopped at the turnoff by the windbreak and then drove off when they saw us coming. No real threat.” The others nodded.

“They’re riding gas-powered bikes. Don’t know where they scavenged the sterile gas from, but they won’t be going anywhere, soon enough,” said LaDwon from the other ATV.

“Can I camp here for the night?” Asked Tim, looking around. Yes, camp here and be gone tomorrow.

“No, of course we wouldn’t dream of letting you sleep outside! Come inside and have a hot shower and a proper meal and tell us everything that you’ve seen,” insisted Akisni, turning to lead the way.

“A hot shower!” exclaimed Tim. “I’d love to! It’s been months!”

This is not good. Not good at all.

Tim swung his leg up over the seat to dismount and followed, walking his bike to the porch.

LVII.                      Would I Lie to You?

Tim was in the shower, the time of day, mid-afternoon, meaning he could take his time because of lack of demand on the hot water supply.

“Look, Akisni. This guy is poison. I’m telling you, you do NOT want him here. Feed him and send him on his way!”

“DD, just because you have a personal issue with him...”

“This isn’t just a personal issue. He’s a criminal. He’s a thief. But I worked side by side with him for years. You know what made him such a great assistant? He manipulated everyone into giving him whatever it was he wanted. He was a door dragon against interruptions when I was working on deadline. He took no shit from bureaucrats or committees, didn’t even bother me with most of their bullshit, just made it go away, like that!” She snapped her fingers. “Nobody liked him. I didn’t like him. But I did trust him. Wrongly.”

“DD, I know how you feel. You don’t want to be the one solely responsible for the machine sickness, but that doesn’t mean he did what you’re so convinced he did.”

Akisni had hit her sorest point. DD lost her cool, and as she heard the crack in her own voice she knew she’d all but lost the argument. “This isn’t about my guilt! This is about taking a serpent to your breast! He’s a psychopath! This is a huge mistake!” Her eyes began to well with tears. She heard the shower shut off and the curtain pulled back. She turned on her heel and walked outside into the spring sunshine to compose herself.

When she returned, Tim and Akisni were talking. Tim was seated in the same chair where DD’d sat on the day when they’d first arrived. DD took a seat a few chairs distant, resolved to be a silent listener, a fly on the wall, as Tim told his tale.

“I was at my mom’s in Miami when everything started shutting down. FEMA came to her retirement community and insisted on evacuating everyone to safety. They took the sickest ones from the assisted living side first. They even had nurses and medical equipment to take care of them. Later on, they evacuated the ones like my mom, who were just old but basically okay by themselves. I wanted to go with her but they wouldn’t let me. They said she needed a different level of care.” Akisni nodded. They’d heard, from other visitors, about the mass round-ups in the cities, sorting people by age and gender, abilities, disabilities, and special skills, sending them to different protection camps, but Tim was the only person they’d met who claimed to have come back from one.

“They took me to a different place, a protection camp. It was like a giant military installation, but there was nothing for anyone to do, and all kinds of people there. Homeless people. Ghetto trash.” His lip curled in contempt. “I was the only white person in my barracks! Anyway, someone had dug a tunnel under the fence and I found it. I snuck out at night. The guards were pretty lax. Most of the people there didn’t try to get out. They felt safer inside than outside.” This wasn’t what others had said. They’d said the camps were basically prisons and that people who tried to escape were punished, or just disappeared. But is it possible that the regimes in different camps, in different areas, vary? DD considered that possibility while Tim and Akisni continued their conversation.

“Where was this camp they took you to?” Akisni asked.

“Just west of Rainesville. I remembered DD talking about this place here, Sutokata, and so once I got out, I decided to make my way here.”

“How did you get here?” Akisni probed.

“I rode my bike.”

“No, I mean how did you find it? It’s not on any map.”

“I knew it was in central Indiana. I asked everyone I met if they’d heard of it.” Bullshit. I should call him on that, question him more.

“Can I go to the bathroom?” Tim nodded at the big glass of clear, pure water, now empty, at his elbow, before she could formulate a question. Missed my chance. She took a breath to say something more to Akisni, but before she could form words, Akisni stood up and walked out of the room, returning with a notepad and pencil.

After Tim came back, Akisni resumed the interview.

“What roads did you take?”

“I-75 all the way to Cincinnati and I-74 into Illinois.” Akisni nodded. Plausible.

“Let me take some notes.” She flipped open the notepad on her lap. “Tell me about the condition of the interstates to the East of us.”

“The few people who were on the road, were all headed North. The oceans are boiling. Everyone wants to get away from the Gulf before next year’s hurricane season.” Tim went on at some length about the degree to which the highways were compromised at different points along the way. He described towns in which the uniformed police had erected barricades which they used as toll gates to extort goods from travelers passing through. “Sometimes they claimed they were redistributing them to those who needed them more. Sometimes they just blatantly took your stuff and kept it for themselves. I lost my metal thermos, all but one pair of shoes,” he nodded at the wood-soled canvas shoes bound to his feet, “all but one of my cotton shirts, a nice wool coat and socks. I got beat up a few times trying to resist.”

DD couldn’t contain herself any longer. She blurted out, “What’s your game, Tim?”

Tim tossed his hair back. “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.” He tried a lighthearted tone, “I was delighted to see you. I thought you’d be happy to see me too!”

“Cut the crap. I saw your purchase orders. I know you were stealing!”

“What? Stealing? You’re crazy! I was never anything but a loyal and dedicated assistant to you! What’s wrong with you?”

“Really? Then why did you order three or four times more cultures than we could possibly use? And why didn’t the ID numbers on the cultures match the ID numbers on the purchase orders?”

He furrowed his brow. “Can you show me what you mean? Everything always added up.”

So brazen! “No, of course not! I don’t have the printouts here! What do you think, I carried them all the way from Texas?”

“Well, then, perhaps you’d better stop making unfounded accusations, because I know a lot of things about you that you might not want repeated in front of your friends here.”

What? What is he talking about? DD thought, taken aback, before realizing in a split second that it didn’t matter; since he was unhampered by the truth, he’d just make things up.

Then, she realized that her silence could be taken by Akisni for guilt. She was off-balance, instantly on her back foot. She was casting about desperately for something to say that wouldn’t make her look defensive.

So, this is how it felt to be on the other side of his attacks when he was running interference, for me, all those years.

DD looked at Akisni with a silent pleading. She shook her head “No,” abjectly.

Please don’t.

But she saw nothing yielding in Akisni’s obdurate gaze.

“I’m sure you must be hungry,” Akisni beamed at Tim. “Let’s go in the kitchen and get you fed, then Suzie will get you settled in to a guest room.” She led him that way without a backward glance at DD.

He said the ocean was boiling. Boiling? Surely not. He’s lying. Boiling!

LVIII.                  Can’t Quit Now

“Jesus Christ! What the hell do you want from me?” yelled Josh, his usual equanimity completely disrupted.

“I just want you to do it right!” screamed Jessica back. “If you don’t get this joint welded perfectly, it’s the weak link in the whole project. This has to be perfect! Perfect!” She pounded the arm of her Adirondack chair in frustration, restrained from surging out of the chair by an act of will. And by gravidity mingled with gravity.

“I’m doing the best I can! You’ve made me start over four times since breakfast, and the last three were just fine. This isn’t rocket surgery, it’s just a still!”

“Listen!” began Jessica. Then she gasped, and Josh’s attitude instantly changed.
“Jessica? Is it time?”

“Don’t change the subject!” Jessica snapped. “I’ve been having Braxton-Hicks contractions for days, and even if this is labor, Akisni says the first baby is slow. I’ve got hours yet. Bring me that pipe and let me inspect the weld again.”

Josh complied, realizing she needed him to humor her now, more than he needed to be right. He continued working on building the distillery for several more hours. During that time, Jessica reacted to a few more random jolts from her distended belly. “They’re more like squeezes,” she said around lunchtime.

The mealtime bell rang and Josh took her hand and leaned back to pull her out of the chair. He held himself back from his normal loping gait and walked protectively behind her. She waddled, spraddle-legged, ahead of him to the picnic tables. She tried to swing her leg over the attached bench and couldn’t get her foot high enough, and Josh bent over to help. This caught the attention of Suzanne, standing by the staging table, and Suzanne pointed it out to Deborah with a jerk of her chin.

Deborah said, “Josh? I know, but a bit young for you, don’t you think?”

Suzanne said, “Oh, I don’t know…twenty goes into sixty a lot more than sixty goes into twenty… No, silly! I mean Jessica. Look at how her hip is sprung!”

The two matrons made their way over to Jessica, the elderly Augusta shuffling behind them.

“Let me help you, dear,” said Deborah.
“Thanks,” said Jessica, leaning on the table and breathing a little harder.

“You in labor.” Augusta caught up, and she sounded quite certain. “You shouldn’t eat nothing,” she croaked.

“No, it’s just another Braxton-Hicks.” Jessica tried to wave them off.
“I’ll get Akisni,” Suzanne trotted towards the kitchen and the two other women fussed over Jessica, who went from annoyed to alarmed as the reality of what was about to happen sunk in. She gave up trying to swing her leg over the bench and sat down on the wood facing away from the table instead. Deborah stood with her hand reassuringly on Jessica’s upper back, and Augusta sat down on the bench next to her.

Soon Akisni was by her side. “Come on inside, let’s check this out.” Jessica allowed Akisni to help her up and began following her into the house, flanked by Deborah and Augusta, with Suzanne at her back. Halfway there, Jessica put her hand on Deborah’s shoulder and paused for a moment, bent forward with her hand on her belly. “12:21,” Akisni noted, flipping her grandfather’s pocket watch shut. “We’ll see how far apart they are.”

DD met them in the infirmary, where Akisni had curtained off an area to make a birthing room. She’d done her best to make it cozy-looking with quilts and pillows. A tray of exam instruments and sutures was on a table in a corner, next to a green metal oxygen tank. Akisni had everyone wash their hands. She examined Jessica’s belly with her on her back, on her side, and on her hands and knees, and she listened to the baby’s heart with a conical stethoscope which she called a fetoscope. “The baby’s head-down,” she assured her. “And the head isn’t engaged yet. That’s pretty common with the first baby. You’ve got a while to go. You can rock in the rocking chair, lie down and try to get some rest, or take a short walk if you like.”

Jessica plopped into the rocker. “I’d love some tea,” she said, putting her puffy feet on the cushioned footrest.

“Should she be eating or drinking?” Deborah frowned.

“It’s okay. She can have a little fruit or a light snack if she gets hungry, too. She’s got a long ways to go and she doesn’t need to get dehydrated or hypoglycemic.” The trio of crones headed for the kitchen to make tea. DD sat on the floor and began rubbing Jessica’s feet gently.

“Oh, mom! You have no idea how good that feels!” She groaned ecstatically.

“Oh, yes I do!” DD smiled. “I was working long days as a graduate assistant in the lab when I was pregnant with you! Support stockings and maternity girdles were my best friends!”

“And you worked right up until you went into labor. I know, mom. You’ve told me the story a hundred times.”

“I was always a workaholic. But when you came along it was like I was torn in two between wanting to be with you and wanting to be in the lab. You’re lucky, in a way, that you won’t have to go through that.”

“Yeah, mom, but what if something goes wrong? There’s no way of doing a transfusion, much less a C-section!”

“I know, honey. I know.” DD’s brow furrowed.

“We’ll do the best we can here,” Akisni put in. “Even though a third of births were C-sections before the machine sickness hit, most of those weren’t strictly necessary. Maybe one in 20 births really, truly needs to be a C-section to save the mother’s or the baby’s life or health. And for a young, healthy mom like you, with a baby in the head-down position like this, the chances are much lower.”

A contraction hit. This one was a little bit stronger, going by her facial expression. Jessica leaned forward, and DD stood up and hugged her head.
“Twelve minutes apart.” Akisni smiled once it was over. “And a thirty-second contraction. You need to rest and save your strength. This baby might not be born until tomorrow. We’ll let it take its time.”

So, the day went, DD and Akisni sitting with Jessica as the contractions got stronger and more frequent. Different residents popped by to visit after their day’s work ended. Jessica ate a peach and a few bites of dirty rice around dinnertime and sipped sweetened herb tea and water.

As twilight fell, the contractions seemed to change in quality as well as intensity. Jessica began to pant and gasp and dig her heels into the floor, breaking a little sweat, with each one. Juni came to the door for a visit, and Akisni turned her away. “And tell everyone else not to come anymore. It’s getting close now and she doesn’t need any distractions.”

DD watched her child, her little girl, sink deeper into the endorphin trance of labor. She thought back to the day—it seemed like just yesterday—that it was her in this state.

“Mooooom!” Jessica groaned, “I don’t want to do this. This is starting to really hurt. I’m so tired. I can’t do it! I just can’t!”

“You’re doing it, sweetheart!” encouraged DD. “You’re doing beautifully. Just let it go. It will be over before you know it,” she lied, as generations of mothers before her had lied to their daughters.

Akisni checked Jessica’s belly again and pronounced her fetus fully engaged and face down.

“OK, I need to check you from the inside. We’ll keep this to a minimum to prevent infection, but I need to know what station you are and make sure you’re dilating properly.” She was at the sink, lathering her hands to the elbows with soap three times, and then drenching them with alcohol from a bottle beside her on the counter.

Jessica lay back and Akisni checked her.

“Four centimeters and plus-one station. Coming right along.”
Jessica swung her legs off the bed to walk into the bathroom, and halfway there her water broke with a gush, producing a spreading puddle on the wooden floor. Akisni grabbed a towel, from a stack of white towels neatly folded and smelling of bleach, and laid it down on the puddle while Jessica went to the loo. Jessica came back and sat on the bed, and as she swung her legs up she began to gag and heave. Miraculously agile for a split second, Deborah managed to get a basin under her face just in time to catch to vomit.

Jessica lay on her side for a few minutes and the contractions slowed. At Akisni’s direction, DD and Deborah helped her up, and held her arms as she slowly walked the length of the room a few times, “It helps wiggle the baby down through the pelvis,” Akisni explained. A contraction hit and Jessica sank into a squat; the women automatically sank down with her and she wound up sitting on their thighs as the pushing urges hit her and her moans turned to grunts and groans. This happened twice more as they walked her back to the bed.

Jessica put her hands on the bed, but before she could climb on, her knees buckled. Akisni hustled around behind and dropped to the floor. “Quick! Get me that stack of towels! This baby is right here!”

Jessica was flat-out screaming now, a sound which brought tears to DD’s eyes as she handed Akisni the towels. My little girl is crying in pain and I can’t make it stop! Akisni got the towels spread out on the floor just as the infant’s slick black head made its appearance. DD sat and took her daughter’s hand, getting her own hand almost crushed for her troubles. Jessica whimpered as the next contraction pushed the baby’s head all the way out, and made panicky noises as the baby’s head turned in Akisni’s hands. Finally, the shoulders and the rest of the body slithered out, and Jessica gave a low moan of relief, burying her face in her mother’s hands.

Akisni dried the baby off, inspecting him carefully as she did so. “A boy,” she said, bundling him loosely. “Go ahead and get up on the bed now, Jessica, and you can hold him.” Jessica complied, leaning back on the pillows. The baby began to cry until she took him, meeting her son face to face for the first time. Once again, DD’s eyes filled with tears, this time of pride, as she saw the face of her grandson. She looked back and forth from his pink, wrinkled, perplexed face to the face of the grown woman she’d met, just the same way, in a time out of place and a place out of time, years ago.

The two women barely noticed Akisni gently guiding the placenta out. “Who wants to cut the cord?” Akisni asked, stepping over to the instrument tray in the corner.

“Oh no!” Akisni exclaimed.

“What is it?” Said DD fearfully.

“Oh, no, it’s okay. It’s just that the clamps are plastic and I guess the machine sickness got to them. Never mind, there’s some boiled hemp over there. I’ll just tie the cord off.” She crossed the curtain and retrieved the spool of homemade string from the infirmary. DD took the scissors and snipped the cord—it was tougher than she expected—and then helped Jessica put the baby to her breast.

“He looks like a nursing champion!” Akisni observed. She left the room and so did Deborah. The three generations of family were left alone to rest, bond, and get acquainted.

A little while later, Akisni returned and woke Jessica, taking the baby and handing him to his grandmother, who was sitting in the rocking chair in a sentimental reverie. Akisni checked Jessica and pronounced her in great shape, with no tearing and not much blood loss. “You did great!” She beamed. She, Deborah, and Suzanne levered Jessica onto her wobbly legs and stripped the stained bedspread and the waxed-cotton sheet beneath it from the bed, revealing a whole, clean set of bedding underneath. They pushed a three-sided crib up against the bedside and secured it with a strap, and DD kissed her grandson on the head—the top of a baby’s head is the best smell on earth—and laid the child inside.

The next morning, DD, still in the chair, woke with a start. Augusta stomped into the room as hard as her frail octogenarian feet could stomp. Still bleary from waking up to help Jessica nurse the baby and tuck him back in during the night, it took her a moment to realize she’d fallen asleep sitting up in the rocker, but the sharp spasm in her left shoulder blade confirmed it.

“What you name this baby?” Augusta demanded.

“I haven’t picked a name yet.” Jessica blinked, startled.

“You gots to name him now.” Insisted Augusta “Mama knows baby name when God give it the breath of life.” She drew closer to look at the infant’s face, then drew back in surprise. “Daddy black?”

Jessica smiled. “Mestizo. Spanish-speaking Mexican Indian.”

Augusta jerked herself upright to her full, intimidating, four feet, ten inches. She gazed at Jessica and the baby critically for a moment, then concluded, “You gots to name that baby,” and shuffled out of the room.

DD smiled wearily at her daughter. “You take your time. Have you thought of any names?”

“I have a few in mind: Amit. Sutokata. Ozark. Hunter. Stark.”

“Those are all good names. I like Ozark especially.”

The baby began to fuss and suck his hands, and Jessica sat up and brought him to her breast. DD watched her feed her son, DD’s grandson. I never thought this day would come. Not a day when the world was back to the dark ages; and not the day when my errant girl would be nurturing a baby of her own.

LIX.  Honor Among Thieves

Brownie rose extra-early on the morning of the 23rd. It was the kind of cool late-Summer morning which lets you know the rollercoaster year has well and truly begun its downhill glide into Fall and Winter, so he shivered as his bare feet hit the floor. He didn’t bathe or brush his teeth. He’d stashed his shoes under his bed, instead of leaving them in the mud room like everyone always did. He pulled on a heavy wool sweater and a knit stocking cap and crept down the stairs. Gillie was on patrol this morning; she’d started her circuit about twenty minutes earlier. Brownie had been watching her; he knew she usually ducked into the goat shed to warm up. They’d all been taking patrol less and less seriously after the raids had petered out; the last one had been five —or was it six? — weeks ago.

He slipped out the door and walked quietly out to the lab shed in the bluish glow of the pre-dawn sky. He stood in the shed doorway as his eyes adjusted to the darker interior from the dimness outside. He’d been spying on DD, Amit, and Josh whenever they went inside, so he followed the protocol: clean smock, clean face mask. A panicky moment when he realized they would see that the mask and smock had been used, but then he realized that the scientists didn’t keep track of one another’s comings and goings, so they wouldn’t notice an extra in the hamper, would they? He drenched his hands in ethanol and poured ethanol into a shallow dish in front of the door jamb. He slipped off his shoes and waded through the —very cold! —tray of alcohol. He gasped involuntarily, and then froze, afraid his sharp intake of breath would draw attention. A minute went by and nothing happened; he told himself he should relax, he was being silly. Everything sounded so loud in the early-morning tranquility.

He took a small, stubby test tube from a rack under a leather curtain. He opened a box, an unplugged dorm refrigerator, with bricks inside that had been heated the prior day in the stove. He took a flask full of cloudy liquid out of the box and removed the thin layer of lambskin stretched over its mouth. He poured a tiny portion, not even an ounce, of the liquid into the test tube, filling it almost completely. He located a jar of beeswax and fumbled with it one-handed, stuffed some into the opening of his little tube. He returned the flask to the incubator, hoping the temperature drop didn’t raise anyone’s suspicion in the morning; he didn’t know how carefully they monitored it. He exited the shed, stuffing the mask and gown he was wearing into the hamper as he left. He put his shoes back on and poured out the tray of alcohol. He squinted in the direction of the rising sun as the door was slammed shut behind him by a spring hitched to the doorframe, sounding loud as a gunshot in the silence, and he stifled a curse.

He slipped down the trail back to the house. Gillie exited the goat barn just as he was reaching the front door; he caught a glimpse of her in silhouette before she blew out the candle she no longer needed in the burgeoning daylight. With care to be soundless, he eased through the door. Then, he froze. The baby wailed! Jessica’s footsteps in the far bedroom, then a pause, then more wailing. Brownie stood still as a statue. What if she decided to just get up and begin her day in the crepuscular light? Could he slip back outdoors unnoticed? What would he say to explain his presence? But Ozark’s infant cries became muffled and stopped, as Jessica put him to her breast and lay down in bed beside him. Brownie stood, frozen, for a long time before he decided it was safe to move.

Brownie was back in his bed, apparently asleep, by the time the rest of the house’s occupants awoke with the sunrise.

The next few hours were excruciating. He went about his normal morning routine, hygiene, breakfast, chores, sure that his guilt was transparently obvious. At long last his afternoon patrol shift rolled around, and he went outside with relief.

Brownie had reconciled himself, years earlier, to sharing information with the Feds. After all, he was just talking. And nothing they were doing at the community was dangerous, or illegal, so as he saw it, the Feds were just being their normal paranoid and incompetent selves and paying him for nothing. And the money he’d squirreled away over the years had been nothing to sneeze at. That money, electronic markers in a bank that had vanished with the death of data, was inaccessible now, of course. Isaac was now paying him instead in antibiotics, sugar, and silver coins.

But this was different. This wasn’t just talk. Brownie had actually, affirmatively, taken action, stolen something from those he considered his friends, people who trusted him. He waited by the deer trail. Sutokata was, in a way, his only remaining family. He wanted to be rid of the ampule as soon as possible, and he was determined to tell Isaac that he wasn’t going to spy any more. There was no more Federal Government as such, from what everyone said; Brownie didn’t even know where this information was going, or who it actually was who wanted a sample of the new “battery bacterium,” as DD had described it.

Brownie handed the tiny test tube to Isaac with a quiet sigh of relief.

“You have to keep it warm. Keep it in a pocket close to your body. If it freezes, it’s dead,” Brownie said. “That’s all I know. It was hard enough to sneak into the lab shed and take this without making them suspicious. Usually only the three scientists go anywhere near there. And they can be there at any hour of the day and night.”

“Good work, Mr. Brown,” said Isaac.

“Yes,” a third voice said, “Good work.” Tim Schneider stepped up to Brownie. With a graceful dance step, Tim whirled, ending up behind him, and with one clean motion, slit Brownie’s throat. Brownie dropped to the ground, unable to gasp or speak, blood trickling and fountaining from the gruesome second grin beneath his chin.

“I’ll take that now, Isaac,” Tim said, holding out his left hand. In his right, he held a simple kitchen knife, honed to razor sharpness.

Isaac backed away. “No, sir. I don’t think so.”

“Isaac, are you disobeying a direct order?”

“You’re not in my chain of command. Lee Flatt was my C.O. and word is, you had a hand in his death.”

Tim made a sudden lunge for Isaac, who turned and ran into the woods. Tim started to follow him, but the smaller man had vanished from sight. The thorns and twigs snagged Tim’s clothing and his feet began to sink in the mud. Tim, ever fastidious, recoiled in distaste. He hesitated a moment, fury twisting his features at losing control of his prize, and then shrugged. Isaac, on foot, couldn’t beat Tim, on his bike, back to the camp. On the other hand, Tim couldn’t explain Brownie’s half-decapitated corpse to the Sutokatans. Tim cogitated rapidly; he could beat Isaac back to the protectee camp, ambush him there, and take the ampule away from him. He wondered what Lee’s superiors, who didn’t even know about Jeff, would give him in return for this prize.

So! Tim figured he’d better get moving. He ran back to the house and grabbed his bike.

LX.      For a Season

Snowbear, Akisni, Josh, Amit and DD raised tiny snifters of French cognac from Snowbear’s private reserve. “To shewanella!” they all repeated and drank a small sip, then leaned back to savor the drink, the moment of victory, and the company.

The heady liquid was consumed as much with the nose as the mouth, by inhaling the biting fragrance and taking minuscule sips. DD closed her eyes and savored the wood-smoke, caramel, gardenia essence.

“You know what I’m thinking?” DD said.

“Probably something obscene,” observed Josh. DD stuck out her tongue.

“I’m thinking about shewanella-powered radios. Hovercraft. Airships!”

Amit jumped in, agreeing.

“No reason we can’t scale up the drone. No reason we can’t scale it down, for that matter, if we can find a plastic-free way to insulate the circuitry.”

“No DOT or FAA to keep it forever in development with regulations!” Interjected DD. “No more ‘Where’s my jet pack?’”

“But why,” mused Akisni, “keep it to ourselves? It’s like sourdough.”

Snowbear snorted a little and nodded. “Sourdough. Spread it around and it will keep growing. The instructions are pretty simple to make the cell cultures. It could go viral.”

“Bacterial, actually,” DD corrected him.

“Whatever. The point is, if we want people to have the opportunity to learn to use it, we need to start spreading it around asap, before the weather starts getting really cold again,” said Snowbear.

“Yes, it’s easier to keep alive when the conditions are warmer,” agreed Amit.

“Not only that,” DD offered, “but this Winter is going to be brutal. Most farmers were using hybridized or GMO seeds. They didn’t have any way to replant last Spring. Then they lost all the technology they used to plant, cultivate, and harvest. Yields of grain had to’ve been pathetic this summer, across the whole country, just like they were around here. People are living on canned goods and crops in silos and warehouses. The bioelectricity has the potential to allow them to grow a reasonable amount of food again. But they have to get started. If people don’t have a way to return to modern agriculture, we can expect mass starvation.”

“Mass starvation means mass migration,” commented Akisni. “Like during the Dust Bowl, or Ireland after An Gorta Mór, the Great Hunger.”

“So,” Amit said, “there’s no internet to spread this around with. Who’s going to disseminate the new technology? It’s going to have to be done the old-fashioned way, by travelers bringing the word with them.”

“I’ve been wondering how my family is doing in Galveston,” admitted Jeremy in a seeming non-sequitur. DD caught his eye.

“I’m ready to hit the road again!” exclaimed DD.

“Are you sure?” Smiled Snowbear. “You haven’t been away from that grandchild more than a couple of hours since he was born!” DD frowned. She hadn’t thought of that. She dipped her lip in the cognac and licked it.

“No,” she said after a moment’s thought, “I’m ready for a trip. Jessica has been complaining that I’m too domineering. She needs some breathing room to come into her own as a mother.”

“Who are you? And what have you done with DD?” Akisni mock-scowled at her.

“I think,” DD said, suddenly introspective and serious, “that holding myself back from trying to track Tim down and kill him personally, with my own two hands, was my great turning point. I was torn between the need to be close to Ozark and Jessica, and the burning urge to strangle that son of a bitch. I realized after a while that, well, you just simply can’t be in control of everything that happens to you, or everywhere around you.”

“Wonder what Brownie did to piss Tim off so badly?” Josh idly wondered. They were all silent for a moment, remembering their fallen friend.

“To Brownie.”

“To Brownie,” they all raised their glasses, then sipped their cognacs. It trickled down their throats like liquid fire, kindling a glow in the stoves of their existence.

A few weeks later, they were ready. The two ethanol trikes were tuned up and loaded. Pages and pages of instructions on maintaining shewanella cultures were printed by hand lithography methods using homemade vegetable dyes and charcoal ink. The glass-blowing kit was running 24-7 making small sample lights, powered by bioelectric cells.

Amit, DD, and Josh still found time to brainstorm and tinker. “We’re almost ready to start testing out the miniaturized semiconductor colonies. Are you sure you want to go now?” Amit asked.

“No, it’s time for me to see the Gulf of Mexico again. I want to know if it’s really boiling.”

LXI.  Fly Away Home

Isaac crouched in the woods. The glass vial of shewanella culture felt like a lead weight in his shirt pocket. So fragile! This technology was too powerful for him to hold the responsibility alone. He had to get the ampule to Site R. Site R had been something of an open secret during his training, and he didn’t know its exact location, but he knew which county it was supposed to be in, and that it was on the highest ground for miles around. That should be enough knowledge to allow him to locate their security cordon so he could turn the vial of shewanella over to them.

The girl they called Jessica, no longer pregnant, had just pulled her little Vespa over to the side of the path and was picking something, the little purple Fall wildflowers maybe, by the roadside. This was his chance to get transportation to Site R! If he could get this ampule to the President before the terrorists took advantage of it, he could save his country! His chest swelled with patriotic pride as he imagined fulfilling his duty, as he’d always dreamed of doing.

Isaac ran out to Jessica’s scooter and swung his leg through. He started it and revved the little motor in one movement. A slight hang-up as he figured out the shifter, and then the scooter jerked forward. As it did, the basket on the back fell to the ground.

Just as Isaac bumped onto the gravel track, he realized what the basket must hold: Jessica’s baby. He ducked his head and glimpsed the child’s drowsy face, still smiling trustingly, in the sick instant before the basket hit the ground with a thump.

He listened for the baby’s cry as he pulled away, but heard nothing. He hoped the reason he couldn’t hear it was because of the sound of the Vespa’s little motor.

LXII.                      Loose but Lucid

The two trikes rolled into town on market day, in a cloud composed of dust and the steam from their ethanol-powered engines. Shoppers and traders, men and women in a variegation of pre-Sickness T-shirts and jeans and homespun hemp, cotton, and hand-tanned leather, clustered around stalls of merchandise and a few savory-smelling food booths. The inhabitants drifted out in twos and threes to eye the new arrivals. Jeremy operated the drone; it lifted from the back of his trike, swept a few lazy circles overhead, and landed lightly on the raised wooden platform that served as a community stage.

DD mounted the weathered wood steps easily. It didn’t take long for a crowd to assemble in the crossroads in front of the trading post. She swept her eyes over the faces, looking for Gabriela or Ed, Marthita or the other kids. She saw a few familiar faces, but her Ozark family wasn’t there. She was pleased that she didn’t see Juan either.

“It’s good to see familiar faces,” she began, timid.

Then she grinned; Jeremy had gotten off his trike and quickly dropped his pants. He pulled up his shirttails and flashed his underwear.

“This winter, my friends, is going to be hard!” She started over, more emphatically. Murmurs and nods of agreement.

“Back when we switched to PVC irrigation pipes, and started using herbicide on GMO seeds it seemed like mere details. Farming was the thing and we were still farming. It was just details. It was!

“The devil is in the details!” The people were starting to glance back and forth at each other, wondering where she was going with this, and who this crazy woman was; if it weren’t for the drone at her feet, she might have lost their attention.

“The devil is not in you or me,” she finished.

“Filthy heretic!” shouted a woman whose long hair and skirts marked her as Pentecostal.

“We’re all filthy!” countered DD. She raised her arm, as though to gesture, then sniffed her armpit and made a face as though at the smell; the crowd tittered at the crude humor and the religious woman frowned and huffed.

“People, we are all: you, me, even her—” she pointed at the holy roller— “covered with filthy germs all the time! The filthy germs everywhere make friends with our guts and make us healthy. The filthy germs that clean up oil spills have now eaten our oil and our plastic. But just as our hearts beat stronger when we have healthy germs in our guts, the heart of the earth continues to beat. Every blood cell circulates everything we need to every cell, tissue, and organ. We don’t know why it happens, but we don’t have to think about it. It’s the exact same way with the world around us!”

“You!” she pointed at a tall man, an alpha, the sheriff who’d been drilling the men in self-defense last Winter, a leader.

“You are a blood cell! I,” she thumped just below her collarbones with her fists in a way that vaguely suggested an ape, “am a blood cell! This,” she pointed at the drone and Jeremy (pants discreetly back up) took his cue, using the remote to lift the drone off the platform, and turning on its flashing lights, “is oxygen. It’s life, and breath. And you can have one yourself.”

Even though maybe one in ten got the gist of her raving, the crowd were interested now. Their body language signaled it as they leaned forward, chatter dying as they eyed the drone and DD.

“There are those who have said that people are a cancer on the earth. Scientists have said that cancer is caused by infections. The infection is cancer and cancer is the infection. But here’s the thing:

“The light comes from the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it. John, chapter 1, verse 5.” She paused, making eye contact with the Pentecostalist woman, who’d been joined by her bearded husband and their seven children, stairstepping in age a year or two apart from toddler to teenager. The patriarch nodded unconsciously, mama relaxed almost imperceptibly, and DD went on.

“The key to fighting off the infection and to outliving the cancer is change, change, change. We, as humans can remake, remodel, and regenerate. This world can only improve by changing. This technology represents change.

“You will tell your grandchildren about this day. You will remember this moment as the moment you learned that restoration is in your hands.”

She saw chests heaving in deep sighs, chins lift, eyes soften. She had them! She went on.

“The single moment when change takes place is an illusion. The process is going on continuously no matter how hard we try to cling to the way things are. It has changed even as we are perceiving it.”

Confusion; better bring it back to something concrete.

“I am going to give away five of these drones, along with instructions on how to make more.” The crowd began to jostle each other to get to the stage. “These drones are powered by a bacterium called shewanella that is easy to culture. It works just like sourdough starter.” A number of the women’s eyes lit up in familiarity. “I am going to leave instructions on how to keep it alive and how to build the power cells that use it. I only ask that those who take it promise to share the information freely.

“Whoa, there, big fella!” She drew her revolver and trained it on the man who had his foot on the first step. She did her best Mae West impression, “I’m happy to see you, too, but we haven’t been properly introduced!” The crowd tittered. Jeremy, guarding the remote between his feet, had a machete in one hand and his carbine in the other and was sweeping a little clearing in the crowd around him, the drone hovering right overhead.

“Everyone can—and will—have a bioelectric cell and the means to make more within two weeks, IF you listen carefully and do as I say. The five drones are hidden by the roadside between here and Little Rock. If anything happens to the two of us, you will never know where they are.” The front row of people, big men all, who’d shoved their way up front, backed away half a step and calmed down to listen.

“One of you will ride five miles south with us, and then we will tell that person where the drones and instructions are. You have the count of five hundred to pick that person. Pick someone you trust.

“I’m walking to my trike now.”

Shoulders square, she strutted down the steps and the crowd parted to let her through. She smiled a little smile to herself.

I’ve gotten to the point where I positively enjoy this part.

She stepped within Jeremy’s perimeter and the two of them straddled their trikes. “One hundred!” Jeremy shouted.

They’d repeated this scene from Indiana to Arkansas in over a dozen small localities and they had the routine down pat. They read this crowd as being no threat (there had been a couple of places they’d needed to fight their way out and leave the hidden drones to die undiscovered). The people focused on the stage where the old sheriff was calling for nominees. This crowd knew whom to trust, and Ed was pushed up front almost organically, like a cell performing exocytosis, and the sheriff just confirmed, “Ed? Is it Ed?” The crowd buzzed affirmation, and Ed walked over to the trikes. The count never reached two hundred. DD gave her old distilling mentor Ed a genuine hug, and the crowd applauded. She gestured him on behind her, and the two trikes rolled south.

“No one is to follow us for ten minutes. Understand?” Jeremy shouted again, and again the crowd murmured yes. As they passed the turn-off to the barn, DD caught sight of Gabriela walking along the road with the kids. She felt a pang, wishing she could visit her friend and see her cozy barn home of last winter, but instead she contented herself with a wave to the woman and children, who swiveled in puzzlement to watch them go by.

After they dropped Ed off with the list of hiding places, they continued towards the Texas border. They went far enough to outrun word of mouth and camped for the night near Texarkana. They went silently about the business of setting up camp, digging a latrine, and building a fire. The sun went down and the Fall cool settled over them; they made a simple dinner of smoked meat and fire-roasted potatoes, then sat quietly by the fire.

I’ll be the first to bring it up. It’s probably not even on his mind.

“That was the last of the cultures.”

“Yes. Yes, it was.” Jeremy, laconic as always.

“So, what now?”

“Well,” Jeremy said, as if surprised it was a question, “aren’t we going back to Galveston?”

DD paused. “No, I have nothing and no one in Galveston.”

Jeremy considered this a moment. “I guess not.”

I guessed right. No commitment. Never was. She searched herself for a sense of loss, of betrayal. None on my end either.

“I thought I’d go look up some old friends in Tallahassee, see how they’re doing and if I can winter with one of them,” she said.

“Sounds like a plan,” said Jeremy.

“We need to spread out the stuff and divide it then,” DD said, beginning to unload the saddlebags on her trike. She spread out a blanket on the ground to put their belongings on. “If we hurry, we can finish before it gets dark.”

“If we hurry.” Jeremy walked up behind her. He grabbed her by the hips and pulled her buttocks against his pelvis; his raging erection took her by surprise, but she ground against him. All at once, they were on the ground, struggling with breathtaking urgency to get their clothes off. To her surprise, she was lubricated and ready almost instantly and he found just the right place; a starburst fired inside her once, twice, and on the fifth stroke she was convulsed by a blinding climax which sent her out of her body for a moment, shooting towards the first evening star overhead, emerging from the dusky blue evening sky above her. She settled back into her body, opened her eyes, and watched Jeremy come, for the last time. She smiled.

Most things work better when you just let go.

LXIII.                  Constellation

Isaac felt his pocket. The ampule was still there, unbroken. He swiped his forearm across his brow, removing the sweat and blood trickling into his eyes, despite the night’s chill. He had only another half mile to go before reaching the Site R perimeter.

“Halt and identify!”

Isaac stopped, called out his name and ID number. The sentry lowered his weapon and escorted him to his CO. Standing by the CO’s shoulder was a man in a dark coat and stocking cap.

“I brought this culture from an enemy encampment.” Isaac held the ampule out in the palm of his suddenly quivering hand. “It’s the secret to renewable power. No one must be allowed to get this except our scientists.”

The man in black stepped forward. “We’ve been waiting for this,” he said, though Isaac, had told no one he was coming. The spook took the ampule and wrapped it in a cloth or tissue and put it in his coat pocket. He then stepped back and nodded meaningfully at the sentry. When the Commanding Officer saw the nod, he also stepped back.

Isaac swallowed hard. The sentry raised his weapon. Isaac was paralyzed by confusion. He’d fought and killed for this nation, killed good people! Innocent people! The infant’s eyes flashed in his mind, trusting in its woven basket until the moment it hit the ground. Had it survived? It didn’t matter. With a tiny shake of his head, he began to take a breath to speak, to explain.

Which he did not. Ever again.

The man in black pivoted, with a small smile, to return to the secure site. As he turned, a light appeared in his peripheral vision. A sentry, out of position, no doubt! He turned to hail him and command him to identify himself, and another light appeared. The first was about twenty feet away, the second one, forty, and his vision resolved a row of pinpoint lights stretching away from him, down the rise he was standing on and ascending the next one. Then he realized the entire far ridge was a constellation of tiny lights.

He furrowed his brow. He slowly approached the first light. He reached it and saw it was on the ground. He squatted and saw two small glass jars connected by a tube with something white and fibrous inside. The lids of the jars were also connected, by wires, and one of the lids was an LED panel, which was where the glow was coming from. He reached for it, hesitated, then decided to pick it up. He’d carry this inside and check it out more thoroughly later. Right now, the priority was getting the agent Isaac’s delivery to Birdwell. A shame about Isaac, but someone who acted with that kind of impetuosity couldn’t be relied upon for future actions. And there were no spare resources to support unreliable, possibly useless assets.

He took the device with him and entered the compound. He walked past the torches mounted on the walls and the lanterns held by the patrols.

Everyone recognized him and let him pass. He glided down the hallways, all the way to the main laboratory, which was one of the few places recently wired with their precious natural-fiber-insulated wires. Those wires only transmitted electricity, generated by their dwindling supply of fiercely guarded gasoline, for a few hours in the evening. He set the strange lighting device, if that’s what it was, down. He turned to Lt. Colonel Birdwell, PhD, and handed him the ampule reverently, mindful of the lives that had been sacrificed to bring this invention to be the salvation of America and the Free World.

“Here it is. It’s what you wanted. With this, the US can rise again to make a whole new world.”

But Birdwell was staring instead at the glass gewgaw on the bench beside him, aghast.

“What’s this?” Birdwell asked.

“I don’t know. I found it in the woods,” he replied dismissively.

“It looks like...” He bent down closer to look at the object. “It looks like a biological-fuel-cell lantern?”

“Yes? So?”

“This is a message from someone. A threat? The terrorists must be close to inventing what we are working on! We have to beat them to the punch, or the enemy will have the technology first and it will all be useless!”

“Should I send someone to bring in the rest of them, then?”

“The...rest...of them?” Birdwell said.

“Yes. The whole hillside was covered with them. I thought they were just toys or something.”

“Where?” Demanded Birdwell.

Minutes later, he was in the darkened woods. The jars each held a liquid with a square of something black in it; one was clear and half-full, the other cloudy and full to the top. The lights, strung out in the darkness, looked like strings of Christmas lights, something Birdwell never thought he’d see again, in these apocalyptic times. The LEDs were suspended in clear glass, instead of plastic. Several soldiers followed behind him with hand carts, carefully loading the lights onto the wagons to be taken back to the lab. He walked from one to the next, to the next, until he reached to top of the hill. And stopped. Because a line of lights went on, for at least a mile that he could see. He turned to his aide and instructed him to send for more soldiers and more wagons.

He stared at the lights for a few moments more. Then he turned to go back to the lab. He needed to think.

A soldier walked up to him and proffered a box. “I think you might want to see this, Sir.”

The box was made of plain unfinished wood, about the size of a breadbox, with a circular hole covered with a stretched piece of paper-thin leather. The speaker, for that’s what it was, was playing music. Then, a person’s voice came from it. It had been so many months since Birdwell had heard a voice over the airwaves he’d almost forgotten what it was like, but the voice, though distorted, spoke words that were as plain as day.

HELLO, AND WELCOME TO THE FUTURE. THIS MESSAGE IS INTENDED FOR ANYONE WHO FINDS IT. THIS BROADCAST IS POWERED BY BACTERIAL FUEL CELLS. THE BACTERIA WHICH MAKE UP THESE FUEL CELLS HAVE BEEN CULTURED AND DISTRIBUTED FREE OF CHARGE. THEY LIVE ON SEWAGE AND ROTTING VEGETATION. THE FUEL CELL TECHNOLOGY CAN BE REPRODUCED BY ANYONE WITH ONLY SIMPLE MATERIALS. I GOT THE FIRST CULTURE FROM A FIELD OF LIGHTS JUST LIKE THIS. THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD IS DISPERSED ENERGY PRODUCTION AND DECENTRALIZED CONTROL. ENJOY…AND PLEASE PASS THIS TECHNOLOGY ON TO OTHERS, AS I DID.

The music started to play again, the same soft rhythm and upbeat melody. It was a recorded message, repeated again and yet again. With only a moment’s thought, Birdwell knew what he’d find within the box: one of the biofuel cells, and a simple assembly of coiled wire wrapped in natural insulators, a simple hobbyist’s radio like those of the early 20th century, preset to one frequency, the frequency on which the message was being broadcast over, and over, and over. He would set his soldiers to finding the source of the broadcast, but he was willing to bet it would be unmanned.

Early the next morning, groggy from sleep, POTUS was being briefed on the development. Birdwell saw the shadows beneath his eyes and the furrows etched in his forehead; the dry skin and the vacant gaze testified to the stress of the past year and a half. He’d gotten where he was by being bombastic and overbearing, achieving what he wanted through a vast organization. The only thing he was ill-prepared for was a situation like this one, where his control was so limited and his underlings were so few and ill-equipped.

“But, this is just twentieth-century technology! Surely once we control the biobatteries, we can defeat wooden radios!”

“Mr. President, it may be simple twentieth-century technology now. But people who’ve had smartphones and insulin pumps and social media and, and, drones and dance clubs and light shows, and everything else we all took for granted until very recently, aren’t going to take long to figure out how to scale this tech both up and down, and make it ubiquitous.” Birdwell paused, taking a deep breath to quell the unfamiliar sensation of panic twitching to life in his diaphragm. “We have no control of who uses this, or where they use it. There’s no way to take control! The materials are cheap and easy to find anywhere. Even if there is some component which turns out to be more expensive or hard to find, let me remind you that we no longer have unlimited financial resources. We have no way to collect taxes: the people in the camps can’t pay them, and the people outside the camps won’t. This tech is not something fueled by substances dug out of the ground in far-away places, where we can control the flow of importation. Anywhere there are human beings, there is abundant fuel for this technology. The technology actually removes or minimizes the problem of waste disposal, instead of creating new wastes.” Birdwell paused, thinking about how an infantry battalion wouldn’t need generators...or latrines!

“This changes everything, Mr. President. Everything.”

Birdwell and everyone else in the room digested this in silence.

“We can’t control it.” Said POTUS.

“No, sir.”

“We can’t confiscate it? Monopolize it?” He said.

“It’s too late for that,” said Birdwell. “The cat is out of the bag. There’s no patent enforcement any more anyway.”

“Damn, I wish I still had control of my corporations! We have the protectees still. Can we set the camps to manufacturing it? “

Birdwell winced. “We could. Communication is spotty and slow, but the manufacture is absurdly simple. The main problem is that we won’t have the protectees much longer. The camps we are in touch with, those east of the Rocky Mountains, are mostly projected to run out of food in approximately mid-February this year. We can stretch the supplies, perhaps until April, but famine conditions will prevail after that.”

“They can still work if they’re hungry.” The big man waved a hand and made a dismissive moue. “At least we’ll be protecting them and giving them a place to live!”

“Yes, Mr. President.” Birdwell knew at that moment that the one-time leader of the Free World was too fixed in his thinking to grasp the reality of change, accelerating as it was, out of control, in fractal patterns. He was clinging to the mental model of power which he’d clawed and kicked his way to the top of. Birdwell had studied military history. He knew he needed to make an immediate decision between supervising a gulag spiraling into death, sickness, and violence, or striking out on his own. He eyed the radio, still parroting its message, and the light, still glowing softly on the countertop.

He closed his eyes. In the darkness behind his eyelids, he once again saw the string of lights on the hillside, stretching off like signal fires along the frontier of empire, into the wilds of the future.

THE END

Science Fiction— Caution: contains real science

The boundaries between science fiction and fantasy have blurred and merged over recent decades, but the recent success of stories like Andy Weir’s The Martian and Dennis Taylor’s Bobiverse books show that there is a persistent appetite for science fiction which is, well, science-y. Everything that happens during the Eupocalypse is based on real events and real technologies, which are being used right now, this very moment, all over the world. Below, in completely random order, are links to articles about some of them:

Operation Jupiter:

https://www.ul.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/2008_Review.pdf

General survey of OHCBs in oil pollution cleanup:

http://hzi.openrepository.com/hzi/bitstream/10033/19793/1/Yakimov%2520et%2520al_final.pdf

Non-scientific article about OHCBs in Deepwater Horizon spill:

https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/04/08/study-oil-eating-bacteria-mitigated-deepwater-horizon-oil-spill

Metabolism of OHCBs in Deepwater Horizon:

https://marine.rutgers.edu/dmcs/ms606/2010_fall/Valentine%20et%20al%20Science%20Express%202010.pdf

Shewanella-based microbial fuel cells:

https://vdocuments.site/a-mediator-less-microbial-fuel-cell-using-a-metal-reducing-bacterium-shewanella.html , and

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bit.25624/abstract;jsessionid=52415C268FC9BB3185227E679964E944.f01t03

Microbial fuel cells currently in use by the US Navy:

https://www.nrl.navy.mil/techtransfer/available-technologies/energy/benthic-fuel-cell

Background on patenting OHCBs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ananda_Mohan_Chakrabarty

OHCBs at oil-spill site in Bemidji, Minnesota:

https://www.mprnews.org/story/2014/06/03/bemidji-oil-spill-site-research

Background on deep-water oil drilling in the Macondo oil range:

https://www.nap.edu/read/13273/chapter/4

p. putida infections in humans:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20809240 , and

http://www.journalofinfection.com/article/S0163-4453(08)00021-2/pdf

Genetically-engineered p. putida used in industrial manufacturing:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221847539_Industrial_biotechnology_of_Pseudomonas_putida_and_related_species

Bacterial populations on human hands:

http://jwbrown.mbio.ncsu.edu/MJC/JWB_paper.pdf

Antonio Meucci inventing the telephone:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/jun/17/humanities.internationaleducationnews

A ton of research about goldenseal:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=hydrastis+canadensis

Watch It Burn

Peri Dwyer Worrell

Copyright© 2018 Peri Dwyer Worrell

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without written permission except in the case of brief quotations included in critical articles and reviews. For information, please contact the author.

This book is dedicated to those men and women who champion non-aggression, self-ownership, self-determination, and self-governance all over the world.

I.                 Double, Double, Toil and Trouble

Dr. DD Davis needed to make it to the top of the Hattiesburg water tower. The pumps at the top of the tank that filled it no longer functioned, of course. The PVC pipes that fed into the city water supply had disintegrated under the onslaught of the bacterial epidemic known as machine sickness. However, the metal rungs and rivets of the ladders and the steel expansion-mesh of the platforms were still in great shape, which made it a superb vantage point.

Survival rations on her travels had made her gaunt, and though she was weaker, her lesser weight made the straight-vertical climb less arduous. She made it to the top, scarcely panting, and scanned the horizon: to the west, the direction she’d come, lay the little lake and the cottages where she’d spent the night as a guest. Also west, the Interstate—now all but useless for travel, liquefied to its gravel base and flooded in spots where its drainage system had imploded. Beyond that, way out of sight, ran the mighty Mississippi herself.

DD had made her way from Texarkana to the Mississippi with little trouble. Local people weren’t so many generations gone from the rural Scots-Irish and African-American traditions of hospitality to travelers. All she needed was a place to pitch a primitive tent by her alcohol-fueled ATV. Not that she often had to settle for that. She’d stayed in barns, sheds, and people’s homes. There had been one spot of ugliness where she’d been surrounded by a gang of unsavory men who seemed like they might be thinking about making gruesome sport of her. She’d kept her cool while talking to them, resting her hand lightly on the grip of her pistol, until they decided nervously to look for easier prey. She had her rifle slung across her back now, and had slid her holster around to just above her tailbone so she could climb.

To the east, the sun had just risen over the small town. There were athletic fields in the brownish-grey of winter. The town looked almost normal from this height. Only the mottled color of the paved streets and roads showed the deterioration caused by the voracious pseudoalkanivorax davisii. It had gobbled up everything made of petroleum, spreading throughout the world like the common cold, travelling from machine to machine along pipes, wires and roads.

She imagined the world unchanged and felt a familiar stab of guilt, like the edge of a broken tooth. If you looked at an area for minute or so, you’d notice that the traffic lights were dark and the cars weren’t moving, disabled and abandoned by their drivers in the first panicky days of the contagion.

No people were visible from here. The neighborhoods of student apartments and middle-class houses were vacant now; those who’d survived mostly moved into the country, where food grew and water flowed. Those who stayed in the towns had clustered in developments with a lake in the middle, like the Cottages, or a pool that could be used as a reservoir. There are a number of ways of storing and purifying rainwater runoff; those who learned them, survived.

Those who didn’t were to be found in settlements like plague villages in Europe centuries ago: people dead in their beds, dead in the streets, dead babies in the arms of dead mothers; fresh graves next to half-dug graves, where the dying had outstripped the survivors’ ability to deal with the dead. Even months later, the stench was overwhelming. A feral yaller dog carrying a human femur in its mouth, had followed DD as she made her way through of one of these neighborhoods.

DD shook her head to rattle the memory loose and turned to the south. There, she saw what she had dreaded—what had brought her towards the Gulf to begin with. Since she’d fled the Gulf of Mexico (leaving the consequences of her mistakes behind), she had wondered what the machine sickness would do to the steely indigo waters and the life-forms within it; from krill on up the food chain to dolphins and manatees.

Tim–traitor!–had said the Gulf was boiling, and she hadn’t believed it until now. But now she saw a cloud to the south. DD had lived in this region long enough to know what winter clouds looked like: a dreary, high blanket on overcast days and little fluffy cotton balls on bright, cool sunny days. But these clouds were nothing she had seen before. They looked like upside-down thunderheads, a crazy funhouse-mirror image of those daily harbingers of Summer’s steaming deluges.

Boiling. Boiling! What have I done?

She buried her forehead in her palm. She knew it wasn’t strictly her fault: her assistant Tim (Curse him forever!) had pretty clearly substituted the wrong bacteria for the cultures she’d brought to Texas. He had done it as part of an elaborate scheme to cover his embezzlement (And what do the Chinese have to do with it? All those Sinopec transactions? I still don’t know). So instead of guilt, she felt just a deep regret that she had trusted Tim.

DD sat down criss-cross-apple-sauce, as her kindergarten teacher used to call the position. She sat on the catwalk to think. A kind group of people who had taken her in for the night, two families sharing an old farmhouse on a rise next to a creek, had warned her against going any further west along the coast than Gulfport. The Duboses and the Armstrongs had attended church together before the machine sickness hit. Two women and their husbands and assorted kids, stepkids, and cousins mingled together; DD hadn’t stayed long enough to get straight who belonged to whom.

But Tamika Dubose had warned her, “Don’t go towards New Orleans. People have turned into animals there. Your life ain’t worth spit if you go that way.”

All the adults agreed. Wayne Armstrong shook his shaggy red head and added, “That’s an insult to animals. Satan is at work in the big cities. People eating the dead before they can rot. Gangs running amok. You don’t want anything to do with that! I see you’re armed, but my advice to you as a woman alone: save a bullet for yourself. Let us pray.”

The table of adults and children bowed their heads over a meal of sweet corn, pumpkin, beans, and stewed chicken.

Her stomach rumbled now as she remembered that meal. She’d been rationing herself, nibbling on a daily handful or two of the dried fruit and crackers, toasted oats, and nuts in her pack. Supplementing with crabapples, boiling up poke or borage or dandelion when she could build a fire—even so, she was running low. The Cottages had ducks and geese, and they had successfully grown corn over the summer. They had plenty of hominy and eggs, but when they killed the fowl, they gave the meat only to the children.

Yet somehow, the canny and shy dog from the lifeless village had been waiting for her, not visibly thinner, when she left their homestead. She’d called it with her hand out, and it had lowered its head, wagging its tail and sniffing the air, then disappeared into the bushes again. But DD could now see the dog chasing something up the alley.

Going closer to the Gulf, it will just be worse. She knew that she was at the point where the soil started turning from Delta riverbottom (not the best soil, but workable with compost and sand tilled in) to silty loam full of sand and salt. All nutrients instantly trickled away and the earth dried to dust overnight when the rain stopped.

People down there would live on fish and seaweed. But is the Gulf dead now? No one she’d met had been able to answer that question. That means that no fishermen escaping the Gulf have fled through here. Maybe it’s not that bad.

II.             When Life Gives you Lemonns…

Before the machine sickness

LS3 Suzanne Garcia’s computer was on a folding table in the new concrete building. Her daily camo fatigues were getting tight in the stomach; soon, she’d have to upsize. She’d almost finished updating the database with scanned info on the last shipment of fresh ammo added to replace expired cases. All the colored columns were crosschecked and ready to be audited. The stale ammo was stacked somewhere on the docks, awaiting the next boat. It was time for her shift to end, and her stomach gurgled when she thought of hitting the mess hall. She had a huge appetite since the morning sickness had faded.

The corner of her mouth twitched ruefully. She’d hoped to have a real career in logistics here in the Navy, but a maternity shore billet would definitely side-track her progress up the enlisted ranks. Manuel wanted her to resign as soon as her tour ended and stay home; he was doing pretty good in his sales job, and said they could afford it.

But Suzanne wasn’t sure; her ambition might fade once she had the baby, or it might not. She’d friends for whom it had gone both ways, and some who turned even more ambitious, eager to give the child the kind of lifestyle they had been deprived of as kids. She took the nasty looks and whispered comments from her colleagues in stride. If she hadn’t known she could cope with sexist jerks, she wouldn’t have signed up for the military! For now, all she cared about was her hunger.

Once she got to the mess hall, she grabbed a fiberglass tray and a napkin-wrapped plasticware bundle. The napkin was empty, so she grabbed a second one. She slid her tray along the metal rails and looked through the glass at the lunch offerings. The first napkin stuck to her hand, so she shook it off onto the floor.

The CS behind the steam trays reached out for a sectioned Styrofoam plate. “What’ll it be?” he asked.

The plate he picked up stuck to the one below it. He turned and started to push them apart with his plastic-gloved hands, but the plates were melted together. He dropped the two into the trash under the countertop and picked up a third plate, revealing that it had a three-inch hole in it. “What the Hell?” he said, then realized his plastic glove was also falling apart.

Just at that moment, a series of loud tones, followed by a voice, came over the loudspeakers, “General quarters. General quarters. This is not a drill, this is not a drill. General quarters, all hands to battle stations. This is not a drill.”

Suzanne exchanged glances with the food-service guy, and they both dropped what they were doing.

Suzanne reported to her CO in the logistics division. The CO had a deep crease between her eyes, a hesitation in her step that spoke of confusion. After calling off to make sure they were all there, she had them stand ready for orders. At-ease with her colleagues, the unasked question was on everyone’s mind: who was attacking?

The assumption was: something to do with the Chinese Army base that was nearing completion on the other side of Djibouti. But they were in the dark until someone told them what was going on. And they were at the bottom of the pile of people who needed to know.

The entrance to the secure drone pilots’ work rooms was at the end of the long series of supplies-warehouse rooms. Standing in formation, all they could do was wait. When electric lights went off overhead, they didn’t break discipline, just patiently remained.

The doors to the drone rooms opened, and the pilots and all the techs and support staff emerged. That was odd; if they were under attack, why weren’t the pilots busy flying the drones back from their missions in Yemen, Syria, or Somalia, to assist in defense? Plus, weren’t there drones enough out at the desert airstrip to defend the base, that ought to be doing so?

But the pilots and staff just filed silently out. Of course, no one told the logistics people anything.

A jet engine screamed overhead, descending towards the runway at the adjacent airport. Background noise, on a normal afternoon. But then they heard a shrieking, tearing metallic noise—unmistakable sounds of a plane crashing at high speed, jarring the concrete beneath their feet with its impact.

They glanced around at one another, breaking discipline for just a moment. It was actually comforting to be able to stand right here, where they were supposed to be, knowing that they were doing just what they were supposed to do, as the sirens and distant screams and yells filtered through the cinderblock walls.

An E-3 messenger scurried into the room and carried on a frantic, whispered conversation with her LTJG, pressed a sheet of paper into her hands, and scurried away.

“Garcia. Bradburn. Parrish.” The CO called the three who mostly handled shipments of ammo, medical supplies, and emergency survival kits. “Follow me. The rest of you: dismissed.”

Suzanne followed LTJG Smith to the locked door which led to the supply warehouse proper. Smith ignored the electronic card scanner lock; Suzanne saw that its panel was dark. Smith dug out a metal key from deep within her pocket and opened the door. The four of them walked inside the area where their computers sat in the gloom, their monitors, the CPUs and relay hardware, all dark.

An apprehensive darkness started to infect Suzanne’s mood.

“Ladies,” Smith said, “we have no power. And we have every expectation that we will not get power back in the near future.”

“But the generators—” began Bradburn.

“Generators require fuel. The generators are fucked. Ladies, you three have the best idea of what we have in this warehouse right now. I need you to take paper,” she pointed to a box of copy paper on the floor next to a darkened printer, “and write down as much as you can remember about what we have, and how much. Be as detailed as possible. If you don’t know something, like an amount or a caliber or type or whatever, write ‘unknown.’ Is that clear?”

“Yes, ma’am,” the women chorused. They walked over to the counter to get pens. The one Bradburn picked up was in a gooey puddle of leaky ink. She noticed just before she grabbed it, avoiding putting her hand in the inky mess. Garcia and Parrish weren’t so observant, and each wound up with fingers stained and sticky. They wiped their hands on their fatigues. Bradburn handed them each a pencil from the cup on the desk instead.

Suzanne shook her head, looked at Bradburn. “There’s no fuckin’ way!”

“Yeah, well, computers are like men, aren’t they? You never appreciate them until they go down on you.”

Suzanne smirked. She could barely remember what she’d been cataloguing before she went to eat, much less creating anything resembling an accurate inventory. This is the US military! This is AFRICOM, the primary US military base on the entire continent… We couldn’t have been caught flat-footed by something as simple as a power failure. Could we? Her stomach growled as she set to work writing down what she could remember.

After an hour or so of the women working this way, heads down, the predictable happened: a medical corpsman came in, slightly rumpled and with a smear of blood on his sleeve, looking for the base hospital’s supplies to treat the plane-crash victims. He had a list scrawled on a sheet of paper.

Parrish looked at him wide-eyed, panicked. Of course she knew where everything was, but there was no way to scan the supplies out; there was no way to keep track of it. But she plainly couldn’t leave bleeding people and burned people and…whatever else…bereft of dressings and casts and drugs and sutures. She hurried to the back and came out with a laden cart.

The corpsman glanced at the signature pad where he would normally sign for the items.

“Just sign at the bottom here,” Parrish said, holding out the list he’d brought her, and he did. She took the list and shuffled it to the bottom of the multi-page stack she’d been working on.

III.        Bull in a China Shop

Hen Li sat. As Chinese prison accommodations went, the tiny room wasn’t uncomfortable. But Chinese prison cells go pretty far in that direction. It was large enough for him to walk, arms extended fully, from one end to the other. The bed was basic, but reasonably restful. There were two buckets: one of clean water, and one serving as the toilet. A silent attendant took them away and replaced them every day.

The boredom was what really got to him. He had been in here for four months now, with nothing to read. He’d been told by some of the old-timers that before the machine sickness—which the Chinese called something which loosely translated into plastic corruption—the residents of the facility would be permitted to sit in a common room and watch CCTV-13 for an hour after the daily meal of rice, vegetables, and occasionally a little fish or gristly meat. But of course, there was no television any longer.

Li thought back to the day, right when it was all starting, when he’d used the secure satellite phone given to him by his old Georgetown drinking buddy, Lee Flatt. He’d squirreled the phone away in his apartment for years. He was a little surprised it took a charge and powered right up, acquiring the satellite signal in a few seconds.

“Lee?” Li had said.

“Li? Hen Li?” Flatt had responded in amazement.

“Yes, Lee, it’s me. Listen: I can’t talk long.” He was pleased to find his English not too rusty. “But I thought you might want to know: the big oil platform Sinopec operates in Bohai Bay just collapsed for no reason. The workers were evacuated due to some unspecified illness the week before. After it was evacuated, they shipped a literal boatload of antibiotics out to it. Then the whole division disappeared from our payroll records. The company is pretending it didn’t happen.” He startled at a movement in the corner of his eye, but it was just someone’s wash blowing on the line. His heart was pounding. “Oh, my God. I’m terrified. I can’t do this! Goodbye, Lee, and good luck.”

Li thumbed the satphone off without waiting for a reply, or for the questions that were sure to come. He took the phone outside, found a big rock, and smashed it into tiny pieces. Then, panting from the effort, he carefully gathered up the pieces, dropping them into several open drains on his way back to work at the Sinopec accounting offices.

He had been skittish as a cat for a few days, afraid he’d be arrested. Then everything began to break down: phone lines, computers, cars. The roads turned to sticky cracking mush and then dissolved into a greyish-black liquid, which puddled on the ground and eventually turned to water. People covered their bicycle wheels with newspaper and rope and old clothing as their tires dissolved; they greased the machinery with shortening. Li still turned up faithfully at the corporate offices for a few days, even though he was just sitting with his co-workers and avoiding staring at darkened computer monitors—or worse, at monitors which were infected by their users’ contaminated fingers, slowly rotting outside-inwards.

After a few days of this (perhaps a week; things were changing so fast and he was sleeping so little), three MSS officers in dark suits filed quietly into the offices. As they passed each individual sitting at his desk and hand-writing or shuffling papers—even though no one had any work to do—each man looked at them. A pair of eyes would spark in recognition. The worker would stiffen almost imperceptibly and stare back down at his work as if he didn’t even notice.

Thus, the men crossed banks of open desks and entered the higher-status cubicle area where Li sat. They stopped, standing silently at the entrance to Li’s cubicle. Li sat immobile until one of them placed a hand on his shoulder. He turned in his chair and wordlessly followed the men out of the office building.

Once the interrogations began, Li had found himself unable to resist their brutality. He began to cooperate almost immediately, but they continued to torture him regardless.

After being punched and kicked, he had told the interrogators the truth about the satphone. While they were shocking his genitals and breaking a few toes and fingers, he had told them how he’d noticed the Bohai oil platform collapse and its cover-up.

The next day, the interrogators were gone. He had two new interrogators, who stripped him and poured icy water over his head, then left him in a concrete room with nothing but a chair for days: no light, no water, no food, no toilet. They would return and ask him questions about people he had never heard of, about things he had no knowledge of.

How long it lasted, Li didn’t know. Eventually, a solitary, silent woman in an austere beige dress opened the door. She beckoned him out, and he shuffled after her on quaking legs. She had opened the door to this cell and gestured that he was to go inside, then shut the door behind him, all without ever looking at him.

The clothes within were too big for him, but they were clothes. He drank, washed his stinking body as best he could, rinsing and rubbing his wounds with his swollen throbbing fingers, and then dressed. The plain rice they brought him that night was delectable, even when scooped with broken fingers and eaten through his missing teeth and swollen lips.

Every day was the same. He had no news of the outside world. His light came through thin vertical windows just outside the barred door. There were other prisoners on his floor, but after one pair were hauled out and shot for exchanging messages in a tapping code, they kept to themselves.

He started counted the days with scratches on the wall he made with a tiny pebble he found on the floor, but he was unsure how many days he’d been there before he started to do that. He had four hundred and twenty-one scratches on the wall when the attendant came one day.

“Good morning,” Li said. He expected that as usual, the attendant would say nothing, deposit an empty bucket and a full bucket of water, and leave with his full toilet bucket and empty water bucket.

Instead, the moon-faced, pockmarked old attendant, a man Li’d watched go from pudgy to slender while Li himself went from trim to emaciated, surprised him by saying, “Good morning. And good luck.” Li then observed that the man was empty-handed. The man turned around and walked down the hall towards the next cell, leaving the door open.

A sudden terror struck Li. He was confused and wary. Was this a trap? There were rumors of prisoners being released and then shot “trying to escape.”

His brain, fogged by a year of starvation and lack of stimulation, sluggishly turned over the implications. He rose and walked to the open door, holding his threadbare trousers up at the waist to keep them from falling off. One bare foot went out in the hall; he considered it stupidly, then stepped out with the other. Momentously, he was standing outside his little room for the first time in over a year.

He looked up and down the hall and saw others: wizened and hunched, hair and beards long and shaggy (on the men of course, though there were women as well) long and in disarray, just like his. They blinked in confusion, just like he did.

At the end of the hall, another door stood open; outside it, the light was considerably brighter. All the prisoners made their way slowly towards it, then gathered in the hallway. A small, stinking crowd looked through the glass window at the streets of Beijing below them.

IV.         Salt of the Earth

Ryan tightened the lugs on the last wheel and stepped around to the jack handle. He lowered the truck to the ground and stood back. The compressed cotton wadding inside the heavy canvas tires supported the vehicle’s weight. The lack of transportation overseas meant that Texas’s massive cotton crop was going dirt cheap…for now. He walked outside the shelter and took the two mules standing under the oak tree by their bridles. He led them between the traces and yoked them to the bar extending through the front of the truck, where the radiator used to be. Then he climbed in the truck, rolled down the window, and leaned out with his long, tapered whip. He gave it a little crack far above the mules’ backs and they started forward, pulling the truck out into the street.

Lori and Missy walked up the street from the beach just at that moment. Barefoot Lori was wearing a flowered cotton sundress and a straw hat, and carried a wooden tub full of seabutter. Missy had a half-crushed handful of yellow flowers and a wreath of the same blossoms perched on her kinky, curly mane. Her caramel skin stood up to the sun much better than her mama’s, which was good. Lori was always fussing about how she couldn’t keep a hat on the child to save her life. Even with the billowing clouds constantly rolling off the boiling Gulf, enough of the subtropical sun made it through the mist to burn crackers like the two of them.

Ryan pressed the brake pedal, and the reins pulled back on the mules. He stepped out, and the animals put their heads back down to graze on the sparse grasses in the sand.

Missy ran up to Ryan and handed him the fistful of flowers. He scooped her up and held the five-year-old on his strong right arm. “Daddy! We saw a live dolphin!” Missy burst out.

Ryan looked questioningly at Lori. “It’s true,” she said. “It was by itself, but it was definitely a dolphin and not a shark.”

Ryan smiled broadly. “Well, that’s just fine.” He held Missy under the arms and held her at arm’s length, then lowered her to his face to rub noses with her. “I was afraid you’d never see a dolphin, at least that you’d remember.”

Lori set the tub of seabutter in the pickup bed. “Let’s get a move on, honey!” She hopped in the cab. “I’ve got to render some of this before I can fix dinner tonight.”

Ryan handed Missy up to Lori. As he shut the door, he asked, “Whatcha makin’?”

“Greens and seabutter, stewed chicken, and fried potatoes.”

Ryan unconsciously patted his belly as he walked around to the driver’s side. Since the huge deposits of edible fat had begun washing up on the beaches, they all had begun to regain the weight they’d lost in the second winter, after the machine sickness hit. He was actually starting to feel a little pudgy.

It was nice to see Missy’s skin beginning to glow again; she was shooting up like a weed. Lori had talked to the pediatrician, who thought she’d likely catch up in her growth with no permanent harm done. The doctor was mostly worried about the lack of vaccines and antibiotics, but since people traveled less now, she said they probably had some time before diseases started moving in again. She was leaving to visit with some of the yarb women who lived in the country, traveling on what used to be back roads north of Houston, to see what they could tell her about doctoring without drugs. But she’d be back soon, and her assistant was taking care of the local couch monkeys in the meantime.

He once again cracked the whip in the air above the backs of the mules. He never reckoned he’d be a mule driver, a literal cracker like his great-grandpa, but here he was. Funny how things move in circles. The mules leaned into the traces, and they started off down the sandy track towards home.

V.             Security blanket

Jessica screamed and ran to the basket on the ground.

She had been completely unaware of the strange man. He’d appeared out of nowhere and stolen the alcohol-powered scooter as she gathered purple asters by the path. The asters were strewn now, forgotten on the ground. She sprinted towards the basket that held her infant child.

“Ozark,” she breathed, every millisecond that went by without hearing his cry lasting a millennium. The melon-thump sound of the basket hitting the ground echoed in her ears. She seized the basket, a woven cradle, and turned it over.

There was a bundle of blankets within. Still no sound. But no blood.

She crouched on the ground and began to flip the blankets aside, dreading what she would see. Her baby’s motionless face appeared. Oh, God! He’s dead!

But then he gasped, and his brown eyes flew open. One hand emerged from the blankets, fisted and quivering, and a horrid shriek burst forth from his mouth.

Jessica suddenly felt her eyes fill with tears. She gathered the boy to her chest and squeezed him, momentarily enjoying his wailing before she realized she was hugging him too hard. He might still be hurt. She laid him down on the ground and flipped all the blankets open, exposing his tiny, perfect feet and legs, knees locked as he howled in fury.

No sign of injury. Her worst fear was unrealized; she was just a mother with a crying baby. She picked him up and began to shush and coo him, gradually soothing and calming him down.

When Ozark was finally quiet, she heard the buzz of the little motor bike fading into the distance. She had converted that bike to alcohol herself! Furious, she recalled all the work that went into rebuilding the motor, replacing all the plastic insulators and gaskets with milk-soaked wool fibers. She was sad to lose it, but also angry at herself for being so complacent and distracted. It had been a while since anyone had tried to raid the compound, but that was no excuse for letting her guard down—especially with an infant to look out for.

Hampered by the awkward basket, she began the walk back to the compound.

As she got closer to the big communal farmhouse, she saw six of the Sutokatans standing together with their backs to her, gesturing with high emotion in the opposite direction. She had to pass right by them to get to the house; she would tell them about the theft of the scooter then. As she drew nearer, she heard their discussion:

“…fifteen or sixteen of them, I’m sure of it,” said Gillie. LaDwon nodded in agreement.

“And you say they had dug a trench?” Snowbear’s voice was cracking; the past year had been hard on them all. Age suddenly seemed to have caught up with him—looks-wise, voice-wise, and in a slight tremor detectable in his hands.

“I almost tripped over them.” LaDwon said. “They’re dug in right on the far side of the oat field.” Thinking about Snowbear’s aging made her look more closely at LaDwon. When she’d arrived, he was just a goofy, soft-spoken but sometimes smart-alecky, skinny kid. Now he was heavier: physically, putting on a thick layer of muscle on his shoulders, chest, and back; but also psychically. He had more gravitas, and his reticence carried more self-restraint than shyness. She realized how quickly boys turned into men, and her grip on Ozark tightened imperceptibly. She felt tears welling in her eyes: damn post-partum hormones!

The group looked up as she approached. “Are you okay?” Gillie asked, patting her shoulder.

Jessica nodded, sniffed. “Yeah, just mommy brain. You all look worried. What’s up?”

“Some militia-types have dug in at the top of the hill. We don’t know what they’re aiming to do. Camo fatigues, guns on tripods, earthworks on the side of the ditch. They must have dug at night, when our patrols were on the other side of the property.”

“Did you talk to them?”

“We shouted ‘Hello!’ But they just stared at us.”

“Okay. Here’s what we need to do,” said Snowbear. “LaDwon and Gillie, start at the northwest corner of the farm and work back and forth north-to-south. Ten passes at least to cover the acreage; make sure there’re no more nests. Josh, Murphy, start at the southeast corner and do the same, working east-to-west. Jesse, see if you can get close enough to their dugout to see what kind of weapons they have. If they have scoped-in sniper rifles, this could be bad. Jessica, take the baby back to the house and let everyone there know what’s going on. Tell them they should stay inside.”

All six of them found themselves obeying without hesitation. Jessica’s mouth quirked a little as she headed up the path to the front door. Snowbear’s voice had steadied and his hands stopped shaking. He’d assumed command spontaneously and effortlessly. She had a glimpse of the young man who’d made a libation from the juiciest part of his youth to the gods of war in the Vietnamese jungles and come home to search for the reasons.

Snowbear had nothing to do but wait. He busied himself working in the pen where their sheep had been enclosed for shearing. One of the gate hinges needed reseating—which meant replacing the upright on the gate itself. He hadn’t noticed it until the sheep were inside.

He whistled for the border collie, Vickie. She came racing from her resting spot under the back porch, instantly perceived the need to keep the sheep inside the enclosure with the gate now open, and dedicated her single-pointed attention to doing just that. The sheep pen, not coincidentally, had big trees positioned so that their yellow and orange autumn crowns blocked lines of sight to surrounding open areas. Snowbear was no fool.

Jesse came over to the pen, scratching Vickie’s head and letting her thump his legs with her tail. “Three M4 carbines and one Sig SSG2000 with a telescopic sight. The guy with the Sig looks like he might be pretty green, a collector, but there’s no telling for sure.”

“Right. We have to assume he knows how to aim it until he proves otherwise. The kids said sixteen of them. That right?”

“I counted fourteen, but it’s a pretty deep trench. Could be more.”

“Okay. Let’s get back to the main house and pow-wow.”

#

The next day, Josh and Amit went out to the compound’s biomethane generation hut. LaDwon, Jesse, and Gillie first took a series of shots at the siege force, giving the two geeks a chance to scramble across the yard with their tools. The pair disappeared inside for a long time.

In the meantime, Jessica was at work with Snowbear inside the woodshed attached to the house.

Around sunset, a series of events happened:

First, the three shooters stepped out and laid down suppressive fire again.

Second, Snowbear quickly wheeled a contraption built on a wood frame out of the woodshed. It trundled on huge wooden cartwheels and had a long central arm made of an entire tree that had been lying in the shed awaiting dressing and trimming . Snowbear crouched under the cover of a thick metal storm cellar door that was now mounted on the front of the primitive trebuchet.

Third, Amit and Josh dashed out from the methane hut with armloads of what looked like balloons. Of course, balloons were no longer a thing—all eaten up by the germs in the early days of the machine sickness. These were filled, tied-off skin bags, normally used for bottling milk and juices and fermenting the latter into wine. These were dropped at Snowbear’s feet. The two rushed back to the hut.

Snowbear signaled the three rifle-shooters. They kept the besiegers occupied while Snowbear loaded and fired the primitive trebuchet at them. The balloon flew at them and burst, and the obscene exclamations of disgust assured Snowbear that he had a few moments to reset the trebuchet for another round. The biogas plant received a generous flow of excrement running from the house’s sewage lines—and the balloons were filled with it.

The pair in the methane hut then implemented their second part in the plan. Unnoticed by the marauders, they had snaked a thin length of metal piping through the grass and vegetation. The lab spark-starter on the tip of the pipe was within a few feet of their trench. They opened the fitted brass valve at their end of the line, Josh’s hand drawing the fine bead chain taut that ran the length of the pipe to the fire starter.

The invaders had momentarily recoiled out of the trench to get away from the feces that Snowbear had flung at them. Gillie wasn’t sure, but she thought she might have wounded one of them. But they were definitely still showing signs of movement, taking off helmets and so forth. Snowbear smiled and loaded another bag.

Josh judged the moment, crossed his fingers, and pulled the chain. The result was delightful, euphoric, and terrifying: like the world’s largest ten-year-old boy had taken the world’s largest aerosol can and sprayed it across a cigarette lighter. The flames billowed out over the top of the trench. Another flurry of cursing activity was accompanied by screams from at least two men.

Snowbear flung another shitbomb at the trench. The bags exploded and splattered the newly-burned men and their compatriots with fecal material. There was, momentarily, no need for suppressive fire. All the Sutokatans retreated back into their home.

The siege settled into the tedium of every siege since the earliest days of human warfare. The Sutokatans were definitely the more comfortable of the two opponents. Sentry patrols were re-routed to keep cover from the invaders while still encompassing the rest of the perimeter. Jesse alternated watch with Gillie, each with their own scoped rifle, shooting at the invaders when they broke cover. The smell of their initial attack began to fade, but then the foul odor began to get stronger, and they occasionally caught a plaintive groan that told them their plan was working.

On day ten, a white flag went up from the trench. Snowbear and LaDwon went up to parley.

The sixteen men in the trench were in a bad way. Their latrine, a deeper trench dug at one end of their earthwork, was a reeking, splattered mess, as was the four feet of trench leading up to it. The men were pale, and several of them were sweating despite the cold. Three were lying semi-fetal, delirious, clutching their bellies. The two burn victims were the worst. Despite the best efforts of the one field medic in the squad, their burns had become infected with fecal bacteria. Having used a prodigious amount of water trying to clean the burnt men and hydrate themselves after the inevitable diarrhea, they had no clean water remaining in their giant tank.

They piled their weapons up at LaDwon and Snowbear’s feet. The other Sutokatans came out to watch them carry their injured and ill comrades away on foot. As they watched, they sipped home-brewed beer in high spirits.

Akisni, ever the healer, pressed her lips together at the condition of the burned men. “With no burn units and the state of technology available to them now, their odds of surviving aren’t good.” As the last of their vanquished foes trailed off into the distance, she looked down sadly.

Snowbear put an arm across her shoulders. “Darling, you know they made their choice. Actions have consequences. They have to deal with the consequences of the choice they made to attack.”

Akisni was silent at first, but being around the others, she couldn’t help catching their good mood. She smiled a little. “At least I’ll have the gas back on in the kitchen. I’m getting really sick of cooking on that wood stove.”

VI.         Prey Drive

DD stood up on the platform after a long session of contemplation. Her left foot had fallen asleep, and she held onto the rail at the top of the ladder while she rolled her ankle to wake it up. She looked down and saw her ATV right where she’d left it. She took out her binoculars and made a circuit around the water tower, carefully scanning the surroundings for anyone nearby: no one. She shifted her weapons and headed down the ladder to the ground.

As she was climbing down the last ladder, she heard the whine of a small engine approaching. Just as I climb down, they pull up? And they were nowhere to be seen when I scouted. Could be a coincidence, but better safe than sorry…

She hurried up her climb and jumped the final ten feet, landing in a semi-squat and slinging her rifle across her chest as she hit the ground. The small engine she’d heard was another ATV, rather like hers. It pulled up a few yards away.

The engine shut down and two men got off it: white guys with beards, one brown and one salt-and-pepper, wearing jeans and T-shirts, leather belts and boots, and bicycle helmets. They were armed similarly to DD—each with a long gun and a handgun, though the handguns were semi-autos and considerably heavier calibers than DD carried. One of them had a rifle, and the younger one carried a pump-action shotgun.

Odd, that shotgun. Most ammo for them is plastic, so most of them don’t work anymore; they must have brass or paper-cased ammo. No tats. No piercings. The helmets are probably a good sign. If they wear helmets, at least they have some impulse control.

She leveled her rifle, but kept it pointed slightly to the side. “Can I help you gentlemen?” she asked.

“Good morning to you, too!” the older man said.

“We won’t hurt you,” the younger one added. “Just saw you on top of the tower and thought we’d come over to check out our visitor.” He smiled, hands out to the side, palms forward.

DD smiled in return, nodded, but didn’t lower her gun. “Well, you’ve checked me out. Nice to meet you. I’ll be on my way now.” The men weren’t between her and her vehicle, but she’d have to turn her back to them at a forty-five-degree angle to walk straight to it. The gravel and concrete at the foot of the tower was rough enough that she didn’t like the idea of sidling over to it without looking. Too easy to get off-balance. There was nothing overtly threatening about the men, but there was definitely an edge in their expressions. Her feeling was that they hadn’t decided whether to bother with her yet.

She smiled even wider and made a show of relaxing, even as she kept her knees unlocked. She casually shifted the gun down by her side in her right hand, but she inconspicuously kept her finger on the trigger guard, watching where their eyes went.

They glanced at each other and chuckled, both holding their hands out to the side. The older one said, “Whatever you like, sweetheart.”

DD glanced down at the path to her vehicle, then sidled over, keeping the men in her peripheral vision. There was a good thirty feet between them now—far enough that they couldn’t rush her before she could draw, far enough that they couldn’t draw and aim before she pulled off. She swung her leg over her ATV and her weapon across her back in one motion, then smiled at them again. Looking straight at them and seeing no change in their position, she started her ATV with a rev and took off.

Her mouth was dry and her hands were shaking. She hoped that was that. But she got only a quarter mile down the road when she heard a whooping rebel yell and heard their engine start. She revved hers to its fastest speed. It was bigger than theirs, and even with her gear, they were a lot heavier than she was. She heard them behind her, but the sound got quieter instead of louder as she drove down the dusty shoulder next to the cracked and pitted asphalt of the street.

She breathed a sigh of relief and approached the road south, where she planned to turn towards the coastline. But she heard a rifle report from off to her right, and her relief was short-lived. The dirt kicked up about twenty yards in front of her. Someone was shooting at her!

She braked abruptly, almost vaulting herself over the handlebars, and scurried behind a metal phone-relay box at the crossroads. Her pursuers weren’t far away, and the shots had stopped—maybe this was part of a plan to pin her down.

She didn’t like what that implied. She pulled her belt knife and put it in her teeth, unslung the rifle again, and checked her handgun holster. The two men howled again as they approached her concealment, an unnerving sound—if I were that easily unnerved, but I’m not, not anymore.

She steadied the rifle barrel level with the ground, against the corner of the relay box. Both eyes open and sighting down it, she swung around on one knee, tracking them like a clay pigeon as she squeezed the trigger.

The stock wasn’t well-positioned and bruised her collarbone, but the shot was true. The youth who was trying to level his shotgun at her while Daddy drove actually let the gun fly out of his hand. The little ATV drifted around, grinding to a halt and flinging gravel amidst the men’s cussing. DD didn’t have time to congratulate herself. The two were momentarily defenseless before her, and she pushed her advantage, squeezing off five more shots. Now both men were on the ground, but at least one of them was still moving.

A sixth shot rang out. Not mine. DD shrank into the cover of her relay box. She listened for the other attackers and heard steps swishing through the overgrown grass in the big, empty lot to her right. The sun was behind them, and she needed to stay where she was. One of the two men who had chased her sat up, and she carefully took aim and fired. She actually saw the shot hit his head. He wasn’t going to be a threat anymore. However, the other group was getting closer, and she had no time to decide what to do. She had used almost half her magazine, but she had another one in her pocket, a full revolver, and two speedloaders.

She had another group closing in on her—unknown numbers, with unknown weaponry—with no backup, and no escape plan. She spared a glance at her vehicle. The three tires she could see were intact and there was no obvious damage, but in her frantic flight for cover, she’d left the key in. Idiot!

She poked her head past the left side of the steel box, then ducked back again. She then got a preparatory solid grip on her long gun, stuck her foot out where she’d stuck her head out a moment ago, drew it back, and dived flat, shooting two wild shots into the sun’s glare, in the general direction of the approaching attackers before rolling behind the box again.

Her foot successfully drew a shot, and her two shots didn’t appear to have hit anyone, but the rustling in the grass slowed just a little. She cowered behind her blockade with a sinking feeling. She realized her chances of getting out of this unharmed were minimal.

They only took one shot at my foot. If I’m lucky, that means they’re short on ammo. Even though people around here had always reloaded their own handgun casings, primers and bullets are hard to make from scratch, and so were in short supply. Homemade gun powder didn’t work well in rifles. That could be all they wanted from her—just to steal any ammo she had, any fuel, any food.

She breathed deeply and took the knife from her teeth, swallowing and trying to loosen her jaw and neck and avoid stiffening up as she lurked. She almost wanted them to hurry up and get it over with. Almost.

She heard the occasional rustle get closer. A twig snapped maybe ten yards away. Again, she took a firm hold on the rifle, mentally rehearsing her aim based on the sound. She stepped most of the way out, squeezed off four shots, and stepped into cover before any of them could get their weapons aimed.

None of them took a pot shot, confirming her suspicion that they were conserving ammunition. She had made a hit; she’d heard a sharp cry from one of the men and now she heard a flurry of activity from the same general direction she’d fired. Her mind processed her glimpse of the scene: the sun and the necessary brevity made it hard to tell, but she thought there were four or five of them. The one she must have hit was closest. The others were maybe fifty feet away and spread out between ten and two o’clock.

DD considered her situation. She’d heard of women saving the last bullet for themselves to avoid rape, but DD had never understood that; survival was all. As if being tortured, raped, and murdered is so much worse than being tortured and murdered. Rape is just another form of torture.

DD had been roughed up badly by her captors when they blamed her–rightly–for the machine sickness in the first days. But they had been trying to coerce her cooperation; they’d wanted her alive and talking. She held no illusions but that it could be much, much worse.

She slung the rifle and unholstered her revolver. From somewhere behind her, the damn dog barked once, twice. She heard a faint crunch on the gravel to the left side of her concealment and took careful aim at the corner of the box, about three feet off the ground. I may not get away, but I’ll take at least one more of the bastards down.

Finally, the first of them came around the box. He peeked around first, cautious because he knew she was armed, but his face was exactly the height she’d pre-aimed at. She neatly holed his forehead, point-blank, just as his compatriot came around behind her and grabbed her with his arm around her throat.

Instead of struggling or reaching for his hands, she kept her cool and let her knees buckle, weighing him straight down and throwing his balance forward, then raised her handgun and squeezed a shot behind her head. Blood spurted over her shoulder and his right arm immediately went limp, but his left hand grabbed her hair. With panicked strength, he threw her to the ground.

“Shit!” he screamed, clamping his left hand where his neck met his right shoulder, “You fuckin’ bitch!” Arterial blood spurted popsicle-red between his fingers. She rolled over, brought the gun up once more, and hit him dead-center of the chest.

She had two shots left in the little five-shot gun, and there were one or two attackers left. She was about six feet from the electrical box now, and she saw one man standing an equal distance just off the gravel roadbed, a wood-stocked hunting rifle leveled in her direction. She made an instant decision and fired at the muzzle of the long gun just as he squeezed his own trigger. Both shots missed, and she was rolling back towards the box as he vaulted up the little embankment towards her. He came around the box, and she squeezed off her last shot…a hit! But a short-lived win.

Someone seized her ankles and dragged her belly-down across the gravel towards him.

VII.     Get the Paper, Hon

POTUS rubbed his hands in glee. “Newspapers!” he said.

“Yes, sir,” said Steve. “That’s what they said.” The reconnaissance team had been quartering the surrounding territory in an expanding spiral. Their last report on conditions in the nearby village of Highfield-Cascade (formerly a bedroom community, but now a functional town, by virtue of having its own spring-fed water system). When they reported that the locals were actually generating media in the form of newspapers, POTUS almost did a little dance. It was the happiest Steve had seen him since the day they’d produced his wife and children.

Steve was overjoyed as well. His forte was public relations. The lack of any media, not just electronic media, was one of the most frustrating things in this new situation. Newspapers weren’t the internet, of course: they couldn’t be stacked with volunteer or paid advocates, bloggers, and commenters. Once something was published, it couldn’t be made to go away. But still, empires had risen, wars had been fought, and entire peoples had been massacred and imprisoned based on what was printed in simple newspapers in centuries past. A newspaper would have media connections with far-flung cities.

Steve had already made the techies build him a giant reverse-engineered biobattery-powered FM generator. He and some of the more talented aides were broadcasting live every day as the “Voice of America in America.” They’d actually had a few people show up on their doorstep looking for “The America That Has Been Lost.” Mostly people looking for handouts, who were praised and pep-talked and gently turned away—but some people with useful talents and skills had been welcomed to the team in exchange for room and board.

He got one of these to accompany him: Tyler, a former machinist turned amateur blogger, and they drove into Highfield-Cascade. Steve liked Tyler. He was one of those big, muscular young men whose size is the only threatening thing about them. Tyler, Steve sensed, would calm any situation he was in, and in favor of whomever he was with.

Heads turned as they drove down the main street of the little village in a full-sized sedan. Since they were making their own fuel, most everyone had gone to smaller vehicles. It ran like crap, of course; with no pickup or power and having been refitted for 100% ethanol, and being heavily armored, had no pickup or power, but it ran.

Steve and Tyler pulled up in front of an old 1930s brick building with its tall windows open, letting the sunlight and fresh spring breezes in. They mounted the steps and walked through the heavy wooden doors. The brass door hardware was tarnished and blackened where its plastic sealant had been eaten by p davisii, but the leaded-glass windows were intact.

Inside, someone had carefully restored the interior, scraping every trace of degraded plastic from the walls and windowsills—although the polished marble countertops and floors were deeply stained by the residue. No one was in the lobby, so Steve swaggered up to the counter and struck the tabletop metal bell’s button twice.

A man in the next room responded to the musical ring. “Hello?” said the man, his smile-creased face putting him well past retirement age. “Can I help you?”

“I hope so,” said Steve unctuously. “Is this the office of the Register?”

“Yes, Hello.” The man stepped out of his office and extended a hand. He wore canvas slacks, wood-soled shoes, a wool argyle sweater, and a collared shirt with horn buttons. “Lou Stonegood, editor-in-chief. What can I do for you?”

Steve took Lou’s hand in a firmly dominant grip and introduced himself and Tyler. The editor showed no spark of recognition at his name, which surprised Steve just a little, because he’d been in the news quite often as POTUS’s right-hand man. “I’m the president’s chief of staff,” he stated, arching an eyebrow expectantly.

Lou gave a quiet little smile. “Is that so?” He asked. “Well, come into my office and we’ll talk about that.” He turned and walked into the spacious high-ceilinged room. Behind a large, dark wooden antique desk, he took a seat in a big wooden chair with a metal base. The two visitors took their seats in leather-padded seats across from him.

Steve sat loosely in his chair and steepled his hands. “I’ll be frank with you,” he said. “You’re the first person to re-establish the free press locally, and I have to ask you: are you a loyal patriot?”

Lou smiled. “Of course.”

Tyler and Steve smiled in return. “Good.” Said Steve. “We’re looking for a way to get the message out that the USA is still alive and well. We trust that you would be interested in having exclusive press rights to the president?”

To Steve’s surprise, Lou didn’t act excited. “That would certainly be a privilege,” the man said in a neutral tone. He rose from his chair. “Are you regular readers, then?”

The two government men looked at each other sheepishly. “Not regular, no,” began Steve.

Tyler blurted, “I’m not much of a reader. I prefer video.”

Lou refrained from commenting that there were no videos available anywhere anymore, and instead stepped to the doorway. “Let me get you a few copies of the Register to look over before we speak any more.”

With the editor out of the room, Tyler said, “He’s playing it cool. Wonder what he wants?”

Steve shrugged. “We’ll find out in a few minutes.”

Lou came back in with three thin newspapers. “Here are the last three days’ editions.” He laid them side by side at the top edge of his desk in front of his two guests, nodded, and sat. “Go ahead and read them. I have some work to do while you’re familiarizing yourselves.” He bent his head over a yellow legal pad, the top page covered with neat writing that had been scratched out in places, with symbols and comments in the margins and carets where things were inserted. Like the President’s clerical staff, he used a quill with a metal nib inserted, dipping it into a bottle of charcoal-based ink frequently as he wrote. Unlike the clerical staff, he didn’t spill a drop of ink or smear the page at all; he obviously spent all day, every day, doing exactly this.

The main headlines of the front pages were the first things the men scanned:

MILITIA ROUTS MARAUDERS

BIOLOGICAL FUEL CELLS ARRIVE

ELEMENTARY SCHOOL OPENS

Tyler looked at the pages with interest. Steve grunted, “No pictures. That’s why the pages look naked. You probably never read a newspaper in your life, did you, Tyler?”

“No, sir.”

“This looks like a newspaper looked when I was a very little boy. No photos, all black and white…” He inspected his blackened fingertips. “Vegetable ink, I assume?”

Lou nodded without looking up.

“They’re big,” Tyler said.

“This is the size they were when I was a kid, too,” Said Steve.

“We couldn’t get the narrower presses to run without synthetic lubricants. Plus, they had electronic controllers. Had to resurrect the old mechanical ones,” explained Lou.

Steve unfolded the first paper. Below the fold, the headlines were even less exciting:

Farmers Market to Open Earlier

Tips for Best Ethanol Fuel Efficiency

Growing Corn Without Irrigation: The Indian Way

He opened the paper, finding it to be one folded sheet, four pages including front and back. Most of the inside front was occupied with recipes and quilting patterns. There was a four-by-five inch ad for a funeral parlor. He snorted. “People keep dying no matter what, don’t they?” The inside back was continuations from the front page above the fold, and the entire space below the fold was taken up by a single long story, entitled, “Visitor’s Tale from Beyond the Rockies.”

Steve reflected that people’s priorities had changed since the machine sickness hit: of course, survival was topmost in their minds. He flipped to the last page, figuring that was where the news of elections and public policies would be—even if they were local. But the visitor’s tale was continued on the back, taking up two thirds of the page. The bottom third was classified ads: LOST DOG; BARBED WIRE FENCING; FRESH EGGS; CANNING JARS; ADULT ARITHMETIC CLASS.

That made Steve wonder something and he flipped to the front. The price of the paper was in the top right corner, or rather, three prices: 1¢ silver, 1 amox, and 10 cal. He got stuck on that last one, but then realized it had to mean calories.

They had two more years of stockpiled food staples at Camp David and Site R, and vegetable seeds to keep their diet tasty and varied. Tending gardens kept the staffers occupied during the long doldrums between messengers. But of course, most people had few grains and starches put away, and those had gotten eaten last winter. As the summer sunlight began to turn golden and darkness came earlier, everyone’s minds had to be turning to what they would eat over the upcoming winter.

The other two papers were overall much the same. Tyler had picked up the one with the headline about the biological fuel cells and was reading it with his eyebrows up. The existence of the cells was need-to-know around Camp David, and Steve knew he’d have to warn Tyler about that. This particular paper could not make it back to the Camp.

“Mr. Stonegood, we’re prepared to give you full exclusive access to the President’s daily press briefings.”

Lou gazed at him enigmatically. “And?”

Steve said, “Of course, being that we’re still in a national state of emergency, we’d need to review the contents of your paper before it went out.”

Lou said, “Very well.”

“Great,” said Steve. “You can send someone up to the camp tomorrow morning for the first press briefing.”

“You misunderstand me, sir,” Lou said gently.

“How so?” Said Steve.

“I meant, ‘Very well. You may leave now.’ Sorry, I’m not always the clearest communicator face-to-face. That’s why I prefer writing and editing.” He gestured to the inky pages in front of him as he stood.

“Why? Do you have to discuss this with your editorial board? Your owners?”

Lou smiled again. “Come with me, gentlemen.” He led the way past the elegant lobby and into the back room. A behemoth of steel dominated the room. There were sorting trays of tiny square metal beads on a counter next to one end of the huge machine. An enormous rope wrapped around a huge steel wheel at one end of the machine and passed through a slot in the rear wall of the building.

A tall, grey-haired man in a rough canvas apron stood at the counter. He was picking the individual beads into the trays from a metal drum of some type using tweezers.

“This is our pressman, Gabe,” said Lou. “Gabe, Steve and Tyler.” Gabe nodded, but didn’t stop what he was doing to shake hands. “Gabe is probably one of a handful of living Americans who knows how to run a movable-type press nowadays. Gabe and I are the Register. We resurrected this museum piece cog by cog.” He patted the giant steampunk-looking device. “We can produce 2,500 newspapers a day, and we sell all of them.”

Gabe nodded in agreement. Lou continued, “The news we have in this paper is what people are interested in. It’s what they need to know, so they buy the paper from us. There’s no need to include anything more.”

“But,” Steve began, and paused. “But,” he resumed. “I couldn’t help but notice that you had no election news, no city council meetings, no political commentary…”

“And why would we?” Lou asked. “When the machine sickness happened, all at once people were on their own. The cities became Hellholes: rioting, bloodshed, starvation, violence, disease. Even outside the cities, people starved due to lack of food deliveries and there were plenty of raids on households that left them ill-supplied. And the police were among the worst of the raiders. The sick and elderly who depended on pharmaceuticals and things like medical oxygen, they’re no longer with us.” He stopped for a minute, his eyes far away and his mouth twisting in some private grief.

“But now, the people who’re doing okay, they’re the ones who not only had useful things and supplies set aside, and the skills to cope, but also–and this is very important! –they were the ones who were prepared to share and trade with others. No one is around any more, except for a few criminal gangs,” he stabbed his finger at the headline about marauders, “who wants to have anything but a win-win with anyone else.”

“That’s what I’m offering you,” said Steve. “A win-win!”

Lou interrupted him, his diffident temperament overwhelmed for a moment. “No. You are not, sir.

Do you think we don’t all know you’re up there? Do you think we don’t all see your messengers running through the area on foot or bicycle, looking paranoid and guilty as burglars about what they have in their pouches? Do you think we don’t know that you have food and water, and yes, sterile fuel, stashed up there?

“Do you think we care?” He shook his head in disgust. “The people who lived around here mostly worked long hours in good, secure corporate or government jobs. They turned their children over to the public schools (or private ones, if they could afford it), spent seven hundred hours a year driving back and forth on roads they didn’t own but had to pay for, in cars they didn’t own, back and forth from houses they didn’t own, and did jobs full of trivial, meaningless jabber in exchange for a paycheck. That check was in a dollar which lost value every year due to the nature of debt-based money, and they were compelled on threat of imprisonment to give half of it away before it ever reached their hands.

“Who stole that money from them? You did, gentlemen. And you had a nice pile of stuff for yourselves, too, bought with those hours you stole out of all these peoples’ lives. Still have most of it, I suppose. You can close your gates and post your perimeter guards and play your silly spy games with your silly messengers all you like. But in the end, you will be left sitting in the wrappers of the junk food you fed people’s minds for hundreds of years.

“You can take your exclusive press briefings, gentlemen…” He stepped over to the doorway. “And feed them to the squirrels. Let me walk you to your car.”

VIII. Visitor From Beyond

The Highfield Register, Wednesday, September 7, Year Two

Wendy Harkavy

The Rocky Mountains were once a scenic drive, hazardous only for those with bald tires or worn brakes. No longer! From the last installment, readers will recall the travails we experienced in crossing the passes—including bear attacks, rockslides, altitude sickness, and an ambush by bandits—along with the beauty of the landscape and the kindness of our hosts and rescuers along the way. Today’s installment will give a broad overview of our journey across the high plains of Utah and the deserts of Nevada to reach the West Coast. Each section will be expanded in future installments.

The Vast Desert

Once we descended from the mountains, we stocked up with as much water as our wagons could carry before crossing the vast deserts of Utah and Nevada. Cities and towns that once relied on water pumped from deep wells or diverted from faraway rivers are ghost towns. It was eerie to see homes abandoned and skeletons of dead beasts (and sometimes humans) everywhere. The roads are still paved in many places, though, because even the machine sickness bacteria seems to require a minimal level of water to survive.

Tahoe

We stopped and rested here before continuing. Coming upon the clear blue waters of Lake Tahoe after crossing the dry desert mountains of Western Nevada was like arriving in Heaven. The machine sickness has destroyed macadam in this wetter region, but many resorts and luxury hotels have turned into small villages. The dirt and gravel roadbeds are well-maintained by the local people. There are several large private compounds as well, and we were welcomed to one of these. The area has a robust militia to protect it from marauders who come from the north and west, and we will report on some of the frequent skirmishes and battles they have fought.

San Francisco

We were advised by many not to venture into San Francisco. Our journalistic curiosity took us as far as the hills overlooking the once-beautiful metropolis. Along with San Jose, the city was reportedly subject to a vicious wave of pillaging, looting, and violence following the machine sickness, due to the large number of very poor juxtaposed with the very wealthy of Silicon Valley and the city itself. Sources describe fires burning unextinguished—some for months afterwards—and millions unable to defend themselves from unspeakable atrocities.

Then the city was struck by an earthquake which was said to equal or exceed the Northridge quake of 1994. We interviewed a seismologist who said it might have been the strongest quake in two hundred years. The destruction was beyond horrific. We will devote an entire column to reporting on this quake and its aftermath. Little remains of this once-great city.

The West Coast

The entire coastal area is a wilderness of abandoned homes. The California Aqueduct ceased pumping when the machine sickness began, and the earthquake finished it. The steep coastal cliffs that make the coast so scenic became impediments to travel once the roads began to liquefy. The hardy people who remain along the coast make their living by fishing and foraging in the abandoned areas above.

Southern California

We stopped in Santa Barbara and turned north. Los Angeles itself is, like Las Vegas and Reno, almost completely abandoned, and the populations that survive are reputed to be savage and dangerous.

The Santa Barbara coastline, however, is quite different. The people there have limited but sufficient water to live. They were the best-fed and healthiest people we have seen, because they harvest a mysterious, greasy substance that they call o-fu (a combination of “ocean” and “tofu”) which washes up on the shore in huge quantities.

The Central Valley

After the machine sickness made life in the deserts and on the coast difficult or impossible, populations migrated to the Central Valley region. The area became crowded. The failure of pumps and plastic piping that controlled water flow resulted in serious drought over the first winter, and then severe flooding killed millions in the spring. Epidemics followed and killed millions more. The Central Valley was treacherous to cross because of all the underground flooding.

Sacramento

Like most cities, Sacramento suffered terribly when the machine sickness struck. Population was reduced to a tenth of what it was Before. Within a year, the area was inundated with refugees from the coastal cities. These refugees now live in camps, receiving a bare minimum of aid from the remaining entrenched population. Most of the established households in Sacramento are heavily-guarded compounds or homesteads along the American River.

California is reportedly attempting to re-form its state legislature. They hope to hold elections this fall, and convene the first session sometime in the spring. The government of the City of Sacramento attempted to commandeer our caravan, animals, and supplies, but once they were convinced of the importance of our documenting and communication mission, they were eager to help us in any way they could.

Oregon

Western Oregon suffered many problems of water supply and road collapse along the coast, similar to California, and their coast is less populated because the mysterious o-fu has not appeared there. Portland suffered the fate of so many US cities once trucks stopped bringing in food and supplies, but the looting and gang violence was apparently less severe than in many other places. The city was gradually evacuated in relative safety. The abundance of rain and firewood has enabled the population to spread out fairly evenly, and local sheriffs and militias keep the peace—even though there are problems with providing for a growing and diverse refugee population from further south.

Washington State and British Columbia

With no roads to channel car traffic, no computer databases, and no federal law enforcement, the national border is almost meaningless. The communities of Seattle and Vancouver have become even more unified than Before. Of all the larger cities we visited, Seattle-Vancouver is the only one that survived the machine sickness—albeit with about a third of the pre-sickness population. Due to the abundant water sources close by and the fisheries of Puget Sound and its bays, along with the area’s intact forests and timberland, many people in this area were able to shelter in place through the disaster and survive fairly well.

The largest markets we have seen since Before thrive in the city centers, with a hustle and bustle of humanity which was once commonplace but now is a rarity. We were cautioned to avoid going out at night, because this abundance attracts desperate refugees by land and pirates by sea. Indeed, we heard gunfire at night quite often during our stay.

Crossing the Great Plains

After wintering in the milder climate of the Pacific Northwest, we traveled to Alberta and then down into the great plains of the US. These areas were sparsely populated Before the machine sickness began, and the loss of air travel has made them even more desolate.

The First Nations/Native American populations in these areas have taken advantage of the situation. We heard first-hand accounts of massacres of entire small towns and rumors of captives kept as slaves in some remote tribal regions. However, the Siksikaitsitapi (Blackfeet) and Sutaio (Cheyenne) people we met were hospitable and kind. It was from these people that we learned that the o-fu (which they call “man chow” in English, or native names from their indigenous languages) appears to be produced by the machine sickness itself, when the bacteria degrades petroleum in cold, air-free conditions. Many of them report that they survived the first winter after the disaster by drilling for o-fu from the pipelines that crisscross the region.

After skirting the horrific urban wastelands of Chicago and Ohio, we were happy to return to central Pennsylvania. Please follow our story in upcoming issues of the Register.

IX.         Mano a Mano

DD clawed at the ground with her free hand, but the last man standing had a firm grip on her ankles. She couldn’t see him, but he was plainly a big guy. He dragged her on her belly, the gravel scraping her front, the gun in her left hand bumping along after her. She frantically kicked and twisted, freeing an ankle—which was quickly recaptured.

The brute wrenched her legs to flip her over face-up. She gripped the empty gun like a set of brass knuckles and kept kicking as hard as she could. His face was twisted in rage. He let go of her abruptly and stepped back, swinging his rifle up in its sling. DD had a moment in which she knew, with wordless and dire precision, that she was about to die.

But then her attacker seemed to change his mind. The shock of the near-death moment had thrown life into slow motion. She watched him shift his grip with both hands to the rifle barrel as dreamily as if she were watching a dancer spinning with filmy scarves.

He lifted the rifle overhead and swung it down with all his strength. “You bitch!” he yelled. “You fucking bitch! You killed him!”

She had just killed several men, so she didn’t know who “him” was, but this guy had plainly cared about one of them. She got her knee and arm up. The rifle stock hit her knee hard, making a cracking sound which she was sure was bone breaking, but the adrenaline kept her from feeling the pain.

The man pulled the gun away again. She noticed, oddly, that he had a week’s growth of blonde beard on a mesomorphic jaw. She rolled as he swung, and the gun bounced off her shoulder blade—relatively harmless this time.

She staggered a little as she sprang up; the knee did hurt, damn it. But the enraged primate was shifting his tactic, reversing his grip on the gun to ram it downwards instead of swinging it.

She barely flinched in time to avoid taking it right in the face. It hit her collarbone, and this time, she didn’t have to guess. The sick crack of the slender bone breaking was accompanied by iridescent pain. Her entire right arm went numb. She used the pain as a jet engine and flew at him, shrieking, swinging the revolver in her left hand and connecting with his temple with a satisfyingly loud thump that turned his head.

The dog chose that moment to interpose itself, barking loudly. The man retreated a step, stunned. DD dropped her pistol, grabbed the top of the rifle barrel between his two slackened hands, and used her knee to drive the stock right into his groin.

She danced back. If I missed the crucial bits, he’s gonna be one pissed-off redneck! But she hadn’t missed. His legs buckled as he grasped his crotch with one hand, keeping himself from falling using the rifle with the other. The dog closed in to nip at his face and neck.

I don’t have long. She was getting some feeling in her right hand, but she felt every single step to the ATV as explosions in her collarbone. She leapt onto the little vehicle, surprised but grateful to find she’d left it running.

Seeing her last foe still struggling to stand upright, she revved the vehicle at him instead of trying to escape. He looked up at her at the last possible moment, an expression of panic, and then went under her bumper.

The abrupt stop threw her weight onto her hands, elbows locked. DAMN, THAT HURTS! The vehicle lurched crazily as its tires ran over him, and the pain was so overwhelming that she had no idea how she managed to keep control. As she pulled away and sped off, she heard no shots from his direction.

About five hundred yards away, she realized except for the knife in its sheath at her waist, she was now weaponless. A quick decision, and she braked again—unable to turn her head from the pain in her shoulder, DD pivoted in the seat to look behind her.

Stopping was a rash choice, because if he’d been able to get the rifle up and was a decent shot, she’d be dead. But he lay still, the dog sniffing at him in puzzlement.

She made an easy U-turn, approaching slowly and keeping a razor-sharp eye on each of the seven downed opponents. She saw movement out in the grassy field, but from the disorganized thrashing, it was not a foe taking careful aim. Still, keep an eye out.

She stopped next to the two who’d approached her at the water tower. Looking down at them, she saw that her shot had excised a good chunk of the older man’s head. The son, if that’s what he was, looked like he had tried to crawl a few feet, but the trail of thick, congealing blood left behind him explained his death. Flies had already found it, and that little detail turned her stomach more than all the gore and killing.

She reached for the key, vacillated, and stopped the engine. More important to hear anyone sneaking up than to make a slightly-speedier escape. The adrenaline was wearing off for real now, the pain was breaking through. Just turning the key with her right hand took an act of determination.

She unclenched her teeth and realized that the man flailing in the grass was also whimpering and moaning incomprehensibly; she hadn’t heard him over the engine. An irrational urge to help him surged within her and was stifled by another wave of nausea.

She swung her leg over and dismounted, walked up to the stowage compartment of the men’s ATV, and popped it open. Her eyebrows went up: a whole box of brass-cased shotgun shells, as precious as if they’d been cased in pure gold. Also, two boxes of .45 pistol ammo which went with the dad’s handgun. She took the shotgun, the handgun, and all three boxes of ammo, and stashed them away.

Then she hobbled over to the electrical box, now pockmarked with bullet holes, and retrieved her own rifle and her beloved S & W revolver. It was not fun running out of ammo in that firefight. I guess I’d better give in and upgrade to a more serious gun, see if I can handle the .45. She hobbled back and laboriously secured the weaponry to her set of wheels.

She looked down at the dog, now sitting on its haunches and watching her. Her breath was coming in gasps, and the pain was making her dizzy. Her hands quivered as she pulled out her metal water bottle and struggled to get the wooden cork out of it with her left hand. She tilted it into her mouth and felt the cool water wash down her throat like a benediction. She made a kissing sound and poured a few drops into the depression of the ATV’s running board. The dog jinked up and lapped it, brown eyes liquid with gratitude.

It looks like I might have a dog. She sat for a moment, reluctant to move on now that the pain and fatigue were washing over her, but knowing she needed to.

X.             Setting fruit

October, Year One.

Senator Nathan Bedford Tyrell had been taking a well-earned break during the Congressional recess in the lobbyist Fred Murney’s rustic Ozark mountain retreat near Branson, Missouri, when all hell broke loose. The cabin was built to look like Granny Clampitt’s cottage—false log siding over modern insulation, knotty pine paneling everywhere, rocking chairs on the front porch, and a trail out back leading not to an outhouse, but to an oversized Jacuzzi on a separate concrete pad. The little shed, also built with fake logs, had a generator and two full tanks of gas along with emergency rations for months.

Even though it was in the mountains, the radio got pretty good reception because of the lake, which also gave the cabin a glorious view. When the news started reporting the strange adversities, electricity shorting out everywhere, floors dissolving into goo, he resolved to hunker down until it passed. To his mild disappointment, Sarah, the blond girl that Fred had sent up to keep him company, had stayed glued to the radio. She decided to leave when she heard about medical equipment failing— mom on a kidney machine or something, he didn’t know. She’d brought her own car, so he waved her off and settled in with another cold one.

He’d watched sports on the big flatscreen until the power and cable went out, then started the generator and watched DVDs. His cell phone was right next to him, all charged up, and they’d call him if the president called them back into session, or the party needed him to make a statement or anything.

He’d been up in the cabin for two weeks and was down to the last can of gas for the generator. He was also running out of beer, a more serious problem, and was starting to wonder why no one had tried to get in touch with him about anything. The cabin was isolated on a spit of land sticking out into the lake, the only house out here. One morning, he jumped in his Satin Cashmere Metallic Lexus 450H SUV and headed in to civilization to see what was up.

He reached the end of the mile-and-a-half-long driveway and saw that there was a deep, wide groove on either side of the two-lane blacktop road. A deep groove. He’d never seen anything quite like it. He got out of the SUV and walked out onto the roadway, noting that the asphalt was soft, like it had been sitting in the noonday sun in July, instead of early on a cool October morning.

He reached the groove, and found it was more like a shallow trench with irregular edges. The bottom of the trench was black and shiny. He walked over to the roadside, noticing that the asphalt closer to the trench had stuck to his soles, and got a stick. The black goo in the trench had a quarter-inch layer of water on top. It was several inches deep, and as he poked it with the stick, the stick broke through the soft bottom, and the water started to drain into the roadbed underneath. He tilted his head to the side.

He smelled the stick; a mix of the normal rich, macadam odor of the paving and another more earthy and yeasty aroma. He gingerly touched a fingertip to the black substance, which was like a thin tar or a thick paint, rubbed his fingers together to feel the oily texture, and shrugged. It didn’t seem dangerous to drive on.

He got back in the SUV, bumped quickly over the rut in the lane, and turned right. About a mile down the road, he came upon an abandoned vehicle—a burgundy Honda sedan. It was half-off the road, almost in the ditch, and all four tires were flat. The bumper was warped in an odd way, like it was sagging in the middle. Must have been a strange accident. He was able to ease around it without running his own tires into the trench.

Another five miles, and he’d passed two more abandoned cars, both with flat tires, and had to run his own left tires into the trench to get around one of them. He reached the main highway into town and put his turn signal to enter the four-lane road.

It was then that he noticed the gas station on the corner, the one where he’d filled up on his way to the cabin. Its sign was gone, the aluminum lightbox and pole caked in goo. There were two abandoned cars, one on each side of the pumps. The store was dark, its doors pried open, the glass shattered.

He glanced down at his own gas gauge: almost full. He decided it would be best to get to his office in Rogers, a little more than an hour away, where he could get the feel of the political scene, get his team to formulate a response statement to the disaster, and for Chrissake find out why the Hell they didn’t call me sooner?

The sound of his tires on the road was wrong, and the car had no pick-up. There were abandoned cars with four flat tires everywhere he looked. Some were on the shoulder, but others were just parked in the middle of the lane. Most had their hoods propped up, universal semaphore for “need help,” and a few even had left their doors hanging open.

A rising tide of queasiness began to lap right under his ribs, so he turned on the radio. It was set to his favorite talk-radio station, but it was static. Usually he picked up a couple of Christian broadcast stations on this stretch of road, but they were off-air as well. He pressed the scan button, and it went all the way from 89.0 to 107.9 without stopping once. No success with the AM band, either.

He passed some people walking on the shoulder: mostly solo individuals, but some couples and families. Most of them carried backpacks or duffel bags, children in slings or strapped into packs, but there were no strollers, he noticed; no wheeled devices at all. He finally saw one skinny college-aged boy pedaling a bicycle, but the tires of the bike were gone and replaced with some greyish substance. He couldn’t tell what without stopping.

Sure as shooting, after half an hour or so, he heard the sound he dreaded: the car lurched and wobbled as the first tire failed all at once, then settled into a rattling jitter as the other three followed suit. He steered straight and decided to get as far as he could; the SUV’s undercarriage didn’t sound like it was dragging, so he shifted into the “2” gear and rode the gas pedal. Crawling along at half normal speed, he made it most of the way to Rogers before the engine itself ground to a halt.

He made use of the remaining battery juice to turn on the radio once more. This time, the scanner found a station. It was broadcasting an endless loop of directions to area FEMA shelters, where people could go for help and protection. Tyrell frowned again, wondering why his staff hadn’t called him. He assumed there would be an emergency session if things were this bad.

He got out of his car and walked the remaining four miles to his office. On foot, he noticed things he hadn’t seen driving: the squishy texture of the asphalt, the way the painted road markings were dissolving into a reticulated pattern of cracks, the way plastic bottles were dissolving into the roadway itself, the pieces of wire left uninsulated, and metal belts left behind where treads had melted off the broken chunks of truck tires. Once he got into the downtown area, he saw that power was out. Some homes and yards had flooded: water-main covers lay open in front yards, and random roof tiles had melted, the plywood sheeting warped and separating underneath it.

He reached his office, a venerable stone building on the old town square near the courthouse, and found a small crowd standing around out front—all men. There were about twenty-five of them just standing around aimlessly.

He smoothed his plaid cotton shirt and hitched the waist of his jeans before approaching with shoulders squared. Quite a few of the men were known to him: Baxter Levine, the Lieutenant Governor of the local Kiwanis division; Joe Davis, whose wife Jennifer was head of the PTA umbrella group; Raphael Rainey of the Arkansas Sons of Confederate Veterans; and Juan Lopez, the head of Voz de Arkansas.

Tyrell clicked into his greeting routine, glad-handing and back-patting like the consummate pro he was. Like any politician, he had a natural-born, finely tuned baroreceptor in his right hand which, correlated with eye contact and tone of voice, reliably told him how affiliated a given person was with him.

This innate receptor array was sending alarm bells to his brain as he moved through the group. He noticed the men bunching a little closer behind him as he approached the door. The office was locked up, there was no sign of his three staffers, and he pulled the key out of his pocket. The colored plastic tab on the key was sticky, but the key still worked.

He put it in the lock and turned it, and as the door opened, a firm bump from his left surprised him. Baxter had bumped him, and as he turned his head that way, Juan was on his right and stepped forward, almost knocking him down. The whole crowd forced him into the office, his keys still hanging in the door lock.

“Where’ve you been?” demanded Baxter. “With all this going on?”

“And what’s up with the protectee program? Why weren’t you working with us to notify us ahead of time?” Juan demanded.

Another man, a sun-broiled farmer in a red baseball cap, said, “Where’s my family?”

Tyrell put his hands up placatingly. His mouth went dry and his heart pounded as he faced the array of angry faces before him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “I just got here myself. If you could just give me a minute.”

Tyrell turned right to look at the computer on the desk he was backed up against. The monitor was misshapen, sagging in the center of a puddle which radiated ripples in the shiny lacquer of the wood desktop.

Something hit him in the left side of the head, causing something to crack in his jaw and a sharp, blinding pain to knife through his skull. He slapped his hand to his neck and right ear, and the flinch and stagger was all the men needed to animate their ferocity. The farmer shoved him with both hands, sending him sprawling over the desktop. When he kicked out, his legs were seized and he was dragged off the desk, his head striking the ground hard.

Dazed, Tyrell thrashed weakly, but his arms were pulled out and he was borne out through the doors, past the stone pillars of the old historical building, and into the town square.

“Get him! Kill him!” someone barked. The chorus was picked up and passed around the crowd, and someone produced a length of stout rope.

That evening, a strange, outmoded drupe hung from the old oak tree in the Rogers town square. Senator Nathan Bedford Tyrell had become the first man lynched in Arkansas in over seventy-five years.

XI.         Girl Scouts

Hawa was running with the other girls. She was happy for a change. With the sheik in the funny hat talking to the grownups, who kept looking very sad and angry, things had been scary in the village. Mama told Hawa a lot to be quiet and stay away; the discussion was for grownups only.

This man wasn’t like the other sheik who came from the city and made sure they were going to school. This sheik came from the sea. The women walked down to the sea to get the seafoam for rendering, and there they were, he and his men. Their dinghy was pulled onto the beach above the tideline (ruining enough seafoam to feed a whole family, she heard her aunt say angrily).

Hawa wasn’t the tallest of the girls. She was only eight, and her cousins were all nine, ten, and eleven. Her mother said she would start to grow fast in a year or two, and then, when she got tall, it would be time to find her a husband.

Hawa wasn’t sure she wanted a husband. “If I get a husband, will I get sad and quiet and walk in the funny way married ladies walk?” Some of them didn’t walk that way, though, and Hawa wasn’t really sure what the difference was.

“No, child. Don’t be silly!” Her mother frowned.

“But when ladies get married, they have to do what their husbands say. Once I’m grown up, I don’t want to do what someone else says!”

Papa beamed at her and said, “That’s my girl.”

Mama, on the other hand, scowled and shook her head. “You mustn’t be so wicked, Hawa. You don’t want them to shame you. You want to be a good wife.” Her mother glared daggers at her father, who absently patted Hawa’s soft hair.

“It is haram,” he murmured quietly. “It is the old way.”

The man in the funny hat made all the older girls wrap their heads and bodies in cloth. They let the cloth fall back so everyone could see their scars and beads and braids, though. What was the point of being women and having the marks and braids and fine headdresses if they had to hide them? They were used to walking around with nothing on their tops because of the heat. The desert sun baked their skin to a vivid rich, dark color which Hawa liked better than the pasty lighter skin of the man with the funny hat and his men.

He wasn’t as light as the woman who visited from the city one time, with the man from the health service. She was nice and funny, but with her yellow hair and pale eyes, she looked like a ghost. The Sheik’s men also talked funny among themselves, in a language that sounded like they were coughing up phlegm all the time. She liked the sound of the Awar language better, and it wasn’t just because she didn’t understand the other one.

The man in the funny hat had called the men to a special council meeting for the men only. This was different, because the Afar tradition was for the men and women to sit on different sides of the gathering, as Allah willed, and discuss things together.

Papa kissed her on her head and whispered, “Come running to the council hut if anything bad happens.”

“What would happen bad, Papa?” Asked Hawa.

“You will know if it happens.” Papa straightened. Mama had entered their house silently and stood looking accusingly at Papa. Papa pretended not to notice, and stiffly walked out.

No sooner was Papa gone than Mama took Hawa by the hand. She pulled her roughly down the path to the house of Auntie Mayala. Auntie Mayala was a big, big, fat woman. Her house was twice as big as Hawa’s family’s house, even though Mayala lived by herself.

Today, there were many women squatting in the dust outside Mayala’s house. Mayala herself was nowhere to be seen. All the girls Hawa’s age and older were there with their mothers. The older girls were standing separately, whispering and glancing around nervously. Hawa trotted over to the group of eight-, nine-, and ten-year-olds, and they were soon engrossed in a game of jumping and counting.

Her cousin Koyna was soon to be married, and she had filed her teeth to points. Her cheek scars were in a row like rays of sunshine coming from her beautiful eyes, and Hawa loved her flashing smile. Koyna often sneaked Hawa a piece of cut fruit when she was helping with the cooking. Now Koyna looked uncertainly at her mother. She held the hand of her best friend for a moment and then slipped into the entry of Mayala’s shelter, where one of the women was beckoning her from behind the colorful cloth door. Koyna went inside.

It was Hawa’s turn to jump and count, so she got in the middle of the circle of girls. Their song rose with laughter and made Hawa happy. She was about to reach the end of the counting song and jump out of the circle so the next girl could have a turn.

A scream inside the hut silenced them.

“Koyna!” Hawa recognized her cousin’s voice. Koyna screamed again, and Hawa flew at the door of Mayala’s home. The women squatting nearby blocked her from getting near. She lashed out at them ineffectually. They grabbed her wrists and ankles, but she managed to break free as Koyna let out one more ragged, sobbing shriek of pain.

Hawa turned around and ran to the clearing, where the men were seated around the sheik with the funny hat. She almost bowled her father over as she vaulted into his arms. “Papa! Papa! It’s Cousin Koyna! They’re hurting her. Oh, Papa!”

Her father stood up, Hawa clinging to his neck. “I suspected as much! You have tricked us, Sheik Abdullah. It is haram, and you have made the old women bold with your Arab lies!”

Hawa buried her face in his neck, but not before she saw several men drawing their curved Qolxad daggers from the sheaths at their waists and running in the direction she had come from. Some of the men stayed where they were, but most of them were running towards Mayala’s house.

Sheik Abdullah pointed his finger at Hawa’s father’s face and shook it. “You should be ashamed that you abandoned your traditions so easily on the say-so of the people who come from the city. Sheik Musa and those like him listen to the ones who would violate our African culture!”

“You’re no African! What do you know about Danakil tradition? I say it is haram, just as the Musa says. He brings school things and medicine. What do you bring us but hatred and the tradition which puts our women in fear of death? I am taking my daughter home.” With that, her father stalked down the path to their home. He sat on the low bench by the remains of last night’s fire with Hawa in his lap.

She calmed her tears eventually and climbed off of him, sitting by his side and looking up at his care-worn face. “What were they doing to her, Papa? Will she be alright?”

Papa sighed. “It is a horrible thing, my child. But it is our tradition.”

“What, Papa? What is our tradition?”

Papa took a breath as if to speak, stopped, started again, and paused. He was plainly not sure what to say. He looked very sad as he finally answered her. “Do you know how a he-goat makes a she-goat have a baby goat?”

“Of course, Papa. I’m not a baby!”

“Okay. Well, to make sure a girl is pure, the tradition is to sew her…shut so that no one can make her pregnant.”

“Sew her? With a needle?”

“Yes, and a strong cord. They cut away everything down there and sew it up nice and smooth.”

Hawa put her hand between her legs, touching the soft folds of sensitive flesh there. No wonder Koyna was screaming! Hawa remembered how bad it hurt the time she was walking on a big branch of firewood, fell, and scraped herself there when she was little. She couldn’t imagine how bad it would hurt for someone to cut it! Tears welled back up into her eyes.

“Hawa, the people from the city who started the school, Sheik Musa and the girl Nejat, they taught us that it is not the will of Allah to do this. The Bedouins in the North used to do it, but they have stopped. It makes it dangerous for women to have babies. And it makes it…not nice…for a girl when she is first married. The Arabs across the Red Sea took the tradition from us, and now they do it more than we do. Since there is no more work and no more money in the oil wells in Yemen and Oman, they’re coming across the sea and bringing this custom back with them. It isn’t our custom any more, or it shouldn’t be.

“But Hawa, the women who had it done to them so that they would be good wives and mothers, the ones who sacrificed so much to bring pride to their families instead of shame—like your mother—they don’t see it that way. They want their daughters to follow the Afar tradition and be like them, and their mothers before them, and their grandmothers before them. They see the girls who don’t go through it as weak and evil. I will not let this happen to you. We will stay right here until it is all over. Don’t worry.”

The men had reached Mayala’s home, running with their curved daggers in their hands, the scabbards flapping empty at their waists. They burst from the low, dry brush and found the girls clustered in bunches by age.

The women were just carrying Koyna out, six of them gripping the edges of a mat made of layers of cloth and woven reeds. The girl lay moaning in the center of the folded mat. The women carried her to the shade of the canopy constructed next to the home and gently lowered her to the ground. Her legs were bound together from ankle to hip with wide white strips of bandaging. Her big toes were tied together with the special white string, tied in a special fancy bow. There was a trail of dripped and dried blood on the top of her right foot.

Yemane pushed his way through the clot of adult women standing near the girl. “What are you doing?” Well-respected and almost forty, Yemane was the biggest man there, with broad shoulders and an imposing presence. “Not even Sunna, but the full job? You know this is haram! Where is the girl’s father?”

Koyna’s father was nowhere to be seen. Her mother crouched by her daughter’s head with a cool cloth to soothe her, pointedly ignoring Yemane.

As he approached, Koyna’s mother stood. “I will not have my daughter be a whore!” She spat the words out with fury. “I went through this, and every one of these women did! We see what becomes of girls who’re not closed. Remember when they paraded Zehara through the village as a slut? I will not have that happen to my Koyna. You would have a whole generation of our girls be whores!” She waved her arms to encompass the whole crowd of young females—from teenagers to toddlers—around the clearing. “It has been fourteen years since one of our girls has had the artful touch of Mayala, and the other Afar people are saying in the Dagu that this is where to come for a whore, not a wife! They’re calling us prostitutes, do you understand?”

“I understand enough, woman!” Yemane said, brandishing his blade. Yet, he hesitated slightly, recalling the young men from the next village who had taken to hanging out in the open country, where the footworn paths of their village faded into the dust.

The women and men recoiled from Yemane’s blade, fearing bloodshed, but Sheik Abdullah’s voice broke through. “It is not haram. It is halal. It is the right thing to make sure that your women are pure and not wanton.”

In the silence, several of the teen girls caught one another’s eyes. They seized up toddlers and young girls in their arms and ran off into the bush.

Hawa clung to her father, but she flinched when the cloth over the low doorway was pushed aside. She gripped her father’s shirt convulsively. She looked up, and there stood two of the older girls.

“Give her to us. We will take her to Musa,” one of the girls said. Hawa’s father gently pried her fingers away and gave her a push. The two teenagers each grabbed an arm and dragged her outside. Her father changed his mind and started after them, but by the time he got out the door, the three girls were gone, running silently on swift bare feet.

XII.     Shanghaied

Hen Li stood among the prisoners, silently blinking in the hallway. They were in the trance of near-starvation, swaying gently on bare feet, ragged clothing hanging on their emaciated bodies. It slowly began to penetrate their awareness that their captors had freed them and left, and that the doors were open. They looked out the window at the streets of Beijing: once teeming with life but now all but deserted, all the signage melted or fallen to pieces, autos and bicycles scattered everywhere, like some giant had tossed a handful of cars like dice and walked away. Blackened, blank spots in the urban landscape lay like teeth lost from the city’s once-lovely face.

Finally, a middle-aged woman pressed the bar on the stairwell door. It opened. She stepped onto the darkened landing and faltered, holding the door open while waiting for her sluggish, hungry irises to accommodate to the gloom. A young man came behind her and put his hand on the door, holding it open. She faltered towards the freedom of the steps, her hand held ahead reaching for the railing. She lowered one foot over the first stairstep, glanced back, and descended into the obscurity.

The rest of the prisoners followed in single file, more or less in silence. An occasional grunt or apology came as someone slipped or stumbled into a thing or person—but really, what was there to say? No one knew anything. Li joined the line and began the long journey down.

When they emerged onto the street below, they saw other signs of the machine sickness’s devastation: all the vehicles had tires that were flat or absent, and the asphalt streets were now just gravel blackened with the residue of the devouring bacteria. Where wires fed from utility poles into buildings, there were scorch marks from short circuits and small fires where insulation had dissolved. The wires themselves were naked. Pried open by the starving, a row of café-style eateries lay devastated.

Li sighed. He remembered how proud he had been to walk the streets of this jewel of a city as a boy. He remembered the beggars and gaunt peasants of his youth, and the polo shirts, smartphones, high heels, and bright paper shopping bags of the early twenty-first-century boom.

The others began to wander off in various directions, free at last and seeking who knew what. Li thought about what he wanted to do. He had mulled things over and over in his mind in the many months he had spent in captivity, and it seemed likeliest to him that the devastation was related to the platform collapse. His interrogators certainly appeared to think so. He had no idea what had become of his wife or children, but his apartment was in between this office building and the bay, so he started towards the docks.

It was a long walk, and he was barefoot. While the sidewalks were mostly intact, crossing the darkened gravel streetbeds was hard on his feet—soft and tender after so much disuse. Freedom, which he had so desperately yearned for, was physically painful. It was helpful that he had lost so much weight during his imprisonment, though, so the rocks did not press so hard. Finally, he remembered that the street two blocks over was a no-car pedestrian mall, paved with concrete flagstones instead of asphalt, so he turned down an alley to cut in that direction. The buildings on either side were so close he could almost reach them with his outstretched hands. Everything was so quiet!

A pathetically starved dog darted out of an empty doorway, sniffed the air, and shied away at a run before Li could react. Still, Li smiled to see a living thing. The smile left his face abruptly, though, as he heard a footfall behind him and turned around.

A man wearing western jeans and a polo shirt with incongruous traditional woven sandals, stood scowling. “What are you doing here?” The man said.

“Just walking home,” responded Li.

“Who gave you permission?” The man was a good five inches taller than Li, and looked as though he hadn’t missed many meals—or workouts.

“I didn’t know I needed…” Li began, but two other men had walked up behind him to the right and left, almost touching him, but not quite.

“Come with us.” The big man nodded, and his two friends took Li’s upper arms, their meaty hands wrapping almost fully around his wasted biceps.

The group set off in the direction Li had been going. He had no energy to resist, and he was habituated to submission by now. He went along without comment, starvation-dizzied by their strolling pace, panting like a racer.

When the four men reached the pedestrian street Li had been headed for, he gratefully stepped up onto the flagstones and followed them to an open storefront. Li halted in front of the store, seeing broken glass everywhere. His two escorts lifted him between them like a doll and carried him through the looted, empty shop and into the back room.

There, they set him on a wood bench facing a long, rough, wooden table. A number of other men sat at the table—some of them looking gaunt and dazed, others who looked more fit and better fed sporting bleeding head wounds, broken noses, or black eyes.

Someone put a bowl of watery rice soup in front of Li, and a spoon in his hand. For a few minutes, there was nothing else in the world for him except that bowl of food. When he finally looked up, he realized that all the other men had been fed as well, and were as engrossed in the measly meal as he was. Li was reminded of the stories his grandmother used to tell about the famines of the Great Leap Forward—whole cities full of people relocated to the agricultural collectives, where they’d be sitting at communal tables like this after working all day, served a quantity of food which wouldn’t sustain a toddler.

Then a man began making a round of the room holding a basket. He reached into the basket and dropped some sort of brownish lump in each man’s bowl. Li’s eyes lit up as he saw what landed in front of him: a whole sweet potato! He hadn’t seen a sweet potato since he was arrested. It was browned, and its peel burnt and flaky where it had sat over a grill. Li momentarily flashed back to himself as a child, pestering his mother to buy him a sweet potato from a vendor in the street. His mouth watered.

The men around the table actually laughed a bit, watching each other trying to peel the hot potatoes without burning their fingers. Once they all were finished and smiling, the tall man who had first confronted Li addressed them all.

“Welcome to the Older Brother Clubhouse.” he began. “You are all privileged to be recruited as Older Brothers to visit the fiery South!”

Li wasn’t following this, and judging by the expressions on some of his tablemates’ faces, neither were they.

“Our Little Brothers in the South have not been able to benefit like we have from the falling away. We’re taking a trip to discover why this is.”

Li’s neighbor finally broke the code for him in a whisper: “Shuo Meng here believes the rumors that Africa still has plastic and gasoline. We’re all going to Africa to try to get them.”

Of course, this left Li with more questions that would have to go unanswered. Why did Meng believe this about Africa? If it was true, why weren’t African countries invading the rest of the world? How would it happen that they were immune to the machine sickness anyway?

And of course, Africa was a big place. Where in Africa was he taking them? Now that his stomach was fuller than it had been in many months, his mind was beginning to function again, and he was able to wonder and speculate beyond the next hour.

All the men were beginning to stand up from the benches, so Li followed suit. Once they were all standing, one of the sergeants who had wrangled him in began to clap his hands. They all stepped in time down the sides of the room, alternated through the door at the end, and wound up in the center of the next room in a single file. It was comforting, being in the company of other free men, acting as one together. This room was basic: a central aisle and two deep wooden shelves on either side, forming top and bottom communal bunk beds lined with bamboo mats. A trough sink and a squat toilet in a shallow booth were at the end of the room.

After complete isolation for so long, the opposite extreme here—a complete lack of privacy—stunned him. But everyone was scrambling onto the beds to make themselves comfortable, so Li picked the left side of the room and crawled onto the bottom bunk. Everyone was careful not to touch his neighbor.

“Get some rest, brothers.” the sergeant called out. “We travel tomorrow!”

XIII. Violation Hatching

Suzanne crouched silently behind the stacked ammo cases with Jomana in her arms. The corpsmen had long since stopped pretending to requisition supplies. As the supplies became scarcer and began to run out, they had become suspicious that the LS women were hoarding, and were gradually looting the warehouse, scattering items into greater and greater disarray.

They started showing up with locals—soft-spoken Somalis with wide temples and lighter skin, darker Nubians, and some Arabs as well. Some of these men they brought in were dressed in military uniforms, some in plain western style shirts and pants, some in tribal attire, and some in flowing robes and fezzes. Djibouti’s role as a cultural crossroads reflected the kaleidoscope of eastern Africa.

The US military men stopped wearing their insignia, many cutting them from their uniforms. Others stopped wearing uniforms at all and started adopting the clothing of whatever group they had allied themselves with.

The cases Suzanne was hiding behind were empty, on their sides with their lids open, haphazardly piled as a hiding place. She trembled, remembering how Parrish had howled and kicked when the men they’d sold her to had dragged her out.

Suzanne needed to get out! She had to get Jomana out! Jo was a quiet baby, seeming to know that when her mother’s sweat turned acrid with fear, she had to be silent and still—like a baby rabbit frozen in the nest when the fox noses around. But she would be babbling and walking soon, and Suzanne knew she wouldn’t be able to hide her any longer. What could she do then?

The corpsman who was here now was showing a dark man around. The man was tall, his hair in the curly, twisted Prince Valiant bob which—with his high cheekbones—marked him as an Afar. But he wore Arab-style robes and the fez which marked the Muslim clergy in this part of Africa, in addition to the huge ceremonial-scabbarded knife which the Afar and Somali men all wore at their waists—belted crosswise for left-hand draw.

“Sheik Muse, as you know, we’re running low on all types of ammunition, handgun as well as rifle. The quantity you request…”

“…Is far less than you have remaining. Do you think I’m stupid? And you still run the risk of getting caught if one of your patrols should come by.”

Suzanne nodded. The last MP patrol had been by three days ago, so it wasn’t impossible. But they were coming less and less frequently, and they’d dropped from six men to just three on the last one. When Bradburn fell from the top shelf and cracked her head open, she’d lain there overnight two nights in a row before the MPs had come and taken her body. Suzanne had checked her as soon as she found her, but the flies crawling on her opaque irises had told her she’d find no pulse in that cooling neck.

Jo was latched on to Suzanne’s nipple—not really nursing, but not quite asleep. The men continued to haggle. Finally, the corpsman stomped off, presumably to get a cart for the Sheik’s purchases. Jo’s eyes flew open as Suzanne gasped.

Sheik Musa had whipped around the stack of ammo cases, and his face was inches from hers. His skin gleamed and she could see every hair in his sparse mustache, smell the goat butter he used to dress his braids. “Are you a prisoner?” he hissed. “Do you want to leave this place?”

Suzanne, stunned speechless, nodded.

“Then trust me.” The corpsman came back in.

Sheik Musa stood, pulling Suzanne roughly by the hair. “I will take the woman—and the child—as well.”

The corpsman’s eyes lit up in greedy surprise. “Suzanne! We thought you’d already hoofed it out of here.” He addressed Sheik Muse. “If you want the woman, I won’t agree to the added containers. She’s a fine piece, I know for a fact!”

Tears came to Suzanne’s eyes; he did know. That was why she’d taken to hiding when anyone came around (it might be him).

“You drive a hard bargain,” Sheik Musa conceded. “But I’ll take her nonetheless. And fifty more for the added containers.”

“Agreed.”

So, Suzanne feared, she was now a slave. She hoped the sheik had something to eat. Suzanne had subsisted on crumbs and condensation for so long, she herself looked like a famine victim, and only the fact that her milk had not dried up kept Jo growing—just barely. The baby’s pallor and dry, flakey skin broke her mother’s heart.

“Follow me,” commanded Muse. Suzanne obeyed.

XIV. Nice to Meet You, Too

A man stood looking down at Missy. Ryan didn’t hesitate—he instinctively burst into a run, his legs covering the hundred yards of beach between himself and his little girl in moments. He forgot about the tire iron in his hand until he saw himself swinging it at the man’s head.

Missy had been sitting in the sand, digging one of her masterfully designed sandcastle waterworks. Her head was tilted up to look at the man, her twin afropuffs catching the afternoon sun, one strap of her sundress slipping down her plump little shoulder. Her expression, an innocent smile, registered with Ryan just as the man stepped away.

Ryan pulled his swing at the same time, and let the tire iron hang inoffensively at his side.

“Hey, I didn’t mean anything,” the stranger said. “I was just talking to the little girl is all.” He was tall, brown-haired—a skinny, workin’ fella. He wore jeans and a metal-snapped cowboy shirt, faded and threadbare, and leather moccasin boots with thick sewn-on soles. Ryan glanced up at his ride: an ATV, a four-wheeler. Ethanol-powered, if he guessed rightly about the jugs lashed to the wooden luggage tray on the back. He nodded.

“Sorry.” Ryan chewed his tongue a moment. “Ain’t no law any more, you know? Man has to look after his family.”

“Sure, man. I get it, bruh. No hard feelings.”

Lori, gathering petrobutter down the beach, had noticed the stranger and now came jogging up.

“Mommy!” Missy laughed. “Look at the tunnel for the moat!”

Lori beamed at her, glanced between the two men.

“Sorry, my manners! Name’s Jeremy.” He extended a hand to Ryan’s introduction, shook Lori’s offered hand, and grinned disarmingly when Missy held her hand up to be shaken too.

“This here’s Missy,” said Lori. “You from around here?”

“Used to be. I went up to Indiana right when the machine sickness hit.”

Ryan whistled. “Not easy traveling nowadays!”

Jeremy nodded. “Not easy, no. But not impossible either.”

“Well, you’re welcome to join us for dinner. It’s seabutter, potatoes, and goat cheese tonight.” Lori held her hand out for Missy to take, pulling her to her feet. “I’ll just go get my basket.”

Jeremy’s stomach growled audibly. Lori peered at him. He was awful thin. “I’d be honored.” Jeremy said. “Can I help?”

“No, sir,” said Lori firmly. “That there’s our truck, the one with the mules hitched to it. Just pull your bike up next to it, and you can follow us home.”

Jeremy gazed curiously at the people spaced about five hundred feet apart along the strand. Most of them were women and children, and they were scooping something out of the surf and depositing it in tightly-woven straw receptacles. He followed the family in their truck-turned-mule-wagon, casting a look over his shoulder at the strange, low clouds seething over the Gulf—like nothing he’d seen before.

Later, the mule team pulled the truck up underneath a stilted bungalow, about as far from the beach as you could get on Bolivar—which is to say, not far at all. Jeremy dismounted his ATV and stepped up to the truck bed, lifting Lori’s basket out without asking this time.

Lori smiled. Missy ran to the front of the rig to “help” her daddy un-hitch the mules, which consisted of whispering earnestly to them while Ryan unbuckled, unclipped and unhitched them, lowering the traces to the ground.

Missy seemed torn, but the novelty of the stranger’s presence prevailed. She left her father to halter the mules and lead them out to the sandy paddock behind the house, where they drank from their trough and munched on the tough sea grasses. Missy followed Jeremy and her mother up the steps to the front door of their home.

Lori took the basket from Jeremy and set it on the granite countertop. She stepped onto the screened rear porch, opened the woodstove there, and fed firewood into the ash-blanketed coals inside until it was burning brightly. She took a metal bucket and handed it to Missy. “Go get some water, baby,” she said. Missy clattered down the steps outside to the rain barrel with the water bucket.

“Cute little gal. How old is she?”

“Five. She’d say five and a half. She was three when the machine sickness hit. Doesn’t remember anything Before.” Lori looked wistful.

“She seems pretty happy.”

“She’s a good girl.” Lori took a stewpot from the cabinet and began sorting through the muck she’d scooped up on the beach.

“What’s that?” Asked Jeremy.

Lori stopped and scrutinized him for a moment. “You really are new around here, aren’t you?”

“Well, not really. But I left right after the machine sickness began. What’d you say that was?”

“This,” Lori picked up a handful, picked out bits of shells and sand, feathers and miscellaneous flotsam, and plopped the rest into the stewpot with a splat, “is seabutter. Started washing up on the shore over the first winter, maybe three or four months after everything went to Hell.”

“And you eat it?”

“Sure do. You have to boil it and drain off the grit. If you don’t, it gives you the trots and awful cramps. But if you do, it’s good eating. Missy is doing great on it.” She continued sorting the chaff out of the seabutter while they talked. “And I have to watch out, or my pants get snug, even with all the hard work I have to do nowadays.”

Missy came in, straining proudly under the weight of the bucket full of water. She set the bucket down on the dark, roughened plywood floor, undoubtedly chewed up when the machine sickness had eaten some type of vinyl floor covering.

Lori filled another pot with the water and set it atop the warming stove. “Missy, get Mr. Jeremy here some tea.” To Jeremy, “It’s chamomile. Hope that’s alright. You can’t get real tea for love or money anymore.”

Jeremy smiled.

Missy went out on the porch and came back in with a big glass jug full of yellow flowers floating in yellow liquid. She set it on the countertop, which she could just barely see over, and pulled a glass and strainer off a low shelf. “Here you go, Mama,” she warbled.

“Jeremy, would you mind pouring your own? I’m up to my elbows in grease here.” Jeremy could see that was almost literally true; the shine on her hands and arms looked oily and rich. He poured himself a glass of the sun tea.

Ryan came in and got himself some tea, and the two men sat down for a few minutes to talk. “So, what brings you to these parts?”

“I was just telling Lori that I used to live hereabouts. I left right after the machine sickness hit.”

“Whooee, you left? Where’d you go?”

“Indiana. This girl I was with…”

“I knew it. It’s always a girl!”

Jeremy smiled and went on, “This girl I was with knew some off-gridders up there, and figured that was where we ought to go.”

“And was it?”

“It was a pretty sweet set-up, alright. They had a scientific lab up there, and they built these things they called biobatteries. They produce their own charge and run on garbage.”

“Pull the other one!”

“No, really. I’d show you, but we gave ’em all away.”

“What the hell’d you do that for?”

“Well, they’re like sourdough—once you have one, you can grow more, easy. We wanted to get them spread wide as we could before winter.”

Ryan sipped his tea and sucked his teeth for a bit, thinking about that. “So, you can power things with ’em? Like, what kind of things?”

“Anything, I guess, if you build a big enough one.”

“And they run on trash?”

“Or raw sewage, yep.”

“Get the hell out of town!”

“No, really.”

“Well, I guess you earned your meal with that story. Mmmm…” a sizzling sound was accompanied by the unmistakable smell of browning potatoes and onions. “Almost suppertime.”

They all rinsed their hands off in a shallow basin of water on the porch, which Lori flung out onto the little kitchen garden below.

They sat and folded their hands, and Ryan said, “Lord, for what we are about to receive, make us truly grateful.”

With a chorus of amens, they tucked in. Jeremy had to admit, the seabutter was not half bad. It had some texture to it, almost a meatiness, and just a vague tarry taste which lent it almost a mesquite barbecue flavor. Lori had doctored it up with some herbs and seasonings, and in combination with the home fried potatoes, it filled him up and left him feeling contented and full as he hadn’t felt since leaving Sutokata.

They reclined in their chairs, savoring the fullness of their tummies and the warm, rosy light of the setting sun filtering into the windows. Lori picked up a cotton shirt she was sewing, going anew over the seams sewed with polyester thread, re-stitching them with thread spun from the fur of her angora goats.

Here in America, where clothing had been so cheap it was almost free, the cheaper all-cotton imports were the only things that had survived. Clothing was dear now, and cotton, silk, or wool thread, even more so. Many people had discovered in the early days that their “100% cotton” labeled clothing was actually cotton coated with acrylic or polyester resin—which went sticky and wet, and then fell to pieces when the machine sickness bacteria inevitably got to it.

What everyone missed the most, though, was elastic. Underwear was just not the same.

“So, where to now, my friend?” said Ryan.

“Well, I used to stay with a lady up the way, Joanne Jebali. She ran a B & B. You know her?”

“Joanne? Sure I do.”

“She still there?”

“Still there; lives by herself in that big old place. She’ll get a traveler now and then, but there ain’t much tourism anymore. Most of the folks who made it out here were folks with vacation homes who hightailed it out of Houston when things got ugly.”

“Did you have lots of human animals show up, after?”

“Yeah, we had a few.” Ryan grimaced. “Only one way out here once the ferry quit running, though. They come out here, but they don’t usually make it back out again.

“It was quite a sight, that ferry boat sinking in the dock, all those cars and trucks on it. It’s still there. You should go take you a look if you got time. Good fishing spot, too.”

“Not tonight,” said Jeremy.

“Oh, no,” said Lori. “It’s getting dark soon. Coyotes out there, and a few feral dogs. No lights, and a new moon. You can just spend the night on the hammock under the house and take off first thing in the morning.”

XV.     Your Amazon Order Has Arrived

DD heard hoofbeats coming from the field to her right. More of them. Shit. She stared stupidly at her hand on the key. She had actually blacked out from the pain, or grayed out, for a moment when she tried to start the vehicle. The push-and-twist of the key forced her broken clavicle into just the wrong position. She was in a bad way, and if she had any choice, she wouldn’t try to drive in such a state. She tried leaning over to use her left hand on the key, swayed. She’d need to get off, start the vehicle, and get back on. Standing up seemed so difficult just now…

The men on horseback were closer now—three of them working their way across the grassy field at an easy trot. They wore cowboy hats, and held long guns at ready resting on their pommels.

DD got one foot down, and was struggling to swing the other one through when the first rider reached the man thrashing in the weeds.

The rider barely grunted, “Whoa,” and the horse stopped. The gun came up, the rider aimed, and the report echoed. The man’s whimpering ceased.

DD ceased her effort to stand up. If these riders were enemies of the men who’d attacked her, maybe they’d help her. If not, well…DD would make a last stand here. She didn’t have the ability to run again and then fight a new, fresh, new batch of opponents.

As the first rider came up the embankment and crossed the congested ditch, DD corrected her initial impression. She had her first glimmer of real hope when she saw that the rider who’d shot the downed predator was a woman.

Gaunt, lithe in the saddle, face deeply tanned and creased with the lines of an outdoorswoman, hair pulled into a lank ponytail, the woman looked down at DD. “You don’t look so good,” she said.

“No shit!” DD said, then, “Sorry,” a moment later. “At least I’m still alive.”

Another woman rode up next to the first. “And thank God! Where’re the rest of you?” Stocky, red-faced, close-cropped grey hair.

“I’m alone,” DD said.

“Don’t give us that!” the older woman said. “There were seven men down when we got here. You expect me to believe you took them all down yourself?”

DD looked around, counting. “I don’t believe it myself. But I think my collarbone is broken.”

The third woman rode up—a soft-looking dark-haired gal in her late twenties or early thirties, less poised in the saddle than the other two. She guffawed, “You think that’s bad? You should see your face!”

“Cindy,” the senior woman cautioned.

Cindy looked down, chastened. She absentmindedly released her horse’s reins, and the nag immediately lowered its head and snagged a mouthful of grass.

“Do you ride?” The first woman asked.

“A little,” DD said. “I’m not sure I can mount, though.”

“Get off your horse, Cindy. Help her stand on the four-wheeler to mount up. You drive the vehicle to the ranch. Big Boy is gentle as a kitten, and he’ll follow the other horses. We’ll walk home nice and easy.”

Cindy complied without question, leading her horse alongside the little vehicle and holding his head (unnecessarily; the big, calm horse was not interested in going anywhere).

DD managed to lever herself up onto the running board with a grimace from the pain in her knee, got her left foot in the stirrup and her left hand on the pommel, and somehow swung up and over the beast’s back. With that, her strength was gone.

Cindy walked around the vehicle, but paused. “I thought you said you were alone?”

“I was.”

“Who’s this, then?” She hunched down and reached for the yaller dog, who shied away and stood stiff-legged, sniffing the air and eyeing the horses suspiciously. Cindy shrugged and started the little alcohol-powered engine (Big Boy didn’t even blink) and led the way south, the white-haired woman leading, and DD plodding behind.

The horsewoman of the group heeled her pretty, long-legged mare into a rapid-paced gaited walk, both right legs and both left legs coming forward in unison. She circled around, confirming that there were no others waiting in ambush. She cleared and slung her shotgun, then cantered to catch up.

XVI. Well, Give ‘Em the Bird

Birdwell tied his boots. The biofuel cells had been a huge shock. After over a century of innovation driven (or at least guided) by governmental exigency, the fact that a revolutionary technology released freely might spread like wildfire, with as much benefit as the machine sickness had caused harm, was startling. As a military man, Birdwell was an amateur student of history. The historians of the early twenty-first century had begun to expose a side of history which was different from the battles, treaties, and great leaders of Birdwell’s school days.

He shook his head ruefully at the small collection of paper books he’d carried with him, foregoing all but the most basic kit in his personal baggage when they fled DC to make more room for books. In the long, media-free evenings since the machine sickness hit, reading scholars such as Fernand Braudel and Kirsten Wolf had gotten his mind roaming down unfamiliar tracks: visualizing the changes in peoples’ lives occasioned by the adoption of technologies like gristmills and ironsmithing, transmitted in a networked fashion along with ideas about the mind, the person’s place in relation to others, and the role of humanity in the world and the universe.

He had already begun to suspect what those around him would not admit unless forced to (and many of them, not even then): the reset button had been pushed. The intricate structure of twenty-first century society had been predicated on the success of command and control. Embodied first in the divine right of kings, it had then morphed by a process of tug-of-war and negotiation to encompass the aristocracy, the landowners, then the common man, then the humans held as chattel: slaves and women. No matter how political humanity tried to overcome that bias, whether by declaring hypocritically that all men were endowed with inalienable rights, or by seizing the means of production on behalf of some mythical brotherhood of humanity whose interests involved slaughtering actual humans by the hundreds of millions, the underlying structure drove the function, and the overlying function limited the structure. He blinked at the pre-dawn darkness. Always waiting for the dawn, which never came.

Birdwell didn’t flatter himself that knowing this made him a better person, or that it made him exempt from the hypocrisy of history. He had benefited from the organizational pattern and sacrificed his humanity to its gods for decades; he could no more escape it than he could give up blinking.

But he was old enough that ambition had lost its allure. He was smart enough that he craved new knowledge and insight more than anything else the world had to offer. And the fact that the game he’d been playing his entire life had been swapped out for a new one—as different from the old as craps was from ballet—tempted him with the prospect of delicious nourishment for his mature, developed, and yes, age-frayed mind.

He pulled out his checklist, ticking off each item arrayed on his mattress, and then stowed them neatly in his small knapsack. He’d kept it light and minimal, knowing he had misplaced a lot of his fitness level in the months of confinement here at Site R. Even though he’d visited the gym regularly, he’d been uninspired, perhaps even depressed. At his age, the rule was “use it or lose it.”

He’d be alone and on foot now, and facing who knew what enemies or pursuers. The most immediate of those would be his own subordinates. He left a note on the bed saying just: I have left. Please do not pursue me, above his signature. He had slipped an identical note under the door of his secretary, and clipped one to the final page of the last report he had prepared for the POTUS, lying in the messenger bag on his desk for the courier to pick up in the grey dawn.

Which would be here very soon. Of course, he was privy to the patrol’s schedule; he had about seven minutes to get clear of the inner fence. Birdwell strode silently down the hall, punched his code into the mechanical door lock, and slipped out the door.

XVII.                     Church Ladies

DD couldn’t say how long the women rode south with her. Her vision kept graying out, and the world spun. The nausea kept creeping up on her, but she fought it, knowing if she vomited, the heaving would hurt her shoulder. She didn’t know how many times she caught herself starting to slump over to one side or the other, jerked herself upright, and rocked herself into the placid gelding’s plodding stride.

The reins draped over her pommel were just for decoration; the horse knew the way home, and was following the other two anyway. Every now and then, her ears caught the buzz of Cindy’s four-wheeler up ahead, but after a while, she stopped being able to tell that buzz from the growing buzz inside her head.

They left the roadbed after a while. An hour? Four hours? She didn’t know. At one point, she realized they were picking their way through swampland, and she wondered about alligators. At another point, they were on a long, straight track of pure sand, surrounded by tall, straight pine trees planted in rows like a cornfield: a paper plantation. When they finally stopped, it took her a minute or two to realize they had reached their destination.

Cindy walked up on her left. DD’s eyes struggled to focus on the other woman. She realized she was reaching up to help her down off the horse, help she needed badly. She gently pulled the stirrup off her left foot. She leaned forward, the pommel a hard lump in her belly, kicked her right foot free of its stirrup, awakening the pain which her brain had stopped registering miles back, and swung it over.

She nudged herself off the pommel with her left arm and slid gracelessly off the saddle. Big Boy (god bless the big placid creature) stood calmly through this inelegant dismount, not even twitching an ear when DD cried out in pain as her feet hit the ground.

Cindy’s hands on her waist did little to cushion the impact. “Let’s get you to the clinic,” Cindy said. “Here’s Sister Greta now.”

DD was sure now that she was hallucinating. Walking towards her, hands out to help, was…a nun? Unmistakably—from her sensible shoes to her mid-calf dress, to the neatly folded wimple covering her fading hair—this woman with the horn-rimmed glasses was the archetypal Bride of Christ, Catholic flavor.

“She’s got a broken shoulder, Sister Greta,” cautioned Cindy.

Sister Greta noted DD’s right arm folded over her chest and turned her hands palm up, to let DD choose the best way to be helped. “Thank you, Sister Cynthia,” said Greta to Cindy. “I think we’ve got it from here.”

DD allowed herself to be supported by her left arm and the nun guided her to steps of the big brick building they’d stopped in front of. Well-maintained, with ivy climbing its walls and arched windows, which DD would probably have already noticed if she’d been in any condition to notice anything. She looked up, and sure enough, the end of the big building had a steeple—just barely visible now over the roof of this end of the abbey.

DD hissed as she tried to mount the stairs with her injured knee, and Sister Greta clucked and cooed over the entire slow process. Finally, DD entered the tall wooden doors and they walked her down a nondescript institutional hallway to a room where there was, wonder of wonders, a bed with cool white sheets and a pillow.

DD’s vision tunneled in on the need to collapse into that bed, but first, Sister Greta (who, it turned out, was an ARNP as well as a nun) had to check her out from head to toe. She stripped her in a businesslike but gentle fashion, then sat her on the bed and examined her knee, which she pronounced “probably not broken. But that collarbone definitely is.”

She walked around behind DD and slipped one hand under her armpit and locked her hands over the ball of DD’s shoulder. A quick pull, and she met DD’s shriek of pain with a quiet, “I’m so sorry, dear. A surgeon ought to pin that, but this will have to do.”

DD was sobbing from the pain of having the fracture set, and Sister Greta walked around the bed and poured her a glass of water, insisting she drink it. Drinking it meant she had to stop crying. “You’re not allergic to hydrocodone, are you?” She gave her a pill to wash down with it.

Then Sister Greta slipped a hospital gown over DD’s nakedness. The nun took her left hand and helped her lie back on the pillow. Despite the pain, DD fell sound asleep before the medication could even kick in.

XVIII.                 Live By, Die By

Otis sat on Mike’s back. Mike was curled on the ground in a fetal squat for that very purpose. Otis sucked on his bat, making a great show of sucking in the smoke, letting it trail out of his mouth and nose. Even though it was road kill, the others eyed him jealously.

“Why you give me the red eye?” Otis asked Bambam. Bambam looked away. Otis didn’t need to look at the other men. He knew none of them would eye him now. He finished his cigarette and stood up. He gave Mike a light kick in his soft, flabby side. “Come on, June Bug,” he said. “Time for us to finish making jackrabbit parole.” Mike put his head down and looked up at Otis with liquid eyes, which made him smile.

Mike stuck close by Otis on his left. Bambam stood behind him on his right, a good road dog. The other four were close behind. “Let’s drive this car out of here.”

Otis had a woman and two little ones in Little Rock. The seven men sauntered across the grassy meadow, the final chain-link fence and its interior concentric rounds of severed razor wire fading in the distance behind them. At least they left it behind on the outside. The things they’d been through inside, the things they’d done to get there, the things done to them to make them the kind of men who wound up there: those things would be with them all day. All day and a night.

How could they know, with senses until recently truncated by the close quarters of the cell, the common room, and the exercise yard, that they were being watched? On a rise in a copse of trees, stood five helmeted men in camouflage, holding rifles or carbines, with bandoliers and belts full of handguns and ammo, cargo pockets bulging with water bottles and compasses and firestarters and knives, a grim bunch of latter-day Boy Scouts. Two of them had armored vests on.

Robert, the corporal heading this fire team of the Seventh Arkansas militia, sneered. “Look at the nigger scum escaping the prison. This is why we’re here, boys! Fire at will!”

The militiamen were thrilled to comply. This was what they’d been meeting two weekends a month to prepare for, after all. No scum-of-the-earth prisoners were going to walk free on their watch!

To say it was a massacre would be too kind. Only two of the prisoners were even fighters, and those two were street fighters, with no sense of the way sound carried over earth and grass or echoed off trees. All but one of them were armed only with weighted socks and knives liberated from the prison’s kitchen or homemade knives, some of surprising quality.

Otis had a guard’s little leg gun tucked into the back of his pants. He instinctively drew it when the first rifle shot rang out, but he swung his arm around wildly, trying to find a target for less than five seconds before he was downed by a .300 Winchester Magnum round. He fell like a deer in his tracks.

The militia men whooped in joy. They ran down the slope towards the men lying in the dirt, high-fiving each other in congratulations as they converged, kicking the corpses and strutting.

Robert let them have their moment, then called them to order. “You, William: go through their pockets! Keep any weapons you find. You two, Paul and Rick, start carrying them over to that dry culvert and fling them in. Shawn, start cutting branches to toss over the bodies.” He gestured at the copse of trees nearby. The men obeyed their orders with alacrity, grinning.

William was going through the inmates’ non-existent pockets, meaning he was finding weapons and other items rolled into T-shirt sleeves, taped to the men’s skin, or secured with torn strips of cloth. He found a self-seal bag enclosing a photo taped to the chest of one of the men—a deep, dark-skinned youth, barely more than a boy, with hair barely a fuzz on a scalp almost shaved on one side; his head on the other side was a bloody mess.

The photo showed an older woman. Hair straightened, wearing a feathered hat and a fancy dress suit, she stood on the steps of a small country church, her hand on the shoulder of a small, serious child of perhaps eight.

William looked from the boy in the picture to the boy on the ground. With the shell-blown side of his head not visible from this angle, he could see the resemblance: the full mouth, the wide doe-like eyes, lashed like a girl’s. William shrugged. War was Hell. He dropped the baggie on the ground, hesitated, and then took it and taped it as neatly as he could back on the kid’s chest.

This all took place within sight of the prison grounds. The militia men did not know (though they guessed) that the prisoners had slaughtered the guards once the rebellion began. The guards depended on handheld radios, and on a system of doors and partitions which opened and closed automatically. In the first few weeks, as the machine sickness had infected their devices, they’d gradually lost their communications.

The inmates had starved. Some had sickened, and a few of those had died. Many had been injured or killed in the fights that broke out among men crammed in too little space—a few of them killers, all of them scared, most of them made more furious by the lack of food and medical care. When the toilets backed up and the water stopped running, more of them died in a reeking, self-perpetuating nightmare epidemic of diarrhea and dehydration.

Most of the guards had left by then. After the first group of men kicked down the first steel door and there were no reprisals, the prison belonged to them by nightfall. The luckier guards had had their throats cleanly cut. The less lucky, the ones who preyed on their charges, enjoying the power, extorting and humiliating them—well, they died more slowly.

The militiamen tossed the last body into the ditch. Shawn was dragging the second of several twelve-foot branches he’d hacked off a dogwood with his knife. He was the first one to go down.

The others turned towards the guard tower, and Robert immediately perceived their amateurish mistake. “Sniper! Take cover!”

William had hit the ground at the first shot, and by pure luck, his location put a fencepost between him and the sniper. He lay belly down in the dirt, panting in horror, terrified to move. Paul was the next to go down, and Rick dove atop the corpses in the ditch, avoiding being hit by a fraction of a second. Robert drew a breath to shout another command. What that command would have been, William would never learn; Robert’s chest would never hold a breath of air again.

After a few minutes, he heard Rick’s voice from the culvert. “Hey! Is anyone there?”

William was afraid to call out in reply. His pants were wet where he’d pissed himself. His stomach itched, and he didn’t know if it was ants crawling on him or just sweat trickling or grass where his shirt might have gotten pulled up. He just didn’t want to move at all, because he feared the sniper would be able to make out his form and draw a bead on him if he moved.

Hours seeped by, saturating his limbs with a deep abiding ache. His hands were asleep. He finally risked bringing his arms down to his sides and made a slow shift in his hips to ease his back and knees.

No shots rang out.

The sun approached the horizon, and chill breeze began to stream over him. Nights were getting cold, and he might develop hypothermia if he tried to sleep rough. He resolved to wait until dark and then make a break for camp. He laid his face down awkwardly on the grass, trying to find a way he could breathe and not have to move his neck every couple of minutes.

Just then, Rick cried out again, his jaw quaking with the juzh-juzh-juzh of someone losing body heat. “Help! Is anyone up there?” The ditch was not that deep; a tall man, like Rick was, could see out of it standing up. Which meant Rick must have hurt himself when he went over the edge in a panic.

William hadn’t happened to look down in the ditch to see if there was water in it, but if Rick was hurt bad, and wet, he might not have the luxury of waiting a couple more hours until dark to make his escape.

William made his decision. “Rick, buddy.” He yelled. “It’s me, William! You injured?”

“Yeah, man. I broke my ankle. It’s bad, dude! I think I see bone.” He was trying to keep the fear out of his voice, but he was not successful, and William didn’t blame him.

“Hang on,” William said, “I’m coming!” He brought his arms up again and slithered forward a foot or so. He paused for one deep breath, invoking God in a whisper. When no bullet hit him, he opened his eyes and resumed the sinuous belly crawl. Definite gap between shirt and pants, he felt it now as his belly scraped along. At least he was moving. He expected each moment to be his last.

The fifty-foot crawl to the culvert seemed to stretch much longer, but he made it to the edge and looked over.

There was Rick, alright, perched atop two dead bodies lying Xed over each other. William saw that one of them was the boy who he’d re-taped the photo to, but he couldn’t tell if the photo was still there. Rick had his right knee drawn up to his chest, his hands wrapped around the ankle. William could see red smears of blood amongst the mud on Rick’s hands.

“Hey, buddy! I’m here for ya! Can you stand up?”

“I think so. It’s pretty muddy.” Rick levered himself upright on his left foot, holding onto the branch. He raised his hands up for help, and William saw there was no way he would be able to scramble up the almost-vertical embankment with only one good leg. William would have to stand so he could haul him out.

He gathered himself stiffly after so many hours on his belly and squatted, taking Rick’s hands and leaning his weight backwards to drag the older man out of the muck. Rick got the knee of his injured leg over the rim of the ditch, and the next moment, lay sprawled on his belly, panting and shivering. William reached out and grabbed the branch, sticking out upright from the culvert, intending to cut it down for use as a crutch.

Two shots reverberated. William somersaulted into the ditch. Rick just died where he was.

#

Thus began the first and last war of the Seventh Arkansas Militia versus the escapees of the Grimes Correctional Facility. It was a short, bloody war, concluded in a few short skirmishes, a war of an enraged but undisciplined, under-equipped and under-supplied force in a superior position besieged by a well-equipped, cohesive group of naïve amateurs.

It was a war of atrocities on both sides. It was the type of war which Herbert Spencer, the Victorian eugenicist and opium fiend who coined the term “survival of the fittest,” might have delighted in, in that two populations whose fitness to exist was challenged by many, eradicated one another. In Sun Tzu’s words, the entire conflict was fought on serious ground, for the enemies did not realize that in the final analysis, they were fighting themselves.

XIX. Nipped

Two weeks after Jeremy and D.D. left, in early September, was not an unusual time for the first freeze in central Indiana. It was, however, not expected that the temperature would plummet into the single digits (Fahrenheit) and stay that way for two weeks. The denizens of Sutokata rushed their livestock into winter stalls that were not yet prepared for them, but the chickens were almost a total loss. Buried under a pile of their dead coopmates in the corner, only three brave hens were found alive. Vegetables were harvested as frozen rocks and thawed to mush when brought indoors. Fruits froze on the trees. The ground froze solid, and soil amendments were left in heaps.

“The sky has never looked this way so early.” Snowbear scowled at the heavens, as though to prompt them to behave more politely.

“What way?” said Amit. He’d been savoring the smell of the applesauce cooking inside, the collective working day and night on preserves, doing their best to salvage the heaps of ruined fruits.

“It has the look of a January cold spell. See that white fuzzy line?” He pointed just above the horizon. “That’s a layer of suspended ice crystals. You don’t usual see that until after Christmas.”

“I didn’t notice that before.”

“This is bad. We were going to be marginal over the winter anyway with no seed corn available. Now we’ll have no eggs and no Fall greens. What will be worse is if we don’t get a long thaw later in the month. Not getting all the manure and compost turned in now is going to mean we won’t have much production next Summer either. That’s on top of the fruit trees freezing back, with their sap still up!”

“You worry too much, my friend!” Amit said.

“Ha! You’re usually the worry wart of the two of us.”

“You’ve had a lot on your mind. For all your planning and scheming, this year is the first time Sutokata is having to go it alone, really alone. You should have more faith in yourself. This is what you’ve been preparing for all these years.”

Snowbear shook his head. “Maybe I’m reading too much into the sky. Maybe it’s a positive change to do with the fact that we’re not burning fossil fuels any longer.”

“Another way to think of it is that almost all the fossil fuels have all been burned up at once. Shouldn’t that make it get warmer instead of colder?”

“Hmm. Well, at the very least, it might make the sky look different. I shouldn’t read so much into a single freak cold snap.”

“No, my friend, you shouldn’t. Life is too short to worry about things you can’t control. This is a wonderful time of year. Smell the sweetness of that applesauce!”

XX.      You Can Go Home Again

The next morning, Jeremy woke with the sunrise. His eyelids were heavy; he’d been disturbed by the shrill yapping of coyotes a few times during the night. The screening around the stilts under the home had kept them away, but still. The Yucatan hammock looping from the floor joists above had turned out to be surprisingly comfortable—once Ryan had shown him how to get in without dumping himself on his head on the concrete. Ten-thousand-year-old technology for the win! Getting out was a new challenge. His fingers and toes had gotten entangled, but after some thrashing and twisting, he managed to get on his feet.

Ryan came down the stairs. “Taking the gals to the beach again today. I’ll be back in a bit.” Lori and Missy were a few steps behind him.

“Thanks for your hospitality,” said Jeremy, “but I’ll be on my way over to Joanne’s now.”

Ryan stepped up to him and gave him a convincing handshake.

Jeremy squeezed back, bemused at how much his grip had weakened in the weeks he’d been on the road. There was plenty of hard work to do in the fall at Sutokata, but for all it made him stiff and achey at the end of the day, twisting the throttle on the four-wheeler didn’t really challenge him much. He was ready to earn his keep at Joanne’s place. He was sure the old woman with her ravaged lungs would have plenty of need for things done around the sprawling B & B.

Jeremy packed up everything on his ATV while Ryan hitched the mules. Missy stood solemnly watching, blinking in the early-morning light. Jeremy mounted up, nodded to Lori, “Thanks again, ma’am,” gave little Missy a wave, and pulled off down the sandy trail. He reached the remains of the main road along the peninsula, gravel almost completely ground into the sand, and headed to Joanne’s place.

When he got to the B & B, it looked almost like he remembered, except that the lawn chairs and chaises underneath the big main building were just a neat stack of aluminum frames, the vinyl mesh completely dissolved away. The wood porch swing still hung from the joists overhead. The expansion-mesh elevator stood at ground level, full of shovels and hoes and edgers. Obviously, that wouldn’t work anymore, even if she had power, since the insulated wires would be shorted out, so she was using it as a storage shed.

Closer scrutiny showed signs of degeneration: a stair tread that was splintering from normal exposure to the sun and rain and wind; a windowpane replaced with cardboard (he wondered what she’d used to hold it in place, since tape, made of plastic, was no more). He cut the engine and stayed a few minutes.

Sure enough, the curtain on the glass window in the doorway at the top of the stairs opened a little. Moments later, Joanne threw open the door, a huge smile bringing out the peaks and valleys of her wizened face, her brown eyes sparkling as ever. “Jeremy!” she croaked. She had a memorable Philly Yankee accent, and a voice ruined in a ventilator accident in her nursing days.

She stepped onto the landing and started down the steps, but he stopped her. “No, you stay there.” He took the steps two at a time and enfolded her in hug. He hadn’t realized how happy he’d be to see her. His own mama had passed in a car crash when Jeremy was still a young man, and so Joanne had kind of adopted him while he was staying with her working on the house foundations after a hurricane.

“How have you been? Let me look at you!” she rasped. Standing on the step above, Joanne was eye-to-eye with him. She put her hands on his shoulders now and took a good, long look. “A bit thinner than I remember. Come on inside and let me fix you something to eat.”

Jeremy smiled. Joanne was true to her Italian upbringing; it was never a question of whether a guest was hungry, for she would inevitably feed them something.

He followed her in the house and looked around. It was neat and clean, the overstuffed leather furniture intact, the wool rugs unscathed. The shiny polyurethane on the wood floors was long-gone, leaving a dull surface behind, and the artificial Christmas tree in the living room was now pushed into the corner, a pathetic wire skeleton left after all the plastic vegetation had rotted away with the machine sickness.

“I’ll take that outside that for you.” He nodded at the tree.

“Later, dear.” Joanne was scooping seabutter into a metal pot and sprinkling something on top of it—sesame seeds, maybe. She stepped out through the screen door onto the capacious deck and lit a small fire in an open-topped chiminea, atop which an old steel satellite dish had been repurposed to make a serviceable stove.

Jeremy made a mental note to see if he could scrounge up an actual woodstove to install for her. He was sure she must have had some unpleasantly chilly days during the south-Texas winter since it all went sideways. He’d try and make sure she didn’t have to shiver during the one coming up.

She stirred the concoction for a few minutes, and a delightful smell arose. She set the dish down on the granite counter in front of Jeremy. It was as delicious as it smelled, flavored with garlic and filled with crunchy seeds—not sesame, but flax.

“Great breakfast!”

“You like it?”

“It’s delicious. This seabutter is really growing on me!”

“I know. It’s a miracle, really. With no boats or trucks coming in, we’d of been in big trouble if it hadn’t started washing up. Nobody knows what it is, and whoever figured out you could eat it must have been desperate, but we’re glad to have it.”

“Lot of desperate people lately.” Jeremy scooped the last bite up and left the spoon in the bowl. “The fella I stayed with last night almost whupped me with a tire iron when he saw me.”

“Who was that, then?”

“Guy name of Ryan. Wife, Lori; little girl, Missy.”

“Oh, yes, the Willises. Nice people. I’m not surprised Ryan took a swing at you. He didn’t hurt you, did he?”

“No, no, I’m fine.”

“People from Houston drift in every now and then. Most of them are just looking for someplace safe to live and something to eat. But some of them are gang-bangers, escaped prisoners, ex-cops, lunatics…”

“Oh, I know,” said Jeremy. “I’ve been to Indiana and back since you seen me. The big cities aren’t anyplace you want to be nowadays. And we met some scary characters in the country too. I worry about DD on her own out there.”

“DD? That girl you, er, met that last week you were here?” Joanne blushed a little. Apparently, she hadn’t missed a thing.

“The very same.”

“I thought she’d hit the road without telling you goodbye!”

“Well, yes. We kind of hooked back up again. It’s a long story.”

“Well, I’ve got time. Come sit down and tell me the whole thing.”

On the sofa, Jeremy explained how DD had stumbled up to his disabled truck out on Pelican Island, looking half-dead after a beating by some type of law enforcement spooks in an abandoned warehouse. He told her how the two of them had gone up to the off-grid community, Sutokata: “Kind of part hippie commune, part survivalist camp, and part tech incubator,” was the way he described it. “She’d kept in touch with her college friends who lived there.”

“And you two broke up?”

“Not really. We just went our separate ways, is all. She headed for Florida, and I wanted to come back here.”

Joanne tilted her head in puzzlement. “Weren’t you worried about her going off all alone like that?”

“Yeah, but DD can take care of herself.” Jeremy shrugged. “Looks like you’ve had folks looking out for you.”

“Well, the Mormon couple next door had food storage and their kids were gone, so they look after me and try to convert me. I still make my jewelry, and every so often, someone comes by to trade some fresh produce or a chicken for a birthday or anniversary present for his wife or mother.” She sighed. “I’ve had a few bad, scary episodes since my inhaler melted, but there’re some herbs that help. I wear a mask when the air is dusty or mildewy. I’m still hanging in there, touch wood.” She tapped the coffee table, also dull without its lacquer.

“Well, if you’re amenable, I could stay here and swap room and board for helping you out around the place?”

“That would be wonderful.”

“I noticed there was no new washout around the foundation. No bad hurricanes this year?”

“None so far. Rumor is, no tropical weather at all. Of course, you know how rumors are. But there was a man up from Corpus Christi…”

“Yeah? How long ago? My dad and sister are there.”

“Oh, a couple months ago, and then there was some crazy guy who built a Polynesian outrigger canoe and paddled all the way from Fort Myers, and they both said no storms last season. And so far, no sign of any this year. Maybe it has something to do with those weird clouds we get over the ocean now? I don’t know. The canoe guy said big bubbles of steam are coming up out of the deep water.”

“Hm.”

“Now you look lost in thought.”

“Oh, I’m just thinking about DD. Someone told her the Gulf was boiling, and she didn’t want to believe it.”

“Didn’t want to? That’s a funny way to put it.”

“Yeah, well.” He paused. “DD was the one who started the machine sickness.”

Joanne laughed. “No, really. She told you that?”

“No, she really did! She was a microbiologist, and she made a bacteria…bacterium…to eat oil spills, but something went wrong. It eats everything made from oil and spreads like the common cold. She was really tore up about it; still is. Wants to find some way to fix it.”

“Hm.” Now it was Joanne’s turn to get lost in her thoughts.

“Well, no point in wasting daylight! Let me earn my keep.” He rose. “I’ll get that sad-looking tree down and fix your front steps before someone breaks their neck. What else you need done?”

XXI. Atom Smashing

Tim Schneider’s legs pumped like the pistons of the great Texas and Pacific locomotives which had traversed the Texas plains a hundred and fifty years earlier. His lungs were bellows consuming the humid air and expelling carbon dioxide. The ravenous spark in his eyes and the intentness of his body’s generation of speed, speed, speed, his lack of care for the roughness of the muddy and rocky ground he cycled over, the remains of the great freeway system which had once been America’s hope and more recently, its undoing in the Age of Autos, deterred anyone who might consider attacking him. He was a gamma particle, tearing through his surroundings with so much energy they could not affect him. He was an ICBM aimed at a single target: the protectee camp where he would be waiting for Isaac when Isaac arrived with the ampule of culture which Tim had killed for.

Tim’s already stridorous breathing became a snarling growl as he recalled Isaac vanishing into the woods with his prize. Tim knew if he could beat Isaac there, he could work the Federal Agent at the protectee camp, could play Jeff like a violin. Tim could play anyone he couldn’t intimidate. It was a gift.

He cycled between the cotton fields, still polka-dotted with unharvested bolls, and turned down the long driveway to the gate in the high chain-link fence around the collection of Quonset structures that made up the camp. He dismounted his bike a hundred yards away and listened; the camp was too quiet. It usually had a background music to it, the thrumming white noise of the conversations and movements of thousands of men crowded together in spaces built without soundproofing in mind.

Tim had thought this out during the days he’d spent riding from Indiana to Texas. At the very least, he needed to intercept Isaac before he got into the compound, get the culture ampule away from him, and bring it to Jeff himself. But it would be even better if Tim could figure out who Jeff’s superior in the agency was (better still if he could identify the vague agency, so he knew a little better whom he was dealing with) and go directly over Jeff’s head with the ampule, cutting out the not-too-bright middleman. Then, Jeff would consider Tim a loyal team player, while at the same time, the higher-up would give Tim credit for doing Jeff’s job—undermining Jeff and leaving the door open for more power and latitude for Tim.

This current situation added a new wrinkle, though. The camp appeared nearly deserted. Tim furrowed his brow. He took a few steps towards the gate, walking the bike, but froze when a voice called out, “Stop right there!”

The voice came from the administration building behind the second gate, at the end of the chain-link corridor connecting the two entrances. Tim hadn’t been able to see the man inside the darkened window, but now he saw the barrel of a rifle pointed at him. Tim was unarmed; he’d fled Sutokata too soon, without any weapons or food. He’d also lost probably ten or twelve pounds in the four and a half days since he’d left—barely stopping to sleep, drinking until he bloated whenever he happened upon a trustworthy water source, but now pissing ochre and verging on dehydration. He was a scarecrow, a shadow of his buff and sexy former gym-rat self. Not that he’d ever been a fighter (unless he knew he had the jump on someone). He was not about to try to fight anyone in this state.

“Leave the bike. Walk to the gate.” Tim complied. “Turn around slowly.” Tim did, arms out, then stopped facing the gate again.

“Keep turning.” Tim made four more revolutions like a hot dog on a gas-station griddle, before the unknown overseer said, “Stop. Stay right there.”

Tim dropped his hands to his side and waited. Two men came out of the admin building. One of them he didn’t recognize, but the other one was Cholo, a Tango Blast gang member who had taken great pleasure in demonstrating what Tim could expect more of if he failed to deliver the expected cut of each sugar bundle smuggled into the camp. Tim’s throbbing quadriceps muscle twitched a little at the sense memory of having his kneecap lovingly tapped with an axe handle.

Cholo, wasn’t. He was a big man with a wide, red, smushed-in face, straight brown hair and eyes, and an indeterminate accent. He’d grown a beard, made sparse by the acne scars on his cheeks, and he was leaner than Tim remembered, but he still had a good seventy pounds and six inches on Tim.

The other man, the one with the rifle, kept it pointed at Tim. “What do you want?”

Tim turned his palms forward again, evoking his boyish-innocence aura and said, “I only want a place to sleep. Is Jeff still in charge here?”

Cholo grunted, “I know this guy. He used to suck up to Jeff. Used to run sugar.” He asked Tim, “Got any sugar with you?”

“Afraid not,” said Tim diffidently. “But I know how Jeff can get something even better!”

“Jeff’s dead.” The other man made a decision and lowered his gun.

“Oh, no!”

Tim was rapidly recalculating his situation. Deserted camp, Jeff gone: no payoff for Tim. But also no attaboy for Isaac. Isaac might know how to contact Jeff’s superior. So, instead of ambushing and killing Isaac and taking the ampule, Tim would have to find a way to cultivate his trust once he arrived. He unconsciously ran multiple different tactics and scenarios in his head.

Out loud, he just said plaintively, “What happened?”

“Ran out of food and supplies. The admins had the peacekeepers line us up and march us out the gate. Then the admins pushed the peacekeepers out. Then they locked the gates. Me and Cholo was having a conference under one of the huts when it happened.”

When Tim had left, there had been seventeen admins supervising about two hundred protectee peacekeepers, overseeing about three thousand protectees. “How’d the two of you beat the admins?”

“Ain’t hard to beat guys who’re sleeping and don’t know you’re there.” snickered Cholo.

The other man walked over to unlock the interior gate. “I’m Tad, by the way.”

Tim waited patiently as Tad shut the first gate behind him, walked up to the second gate, and opened it to let Tim in. “Assume the position,” he commanded, then frisked him quickly, taking the kitchen knife Tim had used to slash Brownie’s throat in Indiana.

Tad locked the outer gate and walked beside Tim to the inner one. Tim eyeballed him and saw a grizzled, sun-distressed face, deeply creased into more smile than frown lines. His eyes were blue under bushy white eyebrows. He wore a short-sleeved shirt, and the age spots on his arms told of many years in the sun. Everyone’s hands had gotten tough after a year growing cotton in the camps, but this man’s thickened knuckles and profusion of calluses bespoke years of doing the kind of manual farm labor they’d all been forced to do. Those hands undid the inner gate lock and ushered Tim inside.

Tim faced Cholo with a wry grin, shoving his hands in his pockets. “Well,” he said. A massive shock spewed stars inside his head. Pain came a moment later, with the awareness that he was seated on the ground. “What…” he began. Cholo’s kick right under his ribs interrupted him, knocking the breath out of him and making him heave.

“Not enough for us, and you think we’ll just invite you in for tea?” Tad.

Another kick, this one in the face, laid him flat on his back and spitting teeth. The foot that landed on his testicles next sent vomit chasing the tooth fragments. Tim curled on his side as the two men rained kicks and blows on him. Finally, mercifully, he lost consciousness.

Cholo lifted one great booted foot above Tim’s head. “Prick!” He roared, ending Tim’s life with a final stomp.

XXII.                      Sorority

Suzanne squeezed Jo to her belly as the Jeep bounced over the sandy landscape. The devastation of the beautiful Djibouti City had astounded her. First, the deserted airport with the burned scar of the transport jet which had crashed that first day—then the new asphalt roads, melted to expose their underlying gravel. The signage: melted, like everything plastic. The vehicles, abandoned and later stripped and looted. Skeletons and bundles of rags which might have been humans, or not. No dogs, of course, but vultures everywhere. Then, when they’d entered the countryside, there was simply no one and nothing for miles and miles. Only the constant jarring of the vehicles on the ravaged roadbeds kept her from falling asleep.

Now they were on a dirt track, headed in the direction of the sea. Five Jeeps followed theirs, laden with the ammunition and weapons Musa had bought from the base. It wasn’t until just now that Suzanne wondered why they hadn’t bought any of the dwindling supply of MREs in the base’s emergency stock.

They crested a ridge and slowly bumped onto a barely-visible track overlooking the beach. Djibouti’s beaches were famous, and the town they were approaching was famous for snorkeling and swimming. Or had been, she corrected herself. She remembered an outing here with her unit in one of the skiffs, a morale-building R & R thing. It seemed like ages ago.

Things were completely different now. No more boys running alongside to lure them onto tourist boats. The beaches were littered with aluminum skeletons of fiberglass boats, little flakes of undissolved fiberglass clinging here and there, the fittings and furnishings of the boats scavenged away. To Suzanne’s surprise, though, there were wooden boats out in the water, over the reefs which she remembered as colorful paradises full of marine life. And there were also people strung out along the shoreline; women in traditional outfits with huge flat baskets on their heads or lying in the sand next to them. The women scooped something out from the shoreline. Seaweed?

But as they got closer, Suzanne saw that it was white. It looked like they were collecting big baskets of seafoam, but the way they scooped it and their effort when lifting it made it plain that it was thick, heavy, and substantial.

Suzanne also couldn’t stop staring at the women’s bodies, and not just because they were bare-breasted. They actually had breasts! And hips! And the children had cherubic cheeks, and the toddlers’ plump arms and thighs bounced as they frolicked together in the tiny waves breaking on the beach.

The Jeep caravan came to a stop before one of the lovely white houses which faced the strand. This one had a crescent moon mounted above it, which she supposed had some sort of Islamic significance.

Musa gave the driver some instructions in the Afar language and beckoned Suzanne. “Come,” he said, and she followed him through the blue-painted door. Inside, the tiled floors were lined with folded textiles of every color and texture, some quite intricately worked, and cushions were set against the walls.

“Koyna,” called Sheik Muse. “Come here.”

A young girl, not even ten, came running up barefoot. She kissed Sheik Muse’s hand and stood for him to pat her hair kindly. He gave her some directions in Afar. She disappeared, returning a few moments later with a tray covered with some sort of hard, crispy, round flatbread, thickly spread with some sort of grayish paste that was flecked with green herbs, and a ceramic flask of what proved to be clear, pure water.

Koyna squatted and motioned for Suzanne to do the same, which she did, with far less grace than the girl. She placed the tray of food on the floor between them, said something in Afar, then sprung up and left before Suzanne could even wonder how to thank her.

Suzanne didn’t know what the food was, but her stomach knew it was food. She took one of the crackers and bit a small exploratory piece off. The bread itself was bland and gritty, but the paste was garlicky and delicious, with a buttery texture and bits of some sort of crunchy vegetable in it. She made herself chew it well and swallow carefully, then took a sip of water. No off tastes. Her stomach called for more, and so she dived into the tray with gusto, throwing her self-restraint to the wind, and killed the whole meal in minutes.

She looked up to see a teenaged girl standing and looking at her calmly. The girl wore a gorgeous dress of tie-dyed material and a headband of beads, with her hair elaborately braided and coming to a point in the center of her forehead. Small beads hung from the headband across her forehead like the retro beaded curtains some people hung in doorways back home.

The girl was looking down at her from below the beads, and her gleaming eyes were calm and happy. “You like food?” the girl asked in accented English. “My name is Meala. You want more water?”

Suzanne nodded. The girl bent fluidly and picked up the tray, then came in with the flask full again. Suzanne drank deeply. “Your English is very good. My name is Suzanne.”

“Thank you. I have learning English at school. Musa has girls school in village. Bigger school here.”

“Musa treats his slaves well.”

“No slaves.”

“No?” Suzanne asked skeptically.

“No, we are the future. Sheik Musa says we are the future. Inshallah. Let me take the little one. She needs clean.”

Suzanne did recognize that the rag diaper Jo was bundled in was filthy and reeking. But she wasn’t ready to put her baby in the arms of a stranger—even one as charming as Meala. She stood up. “I’ll come with you. We will take care of Jo together.” She smiled.

XXIII.                 It’s an Ill Wind

Jeremy felt more at home than he had in a long time. Working all day in the salty Gulf breezes, falling asleep at night to the sound of the waves on the seashore close by, talking with neighbors with a musical Texas twang in their voices: it all felt right.

Not that the folks in Indiana and Arkansas weren’t nice and all; they were. But he was a Texas Gulf Coast boy born and bred, even if his mom, rest her soul, had been a Kiwi. Even if she’d never lost that God-awful Yankee accent, Joanne had been in Bolivar long enough that she was an honorary Texan, but more important, she was family.

Jeremy wondered about his father and sister, but they’d never been real close. His sister Evie spoke Spanish, an essential skill now that the border was wide open and people flowed across the Rio Grande as they pleased. His dad never spoke anything but English, and Jeremy hoped he was making out alright. He would get down there to check on them—probably in the spring.

But in the meantime, Jeremy had an idea germinating in the back of his head. Before, he’d had his own landscaping business. His daddy had owned a ranch, until ranching got too hard for a small outfit to compete in. Jeremy knew how to run an honest business, supplying people with things they wanted.

And he thought of all the unsown fields across the US’s bread basket this past summer—farmers who’d planted hybrid seed or GMO Terminator crops which wouldn’t breed true and had no good seed the past spring. He thought of all the uneasy whispers or nervous laughter he’d heard as people dipped way into the bottom of their corn cribs or flour bins.

The price of alcohol fuel for his ATV had gone up. Last year this time, unsold crops were sitting on loading docks, in trucks or in silos, or rotting in the fields for lack of distribution. The entire rural US had become a diffusely distributed factory: ten million kitchens canning and pickling and smoking and salting; a thousand gristmills revived from their limbo as tourist curiosities and reopened for business; ten thousand hastily built smaller mills operating on mule or horse or human power, the raw produce available for the price of a share of the finished product.

That included the finished product of the still, a craft handed down through the generations since the first Irish immigrants had taught their sons the art of making uisce. But it had gone from twenty gallons of ethanol for an ounce of silver to one, and now two silver coins got you just one gallon. This winter would predictably deplete the stored grain from last year. If the few farms still growing heirloom grain and vegetables had a good year, there might be a slim supply of seed available next spring. From what Jeremy had heard, it would take three or four good years, or six to ten bad ones, to get the seed stock up from the level of scarcity.

For a modern American, the notion of famine was something inconceivable. But Jeremy’s great-grandpa had lived through the Dust Bowl, and he knew America could easily go through the same thing again, but worse. There were going to be a lot of hungry people in the country’s heartland.

But there was a lot of seabutter going uncollected every low tide. It washed out to sea when the high tide returned for it like an absentminded matron who’d forgotten her reading glasses.

Jeremy took over Joanne’s desk when he got the chance. He was of the last generation that had learned to do arithmetic in school, and he took up pencils and paper. Over weeks, he slowly and laboriously made up a plan that would have taken him a day or two Before.

When his business plan was in place, a wagon full of live turkeys creaked its way down the main road, getting everyone supplied for Thanksgiving.

Jeremy bought five turkeys with the last of his silver and a handful of amoxicillin he’d found in Joanne’s medicine cabinet. Surrounded by a puddle of water and colored grease, the remains of dissolved plastic bottles of various lotions and potions, the plastic bottle had been mostly intact, the powder from the chalky antibiotic tablets protecting the bottle from the inside. Yet the bottom of the bottle stuck to the floor of the cabinet, and the bottom four tablets were ruined.

He had found a wood stove in an abandoned house and liberated it, and Joanne spent the three days leading up to Thanksgiving serial-roasting turkey after turkey. The neighborhood dogs assembled in a cheerful pack in the driveway, and children would stop in the street, savoring the smell.

When the holiday rolled around, Ryan, Lori, Missy, and several other families showed up with a big covered dish of roasted sweet potatoes (“No marshmallows, sorry,” Lori said). They had assembled three primitive tables from wood doors. Joanne had brought out all her stored table cloths to create a vast feast. They got set up out on the gigantic deck connecting the little cottages that comprised the B & B.

They all gathered around the tables, adults at the taller tables supported on sawhorses, and the children at a lower table in between supported on empty propane tanks. Everyone was scrubbed clean and dressed a little better than usual: cotton dresses for the girls and women; cotton shirts and jeans or slacks for the men and boys. The food was steaming on the table in big dishes and pans. The places were set with a motley array of different china patterns and some hoarded paper plates (the cheapo, uncoated, paper kind were the only ones that had survived).

As hostess, Joanne had the head of one table. In deference to tradition, she turned to the eldest man present, Scott Beiser, to play the ceremonial role of patriarch. Scott was seated on her right side, and she turned to him and asked, “Will you say grace, Scott?”

He rubbed his gray beard for a moment, then intoned, “Let us pray.” Everyone bowed their heads, even the agnostics and atheists. “Lord, we thank you for bringing us through this time of trial. We thank you for the blessing of seabutter, which you have brought to us like manna to the Israelites in the desert. We thank you for our family, friends, and neighbors, and we ask you to bless this meal we share together. Amen.”

Everyone muttered “Amen,” except for the charismatic evangelical family at the end of the table, the Smiths, who raised their hands and shouted “Amen! Hallelujah!” in loud voices.

With that, they dug in. Platters and bowls were passed, beverages were poured. Spats and quarrels broke out at the children’s table and were put to rights by parents. The Thanksgiving tradition of eating to excess was celebrated with gusto, though their appetites were a little lighter than they might have been, Before. Even though they’d been filling out since they’d figured out about the seabutter, the fattest people there were just barely plump. There were no drive-through burgers and no pizza delivery. So many things done by machine, Before, were now done by muscle power and the sweat of one’s brow. More trips were made on foot. Sugar was a prime barter commodity. When the meal was over and the bakers in the group brought out their pies, little gasps of delight came from everyone.

After dessert, they participated in the penultimate part of the Thanksgiving Dinner ritual of the late, great, United States of America. They sat in their chairs, leaned back, and put their hands on their stomachs, groaning about how full they were.

“I just wish there was a game on!” Said Scott.

“I brought a football,” said the teenaged Jed. “Anyone wanna play?”

“I do!” several other boys and young men chimed in.

“Wait one minute.” Jeremy stood up. “Before we all scatter to our own activities, I have something I want to bring up.”

Thirty-four adult faces looked at him expectantly.

“We’re blessed to be near the ocean, where we can get enough to eat and feed our animals from the seabutter.” The Smiths put their hands in the air, murmuring amens. Jeremy mentally noted that he’d better not use any more religious language, or this would turn into a revival meeting—which was emphatically not his intent here. “But have you thought about the people who don’t live near the ocean? The big factory farms are dead in the water. The supply of non-hybrid seed is a tiny fraction of what’s needed to grow grain. They don’t have enough grain to eat, much less press for oil. I just came down from Indiana, and the further north you go, the closer people are coming to starvation.”

The people at the tables gripped their bulging tummies a little more tightly. They glanced around at each other, unsure where this was going.

“But there’re still people growing fruit, stuff that won’t grow here. They’re growing nuts. Down by Corpus Christi, they still grow sugar cane. There’s a big opportunity for trade here, and the first ones into the market will be the ones who profit from it.”

A few heads were nodding. “What’re you proposing?” someone asked.

“Just this: we all have seabutter canned and set back just in case, right?” The women all looked side-to-side and reluctantly nodded, realizing they’d all had the same idea, and their pantries were all lined with jars full of the jelly-like substance. “Let’s start making more. We’ve all got horses, goats, mules, and such. We can use them to take wagonloads of petrobutter inland and trade for things we need, things we miss that we can’t grow or make here.”

“You had me when you said ‘nuts,’” one of the Smith women said. “I miss my pecans!”

“Apples. That apple pie was like Heaven.” someone chimed in.

“Thanks. They were the last of a bag of dried apples I had tucked away.” The baker, Jordan Long, smiled modestly.

Jeremy looked around. About half the faces held a look of active interest. From temperament or intelligence, the rest had no interest, and were disengaged, but he’d expected that. One or two looked skeptical or slightly hostile, but none of them spoke up.

“Alright,” Jeremy said, “This time tomorrow, right here, will be the first meeting of the Bolivar Trade Partnership. We’ll talk about ownership and profit-sharing and all that then. In the meantime, let’s play ball!”

The youngsters whooped and jockeyed to be the first ones down the steps. Jeremy and the rest of the middle-aged men followed behind at a more sedate pace.

That left most of the women, the children, and Scott to clean up. “Some things never change.” Lori complained, looking at the mess on the tables.

“It’s a Thanksgiving tradition,” Jordan said. “The menfolk with their football, and the womenfolk cleaning up and complaining about it.”

“Hmph,” said Lori, picking a crispy piece of turkey skin out of the roasting pan. “At least we get to pick at the best parts!”

Jordan’s mouth was bulging with sweet potato pie at that moment, so she couldn’t answer.

XXIV.                  General Hospital

Drugged insensible most of the time on narcotics so that she’d stay still and her collarbone would heal straight, DD had spent a month under Greta’s care. DD began to have flashes of coherence. Dreams of nuns turning into yaller dogs who jumped onto ATVs and flew around the water tower like the witch in the Wizard of Oz, while the tornado turned into upside-down thunderclouds swirling over the Gulf, slowly faded into a hospital dormitory with high arched windows. The hospital-dormitory scene kept coming back and staying longer, and as it lasted longer, the ache in her shoulder would assert itself.

At some point, she realized Greta must be weaning her off the drugs. She knew she should be glad, but the sweet opiate oblivion was so preferable to the discomfort that she found herself eagerly awaiting the moment when someone would trickle the bitter syrup down her throat. They’d then hold a glass of water with a paper straw and insist she suck on it until she drifted off again. Sometimes it was Greta, sometimes Cindy, sometimes one of several other women. Greta was the only one wearing a nun’s habit. Sometimes there were other patients in the other beds, and sometimes their families would visit them, speaking in hushed tones behind curtains drawn around DD.

As her painkiller dose diminished, she began to sit up and sip the water properly from the glass. One of those moments made her realize with a shock that she was wearing a cloth diaper.

The indignity of that motivated her to try to get up, only to be easily pressed into her pillow by Sister Greta’s soft warm hand. “Now, now. Baby steps, child. You’ve been in bed for six weeks, and you’re very weak. Let’s start by getting some real food into you.”

A few minutes later, she came back with a tray containing a bowl of some sort of pudding and a small porcelain cup of peach nectar. DD’s stomach had been quiescent, but suddenly emitted a twisting growl when she saw and smelled the food. Sister Greta let DD take the spoon in her left hand, made sure she was able to feed herself without shaking or dropping it, and watched her devour the meal.

She smelled the food first: a rich, garlicky smell. “What is it?”

“Seabutter. Try it, it’s good.”

DD tried it. It had a salty flavor and a greasy feel on her lips, but it was brothy and rich-tasting as well. “Fat and protein?” she guessed.

“It seems so. This is just steamed with a little salt and garlic, but it’s very versatile.”

“Hmm.” DD took another spoonful. “I like it.” She slurped a few swallows of the pear nectar. She ate only a few ounces of the seabutter, which made her shrunken stomach feel incongruously full.

Her medication began to kick in, and she pushed the tray away and sank into the bed. The next thing she knew, the light was different and Cindy was sitting on the bed. There was a new tray on the nightstand.

“Hey, sleepyhead,” said Cindy. “Greta says you can eat like a normal person again. Let’s sit you up.” Cindy reached for DD’s bad right arm, and DD took her hand lightly but used her left hand on the bedrail to pull herself upright.

Still wearing a damn diaper. And I look like skin and bones! She noticed that there was a sheet of waxed cloth on the bed as well.

Cindy held the water glass for her, but tilting it was awkward, so DD took her left hand and guided her. Cindy watched her closely as she drank. So intent. With a strange intensity in her face, Cindy fed her a scrambled egg and watched her gulp a cup of orange juice, which left DD wanting more.

“I’m still hungry.”

“Well, that was the last egg, but we have some seabutter. Would you like that?”

“Sure,” DD said.

“Okay. Here, you’re supposed to start taking your medicine in pill form now.” Cindy poured her another glass of water and gave her half a tablet to swallow. “I’ll be back in a jiffy.”

But another woman came in a few minutes later. She introduced herself as Sister Margaret. She was younger than either DD and Cindy, late twenties or thirties, with a pleasant, oval face and coarse, mousy hair.

DD talked to Sister Margaret while they ate. “So, this is a nunnery?”

Sister Margaret smiled. “We call it a monastery. But yes, we’re a Benedictine order of nuns, the Order of Saint Abigail. Not all the women you met here were nuns. There are twenty-eight of us in the Order here at present, and fourteen lay women.”

“And this seabutter—what is it, exactly?”

“Divine providence,” smiled Sister Margaret. “That’s the best I can tell you. It started washing up on the beaches and wetlands of the Gulf not long after the machine sickness began. Fish and crabs and sand fleas eat it, and well, so do we. It’s saved hundreds…thousands…of people from starvation this year.”

“I wonder what it is.” I need to know if it’s something to do with p. davisii. Under certain conditions, alkanivorax species produce lipids. I don’t recall what their composition is.

No internet. We took it for granted, Before, that we could always just look things up. The only place I know to find that information is in the books on the shelf in my office in Houston—if it’s even there anymore. She began to feel pleasantly warm and hazy as the drug kicked in.

Over the next few days, she met two more of the nuns, Sisters Catherine and Veronica, as they eased her out of bed (no more diapers, yay!) and off the pain medication. They gave her a shapeless sort of shift and some primitive slippers to wear around the monastery. In hopes of rebuilding all the muscle she’d built up over the past year on the road and on the farm at Sutokata, she began to walk the halls and then the grounds, frustrated by her lack of suitable footwear.

The Monastery of the Holy Cross had been established here some two hundred years previously, not far from what became Mississippi’s beach communities. The grounds surrounding the hospital, church, and the nun’s living quarters were considerable in size. Without grounds-keeping help or equipment, the periphery had become overgrown.

The three main buildings formed a kind of courtyard, and the interior was laid out as a formal garden, with low brick walls, flowers, a kitchen garden of herbs. The nuns and their protégées had focused their energy here, and they managed to keep it tidily weeded, mulched, and swept. It was the depth of Mississippi’s mild winter now, so most of the beds were empty, the summer herbs like basil gone and the woody stems of the rosemary leggy with graying leaves. But the glossy leaves of the azaleas and tea olives were still green, and the garden was a peaceful place to stroll. Sadly, a small pond had been filled in with sand and gravel. With no electricity for the pump it was a mosquito nursery.

She returned to the hospital dorm and was happy to notice her canvas backpack was there. The pack had been a real find, though the occasion of finding it had been sad: it was in the attic of the Larssens, the couple who lived down the road from Sutokata. The husband had been an insulin-dependent diabetic, and when the drug ran out, his days were limited. The Sutokatans had checked on them periodically while he lost his eyesight, then slowly slipped into the oblivion which ended his life.

They’d dug his grave, and then they’d checked on his wife every so often. Mrs. Larssen wouldn’t accept charity, but she would trade with them, and apparently Mr. Larssen had been in the Army in his youth. DD had been delighted to barter for this old pack, still intact because it had neither nylon thread nor plastic buckles.

She opened the metal buckles now and found all the clothing that had been stowed in the ATV, laundered and neatly folded. She pressed her face into a T-shirt and smelled the faint yet sharp odor of lye soap and sunshine. Her boots were on the floor next to the pack—leather uppers from a pair of good commercial work boots stitched to home-made layered-leather soles with hempen twine, then padded with cotton. She quickly changed into her own clothes, gratefully setting aside the loose gown and slippers the nuns had provided. She cinched her leather belt as tight as it would go and still found her pants slouching over her hips. Need to make a new hole. She laced the rawhide strips and tied her boots low on the ankle, then set out for a real walk.

A quarter mile from the main building, following the remains of a former macadam path which was now sandy gravel, she had to sit on a stone bench. It was plainly going to take her some time to get her legs and lungs back.

The path became uneven as it entered a copse of live oaks hung with drooping Spanish Moss. She slumped on the bench, defeated, and then looked up. She gave a gasp: a ghost!

She pressed her hand to her chest, laughing. The “ghost” was a woman wearing a heavy beekeeper’s jumpsuit and a wide-brimmed hat with copious layers of translucent white cheesecloth veiling her face. “Oh, you almost scared me to death, there. I thought I’d seen a haunt!”

The beekeeper flipped her veil up. “No, it’s just me. I’m Sister Barbara, and you must be DD.”

“Guilty. Do you keep bees?” That explains the waxed cloth. Beeswax has functional side groups that would keep the P. davisii from digesting the ester bonds, or at least slow it way down.

“No, I just like haunting the woods and scaring Sister Greta’s patients to death.”

Ouch. Well, it was a stupid question. “Is there a lot to do with beehives in the winter?”

“Not really, but you need to check on them every so often. I don’t really need the gear, but I hate getting stung, so I wear it anyway.” The nun took the hat all the way off and perched like a bird on the bench next to DD. She had a poised look about her, like she might take off into the air at any moment, and a way of inspecting one with her bright hazel eyes while turning her fluffy brown head at an angle. “It’s nice out here in the afternoons. I guess we’ll need to get out here in the next couple of months and clear out the weeds and creepers. These woods can get overgrown with wait-a-bit and air potato pretty quickly.”

“Once I get to feeling a little better, I can help out. I want to earn my keep.” DD said.

“Well, that’s kind, but it’s part of our mission to care for travelers. We’re a Benedictine order.”

“You know, I never thought of the rural South as a big place for Catholics.”

Sister Barbara smiled. “Oh, my goodness, where’d you get that idea? Back when Northern businesses were hanging signs saying ‘no Irish need apply’…are you interested in history, dear?”

“Always.”

“Well, the Know-Nothings were tarring and feathering Catholics in Massachusetts and burning Catholic churches in Pennsylvania back then. A lot of Catholics moved South, where people were more tolerant. For a long time, Catholics—and Jews—felt safe in the South and nowhere else.”

“Hm. Well, you learn something new every day!”

Sister Barbara rose. “Are you joining us in the dining hall tonight? I think you’ve only met the hospital staff so far. The rest of us are dying to hear your story. News is such a scarce commodity nowadays.”

“I guess I can, if Sister Greta says it’s okay.”

“Great. Well, I’d best be getting along then. See you at supper!”

#

Right after vespers, the community gathered in the monastery’s dining hall. There were five long wooden tables set up across the room, and the big pass-through window into the kitchen was set up buffet-style with trays, pitchers, and platters. DD was amazed that her drug- and injury-addled brain recalled the names of all the women she’d met so far: Sisters Greta, Margaret, and Barbara were sitting together at one table with Greta at the head, and they indicated an empty seat.

That put DD back to back with Sister Cynthia, who was sitting at the next table with the two women who’d picked DD up, the equestrian and the stockier, grey-haired woman. Catherine and Veronica were sitting at a third table. The rest of the seats in the room were occupied by a collection of women ranging in age from late-teens and early-twenties to one wilted lady who might be anywhere between seventy-five and a hundred. Greta was still the only one wearing a nun’s habit. Makes it difficult to figure out which ones are the nuns and which ones are the lay women.

DD observed each of them serving herself and sitting down to eat, so she got up to do likewise.

Cindy got up at the same moment and stood next to her at the counter. Cindy poured herself a glass from one of the pitchers and asked DD, “Sweet tea?”

DD used to take unsweet, when she had to watch her sugar intake and calories. Not an issue anymore. She nodded. “Sure.”

Cindy poured for her while DD helped herself to cooked greens, tortillas, and some sort of shredded meat in a brownish sauce, which she poked curiously with her fork. “Curried goat. Selene’s specialty.” Cindy jerked her chin at the lithe equestrian.

“Come sit with us,” said Cindy. DD glanced at Sister Greta’s table and saw the three hospital Sisters engrossed in conversation, which DD guessed would not involve or interest her.

“Thank you, Sister Cynthia.” Cindy sat on D.D.’s other side as she sat down next to Selene and stuck out her hand.

Selene shook it. “Don’t call her that. She hates it. My name’s Selene.”

“D.D.”

“Short for?”

“Deirdre Davis. I’ve been D.D. since elementary school. When I got my PhD, it became Doctor Deirdre Davis, but D.D.D. was just too much.”

“I get that.” Selene’s charming smile lit up her eyes. D.D. felt herself spontaneously returning a broad grin.

Selene introduced the stocky, grey-haired woman as Maddy. Maddy had coarse pores and the broken blood vessels on her red nose from heavy drinking. She spoke in monosyllables, but she had an amiable air.

“Are you two nuns?”

Maddy snickered. Selene gave her a quick side-eye. “No, we live in the guest quarters. My horse ranch adjoins the monastery grounds. After the machine sickness hit, I lost all my help, and I moved in with the nuns. Safety in numbers; they help me keep the horses, and they have transportation. But how’d you end up half-dead at the crossroads?”

“Yes,” said D.D. “I haven’t thanked you properly for saving me there. I was in a bad way.”

“That’s putting it mildly. But I think any woman who’d just killed six men and left one crippled might show just a tetch of weakness, yeah?”

Cindy horned in. “So tell us! Tell us the story.” She jostled D.D.’s thigh with her own soft hip—aggressively enough that D.D. felt her collarbone and various other sprains, strains, and bruises kick up.

D.D. scooted away imperceptibly and began her story. She related her trip down from Indiana, the towns she’d been through, how she’d split up with Jeremy (she left it implied that they’d had a fight and broken up), and the dysentery village.

“That reminds me. There was a dog…”

“Oh, he’s here!” Selene laughed.

“Cindy’s fuckin hardly let him out of her sight,” snorted Maddy.

“You didn’t think I’d neglect your baby, did you?” Cindy patted D.D.’s hand.

D.D. saw sister Greta notice the pat, catch Cindy’s eye, and frown. D.D. got up abruptly. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she announced. “Where is it?”

When she came back, she slid her chair over to give a few more inches between herself and Cindy.

“So, what’s his name?” Asked Cindy.

“His name?” D.D. looked stupid for a moment, then remembered. “Oh, the dog. Well, I haven’t really given him a name. He just started following me a few days ago, er, a few days before you found me.”

“Really?” said Maddy. “That mutt’s been sitting outside the hospital windows every night, glued to them like he can’t wait to catch a glimpse of you! Fuckin’ nuns don’t let dogs inside.”

Serious case of potty mouth.

“So, are you going to move into the guest quarters?” Selene cleanly changed the subject.

“Not sure. Sister Greta hasn’t said if I’m released yet.”

“Well, come on over after supper and we’ll show you around. Bring your bathing suit. We have a hot tub.”

D.D.’s achey body screamed, Yes! Her mouth said, “That sounds great!” before her mind could quite wonder if maybe that wasn’t the greatest idea.

XXV.                      Startup

Three weeks later, Jeremy and Ryan whoa-ed the mule truck in the town square of Cleveland, Texas. They pulled back the cover on the truck bed and hung out a hand-painted tarp sign saying “SEA BUTTER.” The square was lined with other vendors with carts and wagons; some kludged from motor vehicles like theirs was, others, antiques designed to be pulled by animals. A few people had ethanol-converted small vehicles, like scooters or Jeremy’s little ethanol offroader. The economics of fermenting and distilling alcohol for fuel, plus the frequent changes of vegetable oil used for lubrication, meant few people ran larger, heavier vehicles on it, especially with food getting scarce.

Jeremy strolled around the square to see what people had available. He noticed pecans, knew Mrs. Smith would appreciate that. He saw wagonloads of bags and bins of dried corn and wheat. He saw spun cotton and virgin and reclaimed wool yarns and thread, woven cloths of varying designs, and baskets plaited from reeds and vines and pine needles. Vendors had bottles of beer and liquor for drinking, and larger jugs of alcohol for fuel.

He stopped by a display labeled BIODIESEL and asked the owners for more information. “Yep,” they said, “we make it from any type of vegetable oil, using lye and methanol. You can burn it in a regular diesel engine—for a while. Eats the engine up, but at least the machine sickness won’t dissolve it.”

He walked by one of the wheat vendors, his flatbed horse-drawn wagon loaded high with burlap bags. He saw a man come up to the vehicle holding a stack of slips of paper, half a standard 8 ½ by 11-sheet in size. The slips had a picture stamped on them; Jeremy couldn’t tell what it was. They also had what looked like a signature across one end. The wheat vendor took the slips of paper and scrutinized each one carefully, counted ten of them, then nodded and helped the man unload ten bags of wheat onto his own wagon nearby.

Jeremy figured he couldn’t just issue slips of paper for future shipments of seabutter. He judged by the easy chat among the people at this market that their daddies and great-granddaddies had known each other. No one here knew him at all.

He made his way around to the mule truck, where Ryan was handing a small jar of the seabutter to a woman with three small children in tow. “Try it at home. You can pan-fry in it, but don’t forget to scrape up the browning in the pan when you’re done. Crunchy and delicious!” Each child was nibbling at their samples, small biscuits made with the oily delicacy.

They made no sales that day, nor had they expected to, but all their samples were gone by nightfall. They ate a simple meal of seabutter-and-goat sandwiches on cornbread, pitched small tents in the dirt of the old town square, and bedded down for the night.

Roosters crowing woke them with the first glimmering of dawn the next morning. Ryan shoved his head deeper under the folded blanket he was using for a pillow, but Jeremy squirmed out of his tent.

The roosters had sounded loud, he saw, because they were right next to the camp. The woman who’d taken the samples home the night before was standing there, her children holding the handles of a rectangular lidded basket bigger than they were, the sounds of chickens coming from inside.

“That seabutter is amazing! I’ll trade you a chicken for two quarts of it. I have ten chickens.”

“Hmm. Well, I don’t need any chickens. I came here looking for nuts and grains. But ma’am, I just woke up; you’ll have to excuse me a moment.” He kicked Ryan’s foot through the end of his tent, and when Ryan groaned, “What?” Jeremy kicked him again.

Jeremy reeled his way to the row of privies in the vacant lot a block away, gradually coming fully awake. He walked back to find Ryan scratching his head and looking around.

“Where’d she go?” asked Jeremy.

“Dunno. But I gotta piss like a racehorse.” Ryan went off to the latrines. The eastern horizon was good and bright now, and in the imminent sunlight, Jeremy picked out the woman with the chickens and children. She stood by the pecan vendor, and when she came back, instead of the basket of chickens, each child staggered under the weight of a sack of pecans.

“Now, that’s more like it!” Jeremy said. “Those nuts will buy you ten quarts of seabutter.”

“Ten quarts for all these nuts!” She frowned. “How long does it keep?”

“Sealed up like this, if you keep it in a cool pantry? A year at least. It won’t spoil unless you leave it out in the hot sun or something.”

“Hm. Eighteen quarts.”

He felt each of the sacks in turn, feeling the same large, plump nuts he’d seen at the nut vendor’s wagon the day before.

“Twelve.”

“Fifteen, and that’s my final offer.”

“Sold! Fifteen quarts for the three sacks of pecans.” The woman loaded the seabutter into the basket she’d brought the chickens in, and the children hoisted it like little pallbearers and marched off. Jeremy loaded the pecans on his wagon and smiled.

The rest of the day went pretty much the same. The big load they’d brought with them was reduced by half by sunset. They’d sold the entire load by ten o’clock the next morning. Besides the pecans, they ended up with fifty sacks of wheat, fifty of dried corn, a box of dried peaches, fifteen gallons of sorghum syrup, giant spools of cotton thread, and a huge, soft bag of wool, like a giant’s pillow. Additionally, they’d loaded up on carrots and yams, several varieties of squash, and a small number of dried gourds, which looked like they might be useful for something.

Up shortly after sunrise the next day, they cracked the whip and headed to Bolivar.

XXVI.                  Prior Constraint

Highfield Register, November 10

The changes that have swept over our world in the past few years have been serious and sobering. The struggles we have faced and our grief for those who are no longer with us hardly bears mentioning. But the change in our mental landscape and the destiny of humanity holds much positive promise for the future as well.

First, let me inform the readership of this humble newspaper what transpired yesterday afternoon. Several representatives of the presidency of the now-defunct political entity formerly known as the United States of America visited the offices of the Highfield Register and made us an offer. In exchange for exclusive rights to report on their activities, we would grant them exclusive rights to review our content before we released it. No doubt, these nefarious authorities imagined that they were making us an offer we couldn’t refuse. They were sadly mistaken.

Given the devastation wrought throughout this land and throughout the planet by the coercive power of states in general and of the USA as the state qua state, it is inconceivable that we should turn our budding press freedom over to those who cling to the illusion of government as order personified.

The bloodshed and mayhem which overtook the cities after their mechanisms of command and control crumbled speaks more clearly to the moral and economic bankruptcy created by the state than any rhetoric. With no way to extract the wealth of the countryside via the myriad hidden taps that drained us every day, the ultimate deceptiveness of their pretense to strength and power was exposed. They were unable to feed themselves or their hangers-on and sycophants. Death and destruction was the inevitable result.

As we have learned in the ensuing days, we’re able to produce a form of abundance for ourselves. Many of the luxuries we had come to view as necessities are no longer available, it is true. But at the same time, we’re not forced to buy expensive cars to drive on expensive roads to work at mind-deadening jobs to pay ever-increasing taxes. We’re no longer compelled to pay insurance corporations growing fractions of the wealth we produce for the privilege of living in our homes, moving about our towns, or asking our doctors to aid us in caring for our health.

It may be that now, when we want the news, we have to get ink on our fingers. But at least we don’t have to give our personal information to the likes of the NSA. It may be that now, if we want entertainment, we have to sing and dance and play music for ourselves, or for one another. But at least we aren’t spoon-fed addictive spectacles which weaken our minds and pander to all that is worst in human nature. Who among us wants to return to that?

The nature of government is to destroy and devour all that lies in its path. The sacred duty of a free press is to oppose that devastation with the weapon of freely-spoken truth.

XXVII.              Auld Lang Syne

By Christmas, Jeremy was making regular runs to Cleveland in Scott’s home-built wagon pulled by the Smith’s mules. He was going alone, because Ryan had taken the mule wagon on a weekly run to Sugarland, south of Houston. The old sugar refinery there had re-opened, using raw sugar harvested and milled in the coastal wetlands. The refinery’s machinery wouldn’t run without electricity, of course, and some stages of the process couldn’t be run at all, but the machinery could be run using human and animal power to produce a brownish, coarse crystal.

With all the sugar and grains to be mixed in with the seabutter, some of the plumper residents of Bolivar were starting to take on a little bit of the roundness they’d had Before, when Americans were bemoaning the obesity epidemic. Nothing like a worldwide global catastrophe to cure such an epidemic.

Ryan’s job was pretty straightforward: the sugar workers were paid in sugar, and they were happy to trade it for the fat- and protein-rich seabutter. No one else was hauling seabutter inland (yet), so the rate of exchange stayed more or less fixed.

Jeremy, on the other hand, was still confounded by the need to work out complex barters for the things he and his partners wanted and needed. Rather than simply setting a price with maybe a little haggling, any sale of any quantity might involve a complex deal involving five or six people and as many commodities—all of which had to be inspected carefully before the exchange took place, and subject to incorrect memory, misunderstandings, and miscountings. The accounting aspect of it was a nightmare without a computer, especially given that the sixteen people involved in the Bolivar Trade Partnership each had a claim on a certain share of the profits.

Yet despite the work involved, Jeremy couldn’t complain too much. Joanne’s kitchen and former laundry room (the washer and dryer were not much use anymore) were crammed with food and textiles, her shed and yard with building supplies and hardware. The other sixteen people all belonged to four families: the Smiths, the Beisers, Ryan and Lori Wilkerson, and Joanne Jebali and himself, who everyone treated like mother and son.

Those four families were doing really well for themselves; they all had well-stocked larders and yards. Their homesteads looked great, because they paid goods to people for help with repairs, renovations, gardening, and decorating. The same means afforded them more and newer clothing. It might not be wealth like they’d all taken for granted Before, but no one could deny they were better off than their neighbors.

One day, Scott came by and sat down by Jeremy’s side where he worked away at endless arithmetic on huge paper ledgers. Scott had taught Jeremy double-entry bookkeeping, an art which had been almost lost in the computer age, and now he had a new idea. “Jeremy, you have any more room to store the stuff you got?”

Jeremy grinned sheepishly. “No, not really. You?”

“No, me neither. That’s why I have an idea…”

One January, around the time of year people started to really notice the sun coming up through the ever-present bubbling clouds of the Gulf a bit earlier, Scott and Jeremy stood together, facing the sixteen members of the Partnership.

“Okay, I’ve got a question. Let’s see who can answer it: what is money?”

“Money is paper or coins that the government puts out,” Zinnia Smith said.

“Wrong. Anyone else?”

“Money is a set medium of exchange?” offered Jed.

“Better. Let me help you out: money is a measure of value.

“The best measure of anything is a fixed value, like an inch or centimeter. Everybody knows what it is, and if something is six inches long here, it’ll be six inches long in California or Maine. The best money holds the same value, and if the prices of things change, it’s because they’re harder or easier to get or more or less in demand.”

“Well,” said Lori, “If that’s true, then why’d money keep losing its value to inflation Before? When I was a girl, you could buy a gallon of milk for a dollar. When the machine sickness hit, it was up to $4.39.”

“Ah, yes. That’s because the money we were all using Before wasn’t set in value. It was issued by a central bank, the Federal Reserve, based on debt. All money from across the world was. And it was all tracked on computers. When the machine sickness took down the computers, and took down the hope of ever even building new computers, all that debt-based money just vanished into thin air. People took cash money for a little while afterwards…what, a few weeks? But eventually, things got bad enough that they wanted something they could use—something real.”

“I remember the first day,” Ryan said. “I was at the auto parts store with Lori’s mom. Some lady came in, hysterical that the cash machine was down at the bank next door. I went outside. The bank was closed, and there was people shouting and screaming. One guy was beating at the ATM with a baseball bat. He tried to shatter the teller window, but it was bulletproof glass.”

“Right. There was a lot of bad stuff happening then. Dark times.” They were all quiet a moment, remembering the trauma and confusion of those times.

Zinnia put her hand on Lori’s shoulder. “I’m sorry about your mama.”

Lori brushed her tear away. “She wasn’t the only diabetic who died. We lost a lot of people in those days.”

In the silence, Scott said, “People still need something real. And we have something real to show them. The Bolivar Partnership has proven we have the ability to produce wealth—more wealth than we can realistically use or consume. It’s time to share it.

“I propose that we issue share coins. Each one could be worth one-thousandth of our net profit for the year. We all know how many shares we each own in the partnership, based on what we contributed, right?” Everyone nodded. “And we’ve all been working as hard as we can, because we all want the partnership to succeed. But what about someone who just wants to do a little for the partnership? If they get one of these coins,” he had a stack of silver quarters from Before, which he and Jeremy had pounded into a mold, stamping them with a picture of a brown pelican, “these Bolivar Pelicans,” he continued, holding one up, “they’re entitled to one one-thousandth of what we make.”

Everyone was quiet. Brows beetled in confusion. “So…” started Ryan, “we sold a thousand jars of seabutter in December…”

“And did we collect and render all that seabutter?”

“No, of course not.” Lori said. “Anybody with extra seabutter comes to one of the four families in the partnership and bargains for what we might have to trade for it.”

Scott patiently drew the next idea out of the group. “And in order to have something to trade for it, you have to have gotten your share of what we get each trip, right?”

“Yeah, and let me tell you…figuring out those shares is not easy!” Jeremy jumped in.

“Would it be harder if it was a thousand shares?”

“A little…but not a thousand times harder.” Jeremy said.

“Because the problem is figuring out the relative value of each item, not the actual dividing, right?”

“Yes…”

“So, what if we put all the goods we brought from every trip in a warehouse? We could let anyone who has a Pelican take one one-thousandth of the value of what’s in the warehouse. People could also pay for each load of seabutter in Pelicans.”

Everyone’s mind was ticking over. “But…what about the work we partners put into it? Most of us put in ten or twelve-hour days!”

“What about my truck and mules?” asked Ryan. “It cost me to buy ‘em. It costs me to feed ‘em. And it costs me to fix ‘em when they break down or get sick!”

Scott smiled. “Exactly. So why shouldn’t we get paid for our work and reimbursed for our expenses? In Pelicans.”

“It sounds like you’ve invented the corporation.” Lori said.

“In a sense,” Scott said. “Corporations are created by charters from governments. People in corporations weren’t held responsible for what they did if they were acting in the corporation’s interests. We’re creating this Partnership by ourselves, and nobody’s got any special privilege from it.”

“And why should people accept Pelicans for money?” Jed asked.

“Good question, young man! After all, governments can keep people from using any money but the money they issue, and they did: they charged you with ‘counterfeiting.’ We’re issuing the Pelicans just as a convenient way to keep track of the added value our enterprise creates. If someone else wants to issue another currency, they certainly can. But everyone on the Peninsula knows that we’re generating value. They can see that value coming down the peninsula in the backs of trucks and wagons every time one of us returns from a trading trip. They know a Pelican will give them one thousandth of whatever comes down that road.”

“Mm. I guess that gives them an incentive to make sure the road is in good shape, too,” mused Ryan.

“Exactly… You see where this is going?”

The light started to come on in people’s eyes. They began to toss out new examples of the way the new system might make life easier. Someone pointed out that every time someone exchanged a Pelican for another good or service they’d made or performed, it made the currency worth more.

“Yes!” Scott practically shouted. “The Pelican will be the opposite of debt-backed currency, whose value is slowly bled off by interest paid on it. The value of the Pelican will increase as long as we keep adding value.”

“I guess the danger of that would be if the supply of seabutter dries up,” ventured Zinnia. “I hate to be a downer, but…”

“If the supply of seabutter dries up,” said Joanne in her dry and creaky voice, “we will have more serious things to worry about than the value of the Pelican.”

#

Jeremy headed up the coastline in a newly-built wagon, four times the size of Ryan’s truck but with a lighter unloaded weight. It was pulled by four mules, with six donkeys trailing behind. The resourceful, intelligent little donkeys could cope with side trips down pitted rural roads. Jed sat beside him on the bench seat of the wagon, a shotgun balanced across his lap. Jed would stay with the wagon in the bigger towns, while Jeremy took the donkeys on side trips into smaller settlements. The wagon held enough seabutter to feed a small town for a month. And this was just one of four Partnership wagons plying the roads headed north.

The spring sunshine was coaxing blossoms from the vegetation everywhere, and the balmy temperatures made them hum a little tune as they rode along. Jed set aside the shotgun, tilted his fine straw hat, pulled a harmonica out of his pocket, and began to blow a bluesy melody.

The entire coastline from the tip of the peninsula all the way to Port Arthur, a distance of almost seventy miles, was lined with people and baskets. Small donkey wagons and alcohol-fueled carts cruised up and down the road, light and empty going north up the Peninsula, fully loaded with raw seabutter headed south for processing in huge vats.

A dolphin jumped in the waves. Another one! A fishing boat was dragging heavy nets. The Gulf had died back the first year after the machine sickness happened, but humans weren’t the only critters who could live on seabutter. Almost invisibly tiny crustaceans, wiggling like kittens nuzzling a mother cat, always came up with the raw gritty butter in the baskets they scooped. They must have made food for bigger aquatic creatures, as the fisheries were producing, and the dolphins were calving.

This trip was to be longer than the others. Jeremy was intent on expanding their territory further north. The donkeys twitched their ears irritably and became stubborn from walking along behind the wagons day after day, because Jeremy took no side trips. They stopped at their regular towns of Jasper, Texas, and Texarkana, and then pushed on.

The day they pulled into Pine Bluff, Arkansas was that day each Southerner dreads every year: the day balmy, cool spring weather gives way to the sultry humidity which glues one’s shirt to one’s back and swells one’s fingers so that one’s rings won’t come off. The grass was still bright green, but the pink and purple profusion of azalea and wisteria blossoms crumpled into drooping globs of mauve and grey.

This town was not one with a square, but Jeremy knew well where the center of local business lay. An intersection where a gas station had once stood was now surrounded by shacks and tents. He noticed that a couple of real walls and roofs had gone up since he’d last been there, creating stalls. In addition, the gas-station building still stood, its pumps converted into uprights for hitching posts, its glass front broken completely since shortly after the machine sickness. The building had served as a trading post for a time, but now the business of trading had moved to the nearby structures. The station itself appeared to be a restaurant and community center.

Jeremy decided they should stop in an open area not far from the station, but on the opposite side from all the other small enterprises. He told young Jed, “Sit tight here while I check things out.”

Jed nodded, logy with the heat, and tilted his hat down a little further to protect his face from the searing late-morning sun.

Jeremy walked inside and inhaled the delicious aromas of cooking. He looked around, taking in the wooden chairs and tables over plywood flooring, which had replaced the convenience-store plastic seating and linoleum. The coolers and freezers stood empty, the shelves which once held snacks and sundries pulled out to make room for more seating. The fluorescent lights overhead were long gone, but some glass globes were suspended from the now-empty ceiling tile grid. That made Jeremy smile. He looked closely and saw that they were glowing brightly, the light they produced overwhelmed by the brightness of the sun shining in through the open windows.

A few people looked at him curiously. One or two recognized him from his time here more than a year earlier, and nodded, but none of them were people he had come to call by name. He just nodded and smiled, and they resumed their conversations. He stepped up to the counter and looked to where the cooking smell was coming from. There, he saw a woman with shining, waist-length, braided black hair. She was stirring something on top of a stove. A stove—as in a large, cubical, stainless-steel item with round elements on top of it, producing heat!

Next to the stove stood a giant, thick-walled version of the twin glass globes that hung from the ceiling, both globes almost full of fluid. Fused together on one side, the globes were connected by a glass tube that held what looked like a loosely-twisted wool or cotton rope. Leading out of the contraption was a thick wire wrapped in braided cloth fiber, which extended to the back of the stove.

“Excuse me, Miss?” he asked loudly. “Is that a microbial fuel cell?”

The woman turned around with a smile. She was all ready to brag about the technology, but when she saw his face, the lecture turned into a shriek instead. Jeremy met her joy with his own grin and put his arms out. She sprinted around the counter and jumped on him with both arms and both legs.

After hugging him and squealing a few times, she calmed down enough to say, “Jeremy! I thought I’d never see you again!”

“Gaby, you’re a sight for sore eyes! It sure feels like coming home.”

“Where’s DD?” Gaby looked over his shoulder, arming herself for another huge embrace.

“DD and I went our separate ways. Last I saw her, she was headed back to Florida.”

Did Gaby’s face illuminate a little at that? Or had her eyes always had that glow? Jeremy filed the thought away for further consideration.

“Well, gee!” Gaby said. “I saw you and her going by when y’all dropped off the first of the biobatteries.” She gestured at the power supply in the kitchen. “But I didn’t know when or if you’d be back.”

“Yeah, sorry about that.” Jeremy noticed it was a little bit warm under the roof here.

“No, no, no, I understood right away.” She smiled. “When I heard the story about how you left the batteries to be picked up? Brilliant idea: nobody could take them and keep the tech for themselves! Now there are factories for the biobatteries popping up all over the South and Midwest.”

“Perfect. That’s just what we dreamed would happen.” Jeremy found he actually had a tear in the creased corner of one eye. He turned his head and brushed it away, pretending to be scratching his nose. “Hey, how’re the kids doing?”

Gaby smiled. “Oh, they’re doing great. Cristina is shooting up like a weed, starting to look like a young lady, and Ricardo is kicking balls around like a madman, playing some crazy version of soccer they’ve invented around here.”

“And little Martha?”

“She’s alright. She took it a little hard when we found out about her daddy.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah—his whole unit went over a bridge into the river when the brake lines got infected with the machine sickness. There were only two survivors. One of them passed through here in February.” She sighed. Jeremy noticed she was wearing her wedding ring on a chain around her neck. “It was good to finally know. So many people never did, never will.”

They were both silent for a moment. Then Gaby swung her sleek black braid around and hustled into the kitchen. “Got to keep stirring this or it’ll scorch. Taste it.” She took a spoon from a drawer and dipped him a bit.

The spicy richness of the meaty stew made him put the empty spoon back in his mouth to lick it. “This is good enough to make you slap your grandma! What is it?”

“It’s a cross between a gumbo recipe Charlene gave me and my mother-in-law’s cochinita pibil.”

“Well, I’ll have a bowl of that, and one for my assistant. Is our wagon safe outside?”

“Oh, yeah!” Gaby waved a hand. “Folks around here watch out for each other. No real problems with thieving or looting, and even if there were, no one wants to disturb the peace of the market center. They’d be run off the next time they tried to come back.”

Jeremy went out and retrieved Jed and a large jar of seabutter, along with five of the smaller sample-sized jars. He brought an array of small trade goods to pay for his meal: ammunition, screws and nails, a bag of flour, a bag of sugar.

The two men came in to find two generous bowls of Gaby’s creation and two spoons. While they relished their meal, Gaby busied herself setting up for the lunch rush and looking through their merchandise. She was most interested in the sugar they had for sale—“The good stuff!”—and accepted the bag in exchange for their meal.

Jeremy noticed she eyed the flour as well, and they’d not been offered any bread or tortillas with their lunch. DD’s guess must have been right: last year, all the farmers dependent on commercial seed, had been caught flat-footed without seed to plant grain crops. Adding that to the wide-scale loss of irrigation when PVC pipes failed, taking into account the fact that she’d taken a sack of sugar for two bowls of stew, and Jeremy could read the signs of food shortage across the breadbasket. Indeed, the sun was right overhead for dinnertime, and while a number of people sat in the chairs, no one but them had bartered for any food yet.

He wasn’t the most educated man, but he had run his own landscaping business for twenty years and made a good living from it. His father was a rancher, and they needed a head for business, inputs and outputs, odds and risks.

Where some might see only a quandary and a risk of famine, Jeremy saw an opportunity. He brought the empty bowls up to the counter with one of the jars of seabutter.

“What’s this?” Gaby asked.

“I’ll tell you what: take that skillet there, heat it up, and put this in it.”

Gaby complied, and the melting seabutter began to sizzle. “Stir it up a little,” Jeremy advised, “or the protein in it will burn. This is seabutter. This is what’s making us fat down on the Gulf of Mexico.” He patted his stomach and watched Gaby’s eyes follow his hand.

“Not fat by a long shot!” she said. “I could fatten you up a good bit, make you healthy.”

“I’m carrying enough extra already, darling. Don’t be shrinking my jeans!”

Gaby scrubbed her spatula through the pan of sizzling seabutter with interest, then set it aside to cool. “I’ve heard about this stuff. You here to do business?”

Jeremy found himself feeling atypically shy. “Maybe.”

“Hmm. Well, Mr. Robinson,” said Gaby, “Maybe I’d have an interest in discussing it with you. Later. You remember where my place is?”

Jeremy made the rounds of the market stalls and gave out all the remaining samples of seabutter he’d brought with him before the sun kissed the horizon. He and Jed set up camp, and Jeremy took one of the horses and bridled him. “Don’t wait up, now.” He rode down the road towards Gaby’s house.

Once he got to the house, an old shotgun shack which had obviously been reconfigured with a pump-handle well out front, he tied the horse to the fence. The sun was down, the cloudless sky in the west shading from yellow into green, aqua, and vivid cerulean overhead, the first singular stars revealing themselves. The day had been warm, but there was an autumnal coolness on the breeze. It braced Jeremy’s pulse and rumpled his hair.

He mounted the steps with a creak that announced him, so that Gaby opened the door before he had a chance to knock. She was wearing a gauzy yellow dress which framed her shoulders and upper chest and reflected a warm, golden glow onto her warm-toned skin. She had loosened her braid and wore her luxuriant, thick black hair gently roped over her shoulder, where it trailed across one breast. The lanternlight was dim, and he didn’t want to stare, but…

She came closer to kiss his cheek in greeting. He smelled a piney, flowery fragrance from her skin, along with the faintest aroma of perspiration; the feminine musk of it was intoxicating. He put a hand to her waist, thinking only to hold her from pulling away. She paused and looked up at him. They stood that way for a moment, and then she smiled again. That smile did something to him beyond the physical desire developing in his body—he actually felt butterflies!

She grabbed the back of his head and kissed him firmly and deeply, opening her mouth like she was biting into a piece of fruit. He surged closer to her, pressing his erect penis through the denim of his jeans against the softness of her gauze-clad belly. She tasted of blackberries and garlic. He didn’t know when he’d felt so turned on. He pressed her body to his with both hands as he deepened the kiss.

It was with supreme effort that he forced himself to break the clinch. The home’s main room was living room, dining room, and kitchen combined. The next room was a bedroom, the corner of a neatly-quilted bed just visible. The third room was just a doorway, dark and obscure.

“The kids?” he nodded that way.

“At my mom’s.” She was panting lightly.

“Perfect.” He put his hands on her waist. “Let me just look at you for a moment.” He’d not been mistaken; the gauze of the dress was translucent, and her nipples were traceable beneath it. He’d already noted her lack of undergarments. “You are so beautiful.”

“Prove it,” she trilled.

He kissed her again, burying a hand in her soft shining hair. He ran his other hand up and down the luscious curves of her torso, palming her breast. She made a little humming moan at that, and he cultivated the moan into a little breathy cry as he thumbed her nipple. “I’ve been thinking about this since I first saw you,” she whispered. “But I thought it would never happen.”

“It’s happening…now!” He picked her up and walked into the bedroom. He flung her onto the bed and stepped out of his jeans in one motion. She reached out for the mother of pearl snaps on his shirt and ripped them open all at once; he’d pushed the flowing gauze up and out of the way. The length of their bodies pressing together was electric.

His prick was throbbing. He immersed his face in her hair, nipping her neck, moving down her body, tonguing her breasts but not stopping there. Finally finding her exquisite ebony-enrobed vulva, he teased the hair with his breath. She was breathing so hard, he had a moment’s concern for her well-being, but she didn’t seem to be in distress; far from it. So he set about relieving the disquiet she was unambiguously feeling, his tongue teasing its way between her lips until it found the secret center of joy. She called like spring birdsong as he settled into a rhythm on her clit. Just as her pelvis tightened and rose from the mattress, he stopped.

He slid up her body and kissed her with the taste of her own juices. As he did so, he sunk inside her, enveloped by a delicious snug warmth. He moved as slowly as he could, trying to make it last, but she was bucking, crazy with being almost there and then denied.

When her orgasm squeezed him, he began to thrust with abandon. It still took him a few more strokes, with her moans growing softer and more satisfied sounding. The last beat made him buck in his turn, consumed by the pulsing of his climax deep inside her.

It felt like a long time before either of them spoke. He found himself wanting to hold her like this, in this moment, in a place outside the passage of time. He had just come by for some fun, but her words about not thinking this would ever happen made him recall the sadness he’d felt the prior year, when they’d first come here and he’d realized she was still married and he was, if not committed to Deirdre, visibly coupled with her. He’d realized then that Gaby was the kind of woman that he wanted to come together with cleanly—not sneaking around, not hurting a friend’s feelings, not filled with doubt about her husband’s fate. Lying here now, he felt a quiet elation that it had so come to pass.

XXVIII.         Not Her Too.

Suzanne was surprised how quickly she settled into the household. When the US Military’s rigid, secular organization made up mostly of men disintegrated into a nightmare of aggression and danger, she’d felt lost and brokenhearted. Only the birth of her sweet Jomana (named after the base’s Amharic translator, who’d held her hand while she delivered), and the kindling of the fierce need to keep her safe and well at all costs, had given her back a sense of life purpose.

Now she was in a household made up of all women, except for the benevolent and charismatic Sheik Musa himself—the Muslim cleric to whom so many of the girls had fled, abandoning their families’ rigid strictures. They were tying together the traditions of the Islam grafted on top of Northern African traditions dating back five thousand years or more, to the Cushites and Nubians.

Suzanne was picking up their polyglot creole of Arabic, Afar, and Amharic a word or two at a time. Musa, Meala, and a few others spoke some English. And now came Li, who spoke American English with almost native fluency. Because of this, Suzanne and Meala gravitated towards the marooned Chinese. Suzanne was enjoying speaking her native tongue with a fluent speaker, and Meala was determined to improve her English.

Meala had already been spending time in halting conversation with Suzanne, but now she could listen to the two of them speak idiomatically, moving her lips at times, and her English was progressing by leaps and bounds.

“So, how did you say these women came to be here?” Li was asking.

“I think this is right,” said Suzanne, “…tell me if I’m wrong, Meala?” The girl nodded. “Is that the Afar tribes these girls are from still practice infibulation, and the governments of Djibouti and Eritrea were trying to wipe out the practice.”

“Infib—what?”

“Female Genital Mutilation. Cutting.”

“Oh.” Awkward silence. “I’m sorry I asked.”

“Anyway, Musa belongs to a more modern, progressive school of traditional North African Islam. The government was supporting him to go on outreach trips into the rural desert areas with the public health doctors and nurses, to teach them that the practice is haram, not in accord with Islam, rather than halal. They were getting a lot of pushback from the traditional midwives and herb women in the villages. Just before the machine sickness came on, there were some other imams from the other side of the Red Sea, who were trying to organize a return to the traditional ways. A bunch of the young women took off and ran away.” She looked at Meala for confirmation.

“Yes,” Meala nodded. “Girls run away a lot, but this time there were many of us at same time, and Musa gave us a place to go. Musa is good. Usual is, girl hides in bush until she gets hungry, then comes back.”

“The little girl, Hawa, was going to have it done too. Sometimes they do it to newborn babies.” Suzanne spit the words out more angrily than she’d intended, but the thought of someone harming an infant that way affected her more than it might have if she weren’t nursing her own Jomana. With Manuel thousands of miles away across desert and ocean, she had to protect the baby herself, be both mother and father. She refused to believe she’d never see him again, refused to consider that he wasn’t alive, but the distance seemed insurmountable now that modern transportation had come to a halt. “So, tell me about the boat you were on,” she said. It was probably too abrupt a change of subject, but Li took it in stride, and even Meala followed the change in topic despite her limited English.

“I don’t know a lot about it. I was kidnapped and forced into a work crew on board. These guys—I guess you’d call them a gang—were coming to Africa because they’d heard that the machine sickness didn’t affect you here…”

“Wrong!”

“Yeah. I don’t know where they’d gotten that idea. Probably had a boat come in from the Chinese navy base here in Djibouti or one of the railroad-building groups that’s been putting in the trains connecting Djibouti and Addis Ababa just before the virus started to spread.”

“So the boat…”

“The boat was a replica of an old Chinese exploration junk. I wish you could have seen it in full sail! The way the sails were constructed like the wings of a bat. Elegant.” His eyes took a faraway look.

Unnoticed, Meala smiled, looking at him.

“Anyway,” he said, “we were slave laborers for rowing when the wind was calm. That wasn’t fun.” He worked his hands open and closed, remembering the stiffness that paralyzed them after hours of working those oars.

“I wonder if those ships could make it to North America?” mused Suzanne.

“I know!” Meala piped up, “you need Somali boat! Somalis great fishers. Build boats old way again.”

“I’ve seen them,” Suzanne agreed. “Sailing along just in sight of land. They look a little like Spanish galleons.”

“That could work.” Li furrowed his brow. “One of those could get me back to China, too.”

“Chinese live at base in Djibouti,” said Meala.

“That’s right. There was a Chinese base right near the AFRICOM installation I was stationed at. This is a crucial chokepoint for the Red Sea, and all the countries wanted a foothold. I don’t know if the Chinese base was in any better shape than the US base.”

“Maybe I’ll go check it out once I’m all healed up.” Li still had some deep, healing wounds on his head, arms, and legs where the volcanic rock had gouged him while he was near drowning. He rose stiffly now, and the women followed him up the hill towards the compound. A group had gone to market, and those who’d stayed behind were in the kitchen preparing the evening meal, so the cool rooms were quiet and soothing.

Meala yawned. “Sleepy. I go lie down.”

“Sounds good. I guess I’ll go too. See you in the dorm in a minute.” Suzanne headed for the toilets. Li watched Meala sway through the big arched doorway. Then he turned to go to his own quarters.

He had only gotten a few steps when a scream pierced the tranquil half-light. “That’s Meala!” She sounded enraged.

He ran towards the sound, followed by the women from the kitchen, six or eight of them, and Suzanne, fastening her pants as she ran. Meala screeched again, something incoherent, as the first of the women passed Li and rounded the doorway into the room the noise was coming from.

Li stopped, not comprehending for a moment. Meala was still bellowing in rage. Her headwrap had fallen down her back. She was slapping and grabbing wildly at a huge, dark mass which Li figured out was Sheik Musa, cowering under crossed arms and completely naked.

On the bed, partially concealed by the festoons of mosquito netting, was little Hawa, gathered into a wary fetal crouch that did not hide the fact that she, too, was nude.

Li stood gobsmacked as the women flooded around him into the room. They chattered among themselves in their languages, outrage growing in each one’s voice as she understood what was going on. Shortly, Musa was prone on the floor in a ball, bleeding from his scalp where huge clumps of his hair were torn out, crying and begging for mercy. Kicks in the ribs and kidneys had him crying and groaning in pain.

Li tried to restrain some of the women with little success. Just as he got one pair of hands under control, another would replace them, and the woman he held would kick and writhe until she got free to return. Li also wasn’t trying very hard. The behavior the women were punishing was too vile.

As they spent their fury, the rain of kicks and punches tapered off like a bag of popcorn finishing up in the microwave. The women stood in a circle over their former savior, chattering at one another about what to do. Li couldn’t follow most of what they said, but they seemed to be divided into a camp which wanted Musa punished more, who punctuated their words with kicks and blows, and a camp which was preaching some sort of restraint.

Gravel shifted outside. A donkey brayed softly, and the jute-tired, alcohol-fueled vehicles of the shopping brigade pulled up. The rest of the women came inside, calling out when they found the main room empty.

A few of the debaters went out to talk to them. Musa cautiously raised his head, and got a bare foot in his teeth for his trouble. Hawa jumped off the bed and ran off, Meala on her tail. Li wavered, wanting to support Meala in comforting Hawa, but his curiosity about what would befall Musa was too strong. He stayed put.

Loud voices from the hall. The small sleeping chamber was suddenly thronged by the colorful attire of the women, packed together like riders on a Shanghai train at quitting time, their feminine sweat mingling with the smell of blood and fresh urine coming from Musa on the floor. The heat of their bodies in the small space was no hotter than the anger in their voices and eyes. The only thing protecting Musa at that point was that none of them could step back far enough to really swing her foot or fist at him.

Suzanne waded into melee with a soldier’s confidence, shoving the shorter, younger women aside with shoulder and hip, and grabbed Musa by one arm. She forced the arm behind his back as she lifted him upright, the women around her helping lift him. He was carried by the outraged mob without his feet touching the floor, his eyes squeezed shut against the gouging fingers that wriggled towards them.

The women cast him face-down in the dust outside. As she looked down at him, Suzanne realized she had saved the man’s life, however briefly, and then considered that this man had rescued her. Why?

A dark, sinking gulf opened in her emotions as she realized that he had rescued little Jo as well. How young did he like them? She wanted to vomit.

Li hung back in fascination at the top of the three steps to the broad entryway. The women began a chant of some sort. The chant ended, and they then segued into some sort of formal dialogue in Afar. Musa tried to rise twice, and twice the women kicked him prone again, standing on the backs of his hands with their bare feet.

Meala and Hawa emerged from inside. Hawa’s face was streaked with tears but she was otherwise calm. “The oldest woman acts first,” Meala explained to both Li and Hawa. The oldest woman in the compound was only thirty, a friendly woman with a ready smile named Bilqis. She was not smiling today. “I guess that the eldest is not so old in our group.”

Bilqis stepped forward, a fury in her red cotton robe, and the others subsided. She was holding a chunk of rock the size of a boot in her strong, callused hands. She lifted the stone above her head and brought it down, releasing it with a guttural cry. The women began to clap and chant something Li did not understand in Afar.

A grisly rhythmic dance began: women swirled out of the group, snatched rocks, and burrowed back between their companions. Each thud! was followed by a high-pitched ululation of the mob. They threw back their heads, the ones with filed teeth looking like wolves flashing their fangs, and howled.

Finally, when Musa was nothing but a poorly-ground piece of meat and offal at their feet, Bilqis raised her arms. “Stop!” she shouted in Afar. The women’s energy was starting to flag by that moment, and so their chanting and clapping did not take long to fade to silence.

They stood, catching their breath, when at once a piercing cry rang out. It was the muezzin of the nearby mosque. He was calling the men to mid-afternoon Asr prayer. The women glanced at one another.

“There are no more men here,” Bilqis said.

Meala stole a glance at Li and touched two fingers to his hand. He might have begged to differ, but he prudently kept silent.

Bilqis took off her headscarf, revealing the beaded headband beneath. She tossed her head and ululated, a longer, broader, fuller-throated version of the little yelps the women had been making when each stone struck the pedophile priest. Another woman drew the fierce, curved gile dagger her brother had gifted her from inside her waistband. Then, like a sussuration of starlings changing vectors in flight, the entire group was on the move, twining thongs and belts and scarves in their hands or clutching rocks.

The women swarmed into the mosque. Moments later, the call to prayer was abruptly cut short. Li shaded his eyes and made out the red of Bilqis’s dress pressed against the white of the muezzin’s dishdasha. He made out her red scarf about his neck. After a few minutes, the muezzin fell from the tower balcony, a white kite with a red tail trailing behind.

Bilqis began to ululate once more, but her song now was a little different. It was a combination of the traditional Qafar Afar vocal styling with the music of the Adhaan call to worship Allah.

“It is good,” murmured Meala by his shoulder. She glanced down at silent wide-eyed Hawa. “Men should not sing or play music. This is the Afar way.”

Bilqis cried out in an ecstasy that tugged at Li’s soul, but struck fear into his heart. The other women crowded onto the balcony turret and sang back to her, in call and response. Meala translated for Li:

Mother is great

Nefertiri Queen is lady

Elegant, boss of everywhere

I testify that she

Is who is

I bear witness that there are a million gods

None greater than the queen of the vultures

Come to prayer

Call the vultures

Come to prayer

Call the vultures

A buzz arose within the sound of the women’s calls, then grew louder until it overwhelmed them. Li gimballed in place, trying to get a fix on where the sound was coming from. He spotted the source moments after the women in the tower, who now began calling, “The vultures! The vultures!” in excitement.

Li took Meala by one hand and Hawa by the other and led them inside. He made them lie down in the sunken living room’s center. The buzzing grew louder, and he risked a look outside. He had been right; the buzzing sound was coming from three drones, their faceless silhouettes unmistakable against the blue afternoon sky. He lay down again, wondering, how did they fuel those things? How do they control them with all electronics down? Is it true that there are places here untouched by the machine sickness?

“Chinese drones,” Meala breathed. “They come from the Chinese base.”

The vultures cruised low, their suspended payloads of bombs like peapods clutched beneath them. They circled the compound and the mosque three times, the women raising their hands in adulation from the tower. The men in the street who had been making their way to the mosque dropped to the ground in fear of taking fire, but the women pelted them with the rocks they’d brought.

The drones turned and went on their way, climbing out to the northwest, for purposes Li could not fathom. Li took Meala in his arms and held her closely for a long time.

XXIX.                  For the Common Good

Stonegood was sitting in his office, working in the patch of sunlight that came in through the window and dried the ink on the pages quickly, averting smudges. He unconsciously registered the sound of the giant steel-and-copper press becoming deeper-pitched and softer until it stopped. He set the last page of the days’ compilations of news on top of the stack at the end of the desk. The thumps of bundles of papers being stacked for distribution came from the next room.

He watched the first of the paper boys come up to the building. He called them “paper boys” in his mind, but in fact, they were not all boys; some of them were women and some were full-grown men. They arrived on ATVs, on foot, on mule and horseback, and in wagons. Each took a stack of papers suitable for his or her distribution area, dropped off payment for yesterday’s stack along with any unsold copies and a form enumerating the locations and types of sales, and left hauling the evening’s news.

Lou rose from his desk, stretched, and headed to the back to give Gabe such assistance as his aging bones allowed. He entered the press room and admired the cogs and rollers of this beautifully restored machine. He began tying twine around the bundles as Gabe plunked them down.

Esther Barrington had just left with her bundle, headed for her handcart, but now she rushed back in the door. She’d dropped the bundle in her hurry, and she was wild-eyed. “There are six cars headed up the road towards us now. They have guns. It looks bad.” She brushed by them and pushed open the back door to the building, letting it fall shut behind her as she took off in a sprint.

Gabe and Lou exchanged a meaningful look.

“Guess you’re gonna do what you’re gonna do,” Gabe said. “Can’t change your mind? Didn’t think so. I’m outta here.” Gabe stripped off his grimy coverall and shrugged into his jacket. Grabbing his hat, he also made an exit via the back door.

Lou stood up and calmly walked over to the gallons of ethanol stored neatly against one wall. Ruefully but methodically, he began to pour the contents onto his beloved press, pausing to stuff balled up copies of today’s paper into the crevices of the device, then saturating it with the flammable accelerant.

Car engines pulled out up front and died; car doors slammed. A three-second burst of automatic weapons fire rang out. Lou strained his ears for a cry or thrashing that might mean Gabe was hit, but it didn’t come.

The six cars—revived from their sterile storage in the fenced compound’s bunker for just this occasion, fueled and lubricated with precious fuel and oil preserved in sealed containers—had pulled up in a defensive formation. The men within grinned thinly, betraying their joy at having a purpose again. The tightness in their shoulders and the snugness of their shirts across their paunchy bellies attested to many months of forced inactivity and ennui.

They had no radios; the devastation wrought on the plastics and wires of small electronics that were frequently handled had been near-complete. They communicated using hand signals and the occasional verbal command. They surrounded the Register building, covering all exits and all windows with their weapons. Once all were in place, four men slipped sideways through the front doors, alert for traps or ambushes that never came.

Tyler was in the leading group, and after the initial rush of entry, he sniffed. “Shit! I smell burning!” he cried. The four men dashed willy-nilly into the press room and saw flames beginning to lick one side of the metal behemoth. They rushed to whip off their jackets, smothering the flames where they could.

“Looks like a lot of the fire went out on its own,” Brent observed.

Tyler spotted a water bucket under a pump and quickly filled it. A few trips back and forth extinguished the remaining flames. “Clear the building!” the men moved quickly and established that the structure was empty. Lou had made good his escape. “Steve won’t be happy about that. He wanted him arrested. I have the warrant here.”

Brent smirked at Tyler’s earnestness. Warrant indeed. “At least we’ve got the press and the newspaper building secured,” Brent said.

At that moment, one of the outside men shouldered through the door and dumped an indignant Gabe to the floor. The man had a huge lump on his forehead that swelled his eye shut, and his torn clothing and huddled posture suggested he’d taken more.

“What have we here?” laughed Tyler. “Even better. The press and the pressman. Not bad for an afternoon’s work. The president will be pleased.”

XXX.                      A Modest Proposal

Over that season, Jeremy made at least one of the weekly Ozark runs for the Bolivar company. Each time, he sold all the seabutter he could bring. More interestingly, he observed that his return trips started to involve more company. The first few trips, he would come with Jed or someone else from Bolivar, and they’d ride home with a load of trade goods.

Then, one morning, he walked out the door of Gaby’s house to rinse off and brush his teeth at the pump.

There was a woman waiting for him. She was scrawny and her hair and eyes were dull. “Excuse me?” she said. “Are you Jeremy Robinson?”

“Last time I checked.”

“Jed said I’d find you here. My name’s Sarah Cooper. Can you take passengers to the Gulf?”

“Depends. How many passengers?”

“Me, and three little ones. We don’t weigh much, and we won’t take up much room. The youngest is just a baby. We won’t eat much.” She gave a little nod as though setting her resolve, and then sidled up to Jeremy inexpertly. “I could make it worth your while.”

Jeremy looked at her, mentally compared her emaciated pallor to his lovely Gaby’s fullness and grace, and sidled back himself. “That won’t be necessary,” he said laconically. “Y’all can ride with us. Pay it forward to someone else. What goes around, comes around.”

She smiled, showing a missing bicuspid, and thanked him profusely.

She and the children arrived at the appointed time. They had little baggage, basically just what they’d need for the trip. The children were skinny but neatly dressed, and better-fed than their mom, he noted with some approval. True to her word, Sarah kept the children calm and quiet most of the time ,and had to be pressed to take some of their food.

“It’s the seeds,” she explained. “It just got too easy for the farmers to buy their seed from the big agricultural suppliers every year. They put seed by at the end of this year’s harvest, but that won’t feed us for another year. It’ll be fine after that, but these young ones can’t wait another year. They’re growing now.”

Jeremy privately doubted that food would be as plentiful as before, even after the reserved seed was put in. He knew from his dad’s lectures that yields had doubled in the past century because of cheap, plentiful chemical fertilizers and mechanical cultivation. Neither of those simple technologies were attainable now. The effect of the machine sickness had been fatal for manufacturing and transporting fungicides, pesticides, and herbicides, and the limitations of ethanol engines lubricated with natural substances.

On the other hand, a lot of people had died in the upheavals, After. Most of the dead were in the cities, and the people who’d survived were the ones who’d gotten out. They were spread across the countryside and small and midsize towns. Abandoned homes were being reclaimed by squatters. But if the populace was reduced by a third, and food production was half of what it had been, seabutter could make up the deficit.

Jeremy and the Bolivar Partnership were bringing the seabutter to the people. But what if the people came to the seabutter? That’s what Sarah was doing. Despite Jed and Jeremy’s urgings to continue with them, she elected to hop off the wagon as soon as the sea came into view beneath its cowl of roiling clouds. She stood holding a child’s hand on each side, the baby slung at her hip and a rifle across her back. The kids waved goodbye.

“I feel bad about leaving them alone.” Jed shook his head and turned to look back at them, but they’d disappeared into the palmetto scrub.

“She made her choice. You can’t protect someone who doesn’t want protecting. That’s how a man winds up dying for nothing.”

“What would you die for, Jeremy?”

“That’s a young man’s question. My uncle died in Viet Nam when I was five. My aunt kept a framed poem by AE Housman on the wall in her kitchen, with his picture tucked into the corner of it:

Here dead lie we because we did not choose

To live and shame the land from which we sprung.

Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;

But young men think it is, and we were young.

“The question is, what would you live for?”

Jed wrinkled his forehead at that, but let the conversation drop.

But the questions reverberated in Jeremy’s head for quite some time after. They haunted him every time he drove a wagon carrying load after load of passengers to the coast. They passed more on foot or riding donkeys, leading cattle or herds of sheep, toting barrows and travoises of things and food and people and livestock with them.

The co-operative had agreed on how to set a fair price for transport, which varied with demand, but Jeremy—who was accumulating quite a store of Pelicans by this point—himself paid a good number of fares on behalf of the destitute. What goes around, comes around. The wheels went around, and the horses’ hoofs beat out a rhythmic question: What would you live for? What would you die for?

#

One fine October day, Jeremy was late arriving in Pine Bluff. A wheel had broken on the wagon, and the spare was lying flat on the wagon floor under the full load of seabutter, which had to be unloaded so the wheel could be replaced and then reloaded again.

He and Jed were both whipped when the wagon stopped at Gaby’s. The sunset was subtle streaks of peach and lemon on the horizon. Jeremy handed off the reins to Jed and grabbed his duffel. Jed waved and rode off. Jeremy patted his pocket as he walked inside.

“There’s my cowboy,” grinned Gaby. Her flashing smile still took his breath away. She wrapped her arms around his neck for a hot kiss.

He took her shoulders and pushed her back, looking her in the eyes. “It’s been twenty years since I did this, and I told myself I’d never do it again, but…” He dropped to one knee, producing a ring. “Will you marry me?”

She put her hands over her mouth, nodding. “Yes!” she managed to squeak out.

Martha, Cristina, and Ricardo had been eavesdropping, and they burst out of the bedroom in excitement. Jeremy and Gaby were enfolded by a bounding, squealing scrum of a group hug.

I. Nun of That, Now

After the meal, the women sorted themselves into two groups, the bigger group of Sisters of the Order of Saint Benedict heading out one door to their evening devotions—or whatever nuns did with their evenings—and the others heading out the exterior door. D.D. followed the nuns and headed to the hospital dorm.

It annoyed but didn’t surprise her to find Cindy walking behind her. When D.D. made the turn into the dorm, Cindy called out, “Going to the guest quarters?”

“Yeah, I guess so. What do they wear for bathing suits?” No nylon or spandex any more.

“Just throw on some shorts if you have some, and a tank top. Maybe you can get Lacey to make you an actual suit while you’re here. She sews.”

D.D. quickly changed into cutoffs and a cotton tank from her pack. She popped out into the hall and started back the way she came. She was just stepping out the door into the moonlight when Cindy came in the the other dining hall door.

“You’ll want this,” Cindy said, holding out a towel. D.D. noticed she had one for herself too, and was wearing the same kind of shift they’d dressed D.D. in when she first got out of bed. On the large woman, it looked like a circus tent.

“Thanks,” D.D. said.

Cindy followed her out the door. To D.D.’s questioning glance, she shrugged, “What Mother Laura doesn’t know, won’t hurt her.”

Great, D.D. thought. She doesn’t seem like the type who discourages easily. But Cindy was perfectly cool all the way down the moonlit path.

Something cold and slimy touched her hand, and she jerked away. It was the dog, tail wagging, asking for her attention. She scratched his ears.

“That’s the guest quarters,” Cindy pointed out the building with candlelit windows ahead. “And if you can see it in the dark, the stable is right over there.” D.D. could just make out the flat-topped barn to the right. The two women walked around the building. “And here…” She paused for dramatic effect, “is the hot tub!” She touched D.D.’s back and D.D. stepped forward.

D.D. drew closer to the tableau: what looked like a huge kiddie pool, surrounded by bushy plants, with oil-lamp torches burning around it (the seabutter burned with a charring-barbecue kind of smell, she noted, meaning there must be a good bit of protein in it). Ten women sat in the pool. As she got closer, she saw that it was a huge, circular stock-watering trough, the kind you saw on big cattle operations, holding thousands of gallons of water. She shrugged, looked around, and tossed her towel on top of the pile of towels to one side, then walked up to the edge of the tub. The dog cringed, wagging his tail nervously. Must be afraid of water. There was a little wooden stair there, so she stepped up onto it.

“Careful!” called Selene. “It can be a little slippery climbing in.” Someone held out a hand, and D.D. took it as she lowered herself into the tub.

“This is D.D., everybody. Everybody, D.D.!” She was introduced to Amelia, Carolyn, Deanna, Jada, Karen, Lacey, Prianca, and Tonya.

“Sorry, I know I won’t remember all your names.” Lacey, she’s the one who sews. Prianca looks Indian and has an Indian name. The rest? Amelia, umm, Carolyn…

The water was quite warm—almost too warm at first. “Ahhhh… That feels so good!” D.D. let herself sink into the tub up to her chin. The heat began to make her skin flush and her muscles unlimber.

“Move, girl!” commanded Cindy.

D.D. slithered across the bottom of the tank to an open space on the other side and hooked her hands over the rolled rim. Cindy unceremoniously plopped into the water, creating great waves that slopped over the edges, prompting objections from the others in the water.

“Hey, you’re spilling the hot water! Fuckin’ firewood doesn’t grow on trees!” Maddy said.

“Actually, it does.” said Cindy. “Whooo-hooo! That is some hot water. Man, that feels great!” She paddled around and wedged her bulk in not far from D.D.

“So, you’re the gal that killed that filthy pack of redneck assholes?” Carolyn…or was it Deanna?

“Hey, watch it! I’m a proud redneck, dammit!” one of the others said.

“Hell, yeah!” someone seconded.

“Whatever. So, how’d you do it? Those killers have been picking off solo travelers on that stretch of road out of Hattiesburg for quite some time now.”

D.D. had thought a lot about that during her convalescence. “Well, they were split up at first, so I didn’t have to deal with them all at the same time…”

“How many were there?” someone said.

“I counted seven, including the one who was down, the one Selene shot,” said Maddy.

“I was sure glad to see you three ride up!” DD said.

“You made quite a sight, riding into the monastery,” said Lacey. “The four horsewomen of the Apocalypse.”

“Shit!” said Maddy. “Fuckin’ Pestilence, Famine, War, and Death. That’s us.”

“Yeah, except I wasn’t on a horse,” objected Cindy. “Which of the four horsemen rode a four-wheeler?”

“Machine sickness.” said someone. “Was that one of the Horsemen?”

“Yeah,” said D.D. thoughtfully. “Who’d have thought the plague that wiped out civilization would be a plague that made things sick instead of people?”

“I don’t know about civilization being wiped out.” The woman speaking was reserved and composed. Jada? “I think this big change just made civilization stop and pivot.”

“What the motherfucking Hell are you talking about? Didn’t you hear about those cunts who D.D. killed? Were they civilized?”

“Well, there were plenty of criminals and fighting and shooting in the neighborhood where I lived in Baltimore,” Jada said. “And I can tell you, most of them died in the few weeks after the machine sickness kicked in. It was full-on war for what little was left.”

“Good Lord, child! How’d you survive? How’d you get out?”

“I hid in the basement until spring. By that time, all the little guys had deserted, until the big players were fighting each other in the streets themselves.”

“The basement?”

“The basement where?”

“How did you eat?”

She was peppered with several questions at once.

“Where did you shit?” Maddy. Of course.

“I’d really rather not talk about it.” The pain in her voice yanked their curiosity up short. Quiet ruled for a few minutes, punctuated by a sigh now and then as someone shifted her muscles in the warm water.

“So, did you pick out a name for the dog?” asked Maddy.

“How about Kittykitty?” said D.D. thoughtfully.

“What kind of name is that for a dog?” said Cindy.

“—That’s great!” said Selene at the same time.

“I always wanted to have a dog named that. Imagine calling out ‘Here, kitty, kitty,’ and this yaller dog comes running up.”

Hearing the high-pitched call, the dog actually did come running up into the edge of the torchlight, wagging its tail, head to one side.

“Well, that settles it. The dog’s name is Kittykitty. Here, Kittykitty!” D.D. stuck her hand out and Kittykitty licked the water off it, then lay down.

“My brother had a yaller dog with a black face like that. Did you know they’re actually a separate breed, descended from Indian dogs?” Lacey said.

“That’s what folks called them in South Carolina where I grew up. Indian dogs…or Carolina curs.”

Selene reached out into the darkness and grabbed a bottle, handed it to D.D. “Try our homemade honey hooch. I guess you could call it distilled mead. We call it bees’ knees.”

“Bees’ knees? Cute!” D.D. twisted the metal lid off the old whiskey bottle, sniffed, and swigged. It burned going down, but the aroma and aftertaste were actually pleasantly sweet and flowery. She huffed a little, but took another hit.

Cindy held out her hand, and D.D. handed the bottle to Selene between them. Selene took a bracing glug-glug-glug draught and handed the bottle along to Cindy, who surprised D.D. by taking only a moderate swallow before handing the bottle along. Would have figured her for a lush.

“Now I’m warm inside and out.” D.D. sighed contentedly.

“How’s that collarbone?” asked Cindy.

“It’s still kind of sore and achey,” D.D. said. “I never had a broken bone before. I guess I’ll always have this bump.” She looked down at her collarbones. The one that had broken had a definite lump—the size, maybe, of a small lime.

“Yes, you will,” said Cindy. She is not looking at my collarbone! “But it won’t always be that big. The bone will remodel over time.”

“Well, the hot water feels great on it. How do you get so much water so hot?” D.D. stuck her legs out and let her butt settle to the bottom of the tank so the water could soothe her healing bone.

“There’s a woodstove in the guest quarters,” said one of the others. “We’ve rigged up a coil of copper pipe around it. Somebody has to start tending the fire ’round the clock about three days before we plan to have a soak party.”

“Oh, but it’s so worth it.” moaned Cindy, sinking into the tub herself. Her feet touched D.D.’s, and D.D. moved hers away. Cindy’s feet followed.

Okay, that’s it. “Cindy, those are my feet. Do you mind?”

Cindy pulled her feet back. “Oh, sorry.” Trying to make it seem like an accident.

“Cindy,” Maddy said, “I think it’s about damn time you went home. Don’t you?”

Cindy took a breath to argue, but Maddy pulled herself upright and scowled. Cindy appeared to reconsider. “Fine. I was just leaving anyway.” She hoisted herself out of the water and made the closest approximation of a dignified exit that a dripping, obese person can make.

“Fucking nuns.” Maddy shook her head. “Brides of Christ, my ass! She always thinks she’s being so slick and sly.”

“Now, now,” said Prianca. “It can’t be easy, giving up men like that.”

“We’ve pretty much given up men here in the guest quarters,” said Deanna, or somebody. “Not on purpose, it just worked out that way.”

“Speak for yourself!”

“Carolyn! Is there something you’re not telling us?”

“Maybe. Ain’t nobody’s business but mine, is it now?”

“Hmph. Lucky! It’s been so long for me, I wouldn’t know what to do with a man if I had one.” Lacey crossed her arms and stared off into space wistfully. “I used to have a boyfriend I’d call the Train, because he could go all night long.”

“I had a man I called the Sniper because he always hit the spot.”

“Yeah, well this guy I’ve been meeting? I call him Courvoisier.” Carolyn smirked.

“What the fuck is that?” Maddy said. “Ain’t it some kind of fancy liquor?'

“He sure is!” It took a minute. The girls all groaned at once.

“On that note,” sighed Lacey. “I’m getting all pruney.” She held out her soggy fingers.

“Yeah, it’s getting late,” one of the others said. “I’m heading in.”

“Yeah, the mosquitoes love me. I’m getting et up.”

One by one, all the women left the tub except D.D. and Selene. Once they were gone, the water level was shallower. They lay down horizontally and floated, their ears submerged in utter silence. Their hands at their sides were wafting in the water, which had cooled to skin temperature. The sky directly above them had become overcast, clouds concealing the stars, lit to a blank LCD display by the moon behind. D.D. closed her eyes in the darkness. Only the slight coolness of the damp Mississippi air above, compared to the water in which she floated, let her know her body was even there.

Then, electrically, something brushed her outer thigh. It was the back of Selene’s hand. Neither of them pulled away, and they continued to drift together until both their arms were gently trapped between them. They rebounded and began to drift apart, but their movement put the palm sides of their fingers together. They gently intertwined them. The resistance of their arms almost imperceptibly brought their languid drifting into sync until they floated as one. In the profound silence, D.D. couldn’t miss the subtle quickening of her breath and heart.

Finally, it was D.D. who broke the spell. She drew her hand back and sat up in the water, which was beginning to get uncomfortably cool. “I have to pee.”

Selene sat up too, smiling, eyes gleaming in the torchlight. Her dirty-blond curls had darkened and straightened with wetness, plastered sleekly to her scalp. “I’ll show you where it is.”

They slowly and deliberately got out of the water and dried themselves. With her wet shorts and tank top still on, D.D.’s towel was ineffective. She hung it around her neck and followed Selene inside. The taller woman’s gait had the smooth oscillation of a woman who was at home in the saddle. She opened the door to the guest quarters, and D.D.’s eyes took a moment to adjust even in the dim lanternlight.

“It’s right there. I’ll wait,” Selene said. “Right. Here.” She lightly touched the back of her fingers to D.D.’s forearm, causing a shiver.

In the bathroom, D.D. stripped and left her sopping clothing on the floor. She wrapped the towel around her body and came out. Her towel protecting the furniture, Selene was sitting in her bandanna-bikini swimsuit, on an institutional-looking striped Queen Anne settee. It was the common room of the nun’s guest quarters. The room was library-like, with dark wood, book-lined shelves all around and sturdy upholstered chairs for reading.

D.D. glided surely to the settee and sat down next to Selene. She tentatively laid a hand on her shoulder, and when Selene leaned in, D.D. slid her hand around her neck. Her lips met D.D.’s, soft and delicate, and parted to gently swirl their tongues together.

They slid closer, arms around one another. D.D. slid her cheek over the silk of Selene’s face and kissed her neck. “Is there somewhere we can be alone?” she whispered.

Selene rose and D.D. surged to her feet as well, loathe to increase the distance between them. Selene playfully hooked her finger over the twist between D.D.’s breasts and used the towel to pull her down the hall into a sparely-furnished bedroom. Once the door shut behind them, Selene turned to light her own lantern and then stripped off her cotton swimsuit. D.D. put her hands to her towel, met Selene’s eyes, and slowly—very slowly—teased the knot apart, then finally let the towel fall to the floor.

Selene’s breasts were small, with firm, brown nipples and crinkled areolas. D.D. found herself hypnotized by the angles of her frame, her wiry strength and symmetry. She crossed the space between them, bare feet padding on the wood, and found she had to go on tiptoe to kiss her. The kiss deepened, and D.D. cupped Selene’s spare buttock to pull her closer. Selene stroked her hair and throat and trailed her hand towards D.D.’s breast, pressing the tender bump of the healing, broken bone, protruding prominently as D.D. extended her neck.

That broke D.D.’s concentration enough to distract her; she put her hand over Selene’s and pulled her backwards to the double bed. They fell together, softness on softness, hungrily kissing. Selene lowered her head to D.D.’s nipple and nipped it with her lips, then pulled it into her mouth and rolled it with her tongue over and over until D.D. couldn’t help but moan.

At that, Selene lifted her head and put her finger on D.D.’s lips. “All the bedrooms are on this hall,” she cautioned.

D.D. nodded, thinking, how will I ever keep quiet? This is like having sex in my room at mom’s house! She rolled over on top of Selene, jamming her thigh up between hers, rolling both of those penny-brown nipples between her fingers, sealing her mouth to hers, sucking her tongue.

Selene responded by lifting her hips, tilting her mons against D.D.’s thigh with a rocking equestrian movement that grew rapidly more urgent. Her two thighs were compressing D.D.’s one, so hard it was almost going numb. D.D. slid one hand between them, probing easily until she found the slippery slit and locate the tiny button within. She gasped—quiet! —as Selene’s slender fingers found her own clit.

She followed the cues as the taller woman led her into a world-rocking rhythm, her belly and breasts and face all blaring their exultation at the buttery warmth of her body. The taste of her tongue was in her mouth, blending with the urgency of their mingled breaths and the cold of her wet hair trailing across her jaw. All at once, she was coming in iridescent waves. Selene grasped the back of her waist and bucked so hard. D.D. almost lost her touch.

She realized they were coming together, which touched her off, in turn, into a deeper orgasm. D.D. lost all track of where she was, who she was, or even that she was. When she began to return to the world again, she realized she’d probably made some noise, and that the bed had been creaking rhythmically, too. Oh, well.

She reclaimed her hand from between Selene’s thighs and knelt on her elbows. Someone opened a door in the hall and padded past. A few moments later, they heard Maddy’s unmistakably tinted vocabulary streaming from the bathroom, and then a loud plop as D.D.’s wet clothes landed on the common-room floor.

The two tittered like giddy teenagers.

“That was…wow.”

Selene nodded, her brown eyes dreamily half-lidded, and spoke softly. “I knew I wanted you the moment I saw you standing in the road, swaying, half dead on your feet, and looking up at me.”

“Right after you’d shot that guy in the field.”

She smiled and laid a hand on D.D.’s face. “You had a look on your face that said, ‘if I have to fight you, I damn well will.’ That blew me away. There you were, weak and injured and filthy and riled by pain, and you knew you needed help, but you were ready to take the situation as it was and give it your best no matter what. You were a warrior.”

A warrior. I never really saw myself that way. She tucked that thought away to examine later, like a jewel Selene had picked up from the dust of D.D.’s life and thoughtlessly handed to her.

“You know what I was thinking at that moment?” D.D. said. “Besides that you were the most graceful horsewoman I’ve ever seen? I was thinking that I had never realized how beautiful a woman’s face could be.” I would not have fought you, brown-eyed avenging angel.

D.D. sunk onto her side, nestled against Selene’s shoulder. The two of them puddled into the serene, slow ripples of undisturbed sleep.

XXXI.                  Your Hero and Mine

Highfield Register, November 18

In response to the deep concern expressed by many about danger to the freedom of the press, we at the Highfield Register are pleased to announce that publication of the newspaper you have come to know and love will continue as usual, despite the brief interruption occasioned by an attempt at arson by opponents of the First Amendment of our Constitution.

The chaos which struck us after the machine sickness was propagated across our nation has been heart-wrenching and terrifying. What is more disturbing, however, is those who would exploit the crisis to perpetuate a dangerous form of terrorism that can lead to irredeemable anarchy.

We can all take reassurance from the fact that the President of the United States of America has safely survived the catastrophe, along with his most critical aides and crucial civilian and military leadership. This county, which voted 73% for President Schmidt in the last, hotly-contested, presidential election, can now proudly boast to being the headquarters of the newly-reconstituted federal government.

The first order of any modern government is to care for its people. Social Security payments can be expected to resume within a short period of time; those eligible should bring documentation of their eligibility to the address specified in the “announcements” section of this paper. All residents will be expected to register by household. The US Census Bureau will begin hiring census canvassers on a tapering basis as the system becomes operational.

We know, as citizens of this great nation, that order must be restored for liberty to triumph. Let us take these first steps together to build a brighter future.

XXXII.              Do as I Say, Not as I Do…

Around 4:00 am, D.D. woke to pee. It took her a few moments to recall where she was, and when she did, she reached for Selene. The other woman was gone from the bed, and D.D. sat up just as Selene slipped back in through the bedroom door. D.D. rose, paused for a sweetly sensual kiss, and slipped out. She snagged her wet clothing off the floor on the way by.

When she got back to Selene’s bedroom, she found Selene was up and holding out a nightgown. D.D. slipped into it, and found it trailed on the floor because she was so much shorter than Selene. Selene beckoned her to follow. She held the hem up and followed her to the end of the hall just before the common room. “Twelve rooms, ten women. These two are free. Right or left?” Selene whispered.

D.D. took the lantern and peeked in both rooms. Pretty much the same, and identical to Selene’s. She chose the one towards the back of the house. “This one.” Selene followed her in and turned down the covers while D.D. hung her clothes on a chair to dry. D.D. slid into the bed, kicking to free her feet from the long gown. Selene stroked her face, cupped her cotton-covered breast briefly and tenderly, and leaned forward to plant a kiss on the bump of her knitting bone. She pulled the covers up almost maternally, and kissed D.D. deeply once more.

“So, we have to be secret about this?” D.D. whispered.

“It’s wiser to. I’ll tell you the whole story tomorrow. For now, get some sleep.” With another brief kiss, she was gone.

D.D. closed her eyes and sighed, deeply content. When she opened her eyes again, dawn light was coming around the curtain of the room’s single window. The austerity of a retreat space was evident: the room held a basic wood desk, shallow closet with wooden hooks, bedstead, and an old-fashioned braided rag rug. Above the desk was a small wall-mounted bookshelf. Two books were neatly stacked right in the center of it: a Catholic Bible and a biography of Saint Benedict.

She got up. Her clothes were still wet, so she gathered the nightgown again, a gesture which made her feel vaguely Victorian and ladylike, and went out to the common room.

D.D. crossed the common room, which was in the center of the elongated structure, and entered the kitchen wing, following the aroma of cooking food and…was it? Coffee? No, it wasn’t. It was roasted chicory and dandelion brew, a brownish concoction which had a rich flavor similar to coffee’s bracing bitterness, but with no caffeine.

Lacey and Prianca sat at one of the tables, slurping at bowls of oat porridge and cups of the chickory brew.

“May I?”

“Of course.”

D.D. helped herself to the last of the oatmeal from a pot off to the side of the wood-burning cookstove. The smaller heating stove, with its ingenious spiraled-copper tubing, sat alongside. She scooped a dollop of seabutter on top and dug in.

“Did Selene give you her nightgown?” Prianca smiled.

“You look like a little girl wearing Mom’s clothes. I can hem it up for you if you like,” Lacey said.

“No, she just lent it to me. I didn’t feel like going back over to the hospital last night. You all were asleep by the time we came inside.”

“Yeah, the whole monastery keeps nun’s hours. Didn’t the bells wake you?”

“No, I didn’t hear them. They were much louder at the hospital.”

“Nobody ever gets much rest at hospitals,” Prianca observed.

“True. I guess it’s traditional to wake patients up to take their sleeping pills.”

Selene came in, fully dressed, and peeked into the empty pot. “No more oatmeal? That’s what I get for being a slugabed. Are there any of those shelled pecans left?” She found the nuts in a cabinet and sat down to munch a handful.

D.D. hoped her face wasn’t flushing. She didn’t know where to look. I’m a terrible liar.

“Are your clothes dry?” Selene helped her out.

“Not even close. I guess I need to walk over to the infirmary to get my stuff sooner rather than later.”

“I’ll come with you.” Selene popped out of her chair. D.D. scooped up her last bite and gathered her skirts.

After she grabbed her shoes, the two walked down the path to the main complex. Kittykitty trailed behind, wagging his curly tail. They passed a crook in the trail where they were out of sight of both the monastery and the guest quarters, and D.D. reached for Selene’s hand. Selene squeezed back and smiled, and D.D. moved closer to kiss her, but Selene shied away.

“Okay, you were gonna tell me. What’s up?” D.D. asked.

“Have you not noticed that this is a Catholic monastery?”

“Oh, you’re kidding! This is the twenty-first century. There’s no communications. No way they’re still under the thumb of the Pope. The world has completely changed in ways no one could have imagined. Surely they’re not still frowning on stuff like that!”

“Benedictine orders have always been self-sufficient, but they say they go by the teaching they’ve gotten from Rome in the past. As far as they’re concerned, it’s still The One True Church.”

D.D. made a pouf of dismissal. Then she said, “But what about Cindy playing footsie with me in the hot tub? I mean—”

“Yeah. Hypocritical, ain’t it? And all those pedophile priests. I was raised Catholic, but all that’s why I left. I’m not one for organized religion.”

“I don’t know. People apparently need religion in their lives. If they don’t have church, they start to look to political leaders instead. Worshipping the government.”

“Or football.”

“That too. Especially here in the South.”

“My brother used to say a Southern faggot is somebody who likes women better than he likes football!”

“Whatever do they do, now that they don’t have The Game on TV?”

“Attack travelers on the road, mostly. They’ve got to do something with all that testosterone.”

They reached the hospital and D.D. went into the dorm. Greta was putting a cool cloth on the forehead of young child, her only patient at the moment.

Cindy was making D.D.’s empty bed. She did not look up when D.D. came in. D.D. went over to the side of the bed just as Cindy finished making it.

“Did you have a good night?” Cindy asked, her tone ever-so-slightly strident.

D.D. smiled sweetly. “I always sleep well after a soak. How about you?”

“Fine, thank you.”

Greta was still fussing over the child, wan and immobile in the bed.

“Do you mind?” D.D. had a clean T-shirt from her backpack, and she gestured with it. Cindy snorted, but turned her back, and D.D. yanked the curtain shut between them. She dressed and opened the curtain.

Cindy was right there, and she put her hand on D.D.’s neck. “How’s that collarbone healing?”

D.D. slapped her moist hand away almost reflexively.

“It’s the right collarbone, not the left,” she snapped, louder than she’d intended, and she saw Sister Greta react out of the corner of her eye. “And I would appreciate it if you’d keep your hands to yourself!”

Sister Greta was by her side, ready to separate them, but Cindy was gobsmacked for only a second and then tossed her head. “Jeez. I was just checking on our patient!” She rolled her eyes.

“That was kind of you, Sister Cynthia.” Sister Greta patted Cindy’s shoulder. “Will you please attend to Andrea Morris’s rash? I’ve cleaned it, but it still needs ointment.” D.D. now noticed the little girl did indeed have a florid rash visible on her face and arms where they showed outside the sheets. Cindy sauntered over to do as she was told.

Sister Greta turned her attention to D.D. “How is the collarbone?”

“It’s still sore, but the hot soak last night really helped. Sorry I raised my voice.”

“It’s alright, dear. Sit down.” Sister Greta sat on the bed and indicated for D.D. to take the aluminum guest chair next to it. “Sometimes, when something really horrible happens to a person, it can make them prone to irritable outbursts.”

“I was thinking about that. PTSD, you mean?”

“Well, yes. There are, er, particular vulnerabilities in the case of women.”

“Rape, you mean?”

“Well, yes. I thought you might want to know that you’re not pregnant.”

D.D. almost laughed. “I should hope not! I had a tubal ligation after my daughter was born.”

Sister Greta literally recoiled.

Oh, Catholic, right. “My OB-GYN said it was best not to have any more children. He said it was a miracle I was able to have the one.” Sister Greta relaxed.

“As for…”

“I wasn’t raped. Recently. And let me tell you something: I had some friends years ago, a couple. Nice people. Their kids were about the age of my daughter, and we used to have playdates. He made a killer guacamole. She helped me stencil my dining room.

“She had been gang-raped and thrown out of a car by a gang of teenagers when she was sixteen. He had been in Central America, and would never say who he was working for when he was there. He had back problems, but who doesn’t? One night, we’d all been drinking a little and he sat in a straight-backed chair in my dining room. He settled into it and almost immediately let out a gasp.

“Okay, so nothing odd, right? But then, he just started sobbing, totally broke down, and she helped him into the living room. He lay on the sofa and told me he had been a prisoner, and the people who held him—he just said they were ‘not very nice people’—used to bend him backwards over a straight-backed chair while they were torturing him.

“The two of them had one of the strongest marriages I’ve ever seen. They both respected each other’s trauma, and it made a bond between them. They held each other when they woke up from nightmares, and they picked up the slack for each other when one of them was overwhelmed by fear or hadn’t slept in days.

“So, I guess what I’m saying is, yeah, I’ve been traumatized. I’ve experienced more violence in person in the two years since things changed than in my entire life, Before. But it’s B.S. that violence and terror and mutilation’re somehow worse for a woman because she can be raped. For one thing, men can be raped too, and I don’t know if my friend was or not, because I respected him too much to ask him to tell me more than he was ready to. But you know what’s really brutal? The way women who get raped are treated afterwards. Like they’re less than human now, like the rape changed them permanently in some way that only women who are raped can be changed.

“And you know what else is brutal? That men who’re beaten and tortured and maimed and sometimes raped too, that they’re given ‘respect’ for it and expected to be stoic and shake it off, when they’re actually quivering and sobbing inside. Terror is terror. Violence is violence. And self-defense is self-defense.

“I was lucky. I’ve been lucky to come through the past two years alive and relatively unscathed. I know that. The numbness that comes over me when things get violent probably helps me, and I know where it comes from, and it’s none of your business. But I think the main thing that’s kept me sane is that I had the ability to defend myself. And even though I might have failed at that in some ways…my bones were broken and I was bruised and bleeding and almost unconscious…at least I had some degree of control and self-determination.”

The older woman quietly regarded her through steel-blue eyes beneath her wimple, with her hands in her lap. When she was sure D.D. had finished, she said, with formulaic religious spiritual pacific nun-like gentleness, “I understand. I’m sorry for prying.”

Cindy was standing behind her, though, pulling a side-eye face with pressed lips that said D.D.’d gone way too far. She stopped mugging and took the bowl of cloths Greta had used out of the room.

“I’d like to move out into the guest quarters, if you’re ready to release me?” said D.D., trying to sound humble.

“I don’t see why not. You seem to be making a good recovery.”

Indeed, other than the sore lump in her shoulder, some deeper cuts and scrapes that were still scabbed, and the yellowish mottling of the larger bruises that hadn’t resolved, D.D. was basically well. She was skinny from not eating for a month, but the seabutter and honey would no doubt take care of that.

“Erm…do I have to pay anything to stay here? How does that work?” D.D. folded Selene’s nightgown and tucked it into her knapsack. She fastened it to carry over to the guest quarters.

“Well, you’ll have to discuss that with Mother Laura. The Order has always had a tradition of receiving guests. But since the machine sickness, we’ve been accepting women from the community to stay here under rules that are…somewhat different than specified by Saint Benedict. If you want to stay here indefinitely, you and she have to come to some sort of understanding. Before you go, it’s traditional to pray with our guests. Shall we pray?”

Not wanting to be rude, D.D. sat back down in the chair. She followed Sister Greta’s cue and bowed her head over her folded hands. She was curious as to what form the Catholic prayer would take, but Sister Greta merely sat silently with her for a few minutes.

D.D. took the prompt to breathe calmly and reach out for the great I AM herself. She was not religious. Her parents hadn’t been either, but she’d explored Eastern religions in College, went to her ex’s Episcopalian church when she was married, and participated in the generic Asian meditation included in some of her martial-arts classes. Throughout all the faiths, she’d encountered the same sense of presence—serene yet unspeakably ferocious, kind yet inconceivably stonehearted, silent, and yet reverberating through all of living and dying.

She was calmed and uplifted when she and Sister Greta raised their heads.

Greta surprised her by kissing her gently on the forehead. “Peace, child. And check back with me in two weeks about the collarbone.”

“Thank you, Sister Greta. I’m really grateful for all you’ve done for me.” I truly am.

D.D. went out into the vestibule where Selene lingered. “That all your stuff?”

“Well, no. I guess the rest is on my little four-wheeler, wherever that wound up?”

“Oh, it’s in the stable. Well, let’s go. I have cleaning duty at the guest quarters today. The nuns are going to lunch now. They do their Bible reading prayer mealtime thing at breakfast and lunch, but they eat with us at supper.”

“Wait! I’m supposed to talk with Mother Laura about staying here.”

“What day is today? Come here.” Selene led her down the hall. “This is Mother Laura’s office.” She indicated a wooden door with a glass window in it, on which was lettered MTR LAURA INGRAHAM, OSB. “And here’s her appointment scheduler.”

The paper on the clipboard had days of the week and times laid out on it in a grid. “What’s today, anyway? Tuesday?”

“Friday, actually.” I completely lost track.

“Friday…” she found that Mother Laura’s next opening was the following Tuesday, at three o’clock in the afternoon.

“So, you’re a guest at least until then. Might as well enjoy it.” Selene clandestinely pinched D.D.’s thigh, and D.D. managed neither to flinch nor to look around for observers. This is too weird.

#

D.D. did enjoy the next few days. Lacey measured her and stitched up a bathing suit like Selene’s, a series of soft cotton triangles of fabric that tied behind her neck and back and at the hips. D.D. helped in the garden and even mucked out two of the eight horse stalls before begging off from further pitchfork work due to her aching collarbone.

She cleaned up the ATV and refueled it (her jugs of ethanol fuel were undisturbed) and added some lubricant to the crankcase which the ladies assured her worked better than any of the vegetable concoctions she’d used so far. “The seabutter is fizzed through sphagnum and mixed with filtered beeswax. Try it!” Deanna had urged. That was the biggest problem with running alcohol-fueled engines since the machine sickness had destroyed all petroleum: engines had to have oil changes every fill-up or two, and they still ran hot and were prone to seizing.

D.D. even rode horseback a couple of times. It had been years since she’d sat on a horse, not counting her rescue, much of which she’d been too delirious to remember. But she remembered the basics, and she admired Selene’s practiced ease on the gaited golden horse she called a Tennessee Walker. They explored the long sandy trails in the woods and fields around the monastery. “Riding the trails on horseback helps keep the pathways open. They’re getting so overgrown.”

The next four nights, once everyone else was sleeping, Selene slipped into D.D.’s room or D.D. slipped into hers. D.D. reveled in their encounters, exploring her with fingers, lips, and tongue, pressing and releasing, nipping and rolling in sensuous, dancelike lovemaking. Yet when the rooster crowed in the deep darkness before aurora, they separated, and in the day, pretended nothing had ever happened.

Tuesday rolled around and D.D. was in the guest quarters kitchen with Deanna, rolling out a dough made of ground, dried kudzu root and seabutter to make biscuits for lunch. Selene came in with a little crease between her eyebrows and nose on each side, but she wouldn’t say anything in response to D.D.’s questioning look, waving it away with her hand.

Later, D.D. walked alone to the main building for her appointment. She got to Mother Laura’s door. She’d met the abbess and been welcomed by her at dinner one night; she seemed a nice enough woman: serious but pleasant-looking, middle-aged, and with smooth dark skin and close-cropped, kinky hair. D.D. assumed the meeting was a formality, and she’d be assigned some tasks around the monastery for the duration of her stay. I’d like to stay a while, until the soreness is gone and I’ve put some of the weight back on. Maybe until Spring?

But outside the door stood Sister Greta, looking serious, and Cindy, not meeting D.D.’s eyes.

Uh, oh. What’s up? The door opened, and Mother Laura’s last appointment walked out, a Sister D.D. had seen but not interacted with. She gave Mother Laura a kiss on the cheek and left. Mother Laura pulled herself erect and scowled at D.D., then gestured all three of them into the office.

It was set up like a principal’s office at school—small uncomfortable chairs across the big desk from the bigger office chair. At Laura’s command, the three women took a seat. The Mother herself remained standing.

“Miss Davis, I am informed that you may have committed a grievous sin here at our monastery, where we have taken you in as a guest and cared for your wounds.” Mother Laura began, her diction clear, her bell-like tones stamped with the r-less imprint of educated African-American speech.

Make her say it, dammit. “What sin would that be, Mother Laura?” she shot a glance at Cindy and Greta, who sat obdurate.

“I will ask you, and I expect an honest answer: did you have homosexual relations with one of our other guests?”

“Yes, I did.” D.D. flushed with anger and embarrassment, fear on Selene’s behalf close behind.

“Are you Catholic?”

“No.”

“Are you willing to renounce such behavior and never behave this way again?”

That’s the question, isn’t it? I’ve never been one who liked being told what to do. I even hated clicking “submit” on web page forms! She hesitated. “No. I can’t promise that.”

“You understand that you may not stay here under those circumstances?”

“I do.”

Mother Laura nodded at the two nuns. “You may leave now.”

D.D. got up to follow, but Laura said, “Not you.” She nodded at the chair, and D.D. found herself sitting obediently from the sheer force of the dominant woman’s personality—now turned full-blast on D.D., a fire hose, taser, and pepper-spray of disapproval all in one.

“It is important that you understand that what you have done is a grave depravity. You have risked your immortal soul’s salvation by indulging these disordered inclinations. And you have tempted another into participating in the same violations of natural law.”

D.D. felt tears start down her cheeks. She gulped hard to steady her voice. The attempt was unsuccessful, and she quivered, “Thank you for that information. I’ll be leaving now.”

“Wait! This discussion is not over.” The Darth-Vader command tone in Laura’s voice was powerful, but D.D. shook it off and reeled numbly into the hall and out the door, not deigning to make eye contact with Cindy, who stood at a small distance to savor her humiliation. Greta, at least, was nowhere to be seen. Small mercies. I can still remember her as kind.

D.D. allowed sobs to wrack her and tears to incise her cheeks as she walked the path to the guest quarters. She opened the door to the cozy retreat. Selene was not there. Lacey looked like she was about to speak, but Deanna put a hand on her arm in caution and looked away. So that’s how it is.

D.D. stomped to her little room and stuffed her knapsack haphazardly. She left Selene’s nightgown and the bathing suit Lacey had made her, neatly folded on the bed.

She strode out to the stable. Her ATV was still there, boozed up and ready to ride. She opened the stall gate, lashed her pack onto it.

Just as she was about to swing her leg over the seat, Selene showed her face. She stood with one hand on the top rail of a stall, her lithe body as poised as ever, her eyes sad as D.D. hadn’t seen them.

D.D. battled the urge to go to her, to wrap up in her arms, to cry on her shoulder and drown in her kiss. Instead, she asked, “Are you going to catch Hell for this?” Flicked her a glance, looked away.

“No,” Selene said breathily. “I own this barn and all these horses. The Church is nothing if not pragmatic. I suppose…” she gazed out the barn door into the distance. “they’ll make out that you corrupted me somehow. I’ll have to do penance. I’m sorry, D.D.”

“Yeah, well. As we used to say growing up, that and a buck’ll get you on the subway.”

D.D. sat on the four-wheeler and started it up. It chugged a little but settled into a smooth growl. She grabbed her rifle from its holder, checked the action, and slung it across her back. The accelerator twisting under her hand felt good, felt powerful. She rolled past Selene without another word or gesture.

Outside the barn door, she called, “Here, kitty, kitty!” The yaller dog emerged from the side yard and jumped atop the luggage box behind D.D. She continued onto the path to the main road. A Bible verse, of all things, flashed to her mind:

And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words, when ye depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust of your feet.

XXXIII.         Circle Back and Land

D.D. headed east, parallel to the Gulf Coast. She had a paper map which had been unclaimed in the guesthouse, and using that, began to work her way towards the Audubon Bridge over the Mississippi. She didn’t know what she’d do if it were closed, or occupied by some would-be government gang collecting tolls. I guess I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. She laughed shrilly, a sign that she was still shaken by her treatment at the hands of the “Sisters,” driving into the breeze of her passage down a long straight stretch of dirt road. Kittykitty responded to the hysteria in her voice by licking her ear.

The roads that had been dirt Before were generally better traveling than the ones that had cradled a ribbon of now-decomposed asphalt. She’d learned this earlier in her travels. It was late afternoon when she left, wintertime but fortunately not rainy. She kept pushing east until long after she should have stopped for the night. Finally, she threw down a tarp in a deer nest at twilight. She shared a few crumbs with Kittykitty, who slipped off to hunt voles and field mice on his own.

Once she was lying down in the dark, the ghosts of her past that Mother Laura had summoned came back to haunt her. She remembered her first love; she fifteen and eager to dispose of her virginity, Dennis a worldly-wise (or so it seemed) sixteen, and more than willing to help. They used to find little niches like this one in the unmowed corners of the parks, around the backs of alleys they’d slip their supple teenaged bodies through chain-link fence to get into, or (her favorite) on a blanket on the roof of his apartment building, the sun in its blazing heat bringing out the contrast of his brown skin with her pale whiteness.

One day, he lay on one elbow after they’d made love, stroking her sleek, firm adolescent body, and said, “One day, we’ll be married and have a daughter. She’ll have café-au-lait skin and eyes as green as yours.” D.D. smiled now, remembering.

Then she remembered Yvonne, Dennis’s mother, who had figured out their oh-so-transparent lies and gumshoed them up onto the roof. D.D. in her bra, picking up her shirt to pull it on, turning and coming face to face with Yvonne’s furious demand that they come downstairs right now!

Delaying it, dressing slowly and apprehensively, dragging their feet down twenty-four flights, to find Yvonne and D.D.’s parents embedded in the living room. Yvonne shrieking into her face words like whore and slut and aren’t you ashamed? D.D.’s mother and father silently taking in the cruelty, speechless and unsure how to react, Dennis posed rigidly, expressionless, a stone, not looking at her or taking her hand, underneath the Eldridge Cleaver poster on the wall.

No, I am not ashamed. I will never be ashamed. And I am never coming back.

Her parents still sitting, still impassive, on Yvonne’s sofa. The door slamming behind her so satisfyingly, the doorman downstairs backing up a step when he saw her furious tear-streaked face. She didn’t remember walking home, but she would have stopped the tears and put on a street face, because crying white girl’s tears in the street of that neighborhood was like slinging a bucket of chum to sharks.

Getting to her walk-up tenement building somehow. Unlocking the first door, to the street, and Calvin coming up, the boy who had been eyeing her when she walked by the crowd of Puerto Rican and black boys who hung out on the next street—eyeing her but not saying anything crude or making kissing noises or hissing sounds, like some of them did. She’d smiled at him a few times before she met Dennis, and even wrote in her diary that he was cute, making a little heart instead of the dot over the “i” in his name.

Calvin was suddenly behind her in the entryway as she fitted her key in the second door and turned it, and then he was pressing her against the wall at the foot of the stairs, bigger and more solid than she’d thought, his mouth bruising hers and his chest squeezing the air out of her lungs. Laughing when she struggled to push him off her, covering her mouth with his again when she finally got enough breath to try to scream, his hands, his cock, his rancid smell, the pain, and too late, the sound of a door opening upstairs and another tenant clattering down the stairwell, five floors up. He’d ghosted. She’d pulled up her shorts and run inside her family’s empty apartment before anyone could see her like that. She had cried herself to sleep, as she was crying now.

…And waking at the first light of dawn, shivering and wet with dew, with hands and face bloated with bug bites. Close and warm, Kittykitty was lying across the entrance to the little rounded hollow in the brush where she lay. She scratched the cur’s upright ears. She and the dog pissed and pushed on.

She reached the bridge mid-morning, but she already knew she was getting close by the traffic traveling alongside her. Horses, donkeys, a few ethanol-fueled vehicles like her own, and dozens of people on foot converged on the bridge and fanned out from it.

Being concrete and steel, the ramps and bridge were still solid. The paving of the roadway was long gone, its residue washed into the Mighty Mississippi and out to sea. The epoxy paint layer on the cable stays was also gone; the cables were metallic dull grey and beginning to fleck with rust. They won’t hold up nearly as long as they should. All the coatings and anti-corrosion compounds that we used to make from petroleum. P. davisii is truly the gift that keeps on giving.

She joined the procession approaching the east end of the bridge. As she reached the beginning of the span, she glanced nervously at the stall set up there. But it was not a tollbooth, no, just a market stall selling rutabagas, potatoes, jugs of ethanol, and jars of rendered seabutter.

Then something else caught her eye: hanging from one of the spokes of the canopy, a row of double glass globes separated by the familiar proton-exchange membrane—are they using a different type of membrane? This one looks thicker and darker— wires connected from the cathode on one side to the anode on the other, passing through the glass-cased LED perched in between. She slowed to a stop, to the vocal annoyance of the mule-cart driver behind her, and got a closer look.

Was it? It was. She smiled and jockeyed her way to the side of the lane. Even though she and Jeremy had left the last of the demo units a good hundred and fifty miles north of here, the shewanella bioelectric units had made their way almost to the Gulf! Minutes of haggling later, minus a good machete and a gallon of ethanol, she called Kittykitty from the ground under the food stalls, and continued her journey with a shewanella lantern securely stowed behind her.

XXXIV.          I’m Such a Wreck!

Li was not prone to seasickness. He wished he could say the same for his co-conscriptees. He found himself gagging on the smell of vomit whenever he came down from the deck into their cramped bunkroom. Almost a third of the crew of sixty men were sprawled there at any given time, moaning and grasping puke pails. The others were driven extra-hard in four-hour shifts at the deck-mounted oars on those becalmed days when the batwing-battened sails of their replica sixteenth-century junk explorer were useless.

After one such shift—his hands numb, his decimated muscles and joints screaming in agony—he’d thrown himself on the rope net bed and waited for his nostrils to deaden from the smell. Before he knew it, he was being awakened from sleep by a loud fire-alarm bell and panicked screams calling all hands on deck. In the prior weeks, he’d learned the sailors’ trick of sleeping through the roughest seas and storms, his body unconsciously writhing with the ship’s rolling to keep him centered between his personal Menshen, guardian soldier gods of peaceful sleep.

Only now, the only guardian soldiers around were just as terrified as he was. He heeded the call to mount the deck, only because he dreaded being trapped in a thalassic crypt when the ship sank. He had no idea what sort of action might be useful in a storm.

And what a storm it was! The ozone from the lightning, borne on the frigid whipping breeze, scoured the aroma of man-sweat and vomit from his awareness. He grasped a rope tied to the cabin wall. The lightning itself branched over and over again, in dazzling revelation, its beauty gone before his eyes could drink it in, followed much too fast —much too close—by the earsplitting bang of thunder. The ship was arcing into the air on one wave and crashing down on the next, bringing torrents of seawater across the deck that washed unsecured shipmates overboard. One blinding flash came at one moment with the thunder, raising his hair as it did so. He looked up and saw that one of the sails was on fire.

Then a jolt knocked Li’s hand loose of the rope and sent him sprawling against the rail. The ship had stopped moving, but the brutal force of the furious ocean had not. The next wave broke over the deck in frothing madness and took the stunned Li with it.

Meala had been gathering seabutter on the strand when the storm rolled in. The Red Sea had begun generating the roiling clouds the last few weeks, and these flash storms were a new development in the region. At the first flash of distant lightning, she turned and ran to the cliff, her bare feet slapping in the hard, wet sand. She quickly picked her way up the switchbacks of the hidden trail to the cave halfway up. She looked down, expecting the other girls and women to be right behind her, but all of them had chosen to make the longer run up the beach to the house instead. Youngest among the girls working on the beach, Hawa was far behind, sprinting frantically to try to catch up with the older girls and young women.

Another beautiful, deadly bolt stuttered from cloud to ocean, and the boom resounded over the water, fading into the sound of the surf beginning to pound the shore and the rocks below her. The sharp edges of those rocks had left enough bleeding nicks on Meala’s (and all the other girls’) legs until she learned the trick of how to place her feet and bend her knees. The ozone smell of the lightning hit Meala’s nose now.

Safe in the shelter of the dark cave, she curled her legs up beneath her and watched the sky grow gradually darker outside. Soon it was as dusky as late twilight. Each wave clouted the beach a little harder and receded a little less. The gale on the horizon was impossibly deep, blue-grey with a thread of white marking the horizon from the frothing surf.

Meala’s eyes narrowed as they settled on a tiny point near that streak: a light that flickered irregularly, covered and uncovered by the capricious waves and weather. Beautiful, she thought, and then realized that it must represent a boat afire in the tempest—human beings trapped aboard in peril of their lives.

She had risen to her hands and knees and now crouched at the cave entrance, drawing her scarf across her face against the whipping wind and rain. The storm continued, and the boat disappeared. She scanned the area where she saw it last.

Just as she was about to give up catching sight of it again, a close-by flash of lightning illuminated it—dark against the foaming water, and much closer than she expected. She watched the surf push the helpless craft towards the outermost rocks of the little cove. Three huge waves were funneled into one by the channel mouth. The one great wave lifted the wooden craft high and slammed it onto a cruel rock with a crack audible even over the noise of the waves and wind.

Meala was on her feet and halfway down the little path before she knew it. Heedless of the whipping wind and the slippery slope, she picked her way into the surf, flinching only when a lightning strike almost blinded and deafened her. The deepest abyss of the clouds was right overhead now. She waded into the shallow water and then was almost thrown off her feet by a surge.

A beam from the smashed junk swung like a compass needle in the surf, straight for her knees. She jumped it at the last instant, landing barefoot on volcanic gravel and stumbling, scraping her cheek on a big stone. She she embraced it desperately, her nails tearing and cracking on its sharp edges as the water grasped and tugged, eager to claim her body for its own.

Panting, she thrashed to her feet. The boat was too far out for her to reach; she would have been in over her head without the strength to fight the ocean. But at her feet, she saw a piece of debris from the wreck. Another wave engulfed her. She braced herself, keeping her feet, then looked for the flotsam, a bundle of rags.

She found herself dancing against the hip-deep current as she made her way to it, and lo and behold, it was a man face-down in the brine. She turned him over and her distraction was the vulnerability that the sea needed to take her.

One arm across his chest, his head under her chin, she kept her calm and flailed her three other limbs until they broke the surface. He was still warm, but she had no way to know if he still lived. The frantic pace of the waves in the darkness kept her sputtering, disoriented. Another lightning strike illuminated the scene, and she saw which way was the center of the lagoon, and where the tow had stuck the stranger on the rocks.

They floated that way, the waves drifting them where they would; his head on her chest, cradled between her bare breasts, each breath a precious gift. When the sky began to lighten and the sea began to calm, she eased him away from her enough to see his face. He was Asian, with a smooth sleeping face made pale and serene as the moon. She held her ear to his face and caught a wisp of a gasp from his breathing. She closed her eyes and hummed a quiet song the women sometimes sang, an old pagan hymn to Yemaya the sea goddess.

Yemaya, Yemaya,

Mother of the crabs,

Sister of the wrasse,

Rock me in your arms.

It comforted her, this nursery rhyme, and she closed her eyes. When she opened them, the man’s eyes were open—as black as hers, staring at her, entranced and delirious. He said something she didn’t understand. Presently, the gently lapping waves brought her feet in contact with the sandy beach, and she dragged him with her into the shallower water, where they lay as the tide subsided.

She awoke with a start: the sun hot on her face, his body warm against hers. She squirmed out from under him where he lay face-up. She knelt and pushed his hair back from his eyes, which opened again.

“Iwi salami newi,” she said. Hello.

“Nǐ hǎo,” the man murmured. Hello.

Neither understood the other. A foot plumped in the sand next to the man’s head, and Meala looked up to see another girl looking down at her, Asma.

Asma raised her head and called out, waving her arms, “I have found her!” Soon four or five other girls descended upon the pair, exulting that Meala lived, and curiously prodding at the stranger and giggling.

Li struggled to sit upright, and two of the women helped him up and half-dragged him up the beach into the house. Meala leaned on Asma’s arm, and the two women followed close behind.

XXXV.               Enclave

A few days later, D.D. pulled into the parking lot of Amrencorp. The beautiful sign with the Amrencorp logo, which some graphic designer had no doubt received more than the price of a luxury car to create, was gone. One of the glass doors was smashed. The nylon carpet in the hallways was nothing but a filmy residue on concrete, but the lobby floor had been polished granite tile, so it persisted, still gleaming expensively in places.

Kittykitty hung back, unwilling to risk the glass with his bare paws. D.D. stepped cautiously through the shattered door, noticing that there was a partially clear path through the shards of glass—as though many feet had been in and out this way since the glass broke. Once she stepped inside, she spotted a young man slouched against the wall, in a pile of pillows on the floor.

Her approach must have been quiet. Or perhaps not; the boy appeared to be absorbed in something lying on his lap. He glanced up and did a double-take, scrambling to his feet.

“Hi. Who’re you?” he asked.

“I’m Deirdre Davis, and this is…was my lab. I’m a microbiologist.”

“Microbiologist. I’m Nate Jennet.” He blinked and refocused. “What was your name again?” He suddenly remembered that he had hands, stuck one out for her to shake.

“D.D., Deirdre Davis.”

His eyes widened. “Microbiologist Deirdre Davis? That’s you?”

She smiled warily. “Yes. You’ve heard my name before?” Here it comes. She dropped her hand unobtrusively to hang next to her holstered weapon.

“Heard it? You’re the one who first created the machine sickness! In that very lab, down that very hall over there… This is awesome!”

Awesome. Not the response I expected. He spoke with his hands, and she got a good look at what he was holding. It was rectangular, about the size of a dictionary: a metal box with a glass window in one side and a row of buttons.

“What’s that?” D.D. asked.

“Oh, this?” Nate held it out for her inspection. “It’s an e-reader. We don’t have wi-fi yet, we have to plug it in to the big box, but we can at least look at text files from Before. It’s a start.”

“A start? That’s phenomenal!” It was D.D.’s turn to wave her hands in the air. “When we made the biobatteries, we thought it would be ten years or more before anyone came up with a way to make computers again.”

“Wait a minute. When you made the biobatteries?”

“Well, not me, really. I helped in the lab. It was mostly Amit Viswanathan and this engineer, Josh…” D.D. was slowly walking towards her lab during this conversation. Someone had crowbarred the fancy fingerprint security lock a while ago, and she just walked right in.

Her emotions had been on a roller-coaster ride recently, and she’d not quite reclaimed her equilibrium. That was why, she told herself, her eyes filled with tears.

The lab looked much as it had when she’d walked in here two years ago, the day the machine sickness had been loosed upon the world. So much had happened since then, so much had changed, but the lab looked almost untouched: the stone counters, the steel sinks, the wood cabinets with glass fronts, the stacks of glass petri dishes and rows of beakers and pipettes…the laminar-flow UV hoods won’t be useful now without power. Probably no water, either.

She touched the switch for the fan motor wishfully… and then yanked her hand back in surprise when the fan motor hummed to life! “Electricity?” she squeaked.

“Oh, yeah.” Nate shrugged. “We run the generator on ethanol when we’re working here. Some of the computer labs have big shewanella biobatteries now, but we’re still working out the bugs on scaling them up that far. That’s really what’s holding us back the most.”

“Okay. Who’s this ‘us’ you keep talking about?”

“Well, we have a bunch of names. Silicon Refugees, the Wizards, the Furies, Hellfire…we couldn’t really agree on one. You know this is a really big industrial office park, right?”

“Well, yeah. That’s kind of hard to miss.” Hundreds of acres, honeycombed with muddy gravel trenches that used to be roads, winding between big glass-and-steel office buildings and spaced apart by former lawns, which were now in the process of reverting to their natural state of clumpy Texas prairie vegetation.

“Well, about three quarters of the businesses in here were tech firms. HP, NetMicro, Apple, Intel, Glaxo, all the smaller companies that support—supported— them and developed applications, and designed and built components, and so on.

“After the machine sickness, everything went to shit, and we came back. The ones of us who’re here, that is; not everyone—we kind of decided that the best place to be was with the smartest people we knew. Which was here. It was phenomenal, Deirdre…Deirdre, right?”

“D.D.”

“D.D., it was amazing. All these brilliant people just kept showing up!”

“And they all know it was me who created the machine sickness?” she squeaked.

“Yeah! Oh.” His eyes softened. “You don’t have to worry about us. Most of us are doing real, meaningful science for the first time ever. We went into it because we wanted to save the world. We got stuck being corporate drones, paying off student loans while we were stuck in the lab of some no-talent hack who knew someone who knew someone instead. This is the most interesting thing that ever happened, maybe the most interesting thing that ever will happen!”

“Well, I can’t wait to meet everyone. My purpose in coming here was to get to my reference library to look some things up, and also see if my lab was still functional enough to test the seabutter to find out what’s in it.”

“Oh, your library. Right.” Nate’s face fell.

D.D. felt her heart sink with it. “What’s wrong? Was it destroyed?”

“Oh, no, nothing like that. We just made the rounds of the whole park, pulling out all the printed material we could find and putting it in the biggest building over there, the NetMicro one. One problem: no librarians. It may take a while to find your books.”

D.D. shrugged. “Hopefully not too long.”

Nate smiled. “Come on, let’s go to the main building. I can’t wait to get to introduce you.”

They went outside to hop on her ATV, with Nate perched on the seatback. They cruised slowly, him telling her where to turn and Kittykitty trotting cheerfully behind.

When she dismounted at the big building, she was met by a crowd. About twenty people, four of them women from what D.D. could see, stood in front of the entryway. The group skewed unsurprisingly young, with lots of smooth cheeks and sparse mustaches, though there were also a few greying beards and white hairs among them.

“Want some coffee?” someone said.

“You’re kidding?”

“No, really. We scavenged enough coffee for three or four years from all the breakrooms and kitchens in these offices. We ration it like gold now, but you’re a guest, right?”

Nate looked around and people nodded. Everyone went inside, and D.D. called Kittykitty, shy in the large group and mistrustful of the indoor space. But he stuck close to D.D. and followed them to the company cafeteria.

“How do you take it?” Nate asked.

“I like my coffee like I like my men: strong, hot, and sweet.” D.D. laughed. “Black, please.”

As Nate fixed her cup, D.D. found herself an object of attention of some sixty or seventy earnest young pairs of eyes. She was given the place of honor on a wooden crate with a larger crate for a table. Kittykitty sat sphinxwise at her feet. The rest of the occupants sat on pallets and blankets on the naked cement floor, all the plastic chairs and tables long since gone along with the linoleum.

Someone brought her a plain white mug full of pure, brown deliciousness. She felt like she was savoring a rare, old wine. She swirled it in the cup, enjoying the thin, oily film on top. She stuck her nose in the cup and inhaled the rich, smoky aroma. Then she closed her eyes and took her first sip. The bitter lusciousness hung on her tongue for one perfect moment before she swallowed. She opened her eyes and sighed. “I can’t even begin to tell you how wonderful this is!”

The ritual over, the techies realized they were staring at her. They broke up into their own little groups, got snacks from the kitchen, and left her with Nate and a few others. One of these was Alfred, a man D.D. guessed to be in his mid-fifties, close to six and a half feet tall and perhaps a hundred and twenty pounds with his pockets full, and sporting a belly-length beard and coke-bottle glasses. “Systems engineer, via cybernetics. Quantum computing, cybernetic intelligence and ethics, all that. Let me show you where the library is.”

The book room was not what anyone would call a “library” in any real sense of the word. Books were piled waist-high in stacks, bigger books on the floor, tapering to smaller ones on top. The stacks were distributed around the room semi-randomly, although here and there it seemed someone had made an effort to separate them in some orderly fashion: there was a series of stacks of all blue, all red, all yellow, and multicolored covers; here was a stack where the spines had at least been aligned to face the same direction to make them easier to see the titles.

“Oh.” D.D. said.

“Yeah.” Alfred nodded. “These guys have grown up with information all organized by computers. All they’ve ever had to do is click “sort by” to get everything in alphabetical order, or grouped by subject, or whatever. They have no clue how to maintain a physical system of organization. They have no idea how to use a book’s index, either.”

D.D. huffed in annoyance. “My cohort was the last one to learn about card catalogues and the Dewey Decimal system. But I’m not getting sidetracked into playing librarian while trying to whip this into shape. I’m hoping, at least, all my books got dumped near the same spot.” She walked to the nearest stack and started walking around it, reading titles.

“You want me to help?” Alfred offered. “I’m kind of stuck until someone else finishes their part of the project I’m working on…”

“Sure. I’m looking for my microbiology books. There’s a big one, a thick hardcover about this big, blue with white writing on the spine, title of Oceanic Microbiology by Elbaz and Ascani. It should be easy to spot. Being so big and thick it’ll be close to the floor, and I’m hoping the rest will be close by.”

“Oceanic microbiology? Are you working on climate change?”

“Not my field. I don’t expect there are any data coming in from the weather stations, and even if there were, there aren’t any supercomputers to process it. But they say the oceans are boiling, and I can’t imagine all that petroleum breaking down at once wouldn’t have a massive effect on the atmosphere. No, I look at very small micro things, not macro things like the entire planet. Easier to isolate the effects.”

“Which building were you in? When they were hauling the books, they started at the far end,” he gestured at one side of the room, “with the books from buildings further back in the complex, and then they worked from right to left as they worked their way out.”

“Well, that helps me tremendously already. Thanks! My lab was right by the front driveway. Let’s start over here.”

The two of them started spiraling around stacks of books, looking them over carefully for the books D.D. wanted.

“So,” Alfred said, “I can’t resist asking if the rumors are true: did you really create the machine sickness?”

This was the first time anyone had asked D.D. this outright. She took a breath and swallowed, her hands suddenly sweating. “Yes, I have to admit, it was me.” Alfred was probably the least menacing person she could imagine confessing this to.

“Great Mother of us all! Did you have any idea what you were doing?”

“No, I really didn’t. I hate to cop out, but it wasn’t really my fault. My assistant was swapping out the cultures behind my back in order to sell them to the Chinese. Along with some other strange dealings involving embezzlement.”

“Really! So the crazy rumor that an oil platform in China was the first place infected might not be so crazy after all. Interesting…”

“I never heard that.”

“A bunch of the fellows here lived on chat boards, Before,” Alfred clarified. “They’re always looking for freak occurrences—blips in the data, black swans, you know.”

“Well, it would make sense. I spent last winter with Amit Viswanathan. Have you heard of him?”

“No, afraid not.”

“Not unusual. No one outside microbiology and genetic engineering would have. He pioneered the field, patented the first genetically engineered organism. Anyway, he said that he got a strange call from China the week…Before. Someone calling about how to combat infections with one of the bacteria the machine sickness was based on. He didn’t think anything of it, but later, when he heard about the China connection in my lab, he put two and two together…”

“I don’t know whether to condemn you as a demon or worship you as a goddess.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yes. I’m a goddess worshipper, a neopagan, now solitary because I’m cut off from my coven, and I don’t know what to think. Is the Goddess Mother Earth herself righting the mess we’d made of the planet, feeding her children with seabutter while culling the herd of the more violent, the passive, and lazy? Is this what the Hindus called the Age of Kali, the destruction of all that was?”

D.D. smiled. “I’m no longer religious myself. But I’m pretty sure if I were a goddess, I’d know it.”

“But,” Alfred crooked a finger and tilted his head in a comical way, “isn’t that just what a goddess would say?”

“Oh, oh, here it is! Here it is!” D.D. squatted down, pointing at the bottom book in a tall stack. “And look… Almost all the books in this stack are mine. This is great!”

She and Alfred pulled the stack into smaller piles. D.D. flipped Elbaz and Ascani to the chapter on obligate hydrocarbonoclastic bacteria. “Here it is.” She ran her finger down columns of dense technical prose, moving her lips as she skimmed. Finally, she said, “Here. This is it! I knew it! OHCBs in anaerobic conditions —like on the sea floor—produce glycerol compounds with a profile almost exactly like that of olive oil! My theory is that combined with the protein and aminoglycan compounds of the bacteria themselves, and you get…guess what?”

“Seabutter!” cried Alfred, leaping to his feet and launching himself into the air with such glee and enthusiasm that D.D. thought he might actually flutter into space.

She laughed out loud despite herself. “I like you, Alfred!”

“I like you too, D.D. Now, let’s gather all your books up and carry them back to your lab, shall we?” He pushed his thick glasses up his nose, smoothed his now-wild frizzy white hair, and bent to the task.

#

A few weeks later, D.D. was sitting in her office, going over some notes from the day’s trials. It was slow going without a full staff of lab assistants. A couple had some background in biology, there were two pharmaceutical chemists, but the vast majority of people here were engineers. Working with bacteria entailed a steep learning curve. She was consulting with the biobattery people about culture techniques and nutrient flow management, and there was an amazing project run by one of the physics think tanks, where she’d helped with some of the genetic engineering to speed up the routing of biocomputing synapses. She couldn’t begin to understand the quantum circuits they were designing, but she could understand the tolerances and conditions they needed to create in order to conduct signals in living tissue networks.

But she’d also gotten some cultures of P. davisii going, and she’d established that they were, indeed, producing something like seabutter. It was composed of predominantly oleic acid, triolein, and oleyl oleate in a matrix full of ruptured bacterial cells. She was on to the step of trying to establish the composition of the rest of the matrix components and figure out what was causing the cells to rupture.

Alfred stuck his head into the office. “I’m going shopping. Want to come?”

D.D. was living in the lab now, her ATV secured in the parking garage beneath the building (in the VIP spot, take that, corporate bigwigs!). “I’d love to get out of here! Y’all are nice people and all, but these four walls are closing in on me.”

“I was hoping we could take your vehicle,” Alfred admitted. “I think it will pull the little handcart we usually use.”

“Sounds like a plan!” D.D. followed him as he bounded down the stairs two at a time. The cart was designed to be pulled by a riding lawnmower, so hitching it up to the ATV was a minor kludge.

“I don’t guess this is street legal.”

“I don’t think there are any traffic cops out there to care anymore.”

D.D. started the vehicle up, and Alfred collapsed himself down like an ironing board onto the seat behind her, his impossibly long legs on either side, his knees almost touching the handlebars of the 4-wheeler. “Wheeee!” He cried, his long beard flapping over his shoulder and his elbows winging gaily on either side as they rode off. Kittykitty was patrolling the grounds briskly, as was his daily routine, and he loped along behind them now.

He directed her to the marketplace where everyone gathered to barter and trade. D.D. was intrigued to see people exchanging items for rounded coins which they called Pelicans. Alfred had a few, and he’d brought some items to sell for more: shewanella-powered calculators with glass-embedded biocomputer circuitry, the size and weight of a shoebox; hand-printed charts predicting the next year’s tides and lunar phases, calculated by those in the complex who could solve integral equations in their heads while sorting their socks and humming a tune.

Once Alfred had sold what he’d brought, they went to seek out the items they needed for the Complex Complex. They needed food, of course. The seabutter at the first stall was nixed by Alfred. “Too gritty. We’d have to render and filter it before we could use it.”

They picked up vegetables and some live chickens (Alfred, a compassionate vegan, actually teared up at the thought that they’d be dead soon). They were starting to run low on paper, so they bought some samples of what was available, which proved to be halfway decent in quality, if not consistent from batch to batch. They bought some other odds and ends. At the end of the row, they sauntered down was another seabutter stall.

Alfred picked up the jar and said, “Now, this is what you want in seabutter.” He pointed to the viscous substance inside, and D.D. had to tilt her head back to look at it even though he held it low in front of his chest. His lesson in the finer points of seabutter was aborted, however.

Kittykitty barked a sharp alarm.

“D.D.?” she heard.

The sound of that familiar voice shocked her with recognition. “Jeremy!” She didn’t even have to look at him. She just turned and threw her arms around him. “What are you doing here?” she asked.

“I might ask you the same.”

“I decided it was more important to figure out what was causing the seabutter than it was to make it back to Tallahassee. I was afraid the people I care about there might… not be there anyway. How’s your family?”

“Well, actually, I never made it down to Corpus. I guess I was kind of afraid of the same thing. But I figure I’d better make it there soon. I’ve got big news.” They were still half-embracing, forearms latched together, and he put his hands on her shoulders. With a gentle, concerned look in the eye, he said, “Gaby and I are getting married.”

It took D.D. a moment to process the information. She felt a mad spark of joy explode within her—happiness for her two friends. It was with no falsehood or hesitation she cried, “That’s wonderful! Oh, I’m so excited for both of you. When’s the wedding? And where? And am I invited?” If that was a test, my heart passed with flying colors.

Alfred cleared his throat. DD turned. “Oh, how rude of me! Alfred, this is Jeremy, Jeremy, Alfred. You remember me talking about Jeremy, who I traveled down from Indiana with?”

“Oh, yes. So pleased to finally get to meet you!” Alfred was…yes, definitely…flirting! Not that his batting eyelids and coy look were particularly effective, as he looked down at Jeremy from a good eight-inch height advantage. And not that he was remotely Jeremy’s type. But it confirmed D.D.’s suspicions about Alfred. Kittykitty licked Jeremy’s dangling hand and insisted on an introduction as well.

Jeremy shook his hand firmly and continued, “D.D., I know Gaby’d love to have you at the wedding. She’ll be delighted to see you again. We’re getting hitched out on Bolivar. Her family’s coming, Ed will be there. It’ll be, let’s see, four months from now.”

“Wild horses couldn’t keep me away! Well, Alfred here is one of my roommates at the lab. He was just telling me how to tell a good jar of seabutter from a bad one.”

“You’ll find no better seabutter than the Bolivar Partnership sells.”

“He’s right,” Alfred agreed. He pointed out some features of the jar which let one know it had been properly refined, sealed, and was not adulterated. They packed the jars carefully, finished the rest of their marketing, and headed back to the lab.

XXXVI.          Cold War

By Halloween, a foot and a half of snow was layered onto the ground, and the Sutokatans had resigned themselves to the premature winter. The hectic chaos of trying to salvage what they could of their ruined agricultural output had exhausted all of them except little Ozark, who spent most of his time making contented little humming noises from his sling across his mother’s chest.

The consensus meeting on rationing was short. No one needed convincing that their situation would become dire by the time April brought her warmth again. They all imagined too clearly the months waiting for the first early plantings to bear.

“No matter how we scrimp, we’ll be eating early dandelion and violet leaves (and glad to get them) before we get any yields,” Akisni said. She and Gillie sat stuffing feathers from the ravaged flock of chickens into rough homespun duvets.

“At least one of us will get enough to eat.” Josh nodded at pure, oblivious Ozark, freshly burped and sleeping on his mother’s shoulder.

“I’m more worried about Sheila,” Akisni said, and the girl’s mother nodded. “She’s about to go through her final growth spurt, and she’s at that age when kids burn through food like nobody’s business. She’s going to need double rations. Jessica will need a little extra to support breastfeeding…”

“No, I’m too fat anyway,” said Jessica. “If I burn off some extra calories nursing, that’s fine.”

“Jessica, you may be carrying a little pregnancy weight still, but none of us are going to be what anybody could conceivably call ‘too fat’ by spring.”

“Have you seen photos of the Bangladeshi famine in the 70s?” Amit asked. Snowbear and Akisni nodded sagely, but the rest of them, younger, looked clueless. “Really? No one? Where the government was stopping grain convoys while people starved? Children with stick arms and legs scratching the ground for worms to eat?” They looked around at one another, shaking their heads. Some shrugged.

“Calm down, Amit, man. We get the picture,” LaDwon said.

That night at supper they all looked down silently at their tiny portions. They ate carefully, chewing each bite with great attention and scraping the last morsel from each plate. All except for Amit. He left a quarter of his piece of chicken behind and pushed his plate under Sheila’s nose. “Here you go, child. I’m stuffed.”

Amit continued to feed Sheila. He’d sometimes pass off a crust or morsel to Jessica as well. But one evening in late January, after they’d all consumed their scanty meal, Josh could be heard raising his voice. “No, buddy. I won’t eat your food!”

“Please take it. You look like a skeleton. And I am truly not hungry.” It was true that Josh, tall and lanky to begin with, was showing the effects of the short rations more than the other adults.

“You can’t possibly not be hungry! We’re all hungry!” Josh eyed the meal Amit had only picked around the edges of, his frustration shouted directly at the plate containing an ounce or two each of beans and squash and half a small potato.

Akisni bestirred herself from the torpor that overtook them all nowadays, as the evenings grew colder and the prairie winds were a huge animal tackling the side of the house. “Are you really not hungry, Amit?”

“No, I’m fine.” He brushed off her concern.

“Are you having any trouble swallowing?” She put her hands up to touch his neck, and he gently held her wrists away.

“Akisni. I. Am. Fine.”

She dropped her hands, but for the next few weeks, her eyes never left his face and hands at mealtimes. Finally, one night she cornered him alone when he was in the kitchen on cleanup duty. “Amit, you don’t look well. You’re pale.”

He smiled. “How can I be pale? I’m Indian. My skin is like mahogany. I’m darker than anybody here but LaDwon, Juni, and Augusta.”

“Very funny. Your color is off, then. You’re ashen. Your hair is dropping…”

“That happens to us older men.”

Undissuaded, she went on, “And then I noticed this.” She put her hand out before he could stop her and took a firm but gentle hold on a lump in the side of his throat, her fingers’ pinch blocked by the thickness of an egg.

“Amit. Can you even swallow solid food any more?”

His eyes flickered through fury, indignation, terror, relief, and sorrow, the tiny muscles around them betraying the emotional kaleidoscope he was not permitting himself to feel. He put his hand over hers. He shook his head. “I can only suck the juices out, now, and let them trickle down my throat.”

Her healer’s fingers followed the lymph node chain up under his chin and down into his shoulder. She looked at him questioningly.

“Don’t say it.” His voice was even raspier than the hoarseness she had been too absorbed in her aching stomach to notice until now. “And please, don’t tell the others. It will be obvious pretty soon.”

Akisni wordlessly took her hand off his neck. She enveloped him in a hug and held him while silent tears ran down his face.

Josh was the next one to realize. He was in his usual place, cuddled under a feather duvet with Jessica, the two of them rousing occasionally from their dullness to exchange brief, longing looks before sinking back into the sluggish torpor of semi-starvation.

He’d just watched Ozark latch on to her breast with more than academic (but less than immediate) interest, and it made him think of how Amit had been feeding Jessica and Sheila all the time. He looked at his friend’s profile in the lamplight and took note, for the first time, of the thickness that he’d not seen before, and of the way Amit—who Josh had always razzed for buttoning his shirts all the way up—was leaving the top button open. He watched his best friend take one of the scraps of cloth he used for snot rags and spit something dark into it. And he knew.

XXXVII.      If You Build It…

Hawa was always rigid, her neck muscles bunched and her eyes darting. She had been through so much already. Suzanne wished she could erase whatever it was that Musa had done to her. Failing that, she wished she could stop the other girls and women from asking her about it all the time. But she didn’t even know what they were saying to her most of the time because of the language barrier, so she felt helpless to do much. Hawa did enjoy helping to care for little Jo, and Suzanne thought that probably helped.

Jomana was perched on Hawa’s hip in a fabric sling wrap one day. Suzanne and Hawa walked home from the well. Suzanne pulled a handcart full of water skins. Jomana was blubbering, and Hawa was popping her hand on the baby’s lips, making the little girl squeal with glee. Suzanne laughed, too.

Then Hawa froze. Suzanne followed her gaze and saw an older man wearing the loose pants and tunic of an Afar, his hair butter-dressed. His gile hanging from the thick belt at his waist. He held out his arms, which broke Hawa’s immobility. She pressed Jomana into Suzanne’s arms and ran to him, shouting, “Aba! Aba!”

The man took his daughter in his wiry arms, closing his eyes as he embraced her. Suzanne brushed a tear from her eye, seeing the joy on his face. Hawa took her father’s hand and led him to Suzanne, who extended a hand and introduced herself. After a moment’s hesitation, he took it and introduced himself as Esayas.

Hawa took Jo again and the group walked to the compound. Hawa bounced along, smiling up at her daddy, and Jo and Suzanne caught the mood. They walked cheerfully into the kitchen. Meala was standing next to Li at the counter, chopping vegetables. She looked warily at Esayas at first, but the man melted into a corner and watched the others pour water into the big pot on the wood-fired stove to begin cooking the cassava and seabutter for the evening meal.

The group sat together in the main hall, Li and Meala side-by-side as usual. Esayas and Suzanne sat on the other side of the low table, and Jo sat on Suzanne’s knee, somewhat restrained by the sling. Li had learned a little Afar, and Meala’s English continued to improve, so they managed to have something resembling a fitful conversation.

It turned out that Hawa’s mother had angrily divorced Esayas after she perceived as his weakness in failing to protect his daughter’s honor. She and a number of the women—wives and healers and single maidens of the village—had taken up residence in a separate village with the Yemeni imam, Abdullah, who was intent on creating a Salafi Muslim movement throughout northeastern Africa, extending the reach of the fundamentalist theosophy which had been striving to spread outwards from Saudi Arabia, Mesopotamia, and the Persian Gulf, in the time Before.

Neither Li nor Suzanne had known that there were many types of Islam; the Afar people and many other Africans called themselves Muslims, but their heritage reached back much further than the time of Prophet Mohammed, to the time of the pyramids, and their culture was a veneer of monotheism laid on top of the deep, deep traditions of polytheistic animism.

This is why it had always rankled the women of the Afar to have a male muezzin singing from the tower. In their tradition, music was an activity reserved for women. It was taboo for a married man to even touch a musical instrument. Esayas smiled when he heard the compound’s calls to prayer in a woman’s ringing voice. All the women crouched on brightly-dyed and hand-woven cloths and faced the north for prayer. He made a remark to Meala, who translated, “He remembers his grandmother singing like this. It is the Afar way.”

Over the next few weeks, more men of Hawa and Esayas’s village and other surrounding Afar groups began to show up. More women joined the group, too—mostly Afar from the Danakil lands of Eritrea and Djibouti, but some Somali women, somewhat taller and lighter-skinned, speaking no Afar. They spoke among themselves in Somali and communicated with the Afar women mostly in Arabic or French.

Suzanne had never been in such a cosmopolitan, polyglot group before. The way that people took care to use respectful gestures and body language with one another when they did not share a common language enlightened her. She noticed Jomana was picking up this fluency of nonverbal communication at the same time she acquired a few words of multiple languages.

That is not to say there was no conflict. The Somalis were Sunni Muslims and had their own clan and legal system, called Xeer, a 1400-year-old set of principles, agreements and ideas known as xissi adkaaday. This traditional code conflicted with some of the Afar traditions, and the dictates of the varied waves of Muslim theology complicated matters even further. The Somalis and the Afars of Djibouti had fought bitterly at various times in history, the last as recently as 1991, and there was much bigotry and resentment to be overcome.

The single women of the Afar tribes who had fled infibulation, and a few married mothers who had fled with their intact daughters, remained the core group at the compound. Several complete families that separated from the villages made their way to the compound just as Esayas had. The villages were being regimented by Sheik Abdullah’s regime, with its strict hijab and obedience for women and rigid adherence to business and prayer customs for men. The married couples with their children set up the time-honored traditional shelters seen throughout the drier parts of Africa, made of stucco and light timber, or yurt-like nomadic homes within a radius of three miles or so on the northern side of the compound. The Somalis did the same on the south side.

Somali or Afar, any girl or woman wanting to flee infibulation was welcomed in the main residence. The women, empowered by their summary execution of the pedophile imam Musa, and further emboldened by their successful takeover of the mosque and revival of the ancient cult of Nefertiri, made sure that any parent, fiancé, or the midwife herself who tried to abscond with a girl to infibulate her, was pounded with stout poles until giving up. Some girls were brought in by their fathers—men who, like Esayas, did not want to see their daughters suffer in sex and childbirth, as their wives had. Some were mother-child pairs, mothers with daughters at their breasts, fleeing mothers-in-law or husbands who wanted to cut their newborn girls.

At the same time, the population included a normal segment of teenaged boys and young men. Seeing their prospects of love and marriage dwindling by the day, these men grew angrier.

The end result, after a few months, was a village of women under low-level siege. As they went about their business—drawing and carrying water, traveling to the market on trading days, harvesting wild fruits, herbs, or seabutter—they had to be constantly on the alert.

They took to carrying their staffs with them, and a few had jile knives taken from brothers or uncles when they ran. Musa had kept a few trusty old Kalashnikov rifles and newer M4s and QBZ-95s from the US and Chinese bases, and the women carried them in rotation. Suzanne, ever a logistics soldier, fretted over their limited ammunition supply. Most of the women probably couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn, and there was not enough reserve ammo for them to practice. She made sure they at least knew basic safe handling practices, and had fired the weapons at least once before taking the guns on patrols.

At any time, though, they had to be prepared to fend off small raiding groups targeting recently arriving women and girls. These were fewer in number, usually targeting runaway family members, and ignoring anyone else.

The most problematic threats were the young men. Testosterone-addled as young men anywhere, they clustered in groups and egged each other on with feats of daring. At first, their raids on the young women were easily dissuaded by a few shots in the air, but over time, they grew bolder and more determined.

“I hear uncut women are sex maniacs!” they would bawl to one another, tagging behind a small group of maidens.

“I hear they can’t get enough dick!” One would slide in close and pinch or pat a buttock, or yank a headscarf. When the girls turned their weapons on them, they’d all dance away from the poles and cudgels, shrieking when shots rang out and vanishing into the bushes. Every so often, a girl would hit one of them, and the group would strut off, undisturbed by the screaming. Then the harassment would stop for a while—only to gradually ramp up again as they forgot their comrade’s wound.

Bilqis had emerged as the de facto leader, always making the noonday Dhuhr call to prayer herself, though she left the other four prayer calls to women she anointed, “muezzin of Nefertiri.” After dinner and before the evening ‘Isha prayer, she would preside over a meeting to discuss the days’ productivity and problems and to plan for the next day and the future. Sometimes these meetings were brief check-ins; other times, they went on long into the night, until they stopped making sense and had to table the agenda for the morrow.

The day came when they could not overlook the man problem any more. A group of six girls and young women, ranging in age from twelve to seventeen, had been carrying baskets and poles to a stand of pistachio trees. They were part of an orchard someone had planted Before, which had been abandoned in the upheavals of the machine sickness, and only rediscovered with its first biennial fruiting.

The sun was warm, and many several of the girls were shirtless. One of the girls, Amene, carried a Chinese QBZ-95 rifle slung across her back. The girls could never agree later how many youths had been in the gang which sprang upon them. Some said no more than eight or nine, but others insisted there were twice as many. But they all agreed that the boys were fast and purposeful—unlike earlier assaults and harassment, which had been almost playful by comparison. They all had jiles drawn, and two of them had small rifles or carbines, which they did not fire.

Amene was the only one who fired. She acted swiftly when the attack began, but by the time she had aimed and readied the rifle, all she could do was fire two low bursts at the boys’ retreating backs. They ran off, following the one slinging Mona across his shoulders in a fireman’s carry. Mona shrieked, thrashed, punched, and spit, her braids and beads rattling. The guy carrying her was uncommonly large, and she could not prevail.

The four other girls remaining picked themselves up from the dirt and gave chase, but they stopped after less than a minute. The young men were far ahead of them and could turn and ambush. They checked their bruises and scrapes and walked home to the compound with empty baskets.

That night, Bilqis laid the problem out for them: “Men are the problem. They have always been the problem. We Afar women are famous for our fierceness, but women do not rape; women do not make war. For ten thousand years, men have been in charge. It is time to go back to the days of Neftertiri and Cleopatra. It is time to rediscover the wisdom of Makeda and forget the boasting of Menelek. It is time to put men in their place.”

Etagegnehu stood up. “My sister Gobena was married by tradition to our mother’s brother’s son. The wedding was happy. We danced all day. But when the couple went into the marriage hut, only her husband came out alive. He could not penetrate her where she was infibulated, so he took a jile and cut her where she was sealed. While he was taking her virginity, she bled to death. It is men who cannot restrain themselves. Why is it women who are punished for their lack of control?”

The talk went on. Every member of the convocation had a story of brutality to tell. Fury fed on rage, until the anger took on a spirit of its own. Bilqis steered the conversation back to concrete proposals; the women contributed ideas. When their attention flagged, she would prompt another girl to tell how she’d lost someone she loved to the bloody razor blade or the birthing bed when scarring prevented passage or entry. The women would begin to weep and scowl, and their urgency to find solutions would be rekindled.

Li and Esayas were not expected to attend this meeting, and they slept through it. Late in the night, though, Meala slipped into Li’s curtained chamber. She lay down next to him and whispered to wake him. “Li. You must go now. It will not be safe for you in the morning.”

Li came slowly to consciousness, realizing that his dream of Meala’s ripening body next to his was real. He put an arm around her upper back to pull her closer. Then awareness of her words penetrated his mind. Her breasts, customarily uncovered in the way of Afar women, were now pressed against his chest. Instead of kissing her as he wanted to, he pressed his lips to her ear and whispered, “What’s happening?”

“They’re angry at all men. You’re not safe. You must leave now.”

Li’s eyes opened wider and his heart picked up its pace. With regret, he released Meala from his embrace and sat up, shaking his head a little to clear it. He rose as Meala slipped out of the room. He clothed himself in his waist wrap and loose shirt. He had nothing to take but a change of clothes, which were quickly bundled and tied over his back. He grabbed his staff, put a small folding knife that had survived the shipwreck in his pocket, and stepped out into the hall, looking around for Meala.

She came towards him with a solemn, confused five-year-old boy holding her hand.

“What’s this? I can’t take care of a child!” Li hissed.

The child shrank back, clinging to Meala’s leg.

“Oh, Li,” Meala said. She edged closer to him, pouting. “If you don’t take Atikem, who will keep him safe?” She batted her eyes.

Amused and enchanted by her clumsy attempt at charming him, reminded that by her people’s standards she was a woman, Li shook his head, but stole a kiss from Meala. He realized with a pang that he might not get another chance to kiss her. “I’m going to try to make the Chinese army base. If they have drone fighters, they must have supplies too.”

Atikem shrank away from him, but he was already gone—barefoot and moving at a light jog.

#

The next morning, Hawa took her morning tea and a cup to share into her father’s sleeping area, as was their habit. But as she approached, she heard voices raised in anger: several women surrounded her father, who stood naked in the hallway. The women held cudgels and were threatening him.

He spied Hawa. “There is my jewel. I will leave once I have told her goodbye,” he told the girls. “Come and say goodbye to your father!”

She came up to him, the women letting her pass, and offered him his cup of red tea. He took it from her and set it down on a nearby table. Then he put his arms around her and said, “I will see you again soon, little one. For now, I must go.”

“But Aba! I liked having you here!”

“I know, but you must let your aunties care for you now. I will be back.” He released her with a squeeze on her little shoulders. She waved sadly as he strode calmly away from the women.

She went to the children’s dormitory and saw Bilqis walking among them with some of her trusted aides.

Bilqis looked at each sleeping child briefly and then moved on. Finally, she stopped. “This one.” She pointed to Atikem.

One of the women nudged the five-year-old boy with her toe and he sat up, blinking, and rubbed his eyes. “Come with us.” He stumbled to his feet. The women took his hands and led him past Hawa, pressed to the doorframe. She followed quietly.

The women went into a small separate chamber used for simple medical procedures and massages, among other things. Hawa watched them lift Atikem to the top of a sturdy table. Four women took his limbs to hold him still. He began to wail.

Bilqis stook over him with a jile honed razor sharp. “This is how we will keep ourselves safe, now and always. The age of Zar-Wak Allah is over. It is now the age of Isis and her daughter Nefertiri, come again to rule all the world of human beings from its center here in Africa!”

The giant knife descended, and Atikem shrieked. She took a small round pebble from the table, where it had lain unnoticed. Bilqis pressed it into the cut at the pubis, just above Atikem’s hairless crotch. She took up some fine-textured twine and a steel needle and sewed the cut closed with three deft, close-spaced stitches.

Hawa covered her ears to shut out Atikem’s wailing and blubbering cries. She blinked back her own tears as Atikem sobbed and panted.

Bilqis was obdurate. She called out, “This is the spur. All our men will have this spur and give pleasure to women to come, until as many generations of women have lived and died as there have been generations of women subject to the cutting.”

She took up a small metal object like a piece of jewelry, shaped like the carapace of a beetle. She held it up over her head. Hawa saw that it was made in two bell-like, curved parts, connected with welded links on one side, and opening on the other like a clamshell. The old woman put the shell over the glans of the child’s penis, which it fit loosely, then pulled his foreskin up around it. He was glazed and spent from crying, and so he only watched. However, when she took two thick pins and pierced through his foreskin, in through matching holes in the metal, and back out again, he began to cry again.

“Sit him up,” she commanded, and they complied. She took tiny small hammer and pounded the ends of the pins flat, then rolled them back to make a twist so the pins couldn’t pull free. “The scarab has long been sacred to the Afar people. Let this scarab be the sign of a man who will serve the goddess Isis and be holy and chaste. Let no man come near us who does not bear the spur and scarab. Inshisis! As Isis wills it!”

“As Isis wills it,” echoed the women.

“Take him to the kitchen and give him something sweet. Let him know he’s been very good and very brave.” As the village circumciser always said to the mother of each girl she mutilated.

Hawa turned and ran away on soft bare feet.

XXXVIII.  Might as Well Be Spring

When it’s Christmas in the Midwest, you wake up and open your eyes to muffled silence. You look out the window and see the world engulfed in pristine glowing lightness. The lights of the tree are shining in the living room, gifts piled underneath. The first one up, you smile ear to ear, momentarily a child again.

When it’s mid-January in the Midwest, you’ve packed away the ornaments and burned the brown dry tree on the Epiphany bonfire. You wake up and realize it’s staying dark a little later this morning than yesterday, and it will be another week until the days start to get longer again. You cringe and pull the covers up over your head, then take a deep breath and throw them off, putting your sock-clad feet reluctantly on the cold floor. You stagger out to start the fire in the woodstove before you even go to pee.

But then it’s May in the Midwest and the dawn comes brightly in the window, but the birds are silent and the snow is above the bottom of the windowsill and dammit, it’s snowing again, you might want to get up. You might want to find something to do. But the hollow in your stomach is a gaping, burning chasm, and the shakes start as soon as you move your hands to throw back the covers. Your hands are like icicles, and your feet are cold inside two pairs of socks. You haven’t felt your toes in weeks.

It’s May. You’re on a farm. You should have plenty to do: animals to tend, fences and stalls to mend, vegetables to transplant, mulch to lay, rows to hoe. But there’s the snow. The bud tips of the trees are thick, but brown. They tried to leaf out when it thawed for a few days in April—but no.

You put a huge pot of water on the gas burner. It takes a long time to boil because the burner is low, and there is so little biomatter for the methane plant. The tiny amount of sewage produced by starving people whose digestion has almost completely shut down in dejection is barely a sludge in the bottom of the huge tanks. After the last of the hay (which the livestock won’t eat, because you slaughtered every single one of them) is gone, there will be no more vegetation. You make tea in the oversized kettle, the last of the roasted dandelion root from last summer. No dandelions this year. No sugar or milk for the dark, bitter tea.

You hit the big gong in the common room. It makes a ghost of a sound. You didn’t know you were so weak. You clench your teeth. It’s painful, because they’re loose in your jaw.

You put major effort into hitting the gong again. The cushioned mallet makes firm contact. The resounding BONG violates the silence and lingers, fading slowly into silence. A few moans and whimpers begin. You hit the gong again, and people stir.

Your companions slowly rise, too enervated to stretch or complain, and make their way to the common room. Everyone is leaner than they were in the fall. Sunken cheeks and knobby wrists, tendons darting up under the skin like snakes, dull eyes which focus and then drift: all testify mutely that they feel the same as you. Only LaDwon’s previously plump, meaty body still looks loosely normal. And dear Amit is a skeleton, a Mexican Katrina, Dia de Los Muertos on the hoof, with incongruous calabazitas growing globular round his throat. When he speaks at all, it’s never above a rasping whisper.

Not that there is much to speak about. Plainly, you all must go. All that remains is planning: taking stock of your meager resources, unfurling old paper maps. In slow, croaking voices, others offer ideas for shelter, warmth, transportation—unable to articulate or follow beyond the basics.

The rest of that May Day in Indiana, that day of snow and foot-long icicles solidly fused to the eaves, is bustling. Sighs and the occasional sniffle are heard, but no one cries or complains—not from gladness, but because it takes too much energy.

You take your things and bundle them up, strap them into a pack: warm woolen clothing, the boots that you remade with leather soles when the machine sickness took the Vibram (you will wear those), your leather moccasins, your knife, a few photos.

That night, everyone lies down in their beds as usual. The days are longer—the Earth’s orbit is unchanged—and it doesn’t get dark until late. Some drop into sleep, but most are in the stupor of starvation, drifting from dream to reality many times an hour. Their bodies wake them, demanding Food! Food now! and they ignore it, a habit that never feels natural.

When the sky begins to brighten, reflected by the blanket of snow outside, there is a general stirring. The Sutokatans gather themselves almost wordlessly, bathe and dress, and assemble outside. You look ruefully at the little ATVs—useless, since the alcohol itself and everything to make it was consumed weeks ago. Pushing handcarts fitted with skis, wearing snowshoes, Jessica with the baby tied to her body in his sling, all are equipped with what will help them live—or what they’d rather die than leave.

As planned, you take up the rear, waiting for the other twenty to file down the trail. You left all the doors unlocked. Perhaps it will save someone’s life. Perhaps it will just save the doors from being smashed.

As you round the curve past the first windbreak, there is a slight incline in the plain and you see the group beading out ahead of you. It strikes you that from above, you must look like a column of ants crossing a vast concrete parking lot. You remember watching ants as a child—each one discretely individual, each one acting on behalf of the larger whole. You set up blocks of sticks and Legos, moats full of water from the hose, to see how they’d negotiate around the obstructions. You picked them up between your little pudgy fingers, set them back at the beginning of their course, and watched them circle, waving their antennae frantically until they found the path and resumed it.

Finally, when your mother called you inside, you did a dance of doom, a cherubic Shiva in sneakers with rubber toes, crushing as many of them as you could before turning and running inside without a backward glance.

You don’t look back today, either.

XXXIX.          Learn or Repeat

Lou Stonegood

Cascade Beacon, November 27

An Empire of Lies

One of the oldest propaganda techniques, one used as far back as the Romans, is a method of invading a territory. As the fleeing populace sets fire to their fields to deny them sustenance, they condemn the vanquished enemy for the arson. Throughout history, many such victims of conquest have lost their lives. This week, we at the Beacon are grateful still to have both our lives and a means to communicate with you.

On this weekend of Thanksgiving, which many of us still celebrate according to our family traditions, let us remember the first Thanksgiving. The Indians who aided the settlers of that time would go on to experience genocide and generational betrayal by waves of invaders promising a brighter future. Let us not fall victim to that trap.

Let us also remember the whole story of Thanksgiving.

The Pilgrims’ famine didn’t end when the Native Americans taught them how to farm the local land. In fact, the Pilgrims suffered hunger and want for three more years after the first Thanksgiving.

Plymouth Plantation was founded based on a system in which food and supplies were held in common, and then distributed based on “equality” and “need”, as determined by plantation officials. Everyone received a like portion of the harvest. The Pilgrims were not allowed to grow food separately from the communal farming efforts.

According to historian William Bradford, this system “was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort.” Apparently, “young men, that were most able and fit for labour, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense.” This is why crop yields were so low.

As the colony starved, they began a new system in 1623. Each family received a private patch of land. They kept all they grew on their own acreage, but now they were also completely responsible for supporting themselves. According to Bradford, this “had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been. […] The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability.”

Before the machine sickness swept the entire world, we lived in a plantation of sorts. We were at each other’s throats for a greater share of the fictional currency known as the US dollar. Let us look long and hard at the life we have now before we run to the skirts of the nanny state again. Let us consider what strings are attached to that government check.

Let us consider our children—spending time with us as we re-learn the skills our grandparents forgot, but also learning far greater lessons in how to be better men and women. Let us govern ourselves according to the natural laws that humanity has known for thousands of years.

This is not to say that we must labor forever at hand-planting our fields, scrubbing our laundry, and grinding our corn by hand. Many of us already have homes that are lit by shewanella biobatteries, and we have heard reliable reports of larger batteries being built to serve greater purposes.

On the reverse of this sheet, you may read an exciting news report about biocomputers reportedly being developed in Texas and California. The question is, will technology serve humanity in the future? Or enslave it once again?

The maw of the state can never be satisfied. It will devour all you have created in the past few years and demand more. It will demand your wealth; it will demand your time; it will demand every detail of your personal information; in the end it will go to war and demand your children. It will pay you back in nothing but debt and worry. At this precise moment, you are at a unique and providential point in human history. Let this generation be the first to awaken from the long and bloody nightmare of government.

XL.      Out of the Wild

The Sutokatan community put one foot ahead of another for days, which turned into weeks. Bark could be stripped from trees and chewed. Fires, at least, could be built, and they could gather around them and huddle close, seeking the warmth their gaunt bodies could not hold. Josh took to carrying Augusta close to him, wrapped in a length of woolen homespun, like Ozark riding on Jessica’s back. She was a bird now, so tiny and frail, her hair just white puffs around her scalp. She spoke little, murmuring indistinctly now and then, sometimes calling him by the wrong name—a son’s or grandson’s, perhaps.

How many bodies did they see frozen in the snow? Coyotes tore at dark objects in drifts, and they learned quickly to leave them to their grisly work. One night, they looked up and saw eyes in the brush: a stalking bobcat, its usual small prey starved out by the lack of forage.

Josh pitched rocks at it. Juni yelled, “Go! Scat!” But it just circled the camp and settled into watching from a different vantage point. After that, Jessica took to digging a pit just big enough for Ozark’s tiny body and lying across it to sleep.

Grimly, they marched. Toes could be lost. Ozark might cry, a keening, aimless groan which faded to nothingness and became less frequent over time.

As they pushed further south, though, the snow became crunchy on top, where it had melted and refrozen. Further still, and there were patches of bare dirt with sprigs of grass greening up. Dandelions and plantain leaves made a welcome addition to their diet, but also gave them cramps, left them squatting in the ditches.

The grave they dug for Augusta was barely more than a shallow ditch. They hadn’t the strength to do more.

One day, they finally came upon a cultivated field: a half-acre patch of turnips, wan but green with small bulbous roots. There was a small house nearby, but no one home. There was no smoke, but the brick chimney was still warm to the touch from outside. A shed with hay and tack stood empty, hoofprints of an unshod mule or horse leading out of the yard.

“We can’t just take their food,” began Gilley.

But Jessica was already cramming her empty pack full of them, beating the dirt off the roots and stuffing them in whole. “It’s my baby starving.” She snarled. “Fuck your ethics!”

The others were too weak to argue. They each pulled up as much as they could carry and then quickly moved on, leaving a third of the homesteader’s garden pilfered. As the day wore on, they were stalked not just by the hungry predators, but by an imaginary gardener riding up behind them.

They camped, built a fire, and roasted the roots, steaming the greens. The animal need of their bodies kept any of them from feeling shame or regret when the starchy, fibrous roots hit their stomachs. All they felt was joy. Jessica chewed Ozark’s, pushing the food into his mouth in a kiss, and gorged herself.

Two days later, they descended the Ozark trail into the no-name village—the crossroads where they’d wintered in Year One.

“The barn’s still there, but fewer sheep,” Jessica observed. There were fewer smoke trails in the surrounding hills, too. No doubt manufacturing ethanol was secondary to food as a use for the year’s meager harvest. They went a little further, until they reached the crossroads.

The trading post was still there. “Must not be a market day,” Jessica said. “See there? That row of stalls across the way are all empty today.” But there was a delicious smell coming from the trading post/café on the corner, and the group wandered inside.

It was strange to be in civilization again after their weeks on the road. But there was an unknown woman behind the counter who saw their state and offered them warm, milky tea from an urn. “Seventeen cups on the house. Pay it forward.” She saw Ozark’s dull eyes and the cracks in the corners of his mouth and scooped him out a bowl of mashed potatoes without a word, waving off Jessica’s offer of payment.

“So, are Gaby and Ed around?” Jessica asked.

“You friends with Gaby and Ed?” the cashier/waitress/manager asked.

“It’s been a while, but yeah.”

“They went up to close up Gaby’s house. You know she’s getting married?”

“No! That’s great! She’d just lost her husband when I was here before.”

“Oh, it has been a while! You’re welcome to rest here until they get back. Should be a couple of hours. If you want to lie down, there’s a hayloft in the barn.”

“Okay! We’ll do that! Tell her Jessica is here with a few friends.”

The crew didn’t have to be told twice, and with many a heartfelt word of thanks, they sacked in the outbuilding—enjoying the shelter, the safety, and the soft bed of hay like a premium suite at the Saint Regis.

A few hours later, they were drifting in peaceful slumber when Gaby’s familiar voice rang out. “Jessica,” she called. Her arrival was heralded by the smell of seabutter biscuits and toasted pecans. Ed was behind her, and introductions were made. While the party ate, Jessica, Ed, and Gaby caught up.

Jessica had left Ozark in the innocent oblivious sleep of a child, and when he woke alone, he let out a wail which made the Sutokatans smile—even Amit, who rarely spoke and had not eaten at all, letting drops of milky tea trickle down his throat.

Jessica retrieved Ozark from the hayloft and watched Gaby count on her fingers. “Is that…?”

“Juan’s,” Jessica confirmed. “This is little Ozark. Say hi to Aunt Gaby and Uncle Ed, Ozark.” The child perched on her knee, solemnly blinking at the new arrivals.

“Juan is gone. He…messed with…another girl, and some of the men…”

Jessica nodded. “No great loss. But what’s this I hear about you getting married?”

“Oh, Jessica! You’ll never guess?”

“Tell me!”

“Jeremy!”

“You’re kidding! Is he here? Is my mom? I mean—”

“No, they’re all down near Houston. We were just closing up Ed’s house for the trip to the wedding!”

XLI.  Mama’s Favorites

Etagegnehu ran out of fronds before she’d finished the baskets she was weaving. She pressed her lips together and gave a little huff of frustration. Then she remembered: there was a clump of palms with pre-dried fronds about a quarter mile out of the village, on the border of the no-mans-land. She shouldn’t go alone…but no one else was around, and she knew right where it was.

She ran the tip of her tongue along her sharpened teeth, nodded. She’d be right back.

She gathered her skirt and draped her headwrap against the noonday sun. She scurried down the trail towards the grove.

As she neared it, she caught sight of a movement from the corner of her eye. She turned and scrutinized the bushes. Perhaps a vulture? She sniffed the air and caught no fragrance of death. Isis’s daughters had keener smell than she. They could smell a dead mouse from a thousand feet overhead.

She continued. Once she reached the cluster of trees she had in mind, she shed her headwrap and hiked her skirt. She wrapped her hands for protection, then mounted the serrated, staggered stems of the tree to climb it. She was perhaps ten feet above the sandy earth when she caught sight of Momad leaning against a nearby tree.

The youth was smiling, his eyes drinking in the sight of her athletic body swarming up the tree, of her chest expanding with breath.

She flushed and breathed deeply, surprised by her own pleasure at his enjoyment. “You! You’re on women’s land!” she screeched, trying to bluster her way past her fluster. She scowled unpersuasively.

“That’s not what I was told,” Momad equivocated. He nodded. “That boulder over there is the dividing point.”

“No!” she said. “I am sure you don’t belong here!” She released the tree with one hand, waving palm down. “Go!”

He continued to regard her calmly. She broke into a smile despite herself, watched his eyes light up as he caught sight of the sharp points of her white incisors.

He smiled. “Okay, I will go.” He walked a few yards down the path, stood between two bushes, and patiently watched her cut her fronds and drop them to the dirt.

She climbed down when she was done, inserting her knife into its sheath at her waist. She crouched to trim the fronds.

When she looked up, Momad was looking down at her. He was holding his jile out hilt-first. “That little thing will take forever. Here’s what you need to make short work of the job.”

She took the jile, and a few minutes of chopping excised the overlong stems and the moldy or damaged fronds. She handed the big knife back.

He took it with excruciating slowness, his fingers lingering on the hilt before grasping its weight and looking into her eyes. “Etagegnehu, you know I have always admired you.”

She looked away. “You know it is not possible. Not at this time.”

“And why not? Your father approves.”

“I have not spoken to my father since the separation.”

“And your mother?”

“She is just glad I’m safe and…and whole.” She bundled her harvest with twine and rose, swinging it up behind her head to carry on her shoulders.

As she walked away, he followed a few paces behind. “Etagegnehu! Is there no way?”

She had never before felt the emotion which twisted now inside her chest. She pivoted to face him.

“Momad. There may be a way. But there will be pain.”

“No pain is too great for you! I’m an Afar warrior. I can bear the pain.”

“I don’t think you will say that once you learn what I’m talking about.”

“I think you underestimate me.”

“Very well. Give me five minutes and then follow behind. Let me get Bilqis, and we will meet you at the trail’s end.”

When Momad got there, the two women were waiting for him. Bilqis had become fearsome. A tall woman to begin with, her hair was fluffed into a crown adorned with beads and metal discs, with chains connecting it to gleaming plates in her nose, eyebrows, and cheeks. Her eyes gleamed with the fervor of religious passion, and he wavered.

But then he saw Etagegnehu standing a step behind her left shoulder, her eyes gleaming tenderly and her pointed teeth peeking out from under her full upper lip. He jutted his breastbone.

“Are you ready, youth?” Bilqis’s voice was demanding and strident. “Are you ready to take the spur and scarab and swear allegiance to Isis?”

“I am.”

Bilqis began to wail. Her ululations began from the deepest croak, ascended to a shriek and descended again. At the end of each cry, she paused, and a distant hum could be heard. The hum grew closer and resolved into an answering call from the other women of the compound—assembling around the tableaux of Momad, Bilqis, and Etagegnehu. The sound grew deafening.

“Fall to the ground!” commanded Bilqis.

Momad obeyed. The women descended upon him and lifted him from the ground, carrying him overhead like a fallen hero. They bore him into the chamber and bound his hands and feet, slipping the jile from his waist and the cloth from his loins.

“Wait!” He was naked and defenseless. The panic was a real creature, a lizard which scuttled into his pulsing heart and wrapped its tail around his chest. But it was too late; a rag was stuffed into his mouth.

Just as she had for Atikem, Bilqis placed the spur and the scarab. Momad fainted when the spur was being placed, and woke to the throbbing pain of the scarab. “No, no,” he whispered.

Etagegnehu stood gazing down at him with naked admiration. She reached out and stroked his forehead. “It is over. You’re safe,” she said.

“I’m safe.”

“You are safe.”

“I am safe,” he murmured as he slipped from consciousness again.

XLII.                      Rah!

Highland Register, December 1

The initial registration efforts for Social Security and census takers were a resounding success! Be sure to acknowledge your neighbors wearing the gold Census badge, because they have taken on this important service on behalf of our great nation. Continue to consult this publication for projected dates of Social Security payment issuance.

It has been nothing but heartening to see the constant parade of citizens entering the new US government offices downtown, heads held high, ready to rebuild the foremost nation in the world.

The President has issued the following statement:

As the forty-fifth President of the greatest country in history, let me warn you of the bad and dangerous fake news being circulated. You can see just by looking that the hand-lithography on those pages is as amateur as the thinking contained in them.

First: taxation is absolutely NOT planned for the future. This country is a great country, a wealthy country, and there is plenty of money in the Social Security trust fund to pay benefits as promised to this generation and future generations. The US Dollar is the strongest currency in the world and benefits will always be paid in dollars.

The people who spread these lies are very dangerous terrorists. The US can and will defeat terrorists. We have in the past, and we will continue to do so in the future!

XLIII.                  Seek the Flock, Find the Wolf

Li paused at the intersection of five paths. At the memory of where Meala’s breasts had pressed against him when he awoke, his chest still tingled. He glanced at the sun, at the sky, tried to remember the layout of the hand-drawn map on the compound wall. Hard to his right, he heard the morning sounds of the men’s village waking up, so he took a soft right, thinking that would take him towards Djibouti City and the Chinese base. He had a kitchen knife and a thick wooden club which doubled as a walking stick, but no other weapons. He’d never handled a gun in his life—just guns in online games, and he had been around for enough years to know it was probably quite different. I’d probably shoot myself in the leg and bleed to death like an idiot.

He carried a skin full of water, and he knew that once the sun got high he’d need to find shade through the most brutal part of the day. He wore a ridiculous palm-frond hat to shelter his skin from the caustic desert sun. He had good shoes on—layered canvas with rope soles, which Meala had stitched, tucked, and padded to fit him.

He sighed. Meala. One day, I will find a way to come back and be with you. One day.

He settled into a light and steady pace, meeting no one on his way, and traveled this solitary path for hours. The sun cast the bushes’ shadows when he started. When the path was all sun and there was no shade to be found, he began to look for a place to conceal himself. He eyed a house-sized boulder about forty feet off the path with no tracks leading to it, so he warily left the path and picked his way over.

Someone had used it for temporary shelter in the past. There was a crude open-ended lean-to of brush on the lee side of the outcropping. With a last glance around, he dropped into a squat and crabbed his way inside. The tiny space was not cool, but compared to the roasting weather outside, it was a paradise.

He stretched out on the dusty floor and tried to think. He didn’t know what would happen to him if the Afar or Somali men found him, but he suspected it might be bad. These men came from cultures of honor where masculinity was tied up with their fighting prowess. Many of the mela groups still considered a male to be a boy until he had killed a man in battle, and any disagreement over cattle-grazing rights and territory was liable to erupt into combat. This was foreign to Li’s experience in Chinese and US cities, universities, and corporate offices.

For that matter, Li had little experience with Chinese soldiers either. Even though China supposedly required two years of military service, the reality was that service was optional, and required grueling physical fitness testing and usually a bribe to get into. Most of the military were rougher types, not unlike most of his shipmates on his ill-fated cruise. Once he reached the base, his demeanor and educated accent could make him a target. And what could they be doing at the base? Obviously, in this post-disaster world, all bets were off. There was no longer any point in jockeying for hegemony over a global order that relied on electronic communications and hinged on control of a substance which had turned to water before their eyes.

The droning of the cicadas in the heat began to lull him, and his eyes sank closed. His brain hummed Meala’s name in rhythm with the rising and falling volume of the droning insects, droning like the Chinese drones still mysteriously flying towards the distant Mediterranean. He remembered a vacation trip to Malta he’d taken in college—the only single man in a group of young couples. He imagined Meala smiling at him from a specific sunny terrace overlooking the rocky seashore.

The buzzing cicadas began to change in tone. As he realized there was another sound, he struggled to stir himself from his doze. He opened his eyes and sat up. As he did, the quality of light in his little shelter changed, and he heard a footfall outside. His heart began to thump—he froze, a frightened rabbit hiding in its hole. More shadows passed between the wall and the sun, and then a face showed in the doorway.

It was a deeply tanned face surmounted by a keffiyeh. The Arabic words that came from the man’s mouth were meaningless to Li. The man squinted, obviously unable to see inside the relative darkness of the shelter from the brilliance outside. Li broke from his paralysis, slithering madly towards the other end of the lean-to. The triangle of light outside was occupied by sandaled feet and legs either bare or covered in serwal pajamas under khamlis robes. He froze again, paused, then made his choice and crawled into the light, quickly rising to his feet.

The seven men who surrounded him, including the one who’d looked in the other end, began to wave their hands and yell in high-pitched, animated Arabic at one another. Finally, they called a pale, plump boy over from the other side of the big rock. Li realized then that there was a veritable crowd of the Arabs threaded out among the bushes in the burning sun, moving quietly across the sand.

The youngster timidly approached. His English was terrible. Li was used to Suzanne’s American accent and the stilted Afar- and Somali-accented English used by Meala and the compound women. Still, he understood that he was to follow the boy and the group of men who’d ousted him from his hiding place.

They dragged him before Sheik Abdullah, but not before relieving him of his water at gunpoint.

“Sheik Abdullah wants to know where you go?”

“I go to Chinese base.” Li kept it simple, as years of international travel had taught him to do when faced with a language barrier.

Abdullah sneered, looking at his outfit. “Abdullah says you do not look like a soldier,” the boy translated.

“I’m not a soldier. I came on a boat that wrecked.” The boy hesitated. “Crashed. Boat broke.” The boy caught on and explained to Abdullah.

Abdullah let loose with a long speech, the boy growing more panicked at the complexity of what he was expected to translate. The boy spoke obsequiously and Abdullah harshly, back and forth.

Li’s eyes widened, flicking his gaze between the two of them, who refused to look at him. Abdullah shouted a command to the two men behind Li and they seized him by the arms. Li felt a searing pain in his back and a panicked sense of violation in his chest and belly. The lights faded around him.

XLIV.                   Ink By the Barrel

Lou Stonegood

The Cascade Beacon, January 15

Is it overstating the case to say that the President is a liar?

There can be no doubt that the supposed “parade” of citizens signing up to be Social Security recipients and census takers is more like a furtive trickle. The four or five individuals darting secretively into the office door—like timid mice hoping to find a crumb of cheese—can hardly be characterized as “proud.”

The “gold” Census badges, dropped in the street for the taking, can be easily seen for nothing more than hammered and polished brass.

An interview with a local citizen reveals the truth of other claims. While gathering unread copies of the Register from the sidewalk outside local businesses to use as fire starter, this person stated: “They came to my house and asked a lot of questions. They pointed out the amount of preserves lining the shelves in the dining room and asked to buy them—for dollars. What can I do with dollars? Nobody takes dollars anymore. I can’t feed my children dollars! They took the fattest of my pigs, the one we were going to slaughter and smoke. But that’s not all. The next week, they came to my house and said because I had five adults of working age producing goods and services, I had to give back half what they’d paid me! It was just worthless paper money, but still.”

Once again, be wary of turning backwards to the evil of the past. There are two ways for people to interact. One is hierarchical. The other is cooperative.

Parts of humanity have lived under the hierarchical model for at least three thousand years. It has brought police states, imperialism, corruption, kleptocracy, and ruin. Think of the internet before the government brought it to heel. Think of Napster and Uber and all the elements of the sharing economy, which were based on peer-to-peer networked communication until governments joined hands with corporations and brought them under their dominion! We can have that again—with or without computers. The technology wasn’t the point; the reason technology enabled a transformation was because governments failed to foresee the growing speed of communication.

It took them twenty years to catch up, and they caught up largely by slowing the technology down instead of by becoming more nimble predators. When you are talking to your grandchildren, be on the side of those who resisted recentralization. Be among those who joined to forge a new planetary network of cooperation based on the enlightened self-interest of billions of individuals, finally set free from the boot on mankind’s neck!

For daily news and information, set your shewanella radio to AM 1776, the Beacon of Liberty station.

XLV.                       Widow’s Fury

Five young women strode across the courtyard. Meala rewrapped rice from decaying woven plastic bags into sheets of cloth. She’d just finished stacking a burlap bag atop the pile when the girls surrounded her.

“Meala. We are so sorry to tell you this.”

“What? What is it?” But from her eyes and the tone in her voice, it was plain that she knew. As she erupted in a wail, the girls wailed with her, and every woman in the compound gravitated to her.

The throng of wailing women came to Bilqis. She sat on her throne, resplendent in a green silk gown, with beads of crystal, onyx, and copper in her hair, her scars shining from her eyes like the rays of the sun.

She listened patiently as the women told their tale of tracking Li’s footprints until they found his hat, plus an impossible amount of blood, in the dust, near where Abdullah’s men had passed on their way to the sea. She listened as Meala poured out her fury and bereavement.

Finally, she stood. “You will be avenged, Meala! Every woman who has a weapon! Every woman who is able! We will go, now, before the cowards can escape!”

The women scurried to retrieve their weapons—some with staves and clubs, some with jiles or kitchen knives and cleavers, some with rifles or shotguns, and others with nothing more than ropes, rag slings, or wire garrotes. Their eyes flared, and they began to run as inexorably as gnus on migration, padding towards the coast at a slow, steady pace. They ran through the night by torchlight, ululating and crying the name of Isis.

Bilqis led her forces like a new Mekeda, chanting from the Kebra Negast:

I went down like the great iron anchor whereby men anchor ships for the night on the high seas, and

I received a lamp which lighteth me, and

I came up by the ropes of the boat of understanding.[1]

As the sun rose behind them, the women reached the sea where Abdullah and his men were loading their new brides onto their boats—some of them still bound at the toes and knees from their infibulations—and slaughtered the men savagely before they even knew they were under attack. Hardly a man cried out, and none even fought, so stunned were they to be beset by a horde of wild-eyed women.

How the red blood flew in the red light of dawn! The waves lapping at the shore were tinted with it. The sand drank it like precious water, and the seabutter absorbed its flavor. The women dipped into the men’s supplies and soon feasted exultantly.

Bilqis gave each infibulated girl a jile and made her desecrate one of the Arabs’ corpses, throwing his organs into the sea and crying out, “Yemaya, it is yours!”

Their celebration was short-lived. They had run for hours, and when they’d filled their stomachs, their faces gleaming like ebony and mahogany in the firelight, they soon collapsed in heaps. Resting one upon the other, they dreamed of entering the blaze of the flame of the sun, lighted with the splendour thereof, and made of it shields, saved themselves by their confidence—and not themselves only, but all those who travel in the footprints of wisdom.

XLVI.                   Nice Press You Got There…

Louis hunched over his desk in the damp basement where he now worked. He looked up at the shewanella globes glowing overhead, so unlike the sunny windows in his ancestral family business. He sniffed the spicy, vaguely rotten odor of the vegetable ink of the day’s papers in the next room.

“Three hundred!” The voice of Esther Barrington pealed, and her three co-workers added applause.

“That’s great!” Lou said. “The best day yet. Let’s see the new disguises.” The four of them plunged into a pile of hats and scarves, sunglasses, wigs, baggy pants, and platform shoes. They came out looking utterly different, and by stuffing their clothing layers with the newspapers they were smuggling, they looked much heavier as well.

“Let me see if the coast is clear.” Lou ducked out the door and up the steps to street level. The eight bodyguards who’d volunteered to protect him were in position: two flanking the steps, two on the roof of the brownstone across the street, one at each street corner, and he assumed the ones by the coal chute entrance out back were in position as well. They breathed steam, hands in their coat pockets, stomping now and then to bring blood into their feet. In the waning evening sunlight, no one else was in sight.

He stepped inside. A few minutes later, one compatriot scuttled out the front door. Another quickly jumped out of the coal chute trapdoor and walked off. After a little while, the other two distributors left by the same egresses.

Lou tidied up his workspace and bundled up for the walk home. Just as he approached the door, he heard shots ring out. Sniper fire from across the street! He paused, made sure his own weapons were accessible, loaded, and ready to go. He heard more gunfire—mostly single shots, as ammunition wasn’t to be wasted.

He stuck his head out the front door and called, “Stand down!”

The two nearest guards waited. One of them shouted, “What the Hell? We’re here to protect you.”

“No. I don’t want anyone to die for me. I’m an old man who’s lived a better life than I’ve had any right to expect. You have your whole life ahead of you. Go on home to your family. I’ll take a few of the damn government criminals with me if they try to kidnap me, but you go. Tell the rest of them I said so.”

He drew his 9-mm, cradled his AR-15, and stood in the doorway. The two men held their hands up for a truce. Soon, they and the two at the end of the street were backing off. The government men advanced unimpeded, and Lou waved his arms at the snipers to make sure they didn’t misinterpret the situation.

The government men approached. Lou had his guns pointed at the ground, and they approached with theirs down as well. There were eight of them slowly walking up.

“Louis Stonegood?” The leader didn’t wait for him to answer. “You’re under arrest. We’ll need you to come with us, please.”

“Are you threatening to shoot me if I don’t come with you? Because that’s kidnapping.”

“You’re under arrest. Come with us, or we’ll have no choice but to use force.”

“Oh, really?” Louis asked. He cut his eyes to the streetcorner. The bodyguards had returned, but at their backs were at least fifty to a hundred individuals—some of them in armor and toting shotguns and expensive rifles, a few with full-auto military grade weapons, and some with nothing more than a handgun and a look of grim determination. The other end of the block was similarly populated.

The men facing Lou immediately formed an outwards-facing defensive circle as the crowd approached. They silently blocked the street about ten feet away from the tableaux of Lou and the goons.

The leader of the government contingent loudly announced, “Louis Stonegood, I am here to place you under arrest for tax evasion. You’re in the business of producing a newspaper for profit, and you haven’t paid taxes on any of your sales or income.”

Whitehaired, grizzled, and slightly stooped, Louis let out a belly laugh. “You confiscated my land and a building that’s been in my family for four generations! You stole my printing press! I think if anyone should be arrested here, it’s you!”

Affirmative buzzes from the crowd made the government men shift nervously.

The leader seemed at a loss for what to do. A dog barked in the distance. Someone coughed. The stalemate continued. Someone in the back of the crowd racked a slide on a pistol.

The click blessed the leader with sudden resolution. “Alright. In light of what you’ve reported, I’m authorized to have the tax collector meet with you in person to negotiate a resolution.”

“The only way I’d agree to that is if you return my property first.”

“I am not at liberty to make such an offer.”

“I don’t ever want to hear the word ‘liberty’ in the mouth of from the likes of you again,” Lou sneered. “I will meet with you—at noon tomorrow at the Register offices, accompanied by the individuals of my choice. I think if you’ll agree to that, these good people might oblige themselves to move out of the way and let you leave.”

The men sidled back-to-back through the parting crowd. Once they were gone, Lou holstered his weapons and lost himself in the embraces of his protecting flock.

#

The next day at noon, a more organized crowd of the same size assembled around the dry fountain in the center of the Highfield square. Lou led them down the street to the front door of the familiar edifice. He stepped up onto the veranda, flanked by Esther on his right and his cousin Alf on his left. Two guards blocked their entry.

“Only you, Mr. Stonegood.”

“Those were not the terms I agreed to.”

“The president said only you.”

“Very well.” Lou turned his back to the guards and prepared to step off the stoop.

The front door opened. “Wait.” Steve called. Lou stopped but didn’t turn.

“There’s been a misunderstanding. Of course your, er, associates can come with you.”

Lou raised his hands, palm out, to the crowd. They erupted in applause, which he acknowledged with a diffident nod. He turned, and the three of them sauntered inside.

Lou entered the office…his office, and his eyes narrowed when he saw Steve sitting behind his grandfather’s desk. But he forced himself to breathe normally and shook Steve’s hand when it was offered.

“Mr. Stonegood. A delight to see you!”

“A feeling I fervently wish was mutual,” smiled Lou.

“I apologize for the recent unpleasantness.”

“Oh, it’s nothing.”

“But it is something. Let’s not beat around the bush. You’re part of a community, Mr. Stonegood, and you’ve had it largely to yourself for the last couple of years. You’ve built up a political reputation hereabouts, while the actual government was struggling to get back on its feet, but that’s over now. You’re a man of substance and means, and as we know two things are certain in this world. One of them is taxes!” He let out a plummy, jovial chuckle.

“And the other one is death. Do you really want to make me a martyr?” Stonegood countered.

Steve laughed. “Of course it won’t come to that, Mr. Stonegood!”

“Of course.”

“We have calculated the amount of income you have received according to our posted exchange rates for US dollars, estimating that one third of your sales are in silver, one third in amoxicillin, and one third in food. I have the calculations right here.” He tossed a page onto the desktop, which acknowledged with a nod. He didn’t pick it up.

After a moment’s hesitation, Steve continued, “Over the fourteen months you operated it, we calculate your income from publishing the Register at $10,500 US. The current income tax rate is 35%. That brings your tax liability—less the standard deduction—to $2,835.”

“I see.”

“We will accept payment in silver, food, or amoxicillin equivalent to the US Dollar amount, according to the exchange rates on page two of the document.” He nodded at the document.

Lou didn’t even look at it. “You have already confiscated my property and suppressed my freedom of speech.”

“Don’t be foolish. You’re free to say or write whatever you want.”

“Not to change the subject, but how many papers are you selling, Mr. Brannen?”

“We distribute our entire press run every day. As you know, the presses will produce about 2,500 papers running full-time. We have had some technical issues, so on some days—”

“That’s not what I asked. When I walk around town, I see the papers used to make tires for light vehicles. I’ve seen them used to cover broken windows, to mop up spills, and to insulate cellars and crawlspaces. But I haven’t seen anyone reading one. So, that’s why I ask: how many are you selling?”

Steve smiled, but reddened slightly.

Lou pressed on. “Because people aren’t willing to pay for something they don’t value, are they? For example, you asked me to pay you $2,835 just now. I don’t see that I receive anything of value in exchange for that, so I’m not willing to pay it.”

“You know you’ll subject yourself to arrest as a tax avoider if you don’t pay your taxes.”

“So, you’re selling me my freedom? Or more precisely, offering to refrain from taking my freedom from me if I pay you? Leaving off the fact that that meets the definition of criminal extortion, what makes you think that my freedom is worth $2,835 without my printing press and family property?”

Steve’s brow furrowed for an instant. Then he twigged and said, “So, you’re saying you’ll pay your taxes if your property is returned to you?”

“It’s obviously worthless to you.”

“Hmm.” Steve sat upright and thought for a moment. “Alright, I agree.”

“Very good. How shall we transact the exchange?”

“How soon can you have the payment to us?”

Lou picked up the papers, flipped to the page with the exchange rates, nodded. “These rates seem fair. Is tomorrow at noon convenient for you?”

“Very much so. We’ll see you at our compound at twelve o’clock tomorrow.”

“I don’t think so. I’ll need to inspect the property you’re returning beforehand. We’ll meet here.”

They shook hands. Lou and his companions walked out the front door. Lou cleared his throat, and the chattering throng quieted.

“Fellow citizens,” he began, “I am pleased to announce that, in exchange for merchandise priced at just under $3,000, the occupiers will return the Register to my possession at noon tomorrow. I welcome you all to join me in celebration immediately afterwards!”

“I’ll bring the beer. First barrel’s on me!” bellowed Paul Erikks, the town brewer and publican. A rowdy cheer rang out. Someone brought out a harmonica, and someone else had a guitar. The main crowd began to drift apart, but a small group stayed behind to hear the music. A woman started to sing in a high, clear voice.

“Where are you headed?” Alf asked. “I’ll walk with you to be sure you make it safely.”

“That’s a good question.” Lou said. “These people aren’t above kidnapping me, justifying it based on their delusion of representing some sort of collective higher good. I probably shouldn’t go home tonight.” He waved a hand airily, as if he hadn’t just described being arrested and disappeared. “Any suggestions?”

Esther offered a grin that made her brown eyes sparkle. “Did I mention I’m Italian on my mother’s side?”

“No, but I don’t see…oh.”

“My cousin Dom has a guest bedroom. I’m sure he’d put you up. It’s not far.”

The three of them headed towards the section of town where its best deli still operated, though with a drastically reduced inventory. As the strains of music became fainter behind them, Lou smiled. “That’s one thing I’m glad of since things changed: people make their own music again. I’m sure it won’t be long before someone re-invents the Victrola.”

“Oh, we can skip the wind-up stage,” said Alf. “Those biobatteries will bring us to powered record players as soon as someone cobbles together a way to record sound without plastic. Didn’t they used to use wax?”

“Not sure what kind of wax. I think it was some sort of plastic coated with a natural resin. But with a concept, someone will figure out the details. Human ingenuity is truly miraculous.” Lou looked dreamy and linked arms with Esther and Alf.

“But still. I love hearing voices singing their own songs in the street.”

#

By eleven o’clock Friday morning, the town square of Highfield had taken on a party atmosphere. The harmonica, guitar and voice ensemble had acquired a drummer, a saxophonist, and a bagpiper. It was unseasonably warm, and several enterprising kids had set up stands selling apple- and berry-juice cocktails garnished with sprigs of mint. A mule wagon laden with folding wooden benches and tables pulled up, and so did another with barrels, buckets, baskets, and gear to set up a wood-fired grill. Teenagers collected in gaggles and prides, littler children dashed about underfoot, and adults sat on benches or blankets and chitchatted.

At eleven fifty-five, Lou, Esther, and Alf walked up the street, each carrying a visibly heavy canvas bag in their arms. “Déjà vu,” she whispered.

“Yeah, but much more cheerful vibe this time,” said Alf.

They mounted the steps, and today, the guards deferentially opened the door for them. Inside, they entered the office, set their three bags on the floor with a clank.

“Is that…silver?”

“All silver coins: Buffaloes, Eagles, Maple Leaves, Kangaroos, Libertads, and pre-’64 dimes, quarters, and half-dollars. Figured it was the easiest to carry.” They were all three perspiring a bit and breathing fairly heavily, so ease of carrying was relative. “Oh, and this.” He pulled a smaller sack out of his pocket and dropped it on top of the bigger ones; it landed with a soft clack. “Broad-spectrum beta-lactam, mostly amoxicillin.”

Steve rose. “You wanted to inspect the premises?”

“It seems only reasonable.”

“Very well. Follow me.”

XLVII.              Star Light, Star Bright

When the women awakened with their enemies’ bodies at their feet, they realized they had a sacred undertaking before them. They stumbled to their feet and saw a throng of women staring at them: Somali, Habesha, Issa, and Afar women were side by side, united in their wonder. All of them had awakened at dawn from dreams of a new star shining from the top of the desolate mountain Gabal Elba, and of this woman in her green silk robe, with a star shining from within her belly, brighter by far than anything they had ever seen.

Bilqis stood, and a gasp rang from the crowd.

“It is her.”

“She is the one from my dream!”

“The one with the star.”

“I dreamed she ran on the feet of a gnu.”

Hands reached out to take the arms of sisters and cousins. Muslim women and Christians mingled as the crowd moved in, hands out to bring Bilqis’s retinue to their feet. Bilqis raised her arms and began her overwhelming, undulating inundation of sound. Each woman felt the tones echo and vibrate within her own womb. Those who’d been cut felt the phantom pain of lost nerve endings and tissues that would never engorge—buried beneath their parents’ doorjambs and abandoned, but never forgotten.

It coursed through them as rage, joy, sorrow, and hope. Their eyesight grew grey, then red, then radiantly green in rhythm with the music’s cry, and they began to spin and dance. Even the girls of the compound—who had run a marathon the day before, most of them barefoot—began to step and glide and lean. Soon, the entire seashore was occupied by a mass of female flesh greeting the sunrise, heedless of the night before or the day to come.

How terrifying to fall under those feet! But no one fell. Little girls and aged women teetered, but there was always a hand, an arm, a thigh, to counterbalance, lift, or spin them out of danger. No thanks were given, and none expected, for at that moment, they shared one being.

The sun began to heat their skin, and they slowed and finally stopped, sinking to the ground in dhuhr to the light within each of them—shining most brightly from Bilqis herself.

Bilqis stood and addressed them, and each woman heard her words in her own language.

“Meala has been robbed of her man, the Chinese who came to her in a boat. Meala will tell her story now.”

Meala stood. Her eyes swept out over the sea of colorful shawls and beads and braids and bands, bare breasts and covered heads. She saw a flame burning above each woman, of the same plasma that fueled the sun shining deep within her belly.

Meala spoke:

I left mother. I left father.

I saved only myself and She who is my self.

I forgave Father.

I forgave Mother.

I have found forgiveness,

I have reached forgiveness,

I inhale forgiveness;

And I will always bear scars.

The scars are mine,

And I found someone who did not know.

I saved someone that no one cared about.

He was mine,

His heart was mine,

His breath was mine.

And he was cut down by the demon,

He was killed by the believers in false gods.

Now they are mine.

Now they are ours!

The women took up the call of her words, tongue calling to tongue, the languages susurrating and harmonizing, amplifying, interfering, muffling, and then braiding into a new song over and over.

Bilqis began to shape the words of their chant. She threw in a word here or there: Future; clean; untouched; unbroken; ours.

The women echoed back: Now; unbreakable; spur-and-scarab; revenge.

The women had begun small fires to render seabutter. The palm-leaf pots they passed around sustained them that day and into the evening. They once again collapsed in place, a tiny inoculation of compound women who had spread into a colony across the agar of the seashore.

Meala lay her head in Bilqis’s lap as the sunset faded to the darkness of nightfall. Bilqis was sitting cross-legged, erect, showing no sign of fatigue. Meala gazed up at her face, dark against the dark sky, catching hints of firelight, and felt with a sudden thrill that Bilqis…Bilqis, with whom she had woven reeds, built fires, diapered babies…wasn’t human.

Was she a witch? No, more; she was more than that. A demon? No, Meala knew in her heart that she was more, and that she was good. She was goodness.

With the next dawn, the glow and flames were gone, but the spell was unbroken. The women dispersed.

By that night, there wasn’t an unrepentant circumciser left alive within a days’ walk of their seaside assembly.

Within a week, the males of the district were divided into those who lived apart from the villages and camps, and those who were healing from the sacred spur and scarab.

A month? The colony had inoculated and spread itself around the Horn of Africa, as far along the Red Sea as Cairo.

#

Bilqis rose from meditation and raised her arms. The encampments around her were arranged like the rays of the sun, all fanning from the natural pyramid of Gabal Elba, on which she made her temple—the first Mosque of Makeda.

The desert had yielded to the changes from the sea. The same conditions that brought the seabutter, changing the smell and feel of the sea like a woman’s secretions changed with pregnancy, had moistened and soothed the sere and rocky expanse of desert between what had once been Egypt and what had once been Sudan. Some said the new religion had a hundred thousand followers in Africa; some said a hundred million. Their offerings of goat meat and seabutter, bananas and yams, maize and beans, kept her full and growing fat—wanting for nothing.

Adoring Meala sat by her side, and Bilqis looked down at her face, caressed it with motherly love. “Meala, there is something I must ask of you.”

“What is it, great Bilqis?”

“I wouldn’t ask this if great Nefertiri, Elegant Lady, Generous, Charming, Sweet and Loving, Commander of Everywhere, Femme Fatale, Mother's Favorite, Savior of Jesus—didn’t will it.”

“I know, Bilqis.”

“The time has come to balance the scales on the other side of the Red Sea.”

“Yes, Bilqis. You have mentioned this before.”

“More of our sisters are being cut and cored, bleeding and dying, across the sea where more Arabs live. I have seen in my nightly travels that there are millions more, all along the seashores and across the mountains—where women are tiny and sloe-eyed, and where women are almond-eyed and shallow of hip like your one true love: all touched by the Sar Awak, the evil that had held sway for so long. They must learn to find the shining sun within, and to harness the virility among them with the spur and scarab.

“Meala, there is none among us I can trust as much as you. Will you go?”

Meala thought of her sweet Li—his straight dark hair threaded with grey, his hooded almond eyes, the smoothness of his fine-grained pallid golden skin on that one morning when she’d finally dared to press it with her own. The day he’d gone to his death.

She’d not been with anyone, even though the women all raved about sex with the men who’d had the spur put right where it would bump the partner’s clitoris. It took some time for their penises to discover their function again when the scarab was removed. They were sensitive, and moved oh, so slowly.

Apparently.

Meala had thoughts only of Li. And she considered the possibility that somewhere far to the east, she might meet a distant cousin of Li’s, some man who couldn’t replace him, but at least remind her a bit of him.

“I will go.”

Bilqis smiled as though she’d known Meala would agree.

Then she held something out to her. It was shell-like; phosphorescent in places, translucent in some, opaque in shades of green in others.

Meala took it and felt its weight. “Is it alive?”

“It is.”

Bilqis had another of the items in her other hand. She turned and walked a few steps away, then pivoted and pressed a spot on the carapace of the creature in her hand. To Meala’s surprise, the animal she herself held began to pulse with light and purr softly.

“Press the farthest spot,” Bilqis said. Meala complied.

Bilqis brought hers to her lips, and for a moment, Meala wondered if she were about to eat it. But she merely whispered, “Hello?”

Meala heard Bilqis’ voice coming from the creature in her hand. “Hello?” it said. And on one of the clear chitinous areas of its skin, the word for “Hello” in Afar appeared in the Ge’ez alphabet, then shimmered and slowly faded.

“What is it?” Meala marveled. Her node flashed the Ge’ez Afar for “What is it?” in a slightly different color, which likewise disappeared.

“It is a node. Moroccan traders brought them overland. Our best fish farmers have been growing them in tanks. They call them bioelectronics. They were invented far away, across the sea.” All her words were rapidly scrolling by on the small organic screen. “They’re implanted with a small copper coil to increase their bioelectric radio signal. I don’t understand all the science, but the technology works. They’re all on one network, and all their daughters and granddaughters will be on the same network.”

“Like a cell phone?”

“Something like that. But the network is only for this region. Once you’re out of range, the signal is lost. It may be many years, perhaps many lifetimes, before the network joins us together around the world again.”

Meala grinned. “But it’s a start!”

“It is a start. And you will be taking these devices with you when you go east.”

#

Meala stood next to the tanks with their walls of swollen reeds, holding the fresh water that grew the nodes within—just like the hull that held the sea at bay on the outside. Abiba, the node farmer on her crew, was a tall, lanky woman. Her eyes had looked off in two directions ever since she’d corrected her husband on a point of scripture one night after dinner. He had beaten her until she admitted that up was down and black was white. Abiba’s husband had slowly sickened and died after that.

If the machine sickness and the True Mother hadn’t intervened, Abiba might have been stoned as a witch for having her revenge. As it was, she had that crazed, hermitic look of those people whose complex, thoughtful conversations end in frustration with others. She lit up when she looked at her nodes—as though their elegant architecture was more real to her than the women around her.

Meala ascended the ladder to the deck and surveyed the sails, modernized Somali boats with certain modifications to them that had been burned into Meala’s brain since the day she saw Li’s ship burning on the storm-churned harbor. The crew were brave women, strong and level-headed. They’d drilled and practiced and rehearsed every detail of the ship’s routine and of every emergency they could imagine—from being attacked by pirates to epidemics to springing a simple leak.

They were sure they were forgetting nothing, yet Meala shrank from the vastness of the water arrayed before her tiny vessel. Her first destination on the other side, out of sight, was the land known as Yemen, from whence Sheik Abdullah had sailed. She wished for a moment—but just for a moment—that she was squatting peacefully by her mother’s hearth, slicing vegetables for dinner again. But that wasn’t what Isis wanted for Meala.

Meala would face the fate Isis had spread before her with courage.

XLVIII.          Handoff

“I think it might be better for Esther to stay here.” Alf interjected. “She can see the festivities outside.” he nodded at the front windows. Esther pulled up a chair and leaned back in it, her jacket falling open just enough for the butt of her carbine to show, and rested her feet on one of the sacks of silver.

She sighed. “This is lovely.”

Tyler stepped out of the corner where he’d been standing. “May I?” He nodded at the bags.

“Oh, I suppose so.” Esther put her feet flat on the floor, and Tyler picked up the bag of drugs first, pouring the tablets out on the desk and sorting them by type: some coated and shiny, others chalky, some round and some oval, some capsules. Most people nowadays could pick out the common brands and doses of antibiotics on sight. Even children knew how to crush them and coat the increasingly-rare items of plastic that still existed with the dust. He finished counting up the drugs, scooped them into the sack, and picked up a bag of silver coins, which he began to stack neatly on the surface of the desk.

In the meantime, Alf and Lou followed Steve and two large men in uniforms into the press room. Lou could hardly conceal his joy at seeing the gleaming, intact metal of the hulking press. He began to walk around it, but when he got to the far side and saw what was there, he stopped. “Gabe?”

The pressman was seated on a cot, his elbows on his knees and his hands hanging limply, head down. He looked up at Lou and jumped to his feet, his broad, patient face telegraphing pleasure, fear, hope, joy, and shame in rapid succession. “Lou! I thought you were dead! They made me—I would never—you’re not a prisoner?”

Lou stepped up and offered his right hand. Gabe stepped forward, but stopped short. “You’re shackled?”

Gabe looked down at the steel-banded leather strap on his ankle and the chain connecting it to the press. He flushed red.

Lou rounded on the three men. “You shackled him to the press?”

“He’s under arrest for assaulting an officer,” Steve smoothly explained.

“I’m on work release.” Gabe nodded at the press.

“This is slavery.” Lou said. “You release this man, or the whole deal is off…and we’ll see what the people in the square outside think about this situation.”

Steve’s jaw worked. The goons shifted position, menacing Lou from the rear. Lou kept his hand off his sidearm with visible effort. The band outside finished a nouveau rendering of “Clementine” and launched into “Dr. Graffenburg.” A dog barked.

Finally, Steve nodded at one of the two men. “Release him.” The man obeyed, and Gabe stepped forward and embraced Lou—to Lou’s obvious discomfort.

Lou promptly stepped back and took Gabe’s right hand firmly in his two, not reacting to the tears in the other man’s eyes. “Gabe, you’d better go see to your family. Louise thinks she’s a widow and your girls are orphans.”

Gabe didn’t even glance around. He was out the door in seconds.

“How can you claim to be operating under the Constitution and imprison a man without charges or trial?” Lou asked.

“It was a matter of national security. Congress expressly authorized—”

“Never mind,” Lou interrupted. “I know what Congress has expressly authorized over the past twenty years. Thank God that’s over and done with!” He continued to stroll around the press, noting scorch marks here and there, casting a scornful glance at the narrow cot and the chain. “Everything appears to be in order. Let’s check the ink supplies in the storeroom.”

A few minutes later, Lou stepped out on the veranda with Alf and Esther. Steve, Tyler, and the two cops stood on the other side. The music stopped; the crowd took notice and gradually assembled facing them.

Lou stepped up front and center. “My friends, let this mark the beginning of a new era. There can be no freedom more important that freedom of the press. Aside from life and liberty, there can be no right more sacred than the right to property. Today, you see those principles upheld!”

His words were met with a round of applause, whistles and cheers. “Let’s party!” yelled Alf.

The crowd returned to its revelry. Tyler and the other two carried the bags through the interior to put them in their car, hidden under a canvas cover in the rear loading dock, dusted thoroughly with antibiotics.

Waiting for the car to come around, Steve took Lou’s hand. “I trust,” he said, “that you understand the importance of the president reviewing your coverage before it is released?”

“I’m flattered that the president would want to read my little newspaper. I’ll be happy to send a copy up to him as each edition comes off the presses.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Steve said. “I would expect an opportunity to review any editorial content or reporting which affects national security ahead of publication...if nothing else, so he could have a chance to respond.”

“That sounds fair,” Lou said.

Steve let out a tiny sigh of relief. “Good, that’s settled, then. A pleasure—”

“…but it isn’t fair,” Lou concluded. “Like every other citizen, the president is entitled to respond in whatever way he likes. I will provide him a copy of every publication gratis as a courtesy. After it’s released.”

Steve smiled even more broadly, but with glinting daggers in his eyes. “Watch your back, Mr. Stonegood,” he cautioned, squeezing his hand in a vice-like grip. He broke contact and strode to the car, its Presidential Seal proudly displayed on the door.

XLIX.                   Join US

Steve and Tyler got out of the car at the presidential compound and walked around, watching their lackeys unload the sacks of silver and precious drugs. They made sure they walked behind the men carrying the bags so none of it went missing.

Tyler nodded at the windows of the office wing. Barely visible above the high window ledges, a line of faces watched the bags coming towards them. The amount of silver in those bags would feed every person in the compound for three years. The antibiotics would keep their poor, isolated electronic equipment from becoming infected for…who knew how long? Some devices had become infected with antibiotic-resistant strains already. Security had confiscated and quietly destroyed those, but word got around, and those with sickened devices concealed them. Nobody wanted to risk the confiscation of a device that didn’t respond to the drugs.

But now that the shewanella tech was circulating, everyone wanted to buy a globe of it. They’d kept it under wraps in the workshop as long as they could, but in a community of fewer than a hundred and fifty people, there can be no real secrets. Then they tried giving each person an identical shewanella light. That kept people happy for a few weeks. Then someone figured out that the shewanella could be cultured in a bigger milieu to generate power on a bigger scale. The demand for glass globes and tubing and wicks and membranes became tremendous. The workshop had issued memo after memo advising that the materials were reserved for the extremely critical research that the top scientists of the lab were doing to refine the technology.

One night, a series of gunshots rang out at the perimeter. That wasn’t unusual, as the sentries had orders to shoot any unidentified person approaching. But a few minutes later, a pickup truck went out to the spot the shots had come from and came back with a tarp-enrobed body in the truckbed. Normally, dead intruders were taken to a nearby pit—a glaring white gouge in the landscape, where they were tossed in and covered with lime, reducing their bodies to unrecognizable ash in weeks.

The few co-workers who attended the interment of the fleeing staffer confirmed that he’d had a dream of getting his hands on a shewanella radio set. He’d been a huge music collector Before, and he used to daydream at length, reminiscing about the days of being able to press a button and hear any type of music he wanted.

After that, there were two or three defections a week. About three quarters of them made it out. After the fourth funeral, the rest were consigned to the quicklime mass grave. Memos circulated reminding all remaining that these were cowards, traitors, criminals, and accusing them of theft, pedophilia, rape, spying for the enemy, attempted bribery…

So, these bags of silver gave them hope. If they got paid in real currency, they might be able to get more raw materials from locals, smuggled in along with their delicacies when deliveries of officially purchased foodstuffs were made. For that matter, the cafeterias had been stretching the meat and reducing portion sizes bit by bit. The leaner among them were getting emaciated and the enforcers were skipping workouts to avoid losing too much weight.

This money came just in time. The first thing the chief of staff did was to send his most trusted aide into town to recruit ten new security guards and equip them with guns and ammo. After all, every orderly regime needs secure borders.

L.              Hello, Goodbye

It was a perfect day for a wedding. It was a perfect day for a funeral. Palm fronds fluttered in a light breeze. The sun shone, but the air was crisp and cool. DD, Snowbear, Akisni, Josh, and Jessica sat on the catamaran’s deck. Dressed in white from head to toe, Jeremy set the sail for the middle of the bay.

Once he’d heaved-to, they all stood together on the gently-bobbing surface.

Snowbear spoke. “Saying goodbye to a friend is never easy. Saying goodbye to a genius, even less so.

“I met Amit Viswanathan when we were both kids. He was a scared foreigner, skinny as hell and away from home for the first time. But he had a visionary mind and a basic sense of decency that drew people to him. We had some crazy times together.” he chuckled. “Whether it was hitchhiking to California or renting a big old house with a group of pals, picking a crazy thesis topic or tripping on mushrooms, he was always the sane one, the one who reminded us of the risks and then encouraged us to do what we really wanted anyway.

“Amit brought me through some dark times as well. I was just back from the Viet Nam war, and he sat up with me some nights when things got bad.” His voice cracked, but then he straightened. “I would probably not be here today if it were not for Amit Viswanathan. I returned the favor when his children died in a house fire, and I saw his big, loving heart break. That heart healed with a greater love for all humanity and a determination to make a better world. Amit was one of the finest people I have ever known.”

Jessica saw a tear streak down D.D.’s face. She dropped Josh’s hand and took her mother’s. “It’s okay, Mom,” she whispered. Josh, solemn, took the canvas bag with Amit’s ashes in it, released the drawstring, and upended the sack. The heavier parts of the ash hit the water with a sizzling sound; the wind caught the powdery portion and blew it away in a swirling cloud.

“Goodbye, old friend.” The seagulls lamented overhead, disappointed that there was nothing edible in the debris. Amit’s friends on the boat abided in honor of their companion, friend, and mentor. Some wept. All grieved.

Jeremy turned the boat back to shore, tacking across the wind, and tossed Ryan a rope when they reached the low dock. Ryan set a plank between the deck and the beach, and the party filed off, mindful of their Sunday-best clothes. Ryan whisked Jeremy away in a wagon. The rest made their way on foot a little further up the beach, where a canopy of flowers awaited.

Once the group was assembled, musicians struck up the march. Marthita pranced ahead, wearing a fluffy confection of a dress, strewing azalea petals, and joining her sister in standing across from her brother amongst the wedding party. Glowing exuberantly, Gaby walked down the aisle, her black hair glossy and gleaming down her back beneath a wreath of blossoms. Her straight floor-length dress, embroidered with crystals, shimmered in the sun.

As the local minister led the two through their vows, DD noticed that the dress was awfully snug across Gaby’s midsection. The two of them are so perfect together. Who would have imagined this when we all first met each other, scared and running for our lives?

After the ceremony, the guests adjourned to party. Musicians dropped in and out of the band, playing waltzes, bluegrass, rock songs, and mariachi. Each type of song brought a different portion of the crowd to the raked patch of packed sand which served as a dance floor. Except for Alfred; wearing a swirling parti-colored muumuu and cape, he minced and flailed, stomped and twirled, bumped and gyrated non-stop through every number, his long limbs and beard waving indiscriminately around him in a gaily terrifying carousel of pure, uninhibited joy. Jeremy’s sister and father had traveled up the coast, and Gaby’s extended family—both the dark-complected mestizos and Arkansas rednecks—were getting to know their new relatives over wine, mead, fine reposada tequila, and corn whiskey.

The feast was prodigious: a wide assortment of delicacies ranging from seabutter crab puffs to roast turkey and pork, new potatoes and parsley, tarts and nuts, and finished with a gorgeous cake made from expensive sugar and flour. The older children raced around, giggling and playing games, Kittykitty bounding along with them and barking.

“Quite a spread!” said DD after hugging the happy couple. “Things must be going well here.”

“We can’t complain. We just happened to be lucky enough to be where the seabutter was. Now we make our livings feeding people further inland.”

“So cool! And it looks like you’ve got a new addition…?” DD cocked an eyebrow at Gaby’s belly.

She beamed. “I miss having a little one around. I’m due in July.”

“How do the other kids feel about it?”

“Oh, they’re fine with it. All the women in my family have a lot of kids. We usually stop at thirty-five, though.”

“Thirty-five? That’s so young! Why?”

“Well, thirty-six kids is just too many.” Groan.

“If it’s a boy, we’ll call him Amit.” She patted her belly.

“And if it’s a girl—”

“Deirdre!” blurted Jeremy.

“Oh! You guys!” DD was speechless.

LI.          Don’t Back Down!

Lou Stonegood loved to read his own writing. He especially loved it when someone humored him and allowed him to read one of his own editorials out loud. When that someone was a beautiful, brilliant, tough and elegant woman like Esther Barrington, and she was wearing nothing but a pair of thigh-high black deerskin boots, Lou felt like he was in heaven.

For her part, Esther knew she was in the presence of greatness. She couldn’t feel more fortunate that this brilliant man hadn’t only taken an interest in her, but had made it his secondary preoccupation in life to keep her satisfied—intellectually, materially, and sexually. Her stomach was full of the treats from yet another victory celebration on the town square. Her thighs were sore, her body tingling and relaxed as she sprawled with her arm across Lou’s chest and listened to him read out loud.

He patted her shoulder and tucked his chin to put his bifocal lenses in the right spot for reading from his copy of the Highfield Register. “We of the Register—”

“I wish you’d give up the editorial ‘we.’ It sounds so pompous.”

“Hush, woman! We of the Register are warmly grateful for the outpouring of support we have seen over the past few days and weeks. Blah, blah, celebrate victory, thanks to supporters, names, names, names, et cetera, et cetera…

“Ah, here we go: the enclave on the hill above us is in the hands of those who refuse to realize that they are a vestige of a time whose time has passed. We, the people, have learned that each of us is just that: a person. We will never again be fooled by the platitudes of collectivism which appeal to the worst in our natures.

“Yet, we must remember that the worst in our natures remains coiled, ready to strike, like the proverbial snake in the grass—or that other snake who lured humanity into corruption so long ago.”

“Ugh. You didn’t!”

“Not all of us are atheists, my sweet. Where was I? Oh, yes: the critical element in rebuilding our world in a decentralized, antifragile, peaceful, and equal way is to incorporate new technologies that enable us to interact peer-to-peer in a true world wide web. The new era of Biocomputing devices, powered by shewanella-based electricity and wired with the same type of circuitry which makes up our own brains, will offer the opportunity to leapfrog the thousand years of dreary decay and dark ages that might have been needed to allow networks once again to reach critical mass and break free from command and control.

“From this era forward, remembering that eternal vigilance is the price of freedom, let humanity’s relations be governed by the principle of ongoing, enthusiastic consent.”

“I’ll show you ongoing, enthusiastic consent!” Esther knocked the paper aside and swung her lush thigh over Lou’s torso.

Lou put his hands up and threw his head back on the pillow. “Mercy, woman!” he cried. “I’m an old man. I may not be as good as I once was.”

Esther relented and sprawled beside him. “At least you’re as good once, as you ever were. There’s always later.”

“It never goes away.”

THE END

Dear Reader:

Thank you again for buying the exclusive box set. If you’ve made it this far, I know you’re wondering where I could possibly intend to go with these characters and events in the third book, but if I could trouble you for just a few minutes to pop over to the book’s Amazon page and leave a review, I would be eternally grateful.

—PDW

Science Fiction— Caution: contains real science

The boundaries between science fiction and fantasy have blurred and merged over recent decades, but there is a perennial appetite for science fiction which is, well, science-y. Everything that happens during the Eupocalypse is based on real events and real technologies, which are being used right now, this very moment, all over the world. In addition, this second books dips into the “dismal science” of economics and some rather disturbing anthropological sociology. Below, in completely random order, are links to articles about some of them:

- Shewanella-based microbial fuel cells:

- https://vdocuments.site/a-mediator-less-microbial-fuel-cell-using-a-metal-reducing-bacterium-shewanella.html , and

- http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bit.25624/abstract;jsessionid=52415C268FC9BB3185227E679964E944.f01t03

- Lipid production by Hydrocarbonoclastic bacteria: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/40026718_Analysis_of_Lipid_Export_in_Hydrocarbonoclastic_Bacteria_of_the_Genus_Alcanivorax_Identification_of_Lipid_Export-Negative_Mutants_of_Alcanivorax_borkumensis_SK2_and_Alcanivorax_jadensis_T9

- Female Genital Mutilation in the modern Horn of Africa:

- https://www.dovepress.com/attitude-toward-female-genital-mutilation-among-somali-and-harari-peop-peer-reviewed-fulltext-article-IJWH

- https://www.unicef.org/esaro/5440_Ethiopia_FGM_abandonment.htm

- The Afar:

- http://www.orvillejenkins.com/profiles/afar.html

- http://afar-infocenter.com/

- Basic voluntarist/anarchist thought:

- https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/11/lew-rockwell/fatal-flaw-politics/

- https://fee.org/articles/how-communism-almost-ruined-the-first-thanksgiving/

- The entrepreneur as hero:

- https://fee.org/articles/the-entrepreneur-on-the-heroic-journey/

- Prehistoric, pre-plastic computer: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/decoding-antikythera-mechanism-first-computer-180953979/

Lastly, a chance to make a difference. The Eupocalypse is fiction, but some things contained in the story are sadly all too real. Many of the beta readers of this book’s drafts were appalled and shocked to learn about the practice of female genital mutilation. Below is a link to the AHA foundation, where you can get more information and find out what you can do to help:

https://www.theahafoundation.org/

Catallaxis

Book 3 of the Eupocalypse Series

Peri Dwyer Worrell

For Amanda

And Ben

Catallaxis

Peri Dwyer Worrell

Copyright© 2019 Peri Dwyer Worrell

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without written permission except in the case of brief quotations included in critical articles and reviews. For information, please contact the author.

I.                 Deep Blue

The barely-taut sails above Meala swallowed the steady breeze bearing her and her crew relentlessly east by east-northeast. From the wooden deck of the gently bobbing ship, she scanned the distance for attackers. Approaching the shore of Yemen, they had almost crossed the Red Sea. The voyage had been a long one. Now becalmed in the middle of the crossing, the crew of seasoned fighting women had plenty of free time.

Each woman spent the interlude between their five-times-daily prayers to Isis, doing what she did best or loved most. Some gambled, some slept; some honed their knives, or ceaselessly disassembled, cleaned, and reassembled their guns. Others sang, playing old Afar, Habesha, and Somali melodies on the krar, accompanied by new words that praised Isis and her victory over the old Zar-Wak Allah.

And a few of the women, like Abiba, quietly cared for the things under their charge. Abiba’s scarred face and scalp, misshapen nose, and stooped posture prevented her from taking great pleasure in others’ company. Her deceased husband had pounded shrieks of received brutality from her like she was a drum, and her shredded voice was not musical. She was most commonly seen looking down—partly out of reflexive, conditioned subservience, and partly to avoid seeing or caring about the other women’s pity.

But she escaped her emotions and found refuge in thought. Since late infancy, her thoughts had expressed themselves in pure mathematics. Those thoughts were as deep and complex as the web of life itself, and as deep as the sea they sailed over.

Abiba gazed into the tank where her precious ctenophores were growing. Like trilobites or cuttlefish, the multi-armed and segmented creatures moved around the tank with an eerie purpose. As they moved, transient images of circuit-board tracings flashed deep within their translucent bodies. Across the whole population of the animals, these flashes created patterns that sometimes spiraled or radiated like fireworks; other times, forming golden-ratio cascades within the volume of the tank.

The symbolic mathematical formulae that formed seemed self-evident to Abiba, and might also have made sense to academic mathematicians and theoretical physicists—had any been present. But none were, for what university scholar or scientist would care to visit a ship sailing from one of the poorest desert regions of eastern Africa? And even if there had been such a scholar—perhaps an adventurous PhD en route from the Djibouti US army base to a safari somewhere—he or she would almost certainly have been killed when the machine sickness unleashed its chaos.

Well, not chaos. Disorder and destruction, but not chaos. For it was chaos that bubbled within the ctenophores now, quantum chaos that mimicked order, just as the mind convincingly mimicked purpose.

Abiba laughed. “Purpose!” she rasped. “Just a handle to push and pull people by. Like Bilqis pushed that wretched fool Meala to do her bidding. Maybe we were right to cut out the flesh of desire for all those centuries, for all the good desire did Meala. Look at her. Look at her!”

Abiba gently covered her ctenophore tank and camshafted her twisted body up the ladder to the deck to do just that.

She looked at her captain, her commander, who faced the approaching shore: her back erect, her radiant, pure coffee skin glowing from the salt mist. Meala wore canvas pants and cloth wraps secured with sewn leather straps, which also served to holster her traditional gile knife and an Ares-16 carbine tucked beneath them.

Despite her cynicism, Abiba spared a moment for a breath of simple aesthetic admiration. Then she let it out with a snort, recalling how easily Meala had been manipulated into this mission by the memory of her lost love.

Love! Li, after all, had died a violent death in the desert. Thus, Meala could always remember him through the haze of adolescent infatuation, a rosy glow surrounding her first memory of him. After she fished him from the sea, half-drowned, he’d regained consciousness in her arms, blinking at the receding storm clouds.

If he’d lived, just give them a few years together, and he’d be calling her foul names and demanding she keep the brats quiet!

Abiba had unconsciously put her hand on the ever-throbbing ridge of scar that ran along her skull, but now, she laid it tentatively on Meala’s forearm.

Meala trained her serene gaze on Abiba with a peaceful smile. She was one of the few people who looked on Abiba without a flinch. Even though the older woman tried to be indifferent, she did care. With the side of her mouth that was capable of motion, she felt herself smile in return.

“Is this our next conquest?” Abiba nodded at the dark stripe of land barely visible above the sea’s horizon. They spoke Awar, the language they’d carried from their Danakil homeland.

“Yes, Abiba. The maps show this stretch is full of small bays. We have only to sail along the coast until we find a harbor deep enough for us to anchor.”

Abiba squinted at the young leader and slipped her hand into the crook of her elbow. “What aren’t you saying?”

Meala raised an eyebrow, acknowledging the sage’s perceptiveness of her concern for her team. “Sheik Abdullah sailed from here. I don’t know where he went, and I don’t know if there are others like him. I remember him well—as the worst type of fanatic. It would enrage the untrue imams and their deluded believers to encounter faithful women like us, who serve the true order of existence!”

As if on cue, the muezzin of the ship climbed the mast and let out a wailing call to prayer.

I bear witness that there are a million gods

None greater than the queen of the vultures

Come to care

Call the vultures

Come to prayer

Call the vultures

Meala beamed. Abiba’s left lip twitched upwards in response; she brushed her face with her free hand and turned her head away. Meala caressed Abiba’s hand before she slipped it from her touch. The two crouched down in Asr.

Barely had they begun the prayer when a clangorous bell rang out.

Alert! Alert! Attackers! it pealed.

“My ctenophores!” Abiba sprang up and hurried down to care for the beasts in her tanks.

Meala called out commands briskly to the sailors who reported to her. “Furl the top sail! Ani, you relieve Lell on the rudder! Break out the armory! Battle stations!” Each combatant turned and ran to obey in turn.

The Arabs were almost on top of them. They knelt in a row, back-to-chest, paddling their flat-bottomed boat in perfect unison—a craft and load unsuitable for any seas but these becalmed ones. Meala scanned them for Sheik Abdullah’s visage, hoping for revenge, but he wasn’t among them.

“Hold your fire!” Meala commanded. Ammunition was finite. There was none to waste on potshots, and these men couldn’t even unsling their weapons, so closely were they packed and so vigorously were they paddling.

Just before they came within range, she drew a bloodstained rag from a hidden pouch in her waistband and kissed it, murmuring, “Li.” At moments of crisis like these, this talisman—all she had left of him—tapped her inner courage.

“Fire at will!” The military orders Corporal Suzanne had taught them in their early days of drilling and learning to fight for themselves came easily from her lips now.

The men were close enough for Meala to see their features now—scrawny cretins with snaggle-teeth and the deciduous skin of the malnourished. When the first shots hammered out, the men’s faces showed incomprehension.

Meala grinned in glee. They’d encountered this before: men who saw a boat full of women, and saw only women, somehow failing to see their weapons…because they were women.

The first few men were hit, went down, striking the water with splashes. She spared no time for smugness, for she knew from experience how quickly their surprise would turn to rage. They no doubt thought she and her women would go down easily, in a chorus of shrieks and wails, and had horrible things in mind for them afterwards.

By the time the men processed what was happening, readied their weapons, and returned fire, their numbers were nearly halved. Abiba was belowdecks—likely strapping protective metal plates around her beloved ctenophores’ tanks. The decks creaked and clacked with ruggedly sandaled feet that dashed from cover to cover. Splinters flew where bullets struck. Hit, a woman screamed. A party of men were abruptly boarding them, and even in their malnourished scrawniness, some of them were heavier and faster than almost all of the women.

But amongst the treasures in Meala’s hold were two heavy, fully automatic guns, and the women were already hauling these up top. The gunners mounted them and brought them rapidly to bear. With the precision they’d drilled a thousand times, a series of bursts cut through the grove of marauders.  One of the muzzles swung over the rail. The men’s hull immediately ruptured; the boat wallowed sideways and sank into the blood-reddened water faster than seemed possible, a setting sun in hot, dry summer.

And just like that, the battle was over. The devotees of Isis helped the wounded climb below for care, patting and embracing each other jubilantly, clapping and laughing together.

Meala set a patrol to watch for any desperate survivors who might foolishly try to board them. She called to Lell the pilot, “Turn port and sail north. We search for a place to anchor tonight!”

She stood akimbo, projecting pride to her crew, feeling herself part of the surging pulse of the New Islam and the will of the Lady. Yet two fingers hidden in her waistband found and held fast the scrap of bloody cloth.

II.             VTOL

Jessica squeezed her eyes shut as Josh’s hand hovered over the switch.

“Ready?” Josh called.

“Ready,” squeaked Jessica. He tripped the switch. Where she sat, the circle of wood and wax and silk began to hum to life around her. Josh manipulated the rounded gel insets of the translucent, lobster-like device in his hands as he keenly watched Jessica and the big contraption.

The drones slowly lifted from the ground. She felt the sling of threads tauten beneath her legs and butt, put her hands out to steady herself, and felt her fingers slip through the fine net.

“Here goes,” Josh said. The buzz of the crane-fly-like drones grew louder and deeper. The glow from within their imbedded gel-neuronal circuits became faintly visible even through the overcast daylight. He intently observed the movements, his eyes flicking from the controller to the apparatus.

Jessica felt her body pressed upwards, and struggled against the urge to flail for balance. She wobbled backwards awkwardly, then gave up, and slowly curled her body down to a supine position. She felt herself rising, rising…

And then her right side dropped abruptly. She held her head away from the ground, absorbed a bump on her right hip, and flopped like a starfish on the sandy soil. Facing the sky, she whooped with triumph.

“Yes! How far up was I?” She sat up.

“Maybe eighteen inches at the highest.” Josh’s face split open in his gaping grin. Alfred, Nate, and Jessica’s mother D.D. high-fived each other. The yellow-furred hound at D.D.’s knee also grinned and wagged his tail, prancing in joy at his pack’s celebration. D.D. let go of his collar, and he galloped over to the test pilot and licked her hand.

Jessica said, “We can do better,” but her glow belied her self-criticism. “Plastic drones could lift twenty kilograms, Before. We have seventy-three drones here, and I weigh eighty kilos. Surely we can get the ratio down to where they can carry you,” she nodded at Alfred, impossibly slender and improbably tall, “or even you.” Nate unconsciously patted his belly, plumped up with a seabutter-based diet.

“I’m more concerned with the stabilizer mechanisms,” said Josh. “I know you said the bioelectronics don’t use algorithms per se…”

Alfred shook his head. “I’m working on it. Or rather, they are. We’re jumping from biological circuits to tiny electrical impulses—and vice-versa—thousands of times per second. Each node has to self-regulate and coordinate with the others—”

“—Like a mammalian spinal cord and cerebellum!” interjected D.D.

“— Right. Sort of. More like octopus arms. If we tried to send signals from one central point, it would be far too slow.”

He bent down, holding the sleeve of his caftan away. His fourth finger gently stroked the central prominence in a drone as he murmured something none of them could hear. The gel sparked and chirped shrilly for a fraction of a second. D.D. glanced at Jessica, who ignored her to gaze at the oblivious Josh.

Alfred smiled. “My angels. My devis.”

With a few nudges and shakes from Josh at the controller, the graceful organisms inched away from the earth and spread out evenly, pulling taut the net that connected them. They flowed after Alfred, who strode to the door of the brutalist building where they worked. D.D. trotted after him.

D.D. paused. “Here, Kittykitty,” she called. A yaller dog hopped to his feet, a perfect specimen of the canids that had been living with the indigenous Americans for millennia. Kittykitty heeled and licked D.D.’s pinkie finger, tail wagging. Jessica, Josh, and Nate brought up the rear. They reached the door and watched as the networked drones flowed over a cart and settled, shutting down their propellers. Practiced at the job, the humans carefully stacked the devices, looping the slender, threadlike cables that connected them so they didn’t tangle.

“I just want to check a couple of these connections before. I won’t get much time to work on them these next few weeks during the trade fair.” Josh stood, fussing over the cart.

“I’ll help,” Jessica volunteered.

While the two finished making sure the cart was safely stowed away, the others sat on the concrete benches outside to celebrate. The homogeneous grass and trees once planted here were long gone. The native Texas prairie spectra of life were reasserting themselves, and in turn, fading into a swamp on the southern border of what had once been a tech-incubator office park.

D.D. relaxed, taking it all in. Kittykitty’s tail thumped the scrubby grass and Nate and D.D.’s legs indiscriminately. D.D. scratched her familiar companion’s head.

Just then, the ctenophore in its little pouch at Nate’s hip squirmed gently. He cupped it in his hand. The emojigram for shopping popped up, and he wiggled his fingers in the pattern to signal a reply. “Meet you at the gate,” he said.

The cuttlefish-like device added the characters for meeting and gate, then glowed bluish to show the message had been sent. “The first merchants are here. I’d better go help them set up.”

D.D. watched him stride off down the crumbling concrete sidewalk, then continue down the rough gravel roadbed, all that was left of the looping asphalt drives formerly slicing through the office park. The asphalt, of course, had all liquefied in the year or so after the machine sickness—a widespread nickname for the bacteria which had devoured all petroleum and synthetic polymers.

The gravel was slowly grinding its way into the soil. In that spot, it was being overgrown by the scrubby grasses and low bushes that had extinguished the bahia and centipede lawn of the past. Only the paths that people actually used regularly were still apparent. She imagined Nate walking down a smoother but harder path, in a different timeline that had skipped the butterfly-effect sequence that began with her assistant embezzling, then moved through the wrong microorganism being genetically altered to clean up oil spills, and ended in the destruction of everything made of plastic or petroleum on the entire planet, with the loss of billions of lives due to structural failures, loss of water supplies (carried in PVC pipes), the dissolution of asphalt and of every kind of anticorrosion compound or lubricant then in use.

Once Nate reached the main thoroughfare of the complex, he walked across the roadway, on wood planks and hard cattail reeds laid horizontally over an underlayment of chips and splinters, tamped tightly down by the passage of feet, hooves, paws, and wheels. The road required periodic rebuilding as the organic material deteriorated, but that was dealt with by work groups: in populated areas, by churches or clubs or less formal get-togethers. In the countryside, longer stretches were maintained by groups that collected tolls.

Nate flicked the metal toggles in that week’s pattern on the gate lock. The chain-link fence around the complex was intact; the wire to patch it was metal, and the technology of linesman pliers and poles set in concrete wasn’t subject to decay by pseudoalkanivorax davisii. He opened the lock and swung the gate open to greet the traders outside.

“Hola, Buenos dias,” he said, “Bienvenidos.”  The dark-skinned, compact man leading the procession smiled.

“Gracias, amigo, thank you my friend,” he said. They established between them that neither spoke the other’s language particularly well and settled into Spanglish.

“Come on then, por alla—set up your palapas.” The caravan of donkey carts followed them into the park. Nate smiled at the Beetle carts, old Mexican VWs turned into animal-drawn conveyances with wood and rope wheels. The men, women, and children poured out. They began to set up tables and shelves loaded with ceramics, textiles, preserved meats and jars of jams, salsas, and delicacies, dried fruits and vegetables, and small items of handcrafted furnishings and decorative items.

Nate grinned to see guitars and drums come out. Small children dashed about gleefully. A few people were already sipping clear liquor from bottles, but since he was on duty, he shook his head. But when a grinning youth his age sidled up and held out a bottle, he couldn’t refuse—just to be polite. The crude young tequila burned like fire. He turned away to hide his reaction and fought back a cough as the guy tried to hide his smirk.

He turned around and saw he needed to open the gate again.

The Bolivar traders were here! He hadn’t expected them until tomorrow. He hurried to let them in and grasped Jeremy’s hand in a firm handshake, then accepted Gaby’s proffered hug.

“I thought you’d start early and be here mid-morning,” Nate said.

“Yeah, well, we got to a stopping place around noon, and figured we had enough time to make it here by dusk.”

From the bench on its little rise, D.D. watched the carts roll in—pulled mostly by horses and mules, trending more towards newly-built wood wagons and less towards the refurbished trucks of the first year or two. Those had been durable but heavy. To re-suspend the trucks once the lubricant in the transaxles or differentials was destroyed required more trouble than it was worth. Funny how the Prairie Schooner’s made a comeback, even though we’re verging on flying car technology.

Jeremy and Gaby’s lead coach—so large, it was practically a horse-drawn bus—rolled to a stop. The four kids poured out, tiny Deirdre cradled in her nine-year-old half sister’s arms. The baby burbled softly, and Martha cooed, “We’re gonna find Aunt D.D. Don’t worry!”

The baby didn’t look the slightest bit worried. She was plainly too young to have any idea who she was named after or who they’d come to visit. But she’d caught the excited tone in her sister’s voice, and took her hand out of her mouth long enough to smile a two-toothed, ecstatic grin.

“D.D.’s over there, and Jessica’s inside.” Nate gestured at the building he’d just left.

“Ozark? Where’s he?” asked Martha hopefully. “Deirde’s never met him. I bet he’s getting big!” She turned to Gaby. “Mamá, can I go find them?”

Gaby nodded, calling after her, “Watch out for snakes!” Martha’d seen D.D., and made a beeline for the bench, running off the path, but slowed down to look at the grass at her feet. Gaby nodded. “Four people have told me they’ve seen rattlesnakes in the last few days,” she noted.

“We couldn’t let the Tampico Alliance get the drop on the market!” Jeremy gestured at the Spanish-speaking encampment’s sheltered tables and booths. The Bolivarans were unloading their own merchandise. “I guess we’ll set up and be ready to open for trade first thing in the morning!”

III.        Feeling for Stones

Eyes open, burning; can’t rub them (hands under covers); something holding left hand down: I.V. Tape, tubing. Too complex. Somehow cold and burning at the same time. Light. Daytime. Close them now. Rest.

*

Someone talking. Woman. Mandarin.

Mandarin? No longer in Africa?

Try to answer, but mouth is too dry. Strange whistling gasp: throat. Eyes open and focused on the wall opposite, featureless. Bed. I.V. in arm.

In Mandarin, she says, “You’re awake.”

She pours some water into a tiny cup and lets a drop fall on his cracked lips. He works his lips. Sensation returns as they hydrate, and a taste of stagnation and bitterness blooms across his tongue.

He thanks her in a whisper, and drifts off to sleep before learning whether she even heard him.

*

A cool wave passes through his left arm, jolting him fully awake. He barely makes a move to sit up—a tearing pain in his flank and belly convince him to lie still. He realizes that pain has been with him, a constant muse coaxing him through the labyrinth where he’s seemingly wandered forever.

He turns his head slightly and sees a nurse, or technician, who settles the fresh I.V. onto its hanging stand over the bed where he lies.

She brings him another tiny cup of water and holds it while he laps a few drops. He feels absurdly grateful. She is speaking Mandarin to him, chattering reassuring nonsense.

He wants to ask her how he came to be here, what’s wrong, but he can barely wheeze out, “fāshēngle shénme”—what happened?

And then the darkness sweeps in from the sides of his vision. He knows his face is drooping and he’s drooling on his pillow, but he doesn’t care.

*

He’s been aware of a day becoming a night, and then another day. There’s a window. Banded by the blinds, a piercing rhombus of sunlight evolves on the wall. It’s now long and dim; late afternoon. More technicians or nurses, sometimes chatting in pairs, care for his limp body. Everyone’s Chinese, like him. He’s not sure if he’s still in Africa or if he’s somehow been returned to China. But for the past half hour or so, he’s been continuously awake and retracing his memory.

He remembers hiding in the lean-to, where he’d sought protection from the searing Djibouti sun. A young boy was translating Arabic to English growing more and more panicked.

His memories are jumbled, tied up with the pain in his side and flank. He works his toes and ankles, relieved that he can. Shifting his hips is painful—not least because he has a catheter and several drain tubes in place.

All at once, his eyes open wide. Drain tubes? As in, plastic tubing? He begins to take real stock of his surroundings. Electric lighting. Plastic drains and I.V. tubing, yes. A monitor which displays a steady blip of light and a readout he assumes is his pulse rate, plus another number; a foam-padded plastic clip on his finger has a plastic-insulated wire feeding into it.

Was it all a dream? The plastic corruption, the fall of Shanghai, the boat, the shipwreck…Meala?

This last notion makes him reject the idea. If there’s one thing in this world he knows to be real, it’s Meala—her grace and courage belying her youth, serene and supreme and more real than the pain that wracks his body.

The pain! He flinches, recalling the initial jolt when he was stabbed, the violation of his insides, the livid weakness of the skin and muscles of his flank parting, the spinning grey luminescence of darkness coming to take him at last. The end.

But evidently not the end, for here he is.

China? No way. He’s surely hurt too badly—and too freshly—to have come so far.

He must be at the Chinese army base he’d been seeking when Abdullah and his men found him. Sheik Abdullah had been fleeing the murderous women of the New Islamic Caliphate during the vengeful, bloodthirsty rampage that marked the first days of their revolution. Just Li’s bad luck that the former had crossed his path while he, too, was evading the latter, hoping to spare himself the spur and scarab.

And now, a small bevy of scrub-clad medical professionals file into the room and nod. They smile expectantly at him. A slender, serious woman with grey temples speaks to the group in Mandarin.

“This is our wanderer from the desert. Found with massive knife laceration of the lumbar musculature, left kidney, left renal vein, nicking the renal artery, and multiple loops of jejunum. Exsanguination was severe. He took nineteen units of blood that night. We were surprised when he stabilized after surgery, and still more so when he appeared to be grossly neurologically intact.

“Following decontamination, he was brought on base. Pending neurological examination, it’s safe to say he’s made a remarkable recovery. He first attempted to talk within forty-eight hours, and as you can see, he appears fully conscious now.”

Li feels irritated that they’re talking about him as though he’s not there. “My name is Li. Hen Li.” Li’s trying to sit up.

“Very good, Mr. Li. Please, remain in a resting position.”

Twelve eyes are on him now, regarding him curiously. The woman steps up and lifts his right foot from the bed, taps his ankle with a rubber hammer, and smiles as his foot jumps slightly. She asks him, “Do you know where you are?”

“A hospital. I’m guessing, the Chinese army base at Djibouti?”

“Good guess! And correct,” she nods. “Do you know what year it is?”

“Two years after…” he pauses. “But there’s plastic.” He falls silent.

The technicians titter quietly.

“Yes, Mr. Li. We have plastic here. The base is a sterile zone. We think it might be the only place in the world where the plastic corruption bacteria haven’t become established.”

“Forgive me, but that seems impossible. So many people, and no contamination?”

“We rarely leave the base. And we rarely permit anyone to enter. Our perimeter patrols live outside the base. When someone has to be brought in…like you…we have a series of decontamination protocols.”

“So many questions.”

Li’s fading again. He lays his head down and closes his eyes. When he opens them again, he’s alone, and it’s deepest nighttime. He flexes his hands, and feels the spongy cushion of the pulse monitor adhere to the pad of his index finger. It’s sticky.

####

It takes weeks for Li to bounce back from the assault. Drain tubes and dressings disappear frustratingly slowly. Bandages shrink and disappear, and sutures are sequentially removed, leaving permanent scars—some small and some large. He ruefully reflects that a man in his thirties doesn’t have the recovery stamina of a younger man. He thinks younger Li would have been up on his feet in no time.

The nurses, doctors, and therapists diplomatically convey that it was remarkable that he even survived, and even more remarkable that he can move, breathe, and walk. He gathers that the fact he seems to have his full mental faculties is nothing short of a miracle. Most people who’ve lost so much blood, they tell him, are permanently brain-damaged.

One day he’s walking the hallway accompanied by his therapist, Ming, a quiet young man from a good Harban family. Ming totes a stopwatch and uses a tablet to record Li’s progress. Li’s just broken a plateau on walking speed and distance, so both men feel cheerful.

Ming says, “Not bad. Soon you’ll be able to walk uphill.”

“Ha! How will I accomplish that? This base is flat as a pancake!” Li says.

“Oh, did you think you would get to stay here forever?”

“What do you mean? Are you planning to abandon me out in the desert?”

Ming recoils slightly, and they stroll in silence for a short time. Then Ming ventures, “I guess I can tell you. You’re going to be assigned to a mission.”

“A mission?” Li ponders this.

He didn’t have the temperament to join the military when younger, and the People’s Republic law that required military service was, in pragmatic terms, applied more as a privilege than a universal mandate. Only the children of the rich or well-connected could bribe or threaten their way into the military, Before.

“I suppose even at my age, a man has a duty to his country.”

“Just so.” Ming seems relieved.

“My country tortured me,” blurts Li. Ming stiffens. “When they released me, and then the pirates kidnapped me, I thought there was no more People’s Republic.”

Ming’s eyes dart around in panic. “C-careful,” he stammers.

Li forces his mind to return to the tracks on which a good Chinese citizen’s brain should run. “Of course. Sorry, it’s the shock. Maybe my injury affected my mental stability more than I realized.”

“That can happen sometimes. I will make a note in your chart for the neurologist to reevaluate you next week.”

“Thank you, friend.”

In brief snippets of conversation like this, Li gleans that he’s to go north with an expeditionary force. He realizes his caregivers are also spies and minders, that there’s no demarcation between the two in this military environment—a sphere of discipline and paranoia. It’s a controlled regime, so strict that it’s managed to keep the plastic corruption at bay for over two years.

As weeks turn into months, the conversations circle around to the topic of the Afar, Habesha, and Somali women, and their strange cult of New Islam.

“And they really cut the men? Like they used to cut the women?” Ming asks one day.

“Not just the same,” says Li matter-of-factly. “They put a bell-shaped cover on their dicks. They can take it off later. They call it a scarab.”

“Hm. It’s attached with a, how? A clip?”

“It’s sort of riveted in place. It’s a big deal to get it off.”

“And when a man has an erection?” Ming colors in embarrassment, and Li decides to skip telling him about the spur that’s implanted at the base to stimulate the women’s clitorises better during sex.

“I hear that it’s uncomfortable. They don’t sleep well until their bodies learn to stop doing that.”

“Did they do it to you?” Ming’s eyes flick to Li’s crotch and away.

“No, but they would have if I’d stayed any longer. That’s why I left the New Islam compound.”

“Which compound?”

“Is there more than one?”

Ming gives a slight surprised gasp, changes the subject fast. “Let’s look at your numbers. Aren’t you getting tired? Let’s slow down so you can cool off. Good workout today!” He claps Li heartily on the back.

The rest of Li’s afternoon is busy with bathing and meeting with various doctors and nurses, who all agree he’s coming along well. It’s not until later, when he has a few minutes’ privacy after he gets in bed, that he considers the implications of what he’s learned. Apparently, the New Islam, which he’d considered just a freak cult of a few women—a flash in the pan, group insanity generated by their trauma when they learned of Sheik Musa’s perverse hidden agenda in rescuing young girls—hasn’t burned out as Li expected. Instead, it must have spread.

Li imagines what that must have been like. He wonders what role Meala—his Meala—might play in the new religion. He allows himself to drift into a reverie of Meala’s gleaming cheeks, her gentle hands, her arms rocking him in the surf when she pulled him from the stormy sea, the depth of her dark eyes which could pull a man under oh, so willingly. So young, but so wise at fifteen, a woman by Afar custom. Meala!

His eyes fly open. Meala! If he’s going towards the compound, he may be able to see her again, somehow. But the therapists and cardiologist keep dropping hints that he needs to be prepared to climb hills or mountains. Maybe he’s not going to the coastal area? He’s uncertain. He’ll have to keep probing for more tidbits of information.

How glorious it would be to see Meala’s face again…

IV.         A Time for Every Purpose

In a room encased by floor to ceiling plate-glass windows on two sides, Esther Barrington looked at Lou Stonegood and Gabe Zeno. Under the solid oak conference table, Esther tapped her foot expectantly. In his abstracted professorial way, Lou steepled his fingers, brow furrowed, smirking occasionally, deep in thought. Gabe drummed his inky pressman’s fingers on the table top. Ill at ease in his new, crisp, clean cotton shirt, he fidgeted and blinked frequently. Esther sat poised like a racehorse in the gate, ready for the bell.

They all eyed the view over the sun-dappled valley beneath them through the plate-glass windows. They all savored the relief that they’d made it far enough south to reach somewhere with a summer; they had been so afraid the entire planet had been enveloped by a winter without end.

A group of riders appeared on the compacted dirt trail that led up to the Mountain Breeze lodge and conference center. Three men and a woman, erect in their fine leather saddles, sat astride gleaming beasts. Despite their lack of equestrian knowledge, Esther, Lou, and Gabe could tell they were fine animals. The four people were as alike as peas in the pod: tall and blond, with skin creased and mottled by six decades in sun more intense than anything from the Hibernian climes of their ancestors. They wore simply tailored clothing of quality cloth, finely woven—though that wasn’t obvious from this distance. What was evident, and would have been so even if they’d been naked and on foot, was that these people were used to making things happen in this part of South Carolina.

The riders decorously ascended the hill and looked around for someone to take their horses, but when nobody emerged, they tied them to the bicycle rack out front. Esther was on her feet, opening the door, greeting each of them by name.

“You must be Mr. Earl Ferrell. Pleased to meet you,” with a charming smile, “and this must be your sister, Cornelia.” Esther had somehow lost her Italian Philly twang and acquired a high-country lilt that would attract bees. “Please, step right into the meeting room.”

They did. Lou had risen, copied by Gabe a few moments later. Lou stepped forward, hand extended.

The man spoke.

“Harold Middlebrook. Good to meet you.”

“I’m Esther Barrington. And you must be Elliott Sinclair.” She shook hands crisply, gestured each to a seat, and brought up the rear. She offered coffee and water, which were declined, and then took her seat across from Gabe and Lou. The Ferrells sat at the head of the oval table, with Harry and Elliott at the foot end.

Beads of sweat stood out on Gabe’s forehead. Lou was at ease, but Esther was in her element, working her considerable charm. The four muckety-mucks of the local populace were tranquil and aloof.

Esther began. “In front of you, you’ll find the latest printing of the Register, formerly the Highfield Register.”

“Where’s Highfield again?” Cornelia fluttered as if confused, fooling no one.

“Highfield’s in Pennsylvania,” said Lou. “When we left there in June, it was under three feet of snow.”

“My! How dreadful for you!” said Cornelia. “Our winter seemed like it would never end here, either.”

“Be that as it may,” Esther smoothly redirected, “if you will page through the Register, you will see that this is a paper of exceptional editorial quality, in addition to being esthetically pleasing. It’s a valuable asset to whatever community it serves.”

Lou picked up the ball. “The people of Highfield made great personal sacrifices to transport the press and its accoutrements with them on their trek South. That’s because they knew the Register was something special. My associate,” he nodded at Gabe, who promptly stopped jittering his foot, “is one of the few men in Pennsylvania who can operate a press of this nature. I don’t have to tell you the value of people who know how to use older technology, since the loss of all plastic was catastrophic for mass communication.”

Lou faltered as Earl looked out the window, as though he had somewhere else to be.

Harold said, “Mr. Stonegood, I’m sure y’all have a very fine newspaper here. It reminds me of the way papers used to be when I was a boy. What I’m wondering is this: what can we do for each other?”

“We need support for the citizens of Highfield,” blurted Lou.

“There aren’t that many of you, but—not to put too fine a point on it—Highfield,” observed Elliott, “no longer exists. You’re carpetbaggers now.”

Oblivious to the word’s connotations, Lou plowed ahead. “It’s true that we’re displaced. But we aren’t standing here with our hats in our hands. The President of the United States himself recognized the value of this paper. He tried to take it from us.” He puffed up. “Unsuccessfully, I might add.”

He got a grudging nod of respect from the Southerners with that.

“So, you’re asking for money. You’re asking us to support what’s left of your community with our limited resources?” Elliott.

“We wouldn’t ask for charity!” Esther cut in diplomatically. “We offer editorial input in the Register in return!”

“Hmm.” Earl turned his dispassionate blue eyes on them. “As Mark Twain said, it never hurts to have a friendship with a man—or woman—” exchanging nods with Esther, “who buys ink by the barrel. Last week, this would have sounded like a tempting offer.”

“But this week,” said Cornelia. “—Oh!—I should test it now that we’re on the mountain!” She withdrew a small object from her pocket. Like a fossil trilobite cast in jello, it bore eight wriggling clear legs and glowing slender wires in a spiraling circuit-board pattern visible within. She prodded it with her index finger and spoke into it. “Calling Trudy. Can you hear me, Trudy?”

A few moments passed, and then her face lit up. “She’s answering! She says she can’t hear me, but the text is coming through!”

“As you can see, gentlemen,” to Esther, “Ma’am: we have a new development on our hands. Until we know what these ctenophores are capable of, we don’t want to make any commitments to older, possibly obsolete forms of communications.”

Esther had seen Lou speechless only once before, and never with his clothes on. “Wh...what’s that?” he finally stammered out.

“Something some traders from Mississipi brought with them. They call them ctenophores, but some say ‘trilobite’ too. They’re bioelectronics, something of that nature, whatever that means. They have to be set, or grown, to each other’s frequency as they call it, in colonies…”

“—They’re actually alive?” Gabe burst out.

Harold smiled. “In a manner of speaking. That is, they have mommas, grow from eggs and all. But the electronics, that’s something else entirely. It looks like they build it, or grow it themselves on the inside.”

“But they communicate over long distances?” Lou asked.

“Not too long. That’s why I wanted to try it out here,” said Cornelia. “We’re about half a mile away as the crow flies from the nearest member of the colony, but there’s a big ol’ mountain between us and them. I was wondering what the range was, and if it’s line-of-sight, like a radio or TV signal. It can be hard to pick up broadcast signals here in the hills.”

“I guess the answer is no to the line-of sight, huh?” said Esther. The locals were gathering their belongings in preparation for leaving, not paying attention. “Sure I can’t get you something to drink?”

“No, thanks, we’re fine, dear.” Cornelia rose first, then the men. Her brother held the door for her. “Hope you do alright up here in Mountain Breezes. The winters on the mountainside could be cold, Before, but if we have another winter like the last one…well, we don’t build for that kind of weather down here. They say it was a one-time thing, you know, from all the water vapor, but I don’t know.” She shook her head gently and swept through the door. The men shook hands all around and followed.

The three sat in their chairs, dejectedly watching the local aristocrats who’d represented their big hope swing onto their animals and start away down the trail.

“What the hell?” said Lou.

“I was looking over her shoulder. That jellyfish thing had letters…in its skin!” Esther was back to her old self, rattling Philly consonants replacing the Southern vowels she’d been warbling out a few minutes earlier.

“Ctenophores? Trilobites? Trilobites?” Gabe sputtered.

“I didn’t think they’d really work with us anyway,” shrugged Esther.

“You know what Gore Vidal said were the four most beautiful words in the English language, don’t you?” said Gabe, “‘I told you so.’”

“No, I’m not being a smart aleck here. It’s just that these old Southern families trace their lines to before the Civil War, a lot of them. They remind me of the Sicilians on my mother’s side. My dad didn’t know what he was getting into when he married into that family, and from the stories I hear, he almost didn’t survive the hazing from my uncles. They don’t trust or negotiate with anyone whose grandparents weren’t friends with their grandparents.”

Lou had his hands flat on the table atop the newspaper in front of him. His lips puckered into a frown. “It’s going to be a long, cold winter,” he said flatly.

Outside, tucked into a fold of the hem of the woods, Colonel Birdwell glided quietly along, his hooded eyes alert, his pack ragged, his moccasin boots worn thin. He watched the four locals depart, standing calm and silent until they were well away, and then stepped across the roughened grass of what once had been a golf course, towards the building where the meeting took place.

The Highfield contingent left the building with the meeting room’s hermit caretaker and wandered over broken paths to their cabins. Once rented out to prosperous tourists as “rustic” retreats, the buildings were still comfortable enough, even without air conditioning and indoor plumbing. They were truly rustic now—their jacuzzis and gas fireplaces inert, the acrylic lacquer on the hardwood floors long since digested to water by the P davisii. Yet the bare rough wood was still solid, and metal screens on the windows offered cool comfort on this warm fall afternoon.

Birdwell stalked them until the three split up, then followed Gabe to his solo cabin. Birdwell watched Gabe go inside. He heard Esther and Lou step into their dwelling, concealed behind a copse of hardwoods and brush, and shut the door. Birdwell stepped to Gabe’s door, opened the screen door, and slipped a flexible blade into the flimsy door lock. Gabe turned, his hand on the gun at his waist, but paused when he saw Birdwell’s empty palms above his shoulders.

“Who the Hell are you?”

“A friend. My name’s Birdwell. I used to work for the Federal Government, but I left. I heard what they tried to do to your press.”

Gabe’s eyes narrowed skeptically. The stranger was taller and a great deal fitter, even if he had a decade or more on the pressman. “What do you want?”

Birdwell kept his hands up. “I want to help if I can. Lou’s got more balls than any man I’ve met in a long time.” He sighed. “Is it alright if I sit down?”

Gabe considered. “Step out on the porch.”

Birdwell did, willingly turning his back to the other man, who followed him out.

“Now take off your pack and drop it over the rail.”

Birdwell did as he asked, lowering the leather rucksack slowly, almost touching the ground before he released it. Gabe watched him the whole time, noting his sidearm.

“I’m unslinging my rifle, too.”

Gabe nodded agreement and watched him slowly remove the heavy armament on its strap and lean it against the porch rail.

“Have a seat, Mr. Birdwell.”

The older man obeyed, sinking into an Adirondack chair.

Gabe looked down at him, considered their relative positions, and took his hand off his gun.

“Talk.”

“Alright. Good man! Caution’s important. I wouldn’t have expected Lou to pick anything less in a man he trusts.”

“Enough bullshit. If you like Lou so much, why’d you come to me instead of him?”

“I’m one scruffy guy, alone. There are ten thousand like me in these hills, and enough of them are bandits that I figured if I approached two of you together, I was twice as likely to end up a dead man. I’ve been watching the three of you, and I thought you were the steadiest one.”

“Looks like you won your gamble. Drink?”

“I’m thirsty. Yes, please. Nothing stronger than water until our business is done, if you don’t mind.”

Gabe went inside, pouring himself a glass of clean water from a skin hung on a hook by the door. He brought Birdwell one.

“So, you want me to introduce you to the boss?”

“If you don’t mind.”

“Why should I?”

“Look: I was the Army Corp of Engineers’ head ecologist. The night I first saw the biobatteries spread out on a hillside like Christmas lights, I understood that nothing would ever be the same again. The world is just never again going to be controlled from the top down. The machine sickness was just the beginning. This transformation’s been brewing a while, and the bacterium was just the spark that set it off.  It’s going to be utterly unlike anything that’s ever happened before, at least since the discovery of fire.”

Gabe smiled. He chugged his water. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve. He enjoyed knowing something the other man didn’t for a second.

“Have you seen the trilobites?”

Birdwell nodded.

Gabe backed up to the chair across from Birdwell and sat down, stunned.

“Young man,” Birdwell began, “you have no idea…”

V.             It Ain’t the Meat, It’s the Motion

D.D. nudged Alfred, who’d been looking at her with an alert and cogent expression for at least three minutes.  He nudged her back with the easy smile of established rapport.

“It’s not that I don’t think in words sometimes, it’s just that I find words almost useless for most of what I think about,” Alfred said, as though merely continuing a conversation.

D.D. nodded. “Yes, yes, I agree. And yet, I need to ask you something about computational analysis. I’ve been musing about this since we lost plastics and there were no more computer chips. The glass and metal microtransistors the boys are cobbling together seem to work fine—if you don’t mind that the stuff they build looks like a throwback to the 80s…”

“—which I don’t,” interjected Alfred, “because I not only remember the 80s, I remember when that caveman tech they make fun of was dazzlingly state-of-the-art!”

“Yeah, me too. But this shit works a lot better. They’ve learned more about how to hard-code since then, so they get more out of the clunky devices.”

“You weren’t here when they were first figuring it out from scratch! They had no idea how much the layers of bloatware was weighing down the basic systems until they had to do more with less.”

D.D. smiled. “I can imagine. I also expect it took them a while to figure out they didn’t need to prioritize for security at this point. But I’m getting off task. What I wanted to say was that I was thinking about how DNA analysis relied on computers, and how at sea I was without them at first. But then I was thinking about what you said about the 4-dimensional spherical nature of spacetime.”

“Hee hee. You were listening! Although ‘4-dimensional sphere’ isn’t exactly right. It’s just that the relation of time to space is like the relationship of a sphere to a disc-shaped map of the sphere…”

“—Right, right!” D.D. interrupted, carrying on with her own train of thought before Alfred led her around the conceptual maypole again. “But it made me think about how time and space can invert. If a computer can be used to analyze bacterial DNA…in the same way, couldn’t bacterial DNA function as a computer?”

“Hmm. Well, I guess you could say DNA’s a simple Turing machine. That’s what the ctenophores are using, switching from DNA to electrical encoding over a million times a second.”

“No! No, don’t you see? It’s more than that!” D.D. jumped up and began pacing, talking with her hands. “You were talking about the way the 4-dimensionality of space allows quantum equations which don’t even use the expression of time.”

“Yes. Want some beesknees?” He filled his own cup with the distilled mead.

“No, thanks. Trying to cut back. But listen…doesn’t that mean that the only thing coding information in quantum theory is spin?”

“Well, no, not really, but close enough.”

“And wouldn’t the spin of electrons allow quantum coding of information?”

“Only in a very dry, cold, pure environment…”

“That’s where you’re wrong!” D.D. was shouting now, and Alfred barely saved his bottle of beesknees from the sweep of her arm as she gestured. “What element has the stability to transmit electrons in a wet environment?”

Alfred stared, this time in perplexity.

“Oh, come on! I’ll give you a hint: when electrons are transported, what happens to protons?”

Alfred shook his head slightly.

“Give up? Okay: it’s phosphate!”

Alfred took a sip of his drink. “Isn’t the backbone of DNA made of phosphate molecules?”

“Exactly! Are you familiar with pi stacking?”

He set his cup down. “Vaguely…oh. Oh! The DNA molecule could be a spiral of potentially-entangled quantum fields.”

“A spiral. A screw. A spring. The mathematics of the enantiomers must be manipulable.”

“Hmm. The Planck constant, the charge on the electron, and the speed of light can be reduced to 1/137, and you do wind up with a unitless measurement. I don’t think I can work the applications of those equations in this context, though.”

“Me, neither. But someone can. And in the meantime, we can be working on miniaturizing the electronics by using bacterial DNA as simple Turing machines to automate the operating systems.”

“I like it!”

“Here, Kittykitty!”

The dog jumped up from where it lay in the corner and came running. D.D. grabbed a leash and Kittykitty went berserk with joy, thrashing D.D. and Alfred’s knees mercilessly with his tail.

“I’m going for a walk with the dog. Want to come?”

“No, that’s okay. I want to cogitate about these quantum DNA gates some more.”

“Be my guest. But by the time you’ve figured them out, the ctenophores might have mutated into something else entirely!”

VI.         The Highfield Register, September 8, Year Three

Wendy Harkavy

South Tahoe, Nevada

After the slow trek across the Great Plains, with their endless regularity, and then the grueling ascent of tall slopes of parched dusty boulders, coming to the edge of the Tahoe basin felt like ascending to Heaven. Unfortunately, the ascent was ruined when we passed through a landscape shaped by shallow graves, corpses barely buried that have been dug up, bones strewn and chewed by the thousands by the sharp teeth of predators. A weathered metal sign told us that we were on Prey Meadow Road, but of course, the road itself was melted into a barely-visible gravel track.

We passed these graves with increasing trepidation. Several members of our party wanted to turn back, but the local guides who brought us reassured us that there was no danger, so we persevered. Certainly, with Fall closing in, we didn’t have the option of retracing our steps and trying to survive the harsh Plains winters with no food, shelter, or power.

We made our way along the coast of the beautiful lake until we were met by a welcoming delegation atop the “round mound” known as Round Hill, which once marked the dividing line between Nevada and California. Eleanor Jolie, the chairperson of the South Tahoe Town Collective Council, greeted us with several prominent local personages. She made a short welcoming speech, and the group rode with us on horse back to the town itself. A security detail armed with rifles brought up the rear. The most noticeable thing about the group, by today’s standards, was that only the security detail carried weapons; none of the council members or their associates did so. On the way, Jolie pointed out several points of interest, including the hulking, uninhabitable Harrah’s Casino building, and the remains of the quickie-wedding chapel where California residents used to get married on weekend getaways.

Once we arrived at the South Tahoe Town Council chambers, the security arranged themselves in pairs around the building’s six doors and we went inside. Alicia Kane was introduced as the Council Secretary, and she showed us The Chronicle of New South Tahoe, an invaluable historical document which she’s taken it on herself to maintain since the earliest days of the machine sickness. Most of the dates given in the following material are taken from that reference book, interspersed with quotes from interviews during our stay with Council Members, security staff, and local residents.

When the machine sickness struck, the region was between the Summer recreational tourist season and the winter skiing season; its population was at a low point. The area was already prepared for its isolation during that first winter, because it’s always had periodic snow-ins during the winter months. However, after the Spring thaws, surrounding regions became uninhabitable, resulting in migration. Lacy Calhoun, who ran a local vegan café and now sits on the town council, describes the results:

“Hordes of ragged people came over the ridges and passes around the lake. They would show up unexpectedly and aggressively demand food and lodging. Sometimes hundreds in one day! It was terrifying!”

After a series of break-ins and robberies, the Town Council met and organized self-defense groups. These armed citizens’ groups patrolled the outskirts of the towns. Brandon Lutz, a former ski instructor, explains, “A lot of us were opposed to carrying weapons. But after March 19th, we couldn’t see any other way.”

On March 19th of Year 1, a patrol composed of Brandon, Lacy, and seven other men and women was strung out along the ridge forming a nearby mountain pass. They encountered a crowd of people on foot. “They weren’t willing to listen to reason,” Lacy explains. “They insisted—well, the ones in front did—that they had a perfect right to enter the valley. We explained that this was our home and we barely had the resources to support ourselves, but they just kept coming!” Lacy’s voice cracks, and Brandon lays a hand on her shoulder.

“We lost five of the patrol at that point. They were just brutal!”

“Animals!” Lacy says.

###

A short trip down the mountains takes you to a ramshackle settlement called Picketts Junction. Many people were living in sod homes there, others in skin tents or primitive wooden houses. “We just wanted food for our children and ourselves,” laments Lamont Smith. “They treated us like we were less than human. My little girl…” His voice trails off. “Let’s just say they weren’t kind to us. We did what we had to do. But in the end, they made us retreat.”

“The Council decided as representatives of the collective will of the community, we couldn’t allow ourselves to be overrun, so we allowed some of the local agrarians to contribute their armaments,” Lacy says.

“The cowboys weren’t too popular here before that,” Brandon adds. “But afterwards we all enjoyed learning how to defend ourselves and our homes.” His face shows spontaneous enthusiasm.

“Enjoyed isn’t the right word,” says Lacy pointedly.

“Oh, yeah, I guess not,” says Brandon.

Where are the ranchers now?

“They keep to themselves for the most part,” says Lacy. “Them and their Stepford wives.” She shrugs.

The settlers at Pickett’s Junction tell the tale of the following year:

“We came from cities, mostly, and we had no idea how to purify water, build shelter, find food, hunt. There were a few doctors and nurses and they did the best they could, but face it, all their training revolved around products made of plastics and equipment that ran on electricity. They were making it up as they went along. My best friend died of an infected blister on his foot. Died!” Lamont shakes his head. “I didn’t even know that could happen!”

Barton Raizman is a medical doctor, a former pathologist, and he agrees. “I had no recent experience actually treating patients at all, but even the doctors who did had no idea how to work under those conditions. It’s a bit better now that the high and mighty on the mountaintop are letting some people in and out, but it was brutal with all the frostbite that winter. It was like Civil War stories—amputations without anesthesia, dysentery, people screaming and shivering everywhere you looked.”

###

Asked about the humanitarian conditions in Raizman, Lacy and Barton are unapologetic: “You have to understand who those people are,” Lacy begins. “The oppression they inflicted and the second-hand trauma they claimed despite their privilege was deeply offensive, and triggering to many of us.”

Barton finishes her thought. “Their level of consciousness was very low. Have you seen what they did to the landscape down there in Pickett’s? Imagine what they would have done to the beautiful, pristine lake!”

Indeed, Pickett’s Junction is a vast plain of devastated vegetation and packed mud. Some people have scratched out small gardens, but there are small, smoky fires burning everywhere, making the eyes burn. There’s a primitive water distribution system from a small creek nearby, using wooden troughs and manual pumps, but waste disposal is open trenches and middens. The smell is indescribable.

Later, Lacy explains, “They don’t understand the critical ecology of the Lake basin. I don’t know how they can be so ignorant about basic measures of care for the environment. It would have been devastating to the natural balance if we had allowed people like that in here.”

Later, we are finally able to approach a ranch. Ezra Dorran was in town for supplies, and he agreed to be interviewed.

The next day, we cautiously ride two mules up to the solid gate that blocks access to the canyon leading to his acreage. Ezra and his son Daniel are standing on the steep hillside to each side, and we apparently pass inspection, because Daniel slings his rifle across his back and shambles down the rocky trail to let us in.

Lucille Dorran, Ezra’s wife and Daniel’s mother, serves us homemade acorn bread, butter, and preserves, but declines to be interviewed.

“We never had a lot to do with the town people, not the tourists, nor the people who moved up here to cater to ‘em. My great-great-great grandpa came here looking for gold and made a good life for us with dairy and small-scale farming. It’s good land. Good country.

“Nowadays we can make a little in trade for running off the human pests that try to invade the town. The town folk are like a buffer for us. We don’t bother them. They don’t bother us—unless they need us to run off some hoboes.”

The Chronicle explains that the following Spring was even worse; it describes hordes of people amassing to the west of the drought-stricken Carson City, crossing the desert, and attempting to overwhelm the valley’s defense forces from the east. A chapter entitled The Battle of Spooner Lake describes movements in a series of guerilla battles and lists South Tahoe’s fallen. We saw the fallen of the desert dwellers on our journey into the valley.

“You have to understand,” explains Eleanor, “those weren’t well-educated people. They were the type of people who created this sort of ecological disaster to begin with. We can’t tolerate that type of thinking in a crisis situation. We have to act in the best interests of the whole community, and of the Earth itself.”

Indeed, South Tahoe is beautiful. If you ignore the disabled vehicles and the rows of darkened windows in the ski resorts, you could believe that everything here is as Before. Shops which sold authentic beeswax candles and handmade soaps as luxury goods now sell them as utility items. Restaurants which served wild-foraged mushrooms and goat cheese as chic “locavore” options, now serve them because they are the only food available. This small village feels blessed, fortunate. Not so the shantytown below.

###

VII.     It Never Happened Before

“Based on the data available, we are 98% confident that the temperature will return to normal parameters within the next four to six weeks.” Simon, the head of the scientific staff addressed the President with a confident nod.

“That’s a relief.” The POTUS waved his hand to indicate that he didn’t need to review the slides. Simon was taken aback, deflated, as he had had to pull strings to get the electricity allotted to run his computer continuously to prepare the presentation. He’d heard POTUS was a “big picture guy,” so he’d not expected him to read the report stacked neatly in front of him, even though he’d printed it using some of their precious remaining printer ink, on a quarter ream of their dwindling supply of paper. But what on earth did the man have to do that was so important he couldn’t take time to assess the evidence that the temperature anomaly they were experiencing was temporary?

And there was no doubt it was temporary. The p values varied from .01 to .001 for the data; virtual scientific certainty.

Simon set his disappointment aside. Overall, he’d been feeling valued and trusted. He was relieved when he’d been admitted to the compound; so many others had been turned away. But he knew that the best hope for America and for the world lay with the leadership here, in this very place. He might not agree with everything the leaders said and did, but Simon was nothing if not loyal to the nation, the last superpower left standing.

He smiled at his own sappiness, but the smile twisted into a sad moue. The word in his thoughts came in Candice’s musical voice. Candice, always a skeptic, calling him “sappy,” accusing him of being näive and trusting in his patriotism. After surviving the disorder of the early days, Candice had died with a broken neck in a stupid, freak accident: a fall down a fight of stairs at home. He still couldn’t believe she was gone.

Simon wrapped his coat tighter around himself and dropped his precious computer into its leather bag with a little puff of antibiotic powder. He gasped when the cold of the courtyard hit his nose, but stopped anyway to look at the narrow pond.

The black swan was still there, floating peacefully on the surface. Where had this unlikely creature come from? How had it found this pond, and how had it known that this pond, sitting atop the septic field deep underground, wouldn’t freeze, unlike all the other standing water within five hundred miles, now turned to ice?

The bird cocked its head and regarded Simon, then decided he was no threat and glided serenely away.

Crazy. Here it was, May, and everything was still enrobed in ice and snow, a fairyland that had lost its enchantment months ago.

August. Cold. Ice.

Simon had re-run the computations with the last bit of power he was allowed before the compound’s power plant went dark. “Reserving the remainder for emergencies,” they said.

But it was obvious that there was no more reserve. Food was down to the nutrient pastes in the survival supply kits stored in the farthest sub-basements. Everything wood had long since been burned.

The numbers all said that the weather would break. It had to break. And once it did, everything would be fine.

He crunched his way through the crusted snow to the trench that served as a latrine, now there was no power to pump water to the toilets. It wasn’t all that bad, though; the cold kept it from reeking. He stopped to look at the pond, as usual.

Something different had happened, a break in the unrelenting sameness of cold days. The gorgeous and enchanting black swan was today a bedraggled mass of grimy, fibrous feathers stretched inertly on the pond, its legs twisted grotesquely where its feet had frozen into the ice, feathers strewn about it on the icy granules, showing where it had beaten its wings in a futile attempt to escape its fate.

Simon went on to the latrine and urinated. The act reminded him to gather uncontaminated snow from some distance away before he crawled into his bed in his room. The room was surrounded with extra blankets he’d scavenged from neighbors and compatriots whose demise had preceded his—his death, which he could no longer pretend was anything but imminent.

The room was dark—a series of tents within tents actually, blankets overlying blankets with airspaces in between, supported with coat hangers and metal frames from furnishings long since burnt. An adult sofa fort, but deadly serious instead of a plaything.

It was stifling inside, but the temperature was warmer than freezing. The metal trash can he filled with clean snow would slowly absorb the tiny bit of body heat that kept the interior livable. This way, he could hydrate his own interior, and keep living another day.

How many days since he’d seen or heard another person? He had a suspicion he was the last person left alive in the entire world. Though it had been kept secret, he thought he knew the exact day when POTUS had died, because of the mood of doom and dread that had settled on the few staff who still moved around.

But he was beyond caring about that now. The heat within his body radiated through his clothes and passed out of his nose with every breath, warming the inner core of his home. The water in the metal can transmuted from solid to liquid with agonizing slowness.

The next layer outside the inner core got ever so slightly warmer. He wanted to find a way to reverse the entropy, to make the transmitter into an attractor. But it was an abstract kind of desire.

He realized that all his desires were abstract in the end. The thought comforted him, and a vague, pallid smile touched his lips.

At that moment, the warmth within him burst forth. Miraculously, he wasn’t cold. In fact, he felt the room grow warmer! He didn’t know what was happening. He would check in a moment—surely he could figure it out—but for now, he was uncomfortably hot. He pushed his hood away from his face and unzipped his coat, luxuriating in the glow he felt, like a hot toddy exploding on the surface of the sun. He bent forward and worked the laces on his boots, grinning feverishly.

He would go out in the courtyard and find that pond melted. Why, he would take a swim with that black swan!

He paused.

VIII. Walking the Planck

Her eye was a spike of fire. That was how Abiba gyred around her head, her thoughts swirling. Her mind flickered continually with photoelectric sparks, segueing from slow indigo to rapid-sweeping red grains that fell like hailstones into her thoughts, sleet peppering her until a hailstone or a boulder splashed into her mind. Then mucilaginous coherent arms uncoiled into a vision of somewhere new to go: straight down, forward ninety degrees, up ninety degrees, and returned to the point of impact. Then: straight down, forward ninety degrees, up ninety degrees, and somewhere out in space far away.

And what was the difference between the two? What, indeed…

Don’t look! If you look, Abiba dearest, the difference collapses like your face—like the eggshell bone of your skull when you raised your eyes to your lord and master’s gaze.

Her lord and master walked from house to house one dark night, caught in the light of fires inside that shone out of the doors. She knew he wasn’t disappearing, but she knew she couldn’t see him, and yet, something as large and substantial as a man (a fist), couldn’t actually vanish.

Her eyes couldn’t recognize faces any more, but it wasn’t difficult to deduce with whom she was speaking most of the time.

This, then, must be Lailleya, with the mole on her throat and the braids. “Madam Abiba, Captain Meala says she doesn’t know the number of ctenophores ready for use right now?”

Abiba nodded, a sleet spark from the idea of ctenophore, living, nonliving, electronic, biologic, occupying space and having mass but mutable, constantly mutating, unfixed until it interacted. The pristine clarity of music in each vibration, cascading and unfurling…

The fire above her eye demanded more sacrifice. She turned to her workbench to appease it, reaching for the paper and pencils and sand and rocks and strings and threads and wires.

Lailleya cleared her throat.

Abiba’s working hand was twisting wires around pins thrust into the desktop. Her paralyzed hand was in another placelessness, where it was spelling out sums over paths and floating infinitely lightly on a nebulous cloud of probability.

“Madam Abiba?” This was almost certain to still be Lailleya.

“Yes.”

“The answer to the captain’s question?”

Sparks suddenly collapsed into dust, and her hands both stilled. She turned her dagger towards the girl, and her eyes followed. “Did the captain ask a question? I heard none.”

She turned to the table again, but the idea was gone, a soap bubble by a rocky cliff on a windy day. She quashed the urge to reach for it. Human urges aren’t to be trusted. A tear trickled from the knife of fire, followed by another and another and another.

Lailleya was terrified by the wail that came from Abiba’s throat, and she ran up the steep ladderlike stairs to the deck above, fearing Meala’s wrath less than the abyss of Abiba’s outlandish sentience.

Some time later, Abiba is/was/will be cooing softly to a ctenophore cupped in her palm while probing it dexterously with her dead hand.

Meala came down the steps and said softly, “Abiba?”

“It’s like a miniature model of space and time,” Abiba explained earnestly. She smiled at Meala, realized it was Meala, and the part of her that recognized faces agreed and sent a weak affirmative, causing the ctenophore in her hand to form the characters that spelled Meala’s name. Abiba blinked, and a huge cascade of blue-green mangosteen-sized sparks vomited forth from the mollusk behind the spark that gave birth to the spike behind her eye.

“How many ctenophores are available for use by our landing party?”

Abiba nodded at the tank to her left. Her eyes took in the tank and delivered a number: 137. She knew intuitively the axiom of the twentieth-century American mathematician and engineer Claude Shannon: information is the measure of the number of possible alternatives for something. Obvious.

Meala waited a moment, then resignedly stepped over to the tank and began to count silently, moving her lips and pointing. She stopped and started over, trying vainly to keep the swimming creatures straight. Finally she decided just to estimate based on a small part of the volume.

Meala left to compose eleven squads of twelve in order to make sure each had a communication device based on the number, 132, she estimated were available. Her loose trousers swirled about her thighs and Abiba caught the swirl and blended it into the work she was doing backwards in time and around the 4D sphere in her paralyzed hand.

The ctenophore in her hand instantly expanded and took a million and fourteen years to form a long, flowing skirt that couldn’t be seen until 10-33 seconds ago.

Abiba laughed. She muttered, “Time is information we don’t have. Time is our ignorance.”

Abiba looked down at the skirt from a great height, a flat turquoise table like the ocean itself, and she descended slowly, discerning great wells and eddies and waves. She approached closer still, and the chop broke into microscopic foam. Closer still, and she stepped into the raiment she had made: coruscating webs traced a foamy chiffon around her. ½, 3/2, 5/2…the skirt extended forever, with no space to be in, because it was the space. Or was not the space—since for a garment to be anything it must refer (explicitly or implicitly) to another system, and there was no other.

She swirled in the skirt, and the skirt changed colors and brightnesses and timeframes. What was the skirt sewn from? Fields. Simple: the threads were spinfoam nets of quanta of quantum fields; the light of its color was formed by quanta of a field. This raiment is truly one-size-fits-all, as its size comprises nothing more (or less) than a field, which is also made of quanta; and time emerges from the processes of this same field.

It’s as nothing for Abiba to be wherever she wants whenever she wants. In fact, she’s already there, and was already then.

She is/was at Bilqis’s side and Bilqis does/did see her and will say, “Abiba? What are you doing here? Has the mission failed?”

Abiba laughs/laughed and said/says “The mission’s more successful than you will ever know.” Abiba rises/descends and the skirt unfurls/rolls up tight and Bilqis’s jaw drops in astonishment; her eyes bulge, and she’s uncharacteristically speechless.

Abiba’s headache subsides momentarily.

Abiba rises/descends still further to the level that shows her an even finer but stronger vibration, for gravity’s affected less by matter than light, radio, and sound waves. At this level and era of compression, there’s no headache at all, no brightness, no sparks. Everything that’s happened/will happen is emanating from this very spot, erupting into spinfoam of spaceless quanta like a fire extinguisher she once saw used to try to put out a flaming car: mountains of textureless, weightless effervescence spraying wildly from a cylinder a tiny fraction of its volume. The car still burned, black smoke billowing, and people gathered to watch the spectacle, the owner wailing, distraught. This memory makes/made Abiba’s headache recur.

She is/was with Bilqis again. As every living thing, they have completely reformed themselves in order to remain themselves. It’s been forever and no time’s passed. “The warriors have assaulted the shore settlements and they have submitted, mind, soul, and body, in true Islam to the Queen of Heaven…”

The stabbing sensation of sparks behind her eye suddenly ramp up. She squints, but realizes that this makes her even more hideous than ever; she comes to her senses and raises her hands, still dripping quantum infinity, from her swirling fractal foam skirt.

She presses them to her face. She rounds her shoulders and begins to sob. How could she have forgotten that she’s a hopeless, unwanted piece of debris, mutilated and useless, a murderess, a widow; a childless, twisted, broken beast? Before the last of the foam melts away, she scoops the ctenophore from her pocket and raises it to her lips, murmuring a prayer for rescue.

She is/was with a school, a tribe, of ctenophores. They are patterns of gel and organic wire, spatters of Higgs Bosons like fireworks within the electron-stacked spines of their DNA. She is nothing if not expressed in this DNA, or one might say she is not expressed in this DNA if she is nothing. This comforts her.

The ctenophores murmurate through the Red Sea’s saline water, phosphatidal tidal organisms orgasmically fertilizing everything in their path. She ascends to the surface, and is/is not the five thousand closest (in space?) to her heart (she is heartless).

A man’s on the shore. He’s familiar to her, which marks him as dangerous, but she suppresses her panic. Her mantle undulates away from her face.

Li spies her in the sky, the clouds, the waves, and the shadows of the seaspray. He blinks and shakes his head, but she’s definitely there. With something that might be effort, she disregards the pain and forms waves of crude sound. She pauses—she has all the time that ever was and will be—to reflect that he may see what happens next as magic.

Neither Abiba nor Li is familiar with Clarke’s Third Law, though the deepest laws of physical nature are self-evidently obvious to Abiba, as they were two centuries ago to the blacksmith’s son, valet Michael Faraday—whom Abiba has never heard of.

“Come to Gabal Elba,” Abiba commands.

“I will,” Li says. “Where is it?”

Abiba takes hold of the Faraday lines between herself and Li and shakes them until he sees a vision of the high mountain, most sacred above the desert, home of Isis for ten thousand years, and Bilqis, her servant emissary enthroned upon it. Li moans as the sight floods into him, with no regard for who he thinks he is, no respect for who he imagines himself to be.

And how dare he imagine himself to be anyone!

How dare these men to think they are anything at all when they cannot make the simplest living thing from the frail, disposable hypodermics they call “bodies!”

She lets out a croaking shout: “Don’t defy the One, Li! Make your way to Gabal Elba and find your fate!” Her sudden rage brings her fully into her body.

#

Li sits up in bed with a choking gasp. Not a dream! No, a dream. No, not a dream. We are going to Gabal Elba.

IX.         Just a Cotton Pickin’ Minute

Jacob’s body was lean and hard, muscles cut out in ways that seemed unattainable in his Uber-driving, community-college days. He was walking behind the big wagon today. He’d been conditioned by pulling the wagon, his hands callused. Today, he was off “mule” duty—his group’s turn to be rotated to the rear. Tomorrow he’d be in the group up front, the hardest job, since they had to stretch the thigh-thick ropes tight and overcome the first impossible inertia that held the wagon in its spot.

What they were pulling looked like a Conestoga wagon constructed for giants. The “prairie schooners” of the old western frontier were wooden wagons drawn by horses or mules, and covered by hoops of wood with canvas stretched over them. This was laid out the same way, but the wagon wheels were the height of an elephant. The canvas was stretched over full-circle welded metal hoops that Jacob could have walked through with another man his size astride his shoulders. The hoops were mounted on top of a gigantic open box. The box was full of their cargo: the same fluffy substance made of short white fibers, puffing the canvas cover out like a skier’s jacket.

Jacob’s feet were hard, hoof-like. He’d gone without shoes since the pair he’d been wearing when the machine sickness hit fell apart. That was two years ago and then some. His hands also were hardened, especially his fingertips, where the hulls of the cotton bolls had raked and gouged them.

His spirit had been hardened years ago—the first slash accomplished by his father’s arrest for marijuana possession and his mother’s faithless departure for the West Coast with her new man, all not long after Jacob’s eighteenth birthday. The scab on that psychic wound was soon torn open by a girl, then by a best friend who chose the illusory safety of the gangs and wound up dead after narcing on his second-best friend, who’d copped a plea because he’d had a gun. And who didn’t? But that meant his friend’s weed sale was a gun-related felony—and so, after it happened, Jacob wound up friendless.

As to the matter of Jacob’s spirit now, it was softer in the same way the fluffy cotton in the wagon was softer. The fluffy cotton in the wagon had been treated with niter. Niter was made from huge drums marked “highly flammable,” which had been humped in to the camp during the cold, cold winter the second year, After. The niter was dissolved in the drips from the rotting compost, where it was left to condense on glass. The cotton was soaked in the mixture of nitric acid and sulfuric acid.

Once it dried, it became nitrocellulose. In other words, what Jacob and the hundreds of other camp inmates were pulling down the road was a wagon full of explosives. The slightest spark could leave them all no more than flecks of greasy ash on the edges of a blackened, smoking crater.

This, then, was what they had been breaking their backs for: planting, cultivating, and harvesting the cotton for that first year. All those evacuated from New Orleans and bused to the camps, the trailer trash and Yats and ghetto denizens, the college students and their professors, the tourists and bureaucrats—all leveled and blended into a homogeneous mass of humanity wearing shapeless cotton pajamas of indeterminate color. Those faded and fell into disrepair, even as the cotton they grew was carefully ginned, sorted, and prepared to go through the stinking vats at the far end of the camp. All to make something they couldn’t eat or drink or read or listen to or wear. No, it was used to make something that would blow up. Because.

Because if the US government was going to continue to provide for them, it needed to be able to defend them. Because in the absence of plastics and electronic guidance and propulsion, the weapons scientists were starting over again with gun cotton, carefully-tamped ammunition, and metal-cased bombs scarcely more sophisticated than those worn by terrorist children in their vests, Before.

Nobody was committing suicide bombings any more—or school shootings for that matter—at least not that Jacob had heard of. But the guards shifted nervously, knowing that the nitrocellulose could be used by anyone to reload spent ammunition casings; it was literally worth its weight in gold.

The wagon jolted hard into a rut on the gravel roadbed. A note of acrid fear topped the sweat fragrance that swirled invisibly over the people. They’d all voted to make this trip, although the Agency staff had been the ones to count the votes (Jacob had no reason not to trust them, did he?). But they hadn’t realized they’d be hauling this gargantuan means of destruction, this inverse Trojan horse, holding their breaths every time it jolted.

They let their breaths out and continued moving.

Jacob’s thoughts ran in the same depressing yet comforting ruts over and over. He’d catalogued his feet, his hands, his muscles, his broken heart. The last thing was his gratitude that he was still sucking air. The epidemic that had ground through the camp in the final weeks before they’d gotten the order to march had given him more reason than ever to appreciate that.

The illness had started as a fever and a pinkish rash, and for many of them, that was the worst it ever got. But a third got the cough. If you got the cough, you still had a chance. At least half the ones who got the cough were okay—after a few weeks of honking and gasping and vomiting and turning blue all day and all night. But the other half, one in six of the camp’s residents, were added to the piles generating more and more hydrogen sulfide gas to be turned into sulfuric acid. The carrion reek permeated the entire grounds with its aroma, a fragrance that turned deceptively sweet once your nose got used to it.

At least here the crowd’s sweat was the only smell. On a signal from the trustees, the protectees slowed and the wagon dropped to a ponderous crawl, then rocked easily on its single axle and stopped. Every eye turned away from it and everyone let out a deep breath once again.

“Rest break. Latrines behind that wind-row.” Men and women trudged towards opposite ends of the row of trees. The trustees oversaw the unloading of bricks of corn, peanuts, and fruit pressed into a starchy pemmican, a quick snack to keep them marching. The sun was at least two and a half hours above the horizon, so they had a good bit more to travel before stopping to camp for the night.

Where were they going? They’d voted on moving to a camp with better supplies. The rumors said the president would be visiting the other camp, and that they had hot water there and raised chickens. That meant meat! Showers! Someone even said they had coffee, but Jacob discounted that. He’d studied; he was a smart guy. He knew the fragile supply chain that delivered coffee from distant sunny mountainsides to the green-logoed shops that once dotted the developed world’s landscapes was irretrievably broken.

He’d begun to doubt that they were going to a better place at all. He’d begun to suspect they were moving the nitrocellulose somewhere to be processed into weapons. After that, what happened to him and the human beings he traveled with, might or might not be better than what was happening so far.

He watered a tree, buttoned his trousers, and wandered to the chow line to get his pemmican.

Oh, he’d been glad to get to the camp, and he’d gone willingly. New Orleans was a terrifying maelstrom of violence in the weeks and months, After. But his momma didn’t raise any fools either. He could tell that the camps’ ostensible mission of protecting citizens and ensuring their survival was subject—as any action of the Powers that Be—to revision and repurposing to serve other ends. He accepted his food from a dead-eyed trustee and kicked a brushy hummock of grass to displace any wildlife—scorpions or such—before flinging himself onto it to eat.

He chewed only on the left side of his mouth, having recently enlisted a bunkmate to wrench out a rotting tooth on the right.

The food was gone too fast, and his youthful scaphoid stomach squealed for more. There was no more. Someone was standing near the load of nitrocellulose, clanging the pot that called them back to work hauling the wagon. Jacob rested as long as he could before the guards and trustees would notice and mark him for some near-future reprisal.

X.             Slipping the Leash

In the thin dawn light, Li stirred in his bedroll, hearing the metallic sound of spoon on cup rousting the company. In the dry North African air, dawn came quickly. The troop would be on the move before the first rays of unrelenting sunlight blasted over the eastern horizon.  He threw off his cover and rose to his feet, though more slowly than the younger compatriots around him. As he bent to tie his boots (they all slept in their boots), he heard a strange rasping sound on the ground nearby.

Li’s gaze fixed on the creature just as Feng accidentally set his boot down on its knotted body. It was beige and brown, its head showing the triangular chipmunk cheeks of a viper. As Li processed the sight of the slender antennae-like projections above its eyes and thought horned viper, the serpent struck Feng’s ankle, just above the tongue of his still-open boot. Feng shrieked.

Former Li would have tried to help the man, tried to kill the snake, tried to make the situation better somehow. But this was Li now—after being imprisoned and tortured, released and kidnapped, shipwrecked and rescued, turned out alone into the desert, stabbed and left for dead.

The present-day Li finished tying his boots rapidly, feigning slowness in grasping the calamity. The others around him closed in on Feng and the snake. Poor beast. Still sluggish from the cool of the night, it stood no chance. Six or eight handgun shots rang out to signal its demise. Feng shrieked again, hopping on the other foot and trying to inspect the bite. His teammates tried to soothe him, and someone ran for the medic.

Li eased to his feet and shifted his right foot behind his left, then his left again. No one reacted. He gradually backed up further away from the scrum. When the medic finally arrived, while everyone was talking at once, he used the distraction to turn tail and run towards the rising sun.

The trek so far had been austere, but tolerable. His captors treated him more like a fellow soldier than a prisoner. Few people were allowed in or out of the inner core of the Chinese military base. It held fewer than two thousand individuals, carefully quarantined to avoid contamination by the plastic corruption.

The fact that Li had not only been admitted to the base, but then allowed to leave again, made him a refreshing curiosity to these particular personnel. These were soldiers who lived in barracks settlements on its periphery, tasked with patrolling the no-man’s-land, repairing the fences, and handling the elaborate system of supply drops that fed supplies into a series of decontamination stations. They lived the confused, struggling lives of all the survivors around the globe, thrown abruptly from the twenty-first century technological world into the nineteenth century, without the skills needed to survive its conditions. Yet they saw the distant gas-powered jeeps travel the dusty roads of the base compound, and even more awe-inspiring, the drones that occasionally took off from the intact runways that formed the base’s heart.

They might have been peasants two thousand years earlier, in the fields outside the Han Emperor’s complex, the largest palace ever built. But instead of the legendary spectacle of Weiyang Palace, there was a different source of hope for the future of the Han people of China: a place where they alone had saved what everyone else had carelessly lost.

Instead of fireworks and kites symbolizing unity, and displays of martial ferocity when the Imperial armies left to fight off the Xiongnu barbarians, the drones were their symbol, soaring overhead like vultures. These drones dropped bombs to restrain incursions by resurgent Bedouins and marauding groups of Islamist guerillas who’d lived so basically that they barely missed the now extinct technology.

Of late, though, the drones always flew northeast, never northwest. The society of New Islam had crystallized like a supersaturated solution in the peoples of the western coast of the Red Sea. They did not raid, but they were not raided, either. When the Chinese had sent raiding parties against them, their raiders simply did not return. When the New Islam reached an area, it was lost to them, like a curtain had fallen over it.

Rumors were rife about their ways, so when it was learned that Li had lived among them for a time, he became quite popular. The others had plied him with stashed sweets and alcohol, attempting to ferret out what he might be able to tell them about these strange, mystical, imperious women who lived in village clusters with their children, surrounded by concentric rings of fierce single men.

Li always accepted just a taste of whatever treat was offered with gratitude that was just slightly more effusive than necessary. He always gave the same few inconsequential details about his time in Bilqis’s compound with Meala: what they wore, what they ate, how they slept. Eventually, the rest realized he would spill no more, and stopped pestering him.

Li asked himself why he did this, and he realized he felt some fealty to the New Islamists. This surprised him. He’d been horrified when the first boy received his spur and scarab. When it came down to the flash decision to leave Meala or submit himself to their ministrations, he hesitated only briefly. But now…now, the crazed energy that had driven the women to dance all night had energized an infant culture, spreading like a lightning bolt branching across the deserts of northeast Africa and Egypt.

Li had thought himself dead when his ship had crashed onto the rocks in the Red Sea storm, and when he woke, battered by the rocking waves that bumped his head against Meala’s sheltering chest, the very fact of being alive was a rebirth of who he was. Somehow, he was meant to be in this strange red-brown land with its flat-topped trees and the parched sands that met the rolling benevolence of the violent sea. He was meant to be with this woman. He had no doubt.

Every day at the base, he had awakened with a sense that he was missing someone, missing her. Every night, he had lain in his hospital bed in the dark, tucked his regret into a neat box, and tamped the lid down tight: regret at leaving her, at leaving them, and taking the mad flight into the desert that had cost him most of his blood, and almost his life, when he encountered Sheik Mohammed’s squad of mercenaries.

That had been a second time he’d been sure he was dead. He’d heard that people who woke from a coma often forgot the incident that had put them there. He’d heard they often forgot, in fact, events extending days or even months prior to the injury.

But he was not allowed that mercy. He vividly remembered the moment the knife penetrated his back, the sense of wrongness, his brain trying to make sense of the pain he felt in the skin and core muscles, his stomach lurching and cramping, his heart pumping in panic, then just fluttering, and his vision greying out, all at once. And when he had awakened, there was no Meala to save him. Things come in threes; third time’s the charm. Next time will be the last time.

He shook his head. One foot in front of the other. His captors were paralleling the coast, hugging the hills on their left, to avoid the coastal populations and avail themselves of the rocky caves for shelter each night. They were about ten kilometers from the ocean at this point. Gabal Elba was somewhere to the Northwest.

He paused, torn. Ocean? Or mountain? He yearned to go to the mountain, where he hoped to find Meala and the other women in their stronghold. But he had no food, and more importantly, only the water in the half-empty canteen at his waist. He also didn’t want to risk encountering the party he’d just escaped, who were heading the same way. If he tailed them and tried sneaking into their camp to steal food and water, chances were high that he’d end up with them again, more harshly imprisoned and suffering the effects of a beating added for his trouble.

On the other hand, while he was the only person with any knowledge of the New Islamists, he’d repeatedly let it be known that he didn’t have a lot to say on the subject. He thought they’d probably not divert their course to track him.

No, he’d head for the sea, get supplied with water and seabutter, and see if he could find out more about what the New Islamists had become before seeking them out. He’d rebounded from his injuries, and the walk so far across stretches of what used to be Eritrea and Sudan had conditioned him. He would be able to reach the shore by nightfall.

Unless I stand here like an idiot much longer. On my way, then.

XI.         Update Loading

Meala rose from evening prayer. She was facing west, the direction Gabal Elba lay, home of the goddess Isis, across the Red Sea. She crossed the few steps of wet sand left by the ebbing tide and toed the shallow waves. Her ctenophore squirmed in its case and she palmed it, felt its dryness, and let it plop into the surf, where it frisked about on its tentacles.

She sighed, savoring the glory of the sunset. She crouched to scoop her moistened mascot from the water, but retracted her head when she saw it was not alone. She had dropped a single small eight-legged creature with phosphorescent circuits glowing in its gel, and now there was a ten-legged cousin next to it. Slightly larger, and with a reading face that was more oblong and took up more of its dorsal surface, this one had entangled its legs with Meala’s communicator.

For all Meala’s stalwart bravery, she was still a teenaged girl. She felt a prurient flush as she watched what she presumed was copulation.

But soon she saw that there was something more going on, for the sinuous circuit-board-like structures within the beasts were slowly reconfiguring themselves, merging and flipping, spiraling and paddling, becoming one. Meala squatted and watched patiently, raising her head every so often to sweep the horizon around her and ensure her lieutenants were still vigilant at four and eight o’clock. After about twelve minutes, the pulsing mass within the conjoined, cybernetic, aquatic animals began to unravel.

When the process was complete, the two released, and a wave pushed them a centimeter or so apart. Meala scooped up her ctenophore, hesitated, then scooped up the apparently wild cousin as well. The one in her right hand still felt dry and sticky, despite its soak in the surf; it sat lethargically in her palm. The new one, on the other hand, nestled actively into her left palm and seemed to grow brighter.

“Hello, little one,” she murmured. Her old ctenophore formed the characters for “hello,” dimly, but they dissolved and faded. The new etched the Ge’ez words Hello, little one crisply and quickly, the letters’ surface slightly raised on its screen, paused to wait for the send command, then faded.

Meala rose. “Get Abiba,” she said to the woman by the boulders to her southeast. The woman nodded and trotted towards their encampment.

You sent for me? The ten-legged creature in her hand spelled out.

“Abiba?” Abiba? Send.

Yes, my captain.

Did you breed a new type of ctenophore?

Yes, my captain. You may let the old creature return to Mother Yemaya.

Meala turned the cradle of her right hand over, rock-a-bye baby, and the eight-legged creature fell into the water.

The next message astonished her.

Meala, this is Bilqis.

How? I thought the range of the ctenophores was only a few hundred meters.

Meala’s brow was creased. Concentrating on the conversation in her hand, she missed the first few laps of the wavelets on the object forming in the shallows nearby. She heard the footstep of her sentinels approaching to her right, prompting her to look around. She was stunned to see a human form boiling up from the brine, gelatinous and filled with phosphorescent biocircuits like the ctenophores, but recognizable in form and outline as…

“Abiba?” she said, even as Bilqis continued their dialogue.

Abiba has prepared a new kind of ctenophore, which can transmit over great distances.

Meala considered the implications, speaking rotely as she did. “Praise the Lady Who is the Source of All Wisdom.” She thumbed send.

Please be cautious with these new cybernetic devices. We don’t know their range or how secure they are.

Yes, your glory. Do you have any orders for me?

No new directives, Admiral Meala. Abiba tells me you have conquered many unbelievers.

Yes, your glory. Those who submit to the spur and scarab, we spare. We put many to death.

Meala could hear Bilqis’ harsh laugh in her mind as she read, Yes they would rather die than go through a temporary fraction of what they have put us through down through the centuries of Zarwak rule!

Meala’s stomach turned lightly. And how do we presume to take the Lady’s vengeance in our own hands? Does this make us better than they were?

But all she replied was, Yes, your glory.

You have done well, my admiral. Now we can stay in communication and you can advise me of your victories!

Isis is great.

So it is. Selah.

The screen faded. Meala slipped the ctenophore into the moistened pouch at her waist, bending to scoop a palmful of seawater in behind it to keep it wet. It let out a subtle trill and nestled into its home.

XII.     Snatched from the Jaws of Victory

“I think they’re entangled, Alfred!” D.D. said.

“The new ctenophores you got from the traders?”

“Indeed.”

“Not possible.”

“I think so.”

“Let me run the math again.”

“Not necessary.”

“What do you mean?”

D.D. nudged the hovering drone and the translucent ten-armed creature within it towards him. The ctenophore obligingly whirred to his side.

Alfred peered at it, pursing his lips. “Holy Mother of Us All!” he expostulated.

D.D. grinned. “I don’t know what alphabet that is…”

“…Not Sanskrit or Arabic, I’d’ve recognized those…”

“But it’s definitely not coming from here!”

The foreign shapes faded in the creature’s multilayered gel-covered skin. A new message began to scroll, this time in English—DEFINITELY NOT COMING FROM HERE, transcribing what D.D. had just said.

A few milliseconds earlier, the ctenophore cupped in Bilqis’s hand spelled out “definitely not coming from here,” and Bilqis beckoned Suzanne to her side. Suzanne left the table where she had been sorting out the duty roster for the sentries, tailed by Jomana.

But by the time she had crossed the majestic room to look at Bilqis’s messenger ctenophore, the message had faded. Bilqis scrolled back and held it out. Jomana had plunked down on the floor and returned to picking at her rag doll’s fine wool hair, so Suzanne scrutinized it quietly for a moment.

“Well, what does it say?” Bilqis demanded.

“It says,” Suzanne translated the phrase into Awar, and the creature heard her and faithfully transcribed her words in the Ge’ez alphabet.

“But what does it mean? Why is it giving this message?” Bilqis asked.

“I don’t know,” Suzanne murmured in English, and the ctenophore scrolled I DON’T KNOW across its face. She repeated herself in Awar, and the ctenophore typed that as well.

A few milliseconds earlier, D.D.’s Ctenophore scrolled I DON’T KNOW, followed by some letters in the script which neither D.D. nor Alfred could identify, but which was the script used in Northeast Africa and known as Ge’ez. The two of them eyed each other, hope and fear warring with incredulity in their microexpressions.

“Hello. Is someone there?” D.D. spoke into the ctenophore. Moments later, that message faded, and the return message appeared: YES I AM HERE. WHO IS THIS?

D.D. AND ALFRED. WHO IS THIS?

SUZANNE.

D.D. quirked an eyebrow. “Do you know a Suzanne?”

Alfred shook his head. There was no Suzanne within the range of ctenophore transmission, not that Alfred or D.D. knew of.

WHERE ARE YOU?

GABAL ELBA. THE PALACE.

IS THAT NEAR HOUSTON?

ARE YOU IN HOUSTON?

NEAR HOUSTON, YES.

GABAL ELBA IS IN EASTERN AFRICA NEAR THE RED SEA.

D.D. felt the hair stand up at the base of her skull and she could see from Alfred’s wide eyes that he was feeling the same sense of eerie astonishment. She cupped the Ctenophore. “Do you think it’s someone playing a joke?”

“Hmm. Think about it. Who would do that?” Alfred shook his head. “This feels real.”

“Well if it’s a hoax, I’m playing along so I can figure out who it is!” D.D. uncovered the beast and said, “If you’re in Africa, how can you be messaging us?”

I DON’T KNOW. THIS CTENOPHORE BELONGS TO EMPRESS MUEZZIN BILQIS OF THE ISIS TEMPLE OF THE NEW ISLAM.

“Whoa. If you don’t mind, I’m afraid you’re going to have to explain things a little more.” D.D. tapped the relay on the wooden tray that held the ctenophore, and the tiny wooden propellers slowed, settling the device to the ground on its spindly legs, then shutting off as the legs folded up beneath it. Alfred, almost as spindly as the drone, sat down across from her.

Over ten thousand kilometers away, Bilqis and Suzanne reclined on cushions with their ctenophore between them as well.

Hours passed in intense conversation. The three Americans fell into long-disused social-media habits spontaneously. Bilqis, whose children had mobile phones but who had never seen the point herself, discovered the simple wonder of chatting with someone a world away.

Jomana, having a toddler’s attention span and a toddler’s needs, began to whine and worry at her mother’s side. On Bilqis’s insistence, Suzanne sent her away with an aide for dinner and bedtime.

The pace of the conversation was reminiscent of early bulletin-board internet chats. Bilqis and Suzanne’s replies were slow. Suzanne had to translate for Bilqis both ways, and Suzanne’s Awar was intermediate at best, while Bilqis’s English was non-existent. Plus, there were lots of pauses:

BILQIS ASKS IF YOU ARE MARRIED AND IF YOU ARE COUSINS, Suzanne conveyed. AMONG AFARS IT IS CONSIDERED BEST TO MARRY YOUR FIRST COUSIN.

WE ARE NOT COUSINS AND WE ARE NOT MARRIED. WE ARE FRIENDS.

Pause. Suzanne explaining to Bilqis, D.D. explaining to Alfred that it was a myth that first cousins oughtn’t have children together, at least genetically speaking.

Finally, Bilqis and Suzanne had to beg off due to the lateness—or earliness—of the hour.

OF COURSE, I FORGOT ABOUT THE TIME DIFFERENCE! GOODNIGHT!

GOODNIGHT, Suzanne replied. A string of Ge’ez characters that D.D. assumed was “goodnight” in Awar floated up like a Magic 8-Ball message and slowly faded.

D.D. set the ctenophore beside its sisters, near a window where they would catch the morning sunlight. They hungrily absorbed the sunlight to recharge themselves by photosynthesis, sitting all in a row like giant craneflies perched on a reed.

“I’m starving. We’re long past dinnertime, and we skipped lunch!” she said.

“I know! And I bet there was lots of great food at the market festival, too!”

“Oh, damn! I was so excited about the quantum communicator that I forgot all about the market! Damn!”

“Maybe we can still rustle up some leftovers from the booths. Come on, let’s go.”

But as they approached the exit, the door burst open and Jessica staggered in.

She stopped short and glowered at them from sunken eyes, her lips puffy. Her hair was lank and mussed. She reeled in a spiral and her gaze jerked unsteadily from D.D. to Alfred and back again.

“I’m sick of your bullshit, Mom!” Jessica growled without preamble.

D.D. raised her hands placatingly, exhaustion and hunger slowing her thinking. “What bullshit? What are you talking about?”

“I don’t appreciate your sharing my personal business with people all over Texas and Arkansas!” Jessica shook her finger in her mother’s face.

“What personal business? What did I say?” D.D. was genuinely perplexed.

“Martha told Josh I was a puta borracha, a drunken whore!”

Martha was too young to use that kind of language on her own, so the implication was that she’d heard an adult call her that.

“Oh, baby!” D.D. reached as though to comfort her daughter.

Jessica was having none of it and batted her hand away, harder than necessary.

“What did you tell those people about me?”

“Jessica! Listen to me. They didn’t hear anything from me! But we weren’t alone. Jeremy,” (Martha’s stepfather), “was there that night in the barn. You know the night I mean. The night when you came crawling back, after Juan beat you half to death! Did you forget that?”

“That was years ago!”

“I know it was years ago, and you’re young enough that two or three years feels like a long time. But believe me, to someone my age, the pain of seeing my daughter bloody and filthy and almost unconscious is as fresh as if it happened yesterday.”

“Oh, now this is about your pain, is it?” Her voice dripped bitter sarcasm, “Well I’m sorry to be such a disappointment to you as a daughter!”

“You’re not—”

“I don’t want to hear it! It always comes down to this!” Spit flew from her lips and she clenched her fists. “I can never do anything right. Any time I have any chance at a relationship, it comes back at me. You never let me live down any of my mistakes!”

“How did I—”

“I’m through with you! Do you understand? Ozark and I are leaving! Don’t try to find us! You’ll never see your grandson again!”

D.D., stunned, took a step towards her, arms extended wordlessly to wrap her in a hug—hold her close, keep her from leaving, heedless of the boozy fumes she emanated.

Jessica planted a meaty palm on her mother’s breastbone and shoved her so hard, she sprawled on her butt on the concrete floor.

Jessica nodded, cracked her knuckles, and gave an inebriated sneer down at her mother. Chin up, she turned, overshooting slightly, and wove her way out the door she’d come in.

D.D. had tears in her eyes that stitched the pain and shock of Jessica’s bewildering explosion together with the pain in her jolted tailbone, which had never felt quite the same anyway after she’d given birth to Jessica over twenty-five years earlier. She palmed herself into an upright position and gingerly gathered her feet under her.

Alfred was a few steps away, awkward, uncertain, silent. D.D. looked at him and felt embarrassed and humiliated for his awkwardness.

D.D. fought back a sob fizzing in the back of her throat. Instead, she hopped to her feet and forced her face into a smile.

“I should eat. Let’s go!”

Alfred’s eyes flicked to the ctenophores on their shelf, then to the door Jessica had just walked out of. D.D. walked out herself, and he followed her, headed to the campground.

XIII. Pedal to the Metal

As you come to her, the ocean approaches you through all your senses. Li had been smelling the ocean for some time—a complex aroma carried in a tinge of moisture, a salty, composted fragrance on the intermittent breeze. The ocean’s song of surging and seceding gradually made itself known to his ears, first imperceptibly, and then undeniably. And as he crested the rise of the millionth dune today, his calves beyond cramping, numb with pain, she touched his eyes with her gleaming glory.

The remaining distance was unbearably cruel, but he finally crossed it and took off his boots and socks, sighing in ecstasy as the salt water enveloped his chafed, throbbing, swollen feet. He thought of stripping naked for a swim, but found he felt still too vulnerable. He collected his foot coverings and headed north along the beach, walking on the wet-packed sand, thinking to find a hiding place among the rocks of the next point.

He saw what looked like an animal rising from the water. A bird? A seal? (Do they have seals or sea lions in the Red Sea?)  Poised to hunt or to flee, he rubbed a hand across his eyes, thinking his vision dazzled by the reflection of the waves.

The beast resolved into a human form. He recognized the old woman Abiba from Sheik Musa’s compound, but the left side of her face was no longer caved in, her mouth no longer drawn into a rictus of disfigurement. She was a whole and handsome woman in her prime. She continued rising and rising, and he took a step back.

Her frail old-woman body was gone—a younger, symmetrical physique instead embedded at the pinnacle of a mountain of undulating, glowing, mucilaginous flesh.

“Li, I told you to go to Gabal Elba!” Her voice was different, too. It was imperious and irritated now, but also youthful, ringing like a bell.

He recoiled unknowingly, closed his gaping mouth, swallowed hard. “I know, I’m sorry. I needed to make a detour once I escaped the assault party.”

She regarded him serenely. “This assault party. How many? What armaments?”

“About four hundred. All armed with sidearms and rifles. They are carrying a few machine guns—type 80s they called them—but they only have a box or two of ammunition apiece for those.”

“And what type of attack are they planning?” She queried him about more details of the Chinese approaching Bilqis’s stronghold.

His wonder faded as he realized she was not supernaturally omniscient. Rather, she needed the information he had.

Finally, she said, “Thank you for the information. You’ve done well.”

He said, “May I ask how you come to be,” He gestured at her impressive height—twelve feet or more of billowing skirts that blended into seafoam at his feet—“here?”

She smiled. He’d never seen her smile without wanting to flinch in horror, but her face had been remade. Her smile was radiant, her visage firm and bold, yet somehow full of a gentle, grandmaternal delight. “I have always and never been here and not-here.”

“A riddle, then? Magic?”

“No, no riddle! No magic.” She chuckled, with the sound of waves swirling on rounded glass pebbles. “Things far enough away are in an eternal present. And an entangled electron can be an infinite distance away. I have been told that physicists imagine we must flee gravity to truly interact with quantum entanglement. But the phosphate in living nucleotide chains creates spin-stacked electrons that can be entangled, even in water. And in water, well, we float.

“See? We float. Look.” She dissolved in a fizzing eddy. Within moments she was floating, a film of twinkling seafoam in the cove, as if that explained everything.

Li was no scientist (political science is not a science, despite its name), and so to him, she had explained nothing. She might as well have said, “bibbety bobbety boo, the science is settled,” for all the clarity it added.

She washed out to sea in a sequence set by the rhythm of breaking waves.

His attention followed her, dissipating as she dispersed. He felt unsatisfied, as though she could have told him more. He felt abandoned, as though she could have been looking out for him better. He felt too awkward to address her, though, as she slowly dissolved, for it seemed a vulnerable moment. Besides, how would he know if he had her attention?

But, after all, he was doing okay at looking out for himself so far. He wasn’t her concern, nor did he need her.

So he returned towards the rocky head to find a sheltered cave to rest in while it was still daylight. He was so tired. And there was no Meala to cradle his head if he should stumble and fall into the surf.

XIV. Extra! Extra!

Esther cupped her hands together, forming a clamshell. Her impish smile looked out of place on that usually intensely serious face.

Lou couldn’t help but smile too. He indulged her.

“Okay, what is it? Something alive?”

She’d caught a frog, or cicada perhaps. Frogs were slower in the cool Fall air, and she’d been walking in the glorious red and orange woods of the Carolina hills.

“No, it’s not. Guess again!” She held her hands closer to him.

“Just tell me.” Even though he was in a good mood from the crisp breeze and honey-gold sunshine, his patience with childish games was never great, and growing less as his time grew shorter with age.

She opened her hands slowly, at first so only she could see, and then she tilted them towards him. Inside was a segmented, apricot-sized beast with eight legs, its flesh translucent, its flattened back just barely revealing glimpses of a curving circuit-board-like pattern within. Its eyes seemed primitive, just dark spots.

He gazed in slightly horrified fascination.

“Is it alive?”

She proffered it to him, and he recoiled instinctively, surprising himself with his dismay. “I’m good, thanks.”

The circuitry within began to glow, but then the flat skin covering it absorbed the glow and became gradually opaque, turning from white into brown, with occasional quick ripples of shades of purple and red.

She tickled it somehow at the base of its legs, and creamy letters began to scroll across the chocolate-colored surface.

~~~TREEFALL ACROSS BOONE ROAD CLEARED. FIREWOOD FIRST COME FIRST SERVED. ~~~#OLDTIMEMUSIC JAMBOREE PICKENS STATION SATURDAY 8 PM ~~~ 5 HOME INVADERS CAPTURED TRIAL AND HANGING TUESDAY DAWN CLARK HOLLOW. ~~~

He watched the news scroll, agog, for a few moments.

Finally he gathered his thoughts enough to comment, “Now I understand. This explains why they weren’t excited to have that old movable-type press we were so proud to drag along with us!” He squeezed her shoulders lightly.

“Exactly.” She smiled sheepishly up at him.

“So, this—trilobite?—is picking up a broadcast? Like an old-fashioned radio? How do you change stations?”

“No, silly! I bought this one from the general store. They grow them in tanks, and they all communicate on the same frequency as their brothers and sisters.” She sat in the chair next to him and crossed her legs thoughtfully. “Mmmm—if you’re going to compare it with technology from Before—more like old-fashioned walkie-talkies.”

“Walkie-talkies? How limited is their range?”

Her open hand on the tabletop still held the animal. He forced himself to extend a finger and touch it, resting his palm on her thumb hesitantly, barely making contact with the thing.

“Well, that depends. I’ve been pumping the locals for information. Apparently, they amplify each others’ signals like wi-fi extenders, but you can’t get more than a half mile or so from the nearest one. This news is from the one in town.”

“About eight miles away. So there must be fifteen or sixteen at least between here and there. How long do they live?”

“They say about two to three years, but they have to be kept moist, and they can’t get too hot or too cold.”

“That was my next question. So, they’re really alive, then?” Its tentacles wiggled indignantly in reply.

“Yep. Kind of cute, isn’t he?” She pursed her lips at the helpless diminutive thing squirming in her palm.

“How do you know it’s a ‘he’?” Lou rolled his eyes.

“Because it goes on and on and on even when it’s clear you’re not interested?” She sidled up to him.

“Misandrist!”

“Totally.” She elbowed him lightly.

“Well, I’m glad you have something new to divert your maternal instincts towards.” He caressed her curly hair.

“They’re not exactly like babies, now are they? Not unless you have a fondness for cuttlefish or octopuses.”

“Electronic octopuses, for that matter.” She drew closer to him again as they examined the creature more closely.

“True, but they’re all the same, right?” he said.

“I think so. Pretty much.”

“So, wouldn’t that make them…i-tentacle?”

She groaned and rolled her eyes. He giggled.

“I wonder,” Esther said, “how you go about starting a new colony, on a new frequency? I asked Jason, who owns the store, but he evaded.”

“That is the question, isn’t it? If we could start our own colony, we wouldn’t need to worry about ink for the press, among other things.”

Gabe walked up to them at that moment. Esther smiled, but Gabe was wooden. Esther had noticed this becoming more common; Gabe was never a chatterbox, but he’d been even more taciturn than usual lately. Esther suspected he was withholding something personal, but she didn’t want to pry if he didn’t want to share.

Gabe looked at the thing in her hands. “Oh, you got a trilobite?” He watched the news scroll for a few moments. “One of the Pickens ones, it looks like.”

Lew said, “Yes. We were just talking about whether it’s possible to start a new colony on a different frequency and how to go about it.”

Esther sighed. “Can’t look it up on DuckDuckGo any more, can we?”

“No, but you could ask your old buddy Gabe, here.” Gabe grinned slyly and pointed both thumbs at himself. Lou and Esther’s eyebrows flew up.

“What do you know that you haven’t told us, old buddy?” Lou asked.

“Well, actually, I don’t know much about it. But at it turns out, I’ve gotten to know someone who does.”

“Know someone?” Lou and Esther spoke at once.

The trio were pretty isolated on the mountainside. Once it began to seem as if the newspaper was not going to start publishing again, the Highfield immigrants had stayed together in town. A few local people had been staying in the abandoned dwellings when they got here, but those few, who’d come up to the higher altitude to escape the heat of summer, had mostly returned to the valley when the nights turned chilly.

They could count the remaining occupants on their fingers: a ranting hermit who’d built a wall of deadwood and animal bones around his cabin. A feral family of four or five or six, who dashed from hiding place to hiding place and scattered like stray cats at the first sign of anyone approaching. A thoroughly deaf older couple who serenely harvested their pumpkins and picked blackberries and sat on the porch, smoking pipes and knitting, for all the world as if the world hadn’t died and been born again. And the three of them—in a golf-course development that could have housed a hundred times as many.

“Well, okay, I guess it’s time I told you. I’ve been keeping a secret. We have a visitor. He’s been here about two weeks, but I think it’s time you met. If you’re ready, I’ll go get him.”

“Get who?” Esther said.

“Who is it?” Lou asked at the same moment.

But they were both already talking to Gabe’s receding back through the doorway. They jumped up and followed behind him as he hustled down the short path between their two cabins. Gabe entered his cabin, and the couple exchanged puzzled glances while he was inside.

Shortly, their comrade emerged with an olive-skinned man. Esther appraised him at a trim sixty years old, gray at the temples but still with thick salt-and-pepper hair, even on top. Tall. An unusual air of gravitas.

“Esther, Lou: this is Colonel Emilio Birdwell.”

Birdwell and Stonegood shook hands. Esther offered her hand, and he shook it.

“Colonel?” asked Lou.

“Lieutenant Colonel. I was the Chief Environmental Liaison to the Executive Branch for the US Army Corps of Engineers.”

“Interesting. I thought all the Corps’ Environmental people were civilians.”

“Oh, you’re familiar with our work? Not many people are, er, were. God,” his hooded eyes gazed into the distance, “it seems like a lifetime ago. Hard to believe it’s been less than three years.”

A familiar silence occurred, the unspoken beat that happened whenever anyone mentioned the machine sickness. Solitary events that transform a nation or a culture are rare: epidemics, bombings, assassinations— but how often does one transform the history of an entire planet?

Recalling his attention to the moment, Emilio said, “But yes, my career trajectory was…somewhat unusual. Let’s just leave it at that.”

Lou, lapsing into journalist mode, pursed his lips and seemed unprepared to leave it at that, but Birdwell spoke over him, “So, Gabe says you have a question I might be able to assist you with answering?”

“Yes,” said Esther. “You know something about the trilobites?”

“I’ve been hoboing about the Southeast recently. I’ve had a chance to fiddle with a few of them.”

“I bet you have some great stories!” said Lou, journalist mode not so readily turned off.

“Does he ever!” Gabe said

“—I’d love to hear them! We were wondering, for example, how to grow a new trilobite colony that’s geared to a different frequency,” Esther redirected.

“Of course you were,” Emilio smoothly picked up. “I wondered the same thing myself. Let me answer by telling you about the first time I encountered them. I was on foot and I was offered a ride by a woman named Sally carrying a heavily-laden wagon with tanks full of the things. Sally introduced them to this whole region.”

“What happened to her?” Esther fell into easy rapport with the newcomer, her Philly accent evaporating into the bland homogenous syllables common inside the Beltway—involuntary mimicry. “But where are my manners? Come in, sit down. Let’s relax and talk.” She beckoned him to follow with a toss of her chin.

Esther led Emilio up the walk to the cabin, the other two men in tow, and the four of them sat on the rustic wood straight-backed chairs around the dining table. Esther jumped up for a moment and plopped her molluscan charge into a shallow bowl of water.

“In answer to your question about what became of Sally, Sally’s husband lived in Oconee. When we got there, he thanked me for accompanying his wife and strongly implied that my further presence was unneeded.” He chuckled wryly. “But before that happened, I learned a great deal from her, not least of all about trilobites.”

Lou jumped in. “So, it is possible to start a new colony on a different frequency?”

“Yes, I saw Sally do it twice. Let me see yours?”

She set the bowl in front of him. Everyone leaned in to look.

“See this bulge? It’s a ripe egg sac. This is a female, and she’s about to lay eggs. You need to keep her water warm, almost bathwater warm, but not quite. You do have a way to heat water?” He looked around and saw the cabin had a small woodstove in the living room. “Good. The eggs are bigger when you keep her warm. Then you have to take her out of the container as soon as she lays the eggs and cool the water immediately. The cooling increases the hatch rate for some reason. If you can get some vinegar, Sally said that making the water more acidic helps keep you from losing them to the temperature shock, but I’m not sure if you need that so much here,” he mused. “The water hereabouts is pretty soft. We were on the piedmont, where it’s more alkaline.”

“How long until she lays the eggs?” Esther asked over her shoulder. She promptly began to fill an iron kettle and feed the fire in the woodstove.

“I’m guessing” he cocked his head at the ctenophore, “about three weeks. You’ll need a bigger bowl, though.” Emilio, uninvited, opened a cabinet door to look inside.

Gabe and Lou watched the two of them prepare a maternity ward for the beast.

Over the next three weeks, Emilio came by often to regale Lou and Esther with stories of his travels and monitor the trilobite’s progress.

One cool autumn night, all four of them sat in the cabin’s cozy living room, watching the fire burn in the open door of the stove, Esther and Lou nestled on the loveseat, the two men flanking them in easy chairs. Eve (as they’d named the trilobite) sat in her big mixing bowl like a bizarre pet goldfish.

Lou had just finished telling him the story of how things had gone when they’d been living near the presidential encampment. Lou was obviously proud of how they’d thwarted the tiny residual government’s attempts to strong-arm them into turning over control of the newspaper. He emphasized how he was sure they intended it for use as an instrument for political hype.

Gabe described how the federal bunch “arrested” him and chained him to the press, since he was the only one who knew how to use it. The bitterness when he described being treated like a slave was almost palpable.

Birdwell sighed. “I have a confession. I was with the POTUS when the machine sickness hit. I was at that encampment.”

“So you knew about all this?” spluttered Gabe.

“No, no, all that was after I left.” Emilio fluttered a hand in the air dismissively. “I struck out on my own months earlier. I knew it was over once I saw the biobattery technology was obviously not going to be containable—meaning people were going to have a cheap, simple, self-reproducing way to get power independently. The President and his staff were determined to maintain authority, but they had no mass communications, and no control of food or energy resources. Their multi-billion-dollar advanced armaments were all electronic, so once plastic insulation melted away, they were useless. Their supply chain relied on petroleum fuels that didn’t exist any longer. It was foolishness, delusional. I just didn’t see it ending in anything but disaster.”

“I have no trouble believing that!” Lou said. “And it’s a good thing too, in my opinion. I’ve been writing about the inevitability of the collapse of command-and-control hierarchies in my newspapers, newsletters, blogs, and social media feeds for over forty years—and recently, back to newspapers again.” He shook his head. “But the mythology of state worship was so damn powerful: the temples and steeple of the National Mall, the totem of the Eagle, the icon of the flag, the scriptures of pledges and the rituals of elections, idols of presidents blasted into the sides of mountains. Before, I was honestly in despair that I’d see the dawn of civilized self-government in my lifetime. Every time a little spark started, they’d stomp it out.

“Then after the machine sickness, I had more immediate concerns. I got scared for a while that the people of Highfield were going to wind up as pawns in the game of helping the old power regime re-form itself. I was afraid they’d sacrifice my grandfather’s printing press to that cause. Then things got more intense, and I was terrified they’d sacrifice me!”

Esther smiled and patted his hand. “Highfield believed in you. You had no reason to doubt them. You know that.” She moved a little closer to him.

“I thought they did. But then, why did they dissipate and drift away on the trip down here? We started off with hundreds, and wound up with a couple dozen.” He frowned, morose, but put his arm about her shoulders and allowed her to sink against him.

“You know the answer to that!” She looked up at him from beneath dark lashes. “It was a long, hard road we led those people down. They almost all had relatives and friends they wanted to check on, somewhere between Pennsylvania and here. Look, you believe the best of all possible worlds comes from people being free to pursue their own self-interest, right?”

He nodded.

“That’s all they did.”

She patted his knee, curled her feet up underneath her, and scooched closer to his side, but he stared straight ahead into the flickering firelight.

XV.     Land of Oz

“Ozzie!” Jessica called her son, as good moms do all over the world. But Jessica’s voice was ragged and harsh. “Ozzie!”

He froze, eyes wide—a rabbit hearing the whine of the hawk’s pinfeathers as it stalls, talons out.

She grabbed his upper arm and yanked his elbow up, hard. Jessica slid her hand down around his wrist and pulled him along behind her as she lurched up the hill to the yurt. “Dammit! I just looked down for a minute, and you were gone. How many times do I have to tell you to STAY WHERE I TELL YOU TO?”

She’d been asleep, and he’d been bored, so he went outside. But he couldn’t talk well enough to explain that; he was barely two.

His eyes teared up as she jerked his arm. His other hand was pulling at his padded underpants, now wet where he’d lost control.

She bulled her way through the tent flap, towing him behind. She sat on a wooden box and pulled him to her knee, then pushed him away abruptly as the moisture penetrated. He fell onto his hands and knees.

“Dammit! You promised you wouldn’t pee yourself any more!”

He was crying in earnest now, hands crossed behind his bottom, backing away. She pounced on him and yanked his pants off, scratching his hip carelessly in the process, leaving the pants caught on his moccasins. “At least it’s only pee,” she muttered.

She squatted onto the box, turned him over her knee, and smacked his bottom. Big, dolloping tears plopped on the dusty dirt floor. He stayed quiet for one slap, two—but the third burned. He let out a yelp.

“I’ll give you something to cry about!”

She reached out and grabbed a flat lathing strip—raw wood pried off a crate for later re-use—and began to flog in earnest. Blossoms of purple and red sprouted on his buttocks, tiny bits of abraded skin unfurling. Screams fertilized the garden, a blackish-red sun of fear eclipsing his vision.

Did he writhe? Did he struggle? Did he make himself rigid? It didn’t matter. Every blow that landed just created a new torment.

When it finally stopped, she threw him face-down on the floor and put a foot behind one of his knees, pulling up to remove the left pant leg and moccasin in one yank. Then the right got the same treatment. She dropped the bundle of pants, pullup, and moccasins to the floor.

Ozzie stood up and reeled in place, yowling out his confusion and panic, pausing only to sniffle or cough away mucus.

Jessica staggered to the pile by the wall and started shaking out clothes, trying to find him a clean pullup and pants.

Each item she took up was wrong: her clothes; his shirts; a pullup already soaked, beginning to reek of ammonia; pants, stained at the knees. She huffed in frustration and sat down heavily on the bedroll.

She cupped the sides of her head. “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! I can’t think! You’re giving Mommy a headache!”

Her voice, though unkind, was familiar, and commanded a mother’s authority. As such, it soothed his crying somewhat.

She scooped him up and hugged him to her chest, then crushed him to her and flopped down on her side. “Just a little lie down. A little rest.” The burning, fruity smell on her breath was strong.

He twisted in her arms, his foot pinned uncomfortably. He tried to wiggle around to a more restful position, but she grasped him more closely, making him push away harder.

She looked him in the eyes, gripping his shoulder too firmly. “Just stay still! Mommy needs a rest! It’s nap time! Can you do that for me?”

He nodded. She relaxed her grip. He went limp in response, and managed to stay that way, breathing shallowly, until she passed out again and started snoring. Then, he eased his foot from beneath her hip, slipped from her insensate arms, and toddled to the tent flap once again.

He stepped out the door, barefoot and bare-bottomed, wearing only a loose cotton shirt. He considered the luminous pinks and lavenders in the sunset sky insouciantly. The path to Uncle Jeremy and Aunt Gaby’s tent was not long, and Maria would be there. She was always nice. She’d take care of him.

He rather enjoyed the breeze cooling his stinging bottom. Plodding along with determination, and smiling blithely, he wobbled past the sharp back hooves of a team of tethered mules.

He had it clearly in his mind that Maria, Pablo, Martha, Jeremy and Gaby would be there.

When he got to their tent, the tent itself was gone, and everything looked different than he remembered. There was no one there. “Hellooo!” he called, the word barely formed in his childish throat and mouth.

“Helloooo!” Ozark called again, louder and more urgently. He was unexpectedly crying again.

He put his foot down in a fire-ant mound, and the red ants swarmed up his foot and leg, incising his pudgy flesh with their burning stings. He shrieked and waved his foot in the air. He fell to the ground and screamed helplessly at the little animals imbedding their tiny poisonous stingers in his tender skin, then dropping off, dead.

How long did he cry? Who knew, but suddenly, Jeremy was there. “Well, hey there, little guy! Whatcha doing here with no pants on? Where’s your mama?” Jeremy picked Ozzie up under the arms and regarded him.

Gaby came up beside her husband and slipped a brown arm around his belted waist. “The Tampico Alliance campfire is cold. They must have left early in the morning, be well on their way now—” She gave a quick gasp. “He’s hurt!”

She pointed at the scratch down Ozzie’s hip and thigh, where his mother’s fingernail had gouged as his pants came off. She reached out to brush off the few surviving fire ants.

Jeremy turned him around to look at the ant bites, and the state of Ozzie’s bruised and abraded buttocks came into full view. They both winced, then looked at one another, stunned.

Their preteen daughter Maria joined them, her infant sister Deirdre slung behind her delicate prepubescent shoulders. “Ay, what’s happened to him?” She looked closer at his injuries.

Gaby shooed her away. “Go see to your brothers and make sure everything’s tied down on the wagon! Go!”

Maria hesitated, seemed about to question further. She saw the intensity in her parents’ eyes and obeyed instead.

“The light’s not good here, but I don’t see any deep wounds. He was walking okay,” Jeremy observed.

“Nobody should beat a child like this!”

“No, nobody should.” Jeremy pressed his lips together. “I’m going to have a word with his mother.”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

“There was a time I was almost like an uncle to her. I can’t just let this go.”

Gaby nodded thoughtfully. “I’ll see if I have some britches for him. I just got some almost new ones for Deirdre to grow into that might fit.”

These big trade camps were a wonderful time for parents to trade children’s clothing, swapping outgrown garments and buying bigger ones, making complicated chains of deals based on children’s relative ages, sizes, and the garments’ conditions.

Jeremy shambled down the short path to Jessica’s tent, finding her sprawled on the bedroll, fully dressed, snoring and drooling, the floor of the yurt strewn with clothing. He shook his head, picked his way across the floor, and nudged her with his toe.

She didn’t budge. He squatted down and shook her. Her snoring lessened, but that was all.

He looked around and saw a glass jug of clear liquid on a box serving as a nightstand. He uncorked and sniffed it: water. He dripped it right on the center of Jessica’s forehead, and watched her splutter her way into wakefulness.

“What the hell?”

“Where’s your son?” Jeremy asked gently.

Jessica sat up. “Ozzie? He was just here! He pissed himself—” She looked around and frantically struggled to her feet, disoriented by waking in the dusky twilight.

“Did you punish him?” Jeremy spoke softly, so softly.

“I may have given him a little whack.” Her glazed, lying eyes met his steady ones.

“Jessica—”

“Where is he?” Her voice rose in abrasive demand. But her eyes fell.

“He’s safe, and with us. We’re taking him for now. We’re heading back to Bolivar here in a bit, traveling overnight; it’s cooler. You know where we live. Once you sober up, you come get him.”

“I’m not a drunk!” Her lips rictused in ugly crying.

“You’re a drunk. You know you’re a drunk. You’ve known it a long time. And now you’re drinking again. Ozark’s safer with us. You know he is.”

She looked like she might fight. Swaying on filthy bare feet, she looked like she might run out the door and search wildly after her son.

But in the end, she opened the nightstand and pulled out a bottle of the cheap, raw tequila that the Tampico group had brought to trade. She put it to her lips and chugged, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. She held the jug out to him, and he ignored it.

“Good luck, Jessica,” he said.

“Yeah, whatever.”

He turned to go. He heard the bottle glug again before the tent flap closed behind him.

XVI. Renovation

Abiba croaked in Awar, “How…do I…get free?”

A twisted, painful prison at the best of times, her body was stiff from sprawling on the hard bunk for so long. Her skin, already scarred from her disfiguring injuries, was puckered and tented from dehydration. She smelled her body’s rank odor with disgust.

Her eye was caked so firmly shut, it might be blind for all she knew—that discomfort overshadowed by the intensity of the spiking pain behind it. Her breath vibrated in her chest like a broken balloon trying to inflate.

A young girl—whose name Abiba didn’t recall, or never knew—was sitting nearby in the ship’s tiny cabin, doing something to a sharp blade. She set the knife aside when she heard Abiba, and closed the two steps between them.

“What is it?” She bent to put her ear close to Abiba’s lips.

“Free. I…free.” Abiba formed the words laboriously.

The girl saw that her mouth was parched, the mucus membranes like tissue paper. She took a bowl of fresh water, wet a clean cloth, and dripped moisture onto Abiba’s tongue.

Bit by bit, drop by drop, Abiba worked her cheeks and tongue, spreading the moisture, lubricating the surfaces so they could glide against her teeth instead of sticking.

The words were distinct enough to understand now. “I can’t get free.”

Confused, the girl tugged at her bedding, lifted her bamboo-light limbs one at a time. “Are you bound up somewhere?”

Abiba groaned in negation—a sound like a sandstorm hitting a grove of palm trees.

She beckoned feebly at the water. The girl helped her drink—tiny sips at first, then more. Her body absorbed the moisture greedily, and like a shriveled plant, she gradually began to come alive. “The ctenophores.”

“They’re safe, Auntie Abiba. We’ve been caring for them while you’ve been ill.”

“Take me…” she jerked feebly in the bed.

“Can you get up?”

“Carry me!” The girl obeyed. The woman’s body was light as a child’s.

They stepped to Abiba’s corner workshop full of tanks. The young woman’s careful gait reminded Abiba of the rocking of the deck, that movement which had become integrated into her awareness until she barely felt it. Abiba reached for the nearest tank, fanning her fingers like a baby reaching for a toy. The girl moved closer so she could slip her hand into the water. She scooped up a ctenophore in her palm.

In an instant that took a million years, the beast reached its foaming tentacles into the bodies of the old woman and that of the young girl. Moisture instantly subsumed Abiba’s remaining dryness—water that spread like fire, wetness that immediately spun into bubbles with foamy walls. Each bubble of the foam was composed of finer foam, of finer foam, and finer, and fine enough to penetrate her living cells and intercalate the strands of each DNA molecule for 10-31 seconds before whirling down the stacked pi states of the electrons in a spin-entangled dance.

The woman and the girl both now-then-had-would-later-have skirts of undulating spacetime, as well as wings of brittle, functional correlations that turned illusory and then firmed up and turned illusory and then firmed up.

The  pulsation became (both instantly and millions of years in the future) so rapid it could not be counted even by the multiple decision states accessible by the quantum computers embedded in the nuclei and mitochondria of the women’s cells, and in every bacterium in their guts and on their skin and hair.

Now/long ago, Abiba and the girl appeared before Bilqis, who was holding her own ctenophore.

Bilqis looked up—startled, then tranquil, enchanted, when she saw Abiba attended by her caregiver. Each of the two women was a vision of light beyond light, a chord of sound beyond sound.

Abiba’s voice had transformed into an instrument that couldn’t have been more different from the raw groans and gasps of just a few minutes earlier. “The masters of the vultures are approaching; four hundred of them. They’re yours, if you only will it. From this time forward, all things will be different between them and us. They approach from the south. They will leave by becoming one with the soil.”

The girl found herself unconsciously humming along in harmony with the words Abiba spoke, words that fired her brain like music.

Bilqis took a step towards the pair, her hand raised in preparation to make a point or perhaps to ask a question, but they were absent.

On the ship, Abiba glided upright from the workshop to the rail of the deck, moving like a snail on her gelatinous skirt. She held a ctenophore in her hand. She turned her formerly twisted back to the waxed wooden rail.

To the girl, she said, “This is not yet your time. But don’t worry, child, it will be soon. We all have our day,” she beamed in elation, “because we own the power of creation.” She put her arms out, and the girl moved forward, thinking she was about to embrace her.

Instead, Abiba somersaulted backwards over the rail, into the blue waters of the Red Sea.

Abiba released the ten-legged ctenophore in her hand as she whooshed into the water. It jetted off without a backward glance. Abiba didn’t need to breathe, or she’d have sighed. She didn’t need to make sound, or she’d have laughed in joy, joy yet bubbling forth from deep within her.

She surfaced after a few nanoseconds, and also about eight minutes later. She had taken advantage of the fact that “here and now” makes sense, but that the concept of events “happening now” simultaneously throughout the universe—including at the far-flung locations where particular electrons entangled with the electrons in her DNA were located—is fundamentally meaningless.

She popped up at the mouth of a rocky tunnel. Abiba allowed the plunging waves of the rapidly rising tide to wash her into the corridor.

Inside the cave, she let the water jet her along. The tunnel turned a ninety-degree angle, then sloped to ankle depth and ended abruptly at an ascending stone stairway. This was the entrance to the temple Kankeshwari Mata. She hit the liminal point at the start of the flagstones and wallowed, lingering patiently there.

Within minutes, a cloud of ctenophore companions converged on her, turning brilliant colors of reds, greens, and oranges. They spun and quivered around her, communing as she grew ten arms herself, preparing for the sacred transfiguration that was about to begin. Once she was properly tentacled, the small creatures whirled off, dancing in increasingly intricate patterns.

The compact aquatic creatures jetted their way along the coast of the island. Their destination was a harbor named Diu on the island’s north side. A long bridge at the harbor’s end crossed Diu to mainland India.

There are only a few hundred Asiatic lions still living on this planet, and they all reside on a fat peninsula of land in the province of Gujarat, India. Centuries ago, this subspecies—which once ranged from Turkey and Egypt to the southern tip of the subcontinent—submitted, and was almost utterly destroyed, in its competition with a fiercer predator: woman.

In their genes, these lions remember how woman shaped her world into a place of ownership. She made the night a place of safety, a place where she could give birth peacefully, and sent her mates to the edge of darkness to guard her human cubs. These lions retain within the methylation of their DNA the remembrance of how, in the light of day, they carried woman in a symbiosis older than horse and man, a feline, multi-appendicular centaur known as Durga.

With such a steed, the buffalo demon Mahishasura had had a snowball’s chance in quantum Hell of defeating her.

In the black-hole abode of darkness, these lions now know her as Kali. Kali, more than any other avatar of any other goddess, is their very own. She laps up every drop of the adversaries’ blood to prevent it from fertilizing the world with its evil.

A lion, with its preternaturally powerful hearing, can hear a chital place its delicate hoof on a clump of dry leaves from three miles away. The lions lounging, feeding, or mating in the former Gir wildlife refuge raised their heads and laid back their ears.

The ctenophores had surfaced near Gir and begun to emit a high-pitched bioelectronic beeping that grew louder and louder, like droning cicadas. The hot Gujarat sun beat upon their backs, and as the sound swelled louder and louder, the golden carnivorous beasts grew frantic. They abandoned kills, shaking their heads and flicking blood from their whiskers, light rainfalls in a tapering crimson spiral. They left mates mid-copulation. They pressed playful cubs flat in the dirt with spatulated velvet paws, ignoring their struggles. In time, each one began to walk, and then to lope, in the direction of the sound.

The first lion to crest the ridge overlooking the beach was an adolescent female, still scrawny due to her inexperience at catching prey. Her head popped above the horizon line and she sighted the school of succulent creatures spiraling and undulating in the shallow water. She approached the lapping waves and pawed tentatively, kitten-like, at the ctenophores. Soon, she was followed by a big male with the breed’s characteristic mohawk mane. She retreated slightly to see what he might do with these aquatic prey animals—so baffling, yet enticing. Another lioness arrived; another lion; and more and more. They paced the shoreline tensely, occasionally clawing and biting at each other in brief irritated scuffles, or else sat on their haunches, spectating.

One ctenophore swam towards the bridge, trailing its back above the water in a v-shaped wake. A lion spotted it and advanced, closer to the bridge than the others yet had. He turned his back and sat, licking himself with a show of feline indifference, like a housecat with a mouse. The ctenophore sank underwater and swam away, but now a second lion saw the first and padded a bit further along the shore towards the bridge, between the bay and the first lion. This drew the attention of a third. With a thousand such seemingly random movements, the impromptu, mixed-sex pride made its way across the Shamji Bridge and across the island. Their destination was the Kankeshwari Mata Temple, where Abiba/Durga awaited them.

The sun was westering by the time they assembled on the flat seaside rock forming the temple courtyard. The many-armed Devi whom they sought was positioned at the landing where she had emerged from her tunnel. She patiently gazed at each of them in turn. Her attention kept returning to the largest male, magnificently muscled, and with a lush mane. She glided free of the water and locked eyes with him.

She slid closer, closer… she crossed some invisible boundary, and his face writhed into a carnivorous snarl, displaying a murderous intent to shred her flesh.

He gathered his haunches close to the ground, wriggled them slightly—and charged! He sprung upon her, fangs bared, claws out.

She dissolved around him and coalesced upon his rampant back.

He arched his neck and bucked, frantically as a green horse, trying to get her off.

She was tenacious.

He rolled; she spiraled effortlessly around his body. He raked at her with sharp, hard claws, large as the tines of a pitchfork, but he couldn’t reach her. He’d rest, sides heaving, tail lashing, then flash into movement, trying to dislodge her with a jolt.

The dance went on for hours. Twilight was upon them by the time his fury subsided. He submitted to her will.

Finally, the lion and the transformed woman his passenger set off inland. All the human beings they passed fell on their knees before the many-armed goddess riding a lion: ancient scripture made flesh. Then they saw what followed and scrambled to their feet in terror. Awe turned to dread, and they ran away from the squadron of very real lions padding along behind them.

The procession of lions returned across the bridge that had brought them from the mainland. They didn’t even deign to look down at the knots of children in the shallows, who were playing with the ctenophores like newfound toys.

This region was one of those which had skipped wired telephony entirely, leaping to smartphones at the dawn of the 21st century. Cruelly, they’d had the technology for only a decade before it was snatched away by the machine sickness. The older children, who still remembered the electronic devices they used to covet, were sharing with their barely clothed youngest siblings the wonders of what the ctenophores could do. The children pretended not to hear their mothers’ twilight calls to come home, oblivious to the sharper edge on those cries tonight. Absorbed in the cybernetic screens, they didn’t even look up to see the spectacle of the lions parading by right above their heads.

The lions, for their part, surged along, unstintingly covering ground. Most of the temples were still abandoned. Much of the land had been reserved as a wildlife reserve for the lions, Before. After so much of humanity had died in the upheavals and epidemics following the machine sickness, there were other lands available for the taking. This being the case, only a handful of the local farmers had stayed, not caring to continue taking the risks inherent in defending their children and livestock from the endangered lions, not when there were lion-free farms to be claimed elsewhere. But there were a few holdouts—people in small towns whose sense of home was bound up in this place where their grandparents’ grandparents’ grandparents had lived: arcs of the spiraling DNA-electron cloud of generational antiquity.

As they moved cross-country, these few remaining people came out with bioelectric bacterial lanterns to investigate the activity in the night. Most saw the lions and fled to safety. A few intrepid souls, afflicted with curiosity or piety, formed an impromptu procession. At each abandoned temple they reached, the lion would mount the steps and turn around, with Abiba-Durga still on his back. The lion would fix them with his enormous amber eyes while she addressed them all.

“See before you the glory of Brahman! I Am the form of Brahman given life on Earth!

“You! Young men!” (For the first row was always teenage boys, who are universally convinced of their indestructibility.) “You may partake in my glory by surrendering! Come. Now.” Her voice resonated (a simple matter of building a conical membrane within her chest that projected a bass note) and brought the youths forward onto the steps. “You shall be called to sacrifice your bodies in ways you may not understand by those who come after me. In time, there shall arrive here seven strange women, avatars of the Septa-Matrikyas. You must do as these travelers say with perfect obedience. Now, go.” The boys stared at her.

“I said, GO!” Her face turned blue-black; her eyes, to snakelike slits. Her teeth grew into razor-sharp fangs.

The boys staggered back, stumbling over each other and over their own feet, confronted with the image of Kali come to life. The lion rose on his hind legs and flexed his claws at their fleeing backs.

“You! Young women,” she beckoned the girls, who usually were found in a cluster off to one side. “Come. Be with me.” She was briefly pale blue, luminous with lunar softness, and emanating a fragrance of jasmine, before reverting to many-armed Durga once again. “For it shall be as it was and is:

“Through me alone all eat the food that feeds them, – each man who sees, breathes, hears the word outspoken.

“They know it not, yet I reside in the essence of the Universe. Hear, one and all, the truth as I declare it.

“I, verily, myself announce and utter the word that gods and men alike shall welcome.

“I make the one I love exceeding mighty, make him nourished, a sage, and one who knows Brahman.[2]

“I turn these youthful men over to you, to keep at your feet, as I kept the Buffalo Demon Mahishasura. They shall have honor only to the degree you are honored. Each of you must live as divine warriors from this moment on. Dark-skinned, fierce women will come from far beyond the sea to teach you how to live this reality. You must learn well. You must learn all they have to teach you.”

Temple after temple, Abiba-Durga on her lion trotted implacably on. The dimness of night dispersed as the cool moon wheeled higher overhead. As the goddess moved, she and the lion both grew until they were bounding across the landscape ten meters at a step. They raced across Gujarat, across what had once been a border between two nations and was now a mere threshold. They flowed across a narrow neck of land into the wilderness south of Hyderabad. The lions trailing them—ordinary fleshly animals still—became hungry and tired. They began to break off into hunting groups to stalk the abundant antelope and deer in Keti Bunder.

She eventually stopped to sleep, heedless of her surroundings, impervious, immortal, curling up to the silky belly of her lion. As she slept, the quantum messages flickering through the ether directed her ten arms to knit together into titanic wings.

As the sun rose, so did she, and saw that she was on a great sloping plain: behind her an expanse of waving, golden reeds, and before her a great crowd of women who had felt a silent call or heard a whisper in the pre-dawn dark, to come. She seated herself on the lion’s plush golden flank, her throat and shoulders expanding as her glowing wings strained towards opposite horizons.

“This is the dawn of the new age of Isis,” she sang. The woman Abiba, couched within the goddess Durga, was astonished anew at how her voice now rang, like the bell of the rays of the ascending dawn.

“Bohra women, let your men wear the scarab. Let them assume the spur for your pleasure. Let the women who have been cut by Zarwak-Allah’s minions be revered among you as grandmothers—even the ones so young they have not yet bled!

“Let the message go out to the Kurds and the Christians as well. This is the new Age of Isis!”

She surged to her feet and turned, her wings trailing through the air with a swirling subsonic resonance that stirred the crowd’s bones. She approached the great salt marsh of Keti Bunder that had been behind her. The lion padded along, a loyal escort. A million ctenophores had wriggled their way into the shallow water of the brackish flats overnight, where they wove complex contoured mazes amongst the reeds.

She bent to pick one up and handed it to the woman nearest her.

“With these, the word is made flesh.” The woman stared as the letters, gawking at the phrase formed in the pane of skin on the animal’s back. Her eyes were wide, but they did not move across the letters, for she could not read. After a moment, Abiba-Isis’s words were softly repeated, from somewhere among the tiny creature’s ten legs. It prompted the woman almost to drop the ctenophore, but she didn’t. The others behind her, intrigued, began to pluck individual creatures from the water for themselves.

Abiba-Isis spared them no more attention. She was beginning to parch again; her skin, drawn taut, skidded across her tendons and bones like leather as she moved. With a sigh that betokened great liberation, she allowed her feet and legs to flare out once more into a skirt that expanded within the weakly saline water.

The lion’s inscrutable golden eyes watched her go.

XVII.                     Take a Memo

Lou sat in his chair on the porch, savoring the cool fall air and sipping a mug of roasted dandelion root tea, scrolling down the text that showed on the eight-legged trilobite in his hand.

Suddenly, he sat upright. He almost knocked his cup over as he got up and went next door to Gabe and Birdwell’s bachelor cabin. He pounded on the door. Gabe answered in a pair of boxers, blinking in the morning light.

“Where’s that editorial assistant of mine? I have a bone to pick with him!”

“Hell if I know! He’s my roommate, not my child. What’s the big deal?”

“I made it clear I didn’t approve this format! He can suggest all he wants, but going behind my back like this is unacceptable!”

Gabe shrugged. He left the door ajar and vanished, but reappeared in a minute or two to say, “Emilio will be right out. Have a seat.” He nodded at the Adirondack chairs identical to the ones at Lou’s own cabin. Agitated, Lou didn’t sit, choosing instead to pace the narrow porch until Birdwell emerged.

“Good morning, Lou.” He filled his chest with a vigorous breath. “What can I do for you this fine, crisp morning?” He held out his hand for their usual quick shake, but Lou didn’t take it.

His hand held out the trilobite, shaking slightly. “Did you change the order of these paragraphs? After I explicitly told you not to? And after I told you why: It altered the meaning of the entire piece!”

Gabe was in his bedroom, banging things around and whistling excessively loudly.

“Oh, is that what you’re upset about?” Emilio waved a hand. “It’s minor. But you know no one was going to read that wall of text unless you gave them a reason first.”

Gabe came out, dressed and ready for his day. As he brushed past, he said cheerfully, “Hey, Lou! Great editorial today, by the way! Really grabbed me from the first word!”

Lou locked eyes with Emilio. Emilio smirked almost imperceptibly.

“I’ll let it go this time,” Lou conceded. “But listen… it would have taken only a few minutes to convince me, instead of going behind my back. When you offered to stay on as my major-domo and help me rebuild my media reach, I trusted that the line of authority was clear. I thought you were a military man who understood chain of command.”

“Yes, I was a military man. And I stand corrected. Yes, Lou, you’re right. My mistake. I apologize.” He raised his eyebrows, and Lou couldn’t help but soften. “No hard feelings?” He held out his hand again, and this time, with a show of hesitation, Lou shook it.

Both men squeezed a bit harder than was, strictly speaking, necessary.

Esther came around the bend in the path at that moment, her loose cotton dressing gown blowing airily about her hips, her curly black hair in disarray. Her eyes flicked from one man to the other.

As they turned to look at her, she smiled. “Good morning! Cooking some of those eggs we got in trade for the last trilobite.”

To Lou, “Want some?”

“No, thanks,” Lou said.

“Fresh eggs?” Emilio asked.

“Brown ones! I know they say they all taste the same, but I can tell. The brown ones are better.” Her dark eyes twinkled. “Can I fry you up a couple?”

“I was hoping you’d ask!” Emilio followed her down the path.

“Actually, fried eggs do sound good.” Lou’s step fell in behind them.

Inside the cabin, the men sat at the table. Esther set a cast-iron pan on the stove, then swirled a little oil in the bottom and left it to heat. She lined up six eggs in front of herself and waited, her gaze unfocused out the window. Lou scrolled on his trilobite, checking the day’s published Register to make sure there were no other errors, omissions or typos. Esther cooked the simple snack and grabbed three plates. Emilio sat at ease. Lou disregarded the object of Emilio’s gaze.

Esther bent over to put a fork by Emilio’s plate, and Lou’s nostrils flared.

She caught his tiny snort and flashed him a quick scowl.

XVIII.                 The Head of a Pin

“Never going to happen!” D.D. shook her head and avoided looking at Alfred. She scooped another handful of seabutter-permeated corn out of the bowl beside her and crammed it in her mouth. On her homespun wool-stuffed pouf chair, her muumuu billowed around her. In a radial pattern on the floor around her sat snoozing drones, each holding a book. She was a plump spider in the center of a web of captured thoughts. Kittykitty sprawled at her feet, watching alertly for her to drop a kernel.

Alfred hovered around the edges of the web—like a praying mantis attracted by the buzzing, but wary of being ensnared along with its kill. “How can you say that with such certainty? You admit your physics is weak at best!”

“Was! Was!” D.D. snapped. “Since I stopped sleeping, I’ve had nothing to do but study and learn.”

Alfred frowned.

“Stopped sleeping? Really? Well, but that’s beside the point I was making about the drones. D.D., you’re a microbiologist. A good one—a great one, in fact—but not an expert in A.I.”

“And your degree was in, what? Computer science? Coding? Did you have any training in cybernetics? Did your education prepare you for building anything without plastics?”

“Exactly! But I do recognize artificial intelligence when I see it. And I see signs of it when we have all the drones up like this.” He gestured at the spiral pattern on the floor around her. “Maybe you’d see it too, if you’d get some rest so you’d have more perspective.”

Right on cue, a drone on the periphery rose, without any signal from anyone, and carried a book to settle next to the volume D.D. had been perusing. Her eyebrows flew up. “That’s it!” she murmured, her eyes flicking from one text to the other. She shoved down another mouthful of the greasy grain and chewed avidly as she read.

“See?” persisted Alfred. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about! The network’s anticipating your needs based on your prior explorations, while discarding things you already know. That’s a clear sign of Bayesian analysis.” He smiled triumphantly, chin out, palms up.

“Ludicrous.” D.D. didn’t even spare him a glance as a drone hummed over with yet another text. She took up a tablet and made a series of notes on its fleshy screen. “I’m trying to determine if glass coffins will ever be popular.”

“Remains to be seen.” Alfred seized the moment of stillness to slip by the drones, towards the web’s apex. “D.D.…D.D., what’s happened to you? We were such good friends, but now it’s like you’re in a different world. I don’t understand this mental wall you’ve put up around yourself!” He knelt on the floor next to her, towering over her seated form even on his knees.

D.D. sighed. “Alright. Let’s address the elephant in the room.” She gathered her feet under her on the pouf and sat upright on her heels.

The drones spontaneously retreated to their spots in the array around her. She heaved herself to a standing position, puffing slightly with the effort, ignoring the helping hand Alfred held out.

She advanced, looking down at him sternly. “What’s she been saying to you?”

“Who?”

“Who?” she mocked. “Jessica! She’s made it no secret that she hates me. She blames me for everything. Now she’s trying to turn my few remaining friends against me. That’s why I didn’t go out to the market festival; I couldn’t face everyone, knowing how she’s been smearing me.

“I never thought you’d be so easily manipulated, though, Alfred. I thought you were my friend. At least tell me the truth: What did she say to you?”

He shook his head, kept his voice calm. “D.D., I haven’t seen Jessica since she stormed out of here that day. I know, I know—what she said was unfair. You did nothing to deserve it. Believe me, I’m 100% with you on that! But you can’t control what she says or does. You’re just sitting here, beating yourself up and hoping she feels the pain.”

Alfred’s lanky form sprang upright. He leaned over and patted her shoulder. She softened. “Look,” he said, “you’ve been holed up here too long—not sleeping, not getting any sunlight or exercise. Why don’t we take a road trip, maybe visit Gaby and Jeremy at Bolivar, away from all this drama? I know you miss that grandson of yours, but you can’t do anything about that. But you haven’t seen your namesake Deirdre in a long time, either. When they were here, you were sulking and missed your chance.”

“Sulking? Really? I don’t think avoiding embarrassment and humiliation exactly counts as sulking!”

“Okay, okay, sorry, sorry. I didn’t mean sulking. I just meant you didn’t see the baby, and I know how you love babies!”

“Apology accepted.”

“What I meant to say is, it would do you some good to spend some time with your friends, with the kids; get out, get active. C’mon, buddy. What do you say?”

Her eyes narrowed suspiciously. “What exactly are you implying now?”

“Just that you’d feel better—”

“I feel fine!”

“D.D., don’t…”

She turned away, fell back on her pouf, heavily as a dead tree trunk. “Forget it. I’m not getting into this with you. I have nothing to say.”

Alfred gazed down at his friend a moment more. The drones rose from the floor, furiously flitting around her, jerking in sync with her rage. The crinkle of pages flipping was chitinous, like insect wings. Her eyes flickered from book to book as she absorbed information at phenomenal speed.

After observing her and the drones, he eased his way further into her orbit, a gangly child jumping into a game of double-dutch. He hopped his way through until he reached the center, where he squatted eye-to-eye with her—to the apparent consternation of several hovering drones, whose access to her visual field was blocked by his body. They looped crazily about the two of them in a holding pattern.

“D.D., you have to get out of here. You haven’t left this building in months. You’re so deconditioned you can hardly walk. Your clothes don’t fit anymore. You can hardly breathe. You know as well as I do that no matter how much information you accumulate, your brain can’t think clearly unless your body’s in good shape!”

D.D. glared at him, but he maintained a level gaze suffused with kindness and compassion. The staring contest stretched in time.

“Okay,” D.D. said. “I’ll go on one condition.”

“What?” Alfred asked.

“Explain the word ‘plethora’ to me.”

“I will, once we’re on the road.”

Satisfied, Alfred rose. His place was immediately taken by the waiting drones, and she began reading frenetically once again.

He paused at the door. “Tomorrow morning. You promise?” He waited until she looked away from the books and made eye contact.

“Tomorrow morning. I promise.”

He nodded and left to pack for the trip.

XIX. Slow and Furious

Jacob headed for the rear of the column, leading six others around the flank of the group. The rest of the crew gathered inwards and forwards, towards their ropes. Since he was going in the opposite direction, he had a clear view of the area, unlike everyone else, crowded together. He noticed that the trustee woman banging the gong was new at it, hitting the giant cast-iron skillet awkwardly and not loudly enough. She’d also set the unit up closer to the wagon traces than usual. Jacob frowned.

“Louder, you dumb slut!” the guard commanded. She leaned into a serious wind-up with the arm holding the fireplace poker and swung it towards the pan. As the two cast iron objects met, sparks flew.

Sparks!

Jacob flung himself to the ground. At the same moment, a roaring WHUMP! broiled his back.

He buried his head in his arms, fingers locked behind his neck. He held his breath. He dreaded getting up to soon, only to be hit by a second, bigger explosion. He waited for it. Listened with ringing ears. Instead, he heard only screams and moans nearby.

Slowly, he raised his head and saw the sere grass around him flaming in spots. He thought of a movie he’d seen once, where a brush fire cooked resting people alive. That made him spring up in a panic, only to realize that the little fires were quickly dying, leaving patches of blackened vegetation.

His ears hummed and the horizon spun. He reeled on his feet, his brain stunned by the shockwave.

The giant wagon itself was fully consumed in flame. He could feel its heat on his face from fifty yards away. Thirty feet of the thick pulling ropes were already consumed, the ends smoldering feebly on the blackened earth like a cartoon dynamite fuse. The gong-ringer was nowhere to be seen, nor was the guard. Presumably, they were two of the blackened lumps smoking on the singed earth around the wagon.

A flaming human form shrieked into the prairie at a sprint, flailing its arms, and then collapsed. Jacob was relieved just to be able to hear anything after the explosion, but the moans and wails of pain from prostrate people in every direction shook him. He saw a few survivors bending over the injured to render aid. Or maybe they were checking their pockets for valuables, it was hard to tell.

Jacob hesitated. He felt as though he should do something to help. He had no medical training. There was nowhere to carry the survivors to. His heart pounded. He gathered his wits and looked around; there was no one watching him. This was his chance at freedom.

He turned to walk away.

“Stop right there.” In Jacob’s exhausted brain, the metallic click still registered as a firearm being cocked, and he raised his arms.

“Get on the ground!” He complied.

The guard loomed over him. “Going somewhere?”

“No, sir,” Jacob said loudly into the dirt.

The guard kicked him—barely a kick, really; bumped him with a toe. Might have imagined he was being kind. “Good. Remember that. Now, come help salvage what we can from this fire.”

XX.      Indiscretion

Lou always wrote his articles in longhand on paper first; it was just how he organized his thoughts. When the machine sickness hit and there were no more computer keyboards and no more electricity, and even the petroleum-based inks and plastic keys of classic typewriters didn’t work anymore, he had secretly gloated over returning to the world of hand-written work. He enjoyed the immediacy of turning the papers over to Gabe and letting the artisan do his time-honored work of setting the type, line by line.

Now he was back to the annoyance of needing someone to transcribe his work to a digital format for him. The trilobites’ tiny screens meant that text was painstaking to enter, and Emilio’s willingness to take on this menial chore—despite the man’s previous status—made Lou appreciate the man more.

Maybe it’s made me too reluctant to question his motivations. When something’s too good to be true, it usually is.

Lou eyed Esther.

She moved about the tiny cabin, combing her hair with a fragrant oil, securing it with a carved hairpin he was sure he hadn’t seen before.

“Going out for a walk.” She was out the door before he could reply.

He tapped the page with his pencil a few times. He had to admit he was distracted. Gabe had been hard to catch up with lately, taking lots of long walks by himself or hiking down the mountain to hang out at the pub, sometimes spending the night two or three nights in a row when the weather was bad (as it got sometimes, in late fall in the Blue Ridge mountains). Subscriptions to the Register, made up of eight-legged trilobites grown on their network, had leveled off.

Lou had to face the truth: it looked like this incarnation of the Highfield Register would never have the popularity the old paper version had, so long ago in Pennsylvania.

He mentally reviewed the bitter winter that had driven the population of Highfield south by refusing to end, and the labor of hauling the huge, antique press all this way. He morosely recalled the machine that represented his family’s legacy bogging in the mud and straining the backs of the beasts who pulled it—only to be ultimately made obsolete, once again, by the trilobites’ bioelectric local communication networks.

And now, this. This was the last straw.

He whipped his jacket from the hook by the door and set off for Emilio and Gabe’s cabin. He had a pretty good idea what he’d find, and he knew how flimsy the door latches were. A good, solid kick, even from his middle-aged frame, should do it.

And the door swung open. Six steps through the tiny house into the bedroom. Esther standing naked, silent, unrepentant; Emilio fumbling to button his pants with his left hand, his right holding his handgun.

Lou’s breath rasped. His pupils flared; his hair stood up on the back of his head and neck. His mouth was dry, and his muscles twitched.

Emilio seemed calmer. Without looking down, Esther took a single step closer to the nightstand, where her clothing and holster lay.

Lou didn’t draw. He spoke to Emilio. “Let’s settle this like men. Outside.”

Emilio lowered his weapon. Nodded. “Give me a minute.”

Lou’s eyes flicked to Esther, away. He walked outside.

He took off his jacket, set his handgun on top, and paced, swinging his arms in the chill drizzle. Emilio was ten years younger and twenty pounds heavier, but Lou was five or six inches taller. And hadn’t been in any kind of physical fight in forty years. But he’d do what he had to.

Emilio stepped out and came down the steps. Esther followed a few paces behind him, fully dressed, and stopped on the porch to watch.

The men squared off, and Lou brashly took the first swing, a lunging attempt at a haymaker. Emilio ducked, grabbed Lou’s arm, and threw him across an outstretched leg.

Lou tripped and fell prone. He barely had time to roll over on his back before Emilio was on top, grounding and pounding him. The pain in his face was blinding and relentless, but he was still humiliatingly aware that Emilio wasn’t giving it his all.

Emilio paused. “You’re no fighter, old man.” He was barely breathing hard. “Give up?”

Lou felt blood trickling along his receding scalp line. He felt shame trickling down his face from within. He choked tears down and nodded, not trusting his voice.

Emilio slowly shifted his weight off his knees, alert for a feint from his bested opponent.

Lou lay regarding him silently. He felt no urge to fight anymore. It was a momentary madness that had quickly passed, leaving remorse in its wake. He rolled over and got to his feet as soon as Emilio took a step away.

Both men naturally turned to look at Esther. She was gone.

XXI. Quantum Phineas

The Northern Equatorial Ocean Current carries debris and organisms from the mouth of the Red Sea and churns them to the east, towards the coast of India. Before the P. davisii consumed all the world’s oil and plastic, oil tankers used to take advantage of this current to make better time. Millions of cubic meters of colorful plastic debris also used to make excellent time, but with no particular volition. In the early twenty-first century, the everlasting confetti washed up on the shore of Gujarat, drifting from Egypt and the vibrantly growing consumer economies of east Africa.

Now, however, there were no tankers and no plastic trash.

But in their stead were a new, rapidly-self-mutating breed of small ten-legged creatures swarming in the waters. The second-generation ctenophores reproduced at a mad pace in the wild, like their earlier cousins, who were now to be found on coastlines everywhere. They wandered wherever their tentacles led them. So it was not long before the first African ctenophore touched tentacles with the first Indian ctenophore.

Not long after that, the two iridescent beasties began their mating dance. When the African broke off his mating arm and presented it to the Indian, and she accepted it, one pi-stacked quantum spiral potentiated the next as they unreeled and rewound within her.

Abiba was, at that very moment, not at that very moment. She floated on the surface of the ocean. As the mating occurred, she felt herself instantly spread out. Her awareness distributed itself on the surface tension of the water of all the gulfs and seas of the world, impossibly thin. She imagined she might be dying; she accepted it as the release she’d long been yearning for.

But then the tension broke, disappointing her, and she was dispersed with a tremendous inaudible roar throughout the depths of the waters of the planet.

This was different than her previous ventures into quantum awareness. It was less destructive. It was more complete, encompassing her body at a human scale of being, instead of forcing her into miniscule subatomic space and exploding her to expansive interstellar distances.

As her attention resolved into something that made some sort of sense, she realized that she was everywhere any type of ctenophore was found: the marsh in Keti Bundur, the warrior sailors on the coast of Yemen, the wild ctenophores teeming off the beaches of Djibouti and Eritrea, tucked away in the pouches at the waists of all the women at Gabal Elba, hovering in some sort of flying contraption around some corpulent, pallid individual in Texas, and held in the hand of Bilqis, Favorite of the Lady, the Queen of Heaven on Earth.

Bilqis was issuing orders to her lieutenants, some via ctenophore and some in person, and preparing for the imminent assault of the Chinese on her stronghold.

What was left of Abiba-Durga that was human smiled indulgently. The Chinese force was so small to begin with, and so exhausted from crossing the desert, that even with their automatic weapons they would kill, at most, a hundred of the New Islamists’ thousands of warriors before being overwhelmed themselves. They did not belong here—while the Afar and Somali, Habesha and Tigray who followed Isis and looked to Bilqis for leadership, did.

But Abiba was disinclined to interfere. The energy of the commands flying from one ctenophore to another, and the order created by the commands, reminded her of a spinfoam turning itself inside out. She was mesmerized by its patterned kaleidoscopic beauty.

As the warriors assembled in ambush formations where the Chinese would most logically emerge from the desert, Abiba had an excellent view. She watched the desert-camouflaged Chinese file out from the slim cover of brushy vegetation and shallow canyons. She watched them form up and level their automatic weapons, disregarding the occasional, undisciplined rifle shots that came at them from too long a distance as the women marched forward.

They opened fire! She watched in agonizing grief as the first row of Isis warriors fell before them, but then the Chinese had to reload the greedy automatic weapons, and in those precious seconds, the second row of the New Islam troops reached their line. The women took heavy losses from handguns at close range and snipers bringing up the rear. Despite their primitive spears supplemented with a far-fewer number of guns, they finally overwhelmed the massed Chinese with pure numbers.

Abiba watched the women take a few prisoners. With curiosity, she scanned every Chinese face within range of a ctenophore’s photosensitive skin, but she didn’t recognize Li’s. Where was he? One tiny part of her, a part that was a configuration of far-flung entangled quanta and also a thought, and also a pattern of neurons firing in her still-embodied meat brain, mused on this and let it go.

She whispered through the newly-crystallized quantum network “Bilqis! Go now! Advance! Advance swiftly! The Chinese base is yours for the taking, and you have ten thousand warriors who have been denied their battle!”

The network began to shriek, every ten-armed beast its own source of the great I AM. The women began to call and respond as well. It was a magnificent cacophony! Freshly rested, armed, equipped, they began to trek across the desert. Like the herds of gnu further east, like the ancient flocks of ibis over the Nile, like the caribou in the Arctic, they moved inexorably and patiently towards the People’s Republican Army base. They encamped at sunset, wailing the songs of the Goddess back and forth late into the night.

Roni paced uneasily; there were no lights showing in the Chinese compound. Perhaps they were observing a blackout to avoid being targeted by snipers, but the fence perimeter was far enough from the buildings that that such attacks were unlikely, and the Chinese surely knew that. Abiba was frustratingly silent, and when the indigo sky over the distant eastern mountains turned cornflower blue, she contacted Bilqis, who only repeated the order to attack.

However, before the sun rose, in the greyness of predawn morning, a uniformed officer came to the double chain-link fence to parley. It was a long walk from the base. The women patiently watched him every step of the way, all the while sharpening their weapons and mending gear and tack, preparing food and pounding drums to accompany an aimless, cyclical song.

He had two subordinates with him. The three men faced the amassed women, spread across the flat land as far as they could see.

“We are here to surrender,” the leader of the Chinese contingent said.

The women muttered, irritation spreading in a wave as the information spread through the ranks, their battle-lust thwarted yet again by a disappointing opponent.

“This is a trick,” said Roni, their commander.

“No trick. We were the last stronghold of the industrial world that was destroyed. We dreamed of finding a cure for the plague and bringing the modern world back.

“But some weeks back, we had a captive. His knowledge was deemed important enough and his injuries were serious enough to justify bringing him inside for medical care. Though we followed our rigorous decontamination protocols, he somehow brought the plastic corruption within our gates. Our plastics have dissolved and we have no substitutes. We have no fuel, no electronics, no power. We are at your mercy. We want to join you and learn to live as you have learned to live, without the modern ways.”

Roni’s eyes dropped to the men’s uniforms, noting for the first time that they had no buttons on their shirts.

“Allow me to confer with my captains.”

She retreated into a large tent with ten other women, each the head of a thousand soldiers. The sun rose fully, insects began to drone, and the women grew increasingly restless in the heat.

Shortly, Roni emerged. “You may join us. The Lady’s merciful. She will accept you within our fold. But: you must conform to our ways.”

“Of course! If we are to live among you, that should go without saying!”

“Very well. Your men must be initiated first.”

“Initiated?” The commander’s face went pale. This involuntary reaction, coupled with the lack of power at the compound last night, confirmed Roni’s gut feeling that they were sincere.

“Ho! You are afraid? The big man’s afrai-aid!” she mocked him. The women all elbowed each other and guffawed.

He straightened. “Certainly not. But…is it true? Would we be—emasculated?” he croaked the last word.

Roni curled her lip in contempt. “No. We will not, as you say, emasculate you. What use would our men be to us if we gelded them? We won’t even break your feet and fold them in half, as your ancestors used to do to your women.”

The commander lifted his chin as though to argue, then thought better of it and remained silent.

Roni continued, “We will only provide you with what nature failed to provide: a brake for your urges and a tool for your women’s pleasure. As for how long it will take you to get over it, our men recover within a day. You are weaker than our people, but I don’t think by much. We’ll allow you two days, then take you home with us.

Now, open your gates.”

“Wait…”

“Do you want to do this? Or do you want to fight us?” The women behind her who held spears eagerly percussed them on the ground.

“No!” He looked helplessly over each shoulder at his subordinates. The two men waited impassively at attention. He wasn’t really expecting help from them, and he found none.

“Good.” Roni dusted her hands together. She beckoned the priestesses, already working their way forward from among the troops. They began to amass at the gate, each holding a uniquely red-painted leather sack.

The commander reluctantly walked over to the gate. “The lock…it was electronic,” he stalled.

The front priestess drew a .45 from her leather girdle and shot the hasp of the lock, strode in to the second interior gate, and destroyed that lock as well.

The women began sauntering unhurriedly inwards along the long, long drive that paralleled the runway. They spared a few resentful glances at the runway, whence the drones that had harassed them, which they called vultures, had only lately taken off. All the vultures still in the sky belonged to Isis now—only natural feathered creatures, not these obscenities of remote-controlled warfare.

The commander trotted to the head of the line, fell in next to the leisurely striding head priestess, and had a brief conversation with her, then took off at a steady jog ahead. Roni assumed he was preparing things for their initiation. She beckoned her swiftest messenger, nodded at the man. “Follow him. Contact me by ctenophore if you see the slightest sign of treachery.”

Roni began to move her troops through the gate in an orderly fashion, detailing some of them to disassemble the fence. The trickle changed gradually into a flood, and then a wave, then an avalanche. By midday, the women had reconfigured their same camp, just a few kilometers closer to the buildings of the Chinese military.

By the end of the day, Roni was growing irritated over dealing with the petty annoyances of life in camp. The troops camped closest to the compound were complaining of the smell where the Chinese sewage system, dependent on plastic sewage pipes, had failed. Others were grumbling about returning to Gabal Elba, seeing there was no fight to be had, or wanted to return to their seacoast homes, where the seabutter harvest was going to waste. There was a warrior who had come out pregnant, against orders, and was now having a miscarriage: a difficult disciplinary decision to be made and followed through.

The priestesses returned just as cookfires began to be lit for dinner, orange specks on the wide plain that picked up the post-sunset sienna glow above. Quite a few Chinese women followed them, Roni noticed. She roughly estimated they were about a tenth of the women stationed at the base—if the personnel were three-quarters men, as her scouts maintained.

“These are the ones who liked the idea of women being in charge,” said a priestess to her, sotto voce. The Chinese women were made comfortable at campfires and served their share of seabutter, goat, and cassava. They remained with the encampment when the priestesses returned from their night of initiating the men into their bond with the Lady, queen of vultures, source of all goodness and light, peace be upon her.

The next morning, a few of the priestesses went to the compound to check on their new initiates. They returned to report the men were all in good health; no problems, just sore and in as much pain as expected, from having the spur mounted over their pubic bones, as well as having their foreskins pierced through and pinned in place within the bell-shaped scarab.

Around eleven, the sun was high. Roni called her ten lieutenants. “Now.”

The women each took a hundred of their most disciplined troops, making a thousand, and they all entered the compound. They kicked in doors. They turned over furniture. They flung whatever personal items they found out windows or into heaps in the center of the floor, heedless of what was ruined.

Any women remaining inside were gathered in a group, hands tied, and marched off the base to a separate prisoner-of-war area.

The men were yanked harshly from their beds, many hobbling and gasping with their fresh incisions, and lined up out front.

Roni walked back and forth before them. Few of them were completely upright. Some were leaning on each other for support, but most stood slightly bowlegged with pained expressions and pale, sweaty skin.

“What do you think, Chinese men?” The scorn in her voice was apparent even to those who didn’t understand her heavily-accented English. “Do you still think that Dankalia and Somalia are China’s for the taking?

“Oh, that’s right! I heard there is no more China! Too bad! But there is Dankalia. There is Somalia. And now it’s the land of Isis!

“You may live free outside the borders of the Lady’s lands. You may hunt and plant, gather food and fuel, and do what you will. But you will not approach a woman without permission. Any man who disrespects a woman forfeits his life. Every woman will join together with all the others to hunt him like the animal he is. He will never know the touch of a woman’s tenderness again; no woman will carry his child in her womb.”

The thousand warriors prodded the pained men slowly ahead of them to the opening in the fence, and then along the outside of it until they were all clustered in a group. Blankets and camping gear were piled nearby, and antibiotics distributed to them to last them while they were recuperating from their spur-and-scarab surgeries. The women then turned and sauntered leisurely to join their confederates in occupying the compound and plundering it of whatever remained usable after the bacterium had destroyed all the fuel, solvents, pipes, insulation, electronics, and everything else made of plastic.

XXII.                      Retirement Village

Li scooped up seabutter from its bamboo container over the fire. He spooned the tasty browned concoction to his mouth, blew on it to cool it before eating, and wiped the grease from his lips with a clean rag.

Not a bad life, really. I could live here indefinitely.

The safe little cave he occupied was one of many that pervaded this cliff face over the ocean. Most of the caves were occupied by Afar and Somali men, now his neighbors. Quite a few of these men, especially the younger ones, liked to go out along the edge of the rocks, where they hovered to watch the village women who came to the shore to fish and gather seabutter. The women waded in the shallow waves and took rest breaks in the sand, letting the breeze blow through their hair and swigging water from skin bags at their waists.

Li observed them like an anthropologist. He noticed the men hung shyly back, visible but passively smiling, until approached by a woman; women would break off from their fishing or harvesting groups in twos and threes, and one of the group would approach a man. The fortunate fellow thus chosen would disappear with a woman for a time inside the caves, while her friends stood guard. Along with their weapons, the women all carried pinching tools on their belts: pliers, vise grips, and adjustable wrenches, useful to remove and replace a scarab. The lucky recipient of a lady’s affections would—usually—emerge with a combination of postcoital smugness and mild discomfort on his face.

Li stayed hidden and observed from further back. When he did venture out, he wrapped himself as heavily as a light-complected African person would to protect against the sun. Enough of the Somalis were lighter-skinned that from a distance, no one would think him unusual.

From closer up, though, his Asian eyes marked him as exotic, even among the diverse North Africans. He didn’t want to attract the women’s attention, least of all sexually, because he had managed to avoid being initiated with the spur and scarab. He’d watched one man (who’d removed the uncomfortable scarab on his own and been discovered) summarily stoned to death by the women on the beach.

After that happened, the women all left the men on that stretch of beach alone for several days. When the first few showed up again, the men began to police each other to make sure their peers were all complying. The spur-and-scarab dictate was slowly gaining acceptance as normal, all throughout the region. It was even often praised as desirable by the men who suffered it, perhaps in an effort to convince others to comply so they could all have equivalent access to sexual activity. Perhaps it was to rationalize their own submission.

The spur-and-scarab ritual was the thing that had first driven Li to separate from Meala, fleeing into the bush in a panic. That was in the first, terrifying days of the New Islam, when the procedure seemed so brutal and barbaric. To be fair to Li, it hadn’t been at all clear how much further the women were likely to go in their vengeance on all things masculine.

Now, it seemed to have been formalized: boys were initiated with the spur and scarab some time between weaning and puberty, and then deported to the men’s colonies. They referred to the spur and scarab with the same words they previously used to describe female infibulation, and they had switched to saying “Insh’Isis” as easily as they had said “Insh’allah” before.

Women formed occasional enormous manhunting parties, and any man they trapped alone or in a small group was fair game. He was stripped, and if he’d removed his scarab, he was killed, sometimes torn to pieces in a Dionysian frenzy, but usually just stoned to death or shot and hacked to pieces.

Be that as it may, Li had sacrificed the love of his life to avoid what he regarded as ritual genital mutilation. He wasn’t about to submit to it now, so he had to be wary. He didn’t join the men at their campfires, but lived as a hermit, afraid his intact status would become known and they would turn him over to the priestesses, or even crudely initiate him themselves. That is, if he wasn’t simply murdered in the traditional, full-contact, mixed-weapon combat games the men sometimes took part in as “recreation.”

Li had been raised in a city and educated in schools and universities and worked in offices. He had no illusions about how he’d fare in those competitions.

But he had observed his neighbors talking into jellyfish-like creatures in their hands, and now he saw the women scooping these same creatures from the water along with their net fishing. So far, he’d been fishing using only a line, trying to stay hidden among big boulders, but now he resolved to capture one of the creatures and see what they did.

Once the women moved to a distant stretch of shore, the men returned to their caves to escape the afternoon sun. Li walked alone to the shore. He would not strip naked as the others all did, for fear that someone was watching and would see that he had neither the bell-like scarab pinned over his glans, nor the knob-like spur implanted over his pubic bone.

Behind a concealing boulder, he knotted a strip of woven material around his mid section as a loincloth, then waded out chest-deep into the water.

The sea was pretty turbid, but in the foot or so of visibility, he could see ctenophores surfacing periodically and then sinking into the waves. After a few minutes, he realized the water must be teeming with them. He scooped at one, attempting to catch it. It slithered over his fingers and jetted away, turning a brilliant orange as it did so. He tried again, and again, but got nothing but tickles of slimy tentacles and plenty of splashing.

After a few minutes of this, his face was flushed, his eyes stung, and his mouth tasted of salt. He turned to wade to shore, but then a single beast swam up right in front of him and hovered at the water’s surface. He rubbed his eyes and bent to look more closely at it. He observed the creature had distinct eyes, with pupils shaped like commas, and this pair of eyes appeared to be looking intently at him. Tentatively, he dipped his hand into the water. This time, the animal swam directly into it. It balanced patiently in his palm as he lifted it out of the water and examined it.

It was the size and shape of a small mango, with ten flexible legs arranged near the two eyes he’d already observed. He assumed that the complicated structures buried amidst the legs were its mouth parts. Its body was segmented in five, and each of the five segments had structures floating in it that resembled circuit boards, but with no corners; all the edges were rounded. Its skin was translucent. As he watched, a large patch on its back flattened out and turned an opaque white. Ge’ez characters floated to the surface of the screen.

“I don’t know what that means,” Li said. He spoke aloud, possibly because he thought the thing could hear and understand him. Possibly not. He’d been talking to himself a lot, anyway, in his recent solitude.

Greetings, welcome to the Quantum network.

The words startled him so much he dropped the thing into the waves. There it patiently paddled, maintaining itself in place with its ten tentacles—and, as he now saw, a jet of water that came from somewhere underneath. He scooped it up again.

“Who is this? What are you?” The questions bubbled out of him.

Who is this? What are you? The words hung suspended on the screen while he considered them. When he did nothing, they faded away, to be replaced by:

You have joined me/them/us. Use this to speak to someone.

“Who would I speak to?” Li murmured, bewildered. The screen showed undulating dapples for a few seconds.

Hello. This is Abiba.

“Abiba?”

Yes, hello. I realized after we last spoke that you should know: Meala misses you.

“Meala? Is she still at the compound?” He cast his eyes to the southwest, reckoning how long it might take him to reach the humble compound that was the birthplace of the New Islam, where he’d last seen her.

Admiral Meala is at sea. Her fleet ferried the invasion force that’s marching to Sana’a.

“Admiral? Wait… Sana’a? You mean the city in Yemen?”

There’s no Yemen, no Egypt, no Eritrea or Djibouti. Only the realms of the Lady, the One True God, Isis.

He turned his eyes to the ocean again. The Red Sea looked narrow on the map, but to a tiny, insignificant human who wanted to see someone on the other side, it might as well be the vast Pacific.

“Meala.” He breathed her name almost without realizing it.

Meala, the ctenophore spelled out. An unfamiliar symbol emerged on the screen, blinking next to the text. A send button? Without thinking, Li prodded the flashing mark with his finger.

Moments later, the screen dissolved and reformed two letters: Li

His heart leapt with fierce hope. It couldn’t be!

“This is Li.” This is Li. Send.

Hen, this is Meala!

Meala! I miss you so much!

Li, I thought you were dead. They found the spot where you were stabbed.

I am alive.

There was so much blood on the ground around your pack.

Yet I survived. And I love you now more than ever.

I love you Li. Where are you now?

I am on the Egyptian coast near Gabal Elba.

The waves before him coalesced and swirled into a colossal icon.

Abiba’s face, restored to the radiant beauty of her youth, topped a towering body of iridescent gel. The gel was impregnated with the same spiraled circuit boards as the ctenophores, but there were miles and miles of them, radiating into the ruffles of her skirts, spreading out and merging with the waves.

A voice like the croaking voice Li recalled as Abiba’s rang in his ears, but now mellifluous as a young woman’s.

“She’s anchored the fleet at Al Mukallah. There’s a ship leaving Shalateen bound there soon. You can make it there before they cast off if you leave right now.”

Meala! A voice sang within his chest. “I’ll get my things!” he declared, turning to scramble up the rocks to his cave—awkwardly one-handed because he was holding the ctenophore. Dressing took him longer than packing. The bulkiest items were his oilskin evaporative water catcher (a simple sun-catching membrane setup which distilled drops of precious potable water into a half-liter skin bag), and a packet of seabutter flatbreads.

He took the ctenophore and sent a message, bemused at how quickly the old habits of the smartphone days came back—and at how good they felt.

I am coming to you, Meala. Send.

Hurry, Li. We may have to set sail soon.

I’m coming. My love. Send.

He remembered how it was to try and walk or drive while texting, Before, how it used to seem at times the whole of humanity was lost in an electronic trance; sluggish footsteps, cars sitting motionless at green lights, and couples in cafés ignoring one another in favor of their devices. He wrapped the ctenophore in a wet rag, which he stuck inside in his rough leather cross-body satchel.

The sand at the junction between desert and beach was mostly hard-packed; he reckoned that would help him make good time on foot. He wrapped his feet in his primitive sandals and steadily shambled off northwards towards Shalateen.

XXIII.                 The Register, September 9, Year Three

Wendy Harkavy

After our travails crossing the mountains headed west in the Fall, we worried about crossing the other direction on our trip east. Our worries were unjustified. While the hiking was strenuous, the Rocky Mountain springtime was spectacularly beautiful. We reached Iinnii (formerly Browning, Montana) in mid-April, amidst buffalo grazing on miles-wide plains of blooming wildflowers.

The people in this town are a conglomeration of Siksikaitsitapi, Nakota, and American and Canadian whites. The town is one of the few places we visited that has increased in population since the machine sickness.

Keith Edmo, Chief of the Town Council, explains:

“The second winter, the one which never ended, the village here became a magnet for the people who couldn’t survive in the mountains. At the same time, all the fighting in the eastern part of the state drove Indians and Wa'piski-wiyas [whites–ed.] to move here where it was safer. We had around 1,000 people before. Now, over 3,000 people live here.”

To learn more about the fighting, we interviewed several people who had come to Iinnii as refugees.

Sally Longworth was a teenager living in Havre when, as she describes it, “all hell broke loose.” She was retrieving wood from the woodshed to feed a cooking fire when she heard shots and screams coming from the family’s ranch house. She hid in the shed until night, when the temperature dropped and, in danger of freezing to death, she crept back into the house. “My mom, Dad, and three brothers were all dead,” she states, a haunted look in her eyes. “They attacked the town for no reason!”

Dominick Stiff Arm has a different tale to tell.

“We were living in Lodge Pole. We were the ones who discovered the petroleum pipelines contained food. My son William was the one who discovered it! We were hunting, and we’d shot as many birds and rabbits as we could carry, so we were pretty happy, following the oil line home. He was being a ten-year-old boy, banging on things and making noise, and he noticed just after we passed the old pumping station that the pipeline changed pitch when he pounded on it. I didn’t want to stop, but it was still early in the afternoon. He worried and teased until I agreed to pound a piton into it, and wouldn’t you know, the greasy stuff came dripping out.”

Apparently, this is the same material as the o-fu that washes up on the west coast in areas of undersea oil deposits. The Nakota call it “man chow” or just “the food,” and they found that it collected in oil pipelines where they were under highest pressure under cold-winter conditions, after the machine sickness bacteria reached the area.

Stiff Arm continues: “We had extracted and rendered all the food from the pipeline, up almost to the Milk River, when we ran into a group of Wa'piski-wiya farmers who had set up barricades to prevent us from getting any further. Fair enough, if they claimed the food in the pipeline. Maybe they had a right to, but they blocked the roads and trails too. We were just then figuring out that the food didn’t regrow, it was a one-time-only thing, and that all the oil in the pipes was turned to water, and maybe they didn’t know that. Then the Westside Militia in Dy Junction put up roadblocks too. We just went around ’em, no big deal, since the roads were all dirt tracks after the machine sickness got into the asphalt anyway.

“But then it got ugly. They started patrolling what they said was the boundary of militia territory and searching us when we crossed it. We had to go through their gauntlet to get trade goods of any type: medicine, wool, anything.

“Then they started searching the women a little too disrespectfully, and keeping some of our trade goods when old folks or women were traveling alone, and we had to start sending armed men along with them to defend them. That led to a few brawls and a few people got hurt, a couple young men got killed, mostly being stupid.”

He sketches a crude map. “Black Butte was a sacred meditation spot for our ancestors. We sent a contingent of medicine leaders to follow the herd of buffalo, and they were led there. While they were peacefully meditating and singing and praying for guidance and aid, they were attacked by the sentries from the Restland Ranch. That led to a battle. Long story short, the Nakota took possession of the ranch.”

Sally Longworth knew about the battle, but she heard something different. “My dad and mom were talking about it, and what happened was, these Indians drove their cattle onto the Restland’s prime grazing land and let them wallow in the lake, fouling the water. The Restlands asked them to stop, but they refused, so they had no choice but to try to run them off. People have to protect their land and water, especially in these times. Mom and Dad were real upset when they learned all the ranch hands and the Restlands and all their kids and grandkids were killed, and they weren’t the only ones!”

Longworth explains that the populace of Havre met to decide what action to take. As an underage girl, she was not permitted to attend the meeting, but she reports that afterwards, she was told the men of the town had “decided they would take care of it.”

As Stiff Arm describes it, a contingent from Havre attacked Restland before dawn one morning. They had seriously miscalculated their timing, because all the fighting-age men were in the midst of a weapons blessing ritual atop Black Butte, meaning they were positioned, with long arms, well above the invading squad. The Nakota simply picked them off one by one, with not a single casualty on their end. The sneak attack by the Havre men enraged them. Fresh from an inspiring religious retreat and a dramatic victory, they advanced on Havre.

“I’m not saying it was good what the braves did. But up until that point, we were happy to live and let live. This was our sacred land first, but the farmers have been here for generations. But they couldn’t just live in peace, so we couldn’t either,” Stiff Arm says. “I was too old to fight and I wasn’t there. But I supported the war council that decided they should go. It was war. War is an ugly business.”

Longworth agrees. She cries, relating, “I had four best friends in the neighborhood. We all grew up together, started high school together. We kept studying together after the machine sickness. We took care of each other’s little sisters and brothers. We fixed each other’s hair. Of the five of us, I’m the only one who made it. The only person left alive. A man came through a month later and said he’d heard that the Indians kept some of the white girls as slaves. Do you think that’s true? My friends could still be alive…”

Asked about these allegations, Stiff Arm denies such a possibility. “Nakota don’t keep slaves. I would have heard of it if any such thing was happening.” He shakes his head sadly. “I wish I could tell that girl her friends might still be alive. But it’s just not true. We lost a lot of our teenagers too, boys and girls, and they’re still killing each other every week in that part of the state. It’s a tragedy. Survival’s hard enough these days.

“So many dead. Such a waste.”

XXIV.                  Marching to Mars

Jacob’s nose had finally numbed to the smell of burnt cotton and singed flesh. His face was tender and taut from the heat of the smoldering wagon, and smeared with black soot from the smoke. His muscles ached from turning over debris, picking through it for anything that might have survived the damage: metal implements, such as the cast-iron pan and poker that had sparked the blaze, sacks of dried grains, fragments of rope and clothing that were under the charred bodies he turned over.

As his nose had become inured to the odor, his eyes had become invulnerable to the shock of death and gore: the body that split as he flipped it, revealing the face of the campmate who’d given him a hand-rolled cigarette—still tucked into Jacob’s breast pocket—above a pile of livid half-cooked offal where his belly should be. The beef-jerky arms he cracked apart to reveal the precious water skin, still full, which the owner had been cradling as the fire swept over him.

Mostly, his back hurt. He found his way to the heap of textiles that he and the few other survivors had been compelled to collect and pulled out what he could. The guards and trustees had already made the first pick, so he got random rags, which would make for a lumpy bed. He thought he’d sleep anyway, so loudly did his body and mind cry their exhaustion. The sun had set, and there was just enough light left to pass around crisp wafers of flatbread smeared with peanut butter and some cups of tepid water.

The protectees squatted or lounged on the dirt and munched the sparse food deliberately, savoring each bite. Jacob dumped his armload of rags on the ground and sat cross-legged among them to eat.

The guards moved listlessly among them. After a few minutes, shouting and waving their guns, they herded the workers to a clear-swept area. Jacob spread his bedding out as evenly as he could and stretched out on the meager cushion. He didn’t shift position even once before falling deeply asleep.

He woke in a panic. His sleeping mind had been treating him to rapid-fire images of the preceding day that he could not turn away from. The knowledge that every single body he turned over had been a living, breathing human and that at some moment he, himself, would be an inert hunk of meat crept closer and closer… and closer. He moaned at the half-moon overhead, his own voice waking him, yet somehow not reassuring him that he still lived.

His heart was pounding and his palms were sweating. He lay still and breathed deeply, listening to the hammer-drill din of his atria and ventricles, willing them to slow, staring at the moon, wanting to howl.

Finally, his pulse slowed and he let his eyes sink closed, hungry for rest. Just then, someone arose from a bedroll near him and stepped over him. Going to take a leak, no doubt. No point falling asleep then, since the person would be back soon and wake him again on his way to bed. He waited for the wanderer to return so he could settle, but minutes ticked by, and no one came.

Frustrated, he sat up, and was rewarded by a pain on the right side of his neck, knifing forward to the base of his tongue. He gasped and grasped the side of his neck, his eyes tearing up with the sudden spasm.

He’d had these before. His girlfriend used to rub it out, and a couple of ibuprofen would take the rest of the edge off. He hadn’t seen the girl in years, and there was no hope of getting an ibuprofen here. He pulled his knees up to his atrophied belly, lowered his head carefully onto his folded arms, and tried not to cry. He pulled out the sack of water he’d secreted under his shirt—a few ounces left, piss-warm and tasting of the animal the skin had come from. But he swished it gratefully through his teeth, rinsing fresh blood from his gums and reawakening the dismal flavors of burning cotton and the revoltingly delicious aroma of human flesh roasting. He started to sob quietly, but no tears came.

Where was that person who went to piss?

Or had he?

Jacob knew he wasn’t going to fall asleep now. All that the days ahead offered was more dismal work burying bodies in unmarked graves, then resumption of the long, forced march the protectees were on. He’d entered the camp willingly, glad to have shelter, a shower, food, safety. The shelter had been rendered nightmarish during the epidemic, then lost completely when they set off to deliver the gun cotton. His last shower had been the week before they started traveling; then he’d had a swim in a muddy lake a few days after.

As for safety? As the guards became bolder and lazier, they delegated their peacekeeping functions to their favored trustees. In turn, the trustees exploited their authority in large ways and small, accepting gifts and sharing them out to the few biggest and meanest among them in loose, ever-shifting alliances punctuated by gruesome fights.

Jacob’s momma, as previously noted, had raised zero fools. He’d steered clear of the big-dog game, and protected the smaller, weaker, and more helpless on those rare occasions when he could—more to preserve his self-respect than out of any illusion that it improved their lives. He tried to be kind in ways that cost him nothing, tried to be full of hope and encouragement when others were in danger of sinking into the quagmire of despair.

Not being a fool, Jacob saw that his current situation was bound not to end well. He considered: he had nobody dear to him here.

The moon had moved visibly while he’d been sitting here. He silently rose to his feet, wincing anew at the jab in his neck, and took off headed roughly south, navigating by the moon.

The first hour was the worst: constantly waiting for shouts or gunshots behind him, even though he knew most of the guards were snoring on their comfy pallets, having had first pick of the salvage and nabbing the few intact bedrolls and sleeping bags.

The ones that weren’t, those who were standing a desultory watch, would have sounded the alarm right away or not at all. They’d been affected by the day’s grisly chores, even though they weren’t elbow-deep in it, and they too were unusually quiet that night. This, Jacob knew, but he still jumped at every bobcat cough or ground dove that fluttered from the brush, wings trilling.

The moon was close to setting. He estimated he’d put ten miles or more between himself and the camp when he finally decided to stop. The walking had rocked some of the worst of the pain out of his neck.

He came to a shallow gulch with a glint of water at the bottom, and tall grasses along its edges. His waterskin was empty. The water in the ditch below might be an open sewer, though he didn’t smell anything to suggest that. It might be full of mud, or green with algae from nutrients running off nearby fields.

But it also could be fresh and potable, and only the light of day would answer the uncertainty.

He crouched and patted the grass. God, it was lush! Compared to the wad of filthy motley he’d been sleeping on in the dust, it was like a premium luxury mattress, the kind of foam that didn’t exist anymore, since the machine sickness had destroyed all plastic. He imagined a soft bed and collapsed onto it, giving a strangled cry as his neck grabbed at him with one last jolt of agony. He shifted position until he found a way it didn’t hurt, took a deep breath, and was asleep before he exhaled.

XXV.                      Clausewitz Fog

The screaming woke Meala from a sound sleep. She sat bolt upright; a second scream impelled her from the bed. Her feet barely touched the floor as she leapt into her loose trousers and seized her weapon belts, slinging them diagonally across her body as she ran down the corridor towards the ladder to the deck. The scream stretched out and morphed into a beastlike roar just as two, separate, gunshots came from above. She heard the thump of a body hitting the wooden deck.

She climbed the ladder and found the whole ship illuminated by the soon-to-be setting moon, almost full. She deduced from its position near the horizon that the opposite direction was a few minutes from showing the first shimmer of dawn over the distant inland mountains. But directly overhead, a low overcast meant the moonlight was not bright enough to give the intruders much of an advantage.

She rang the bell outside the aft-facing door and pulled her own weapon, checking its readiness to fire with a warrior’s habitual reflex. A sentry standing over the body of one of the would-be boarding party she’d shot, held her smoking gun at the ready as she moved silently back-to-back with her.

Three other sentries should be on deck. Meala felt a sinking sensation when she registered their silence.

But even as she thought it, she heard the firing of multiple guns from the other side of the deck, beyond the cabin, and then four measured shots coming from the catwalk fore of the tiny wheelhouse. The two of them froze for a moment, straining their ears for some inkling of where they were needed. Then a splash resounded from under the bowsprit. They heard the loud, victorious ululation of their shipmate, Tiriig, known for her agility, balancing barefoot on the rail. Tiriig leapt to the deck and sprinted to Meala’s side.

“Aft, ladies!” Meala cried. “With me!”

The three of them diverged around the cabin, followed quickly by two more women who popped out of the doorway, and then more, until the whole complement of sixteen was lined up about the rail on both sides.

Aft, another intruder sprawled face-down, motionless, in a spreading dark puddle on the decking. A second, though, was still alive. He knelt before his opponent, her gun to his head.

Meala approached. “Who’s your commander?” she asked the dark-clad man.

He raised his curly head and fixed her with dark eyes set in a caramel face.

“I have no commander but Allah. We will never submit to your apostasy!”

“As you will.” Meala casually backhanded him, his teeth scraping her knuckles in passing. “How many of you are there?”

He spat blood at her feet. Meala waved her hand at the woman who held him captive. She grabbed his dark mane and yanked him to his feet. He swung at her, but his awkward angle pulled the blow astray. She pulled his head back towards the ground, kneeing him in the face with a crunch, then swung him against the rail before he could recover. Once he was silhouetted, elbows out as he grasped his broken nose, she dispatched him with a shot; he fell sideways on the rail and then slid wetly off into the sea.

“Binoculars.” Meala took them from the ensign that proffered them, a treasure because they were metal-bodied antiques. Instead of plastic fittings, the lenses were held in place with carved horn.

She held them to her eyes.

“Just as I thought. There are over a thousand of them massed on the shore.”

“Shall we haul up the raiders’ dinghy?”

Meala nodded, and the crew quickly complied.

She pulled her ctenophore from its moist bed within its pouch. Tapping on the glowing screen, she narrowcasted a message to the other ships in her fleet.

Captains report.

Ten responding messages came in close sequence:

Boarders repelled.

None of the ships was taken, but: No lives lost. Four lives lost. Captain Zahara and two more lost.

Enemy troops massed on beach, Meala tapped. We retreat, sail to next destination. Maintain communications silence until weighing anchor.

“General, you’re wounded.” The ship’s medic was standing with a bowl of clean water and a wad of clean rags draped over her arm. She nodded at the young commander’s side.

Meala pressed her hand to her ribs, shocked. The wet, gaping gash there began to burn and gnaw as soon as she became aware of it. Wordlessly, she collapsed onto the bench and reclined with her hand atop her head, so the woman could dress her wound.

As she worked, Meala thought, The bulk of the invasion force and their Yemeni converts have an excellent head start into the mountains towards Sana’a. They have the second-gen ctenophores, which the Zarwak worshippers don’t, as far as we know. Still, best to wait until we weigh anchor before we advise them to proceed to Aden instead of returning here to rendezvous.

I wish I knew if I could trust the ctenophore network not to leak somehow, so I could tell Li I won’t be here when he comes. I know so little about the way the quantum network functions. I wish Abiba were here, but I can’t risk messaging her, either.

As soon as her side was packed with bandages, she sat upright, contra her physician’s protests.

“Weigh anchor now! We sail for Aden without delay!” Her breaths ran ragged and her vision swam. She kept her hand from her side, did not look at the medic, kept her chin up, and refused to let herself wonder, how bad is this wound?

XXVI.                  Past Due

Alfred finished checking the horses’ tack and harness. He was wearing chic platform huaraches, a flowing yellow silk skirt, and a knit tank top in chartreuse hemp. His long salt-and-pepper beard was neatly braided, as was his hair. He tossed his duffel into the carriage and climbed in himself, reaching down for D.D.’s bag and then holding a hand out to help her heave herself in.

She manipulated the bauble-like controls in her hands like a contact juggler handling glass balls. The flock of drones settled onto the roof of the carriage overhead, folding their intricate wooden hinged legs into their locked configuration and falling into their quiescent charging phase. Alfred swapped places with Kittykitty, who sat on the floorboard.

D.D. settled on the bench seat and leaned her head against the wall behind her.

“Are you sure you don’t want to ride shotgun here with me?” Alfred asked.

D.D. patted the shotgun across her knees. “I can ride shotgun back here. I don’t feel really sociable.”

“Okay, but you could use some sun. You’re so pale.”

“Maybe I’ll sit up top later and get some sun.”

“Suit yourself.” Alfred ducked his head to exit the door.

D.D. stopped him with a hand on his shoulder.

“Alfred, thanks. For being my friend, I mean. You have no reason to give a shit about me, and you’ve been really kind.”

“Bullshit. You’re the only one who halfway tolerates my rants, and one of maybe, like, ten people who even understands most of what I say. Besides, you’re my best friend. Oh, and I remember what I promised you. It means a lot.”

D.D. smiled. Alfred climbed up to the driver’s seat and gathered the reins, clicking to gee the horses. They set off down the sandy road towards the coast.

D.D. looked out the carriage windows. This close to the Houston population ring, the road was busy. The machine sickness made it instantly impossible for people to live in the cities—no water piped in once the PVC pipes collapsed and the pumps failed; no roads or trucks to carry food and goods in and garbage and merchandise out; no sewage systems to bear away the vectors of dysentery, cholera, malaria, and typhoid. After that, the closer-in suburbs had turned back into the small towns they had once been, swallowed in the twentieth century’s hubris-drunk binge of sprawl.

The loss of two-thirds of the population had rendered the return to smaller-scale farming viable. The seabutter supplemented the sustenance lost when industrial-scaled agriculture, with its dependence on motorized machinery and petroleum-derived fertilizers and pesticides, had failed.

They clippety-clopped past a field of amaranth, and D.D. observed a drone buzzing in a scanning pattern above the rows of bushy green plants. She leaned forward and scanned the field. Sure enough, there was a lone woman, a farmer, standing at the edge of the field, holding a controller much like her own and an oversized ctenophore, viewing images from the drone on the screen.

Further along, Alfred whoa’ed the horses at a way station. D.D. got out and helped him carry buckets of water to the beasts, and then the two of them walked inside.

D.D. scooped a ladle of water into a glass and sat on one of the benches lining the walls. Alfred bought himself a sandwich at the station’s main counter and sat nearby at a small table. A group of six earth-smeared farmworkers was sitting at another table, apparently on a lunch break. One of them was talking, the rest chewing and slurping.

The man speaking was compactly built, dark-haired with a carelessly-trimmed beard, and so dirty it was difficult to tell whether his ancestors had mainly come from Europe, or lived in North America before the invaders came.

“Here’s the thing: we’re doing alright, but what about the people we lost?” His companions nodded. “My mom, two of my sisters, two of my four kids. You can talk about how much more freedom we have now all you like, but they didn’t live to see it.”

A tall black man chewed and swallowed. “I don’t miss having to be nervous every time I see a cop. Just saying, man.”

“I hear you,” the original speaker continued, “but the fact remains, our lives are harder, and we’re all grieving people we loved.”

A woman, dirty as the rest, chimed in: “On the other hand, you don’t see so many obese people any more.” Her eyes flicked over to D.D., then away. “Our kids aren’t getting shot in schools.”

“There are no public schools any more.”

“Yeah, okay, but look how we’ve stopped destroying the planet we’ll leave to our kids! All the plastic in the ocean…gone! No more factories belching smoke, no more cars giving off carbon dioxide…”

D.D. couldn’t help herself, “All the carbon dioxide was released at once.”

Six pairs of eyes turned to look at her. Alfred pointedly did not.

“What did you say?”

“Why do you think last winter never ended? Every bit of fossil fuel and plastic—in the earth, in the ocean, in your gas tank—dissolved into carbon dioxide and water. The cloud cover from all that water vapor reflected all the sunlight hitting the planet. No sunlight hitting the atmosphere? No greenhouse effect.”

“Now, how can you know that?” a sardonic voice asked. “You’re some kind of denier? Even now, after all that’s happened?”

“No, but I’m a scientist. I guess I’ve been a little obsessed with this because I made the machine sickness,” Alfred shot upright, stopped chewing, “and I wanted to know all the consequences.”

The six had all stopped eating as well. The first man got up and stepped towards her, the woman behind his shoulder. Kittykitty, animally alert, lowered his head and laid his ears down, but he didn’t move from his spot on the floor under D.D.’s seat.

“Did you say you made the machine sickness?”

“Let’s go, sweetheart.” Alfred abandoned his meal, took D.D.’s hand. “Don’t mind her. She’s a little,” he made the universal corkscrew sign in the air next to his head, “not been the same since losing everything.”

He tugged at her; she started to rise.

“Wait,” the man said. “I asked her a question.”

D.D. gulped. I fucked up. “I’m sorry, what was the question?”

The woman said, “You heard him. Did you, or did you not, make the machine sickness?”

D.D. looked at the faces in a semicircle around her.

No sympathy in any of them. Well, nothing to do about it now. No sense in giving them the satisfaction of seeing me cry and beg.

She squared her shoulders and relaxed into an acceptance of the inevitable. “Yes, I did. It was designed to clean up oil spills.”

“You? You were the one?” Another of the laborers, silent until now, was incredulous.

“How can you live with yourself?” the woman demanded shrilly.

D.D. turned to Alfred, standing to her left, still tugging at her hand. “You should go now,” she told him.

Before the last word left her lips, her visual field gave way to yellow sparkles, and a loud crunching noise briefly preceded a sharp pain behind her right ear. Kittykitty barked.

When she could see again, she realized she was looking at the floor, holding onto Alfred’s forearm. She released him. “Go!”

Alfred did not go, but nor was he much help. For all his height, he was awkward and hesitant, and barely landed a slap. He buckled under the first few desultory blows directed at him, and wound up crouching in a semi-fetal position, with his arms crossed over his face while the group closed in on D.D. Kittykitty growled valiantly and nipped at the group, earning himself kicks and clouts.

No point fighting back. I’m unarmed. There are six of them. I’ve hardly moved in months; they’ve been working the fields and orchards. She took a hard blow right to the nose, heard a crunch—raised her hand to it instinctively. Feeling wetness, she probed a loosened tooth with her thumb.

The next blow was to her belly and knocked the wind out of her. She doubled over, straining to take a breath. A foot came up to hit her face again—right above her right eye this time. She was pretty sure she was crying.

Kittykitty let out a yelp and flew through the air, hit the wall, and slid down. Oh shit, this is bad.

According to DeVor’s Encyclopedic Medical Dictionary, retrograde amnesia is a frequent consequence of head trauma and is also sometimes a response to psychologically traumatic events. Most commonly, the trauma that causes the memory loss is included in the information lost to the amnesia. The period of lost time preceding the trauma may be discontinuous—in which case we refer to memory lacunae—or it may extend backwards continuously for minutes, hours, days, or occasionally months or even years. It’s common for memories to return during the recovery process, but this is not a predictable occurrence.

After the beating, the first thing D.D. was aware of was Alfred begging her to wake up, because he couldn’t lift her into the carriage. She was upright, with an arm around his neck, feeling like it was almost pulled out of its socket. She had a vague sensation that she’d been stumbling along beside him. She roused herself enough to bob and scramble her way inside, lie on the floor, and try to think. The jarring of the carriage starting underway alerted her to an archipelago of pain within her, especially her broken ribs.

Kittykitty licked her face. The last thing she remembered was being asked a question.

A question? What was it? Did you? Did you or did you not?

“I did.” Her throat was so dry, it hurt to talk, her mouth so swollen her speech was slurred. I did make the machine sickness. My intentions were good. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. But I’m not in Hell. I could have been. Almost was. A hard jolt lanced through her chest as the wagon hit a bump, and she groaned involuntarily. The wagon came to a halt.

“Are you okay?” Alfred’s face popped into the wooden box she lay in.

“What do you think?” she slurred through thickened lips.

He smiled sadly. “That’s my girl, sassy as ever! I meant, do I need to stop now? Or can we keep going until we get to Mont Belvieu? There’s an inn at the old refinery there that’s supposed to be first-class, and I’ll bet we can find someone there to doctor you up.”

“I’ll be fine,” D.D. said. It’s not the first time I’ve been beaten up since everything happened. At least this time, it was for something I actually deserved.

No, that’s not right. I didn’t deserve it. I was trying to do something good. Just because I stood to make money from it, doesn’t mean it was bad. Just because it had unforeseeable consequences, doesn’t mean it was evil.

But those unforeseeable consequences. The end of the world as we know it! That REM song from when she was a girl started playing in her head. She couldn’t vocalize the song—it hurt too much—but she tried to convince herself that the tag line, “I feel fine,” was true.

And yet, my world didn’t end. I’d already lost everyone close to me, or had to let them go. Now, I’m a grandma. Or I was.

A pang as she remembered Jessica’s spiteful words the last time she’d seen her. She wondered where she and Ozark were now. People always hurt me, let me down. But not Alfred. Thank God for Alfred, or I guess he’d say, thank the Goddess.

She began an exploratory pat-down of the parts of herself she could reach without causing herself more pain. Kittykitty nuzzled her hands, exploring with his nose for injuries his own way. Hard to believe he was feral when he came to me. Don’t know what I did to deserve him, but he’s my, “Good boy!” Her words were barely comprehensible, but he took her meaning. She spared the energy to pat his head and stroke the ears that were laid back in worry against his head.

Her ctenophore pouch was missing from her belt. She’d had a utility knife sheathed at her waist, and it was gone too. She felt her teeth and found a single lower incisor broken in two, a jagged shard stabbing her swollen tongue. Her nose would, she thought, never be the same.

She tried to block one nostril, then the other, and found she could just barely breathe through each one. All this sniffing made her acutely aware that she’d vomited on herself at some point during the festivities.

When did I get so helpless? And why didn’t I fight back?

The answer to the second question was obvious: on the deepest level, she felt responsible for the machine sickness, even though she knew her assistant Tim had tampered with the cultures without her knowledge. She had claimed the authority to run the lab; she had been responsible for everything that went on there. The buck stopped with her.

Or did it? Don’t they say the abused child grows up to be a hyper-responsible adult? Is that what’s going on inside my head? The wagon hit another bump, and the pain in her side was psychedelic.

Maybe so. Maybe not. But I think I’ll just stamp this debt paid. And start taking care of myself again.

The faces of her attackers, contorted in senseless rage, surrounding her just before the walloping flashed in her mind. And from now on, lest someone thinks otherwise, I’ll just keep my mouth shut about it.

XXVII.              Lonely at the Bottom

“Fuck 'em if they can’t take a joke!” Jessica tossed the empty bottle out of her shelter. “Fuck 'em all anyway!”

She pulled the cork out of a new clay jug. She swished the clear beverage in her mouth and swallowed, ran her tongue over her teeth and muttered, “Good enough. Nobody’s kissing me anyway.” She began to cry. “Nobody loves me.”

She tipped the bottle up again, dribbling some from the corner of her mouth. The greenery of the bushes around her filtered the light, the waxed tarp over her head blocking the light of the sky above. She punched the filthy rags beneath her, trying to get more comfortable.

She heard a thrashing noise from outside her shelter. “Hey! Hey! Hey, Jessica!” a man’s deep voice called.

“Shit,” she said. “Not so damn loud! My head!” She buried her face in her hands, quickly smearing her tears away from her eyes, and pulled her snarled hair into a ponytail, which she knotted carelessly at her nape. She shoved the jug under some less-filthy clothes in the corner.

The big man loomed at the opening to her compact lair, grinning at her. “Hey, Jessica!”

“Hey, Chuck!”

“Charles.”

“Chuck. Chuck. Chuck.” She stuck out her tongue.

He cackled and raised a hand half-jokingly. She half-jokingly flinched. He said, “Guess what I got?”

He held up a glass bottle, labeled with the mark of a well-known distillery near Tampico. “Tequila! The good stuff, baby!”

It was a pure agave product, but not the best. Not the worst, though, not by far. And more saliently, it was 38% alcohol.

“My hero! Thank you, Charles!” Jessica took the bottle and uncorked it, chugged a big draught, and passed it over to him before flopping on her back to undo her pants.

###

Fifteen minutes later, Charles was shambling up the narrow deer track, and Jessica was unconscious. He passed another man headed the opposite direction. “Looks like you get a free ride!” he sniggered. “She’s passed out cold.”

“Not my taste,” the man said, “but also not what I’m here for.”

“Suit yourself.”  Charles shrugged, resuming his course. He glanced once more at the man—a stranger in work clothes whose broad cowboy hat had seen better days.

The stranger stuck his head into the burrow and recoiled, nostrils flaring at the scent of alcohol, sweat, and unwashed sex in the darkness. “Ms. Jessica?” he asked tentatively.

No response. “Jessica?” he asked again, a little louder. Still no reply.

With a sigh of aversion, he bent and entered the shelter. He wasn’t a tall man, but the tiny nest was too short for him to stand in. His eyes adapted to the darkness, and he saw the form of the woman he was looking for, sprawled face down and half-covered by a grimy blanket. No doubt she was alive, from the way she was snoring. He hesitated, then reached out to shake her shoulder.

Jessica whimpered softly. He shook her again. She raised her head, fixed him in a glassy stare.

“Jessica, I’m a friend of Jeremy and Gaby’s. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Don’t tell me about those stuck-up assholes.” Jessica tried to bury her face in the crook of her elbow.

The man grabbed the knot at the base of her neck and pulled her head up.

“I hate to do this, girl. But this needs to happen. I’d hope somebody’d do it for me if I was in your state.” He held her hair with one hand, grabbed the loose fabric of the back of her unbuttoned shirt with the other, and backed out of the hollow in a squat, dragging her along with him.

She groaned inarticulately, flailing with no discernible coordination and landing no blows on her assailant.

He rose and released her, and she panted on her hands and knees for a moment.

“Get up,” he commanded. She staggered semi-upright and fell heavily against him.

“Fine,” he said, and grabbed her by the shirt collar and an elbow. He duck-walked her down the narrow trail to the swampy edge of the cattle pond nearby. He pushed her ahead of him, hard, and she fell face-first into the turbid brown knee-deep water.

She came up spluttering. She flipped her hair back and produced a banshee-like shrieking noise, fixed on him and tried to attack. Her feet stuck in the mud, and she went down again with a grunt. She struggled up, fell again, and sat up to her waist in the muck, making a sound that was something like heaving, panting, and sobbing all at once.

“Done yet?” The stranger was squatting on his bootheels, his straw cowboy hat sheltering his face from the Texas sun.

Jessica gathered herself. “Yeah, yeah, I am.”

“Are you sober enough to remember what I’m about to tell you? I don’t want you saying you never got the message later.”

Jessica crawled on hands and knees into ankle-deep water, managed to get her feet under her, and staggered onto the grassy bank. “I don’t know about that, now.”

He looked away. She noticed and gathered her oversized cotton shirtfront together.

“I think you need to walk a little. Do you have any other clothes to wear?”

She gazed at him a moment. “You’re asking me to put my clothes on? That’s a switch!” He rose as she brushed past him, heedless as she smeared his sleeve with grime. He followed her to the beginning of the trail, to her hidey hole, and waited while she rummaged around for a loose drawstring skirt and a (relatively) clean shirt. She slipped her blackened feet into a pair of leather flipflops and rejoined him.

Now that she was dressed, he looked her over head to toe. “When’s the last time you ate anything?”

She shrugged. “It’s been a minute.”

“I’ve got some provisions in my wagon. C’mon.” He led the way to the road, where his placidly gazing mule was tethered to a fencepost between the traces of a plain box wagon. He flipped the canvas cover away and took out a small canvas sack, then pulled a wrapped package out. “Simple tortillas. Corn, seabutter, salt.”

She took the package and opened it, sniffed, tentatively took a nibble. The seabutter, crispy and almost meaty when fried alone, made a tortilla into a savory, filling meal even without a topping. He patiently watched her devour the entire packet with abandon.

“It has been a while, hasn’t it? Feel better?”

She nodded, wiped her mouth with her hand. “Thanks. I needed that.”

“Good. Okay, ready for the message?”

“I suppose.”

“I’m here from Bolivar. Gaby and Jeremy sent me.”

“Those assholes!”

“They said you might feel that way. Just listen, okay?”

“Yeah, shoot.”

“Gaby says she’s sorry she had to take Ozark, but he wasn’t safe with you.”

“I’m his goddamn mother!”

“Just listen.”

“Okay, I’m listening.”

“She says he’s gotten much bigger. He knows his ABCs now. He remembers you and he asks when he can see you again.”

“And?”

“That’s it.”

“That’s it? You came all the way from Bolivar to tell me that?” Her face crumpled with anger, bringing out the dark circles under her eyes and grimy creases in her forehead.

“I was going to Temple anyway. Owed Jeremy a favor.”

“Did you see him?”

“Jeremy?”

“No, idiot! Ozark! Ozzie, my boy!”

“There were a number of young ones running around the last time I visited them. How old is he?”

“He’d be—” long pause. Gulp. “—going on four now.”

“There was a little guy about that age. Cute thing. I can see the resemblance.”

She looked down, ashamed for the first time since he’d arrived. “I hope he looks better than I do.”

“Jessica, your boy’s fine. You need to clean up a bit, though, don’t you? Not that it’s any of my business, but you’re hitting bottom about now.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I guess I am.”

“Again, none of my business, but I’ve been in a similar situation.” She snorted. “Not the same, but similar. I happen to have seen this symbol,” he took a pencil out of the brim of his hat and drew a circle with a triangle inside it on the tortilla wrapper, “on the front of the church about three miles east of here.

“That’s the symbol for AA. They meet there six nights a week. The first step to recovery is admitting you need help…”

“Yeah, I’ve done AA before.”

The statement hung gently in the air between them.

With a shrug, he said, “It works…”

“If you work it. Yeah.”

He took the canvas sack and pulled another packet out, hesitated, then put the packet back and handed her the whole sack.

“Good luck,” he said. He flipped the reins from the post over the mule’s head, then swung easily onto the front of the wagon. With a sharp whistle, he was off, headed west.

Jessica watched him for a moment. Then she turned her back on him and began walking east.

XXVIII.         Bridge It

Esther beamed from her vantage point on one side of the stage sheltered in the natural amphitheatre. She watched the row of young people ascend the steps to join her. Once all ten of them were seated, Esther walked across to the central podium and faced the audience, arrayed in rows leading down the sides of this hollow in the hill.

“These young journalists are extremely special.”

The audience geysered applause. A wide mix of faces, all split by grins, let out whoops and cheers. Today’s honorees were local talents, but they were gaining global fame in the new media—a phenomenon which nobody had believed would ever exist again in their lifetimes.

“This community knows them as your brightest minds and their boldest voices.”

More cheering. At this rate, it’ll take all afternoon. “Please. Please hold your applause for the awards themselves.” The friends, families, and local dignitaries grudgingly settled down. “The machine sickness couldn’t keep them down. The winter that wouldn’t end couldn’t freeze them out. Now the new-generation trilobites have given them a new voice. The voice… of the future!” A few irrepressible claps and cheers were shushed by their neighbors.

“Those of us old enough to remember the beginning of the internet will recall those heady early days. Remember that?” Calls of affirmation here and there. “I do. I remember the way it seemed like all of humanity would finally be able to communicate on equal footing. It seemed like we’d all be heard. The new medium seemed to promise us a new world.

“Many of us also remember how sadly that promise was betrayed when the internet was turned around, censored, and used to spy on us and control what we thought.

“The new era of quantum communication changes all that.” Esther took out her own ten-legged ctenophore. “Let’s pause for a moment and appreciate the fact that instantly, anywhere on the planet, we can tap into the infinite and simultaneous peer-to-peer communication these small living creatures provide. Thanks to them, and the advanced blockchain—the quantum crypto spiralchain— censorship and fraud will be a thing of the past. And these young people here are among the first voices to reach out on that network.

“Let’s review some of the stories they’ve covered in the past year: the spread of New Islam in Africa and the Middle East; the resurgence of the Amazonian and Andean indigenous people; the great oceanic upheavals and the changes in global weather patterns. These individuals on stage are just a few of the talents collaborating worldwide, digesting information and bringing it to your own devices, in your own homes.

“Media will never mean the same thing again, and these young people are the source of the innovation. They are the hope of the future. They are only now scratching the surface of the full potential of this knowledge. They are only now beginning to show us what a free press really means, in a world where it is impossible to successfully lie.”

A deep murmur of excitement spread through the crowd. Going about their daily lives, many of them had not thought of the technology in this way before.

“I can’t thank you enough for the support which has made the Global Oracle the most popular publication in the greater Carolinas. And for those of you who are late adopters, if you’ve only been reading the news and not experiencing it full-immersion, you may not be aware of this: As of this week, the Global Oracle is the fourth-most-popular publication on the entire planet.”

Applause scattered among the assembled crowd.

Esther knew that the vast majority of people still preferred to avoid entangling their minds with the ctenophores’ consciousness. For herself, Esther found it draining and dissipating. The disorientation was like falling endlessly, with nothing to grab onto, and trying to console oneself with the knowledge that there was no ground. Much of the real-time information that came through was in a form not easily digestible, unless one was fully immersed, so there was always a need for people to translate it into the vernacular and summarize it.

“Some of you may still be fuzzy on the understanding of how the ctenophore consciousness ‘knows’ what a person knows and most wants to know and can understand. It’s not crystal clear to me, either.” The crowd met her self-deprecating laugh with sympathetic nods. “But one thing that’s basic to understand is that it’s not something that can be authoritatively described—any more than the right price for a gallon of seabutter is set by any authority. It’s something that’s established by a thousand or a million tiny interactions among a billion signals throughout the universe.

“And these kids are the best and brightest of the Carolinas—only in that the catallaxy, the network of causality and consent that constitutes the spontaneous order arising from those interactions—resolves most clearly in their awareness. They explain it to us without explaining when the awareness is personified in us through them.

“I’m reminded of a teacher I had in college. He brought in a mayonnaise jar and set it on the desk. Into the jar, he poured a layer of sand. The jar was a third full. Then he poured in a layer of pea gravel, and the jar was two-thirds full. Next came a layer of pebbles, and the jar had no room for anything else. He still had river rocks and a couple of fist-sized stones left.

“Then the teacher poured out the jar and started over. This time, he put stones in first. Then he added river rocks. On top of that, he poured the pebbles. He gave the jar a little shake, and added the pea gravel, and last of all, the sand. It all fit. He asked the class what the lesson was, and when no one guessed, he announced: ‘Take care of the big things, and the small things will take care of themselves.”

The crowd was quiet now. She’d lost most of them, but the few who understood showed faces of alert recognition in the crowd, like daisies in the meadow of people before her. It was time for some pageantry to touch the emotions of the rest.

“Now, each of these young people will come up and receive a silver wreath to celebrate the wisdom they are sharing with us. In alphabetic order, let’s put our hands together for:

“Elena Abercrombie!” Enthusiastic cheering led by Elena’s parents, of course, and the named journalist rose. Esther topped her blonde hair with a silver tiara.

“Tamika Bonds!” More cheering and another tiara, this time topping a soft, close-cropped natural head of springy curls.

“Maribel Hernandez!” A wavy, dark mane was surmounted by silver.

“Cindy Nguyen!” The clapping went on and on as sleek, straight hair was encircled by the band.

The misses Patel, Rawls, Roosevelt, Santiago, Smith, and Wingo all had their turns, and finally all posed together, holding hands and wearing radiant smiles. They raised their hands and bowed.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I give you your local servants of truth. Let their light shine!”

The applause took minutes to die down, but when it finally ran its course, Esther added, “I forgot to tell you what happened next in my class. One of the students stood up and walked up to the jar and poured in a bottle of beer, soaking the sand. So the ultimate moral was: there’s always room for beer!” The crowd buzzed with laughter, primed for the party scheduled afterwards.

Esther raised her hand, the gesture for the award recipients to turn and march off stage. Instead, Elena stepped forward, holding something in her hand. She nervously straightened her tiara. Despite the fact that hundreds of millions heard her voice on her broadcasts, standing in front of a physical crowd made her voice quiver a little.

“Ms. Barrington, we wanted to recognize you for what you’ve done. You came here as an outsider a little more than a year ago, and it took a lot of courage for you to keep reaching out to us the way you did. Without your knowledge of what it took to become a journalist, I don’t think we would have been inspired to experiment with the new forms of knowledge inspired by the second-generation trilobites. But you encouraged us, and we did it! You encouraged us to keep going, even when others tried to sabotage you.”

A few clued-in heads turned to glance at Lou and Emilio, but the moment passed quickly. “You encouraged us to continue even when we went far beyond what you imagined or were capable of.”

Esther laughed and nodded. “And for that, we thank you. And we want you to have this.”

She held out a jeweled metal crown with a live ctenophore at its center. The crowd watched in fascination as ten sets of fragile wings sprouted in a circle around its margins. Its silver and copper cogs and springs began to whir, and a circle of tiny encaged propellers popped up. The circlet rose from the younger woman’s hands as if carried by a hive of bumblebees, hovered slowly, and then lowered itself atop Esther’s curls, the ctenophore’s tentacles gently entwining with her hair.

Esther put a hand up and gently touched the delicate, beautiful thing, grinning with delight. The audience rose to its feet, whistling and clapping. At Tamika’s gesture, Esther walked upstage of her line of protégées and led the procession out the stage “exit” into a secluded grove on the side, where they were partly hidden from the others.

The brilliant young journalists lapsed momentarily into exhilarated girlish laughter as they hugged and squealed. Esther broke from the embrace when she spotted a group of four people off in a corner. She extricated herself from the estrogen pit and walked over.

“Well, look what the cat dragged in.” She put a hand on a hip and elevated an eyebrow.

“Esther,” Lou sighed. “I guess I deserved that.” He scuffed the dirt with his toe, then looked up from the ground and held out a hand. “I came to apologize. And to congratulate you.”

Esther shook his hand graciously. “And you?” she asked Emilio, who raised a glass to her in a toast.

“Same. My abject apology. And let me add: I feel like a fool for thinking I could control you. You’re a force of nature, and I’m sorry I underestimated you.”

“Hardly a force of nature!” laughed Esther. “But I’ll take that in the spirit I hope you intended it.”

Lou turned to his companion. “Esther, this is Nora.” He rested a hand on the waist of the woman by his side. Thirty years his junior, barely older than Esther’s protégées, she was lovely, with creamy, perfect skin and a dancer’s sleek grace. Esther admired her beauty, met her eyes, and was surprised by a sparkle. She found with glee that she instantly adored the young lady.

She turned to Emilio’s date. “Ana, this is Esther.”

Ana was also a very beautiful specimen of womanhood, with waist-length black hair, a voluptuous body, and sloe eyes, but she had a very shy demeanor. She flicked her gaze to Esther with a tight smile and turned back to Emilio, watching him closely for cues.

When Emilio smiled and nodded reassuringly in Esther’s direction, Ana looked back at Esther and gave her a luminous smile.

Esther pressed each of women’s hands between her own. There are some moments in life when everyone seems to be exactly where they’re supposed to be, and one can, for an instant, believe the preposterous notion that everything is working together in perfect order to bring a higher plan to fruition.

“It looks like the move south has been good,” she said, “to all of us.”

XXIX.                  Octopus’s Garden

D.D. was really tired of the whole “taking a beating” thing. When I left the neighborhood to start school to become a scientist, I thought I’d never have to deal with that again. It seems like the violence follows me—even though I’m a peaceful person at heart. At least I learned how to fight back as a kid. Even if this time, I didn’t fight back.

Never again.

She sat beside Alfred. She’d found that seeing the bumps and ruts coming up made it easier to brace against them and avoid hurting her broken ribs. The sunshine on her skin helped the bruises fade faster. And having a friend beside her, she just felt better.

They came around a long, easy curve and over a slight rise. and glimpsed what seemed to be a mirage on the horizon.

But the reflective blueness did not fade into invisible undulations. Instead, it grew more distinct. D.D. began to notice a slight breeze cutting the heat of the afternoon sun. She slowly breathed in, just until the pain in her side barely caught, and then let the breath out.

“Smell the ocean?” she asked Alfred.

“I love that smell. How are the ribs doing?”

“Not too bad. The salve the guy gave me at Mont Belvieu seems to help.”

“That’s good. I’m looking forward to relaxing on the beach for a bit, doing some meditations on the goddess, saluting the womb of all life.”

“The ocean is soothing.” Love this man, he’s my best friend, but the pagan piety gets wearing at times. It’s as bad as the fucking Catholics.

They rode on peacefully, the call of seagulls and the clumping of the horses’ hooves on the soft sand the only sounds. They reached a sharp right turn in the main road, but instead of taking it, continued straight towards the ocean on a two-rutted track.

“Did you know the tracks we use today are the same width as the roads of the Roman Empire?” D.D. asked.

“Really?”

“Yes. The Romans decreed that the roads had to be wide enough for two legionnaires to march abreast. Later, they began to fight in chariots—which they copied from the Celts—but they designed the chariots so that they’d fit the width of the roads the Romans had built. When people throughout Europe started to travel by cart and carriage, they followed the same measurements. As railroads were being built, they spaced the rails to follow the tracks of existing roads. Finally, when cars came along, they just followed that standard. Even in Indonesia, China, Siberia, South Africa, all over the world, the width of the roads is directly descended from the ones in the Roman Empire.”

“Interesting. Because my uncle was a railroad buff, he used to travel all over the country before he died, taking railroad tours wherever he found them—the older the train line, the better. He used to love the smaller local railroads in the southern USA, because they were built on several different gauges than the standard widths that they used all over the rest of the continent. It’s part of why the North took so long to beat the South in the Civil War. They couldn’t run their railroad cars on the captured tracks. Of course, it’s part of why the South didn’t industrialize, too.”

Gradually, the sandy ruts began to be heaped with drifts of soft sand. The wheels began to drift sideways, threatening to go off the road, and the horses struggled. The two of them got down and released the horses from the traces, stashed their shoes in the carriage, and led the horses. Presently, they came to the seashore. Kittykitty loped behind them, limping slightly but otherwise no worse from his encounter with the angry mob.

They paused as they came out between two dunes and saw the sea. To the north, rows of gatherers were loading seabutter into wheeled trolleys. They’d already harvested the beach south of D.D. and Alfred, so it spread out empty and inviting. D.D. maneuvered the orbs that controlled her drones, and they rose from the carriage top and followed them overhead.

They walked some distance down the broad beach, and Alfred flipped the reins up over one horse’s head, a placid white mare, and vaulted onto her back. He looked down at D.D., who shook her head and patted her ribs.

“I’ll pass.”

Alfred shrugged and dug his bare heels into the horse’s sides, taking off on an easy canter along the moist packed sand. D.D. waited on the beach, holding the reins of the bay gelding, and listened to the soft, soothing breaking of the waves. She brought the drones down to the lee side of a tufted dune and let them photo-charge in the warm coastal sunshine.

The weather was calm, with just a light breeze, so the waves were regular and rhythmic. She enjoyed the musical feel, punctuated by an occasional stomp and snort from the impatient horse. She closed her eyes and was lulled into a trance, feeling the warmth of the sun healing her battered body.

Then the sound shifted slightly. She opened her eyes, expecting to see a person—a seabutter harvester, perhaps, or a turtle or dolphin surfacing in the shallows. She saw something, but it looked more like a large jellyfish, larger than usually seen in the Gulf. It was ascending from the waves, forcing them to break a few meters further out than normal.

The whatever-it-was rose further from the water. She could see that it was slick and translucent. It looked a bit like the exterior of a ctenophore. She glanced towards Alfred, but he was a barely-visible dot where the strand met the sea in a vanishing point. She looked for Kittykitty, but he had ducked into the dunes, chasing something that rustled.

The horse nickered softly. D.D. led him to a post holding the splintered remains of some sort of plywood sign, the paint of the sign and the glue of the plywood long destroyed by the P. davisii machine sickness pathogen. She tied the horse clumsily, never taking her eye off the shape that was forming in the surf.

She woke the drones and summoned one with a large, flat back. The flock flittered and trilled a quick negotiation, and the one in her hand was designated a viewscreen. The layered chromatic cells of its skin rotated through the view of each of its cohorts’ eyes, and the sensory images, from their photosensitive skins.

She walked all the way to the water’s edge. A braver wave scooped around her feet and robbed them of the sand beneath. She observed that the form was loosely human shaped, but tall, taller than any human, and still growing. The rounded circuitry, characteristic of the ctenophores, penetrated its body as well.

As she watched the being, a face formed, and the body resolved into a lean woman’s shape. The face appeared wise and kind, broad-templed but narrow-nosed, surrounded by kinky hair that peeked out from the cowl formed by the aquatic mantle around her head. Even though the skin was bluish and opalescent, she recognized the features as North African. But the woman’s body retained the ten arms of the ctenophores, tentacles like a cuttlefish or octopus radiating out from where her shoulders would be.

The tentacles reached out for her nine flying ctenophores with effortless speed and precision, and the drones’ signals were silenced. D.D. put the blank display unit down on the sand. It raised itself on its tentacles and skittered into the water.

Abiba’s eyes infiltrated D.D.’s being in that moment. D.D. heard a voice, but Abiba’s lips were not moving.

She pulled her simple communications trilobite from its pouch, but it was inert. Having exhausted its supply of energy-rich carbohydrates and related compounds, it needed to charge in the sun. She set it in the sun, and it rested, soaking up the rays.

She gaped at Abiba and tried to make sense of her words.

“Come to me, crushed one. We have been broken and damaged beyond what fire and air can repair. Come to me, and let Yemaya heal you. Come and learn why it is that we are the only ones who are human. Let the ebb and flow of the very source of work and wealth, life and joy; be one with who you are. Come; let yourself be one with the One who cannot be owned but who will always own all.”

D.D. heard most of the words as gibbering nonsense, but she was so tired and so discouraged, and the refrain made sense to her. Come, come to me, come…and she did.

She stepped into the salt surf, feeling each wave wash more of the sand from beneath her—wading up to her knees, up to her hips, her waist, the water lifting the weight of her chest off her broken ribs (an unexpected relief), and then the weight of her body lifting from her feet, and her feet from the seabed.

Abiba’s arms coiled sinuously about her. Where they touched, her pain abated. She felt a wave of nausea and a flutter behind her collarbones, and then a warmth that spread out from her middle like a gulp of brandy on a cold winter night.

At some point, the tentacle ceased being Abiba’s but did not quite become D.D.’s, and at some point earlier (or perhaps many years later) the brokenness within her knitted into perfection.

She looked down with her skin and saw the waves breaking into foam which broke down ever finer, 5/2, 3/2, ½, until it was 10-33 and there was only location and spin, nothing more, and everything more.

Consumed/not consumed

Given/not taken

Boiled/frozen

Pure/contaminated

Abiba and D.D. agreed.

D.D. melted into the waves with Abiba.

A few minutes later, Alfred returned. The white mare had regained her wind after her long run, and now stepped delicately along the liminal shifting line between sea and shore, leaving foamy footprints in the sand, which soon washed away.

He spotted the bay horse where it was tied.

“D.D.?” Alfred called.

He steered the mare into the sawgrass, but she balked when the breeze whipped its serrated blades against her sides. He saw the dog’s pawprints, but no other prints headed into the dunes. He dismounted and tied the mare next to the bay.

He stepped into the water and felt a pull, different from the delicate pull of the waves on his bare feet. This was the pull he’d come to know in his worship, when he’d had a coven and they danced sky-clad, in the days Before.

He smiled; he’d missed the presence of the Goddess in her many forms in his life, but he’d lost contact with the small, spread-out minority of other Goddess-worshippers in the Houston area when the disastrous event had occurred.

Yet he’d been unaccountably queasy at the idea of trying to find fellow pagans once the ctenophores had revived a form of social media. Perhaps he was afraid of learning the fates of his co-worshippers. Perhaps he was afraid, somewhere deep inside, that since everything in the world around them had changed so utterly, the religion would seem somehow false or frivolous.

This pull, to the contrary, was a validation. Yes, it is real. It was not all a fantasy.

His ctenophore quivered in its holster, and he pulled it out, expecting a text from D.D. The delicate creature squirmed and wiggled, flashed the word: BEHOLD, and flipped out of his hand into the water.

Before him, the waves mounded up like a water spout, wind whipping his hair and beard. A glance at the horses revealed that the wind was highly localized, tousling only him. The water spout settled into a form of a woman, ten-armed and two-faced, like Durga, like…

“D.D.?” He recognized his friend.

“Yes, it is we.” D.D. and Abiba’s voices spoke in unison. “This is the era of the transformation of what’s always been and has never been before. The photons have split, and the pattern remains. I will be with you again, I have always been with you.”

And, just like that, D.D. appeared next to Alfred—ankle-deep in the waves, her split lip and black eye gone, her face at ease from the physical pain—and, Alfred intuited, an inner pain as well. The huge luminescent blue form before them sprayed riotously out over the waves and dissolved with a patter-patter of droplets, which distinctly formed the word, “Farewell!”  The word was so clear that both of them quite naturally responded.

“Farewell, Abiba!” D.D. said.

“Farewell, Goddess!” Alfred called.

XXX.                      Lone Star

Jacob awakened to a brilliant sunrise. He flinched, hesitating before sitting up, but his neck pain had faded to soreness. He had slept better on his bed of tall, dry grass than on any night he could recall for months. The ditch to his right looked like an old agricultural drainage channel, but the fields beside it were fallow, abandoned.

He arose and turned slowly around in the powdery dawn light, but saw only encroaching grassland taking over. Here and there, the metal framework that once supported PVC-piping irrigation rigs were listing, collapsing, and corroding He could just make out a couple of small houses in the far distance, but not enough detail to know if they were occupied.

He froze, silent, for a few moments, willing any nearby humans to make themselves known. There was nobody close by, or at least, nobody who was up yet. He scuffed down the bank of the ditch to the stream below. He found it clear and running briskly. A green-golden frog croaked in surprise and hopped in—a good sign that the water wasn’t poisonous. Still…he took off his shirt and poked it into the neck of his water skin, making a crude funnel-shaped filter. That should work. He patiently scooped handful after handful into the conical hollow, letting it drip into the bottle.

Eventually, he took a small sip of the water. That was a survival trick they’d taught each other on the march from the camp: whenever they took on water at a new source, they sipped slowly and went mostly thirsty for the first day or two. Those who disregarded the precaution and profligately slaked their dry mouths and throats sometimes suffered the consequences with wretched dysentery. A few had even died.

Jacob relieved himself behind a small copse, set his bearing by keeping the rising sun on his left, and began walking south on the dirt trail that ran before him.

By noon, he could see that the vast sheets of the flatlands had given way to rumpled blankets of woody hills, with a streak of sand here and there. That sand, and the seabreeze that came from what he’d reckoned to be East, confounded him. He’d thought he was heading straight for the Gulf, but he should have hit the swamps and salt marshes by now. When the sun had gotten high, depriving him of his best navigation aid, he’d watched for the trails he was following to curve. They’d seemed to go straight southerly, but now he wasn’t so sure.

He found a grove of dark-trunked trees and sat in their shade for a long rest; once the sun began to descend, he’d know which direction was which again.

He was sitting on something hard. He wiggled his butt, and it dug into his flesh. He reached under himself. To his delight, it was a whole pecan. He looked up and realized he was in an abandoned pecan grove. He cracked the nut in his hand. It split with little pressure, and he found it brown and rotten within, but quickly found another, which yielded brown, delectable meat.

He scoured the ground and soon had a good-sized pile of solid brown nuggets. He cracked them with two stones and picked the rich centers into his mouth until his stomach was more satisfied than he could recently recall. Then he spent some more time scrabbling through the low grasses and weeds until his pockets were bulging with as many as they’d hold. He began to wonder why he’d thought the camp had anything to offer him in the first place.

He’d also cleared a patch of soft grass in the process, so he took a quick nap, then woke up to see a doe and two yearling fawns inches away. He wished he had a firearm, but then he figured by the time he’d gotten it up, the graceful ungulates would be gone anyway. He sniffed, they heard, and they pogoed a ridiculous, wanton, gliding retreat through the shade of the trees. His nose crinkled in a smile that would permeate the rest of his day.

The sun had moved west, and it was indeed on his right, the direction he’d thought when he faced the way he’d been going. He deduced that the forced march must have taken him further west than he realized, and he was heading south into what used to be Texas. He pondered that a moment. He couldn’t really say how many days they’d been on the move; the physical rigors, deprivation, mental abuse, and uncertainty made the whole period into a kind of opaque mirrored object which his mind refused to examine. He wished he had a map. He thought the coast ran kind of diagonally northeast-southwest, but now he wasn’t sure.

“Only thing to do is to keep walking.” No one else was there, but it felt good to hear a human voice, even if it was just his own.

As the afternoon shadows lengthened, he passed through a village with a trading post. The post was occupied only by its owners, a middle-aged couple, lean and sunburnt, who slowly looked him up and down, noting he was unarmed, and then invited him to sit with them on the porch they’d added on to the former gas station. They confirmed he was approaching the Texas Gulf Coast, near what used to be the town of Beaumont. They let him shelter overnight in a vacant vendor stall out back.

In the grey light of dawn, the woman, whose name was Leah, came to him with a piece of fresh crusty bread and a cup of steaming chickory.

“I can’t pay for this—” he began.

“Pay it forward,” she told him. “Our boy made it back here from college in Lubbock on foot because people helped him out along the way. He’s got a good farm and a good wife and kids now. You kind of remind me of him.”

“Thank you.”

After he rolled up his bedroll, he picked up all the scraps of miscellaneous rags, wire stubs, and wood scraps from the floor of the stall he’d slept in. He carried them all to the burn pit and tossed them in. It took three trips.

On the third, Mark, the man, came up and shook his hand. “Hey, good luck, man.” He pressed a paper packet into his hand. “Turkey jerky. For the road.”

“Thanks, man. Thanks a lot.”

He set out down the dusty road, and soon it turned to a long, straight sand track. He began to pass side trails with ornamental plantings and well-kept homes by the roadside with mules and horses, cows and pigs, and vegetable gardens. An overall feeling of modest prosperity was the general impression.

He heard a buzz and waved his hand at his neck, then realized it wasn’t one of the biting flies that pestered one hereabouts. The buzz grew louder. He turned around and a small vehicle resolved in the distance. As it grew closer, he saw it was a small four-wheeled recreational vehicle. He watched it approach and come to a stop.

The young woman driving it smiled at him. Plump, ripe lips showing pink gums and strong white teeth. He already felt good, and the warmly glowing grin outlined in her smooth chestnut-brown skin amplified that good feeling. She was around his age, plump and muscled, her hair covered by a yellow batik bandanna.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey back at you. My name’s Jacob.”

“Latoya. Where you headed, Jacob?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere I can find work, I guess.”

“Well, I’m headed home to the Bolivar Pensinsula. Lots of work there if you don’t mind starting at the bottom.”

“What do you mean, the bottom?”

“Well, they’ve got a big seabutter industry. You can almost always find work packing seabutter and moving inventory in the warehouses. But there’s lots of other work there, too. Lots of trade, lots of business; people need work done. But sometimes you got to get your hands dirty.”

“No problem with that. I spent the last two years at work in the cotton fields at an emergency camp in Louisiana.”

“Damn! That sounds like a tough time.”

“Sure enough.”

“I’m coming back empty after delivering a load of fresh fish in Beaumont. You want a ride onto the Peninsula?”

“You know I do, girl!”

“Get on!”

As he approached the vehicle, he said, “How this thing run? The gasoline…”

“Oh, it don’t run on gasoline. Alcohol.”

“That right?” He gathered himself onto the platform behind her and held onto a metal bar. She smoothly accelerated down the road. He was amazed how good it felt to be moving along with a motor underneath him. And the charming driver made the experience even sweeter.

This was a good day, indeed.

In short order they were buzzing down the road onto the Peninsula, and Latoya waved at almost everyone they passed, an easy wave of her fingers with her palm still on the handlebar. The horse- and mule-back riders and pedestrians they passed turned curious glances at Jacob. Eventually, she pulled into a flat gravel lot outside a big building, a log cabin above on tall coastal stilts below.

“I’ll just drop you here at the Partnership’s headquarters. Unless there’s somewhere else you’d rather go?”

He looked up at the building, looked at her, took a quick breath and opened his mouth, closed it.

“You can look for work at the exchange inside.”

He stood looking up at the building. She revved the ATV, circled the lot to exit the driveway, and stopped before she passed.

“I guess this is goodbye, then,” he said.

“I guess so.” She paused a beat. Two beats.

Now. “Can I see you again?”

She grinned. “I’d like that. I come by here every morning to look for delivery and transport jobs. About an hour after sunrise.”

A light kindled in his chest. “I’ll see you then!”

“Bye, Jacob! Good luck!” and she was gone.

He climbed the steps and opened the screen door, entered the wraparound screen porch. Inside, mismatched patio furniture in wood and wicker held similarly mismatched people, young and old, mostly white and brown, but a few African-descended faces too. They chattered in a mix of Spanish and English. Some of them ate or drank, some just talked; some whittled or carded wool or cotton, others played cards. Several groups of children played: toddlers on quilts on the floor; preschoolers rolling balls, playing dolls, or chasing each other to and fro.

He shifted from foot to foot awkwardly until a man in a rocker took notice of him. “Can I help you, young man?”

“Uh, yeah. I’m looking for work.”

The man swung his feet to the floor and got up. He stuck out his right hand. “Jeremy.”

“Jacob.” They shook.

“Let me show you the job board, Jacob.”

Jeremy opened the door and they went down a short corridor into the big building. The vaulted room held rows of picnic tables with attached benches. A stage at one end was empty, dark, and silent. He also saw rows of bulletin boards that lined the far wall, and as he turned to scan the entire voluminous space, he saw the wall they’d entered through was full of small offices with open windows to the interior. Some were curtained off, but others were open and seemed to be shops or restaurants. The smell of something cooking made his stomach growl. The jerky Mark had given him that morning was long gone, and he had put a lot of miles on his young body—once fleshy, now scrawny.

“What kind of work you looking for? Manual labor?”

“I guess. I’ve waited tables and drove Uber for a while when I was in school.”

“And since the machine sickness?”

“I worked growing cotton at a camp.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It is what it is.”

“Well, these jobs are all manual labor. You know how to handle horses?”

Jacob snorted. “I come from New Orleans!”

“Never mind this board, then. You know how to handle firearms?”

“Well enough. I’m not a crack shot, but I know you point the open end at what you want to put a hole in.”

Jeremy chuckled. “Well, there’s police work up here, too.”

“I’m not a cop.”

“Oh, they’ll train you. No such thing as cops any more, not as such. It’s all private security. No government to speak of.”

“That sounds kind of Wild West!”

“Not really. Those private firms don’t want to get sued, so they’re pretty good at de-escalation.”

“How can they get sued if there’s no government?”

“Yeah, it’s kind of different from what you’re used to. Speaking of which, when you sign on for the job, you also accept an employment court jurisdiction. There are four main ones hereabouts…and three reconciliation firms.”

“Reconciliation firms?”

Jeremy sighed. “Courts which reconcile the decisions of different jurisdictions. Look, all four of them are pretty fair, and mostly the same for the type of work you’re looking at. I’ll leave you to it. I’ll be outside if you have any questions.”

He walked out to the porch, but he’d barely settled into his chair before Jacob was back at his elbow.

He had a slip of hempen paper he’d pulled down from the board in his hand. “What’s this Pn?”

“A Pelican. It’s the money we use hereabouts. Mostly.”

“And what’s this symbol mean?”

“That’s the trilobite messaging code. You got your trilobite, yeah?”

“Umm…”

Jeremy sighed and pulled his ctenophore out of the pouch that hung next to the holster on his belt. “These second-generation ones don’t look much like trilobites any more, but the name kinda stuck.”

Jacob squatted, fascinated, while Jeremy summarized the capacities of the tentacled creature. “Where can I get one?”

“Did you ask where to get a trilobite?” boomed a voice nearby. A broad-beamed and matronly Latina smiled at him. “I sell them! Got a new batch fresh from the sea in the tank inside.”

“Liliana does keep ‘em healthy, and it’s easier than catching your own,” allowed Jeremy.

“I have no money.”

“Well, you’ll just have to catch one, then, won’t you? Sorry, Lil.” Jeremy winked at her, and she winked back.

“How can I get in touch with these jobs if I don’t have one?” mused Jacob, frustrated.

“Which job you looking at?”

Jacob held out the paper again, and Jeremy looked. “You’re in luck.” He shouted, “Hey, Sam!”

Another man walked over, also dressed in canvas jeans, leather boots, and a Western-style shirt with pearl snaps. “Sam, this is Jacob. Jacob’s interested in your loading dock job.”

Sam looked hard at him. Jacob met kind blue eyes. “I pay well.”

“Yes, sir,” Jacob said. “I saw you pay three Pelicans, more than almost any of the other jobs.”

“That’s right. I pay well because the work’s hard. I don’t accept any slacking. You don’t get any breaks, and if you can’t keep up the pace, I’ll fire your ass so fast your head will spin. That clear?”

“Clear enough, sir.”

“Let me see your hands.” Jacob held them out and Sam turned them over, palm up. As he observed the distinctive scars and callus pattern, his mien softened.

“Cotton. And pulling cable?”

“Ropes, sir. I was in a cotton camp, and we were pulling oversize loads of gun cotton on ropes out west.”

“A camp refugee, huh? How’d you get free?”

“The gun cotton went up in flames. No one was watching, so I took off.”

Sam whistled, dropped Jacob’s hands. “Well, good to have you, Jacob. Let’s get the formalities out of the way.” He pulled out his trilobite and began to fiddle with the screen. “Open end contract, at-will, you give two weeks’ notice.”

“Hell, Sam!” blurted Jeremy. “He just got here, cut him a break.”

“Okay,” Sam looked chastened. “No notice needed either way. Bluebonnet Law okay with you?”

“I guess.” He glanced at Jeremy, who gave a slight nod and shrug.

Sam looked over Jacob’s shoulder as he scrolled through the brief employment contract on the trilobite’s screen. “Pretty basic stuff. Any questions? Problems?”

Jacob hesitated. It had been so long since he’d had the autonomy to decide what to do, let alone what terms he’d do it on, that he felt a tiny surge of panic. He looked at the two men, and his gut said they were alright. “No, sir.”

“Good man.” Sam put the trilobite to his lips, its ten legs waving, “Spiralchain voiceprint encryption for employment contract. Sam Hall, employer. Agree to hire Jacob—”

“Johnson.”

“–Johnson.”  Sam held the ctenophore away from his mouth, hand cupped over it, and whispered, “Say, ‘agree to work for Sam Hall.’”

“Agree to work for Sam Hall,” said Jacob. He eyed the squid-bodied being curiously.

“Excellent. The warehouse is about a mile from here. Where you staying?”

Jacob stammered.

“Oh, you’re really new! No place to stay yet?” Sam clapped him on the shoulder. “There’s a bunkhouse by the warehouse. Used to be full of my workers when I first opened, but now everybody’s making so much money round here, they turn up their noses at it. It’s not the Ritz, but there’s water and shelter, straw pallets to lie down on.”

“I’d be grateful. It’s been a minute since I slept indoors,” Jacob said.

“Let me buy you a bowl of Sally’s seabutter-and-bean stew. She makes some fine cornbread, too. I’ll take it out of your first day’s wages.”

Sam led the way inside with Jacob on his heels, stomach growling.

An hour later, sprawled out on a straw mattress with a belly full of beans and cornbread, the memory of Latoya’s smile swimming in his mind, he sighed contentedly. He felt vaguely disturbed by the unfamiliarity of the emotion that welled up within him.

At last, he recognized it—hope.

XXXI.                  Recognition

Jessica felt pretty good about it all.

She’d had nothing in the little hollow worth going back for. It was getting colder, so she went to Ms. Tamlyn’s place and offered to do her chores in exchange for meals and a place to sleep in the barn. Since her husband had died, Ms. Tamlyn had sold off livestock one at a time for sustenance, so the capacious barn was occupied by a handful of sheep, two donkeys, and a milk cow. A coop of chickens leaned against the wall.

Ms. Tamlyn was delicate and elderly, so there was much about the farm that had been neglected or haphazardly patched together. Jessica was young, strong, and had both mechanical aptitude and the willingness to get her hands dirty. She’d rebuilt gaps in fences that Ms. T. had just piled up branches in front of. She’d repaired the pump handle that kept falling off the manual pump. She’d fixed the chicken wire where the bobcat had slipped through and left a pile of bloody feathers in one end of the coop and a clot of terrified biddies on the other. The stall floors were mucked out and the floors threshed, and the donkeys had been curried until they gleamed like thoroughbreds.

The best thing was that the farm backed up on the graveyard of the church. After each day’s work was done, she had only to hop the fence, cross the cemetery, and exit through its simple stone archway to attend the AA meeting at the church.

“Hi. My name is Jessica, and I’m an alcoholic.”

“Hi, Jessica,” in chorus.

“This is a really big week for me. All the harvest’s in and the winterizing work hasn’t started yet, so Ms. T said I could take time off. I’m planning to go to Bolivar and see my son.

“The people who are keeping him are good folks. They have a child a year or so younger, a girl. She and Ozark must be practically brother and sister now. But somebody told me that Ozzie was asking for me. I was afraid he’d…” her voice caught, “forgotten me. Maybe it would be better if he had.

“I wasn’t a good mother when I was drinking. I don’t know if I’m ready to be a good mother now. But these last months of sobriety, once I stopped craving booze every waking minute of every single day, I realized I was craving him—craving my baby. I guess I’m afraid I might use a person as a substitute for my substance of choice. I don’t know what’s normal maternal instinct and what’s stinking thinking.”

After a minute or so of silence, the day’s leader said, “Thanks for sharing.” The meeting moved on to the next hopeless drunk.

###

The next morning, as usual, Jessica sat up and put her feet on the floor as soon as the first pale shade of blue washed across the sky. She poured a splash of water from her pitcher into her basin and rinsed her face, brushed her teeth with a dab from a jar of minty clay, and poured the residual water into the dirt outside the back door of the barn.

She put her few belongings into a leather knapsack and walked to the corner of the barn. She walked around the marvelous machine she’d tinkered together there: a riding lawn-mower whose engine she’d disassembled and painstakingly converted to run on ethanol, using carved bone, shell, and horn for hard plastic parts and wool felted and boiled in condensed milk for rubber seals and gaskets. She’d constructed a seat out of wood scraps and rags, stuffed with straw and wool, suspended on springs and protected under a canopy of bamboo and waxed canvas.

She admired the rustic pioneer-steampunk effect and then turned to a tank nearby, whence she scooped out a 1G ctenophore, eight-legged, obedient and passive, that she’d coaxed to grow around a cluster of simple electrical relays and switches.

She carefully blotted the metal parts dry and packed more beeswax around them where the ctenophore’s circuitboard nervous system interpenetrated. She plugged the relays to matching relays embedded in a tortoise’s carapace she’d custom-fitted to the dashboard of the yard device. She wrapped the animal in rags and carefully dampened them from her waterskin. Jessica traced her fingers over the skin of the mollusk and colors streaked behind them, which varied in hue and intensity with her hand’s speed and pressure. The motor sputtered, caught, and came to life.

She smiled and settled her waterskin behind her. She steered with light touches as she pulled the miscegenated beast-machine out the doors of the barn. “Sit. Stay,” she told it with her fingers as well as her words, and was elated when the animal trilled in response as it obeyed. She hopped off the seat and closed the barn door so the more basic beasts wouldn’t wander off. Then she turned in the drive, and was on her way.

The roads she followed were dirt, sand, and gravel, incongruously bordered by miles of concrete curbstones which had survived the bacteria that digested petroleum and plastic alike into water. Those concrete curbs were now mostly buried by grasses and weedy ground-cover vegetation that crept inwards from the edges, assimilating the extra lanes that went unused by the shrunken population.

The frugality that had overtaken her in her newfound temperance felt satisfied by the economy of it: no route was found where it was not needed; no highway led where nobody meant to go. So much better than the excess of expressways and cloverleaves that made for more buildings, that made in turn for more roadways, in an endless orgy of more, more, more! She had actually missed that more before she sobered up. Now she was content.

It was a recurrent theme in the meetings she’d been to lately: people consumed by grief from deaths of loved ones, homes destroyed. Adding insult to injury, their comforts and conveniences vanished: TV, video games, endless hot showers, fast food, frozen microwaveable snacks…there was one comfort that was easy to make and find, though. Alcohol: booze, beer, mead, wine, and all the barely-swiggable versions of homemade buzzjuice people had learned to ferment in prisons, camps, or boarding schools, or the somewhat better stuff they’d learned to distill from their great-grandparents.

People still grew and smoked weed (though less-potent varieties had made a comeback since the loss of PVC irrigation and cheap electricity), and there was a brisk trade in recreational poppy products as well as the milder tinctures of cannabis and papaver. Those were all part of the thriving market in herbal medicines of all types which had sprung up after the loss of regulatory regimes.

She hummed an old Irish tune she’d heard in a pub on a long-ago Saint Patrick’s Day:

O grádh mo chroidhe mo crúiscín,—
Sláinte geal mo mhúirnín.
Grádh mo chroidhe mo crúiscín lán, lán, lán,
O grádh mo chroidhe mo crúiscín lán.

But then she remembered the English words to the verses and internally admonished herself to silence. One day at a time.

It was in contemplative internal silence that she rode the long drive down the peninsula. The spruced residences, well-kept roadways, and public spaces bespoke the prosperity of this community. Bolivar was among the first to exploit the bounty of seabutter to feed the interior of what used to be the great state of Texas.

She approached Gaby and Jeremy’s home: a big house on tall stilts surrounded by a wraparound, porch-style balcony. She pulled up to the chain-link gate and hesitated.

Two older kids ran up and down the yard, kicking a brown soccer ball: a boy and girl creeping up on adolescence, and a barely school-aged younger girl with them, bronze-skinned with black hair: Pablo, Maria, and little Martha, whose acquaintance Jessica had made by stitching up a cut in her scalp. These were Gaby’s children by her first husband, a soldier who’d died (as did most soldiers then). He’d been killed in a stupid accident during the military mobilization just After, when the machine sickness had thrown society into disarray.

She scanned the yard and spotted two younger children, who were building something out of rocks and shells and wooden blocks in the shade. Above them, on elevated structures, their mother was completing some task on a sawhorse table. A girl was in the light; a toddler, fairer-skinned than the other two. A preschool-age boy, also dark-haired, was hunched on the ground in the shade, his back turned.

She realized the girl must be Gaby’s daughter Deirdre, and her heart leapt as she realized that the boy must be her own son, Ozark. Her mouth was dry, and a spike of fear penetrated her chest.

She must have stayed frozen for longer than she realized, because Pablo had approached the fence. His eyes, so brown they were almost black, regarded her from under lush lashes. “Hello, Miss? Can I help you?”

“Of course you don’t recognize me. I’m Jessica.”

He nodded expectantly.

“Ozark’s mother.”

His eyebrows jumped, and he said, “Oh! Oh, we didn’t know you were coming! Hold on, let me get Mom.”

She felt helpless as she watched him walk the considerable distance across the yard and talk to Gaby. Both of them gestured in her direction and looked at her several times. Pablo then trotted out to rejoin the two other kids at their ball game. For a while, nothing happened.

Jessica quelled her impatience by tipping a small amount of water into the compartment where her trilobite controller lived, then looked up. Gaby had picked her own infant, Deirdre, and called out to Martha, pointing at Ozark. She strode towards the gate with Deirdre on her hip, and Martha walked over to watch the boy.

Deirdre’s fist was in her mouth, and she looked at Jessica impassively.

Gaby, however, greeted her warmly.

“Hey, girl! We sent word to you a few months ago…”

“—Yeah, that guy found me over the summer on his way west. I wasn’t in any state to see anybody right about then.”

“Yeah? So, what’s changed?” Gaby was frank.

“I’m clean and sober ninety days. I intend to stay that way. I want my boy back.”

“Four months is a long time for a little one his age. He asks for his mama, but I’m not sure he really knows what he means by it.”

“Oh, a child always knows his mama!” The comment fell into silence. “Wait, you’re not…surely…Gaby, I’ve gotta see my boy.”

“Sure you do. He’s yours. I’m just saying.”

Gaby undid the latch and opened the gate, which swung easily on its hinges. Jeremy always liked things done right and kept up properly.

Jessica mounted the vehicle and idled up to the edge of the slab, then dismounted and entered the sheltered area.

Ozark was hunched over a board with geometrically shaped holes cut in in it, trying repeatedly to place shaped blocks into the correct shaped holes. He didn’t even glance up, but took a triangle and tried systematically to fit it in a star-shaped hole, turning it several times, then discarding it and picking up a stumpy cylinder, trying first one end and then the other, then dropping it and picking up the next. Jessica fought the urge to help him as he picked up the star and tried to fit it, unsuccessfully, twisted it ninety degrees and tried again, frowned at it sternly, and pounded it on the hole a few more times.

He jiggled it, and it slipped into the hole. She let out the breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. With a quiet snort of satisfaction, Ozzie took the star out and carefully fitted it back in, then dropped it through and moved on to the square hole.

She stepped forward then, and Ozark saw her homemade leather boots first, then followed her legs up with curious eyes until he came to her face. Jessica’s eyes mirrored his own jolt of recognition: self of self, chromosome to chromosome. She squatted down.

He flinched. He fluttered his hands. To her consternation, he began to shriek and bawl. His lips pulled back for an ugly cry. She reached for him to hold him and he wallowed backwards, leaving a handful of shirt in her hand, which she grasped for an instant and then let go.

She got up and backed away, palms out. Maria swooped in, picked him up, and perched him awkwardly on her prepubescent hip. She cooed and clucked and Ozark gradually calmed down.

Jessica wiped a silently transgressing tear from her own cheek.

Ozark had his face on Maria’s shoulder, his head turned away, and after his crying subsided, he lifted his head and mashed the other cheek into her arm. He scrutinized his mother cautiously.

“Ozzie? Baby? It’s me, your mama.”

“It’s okay, Ozzie, it’s your mami. You’re fine,” soothed Maria at her elbow.

He raised his head. Maria took a step closer. Jessica stepped closer, too. Now they were a foot apart. It seemed to Jessica they stayed that way a long time.

Finally, the toddler raised his free hand to her, and she tentatively stroked it. A ghostly smile played about his lips. She held her arms out, and he leaned towards her, let himself be taken from his foster sister. Jessica engulfed his fragile soft presence in an uncompromising embrace.

This is the most delicious feeling in the world. How could I have let this go even for a minute? I almost lost him. I can’t let that happen again, ever.

Or at least, not today.

One day at a time.

XXXII.              High Cs

Li could not believe he was in the same situation again: on a ship with no control of his destination. He’d managed to hire on to the crew of the merchant ship bound for Al Mukallah, but only as menial labor, and at no pay, no food, only a water ration, sleeping on the open deck. The voyage should have taken less than a week, and he had enough bread to avert fainting from starvation for that short a time if he rationed it—two and a third flatbreads a day, two to be safe. He’d set up his water catcher in his tiny square of space on the deck, and with his fresh water allotment, he was better-hydrated than many of his shipmates.

But then the pirates came. Li had gotten a crash course in the history of the “Somali Volunteer Coast Guard” from Abil, a deckmate who spoke some English and translated and explained things for Li. In return, Abil was allowed to wet his mouth with sips from Li’s water skin at regular intervals, a fair trade in Li’s eyes…and ears.

As he gleaned from Abil’s rambling and less than fluent explanations, two generations ago, Somalia’s government had collapsed, and Somalia’s seafaring neighbors were among the first to take advantage. The smaller fishing boats that had confined themselves to the shores of Yemen and Kenya began to encroach on their neighboring country’s fishing territory, and the fishing fleets had begun to arm themselves against the frequent skirmishes that resulted.

Then, word got around. Within a few seasons, Somali waters were being fished barren by Japanese, South Korean, Indian, and Spanish vessels, huge behemoths with processing factories and giant freezers in their holds.

The Somali boats had escalated their armaments, the battles had gotten fiercer, and when the US kicked the ascendant native government in the teeth in 2006, a new generation of young men who’d known nothing but skirmish warfare joined the fracas on the high seas.

Of course, this story came out in drips and drabs of broken English over days and weeks. “I had no idea,” Li said one day. “Now I understand what it means to be a pirate here. My girl—” he stammered a bit.

“Ah, a woman,” Abil nodded and crooked a knowing finger.

“But what a woman! You have no idea. Her name is Meala.”

“Admiral  Meala? The one who was killed by raiders at Al-Hudaydah?”

“Killed?” Li felt like he was in an elevator whose cables had been cut.

“Some say killed, some say wounded. Who knows?” Abil noticed Li’s pallor and patted his arm. “Sailors tell lies. Maybe she is alive.”

Li sunk into silence, barely following as Abil finished the story of the Somali Coast Guard.

Spent nuclear and chemical waste containers and garbage began to wash up on the shores, which further enraged the Somali coastal people. Soon, the navy that had formed to protect fishermen had morphed into kidnappers who boarded foreign ships and held the crew and the boat for ransom, which was almost always paid without bloodshed.

This proved highly lucrative, bringing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of scarce money into the impoverished, embargoed region, and so their ranks swelled. Soon, even simple container and tanker ships throughout the entire Gulf of Aden, Red Sea, and the Arabian and Indian Ocean were victims of these crimes.

By the time of the plastic corruption, the insurers of such shippers had begun to take a dim view of all the claims they were paying out for ransom and kidnapping losses. They mandated that crews be armed, and politically twisted the arms of international navies to defend them. The rewards dried up, and the perceived risk of piracy increased considerably after a few pirates were killed.

Yet the latest generation of mature Somali men had seen their land become a battleground for international powers. They’d watched their millenia-old Xeer system shunted aside, a casualty of the warfare among Islamist sharia, totalitarian dictators, and colonial powers such as the US and China, greedy for mineral and agricultural resources.

The machine sickness suddenly rendered the invaders helpless. The Islamists who got funding and armaments from Arab petrostates were suddenly broke. The US and Russian military were cut off and had no more toys or cash for their indigenous proxies (sometimes including the same Islamists, who were nothing if not enterprising, and also unencumbered by loyalty to infidels). The smiley-faced Chinese development advisors no longer oversaw regimented villages of workers who built aqueducts and laid high-speed railroad tracks.

So, naturally, some of the Somalis had returned to the profession of piracy. Their gasoline- and diesel-powered vessels forsaken for traditional dhows, they were a menace. A rare menace, but a menace nonetheless.

So it was with florid curses in Arabic and Somali, along with one lone voice cursing in Mandarin, that the dhow had been met when it fired shots across the bow of the merchant ship Miskaha. Li, unarmed and not caring inordinately about the fortunes of the traders—who’d berated them viciously as they loaded the cargo—quickly collapsed his water setup and rolled himself with it in his bedclothes under the rail.

Gunshots beat and bodies thudded, a couple of screams resounded, and the short battle was over. An inquisitive pirate had discovered him with a probing toe and unrolled him onto deck, amidst much ridicule and a few frivolous kicks.

Turned out, the cargo they’d loaded included sweets and liquors. The pirates had been happily abusing their livers and pancreases in a giddy binge, worthy to rival a first-grader whose hungover parents allowed him all the cereal he wanted on a Sunday morning. Their gaiety was punctuated by grumpy tiffs and tearful sulks—always worth keeping an eye on, since they involved grown men armed with bladed weapons and a history of post-traumatic stress. Thus, had they cruised precariously south.

The pirates didn’t particularly want to deal with the possibility of a prisoner mutiny, so they’d identified the few on board who actually gave a crap about the cargo, and dispatched them. The rest were treated, more or less, as junior associates. Li pricked up his ears when he started hearing the name of the town Al-Hudaydah on the lips of the pirates and his fellow prisoners, but the ship did not make a turn towards the coast.

“But, that was the destination I joined the crew for,” Li said to Abil. He didn’t mention it was where Meala’s fleet would have anchored to allow the troops they carried to invade Sana’a. He didn’t want any more ribbing or unwanted, empty reassurances from Abil about Meala. Besides, a fleet of religious warriors bent on invasion was probably not high on any of his shipmates’ lists of must-meet luminaries.

“It was where going most of the cargo,” Abil said, “Do you suppose they want to meet the buyers, now they eated and drinked most of their goods?”

Li squinted in the sun at the port railing as they passed the harbor mouth. But he saw no ships that resembled the ones comprising Meala’s fleet.

He saw a ferris wheel on the coast, motionless and abandoned. The plain beyond the coastline was flush and horizontal, a tan flatness. He strained his eyes for mountains beyond, but he could make out nothing in the hazy distance.

The voyage continued. The pirates moderated their intake. They put in for fresh water in Mocha, where a deep well that produced water was the only productive asset.

Li was carrying two heavy water skins when he observed two Djiboutians exchanging glances and whispers. He kept an eye on them, and when the pirate supervising them stepped away to relieve himself, he saw them take off at a run, their long legs and bare feet flashing rapidly. Li set down his water skins and followed them a short distance, hoping to find some sign of Meala, but was outpaced and stopped himself. He spoke no Arabic; his typical Asian features labeled him an object of suspicion here. He casually sauntered back to retrieve his burden and managed to blend back into the workflow at the loading zone before his absence was noted.

By the time all the water was aboard in the hold, the two youths had returned. They’d estimated their odds of survival if they struck out into the harsh Yemeni desert on their own. Now they shuffled up to the gangplank, contrite, and begged to be permitted and come back aboard, even if they had to take a flogging.

The ship sailed through the straits of Bab Al-mandab without mishap. Li began to fear that they were headed for open ocean. Besides the risk of being so far at sea in such a tiny vessel, Li began to fear that he would be carried further from Meala.

He began to accumulate discarded skins that he could mend and inflate, and bits of wood too small for repairs in his private corner of the deck. Anything that would float. He didn’t want to die afloat in the shark-infested waters, but now that he had found his heart’s lodestar and learned that she still wanted him, he was not about to be passively drawn away. Not until he knew, at least, if she was still alive.

The ship moored south of the island of Perim, and his lack of the Arabic, Somali, and Afar languages frustrated him. He could not get straight answers about their destination; Abil just shook his head and shrugged.

That night was a full moon. Li lay awake until everyone was sleeping, gathered his possessions together, including the flimsy sack of floatables he’d hoarded in hopes of increasing his survival odds, and dangled from the rail by his fingertips so that he could drop into the water with as little of a splash as possible.

XXXIII.         Skull Crumble

D.D. and Alfred walked silently from the beach to the carriage. The soon-setting sun warmed their faces, and the balmy Gulf breeze cooled their backs. Kittykitty fell in behind them, panting softly. Gulls and terns wheeled overhead. Neither of them spoke yet of what they’d experienced. Every few steps one of them would pause and take a breath as though about to speak, then break gaze and walk on as the other turned.

D.D. considered her body. The pain in her ribs was still there, but its sharp, stabbing nature was lessened. Her bruises were almost entirely resolved, faint streaks of greenish yellow beneath the skin their only residue. Where she had been scratched or gouged, her skin bore new, supple pink scars. She felt she was standing straighter, too. She felt somehow more compact and agile than she had in years.

Whatever kind of hallucination that was, it’s affected my healing as well. Almost as if my immune system was accelerated.

Alfred’s face had that starry-eyed expression he always slipped into when he began to talk about the Goddess and his neopagan religion. D.D. usually let him blither, occasionally firing a wry caveat (“if one believed in such things”) into the conversation just to bring him down to earth again.

The thing is, I have this euphoria as if I actually saw the Goddess myself. It was just some kind of a hallucinogen or psychedelic effect, some sort of chemical the ctenophores produce in their secretion that’s absorbed into the skin. Scopalamine or something of the tryptimine class.

Wait…Alfred wasn’t in the water that long. He’s acting as if he saw it too, though. Or is he?

“Alfred, what do you think just happened?” Kittykitty edged in and licked her hand.

Alfred shook his head. He looked at her mistrustfully. “I don’t think I’m ready to discuss it yet.”

“Fair enough.” D.D. gave a slight frustrated sigh.

D.D. held the beasts’ reins while Alfred seesawed the lightweight carriage through a turnaround on the narrow track. After a few minutes of cooperation, they got hitched up.

As they moved jauntily through the process, the jingles of the metal buckles and clips rang like bells, and bright, cheerful smiles lit their faces. He looks less stiff than usual, too.

She was smiling for no reason other than being by the sea, with three lovely animals and a great friend, and feeling better physically than she had in quite a while. She felt eager for whatever happened next.

The two of them flipped the traces and climbed up onto the bench in the front of the carriage. It was D.D.’s turn to drive, so she took up the reins and clicked her tongue in the corner of her mouth.

Soon enough, they were on the Bolivar peninsula proper.

D.D. craned her neck. The whole peninsula had changed its character since she’d was here before, way back at the  beginning, before they even knew what had happened to cause the machine sickness—or indeed, or that it was in fact a sickness, passed from machine to machine via their petroleum “body fluids”. They learned soon enough how it metastasized via plastic that melted and flowed in puddles and dripped and clung to hands and feet and metal equipment, to infect other machines at the slightest touch; they were still reckoning what global consequences it later caused.

The peninsula had once been a quiet backwater, dependent on snowbird retirees (for half the year) and Texan tourists eager for particularly isolated weekends by the sea.

Now, the bustle began close to the turnoff that took you down the peninsula. This intersection had once been indistinguishable from the miles of bushy vegetation and brown sea grasses, like that which D.D. once watched a murmuration of birds break from.

Was it only four years ago? It felt almost like it had happened in a different world.

But this formerly deserted stretch of salt marsh was dotted by stilted bamboo structures where people did business with passing travelers. And there were a good many travelers. In their horse-drawn carriage, they had been passed by a courier on a fast horse, several lightweight, chariot-type, single-person transports with huge wheels, and a few lightweight ATVs running on alcohol. They also noticed that there were some strangely flying birds, which turned out to be distant drones. They didn’t buzz quite the same way drones used to; since they were only organic and metallic, they had more of a muffled thrumming sound.

They stopped for the night in one of the bamboo structures. A youth came from the adjacent rafted paddock to unhitch the horses before stabling them for the night, and turned Kittykitty into a kennel situated next to an ancient Great Dane, who barely lifted his head to acknowledge him.

The two friends climbed the steps—a shallow ladder or steep staircase, D.D. couldn’t decide which to call it—and entered a huge, pleasant, airy, rectangular room, hung with fine gauze curtains all around. They allowed the breezes of the nearby ocean to cool the thatched room through the half-open sides, while mostly excluding the local flying fauna. There were curtains hung to make four stalls with straw pallets in them at one end, lightweight bamboo chairs and tables in the middle, and a small kitchen-and-cleaning area in the corner, which smelled of cinnamon, lavender, and roasting poultry.

Soon, they were seated with a glass apiece of an exquisite fruit wine. They watched their host dish out plates of roast chicken and stewed vegetables. He served it with a crispy cornbread on the side. There were three other travelers: Scott and Sheryl, a young couple sharing a stall; and a lone man, Mark. The host and hostess lived in a separate, smaller house connected by a walkway. Conversation over the meal flowed light and friendly.

“So, where are you two heading?” Sheryl asked casually.

“Down Bolivar peninsula,” said Alfred. “And you?”

“We’re headed north to Big Thicket for some hunting,” said Scott.

“Nice,” Mark said. “You hunt too, Sheryl?”

“Always have. I was the only girl with four brothers. I bait my own hooks and I can field-dress a deer.”

“You’re a lucky man, Scott!”

“I know that!” Scott squeezed Sheryl’s waist.

“Who’s in Bolivar? Family?” Sheryl said.

“I have some old friends and family there, and Alfred’s along for the ride. How about you, Mark?”

“I’m looking for work. Used to work construction. The last few years have been all about survival, but I hear Bolivar’s booming.”

The hostess chimed in: “I’d say so! We’re full up every night of the week, and we turn folks away most nights.”

D.D. smiled quietly over her dinner. It’s nice to hear ordinary talk like that. People talking about how business is, looking for jobs, going for weekend getaways…

It seemed to her it had been a million years since things felt normal.

She tried to think: it had started long before the world’s collapse. It was not her bacterium that had brought civilization down. Civilization was heading for a fall long before that; the P. davisii was just the final catalyst.

A healthy civilization would have survived it. In point of fact, what was healthy in civilization had survived—such as the willingness to help one another and a sense of personal responsibility. As they’d just recently learned, there were other civilizations, which had other strengths, that survived.

She wondered what Abiba… if she actually existed…might have brought through the fire with her? Or more precisely, the water, if you think of it elementally.

“You’re awful quiet,” commented Mark.

“Just thinking about the chemical spill.”

“Yeah, I hear the Gulf of Mexico is full of dihydrogen monoxide,” Alfred deadpanned.

“Damn! I hope it doesn’t kill the seabutter harvest!” Mark frowned.

D.D. shrugged and went to bed.

###

Late the next morning, they hitched up the carriage and continued towards Bolivar. The salt marsh gave way to sandbar and beach-island conditions. The roads became more distinct, but softer and sandier. Hard to make progress on in some spots, though there were many long stretches where it appeared that the local folk had banded together to grade the roadbed. It was funny how every convenience store had become a compact, crowded village, with the storefront as a sort of stage at the center. The solid shelters for the useless gas pumps were generally used as starting points for thatched gathering places.

The people mostly resided in simple shelters they’d constructed within walking distance. The notion of “the commons” had returned, with anything that had belonged to the defunct, hierarchical government provisionally up for grabs. Some of the former 7-11s and Piggly Wigglys served as houses of worship, but a few villages had grown up around actual church buildings, too.

She thought about seeing Gaby and Jeremy again. Since they’d named their daughter Deirdre for her, she’d had hardly had any contact with them. Martha must be getting big. She remembered the night she’d first met her, when she and Jessica and Jeremy had to kill that poor psychotic drifter.

A pang.

Jessica. Damn. No answers there. Will I be able to avoid talking about Jessica when I get home to visit Gaby and Jeremy? I hadn’t thought of that. I’m not ready to unpack all that baggage right now. Home? I haven’t really had a home since before the machine sickness hit. Long before, if you include “family” in the word “home.”

“Stop at the next crossroads and drop me off,” she said abruptly.

“What?” Alfred was driving.

“I want to go spend a couple of days by myself on the beach.”

“But, D.D., I thought we agreed it would be better for you to spend some time catching up with your old friends?” Alfred wheedled.

“What are you, my husband?”

“Hardly.”

“Well, fine. None of your business then, is it?”

“Suit yourself.” Alfred knew when it was useless to argue with his friend. He whoa’ed the team by the next crossroads shop and watched her walk around the vehicle’s rear and grab her backpack.  “Damn, you’re stubborn!” He looked down at her and shook his head.

“Tell me something I don’t know. Hey, asshole, I love you.”

“I love you too, D.D.”

She extracted her controller from her pack and slung it on her back, clicked her tongue at the dog, and walked eastwards towards the beach on a foot trail that was probably once the asphalt driveway of some private seaside retirement village.

The drones lifted off the carriage and she flew them ahead. She expected to find dilapidated, unoccupied homes, perhaps a squatter or two, or some recluse who refused to live closer to the rest of humanity.

Which is what she had a half-formed hope of becoming. She had failed so spectacularly at every aspect of her life’s project: marriage, family, kids, and finally, at the brink of what seemed her greatest success, her career.

She intended to struggle through all that in solitude, salvage what she could from the ashes, and learn to love whoever the hell she was now.

###

Half an hour or so later, Alfred pulled up to the front of Jeremy and Gaby’s home. Gaby was talking to another woman in the yard, surrounded by miscellaneous children. She turned to see who had come. Alfred was startled to recognize Jessica. He smiled quietly to himself. D.D. certainly would have been flung straight into her pot of crazy if she’d been blindsided by seeing Jessica unexpectedly. D.D. could take care of herself; he’d go check on her and break the news gently.

It looks as though the Goddess guides events after all. He smiled and waved at the women walking his way to open the gate.

XXXIV.          Snuffed Out

Mountain Breeze, once a golf resort, now thrived as a writer’s colony. Almost overnight, the second-gen ctenophores enabled a new era of uncurated peer-to-peer art and journalism, and the arts were beginning to reemerge. The Highfield crew now had neighbors. The busiest building on the hillside was the former back-nine lunch counter, now converted to a tank facility where strains of ctenophores attuned to a particular publication or artist’s feed were grown for distribution. The old Highfield Register was one of several publications with a more local focus, but the bulk of the tanks overflowed with Global Oracle ctenophores.

It was fortunate that blockchain cryptography had surged into the world’s awareness before the eupocalypse, because it had primed the transition to spiral-chain quantum cryptography. Every peer-to-peer information transfer was verified and traceable, and those trails disappearing into anonymous sources were accorded the respect such rumors deserved. Which is not to say that the wheels of rumor mills were eternally stilled; far from it. But propaganda would be orders of magnitude more difficult to create and sustain in this decentralized environment.

At the door to the tank facility, Esther bumped into Lou.

“After you,” she gestured, since he was closer to the door.

They went in and found the tanks burbling happily. Ctenophores pollywogged between the shaded indoor portions and the parts that extended through the wall, allowing the creatures to float in the sun outside and recharge or cool off as their needs dictated.

“Helloooo?” she trilled. Nobody answered. Lou rang a bell that sat on the counter.

A groan came from the floor, and the two exes came around to check it out. A figure lay supine. They recognized the day worker at the tank farm—a young woman named Daisy, whose courtesy and efficiency made her invaluable to the enterprise.

Daisy did not look courteous or efficient now. Her eyes were sunken in purplish pits, her mouth was dry and her swollen lips were peeling. She gave off a sour, fermenting, febrile odor. Esther bent over her, and she coughed.

“So cold. So cold.”

“It’s a lovely warm Fall day, Daisy.” Lou bent over her. “Her forehead’s burning up.” He unconsciously wiped his hand, damp with her sweat, on his pants leg.

Lou and Esther’s eyes met over the sick woman’s body. Esther pulled out her ctenophore. “I’ll call the doctor.”

They brought Daisy some fresh water and held her head up while she drank it. The doctor walked in just as Daisy brought the water back up. She coughed and gagged, splattering her benefactors.

“Thanks for coming. She’s bad.”

“I’ve seen a couple of these, just today. Looks like some kind of twenty-four-hour bug. Help me get her to bed.” Dr. Chaprata, a Pakistani woman, was temperamentally suited to this type of small-community medicine. Once they’d basically dragged the sick woman to her little suite in the rear of the building, she bent over her and assessed her more thoroughly.

“She looks really bad off,” Esther said.

“Not as bad as the guy I saw earlier. He had three wooden horses in his rectum.”

“Really?”

“Yes, but now his condition is stable. Really, though, this is a bad virus. Can one of you stay with her? She needs to drink fluids. We could take her down to the infirmary,” a small hospital Dr. Chaprata and some other practitioners had established in the valley, “but she’ll probably get better faster if she just rests.”

“I will,” Esther said. Lou and the doctor left, and Esther sat down with a wide-backed ctenophore to work on tagging the uploads for the day.

Lou, in the meanwhile, walked downhill to his own cabin. The lovely Nora was arranging red leaves and pine cones in a vase on the table. A cinnamon fragrance wafted through the air. Nora kissed him distractedly. “I’m a little tired. I think I’ll lie down.” She rubbed her eyes. To Lou’s dismay, her fingertips left purple bruises behind. She suddenly had two black eyes.

“Are you alright? The doctor says there’s a twenty-four-hour flu going around.” He caught her hand. Hot.

She coughed.

“Just leave me alone. I need to lie down!” Nora said with uncharacteristic irritability. She stumbled down the short hallway and barely got herself under the covers before she was asleep.

Lou frowned, but he still went off to work. The quantum spiral-chain Highfield Register might only have a few thousand subscribers, but he was still a publisher and commentator, and always would be. He took his pad and pen and began to write.

He became absorbed in his work; hours passed. Someone knocked on his door, and he looked up and realized he was hungry. Nora usually fed him, so he’d gotten out of the habit of feeding himself.

He rose and opened the door to Esther. She had a devastated expression. “It’s Daisy. She’s not breathing. No pulse.”

Lou said, “You’re kidding!”

Esther’s expression told him it was no joke. “Let me just check on Nora; she’s sick too.” He went to the bedroom, where his recent bride was huddled under the covers. He touched her forehead, which was still hot, and told her, “I’m just going up the hill to check on Daisy.” She murmured something.

He and Esther walked quickly up the steep mountainside together. Esther paused at the threshold, then followed Lou in. Lou checked Daisy, and confirmed she wasn’t breathing and had no pulse. Still warm, but then she’d been feverish. Her black eyes had spread further down her face, and her lips were pulled back to reveal teeth rimmed in blood. Her arms showed deep black bruises where they’d supported her while bringing her to bed. He flipped the covers back. She wore a sleeveless shift, and he saw her legs were as purple as a soccer player’s who’d forgotten to wear shin-guards.

“What should we do? Should we do CPR?” he said.

“No point in that. She’s been without pulse for at least as long as it took me to walk down and us to walk back up. Half an hour? She’s gone.” The scene had a grim, unwanted familiarity; Lou and Esther had seen so much death and illness together in the past few years.

“Let’s call Dr. Chaprata. She should know who can handle the body. I’ll call Danny,” the owner of the tank farm, “and see if he’s got a family contact for her or anything.”

They made their calls. Daisy had a brother in the valley who was called and would be here soon. Dr. Chaprata was not answering her ctenophore, which was not like her at all.

“I never saw a dead person before the eupocalypse,” Esther said.

“Yeah, we’re more able to be matter-of-fact now. Death comes to us all.”

“But still, it hasn’t lost its sting.” She sighed.

They looked down at the cadaver that had been their acquaintance. Lou’s mind began to wander, and he realized he wasn’t hungry any longer. He also felt the chill that had swept over him when he saw the dead body grow more intense—despite the unseasonably warm afternoon sun that streamed in the window.

Esther coughed.

###

Global Oracle

Mountain Breeze, South Carolina

Mountain Breeze Extinguished

Cindy Nguyen

With the death of its last resident, the village of Mountain Breeze in the Semihawa region of South Carolina died out today. Cindy Nguyen watched all eighty of the village’s other residents die of a mysterious illness. Nobody who’s fallen ill has survived more than 36 hours. The village has been effectively quarantined and the illness so far shows no signs of becoming a spreading epidemic. Ms. Nguyen remains alone in the village, bedridden, and plans to continue streaming video as long as she is able.

XXXV.               Flotsam

Once Li dropped into the water, he clung to his float and let the soft current pull him away from the boat. The dark mass of the vessel on the horizon grew smaller and smaller beneath the gleaming orb of the moon and its dazzle on the water. His anxiety subsided. He had figured the tide correctly, so it was washing him towards the mainland. He looked north, and then down at the water that supported him.

To his surprise, as his eyes adapted to the loss of the moonlight and its reflection, he saw patterns of light that swirled here and there. There seemed to be more of them closer to him. It only took him a moment to recognize the patterns: they were the same as the patterns inside the ctenophores. He watched them bob and dip about in the water around him for a few minutes, and became quite convinced that he was seeing the aquatic beasts. They were moving in a loosely Brownian motion, but amongst the randomness, they unhurriedly formed into a school about him in a reversing and concentric spiral.

He felt one run into his right calf, and he flinched. Not that it was painful; the small animal’s soft body lacked the capacity for the slightest violence. Then another brushed by his lower back. His upper back. His left buttock. The bumps grew more and more frequent, and they all came from roughly the same direction, even when he spun in the salt water. No single bump was enough to change his direction appreciably, but the relentless soft taps slowly and surely propelled him shorewards.

Eventually, the bumps tapered off, and he straightened his legs experimentally. His toes touched solid sand, and he found his footing. He was in water up to his armpits. He waded ashore, gravity aggressively claiming his body and wet clothes and gear.

Li fell heavily on the sand. He panted a bit as his heart and lungs caught up with the changes in weight and pressure. He took his ctenophore from its pouch and prodded it awake.

“Meala?” Meala. Send.

He waited and waited. No response. He could not—would not—believe she was dead. But then, why isn’t she answering?

The landscape was not inviting in the moonlight: short shrubs and dusty sand. He made for a blasted tree, the closest thing to shelter or concealment in sight. He put his float bag between its thorny trunk and his back, and leaned against it to ponder his next step.

XXXVI.          The Register, September 20, Year Three

Wendy Harkavy

Sacramento, California

[Archived edition found in the abandoned village of Mountain Breeze]

We stopped for a hiatus of some months in Sacramento. There, we met a woman by the name of Sarah Lavoie, who was kind enough to spend several days recounting her tale of the fall of San Francisco and the refugee crisis of the Central Valley. This account will intersperse our own observations of conditions in San Francisco and the Central Valley area with her first-hand records.

We crossed the San Mateo bridge with trepidation. The Bay Bridge was destroyed in the catastrophic earthquake of July 12, Year Two. Since that time, the reputation of the area that once constituted what was surely one of North America’s loveliest cities has become a place of unimaginable horror and misery. We were sure the stories were exaggerated: some of them even involved supernatural occurrences or alien presences.  However, we were concerned enough to dip into our dwindling resources to hire a team of professional bodyguards to escort us.

The bridge itself was a rust-and-concrete skeleton, its asphalt and paint components long since consumed, its long concourse formidable. Yet it was deserted, and our crossing was uneventful except for an aggressive osprey defending the territory beneath its nest.

Once we approached the end of the bridge, though, it was a different story. Our escorts had to negotiate our transit through a permanent checkpoint constructed by the dominant group in the region, the Zeta Thuggs. It was quite costly in terms of our negotiable trade goods.

Once we moved north into the formerly great city, down muddy trails that were once broad highways, we saw the effects of twin disasters: first, the looting and subsequent arson fires that occurred the year the machine sickness struck; and then, the Giant Earthquake that struck the following year. The beautiful luxury homes of Silicon Valley are piles of blackened rubble spilling down the ridges that once overlooked the rest of the area. We carefully picked our way among these ruins until we reached a vantage point overlooking the entire Bay area.

The devastation stretched for miles, but the most dramatic thing about the landscape was what we did not see: there were no signs of human movement, no smoke rising from household fires, no wagons, nor people on foot gathering in public places. Nothing. The sun was descending towards the Pacific Ocean at that time, and the Zeta Thuggs had warned us to be out of what they called the Zona Muerta before dark. We trekked into the checkpoint as darkness fell, reflecting over a long, silent walk on what had been lost.

The Thuggs tasked us with escorting a guest to the Central Valley. Slight, with a sleek brown ponytail and kind eyes that belie her inner toughness, Sarah Lavoie had spent the prior week exploring the Zona Muerta under the protection of Funesto, a lean, tall man with many scars, dressed in leather armor.

We left early the next day, crossing the bridge uneventfully. It was a journey of ten days to reach Sarah’s home in Merced, in California’s Central Valley. During that trip, we had the opportunity to get her story, which is presented in much-abridged interview form below.

WH: Were you in San Francisco when the machine sickness struck?

SL: Yes. I was at my home in Outer Mission with my three kids. My husband had a long commute…he worked as hospitality manager at California Golf Club…and so I was home alone as usual when the power failed. I worked at home doing web design, so I just took it in stride and did my stuff around the house, then played Robot Turtles—that’s a board game— with the kids. You’d been hearing about all the strange goings-on, but it was the weekend. The kids and I were just doing our own thing and didn’t worry about it. Maybe we should have.

WH: When did you realize what was happening?

SL: I think it was when my sister came over and banged on the door. “When did you last fill up the car?” she asked. It had been almost a week, because Sally—that’s my oldest—was home with the flu, and the two younger ones weren’t in school yet, so we hadn’t gone much of anywhere. Lori—my sister—had both of her kids with her, and they were carrying backpacks. “We’ve gotta get out of here!” she said. I thought she was kidding around, talking crazy, you know, but she finally convinced me that people were rioting downtown and it was spreading in our direction. She’d filled up at an infected gas station, so her car wouldn’t run.

WH: So, did you evacuate to the Central Valley at that point?

SL: No, we tried to shelter in place. Lori had some signal and some charge left on her cell phone, and so we called Walter at the country club. He said he’d heard things were going nuts, and he was on his way, so we hunkered down—just me and my sister and the five kids in our two-bedroom house. Walter showed up two days later. The house was pretty gross by then, because the PVC pipes to the street had collapsed and we couldn’t flush the toilets or take showers, so we were glad to pile into the minivan—Lori was divorced, so there were eight of us—and head inland.

WH: You went to Merced?

SL: Yeah, it was slow going…the roads were starting to melt, you know, and abandoned cars everywhere. We ran out of gas around Vernalis. That’s when they got Lori and her littlest girl…

WH: It’s okay if you don’t want to talk about it.

SL: No, it’s okay. Heather. Her little girl’s name was Heather. I almost forgot somehow. I never thought I’d forget my own niece’s name. Heather. Heather.

WH: Heather.

SL: Lori took her behind a bush to pee. I heard Heather scream, and she came running out. This big dude ran out and grabbed her and pulled her back in the bushes. I started to run after her, but Walter grabbed me. He was right. Lori had to be dead already, she’d’ve never let somebody treat her girl that way. We had four other kids to worry about, including Cody, Lori’s oldest. But I still have nightmares about that day. What if Lori wasn’t dead? What if she woke up and found we’d left her?

WH: Then what happened?

SL: Well, we made it to Walter’s parents’ place in Merced. They were set up pretty well: had stuff stored up for emergencies, a freezer full of food, a windmill, a rifle and a couple shotguns for critters. We stayed with them that Winter. Their winter crops died in the fields, of course.

WH: Why’s that?

SL: Not a lot of people realize the Central Valley isn’t natural farmland. It was set up with aqueducts and drainage projects over a hundred years ago so it wouldn’t flood, and big pumping stations to keep the irrigation water flowing. Once the PVC pipes melted, and the pumping stations stopped working, the land dried up. Then in the Spring, the rains came and the snowmelt from the mountains flowed down. The whole valley flooded. My in-laws’ house was on a little hill, but it was an island in the middle of these swampy fields. Snakes and bugs and field mice came up in the house. It was horrible! But it subsided, and they put in what seed they could salvage.

But then the Great Earthquake happened.

WH: What was that like? Did you feel it even in the Valley?

SL: We sure did! It’s quite a feeling when the ground starts rolling and bucking under your feet. Of course, I was used to quakes. I lived in San Francisco for years. But this was a big one, alright. Of course, soon we found out it wasn’t just a big one…it was the Big One that everybody here used to talk about. It took down whatever was still standing in San Francisco, San Jose, all the way down to Monterey. It gave them a good shaking even in LA, and I heard they felt it in San Diego.

WH: Wow. No wonder San Francisco looks the way it does.

SL: Yeah, it took out the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges. The city was still in bad shape from all the arson and looting. People poured out of San Francisco into the countryside. They piled into the Valley.

WH: Did they come to Merced?

SL:  Yeah, they just kept coming and coming. They set up tents, or just piles of rags and sticks, really, in the fields where the seeds were just coming up. My father-in-law ran them off at first, but the next day, there’d be twice as many, then more and more, and then the rains stopped completely and there was no point.

WH: But you made it through the Summer?

SL: I did. Cody did.

WH: And the rest? Your husband? Your children?
SL: Do you know what happens when you’ve got fifteen million extra people piling into an area the size of Denmark?

WH: What happens?

SL: You get cholera, that’s what happens. I watched my father- and mother-in-law shit their lives away. Walter and the kids recovered the first time, but another epidemic came along in the Fall, and we were all sick as dogs. I don’t know how it didn’t kill me and Cody, but we lived.

WH: Where’s Cody now?

SL: He’s with Walter’s brother. His sister-in-law didn’t make it, but Brian and his son, Walter’s nephew, Grayson, had a place that stays high and dry year-round.

WH: Why’d you leave them to go back to San Francisco?

SL: I wanted to see if there was anything left of the house. Photos, keepsakes, heirlooms…stuff like that. I have so little to remember them by.

WH: I can understand that.

SL: I used to be a teacher in the public-school system, before the kids came along. I kept thinking about my students, wondering how they’d made it. Some of them were disadvantaged, and I worried.

WH: Did you find any of them?

SL: Yes. You met one of them.

WH: Really?

SL: Funesto.

WH: Funesto? I never would have guessed! He looks so mature!

SL: He’s lived a rough life. I mean, we’ve all lived rough lives since the machine sickness hit. But Funesto didn’t have a great start. Turns out, though, that it gave him just the skillset to survive and thrive when the gangs all merged in the urban ruins. He’s a tough guy. But he remembered me. Recognized me the minute I came across the bridge. He called me “Ms. Lavoie.”

WH: I noticed he called you that. I thought it was odd. I only heard first names the whole time…

SL: Yeah, well, that’s why. That’s why. He remembered me. I certainly remembered him! One of the smartest kids I ever taught. I’m not surprised he turned out to be a leader in his community.

WH: What turned him from a community leader into a gangster?

SL: The gang is his community. The only community that ever had his back. The only community that ever gave him a framework to advance his own self-interest. The only community that ever valued what he had to offer.

WH: That’s an interesting way to think about it. So, what’s next for you?

SL: Well, assuming I make it back to Merced in one piece, I’m going to give Cody, Brian, and Grayson big hugs. I think it will give us all closure, knowing now there’s literally nothing to go back to. There are some people trying to grow some different crops—like rice, kangkong, and fish and frog ponds—which can take the annual floods. We can trade those for seabutter, too. We’re just making our way in this new world.

WH: Thanks for talking with me. I know revisiting these experiences must be painful.

SL: Yeah, well, you get numb after a while. You can only grieve for so long.

The remainder of our walking trip to Merced was uneventful. The Central Valley’s dead fields were reverting to prairie, and dead orchards made spooky scenery that stretched for miles in places. As in the rest of the country, the population clustered in small villages and moved about on horseback or on foot. We spent a night camping in the yard of Sarah’s brother-in-law, and left the four of them waving from the porch: the remains of three families banded together.

XXXVII.      One Day at a Time

With the children’s help, Alfred, Gaby, and Jessica were getting dinner on the table. Jessica and Gaby trundled plates, flatware, and cups to the table. Alfred stood in the kitchen, where his height made it a cinch to reach all the high shelves. When they were done, homemade poblano pepper sauce and mayonnaise, sea salt, sliced goat cheese, and fruit sat in the center with a big pitcher of crimson hibiscus tea.

“Bug juice,” Alfred said, “is what we used to call it at summer camp.”

“What’s summer camp?” Martha asked.

“It’s like hunting camp, silly!” said her older brother Pablo. “The whole family goes out in the woods and stays in tents, and you hunt animals and pick berries…”

Alfred smiled. “Not exactly.”

“Well, what does it mean? What does it mean, Mama?” Ozark turned his eyes to Jessica.

“Camp,” Jessica straightened a place setting, “used to be where parents would send their children when school was out, so other people could take care of them for a while. The kids could have sleepovers and the parents could get a rest.”

“What’s school?”

“School’s where you sent children all day, so they could learn things.”

“Why didn’t they learn things at home like we do?”

“Well, it was easier for people to go to work when the kids were at school, I guess.”

“But how did the kids learn to work if they were away from their parents all day?”

“They didn’t start work until they were grownups. In fact, it was illegal for kids to work.”

“Wow! That sounds great!”

“It wasn’t, honey.” Jessica paused for a moment. “We used to hate school. We couldn’t wait to get out of there.”

“Why? Didn’t you learn interesting things?”

“No, not usually. Everyone had to learn the same thing at the same pace, so you were usually bored in the classes you were good at and confused in the ones you weren’t.”

“That sucks.”

Martha deftly scooped Deirdre up from where she was worrying at the lid to the flour bin. Deirdre squealed, her pudgy toddler legs kicking. “Oh, no you don’t, little Miss! We don’t want to spend the next week sweeping and wiping up flour!”

The table set, Alfred lifted the lid to the pot on the wood stove and smelled the stew with a hum of appreciation. He stirred it with a huge ladle just as the dogs outside began to bark.

“Dogs!” shouted Deirdre, who’d just been set on the floor again. She trotted to the screen door. “Dogs!” Hoofbeats thudded on the hard-packed sand.

Alfred’s skirts swirled as he poured golden honey liquor into the colorful ceramic wine cups lined up on the counter. There were four adults eating, but only three cups. Jessica’s eyes fixed on the alcohol, and her face flickered dismay and regret for the barest instant, but she and Alfred exchanged no words.

Jessica slipped up to Gaby and gave a quick squeeze across her friend’s shoulders.

“What was that for?” Gaby smiled.

“I just appreciate you. That’s all. Thanks for taking care of my boy when I couldn’t.”

“Anybody would have done it.” Gaby waved a hand. She stepped to the windows and watched Jeremy dismount the wagon. “Pablo, run down and help your stepdad unhitch the mules.”

The boy’s lean body slipped through the screen door, and his moccasins patted down the wooden stairs.

“I’ve got to say, you look better than the last time I saw you, Jessica. Calmer somehow,” said Alfred.

“Just living one day at a time. Well, and it’s pretty hard to feel bad in this household.”

Jeremy and Pablo came in, and Jeremy swept his wife into his arms. He stroked her hair and looked into her eyes before giving her a firm kiss. He let her go, patted Ozark and Deirdre on the head, then swung his feet across the room with a child seated on the top of each boot, both children giggling wildly.

“Jeremy, so good to see you!” Alfred shook the shorter man’s hand.

“Likewise, bro,” said Jeremy. He glanced around. “I thought D.D. was coming?”

Jessica looked at them sharply.

“She was, but then she decided she wasn’t quite up to spending time with a lot of people. She’s been…going through a lot lately.”

“Hmm.” Gaby gestured towards a chair with her free hand, a platter of potatoes in the other. “Let’s sit down to eat, and you can tell us all about it.”

They sat, and Alfred told them about D.D. and her communication with the Africans, and her obsessive absorption in the new ctenophores.

“They are pretty freaky,” Jeremy observed. “We’ve started to use them to communicate with the shipping crews over long distances, and sometimes they know what we’re going to say before we even say it. It’s amazing how fast the technology has gone from walkie-talkie, to basic cellphone, to smart-phone-with-translator, to handheld tablet computer. It took petroleum-based devices decades to develop so far!”

“You don’t know the half of it!” said Alfred.

“What about the VTOL drone bike? Has anyone made any more progress on it? I had an idea about the aerodynamic stability process based on the way the ten-legs swim in tide pools,” said Jessica.

“Nobody’s touched it since you left.” Alfred rested his chin in his hands, regarding her.

“That’s sad,” Gaby said, distracted by feeding Deirdre, who was learning about the aerodynamic properties of partially-chewed potatoes.

“It is sad,” said Albert, “but when you left, your mother got kind of weird about anything that had to do with you. She didn’t exactly stand at the doorway refusing to let anyone in, but—”

“—I know how Mom can be. Terrifies people by lifting an eyebrow.”

“I wish she’d teach me that trick,” said Gaby, giving up on keeping potatoes in her giggling daughter’s mouth. She turned to her own dinner.

Jeremy patted her back. “You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.”

She smiled, leaned in. “True. And I’m the one who wound up with you!”

“Get a room, you two!” Alfred said.

“I believe this room is ours.” Jeremy punctuated his point with a soft peck on Gaby’s lips.

“Alright, alright,” said Jessica. “Ozark, do you need that rabbit cut up a bit more?”

“Oh. This isn’t chicken?” Alfred said.

“No, it’s rabbit. Pablo kills and skins them, and I help cut them up,” said Martha proudly.

“Sorry,” said Gaby.

“Oh, it’s fine. I just thought it was chicken. Hey, what do you call a chicken crossing the road? Give up? Poultry in motion!” The older kids giggled.

“Seriously though, I noticed you weren’t eating,” said Gaby.

“Sorry,” said Alfred. “I never have much of an appetite. D.D. reminds me to eat. I’ll forget for days.”

“I’ve never forgotten to eat!” said Jessica. “Although at times, I’ve forgotten that I’ve already eaten!” She reached for the ladle to serve herself seconds.

Alfred began to feed himself mechanically. The children finished their meals and asked to be excused to play outside in the fading afternoon light.

When the meal was done, the four adults retired to the living room. They settled down with tea or mead, and Alfred became more relaxed.

“Honestly, something happened with D.D. that I’m still processing,” he said.

“Uh oh! What did she get mad at you about this time? Some minor insult?” Jessica asked.

“No, no, nothing like that. D.D. and I have been best friends for two years now. We’re past that. It’s more than that.”

“Well, what is it? Spit it out,” said Gaby.

“I’m just trying to think of how to describe it. You know how the ctenophores sometimes know what you’re going to say before you say it?”

“Yes, I assumed that the predictive software had been improved.”

“I suppose that’s part of it. Although it’s not actually software. Nobody writes the code for these things. They literally evolve new code. But that’s something the AI people had been getting closer to over time anyway.

“The thing is, because the ctenophores are organic, they evolve physically as well. Change in their hardware recombines with changes in their software. And it seems undeniable now, something we’d only speculated: the aromatic nucleotide pi stacking in their DNA’s a medium for quantum entanglement.”

The other three sat impassive, staring blankly.

“That means that electrons move along their DNA molecules until quantum teleportation takes place when they hit the right enantiomeric pairing, which breaks coherence...”

He looked around. “—Crickets.”

Ultimately, Jeremy spoke. “Speaking of coherence…”

“Okay. Let’s try again. You know about Schrödinger’s cat?”

“Okay, yeah—the cat’s in the box but you don’t know if it’s alive or dead, so it’s both, until you open the box.”

“Right. Well, DNA has a way of moving electrons along its spiral that goes one of two ways, depending on the quantum spin of the electron. Quantum spins are similar to Schrödinger’s cat: you can’t know what they are until you measure them. And there’s another electron somewhere with the opposite spin. So if one DNA molecule stops the transmission at a certain point, and another DNA molecule on the other side of the world stops it at a certain point, there’s a bit…actually a qbit…of information that’s transmitted instantaneously to the other side of the world.”

So, you’re saying the new ten-legged ctenophores talk to each other through their DNA?” Gaby asked. The children’s laughter pealed outside.

“Maybe talking to each other isn’t the best way to think about it. It might be more accurate to say that, in limited and specific ways, they are each other.”

Jessica jumped in. “You say this information is transmitted instantaneously? No time delay?”

“That’s right.”

She frowned. “So, how do they know which ctenophore the signal came from?”

“Exactly! They don’t!”

Jessica shook her head, hard. “Okay, so what keeps them from interacting with the DNA of other kinds of animals?”

“Nothing, as far as we know. But remember, most animals’—and plants’—DNA is physically pretty inaccessible. It’s locked up into cellular nuclei inside cytoplasm and cell walls and membranes and tissue matrix. It’s in mollusks that it’s most exposed—more than in baby animals, more than in any plants, more than in any other type of animal cell except for embryos. I didn’t know all this until I started to talk about it with your mother. I’m more of a physical-sciences kind of guy.”

“Okay, so the ctenophores can talk to each other across the world. What does that mean for us?” Jeremy, down to earth and practical as ever.

“Well, it means a lot of things.” Alfred held up a hand. “Hear me out; I’m not being evasive here.

“It’s just that something happened the other night on the beach. Something with your mother,” he looked at Jessica. “Something which I thought was a dream or a hallucination at first.”

“Were you eating mushrooms?” chided Jessica, with a glance out the window at the children, who were playing some sort of dancing-and-dice game on the broad screened porch.

“No, no, nothing. I don’t care for hallucinogens at all. That’s what was strange. We both saw it. We both felt it.”

“What, exactly, is this it?” Jessica asked. “Is my mom okay?”

“Oh, yes, yes she’s okay. As she put it, she’s ‘better than she’s been in a long time.’ But there was someone in the water with the ctenophores. Someone larger than life. She was…a majestic presence.”

“Is this more of your pagan goddess worship stuff?” Jeremy asked. “I know it’s your religious belief, and I respect that, but—"

“No. I mean, yes, but no.”

“Now you’re in Schrödinger’s box!” said Gaby.

“What I mean is, yes, I understood the presence as the great mother goddess. But D.D.’s about as agnostic as they come, and she more than saw what I did. She…in a way, she merged with her.

“It seemed to be one of the women she’s been chatting with from Djibouti. That’s in the Horn of Africa, south of Egypt. But she’s somehow become blended, united, merged, whatever… with the quantum consciousness of the ctenophores. If you can call it consciousness.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, to be conscious, you have to be aware of time passing, right?”

“I suppose so. I never gave it much thought, but it wouldn’t mean much to experience things if they all happened at the same time, would it?”

“Or if they happened backwards as easily as forwards. Quantum coherence effects work equally well backwards through time as forwards.” The children’s thumps became louder. They were running and shrieking at the tops of their lungs and the screen door that led to the stairway kept banging.

Jessica shook her head again. “Maybe it’s because I’m not drinking. Does this make sense to either of you?”

Gaby and Jeremy shook their heads. Gaby glanced out the door, shifted to get up and check on the kids.

“You’ll just have to trust me on this. I don’t think your mother will ever be the same. But, and this sounds absurd, but I don’t know if she ever was.”

The children fell instantaneously silent. Then Pablo and Martha, the two oldest, ran breathlessly in, little Deirdre trailing Martha hand in hand.

“Come quick! Ozark’s hurt bad!” said Pablo.

“Real bad!” whimpered Martha.

Jessica was up and out the door like a shot, Jeremy on her heels and Alfred close behind. Gaby took Pablo by the shoulders. “You’re not in trouble. What happened?”

“We were playing ringle-eave-door-luck, and Ozark tried to get away from me by climbing down the outside of the steps. I grabbed for him, but he was too heavy.” He took in a deep breath.

“Mom, he fell on the threshing drum.”

All color drained from Gaby’s face. “It’s going to be okay,” she said. She released his shoulders and headed out the door. She murmured to herself, “It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay,” as she descended the stairs.

Jeremy stood over the drum of the threshing machine. “Oh, god, oh god,” he said, as Jessica knelt next to Ozark. “I was going to move the drum back into the shed, but then a thunderstorm came up. I’m so sorry.”

Jessica said, “Can you hear me, Ozzie?”

Ozark lay on his back, splayed over the thresher drum—a cylinder the size of an oil drum, studded with heavy, blunt six-inch-long steel spikes. Blood flowed from somewhere under his head. The child’s plump baby limbs lay at wrong angles.

Gaby glanced up. If he’d been at the top, he’d fallen about fifteen feet. He’d hit the squared-off ends of those rods hard.

She spoke to her husband. “Ride to the hospital.” She took her ctenophore out of her pocket. “I’m calling them now. But you can meet them on the way, or if they haven’t left yet, you can hurry them along and ride with them.”

Jeremy nodded, relieved to have something to do.

The three other children clumped around Gaby. Deirdre started moaning for her mother and Martha handed her over. Gaby spoke to the hospital. “Yes, it’s an emergency. A toddler, almost three years old, fell on a thresher. He’s unconscious.” To Jessica, “Is he breathing?”

Jessica nodded. “He’s breathing,” said Gaby into the ctenophore. To Jessica, Gaby added, “They say not to move him. They’re coming.” Jessica smoothed a lock of hair from the unbloodied side of her son’s forehead, took his limp fingers in her own.

What felt to be hours later, an enclosed wagon with elaborate spring shock absorbers arrived, and four people got out. Jeremy followed not long after.

“Hey, doc!” Gaby recognized the emergency doctor, Creekmore, from less serious visits. “It’s bad.”

“Let me be the judge of that,” Dr. Creekmore said. She examined Ozark carefully where he lay on the thresher, carefully probing the spike his head lay on. She prodded his neck, flicked his fingers and toes, and shone a ctenophore-powered flashlight into his eyes.

“Let’s get a collar on him, then lift him straight up onto the spine board.” Her technicians efficiently complied, and as he was being placed on the board, Ozark’s eyes flickered open.

“Ozark?” Jessica said, the technician securing him to the board gently blocking her from getting too close.

Ozark didn’t respond to his mother’s voice.

XXXVIII.  Opposite of Irish

The pool cabana was livable. The pool itself had drained when the pipes connecting it to the pump had melted away with the machine sickness. Someone had squatted in the main house until the accumulation of garbage and human waste (people obliviously continued to use toilets everywhere, long after it became obvious that they were never going to flush again) made it impossible for any but the most olfactorily stalwart to stand occupying them.

The walls of the big house were permeated with mold from the water that leaked from ruptured pipes and seeped from vinyl wallpaper. The plywood floors had slowly peeled apart from the synthetic glue that held them together. The nylon and olefin and polyester carpets had dissolved in days. Asphalt roof tiles meant that rain and wind now entered freely.

But the pool cabana had a clay-tiled roof and steel framing, its floor was tile (now loose, since the mastic holding the tiles to the concrete floor was gone) and the gypsum wallboard was more or less undamaged, though the paint on it had long ago run off in streaks where the P. davisii consumed the synthetic latex and left the pigment.

D.D. unrolled her bedroll and went out to gather firewood on the concrete pool deck. Kittykitty caught lizards and mice for his dinner. The beach was covered with seabutter, and she found an empty can to use to render it. That task occupied her until nightfall.

She braced the door shut and lay down, Kittykitty at her feet. One hand clutched her revolver (never did replace it with a semiauto).  The central drone unit slept by her side, its cousins perched in various spots around the periphery outdoors. She fell asleep listening to the sound of the waves breaking on the shore.

She woke at the first glimmer of dawn, acutely aware that her body had aged quite a few years and taken several beatings since the last time she’d slept on concrete. She stretched out as best she could and rolled her neck.

Making her way down the path to the beach, she disturbed sleeping birds tucked amongst the dunes. She was welcomed by the most glorious, flamboyant, multilayered sunrise imaginable. She skirted a streak of seabutter at the tide line and padded barefoot to the lapping surf, Kittykitty close behind.

She touched her toes to the top of a wave as it reversed itself. The water was cool. Nothing unusual. Another wave enveloped her feet, rising to the level of her ankles, and pulled away the sand around her feet—and then, beneath them. Kittykitty danced back.

She staggered slightly, off balance. The next wave was close and splashed her knees, and all at once nothing was solid. She lifted one foot and stepped into her own death. Or something which took her soul away from her body, so she couldn’t own her body anymore. And what is life if not the process of owning one’s body?

Kittykitty barked and forgot his fear of water. He lunged after her and became enmeshed with Abiba and a million ctenophores.

The swirl of the waves ceaselessly conveyed a message which was new with every wave. Yet the pattern of the waves was finite; the sea didn’t go on forever. Where she and Kittykitty touched the wave, they canceled it. The next wave came anyway.

And with it came Africa. With it came the spinfoam energy that bound two lovers on the coast of Yemen. With it came the meshwork of impossibly small black holes that collapsed an impossibly long time ago to make the dimensionless and omnidimensional substance of reality.

Abiba didn’t need tentacles to embrace D.D.; D.D. grew her own and soothed her loyal hound until his whimpering stopped. A raft of ctenophores bore him along.

A presence. A presence.

Abiba sensed the presence, and it was new to her, but had been in her womb when she was D.D., which was 10-33 instants ago. She and all the ctenophores wriggled and blasted and flew and rolled towards the presence and away from it, and over and under and through and around it.

Jessica stared at the sun where it ascended above the Gulf, her face puffy, her tear ducts squeezed dry. The section she was standing on had been harvested already; the harvest crews started at the end of the peninsula before daybreak and worked north, delivering their slimy, grimy delicacy to the rendering plant, which heated up early to avoid the heat of fires in the intense sun of midday.

Something was there in the waves. A dolphin? No. She passed a hand over her face. It didn’t disappear.

“Jessica.”

It was her mother’s voice, but not. Improbably, her mother’s dog floated towards her like a sunbathing tourist, sprawling on a raft of ctenophores. The raft bobbed in place a few yards out, Kittykitty’s tail wagging and thumping the beast’s skin. The dog clinched it for her. “Mom?”

The vague lump in the water coalesced into a human structure, clear and shot with spiral circuitry, then opacified and solidified into her mother. “What’s wrong, baby?”

“It’s Ozark. He’s in a coma in the hospital.”

Her mother looked as Jessica remembered her from long ago, in her prime—before the adolescent rebellion had cleaved them apart, before the machine sickness, before the misadventures that had brought Jessica to Texas.

“What happened, baby?”

“I knew I shouldn’t have let Gaby and Jeremy take him! He was my child! No matter how bad of a mom I was being, he was my baby! I shouldn’t have let him go!”

“Was it something they did?”

“Jeremy left the thresher drum at the foot of the ladder. Gaby’s brat pushed Ozark off the ladder onto it. Oh, Mom, he might never wake up. He looks so still and pale!”

Jessica froze as a barely-perceptible tendril curled around her leg, and then sighed as a wave of profound relaxation swept through her.

“Ozark’s given you all he will give you. He’s made you fully alive.” This voice was her mother’s but not—the voice of a presence she felt from far away, on the other side of the world, somehow, but still right here with them. Like a dubbed foreign film, it came from her mother’s lips.

“How?” Jessica stammered.

“To live is to own your body. You can only live if you own your body. Men can own a body but only a body, in the same manner you own a television or a house. Women are the source of life and wealth and abundance. What they own is ownership of ownership of ownership. Life after life, life after death. Women are the only ones who are fully alive.”

Jessica shook her head. The mysteries were complex enough, but her grief made them incomprehensible to her. “My baby—”

“Jessica.” This was her mother’s voice; no doubt. “Forgive.”

The word echoed from mother to daughter, owner to ownership, future to cold, past to heat. Forgive.

The sound began to build and burn like fire, ache like cancer, scream like a harpy on a cold mountaintop: Forgive.

Jessica wanted to cover her ears. D.D.’s hands were over hers. Abiba would have covered hers, but she had none at the moment. Only Kittykitty was unaffected; he held no grudges, so forgiveness meant nothing to him.

“How can I forgive them? My baby could be dying!” She sobbed the word so it throbbed, dy-y-y-y-ing.

“Forgive for yourself.”

“If I forgive, will he be alright? Will my baby be okay?”

“Forgive for yourself.”

At the moment Jessica forgave, D.D. felt something give way within herself as well. Suddenly all the scars she wore like medals slipped away from her like a fish through her fingers. Slights, slaps, punches, kicks. Frotteurs and exhibitionists. rapes and near-rapes. Robberies and scams. Threats and insults. Lies; so many lies. Men shooting at her, chasing her like a wolf pack. Betrayals: Jessica’s father. Tim. Selene and the nuns. Even the mob at the inn. They poufed out and away, in an iridescent mushroom cloud, dissolved in swirling streamers, sifting, sand falling into mud.

D.D. and Jessica stepped forward at the same moment and fell into a tear-logged embrace.

“Mom!”

“It’s okay, baby. It’s going to be okay.”

XXXIX.          Sometimes the Sun

The sun rose over the ocean, illuminating the sky with lavender and rose-gold fluff, high clotted-cream clouds that would soon burn away in the morning light. Li had dozed lightly in his spot propped against the tree trunk, and now the growing daylight was revealing just how desolate his surroundings were.

It had been thousands of years since Yemen had been anything but a desperately poor, isolated place, a starving nation among its petrowealth-replete Arab neighbors. The proxy wars of the Saudis, Russia, and China in the few years prior to the eupocalypse were an escalation of torture and neglect that had ended abruptly with the transformation of petroleum to water and carbon dioxide. The kleptocracy that thrived on black money and military aid faded into the woodwork, leaving an ungoverned and ungovernable indigenous population.

None of them were here where Li stood, now. There were: barely-discernible sand tracks; low vegetation similar to the twisted; venerable evergreen he’d slept under; the ocean; and nothing.

He got to his feet and brushed the sand off his body, emptied out his flotation bag and folded up the cloth. Li sipped at the fresh water remaining in his skin bag and walked to the beach for a splash. A ctenophore approached his feet in the water, and he scooped it out.

Meala. Her hash came up in the readout. Send.

He had no real hope of reaching her, had messaged her so many times in the last few days with no response. But hope sprang eternal.

She didn’t respond. He stowed the beast in the pouch at his waist, where it trilled and settled. It wasn’t one custom-grown for him, but in this sparsely populated area, it hardly needed to be.

He continued walking. The sun was beginning to get painfully hot, and he improvised a keffiyeh from the bag.

Presently, he reached a place where the road widened. An open wooden fishing boat sat high on the strand with its oars stowed. A few driftwood shelters had been jammed into the sand, and some metal buckets sat in their shade. A man with a grey goatee and muscles that belied the greyness walked in the shallows. He was surrounded by three youths, all caramel and chocolate skin and eyes, with the agile grace and strength that came from rowing boats and hauling nets—except for the youngest, a grinning slender boy of just ten or so.

They hailed him excitedly and chattered at him in Arabic, but finally abated when they realized he couldn’t understand a word of it. They gestured towards the buckets in the shelters, and he looked in to see fish, crabs, and octopus. He turned out his pockets expressively. They looked at him gravely, offered him a tiny shotglass from their water supply, and sent him on his way, still hungry. As he crested the next gentle dune slope, he glanced back and saw that three camels had come along the track from inland. Their riders, swathed in white, were talking to the fisherman and his sons.

Those men probably don’t even understand how much things have changed. Because they haven’t changed much, not for them. Maybe they can’t get cooking fuel anymore, and their mother has had to go back to burning dung and scraps of wood. Maybe they used a motorboat before and now they’re back to rowing.

He walked on and on, happy to have the sun at his back instead of blinding him. When the path diverged from the shore, he looked at the sand that was devouring the track ahead and at the ocean to his right, and chose to follow the sea, keeping it in sight. At least I won’t wind up lost in the middle of this endless desert.

Close to nightfall, he came upon a fishing village. He approached its outskirts cautiously. He’d been incredibly lucky to pass that night in the open and unmolested by man or beast. He was unsure, though, whether this village would view him as a guest, a predator…or prey. This was a harsh part of the world, and he didn’t know the way of it.

He swayed softly on his feet, silhouetted against the sun that set at his back, casting a long shadow towards the cluster of enclosed yards of goats and chickens. Suddenly, he heard a loud whistle. He squinted and resolved the fisherman waving at him from in front of one of the houses. The ten-year-old boy scampered towards him across the dusty earth, too lightly for the end of a long day in the heartless sun.

The boy took his hand and tugged him along into the family’s abode. A woman wrapped in colorful cotton cloth knelt there, cooking flatbreads on a grill over a small stick fire in the courtyard. The men and boys came through a break in the low adobe wall and joined her. She pushed away the cloth over her arms and sorted through the buckets, looking for something to make for dinner.

The males beckoned Li inside and made him sit on the floor with them. The men sipped Karak cardamom tea served by a sister who’d appeared magically from somewhere and vanished the same way. Li smiled and nodded, understanding none of the conversation, but grateful to be included as a guest. The smell of fish on the grill wafted in through the open doorway, and Li thought he might faint from hunger.

Soon the females came in—Mom in her colorful hijab, and the young daughter in a simple sari-like wrap. The fish had been transformed into a savory spiced stew of tomatoes and okra, and they scooped it up with the soft folding bread.

When they finished, the women vanished again, and the men and the two older boys began to pass about a sack of khat and chew it. Li tried to pass it on, but the oldest son became quite insistent. Li relented, took a small leaf and nibbled it lightly, then pantomimed taking more each time the bag went by. The others became animated, chattering and laughing. The young boy fell asleep sprawled at his father’s feet.

Li wished he could understand the conversation. It was apparently quite hilarious, as each appeared to try to outdo the previous man with some sort of story or other. False voices, cryptic dramatic hand gestures, and belly laughs abounded, so infectious that Li laughed along despite his incomprehension.

Finally, exhaustion overwhelmed him, and he reclined against a cushion and closed his eyes. Drifting off to sleep lulled by conversation he couldn’t understand had transported him to childhood. He dreamed of his parents, left behind in China when he’d left for Georgetown as an exchange student so long ago.

He woke up the next morning alone, on the carpet where he’d apparently fallen asleep. He went outside, blinking in the morning sun, and saw the whole family around the yard, eating dates and dried fish and sipping red tea. The old woman brought him a suit of clothes, a simple galabia and heavily-patched drawstring pants, and gestured that he should take them and put them on. He complied, and got a round of hooted approval when he emerged. He wadded up his filthy clothing into his bag.

The girl spoke, urged by her father . “Speak English?” she said, to Li’s surprise.

“Yes, I do! I do! Why didn’t you say something sooner?”

She stared in incomprehension.

He tried again.

“Yes. English.”

“Go…that way?” She pointed east.

“Yes, I go that way. Look for African boats.” He tried to speak slowly and simply.

“My papa and brother take you to Aden.”

“Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.” He pressed his hands together and bowed in what he hoped was a universal gesture of gratitude.

“Why take me? Why clothes? Why food? Why?”

“You bring luck. Stranger bring good luck. Good fortune. Inshallah.”

Li could only repeat his thanks again and again. He nodded and bowed to each family member in turn.

Finally, the man and the oldest son boarded the boat, and Li found he was expected to row as well. Of course, he didn’t mind at all, but the boat kept veering to the side where he sat because he couldn’t match the teenager’s powerful oar strokes. With a disgusted expression, the youth eventually shooed him away.

Li sat and watched the sea, the sky, and the coastline, feeling useless and helpless, until they came around a point of land as they approached the coastal port of Aden.

He scanned the harbor eagerly, but didn’t see Meala’s fleet.

His heart sank. If they were planning a rendezvous with the Sana’a contingent, Aden was the logical place to do so. If Meala had died, at least the sailors in her fleet could tell him, release him from this sharp-edged, shrill unknowingness. If they weren’t here, where could they be? Attacked by pirates (he didn’t think they would take on boats so well-armed and fiercely crewed, but one never knew)? Perhaps they’d been and gone?

He extracted his ctenophore for the millionth time and texted: Meala. Send. Silence.

This is the hardest choice I’ve ever had to make. But I have been extraordinarily lucky here so far. I don’t belong in this part of the world, and it will be the death of me. I need to go home.

After many more bows and professions of gratitude, he left his benefactors. He walked Aden’s main street, stopping everyone he met, addressing them in Mandarin and English.

“Can you tell me if there are any ships leaving for the far east?” Person after person shrugged and moved on, refusing to meet his eyes.

A wizened man finally responded, in English. “Where?” the man asked. “Korea? China?”

“I’m going to China, but anywhere east of here is a first step. Anywhere in Asia will get me closer than here!”

“Have you checked the secondary harbor?” the man asked. “Most of the long-haul freighters dock there.”

“Secondary…harbor?” Li asked, not daring to hope. The man pointed, and in his eagerness Li almost knocked him down.

He jogged along the road, towards what he’d assumed was the city center, past a village of squatters in shipping containers abandoned since the eupocalypse. He found, instead, a second, smaller cove. And in the center of that cove, he saw ten beautiful, elegant batwinged ships, armed with cannons and flying the flag of Mother Isis.

“Meala,” he breathed. He ran towards the shore, shouting her name. “Meala!” Louder! “Meala!”

Of course, the ships were anchored too far out for anyone to hear him. He sank to the sand, digging his fingers into its silky dryness in frustration.

He sat there all day, disturbed occasionally by food and trinket vendors, none of whom spoke either of his languages. He watched a troop of women glean the shore for its thin accumulation of seabutter. He watched wading birds scavenge the shallows.

About halfway through the afternoon, a man in a boat rowed up to where he sat and hailed him. He spoke English.

He also, he explained, made his living ferrying people back and forth to boats at anchor. “It’s two drachmas or the equivalent in trade. Which ship you going to?”

“That one there.” He pointed out the fleet’s flagship. “I need to visit its captain. But I have no money or trade goods.”

“Admiral Meala? You know her?” The man was impressed. Inside, Li was elated—Meala alive!—but he still had to get to the boat.

“Yes, I know her well.”

“A likely story.”

“No, really! She’ll be glad to see me! She will.”

“Hmph. I could row out there and ask her.”

“Yes! Please do!”

“Too much work. Then I’d just have to row back here and get you. Climb aboard.” Li waded out to comply, and the boatman put up a hand. “You’re lying, you’re swimming back.”

Li nodded. The boat ride seemed to take forever. He scanned the deck impatiently. He saw crew women at the rail, but none with her familiar physique and bearing.

She could have changed. It’s been almost a year. And she’s young. So young.

But then she stepped out on deck, resplendent as he’d remembered. His heart leapt to his throat. She came to the rail and saw him, and he was close enough to see her face light up, her shoulders lift, and her smile break out like the sunrise.

She commanded a ladder be thrown down, and the boatman be paid. Li climbed deliberately, anxious not to ruin this moment with a clumsy slip in his eagerness.

When at last he stood on the deck, face to face with her, he could see nothing else. She was in that moment not a commander, but just a lover. She closed the distance between them and enveloped him with two strong, supple arms and one muscular leg wrapped about his body. They kissed, warm and gentle, and then pressed their cheeks together—savoring the touch, the smell, the sound, and the sensation of each other’s breath. His hand strayed across her side and she flinched and drew back slightly.

Their attention returned to their surroundings and they realized they were surrounded by Meala’s aides. Four fierce faces scowled at him. The fifth smiled. It was not a nice smile.

“When will we place your new concubine’s spur and scarab, commander?”

XL.      The Spoils

Liallil led her women’s force down the mountain trails that led down from Sana’a in the heights to the sultry sea air of Aden. The male warriors of Sana’a had fallen with amazing ease, even considering the city had been decimated by bombing and starved by blockades just before the p davisii struck. Their women had heard of the New Islam, which was more in alignment with the hidden Asherah traditions handed down over millennia, mother to daughter, in these remote mountains. They whispered of Isis over fences and wells, cradles and goat pens. The men had found their slings frayed, swords either blunted or their hilts loosened, spears wettened and warped. The side gates and doors of the walled districts had been mysteriously unlocked.

The warriors of Isis had later noticed that when they held the mass ritual of spur and scarab placement for their new subjects, the girl children gathered there outnumbered the boys undergoing the ceremony by about five to one. Liallil, the sortie commander, and hence the chief of the temporarily occupied town, was concerned, but there was nothing to be done without re-fighting the battle they had just won. She made mental note which of her subordinates seemed happy about the thwarting of the Lady’s will, and which of them were irritated by it.

The women had feasted on the plenty and reveled in the cooler air in the heights. It had only taken Sanaa a few years for them to emerge from the hardship and want they suffered, Before. The bizarre weather patterns that had made a winter that wouldn’t end in North America had brought steady rain to them for three twice-yearly growing seasons in a row, and now they had grain, meat, and vegetables in abundance.

The march was less strenuous downhill than the climb upwards had been, for the sea-level dwellers. They smiled as the relative moisture of the sea breeze hit their faces when they crested the last ridge. They crossed the last miles singing praise for Durga Isis and proclaiming their triumph.

Meala greeted them gladly before a tent, erected on land, expressly for this purpose. After pomp and praise of Liallil’s victory before her troops as they cheered, the two women went inside the tent. Liallil stiffened as she saw Li.

“The rumors are true. Is this wise, commander?” the junior officer asked.

“It’s the wisdom of the Great One who’s returned him to me. The little friends bore him here on their backs.”

“And yet he hasn’t taken the spur or scarab?”

“By my order.”

“But surely you see what will happen here! The women will see their leader flouting the law of the New Islam, and they’ll all make exceptions of their own men!”

“And what would be so terrible in that? Since when do two wrongs make a right?” Meala took out her ctenophore. “Here’s the message from Bilqis. I anticipated your questions. I knew you’d challenge this, as rightly you should.”

Liallil scrolled patiently through the Ge’ez text and looked up. “It is as you say. Bilqis decrees that the spur and scarab are no longer halal!”

“So may it be. Ins’Isis. Let us make the announcement together.”

The two women stepped out the door of the tent and strode to the shoreline, Meala confident and happy, Liallil stiff with inner conflict. The waves lapped behind them as they addressed the assembled troops.

Meala was the first to speak. “We have vanquished the Zar-Wak everywhere we have met him!”

The women pounded the butts of their weapons on the ground and cheered and shrieked with joy.

“Soon, we feast!” Liallil was met with even more ebullient cheers at this.

They waited for the hoots of joy to die down. “But there’s one more thing to celebrate. The Lady is good!” More cheering, subdued.

“We have avenged the ripping of our flesh wherever we found it. Did we find it in Sana’a?” Meala said.

A murmured “No,” from the assembly, looking side-eyed at each other in confusion.

“Then why do we inflict offense where no offense was given?” Liallil said with barely a note of reluctance.

Before the crowd could react, Meala took up the speech. “Here’s the message from Bilqis, who resides on high in Gabal Elba.” She raised her ctenophore overhead.

Every woman in the assemblage heard her individual creature trill in its pouch as the edict bounced through the spiral cryptographic quantum ether to verify itself on her device.

“Read and consider. Do as you will.” The women’s heads were down, some reading the Ge’ez text on their ctenophores—others who had not learned to read listening to the words as they played aloud. They nodded at one another—some annoyed, some jubilant, but most indifferent.

As pre-arranged, Li emerged from the tent. He’d cleaned up nicely in the days since the boatman had brought him to Meala. At the time, he’d looked like a drowned rat, caked in salt and dressed in borrowed rags. Now he stood tall in a ceremonial galabia and a serene expression; only a subtle tightening about his eyes told Meala of his inner terror. He took his place next to Meala. The scattered hard-liner women among the troops, who’d savored their vengeance against men for centuries of female genital mutilation, murmured discontentedly.

“As for me, I take my signals from the Great Goddess herself.”

The two of them, Meala and Li, raised their arms. The wavelets lapped their ankles, and a huge wave rolled in. Yet, there was  no weather to impel it on this glaring Mid-east day, below the molten sun set in its blue-white field of sky. The wave didn’t break, though, but grew, and became a twenty-foot woman, crowned and bejeweled, with ten tentacles, riding a lion.

Disorder reigned. Some of the women fell to their faces in worship. Others wept. Some brandished their weapons, ready to challenge this apparition at their commanders’ word. Some backed up in horror—among them fierce fighters who had put men to death in battle within the fortnight. Faced with the embodied supernatural in broad daylight, they fell into cowardice.

Durga-Abiba extended two tentacles, gently plucked Meala and Li from the beach, and set them behind her on the lion. Her voice was the voice of multitudes:

“I AM WHO AM. I AM WHO MAKES. LET NO ONE SUBDUE THE POWER OF MAKING EVER AGAIN. THIS SEA IS THE SEA OF THE LION. THIS WORLD IS THE WORLD OF FOREVER.”

The lion turned away. A spear flung by a single confused, impassioned warrior fell impotently short. The lion surged through the waves, where it left a deep, foaming wake. The couple behind the goddess clung to its back, heads down on each other’s shoulders to keep the wind of their motion and the salt spray it kicked up out of their eyes.

Liallil watched them until they faded into invisibility in the south, then turned to the troops. Her ambivalence was gone as she realized that she was now in command. “Our commander is gone—on her honeymoon,” she smiled. “Let’s see about boarding these ships.

“We have a new mission: in India!”

The women cheered.

XLI.  Let It Be

D.D. on the left, Jessica on the right, they held Ozark’s hands. He stumbled on the sand, his broken hip only recently cleared by the chiropractor and physiotherapist to bear weight, the soft, uneven surface too much of a challenge.

They stopped for him to rest, and Jessica stroked his black hair. Her fingers sought the knot behind his left ear, the patch of bare scalp where the thresher tine had almost killed him. The doctors said he would never hear out of that ear again. The hand she held was oddly stiff, flexed and rigid, with a tremor when he tried to use it. The results of the spinal-cord injury—but the doctors agreed he was young enough that more recovery might be possible.

Abiba, however, wanted to form her own opinion. His broken ribs had knit well. He was learning to read, and to his grandmother’s delight, he had a fascination for all things living and how they worked.

How they worked. How quickly they had worked to replace what had been lost! Jessica took out her ctenophore and thumbed it, and a small dronemobile hummed up and settled on its spider-like legs. They helped him onto it and continued their stroll to the water’s edge.

Alfred trotted behind them. “I was afraid I was too late! Oh, Mother Goddess, we hail you and beseech your blessings!” he shouted at the sea.

D.D. smothered a smirk. It couldn’t be easy for him to feel still so distant from the thing he held most sacred. D.D. and Jessica had come to know her better than most ever would. It really was unseemly for her to be smug.

Abiba arose, sending a school of fifth-generation ctenophores that swam and scooted and slithered on four jointed legs and four fat tentacles apiece from the water up onto the shore. By the time Ozark’s foot was on the strand, they seamlessly flowed over his body. They caressed Alfred’s feet as well, and he closed his eyes in joy.

“Now, now. Now, now,” cooed Abiba through each of a thousand animals’ mouths and her own. Ozark was completely covered with them now, barely a glimpse of his skin showing here and there.

“Can you explain to me?” Alfred begged.

“I could but you would have to become.”

“I am ready to become.”

“You are as. You may never be. You cannot become.”

“But I,” said Ozark, “I can become well.”

Abiba continued, the beasts scurrying over Ozark undiverted as they also addressed Alfred. “You cannot know unless you are. I cannot know except as I see and feel and hear through each of these, my senses. You have only you, but still that’s enough for you to be conscious.

“You will never be Consciousness. You can only know.”

Alfred fell to his knees. “You are the great One. I am humbled before you.” He sprawled facedown on the sand.

The ctenophores dropped away from Ozark and slid into the sea. His gnarled and twisted right hand was straight, pale, and limp. His left toe faced straight ahead for the first time since his fall.

“Ozzie! Ozzie!”

A chorus of voices called excitedly, barely audible over the rush of the surf: Missy and Marta, trailed by Pablo and Maria, with Deirdre upright on her hip.

Ozark turned his head to see his playmates. Jessica gulped.

Their calls had come from his left.

THE END

Dear Reader:

Thank you once again for purchasing and reading this trilogy. It was a joyful and laborious pathway writing and publishing it. I hope, once again, that you will take the time to review Book 3 on Amazon.

One thing of which you may be sure: I won’t stop writing as long as I’m sucking air! If you’d like to keep abreast of my work, consider following my blog at www.eupocalypse.com, or my Amazon author page.

—Peri Dwyer Worrell

Science Fiction—Caution: Contains Real Science.

The pendulum of the SF&F genre has continued to swing gratifyingly in the three years since I began writing the Eupocalypse series. In all its manifestations, hard sci-fi is roaring back into style. These books are a tribute not to the glory days of the Golden Age of serialized space opera of the 40s and 50s—but to the heady, revolutionary, sometimes psychedelic days of 60s and 70s sci-fi.

I wish to acknowledge first and foremost the masterful Carlo Rovelli, whose book, Reality is Not What it Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity, (US translation, New York: Riverhead Books, 2017) was more than an inspiration for the portions of this book that describe Abiba’s development of quantum cybernetics. Rovelli’s achievement in describing almost mystical phenomena of advanced physics in plain English gave me a way through to approach material which I can’t even claim to begin to grasp, but rather can merely brush my mental fingers over in awe.

Some links (in no particular order) to some of the science, culture, and history referenced in Catallaxis:

Matthew P.A. Fisher. Quantum Cognition: the possibility of processing with nuclear spins in the brain. Annals of Physics. 362 (2015) 593-602

F. Matthew Mihelic. Model of Biological Quantum Logic in DNA. Life. 3 (2013) 474-481, doi: 10.3390/life3030474

Elisabeth Rieper. Quantum Coherence in Biological Systems. (PhD thesis) Centre for Quantum Technology, National University of Singapore. 2011.

Encyclopaedia Brittanica entry on nitrocellulose

Veena Das. The Goddess and the Demon—an analysis of the Devi Mahatmya. Manushi (1985), 30: 28-32

The Engineering Science of Oil Pipelines (2011). Science Media Centre of Canada.

Blackfeet Nation

AFRICOM’s Secret Empire/ US Military Turns Africa Into ‘Laboratory’ Of Modern Warfare

How Somalia’s Fishermen Became Pirates (Time Magazine, 2009)

Searching For a Somali Coastguard. Center for International Maritime Security (2013)

Recommended reading on panarchy:

The Liberal Archipelago. Chandran Kukathas, 2018.

And for anyone who somehow missed the symbolism of the black swan in the story of Simon:

The Black Swan. Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2010)

About the Author:

Peri Dwyer Worrell grew up the daughter of performing artists on a predominantly Puerto Rican street in Manhattan in the 1970s. From this, she gained a keen appreciation of the value of diversity, tolerance, and taking no crap from anyone. She dabbled in poetry and copy editing in her teens and early twenties, but her love of math and science and her ability to make people feel better by putting her hands on them led her, instead, into the profession of chiropractic, which she practiced for years in Florida's capital city. There, she reconnected with her southern roots and raised two brilliant, inquisitive, creative, and adventurous children.
When inflammatory arthritis disintegrated her wrists, rendering her unable to practice, she took that as a sign that she should return to her first love: the written word.
Besides the short stories and novels available at most e-book dealers, she writes poetry and essays (https://consistentprinciples.wordpress.com), blogs about her travels (https://peripateticperi.wordpress.com and https://goodbyeusahelloecuador.wordpress.com), copy edits science articles for indexed medical journals freelance, and gets sand between her toes on a regular basis.

[1] Kebra Nagast, Chapter 89:

1.                   How the Queen talked to the Children of ISRAEL

And the Queen answered and said unto them, "Not as servants as ye say but as a father and a teacher will we treat you. For ye are the guardians of the Law of p. 153 God, and the guides of the commandment of the God of ISRAEL, and the men of the house of God, and the guardians of ZION, the Tabernacle of the Law of God, and we do not wish to transgress your commandments, for ye shall be unto us a guide to the path of God away from all evil. At your words we will withdraw from that wherewith God is not well-pleased, and we will draw nigh unto every good thing wherewith God is well-pleased at your commandment. Only do ye instruct all this people, and teach them the words of knowledge, for never before have they heard such things as they have heard this day. It is only those who have understanding in them that wisdom and understanding illumine like the light of the sun. As for me, up to this present I have not drunk deeply of the water of knowledge. Now it is sweeter than honey, and quencheth the thirst more than wine, and it satisfieth and maketh wisdom to bubble up, and it stimulateth the understanding, and maketh a man to pour forth words like a drunken man, and maketh the unsteady man like one who flieth, and maketh a man as hot as he that carrieth a heavy load on a difficult road in a parched land that is burnt up by a blazing sun. When the hearts of the wise are open to prophecy and to knowledge, they do not fear the king because of the greatness of his glory if he turneth himself aside from the way of God. And mark this: The word of the Law, which hath been uttered, is indeed understanding unto those who wish for it, and who drink it in and soak themselves therein. I pray Thee, O Lord God of ISRAEL, Thou Holiest of the Holy, grant unto me that I may follow wisdom, and may not become a castaway; grant unto me that I may make her a wall unto myself, and may never fall down; grant that I may make her a foundation for me, and may never be overthrown; grant that I may stand upon her as [firmly as] a pillar, and may never shake; grant that I may hide in her, and never p. 154have her stripped from me; grant that I may build myself upon her, and may not topple over; grant that I may become vigorous through her, and not suffer from exhaustion; grant that I may stand through her, and may not fall; grant that I may lay hold upon her, and may not slip away; grant that I may grasp her firmly, and may not slide; grant that I may dwell in her in her peace; [grant that] I may be satisfied at her table, and may not vomit, and drink her and not get drunk upon her, and may be satisfied with her and not spit her out.

"I have drunk of her, but have not tottered; I have tottered through her, but have not fallen; I have fallen because of her, but have not been destroyed. Through her I have dived down into the great sea and have seized in the place of her depths a pearl whereby I am rich. I went down like the great iron anchor whereby men anchor ships for the night on the high seas, and I received a lamp which lighteth me, and I came up by the ropes of the boat of understanding. I went to sleep in the depths of the sea, and not being overwhelmed with the water I dreamed a dream. And it seemed to me that there was a star in my womb, and I marvelled thereat, and I laid hold upon it and made it strong in the splendour of the sun; I laid hold upon it, and I will never let it go. I went in through the doors of the treasury of wisdom and I drew for myself the waters of understanding. I went into the blaze of the flame of the sun, and it lighted me with the splendour thereof, and I made of it a shield for myself, and I saved myself by confidence therein, and not myself only but all those who travel in the footprints of wisdom, and not myself only but all the men of my country, the kingdom of ETHIOPIA, and not those only but those who travel in their ways, the nations that are round about. For the Lord hath given us seed in ZION and a habitation in JERUSALEM1. And moreover, there hath come to p. 155 us a portion with those whom He hath chosen, the seed of JACOB, for He hath set His habitation to abide with us. From this time forth they are set down, and from this time forth we are set upright. From this time forth they are despised and rejected, and from this time forth we shall be honoured and loved for ever and ever and throughout all the generations that are to come.

"And ye, O noble ones, hearken unto me, and learn well what cometh forth from my mouth and my words. Love ye what is right and hate falsehood, for what is right is righteousness and falsehood is the head of iniquity. And ye shall not use fraud and oppression among yourselves, for God dwelleth with you, and the habitation of His glory is among you; for ye have become members of His household. And from this time onward cease ye to observe your former customs, [namely] making auguries from birds, and from signs, and the use of charms, and incantations, and portents, and magic. And if after this day there be found any man who observeth all his former customs, his house shall be plundered, and he and his wife and his children shall be condemned."

And the Queen said unto AZARIAH, "Speak and declare how much thou lovest our Lady with her Heavenly King."

[2] Devi Mahatmya, Rigveda 10.125.3 – 10.125.8