Selection Event (30 page)

“Now you can dress it out for us,” she said to Winch. “We can have it tomorrow.”

Winch was shaking his head. “No, I don't think so. I don't want anything to do with it.”

Together, he and Martin went out the gate and left Paul and Leona behind.

“What do you mean?” Leona was saying after them. “What do you mean? This is for all of us! You said you'd dress it out!”

Halfway back to their houses, Winch grumbled, “You suppose we're a bunch of wimps, Martin? It used to be very manly to kill something larger than oneself.”

“I would've felt like a coward, shooting that animal.”

They walked in silence, the rifle strap weighing heavily on Martin's shoulder.

Finally, “I don't think I want to kill anything anymore,” Winch said.

Chapter 54

Two days later, when they celebrated Solomon and Missa's birthdays, they filled Martin and Catrin's house with food. Winch brought over a small cauldron of hot and sweet chili — without meat. Winch set it on the full table in the living room, he announced, “And I have a big surprise for everyone later. A
big
one!”

Missa begged to know, but Winch airily refused even a clue. Solomon grinned and his eyes nearly glowed with excitement.

Xeng had prepared a strange concoction of noodles, cabbage, and canned lychee fruit. Cans of peaches, applesauce and grapes had been dumped in crystal bowls and topped with fresh mint. Catrin had put together an immense fresh salad, and from the kitchen, the house was filled with the smell of hot apple and berry cobblers.

Martin had opened soda for the children and three bottles of wine for the adults. Winch got car flares from an auto supply store and in the backyard set up ten for Solomon and six for Missa. “And this is not the surprise!” he told the children. “It's something else!”

Everyone was there except Leona. Paul moped from room to room, saying little.

“Is she all right, Paul?” Catrin asked him.

“She's, um.... No.” His head was bowed deeply and he picked at his fingernails. “She's, well, going to have a baby.”

“She's pregnant?” Now Catrin looked troubled. “Martin? Paul says Leona's pregnant.”

“She's afraid she'll die,” Paul murmured.

“But we have a doctor,” Martin said.

“Xeng,” Paul muttered.

Martin held his tongue at this comment but he decided not to let it go by. To Catrin he said, “We all need to discuss Xeng's practice and she needs to be here.”

She nodded. “I'll talk to her about her pregnancy.”

Martin took Paul aside. “Paul,” he said, “I don't know what your problem is with Xeng, but Winch would have a useless arm if it wasn't for him. What if it had been you instead of Winch?”

“Well, Xeng is a, you know, not a Christian.”

“What does that have to do with fixing an arm or delivering a baby?”

“He's not like us. He doesn't have our values.”

“You mean he doesn't know right from wrong or that he doesn't respect people? I hadn't noticed that. Had you?”

Paul kept looking down at his hands and shrugged. “He's different,” he mumbled.

“You're acting like someone back in the old world. You can't afford to do that.” Paul stood there not looking at him, remote, and it seemed to Martin that his words were having no effect. With his finger, he poked Paul twice in the chest, hard. Paul looked up then. Sternly Martin said, “Let's hope, if you get sick, Xeng doesn't share your values, because if he did, he'd let you die. Because you're different.”

Then he walked away, feeling Paul's eyes watching after him. Once again, Paul had provoked Martin into making threats. This didn't sound like the old Martin.

Catrin brought the puffy-eyed Leona into the house where the party had been set up. All activity stopped and everyone looked at her.

After a few moments of silence, Catrin said, “She's pregnant and she's afraid.”

“Oh,” Xeng said, coming across to the two women, “you should not be afraid. I have studied this.” He took one of her hands in his.

"It'll be our first
original
member," Winch said. "That's great." 

“I'll be in terrible pain and I could die!” Leona said, starting to sob.  

“Oh, not likely,” Xeng said. “I even have now....” He looked back over his shoulder at Martin.

“We have home-grown painkillers now,” Martin said. He explained how Xeng made it and how the manufactured drugs they had now would soon become ineffective. “I told Xeng there wouldn't be a problem with this.”

“It's opium,” Paul said quietly. “It's illegal.”

Ignoring Paul, Catrin said, “Of all the things we might need, I'd put a painkiller at the top of the list.”

“I agree,” Jan-Louise said. “What if someone gets appendicitis? What's Xeng supposed to do, just say, 'Hold still, please'?”

Winch was nodding. “I say we need it. Top priority.”

“I just don't want it to hurt,” Leona whined. “Paul? Paul, say yes.”

Paul might have nodded.

“If we have it, we can use it or not,” Catrin said, “and Leona or I may need it, or not.”

Martin turned to stare at her. “Why?”

“Can you guess?” Catrin asked with a smile.

“I—” Words failed him.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Winch said, coming forward, awkwardly balancing a tray of glasses filled with wine and soda with his good hand and sling-arm, “ladies and gentlemen, a toast to the day Martin Lake had nothing to say! A toast to our children, present and future!”

They lifted their glasses and drank.

“I was going to announce it today,” Catrin said, “but Leona upstaged me.”

....

They sat at the loaded table and passed the plates around, filling each other's plates, serving one another, and ate until they were tired.

When it was dark, Winch lit the brilliant pink-burning flares, and announced that it was time for his surprise.

He brought out his saxophone and, surrounded by light, he played “Happy Birthday” for the children. Then, slowly, lazily, he played “Summertime,” and it brought back to Martin the memories of hearing it before the catastrophe, when it meant something so different.

Martin felt tears run down his cheeks for all they had lost and all they had gained.

....

Isha retired to the front of the house, away from the sputtering flares and the noise of the people. She lay just inside the bars of the front gate, her muzzle resting on her front paws.

An instant before she saw Mona, she smelled her. Out of the darkness, black Mona materialized without a whisper of sound, and stepped through the bars of the gate. Mona had grown huge during the cooler months.

Mona came closer and Isha smelled something else now, too. In her mouth, Mona held a long chunk of meat that hung halfway to the ground from each side of her jaws. She stretched her neck forward and dropped the meat at the end of Isha's nose. Then Mona backed away two steps and sat down and watched.

Isha stood and nosed it and turned it over. Yes, this gift was something she would like.

She held it down with her front paws and bit into it and pulled away. After ripping and swallowing several bites, she backed off a step and waited for Mona to have what was left. Soon there was nothing but a wet spot on the cement. Mona then cleaned herself as they listened to the noises of the humans inside the house, talking, laughing, and singing.

Chapter 55

There was no rain during the warm December. During the long nights, by moonlight they would watch immense, sky-spanning V's of geese cross the sky. In February, daffodils bloomed, and by the beginning of March, there had been only three inches of rain.

“Do you think Mother Nature's trying to tell us something?”

“I think she's saying we've messed with her long enough, and now I think she's going after the snivelers. It's time to think about moving out. Whatever water we get, we'll have to pump out, and I don't know if we can scrounge up enough gasoline to hold us through next summer. Any kind of garden is highly doubtful.”

Martin didn't like to think about it. “If we don't have any rain, I don't see any point in staying here another summer. We'll probably have to move eventually. I guess we should give it some thought and be ready.”

“I guess. How would we do it?”

“Skate?” Martin asked.

Winch laughed and shook his head. “That Diaz was some guy. Suppose he'll ever come back?”

Chapter 56

Diaz lay flat on the saddle, throttled it, and even over the whining roar of the bike, he could hear bullets making a slicing sound as they cut the air around him. He hoped she was a bad shot, because if she hit him, he'd take it in the ass, and he sure didn't want to get shot there — anywhere else he'd take his chances — but not in the ass.

He twisted the throttle tight, felt the back tire lose tracton, spin sideways—
Fly, baby! Fly!
—then grab the pavement as more bullets zinged past his head.
Not in the ass
, he was thinking, and,
How big a magazine does that thing have?
 

Around the corner and out of range, Diaz sat straight up, let his hair blow back, the sweat dry off, and rode like the wind, a casual eighty, ninety-mile-an-hour breeze at a hundred and ten decibels. Passing abandoned cars, passing grain storage elevators, passing neatly arranged car lots, leaving it all behind him. That was freedom! Gradually, through the afternoon, he felt the pressure of his mania begin to dissipate. It had to happen.

He told her he'd be back for her. He probably wouldn't, but he meant it when he said it. He told her he loved her — told her that a lot over the last months — and he meant it, too — but like a migrating bird, he had movement wired into his head. When he was up-cycle, he had to go, he had to roll, and when he was down, the world was a suckhole of waste and loss and half the dials in his brain were set to zero.

....

Kansas City — wasted. A grotesque disneyland of weird burned-out shapes and vine-crawling ruins, but the muddy Missouri River kept on rolling. Midway through the city, mile long swarms of rats, as vast as the old buffalo herds, spilled across the freeway, traveling from one blown-out grain storage area to another. Diaz put the kickstand down and sat on his bike and watched the herd spread toward him and run between his tires, surrounding him... millions of gray and black rat backs, skittering and humping toward more food.

Diaz talked to them, yelled encouragement, waved them forward, recited to them, and preached.

 “Diaz is an island! Surrounded by the rivering flocks of the true successors of Man! Go, my children! Go and multiply! Seed the earth! Slay those who set up nations, eat those who set up laws, throw into the chasm those who claim enlightenment, for they are in the grip of delusion! Remember Mickey, and
onward!
”

For an hour, they roiled and swarmed, and when their tide receded, Diaz fired up his Harley and rolled on, like the wind.

Outside Ames, Iowa, a hailstorm cut him up badly, but he rode on, wind-whipped blood flying from his knuckles and into the past behind him. In his rearview mirror, he laughed at his blood-streaked face — from the ice-nicks and punctures, the blood made weird branching patterns back into his hair.

East from Ames, in the cloud-streaked twilight, just a dozen yards off the road, he saw two men and a woman hoeing in a garden. They looked up and waved and yelled something at him. He didn't understand, but he waved back and yelled, “Power to the people!”

He saw them laugh and wave again but he rode on. They might have been nice people and he would have had to stay, but he had too much juice in him, too many vibrations, too many free radicals in his blood needing the fix of physical speed.

Chicago — long dead bodies on the freeway, bones scattered by animals through the central part of the city which, surprisingly, still looked habitable. When he slowed up, he heard the pops of gunfire, figured he didn't need that, and gassed it.

Up into Michigan, he rode on through Kalamazoo where someone threw rocks at him from an overpass. Rode on through Battle Creek where he saw wolves at the edge of the freeway eyeing him suspiciously.

He rode on, rode on, draining gas from abandoned cars, once from a gas truck, and as he left it, he flicked a match into the spill. Five miles down the road, he heard the blast and entered the Detroit city limits with the bang.

Since it was daylight, Diaz cruised around till he found the Ford factory. The gates stood half open and the wind pressed year-old newspapers against the chainlink fence. Through a few dark offices and unlocked doors, he found one of the assembly lines. Huge dim shapes of frozen robot welders rose over him, their hydraulic fluids cold and stale inside the heavy hoses. The air smelled of dust and oil.

He walked a little further in, threading his way through the equipment and around the engineless car bodies that lay shiny and open, like patients waiting for hearts. He thought he saw a flickering light ahead and tried to move slowly, which was not easy for him.