The End Has Come (6 page)

“How far did it go, Aren?” Enid asked carefully. In the driver’s seat, Bert frowned, like maybe he wanted to go back and have a word with the man.

“He never did more than hit me.”

So straightforward. Enid made a note. The car rocked on for a ways.

“What will happen to her, without a banner?” Aren asked, glancing at her belly. She’d evidently decided the baby was a girl. She probably had a name picked out. Her baby, her savior.

“There are households who need babies to raise who’ll be happy to take her.”

“Her, but not me?”

“It’s a complicated situation,” Enid said. She didn’t want to make Aren any promises until they could line up exactly which households they’d be going to.

Aren was smart. Scared, but smart. She must have thought things through, once she realized she wasn’t going to die. “Will it go better, if I agree to give her up? The baby, I mean.”

Enid said, “It would depend on how you define ‘better.’”

“Better for the baby.”

“There’s a stigma on bannerless babies. Worse some places than others. And somehow people know, however you try to hide it. People will always know what you did and hold it against you. But the baby can get a fresh start on her own.”

“All right. All right, then.”

“You don’t have to decide right now.”

Eventually, they came to the place in the road where the ruins were visible, like a distant mirage, but unmistakable. A haunted place, with as many rumors about it as there were about investigators and what they did.

“Is that it?” Aren said, staring. “The old city? I’ve never seen it before.”

Bert slowed the car, and they stared out for a moment.

“The stories about what it was like are so terrible. I know it’s supposed to be better now, but . . .” The young woman dropped her gaze.

“Better for whom, you’re wondering?” Enid said. “When they built our world, our great-grandparents saved what they could, what they thought was important, what they’d most need. They wanted a world that would let them survive not just longer but better. They aimed for utopia knowing they’d fall short. And for all their work, for all our work, we still find pregnant girls with bruises on their faces who don’t know where to go for help.”

“I don’t regret it,” Aren said. “At least, I don’t think I do.”

“You saved what you could,” Enid said. It was all any of them could do.

The car started again, rolling on. Some miles later on, Aren fell asleep curled in the back seat, her head lolling. Bert gave her a sympathetic glance.

“Heartbreaking all around, isn’t it? Quite the last case for you, though. Memorable.”

“Or not,” Enid said.

Going back to the way station, late afternoon, the sun was in Enid’s face. She leaned back, closed her eyes, and let it warm her.

“What, not memorable?” Bert said.

“Or not the last,” she said. “I may have a few more left in me.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Carrie Vaughn
is the author of the New York Times bestselling series of novels about a werewolf named Kitty, the most recent installment of which is
Kitty Saves the World.
She’s written several other contemporary fantasy and young adult novels, as well as upwards of 80 short stories. She’s a contributor to the Wild Cards series of shared world superhero books edited by George R. R. Martin and a graduate of the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop. An Air Force brat, she survived her nomadic childhood and managed to put down roots in Boulder, Colorado. Visit her at carrievaughn.com.

One

The damned thing is, I still don’t like San Francisco.

The present tense sounds wrong. It catches on the way out, like a ballpoint pen running dry and dragging an invisible indentation in the shape of a letter. But after everything, after the end of everything, it’s the truth.

I still don’t like the city, its steepness, its damp chill, the feeling that something is lying in wait behind the crest of every hill. All those crowded sidewalks, slabs of concrete unevenly pieced together like a half-hearted mosaic, the cracks gathering cigarette butts and blackened chewing gum. People everywhere at all hours, and that sour smell that hangs in the air of seaside cities, unless you’re close enough to the ocean that the salt is burning your sinuses instead. I never was a city girl: Mama was right about that, in the end. Right about me, and right about
him
.

Felix. Fucking Felix-from-fucking-San-Francisco, Mama always said.
He has nothing to give you but heartbreak, Grecia. What are you thinking?

You can hate someone who’s dead, can’t you? And some place — it’s the same thing. You even feel the same guilt, saying it.

There’s nothing left now. The rain has stopped, and a bare skeleton of a city remains. I borrow Mahesh’s binoculars, stand in the prow and look out across the bay, and every time the sight turns my stomach. There’s a few cement pylons clinging to the hills, tangles of steel, and slabs and slabs of white concrete broken and pocked like a sponge. Just north of us, the frame of the Bridge still arcs out toward Yerba Buena, but then it disappears. Down into the black water, its eerie stillness turned iridescent by the sun, like a puddle of oil. There’s life returning to Oakland, or at least scavengers; late at night, you can see the lights bobbing through the ruins south of the port. But San Francisco is still and quiet.

And here, on a container ship grounded in the Oakland Outer Harbor, I have this recurring dream.

I’m stepping out into the courtyard behind the tiny theatre in the Mission where Felix rigs the lighting. Or I’m standing on the fire escape outside our kitchen window, at the top of a Victorian row house that no one bothered to paint properly — the layers of trim lost in a uniform pastel pink, like the chalk they give you to cure an upset stomach. Or I’m cresting one of the hills — Potrero, walking home from the theatre, my arms laden with groceries or costumes that need repair — and I half-expect to meet a monster on the other side. I half-expect to find the end of the world, the whole city sliding down a sheer cliff into nothingness, just ocean as far as the eye can see.

And in the dream, I’m right. There’s nothing on the other side of the threshold. No downhill street, no rows of homogenous-hued Victorians marching like lemmings toward the freeway and the sea. No murals of goddesses and butterflies or undulating koi fish over the overflowing dumpsters behind a Chinese café. Just gray static, like the analog television in our bedroom that collected stacks of unpaid bills. There’s a faint ringing in my ears, a buzzing sound like fat garbage flies.

Does it count as a recurring dream when it’s the only one you have? I think I ask myself this question every time, just before I wake up.

Two

“Again,” Lena says. “Please.”

Coming out of the immersion is excruciating, like all my senses are being slowly dragged across sandpaper. My eyes water as I peel away the visor, and for a moment the inside of the shipping container vanishes, and I’m caught again in the gray world of the immersion — scentless, colorless, the only sound the faint static prickle in my earphones. The coolness along my left side tells me the container’s sliding door is open, letting in light and the clear, dry air that smells like absolutely nothing. I blink the tears away, and Lena looks up from her computer screen.

“Let’s do it again, please.”

On the table in the other end of the container, she has her own set of pieces laid out. Compression gloves, the hood with its broad blue-tinged visor, and yards of rubber-coated wires to link the suit and a miscellaneous suite of suction cups back to her computer. Her dark hair, damp with sweat, is flopping out of her barrette. I see the traces of gritty saline paste at her temples, which means she’s been trying to record again. Which means the flicker of memory I felt inside the immersion, the lapping rhythm that may have been waves and the roughness of
something
against my palm — steel? concrete? — belonged to her.

“Give me a second.” I sit up slowly, feeling the blood rush to my head. My legs feel asleep below the knee. “I felt something, right toward the end. Rough and solid. What was it supposed to be?”

Lena sighs, leaning against the corrugated wall. She slowly drags her fingers through the loose strands of hair.

At the university where she used to work, back in D.C., Lena says they had an almost perfect immersion. A fairground, somewhere in Nebraska, programmed and rebuilt piece by neural piece. They’d spent years, first, assembling the brain scans and the sensations — the feeling of dusty gravel underfoot, the sound of blowing grass, all the smells and motions and minute variations of light. She has them all copied, here, in the dozens of drives scattered throughout her makeshift containership laboratory. She also has me, and Mahesh and the half-dozen other survivors on board, and all our memories of overpriced coffee, uneven sidewalks, poorly painted Victorians, and the soft crunch of cigarette butts on our doorsteps.

Enough, she thinks, to remake San Francisco. A ghost of it, at least. As much as you’d ever find in a museum, or as much as you’d ever remember at a funeral. An outline with a few spots of high relief, as sharp as the day you first felt them — that’s what she’s hoping for.

What we’ve gotten, so far, is gray.

A lot of fog again. Guess that’s why you picked San Francisco
. I make the same joke every time, and Lena always smiles. But it isn’t the truth.

She picked San Francisco because she loves San Francisco. Because it was home for her, years and years ago, long before the quakes and eruptions and atmospheric decomposition, and long before the rain swept away everything that was left. If you’re going to raise a ghost, it should be one that you loved.

“That was supposed to be the bridge,” Lena says. Her fingers have reached the end of her ponytail, and she flips it back over her shoulder. “The Golden Gate, I mean. Walking across it, going north. Nice and iconic.”

“I never did that,” I say. “Too touristy.”

“You’re kidding.”

“About the touristy part, sure.” I wink at her, and she smiles, just a brief flash of teeth. “But I really never walked across the Golden Gate. Didn’t have that kind of . . . leisure time.”

“Fair enough.” She knows I’m teasing her now. She stands up a bit straighter, stepping away from the wall and rolling her shoulders. “I only remember it because we didn’t do it often. My sister and I, we made that walk maybe five, six times in all the years we lived there.”

I know better than to ask what happened to her sister.

I think there’s a paradox here, and it’s starting to frustrate Lena, whether she’ll ever admit it or not. When a city is wiped out as completely as San Francisco was, the people who really knew it are gone. Gone in all kinds of horrible ways, burned or suffocated or sunk to the bottom of the sea. The only people who remember it are the ones who went away. People like Lena, who had to leave — or people like me, who ran.

The city has millions of stories that I don’t know. Never did and never will.

“Okay,” I say. I flip the visor back over my eyes, and the container flickers away behind a wall of blue. “Let’s do it again. Same thing. I think I almost got it.”

For Lena’s sake, I always try again. As many times as she asks. No matter how I feel about this city, I can admit — you deserve to be remembered by someone who loves you.

Three

I wonder if anyone alive remembers Felix.

What a disaster
that
turned out to be
. I hear this in Mama’s voice, although of course I never heard her say it. She had a bad feeling about Felix, and now it colors everything in retrospect. I close my eyes and see him approaching me like a harbinger of doom, all honey-colored beard and blue eyes like the heat death of the universe. Tight black turtleneck sweater, showing off a trim waist and hiding a beautiful map of ink, sleeving both arms and tracing his sides from hip to collarbone. I can’t remember half the images, only the brightness of the colors.

He came up to my register with a bill for a turkey sandwich and small coffee, and handed me his phone number with his credit card. “Felix,” I asked, “is that ‘happy’ or ‘lucky’?” I don’t think he understood the question, but I called him anyway.

I did love him, at least at first. Enough to follow him north and west to what felt like the edge of the world, a finger reaching up into the Pacific, reaching or pointing for something unimaginable. Not that I saw the ocean side with any frequency. Our home overlooked the bay, if you stood on tiptoe and squinted through the gap in the houses, over the distant slice of 280. On warm nights, we stood on the fire escape as long as we could bear it, sipping wine from CVS out of plastic cups and pretending it was romantic.

He got me a job at the theatre, coming in after each performance to clean up the lobby and the seats. I swept up water bottles, abandoned programs, the ends of joints, and sometimes unspeakable or unidentifiable things more suited to Hazmat than the lighting guy’s girlfriend. I hated the job, but for his sake I tried to love the city. And sometimes I even succeeded. There was a corner shop with reasonably priced cigarettes that smelled like incense and played Lebanese pop on an ancient boom-box behind the counter. The
panederia
across the street sold delicious spiral-shaped cookies rolled in pink sugar. But mostly, I failed. And the more I hated where I was, the more I hated who I was with.