The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25 (Mammoth Books) (61 page)

Maureen F. McHugh made her first sale in 1989, and has since made a powerful impression on the SF world with a relatively small body of work, becoming one of today’s most respected writers. In 1992, she published one of the year’s most widely acclaimed and talked-about first novels,
China Mountain Zhang,
which won the Locus Award for Best First Novel, the Lambda Literary Award, and the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, and which was named a
New York Times
Notable Book as well as being a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula Awards. Her story “The Lincoln Train” won her a Nebula Award. Her other books, including the novels
Half the Day Is Night, Mission Child,
and
Nekropolis,
have been greeted with similar enthusiasm. Her powerful short fiction has appeared in
Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Starlight, Eclipse, Alternate Warriors, Aladdin, Killing Me Softly,
and other markets, and has been collected in
Mothers and Other Monsters.
She lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband, her son, and a golden retriever named Hudson.

Here she takes us to a frighteningly plausible future where the apocalypse doesn’t happen all at once with a bang, but rather sneaks up on you one step at a time.

J
ANE PUTS OUT
the sleeping bags in the backyard of the empty house by the tool shed. She has a lock and hasp and an old hand drill that they can use to lock the tool shed from the inside but it’s too hot to sleep in there and there haven’t been many people on the road. Better to sleep outside. Franny has been talking a mile a minute. Usually by the end of the day she is tired from walking – they both are – and quiet. But this afternoon she’s gotten on the subject of her friend Samantha. She’s musing if Samantha has left town like they did. “They’re probably still there because they had a really nice house in, like, a low-crime area and Samantha’s father has a really good job. When you have money like that maybe you can totally afford a security system or something. Their house has five bedrooms and the basement isn’t a basement, it’s a living room because the house is kind of on a little hill and although the front of the basement is underground, you can walk right out the back.”

Jane says, “That sounds nice.”

“You could see a horse farm behind them. People around them were rich, but not like on TV rich exactly.”

Jane puts her hands on her hips and looks down the line of backyards.

“Do you think there’s anything in there?” Franny asks, meaning the house, a 60s suburban ranch. Franny is thirteen and empty houses frighten her. But she doesn’t like to be left alone either. What she wants is for Jane to say that they can eat one of the tuna pouches.

“Come on, Franny. We’re gonna run out of tuna long before we get to Canada.”

“I know,” Franny says sullenly.

“You can stay here.”

“No, I’ll go with you.”

God, sometimes Jane would do anything to get five minutes away from Franny. She loves her daughter, really, but Jesus. “Come on, then,” Jane says.

There is an old square concrete patio and a sliding glass door. The door is dirty. Jane cups her hand to shade her eyes and looks inside. It’s dark and hard to see. No power, of course. Hasn’t been power in any of the places they’ve passed through in more than two months. Air conditioning. And a bed with a mattress and box springs. What Jane wouldn’t give for air conditioning and a bed. Clean sheets.

The neighborhood seems like a good one. Unless they find a big group to camp with, Jane gets them off the freeway at the end of the day. There was fighting in the neighborhood and at the end of the street, several houses are burned out. Then there are lots of houses with windows smashed out. But the fighting petered out. Some of the houses are still lived in. This house had all its windows intact but the garage door was standing open and the garage was empty except for dead leaves. Electronic garage door. The owners pulled out and left and didn’t bother to close the door behind them. Seemed to Jane that the overgrown backyard with its tool shed would be a good place to sleep.

Jane can see her silhouette in the dirty glass and her hair is a snarled, curly, tangled rat’s nest. She runs her fingers through it and they snag. She’ll look for a scarf or something inside. She grabs the handle and yanks up, hard, trying to get the old slider off track. It takes a couple of tries but she’s had a lot of practice in the last few months.

Inside the house is trashed. The kitchen has been turned upside down, and silverware, utensils, drawers, broken plates, flour and stuff are everywhere. She picks her way across, a can opener skittering under her foot in a clatter.

Franny gives a little startled shriek.

“Fuck!” Jane says. “Don’t do that!” The canned food is long gone.

“I’m sorry,” Franny says. “It scared me!”

“We’re gonna starve to death if we don’t keep scavenging,” Jane says.

“I know!” Franny says.

“Do you know how fucking far it is to Canada?”

“I can’t help it if it startled me!”

Maybe if she were a better cook she’d be able to scrape up the flour and make something but it’s all mixed in with dirt and stuff and every time she’s tried to cook something over an open fire it’s either been raw or black, or most often, both – blackened on the outside and raw on the inside.

Jane checks all the cupboards anyway. Sometimes people keep food in different places. Once they found one of those decorating icing tubes and wrote words on each other’s hands and licked them off.

Franny screams, not a startled shriek but a real scream.

Jane whirls around and there’s a guy in the family room with a tire iron.

“What are you doing here?” he yells.

Jane grabs a can opener from the floor, one of those heavy jobbers, and wings it straight at his head. He’s too slow to get out of the way and it nails him in the forehead. Jane has winged a lot of things at boyfriends over the years. It’s a skill. She throws a couple of more things from the floor, anything she can find, while the guy is yelling “Fuck! Fuck!” and trying to ward off the barrage.

Then she and Franny are out the back door and running.

Fucking squatter! She hates squatters! If it’s the homeowner, they tend to make the place more like a fortress and you can tell not to try to go in. Squatters try to keep a low profile. Franny is in front of her, running like a rabbit, and they are out the gate and headed up the suburban street. Franny knows the drill and at the next corner she turns, but by then it’s clear that no one’s following them.

“Okay,” Jane pants. “Okay, stop, stop.”

Franny stops. She’s a skinny adolescent now – she used to be chubby but she’s lean and tan with all their walking. She’s wearing a pair of falling-apart pink sneakers and a tank top with oil smudges from when they had to climb over a truck tipped sideways on an overpass. She’s still flat-chested. Her eyes are big in her face. Jane puts her hands on her knees and draws a shuddering breath.

“We’re okay,” she says. It is gathering dusk in this Missouri town. In awhile, streetlights will come on, unless someone has systematically shot them out. Solar power still works. “We’ll wait a bit and then go back and get our stuff when it’s dark.”

“No!” Franny bursts into sobs. “We can’t!”

Jane is at her wit’s end. Rattled from the squatter. Tired of being the strong one. “We’ve got to! You want to lose everything we’ve got? You want to die? Goddamn it, Franny! I can’t take this anymore!”

“That guy’s there!” Franny sobs out. “We can’t go back! We can’t!”

“Your cell phone is there,” Jane says. A mean dig. The cell phone doesn’t work, of course. Even if they still somehow had service, if service actually exists, they haven’t been anywhere with electricity to charge it in weeks. But Franny still carries it in the hope that she can get a charge and call her friends. Seventh-graders are apparently surgically attached to their phones. Not that she acts even like a seventh-grader anymore. The longer they are on the road, the younger Franny acts.

This isn’t the first time that they’ve run into a squatter. Squatters are cowards. The guy doesn’t have a gun and he’s not going to go out after dark. Franny has no spine, takes after her asshole of a father. Jane ran away from home and got all the way to Pasadena, California when she was a year older than Franny. When she was fourteen, she was a decade older than Franny. Lived on the street for six weeks, begging spare change on the same route that the Rose Parade took. It had been scary but it had been a blast, as well. Taught her to stand on her own two feet, which Franny wasn’t going to be able to do when she was twenty. Thirty, at this rate.

“You’re hungry, aren’t you?” Jane said, merciless. “You want to go looking in these houses for something to eat?” Jane points around them. The houses all have their front doors broken into, open like little mouths.

Franny shakes her head.

“Stop crying. I’m going to go check some of them out. You wait here.”

“Mom! Don’t leave me!” Franny wails.

Jane is still shaken from the squatter. But they need food. And they need their stuff. There is $700 sewn inside the lining of Jane’s sleeping bag. And someone has to keep them alive. It’s obviously going to be her.

Things didn’t exactly all go at once. First there were rolling brown-outs and lots of people unemployed. Jane had been making a living working at a place that sold furniture. She started as a salesperson but she was good at helping people on what colors to buy, what things went together, what fabrics to pick for custom pieces. Eventually they made her a service associate; a person who was kind of like an interior decorator, sort of. She had an eye. She’d grown up in a nice suburb and had seen nice things. She knew what people wanted. Her boss kept telling her a little less eye makeup would be a good idea, but people liked what she suggested and recommended her to their friends even if her boss didn’t like her eye makeup.

She was thinking of starting a decorating business, although she was worried that she didn’t know about some of the stuff decorators did. On TV they were always tearing down walls and redoing fireplaces. So she put it off. Then there was the big Disney World attack where a kazillion people died because of a dirty bomb, and then the economy really tanked. She knew that business was dead and she was going to get laid off but before that happened, someone torched the furniture place where she was working. Her boyfriend at the time was a cop so he still had a job, even though half the city was unemployed. She and Franny were all right compared to a lot of people. She didn’t like not having her own money but she wasn’t exactly having to call her mother in Pennsylvania and eat crow and offer to come home.

So she sat on the balcony of their condo and smoked and looked through her old decorating magazines and Franny watched television in the room behind her. People started showing up on the sidewalks. They had trash bags full of stuff. Sometimes they were alone, sometimes there would be whole families. Sometimes they’d have cars and they’d sleep in them, but gas was getting to almost $10 a gallon, when the gas stations could get it. Pete, the boyfriend, told her that the cops didn’t even patrol much anymore because of the gas problem. More and more of the people on the sidewalk looked to be walking.

“Where are they coming from?” Franny asked.

“Down south. Houston, El Paso, anywhere within a hundred miles of the border,” Pete said. “Border’s gone to shit. Mexico doesn’t have food, but the drug cartels have lots of guns and they’re coming across to take what they can get. They say it’s like a war zone down there.”

“Why don’t the police take care of them?” Franny asked.

“Well, Francisca,” Pete said – he was good with Franny, Jane had to give him that – “sometimes there are just too many of them for the police down there. And they’ve got kinds of guns that the police aren’t allowed to have.”

“What about you?” Franny asked.

“It’s different up here,” Pete said. “That’s why we’ve got refugees here. Because it’s safe here.”

“They’re not
refugees,”
Jane said. Refugees were, like, people in Africa. These were just regular people. Guys in T-shirts with the names of rock bands on them. Women sitting in the front seat of a Taurus station wagon, doing their hair in the rearview mirror. Kids asleep in the back seat or running up and down the street shrieking and playing. Just people.