Across the Spectrum (28 page)

“No, nothing can kill you, old loon,” she said aloud,
half-affectionately. She turned away from the window, taking the greasy pan
from the stove. She set it in the sink without rinsing it. There wasn’t much
water left in the bucket anyway; she’d have to go to the stinking well for more.

Instead she went to the basement, or what passed for one. It
was a low space half-dug into the rocky hillside, intended for a wine cellar.
But Cypriot wine was harsh and sour, and her English palate had never adapted.

She stood blinking in the dim space, waiting for her old
eyes to adjust, and pulled down a fresh bottle of Bombay gin. She stocked the
large bottles—1.75 liters—even though they were hard to maneuver above her
glass, especially as the evening progressed. Before leaving the cellar, Beth counted
the bottles. There were eighteen, not including the one she had in her hand.

“That’s all you’ve got,” she said. “After that, it’s all
over.” Her words were swallowed by the earthen walls.

∞

Seven weeks after Christos sailed away, Elizabeth Barnett
sat in a leather chair with one of her own books in her lap—book seven of
The
Caged Sword
series, and her personal favorite:
Man and His Weaknesses
.
She could hardly stand to read books written by anyone else. They were never
written as she would have done; they were over too soon, or too late; the
relationship between the hero and heroine never rang true; and the endings were
always contrived, seemingly invented merely for the purpose of making a good
story.

Well, of course they were, she knew that. But other people’s
imaginations, to Beth, just seemed . . . inferior.

So she read her own work. And certainly there was plenty of
it. When twilight fell, she lit a fire in the hearth and a small candle by her
chair, refilled the glass of gin, and picked up the book again, chuckling to
herself as Larion prepared to storm the Fair Castle Rhuligel and save Marleena.
Naturally, Marleena would refuse to be saved; that was when the fireworks would
start. “Oh, you minx, you little vixen,” she murmured.

That was when she heard the crash from the back yard.

Beth froze, holding the heavy hardcover on her lap. What was
it? Definitely something large. Another goat?

She heard another noise, not a crash this time, more like a
bump. It was closer to the house.

She slowly got to her feet, leaving the book on the chair. A
goat would be good news: it would mean milk, or at least meat. She walked over
to the doorway and peered down the hall, craning to see the back of the house,
but it was too dark inside. A small window was set high on the back wall of the
living room for cross-ventilation.

She sidled over to the window and stood on tiptoes, but
could not reach to see out.

She could hear, though. She heard footsteps.

“Who’s there?” she called, making her voice strong,
projecting to the rear of the audience as she had done for years.

The footsteps stopped.

A goat would have kept on, ignoring her in its desperate
search for food. What other animal could it be? The dogs were all long dead,
eaten mostly by one another, and then by the remaining people.

And the people were long dead as well. Most of them, anyway.
If one in ten thousand humans had survived the plagues, that would have left
Cyprus with a population of eighty. Not counting tourists, of course. . . but
the tourist trade had slowed greatly before the final plagues. The last ten
flights in had been matched by as many flights out before the planes were
grounded for good.

Moving quietly, Beth left the living room and went into the
hallway that led to the back door. It was darker here, and there was still a
little light outside. She made her way to the window in the door, staying back
a bit so as not to be seen.

A man stood in her back yard. He was staring at the house,
the roof. The chimney. He must have smelled the smoke from her fire.

Ignoring the clutch of fear in her chest, Beth studied the
man. He looked terrible; he was clearly starving, and filthy. But he didn’t
seem plague-bit. He was about fifty, maybe, though it was hard to tell in his
condition—no, she corrected herself. It was impossible to tell. He could be
thirty or seventy, who knew?

Anyway, he appeared weak. Frail as Beth was, he was likely
not a significant threat.

By the looks of him, he was not Greek or Turk or Armenian or
any of the other more customary inhabitants of the island. He could be at least
as English as she was.

What were the odds?

As she watched, the man suddenly became animated. She sucked
in her breath and pulled back farther from the window. He took a step toward
the house, then stumbled and pitched forward.

“Oh,” Beth said, as the man landed on his face on her
cobblestones.

∞

He lay on a narrow bed in the guest room, still
unconscious. Beth cleaned and bandaged his bloody forehead, and had brought in
some more halloumi—the last she had, it would be canned food after this unless
she found more milk—in case he woke up. He was breathing, but unsteadily; his
temperature seemed high, but she was no doctor. Beth had never been a mother
either, had never wiped a fevered brow as people did in her novels. Maybe he was
plague-bit. But no, there were no buboes, there was no swelling. And the only
blood was from his cut.

She sat in a hard chair beside him, biting her lip. It had
taken much of her strength to drag him here, and lift him up onto the bed. She
wouldn’t have been able to do it at all if he hadn’t been so emaciated.

The man’s eyelids flickered and he gave a small moan.

Beth leaned forward, peering into his face. “Are you awake?”

“Ah . . . ” One eye fluttered open, then
shut. He gave a long, sour exhale.

Beth touched his shoulder, giving him a light shake, and
touched his forehead again, next to the bandage. “Wake up.”

He was silent a moment, then both eyes opened. “Wh. . . mou.
. . uh. . . ”

“Do you speak English?” she asked.

Now his eyes opened wider. “Yes.”

“That’s good.” Beth stared into his face before looking
away. “But then of course you do, everyone does.”

The man blinked, staring at her. He asked, “Where. . . where
is everyone?” His accent was flat, broad—American, perhaps.

“What do you mean?”

He swallowed and glanced around the room. His face filled
with fear. Terror, even. “Nobody’s here, are they?”

“I’m here.” Was the man a fool? Quite likely. Most people
were fools, and if they hadn’t been before the world fell apart, they certainly
were now. Or, rather, they were dead now, the vast majority of them. And the
fools like Christos had sailed off to follow a dream, a computer hoax, a cruel
fantasy someone had written, about a place called Grants Pass, where society
would begin again. As if there was any chance of that.

“You . . . ” The man struggled to sit up, and
Beth didn’t stop him. He leaned against the pillows and shivered in the heat.
“Who are you?”

“Elizabeth Barnett.” She watched his eyes as she said her
name, but he gave no flicker of recognition. “Who are you?”

“Tyler.” He blinked and swallowed, and she stared at his
throat, but saw no swelling. “Tyler Anderson.”

“I am pleased to meet you, Tyler Anderson,” Beth said,
slipping into the tone she would use when greeting over-eager fans.

Tyler closed his eyes, leaned against the headboard, then
opened them again. He had already smeared the white coverlet with his filthy,
stained hands. But without water, she’d have no way of washing them. Everything
was just going to get dirtier and dirtier from here on out, until everything
was the color of the sun-baked earth. Including herself.

“Is it true that California . . . ?” His
eyes appealed to her as he broke off, then started again. “Is San Diego really
ruined?”

Now Beth stared at him. “That was two years ago.”

∞

She was not a nurse, she told herself that she didn’t care
if he lived or died, but for some reason she fed him and cleaned him up a bit,
and changed the bandage on his forehead. The bleeding slowed and stopped, and
seemed like it would heal.

Once he was cleaner, she saw that he was even younger than
she’d realized. Probably in his twenties, though he’d lived a hard life during
those few years. Well, who hadn’t, lately?

He slept a lot, and ate the halloumi she brought, and the
canned foods. Beth began to wonder if she’d need to make another raid on the
neighboring houses, or even—god forbid—venture down into Larnaka again.
Christos had packed the small cellar full before he’d left, even as he’d
continued to beg her to change her mind. But an old woman didn’t eat nearly as
much as a young man.

Within a week, Tyler was able to walk around a little, and a
day or two later, he washed himself, using most of a bucket of brackish water.
Beth brought him pants and a cotton shirt that had belonged to James, handing it
to him without comment.

Tyler dressed himself, then came and found Beth in the
living room.

“Drink?” she asked, indicating the bottle of Bombay on the
sideboard.

“Oh my god,” he said, his blue eyes glittering with a touch
of madness. Or at least that’s how she would have written it, as she thought
about it later. In the moment, she only thought,
Now, there’s a healthy
young man who appreciates quality gin
.

He poured himself a full three fingers of the stuff, his
arms shaking as he lifted the heavy bottle with both hands. Sitting in the
second leather chair, he raised the glass and smiled at her.

She lifted her half-empty glass, and they clinked.

He took a generous swallow of the gin, closing his eyes as
it went down, and turned to face Beth, grinning. “Oh, man. That’s incredible.”

She lifted an eyebrow. “I take it it’s been a while?”

“Ha!” It wasn’t a laugh; more like an ironic bark, and a bit
too loud. “Yes, it has. I’d say two years, at least.”

Beth leaned forward, holding him with her eyes. “So, Tyler, tell
me: what do you know of what has gone on in our world these last few years?”

He took another drink, not quite as gulpish as his last, but
she still noted it.
If he drinks like that, eighteen bottles won’t be near
enough
, she thought. “Not a whole hell of a lot, to tell you the truth.”

“What’s an American boy doing in Cyprus anyway, now, knowing
nothing? If I didn’t know better, I’d say you’ve been in prison.”

Now he did laugh, though it was as bitter as before. “Why,
yes, as a matter of fact, I was in prison.” He finished the glass of gin,
setting it quite deliberately on the table beside his chair, next to the
cut-glass coaster.

∞

It turned out to be the usual story—young tourist arrested
for drugs in a country with little patience for such things, thrown into prison
to teach him a lesson. It would have had the usual outcome—his parents sending
money or coming to retrieve him, a whole lot of nuisance and no lasting ill
effects—except for the unfortunate timing of the apocalypse.

Tyler spoke no Greek, no Turkish, nothing but English. His
parents had presumably died in the initial earthquake, but he didn’t know for
sure, as communications went down almost immediately thereafter. The plagues
had come then, sweeping across the world. He had known almost nothing of this
as he languished in prison, waiting for rescue, for anything. His guards
changed weekly, then daily, with no explanation. Then one died right in front
of him, and he finally, belatedly, understood.

“How did you get out of the locked cell?” Beth asked him,
swirling her drink.

He shrugged, looking down. “Reached out, took the keys from
him. I thought for sure I’d get the plague then, but I guess not.” His words
were casual, but his face was bleak. There was more to the story. If he wanted
to tell her, he would.

He was vague on the timing—how long he had been out of the
prison, surviving on the rough countryside. But that was because he didn’t
know, Beth felt, not because he was trying to deceive. It had obviously been a
while. He must have wandered the entire island before finding her. Christos had
come to her in the first few weeks after the initial devastation, when the few survivors
were banding together. And Christos had stayed with her when the others had
left the island. Until he, too, could no longer resist the empty promise of a
dream.

∞

Tyler’s strength grew, and soon enough he was poking
around the place, exploring neighboring houses, trying to figure out ways to
improve their lot. Just like Christos had done. Beth was pleased enough to have
the help, although she’d been doing perfectly well on her own, thank you very
much. Tyler began talking more, yammering on to her in the evenings about
everything and nothing—his boyhood in California, girls he’d liked, his world
travels on a shoestring. She took to retiring early, going to her room with a
book and a candle where she could read in peace until she felt like sleeping.

“What’s this?” he asked one day. Beth was in the kitchen,
trying to decide whether to light a fire to heat up the canned lakerda or just
eat it cold. She turned around at the sound of his voice. He was holding a
sheaf of papers.

Beth recognized them at once. “Where did you get that?”

Tyler shrugged. “I was cleaning up, I found them. Is it
true?”

“Give me those.” Beth reached out for the papers, but Tyler
held them away from her. “I asked you where you got that.”

He stared at her, his eyes wide and needful. “We could find
other people. We could go; we don’t have to stay here!”

“Put that down. You’re a goddamned fool, do you know that?”

He started to say something else, but she interrupted. “I
said,
put that down
, and don’t speak of it to me again.”