End Time (73 page)

The heavenly host of morphine warmed her cold limbs for a spell, and Cheryl wondered whether they'd take her to a church, let her sit in the pew and stare at the stained glass. Sure they would. But would she make it? She coughed again. More blood, which she wiped off with some lemon-scented disinfectant wipes. No, she wouldn't make it to church.

Beatrice's voice floated over her.

“Hey there, Gorgeous…”

“Hey, yourself.”

Tough to see the older woman's face now; it sort of sparkled. Cheryl's eyes were tearing badly, streams of tears flowing down her cheeks, but Cheryl didn't feel like she was crying. When Cheryl touched her face she felt blisters; blisters from forehead to chin. She feared that if they cracked all her life would seep away. Maybe Big Bea was doing all the crying and that's why her face sparkled, with pings of light in blue and yellow.

“I had plans,” Cheryl said to the angelic face in front of her. “They weren't big plans, but they were my plans. I thought maybe you and me—” She hacked a little, covering her mouth. No more plans. A few more words slurred up Cheryl's throat. One last request. Very slowly and deliberately the words came out:

“Could you give me the extra shot now? The pain is coming back. And I don't want to scream so anyone hears.”

“I understand,” Bea said to her. “I understand.”

Cheryl saw the needle shimmering on the edge of sight. Suddenly wishing she could have done it herself and not made Beatrice do it. Regretting that so deeply.
Sorry, sorry, so sorry …

*   *   *

Inside the bus Maria hid behind a seat, huddling as if there was no shred of doubt, no hope. With every fiber of her being the little girl tried to see the future. What to do?
What to do?
There must be something they could do—but her mind was filled with clouds, just like the sky outside.

Billy and Lila crouched with Maria, trying to comfort her. Lila held the little girl's hands and stroked her arms, grateful the child didn't have to watch Cheryl pass away. Not good for a child to see something like that; Maria had been through enough of that sort of thing. But as Lila touched the child's face she felt the silvery lightness—a kind of soft tingle at the tips of her fingers. And then Billy Shadow felt it too, like the trill of that tin wolf whistle making the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.

“Can't we be blood brothers?” the little girl asked.

Was she really suggesting what they thought she was? Would that really work? A child's notion, that if you held hands, one person's blood flowing into the next, Cheryl wouldn't die, that they could somehow heal her. Blood brothers, like at a ceremony?

“We could do it,” Maria insisted. “Make a cut, make a chain, hold hands, take the poison away.” Billy and Lila didn't know what to say. “Then when we're done rub ashes in the cuts to make the bleeding stop.” Perhaps this was just exhaustion talking. But what was there to lose? Nothing. Hope and one last chance …

Cut your hand, press palm to palm—

“Everyone should do it,” Maria whispered. “But Lila first. Lila's the strongest.” Billy Shadow understood. They'd all survived the wandering sickness. They were all strong. It was worth a shot.

Nothing to lose but the dying.

Seconds later, Lila, Billy, and Maria half slogged, half ran across the Mobil station, appearing in the convenience store doorway. Billy held Maria in his arms, carrying her over the four-foot drifts. They stumbled in, dragging a wave of snow with them. Beatrice was weeping silently, face in her hands, the syringe trembling in the other.

“Put down the needle!” Lila said. “Maria showed us. Billy and me.”

“What?” Beatrice demanded.

Billy Shadow opened his penknife. “Give me your hand,” he said.

Big Bea looked at him in alarm.

“Do you care if we're wrong?” Lila asked.

*   *   *

Outside the abandoned convenience store an onlooker would have seen the strangest thing: three women, a child, and a man holding hands in a line; just holding hands as though they were praying. Heads bowed, letting their life force flow between them, a transfusion of cells and blood, bone marrow, and molecules. Like that old musty, antique fossil of a rhyme:

Six little Injuns all alive,

One kicked the bucket and then there were five;

Five little Injuns on a cellar door,

One tumbled in and then there were four.

Except this one wasn't going to die.
Blood to blood and hand to hand, filtering Cheryl's essence from one person to the next—from Cheryl to Lila, to Maria, to Beatrice and, finally, Billy.…

Lila Chen, the first to hold the sick woman's hand, grew very pale, her breath coming in shallow gasps, and as the poison passed from one person to the next, each grew sick in turn. Until at last it came to Billy; he felt the burning sensation flowing outward from Big Bea. Holding his free hand over the convenience store sink, a last cut from his penknife let drops of blood drip down the drain. And as each drop of tainted blood flowed away, slowly the life returned to Cheryl's honey-brown skin, then to Lila, and so on down the line.… In the end the color returned to each of their faces.

Before they were done they took a pinch of Janet's ashes and rubbed them in their wounds. The cuts coagulated, and hardened. The blisters on Cheryl's once-smooth cheeks cracked, leaked, and shrank. Finally healed—but the scars would remain for the rest of her life.

The final syringe lay forgotten on the counter. Beatrice squeezed the dose down the drain along with everything else. Cheryl struggled to stand; then glanced about the abandoned convenience store. Eyes darting, she looked for Rachel, her bestest girlie.

Then found her.

“I hoped you'd be here if I came back from the dead.”

“I guess I just wanted to make sure you were okay,” Rachel whispered into Cheryl's ear. She touched the hem of her hospital gown. “They're having a special in Eternity Wear. I think I can go now.” Rachel kissed her cheek, but Cheryl couldn't feel it. Exhausted, wrung out, yes, dead tired, she couldn't feel anything. Rachel's ghost breezed through the plate-glass store window, then across the drifts, bare feet, no prints. Outside, the snow slowed to faint spirals; the clouds broke; a shaft of sun lit the empty ground.

I know your face better than my own.

*   *   *

Guy and Lauren spent the longest night of their lives waiting out the storm in the gabled house back in Middletown. No one dared sleep. Guy hacked away, sweating and shivering all at the same time. Alice brought him endless cups of tea, with lemon juice and plenty of sugar. The two greyhounds came to lie with him on the couch, canine hot-water bottles. The hours crawled on their hands and knees as the snow flew sideways across the porch.

Snow,
Guy thought. God, what did people do in the good ol' days? Wind drifts and ice fog—you couldn't see beyond your hand. Guess in olden times people snuggled inside until the weather broke and the sun came out; then shoveled a lot. The first few inches weren't so bad, but as it started to accumulate—half a foot, a foot, when it grew to two feet—the harder it became to get out of your way. He'd read somewhere that horses pulled rollers and sledges to pack down the roads. Guy remembered watching plows work the Albany airport some years ago; 2 a.m. and the maintenance crews were still pushing mounds around under the runway floodlights. By dawn, Guy had stopped hacking long enough to drift off.

A bar of feeble daylight crossed the carpet. Lauren opened her eyes. The snow had stopped. The first thing she noticed—two bold rabbits sitting on the windowsill on the other side of the glass. Corky and Peaches perked up their ears, twitching inquisitive noses. In one bound they leapt over Guy's snoring body.

The rabbits vanished.

Lauren cautiously padded across the floor. The dogs' noses had steamed the lower panes of the frosted window. The rabbit tracks stretched back to the edge of the trees. The world was covered in snow.

Lauren sighed and looked away. But her eyes snapped back to the window at the grumble of a large engine driving around the hospital grounds. The forgotten and yet familiar sound of road surface being plowed; the rhythmic rumble and thump of a plow pushing snow. In a few moments the vehicle came into view. Lauren ran to get her boots and parka and the revolver. To Alice she said, “Stay with Guy and the dogs.”

The vehicle turned out to be the Kubota front loader with one of the maintenance guys driving. A cheerful fellow about sixty in a dark blue snowmobile suit; he pushed a mound of snow deftly past the line of parked vehicles—Mr. Washington's car, the white minivan, the yellow 4Runner. Then pulled up by the porch and leaned out the transparent plastic cab.

At once Lauren thought of him as the Good Samaritan, coming out of nowhere to rescue her and Alice and Guy marooned in the snow.

“Saw some tracks leading up here and just checking to see if everyone is okay.”

He glanced at the bodies stacked on the porch completely covered in snow. The Good Samaritan wagged his head in dismay. “Lot of that going around. But it seems to be tapering off. Are you hurt?”

Lauren shook her head no, then finally remembered to say something. “Can I get you something. Tea or cocoa? Would you like to come inside and get warm?”

“No, I'm all set,” the man replied. “I'm the only one who showed to work today, but that's better than nothing.” He saw Lauren's confused expression.

“There seem to be a lot of people waking up,” he explained. “People you thought were gone for good. Believe it or not, they opened up the minimart back in Middletown this morning.” He chuckled. “Cold cuts but no bread.”

Then Lauren noticed an animal moving by the Good Samaritan's boots. A bunny stared out the bottom of the plastic see-through cab. The man stared down at the creature and laughed again. “He just hopped in and likes plowing. Go figure. Anyway, he makes me feel better.”

Lauren didn't know what to say.

The rabbit wrinkled its nose and cocked his ears. And somehow that made Lauren feel better too.

 

EPILOGUE

American Gothic

Happy the man, and happy he alone,

He who can call to-day his own;

He who, secure within, can say,

To-morrow, do thy worst, for I have liv'd to-day.

—John Dryden (1631–1700),
Imitation of Horace,
Book III, Ode 29, Line 65–68

 

45

Tea House of the Hidden Moon

Lattimore stood at the bronze window of his library and stared out across Sioux Falls. The setting sun shone across miles of white snow. Outside the aerospace building, Lila Chen and Little Maria were decorating the trees on the sidewalk with Christmas lights. The two girls unwound the sparkling strings from a large roll the company kept in the basement—handing the pretty lights off to Billy Shadow, who passed them on up a tall double-sided ladder to Cheryl and Big Bea. Strangely, or not so strangely, the large woman didn't seem to need her leg brace any longer, her knee miraculously healed. And Cheryl was just happy to be alive.

Several lit trees gave off an air of sugarplums and fairy magic. A few weeks ago, you wouldn't have thought it possible. A few weeks ago, the aerospace boss wouldn't have thought much of anything was possible.

When Lattimore returned from the server farm he found Mildred facedown on the bed, OD'd, a rime of rainbow dust around her lips and nose. That night—a very long walk about the apartment, keeping her on her feet until the drugs relented. Then there were the days of detox after Lattimore got rid of her stash, Mildred snarling, “
Clem! Clem, you bastard
,
get me one more touch. One more touch.…”

For several days, Lattimore changed soaked sheets, poured endless cups of tea down Mildred's throat, and mopped her brow every time the devils leapt out of the walls. During the quieter moments of hand-holding, a deep silence reigned over the world, and Clem began to wonder whether they were the only two people left.

No one knew the real numbers on the dead. Some thought one in three, others thought one in four. Lattimore guessed one in five. Twenty percent; this meant fifty or sixty million people in the USA alone. The lucky ones hid like peasants in the Dark Ages until it was safe to come out. The cities took it the hardest; most metropolitan areas—Chicago, New York, Los Angeles—cracked open on the pavement, like ancient Rome abandoned to corrupt officials, scavengers, and cutthroats. For a time it felt as though the cockroaches had finally inherited the Earth.

One small blessing; as winter had come, the massed dead in the North could be stored outside and eventually carted off to landfills as rail freight and trucking limped back to life. In the South, they made bonfires, and this process, if you could call it a process, replicated itself around the globe.

In Sioux Falls, those first few weeks were no fun. NorthWestern Energy and Black Hills Power faded every couple of hours; people huddled around fireplaces and woodstoves, scrounging gas or oil for their generators. Word got around that Lattimore, Inc., still had supplies of food; scores of frightened, famished people with nowhere to go lined up outside the aerospace building. Nothing to do but open the doors of the Cosmos Café … until the food ran out. At least the company generators kept people warm, and the empty frozen body of Security Chief Nash got taken outside for good.

However, just as the point of no return approached, the deliveries that people took for granted, and lost all hope of ever seeing again, miraculously started up. In a few weeks people discovered extra stores of goods, allowing the employees of big box outlets to distribute staples. Food banks were set up with regular collection times, and finally the rail depots on the edges of towns started seeing more freight. Foodstuffs were getting in—not much in the way of fresh, but plenty of frozen vegetables, and flour and rice, along with mountains of canned meat—enough to keep people going. Americans lived in a very rich country; you couldn't eat everything at once even if you tried. South Dakotans, along with the heartland and huge hunks of the South and Southwest, had avoided total annihilation.