Extinct Doesn't Mean Forever (27 page)

Indigo’s descent ended abruptly. Warm water washed over his broken body, and for the last time a smile spread across his face.

~~~

ADAM ISRAEL, after having lived and worked in Chicago, New York City and Los Angeles, expatriated to southwest Ontario, Canada, with his wife, three dogs and three cats. He attended SFWA Grand Master James Gunn’s short fiction workshop in 2007 and Clarion in 2010. When not writing, Adam is a freelance software engineer, consultant and blogger. His fiction has appeared in several venues online and off, including
Crossed Genres
.

Website:
http://www.adamisrael.com/

Website:
http://www.inkpunks.com

Twitter:
http://www.twitter.com/AdamIsrael

When his pampered world loses the technology it depends on, extinction looms faster than lonely survivor Levo could ever have expected.

BLOOD FRUIT

by
Shona Snowden

Most people died the first night. When the electricity went out, the StayClosed doors and windows did exactly what they were supposed to do. I don’t know how long people lasted in their sealed units without the recirculating air. I guess most were sleeping. Like my family. I hope they were sleeping real deep and never knew a thing about it.

Anybody who was awake figured out what was happening. They had long enough to batter against their StayClosed doors and windows. Long enough to ram them with chairs, tables, anything they had to hand. We saw that afterwards, as we wandered through the empty streets.
People and their belongings all smushed up against the windows.
Shattered furniture, broken kitchen implements, bleeding fists and crushed feet.

And the faces pressed up against the glass, purple and swollen like overripe Jufruits. People’s faces pressed so hard up against the glass, like they had been trying to breathe through it — like they believed they could, if they just pushed hard enough. Some had pushed so hard their skin had burst open, coating the glass with red slime, all splattered and oozing. Everywhere we walked, we saw bulging eyes through the windows. Empty, but still kind of pleading.

So I hope my
family were
sleeping real deep. I never went to see.
Vin
wanted to, though. That first day, with his arms full of candy he’d just swept off the shelves of the store we were looting, he was all keen to check it out. “Don’cha
wanna
know, Levo?
See that fat Meshie-eating father of yours all squished against the window like a big Jufruit?
Mama trying to bite through it with those shiny Bleach-O-Dent teeth all smashed up?
Phrocking beautiful, mano!”

Vin
was a TubalChem baby, so he never had a family. He didn’t understand family and he never would. Let alone why I cared about mine, even though they’d pretty much disowned me when I opted out of the Graduation Module and went for Manual Labor Status III. There was no point in getting mad at
Vin
.

“Forget it, mano,” I told him. “They’re all gone, and that’s it. It’s just us now.”

“You, me and a phrockin’ city full of Meshies and PinniPods!”
He grinned through a mouthful of PinniPods, brown gunk oozing between his teeth. I glanced towards the back of the store where a face was plastered up against a tinted glass window in the door that must have led to the storeroom. The tint in the glass made the splatter of gunk on the window look like the melted candy smeared around
Vin’s
mouth. I just wanted out of there.

“Forget the candy,” I said. “Let’s see what else we can find.”

Vin’s
brown-edged grin grew wider. “Like Beppies?”

“Whatever. Candy stores aren’t the only ones with old-style doors.”

Vin
let the candy drop out of his arms. “Mano, you are a phrocking genius. Let’s hit it.”

I hadn’t done any of the hard stuff for a couple of months. I was kind of thinking of cleaning up; not that I’d have said that to
Vin
. I just told him my belly was acting up and a couple of minutes after he’d taken his first Funbo or whatever, he couldn’t have cared what planet I was on let alone what I was or wasn’t taking. He was still roaming from job to job, just loading, pushing, whatever, getting the cash he needed to keep him in DrinCuls and Beppies. He didn’t seem to have noticed that I’d been at PhillFast for three months or so, which was like a record for either of us. The work was easy and the people were nice, talking about maybe promoting me after a while. I’d been thinking about keeping on there, maybe saving up to get my own place — like a newer unit. Without
Vin
and with StayClosed doors that actually worked.

But right now I could really have done with some of the hard stuff. Then maybe I could stop thinking about the things I was looking at.

Pity there wasn’t any hard stuff to come by. Turned out Pharma stores and DrugBanks were right up to date with their StayClosed doors. And it wasn’t any easier to get through StayClosed from the outside than it was from the inside.

“Phrocking doors!”
Vin
tossed aside the Metallo bench he’d been using to ram the doors of the Drama & Stars DrugBank. The legs of the bench were bent, the StayClosed glass unscratched. “What the krig is in that stuff?”

I was sitting on the sidewalk, with my back against the wall of the BloMo store next door. I’d given up on the doors already. “Something no man shall ever put asunder…” I intoned in a deep voice, mimicking the StayClosed ad that had perpetually played on the city screens — the same ones that still loomed above every store, blank and silent for the first time. My voice echoed along the empty street. Without the gabble of the screens everything seemed too loud.

Vin
glanced nervously from one end of the street to the other, and then narrowed his eyes at me. “Don’t freak me out, mano.” His forehead gleamed with sweat and his fingers twitched against his thighs, curling up like he was getting a grip back on the Metallo bench. I wondered how many Beppies he’d had the night before.
And the night before that.
He’d been rolling pretty strong for a while.

“Rechill, mano. We’ll find one,” I said. “On the edge of City Central, near the river or over the Other Side, there’ll be some places with the regular old doors.”

He curled his lip. Then, so fast I almost missed the change, the big old
Vin
smile flashed over his face. “Better get moving then, mano.
Wouldn’t wan’ to miss out on any of the fun.”

There were other people around. Not many. They all moved past us pretty fast, like they didn’t want to be seen. I got that. I wouldn’t have wanted to get too close to us either. A couple of girls, kind of ripe-looking in tight-fitting Huddlesuits, had crept past on the other side of the road while
Vin
was trying to crash the DrugBank. He hadn’t noticed them and I didn’t say anything.

I stood up. “Better move on, then. Want anything to eat? This BloMo’s got the regular doors.”

“Naw, mano.
Mostly I’m just hot.” A bead of sweat from his forehead dribbled down his cheek, like a dirty tear.

I was hot too, and I hadn’t worked even half as hard as
Vin
. My Bluesuit felt sticky.
Which shouldn’t happen.
They’re supposed to adapt to any standard ambient temperature.

But what if the temperature wasn’t standard? I looked up at the sky.
Blue, like normal.
The sun
.
It was the sun that was different. Instead of the usual pale lemon disk that should have floated above us like a kid’s AirPuff, an angry orange-red fireball glared down at me, searing my eyes with a flash of pain.
“Phrock!”
I looked away as fast as I could, but I still saw an orange globe – no, two orange globes, one stamped on the front of each eye. I shook my head, blinking fast, until they faded.

Vin
sniggered. “Shake it out, mano!”

“The
sun, Vin — no don’t
look at it!” With an effort, he looked back at me. “It near burned my eyes out. The Vault’s filters are down. It’s full blaze up there.”

Now we needed a Pharma for more than Beppies — we’d need SunGear, SkinPro, LanoFill — all the stuff people needed for trips outside the Vault. Now we were going to need them inside, too. Or maybe enough Beppies not to care about fried skin and dried lungs. No wonder the girls had crept past. It wasn’t us — although it might have been part of it; mostly they were clinging to the shade of the buildings on the far side of the road.

“Better walk fast, mano,” Vinnie tossed at me. He turned on his heel, heading to the shadier side of the street, loping along on his long legs, almost faster than I could follow. I didn’t complain. There was no point.

We moved forward steadily all that day, dropping into a kind of routine — walk for an hour or so, find a store and lift a few cans of Fizz or Tapo, walk again. All the time, eyeballing every Pharma we passed, even though we knew it would be tomorrow before we could reach the areas around the river with their shabby stores. The bad news was that older stores meant older units without StayClosed, so more people — which added up to less stuff to go around.

Even though we stuck to the shade, within a few hours the skin on
Vin’s
face and hands was streaked with red and my hands were tingling. My face was beyond that, heading towards burning. I kept my eyes ahead, on the rippling back of
Vin’s
Bluesuit, his muscles working rhythmically as he walked. Not looking to the sides, not looking at the purple faces pressed to the glass, the empty eyes looking at me.
Mocking me, making me wonder if in fact they were the lucky ones, because it had only been a few hours for them.
Grilling to death under an unfiltered sun could take a few days.

Just after dark, we stopped at a BloMo that still had plenty of Thinpax and cans, although gaps on the shelves showed where others had already been through. We’d seen people flitting along the streets, moving in the same direction as us, towards the river. Nobody wanted to go to the Other Side unless they had to. Now we were all heading there.

We gorged on multiple meal combos, and then built nests from crumpled plastiwrap to rest for a few hours. I peeled my Bluesuit off one shoulder. The skin there was almost as red as my hands.

“We could just stay here, mano,”
Vin
said through cracked lips. “Eat candy and Thinpax ‘til things are all fixed up.”

“The food won’t last forever. And when are things going to be all fixed up? Who’s out there to do it? Seen anyone that looks like they know what they’re doing? Plus, how’re you doing without the Beppies?”

Vin
just looked at me with red-rimmed eyes. His hands had gone from trembling to quivering. I’d had to open his Thinpax.

“We’ll find you some,” I told him.
“If we keep moving.”

Vin
sighed and curled up on a bed of Virtue Pads. “I’ll take your word.
For now, mano.
For now.”

We slept for a couple of hours and then moved
on,
There was no full dark without the filter. Stars blazed above us, each one a burning sun in its own right, adding up to a grayish light that prickled our already-burned skin.

It was by this grayish light that we saw our first bodies outside the StayClosed.
Vin
walked into the first one — he didn’t see it, hanging from a useless CityLec pylon. He grunted when he hit it and fell backwards, knocking me down behind him. We sprawled on the ground, side-by-side, looking up at the body,
a
darker grey shadow against the drab sky. He’d hanged himself with some kind of cord, looped over the Metoplex arm of the pylon. The sidewalk was scattered with the Thinpax cartons he must have stood on,
then
kicked away. Dark, curly hair stood out around his head like a black halo.

We picked ourselves up and walked on without speaking. There were more bodies over the next day or so.
Mostly hanging.
Some in stores, beside empty bottles of Drainfix and Stilosopa, sprawled out in gruesome puddles of bloody vomit, their bodies twisted in agony, their faces grey and rigid, stuck in a permanent howl of pain. The hanging ones were quieter, their purple faces and bulging eyes the outdoor twins of the people stuck to the StayClosed glass.

However they died, they soon began to stink in the queer, still heat of the Vault. We walked through the sweet and meaty stench, waded on through it, as our skin baked and curled under the relentless sun. We took turns to lead, the other following close behind, falling into the same rhythm, walking like machines, ducking into stores for fuel — just quick in and out, because in there the stink was often worse, the heat and the bodies trapped together. Vin seemed to be coping OK without the Beppies, although there was a hard set to his jaw that suggested he was clenching something inside, something he didn’t want to let escape. We didn’t talk.

A pale, silvery dawn was beginning as we crossed the broad strip of Geocrete that ran alongside the river that lay between City Central and the Other Side. When I studied history, one teacher showed us an old picture on FloScreen of something she called “nature”: flat courtyards of green stuff called “grass,” dotted with brown sticks with darker green fluffy stuff on top — she said nobody knew what they’d been called. Through the middle of the picture ran a coil of blue, curving through the grass — she said that was what rivers used to look like. Our river didn’t look like that. Our river was a swirl of brown running through a deep Geocrete channel. It ran across the whole Vault, and took a loop right around City Central, with a series of bridges crossing over to the Other Side, before rejoining itself to run through the rest of the Vault and out the far side.