Asimov's Science Fiction: July 2013 (16 page)

Nathan nodded his head.

The TDR.

Totally drug-resistant.

A strain of TB that resisted all forms of antibiotics.

Now the only people left were those with natural resistance, or the slowly dying. The world had been dying now for twenty-three months.

"Will it sting?"

"Not as bad as gangrene, or the subsequent amputation. Cutting your whole foot off would
really
sting. You sure this dog wasn't sick?"

"It was healthy."

"Just because it looked healthy doesn't mean it was. An unprovoked attack can be a sign of disease."

"It wasn't unprovoked. I provoked it. It was a farmer's dog. I think the farmer told it to attack me, but I don't know for sure."

Doc raised an eyebrow, so Nathan told the whole story. Told about the bull, and the pigs, and the corn.

"Well," Doc said as he finished scrubbing out the wound. "It sounds like a few dog
bites was the better of two evils. I'd rather face a dog than a two-ton bull." "The bull wasn't all that big. In fact, it was kinda scrawny. For a bull, I mean." Nathan thought a lot about the bull as he limped back to the S-10 and climbed in the back. Could bulls get the TDR? In all the time they'd been wandering, even before the reservation, and what happened in Perryton, they hadn't come across any livestock. When the farmers had died, so did their animals. What was left was deer and wild game. Things you could hunt.

A few minutes later, Elias and Jacob climbed into the big four-by-four. Marco climbed in the S-10. The vehicles rumbled to life, and Marco shifted the truck into gear. The caravan rolled on.

"So now you ride with me, eh?"

"Looks like."

"You had this whole empty place to ride, and you still crashed your bike."

"It was the farm," Nathan said. "I wasn't expecting it."

"You said there was a bull. Were there other things, too?"

"Yeah." "Does the Doc know that?"

"Yeah, I told him."

"And it's up ahead, the way we're going?"

"Yeah."

Marco was silent for a minute. "Tell me about this farm."

Nathan hadn't grown up on a farm, but he'd spent summers at his uncle's place as a kid. He'd slopped hogs and milked cows. When he was twelve, he'd raised rabbits, too, and sold them at the county fair. One summer, he'd saved up and gotten his hands on a couple of Flemish Giants—red-brown rabbits roughly the size of cocker spaniels. They were freaks of the rabbit world. After he'd gotten several litters out of the pair, he'd crossed one of the giants to a tiny mini-lop dwarf just to see how the bunnies would turn out. The results were fascinating, if not altogether surprising. Ordinary rabbits. Just normal, ordinary rabbits.

That place, those summers; they had been an escape for him. An escape from all the expectations he'd never lived up to. It did him good to be on the farm. He liked to think it was in his blood, even if there was precious little evidence for it.

With a name like Anderson, Nathan never had to guess about his roots. And although he knew that Swedes
did
come in colors other than red and blonde, and in sizes other than extra large, he never would have learned that from his father's side of the family. Nathan's paternal grandmother had always seemed inordinately proud of her brood of Viking caricatures. She'd borne an even half-dozen in her time—blue-eyed boys and girls as overgrown as they were under pigmented. The Andersons of that generation were framed long and slung in beef—big, meaty hands and big arms and big shoulders. Big, meaty legs, and chests, and asses. They were tall and nothing you'd call fat, but just thick—and there's a difference.

Nathan's mother had been as small as his father was large. She was thin and dark—some parts Irish, some parts Cherokee if the rumors were true, but most parts just plain scrawny hill folk three generations deep from the backcountry of West Virginia.

Nathan had his father's pale complexion and square, even features, if none of his tendency toward Nordic pituitary excess. Nathan was a normal-sized rabbit. As out of place among his grandmother's Viking brood as he was in the caravan that had brought death to Perryton.

The sound of gunf ire snapped Nathan from his daydream. He sat up straight, neck aching from how he'd been sitting with his head against the window.

Luke was shooting again.

Plinking shots against an old signpost.

They were parked in the center of town. It looked different by day. Even more dead, somehow, if that were possible.

Elias had a garden hose stuck into the side of minivan.

Gas there was plenty of. Siphoned as they went.

And cars, plenty. Ammunition, guns. Plenty. Picked up here and there.

People though were fewer.

And food least of all.

Nathan pushed open the truck door and stretched his legs.

By the time he'd laced his boots up, Elias had capped the big metal gas can and was lugging it over to the pickup. Nathan walked over to help, and together they lifted the can up onto the bed of the four-by-four with the rest of the supply. They stood back to look at their collected worldly goods.

It wasn't pretty.

Nathan counted the cans. They'd burned through nearly half their gas. They'd burned through the food even quicker. A hundred feet across the empty intersection, he saw the doc standing by the RV, watching them.

"I miss my bike," Nathan said.

"You make friends wherever you go?" Marco asked.

"That farmer could have helped me. We could have got my bike out before the bull trashed it."

"Why would he do that? You shot his dog."

"It was biting me."

"That's because the farmer probably told it to bite you."

Nathan slammed the tailgate closed. "Then the farmer should have thought twice," he said.

"That dog was probably used for driving the sheep. No dog, and the sheep run away, get lost, get eaten. No sheep dog," he said, "then maybe there's no sheep. You think of that?"

"No."

"This farmer, he had a girl, you said? Where's his wife? You didn't see her, that means she's dead. And others, too, probably. His whole family. Not enough food now, maybe daughter dies next."

"He still shouldn't have set his dog on me."

"Some stranger comes in
your
livestock pen, what you think? You think he comes to steal? Or think he wants to play with the bull?"

That night Nathan lay awake for a long time in the bed of the truck. He'd seen enough to recognize the truth in Marco's words. There was a fine line between subsistence farming and starvation. Outside the reservations, the world had ended. The reservations were the only places where any kind of civility reigned. Anything approaching laws, or civilization. The first nations governed themselves.

The caravan was on its way across Oklahoma, to the four corners. Across the emptied lands.

Emptied of people. Emptied of food.

But here and there, some still hung on. Others came from the South, where the die-off hadn't been so extreme. Driven north by fighting.

Many would probably starve next year.

Maybe the difference would be one failed crop. Maybe one stolen bull. That single
scrawny bovine probably represented the best chance that farmer had. And Nathan
had
been in its pen.

Nathan finally gave up on sleep and sat up on the rusty wheel well. The night breeze was cool and sweet, and the moon was out, bleaching color from the grassy f ield that stretched toward the dark trees on the ridge. At night, the valley was beautiful, a wide-open expanse. A coyote yipped somewhere out in the distance.

Nathan thought about the dog he'd killed—big, black and tan. Maybe the last dog for a hundred miles. The land belonged to the coyotes now.

They drove through the hottest part of the day, three lumbering vehicles in the hot scrubland. Nathan recognized the route he'd taken on his bike. The line of hills. Out here the country was windy. The steady, relentless roll of the wheels ate up the distance. He saw the exact point up ahead where he'd left the road on his bike—saw his own tracks in the dirt, heading up to the ridge. Up ahead, leading the way, the RV seemed to slow, or maybe he just imagined it. And a moment later they were past. Wheels still rolling, eyes ahead. Past the farmer. Who would live on, and keep what was his.

Around midday, they came to the snarl. Here the road curved around a steep rise. The vehicles stopped.

At the front of the line of vehicles, Luke and the doc stepped out. Doc shaded his eyes in the sun. Luke looked pissed.

"I thought you said there was nothing to worry about," Luke called back to him, irritation in his voice.

"I didn't get this far," he shouted back.

A passel of cars sat abandoned. And beyond that, wreckage. Boulders dotted the road. Struck at high speed, probably at night.

The scene was NASCAR-esque. Pieces of twisted automobile spread unevenly over the several hundred feet of pavement. Steel shed like petals from a shook rose. The f inal nucleus rested upside down, like a dead turtle, burned black. Nobody had walked away from that.

Doc and Luke climbed back inside the RV and started the engine. They eased the big vehicle forward along the shoulder, sliding past the worst of the wreckage.

But beyond there, past the curve, the road got worse. The rockslide half covered the asphalt. The doc stuck his head out of the window and shouted orders. Nathan and Marco climbed out and walked ahead, guiding the caravan around the worst of the rock fall. They worked together to push the smaller stones out of the way so the RV could continue. Finally, they came to a place where the rocks grew bigger. Boulders proper. The right lane lay completely buried. On the left, a rock the size of a medicine ball blocked the way. The RV stopped. Nathan and Marco pushed on the boulder, but it wouldn't budge.

The doc stuck his head out the window again.

"Push harder," he said.

They pushed. And pushed. It was f lat on the bottom; they couldn't get it to roll. "It won't go," Marco said.

"Keep trying."

So they pushed, but the stone didn't budge.

"Sonofabitch!" Doc hissed.

His head disappeared back inside the cab, and the RV crept forward again. The huge vehicle slowly pulled forward until the bottom of the bumper touched the boulder, and then it kept coming, inching ahead, and the boulder screeched forward, grinding against the pavement. The stone moved. The fender bent. Then buckled. The boulder seemed to catch on something—some crack in the pavement, as it
was scraping along, and it finally rolled, and the big RV came up over the top of it. With a squeal of rending metal, the RV lifted slightly, and something broke—a loud crack, and the RV came to rest, with the rock wedged firmly underneath.

The RV shifted into reverse, but the rock held strong, scraping the pavement, dragging along.

Doc climbed out, his face a red mask of fury.

He bent and looked underneath. "Sonofabitch," he hissed again. His voice was low, but somehow that was worse. He glared at the wedged truck for a moment then turned, looking for someone to blame.

Marco tried to calm him. "Maybe we can..."

The Doc hit him with a huge closed fist, and Marco's hat f lew off. The doc hit him again, knocking him back against the truck, then again and again. Marco raised an arm to protect himself, but the doc was too big. Again, and again. Beat him down until he was on his back. And that is where most people would have stopped. Some circuit breaker in their heads tripping open. But the doc didn't have that circuit breaker. He kept swinging, pounding his fists down until Marco couldn't even raise an arm. And still he kept going. Stopping only when he was tired.

Doc wouldn't let them bury him.

"Just push him in the ditch."

So that's what they did.

Nathan put Marco's hat over his pulped face. With his hat over his face, it was almost like he could be sleeping. Hands folded across his stomach. Nathan felt he should say something—the only words the man would get.

"
I'm sorry,
" he whispered.

For not helping.

For the TDR.

For leaving his dead body in the ditch.

For what happened in Perryton.

He was sorry for it all.

He climbed back up onto the road. He was tired. The kind of bone tired that seemed to come from the inside out. Tired of the travel, and the fear, and the moving sun. The old man was looking back the way they'd come.

"We stop here for the night."

They made camp in the middle of the road, dragging brush onto the spidery pavement.

They built a fire, then broke out the last of their food stores.

The Doc pulled out a map and spread it out on the pavement where the glow of the f ire cast a f lickering light across it.

"There is no way forward," he declared. "But we can go back. We have to backtrack.

It's going to cost time. And there's no food out here." "The farmer," Luke said. "Yeah." The Doc nodded, like he'd been thinking of it himself. "The farmer."

They finished the last of the corn in the dying light. Nathan only took a few spoonfuls.

The old man sat in his battered old lawn chair. Green and white plastic. Luke sat next to him, studying the map.

"It's a long-ass slog between reservations," Luke said. Elias nodded.

"So you expect this farmer to just share?" Elias asked.

Across the firelight, the doc's eyes appraised him. "No, I don't expect he will. But I
also don't expect we'll give him a choice."

"So we're thieves now?" It was Luke who said it. He spoke softly, then added, softer still, "It's about time."

"I ask you," Doc said. "Why is it right for this farmer to have so much, while we have so little?"

Nathan thought of the farmer's little girl. Her ribs showing through her skin.

"It
ain't
right," said Luke. "Ain't right at all. Greedy is what it is."

"Greedy," the doc said. He smiled with his shark teeth. "That's how I see it, too. And if it ain't greedy, well," and here he stood to stretch his legs. He gazed out over the dry basin that spread out before them. Miles and miles of land visible from their raised position on the road. "I don't give a damn. I'm
hungry.
And it's a long way to the reservation." The doc had explained it once, months ago, when they'd first banded together.