Grants Pass (16 page)

“
We need to
pack,” I said.

“
Well, I
could use some help with these boxes…”

Diane looked at me. I knew she’d want
to pack her own clothes and keepsakes. I also knew she’d have no trouble with
mine…

“
I’ll stay,”
I said. “But I’m not that great with heavy lifting.”

Aldo stepped forward and punched me
on the arm, good old boys together. “Damn it, son! A couple of weeks on board
with me you won’t need your mama around so much! I’ll soon get you into shape!”

“
Oh, he’s
not—” Diane piped up. I shot her a glance and she fell silent.

“
I’ll be
fine,” I reassured her. “You go. Pack for both of us.”

“
If you’re
sure?”

“
I’m sure.”

****

We stood on the jetty and she
hugged me warmly. “Don’t overdo it.”

“
No problem.
I’ll be as quick as I can, and see you back at the house.”

“
It’s a
date. I’ll open some wine.”

“
That’d be
different.”

“
Git.” She
trotted off down the walkway, stopped and turned back. “Think you can change
his mind; get him to come back to the house with you when you’re all done?”

I shook my head. Aldo had decided
that if we weren’t sailing until dawn, he’d remain with the boat while Diane
and I gathered our belongings. “No, he’s pretty sure he wants to stay here
tonight. Keep an eye on the boat.”

“
From who?”

I laughed. “I’ll be back by dark.
Get packing.”

****

“
Thanks,
boy.” Aldo dumped another box on the deck. The trolley was almost empty now,
and we’d restocked the ship with everything from fresh water to antibiotics.
“You ain’t as runty as you look.”

I ignored him and lugged a pallet of
tinned sausages and beans down through the hatch to the kitchen area. From the
moment Diane had left, he’d started sniping at me and I was losing patience. As
it was, we’d been hefting boxes for hours and I was starting to wane. I’d need
to rest soon. Sleep.

“
Getting
dark,” I called up the steps. “I’ll have to get back to Diane.”

Aldo clumped down into the cabin.
“Got to say, you surprised me there, sonny.”

“
I’m sorry?”

“
Woman like
that with a boy like you…Guess the plague wasn’t a disaster for everyone now,
was it?” He flashed a mouthful of perfect white teeth at me, luminescent
against in his tanned skin. “You
are
hitting that, aren’t you?”

“
It’s not
like that. We’re — you know.”

He furrowed his brow at me. “You
some kind of faggot?”

I gritted my teeth and tore open a
cardboard carton of first aid supplies.

“
Been a long
time since I seen a woman, never mind one as good-looking as her.” He licked
his lips. “I’d be all over her in a second.”

I popped open the chart cabinet, and
reached for the first aid kit. Keeping my back to him so he couldn’t see my
anger, I started replenishing the tin’s bandages.

“
You want to
get your shit together there, boy. Where we’re going there’ll be plenty who’ll
get on her if you don’t.” I could see him behind me, reflected in the cabin
window. He was brushing at his sleeve with one hand, dusting himself off.
Preening. “Hell, it’s going to be a long trip, I might just get some myself. A
girl’s got to pay her way!”

 
I replaced
the tin and started to close the cabinet door…hesitated. Aldo had wandered into
the kitchenette and was stacking tins under the work surface. His head ducked
out of sight, and the decision made itself. I shut the cabinet loudly. Aldo
looked up from his work and winked at me broadly. “You done, boy?” I nodded.
“You best get back to her then. Spend some time together before we go. Cast off
time’s six in the ay-em.”

“
See you
then,” I muttered, and plodded up the steps.

I couldn’t see him, but as I trudged
off into the twilight, I could feel Aldo’s eyes, burning into me. Zipping my
jacket against the cold, I told myself I hadn’t made my mind up about anything,
not yet.

The new heaviness in my pocket
called me liar.

****

Diane pulled the stops out for
our last night in the house. We gorged on what perishables we had left in the
pantry, while she put most of a bottle of wine away. As ever, I had to limit my
alcohol, so only needed one drink to get a buzz on.

“
Can’t let
it go to waste!” she proclaimed, glugging herself another glassful. She ended
the night dancing to her favorite CD, an 80s compilation I’d found for her in
the bargain bin of an abandoned music store. She bounced around in a blur of
hair and limbs, laughing and spinning until the room started to spin for her
too, at which point she collapsed heavily onto the couch.

I was still too drained from heaving
boxes around to help her to bed. Instead, I fetched a duvet and covered her. As
I tucked her in, she reached up a hand, slowly, like she was moving through
water, and touched my cheek.

“
Thanks,
Will.” She smiled crookedly.

And she was asleep.

****

It wasn’t so easy for me. Despite
my fatigue, my mind was still whirring a couple of hours later. I sat in the
window, watching the stars and listening to Diane snoring lightly from her
feather cocoon. She always slept heavily after a drink. Most people do.

I pulled on my jacket, padded across
to the front door and quietly snicked open the latch. I paused, just for a
second, to listen to Diane’s rasping breath. Then, my fingers drifting to the
cool metal in my pocket, I slipped out.

****

“
Wake
up.” I shook Diane’s shoulder gently. She moaned, squinting at the brightness
pouring through the window.

“
Sleeping.
G’way,” she grunted, her stale breath catching me square in the face.

“
Di. Wake
up. It’s Aldo. He’s gone.”

In an instant she was upright,
red-rimmed eyes boring into mine. “He’s what?”

****

“
Bastard!”

Diane screamed out to sea as we
stood on the promenade and watched the yacht grow smaller. “Prick! Bastard!”
She jumped down onto the beach, seized a pebble and flung it as far as she
could into the waves, so angry that the futility of it didn’t even occur to
her.

“
How could
he?” she asked me, tears running down her cheeks. “How could he just steal our
supplies and dump us?”

“
I don’t
know. Maybe he thought extra supplies were more valuable than extra hands.”

She came to me, threw her arms
around me. “We’ll find a way,” she said. “We’ll get you help somehow. I won’t
let you—”

Suddenly she couldn’t look at me.
Disengaging from the hug she worked her hand into mine, lacing our fingers
together. “I won’t leave you like that,” she promised, staring out to sea.
“However long you’ve got, I won’t ever leave you.”

“
I know,” I
said, squeezing her hand and watching the boat chug over the horizon in a dead
straight line.

“
I know.”

Biography

Pete Kempshall

Pete Kempshall lives in Perth,
Western Australia, a city that often seems so far away from anywhere else he’d
be surprised if a humanity-destroying disease could even find it.
Rights of
Passage
is his second story for Morrigan Books after
Just Us
in the
anthology
Voices
. He has also written a novella and several short
stories for Big Finish’s
Bernice Summerfield
and
Doctor Who
ranges.

Like most writers, he has a blog:
http://www.tyrannyoftheblankpage.blogspot.com
.
Feel free to pop along and double the readership.

Afterword

I’m one of those people who can’t
just sit down and write. I need the security of having plotted each scene from
beginning to end before I’ll even type word one. It’s like a map, and without
one I’m not confident enough to start. But now and again, in spite of my carefully
planned itinerary, I find a character seizes the wheel and veers off in new and
darker directions. And of course, that’s where the fun starts.

When I was plotting
Rights of
Passage
, the central question was simple: would Will sacrifice the chance to
cure his illness if finding that cure meant Diane would suffer? As I wrote the
story, however, the focus began to shift. I always knew the decision Will would
make. The question now became
why
was he making it?

In my mind, there’s no doubt Diane
loves Will. There’s a spark there that says if Will were only up to the job,
Diane would happily take things further. In Will’s mind, however…well, given
his past experiences with women, you can forgive him some insecurity. And as
the story took shape, that insecurity suggested to me that his final decision
might not be entirely altruistic.

Does Will kill Aldo to stop him
raping Diane? Absolutely. Does he also kill Aldo to stop Diane getting to
Grants Pass? That’d be telling...

One other quick note: as far Will’s illness
is concerned, I needed to find something that, without proper treatment, would
slowly and inevitably kill him. It couldn’t be something you could treat simply
by popping pills because there’d be no shortage of empty pharmacies where he
could find medicine. Nothing quite worked, until a couple of doctor friends
suggested a blood disorder. It wasn’t perfect, but it was close enough for me
to be able to ‘tweak’ something to fit. Any factual errors, therefore, are for
dramatic purposes. They’re my own doing and are quite intentional.

A Perfect Night to Watch Detroit Burn

Ed Greenwood

The sky was clear, only the
gentlest of breezes blowing, and the night was warm enough to ward off the
shivers.

It was a perfect night to watch Detroit
burn.

Motor City had been on fire — the
downtown, that is, all those newer towers that soared into the sky around the
old Penobscot Building — for three days and nights, now. Ever since the
lightning storm.

A good, solid pounding of a storm,
cloudburst after roaring sheets of rain after bolt after bolt of lightning
stabbing down blinding-bright, from sunset until darned near sunrise. A fist of
a storm, the sort that came a dozen times a year or so. Loud and hard, but
nothing apocalyptic.

With no firemen, though, and nothing
much roaming the streets but hungry dogs, a few slinking coyotes, and a patient
pack of wolves that had been howling up Grosse Pointe way for a week or so, it
only took one bolt in the wrong spot to breach some rusty tanker in the dark
and silent maze of downtown factories, to start flames whooshing into the sky,
and — from weeds to timbers to blowing newspapers and all the usual trash — a
fire was underway.

It would have been the sort of fire
the talking heads on nightly television and the Net would have called
“stubborn,” if there’d been any news networks nattering about anything,
anymore, and any sweating firemen left to stare into a camera and grimly tell
the watching world what a “tough one” this fire was — but all the firemen, it seemed,
were dead, and there wasn’t much left hereabouts of a watching world, either.

There were just a few scattered and
wary handfuls of men and women who had come down out of the great silent
expanse of Ontario farms and along the St. Clair shore, seeking gasoline, tools
and the canned food that they could scrounge out of the reeking, rat-scurrying
labyrinths most supermarkets had become in Windsor. Which should hold tools and
fuel in plenty. Even with most of the car plants shut down these last few decades,
Windsor had boasted, if that was the word, an airport and rail tunnels and the
bridge, too.

The bridge they had to block if they
wanted to stop the raiding.

Stop the Americans pouring into
Canada, most of them so loaded down with guns and grenades and night-goggles
and rolls of barbed wire that they might as well have been army platoons in
some bad Hollywood movie.

Clint Heston had wondered how bad it
must be in the old U S of A for them all to come flooding up into the Great
White North, a place most of them “knew” just as a land of snowy mountains,
growling bears, Mounties, and scantily-clad babes in beer commercials.

Or
was
it all those beer
commercials?

Were hundreds of good ol’ boys — if
there were still hundreds of good ol’ boys, that is — sitting in the ruins of
America thinking Canada was a charmed never-never land of laughing, beckoning
women who’d escaped the plagues and kept the beer cold and kitchen ovens hot,
where supermarkets were still full of food, football games and sex-mad hospital
workers and forensic hero-cops were still on TV every night, deer wander
obligingly up to every porch on sunny mornings to be shot dead for dinner, and
life was all still good?

The guy they’d found dying in the
cab of his rig on the bridge had thought so.

Gut-shot and covered with flies,
staring out through the shattered windshield at the bloody aftermath of a gun
battle that had raged and literally died out before any of the farmers had got
there, he’d more or less gasped out all of those things, before struggling to
ask them for a beer and if “It was still safe, this side.” And then dying
before hearing the scavenging farmers try to stumble through answering him.

But then, why be cruel enough to let
him hear and understand the word “No” before he slid into everlasting darkness?

It was, after all, the truth.

No, it wasn’t “safe” in Canada. It
wasn’t safe anywhere.

The plagues had rolled through the
provinces just like the border States to the south of them, and the wild
weather, too. Leaving almost everyone dead, dogs and coyotes and wolves fat and
bold and roaming everywhere, and...and frontier days come again, for the
fortunate — fortunate? — few who’d survived.

Were all Americans stupid enough to
think wind and rain and swarming flies respected borders? With “the greatest
country in the world” shining brightly on one side of a line drawn on a map and
the endless gloom of God-forsaken terrorist tribesmen, or in a few places
unspoiled wilderness, on the other?

McTavish had asked that, but the
trucker had been too dead to answer — and Heston, who’d asked that question
himself a time or two, had just shrugged back at Derek McTavish, still having
no good answer to give.

Then they’d started up two or three
of the bullet-riddled pickups and rigs that would still start, slammed them
into each other, and let them all burn. The battle that the dead trucker had
been caught in had managed one good thing: the bridge was blocked now, with
great holes fire-melted in its pavement. Some of the burnt-out vehicles had
sunk into those pits and glued themselves there. Nothing that would stop men
with guns from clambering over them and crossing the bridge, but they’d have to
walk. Only a tank could bull its way through the wreckage — and a tank, or
anything comparably heavy, would fall through the bridge decking. In a dozen
years, with no one repainting the steel or repairing welds and rivets, the
whole thing would start to sag.

The tunnels had all flooded months
ago, with no power to work the pumps and no one left to fix them. Gunfire from
both sides of the Detroit River greeted any motorboat piloted by someone stupid
enough to try a crossing in daylight, these days. Motors still purred by night,
but they weren’t exactly quiet, and though nights were now very dark times when
the clouds and moon didn’t oblige otherwise, there wasn’t much noise aside from
the peepers to hide motor sounds now; landings were often deadly.

There were still plenty of people
alive enough to fire guns, of course.

The plagues hadn’t been
that
good.

Everyone who was left probably
wouldn’t die of plague until some new sickness arose, and those same survivors
were much too busy trying to find food and water and safe shelter by night —
shelter they wouldn’t freeze in, come winter, which was why so many Americans
were seeking the endless trees they thought all Canada was thickly cloaked in,
for firewood — to worry about plagues, or the fact that darned near every
doctor seemed to have either died or become precious gods to, or captives of,
bands of people who guarded them night and day.

Heston had shot down men who’d said
they’d come across the river to find and seize doctors and nurses, and take
them back.

It had been late last year when he’d
admitted it to himself: the world was going wild again, with the humans who were
left too few to stop it and too busy killing each other, in endless skirmishes
between those who roamed taking things at gunpoint versus those who hid and
cowered and crept around foraging, to care much.

Right now, all the flames across the
river were giving Heston and McTavish and Breskbro —
their
treasure, a
Cree woman who was a doctor and a better shot than either of them, with bow as
well as gun, and whose dirty, sweaty curves were more beautiful than half a
dozen pale, underfed cheating wives on television — light enough to see by, to
loot one of the rare convenience stores on Riverside.

The flames lit up the always
restless water amber bright, displaying the dark shapes of two small motorboats
heading towards Canada, but the idiots in them were already shooting at each
other, and slinking shadows that were either coyotes or wolves were gathering
on the near bank to await the survivors’ landfall. If there were any survivors.

That was another thing that had
changed. It sure hadn’t taken long for most wildlife to stop fearing humans.

“
Shit,” Mary
Breskbro snapped, jolting Clint out of his remembrances. She crouched down and
hurled a can loudly through the glass of one of the few windows that had been
intact, making sure she got the attention of both her men. “
Trouble
.”

Clint stopped scooping cans into one
of the hundreds of blue recycling boxes they’d found in garages all over
Windsor, and snatched up his rifle. McTavish was already running along the next
aisle in a crouch, like some movie Marine, the submachine gun he’d liberated
from a dead American raider a week back up and ready.

There were people outside, people
wearing hardhats with headlamps on them, headlamps that were dark. Small
wonder, that, with no electricity for most of a year and precious few batteries
lasting through the freezes and thaws of a winter. Three people, two of them
waving — God damn! —
white flags
.

The third was trailing her flag — a
shirt nailed to a rake, it looked to be — behind her, and wandering aimlessly
about as if she was drunk, mumbling something soft, off-key, and endless, that
might have been singing.

The other two — a man and a woman,
the woman clutching a motorcycle helmet as if unsure whether to swing it as a
weapon, or use it as a shield — had their arms raised in “stop!” gestures, and
didn’t look to have any guns. Just homemade white flags.

“
Peace!” the
man called through the broken front store window, sounding a little scared, a
lot earnest, and American. Indiana, maybe southwestern Michigan.

“
We don’t
have guns,” the woman added quickly. “We don’t want to be any trouble.” By her
voice, she was from the same place as the man standing beside her.

“
You already
are,” Mary told them flatly, not a hint of friendliness in her voice. “Whatta
you want, and who else is with you?”

“
N-no one.”

“
No one
else, creeping up on us while you talk?” McTavish snapped at them, waving his
gun.

“
No!
There’re just the three of us!” The man cleared his throat nervously. “I’m Jim
— Jim Adams — and this is my wife, Ida.”

McTavish asked a silent question by
pointing his gun at the mumbling woman.

“
Oh. That’s
Jess. She’s...harmless.”

“
Uh-huh,”
McTavish told them, clear disbelief in his voice. “What’s wrong with her?”

“
She...” Jim
Adams ran out of words and looked to his wife.

“
She has
Jesus where her brains ought to be,” Ida said flatly. “Lost her family a few
months back to someone — we don’t know who — shooting from far off. She follows
us everywhere, now. Nice enough. Good cook.”

“
I’m sure
she can fry squirrel just fine,” Mary told them in a voice like ice, “but I
asked you what you wanted, and I haven’t heard an answer.”

She hefted a can back beside her
ear, ready to throw, and added, “We don’t plan to spend the night standing here
talking, when we could’ve been back out of here by now and heading somewhere
safer.”

“
Safer?” Ida
Adams asked her, just a touch of a quaver in her voice. “In all this?”

“
Up on a
roof,” McTavish told her, “of someplace that won’t burn easily, with no
buildings or trees near, when there’s enough of us to stand watch through the
night. Now
what do you want?
”

“
Help,” Jim
Adams replied quickly.

“
To do
what?”

“
Get...”
Adams cleared his throat again, sounding almost ashamed. “To get to Grants
Pass.”

His words fell into a little
silence.

After it started to get longer than
“a little,” he grounded his white flag — it trembled, all the way down, so his
hands must be shaking a lot — and stammered, “Y’see, just before all the —
everything went bad, Ida read this message from someone on the Internet, about
meeting in—”

“
We know.” Mary’s
voice was still flat, but not quite as cold as before. “Grants Pass, Oregon.
Someone named Kayley, wanting to meet her friend Monte there. A sort of
peaceful-people rendezvous, if the end of the world happened. She was scared of
tough guys with guns setting themselves up as warlords. We printed it out, back
before the power went.”

Clint knew that Mary’s precious
handful of printouts were far fewer than she wanted them to be. She’d made them
in spare moments snatched at her job, back when computers worked and people
everywhere were living lives so fast that they never had time to look up and
think — so the plagues had hit them like a brick in the face, one two three,
making most of them fall over dead without even having time to blink, or say
more than, “Shit, now, what—?”

Not that Mary was going to tell
these strangers any of that. She stood up. “But why’re you
here?
Oregon’s
that
way, a lo-o-ong way behind you, not this direction!”