Grants Pass (20 page)

When Matt could focus on anything
again, he found himself staring down the barrel of a gun for the second time
that day. Bill’s finger tightened on the trigger. Damp warmth spread across
Matt’s jeans.

Click!

“
Aww, crap!”
Bill yelled. “You reporters are just like cockroaches, aren’t you? You just
won’t die!” He grinned savagely. “Well, my mamma always said the best way to
kill a roach is to crush it.”

Bill turned the shotgun in his hands
and held it like a club over his head.

“
It’s all
your fault,” he growled.

Matt closed his eyes.

“
OUT OF
ORDER!”

The voice sounded familiar, but
surely Bill’s massive chest never issued such a high-pitched sound. Matt’s eyes
popped open.

The mayor stood behind Bill, one arm
clutched around his stomach. The other rose over his head, gavel clutched in
his fist. The hammer fell with a muffled crack. Bill’s eyes rolled back in his
head and he fell to one side, knocking over several chairs. Gary went down with
him, still swinging. He kept hammering, grunting with every wet
smack
,
until the head snapped off the gavel. Gary pitched forward over Bill’s
motionless body. He lay there, breathing shallowly.

“
Firearms
not allowed,” he muttered. “Killed Frank…ruined my gavel…not on the agenda…” He
trailed off into incoherence.

Matt sat still, staring at the pair
until the mayor stopped breathing. As the sunlight started to wane, he finally
grabbed a chair and pulled himself upright, standing still for several moments
before limping out.

A double murder at City Hall, and he
witnessed the whole thing! This was going to make a great story. He just needed
to get one of the paper’s digital cameras and come back. Maybe if he shut off
everything else, the generator could power the press. He’d get another if
necessary. Matt paused. Newspaper policy forbade photos of dead bodies on the
front page. He turned back, surveyed the scene once more and nodded to himself.
Screw the policy.

“
I’m editor
now,” he said, rubbing his hands together. He planned to make the final edition
of
The Paris News
the best this town had ever seen!

After that, who knew? Maybe Grants
Pass needed an editor.

Biography

Jeff Parish

Jeff Parish, author of “Final
Edition,” is a 30-something native Texan. He and his wife, Melinda, have a girl
and two boys. He has been writing since middle school, where he concentrated
mostly on (bad) fantasy tales and (even worse) poetry. His writing skills
developed over time, much to his delight and the relief of everyone he forced
to read his work, and he gravitated to prose over poetry. He even decided to
make a living as a writer, starting work at a small newspaper in Greenville,
Texas, nearly a decade ago. Since then, he’s worked at several papers of
varying sizes, including the Dallas Morning News, Galveston County Daily News
and, yes, three years at The Paris News. His last newspaper job was as managing
editor of two weeklies in Rockwall County. His newspaper career was suffocated
in its sleep in February 2006 after he realized journalism might be a noble
profession, but slowly starving his family to death was not. He is now an
English teacher at a high school in Paris. He’s had stories appear in
Andromeda
Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Bits of the Dead, Triangulation: End of Time,
Courting Morpheus, Abominations, Flashing Swords, Speculative Realm
and
The Edge of Propinquity,
among others.

Afterword

Write what you know — that’s what
they tell writers. When I found the guidelines for
Grants Pass
, my mind
immediately turned to Paris, Texas. It’s easy to focus on the big cities in a
post-apocalyptic setting, and it’s quite dramatic with all kinds of opportunities
for a good story. But I wanted to explore a smaller town. Small-town folks are
among the best on earth, but they’re also a bit rabid about local politics and
local happenings. You can’t dig them out of the town with a backhoe. Shock
tends to push people to the extremes of their natural inclinations, right to
the edge of madness or even beyond. I thought about some of the people I’d
worked with in my career — the obsessive journalist, the local politician, the
guy whose family has lived in the same house for generations — and “Final
Edition” was born.

The Discomfort of
Words

Carole Johnstone

Another storm was brewing.

Louise sat upon a stool close to the
vast picture window that looked down into New Town, watching the clouds chase
the fleeing sun over the thin strip of blue that was the Atlantic; watching
their obtrusive return cast the resort into grey twilight shadow, whipping up
sand devils and bending low the spines of palm trees.

There were no signs of life. This
should have been the beginning of the
Fiesta de Carmen
. The promenades
and cobbled streets should have been swollen to capacity and filled with
lambent light and dance and song. The bars and restaurants of the
Avenida
de las Playas
should have spilled their
illumination onto road and pavement; their neon welcomes stretching from new
town to old in wavering lines of pink and green and gold. Fishing boats strung
with fairy lights, their bows painted gold and silver, should have shone in
stark relief against the darkening ocean as they called for good summer
catches.

Instead there was nothing.

She considered that such dearth of
life might have lost some of its capacity to shock, to frighten. But she could
remember those who had crept into new nights of drum fires, barricades and
shouted noise — rendering it only more insidious. And the encroaching dark more
absolute.

In the beginning, she had locked
herself away in her own little two-bed villa on the
Calle Lapa
, doing
her best to ignore the sirens and the wailing screams. But she had been too
close to the main resort. And when everything started to get worse — a
lot
worse — that cool whisper at her back had started up again; the same intangible
fear that had found her leaving London for her holiday home on the island months
earlier than usual.
Run away
.

But her options had dwindled
somewhat. Lanzarote was an island less than 900 kilometers in area. Much of the
north was lost to old volcano fields and a barren lunar landscape too
inhospitable to afford safe refuge, and the capital to the east had been on
fire too many weeks. A stagnant air — now bereft of the north-east trade winds
that had cooled the equatorial heat from the south — had hung great clouds of
smoke and debris over Arrecife and the island’s only airport, choking any
lingering idea of escape. In the end, she had been forced to take to the hills
high above
Puerto Del Carmen
.

Louise turned away from the dark
beyond the picture window. The heat was an oppressive cerement that made her
feel claustrophobic, clinging to her back and chest, and chasing away her fear.
She no longer opened the windows at night. The arid island had previously
suffered only mosquitoes and the occasional cockroach. Now insects, often the
size of her fist, invaded the resort every sundown — even this high in the
hills — battering their grotesque bodies and thrumming wings against the opaque
walls of her lit prison.

That was all she now allowed
herself. Light in the dark.

Her new sanctuary was far more
luxurious a villa than her own had been: an abandoned
mansión
complete
with generator, wrought-iron gates and a walled enclosure. All she needed to do
was sit this out — whatever
this
was — and when it was safe again, she
could go back down and find help.

There was still plenty of food in
the freezer, but this comforted as much as the false solace that there would
ever
again be help to be found. The generator was still working, humming away in the
sloped subterranean garage under her feet, but even with the air-conditioning
turned off, there was no denying that it was fast running out of juice.

And there was an even more immediate
concern. There was less than half a water bottle left. Despite always adhering
to such prohibition before, she was more than prepared to drink water from the
taps, but what was still in the cisterns likely wouldn’t last very long. There
were no rivers on Lanzarote, no natural supply of water anywhere on this
Land
of a Thousand Volcanoes
. Severe drought had been the norm even before the
world had fallen apart.

But she would not go down. Not while
her courage still failed her. Not while fires still raged; while madmen
doubtless still prowled the streets with knives and clubs — and grins so
terrorized that they were beyond reason
or
fear; while barricades
distorted the familiar, creating a patchwork of hasty and oft-disputed
territory that stretched as far west as the harbor and as far east as the
still-burning capital. Nor while bloated bodies stacked up alongside the
promenades and restaurant bars like rank, slack-mouthed sentinels.

****

Louise returned to the window and
sipped her tepid water, and tried not to think.
She
eyed the blank television with something between resentment and longing. It
hadn’t worked for weeks. The last storm had torn down the roof aerial, although
the screen had been showing only static by then. The phones had gone out long
before that. In a way she had been glad. The internet had been screaming and
unrestrained, and yet she had come back to it again and again, picking over its
dire portents and accounts of mayhem and disease like a scab.

She reached into her shorts pocket
and felt the reassuring square of paper there.
Kayley.
A sudden spike of
lightning danced across the sky, exposing the desolate landscape in horrible
silver relief. She swallowed a scream, bringing out the folded paper and
pressing it hard against her mouth.

The following thunder was too loud,
too close. It trembled the tiles under her feet and put out the lights. She
sank onto the couch with a sob, feeling around the coffee table with desperate
fingers. The dark was a monster — a plague all of its own — and one that
threatened her more than any other had done before it.

In the days before all stations had
been lost to the same static as the TV, the radio had shrieked
muerte
and
peste
and then
Apocalipsis
. On the last day, a frightened
Spanish voice had muttered over and over the numbers already dead: a
mortanada
so huge it was hardly comprehensible. The only one that she now remembered was
two million. That had been Madrid.

Finally she found the lighter,
sparking it close — but not too close — to the now opened sheet of paper. She
had found it tacked to the bedroom wall of whoever had fled the villa: a
teenager’s bedroom papered over by white-toothed boys with floppy hair and
tattoos. The journal entry had evidently been printed off an internet site. Of
the many posts (there had been dozens more tacked behind it), Louise had only
noticed this one, had only read it, because its third sentence had been
highlighted in an untidy neon slash.

When the end of the world comes,
meet me in Grants Pass, Oregon.

It mattered little that the post was
more than two years old; nor either that it was likely only adolescent fantasy.
Pretense. Kayley’s voice (and Louise had instantly imagined her a fresh-faced
all-American cheerleader) was childish — even mawkish, while managing to still
sound blasé. An exercise born out of boredom, perhaps even a school project.
Most probably little else.

But still. There was the neon slash.
And even if
that
meant nothing either, Kayley spoke to Louise when
no-one else had done for weeks. Even from another time and another world;
across reaches of terror and despair — and ever stoic denial — Kayley had
whispered in Louise’s ear. Had whispered kindness, possibility. Hope.

Now, in the dark and the storm that
bellowed but taunted with no rain, and the monstrous insects that yet banged
against the windows in angry, mindless thumps, Louise read Kayley’s message
again. She knew it almost by heart anyway, but to see it, to touch it — to
breathe it — was the greater comfort. Before the internet had hung up for good,
she had Googled Grants Pass. Just to look.

As far as the Pacific Northwest was
from those Spanish islands less than 150 miles off the coast of Africa, Louise
had still been able to seek solace in Grants Pass’ parks and green spaces, its
evergreens and pines, its summer night concerts and Boatnik Parade, its
historic downtown lined with animal statues and Christmas murals, its antique
shops, carnivals and firework displays. It reminded her of lazy Saturday
afternoon films on Channel 5. It comforted where nothing else could.

Louise carefully folded up the paper
and let go of the lighter’s lever. Her thumb grazed its hot spark wheel. She
curled up on the couch, the heat an oppressive blanket above her; the storm
moving off towards the mountainous north in dry and angry flashes.

Tomorrow. She would go back down to
the resort tomorrow, and no longer dwell upon the reasons why she shouldn’t. As
she drifted towards sleep, she thought only of green and trees and rivers and
cool. And Kayley. Blond-haired, freckle-faced Kayley. Who waited for her there.

****

The next day it was hotter still.
Grabbing hold of brittle flora, clambering past clusters of date palms, dragon
trees and cacti, the sun beat down upon her through an ugly haze of sand and
hot breath. It took even longer to get down from the hills than it had done to
climb them — which was disheartening enough before she reached what was left of
Puerto Del Carmen
.

As she stepped out of the barren
wilderness of the north and onto the incongruent paving stones of
Calle Lapa
,
she longed for the return of boisterous noise: the chinking of glasses, the
fractious screams of too-hot children, the better humored squeals of women — a
job-lot of paperbacks, cocktails and psychedelic knock-off kaftans — thrown
into kidney-shaped pools courtesy of boyfriends and husbands who were drunk by
lunchtime, and who bellowed at each other from tiny balconies less than twenty
feet apart.

Instead there was only silence.
Horrible, empty, windless silence. And a smell so dreadful that not even the
briny taste of the Atlantic could disguise it.

The white-walled apartments on the
other side of the street were still deserted. She remembered finding her first
dead body there in the days before she had fled. In the days before she had
believed in the plague or in the end of the world, or in the terrible things
that people could do in the face of either.
It
had been lying on a sun-lounger.
A grey-skinned
figure painted patchy red by the sun.

She had approached that body despite
the whispered
Run away
at her back. She had approached it despite the
incredible stench that came from it; despite knowing what she would likely
find. Her fear had been a dazed anger that clutched hard at her chest. But
still she had looked.

He had already begun to rot. Whether
that was down to the heat or his terrible affliction hardly mattered. Huge dark
lumps inside his armpits had splayed out his arms; more of the same protruded
from the leg holes of his bloodied trunks. His face was the bloated dark purple
of thunderclouds. Black viscous fluid had pooled and congealed beneath his
eyes, while his mouth — a bloody and crusty mess — let escape a grey and
flaccid tongue, leaving space for whistling breath.

It had taken that for her to
believe. Not the sirens, the screams, the pall of smoke over the capital. Not
Breaking
News!
alerts and grainy satellite pictures, or an endless dial tone
whenever she tried the British Consulate or the
Cabildo Insular
. Her
denial had demanded better proof than any of that — and a rotting, still-alive
body had been it.

The day after that
she
had
gotten sick. She had locked her doors and stayed in bed along with everyone
else. When she had ventured out again: a gnawing hunger sending her back down
towards the
supermercado
, she had not even glanced once towards the
neighboring apartments or their pool.

****

Now heading again for that same
supermercado
,
she looked only straight ahead, a memory of that bewildered anger tormenting
her again. She ignored it. As she walked down the street towards the beach and
promenade, her legs jarring against the unfamiliar paving stones, a sudden
sound came to her. In the otherwise silence, it was an approaching wall of
noise — though no more recognizable for that.

When the biting-hot wind suddenly
found her, the hackles rose higher on the nape of her neck and she gripped a
lamppost in trembling fingers. The sound moaned ever closer. Now she cursed the
return of all that was familiar. Only once before had she felt that peculiar
searing wind; heard that singing approach. A Christmas Eve more than ten years
ago, when she and Patrick had first bought their island villa; when they had
still sought each other’s companionship. Each other’s welcome company.

Eyes now filled with gritty sand,
Louise backed up a little, determined to continue down to the beach despite
what she now suspected was coming up from it.

“
It’s the
wrong time of year,” she whispered to the empty street and its frantically
waving palm trees, to the cracks between paving stones. A Gallotia lizard
scuttled past her on squat, frantic legs, and the moan that escaped her was too
brittle.