Life on the Preservation, US Edition

LIFE ON THE

PRESERVATION

JACK SKILLINGSTEAD

SOLARIS

First published 2013 by Solaris

an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,

Riverside House, Osney Mead,

Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK

www.solarisbooks.com

ISBN (EPUB): 978-1-84997-570-4

ISBN (MOBI): 978-1-84997-571-1

Copyright © Jack Skillingstead 2013

Cover art by Vincent Chong

The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,

in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

For Daniel Skillingstead

Nothing says love like a paranoid science fiction novel.

“Our identities have no bodies...”

JOHN PERRY BARLOW

“Nothing is going on

and nobody knows what it is.”

THE EXEGESIS OF PHILIP K. DICK

SEATTLE, OCTOBER 5, 2012

A
T TEN PM
on a Saturday he was hanging his ass in the wind. It was like he
wanted
a police cruiser to light him up. Ian’s canvas was the parking-lot wall of Dick’s Drive-In on Broadway. Tweaks, drunks and college kids wolfed cheeseburgers and watched him paint. He triggered the spray can, swept his arm in familiar flourishes, then stood back, scowling at: WHO CARES. Street lamps desaturated the green paint, flattened the letters. WHO was what Ian used to be but wasn’t anymore, an identity tag on a hundred post-midnight walls. WHO CARES – it was no good. His trademark style ran out of gas and definition a mile before the S curves. His audience applauded, but Ian’s shoulders sagged. He’d put up everything he had left. Empty, he dropped the Sabotaz 80 can. It clunked heavy and rolled on the pavement as he walked away, hood up and head down; it wasn’t the can that was empty.

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

OAKDALE, WA., 2013

A
YEAR AFTER
the world ended, Kylie sat on the floor at her boyfriend’s house, picking through stacks of DVDs. The living room was small and over-crowded with deep bookcases, bulky leather chairs and a matching sofa big as a Buick. The carpet held dust like a dry sponge. It hadn’t been vacuumed since Judgment Day. Once a week a power strip drew electricity for the TV setup plus one pole lamp. A thick extension cord snaked out of the living room and through the kitchen window to a noisy generator on the back porch. Most of the time Kylie was used to the lack of animating electricity. But when movie night ended and Billy switched the gennie off, the house always felt dead to her again. She wouldn’t give up the movies, though. Not for anything.

Kylie was eighteen and hungry for things she couldn’t have. “This one?” she said, holding up a movie.

Billy slumped in a corner of the sofa with a warm can of Mountain Dew in his lap. He looked up. His shaggy beard and patchy hair made him look older than he really was – though he was already pretty old for Kylie. At thirty-five Billy was played out, overweight, and impotent. Well, all the men in Oakdale were impotent, not just Billy; the poison rain saw to that. It also accounted for the patchy hair. At least Billy hadn’t scabbed up yet. His eyes were mostly clear, his finger and toe nails hadn’t fallen off, his breath was mostly okay. It was all coming, though; everybody got it bad, eventually. Everybody except Kylie.

Usually Billy drank beer or wine, especially on movie night. The Mountain Dew didn’t make him as happy. Not that he was
ever
exactly ‘happy’. But when he was drunk, at least, he tended to be less gloomy. Billy wasn’t drunk now. His shirt was untucked and missing a couple of buttons. Billy’s navel squinted in a wiry tangle of black hair. He nodded at Kylie’s movie choice. “Again? Sure, yeah.”

The cover of the DVD case depicted a man and a woman: John Cusack and Ione Skye – Lloyd and Diane in the movie; two people no doubt annihilated by The Judgment (as Father Jim called it) but miraculously existent in Kylie’s hand, their endlessly repeating lives waiting to be unlocked by laser light. Kylie pried the case open. She tilted the silver disk under the lamp, watching colors bend over its surface. Then she fed it into the machine and sat next to Billy on the sofa. He slung his arm around her, pointed the clicker and pushed PLAY. The empty blue screen filled with images of a lost world and the things Kylie couldn’t have.

Two hours later she said, “They were meant for each other.”

“Movie people,” Billy said.

She snuggled against his body. He was big and warm. Well, he was bound to be big, with all the crap he ate. Kylie rested her head on his chest, which rose and subsided heavily with each breath. Her nose twitched at the sour smell of his sweat. But she didn’t mind that. He took care of her, protected her. She thought:
I love him
. Like telling herself something and hoping she believed it.
I love Billy
. But maybe not like Diane loved Lloyd.

Billy came from outside the town. This was almost unheard of. Wanderers did occasionally straggle into Oakdale but they tended to straggle right back out again. Unless they were skin-and-bone people, SABs, in which case townies
drove
them back out. Billy had grown up in Oakdale, but had been gone almost as long as Kylie had been alive, and so his arrival in the aftermath of disaster was simply a return home.

“Do you want to watch a sex one now?” she asked. Kylie didn’t really get the sex movies, the pornos. But sometimes watching a little of one got Billy in the mood, even if his poisoned body could no longer perform the way men in those movies did. Kylie was more turned on by
love
scenes. In a love scene you saw people who cared about each other kissing and caressing. Maybe once in a while there was a bare breast or exposed behind, but it was the love that mattered. Kylie was the youngest survivor in town and the only one not sick. That’s probably why she still cared about love scenes.

“I don’t think so,” Billy said.

“Are you sure?”

He patted her shoulder. “I don’t really like them anymore,” he said. “They’re depressing.”

“Oh. What about one of your gangster movies or Westerns?”

“They’re depressing, too.”

“It’s okay, Billy. Don’t be sad again.”

“I’m not sad.”

“Do you want a beer?”

“I don’t think so.”

They were quiet a while.

“Let’s go to bed,” Kylie said.

Billy grunted. He turned off the TV and the DVD player then got up to kill the generator. He carried his extra weight awkwardly. Billy ate a
lot
of crap food. He hoarded it in the spare bedroom, cases of Doritos, potato chips, candy bars and soda pop. “Might as well eat what I want,” he liked to say. “All bets are off.”

Kylie lit a candle that smelled like strawberries. A minute later the generator cut out. In the absence of its muted racket the profound silence of the world returned. It was God listening to the souls of the survivors. That’s what Father Jim said, and the hundred or so dying, rag-tail remnant souls of Oakdale believed in Father Jim. Kylie used to believe in him, too. In fact, she used to be hooked up with him –
definitely
not like Diane and Lloyd; but all that was before.

To Kylie the silence was like a bottomless well into which everything she knew had been discarded – every comfort and familiar joy and expectation, every hope. Even Kylie’s father was in the well, she supposed, though he had been gone anyway for many years. Her mother, who said her rosary every day, maintained her own silence on the subject of Kylie’s father. He was dead by now, anyway. The Judgment had killed almost everybody outright. Those few who survived were dying by slow inches.

Except for Kylie.

In the bedroom she stripped down to a t-shirt and panties. The t-shirt was gray with black letters that spelled: PROPERTY OF U DUB, one of Billy’s old shirts. Kylie liked candlelight, enjoyed the way it fell on the pages of the books she found in Billy’s house. She looked through a collection of poems by Yeats, hoping Billy would come in soon. Mostly she didn’t understand the poems (Robert Frost was easier and Charles Bukowski the
best
) but she liked how the words sounded together in her mind and the way the lines of black type assembled in orderly ladders on the thick white paper. She read silently, moving her lips. Her father used to read to her when she was very little. Kylie remembered that much about him.

Lying on her back, reading, Kylie had a strange feeling she wasn’t alone. She looked up. The blinds were open and the window was a black mirror capturing a girl, a book, and a candle. Then Billy appeared in the doorway and she let the feeling go. He didn’t come in but only stood there, the candle making shadows on his face, hiding his eyes.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

“Nothing. Maybe I’ll stay up for a while.”

She put her book on the bedside table. “Billy?”

“Yeah?”

“I really don’t want to be alone.”

He didn’t say anything.

She patted the bed beside her. “Come on.”

He scratched his cheek, stalling.

“Don’t you want to be with me?”

For a moment it seemed he really
didn’t
, and Kylie’s heart sank.

“’Course I do,” he said, not very convincingly. He lay beside her, the mattress springs groaning. Like he’s doing her this big favor. Kylie stifled her irritation, tried to relax back into the right mood. After a while she said, “Touch me,” and he began to caress her breasts. His hand knew what it was doing, even if the rest of him was checked out. Kylie closed her eyes and let her mind hover around certain images from the movies, and then she slid her hand between her thighs. After a long while, her breathing changed. She made a sound in her throat. Some of it was acting, like people in the movies, but not all of it. She slipped her hand inside her panties. Things became mixed up in her mind, Billy and Lloyd and John Cusack and the good feeling of her body, and the way her dreadful loneliness retreated. Time began to unwind in sensation, and then the acting part was over, and the heat built and spread through her thighs and belly until it became bigger and bigger and was through all her body and she was almost
outside
of herself with the intensity of it. She arched her hips and cried out: “I love you, I love you, I love you,” like that had to be part of it, then fell back, panting, while the glow subsided.

She wanted to cuddle now. Touching herself could banish loneliness for a few moments, but sometimes when Billy held her it was as though loneliness could be extinguished forever. Not this time, though. She slung her arm and leg over him, and he held her but was distant, staring at the ceiling.

“Tell me what’s wrong,” she said.

“Nothing. I’m thinking.”

“What about?”

“I’ll tell you later.”

He patted her raggedy hair. Kind of patronizing. Kylie made a face. Her mother cut Kylie’s hair short, using the big kitchen shears, and it was uneven and choppy. Kylie
hated
her hair.

“I wish you would get undressed one of these times,” Kylie said.

“What would be the point?” Suddenly he crushed her hard against his body. He was trembling, and she could hardly breathe, he held her so tight. Then he let go and stood up, wiped his eyes and put his glasses back on. He turned away and said, “I’m going to stay up for a while.”