Life on the Preservation, US Edition (20 page)

“Check that,” the P.O. said, regarding Vina’s observation. “No offence, kid.”

The
Penetrator
was an F-18. It stood on the canted deck, its nose wheel hooked to the catapult shuttle. Steam vented around it. Steam powered the huge catapult pistons under the deck. The ship’s nuclear reactor provided the steam. Kylie got all this from Wolcott on the walk from Bremerton. Someone had painted ‘Penetrator’ on the side of the jet.

“At least she’s flown a plane,” Wolcott said, “even if it was a Cessna.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” the P.O. said, without much emotion, as if he were remarking on the weather.

“If she crashes the
Penetrator
we lose our one chance to
strike back
,” Vina said.

Wolcott, who had been swaying a little, sat down on the deck. He looked sicker just from the walk back from what was left of Bremerton. He had been an engineer before the world ended, he told Kylie. He had been living on the
Carl Vinson
ever since. All that was about to end, though, especially the living part.

“If we’re all dead,” Wolcott said, “nobody strikes back.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” the P.O. said again. He had the look of a beefy man who had lost his beef all at once. His skin
sagged
on his bones. His hound dog face suggested doom wasn’t far off. “How much do you know how to fly, kid?”

Kylie shrugged. She knew she didn’t have a chance of piloting the military jet safely off the deck of the
Carl Vinson
. She had only told Wolcott she was a pilot so he would let her come to the Big Boat, which Billy seemed to think was a safe place. Now that she was here it didn’t seem any safer than Oakdale. In fact, it seemed less safe. And they expected her to fly in the morning? What bullshit. Besides that, they would have let her stay, whether she was a pilot or not. Everybody was dying. The people would run out long before the food and water.

“Did you solo, at least?” Wolcott asked.

“Yeah. I had like twenty-five hours.”

Vina spat and shook her head.

“That’s twenty-five hours more than
you
,” Wolcott said. “Kylie flies. One of us goes with her.”

“Which one?” Vina said.

“Whichever one is still alive in the morning, I guess.”

A
FTER SUNSET THE
eastern sky turned green. Kylie stood on the deck, arms folded, looking at it.

“It’s the Seattle Dome,” Wolcott said. He held a Navy duffel bag in his arms. He looked weak. “Brought you some blankets and a pillow. You should come below decks, though. It might rain.”

“I want to sleep in the open,” Kylie said. Everything below decks smelled like death and rot. “I don’t care about the rain. I’m immune.”

“Nobody’s immune. You’re just young. It’s epigenetic.”

“It’s what?”

“Epigenetic. We had people working on it, but they all died before they could get anywhere. The aliens basically weaponized the upper atmosphere with self-replicating retroviruses. That’s the light show you see at night. It filters down continuously, probably world-wide. We’re breathing them all the time, but the rain brings the mother lode. Enters through the pores, not just breathing. The retro-viruses attach to a variety of genes. Genes that cover sexual arousal, for instance. But a lot of different ones, wrecks us pretty good, and it will go on until there’s not a single human being left alive, I guess. Bastards know a lot more about our genome than we do. Anyway, the viruses trigger the mutated genes, which produce all sort of weird proteins, and,
bingo
, we’re sick as dogs and nobody gets out alive. Kid, some of these genetic changes don’t get going till you’re well past puberty.”

“I’m eighteen,” Kylie said.

“Where you come from, were there any others like you – young, I mean?”

“Some, but they all got sick right away.”

“You’re not immune, Kylie. Nobody is. You’re just a late bloomer.”

Kylie wanted him to stop talking. She pulled the bag from his arms, and Wolcott swayed back, as if it had been counter-balancing him. “I’m sleeping up here, and I don’t care if it rains. If I’m going to die tomorrow, I want to be able to breathe tonight”

Wolcott didn’t look happy.

“You know I can’t fly this plane, right?” Kylie said.

“Sure, I know. Kid, we just want to see it go. Like fireworks – you want to light ’em off, because that’s what you do with them, right?”

“You guys are crazy.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

I
T DID NOT
rain. Kylie woke on the hard rubberized surface of the deck. In the morning light the green glow was gone. A thick blanket of clouds shrouded the dawn. The air felt damp and expectant. She wanted to get away from the Big Boat before any of the others woke (if they
did
wake) and expected her to light off the last firework. She rolled up her bedding and stuffed it back into the duffel bag and left it slumped against the nose wheel of the jet.

S
HE RODE THE
Goldwing back into the ruined city. With Billy gone and the Big Boat nothing but a floating death house there was no point in hanging around.
Gown
. She couldn’t return to Oakdale – not unless she wanted Father Jim to cut her. She would try south. Maybe there were more survivors, or at least better weather, in Oregon or California. It didn’t really matter. She wasn’t immune. In her heart she had known that, but a piece of her had gone on believing she would live, that she was special – maybe even chosen. It was so completely stupid. She was no different than anybody else. Her hair would fall out, her teeth go rotten – everything she’d seen happen to others was going to happen to her, too.

She idled the bike in the middle of the street, taking a last look at Bremerton. Now she would ride south, until her gas ran out, and then whatever happened, happened. Thunder growled out of the clouds. A raindrop appeared on the wing mirror. She looked up, and the sky unloaded. She opened her mouth and closed her eyes. It was a suicide rain and it didn’t matter. Then someone called her name.

A man in a baggy white full-body suit peddled a wobbly bicycle toward her. He was wearing rubber gloves. His head was covered by a hood. The face behind a clear plastic plate was Wolcott’s. His voice muffled by the hood, he panted, “You have to get out of the rain.”

She shook her head. “It’s okay. You said I’m going to get sick anyway.”

Wolcott dumped the bike and staggered to her. “Listen.” His face was agonized behind the foggy, rain-beaded plate. “I like you, kid. You remind me of the good old days, right?” Kylie felt bad for him – the effort it must have taken, in his condition, to catch up with her.

“I’m not flying your jet,” she said. “I can’t. I’d just crash it, like Vina says.”

“Fuck the jet. But you have to get out of the rain, okay?”

“Okay.” She turned back the key, climbed off the bike and walked with him to the one intact building. It was dark inside the Red White and Blue Diner. Wolcott removed his hood and stepped behind the dusty counter. Sugar dispensers and salt and pepper shakers stood neatly upon it, waiting for customers to sit on the red vinyl swivel stools. Pictures of aircraft carriers and other Navy ships hung on the walls. Kylie turned away, feeling sad, and racked the blinds up on one of the big windows. The rain was really coming down.

“Hey,” Wolcott said, and when she turned he tossed her a bar towel. “Dry off.”

She caught the towel, patted her face, and dropped the towel on the floor. It really just did not matter. Rain rattled on the roof like a shower of marbles. The Goldwing looked beaten down, obscured by blowing curtains. Kylie crawled into the booth and got close to the window. She had never seen such rain. It dumped out of the sky in a thundering flood.

“You’ve got a nice ass,” Wolcott said.

Kylie scooted off the bench and faced him.

“Not that I care,” Wolcott said. He sat on a counter stool, swiveling listlessly back and forth. “It’s merely an observation. Man, I wish you
could
fly the
Penetrator
.”

“Well, I can’t.”

“Maybe you–”

“I’m tired of
talking
,” Kylie said.

“Right. Okay, listen, I want to give you something. Then I’ll stop talking. Promise.”

Wolcott slid off the stool and crossed to Kylie. He unzipped his bio suit, reached inside, and tried to hand Kylie a thing like an over-sized TV remote with a digital display grid. She made no move to take it.

“What is it?”

“Electromagnetic field detector,” he said. “I fooled around with it, so it keys to the Dome’s weird signature pulse.”

“What do I need it for?”

“Nothing, since you aren’t going inside the Dome. But if you were – I mean, if you changed your mind, or some miracle happened – you could maybe use it as a locator, track down the machine that maintains the Dome.”

Kylie stared at him

“Get close enough and the reading will spike. That’s the theory. There’s never any shortage of theories, is there? Did you know all
kinds
of things produce electromagnetic fields? Cell phones, the sun, microwave ovens. Human brains. There’s even a theory that consciousness exists in the brain’s EM field. Maybe that thing’s a giant brain, huh?”

“Yeah, sure. Can we stop talking now?”

“All right. Hey, what’s going on out there?”

Two men stood by Kylie’s Goldwing. One of the men wore a long coat and a broad-brimmed black hat. “
Shit
,” Kylie said.

“What?” Wolcott slid off the stool and joined her at the window.

“I know those guys. That’s Father Jim with the hat. My boyfriend shot him in the head and he didn’t die. He told people back in my hometown that it meant he was a messenger of God, and everybody believed in him. The other one’s Ray Preston. He’s an asshole.”

Jim opened the storage compartments. A flask stuck out of Ray Preston’s hip pocket. He reached for something on the control console and the Honda’s engine started.

“Damn,” Kylie said, “I forgot the key.”

“Here comes the welcoming committee,” Wolcott said.

SABs shuffled and lurched out of the blasted buildings, drawn to the noise of the motorcycle engine. There were even more than when Kylie arrived. Ray Preston, with his scarecrow body and scraggly Crypt Keeper hair streaming wet to his shoulders, could have been one of the skin-and-bone people himself.

“They want to hurt me,” Kylie said. “Father Jim and Ray.”

“Why?”

“They think I’m different. They don’t know I’m going to get sick like everybody else. Even
I
didn’t know that. Father Jim thinks if he cuts my clit off like they do in the
National Geographic
, God will let everybody go to Heaven.”

“
What?
”

Out in the street Ray had grabbed Billy’s rifle out of its scabbard. He may have looked like one of them, but the SABs crowding around the motorcycle were definitely not his brethren. Father Jim tried to wrest the rifle out of Preston’s hands. Preston jerked it away. The butt came up, clouting Jim in the jaw and sending him down. The weapon discharged. A bullet crashed through the window of the Red White and Blue Diner and ripped open Wolcott’s throat. Wolcott spun away from the window, bright arterial blood spraying his white bio suit. Kylie caught her scream before it could escape.

With the window blown out the rain was deafening. Gunfire came in undramatic pops. Kylie dropped to the floor, below the line of sight and fire. She bit down on her knuckles to keep the next scream inside. Wolcott thrashed, making gurgling sounds, blood spouting from his torn carotid. He kicked a wooden diner chair over, tried to sit up, fell back and was still. A blood bubble grew out of the wound and burst at the same time that Wolcott’s limbs stopped jerking and twitching.

Kylie cautiously raised her head above the window sill. Father Jim was on his knees, praying or stunned. Ray had Billy’s big-ass revolver in his fist, the rifle cast aside, either empty or jammed. SAB bodies with ruined heads lay in the street. The other SABs appeared confused. Some stumped away, some loitered in their usual empty-chicken-head fashion. Ray removed the flask from his hip pocket, spun the cap off, threw his head back and finished the whiskey or whatever was in it.

Kylie reached into her boot, where her good-for-a-girl gun should have been, but it wasn’t there. She had slept with the gun and must have rolled it up with the bedding and left it in the duffel. She yanked the boot off and shook it, unable to believe she had done something so stupid. But she had.

Ray Preston pushed the barrel of the Magnum into the face of a cowering SAB in a ragged business suit and pulled the trigger. The back of the SAB’s head blew out. Nearby skin-and-bone people scattered in their halting, ineffective way. Ray chased after one, holding his gun out with both hands. Licks of yellow flame appeared at the muzzle, and the SAB pitched over. Ray leaped past the body on his bandy legs and chased down another target.

Kylie pulled her boot back on and crawled away from the window. Her hands skidded in Wolcott’s blood. She crawled all the way to the dry storage room in the back of the kitchen. There was a ladder leading to a trapdoor in the ceiling. She climbed the ladder, her blood-slippery hands sliding on the rungs. At the top she shoved the trap open – the hinges stiff and complaining – and got a face full of rain. She climbed onto the roof, dropped the trap closed. A gunshot popped in the alley behind the diner. The slug pinged off something metallic. Kylie squat-walked to the edge of the roof and cautiously peered over.

A female SAB pressed face and hands against the brick wall of the diner, trapped between the wall and a big green trash dumpster. Ray Preston blocked her in, clumsily reloading Billy’s revolver. He dropped a couple of bullets and dug more out of his filthy jeans. The SAB looked up the side of the building, saw Kylie. It was Linda, the SAB that had told Kylie to “gown”. Kylie pulled back from the edge and looked around. Four cinderblocks pinned down the corners of a tarp. She picked up one of the cinderblocks with both hands and the wind blew the loose corner of the tarp up, flapping it like a pennant and revealing a few roofing tools, a broom with bristles glued stiff with old tar, a five-gallon drum. She lugged the block to the edge of the roof. Ray had finished reloading and was bringing the gun up. Kylie dropped the cinder block. On impact, Ray’s head burst like a watermelon.