W. Thompson: Out of the Waste Land

“Good spot,” he said as she sat down next to him in the lee of a boulder. He began to open up his bedroll. “We’re pretty much out of the wind, and we’re on the downhill slope here, so we re protected from anything that washes down from farther uphill.”

“Need my pack,” Margaret said. Her recharger was in it, along with her sleeping bag.

“Forget it,” Geisler told her. He nodded at the slope, where sheets of muddy rainwater cascaded into the gully. “You slip now, you won’t stop until you go over the edge. So sit tight.”

She was about to answer when light glared in the distance. “Lightning,” Margaret said.

Geisler nodded and draped the bedroll over them. His lips moved silently, and she realized he was counting off the seconds until the thunder came. “Three miles off,” he said. “Don’t worry about the lightning. It’ll hit higher up, on the hilltops.”

“Good. How long will the rain last?”

“Beats me. Why? You goin’ anywhere?”

“No.” The rain washed the grime from her eyeplate, but the water swiftly turned her view into a sheeting blur. “Are you all right?”

“I’m a little banged up,” he admitted. “I guess the trip is over. Think you can make it back to town without me, and get some help?”

“Yes.”

“Good, ’cause I’m stuck here. Glad you saved the water and food. You’ll need ’em for the walk tomorrow.”

“Yes.” We must still be in serious trouble, she thought, if he thinks I have to make a walk like that alone. But she could do it. And there was something else. “I remembered what happened,” she said.

“Huh?”

“To Lydia. Alan.”

Under the bedroll, he put an arm around her shoulder. “You going to talk about it, Maggie?”

“Not much to say,” she told him. “What you sdaid about what happened was right. I don’t know why I coulnt think of it before. But I remember some things now.”

“Like what?”

“I missed Lydia’s funeral. And Alan blamed me for everything. I let him because I wanted to believe it was my fault.”

“Yeah? Why?”

She tried to think. “If it was my fault, it meant I could have done something to keep Lydia alive. A thing can’t be your fault if you couldn’t do anything.”

Geisler nodded. “And you want to believe you could’ve saved the kid. If a whole hospital couldn’t do it, how could you? And you can’t live with guilt like that. If you don’t kill yourself over it, it’ll drive you nuts.”

“I know. But I know I never thought about killing myself.” She paused. “Or I don’t remember thinking about it. I can’t remember what any of it felt like, either. I don’t think I felt anything then.”

“You will,” he said.

Margaret thought he sounded grim. It was grim, she thought. It would be like having surgery without an anesthetic.

The rain grew heavier, and between the noise of its pounding and the wind talk became impossible. The black clouds cut out most of the sunlight, and Margaret could barely see ten yards as the rain churned the slope into mud. Lightning struck closer and closer, and she wondered what the discharges might do to her helmet’s systems. Her circuits were shielded, but the shielding could be overloaded. Then she heard Geisler’s voice, half-lost in the sheeting rain as he said something about crispy critters. Margaret had to laugh at the reminder that the lightning could do something more overwhelming than damage a tew circuits.

There was nothing she could do about that. She thought about Lydia and Alan instead. Reviewing her memories of the past—what, she wondered in surprise, ten months?—she felt baffled by the way her mind had worked. Things had happened, but she had blanked them out almost immediately. The frantic afternoon after they had received the flu shots, with Lydia falling down every time she tried to stand up and Margaret staggering around like a drunk, her voice growing slurred, while Alan packed them into the car and rushed them to the hospital. Lydia getting CPR in the emergency room, too late, while she was wheeled out on a gurney. Days on life support in the ICU. Alan taking an almost sadistic glee as he described Lydia’s funeral.

She could concentrate on the memories now, but they remained as remote as a stranger’s photo album. She wondered what she could have done to keep Lydia from dying. Not have her immunized? But there had been no way to know that she would react as she did to the shot. Get her to the hospital faster? Or a different hospital? The doctors hadn’t known how to stop the damage from the shot; they didn’t even know why it had stopped with Margaret when she still had her eyes and ears.

Alone. That had been the worst of it, even worse than Lydia’s death. Alone, not just because her daughter and husband were gone and their apartment was gathering dust. Alone because she was living in a hospital, with friends and relatives limited to visiting hours. Alone because for the first month she had been unable to talk, unable to tell anyone how she felt. Unable to say that the therapists’ well-intended monologues about grief and healing were torture.

The wind gusted, hard, and something cold and wet slapped Margaret in the face. Geisler swore and grabbed at the bedroll as the wind carried it off. It landed only a few feet away, but before Margaret could switch to her movement icons, the mud and water carried it downhill, toward the gully. Geisler huddled closer to her and tried to shield her from the rain. “I wondered when things would get interesting,” he muttered.

“Trouble?” Margaret asked.

“You might say so,” he said. He gestured to the arroyo, where the bedroll had vanished. “No blanket, no sleeping bag. We’re gonna freeze tonight.” Margaret remembered how cold it had been last night. It might not cause her any discomfort, she reflected, but she could still die from exposure. So could Geisler. “Ideas?”

“This rain will stop in a while,” he said. “The clouds should break an hour or so later. When they do, we can dry out in the Sun. Bein’ cold and dry beats being cold and wet.”

“Will anyone look for us before dark?” she asked.

“I wouldn’t count on it,” Geisler said. “We’re supposed to be surviving on our own, and everyone knows I’ve made it through worse storms than this.”

And they would need a helicopter to reach us, Margaret thought. Nobody was coming up here on foot, or in any kind of a vehicle, not until the ground dried out.

Margaret clicked on her time icon. To her surprise it was already four in the afternoon. She couldn’t remember when the Sun had set last night, but she thought it was some time between eight and nine. That would leave only four hours or so of daylight.

The rain ended and the clouds began to break after a half-hour. Geisler dragged himself away from the rocks and out into the Sun. “Have to try to stay out of the wind tonight,” he said, as he peeled off his jacket. He lay it on the muddy ground to dry. “You better get something to eat, Maggie. It won’t hurt me to lose a few pounds, but you’re gonna need your strength.”

“Yes.” She went to the bag and dug into it. She found a ham sandwich; the bag had leaked and it was soggy, but she didn’t care. When she had finished she tried her modem again, with no luck. It seemed unfair. The phone company claimed that its cellular service covered every inch of the West. Well, that probably meant they had only covered the towns and roads out in the boondocks, as well as some of the more isolated tourist sites.

Geisler had said something. She remembered it now. She walked over to him. “You said my modem might work if I climbed a hill.”

“It might,” he said. “If you got high enough to get in the line of sight with a phone station, and if you’re in range of it, and if the storm didn’t knock it out.” He looked around, then pointed uphill. “That’s the only high ground you’re going to reach today; maybe it’s high enough. Gonna be slippery.”