Charles Sheffield - Aftermath

Art woke to the faint sound of voices. It felt early, but when he opened his eyes the ceiling and walls of the room were strangely bright. He rolled out of bed, tested his arthritic knee gingerly before putting his weight on it, and limped over to the window.

Snow. Thick, large-flaked snow, falling steadily and already deep on the ground. No wonder everything was so bright.

What was the date? Almost the end of March. It was unusual in this area to have snow so late in the year, but not unheard of. Ten years ago snow had fallen in April. But not snow like this. Not a dense whiteout that reduced visibility to forty or fifty yards, covering plants that had been seduced by early warmth to a late spring stage of growth. If this year’s harvest had been a question mark before, it was now a guaranteed disaster.

Art went across to the toilet and used it, but he did not flush it. He closed the lid and opened the tank, leaned over, and sniffed. It smelled fresh. He rubbed cold water on his face, dried himself using the sleeve of his sweater, and closed the tank.

He could no longer hear the voices. Still in his stockinged feet, he picked up his waterproof bag, opened the door, and headed downstairs. The person he would most like to have seen was Morgan Davis. Morgan was only in his early forties but he had lost all his hair before Art met him, either naturally or as a by-product of some dubious treatment preceding the telomod therapy. His smooth, well-shaped skull and even features combined with a thoughtful way of speaking and an urbane manner to suggest a distinguished Chinese elder. Everyone in the treatment group recognized his authority. If Morgan were here, Art would certainly be glad to hand over his own role in major decision making.

No such luck. Morgan was far-off in Arizona. The only people in the dining room were Dana — fresh-faced and lively, her light brown hair pulled back from her face — and Seth Parsigian.

At every previous meeting of the treatment group — which Parsigian insisted on calling the Lazarus Club — Seth had been groomed and coiffured and impeccably outfitted in expensive business suits. Now, dressed in dark gray pants and a slick black overcoat three sizes too big, he squatted over a tiny gas stove. His black hair had been trimmed to an uneven stubble, marked and furrowed by the scars of past surgery, and now it was wet with flakes of melting snow. Somehow, amid all the rain of the past weeks, Seth had acquired a heavy tan. He glanced up at Art with alert, dark brown eyes and grinned.

“Hey there, big boy. Slept well, eh? You must have a real clear conscience.”

The old incongruity, Middle Eastern looks and polished manner combined with a West Virginia good-old-boy accent, had vanished. Art felt that he was seeing Seth clearly for the first time. Here was the real man, poised, primitive, and confident, crouched over a pan of snow melt.

“No one else made it?” Art spoke to Dana, but it was Seth who answered.

“Anybody with any sense will be holed up someplace, ’til it’s over. It’s real rough out there.”

“The weather?” Art recalled the agonized scream in the night.

“That, too.” Seth jiggled the pan impatiently. “Come on, you. Boil.”

“You brought the stove with you?” Art put down his bag, opened it, and felt around inside.

“Let’s just say, I came across it. I knew from bein’ here yesterday there was plenty of propane, a couple of five-hundred-gallon tanks of it down in the basement. Too heavy to haul out, I guess, without equipment.”

Art, with a mixture of satisfaction and regret, pulled the jar of coffee crystals from his bag and handed it to Dana. Seth saw it, and his eyes gleamed.

“Now we’re smokin’. Where’d you scrounge that, boy? I’ve not smelled coffee for a week.”

“Let’s just say, I came across it. Here’s sugar, too.” Art felt an odd reluctance to mention to Seth his hideaway up on Catoctin Mountain. Yet he knew he would have no hesitation in giving details of the place to Dana, or even in taking her there. “What were you going to do with the hot water?”

“Boil rice. I got me a fifty-pound bag. White rice, I’m afraid.” Teeth gleamed in the dark face. “Not nutritionally balanced, you know. Maybe we’ll all get sick.”

“Sick again,” Dana said. She put the jar of coffee crystals down on the floor, straightened up, and began to pace around the ruins of the dining room. “Not if I have anything to do with it. I’ve been too close to death once. I don’t care what you two do, but I’m heading for the Institute. Snow or no snow, I have to find out what our chances are.”

Seth stared up at her from where he squatted. “Hey, girl, easy. There’s a whole lotta day left yet.”

Art stood up and went over to Dana. “Of course we’re going to the Institute,” he said gently. “We didn’t come all this way not to go. But you need to travel on a full stomach. First you have something to eat and drink.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“I believe you. Before I entered the telomod program, my old doctors tried multiple drug antimetabolite chemotherapy. Did they do the same to you?”

“Sure they did. It didn’t work, though — nothing worked. I tried the telomod as a last resort.”

“Same with all of us. Right, Seth?”

“Too damn right.”

“So, Dana, do you remember what the chemo did to you?”

“Of course I remember. I’ll never forget. It didn’t help with the cancer, but it stripped the lining of my mouth and throat and esophagus. They were raw. I couldn’t swallow.”

“You couldn’t eat. So what did you do?”

“You know what I did. The same as you did, the same as we all did. I ate. I cried with every swallow. It took me two hours to force down a milk shake. But I ate. I knew I’d die if I didn’t.”

She walked back to where Seth was still sitting patiently by the stove. He had made a pan of coffee, and another pan was heating more water. “Here. You’ll need this with the rice.” She handed over a blue container of salt. “You’re right, Art, of course you are. But we’re so close. The Institute is less than a mile away. I thought of going there last night, but it was dark by the time I arrived and it was raining hard.”

“Raining, then snowing,” Seth said.

Art sat down on the floor opposite Seth, stretching his stiff leg out in front of him. “You went there, didn’t you?”

Dark eyes gleamed. “Now why’d you think a thing like that?”

“If you hadn’t, you’d have an itch inside worse than ours. You’d be keener than Dana to get out of here and over there.”

“That easy to read, am I? Well, maybe I’ll surprise you yet.” Seth dumped a measuring cup of rice into boiling water and threw a pinch of salt in after it. “But you’re quite right. I went over to the Institute late last night.”

Art sipped sweetened black coffee. He felt his whole body beginning to wake up. “What did you find?”

“Nothing worth mentionin’ — or I’d have mentioned it already. The Institute was the way it ought to be at night. Locked. I tried the doors. Dead bolts. I tried the bells, and they didn’t work. No surprise, the automatic guards and security systems aren’t functioning. I didn’t try shouting, and I won’t try shouting today. Were you thinkin’ of shouting?”

Art shook his head. “No way.”

“So why not?”

“Just listen. It’s completely quiet outside. We’re strangers here, but it shouldn’t be this quiet without a good reason. Where are the people, and what are they doing?”

Seth raised himself from his crouched position, walking about the room to stretch his legs and leaving Art and Dana to make sure that the cooking rice did not boil over. “Where are the people, eh? You been livin’ in the city the past week and a half?”