Нэнси Кресс - The End Is Now

Macun scratches his scalp and comes back with a glistening red finger. He seems surprised by it. Then he looks down at the blood trail, and seems surprised by that, too.

“What happened to you, sir?” I ask. “Is there rioting out there?”

“Are these human brains?” Macun asks.

“They are. General Camper signed the warrants to open cryo-freeze.”

Macun grits his teeth in disgust.

“Sir,” I say, as calmly as I know how. I’m channeling my husband, on whose tongue butter doesn’t melt. “You must see—the shelters need aboveground caretakers. Satellites won’t work after impact—there won’t be any kind of remote control drones. It’s got to be something that can engage independently from us. How else will the human race survive?”

“We’re going back to AI as soon as we have more time,” Marc chimes in. “Long term versus short term, you know?”

“What happened to you, sir?” I ask.

“It was just a dream,” Macun mumbles.

“Is Nine compromised, or did that injury happen up here? Did you do it to yourself, sir?” I ask.

Macun finally notices that I’m talking. He notices the blood again, the brains again, and his eyes go wide.

“Who cut your head?” I ask.

Macun’s feet go pigeon-toed. His knees begin to bounce. “Shelter Nine! Why, we had to bomb Shelter Nine!” he says in giggling sing-song.

“You must be confused, General. Shelter Nine is the only shelter within five hundred miles. It would be a senseless place to bomb. You’d be obliterating the population of the entire Midwest,” I say. “Can I pour you a shot of bourbon and we can talk about all this?”

“They didn’t listen. The President didn’t listen. Korea didn’t listen. Shelter Nine didn’t listen. Do you know how to listen?” Macun asks.

I don’t have time to answer. Macun’s arms and legs twitch in a hysterical scarecrow’s dance. He grabs me by the bloody coat, shoving me back over a swivel chair. My ankle hits something metal with a crack!

Macun keeps going. He finds Troy’s forceps and chucks them. They land upright in Kris’ dead left leg.

“Hey!” I cry.

He flips a steel gurney, on which we’ve set three good brains. Splat! they go. He flips the next table—four more brains. Gentle Jim Landers gets him by the waist. Crazed, strong, and military trained, Macun lifts Jim up, knees him in the groin, breaks free, and flips the third table.

The last viable brains go splat. Formaldehyde sprays. All is lost.

General Howard Macun grins.

“I should kill you,” I mumble, and I don’t even realize I’ve said it.

Panting, smiling, blood dripping from his crown and down his brow into his eyes like sweat, he scuttles his compact, muscular body across the brain-riddled floor. Slides around. Does a gory kind of victory dance. The brains turn to pulp.

“Please hand me your AFB-Connect, General,” I say.

Panting, Macun peers out from the corners of his bloody eyes.

“General Macun? I’d like you to leave now,” I say. “We’ll be informing Shelter Nine and the US government of your treasonous actions.”

Macun’s wide-eyed, lunatic expression glazes. I get the feeling his crazy’s not gone, just resting.

“Get the hell out,” I say.

“Of course,” he says at last. His voice is normal. This could be a year ago, his Christmas invocation at the Chapel, where he told us that courage would see us through these trying times.

“Good. See you at Nine for your court-martial,” I say.

“No. I don’t think you will.” Macun opens his AFB-Connect, and starts typing as he follows his blood trail toward the door. Then he looks back, his expression oddly somber. “They’re all dead. Don’t take it too hard. It’s for the best.”

I don’t know it, but I’m chasing him down the hall. The air raid sirens sound again. A newly downed plane, or a nuke, or another all-out war.

Aaaaroooaaah! Aaaaroooaaah! Aaaaroooaaah!

“General, I demand an explanation!”

He looks back with this bewildered expression. For just a second, I get the feeling he’s remembering the role he used to play: A house on General’s Row, six grandkids, a drunk wife, papers piled high on his desk from heads of state that all required his careful eye. But then the bewilderment is gone. He’s not that guy anymore.

“Sir. What have you done? We have families headed for Shelter Nine.”

General Macun wipes the blood from his temples, and salutes. “They’re dead. You’re dismissed,” he says.

It’s Troy Miller who chucks the skull hammer. A nerd his whole life, he probably never expected it to bullseye into the center of Macun’s forehead. The tough bastard stands for at least a minute, hemorrhaging even more blood, before he falls.

Aaaaroooaaah! Aaaaroooaaah! Aaaaroooaaah!

The rest of them don’t want to touch General Macun’s body because they’re squeamish. I’m just afraid he’s not really dead. “We need his AFB-Connect,” I say.

The old Strat Com looks like a 1950s public school. The equipment is state of the art, but the building is post-war junky, from the fluorescent lights to the one-dollar Wonderbread baloney sandwiches at the contract employees’ cafeteria. We’re standing in a tiled hall, our voices echoing.

Marc bends down, gracefully arranging his moccasins so that Macun’s blood river runs between his bulky legs. “I smell whiskey.”

“Drunk jerk,” Jim says. He’s outside the circle we’ve made, leaning against the hall. His balls must still hurt. “I’m not going to jail for this.”

“There is no jail anymore,” Kris answers. “And what if Nine’s gone? What are we supposed to do with a caretaker when there’s nothing to take care of? We don’t even have any more brains!”

I squat next to Marc. Brown foam bubbles from Macun’s lips.

Seeing this foam, Lee announces, “I’m so fucking done.”

I use my foot as a fulcrum to turn Macun over. Marc helps. The steel skull hammer clangs, reverberating inside Macun’s forebrain. An AFB-Connect, about the size of a deck of cards, falls from his clenched hand, skidding in blood. Marc uses his lab coat to pick it up and wipe it clean.

“What’s on your mind?” I ask Troy while Marc prods the port. I do this because Troy is openly weeping.

“I killed a guy,” he says.

“Yeah. But he deserved it.”

Troy presses his face against the tiled wall to hide his tears. “I heard you say it!—that we should kill him. This is a military installation. You’re my superior. You gave an order. You made me!”

I consider patting the guy’s back but he’s such a cold fish I can’t imagine he’ll appreciate it. “I’m fine with the blame. We needed his AFB.”

“You don’t understand. I killed him for you.”

“I’m glad you did it, okay? Thanks. Much appreciated. Now, do you want to keep trying for a caretaker or do you need to get out of here?”

“Home is gone,” he says. “I never had a home. Only you. You’ve been my boss six years. That’s family, too. I bet you never even thought of me that way, did you . . . ? My mom died. Not from this. I didn’t kill her. She died when I was little. She choked and it was just me with her. We were eating pineapple. I was making her laugh and something got stuck. I was too little to call the police. I just sat with her the whole time. I bruised her, trying to wake her up. Like, boxing, you know? I boxed her. She was beat-up by the time my dad came home from work. So he always said it was me that did it. I killed her. He never believed she choked. Did you know that about me?”

“Okay,” I say, finally patting his back. “You’re okay.”