James Kelly - Rewired - The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology

“You have neighbors?”

“At least ten,” she said. “The people in the restaurant across the way make a pretty good soup, even if most of the veg is canned. They cleaned me out of Sterno, though.”

“You’ve got neighbors and you trade with them?”

“Well, nominally. It’d be pretty lonely without them. I’ve taken care of whatever sniffles I could. Set a bone — broken wrist. Listen, do you want some Wonder Bread and peanut butter? I have a ton of it. Your friend looks like he could use a meal.”

“Yes please,” Van said. “We don’t have anything to trade, but we’re both committed workaholics looking to learn a trade. Could you use some assistants?”

“Not really.” She spun her axe on its head. “But I wouldn’t mind some company.”

They ate the sandwiches and then some soup. The restaurant people brought it over and made their manners at them, though Felix saw their noses wrinkle up and ascertained that there was working plumbing in the back room. Van went in to take a sponge bath and then he followed.

“None of us know what to do,” the woman said. Her name was Rosa, and she had found them a bottle of wine and some disposable plastic cups from the housewares aisle. “I thought we’d have helicopters or tanks or even looters, but it’s just quiet.”

“You seem to have kept pretty quiet yourself,” Felix said.

“Didn’t want to attract the wrong kind of attention.”

“You ever think that maybe there’s a lot of people out there doing the same thing? Maybe if we all get together we’ll come up with something to do.”

“Or maybe they’ll cut our throats,” she said.

Van nodded. “She’s got a point.”

Felix was on his feet. “No way, we can’t think like that. Lady, we’re at a critical juncture here. We can go down through negligence, dwindling away in our hiding holes, or we can try to build something better.”

“Better?” She made a rude noise.

“OK, not better. Something though. Building something new is better than letting it dwindle away. Christ, what are you going to do when you’ve read all the magazines and eaten all the potato chips here?”

Rosa shook her head. “Pretty talk,” she said. “But what the hell are we going to do, anyway?”

“Something,” Felix said. “We’re going to do something. Something is better than nothing. We’re going to take this patch of the world where people are talking to each other, and we’re going to expand it. We’re going to find everyone we can and we’re going to take care of them and they’re going to take care of us. We’ll probably fuck it up. We’ll probably fail. I’d rather fail than give up, though.”

Van laughed. “Felix, you are crazier than Sario, you know it?”

“We’re going to go and drag him out, first thing tomorrow. He’s going to be a part of this, too. Everyone will. Screw the end of the world. The world doesn’t end. Humans aren’t the kind of things that have endings.”

Rosa shook her head again, but she was smiling a little now. “And you’ll be what, the Pope-Emperor of the World?”

“He prefers Prime Minister,” Van said in a stagey whisper. The antihistamines had worked miracles on his skin, and it had faded from angry red to a fine pink.

“You want to be Minister of Health, Rosa?” he said.

“Boys,” she said. “Playing games. How about this. I’ll help out however I can, provided you never ask me to call you Prime Minister and you never call me the Minister of Health?”

“It’s a deal,” he said.

Van refilled their glasses, upending the wine bottle to get the last few drops out.

They raised their glasses. “To the world,” Felix said. “To humanity.” He thought hard. “To rebuilding.”

“To anything,” Van said.

“To anything,” Felix said. “To everything.”

“To everything,” Rosa said.

They drank. He wanted to go see the house — see Kelly and 2.0, though his stomach churned at the thought of what he might find there. But the next day, they started to rebuild. And months later, they started over again, when disagreements drove apart the fragile little group they’d pulled together. And a year after that, they started over again. And five years later, they started again.

It was nearly six months before he went home. Van helped him along, riding cover behind him on the bicycles they used to get around town. The further north they rode, the stronger the smell of burnt wood became. There were lots of burnt-out houses. Sometimes marauders burnt the houses they’d looted, but more often it was just nature, the kinds of fires you got in forests and on mountains. There were six choking, burnt blocks where every house was burnt before they reached home.

But Felix’s old housing development was still standing, an oasis of eerily pristine buildings that looked like maybe their somewhat neglectful owners had merely stepped out to buy some paint and fresh lawnmower blades to bring their old homes back up to their neat, groomed selves.

That was worse, somehow. He got off the bike at the entry of the subdivision and they walked the bikes together in silence, listening to the sough of the wind in the trees. Winter was coming late that year, but it was coming, and as the sweat dried in the wind, Felix started to shiver.

He didn’t have his keys anymore. They were at the data-center, months and worlds away. He tried the door-handle, but it didn’t turn. He applied his shoulder to the door and it ripped away from its wet, rotted jamb with a loud, splintering sound. The house was rotting from the inside.

The door splashed when it landed. The house was full of stagnant water, four inches of stinking pond-scummed water in the living room. He splashed carefully through it, feeling the floorboards sag spongily beneath each step.

Up the stairs, his nose full of that terrible green mildewy stench. Into the bedroom, the furniture familiar as a childhood friend.

Kelly was in the bed with 2.0. The way they both lay, it was clear they hadn’t gone easy — they were twisted double, Kelly curled around 2.0. Their skin was bloated, making them almost unrecognizable. The smell — God, the smell.

Felix’s head spun. He thought he would fall over and clutched at the dresser. An emotion he couldn’t name — rage, anger, sorrow? — made him breathe hard, gulp for air like he was drowning.

And then it was over. The world was over. Kelly and 2.0 — over. And he had a job to do. He folded the blanket over them — Van helped, solemnly. They went into the front yard and took turns digging, using the shovel from the garage that Kelly had used for gardening. They had lots of experience digging graves by then. Lots of experience handling the dead. They dug, and wary dogs watched them from the tall grass on the neighboring lawns, but they were also good at chasing off dogs with well-thrown stones.

When the grave was dug, they laid Felix’s wife and son to rest in it. Felix quested after words to say over the mound, but none came. He’d dug so many graves for so many men’s wives and so many women’s husbands and so many children — the words were long gone.

Felix dug ditches and salvaged cans and buried the dead. He planted and harvested. He fixed some cars and learned to make biodiesel. Finally he fetched up in a data-center for a little government — little governments came and went, but this one was smart enough to want to keep records and needed someone to keep everything running, and Van went with him.

They spent a lot of time in chat rooms and sometimes they happened upon old friends from the strange time they’d spent running the Distributed Republic of Cyberspace, geeks who insisted on calling him PM, though no one in the real world ever called him that anymore.