John Adams - Wastelands 2

Fortunately for me, the wind was blowing out to sea, carrying the bulk of the doubtless carcinogenic smoke with it. I left the trailer about a mile down the road from the lookout point, choosing the minor risk that one of the other poor souls left in this godforsaken world would stumble over it—you can’t exactly LoJack a draft horse—over the greater risks of smoke inhalation and panicked animals rocketing out of my control. My mare, the unimaginatively named Midnight, would put up with just about anything I asked from her. She’d be able to stand the heat as long as I could.

Even with the wind in our favor, the air was so thick with ash that I could practically chew it by the time we got to the top of the lookout point. I shielded my eyes to block the flames, squinting through the smoke as I strained to see the city beyond. There wasn’t much left to see. The fire had almost burned itself out, but it was still vigorous enough to make that particular route impassable.

There were two choices. We could try to find another route. Or we could backtrack twenty miles to the superstore I’d seen in San Ramon, resupply, and let the fire finish burning itself to death.

“We need a break, don’t we, Midnight?” I asked, running a hand down the anxious mare’s throat. She snorted, front legs dancing a half-panicked tattoo against the gravel. She was ready to bolt, holding herself in place solely because she assumed I wanted her to stay.

There was no need for that. We’d seen everything we’d come to see, and it was just more devastation. Tugging gently on the reins, I turned Midnight towards the caravan, and the road.

Before we rode out of the region completely, I stopped at the sign marking the city limits, pulled out my staple gun and another of my precious flyers, and set to work. Even if we didn’t come back this way, even if the store managed to yield a better route, I would have done my self-imposed duty by the people who might still be living here. Wherever they were. When we finally turned towards San Ramon, white copy-paper ghosts glared from the city sign behind us, eye-poppingly clean in a landscape gone to ash.

It would never be enough, but it would have to do.

“If you’re alive and reading this, there are a few things you should be aware of. Firstly, those diseases everyone died of? The ones that barely had time to make the papers before it was over? They weren’t natural, and that means there’s no way to estimate their out-of-body survival rates. Be careful. Keep contact with the dead to an absolute minimum. If you must handle human remains, wear gloves and be prepared to dispose of your outer garments immediately afterwards. Avoid closed-up spaces where people died, especially those which have remained moist. Diseases survive better in dark, warm, moist places.

“Stick with bottled water whenever possible. Boil everything when you can’t. All that plastic they said we needed to keep out of the landfills? Forget it. Bottled water could save you. (Not just from the manmade toxins. Cholera, dysentery, lots of other nasty things could be lurking in the water by now. Drink Crystal Springs or shit out your intestines. The choice is yours.) When selecting canned foods, check to be sure that the cans are whole and have not been dented. Exterior rust is fine. Interior rust is not.

“On the bottom of this flyer you will find a list of basic nutritional supplements which are likely to be missing in your current diet. All items on the list can be found at any large grocery store or moderately-sized health food store. I recommend you begin taking them.

“Watch out for dogs and other previously domesticated animals, as they may have turned feral in the absence of human custodianship. I have also included a list of standard poison baits and their doses. I do not recommend their use. They may still provide a measure of security while traveling.

“I am on my way to Grants Pass, Oregon. I recommend you do the same as soon as you can. Time was short before the pandemics, and there’s no telling how much we have left.

“Hurry.”

My name was at the bottom: Mercy Neely, Doctor of Veterinary Medicine. Possibly the last vet in the world. Possibly the last medical practitioner of any kind in California.

I really wish I’d paid more attention in class.

The San Ramon superstore showed signs of moderate looting, which was reassuring. I’ve come to see looting as a sort of hopeful omen, a little piece of proof that the human race will manage to recover from what it’s done to itself. I was less pleased to see that my would-be looters had focused their attentions on the junk food aisles and cosmetics, almost completely ignoring the canned goods and well-stocked pharmacy. Maybe that was better for me, but it didn’t bode well for the survival of the species.

After my brief solo reconnaissance was done, I cranked up the loading bay door enough to drive the wagon inside and parked it in what used to be the stock room. Midnight wandered off to investigate while I was unhitching the other horses and pouring their oats out on the concrete. I don’t know what their names were originally; I call them Tweedledee and Tweedledum, and that seems to work well enough for everyone involved. The goats were hard at work trying to chew through their ropes again. I set them loose to wreak what havoc they could inside the closed superstore ecosystem. Goats can do a lot of damage, but even they can’t chew through walls.

Finally, with everyone else roaming free, I opened the wagon’s back door and released the hounds. Even indoors, it’s difficult to overstate the value of a good guard dog in this brave new world we’re all marooned in. They came bounding out with tails wagging madly, even Brewster, whose close-cropped stub of a tail could barely do more than vibrate rapidly back and forth.

The dogs inquired whether I might be interested in company while I explored the store, largely through the mechanism of trying to jump up and lick my face. I allowed that this might be acceptable. An agreement was reached. Who says animals don’t communicate?

“All you be good, now,” I cautioned the rest of the traveling zoo, and stepped through the swinging doors that separated the loading dock from the rest of the store, all three dogs at my heels. Time to go shopping. New-world style.

The world ended about fourteen months ago. Sadly, I missed this momentous occasion. I was home sick with the plague, and was thus not allowed to participate in the grand pandemic which wiped out the majority of the human race. Yeah. I get the irony. Still, I like to think I’m doing pretty well, all things considered. I’ve made it more than halfway to my eventual destination, despite some pretty major complications, and I’ve managed to do it without having a psychotic break. Talking to the animals doesn’t count. That’s what I went to school for.

As for how I missed the pandemic… bubonic plague has been endemic in California’s small mammal population since the 1800s, when it was imported along with other luxury items such as silk, spices, and cheap immigrant labor. The state managed to hold on to all four imports until just recently. I doubt there’s going to be much of a market for any of them these days, but hey, I also didn’t think mankind was going to wipe itself out in a blaze of dick-waving glory, so what do I know?

California’s ongoing plague problems are how I know for certain that the pandemic was manmade. Supposedly, Texas was hit by a form of bubonic plague that mowed down the population like a wheat thresher. It spread too fast for anything but a droplet-based transmission—person-to-person by way of sneezing or coughing—and it was resistant to all known antibiotics. Welcome to fourteenth-century Europe, where the Black Death was everybody’s least-favorite neighbor. Only that’s not possible, because that’s not how bubonic plague works. Bubonic plague is carried by rat fleas, transmitted by rat fleas, and spreads slowly, since rat fleas are notoriously unreliable about when they bite you. Pneumonic plague is droplet-based, but that’s not what killed Texas. Bubonic plague that wasn’t bubonic plague killed Texas, and that means it wasn’t bubonic plague at all. It was something somebody built in a lab, and I’m sure its creator won the Terrorist Science Fair before letting it out of the vial.