John Barnes - Directive 51

Jason took a deep draft of Mountain Dew, and settled in to listen; he didn’t think he’d ever paid this much attention to someone talking before. Beside him, Beth was stone-still and alert.

The engine purred away on idle from time to time; otherwise the night was silent. When the Acting President’s speech was over, and the station had gone back to broadcasting orders (mostly to preserve valuable resources) and requests (mostly to report where useful material was) from Homeland Security, Jason turned the radio off.

“Don’t,” Beth said. “We can leave it on real soft, but don’t turn it off, please.”

“Sure.” He turned it back on. Something about her tone made him reach out to touch Beth, and he found her face wet.

“You okay?”

“No. Yeah. Kind of. I—I liked hearing the president on the radio. And hearing the radio. It was like, the world’s gonna go on, that was what it was like. Like there’s still an America and everything. And I know he was just like making a lot of promises to win an election—”

“Which he won’t.”

“Which he won’t—but you heard him, Jason, he was like reaching out to the whole country, here’s what we’re going to build and do and make, let’s get going, let’s get to work—and it was just kind of… beautiful. I mean I know it’s all a fake and a lie but I was real glad that Chris Whatsisface didn’t start telling us all about how it was all bullshit and all. I just… I wanted to know someone was doing something, I wanted to know the government was trying, and I wanted to hear the radio and know we weren’t the only people left on Earth.”

“Truth?”

“Sure.”

Jason took another delicious sip of Mountain Dew, thought about how long it might be before he had more of it, looked at the night sky swarming with stars around the dim reflection of the radio’s glow. “I wish I’d never fucking heard of Daybreak, and neither had anyone else.”

Beth started to cry, harder, and he reached for her to see if she was okay. She said, “Me too, but I wasn’t gonna say nothing to you.”

He felt queasy and sick from what they’d been saying, and Beth looked like she was in more pain, so he said, “We’d better sack out.”

They fell asleep with the radio still going, under piles of clothes and coats, Beth in the front seat, Jason in the back, to give her most of the heat. The seat leather smelled good and the warmth of the heater and the soft engine turning over every few minutes were comforting; the last thing he remembered before falling asleep was the little insect voice of the announcer reading a complicated post from DHS, asking anyone who had any antique steel puddling tools, and any iron sculptors, blacksmiths, and heritage craft ironworkers to gather at Homestead, Pennsylvania, in three months’ time.

Somewhere well past midnight, the engine suddenly seized and died. Beth cried out and woke up; Jason sat up, breathing hard. Not willing to let cold air into the car, he crawled forward and tried to restart it; the starter cranked without success. He left the heater fan running on battery power, recirculating the warm air from inside the car, to extract the last heat from the radiator. KP-1 was still on the air, reporting that they’d gotten ten-hour-old Internet voice mail from Banff, Alberta, and were passing on a request for the government in Ottawa, dissolving provincial governments till further notice, and asking that local governments report ASAP.

Beth curled up and went back to sleep. Jason eventually did too, but for a while he kept waking from dreams about Elton’s body dangling from the barn’s pulley. Something about the radio creeped him out, as if the old plaztatic world was lunging to get him, and the stars were too far away to save him.

“Hey, am I crazy, or is there a newsboy down on the street?” Lenny asked.

“Those are not mutually exclusive questions.” Heather rushed to the window beside him. On the sidewalk below, a boy of about ten waved a paper over his head, shouting, “Read all about it!”

“Might as well see if we’re both hallucinating,” she said, strapping on sneakers.

In the street, she asked “How much?”

The boy smiled. “One paper for five dollars paper money or one can or box of food, has to be edible by itself, no fridge stuff, and I don’t make change on food,” proud that he’d remembered the whole spiel.

Heather traded a ten for a five and took the paper upstairs. It felt strangely like the local newspaper she could remember from when she’d been in college and had occasionally read one out of boredom; it was even about as thick as the Costaguana Weekly Courier , and had the same smeary, slightly greasy feel to it.

The front page had a little box:

Three full pages listed all the stores both individually and by chain, noting the few of them that were still open to sell toiletries, cleaning supplies, and so forth. “Probably I can get some deals on disinfectant,” Heather said, “if I hustle over to the Safeway three blocks over.”

“Also check Rite Aid,” Lenny suggested. “Especially home hair-dye kits.”

“Are we going in disguise?”

“They have goopy extra-strength peroxide. We can use it to scrub around the seals on the windows, the air intake for the generator engine, stuff like that. Wonder if the gasoline would be safer if we could add antibiotics to it? Or if that would just spoil it?”

“We could—shit. I was about to say maybe we could Goo-22 antibiotics and gasoline. How the hell did people find things out before the net?”

“Think about when we were kids. Phone books, dictionaries, paper encyclopedias—”

“Well, yeah, when I was a little kid. Mostly I remember the heap of them in the Dumpster when the school got a grant. How long since anything like that’s been produced? 2015?”

“Yeah. I can’t imagine anyone ever thought about gasoline spoiling anyway.” Lenny sighed and ran through the autochecks on the control screen of his wheelchair, which was becoming a nervous habit. “Well, it was a nice thought. I have fuel enough for about a week, but it’ll be infected well before then.”

“And there’s food in the fridge and freezer for about that long. It won’t benefit us at all if it spoils. So we’d better have breakfast today and read the paper to each other like more or less normal people.”

They skipped reading the text of Shaunsen’s speech and agreed that they liked Rusty Parlotta’s editorials calling for everyone to admit that the system was down and act more like a grown-up about it. Lenny thought Chris Manckiewicz’s reporting was biased too liberal, and Heather that it was just liberal enough. “I wonder if they’ll have comics, and sports pages, like old-time papers?” Lenny said, as they were eating the last of the mixed, chopped fresh fruit. “I’d like that.”

“Me too. My dad used to read me Rose is Rose and Heart of the City , and we always went over the stats on the Lakers every Sunday in the Times .” The classified ads were mostly people looking to barter expensive cars and computers for canned food and guns. There were black smears on her hands, just below the little fingers. “On the other hand, the Web was never quite this grubby. There couldn’t be lead in the ink, could there?”

“That little story about ‘local printer-hobbyist finds new occupation’ said he didn’t use lead-based inks, but it doesn’t hurt for either of us to be washing hands constantly, considering.”