Mike Ashley - The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF

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, then, 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 in 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 floor-boards 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.

It wasn’t a good life, most of the time. Felix’s wounds never healed, and neither did most other people’s. There were lingering sicknesses and sudden ones. Tragedy on tragedy.

But Felix liked his data-center. There in the humming of the racks, he never felt like it was the first days of a better nation, but he never felt like it was the last days of one, either.

> go to bed, felix

> soon, kong, soon — almost got this backup running

> youre a junkie, dude.

> look whos talking He reloaded the Google homepage. Queen Kong had had it online. The Os in Google changed all the time, whenever she got the urge. Today they were little cartoon globes, one smiling the other frowning.

He looked at it for a long time and dropped back into a terminal to check his backup. It was running clean, for a change. The little government’s records were safe.

> ok night night

> take care Van waved at him as he creaked to the door, stretching out his back with a long series of pops.

“Sleep well, boss,” he said.

“Don’t stick around here all night again,” Felix said. “You need your sleep, too.”

“You’re too good to us grunts,” Van said, and went back to typing.

Felix went to the door and walked out into the night. Behind him, the biodiesel generator hummed and made its acrid fumes. The harvest moon was up, which he loved. Tomorrow, he’d go back and fix another computer and fight off entropy again. And why not?

It was what he did. He was a sysadmin.

Dale Bailey is a professor of English at Lenoir-Rhyne College, North Carolina. His novel The Fallen (2002) was a nominee for the International Horror Guild Award, an award he went on to win with his 2002 short story “Death and Suffrage”. His short fiction has been collected in The Resurrection Man’s Legacy (2003). He is also the author of a study of contemporary horror fiction, American Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in American Popular Fiction (1999).

This story and the next one form something of a related sequence looking at how individuals may react to a global flood.

THEY DROVE NORTH, into ever-falling rain. Rain slanted out of the evening sky and spattered against the windshield where the humming wipers slapped it away. Rain streamed from the highway to carve twisted runnels in the gravelled berm. Raindrops beaded up along the windows and rolled swiftly away as the slipstream caught them up. All about them, only the rain, and to fill the voiceless silence, the sounds of tires against wet pavement and rain drumming with insistent fingers all about the car. And in these sounds, Melissa heard another sound, a child’s voice, repeating a scrap of some old nursery rhyme: rain, rain go away, come again some other day.

For forty-nine days, nothing but rain, everywhere, all across the United States, in Canada, in Mexico, in Brazil, in England and France and Germany, in Somalia and South Africa, in the People’s Republic of China. It was raining all around the world. Rivers of water flowed out of the sky, tides rose and streams swelled, crops rotted like flesh in the fields.

Weathermen were apologetic. “Rain,” they said during the five-day forecast. “Just rain.” Statesmen expressed alarm, scientists confusion. Religious fanatics built arks. And Melissa — who once, in a year she could barely remember, had fantasized making love in the rain — Melissa saw her life swept away in the rain. They drove north, to the mountain cabin -three rooms for her and Stuart, her husband. And all about them the unceasing rain.