Scott Mackay - Phytosphere

“Yeah? And so?” said Denim Jacket, pulling the bottom of his jacket away to reveal a pistol shoved into his pants. “Go ahead and shoot me, lady. We’ll see who’s faster.”

She looked more closely at Denim Jacket. Was he high? In the light coming from the torches, his pupils certainly looked small, and she wondered if, before burning down the Mercer and Dawes wings, he had gotten into the dispensary.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” she said.

“Buck, check the car.”

This time it didn’t come to her in a blinding flash, like it had with Fulton, that Denim Jacket was the evil one. This time she found she couldn’t pull the trigger, no matter what, because Denim Jacket was just a kid, and his parents were probably dead, and starvation was bound to kill him by Thanksgiving. She let Buck come ahead, and Buck inspected the car, then backed away and looked at Denim Jacket with wide eyes. He said, in a voice that hadn’t yet changed, “They got food.”

Denim Jacket pulled out his pistol and pointed it at Glenda’s head. He said, with a crooked smile, “What now, lady?”

She knew he was acting tough because he understood the new politics well, and that he couldn’t act weak, not in front of his friends, or they would tear him to pieces. She was afraid of Denim Jacket, yet felt motherly toward him as well. His brown hair was a mess, matted with the grease hair develops after it hasn’t been washed in a while. He was pale. His eyes, she saw, were blue, like the surf at Nag’s Head, and the freckles spattered across his nose were like specks of chocolate. He had a green armband that looked as if it were made of ripped surgical scrubs, and she saw that the other boys wore arm-bands as well—they were wearing colors as though they were in a gang.

Denim Jacket looked like he was in grade nine, a year or so younger than Hanna, and he spoke with the accent of the hills. He was old North Carolina, as tough as they come, but scared… frantically scared, despite his show of callous indifference to the whole situation.

“Where’s your mama?” asked Glenda.

A small paroxysm of emotion quivered over his face, and she likened him to a broken pot that had been glued back together, only the glue hadn’t set yet.

“Where’s yours?” As smart-ass remarks went, this was fairly lame, and she could see that he was having a difficult time holding it together.

“Dead,” she said.

“Dead how?”

“Diabetes.”

Denim Jacket shrugged. “Big deal.”

“Why don’t we share some of this food with you?”

“A guardsman killed my own ma. Happened last month.”

And then a deafening roar exploded from behind the pillar where Jake was hiding, and Denim Jacket’s face seemed to bend toward the center, even as his lips formed a perfect O, his eyes squinted in pain, and a fine spray of red erupted from his temple. His arm went down, the gun fell from his hand, and he crumpled to the concrete floor.

The other boys dropped their crude torches and scattered; for a second she thought it was just boys running away from their own mischief, like they had egged a house, or let the air out of someone’s tires, or left a burning bag of dog shit on somebody’s doorstep, because they ran like all boys run, flat out, and with the pump and effort of crazed terror. Glenda thought all this in a split second but then remembered it wasn’t boys playing mischief anymore—it was another sequence, another beat, another slice of goddamned life from the end of the world. She had killed a cop, and now her son had killed a child. Kids killing kids. That’s when you knew the Apocalypse had truly arrived.

Jake ventured from his pillar, and he looked scared and proud at the same time, and not at all like her son, but like a boy she didn’t even know. He was breathing hard, his chest rising and falling under his T-shirt, and he walked toward them with an odd lurch, as if the strength had disappeared from his legs.

The torches lay scattered around Denim Jacket, casting wisps of black smoke, and Denim Jacket sprawled there, bleeding profusely from the head, the blood spreading and spreading until it finally reached the drain next to the generator and started trickling down.

“I told you I could shoot someone,” said Jake, looking at his sister.

Glenda could tell that Jake didn’t fully understand what he had done.

As for Hanna, she had gone catatonic and was just standing there with her limp hair in front of her face, trying to manage her wheeze while she stared with sightless eyes at the blood trickling down the drain.

Glenda looked at her son and saw he wanted her to say something, to give approval, but every muscle in her body was rigid, and it was like her mind was frozen.

She heard the kids yelling to each other on the next level, some spontaneous communication, perhaps a warning, but it was too echoey down here, and she couldn’t make out the precise words.

“Mom?” said Jake.

She nodded, but it was a dull and distracted nod.

“Mom, he had a gun pointed right at you.”

“I know.”

Jake broke down and cried.

She went to him, and took him in her arms like the child he was. And even when the generator clicked off because her car was full, she kept holding him because he couldn’t seem to get his sobbing under control. He didn’t cry often these days; she couldn’t remember the last time he had cried. But he was crying now. She heard his voice crack, and realized his voice was changing.

“Let’s get in,” she said. “We’re full.”

“Mom, are you happy I killed him?”

And in a voice that was as dead as Denim Jacket, she said, “Yes, Jake, I’m happy you killed him.”

She lifted Denim Jacket’s gun and brought it into the car with her.

They drove up to the ground-floor level and out to the gate. Cedarvale continued to burn. Where was Whit? And the remaining residents? Were they all dead now? Had Whit made it to Detroit?

She took some food out—four cans of Irish stew—stacked them on the curb next to the security kiosk, put Denim Jacket’s gun on top, and then drove off into the darkness. She wasn’t going to leave Buck and the others without a gun.

At Homestead, Neil studied the new downloads from the Department of Defense with misgiving. Only so many launch vehicles left, and according to his virus specs, dispersion would fall short by twenty-five percent if he didn’t come up with a solution. Secretary of Defense Sidower was indeed correct in his bleak assessment—except for what they had in the United States, and in U.S. bases abroad, launch infrastructure worldwide, particularly in terms of personnel, had been degraded to the point of zero capability.

Was there a solution?

He entered the parameters again, just in case he had made a mistake—lift requirements versus existing launch capabilities—and came up with the same dead-end numbers. But then he widened the data pool, and entered the parameters through a games-theory program Kafis had given him one summer at Marblehill, something the Pentagon computer geeks didn’t have, just to see what would happen. Outside, on the air base, the last of the sun was slowly disappearing.

“Analyze,” he told his waferscreen.

Sixty seconds later his waferscreen gave him an answer he hadn’t been expecting—the Moon.

He scrutinized the data. It turned out that AviOrbit had dozens of interlunar shuttles crated in various warehouses, some out of service for decades, but all possessing, to varying degrees, launch potential. His waferscreen told him that if these shuttles were refurbished, they could be transformed into crude missiles.

He sat back, glad that the Tarsalan software had taken into account this phantom resource. Was it possible, then? Could he win this chess game after all?