John Adams - Wastelands - Stories of the Apocalipse

"Then how did you know where your body was?"

"How do you know where your chin is? It was just there." Jody turned away from him and leaned back in her seat. "Look, I’m tired and my head hurts and I’ve been dead once too often today. I just want to get some rest. I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow."

I took the hint and flew us away in search of a hospital.

Later, after we’d bandaged her head and made sure she had no other injuries, we took the bridal suite at the top of the Fort Collins Hilton. Dave was in one of the rooms down below. I’d wanted to put him in the city jail, but Jody wouldn’t let me.

"His teeth are pulled," she told me as we lay in the enormous bed, a dozen blankets pulled over us for warmth and as many candles providing light. "He’ll believe anything I tell him now. Besides, we need him. The best thing we can do is treat him like a recovering alcoholic or something and just integrate him back into our lives as fast as we can."

"Integrate him back into our lives?" I asked incredulously. "After what he did to you? He murdered you. You were dead!"

She giggled. "Well, I’m not so sure about that."

"Huh? What about the tunnel of light, and the gates to Heaven and all that?"

She lowered her voice to a whisper. "That was all total vacuum. I told him what he wanted to hear. Well, what I wanted him to hear, anyway."

I stared at her in the flickering candlelight, dumbfounded.

She shrugged. "I don’t remember a thing from the moment Dave knocked me out until the moment I woke up with you next to me."

"You don’t?"

"No."

"You’re one hell of an actress, then."

"Good, because I want him convinced."

I thought about that. "Even if we aren’t?" I asked after a while.

"What?"

"You want Dave convinced, but we’re still in the same shape we were before. We don’t know anything at all about what’s waiting for us after we die."

She giggled again and snuggled up closer to me under the covers. "Then God is just, if He exists," she said. "After all, I’m agnostic. I wouldn’t have it any other way."

Gene Wolfe — who is perhaps best known for his multi-volume epic, The Book of the New Sun — is the author of more than 200 short stories and 30 novels, is a two-time winner of both the Nebula and World Fantasy Award, and was once praised as “the greatest writer in the English Language alive today” by author Michael Swanwick. His most recent novels are The Wizard-Knight, Soldier of Sidon , and Pirate Freedom .

This story is about two children who return home, find an empty house, and are forced to grow up in a hurry. It first appeared in the program book for the 2002 World Horror Convention, where Wolfe was guest of honor.

In that same program book, Neil Gaiman offered up some advice on how to read Gene Wolfe. The first two points of his essay were:

(1) Trust the text implicitly. The answers are in there.

(2) Do not trust the text farther than you can throw it, if that far. It’s tricksy and desperate stuff, and it may go off in your hand at any time.

Keep that in mind when you’re reading this story. And when you’re done, you might want to heed Gaiman’s third point as well: “Reread. It’s better the second time.”

Jill was not certain it was a bus at all, although it was shaped like a bus and of a bus-like color. To begin with (she said to herself) Jimmy and I are the only people. If it’s a school bus, why aren’t there other kids? And if it’s a pay-when-you-get-on bus, why doesn’t anybody get on? Besides there was a sign that said BUS STOP, and it didn’t.

The road was narrow, cracked and broken; the bus negotiated it slowly. Trees closed above it to shut out the sun, relented for a moment or two, then closed again.

As it seemed, forever.

There were no cars on the road, no trucks or SUVs, and no other buses. They passed a rusty sign with a picture of a girl on a horse, but there were no girls and no horses. A deer with wide, innocent eyes stood beside a sign showing a leaping buck and watched their bus (if it really was a bus) rumble past. It reminded Jill of a picture in a book: a little girl with long blond hair with her arm around the neck of just such a deer. That girl was always meet­ing bad animals and horrible, ugly people; and it seemed to Jill that the artist had been nice to give her this respite. Jill looked at the other pictures with horrified fascination, then turned to this one with a sense of relief. There were bad things, but there were good things too.

“Do you remember the knight falling off his horse?” she whispered to her brother.

“You never saw a knight, Jelly. Me neither.”

“In my book. Most of the people that girl met were awful, but she liked the knight and he liked—”

The driver’s voice cut through hers. “Right over yonder’s where your ma’s buried.” He pointed, coughing. Jill tried to see it, and saw only trees.

After that she tried to remember Mother. No clear image would come, no tone of voice or remembered words. There had been a mother. Their mother. Her mother. She had loved her mother, and Mother had loved her. She would hold on to that, she promised herself. They could not bury that.

Trees gave way to a stone wall pierced by a wide gate of twisted bars, a gate flanked by stone pillars on which stone lions crouched and glared. An iron sign on the iron bars read poplar hill.

Gate, sign, pillars, and lions were gone almost before she could draw breath. The stone wall ran on and on, with trees in front of it and more trees behind it. Alders in front, she decided, and maples and birches in back. No poplars.

“Did I ever read your storybook?”

She shook her head.

“I didn’t think so. I was always going to, but I never got around to it. Was it good?”

Seeing her expression, he put his arm around her. “It’s not gone forever, Jelly. Okay? Maybe they’ll send it.”

When she had dried her eyes, the bus had left the road and was creep­ing up a narrow winding drive between trees. It slowed for a curve, slowed more. Turned again. Through the windshield she glimpsed a big house. A man in a tweed jacket stood in what seemed to be its back doorway, smok­ing a pipe.

The driver coughed and spat. “This here’s your papa’s place,” he an­nounced. “He’ll be around somewhere, and glad to see you. You be good kids so he’s not sorry he was glad, you hear?”

Jill nodded.

The bus coasted to a stop and its door opened. “This’s where you get out. Don’t you forget them bags.”

She would not have forgotten hers without the reminder. It held all the worldly goods she had been allowed to take, and she picked it up without difficulty. Her brother preceded her out of the bus carrying his own bag, and the door shut behind them.

She stared at the back door of the house. It was closed. “Dad was here,” she said. “I saw him.”

“I didn’t,” her brother said.

“He was standing in the door waiting for us.”

Her brother shrugged. “Maybe the phone rang.”

Behind them the bus backed up, pulled forward, backed a second time, and started down the drive. Jill waved. “Wait! Wait a minute!”

If its driver heard her, there was no sign of it.

“We ought to go in the house.” Her brother strode away. “He might be in there waiting for us.”

“Maybe it’s locked.” Reluctantly, Jill followed him.

It was not, and was not even closed enough to latch. There were leaves on the floor of the big kitchen, as though the door had stood open for hours while the wind blew. Jill pushed it solidly shut behind her.

“He might be” (her brother’s voice cracked) “in front.”