John Adams - Wastelands - Stories of the Apocalipse

"I don’t think so. Only I didn’t stay long. It was really dark, and it smelled bad."

They found the source of that smell in back of a bank of freestanding shelves heaped with tools and paint cans. It was rotting and had stained its clothing. In places its flesh had fallen in, and in others had fallen away. Her brother cleared scrap wood, a garden sprayer, and half a dozen bottles and jugs from the shelves so that the light might better reach the dead thing on the floor; after a minute or two, Jill helped him.

When they had done all they could, he said, "Who was it?" and she whispered,

"Dad."

After that, she turned away and went back up the stairs, washed her hands and arms at the kitchen sink, and sat at the table until she heard the basement door close and her brother came in. "Wash," she told him. "We ought to take baths, really. Both of us."

"Then let’s do it."

There were two bathrooms upstairs. Jill used the one nearest their room, her brother the other. When she had bathed and dried herself, she put on a robe that had perhaps been her mother’s once, hitching it up and knotting the sash tight to keep the hem off the floor. So attired, she carried their clothes downstairs and into the laundry room, and put them in the machine.

In the living room, the man whose lips she had tried to read was gone. The screen was gray and empty now save for the single word MUTE in glowing yellow. She found the panel her brother had shown her. Other channels she tried were equally empty, equally gray, equally muted.

Her brother came in, in undershorts and shoes. "Aren’t you going to eat?"

"Later," Jill said. "I don’t feel like it."

"You mind if I do?"

She shrugged.

"You think that was Dad, don’t you? What we found in the basement."

"Yes," she said, "I didn’t know being dead was like that."

"I saw him. I didn’t believe you did, that time. But I did. and he closed the basement door. I heard it." She said nothing.

"You think we’ll see him anymore?"

"No."

"Just like that? He wanted us to find him, and we did, and that was all he wanted?"

"He was telling us that he was dead." Her voice was flat, expressionless. "He wanted us to know he wouldn’t be around to help us. Now we do. You’re going to eat?"

"Yeah."

"Wait just a minute and I’ll eat with you. Did you know there isn’t any more TV?"

"There wasn’t any before," her brother said.

"I guess. Tomorrow I’m going out. You remember that gate we passed on the bus?"

He nodded. "Poplar Hill."

"That’s it. I’m going to walk there. Maybe it will be unlocked to let cars in. If it isn’t, I can probably get over the wall some way. There were a lot of trees, and it wasn’t very high. I’d like it if you came with me, but if you won’t I’m going to anyhow."

"We’ll both go," he said. "Come on, let’s eat."

They set out next morning, shutting the kitchen door but making very certain that it was unlocked, and walking down the long, curving drive the bus had climbed. When the house was almost out of sight, Jill stopped to look back at it. "It’s sort of like we were running away from home," she said.

"We’re not," her brother told her.

"I don’t know."

"Well, I do. Listen, that’s our house. Dad’s dead, so it belongs to you and me."

"I don’t want it," Jill said; and then, when the house was out of sight, "but it’s the only home we’ve got."

The drive was long, but not impossibly so, and the highway-if it could be called a highway-stretched away to right and left at the end of it. Stretched silent and empty. "I was thinking if there were some cars, we could flag one down," her brother said. "Or maybe the bus will come by."

"There’s grass in the cracks."

"Yeah, I know. This way, Jelly." He set out, looking as serious as always, and very, very determined.

She trotted behind. "Are you going into Poplar Hill with me?"

"If we can flag down a car first, or a truck or anything, I’m going with them if they’ll take me. So are you."

She shook her head.

"But if we can’t, I’m going to Poplar Hill like you say. Maybe there’s somebody

"I’ll bet somebody is." She tried to sound more confident than she felt. "There’s no picture on the TV. I tried all the channels." He was three paces ahead of her, and did not look back. "So did I." It was a lie, but she had tried several.

"It means there’s nobody in the TV stations. Not in any of them." He cleared his throat, and his voice suddenly deepened, as the voices of adolescent boys will. "Nobody alive, anyhow."

"Maybe there’s somebody alive who doesn’t know how to work it," she suggested. After a moment’s thought she added, "Maybe they don’t have any electricity where they are."

He stopped and looked around at her. "We do."

"So people are still alive. That’s what I said."

"Right! And it means a car might come past, and that’s what I said."

A small bush, fresh and green, sprouted from a crevice in the middle of the highway. Seeing it, Jill sensed that some unknown and unknowable power had overheard them and was gently trying to show them that they were wrong. She shuddered, and summoned up all the good reasons that argued that the bush was wrong instead. "There were live people back at that place. The bus driver was all right, too."

The iron gates were still there, just as she had seen them the previous day, graceful and strong between their pillars of cut stone. The lions still snarled atop those pillars, and the iron sign on the iron bars still proclaimed POPLAR HILL.

"They’re locked," her brother announced. He rattled the lock to show her-a husky brass padlock that looked new.

"We’ve got to get in."

"Sure. I’m going to go along this wall, see? I’m going to look for a place where I can climb over, or maybe it’s fallen down somewhere. When I find one, I’ll come back and tell you."

"I want to go with you." Fear had come like a chill wind. What if Jimmy went away and she never saw him again?

"Listen, back at the house you were going to do this all by yourself. If you could do it by yourself, you can stay here for ten minutes to watch for cars. Now don’t follow me !"

She did not; but an hour later she was waiting for him when he came back along the inside of the wall, scratched and dirty and intent on speaking to her through the gate. "How’d you get in?" he asked when she appeared at his shoulder.

She shrugged. "You first. How did you?"

"I found a little tree that had died and fallen over. It was small enough that I could drag it if I didn’t try to pick up the root end. I leaned it on the wall and climbed up it, and jumped down."

"Then you can’t get out," she told him, and started up a road leading away from the gate.

"I’ll find some way. How did you get in?"

"Through the bars. It was tight and scrappy, though. I don’t think you could."

Somewhat maliciously, she added, "I’ve been waiting in here a long time."

The private road led up a hill between rows of slender trees that made her think of models showing off green gowns. The big front door of the big square house at the top of the hill was locked; and the big brass knocker produced only empty echoes from inside the house no matter how hard her brother pounded. The pretty pearl-coloured button that she pressed sounded distant chimes that brought no one.

Peering through the window to the left of the door, she saw a mostly wooden chair with brown-and-orange cushions, and a gray TV screen. One corner of the gray screen read MUTE in bright yellow letters.

Circling the house they found the kitchen door unlocked, as they had left it. She was heaping corned beef hash out of her frying pan when the lights went out.