Морин Макхью - Wastelands - The New Apocalypse

When the world’s burning, you have to make choices.

That night, I heard Macy outside the house shouting my name. I opened one of the shields over a second-floor window and saw her below. She was naked and smiling.

“Come outside,” she said.

I yelled at her. “You’ll have to try harder than that. You’re not Macy.” I closed the shield and haven’t been outside since.

The damn TV had gone off the air before someone could tell us that Stingers could look like people. And that they absorbed whatever information was in their lunch’s brain. I guess what it got from Macy was me was our anger. Stingers must also have some psychic ability to communicate with each other because the next day there were two Macys outside.

Soon there were a dozen.

Another day and it was a hundred.

Now the house is surrounded and my wife, naked and furious, stretches around me for as far as I can see.

With Frank’s supplies and everyone else gone, I’m set for the rest of my life in Xanadu. I talk to people on the shortwave sometimes. I watch movies. Listen to music. At night I sometimes take off the headphones and listen to Macy. She doesn’t always scream. Sometimes she whispers and coos, like a sly seduction. I put the headphones on right away on those nights.

The screams I can deal with, but not the sound of Macy in love.

Eventually a Stinger got into the house. I don’t know how it did it. It looked like a butcher knife and when I reached for it, it grabbed me. Fortunately, it was just a small one. I hacked it off my arm with a real knife and shoved it down the garbage disposal.

Frank had laid in a good supply of antibiotics and I’m gobbling them like popcorn. Still, the infection where the Stinger touched me is getting worse. I can feel my arm going soft, dissolving from the inside. I wrapped it in bandages and put it in a sling just so I don’t have to look at it.

I wonder if, like Frank, I’ll turn into a monster one day. By a lot of people’s standards, I guess I already have.

There’s not a lot to do around here anymore. It’s harder and harder to find people to talk to on the shortwave. I’ve tried talking to Macy a couple of times on her cooing nights. But the sound of my voice soon gets her screaming again.

Here’s the funny part, the part it took me a while to understand: There are so many Macys now that even with all the shielding over the doors and windows, if they rushed the place all at once, they’d be able to crash through. But that’s not what the Stingers want. We’re playing a game.

What they want is for me to open the doors and let them in.

When I dream now all I see is Macy’s face disappearing under a tentacle. Alex being drawn into the sky. Frank splitting open. Geoff falling to the ground.

I know that one night when the dreams get too bad, my gamey arm starts dissolving the rest of me, or I can’t stand watching Die Hard one more time, I’m going to call the Stingers’ bluff. I’ll open the doors and windows and invite them in for high tea. Will they absorb me right away?

I might be the last human in the world by then.

They might want to keep me for a while as a pet.

A memento of the early days when the world was full of people and the air wasn’t always chalk.

Catherynne M. Valenteis the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of over two dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Space Opera, Palimpsest, Deathless, Radiance , and The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making . She is the winner of the Andre Norton, Tiptree, Sturgeon, Prix Imaginales, Eugie Foster Memorial, Mythopoeic, Rhysling, Lambda, Locus, Sturgeon, and Hugo awards. She has been a finalist for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards, and her story in this volume was selected for inclusion in Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy . She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with a small but growing menagerie of beasts, some of which are human.

My name is Tetley Abednego and I am the most hated girl in Garbagetown. I am nineteen years old. I live alone in Candle Hole, where I was born, and have no friends except for a deformed gannet bird I’ve named Grape Crush and a motherless elephant seal cub I’ve named Big Bargains, and also the hibiscus flower that has recently decided to grow out of my roof, but I haven’t named it anything yet. I love encyclopedias, a cassette I found when I was eight that says Madeline Brix’s Superboss Mixtape ’97 on it in very nice handwriting, plays by Mr. Shakespeare or Mr. Webster or Mr. Beckett, lipstick, Garbagetown, and my twin brother Maruchan. Maruchan is the only thing that loves me back, but he’s my twin, so it doesn’t really count. We couldn’t stop loving each other any more than the sea could stop being so greedy and give us back China or drive time radio or polar bears.

But he doesn’t visit anymore.

When we were little, Maruchan and I always asked each other the same question before bed. Every night, we crawled into the Us-Fort together—an impregnable stronghold of a bed which we had nailed up ourselves out of the carcasses of several hacked apart bassinets, prams, and cradles. It took up the whole of our bedroom. No one could see us in there, once we closed the porthole (a manhole cover I swiped from Scrapmetal Abbey stamped with stars, a crescent moon, and the magic words New Orleans Water Meter ), and we felt certain no one could hear us either. We lay together under our canopy of moldy green lace and shredded buggy-hoods and mobiles with only one shattered fairy fish remaining. Sometimes I asked first and sometimes he did, but we never gave the same answer twice.

“Maruchan, what do you want to be when you grow up?”

He would give it a serious think. Once, I remember, he whispered:

“When I grow up I want to be the Thames!”

“Whatever for?” I giggled.

“Because the Thames got so big and so bossy and so strong that it ate London all up in one go! Nobody tells a Thames what to do or who to eat. A Thames tells you . Imagine having a whole city to eat, and not having to share any! Also there were millions of eels in the Thames and I only get to eat eels at Easter which isn’t fair when I want to eat them all the time.”

And he pretended to bite me and eat me all up. “Very well, you shall be the Thames and I shall be the Mississippi and together we shall eat up the whole world.”

Then we’d go to sleep and dream the same dream. We always dreamed the same dreams, which was like living twice.

After that, whenever we were hungry, which was always all the time and forever, we’d say we’re bound for London-town! until we drove our parents so mad that they forbade the word London in the house, but you can’t forbid a word, so there.

Every morning I wake up to find words painted on my door like toadstools popping up in the night.

Today it says NIHILIST in big black letters. That’s not so bad! It’s almost sweet! Big Bargains flumps toward me on her fat seal-belly while I light the wicks on my beeswax door and we watch them burn together until the word melts away.

“I don’t think I’m a nihilist, Big Bargains. Do you?”

She rolled over onto my matchbox stash so that I would rub her stomach. Rubbing a seal’s stomach is the opposite of nihilism.

Yesterday, an old man hobbled up over a ridge of rusted bicycles and punched me so hard he broke my nose. By law, I had to let him. I had to say: Thank you, Grandfather, for my instruction . I had to stand there and wait in case he wanted to do something else to me. Anything but kill me, those were his rights. But he didn’t want more, he just wanted to cry and ask me why I did it and the law doesn’t say I have to answer that, so I just stared at him until he went away. Once a gang of schoolgirls shaved off all my hair and wrote CUNT in blue marker on the back of my skull. Thank you, sisters, for my instruction . The schoolboys do worse. After graduation they come round and eat my food and hold me down and try to make me cry, which I never do. It’s their rite of passage. Thank you, brothers, for my instruction .