Морин Макхью - Wastelands - The New Apocalypse

Say you understand. I had to. I’m not a nihilist or a murdercunt or a terrorwhore. They were gonna use up every last drop of Garbagetown’s power to go nowhere and do nothing and instead of measuring out teaspoons of good, honest gas, so that it lasts and we last all together, no single thing on the patch would ever turn on again, and we’d go dark, really dark, forever. Dark like the bottom of a hole. They had no right. They don’t understand. This is it . This is the future. Garbagetown and the sea. We can’t go back, not ever, not even for a minute. We are so lucky. Life is so good. We’re going on and being alive and being shitty sometimes and lovely sometimes just the same as we always have, and only a Fuckwit couldn’t see that.

I waited until Brighton Pier cast off, headed to the next rickety harbor of floating foolboats, filled with players and horns and glittering wheels and Dorchester menus and fresh mountains of letters we wouldn’t read the answers to for another twenty years. I waited until everyone was sleeping so nobody would get hurt except the awful engine growling and panting to deliver us into the dark salt nothing of an empty hellpromise.

It isn’t hard to build a bomb in Electric City. It’s all just laying around behind that fence where a boy held my hand for the first time. All you need is a match.

It’s such a beautiful day out. My hibiscus is just gigantic, red as the hair on a Peep Show dancer. If you want to wait, Big Bargains will be round later for her afternoon nap. Grape Crush usually brings a herring by in the evening. But I understand if you’ve got other places to be.

It’s okay. You can hit me now. If you want to. It’s what you came for. I barely feel it anymore.

Thank you for my instruction.

Shaenon K. Garrityis a cartoonist best known for the webcomics Narbonic and Skin Horse . Her prose fiction has appeared in publications including Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Escape Pod, Drabblecast , and the Unidentified Funny Objects anthologies. Her most recent book is The Zombie Gnome Defense Guide , written with Andrew Farago and Bryan Heemskerk. She lives in Berkeley with a cat, a man and a boy.

Allergic Reaction

If you get ill after eating or touching something that didn’t make anyone else sick, you may be allergic to it. Especially if there’s a rash. Allergies are caused by your body rejecting substances it doesn’t like. There is no treatment but to avoid those substances. Fortunately, only a few types of allergies can kill you. Nut allergies, for instance. Bee stings. But I imagine most people with fatal allergies to common things have died by now.

I am allergic to wool, soy, peanuts, and pollen. Only my peanut allergy can kill me.

Appendicitis

There is an organ in your body called the appendix, and sometimes it goes bad and kills you. The only treatment is to cut it out of your body. I don’t recommend trying this. You’ll bleed to death. On the other hand, death from appendicitis is long and excruciatingly painful. So maybe try surgery. There’s something to be said for the quicker death.

Bears

Bears aren’t so bad. They can kill you very easily, but mostly they leave people alone. Also, they keep wolves away. After Lauren died, I settled in Gualala because grizzly bears had been sighted in the area. Most people were afraid of the bears, but those people were idiots. Bears are so much better than wolves.

If you encounter a bear, move away slowly. If that doesn’t work, drop to the ground and play dead. You want the bear to lose interest in you and go away. But if a bear wants to kill you, it’ll kill you. There isn’t much you can do about it. I suppose that’s what scares people about bears. But if you think about it, the same thing is true of everything that can kill you.

Beriberi

This has a lot of names in different places: the shakes, the bone dance, calf legs. It starts with feeling weak and fatigued, then progresses to numbness in the arms and legs, inability to walk, facial tics, and dementia. Sufferers may also have a rapid heartbeat and shortness of breath.

As complex and frightening as these symptoms are—and I’ve seen them enough to know how scary they can be—the cause is a simple vitamin deficiency. Unless it’s progressed too far, a diet of fresh meat, green vegetables, and brown bread ( not anything made from the white flour or white rice found in the cities) should take care of the problem. Also, drink fresh clean water instead of beer if possible. If none of this is possible, beriberi can easily kill you.

As we traveled up the coast, back in my traveling days, Lauren and I started to see more and more stick-thin sufferers of beriberi, sometimes even in the larger settlements, and we were told more and more often that our diagnosis was useless. Where was anyone going to get fresh greens, when all the local farmland had turned poisonous and chalky, and even the trees in the woods were whitening? People got angry, they refused to pay. That was one of the things that made us think we ought to give up the traveling medicine work and settle somewhere, if we could find a healthy place that would take us.

Blood Poisoning

There are a lot of ways blood can get poisoned. Stepping on a rusty nail. Getting cut by a sharp piece of old metal. Always wear boots and gloves when foraging in the cities.

If you get an infected cut and start having spasms, especially in the jaw, you have tetanus. Tetanus can easily kill you. The only treatment we have these days is bed rest. Some people try bloodletting to release the poison, but I’ve never seen that work. The sickness isn’t caused by poison, anyway. It’s caused by bacteria that live in dirt.

You can also get blood poisoning through a tooth abscess or other dental problems. That’s what got Lauren. She had a toothache and she let it go, and let it go, and one morning her whole jaw swelled up and her body was on fire. She died a few days later. That was when I had to start looking seriously for a place to settle down, because I can’t travel alone, not with my allergies and my fibromyalgia. (Fibromyalgia is a painful disorder of the muscles. It’s not worth going into here, because it can’t kill you.) It took me three days to dig a grave in a nearby redwood grove, a safe distance from any source of water, and then I cried a little, and then I got the wagon back on the road and headed for the nearest settlement.

Keep your mouth as clean as possible, and pull rotten teeth before the rot spreads.

Botulism

Botulism causes cramps, vomiting, and breathing problems. There is no fever. You usually get it from food that’s been improperly preserved. It happens sometimes with smoked and cured meats, but is most common with canned goods. If you find canned food, check the can carefully for dents or swellings. Do not eat food from damaged cans, no matter how rare and delicious it is.

There used to be a cure for botulism, if treated quickly enough, but we don’t have it anymore.

When I worked at the trading post in Gualala, I threw out dozens of cans that people had salvaged from San Francisco and Berkeley. Most canned food from the old days is no good anymore. A lot of people got angry at me. Fortunately, Evan, who ran the trading post, backed me up. He’d dealt with botulism before, and he knew it can kill you.

A man once threatened to shoot me for destroying ten cans of Vienna sausages he’d found. I should have just let him eat the diseased meat. What kind of person wastes a bullet over spoiled Vienna sausages? I know how hunger grinds at you, especially if you’re coming up to trade out of the dead places, but eating bacteria just makes things worse.