Морин Макхью - Wastelands - The New Apocalypse

This didn’t seem to help. “But you’re having sex. Tell me, are you having sex?”

Kath glared. “I’m twenty years old, of course I’m having sex!”

“And you’re pregnant.”

“No, God no!”

“But have you been using protection? How do you know?” Maggie seemed desperate.

Kath paused, then shot back, “Because I’m sleeping with Melanie!”

Maggie drew back, and Kath wondered what she was going to rant about next. It wasn’t that she and Melanie had been hiding anything. It just made sense to double up on tents to save space, and they hadn’t actually announced anything when they became more than friends. It wasn’t being gay that Kath thought would upset people. It was being… adult. She wasn’t growing up. She was grown .

Now, Maggie did cry. Or laugh. Something that came from tension releasing, and causing whatever was holding her together to collapse. She slumped against the wall, both hands covering her face. “I’m sorry, Kathy. I’m sorry. It’s just… we can’t feed everyone, and people keep having babies and we can’t do anything, we can’t feed them—”

Kath put her arms around the woman and just held her.

“God, look at me,” Maggie said around sobs. “I’m supposed to be taking care of you and just look at me.”

“You don’t have to take care of me,” Kath said. “You have enough to worry about, just let me… be me.”

They stayed like that awhile, hidden in the shelter of the building where Maggie could lose it in private, and Kath stayed to make sure she was okay. The older woman had been right at the edge for such a long time.

Maggie finally pulled away, scrubbing tears off her face and chuckling at herself, a strained and painful sound.

“So, you and Melanie, huh? I think I knew that. Yeah. Oh God, I’m so messed up I can’t see what’s right in front of my face. I promised your mom I’d look out for you and if you turned up pregnant in this mess—” She took a shuddering breath, rubbed her face one more time. And like that she had put on a new mask, and was smiling. “I’m sorry. I forget sometimes, that you’re grown up.”

Kath offered words, a gesture of comfort, though it might hurt as much as it helped. Kath wanted to say it. “I never got to come out to Mom,” she said softly. “I mean, I sort of knew, I was starting to figure it out. Figuring out that I didn’t just put those pictures on my wall because I liked beach volleyball so much, you know? But I never told Mom.”

“Oh, hon. You know she’d be okay with it, right?”

“Yeah, I know. But I wish…” She shook her head. They all wished.

“You should be in college,” Maggie murmured, running a hand over Kath’s hair.

All the adults said that to her in their most maudlin moments. She should be in college. Not staying up half the night with a gun under her arm. Kath herself had stopped believing anything would ever change. This was just what life was now. There’d never be somewhere else.

“Where would you be now?” she asked Maggie.

She looked around at the wide-open compound that used to be part of a pleasant street, the modest building now crammed with solar panels it didn’t used to have. “I’d be here, I think. But it’d be a lot different. Can you do a watch shift tonight? Mike’s come down with something.”

“Bad?”

“No, just a cold.”

“Yeah, no problem.”

“Thanks. Just… thank you.”

Kath’s watch shift started late afternoon and went into the evening. She covered about half the perimeter, walking on top of the barricade, stepping from car roof to truck hood to trailer and on. They’d bolted on sheets of metal and spikes, fencing, and other odds and ends to the basic framework over the years. Occasionally she’d come upon a loose bit, a piece of sheeting that moved under her feet, a car roof that was rusting out, and the next day someone would come to repair it. Used to be, they’d have four or five people covering the barricade, especially during the night watch. But since the fire and clearing the line of sight, they needed fewer people watching and could save the effort for other chores. The long approach gave the watchers plenty of time to spot trouble and raise an alarm.

This evening, trouble came right around dusk. The worst time, with the light fading. Her first hint came as movement on the horizon. Could have been anything, so she waited for the movement to resolve into shapes, or fade into nothing. Shadows appearing in wavering heat lines in the distance could be deceptive. She brought binoculars to her eyes, spent a moment focusing with one hand, the other clenched on the shotgun.

The shadows gained definition. Not a mirage, not deer or something else wandering in the distance. Now that she saw them, she heard the noise, a rumbling sound that was becoming rare. Gas-powered engines, beating against the air. Three cars, a couple of motorcycles, more than a dozen people, and those were just the ones she could see from this distance. Who knew how many were hiding inside the vehicles?

The convoy was racing straight for them.

She let the binoculars hang off their strap and cupped a hand to her mouth. “Incoming! Incoming!”

Someone at the clinic heard her and clanged the brass bell hanging off the front overhang.

They didn’t need it very often, but they had a routine for this, when strangers came barreling at the clinic compound in a way that didn’t suggest friendship. Those standing watch at the barricade stayed put, in case the invaders came on multiple fronts. A dozen others, whoever was on hand, grabbed weapons from the locker and came out to where the alarm had sounded.

Kath waited for her backup, shotgun in both hands, watching her targets come into range. The cars bounced and jutted over broken asphalt, while the motorcycles curved and weaved.

“Where the hell are they getting gas from?” Dennis asked. He’d climbed up on the barricade next to Kath.

Maggie was right behind him. “Don’t know, don’t care. What do they want?”

Kath said, “Better get down, in case they come in firing.”

The barricade had places to shelter: inside cabs, on shielded truck beds. All the invaders would see was their shotguns and rifles bristling out.

The caravan stopped at the edge of firing range. If one of the rifles fired at them now, it might or might not hit. A big man, white, wearing a leather jacket and cowboy hat, scrambled out of the driver’s side of one of the cars and marched forward a few paces. He didn’t seem to be armed.

Kath stood tall and shouted at him across the barrel of her shotgun. “Stop! Stop and show your hands!”

The man’s thick beard worked, as if he was biting his lip under it. He raised his hands. “Is this the clinic?” he shouted. “The one people talk about, that has doctors and medicine? Is that you?”

“What do you want!”

He gestured back. “We have wounded! We need help! We can trade for it! We have gas, guns, bullets—”

“Food?”

He paused a moment. “Yes!”

Kath looked at Maggie and Dennis.

“What kind of wounded?” Dennis shouted back. He stayed behind his shelter.

“Gunshot! Two men. God, please, help them!”

It could be a trick. Or the man could be honest. In the end, half the people here were doctors and nurses, and they recognized that kind of desperate plea.

The clinic had a process for this kind of situation, too.

Maggie and Dennis both emerged on top of the barricade, and Maggie called out. “Okay, here’s how it’s going to work. You bring the injured men inside, the vehicles stay out. Just the injured and two people each to carry them, no one else gets in, and you leave all your weapons outside. Got it?”