Морин Макхью - Wastelands - The New Apocalypse

“What? Whose children?”

“The Plague Eater.” With a sleepwalker’s drowsy gait, Kristi stumbled back to bed, pulling the cotton sheet up to her chin and murmuring something about dancing. Tulli tucked the Pendleton over her friend.

“What?” Moraine asked, waking. “Did Kristi have a nightmare? Must be exciting. I’d love to experience her brain for just one REM cycle.”

“Nightmares aren’t pleasant, last I checked.”

“Better than the tedious junk I experience. This time, I dreamed of notes in the major key.”

“You’re a true musician, Moraine.”

“Guess I’ll try again.” He pulled the sheets up to his chin. “Hey.”

“Yeah?”

“Keep an eye on her, okay?”

“I promise.”

Once her friends drifted off to sleep, Tulli sat on the end of Kristi’s bunk and held her hand. The muscles in her long fingers—a violinist’s fingers, spidery and dexterous—tensed, relaxed, and tensed. Her livelihood, if not her life, was rapidly expiring.

Where were the powers their mothers swore by? The great forces that heal faithful children and make bodies strong? “I’ll do anything,” Tulli whispered. “You just need to ask.”

In the silence that followed, she chuckled. The Apparently Siblings reveled in gallows humor. It was much nicer than weeping.

Later, as the train chugged through Mariposa Compound, it passed rows of white barracks with slatted pitch roofs. Laundry lines, sun-bleached plastic toys, and potted plants cluttered the residential grounds. The train stopped between sprawling, nearly identical facilities. To the right: a hospital. To the left: a community center. Beyond them were convenience shops, the kindergarten to twelfth-grade school, a computer lab, a library, and a cafeteria. Tulli had memorized her compound map during the trip, knew where every facility was located. Where she and her siblings would live. Where they would be treated. Where they could eat, rehearse, and hang out. Where they would be memorialized, if the plague consumed them.

Nurse Jon helped load their bags on a trolley. “I have to ask something,” he said. “Are you three related?”

“Because we look alike?” Kristi asked.

“Excuse me, Miss. I don’t meet many goths.”

“You’re my new favorite person, Jon,” Tulli said. “Our style is closer to neoclassical alt-metal fusion than goth.”

“Here’s why I asked,” Jon said. “They house men and women separately in Mariposa Compound unless you’re family or dating.”

Moraine shook his head. “I see,” he said. “We have the same great-uncle. Will that do? I can’t convincingly pretend to date a woman.”

“Hopefully. Good luck, you three.” Jon escorted them outside, stealing a breath of fresh air before ducking back into the White Train.

Thanks to their apocryphal great-uncle, the Apparently Siblings shared a bedroom that was originally designed for one patient. Imperceptibly tinier than their efficiency apartment in McAllen, the close quarters did not bother Tulli. At least they had a window. Granted, it overlooked a blank white wall, one of the neighboring barracks.

“The internet broke again,” Kristi said, prodding her laptop. She’d been bedridden for three days, shivering under her covers and racing to finish her memoirs before the illness made typing impossible. “I’m supposed to call my parents in twenty minutes.”

“There’s a landline in the common area,” Moraine said.

“I want to see them.”

Tulli peered out the window, her back to the other siblings. During sunset, the blank wall resembled a cool flame: vivid orange, blushing darker, slipping into shadow. “How’s your family doing?” she asked.

“Still healthy, but worry will kill ’em before any virus, at this rate,” Kristi said.

Orange became rust, red, black. Tulli rapped a shrill toy drum she borrowed from the K to 12 music room. Pacing, Moraine hummed the tune he dreamed on the White Train. Kristi finished her memoirs with a discontented sigh. At nightfall, they all climbed into bed. Breakfast ended at nine sharp, and the meal lines got longer every day. “What’s the opposite of a vampire?” Moraine asked. “’Cause I feel like one. It’s unnatural, this early-to-bed schedule.”

Tulli pretended to be asleep. If she responded, Moraine would chatter well into late-night-early-morning. The last time that happened, they overslept and missed both breakfast and lunch. She could hear Kristi shifting, shuddering, contorting under the Pendleton blanket with whispering shif, shif, shifs . Plague-triggered muscle spasms: most people called them slow death throes. It was like a dance, a terrible dance.

In the hypnagogic realm between awake and asleep, where dreams poisoned reality, a shadow stood proudly against the wall. It possessed eyes: unblinking, round, yellow eyes with pupils that swallowed Tulli’s soul, two points of space-time singularity from which nothing could escape.

Drumbeats rang— rap, RAP, rap —and the shadow began to spin. It revolved clockwise around the walls, and when the circle was completed, a final, thunderous rap rang out, punctuated by the sound of breaking glass.

Tulli leapt to her feet; the window near her bed had cracked. Cautiously, she peeked outside. “Whoa!” A wake of turkey vultures stumbled drunkenly below the window, stunned by their impacts against the glass. One by one, they alighted, until all that remained were three tail feathers piled in the dust.

“Hyuh!” Moraine said, patting his pillow-ruffled punk pompadour. “I just had the worst case of sleep paralysis.”

Kristi, wrapped in black wool, said, “It was a dancing ghost. Unless you believe in shared hallucinations?”

“What about shared visions?” Tulli asked. “Guys. This may be our jingle dance moment. I think we’ve been chosen.”

“By whom?” Moraine said.

“No idea. Hold your imperious retort while I grab those feathers.”

As Tulli entered the alley, she heard a radio muttering through a neighbor’s cracked window. The static-thickened voice said, “I looked, and behold, an ashen horse; and he who sat on it had the name Death.” Tulli was not religious, but, as a fan of horror movies and the novel Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, she knew all about the four horsepeople of the Apocalypse, color- and noun-themed riders who emerged during the End Times.

The moon was full and high, its light spilling into the alley between barracks. When the radio preacher concluded, “… to kill with sword and with famine and with pestilence and by the wild beasts of the earth,” Tulli pressed the turkey vulture feathers over her eyes, blocking the obnoxious white globe. They were so dark, Tulli wondered if their vanes devoured more light than the blackest material on Earth, a forest of carbon nanotubes constructed by Japanese scientists, her personal STEM heroes.

“Not today, Apocalypse,” she said.

Inside, Moraine and Kristi were fussing. Nostalgia washed over Tulli; she thought about the day they met. How little things changed, even when everything changed.

“The virus causes hallucinations when it damages the temporal lobe,” Moraine said. “Shadows are common.”

“We all saw a woman spinning around our bedroom as turkey vultures smacked rhythmically into the window.”

“Okay. Sure. What makes you believe she was teaching us a special dance?”

“Powerful dances come from visions. That’s what my mother taught me. That’s what her mother taught her. That’s how I know what I know.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way: if your ancestors knew powerful dances, why aren’t we ruling the world right now?”

“We’re holding our own,” Tulli interrupted.