Морин Макхью - Wastelands - The New Apocalypse

The temperature dove from chilly to Alaska winter cold. Even Kristi, with her wool shawl and patchwork dress, shivered. “From the world Above,” boomed everywhere Below, “I take the Big Plague, drink its coils, and sate my hunger. The virus is now just a troubled memory. Make no mistake: you’ll all die eventually. Heheh. Mortals always perish. Maybe by illness. Maybe by accident. Maybe by something stranger. It’s not my place to know. When the time comes, I hope you will find me and perform for all the dead, the never-born, and the monstrous who live in my deep country.”

“Woah. Metal . What… what are you?” Tulli asked, leaning against her friends for warmth. “A spirit?”

“A ghost?” Kristi asked.

“A god?” Moraine asked. “Or could you be part of a complex delusion? Maybe I’m asleep, and all this has been a nightmare.”

“Just call me Plague Eater. The rest is mystery.” The fingers curled around them. “But I’m definitely not that last guess.”

“I have to admit,” Tulli said, “that the White Train is much nicer this time. I even saw Nurse Jon sipping a martini in the dining car. I asked if he wanted an autograph, and he said, ‘No, you left one on the wall.’ What a funny guy. I may really love him.”

Kristi snorted. “Get his number, but don’t invite him home. Our apartment must be rank. We left chili in the sink.”

“Let’s hire a maid after the tour finishes,” said Moraine.

“Maybe even rent a bigger apartment?” Tulli asked.

It had taken a few weeks to check, double-check, and triple-check their blood samples; not a hint of Big Plague remained. In fact, nobody carried the virus anymore, regardless of the bodily fluid or tissue that was screened. Big Plague even vanished from test vials in laboratories and secure government facilities.

Maybe that’s why so many people believed that the Apparently Siblings apparently saved the world. YouTube videos of their performance helped, too: turkey vultures bobbing their naked heads, the dance, song, and drum, a flurry of feathers, an empty courtyard, cheers when the crowd spotted Tulli, Kristi, and Moraine on the medical center rooftop.

In every video, their bodies were perfect silhouettes against the red western sky.

Ken Liuis an author of speculative fiction, as well as a translator, lawyer, and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards, he is the author of The Dandelion Dynasty, a silkpunk epic fantasy series: The Grace of Kings, The Wall of Storms , and a forthcoming third volume. He is also the author of the collection The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories and wrote the Star Wars novel, The Legends of Luke Skywalker . In addition to his original fiction, Ken has also translated numerous works from Chinese into English—including The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin and “Folding Beijing” by Hao Jingfang, both Hugo winners. Learn more at http://kenliu.name.

I’m in the river fishing with Mother. The sun is about to set, and the fish are groggy. Easy pickings. The sky is bright crimson and so is Mother, the light shimmering on her shkin like someone smeared blood all over her.

That’s when a big man tumbles into the water from a clump of reeds, dropping a long tube with glass on the end. Then I see he’s not fat, like I thought at first, but wearing a thick suit with a glass bowl over his head.

Mother watches the man flop in the river like a fish. “Let’s go, Marne.”

But I don’t. After another minute, he’s not moving as much. He struggles to reach the tubes on his back.

“He can’t breathe,” I say.

“You can’t help him,” Mother says. “The air, the water, everything out here is poisonous to his kind.”

I go over, crouch down, and look through the glass covering his face, which is naked. No shkin at all. He’s from the Dome.

His hideous features are twisted with fright.

I reach over and untangle the tubes on his back.

I wish I hadn’t lost my camera. The way the light from the bonfire dances against their shiny bodies cannot be captured with words. Their deformed limbs, their malnourished frames, their terrible disfigurement—all seem to disappear in a kind of nobility in the flickering shadows that makes my heart ache.

The girl who saved me offers me a bowl of food—fish, I think. Grateful, I accept.

I take out the field purification kit and sprinkle the nanobots over the food. These are designed to break down after they’ve outlived their purpose, nothing like the horrors that went out of control and made the world unlivable…

Fearing to give offense, I explain, “Spices.”

Looking at her is like looking into a humanoid mirror. Instead of her face I see a distorted reflection of my own. It’s hard to read an expression from the vague indentations and ridges in that smooth surface, but I think she’s puzzled.

“Modja saf-fu ota poiss-you ,” she says, hissing and grunting. I don’t hold the devolved phonemes and degenerate grammar against her—a diseased people scrabbling out an existence in the wilderness isn’t exactly going to be composing poetry or thinking philosophy. She’s saying “Mother says the food here is poisonous to you.”

“Spices make safe,” I say.

As I squeeze the purified food into the feeding tube on the side of the helmet, her face ripples like a pond, and my reflection breaks into colorful patches.

She’s grinning.

The others do not trust the man from the Dome as he skulks around the village enclosed in his suit.

“He says that the Dome dwellers are scared of us because they don’t understand us. He wants to change that.”

Mother laughs, sounding like water bubbling over rocks. Her shkin changes texture, breaking the reflected light into brittle, jagged rays.

The man is fascinated by the games I play: drawing lines over my belly, my thigh, my breasts with a stick as the shkin ripples and rises to follow. He writes down everything any one of us says.

He asks me if I know who my father is.

I think what a strange place the Dome must be.

“No,” I tell him. “At the Quarter Festivals the men and women writhe together and the shkins direct the seed where they will.”

He tells me he’s sorry.

“What for?”

It’s hard for me to really know what he’s thinking because his naked face does not talk like shkin would.

“All this.” He sweeps his arm around.

When the plague hit fifty years ago, the berserk nanobots and biohancers ate away people’s skins, the soft surface of their gullets, the warm, moist membranes lining every orifice of their bodies.

Then the plague took the place of the lost flesh and covered people, inside and outside, like a lichen made of tiny robots and colonies of bacteria.

Those with money—my ancestors—holed up with weapons and built domes and watched the rest of the refugees die outside.

But some survived. The living parasite changed and even made it possible for its hosts to eat the mutated fruits and drink the poisonous water and breathe the toxic air.

In the Dome, jokes are told about the plagued, and a few of the daring trade with them from time to time. But everyone seems content to see them as no longer human.

Some have claimed that the plagued are happy as they are. That is nothing but bigotry and an attempt to evade responsibility. An accident of birth put me inside the Dome and her outside. It isn’t her fault that she picks at her deformed skin instead of pondering philosophy; that she speaks with grunts and hisses instead of rhetoric and enunciation; that she does not understand family love but only an instinctual, animalistic yearning for affection.