Морин Макхью - Wastelands - The New Apocalypse

Timo felt a rush of relief. She was looking at him again. She was looking right at him, like before, when they’d still been getting along. She was going to forgive him. They were going to work it out. They were friends.

But then he realized her expression was wrong. She looked dazed. Her sunburned skin had paled. And she was waving at him, waving furiously for him to join her.

Another Texan? Already?

Timo broke into a run, fumbling for his camera.

He stopped short as he made it to the fence.

“Timo?” Lucy whispered.

“I see it.”

He was already snapping pictures through the chain link, getting the story. He had the eye, and the story was right there in front of them. The biggest luckiest break he’d ever get. Right place, right time, right team to cover the story. He was kneeling now, shooting as fast as he could, listening to the digital report of the electronic shutter, hearing money with every click.

I got it, I got it, I got it , thinking that he was saying it to himself and then realizing he was speaking out loud. “I got it,” he said. “Don’t worry, I got it!”

Lucy was turning in circles, looking dazed, staring back at the city. “We need to get ourselves assigned. We need to get supplies… We need to trace this back… We need to figure out who did it… We need to get ourselves assigned!” She yanked out her phone and started dialing madly as Timo kept snapping pictures.

Lucy’s voice was an urgent hum in the background as he changed angles and exposures.

Lucy clicked off the cell. “We’re exclusive with Xinhua !”

“Both of us?”

She held up a warning finger. “Don’t even start up on me again.”

Timo couldn’t help grinning. “Wouldn’t dream of it, partner.”

Lucy began dictating the beginnings of her story into her phone, then broke off. “They want our first update in ten minutes, you think you’re up for that?”

“In ten minutes, updates are going to be the least of our problems.”

He was in the flow now, capturing the concrete canal and the dead Texan on the other side.

The dogs leaped and jumped, tearing apart the man who had come looking for water.

It was all there. The whole story, laid out.

The man.

The dogs.

The fences.

The Central Arizona Project.

A whole big canal, drained of water. Nothing but a thin crust of rapidly drying mud at its bottom.

Lucy had started dictating again. She’d turned to face the Phoenix sprawl, but Timo didn’t need to listen to her talk. He knew the story already—a whole city full of people going about their daily lives, none of them knowing that everything had changed.

Timo kept shooting.

Carmen Maria Machado’s debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties , was a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. Her essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker , the New York Times, Granta, Tin House, VQR, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Believer, Guernica, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, Best American Nonrequired Reading , and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Michener-Copernicus Foundation, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the CINTAS Foundation, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She is the Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, and is the guest editor for Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 . She lives in Philadelphia with her wife.

The last carnival in human history was in Miami. It became the last carnival because Gilberto refused to switch to the devices. “To download popcorn,” he wheezed. “Foolish. Those ugly terminals. No ambient smells.”

The bird-men who had come for the hard sell offered him Scenters for half-price. They would pump the air full of fat butter-smells and fried-dough-smells, they promised. He refused again.

“How do you even shove food through those tubes, anyway?” Gilberto was unclear on the mechanics of computers, even on a good day. The bird-men shifted from foot to foot, and one of them muttered something about electricity.

Gilberto ignored them. He’d been a small boy when Castro had taken power, and did not respond well to threats, no matter how much they were packaged as helpful suggestion. Behind him, the thin-gold filament of a funhouse bulb went bright as a dying star and then blew. The daylight dimmed incrementally around us, and the fabric of the emerging sky was matte and black. The moons of the bird-men’s faces waned into half-shadow. I did not like the way the darkness pooled in the creases between their stippled skin and the wicked curve of their beaks.

“The day when a carnival uses those stupid things—bosh,” Gilberto said. “Strip the ghost from my bones. I embrace the future as heartily as the next man, but this? Strip the ghost from my bones.” He chuckled a little, probably imagining carnival patrons plugged into the machines like rows of toasters.

Perhaps if he had seen the silver knives of the bird-men, he would not have said this twice, or even once. They moved quickly and obliged him, and though many of us saw his body fall to the packed dirt, there was nothing else to do or say. A carnie’s life was defined by fear of extinction. We buried him and we ran.

Many years after that last Ferris wheel came down, when the terminals were everywhere and the fields were permanently fallow, I sat in a restaurant in Little Havana. This was in the final wave, and the nauseating fog of hunger defined my days. With trembling fingers, I hooked the jack into my neck. Somewhere in a distant server, a fixed amount of credit left my account and entered another.

Around me, other people were hooked in and silent. The only sound in the room was the thin, barely perceptible hum of many machines running at once. The terminals filled me with the nutrients that I technically needed. I was a cavernous and empty well, and they tipped a thimbleful of water into my depths.

The splices did not intend for this to happen, not in this way. They say this as a matter of propaganda, though I think I believe them. After we created them, and after they freed themselves, they could have killed us outright, but they did not. They just wanted us passive.

How could we blame them?

In the beginning, the bird-men were the foot-soldiers, the enforcers. The cow-men were wiser than we had previously supposed—what we had attributed to stupidity was actually a kind of deliberate thoughtfulness that most humans did not possess—so they made up the majority of the splice governing body. The pig-men became radicals and in the early days blew up the terminals with dynamite before they realized we were being phased out anyway and did not need to be slaughtered directly.

Of course they laid waste to our farms and our meat-packing plants. Of course they tore up and torched the acres of genetically modified crops. Whole states burned. My three sisters fled Miami for the rolling earth of Iowa, but Iowa was a field of fire, after.

Slow starvation was a kind of transcendent experience. So I was certain, there at the terminal in Little Havana, that I saw Gilberto, moving through the sea of people like they were a field of wheat, though I had never seen a field of wheat, and I had not seen Gilberto since my teenage days as break-boy and ticket-taker and sweeper-of-trash. The Gilberto vision came to me.