Морин Макхью - Wastelands - The New Apocalypse

I had to push away so many questions. What would happen to us when we got out there? Would Nina even fit out of the ruin-cave with that stuff on? How long would it keep working? Could I find Mama out there? Was she even still alive to find?

“Time’s up,” the SUPERVISOR yelled. “Get out or I burn you out.”

Nina turned her shiny black fossil-head to me. Through the little hole in the little window it was hard to see her face. She looked like a Before-people ghost come alive, like a Sunrise giant and all its old old magic shrunk down to person-size.

She nodded once to me. I nodded back.

“Coming,” she called.

Violet Allenis a writer based in Chicago, Illinois. Her short stories have appeared in Lightspeed, Liminal Stories, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, Resist: Tales from a Future Worth Fighting Against, A People’s Future of the United States , and elsewhere.

This wasn’t so long ago, but the memory is beginning to decay into narrative. Already, I find myself inclined to manufacture details in the retelling, and I fear that soon the real events will be consumed by a story that I hold too close to my heart.

Look at this photograph. Here is Flynn, sitting in the lower basin of a ruined fountain, smiling beneath a tangle of neon flora spilling out from the upper basin, rendering him an orange-green-violet silhouette in the half-dark. I look at this image, and I can no longer tell you what day it was, or what part of the city we were exploring when I took it. I can tell you that I joined him in the fountain after I took the photograph, and that we climbed up and plucked the glowing blossoms off the vines and let them float away in the wind and laughed and fell asleep next to one another.

This kind of sentimentality is the root of all lies.

Still, I want to tell you about my meeting with Flynn, in the ruins of the city where I was born. The narrative will encompass seven days and six nights. I will be as honest as I can, and I will try not to let sentimentalism creep in.

I first saw Flynn shortly after I crossed into the Quarantine Zone. He was walking alone on the side of the road. I stopped and asked him if I could take his picture. I had received special dispensation to survey and photograph the ruins by the leadership of my camp.

At this time, “Quarantine” was more theory than practice. Scavengers entered and exited the affected areas more or less as they pleased, and there were rumors that people were once again living in some of the smaller eastern cities. This was before we had given up on reclaiming the old cities, when we had hope of unraveling this strange, new world instead of rebuilding in the spaces between. But my motivations were not so lofty. I simply missed the city I had grown up in, and I thought it might be nice to go there one more time and to have some pictures so that I would not forget more than I already had.

Flynn was tall and thick, and he wore a coat made out of golden fur with a hood shaped like the head of a spider. I had never seen the creature the coat had presumably been crafted from, so I was curious. I thought his image would make a good addition to my collection, a bit of rustic neo-Americana. Flynn told me I could take his picture, but asked that I take him in my transport to a certain neighborhood in the northwest. I quickly agreed. My mission, such that it was, had no particular parameters, and I had planned to mostly wander the city aimlessly with the only real goal of viewing the area where my childhood home had been.

As he stepped inside my transport, I removed my gun from its holster and held it up for him to see.

“I fought in the war,” I said. “Don’t fuck with me.”

This was technically true, but only just. I had only once been on a battlefield, and I had never pulled the trigger on a weapon. Still, it was important to establish that I was not a soft target. People were mostly civilized again at this point, but we still remembered plainly how easy it was for people to become animals.

He shrugged and softly laughed. “Sure. Me too.”

And so we went. Our conversation was slow at first. Back then, people mostly wanted to talk about the old world. The invasion, the war, the changes, these were not polite topics, at least not with strangers, and we had not yet made very many memories of the new world. We talked about where we were from, how we used to live, and even though the details were different, it was always the same story. Things had been as they were, good or bad, and then everything changed in an instant.

But then, he told me about the Shit Lake.

“I used to come here for the summers to stay with my grandma, right? And there was this little lake in the park by her house. The water was brown, and it smelled like shit, hence the name. I don’t know if it was sewage or rotten vegetation or just algae. It was awful, whatever it was. The neighborhood kids had this whole mythology around it. They said that if you swam to the bottom and waited for a whole five minutes, you would get special powers. Like a superhero. You remember how it was in early 90s, right? All the superheroes powered by slime and filth. Remember the Turtles? The Toxic Avenger? Swamp Thing? It was like that. I was kind of a dork, right? I used to dream about diving in and becoming someone strong and brave, someone who would always do the right thing, even if I smelled like shit. One time, I said I was going to do it in front of all the other kids, but all I could do was stick my foot in and then I ran away. They never let me forget it.”

It was sort of a standard kids are dumb assholes story, but I was taken with it. The appeal was obvious to me now; of course I wanted something beautiful to emerge from the ugliness. But at the time, it just seemed like a nice little story, a bit of color in an otherwise drab conversation.

“Did they call you Shit-foot?” I asked. “That’s a great superhero name.”

“No.”

“I would’ve called you Shit-foot. It gets the point across rather elegantly.”

“Were you a mean kid?”

“Yeah, but I didn’t mean to be. I just liked to have too much fun, and sometimes people got hurt.”

“Sounds like you were a bully.”

“Not really. I was sort of in the middle. Kids with a little more social capital were shitty to me, and then I was shitty to the kids with a little less social capital. It was a circle. The bullies were the ones who were shitty to kids way below them on the ladder.”

“That’s a very nice way of absolving yourself. Just an innocent cog in a cruel machine.”

“I admit that I was kind of an asshole. I’m just saying, I wasn’t a motherfucker.”

“Being a hero is about standing up, not just doing what you’re supposed to.”

“Yeah. That’s why superheroes aren’t real.”

We spent that night in the transport, hidden in a thicket of witchtooth just outside the city proper. We left it behind the next morning. The roads were too overgrown to navigate in any vehicle and the sound of an engine could draw unwanted attention. Against my better judgment, I gave Flynn my rifle while I kept my pistol at the ready. I trusted him enough that I didn’t think he would try to hurt me, but not enough that I was sure he wouldn’t do something stupid.

Look at this one. The skyline. I took it when the sun came up that morning, just as we were walking into the city. Even now, it’s strange to look at, like I superimposed multiple photos into a single image. There are the remains of the old skyscrapers, still standing (but barely), and there are the structures the invaders had been building, half-finished, both new and old at the same time, and there is the alien flora and fauna commingled with our own, strange vegetation and humongous insectoids and lifeforms that I cannot class in any of the familiar kingdoms. The juxtaposition was surreal. It was like the old world and the war and the present were places you could go instead of stretches of time.