Морин Макхью - Wastelands - The New Apocalypse

Luis opens his mouth for the first time and his voice is a dry, hot croak. “A gun. A fully loaded gun. Ay, chingado.” He touches his head.

Nobody sees me wink except Jessica. She pulls the right card, deft as a magician. Luis wins. Tomtom wins.

I can’t watch people lose anymore. I tell them their luck will improve. I tell them we all have something to look forward to, that we’re headed toward hope. I don’t have to say anything about how things are; they know. I ask them to help the dog population. To meet up after the show and try to breed them. We all need a little more love in our lives.

The things we do to gather these prizes. These showgirls are braver than anyone will ever know. Days are getting harder to count as the sun gets lazier and dimmer. But I tell people we’ll be here, same time next week. We’ll spin this wheel every week, until the world makes us move on.

Emma Osborneis a queer fiction writer and poet from Melbourne, Australia. Emma is a graduate of the 2016 Clarion West Writers Workshop, and their writing has appeared in Nightmare Magazine, GlitterShip, Shock Totem, Apex Magazine, Lightspeed Magazine (Queers Destroy Science Fiction special issue), Pseudopod, The Review of Australian Fiction and The Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror . Learn more at emmakosborne.comand @redscribe.

The horde is attracted to bright colours, so when you put together your bug-out bag, you pack the drab outfits you’d sworn never to wear again once you’d finally, breathlessly, emerged as your true, radiant self.

You pack a heavy hunting knife, because what you carry looks valuable. You’re glad that your arms are gym-strong and intimidating, because the idea of hurting someone, even in self-defense, makes you want to vomit.

You leave behind your old name. You try not to wonder if you’re the only one left who remembers it. You don’t know how you’d feel if that were true.

You take two photos of yourself, one of a gap-toothed girl on her first day of school, her shoes pink like the inside of a scalp, and a photo of a strong young man shirtless in the sun.

Same eyes, same mouth.

Heavier shoulders, denser bones.

More scars, some of them deep.

You pack a map, but you already know all the good hiding places: the disused stairwells in the school that hid you for years, the storm drain near your apartment that you saw in a documentary about the Cave Clan, the hollow of the swooping gum tree that stands bold and tall in the front yard of your best friend’s house.

You know where to go where nobody will hear you, not Jason Miller from the cricket team, with his sharp laugh and rough knuckles, and not the horde with their clacking teeth and hungry hands.

You leave behind fear. Can’t afford the weight. You’ve had enough of it to last a lifetime, anyway, and you’re only twenty-seven. You’ve been frightened, though, of leaving your apartment, of being a body in a world where bodies are consumed. The horde thump on your walls sometimes, and you imagine them finding weak points, streaming in. They’re as smart as ravens, maybe pigs. You know you’ll feel nothing after a bad bite, but you’re scared of another transformation, this one unwilling.

There are four sets of car keys in the front pocket of your bag. They belonged to exes and old lovers, and in one case, your best friend, Kristy. Odds are, they’re all dead, but you hope that at least one of their cars is still there, free of fleshy detritus and containing enough petrol to make it out.

You hope that Kristy’s car is long gone.

Maybe you’ll find a car that runs, and you’ll be able to drive for a while. Maybe you’ll get as far out as the sun-blasted fields on the outskirts of Melbourne, maybe as far as your parents’ house in the country. Something tells you that they’re still there, still managing and still safe, with their rainwater and their solar cells and their little white dog.

You’ve drummed the fantasy of their safety into your heart, because if they’re safe, you don’t have to go out and find them. You don’t have to be the hero, the rescuer.

You haven’t spoken to them since the phones went down, but even in the dark you know your way home the same way you somehow always know which way is north. It’s an uncanny, gut-deep pull. You feel it in your bones, as if they were heavy with metal, magnetic.

It has always surprised you that your earth-moving, beer-drinking, football-cheering stepdad loves you completely and utterly for who you are. Your mother, too, but she’s blood. She’ll have a hundred and one natural remedies stashed away. Some of them might work for minor troubles, but you’ve seen with your own eyes that nothing will calm the horde when they smell sweat and blood in the air.

You pack your hormones, of course. You have a couple of pre-loaded syringes, but you can’t remember how long the clinic said they’d last. When they’re gone you’ll have to figure something out. Hope that looters will overlook T when they break into abandoned chemists. Maybe you’ll get lucky on the road.

You don’t pack hope. You can’t quite imagine getting free of all this.

Not yet.

It smells like hot, broken death outside, and the horde never stops moving. They break like waves on park benches, on abandoned cars. They are soundless but for the tramp of their decaying feet. When you’re half asleep they sound like an inland sea, their dry skin whispering like canvas, their loose arms slapping like ropes.

You have protein bars to spare from that online sale, but they won’t last forever, and you need something green to balance them out. Still, they help. The chocolate kind still almost feels like a treat. Your fridge is full of spoiled vegetables. You opened it once to make sure there was nothing useful in there and nearly threw up at the smell. Still, there was half a bottle of vodka in the freezer. You did a couple of quick shots to settle your nerves and thought about the times you danced to the Spice Girls in Kristy’s lounge room.

You still don’t know where she is, but you looked as long as it was safe. Kristy grew up in the country, too. Maybe she made it out.

You can’t take all of your other people with you, your global community. They’re scattered, hopefully safe, hopefully not dead. Last you heard, the horde is confined to Australia, parts of Indonesia. Maybe quarantine caught the spread early enough, and everyone else is okay. You refuse to worry about anyone in particular, because you know that once you’ve started, you won’t stop, and tears won’t help.

You’re used to checking in with them throughout the day, and now that they’re gone, you feel truly alone. Your hand creeps spasmodically to your jeans pocket, muscle-memory yearning to flick open your phone screen, to navigate to a sanctuary. You carry your phone even though it’s a useless brick of plastic and glass.

You add fishhooks to your pack, although you always hated stabbing fish behind the eye when you’d pulled them gasping out of the water. It was years ago now that you’d fished with your dad. Your real dad, the dead one. At least now he won’t chase you around with a severed fish-head, laughing, thumb poked through the teeth. It’d always made you scream, but these days it would take much more than that.

Matches. They wouldn’t let you into the Scouts, so you need them to get a fire started. Maybe your brother still has the flint and steel he always kept in his car for barbecues and hunting trips. Something tells you that he’s with your parents. Your nieces and your sister-in-law have to be safe, they just fucking have to be, because if they’re not okay, your brother won’t be either.