Морин Макхью - Wastelands - The New Apocalypse

“South.” I pointed left.

Rainier had seen some action. Weed-covered concrete rubble lined the road’s edges, narrowing it to one lane. A half-burned restaurant sign advertised hotcakes. A sandbag bunker, evidently empty, guarded an intersection filled with a downed walkway. A shred of tattered camo clung to a wrecked lamppost. Must be relics of the early days; soldiers had been some of the first outside jail to head Otherwise, deserting in larger and larger numbers as real life got lousier and lousier.

“Wow. What a mess.” Aim eased over a spill of bricks and stayed in low gear to rubberneck. “How’re we gonna get off of this and find the park?”

“Uhhh.” Would we have to dig ourselves a turnoff? No—“Here!” More sandbags, but some had tumbled down from their makeshift walls, and we only had to shove a few aside to reach a four-lane street straight to the lakeshore. We followed that around to where the first of the Rattlers’ lookouts towered up like a giant birdhouse for ostriches with fifty-foot legs. A chica had already sighted us and trained her slingshot on the truck’s windshield. Her companion called out and we identified ourselves enough that they let us through to the gate in their chain-link fence. Another building, this one more like the bunker on Rainier, blocked the way inside. Four Rattlers were stationed here, looking like paintball geeks gone to heaven. We satisfied them of our bona fides, too, using the sheet of crypto and half a rubber snake their runner had turned over with Rob’s message. They took my knife. I didn’t blame ’em. They let us keep our gun, but minus the bullets.

“What’s in the back?”

I hadn’t even looked after tossing up the rolly. Dumb. When the sentries opened the big metal drums, though, they found nothing but fuel in them, no one hiding till they could bust out and slit our throats.

Four of those, and the rest of the bed was filled with covered five-gallon tubs: white plastic, the high grade kind you use to ferment beer in. And that’s what was in the ten they checked.

“Welcome home,” one chica maybe my age said. Grudgingly, but she said it. She walked ahead to guide us into their main camp.

Didn’t take her long. A few minutes and I saw firepits, and picnic tables set together in parts of circles, tarps strung between trees over platforms, a handful of big tents. We pulled up next to their playground as the sun was barely beginning to wonder was it time to set. The chica banged on our hood twice, then nodded and scowled at us. Aim nodded too and shut off the ignition.

The kid opened the truck’s passenger door. Aim and I looked at each other in silence. Then she grinned. “I guess we’re there yet!”

Maybe it was the other littles on the swings and jungle gyms that got through to him. He slid to the ground and walked a few steps toward them, then stopped. I got out too and slammed the door. Didn’t faze him. He was focused on the fun and games.

“What have we here?” A longhaired dude wearing a mustache and a skirt came over from watching the littles play.

Aim opened her door and got out too. “We’re a day or so early I guess—Amy Niehauser and Dolores Grant.” I always tease Aim about how she ended up with such a non-Hispanic name, and she gives me grief right back about not having something made-up, like “Shaniqua” or “Running Fawn.” “We’re from Kiona. In Pasco?”

Dude nodded. “Sure. Since Britney was bringing you in I figured that was who you must be. I’m Curtis. We weren’t expecting a vehicle, though.” He waved a hand at the truck.

Britney had hopped up on the bed again while we talked, lifting the lids off the rest of the plastic tubs. “Likewise!” she shouted. “Look at this!”

Aim and I leaned up over the side to see. Britney was tearing off cover after cover. Sure enough, the five tubs furthest in were all at least three-quarters full of thick, indigo blue liquid with specks of pale purple foam. I had never seen so much Likewise in one place.

Curtis lost his cool. “What the hell! We told you we don’t allow that—that—” He didn’t have the vocabulary to call the drug a bad enough name.

“No, it’s not ours—we stole this truck and we didn’t know—” Aim tried to calm him down. She tugged at the tub nearest the end. “Here, we’ll help you pour ’em in the lake.”

“You seriously think we wanna pollute our water like that?”

“Look, I’m just saying we’ll get rid of it. We didn’t know, we just took this truck from some dudes acting like cowboys on the other side of the bridge, the little dude’s big brothers, and they had a few friends—”

That got Britney’s attention. “They follow you?”

“Not real far,” I said, breaking in. “Since when we took this we left ’em on foot.” And they hadn’t shot at us more than once—the fuel explained why. “They ain’t the only trouble you got for neighbors, either—I’d be more worried about Mercer Island if I were you than them bridge dudes—or a load of Likewise we can dump anywhere you want.”

“Right.” Curtis seemed to quiet down and consider this. “Yeah, we’ll dig a hole or something…”

No one had proved a connection between Likewise and all the adults talking about living Otherwise, then disappearing. No one had proved anything in a long time that I’d heard of. But the prisons where it first got made were the same ones so many “escaped” from early on, which is the only reason anyone even noticed a bunch of poor people had gone missing, IMO. News reports began about the time it was getting so popular outside, here and in a few more countries.

Some of us still cooked it up. Some of us still drank it. How long did the side-effects last? If you indulged at the age of sixteen would you vanish years later, as soon as your brain was ready? Could you even tell whether you went or not?

The ones who knew were in no position to tell us. They were Otherwise.

Britney went to report us to the committee, she said. A pair of twelve-year-olds came and showed us where to unload the fuel drums. I helped Aim lower the rolly from the bed—how had I got it up there on my own? My arms were gonna hurt bad when the adrenaline wore off—and she handed them the keys. They drove to the bunker with the Likewise for the sentries to watch over.

Aim had to head back to the playground after that. The little dude seemed thoroughly recovered: he’d thrown off his jacket and was running wild and yelling with the other kids like he belonged there.

The Rattlers’ committee met with us over dinner in this ridiculous tipi they’d rigged up down by the swimming beach. Buffaloes and lightning painted on the sides. I mean, even I knew tipis were plains technology and had nothing to do with tribes in these parts. But, well, the Rattlers acted proud and solemn bringing us inside, telling us to take off our shoes and which way to circle around the fire, and damn if they didn’t actually pass a real, live pipe after feeding us salads plus some beige glop that looked a lot worse than it tasted. And tortillas, which they insisted on calling frybread.

Tina, their eldest, sat on a sofa cushion; she looked maybe Aim’s age, but probably she was older. Trying to show the rest of the committee how to run things when she was gone Otherwise, she asked about folks at Kiona: who had hooked up with who, how many pregnant, any cool salvage we’d come across, any adults we’d noticed still sticking around. Aim answered her. There were two dudes, one on either side of Tina—husbands, maybe?—Rattlers were known for doing that kinda thing—and a couple younger chicas chiming in with compliments about how well we were doing for ourselves. I waited politely for them to raise the subject they wanted to talk about. Which was, as I’d figured, the five tubs of Likewise.