The End Has Come

She placed a piece of apple in her own mouth and chewed, then carefully scooped the moist pap into the corner of Yulianna’s lips. She gave her a little water, but it ran out between her teeth.

“Sweetie,” Yana said, “You have to swallow. There’s fish too, beef jerky. Some pemmican. So much food, we’ll get fat. And I have trade goods. We can find a town.”

Yulianna didn’t answer. She stared ahead unblinking.

Yana wiped the corner of her sister’s eye, and the skin crumbled. She pulled her hand back and resolutely reached for another bite of apple.

“You have to get strong,” she said, stroking her sister’s hair again. The stiffness was bad today, she thought. “You have to eat. You have to get strong. So we can travel. So we can be the ones who make it.”

She leaned down and kissed her sister’s cheek, rubbing soft lips against hard, papery skin.

Yulianna made no answer.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. When coupled with a tendency to read the dictionary for fun as a child, this led her inevitably to penury, intransigence, and the writing of speculative fiction. She is the Hugo, Sturgeon, and Campbell Award-winning author of almost a hundred short stories and more than twenty-five novels, the most recent of which is Steles of the Sky, from Tor Books. Her dog lives in Massachusetts; her partner, writer Scott Lynch, lives in Wisconsin. She spends a lot of time on planes.

JINGO AND THE HAMMERMAN Jonathan Maberry

-1-

Kind of hard to find yourself when everything’s turned to shit.

Kind of hard, but when it happens . . . kind of cool.

That’s what Jingo was trying to explain to Moose Peters during their lunch break. Moose liked Jingo, but he wasn’t buying.

“You are out of your fucking mind,” said Moose. “Batshit, dipso, gone-round-the-twist monkeybat crazy.”

“‘Monkeybat’?” asked Jingo. “The hell’s a —”

“I just made it up, but it fits. If you think we’re anything but ass deep in shit, then you’re off your rocker.”

“No man,” said Jingo, stabbing the air with a pigeon leg to emphasize his point, “your problem is that you don’t know a good thing when you see it.”

Moose took a long pull on his canteen, using that to give himself a second to study his friend. He lowered the canteen and wiped his mouth with a cloth he kept in a plastic Ziploc bag in an inner pocket of his shirt. He was careful to not dab his mouth with the back of his hand or blot it on his shirt.

Jingo handed him a squeeze bottle of Purell.

“Thanks,” said Moose in his soft rumble of a voice. The two of them watched each other sanitize their hands, nodded agreement that it had been done, and Jingo took the bottle back. Moose stretched his massive shoulders, sighed, shook his head. “Not sure I get the ‘good’ part of things, man.”

Jingo, who was nearly a foot shorter than Moose, and weighed less than half as much, got to his feet and pointed to the crowd of people on the far side of the chain link fence. “Well, first,” he said, “we could be over there. I don’t have a college degree like you and I haven’t read all those books, but I’m smart enough to know that they got the shit end of the stick. Tell me I’m wrong.”

Moose shook his head. “Okay, sure, they’re all fucked. Everyone knows they’re all fucked. Fucked as fucked will ever get, I suppose.”

“Right.”

“But,” said Moose, “I’m not sure that sells your argument that we have it good.”

“I —”

“Just because we’re on this side of the fence doesn’t sell that to me at all, and here’s why. Those poor dumb bastards are fucked, we agree on that, but they don’t know they’re fucked. At worst, they’re brain-dead meat driven by the last misfiring neurons in their motor cortex. At best — at absolute best — they’re vectors for a parasite. Like those ants and grasshoppers, with larvae in their brains or some shit. I read about that stuff in Nat Geo. Either way, the people who used to hold the pink slips on all those bodies have gone bye-byes. Lights are on but no one’s home.”

“You going somewhere with that?” asked Jingo as he rummaged in his knapsack for his bottle of cow urine.

“What I’m saying,” continued Moose, “is that although they’re fucked they are beyond knowing about it and beyond caring. They’re gone, for all intents and purposes. So how can you compare us to them?”