The End Is Now

His eyes dropped away. Plenty had happened since, but London had been the first proof that China’s Seventy-Two Hour Virus was waging a world war instead of only a genocide. Cases hadn’t appeared in the U.S. until a full two days after London burned—those last two days of worry over the problems that seemed far away, people that were none of their business. The televisions had still been working, so they had all heard the news unfolding. An entire tribe at the fire, just before the rains.

“What have you seen?” Finally, he wasn’t trying to push her away.

“I can only report on Southern and Central California. Almost everybody’s gone. The rest of us, we’re spread out. You’re the only breather I’ve seen in two months. That’s why it’s time for us to stop hiding and start finding each other.”

“‘Us?’” he repeated, hitched brow incredulous.

“NIs,” she said. “Naturally Immunes. One in ten thousand, but that’s a guess.”

“Jesus.” A worthy response, but Nayima didn’t like the hard turn of his voice.

“Yes.” She realized she didn’t sound sad enough. He might not understand how sadness made her legs collapse, made it hard to breathe. She tried harder. “It’s terrible.”

“Not that—you.” He sang the rest. “Welcome, one and all, to the new super race . . .”

Song as mockery, especially in his soulful, road-toughened tenor, hurt more than a physical blow. Nayima’s anger roiled from the memory, the rivulets of poisoned saliva running down her cheeks from hateful strangers making a last wish. “They spit in my face, whenever they could. They tried to take me with them—yet here I stand. You can stop being a slave to that filthy paper you’re wearing, giving yourself rashes. We’re immune. Congratulations.”

“Swell,” he said. “I don’t suppose you can back any of that up with lab tests? Studies?”

“We will one day,” she said. “But so far it’s you, and me, and some cop I saw high-tailing out of Bakersfield who should not have still been breathing. Believe me when I tell you: this bad-boy virus takes everybody, eventually. Except NIs.”

“What if I just left a bunker? A treehouse? A cave?”

“Wouldn’t matter. You’ve been out now. Something you touched. It lives on glass for thirty days, maybe forty-five. That was what the lab people in China said, when they finally started talking. Immunity—that’s not a theory. There were always people who didn’t get it when they should’ve dropped. Doctors. Old People.”

“People who were careful,” he said.

“This isn’t survival of the smartest,” she said. “It’s dumb luck. In our genes.”

“So, basically, Madame Curie,” he said, drawing out his words, “you don’t know shit.”

Arrogant. Rude. Condescending. He was a disappointment after three days’ walk, no question about it. But that was to be expected, Nayima reminded herself. She went on patiently. “The next one we find, we’ll ask what they know. That’s how we’ll learn. Get a handle on the numbers. Start with villages again. I like the Central Valley. Good farmland. We just have to be sure of a steady water supply.” It was a relief to let her thoughts out for air.

He laughed. “Whoa, sister. Don’t start picking out real estate. You and me ain’t a village. I’ll shoot you if you come within twenty yards.”

So—he was armed. Of course. His gun didn’t show, but she couldn’t see his left hand, suddenly hidden beneath a fold in his sleeping bag. He had been waiting for her.

“Oh,” she said. “This again.”

“Yeah—this,” he said. “This is called common sense. Go on about your business. You can spend the night here, but I want you gone by morning. This is mine.”

“Rescue’s coming?”

He coughed a shallow, thirsty cough—not the rattling cough of the plague. “I’m not here for rescue. Didn’t know a thing about that.”

“I have water,” she said. “I bet there’s more in the vendor booths.” Let him remember what it felt like to be fussed over. Let him see caring in her eyes.

His chuckle turned into another cough. “Yeah, no thanks. Got my own.”

“If you didn’t come here to get rescued, then why? Jonesing for hot dog buns?”

He moved his left hand away from his gun and back to his guitar strings. He plinked.

“My family used to come,” he said. “Compete in 4-H. Eat fried dough ’til we puked. Ride those cheap-ass rides. This area’s real close-knit, so you’d see everybody like a backyard party. That’s all I wanted—to be somewhere I knew. Somewhere I would remember.”

The wind shifted. Could be worse, but the dead were in the breeze.

“Smells like their plan didn’t work out,” Nayima said.

“Unless it did.” He shrugged. “You need to leave me alone now.”

Coming as it did at the end of the living portrait he’d just painted, the theft of his company burned a hole in her. She needed him already. Father, son, brother, lover, she didn’t care which. She didn’t want to be without him. Couldn’t be without him, maybe.

His silence turned the fairgrounds gloomy again. This smell was the reason she preferred the open road, for now.

“At least tell me your name,” she said. Her voice quavered.