The End Is Now

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ken Liu (http://kenliu.name) is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, he has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. Ken’s debut novel, The Grace of Kings, the first in a silkpunk epic fantasy series, will be published by Saga Press, Simon & Schuster’s new genre fiction imprint, in April 2015. A collection of his short stories will also be published by Saga in 2015.

YOU’VE NEVER SEEN EVERYTHING Elizabeth Bear

No one is making me say this. No one is making me tell this story. Nobody’s ever been much good at making me say anything I hadn’t already made up my mind to say.

I’m Alyce Hemingway, no relation. And I’m facing the Rocky Mountains on foot, coming home.

Or going home, maybe. It’s hard to say.

Casey and you are waiting for me. Casey is going-on-eleven and crazy about horses, which we can’t afford. You? You’re two years younger than me and six times more fun to be around. You’d make a joke about not knowing if you were coming or going. You’d hold my hand when I got too tired to walk. To climb.

You’re both waiting for me. And that’s why I know I have to get home.

Route 70 was the most direct path, but I’m starting to think I should have walked north, out of Colorado, and taken the relatively flat saddle of the South Pass in Wyoming. Regrets are not a good thing at this stage of the game, but I’m facing the mouth of the Eisenhower Tunnel above Denver, and it seems, abruptly, like a long way to go in the dark. And I remember the high passes between here and Grand Junction, the toil of simply climbing. Maybe I should have gone around.

I’m not used to making decisions like this and having them routinely be a matter of life and death. Very few of us are.

I guess those of us who survive will get better at it.

It’s spring—Memorial Day, more or less—which doesn’t mean as much in the Rockies as it otherwise might. It’s morning, but gray, and lazy flakes of snow drift down from the haze to speckle my sleeves and pack straps. I’m lucky; I was in the Rockies for field research, and my work involves a lot of hiking. I have good socks, good boots, a good frame pack full of technical base layers and Clif bars.

What I don’t have is anything resembling a weapon, unless you count my pocket knife. And there are three people standing between me and the tunnel entrance, blocking my path. All are more or less dressed for the weather. They’re waiting for me. One has empty hands. One is holding an aluminum softball bat.

One is wearing a gun.

I raise my hands so they can see that they are empty. “I’m Alyce Hemingway of San Diego,” I tell them. I think of you, to keep my voice from shaking. “All I ask is passage through the tunnel. I’m trying to get home.”

They share a look. Gun wrinkles his nose; Softball Bat shrugs her shoulders. The one with empty hands steps forward. “There’s a toll.”

* * *

Not cash. Nobody cares about cash right now. But I’ve bargained them down to two packages of trail mix and some water purification tabs when, in the course of their questioning, it comes out that I’m a biologist—a botanist, to be more precise—at UCSD.

“You got any medical skills?” asks Softball Bat.

“Some first aid,” I say. “And my specialty is plants. Some have medicinal value.”

“Can you do anything for the Fever?” she asks.

I wince. “I can show you willow bark. It’s got salicylic acid in it. That’s a component of aspirin. Horehound, though that grows at lower elevations. Soothes coughs. There’s a lichen called old man’s beard that’s supposed to be an antiviral, but I don’t know about any studies off the top of my head, or what the dosage or preparation would be.” I shrug. “I’m sorry. Anything I can show you is palliative or speculative. If there was a cure—”

If there was a cure, we wouldn’t be standing here. There’s a vaccine now but there wasn’t last winter. And now there’s lousy distribution and limited supplies. The exceptional virulence of the strain has combined with anti-vaccine panic to create the sort of short-term death toll not seen since the Spanish Influenza or the Black Death.