Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalipse

Kara Desmond and Rob Cottrell come up to me, blocking my view of the dancers. They’ve been here as long as I. Kara has an infant great-grandchild, one of the rare babies born already disfigured by the disease. Kara’s dress, which she wears over jeans for warmth, is torn at the hem; her voice is soft. "Sarah. It’s great to see you out." Rob says nothing. He’s put on weight in the few years since I saw him last. In the flickering torchlight his jowly face shines with the serenity of a diseased Buddha.

It’s two more dances before I realize that Jennie has disappeared.

I look around for Rachel. She’s pouring sumac tea for the band. Peter dances by with a woman not wearing jeans under her dress; the woman is shivering and smiling. So it isn’t Peter that Jennie left with…

"Rob, will you walk me home? In case I stumble?" The cold is getting to my arthritis.

Rob nods, incurious. Kara says, "I’ll come, too," and we leave Jack Stevenson on his stool, waiting for his turn at hot tea. Kara chatters happily as we walk along as fast as I can go, which isn’t as fast as I want to go. The moon has set. The ground is uneven and the street dark except for the stars and fitful lights in barracks windows. Candles. Oil lamps. Once, a single powerful glow from what I guess to be a donated stored-solar light, the only one I’ve seen in a long time.

Korean, Tom said.

"You’re shivering," Kara says. "Here, take my coat." I shake my head.

I make them leave me outside our barracks and they do, unquestioning. Quietly I open the door to our dark kitchen. The stove has gone out. The door to the back bedroom stands half-open, voices coming from the darkness. I shiver again, and Kara’s coat wouldn’t have helped.

But I am wrong. The voices aren’t Jennie and Peter.

"—not what I wanted to talk about just now," Mamie says.

"But it’s what I want to talk about."

"Is it?"

"Yes."

I stand listening to the rise and fall of their voices, to the petulance in Mamie’s, the eagerness in McHabe’s.

"Jennie is your ward, isn’t she?"

"Oh, Jennie. Yes. For another year."

"Then she’ll listen to you, even if your mother… the decision is yours. And hers."

"I guess so. But I want to think about it. I need more information."

"I’ll tell you anything you ask."

"Will you? Are you married, Dr. Thomas McHabe?"

Silence. Then his voice, different. "Don’t do that."

"Are you sure? Are you really sure?"

"I’m sure."

"Really, really sure? That you want me to stop?"

I cross the kitchen, hitting my knee against an unseen chair. In the open doorway a sky full of stars moves into view through the termite hole in the wall.

"Ow!"

"I said to stop it, Mrs. Wilson. Now please think about what I said about Jennie. I’ll come back tomorrow morning and you can—"

"You can go straight to hell!" Mamie shouts. And then, in a different voice, strangely calm, "Is it because I’m diseased? And you’re not? And Jennie is not?"

"No. I swear it, no. But I didn’t come here for this."

"No," Mamie says in that same chill voice, and I realize that I have never heard it from her before, never, "you came to help us. To bring a cure. To bring the Outside. But not for everybody. Only for the few who aren’t too far gone, who aren’t too ugly-who you can use."

"It isn’t like that—"

"A few who you can rescue. Leaving all the rest of us here to rot, like we did before."

"In time, research on the—"

"Time! What do you think time matters Inside? Time matters shit here! Time only matters when someone like you comes in from the Outside, showing off your healthy skin and making it even worse than it was before with your new whole clothing and your working wristwatch and your shiny hair and your…your…" She is sobbing. I step into the room.

"All right, Mamie. All right."

Neither of them react to seeing me. McHabe just stands there until I wave him towards the door and he goes, not saying a word. I put my arms around Mamie and she leans against my breast and cries. My daughter. Even through my coat I feet the thick ropy skin of her cheek pressing against me, and all I can think of is that I never noticed at all that McHabe wears a wristwatch.

Late that night, after Mamie has fallen into damp exhausted sleep and I have lain awake tossing for hours, Rachel creeps into our room to say that Jennie and Hal Stevenson have both been injected with an experimental disease cure by Tom McHabe. She’s cold and trembling, defiant in her fear, afraid of all their terrible defiance. I hold her until she, too, sleeps, and I remember Jack Stevenson as a young man, classroom lights glossy on his thick hair, spiritedly arguing in favour of the sacrifice of one civilization for another.

#

Mamie leaves the barracks early the next morning. Her eyelids are still swollen and shiny from last night’s crying. I guess that she’s going to hunt up Peter, and I say nothing. We sit at the table, Rachel and I, eating our oatmeal, not looking at each other. It’s an effort to even lift the spoon. Mamie is gone a long time.