Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalipse

"Rachel," I say. She doesn’t answer, but I see what silence costs her. Even such a small defiance, even now. Yet she is going. Using McHabe’s contacts to go Outside, leaving to find the underground medical research outfit. If they have developed the next stage of the cure, the one for people already disfigured, she will take it. Perhaps even if they have not. And as she goes, she will contaminate as much as she can with her disease, depressive and non-aggressive. Communicable.

She thinks she has to go. Because of Jennie, because of Mamie, because of McHabe. She is sixteen years old, and she believes-even growing up Inside, she believes this-that she must do something. Even if it is the wrong thing. To do the wrong thing, she has decided, is better than to do nothing.

She has no real idea of Outside. She has never watched television, never stood in a bread line, never seen a crack den or a slasher movie. She cannot define napalm, or political torture, or neutron bomb, or gang rape. To her, Mamie, with her confused and self-justifying fear, represents the height of cruelty and betrayal; Peter, with his shambling embarrassed lewdness, the epitome of danger; the theft of a chicken, the last word in criminality. She has never heard of Auschwitz, Cawnpore, the Inquisition, gladiatorial games, Nat Turner, Pol Pot, Stalingrad, Ted Bundy, Hiroshima, My Lai, Wounded Knee, Babi Yar, Bloody Sunday, Dresden or Dachau. Raised with a kind of mental inertia, she knows nothing of the savage inertia of destruction, that once set in motion in a civilization is as hard to stop as a disease.

I don’t think she can find the underground researchers, no matter how much McHabe told her. I don’t think her passage Outside will spread enough infection to make any difference at all. I don’t think it’s possible that she can get very far before she is picked up and either returned Inside or killed. She cannot change the world. It’s too old, too entrenched, too vicious, too there. She will fail. There is no force stronger than destructive inertia.

I get my things ready to go with her.

And the Deep Blue Sea by Elizabeth Bear

Elizabeth Bear is the author of several SF novels, including Jenny Casey trilogy — Hammered, Scardown, and Worldwired — which won the Locus Award for best first novel, Undertow, and Carnival, which was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. She is also the author of the Promethean Age fantasy series, and, with Sarah Monette, A Companion to Wolves. She is a prolific short story writer, with nearly 50 publications to her credit since 2003. Much of her work has been collected in The Chains That You Refuse, and a look at her website, www.elizabethbear.com, reveals several more pieces of short fiction — as well as a number of novels — forthcoming in the near future.

“And the Deep Blue Sea,” which first appeared in the online magazine SCI FICTION, is Bear’s take on the post-apocalyptic messenger story, reminiscent — without being derivative — of Roger Zelazny’s Damnation Alley. Bear’s fascination with abandoned places, and the fact that she lived for years in Las Vegas — “America’s Nuclear City” — led her to write this story. As research for this piece, she says she learned how to move safely through a radioactive zone, which should come in handy should the events leading up to this story ever come to pass.

The end of the world had come and gone. It turned out not to matter much in the long run.

The mail still had to get through.

Harrie signed yesterday’s paperwork, checked the dates against the calendar, contemplated her signature for a moment, and capped her pen. She weighed the metal barrel in her hand and met Dispatch’s faded eyes. “What’s special about this trip?”