Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalipse

Some days, the sky bursts open and rains fish. Sometimes stones or Barbie dolls. Last night, I cooked a sky salmon over an autographed copy of The Great Gatsby. I shared the fish with Natasha, a mute girl who runs one of the cranes, hauling carcasses from the freon pools. She’s been staying with me out by the docks, in the cargo container I commandeered. I killed a man to get the container and still have to slice and dice the occasional house crasher. Natasha’s not shy with a knife or length of rebar and has done more than a few intruders herself. I assume the ones she did were intruders. Anyway, it keeps us in meat.

I’m not sure that you’d call what we have a typical romance. I live with a girl who can make gloves from a poodle’s hide and scavenges boots and clothes for me, and they’re always my size. She grows herbs in a bathtub on the roof and decorates our home with wind-up toys and parts of smaashed statues from looted museums. I miss ice cream, convertibles and going to the movies. I’m not fool enough to say that I’m happier since the world went away, but except for the rains of stones, I’m no more miserable.

They found a layer of zoo animals under the collapsed roadway of the Williamsburg Bridge. People over there have been living large on elephant steaks and giraffe burgers. The local government wants us to help gather up the remaining body parts, so we do. No one asks why. It’s something to do. Besides, the paper pushers refuse to let the world end until every form is turned in, timestamped and properly initialed. Apocalypse is the last gasp of bureaucracy.

After dinner, Natasha and I sit on top of the cargo container watching a field full of cop cars sink slowly into a newly risen tar pit. Everyone from the docks is there. We give might Whoop! as the last car slides, bubbling, below the surface.

Will the last person on the planet please turn off the lights?

Artie’s Angels by Catherine Wells

Catherine Wells is the author of several books, including the post-apocalyptic novel Mother Grimm and the Coconino trilogy: The Earth is All That Lasts, Children of the Earth, and The Earth Saver. Her latest is Stones of Destiny, her first foray into historical fiction. Her short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s and Analog, and the anthologies Redshift and The Doom of Camelot.

This story, which first appeared in Realms of Fantasy, was inspired by a disturbing dream Wells had more than 30 years ago. In the dream, a young man shimmied up a drainpipe in a tenement to visit his friend; and although he was a good person, someone came to his bicycle shop and fired a shotgun through the plate glass window. The senselessness and injustice of that dream event haunted Wells, and years later, as she rode a tandem bicycle along the back roads of Arizona, she imagined a post-apocalyptic society involving bicycles and young man such as the one in her dream, and “Artie’s Angels” was the result.

When you set out to perpetrate a lie, I suppose it’s counterproductive to write down the truth like this. But whatever population survives here on Earth is not likely to read this, much less believe it. Most of them can’t read anymore as it is—not BookEnglish, anyway—and it will probably get worse before it gets better. Much, much worse.

My birth name is Faye, but I have not used it since I was ten. That’s the year we moved inside the radiation shield, into a wreck of a building in Kansas Habitat. My mother cried, because my little brother died just before we got there, and she kept moaning that if only we’d gotten inside sooner, he might have lived. But you had to have either money or skills to get inside the radiation shield, and my parents had neither. So we fried our skins and our eyeballs in Earth’s unfiltered sunlight until enough rich people moved offworld to make room for us under the shield.