Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalipse

They rode old combustion-engine motorcycles, powered by whatever alcohol they could manufacture to fuel them. Their philosophy was nihilistic: Earth and its inhabitants were doomed, so why not help them along the path to destruction? Whether or not they died in the process seemed of no consequence to the Reapers. Of the twenty or so who crashed the gate that day, only two made any effort to escape the certain death they found at the hands of KanHab’s defenders. But before they died, eighteen Security officers and over a hundred civilians fell to the Reapers’ projectile weapons-not to mention the people they simply rode down. Hundreds more burned to death in the fires they started.

Infrastructure at the gate, including the radiation shield, was so badly damaged that Admin sealed off the entire sector and simply built a new gate further in. They did nothing to repair the collapsed tunnels and fire-gutted buildings of A7 and 8. Why should they? Physical space was not what kept people out of KanHab, but the lack of food from our greenhouses. Housing was plentiful, and it was only residential areas the Reapers had terrorized in their eighteen-hour frenzy of destruction.

Artie got two months off from classes while he and other students helped repair the damage to the shield and other critical parts of the infrastructure. One day as we worked in C17 underground-Artie as field engineer and DeRon and I as his crew chiefs—the most strikingly beautiful woman I have ever seen approached us: tall and lithe, with high cheekbones in an oval face and dark, unblemished skin.

"Mr. D’Angelo?" she asked, and her voice was like thick cream, a smooth, rich fluid that spilled out and soaked into the thirsty air.

Artie was smitten; it was written all over his face as he stepped down from the ladder he had just mounted. "I’m Artie D’Angelo," he said.

I tried to see what Saronda was seeing: a wiry young man well shy of six feet, with a flat gut and thighs like tree trunks; dark hair clumped in curls from sweating beneath his hard hat; red-rimmed eyes and two days’ growth of beard telling how little he had done the past forty-eight hours except work to salvage something from the destruction.

But she smiled, a smile as warm and sincere as it was brilliantly white. "I’m Saronda McCabe. I understand you build bicycles."

She was an electrical engineering student, and her father worried about her travelling from her home in F3 to her practicum in C7. She thought a bicycle might be the answer. Artie agreed, provided she also got some practical training in avoiding danger-which he, of course, would be happy to provide at no charge. DeRon and I exchanged a look, then took our crew in search of some lunch while the two of them made eyes and traded compliments. "Ten ExCees he’s in her pants before morning," DeRon muttered as we turned a corner.

I didn’t think so-she was high-class stuff-but I wasn’t stupid enough to take the bet. Good thing-I would have lost.

Once Saronda’s bicycle was made, we started swinging through F3 on our morning rides to pick her up for a couple of miles, after which she and Artie would break off and go their own way-because, he said, she couldn’t keep up with us quite yet. That was true, and they did stay with us longer as she improved. But she had a housing assignment separate from her parents-her father was high up in Admin-and within a couple of months we were picking up Artie in F3, too.

His bicycle building went by the wayside. All the kids in B9 had bikes by this time, anyway, and every Angel had a top-notch custom machine. On weekends he came back to B9 to check on the courier operation and hang with his pack, and he was still the same Artie: same huge smile, same warm laugh, same abiding concern for his neighbourhood. But the kids missed him, and some of them started acting out, breaking the Code. That brought him back for a while, because he recognized that his presence was necessary to keep them on track, to keep them believing. I worried more about him then, though, because when night came and things started locking up, that’s when he’d get on his bicycle and head for F3 to see Saronda. It was a bad hour to be out without your pack.

I told myself that Artie was making a terrible mistake, that he was headed for another fall like with Yvonne; but I don’t think I really believed that. He was too happy, and Saronda-blast her sculpted, perfect face-was a nice person. Genuinely nice. I liked her, hard as I tried not to. Once she came with us into B9, because she wanted to see where Artie and the rest of us lived, to meet the children and hear them recite the Code. "I wanted to join the Sisters of Literacy when I was younger," she confided to me as Artie explained to a nine-year-old how the derailleur worked and the easiest way to replace a slipped chain. "But my dad wouldn’t hear of it. He pointed out that where we’re going—"