Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalipse

I bolted for the door, not even pausing to look out my window. Though the sound was foreign to me, and I wouldn’t know until much later what had made it, I was seized with a dread conviction that it had come from Artie’s shop.

The Reaper hadn’t stuck around, but his handiwork was all too evident. The fiberforced glass in the storefront window was not meant to withstand the onslaught of outlaw projectile weapons; it had shattered into a million harmless shards that crunched under my feet as I stumbled through the wreckage to the back of the room. Artie was on the floor between the truing stand and his frame building jig, in a litter of primalloy tubing and joining patches. His chest was shredded where the brunt of one blast had caught him, and spots of blood glistened on his legs and arms from a spray of pellets.

Someone else entered behind me-Louis, it turned out. "Get a doctor!" I screamed. "Call for med-evac!"

But the light was already fading from Artie’s eyes. "Wanted to take you with me," he slurred, blood foaming with the words from his lips.

"Don’t talk," I commanded. "Lie still. Help is coming."

"Said I’d go if you could, too," he managed.

"Shut up, Artie!" I shouted. "Don’t you lay that on me! Don’t you do it!" Then, impossibly, he smiled. "Morgan LeFey," he whispered. "Take me to Avalon… "

The story goes that we got him to a hospital, and the doctors were able to stabilize him enough to put him in a cryogenic chamber. That chamber went on the next transport ship to a distant world where Saronda was waiting, and where they have the medical science to heal him. Someday, when he’s recovered, he’ll come back to Earth again, to KanHab. In the meantime, Artie’s Angels are still here, seeing that what he started doesn’t die.

That’s the story. But Artie died in my arms that night, and no med-evac bothered to come. Not to B9. Louis and I took him underground, to a place where a collapsed tunnel had left only a crawl space. We laid him in there and sealed it up, and we didn’t tell anyone else. Then I concocted that story about the cryogenic chamber. Ha. As if KanHab had any such thing.

So that is the truth of what happened to Artie D’Angelo, but don’t try to tell that to anyone in KanHab. He has become larger in death than he ever was in life-I have seen to that. A brutal act of nihilism deprived me of my friend, my pack leader, my guiding light, but I will not let it deprive KanHab of hope. The stories of Artie’s exploits grow richer with each telling; and in them he succeeds, in ways he could only dream of, in protecting the helpless and improving the lives of those he left behind.

For us, he turned down a chance to live hundreds of years in comfort and peace with his beloved. I will give him, in its place, immortality.

Sleep well in Avalon, my Arthur. KanHab will not forget.

Judgment Passed by Jerry Oltion

Jerry Oltion is the author the novels Paradise Passed, The Getaway Special, Anywhere But Here, and several others. In 1998, he won the Nebula Award for his novella “Abandon in Place,” which he later expanded into a novel. He is also the author of more than 100 short stories, most of which have appeared in the pages of F&SF and Analog.

“Judgment Passed,” which is original to this volume, tells of the Biblical day of judgment from a rationalist viewpoint; a starship crew returns to Earth to find that the rapture has occurred without them. Oltion has strong views on religion—namely that it’s a scourge on humanity—that led him to write this story, which speculates on whether or not being “left behind” would be such a bad thing.

It was cold that morning, and the snow squeaked beneath my boots as I walked up the lane in search of Jody. Last night’s storm had left an ankle deep layer of fresh powder over the week-old crust, and her tracks stood out sharp and clear as they led away through the bare skeletons of aspen trees and out of sight around the bend. She had gone toward the mountains. I didn’t need to see her tracks to know that she had gone alone.