Authors: George P. Saunders
Jack looked up at Walter briefly, then again returned to the microscope.
"Nope. Tough as nails, that one. I don't know how, but he's fine." Walter's invulnerability to radiation was definitely something Jack did
not
want to think about at the moment.
"Maybe he's a magic bird," Rebecca offered.
Jack offered the doctor's smile once again.
"Maybe."
He sealed off two more vials of Rebecca's blood and put it into a refrigerator. Rebecca, quiet now, watched in fascination. Jack felt as if he was being studied, judged. Another ridiculous notion (and wasn't he full of them today?) that just wouldn't run along and play.
"Doctor Calisto?"
"Yes, Rebecca?"
"Why do we have to die?"
Jack froze, both hands on the refrigerator door for support, not daring to turn around just yet. He swallowed hard and felt his palms begin to sweat, the visible turncoats to his will. He brought them to his lab smock self-consciously, hoping that Rebecca wouldn't notice.
Nice shot, little girl; as they say, a clean hit. You must meet my friend the Hound one day.
At last, he faced the child, ransacking his mind for a convenient lie; an evasion that would make things nice and tidy and mess free.
Anything but the truth.
Jack looked into Rebecca's eyes. Suddenly, the lies died, not even making it to the starting gate of his lips.
Why, sweetheart? You asked the million dollar question. Because life is fucked, because your mommy and daddy and I belonged to a generation of idiots who blew up the world and murdered you. Happy? Because nothing in life is fair, least of all its duration, of which you, sweet thing, will enjoy only the briefest of stints.
It was harsh, but it was true and Jack wished desperately he could scream it out, if not to Rebecca, then to whatever perverse god or universe had allowed his world to be massacred, leaving him alone with the dubious joy of trying to pick up the pieces and continue living. And saving (or trying) to save those who were unsalvageable.
He did not tell this to the little girl in front of him. He did not, for want of a better word, have that kind of courage.
"Everybody dies, Rebecca. Sooner or later."
Rebecca shrugged, smiling, but clearly not happy with the answer.
"Not everybody. You won't."
"I'll die one day, too."
"But not
soon
," Rebecca countered with astonishing speed and sobriety. Jack's legs felt like rubber; the attractive notion
of taking a meat axe to Gleeson for subjecting him to this kind of interrogation swirled lovingly in his head.
No, Rebecca. Probably not soon. This old world is having too much fun kicking me in the balls and watching me turn purple; just no time to die at the moment.
"I hope not," he replied lamely. At the moment, he was thinking just
how
lucky dead people were.
This time Rebecca didn't smile. And once again, Jack thought he saw the look – the look of accusation, the one that said, 'you're full of it, Jack; you know it, I know it, and they know it. Fess up, Jack – you're lucky – and we're goners.'
"Dr. Calisto?"
Would it never end, Jack wondered numbly.
"Yes, Rebecca."
Rebecca, eight years old today, terminally ill and weighing a pathetic 45 pounds, whispered in a voice filled with tears:
"I don't want to die!"
Jack stared for what seemed an eternity, swallowed the basketball in his throat, then picked Rebecca up and hugged her.
* * *
When she left, Jack threw his very first tantrum.
He was careful ahead of time to protect the most important equipment and to secure the fragile glassware that preserved thousands of blood specimens to the needy Edenites; only after the last beaker was stowed and the last centrifuge covered did Jack Calisto proceed to lay ruin to his laboratory.
Walter watched in stunned horror, staying well above the air space of flying articles and furniture, which Jack flung wildly, weeping and screaming as he did so. The histrionics were brief and exhausting; with a deficit of breakables at his disposal, Jack eventually just collapsed on the floor like a child and sobbed. After a time, he lifted his head and looked at Walter. His eyes were red, bleary pits of misery. He had hurt himself during the thrashing about, and was bleeding; Walter could see that it was a small injury, extending from the base of his wrist around to the top of his hand. A superficial cut, but still, it needed cleaning, and as far as Walter could tell, Jack was making no effort to help himself.
Able to bear no more, Walter fled the lab. Jack didn't even notice.
The Black Hound was back again in force and this time, he did believe, the old mutt just might get him. There was nothing he could do to save Rebecca; he had known that for months, accepted it with the cold certainty of one who was accustomed to observing death regularly and conceding victory to it unflinchingly. Other children had died in Eden before her; he had tried to save them, too, and felt bad when those efforts proved futile also. Rebecca was no different than those tragic losses. So he told himself with practiced clinical aloofness. Just another casualty to war, another statistic tabulated in the great unofficial logbook of Earth's post-mortem.
Case closed.
Very nice – except it simply wasn't true.
Rebecca
was
different; she was the last one, the last child in Eden. And she
did
matter. When she would go (and Jack was sure she
would
go very soon now) a little bit of Eden would die with her. A big part of Jack Calisto, he thought, would also buy the farm, thank you much. And again, the unrelenting futility of all he had tried to prevent, tried to rectify, tried to heal descended on him in full, black force. He could not save Rebecca, nor her people; death and more death was ahead, fully booked for the hideous land of tomorrow.
There on the floor, Jack sat, finally just curling up in a ball and falling asleep. Walter transformed, and Angela proceeded to tend to the cut on Jack’s hand; it took over an hour to work around Jack's relatively light sleep. One wrong move and he would have awakened, thus delivering her back into feathered form again. Luck had sided with her (for now) and she finished just as he awoke.
Walter flapped up to her ledge, eyeing her nursing attempts in the form of a gauze pad and rubbing alcohol. She need not have worried, for Jack was still semi-catatonic. Like a bird trying to free itself from the bondage of an egg, he pulled himself off the floor and stared at the mess around him. Jack didn't notice Walter's paraphernalia. Dazed, he stood there and licked his chops like a dehydrated dog; the inside of his mouth was like sandpaper and he suddenly thought: so this is what three day old puppy turds taste like.
My, My. Just like momma used to –
He shut his mind up fast and closed his eyes.
He had dreamed.
Laura was in the dream, for his haggard brain had conjured up a picture of her from sheer hope and imagination. In the dream, Laura was reaching out for him, smiling, her black hair waving behind her. Laura's face threatened to transform into that of his dead wife's, but Jack curtailed this assault on his sanity with all the power his subconscious could muster. Walter was on her shoulder, cooing. It was night and behind them Jack could see a thousand eyes, all red, all angry, all inhuman. The eyes turned to fireballs; mushrooms of light, blasting outward, vaporizing, Laura, Walter, and for all Jack knew, the dreamer himself.
And then it was over and he was back.
He needed a drink. Badly. Walter flapped down to his shoulder and nibbled his ear. Jack grunted, poking the bird gently with his finger.
"Sorry about that, buddy," he wrestled his dry mouth for the words. "One of those days."
One of those wacky, zany, fucked up days in Dante's playground, he thought, regarding the extensive damage he had created in the lab.
Screw it, he decided after a moment of uncertainty; it could wait a week. Or a month.
Because by then Rebecca would be dead anyway, right, Jack?
Right, Blackie, he fenced mentally with the Black Hound. Eat shit and leave me alone.
Jack rubbed his eyes and sighed.
Laura. He would have to think of Laura. Imagine what she was like, see the color of her eyes, dream of her smile. These things would have to keep him going. Laura.
Rebecca.
Laura.
Angela –
He walked out of the lab fast, only barely keeping Black Hound at slobbering bay.
Suddenly, there was a commotion from outside that Jack heard only as he approached the entrance to the Dome, which he had left open.
The Growler and the Maddogs were charging the barbed wire gate. Some vehicles plowed over the barbed mesh and headed straight for the Eden encampment.
Gleeson screamed out to men all around him.
“Arm up. Fire at will!”
Jack ran to his garage, and climbed aboard the Humvee. Walter flapped after him and launched himself into the passenger section of the vehicle.
Jack started the armed car, and sped out of the garage, disengaging the main gate of power.
Jack leaped out of the Humvee, and climbed on top of it, assuming a sitting position behind the M134 Minigun, the Mk 19 grenade launcher, and a secondary M2 heavy machine gun. He began to fire into the hoard of the attacking Maddogs.
Cars, motorcycles and men and women, armed with guns or knives, screamed and died, as they fell – no match against Jack’s sophisticated armory of fiery death.
Far beyond, on the horizon, Jack could see the figure of Mathias, next to the huge behemoth, the Growler.
The battle lasted all of five minutes. Those among the Maddog survivors broke and ran back toward the barbed wire defenses they had initially breached, only to be electrocuted while trying to climb over it and escape the barrage of gunfire.
At the end of this particular conflict, only a dozen Maddogs escaped death.
Gleeson turned to Jack and gave him a thumbs up.
Jack merely nodded, weary to the bone.
This is what I have become
.
See, I am Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.
The ancient Hindu text burned in his brain.
* * *
The Maddogs did not appear the following afternoon, and because this was an odd relief following the aftermath of the battle the day before, Jack decided to postpone his departure in search of Laura for twelve hours. As attractive as the idea was that the Growler and his fiendish cohorts had grown tired of attacking the beleaguered Eden encampment, Jack couldn't quite buy it. The losses the mutants had suffered yesterday were only average; sometimes the Growler had lost dozens, and still come back for more the following day. Gleeson received the news ecstatically, and for a second, Jack thought the scarred little man would break out in delighted laughter. Instead, Gleeson just smiled broadly, and limped off to pass the word.
Jack, meanwhile, loaded the Humvee with food and ammunition – enough to last him for a month, if necessary. He only planned to be gone for a few days, but Jack was not one to take chances. The desert beyond the virtually impenetrable perimeter of Eden was a death zone, harboring worse things than just Maddogs and Stiffers. There were some horrors in this new world he was confident had yet to make their presence known, and though he hoped he would not encounter them, he would be prepared to do so nevertheless.
As he packed, he watched the horizon continuously, expecting at any moment to see the screaming, gibbering hoard of the Growler's army. But no army came, and soon the land grew dark
with the coming of night. Jack instructed Gleeson to assign a double guard this evening, with frequent shift changes, to ensure alertness. If the Maddogs had not adhered to a predictable schedule, perhaps they had something else up their collective sleeves. Jack would take no chances.
Alone again in his Dome, Jack took out a map of the immediate desert and studied the route he would follow in the morning. If the Angel's scant directions were to be adhered to strictly, he would have to pass over some parts of the sands he knew for a fact were still highly irradiated. Long ago, he had triangulated those regions most likely to be contaminated, based on projected missile impacts, proximity to large civilian centers and wind direction. Las Vegas was only 80 miles west of Eden; fallout from that city's destruction a few years earlier was minimal, passing Jack's Dome-house only glancingly. Ten miles further north, however, and the rad dosage per square foot was tripled, due to a freak low pressure system produced by an underground spring not far from Eden. The resulting convection bullied the poison air from Vegas away from Jack's home and sent it speeding west, where it would mingle with the equally fetid atmosphere of northern Arizona and southern Utah, and finally continue its accursed progress eastward. If Jack would pass through this area, and remain for more than a few hours, his chances of returning to Eden in the same condition as its inhabitants were excellent.
Jack was not planning on lingering in one place for too long. He would seek out cleaner pastures as quickly as possible. As he studied the map further, he speculated on Laura's exact position. There were few places in the world, Jack knew, that the blind winds of nature neglected to spew their poison; that part of the United States between the Nevada and California borders, a hundred miles in either direction from Eden's location, was one of the cleaner areas, radioactively speaking. There would be, Jack conceded, an excellent chance however that Laura was familiar with the less than enchanting company of Stiffers, and possibly, mutants, like Maddogs or the more benevolent strain of monsterdom like the Edenites. If the Angel's promise of Laura's existence was to be taken seriously, however, it would be safe to assume that the girl had developed some method of either dealing with these problems – or eliminating them accordingly.
Walter flapped onto the map and fought for balance. Jack took the hint.