“Keeping warm sounds real good. What’s it do?”
“My dad had one of these old gas-only cars when we lived in Vermont. Some of them for high altitude and cold climates could be set to idle from time to time just to keep the battery charged and the water in the radiator warm, for parking on the street when it was twenty below outside, with a detector for monoxide in case you mistakenly left it on in the garage. So we set it to keep warm, turn on the heater full blast, and every time the battery gets low or the radiator water cools off, it’ll idle a few minutes and warm us up. One long comfy warm night with food.”
“But . . . Jeez, Jason, aren’t we burning a lot of gasoline, polluting, you know, all that stuff?”
“One car would have a hell of a time polluting the San Luis Valley in one night. The gas is just going to turn into goop in a couple days anyway. And the car is going to die as the nanoswarm eat it, Beth, but for right now enough is working to keep us warm, and there’s more than we can possibly eat in the trunk. I vote we eat ourselves silly and sleep till the sun wakes us up.”
She shrugged. “Well, the way you say, it makes sense and all. I just feel all weird and stuff about sitting burning gasoline and going nowhere in the last running Cadillac. Feels like something my dad would’ve done.”
Beth was vegan, and Jason had always felt a little guilty that he wasn’t, and, of course, both of them were philosophically opposed to plaztatic food, but lunchmeat sandwiches with salsa from a jar, Doritos, Pringles, irradiated chili in a plastic tub, and partly melted ice cream—all washed down with milk, Orange Fanta, and Budweiser—made the most wonderful dinner date they’d ever had, with the big heater keeping the old Cadillac toasty and the brilliant stars shining in through the dark windshield.
Beth switched on the radio; the scan button ran through four hundred channels without finding a signal, but “it’s probably not seeing a working cell tower anywhere, and that cliff behind us is probably blocking the satellites. So—” She leaned forward, peering at the old-fashioned physical buttons by the light of the screen. “Hey, this thing is so old it still has FM and AM besides cell.” She flipped the toggle; there was nothing on FM, but on AM the voice leaped out at them: “—think officially at the moment we are a 130,000-watt station but it might be more if Ernie can find a way. The reason we’re doing this, of course, is that nearly every other station is off the air, but we have working generators, we’ve been able to keep one studio and our transmitter running, and we have a functioning fiber line to Washington; we just have to hope enough of you out there have radios that can pull in our signal.
“Once again, anyone with working recording and broadcasting or net-connected equipment is requested to record this broadcast and pass it on in any form possible, to as many people as you can reach with it; the Acting President has authorized compensation for your time and trouble.
“For those of you who just found this station, you’re listening to Radio KP-1, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, broadcasting at 1020 on the AM band, which is actually KDKA’s transmission facility linked by a fiber-optic line to WQED-TV’s broadcast studio, using partly hand-built tube electronics from Westinghouse Labs. Mark this spot on your dial as we think we’re likely to remain on the air permanently, thanks to technical support from Westinghouse and PPG.
“In a moment, Radio KP-1 will be carrying a live broadcast from Washington of a speech by Acting President Peter Shaunsen, who will be addressing the nation to explain current plans for dealing with the Daybreak emergency. While we are waiting, here are some other announcements that the Department of Homeland—one moment please—yes, the President’s speech is about to begin, so we now take you to the Oval Office, where the President’s speech will be reported by Chris Manckiewicz of The 24/7 News Network.”
Jason took a deep draft of Mountain Dew, and settled in to listen; he didn’t think he’d ever paid this much attention to someone talking before. Beside him, Beth was stone-still and alert.
The engine purred away on idle from time to time; otherwise the night was silent. When the Acting President’s speech was over, and the station had gone back to broadcasting orders (mostly to preserve valuable resources) and requests (mostly to report where useful material was) from Homeland Security, Jason turned the radio off.
“Don’t,” Beth said. “We can leave it on real soft, but don’t turn it off, please.”
“Sure.” He turned it back on. Something about her tone made him reach out to touch Beth, and he found her face wet.
“You okay?”
“No. Yeah. Kind of. I—I
liked
hearing the president on the radio. And hearing the radio. It was like, the world’s gonna go on, that was what it was like. Like there’s still an America and everything. And I know he was just like making a lot of promises to win an election—”
“Which he won’t.”
“Which he won’t—but you heard him, Jason, he was like reaching out to the whole country, here’s what we’re going to build and do and make, let’s get going, let’s get to work—and it was just kind of . . . beautiful. I mean I know it’s all a fake and a lie but I was real glad that Chris Whatsisface didn’t start
telling
us all about how it was all bullshit and all. I just . . . I wanted to know someone was doing something, I wanted to know the government was trying, and I wanted to hear the radio and know we weren’t the only people left on Earth.”
“Truth?”
“Sure.”
Jason took another delicious sip of Mountain Dew, thought about how long it might be before he had more of it, looked at the night sky swarming with stars around the dim reflection of the radio’s glow. “I wish I’d never fucking heard of Daybreak, and neither had anyone else.”
Beth started to cry, harder, and he reached for her to see if she was okay. She said, “Me too, but I wasn’t gonna say nothing to you.”
He felt queasy and sick from what they’d been saying, and Beth looked like she was in more pain, so he said, “We’d better sack out.”
They fell asleep with the radio still going, under piles of clothes and coats, Beth in the front seat, Jason in the back, to give her most of the heat. The seat leather smelled good and the warmth of the heater and the soft engine turning over every few minutes were comforting; the last thing he remembered before falling asleep was the little insect voice of the announcer reading a complicated post from DHS, asking anyone who had any antique steel puddling tools, and any iron sculptors, blacksmiths, and heritage craft ironworkers to gather at Homestead, Pennsylvania, in three months’ time.
Somewhere well past midnight, the engine suddenly seized and died. Beth cried out and woke up; Jason sat up, breathing hard. Not willing to let cold air into the car, he crawled forward and tried to restart it; the starter cranked without success. He left the heater fan running on battery power, recirculating the warm air from inside the car, to extract the last heat from the radiator. KP-1 was still on the air, reporting that they’d gotten ten-hour-old Internet voice mail from Banff, Alberta, and were passing on a request for the government in Ottawa, dissolving provincial governments till further notice, and asking that local governments report ASAP.
Beth curled up and went back to sleep. Jason eventually did too, but for a while he kept waking from dreams about Elton’s body dangling from the barn’s pulley. Something about the radio creeped him out, as if the old plaztatic world was lunging to get him, and the stars were too far away to save him.
THE NEXT DAY. CHEVY CHASE, MARYLAND. 7:30 A.M. EST. WEDNESDAY. OCTOBER 30.
“Hey, am I crazy, or is there a
newsboy
down on the street?” Lenny asked.
“Those are not mutually exclusive questions.” Heather rushed to the window beside him. On the sidewalk below, a boy of about ten waved a paper over his head, shouting, “Read all about it!”
“Might as well see if we’re both hallucinating,” she said, strapping on sneakers.
In the street, she asked “How much?”
The boy smiled. “One paper for five dollars paper money or one can or box of food, has to be edible by itself, no fridge stuff, and I don’t make change on food,” proud that he’d remembered the whole spiel.
Heather traded a ten for a five and took the paper upstairs. It felt strangely like the local newspaper she could remember from when she’d been in college and had occasionally read one out of boredom; it was even about as thick as the
Costaguana Weekly Courier
, and had the same smeary, slightly greasy feel to it.
The front page had a little box:
For stores, restaurants, and warehouses known to be empty of food, see pages 4-6
.
Three full pages listed all the stores both individually and by chain, noting the few of them that were still open to sell toiletries, cleaning supplies, and so forth. “Probably I can get some deals on disinfectant,” Heather said, “if I hustle over to the Safeway three blocks over.”
“Also check Rite Aid,” Lenny suggested. “Especially home hair-dye kits.”
“Are we going in disguise?”
“They have goopy extra-strength peroxide. We can use it to scrub around the seals on the windows, the air intake for the generator engine, stuff like that. Wonder if the gasoline would be safer if we could add antibiotics to it? Or if that would just spoil it?”
“We could—shit. I was about to say maybe we could Goo-22
antibiotics
and
gasoline.
How the hell did people find things out before the net?”
“Think about when we were kids. Phone books, dictionaries, paper encyclopedias—”
“Well, yeah, when I was a
little
kid. Mostly I remember the heap of them in the Dumpster when the school got a grant. How long since anything like that’s been produced? 2015?”
“Yeah. I can’t imagine anyone ever thought about gasoline spoiling anyway.” Lenny sighed and ran through the autochecks on the control screen of his wheelchair, which was becoming a nervous habit. “Well, it was a nice thought. I have fuel enough for about a week, but it’ll be infected well before then.”
“And there’s food in the fridge and freezer for about that long. It won’t benefit us at all if it spoils. So we’d better have breakfast today and read the paper to each other like more or less normal people.”
They skipped reading the text of Shaunsen’s speech and agreed that they liked Rusty Parlotta’s editorials calling for everyone to admit that the system was down and act more like a grown-up about it. Lenny thought Chris Manckiewicz’s reporting was biased too liberal, and Heather that it was just liberal enough. “I wonder if they’ll have comics, and sports pages, like old-time papers?” Lenny said, as they were eating the last of the mixed, chopped fresh fruit. “I’d like that.”
“Me too. My dad used to read me
Rose is Rose
and
Heart of the City
, and we always went over the stats on the Lakers every Sunday in the
Times
.” The classified ads were mostly people looking to barter expensive cars and computers for canned food and guns. There were black smears on her hands, just below the little fingers. “On the other hand, the Web was never quite this grubby. There couldn’t be
lead
in the ink, could there?”
“That little story about ‘local printer-hobbyist finds new occupation’ said he didn’t use lead-based inks, but it doesn’t hurt for either of us to be washing hands constantly, considering.”
While she was scrubbing, the phone rang; she heard him talking for a minute before he wheeled into the bathroom. “Cameron Nguyen-Peters wants us to attend a meeting of DRET at DHS.”
“What’s DRET?”
“Daybreak Research and Evaluation Team; it means ‘Cam’s bunch of smart people that help him figure stuff out.’ They’ve got a biowar-rigged Hummer that sprays its own tires with disinfectant and has an extensive air filter system, coming to pick you up in about half an hour.”
“For me? You said he wanted—”
“I think I’d better not go outside any more than I have to; in here, I’ve got it mostly sealed and as disinfected as I can get it, but out there, I could come down with nanoswarm or biotes, and be just as dead as any transistor radio. I’ll have to work mostly by letter and phone from now until there’s a better solution.”
“I don’t like the idea of leaving you here by yourself.”
She could hear him trying not to snap at her. “And I don’t like being confined to the house, but I think I’ll have to live with it. Meanwhile, I’m moderately well-armed, the place has power on to support me, I can fix most of what will break in here, it’s a lot safer from contamination, and we both have work to do. I’ll be here, you’ll be there, we’ll be fine. I’ll set out a dish basin with some disinfectant at the door; when you come back, be sure you dip your shoes and scour everything else.”
ABOUT AN HOUR LATER.MARANA. ARIZONA. 8:30 A.M. MST. WEDNESDAY. OCTOBER 30.
When Kai-Anne pulled the curtain aside to see what the noise was about, she jumped back; a man with a bat stood in their driveway. She looked again and saw that there were perhaps twenty people with bats and guns. She didn’t know what it was about but she knew she wanted a cop. She checked the landline; no luck. The cell phone was dead too.
“What’s going on, hon?”
Greg’s voice was low, trying not to wake the kids.
“Bunch of people outside with guns and bats,” she said, trying not to sound nearly as scared as she felt.
“Shit. We’re dealing with excessive citizen initiative here; remind me to thank the Acting President and the Moron Stream Media. Answer, but don’t open the door if they get up the nerve to knock. I gotta dress. Don’t go out there yet.”
What’s he mean,
yet
? He can’t mean he’s going to—
They were shouting at each other out there, arguing about something or maybe nerving each other up.
Please let that be an argument.
The only person she could distinctly understand was the guy outside the door with the bat; he was yelling at people to
calm down, we just gotta ask some questions, just some questions, let’s not guess till we asked our questions.