Read Grants Pass Online

Authors: Cherie Priest,Ed Greenwood,Jay Lake,Carole Johnstone

Grants Pass (4 page)

There would be others, waiting in
Grants Pass. There, my ghost would take form again.

The ravens flew above me, beside me,
their voices rising in their song of mourning.

Biography

Stephanie Gunn

 

Stephanie was born and raised in
Perth, Western Australia. While her formal education is in microbiology and
immunology, she has discovered the worlds in her mind to be far more
interesting than any seen down a microscope. She is an associate editor for
Horrorscope and a reviewer for Black Magazine, and has had short stories
published in the likes of “Shadowed Realms”. She is currently at work on
several urban fantasy novels.

 

Afterword

 

I’ve long been fascinated by
cities and the way that our urban society would crumble in the wake of an
apocalypse. New York, for me, is the quintessential city, and the perfect
setting for this story. Ravens are a motif that feature in a lot of my work,
and it was natural for me to include them here, as both carrion eaters and
heralds of the future.

I’d like to hope that even in the
event of a series of global catastrophes, humanity would find their way through
to something better.

 

Boudha

K.V. Taylor

 

A low buzz trickled through the
wet evening — those few who weren’t sick were taking advantage of the momentary
lull in the storms to find supplies. The buzz used to be the sound of mantras
or prayer wheels, shopkeepers playing their Tibetan chant CDs at top volume to
attract business. Now the shops were shuttered and abandoned, the only sounds
left were low, frantic snatches of gossip from the rest of the Valley.

Pema didn’t need to listen to it to
know what it said. Most of Kathmandu was dying, and those who weren’t would be
dead soon. The circle of shops and monasteries around the stupa had gone from a
busy spiritual and commercial center to a soggy, spare hub in mere days. The
relative handful of people still healthy enough congregated here when the
weather allowed, maybe so they could pretend they weren’t the only ones left.

She hefted the pack on her shoulder
and led her brother home through the too-thin crowd, sparing a glance here and
there for some of the beggars — the ones who were still alive. She pressed a
few rupees into a hand here, a bottle of water there, and she knew Sonam did
the same behind her.

Water was more precious than rupees.
The Bagmati was swollen with monsoon waters, even more so than usual, but this
year it was poisoned and overflowing with bodies. Cartfuls of them were left at
the ghats, so that everyone had to abandon the Pashupati temple-town there,
except the most devoted sadhus.

Which figured. When you devoted your
existence to a god who danced in a cremation ground, it was probably second
nature to do it yourself. Especially when you smoked as much hash as the sadhus
did.

A thicker-than-usual knot in front
of one of the monasteries blocked Pema’s progress, and she was forced to stop.
She was in a hurry to get back to Tenzin, but they were near their apartment
now — she could see their curtains fluttering in the open window above. Sonam
bumped into her from behind. “What’s happening?”

She shook her head and went up on
her toes.

Sonam turned and looked over the
heads in front of him, taking it all in with eyes even more intense than usual.
“There’s a monk on his knees, and another one with a stone.”

Someone near her muttered in Nepali,
“It will come to us all.”

Pema almost asked the speaker, an
older woman in a black-and-red Newari sari with her wrap over her head, what
would come. But just then a tall man who’d been standing in front of her moved,
and she saw for herself.

The monk on his knees was fully
prostrate, his forehead pressed to the marble entryway, a small, adolescent
figure in saffron and red. Another monk, older, kneeled over him, wielding a
large, smooth stone two or three times the size of his head. He raised the rock
and brought it down, pretending to smash the smaller monk’s brains out.

Pema furrowed her brow. Some of the
Nepalis around them muttered, beginning to understand. But the other Tibetans
seemed to grasp what was happening immediately — or at least, they didn’t
question it.


Like sky
burial,” Sonam said quietly, into her ear. He sounded sad — he had for days
now.

She nodded, unable to tear her eyes
off the spectacle. It wasn’t something that belonged here, so it struck her as
odd. This was for pilgrims who traveled to the sites behind Ganden and Sera,
the other sacred places. But she knew what was happening, and why it was
significant now, as all anyone could talk about was the third plague; the one
that had finally reached them here. Where everyone had desperately hoped they’d
be safe.

The young monk on the ground was
meditating on his own death, and it was definitely a sky burial. He would be
thinking of his body being taken apart piece by piece and fed to vultures on
one of the high plateaus of their homeland. The stone was for crushing his
skull, so the vultures could have what was inside. It would all be eaten, gone
to the sky — food for the gods.

Returned to the circle.

The Nepalis weren’t squeamish about
death — their beliefs were similar, especially the Buddhists, even if their
death rituals were different. They all understood the most basic message of
this meditation.

Existence is impermanent. Don’t
become attached to this world. It’s not real. It won’t last.

Pema chewed on her lower lip,
watching the young monk hold his position after the symbolic crushing. She
could barely see his lips moving against the marble under them, praying,
meditating. Reminding himself that this was what they would all get, and that
it was…all right.

She took a deep breath,
subconsciously missing the smells that used to linger there. Frying samosas and
nag champa incense, replaced now by sickly sweet death. But watching the monk
whispering his mantras into the ground, she felt a little better.

But she had to get back to Tenzin
and make him as comfortable as she could.

 

****

 

Pema turned away for a moment and
reached for another wet cloth for Tenzin. Sonam was on his own bed in the
corner, under a wall covered in his own fantastic drawings and paintings.
Cities he’d never seen and creatures that had never existed, pictures of
deities and myths from Greece to South America, sensitive portraits of friends,
spread over his head. His legs were propped up in front of him, one of his
elbows resting on a knee. His hand hung low, holding a string of beads, his
mala, and he pushed them through his fingers, one after the other. Staring
straight ahead, he didn’t seem to realize what he was doing. His lips moved,
but no words came out.

She didn’t blame him. Even the
incense couldn’t cover the smell of sickness in their one-room flat, all sour
and
wrong
. The storms had started again, and the sky hung heavy and gray
over the Boudhanath Stupa outside. Thunder rolled now and then, and bucketfuls
of rain slammed against the roof. They couldn’t even open the window to let in
some air.

New cloth retrieved from the cool
bowl beside her, she took the old one from Tenzin’s forehead and replaced it.
He made a face, like her touch hurt him. Pema winced because she knew it did.
It had started three days ago. Now Tenzin’s normally sun-brown skin looked like
pale wax, wet from sweats that came out of nowhere. He’d sleep for a few
minutes, then wake up and twitch in some awful unspoken pain, then sleep again.

She hoped he’d sleep forever soon.
When he did, she wouldn’t leave him at the ghats with all the others. Sonam
wouldn’t want to either.

Cloth replaced, she stood and wiped
her hands on her jeans and went to the desk, flicking on the computer screen.
The internet connection had gone down last week, but she still opened up her
inbox and went through her old mail now and then. They hadn’t seen anything
from their oldest brother, Thinley, who had been in Chicago, for weeks. The
last she’d heard, the sickness and devastation was worse there.

Here, they’d had landslides in the
mountains, disasters along the roads to Tibet and floods on the roads to the
Terai. The monsoons had begun early for the last two years, the rivers had been
flushed with too much runoff from the Himalayas, but the Valley and her people
had mostly survived. Pilgrims had still come from the villages, Hindus for the
temples, and Buddhists for the stupas and monasteries. Shopkeepers had opened
their doors in spite of the fact that there were no tourists, and hadn’t been
in over a year. It was an act calculated to ward off their own despair, but it
spread to the rest of the city — or at least the neighborhoods like Boudha that
used to thrive on tourism.

Pema wished she could find out about
Chicago — whether things were better or worse there. Thinley’s emails used to
be so funny, full of stories about the city, how different the clubs were
there, the jokes people told him, and the strange Inji couple who owned the
restaurant where he worked. But she didn’t open any of those; instead, she
opened his last mail, scanning it again, even though she had it memorized.

It still didn’t make any more sense
than it had the first time. He must’ve been sick when he’d written it — Tenzin
sounded the same, fevered and confused. There was something pasted into the
text — a journal entry, maybe from someone he knew there, but definitely an
American.

When the end of the world comes,
meet me in Grants Pass, Oregon.

That, at least, made a little
more
sense, these days. But still, not much.

As she had the thought, there was a
sudden popping sound from the computer, from inside the walls, and the screen
went black. The sound of the tower’s fan stopped short. The light overhead
flickered and went out.

A hard knot formed in Pema’s
stomach, as she sat there in the gray-almost-dark, listening to the suddenly
deafening sound of the storm outside. She looked over her shoulder at Sonam.

He sat in the exact same position:
Staring at nothing, fingering his mala thoughtlessly. He hadn’t even noticed.


It’s not
Thursday, is it?” she asked, because she wanted to hear him say something.
Thursday was Boudha’s scheduled evening for blackouts, to save power…but she
knew it wasn’t Thursday.


No.
Saturday.” His expression never changed.

He could’ve at least smiled at her,
she thought. He was the oldest here — he used to smile at them when things got
bad. He used to at least
try
.

She stood and went to the window,
looking through the torrents of rain down to the circle below. The tiny crowd
in front of the monastery had cleared when the storms started again, but a few
monks were still there, meditating on their mortality. She looked to the stupa,
the center of their world — its seven-foot high outer walls a stark white in
the growing darkness. There were three levels of platforms up, a walkway of a
mandala, to the whitewashed dome. She tried to see it as it used to look, with
saffron lotus petal shapes sprayed across it every new moon; the eyes on the
tower above still bright and blue, the fringe of material shielding them; and
the strings of prayer flags above, bright red, green, yellow, and blue.

But it was all faded and frayed now,
endless rain and shortened manpower taking their toll. Her eyes started to
burn, and a loud clap of thunder struck, rolling over them. It shook the walls.

She returned to the desk and opened
a drawer, looking for candles and a torch. She didn’t figure the power would be
coming back. Not ever.

 

****

 

A sudden crack of lightning
forced its way behind her eyes, tearing her out of a deep sleep. Pema sat up in
bed, breathing hard. She glanced over to the next bed quickly, saw Tenzin
there, silent and pale. She watched carefully in the dark and…yeah. His chest
rose and fell.

She started to take a deep breath
and reached for a bottle of water on the desk—

Another crash, though, this one from
inside the room. Her eyes darted through the shadows, her entire body tensed.
There had been so many lootings this past week, with everyone falling sick one
after the other. Anyone could be inside, and Sonam slept like the dead. What
if—?

He stepped out of the shadows on the
far side of the room — a tall, broad-shouldered figure. Familiar.

She took a deep breath, finally.
Just Sonam.

But Sonam was in his jacket, with
his Adidas Sambas laced up. A backpack hanging from one hand, a small purse,
the kind the Indian beggar-kids tried to sell to tourists for twenty times
their value, from the other.

The purse they kept all their money
in.


What are
you doing?” she asked. Her body began to tense again, although she wasn’t sure
why.

He stepped closer, skirting the edge
of Tenzin’s bed until he came to the foot of hers. He looked down at her, biting
his lip, his fingers clutching at the Indian purse fitfully. Like he was trying
to strangle it, but couldn’t quite bring himself to.


Sonam,” she
said through her teeth. A command.

He shook his head. Sadly, she
thought. “We have to go.”

Her heart began to race, and a sick
feeling rose in the back of her throat. “Go where?”


Lumbini—”


Lumbini
flooded last summer, they barely saved the pillar. Do you think they’re not
sick down there in the jungle too, if we are up here?”


Dharamsala
then—”


Delhi was
hit first; of course they have it in Dharam—”


Lhasa!” he
shouted, making a cutting-off gesture with the purse-hand. Like this was the
end of the discussion, some kind of irrefutable truth.

The lightning was distant, she
realized, as his eyes flashed with it. Her heart thudded loudly in her ears
until the rumble of thunder finally came, several seconds later.

She couldn’t believe it. Of all the
things she’d seen in the last year, this was the most awful. It was a
nightmare, it had to be. Not her Sonam.

Other books

Mira's Hope by Erin Elliott
Realm of the Dead by Donovan Neal
The Magician's Apprentice by Canavan, Trudi
Eternal Fire by Peebles, Chrissy
Simple by Dena Nicotra