Wastelands Read online

  WASTELANDS

  Stories of the Apocalypse

  edited by John Joseph Adams

  Wastelands © 2008 by John Joseph Adams

  This edition of Wastelands © 2008 by Night Shade Books

  Jacket art © 2008 by Daniel Kvasznicza

  Jacket design by Michael Fusco

  Interior layout and design by Jeremy Lassen

  All rights reserved

  "Introduction," "For Further Reading" and author notes © 2008 by John Joseph Adams

  Printed in Canada

  First Edition

  ISBN 10: 1-59780-105-4

  ISBN 13: 978-1-59780-105-8

  Night Shade Books

  Please visit us on the web at

  http://www.nightshadebooks.com

  Acknowledgments

  "The End of the Whole Mess" © 1986 by Stephen King. Originally published in Omni, October 1986. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "Salvage" © 1986 by Orson Scott Card. Originally published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, February 1986. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "The People of Sand and Slag" © 2004 by Paolo Bacigalupi. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, February 2004. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "Bread and Bombs" © 2003 by M. Rickert. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 2003. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "How We Got In Town and Out Again" © 1996 by Jonathan Lethem. Originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction, September 1996. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "Dark, Dark Were the Tunnels" © 1973 by George R. R. Martin. Originally published in Vertex, December 1973. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "Waiting for the Zephyr" © 2002 by Tobias S. Buckell. Originally published in Land/Space, 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "Never Despair" by Jack McDevitt © 1997 by Cryptic, Inc. Originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction, April 1997. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth" © 2006 by Cory Doctorow. Originally published in Jim Baen's Universe, August 2006. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "The Last of the O-Forms" © 2002 by James Van Pelt. Originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction, September 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "Still Life with Apocalypse" © 2002 by Richard Kadrey. Originally published in The Infinite Matrix, May 29, 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "Artie's Angels" © 2001 by Catherine Wells Dimenstein. Originally published in Realms of Fantasy, December 2001. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "Judgment Passed" © 2008 by Jerry Oltion. Appears for the first time in this volume.

  "Mute" © 2002 by Gene Wolfe. Originally published in 2002 World Horror Convention Program Book. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author's agents, the Virginia Kidd Agency.

  "Inertia" © 1990 by Nancy Kress. Originally published in Analog Science Fiction & Fact, January 1990. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "And the Deep Blue Sea" © 2005 by Elizabeth Bear. Originally published in SCI FICTION, May 4, 2005. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "Speech Sounds" © 1983 by Octavia E. Butler. Originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction, Mid-December 1983. Reprinted by permission of the estate of Octavia E. Butler.

  "Killers" © 2006 by Carol Emshwiller. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October/November 2006. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "Ginny Sweethips' Flying Circus" ©1988 by Neal Barrett, Jr. Originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction, February 1988. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "The End of the World as We Know It" © 2004 by Dale Bailey. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October/November 2004. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "A Song Before Sunset" © 1976 by David Rowland Grigg. Originally published in Beyond Tomorrow, 1976. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "Episode Seven: Last Stand Against the Pack in the Kingdom of the Purple Flowers" © 2007 John Langan. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September 2007. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  Introduction

  by John Joseph Adams

  Famine. Death. War. Pestilence. These are said to be the harbingers of the biblical apocalypse—Armageddon, The End of The World. In science fiction, the end of the world is usually triggered by more specific means: nuclear warfare, biological disaster (or warfare), ecological/geological disaster, or cosmological disaster. But in the wake of any great cataclysm, there are survivors—and post-apocalyptic science fiction speculates what life would be like for them.

  The first significant post-apocalyptic work is The Last Man (1826), by the mother of science fiction—Frankenstein author Mary Shelley—so the sub-genre is in essence as old as science fiction itself. Although its origins are firmly rooted in science fiction, post-apocalyptic fiction has always been able to escape traditional genre boundaries. Several classic novels of the genre, such as Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank, On the Beach by Nevil Shute, and Earth Abides by George R. Stewart, were published as mainstream novels. That trend is seeing a resurgence, with authors like Cormac McCarthy venturing into post-apocalyptic territory with his bleak new novel The Road—which was not only a best-selling book and an Oprah Book Club pick, but a winner of the Pulitzer Prize as well.

  But SF has produced its share of novel-length classics as well, including the undisputed king of the sub-genre, Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz. Not to mention Leigh Brackett's The Long Tomorrow, John Christopher's No Blade of Grass, or Wilson Tucker's criminally underappreciated The Long Loud Silence. I could go on and on . . .and I do—in the "For Further Reading" appendix you'll find at the end of this book.

  Post-apocalyptic SF first rose to prominence in the aftermath of World War II—no doubt due in large part to the world having witnessed the devastating destructive power of the atomic bomb—and reached the height of its popularity during the Cold War, when the threat of worldwide nuclear annihilation seemed a very real possibility.

  But when the Berlin Wall fell, so did the popularity of post-apocalyptic fiction. If you examine the copyright page of this anthology, you'll note that just two of the stories in this volume were written in the '90s. On the other hand, more than half of these stories were originally published since the turn of the millennium. So why the resurgence? Is it because the political climate now is reminiscent of the climate during the Cold War? During times of war and global unease, is it that much easier to imagine a depopulated world, a world destroyed by humanity's own hand?

  Is that all there is to it, or is there something more? What is it that draws us to those bleak landscapes—the wastelands of post-apocalyptic literature? To me, the appeal is obvious: it fulfills our taste for adventure, the thrill of discovery, the desire for a new frontier. It also allows us to start over from scratch, to wipe the slate clean and see what the world may have been like if we had known then what we know now.

  Perhaps the appeal of the sub-genre is best described by this quote from "The Manhattan Phone Book (Abridged)" by John Varley:

  We all love after-the-bomb stories. If we didn't, why would there be so many of them? There's something attractive about all those people being gone, about wandering in a depopulated world, scrounging cans of Campbell's pork and beans, defending one's family from marauders. Sure it's horrible, sure we weep for all those dead people. But some secret part of us thinks it would be good to survive, to start over. Secretly, we know we'll survive. All those other folks will die. That's what after-the-bomb stories are all about.

  Or is that just the begin
ning of the conversation? Read the stories, and you decide.

  The stories in this volume go beyond the "wandering," "scrounging," and "defending" that Varley describes above. What you will find here are tales of survival and of life in the aftermath that explore what scientific, psychological, sociological, and physiological changes will take place in the wake of the apocalypse.

  What you will not find here are tales depicting the aftermath of aliens conquering the Earth, or the terror induced by a zombie uprising; both scenarios are suitably apocalyptic, but are subjects for another time (or other anthologies, as it were).

  In the stories that follow, you will find twenty-two different science fictional apocalyptic scenarios. Some of them are far-fetched and unlikely, while others are plausible and all-too-easy to imagine. Some of the stories flirt with the fantastic. Many venture into horrific territory. All of them explore one question:

  What would life be like after the end of the world as we know it?

  The End of the Whole Mess

  by Stephen King

  Stephen King needs no introduction. He is the award-winning, best-selling author of novels such as Carrie and the post-apocalyptic masterpiece The Stand. Although he is most well-known for his novels and the movies they've inspired, he is a prolific author of short fiction as well, having written enough of it to warrant several collections including: Everything's Eventual, Night Shift, Skeleton Crew, and Nightmares & Dreamscapes. "The End of the Whole Mess" appeared in the latter volume, but was originally published in Omni magazine in 1986. It was nominated for the World Fantasy Award, and was recently adapted into a one-hour movie as part of a TNT Nightmares & Dreamscapes miniseries.

  There are several factors that go into deciding which story to lead off an anthology with. You might pick a story that's by a high-profile contributor, one that's uncommonly good and packs a strong emotional punch, or one that will set the tone for the rest of the book; this story is all three.

  I want to tell you about the end of war, the degeneration of mankind, and the death of the Messiah—an epic story, deserving thousands of pages and a whole shelf of volumes, but you (if there are any "you" later on to read this) will have to settle for the freeze-dried version. The direct injection works very fast. I figure I've got somewhere between forty-five minutes and two hours, depending on my blood-type. I think it's A, which should give me a little more time, but I'll be goddamned if I can remember for sure. If it turns out to be O, you could be in for a lot of blank pages, my hypothetical friend.

  In any event, I think maybe I'd better assume the worst and go as fast as I can.

  I'm using the electric typewriter—Bobby's word-processor is faster, but the genny's cycle is too irregular to be trusted, even with the line suppressor. I've only got one shot at this; I can't risk getting most of the way home and then seeing the whole thing go to data heaven because of an ohm drop, or a surge too great for the suppressor to cope with. My name is Howard Fornoy. I was a freelance writer. My brother, Robert Fornoy, was the Messiah. I killed him by shooting him up with his own discovery four hours ago. He called it The Calmative. A Very Serious Mistake might have been a better name, but what's done is done and can't be undone, as the Irish have been saying for centuries . . .which proves what assholes they are.

  Shit, I can't afford these digressions.

  After Bobby died I covered him with a quilt and sat at the cabin's single living-room window for some three hours, looking out at the woods. Used to be you could see the orange glow of the hi-intensity arc-sodiums from North Conway, but no more. Now there's just the White Mountains, looking like dark triangles of crepe paper cut out by a child, and the pointless stars.

  I turned on the radio, dialed through four bands, found one crazy guy, and shut it off. I sat there thinking of ways to tell this story. My mind kept sliding away toward all those miles of dark pinewoods, all that nothing. Finally I realized I needed to get myself off the dime and shoot myself up. Shit. I never could work without a deadline.

  And I've sure-to-God got one now.

  Our parents had no reason to expect anything other than what they got: bright children. Dad was a history major who had become a full professor at Hofstra when he was thirty. Ten years later he was one of six vice-administrators of the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and in line for the top spot. He was a helluva good guy, too—had every record Chuck Berry ever cut and played a pretty mean blues guitar himself. My dad filed by day and rocked by night.

  Mom graduated magna cum laude from Drew. Got a Phi Beta Kappa key she sometimes wore on this funky fedora she had. She became a successful CPA in D.C., met my dad, married him, and took in her shingle when she became pregnant with yours truly. I came along in 1980. By '84 she was doing taxes for some of my dad's associates—she called this her "little hobby." By the time Bobby was born in 1987, she was handling taxes, investment portfolios, and estate-planning for a dozen powerful men. I could name them, but who gives a wad? They're either dead or driveling idiots by now.

  I think she probably made more out of "her little hobby" each year than my dad made at his job, but that never mattered—they were happy with what they were to themselves and to each other. I saw them squabble lots of times, but I never saw them fight. When I was growing up, the only difference I saw between my mom and my playmates' moms was that their moms used to read or iron or sew or talk on the phone while the soaps played on the tube, and my mom used to run a pocket calculator and write down numbers on big green sheets of paper while the soaps played on the tube.

  I was no disappointment to a couple of people with Mensa Gold Cards in their wallets. I maintained A's and B's through my public-school career (the idea that either I or my brother might go to a private school was never even discussed so far as I know). I also wrote well early, with no effort at all. I sold my first magazine piece when I was twenty—it was on how the Continental Army wintered at Valley Forge. I sold it to an airline magazine for four hundred fifty dollars. My dad, whom I loved deeply, asked me if he could buy that check from me. He gave me his own personal check and had the check from the airline magazine framed and hung it over his desk. A romantic genius, if you will. A romantic blues-playing genius, if you will. Take it from me, a kid could do a lot worse. Of course he and my mother both died raving and pissing in their pants late last year, like almost everyone else on this big round world of ours, but I never stopped loving either of them.

  I was the sort of child they had every reason to expect—a good boy with a bright mind, a talented boy whose talent grew to early maturity in an atmosphere of love and confidence, a faithful boy who loved and respected his mom and dad.

  Bobby was different. Nobody, not even Mensa types like our folks, ever expects a kid like Bobby. Not ever.

  I potty-trained two full years earlier than Bob, and that was the only thing in which I ever beat him. But I never felt jealous of him; that would have been like a fairly good American Legion League pitcher feeling jealous of Nolan Ryan or Roger Clemens. After a certain point the comparisons that cause feelings of jealousy simply cease to exist. I've been there, and I can tell you: after a certain point you just stand back and shield your eyes from the flashburns.

  Bobby read at two and began writing short essays ("Our Dog," "A Trip to Boston with Mother") at three. His printing was the straggling, struggling galvanic constructions of a six-year-old, and that was startling enough in itself, but there was more: if transcribed so that his still-developing motor control no longer became an evaluative factor, you would have thought you were reading the work of a bright, if extremely naive, fifth-grader. He progressed from simple sentences to compound sentences to complex ones with dizzying rapidity, grasping clauses, sub-clauses, and modifying clauses with an intuitiveness that was eerie. Sometimes his syntax was garbled and his modifiers misplaced, but he had such flaws—which plague most writers all their lives—pretty well under control by the age of five.

  He developed headaches. My parents were afraid he had
some sort of physical problem—a brain-tumor, perhaps—and took him to a doctor who examined him carefully, listened to him even more carefully, and then told my parents there was nothing wrong with Bobby except stress: he was in a state of extreme frustration because his writing-hand would not work as well as his brain.

  "You got a kid trying to pass a mental kidney stone," the doctor said. "I could prescribe something for his headaches, but I think the drug he really needs is a typewriter." So Mom and Dad gave Bobby an IBM. A year later they gave him a Commodore 64 with WordStar for Christmas and Bobby's headaches stopped. Before going on to other matters, I only want to add that he believed for the next three years or so that it was Santa Claus who had left that word-cruncher under our tree. Now that I think of it, that was another place where I beat Bobby: I Santa-trained earlier, too.

  There's so much I could tell you about those early days, and I suppose I'll have to tell you a little, but I'll have to go fast and make it brief. The deadline. Ah, the deadline. I once read a very funny piece called "The Essential Gone with the Wind" that went something like this:

  "'A war?' laughed Scarlett. 'Oh, fiddle-de-dee!'

  "Boom! Ashley went to war! Atlanta burned! Rhett walked in and then walked out!

  "'Fiddle-de-dee,' said Scarlett through her tears, 'I will think about it tomorrow, for tomorrow is another day.'"

  I laughed heartily over that when I read it; now that I'm faced with doing something similar, it doesn't seem quite so funny. But here goes:

  "A child with an IQ immeasurable by any existing test?" smiled India Fornoy to her devoted husband, Richard. "Fiddle-de-dee! We'll provide an atmosphere where his intellect—not to mention that of his not-exactly-stupid older brother—can grow. And we'll raise them as the normal all-American boys they by gosh are!"