Wastelands 2: More Stories of the Apocalypse Read online

  Also available from John Joseph Adams and Titan Books:

  Dead Man’s Hand: An Anthology of the Weird West

  Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Also by John Joseph Adams

  Title Page

  Introduction

  John Joseph Adams

  The Tamarisk Hunter

  Paolo Bacigalupi

  Deep Blood Kettle

  Hugh Howey

  Animal Husbandry

  Seanan McGuire

  “…for a single yesterday”

  George R. R. Martin

  Chislehurst Messiah

  Lauren Beukes

  Colliding Branes

  Rudy Rucker & Bruce Sterling

  Ellie

  Jack McDevitt

  Foundation

  Ann Aguirre

  Beat Me Daddy (Eight to the Bar)

  Cory Doctorow

  A Beginner’s Guide to Survival Before, During, and After the Apocalypse

  Christopher Barzak

  Wondrous Days

  Genevieve Valentine

  Dreams in Dust

  D. Thomas Minton

  By Fools Like Me

  Nancy Kress

  Jimmy’s Roadside Café

  Ramsey Shehadeh

  The Elephants of Poznan

  Orson Scott Card

  The Postman

  David Brin

  When We Went To See the End of the World

  Robert Silverberg

  The Revelation of Morgan Stern

  Christie Yant

  Final Exam

  Megan Arkenberg

  A Flock of Birds

  James Van Pelt

  Patient Zero

  Tananarive Due

  Soulless in His Sight

  Milo James Fowler

  Outer Rims

  Toiya Kristen Finley

  Advertising at the End of the World

  Keffy R. M. Kehrli

  How the World Became Quiet: A Post-Human Creation Myth

  Rachel Swirsky

  Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man’s Back

  Joe R. Lansdale

  After the Apocalypse

  Maureen F. McHugh

  The Traditional

  Maria Dahvana Headley

  Monstro

  Junot Díaz

  Biographical Fragments of the Life of Julian Prince

  Jake Kerr

  Acknowledgements

  About the Contributors

  About the Editor

  Also Available from Titan Books

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  JOHN JOSEPH ADAMS

  It’s hard to imagine following up something like the end of the world.

  But fans of post-apocalyptic fiction know that end-of-the-world stories aren’t really about the end—they’re about new beginnings and the end of the world as we know it. Our stories, our lives, our world continues on, even if the trappings change and the facade of civilization falls by the wayside. As the title of George R. Stewart’s masterpiece reminds us: the Earth abides.

  And as the Earth abides, so does our interest in post-apocalyptic fiction. The genre has continued to flourish in the years since the original Wastelands (hereinafter referred to as “Volume One”) was published, and when I began reading for the new anthology I discovered a wealth of material to choose from. Yet it was very difficult to even contemplate following up a book like Volume One, which, to my astonishment, was widely hailed as not only the definitive post-apocalyptic anthology but as one of the finest anthologies of any kind. And, although it was my first anthology, it contained works by the likes of Stephen King, George R. R. Martin, Orson Scott Card, Octavia E. Butler, and other legendary figures of the SF/fantasy field. When you come out of the gates with that kind of success, it’s daunting to say the least to contemplate a follow-up.

  But my love for post-apocalyptic fiction has not waned since editing Volume One, and it’s clear the genre is still at the forefront of many authors’ minds as well. Five of the stories included here are from the 20th Century, but the remaining twenty-five were all published from the year 2000 onward, and eighteen of those were originally published in the years since Volume One came out. That seems to indicate that the boom in post-apocalyptic fiction that I detected back when I decided to put Volume One together is still ongoing, and writers and readers now are seemingly as fascinated with the apocalypse as we were back in the genre’s heyday in the 1950s. Or, in other words, it’s certainly not the end of the world for the end-of-the-world genre.

  In Volume One’s introduction (which you can find online at johnjosephadams.com/wastelands), I traced the rise and resurgence of post-apocalyptic fiction, citing the dawn of the Atomic Age as the former, and 9/11 as the latter. I also speculated at length about why we’re so fascinated by the end of the world. There, I said, “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.” But it’s since occurred to me that many of us have a strong attraction to things that scare us; there wouldn’t be a horror genre otherwise. And in many ways, post-apocalyptic fiction is the scariest kind of fiction there is, because the more plausible a horrific story is, the scarier it is. Stories about demons and supernatural monsters can be entertaining, but deep down I don’t find them particularly scary, because I’m pretty certain those things don’t—and never will—exist.

  The end of the world, however? That could happen.

  Will we ever sate our appetite for stories about the end? It’s hard to imagine that we will. At least not until the end actually comes…

  THE TAMARISK HUNTER

  PAOLO BACIGALUPI

  A big tamarisk can suck 73,000 gallons of river water a year. For $2.88 a day, plus water bounty, Lolo rips tamarisk all winter long.

  Ten years ago, it was a good living. Back then, tamarisk shouldered up against every riverbank in the Colorado River Basin, along with cottonwoods, Russian olives, and elms. Ten years ago, towns like Grand Junction and Moab thought they could still squeeze life from a river.

  Lolo stands on the edge of a canyon, Maggie the camel his only companion. He stares down into the deeps. It’s an hour’s scramble to the bottom. He ties Maggie to a juniper and starts down, boot-skiing a gully. A few blades of green grass sprout neon around him, piercing juniper-tagged snow clods. In the late winter, there is just a beginning surge of water down in the deeps; the ice is off the river edges. Up high, the mountains still wear their ragged snow mantles. Lolo smears through mud and hits a channel of scree, sliding and scattering rocks. His jugs of tamarisk poison gurgle and slosh on his back. His shovel and rockbar snag on occasional junipers as he skids by. It will be a long hike out. But then, that’s what makes this patch so perfect. It’s a long way down, and the riverbanks are largely hidden.

  It’s a living; where other people have dried out and blown away, he has remained: a tamarisk hunter, a water tick, a stubborn bit of weed. Everyone else has been blown off the land as surely as dandelion seeds, set free to fly south or east, or most of all north where watersheds sometimes still run deep and where even if there are no more lush ferns or deep cold fish runs, at least there is still water for people.

  Eventually, Lolo reaches the canyon bottom. Down in the cold shadows, his breath steams.

  He pulls out a digital camera and starts shooting his proof. The Bureau of Reclamation has gotten uptight about proof. They want different angles
on the offending tamarisk, they want each one photographed before and after, the whole process documented, GPS’d, and uploaded directly by the camera. They want it done on-site. And then they still sometimes come out to spot check before they calibrate his headgate for water bounty.

  But all their due diligence can’t protect them from the likes of Lolo. Lolo has found the secret to eternal life as a tamarisk hunter. Unknown to the Interior Department and its BuRec subsidiary, he has been seeding new patches of tamarisk, encouraging vigorous brushy groves in previously cleared areas. He has hauled and planted healthy root balls up and down the river system in strategically hidden and inaccessible corridors, all in a bid for security against the swarms of other tamarisk hunters that scour these same tributaries. Lolo is crafty. Stands like this one, a quarter-mile long and thick with salt-laden tamarisk, are his insurance policy.

  Documentation finished, he unstraps a folding saw, along with his rockbar and shovel, and sets his poison jugs on the dead salt bank. He starts cutting, slicing into the roots of the tamarisk, pausing every thirty seconds to spread Garlon 4 on the cuts, poisoning the tamarisk wounds faster than they can heal. But some of the best tamarisk, the most vigorous, he uproots and sets aside, for later use.

  $2.88 a day, plus water bounty.

  * * *

  It takes Maggie’s rolling bleating camel stride a week to make it back to Lolo’s homestead. They follow the river, occasionally climbing above it onto cold mesas or wandering off into the open desert in a bid to avoid the skeleton sprawl of emptied towns. Guardie choppers buzz up and down the river like swarms of angry yellowjackets, hunting for porto-pumpers and wildcat diversions. They rush overhead in a wash of beaten air and gleaming National Guard logos. Lolo remembers a time when the guardies traded potshots with people down on the riverbanks, tracer-fire and machine-gun chatter echoing in the canyons. He remembers the glorious hiss and arc of a Stinger missile as it flashed across red-rock desert and blue sky and burned a chopper where it hovered.

  But that’s long in the past. Now, guardie patrols skim up the river unmolested.

  Lolo tops another mesa and stares down at the familiar landscape of an eviscerated town, its curving streets and subdivision cul-de-sacs all sitting silent in the sun. At the very edge of the empty town, one-acre ranchettes and snazzy five-thousand-square-foot houses with dead-stick trees and dust-hill landscaping fringe a brown tumbleweed golf course. The sandtraps don’t even show anymore.

  When California put its first calls on the river, no one really worried. A couple towns went begging for water. Some idiot newcomers with bad water rights stopped grazing their horses, and that was it. A few years later, people started showering real fast. And a few after that, they showered once a week. And then people started using the buckets. By then, everyone had stopped joking about how “hot” it was. It didn’t really matter how “hot” it was. The problem wasn’t lack of water or an excess of heat, not really. The problem was that 4.4 million acre-feet of water were supposed to go down the river to California. There was water; they just couldn’t touch it.

  They were supposed to stand there like dumb monkeys and watch it flow on by.

  “Lolo?”

  The voice catches him by surprise. Maggie startles and groans and lunges for the mesa edge before Lolo can rein her around. The camel’s great padded feet scuffle dust and Lolo flails for his shotgun where it nestles in a scabbard at the camel’s side. He forces Maggie to turn, shotgun half-drawn, holding barely to his seat and swearing.

  A familiar face, tucked amongst juniper tangle.

  “Goddamnit!” Lolo lets the shotgun drop back into its scabbard. “Jesus Christ, Travis. You scared the hell out of me.”

  Travis grins. He emerges from amongst the junipers’ silver bark rags, one hand on his gray fedora, the other on the reins as he guides his mule out of the trees. “Surprised?”

  “I could’ve shot you!”

  “Don’t be so jittery. There’s no one out here ’cept us water ticks.”

  “That’s what I thought the last time I went shopping down there. I had a whole set of new dishes for Annie and I broke them all when I ran into an ultralight parked right in the middle of the main drag.”

  “Meth flyers?”

  “Beats the hell out of me. I didn’t stick around to ask.”

  “Shit. I’ll bet they were as surprised as you were.”

  “They almost killed me.”

  “I guess they didn’t.”

  Lolo shakes his head and swears again, this time without anger. Despite the ambush, he’s happy to run into Travis. It’s lonely country, and Lolo’s been out long enough to notice the silence of talking to Maggie. They trade ritual sips of water from their canteens and make camp together. They swap stories about BuRec and avoid discussing where they’ve been ripping tamarisk and enjoy the view of the empty town far below, with its serpentine streets and quiet houses and shining untouched river.

  It isn’t until the sun is setting and they’ve finished roasting a magpie that Lolo finally asks the question that’s been on his mind ever since Travis’s sun-baked face came out of the tangle. It goes against etiquette, but he can’t help himself. He picks magpie out of his teeth and says, “I thought you were working downriver.”

  Travis glances sidelong at Lolo and in that one suspicious, uncertain look, Lolo sees that Travis has hit a lean patch. He’s not smart like Lolo. He hasn’t been reseeding. He’s got no insurance. He hasn’t been thinking ahead about all the competition, and what the tamarisk endgame looks like, and now he’s feeling the pinch. Lolo feels a twinge of pity. He likes Travis. A part of him wants to tell Travis the secret, but he stifles the urge. The stakes are too high. Water crimes are serious now, so serious Lolo hasn’t even told his wife, Annie, for fear of what she’ll say. Like all of the most shameful crimes, water theft is a private business, and at the scale Lolo works, forced labor on the Straw is the best punishment he can hope for.

  Travis gets his hackles down over Lolo’s invasion of his privacy and says, “I had a couple cows I was running up here, but I lost ’em. I think something got ’em.”

  “Long way to graze cows.”

  “Yeah, well, down my way even the sagebrush is dead. Big Daddy Drought’s doing a real number on my patch.” He pinches his lip, thoughtful. “Wish I could find those cows.”

  “They probably went down to the river.”

  Travis sighs. “Then the guardies probably got ’em.”

  “Probably shot ’em from a chopper and roasted ’em.”

  “Californians.”

  They both spit at the word. The sun continues to sink. Shadows fall across the town’s silent structures. The rooftops gleam red, a ruby cluster decorating the blue river necklace.

  “You think there’s any stands worth pulling down there?” Travis asks.

  “You can go down and look. But I think I got it all last year. And someone had already been through before me, so I doubt much is coming up.”

  “Shit. Well, maybe I’ll go shopping. Might as well get something out of this trip.”

  “There sure isn’t anyone to stop you.”

  As if to emphasize the fact, the thud-thwap of a guardie chopper breaks the evening silence. The black-fly dot of its movement barely shows against the darkening sky. Soon it’s out of sight and cricket chirps swallow the last evidence of its passing.

  Travis laughs. “Remember when the guardies said they’d keep out looters? I saw them on TV with all their choppers and Humvees and them all saying they were going to protect everything until the situation improved.” He laughs again. “You remember that? All of them driving up and down the streets?”

  “I remember.”

  “Sometimes I wonder if we shouldn’t have fought them more.”

  “Annie was in Lake Havasu City when they fought there. You saw what happened.” Lolo shivers. “Anyway, there’s not much to fight for once they blow up your water treatment plant. If nothing’s coming out of your fauce
t, you might as well move on.”

  “Yeah, well, sometimes I think you still got to fight. Even if it’s just for pride.” Travis gestures at the town below, a shadow movement. “I remember when all that land down there was selling like hotcakes and they were building shit as fast as they could ship in the lumber. Shopping malls and parking lots and subdivisions, anywhere they could scrape a flat spot.”

  “We weren’t calling it Big Daddy Drought, back then.”

  “Forty-five thousand people. And none of us had a clue. And I was a real estate agent.” Travis laughs, a self-mocking sound that ends quickly. It sounds too much like self-pity for Lolo’s taste. They’re quiet again, looking down at the town wreckage.

  “I think I might be heading north,” Travis says finally.

  Lolo glances over, surprised. Again he has the urge to let Travis in on his secret, but he stifles it. “And do what?”

  “Pick fruit, maybe. Maybe something else. Anyway, there’s water up there.”

  Lolo points down at the river. “There’s water.”

  “Not for us.” Travis pauses. “I got to level with you, Lolo. I went down to the Straw.”

  For a second, Lolo is confused by the non sequitur. The statement is too outrageous. And yet Travis’s face is serious. “The Straw? No kidding? All the way there?”

  “All the way there.” He shrugs defensively. “I wasn’t finding any tamarisk, anyway. And it didn’t actually take that long. It’s a lot closer than it used to be. A week out to the train tracks, and then I hopped a coal train, and rode it right to the interstate, and then I hitched.”

  “What’s it like out there?”

  “Empty. A trucker told me that California and the Interior Department drew up all these plans to decide which cities they’d turn off when.” He looks at Lolo significantly. “That was after Lake Havasu. They figured out they had to do it slow. They worked out some kind of formula: how many cities, how many people they could evaporate at a time without making too much unrest. Got advice from the Chinese, from when they were shutting down their old communist industries. Anyway, it looks like they’re pretty much done with it. There’s nothing moving out there except highway trucks and coal trains and a couple truck stops.”