The End Is Now Read online

  Words were nearly useless now, so she didn’t speak right away when she found his camp alongside the elephant ear vendor’s booth. He had laid out a sleeping bag in the shade of the awning promising “Taysteee Treets,” his back supported against the booth. She stood across the fairway by the ring-toss and took him in.

  First surprise: he was wearing a dust mask. A summer look for the fall. Ridiculous.

  The mask was particularly disappointing because it was already hard to make out his face beneath his hair and the dirt. He had light brown skin, she guessed, a dark tangle of thinly textured hair, a half-fed build to match hers. He looked nearly a foot taller, so he would have an advantage if they had to fight. Nayima slipped her hand to the compartment in her backpack she kept in easy reach. She took hold of the gun slowly, but she didn’t pull it out.

  “Guitar’s mine to keep, and nothin’ else is worth taking,” he said. His voice was gravel. “Grab your pick of whatever you find here and move on.”

  “You think I followed you three days to rob you?”

  “I don’t try to guess why.”

  Nayima shook off her light jacket’s hood. She’d shaved her head in Bakersfield so she wouldn’t be such an obvious rape target. Most of her hair was close to her scalp—but she had a woman’s face. She imagined his eyes flickering, just a flash.

  “I’m Nayima,” she said.

  He concentrated on his guitar strings. “Keep your distance.”

  “You’re immune.” Dummy. She didn’t call him names, but it dripped in her voice.

  He stopped playing. “Who says?”

  “You do,” she said. “Because you’re still breathing.”

  He went back to playing, uninterested.

  “Let me guess,” she said. “Everyone in your family got sick and died—including people you saw every day—but you never got even a tummy-ache.”

  “I was careful.”

  “You think you’re still alive because you’re smarter than the rest?”

  “I didn’t say that.” He sounded angry. “But I was very careful.”

  “No touching? No breathing?”

  “Yes. Even learned how to play with these on.” He held up his right hand. She hadn’t seen his thin, dirty gloves at first glance.

  “Your fingertips never brushed a countertop or a window pane or a slip of paper?”

  “Doing my best.”

  “You never once got unlucky.”

  “Until now, I guess,” he said.

  “Bullshit,” she said. Now she felt angry. More hurt, but angry too. She hadn’t realized any stranger still held the power to hurt her feelings, or that any feelings were still so raw. “You’re living scared. You’re like one of those Japanese soldiers in World War II who didn’t know the war was over.”

  “You think it’s all over. In less than a year.”

  “Might as well be. Look how fast the UK went down.”

  His eyes dropped away. Plenty had happened since, but London had been the first proof that China’s Seventy-Two Hour Virus was waging a world war instead of only a genocide. Cases hadn’t appeared in the U.S. until a full two days after London burned—those last two days of worry over the problems that seemed far away, people that were none of their business. The televisions had still been working, so they had all heard the news unfolding. An entire tribe at the fire, just before the rains.

  “What have you seen?” Finally, he wasn’t trying to push her away.

  “I can only report on Southern and Central California. Almost everybody’s gone. The rest of us, we’re spread out. You’re the only breather I’ve seen in two months. That’s why it’s time for us to stop hiding and start finding each other.”

  “‘Us?’” he repeated, hitched brow incredulous.

  “NIs,” she said. “Naturally Immunes. One in ten thousand, but that’s a guess.”

  “Jesus.” A worthy response, but Nayima didn’t like the hard turn of his voice.

  “Yes.” She realized she didn’t sound sad enough. He might not understand how sadness made her legs collapse, made it hard to breathe. She tried harder. “It’s terrible.”

  “Not that—you.” He sang the rest. “Welcome, one and all, to the new super race . . .”

  Song as mockery, especially in his soulful, road-toughened tenor, hurt more than a physical blow. Nayima’s anger roiled from the memory, the rivulets of poisoned saliva running down her cheeks from hateful strangers making a last wish. “They spit in my face, whenever they could. They tried to take me with them—yet here I stand. You can stop being a slave to that filthy paper you’re wearing, giving yourself rashes. We’re immune. Congratulations.”

  “Swell,” he said. “I don’t suppose you can back any of that up with lab tests? Studies?”

  “We will one day,” she said. “But so far it’s you, and me, and some cop I saw high-tailing out of Bakersfield who should not have still been breathing. Believe me when I tell you: this bad-boy virus takes everybody, eventually. Except NIs.”

  “What if I just left a bunker? A treehouse? A cave?”

  “Wouldn’t matter. You’ve been out now. Something you touched. It lives on glass for thirty days, maybe forty-five. That was what the lab people in China said, when they finally started talking. Immunity—that’s not a theory. There were always people who didn’t get it when they should’ve dropped. Doctors. Old People.”

  “People who were careful,” he said.

  “This isn’t survival of the smartest,” she said. “It’s dumb luck. In our genes.”

  “So, basically, Madame Curie,” he said, drawing out his words, “you don’t know shit.”

  Arrogant. Rude. Condescending. He was a disappointment after three days’ walk, no question about it. But that was to be expected, Nayima reminded herself. She went on patiently. “The next one we find, we’ll ask what they know. That’s how we’ll learn. Get a handle on the numbers. Start with villages again. I like the Central Valley. Good farmland. We just have to be sure of a steady water supply.” It was a relief to let her thoughts out for air.

  He laughed. “Whoa, sister. Don’t start picking out real estate. You and me ain’t a village. I’ll shoot you if you come within twenty yards.”

  So—he was armed. Of course. His gun didn’t show, but she couldn’t see his left hand, suddenly hidden beneath a fold in his sleeping bag. He had been waiting for her.

  “Oh,” she said. “This again.”

  “Yeah—this,” he said. “This is called common sense. Go on about your business. You can spend the night here, but I want you gone by morning. This is mine.”

  “Rescue’s coming?”

  He coughed a shallow, thirsty cough—not the rattling cough of the plague. “I’m not here for rescue. Didn’t know a thing about that.”

  “I have water,” she said. “I bet there’s more in the vendor booths.” Let him remember what it felt like to be fussed over. Let him see caring in her eyes.

  His chuckle turned into another cough. “Yeah, no thanks. Got my own.”

  “If you didn’t come here to get rescued, then why? Jonesing for hot dog buns?”

  He moved his left hand away from his gun and back to his guitar strings. He plinked.

  “My family used to come,” he said. “Compete in 4-H. Eat fried dough ’til we puked. Ride those cheap-ass rides. This area’s real close-knit, so you’d see everybody like a backyard party. That’s all I wanted—to be somewhere I knew. Somewhere I would remember.”

  The wind shifted. Could be worse, but the dead were in the breeze.

  “Smells like their plan didn’t work out,” Nayima said.

  “Unless it did.” He shrugged. “You need to leave me alone now.”

  Coming as it did at the end of the living portrait he’d just painted, the theft of his company burned a hole in her. She needed him already. Father, son, brother, lover, she didn’t care which. She didn’t want to be without him. Couldn’t be without him, maybe.

  His silence turne
d the fairgrounds gloomy again. This smell was the reason she preferred the open road, for now.

  “At least tell me your name,” she said. Her voice quavered.

  But he only played his fantasy of bright, spinning lights.

  • • • •

  With only two hours left before dark, Nayima remembered her situation. She was down to her last two bottles of water—so there was that. She noted every hose and spigot, mapping the grounds in her mind. Even with the water turned off, sometimes the reserves weren’t dry.

  Nayima went to search for a car first, since that would decide what else she needed. She didn’t break into cars with locked doors during her first sweep. She decided she would only break a window if she saw a key. Glass was unpredictable, and her life was too fragile for everyday infections. The first vehicles she found with keys—the first engines she heard turn—had less than an eighth of a tank. Not enough.

  Then she saw the PT Cruiser parked at B-7. Berry purple. The cream-colored one she’d driven in college at Spelman had been reincarnated in her favorite color, calling to her. Unlocked door. No stench inside. Half a bottle of water waiting in the beverage cup, nearly hot as steam from a day in the sun. No keys in the ignition, but they were tucked in the passenger visor, ready to be found. The engine choked complaints about long neglect, but finally hummed to life. And the gas tank, except by a hair, was full. Nayima felt so dizzy with relief that she sank into the car’s bucket seat and closed her eyes. She thanked the man on the road and his music in the sky.

  She could pack a working car with enough supplies for a month or more. With so much gas, she would easily make it to the closest town. She would stake out the periphery, find an old farmhouse in the new quiet. Clean up its mess. Rest with a proper roof.

  Nayima’s breath caught in her throat like a stone. Her first miracle in the New World.

  The rest of her searching took on a leisurely pace, one step ahead of the setting sun. Nayima avoided the guitar player while she scouted, honoring his perimeter. She drove from the parking lot to the fairway, her slow-moving wheels chewing the gravel. Her driver’s seat was a starship captain’s throne.

  Weather and dust were no match for the colors at the County Line Road Fair. Painted clowns and polar bears and ringmasters in top hats shouted red, blue, and yellow from wildly-named booths promising sweet, salty, and cold. In the colors and the guitar music, ghostly faces emerged, captured at play. The fairground teemed with children. Nayima heard their carefree abandon.

  For an instant, she let in the children’s voices—until her throat burned. The sky seemed ready to fall. She held her breath until her lungs forced her to suck in the air. To breathe in that smell she hated. The false memory was gone.

  As she’d expected, airtight packages of hot dog buns looked fresh enough to last for millennia. She found boxes of protein bars in a vendor’s cabinet and a sack of unshelled peanuts so large she had to carry it over her back like a child. She stuffed the PT Cruiser with a growing bounty of clean blankets, an unopened twenty-four pack of water bottles and her food stash—even a large purple stuffed elephant, just because she could. The PT Cruiser, her womb on wheels, cast a fresh light on the world.

  But there was the question of the passenger seat, still empty. The may, maybe, might part was making her too anxious to enjoy her fair prizes.

  Then Nayima saw the stenciled sign:

  RESCUE CENTER ➩

  The arrow pointed away from the vendors’ booths, toward the Farm World side of the fair, with its phantom Petting Zoo and Pony Rides in dull earth tones; really more an alleyway than a world. On the other end, a long wood-plank horse stall like one she had seen at the Kentucky Derby stood behind an empty corral, doors firmly shut.

  Nayima climbed out of her PT Cruiser, pocketing her precious keys. She followed the dried tracks of man and beast side by side, walking on crushed hay. On the Farm World side, she could barely make out the sounds of the guitar. She felt like she had as a kid swimming in the ocean, testing a greater distance from shore. He might stop playing and disappear. It seemed more and more likely that she had only dreamed him.

  But she had to see the rescue center. Like the driver from the PT Cruiser who had left her water bottle half full, in her imagination Nayima melted into scuffling feet, complaining children, muffled sobs.

  The signs were posted on neatly-spaced posts. Each sign, helpful and profound.

  FAMILIES SHOULD REMAIN TOGETHER

  YOUR CALM HELPS OTHERS STAY CALM

  SMILE—REMOVE YOUR MASK

  The smell worsened with each step toward the looming structure. In front of the closed double doors stood two eight-foot folding tables—somewhat rusted now. Sun-faded pages flapped from a clipboard. Nayima glanced at a page of dull bureaucracy: handwritten names and addresses: Gerald Hillbrandt, Party of 4. As she’d guessed, a few hundred people had come.

  SHOES ➩

  Nayima’s eyes followed the next sign to the southwest corner of the stall, where she found rows of shoes neatly paired against the wall. Mama Bear, Papa Bear, Baby Bear, all side by side. Cheerfully surrendered. Nayima, who wore through shoes quickly, felt a strange combination of exhilaration and sorrow at the sight of the shoes on merry display.

  ENTRANCE ➩

  The next sign pointed around the corner, away from the registration table and cache of shoes. The entrance to the intake center had been in the rear, not the front. The rear double barn doors were closed, but they also had tables on either side, each with a large opaque beverage dispenser half-filled with a dark liquid that could be iced tea.

  A refreshments table, she thought—until she saw the signs.

  MAKE SURE EVERYONE IN YOUR PARTY TAKES A FULL CUP

  PARENTS, WATCH YOUR CHILDREN DRINK BEFORE DRINKING YOURSELF

  MAKE SURE CUPS ARE EMPTIED BEFORE ENTERING

  TRASH HERE, PLEASE

  Beneath the last sign, a large garbage can halfway filled with crumpled plastic cups. Nayima stared. Some cups were marked with lipstick. Several, actually. Had they come to the Rescue Center wearing their Sunday best? Had they dressed up to meet their maker?

  The smell, strongest here, was not fresh; it was the smell of older, dry death. The door waited—locked, perhaps—but Nayima did not want to go inside. Nayima laid her palm across the building’s warm wooden wall, a communion with whoever had left her the PT Cruiser. And the shoes she would choose. What visionary had brought them here in this humane way? Had they known what was waiting? Her questions filled her with acid grief. She was startled by her longing to be with them, calm and resting.

  Just in time, she heard the music.

  • • • •

  “Look what I found,” she said, and held up the sign for him to see.

  “Can’t read that from here.”

  “I can come closer.”

  “Wouldn’t do that.”

  So, nothing had changed. She sighed. “It says—‘Smile, Remove Your Mask.’”

  He laughed. She already loved the sound. And then, the second miracle—he tugged his mask down to his chin. “Hell, since it’s on the sign.” He pointed a finger of judgment at her. “You stay way over there, I’ll keep it off.”

  His voice was clearer. It was almost too dark to see him now, but she guessed he couldn’t be older than fifty, perhaps as young as forty. He was young. Young enough. She wasn’t close enough to see his eyes, but she imagined they were kind.

  “I’m Kyle,” he said.

  She grinned so widely that she might have blinded him.

  “Easy there, sister,” he said. “That’s all you get—my name. And a little guitar, if you can be a quiet audience. Like I said, you’re moving on.”

  “Some of the other cars have gas. But this one has a full tank.”

  “Good for you,” he said, not unkindly.

  “You’ll die here if you’re afraid to touch anything.”

  “My cross to bear.”

  “How will you ever know you’re immune?
” she said.

  He only shrugged. “I expect it’ll become clear.”

  “But I won’t be here. I don’t know where I’ll be. We have to . . .” She almost said We have to fight back and make babies and see if they can survive. “. . . stay together. Help protect each other. We’re herd animals, not solitary. We always have been. We need each other.”

  Too much to comprehend lay in his silence.

  “All you need is a full tank of gas,” he said at last. “All I need is my guitar. Nothing personal—but ever hear of Typhoid Mary?”

  Yes, of course she had heard of Typhoid Mary, had lived under the terror of her legacy. In high school, she’d learned that the poor woman died in isolation after thirty years, with no one allowed close to her. Nayima had decided long ago not to live in fear.

  “We have immunity,” she said. “I won’t get you sick.”

  “That’s a beautiful idea.” His voice softened practically to a song. “You’ll be the one who got away, Nayima.”

  She couldn’t remember the last time anyone had called her by name. And he’d pronounced it as if he’d known her all her life. Not to mention how the word beautiful cascaded up and down her spine. While her hormones raged, she loved him more with each breath. Nayima was tempted to jump into her PT Cruiser and drive away then, the way she had learned to flee all hopeless scenarios.

  Instead, she pulled her car within fifteen yards of him and reclined in the driver’s seat with her door open, watching him play until he stopped. The car’s clock said it was midnight when he finally slept. Hours had melted in his music. She couldn’t sleep, feverish with the thought of losing him.

  At first, she only climbed out of the car to stretch her limbs. She took a tentative step toward him. Then, another. Soon, she was standing over him while he slept.

  She took in his bright guitar strap, woven from a pattern that looked Native American. The wiry hairs on his dark beard where they grew thick to protect his pink lips. The moonlight didn’t show a single gray hair. He could be strong, with better feeding. Beneath his dusty camo jacket, he wore a Pink Floyd concert shirt. He could play her all of the old songs, and she could teach him music he didn’t know. The moonlight cradled his curls across his forehead, gleamed on his exposed nose. He was altogether magnificent.