Aftermath

7

Art woke to the faint sound of voices. It felt early, but when he opened his eyes the ceiling and walls of the room were strangely bright. He rolled out of bed, tested his arthritic knee gingerly before putting his weight on it, and limped over to the window.

Snow. Thick, large-flaked snow, falling steadily and already deep on the ground. No wonder everything was so bright.

What was the date? Almost the end of March. It was unusual in this area to have snow so late in the year, but not unheard of. Ten years ago snow had fallen in April. But not snow like this. Not a dense whiteout that reduced visibility to forty or fifty yards, covering plants that had been seduced by early warmth to a late spring stage of growth. If this year’s harvest had been a question mark before, it was now a guaranteed disaster.

Art went across to the toilet and used it, but he did not flush it. He closed the lid and opened the tank, leaned over, and sniffed. It smelled fresh. He rubbed cold water on his face, dried himself using the sleeve of his sweater, and closed the tank.

He could no longer hear the voices. Still in his stockinged feet, he picked up his waterproof bag, opened the door, and headed downstairs. The person he would most like to have seen was Morgan Davis. Morgan was only in his early forties but he had lost all his hair before Art met him, either naturally or as a by-product of some dubious treatment preceding the telomod therapy. His smooth, well-shaped skull and even features combined with a thoughtful way of speaking and an urbane manner to suggest a distinguished Chinese elder. Everyone in the treatment group recognized his authority. If Morgan were here, Art would certainly be glad to hand over his own role in major decision making.

No such luck. Morgan was far-off in Arizona. The only people in the dining room were Dana — fresh-faced and lively, her light brown hair pulled back from her face — and Seth Parsigian.

At every previous meeting of the treatment group — which Parsigian insisted on calling the Lazarus Club — Seth had been groomed and coiffured and impeccably outfitted in expensive business suits. Now, dressed in dark gray pants and a slick black overcoat three sizes too big, he squatted over a tiny gas stove. His black hair had been trimmed to an uneven stubble, marked and furrowed by the scars of past surgery, and now it was wet with flakes of melting snow. Somehow, amid all the rain of the past weeks, Seth had acquired a heavy tan. He glanced up at Art with alert, dark brown eyes and grinned.

“Hey there, big boy. Slept well, eh? You must have a real clear conscience.”

The old incongruity, Middle Eastern looks and polished manner combined with a West Virginia good-old-boy accent, had vanished. Art felt that he was seeing Seth clearly for the first time. Here was the real man, poised, primitive, and confident, crouched over a pan of snow melt.

“No one else made it?” Art spoke to Dana, but it was Seth who answered.

“Anybody with any sense will be holed up someplace, ’til it’s over. It’s real rough out there.”

“The weather?” Art recalled the agonized scream in the night.

“That, too.” Seth jiggled the pan impatiently. “Come on, you. Boil.”

“You brought the stove with you?” Art put down his bag, opened it, and felt around inside.

“Let’s just say, I came across it. I knew from bein’ here yesterday there was plenty of propane, a couple of five-hundred-gallon tanks of it down in the basement. Too heavy to haul out, I guess, without equipment.”

Art, with a mixture of satisfaction and regret, pulled the jar of coffee crystals from his bag and handed it to Dana. Seth saw it, and his eyes gleamed.

“Now we’re smokin’. Where’d you scrounge that, boy? I’ve not smelled coffee for a week.”

“Let’s just say, I came across it. Here’s sugar, too.” Art felt an odd reluctance to mention to Seth his hideaway up on Catoctin Mountain. Yet he knew he would have no hesitation in giving details of the place to Dana, or even in taking her there. “What were you going to do with the hot water?”

“Boil rice. I got me a fifty-pound bag. White rice, I’m afraid.” Teeth gleamed in the dark face. “Not nutritionally balanced, you know. Maybe we’ll all get sick.”

“Sick again,” Dana said. She put the jar of coffee crystals down on the floor, straightened up, and began to pace around the ruins of the dining room. “Not if I have anything to do with it. I’ve been too close to death once. I don’t care what you two do, but I’m heading for the Institute. Snow or no snow, I have to find out what our chances are.”

Seth stared up at her from where he squatted. “Hey, girl, easy. There’s a whole lotta day left yet.”

Art stood up and went over to Dana. “Of course we’re going to the Institute,” he said gently. “We didn’t come all this way not to go. But you need to travel on a full stomach. First you have something to eat and drink.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“I believe you. Before I entered the telomod program, my old doctors tried multiple drug antimetabolite chemotherapy. Did they do the same to you?”

“Sure they did. It didn’t work, though — nothing worked. I tried the telomod as a last resort.”

“Same with all of us. Right, Seth?”

“Too damn right.”

“So, Dana, do you remember what the chemo did to you?”

“Of course I remember. I’ll never forget. It didn’t help with the cancer, but it stripped the lining of my mouth and throat and esophagus. They were raw. I couldn’t swallow.”

“You couldn’t eat. So what did you do?”

“You know what I did. The same as you did, the same as we all did. I ate. I cried with every swallow. It took me two hours to force down a milk shake. But I ate. I knew I’d die if I didn’t.”

She walked back to where Seth was still sitting patiently by the stove. He had made a pan of coffee, and another pan was heating more water. “Here. You’ll need this with the rice.” She handed over a blue container of salt. “You’re right, Art, of course you are. But we’re so close. The Institute is less than a mile away. I thought of going there last night, but it was dark by the time I arrived and it was raining hard.”

“Raining, then snowing,” Seth said.

Art sat down on the floor opposite Seth, stretching his stiff leg out in front of him. “You went there, didn’t you?”

Dark eyes gleamed. “Now why’d you think a thing like that?”

“If you hadn’t, you’d have an itch inside worse than ours. You’d be keener than Dana to get out of here and over there.”

“That easy to read, am I? Well, maybe I’ll surprise you yet.” Seth dumped a measuring cup of rice into boiling water and threw a pinch of salt in after it. “But you’re quite right. I went over to the Institute late last night.”

Art sipped sweetened black coffee. He felt his whole body beginning to wake up. “What did you find?”

“Nothing worth mentionin’ — or I’d have mentioned it already. The Institute was the way it ought to be at night. Locked. I tried the doors. Dead bolts. I tried the bells, and they didn’t work. No surprise, the automatic guards and security systems aren’t functioning. I didn’t try shouting, and I won’t try shouting today. Were you thinkin’ of shouting?”

Art shook his head. “No way.”

“So why not?”

“Just listen. It’s completely quiet outside. We’re strangers here, but it shouldn’t be this quiet without a good reason. Where are the people, and what are they doing?”

Seth raised himself from his crouched position, walking about the room to stretch his legs and leaving Art and Dana to make sure that the cooking rice did not boil over. “Where are the people, eh? You been livin’ in the city the past week and a half?”

“No. Far from it.” Again, Art felt a reluctance to give details to Seth.

“Well, if you had you’d be able to take a good shot at answerin’ your own question. Maybe you can anyway.”

Art said nothing.

Seth was over by a window, staring out at snow that fell as heavily as ever. After a moment he went on, “I’m in the shipping business — or I guess I should say I used to be. ’Til eleven days ago Supernova Alpha was givin’ us wild weather, but nothin’ that the system couldn’t handle. Shipments from South America and South Africa were spotty an’ gettin’ worse, but the freight monorails were bringing supplies in regular from anywhere on this continent. Some folk were even sayin’ it was no bad thing if food stockpiles were comin’ down. The recom ag protocols can grow strawberries on a salt heap, so they say, and we’ve had gluts an’ more and more long-term storage for the past decade. Be nice to pull ’em down a bit.

“Then, twelve days ago, March 14, Day of Infamy ’cept we had nobody to blame an’ flame, Nature stopped playing around an’ crapped all over us.

“When the gamma burst hit an’ all the microchips went belly-up” — it was Art’s first confirmation that what he had told Ed O’Donnell and Joe Vanetti was correct — “I knew we were in trouble, but I don’t think anybody had any idea how much. I sure didn’t. I mean, power went out, but we’ve had outages before. The Antifed blowout in ’16 shut the whole damn grid down for eight days, how could anything be worse than that? Next day, though, I couldn’t get a telcom working, or a van, or a credit machine. There were a dozen big holes around the city, where heavy lifters just dropped out of the sky. Nobody knew what the government was doing — if it still existed. I chose my place, stockpiled all I could, and went to ground. I might be there still, if Dana hadn’t called. Though I have to say, I was gettin’ awful itchy to find out what was happenin’ at the Institute.” Seth pulled back his sleeve to reveal three spots of light blue. “There’s the reminder, my treatment session comin’ up in six weeks — not that I need reminding, any more than you do. That’s why we’re here. It’s why we’re even alive, when logically we ought to be dead. Lazarus Club members might not like each other much” — Seth winked at Art, as though he knew more than he was saying — “but we can rely on each other for one thing: a strong interest in living.

“But what about the rest of the people? I don’t mean the whole continent. I don’t give a damn about that. I mean this city and the area around it. There’s fifty million people here — no, forget that. Let’s say, twelve days ago there were fifty million. It’s been twelve days now without power. Twelve days since water came out of the faucets, twelve days since food supplies came in from outside, twelve days since a news broadcast system existed, twelve days since money or government could do anything for you.”

“It takes longer than twelve days—” Dana began. But she stopped, and turned her head back down to the little stove.

“Longer than that, for people to die of starvation?” Seth walked to where Art had snagged a few grains of rice with his knife and was tasting them to see if they were cooked. “Yeah. It does. But it only took three or four days for some people to figure out that no one had any idea how long the problem would go on — we still have no idea, least, I don’t. An’ I live — lived — half a mile from the White House. Wouldn’t you think it ought to be safe there, if anywhere could be? But by the sixth day I decided to get out. Too many corpses for my taste. An’ I could hear gunfire around the clock. Most guns have smart circuits for automatic aiming and target motion compensation, so they won’t work anymore. My guess was, for every shot I heard there must have been fifty people stickin’ each other with knives or bangin’ away with clubs and axes.”

“So how did you get out of there?” Dana asked. “I mean, if it was so dangerous.”

Seth grinned at her. “I’m not always the high-class gent you see today. I had to do a little slice-and-dice of my own before I was out of the city. No big deal, nothin’ to get excited about. But I managed. That rice cooked yet?”

Art nodded to Dana. She began loading it onto flat pieces of hardboard made by breaking a ruined painting into three parts. The kitchens had been emptied of all the plates, and the hardboard fragments were her best approximation. The original picture had showed a group of pirates burying treasure. Art, turning his piece over before Dana loaded it, found he was looking at a bearded bare-chested man, a sandy strip of beach, and the prow and foredeck of a sailing ship in the background.

“So what’s your answer?” he asked. “Where are the people?”

Seth took a load of rice and went back to the window. “What do you think, maestro? I already said my piece.”

“I’ve not been close to things, the way you have, but nothing you’ve said surprises me. A lot of people are dead, maybe thousands, and everyone else is going to lie low until the government gets hold of things again, or folks become so starved and desperate that they think they have nothing to lose.”

“Not far off.” Seth was eating rapidly, with no sign of reduced appetite at the thought of heaps of corpses within twenty miles. “But you’re too optimistic. I’d say you got a few thousand dead where there’s big food warehouses and the pressures are less. In the inner cities, though, it’s more than that by now. And the starvation and disease are just startin’, not to mention rats and flies and “polluted water and no food. Things are going to get a lot worse before they get better.”

Art glanced across at Dana, wondering how all this talk of death was affecting her. She was nodding thoughtfully and eating as heartily as Seth. When it came to the crunch, she in her own way was as tough as anybody.

“From what I saw coming over here,” she said, “you might both be optimistic. I must say, I didn’t waste time stopping to look — the first sign of trouble, I was up to seventy miles an hour and long gone — but I saw plenty of dead bodies. And I passed through whole subsections in the suburbs where the smell was just awful. I only saw one cleanup group, and they were pulling a wheeled trailer by hand.”

“Not today, though.” Seth laid his emptied makeshift plate on the broad windowsill. “This snow is the best thing that could have happened to us. Nobody’11 be outside who doesn’t have to be. How long ’til you’re ready to leave? We don’t know how long it’s goin’ to stay this way, might as well take advantage.”

“Two minutes.” Art swallowed a final mouthful of rice, washed it down with coffee, and followed Dana out of the dining room.

“I don’t know how you felt,” he said softly, when Seth was safely out of hearing, “but I think he may have more to do with the number of dead bodies back in the city than he wants to admit.”

She turned to him and dropped her voice. “I’d bet on it. There’s something I ought to have told you last night, but I didn’t because we’ve never talked about other group members before. Did you know that Seth was once put on trial for murder?”

“He told you that?”

“No, and I never asked him. When I first met him I remembered reading about it. He was accused of blowing up three of his partners on a boat off Cape May. They were planning to push him out of their business.”

“He was acquitted; he must have been.”

“Right. Good lawyer, tainted evidence. But that doesn’t mean he was innocent.”

“I’m sure he wasn’t. You heard that ’a little slice-and-dice.’ Did you see the gun in his belt when he stood up and his coat was open? I’ve never seen him wearing clothes before that looked anything like that — and his coat’s too big for him.”

Dana, who had reached the top of the stairs, turned to look down on Art. “Honey, you know my views on Seth. I’m not his number one fan, and I’ll take you over him any day of the week. But last night he’s not the one who arrived wearing somebody else’s rubber boots. And I let you into my bedroom.”

“That’s different. Those boots were loaned to me by Joe Vanetti.” But her point was valid. Seth might have friends, too, though he had the guarded, watchful eyes of a natural loner.

Dana, before she went into her room, added to that idea. “Forgetting the gun and knife and coat,” she said, “I’ll tell you one thing about Seth. I’ve never seen him look as much at ease anywhere as he does here and now. He seems right for this situation. He’s at home. That’s scary, but it may be just what we are going to need.”

As Art went into his own room he wondered if he would be able to protect Dana from Seth if the need arose. He doubted it. He might be ruthless enough — he believed he could be — but Seth was better armed, younger, and fitter. Art pulled on the outsized boots. More agile, too. Could you walk through snow in these damned things, or would it all be hopeless floundering?

He donned the purple raincoat and the blue baseball cap, but drew the line at tying the mohair scarf over it. Instead he knotted it around his neck under his coat. The handgun went into the raincoat pocket, baggy and shapeless enough that one more bulge made little difference.

By comparison, Dana was a fashion plate. She wore a form-fitting jacket and pants of slick dark blue kevlon, black knee-high boots, and a jaunty black cap with built-in earmuffs. Art met her at the top of the stairs. He looked at her appreciatively but dubiously, until she said, “Fully thermal, though they don’t look it. Don’t worry, Grimaldi, I’ll be a lot more comfortable than you will.”

Her words were reassuring. Seth Parsigian’s expression, when they joined him in the dining room, was not. Art wondered what Seth would have done had he not been there. And then he knew. Until they had been to the Institute, and determined the status of the telomod treatment program, nothing would sway Seth — or Art himself — from pursuit of the main purpose.

At stake was something more important than sex. At stake was life and death.