The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF - Mike Ashley [117]
Then I opened my eyes on darkness, wondering what time it was, wondering how long I'd been asleep. I was alone in front, sprawled in the driver's seat, feet propped up on the passenger's side, looking out the window. I could see the starry sky, no recognizable constellations. The seat was shaking gently to the soft throb of the idling diesel.
Be a pisser if it stalled while we were sleeping, huh? Never get the fucker started again in this cold. Connie was stretched out on the middle bench seat, gasping softly in her sleep, one arm outflung, resting across my right thigh.
Paul and Julia must be crammed together in back. If you could, Paulie, would you get her out of the suit for one last little fuck? Or is that me I'm thinking about?
Somebody was sniffling a bit. Not Julia.
Watching the stars, I realized I could see them slowly edge east to west. As the world turns? Still got that, at least.
What the fuck are we going to do?
Once the diesel runs out and the engines stop, maybe a week or ten days from now, we'll last another six or seven hours on the suit batteries, then we freeze to death.
That's all, folks?
Or we go outside, losing a cabin full of air, try to dig the fucker loose? Maybe it falls on us, or explodes or something? What if the tracks are broken? What then? What if we do break it loose? Can we drive it out of here? There's a winch under the front bumper. Maybe ...
Maybe hell.
Never-say-die bullshit.
Where the hell's Superman when you fucking need him?
Maybe that other thought was the right idea.
I watched the stars in their slow, stately dance, and, after a bit, wondered why they weren't all going at the same speed, then wondering if they shouldn't be going in the same direction. That one star right there, a little brighter than the others, seeming to detach itself from the field and go diagonal...
"Paulie?"
Sniffle. "Paul. Wake up."
"What the fuck do you want?"
Bitter. Angry. Full of... everything.
Everything that ever went wrong between us.
I said, "There's not enough ambient light to reflect off a big satellite now, is there?"
The scorn was, as they say, palpable. "Of course not."
I pointed out the window, and said, "Then what the fuck is that?"
The spaceship turned out to be from Colorado, investigating our mysterious infrared source, and they were impressed as hell we'd built ourselves a mooncar.
Well. You know the rest. The flight to the National Redoubt, Connie gone, then blessed Maryanne, the Expedition to the Sun, the ... right. The End.
Maryanne kept craning her neck as we pushed our way through the tall saw-grass, trying to watch the tribe of scared-looking chimps that'd been paralleling our track for the last few days, shading her eyes and standing on tiptoe. There were big, grizzled males, females with babies, cute as hell. Watching us, staying close, but not too close.
Maryanne whispered, "What do you suppose they want?"
I hefted one of the sharpened, fire-hardened sticks we were using for spears, and said, "They probably understand the sabertooth cats are scared of us."
It'd been about a month since our little tribe had departed the top of the hill and started working its way downslope, deeper into the Earth Bubble valley, a month we'd counted by slashes Millikan made on a stick with his first flint blade. God damn clever little son of a bitch. But he got me thinking about the things I knew too. Which got us all started thinking about what we wanted to do.
Connie hadn't turned up in that month, nor Lara, nor anybody else, fear about that meeting gradually ebbing away. But still, I wondered. If I found her, would Lara still be thirty years old? Really?
All I have left of her is hazy memories of wonderful old fucks. Were they so great? The only way I'll ever know is if she turns up and ...
Jonas, taking point, held