The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF - Mike Ashley [137]
I'm not holding hands with May anymore but we're standing close. Her grandmother does one slow turn, majestic in its own way. Then her gaze fixes on one of the closest homes - a three-story mansion built to eat sunlight and wind while wasting nothing - and with a voice as clear and certain as any can be, she asks, "Where is this? Where am I?"
I nearly laugh at her harmless confusion.
And May shows me a big wink while calling out, "This is Salvation, Grandma. Just like you described it. And doesn't it look wonderful... ?"
My father was gone. He was never officially shunned and certainly not banished, and the other adults began treating me with an uncommon amount of consideration. Warm voices asked about my state of mind. People I barely knew offered words of encouragement, friendly pats delivered to my shoulders and back. I was the man of the family now, and what a good young man I was. Yet those same voices began to whisper. Our community was better off without that very difficult soul. Nobody missed my father. Nobody wanted his return. The man's peculiar ideas and attitudes were problems, yet his enemies preferred to laugh at his lousy carpentry and his inability to grow tomato plants. Cooperation and competence were what the world demanded, and how would a man with so few skills manage to survive?
One day, a teacher warned my class that the easy pickings were running out. Good water was harder to find, and bad water was rusting away the last of the canned goods. Then she looked at me. With a glance, she told me that she was thinking about my father. Then with a winner's grin, she promised everybody that soon, very soon, the last of the wicked people would face God's justice.
Salvation was built without an official school. Its original children were taught at home using the Internet and smart software. My school was the local organic grocer, stripped of its refrigerators and freezers, the empty space divided into simple classrooms. My teachers were women with little experience and uneven talents, but who nonetheless volunteered to stand in front of a mob of kids, giving us an opportunity to do something besides tending crops or running errands.
One lady tried hard to teach history. Our random textbooks covered a few periods in suffocating detail, while most of the past was as empty and unknown as the far ends of the universe. She liked to show movies even older than her. Using aging DVD players and televisions, she educated me about those black-and-silver days when everybody smoked and everybody could sing and dance. But more useful were her memories of life as it stood in the recent past. She was a natural talker blessed with an audience just old enough to remember bits and pieces about the world before, and she spent entire days rambling on about her lost life, how she and her husband had four cars between them and a big beautiful house that they didn't have to share. The woman had little family and no children. She and her husband had survived the worst, but he died of a heart attack days after their arrival here. Few could talk as easily about the end of the world. Just mentioning the topic made most of the adults quiet and strange. But our teacher hadn't lost as much as the others, and blessed with a tenacious optimism, she could claim total confidence in God's mercy and the existence of heaven.
More than anything else, we wanted to know about the plague and its aftermath. She listened to our questions and warned that she was no medical expert, but in the next moment she carefully defined the plague's miseries: blisters and bleeding lungs, the high fevers and painful, suffocating deaths. China was halfway around the world but new diseases often came from there. Twee in two years, the Chinese government barely contained the viral monster. And that's why the world was terrified: what if the bug someday climbed onboard an airplane or bird, and what if it was