The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF - Mike Ashley [142]
The upper windows are original, but tossed balls and careless tumbles have broken all the lower panes. The replacement glass is never as good. Cold air seeps through gaps. And maybe that's what the old lady feels now. The hand that May was holding lifts, fingertips to the dingy glass, and she seems to tilt into the sunshine, preparing to collapse again. But she doesn't. She manages to straighten, the big dim eyes staring at the bluffs. "What happened to those trees, darling?"
"What trees, grandma?"
"On that hill there. Are they dead?"
"No, grandma." The girl leans in close, speaking with a flat teaching voice. "It's winter, grandma. The trees are sleeping."
"Winter?"
The lady seems flabbergasted.
"Not like Florida, is it?" May asks.
And then grandma giggles. There's no other word for the joyful girlish laugh that rolls out of her. She giggles and turns back to her granddaughter, saying, "Oh, my. Winter? Really?"
"Really."
Delighted to her core, the old gal says, "Well then, we did it, didn't we? Winter came. We saved the world!"
I wasn't quite seven years old, hunting inside a garage for gas cans or tools, or even better, fresh toys that might help pass the day. Dad was searching the house for food. Mom waited on the front yard. She was supposed to be helping us, but sometimes her energy would leave her. Maybe she looked stern and strong, but the truth is never as simple as appearances. Sitting and doing nothing was all she could manage that morning, her face unchanged but the wrinkles deeper, the color leaving the skin as secret thoughts made her sick.
All of us were sick. More than once, dad confided that to me. We weren't sick in ways that would kill us, but because of the awful things that we had seen. Yet difficult as it seemed, he insisted that each of us should try to count our blessings.
The garage had no blessings. There weren't any toys and the only gas can was empty, and even before the world ended the car wasn't worth much. Dust lay thick on its windshield, and I spent most of a minute writing the words I knew into the gray grime. I wrote my name and "dog" and "cat" and I don't remember what else. Then dad came out the house, looking back at me.
"Wait there," he said. "Don't go inside."
I'd seen bodies before. They didn't scare me.
But dad was worried about something. He walked up the driveway, aiming for mom, and he started to talk and she looked at the house as he said something else, and then she was shaking her head.
"It's not our business," she said. "Don't."
That's when I slipped through the side door.
The lady was in her thirties, and she used to be pretty. I found her sitting in the middle of the dining room. She was naked. Walls of cardboard boxes were stacked on three sides of her, each box cut open so that she could reach inside whenever she wanted. Empty cans of applesauce and spaghetti and condensed tomato soup and plastic water bottles covered the rest of the filthy floor. She sat with her naked body propped up, soft ropes around her chest and rubber handles dangling from the ceiling. Her chair belonged in a living room, except somebody had used a chainsaw to cut through the cushion. The hole was nearly too big for her scrawny bottom. Later, thinking about the situation, I realized that somebody must have cut a matching hole through the floor, leaving it so that the lady could go to the bathroom whenever it was necessary. Food and water in easy reach, and she could have lived for years eating from that stockpile.
I whispered, "Hello."
Her face was jumping, but her eyes were steady. She could see me well enough to react, though her words didn't make sense. Her ingenious, desperate system had worked until she was too weak to unseal the cans and bottles. Openers