The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF - Mike Ashley [185]
Well, the strangers are gone, but they're coming back. It hasn't been decided yet just what will happen. Maybe the Nest will be kept up as what one of the strangers called a "survival school". Or maybe we will join the pioneers who are going to try to establish a new colony at the uranium mines at Great Slave Lake or in the Congo.
Of course, now that the strangers are gone, I've been thinking a lot about Los Alamos and those other tremendous colonies. I have a hankering to see them for myself.
You ask me, Pa wants to see them, too. He's been getting pretty thoughtful, watching Ma and Sis perk up.
"It's different, now that we know others are alive," he explains to me. "Your mother doesn't feel so hopeless any more. Neither do I, for that matter, not having to carry the whole responsibility for keeping the human race going, so to speak. It scares a person."
I looked around at the blanket walls and the fire and the pails of air boiling away and Ma and Sis sleeping in the warmth and the flickering light.
"It's not going to be easy to leave the Nest," I said, wanting to cry, kind of. "It's so small and there's just the four of us. I get scared at the idea of big places and a lot of strangers."
He nodded and put another piece of coal on the fire. Then he looked at the little pile and grinned suddenly and put a couple of handfuls on, just as if it was one of our birthdays or Christmas.
"You'll quickly get over that feeling, son," he said. "The trouble with the world was that it kept getting smaller and smaller, till it ended with just the Nest. Now it'll be good to have a real huge world again, the way it was in the beginning."
I guess he's right. You think the beautiful young lady will wait for me till I grow up? I'll be twenty in only ten years.
GUARDIANS OF THE PHOENIX
Eric Brown
Eric Brown has written over twenty books and eighty short stories, since his first collection The Time-Lapsed Man (1990). His first novel was Meridian Days (1992). Recent works include The Fall of Tartarus (2005) and The Extraordinary Voyage of Jules Verne (2005). He has twice won the BSFA short story award, in 2000 and 2002. I had the pleasure of collaborating with him in compiling The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (2005).
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IT WAS DAWN when we set off from beneath the twisted skeleton of the Eiffel Tower and crossed the desert to Tangier s.
We travelled by day through a blasted landscape devoid of life, and at night we stopped and tried to sleep. I'd lie in my berth and stare through the canopy at the magnetic storms lacerating the troposphere. The heat was insufferable, even in the marginally cooler early hours. When I slept I dreamed of the women I had seen in old magazines, and when I woke in the searing heat of morning and Danny started the truck on the next leg of the journey, I was silent and sullen with melancholy longing.
Two days out of Paris, heading through what Edvard informed us had once been the Auvergne, we picked up the fifth member of our party.
Around sunset, as the horizon burned and a magnetic storm played out in a frenzy overhead, the truck stuttered and came to a halt.
Danny hit the steering wheel. "Christ! It's one of the main capacitors. I'll wager anything..."
"Not again?" Fear lodged in my throat. This was the third time in as many weeks that the truck had failed, and every time Danny's desperation had communicated itself to me. He tried to disguise it, but I could see the dread in his eyes, in the shake of his hands. Without the truck, without the means to cross the ravaged land in search of water, we were dead.
Danny was our leader by dint of the fact that he owned the truck and the drilling rig, and because he was an engineer. He was in his fifties, small and lean, and despite what he'd been through he was optimistic.
I'd never heard that word till I met Danny, four years ago.
I stared through the windscreen. We were on the edge of a city: its jagged skyline of ruined buildings rose stark against the dying light. Over the decades, sand