The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF - Mike Ashley [48]
On the twenty-seventh day - a Saturday, and by this time everyone was keeping count - Stuart walked about the house with the stiff-kneed gait of an automaton, jerkily pacing from window to window, shading his eyes as he peered out into the gloom and falling rain.
"Why don't you call Jim?" Melissa had said. "See if he wants to do something. Get out of here before you go crazy." Or drive me crazy, she thought, but didn't say it. She was reading Harper's and smoking a Marlboro Light - a habit she had picked up two years ago, after the miscarriage. She had always planned to quit, but she somehow never did. It was too easy to smoke at home alone. Stuart had discouraged her from going back to teaching. Take some time for yourself, he had said. And why not? They didn't need the money now that Stuart had made partner. And it would have been too hard to be around kids.
"I don't want to call Jim," Stuart had said. He peered out into the rain. "I wish you'd quit smoking. It stinks up the whole house."
"I know," she said. And she had tried. But as soon as she quit, she started putting on weight, and Stuart didn't like that either, so what was she to do? Smoke.
Now, driving through rain across the ridges separating Virginia and West Virginia, she fumbled in her purse for a cigarette. The flame of the lighter threw Stuart's angular face into relief, highlighting a ghostly network of lines and shadows that brooded in the hollows around his eyes and beneath his cheeks. For a moment, before the flame blinked out and darkness rushed back into the car, she knew what he would look like when he was old. But he was handsome still, she thought, distinguished even, with the first hint of gray in his dark hair.
Still handsome after twelve years, still the same Stuart. He had noticed her at a time when few men did, had made her feel beautiful and alive, as if she shared his color and energy, his arrogant charm. And just then, leaning over beside her in freshman composition, he had been boyishly vulnerable. "Look," he'd said, "I'm not very good at this kind of stuff. Do you think you can help me?"
That was a long time ago, but the old Stuart was still there; sometimes she could see vulnerability peeking through the cool and distant resolve he had woven about himself after the baby. She had talked about adoption for a while and she had seen it then - the ghost of that insecurity in the hard curve of his jaw, in the brazen tone of his voice. As if the miscarriage had been his fault.
She cracked her window and blew smoke into the downpour. Stuart coughed theatrically.
"Leave it alone, Stuart," she said.
Stuart grimaced. He flipped on the radio and searched for a station with one hand. Most of the stations had gone off the air by now, same as the television networks. Why, no one could be certain.
Hysteria, Melissa suspected. The government had shut them down to prevent hysteria. In the last week or two news reports had become increasingly disturbing, often bizarre: floods of epic proportions in the Mississippi and Ohio River valleys and just about everywhere else, roving gangs in the sodden streets, doom cults who practiced human sacrifice to appease angry weather gods, videotapes of the giant toadstool forest that had erupted over miles and miles of empty western territory. In many places, money was no longer good. People had taken to bartering for canned food, gasoline, cigarettes.
By day thirty-six, Stuart had himself begun to stock up on gasoline and the non-perishable food crammed into the back of the Jeep. He had wanted to buy a gun, but Melissa had drawn the line there; the world might retreat into savagery, but she would have no part of it. At night, the two of them sat without speaking in the living room while the rain beat against the roof. They watched the news on television, and then - on the forty-second