SelectionEvent (2ed) Read online

  “I have a question, Diaz.”

  “Speak it.”

  “Why should I trust a bipolar individual who says he's harmless?”

  “Good question. I look like a biker, I'm dirty, but I make sure I never stink, and I got a mental problem for which I was wrapped up a couple times in a canvas jacket.” Diaz held up one finger and pointed it at Martin. “Here's my answer.” He flipped open the lid to one of the carry-boxes on the back of his motorcycle and reached inside. “You should trust me because I'm going to give you this.”

  Delicately, with a thumb and forefinger, Diaz pulled out a black, slim-profile automatic pistol by the barrel. Carrying it that way, he came up the walkway half a dozen steps and put it in Martin's hands. “It's loaded, so be careful, all right?” Diaz turned his back and returned to the curb. C'mon, man. I'm hungry and the Safeway's waitin'.”

  Martin checked and saw that it was loaded. He gave it back to Diaz. Big Diaz grin. He put it away under his vest.

  ....

  Diaz insisted they walk in order to enjoy the view. “I love the kind of scenery, man, where there are no people. People were the rot of the world. Lice. Ticks.”

  Isha followed quietly behind them, her head low.

  “You don't want to drive around too much,” Diaz explained. On the north side of Santa Miranda, he said, some people were getting organized and looking for other survivors. “And you think I'm whacked,” he said, “their Mr. Macho thinks he's going to set up a new government, bring back cars and factories and in a few years we'll have everything back the way it used to be and we'll all be having a hell of a lot of fun again — well, after we get rid of the Greenpeacers, faggots, atheists, uppity coloreds, and those femo-ovo-Nazis.”

  “Civilization rears its smiling face,” Martin said. He recalled what he had read in the past months — in times of chaos, people's desire for order led them to tolerate the most horrific acts in the name of security.

  The Safeway had been through hard times. The front doors had been shattered and the cash registers had been smashed open with axes, which still lay on the checkout counters.

  Surprisingly, a few of the overhead lights were still on. In the first moments, Martin had visions of smoking slabs of meat, crosshatched with grill marks and blackened with burned barbecue sauce, cold sliced tomatoes spread across a white plate, and watermelon and cantaloupe and....

  Then he noticed the smell of rotten meat and fruit.

  “You'll get used to it.” Diaz pulled a hibachi off a shelf and Martin picked up a bag of charcoal. “Two weeks ago,” Diaz said, “I was in a Safeway up in Sacramento, found a jaguar up in the meat section, and I don't mean the car type of jaguar. Just standing there, eatin' up round steaks and t-bones. Those things have jaw-muscles the size of footballs. He was chewin' up beef bones like cracker-jacks.”

  “What happened?”

  “He ate all he wanted. He looked at me once and I left. Jaguars don't recognize the threat implied in my style of dress. Diaz attempts to coexist with nature.”

  “The whole ecology's going to change, isn't it,” Martin said. “This area will dry up, fires will probably clear everything away, and then it'll start over.” He was saying it, but he still couldn't believe it — not really. Before him, here in the Safeway, the clean, well-lighted place of the Western world, were rows of rat-damaged Hamburger Helper and spilled Rice-a-Roni. Bags of flour had sprayed across the floor and now showed the footprints of many small animals. Canned vegetables lay scattered everywhere.

  All across the store, most packaged food had been chewed into. Grains and pastas and cereals were spread across the once-shining floor. The meat counter had been ravaged — styrofoam, plastic wrap, and scraps of dried meat were pulverized together. Martin remembered the dog pack he had seen the day before and wondered if dogs had been in here also. The rotten-meat smell was not so bad now; olfactory exhaustion was a good thing.

  “I'm a vegetarian,” Diaz said, loading his arms with cans of corn, beans, and fruit.

  “I feel a little guilty about this,” Martin said. The store was a shambles, and obviously anyone who might care was dead, but the morality he had lived with all his life kept his hands at his sides. “I don't have any choice, do I? No one's alive who can sell me anything.” He felt a little less like a thief and more like a scavenger.

  “Money went out of style long ago. And the people that are alive, they're more in the taking than the buying mode,” Diaz said.

  At Martin's feet, Isha sniffed at a scrap of meat and then licked it up and swallowed it. She looked up at him and whined once, briefly. That made his decision comfortable.

  They set up two lawn chairs inside the store, on the side opposite the rotten meat section, and they had finished eating an hour ago. Isha lay dozing beside the cooling hibachi, having eaten two cans of dog food and, for dessert, one of cat food. Diaz was picking fruit out of a jar.

  “I don't know what I used to be,” Martin said. “I was drifting. And now I'm even less sure what I am. At the moment I'm just glad to be here.”

  “A zen moment!” Diaz announced.

  “I thought I had it figured out,” Martin said. “I was going to come back and fit into society, propose to a woman....” He had to stop talking and swallow the knot in his throat. “I was almost an architect — almost a draftsman, anyway — but the more I got into it, the less it interested me. Then I studied a few other things that seemed to take me further down some remote road. I felt too ignorant of too many things to specialize in one thing. I guess I got my head in a corner. Then I volunteered for the isolation study.”

  “Sounds like you were at the bottom of your cycle,” Diaz said, still picking at his teeth.

  “I thought that with a year to examine myself, I'd come out knowing what I wanted, that I'd be... wiser.”

  “It work?”

  “What could ever have prepared me for this? It made everything I thought irrelevant. Look where we are, sitting in lawn chairs having a Safeway party and listening to the rats chew.”

  Diaz looked at him with one cocked eyebrow. “They're eating. We're eating. Seems copacetic to me.”

  “You're at the top of your cycle. How can I not be depressed? My parents are dead, everything's gone, I don't know if the woman I wanted to marry is alive or not....”

  “She's not, man. She woulda come and found you. She's with everyone else, except those whacked bubos across town.”

  “I need to find out.”

  “Of course. But nowadays, my friend, we do not needlessly rush.” Diaz stretched his feet out in front of him and leaned back, pushing his thick fingers through his dirty hair and locking his hands behind his head. “I specialized in being a euth artist.”

  “A youth artist?”

  “As in euthanasia. People were begging to die. It almost got to be a fad. You get MIV, and to save what medical resources there were, not that they saved anybody, you go to the nearest hospital and you get on the list for the euth artist. I was all cleaned up then, hair was cut, didn't use no double negatives, and I was good, man, I was soothing, I was the best. I had my little tank of nitrous oxide and I'd make 'em feel happy for the last time. Then I'd shoot 'em full of potassium chloride or curare or whatever the hell they had on hand, and they were gone. Bed was emptied in two minutes and I'd put on my comforting smile go to the next bed. They never had a complaint.”

  Diaz let his chair tilt forward and he searched around in his vest pockets and brought out a dirty little tablet. Carefully he opened it up. It was a list of names, closely written in tiny, ragged script, with some numbers after each one.

  “This is their names and the dates,” he said. “Every one I euthed. I wrote 'em down while they checked for vitals. I always carry this.” He looked at the unfolded paper a moment. “I remember almost every one of 'em, man. Like this one here.” He pointed one out. His fingernail was broken and black with dirt and grease. “Foley, Linda C., November ten. She was about twenty-eight, light brown hai
r, funny overlapping teeth. I remember I could smell cigarettes on her breath. I gave her the nitrous and she said something like, 'This won't hurt, will it?' A lot of 'em said that. Then she said, 'I used to be pregnant.'” Diaz closed up the little tablet. “I gave her full nitrous and then shot her up. She never even blinked. Died looking at me. A lot of 'em did.”

  Neither said anything. In the expanses supermarket, nothing moved, but around them they could still hear the rats chewing.

  “You deal with it okay?” Martin asked.

  “Mostly. At least I know the names of my ghosts.”

  Isha groaned peacefully in her sleep and rolled over on her side.

  “What're you going to do now?” Martin asked him. “Since you lived?”

  “Travel. Get the hell away from the scene of my crimes. Check things out. I was on my way to New York when I saw you drivin' through town. How about yourself? Gonna re-establish civilization?”

  “When I came up from underground, I knew one thing: wherever I was, I wanted to eat up every moment of being here. Corny.”

  “Like 'be here now.' By the way, nothing's corny anymore.”

  “But I thought I'd be here now with some of the people I used to know.” Martin checked his wristwatch. It was almost noon. He was thinking of Delana — could she be alive, out wandering around, looking for food? “I guess I'll figure things out a day at a time. First thing, I want to check on Delana. She lived... lives over on the east side of town. How safe is it to be out and around?”

  “Moderately safe. Fascist Erectus over on the north side has only got maybe a dozen survivors with him. It's pretty safe. If you're armed.”

  “You're telling me I should always be armed when I'm out?”

  “You're learnin,'” Diaz said.

  Diaz poured a bottle of distilled water on the hibachi. The ashes and coals sizzled and ran across the floor. When the hissing stopped, they heard the approaching thum-thump of a car stereo.

  “I heard that last night,” Martin said. “Thought I was so lonely I was hallucinating.”

  “I heard it too. And I can tell you one thing — anybody who advertises himself like that, one of these days is going to get something in his mouth he ain't gonna be able to spit out.”

  The music got loud, then louder, until Martin thought it had to be a flatbed truck with a load of amps and speakers, not a car.

  “Should we take a look?” he yelled to Diaz.

  It was a car, a long, wide, white Cadillac convertible, the top down, and the curly-haired kid who slouched in the driver's seat grinned at them, touched his black sunglasses, then whipped a fast circle in the street, bumped up over the opposite curb, and came to a stop a dozen feet away from them. He had a fabulous grin.

  Chapter 9

  The deafening music boiled out of the convertible like an invisible storm. Isha stood behind Martin, head lowered, and stared at the car.

  The kid behind the wheel was no more than nineteen, wearing a billowy white shirt and a big grin on his face, like he could have been stopping by to pick up his date. His right arm lay across the back of the white leather seat, and he looked in their direction, thrusting his head forward in time with the music, having a great time. At such a volume, it didn't exactly sound like music; it was more of a deafening throb, punctuated by distorted crashes and the vocalization of several people, possibly in language.

  “Now that,” Diaz shouted in Martin's ear, “is really stupid.”

  The kid put his hand to his ear and Martin read his lips saying, “What?”

  “I said you're stupid,” Diaz said in his direction.

  Again the kid mouthed, “What?”

  Martin made a twisting gesture with his hand and the kid lowered the volume a few decibels. It was still overwhelming and was the only thing that could be heard. Still thrusting his head forward in time to the thumps, the kid put his hand to his ear again and grinned.

  Diaz strolled over to the passenger side of the car and casually reached inside his leather vest, bringing out the automatic. When he raised it above the door, the kid began trying to scramble straight up, getting his feet into the seat just as the gun went off, twice, the pops sounding almost harmless inside the fury of the music. And then, except for the ringing in Martin's ears, everything was silent.

  “I said,” Diaz repeated to the staring kid, “that you're stupid.”

  “You shot my car!” the kid yelled. “You god damn ruined my car!” Yelling at someone who looked like Diaz, who was standing a foot away with a gun in his hand, didn't seem bright.

  “You can get another where you got this one,” Diaz said, putting the pistol back inside his jacket.

  “You shot my car!” the kid said, as amazed as he was furious. “This was my car! What's the matter with you?” The kid got out and slammed the door and stomped around the back of the Cadillac toward Diaz. “God damn you, you think you're god or something?” He sputtered and flailed his arms at the air in complete outrage.

  “Martin,” Diaz said over his shoulder, “I'm going to waste this moron, so you might not want to look.” He already had the pistol out again and was handling it loosely, not really pointing it in any specific direction.

  Reality finally descended on the kid. “Wait a minute,” he said, losing all his breath, stopping in his tracks, and then backing up two steps. “Okay, okay, okay, it's all right, man, I'll get another car, no sweat, no problem. Shoot it again if you want. It's all right.”

  “No, it isn't,” Diaz said. “Nearly everyone's dead and you drive around irritating the survivors. Then you spoke coarsely at me.”

  Martin was liking Diaz more and more; he was unpredictable, but he had a good sense of humor and he probably wouldn't kill the boy.

  “I'm sorry, man, I didn't mean to hurt your feelings, really. I was just driving around with my tunes. I wasn't meaning to bother nobody and I got a bad habit with my mouth.”

  The kid's forehead wrinkled in an upside-down V, an expertly sorrowful and pleading expression.

  “You don't ever get smart with someone who's holding a firearm and has been shooting in your general direction. Did you not have a mother to teach you such things?”

  “That was bad of me, man. I got a bad habit with my mouth.”

  “You got a bad habit with your brain,” Diaz said, “that's gonna get your whole body in trouble.”

  The kid shook his head dramatically as he leaned rather casually against the back fender of the Cadillac. “I'm really sorry, I really am. Can I go now?”

  “What's your name?” Martin asked the kid.

  “Stewart Bailey.” His intonation made it sound like a question. “Can I just go now?”

  “Who else have you seen alive?”

  “Nobody. Some guys on the north side. No girls. though.”

  “How many did you see, Stewart,” Martin asked quietly.

  “I don't know. Half dozen. One or two Mexicans. Shit, who cares, I just want to go now, all right?”

  “Stewart,” Martin said quietly, “my friend here, the one with the gun, he's unstable, you know? So you should try not to be irritating — for just a few minutes. Do you think you can do that?”

  Stewart folded his arms and rolled his eyes. “You guys always have to lord it over somebody.”

  “Did you speak to any of these people across town?” Martin asked.

  “No. Well, yeah, but I couldn't hear what they said back. Can I go now? I need to get another car.” Stewart's eyes suddenly lit up. “Can you believe it, man, anything you want, you just take it.”

  Diaz cleared his throat. “Stewart, shut up. These people you saw, what were they doing? What activities were they engaged in?”

  “Engaged in?” he mocked. “You sound like a dickhead teacher or something.”

  “You're being rude,” Martin said. “Why give each other a hard time? What were these people doing, Stewart?” Martin asked. Diaz could probably beat the answers out of him much more quickly than they could be got through c
onversation. “Tell us what they were doing, and we'll all go our separate ways.”

  “They were standing around. How should I know what they were doing? I'm no mind-reader.”

  “He's right about that,” Diaz said.

  “And I'm not stupid, either,” Stewart sneered at Diaz, pointing his finger at him. “You treat me like I'm stupid and I'm not!”

  “We're just treating you like you're not a mind-reader, Stewart,” Martin said. “Why don't you go get yourself another car now.”

  “Fine. I will.” He stomped away from us, up the street, his steps echoing hollowly in the quiet street.

  “Thanks,” Diaz said. I was on the verge of putting him out of my misery.”

  From up the street, Stewart turned around and shouted, “Eat shit, you homos!” and then ran around a corner and disappeared.

  “The exuberance of youth. You wouldn't have shot him, would you?” Martin asked.

  “Probably not. I don't have any more room on my list.”

  As they walked back to Martin's parents' home, Diaz stopped at a few houses and kicked in the doors and went inside for a few minutes. “Just checking,” he explained. Finally he came out of the last house with a pump shotgun. It was shiny with oil and on the dark stock was a detailed carving of the American flag. Diaz had filled his pockets with shells and they bulged in lumps. “In case we run into any mutants when we go looking for your friend. Drive a car, you're high profile.”

  Martin drove, with Diaz in the passenger seat and Isha in the back. She sat up and quietly looked out the side window, as a human would.

  Except for the overgrown yards, everything looked exceptionally normal. Martin even lifted his foot from the accelerator and started to brake when they came to a stop sign.

  “Old habits,” he said.

  “What did your friend, Delana, do?”

  “She was a paramedic. Rode in the back of an ambulance and tweezed body parts up off the pavement.”

  “Ah. A fellow traveller of mine. She'd have drugs at her place then.”

  “Drugs?”

  “Antibiotics,” Diaz said. “Pain killers. You should check. It's going to be a long time before anyone's manufacturing any more tetracycline. Once anybody thinks twice about it, antibiotics'll be more valuable than gold. You should check her place out while you're there.”