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    After the End: Recent Apocalypses
    After the End: Recent Apocalypses
    After the End: Recent Apocalypses
    Ebook541 pages7 hours

    After the End: Recent Apocalypses

    By Paula Guran

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    From the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh to Norse prophecies of Ragnarok to the Revelations of Saint John to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and any number of fictional zombie Armageddons and the dystopic world of The Hunger Games, we have always wondered what will happen after the world as we know it ends. No matter what the doomsday scenario—cataclysmic climate change, political chaos, societal collapse, nuclear war, pestilence, or so many other dreaded variations—we inevitably believe that even though the world perishes, some portion of humankind will live on. Such stories involve death and disaster, but they are also tales of rebirth and survival. Grim or triumphant, these outstanding, post-apocalyptic stories selected from the best of those published in the tumultuous last decade allow us to consider what life will be like after the end.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrime Books
    Release dateMay 28, 2013
    ISBN9781607014119
    After the End: Recent Apocalypses

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    Reviews for After the End

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    • 4/5
      Reading short stories is a good way to find new authors that you like. In this book, I found Cory Doctorow and Mary Rosenblum. Good stories. Most of them enjoyable and thought provoking. Only a few duds.
    • 4/5
      One of the first anthologies I have read that most stories are actually about what the title of the anthology says it is about. Most of the stories are good, well written stories. Many have interesting ways that the world ended, ranging from infections, war, and human stupidity. They range from 8-30 pages in length and published between 2007-2012 (there were no new stories). While I enjoyed many of the stories, I particularly liked:Pump Six by Paolo BacigalupiAmaryllis by Carrie VaughnIsolation Point, California by John Shirley
    • 3/5
      Paula Guran, as shown in her introduction, certainly understands the variety of potential apocalypses we face, that we read post-apocalypse stories to have something revealed to us, to feel grateful after being shown how our lives could be so much worse, and even that the post-apocalypse story and its attendant death and destruction is rather equivalent to daydreams of forbidden sex. Unfortunately, this collection often fails meet those needs. Though none of the stories are bad, some are forgettable. I like the post-apocalypse sub-genre for the revelations it can offer about humans and our technological civilization. I want, in the post-mortem examination of a dead or dying world, to learn something about how it worked. I also want dire warnings and cautionary tales – even if I don’t accept a given danger is much to worry about.It’s not really the authors’ fault so few works here deliver on this promise. They probably had no intention of fulfilling such a promise. Presumably many of these stories were written with their apocalypses as mere settings or rationalizations for the stories they wanted to tell. I suspect many of the authors here didn’t see themselves as saying something specific about the sub-genre of doom-stricken worlds. A further problem is that Guran limits herself to s small span of time to draw on. With one exception, all the works are from 2005-2017.There were some outstanding stories that did meet my needs. Maureen McHugh’s “After the Apocalypse” has a single mom and her teenage daughter trudging through a slow motion economic apocalypse in America after Disneyland is struck by a dirty bomb. Not only does she finally realize that she is now of that formerly alien class “refugee”, but we come to see her final, surprising decision not as life under duress but, in a way, life has she has always lived it. “Pump Six” by Paolo Bacigalupi is sort of C. M. Kornbluth’s “The Marching Morons” – without the smart people. Its hero comes to realize that not only does no one care about the failing sewer pumps of New York City circa 2120, but no one can do anything about it.While less satisfying stories due to their vague or unlikely apocalypses, Paul Tremblay’s “We Will Never Live in the Castle” and Cory Doctorow’s “Beat Me Daddy (Eight to the Bar)” are quite self-consciously addressing the post-apocalyptic tradition. The narrator of Tremblay’s story inhabits the amusement park where he used to work, and, while he’s gotten the civilizational collapse he always longed for, not all his old dreams will be fulfilled. For such a technologically savvy writer, Doctorow’s 2002 story has the improbable setup of warplanes flying overhead years after the war ended thanks to automation. As with many of his recent works, he really is more interested in playing off other post-apocalypse stories connected than giving us a credible disaster. However, he does have a serious point about those who, to quote The Road Warrior, just want to “live off the corpse of the old world”. Another conscious addition to the post-apocalypse tradition is Kage Baker’s “The Books”. Its child characters, members of a Renaissance Festival troupe that tours America’s west coast post-disaster, are certainly aware of manuals full of all sorts of instruction on useful skills like glass blowing and the adults’ beloved paperback books, but, one day, they discover another kind of book. It’s a nice statement about the human need for story. As you would expect, most of the stories here are set in America or Britain. Bruce Sterling’s “The Goddess of Mercy” though is set in a Japan weakened by North Korea nuking Tokyo. Specifically, the island of Tsushima has turned into a pirate haven. A high-tech ninja, a bickering reporter and peace activist, a Somali pirate queen, hostages, humor, and hacker anarchy come together in a satisfying and unsimplistic story. Nnedi Okorafor’s “Tumaki” is set in Africa after an alien invasion has rendered nuclear weapons and bullets inoperable. What turns out to be a story of young, forbidden love between a “meta-human” (seemingly a cyborg) and a Moslem woman, turns out to be a rumination on genocide. While I liked the setting and the delivery, I thought this another story marred by a vague apocalypse, and I’m generally not a fan of the sort of “genre-blending” it features.When we do get an explicit disaster, the disaster de jour is, off course, global warming. M. J. Locke (aka Laura J. Mixon) gives us “True North”, an enjoyable story featuring warlords and airships and survivalists and a man find purpose at the end of his life. However, while I liked the plot and characters and found them realistic, the same cannot be said of the too optimistic ending. “The Egg Man” from Mary Rosenblum is another story of a lonely man wandering a post-warming wasteland. Here the hero wanders an even more parched southwest of America delivering pharmaceutically modified eggs and looking for his former lover. I’d seen this story before but was happy to get reacquainted.“A Story, with Beans” from Steven Gould is another look at the world of his novel 7th Sigma, an American Southwest infested with metal-eating “bugs”, and its hero from a different perspective. Like the novel, I enjoyed it.Several stories seem to use mysterious disasters or retro disasters as set ups for surrealism, ambiguity, madness, and horror. These aren’t stories warning of real dangers or worried about plausibility. They have other concerns.Livia Llewellyn’s “Horses” is a character study, with a Missile Facilities Technician, with horror and existential despair before, during, and after a rather improbable U.S.-Russia nuclear exchange. The six characters of John Mantooth’s “The Cecilia Paradox” may or may not be the sheltered survivors of a global apocalypse. Or they might be reality tv contestants. One thing is for sure: they are under the rule of a madman. The narrator of Brian Evenson’s carefully cadenced “The Adjudicator” may or may not be mad and may or may not be curiously immortal as he ponders his fate in the wake of being asked by his post-disaster community to kill a man.Some stories are more straightforward if no more serious in their speculative setups.Lauren Beukes’ “Chislehurst Messiah” attacks British barbarians in the ruins of the UK post-plague, the upper class twits represented by the delusional protagonist who waits in his apartment for Scotland Yard’s CO19 unit to arrive all the while watching the apocalypse on YouTube. And Buekes even takes a swing at the modern anti-vaccine movement. Mostly, though, it just comes across as an exercise in nastiness.Simon Morden’s “Never, Never, Three Times Never” is about the faith of true love as found in two refugees, one wheelchair bound, the other blind, on the way to a possible sanctuary in London.The cause of civilizational collapse is pretty straightforward in John Shirley’s “Isolation Point, California”: humans go murderously insane when closer than 19 paces from each other. The narrator and a woman he meets try, in such circumstances, to satisfy their need for intimacy.While Carrie Vaughn’s “Amaryllis” is set in a world after general environmental collapse, it seemed to be set far enough in that future as to be just another science fiction tale set in a world different from ours. Its narrator must confront the social stigma attached to her as an illegal birth in a world of population control.Along with the McHugh story, Paul Park’s “Ragnarok” was the entry – it’s not actually a story but verse written in the Anglo-Saxon alliterative style – I was most looking forward to. While not bad, I did find it disappointing. While the story was bloody and I was amused to hear of Black Eirik of the Glock Nine, the plot struck me as nothing special and the verse occasionally broke the alliterative requirements of the form.Also not bad but forgettable were a couple of other stories. Blake Butler’s “The Disappeared” is about a child, perhaps mutating, thrown in a government facility in the midst of a crises of disappearing people that include the child’s mother. Margo Lanagan’s “The Fifth Star in the Southern Cross” features a humanity largely infertile. While there is a memorable bit in a brothel staffed by aliens, the conclusion of the story seems to have to do with the peculiarities of a sexual fetish than symbolizing a humanity changed by pollution or alien contact.A collection worth reading as long as you don’t expect to a lot of serious workings of this old theme.

    Book preview

    After the End - Paula Guran

    AFTER THE END:

    Recent Apocalypses

    Copyright © 2013 by Paula Guran.

    Cover design by Sherin Nicole.

    Cover art by Aurélien Police.

    Ebook design by Neil Clarke.

    All stories are copyrighted to their respective authors,

    and used here with their permission.

    An extension of this copyright page can be found here.

    ISBN: 978-1-60701-390-7 (trade paperback)

    ISBN: 978-1-60701-411-9 (ebook)

    PRIME BOOKS

    www.prime-books.com

    Publisher’s Note: No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

    For more information, contact Prime Books at prime@prime-books.com.

    It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

    —R. E. M. song title

    (Written by Bill Berry, Michael Stipe, Mike Mills, Peter Buck)

    • CONTENTS •

    Introduction • Paula Guran

    The Books • Kage Baker

    Tumaki • Nnedi Okorafor

    The Egg Man • Mary Rosenblum

    Chislehurst Messiah • Lauren Beukes

    Ragnarok • Paul Park

    Beat Me Daddy (Eight to the Bar) • Cory Doctorow

    After the Apocalypse • Maureen F. McHugh

    We Will Never Live in the Castle • Paul Tremblay

    Never, Never, Three Times Never • Simon Morden

    Pump Six • Paolo Bacigalupi

    The Disappeared • Blake Butler

    Amaryllis • Carrie Vaughn

    The Fifth Star in the Southern Cross • Margo Lanagan

    True North • M. J. Locke

    Horses • Livia Llewellyn

    The Cecilia Paradox • John Mantooth

    The Adjudicator • Brian Evenson

    A Story, With Beans • Steven Gould

    Goddess of Mercy • Bruce Sterling

    Isolation Point, California • John Shirley

    Acknowledgements

    :

    INTRODUCTION:

    BEFORE AFTER THE END

    Paula Guran

    These are twenty-first century stories of what might happen after the end of the world as we know it: post-apocalyptic fiction.

    In ancient Greek, apocálypsis, literally meant uncovering. An apocalypse was like taking the lid off of a pot of previously hidden knowledge. It later came to mean, around the fourteenth century, revelation, or the lifting of a veil to disclose mysteries. In Middle English, it also had a less specific meaning of insight, vision or even hallucination.

    Nowadays, outside of its prophetic meaning, we usually use apocalypse to mean a cataclysmic event or doomsday scenario in which the world suffers great or near-total devastation.

    Of course, such scenarios can be revelatory, and post-apocalyptic tales often offer insight . . .

    Homo sapiens have been expecting, predicting, and fearing the end of the world since they could conceive of such a thing.

    Our close relations, the Neanderthals (just how we’re related is too debatable to delve into here), became extinct around 30,000 years ago. At least some of our ancestors probably made note of that. Many of the theories of their demise match our own concepts of human apocalypse. To Neanderthals, homo sapiens might have equated with an alien race—one that may have killed with genocidal fervor, merely used their advanced technology to invade and conquer, or introduced new pathogens resulting in a species-ending pandemic. Climatic change and natural disasters could have played a role in bringing doom for the Neanderthals as well.

    But, even now, modern humans share some nuclear DNA with the extinct Neanderthals. If there is such a thing as genetic memory, the story of their apocalypse might still be part of us all.

    Since the extinction of the Neanderthals, humans have experienced, time and again, events that—at least for those involved—meant the end of their civilization, their cultures: their world. There are numerous tales in many cultures of a great flood wiping out a civilization, and we know of various other verifiable cataclysmic natural disasters. Genocide reaches back at least to the first millennium BCE; draconian changes in climate have destroyed established ways of life or forced inhabitants to seek new territories over the millennia; countless pandemics have drastically reduced populations, altering social structures forever; mass panics have resulted in substantial ruin; and endless wars have led to numberless annihilations.

    In the past, the end of the world for one tribe/country/continent may have been just an extreme event to those not affected. Today, all of humanity is far more closely linked, so we view apocalypse on a global scale. Some areas might survive better than others or retain more of a semblance of what once was, but the entire world as we know it would be affected to some extent.

    There are still many who believe in a religious apocalypse brought about by the will of the divine, but science has given us plenty of new possibilities to be concerned with beyond holy wrath or predetermined prophecy: impacting asteroids, rogue planets, solar flares, overpopulation, Y2K (obviously we lived through that one), the Large Hadron Collider seeding a black hole, out-of-control nano-bots consuming stuff, AI displacing humans, intentional or accidental biological catastrophe . . . the more you know the more apprehensive you can be.

    Speculation can also produce apocalyptic anxiety. The idea of aliens from another planet invading Earth or infiltrating among us was not a societal concern until we grasped the concept of our world as a planet, and then considered the possibility of life elsewhere and the means for them to reach us. Physics and electricity could fail, technology might cease to function altogether and we’d have to revert to a style of life we have not known for generations . . . or maybe magic would take the place of technology . . . or perhaps the end has already come and all of us are really only bits of binary code in a computer program.

    Daily reality provides a lot of fearful fodder, too. Who worried much about nuclear warfare before 1945? The Cold War made worldwide destruction seem quite probable. In the sixties and seventies societal injustice and political upheaval brought rioting in the streets (it wasn’t the first time). International energy crises, economic recessions, urban decay, and industrial collapse followed. The appearance of AIDS became both a moral watershed and a reminder of how quickly a deadly disease can change the world.

    Although the Mideast always seems on the verge of explosion, how seriously did we concern ourselves with terrorism before 9/11? Did technological calamity bother us that much before events like the Gulf of Mexico oil spill? A hurricane like Katrina had long been anticipated for New Orleans, but when it happened, we wondered why we were so unprepared. When a superstorm devastates the Jersey Coast and shuts down New York City, we start considering how close to the brink society might be. The economic upheavals of the last few years have made cultural meltdown suddenly seem more probable. Senseless acts of mass violence against innocent victims shake us all.

    Some feel our love/hate relationship with the apocalyptic is based in a collective anxiety about that which lies outside our individual control. Events like those above make us wonder if humankind even has the capacity to solve such overwhelming problems. We feel powerless.

    Maybe that’s where post-apocalyptic fiction, film, television, and gaming enter the picture. One researcher, Jerry Piven, has been quoted as saying he feels our consideration of doomsday almost embeds a tale of fantasy into reality and provides safe theater for exploring death. Robb Willer, an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies apocalyptic political and religious psychology, thinks end times can be both a spectator sport and a reality show for some people.

    Whatever the reasons, our pop cultural fascination with the end of the world is both ancient and current. Science fiction and fantasy critic Paul Goat Allen wrote, in 2011:

    . . . the last few years have brought about a new Golden Age of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction. . . .What does this renaissance of apocalyptic fiction tell me? Readers—and writers—are, once again, becoming increasingly fascinated by various end-of-the-world scenarios: the causes, the implications, and the aftermath. The specific reasons readers are attracted to apocalyptic fiction releases varies from person to person but for me at least, I think it’s all about comfort and hope. Reading these books and envisioning the nightmarish, end-of-days horrors described within makes me realize just how well off we have it. Yeah, I drive an 18-year-old car and sometimes it’s a struggle to pay my bills but at least I have food to eat and a roof over my head. After reading about a world inhabited by masses of starving nomads . . . an America overrun by zombies . . . and a world where millions have simply disappeared after a Rapture-like event . . . my life seems pretty good! . . . I know it sounds paradoxical but reading apocalyptic fiction generally leaves me with a sense of hope—hope that we can somehow avoid the mistakes made in [this fiction] and right the wrongs before it is really too late.

    There’s also a simpler theory, one espoused by a character in one of the following stories:

    I used to pretend the world had ended and that I was the only one who survived . . . I know your secret, you’ve fantasized about that too, everyone fantasizes that they’re important enough to survive, more than survive, to be the last one left, right? [I]t’s why you read those books or watched those Will Smith movies, you imagined how important the last one left would feel . . . you only indulged in the fantasy because it was safely impossible in your mind, sort of like daydream sex with somebody you’re not supposed to be daydreaming about, you indulge in the danger until you start thinking about the consequences, until you start really thinking about the big what if, what if it really happened?

    Although the twenty-first century has brought a plethora of media featuring zombies—both supernatural and science-based—you won’t find that particular type of post-apocalyptic fiction in this anthology. I’ve edited one anthology, Zombies: The Recent Dead (Prime Books, 2011) that includes some of the best short zombie fiction from 2000-2011; another, Zombies: More Recent Dead is forthcoming in 2014. There’s also Extreme Zombies (Prime Books, 2012)—not confined to only recent fiction and intended for those who enjoy more extreme explorations of the trope. In other words, I think I have zombies covered—apocalyptic and not.

    I delighted in discovering the many non-zombie variations of post-apocalyptic futures depicted in the stories collected here. With one exception (first published in 2002), the stories in this volume first appeared from 2007 through 2012. I hope they demonstrate at least a few of our current ideations of what will bring the End and come after it. They vary in style from Anglo-Saxon epic verse to the near-surreal and, in tone, range from optimism and hope to the bleakest pessimism. What the stories all have in common, other than the theme, is that they are about people: their actions, reactions, interactions, and relationships; their hopes, dreams, strategies, and failures. More than one someone has survived. The world may have ended, but there is still life.

    Paula Guran

    9 March, 2013

    (National Panic Day)

    The End came perhaps a generation before the narrator of Kage Baker’s story was born. His parents are members of a band of artisans and entertainers who once were a travelling Renaissance fair. Now they use their olden times skills to make necessities of life, but they still provide much-needed entertainment too.

    THE BOOKS

    Kage Baker

    We used to have to go a lot farther down the coast in those days, before things got easier. People weren’t used to us then.

    If you think about it, we must have looked pretty scary when we first made it out to the coast. Thirty trailers full of Show people, pretty desperate and dirty-looking Show people too, after fighting our way across the plains from the place where we’d been camped when it all went down. I don’t remember when it went down, of course; I wasn’t born yet.

    The Show used to be an olden-time fair, a teaching thing. We traveled from place to place putting it on so people would learn about olden times, which seems pretty funny now, but back then . . . how’s that song go? The one about mankind jumping out into the stars? And everybody thought that was how it was going to be. The aunts and uncles would put on the Show so space-age people wouldn’t forget things like weaving and making candles when they went off into space. That’s what you call irony, I guess.

    But afterward we had to change the Show, because . . . well, we couldn’t have the Jousting Arena anymore because we needed the big horses to pull the trailers. And Uncle Buck didn’t make fancy work with dragons with rhinestone eyes on them anymore because, who was there left to buy that kind of stuff? And anyway, he was too busy making horseshoes. So all the uncles and aunts got together and worked it out like it is now, where we come into town with the Show and people come to see it and then they let us stay a while because we make stuff they need.

    I started out as a baby bundle in one of the stage shows, myself. I don’t remember it, though. I remember later I was in some play with a love story and I just wore a pair of fake wings and ran across the stage naked and shot at the girl with a toy bow and arrow that had glitter on them. And another time I played a dwarf. But I wasn’t a dwarf, we only had the one dwarf and she was a lady, that was Aunt Tammy, and she’s dead now. But there was an act with a couple of dwarves dancing and she needed a partner, and I had to wear a black suit and a top hat.

    But by then my daddy had got sick and died so my mom was sharing the trailer with Aunt Nera, who made pots and pitchers and stuff, so that meant we were living with her nephew Myko too. People said he went crazy later on but it wasn’t true. He was just messed up. Aunt Nera left the Show for a little while after it all went down, to go and see if her family—they were townies—had made it through okay, only they didn’t, they were all dead but the baby, so she took the baby away with her and found us again. She said Myko was too little to remember but I think he remembered some.

    Anyway we grew up together after that, us and Sunny who lived with Aunt Kestrel in their trailer which was next to ours. Aunt Kestrel was a juggler in the Show and Myko thought that was intense, he wanted to be a kid juggler. So he got Aunt Kestrel to show him how. And Sunny knew how already, she’d been watching her mom juggle since she was born and she could do clubs or balls or the apple-eating trick or anything. Myko decided he and Sunny should be a kid juggling act. I cried until they said I could be in the act too, but then I had to learn how to juggle and boy, was I sorry. I knocked out one of my own front teeth with a club before I learned better. The new one didn’t grow in until I was seven, so I went around looking stupid for three years. But I got good enough to march in the parade and juggle torches.

    That was after we auditioned, though. Myko went to Aunt Jeff and whined and he made us costumes for our act. Myko got a black doublet and a toy sword and a mask and I got a buffoon overall with a big spangly ruff. Sunny got a princess costume. We called ourselves the Minitrons. Actually Myko came up with the name. I don’t know what he thought a Minitron was supposed to be but it sounded brilliant. Myko and I were both supposed to be in love with the princess and she couldn’t decide between us so we had to do juggling tricks to win her hand, only she out-juggled us, so then Myko and I had a sword fight to decide things. And I always lost and died of a broken heart, but then the princess was sorry and put a paper rose on my chest. Then I jumped up and we took our bows and ran off, because the next act was Uncle Monty and his performing parrots.

    By the time I was six we felt like old performers, and we swaggered in front of the other kids because we were the only kid act. We’d played it in six towns already. That was the year the aunts and uncles decided to take the trailers as far down the coast as this place on the edge of the big desert. It used to be a big city before it all went down. Even if there weren’t enough people alive there anymore to put on a show for, there might be a lot of old junk we could use.

    We made it into town all right without even any shooting. That was kind of amazing, actually, because it turned out nobody lived there but old people, and old people will usually shoot at you if they have guns, and these did. The other amazing thing was that the town was huge and I mean really huge, I just walked around with my head tilted back staring at these towers that went up and up, into the sky. Some of them you couldn’t even see the tops because the fog hid them.

    And they were all mirrors and glass and arches and domes and scowly faces in stone looking down from way up high.

    But all the old people lived in just a few places right along the beach, because the further back you went into the city the more sand was everywhere. The desert was creeping in and taking a little more every year. That was why all the young people had left. There was nowhere to grow any food. The old people stayed because there was still plenty of stuff in jars and cans they had collected from the markets, and anyway they liked it there because it was warm. They told us they didn’t have enough food to share any, though. Uncle Buck told them all we wanted to trade for was the right to go into some of the empty towers and strip out as much of the copper pipes and wires and things as we could take away with us. They thought that was all right; they put their guns down and let us camp, then.

    But we found out the Show had to be a matinee if we were going to perform for them, because they all went to bed before the time we usually put on the Show. And the fire-eater was really pissed off about that because nobody would be able to see his act much, in broad daylight. It worked out all right, in the end, because the next day was dark and gloomy. You couldn’t see the tops of the towers at all. We actually had to light torches around the edges of the big lot where we put up the stage.

    The old people came filing out of their apartment building to the seats we’d set up, and then we had to wait the opening because they decided it was too cold and they all went shuffling back inside and got their coats. Finally the Show started and it went pretty well, considering some of them were blind and had to have their friends explain what was going on in loud voices.

    But they liked Aunt Lulu and her little trained dogs and they liked Uncle Manny’s strongman act where he picked up a Volkswagen. We kids knew all the heavy stuff like the engine had been taken out of it, but they didn’t. They applauded Uncle Derry the Mystic Magician, even though the talkers for the blind shouted all through his performance and threw his timing off. He was muttering to himself and rolling a joint as he came through the curtain that marked off Backstage.

    Brutal crowd, kids, he told us, lighting his joint at one of the torches. Watch your rhythm.

    But we were kids and we could ignore all the grownups, in the world shouting, so we grabbed our prop baskets and ran out and put on our act. Myko stalked up and down and waved his sword and yelled his lines about being the brave and dangerous Captainio. I had a little pretend guitar that I strummed on while I pretended to look at the moon, and spoke my lines about being a poor fool in love with the princess. Sunny came out and did her princess dance. Then we juggled. It all went fine. The only time I was a little thrown off was when I glanced at the audience for a split second and saw the light of my juggling torches flickering on all those glass lenses or blind eyes. But I never dropped a torch.

    Maybe Myko was bothered some, though, because I could tell by the way his eyes glared through his mask that he was getting worked up. When we had the sword duel near the end he hit too hard, the way he always did when he got worked up, and he banged my knuckles so bad I actually said Ow but the audience didn’t catch it. Sometimes when he was like that his hair almost bristled, he was like some crazy cat jumping and spitting, and he’d fight about nothing.

    Sometimes afterward I’d ask him why. He’d shrug and say he was sorry. Once he said it was because life was so damn boring.

    Anyway I sang my little sad song and died of a broken heart, flumpf there on the pavement in my buffoon suit. I felt Sunny come over and put the rose on my chest and, I will remember this to my dying day, some old lady was yelling to her old man  . . . and now the little girl gave him her rose!

    And the old man yelled What? She gave him her nose?

    "Damn it, Bob! Her ROSE !"

    I corpsed right then, I couldn’t help it, I was still giggling when Myko and Sunny pulled me to my feet and we took our bows and ran off. Backstage they started laughing too. We danced up and down and laughed, very much getting in the way of Uncle Monty, who had to trundle all his parrots and their perches out on stage.

    When we had laughed ourselves out, Sunny said, So . . . what’ll we do now? That was a good question. Usually the Show was at night, so usually after a performance we went back to the trailers and got out of costume and our moms fed us and put us to bed. We’d never played a matinee before. We stood there looking at each other until Myko’s eyes gleamed suddenly.

    We can explore the Lost City of the Sands, he said, in that voice he had that made it sound like whatever he wanted was the coolest thing ever. Instantly, Sunny and I both wanted to explore too. So we slipped out from the backstage area, just as Uncle Monty was screaming himself hoarse trying to get his parrots to obey him, and a moment later we were walking down an endless street lined with looming giants’ houses.

    They weren’t really, they had big letters carved up high that said they were this or that property group or financial group or brokerage or church, but if a giant had stepped out at one corner and peered down at us, we wouldn’t have been surprised. There was a cold wind blowing along the alleys from the sea, and sand hissed there and ran before us like ghosts along the ground, but on the long deserted blocks between there was gigantic silence. Our tiny footsteps only echoed in doorways.

    The windows were mostly far above our heads and there was nothing much to see when Myko hoisted me up to stand on his shoulders and look into them.

    Myko kept saying he hoped we’d see a desk with a skeleton with one of those headset things on sitting at it, but we never did; people didn’t die that fast when it all went down. My mom said they could tell when they were getting sick and people went home and locked themselves in to wait and see if they lived or not.

    Anyway Myko got bored finally and started this game where he’d charge up the steps of every building we passed. He’d hammer on the door with the hilt of his sword and yell, It’s the Civilian Militia! Open up or we’re coming in! Then he’d rattle the doors, but everything was locked long ago. Some of the doors were too solid even to rattle, and the glass was way too thick to break.

    After about three blocks of this, when Sunny and I were starting to look at each other with our eyebrows raised—meaning Are you going to tell him this game is getting old or do I have to do it?—right then something amazing happened: one of the doors swung slowly inward and Myko swung with it. He staggered into the lobby or whatever and the door shut behind him. He stood staring at us through the glass and we stared back and I was scared to death, because I thought we’d have to run back and get Uncle Buck and Aunt Selene with their hammers to get Myko out, and we’d all be in trouble.

    But Sunny just pushed on the door and it opened again. She went in so I had to go in too. We stood there all three and looked around. There was a desk and a dead tree in a planter and another huge glass wall with a door in it, leading deeper into the building. Myko began to grin.

    This is the first chamber of the Treasure Tomb in the Lost City, he said. We just killed the giant scorpion and now we have to go defeat the army of zombies to get into the second chamber!

    He drew his sword and ran yelling at the inner door, but it opened too, soundlessly, and we pushed after him. It was much darker in here but there was still enough light to read the signs.

    It’s a libarary, said Sunny. They used to have paperbacks.

    "Paperbacks," said Myko gloatingly, and I felt pretty excited myself. We’d seen lots of paperbacks, of course; there was the boring one with the mended cover that Aunt Maggie made everybody learn to read in. Every grownup we knew had one or two or a cache of paperbacks, tucked away in boxes or in lockers under beds, to be thumbed through by lamplight and read aloud from, if kids had been good.

    Aunt Nera had a dozen paperbacks and she’d do that. It used to be the only thing that would stop Myko crying when he was little. We knew all about the Last Unicorn and the kids who went to Narnia, and there was a really long story about some people who had to throw a ring into a volcano that I always got tired of before it ended, and another really long one about a crazy family living in a huge castle, but it was in three books and Aunt Nera only had the first two. There was never any chance she’d ever get the third one now, of course, not since it all went down. Paperbacks were rare finds, they were ancient, their brown pages crumbled if you weren’t careful and gentle.

    "We just found all the paperbacks in the universe !" Myko shouted.

    Don’t be dumb, said Sunny. Somebody must have taken them all away years ago.

    Oh yeah? Myko turned and ran further into the darkness. We followed, yelling at him to come back, and we all came out together into a big round room with aisles leading off it. There were desks in a ring all around and the blank dead screens of electronics. We could still see because there were windows down at the end of each aisle, sending long trails of light along the stone floors, reflecting back on the long shelves that lined the aisles and the uneven surfaces of the things on the shelves. Clustering together, we picked an aisle at random and walked down it toward the window.

    About halfway down it, Myko jumped and grabbed something from one of the shelves. Look! Told you! He waved a paperback under our noses. Sunny leaned close to look at it. There was no picture on the cover, just the title printed big.

    Roget’s. The. Saurus, Sunny read aloud.

    What’s it about? I asked.

    Myko opened it and tried to read. For a moment he looked so angry I got ready to run, but then he shrugged and closed the paperback. It’s just words. Maybe it’s a secret code or something. Anyway, it’s mine now. He stuck it inside his doublet.

    No stealing! said Sunny.

    If it’s a dead town it’s not stealing, it’s salvage, I told her, just like the aunts and uncles always told us.

    But it isn’t dead. There’s all the old people.

    They’ll die soon, said Myko. And anyway Uncle Buck already asked permission to salvage. Which she had to admit was true, so we went on. What we didn’t know then, but figured out pretty fast, was that all the other things on the shelves were actually big hard books like Uncle Des’s Barlogio’s Principles of Glassblowing.

    But it was disappointing at first because none of the books in that aisle had stories. It was all, what do you call it, reference stuff. We came out sadly thinking we’d been gypped, and then Sunny spotted the sign with directions.

    Children’s Books, Fifth Floor, she announced.

    Great! Where’s the stairs? Myko looked around. We all knew better than to ever, ever go near an elevator, because not only did they mostly not work, they could kill you. We found a staircase and climbed, and climbed for what seemed forever, before we came out onto the Children’s Books floor.

    And it was so cool. There were racks of paperbacks, of course, but we stood there with our mouths open because the signs had been right—there were books here. Big, hard, solid books, but not about grownup stuff. Books with bright pictures on the covers. Books for us. Even the tables and chairs up here were our size.

    With a little scream, Sunny ran forward and grabbed a book from a shelf. It’s Narnia! Look! And it’s got different pictures!

    What a score, said Myko, dancing up and down. Oh, what a score!

    I couldn’t say anything. The idea was so enormous: all these were ours. This whole huge room belonged to us . . . at least, as much as we could carry away with us.

    Myko whooped and ran off down one of the aisles. Sunny stayed frozen at the first shelf, staring with almost a sick expression at the other books. I went close to see.

    Look, she whispered. "There’s millions. How am I supposed to choose? We need as many stories as we can get. " She was pointing at a whole row of books with color titles: The Crimson Fairy Book. The Blue Fairy Book. The Violet Fairy Book. The Orange Fairy Book. I wasn’t interested in fairies, so I just grunted and shook my head.

    I picked an aisle and found shelves full of flat books with big pictures. I opened one and looked at it. It was real easy to read, with big letters and the pictures were funny, but I read right through it standing there. It was about those big animals you see sometimes back up the delta country, you know, elephants.

    Dancing, with funny hats on. I tried to imagine Aunt Nera reading it aloud on winter nights. It wouldn’t last even one night; it wouldn’t last through one bedtime. It was only one story. Suddenly I saw what Sunny meant. If we were going to take books away with us, they had to be full of stories that would last. What’s the word I’m looking for? Substance.

    Myko yelled from somewhere distant Here’s a cool one! It’s got pirates! It was pretty dark where I was standing, so I wandered down the aisle toward the window. The books got thicker the farther I walked. There were a bunch of books about dogs, but their stories all seemed sort of the same; there were books about horses too, with the same problem. There were books to teach kids how to make useful stuff, but when I looked through them they were all dumb things like how to weave potholders for your mom or build things out of Popsicle sticks.

    I didn’t even know what Popsicle sticks were, much less where I could get any.

    There were some about what daily life was like back in olden times, but I already knew about that, and anyway those books had no story.

    And all the while Myko kept yelling things like "Whoa! This one has guys with spears and shields and gods! or Hey, here’s one with a flying carpet and it says it’s got a thousand stories!" Why was I the only one stuck in the dumb books shelves?

    I came to the big window at the end and looked out at the view—rooftops, fog, gray dark ocean—and backed away, scared stiff by how high up I was. I was turning around to run back when I saw the biggest book in the world.

    Seriously. It was half as big as I was, twice the size of Barlogio’s Principles of Glassblowing, it was bound in red leather and there were gold letters along its back. I crouched down and slowly spelled out the words.

    The Complete Collected Adventures of Asterix the Gaul.

    I knew what Adventures meant, and it sounded pretty promising. I pulled the book down—it was the heaviest book in the world too—and laid it flat on the floor. When I opened it I caught my breath. I had found the greatest book in the world.

    It was full of colored pictures, but there were words too, a lot of them, they were the people in the story talking but you could see them talk. I had never seen a comic before. My mom talked sometimes about movies and TV must have been like this, I thought, talking pictures. And there was a story. In fact, there were lots of stories. Asterix was this little guy no bigger than me but he had a mustache and a helmet and he lived in this village and there was a wizard with a magic potion and Asterix fought in battles and traveled to all these faraway places and had all these adventures!!! And I could read it all by myself, because when I didn’t know what a word meant I could guess at it from the pictures.

    I settled myself more comfortably on my stomach, propped myself up on my elbows so I wouldn’t crunch my starched ruff, and settled down to read.

    Sometimes the world becomes a perfect place.

    Asterix and his friend Obelix had just come to the Forest of the Carnutes when I was jolted back to the world by Myko yelling for me. I rose to my knees and looked around. It was darker now; I hadn’t even realized I’d been pushing my nose closer and closer to the pages as the light had drained away. There were drops of rain hitting the window and I thought about what it would be like running through those dark cold scary streets and getting rained on too.

    I scrambled to my feet and grabbed up my book, gripping it to my chest as I ran. It was even darker when I reached the central room. Myko and Sunny were having a fight when I got there. She was crying. I stopped, astounded to see she’d pulled her skirt off and stuffed it full of books, and she was sitting there with her legs bare to her underpants.

    We have to travel light, and they’re too heavy, Myko was telling her. You can’t take all those!

    I have to, she said. "We need these books!" She got to her feet and hefted the skirt. The Olive Fairy Book fell out. I looked over and saw she’d taken all the colored fairy books. Myko bent down impatiently and grabbed up The Olive Fairy Book. He looked at it.

    It’s stupid, he said. Who needs a book about an olive fairy?

    You moron, it’s not about an olive fairy! Sunny shrieked. It’s got all kinds of stories in it! Look! She grabbed it back from him and opened it, and shoved it out again for him to see. I sidled close and looked. She was right: there was a page with the names of all the stories in the book. There were a lot of stories, about knights and magic and strange words. Read one a night, they’d take up a month of winter nights. And every book had a month’s worth of stories in it? Now, that was concentrated entertainment value.

    Myko, squinting at the page, must have decided the same thing. Okay, he said. But you’ll have to carry it. And don’t complain if it’s heavy.

    I won’t, said Sunny, putting her nose in the air. He glanced at me and did a double-take.

    You can’t take that! he yelled. It’s too big and it’s just one book anyway!

    It’s the only one I want, I said. And anyhow, you got to take all the ones you wanted! He knew it was true, too. His doublet was so stuffed out with loot, he looked pregnant.

    Myko muttered under his breath, but turned away, and that meant the argument was over. Anyway we need to leave.

    So we started to, but halfway down the first flight of stairs three books fell out of Sunny’s skirt and we had to stop while Myko took the safety pins out of all our costumes and closed up the waistband. We were almost to the second floor when Sunny lost her hold on the skirt and her books went cascading down to the landing, with the loudest noise in the universe. We scrambled down after them and were on our knees picking them up when we heard the other noise.

    It was a hissing, like someone gasping for breath through whistly dentures, and a jingling, like a ring of keys, because that’s what it was. We turned our heads.

    Maybe he hadn’t heard us when we ran past him on the way up. We hadn’t been talking then, just climbing, and he had a lot of hair in his ears and a pink plastic sort of machine in one besides. Or maybe he’d been so wrapped up, the way I had been in reading, that he hadn’t even noticed us when we’d pattered past. But he hadn’t been reading.

    There were no books in this part of the library. All there was on the shelves was old magazines and stacks and stacks of yellow newspapers. The newspapers weren’t crumpled into balls in the bottoms of old boxes, which was the only way we ever saw them, they were smooth and flat. But most of them were drifted on the floor like leaves, hundreds and hundreds of big leaves, ankle-deep, and on every, single one was a square with sort of checkered patterns and numbers printed in the squares and words written in pencil.

    I didn’t know what a crossword puzzle was then but the old man must have been coming there for years, maybe ever since it all went down, years and years he’d been working his way through all those magazines and papers, hunting down every single puzzle and filling in every one. He was dropping a stub of a pencil now as he got to his feet, snarling at us, showing three brown teeth. His eyes behind his glasses were these huge distorted magnified things, and full of crazy anger. He came over the paper-drifts at us fast and light as a spider.

    Fieves! Ucking kish! Ucking fieving kish!

    Sunny screamed and I screamed too. Frantically she shoved all the books she could into her skirt and I grabbed up most of what she’d missed, but we were taking too long. The old man brought up his cane and smacked it down, crack, but he missed us on his first try and by then Myko had drawn his wooden sword and put it against the old man’s chest and shoved hard. The old man fell with a crash, still flailing his cane, but he was on his side and striking at us faster than you’d believe, and so mad now he was just making noises, with spittle flying from his mouth. His cane hit my knee as I scrambled up. It hurt like fire and I yelped.

    Myko kicked him and yelled, Run!

    We bailed, Sunny and I did, we thundered down the rest of the stairs and didn’t stop until we were out in the last chamber by the street doors. Myko’s still up there, said Sunny. I had an agonizing few seconds before deciding to volunteer to go back and look for him. I was just opening my mouth when we spotted him running down the stairs and out toward us.

    Oh, good, said Sunny. She tied a knot in one corner of her skirt, for a handle, and had already hoisted it over her shoulder onto her back and was heading for the door as Myko joined us. He was clutching the one book we’d missed on the landing. It was The Lilac Fairy Book and there were a couple of spatters of what looked like blood on its cover.

    Here. You carry it. Myko shoved the book at me. I took it and wiped it off. We followed Sunny out. I looked at him sidelong. There was blood on his sword too.

    It took me two blocks, though, jogging after Sunny through the rain, before I worked up the nerve to lean close to him as we ran and ask: Did you kill that guy?

    Had to, said Myko. He wouldn’t stop.

    To this day I don’t know if he was telling the truth. It was the kind of thing he would have said, whether it was true or not. I didn’t know what I was supposed to say back. We both kept running. The rain got a lot harder and Myko left me behind in a burst of speed, catching up to Sunny and grabbing her bundle of books.

    He slung it over his shoulder. They kept going, side by side. I had all I could do not to fall behind.

    By the time we got back the Show was long over. The crew was taking down the stage in the rain, stacking the big planks. Because of the rain no market stalls had been set up but there was a line of old people with umbrellas standing by Uncle Chris’s trailer, since he’d offered to repair any dentures that needed fixing with his jeweler’s tools. Myko veered us away from them behind Aunt Selene’s trailer, and there we ran smack into our moms and Aunt Nera. They had been looking for us for an hour and were really mad.

    I was scared sick the whole next day, in case the old people got out their guns and came to get us, but nobody seemed to notice the old man was dead and missing, if he was dead. The other thing I was scared would happen was that Aunt Kestrel or Aunt Nera would get to talking with the other women and say something like, Oh, by the way, the kids found a library and salvaged some books, maybe we should all go over and get some books for the other kids too because that was exactly the sort of thing they were always doing, and then they’d find the old man’s body. But they didn’t. Maybe nobody did anything because the rain kept all the aunts and kids and old people in next day. Maybe the old man had been a hermit and lived by himself in the library, so no one would find his body for ages.

    I never found out what happened. We left after a couple of days, after

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