Mather was correct on the offspring issue, of course. He’d been correct on every issue since he took charge two years ago when the sky blew off, the crops started wilting, and the world’s population started dying by the hundreds of millions.
It was summer, the summer of my twenty-seventh year, and it had been the most glorious summer of my life.
We were living in New York, then, all of us, living in style and with more than our fair share of creature comforts in an upper West Side neighborhood that only recently had been gentrified. We were the brie-chablis crowd, the folks with the MBA’s and the designer bathrooms who spent weekends on Cape Cod and February vacations in Aspen. There wasn’t a one of us who wasn’t making fifty grand then, minimum, not a one of us who wasn’t employed with one of Wall Street’s or Madison Avenue’s most reputable firms.
Was it the Soviets, us, or some third party?
I don’t know if anyone anywhere ever really learned the answer to that question, not at the beginning, when the only effects were those amazing technicolor sunsets and that crazy shift in the jet-stream, or, later on, when political institutions and economies were disintegrating faster than global temperatures and the seas were rising.
In the early days, when the presses still ran and the six o’clock news was still being broadcast, there was all sorts of talk that it had been the test of some new thermonuclear weapon — more frightening and more secret than the Bomb, which had every true-blooded Yuppie doing flips back then.
I have to believe the guy upstairs has a pretty mean streak of irony because that wasn’t it by a long shot. There was no big bang, no escalation of crisis, no state of alert, no Warsaw Pact troops marching across Germany, no Colonel Khadafy dropping a surprise on Israel — just a sky the color of fresh blood the evening of July twenty-sixth.
Maybe it was the test of a new killer technology related to the so-called Star Wars program that the late President Reagan had announced a decade before. Maybe it was the test of something the Soviets had up their sleeves that our intelligence never picked up.
Maybe the Martians landed in a Kansas cornfield and decided to zap ninety-five percent of the human race, just for kicks.
Whatever it was, it silently and quickly burned off half the upper atmosphere, leaving plants to die, food chains to be disrupted and destroyed.
We didn’t know how bad it had really been until it turned winter, and winter brought no dirty snow on Fifth Avenue, no frost on Macy’s windows, no skating in Central Park, no temperatures lower than the sixties, not even in January or February.
By spring, the hospitals and doctors were overloaded with skin cancer cases and people whose vision was fading away to darkness.
By summer, the effects of the failed wheat and corn crops were filtering down, and grocery stores experienced their first shortages.
By fall, there was rioting and looting, and the cities began to burn. Police and the National Guard controlled some of it, at first, but then the panic set in. When it did, the authorities put down their weapons and ran.
By the next winter, starvation was coast-to-coast and the typhus had gone wild.
It was, of course, Mather’s idea to leave New York. Right from the start, everything had been Mather’s idea. We got out of the city in June, before the real panic hit, and we headed up the Connecticut coast. There was still gas left, although there were shortages and growing lines at the stations, so we drove, charging up a storm on our American Express and Visa cards as we went.
Mostly, we traveled by night, holing up during the daylight hours in cheap motels. When we did have to go outside, no matter how briefly, Mather made sure we wore sunglasses and painted ourselves with sunscreen, protection factor fifteen. Eventually there was a run on sunscreen and finally supplies dried up, but Mather had been smart enough to buy cases of it before John Q. Public fully realized what was going on. He’d done the same thing with penicillin and guns, so we were okay on those fronts, too.
We were in Boston when the fabric of American society began to dissolve, slowly but completely, like a cube of sugar in water. It was September, the hottest September ever recorded by the National Weather Service, and no one any longer had any doubt what was happening.
Mather had decided to put down roots, at least until we could figure out what the long-term plan would be. After disposing of a gang of winos, we’d made our home in an abandoned subway tunnel near Park Street Station, which is almost directly under City Hall. From a defensive perspective, the tunnel was a dream — only one entrance, which we kept clear with occasional firefights. From the survival point of view, it gave us decent access to stores and warehouses, particularly those mammoth ones along the waterfront, which were still stocked weeks after everything else ran out. The day the looting began in earnest, we grabbed enough canned juices and beef stew and hams for at least a year, according to Mather’s calculations.
It was a sickening scene we found when the Great Fire finally forced us to the surface. Bodies strewn everywhere, smoldering or just plain rotting, every one of them guaranteed to be harboring enough disease to wipe us out a thousand times over. Immediately Mather decided to head north, where, he said, we would have the best chance of establishing a camp. We passed other bands as we walked, and we had some skirmishes, losing two of our original group in the process.
Now the big threat was roamers.
Why they didn’t establish camps like the rest of us was a mystery not even Mather pretended to be able to solve. His best guess was that it had something to do with intelligence, or lack thereof, and I imagine he was right. You needed brains to build a camp, defend it, find a way to eat — in our case, a small but successful fish hatchery, supplemented by freeze-dried and canned stuff we’d managed to hoard. It took brains to beat the sun, escape the heat, and it took brains to keep the germs at bay.
From where roamers stood, it was plain easier to loot, pillage, whatever it took.
Which made every camp a target.
Pete followed me down the hill.
Neither of us spoke — I guess there wasn’t much of anything to say. The moon was three-quarters full and between that and the usual stunning array of stars we had no trouble keeping up a good clip. I wanted to get in and out quickly; I had some business back with Lisa, who’d been my girlfriend in the West Side days, and who Mather had decided was still an acceptable mate for me. He hadn’t assigned Pete a woman, but he had occasional privileges, which he was always pleased to exercise.
They were eerie, the nights since the sky blew off.
Sound seemed to carry twenty times farther than it had before. Noises were louder, exaggerated. A few nocturnal animals still survived, owls and raccoons among them, and their voices seemed to come from a hundred directions at once, or no direction at all. It was like Mother Nature had gone ventriloquist. Crickets, which had done quite well, put out sound like steady radio static.
But it wasn’t only noise that made the nights strange — temperatures had been thrown all out of whack, too. Most nights, like tonight, you were lucky if the mercury dipped into the nineties. The only relief was an occasional evening breeze.
A mile from our camp, we entered the outskirts of Bradford Village. If you closed your eyes, you could picture it as it might have been before the sky blew off: a charmed little blue-collar village, where neighbor knew neighbor and treated him with proper Yankee respect, a place where the machinery of life hummed quietly along in a more or less well-greased fashion. You could imagine being born in that village, growing up there, raising a family, walking your children down the aisle, bouncing your grandchildren on your knee, going to your grave a reasonably satisfied man.