And yet here I am, with my allergies and my fibromyalgia, impossibly far from the green-and-yellow island where I used to sit in the shade and pore over my mother’s library. I’ve made it a long way. All the way up here. Somehow, without meaning to do anything but stay alive and keep others alive if I can, it seems I’ve climbed to a big death after all.
Mountain Lions
They’ll eat you if they’re hungry, but they’re usually not hungry enough, except in the most badly infected of the dead places. Not as bad as wolves, or even as bad as bears. Just avoid them, and if you see one, don’t bother it. Why would you even want to bother a mountain lion? I’ve seen people do it. Stupid people.
A mountain lion carried off a child in Gualala. A little girl. Tell your kids to leave strange animals alone. Simple as that.
I saw mountain lion tracks this morning when I left the shelter for water and fuel. They don’t worry me much. Not as much as the wolves I heard howling last night.
Pollution
I was going to have Dr. Spendlove write this section. Pollution, even if we’re just talking man-made pollution, is a big topic, and it’s not one I know that much about. There are just too many kinds, in the air and the water and the ground. That’s why people fight so viciously for the land where crops still grow.
Dr. Spendlove knows a treatment for the white plague in the soil. Or so he says. He found a paper on it while camping in the ruins of Berkeley, collecting data from the old days. He thinks he can use it to cook a cure. That’s why we risked this mountain crossing, to get this information to the lab that Dr. Spendlove is almost certain still exists in Eureka.
We could have waited for spring. Probably. If I’d been smart, I would have insisted on waiting. But he was so eager, and his heart was so weak.
I’ll come back to this section later. Maybe when we reach Eureka. Maybe when Dr. Spendlove comes to.
Snakebite
Here in the northwest, there aren’t many poisonous snakes. It’s not worth worrying about. Anyway, they’re like most animals (except the dogs, except the wolves)—leave them alone, and they’re usually happy enough to leave you alone in return.
In Mexico, when I was a girl, one of my summer jobs was killing coral snakes out in the fields. They were beautiful snakes, with thick shimmering stripes the color of a campfire. Their bite could kill in twenty minutes. We stabbed them with pitchforks. Some kids saved the bodies and made the skins into belts or satchels, but I never wanted to touch anything with that much venom. For a while, before I got used to the work, I had nightmares about a coral snake brushing my foot with its fangs.
Now that I’m older, I’m a little nostalgic for coral snakes. Such a quick, warm death, and so beautiful.
Stab Wounds
People worry too much about animals. When I traveled with Lauren, and then later at the trading post in Gualala, people always asked me how to survive animal attacks. What about mountain lions, they’d say. What about snakes. What about bears.
You want the truth? Animals that can kill you are rare and mostly don’t want to meet you. People that can kill you are everywhere, and they’re looking for you.
Everyone knows about the raiding parties that hide in the mountain passes. Usually they’ll just steal what they can and ride off. But in the winter they get hungry, just like everything else in the mountains. In the winter they get desperate. And if they’ve managed to scavenge, borrow, or steal a cache of weapons, maybe they’ll just kill your party instead of robbing you.
It was a raiding party that took my mother’s library, years ago. They rode out of the hills in Jeeps. There was gasoline back then. I was working on a sweet-potato farm near the ruins of Pasadena, and they rode out of the hills and grabbed as many of us as they could. They took my library and my boots and let me go. I guess raiding parties have hardened since then.
It used to be that gunshot wounds were the type of death you most had to fear from your fellow man. But with the old guns falling apart and bullets, even the homemade kind, getting precious, most bandits attack with knives. Clean stab wounds and bind tightly. The wound must be washed regularly, because there are many ways to die of infected wounds. Staph. Gangrene. Tetanus. It used to be uncommon for someone to die of infected wounds, but most people today were born after vaccines, so now it happens quite a lot.
I kept Dr. Spendlove’s wounds as clean as I could, but the wounds were deep and the knife was filthy.
Thirst
You find out where the clean water is, and you drink that only. If there isn’t enough clean water, you make beer. Lack of water will kill you long, long before lack of food. Everyone knows this, but some people still insist on working all day in the heat without enough to drink, or leaving the ice on the well uncracked until they can’t break through. Fetch water. Drink. Fetch more.
I am eating snow now. It seems to be sufficient, but my lips are deeply cracked. Not bleeding. This may be a bad sign. I wish I had my library.
Typhus
Typhus! That’s what I should have died of! It’s common along the coast nowadays, especially as you get further up north. It’s a bacterial disease spread by lice and fleas, often carried by rats. Symptoms are everything that means sickness: muscle ache, headache, vomiting, coughing, fever, chills, delirium, a pink rash that turns dull red as the typhus gets worse. A whole library of ills.
It’s easy to prevent typhus with basic hygiene: Bathe regularly, keep your house clean, trap rats and feral animals, and, especially, don’t let rat poo collect where you eat and sleep. But people don’t do it, won’t do it. We used to have many cures for typhus, but we lost them, and now there are none.
It’s the perfect thing to kill me. With the wide range of symptoms, I could keep busy observing and honing my diagnosis right up to the end. And it’s such a little thing. A flea bite. A flea bite that wouldn’t have happened if people had any common sense.
Instead, it looks like I’ll die of hypothermia. What a personally stupid way to die. It’s my own fault for going up into the mountains, fibromyalgia and all, to follow Dr. Spendlove’s fluttering heart.
I’ve read that hypothermia is pleasant. You go numb and drift to sleep and that’s the end. It may be the kindest of all the things that can kill you. If I stay here, curled against Dr. Spendlove in our makeshift shelter, it will take care of me, slow and gentle and white as the death that’s creeping over the planet. It feels pleasant now, and even writing is starting to feel like too much work.
Or I could stand and walk. I won’t get far. There’s nowhere to go anymore. But I could stand.
Wolves
There is something to be said for the quicker death.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My most heartfelt thanks and appreciation goes out to: Steve Saffel (for acquiring the book and his editorial input) and to Sam Matthews and the rest of the team at Titan Books. My agent, Seth Fishman, for being, as always, awesome and supportive. Gordon Van Gelder and Ellen Datlow, for being great mentors and friends. My wife, Christie; my stepdaughters Grace and Lotte; my mom, Marianne; and my sister, Becky—for all their love and support. My intern, Alex Puncekar. All of the writers who had stories included in this anthology, and all of my other projects. And last but not least, to everyone who bought this book, or any of my other anthologies (or subscribed to my magazines Lightspeed and Nightmare)—you’re the ones who it make it all possible.
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