Nayima felt shy beneath the strangers’ stares, under the weight of what they needed and her promises to them. She opened her backpack and stood ten water bottles upright, fighting common sense that told her to keep it.
“Here’s the free water,” she said. “It’s desalinated, but go on and boil it. I boiled the bottles too, but you can use gloves.”
When Nayima stepped back, no one stepped forward for the water. Good.
She measured the space in the center of the pier’s walkway to set up her crates. While Karen offered her a hand to steady herself, Nayima climbed up and tested her balance with one foot on each. The crates were not quite even, rocking her like she was surfing.
Nayima wished the sun rose in the west, but the dawn sky was growing bright with resolve, washing everything in pink and lilac like the colors of her thumbtacks.
“We’re up here!” she heard Karen shout out behind her, motioning to someone from farther down the pier. Nayima hoped Karen had sense enough not to be hailing marshals.
“There’s, like, six more of them,” Karen told her, excited.
Two members of the Brat Pack had come in dust masks and blue gloves, a new young couple who looked carefree in beach clothes and light jackets. Most of the faces were new: a brown man with three women of different hues, all of them taller than him, all four of them hiding their faces behind clean, colorful scarves. Their clothes were clean too. One of the women was wearing perfume, even.
“Are you from Sacramento?” one of the women said, hopeful inside her purple scarf.
Nayima shook her head. She repeated her spiel about the free water, so the woman in the purple scarf walked up to take a bottle in her gloved hands. She motioned to Nayima, asking if she could take two, and Nayima nodded. The woman offered one bottle to the old fisherman, and he shook his head, waving her away. He was not wearing gloves.
Nayima counted: twelve people had gathered in Malibu! She had not been in the company of so many others in more than a year, almost since the plague began.
“It’s great to be here!” Nayima proclaimed.
The crowd, stone silent before she’d spoken, transformed into a rousing amen corner. The old man was already smiling. Their clapping was muted by their gloves.
Nayima was so shocked by their response that she almost forgot her first joke. She’d planned to open with the joke Karen liked about Malibu prices going down, but it felt wrong now, especially with the car tombs in view. Why were most of her jokes about the lost?
She blurted: “I went swimming in the ocean the other day—my friend said, ‘Aren’t you afraid of the sharks?’ I said ‘No, I’m only afraid of the lifeguards.’”
She’d rushed it. Her delivery had been bland.
But their laughter nearly rocked Nayima from her unsteady crates. The bearded man laughed so loudly that the approaching tide could not smother him. He pointed at her, head turned over his shoulder to be sure everyone knew she was there. Farther back, the children squealed and tugged at each other, until their father separated them. Most of them applauded.
Nayima told every joke she could think of, every joke she had ever known. She raised her voice until she was hoarse so everyone would hear her punchlines. Their smiles were hidden, and sometimes the waves drowned them out, but she saw laughing in their eyes. She luxuriated in so many eyes. Especially Karen’s—staring at her as if she were the goddess Yemayah rising from the sea.
Nayima smiled at Karen, her hand over her heart to say: I love you. She didn’t know if it were true yet, or if loving was possible anymore, but Karen deserved to be loved as much as these strangers deserved to laugh. As much as these children deserved a childhood. As much as they all deserved a memory without claws.
Nayima did not stop her show—not at first—even when she heard the faraway chop-chop-chop sound of helicopters and saw the swarm of black dots advancing in the morning sky.
BLACK, THEIR REGALIA
DARCIE LITTLE BADGER
Darcie Little Badger is a Lipan Apache geoscientist and writer. Her short fiction, nonfiction and comics have appeared in multiple places, including Love Beyond Body, Space, and Time, Strange Horizons, Fantasy Magazine, The Dark, and Deer Woman: an Anthology by Native Realities. She currently lives on both coasts but will always be home along the Kuné Tsé.
Outside, the quarantine train was unblemished white. Where its tracks skirted populated regions, barbed wire and warning signs—DANGER! ¡PELIGRO! INFECTIOUS MATERIALS! ¡SUSTANCIAS INFECCIOSAS!—discouraged trespassers from marking the cars with spray paint.
The interior was another story. In her cabin, a narrow sleeper with four beds (one for Screaming Moraine, one for Fiddler Kristi, one for Drummer Tulli, and one for their carry-on luggage, several densely packed grocery bags, and an electric violin), Tulli found graffiti scrawled near her upper bunk.
Tulli fished a leather-piercing needle from her sewing kit. With marks like spider silk, she etched: The Apparently Siblings rode the White Train.
Tulli, Moraine, and Kristi were only siblings in the spiritual way; their band name was a response to all the strangers who asked, “Are you triplets?”
When she felt thorny—so almost always—Kristi responded, “Because Natives look alike? No. Well. We might have the same great-uncle. He gotta reputation.”
“Hey! Tulli! Are you defacing the train?” Moraine shouted, as if she couldn’t hear him across three feet of recirculated air. “Don’t write our names! I’d rather not pay a fine.”
“Uh oh. I wrote our band name already.”
“Don’t worry,” Kristi said. “There’s no chance anybody will recognize it.”
So the Apparently Sibs weren’t remotely famous, but they’d been off to a promising start before the plague spread. On average, they played four paid shows a month and had sixty followers on Twitter (sixty-three, if you counted their mothers). With enough time, they could have serenaded the right person, signed a contract, and toured the world. Or, at the very least, toured states outside Texas.
Now, their on-stage corpse paint seemed like a premonition. What little humankind knew about the Big Plague pointed to a grim, albeit sluggish, prognosis. The poor souls who carried the strain had a year, more or less. Could be enough time to find a cure. Maybe even enough time to mobilize the largest treatment plan in human history. Unfortunately, some people crashed fast, their nervous systems torn apart.
A rap on the door announced breakfast: oatmeal and tea. The twenty-something, freckled nurse, Jon—is he the Jon of wall graffiti fame, Tulli wondered—prepared the food with automaton efficiency and took their temperatures. Ninety-nine, ninety-eight, one hundred and one point nine. Kristi was running a vigorous fever already.
“Can we do anything to slow her symptoms?” Tulli asked. Like all White Train nurses, Jon was a carrier, immune to the virus but contagious. Lucky: a hazmat suit would obscure the sympathetic crinkles around his eyes.
“Possibly,” he said. “The doctors at Mariposa Compound will do everything they can.” Jon dropped the disposable thermometer tips down a biohazard chute near the door. He hesitated in the exit, gazing beyond Tulli’s head, as if distracted by a memory. “Goodbye, then,” he said. “Call if you need anything.”