The End Has Come

The dark was thick to the forsaken east, but to the west she saw the gentle orange glow from the colony in Sacramento, the fortress she would never enter. The town folk had electricity to spare, since their lights never went fully dark anymore. They were building a real-life Emerald City from the ruins, with bright lights and fresh water flowing in the streets — literally, after the levees flooded back in the ’20s.

By contrast, her tract, Nayimaland, was two-hundred acres of dead farmland she shared with feral cats made bold because food was scarce — taken by drought, not the Plague. The late State of California had yet more dying to do.

Nayima felt thirsty, but she didn’t stop at her sealed barrel to take a scoop. She couldn’t guess how long her standing water would have to last. Sacramento owed her water credits, but she would be a fool to trust their promises.

At the rear of the chicken coop, Nayima found the hole the cat had torn in the mesh and lashed loose wires to close it. The hens were unsettled, so she could expect broken eggs. And she couldn’t afford to cook one of her reliable laying hens, so she’d have to wait for meat at least another week, until trading day.

By the time Nayima came back to her porch, her two house cats, Tango and Buster, had gathered enough courage to poke their heads up in the window. For an instant, her pets looked like the thief cat, no better.

“It’s okay, babies,” she said. “One of ’em got a chicken.”

Buster, still aloof, raised his tail good night and went to his sofa. But Tango followed her to her bedroom and jumped beside her to sleep. Nayima preferred a bare mattress to the full bed that had been in this room — fewer places for intruders to hide and surprise her. She slept beneath the window, where she could always open her eyes and see the sky. Tango rested his weight against her; precious warmth and a thrumming heartbeat to calm her nerves.

“I can’t feed you all,” she told Tango. “I’m crazy for taking in just you two.” Tango slowly blinked his endless green eyes at her, his cat language for love. Nayima returned Tango’s long, slow blink.

* * *

Nayima thought the jangling bells outside soon after dawn meant that a cat had been caught in a cage, but when she went to investigate, she found Raul’s mud-painted red pickup slewed across the dirt path to her ranch house. He was cursing in Spanish. His front tire had caught a camouflaged cage, and he was stooping to check the damage. At least a dozen sets of cats’ eyes floated like marbles in the dry shrubbery.

“Don’t shoot!” Raul called to her. He knew she had her little sawed-off without looking back. “You’ll blow off your own culo with that rusty thing one day. ¿Es todo, Nayima?”

Despite the disturbance and his complaining, Nayima was glad to see Raul. He looked grand in morning sunshine. Raul’s eyes drooped slightly, giving the impression of drowsiness, but he was handsome, with a fine jaw and silvering hair he wore in two long braids like his Apache forebears. Since reconciliation and the allotment of the Carrier Territories eight years ago, Raul looked younger every time she saw him.

Nayima had turned sixty-one or sixty-two in December — she barely tracked her age anymore — and she and Raul were among the youngest left, so most carriers had died before the territories were allotted. In their human cages.

Captivity had been their repayment for the treatment and vaccine from the antibodies in their blood. They were outcasts, despite zero human transmissions of the virus after Year One. The single new case twenty-five years ago had been a lab accident, and the serum had knocked it out quick.

The Ward B carriers Nayima had barely known still lived communally, or close enough to walk to each other’s ranches. But Nayima had chosen seclusion on an airy expanse of unruly farmland that stretched as far as she could see. In containment, she’d never had the luxury of community, except Raul. She had enough human contact on her market trips, where she made transactions through a wall. Or her hour-long ride on her ATV to see Raul, if she wanted conversation. Other people wearied her.

“Sorry — cat problem,” she told Raul. “Did it rip?” She had a few worn tires in her shed from the previous owner, but they were at least forty years old.

Raul exhaled, relieved. “No, creo que está bien.”

She squatted beside him, close enough to smell the sun on his clothes. She had not seen Raul in at least thirty days. He had begged her to share his house, but she had refused. She needed to talk to him from time to time, but she remembered why she did not want to live with him, and why she had slept with him only once: Raul’s persistent recollections about his old neighborhood in Rancho Cucamonga and his grandparents’ house in Nogales were unbearable. He always wanted to talk about the days before the Plague.