Wastelands 2: More Stories of the Apocalypse

A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO SURVIVAL BEFORE, DURING, AND AFTER THE APOCALYPSE ^{CHRISTOPHER BARZAK}

First, remember what it means to be human. Even when your country has turned against you, even when some other part of the world has been decimated (by bomb, by terrorist cells, by forcible entry and removal of dissidents to dark and forgotten chambers, by hurricane or tornado or tsunami), even then remember that you can retain your humanity if you continue to be humane.

Despite that, you will have certain struggles, like finding work when you’re not the right sort (too young, too old, too female, too ethnic, too queer), or like that time you went to the grocery store and the cashier refused to touch your money because you were one of them: one of those Other People. Stay calm. If you are not a part of a normalized group, your chances of being strung up for giving the wrong look or replying with the wrong tone might be more than enough reason for a society gone wrong to cast you out even further, or perhaps kill you. Instead, say, “Thank you.” Say, “I’m sorry, that’s not what I meant.” Say, “You’re absolutely right, I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking. I’m sorry.” Say it again: “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

Wear the requisite uniform. Brush the dust off your shoulders and polish your shoes. Look like you mean this pose you’re taking. You love this country more than you love life itself. Practice these phrases: “I am a patriot of the first order,” and, “God has shown me the light,” and, maybe the most important one, “If you don’t like it here, go somewhere else.” This last one is most effective in proving your loyalty. Do not hesitate to degrade your fellow man if it means your life or his is at stake.

Go to underground meetings in the back rooms of bars and coffee shops. It will not be like the 1960s. There is no free love, just fear, fear, fear. Despair reigns over these conversations, and occasionally you find yourself trying to annihilate your desperation by taking other meeting-goers to bed after too many drinks. Say, “Do you think this is it?” And when they ask, “This is what?” say, “The end of the world. Do you think this is it?”

They’ll say, “If it isn’t the end of the world, I don’t want to know what is.”

They will cry after you make love to them. They will tell you secrets. Secrets about the child they aborted ten years ago, when that was still legal, before they began to arrest women post-facto. That was what they called it in the Reformation Papers: post-facto. After the fact. Retrospective retribution. They will tell you secrets about the last lover they had, before their lover was outed during the Reclamation Period, when all of the homos and queers were given the choice: normalize or die. It was fairly simple. Most chose life. It is one of the most unfortunate aspects of being human, this drive to survive no matter what the cost. Their last lover will have been called Jason, and you’ll wonder what sort of person Jason was, what kind of lover. Do you remind this person with whom you’ve chosen to abandon reality of Jason? Do you have the same eyes? The same smile? The same voice? The same scent? Are you Jason-esque?

Take drugs. They will keep you not-feeling. Numbness is important when the world is coming apart. Refuse the hallucinogens. Accept the dampeners. You need to see the world as it is. You cannot afford to see it as it isn’t.

Remember. This is one of the verbs they will try to remove from your brain. Remember. If you cannot remember, they can tell you anything about the past—your own or the world’s—and you will not be able to know if they are telling the truth. Sit in the library, that most taboo of places, and read as many books as they still allow to be kept on the shelves. Download illegal information. Use false service provider addresses. Move around. If you stay still, you’re certain to be caught.

When the first of the bombs go off, go into hiding. When you are safe, grieve. Sit in your cave, the one in the hills that used to belong to your family, and grieve the loss of so many lives. Lives you never knew personally. Imagine their faces. Imagine the faces of those you knew and loved. Imagine the mushroom clouds and the clouds of viruses. Imagine the way skin crackles and crisps, the way the body can turn against itself in mere minutes or hours when exposed to the right amount of radiation or illness.

Stay where you are. Keep silent. When you hear others pass by your carefully obscured cave entrance, bite your bottom lip and pray. Pray, even if you don’t believe in a god. It may help you to keep silent if you are speaking the language of angels, which can never be heard by human ears. It is the language of thought, plucked like rays of light from the sky and carried off to some other place, where you hope some higher power may hear you.

At night, build a small fire out of moss and straw and twigs. Do not risk the luxury of true warmth and light. It will reach the eyes and ears and noses of those who would take what little luxury you have planned for: a six-month supply of canned meats and vegetables, a mattress and a pile of blankets, a lantern and gobs of oil to burn. Soap. A creek you can wash yourself in at night, even though it chills you to the bone.

Be vigilant during the daytime. Erase the tracks you make between your regular routes from the cave to the nearby river where you sometimes try to fish but rarely catch anything worth starting a fire over. Gather berries and nuts from different bushes and trees, so that no one can see them disappearing so obviously from one place. Notice the curl of blue smoke coming over the hillside. Walk toward it until you see the farm from which it comes. It is a four-mile walk to this place. Not far. Remember that they can see anything you might smoke just as you saw theirs.

Ignore the human howls of pain and starvation that pierce the early morning air. Ignore the disappearance of the animals that had occasionally blundered into your cave in those first few months after the bombs went off. Surely this is bad news. But what can you expect? This is the end of the world you’re trying to live through. Animals may disappear. It is your job not to let yourself disappear with them.

Learn how to swim, strong and hard. Don’t trust old women who live in shacks in the woods. If someone pulls out a dagger, even in an innocuous manner, run. Hide in disgusting places, because no one will want to look there, even if they know they should.

When the world grows quiet, remember what it used to be like before the apocalypse, remember what it felt like to live in a town with streets on a grid, a tree growing strong and proud in front of each house. Remember the scent of your mother’s rosebushes, and how she called them her babies. Remember how your father picked you up when you fell off your bicycle and the asphalt of the street ate a chunk of the palm of your hand. Remember how he said, “Shh, shh, it’s okay, baby,” and try not to make any noise when you feel the tears falling down your cheeks. There are bandits moving around outside. If they hear, everything you’ve managed to accomplish—constructing this semblance of existence after the world has ended—is finished.

Start talking to your shadow. It sits on the wall of your cave each night like an angry imp. Arms folded. Chin tucked into its chest like a sulking child. Tell it to cheer up. Tell it to stop whining. Tell your shadow it needs to buck the hell up or get lost. You don’t have time for stragglers in this screwed-up world. You can’t wait around while it sorts out its feelings. Ask it, “Are you a man or are you a shadow?” When it remains silent, say, “I thought so.”

Stare at the sky over the hillside for a number of days and notice how the ribbon of smoke that occasionally found its way over the farm behind that hill has stopped appearing. Don’t do anything right away. Just count the days. One. Two. Three. Four. Like that, until you get to ten full days with no smoke dawning on the horizon. Walk over the hill to the farm. Creep around its perimeter. Wait for an hour or two, just watching, to make sure there are no signs of life. Peer into the kitchen window. Dirty dishes are stacked and scattered everywhere. The body of an old woman lies at an odd angle beside a table overflowing with old newspapers, plastic grocery bags and rubber bands. Enter the house quietly, and make your rounds until you’re sure no one living remains. Then raid the kitchen, take the food stored in the basement, the guns in the living room, the newspapers and boxes of matches for starting fires more easily, then—

Stop. Why are you taking everything when you can move what you have to the house instead?

Bury the old woman. Lie in her bed each night staring up at a foreign ceiling, but remember how familiar it is to do this, unable to sleep, a ceiling above you. Not the cold walls of a cave. You are still a bit human, then. You can remember creature comforts, luxuries. You didn’t completely devolve.

And here you have a house! And a river nearby, and a garden, and a barn where six chickens and a rooster all sit on their nests like the little members of royal families, clucking their way through the dead days of the apocalypse. They lay eggs, and you fry them in a pan on an antique stove. The old woman was a collector. Everything in this house is old, old, old.

Sit down in the old woman’s old rocking chair. Push yourself back and forth on the balls of your feet like you are her. Grip your fingertips over the arms of the chair. Smile as you turn your face to look out the nearest window, where the sun falls through in a long golden shaft, and dust motes spin like stars inside it. Beyond it, though, take notice of the smoke curling up and into the sky above the hillside. Someone has taken your old cave.

Be cautious, but not illogical. Whoever it is up there, they’re just another person trying to eke out an existence under ridiculous circumstances, just like you. Watch the perimeter of your property, though. Pay attention to all of the places you yourself used to hide when you were spying on the old woman. Take notice that you think of the old woman’s land as your property now. No one owns the world any longer. It is all yours.

On a cool evening, drift through the purple gloaming that hovers beneath the trees around your property and climb the hillside from a secret angle. When you see the person living in your cave, wince in confusion. They are so familiar. Those eyes, that hair, the curl of the lips, the set of the shoulders. It’s you, actually, after all. To be precise, it’s your shadow. It never left the cave when you moved into the old woman’s house. It stayed behind in the surroundings to which it had grown accustomed. It can never forget what it went through. It can never move with you into the old woman’s house. If it did, it would forget everything that happened to it, and in the moment of its total forgetting, it would cease to exist.

Leave your shadow be. Let it continue on as it wishes. Go back to the old woman’s house and make yourself dinner. A nice salad. Some eggs, hard-boiled. Sigh when you’re all finished. It’s hard to get the image of your shadow out of your memory. The food doesn’t distract you. The warm water of the bath you boil up with plenty of kettles an hour later can’t either. So you sit in the dented copper basin in the pantry like some kind of pioneer days person, knobbly knees sticking out of the sudsy water, and weep. Weep for everyone you used to know. Many names can be included on this list that you conjure, including your own.

There is such a thing as survivor’s guilt, even at the end of the world, even after the end of the world is over. But don’t worry. Like everything else, this too shall pass.