Wastelands 2: More Stories of the Apocalypse

ANIMAL HUSBANDRY ^{SEANAN MCGUIRE}

The city of Clayton was burning. I saw the smoke from over fifteen miles away, but I kept riding towards it, less from hope that the fire was a sign of civilization than from sheer, cussed stubbornness. My instructions said I needed to go this way. Since all the GPS systems failed around the time the networks and satellite uplinks died, I really didn’t think that deviating was a good idea. Not if I was actively interested in living, anyway.

Fortunately for me, the wind was blowing out to sea, carrying the bulk of the doubtless carcinogenic smoke with it. I left the trailer about a mile down the road from the lookout point, choosing the minor risk that one of the other poor souls left in this godforsaken world would stumble over it—you can’t exactly LoJack a draft horse—over the greater risks of smoke inhalation and panicked animals rocketing out of my control. My mare, the unimaginatively named Midnight, would put up with just about anything I asked from her. She’d be able to stand the heat as long as I could.

Even with the wind in our favor, the air was so thick with ash that I could practically chew it by the time we got to the top of the lookout point. I shielded my eyes to block the flames, squinting through the smoke as I strained to see the city beyond. There wasn’t much left to see. The fire had almost burned itself out, but it was still vigorous enough to make that particular route impassable.

There were two choices. We could try to find another route. Or we could backtrack twenty miles to the superstore I’d seen in San Ramon, resupply, and let the fire finish burning itself to death.

“We need a break, don’t we, Midnight?” I asked, running a hand down the anxious mare’s throat. She snorted, front legs dancing a half-panicked tattoo against the gravel. She was ready to bolt, holding herself in place solely because she assumed I wanted her to stay.

There was no need for that. We’d seen everything we’d come to see, and it was just more devastation. Tugging gently on the reins, I turned Midnight towards the caravan, and the road.

Before we rode out of the region completely, I stopped at the sign marking the city limits, pulled out my staple gun and another of my precious flyers, and set to work. Even if we didn’t come back this way, even if the store managed to yield a better route, I would have done my self-imposed duty by the people who might still be living here. Wherever they were. When we finally turned towards San Ramon, white copy-paper ghosts glared from the city sign behind us, eye-poppingly clean in a landscape gone to ash.

It would never be enough, but it would have to do.

My name was at the bottom: Mercy Neely, Doctor of Veterinary Medicine. Possibly the last vet in the world. Possibly the last medical practitioner of any kind in California.

I really wish I’d paid more attention in class.

The San Ramon superstore showed signs of moderate looting, which was reassuring. I’ve come to see looting as a sort of hopeful omen, a little piece of proof that the human race will manage to recover from what it’s done to itself. I was less pleased to see that my would-be looters had focused their attentions on the junk food aisles and cosmetics, almost completely ignoring the canned goods and well-stocked pharmacy. Maybe that was better for me, but it didn’t bode well for the survival of the species.

After my brief solo reconnaissance was done, I cranked up the loading bay door enough to drive the wagon inside and parked it in what used to be the stock room. Midnight wandered off to investigate while I was unhitching the other horses and pouring their oats out on the concrete. I don’t know what their names were originally; I call them Tweedledee and Tweedledum, and that seems to work well enough for everyone involved. The goats were hard at work trying to chew through their ropes again. I set them loose to wreak what havoc they could inside the closed superstore ecosystem. Goats can do a lot of damage, but even they can’t chew through walls.

Finally, with everyone else roaming free, I opened the wagon’s back door and released the hounds. Even indoors, it’s difficult to overstate the value of a good guard dog in this brave new world we’re all marooned in. They came bounding out with tails wagging madly, even Brewster, whose close-cropped stub of a tail could barely do more than vibrate rapidly back and forth.

The dogs inquired whether I might be interested in company while I explored the store, largely through the mechanism of trying to jump up and lick my face. I allowed that this might be acceptable. An agreement was reached. Who says animals don’t communicate?

“All you be good, now,” I cautioned the rest of the traveling zoo, and stepped through the swinging doors that separated the loading dock from the rest of the store, all three dogs at my heels. Time to go shopping. New-world style.

The world ended about fourteen months ago. Sadly, I missed this momentous occasion. I was home sick with the plague, and was thus not allowed to participate in the grand pandemic which wiped out the majority of the human race. Yeah. I get the irony. Still, I like to think I’m doing pretty well, all things considered. I’ve made it more than halfway to my eventual destination, despite some pretty major complications, and I’ve managed to do it without having a psychotic break. Talking to the animals doesn’t count. That’s what I went to school for.

As for how I missed the pandemic… bubonic plague has been endemic in California’s small mammal population since the 1800s, when it was imported along with other luxury items such as silk, spices, and cheap immigrant labor. The state managed to hold on to all four imports until just recently. I doubt there’s going to be much of a market for any of them these days, but hey, I also didn’t think mankind was going to wipe itself out in a blaze of dick-waving glory, so what do I know?

California’s ongoing plague problems are how I know for certain that the pandemic was manmade. Supposedly, Texas was hit by a form of bubonic plague that mowed down the population like a wheat thresher. It spread too fast for anything but a droplet-based transmission—person-to-person by way of sneezing or coughing—and it was resistant to all known antibiotics. Welcome to fourteenth-century Europe, where the Black Death was everybody’s least-favorite neighbor. Only that’s not possible, because that’s not how bubonic plague works. Bubonic plague is carried by rat fleas, transmitted by rat fleas, and spreads slowly, since rat fleas are notoriously unreliable about when they bite you. Pneumonic plague is droplet-based, but that’s not what killed Texas. Bubonic plague that wasn’t bubonic plague killed Texas, and that means it wasn’t bubonic plague at all. It was something somebody built in a lab, and I’m sure its creator won the Terrorist Science Fair before letting it out of the vial.

The Texas plague killed horses, cattle, goats, and most dogs, by the way. Texas may be the last place in this country where it’s safe to sleep outside without fear of your neighbor’s abandoned Rottweiler. Thanks, Texas plague. Thanks a lot.

As the only veterinarian in Pumpkin Junction, California, my practice covered basically anything that people wanted to bring me. Mercy Neely, Swiss Army veterinarian. If someone had a sick cat, dog, or other standard pet, I was their girl. If they had a horse that needed gelding, a cow that needed a checkup, or a flock of sheep that needed their shots, that was also me. I did parrots, reptiles, and anything else animal-like that happened to need medical attention. I examined an African praying mantis once; I extracted a mousetrap from the stomach of an escaped boa constrictor; I euthanized an emu with a broken leg. My practice was boring more often than it was interesting, but it was always vital. I was the only game in town.

I guess I technically still would be, if I’d stayed.

I’d been out at the O’Shea place the Sunday before the pandemic started, giving the goats their yearly exam. With thirty of the things in the flock, it was easier for me to go to them. The barn was hopping with fleas, and I must’ve been bitten a good thirty times before I finished for the day. Three days later, I got sick. You can’t be a California vet and not know what’s endemic to the population; I know bubonic plague when I see it. I diagnosed myself, gave myself an illegal prescription for tetracycline, doped myself to the gills, and went to bed. Not, sadly, before hanging a sign with a cute little hand-drawn rat on my door. “Doc’s got the PLAGUE!”

I even slept through the quake that leveled half the damn state. Remember, kids, vets get the good tranquilizers.

I like to think that there were other survivors in my home town. The pathogens that hit California seem to have caught and killed almost instantly, and I went to bed for six days starting two days before the pandemic came out to play. I like to think that some people made it through the sickness, saw the sign on my door, and decided that there was no point in checking. I wouldn’t blame them if they did, but I would see them again when I got to Grants Pass.

Most of all, I like to think that I was exposed along with everybody else. I didn’t miss infection because I was locked in my little room over the office; I missed infection because I had a natural immunity. In a healthy population, naturally immune parents tend to have naturally immune children. Maybe Dan didn’t make it through, but if I was naturally immune, there’s a chance that Linda was, too. There’s a chance that she’ll be waiting for me at the end of this road.

Wishful thinking, but hell. Everybody’s allowed a little wishful thinking after they’ve survived the end of the world.

The dogs roved ahead of me as we walked through the dimly lit store, never ranging more than about ten feet away. It wasn’t just because they felt the need to protect me, although that was a part of it; the last six people we’d seen had been armed, and had taken shots at my little pack before I had time to tell them not to. When I left Pumpkin Junction, I had six dogs in my personal escort. They’d been picked off one by one, and the three I had left were the ones who’d figured out that hiding behind the human was the best way to survive.

Brewster was the most timid of the three, despite also being the largest. He looked back at me, buffing uncertainly. “It’s okay, Brewster,” I said, in a soothing tone. I was only half-paying attention to his unease. My eyes were too busy crawling over the shelves, noting the things we needed, the things we could use, and comparing them to the wagon’s carrying capacity. If I hitched Midnight alongside the Tweedles and walked for a while, we could manage another few hundred pounds of kibble; that would probably get us all the way to Sacramento, where we could—

A gun hammer was cocked behind me. A very small sound, but one that had come to hold a great deal of importance in my life over the past year. It was the sound of someone who might decide that my surviving the pandemic was just a fluke that needed to be corrected.

I stopped in my tracks, raising my hands to shoulder-height. Brewster hunched his massive head down, a growl rumbling from the bottom of his throat. I could hear the other two dogs moving up ahead, still uncertain and unwilling to approach the stranger. “I’m sorry,” I said, voice calm and level. Never be the first to show panic. Never let them think that you might be an easy target. “I didn’t know this store was yours. If you’ll just let me gather up my animals, I’ll be on my way.” Please, I prayed silently, please let me gather up my animals. I lost two goats to a man who saw them as fresh meat on the hoof; I lost my second riding horse to a man who fancied himself the Lone Ranger and decided that an old gray mare would do just fine as Silver. I’m sure one of her legs was broken before I’d even made it out of the valley that he took her from me in. The old gray mare, she ain’t what she used to be.

“Turn around, miss. Real slow, no sudden movements.”

Male; middle-aged, probably one of the white-collar workers who’d packed this sort of business park before the pandemic; artificially polite, which was a natural development under the circumstances. Even when you were the one holding the gun, it paid to be polite. Next time, the gun might belong to someone else. I turned as I’d been instructed, not dropping my hands or making any effort to avoid meeting his eyes. Confident without being challenging, that was the goal. Once you’ve stared down a bull that smells cows in estrus, you can handle anything humanity has left to throw at you.

The man behind me looked almost exactly like I would have expected, even down to the stained, slightly tattered white dress shirt. Even a year after the disaster, people still dressed like they expected the old world to be called back to order any second. The poor bastards. They’d been domesticated, and they didn’t even know it.

“Those your dogs?” he demanded. The skin of his left cheek jumped and fluttered in a nervous tic, making it look like he might jitter apart at any moment.

“Yes,” I said, not lowering my hands. “They’re also my horses, my goats, and, if you’ve been inside the wagon already, my birds. They’re well-fed and not a threat to you.”

The pistol he had angled towards my chest wavered, almost perfectly in time with the tic on his cheek. “Are you some sort of farmer?”

“No. I’m a veterinarian.”

Shock and relief chased each other across his face for a moment before he lowered his gun, saying, “Miss, I’m going to need you to come with me.” He hesitated, finally adding, more quietly, “Please.”

“Sir, I don’t want to get your hopes up here. I’m not a people doctor. I’m—”

“It’s my daughter. She’s nine.”

Linda will be nine this year. If the world can make it that long. I sighed.

“Come back to my wagon with me. I’ll need some things from my bag.”

His name was Nathan Anderson; he’d been a tech writer, churning out endless pages of instructions for machines he’d never use. Like almost every other survivor I’ve encountered, he never got sick at all. No pandemic for Nathan. No wife, friends, or job, either. Nothing but scrounging from the stores of San Ramon and taking care of Miranda. Until Miranda started getting sick; until he was lucky enough to catch a traveling veterinarian who’d been to some form of medical school, even if it wasn’t the human kind.

He was quiet as we walked the three blocks back to the office building they called home, only the gun in his hand serving as a reminder of his status as my captor. Brewster, Mike, and Little Bobby trailed along behind me, an anxious canine escort. I wasn’t willing to leave them behind. Too much of a chance that Nathan had friends who’d learned the hard way that dogs needed to be shot on sight.

Nathan paused at the office door. “She was awake when I went out scouting for supplies. She gets a little disoriented sometimes, but she’s a good girl. She’ll probably even like your dogs.”

I could smell the sickness from here, that horrible combination of sweat and vomit and a dozen other bodily fluids that says “something’s dying nearby.” I kept my face as neutral as I could. “Let’s see if she’s up now.”

Nathan looked relieved—like he’d been afraid right up until that moment that I was going to disarm him and run—and opened the door.

Miranda’s room had been a corner office before the pandemic, probably much-prized for the floor-to-ceiling windows that comprised two of the four walls. Now it was a little girl’s paradise. The once-white walls had been inexpertly painted pink, and flower-shaped plastic decals studded the window glass. Toys and books were heaped haphazardly around the floor. At the center of it all was a glorious fairy tale of a four-poster bed—God knows where they found that—and in the center of the bed was Miranda.

Any hopes this little jaunt would prove my theory about immunity being hereditary died when I saw her. Adopted daughter, maybe. Adopted after the pandemic, almost certainly. But biological daughter? No. Not unless he’d had a Korean wife whose genes had been able to beat his nine falls out of ten.

Miranda raised her head at the sound of the door, summoning a smile from somewhere deep inside herself. “Daddy.” She paused, brow knotting. “We have company?” The question was uncertain, like she thought I might be a hallucination.

I swallowed the lump in my throat before it could turn to full-fledged tears. “I’m Mercy Neely, honey. I’m a veterinarian.”

Sudden interest brightened her eyes. “Is that why you have dogs? I like dogs. I used to have a dog. Before—” She stopped, the brightness fading. “Before.”

“A lot of people did.” Nathan was standing frozen next to me. He’d ceased to be a factor as soon as I saw the little girl. Ignoring the possibility that he’d decide to shoot me, I started for the bed, setting my traveling medicine kit down on the mattress. “Now, your dad says you don’t feel so good.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You want to tell me about it?”

“My head hurts. I can’t breathe sometimes. I keep choking when I try to sleep.” She sounded ashamed of her own symptoms. Poor kid. “I—” A cough cut off her words, and she sat up to catch it in her hands, bending almost double in the process. It had a rich, wet sound, like it was being dredged up through quicksand.

“Just breathe,” I said, and turned back towards Nathan. “It could be a lot of things. Without a lab, I can’t really tell you which one. It’s probably pneumonia, complicated by general malnutrition. I’m going to give you a list of medicines that I need you to go back to the store and find for me.”

His eyes widened, then narrowed. “I’m not leaving you alone with her.”

“My way out of here is back at that store. I’m unarmed. I’m not exactly going to take a sick little girl hostage, now, am I?” I shook my head, expression disgusted. “She shouldn’t be left alone. Either you trust me here, or you trust that I’ll come back.”

“I’ll lock the office door behind me.”

“You do that.”

Still he hesitated, eyes flicking from me to Miranda and back again.

I sighed, and played the ultimate trump card: “I don’t know how long she has.”

His expression hardened.

“I’ll be right back.”

Things I don’t need to explain: what it was like to step outside for the first time after I got better and the rest of the world didn’t. I’m pretty sure everyone that’s still alive has their own version of that story, and they don’t need to be repeated. I woke up, I felt better, I went outside, I threw up six times, I went a little crazy, and I got over it. There wasn’t time to have a nervous breakdown. Maybe if I’d been a doctor, but I wasn’t a doctor; I never wanted to be a doctor. I’m a veterinarian, and my patients still needed me.

Four days isn’t long enough for most animals to turn vicious; that made my job a lot easier. It took eighteen hours to canvas the town, letting cats out of houses, assessing dogs and livestock and making my decisions as impartially as I could. Domestic cattle aren’t made to live without somebody to take care of them. They need milking, or their udders will split open and they’ll die of infection. Sheep are worse. Goats are fine on their own; so are horses, most poultry, and pigs. Cats will go feral. Dogs will go mean. If it could be released, I either released it or fed it and promised to be back in a little while. If it couldn’t be released…

Ending future suffering is one luxury veterinarians have that human doctors don’t. I spent a lot of that first day crying, but I guarantee you that while the people of Pumpkin Junction died just as badly as the rest of the world, our animals died better than they did anywhere else.

I held back some of the stock. A few milking goats, some horses I knew were gentle and well-mannered, several of the larger, healthier, friendlier dogs. I was already planning, you see. Figuring out what I’d need, and what we’d need when I finished the trip. Can’t build a society without animals, and there’s no point in re-domesticating when we have the potential to save the work we’ve already done. Some of it, anyway.

God, I hope she’s there.

Miranda turned wide, dark eyes on me after her adoptive father was gone, and asked, “Am I going to get better?”

“That’s what medicine is for, isn’t it?” I opened my bag, pulling out a needle and a small, unlabeled bottle. I never labeled that particular bottle. They taught us that in veterinary school. Even when they were the ones who’d decided that dear old Kitty was ready for that great scratching post in the sky, people didn’t want to see the label.

They also taught us to be natural about it. To fill the syringe like it was any other vaccination. “Miranda’s a pretty name,” I said. “I like it.”

“So do I,” she said, watching me with gravity beyond her years. “Are you going to give me a shot?”

“Mm-hmm. Just a little one, to help you sleep.” I glanced up, offering her a warm smile. “I have a daughter just about your age. Her name is Linda.”

“You do?” Her expression turned carefully neutral, like she was about to walk into a minefield. “Is she… did she…”

“She’s just fine. She’s waiting for me in a place called Grants Pass. It’s up in Oregon. I’m on my way there now.” Linda would be there. Linda had to be there. She was the one who had told me to go there in the first place. Eight years old, smart as a whip, and gullible enough to believe everything she ever read. Gullible enough to believe the pandemic was coming, for one thing, and that it would probably come in our lifetime. “When they go crazy, Mom, you have to promise to come to Oregon,” she said, with those big blue eyes just as wide and serious as they could go. Like my agreeing to come to Grants Pass was a matter of life or death. So I agreed. What else can you do? I only got her every other weekend, and if she wanted me to promise to take a post-apocalyptic road trip, I’d promise.

Linda had to be there. What I’d seen in Pumpkin Junction on the day I went a little crazy was just the shock talking. I didn’t see it again. And if part of me insisted that I only didn’t see it because I didn’t go back there, who cares? There were no animals in that shitty little apartment. There was nothing there to save.

Miranda looked unsure. “How come she isn’t traveling with you?”

“Well, see, Linda’s daddy and I didn’t think it was a good idea for us to live together anymore. So Linda was with her daddy when everybody got sick, and she had to start without me. I’ll catch up to her sooner or later.” I tapped the syringe, easing out the bubbles. “She promised to meet me there, and she takes her promises seriously.”

Linda takes everything seriously, and has since she was born. So we sat down with the maps of the state, and we worked out four routes that we could take to get to Oregon. The Route Where They Closed the Roads. The Route Where Quarantine Kept the Roads Open. The Route Where There’s Been An Earthquake and We Have To Go Around. The Route Where Too Many People Survived and We Need to Avoid Them. Even after the earthquake that took out most of the Los Angeles metro area, the bulk of California was mostly somewhere between routes one and two. Linda wouldn’t have had any problems if she’d avoided the coast roads and skirted the area around Red Bluff.

“Can we come with you? Me and my daddy?”

“We’ll talk about it when you wake up,” I said soothingly.

She didn’t even cry when the needle went in; she bore the brief pain like a trooper. Domesticated animals always do.

There are a lot of ways for people to die in the post-pandemic world; I’ve seen most of them. The human race was domesticated a long time ago, and like the cows that need someone to milk them, or the sheep too dumb to run away from a predator, the humans forgot how to stay alive without the trappings of their civilization. So they stagger along pretending they still have some quality of life while their teeth get loose from scurvy and their bowels get scarred by parasitic infections. Most of the people who lived through the sicknesses shouldn’t have. They’re just suffering now, without all the little luxuries they were so accustomed to.

Euthanasia is kinder. It’s quicker. It takes the pain away. If we don’t let our pets suffer, why should we let people do it? Part of being a vet is knowing that the thing to do with suffering is end it, not prolong it just for the sake of being able to say that all your patients survive. I’m not a moralist. I see suffering, and I end it. It’s that simple. Human doctors aren’t allowed to have that luxury, but there’s a reason I never wanted to work with people.

Miranda’s eyes fluttered shut in a matter of seconds as the drugs took effect, her body effectively sliding into a comatose state that was deeper than any sleep. I put the syringe away and took her hand, my index finger pressed against the pulse point of her wrist. Her heart sped up, fighting against the lidocaine. Her fingers tightened on mine with no more force than a kitten’s jaws.

She gasped once, sighed, and was still.

“See?” I said, slipping my hand out of hers. “Nothing to be afraid of.”

Nathan returned about ten minutes later, clutching a bag that bulged with medical supplies. I met him at the office door, motioning for him to be quiet. “She’s sleeping,” I whispered. He looked past me to where she was stretched out on her bed, expression peaceful, and believed me.

Outside, in the hall, I offered him a sympathetic smile, and said, “It’s bad, but she should pull through. I’ve given her something to help her sleep, and I can show you which medicines to give her. But there’s a fee for my help.”

The hope in his eyes died like a switch had been flipped. “What’s that?” he asked, warily.

I held up my bag. “After spending a year scrounging in all this rust? You need a tetanus shot. Let me give it to you, and I’ll stay as long as it takes to get her better.”

Nathan laughed, sounding utterly relieved. “I think I can stand a shot if it gets my baby girl better.”

“Good.” I smiled. “This won’t hurt a bit.”