After the Apocalypse

After the Apocalypse

(Excerpt, short story by Maureen F. McHugh)

... Things didn't exactly all go at once. First there were rolling brownouts and lots of people unemployed. Jane had been making a living working at a place that sold furniture. She started as a salesperson, but she was good at helping people on what colors to buy, what things went together, what fabrics to pick for custom pieces. Eventually they made her a service associate, a person who was kind of like an interior decorator, sort of. She had an eye. She'd grown up in a nice suburb and had seen nice things. She knew what people wanted. Her boss kept telling her a little less eye makeup would be a good idea, but people liked what she suggested and recommended her to their friends even if her boss didn't like her eye makeup.

She was thinking of starting a decorating business, although she was worried that she didn't know about some of the stuff decorators did. On TV they were always tearing down walls and redoing fireplaces. So she put it off. Then there was the Big Disney World attack where a kazillion people died because of a dirty bomb, and then the economy really tanked. She knew that business was dead and she was going to get laid off, but before that happened, someone torched the furniture place where she was working. Her boyfriend at the time was a cop, so he still had a job, even though half the city was unemployed. She and Franny were all right compared to a lot of people. She didn't like not having her own money, but she wasn't exactly having to call her mother in Pennsylvania and eat crow and offer to come home.

So she sat on the balcony of their condo and smoked and looked through her old decorating magazines, and Franny watched television in the room behind her. People started showing up on the sidewalks. They had trash bags full of stuff. Sometimes they'd have cars and they'd sleep in them, but gas was getting to almost ten dollars a gallon, when the gas stations could get it. Pete, the boyfriend, told her that the cops didn't even patrol much anymore because of the gas problem. More and more of the people on the sidewalk looked to be walking.

“Where are the coming from?” Fanny asked.

“Down south. Houston, El Paso, anywhere within a hundred miles of the border.” Pete said. “Border's gone to shit. Mexico doesn't have food, but the drug cartels have lots of guns, and they're coming across to take what the can get. They say it's like a war zone down there.”

“Why don't the police take care of them?” Franny asked.

“Well, Francisca,” Pete said – he was good with Franny, Jane had to give him that - “Sometimes there are just too many of them for the police down there. And they've got kinds of guns that the police aren't allowed to have.”

“What about you?” Franny asked.

“It's different up here,” Pete said. “That's why we've got refugees here. Because it's safe here.”

“They're not refugees”, Jane said. Refugees were, like, people in Africa. These were just regular people. Gays in T-shirts with the names of rock bands on them. Women sitting in the front seats of Taurus station wagons, doing their hair in the rearview mirrors. Kids asleep in the back seat or running up and down the street shrieking and playing. Just people.

After the End. An empty room. Photograph by Elena.