Things to Do in Denver When It’s Dead
SARAH A. HOYT
Climbing up the once-glimmering glass-fronted building on Seventeenth Street in Denver shouldn’t have been a problem. Well, it shouldn’t have been a problem any other day.
But the cold, snow-laden wind blowing from the West stung his face and hands and sixteen floors up it howled like something in pain. Next pair of headphones he came across, he was going to grab, because screw that, he didn’t want his ears to freeze and fall off. Colton should have listened to the weather report, he thought. And grinned to himself because there were no weather reports, anyway. Not that they had ever been much use. Colorado meteorologists before the Fall had all gone insane. Predict ninety-degree weather, get snowstorm. And vice versa.
“Hey, slow poke,” Mike shouted from above him, her voice taunting. “Are you coming?”
He didn’t answer. He’d get a mouthful of cold air and not much else. He could only decode Mike’s words in retrospect.
And yeah, she was climbing up faster than he could. That was because Mike—Michaela Argyris—was a tiny young woman, maybe five two, and weighed eighty-five pounds soaking wet, with lead in her pockets. So, once the climbing rope was thrown, she could climb up with very little concern that a badly placed foot would crash into the window she balanced against, or cause a cascade of falling glass.
As his foot did just that and caused three of the glass plates in the warped frames to drop straight down, raining glass fragments on Joss and Mira below. Colton heard them yell something, though too far to hear words, and flinched a bit. Maybe he should diet or something. Not that it made much difference when you were six three.
And frankly, Mike was just better at climbing. She’d been better when they were college students and climbing over at Garden of the Gods in the Springs on weekends, and she remained better now that climbing was deadly serious business for the Colorado Reaper Club.
But he thought, as he balanced and climbed up the rope by the force of his well-gloved hands, at least he got a full-on view of Mike’s rounded, muscled rear as she scrambled up ahead of him.
As he looked, said rear disappeared through the window to which they’d secured their rope. They’d used a drone to both break the window and secure the rope to frame, but that was a minor refinement that Joss had come up with to climb these glass monsters.
After a while he heard her give a shout. Since it seemed to be glee, not fear, he grinned and hurried up.
By the time he got there, Mike was fleeting around happily. There were desks and computers. Good, even if it was going to be a pure bitch to secure those to send down. But the components would come in handy. There were people, down in the Springs and Monument trying to build server farms, trying to get an Internet backbone back up that could be used by people desperately in need of information on how to rebuild, well, everything, from computers to farms, from raising livestock to growing corn, from how to get oil out of the ground to how to refine it. Yeah, yeah, experts in all this had survived, somewhere. The problem was often getting the expert together with the need.
So, they’d crate these computers with found materials and get them down. Some might be used as was, but mostly—if he understood rightly, and he had a couple of friends doing it—they were breaking the machines down to component parts then building smaller, less energy-hungry computers that would function on battery most of the time since energy was still hit or miss.
Sure, the powerplant in the Springs mostly worked on coal. Getting the right shipments of coal was like getting the right experts. You could get them, just not often in the right place.
The armed services, of which Colorado had a surplus, had tried to restore order and supply lines for the last six months, by sending people out to look for specific things and send them back to specific places. It worked, sort of. Except that it worked a lot like Soviet requisitioning. Someone at the top thought they needed something, sent out exact specifications, and the people looking passed over a lot of things that might have worked, because they wanted that other thing. So, if the computer was not green, they might ignore it rather than take the purple computer.
Not that Colton had ever told the few armed forces searching parties they were being Soviet. For one, he liked to live. For another it wouldn’t change anything. It was the way they were set up to work. Requisition and fulfillment, though he’s seen some amazing improvisation over the last two years. Eh. Heard about it on the radio. Or rumors around the campfire.
On the other hand, the Reapers made their living from the in-between. Climb these abandoned buildings—the bottom floors were likely to be burned out, destroyed and otherwise hazardous, including increasingly rare appearances of dangerous infected—find whatever could be crated and rope-and-pulleyed down and barter it to the people who needed it. Or to one of a dozen distributors who could get it places across the country.
He was trying to figure out if they could use one of the desks—upside down, and sides protected with the screwed-off tops of other desks—to pack full of computers and rope-and-pulley down, when Michaela gave another whoop of delight. He looked up.
She was fiddling with something she’d found in a desk drawer, and suddenly a voice sounded, loudly, “This is Radio Free Colorado, bringing you things to do in Denver when it’s dead. Go to the zoo. Identify the animals by the skeletons.” There was the self-conscious laugh of a DJ who thought he was too clever by half, and then, “No, seriously, folks, wherever you are in our beautiful state, I hope you’re doing something worth doing. Far as we can tell from our mountain fastness in beautiful Monument, your day is going to get much colder faster, and there might be a few eruptions of zombies, so be prepared.”
“Great,” Colton said, as the radio broke into a rendition of “Rocky Mountain High,” the state’s unofficial anthem, “now we can work to music.”
Mike laughed. “No, you’re missing the point. We’re hearing it all the way from Monument. I wonder who has set up a repeater—” She stopped and reached for the little transistor radio, turned it off.
“Wha—?” Colton started.
Mike took her finger to her lips. “Shhh.”
Then grabbed Colton and pulled him behind a cube wall in the corner.
Colton still hadn’t heard anything, and was about to fight free, when the floor shook. Then there was the sound of footsteps as if heavy men were jogging across the floor.
Mike and Colton exchanged a look, the kind of look that said without words Are they going to bring the whole thing down?
Because that was the thing with these buildings: you never knew. You never knew when or where a decisive impact would bring the whole thing crashing down. The bottom floors had been burned, probably multiple times, in the firestorms caused by the infected, they had sustained explosions of cars parked in front of them, and it wouldn’t be the first time that one of them went down, suddenly, without provocation. So far none of it had happened near Colton, much less a building they were on, but it was one of the reasons they harvested the contents very carefully and pushed them out the window, lowering them down with extreme care.
Whoever these people were, they had no care. By the sound of it there were two of them, running, and for a moment Colton wondered if they were infected. It was rare to find them in the upper floors. Well, it was rare to find them period, except for a rare beta here and there being looked after by some order or nuns or other, but not the aggressive ones.
It had happened, though. Three months ago, he and Lillian had been going through a building where there should’ve been no life left, when suddenly an infected came charging out of the dark. Lillian had nailed it with a shot from the Glock she carried, but damn, it had been scary and close.
But just as he thought maybe these were two large infected chasing each other, a voice sounded, “So, they’re here? Shouldn’t important paintings be in the art museum?” The voice had a marked foreign accent.
“No,” another male voice answered. “Here in the building, there’s an art shipper tied to an auction house, and there is a portrait from—” The words became fuzzy. Colton looked at Mike, who squeezed his wrist and said, “No.”
But Colton was not in the mood to hear that no, and he guessed it showed in his face. He shook his head at her, and then got up, tiptoeing.
The inside of the building, outside the office doors, had the once common structure of a balcony-hallway that allowed a view of escalators. The escalators were burned here and there, and the men must have been carrying a telescopic ladder because it was set up between the floor directly below and this one, where the escalator had collapsed in on itself.
He heard noise of voices from further down the hallway and knit himself to the wall, following it. The door at the end of the hallway was open, and he heard talk coming from there, but before he got close enough to hear words, two men came out at a semi-jog.
He ducked quickly into the recessed entrance to the bathroom. As two men came trotting past, he saw that one of them was a powerfully built maybe fifty-year-old man, and the other a tall, dark Mediterranean type. The second was carrying a maybe three-by-four parcel. “See,” he told the other man. “I figure he will pay well for this, and then there’s the museums we can go through, though that’s dicier. I understand the art museum is unstable, structurally—”
They walked towards the telescopic ladder, climbed down, then must have collapsed it by some mechanism, and he heard them set it up to go down another level.
When he came back, Mike was packing stuff into the desk, her mouth set in a grim line. She didn’t say anything, so he didn’t either.
Over the last few months they had improvised and learned to arrange for ropes to lower things with. Even quite heavy things. Colton carried the ropes, and they usually arranged them on office furniture or structures, so they could lower loads of salvaged material slowly.
In this case the ropes were wound around two columns, deflecting enough of the weight, so Colton could lower the desk-loaded-with-computers slowly enough.
Not that there hadn’t been mishaps in the past, like the time he’d lost his grip on the rope, and the whole load of paper had dropped on the street, spraying printer paper all around. He’d not heard the end of that one for a while.
Not that paper was a high-return merchandise, but it was needed by practically everyone, and there were no manufacturing processes for it going on anywhere near. He wasn’t going to say there wasn’t manufacturing going on anywhere in the country, but it wasn’t nearby. Part of what they were fighting against was a lack of information.
Computers would bring in more, and he and Mike lowered two desks full of computers and components before they left the building via the rope ladders. They didn’t talk. They ignored the next few buildings. The brewery had burned, which was a pity, not just for the finished product, but because some of the equipment might come in handy to someone trying to start up brewing again.
The Reapers had found there were all sorts of opportunities in stuff like that, from restaurant equipment being used to feed large groups of people, to car parts, to other stuff. They’d cleared up the top floor of a bookstore. The bottom had burned and there was nothing of value there, but the top was intact, and was mostly reference books. A broker from Greeley had given them top dollar on it—well, top military script, anyway, which was what most of them were using for trade—and if Colton had understood correctly a lot of that truckload was now being distributed up and down the Eastern Seaboard, both as information and as entertainment, because so much of the printed word had burned.
It wasn’t until they had picked up a load of canned goods, from a warehouse distribution point that Joss had found—working with Denver-area phone books—that Colton figured out why the guys retrieving the painting with the intention of selling it, presumably, had bothered him, or the idea that they intended to hit up the museums next.
He was driving the expedition, with Mike riding shotgun, while the other couple drove the truck full of computers. It had started to snow, a fine, powdering of the kind that didn’t stick, not yet, but made visibility shit in the darkened streets.
The city looked dead. He and the original Reapers had been going to college in Colorado Springs when the apocalypse had started.
For a long while their lives had consisted of shoot or be eaten, run or be eaten, move, move, move. They’d lost Zed and John, then. They’d zombed out early and had to be killed. Colton still had nightmares about strangling Zed, while Zed chomped, trying to bite him.
The group had started in the beforetime as a climbing club with a spicy-food problem. There had been ten guys and six girls who spent their weekends climbing, and then found out the local restaurants with the hottest food. Both the climbing and the food were uploaded to the Internet, where they’d gathered a bunch of fans for their fun, fast banter during both activities. They’d named themselves Colorado Reapers because Mira had thought it was a hot pepper. She was a bit of a ditz and Colorado and Carolina were obviously the same to her.
Now it seemed more appropriate to the work they did. And the fourteen survivors had been joined by friends, and girlfriends—Joss was living with five women—and moved to Castle Rock to the south of Denver, to an oddly untouched mansion up on one of the ridges, with all approaches clearly visible.
Though they still did most of the reaping—and selling—in Denver or the Springs. Or Monument, where the Air Force had secured the town and setup a sort of trading post that took a lot of things and found someone to distribute them. That’s where this load was headed, which made the snow bothersome.
Every little storm became magnified in Monument Pass.
But he wasn’t even thinking about the snow. He’d grown up in Colorado, unlike a lot of other Reapers—lucky them, who didn’t know what had happened to their families, or not for sure—so driving in blowing snow was automatic.
Instead, he was thinking of all the books that had burned or been destroyed, and of electronic books which might or might not still exist in some database. And then of art. “You know,” he said, “I bet in the future this will be like those historical periods when all the books disappeared or burned, or something, and there’s only a handful of works left, from which people try to guess what the rest must have been like. Like . . . like the Library of Alexandria or something.”
Mike gave him a dark look. “That was never true. Well, not really. There were many libraries of Alexandria, and many of them burned, but there’s no reason to think—”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “It was just an example.”
But Mike was glaring at him, and then it occurred to Colton she’d been unusually quiet all this way. Of course, this occurred to him just as she stopped being quiet and cut loose. The fact that she spoke in a really low voice made everything worse, “Don’t you ever,” she said. “Do anything like that again.”
He was so surprised, he crossed the road, not that it mattered much because there was no traffic coming the other way. There was no traffic practically anywhere.
Partly because fuel was hard to get on a regular basis. A lot of the people that used to live in the city had escaped to more sparsely populated and more defensible places. Though it was suspected that most of the ones in the big cities had died, which made sense. Pretty hard to avoid contagion when you were all packed in and eating at the same restaurants.
Which was why Denver was dead. The Springs had a few more people, at least in the suburbs that had forted up and where someone had been ruthless enough to kill any infected who turned up within the perimeter.
Castle Rock had come through relatively well. The downtown had burned, but the rest of it, all ridges and broken terrain, had seemed to escape much of the problem. Some people who worked in Denver had never made it back, which was why the Reapers had found themselves an abandoned mansion.
But other than that, it was almost back to what it had been. Except that few people drove, commerce took place in military credit notes or outright barter, and there were patrols of citizens down the main streets at night.
They’d pulled the Reapers over, the first time they’d come back to the compound—which they’d just claimed—at night, and asked way too many questions. But in the end they seemed to decide the Reapers were harmless, and that the house they’d taken over was better occupied than not.
“The books,” Colton said, confused, after he got the expedition back on track on the bouncy slopes of 85.
“No. Going off where those guys were talking. You didn’t know who they were, and the way they were galloping around, I got this feeling they were as likely to shoot us as not. I sat there, wondering if I’d ever see you again.”
He gave Mike a look out of the corner of his eye. A lot of the Reapers were sleeping with each other. And a lot were sleeping with people who had joined in the last few months. They weren’t exactly a commune. For one, none of them believed in sharing everything. They might have, once, when they were college students, but now any of them who didn’t pull their weight would find him or herself cast out to figure out their own way.
There was no give in the group. There was no lovingkindness. They’d all survived tough times by doing what they had to do. There was probably no one there who hadn’t lost someone. He’d lost his parents, and from something Mike said, she was sure she’d lost hers.
The one thing they were like a commune on was . . . well, people slept around. A lot. Partly because they had been through enough in their mid-twenties to know that life was short and the unspeakable could happen at any time. Carpe diem and all that. A couple of the original reapers had dropped out to go work for a guy with a cattle farm down near Rocky Ford, because they had a couple of kids, and thought what they did was no way to raise them. And there were other women who were pregnant or had infants. But he and Mike—
He’d had a crush on Mike from the beginning. The curly-haired girl, first generation born in America from Greek parents, was funny and cute, and full of life, but she’d been pretty traditional, and she’d said early on when time came to marry her parents would probably arrange something with someone from Greece.
So, American-mutt-stock Colton had put her out of reach from the beginning. And never revised it. Never taken much interest in anyone else, either. Instead, he’d spent his days planning places they’d hit next, driving out to see if they were solid enough to climb and—
Now he looked at Mike. “You’d have been okay,” he said. “They might have shot me but they had no reason to know you were there. You’d have been okay.”
“Not if you’d got shot. I’d never have been okay.”
She did that thing she did when she grabbed his arm. It was both dorky and super intense, because the way she did it was as if it had all kinds of meanings. “I don’t want to lose you, okay? I’ve lost too many people already.”
“Uh. I’m sorry. I didn’t know—” He almost said he didn’t know she cared, but the fact was he still didn’t know. She might just be trying to avoid another tragedy. “It’s just, I had a bad feeling about them. And I was right.”
He got a silent look and raised eyebrow and he related the conversation to Mike.
She was silent a long time. “Yeah, that bothers me too,” she said. “But I’m not even sure why. Not quite, you know?”
“Because,” Colton said. “I don’t know what they intend to do with it. And . . . it felt wrong. Like. Like . . . ” They passed a car headed the other way. The snow had intensified to the point that he wasn’t absolutely sure where they were on the road, and sometimes he felt like he was just following the taillights of Joss and Mira’s truck. “Look, what if we’d taken that load of books we got, and instead of passing them to a reseller, we’d locked them away somewhere in a basement?”
“Well, they’d be okay in a basement. . . . ” Mike said thoughtfully.
“They should be okay. But what if they weren’t. What if something happened. It would be like losing part of the past forever.”
“My roommate, when . . . you know, in the beforetime. She used to go out and topple statues, because she said they were white supremacy and a sign of the times when women weren’t free.”
Colton spared her a look, but she was looking ahead, her forehead wrinkled as though in deep thought.
“I don’t think it was right. I didn’t think it was right then, mind you. I mean if you want to fight for something fight things that can fight back. Statues can’t. But more than that, I thought it was stupid to destroy things you couldn’t build. I guess—” Mike shrugged. “Hey, she was one of the first to zomb out and I bashed her head in with a piece of a chair, before running out and finding you guys.”
“Yeah,” Colton said. “But I think that’s it. Something like it. It . . . it doesn’t seem right. I got a feeling—I know it makes no sense—that these people are getting art from various places and taking it somewhere, perhaps Europe and . . . ” He shrugged. “If we’re going to rebuild, we should have that stuff here, where people can see it in the future. You know. All the kids being born now.”
“Cultural patrimony,” Mike said. “My dad used to talk about a lot of that, in Greece and how it had got destroyed with invasions and stuff. I wonder if any of that is left?”
After that he had to concentrate on the drive, and then, when they got to Monument, and emptied the trucks, and got their scrip, it was time to rush back, to grab some food at the house.
The house had started out massive. Ten bedrooms with en suite. But it housed even more people, as people had staked out corners of the great room and there was a family living in the solarium.
They all put money in the pot for the food, and took turns on a strict rotation, cooking and doing dishes.
There was dinner being held for them when they came in, and the others listened to both the finds and the amount they’d received, and some guys sat in the corner, mapping out the next few hits.
Joss and Mira grabbed bowls of pasta with meat sauce—that night’s fare—and sat across from them. “It still feels a bit like robbing graves. I was an anthropology major, you know, and we used to talk about how much more we’d know if over time it hadn’t all been robbed and the graves despoiled.”
“They’re not graves,” Joss said. One of his girlfriends came and sat next to him, as he spoke. “And besides, we can use the stuff.”
“Yeah, well, the Egyptian robbers probably could use it more than the dead pharaohs too,” Mira said. She took her empty bowl, gave either a disgusted or resentful look at Joss—Colton was never sure if she was interested in Joss or just annoyed by him—and wandered off. She and Joss had been an item in the beforetime, but they didn’t seem that close now.
Mike plucked at Colton’s sleeve. “It’s not the slightest bit like robbing graves,” she said. “It’s more like what happened after the Black Plague in Europe when suddenly there was a need to find new owners for things that would otherwise decay and become of no value to anyone. I mean, probably a bunch of livestock died because no one took them over, and we know a lot of farms returned to forest. But what people could find, and use, propelled the largest expansion in wealth and lead to the greatest scientific knowledge and population explosion our kind has seen.”
Colton looked at her for a while. “You were majoring in history?” He felt like he’d known her major once upon a time, but it seemed like it had been another life altogether, and anyway they’d been too busy climbing rocks and trying out new restaurants.
She laughed. “No, economics. But I like history.”
He nodded. “So, you don’t think we’re hurting anything?”
“Uh. No. There are things that lost value precipitously overnight. I mean, I hear that most of the cars they hauled off from the highways were probably junked by the time anyone got to them. And that was the ones where the owners hadn’t rotted in there. But—” She shrugged. “You know, a lot of the houses will lose value. That’s why no one minded we claimed this place. It’s better for it to be lived in, even above occupancy, because we keep it heated and cooled, even if it’s heated with kerosene sometime, and we’ll fix it if it needs fixing. Modern houses aren’t built to be unlived in for long times. Some of them are already collapsing. Burst pipes in the walls, the roof gets a leak, and next thing you know, it’s all back to nature.”
“I remember there was some kind of program about how long it took. Never watched it.”
“Me neither, but it’s obvious. Even the roads are becoming all ruts. We’re in a harsh climate, you know? And most of the stuff we take will be lost when those buildings collapse. The structures are unstable already and will get more so over a few cycles of freezing and thawing. The cities will pretty much disappear in a few decades. What we’re saving is stuff that we don’t need to produce.”
Colton frowned. “Shouldn’t we produce it, though? Make our own stuff?”
She sighed. “What, from some kind of moral point of view? Why? We have a surplus of most things, except one: labor. There aren’t enough people left, and there isn’t enough to restore worldwide commerce. And a lot of things need it. Well, for now. Things like paper we can make, but there isn’t a pipeline for wood pulp and spending fuel to carry it will make it short elsewhere.”
“The frackers in Weld County are hiring,” Colton said. “Joss keeps talking about going and working out there.”
“Joss talks a lot of talk,” Mike said. “But he doesn’t have enough interest in life to do it. Here’s the thing . . . the things we need, and we need to make anew, are the consumables. Food, fuel. Not even because we don’t have enough food—there’s probably enough canned to keep the entire population alive for a year or two, even if we didn’t grow anything—but because in the long run we have to keep the farmer animals alive. And we have to know how to grow food and keep the fields going. And we need fuel. We need a lot of fuel. Modern civilization runs on fuel, and if we want to live like we used to, we need energy.”
“Yeah, renewables aren’t gonna make it,” Colton said. “They told us they would, but it was obvious even then . . . ”
“Right. Most of the wind farms are stopped and broken. So, food, fuel. Clothes? Parts? Computers? Hell, we have all that. Which is where we come through. We’re gleaners. That’s what they used to call the people who went through harvested fields and picked what had been left behind. Because if we don’t pick it, it will go to waste.”
“Like art. And books.”
She looked at him and frowned but didn’t say anything.
And he went to bed, still not sure what bothered him. He had a room for himself, in the basement, which must have been one of the kids’ rooms, because it was small, with a single bed.
He’d grabbed the little battery radio that Mike had found in the first office. He turned it on, very low, in the dark room.
“Radio Free Colorado rocks you through the night,” a female voice said. “Whatever you did today, we hope it leads to restoring a better life for everyone around you.”
The people running this must have come of age in the nineties, because they plunged into a selection of music that had since become the fodder of easy listening. Other than their obsession with John Denver—which was a thing of post-Fall Colorado—it was all Green Day and Spice Girls, and other blasts from the past in eclectic profusion that told him they were running whatever they could find.
Whatever they could find.
He woke with Mike pounding on his door. Only he didn’t know it was Mike, of course, and only found out once he’d rasped, “What?” and she answered, “Mike. I wanna talk.”
He’d looked at the window high up on the north wall, through which streaky thin light shone, then pulled the sheets up and bunched them on his lap, because he wasn’t sure what she’d do if confronted with a morning glory. “Yeah, come in.”
She came in in sweats, her curls adorably mussed, and he thought she’d come straight from bed, which did not make things easier at all. “Yeah?” he said, as she sat on the edge of his bed.
“I was thinking about what you said. About something being wrong. And I think something is, though not . . . perhaps? With what those people were doing?”
He ran his hand across his face. “What?”
“The people who picked up the painting. You thought there was something they were doing wrong. And mind you, I think there was. I mean, they were running in a building that might fall at any minute. I don’t think they’re the sanest or most careful people around, but what they’re doing isn’t wrong. Not that.”
“What?” he said again, furious at himself that he couldn’t find a better way to express himself. But the thing was, he was tired, and none of it made sense, not really.
She grinned. “Hold on.” And left. He realized she was barefoot, and she walked with a little wiggle, and no one had the right to look that good in baggy gray sweats. But there it was.
She came back, with a smell of coffee, and handed him a big mug. “Black, with sugar,” she said. “Like you take it.”
Which was true. He sipped at it.
“So you know what Mira said, yesterday, about all the stuff we don’t have? Like . . . ”
“The Library of Alexandria,” Colton said, and in the next minute realized that wasn’t right and could have kicked himself.
Mike laughed. “No, it was you who said that. But right. The library burned several times, and even if we probably have copies of most of the stuff in it, there were probably things we don’t have copies of. But more what Mira was saying. Grave robbers robbed the graves, but . . . but they went down into a long time of darkness and ignorance, so things weren’t kept, and we only have a fraction of the knowledge lost then.”
“Like the books,” he said.
“Right, and the art. And you know . . . it hit me. It’s not that they’re doing something wrong. It’s that we are.”
“Uh? You said—”
“Oh, not the stuff we take,” she said. “The stuff we leave behind. It occurs to me that there’s art, in abandoned mansions in Denver. All of it can’t have burned. And there’s books. And there’s stuff that will be lost forever, as the city gets eaten by the wilderness. And it will be.”
He shuddered. “Maybe not. I mean, the military and . . . and people from government are talking of rebuilding and—”
“Oh, the military will try,” Mike said. “But they can’t do everything. Their primary need is to restore their own ranks and make sure they can defend us, and . . . and lend what aid they can to people who are in real trouble. Then there is that republic thing.”
“Uh?”
“They’re supposed to defend and uphold the republic according to the Constitution which guarantees everyone in the territory of the United States a republican form of government. I’ve heard stories, and you have too. I don’t know how long we are from those elections they keep promising us, but I know that there are places in this country right now that are fiefdoms and tyrannies. And the military has to deal with those first. I heard there are slave auctions in New York, and even if that’s not true, I bet you there’s slave auctions somewhere. Even if the slaves are just beta females that someone wants to use for the sex trade.” She shuddered. “The military is dealing with all that and restoring communication. Which means restoring power, which means restoring energy supplies, and they have to coordinate all that. Do you really expect them to go house to house and door to door, and get all works of art, and all books?”
Colton finished his coffee. Slowly, his brain was coming together like a puzzle, and he was trying to follow Mike’s silvery intellectual trails in the fog-benumbed darkness of his brain. “Do you mean that we need to? Do you want to leave the Reapers?”
He felt a vague surge of alarm, but his heart thumped wildly. If she wanted to leave the Reapers and undertake doing something just with him, surely that meant that—
“Nah,” she laughed. Then her face became grave. “Well, not yet. I want to start doing something about those books and paintings in our free days. Like today.”
He nodded. “Right. Give me half an hour.” He stopped, half out of bed, conscious that he probably looked obscene in his underwear. Or at least he became conscious of it, when he saw her blush. But she looked up at his eyes and grinned. “Hey, I need to get dressed too.”
“We’re going to need to pay for fuel,” he said.
* * *
They’d paid for fuel from their store of scrip. They’d taken a map of Denver, though it was still easy to get utterly lost because so many buildings had burned to nothing and so many were lost.
They’d tried to find the homes of the richest people in the area, on the assumption they’d have art. After three of the intact mansions had been gone through, they regrouped, sitting in the truck.
“Nothing,” he said.
“Well, those funny woven things were probably considered art,” she said. “The problem is that I don’t know much about art to know what will be considered art, now or in the future.”
“Don’t ask me,” Colton said. “I was in mechanical engineering.” He sighed. “And it’s not what we’re after, is it? Things that might be considered art, maybe?”
This time, it was Mike who looked like he’d left her completely behind. She frowned at him. “Uh?”
“Well, it’s not, you know, art. Not real art. Collectors might have paid a great price for this funny woven cloth, and some professors might have said a bunch of things about how great and innovative it was, but does that really matter? Will our kids or grandkids think it’s great?” He started digging through the glove compartment until he found a bag of candy he’d stowed there when they’d cleaned out a food warehouse. “Take this candy. It’s perhaps a little stale.” He opened the bag and grabbed a mini-Snickers, one that had probably been headed to the stores for Halloween before the zombies. “But it’s edible, and we can eat it and appreciate it.”
She dug in, and grabbed a peanut butter cup, which she unwrapped carefully. Like it was a precious and rare pleasure. Which it was these days.
“Imagine, though, that instead we’d found a gourmet food store, one of those weird ones that sprouted in places like New York City and they had . . . I don’t know . . . candy-coated rhinoceros poop.”
“No one coated rhinoceros poop in candy,” Mike protested, laughing.
“Maybe not, but I heard of things that were almost that weird, and so did you. And I often heard of it when people who had a ton more money than I even ever dreamed of talked about how amazing it was. But if we found it now, without all the hype, do you think it would be amazing?”
She took little bites of the chocolate peanut butter cup and sighed. “My dad used to say that art had gone to hell when it started needing a card with an explanation to know it was art.”
“That,” he said. “Your dad had it exactly right.”
“He did about a lot of things,” she said. “So, what you’re saying is that we should get art, real art. Like the older stuff, and stuff that’s obviously art? Not funny woven bits of cloth. But neither of us know anything about art. What if what we pick are bad reproductions?”
He laughed. “Well, I don’t know. I know that what we have now might very well have been the dogs playing poker of Classical Greece. But it survived, and it was better than anything that came after.” He made a face. “I grant you it would help if we could find a good book on art. But you know what’s more important? Finding things people will buy and want. Because the more art that’s out there and sold, the more chance that some of it will survive.”
She looked at him a long while, and it pulled some sense from him, some need to explain. “Look, I think we’re going to go through very tough times. Maybe half a century of tough times, maybe more. When it’s done, a lot will be lost. Let’s save what we can.” He looked at her face, starkly beautiful and reminiscent of Greek sculpture. She had a face like a thousand caryatids holding up the ancient temples of civilization. “People will need beauty to survive,” he said.
“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah.”
They went back. They went to a few more houses, then decided to risk the Denver Art Museum.
It was . . . falling apart. He had some memory of having read a lot of blather about it, in the time before the zombies. It was a modern building, and the architecture was all sorts of innovative.
He had a vague memory—all memories before the Fall were now vague, like a dream from long, long ago—of having gone there once with some girl whose name he no longer remembered, and who had probably died in the great zombing. He remembered walking up a glimmering staircase with strategically placed lights.
Now . . . well, the entire entrance area was filled with dirt and ashes and shits. There was someone in what looked like the remnants of a uniform rotting in a corner. Mike slipped her hand into his and clung near him. Neither of them went near the human remains, or the other piles of stuff that might also be human remains. Things scrambled in the piles of refuse, either mice or squirrels or whatever, and Colton didn’t want to know which. His hand came to rest on the Glock strapped at his side.
The Reapers mostly packed Glocks which were light and convenient when climbing buildings the wrong way, but also because they were easy to find at every single—now abandoned—police station, as was the 9mm ammo, found in bunches and handfuls everywhere including at the sports and fishing stores that had long since been forgotten and were falling to ruin.
He’d not fired a gun before the Fall except once, for Joss’s birthday, when they’d gone to some outdoor range, and notably failed to hit the target.
But after the first shock of the zombies and the attacks, Mira had said, “You know how you can’t hug every cat? You can’t strangle every zombie. Sooner or later one of them is going to get a bite in when you’re doing close-in work.”
So, someone, he no longer remembered who, had said they should go to the police stations and get guns, and then they’d practiced.
Until the last six months, all their—ah, what had Mike called it?—gleaning work in the ruins of civilization had involved shooting an infected before it could get you. And they’d got pretty good at it.
Colton put his arm around Mike and pulled her close, as they walked up the staircase, picking the part with fewest debris. His free hand rested on the Glock. He had a strong feeling that the Colton from before the Fall would have been shocked as hell at him. He remembered his mother saying she’d never enter a place where people had a gun. And his dad had said that one of the advantages of civilization was that a man didn’t need to be armed.
Well, Dad might have been right at that, though Colton had an inkling of a suspicion that he wasn’t. That even before the Fall, guns were just as they were now, just a way to defend yourself. And if you could defend yourself, you were more likely to survive whatever came your way. A zombie apocalypse, for example.
He was thinking about it, which was good, because when the infected came running from the dark area above them, headed for them, teeth clacking, he pulled and shot without thinking. Mike’s shot echoed his, and the infected’s head exploded all over the hallway.
“Damn,” he said. “What has it been living on?”
Mike grimaced and gestured at the piles around. “All this.”
They proceeded twice as cautiously, but other than a corner that the infected must have colonized, a mess of soft furnishings and blankets not even a coherent nest as betas were supposed to build, the upper floor was clear of infected and debris. There was what looked like a human skeleton in a corner, but for all Colton knew it might have been some weird art installation.
They walked through the area where he vaguely remembered there used to be installations, including one that looked like the twisted remains of someone’s kitchen drawer, with a plaque that called it something like “Drudgery” and talked about how it represented female domestic slavery.
“This way,” Mike said. She’d got her flashlight out and lit a plaque that said “Western Art.”
The gallery was untouched. Someone had managed to close it off before it could be fouled by the infected.
They walked, like kids at an art show, from a painting of a cowboy on a horse, to paintings of wild prairie, to paintings of men who’d conquered the West, or Native Americans in barbaric finery.
“This is us,” Mike said.
“Uh, not noticeably.”
“No, think about it. They faced an untamed land and they had to fight like hell, sometimes against each other, to make it civilized and plentiful for the people who came after.”
“Oh,” he said.
They took the Western gallery first. Mike had found some kind of packing paper in one of the back rooms. Cushiony stuff. They’d wrapped the pieces reverently and taken them out with a dolly.
“Where do we take them?” he said, as they headed out of dead Denver, listening to Radio Free Colorado play “Unwell” by Matchbox 20.
“Let’s see if the military wants them,” she said. “Let’s go to Monument and see if anyone bites. All except one. That one of the guy on the horse, with the untamed West all around. We’re going to keep that for our living room, eventually.”
And he was so shocked she’d said our living room that he buzzed with happiness all the way to Monument.
Weirdly, no one gave them guff over taking the art, and no one told them that this was already owned by the people of Colorado. They’d been prepared to defend their actions, to explain that they were trying to save things before “nature” brown and black in mold and mildew ate them.
Instead, they were thanked for having rescued the paintings, given a finder’s fee—not of course what the paintings were worth in the time before the Fall, but a very nice fee that would keep them in food for many years—if they chose not to glean anymore.
Then the guy in charge had taken them to one of their experts. “Because Tommy here can tell you what we’d like you to rescue.”
Tommy, who looked fifty or sixty, a suave, gray-haired man, whose face bore marks of grief and tiredness, and who wore a uniform with markings that meant nothing to Colton or Mike, had sat with them at a table, offered them coffee, and said, “I thought most places in Denver were still too dangerous to go to. Not infected, though I hear there are some still around, but—”
“Yeah. There are, other people trying to get things,” Mike said.
“And I hear the buildings aren’t safe,” he said. “Mostly that.”
Colton shrugged. “No, sir, they’re not. Which is why we’ve gone in and tried to save what we could. We figured the armed forces couldn’t do it all. And I know there’s been talk of the government—”
The man made a face at the mention of government. “Yeah,” he said. “If we’re lucky we maybe might have an election again before I die. I’m almost afraid of what kind of politician will come out of these times.” He sighed. “But the two of you, why art?”
So they’d explained. All about the guy with the German accent and the other guy, and how it had seemed really wrong, until they realized that everything might be lost if the buildings collapsed, or another firestorm swept the area.
He’d choked on sudden laughter when they explained the rhinoceros-poop-covered-in-chocolate theory of art.
And then he’d sat with them and a map of Denver and circled the places they might expect to find things worth saving.
“Get what you can out of there before it all goes down. And we’ll pay you. You’re risking your lives. You should be paid.”
That night, Mike had come to his bed, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. As if they’d been living together and making love for all the time since they’d first met.
Their first coupling was like predestined eternity, like they’d been lovers forever and would be lovers forever. And even though Colton was a geek with nearly no experience, and Mike told him he was her first, there had been no awkwardness, no embarrassment.
In the morning, Mike brought him coffee and said, “We’re going to have to leave the Reapers, if we are going to make this art salvage thing a go.”
“Yeah, I’d figured that out sometime in the night,” he said, and then stopped because it was a pretty uncouth thing to say and she might be offended.
But she laughed. “And now I know what you think about during sex.” She kissed him, her mouth sweet and tasting of coffee. “Next time I’ll have to make sure you can’t even think.”
* * *
Hours later, they were driving back to Denver. They’d bought an old blue Expedition off the Reapers. It had enough room for a lot of art in the back, and a tendency to just keep on trucking, no matter what got in its way.
Mike had, solemnly, painted on the door DOGS PLAYING POKER ART SALVAGE.
But that wasn’t what they got. Of course it wasn’t.
They collected art from museums and private homes: pictures of women in beautiful gowns, of rugged men sitting atop horses, and beautifully groomed men in dinner jackets. Books too, when they found them. Those went to the distributors who were always hungry for fiction and nonfiction.
Along the way they found a house, behind the old botanic gardens now wild and overgrown, the fountains silenced, the statues verdigrised.
“I thought we would end up settling in a farm or something,” Colton said, as they walked hand in hand through the home which was inexplicably—or perhaps explicably—pristine. Perhaps explicably because it had been surrounded by a wrought iron fence that turned out to be electrified. Which had probably been illegal in Denver before the Fall. And also probably needed to keep the feral homeless—almost as bad as the infected—out.
“Later, we can take down the wall to the botanic gardens, and we’ll have a spread. They even have vegetable gardens in there somewhere.” She squeezed his hand. “Remember how I told you this was like the wild, untamed West? The city is too. It’s mostly empty, and someone should recolonize, and save what we can. Eventually people will want cities again, and to see the things that were important. Not the downtown, and all the skyscrapers. I don’t think they’ll hold. But these old mansions are part of history, part of the gold rush and all that, and we should keep all of them we can going. Maybe get some people, over time, to take the others around here.”
They’d set up there, behind the electrical fence, and fanned out.
They ran into the art salvagers with the German accent only once more, in the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, where Tommy told them there were some carved Russian gems and other gems worth preserving.
They’d taken the gem carvings and come back for the preserved butterflies and insects under glass. Not because they were art, but because it might be many years, perhaps a century, before people gathered such a collection again, and because frankly Mike thought they’d look good on their new bedroom walls.
They were in the semi-darkened niche, methodically removing the cases from the wall, or the insects from cages, when they heard the same running feet they’d heard before.
“Are you sure this is worth our time?” the German accented voice said.
“Yes,” the darker man answered. “I hear they have some Egyptian mummies. No one is going to Egypt for a long time. My people in Italy will give us good money for them.”
Mike and Colton stayed very quiet, in their corner, in the dark, while the men went back and forth, with loaded dollies and platforms.
“Now,” the German guy said. “We’ll go to the art museum. I hear they have some very fine Western paintings.”
Mike saluted silently as they left. She looked very cute, in a tight little T-shirt that showed off the baby bump. Colton was going to have to talk to some of the people in Monument about obstetrics. He heard there was a bit of a baby boom, and the armed services baby catchers were all subsisting on two hours of sleep and pulling babies out and slapping baby bottoms around the clock.
Except he didn’t even know if it was true that anyone slapped baby bottoms when they were born, and whether they were—as Mike said—new pioneers or not, he had no intention of delivering their kids. He’d read enough of history and even Western books now to know that a lot of those births ended with Mommy or baby or both under a slab. And he was not willing to lose Mike or their kid.
When they left there with the stuff for the guys in Monument, and the stuff they intended to keep—mostly the insects and some trilobites and ammonites—Mike drove. She didn’t take the normal route back, but instead plunged into the narrow little labyrinth of streets, radiating from Colfax. These were mostly working-man Victorians, though by the early twenty-first century they’d come to be worth close to a million each, as the city gentrified, cleaned up and became very refined indeed—and sold out to the Californians. Colton remembered a bumper sticker: Don’t Californicate Colorado. He felt an almost unbearable loss, a longing for those days. Even Californians were better than infected.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“To a place I haven’t had the courage to go for a long time.”
They parked, and she held his hand as she guided him up a dozen steps to a garden raised from the street. It must once have had a very nice garden, because early in spring, it showed a profusion of bulbs in every flower bed, and what must have been a very nice handkerchief-sized lawn, even if it was now completely overtaken by dandelions.
The front door was locked, though it opened relatively easily, and the inside was remarkably clean, if covered in an inch of dust. The walls had paintings that were obviously reproductions of classical works representing Greek gods. The furniture was good and old-fashioned. There were black splatter stains on the kitchen cabinets, and a huge dark stain in front of the cold, abandoned fireplace.
And Mike’s eyes held all the sorrow of the zombie apocalypse, all the sadness of the collapse of civilization under a virus that made people mindless, destructive animals.
She looked out the window at the overgrown garden in the back.
When she spoke, her voice was low and raspy. “When I had beaten the brains out of the roommate, I was surprised to find it did in fact have some. I didn’t go in search of the Reapers. Not right away. I came here. I came home to Mom and Dad.”
Colton put his hand on her shoulder then, but she didn’t turn around. “I found them dead, you know? The story was easy to figure out. Mom zombed, and Dad beheaded her by the fireplace. Then he blew his brains out in the kitchen. Mom had been sick with that flu thing. She caught it after traveling to Greece. Those bathroom air fresheners.” Mike sighed. “I dug a grave out back and dragged them out and put them in together. I haven’t dared come back here since. First, because it was too dangerous to come out, with all the zombies, unless there was a group of us, and I didn’t want to bring a group here. And then because I was afraid to find that the place had been torched, their graves desecrated.”
They opened the back door, and Mike found the graves. “I planted the rose,” she said. He nodded and wondered if she realized there were tears falling down her cheeks. She didn’t seem to react to them or try to clean them off. “They came here in the mid-nineties, you know? Dad was hired by an engineering firm, and they moved to Denver, where we had some kind of cousins. They loved it here. Dad always said that like Greece was the finest flourishing of ancient civilization, America was the pinnacle of the Western civilization.”
“We’ll be again,” Colton said. “We’ll be again.” And he kissed away the cold tears on her warm cheeks.
She smiled wanly as she led him back in the house and led him by the hand to the basement. “Let me show you why I named our salvage operations what I did.”
Down in the basement there was what had obviously been a man cave, or perhaps a rec room.
There was a huge television, which didn’t matter much, since electricity and broadcasts were both sporadic. But he could imagine Mike’s father sitting there and watching sports.
There was a billiards table. And on the wall there were two things: a picture of Elvis on velvet and a giant, gold-framed picture of dogs playing poker.
Mike turned to him, laughing through her tears. “He said if he could find a picture of a big-eyed crying toddler, he’d put it down here too.”
“We’ll keep this place,” Colton said. “We’ll keep the house from getting hurt in storms. We’ll check in on it. We’ll keep the roses over the grave out back. We’ll tell the children about them.”
And then she’d leaned on his shoulder and cried. She cried for all they’d lost. And perhaps, just a little, she cried with joy for their future together.
Later, in the car, he told her about his parents, dead from a zombie attack and torn to pieces in their car, as they’d been trying to load it to escape the city. “I know how you feel,” he told her. “I too never got to say goodbye.”
The carved gems brought them much scrip, and since they were helping the armed forces to “preserve the cultural patrimony of these United States” while remaining civilians, they were given access to the food supplies the armed forces were starting to organize. The Air Force had this thing they called “Farmer Flights” where they were mapping who was growing what, and matching farmers to places that needed tending and had no one to take them. Colorado ranches were coming back, and cowboys . . . well, mostly fed the cows, but it was something.
It was the Air Force that had figured out, somehow, that Joss came from a farming family in Texas, and after he and Mira married in a ceremony for which all the—admittedly bewildered—Reapers got together once more, Joss and Mira had headed out to run a dairy ranch in the flatter portion of the state.
The DJs from Radio Free Colorado—Steve and Melissa Green—had come out for the ceremony, as celebrity guests, and Rocky Mountain Suite had played as the bride and groom left in an old truck for their new destiny.
A couple of the other Reapers moved in to deserted mansions near the Botanic Gardens. Over time, their work morphed from mere gleaning to keeping the places around them livable, and to making Denver what it had once been, a crossroads of commerce and culture.
Andreas Argyris Johnson made his entry into the world at a makeshift medical center in Monument, Colorado. Named for his maternal grandfather, he entered into the land his grandparents had loved, and the wild untamed frontier it had become once more.
Colton and Mike hung the picture of dogs playing poker in his bedroom and told him, often, about the wealth and luxury that used to be that allowed people to make and collect whimsical art like that and reproduce it by the thousands.
Because they wanted him to know that Western civilization had been a thing of wild beauty and unbelievable abundance.
And would be again.