From this distance, the city looked almost whole. The roads were twining gray lines, like a network of veins. They lay empty, but they were still serviceable. Nothing was grown over—but of course it wasn’t. The surrounding countryside was too yellow and brown even for autumn. Almost nothing grew anymore. But that left a clear view of the intact skyline, glass glinting in the thin daylight. Whatever else was true of this place, it wasn’t a ruin.
Eva had been half afraid that the city would be on fire with skyscrapers toppled when she arrived, so this was an improvement on her imagination. She paused on the hilltop, gulping in deep breaths, and scrubbed a sleeve across her forehead. Her shoulders ached under the straps of the backpack, and her legs burned from the climb. More than anything, she wished the garden wagon she had found to carry the rest of her supplies didn’t squeak and rattle so much. It wasn’t wise to attract attention in these big empty spaces.
Until recently, Eva had lived in the scrappy remnant of a suburb. Nowhere was safe, but she and her neighbors had clung to their town for a long time. There was peace of mind in numbers, even if they rarely spoke to each other, and they knew where to look for resources. It had worked, for a time, until the place had been picked down to its bones. Until scavengers had made off with half the clean water. Until rats chewed up the sealed packaging on most of the old pantry staples they were running out of anyway. People started leaving faster, if they didn’t die first. They often snuck off in the night with whatever they could swipe, to avoid fighting for it. One morning, Eva had woken up to a total ghost town. There was simply nothing left, so she left, too.
Eva would have had to hit the universe’s jackpot to find much food. Instead, she was lugging her carefully tended supply closet. Most of the hospital had been stripped clean, too, but Eva had one advantage over most people: she still had the keys. They had been labeled, once; now there was no trace of ink, and the colored covers she had picked out were faded. The heart-shaped metal pendant and its engraved “Home Is Where the Heart Is” was holding up well, though. There was that.
Eva tugged the wagon to her side and glanced over the contents. Bandages, antiseptics, sutures, and some precious few stock medicines were nestled carefully together. There was a defibrillator buried under there, though it wouldn’t be much good without a power source. She had covered most of it up with some stale PPE, which was nice to have. The rest was layered in her backpack beneath a change of clothes, a couple of books, and yes, some little food.
There was not as much downhill as she would have liked. The wagon banged around ferociously the entire way to the edge of downtown, which she managed inside an hour. As soon as she entered the district, she was struck by the feeling of being watched. She stilled rather than froze. She was particularly good at not visibly panicking in front of anyone. You couldn’t be an EMT and panic in front of people, even unseen eyes. Besides, she had come here because she had reasoned that more people would gather in cities.
Eva looked around slowly. “Hello?” she called.
The sense of being watched vanished. She kept moving.
The thing to do was to find a secure place so that she didn’t wander around with everything she owned. That was easier said than done. There had been no opportunity to scout, and this was not a small city. This area was all low, clustered buildings nearly brimming over into one-way streets. The skyscrapers shadowed over her like mountains a few blocks away. A dry wind blew plentiful grit along the streets and sidewalks.
She was not alone here. She caught movement out of the corner of her eye more than once, from parking decks and rooftops. But whoever lived here had chosen a network of alleyways and interconnected shops on purpose. They were skittish; when she passed, they ducked into their hiding places. If there was organized civilization to be found, it wasn’t here.
Glass shattered in the quiet. It was a puzzling, lonesome sound. In Eva’s town, even vandals had gotten tired of breaking windows pretty quickly. After a few months, it dawned on them that the world wasn’t going to end immediately, and in the meantime, everyone still needed shelter, including intact windows. Any store worth its stock had already been broken into at that point. Since then, windows had been safe unless the whole town was under attack.
Eva took the middle of the street to better see around corners and followed the sound. The wagon resumed its terrible commotion over the crunching, cracked asphalt. A jumble of voices bounced off the buildings. She heard laughter right before she came even with a cross-street and saw them.
Half a dozen people were ambling toward her and talking amongst themselves. As she watched, one of them swung a piece of pipe. It hit a bricked storefront with a crack, and the figure stuck the pipe under their arm to shake out their hands, much to the amusement of their friends. Three more of them were similarly armed. Every one had painted their faces in red and black, making them, if anything, strangely reminiscent of football fans. The group slowed when they saw her. But they kept coming, and she waited.
They were all men, she noted. There was nothing wrong with that in itself, but the exclusion of women too often coincided with men having a very bad idea.
The men stopped a respectable distance away and sized her up. The tallest one, who had a crowbar instead of a pipe, said, “Well, you don’t look like a rider.”
Eva was tempted to reply, “Neither do you,” but this was the wrong thing to say. Instead, she went with, “I’m not. I’m new here.”
The apparent leader grinned nastily. “Well, this is gonna be a short visit for you.” The man who had recently been bested by a brick wall bounced the length of pipe against his leg, clearly eager to prove himself. Two more shifted their weight.
This looked less and less promising. “I’m looking for somewhere people are gathering,” she said. “Is there anything like that here?”
“We’re the only people you have to worry about,” the leader replied. When he stepped forward, the others spread out, angling to cut off any escape.
Eva weighed her options. There weren’t many. “Are you riders?” she asked, though she knew the answer.
“Smart girl. Next time he comes through, we will be.” He thrust a fist into the air. “For War!”
“For War!” the other men crowed in answer.
The rallying cry, misguided as it was, spurred them on. They approached in long, aggressive strides, rolling their shoulders and testing the weight of their various weapons. Willing riders were not uncommon. They thought that riding under a horseman’s banner meant that they were invincible, or at least safe. They thought a horseman of the apocalypse would give a damn about them. The leader continued, “And you’ll make good practice, won’t you? We’re gonna—”
Eva looked at him evenly. “No, you aren’t,” she stated.
He hesitated, and his men faltered with him. Loud people with weapons didn’t like it when you weren’t visibly cowed, because they were secretly afraid of everyone around them. That was why they carried baseball bats. That was why they wanted so badly to join a roving band of killers. And if you weren’t worried about them, it strongly implied that they should be worried about you.
“How about instead of going after one lone woman,” she said into the delicate moment of uncertainty, “you come to me if you get hurt.”
In Eva’s experience, you could sometimes dodge a dangerous situation by tripping its momentum. Her phrasing had knocked some of the triumph out of their expressions. The man with the crowbar tried to wrestle it back. “Yeah, right. How about we take all that anyway, huh?”
She shrugged. “Do you know how to use this stuff?”
The rest of the men were all looking at their leader for a cue. For his part, he stared at Eva, vexation reluctantly replacing the outright hostility in his expression. She had nearly counted the whole exchange over and done when his eyes lit up. “Hey,” he said slowly, “that means you have drugs.”
Then again, sometimes being the most sensible person in the room didn’t save you. Neither would two weeks of basic self-defense courses and a few prior scuffles, not against a lot of blunt weapons. Eva dropped the handle of the wagon and decided that under extreme duress, medical equipment could be used to do harm without moral repercussions, provided she did her professional best to stitch them up afterward.
One of them swung a bat. Eva dropped into a crouch and twisted free of the backpack. She snatched at the zipper, but a kick to her ribs sent her rolling. She scrambled to her feet just in time to hurriedly duck another blow. It put her briefly under the man’s swing, and she threw a punch into his solar plexus. He stepped back, mouth agape in offense. So far, she had succeeded in being separated from her supplies and making one of the would-be riders angrier than before—and the rest of them were rushing her all at once. Eva put her hands up in front of her face.
“Freeze, you sons of bitches!” screamed a new voice.
The men looked over her shoulder. Suddenly, they were engaged in the discreet shuffle of several people all trying to stand behind each other. The leader grabbed one by the shirt and hauled him forward again. “Come on! Nobody has ammo anymore—”
The sound of a gunshot stopped Eva’s heart. Her attackers bolted. One of them kicked over her backpack, but no one bothered to take anything. Very slowly, with her hands up, Eva turned around.
A woman held a revolver pointed at the sky with a satisfied smile on her face. White smoke curled from the barrel of the gun. That was the only intimidating thing about her, offhand. The woman was short, plump, and somewhere in her sixties. Her graying, curly hair was tied back in a tight ponytail. She gave Eva a meaningful wink. “Don’t worry, honey, that was a firework,” she said. She tucked the gun into her jeans pocket. “You put a little one in there and it makes a hell of a noise. He’s right, everybody took off with the real ammo ages ago.”
Eva lowered her hands. She exhaled hard, trying to steady her breathing. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome. Someone saw you coming in with all that stuff, and I thought: for one, that’s asking for trouble, and for another, someone with that much to haul around seems like a good friend to make.”
Eva realized with some relief that she was dealing with a talker. The woman’s rough voice had a quick patter to it that was both friendly and familiarly, comfortingly no-nonsense. Eva had missed conversation. She attended to her supplies while she listened.
“Good thing, too. You okay, hon?” At the first sign of a positive response, the woman continued, “I used to know those boys. I saw them around almost every weekend. They were spoiled then, too, but I always thought they’d grow up to be regular jackasses. The kind that doesn’t tip, not the kind that signs up to end the world. Is that a real nurse uniform?”
She only had the overshirt on. “EMT,” she corrected, “but yes.”
“You’ve got medicine and all in there?”
“Yes.”
The woman’s eyes gleamed, and she wandered closer. “You looking for somewhere to settle down?”
Eva hesitated. She hadn’t thought of it in those terms. But going where she was needed and seeking out other people because she was afraid and lonely amounted to much the same thing, and neither one was untrue. “I suppose I am.”
The woman grinned widely. “Well, welcome to the neighborhood! I guess you could call me the mayor of whatever’s left around here. I’m Martha.” She stuck out her hand. “What’s your name, honey?”
“Eva.” She shook the proffered hand. “Eva Hall.” She smiled despite worrying she’d forgotten how. “Nice to meet you.”
“So professional!” Martha plucked up the handle to the wagon and set off. Eva had to jog to catch up, even though her legs were far longer. Martha was already saying, “One thing’s for sure: you’ll get a warm welcome from me and mine. We could use another doctor around, the way things are going.”
Eva considered pointing out that she was only an EMT, but she had said it already, and she wasn’t sure it mattered to Martha. “I’m here to help,” she replied.
“That’s what I like to hear,” Martha said cheerfully. “Because if you weren’t, we’d have to convince you. It’s not all charity out here, you know. We have to play it smart. There’s safety in numbers until people like Jeff Briggs and his friends find out you have a good thing going. We’re one raid away from having to start all over again. But so is everyone else in the world.”
That was probably true, too, though Eva hoped it wasn’t. There was no way to know for sure. Lines of communication were still present—the phone lines, the internet, the power grid—but they had splintered with society. Now they worked only in bits and pieces, where brave souls had made an effort to keep them running. “What kind of infrastructure do you have?”
“We patched up a couple blocks of buildings for better shelter,” Martha explained. “We share food and we mostly don’t take swings at each other. Andrei’s an electrician; he’s trying to see how far our generator will go. It’s not much.”
“It’s a good start,” Eva said frankly. Martha beamed with pride. She had offered Eva more smiles in five minutes than she had seen in a long time. Eva felt every one. She cleared her throat and continued before Martha could, “I want to start a clinic.”
Martha nodded. “That’s just perfect. The closer we can get to normal, the better. A clinic will make people feel like they’re being taken care of. Make them stick around.” She wasn’t out of breath in the slightest despite the brisk clip at which she took the roads. “Coming and going doesn’t do anyone any good. We’ve got to be a real—well, there aren’t enough people left around here to make a real city. But a neighborhood, anyway. There it is. You can hardly see it, can you?”
At first, Eva wasn’t sure where her attention was being directed. The buildings had grown taller around them, and the streets were wider. Some rusty cars sat parallel parked by the curb. This had been the busiest part of downtown, once, packed with traffic and lined with businesses stacked atop one another. Now, like much of civilization, it all appeared abandoned. Eva’s gaze searched fruitlessly in the direction of Martha’s gesture. Then she saw movement—a figure vanishing from a large window. A heavy curtain fell back into place, shielding the interior from view with a veil of unoffensive beige.
“Is that a hotel?” Eva realized aloud.
“Smart, right?” Martha chirped. “Nothing really in it, but the doors are solid and there’s a big kitchen. About half of us live in there.”
Martha detailed the benefits and drawbacks to living in an emptied downtown hotel. Eva followed and listened. She couldn’t pinpoint why she trusted the woman. It could have been that Martha was inescapably friendly. That she had spooked the would-be riders was a definite point in her favor. And possibly, Eva just hoped very much that all this was true.
“Doctor in the house!” Martha announced loudly as she shouldered her way through the door. It still swung nicely on its hinges, and the glass had been replaced with plywood. Eva stopped it from closing long enough to enter behind her.
Oh, yes—people lived here.
The ground floor, which would have housed the reception area, a restaurant, and a lounge, had been divided up anew. Machinery parts were lined up on the reception desk. Furniture, most of it patterned so oddly that it had to be original to the hotel, was arranged in several circles. A tiny, half-full bookshelf sat by the stairs. There was a cornhole board, of all things, shoved against the wall, and a half-built twin beside it. There were fortifications, too: reinforcements to the multitude of windows and the lookout whom Eva had spotted, now peering at them over the second-floor railing.
Ten people would not have been a crowd before the end of the world, but now it was startling. It was especially surreal to see them all loitering rather than scavenging, fighting or fleeing. Three people leaned against the desk on their elbows, fiddling with a circuit board. The rest were looking at the new arrivals from the hotel chairs. They weren’t carelessly relaxed, but one young woman was sitting sideways with her legs draped over the arm of the chair, and Eva caught the tail end of laughter as she entered.
This wasn’t just shelter. It was what people did when they stayed somewhere.
“Wow,” she breathed.
“Quit picking up strays, Martha,” said a large man at the reception desk.
“What’s that?” called the lookout. She pointed at the wagon. “Food?”
“We heard the gunshot,” put in one of the loungers. “Everything alright?”
Martha pulled the wagon around and put her hands to her hips. “You’re such a hypocrite,” she informed the first man. “Like I didn’t find you wandering around with sad puppy eyes.” To the lookout, she said, “No, it’s medicine and band-aids and all. You know, that other stuff we need?” She waved the last man over. “We’re fine, just ran into some War fanboys. David, come here, I want to introduce you to our other doctor.”
David shook his head but rose to join them. He was maybe twenty years older than Eva; though there was no gray in his short curls, he had a few lines on his face that folded easily into a smile. “Hey there,” he said. “Don’t mind Martha. I’m a registered nurse.”
“EMT,” Eva returned, glad for someone who would understand the difference. “My name’s Eva.”
He looked over the wagon curiously. “You made it here with all that stuff by yourself?”
He and Martha made it sound so foolish, but what else could she have done? Eva shrugged. “I want to set up a clinic.”
He nodded. “That’s not a bad idea. I’ve been patching people up, but with a dedicated space and supplies, not to mention some help…” He rubbed thoughtfully at his close-trimmed beard. “What do you think, Martha? Can you spare us some of the ground floor?”
Martha looked as though Christmas had come early. “Oh, I’m sure we can find something. Not like it’s crowded. Where’s Tiffany?”
The big man, who had returned to looking over the machinery parts, grunted sourly. “Out finding water, if she’s coming back.”
“Lord, that girl. Did she take anything with her?”
“Just her own stuff.”
“Down one already,” Martha complained. “Damn! Well, looks like another room just opened up. Set up wherever you like—that is,” she continued loudly and expectantly, “if everyone’s alright with it. What do you say, folks? We take care of her and she takes care of us?”
The initial silence made Eva keenly aware she would be another mouth to feed and another potential thief to disappear with some of their stores. But within moments, murmurs grew to an enthusiastic volume. The lookout shouted her approval, and then various welcomes were being called in Eva’s direction. David shook her hand enthusiastically.
Martha winked. “Call that free healthcare,” she quipped. “Come on, honey. Let’s get you a room.”