Life on the Preservation US Edition

  LIFE ON THE

  PRESERVATION

  JACK SKILLINGSTEAD

  SOLARIS

  First published 2013 by Solaris

  an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,

  Riverside House, Osney Mead,

  Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK

  www.solarisbooks.com

  ISBN (EPUB): 978-1-84997-570-4

  ISBN (MOBI): 978-1-84997-571-1

  Copyright © Jack Skillingstead 2013

  Cover art by Vincent Chong

  The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,

  in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  For Daniel Skillingstead

  Nothing says love like a paranoid science fiction novel.

  “Our identities have no bodies...”

  JOHN PERRY BARLOW

  “Nothing is going on

  and nobody knows what it is.”

  THE EXEGESIS OF PHILIP K. DICK

  SEATTLE, OCTOBER 5, 2012

  AT TEN PM on a Saturday he was hanging his ass in the wind. It was like he wanted a police cruiser to light him up. Ian’s canvas was the parking-lot wall of Dick’s Drive-In on Broadway. Tweaks, drunks and college kids wolfed cheeseburgers and watched him paint. He triggered the spray can, swept his arm in familiar flourishes, then stood back, scowling at: WHO CARES. Street lamps desaturated the green paint, flattened the letters. WHO was what Ian used to be but wasn’t anymore, an identity tag on a hundred post-midnight walls. WHO CARES – it was no good. His trademark style ran out of gas and definition a mile before the S curves. His audience applauded, but Ian’s shoulders sagged. He’d put up everything he had left. Empty, he dropped the Sabotaz 80 can. It clunked heavy and rolled on the pavement as he walked away, hood up and head down; it wasn’t the can that was empty.

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  OAKDALE, WA., 2013

  A YEAR AFTER the world ended, Kylie sat on the floor at her boyfriend’s house, picking through stacks of DVDs. The living room was small and over-crowded with deep bookcases, bulky leather chairs and a matching sofa big as a Buick. The carpet held dust like a dry sponge. It hadn’t been vacuumed since Judgment Day. Once a week a power strip drew electricity for the TV setup plus one pole lamp. A thick extension cord snaked out of the living room and through the kitchen window to a noisy generator on the back porch. Most of the time Kylie was used to the lack of animating electricity. But when movie night ended and Billy switched the gennie off, the house always felt dead to her again. She wouldn’t give up the movies, though. Not for anything.

  Kylie was eighteen and hungry for things she couldn’t have. “This one?” she said, holding up a movie.

  Billy slumped in a corner of the sofa with a warm can of Mountain Dew in his lap. He looked up. His shaggy beard and patchy hair made him look older than he really was – though he was already pretty old for Kylie. At thirty-five Billy was played out, overweight, and impotent. Well, all the men in Oakdale were impotent, not just Billy; the poison rain saw to that. It also accounted for the patchy hair. At least Billy hadn’t scabbed up yet. His eyes were mostly clear, his finger and toe nails hadn’t fallen off, his breath was mostly okay. It was all coming, though; everybody got it bad, eventually. Everybody except Kylie.

  Usually Billy drank beer or wine, especially on movie night. The Mountain Dew didn’t make him as happy. Not that he was ever exactly ‘happy’. But when he was drunk, at least, he tended to be less gloomy. Billy wasn’t drunk now. His shirt was untucked and missing a couple of buttons. Billy’s navel squinted in a wiry tangle of black hair. He nodded at Kylie’s movie choice. “Again? Sure, yeah.”

  The cover of the DVD case depicted a man and a woman: John Cusack and Ione Skye – Lloyd and Diane in the movie; two people no doubt annihilated by The Judgment (as Father Jim called it) but miraculously existent in Kylie’s hand, their endlessly repeating lives waiting to be unlocked by laser light. Kylie pried the case open. She tilted the silver disk under the lamp, watching colors bend over its surface. Then she fed it into the machine and sat next to Billy on the sofa. He slung his arm around her, pointed the clicker and pushed PLAY. The empty blue screen filled with images of a lost world and the things Kylie couldn’t have.

  Two hours later she said, “They were meant for each other.”

  “Movie people,” Billy said.

  She snuggled against his body. He was big and warm. Well, he was bound to be big, with all the crap he ate. Kylie rested her head on his chest, which rose and subsided heavily with each breath. Her nose twitched at the sour smell of his sweat. But she didn’t mind that. He took care of her, protected her. She thought: I love him. Like telling herself something and hoping she believed it. I love Billy. But maybe not like Diane loved Lloyd.

  Billy came from outside the town. This was almost unheard of. Wanderers did occasionally straggle into Oakdale but they tended to straggle right back out again. Unless they were skin-and-bone people, SABs, in which case townies drove them back out. Billy had grown up in Oakdale, but had been gone almost as long as Kylie had been alive, and so his arrival in the aftermath of disaster was simply a return home.

  “Do you want to watch a sex one now?” she asked. Kylie didn’t really get the sex movies, the pornos. But sometimes watching a little of one got Billy in the mood, even if his poisoned body could no longer perform the way men in those movies did. Kylie was more turned on by love scenes. In a love scene you saw people who cared about each other kissing and caressing. Maybe once in a while there was a bare breast or exposed behind, but it was the love that mattered. Kylie was the youngest survivor in town and the only one not sick. That’s probably why she still cared about love scenes.

  “I don’t think so,” Billy said.

  “Are you sure?”

  He patted her shoulder. “I don’t really like them anymore,” he said. “They’re depressing.”

  “Oh. What about one of your gangster movies or Westerns?”

  “They’re depressing, too.”

  “It’s okay, Billy. Don’t be sad again.”

  “I’m not sad.”

  “Do you want a beer?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  They were quiet a while.

  “Let’s go to bed,” Kylie said.

  Billy grunted. He turned off the TV and the DVD player then got up to kill the generator. He carried his extra weight awkwardly. Billy ate a lot of crap food. He hoarded it in the spare bedroom, cases of Doritos, potato chips, candy bars and soda pop. “Might as well eat what I want,” he liked to say. “All bets are off.”

  Kylie lit a candle that smelled like strawberries. A minute later the generator cut out. In the absence of its muted racket the profound silence of the world returned. It was God listening to the souls of the survivors. That’s what Father Jim said, and the hundred or so dying, rag-tail remnant souls of Oakdale believed in Father Jim. Kylie used to believe in him, too. In fact, she used to be hooked up with him – definitely not like Diane and Lloyd; but all that was before.

  To Kylie the silence was like a bottomless well into which everything she knew had been discarded – every comfort and familiar joy and expectation, every hope. Even Kylie’s father was in the wel
l, she supposed, though he had been gone anyway for many years. Her mother, who said her rosary every day, maintained her own silence on the subject of Kylie’s father. He was dead by now, anyway. The Judgment had killed almost everybody outright. Those few who survived were dying by slow inches.

  Except for Kylie.

  In the bedroom she stripped down to a t-shirt and panties. The t-shirt was gray with black letters that spelled: PROPERTY OF U DUB, one of Billy’s old shirts. Kylie liked candlelight, enjoyed the way it fell on the pages of the books she found in Billy’s house. She looked through a collection of poems by Yeats, hoping Billy would come in soon. Mostly she didn’t understand the poems (Robert Frost was easier and Charles Bukowski the best) but she liked how the words sounded together in her mind and the way the lines of black type assembled in orderly ladders on the thick white paper. She read silently, moving her lips. Her father used to read to her when she was very little. Kylie remembered that much about him.

  Lying on her back, reading, Kylie had a strange feeling she wasn’t alone. She looked up. The blinds were open and the window was a black mirror capturing a girl, a book, and a candle. Then Billy appeared in the doorway and she let the feeling go. He didn’t come in but only stood there, the candle making shadows on his face, hiding his eyes.

  “What’s wrong?” she said.

  “Nothing. Maybe I’ll stay up for a while.”

  She put her book on the bedside table. “Billy?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I really don’t want to be alone.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  She patted the bed beside her. “Come on.”

  He scratched his cheek, stalling.

  “Don’t you want to be with me?”

  For a moment it seemed he really didn’t, and Kylie’s heart sank.

  “’Course I do,” he said, not very convincingly. He lay beside her, the mattress springs groaning. Like he’s doing her this big favor. Kylie stifled her irritation, tried to relax back into the right mood. After a while she said, “Touch me,” and he began to caress her breasts. His hand knew what it was doing, even if the rest of him was checked out. Kylie closed her eyes and let her mind hover around certain images from the movies, and then she slid her hand between her thighs. After a long while, her breathing changed. She made a sound in her throat. Some of it was acting, like people in the movies, but not all of it. She slipped her hand inside her panties. Things became mixed up in her mind, Billy and Lloyd and John Cusack and the good feeling of her body, and the way her dreadful loneliness retreated. Time began to unwind in sensation, and then the acting part was over, and the heat built and spread through her thighs and belly until it became bigger and bigger and was through all her body and she was almost outside of herself with the intensity of it. She arched her hips and cried out: “I love you, I love you, I love you,” like that had to be part of it, then fell back, panting, while the glow subsided.

  She wanted to cuddle now. Touching herself could banish loneliness for a few moments, but sometimes when Billy held her it was as though loneliness could be extinguished forever. Not this time, though. She slung her arm and leg over him, and he held her but was distant, staring at the ceiling.

  “Tell me what’s wrong,” she said.

  “Nothing. I’m thinking.”

  “What about?”

  “I’ll tell you later.”

  He patted her raggedy hair. Kind of patronizing. Kylie made a face. Her mother cut Kylie’s hair short, using the big kitchen shears, and it was uneven and choppy. Kylie hated her hair.

  “I wish you would get undressed one of these times,” Kylie said.

  “What would be the point?” Suddenly he crushed her hard against his body. He was trembling, and she could hardly breathe, he held her so tight. Then he let go and stood up, wiped his eyes and put his glasses back on. He turned away and said, “I’m going to stay up for a while.”

  She started to get up.

  “Kylie, I want to sit by myself and think.”

  She chewed her lip, said, “I love you,” throwing it out there like a ball he was supposed to swat back to her. She didn’t even believe herself. She was scared was all. Why couldn’t it be simple and real?

  “Love you too,” he said.

  “I doubt it.”

  He looked back at her. “I really do, Kylie.”

  “How about a beer?” she said. There was plenty of beer in town, since Father Jim told everyone God didn’t want them to drink ‘spirits’. Billy never quit, though. Billy didn’t give a shit what Father Jim said. And Billy was so much better with the beer.

  “Naw,” he said, “I’m sick of warm beer.”

  There was plenty of beer but the fire-extinguishers had run out ages ago. Billy had used the fire-extinguishers to cool off six-packs. He didn’t want to waste generator fuel running a refrigerator. Because Father Jim had told everybody God wanted them to live simply, without electricity (“God’s a real killjoy in this town,” Billy liked to say), Billy was the only one using a generator; but sooner or later the gas would be gone, and that would be the end of movie night.

  “Anyway,” he said.

  He pulled the door shut behind him. She felt like everything was ruined from the inside out. Kylie stared at the door like she was staring at some pain inside her secret heart, which she was.

  ALONE IN BED, she listened to the deep-well silence and fought off tears. Crying didn’t do any good. The town dentist, Dr. Lee, had cried himself crazy after The Judgment left him standing but killed his wife and kids. Eventually his crazy tears got him killed, too, which Kylie guessed was all right with Dr. Lee.

  She thought about getting up and closing the blinds. Instead she rolled onto her side, yawning, drawing her knees up, exhausted. Random pictures drifted through her mind, like clouds in a foreign sky, and she passed into sleep.

  Some time later the sound of the generator entered her awareness and putt-putted her awake. She opened her eyes, not fully conscious. The candle, bed and girl floated in the black glass, and something else. Kylie blinked slowly, not really taking anything in, her mind mostly asleep. But she had to pee, and she got up and padded out of the room.

  Billy was watching the TV. She could hear it while she was in the bathroom, squatting over a bucket. Her pee rang against the galvanized tin. She struggled to remember something on the edge of her mind. Had she dreamed of the normal days again? Somehow remembering those days didn’t hurt but dreaming about them left her feeling disoriented – almost as if her dreams were real and her reality a bad dream.

  She finished peeing, covered the bucket with a towel, pulled on a pair of tight black Levi’s, and went down the hall. Billy lay on the sofa, facing away from the set, the light shifting on the broad back of his wrinkly shirt. Seven or eight bottles of the beer he was so sick of stood empty, guarding a tower of DVDs. Billy’s favorite Western was playing. Tombstone. The volume was low, but she heard Val Kilmer say, “I’m your huckleberry,” followed by a gunshot. Kylie touched Billy’s shoulder.

  “Are you awake?” she said

  “Yeah.” He rolled over and faced her, his eyes bleary. He reached for a bottle, like a reflex.

  “Are you still sad?” Kylie asked.

  “More like drunk. But don’t worry – I’m turning over a new leaf as of right now. Anyway, I am as soon as the beer wears off.”

  She sat on the edge of the sofa. “What new leaf?”

  “Kylie, if that crazy priest knew what we were up to he’d probably chop my head off. You know how he’s always blathering about ‘purity’ and all that shit. Besides, I think he’d like to chop my head off just on general principles, since I’m the only one around here besides you not falling into lock-step.”

  Father Jim delivered weekly sermons standing in the bed of a burned out F-350 in the middle of Main Street. He really worked on those sermons – and the sermons really worked on him. Like everybody else in town, except Billy, Kylie showed up to listen. There was pressure to
do so, an un-stated threat if you didn’t. Nevertheless, she would have quit going except that Billy told her that was a bad idea, told her it would draw attention to her. Father Jim’s early sermons had been almost incoherent, filled with emotion and desperation. But over the last few months the priest seemed to be building something. To Kylie it sounded like he was building the world from the inside of his head. The Judgment had come sheeting out of the sky like a vast white lightning, killing billions in an instant, transforming most of the world into blasted destruction and leaving the survivors to fade into a slower, more cruel death. In his sermons Father Jim was practically writing a new book for the Bible. The Word According To Jim made sense out of what didn’t make sense.

  “I wonder,” Billy said, “how that idiot felt about purity before God took the steel out of his dick. “

  “He felt guilty, I think.”

  Billy grunted. Father Jim had been a pilot in the Marines, and he still retained a private license. The way he started with Kylie was by giving her flying lessons in his Cessna. Eventually that’s what they called it when they were going to meet for the other things: flying lessons.

  “That was just him grooming you,” Billy told her. “Like he did practically your whole life. The bastard.”

  She had told Billy about Father Jim. The priest had always been around, but the grown up part, the really bad part, began when she was sixteen and ended, abruptly, a year later when the world did the same.

  What she hadn’t told Billy was how crazy Jim had sometimes acted. Once, they had sex on the day bed in her mother’s basement. Her mother, a nurse, had been at work. Father Jim pulled out of Kylie before he finished, disappeared into the bathroom, and stayed there a long time. Kylie got up to see what was wrong. (Of course at this point, deep down, she knew everything was wrong). The door was open a little, so she said his name and pushed it open wider. Jim stood there naked, his half-erect cock bloody from multiple nicks. He held a Gillette blade between his thumb and forefinger, the tab of blue steel shining in the fluorescent light. He had taken it out of the pink safety razor her mother used to shave her legs. She always shaved in the downstairs bathroom because the light was better. The empty razor now sat on the edge of the sink behind Jim. He stared at Kylie with guilt-stricken eyes and said, “What we do isn’t right. I have to mortify my appetites.” Shocked, Kylie couldn’t look away. That was probably a mistake. Jim seemed to get something out of her looking at him. In moments the superficial little cuts ceased to effectively mortify his ‘appetites’. He pushed her back to the bed and took her, grunting with pain and animal excitement. No, it hadn’t been anything like Lloyd and Diane.