The sun is high as I approach, a boiling clot in the midday haze that makes the inside of my highway mask damp with sweat as I take the last turns down the old roads. I’m three hours out of the core, three from the compaction when I finally spot it: a red smudge rising up to touch the sky. From there it grew and grew until it ate the horizon, then the road; crawled in through the cracks in my windshield to smear over my goggles and itch my skin in the gap between my gloves and jacket; put the taste of blood and lighter fluid in the back of my throat. And then, through the mist, its source: a house-tall tractor, armoured in rust and caked residue, dragging a billowing hive of belching pipes and chugging diesel. Red liquid foundtained into the air, poured hissing down on the twisted and towering stalks of nuclear hogweed that filled the lawn and tore at the sidewalk with hungry roots, dripping sizzling poisonous sap as they cracked and crumpled at the seams under the acrid red weight of the pesticides. The roar ended, the tractor stilled, a hulking, gas-suited figure leaned from its open cab and waved a paw in greeting.
The last of the suburbanites had invited me to lunch. I’d just arrived a little early.
***
My roadhopper has never lived so luxuriously: half of a six-car garage, all its own. The tractor scrapes the ceiling a little, but otherwise even that monster couldn’t have a happier home. An older way of parking.
The lunch Kaylee Hawthorn serves me is just as antique: antibiotic Jello apertif; tuna salad and dreadelion sandwichettes lunch brushed gently with ground gigagarlic mustard; a dessert of whipped headache pills meringue on multigrain meal-loaf. A real microwave does the cooking; actual plastic is the surface the meal graces, dyed soft blue and worn with age.
“It’s hard to get this far from the distribution centers,” Kaylee explains as I finish eating, “but really, what isn’t? I’m not out here for convenience.”
Many people don’t know Kaylee’s out here at all. To them, the suburban way of life has been gone for decades, a long-fallen victim of rising fuel prices, the civic tidal retreat, and the groundwater annihilations. Even those stragglers that limped through the gauntlet of the 21st century are assumed to have withered away with the final stake through the heart that was the complete and irreversible erasure of Facebook during the global electromagnetic pulses set off during the Third Limited Exchange. Unable to detect, communicate, or like and friend one another across the countryside, the isolation claimed those few remaining surbanites one by one, sending them home to relatives in corebound groundscraper apartments or into shallow graves scraped in the soil by passing waste-roamers.
Kaylee never used Facebook. “More of a Myspace girl,” she says. “I liked to make playlists. And when that went down, I just sort of kept doing my thing. I noticed the downturn, of course – fewer neighbors, fewer holiday cookouts, less of a need to buy a full two-four for a party when a six-pack would do – but I think it was all so gradual that I didn’t realize I was alone until the super coyotes took Brendan Clarke, and I didn’t even notice THAT until I went by to ask him why he’d stopped spraying my lawn for the nukehoggies – now, as you can see, I have to do it. We used to trade off: I’d uproot the dreadelion colonies for him because he hated getting his hands dirty. I know it’s really awful of me to say this, but the first thing I thought when I found him lying there all tied to the roof of his garage with his liver in his mouth and EAT YOUR’RE SELF, APESES written on his chest with his small intestines was ‘well, maybe if you’d done more weeding you’d have had the muscles to put up more of a fight.’ I swear, that man had no work ethic. But he DID know his way around the insides of a toxitractor mister setup; I sweat every five years I have to hike to Lonesville to get someone to come out here and fix that damn thing because I just do NOT understand machinery. How’d you like your sandwichettes?”
I tell her I loved them. It’s the truth.
“Good,” she says. “That was my second-to-last tuna. I haven’t been able to find any for the last while, do you know why that is?”
“The last tuna sighting was just before the Second Limited Exchange,” I explain.
“Oh,” she says. “I’d better save that one for Christmost.” She looks at the can for a moment, wiped clean and put in the recycling compactor. What year is it?”
I tell her.
“The tin wasn’t punctured,” she draws out, carefully. “I’m sure it’s fine. Besides, I put plenty of rootcohol in the dressing.”
***
After lunch we walk the most important feature of the suburbs: the lawn. The redmist has settled now and the nuclear hogweed lies subdued and sullen, shriveled down to nothing. Kaylee gives me her backup scythe and together we lop off any surviving limbs, now bereft of their virulent inner fluids. They’re piled in a heap out back atop a scorchmark, a lone barbecue standing sentinel among the scanty remaining bricks that once outlined a mighty patio.
“It was so easy to have cookouts back in the day once they moved in,” she tells me. “Can’t really do it without guests, but I do it every couple days anyways. Got to do SOMETHING with the stuff, and if you pile it up sometimes it comes back. That’s what happened to the Hendersons down on Third Avenue.” She wrinkles her nose. “Take a look on your way back. But from a distance.”
Once the weeds have been limbed, the rest of the yard work comes quickly. A wind generator powers a pump that brings up septiwater from the waste tank, sprays it over the field of sheltered brown blades that cling to existence beneath the weed-corpses – glowing them a healthy green, for now. The dreadelion patch’s perimeter is inspected for holes or flaws, all eight feet of chainlink topped by a live wire. And as the shadows grow long, the barbecue is loaded: three skewers, strung heavy with members of the local rodent clade and spare crapapples. I carry the briquettes to fill its maw, stand well back as it steams and growls to itself, sit back in an ancient deck chair and stare up at the clouds and marvel how so much of this place is expressed in burnt offerings. Charred oil, steamed gasoline, seared vegetation, and charbroiled flesh. A sacrifice in an empty temple to a god long forgotten by humanity at large. I pay the price of philosophy and nearly burn the skewers, scramble in haste to put the meal in order and my mind back on the ground.
Kaylee stands up suddenly, plates my work, and gently motions me to stay put as she walks out to the far side of the bonfire-to-be. She comes back without the food, strikes a match, starts the conflagration, and together we listen to it crackle and fume. The gas masks keep out the smoke, the smoke keeps out the malarial swarmers of the evening that swarm in waves from the creaking eavestroughs, the bugs keep the unseeable, unavoidably audible flapping wings of the mushbats fed and fruiting, showers us in tiny wisp-winged batlings that glow in the dark and die in thousands so that dozens might one decades-hence day sporulate on their own. I finish my mojoitoid and try not to make an analogy out of it.
The fire dies quicker than you’d think, fueled by the pesticides and the dried weeds. Behind it, the skewers are gone.
“The HOA isn’t as bitchy anymore,” she admits. “But it’s a lot stricter on the deadlines.”
“Super coyotes,” I guess.
“Mostly,” she says. Her smile is complicated. “I think maybe Brendan Junior is out there sometimes. Can never actually prove it, just never found the body, and he never did like his old man.” The sigh that comes out rattles a little through a loose hinge on her mask. “Too bad, either way. He was the best paperboy our neighborhood ever had, back when we had a paper.”
The conversation wasn’t lively to begin with, but that kills it outright. Kaylee’s had practice not saying much, and I’m feeling the strain of a more complex cocktail – drink, air enviroquality, take your pick and pick both – than I’ve inhaled in years. She tells me to stop by again whenever I want to, and we both know I don’t, and we’re both relieved. The lights go out before I’ve even left the driveway; the six-car garage gaping black as I back out of its maw. Something that sounds like six somethings yips behind me as I shift gears, and I try not to accelerate. I can’t outrun them, but I CAN provoke them.
***
On the way out of the suburbs, back to the compaction, back home, I stop and follow the old signs for a bit. Just for a while.
It’s not hard to find the Hendersons’ street, but it’s impossible to see their house. The nukehoggies have it in their grip now, swaying tall and invincible, barbed rachises swaying in the breeze until they scrape the undersides of the smouldering night fog.
I watch them, unsettled by the lack of city light reflected in the sky. Then I drive home, back to the compaction, back to the core, back to all two hundred million remaining civicilians in North Amerigo, away from the last suburbanite.