Shaddyr's Eclectic Collection > Buffy Fanfiction > Jennifer-Oksana > Wasteland
Wasteland
by Jennifer-Oksanadisclaimer: Joss, not me.
The hell of it is, you have to keep slashing your arm if you want to
travel. Cuz, see, that's how you know if you have it or not. If you cut
yourself and the cut heals green and oozy, you have IT, the Death, the
pestilence, and no one's going to do anything but shoot you on sight and
burn everything within a ten foot radius of you.
By law, you aren't supposed to move if you had the mark, but human
denial's a river that runs deep. It took a quarter of the prison dying
off to let the guards finally give it up that they were in charge. The
rest of us burnt it to the ground--probably with most of the guards and
some healthy people still inside, but no chances were taken. Only people
with clean cuts left that place alive, for safety. I had to kill my two
best friends in there because one of them had it and the other was
fucking her. No one was going to die of the pestilence on my watch.
Pestilence. It's an old word, a funny sort of word that Giles or Wesley
would use, but that's how people talk about the Death 'round here and
it's no good to stick out. People don't trust travelers, even clean
ones. Too many folks here got taken for a lot by con artists and thieves
from the LA Basin during the Exodus.
Here's where the food is, even if the ocean's too far away. Central
Valley, California, somewhere between Bakersfield and Fresno, still with
the Aqueduct, still with the food.
And here I am, with a cut. Three years after the Death came, cutting
like a knife through butter, worse than any anthrax or chem warfare
could have been. Before the news cut out for good out here, President
What's His Dumb Ass was saying it was Saddaam and the Iraqis or Osama
and the Evil Folks but I knew. Cut healed green and oozy? Then it killed
you?
Demons.
Nobody believes in demons, though. Like I said, human denial? River. A
fuckin' river that drowns out reality.
Traveling, it like, brings out the poet in me, you know? Also the
cutting. I get out a lot of the old bloodlust in making that cut fresh
every day--the Death takes three days, but I heal fast, so every
morning, I cut myself--and watching the skin heal.
It's funny the way it heals, all puckery and seamed. Like someone sewed
it and if it weren't for the fact that sewing a permanent cut into your
skin would make it bleed and if you bleed green, you have the plague, no
matter how real the sewed cut looked, that's how I'd get past people if
I had it.
Instead I have a nice seam on the inside of my right arm, looking like a
suicide wannabe. That and a lot of knowledge about demon-lore that
nobody wants to hear. Of course, if I call it plague-lore, it's all
good, but mention that maybe the Death's caused by a demon?
Fuck you, bitch, we don't need your devil-talk.
And here I am, with a cut, walking up the Valley, heading for
Sacramento, maybe. Heard that cars might be back up working in
Sacramento, maybe even planes, and if that's true, I'll fuckin' turn
tricks if I have to, but I'll be on a plane out of this fuckin' state in
a week, flying as far and fast away as I can go. I hate California and I
always did. Stupid state, with its airy-spacey hippies and the endless
heat and drought and desertness.
Stupid state, stupid time slaying here, stupid Death. Stupid stopping in
Bakersfield for eight months to get enough supplies to survive up to
Fresno.
Stupid currently being out of supplies and alone on the remains of
Highway 99.
I'm tired of walking, so I sit down on the side of the road, wondering
if I should have tried my luck walking up 5, but nah. No towns. I would
have really starved to death.
So I sit. Maybe I even cry, but Slayers don't cry, especially ex-con
Slayers who managed to survive the fucking Death, the Death that killed
one out of every two people in California and one out of every five
people in the Western Hemisphere.
But the cuts on my arm are still clean. The blood's still red,
uninfected by anything.
And I sit.
And sit.
And sit.
Finally, I see, like, a van. And fuck pride, I'm on my feet, waving my
arms like crazy, willing to deal with the van guy being a psycho who'll
try to kill me before he lets me into the van, but I can't walk to
Fresno. And it's been...it's been three months since I saw anyone with a
car that had enough gas in it to move.
The van slows down. It stops.
The door slides open.
I know the guy in the van. At least one of the guys, which is fucking
impossible. Sunnydale had like, a ninety-percent death rate (I told you
that the Death is fucking demon-related), and B and all her people were
dead in the First Three Days.
"Faith," the guy says. His hair isn't spiky anymore, which is weird.
Actually, it's just shaved off, like most guys, like most people. Less
stuff to spread contagion into. "Right?"
"Yeah," I say. "Oz, right?"
"Yeah," he says. "You contagious?"
I hold my arm up and display the mark. "Clean as a whistle."
"You must have to cut deep to get it to stay all day," he says, waving
me in. "Where are you headed?"
"North. Sacramento," I say, climbing into the van with my backpack and
my mouth dry as it could be.
Someone laughs. "Nothing there."
"I heard maybe planes," I said stubbornly. "Cars, definitely."
"No, the Death came back through there," Oz said. "We just came from
there on a sweep. Nothing there. Two out of three dead. The survivors
mostly starving to death. We went down to Bakersfield, but they're not
letting people in."
"Fuck," I say.
"Yeah, no fuckin' kidding," the driver says. "We're thinking of trying
to get past state borders into Oregon. Decon's pretty harsh but once
you're there, you're a hero for surviving the pestilence."
"Maybe," Oz says.
"Definitely," the driver says.
"Yeah, and definitely there were cars and planes in Sacramento," Oz says
pithily. He looks at me. "Water?"
"Yeah," I say. "How much?"
"You're a Slayer," Oz says, raising an eyebrow. "We've been tracking you
since we heard you were on the road to Fresno."
He hands me a bottle of water. I take it, eyeing him.
"How much?"
"Protection at nights."
I bite my lip. It's not that I can't take anything out there--I can--but
if someone infected with the Death were to jump me, I'd be dead. Three
days, dead. Or if I survived (and the Death has something like a sixteen
percent survival rate), I'd die because they'd leave me on the side of
the road and I'd dehydrate or I'd be killed by someone who was afraid
they would die of it.
"Deal," I say, taking a drink of water. "It's getting worse, then?"
"It's adapting itself," one of the other guys in the van says. "Sooner
or later, the demon carrying this thing will infect someone allowed to
cross back and forth and we're all dead."
"You said demon," I say, stunned.
"Well, it's a demon-based contagion that's three times as deadly as the
bubonic plague--what they used to call the Death--and it's green and
pus-y and the viral carrier's not human," the guy says. "So it's either
alien or demon and there aren't any aliens and there are demons."
I'm impressed. Maybe, finally, the fact that we're all doomed means that
the river of denial has shrunk up and we're finally going to face
reality in all of its tough beautiful reality.
"Yeah," the driver says. "But fuck that. Demons can go fuck themselves.
What I'm wondering, you know, is if we can find a drummer in Oregon."
Maybe not.
Oz looks at me and grins. "Dev's obsessed with starting the band again,"
he explains quietly. "He thinks that's the best way to deal with it, by
moving on, by being human again."
"What do you think?"
"I'm not really human," he says quietly. "Your cut's starting to go
away."
He touches the sore skin on my arm, where the seam is more a memory than
a reality.
"It's been a bitch. Most people don't even believe in Slayers, so I have
to keep cutting and cutting and it won't stay."
He nods. "You cut it before you go out and when you come in mornings,"
he says. "We can't afford contagion. We almost had a thing in
Bakersfield."
I nod. "Someone you knew?"
"Yeah," he says, like it hurts. "Cordelia."
"That cheerleader girl? Angel's secretary? She--"
He shakes his head, like he's a little sad, but mostly surprised that it
happened at all.
"She swore she was clean, almost came on board--but she tripped. She cut
herself. In Bakersfield. Well, just outside. She was sitting outside,
crying, and I--"
His voice fades out. I get the picture. I've seen as many of them as he
has, looking fine except for where the cut is, where the red blood is
tinged with green and you know--you fucking KNOW--that tomorrow or
tomorrow or tomorrow, the person's dead.
"She said she was already a demon," Oz mutters into his hands. "She said
she wasn't contagious."
He looks at his feet. I look with him and I see the gun.
"You do it?" I ask.
"Didn't have a choice. Werewolves don't get this--we're immune to
blood-based pathogens--and I couldn't let the rest of them die."
I knew. I could see it in my head, could see any of those little
Sunnydalers, crying, begging, swearing. You swear a lot of things when
you've got the pestilence.
You're lying.
"How many did it take to put her down?"
"Four--she wouldn't lay down, and I--"
I nod. "I dig."
"Nobody's going to die of the pestilence on my watch," Oz says, looking
at me. I take another long gulp of water, wipe my mouth. The van's a
fuckin' oven. We go over a bump and I realize that it's a long way to
Oregon.
If there's still an Oregon.
"Nothing to worry about from me," I reply.
We look at my arm. There's nothing left of the cut except fresh pink
skin.
I close my eyes and count down the minutes until we stop.
The End