Across the Distance

By Eric Del Carlo

PAIN, WITH THE CRUEL STRENGTH of steel fingers, reached up under Corbin’s lowest ribs, seized his innards, and squeezed. He emptied his lungs in a cry and couldn’t refill them. The sudden agony had frozen all the mechanisms of his body. He doubled over, then pitched headlong into the dirt. The soil scraped his cheek. He tasted dust in his open mouth.

He hadn’t felt the Pain in years. It took a few seconds for his stunned mind to recognize it. Then he wondered how he could ever have forgotten it, even for an instant.

After that he wondered who was Near, who was causing him this torment.

Whoever it was, they felt the Pain, too. So they would retreat the way they’d come. That was logical. But the logic part of Corbin’s brain was under assault. He lay on the ground, fetus-wise, eyes watering, limbs shivering, flesh crawling with the Pain. Primal instincts told him he should retreat himself, but he didn’t know from what direction this intruder had come. He might end up moving closer to the person.

So he lay there. And he Hurt, Hurt, Hurt ...

When an eternity had passed, the Pain vanished. It didn’t ebb; rather, simply ceased. It left no fading reminder, the way a muscle cramp would. But a cramp or even a broken bone was regular pain. This was of a whole other order.

Despite the absence of physical aftereffects, Corbin had to struggle to his feet. The Pain had awakened terrible memories, freshened sensations that his nerves had desperately deadened. Fear rattled his thin frame. He was a bony adult. His hair was short because he clipped it with scissors from a sewing kit. He didn’t know much else about how he looked. The farmhouse didn’t have a mirror. Someone had busted out all the glass in the place before he’d gotten here, some years ago.

He spit out dirt and wiped his eyes. Sunlight fell on the silent yard. His last chicken had died several months back, and the goat who’d been here when he took over the farm had gotten loose and wandered away long before that. He missed milk and eggs, but found he could live without either. Really, it was the lack of animals for company that gave him an ache. He kept hoping a cat would show up. Or that crows would roost in the old barn.

It didn’t matter if animals were Near. Only people brought the Pain.

Corbin dusted off his patched-up clothes, the shock easing and his curiosity and uneasiness rushing to fill the void. Who was out there? He had clearly marked this territory. Who would try to intrude—a crazy person?

Grimly, he went into the house, peeled a fading flower-print cloth off the lid of a trunk, and lifted out the shotgun.

He went to walk the perimeter of his territory.

***

The inner circle markers were all there, all intact. He had used slats from a wall of the barn and painted them red and white. The last official broadcasts Corbin had ever heard had recommended this procedure.

He’d staked them within easy sight of each other. Anybody approaching would see that the wood posts formed a circle around this vegetated, mildly wooded area. But no one should even come this far. The circle of outer markers was meant to stop them.

The shotgun hung in his damp hands. Everything he knew about guns told him this well-preserved instrument should work, but he had never fired it. Taking it out of its trunk made him anxious. Guns were sudden and final. If he should decide impulsively to turn the barrel on himself, he might not have time to reconsider his action.

The substantial distance between the inner and outer markers was a no-man’s-land. As long as no one entered it, he would never feel Pain. And if he didn’t step out into the zone, there was no chance of him getting Near to anyone else. Someone, however, had violated this safety margin. There was no other explanation. The Pain had struck him deep inside his territory.

Taking a long breath, he stepped out into the buffer zone. It had been half a year since he had checked the outer markers, which were painted just as brightly from cans of enamel he’d found in the farmhouse. He had also painstakingly printed explicit warnings on the markers. There had been no rope or barbed wire on hand to string between the posts, but the boundary was unmistakable. So he’d thought.

He moved carefully among the wild grasses and scattered oaks. He knew every meter of his territory, every millimeter of the house and barn. Going beyond those confines was tremendously unnerving, like venturing out onto an alien planet. But he also felt a tiny, tremulous excitement.

At any instant he might move within the influence of the intruder or some other person. That threat of Pain heightened his senses. He heard the individual rustle of leaves. A bit of cloud passed, and he saw its clearly defined shadow glide over the ground. Early on in his time here, he had gazed at the sky for hours, but had never seen a jet’s contrail nor a passing helicopter.

He stalked the no-man’s-land, looking for signs of the intruder. Seeing his outer markers through the screening trees, he paused. Beyond the posts with their barber pole colors and hand-printed warnings lay the world. Really, it was just more rolling countryside. Corbin remembered arriving here after a desperate overland hike, hungry, terrified, half-mad with random exposures to the Pain. The rural vicinity was unremarkable, reasonably fertile, and well away from any serious roads. He had been very lucky to blunder onto the abandoned farm.

But those trees and gentle brambly slopes and grasses waving in the midday breeze were an exotic land to him now. They stood outside his personal sphere, where he had lived for years, alone.

A few of his markers leaned a little, but he’d planted them deep and none were down. He swept clockwise, still hyper-alert. When he halted abruptly three-quarters along his circle, he almost jerked the trigger of the shotgun. He’d seen some small movement, low, just ahead. He crept forward with gritted teeth.

He came to the spot.

A can with a faded label held down a sheet of paper. The wind was catching the paper’s edge.

The weapon shook in Corbin’s hands. He looked around—all around, with wide eyes that picked out every detail from the surrounding landscape. He saw no people. He saw no intruder.

Finally he knelt. The paper was torn from a notebook. The one-word message had been scribbled there, as if in great haste or Pain or, Corbin guessed, both. The shaky letters said only: sorry.

When he was sure his legs would hold him again, he stood, took the can and the paper, and returned to the farmhouse.

***

The house where he slept was at the bull’s-eye of the two concentric rings of markers. But Corbin didn’t sleep that night in the bed with its old familiar quilts. He sat at the sturdy kitchen table and strained to see the word on the paper by the moon- and starlight falling through the glassless window. By now he knew every shivery line of the letters, each dot of ink that had conveyed him the message: sorry.

It could have only one meaning. It was a simple, literal apology for the intrusion, accidental or deliberate, onto his territory. Maybe the person, a wanderer or even someone living in the general vicinity, had been scouting the area. Just because markers were up didn’t mean they were current. Perhaps the posts looked a little faded, neglected. The resident—he—might be dead, which would mean it was safe to approach.

Corbin felt strange putting himself into someone else’s mindset. He had stopped regularly thinking of people in the present tense. He remembered people from before the Proximate Plague, but here, on the farm, it was like he was the only human left.

He squinted at the can. He had read the ingredients on the label thoroughly, over and over. It was the first new reading matter he’d had in years. The can contained beef stew, a decent brand as he recalled from the days of supermarkets. This farm hadn’t had much in the way of canned supplies when he had commandeered it.

The message and can combined to deliver a clear communication: sorry for the intrusion; here’s an offering to make up for it.

It was an age-old custom. Contrition for an offense. If you bumped somebody in a bar and spilled their beer, you apologized and bought them another. If you went accidently Near someone, you left a can of stew to say you were sorry about the Pain.

The neatness of that transaction fascinated Corbin. Whoever had come within his outer markers had experienced Pain too. Yet he or she had paused long enough to write a note and leave a gift, obviously hoping he would find them.

That was a very civilized thing to do. It was even quite thoughtful. He’d had no idea such remnants of civilization still existed, even if only from a random individual, whom this intruder must be. Just someone. Just a survivor.

Farther down the table Corbin had laid the shotgun. It shone dully in the deep part of the night. He had no functioning timepieces. But it felt like the midpoint between dusk and dawn when he got up and laid the gun back into its trunk, throwing the flower-print cloth over it like it was a little coffin.

***

The soil grew turnips and lettuce, plus potatoes in abundance. Really, Corbin didn’t have to do much to make these crops produce. The farm had a hand-pumped well that had never failed him. He didn’t know who had rightfully owned the place before he’d assumed it. They’d left no legal papers behind, no correspondence. The house had looked inexpertly ransacked when he had found it after his long delirious trek on foot over the hills and fields. The windows and mirrors were all broken, some of the furniture overturned. But he had cleaned it up, and after a few fearful days of listening to a radio with dwindling battery power, he had made his marking posts and paced off the necessary distances.

Since then, the farm had been his refuge against the Proximate Plague. No one had come Near, and he hadn’t experienced Pain until yesterday. Neither had he had any communications from the outside world. The electrical grid had already failed when he’d set out, figuring deep rural environs were his best bet.

In the late morning, after fidgeting and pacing, he went to the sprawling potato patch. Then, resisting the impulse only a moment, he gathered a fine full head of lettuce as well. His food was simple, maddeningly so, but he had plenty of it.

The next part of his venture wasn’t so simple. Though he had done it only yesterday, it still frightened him to enter his outer circle. But that excitement from the day before still tingled his nerves. He might encounter the Pain. But someone had written him a note and left him food.

When he gritted his teeth this time as he stepped out into the no-man’s-land, dormant muscles pulling in his face made him realize, to his amazement, that he was grinning.

He knew right where the paper and can had been left yesterday. Heart beating hard, he walked a direct line from there to the outer perimeter, fantastically aware that human feet—other human feet—had walked this ground less than twenty-four hours ago. He felt breathless and weightless as he reached the red and white vertical board that warned off trespassers.

Corbin looked around. He cringed at the thought of feeling the Pain again. He was disregarding his own safety measures by being out here. Yet even though he saw nothing but the empty pastoral landscape, he felt engaged, enthusiastic, alive.

He set the potatoes and the head of lettuce at the foot of the marker, then, unable to hold back his pent-up energy, he ran back to the inner markers. He leaned a hand against a modest-sized oak, chest heaving. Before he knew it, he was on his knees, with tears streaming down his cheeks and sobs convulsing his entire body. He couldn’t have said why he cried. Over these past years he had wept unpredictably, uncontrollably. It didn’t matter when or what for. No one was around to make him feel embarrassed or to comfort him.

***

The lack of sleep the night before caught up to him, and he slept late and heavily. He had routines. He ate at regular intervals and exercised and kept up his hygiene as best he could.

But today he stumbled bleary-eyed and without appetite onto the creaking porch. The farmhouse was old and weathered, but he had figured it would last him his lifetime. He didn’t like thinking about that. It wasn’t the end of his lifetime but the indefinite intervening years of isolation that he tried to avoid dwelling on.

He saw almost immediately that something was wrong. The yard in front of the house was strewn with castoff junk. Some of it had been there on his arrival, some he’d tossed out to make room in the house. He had long since become accustomed to the piles.

Something in the night had disturbed them.

His first impulse was to go inside for the shotgun, but he checked that, blinking his eyes clear and shaking his head to scatter the mental fog. He dismissed the thought of the intruder. He had felt no Pain, and the Pain most certainly would have woken him.

He stepped down from the porch, looking about carefully. Again he felt alert and engaged. Even when he’d had the minor distraction of a few meager farm animals, his days had been static things, one following the next with only the tiniest variations. Now with a human visitor, and now this, he felt nearly overwhelmed by events.

The first indistinct sign appeared as he sidled around a cracked and rusted sink. He covered a few more steps and saw the paw print clearly in the fine dirt. It was large; not huge, but large. He followed the tracks. They took him to the planted earth, to a hole half-heartedly dug. The prints went to sniff around the barn, then lit out, heading straight for the perimeter.

Corbin had wanted a cat for company. But a mountain lion was overkill.

He realized he’d made a joke, and he laughed out loud. Like when he had grinned yesterday, this called upon unused muscles. He felt the strain in his larynx.

It all made for quite an adventurous morning. Corbin boiled and mashed some turnips for lunch. He had converted the house stove to a wood-burner. He had plenty of brush for kindling and had long ago mastered the Boy Scout art of making fire. He sat at the table and ate and wondered if the mountain lion would come back and how much of a threat it might be. He doubted it would seriously trouble him. Before the Plague he had been no one’s idea of an outdoorsman, but he had learned a few things, just as with the rudiments of farming.

The problem of the lion engrossed him. So much so that he didn’t think about the offering he had left at the outer marker yesterday until he heard the whistle blowing.

***

He ran without thinking. Then the Pain hit him, and all he could think was: stupid, stupid, stupid.

Doubled over in agony, he clumsily backpedaled until the Pain vanished in that absolute way. He swore aloud, something else very rare for him. Not only had he just subjected himself to a brief reminder of the Proximate Plague which had destroyed human civilization, he had thoughtlessly done the same to his visitor.

He paced back and forth, trying to peer through the trees and brush. The whistle had been shrill, like a police whistle. He didn’t doubt the penitent intruder from the other day had blown it. Two disparate visitors in three days, after so long, flew in the face of any odds.

Waiting was difficult. He counted to one hundred four times, then walked out to his perimeter, ready to back off quickly with every step. The Pain didn’t come again.

The food he’d left yesterday was gone. Another note flapped in the breeze, with two other items on the scene. Part of him hoped for another can of stew or soup or anything. He had placed the first can in a kitchen cupboard with a reverence once reserved for holy objects. He would save the stew for some great occasion. Just the idea of having something different on hand to eat besides his wretchedly familiar fare touched him deeply.

But the visitor had left no food. Instead, there was a whistle hanging from the warning post. And a book, which weighted down the note.

Corbin’s eyes flew wide, and he made some sort of strangled sound. Like when he had wept the day before, he suddenly found himself on his knees. He picked up the book, a paperback, with trembling hands. He wouldn’t even let himself believe the gift was real until he riffled the pages and saw they did indeed contain print. Words. A book. A novel. A story. He’d had no books since arriving here.

He didn’t recognize the author. He didn’t care. The paperback had three hundred eighty-four pages of medium dense typeface. It looked to be a thriller of some sort.

Corbin treasured the book from that first instant.

Finally, he read the note. She gave him her name. She. Janet DeFazio. The name was a wonder to him, like something from myth. He had virtually forgotten what it was like to learn a new name.

Janet DeFazio had also written: i’ve read this book a hundred times. thought you might like it. tell me what you think when you’re done. blow the whistle and i’ll come. Below this, in shakier writing like with her first note, she had added: and wait a minute after i blow it before you come, will you?

He laughed, because the tone of the words forgave him for his dumb action. He laughed with a genuine joy because he had a book to read, and because she would come again and they would communicate. He had a neighbor. He had a ... friend?

***

Corbin had a few ballpoint pens in the house but nothing to write on, so he used the back of one of Janet’s notes. After that, she left him some blank pages from her notebook. He relished this correspondence with her.

It changed everything for him. His days revolved around his transactions with her. He wrote about himself. He learned about her. Adopting the same survival strategy as him, she had fled the population centers. He had already been living in a relatively small town when the Plague had started, engulfing whole regions, skipping from continent to continent. He had experienced the Pain and had barely escaped his town, leaving everything behind, going on foot, off road, seeking the wilderness. He had nearly died from exposure before finding this place.

Janet evidently had had access to news longer than him. She’d seen the final apocalyptic broadcasts from the cities. madhouses, she wrote. people killing people, killing themselves. anything to make the pain stop.

So far as she knew, the Proximate Plague had consumed the entire world. Corbin had long since resigned himself to this eventuality. The Plague was an impossible thing. A furious scramble of scientific study hadn’t yielded the least usable result as to how such a phenomenon could ever come about. Yet some hint of logic must prevail. The destructive spectacle, once loosed, had to follow its course. And now, apparently, every person still alive on the planet had to keep an unwieldy distance from every other survivor.

There would never be unity again, never a culture. Obviously, procreation was at an end. The human species was doomed.

But for the first time since before the Plague, Corbin felt something like happiness.

Janet told him she had stayed in one place for quite a while, a country bungalow many miles away, but that the stream supplying her water had dried up. She had been cautiously moving around, scrounging for food, even doing some amateur hunting. She was twenty-nine years old, she said, and had worked at a bank.

Corbin was thirty-three and had been a market researcher. He read the book she had given him, trying to savor every syllable but helplessly rushing through chapters at a time, as his starved mind gorged on the words. He wrote her what he thought an erudite review of the novel when he was done. They discussed the story’s melodramatic particulars in detail over the course of several messages.

He longed to see her.

There was no clear line of sight, though. They each knew the distance they had to maintain, and with the trees and brush and rolling terrain, no uninterrupted view presented itself. He imagined her constantly, with an adolescent’s fervor. He tried to fashion a physical equivalent for the smart, friendly, compassionate tone of her communiqués, even knowing it was a pointless exercise.

When he asked her if she had encountered any other people since leaving her bungalow, her replies never quite gave a clear answer. This didn’t bother him, however. He was thrilled to be interacting with her.

One midday, the whistle shrilled and he waited, then went out to the exchange site. He had virtually no goods to offer, but had given her all the turnips and potatoes she could want. Today he found a very special object waiting for him.

He read the accompanying note, a great eagerness rising in him. He had to deliberately steady his trembling hands when he picked up the binoculars and aimed the lenses where he’d been instructed.

Corbin’s heart leapt. There she was!

Janet DeFazio stood atop a rocky outcrop on a distant knoll. Without the glasses, Corbin would not have spotted her. He focused the optics.

She waved with big sweeping gestures. She had hair that was short and dark, like his. She wore jeans and a top that left her arms and shoulders bare. The day was warm. She had breasts and a feminine frame. She couldn’t know for certain if he was watching her or not, but she kept on waving, a broad grin across her face. He focused as tightly on her as the lenses would allow.

She was ... lovely.

As he studied her, she added more playful movements. She cocked her hips; she made “oh you!” hand gestures; she was probably batting her eyelashes like Betty Boop. It was mock-provocative. She appeared to be laughing the whole while.

Corbin almost succumbed to another bout of unrestrained weeping. He simply wasn’t used to this overpowering glut of emotion. But something held him back. He hadn’t been a very demonstrative individual back in the pre-Plague world. But he’d had a keen, analytical mind.

After a time, when her frisky movements started to flag, he lowered the binoculars. They were of good quality, maybe even military issue. Had she been using them to surveil him? Had she scouted him before ever coming onto his territory? If so, then that first incident, when he had felt the Pain, had been deliberate and therefore part of some ploy.

He didn’t like doubting her. Perhaps she had just found the binoculars today. He hadn’t been off the farm in years. Maybe others had passed through the vicinity, minding his warning markers and leaving behind valuable goods, like these fine field glasses.

It didn’t seem likely, though.

He set down the binoculars and withdrew to his house.

***

Corbin didn’t shun Janet after that, but he was wary. His heart didn’t jump whenever he heard the whistle. He no longer pored endlessly over every word she wrote him. His own written responses to her questions and observations became a bit reserved.

Finally he went out to retrieve a note that said only: what’s wrong?

I don’t know if I should trust you. He didn’t write down this thought of his.

That night he lay on his bed, confused and dispirited. Janet was withholding something from him. It crushed him to think that the first fellow survivor he had communicated with after these years should be duplicitous. What secrets were left to keep?

The world had ended, and she was playing games with him.

Spent, he fell asleep.

The roar woke him up. It had cut through a terribly vivid dream, one that had prominently featured Janet. He had a true image of her now, and his beleaguered unconscious had put her into some sort of horrible jeopardy. He woke basted with sweat, adrenaline racing in his veins.

The mountain lion!

He hadn’t fully disengaged from the dream. The peril Janet had been in could have to do with the mountain lion, whose tracks he’d found days ago. Somehow that fit. Somehow, in those frantic volatile moments, he connected the roar he’d heard to the predatory animal. He bounded from the bed, bare feet slapping floorboards as he ran for the trunk. He yanked out the shotgun. This fit like the lion, like the gun hanging on the wall in the first act of the play that must—must—be taken down and fired in the last act. It was inevitable.

The stars paled the night as he raced outside.

The roar had been real. If he was sure of anything, it was that. The feral growl, very loud and powerful, still rang in his head. Ghastly images of Janet being mauled and rended by the mountain lion flashed through his mind as well.

Corbin sprinted past the inner ring of markers. He even vaulted one, rather than go around it and waste a step. His legs pumped furiously. His hands gripped the shotgun, which he was completely prepared to use.

He barely paused to think that if he got Near her, the Pain would again reach up under his ribs and mercilessly clench his insides. He would Hurt, and he would be useless.

Maybe not, though. Maybe he could fight through the Pain and rescue her ...

His headlong irrational rush took him past the outer warning posts. There wasn’t enough light to really see by. Even so, he was sure he had raced straight toward the source of the roar. Janet must be close. Or at least the mountain lion had to be around here.

Harsh light slashed across his eyes. He pulled up short, disoriented but still full of the adrenalized need to act. He swung up the shotgun.

“No!” a woman shouted. “Don’t shoot—”

But someone did shoot. Corbin thought it was him. The report was thunderous in the night. He’d never discharged the shotgun before. He hadn’t done so now. Someone else was out here, armed. The mountain lion had never been here. Mountain lions didn’t—couldn’t—roar like that.

A hand seized the shotgun, forced the barrel up toward the night sky, then wrenched the weapon from his grasp entirely. Corbin stood frozen. He was, he realized, waiting for Pain.

But the Pain didn’t come.

With his hands freed, he raised one to block the blazing shaft of electric light. Janet, who had pulled the shotgun from him, stood two steps back with her eyes wide. Past her, sitting astride a much-muddied dirt bike, was a man with a flashlight in one hand and a pistol in the other. A thread of colorless smoke uncoiled from the barrel and into the beam of light.

Corbin’s scrambled senses had recorded what had happened, and the information at last caught up to him. The shot from the handgun had gone past Corbin’s right ear, close enough to leave a line of windburn across his lobe.

The man on the motorbike glowered at him, still pointing the pistol as if considering a second shot.

“Stop! Cool it! Cool down, Giuseppe. Lower the gun. I’ve got his. Just cool it.” Janet spoke in a throaty authoritative tone.

The bike rider, who wore a camo coat and black jeans, slowly lowered his pistol. Both he and Janet also wore the strangest garments Corbin had ever seen. They were bulky vests, almost as cumbersome as life preservers, but made of short metal tubes which were held together by netting and strung with a wild array of wires.

Both people were within a few strides of him, but Corbin felt no Pain. As impossible as the Proximate Plague was, it was at least as impossible that its ghastly conditions suddenly no longer applied.

The cycle was still idling. The roar of that internal combustion engine, a sound so unfamiliar after all this time, had brought Corbin out of his sleep and out of his house, into this bizarre night. Giuseppe cut the motor, put down the kickstand, and stepped off. Body language, which Corbin discovered he could still read, suggested he was aggressive.

“This is your adjusted guy?” He didn’t need to sneer but did it anyway.

Janet held the shotgun pointed at the ground. “You made this happen. Buzzing in here in the middle of the night.”

“I told you I was on my way—”

Both of them had walkie-talkies on their belts, Corbin saw with dismay.

“He didn’t bring the weapon out beyond first contact. You think motorcycles come by this way a lot?” Janet sounded angry, and she had taken half a step between Corbin and Giuseppe, who had long fair hair and a not-quite-adult beard. It shocked Corbin to see he looked about seventeen-years-old.

“I thought it was a mountain lion,” Corbin said. He didn’t mumble dazedly; he made his statement firmly. He, too, was feeling a slowly swelling anger, and he seized on it. He had been right to be suspicious of Janet DeFazio, and he wasn’t too fond of this Giuseppe person so far.

The young blond male blinked at him, then hiccuped a laugh. “He’s Robinson Caruso. Look at his eyes. He’s fried. Been alone too long. Is everybody out in this zone the same? You radioed you had three good contacts.” Now it was Janet who got the benefit of his sneer.

Corbin drew himself straight, pleased to find he stood four inches or so taller than the fatigues-wearing Giuseppe. “It’s Robinson Crusoe. And right now I believe I deserve an explanation. In fact, I am very certain I do.” He put a steely edge on the words. He didn’t flinch from the proximity of the two individuals. He wasn’t intimidated by the guns they held. And he felt no urge whatsoever to break down into sudden tears.

After a moment it was Janet who, quietly and—Corbin thought—contritely, said, “Yes. You deserve that. Let’s go talk.”

***

They weren’t military because there was no military. They were not with the government because no one felt justified using the word. Janet said, “It’s not there yet, Corbin. Maybe it never will be again. Maybe we can do better than government. Or do something else, anyway.”

Corbin regarded her across the width of his kitchen table. Giuseppe had brought along a lamp, an electric light that decisively made and took away shadows in the room.

The philosophy was well and good, but Corbin asked to know the nuts and bolts of their outfit. He expected Janet to tell him, but the blond boy-man pulled out the last chair and sat, and said without any further sneery attitude, “We’re survivors, like you. Some scientist figured how to beat the Plague. That’s what these are.” He tapped his metal tube vest. The cylinders were copper and aluminum, maybe. The rig emitted a steady subtle hum of power. “We can be Near without the Pain. So we are looking for other survivors, trying to find the ones who haven’t gone batshit from loneliness, who aren’t going to shoot us down when we approach. It’s not easy. We’re doing it area by area, and right now we’re here.”

Janet had left Corbin’s shotgun propped on the porch. Giuseppe’s pistol was holstered beneath his camouflage coat.

Corbin had pictured scenes something like this, especially in the earlier days of his isolation when his imagination had been more active. There was one question he always asked his rescuers in those fantasies.

“What caused the Proximate Plague?”

Giuseppe resumed an air of adolescent belligerence. He rolled his eyes. “Who the fuck knows? That scientist has a few buddies now. Maybe they’ll figure it out someday. Look, are you in or do we leave you here?”

Corbin gave him a long measuring look. Finally he said, “I can see why your colleague makes the initial contact.”

Janet barked out a laugh. The blond kid glared, then shrugged and got up and marched out of the kitchen and out of the house. Corbin heard his steps crunching away across the yard.

Janet’s laughter died away, and Corbin gazed intently at her. She was as lovely as she’d appeared through the binoculars, at least by the standards of a man who hadn’t seen a person, female or otherwise, in years.

“I’m sorry about the deception,” she said, suddenly solemn.

It surprised him some. “I appreciate your saying that.”

“Slow revelation, slow integration—that seems to be the most effective way to introduce ourselves.”

“Your partner said you had three contacts in this area.”

“That’s right. Spread out over about thirty square kilometers. People occupying places like this one. I’ve got a Land Rover out in the brush and have been working my way through, site by site.”

“So,” Corbin said, “you’ve been cheating on me?” He held her startled frozen eyes a moment, remembering the flirtatious pantomime she had performed for him atop the knoll. He grinned, and the tension broke. She laughed again, pounding the table this time. He liked the lines that appeared on her face when she laughed.

Eventually the laughter played out, and they sat together in a warm easy silence for a minute.

“Giuseppe’s gone to get you a vest. He can take you out on the back of his bike. We have a headquarters about fifty klicks west. It’s a town, actually, with lots of supplies. Two hundred sixty-two residents when I left on my assignment. There might be more now. At least five thousand are in our network all together, and we haven’t even reached an international border yet.” Janet smiled, but Corbin saw weariness in the expression. Maybe it was sorrow for the calamity that had almost wiped out humankind. Perhaps it was an acknowledgment of the daunting task ahead. Softly she added, “You can still decide not to join us.”

She put out her hand, not offering a handshake; rather, simply ready to accept his contact. As yet, Corbin hadn’t actually touched or been touched by either of these intruders on his territory. He had not, of course, touched another human being in all these years of solitude.

He reached across the distance of the sturdy tabletop and dropped his hand into hers. 

Eric Del Carlo has been published in “Asimov’s,” “Strange Horizons,” “Redstone Science Fiction,” “Shimmer,” and many other venues. His recent story for “Perihelion” in the 12-JUN-2015 issue was nominated for a 2016 Pushcart Prize.