“I’m so tired. There’s no unspoiled food left from the vending machines—did I mention that I took a baseball bat to those things five—almost six days ago now? I guess the delivery guy never got here to restock them. Candy bars, potato chips, and shrink-wrapped tuna salad sandwiches will only get you so far. I’m so…so tired. The kudzu is scrabbling at the base of the door…I don’t think it can actually break through or it would have by now…but I’m thinking, what’s the point, y’know? Outside, the field and hillside are shimmering with the stuff—from here it almost looks as if the vines are dancing—and in a little while it will have reached the top of the broadcast tower…and then I really will be talking to myself.
“If anyone out there has any requests…now’s the time to phone them in. I’ll even play the seventeen-minute version of ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’ if you ask me. I always dug that drum solo. I lost my virginity to that song…the long version, not the three-minute single, thanks for that vote of confidence in my virility. I wish I could tell you that I remembered her name…her first name was Debbie, but her last name…pffft! It’s gone, lost to me forever. So…so many things are lost to me forever now…lost to all of us forever…still waiting on those requests…please, please, PLEASE will somebody out there call me? Because in a few minutes, the vines and thorns will have covered the window and those little mouths with their little teeth are all I’ll be able to see and I’m…I’m hanging on by a fucking thread here, folks…so…
“…three minutes and forty seconds. I am going to play ‘The Long and Winding Road,’ which is three minutes and forty seconds long, and if by the end of the song you have not called me, I am going to walk over to the door of the broadcast booth, say a quick and meaningless prayer to a God that was never there to hear it in the first place, and I am going to open that door and step into those waiting, breathing, pulsing vines.
“So I’m gonna play the song here in a moment. But first, let’s do our sworn FCC duty like good little drones who are stupid enough to think anyone cares anymore, and we’ll just let these six pathetic words serve as my possible epitaph:
“We now pause for station identification….”
Reluctance
By Cherie Priest
Cherie Priest is the author of the bestselling novel Boneshaker, which, as of this writing, is a finalist for the prestigious Hugo and Nebula awards. She has three other works set in the same milieu as Boneshaker: a novella from Subterranean Press called Clementine, another novel from Tor called Dreadnought, and the story that follows. Priest’s other novels include Four and Twenty Blackbirds, Wings to the Kingdom, Not Flesh Nor Feathers, and Fathom. Forthcoming books include urban fantasies Bloodshot and Hellbent. Her short fiction has appeared in Subterranean Magazine and Apex Digest and is forthcoming in Steampunk Reloaded.
Priest is one of the leading writers of “steampunk,” a literary subgenre of fantasy typically characterized by a Victorian aesthetic and the use of Industrial Age technology like gears and steam pipes to power wondrous contraptions such as giant robots.
Our next story, which is set in the same milieu as Boneshaker, is an alternate reality in which the American Civil War has stretched on for nearly two decades and which has seen the development of all manner of incredible steampunk machinery. In the novel, an inventor’s ill-conceived scheme to tunnel for gold beneath Seattle ends up releasing a toxic gas that turns much of the city’s population into shambling corpses called “rotters.”
If just the thought of “steampunk plus zombies” has you quivering with joy, this next story should be right up your alley. The author says, “I’d been reading a lot about the Civil War, and something that nabbed my attention was how boys were occasionally sent off to fight while still horribly young. Thirteen was fairly common, and boys as young as eleven are rumored to have fought. I wanted to tell a story about one of these kids ‘all grown up’ and trying to move on—moving west, to make a life for himself away from the front lines. I thought such a boy might make an excellent character to dump into the creeping danger of a zombie story because he wouldn’t necessarily face the steep learning curve that ordinarily whittles down a survival party; his instincts and battle experience would give him an edge.”
Walter McMullin puttered through the afternoon sky east of Oneida in his tiny dirigible. According to his calculations, he was somewhere toward the north end of Texas, nearing the Mexican territory west of the Republic; and any minute now he’d be soaring over the Goodnight-Loving trail.
He looked forward to seeing that trail.
Longest cattle drive on the continent, or that’s what he’d heard—and it’d make for a fine change of scenery. West, west, and farther west across the Native turf on the far side of the big river he’d come, and his eyes were bored from it. Oklahoma, Texas, North Mexico next door…it all looked pretty much the same from the air. Like a pie crust, rolled out flat and overbaked. Same color, same texture. Same unending scorch marks, the seasonal scars of dried-out gullies and the splits and cracks of a ground fractured by the heat.