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      	  untune the sky 
 by Akamine chan  

 Author's Notes: Many grateful thanks to my betae (two of the three were
unofficial, conscripted betae): Luzula, Lucifuge_5 and Podfic_lover. These
three kept me on the straight and narrow by keeping an eye on my grammar,
my punctuation, my structure, and my plot. They made sure it all made
sense and that I spelled everything correctly. Any remaining mistakes are
mine. All three of them were the source of emails, IMs and virtual gifts,
cheering me on relentlessly. Additionally, they kept me from throwing in
the towel with constant reassurance that no, I didn't suck, and yes, it
was a good story, one worth reading. I couldn't have made it without these
wonderful people. There were also a huge number of people who encouraged
me by wearing short little skirts, shaking pom-poms and doing cartwheels
at one time or another over the last nine months. I was going to make a
list, but really, it's most of my flist. *twirls entire flist* Some
especially loud cheers came from Dugrival, Et_tu_lj, Godess_jessie,
J_s_cavalcante, Keerawa, Kimboosan, Leafy22, Love_jackianto, Mizface,
Nos4a2no9, Prudence_dearly, Neu111, Miss_zedem, and Sisterofdream. *hugs
all of you* I'm probably forgetting somebody; please remind me if I am. In
addition, Prudence_dearly introduced me to the William Morris poem at the
end of the story which fits so well. And lastly, I would like to thank
Monroe_nell for wanting a Big Bang for the due South/Canadian Six Degrees
fandoms and Sansets for taking on co-modding duties.

 Story Notes: Warning: this is post-apocalyptic with all the death and
destruction that implies. Most of it has happened in the past, though.

 

 So when the last and dreadful hour

      This crumbling pageant shall devour,

 The trumpet shall be heard on high,

      The dead shall live, the living die,

      And music shall untune the sky.

 From A Song For St. Cecilia's Day, 1687 by John Dryden, 1687

 

 Before the Smash, if you'd asked him where he was going to be in ten
years, he certainly wouldn't have said here. Burnt-out city, broken land,
dying world. The stink of soot and the bitter taste of ashes.

 

 They called this guy the Mountie; I guess he used to be one, Before.
Canadians weren't so uncommon in Chicago back then, it being a
multicultural city and all, but now the border was locked down tight and
we didn't see so many of our friends from north.

 He agreed to meet me down by the Lake Market at noon, at Buckingham
Fountain.

 Frannie was the one who vouched for this guy, said he was good people and
that I should help him if I could. She told me that the Mountie would lend
a hand at her school, sometimes. He was gentle with the older kids, she
said, made a connection with them and didn't talk down to them.

 And he brought books for them, which was icing on the cake as far as
Frannie was concerned.

 

 The first meet, Ray liked to do in public. Not just in public. In public.
At a crowded diner, at a busy train station, in the middle of the ration
lines down by the hospitals. Public.

 It made him feel safer. It was easier to drop back, blend in with the
crowd, disappear, fade away. That didn't stop him from looking over his
shoulder, though. There was no one watching his back, hadn't been anyone
doing that for years, and it made him skittish.

 

 I found a dinky food stall on the outskirts of the Market - nothing more
than a solar-powered food cart and some beat-up tables with rickety
chairs. I spent a few moments haggling in my broken street Greek with the
guy before getting a cup of strong tea. Like I always did, I pulled out
the picture of Stella and asked the guy if he'd ever seen her. He studied
her picture for a moment before shaking his head. "Ohi, ohi."

 It had been worth a shot. "Efkharisto," I said, tipping my cup in thanks.

 Sitting down at a table, I reviewed everything I'd heard about this
Mountie - Fraser, Fraser, something Fraser. Benjamin? That felt close. No,
no, it was Benton. Benton Fraser. Kind of an old-fashioned name.

 I liked to have a feel for the people I dealt with. Easier to see a deal
turning sideways when you had an idea of what to expect. It had saved my
ass more than once.

 

 Before the Smash, Maria Lagrangia had been a professor of cosmology at
the University of Arizona. She'd come from a family of scientists, and
when she was little, she'd wanted to study the stars. In college, she
found that she wanted to do more than just study the stars, she wanted to
know how they formed.

 Eventually she had found herself working in the field of physical
cosmology, which concerned itself with observing the university in its
totality, how it began, the state it currently exists in, and how it was
going to end.

 Maria had been luckyshe'd taken a vacation to her family's ancestral home
in northern Italy, and that's where she'd been when the Smash had
happened. If she'd still been in Arizona, she would surely have died in
the aftermath.

 She found herself in the smallish city of Como, and after things had
settled down, she took up teaching.

 She taught the children of Como reading and writing, and of course, math
and science. And in the course of her teachings, she would help the
children conduct basic science experiments so they could understand
certain fundamental concepts. They repeated Galileo's Leaning Tower of
Pisa experiment, they built a volcano, and attempted to ascertain the
circumference of the earth with children in other cities.

 And that's when she noticed the problem.

 The numbers were off, so far off that it didn't really make any sense.
Even given that children were making the measurements, she expected a
certain degree of accuracy. She had the children try again, and again, and
each time the calculated circumference was the same value, the same wrong
value.

 The simplest answer was that they were doing the experiment incorrectly.

 It wasn't until years later, when she'd had a chance to consult with
fellow scientists, that she discovered that it wasn't an isolated
incident.

 

 The Mountie was kind of famous in Chicago. I'd heard about him and his
pet dog, the one that followed him around almost everywhere. Even now,
after the Smash, word still got around. And like Before, you had to take
everything you heard on the street with a grain of salt.

 Frannie said he was nice, smart and trustworthy. Jack Huey said he was
fair and always willing to help. Dewey said he was bug-fuck crazy, but
harmless. Which was funny, coming from Dewey. 'Cause Dewey and sanity did
not have a good long-term relationship.

 No one had anything bad to say about him. He was an all-around nice guy.

 Didn't see too many of those anymore. These days, with the world so
fucked up, it was everyone for themselves. Nice mostly just gets you
killed.

 

 "Mr. Kowalski?"

 Ray had arranged to meet the Mountie at the north-east point of the
fountain. It was a nasty day, overcast and chill, with the smell of
something chemical heavy in the air. The Market was remarkably busy in
spite of it.

 The Mountie was broad but underweight, about Ray's height, with neatly
combed brown hair and sharp blue eyes. Ray suspected that like many
people, Fraser didn't get enough calories on a regular basis to sustain
his normal weight. He could have easily passed for early thirty-ish,
except for the crows-feet radiating from the corner of his eyes and the
white streak of hair that ran from his left temple to his ear. He was
polite and earnest. He was dressed in a worn flannel shirt and faded blue
jeans.

 Frannie had told Ray that Fraser was a good man, one of the best she'd
ever met. Honorable, trustworthy. He'd been a friend of her brother's and
she'd known him for a long time. Even Ma Vecchio had loved him like a son
and he'd spent most holidays Before the Smash at the Vecchio family home,
a beloved and well-fed adopted son.

 Ray had never asked Frannie what happened to her brother. With the
tremendous number of people killed by the Smash, and its aftermath, it was
safer not to.

 When they met, Ray got a weird vibe from Fraser, a sense of distance,
like he was just here to observe but not participate in the world around
him. There was a story there, definitely something broken inside of Benton
Fraser, but Ray wasn't about to ask.

 After the Smash, everyone had a story. Most of those stories ended badly,
in starvation, in disease, and death. Those that survived had scars to
show for it.

 

 "Nah. Mr. Kowalski was my dad. I go by Ray," I said, shaking his hand.

 "Ray, then." He looked me over, sizing me up. He had the cop-stare down
pat. No surprise. Mountie meant Royal Canadian Mounted Police and once you
tore away the mythology of the red uniforms and the Dudley-Do-Rights, you
were left with cops. "You may call me Fraser."

 I gave him a once-over in return. It's been a long time since I was a cop
but I hadn't gotten out of the habit. Chicago had been a dangerous city
Before and the Smash had just made it worse. The breakdown of society had
a tendency to do that.

 "Let's take a walk and you can tell me what I can do for you," I said,
flexing my bad leg. Sometimes, like today, the knee ached something
fierce. Years ago, the doctor had told me after he'd fixed it up that this
was as good as it was going to get. That I couldn't expect too many more
miraclesI'd already gotten more than my share and I should just count my
blessings.

 That was Before, of course. Before the Smash, before the divorce, before
medical disability. So many befores and not enough afters.

 We walked around Buckingham Fountain, the green smell of algae strong in
my nose. They called it Buckingham Pond these days; no one had bothered to
fix the fountain pump and so it just grew pond scum and stank. Some geeks
harvested the algae and managed to convert it into a rough bio-fuelit
would run your engine but it sure wasn't pretty.

 "Mr. KowalskiRay, Francesca has told me that you 'procure' goods and
supplies and trade them at the Market."

 Swear to God, he actually did the prissy-finger-quote-thing around the
word procure. Like I was some kind of fancy-smancy uptown fence.
"Scavenge."

 "Obtain."

 "Cannibalize."

 "Secure."

 I smiled, enjoying the back-and-forth. "Scrounge."

 He sighed, agreeing, "Scrounge."

 

 After the Smash, the world had become a much emptier place. Without the
populations to sustain it, the social order broke down and collapsed,
taking much of the infrastructure with it. Without that complex framework,
the flow of goods and services stumbled to a halt.

 An urban legend once claimed that since a majority of the food in the
United States was transported and distributed by truck, once the system
was disrupted, people would be starving in less than a week. There was
some truth to that.

 The first year after the Smash, an uncountable number of people around
the world died due to a lack of edible food, clean water, and basic
sanitation. Many of them, weakened by starvation, froze to death the first
winter, when the ash was still thick in the air and blotted out the sun
for days at a time.

 Afterwards, most people abandoned the suburbs for the urban centers. It
hadn't been a mass exodus, just a steady trickle over the years. Life was
easier in the cities. You could get food and medicine, you could barter
for things you needed. If you had any practical skills, you could put them
to good use. You could survive, with the help of family, friends and
neighbors.

 The suburbs were different from the heart of the cities; the falling
population turned them into the modern equivalent of ghost towns. The
suburbs attracted the wandering, the broken, the mad, the feral. The quiet
emptiness opened its arms, embraced those lost souls, and hid them away in
the abandoned houses and buildings.

 Chicago had been a sprawling city which could be mapped out into ringed
regions. The downtown area which was surrounded by the semi-urban
neighborhoods like Lincoln Park and Pilsen, which in turn were enclosed by
the border communities, both inside and outside of the city limits, like
Edison Park, Norridge and Evanston. Beyond that were the true suburbs like
Deerfield and Palatine, and the far suburbs, the gateway cities and
finally the far cities.

 Before the Smash, the greater Chicago metropolitan area boasted almost
ten million people. Now the population was less than a sixth of what it
had been.

 

 The suburbs were treacherous. It wasn't monsters and mutants that would
get you, it was the people.

 The people that formed thrill-gangs and went around looting and killing
just for the fun of it.

 Others, who were survivalists at heart, had hunkered down and taken
shelter in the suburbs, armed to the teeth and ready to defend themselves.
Shooting first and asking questions later. Plus all the people we used to
consider criminals, back where there was a justice system and laws.
Murderers and rapists, the dregs of society, savage and dangerous and
free.

 That was what made the suburbs so fucking dangerous.

 

 Ray had heard stories about the far suburbs for years. Most times, they
sounded like ghost stories and urban legends. Cannibals, mutants,
monsters. A friend-of-a-friend of Frannie's saw a Bigfoot-like monster in
the woods near Gary. Cults of horribly mutated humans who took the Smash
to be a sign from God were said to be living in Joliet. There were rumors
of a twisted freak who kidnapped women and took them to Waukegan as
sex-slaves. Zombie-like people were wandering the streets in Eglin,
unresponsive, their minds broken by the Smash, leaving nothing behind but
a slowly starving shell.

 Ray believed little of what he heard about the out-lying suburbs. But he
did listen, and file the information away. Because after the Smash, the
impossible wasn't so impossible anymore.

 

 "Yeah, that's what I do. I go out to the outer suburbs, sometimes, and
find stuff that people here in the city need, or want, or will barter
for." I shrugged. It was a living. "Sometime I go into the empty parts of
the city. It depends on what I'm looking for and how lucky I feel."

 "Ah," Fraser said.

 "Ah," I echoed, annoyed. "What does that mean?"

 Fraser glanced at me, sideways. Not a sly look, but a shy one. "What do
you look for, when you're out scrounging for things?"

 I put my hands into the pockets of my jeans and shrugged again. "Whatever
I think might be useful." We drifted close as we walked and our shoulders
bumped. "Sorry. Um, electronics, working is good, non-working is fine.
Preserved food, bottled water, medicines, fuel, batteries, weapons and
ammunition, tools." I thought about it for a moment. "Warm clothing,
shoes. Stuff that's small and light."

 "Books?" There was something in Fraser's voice, something wistful and
sad.

 "Sometimes. Not often. If I see a book that looks useful, I'll pick it
up, but that's about the extent of it. There isn't a big demand for poetry
and literature. And eventually, people will start using books for fuel"

 "No!" Fraser looked absolutely horrified. "No, that can't"

 I stepped away from him, a little weirded out by his intensity. We were
just talking about books. "Easy, there, buddy."

 Fraser reached out and grabbed my shoulder, his touch sending a weird
frisson of heat though my body. I shivered and he stepped back, looking a
bit lost. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean" He wiped his hands on his jeans and
looked at me, wide-eyed. He'd felt it, too.

 "S'okay." I waved it off, hoping he would follow my example and let it
go. For once, my luck held. He opened his mouth to say something, thought
better of it and closed it, sighing.

 "I have a proposition for you, Ray, if you're willing to listen."

 

 In 1850 Léon Foucault, measured the speed of light to be 298,000
kilometers per second. He used a clever set-up which included two mirrors,
one stationary and one rotating, a focused light beam and a tuning fork.
He had been off by 0.6%, which was an astonishing accomplishment in 1850.

 In 1926, using a slightly different set-up with more accurate
instruments, Albert Michaelson measured the speed of light to be 299,796
kilometers per second. His figure was off by only 0.001%

 In 2000, a group of students at the University of Pune in western India
attempted to replicate the experiment using Foucault's methods. Under the
direction of Dr. Jawaharlal Bhoraskar, the students carefully timed how
long the light took to reflect back. They determined the differences in
angle of the rotating mirror. They measured the distance of the change of
the light's path. They repeated the experiment a few times, to get a
larger sampling of data. Carefully, they calculated and double checked
their numbers and presented their findings to Dr. Bhoraskar.

 Dr. Bhoraskar was extremely unhappy with the resultsthe students had
somehow managed to calculate the speed of light at almost fifteen percent
faster than it should be.

 The students tried again, using Michaelson's set-up this time. And they
got the exact same incorrect value for the speed of light as before. Dr.
Bhoraskar was at a loss. The speed of light was a constant; it wasn't
supposed to change.

 But according to their data, the speed of light had increased since the
Smash.

 

 Sex was different after the Smash. I didn't mean the actual sex part, but
the rituals that used to lead up to getting laid. Things that had once
been important simply weren't anymore. It used to be that you'd have to
impress a girl (or guy) with how much you made at your upwardly mobile
job, how well you dressed, how often you bought gifts and flowers and took
them out to dinner.

 The Smash had swept that all away and reduced everything to the simplest,
oldest question in history: what can you do for me?

 Men and women prostituted themselves, not for money or power, but for
safety and shelter. Which, when I thought about it, wasn't such a new
thing.

 Not long after the Smash, I'd met a woman named Luanne Russell. She'd
been a beautiful woman, smart and fascinating and sweet. Under normal
circumstances, she could have been someone I might have been involved
with, someone I might have married and had a future with.

 She had been looking for security, looking for someone to protect her in
the terrifying new world. It hadn't worked out for us, because while she'd
been looking for someone to take care of her, I'd been looking for a
partner.

 I was afraid I would never find someone to fit the bill.

 

 Anyone with a government-issued identification card and some amount of
patience could wait in the dole lines for food. Some days it was a packet
of coarse brown Pseudograinjust add water and heat for a bowl of
insta-gruel. Locally known as Mush, Glop, or Slop, it wasn't particularly
tasty, but had enough nutrients and calories to keep people alive. Some
enterprising souls added hard-to-find spices or flavorings in an attempt
to improve the taste. That usually didn't go so well.

 On other days, the government handed out packets of Green, which was
mainly compressed and processed algae that was specifically tailored as a
food source. Neither palatable nor filling, the fishy aftertaste made it
extremely unpopular and most people would do almost anything to avoid
eating it.

 It was not surprising that gardening became a popular hobby.

 Fraser was trying to start a community garden in an abandoned lot near
the Canadian Consulate, where he lived. The people in his neighborhood
would benefit from the addition of more vegetable and fruits into their
meager government-dole diets.

 There were things that he needed for the project, things that Ray could
get. Some of those things were: plastic sheeting, PVC piping, any kind of
plastic bottle, but two liter soda bottles were especially prized, seeds,
egg cartons, newspapers, any wood lumber or scraps, window and glass
sheets. Dryer lint, socks, chicken wire, pallets, earthworms, tires and
any sort of plastic bin. Garden tools. Barbed wire.

 He made a three page list, neatly printed in blue ink and sorted
according to need and necessity. Diefenbaker had laughed at him for that.

 

 We stopped walking so I could read his list.

 "We thought about putting the things most likely to be easy to obtain
first, but realized that what I thought should be simple to find might not
actually be...simple."

 "Huh." I skimmed over the list, noting that most of the stuff was
actually not going to be that hard to find. And what I couldn't find, I
knew who I could trade or haggle for it. But I still had one important
question

 "So, Fraser, how are you going to pay for all of this?" I indicated the
list in my hand. "We're looking at a significant investment of time and
energy here."

 He looked down at his booted feet for a moment before looking at me with
a cross between a deer-in-the-headlights look and sad-puppy-dog-eyes.
"This is a project that would benefit the entire neighborhood, Ray. People
would"

 "No."

 "have a chance to grow their own food, be more self-sufficient rather
than"

 "Nyet." He wasn't even listening to me.

 "depending on the government handouts. You would gain the respect and
gratitude of the whole neighborhood."

 "Nie." He continued to look at me, pleading silently with those bright
blue eyes. I tried to ignore how pathetic he looked, how earnest and
boyish he seemed, even with that white streak in his dark hair. "Nein."

 "Ray, please"

 "Oh, fuck it! Fine, fine, I'll do it! Just stop with the pitiful,
I-just-kicked-your-dog-look, please!"

 

 Frannie had taken Fraser and Dief aside and told them how to handle Ray
Kowalski. She explained that Ray was like an old junkyard cat, full of
angry hissing and spitting and scratching, but he was actually soft and
fluffy on the inside like a little baby chick. A little bit of pressure in
the right direction and Ray would crack like an egg.

 Fraser ended up spending the morning practicing looking pathetic and sad,
using the cracked mirror in the bathroom to try to judge if it was working
or not, and generally ignoring Dief's snarky comments. By the time he'd
left for his meeting with Ray, asking Dief to stay behind, he was sure he
had the "Bambi-eyes" down pat. He was right.

 

 "Thank you, Ray. Your help will be tremendously appreciated by those who
will benefit from this community"

 "Enough." I held up a hand to stop the flow of thanks. "Deeply grateful
yadda-yadda, don't know how to thank you yadda-yadda. Yeah, let's skip all
that, okay?" I skimmed the list again. "When did you need this stuff?" I
looked at him and watched, stunned, as he slowly smiled.

 Don't get me wrong. Fraser was a handsome man. After the divorce from
Stella, I could stop pretending not to notice things like that. But this
smile transformed his face, stripped away unhappiness and weariness and
left behind the beauty.

 I could see his mouth moving, hear words, but couldn't understand a damn
thing. I shook my head, hard. Get a grip on yourself, Kowalski. No need to
moon over the man like a fucking idiot.

 

 I took this bus, I drove this car, I got on this train, I walked down
this street, I turned this corner, I opened this door, and I stepped into
a bank.

 Ray met Stella when he was thirteen years old. For him, it was love at
first sight. He loved her through high school, through college, through
her years at law school, through his own tenure at the police academy,
through getting shot while stopping a jewelery heist and being put on
medical disability. Through thick and thin, through richer and poorer, it
was always Stella-and-Ray, until one day it wasn't.

 It was hard, and it hurt a lot, but he let her go. It wasn't that she
didn't love him anymore; she did. But she wanted something different and
he couldn't walk down that path with her. So he let her go.

 They were separated for two years before the divorce and in those two
years Ray learned a lot about what he liked, and didn't like. His life was
different without Stella in it, without her being the focus of everything.
It was a surprise to discover that maybe he wasn't as straight as he'd
once thought he was.

 It freaked him out a little, but Stella helped him through it, still his
best friend, still the one who knew him best. She helped him see that this
didn't change anything, who he was attracted to didn't define him, didn't
make him anyone other than Ray.

 In the months before the Smash, they'd lost touch. Stella had gotten a
promotion and Ray had suspected that she'd been seeing someone. He'd been
too afraid to ask.

 

 "...is better, of course, but truly, whenever you can manage to procure
the items is fine."

 "Yeah, okay, then." I stuffed the list into my pocket and turned away,
heading deeper into the crowded Market. "I'll be in touch," I yelled over
my shoulder. I didn't look back.

 

 The United States government hadn't handled the aftermath of the Smash
very well. There had been too many critical losses of key people and the
government had floundered for a while before collapsing under the weight
of its own bureaucracy.

 It had been disheartening, to watch and wait for the government to right
itself and start rebuilding, only to realize there was nothing left to
rebuild, and no one strong enough to do it.

 Eventually, a loose coalition of grass-roots organizations had banded
together to form a 'government.' They were primarily concerned about two
things: food and illness. Everything else was a secondary concern and
they'd get to it, eventually.

 It worked, sort of. It was better than nothing.

 

 It wasn't until much later that I realized that I hadn't shown Fraser the
picture of Stella, asking if he'd seen her since the Smash.

 I had never forgotten before.

 Sometimes, I wondered if I should just stop trying. I'd been showing that
picture of Stella to everyone I'd ever met since the Smash and no one had
ever said they'd seen her. Maybe I should just put the damn picture away
and admit the truth to myselfshe was dead, probably had been since the
Smash.

 Fuck.

 I just couldn't bring myself to do it. Somewhere in my heart, I refused
to believe it. Stella had been the best thing that had happened to mehow
could she be gone?

 

 Ray got the hard stuff out of the way first.

 A lifelong resident of Chicago, Ray had an almost encyclopedic memory for
parks, tourist attractions and museums in the Chicago area due to his mum
and his ex-wife.

 For some of the items he went to a
friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend down in Flossmoor. Before the
Smash, the Iron Oak Learning Center was a place for education and
recreation in a nature preserve setting. As a child, he'd gone to summer
camps there.

 Now, it was mostly deserted, just a few hard-core die-hards hanging on
and helping those they could, while the wilderness slowly reclaimed the
park. They set up parts of the park as garden lots, encouraging everyone
to come and grow their own food.

 Ray was been surprised how much food could be grown on a small four foot
by four foot plot of land. And he hadn't been terribly surprised by the
number of people willing to do so. Of course, anything was better than the
Green that the government handed out.

 It took a little bit of fast-talk, and a little bit of trading, but once
Ray explained that it was for a community garden, the people at the Center
were glad to help him as much as possible.

 

 For plastics, I met up with my friend Sandor. He and his brother Joe had
a plastic smelting business. They took all those plastic grocery bags that
had been such an eyesore on the landscape, sort of melted them down in a
big tank and poured the melted plastic into molds. The bags made a hard,
durable plastic that worked well for certain things.

 Joe was skilled at hand-tooling the hard plastic to create parts that
were no longer being manufactured. I'd seen him make parts for washing
machines, for sophisticated laboratory equipment, for manufacturing
machinery, for medical equipment. He'd even made engine parts for the old
METRA trains that still lumbered along their tracks like old, broken
dinosaurs.

 Sandor scoured the city for plastics and brought it all back to their
warehouse. They'd sort it, using what they could, setting aside everything
else for trade. It was fun to watch them work, to put lie to all the
"plastic is evil" propaganda that I'd heard on the radio and TV Before the
Smash.

 Now we could only be glad that our society had thrown away so much in the
way of useful thingsit left a huge amount of raw material to be reused.

 I left the brothers' warehouse with the promise of more plastic bottles,
bins and bags than Fraser and his garden would know what to do with. I was
also a little buzzed, having brought along a couple of six-packs of
home-brew as a friendly offering to Joe and Sandor, who insisted that I
drink my fair share.

 So I did. We'd sat around the warehouse, bitching and moaning about power
outages, the lack of professional sports teams and how hard it was to get
laid after the end of the world. Some things never changed. Before the
Smash, we would have been complaining about ComEd, how badly the Cubs
sucked, and how hard it was to get laid.

 I staggered home, stripped and fell into my cold, solitary bed.

 

 At the University of Chicago's Department of Physics, there was an
antique metal chamber, a little less than two feet in diameter. Inside
were two charged metal plates and an atomizer that sprayed oil droplets
into the chamber. An x-ray tube ionized the droplets and a viewing port
was used to watch the droplets of oil as they rose and fell in response to
the charged plates and the currents of gravity. The laboratory set up had
been built in 1909 by Robert Millikan and Harvey Fletcher.

 From this apparatus, were able to approximate the elementary electric
charge on an electron. This was one of the first steps into the wider
realm of subatomic physics and Robert Millikan won the 1923 Nobel Prize
for his work.

 Rose Lomantiz had been a promising young student, planning to go to Rice
University in Houston to study nanomaterials. Rice was where Buckyballs
had been invented, after all. Instead, the Smash trapped her in her small
mid-Western university town where she conducted experiments of her own
devising in the empty laboratories.

 She'd found an oil-drop apparatus in the freshman physics lab and spent
three years recording the velocity of the falling oil droplets. According
to the manual for the apparatus, a careful student should get a result of
±3% of the actual value. Rose was an extremely careful student and got a
value that was off by about 13%, consistently. The value of e was
constant, but it was wrong and she didn't know why.

 

 "Hey, RayK, Frannie's looking for you." Jackie laughed, shaking her head
as she sorted through a plastic bin of metal parts. "I think you're in
trouble now."

 "Oh, yeah?" I dug through another container, looking for a smallish
bracket. "She say what she wanted?" The compressor on my elderly fridge
had blown during the last black out and I was trying to find parts to fix
it. I didn't often have enough perishable food to really need a
refrigerator, but sometimes it came in handy for storing other stuff.
Medicines, batteries, that kind of thing.

 I looked up at Jackie, surrounded by the clutter of her shop. Buckets and
baskets and plastic containers crowded the shelves and the counter tops,
overflowing with bits and pieces from a million different types of
machines. Some electronic components, some mechanical parts. I had to turn
sideways to get through some of the aisles that were jam-packed with even
more junk.

 Jackie had an extremely haphazard organization system. There were many
containers filled with nothing but springs of all sorts and sizes; others
containers might contain gears and cogs of a specific size. Some things
were organized by type of item, others were grouped by what they did, or
how they worked. Sometimes I suspected that this was an expression of
Jackie's wickedly sly sense of humor.

 Strung from the ceiling, hanging low on almost invisible wires were
dozens of scale models, metal and plastic: airplanes, cars, spaceships,
regular ships, and war machines. Some I recognizedthe USS Arizona, a '66
Chevy Chevelle and a TIE-fighterbut I had no idea what the other models
were. I had to duck a lot while I wandered around the shop.

 Jackie laughed again. "Nope. Just said to go see her asap."

 I sighed. I was still mad at Frannie for siccing Fraser on me. She knew I
wouldn't be able to say 'no' and she sent him to me anyway. That
particular adventure had cost me a bundle in terms of favors and trade. It
would be a while before I recovered.

 "Thanks, Jackie. Tell her I got the message."

 "Maybe something like this?" She held up a metal t-shape that she'd found
in a bin, almost what I needed, but not quite.

 I shook my head. "An inch and a half longer, and a little wider. And it's
gotta have a little bend in it, see?" I showed her the broken piece.

 "Hmmm. Yeah, yeah." Jackie looked up and grinned. "So, when you going to
let me take you home and show you the rest of my tattoos, Kowalski?"

 I couldn't stop the answering grin on my face. Jackie was blonde,
athletic and had some intriguing tattoos winding down her arms. I could
only imagine what other tattoos she had, and where. "As soon as you get
rid of your extremely jealous husband."

 "Aw, Ray, you're no fun."

 "Maybe not, but I'm still alive." I ran a hand through my hair, ruffling
the spikes. Jackie's husband was one scary dude.

 She sighed regretfully. "Okay. Let me get some scans of that part and
I'll try to find you a replacement somewhere. Or get someone to machine
you one."

 "Thanks, Jackie."

 She put the part on the glass platform of a 3D scanner that was hooked up
to an ancient looking computer. Inside, it was a top-of-the-line machine,
built from the newest generation of micro-micro optical components. On the
outside, it was scuffed and looked older than dirt.

 Jackie was fond of the irony. A few keystrokes and the scanner hummed
happily to itself and in minutes the computer was displaying a schematic
of the broken part.

 "I'll see what I can do, Ray, and let you know."

 

 One of the things that the Smash fostered was an uncontrollable wave of
novel technology. People were endlessly inventive and new techs sprouted
and flourished in the aftermath. Bio-fuels and fuel cells became extremely
important as the supplies of petroleum became difficult to acquire.
Engines became smaller and more powerful, and at the same time, more
efficient. A booming business emerged to re-tool vehicles and machines to
work with the alternatives.

 Once a rudimentary power grid was re-established across the globe,
computer technology leapfrogged ahead. Smaller and faster computers with
more flexible programming became common and cheap. Before the Smash,
technology has been edging toward quantum computers, which used quantum
mechanical phenomena to perform operations on the data. After the Smash,
though, the few prototypes had stopped working. Physicists had proposed
that the Smash had changed something on a quantum level, but they had very
little evidence to support with the theory.

 Instead, computing technology when in a different direction, toward
optical and chemical computers, using light and natural chemical reactions
to drive the operations. It was a different way of computing and it was
feasible in this new, broken world.

 It was survival after the Smash, a twisted chimera, half technology and
half old-school bubble-gum-and-duct-tape engineering. It wasn't perfect,
it wasn't pretty, but it worked.

 

 Frannie caught me at the Market.

 "Ray, I've been looking for you all over town." Frannie put her hand on
her hip and tapped her foot impatiently. "Didn't you get any of my
messages?"

 "Messages?" Oh, fuck, I was in trouble now. "Sorry, I've been busy,
Frannie."

 "Doing what?" She had a smirk on her face.

 "Um" I racked my brain frantically for a good excuse but couldn't come up
with a damn thing.

 She smacked me hard on the arm. "Liar. You've been avoiding me."

 "Frannie." I looked into her eyes, trying my best to project sincerity.
"I would never try to avoid you. You're my friend." She was a beautiful
woman, lush and curved, chocolate eyes and long black hair. Smooth olive
skin and a mouth made for smiling. She would be a great partner for
someone; loving and sweet, and smart.

 She was a wonderful person and I felt nothing for her other than
friendship and affection. I loved her like a brother, and sometimes I
wished I felt more for her.

 "You're sweet." She grabbed my arm and steered me away from the Lake,
toward her favorite bakery stall. "I need you to do me a favor, Ray."

 She led me down the twisted aisles of the Market, past the enticing
smells of fried and barbecued meats, past tea sellers and their fragrant
goods, spice merchants and fruit vendors. I'd missed lunch and was
starting to regret it. "What do you need, Frannie? I'm not finding you any
more fingernail polish," I teased, smiling.

 She smacked me on the arm again. "Idiot!" We stopped long enough to pick
up a couple of pastries from Misha, who was experimenting with alternative
grain flours for his baking. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.
Acorn flour donuts were not something I ever wanted to experience again,
please God.

 "No, I'm worried about Benton and that damned dog of his."

 "Fraser?" I was surprised. "Dog?" It'd been a couple of weeks since I'd
last seen him at the community garden. He'd looked fine, as he always did,
hale and hearty. It wasn't until you looked close that you could see the
traces of unhappiness. There was a loneliness in his eyes that I wanted to
erase, and I had spent all of my time with him biting my lip and fighting
not to respond to his careful overtures of friendship.

 It had been hard, and it had hurt, but I think in the long run I would be
better off for it. I couldn't afford to be friends with him. I had a
tendency to wear my heart on my sleeve and if the attraction I felt was
any indication, I could fall so hard for him.

 In this uncertain world after the Smash, nothing was guaranteed, but that
didn't mean I had to expose myself to unnecessary risks if I could help
it.

 

 Fraser had taken to exploring some of the suburbs on his own. He tended
to be a cautious individual by nature, but that hadn't stopped him from
getting into difficult situations, even with Diefenbaker as his backup.

 He surprised one elderly gentleman armed with a gun, who didn't seem too
interested in Fraser's calm and rational explanations. The man fired a
warning shot and Fraser and Dief made a hurried escape.

 Fraser managed to avoid several packs of feral young men, armed with
clubs and smeared with paint, once by hiding in a trash dumpster. Dief
thought that they might not be amenable to discussions and Fraser agreed
with him.

 He was too trusting with the young waif, who used the threat of a very
large gun to force him to sit in a chair and hold still while she tied him
carefully to it. She stole his knapsack and it took him several hours to
work himself free. His wrists were sore and chafed for days. He was lucky
that she hadn't been truly dangerous, because Dief had been distracted by
her curly blonde hair and innocent smile. They made an oath between them
to never mention that particular incident again.

 It wasn't long after their encounter with the young girl that Fraser and
Diefenbaker ran into their first so-called zombie.

 Fraser and Dief had stumbled across the home of a literature
aficionadothe entire house had been lined with handmade bookshelves and
filled with books. They'd spent the day there, sorting through the books,
picking out the ones that they would take back. They had a limited amount
of space in the metal shopping cart they used to haul books back to the
Consulate.

 He would, of course, carefully note the location of the book trove and
make the attempt to come back for more books. In the meantime, Dief had
helped him to choose which books to take now. Sometimes they had argued
good-naturedly about the merits of specific books. Dief had peculiar
interest in literature of the Objectivism movement, while Fraser found the
philosophy too cold and clinical; it left no room for faith or passion,
both of which were contained in the human heart.

 They had, in the end, decided to put The Fountainhead into the pile to be
retrieved later.

 Fraser had packed up the cart and continued to argue with Dief about Ayn
Rand and her philosophies. As they'd walked through the deserted streets,
they had come across a man shuffling his way through an intersection. He
had been painfully emaciated, wearing clothes that had appeared to have
mostly rotted off of him and he stank.

 Fraser had spoken to him gently, trying to ascertain if he needed help,
but the man just continued to walk, and after a moment, repeated Fraser's
words back to him in a low mumble. Stepping quickly, Fraser had placed
himself in front of the man, blocking his path, hoping to get a reaction.
Without looking at Fraser, the man had shambled around him and kept
walking forward.

 As carefully as he could, Fraser and Diefenbaker had herded the man
toward the nearest open hospital. He hadn't been sure what was wrong with
the man, outside of his obvious catatonia; it would better that he was
seen by a medical professional.

 They had made a strange little group as they traveled through the streets
of Chicago.

 Sometimes, Fraser dreamed about the man; the shuffling walk and the
mumbled words. In his dream, the man was transformed into an actual
zombie, his face partially rotted away, bone gleaming white under the
putrid flesh. He usually spent the first few minutes after he jolted awake
swallowing convulsively, trying to keep the bile down.

 Other times, Fraser dreamed of himself as the empty man, shuffling along
uselessly in a life without hope or purpose. He usually woke from that
dream screaming.

 

 "He's determined to go exploring on his own and he won't listen to me
when I tell him how dangerous it is." Frannie looked worried. "I'm afraid
he's going to get seriously hurt, or killed." She squeezed my arm and took
another bite of her pastry. "He got beat up last week, came back with a
black eye and a limp."

 "What do you want me to do about it, Frannie? He's grown man, capable of
making his own decisions." I looked at her, seeing the concern, the fear.
I had a sudden suspicion. "Oh, Christ, you're not in love with him, are
you?"

 Instead of a flustered denial, she just looked sad. "I thought I was. You
should have seen him when he first came to Chicago, Ray, dressed up in
that beautiful uniform. He was..." She shook her head, a small smile on
her face. "Perfect. And I threw myself at him, repeatedly, until one day
he took me aside and told me that it would never work out between us, that
it would be better if we were just friends."

 I pulled her close and hugged her. "I'm sorry, Frannie. That must have
hurt a lot."

 She hugged me back, nodding against my chest. "I went home, ate an entire
container of double fudge chocolate ice cream and cried myself to sleep."
She sighed. "I really miss double fudge chocolate ice cream."

 "Me, too, Frannie. Me, too."

 

 Frannie's solution to the problem of Fraser's recklessness was simple
enough on the surface. They would work together. Fraser would help Ray on
his excursions into the dangerous suburbs, watching his back, being an
extra set of eyes. Fraser had some experience, after all, with perilous
situations. Together, they could explore the suburbs a little more safely.

 

 Before the Smash, the Chicago Public Library system consisted of
seventy-nine libraries scattered across the greater Chicago area. A
library in every neighborhood. The libraries had been vital, busy places.
Now, only ghosts and Fraser visited them.

 Fraser wanted books. He'd told Frannie they needed to be looked after and
cared for, rather than moldering to dust, unread, in the empty parts of
Chicago.

 Frannie had mentioned to me that sometimes Fraser would help out with the
kids. He'd bring in a stack of books and hand them out to whoever wanted
one. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, he'd be surrounded by children,
faces rapt as he read to them from Peter Pan or White Fang. He was patient
with their questions and Frannie was always encouraging him to spend more
time with the various children that came to Frannie's informal school.

 Books. It was all about books for Fraser. The guy sure did have a weird
fetish about books.

 

 Ray had to think about it. Books were heavy and took up space. They were
worth nothing in barter. You couldn't trade most books for water, or food,
or shelter. The exceptions were few and far between: medical books, books
on practical skills like gardening and preserving, any kind of repair
books. Beyond helping with Frannie's kids, he wasn't entirely sure what
Fraser was going to do with the books he collected.

 They met down at the Pond again, to discuss the details.

 

 "Plus, I'll bring Diefenbaker with us, and he has an exceptional sense of
smell that will come in handy, I'm sure."

 "Diefenwho?" I skirted around an old woman pushing a vegetable cart,
double-stepping to keep my balance. She shouted obscenities at me in what
sounded like Spanish. Maybe Portuguese. I thought about yelling back, but
decided it wasn't worth the effort. My Spanish was bad, my Portuguese
nonexistent.

 "Ah." Fraser did this fiddly, nervous-looking thing, rubbing his
thumbnail over his eyebrow. "My animal companion, Diefenbaker. Named after
the Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker who served from 1957 to
1963."

 There was something fishy about this. "Animal companion? You mean your
dog?"

 "Well..." Fraser looked at me, all innocent and earnest. "Dief is an
Arctic wolf." There was a long pause. "Well, really, he's only half-wolf."

 I just waited him out.

 "A deaf half-wolf." Looking sheepish, he did the thumb-eyebrow thing
again. That was definitely turning out to be one of Fraser's tells. "With
a terrible junk food habit."

 "A deaf half-wolf?" Sounded kinda dangerous, junk food notwithstanding.
Weren't half-breeds prone to going wild and tearing out throats? "Is he
trained?"

 Fraser looked relieved. "Oh, Dief's very well behaved."

 

 Fraser was rightfor a wolf-dog hybrid, Diefenbaker was very well behaved.

 Wolfdogs had a tendency to be unpredictable. They could be extremely
aggressive and territorial like their wolf ancestor, or well-socialized
and even-tempered like their dog ancestor. Even when they were more dog
than wolf, they still retained an element of wildness that made them
companions rather than pets.

 A lot of people didn't understand that. They looked at wolfdogs and saw a
wolf, but a wolf you could take home and feed dog biscuits to and play
fetch with. Every year, wolfdog hybrids attacked and sometimes killed
people, usually small children. People often forgot how dangerous wolfdogs
really were.

 Fraser never forgot, even though Dief was special, even among wolfdogs.
He'd inherited all the intelligence and cunning of his wolf parent, but
very little of the aggression. Fraser sometimes got the impression that he
was the alpha of their pack only because Dief couldn't be bothered to
challenge him for the position.

 Dief was a wolf, as well as a dog, and Fraser was always glad that he'd
willingly chosen to share his life with Fraser.

 

 We walked around the Pond while I contemplated the idea of working with
Fraser. Years ago, Stella had taught me a simple trick when facing a
difficult decision: separate everything into pros and cons and go from
there.

 Pro: I could have a partner, if we worked well together. Someone to watch
my back, to see things I missed. Someone trained to deal with dangerous
situations, someone who wasn't likely to get me into more trouble than I
tended to get myself into. Came equipped with a bad-ass half-wolf, which
was frosting on the cake.

 Con: I would have to trust him. Completely. I didn't know if I could do
that.

 Con: I didn't know what motivated the guy. There was a lot of honor and
duty tangled up with the need to try to save the world and everyone in it.
I could see that, feel that radiating from him like warmth from the sun on
a cold day.

 He would have been fucking dangerous as a cop, always asking the
impossible from his partner, defending the defenseless, doing his best to
make sure that justice was served.

 Con: Fraser was not entirely sane. That was obvious, even without Dewey's
warning. But then again, very few people were these days. I couldn't
really hold that against him. He seemed more inclined toward the wacky
kind of let's-help-everyone-in-the-world craziness, which I could live
with. Mostly.

 It was the
cut-out-your-liver-and-eat-it-because-the-voices-in-my-head-said-so kind
of insanity that I wanted to avoid. I didn't think Fraser would ever get
to that point.

 And last but definitely not least: the attraction thing. Mixing business
and pleasure was always a bad idea. That was true Before the Smash, it was
just as true now.

 

 When Fraser had joined the RCMP, all those years ago, applicants had been
required to take the RCMP Police Aptitude Test, which measured the
applicant's potential aptitude for police work, including observation,
judgment, memory, logic, computation, composition and comprehension.

 He'd done very well on the RPAT, as both he and his father had
anticipated.

 A couple of high profile cases involving the tremendous levels of stress,
burnout, depression and suicide in the RCMP brought mental health issues
to the forefront of public concern. The RCMP introduced a variety of
personality tests to the annual RCMP physical.

 Fraser liked the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator the best. The questions were
logical and easy to answer. He usually scored ISTJ "the Duty Fulfiller,"
with a bit of ESTJ "the Guardian" thrown in. Both of those personality
types seemed to describe him well.

 The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory perturbed Fraser, mostly
because he couldn't figure out what the questions meant. There was no
direct correlation, in his mind, between "I seldom or never have coughing
fits" to any particular mental health issue. Additionally, it bothered him
that they never let him see the results of his MMPI-2. It worried him, and
the more they said, "Don't worry yourself about it, Constable," the more
anxious he got.

 On the other hand, Fraser enjoyed both the Rorschach Inkblot Test and the
Thematic Apperception Test. It was relaxing to look at the pictures and
make up tales, often based on Inuit mythology, for what he saw. On
occasion, the testers would look at him strangely, but he pretended not to
see.

 He'd never had reason to question his sanity. Until the Smash.

 

 I don't know who I was kidding. Even though the cons outweighed the pros,
I was going to do this. Partner up with someone who was probably crazy,
who would most likely get me killed by asking me to jump off the roof of a
tall building. I would have to fight hard not to touch in him in
inappropriate ways, try hard not to pretend he was touching me when I was
at home alone, late at night, touching myself.

 This was so fucked-up.

 

 Over the years, Ray had learned a lot about the many forms of insanity.
He'd taken some psych classes when he'd been in college, and of course,
he'd been required to pass the CPD's psychological screening, which had
included the MMPI-2 and several in-depth interviews. Later, there had been
the officer-involved shooting board (OISB) reviews and the mandated
counseling sessions.

 After he'd kicked a suspect in the head (one suspect, and not very hard,
at that), there'd been the anger management classes. He'd been forced to
enroll in meditation classes as well, which just relaxed him so much he
fell asleep while sitting cross-legged on the smelly blue gym mats.

 As his marriage started to falter, when it got to the point that he and
Stella were arguing and fucking more than talking to each other, they'd
gone to therapy, together and separately. It hadn't saved the marriage,
but it gave Ray the ability to step back from himself a little and really
look at his behaviors. Once he saw those behaviors and how destructive
they could be, he could take steps to correct them, if he wanted to.

 So Ray had a passing familiarity with crazy, and with not-crazy. Fraser
took all of his perceptions about crazy, twisted them into knots, then
threw them out the window.

 

 "Diefenbaker, this is Ray. Ray, this is my companion, Diefenbaker."

 I glanced at where Fraser was gesturing, but there was nothing there but
empty air. Fraser's blue eyes were sincere and earnest, and I wondered if
he was pulling my leg. Maybe this was a joke...

 "Fraser"

 "No need to be afraid, Ray. Dief is very friendly once he gets to know
you."

 Or maybe not. "Heya, Diefenbaker." I held out my hand toward the space
that Fraser was smiling at, hoping I guessed right about Diefenbaker's
location. I let Fraser's imaginary half-wolf sniff me, learning my scent.
"He's a beautiful animal, Fraser."

 Fraser leaned closer to me, like he was going to share a secret. I could
feel the heat from him. "Don't say that where he can see. He's deaf, but
he can read lips, and I don't want him to become any more vain than he
already is. He can be very arrogant for a wolf."

 Yeah, Fraser was unhinged, all right. "Sure, Fraser."

 Later, I gave him the box of dog treats that I'd managed to scrounge for
Diefenbaker, back when I thought he was a real half-wolf.

 "Thank you, Ray." Fraser smiled, shy and proud. It made my insides twist
up with some weird combination of lust and affection that I really wasn't
ready to deal with.

 He looked at the space that Diefenbaker supposedly occupied and nodded.
"And Dief thanks you, too. Though he does wonder if next time you could
'procure'," and there were the damn air quotes again, "wolf treats rather
than dog treats, since he is half wolf."

 I could only laugh and promise to bring wolf treats next time.

 "Very good, Ray. Wolf treats are infinitely preferable to donuts or candy
bars, which are Dief's favorite foods." Fraser pursed his lips in
disapproval.

 Oh, yeah, the half-wolf had a junk food habit. "I can get donuts down at
the Marketthere's this Russian guy who makes them out of potato flour. But
candy bars" I shook my head. "They're impossible to find these days."

 "Regardless, we thank you for the treats. Dief will enjoy them."

 I was sure he would.

 Just when I was sure that the world couldn't get any more fucked up,
along comes Fraser. Good-looking guy, sharp as a tack, crazy as a bedbug.

 

 As a cop, Ray had spent years refining his natural talent for reading
body language. He had been able to tell if a suspect was lying by the way
they held themselves, the physical way they told their story. Ironically,
he couldn't have quantified how he knew, could never put into words what
he saw and understood. It didn't matter because it worked, and he was
usually right.

 This ability, combined with his usually spot-on instincts, gave him a
solve rate well above the average for his district. There had been some
grumbling, some resentment from the other detectives in his squad. Ray had
heard the muttering but had ignored it.

 Now, this particular skill came in handy for keeping track of where
Fraser's imaginary 'animal companion' was. Ray didn't want to accidentally
step through Diefenbaker. It would probably upset Fraser and there was no
reason to do that unnecessarily.

 

 We settled into a routine. Two or three times a week Fraser and Dief
would come over and we'd pack up my beat-up old Jeep and head out to
explore.

 A couple of times a week, when we weren't busy exploring, we'd take
Fraser's imaginary half-wolf out for walks and I'd introduce them to some
of the people I traded and bartered with on a regular basis. I took him to
meet Sandor and Joe, Jackie and her jealous husband, Muhammad al-Khwarizmi
and his family of metalworking-engineers, Gladys and Sophie, who kept me
supplied with motor oil and hard-to-find auto parts, and Blind Pete, who
sat next to his shortwave radio and his computer and had a finger on the
information pulse of the world.

 Some evenings Fraser and Dief would return to the Consulate and I'd go
back to my place alone; other nights we'd find someplace to eat and have
dinner together. On those nights, we'd sit around in some tiny little
hole-in-the-wall restaurant, talking about our lives Before the Smash.

 For a little while, the loneliness in his eyes would fade away. And for a
little while, I didn't feel so alone.

 I learned a lot about growing up in the far north, in the icy wilderness
of the Northwest Areas. I learned about his father, a famous Mountie, and
his murder, which led to Fraser's journey and exile to Chicago. And in
return, he learned more about Stanley Raymond Kowalski than anyone except
Stella had ever known.

 I wasn't sure how I felt about that, being so open and vulnerable.

 

 Before the Smash, Allan Rahill had been a computer programmer and in his
spare time, an amateur astronomer. He had saved his money and bought
himself one of the Russian Maksutov-Newtonian 8-inch telescopes and spent
every spare evening staring at the night sky. His wife had the patience of
a saint and kept him well supplied with hot tea on cold nights.

 Most of the sky had long since been mapped and cataloged and categorized,
so amateur astronomers tended to concentrate on photography of celestial
bodies, finding and tracking asteroids and comets, and observing changes
in the brightness of stars.

 Allan had a passion for photographing the Moon. He'd hook up his camera
to the telescope and spend hours taking hundreds of detailed pictures.
Then he'd process them on his computer using imaging software, tweaking
and fiddling until he had the perfect image.

 He'd won awards for his lunar photography, and he made a bit of money
selling his shots to various magazines. One of his pictures of the Moon
during an eclipse made the cover of Amateur Astronomer Magazine. His wife
had bought a copy of the magazine and had it framed. It was one of his
prized possessions.

 Allan knew the geography of the Moon like he knew his beloved wife's
face. He was familiar with the place heavy with the weight of history
behind them: Statio Tranquillitatis (One small step for [a] man, one giant
leap for mankind.) and Mare Imbrium (And it's been a long way, but we're
here.), Oceanus Procellarum (Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one
for Neil, but that's a long one for me.) and others.

 Allan knew the Moon.

 Until the Smash happened.

 Months afterwards, on a rare clear night, Allan went out, looked up at
the full Moon and didn't recognize it. All the familiar landmarks were
gone, this new surface configuration of craters, dark maria and light
terrae unknown to his eyes. Even the well-known radiating star shape of
Tycho Crater was missing.

 He set up his telescope, hooked up the camera and thought about how much
he missed his wife, and his life Before, and the Moon.

 

 It didn't take long to figure out we worked well together. We were a
duet.

 Fraser was a 'truth, justice and Canadian way' kind of guy, which meant
that we ended up helping a lot more people that I'd planned. As much as I
complained, it made me feel useful for the first time in a long while. We
helped several families reunite, relocated several others to safer places,
started up a small school, a recycling center and two more community
gardens.

 I fixed more engines than I could count while Fraser coddled babies and
reassured toddlers and their mothers. We helped distribute medicines and
food to those who weren't well enough to leave their homes, collected and
handed out blankets and warm clothes to those in need and tracked down
several runaway kids, reuniting them with their worried parents.

 We helped Margaret Hutchinson and her crew of biomedical geeks built and
set up three deep-tank fermenters to grow penicillium and other molds for
use as antibiotics. I found a stash of top-of-the-line camping supplies in
the back of an old house and tried to trade them off before Fraser found
out and gave it all away. I was partly successful.

 Twice I found myself pressed up against Fraser, his warm breath tickling
my cheek and his body solid against mine. He felt so good and I found
myself staring at his mouth hungrily, wanting to kiss him so bad. I leaned
closer, closer, watching as his pink tongue darted nervously, only to stop
myself at the very last moment, a breath away from a really big mistake. I
walked away from him, both times, but I wasn't sure how much more
self-control I had.

 We fell into the Lake and got stuck in a broken elevator in a crumbling
building, ran from crazies with guns and knives and electrified cattle
prods, and tried to forget some of the horrific things we saw.

 Things like the house in Joliet, where the stench of decay had been
strong and cloying. There'd been fifteen or more people, emaciated and
hairless, laid out around a big metal container that had been cracked open
and glowed blue in the dimness. I don't know if anyone was still alive;
Fraser dragged me out of there so fast it wasn't even funny. He took a
moment to carve a crude radiation symbol on the outside of the door before
hustling us off to the nearest hospital to get examined by doctors.

 Sometimes I had nightmares about that house.

 

 Ray lived in an old two-story warehouse not far from the Lake. He needed
the space, mainly for his elderly Jeep and all of the stuff that he'd
collected since the Smash.

 The bottom floor and part of the second was packed full of the things
that he'd scroungedthings that he hadn't found a use for but couldn't
bring himself to throw away. Someday someone might need it. So he kept all
of it, haphazardly piled on wooden pallets and shoved onto bookcases and
work benches, but organized in some arcane order that made sense to only
Ray.

 Vacuum tubes. Printers. VCRs. Glass electrical insulators. Test tubes and
other laboratory glassware. Typewriters.

 The walls were lined with bins filled to overflowing with automotive
parts and electronics parts and other bits and pieces. He'd raided several
hardware stores and had enough nails and screws to build or repair
anything he could imagine.

 Welding equipment. Building equipment. Plumbing equipment. Crate after
crate of scrap metal. Generators and equipment racks and broken solar
panels. Wooden wire spools big enough to use as tables and used water
heaters. Fifty-five gallon drums.

 It was an indoor junk yard and Ray let a tribe of feral cats live there
to keep the rodent population under control. So far it worked. He never
saw mice or rats and the cats always seemed to be plump and happy.

 He lived upstairs, in the northwest corner of the building. There'd been
a manager's apartment on the second floor that he'd claimed as a living
space for himself. A tiny kitchen, a bathroom with basic amenities, and a
bedroom. It wasn't very big, but he really didn't need much, mainly
somewhere to sleep. Some place to be safe. Home.

 Once upon a time, home had meant Stella, and the promise of their life
together. He'd wanted kids, wanted the stereotypical house and white
picket fence. He'd wanted that with Stella. That was the home he'd always
dreamed of.

 He'd learned the hard way that not all dreams come true.

 Sometimes, on bitterly cold nights, the cats would wander upstairs and
pile on top of him as he slept, purring happily like little motors and
keeping him warm.

 

 Sometimes I made mistakes. I tried to be careful, to think things
through, because after the Smash, mistakes were often deadly.

 Sometimes I let my guard down. Sometimes I didn't pay as close attention
to things as I should. Sometimes I just fucked up.

 One of these days it was going to get me killed.

 

 Ray didn't notice the two men who followed him from the hospital
district. He had a lot on his mind, juggling errands he needed to do
before he could get the re-manufactured crankshaft timing sprocket he'd
had his eye on. Detroit had started manufacturing again and was offering
new parts, but they were expensive and Ray couldn't justify the cost to
himself. Re-manned would work fine for his beloved Jeep.

 If he hadn't been distracted, there would have been no way he wouldn't
have noticed them. They weren't trying to be stealthy, they were just
determined to roll him for whatever medicines he'd picked up from a local
biochemist.

 They waited until Ray led them into a quieter part of town, one that
didn't have the constant hustle and bustle of the Market or the dole
lines. Crime was always more successful without witnesses.

 They waited, and then, like the predators they were, they sprang out of
hiding.

 

 I woke up, and I knew something was wrong.

 My head was killing me. It felt like a hangover and a migraine and a
concussion all rolled into one. I moaned miserably and reached up to keep
my brains from leaking out of my ears.

 Something grabbed my hands and kept me from touching my head. "Easy, Ray.
Don't move."

 "Fraser?" I struggled to open my eyes. The dim light hurt, and everything
looked blurry. Glasses. I needed my glasses. "Fraser? What happened?"

 Fraser pulled my hands down and let go. "Ssh. You're safe and everything
will be all right. You need to rest and heal." He placed the flat of his
hand against my chest and I could feel the warmth of him through my shirt.
"Just rest. There's plenty of time for questions later."

 "But"

 "Sssh." He rubbed his hand in soothing circles.

 I gave up the fight and let the darkness swallow me down.

 

 Fraser was sure that Ray was suffering from mild traumatic brain injury,
otherwise known as a concussion. Part of RCMP training included advanced
first aid, since RCMP officers were often first on-scene at accidents and
emergencies.

 When he'd opened the door of the Consulate in response to the loud
pounding, he'd found Ray, passed out and held up by a couple of the young
men who were regulars down at the community garden. They'd found him in an
alley, the victim of a beating and Ray had been drifting in and out of
consciousness for about ten minutes.

 They carried Ray up to what had once been the Queen's bedroom. Fraser
thanked the young men and ushered them out, then gathered his first aid
supplies. He administered the Glasgow Coma Scale and Ray scored a
reassuring 13, which roughly corresponded to a minor brain injury.

 After cleaning and applying a bandage to the rather large but shallow cut
on his scalp and checking the dilation of Ray's pupils, Fraser tucked Ray
into bed.

 For the next twelve hours or so, he woke Ray periodically, checking his
pupils and his verbal responses to simple questions about who he was,
where he was, and the date. The first few times Ray displayed a great deal
of confusion, but as the night wore on, his responses became more
coherent.

 Fraser, who had stationed himself in a chair next to the bed, finally let
himself relax a little.

 

 When I woke up, my head was aching. I was in an unfamiliar bed and before
I could start to panic, a soft snore distracted me. I suddenly had a vivid
memory of being hit on the head by some asshole with a stickbut I couldn't
remember who he was or why he beaned me with the club.

 Slumped in a chair, sound asleep, was Fraser. It looked uncomfortable as
hell and I bet his back was not going to thank him later.

 It hurt to move too fast, so I slowly leaned and touched his knee.
"Fraser. Fraser. Fraser." I squeezed his leg a little harder. "Fraser,
wake up. It's not good for you to sleep like that. You're going to be
hurting in the morning."

 He woke up and blinked owlishly at me.

 "Fraser, come to bed." I lifted up the blanket, gritting my teeth against
the pain. "C'mon."

 "Nonsense, Ray, I'm fine. I'll just grab my bedroll and sleep on the
floor"

 "Fraser, damn it, if you sleep on the floor I'm going to join you." I
breathed out hard against a sudden wave of nausea. "Get into the fucking
bed."

 Standing up, he stripped off his shirt and jeans before sliding carefully
into bed. I scooted back so he wouldn't cram himself against the edge. He
settled, stiff and uncomfortable. "Relax, Fraser." I rolled over, wincing,
and snuggled my pillow. "Thanks for taking care of me."

 I didn't think he was going to answer, but just before I drifted off to
sleep, he whispered, "You're welcome, Ray."

 

 The next time Ray woke it was dusk and his head had mostly stopped
hurting. There was a slight lingering headache, but not the fierce
throbbing pain from earlier. For which he was extremely grateful. He got
up, put on his glasses and slipped on the shirt and sweats that had been
neatly folded at the foot of the bed.

 Fraser was still sound asleep, curled around himself, almost
protectively. Ray was surprised; Fraser seemed to be the type who would
sleep flat on his back, straight as a board and twice as stiff. Ray was
the opposite; he tended to sprawl into whatever available space there was,
usually starfishing in the middle of the bed. It had pissed off Stella
more than once.

 He pulled the quilt up and made sure that Fraser would stay warm before
wandering off to find the bathroom. It took two tries. The first door he
opened was for a closet, which seemed to be filled with Fraser's various
uniforms the formal scarlet one, plus a dark brown one and a navy blue
version. He touched the rough wool of the iconic red serge and tried to
imagine Fraser wearing it.

 There was something vaguely erotic about the thought of Fraser in the
uniform. Ray stroked the fabric, petting it like he would a cat. It was
rough against his fingers, a little itchy. He imagined that the texture
would be a constant reminderit would be hard to forget you were wearing
it.

 Leaning into the closet a little, he sniffed at the uniform, the
intoxicating combination of wool and sweat and Fraser smells making his
mouth water. He rested his face against the uniform and wondered how hard
he'd been hit in the head. He was getting turned on by Fraser's uniform
and he was sure that was against RCMP regulations.

 Ray opened the second door and stepped into the small bathroom. He
pissed, flushed, washed his hands and splashed some water onto his face,
trying to shake off the sluggishness that was threatening to overwhelm
him. His stomach grumbled and he realized that some food might help.

 Peering into the darkened hallway, Ray hesitated. As bad as his eyes
were, he was liable to trip over something and crack his head open, again.
He ducked back into the bedroom and grabbed the old-fashioned oil-filled
lantern that Fraser had left on the bedside table.

 

 I shut the bedroom door behind me, lit the lantern and lowered the wick.
It took a minute for my eyes to adjust to the warm glow. Looking around, I
found myself in a carpeted hallway, a pretty, elegant one. The walls were
wood-paneled, with high ceilings, and there was what looked to be a
hand-carved wooden banister. About what I would have expected a Canadian
consulate to look like.

 What I didn't expect were the books. There were books everywhere.
Paperbacks, hardbacks, textbooks, new books, antique books; all of them
lining the hallway, piled on the floor to Ray-height and higher. Books and
books and books.

 I looked over the railing on the stairs and could see nothing but books.
There was a pathway, like a river had cut through the bedrock of books,
leading to other parts of the Consulate. It was a narrow path, one person
wide. If I wasn't careful, I could knock over a mountain of books, start a
landslide and be crushed. Fraser wouldn't ever find my body; I would
petrify over the years into a lasting monument to clumsiness.

 

 As an officer of the law, Ray had seen a lot of strange things during his
career. Chicago had been a city with its fair share of crazy people in it.
He'd seen a fellow officer savaged by a pack of chihuahuas. He'd caught
this guy who had been breaking into people's houses and stocking their
pantries with food. He'd spent a week tracking down a counterfeiter who'd
been printing fifteen dollar bills and couldn't figure out why she'd
gotten caught.

 And once, Ray had come across a compulsive hoarder, someone who couldn't
bear to throw anything away. This guy, Mitch, had barricaded himself in
his house by piling all of his junk in front of the front and back doors;
the only way in had been through a small door in the garage. Inside the
house, Mitch had piled all of the useless stuff he'd actively collected
over the past twenty years. The only rooms that could be used were the
bathroom and the kitchen, and there was a twisty little pathway between
them.

 This reminded Ray of that. Instead of sewing machines, newspapers,
cardboard boxes, rakes, umbrellas, pianos and bowling balls, Fraser
collected books. Everywhere they'd gone, he'd gathered all the books he'd
seen, like a squirrel collecting nuts for a long winter.

 Fraser had talked about preserving mankind's knowledge, but Ray had a
suspicion that this went far beyond that.

 

 I scrounged a pretty decent dinner in Fraser's book-cramped kitchena
couple of homemade soy tortillas, some leftover goat kebabs I found in his
fridge and a sapodilla for dessert. I washed it down with the solitary
home-brew I'd found and belched contentedly while pondering the mysteries
of Fraser's freakishness.

 There was a door in back of the kitchen, and curiosity drove me to see
what was behind it.

 The Consulate had a walled courtyard in the back. Made of reinforced
cinder blocks, stretching twelve feet high, with coils of concertina wire
barricading the top. It seemed a little excessive until I saw the tomato
plants swaying in the night breeze. Oh. Fraser had his own little garden
back here. No wonder he'd strung up the concertina wire. If he hadn't, the
garden would be picked bare every night.

 

 New foods composed of artificially created, single-celled organisms
filled in some of the niches left empty once the wheat and corn and oats
had finally died off. Genetically modified algae, phytoplankton and yeasts
were engineered to grow quickly in the poorest of environments with little
labor. It was cheap and easy and it kept many people from starvation.

 As the climate changed and plants either adapted or died, new crops were
introduced. Foods that had been rarely seen in the United States outside
of ethic food stores became widely accepted and cultivated where possible.
Fruit and vegetable species came up from the warmer climes of the south,
following new trade routes and a demand for new flavors.

 Sapodillas were small brown furry fruits that tasted a lot like caramel.
They were originally from Central America, but were hardy and slightly
frost tolerant, and grew well in the southern states. They were popular
and in high demand. Breadfruit had become a common sight, as had nopales,
sunchokes, burdock and manioc. Exotic fruits were no longer exotic;
lychee, jakfruit, black sapote and Mexican breadfruit were all easily
found in local markets.

 Alternatives to the now-extinct wheat and oats sprung up and what had
once been relegated to proponents of 'natural food' was now mainstream.
Amaranth, kamut, millet, quinoa and teff were the grains used by most
people on a regular basis. Potato, soy and nut flours were still widely
added to recipes, especially those for baked goods.

 It wasn't the same. But after the Smash, there hadn't really been much of
a choice.

 

 Eventually, I realized that it was useless to try to figure out how
Fraser's mind worked. And in the long run, it really didn't matter. Crazy,
sane, or somewhere in between, he was my best friend. My partner. And I
wasn't going to let him go because he had an obsession with books.

 There was no doubt in my mind that Fraser had problems. Big problems.
Problems that would probably take a professional therapist years to sort
through. Abandonment issues. Perfection issues. Neurotic tendencies.
Compulsive behaviors.

 Very few people could say that they didn't have problems. I certainly
couldn't, not with a straight face, and I'd gone to a counselor for years
before, during and after the divorce. Not that it had helped, in the long
run...

 Suddenly, I was exhausted and my head still hurt. Time to go back to bed
and try to get some more rest.

 

 Fraser was awake when Ray crept back into the bedroom. He watched with
shadowed eyes as Ray stripped off the sweats and shirt, then crawling back
into the bed. Ray had gotten a little chilled, so he squirmed up against
Fraser, trying to steal some of his warmth. Fraser radiated heat like the
sun had Before the Smash.

 Carefully, unsure of his reception, Ray draped his arm over Fraser's side
and rested his hand on Fraser's flat belly, trying to ignore how tense
Fraser was. He moved closer until he could bury his nose in the soft hair
at the nape of Fraser's neck, inhaling his scent.

 Feeling a shiver run down Fraser's body, Ray closed his eyes and relaxed
against him. He could feel the slow flush of arousal that being so near to
Fraser always woke in him, shortening his breath, hardening his cock,
making him want.

 "Ray" Fraser's voice was rough and hoarse, like he hadn't talked in a
long time. "I need"

 Ray rubbed at Fraser's belly. "What do you need, Fraser?"

 "I'm so tired of being alone." The admission was quiet and hesitant. "I
need, I need" Fraser grabbed Ray's hand and pulled it down, down to his
erection, wrapping Ray's fingers around it. He sighed as Ray squeezed
firmly.

 Ray let go of Fraser's cock and tugged at the waistband of his boxers.
"Take this off." Fraser squirmed and twisted to comply. It turned Ray on,
how much Fraser wanted Ray to touch him. Ray pulled down his own shorts
and pressed close.

 "You need this?" Ray asked, slowly stroking Fraser's dick while mouthing
the back of his neck. Fraser's skin tasted salty against his tongue, and
it roused a thirst in him for more. "Tell me what you need and I'll give
it to you, Fraser."

 Fraser moaned, so softly, and shifted forward into Ray's hand, then back
against Ray's dick. "I needharder," he whispered, "harder, please
andfaster, faster..."

 Ray could do harder, but he wanted to draw this out, make Fraser feel so
good. Faster was for back-alley fuck sessions and gropes in filthy
bathroom stalls. This was so much more than that and Ray didn't want to
rush it.

 "Ssssh. What's your rush, hmmm?" He slowed his hand down and lightened
his touch while continuing to explore Fraser's ear, tracing the curves
with his tongue. "We've got all the time in the world, Fraser. You got
somewhere else to be?"

 Shaking his head, Fraser bit at his lip. "Nooo."

 "You sure? 'Cause we can do this some other time." Ray stopped moving,
just held Fraser's cock in his hand, feeling the faint heartbeat racing
just under the skin. It was sexy and it made Ray all kinds of hard. He let
go, pulling Fraser's leg back over his and slid even closer.

 Fraser had automatically reached down to replace Ray's hand on his
erection with one of his own, and Ray clicked his tongue reprovingly at
him. "Don't, Fraser. I'll give you what you need, trust me."

 

 And he did trust me. I could feel it in his body as he let go of his
control, some subtle slippage of the tension as he gave himself over to
me. One broad hand flailed upwards to grab at the headboard, holding
tight. I curled my hand around his, helping him hold onto the wooden slat.
His other hand buried itself in the sheets, fisting the fabric. He was
desperate, panting, his cock hard and eager. He was having a hard time
keeping still, and his body was shivering and twisting, searching for
more.

 He was beautiful.

 I ran my free hand over his hip and down the long muscles of this thigh,
feeling the roughness of my palm catch on the sparse hair, amazed at how
solid Fraser was. I enjoyed the play of muscles under my fingers and he
flexed his leg, urging me wordlessly to continue touching him. "More?" I
asked, retracing my path up toward his waist.

 I was starting to think that this was one of my favorite parts of his
body, the dip of Fraser's hip, the long glide of his flank. I dragged my
fingernails lightly back and forth, smiling at the goosebumps and shiver
that elicited.

 "Ray, please"

 I could feel how tightly Fraser's hand held onto the headboard. "What do
you need, Fraser?" I whispered into his ear. I adjusted my dick so I was
resting against his hole, making tiny thrusting motions. "You need me to
touch you? You need my mouth?" I nipped at his shoulder, and laid my palm
flat against his stomach, urging him back against me.

 I couldn't get any closer and we were both sweaty and slick. I rocked
against him, a strange, arousing parody of penetration, listening to him
moan and gasp. I reached up and pinched his nipple, a little harder than I
intended.

 "Ray! Oh, god, please"

 Figures that Fraser would have a bit of a pain kink. Well, dirty talk was
my kink. "You like that, hmm?" I kept my voice low and intimate, letting
the words vibrate along his nerves, and mine. "What else do you like,
Fraser? You want me to spank you?" I had to bite my lip at the surge of
arousal that image sent through me. I hitched his thigh a little higher,
exposing his cock completely to me.

 "I can do that," I whispered as I cradled his balls in my hand, tugging
on them gently. "Flip you over my knee, smack your ass until it's red and
hot, until you're squirming, rubbing your dick against me like a dog in
heat...you want me to do that to you?"

 Fraser keened softly in his throat and I could feel the tension in his
body growing. He was panting like he'd run a long marathon and his eyes
were squeezed shut. I could tell he was on the verge of begging me to do
something, anything.

 I thrust my cock against his ass, gasping at the friction. "Or I could
fuck you. Push you over, hold your hands down and fuck you hard, pounding
into you over and over, fast and hard and"

 Fraser froze, breathless. "Ray"

 I grabbed his dick and stroked hard, once, twice and he was gone, crying
out like it hurt, shivering and twitching and sobbing. I gentled my hand
but continued to rub against his ass, breathing hard, moving closer to my
own orgasm. I closed my eyes to feel everything better: the hot slide of
skin against skin, the sound of my panting, the thundering of my heart,
Fraser's voice whispering my name, over and over.

 He rocked back against me, a counter-rhythm that pushed me to the edge. I
could feel it starting, the electric prickle curling my toes and arching
my back, the rush of blinding sensation washing over me, drowning me,
pulling me under

 

 They had both fallen into a post-coital sleep, deep and dreamless.

 Fraser woke the next morning at his accustomed time and reluctantly
climbed out of bed. He went into the bathroom and shut the door quietly,
trying not to wake Ray, who was still healing and could use some more
rest.

 Looking in the mirror, he was surprised to see the signs of last night's
passionate activities so visible on his body. His hair stuck up in
sweat-stiffened, unruly tufts. He had a reddish rash on his neck that had
to be stubble burn. On his right shoulder he found several bite marks and
his lips looked swollen. Perspiration and semen had dried on his belly and
chest and back and he stank. He looked wanton anddepraved.

 It was so different from how he was accustomed to seeing himself. After a
moment's thought, he decided he liked it. He liked the idea of being
marked, of belonging to someone, of being wanted.

 Fraser was glad that Dief couldn't see him; he'd never hear the end of it
from him. Dief had insisted some time ago that Ray was interested in a
relationship with him but Fraser had refused to give credence to the
thought. He could already hear Dief's 'I told you so.'

 He cleaned up quickly and went downstairs to make some breakfast, leaving
Ray buried under the quilt, snoring quietly.

 

 The smell of cooking woke me up. I stretched and yawned, feeling pretty
good for a guy who'd gotten bashed in the head not too long ago. Of
course, getting laid always helped. I washed up in Fraser's bathroom,
using the antique pitcher and wash basin he had.

 I put on the clean clothes Fraser left for me and wondered if he had a
stash of Ray-sized clothes hidden away somewhere. As long as I didn't have
to do laundry, I was happy.

 Following my nose, I wandered toward the kitchen. The windows were
boarded up and barred, but the top few inches were clear, allowing the
light to shine in. The place looked even more depressing in the light of
day. Just books, books and more books, dusty and old and stacked like a
free-form sort of library.

 There was nothing personal here, nothing to indicate that Fraser lived
here, had lived here for a number of years. No photos or knick-knacks or
treasured possessions scavenged from the wreckage of a past life and
proudly displayed. Just the books, and scattered about, some homemade
candles he probably got from Siobhan, who raised bees on her rooftop two
streets over.

 Nothing to mark the life of a man who had dedicated his life to duty,
first to his country, then to humanity. Nothing to show of the
intelligent, lonely man who'd been given so little in life and yet
deserved so much.

 I wanted to give him everything. Everything he'd missed in life the warm,
familiar comfort of family, the close affection of friendship, the
rock-solid certainty of a partnership. I would give him everything I
could, if he'd let me.

 

 Ray found Fraser in the kitchen chatting with Dief and making duck-egg
omelets. Chickens hadn't done very well after the Smash; something had
changed and they were having a hard time surviving. Their numbers were
slowly dwindling and someday, not too far in the future, they would be
gone forever.

 Domesticated ducks, on the other hand, seemed to have no problems at all.
They survived and thrived and quacked their way into any number of recipes
that had previously called for chicken. They laid large, tasty eggs which
were more flavorful than chicken eggs had ever been.

 It had been so long since Ray had eaten chicken that he wasn't entirely
sure he remembered how it tasted.

 Walking over to Fraser, he hugged him briefly and kissed the side of his
temple before sitting down at the tiny kitchen table. He accidentally
elbowed some books which fell to the floor. "Oops, sorry." Ray leaned down
and picked them up, glancing at the bright covers and restacking them.

 "Good morning, Ray. I hope you like omelets." With a practiced flick of
his wrist, Fraser flipped the omelet over like a fancy chef would.

 He inhaled deeply, his mouth watering. "Yeah, omelets are great. Can I
help?"

 "No, thank you, Ray, I'moh. Actually, could you pick a couple of tomatoes
from the garden? If you just go through the door there" Fraser pointed
with his chin.

 Ray grinned at him. "Yeah, I saw it last night. I was curious. How many
you want? Two?"

 "Two should be sufficient," he said, smiling back. "Dief doesn't like
tomatoes."

 "'kay." Ray opened the door, letting in sunshine and a gentle breeze.
"It's a beautiful day."

 

 I stepped out into the garden. It really was a beautiful day. For a
moment, the shining sun made me think that the Smash was just a figment of
my imagination, some scary nightmare dreamed up in some broken corner of
my mind.

 

 Fraser's garden was neat and orderly and weed-free, broken down into
little square plots of different plants. Ray hadn't gardened in years, not
since he and Stella had lived in that tiny apartment with all the window
boxes, and even then all they'd grown were fresh herbs: basil, oregano,
mint and thyme.

 Ray's mother had gardened, whenever she'd had the space, so Ray could
still recognize a lot of the plants that Fraser had growing. Some he
couldn't even guess what they werethey were probably some of the newer
vegetables. He could identify the tomatoes, lettuce and eggplants and bell
peppers. Some kind of bush bean and broccoli. Strawberry plants on a tiny
terraced hill and raspberry brambles in the corner. Or maybe blackberries.
He went closer for a better look; he loved raspberries.

 He studied the upright, bushy canes, noticing the wicked-looking thorns.
He couldn't tell for sure what kind of berry plants they were. Shrugging,
he was about to go find some tomatoes when he caught a glimpse of
something on the ground behind the bushes. A piece of concrete or stone,
rectangular in shape.

 It reminded Ray of a gravestone.

 Kneeling, Ray shoved aside some canes, trying to get a better view. "Ow!"
He got caught on a thorn and it scratched, drawing blood. Sucking on his
bleeding finger, he pushed more carefully and managed to clear a big
enough space for him to examine the stone.

 DIEFENBAKER

 friend and loyal companion

 December 1996

 "Oh, Fraser."

 He slumped to sit on the ground, numb. Mourning for Diefenbaker, and
Fraser. Dief had been gone for almost six years. A long, long time for
Fraser to be alone, struggling to survive in a changed world.

 

 I sat there in the warm sunshine, wondering if Dief's death had been the
last straw, the breaking point of Fraser's sanity, after every other
shitty thing that had happened in his life. The brutal murder of his
mother by a family friend, and later his father's death due to the greed
and corruption within the ranks of the RCMP.

 His first, unforgettable lovethe woman he'd tracked through a blizzard
and had fallen in love with as they'd huddled close together on a
mountainside, waiting for death. Fraser's heart had balked at turning her
in, but his honor and sense of justice had not. His last memory of her was
the look of betrayal on her pale face as his brother-officer took her
away.

 Exile from his cold, wintry home. And then the Smash, an uncountable
number of dead and twice as many suffering through the aftermath. With the
future of the human race still hanging in the balance.

 It would have been enough to send a majority of people off the deep end.
And it had. A lot of people had lost it, just...snapped and ran screaming
into the night. Or sank into a deep depression that ended with a strong
rope and a kicked-over chair. Some people just retreated further and
further from reality, ghosting into a catatonic state, lost forever. The
end of the world hadn't been a pleasant experience and most people had
been hard pressed to survive it, let alone deal with it rationally.

 I understood the feeling. Some days when I woke up, it was a fight to
push myself out of bed. I'd think about pulling the covers over my head
and just sleeping the rest of my life away, warm and comfortable. If I
could ignore the world, maybe it would go away.

 Other times, usually nights when I'd been drinking alone and mourning my
life Before the Smash, I thought about killing myself. Who would miss me,
after all? Stella was lost to me, my family was deadmy parents and my
brother had been in Yuma when a swarm of tornadoes had devastated the
area. I had some friends, some acquaintances, and on a couple of rare
occasions, a lover. But no one who would really miss me when I was gone.

 I would ask myself, What do you have to live for? What is there in your
life that makes it worthwhile to get out of bed every fucking day? I never
had an answer, could never point to the one thing that made my life worth
living, but I figured as long as the answer wasn't nothing, then I was
okay.

 Now, Fraser was in my life. And that changed everything for me.

 

 Fraser was surprised when Ray didn't come back from the garden after a
short while. Surely it didn't take that long to harvest some tomatoes. He
asked Dief to check on Ray, but Dief refused, saying he had other, more
important things to do as he flounced out of the kitchen, tail held high.

 Ray was so lost in thought that he didn't hear the kitchen door open,
didn't hear Fraser call his name, didn't hear Fraser walk up behind him
where he sat on the grass.

 "Ray, what are you" Fraser looked between Ray and Dief's gravestone, pale
as death in the strong light. "What" He shook his head, dazed, and started
to back away from Ray. "I" Fraser turned away from the pity he knew he'd
see in Ray's eyes, heading back to the safety of the Consulate.

 

 "It must have been hard, being on your own. The two of you had been
together for a long, long time." Fraser stopped in his tracks, his broad
back to me. I could see his shoulders rising and falling rapidly as he
fought to keep himself under control. "He was just a pup when you found
him, wasn't he?"

 I got up and limped carefully over to him, reaching out and touching his
arm. He was shaking, trembling with the effort of holding back. He was
about to explode and the only thing I could do was hold on and try to keep
him together.

 "C'mere." He tried to turn away, to hide, but I wouldn't let him. There
was a brief struggle as I attempted to hug him while he tried to hide his
tears, but his heart wasn't in it. I pulled him close, pushing his face
into the hollow of my shoulder and laid a kiss on his ear. "It's okay,
Fraser."

 He shuddered, a strangled sound escaping from his throat.

 "It's okay," I crooned, "it's gonna be okay." I held him tight, as tight
as I could, running my fingers through his silky hair and rubbing at the
back of his neck, feeling the knotted muscles there.

 

 Fraser and Diefenbaker had been lucky. They'd made it through the Smash
and the terrible events after it mostly intact. Shaken and disturbed,
maybe, but unhurt and alive. Their apartment building on Racine had been
structurally damaged by one of the many strange earthquakes that had
rumbled through Chicago after the Smash and so they had moved into the
Consulate with Inspector Thatcher and Constable Turnbull for safety.

 They had expected a short disruption as the American government got back
onto its feet, bruised, damaged, but unbroken. It wouldn't be long, they
had assumed, until everything was back to normal. Instead, the country had
floundered under the weight of confusion and fear, a different voice
speaking for the government-in-absentia every few days.

 They had huddled by the radio, listening to reports of food and water
riots, of coup d'etats and political assassinations around the globe, of
virulent diseases and inexplicable events. Horrified, they had listened as
a series of tsunami surged inland seven miles and more against the Pacific
coast, sweeping everything in its path out to sea. By the time an
unprecedented volcano erupted under Lisbon, Portugal, growing several
hundred meters high in a matter of weeks and choking the Tagus River with
molten lava, they had been numb and detached.

 Inspector Thatcher had insisted on trying to get back to Canada before
things got any worse; Turnbull had been honor-bound to accompany her.
Fraser had thought about joining them, but Diefenbaker had seemed listless
and off-color. It hadn't seemed to be an ideal time to be traveling.

 Instead, Fraser had promised Inspector Thatcher and Turnbull that as soon
as Dief was feeling better they would close up the Consulate and head
toward Canada. The Inspector had taken him aside and pointed out that
sooner was better than later; things were only going to get worse as time
went on. She'd shaken his hand, told him that it'd been a privilege to
work with him and wished him luck before ushering Turnbull out the door.

 He never heard from them again.

 

 I guided him to the steps by the door, and pushed him down to sit. I
pulled at his rigid body until he gave up and leaned against me, trusting
me to hold him up and to not let him fall.

 He tried to speak, but his voice cracked and broke. He cleared his throat
and wiped his damp face with shaking hands before trying again. "Dief had
seemed sickhe hadn't been eating very much and his energy levels were
down, but when I asked him, he said he was a little depressed and he'd be
fine. He was snappish about the whole subject, so I respected his privacy
on the matter."

 Fraser paused and tried to gather his thoughts. I kept one arm around his
shoulders and grabbed his hand with mine, holding onto him, trying to keep
him anchored in the here-and-now.

 "A week later, Diefenbaker asked me to leave for Canada without him. I
scolded him, told him he was being ridiculous, we would go together. We
were partners, a pack..." Fraser choked on a sob and buried his face
against my neck. "He started getting progressively worse over the next
week. He couldn't keep any food down, he didn't even have the energy to
get up. Dief started having problems breathing and I used the phone book
to try to track down a veterinarian." Fraser's voice was starting to
wobble and he was having breathing problems of his own.

 I could feel Fraser's tears soaking into my shirt. " Ssshh. Easy," I
whispered. "Deep breaths, Fraser."

 He did as I told him, concentrating on slowly inhaling, then exhaling.
"The two that I'd managed to find were busy with sick and dying people. No
one had time to examine a sick half-wolf. Dief kept urging me to leave him
behind, to go to Canada now, before it was too late."

 Fraser shuddered as I rubbed his back slowly, soothingly. "In less than a
week he was gone. I was alone. II think I went a little mad, then." He
paused and tried to collect his composure.

 

 Fraser lost about six months to his grief. He had no conscious memories
of that time.

 He woke in someone else's bed, in someone else's underwear, bearded,
filthy and terribly thin. He didn't know where he was or how he got there.

 Eventually, he got up and explored the tiny apartment he found himself
in. Fraser picked his way carefully through the debris on the floormostly
empty tin cans of food and boxes of dog biscuits. He headed toward what he
guessed was the bathroom, but the smell of raw sewage made him stop and
reassess his options.

 He found some pants, a shirt and shoes that almost fit him and put them
on, disturbed and disgusted at his state of slovenliness. Even when on
long patrols back in the Territories, he'd never let himself get this
repulsive.

 "Dief, come!" The words were out of his mouth before he could think about
it and it was a moment before the sorrow stole his breath away. "Oh,
damn."

 

 After that, I managed to bully him back into bed, silencing his protests
with a glare and a kiss.

 I cuddled him close, wrapped myself around him, pulled the covers up over
our heads and hummed a lullaby my mum had sung to me as a child.

 "Ju ci nigdy nie uwierz lskiereczko maa. Najpierw byniesz, potem ganiesz,

 Ot i bajka caa."

 Hush! Wojtu won't believe you anymore, little ember. You flicker but for
a moment, then you die.

 And that's the whole fairy tale.

 It was an eerily appropriate song for what had happened to the human
race. We'd shone so brightly, only to end up here, lurching to an awkward
stop at the edge of a long drop. I still wasn't sure if we were going to
tip over or not. Some days, the sheer will-to-live that echoed and
resonated from the people in the world was so loud you could almost taste
it, feel it vibrate across your skin.

 Other days, all you could see was gray despair and hopelessness, people
too tired to even lay down and die.

 Before long, Fraser's breathing slowed and he relaxed into sleep. I
touched his hair, traced a dark eyebrow and let myself drift.

 

 The next few weeks were uneventful. Ray had discovered a small farm that
had been inhabited by a survivalist family out in Palos Park and he spent
a lot of time bringing back boxes of MREs and high energy food bars, water
purification tablets, antibiotics, painkillers, basic first aid supplies,
thermal blankets, light sticks, emergency radios, fire starters, camp
shovels, chemical toilets and best of all, books.

 He argued with Fraser about it, a little, because this wasn't literature,
this wasn't the New York Times Bestseller List, these were books written
by crackpots survivalists who had actually been right about something for
once.

 How To Survive When Technology Fails. Gardening During Hard Times. Being
Prepared For Any Crisis. Planning For Retreat. The Total Book For
Self-Sufficiency. Water Storage After The Fall of Civilization. Living
Contentedly Off The Grid. Basic Butchering Techniques. Wilderness
Medicine.

 An entire set of bookcases dedicated to books on how to survive something
like the Smash.

 Ray could take these books down to the University. There was a group of
people there, mostly what Ray used to call bleeding-heart-do-gooder types,
who maintained a bank of working photocopy machines. They'd take useful
books like these, photocopy them and then distribute them to people who
could use the information, free of charge.

 

 "What, you thought I'd sell this stuff at the Market or something?" I
lifted another box of books into the small trailer attached to the Jeep.
"I'm not a total asshole, you know."

 Fraser looked shame-faced. "I'm sorry, Ray. I didn't mean to imply"

 "S'okay, buddy. I don't you didn't." I sighed, and swiped at the sweat
trickling down the back of my neck. "Just, sometimes, it doesn't seem like
I do enough to help..." I trailed off, biting my lip. "Sometimes it just
feels hopeless, like we're circling around the drain..."

 He pulled me into a rough hug, burying his nose behind my ear. When I'd
first met him, Fraser had been starved for affection, both physical and
emotional. He'd probably been going without for most of his life. It'd
taken a few weeks of me sharing his life and his bed before he finally
realized he could touch me whenever he wanted, that touching me was
expected and appreciated and normal.

 I pulled out the picture I'd found tacked up next to the bookcase and
looked at itmom, dad, three beautiful kids of various ages. We hadn't
found any sign of them in the house, or in any of the out-buildings. Did
they survive the Smash, only to succumb to any one of the many disasters
that had followed? "What do you think happened to them? Do you think they
made it?"

 Fraser wouldn't look at me, just stared into the distance beyond my
shoulder. "Human beings have an amazing capacity for survival," he finally
said.

 I sighed. "You're preveripervari"

 "Prevaricating?"

 "Yeah, that." I studied the smiling family in the picture again, before
sliding it back into the pocket with Stella's picture. "Sometimes I wonder
what I'm doing, why I'm still here in Chicago. Sometimes I think I should
just hop in the Jeep, hit the road and see where it takes me."

 "Why don't you, Ray? There's nothing holding you to Chicagono family,
just friends and acquaintances."

 I stared at him in disbelief. I couldn't understand how he didn't know,
how he couldn't see what was right in front of his nose. "Fraser, I love
you."

 "Oh." His voice was small and unsure and he certainly didn't look
convinced of my sincerity. After a moment, he replied with a hesitant,
"And I you, Ray."

 I kissed him, trying to show him with actions how much he meant to me.
I'd show him more later, when we got home.

 

 Later that month, they'd run into some trouble and Ray had ended up
splattered in bio-sludge, which displeased him enormously. They went back
to the Consulate where over the course of an hour they boiled enough water
to fill up the bathtub. Once the tub was filled, Ray peeled off his
clothes and climbed in, relaxing into his first real bath in what seemed
like forever.

 While Ray was busy in the bathroom, Fraser carefully picked up the ruined
clothes, emptying the pockets of all the flotsam that Ray tended to
collect, then tossing them outside. With some effort, he might be able to
salvage something out of the clothes.

 He sorted through the contents of Ray's pockets and paused to examine the
picture of Stella that Ray always carried. He'd never shown it to Fraser
and Fraser had been afraid to ask. Too often it seemed like Ray was still
very much in love with his ex-wife.

 The picture was old, blurry, scratched and faded. Judging by Ray's
extremely youthful appearance and the clothes he was wearing, it looked
like it'd been taken while he was still in his late teens. He had his arm
comfortably around the waist of petite blonde girl who looked up at him,
laughing.

 She was beautiful and that hit him like a punch in the gut. Fraser hadn't
been expecting that and as he looked at the picture, he tried to see what
Ray saw in her, searched for the qualities beyond physical attractiveness
that had captured his attention, and his devotion.

 She had a pretty smile and long, straight hair and as Fraser tried to
imagine what she'd look like today, an unpleasant certainty settled into
the pit of his stomach. He'd been introduced to her once, a long time ago,
before the end of the world.

 Ray Vecchio had met, wooed and married Stella shortly before the Smash
and she had died with him not long after, both of them victims of some new
virulent strain of what Fraser had later deducted from the symptoms to be
cholera. It had been fast.

 Francesca, disheveled and in shock, had instinctively gone to the
Consulate for help. There'd been no one else to turn toshe and Ray had
been the last of the Vecchio clan and now Ray was gone.

 Fraser had awkwardly patted Francesca's shoulder, made her some tea and
had eventually taken her back to the Vecchio residence to help her bury
the bodies. The two of them had collapsed in the backyard afterwards,
exhausted and lost, the tear-tracks cutting through the dirt smeared on
their faces.

 They'd had no time to mourn for Ray, or his beautiful wife. They'd been
too busy trying to survive.

 

 When I finally felt clean enough to get out of the bathtub, Fraser was
gone. He'd left me some stew, rabbit by the smell of it, and a note about
needing to run a few errands. I shrugged and ate the food, scavenging some
weird-ass bread from the old-fashioned bread box Fraser kept on the
kitchen counter. The bread was chewy and nutty and not half bad. Made from
amaranth, maybe.

 I stood in Fraser's kitchen, barefoot and damp, and felt content for the
first time in a long while. The emptiness in my chest, the cold and
loneliness I'd felt since me and Stella had gone our separate ways, was
missing.

 It made me smile for a moment.

 And then the stew I'd eaten turned into a hard lump in my stomach. I
remembered that every time life seemed to be going well something would
come along and knock me on my ass. Please, I thought, please don't take
this away from me.

 

 Fraser arrived back at the Consulate a while later, accompanied by a pale
and subdued Frannie. They found Ray in front of the building working on
the Jeep, loud curses and metallic clanking noises coming from under the
hood.

 "Ray?"

 Ray straightened, wiping his grease-stained hands on a rag he kept
stashed in his back pocket. "Fraser." He turned to Frannie and smiled.
"Hey, Fran, how are you doing?" He automatically hugged her and pulled
back at the tension in her body, the subtle flinch away from his touch.
Looking down, Ray noticed that tell-tale traces of tears on her face.
"What's wrong?"

 "Oh, Ray, I so sorryplease don't be mad at me"

 She burst into tears and Ray hugged her close, rubbing her back
soothingly. "It's okay, Frannie. It's okay." He glanced at Fraser, who
looked sad and...afraid. "What's going on?"

 Fraser took a deep breath, bracing himself. "Francesca has information
about your ex-wife that she needs to share with you."

 Ray tightened his arms around the weeping woman in his arms and met
Fraser's gaze. "Christ. She's dead, isn't she?"

 Fraser could only nod, slowly.

 He pushed Francesca away and stared down into her face. "Why didn't you
tell me before? I showed you her picture, talked about her" Ray's voice
was hard, unforgiving. Frannie just looked at him miserably. "Take me to
her," he demanded.

 

 I slammed the hood of the Jeep shut, gathered up my tools and threw them
back into the tool box. Both Frannie and Fraser watched me wide-eyed, like
they were expecting me to explode at any moment.

 "Get in."

 They both scrambled to obey, which in any other situation would have been
funny. Frannie sat between us, unnaturally quiet while Fraser gave
directions.

 Twenty minutes later I pulled up to a two-story house in what used to be
a solid, middle-class neighborhood. The grass had grown wild, knee high
and weedy, but the house was still in pretty good shape, just showing its
years a little around the edges. It was the kind of house that was perfect
for an extended family.

 My parents had lived in a house like this the first few years they were
married, living with my paternal grandparents in an effort to save money
up to buy their own place. My uncles Józef and Stanisaw, their wives and
kids and widowed cousin Anna, plus me and my brother. I remember visiting
there when I was older; the house had echoed with boisterous Polish
voices, laughter and love. Not just a house, but a home.

 I'd bet that this house had been like that, Before the Smash. Instead of
bigos and pierogi cooking on the stove, it would have been minestrone and
stuffed cannelloni. Basta! and Sta zitto! rather than Na zdrowie! and
Samknij si! I knew this house, this home, because I'd spent a lot of my
childhood in one just like it.

 Fraser and Frannie sat watching me as I studied the house. "Show me," I
said again, calmer this time. I could feel a strange numbness creeping
over me, sucking all the warmth and hope from my heart.

 They took me to her.

 The backyard, like the front, was overgrown. There was an old, rusty
swing set and a picnic table. A typical yard, designed for giggling
children to play tag in. Mostly wide open, only a stray bush or two to
break up the space.

 Frannie had picked a nice spot for Stella's grave, back toward the corner
under a blooming lilac tree. Next to Stella was her husband, her second
husband, Ray Vecchio. I had heard all about him from Fraser, who'd been
his partner, and his friend the whole time Fraser had been in Chicago.
According to Fraser's stories, the ones he'd shared during meals and while
we'd explored the ruins of the city, Ray Vecchio had been instrumental in
helping Fraser catch the killers of his father, the killers whose trail
he'd followed to Chicago.

 Fraser had told me once that the only reason he'd managed to survive here
in the city was because of Ray Vecchio. He'd also told me, hushed as we'd
laid in bed, that the memory of Ray Vecchio had been one of the reasons
he'd stayed in Chicago, after the Smash. He wanted to help make a
difference in the city that Ray had loved so much.

 

 Ray sat down in the grass next to the grave, silent and somber, Stella's
picture gripped tightly in his hand. Fraser and Francesca retreated to the
picnic table to wait, and to give him some privacy during what had to be a
difficult time.

 "He's never going to forgive me, is he, Fraser?" He had given Frannie his
handkerchief and she nervously twisted it in her hands, winding it between
her graceful fingers before pulling it free to start over again.

 Fraser looked out at Ray, shoulders hunched, arms wrapped around his long
legs, grieving. "I think, deep in his heart, he's known for a while that
she was gone. He wasn't ready to admit it yet."

 Francesca choked back a sob. "I just didn't want to hurt him more"

 Hugging her awkwardly, he sighed. "I know, Francesca. I know."

 

 "Hey, Stella." My voice was rough. "I miss you. You know that, right?"

 I remembered the day I asked her to marry me, my palms sweating and
nervousness crawling across my skin, making me twitchy. The serious look
on her face as she weighed the pros and cons of taking on a Polak loser
with a bad hair cut.

 I remembered her smile when she said 'yes' and how it'd made me
light-headed and shaky. She'd made me sit and shoved my head down between
my knees, laughing and crying and hugging me tight.

 I remembered how angry she was the first time she'd had to strike a deal
and cut loose a low-life career criminal because the D.A. had bigger fish
to fry. And I remembered holding her while she wept when the same low-life
criminal robbed a convenience store and killed the Nigerian owner, who'd
left behind a devastated husband and two kids.

 I remembered when she said the words I hadn't wanted to hear and how much
it had hurt: "I can't do this anymore, Ray. I want a divorce."

 So many memories, a lifetime of them. It was time to set them aside, the
painful edges worn smooth by time and constant handling. Pack them
carefully away in a box, mark the box 'done' and get on with my life.

 I looked at the photo of us as teenagers, and bit my lip, hard, as my
eyes started to tear up. "I hope he made you happy, baby doll."

 

 The trip back was silent. They left Frannie behind and she watched them
drive away, framed by her childhood home and quietly fading memories.

 Ray drove back to the warehouse automatically, wanting the comfort of the
familiar. He was hurting inside. His family was gone, his Stella was dead;
all he had left was Fraser and what little bit home he'd made for himself
and right now he needed both.

 

 We were sitting at my tiny kitchen table, drinking hot spearmint tea. It
helped me relax a little, calming the nerves that had been rattled by our
visit to Stella'smy breath caught. Stella's grave.

 The power had gone out, again, and I lit a lantern to give us some light.
Maybe we would be better off in the darkness. The dark sometimes made it
easier to tell the truth.

 Fraser was silent, staring down into his teacup like he could see the
future in the tea leaves. Maybe he could.

 We sat there for a long time, lost in our own thoughts. I couldn't shake
the image of Stella's face, her sharp intelligence lighting up her eyes
and making her so beautiful.

 My Gold Coast girl. Best friend, lover, wife, better half. Soul mate, for
a time. I'd held her in my heart, loving her as best I could. She'd been
mine. A moment later and she was gone, forever out of my reach.

 I'd known she was dead, but for all these years I'd had some hope of her
surviving, somehow, somewhere. I should have known better.

 "I loved her." I heard Fraser sigh. "I meanI loved her, but I wasn't in
love with her anymore. I hadn't been in love with her for years."

 Fraser just stared down at his porcelain cup, fidgeting with it, rotating
the cup a quarter turn, again and again. His big hands made the cup look
tiny. "I see."

 I reached across the table and took his hand in mine, squeezing it.
Fraser was here, with me. Solid, warm, alive. Stella had been my past;
Fraser was my future. I just had to convince him of it. "Hey, look at me."

 I didn't think he was going to do it. He kept staring into his cup.
Slowly, he looked up, eyes shadowed and wary, like someone who was
expecting to be told 'no,' someone who'd heard 'no' too many damn times in
his life.

 "I love you, Fraser." I'd told him before, but I don't think it had
really sunk in.

 He looked shocked. "Rayyou don't have to say thatI don't expect"

 I interrupted his stuttering. "I love you." I dropped a kiss on the back
of his hand.

 There was a flush high on his cheeks and he kept looking over my
shoulder, like he couldn't meet my eyes. "Ray, I don't think you really"

 "Okay, that's it." I stood up quickly and pulled him out of his chair.
Luckily I managed to surprise him; otherwise I never would have gotten him
out of the chair. He outweighed me by a good twenty pounds and those
pounds made a big difference.

 I grabbed the lantern and pulled him toward the bed. If he
wouldn'tcouldn't believe the words, then maybe showing him would convince
him.

 All I could do was try. And keep trying until he believed it.

 

 Ray set the lantern on top of his dresser and pushed Fraser to sit down
on the edge of the bed. Kneeling, Ray untied Fraser's ancient hiking
boots, noting absently that one of the laces was getting ragged and would
need to be replaced soon. He was pretty sure he had a spare that would
work, and then he pushed away thoughts of extra laces and scuffed boots.

 He unbuttoned and stripped off Fraser's flannel shirt, and the carefully
mended undershirt beneath it, revealing the expanse of Fraser's chest, so
pale in the faint light from the lantern. His fingers briefly skated over
the visible scars, his hands followed the smooth curve of Fraser's ribs,
settling in the hollow of his waist. He leaned, laying his head against
Fraser's sternum and listening for a moment to the steady thump-thump
thump-thump of his heartbeat.

 Fraser wrapped his arms around Ray in a hug, holding him, just holding
him as the rhythm of their breathing gradually became synchronized.

 

 A duet. That's what we are, a duet, partners, two halves of a whole.
Yeah, that worked for me.

 I inhaled deeply, smelling musk and male and Fraser. It made my mouth
water. I moved my head and nuzzled at a flat nipple, sending goosebumps
racing across his skin.

 "Ray"

 "Ssshh." I moved my hands back up his sides, thumbs extended. "Let me do
this for you." I felt Fraser relax, slowly, his hands sliding back,
slipping under my shirt to rest at the waistband of my jeans, the backs of
his warm fingers just barely touching my skin.

 I dragged my palms across the muscles of his chest, rubbing against his
nipples and listening to the sound of his breathing as it got faster and
more labored. I licked them, flicked them into hardness with my tongue and
heard the gasp that Fraser tried to stifle. He was really sensitive. "You
like that?"

 He blushed. "Mmmmm."

 I grinned. "Cat got your tongue?" I cupped a hand behind his head and
drew him down, kissing him, licking at his mouth, coaxing him to open to
me. He did, and he was wet and warm and tasted of mint. I touched his
tongue with mine, stroking it then backing off to nip at his bottom lip.
"Nope, it's still there." I dove back in for another kiss, keeping it
light, teasing him by pulling back when he tried to go deeper.

 "Ray," he breathed, "please..."

 "Ssshh." I let him kiss me, and while he was distracted I let go of his
head and blindly found the button on his jeans. I flicked it open, eased
the zipper down and reached in. The fabric of his boxers was thin with age
and he was hot and hard behind the softness of cloth.

 The back of my fingers brushed against his cock and he gasped into my
mouth. I broke the kiss and went back to his nipples, the sweet-salt-sweat
taste of him making me want more. I wrapped my fingers around his dick and
slowly stroked, feeling the extra slide of his foreskin. I loved the feel
of him in my hand. I mapped out the geography of his body with my mouth,
tracing the ridge and curve of muscles with gentle bites, followed the
path of dark, soft hair with my mouth, down to where it disappeared into
his jeans.

 

 Ray reached up and pushed on Fraser's chest until he fell back against
the bed, propping himself up on his elbows to watch Ray intently. Ray
nuzzled at his bellybutton and he laughed, twisting away from the ticklish
sensation. Grabbing Fraser's hips, Ray stilled him and moved lower.

 "RayRayyou don't have toRay!" Fraser yelped as Ray nipped at him, leaving
behind a reddened mark.

 Kissing the mark, Ray mumbled, "I told you to shush." He tugged on the
waistband of the pants. "Lift up."

 Fraser flexed and arched his back a little, allowing Ray to pull his
boxers and jeans off. He wasn't totally comfortable, naked on the bed
while Ray leaned over him still fully dressed, and he blushed hotly.
"Wait, RayI"

 "Sssh."

 Unexpectedly, Fraser twisted and rolled, using his greater weight to trap
Ray under him, pressing their bodies together from chest to thigh. He
dipped his head and kissed the surprised expression off of Ray's face.
"No, Ray. It's my turn to take care of you."

 Ray opened his mouth to argue, to deny, but the truth in Fraser's blue
eyes stopped him cold. He swallowed hard and nodded, slowly. "Okay."

 "Thank you." Fraser kissed him again, humming softly when Ray opened his
mouth and let him in. Reaching up, Ray buried his hands in Fraser's hair,
loving the silky slide of the dark strands between his fingers. He twisted
his head and moaned, wanting more of the heat and wetness of Fraser's
mouth. He was addicted to the taste of him, sweet and dark and uniquely
Fraserish.

 Fraser methodically stripped Ray's clothes off, exploring the firm
muscles and golden skin, tasting with his tongue, testing texture with his
teeth. Fraser left little red marks behind in the bend of Ray's elbow,
behind his knee, on his left shoulder. He tasted every part of Ray,
intrigued by the flavors he found on the length of Ray's leg, pooled in
the dip above his buttocks, hidden by his collar bones.

 Ray had never given Fraser the opportunity to explore, had never trusted
himself enough to let go and give himself over to Fraser. Now, Fraser was
making up for lost time. There wasn't a part of Ray's body that he didn't
touch, with his mouth or his fingers. Ray couldn't hold back anymore; all
he could do was drift along helplessly in the currents of pleasure Fraser
drew from his body.

 By the time Fraser wrapped his fingers around Ray's erection, Ray was
panting and shivering, pushing into Fraser's hand. "Fraserplease"

 "Tell me what you want, what you need, Ray." That was what it always came
down to between them. Want. Need.

 Fraser's words, spoken in a rough, husky voice, sent a cascade of sparks
through Ray's body. He groaned, arching his back, searching for more
friction. "Fuck me, fuck me, fuck"

 Fraser kissed him, hard. "Roll over for me," he muttered against Ray's
mouth, coaxing him with a gentle hand on his shoulder. He reached for the
bottle of lubricant while Ray scrambled to his hands and knees. Leaning
down, he bit Ray's buttock, smiling at his yelp before soothing the bite
with another kiss.

 Opening the bottle, he carefully coated his index finger before pushing
in slowly, steadily, listening to the rhythm of Ray's breathing, keeping
an ear open for any sign of distress. He paused, waiting for Ray to relax
and open to him. "Okay?" He rubbed his cheek against Ray's sweat-slick
skin, darting out his tongue to steal a taste.

 Ray's head hung low, his hair brushing the pillow, sheets clenched
tightly in his hands. "God. Fraser." He paused, breathing fast and
shallow. "Fuck. More."

 Fraser gave him more, until Ray was rocking insistently back against his
fingers, gasping and groaning. Fraser couldn't wait any longer. He applied
the lubrication to his erection, grabbed Ray's hips and pushed steadily
into him, gritting his teeth at the heat and tightness. He bit the inside
of his cheek, trying to keep his orgasm at bay for just a little longer.

 "Oh." Ray's voice was small and shaky.

 "Ray?"

 "You're a part of me."

 Fraser wrapped his arms around Ray and hugged him. "Yes, Ray."

 "Don't leave me." He sounded lost, and a little scared.

 Fraser pulled back slowly, paused, and then moved forward again. "I
won't."

 They moved together like they were dancing, their groans and the rattling
of the bed a loud counterpoint to their rocking movements. Ray had been
reduced to single words panted out between grunts and whimpers, while
Fraser kept his eyes closed and concentrated on giving as much pleasure to
Ray as he could.

 When Ray stiffened and shook, moaning gutturally, tremors twisting his
body, Fraser let go of his tightly held control and let the pleasure wash
him away.

 

 I roused myself long enough to roll onto my side, cuddling up to Fraser's
warm body. I was exhausted and sore and as I drifted off to sleep, I could
feel Stella's presence watching over me.

 

 Fraser woke up and carefully climbed out of bed, trying not to disturb
Ray. The last couple of days had been difficult for him, and the sleep
would do him good. He still looked sad and exhausted to Fraser's eyes.
Maybe he always would. Stella had been a part of Ray's life for so long
Before the Smash

 It wasn't doing his nerves any good to dwell on such thoughts. He took a
quick sponge bath and changed into clean clothes, gathering the dirty ones
and folding them up carefully until he had a chance to wash them.

 In the kitchen, he tidied up what little mess had been made the previous
night and brewed some fresh tea for himself, enjoying the early morning
quiet.

 There was a soft scuttling sound behind him, but when he turned, he saw
nothing. He idly wondered if Ray had pests of some sortmaybe rats or mice,
or possibly that new breed of cockroaches that had been turning up around
the city. Fraser shuddered. There was something inherently wrong with
insects that big.

 He heard the sound again, and this time, when he looked, he saw a pair of
pointed fuzzy ears sticking up from behind a box. A moment later, several
furry faces popped up to look at him with wide, curious eyes. Cats, not
rats. Or kittens, as the case happened to be.

 Fraser wondered if Ray knew he had an infestation of kittens and found
himself charmed by the irony of it.

 Growing up in the far north, Fraser hadn't been exposed to many pets. The
harsh conditions made pets something of a luxury. Sled dogs were a
different story. They were working animals; often necessary for travel
over long distances. Catsthe only cats he'd ever seen, outside of wild
lynxes and bobcats, were barn cats.

 Crouching down, Fraser sat on the floor to appear less threating and
clicked his tongue against his teeth, making the universal cat-calling
sound, not sure if it would work with feral cats.

 

 When I woke up, Fraser was gone, but I could hear him puttering around in
the kitchen. He hadn't gone far, then. He was talking to himself, and the
indistinct sound of his voice rising and falling was strangely soothing.

 I let myself drowse for a little while longer, warm under the blankets
that smelled like me and Fraser. I wasn't ready to get out of bed and face
the world.

 Some small part of me was still mourning Stella, I know. I felt lost,
remembering being thirteen years old and seeing Stella as a striking girl
with ribbons in her hair. We'd held all the potential in the universe in
our hands. It was gone now, nothing but dust and ashes remained.

 There were no second chances, no do-overs left for Stella and me. We'd
made our choices all those years ago and now she was gone.

 I had to live in the now. And my now included this man that I'd come to
love. Benton Fraser, who was crazy, intense, brave and broken.

 Yeah, okay, I could face the world now.

 

 Fraser wasn't sure if it was the tongue clicking or the natural
playfulness of kittens, but it took just a few minutes for them to stop
being afraid of him and to leave the shelter of the boxes.

 As they came out into the open, Fraser got a good look at them and wished
he hadn't. Close to a dozen brown and gray tiger-striped kittens, bouncy
and fluffy and deformed. It hurt to look at them.

 In spite of their deformity, it wasn't long before he had kittens
climbing up his back, kittens batting at his fingers, kittens tussling in
his lap, all soft fur and tiny, prickly claws. Out of the corner of his
eye he could see several older cats, likely young juveniles, watching
warily.

 He tickled the belly of one of the kittens, unable to stop the smile that
bloomed on his face as it attacked his finger with kitten-ferociousness.

 

 Eventually, I got out of bed, stretching, wincing at the soreness in some
of my muscles. The bum leg was achy and stiff. It sucked getting old. I
washed up and sniffed at yesterday's clothesnope, they were too rank to
wear again. I dug out some clean clothes, listening to the murmur of
Fraser's voice, still talking to himself.

 Or maybe he was discussing things with Dief. I'd been too worried to
bring that particular subject up and I didn't know if we would go to go
back to pretending that Dief was still alive. Didn't know if that was a
good thing or a bad thing, either. Intro to Psych didn't cover these kinds
of things, plus it'd been well over ten years since I'd taken that class.

 I went into the kitchen and found Fraser sitting on the floor with the
kittens. Well, at least he wasn't talking to himself, or Dief. "I see
you've met the cats."

 I poured myself a cup of tea and wished for the millionth time that it
was coffee. Some plant disease had sprung up after the Smash, decimating
most of the coffee plantations in South America and Africa. The shifting
climate had made the tropic-loving coffee plants even harder to grow.

 On rare occasions a shipment of coffee would make it into Chicago but I
couldn't even dream of affording any. Tea was easier to grow and therefore
cheaper, and I'd learned how to make it strong enough to stand a spoon up
it. It wasn't the same, though.

 

 Before the Smash, an occasional headline would scream "Six-legged cow
heralds the apocalypse!" or "Four-legged duckling shocks owner!" Birth
defects were not uncommon in animals, and extra-legged (polymelia) animals
and even people had been well documented through the years. Most times,
such defects could be attributed to a conjoined twin that degenerated
except for the extra limbs; in rare cases it was due to forking along the
wrong body axis.

 Either way, the extra limbs were usually non-functional or located in the
wrong place. Before the Smash, if the animal survived birth, surgery was
usually necessary to remove the extra limbs.

 These cats, from the leery adults to the playful kittens, had six
perfectly formed, perfectly working legs. They walked and ran and pounced
and tumbled like they were supposed to have six legs, like it was the most
natural thing in the world.

 

 I sat down next to Fraser, handing him his still-warm tea, close enough
to brush shoulders with him. "Cute, aren't they?"

 Fraser was closely examining a kitten paw, squeezing gently to get the
claw to pop out. "Ray, they'reit's wrong. Surely something is causing
these birth defects...some chemical or source of radiation or
something..."

 Taking another sip of my tea, I shook my head. "Nope. I had a
biologist-type, used to work at UC, come and look at them after the first
litter of kits were born. This is a true mutation, a favorable one, she
said, not awhatchamacallitaa" I snapped my fingers, hoping to remember the
word. "Teratogenic! She said it wasn't a teratogenic birth defect."

 I wiggled my fingers at a kitten, enticing it to pounce playfully. "She
said that normally it would take a lot of time and a lot of luck for cats
to mutate like this. Something about the Smashshe's been seeing a lot of
impossible large scale changes happening over a short time." I shrugged.

 Fraser carefully peeled a kitten off his shoulder where it was trying to
nibble on his ear. It rolled over in his hand and did its best to look
adorable. "Hmmm."

 "Kowalski cats. That's what she's going to call them. She's writing a
paper on them, but she wants to examine their insides and I told her she
couldn't do that until one of them died naturally." I grinned. "Hey,
they're the world's only six-legged cats. My fifteen minutes of fame, some
day." One of the older cats came over and curled up in my lap, purring.

 I leaned against his warmth. "The world is changing, Fraser. We've got to
make the best of it, for however long we have left. Together."

 "Indeed." He wrapped his arms around me and pulled me closer. "Together."

 

 Love is enough: though the World be a-waning,

           And the woods have no voice but the voice of complaining,

           Though the sky be too dark for dim eyes to discover

 The gold-cups and daisies fair blooming thereunder,

 Though the hills be held shadows, and the sea a dark wonder,

           And this day draw a veil over all deeds pass'd over,

 Yet their hands shall not tremble, their feet shall not falter;

 The void shall not weary, the fear shall not alter

           These lips and these eyes of the loved and the lover. 

 From Love Is Enough: Song I by William Morris, 1872

 -fin-

  
  

End untune the sky by Akamine chan 

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