Green

Papa was coughing up blood.

Boy could hear a wet sound in his father's lungs. Papa was struggling to breathe, and he knew that he didn't have much longer.

There was an arrow sticking out of his father, but Boy knew that pulling the arrow out would just make his father die more quickly.

What would happen to him when his father died? He'd be alone, and he didn't know how he would survive.

They were the good guys; they carried the fire. They did not eat of the flesh of others, and they didn't hurt other people.

They weren't the only ones; Boy knew that other people carried the fire too. Papa couldn't see that; he could only see that other people wanted to hurt them, and he wasn't willing to risk meeting others.

Even if there were other people who were good guys, it would be harder to find food for four or six than it would to find food for two.

Boy had never known a time when he wasn't hungry, except for recently when they'd found a cache of food.

He heard a footstep nearby, and he looked up.

There was a girl standing over them; she was wearing a red suit and a red hat, and she was clean. Her clothes looked new. Boy hadn't ever actually seen new clothes, but he'd seen pictures in old magazines.

He'd never seen anyone who wasn't gaunt other than the cannibals, and even they were thin. She had meat on her bones and she looked healthy. Her hair was beautiful; her back was to the ocean and the sun made it look as though she had a halo.

"Get away," Papa mumbled.

The girl ignored him.

She pulled the arrow from papa, and she touched him.

The blood stopped, and papa immediately began to breathe easily.

"What?" Papa said.

He sat up and stared at the girl.

"My name is Taylor," the girl said. "And I'm here to help."

In her hands, a box just appeared, and immediately a smell hit Boy's nostrils. It was better than canned corn. It was better even than dog food. It wasn't like anything Boy had ever smelled before.

The box just floated in the middle of the air as she pulled a triangle of something from the box. She looked like she was being very careful to keep it off her clothes. She took a bite.

Boy's mouth watered.

"Are you an angel?" Boy asked.

She beamed at him.

"I'm not an angel, but I am from somewhere else. Would you like some pizza?"

Papa hesitated, but he'd seen the girl eat.

Reluctantly he nodded.

The girl handed Papa a piece, and she turned to boy.

"This food is hot. I imagine that you've never had hot food before, so you need to be careful when you eat it."

"He's had hot food," Papa said. "Not often; the smoke attracts predators."

The girl nodded and handed a piece to Boy.

The taste exploded in his mouth. It wasn't like anything he'd ever tasted before, but tears came to his eyes.

The girl touched the box, and it disappeared.

"There's more where that came from," she said. "But if I feed you now, there's a chance your body will go into shock. I can heal that, but I'm not always going to be around."

"Who are you?" Papa asked.

He still had some of the pizza, savoring each and every bite. Boy wished he still had some.

"Did you ever read comic books?" Taylor asked.

Papa nodded.

"There are other universes out there," she said. "I'm from one where the asteroid never hit. Thirty years ago, people in my world began to develop superpowers. I'm one of them."

Papa didn't quite believer her. Boy could see it in his eyes.

The girl suddenly floated up in the air. She held her arms out and was backlit against what was left of the setting sun.

"Maybe I am an angel," she said. "Believe what you want to believe."

"What are you doing here, then?" Papa asked.

"I've got a power that lets me walk between worlds," she said. "But it's got a margin of error, and sometimes I end up in places that I don't expect. This is one of them."

Papa glanced at Boy.

"Anyway," she said, "I've decided to terraform this planet and bring the plants back. But I'll need help from people; somebody needs to live here, to make things better."

"That's impossible," he said.

"Is it?" she said. "We've got our own versions of super scientists. We call them tinkers. Anyway, I'm setting up a community to protect the plants we're going to grow, and I'd like to offer you a job."

"Why me?"

"You aren't a cannibal," she said. "I can read minds, you see. I'm picking those who didn't eat human flesh first, the good guys. If things work well, the next community will be the people who were forced to do it, but are still mostly good."

"And the rest?"

The girl's face darkened.

"They won't be troubling anyone," she said. "I'm clearing out as many of the bad people as I can find to keep everyone safe. I'll provide all of you with weapons. They were in space for a bit, but I've checked them over and they'll work just fine."

Boy didn't know what she meant about what was going to happen to the bad people.

"It's not going to be pretty," she warned. "I've only had a few days to set it up. Things will start looking nicer when I get more supplies and everything, but we're just getting started."

"I've got a few construction skills," Papa admitted, "But I've never been a farmer."

"The thing is, this is your world. I could bring a lot of people here from outside, and I may end up bringing some specialists if we need it, but it wouldn't mean as much to them."

Papa looked around at the empty beach around them. He looked down at Boy.

Boy looked up at him hopefully.

The girl brought Pizza. She brought hope.

And whatever else she was, she was an angel to him.

"Is that your stuff?" she asked.

There was a shopping cart behind them, and Papa looked down.

"Mostly."

She walked over to it, and it vanished when she touched it.

"Take my hand," she said. "And don't get grease on my suit."

Boy took her hand, and his father took her hand, and a moment later, they were somewhere else.

The sun was higher in the sky than it had been, and there were large metal boxes everywhere with doors and windows cut in them.

"Storage containers?" Papa asked.

She shrugged.

"I don't have a lot of time to spent building houses, and winter is coming. Most of you are so malnourished that you don't have the energy to do a lot of construction."

There were wires going from the top of each of the buildings, linking one to the other, and leading up the side of the mountain.

The whole place had maybe thirty of the storage containers, and around it was a wall made out of metal. It was twelve foot high. It was covered with some kind of metal wire.

There was a gate made out of metal too.

"A really determined cannibal could get in," she said, "But most of them aren't strong enough to carry someone on their shoulders."

"They could ram the walls with a car," Papa said.

"We aren't near any roads, and I've dropped enough eight hundred-pound rocks outside they aren't going to be able to ram the walls. There aren't many cars left anyway."

"How are you going to protect the crops?" Papa asked.

"We're going to start with hydroponics," she said. "And once we reach the point where we can grow actual crops, I've got some ideas for how to protect them."

"What are those?" Boy asked.

They were walking around and Boy could hear the sounds of laughter in the background.

They turned a corner, and they saw a metal tower. Things were coming out of the tower, and they were a color Boy had never seen before.

Papa stopped and stared.

"You really can do it."

"Yeah," she said.

Tugging on Papa's sleeve, Boy said, "What color is that?"

Papa knelt down beside him, and he said, "It's green, son."

Green.

It was a beautiful color.

Boy didn't understand why there were tears in his father's eyes, but his father hugged him nonetheless.

"I'm sorry about the accommodations," Taylor said. "I haven't had a lot of time to set this up. I'm going to put you guys in the back, as far from the gate as possible."

"Why even have a gate?" Papa asked. "Did you think anyone would leave?"

"I'm not forcing anyone to stay," she said.

A woman walked around the corner.

"Are these new arrivals?" she asked. She was wearing a white suit, and she was almost heavyset.

"Yeah," Taylor said. "They need their vaccinations."

Papa looked at her, and she said, "I heal everyone when they get here, but everybody is so thin that their immune systems are weakened. Nobody has lived close to anyone in ten years, and disease can spread like wildfire. I've created a general-purpose vaccine against most of the diseases you are likely to experience here, along with the zombie virus that's been causing problems five hundred miles from here."

"Zombie…?"

She shook her head. "Don't ask. We're trying to fix that whole mess, but it'll take time for the anti-virus to spread all over the planet, especially with no animals to carry it."

Boy didn't even know what a zombie was, or a virus.

The lady approached him, and she held out a weird looking device.

"I'm going to put this against your neck for a second," she said. She did, and he felt a coldness against his neck.

"No needles?" Papa asked.

"A jet of compressed air pushes the vaccine through the skin," Taylor said. "We don't need a lot of needles lying around for the kids to get into, and we don't need any medical waste."

The lady held the needle up to Papa's neck, and a moment later she left.

Boy could hear the sound of something rapidly striking against something else. As they turned another corner, he could see that one of the metal boxes had men working inside.

They were all large men; some of them had weirdly distended stomachs. Boy couldn't understand what was wrong with them.

"Boys are almost ready to quit for the day," the biggest man said.

"Remind them to tell nobody what's happening here," she said. "If they ask, remember what happened to Kurt and Lacey."

As the big man went back to the others, Taylor turned to them, and said, "Friends of my father. They needed some work, and I needed some people to help make sure that this place doesn't look like a prison. They finished your spot a couple of days ago, so the paint fumes shouldn't be too bad."

Leading them to one of the metal houses, she opened a door.

She handed Papa a key.

"Maintenance has extra keys, but we'll be irritated if you lose this."

The metal building was small. There was tile on the floor, and the walls were covered with some kind of weird foam.

"It's just peel and stick vinyl flooring," Taylor said. "It's fast and easy. We'll get the walls in later. I figured it was better to get people in unfinished houses than wait while they were starving to death outside."

Papa nodded.

There was a small room with a weirdly shaped chair.

"It's a composting toilet, I'm afraid," Taylor said. "We can't supply enough water for everybody to take all the showers they want, not yet at least. There's a spring that provides enough water to wash your hands and cook."

She showed him how to use it.

"Instead of toilet paper, we use these sonic bidets," Taylor said. She looked up at Papa. "They are controlled by these three shells. It's not what you're used to, but it's actually more hygienic than toilet paper, and it'll keep me from having to keep delivering things all the time. I'm told it'll be a little weird at first, but you'll get used to it."

There was a sink outside the bathroom. Taylor called it that, and showed him how to use it.

"Don't leave it running," she said. "There's a spring providing water, but it has a limited flow rate. I ship extra water in, but it's kind of a pain."

Papa had told him that there was a time when it rained all the time. Now the rains were rare.

There were tubes in the ceiling that glowed.

"Solar tubes," Taylor said. "Easy to build; just use a bottle filled with bleach with the small end stuck through the ceiling. It amplifies the sunlight. Back home it could easily equal a 60-watt bulb; here it's barely equal to a twenty-watt bulb, which is why we have so many."

She flipped on a switch by the wall, and a blazing light appeared.

"You can use this at night," she said. "We've got plenty of power; I covered the whole top of the mountain with solar cells."

There were two cots.

"Sorry," she said. "You can fold the cots up and have more room. If I put a full-sized bed in here, it might take up too much room."

Boy couldn't understand why she was apologizing. This was luxury like he'd never seen. Light on demand! A place to use the restroom!

Not having to always be on the run. Getting to see other people, and not always having to hide.

"Anyway, you can put your stuff here," she said, "Lock the door, and then we'll meet the neighbors."

Papa looked nervous about that, but he took a deep breath and nodded. Taylor gestured and their shopping cart appeared inside the building. Boy's father locked the door.

Taylor gestured, and glass appeared in the air. She gestured again, and it transformed into a statue that looked exactly like Boy and his father.

"A lot of the kids younger than fifteen can't read," Taylor said. "These make it easy to know whose cabin is whose."

She attached it to a piece of metal over the door, the bottom of the glass melting to surround the glass.

"Don't break these," Taylor told Boy. "It's rude and disrespectful."

"I won't," he promised.

"We don't have that many people yet," Taylor admitted," But that may be for the best. Most people haven't been around other people in so long that there's a little culture shock."

"How many?" Papa asked.

"Fifteen people," she said. "A family of four, three couples and five singles. None of them are cannibals, and they're all good people."

"That's all you could find?"

"There's not many people left," she admitted. "And of those who are left, maybe one in ten haven't been cannibals at least sometime. And even the people who haven't been cannibals aren't always good people."

Papa nodded.

"Of course, just because everybody here is a good person doesn't mean that you'll all get along. You guys are going to have to elect leaders sooner or later. I think it's best to wait until everyone knows each other, though."

They were walking back toward the center of town, where that wonderful green was.

There was a long table underneath the tower, and around the tower were kids. There were four of them, and they were chasing each other around the table.

Women and men were bringing something out in bowls and setting it on the table.

"We've got communal electric ovens," Taylor said. "Tonight's meal is pasta with canned tomatoes. The portions are kind of small, but I don't want to overwhelm anyone's systems."

Pasta, as it turned out wasn't as good as pizza, but it was still delicious.

There were two boys his age and they made sure to sit nearby."

"My name's George," one boy said. "And this is James. Who are you?"

Boy looked up at his papa.

They'd never really bothered with names, because there were only the two of them. If his father was talking, who else would he be talking about?

"His name is William," his father said. "The same as mine."

Boy froze.

His name was William?

"Yeah," he said. "My name is William. What do you think of Taylor?"

George looked rapturous.

"She gave us pizza when she met us," he said. "And she's promised that when we get fatter and can handle it, she'll get us a pizza night."

"What's a pizza night?" William asked.

"It's a night when you have all the pizza that you want," James said excitedly. "And something called popcorn. Taylor says she's going to show us something called a movie. I don't know what that is, but mom and dad seem to think it's something special."

"Is this heaven?"

The boys looked at each other and laughed.

"Not yet," George said. "But Taylor promises that someday you'll be able to look out and see green all the way to the horizon."

"There'll be food for everyone, and Taylor says that someday she'll even bring us dogs, and maybe other kinds of animals. The Andersons already have a dog and he's really cool. He can't come out right now, because he likes to bark at new people."

"What other kinds of animals could there be?"

The boys looked at each other and shrugged.

Taylor was at the end of the table, talking to the adults, and William felt that his belly was full for the first time in his life. He felt lethargic and content.

People were laughing, and they were talking animatedly to each other.

Whatever else happened, and whatever anyone else said, William knew that they'd finally found heave