Gudsriki by Ari Bach

You’ll know it when you smell it.”
    â€œThanks,” said Vibeke. She walked the short way to the tower. Sure enough the smell of urine was overwhelming as she passed a grotesque outcropping of mutant shrubs, covered in odd seeds and dripping yellow.
    The glass building was among the least damaged. It had a short line running into its lobby and down the stairs. Makeshift torches lit the way down. Vibeke walked alongside the line; nobody seemed to object to her passing them. In the basement she saw the doctor tending to a man’s legs, which had been badly burned. A nurse spotted her.
    â€œWhat can I do for you?”
    â€œBuying med supply.”
    â€œDon’t have many surpluses.”
    â€œI just need clamps.”
    â€œClamps we’ve got.”
    The nurse led her past some beds toward a table with supplies. In the beds were diseased men and women, not from wave bombs or radiation but bacteria, infections. Without electronic antibiotics, superstrains had returned. The world saw plagues it hadn’t seen since the post-antibiotic era.
    From under the table, the nurse pulled out a box of clamps of varying sizes. Vibeke silently sorted through and found the largest of them, then paid the nurse four of her slivers.
    â€œOh my! Thank you!”
    â€œWas that a lot?”
    The nurse looked worried.
    â€œDon’t worry, keep it,” said Vibeke as she took her clamps and left. She walked topside and headed for the coast. It was only a few blocks away.
    The smell there was rot. Sea rot—thousands of dead fish clogged the water along with scattered debris and several corpses. Some nearly skeletonized, others fresh. She wandered the coast toward a distant pier.
    The fish lasted out to the horizon, and when the wind blew toward her the smell was almost unbearable. She put up her oxygen mask again, but still the stink permeated. She spotted the big, broken hull. A fire in it marked some strange gathering that braved the smell for a secure spot. The men inside watched her hungrily. She wasn’t in the mood to play with anyone, so she kept Bob, her own Tikari, on her shoulder, ready to kill them all without risk.
    One began shouting. He started following her. She sent Bob to cut his head off. She wished to high hell that Violet was there with her. To kill people. Torture them, fight them, survive them. It would be so different with Violet. They’d talk on the long stretches of walking. About how things used to be, about how they could be. About whether the miserable present was truly any worse than the glowing, linked-in past. She felt like with Violet there, it wouldn’t have been. Not for her at least. She often caught herself holding imagined conversations with Violet. She never spoke out loud but knew every word in her mind.
    â€œDid you ever get to this part of Scotland?”
    â€œNo, I stuck to the west. The east was all artsy and pompous.”
    â€œNot your style?”
    â€œMy parents took me to a Shakespeare play once. I pounded on the seat in front of me the whole time. The poor man in it didn’t know what to do. My parents had to keep apologizing and holding me back, but I bit their arms.”
    â€œYou sound like you were a lovely child.”
    â€œWho said child? I was sixteen.”
    Vibs laughed, and then it soured and threatened tears. She tried not to think of it. The thoughts came unbidden every hour or more and stabbed into her. She could feel it in the back of her neck. The thoughts were destroying her. Making her act foolishly.
    The battle to walk on and the battle to stay sane amid madness. The world had gone mad in days, but Vibs was a fighter, a Valkyrie. It would take weeks to drive her completely insane. Maybe even a whole month.
    She almost smiled to herself at that estimate as she topped a mountain of rubble. This one held a view far better than most of the sorry remains of Scotland. She saw the waters of Pentland Firth, cold and junked