The Fittest

Clive Zooly was a family man who believed in family values. The family was nature's way and it was God's way. Only a man's soul was supposed to live forever; the only way God wanted a man's flesh to go on living was when he passed on his seed to his descendants. When a family man fought and killed, he wasn't doing it to save his own worthless hide-he was doing it for his children and his children's children. That's what made Clive Zooly so certain he was a good man; and that's why he was always talking about how The Families ought to join forces and blast every godless Lifer and Cloner on the continent straight to hell.

But Clive Zooly was also a practical man. He might like talking about how, if The Families united to defend their threatened way of life, God would surely strike down their enemies-but he knew damned well it was never going to happen. In order to fight together, people had to have faith in each other-and Clive Zooly didn't have faith in anyone but himself and his family (and he didn't like turning his back on his family any more than he had to). The Zoolys weren't starry-eyed idealists, and Clive knew damned well that none of the other Families were either. If they were, they'd have been dead a long time ago.

Although it often formed in the back of his mind as a gnawing suspicion, Clive could never admit to himself that it was this lack of faith more than any incursions by the coast-dwelling Lifers and Cloners that was the real threat to The Families way of life. Incest breeds defectives. In order to have healthy offspring you need outside blood; and if you didn't trust outsiders, you had a real problem.

For nearly half a century The Families had solved this problem with the Wife Swaps. Contacting each other over their CB radios, between five and twenty-five Families would arrange to meet at a neutral location. Arriving one by one, they'd park their S.U.V.s in a wide circle. Then, using robots or some other automated conveyance system, each family would deposit their surplus females in the center of the ring, hermetically sealed in clear, plastic shells. At this point the negotiating started and procedures tended to vary; but in the end, if all went well, each family would leave with what they'd come for: at least one fertile female with fresh genes.

Unfortunately, due to acts of treachery and the resulting loss of trust, the Wife Swapping system was collapsing. It wasn't the swapped females that were the problem. Females led the same restricted lives no matter what family they were in, and so lacked the motivation, opportunity, or know-how to do much harm. (Like the saying went, women were kept "locked up and knocked up.") The problem was that Wife Swaps were the perfect (in fact, the only) pretext for an ambush. Not only had lots of Families been bushwhacked on their way to or from a swap; but some of the sneakier Families had taken to using their unwitting females as 'Trojan Whores,' planting bombs or poison gas canisters in their plastic shells, or infecting them with hemorrhagic virus. This last tactic was becoming especially popular as it allowed one family to appropriate another family's undamaged S.U.V. without firing a shot. (Though there had been cases where booby-traps had posthumously avenged the victims of this strategy.)

Clive Zooly was worried about all these possibilities as he sat behind the wheel of his family's lead S.U.V. peering through the periscope at the blasted landscape of frozen mud, cautiously approaching the coordinates of what he hoped was a legitimate Wife Swap. Getting ambushed was the least of his worries. The Zoolys were the best-equipped, most heavily armed family in North America. While most Families owned one S.U.V., the Zoolys had four, all slaved to the master controls in his hands. The Zoolys were also one of only two Families he knew of packing depleted uranium shells; and they were the only family he'd ever heard of equipped with their own aerial surveillance drone.

No. The Zoolys could handle ambushes. Better still, thought Clive as he launched the family drone to reconnoiter the site of the Swap, with their aerial surveillance capability, they could avoid them altogether. (There was no point in wasting resources on a fire fight even if you could win it.) His real worry was the Trojan Whores. How to take cargo from another family on board without risking his own was a question that had Clive Zooly stumped. He'd like to forget all about wife swapping, stick with the S.U.V. family credo ("Nothin' in, no one out, and you ain't got nothin' to worry 'bout.), and let Clive Jr. and little Merle knock up their sister.

But Clive's mother and father had been brother and sister, and he'd witnessed the effects of inbreeding first hand. Clive had been the only one of ten children that had come out normal and didn't end up getting used as fertilizer in the greenhouses.

As Clive watched the high-resolution video images sent back by the drone, he thought back with reverence and gratitude to the man responsible for the Zoolys' relative prosperity. What would the man who had survived the Crash, the Burn, and the start of the Freeze-the man whose foresight and determination were still benefiting his family over a century after his death-have done about the Wife Swaps? What would the great Merle Zooly have done?

Merle Zooly, Clive's great-grandfather, had been a successful plumber living alone in Butte, Montana with a large gun collection, two pick-up trucks, and very little faith in his fellow man. As he later recalled in one of the few entries he'd ever bothered making in his scanty journal (eventually preserved as a Zooly family heirloom) it was in 2028 (the year of his twenty-eighth birthday) that one of his employees, a recent recruit in the Aryan Nation, had given him a copy of the book that was to change his life: The Turner Diaries.

The story of a heroic cadre of white supremacist revolutionaries violently wresting control of the United States from the 'hands of the Jews' and then proceeding to initiate the extermination of every non-Caucasian on the planet, The Turner Diaries did not influence Merle the way its author (or Merle's racist employee) had intended. It didn't convert him into a white supremacist with a zeal for genocide. It did, however, leave him firmly convinced that an apocalyptic race war was imminent; and from that point on he dedicated the bulk of his time, money, and energy to preparing to survive it.

Merle's diary didn't explain why racial warfare struck him as so likely a scenario; but in retrospect, it seems clear that it was the notion of the apocalypse itself rather than its particular cause, that had suddenly obsessed him. (Indeed, reading his diary gives one the impression that, if he had been given an epidemiology textbook for his twenty-eighth birthday he would have been suddenly convinced that civilization was on the brink of succumbing to a new, deadly strain of flu.) Believing that the end of the world was coming satisfied a deep emotional need in Merle. The idea that he would survive while the overwhelming majority of those around him perished satisfied and vindicated the paranoia, misanthropy, and misogyny he had felt all his life. In his mind, the collapse of civilization would mean a return to a simpler, more authentic, less corrupt way of life. The strong and well-prepared would survive, while the weak would be culled. Women would go to the men who could best keep them alive, not the ones with the most degrees or the fanciest suits. Once again men would be judged by the only standard that really mattered- the ability to survive, which was the way that both God and nature intended it.

By the end of the year, Merle had sold his business; purchased an easily defendable tract of land in the mountains; and started sinking every penny of his considerable savings into weapons, ammunition, preserved food, winter clothes, razor wire, night vision goggles, flashlights, motion detectors, binoculars, camouflage, Geiger counters, water purification tablets, gold bullion, and whatever other supplies and equipment he thought would help him survive the coming cataclysm. In 2029 he retired to his mountain stronghold to await Armageddon.

According to his diary, by the start of 2033 Merle was starting to believe he'd made a mistake. Not only was there no sign of racial warfare breaking out, but, from what he saw on TV, the world seemed to be entering an unprecedented period of peace and prosperity. He was on the verge of giving up his survivalist dreams and returning to civilization when the stock market crashed.

At first, the crash of 2033 was widely compared to the crash of 1929. Economically, they had much in common. In both cases, the market lost about the same percentage of its value, and comparable numbers of people were thrown out of work. But it soon became clear that things would be uglier this time. The culture had changed over the previous century. To a generation whose parents had been raised on pro-wresting and Jerry Springer, sudden widespread poverty meant only one thing: sudden widespread looting. Everyone knew it was a "dog eat dog," "every man for himself," "kill or be killed," "law of the jungle" kind of world. No one expected a social safety net. No one expected civility or solidarity. Instead of bread lines, there were bread riots; and this time there would be no "New Deal." The fabric of society was unraveling, and this time fireside chats weren't going to help. This time there was something to fear besides fear itself-there was the guy sticking the AK-47 through your car window.

Merle Zooly smugly watched the world fall apart from the safety of his mountain stronghold. Even though he'd been wrong about the race war, he was still very pleased with himself. His survival proved his virtue. He was the ant who had chided the grasshopper. He was the little pig with the brick house. He was "the man who built a house, and digged deep, and laid the foundation on a rock."

The years went by and things went from bad to worse. The cities were burning. Large swaths of the country were under martial law, and even larger areas had descended into total chaos. Refugees began showing up around Merle's property. He trapped and shot most of them, but kept a few of the better-looking women around as "wives."

In 2036 there was still a semblance of civilization. Most TV networks were still broadcasting, and pundits regularly spoke of "the coming recovery." Then came the big news which briefly gave people hope, but in fact drove the final nail into civilization's coffin. A consortium of industries, universities, and government working at Los Alamos had developed a cheap, efficient, safe, durable, compact fusion generator-a device the size of a bathtub that could provide enough power to run a small city. Humanity's dream of a clean, limitless source of energy had finally come true.

At first, just about everyone believed that the new invention would be man's salvation, or at least the salvation of the global economy. But not Merle Zooly. He didn't buy it. Regarding the new fusion generators, Merle wrote in his diary the only genuinely prophetic (or clever) comment he was ever known to have made. "Putting unlimited energy in the hands of people," he wrote, "will effect the world the way putting flamethrowers in the hands of squirrels would effect a forest."

Never were true words written. Fusion, while triggering the collapse of the oil industry and hastening the final collapse of the world economy, resulted in the creation of only one new profitable industry: the manufacture of fusion-powered Survival Unit Vehicles (S.U.V.s) by New Mexico's Enterprise Industries.

A fusion-powered, steam-driven, hermetically-sealed, flexible tank the size of a sixteen-wheel tractor trailer featuring a kitchen, bathrooms, and a greenhouse for the ultimate in self-sufficiency, the S.U.V. proved to be fusion's killer application. At first, Enterprise Industries (who marketed the new vehicle with the slogan, "Be the fittest.") made a token effort to construct vehicles that complied with federal guidelines. Thus the earliest models came with limited firepower and a rubber coating over the steel treads ostensible meant to protect public road surfaces. But when New Mexico seceded from the union, all restraint was left behind. Later models came with a weapons system comparable to an Abrams tank as standard equipment, and available options which included a surface-to-air missile launcher and an automated mine-laying system. Designed with as few moving parts as possible and equipped with a miniature machine shop capable of manufacturing most replacement parts, the S.U.V. was a masterpiece of engineering lovingly designed and constructed with the end of the world in mind.

When Merle saw a news story about the S.U.V. on TV, he knew he had to have one-or rather, at least one. It had already occurred to him that a sessile stronghold, no matter how well armed and provisioned, had serious drawbacks for a man intent on surviving the apocalypse. Despite his large, underground storage tanks, Merle had already begun to worry about running out of gasoline. His original plans had been based on the assumption that, once the worst of the chaos was over, a rudimentary trading economy would develop and he'd be able to barter for fresh supplies; but so far, there was no sign of this happening. People seemed to have reverted to total savagery--to a level of social organization capable of pillage, but not of trade. Violence was rampant. The most heavily armed society in human history had decided they weren't going down without a fight, and fight they did. Already packs of wild humans had surrounded the Zooly compound, like jackals circling a lion's kill. At night, Merle saw the flickering glow of bonfires and heard screams from what he assumed were gruesome human sacrifices and gang rapes. He knew he could hold them off for a while; but he also knew that eventually one of those gangs would become determined or desperate enough to breach his defenses-and that would be the end of Merle Zooly.

The story of how Merle fought his way from Montana to New Mexico became a Zooly family legend. According to his diary, by the time Merle reached the heavily fortified perimeter of Enterprise Industries, he was almost out of food, fuel, and ammunition, and there wasn't a square foot of his covered pick-up truck "without a bullet hole in it." And yet, Merle had managed to hang on to everything he needed to ensure his survival and the perpetuation of the Zooly line. He still had his tools; his guns; his favorite wife; and enough gold to purchase a convoy of five top-of-the-line, fully-loaded S.U.V.s and all the ammunition they could carry.

Once again, Merle's timing had been excellent. Had he left Montana as few as six months later he would never have made it. Not only were the roads impassable by then (in anything less heavily armored than an S.U.V.) but by 20--, Enterprise Industries had stopped accepting gold and would only take food and ammunition in exchange for their much sought after vehicles. And, of course, the year after that came The Burn.

The Burn began when the remnants of the United States government, realizing their disintegrating nation was vulnerable to invasion by any petty dictator or warlord able to field a coherent army, decided it was in America's best interests to launch a preemptive nuclear attack against the rest of the world (with the exception of Canada). Distracted by their own economic turmoil, most of the world's governments were caught off guard, and so only a few developed nations were able to launch retaliatory strikes. Therefore, even though most major U.S. cities were destroyed (Most of them had been demolished by rioting and looting already.), and a new airborne strain of an Ebola-type virus began decimating the nation's refugee population (American doctors suspected that the epidemic was a product of French bioweapon research after observing partial immunity in people of Gallic descent.), the policy of a pre-emptive attack was hailed as a major success by the surviving members of government and the few remaining U.S. media outlets. America, having given much worse than it got, was still number one. In retrospect, historians might have noted that the only significant strategic downside to the attack was the unexpectedly long and severe nuclear winter which followed--a.k.a., The Freeze.

It was The Freeze that really demonstrated to Merle Zooly and his fellow S.U.V.ers that they had gotten their money's worth. For nearly a decade, while radioactive ash filled the sky, plunging the planet into a glacial twilight, blighting crops, and killing untold millions, S.U.V.ers breathed warm, filtered air and grew their own food in high-efficiency greenhouses powered by their own private suns. Nor did the advantages of S.U.V. ownership end with the darkness. Even after the atmosphere cleared, the weather continued to grow colder. Some speculated that nuclear winter had triggered a new ice age; but there were few meteorologists left to either support or refute this theory. In fact, there were few people of any profession left, as the continuing cold--whatever its cause--had accelerated the rapid decline of the non-S.U.V.-owning population. As advancing glaciers killed or drove back the large number of refugees and would-be survivalists who had fled north, cold and hunger lowered resistance to the hemorrhagic virus, and the rampant violence that had characterized America since the start of The Crash continued unabated, S.U.V.s--with their unlimited energy supplies, their mobility, and their firepower--truly lived up to their dead manufacturer's motto. There was no doubt about it. S.U.V. owners were the fittest creatures of the post-apocalyptic environment.

Although Merle Zooly lived to the ripe old age of ninety-six, having fathered four children and having handed down the family convoy to his eldest son, he did not live to witness the ultimate vindication of his last major purchase. Though no one knew in what year it had actually come to pass, it was in 20- (ten years after Merle's death and six before Clive's birth) that it became generally recognized among the survivors that there was no longer a single person left alive in North America (and so probably the world) that wasn't on board an S.U.V.

Realizing they had inherited the earth, the S.U.V.ers at first began to tentatively establish contact with each other in an effort to take stock of their new, shared situation. Détente was declared. Some of the more civic-minded survivors conducted a census by radio and concluded that over 100,000 S.U.V.s were still inhabited and operational. There was talk of rebuilding--of restarting the human race. Some even spoke of founding a new Utopian society based on the twin pillars of individual responsibility and the sanctity of private property.

But such talk didn't last. No one really believed in Utopias any more. Furthermore, as this brief period of limited cooperation and social intercourse continued, it grew increasingly clear that the survivors fell into three distinct mutually-antagonistic categories.

No doubt, had it still existed, the marketing department of Enterprise Industries would have paid good money to learn that S.U.V.'s had been bought mainly by people in three major demographic groups. At one time jokingly referred to as, "the rich," "the smart," and "the vicious," (even though in truth all three groups shared all three of these qualities in varying degrees), the three groups were: the super rich and politically powerful who had maintained control of their resources through The Crash and had devoted these resources to ensuring their personal survival (the last Secretary of Defense and several prominent senators were among this category); academics who had either to some extent foreseen the coming calamity or had simply been fetishistically enamored with the S.U.V.'s cutting-edge technology and elegant engineering (or even with the science fiction fantasy of surviving the apocalypse in a state-of-the-art, self-contained, artificial environment); and, finally, survivalists like Merle Zooly--anti-social or extreme religious types who had been expecting the end of the world for reasons of their own and had just happened to have been proven right this time.

Not only were the three basic types of S.U.V. owners inherently incompatible; but it soon became clear that circumstances were driving them in radically different directions. They were diverging--in an almost evolutionary sense--because each of them had selected characteristically differing strategies for propagating themselves through time.

The rich were trying to live forever. While Merle Zooly hadn't lived to witness the final triumph of the S.U.V., many of his wealthier contemporaries had. Prior to The Crash, it had become popular among those who could afford it to experiment with high-priced longevity treatments and life-extending technologies. When The Crash came, they saw no reason to stop their experiments. It was not uncommon for these "Lifers," as they came to be called, to have picked a favorite doctor or researcher as their sole passenger and to have converted their S.U.V.s into mobile longevity laboratories.

"The smart," chose a different solution to the problem of posterity. With their characteristic social awkwardness, these former science and engineering academics had generally been most comfortable in their own company. They had also tended to have a narcissistic (in some cases even solipsistic) faith in the superiority of their own intellects as well as a conviction of the genetic basis of this superiority. The widespread availability of low-cost cloning equipment on most pre-Crash university campuses had serendipitously provided them with the means of procreation best-suited to their personalities. They had become "Cloners."

Only the survivalists and their descendants (or "The Families" as they preferred to call themselves) had chosen to keep reproducing themselves the old-fashioned way--to keep aging, dying, and replacing themselves with offspring conceived by men and women.

As the different type of S.U.V. owners became aware of each other and their mutual enmity, the brief period of detente came to an end. The groups began segregating themselves, migrating by unspoken agreement to their pre-Crash centers of power. The Cloners took the west coast, the Lifers took the east, and The Families stayed in the middle (or 'The Heartland' as they like to call it.)

War seemed inevitable. But while the three factions did get into the habit of shooting each other on sight (or rather, upon recognition, since most S.U.V.s looked alike and none of the opponents had taken to displaying flags, or other identifying insignia) a full-scale war never materialized. People no longer seemed to have it in them. They were still capable of dividing into groups that hated and killed each other; but they had seemingly lost the ability to unite, even against a common foe. Humanity had somehow lost its cohesiveness.

Even The Families, who ostensibly valued their gene-based solidarity above all else, proved incapable of forming that most ancient and basic of all social organizations--the clan. At first, many Families had tried forming alliances based on blood or marriage; but when news of the results of these attempts had circulated, the rest soon stopped trying. Almost without exception, pacts had no sooner been made than broken. In several cases, fathers had split up their convoys, bequeathing one or more S.U.V.s to newly married sons, only to have their sons turn around and hijack them by exploiting their knowledge of their former family's security codes. Blood or no blood, people had seemingly become incapable of trusting anyone beyond the armor plating of their vehicles, so that, eventually, when a child from one of The Families would ask his parents what "family" meant, the definition he'd get most often was: "The people in your S.U.V."

It was in this world of ceaseless combat and betrayal that Clive Zooly had been raised, which explains why, when the surveillance drone he had sent to reconnoiter the site of the Wife Swap sent back images of a gutted S.U.V. with an overturned glass tank full of human embryos lying beside it, rather than being surprised, his first thought was to wonder whether he could spare the ammunition to finish destroying the hulk. Clive had heard about Lifers and Cloners trying to infiltrate Wife Swaps in order to get their hands on fresh genes for their grisly experiments; apparently this one had got caught at it.

Assuming the wreck had already been stripped bare, Clive had just decided he could afford a quick blast of the flamethrower to incinerate the abomination and put whatever embryos might still be alive in it out of their misery, when he was struck by an idea--a bold and brilliant idea he felt sure was worthy of his illustrious ancestor Merle--an idea that would forever free the Zooly's from exposing themselves to the risks of Wife Swaps while still allowing them to produce healthy offspring. Clive activated the intercom.

"Boys, get up here," he bellowed loudly enough to have made the intercom superfluous. In less than two minutes, his sons, Clive Jr. and Little Merle were standing beside him at attention. They knew better than to keep their father waiting. Clive ignored them until he'd instructed the drone to hover and continue its surveillance over the area and had parked the family convoy less than fifty yards from the Cloner's wreck. He then turned to his sons and said: "Junior, get your parka, your gas mask, and a flashlight. We're going outside. Merle, you take the wheel. Keep the drone up and keep us covered. If you see anyone coming let me know on the walkie-talkie."

"Where are we going, Pa?" Clive Jr. asked, hoping his father was in the mood to answer questions.

"Shut up and get dressed, boy. You'll see soon enough."

Once attired, Clive turned back to his son behind the wheel: "Now make sure you keep your eyes open, Merle. More Families might be showing up any time and we don't want to get caught with our pants down." Clive strode to the airlock with his obedient namesake right behind him. "Oh, and Merle, in case you get any ideas, I rigged the fusion generator to blow up if I'm not back in ninety minutes to punch in my code. You understand?"

Little Merle understood.

The ground outside resembled a frozen, choppy sea of mud. They were in a clearing in a forest of dead deciduous trees surrounded by decaying stumps and tall, bare, lifeless trunks. Aside from a few stunted evergreens and the occasional lichen-speckled rock, there was no life visible. Carefully picking his way over the brittle, uneven terrain, Clive led his eldest son towards the wrecked S.U.V. He paused beside the tank of human embryos and nudged it with the toe of his patched-up boot. "Not frozen solid yet," he observed to his son in a voice muffled by his gas mask. "This probably hasn't been out here more than a few hours, unless there's something dissolved in the fluid acting like anti-freeze."

Not having been asked a question, Clive Jr. didn't answer, and the pair finished approaching the wreck in silence.

From up close, it was obvious the vehicle had been thoroughly stripped. Canons, gun mounts, treads, and even several sections of armor plating were all missing; and even the unyielding ground bore clear traces of recent labor. The front access steps and retractable cargo ramp were still in place, but the airlock they had once led to was gone, leaving nothing but a dark, gaping hole and a few dangling wires. Clive climbed the first two steps and tried to peer inside, but the pale winter sun was setting at the wrong angle to illuminate the vehicle's interior. He turned on his flashlight and beckoned. "Come on, boy. We're goin' in."

Though he didn't dare say so, Clive Jr. didn't want to go in. He thought the gloomy maw left by the missing airlock looked menacing. Besides, he'd heard about booby-trapped S.U.V.s (the looters might have set one out of spite) and he didn't think it was worth the risk to enter a vehicle that had clearly been thoroughly stripped. He wanted to ask his father what he wanted them to go in for; but his father had never been one for encouraging curiosity in his children. Clive Zooly Sr.'s tyranny over his sons (who had never even known another adult male except for their uncle, who Clive had killed when they were little) was absolute; and yet, oddly enough, he sometimes acted as if he was afraid of them--as if he was expecting them to stab him in the back at any moment. Sometimes, Clive Jr. wondered if that was actually what their father wanted them to do--to prove they were men or something. Pausing, he briefly considered sneaking up on his father and cracking his skull open with his flashlight. His father, noticing his hesitation, turned around and said: "You think I'm a fool for taking us in there, don't you?"

Afraid to either agree or disagree with this proposition, Clive Jr. said nothing.

"Well, I guess before we risk our necks I ought to tell you why; that way, if anything happens to me you'll still know the plan." He paused to adjust his gas mask. "Now answer me this, boy: What do you and your brother need before you can have sons of your own?"

"Uh, wives, I guess."

"That's what I would have said until about an hour ago when I figured out it wasn't necessarily true. All you really need to make healthy babies is eggs--the eggs of a female from outside the family, your sperm, and your sister's womb. You follow?"

"Yes, Pa."

"So you understand what we're goin' in for?"

When Clive Jr. didn't answer, his father glared at him contemptuously and said in a nasty, condescending tone of voice, enunciating each word as though speaking to an idiot: "We're going in to find the equipment we'll need to take eggs out of a girl, fertilize them, and stick them in your sister. That's the kind of equipment Cloners use."

"Oh," said Clive Jr., who until that moment hadn't really known what a 'Cloner' was, having only known the term as a designation for his enemies and having never associated it with the process of cloning.

"Once we get that equipment," resumed Clive Sr. in his normal tone of voice, "we'll never have to go to a Wife Swap again. See, the girls we get the eggs from don't even have to be alive, long as they're still warm. So that means instead of swapping, we can just blast open a family's S.U.V., drag out their females dead or alive, cut out their ovaries, and be on our way."

Clive Jr., who had been looking forward to having a wife more than to breeding sons, nevertheless dutifully tried to echo his father's enthusiasm. "It sure would be nice not havin' to risk takin' one of them Trojan Whores on board."

"Nice? It's a hell of a lot better than 'nice,' boy. It means freeing ourselves from the biggest risk to our way of life. It means we're going to live, son. It means the Zooly line will survive."

Clive Sr. spoke these last words with such earnest reverence that--perhaps for the first time in his life--his son considered the possibility that the survival of the Zooly line really was a noble cause, and that maybe his father, in caring more about his progeny than himself, was actually a great man. Seeing the confused admiration in his son's eyes, Clive Sr. led the way into the Cloner's S.U.V. with a feeling of pride he had never known before.

Once inside, father and son had little difficulty finding the Cloner's lab (though Junior nearly threw up in his mask upon encountering the previous owner's charred and mangled remains). As Clive Sr. had predicted, the looters, having been a Family, had had little interest in cloning equipment and had left it unmolested.

With the help of their robots, it took less than an hour for the Zoolys to transfer the contents of the lab to their lead S.U.V. With the help of the cloning tutorial he found on the desktop computer they'd taken from the lab, it took Clive Sr. less than four hours to identify and learn how to use the equipment he required for his purposes while his sons looked on. Less than an hour after that, a Family's S.U.V. pulled into the clearing looking for the scheduled Wife Swap.

"It looks like God approves of our plan," Clive Sr. observed solemnly. "I think it would therefore be fitting to take a moment of silent prayer so we can thank the Lord for his generosity before starting on this new enterprise."

Following their father's lead Merle and Clive J. automatically bowed their heads in prayer. Ninety seconds later, Clive Sr. fired a depleted-uranium-tipped explosive shell into the broadside of their new neighbor's vehicle. The three Zoolys whooped with satisfaction as the shell cut through their neighbor's armor like a hot knife through butter.

Upon going outside and surveying their work, the Zoolys confirmed that the one shell had killed the entire family. But, as Clive Sr. had correctly anticipated, this in no way interfered with their plans. There were two females of childbearing age among the casualties--one looked about twenty, the other about fourteen years of age. Clive Jr. dragged their corpses out wondering what it would have been like to have been married to the younger, prettier one. His father set up portable floodlights and his brother kept them covered from the cockpit of their S.U.V.

Sterilizing his hands, a scalpel, and a pair of fine tweezers in alcohol, Clive Sr. proceeded to remove the young females' ovaries, explaining each step of the procedure as he went along.

"Now I'm going inside to put these on ice," he announced when he'd finished. "Then I'll cover you two while you strip the suv. Just before entering the airlock, he turned around and added: "And don't forget the shoes."

Over the next forty-eight hours, the scene was repeated twice more with little variation. By that time, Clive Sr. had extracted several hundred human eggs. Staring covetously at his genetic stockpile like a miser with his gold, he began dreaming of the day The Freeze would end and the last of the plague would vanish from the continent. He pictured himself or his descendant choosing a piece of prime farmland and settling down. He envisioned a Zooly dynasty emerging and repopulating North America. He imagined a time when his name would be held in reverence and his seed would cover the earth.

The next thing Clive Zooly knew, he was flat on his back in the dark and pleasurable sensations were coming from his groin. Was someone giving him head? he wondered. If so, who? He tried reaching down to identify the fellatrix by touch, only to discover that, as in certain nightmares, he was unable to move. The tempo of the sucking pulsations increased. The pleasurable sensation intensified, and, forgetting for a moment the question of where he was or how he had gotten there, he orgasmed with an explosive grunt. Just as he finished ejaculating, the lights went on.

"Was it good for you?" a mocking female voice inquired.

Squinting in the sudden glare, Clive tried to make out his surroundings. He was strapped down on what appeared to be an operating table, surrounded by an array of computers and high-tech medical equipment. He looked down the length of his body in time to see some kind of soft plastic suction device at the end of a robotic arm disengaging itself from his penis.

"Where am I?" he asked groggily.

"That was some load you shot, you manly man you," the female voice said, ignoring his question. "Do you always come so much or has it been a while?"

"Who are you?" Clive demanded.

"Some girls would be offended by that question after what you just did; but under the circumstances, I guess it's understandable." The voice paused. "I'm what you family types call a Lifer, and you are currently a passenger on board my S.U.V."

Clive took a moment to absorb the implications of what he'd been told. Then, rather more timidly, he asked, "How did I get here?"

That Cloner's suv you looted was a trap I set. I knew that eventually one of you dumb hillbillies would figure out you couldn't keep knocking up your sisters forever and would go for the cloning equipment. The computer you took on board subverted your systems and gave me control of your vehicles and automation. I lowered the air pressure until you and your family passed out. Then I instructed your robots to kill your family and bring you and the eggs you were kind enough to harvest here to me."

Clive was too terrified to react to the news of his family's death. "What do you want from me?" he asked in a quavering voice.

"Well, for one thing, your sperm. But now that I have it I've decided I have some other uses for you."

"What are you going to do with my sperm?"

"That should be obvious. With that big, hot load of come you just shot and the eggs you gathered I have everything I need to make embryos. I have many uses for human organs; and thanks to you I can grow little Zoolys and harvest their organs to supply my needs for at least a hundred years."

Clive tried to subdue his rising panic. She hadn't killed him yet; maybe it was for a reason. Maybe this Lifer bitch needed some dick. "Can I see you?" he asked. "Why don't you show yourself to me?"

"But I am showing myself," the voice said coyly. "I'm really quite hard to miss. Maybe if I describe myself to you you'll be able to spot me. Let's see now... I weigh just under seventy tons. My complexion is gray, but I prefer to think of it as 'steel blue.' I used to be blonde, but now I don't have any hair. I also have treads instead of legs."

Clive was too stunned to speak. The voice laughed and continued. "That's right Clive. I haven't had a human body in fifty years. The original plan was to keep my brain alive forever, hooked up to the AI system controlling this vehicle. But when I discovered my consciousness could reside just as comfortably in the computer system as in my organic brain, I decided to let the brain die. That's when I decided organic life was a dead end and dedicated myself to wiping it off the planet."

Clive was so angered and horrified by the abomination described to him that he temporarily forgot his fear. "You're not even human!" he yelled. "You haven't got a soul! What makes you think you have anything to do with the woman whose brain you let die? What makes you think you're anything more than a machine--a thing?"

The voice hesitated for a moment as if unsure of itself. "That's actually a very good question," it finally replied, "but then, I was never really very interested in philosophy."

Clive tried one last argument to extricate himself from his situation. "If you hate life so much, why are you keeping me alive?"

"Well, since I let my organic brain die, I have an opening for a new brain. You won't be able to control anything, of course, but you will be able to watch me wiping out the Families along with the Cloners and all the other Lifers while I periodically harvest your posterity's organs as replacement components. Some parts are just impossible to find these days, but I've found that certain human organs make acceptable substitutes--though they do lack durability. (The human eye, together with the visual centers of the brain, is, for example, a remarkably sophisticated optical system.) You'll also be able to feel pain when I attach your central nervous system to the exterior of this vehicle to monitor damage, which will give my vehicle a motive for avoiding damage--your motive not to suffer. And, of course, if something should go wrong, you'll make an excellent alarm system. I'll know that something's broken when you start screaming, though, of course, you'll have no mouth."

"Why are you doing this to me? It makes no sense! What did I ever do to you?"

"Another good question!" The voice paused again, even longer than the last time. Finally it answered, "I seem to remember that you remind me of someone.... Yes! That's it! You remind me of my father!"

"So what?" Clive screamed, his voice contorted into a hysterical, high-pitched shriek.

"So I always hated my father."

With a click and a whirr, the scalpels began to descend.