Author's Note: I originally conceived this tale as a humorous sci-fi story. I thought it would be kind of funny if, when faced with the end of the world (thus having nothing to lose), something like half the population of North America would come out of the closet as practitioners of "alternate" lifestyles, with cross-dressing prominently figured. However, it's kind of tricky to write a funny end-of-the-world story, so apart from a few humorous moments, this is essentially a serious yarn. I think ultimately the humor wound up getting replaced by a kind of subtle romantic sub-plot.

I am told that the prolog is really pretty dry—since it's a quickie lesson in stellar mechanics—and opinion is split about fifty-fifty as to whether I should leave it in or take it out. I decided to leave it in, since I think it helps to understand the technical premise of the plot. Read it or skip it. It's up to you. The story does get more interesting, honest!

This was originally posted (in a slightly different form) on "that other transgender fiction website" under the title The Big One.

 

The Orion Effect

by Christine Myles

 

It's the end of the world as we know it

It's the end of the world as we know it

It's the end of the world as we know it

And I feel fine...

R.E.M

Prolog

Two or three times a year, somewhere in the observable universe, a star ends its life in an unimaginably violent explosion. We here on Earth call this event a supernova, and it is by far the most cataclysmic occurrence we know of, anywhere. When a supernova is discovered, it's of great interest to astronomers, because we can learn a lot about the early universe by studying the behavior of matter under such extreme conditions. Unfortunately, over 99.9% of all supernovas occur very, very far away from Earth, so far away that, bright as they are, it still takes a powerful telescope to see them at all.

"Two or three times a year" makes supernovas sound pretty routine, but when you consider that the universe consists of roughly 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars, they start to seem pretty rare, and they are. One reason for this is that not every star in the universe is eligible. Only certain stars can join this elite group. Our sun, for example, will never become a supernova, because it's too small. Extremely massive stars are excluded, too. Their ultimate fate is to become black holes.

All stars begin their existence by fusing hydrogen (the most abundant element in the universe) into helium. The process releases lots and lots of energy, which is why stars are hot and bright. This stage is called the "main sequence". It's the stable part of a star's life, and lasts the longest, over 90% of its total lifespan. Our own sun is in this stage, and will remain so for another 4 billion years, give or take. During the main sequence, all that heat in the core produces a lot of outward pressure, exactly balancing the effect of gravity, which wants to crush the star down upon itself. But, what happens when the hydrogen is used up?

Once the star runs out of fuel, it begins to cool down. This means that it can no longer generate the necessary heat and pressure to keep gravity at bay, so the star begins to shrink, which compresses the core still further. The additional pressure raises the core temperature, and eventually it gets hot enough for the helium debris left over from the main sequence to begin fusing into carbon and oxygen. This generates enough heat to once again balance the gravitational pressure, and a state of equilibrium is regained.

Eventually, the helium gets used up, and what happens next depends on the star's mass. For stars like our sun, that's about it. It'll shrink down to a white dwarf star, shining feebly for a few million years from the heat of its own compression, and eventually burn out to a tiny black cinder, a few dozen miles in diameter.

But for bigger stars, ones with a mass at least seven times that of our sun, the compression is intense enough to raise the core temperature to the point where the carbon and oxygen begin to fuse. This cycle repeats itself several more times: the star runs out of fuel, cools, shrinks, heats up, and then begins burning the products of the last cycle.

Heavier and heavier elements are produced, until the end product is iron.

Each of these cycles releases energy, which keeps the star in a kind of temporary equilibrium, offsetting the relentless effects of gravity. But iron is kind of special, because when it fuses to form still heavier elements, it doesn't release energy, it absorbs it. This means that when the star begins to collapse around an iron core, there is no answering buildup of thermal pressure to stop it. Instead, uninhibited, the collapse accelerates rapidly to nearly 20% of the speed of light. The star shrinks in a fraction of a second from its original diameter, measured in millions of miles, to a tiny, hyper-compacted sphere just a dozen miles in diameter. Scientists call this the point of "maximum scrunch." The temperature skyrockets to hundreds of billions of degrees, and a massive shock wave forms that blasts violently outward, carrying stellar material with it, and leaving behind a tiny sphere of "degenerate matter", matter in which the protons and electrons have been mashed together, forming what we call a neutron star.

Over 99% of the energy generated by this massive explosion is carried away in the form of tiny, almost undetectable particles called neutrinos, but even that remaining 1%, given off in the form of kinetic energy, light, heat and other forms of radiation, represents more energy than we can possibly imagine. The core of a supernova makes the interior of a thermonuclear explosion look like an alpine meadow; at peak brilliance, it can outshine all the other stars of its parent galaxy put together.

Once in a while, a supernova occurs fairly nearby. In 1987, one was observed in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a globular galaxy a mere 179,000 light-years from Earth. This is still an incredibly huge distance, but in cosmic terms, it's just down the block, so to speak. It was the first supernova to take place in our immediate neighborhood since the telescope was invented, and it elicited a positive feeding frenzy among astronomers and astrophysicists. Many of them considered it to be the most significant stellar event of the last 300 years.

About once in a thousand years or so, a supernova will occur so close to earth that it is clearly visible with the naked eye, and may even, briefly, be the most noticeable object in the sky. One took place nearly 2,000 years ago, in a region of space that would have been easily visible in the evening, low on the eastern horizon, when viewed from the central latitudes. It's been the subject of some speculation that perhaps this supernova was the star that guided the Magi to Bethlehem. Another, recorded by Chinese astronomers in 1054 AD, was for a time the brightest object in the night sky apart from the full moon, and was visible in broad daylight for more than three weeks. Its remnants are visible today as the Crab Nebula, a thready, indistinct smear of dust and gases approximately 6,300 light-years from Earth, still expanding rapidly, and still intensely hot.

While supernovas are singularly violent events, they're also important, because they are the only furnaces we know of hot enough to forge the heavier elements—heavier than iron, that is—many of which are necessary for life as we know it to exist. But, they're also deadly. All stars give off massive quantities of radiation in the course of their everyday existence. Interestingly, the radiation given off by own sun is actually lethal at the distance of Earth's orbit, a mere 93 million miles. It's only the Earth's ionosphere and a thin layer of ozone that filters out most of this radiation and keeps us alive... something to think about. But, while our sun's radiation is only dangerous for a trifling few hundred million miles distance, the average supernova can completely sterilize a volume of space over 800 light-years (4,800 trillion miles) in diameter.

If you happen to live in the northern hemisphere of planet Earth, you can look up into the night sky, and most times of the year you'll see the constellation Orion hanging high over the southern horizon. You can see the three stars in a diagonal line that form Orion's belt, and the two dimmer stars below it that delineate his sword. Two widely spaced stars above indicate where his shoulders ought to be and two more below mark his legs.

If you look at the star that makes Orion's right shoulder—the one at the upper left of the constellation as you gaze up at it—you'll notice that it has a faintly orangey hue. This is Alpha Orionis, also known as Betelgeuse. The designation 'Alpha' indicates that it is the brightest star in the constellation, as viewed from Earth. We know it to be an M-type red supergiant, over 1,000 times more massive than our sun, and we know it to be about 300 light-years away. It's a prime supernova candidate. We also know, from examining its spectral lines, that it is nearing the end of its life. We can tell, for example, that its atmosphere contains lots of sulfur and silicon. These are the elements that eventually fuse to form iron, which means that Betelgeuse is in the next-to-final stage of its existence. We know that this stage can last for a couple of thousand years, but there's no way to tell—accurately—how far along it is. It could end tomorrow, or in a year, or a thousand years. But we do know that, once it does enter the final stage, it's no more than a year or so from going bang.

Part One

David Parker had waited impatiently for several weeks to book time on the big 200-inch reflector telescope at Palomar Observatory, and now the time was here. It was nearly one AM when he parked his car, walked through security and into the control room located directly beneath the giant telescope. He powered on the equipment he would need and began poring through his notes. Tonight he planned to make a thorough spectrographic examination of a newly discovered and somewhat bizarre nebula about 64,000 light-years distant, recently christened with the romantic name of NGC-65233. By an irritating coincidence, the nebula lay along a vector that just skimmed by Alpha Orionis, a very bright and nearby star in the constellation Orion, so David knew he had his work cut out for him. He would have to be very accurate to avoid contamination of his results through light spillover.

He typed a few co-ordinates into the workstation in front of him and heard the targeting motors of the giant rig above his head start up in response. Presently, the deep hum ceased, and a star field gradually appeared on the monitor. There it was, his nebula, its peculiar shape arousing as it always did a twinge of discomfort; and there, just to the right, was the brilliant orange blotch of Alpha Orionis. Damn! He made some adjustments, zooming in on the nebula and forcing A. Orionis off the screen, but the optical bleed was still there. Apparently the sky was a little dustier than usual tonight. Oh well, let's do the best we can, he thought. He fired up the only spectrometer that was available at the moment, a bulky, chipped and stained unit of 1960s vintage, and piped the light to it. Then, he opened the optical shutter and sat down to wait.

Secretly, David thought of the nebula as his, even though he was not its discoverer. It was just that nobody else was all that interested. In the private baptistery of his mind, he'd dubbed it the Dildo Nebula. It was an EGG (Evaporating Gas Globule) with a singularly identifiable shape that never failed to arouse raucous laughter and crude jokes whenever images of it were produced at astronomers' gatherings. Maybe that was why nobody wanted to study it. Who wants to become known as the leading authority on a giant cosmic dick? But EGGs are known to be stellar nurseries, and David had noticed some indications in the early data on NGC-65233 that suggested it might be on the brink of giving birth to a whole bunch of new stars. Oddly appropriate, for a huge celestial phallic symbol, he'd thought at the time... Still, it was enough to tweak his interest, and excitement.

Feeling a little antsy, he rose a minute or so later and wandered down to the lunchroom to make some coffee. He stood in the window, gazing out at the darkened landscape and sipping, blowing periodically on the scalding liquid, lost in thought. So lost in thought, in fact, that the brief seismic vibration beneath his feet completely escaped his notice.

Now, the big 200-inch telescope at Palomar, mounted as it is on thousands of tons of concrete, can easily shrug off earth tremors many times more intense than the one that just swept through the area, without so much as blurring an image. But, the ancient spectrometer David was using could not. Somewhere in the bowels of the machine, a tiny mirror slipped microscopically out of alignment.

David kept himself busy with other things while the giant telescope tracked its target through the sky, patiently collecting light and piping it into his equipment. He researched other material on the new nebula, read up on tips and tricks for keeping the light from nearby objects from polluting your observations, and drank more coffee. After a time, he began typing commands into his computer console and extracted some interim results. The raw spectrographic analysis appeared first, a row of bright colored lines and white symbols on a black background, followed by page after page of detailed tables and graphs. The first things that leapt out at him were the signature lines for carbon, oxygen, silicon and iron, which he knew well. Angrily, he jabbed at the "Print" button and the ink jet printer next to him began to hum. He ripped the first page, the spectrograph, out of the machine, and glared at it.

"Fuck." he swore, "Fuckity, fuckity, fuck, fuck, fuck."

Oxygen? Sure. Carbon? Why not. But silicon, iron, and—he noticed for the first time—sulfur and magnesium? No fucking way. Hydrogen levels were also way, way down. There was simply no way an EGG could contain heavy elements those concentrations, and that hydrogen value, well, that was just totally insane. He'd obviously fucked something up. But where the hell were these bogus results coming from? As quickly as he formulated the question, the answer came to him: Alpha Orionis, of course. The damn thing was a curse. But how? He'd been so careful... Great, he thought, balling up the pages and flinging them violently across the room, another three hours wasted!

Then, he paused. He got up, walked across the room, and groveled on his knees for a few moments to retrieve the crumpled papers from behind an equipment rack. He smoothed them out on his desk and examined them again. Iron, he thought, why is iron showing up? It doesn't make sense. He sat down in front of the computer and began scanning through one of the many databases stored in the observatory's giant computer systems.

He clicked through half a dozen submenus before he found what he was looking for. He selected 'Spectrographic Analysis', then scanned down the list until he found Alpha Orionis and displayed the results. The data was from about six months ago. He quickly scrolled down the page until he found a periodic breakdown by percentages. Iron, iron, iron... here it is. Less than two percent. He picked up his own sheets. Over ten percent. A fivefold increase in six months, he thought. That sounds like a lot.

Then suddenly, he felt ice pour through his veins, and the blood drained instantly from his face.

"Jesus Christ," he whispered. With a shaking hand, he reached for the phone.

 

Nick Paloma was David's best friend and colleague. They'd done most of their post-grad together, written complementary theses, done their dissertations a day apart, and received their doctorates at the same ceremony, standing one behind the other in the lineup, due to the alphabetic proximity of their names.

Nick was a year older than David, but claimed that he had taken a year off before post-grad to backpack around Southeast Asia. In this, he was not being entirely truthful. They'd met during one of their prof's periodic slave labor details, collating reams of data from the NEO Project. Computer programs did most of the work, but it was still

tedious in the extreme, and the grad students involved tended to spend their evenings drinking, playing pool and blowing off steam at a local bar known to be frequented by post-grad astronomers, physicists, cosmologists and other lowlifes. Technical discussions over jugs of draft were known to become heated from time to time, but were rarely dull.

David had attended several such gatherings, trying to force himself out of his shell, with less than spectacular results. One such evening, he'd reluctantly joined a long table of boisterous students, which included a large contingent of people he'd never seen before;

Nick was among them. At that moment, he—Nick—was gesturing wildly with his glass of beer, spilling much of it on the table.

"Jellico's trying to tell us that the whole angular momentum thing is bullshit!" he was yelling to a cute blonde grad student who was already far too drunk to care, "He says that the whole spin phenomenon, all that turbulence in the accretion disk, and all that gravity wave stuff, plasma jets, yadda yadda yadda has a completely different mechanism behind it. I think his much-heralded psychological collapse has finally come to pass. What do you think?" he hollered, suddenly turning to face David.

"What?" said David, flustered.

"Spinning black holes!" he yelled back.

"What about them?" asked David, bewildered.

"Well, it's just that my AP prof, he says, well there are these anomalies in the... oh forget it. It's all crap anyway." He turned back to his beer.

"Are you talking about Professor Jellico at Cal Tech?" David asked.

"Yeah," muttered Nick, "But don't sweat it, the guy's a moron and anything that comes out of his mouth is, by definition, bullshit."

"But I heard that his stuff on the Fine Structure Constant was brilliant."

"Yeah, like, twenty years ago," Nick sneered.

"The NOMAD project, neutrino mass at SNO," David ticked off on his fingers, "Proton decay at Kamiokande, gravity waves..."

"Ancient history," Nick dismissed it all with a drunken wave of his hand, "What's he done for me lately?"

They wound up talking most of the night. Superficially, they were very different. Nick was brash, outgoing, iconoclastic, and irreverent, with an instinctive dislike for authority. He was a confirmed party animal, loved beer, and was always ready with a knife-edged verbal joust in any situation. He was of mixed Hispanic and French heritage. He was very slim, almost petite; fine featured, with high cheekbones and deep, beautiful long-lashed eyes, he usually wore his long black hair pulled back into a ponytail. Women found him attractive, in a slightly androgynous way, and at social events he was usually to be found in the company of some pretty co-ed. His parents had been poor, and he'd worked most of his way through university. He took to astronomy and physics like a duck to water, and wrote a groundbreaking paper on the multi-channel quark model before he'd got his B.Sc. Most of his professors deemed him brilliant, but unfocussed. He never seemed to study, but almost always got firsts and seconds.

David, by contrast, was quiet, studious, introverted. He came from an upper-middleclass, white bread Boston background. He'd made it through under-grad on scholarships and his parents funding, and was usually to be found studying in the library or his dorm room when not attending classes. He made few friends, but was generally content with his lifestyle. He worked hard, and usually managed A's. His professors approved of his subdued, serious demeanor and most thought that he would go on to accomplish great things. He rarely attended parties and drank only occasionally. Although not overweight, he was heavyset and rather self-conscious about it, and thus always dressed in neat but loose fitting clothes.

Their meeting was a revelation to them both. David realized that there was a hidden partier lurking inside him, and under Nick's influence, found himself gaining more and more social confidence as time wore on. Nick discovered his own serious side, and found that dedicated work could be rewarding in and of itself, not merely as a means to acquire enough cash to fund his profligate lifestyle. They became best buddies, and now, with post-grad long behind them, they were both in their late twenties, with promising careers in astronomy, and next to no social lives. Nick wanted to work at Palomar, he would explain to anyone who'd listen, because his last own name was only one letter different. On that principle, he went on, David ought to be working at Parkes, in Australia.

On the night of David's momentous discovery deep in the bowels of the Palomar observatory, Nick was in his apartment on the southern edge of Rincon. He should have been asleep, but he was wide awake. He was wide awake because Nick had a secret, a deep secret, a really secret secret, one that he'd never in his life told a soul, not even David. Nick was a closet transvestite. During his year off after graduation, when he had supposedly been backpacking through the mountains of Nepal, he'd actually rented a tiny Malibu beach house and spent as much of the time as he could dressing as a woman. It had been an exciting and terrifying year, both fearsome and liberating. He'd done well at it; even his early amateurish attempts to look like a female were quite successful, due to his naturally androgynous appearance. Over the year, his confidence and skill had increased, and by the end of the first six months he'd felt completely confident appearing in public in almost any situation, even social ones. At the end of the year he'd been determined to come out of the closet once and for all, declare his transgender nature publicly, and fuck the consequences. But somehow it hadn't happened, and now, six years later, he was as deep in hiding as he'd ever been.

At this moment, he was sitting in his living room, dressed in a short, skimpy blue mini-dress, high heels, makeup, jewelry, and beneath, his favorite lingerie. He'd taken his long black hair out of its ponytail and styled it. He looked good, and he'd spent a while gazing at his reflection in the mirror. His digital camera needed batteries; otherwise he would have taken a few self-portraits for his collection. The television was on, and he was watching a late, late movie: the original, classic version of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," the volume turned down low. He was looking forward to turning in when the program was over, sleeping in his prettiest nightgown.

The sound of the phone in the stillness startled him and he jumped, nearly upsetting his glass of beer. His first impulse was to ignore it, but calls at 3 AM were pretty rare, and it could be something really important. The call display read, "PALOMR OBS MAIN". Damn. He picked up the receiver and, after pulling off an earring, held it to his ear.

"Hello?"

"Nick!" said a voice at the other end, "Nick! Goddamn it! Get the fuck over here!"

"David? What the hell's going on?"

"Just drive, man! Meet you at the main doors..."

"Fuck, dude! Did you break something? Shit. I swear to God if that machine's not ready for Klassen's bunch tomorrow morning he is going to tear you about six new assholes..."

"No it's not that. Nothing's broken... not exactly," said David, "Just come. please!" He sounded like he was out of breath.

Nick paused, reflecting on how much time it would take him to change back into male attire. He sighed.

"See you in an hour. There's something I have to do first," he said, and hung up.

 

They sat at a table in the lunchroom, coffee-stained sheets of printout and half-empty cups between them. Nick wasn't looking well.

"Are you saying that in a few months, a year maybe, this thing is going to go pop?" he asked, keeping his voice steady only by obvious effort.

"Looks like it."

"Distance?" Nick asked, although he already knew the answer, as would any astronomer.

"Three hundred light-years, give or take."

"That's pretty close. Have you done any radiometrics, yet?"

"Yeah," he said slowly, avoiding his friend's gaze, "I just ballparked a few figures. I think we're talking six to twelve hundred RADs at peak output."

"For at least three weeks. Fuck."

David had had more time to get used to the idea. "Yeah, well, that's kind of the way it's looking. That's why I wanted you to come. I needed someone to tell me if I was completely fucked here. I need some confirmation, and I need replication of these results..."

"Replication! Yes! That's what we need!" Nick had leapt onto the idea, pounding the table top with the palm of his hand. "Replicate the observation. Conclusions aren't worth shit without duplicated results, right? I know whatsisname, Bob... Bob Loeppky down at CTIO; he was in our AP class. He'd do it..."

David reached across the table and smacked his friend gently on the side of his head. "Dumbass!" he said, "You can't see Orion from there at this time of year!"

"Right... Well then, we could tell Klassen when he comes in..." began Nick.

"Are you nuts? We'd be out of the picture in less time than it takes to fart. He'd tell the world it was his discovery."

"You know, at this point I'm not sure that's so important... Well then... okay, what about Don Bertie at MERLIN. He did that Superstring paper... I think he's at OLVI now; I could call him up... There's that guy Samlal down at Arecibo... No, he's at Fermilab... Don't you know some chick that got a job over at Gemini? Made that Epsilon Indi discovery you thought was so cool... Goddamn it, there's got to be someone!" Nick finished, his voice rising.

"Someone that can keep their mouth shut," said David, "That's what I'm looking for. Let me call up Sharon. She's the one at Gemini.... Goddamn it, why don't you call her? You know her better than me. Didn't you leave with her at that McGill conference in Montreal couple years back? You were a shit, you know, you knew I liked her..."

"Not important!" hollered Nick, waving his arms, "Irrelevant! Trivial! We may all be dead in a year! Don't you think that takes precedence????"

 

The lecture hall was crammed, the room loud with the din of competing voices. David gazed around the hall. All the heavies were in attendance, Weinberg, Glashow, Hawking, Penrose, Fay, Wheeler; the attendee list read like a who's who of modern cosmology.

Nick was on David's right, and further down the row, presiding over the room from center stage was the lumpy but imposing form of Nick's archenemy, Professor Jacob Klassen. To his right and left, the dais table was filled with eminent physicists, cosmologists, astrophysicists, professors emeritus. He and Nick had had to fight for room on the dais. If it had been up to Klassen, they wouldn't even be present.

At the moment, Dr. Steven Weinberg, acting as the Voice Of Reason, was speaking. David was grateful for his calming influence. There was so much tension in the room you could cut big chunks of it out of the air with a knife.

"The question, ladies and gentlemen," began Weinberg in his smooth baritone and the room quieted, "is not whether the data is accurate. I agree that there ought to be more study of this object, but the existing results are already as definitive as any of us need to be quite sure of the implications. The question before us now is, what do we do with this knowledge? Everyone here today has been sworn to secrecy. But the time will come, no doubt very soon, when some other astronomer, one who is under no such sanction, will make this discovery, and the news will be out, for better or worse. I am sure we are all aware of the delicacy of this matter, and I am equally sure we all agree that this is going to require very careful management..."

"Why tell anyone at all?" came a voice from the back of the room.

"A reasonable question," replied Weinberg smoothly, before Klassen could jump pompously on top of it, "Whether or not this news is ever made public, we are certainly unable to change the outcome one iota, thus the facts are of debatable practical value, even to ourselves. The question then becomes whether prior knowledge of this event is of realistic value to the human race at large. I believe that there are many people who, for moral or religious reasons, would want to know. It is also likely that there are some who would rather not be aware of these facts. Just, what is our moral responsibility here?"

"Goddamn it, we're all doomed!" came another voice, "Who cares about moral responsibility?"

A number of voices hushed the outburst. The room became very quiet. After a pause, Weinberg continued.

"Yes, it is true that the current data do seem to indicate that Earth will experience lethal radiation levels from the A. Orionis supernova for several weeks. As we can all imagine, this is going to have a devastating effect on the terrestrial biosphere, humans included.

Projected levels indicate that the gamma flux will be intense enough to be fatal for most organisms more complex than, say, insects or grasses. It seems unlikely that we will survive..."

"What about occupying mineshafts? Wouldn't we be able to preserve a nucleus of humanity that way?"

"Yeah," came a wry voice, "World leaders, cosmologists..." There was some nervous laughter.

"I believe what we're facing at here," Weinberg went on patiently, "is a gross simplification of the global ecosystem, not to mention catastrophic changes to the upper atmosphere, geomagnetic anomalies, induced long-term radioactivity in the environment, mutagenic effects among surviving species, and other less predictable effects. The odds of long term survival of complex organisms such as humans, even should any survive the primary radiation flux, are vanishingly small. The ecosystem simply wouldn't support them."

The silence in the room was intense.

"Now," he continued, "If there are no more questions, I think the issue before us now is whether or not we tell the world, and if so, how. Comments? Questions?"

 

The conference went on three days. In the end, it was decided that the news should be broken to the world, but that it should be managed carefully, so as to avoid panic. Exactly how this should be done, however, was far from clear.

 

Nick and David were holed up in the Palomar security office, watching the external video monitors. The looting had been going on for about three days now, and neither of them had dared to venture outside. There was plenty of food in the cafeteria, the power and water was still on; in fact, the only thing David was really missing at the moment was laundry facilities. He and Nick were beginning to smell.

Nick had been unable to reach his apartment for the past three days, and this irritated him. He'd formulated a plan and wanted to carry it out. If he less than year to live, he was damned well going to live it his way, and to hell with everyone else. He wanted to go home, take off his stinking male clothes, have a long luxurious bath, and put on a dress. He wanted to live the time he had left as a woman, and everyone else could go fuck themselves.

"Looks like things have quieted down," said David, panning the cameras with the remote control joystick, "I can't see anyone outside."

"Who would want to loot this place?" replied Nick, "We won't know what's really going on till we get back to town."

"TV news says things are pretty much under control," said David.

"Well what the fuck else are they going to say?" said Nick irritably, "`Looting and lawlessness are rampant so you might as well go out and steal yourself a car or murder someone´?"

"I really don't think it's that bad," David protested, "I think we should go see for ourselves."

Nick thought for a few moments. "Oh what the hell. What's the worst that could happen?"

They drove down the mountain and along Route 76 to Rincon and crept slowly though the outskirts, hoping to avoid undue attention. The town seemed largely intact, though quiet. A couple of store windows were broken, but the few people to be seen on the streets bore little resemblance to an angry mob. In fact, broken windows aside, it was difficult to tell that anything was unusual at all. There was some traffic, but not much. With a little trepidation they watched the first moving vehicle they spotted as it approached them and passed by, but the driver merely waved and kept going.

"Let's go to my apartment," said Nick, "There's something I want to do."

David commandeered the shower first, as Nick indicated that he might be a while. Then he reluctantly climbed back into his over-ripe clothes and waited in the living room, flipping through the TV channels, while Nick disappeared. Most of the stations seemed to be operating. A couple out of LA were off the air, but all the San Diego channels were up and running. There appeared to be an unusual number of religious services on the air, all of which seemed to be heavily attended. The other offerings were mostly news programs, or public service messages, or broadcasts from emergency measures organizations. Everyone was pleading for calm, and for law and order. There was little on in the way of a distraction, which was what David was looking for.

He got it a few minutes later, though not in the way he'd expected. A movement caught his eye, and looked up to see an attractive, olive-skinned woman with thick, long dark hair enter the room. She was wearing a short white skirt and navy crop top, bare legged with high heels, large silver hoops in her ears, and an Indian silver and turquoise bracelet on her right wrist. She was looking at him with a nervous smile. David thought she looked vaguely familiar. He was startled, and rather enchanted, but puzzled.

"Hello..." he said slowly, "Er, excuse me, but, how did you get in here? This is Nick Paloma's apartment..."

"David," said the mystery woman in a smooth contralto, "It is me. Nick."

There was a heavy silence. "What?" said David.

"It's me," she repeated and sat down in a wicker armchair near the door, looking at him intently.

David gazed at her again, examining her face and figure carefully. A coherent reaction seemed to be eluding him at the moment; he merely felt dazed.

"Well," he said after a few seconds, "This is a new look for you, isn't it?"

 

"So... uh, what should I call you?" asked David, "'Somehow, Nick just doesn't seem all that... well, appropriate."

"How about Nikki?" suggested Nick with a shy smile.

"Okay... Nikki," David responded, smiling back, "I'll see if I can wrap my brain around that."

They were driving down toward the center of town, Nikki at the wheel of her four-wheel drive SUV. They'd loaded a few odds and ends from David's car and Nikki's apartment, and now the next item on their agenda was to load up all the food, water and gas they could find, in preparation for heading over to San Diego to check out the situation there. Beyond that, they had no plans.

They parked on the main street, and decided to split up. Nikki headed toward a nearby supermarket while David began walking in the opposite direction, hoping to investigate the local hardware store for anything that might come in handy, and perhaps find some clean clothes. They agreed that Nikki would collect non-perishable food and some jugs of water and pile it at the front of the store. David would return later, dump his stash into the jeep, and then join Nikki to help carry her findings out to the vehicle.

The supermarket was deserted. The windows were intact but the front doors had obviously been forced. Polite looters, she reflected. She began piling jugs of water by the main doors, then wandered up and down the aisles looking for suitable food items, pushing a cart before her. It was all eerily normal, except for the total lack of other customers. The lights were still on and, weirdly, the Muzak was still playing softly over the sound system.

Some of the food shelves had been ransacked, mostly, she noticed, gourmet and specialty items, and some of the produce had spoiled. But apart from that, she more or less had her pick of the merchandise. She collected what she thought would fit into the back of the truck, then reflected that high heels were probably not the best footwear for this escapade. Reluctantly, she set off down the street and into a nearby shoe store. She traded her shoes for a pair of comfortable women's runners, then placed the heels into a plastic bag and headed back toward the grocery store to wait for David.

A figure suddenly leapt from a side doorway and stood in front of her.

"Give me those shoes," the figure said.

Nikki started violently and backed off a couple of paces. She was frightened by the suddenness of the figure's appearance, but more than that, she found herself shocked, and even more than that a little puzzled.

The figure before her was plainly male, but was wearing a brightly colored sundress, big plastic earrings and inexpertly applied lipstick. A blonde wig sat askew on top of his (her?) head.

"Give me those shoes," he repeated threateningly, then after a long pause, "Please!"

"W-what?" Nikki stammered, "My shoes?"

"There isn't a single pair of high heels in the whole town," the other complained, losing his menacing demeanor, "All those other queens took every last one... Bitches."

Nikki was baffled at first, but then calmed down and thought, hell, if I'm coming out of the closet, why can't other TVs as well? Who am I to judge this guy?

"But, you'd never fit into them," Nikki began, "They're size eight. You look like you're at least a ten or eleven." She glanced down at the other's bare feet. They were certainly way bigger than hers. "You'd never even get your feet in them, let alone do them up."

"Aw... Aw, shit!" the other said, gesturing wildly in frustration, "Goddamn these big feet of mine. Hey, did you see any heels in that store?"

Nikki turned around to gaze over her shoulder. "That one?" she asked, still feeling a little stunned, "Um, no... but then, I wasn't exactly looking for any... Hey, why don't you check it out for yourself? Now I think of it, I'm sure I saw a few pairs at the back!" she finished brightly, hoping to distract the other while she made her getaway.

"I will!" he said, breaking into a run, "Thanks!"

Nikki started back toward the truck, and before she could fully collect herself, David appeared around the corner, clutching an armload of items.

"There's more stuff than I could carry!" he yelled, "We ought to park the truck right outside!"

"Did you see that?" Nikki yelled in return, pointing, "Did you see what just happened here?"

They came together, and Nikki gave him a slightly compressed version of her encounter.

"So?" said David, "Have you looked at yourself in the mirror lately? I may be going out on a limb here, but I'm betting he's not the only guy in this burg wearing women's clothes."

"Okay, okay," said Nikki with a sheepish grin, "but it was just so... I dunno, strange."

"Uh huh," replied David, "Do I really need to point out to you that "strange" is the word of the day at the moment? Not least of which is finding out that my best friend has magically transformed into a foxy babe."

They grinned at each other. "True enough," said Nikki after a few moments.

They pulled the SUV up to the grocery store and began loading jugs of water into the back.

"David?" began Nikki.

"Hmmm?"

"Did you mean it when you, you know... said I was a 'foxy babe'?"

"Yuh-huh!" David responded, grinning, "Sure I meant it! Hell, I'm still getting used to it. I mean, you're the sort of girl that the old Nick would've moved in on like a shot."

"Yeah, it's kind of weird," continued Nikki, "I mean, sometimes, back in the old days, I'd be all dressed up, and I would look at myself in the mirror, and I'd... you know," she looked away, "get kind of... well, turned on..."

"Really!" said David with a broad grin, "Now isn't that interesting."

"Come on," she said, grinning shyly and avoiding his eye, "We've got lots of stuff to load."

They finished loading the water and groceries, then backed around the corner and parked in front of the hardware store. They went inside to find a pile of equipment and other odds and ends that David had collected by the front door.

"What's with this?" asked Nikki, hefting a 30.03 pump action rifle.

"Protection, my friend," replied David, "Something tells me we might need it. I got two, by the way, one each, and a couple of sidearms. Ammo, too."

"Hmmm," Nikki murmured, putting the gun back down quickly.

They finished loading the truck, after discarding a few low-priority items that wouldn't fit, and once again headed out toward the highway. On the way, they passed a group of women walking the other direction, keeping to the shadows. Nikki twisted around to look.

"My God," she said, astonished, "I think those were guys, too!"

"Looks like you're in good company," David grinned.

Nikki looked thoughtful, but said nothing.

Out on the highway, they pulled into a gas station that, amazingly, appeared to be open.

"Hope you got cash!" a young clerk yelled out of the booth, "Credit card system bin down for a few days now!"

"We don't have much," David yelled back.

The man was silent for a moment, then yelled, "Ah what the hell. Take what you need. Ain't like anybody gonna give a shit no more."

He activated one of the pumps, and they filled up the truck's tank, then the four jerry cans they'd taken from the hardware store.

"I guess there's not much we can give you in return," said David hesitantly.

"Don't sweat it. I mean, what's the point, man? Ain't like I got much of a future," he trailed off, looking dejected.

David nodded. They drove out of the parking lot and accelerated down the deserted highway toward La Pala.

 

 

La Pala was much the same as Rincon, largely deserted, largely intact, and eerily quiet. They kept moving.

The I-15 south was quiet, but not entirely empty. Occasional vehicles drove by in the opposite direction, the drivers gazing at them suspiciously as they passed. Now and then a vehicle would hurtle by, heading toward San Diego, some going well in excess of 100 miles per hour. Nikki commented that the drivers probably felt like they had little to lose. Her primary concern was simply to stay out of their way.

Half an hour later, around Escondido, they had their first run-in with a driver whose intentions were not so benign. David was dozing in the passenger seat at the time.

Nikki glanced in the rear view mirror and said, "Oh oh..."

David woke up abruptly at her words, and seconds later they felt a sharp impact on the rear of the truck.

"Oh great," said Nikki tensely, "This guy's not out for a Sunday drive..."

She swerved sharply to the right, and in the same moment another impact came from the rear.

"Shit!"

David wasted no time. He scrambled over his seat into the back of the truck, fumbling for one of the rifles, his hands shaking so hard he spilled ammunition everywhere. He jammed a couple of shells into the breach, slammed the bolt home and raised the muzzle to a side window. Obligingly, Nikki rolled the window down from her console.

"Get the fuck outta here!" David yelled, his voice lost in the slipstream, "Beat it!" He waved the rifle menacingly.

For an answer, the driver of the other vehicle, another SUV, swerved toward them and there was yet another sharp impact.

There seemed to be several passengers in the other truck, who now grinned maliciously at them from the side windows. David raised the gun, aimed at the hood, and pulled the trigger. Nothing. He'd forgotten to release the safety. He fumbled with it briefly, then raised it again and yelled to Nikki, "Try to pull ahead of him!"

She stabbed the accelerator and the truck surged forward. As soon as David had a clear bead on the front grille, he aimed and fired. The recoil nearly knocked him into the front seat, and it was some seconds before he regained his bearings. He looked frantically around for the other truck, then spotted it some yards behind. Steam was pouring up around the hood, and the driver was steering for the shoulder. Just as it reached the side of the road, a rear window rolled down and the ugly barrel of an automatic weapon appeared. David saw the muzzle flash, and the rear window of their truck spidered instantly.

"Holy fuck!" he yelled. But the crisis had passed, for now. The other truck was several hundred feet behind them now, limping slowly along the shoulder.

"I guess the rifle idea was a good one after all," commented Nikki soberly. She continued to drive rapidly for another ten miles or so, then slowed down to her previous speed.

They pulled off onto a rest stop to catch their collective breaths and regroup. They were both still shaking after they got out of the truck, and walked together around the picnic area for a while, trying to calm each other down. The washrooms were locked, so they relieved themselves in the shrubbery, then broke out some bread and cheese and sat eating quietly, each reflecting on their close call.

"I gotta change," said Nikki, standing up suddenly, "I guess a skirt's probably not the right thing for this gig, and besides, it's getting pretty damn hot."

She rummaged about in the back for a while, then removed her skirt and top. For a few moments, David was painfully aware that his friend was standing before him wearing nothing but a bra and panties. Sure does have a nice body, he thought. He discovered to his extreme dismay that he found himself feeling a little... stirred, and looked hastily away.

He was grateful when Nikki quickly donned shorts and a tank top, then threw her discarded clothes into the back.

"We should get going," she said, businesslike, wrapping her long black hair into a ponytail.

Welcoming the distraction from his disquieting sensations, David agreed, and presently they were on the highway again.

They reached the outskirts of San Diego without further incident. Traffic had increased somewhat, but none of the other drivers, for now at least, seemed to bear them any ill will.

They continued down Route 15 into the center of town, picking an off- ramp pretty much at random, and presently came to an area of the downtown core that seemed to be thronging with people. There were many parked cars along the streets; several had their doors open, and music blared forth in a cacophony of competing tunes, echoing loudly among the tall buildings.

They drove down a side street until they found a quiet area, then parked the truck in a wooded area between two apartment buildings, covering it as best they could with palm fronds. There were several large dents at the back, and there was a bullet hole in the rear gate, just by the upper right corner of the window, missing the edge of the glass by about an inch. A little further along the roof there was a long, raised crease next to the rain gutter, but no exit hole. Presumably the bullet was still lodged somewhere inside the body. David opened the rear gate—thank God it still worked properly—and rummaged about in the back until he found two fanny packs, into which he put their handguns, a pair of Glock nine-millimeter semi-automatics with full clips. He fastened one around his own waist, the other around Nikki's. She didn't protest. Then, they walked back toward the center of town, where the crowds were.

 

To be continued…

  

  

  

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