After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia (18 page)

“Yes,” I admit, but my voice is laced with anger. “But I don’t see how that’s wrong!”

Eldest looks at me as if he doesn’t recognize me. “If we didn’t control the people,
if we didn’t have the Eldest system, if the three rules didn’t exist, the ship would
fall to mutiny and war. We cannot let people have the same sort of passion that led
to this.” He sighs, his face full of regret. “We’re…trapped. It’s easier to forget
how very alone we are but…there’s not that many of us. It’s only through the Eldest
system that we’ve survived so far.”

I can see why he’s showing me this. I understand the lesson he wants me to learn.
He wants me to see that passion is bad, that chaos is evil, and anything as intense
as the wild-haired woman’s eyes were when she watched the other woman die can kill
everyone on board this ship.

But…I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

I mean, yeah. The death. That part was bad. But the fire in her eyes?

I’ve never seen fire like that.

Ever.

Even in myself.

“This can’t be wrong,” I say slowly, to myself—I’d forgotten that Eldest was there
until he moves, and I notice he’s watching me intently. But that’s not fire in his
eyes—it’s something cold and hard.

“This sort of passion,” I go on, “it can’t be wrong. It makes evil things, yes, the
battles were terrible, the blood…but. But. It was worth it. It was.” My fingers curl
into fists. “It can’t have been for nothing. It can’t have.”

“It wasn’t,” Eldest says. “It gave us the Eldest system. We had to purge that sort
of thing from our lives, and then we could become this society. This perfect society.”

“I don’t want perfect! I don’t want control!”

Eldest stands. Slowly. He takes my plate even though I’ve eaten only a few bites.
He walks out of the room. He locks the door.

“You can’t make me rule a society that has all the—the
passion
taken out of it!” I roar, racing to the door. “I’m Elder! I rule after you! I won’t
control the people as you do. You can’t make me control them like that!”

I punch the door hard, denting the metal. But it doesn’t zip open.

Rule Three: No individual thought
.

“Are you scared?” the Eldest asked the young Elder, more boy than man. The older Elder
stood off to one side, allowing the old man a chance to speak directly to the boy
before facing the crowd gathered in the garden.

Elder shakes his head, but it’s a lie. He is. He doesn’t know what to expect.

Eldest cinches the robe around his shoulders.

“This is the changing ceremony. I will step down. You will step up. This has all happened
many times before.” He arranges the cloth over him so the embroidery lies flat. In
his palm is a black med patch.

“How many Eldests have there been?” Elder asks.

“Countless.” Eldest takes a deep breath. The patch feels cold in his hand, the med
side up. He imagines how it will feel when he presses it against his neck.

“You’re going to see a series of vids today, after the ceremony. Watch them carefully.
You will need to figure out what they mean. Sometimes…sometimes it’s hard to know
what is right and what is wrong. But you are Elder. You will one day be Eldest. And
you will know what is right by watching the vids and seeing the price we pay for the
ship to live.”

Elder plays with the red stitching at the hem of his tunic. “Did you know what was
right?”

Eldest straightens his spine, throws back his shoulders, feels the tension stiffening
his neck. “I didn’t at first,” he says. “But…I came to see the truth.” His eyes pierce
Elder’s. “You will too. And the Elder after you. And the Elder after him.”

“Forever,” whispers Elder.

Eldest nods. He remembers the wild-haired woman, the way her eyes flashed red with
blood and love. He wonders how many Elders protested their first day of training…how
many—if any—never stopped protesting, were like the woman who didn’t give up until
her blood splashed the walls, and would rather die than become the man who took away
violence at the cost of passion. It’s true there had been…aberrations in the past.
He did not find this out until after he had accepted his role; only a generation ago,
an Elder had protested the system and had been quickly and quietly replaced.

But he also knows—now that time has passed and the memory of that first day has faded,
that he had been right to wrap the robe around himself, just as the black patch felt
right in his hand, now, and would feel right later this day, when he pressed it against
his neck.

“Forever.”

T
HE
C
REEPY PLAYING SECOND BASE IS A HELL OF A FIELDER
but his arm’s for shit, so they can forget about the double play. My sister Jenna
swings a doughnutted bat in the on-deck circle, chewing strawberry gum we found in
the drawer of a wrecked house, her Mets cap turned around backward, her yellow hair
flowing in the constant breeze. Seeing her like this makes me happy. She shouts at
the Ken up at bat, “You’d better hit the goddamned ball, loser!” Mom wouldn’t ever
let that language fly. Jenna’s only ten. But I let it slide. Lately, I let everything
slide.

The Creepies’ pitcher looks like a seven-foot-tall furless cat with giant yellow eyes
that glow no matter what angle you look at them, and rows and rows of toothpick teeth
longer than my fingers. But her arm’s the real killer. She’s struck out four batters
already, and it’s only the third inning. (These Creepies learn fast.) Bottom of the
third inning, actually, and the last. Three innings was all we could coax from these
creatures who seem to be more interested in the strange stars spinning wildly above
the field than the game. Its Jenna, me, the Kens and Barbies vs. the Creepies, and
we’re down 1–0.

The Ken at bat just stands there as the pitch whizzes by. “Strike three!” calls the
ump, a three-foot scaly fish with batlike wings. His voice is like frogs dying. Two
outs. Jenna throws her bat to the ground. Its clank echoes from the home-run walls.
“You idiot! You stupid jerk! You goddamned jerk! Why couldn’t you hit the ball?”

I cautiously approach my sister. Last week, she swung at me, got me right in the balls.
But I’ve forgiven her. I forgive everything now. “Hey, hey. It’s all right. We still
have a chance,” I say. My hand falls on her shoulder, but she shoves it away.

“No! He should have hit the ball, Russell! Three pitches right down the middle and
he just stood there! He’s so stupid!”

The Kens and Barbies are more than stupid, they’re empty. Literally. They look like
ordinary people, except at certain angles you can see right through them, and they
glow like streetlights in fog. And they also do whatever you ask them, because there’s
nothing much left inside to tell them otherwise. (It was easy herding a bunch of them
to play this game.) I turn Jenna around, lean in to face her. “You’re up. You can
do this.”

“She’s too fast. I’ll strike out.”

“I’ve seen you hit the ball. You’re amazing. Show them what we are.”

“That was
before
. I’m nothing now.” She falls to her knees, runs her hand through the dirt.

A green monster like a seven-legged Incredible Hulk runs across the field and leaps
over the home-run fence into the starry abyss. A moment later, a huge flying hairless
ferret-thing arcs over the field, snatches up the monster, and flaps away into the
stars. The monster screams, trailing a rain of golden blood. Jenna doesn’t look up.

I squat down and lift her chin. Her eyes are as red as stoplights. “You’re not nothing,
Jenna. You’re everything to me.”

She frowns, points a shaking finger up. “
He
says I’m nothing. He says we’re all nothing, doesn’t he?”

I look at a sky filled with too-bright stars (even though the sun is up and shining)
at the giant pieces of earth that drift lazily overhead—entire towns and cities uprooted
and tossed into space, never to fall back down. What can I say to comfort her?

Ten weeks earlier, the afternoon of my first day of ninth grade, I lined up my bike
behind a dozen other kids, waiting my turn to trick out on the Track. That was our
name for the curvy, jump-laden BMX bike course some kids had built years back, with
shovels and dirt in the wooded preserve. Each year, some parent inevitably got wind
of it, had the town bulldoze it flat. And each year, some industrious kids rebuilt
it, with improvements on the original design. Far from the eyes of parents or cops,
the Track had become a sacred place, where kids could shred without helmets or pads,
smoke cigarettes, and make out behind the trees.

Everyone who was anyone was here, decked out in their new threads. It seemed as if
every kid had remade himself for the new year. I felt like anything was possible,
that I too could make myself into whatever I wanted.

My friend Vinny (new Adidas pants and sneakers, Lakers cap) leaned in close on his
bike and excitedly showed me a picture of what was supposed to be Pamela Huston’s
cleavage. With careful pinches, Vinny vigorously zoomed in and out on the screen of
his cell phone, as if there were some cosmic secret hidden in the pixels. All I saw
was a blotch of color.

“Dude,” he said, “she sits right next to me. I am so going to love math this year.”

To show him up, I whipped out my new Droid. Four calls from Mom, and two messages,
but I ignored them and waited impatiently as my Web page trickled in. Last night,
I’d created six new levels for the game Nimbus, an opensourced first-person shooter
that had become more popular than Jesus over the past few months. “Check out this
crazy maze I built. No one’s getting out of this death trap.”

“Dude, you’re such a geek!” Vinny said. “I’m showing you tits and you’re showing me
your
game levels
?”

I felt disappointed. I’d spent hours building worlds in Nimbus, and Vinny was usually
excited to see them. I slipped my phone back in my pocket.

Vinny twisted his head with his hands, looked like he was trying to tear it from his
skull. I heard a crack. When some people are anxious, they crack their knuckles. Vinny
cracked his neck. “So why are we here, again?”

I spotted Maeve and Elsa walking toward us, all dolled up in their brightly colored
knee-length jackets, trying to avoid getting dirt on the new fabric. I gestured at
them with my chin. “Maeve’s in my world studies class,” I said. Just saying her name
made my heart skip a beat. “I told her I bike, and she got all excited.”

My phone buzzed. My mom again. I sent her to voice mail.

“Oh, so that’s why you dragged me here with these douche-bags.” Vinny whispered. “Maeve
is
a hottie. I’d totally like to—”

“Shut up!” I said. “Here they come. Don’t be a dick. Girls don’t like that.”

“What? Girls don’t like my dick?” He smiled wickedly at me.

“Shut up!”

I’d had a crush on Maeve since spring of last year, when we shared a square dance
circle in gym class. Her hands had been so warm. But back then she’d been with Christopher
Black, a kid who liked to wear plaid and who probably should have started shaving
in seventh grade but had let his peach fuzz grow until it resembled a patch of blond
mold. Rumor had it that they’d broken up over the summer, and since then I tried to
learn everything I could about her.

“Hi, Vin. Hi, Russ,” Maeve said, smiling. Her cheeks were pink with cold, her black
bob of hair half hidden by a gray knitted cap with tassels. Elsa ran a finger slowly
around her hoop earrings. Both girls wore Ray-Ban glasses (prescription), which had,
for some reason, become the Most-Necessary-Thing™ over the summer, and now all the
girls whose moms could afford to buy them sported a pair. Maeve’s cherry red ones
made her look like a punked-out NASA engineer. “Are you up soon?” she said.

In my best attempt at laid-back cool, I said, “Yeah, after Mi--ke.” But my voice cracked
like I’d just hit puberty.

“Frog in your
thr--oat
?” Elsa said, mocking me. The girls giggled. My face grew hot, and I fumbled to save
myself.

“What my castrato friend here is trying to say,” Vinny said, “is, wait till you see
his backside. Backside
air
, that is.”

I shook my head, but the girls laughed, and all was well again. Maeve stared at me.
She looked expectant, her irises the color of fall grasses, a swirl of green and brown,
and pupils dark pits that threatened to suck me in forever.

She let slip a shy, wonderful little smile at me. I couldn’t think of anything to
say, so I just cheered as Eric Kellerman landed a jump. I sucked at flirting, and
my hacking skills weren’t going to get me girls anytime soon. But I kicked ass at
BMX. I had a growing reputation in the school as “That A-track kid who bikes.” I preferred
that to the previous year’s moniker of “That nerd who hangs out with Vinny.” And I
thought if I tricked out a bit in front of Maeve, got some sick air, then maybe she’d
be impressed; and if the afternoon went really well, we’d go behind the trees and…

My heart hammered. This was going to be a good year.

“I heard you were good,” Elsa said. She whipped out a pack of Marlboro lights from
her pocket and lit the last one, the one turned around for good luck.

Maeve smiled and swayed restlessly, the tassels of her hat swinging back and forth
against her head like a Tibetan drum. “Can you do a full twirl?” she said.

“You mean a three-sixty?” I blushed. “Sure.”

“Awesome,” she said. “I love that.”

I couldn’t believe she was paying this much attention to me, that both girls were.
I had shed my nerdiness like I’d shed junior high. I couldn’t stop smiling.

Vinny poked me in the arm and said, “Dude, is that who I think it is?”

I turned to see a frazzled woman, dressed in green scrubs, walking between the kids
and their bikes. Her presence here was impossible, and for a moment it didn’t register.
Then I remembered the phone calls.

“Russell? Is Russell Broward here?” Everyone turned to look at her, then me.

“Oh, god!” I whispered. I turned my back, pretending not to hear, hoping she’d vanish.

“Russ-ell?”
She sounded like she was calling for a lost dog. She spotted me, stormed right across
the Track, and Eric Kellerman nearly clobbered her as he came around the turn.

“Is that your mom?” Maeve said. She squinted at me.

“
My
mom? Oh, uh…
yeah
.”

“You told her about the Track?”

Maeve pushed her glasses up her nose as if taking me in. I don’t think she liked what
she saw. I couldn’t see her irises anymore, only the dull gray rectangles of reflected
sky.

My mom strode up to us and put her hands on her hips. She took a long look at Elsa,
who hid her cigarette behind her back. Then Mom turned to me. “Why didn’t you answer
my calls? I thought I told you to come home after school!”

“What are you doing here?” I snapped.

Her hair was a mangled mess and her lipstick had missed her lips, fallen on her cheek.
Ever since Dad had died two years back, she always had the appearance of going somewhere
and never arriving. “They called me to cover a shift and I need you to babysit your
sister.”

“Now?”

“Yes,
now
, Russell. And where’s your helmet?” She looked around. “All you kids should be wearing
helmets.” She stared at Elsa, who had been trying not to giggle. “Does your mother
know you smoke? You know teenage smoking increases your risk of breast cancer seventy
percent?”

Oh, god. This wasn’t happening.

Elsa said, “My
mom
buys me all my packs.”

Maeve laughed, but quickly silenced herself when my mother glared at her.

“Come on, Russell!”

Humiliated, I muttered good-bye to them.

“Later, man,” Vinny said mournfully. Elsa seemed annoyed, and Maeve frowned. I heard
Elsa mock, “‘Teenage smoking increases your risk of breast cancer seventy percent!’”
Someone shouted, “Mommy says Russell can’t come out and play!” and a bunch of kids
laughed.

I hung my head as I followed my mom through the trees and out onto the road, where
her Honda CR-V idled. Jenna was sitting in the backseat, playing Derek Jeter’s World
of Baseball on her pink pocket console as my mom opened the hatchback. I threw my
bike in, got in the passenger seat, slammed the door.

“I don’t like your attitude, Russell!”

I was on the verge of tears. “You couldn’t call a stupid babysitter?”

“I’m sorry, Russell, but there was no one else.”

The tires screeched as we pulled away. I looked into the backseat, Jenna in her pink
jacket playing her pink handheld game. She was humming happily to herself. I wanted
to scream.