After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia (20 page)

I see the ball through the Ken’s translucent body. Three perfect pitches. All strikes.
Jenna curses, stomps up and down on first base. “You idiot! You asshole!” The Ken—I
don’t want to call him Arthur because that would imply he was more than just a rolling
tire—hasn’t moved since he lifted the bat over his shoulder. The umpire tells him
again that he’s out, asks him to step away from the plate, but the Ken remains.

I approach. The Ken’s body glows like headlights in rain.

“You’re out, buddy,” I say. His eyes are glassy, distant. “Go sit in the dugout.”

The bat falls to his side, and he turns, walks to his seat. His expression never changes.
There’s a wedding ring on his left hand, and I wonder if his wife’s still alive, or
if she’s wandering the clumps in a body without a soul.

I realize with a pang of fear that I’m up next. There are two outs, and I’m the winning
run. If I strike out, we lose. Jenna looks at me, expectant, as the sky begins to
rain little phosphorescent puffs of light that seem to fall right through the ground.
They fill the sky, brighter than the stars.

“Batter up!” the umpire says.

Rain or shine, it seems.

My cell phone had no signal. And the landlines we found didn’t work either. “We’re
taking the long way home,” I told Jenna as we looped around town. But home, as far
as I could tell, had been torn away.

Empty people waited on broken sidewalks, sat in their dented cars, stared out at their
upturned yards. “Why do they just stand there?” Jenna said.

“I don’t think they have anywhere else to go.”

“Are they ghosts?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think Mom’s a ghost?”

I took her hand. “No. I think Mom’s very worried about us.”

“I don’t like how they just stare.
What are you staring at?
” She screamed,
“Go away! Go away!”
And as if under her thrall, the see-through people ran from sidewalks, fled their
cars, abandoned their once-well-manicured lawns. In a minute, all of them had vanished.

Jenna’s mouth fell open. “They
listened
to me.”

“C’mon,” I said, trembling. “We need to go.”

We turned the corner and she screamed. A bat-eared elephant rummaged through the public
library’s dumpster. It pulled out a ratty book with its humanlike hands and said,
“What a stupendous waste!”

We fled down another street.

On a road shadowed by towering sycamores, a seven-foot-tall walking-stick insect rushed
toward us. I hunched down and covered Jenna in my arms. The insect paused above us,
and from its tiny mantislike head said, “
Please
, I’m a vegetarian,” and ran up a large tree.

When we rose again, the streets were filled with strange creatures. Apes with yellow
fur hopped from broken rooftop to rooftop, singing jazz. A huge hairy spider feasted
on the rubber of downed power lines. A clear ball with a single lidless eye floating
inside it bounced past us. But like the mindless people, these strange beasts weren’t
interested in us.

“What are they?” Jenna said.

“I don’t know.”

“Are they monsters?”

“Are you?” someone grumbled behind us.

We spun to see a hunched, hairless man as thin as a concentration camp survivor, skin
the blasted color of the moon. His smile revealed long canines. A ghoul. “They’re
same as you,” it said, in a voice like gravel being crushed. “The lost.”

Timidly, I asked, “Lost from what?”

“Do you really need me to answer that?”

When I didn’t respond, he looked us up and down and sighed. “Yours wasn’t the first
world created. And it won’t be the last.” He bit his long dirty fingernails. “He didn’t
like it anymore, so he destroyed it. Like he did to mine. Like he did to all of ours.”

“‘He?’”

“You know.” With a bony finger, he pointed up.
“Him.”
He coughed and stumbled away like a drunk.

I shook my head. I’d had enough. “Come on, Jenna.”

“Where are we going?”

“To a safe place.”

“Where’s that?”

The wooded preserve looked as if it had been hit by a hurricane. Downed trees crisscrossed
the path, making it hard going, but we made it to the Track. A huge tree had fallen
across the course and crushed the ramps. A see-through Eric Kellerman sat on his bike
on the other side, moving the pedals back and forth, back and forth. I wondered if
he had biked here all the way from school.

I fell back against a tree. I just needed time to think, to make sense of what was
happening. But Jenna screamed, “Look!” She ran past Eric.

“Jenna! Stop!” I chased after her.

A hundred feet out, the woods abruptly fell away to reveal a gulf of stars. Floating
nearby on a clump of land was a house. Our house.

“Mommy!” she cried. “Mommmmmmy!”

I picked Jenna up, afraid she might try to jump over the edge.

“Let me go! Mommy’s there! I want Mommy!”

For a moment I entertained the thought of using Eric’s bike, building a ramp, flying
out into the stars with Jenna on my back. But the house was too far out. There was
no way I could reach it. In a game like Nimbus, I’d construct a bridge, or give myself
wings, or leap out into the unknown. But even if we could reach it, what would be
the point? I squeezed her as I saw something move in my bedroom window.

I turned Jenna’s face away. “Mom’s at the hospital. She had an extra shift today.
She’s safe there, with all the doctors.”

“But she was supposed to pick me up from school.”

“No, that’s why I picked you up. She told me to come get you. And now I’m here.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“You swear?”

“…I swear.”

“So Mommy’s okay?”

The figure in the house had long, untamed hair. She folded one of my shirts, put it
down on my bed, picked it up, folded the same shirt again. And again. And again.

My voice cracked as I said, “Yes, Jenna, Mommy’s fine.”

I’m up at the plate and I’m shivering. Just as quickly as it began, the phosphorescent
rain has stopped, though the field is still pimpled with glowing spots. Jenna leans
off of first and her eyes are as wide as moons. It’s up to me to win this game, and
she knows it. I can’t let her down. I don’t know what will happen to her if we lose.

The first pitch comes in. It looks high, so I don’t swing, but at the last instant
it dips.

“Strike one!”

Damn! I can’t tell for sure, but I think the yellow-eyed pitcher is laughing.

“Hold up!” the umpire says as a figure runs across the outfield. It’s a man, not a
Ken. It’s a real, solid, flesh-and-bone human being. He screams, “It’s all gone! All
lost! There’s nothing left! Oh god, oh god, oh god!” He runs for the cliff ’s edge
that cuts across right field, where the world drops away forever.

“Stop!” I scream. “Wait!” I just want to talk to him, to speak to someone besides
my sister, to find out who he is and where he’s from and what he did before. But he
has a soul, and therefore his will is his own. He leaps over the edge. For a few seconds,
he keeps moving outward, his legs kicking like Wile E. Coyote gone off a cliff. But
then some invisible current yanks him diagonally away. That’s the third jumper we’ve
seen this week.

Jenna turns back to me. She’s shaking. I wish she hadn’t watched.

I tap my bat on home plate, lift it over my shoulder. “No pitcher!” I say.

After a pause, Jenna says, “No pitcher!”

“Oh and one,” the umpire declares. “Two outs.”

We raided kitchens for food, slept in dank basements and walk-in closets. We once
saw a gang of still-living men and women in suits and dresses murder a boy because
he would not give them his last beef jerky. But after a few weeks it seemed as if
we were the only real human beings left. All that remained of the others were see-through
husks.

“We won’t make it to the hospital,” Jenna said.

“No,” I said. “It’s gone.” I was too tired to lie to her. “C’mon, get your stuff.
We need to find some food.”

“I don’t want to,” she said. “I’m not hungry anymore.”

Neither was I. The strange thing was, we hadn’t eaten for three days and we hadn’t
grown any weaker, though day and night had stopped having meaning. Our clump of earth
randomly tumbled in and out of shadow.

“How come we’re still alive?” she said.

I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

“Do you want to play Derek Jeter’s World of Baseball against me?” She held her pink
pocket game out to me. The batteries had died weeks ago, but she pretended they hadn’t.

“No, Jenna. Not now.”

I looked out the window. A dead soul in a nightgown had dug hundreds of holes in the
yard with her hands, as if planting flowers. But there were no flowers. All the plants,
confused by the strange days, had wilted and died. The woman paused for a moment,
then continued digging.

“Stop digging!” I screamed. And the woman obeyed. Her hands fell into her lap, and
she sat there, dirtied, on the dead lawn. Probably would sit there until the end of
time.

“You’re a bad person,” Jenna said. “You don’t deserve to live, so I’ll crush your
house!” She stared at her blank game screen, making exploding sounds. “And you did
poorly on your test, so I’ll kill all your friends.”

Disturbed, I said, “That doesn’t sound like baseball.”

“No, it’s ‘Smash World.’” She didn’t look up from the blank screen. “One player only.”

“Hit it out of the park, Russ!” Jenna shouts as I lift the bat, readying for the next
pitch. But the umpire calls, “Time out!” A swarm of flying creatures approaches from
right field. They have webbed feet and hands, and faces like rhinos. They wear black
armor and leather buckling, as if they’re going off to battle. They flap their giant
wings and hum a low note as they pass, like chanting monks. My bat vibrates with the
sound.

There are so many flying creatures that they blot out the sky. The field goes dark,
so that only the pitcher’s yellow eyes are visible in the gloom. The creatures suddenly
switch their song to a high-pitched whine, almost a scream. I hold my ears until they
pass, watch them drift out into space going who knows where.