After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia (3 page)

All through dinner, I thought about what Bree said.
If you couldn’t do the job, the agency expelled you. And now I knew that before they
expelled you, they probably made you useless for other places, too.

If you weren’t in an agency, you were on the streets. On the streets the ratcatchers
were waiting, and if they couldn’t sell you, they just disappeared you and brought
in your skullcap for government cash.

(Once, the pediatric acting coach had told me that the rat-catcher had brought me
to the agency because I looked so clever. She said it to make me feel better when
I was failing some exercise, like the school had taken me for some reason besides
my being young enough to be trained. She hadn’t lasted long.)

You’d have to be a bigger bitch than Bree to wish the streets on anybody.

And no way would she tell someone to skip out on a contract. Bree was a teacher. Bree
made her money when the kids made money. She had the best interests of the agency
at stake.

What was so awful about this part that it would be worth telling a student to take
a risk like that?

I dreamed about crumbling in front of the camera, about scalding dust coating my lungs
as I struggled to speak. I dreamed about my fingers being trapped inside the bear
head, about Mason sighing and pulling a hunting knife out of his pocket to do what
had to be done.

“I like the dark circles,” Mason said, the next time he saw me. “Very soldier. Good
work.”

Mason didn’t come with me to the shoot.

“Today you belong to the director,” he said, opening the door to the van. “Do well
for the agency, all right?”

I nodded, uneasy, and ducked into the seat.

As the engine roared to life, Bree appeared in the open doorway, her book bag over
one shoulder.

“I’d like to go,” she said to Mason. “She’s been dropping the intensity in the second
half, and when I’m there it helps her focus.”

“You slapped me,” I said.

She shot me a glare Mason couldn’t see, and said too calmly, “And it was the only
time you’ve done it right.”

Mason looked at her for a second. Then he shrugged.

“I guess if anyone understands a performance like this, it’s you,” he said. “Be careful
not to get in anyone’s way on the set.”

“Of course,” she said, and then she was sliding onto the bench seat beside me, and
the van was pulling away, and suddenly she had horned in on my big moment.

I folded my arms. “What the hell is going on? What are you even planning to do when
we get there?”

“Wait till we get there, and see,” she said.

The guy playing the newsman was from one of the adult agencies, but he was still young,
and handsome enough that my palms went sweaty when we shook hands.

Then he looked up, placed Bree, and went wide-eyed. “And you’re the weeping bride,”
he said, grinning as he held out his hand. “This is a pleasure. I’m such a fan of
the work you did on that segment.”

“Good luck today,” said Bree.

When she was gone, he looked me over again. “Well, if she’s your teacher,” he said,
“then I’m really looking forward to today.”

I tried not to blush like an idiot.

We did a run-through with the director, standing in the shade of the trailer, as the
cameramen worked on angles and lights for the rocky outcrop where we’d be sitting.

I knew this place; I’d spent four days in these woods filming for the bear. The hazy
skyline of New St. Vincent was ahead of us, out of sight; and near the rocks there
was enough wilderness to fool the camera into thinking we were in scrub country.

Below us, farther down the rocks where the ground leveled off near the flooded riverbank,
was the swampland that seeped into your costume and reeked, and made your legs weigh
a hundred pounds more than they told you it would, and looked like a charming springtime
meadow when you viewed it through the lens.

“Good,” the director said, after the first rehearsal. “Poppy, you’re so natural with
the gun, that’s great, but maybe you could work on the sadness a little? We want the
Uppers to really ache for the cause. And Prentis, I like your interest in her—let’s
play that up on this round, increase the focus.”

“Sure thing,” said Prentis, and winked at me.

Bree cut in. “I’d like to see you to work on those last few lines, Poppy. Full costume,
please.”

I slid off the stool, mortified, and sulked over to the edge of the set, where Bree
was waiting.

“You have to go,” she said, under her breath.

I could have hit her myself. I’d never been so furious. “Are you trying to get me
fired? Do you know what’s going to happen to me if they drop me from this piece? I
don’t need help from you if this—”

“They’re going to kill you,” she said.

I stopped talking, with my mouth still open. My stomach dropped to my boots.

I wanted to scream that she was lying—she had to be lying—but a lot of little things
were beginning to make sense in a hurry, as if I had just looked at my stinging arm
and seen the ants devouring it.

(Think about this, Mason had said.)

“How do you know?” I asked.

“The grips have been laying wire along the rocks while you were busy. Don’t look,”
she snapped, like I would have.

“But you knew before this,” I argued. “You never wanted me to take the segment. You
came with me.”

She came with me to save me at the last second. That was too strange to think about.

She looked absently across the scene they were building, slid the strap of the book
bag through her fists.

She said, “I know what a setup looks like.”

I thought how real it had looked on film when the groom fell back from the gunshot;
how I had never seen him again. I thought how stunned Bree had looked in the pictures
as she bent over the body, tears falling from her wide-open eyes.

Just quit
, Bree had told me, and I hadn’t understood why she was so upset.

Let those who would be fooled, be fooled.

When I nodded, Bree’s shoulders sank with relief.

“What do I do?” I asked.

She slid the strap of her book bag into my hand.

“Hope you’re faster than the grips,” she said, “and that your memory’s good.”

I was already looking at the ground, that sloped away beneath us. Down was faster
than up, and if I made it to the city, then…then…

I glanced back at her. “What will happen to you?”

She shrugged, half smiled. “I was supposed to die at the church door, too. I know
how to handle myself.”

Suddenly, I didn’t doubt it.

“When you reach the city,” she said, “get work on the trains, if you can. By the time
you’re over the mountains, there’s decent work for Lowers, and you’ll be too far for
us to find you.”

When I reached for the bag, I clasped her hand for a second, and she jerked back in
surprise before she could get hold of herself. (Everybody has their tells.)

“Can I have a bathroom break?” I asked, loudly enough for the director to overhear.

Prentis raised his hand. “Seconded.”

The director checked his watch. “Fine. Meet back here in five.”

Bree gave me one searching look; then she was walking back up toward the director.
Her face was in perfect light, and as she started talking, he was already grinning.

I swung down behind the first of the outcroppings and headed for the forest.

Five minutes from now, when they realized I was gone, Bree would be as surprised as
anyone, and she’d throw a fit and slow them down, but she had nothing to worry about—I’d
be under tree cover by then.

What took everybody else five minutes, I could do in three.

I
WAS SHOT WITH THE CURE IN THE DARK
. L
ATER, SOMEONE
would tell me it was a Tuesday, but before the tranq dart I didn’t know such a thing
existed. It was either day or night, hungry or sated, alive or dead.

Then there was the cure and I was hauled to the Sanitation Center to be processed:
our identities to be confirmed, and if forgotten, to be assigned a name, a registration
number, date of birth, address.

There were so many abandoned kids after the pandemic stormed through that they changed
the age of majority to sixteen, so in one fell swoop I became a legal adult female.
They gave me my father’s house on the mountain outside of town. They hadn’t located
him yet, and by law I’d have inherited it anyway. They told me it wouldn’t matter
if he somehow found his way home unrecovered—they’d figured out early on that infected
didn’t bite those who were cured. Once someone was Recovered, they were pulled back
to human again even though they still had the infection in their blood.

At the Sanitation Center there were Reintroduction Classes on everything from basic
algebra to civics and manners. I sat off to the side, pulling the old information
from the part of my brain that’d never been touched by all of this. Others in the
room watched the teacher, rapt, and I swear I saw one or two of them lick their lips
or suck their teeth.

I wondered if there was a part of them still hungry or if it was just habit. Sometimes
at night, in the darkness of the barracks, I’d hear my own teeth rattle and my stomach
grumble.

It was like a secret shared by all of us. We knew that to report the stirring sensations
would be to ask for more time locked away. None of us at the Sanitation Center had
seen the sun since our first bites. Few of us were willing to give up the possibility
of freedom by admitting the truth. I wanted to be back home. Even if my parents weren’t
there and my sisters were missing, I wanted the familiar surroundings.

I wanted the smell of my old life: Dove soap cooped up in closets with crisply folded
sheets.

Like the other Recovered, I suffered through the tests and the bar code tattoo along
the back of my ear. Some kept their hair short, at least cut away from the mark. It
became a sort of status symbol, like a gang marker, and rumor had it that people who’d
never been infected would get similar tattoos in underground parlors or color them
on with permanent ink.

Not me. The first thing I did after being released was grow my hair long. I didn’t
want the reminder of what I’d been. It’s enough that in the brightness of the afternoon,
sun will reflect oddly through my eyes, creating a faint glow of red.

That’s how they recognize us. That’s how everyone else knows to shun us.

Monsters
, they call us. Cannibals and vampires or zombies. Sometimes there are riots and fights,
but I don’t see the sense in that. After all, the labels are all true.

I was a monster. I did hunt and kill other people, leaving them to infect in turn
when my hunger was satisfied.

To me, vampire seems like too easy of a word for what we were.

For what I sometimes still am.

What was left of the government urged for level heads and acceptance. They handed
out grants to public interest groups bent on studying us and integrating us. They
introduced laws protecting us and incentives for hiring us.

None of that mattered. One flash of light into my eyes and everyone would know at
a glance what I’d once been. It became common for stores and restaurants to install
searingly bright bulbs above entrances just to catch us on the way inside.

I tried going back to school for about a week, but it became pretty clear I wasn’t
too welcome. Classes were segregated, ostensibly to help catch up those of us who’d
been “disoriented.” When I explained to the principal that none of us—the infected
or the pure—had attended a single class for the last five years, so we were pretty
much all in the same boat, he just shrugged.

“Legally, I can’t treat you any different from them.” He was good with his sneers.
“But I get extra money for hosting rehabilitation classes, and if that means I get
to throw y’all in a different classroom, away from everyone else, all the better.”

I walked right out of his office and off school grounds after that. It felt strange
just being able to leave. But I was seventeen now, legally an adult, so what could
they do?

Half of us—the Recovered—couldn’t figure out who we’d once been and where we’d come
from. The longer you’d been infected, the more it ate away at your brain until there
was hardly anything left. Just gaping holes through old memories so that you might
remember half a name, part of a face, a hint of who you were.

They assigned new identities according to the alphabet, the same way they’d once named
the hurricanes. If you wanted something different, you had to petition for it and
wait.

In the beginning they tried to shield us from the worst of it: what we’d been and
what we’d done. But you can’t hide something that big for forever, and it didn’t take
long for us to understand two things: first, the world we’d once known was decimated,
and second, we were the cause.

It started as a diet drug and mutated into something else. Transferred with a bite,
incubated quickly, it tore fire across the continents.

Not two weeks after I’d been designated as Rehabilitated and released from the Sanitation
Center, I saw a video of what it’d been like. I was standing in the little grocery
store at the bottom of the hill from my house and they had the television behind the
counter turned to the national news. Suddenly, a pirate TV station hacked into newscasts
to air footage from raids and attacks, saying it was wrong to just bury something
like that in the name of national peace.

The video showed a group of men in battle gear approaching a warehouse. Everything
was cast in a greenish tint indicative of night-vision goggles. The feed followed
the hunters inside, and that’s when I saw the creatures.

They were spread across the floors, lounging in heaps, stuffed into the darkest corners.
Each one naked and gray-skinned, bald with patches of stubbornly remnant hair. One
of them opened his eyes, the red glow like the sun against the green.

The cameraman didn’t see it, but I knew what was coming. I watched the fingers unfurl,
long and crooked, tipped with sharpened claws. When the creature ran toward the tiny
group, it howled and screeched, showing sharp pointed teeth that glistened with saliva.

Watching that video, I ran my tongue over my own teeth, now ground to a dull flat.
My cheeks still calloused against the missing sharpness.

What frightened me most about that video wasn’t the horror and disgust I saw on every
other shopper’s face, but the thrill I felt coursing through me.

I’d done that. I knew it to be true based on my own reactions: the way my mouth watered
and my stomach twisted.

I pushed out of the little grocery store while the feed looped around again, and I
stumbled home with my arms crossed tight, chin tucked to chest so none of the glaring
light of day could reflect in my eyes.

In that moment I wasn’t sure where the monster ended and where I began. I know the
government just wanted me to go back to the life I’d lived before, but the monster
always stretched under my skin as a memory. My nails always a little thicker than
before, my hair a little thinner. The taste of animal meat never enough as it used
to be.

I wondered why they even bothered curing us. Sure they wanted their world back, but
why not kill us instead? If they really thought we were monsters and irredeemable,
why go through the trouble and expense?

All they had to do was crash down our buildings, expose us to the light, and be done
with it. Killing us by half measures just seemed that much crueler.

He introduces himself as James, and pauses after saying his name as if I should know
him. I’d been infected for long enough that there are a few gaps in my memory, and
I struggle to place his face in one of them, playing a hesitant smile over my lips
to buy time.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t—” I start, but he waves his hand through the air to brush
away my apology.

“We had a class together in school.” He fills in the blank for me. “Back before…”
He stares off to the side when he says that last word, as if it can somehow offend
me—reminding me that the gap between “before” and “now” is filled with monsters and
savagery.

I take the chance to glance at the back of his ear, wondering if he tilted his head
away for just this reason. No evidence of the bar code tattoo. I force my hands to
be still by my sides—they itch to tug my own hair across my cheeks.

“Yes of course.” I prop up my smile, trying not to show my unease. A storm hovers
on the horizon, signaling that dark will come earlier this evening. I discovered early
on that I’m scared of the dark now, which is funny since I’d spent the last two years
needing it to survive.