After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia (35 page)

Something is happening. I can taste the shift in their fear upon my tongue. I can
taste their blood between my teeth as it pumps, diluted, through their veins in a
failing attempt to graft my immunity to their weakness. Their fear tastes of metal,
hard and cold, and the death stench is soon upon them.

Their fear fills my eyes, my nose, my lungs. Stronger than ever in my mouth. Time
slips past, and their entrances into my chamber grow fewer and fewer. They are losing
their war against this plague, and they curse my strength as their own death marches
forward in the blackness of their blood. Inside me, gaining strength from my mother’s
song, my blood pumps stronger and stronger. Their taking grows less frequent, and
I feel the renewal of my blood bloom within.

The door opens and the bloom withers. They have come once again.

The air changes around me. I’ve not felt this one before.

A fresh anger moves in waves across the room, and I strain against my binds to see
who this one is. Her scent is not of fear. She is not dying. Her blood is pure.

A woman comes to my side, and I see her clearly. No mask, no veil to hide behind.
She is beautiful, her face dark against the harsh lights. Her eyes are black like
mine, her hair is pulled back from her face, and beauty shines from her. I look up
into her eyes, and in them I see a sea of night stars, an ocean of inky darkness,
and she looks at me, hard.

Her mouth is moving, but I can hear nothing from her mouth, only my father’s song
from a distant memory.

Oh my darling, how I love you so
…

Am I dreaming? I have not been able to do so for as long as I can remember.

Stay right by your side forever, yah hey yah.

I’m too lost in the woman’s eyes to make out the pattern of her words that string
along in my head.

I’m not so far away from you, ya hey yah. In your dreams I’ll sing how I love you
so…

All I can see are the stars in a dark expanse of ocean and sky. I know the place of
each of them in the night sky, the name for all the plants and animals. The name of
the people.

So close your eyes and dream. I’ll see you on the other side. Hey yah ha, hey ya hah,
ho!

My mouth opens and I try to speak, but nothing comes out. She reaches out, her hands
resting upon my face, and the expanse of night sky swims in her eyes. I think she
is crying when her words begin to form in my head.

“Sela.” She is saying, over and over. “Sela, Sela, Sela…”

Sela.

My name. My name is Sela.

IV.

“Sela. Your name is Sela.”

My grandmother’s words float over the wind and reach around me, comforting me in our
language. I know my name.

She takes my face in her hands, those dark eyes with oceans of stars staring back
at me, and my mind struggles to focus on her. We are outside, standing at the mouth
of a dark cave in the homeland of our people, staring out at the shadow of Pimu Island
in the setting sun. We have traveled far—that I can tell by the rising and setting
of the sun three times. She’d gathered me into her arms, breaking the bonds that tied
me down, and whispered over and over. “Your name is Sela.”

I had been speaking when she came in. “2231,” I was saying, over and over. The roll
number they had given me when they stole me from my mother’s arms and brought me to
that place. Where they took my blood, with the hope that they would one day find a
cure for the disease that turned their own blood black and their skin into pustules
and oozing death. “2231. 2231…”

I stand nearly as tall as my grandmother, maybe even taller, as I gaze into her eyes.
I am weak from my captivity. She tells me they have held me for three years.

“How old am I?”

She doesn’t hesitate as she answers: Thirteen. She had been searching for me, and
when she entered their facility, their compound, the war was nearly over. There was
no one left to question her when she rode up to the lab in her black Army-issue Jeep
Wrangler, dressed in black fatigues and a headband holding her braid back against
her head. “Your name is Sela. You were named for me,” she says, speaking over and
over, as if I can’t understand. “I’m Isabella. Your grandmother.…”

She presses something into my hand. Something warm, soft to the touch, yet firm. Pliable.
Grasses woven together in the shape of sticks crossed against one another, and bear
grass woven between the spines. We are standing among the tall grasses, the breath
of the ocean moving up the cliffs and through the swaying stalks. As she is speaking,
my fingers begin to form a pattern in the strands, and I weave the strands through
the spine into the beginning of a new basket.

Her words sing in my head as she tells me how she has searched for me all these three
years, staying under the Army radar, posing as a doctor, pretending to search for
a cure for this disease that my captors have let loose in the world. Blackpox, they
call it. “It has killed them like it killed our ancestors, my own grandmother…and
now our blood is our immunity. Our blood is what will survive this war.”

The sun drops down against the western sky, and all around me the sea foams and surges.
In my dreams I stood at this very spot, against the caves in which our ancestors rode
out the storms that tried to extinguish us before. I look into my grandmother’s eyes,
and I can hear my father sing as she wraps me in her arms. The basket is in my hands,
and tears form in my eyes as I see there are no holes, no crooked patterns in this
thing I have created from the memories in my blood. Tears fall onto the pale grass
and, like the kelp in the ocean, the grasses float upon the breath of our ancestors.
I imagine I see Pahe Pahe’s tail glistening like the stars under the sea that surrounds
us in this place that is now, always has been, and always will be our home.

Oh my darling, don’t you cry
, my grandmother sings.
Stay right by your side forever, yah hey yah…

Sela. My name is Sela. I am thirteen years old. I stand at the caves where my ancestors
rode out the storm that once tried to take us down. It is here where we survived,
and here where we will survive again.

“Y
OU’RE NOT SLEEPING,”
M
AX SAID
. “Y
OU’RE STILL HAVING
nightmares about the car. When you’re awake, it’s what you think about. I’m right,
Cody, aren’t I?”

“Mostly,” I told him, and then neither of us said anything else for a while. We sat
together and stared at the ugly red river. It was Max finally spoke up and broke the
silence.

“Well, I was thinking,” he said, “maybe if you were to write it down. That might help,
I was thinking.”

“It might not, too,” I replied. “I already saw Dr. Lehman twice. I did everything
he said, and that didn’t help. How’s writing it down supposed to help?”

“Well, it might,” he said again. “You can’t know until you try. Maybe you could get
the bad stuff you saw out of your head, like when you eat spoiled food and throwing
up helps. See, that’s what I’m thinking.”

“Maybe you ought to think less, Max. Besides, where am I supposed to get anything
to write it on?”

He promptly handed me the nub of a pencil and some paper he’d torn out of the
H–G
volume of an encyclopedia in the Sanctuary library. I yelled at him for going and
ruining books when there aren’t so many left to ruin.

“Cody, we can always put the pages back when you’re done,” he said impatiently, like
I should have thought of that already without him having to explain it to me. “Only,
they’ll be better than before, because one side will have your story written on them.”

“Who’s gonna want to read my story?” I asked.

“Someone might. Someday, someone might. Anyway, that’s not the point. Writing it’s
the point.”

Sitting there on the riverbank, listening to him, it began to make sense, but I didn’t
tell him that, because I didn’t feel like letting him know I didn’t still think he
was full of shit, and because I still don’t think I can do this. Just because it’s
my story doesn’t mean I can put it into words like he wants.

“At least try,” he said. “Just you take a day or two and give it a go.” I told him
I had too much to do in the greenhouses, what with the beans and corn coming on ripe,
and he said he’d take my shifts and no one would even care because there’s so little
work right now at pumps and filters in the hydroplant.

“Oh, and while you’re at it, put in how things went wrong with the world, so when
things get better, people will know how it all happened.”

I said that was just dumb. Other people have already written it down, what went wrong.
The smart people, the people who weren’t four years old on the first day of THE END
OF THE WORLD.

I stared at the shiny encyclopedia pages in my hands. If they’d been ripped out of
a real encyclopedia, words would already have been printed on both sides, but they
were just copies got made right after THE EVENT. See, that’s how the olders always
talk about it, and they say certain words and phrases like THE BEFORE and THE AFTER
and THE EVENT and THE GOO as if they were being said all in capital letters. I stared
at the pages, which were at least real paper, made from real wood pulp, and I told
him if I do this I get more than a kiss. Max said sure, why not, so long as you’re
honest, and he kissed me then and told me I was prettier than any of the other girls
in Sanctuary (which is bullshit), and then he left me alone at the edge of the river.
Which is where I’m sitting now. Sitting, writing, stopping to toss a rock that’s still
a rock into the sludgy crimson river that isn’t still a river because most of the
water went FACSIMILE twelve years ago.

The river moves by about as slowly as I’m writing this down, and I count all the way
up to fifty-three before the rock (real rock) actually sinks out of sight into the
not-water anymore. At least the river still moves. Lots of them went too solid. I’ve
seen rivers that stopped moving almost right after THE EVENT. These days, they just
sit there. Red and hard. Not moving, and I’ve even walked on a couple. Some people
call them Jesus Streams. Anyway, I walked all the way across a broad Jesus Stream
on a dare. But it wasn’t much of a dare since I got a good dose of SWITCH OFF in me
right away, back when I was four.

Okay. Fine, Max. So I’m
doing
this even though it’s stupid. And you better not welch on that bet or I’ll kick your
ass, hear that? Also, I’m not writing much about what happened. I shouldn’t waste
my time writing any of that stuff. I don’t care what Max says, because that’s all
down on paper somewhere else. I don’t even know most of it, anyway, that EVENT three-quarters
of my whole life ago. What I know for sure doesn’t take long to set down. I learned
what they bother to teach about THE GOO in classes. They don’t teach all that much
because why bother telling us about THE BEFORE and WHAT WENT WRONG so we got THE EVENT,
when what we need to be learning is how to run the hydros and keep the power on, horticulture,
medicine, engineering, and keeping the livestock alive (Max’s dad used to oversee
the rat cages before he was promoted to hydro duty, or Max would still be feeding
pellets to rats and mice and guinea pigs). But, okay, Max:

Twelve years ago, in THE BEFORE, there were too many people in the world, and most
of them were starving. There wasn’t enough oil. There wasn’t enough clean water. There
wasn’t enough of much of anything because people kept having babies almost as fast
as the rats do. They’d almost used up everything. There were wars (we don’t have those
anymore, just the rovers and sneaks), and there were riots and terrorists. There were
diseases we don’t have anymore. People started dying faster than anyone could hope
to bury them, so they just piled up. I can’t imagine that many people. Ma’am Shen
says there were more than nine billion people back then, but sometimes I think she
surely exaggerates.

Anyway, in the year 2048, in a LOST PLACE called Boston, in a school the olders call
MIT, scientists were trying to solve
all
these problems, all of them at once. Maybe other scientists in other parts of the
world at some other schools and some of THE COMPANIES were also trying, but SWITCH
ON happened at MIT in Boston, which was in a place called New England. SWITCH ON,
says Ma’am Shen, started out in a sort of bottle called a beaker. It gets called THE
CRUCIBLE sometimes, and also SEAL 7, that one particular bottle. But I’ll just call
it the bottle.

Before I started writing this part, I made Max go back to the library and copy down
some words and numbers for me on the back of one of these pages. I don’t want to sound
more ignorant than I am, and it’s the least he could do. So, in the bottle, inside
a lead box, were two things: a nutrient culture and nano-assemblers, which were microscopic
machines. The assemblers used the culture to make copies of themselves. Idea was,
make a thing you could eat that continuously made copies of itself, there’d be plenty
enough food. And maybe this would also work with medicine and fuel and building materials
and everything nine billion people needed. But the assemblers in the bottle were a
TRIAL. So no one was sure what would happen. They made THE GOO, which Max’s notes
call polyvinyl chloride, PVC, but I’ll call it plastic, ’cause that’s what it’s always
called when people talk about it. People don’t talk about it much, though I think
they might have back before the SWITCH OFF really started working.

Okay, lost my train of thought.

Oh, right. The bottle at MIT. The bottle that was supposed to save the world, but
did just the opposite. The assemblers (or so say Max’s notes, and I can hardly read
his handwriting) during the TRIAL were just four at the start, and four of them made
four more of them. Those eight, though, because the production was exponential, made
eight more assemblers. Thirty-six made seventy-two made 144 made 288 made 576 copies,
then 1,152, 2,304, 4,608, and this was just in one hour. In a day, there were…I don’t
know, Max didn’t write that part down.

The assemblers went ROGUE and obviously the bottle wasn’t big enough to hold them.
Probably not after a few million, I’m thinking. It shattered, and they got out of
the lead box, and, lo and behold, they didn’t need the culture to make copies of themselves.
Just about anything would do. Glass (the bottle). Stone. Metal (the lead box). Anything
alive. Water, like the river. Not gases, so not air. Not water vapor, which is one
reason we’re not all dead. The other reason, of course, is SWITCH OFF, which was made
at another lab, and that one was in another LOST PLACE called France. People got injected
with SWITCH OFF, and it was sprayed from the air in planes, and then bombs of SWITCH
OFF were dropped all over. THE EVENT lasted two weeks. When it was more or less over,
an estimated seventy-eight percent of the global biomass and a lot of the seas, rivers,
streams, and the earth’s crust had stopped being what it was before and had become
plastic. Oh, not all crimson, by the way. I don’t know why, but lots of different
colors.

I didn’t know all these numbers and dates. Max’s notes. What I know: my parents died
in THE EVENT, my parents and all my family, and I was evacuated to Sanctuary here
in Florida on the shores of the St. Johns crimson plastic river. I don’t think much
more than that matters about THE EVENT. So this is where I’m gonna stop trying to
be like the vandalized encyclopedia and tell the other story instead.

The story that’s
my
story.

Isn’t that what Max wanted me to start with?

I’m discovering, Max, that I can’t tell my story without telling lots of other little
stories along the way.

Like what happened the day that’s still giving me the bad dreams, that was almost
a year ago, which means it was about five years after most of the Army and the National
Guard soldiers left us here because all of a sudden there were those radio transmissions
from Atlanta and Miami, and they went off to bring other survivors back to Sanctuary.
Only, they never brought anyone back, because they never came back, and we still don’t
know what happened to them. This is important to my story, because when the military
was here with us, they kept a checkpoint and barricades on the east side of the big
bridge over the St. Johns River, the Sanctuary side. But after they left, no one much
bothered to man the checkpoint anymore, and the barricades stopped being anything
more than a chain-link fence with a padlocked gate.

So, the story of the Army and National Guard leaving to find those people, I had to
get that out to get to my story. Because I never would have been able to climb over
the fence if they hadn’t left. Or if they’d left but come back. They’d have stopped
me. Or I’d probably never even have thought about climbing over.

Back in THE BEFORE, the bridge was called the Mathews Bridge. Back in THE BEFORE,
Sanctuary wasn’t here, and where it is was part of a city called Jacksonville. Now,
though, it’s just the bridge, and this little part of Jacksonville is just Sanctuary.
About a third of the way across the bridge, there’s an island below it. I have no
idea if the island ever had a name. It’s all plastic now, anyway, like most of the
bridge. A mostly brown island in a crimson river below a mostly brown plastic bridge.
Because of what the sunlight and weather do to polyvinyl chloride—twelve years of
sunlight and weather—chunks of the bridge have decayed and fallen away into the slow
crimson river that runs down to the mostly-still-crimson sea. The island below the
bridge used to be covered with brown plastic palmetto trees and underbrush, but now
isn’t much more than a scabby-looking lump. The plastic degrades and then crumbles
and is finally nothing but dust that the wind blows away.

I wanted to know what was on the other side. It’s as simple as that.

I considered asking Max to go with me, Max and maybe one or two others. Maybe the
twins, Jessie and Erin (who are a year older than me and Max), maybe Beth, too. There
are still all the warning signs on the fence, the ones the military put there. But
people don’t go there. I suspect it reminds them of stuff from THE BEFORE that they
don’t want to be reminded of, like how this is the only place to live now. How there’s
really nowhere else to ever go. Which might be why none of the olders had ever actually
told
me to stay away from the bridge. Maybe it simply never occurred to them I might get
curious, or that any of us might get curious.

“What do you think’s over there?” I asked Max, the day I almost asked him to come
with me. We were walking together between the river and some of the old cement walls
that used to be buildings. I remember we’d just passed the wall where, long time ago,
someone painted the word NOWHERE. Only, they (or somebody else) also painted a red
stripe between the
W
and the
H
, so it says NOW HERE, same as it says NOWHERE.

“Nothing,” he replied. “Nothing’s over there anymore,” and Max shaded his eyes from
the bright summer sun. Where we were, it’s less than a mile across the river. It’s
still easy to make out where the docks and cranes used to be. “You can see for yourself,
Cody. Ain’t nothing over there except what the goo left.”