After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia (38 page)

I
T STARTED WITH A TOOTHACHE
.

The Arkle had it, in one of the great hollow fangs at the front of his mouth, that
would have been simple canines before the Overlords changed him, in the process of
turning him into a Ferret. Not that The Arkle was entirely a Ferret. He’d escaped
from the dorms when he was eleven, so he still looked mostly human. A very thin, elongated
human, with his face and jaw pushed out so that it wasn’t quite a snout but you could
tell it would have been one if he hadn’t gotten away.

The Arkle also had a taste for blood. Not the full-on blood-lust the Ferrets had,
because he could control it. But when the Family killed a chicken to roast, he would
cut its throat over a bowl and drink the blood down like a kind of pre-dinner cocktail.
Sometimes he put parsley in the cup, as a garnish. Or, as he said, for those extra
vitamins. The Arkle didn’t eat a lot of greens.

He was one of the younger members of the Family. He’d come out of the city four years
before, more dead than alive, his body covered with sores and his gums receding from
malnutrition. He’d lasted almost six months on his own after escaping from the dorms,
which was no mean feat, but he wouldn’t have lasted much longer if he hadn’t been
lucky enough to have been found by Gwyn, on one of the latter’s last foraging expeditions
into the city fringe.

Gwyn was the first to notice The Arkle behaving strangely. They were working together,
moving one of the portable henhouses to its new location, when The Arkle stopped pushing
and pressed his fingers into his jaw, using the middle knuckle so he didn’t slice
himself with his talons.

“What are you doing?” asked Gwyn, annoyed. As always, he was providing most of the
muscle, and though The Arkle’s participation was mainly for show, the henhouse wheels
were
stuck in the mud, and even a slight amount of assistance would make it easier for
Gwyn to free them.

“Toothache,” muttered The Arkle. He stretched out his jaw and ground it from side
to side. “Annoying me.”

“Doc had better look at it right away,” said Gwyn. He’d had a toothache himself a
few years back, and there was still a hole at the back of his mouth where Doc had
pulled out a big molar. But that was better than what could happen if it was left
to rot. Gwyn had seen that too, in other survivors. And Ferret teeth were certain
to be trickier than more nearly human ones.

“It’s not too bad,” muttered The Arkle. He winced as he closed his mouth, though,
and tears started in his eyes.

Gwyn set down the chicken house and lumbered around, towering over The Arkle. Gwyn
was the big brother of the Family, and the second oldest. He’d been thirteen when
the Change swept through, disappearing everyone over the age of fourteen. Like most
of the surviving children, he’d then been caught up by the suited figures driving
their centipede trains, and taken to the Dormitories. Big for his age and well-muscled,
he’d gone straight into the Myrmidon track, fed alien steroids and exercised to the
limits of torture, but like The Arkle, he’d managed to escape before the final conversion
in the Meat Factory.

Even so, he was seven feet tall, measured four feet across the shoulders, and had
arms roughly the same diameter as the massive logs he split for the winter fire, wielding
a woodchopper that most of the others couldn’t even lift.

“Go and see Doc now,” ordered Gwyn. Like the few other almost-Myrmidons who got away
from the dorms, his voice was high and reedy, a byproduct of the chemical infusions
that had built his muscle, while also effectively making him a eunuch.

But high voice or not, The Arkle knew that when Gwyn spoke, he meant what he said.

“All right, all right, I’m…ow…going,” he said. “You sure you can move this by yourself?”

“I guess I’ll manage somehow,” replied Gwyn.

The Arkle nodded sheepishly and trudged back through the sparse forest where the five
henhouses were arranged. At the edge of the trees, he climbed over the old rusted
fence with the sinuous grace of a true Ferret, pausing to tip a finger at Ken-Lad,
who was on sentry halfway up the ancient tree that served as the western lookout post.
Ken-Lad made a ruder gesture back, before resuming his steady, regulated gaze, staring
up at each quadrant of the sky.

The Farm lay in a deep valley, more than a hundred kilometers from the city. The creatures
had never come to fight their battles there, and even the Wingers never flew overhead.
But very occasionally, one of the Overlord’s flying machines did, and that was why
the sentries watched. The Family could not afford to have a curious Overlord sweep
down and see free humans, for the creatures would surely come then, correcting whatever
oversight had kept the valley secret for the eight years since the Change.

The Farm had been a giant dope plantation before the Change, and the camouflage nets
were still in place over a good thirty acres of land. The Family had poked a few holes
in the nets, here and there, to let in a little more light for the much smaller portion
they had under cultivation. That provided vegetables, and the chickens provided meat
and eggs, and there was hunting for wild game as well. There had been a lot of tinned
and dried food earlier on, but it was mostly saved for special occasions now, since
it was too risky to venture toward the city and the riches that still awaited there.

Doc Carol had found the Farm almost five years before. She’d never told the others
whether she’d known it was there, or had simply stumbled upon it and then worked out
that it was safe from the creatures.

She never told anyone how she knew so much about medicine and healing, either. Gwyn
probably knew, and some of the older ones, but they never talked about anything the
Doc said or did. All the others knew was that she had been a day short of her fifteenth
birthday when the Change came, a day short of being old enough to go wherever it was
that most of humanity went. If they went anywhere, as opposed to simply ceasing to
exist.

The Arkle spat as he remembered the caterpillar train that he had willingly climbed
aboard. He’d been seven years old at the time, and his mother had vanished in front
of his eyes, and he’d been desperately afraid. The train had looked a bit like the
one at the fairground, and it was already loaded with children. He even knew some
of them from school.

So he’d got on, and it had taken him to one of the first established dorms. A tracking
and ID device had been injected beneath the skin of his wrist, and he’d been subjected
to a series of tests at the hands of those silvor-visored, faceless, suited humanoids.
The tests had said “Ferret,” and from then on, everything he did or that was done
to him was designed to make him both less and more than human.

The Arkle looked at the strange purple welt on his wrist as he loped through the high
grass that surrounded the main house. They cut the grass occasionally, using scythes,
just to reduce the risk of fire, but never enough that it would look new-mown.

The tracking device in his wrist had been removed by Tira, a girl in the dorm, though
The Arkle didn’t know exactly how she’d done it. She simply touched her finger to
the lump that showed where the tracker lay under the skin, and there had been a moment
of pain so terrible that The Arkle had blacked out. When he’d come to, there was no
lump. Just the purple welt.

Of course he knew that Tira had used a Change Talent of some kind. He had one too,
only it wasn’t as useful. Or at least it was only useful for one thing. The Arkle
grinned as he thought of that, then grimaced and almost sobbed as the pain in his
tooth came back, darting from his mouth up into his head, savaging him right behind
the eyes.

The pain in his tooth was even worse than that remembered pain in his wrist.

Tira had taken her device out too, and they had run together. Only, she never made
it over the perimeter wire. Tira was the one who had first called him “The Arkle.”
He didn’t know why, but he’d kept the name just to remember her, his truest friend
from the dorms.

Greenie was on the verandah of the house, carefully potting up seedlings of some plant
or other that The Arkle didn’t recognize. She looked at him with her head to one side,
and he could tell she was wondering why he had come in early. But even then, most
of her mind was probably on the plants. Greenie had a Change Talent too, and though
like all Change Talents, hers was very weak down in the valley, she still had a special
empathy for vegetable life. Greenie could always tell when a plant needed water, or
more shade, or sun, or was being strangled by its neighbors.

“Got to see Doc,” said The Arkle. He tried to smile, but it hurt too much, so he waved
instead and hurried on inside.

The Arkle could see Doc Carol through the small square window that was set high in
the inner door to her lab, even though the thick glass was smeared all around with
sealant. Doc was clearly cooking up something fairly toxic, since she was wearing
a gas mask and an ex-Army NBC suit.

The Arkle hesitated, then knocked on the window. He didn’t want to disturb Doc, but
his tooth was getting worse, a lot worse. The pain had been around for weeks, coming
and going, and hadn’t ever got too bad. Then a few days before it had suddenly escalated,
ebbing occasionally but never going away, and when it hit full force he could hardly
think or see, and he just wanted to smash his face into something hard and destroy
the bastard tooth. Only, he didn’t because he knew it wouldn’t work.

Doc looked over, her eyes just visible through the round lenses of the gas mask. Doc
had weird eyes. They were kind of violet, and bigger than normal. The Arkle had heard
that up out of the valley they shone in the dark, and the Doc had to wear sunglasses
all the time. He’d never seen it, but he believed it.

“That you, The Arkle?”

Her voice was muffled through the mask and the heavy door, but clear enough.

“Yeah. Can I come in?”

Doc was almost the only person in the Family who called The Arkle by his chosen name.
Most of the others called him Arkle, or Ark, or Arkie, which he hated.

“Wait a minute,” called out Doc. “This stuff won’t do you any good. I’ll be out in
a minute. Go into my office.”

The Arkle retreated through the outer door. Doc’s office was the biggest room in the
old house. She slept there, as well as worked. Her bed was behind the desk. The Arkle
looked at it and wondered what it would be like to share it with her. He’d slept with
nearly all of the women and at least half of the men on the Farm, because his Change
Talent was for seduction, and even the pale version of it that worked down in the
valley was enough to help out his natural charm. And since everyone had pretty much
grown up in the dorms, there was no such thing as a normal human body anymore. So
his snouty face and fangs and slimmest of waists was not a bar to relationships.

The Doc was the one closest to old human, and even then, she had those eyes. The Arkle
had never dared try his Talent on her, had never even had a few minutes alone with
her to see if it might be worthwhile adding that into the natural equation of liking
and desire.

But he couldn’t even begin to daydream about sex with Doc, not with the pain in his
tooth. He lay down in the patient’s chair, the old banana lounge that sat in front
of the desk, and shut his eyes, hoping that this would somehow lessen the pain.

It didn’t, and the sudden waft of a harsh chemical smell alerted him to Doc’s presence.
She was leaning over him, the gas mask off, her short brown hair pressed down in an
unnatural way, showing the marks of the straps. Her violet eyes were fixed on his
jaw.

“Your jaw is swollen,” remarked Doc. She went behind the desk, put down her mask,
and stripped off the suit. It gave off more chemical smells as she opened the window
and hung it on the hook outside, ready to be hosed down later.

She was only wearing a pair of toweling shorts and a singlet underneath. The Arkle’s
eyes watered as he looked at her ruefully. The tearing up wasn’t from the remnant
chemical smell, but from the pain. A pain so intense he couldn’t even appreciate his
first real look at Doc without the white lab coat she nearly always wore inside—and
there it was, slipping over her shoulders and getting done up at the front, far too
swiftly for his liking.

“Is it a tooth pain?” asked Doc.

“Yeah,” whispered The Arkle. He raised one hand and gestured toward the left-hand
fang. “It’s got…pretty…bad. Just today.”

“That never got this bad in a day. You should have seen me when it first started,”
said Doc. She dragged a box over next to the banana lounge and sat on it. “Open wide.”

The Arkle opened wide in a series of small movements because he couldn’t do it all
in one go, it hurt too much. Doc leaned over him, looking close but not touching.
Some distant memory made The Arkle shut his eyes. For a moment, he was six again and
in the dentist’s chair, and his mother was holding his hand.…