After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia (4 page)

An awkward silence percolates between us until I offer, “How’ve you been?” and then
want to cringe because the answer to that is never very good. Often, in order to stay
alive and uninfected, most survivors had to do things more monstrous than the monsters.
It’s just no one ever talks about that.

“Good.” When he smiles, I have to look away because it makes something bright crack
open inside me—a lust that tastes as powerful as tearing a human body to strips. I
bite my lips, feeling the tension of skin under the pressure of my now-dulled teeth.

He asks to walk me home, up the mountain, and I nod my head, wondering how I can ever
fill each footstep etched in silence. And yet somehow we do, finding conversations
that meander through the easy territory, no talk of monsters or pandemics or the end
of the world.

I’m sure there are those who figured out how to move on past what they’d been. Just
as there were the ones who couldn’t—who, even though they were cured, continued to
hunt the taste of human flesh. I wondered if the real lucky ones were those who’d
gone insane, let the disease lay waste to their brain until they could do nothing
but parrot back whatever their rehabilitation coach spat at them.

The scientists think we don’t remember. That’s supposed to be part of the cure—amnesia
of everything during infection.

Except it doesn’t work that way. At first I thought I was the only one who, when darkness
falls absolute, recalls what it was like to wake standing in the corner, fingers flexed,
claws dirty with dried blood. So very hungry that the world buzzes with it.

But then one day I was waiting for my check-in appointment at the Sanitation Center,
and I watched another Rehabilitated walk over to pour himself a cup of water from
the fountain. It was late afternoon and a storm had blown through, and for the flicker
of a moment, the lights in the center blinked out while dark clouds boiled outside.

When the generator kicked in, I found myself staring at the man, at the way his hand
shook as he gripped the cone-shaped paper cup. At the hunger in his eyes.

And I knew. We both knew. What we’d been—it’s always inside us. Just that some of
us bury it deeper than others.

“Is it hard living alone?” James asks. It’s the third time I’ve run into him at the
convenience store at the bottom of the mountain and allowed him to walk me home. I
grip my fingers around the seat of my bike, propelling it beside me.

“Sometimes.” I think about how I used to be so lazy, my room always a mess. These
days the house is immaculate. What else do I have to occupy my days? “I miss the noise
of people,” I admit.

From the corner of my eye I see the edge of his mouth kick up, and it encourages me
on.

“I had four sisters. There was always drama. Fights, screams.” I realize how bad that
sounds, and I temper it back with a laugh. “But it was good in its way. We were crazy
about each other.”

“I know what you mean.” His voice seems indulgent. “I had sisters too.”

I turn toward him, to share this moment of similarity between us, and the realization
of the meaning of his words is slow to filter through me.
Had
sisters. The bike wobbles under my grip, veering into his path, and he grabs the
handlebars, knuckles flaring white.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper. I can’t look at him. In that moment I feel the monster keenly
within. I taste it against the back of my throat.

I could have been the one to kill his sisters. They’d have been young and fresh, almost
ripe like a perfect fruit. It doesn’t matter whether I did or not; I’d killed someone
else’s sisters. I’d shredded them open, laid them bare.

And I wonder again why they’ve let people like me live. Before the pandemic, someone
like me—a murderer who tortured her victims—would have been put to death without hesitation.

“I’m sorry,” I say again.

His hands clutch at the handlebars, grip pulsing like a heartbeat.

“It wasn’t you,” he says. And I know what he means is that it was the monster inside
me that drove me to such brutality. Ever since the cure, the scientists have embarked
on a massive campaign to explain to the Pure how we are not to be blamed for our actions
while monstrous. don’t blame the victim; blame the disease, is emblazoned across every
crumbling billboard.

I don’t know how to tell him how wrong he is.

At home, with the bike parked in the garage and nothing but the night surrounding
me, I walk through the house and turn out every single light. Before the pandemic
we’d had few neighbors—only a couple of properties scattered across the mountain,
and beyond, nothing but protected wilderness.

Now the isolation is absolute. The other houses stand barren, their occupants dead
or sick. No one’s bothered to even vandalize or squat; we’re too far from the city
to be of much convenience.

Besides, the world is still filled with monsters that like the darkness. Only Rehabilitated
would choose to live beyond the civilization compounds, with their artificial lights
glaring all night. Sometimes when I walk through a dim room I can see the creatures
through the window, racing past the trees searching out their prey.

They speak with a clicking sound that sometimes has the timbre of howling. In the
daytime it’s easy to spot where they passed, their claws raking divots in the tree
trunks.

It’s illegal to hunt them, though that doesn’t stop most poachers. Back before the
Recovery, those with the most kills had the highest designations in many communities.

Now the government hands out the tranq darts filled with the cure, urging hunters
to use those instead, but sometimes they “forget” or claim an ambush and…Oh, well…another
pod of monsters killed. What loss, really, is that to the world?

It could have easily been me on one of those piles of burning bodies. Maybe it should
have.

I’ve been thinking about James and his dead sisters for a week, but when I finally
see him again outside the store, I’m not sure how to approach him, and so I just assume
the familiar pose of chin tucked to my chest, stealing glances as I start walking
my bike home.

He falls into step next to me.

“I had a boyfriend,” I tell him, and the awkwardness of the statement strangles me
until I’m compelled to explain. “Before. And he was killed. By one of the…them.”

Panic lights a fire inside me that this is coming out all wrong. “It wasn’t me who
killed him when I was one of the…them,” I’m quick to add, and that’s what stops the
dribble of words from my mouth.

I want him to understand that I know what it’s like to lose someone you know to them.
That I’ve been on both sides, and neither one is bearable. A painful silence settles
between us, the click of my bike’s wheels counting out the pattern of our steps.

“My mother killed my sisters,” he finally says.

I form the word “Oh” with my mouth.

“She wasn’t one of them,” he clarifies. “It was after the pandemic started. My father
kept a gun in the bedside table. She killed him first, then the girls. I heard the
last shot. It’s what woke me up. She’d ground sleeping pills into instant mashed potatoes.”
For a moment he pauses. “I hate mashed potatoes, and she didn’t remember.”

He brushes his hand along my hip, stopping me. The bike by my side wobbles and then
falls against my leg. He’s not even tentative as he reaches out, sweeps the fan of
my hair aside, and takes the edge of my ear in his fingers as if he can read the bar
code through his fingertips.

“There are other kinds of monsters in the world,” he tells me.

I want to crawl inside him and never leave.

As I stand in the darkness of my house, I press my hands flat against the plate glass
window stretched across the sunroom. There’s a pool carved into the patio below, and
a body thrashes in the fetid water.

Her claws scrape uselessly at the night. I know it’s a she because her body still
retains some of the curves, her breasts just breaking the surface as she fights for
air. Moments ago I watched a pack of them race past the house, a few of them stopping
to sniff the air, as if they could smell me tucked away inside.

The others turned away, kept going once they must have realized my blood contains
the same sickness as their own. Except one. She stepped closer and then again. She
was staring at the window, and the pool swallowed her whole, ripples easing toward
the walls before she broke back up to the surface.

I wonder at how she doesn’t realize she could stand if she just moved a bit to the
right and stretched her feet down.

I have no idea how long it will take her to drown. I have even less of an idea who
she must have been before the pandemic, to have taken such an interest in me standing
here.

All I know is that she’s a monster. I could call in the hunters, have her shot with
the cure and dragged away. I could load my own gun with the cure-tranqs they gave
me the day I left the Sanitation Center.

But what kind of existence is that giving her? Who could ever claim my lonely days
are anything approaching a life?