Nancy Kress - After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall

Pete stared, horrified, at the writhing Ravi. “Is he dead? Is he dead?” Tommy cried, even though Ravi clearly was not. But he was hurt, badly hurt, all that blood, those teeth …

Then Pete was running down the corridor. For once Tommy didn’t follow him. Pete hurled himself into the funeral room and pressed the button high on the wall; he had to jump to reach it. The slot opened, low on the opposite wall. Pete dropped to his knees and then onto his belly and crawled into it. The wall closed up behind him, and he was in darkness.

Julie walked the floor of her living room with Alicia, now six weeks old. Despite being premature, Alicia had weighed a healthy six pounds at birth and just kept putting on weight, emptying Julie of milk as if she’d had a suction pump in her tiny pink mouth. Then, because she drank so fast, she got a tummy-ache and Julie had to walk her, steadily patting the baby’s back, singing songs until Alicia burped, farted, threw up, or fell asleep. Tonight none of these things had yet happened. Julie paced up and down, caught as always in the rich stew of love, exasperation, fatigue, and joy that was motherhood. Behind her, CNN murmured softly. Sometimes the sound of the TV lulled Alicia into sleep. But not tonight.

Love, exasperation, fatigue, joy—but mostly love. Julie had never expected to feel such fierce, passionate, possessive attachment for anyone as she did for this damp, malodorous bundle on her shoulder. She’d always thought of herself as a cool person (in emotional temperature, not in hipness—she’d never been hip in her life). Certainly Gordon, nor any other man, had never ignited in her this intense love. Did he feel this way about his children? Did Linda about hers? Why hadn’t anyone warned her?

“…continues in the clean-up efforts in Tokyo. Officials say it may be months before there is anywhere near a complete list of the dead. With damage reckoned in the billions and—” And there was the video again, shot from a tourist helicopter over Tokyo when the tsunami hit. The tsunami had registered 4.2 on the Soloviev-Imamura Intensity Scale, almost as large as the 2004 one in Indonesia. A wall of water ninety-four feet high had crashed over Tokyo.

“…not unexpected in that the Pacific Rim is well known for underwater faults that—”

Julie jiggled at the remote, trapped between Alicia’s diaper and Julie’s forearm. She got a rerun of M*A*S*H, then PBS: “—over 9,000 species going extinct each year, largely because of human activity. The rainforest is particularly susceptible as—” Another fumble at the remote, which fell to the floor. Unthinking, Julie bent to retrieve it. The sudden motion knocked a huge burp out of Alicia. She jerked in Julie’s arms, let out a contented sigh, and went to sleep.

Don’t think about the children drowned in Tokyo . There was nothing Julie could do about it. But standing there in the dim living room, she clutched her infant tight.

As soon as the funeral slot closed up behind him, Pete wanted to get out again. In the complete darkness he pounded on the wall, all the walls. Nothing happened.

I always knew I would die this way , he thought, and immediately thought how stupid that was; he’d never had any such thought. He’d thought he would die on a Grab for the good of all, or from some sickness, or just old age. Or that he’d fight a Tesslie to both their deaths. But this—why didn’t somebody else push the funeral button to let him out? Somebody would! Tommy would get someone tall enough, McAllister or Eduardo or Ravi… but Ravi lay bleeding on the farm floor with his teeth knocked out. Still, somebody must come soon…

The air went out of the dark room.

Pete heard it, in a whoosh, and then he couldn’t breathe. Pain invaded his chest. So he would die here, he would—

Air rushed back in, and light, and Pete was shot forward by a force he couldn’t see. It felt like someone had pushed him hard from behind. He landed beside Xiaobo, half-glimpsed through the rotting blanket, and a pile of bones.

Pete screamed and skittered away. Xiaobo was barely recognizable, a stinking mass of rotting flesh crawled over by disgusting white things. If it hadn’t been for the little statue of the naked fat-bellied man on top of the mass, Pete wouldn’t have known it was a human. But that was Xiaobo. Pete started to cry, then abruptly stopped.

He was Outside, but something was wrong with the air.

He could breathe it; this wasn’t like the airless funeral slot. But the air was… dirty . He didn’t know what he meant except that it was somehow not clean and fresh like the air in the Shell, but clogged with stuff he could smell and taste even if he couldn’t see it. Still, it was air and he was breathing it and he was Outside.

Outside .

Partly to get away from Xiaobo and the other bones—which were Bridget’s? Robert’s? His father’s?—Pete moved along the sides of the Shell. A plan formed in his dazed mind. He would find the clear patch of wall at the end of the Shell and he would wait there until Tommy or somebody went there and saw him. Then Pete would gesture to be let back in. McAllister could open the funeral slot and Pete could crawl past Xiaobo—ugh—back inside the Shell.

Unless—

He rounded the far edge of the Shell and forgot his plan.

The Shell sat on a hill of black rock. The black rock, broken with various grasses, sloped gently and unevenly a long way down, but then it gave way to… what? “Fields,” McAllister had called them about his pictures in the DIGITAL FOTO FRAME. Not fields of amber grain like in Darlene’s song, but of low, spindly bushes covered with green leaves. So many bushes that Pete felt dizzy. And none of them were soy! Beyond that were stretches of very tall grasses dotted with clumps of pink flowers and beyond those, more water than he had ever imagined still existed. It was blue water like on the beach where he had Grabbed Petra and Kara, water like Before!

He started to run down the hill, across the black rock toward the water. Pebbles and scrub crunched under his bare feet. Then something stopped him. At first he thought it was the hard-to-breathe air slowing him down, but this was more like someone had grabbed his arm from behind without him even feeling it. He turned, and there stood a Tesslie.

McAllister had described the alien over and over to the Six when they were younger: “In case you ever encounter one when I’m gone.” At first Pete had thought she meant gone to use a shit bucket, or maybe to sleep, but when he grew older he knew she meant if she died. The Tesslie looked just as she had described: not a being but a hard metal case like a bucket, four feet high and squarish, with no head or mouth or anything. The bucket-case floated a few inches above the ground. Whatever the Tesslies were, they were inside. Or else this was a “robot,” a machine like the battery-car from Jenna’s Grab, and the Tesslie was controlling it from someplace else. McAllister had said she didn’t know which, and now Pete didn’t know either.

“Aaaarggghhhh!” Pete cried and tried to leap on it, knock it over, split it open as he had split Ravi’s mouth. This thing had killed his world!

He couldn’t move. Not even a finger.

The Tesslie said nothing. But all at once Pete found it much harder to breathe. He wasn’t breathing, he wasn’t doing anything. He woke inside one of the tiny featureless rooms in the far end of the Shell, and it turned out that, in their concern over Ravi’s injuries, no one even realized he’d been gone.

Julie sat in front of the young professor’s desk. She didn’t much like him, even though she’d only met him ten minutes ago. Pompous, self-satisfied, and perhaps even a little sleazy, or how else would he have the “top secret” information he claimed to possess? He’d made her sign a nondisclosure agreement, standard for her job, but still.... She didn’t like him.