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

Jenna would never do another Grab. Her deformities were worse than most, and now her spine would not hold up her body for more than a few minutes of painful movement. It wouldn’t be long before one of the shopping carts would have to trundle her. But despite the constant pain, she retained the sweet nature she had inherited from McAllister, and now she sat on a pillow, back against the wall beside the open door, reading to four kids sprawled on the floor. Goodnight Moon. Pete knew it well.

Kara looked up, saw Pete, and shrieked. “No! No! Nooooooo!” The child threw herself on the floor and kicked her bare feet against the metal.

McAllister picked her up. “No, sweetheart, no… ssshhhhhhh, Kara-love, ssshhhhh….”

Kara went on screaming until Caity rushed over, took Kara from McAllister, and carried her away, tossing a reproachful glance over her shoulder at Pete. He’d never liked Caity, not even when they were kids themselves. “She’s too much like you , ” McAllister had said to him once, and Pete had hid from McAllister in the far end of the Shell for an entire day. He still didn’t like Caity, not even when he was having sex with her.

Jenna said, “How are you, Pete?”

“Great, just great, on this great ol’ day in the morning.” Almost immediately he regretted saying that. Jenna loved the songs Bridget had crooned to them as kids, and she’d loved Bridget. At Bridget’s funeral a few months ago, Jenna had sobbed and sobbed.

Jenna didn’t react to the sarcasm. She, of all the Six, was the best at setting aside her own feelings for the common good. Terrell and Paolo were pretty good at it, too. Pete, Ravi, and Caity often failed.

Failed, failed, failed … That was Pete’s song, unless he made hatred sing louder.

Jenna said, “I’m glad you recovered from your Grab. Kara is coming along very well—”

“Unless she sees me, of course.”

“—and Petra is a darling.”

“I better go Outside to give Kara a chance to adjust.”

McAllister said, sharply for her, “That’s enough of that talk, Pete. Come with me.”

As if anyone could really get Outside!

But he followed her meekly, wishing for the hundred hundredth time that he had Jenna’s patience. Ravi’s physical strength and good looks. Anything that anyone else had and he didn’t. Wishing he could seize McAllister’s waist and take her into one of the rooms at the far end of the Shell, just the two of them and a blanket… His cock rose.

Not a good time! Still, he was glad he was only infertile, not impotent like Paolo. “Pre-embryonic genetic damage is a capricious thing , ” McAllister had said. “We were lucky you Six survived at all.”

Lucky. Great, just great, on this great ol’ day in the morning.

McAllister led Pete around the bucket-wall to the babies’ corner. Three infants lay asleep on blankets, watched over by Ravi, who didn’t much like babies but it was his turn for this duty. Ravi was the least deformed of the Six. His eyes were permanently crossed, but his body was strong and, even though he was a year younger than Pete, he was taller and heavier. With thick dark hair and a handsome face, he looked the most like the princes in The Illustrated Book of Fairy Tales . Sometimes Pete hated him for that, although in general they got along well enough. Ravi was his biological half-brother, after all. Not that that counted for much; what counted was the good of all.

“Look,” McAllister said to Pete, “at the treasure you brought us.”

Petra lay asleep on a blanket, a square of plastic between it and the clumsy diaper made of another blanket. On top she wore a very faded yellow shirt too big for her. Her tiny pink mouth, the little curled fists with the creases at the wrists, the shape of her head… She was a perfect human person and of course she would be fertile. Radiation levels had subsided enough by now, McAllister had said, although Pete didn’t really understand what that meant. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that he had done this thing: brought back a perfect, precious boost to the restarting of humanity on Earth. Someday that restarting would move Outside, McAllister said.

If the Tesslies permitted it.

McAllister put her thin hands on either side of Pete’s face and turned him toward her. “Listen to me, dear heart. I am making you this baby’s father. You are now responsible for her life and, as much as possible, her happiness. Do you understand me? I put Petra’s life in your hands. You are her father.”

Both Pete and Ravi gaped at her. No one in the Shell was “father” or “mother” to any kid taken on a Grab! Everyone was responsible for the good of all, always. Why now, why Petra, why Pete? The questions were lost in the feel of McAllister’s hands on his face.

“Why him?” Ravi blurted. “Is it because he’s the oldest?”

McAllister didn’t answer. She never answered anything she didn’t choose to. But she gave Ravi a look that Pete couldn’t read, and didn’t want to. All he wanted was for her to keep on holding his face between her long slim fingers, forever and ever.

She didn’t. But he could feel her hands long after she took them away, could feel his own deep blush, could feel the burden, welcome because she had given it, that McAllister had just placed on his heart. To turn his red face away from her, he gazed down at Petra.

“Hey,” he said to the baby, who woke and immediately shit her diaper.

Julie sat in her apartment, studying the graphs on her computer screen. Her desk was jammed against the living room window. Beyond the glass a few flakes of early snow drifted through darkness. Cars swooshed through street slush and swept ghostly patterns of light across the ceiling.

The kidnappings and mysterious store burglaries had followed an erratic path, but the rough outline was clear. The first abduction—the first they knew about and had included in the data, she corrected herself—had been in Sarasota a year ago. October 16 2011: Tommy Candless, age six. Parents divorced, and the child basically a Ping-Pong ball for power struggles between them. John Candless, who did not have custody, had grabbed his son and run before, but he’d easily been caught by state troopers since he hadn’t even had the sense to leave Florida. Heather Candless had one conviction for DWI. Julie wasn’t even positive that Tommy wasn’t squirreled away with some obscure relative or friend somewhere that Gordon’s task force had failed to discover. Or the child could have been killed and the body never found. Both parents seemed to her capable of even that in their intense hatred for each other.

Drop Tommy from the data? Would that help? No, her gut said to leave him in. She did.

The path of subsequent abductions moved roughly up the East Coast, sometimes swerving inland, sometimes back-tracking. The intervals weren’t even, coming in clusters that themselves weren’t even. Nine children after Tommy, including Kara and Jennifer Carter. The kids ranged from ten months old to Tommy’s six years. Seven girls, three boys. Two hysterical witnesses, one relatively calm one (but her baby hadn’t been taken; she’d fought off the young abductress). One hysterical witness had been pushed over the slippery edge of her already advancing illness into an institutional schizophrenia, which did not help the FBI Assistant Director to trust her credibility.

The big problem with the data, as Julie had told Gordon, were the store burglaries. Here, too, the MO was the same: no forced entry, no money taken, seemingly random grabs of diverse merchandise, including shopping carts. Why take shopping carts, both worthless and conspicuous? Why take an entire display of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups? At Wal-Mart’s, why take pillows and leave untouched a display of diamond rings? And should the Baltimore Kohl’s burglary be included or not? How about that earlier one in Georgia? Or the one in the New Jersey convenience store? That store had had a broken back window, which might have taken it off the list of no-forced-entry burglaries. However, a neighbor walking his dog at 3:00 a.m. thought he heard glass breaking. He shouted and saw kids run away, empty-handed, so did that mean there were two incidents at the same store at the same night, a coincidence?