Ellen Datlow: After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia

Sister, I thought to myself. We are all sisters and brothers in the pack , I wanted to tell her, but I knew that she’d become aware of it soon enough. Once the infection took hold and brought her to us.

And maybe one day she’d be out on a hunt of her own, and a scent would catch the air, and she’d hesitate. Are you my sister? she’d be wondering, the clicks of her tongue unable to form the words.

Even as the pool water poured down her throat, that’s what she’d be asking. Are you my sister?

And I’d stand there mute, wanting to answer “Yes,” but knowing it was a lie.

We’ve gathered every object capable of emitting light and shoved it into the tiny utility room in the basement, but even so it barely creates enough of a glow to sting my eyes.

Which means all we’ve accomplished is knowing that when the monsters break down the door I’ll be able to see clearly as they shred James’s flesh, sinking their teeth into his limbs.

I pace back to the door, candle wax dripping from my fingers as I set trembling flames to wicks.

“Have you ever thought about what it would be like to be one of us?” I ask him as I stand with my hand pressed to the wall. I hear the vibrations of them pounding upstairs. Three months before the pandemic, my father replaced all the windows with double-paned glass, which only causes a moment’s hesitation in the monsters’ assault.

James moves behind me, coming so close I feel the tremor of each exhalation on the back of my ears. “One of you?” he asks, brushing my ponytail aside and pressing his lips to the ridges of my spine.

I close my eyes. “A monster. Creature of the night.”

“Have you ever thought,” he asks, teeth scraping lightly against skin, “that you’re the lucky one? You can live out on the edge, past the compound, in the darkness. You’re free.”

“Hunted,” I tell him. “Alone. Shunned. Hated.”

“I can’t sleep in the darkness.” His hand has been resting on my hip, and now his fingers curl around the bone, pulling me against him until there’s nothing separating us. Above, I hear the crash of the monsters, my blood spiking.

Tears begin to edge my eyes. James holding me makes me remember what it was like to mean something to someone else. “I belonged to something before.” My voice quavers as I tell him the lie that I wish were truth. “They’ve been searching for me. Asking me back. No one else has done that. No one from before ever cared.”

His hand slips up along my ribs, skimming the edge of my bra until he cups my throat, nails trailing lightly over my jaw. “I came looking for you, Vail.”

There’s this moment as they pour down the stairs when I think about calling out to them that I am here. That they have come for me at last and that I’ve been waiting.

Except they’ve known where I am for weeks. Months. And they have never cared.

I stare at the gun in my hand and the two boxes on the table shoved against the door. Bullets or cure-tranqs. That’s the question. Death or salvation.

Except that I can’t figure out which is which. It seems worse to damn them to this life, of loneliness and exile. It’s taking a part of who they are from them, even if that part is the monster.

But to kill them, the finality of it, seems to make my fingers tremble. All the times I’ve taken lives without a thought other than hunger and now such cold ambivalence fails me.

I’ve always wondered if the one who cured me felt righteous. If he left his compound on a Tuesday morning with his pack full of cure-tranqs and thought, Today I will save the world, and instead he found me.

If he could see me now, hesitating, would he think it was worth it? All the monsters’ dens he waded into, all the risks he took, just to preserve us.

Thinking he was saving the world when really he was just giving us greater access to destruction. Letting us loose to be despised and cast aside in a manner that absolves humanity of its guilt.

As monsters we were pitiable—it was beyond our control. As Rehabilitated we are just like everyone else except in every way that matters, which means we could be discarded without a second thought. Alive but only allowed to live among the fringes.

I stare at how James trembles, his chin dimpled with terror, and I wonder if that’s what’s left of us. We uphold the weak and push down the survivors. He was right: the living sequester themselves in compounds while the rest of us roam the world.

One day, we could own the world if we devised it to be so.

There’s a moment when I think about opening the door and letting them have him. Making him one of us. Giving him the ultimate freedom.

The most perfect kind of love.

And then the first creature strips the wood from the frame and they are upon us, and all I can do is shoot, over and over again, as the bodes pile around me. For a moment there is screaming, a painful kind of rage that goes beyond the normal wails in the night. The air fills with the smell of terror and regret, and eventually silence wraps around us both.

They had names once, before, the creatures spread around me. Then they were pack, which meant names became useless. And now we are nothing, lesser than. How many of the bodies lying still at my feet would have chosen this? If they’d had the choice, what would they have wanted?

Will any of them stand in the darkness of a Sanitation Center and listen to the howls of those still out there and feel the tug of their blood, calling them to a home that can never be theirs again?

There were reports shortly after the cure was first administered, of Rehabilitated trying to reinfect themselves. They wanted to go back, they explained; though it didn’t take long for them to realize there’s no such thing. Once you’re cured, you’re cured forever.

The scientists locked them in cells deep in their research labs to study their brain patterns, to subject them to endless rounds of therapy, trying to understand why anyone would choose to become a monster.

None of those scientists ever understood what it was to exist in the between of something, and none of us could ever explain it, so we gave up trying. We learned to keep our dreams to ourselves, to swallow back the way our mouths watered when we heard the wail of monsters in the darkness.

We learned to survive alone, with a wanting deeper than hunger.

“I’m sorry.” James kneels behind me, vomit pooling around his knees. “I didn’t know how fast the darkness would fall under the smoke tonight.”

Absently, I shake my head. One glance of sunlight kills the monsters. We knew the turning of the earth in a way more intimate than our own blood. It’s what kept us alive, and it’s unfathomable that the Pure can’t do the same. As if they can’t understand true fear and mortality.

“Will they be okay?” he asks, eyes trained on the body of a girl wedged in the door frame, her breath coming in short pants and eyes wavering behind lids.

I have no idea how to answer that question. There are a million definitions of okay , and none of them seem to fit this moment. “They’ll send someone from the Sanitation Center.” And then I remember the fire, and add, “If there’s anyone left. They’ll all become Rehabilitated. Like me.”

James pushes to his feet and skirts the puddle of spreading vomit. Already the cure’s finding its way into their systems, fighting against the monster and turning them back to the closest thing to normal we can decipher.