Ellen Datlow - After - Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia

I look around and I see the flat gray river spreading away for miles with a far-off cluster of boats riding on it like fleas, and closer in I see the mud banks and the channels winding out between them, and then with a jab of fright I see a dark figure shambling away along the tide edge, headed for a heap of rubble where a mob of seagulls is scritching and quarreling over something to eat.

It’s a Hairy. Has to be.

Billy sees me jump. He puts his arm around my shoulders and kinda hugs me, and he says, “Don’t worry. Hairies ain’t scary,” and I almost laugh since this is what Billy always says, but anyway I’m not scared of Hairies, I just loathe ’em.

“They leaves you alone if you leaves them alone,” Billy says, taking care to get it right, because this is what Morris has told him. Billy trusts Morris.

When I was just a kid—seven or eight years old—I tried some nirv. I sneaked a pinch out of one of Morris’s little foil packets. For a second it fizzed on my tongue. Then it burned a hole right through to the core of me and exploded —like I’d swallowed the sun, like light was busting out of my fingertips. I was King of the Universe. I knew everything . It was intense.

Next thing, I was puking up on the floor, with Morris yelling his head off. He throws a bucket o’ water over me, and then he throws the bucket, and then he lams me some more, and all the time he’s shouting, “Don’t ever let me catch you taking that stuff agin,” till me eyes are spinning in me head. He hauls me downstairs. There’s a room on the ground floor me and Billy was never allowed in, though we’d see the punters comin’ and goin’. Morris unlocks the door. It’s cold and damp inside. Metal shutters across the windows, an awful smell. On the floor…

I hate remembering this…

On the floor there’s a girl. Or what useta be a girl. She’s laying there in a skimpy vest and her skirt all rucked up, making a sorta snorting noise, and there’s hair growing all over her, black hairy hair covering her face and chest and arms and legs. I’m backing away, and she opens her eyes, sudden. And I know her. Under the hair, it’s Maddalena, who useta come in and look after me and Billy sometimes when Ma was sick. Morris shoves me on my knees beside her, pushes my head down to hers. An’ she reaches out fast and grabs my arm. Her fingers are hot and strong, and her breath is sickly sweet. The fur on her cheeks and chin is wet with spit. Her eyes burn into mine like she’s seeing to the back of my head, and she’s gurgling, “Go ’way, go ’way, go, go, go…” but she won’t let go, she won’t let go—

—and I scream—

—and Morris drags me out, and he says, “Don’t you never take that stuff again, Charlie, coz that’s the way it ends.”

I was crying so hard, I was almost choking. He says, “Look at me!” and shakes me till I do. His eyes are bright red, there’s a muscle jumping in his cheek. He says, “You want your brain to rot? You wanta grow hair all over your body? That’s what it does, there’s some kinda hormone in it, some kinda animal hormone …” He spits. “In there, that ain’t Maddalena no more. That’s an animal. No one in the Krew does nirv. I don’t allow it. And I promised your ma—” He stops. Then he says, “We ain’t got your ma no more. We got each other and we got the Krew. You respect me, you respect yourself and the Krew, you don’t take that shit. You hear me?”

For weeks and months after, I’d check my arms and hands to see if they was turning hairy. I never asked what he did with Maddalena, though she kept crawling into my dreams. But I did ask Morris once if he thought it was all right to sell nirv to people when we know what it does. And he said, “They’re not forced to take it, are they? They got choice.” He gives me a real hard look. “If they’ll buy it, I’ll sell. It puts bread in your mouth and mine, Charlie, and Billy-boy’s too. You complaining?”

Well, I wasn’t complaining, coz you don’t cross Morris, and anyway he was right. Anyone stupid enough to go blowing their mind on nirv deserves what they get. They know what it does. And yeah, maybe people think they can stop before it gets a-hold of them—but like Morris says, that’s their choice. I never told Billy how people get turned into Hairies, though. He wouldn’t’ve understood.

I’m thinking all this as the Hairy starts to run, howling some weird kinda mad nonsense like they do, and the seagulls spin up in a squealing cloud, and the Hairy—the thing —waves its fists and falls down on the stones.

If it was any closer, I swear I’d shoot it dead.

“ Nelson , Charlie. Charlie!” Billy tugs my arm. “Let’s find Nelson.”

A half-buried flight of stone steps leads up to a platform. We climb them, and I can’t keep from looking up. Them doors at the top hafta be ten meters high. Billy whispers to himself, and I say, “What?” and he says into my ear, “Is Nelson a giant?” and a shiver goes right down my back.

“Nah,” I say, confident enough. “Just—you know—a hero.”

But I don’t know . Why else would doors be that high?

Nelson is two things. One is a statchoo a mile or two to the west. He’s bin there forever, far as I know. Once there woulda bin buildings and stuff all around him; now he’s right on the edge of the tide, a stone man balancing on a stone column fifty meters high, leaning on a sword and staring out over the river.

The other thing Nelson is, is a hero. I dunno what he did, even Ma didn’t know, but it musta bin something big for them to build so high and put him up there. I bothered away at it for years, till one day I just started making stuff up. Before long, specially after Morris came to live with Ma and then when she got the cholera and died, I got to telling Billy tales about Nelson every night. In the stories, Nelson lives in Sint Paul’s. He fights armies of Hairies, he battles in the sewers with giant rats, he smuggles people out to the north. Billy loves it. His eyes sparkle and he chuckles and rubs his fingers like he does when he’s really excited. Far as Billy’s concerned, it’s all real. Even for me, half the time. I know I made it up, but Nelson’s still real, ain’t he? Whoever he was, whatever he did, he was alive once, and he really is buried right here.

The huge doors are open, jammed with rubble. Billy scrambles over it and slips inside. I’m right on his heels. And we’re inside Sint Paul’s.

It’s enormous . A jolt goes through me. Like panic, like I’ve stepped off a cliff. I actually grab Billy’s arm. I can’t see properly. It’s all dark, deep shadows cut by shafts of white light falling through high windows. It smells like the bottom of the river. And there’s a weird soft noise, like someone stroking the back of my neck.

“Birds,” says Billy.

Right. It’s just pigeons cooing overhead and fluttering about. My eyes adjust and I see we’re standing on a floor of black-andwhite squares, but it’s all grimed and filthy, and there’s streaks of pigeon shit down the towering whitish walls.

If my mates in the Krew, Beamer and Sam and Kingy, if they knew how I make up stories for Billy, I’d hafta cut my throat. They don’t know nothing about Nelson and I’d never tell ’em. But there’s something about Nelson I haven’t told even Billy.

I talk to him.

Two three years ago, Billy was sick in his chest, coughing all winter, couldn’t hardly get his breath. Morris wasn’t no use, yelling at Billy to shut up coughing, he couldn’t sleep—I coulda killed him—and I wished Nelson was there, he’d know what to do—and before I knowed it, I was talking to him inside my head. Telling him how scared I was, and begging him don’t let Billy die. And he listened . Don’t tell me any different, he listened, and somehow I just knew then Billy’d get better, an’ he did.