Ellen Datlow - After - Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia

Jenna said, “Let’s play baseball when we get home! Mom bought me a new mitt.”

“I’m not playing with you, loser!”

“Hey! Don’t you dare talk to your sister that way!” Mom said. “You’ll play with her or no video games for a month.”

I crossed my arms and sulked, and Jenna returned her attention to her pocket game. “You’re not like him,” she said.

“What?”

“Dad would always play with me when I asked.”

Mom sighed deeply as she raced down Ocean Avenue toward home, speeding through a yellow light. Just ten minutes ago, my high school future had held so much promise. Now everyone would be talking about Russell Broward, the kid whose mom picks him up from the Track. I’d be a dork in their eyes forever.

“I hate you,” I whispered.

“What did you say?”

We zoomed past three kids popping wheelies, laughing as they raced toward the preserve. “I so hate you both.”

Jenna’s tears have run out, which is good because the white-skinned Creepy in left field has begun to dig up the grasses and vomit jewels into the holes. The others are fidgeting too. This game won’t last much longer. Jenna stands, wipes her cheeks, and with a jab to the ground, frees the bat of its doughnut. I straighten her hat, give her my best smile, and pat her backside as she steps up to the plate.

The catcher is some sort of shapeless ball of worms, which reminds me of the squirming things I once found in our cat Lucifer’s shit, but this Creepy is exceptionally good at catching the ball and returning it to the yellow-eyed pitcher on cue. It says to Jenna, “Your not-rot is repulsive to us,” which I assume is some sort of insult intended to upset her hitting ability.

(Yeah, these Creepies learn fast.)

Jenna steps into the batter’s box, and the many-toothed cat tosses three pitches—all balls, the umpire declares. Jenna takes them with the steadiness of a mountain.

The next pitch. Jenna swings. For a ten-year-old she’s got quite the upper-body strength. The ball makes a metallic ping as it connects with the bat, flies over my head to crash into the windshield of a car.

“Foul ball,” the umpire declares, and distantly, something not quite human screams.

“C’mon Jenna! You can hit the ball!” I cheer. “No pitcher! No pitcher!”

The pitcher’s eyes flicker like moonlit gold.

She takes the pitch. It’s clearly high and outside, but the umpire calls, “Strike two!”

“What?!” I storm toward him, cursing. “That was totally high and away!”

“Step away from me,” the fish-creature says. “Or I will devour your immortal self.” He spreads his batlike wings, and on his scaly hide I see dozens of tiny faces crying out in pain. I leap back, horrified.

“Don’t worry, Russell, I’ve got this,” Jenna says, and her defiance centers me. “These Creepies got nothing on me.”

“Who you calling creepy?” the worm-creature says.

I step back to my place beside the dugout as the pitcher lofts the next pitch. I hold my breath as Jenna swings…and connects! A line drive flies over the second baseman’s head, to land in right field. Jenna screams with joy and sprints to first. A Creepy made of a thousand hands with eyeballs in their palms fields the ball. It catapults it to the shortstop, covering second by rolling end over end. I tell Jenna to hold up at first.

She’s the tying run. We may win this game after all.

“I hit it! I did it!” Jenna screams, over and over. She falls to the ground, hysterically laughing—or crying. I can’t tell which.

Three weeks after that awful first day of school, the leaves had fallen, and so had my hopes of being anything other than what I was last year, that nerd who hung out with Vinny. I went to the Track a few times, but Maeve was never there, and when I passed her in the hall, she just nodded politely and kept on walking. Whenever I brought up the subject with Vinny, he just cracked his neck and said, “Tragic.”

As Mr. Verini droned on about the Peloponnesian War, I stared out the window at the approaching black clouds. I hoped for a violent thunderstorm, something to break my boredom. I watched Maeve’s left hand scrawl out neatly written notes and wondered how it was possible to sit so close to her and yet be so far away. Last week I’d heard she started dating Eric Kellerman, and I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d stayed at the Track that first day of school, it would have been me.

I decided that when I got home I’d trash the new Nimbus game levels I’d created, even if they did give Vinny a hard-on. They bored me, and I had ideas for new ones, better ones, with hundred-story skyscrapers, and bridges that spanned chasms of fire. I started to sketch them out in my notebook, when our classroom shook with thunder.

The lights flickered. Diana Golina yelped, and the class laughed. “Settle down,” Mr. Verini said. He resumed his lesson. He would not be thwarted by mere weather. But the next tremor knocked the corkboard from the wall, and a look of worry crossed his face. I glanced at Maeve, whose mouth was open as if to speak.

Then it happened.

A tremendous groan and screech, like a battleship being torn in two. The lights sparked and went out. Everyone screamed. In the twilight I saw a wall come rushing toward me. I panicked, covered my head.

I must have passed out, because when I opened my eyes, everything was quiet. My legs were covered with broken cinder blocks, but somehow my head had ended up under a desk. My legs were cut and bleeding, but I managed to free myself from the rubble. I stood on a heap of fallen stone, shivered in the strangely warm air, and looked around me.

The school was destroyed. Crooked rebar poked from steaming piles of shattered stone. Small fires burned. Trapped kids cried, their voices muffled by tons of concrete. The sky shined with an endless spray of stars, a sky like you’d see in the deepest, darkest woods. But that didn’t make sense because the sun was up and glowing, bright as noon, giving everything long, strange shadows that shook like rattlesnake tails. And there were mountains in the air. No…not mountains. It seemed as if whole towns had been ripped from the earth and flung into the sky. I blinked, shivered, didn’t understand what I was seeing, when I heard cries beneath me.

Under a pile of broken cinder blocks was a hand, a pen still wrapped in its fingers. I tossed away stones, revealing a shoulder, a neck…a head.

Her cherry red Ray-Bans had snapped in two. Her eyes were open, unblinking, pushed from their sockets. I turned away, threw up.

I heard more cries, heaved more stones, but I quickly realized that I couldn’t do this alone. I listened but heard no sirens, no evidence of help arriving. I walked in a daze around the school, trying to convince myself this was just a bad dream, when I saw a figure at the edge of the school property. He twisted his neck, cracking it. I ran to him, screaming.

“Vinny, Vinny! Ohmygod, what happened? An earthquake? God, Maeve’s dead. She’s dead, Vinny! What’s wrong with the sky?” I spoke so quickly I didn’t realize I was crying. He stared calmly at me, waited for me to finish. And that’s when I realized his skin had a pale glow, that through his expressionless face I could see the crumbled houses on the other side of the street. He twisted his neck, released. I didn’t hear a crack.

“Vinny?” He twisted his neck again. And again. And again. “ Vinny! What’s happening?”