Ellen Datlow - After - Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia

All around me, see-through kids and teachers climbed out of the smoking rubble. They seemed confused, lost. I poked and prodded, shook and slapped, but none woke from their mindless trance. “Listen to me, goddamnit!” And, as if choreographed, all heads turned in my direction together. Terrified, I ran.

Five blocks away, on a street that had buckled up as if the earth had been unzipped, I ran out of breath, and I remembered. “Oh, god! Jenna! Mom!”

I ran past dozens of translucent people on my way to Birch Lane Elementary, gave them a wide berth, which was just as well because they didn’t seem interested in me or, for that matter, anything at all. Houses had collapsed, and mindless people milled about in upturned yards, standing, staring. I tried to ignore the sky, but was mesmerized by a billion overbright stars and an asteroid belt made of stones etched with the circuit-board landscape of cities, leaking water from broken sewers in long, sparkling tails.

I found her sitting on the curb in front of the school, her Hello Kitty knapsack on her back, her eyes wide and vacant. I gasped.

“Jenna! Jenna! Are you all right?”

She didn’t move. “Mom was supposed to pick me up from school today.” A line of blood trickled from her left ear. I was so happy when I realized I couldn’t see through her, that she was real flesh and bone.

“C’mon,” I said, taking her hand. “I’m taking you home.”

I led her down a buckled street. Three houses attached to a clump of dirt tumbled overhead. In one of the backyards a dangling swing spun around three hundred and sixty degrees, like a clock’s hand, as the houses rolled in the air. “That blue one’s Chrissie’s house,” Jenna said. A row of tall spruces scraped their tops along the street, leaving a trail of pine needles. “She has a lot of American Girl dolls. But I have more Barbies.” The houses drifted off with the wind.

We reached a break in the road, a cliff where the earth just fell away. I held Jenna’s hand as we peered over the edge. Below the pavement was a layer of red clay, veined with the severed roots of trees. Below that lay an assortment of broken sewers and torn electrical cables, spilling foul liquid, popping and sparking. Farther down, a thick layer of bedrock. And a few hundred feet after that, the layers ended. Beyond were stars a million light-years away, nebulae that crossed the sky like smeared lipstick, all within an infinite sea of black. Then I knew. We weren’t on Earth anymore. We were floating on a clump, too.

“But this is the way home, Russell!” Jenna said, looking up at me. “How do we get home?”

A Ken is up after Jenna. Why I chose this particular batting order baffles me now. A home run from me could win the game, but the soul-eating umpire won’t let me change the order. After seeing the tortured faces in its hide, I decide it’s best not to argue.

The Ken looks like he was about thirty-five when the event happened, and judging by his suit and name tag (“Arthur”), possibly worked in a bank or a hotel. I tell him to step up to the plate, do his best to hit the ball, and if his empty eyes comprehend anything at all, they don’t show it. But, like all the Kens and Barbies, he does what he’s told.

He lifts the bat over his left shoulder. A lefty. And based on his stance, I figure he might once have played this game when he still had a soul. I’m not sure how much of the person is left behind, or if the Kens and Barbies are more like tires rolling down a hill, unable to alter their course once set in motion until something smacks into them from the outside.

I see the ball through the Ken’s translucent body. Three perfect pitches. All strikes. Jenna curses, stomps up and down on first base. “You idiot! You asshole!” The Ken—I don’t want to call him Arthur because that would imply he was more than just a rolling tire—hasn’t moved since he lifted the bat over his shoulder. The umpire tells him again that he’s out, asks him to step away from the plate, but the Ken remains.

I approach. The Ken’s body glows like headlights in rain.

“You’re out, buddy,” I say. His eyes are glassy, distant. “Go sit in the dugout.”

The bat falls to his side, and he turns, walks to his seat. His expression never changes. There’s a wedding ring on his left hand, and I wonder if his wife’s still alive, or if she’s wandering the clumps in a body without a soul.

I realize with a pang of fear that I’m up next. There are two outs, and I’m the winning run. If I strike out, we lose. Jenna looks at me, expectant, as the sky begins to rain little phosphorescent puffs of light that seem to fall right through the ground. They fill the sky, brighter than the stars.

“Batter up!” the umpire says.

Rain or shine, it seems.

My cell phone had no signal. And the landlines we found didn’t work either. “We’re taking the long way home,” I told Jenna as we looped around town. But home, as far as I could tell, had been torn away.

Empty people waited on broken sidewalks, sat in their dented cars, stared out at their upturned yards. “Why do they just stand there?” Jenna said.

“I don’t think they have anywhere else to go.”

“Are they ghosts?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think Mom’s a ghost?”

I took her hand. “No. I think Mom’s very worried about us.”

“I don’t like how they just stare. What are you staring at? ” She screamed, “Go away! Go away!” And as if under her thrall, the see-through people ran from sidewalks, fled their cars, abandoned their once-well-manicured lawns. In a minute, all of them had vanished.

Jenna’s mouth fell open. “They listened to me.”

“C’mon,” I said, trembling. “We need to go.”

We turned the corner and she screamed. A bat-eared elephant rummaged through the public library’s dumpster. It pulled out a ratty book with its humanlike hands and said, “What a stupendous waste!”

We fled down another street.

On a road shadowed by towering sycamores, a seven-foot-tall walking-stick insect rushed toward us. I hunched down and covered Jenna in my arms. The insect paused above us, and from its tiny mantislike head said, “ Please , I’m a vegetarian,” and ran up a large tree.

When we rose again, the streets were filled with strange creatures. Apes with yellow fur hopped from broken rooftop to rooftop, singing jazz. A huge hairy spider feasted on the rubber of downed power lines. A clear ball with a single lidless eye floating inside it bounced past us. But like the mindless people, these strange beasts weren’t interested in us.

“What are they?” Jenna said.

“I don’t know.”

“Are they monsters?”

“Are you?” someone grumbled behind us.

We spun to see a hunched, hairless man as thin as a concentration camp survivor, skin the blasted color of the moon. His smile revealed long canines. A ghoul. “They’re same as you,” it said, in a voice like gravel being crushed. “The lost.”

Timidly, I asked, “Lost from what?”

“Do you really need me to answer that?”

When I didn’t respond, he looked us up and down and sighed. “Yours wasn’t the first world created. And it won’t be the last.” He bit his long dirty fingernails. “He didn’t like it anymore, so he destroyed it. Like he did to mine. Like he did to all of ours.”

“‘He?’”