Ellen Datlow - After - Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia

“You know.” With a bony finger, he pointed up. “Him.” He coughed and stumbled away like a drunk.

I shook my head. I’d had enough. “Come on, Jenna.”

“Where are we going?”

“To a safe place.”

“Where’s that?”

The wooded preserve looked as if it had been hit by a hurricane. Downed trees crisscrossed the path, making it hard going, but we made it to the Track. A huge tree had fallen across the course and crushed the ramps. A see-through Eric Kellerman sat on his bike on the other side, moving the pedals back and forth, back and forth. I wondered if he had biked here all the way from school.

I fell back against a tree. I just needed time to think, to make sense of what was happening. But Jenna screamed, “Look!” She ran past Eric.

“Jenna! Stop!” I chased after her.

A hundred feet out, the woods abruptly fell away to reveal a gulf of stars. Floating nearby on a clump of land was a house. Our house.

“Mommy!” she cried. “Mommmmmmy!”

I picked Jenna up, afraid she might try to jump over the edge.

“Let me go! Mommy’s there! I want Mommy!”

For a moment I entertained the thought of using Eric’s bike, building a ramp, flying out into the stars with Jenna on my back. But the house was too far out. There was no way I could reach it. In a game like Nimbus, I’d construct a bridge, or give myself wings, or leap out into the unknown. But even if we could reach it, what would be the point? I squeezed her as I saw something move in my bedroom window.

I turned Jenna’s face away. “Mom’s at the hospital. She had an extra shift today. She’s safe there, with all the doctors.”

“But she was supposed to pick me up from school.”

“No, that’s why I picked you up. She told me to come get you. And now I’m here.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“You swear?”

“…I swear.”

“So Mommy’s okay?”

The figure in the house had long, untamed hair. She folded one of my shirts, put it down on my bed, picked it up, folded the same shirt again. And again. And again.

My voice cracked as I said, “Yes, Jenna, Mommy’s fine.”

I’m up at the plate and I’m shivering. Just as quickly as it began, the phosphorescent rain has stopped, though the field is still pimpled with glowing spots. Jenna leans off of first and her eyes are as wide as moons. It’s up to me to win this game, and she knows it. I can’t let her down. I don’t know what will happen to her if we lose.

The first pitch comes in. It looks high, so I don’t swing, but at the last instant it dips.

“Strike one!”

Damn! I can’t tell for sure, but I think the yellow-eyed pitcher is laughing.

“Hold up!” the umpire says as a figure runs across the outfield. It’s a man, not a Ken. It’s a real, solid, flesh-and-bone human being. He screams, “It’s all gone! All lost! There’s nothing left! Oh god, oh god, oh god!” He runs for the cliff ’s edge that cuts across right field, where the world drops away forever.

“Stop!” I scream. “Wait!” I just want to talk to him, to speak to someone besides my sister, to find out who he is and where he’s from and what he did before. But he has a soul, and therefore his will is his own. He leaps over the edge. For a few seconds, he keeps moving outward, his legs kicking like Wile E. Coyote gone off a cliff. But then some invisible current yanks him diagonally away. That’s the third jumper we’ve seen this week.

Jenna turns back to me. She’s shaking. I wish she hadn’t watched.

I tap my bat on home plate, lift it over my shoulder. “No pitcher!” I say.

After a pause, Jenna says, “No pitcher!”

“Oh and one,” the umpire declares. “Two outs.”

We raided kitchens for food, slept in dank basements and walk-in closets. We once saw a gang of still-living men and women in suits and dresses murder a boy because he would not give them his last beef jerky. But after a few weeks it seemed as if we were the only real human beings left. All that remained of the others were see-through husks.

“We won’t make it to the hospital,” Jenna said.

“No,” I said. “It’s gone.” I was too tired to lie to her. “C’mon, get your stuff. We need to find some food.”

“I don’t want to,” she said. “I’m not hungry anymore.”

Neither was I. The strange thing was, we hadn’t eaten for three days and we hadn’t grown any weaker, though day and night had stopped having meaning. Our clump of earth randomly tumbled in and out of shadow.

“How come we’re still alive?” she said.

I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

“Do you want to play Derek Jeter’s World of Baseball against me?” She held her pink pocket game out to me. The batteries had died weeks ago, but she pretended they hadn’t.

“No, Jenna. Not now.”

I looked out the window. A dead soul in a nightgown had dug hundreds of holes in the yard with her hands, as if planting flowers. But there were no flowers. All the plants, confused by the strange days, had wilted and died. The woman paused for a moment, then continued digging.

“Stop digging!” I screamed. And the woman obeyed. Her hands fell into her lap, and she sat there, dirtied, on the dead lawn. Probably would sit there until the end of time.

“You’re a bad person,” Jenna said. “You don’t deserve to live, so I’ll crush your house!” She stared at her blank game screen, making exploding sounds. “And you did poorly on your test, so I’ll kill all your friends.”

Disturbed, I said, “That doesn’t sound like baseball.”

“No, it’s ‘Smash World.’” She didn’t look up from the blank screen. “One player only.”

“Hit it out of the park, Russ!” Jenna shouts as I lift the bat, readying for the next pitch. But the umpire calls, “Time out!” A swarm of flying creatures approaches from right field. They have webbed feet and hands, and faces like rhinos. They wear black armor and leather buckling, as if they’re going off to battle. They flap their giant wings and hum a low note as they pass, like chanting monks. My bat vibrates with the sound.

There are so many flying creatures that they blot out the sky. The field goes dark, so that only the pitcher’s yellow eyes are visible in the gloom. The creatures suddenly switch their song to a high-pitched whine, almost a scream. I hold my ears until they pass, watch them drift out into space going who knows where.

The sound fades, the sky lightens. “Game on,” the umpire says.

Distracted, I take a perfectly good pitch. “Strike two!”

“Damn!”

Jenna looks like she might cry.

I awoke from a nap, and Jenna was gone. I called for her, but she didn’t come. I scoured the neighborhood but couldn’t find her. I searched under stars turning strange orbits. I searched as purple sea monkeys pecked at the rotting treetops. I ran down a street as two clumps, miles away, collided in a spectacular spray of dust, though I heard no sound. I reached the schoolyard and stared across the baseball field.

The home-run fence was cut off in right field by the starry abyss, and a bunch of see-through people huddled by the edge. A hundred feet out, a small clump turned slowly, and I watched as one of the see-through people took a running leap toward it, missed by some eighty feet, and tumbled away.