Ellen Datlow - After - Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia

“I knew it,” the girl said. “We were told you’d tell us lies, trying to catch us in your web of deception. And if one thing you said was a lie, then all things you said were lies. There was no colonel, no soldiers. True, I was taken. I remember that. But you were told immediately what had become of me. You were glad to see me go. It meant more food for you. Everything I was taught was true. You are no better than animals. You have no human feelings.”

“There was a colonel,” I said for Mama. “There were soldiers. I picked Papa to live and watched as he was killed. Mama grieved for you every single day. I’d come home at night, exhausted from fourteen hours of labor, and Mama would say she’d strangle me with her bare hands for a moment’s glimpse of her precious Maria. Does that mean she has no human feelings?”

“It does,” the girl said. “No mother would ever say such things. My mama never would have.”

“Mine did,” I said. “She said that and worse. But you’re right about something. We did tell lies. We had no other way of knowing if you are Maria, her daughter, my sister. All the files were destroyed by the soldiers before The Leader was overthrown.”

“I’ve proven I’m Maria,” the girl said. “I knew there was no Christian.”

I smiled sadly at her. “You’re not Maria,” I said. “Not our Maria, at least. There was no son named Christian. But there was no Bobo either, no doggie. We had no dogs, no pets. Even before The Leader took power, we had no money for pets, no food to spare for one.”

“But I remember my name was Maria!” the girl cried. “And I remember doggie.”

“That could be,” I said. “Or it could be you’re lying. Either way, you’re not one of us.”

I must give the girl credit. Her eyes glistened, but no tears rolled down her cheeks. She had learned her lessons well.

I got up and walked to the back door of the office, the one painted the same dull brown as the walls, to make it less visible. I knocked twice and a partisan came out.

“Take her,” I said.

The partisan grabbed the girl. With his strong right hand, he pinned her arms to her back. With his left hand, he covered her mouth to muffle her sounds of protest.

“Where to?” he asked me.

I looked at Mama.

“I thought for sure she was my Maria,” Mama said. “She looked just as I remembered my darling daughter.”

“Just the eyes, Mama,” I said, gently touching her cheek with my work-roughened hand.

Then I turned to the partisan. This time I had no trouble reading the girl’s face. There was terror in those brown eyes, not defiance.

“I don’t know who she is,” I said to the partisan. “But I think she is one of the taken. She should go to a reeducation camp. She might be salvageable.”

The partisan nodded and dragged the girl back through the hidden door.

“What number was she?” Mama asked. “How many have we seen today?”

“Five,” I said. Two I’d had sent to reeducation camps. I left the fate of the other three to the partisans. Perhaps they were dead already. There was a constant rumble of gunshots outside, but with the office window painted brown, there was no way of seeing who they’d chosen to kill and who they’d kept alive for their entertainment.

“Five,” Mama said, with a sigh. “You’re a fool, Isabella, not to be able to spot my Maria. How many more are left?”

I walked over to the anteroom door. Using the fingers of both hands, I counted. “Seven,” I said, looking at them. Seven brown-eyed girls, all about fourteen years of age, sitting with perfect posture, their hands neatly folded in their laps, their ankles demurely crossed. Any one of them could be my sister Maria. But it was just as likely Maria was dead, executed along with the general and his wife, who had stolen her.

“Look for the prettiest one,” Mama instructed me. “Maria was a beauty, the prettiest girl in the village. Don’t look for girls with plain faces like yours, Isabella. Bring me my beautiful daughter Maria, so that I may hold her and kiss her, as I’ve dreamed of doing every day, every night, for the past ten years.”

FOR CHRISTMAS OUR JUNIOR YEAR OF HIGH SCHOOL, ALL OF our parents got us guns. That way you had a half a year to learn to shoot and get down all the safety garbage before you started senior year. Depending on how well off your parents were, that pretty much dictated the amount of firepower you had. Darcy Krantz’s family lived in a trailer, and so she had a peashooter, .22 Double Eagle Derringer, and Baron Hanes’s father, who was in the security business and richer than god, got him a .44 Magnum that was so heavy it made the nutty kid lean to the side when he wore the gun belt. I packed a pearl-handled .38 revolver, Smith & Wesson, which had originally been my grandfather’s. Old as dirt, but all polished up, the way my father kept it, it was still a fine-looking gun. My mom told my dad not to give it to me, but he said, “Look, when she goes to high school, she’s gotta carry. Everybody does in their senior year.”

“Insane,” said my mom.

“Come on,” I said. “Please…”

She drew close to me, right in my face, and said, “If your father gives you that gun, he’s got no protection making his deliveries.” He drove a truck and delivered bakery goods to different diners and convenience stores in the area.

“Take it easy,” said my dad. “All the crooks are asleep when I go out for my runs.” He motioned for me to come over to where he sat. He put the gun in my hand. I gripped the handle and felt the weight of it. “Give me your best pose,” he said.

I turned profile, hung my head back, my long chestnut hair reaching halfway to the floor, pulled up the sleeve of my T-shirt, made a muscle with my right arm, and pointed the gun at the ceiling with my left hand. He laughed till he couldn’t catch his breath. And my mom said, “Disgraceful,” but she also laughed.

I went to the firing range with my dad a lot the summer before senior year. He was a calm teacher, and never spoke much or got too mad. Afterward, he’d take me to this place and buy us ice cream. A lot of times it was Friday night, and I just wanted to get home so I could go hang out with my friends. One night I let him know we could skip the ice cream, and he seemed taken aback for a second, like I’d hurt his feelings. “I’m sorry,” he said, and tried to smile.

I felt kind of bad, and figured I could hug him or kiss him or ask him to tell me something. “Tell me about a time when you shot the gun not on the practice range,” I said as we drove along.

He laughed. “Not too many times,” he said. “The most interesting was from when I was a little older than you. It was night, we were in the basement of an abandoned factory over in the industrial quarter. I was with some buds and we were partying, smoking up and drinking straight, cheap vodka. Anyway, we were wasted. This guy I really didn’t like who hung out with us, Raymo was his name, he challenged me to a round of Russian roulette. Don’t tell your mother this,” he said.

“You know I won’t,” I said.

“Anyway, I left one bullet in the chamber, removed the others, and spun the cylinder. He went first—nothing. I went, he went, etcetera, click, click, click. The gun came to me and I was certain by then that the bullet was in my chamber. So you know what I did?”

“You shot it into the ceiling?”

“No. I turned the gun on Raymo and shot him in the face. After that we all ran. We ran and we never got caught. At the time there was a gang going around at night shooting people and taking their wallets, and the cops put it off to them. None of my buds were going to snitch. Believe me, Raymo was no great loss to the world. The point of which is to say, it’s a horrible thing to shoot someone. I see Raymo’s expression right before the bullet drilled through his head just about every night in my dreams. In other words, you better know what you’re doing when you pull that trigger. Try to be responsible.”