Ellen Datlow - After - Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia

Mom screamed and Dad swore, swerving again to avoid the dead man, and the wheels caught the shoulder.

It wasn’t much, but it jerked the car around and it went off the road, bounced into, then out of, a ditch, and then plowed through a stand of prickly pear cactus and yucca, out into the desert.

The car came to a stop in a cloud of dust. Dad was bleeding from a cut on the side of his head, and his side window was shattered, but he just said, “Okay?” looking around. Then, “Out, out, out!”

There was dust swirling around the car, but it had cleared the worst of the cactus. Jeremy scrambled through the door and backed away from the car.

Dad was doing something with the dashboard, but he finally scrambled out, brushing at his pants leg. Bright copper flashed and fell to the ground. Dad reached into his pocket and threw something from him. It glittered as it passed over the hood of the car. Several bugs lifted into the air and followed it.

Jeremy looked at Dad’s leg. Where his right pants pocket had been, the cloth was riddled with holes; and there was blood spotting the white tatters that had been the pocket lining.

Mom and Laurie were standing on the other side of the car, near a hoary old saguaro. Mom had taken her cell phone out of her purse. Jeremy don’t know what she thought she was going to do. The cell towers had been the first to go. She turned it on, though, to try to acquire a signal, and the bugs rose up and headed for her.

Laurie screamed, and they both ran.

Dad yelled, “Get rid of the phone!” over and over again, running after them, wide around the swarm.

Mom must’ve heard him finally, for she tossed it off to the left and veered right.

The bugs followed the phone.

Mom and Laurie dropped, exhausted, onto a stretch of sand between the cholla. There was blood on their legs from the mesquite and cactus they’d torn through, and Laurie had a segment of jumping cholla stuck to her knee.

Jeremy paled when he saw that. Jumping cholla is a kind of cactus with nasty barbed spines. They stick all too well. You snag one on your shirt, and a branch segment breaks off in a banana-size chunk, and the recoil usually embeds twenty or so spines in your skin.

And since they’re barbed, they don’t like to come out.

Mom took a large comb out of her purse and held it behind her back toward Dad. He took it and held it low, where Laurie couldn’t see it.

Laurie’s eyes were wide, and she was hyperventilating through clenched teeth.

“Easy, easy,” Dad said. “Oh! Look what the bugs are doing to the cell phone!”

Jeremy knew that was bullshit. There was lots of brush between them and where the phone had landed, but Laurie turned her head, and Dad slipped the comb down between the cholla segment and the cloth of Laurie’s jeans and yanked .

Jeremy ducked. When the barbs let go, the chunk flew thirty feet, whizzing past his hair. Laurie screamed once, and then Mom was holding her tight and rocking her.

Cool , Jeremy thought. He hadn’t know Dad could be so sneaky.

“Gotta get the water out of the car,” Dad said. “I tried to pop the trunk before we got out, but the switch wouldn’t work and my keys are still in the ignition.” He took Mom’s purse and dumped it out onto the sand.

Mom’s keys—a jangling tangle of keys, souvenir key dangles, and the keyless remote for the car—were there. There was a also a small pocketknife, a metal nail file, and a pair of nail scissors. And a mountain of change.

“Shit!” Dad looked around wildly. There were bugs in the distance, but none near. He began scraping a hole in the sand and pushing the change into it.

“Bury it!” he said to Jeremy.

Jeremy stared back blankly.

Dad pointed at the bloody place where his pants pocket had been. “Metal. Any metal. They were going after the change in my pocket.”

Jeremy started pushing sand over the change. “But they really were interested in the cell phone,” he said. “More than the money in Mom’s purse, or her keys.”

“Yeah,” Dad said. “I think anything with an electromagnetic field. Anything with an electric current. Remember how they went for the electrical transmission wires first?”

Jeremy froze. “Shit.”

Despite her tears, Laurie giggled, and Mom’s eyes got really big. “Jeremy Bentham, what did I tell you—”

Dad held up his hand. “What’s wrong, Jerry?”

Jeremy took his GameGuy out of his hip pocket. “It’s mostly plastic, but electronics and a battery, too.”

“Ah,” Dad said. “Yeah, that could’ve gotten ugly. It’s off, right?”

“Yeah. I had it charging when the power went off, and I didn’t want to play it since I wasn’t sure when I’d be able to recharge it.” Jeremy started to put it in the hole.

“No. We can use it, I think.”

Dad took the trunk key off of Mom’s key ring and dropped the keys down on top of the coins. They mounded the sand above them, perhaps six inches high, and Jeremy marked it with a circle of stones.

Dad took the GameGuy and headed back toward the car.

Jeremy followed him, threading through the cholla with care. He stepped on a tinder-dry mesquite twig, which popped loudly, and Dad jerked around. For a second, Jeremy thought Dad was going to order him back to Mom, but Dad closed his mouth and nodded.

As they got closer, Jeremy heard a humming and then a cracking sound. Most of the bugs on the car weren’t flying, so their buzzing wasn’t the loudest thing. It was the car.

“Noisy,” Jeremy whispered.

Dad laughed without humor. “I don’t think you have to whisper. I don’t think they can hear anything outside the electromagnetic spectrum. That and detect metal. That cracking sound is the internal stresses of the metal being released as individual molecular bonds are broken.”

The bugs covered the entire car, including the trunk. The plastic fender liners had slumped down onto the ground, and the tires were flat. Paint was peeling off in shreds. The plastic parts had holes in them too, but they were incidental. The bugs went through them to get to other metal.

Dad looked at the GameGuy, then handed it to Jeremy. “Turn the volume up to max. I figure the more juice to the speaker, the bigger the electromagnetic field. It doesn’t broadcast on an antenna like Mom’s cell phone, but it’ll do something.”

Jeremy rotated the volume knob all the way up with a quick swipe of his thumb. His index finger went for the power switch, but Dad said, “Not yet.”

Dad held up his left hand, the trunk key encased in his fist. “I want you to turn the GameGuy on, then throw it over the car so it lands in that thicket in front. Don’t hit the car—we don’t want to knock it hard enough to stop working. The electromagnetic field needs to persist.”

Jeremy heard what Dad was saying, but his eyes were on Dad’s hand. “Dad, what about your wedding ring? Oh, Christ! What about your pacemaker?”

Dad froze. His eyes widened and his mouth dropped open.

“Oh, God!” Jeremy said. “What about your crowns?”

Dad shut his mouth with a snap. Then he said, “Let me see your mouth.”

Jeremy opened wide, and Dad sighed. “Right. Your mom always insisted on composite fillings for you kids. No mercury silver amalgams.” He looked down at Jeremy’s pants. “Shit. Take off your pants.”

“My pants?”

“You’ve got a brass zipper, a brass snap, and copper rivets reinforcing the corners of the pockets.”

“What about your zipper?” Jeremy said.

Dad shrugged. “You’re right about my pacemaker. I’m not going near the car. You’ll have to do it. We need the water and the clothing, if they haven’t already turned the containers into Swiss cheese.” He looked down. “Looks like your shoes are all leather and plastic—punched lace holes, no grommets. So get out of your pants, and we’ll try this.”