Ellen Datlow - After - Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia

Dad took the GameGuy while Jeremy took his pants off. He felt funny about it—standing outdoors in his underwear—but had his shoes back on in just a few minutes.

Then Dad gave Jeremy the key. “Stick it in the lock, turn it, and flip the lid up. Don’t try to get the key back out.”

Jeremy nodded solemnly.

They moved around until they were lined up behind the trunk, about twenty feet back. Dad had Jeremy show him the GameGuy’s on switch. “Yeah—thought so, but wanted to be sure.”

He swung his arm back and flicked the switch.

There was moment of stillness on the car as every bug stopped moving; then iridescent blue wings exploded into view and bugs buzzed into the air, headed for them. Dad flung the GameGuy through the heart of the swarm, and most of the bugs shifted to follow, but a few still headed toward them.

“Damn it,” Dad said, and bolted. Jeremy dropped to the ground and shoved his fist, the one with the trunk key in it, into the loose sand. With his other hand he scraped sand over it, mounding it high.

One bug flew by, ignoring him, but another hovered for a moment, shifting back and forth in the air over him. Then it dropped to settle on Jeremy’s discarded jeans and began eating the brass zipper.

Jeremy loosened his grip on the key, then dug his other hand into the sand and lifted a mound up, the key inside. He didn’t know how much sand it would take to shield the metal from the bugs, but hopefully, with the car, the GameGuy, and the cell phone, the bugs would have higher-priority targets. He walked slowly forward, dribbling sand as he went. Bugs were returning to the car now, but the trunk lid was largely unoccupied.

Jeremy brought his mound of sand right up to the lock before he let the last grains pour out of his hands. For one frantic second, he nearly let the key slide out of his hand with the sand, but he caught it, aligned it, and jammed it into the lock.

The bugs on the trunk lid were twitching, but they kept eating even as the lock clicked and the trunk rose on sprung hinges.

There were a few bugs in the trunk, but it wasn’t too bad. Jeremy grabbed the baskets of clothes and flung them behind him, far from the car, then snatched the two water jugs and backed up.

The motion of the trunk lid had stirred the bugs up, and more were in the air. One bumped into his head and snagged on his hair. Jeremy could feel it moving, and pictured it eating into his skull. He shook his head violently, and the bug flipped off, buzzing into flight before it hit the ground; but now it was closer to the car than to him, and it flew to the vehicle.

Jeremy quickly gathered the spilled clothes back into the baskets. He dragged the water into the shade of a mesquite bush, well away from any metal. Then he took the clothes back to where Mom and Laurie were still sitting. “Where’s Dad?” Jeremy asked. Dad should have circled back to them by now.

Mom looked around. “I don’t know. I thought he was with you.”

Jeremy guessed she hadn’t overheard their conversation about the crowns and Dad’s pacemaker. He didn’t want to worry her. “He’s probably looking for shelter.”

“Where are your pants?”

“Too much metal,” Jeremy explained. “Metal zipper and snaps and rivets.”

He dug out a pair of basketball shorts, baggy and long but with an elastic waist, and pulled them on over his shoes. He pointed at the clothes baskets. “You should probably change out of anything with metal on it—unless you can remove the metal itself.”

“Where’s my purse? I’ve got scissors in them.”

“We buried them, Mom. Metal, remember?”

He went back and got one of the water jugs, dropping it on the sand by Laurie. “Here. I’ll go check on Dad.”

Dad had gone north, away from the road, away from the car. Jeremy picked up the other water jug and followed.

There was a large stretch of gravel and sand interspersed with mixed cactus and mesquite, and some dry-as-tinder grass. Jeremy kept his eyes open for rattlesnakes and scorpions. He wasn’t as worried about Gila monsters, since they rarely bit unless you picked them up.

The brush stopped at water, and Jeremy blinked, surprised. It was a water trap on the edge of a golf course. On the other side of the water was a green fairway starting to turn brown, and condos lined the far side of that.

They weren’t as far out in the desert as he’d thought.

There were bugs buzzing across the water, and something moved just below the surface, then Dad’s head came up and he took a deep gasp of air. The bugs shifted toward him, but Dad was already underwater again. Jeremy saw a flash of a kicking leg as he swam toward a different spot.

Jeremy knew Dad couldn’t do that forever. He wished he had the GameGuy again, so he could heave it across the pond, distracting the bugs. He had to do something .

A groundskeeper’s shed, roofed and sided with corrugated fiberglass panels, was strewn across the grounds at one end of the pond. There were bugs crawling through the contents, but Jeremy saw, off to one side, some scraps of hose. He ran over, slowing drastically as he got closer. The bugs were eating metal shovels, brass fittings, and the screws out of the two-by-four framing.

But they’d cut through a bunch of hose, too, while eating through the metal reel the hose had been coiled around. Jeremy inched closer until he could reach in and snag a foot-long section. It was still connected to the main hose, but only by a small strip, left when the bugs had crawled through it. Jeremy put his foot on the longer section and heaved. The connecting material broke with a snap, and he fell back into the brown grass, clutching the short end.

Bugs—disturbed by the vibrations, Jeremy guessed—rose into the air, and he froze on the ground as they swirled over him, then finally returned to the scattered shed and settled back onto the tools.

Jeremy edged away from the shed and ran back to the pond, plunging in and swiftly heading for Dad through waist-deep water.

This time, Dad’s face was out of the water, just barely, just enough for him to breathe. His eyes were wide and flicking back and forth, looking for bugs, but they hadn’t spotted him yet.

“Get back, Jerry! Those bugs could get you as they’re trying to get me!”

Jeremy held up the tubing. “A snorkel.”

Dad couldn’t hear him. The water was in his ears. So Jeremy put one end of the tubing in his mouth and tilted up the opposite end, then held his other hand flat, indicating the surface of the water below the upper end of the hose.

“Ah!” Dad reached for the hose, and Jeremy put it in his hand. Dad’s head came up out of the water, and the bugs, four or five, homed in on him. Dad dove back under, and Jeremy did too.

When Jeremy came up again, the bugs were spread out, quartering the pond. He could not see his dad, only the hose sticking out of the water in the middle of the pond.

The water wasn’t that cold, but when Jeremy climbed out of the pond, his wet skin and clothes acted like an evaporative cooler, chilling him. It felt good at first, and then uncomfortable. He wanted to get those bugs away from Dad. Dad couldn’t stay in that pond forever.

Laurie and Mom had changed clothes when he returned. Mom looked up sharply when he came back into sight. “Where’s your father?”

Jeremy gestured. “He’s okay. But he needs to stay where he is. The bugs really like his pacemaker and his crowns.”

The car was now completely covered in bugs, and its outline had changed substantially. It was lower on the ground. Between cactus thorns and bugs burrowing through the tires, going after the steel fibers, the tires no longer held air.

“We should get farther away from that ,” Jeremy said.