Ellen Datlow - After - Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia

Mom started stuffing their metal-free clothes into one of the clothes baskets, ignoring the discards.

Jeremy looked at Mom’s purse, still lying besides the ring of rocks that marked the buried coins, keys, and scissors. He picked it up. It was a leather purse lined with cloth. The straps were a continuous sweep of the body’s cloth-lined leather and it had a nylon zipper. The only metal part, the zipper pull, had come off the previous year.

He started filling it with sand.

“What are you doing?” Laurie said.

“Need to carry some metal over to where Dad is.”

“What? Won’t that bring the bugs down on us?”

“Not if it’s buried in sand. Shielded.” He dug his hands into the sand in the middle of the rock circle, worming his fingers down.

He found the scissors by stabbing himself firmly in the ball of his thumb. He jerked his hand back up and stuck it in his mouth, tasting sand and blood.

Jeremy brought the items up one by one, centered in a double handful of sand, and dropped them into the purse. Only once did a bug come to investigate, and he frantically shoveled more sand into the purse until it flew back to the mound of bugs that used to be their car.

The last thing was his mom’s key ring, with the radio remote for the car and some decorative metal stars hanging on chains. As he pulled it up out of the sand, several bugs took to the air and flew toward him. He dug down into the growing hole, grabbed the last few coins, and threw them at the approaching bugs. As the pennies and nickels flew by, the bugs turned around to follow them.

He had to get Laurie to help him carry the purse, it was that full of sand. She took one strap, Jeremy took the other, and they staggered back through the mesquite and chollo to the water trap.

Dad was still underwater, out in the middle of the pond, breathing through the hose. The bugs, now more than a dozen, were patrolling the water’s surface.

“Where’s your father?” Mom asked.

Jeremy pointed and told her about the snorkel.

She put her hand to her mouth. “We’ve got to get him out of there!”

“And put him where?”

“Someplace where he won’t drown .”

“What about the bugs, Mom? If he gets out of the water, those bugs are going after his crowns and his pacemaker.”

Mom blinked and looked around desperately, as if hoping for a policeman or an EMT or a fireman to help her. Then she covered her mouth, as though holding back screams to keep them from echoing across the pond.

Jeremy curled in on himself, arms crossed. He remembered the body from the road, the one the vultures had been stripping, and he wondered if this is how the man had died. Had the bugs drilled through his head, going for his crowns? Did he have a pacemaker or an artificial knee or hip? For a terrible instant, Jeremy visualized his father lying faceup in the sun, the bugs crawling over him.

Laurie said, “Bury him.”

Mom dropped her hands, shocked. “How is that better than drowning?”

Laurie shook her head. “I don’t mean like a grave. Shield him with earth, like this.” She jerked her chin at the purse.

Jeremy licked his lips. He took a deep, shuddering breath. That could work, maybe. “We’ll have to dig a hole.”

It took an hour to build the bunker. They ran into caliche—fused clay and gravel—at a foot and a half. Without metal tools, they couldn’t really go any deeper, but they could raise the ground around it.

They ended up with a trench that was as long as Dad was tall, with walls that stuck up three feet above the caliche floor. Jeremy dragged some of the fiberglass panels over from the remains of the groundskeeper’s shed, and set them aside. When they were ready, he retrieved a quarter from the center of the sand-filled purse and flung it across the pond. The hovering bugs followed it.

Dad was able to stick his head up out of the water long enough for Jeremy to explain the plan.

He said, “I’ll try anything to get out of this damn water.”

Mom and Laurie waited in the pond near Dad while Jeremy dug his hand into the purse and found Mom’s keys. When it seemed clear enough—there were only a few bugs now quartering the surface of the water—he ran for the fairway, around the pond to the side that was opposite the shed, Mom’s ring of metal keys and bangles dangling from his hand.

A few bugs followed him, but when Jeremy reached the middle of the golf course, he pushed and held the unlock button on the car remote. Bugs rose all around him: from the remains of the shed, from the pond, and from the condos on the other side of the fairway. Thousands of bugs.

He hadn’t thought of that. They were everywhere .

He flung the keys as far toward the condos as he could, and dashed up the brown grass, zigzagging, hearing the bugs tear past him, stinging and burning as they bounced off his face; and then he seemed to be clear of them.

Jeremy circled back around to the pond, where Mom and Laurie had helped Dad out of the pond and into the trench, then laid the fiberglass panels across the raised dirt walls. They were scooping dirt on top of him as fast as they could. Jeremy tried to help, but blood kept running down into his eyes. When the first layer of soil covered the fiberglass, Mom made him go sit in the shade and hold a T-shirt to his face until the bleeding stopped.

Dad stayed in the bunker for seven more days. The structure was open at each end but they built zigzag walls leading out from it, so there were no straight lines for his pacemaker EMF to leak out.

Jeremy scavenged food from the condos, fishing food out of pantries with long sticks—lucking out early on with plastic jars of peanut butter and spaghetti sauce. He went alone, moving carefully among the slowly collapsing buildings, and he always came back with food or liquids. No cans, of course. No jars with metal lids.

Fortunately, most of the residents had fled early on. Most. He didn’t talk about the bodies he did find until Dad, stir-crazy in the bunker, wanted to run for it.

Laurie and Jeremy built a solar still with clear plastic sheets and a hose, and the surface of the pond was substantially lower by the time the National Guard found them.

The Guard moved Dad thirty miles to the west, shielded by sandbags, on the back of an improvised cart, and when they got to a place where they couldn’t find any bugs, they put a white chalk symbol on the ground twenty yards across. A helicopter dropped down from ten thousand feet just long enough for them to throw Dad aboard. Bugs came, but the copter went high, fast, shooting for the thin air at the upper reaches of its operational altitude.

It worked. The bugs couldn’t keep up, and the helicopter didn’t fall out of the sky.

Mom, Laurie, and Jeremy didn’t see Dad for another two weeks—the time it took them to walk out—but he was waiting for them when they crossed out of the zone, near Calexico.

The bugs were behind them, still reproducing, but they weren’t spreading out of Arizona and New Mexico, a guardsman told Jeremy.

“We don’t know why. Maybe they only like the areas with sunshine? Or they’re consolidating before they expand farther?”

Like Jeremy, the soldier had half-healed bug burns across his face. Jeremy had told him about the bodies he’d found in the condos.

The soldier understood. “With holes in their heads, right? Mostly around the jaw?”

Jeremy gulped and nodded.

The soldier hooked a finger in his mouth and pulled his cheek back to show a gap in his molars. “Once we realized what they were after, I had my CO knock out that crown using a rock and a stick as a chisel. This was after we starting ditching all our metal gear.

“It was nice getting your dad out. We found too many people who stayed, with metal crowns or artificial joints. I mean, we saved one guy by amputating his leg while the bugs were working on his artificial knee; and we knocked a lot of teeth out. Your dad, though, is the only survivor I saw with an electronic prosthesis. Saw a lot of nonsurvivors.”