Ellen Datlow: After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia

It started as a diet drug and mutated into something else. Transferred with a bite, incubated quickly, it tore fire across the continents.

Not two weeks after I’d been designated as Rehabilitated and released from the Sanitation Center, I saw a video of what it’d been like. I was standing in the little grocery store at the bottom of the hill from my house and they had the television behind the counter turned to the national news. Suddenly, a pirate TV station hacked into newscasts to air footage from raids and attacks, saying it was wrong to just bury something like that in the name of national peace.

The video showed a group of men in battle gear approaching a warehouse. Everything was cast in a greenish tint indicative of night-vision goggles. The feed followed the hunters inside, and that’s when I saw the creatures.

They were spread across the floors, lounging in heaps, stuffed into the darkest corners. Each one naked and gray-skinned, bald with patches of stubbornly remnant hair. One of them opened his eyes, the red glow like the sun against the green.

The cameraman didn’t see it, but I knew what was coming. I watched the fingers unfurl, long and crooked, tipped with sharpened claws. When the creature ran toward the tiny group, it howled and screeched, showing sharp pointed teeth that glistened with saliva.

Watching that video, I ran my tongue over my own teeth, now ground to a dull flat. My cheeks still calloused against the missing sharpness.

What frightened me most about that video wasn’t the horror and disgust I saw on every other shopper’s face, but the thrill I felt coursing through me.

I’d done that. I knew it to be true based on my own reactions: the way my mouth watered and my stomach twisted.

I pushed out of the little grocery store while the feed looped around again, and I stumbled home with my arms crossed tight, chin tucked to chest so none of the glaring light of day could reflect in my eyes.

In that moment I wasn’t sure where the monster ended and where I began. I know the government just wanted me to go back to the life I’d lived before, but the monster always stretched under my skin as a memory. My nails always a little thicker than before, my hair a little thinner. The taste of animal meat never enough as it used to be.

I wondered why they even bothered curing us. Sure they wanted their world back, but why not kill us instead? If they really thought we were monsters and irredeemable, why go through the trouble and expense?

All they had to do was crash down our buildings, expose us to the light, and be done with it. Killing us by half measures just seemed that much crueler.

He introduces himself as James, and pauses after saying his name as if I should know him. I’d been infected for long enough that there are a few gaps in my memory, and I struggle to place his face in one of them, playing a hesitant smile over my lips to buy time.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t—” I start, but he waves his hand through the air to brush away my apology.

“We had a class together in school.” He fills in the blank for me. “Back before…” He stares off to the side when he says that last word, as if it can somehow offend me—reminding me that the gap between “before” and “now” is filled with monsters and savagery.

I take the chance to glance at the back of his ear, wondering if he tilted his head away for just this reason. No evidence of the bar code tattoo. I force my hands to be still by my sides—they itch to tug my own hair across my cheeks.

“Yes of course.” I prop up my smile, trying not to show my unease. A storm hovers on the horizon, signaling that dark will come earlier this evening. I discovered early on that I’m scared of the dark now, which is funny since I’d spent the last two years needing it to survive.

An awkward silence percolates between us until I offer, “How’ve you been?” and then want to cringe because the answer to that is never very good. Often, in order to stay alive and uninfected, most survivors had to do things more monstrous than the monsters. It’s just no one ever talks about that.

“Good.” When he smiles, I have to look away because it makes something bright crack open inside me—a lust that tastes as powerful as tearing a human body to strips. I bite my lips, feeling the tension of skin under the pressure of my now-dulled teeth.

He asks to walk me home, up the mountain, and I nod my head, wondering how I can ever fill each footstep etched in silence. And yet somehow we do, finding conversations that meander through the easy territory, no talk of monsters or pandemics or the end of the world.

I’m sure there are those who figured out how to move on past what they’d been. Just as there were the ones who couldn’t—who, even though they were cured, continued to hunt the taste of human flesh. I wondered if the real lucky ones were those who’d gone insane, let the disease lay waste to their brain until they could do nothing but parrot back whatever their rehabilitation coach spat at them.

The scientists think we don’t remember. That’s supposed to be part of the cure—amnesia of everything during infection.

Except it doesn’t work that way. At first I thought I was the only one who, when darkness falls absolute, recalls what it was like to wake standing in the corner, fingers flexed, claws dirty with dried blood. So very hungry that the world buzzes with it.

But then one day I was waiting for my check-in appointment at the Sanitation Center, and I watched another Rehabilitated walk over to pour himself a cup of water from the fountain. It was late afternoon and a storm had blown through, and for the flicker of a moment, the lights in the center blinked out while dark clouds boiled outside.

When the generator kicked in, I found myself staring at the man, at the way his hand shook as he gripped the cone-shaped paper cup. At the hunger in his eyes.

And I knew. We both knew. What we’d been—it’s always inside us. Just that some of us bury it deeper than others.

“Is it hard living alone?” James asks. It’s the third time I’ve run into him at the convenience store at the bottom of the mountain and allowed him to walk me home. I grip my fingers around the seat of my bike, propelling it beside me.

“Sometimes.” I think about how I used to be so lazy, my room always a mess. These days the house is immaculate. What else do I have to occupy my days? “I miss the noise of people,” I admit.

From the corner of my eye I see the edge of his mouth kick up, and it encourages me on.

“I had four sisters. There was always drama. Fights, screams.” I realize how bad that sounds, and I temper it back with a laugh. “But it was good in its way. We were crazy about each other.”

“I know what you mean.” His voice seems indulgent. “I had sisters too.”

I turn toward him, to share this moment of similarity between us, and the realization of the meaning of his words is slow to filter through me. Had sisters. The bike wobbles under my grip, veering into his path, and he grabs the handlebars, knuckles flaring white.