Ellen Datlow - After - Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia

I kept walking. I didn’t turn back, like a smarter girl would have done. A smarter girl who understood it was more important to tell the olders what I’d found than to worry about getting in trouble for being out on the bridge. There was a strong gust of wind, warm from the south, and the dust on the bridge was swept up so I had to partly cover my face with my arm. But I could see the tiny brown devils swirling across the road.

Right after the wind, while the dust was still settling, I came to an especially wide crack in the roadway. It was so wide and deep, and when I looked down, the bottom was hidden in shadow. It didn’t go all the way through, or I’d not have been able to see down there. I had to climb over the barricade into the eastbound lane, into the lane with the car, to get around it. I haven’t mentioned the crumbling plastic seagulls I kept finding. Well, I figured they’d been seagulls. They’d been birds, and were big enough to have been seagulls. They littered the bridge, birds that died twelve years ago when I was four. Once I was only, I don’t know, maybe twenty-five yards from the car, I stopped for a minute or two. I squinted, trying to see inside, but the windows were tinted and I couldn’t make out anything at all in there.

The car looked so shiny and new. No way it had been sitting out in the weather very long. There weren’t even any pieces of the plastic girders lying on it, no dents from decayed and falling GOO, so it was a newcomer to the bridge, and I think that scared me most of all. By then, my heart was pounding—thumping like mad in my chest and ears and even the tip ends of my fingers—and I was sweating. Not the normal kinda sweat from walking, but a cold sweat like when I wake up from the nightmares of this day I’m writing about. My mouth was so, so dry. I felt a little sick to my belly, and wondered if it was breathing in all that dust.

“No point in stopping now,” I said, maybe whispering, and my voice was huge out there in all the empty above and below and around the Mathews Bridge. “So when they ask what I found, I can tell them all of it, not just I found a car on the bridge.” I considered the possibility that it might have been rovers, might be a trap. Them lying there in wait until someone takes the bait, then they ask for supplies to let me go. We hadn’t seen rovers—looters—in a year or so, but that didn’t mean they weren’t still out there, trying to get by on the scraps of nothing they found and whatever they could steal. Lower than the sneaks, the rovers. At least the sneaks never kill anyone. They just slip in and rob you when no one’s looking. Ma’am Shen says they’re all insane, and I expect that’s the truth of it. I wished I’d brought a knife (I have a lock-blade I keep in my footlocker), but that was dumb, ’cause rovers carry guns and bows and shit. What good’s a knife for a fifteen-year-old girl out on her own, so exposed she might as well be naked. No chance but to turn around and run if things went bad.

I shouted, “Anybody in there?” At the very top of my voice I shouted it. When no one answered, I shouted again, and still nobody answered me. I hadn’t thought they would, but it didn’t hurt to try.

“You don’t need to be scared of me,” I called out. “And I ain’t got nothing worth stealing.” Which I knew was dumb because if it was rovers they wouldn’t be after what I had on my person, but what they could get for me.

No one called back, and so I started walking again.

Pretty soon, I was close enough I could make out the plates on the front of the vehicle—Alabama, which we all thought was another LOST PLACE, since that’s what the Army guys had told us. On the map of what once was the United States hanging on the wall in the library, Alabama was colored in red, like all the LOST PLACES (which is most of the map). But here was a car from Alabama, and it couldn’t have been sitting on the bridge very long at all, not and still be so shiny and clean. Maybe I counted my footsteps after shouting and not getting an answer, but if so, I can’t remember how many I took.

There was another southerly gust, and more swirling dust devils, and this time the bridge seemed to sway just a little, which didn’t make my stomach feel any better.

Then I was finally at the car. Up close, it was a little dirtier than it had seemed from far away. There were a few dents and dings, a little rust, but nothing more than that. None of the tires were even flat. I stared at the tinted windows and waited for rovers to jump out and point their weapons at me, but that didn’t happen. For the first time, I considered the possibility that the doors might all be locked, and I didn’t even have anything to break out the windows. I looked past the car at the ruins of Arlington, and considered just sticking to my plan, forget the car for now, poke around over there a bit, then head home again. And yeah, tell the olders about the car and take whatever punishment I’d have coming.

I leaned forward, peering in through the glass, but the tinting was too dark even right up on it like that. I gripped the driver’s side door handle, and it was very hot from the Florida sun. It was hot enough I almost pulled my hand back, but only almost. Instead, I gave it a quick twist to the left, and the tumblers clicked. Which meant it wasn’t locked after all.

I took a deep breath and pulled up on the door. It came open easy as pie—like the olders say. It lifted, rising above my head, above the roof. The hinges didn’t even squeak. There was only a soft whoosh from hydraulics and pistons. Scalding air spilled out of the car.

You know exactly what I found in there, Max? It seems wicked to write it down on these “borrowed” encyclopedia pages. It seems wrong, but I’ll do it anyhow. Just in case you’re right, because yeah, I want the dreams to stop. Dead people don’t have dreams. Dead people probably don’t have anything at all, so it’s stupid me worrying like this, hesitating and drawing it out.

The door opened, and there were two people inside.

There was what was left of two people.

Like the might-have-been seagulls, THE GOO had gotten to them, and they were that same uniform shade of bluish green all live things go when the nano-assemblers get hold of them. I stepped back immediately and turned my head away. I even thought I might puke. It’s not that I’d never seen a person who’d died that way; it’s just I hadn’t seen any in a long, long time, and you forget. Or I’d forgotten. I covered my mouth, not wanting to be sick and have to see my half-digested breakfast spattered all over the road at my feet. I leaned forward, hands on knees, and took deep breaths and counted to thirty. Someone taught me to do that whenever I’m afraid I might be about to throw up, count to thirty, but I can’t remember who it was. Not that it matters.

When I felt a little better, I looked again. The woman was sitting with her back to the door, and her arms were wrapped tightly around the girl. The woman’s fingers disappeared into the girl’s hair—hair and hand all one and the same now. I figured they drove as far as they could, drove until they were too far gone to keep going. It takes hours and hours for the infected to die. Like the seagulls, the weather hadn’t been at them, and the woman and the girl looked like they’d just been popped fresh out of a mold, like the molds they use in the machine shop to turn non-GOO plastic into stuff we need. Every single detail, no matter how fragile, was still intact. Their plastic eyebrows, each hair, their eyes open and staring nowhere at all. Their skin was almost exactly the color of Ma’am Lillian’s teal-zircon pendant. Only completely opaque instead of translucent.

Their clothes and their jewelry (I noticed the woman’s silver earrings), those hadn’t changed at all. But it didn’t strike me odd until later, like the car being okay didn’t really strike me odd, though it should have.