Ellen Datlow - After - Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia

I still felt dizzy even if the first shock of seeing them was fading. Even if I was just seeing them now, not seeing them and wanting to run away. I reached inside the car and touched the back of the woman’s neck. I shouldn’t have, but I did. It was just a little bit tacky from the heat, a little soft, and I left fingerprints behind. I thought, You leave them out here long enough, shut up and baking inside that car, they’ll melt away to shapeless globs long before the plastic has a chance to get brittle. I thought that, and pulled my hand back. I was relieved to see none of the PVC had come off on my fingers. But I rubbed them on my jeans anyway. I rubbed until it’s a wonder my skin didn’t start bleeding.

They looked like dolls.

They looked almost like the mannequins in the busted shop windows inside Sanctuary.

But they’d both been alive, flesh and bone and breathing, and it couldn’t have been more than a few days before. A week at the most. I stared at them. I wondered which of them died first. I wondered lots of stuff there’s not much point writing down. Then I glanced into the backseat. And right then, that’s when I thought my heart my might stop, just stop beating like the girl’s and the woman’s had finally stopped beating. There was a cardboard box in the back, and there was a baby in a blanket inside the box. I don’t know how the hell it was still alive, how it had been spared by THE GOO or by the heat inside the car, but it was still alive. It looked at me. I saw it was sick, from the broiling day trapped in the automobile, but goddamn it was alive. It saw me and began to bawl, so I rushed around to the other side of the car and opened that door, too. I lifted the cardboard box out careful as I could and set it on the bridge, and then I sat down next to it. I screwed the lid off my canteen and sprinkled water on its forehead and lips. I finally pushed back the blanket and took the baby in my arms. I’d never, ever held a baby. We don’t have many in Sanctuary. And the ones we do have, the dozen or so, not just any kid can go picking them up. Just the mothers and fathers, the nurses and doctors. The baby’s face was so red, like she’d been roasting alive in there, so I sprinkled more water on its cheeks and forehead. It’s eyes were glassy, feverish, and it didn’t cry as loudly as I thought it should have been crying. I sat there and rocked it, shushing it, the way I’d seen people do with babies. I sat there trying to remember a lullaby.

No need to draw this part out, Max.

The baby, she died in my arms. She was just too hot, and I’d come along too late to save her from the sun. Maybe me sprinkling the water on her had been too much. Maybe just seeing me had been too much. Maybe she just picked then to die. And I wanted to cry, but I didn’t. I don’t know why. I knew I ought to, and I still know I ought to have, but I just sat there holding her close to me like she wasn’t dead. Like she was only asleep and was gonna wake up. I sat there staring at the blue-green plastic people in the front seat, at the sky, at the car.

In my bad dreams, there are wheeling, screeching gulls in that blue-white sky, and it goes on forever, on out into space, into starry blackness, down to blue skies on other worlds without women and men and youngers, where none of these things have ever happened and where THE EVENT hasn’t occurred and THE GOO will never reach. Where it’s still THE BEFORE, and will never be THE AFTER.

God and Jesus and angels and a day of judgment of wicked men, they all live and breathe inside the Reverend Swales’s black book, and in the songs we sing on Sundays. Many other gods and devils live in other holy books. But on the bridge that day, there was no god. In my dreams, there is no god. And I don’t pray anymore. I don’t think much of those who do.

You’re saying, Now that’s not what happened, Cody. I can hear you, Max. I can hear you grumbling, plain as day, “Cody Marlene Hernandez, you’re mixing it all up, and you’re doing it on purpose. That wasn’t the deal, you welcher.”

Fine, you win.

I scrounged about and found a couple of other things inside the cardboard box. I hardly looked at them, just stuffed them into my pack. Carrying the dead baby in her blanket, I walked back across the bridge, quickly as I could, quicker than I’d come. It was a lot harder getting over the fence with her in my arms, but I managed. I didn’t drop her. I’d have fallen before I ever dropped her.

I spent a week in quarantine, just in case. Five men went out onto the bridge and brought back the plastic woman and the girl and buried them in the cemetery. They buried the baby there, too, after Doc Lehman did his autopsy. No one ever scolded me or yelled or revoked privileges for going out there. I didn’t have to ask why. You get punished, you don’t have to get punished all over again.

Me and Max sat between the crimson river and the NOW|HERE wall, and I let him read what I wrote on the back of the torn-out encyclopedia pages. He got pissed near the end, and just like I thought he would, called me a welcher.

“The baby always dies in my dreams,” I told him, when he finally shut up and let me talk again.

“I didn’t say, ‘Write what’s in your dreams.’ I said, ‘Write what happened.’”

“It seemed more important,” I told him, and tossed a piece of gravel at the river. “What haunts me when I sleep, how it might have gone that day, but didn’t. How it probably should have gone, but didn’t.”

“Yeah, but you went and killed that baby.”

“No I didn’t. My nightmares kill the baby, not me. Almost every time I sleep, the nightmares kill the baby.”

He chewed his lip the frustrated way he does sometimes. “Cody, I just ain’t never gonna understand that. You saved the baby, but you go and have bad dreams about the baby dyin’. That’s stupid. You waste all this energy gettin’ freaked out about something didn’t even happen except in a dream, and dreams ain’t real. I thought writin’ the truth, that would make you better. Not writing down lies. That’s what I don’t understand.”

“You weren’t there. You didn’t hold her, and her so hot, and you so sure she was already dead or would be dead any second.”

“I just won’t ever understand it,” he said again.

“Okay, Max. Then you won’t ever understand it. That’s fair. There’s a lot about myself I don’t understand sometimes. Doesn’t matter the dreams don’t make sense. Only matters it happens to me. It’s all too complicated. Never black-and-white, not like SWITCH ON and SWITCH OFF, not like THE BEFORE and THE AFTER. I fall asleep, and she dies in my arms, even though she didn’t.”

He glared at the pages, chewing his lips and looking disgusted, then handed them back to me.

“Well, you don’t win,” he said. “You don’t get any more than kisses ’cause you didn’t even talk about the map or the book, and because you killed the baby.”

“I don’t care,” I replied, which was true.

“I was just trying to help you.”

“I know that, Max. Don’t you think I know that?”

He didn’t answer my question. Instead, he said, “I’m going home, Cody. I got chores. So do you, welcher.” I told him I’d be along soon. I told him I needed to be alone for a while (which is when I’m writing this part down). So I’m sitting here throwing gravel at the sludgy crimson river people used to call the St. Johns River.

Outside my dreams, the baby didn’t die. The olders figured the car had only driven through Arlington and out onto the bridge the night before I found it. They guessed the girl and the woman got sick a couple of days before that, probably before they even got to Florida. They figured, too, the baby would have died of heat prostration and thirst if I hadn’t found it when I did. “You did right,” Ma’am Shen whispered in my ear when no one was watching or listening in. “Even if that wasn’t your intent, you did right.” We never found out the baby’s name, so they named it Cody, after me.