Ellen Datlow - After - Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia

The olders found something in the baby’s blood. It’s like SWITCH OFF, they say, but it’s different. It’s like SWITCH OFF, but it works better. You breathe it out, and it shuts off the nanoassemblers all around you. Maybe, they say, that’s why the car didn’t change, and why the woman and the girl’s clothes and jewelry wasn’t converted, too. But these new bots, they can’t turn stuff back the way it was before.

And yeah, there was a map. A map of the United States and Mexico and Canada. Most of the cities had big red X’s drawn on them. Montreal, up in Canada, had a blue circle, and so did San Francisco and a few little towns here and there. A red line was drawn from Birmingham, Alabama all the way to Pensacola. Both those cities had red X’s of their own. I found the red pencil in the box with the baby. And I found pages and pages of notes. In the margins of the map, there was a list of countries. Some in red, some in blue.

Turns out the woman was a microbiologist, and she’d been studying when the sanctuary in Birmingham was breached. That’s what she’d written in her notes. They read us that part in class. “The containment has been breached.” I also know the notes talk about the nanites evolving, and about new strains the SWITCH OFF doesn’t work on, and new strains of SWITCH OFF that shut down THE GOO better than before, like what kept the baby alive. They know the scientist also wrote about how THE EVENT isn’t over because the bots are all evolving and doing things they weren’t designed to do.

Of course, they also weren’t designed to eat up the whole world, but they did.

Saul Benedict still frowns and asks his questions, and he says everything’s even more uncertain than it was before I found the car.

But me, I look at that baby, who’s growing up fine and healthy and breathing those new bots out with every breath, and sometimes I think about going out onto the bridge again with a can of spray paint and writing HOPE HERE in great big letters on the side of the car. So if maybe someone else ever comes along, someone who isn’t sick, they’ll see, and drive all the way across the bridge.

IT STARTED WITH A TOOTHACHE.

The Arkle had it, in one of the great hollow fangs at the front of his mouth, that would have been simple canines before the Overlords changed him, in the process of turning him into a Ferret. Not that The Arkle was entirely a Ferret. He’d escaped from the dorms when he was eleven, so he still looked mostly human. A very thin, elongated human, with his face and jaw pushed out so that it wasn’t quite a snout but you could tell it would have been one if he hadn’t gotten away.

The Arkle also had a taste for blood. Not the full-on blood-lust the Ferrets had, because he could control it. But when the Family killed a chicken to roast, he would cut its throat over a bowl and drink the blood down like a kind of pre-dinner cocktail. Sometimes he put parsley in the cup, as a garnish. Or, as he said, for those extra vitamins. The Arkle didn’t eat a lot of greens.

He was one of the younger members of the Family. He’d come out of the city four years before, more dead than alive, his body covered with sores and his gums receding from malnutrition. He’d lasted almost six months on his own after escaping from the dorms, which was no mean feat, but he wouldn’t have lasted much longer if he hadn’t been lucky enough to have been found by Gwyn, on one of the latter’s last foraging expeditions into the city fringe.

Gwyn was the first to notice The Arkle behaving strangely. They were working together, moving one of the portable henhouses to its new location, when The Arkle stopped pushing and pressed his fingers into his jaw, using the middle knuckle so he didn’t slice himself with his talons.

“What are you doing?” asked Gwyn, annoyed. As always, he was providing most of the muscle, and though The Arkle’s participation was mainly for show, the henhouse wheels were stuck in the mud, and even a slight amount of assistance would make it easier for Gwyn to free them.

“Toothache,” muttered The Arkle. He stretched out his jaw and ground it from side to side. “Annoying me.”

“Doc had better look at it right away,” said Gwyn. He’d had a toothache himself a few years back, and there was still a hole at the back of his mouth where Doc had pulled out a big molar. But that was better than what could happen if it was left to rot. Gwyn had seen that too, in other survivors. And Ferret teeth were certain to be trickier than more nearly human ones.

“It’s not too bad,” muttered The Arkle. He winced as he closed his mouth, though, and tears started in his eyes.

Gwyn set down the chicken house and lumbered around, towering over The Arkle. Gwyn was the big brother of the Family, and the second oldest. He’d been thirteen when the Change swept through, disappearing everyone over the age of fourteen. Like most of the surviving children, he’d then been caught up by the suited figures driving their centipede trains, and taken to the Dormitories. Big for his age and well-muscled, he’d gone straight into the Myrmidon track, fed alien steroids and exercised to the limits of torture, but like The Arkle, he’d managed to escape before the final conversion in the Meat Factory.

Even so, he was seven feet tall, measured four feet across the shoulders, and had arms roughly the same diameter as the massive logs he split for the winter fire, wielding a woodchopper that most of the others couldn’t even lift.

“Go and see Doc now,” ordered Gwyn. Like the few other almost-Myrmidons who got away from the dorms, his voice was high and reedy, a byproduct of the chemical infusions that had built his muscle, while also effectively making him a eunuch.

But high voice or not, The Arkle knew that when Gwyn spoke, he meant what he said.

“All right, all right, I’m…ow…going,” he said. “You sure you can move this by yourself?”

“I guess I’ll manage somehow,” replied Gwyn.

The Arkle nodded sheepishly and trudged back through the sparse forest where the five henhouses were arranged. At the edge of the trees, he climbed over the old rusted fence with the sinuous grace of a true Ferret, pausing to tip a finger at Ken-Lad, who was on sentry halfway up the ancient tree that served as the western lookout post. Ken-Lad made a ruder gesture back, before resuming his steady, regulated gaze, staring up at each quadrant of the sky.

The Farm lay in a deep valley, more than a hundred kilometers from the city. The creatures had never come to fight their battles there, and even the Wingers never flew overhead. But very occasionally, one of the Overlord’s flying machines did, and that was why the sentries watched. The Family could not afford to have a curious Overlord sweep down and see free humans, for the creatures would surely come then, correcting whatever oversight had kept the valley secret for the eight years since the Change.

The Farm had been a giant dope plantation before the Change, and the camouflage nets were still in place over a good thirty acres of land. The Family had poked a few holes in the nets, here and there, to let in a little more light for the much smaller portion they had under cultivation. That provided vegetables, and the chickens provided meat and eggs, and there was hunting for wild game as well. There had been a lot of tinned and dried food earlier on, but it was mostly saved for special occasions now, since it was too risky to venture toward the city and the riches that still awaited there.

Doc Carol had found the Farm almost five years before. She’d never told the others whether she’d known it was there, or had simply stumbled upon it and then worked out that it was safe from the creatures.