Ellen Datlow: After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia

“I’m sorry,” I whisper. I can’t look at him. In that moment I feel the monster keenly within. I taste it against the back of my throat.

I could have been the one to kill his sisters. They’d have been young and fresh, almost ripe like a perfect fruit. It doesn’t matter whether I did or not; I’d killed someone else’s sisters. I’d shredded them open, laid them bare.

And I wonder again why they’ve let people like me live. Before the pandemic, someone like me—a murderer who tortured her victims—would have been put to death without hesitation.

“I’m sorry,” I say again.

His hands clutch at the handlebars, grip pulsing like a heartbeat.

“It wasn’t you,” he says. And I know what he means is that it was the monster inside me that drove me to such brutality. Ever since the cure, the scientists have embarked on a massive campaign to explain to the Pure how we are not to be blamed for our actions while monstrous. don’t blame the victim; blame the disease, is emblazoned across every crumbling billboard.

I don’t know how to tell him how wrong he is.

At home, with the bike parked in the garage and nothing but the night surrounding me, I walk through the house and turn out every single light. Before the pandemic we’d had few neighbors—only a couple of properties scattered across the mountain, and beyond, nothing but protected wilderness.

Now the isolation is absolute. The other houses stand barren, their occupants dead or sick. No one’s bothered to even vandalize or squat; we’re too far from the city to be of much convenience.

Besides, the world is still filled with monsters that like the darkness. Only Rehabilitated would choose to live beyond the civilization compounds, with their artificial lights glaring all night. Sometimes when I walk through a dim room I can see the creatures through the window, racing past the trees searching out their prey.

They speak with a clicking sound that sometimes has the timbre of howling. In the daytime it’s easy to spot where they passed, their claws raking divots in the tree trunks.

It’s illegal to hunt them, though that doesn’t stop most poachers. Back before the Recovery, those with the most kills had the highest designations in many communities.

Now the government hands out the tranq darts filled with the cure, urging hunters to use those instead, but sometimes they “forget” or claim an ambush and…Oh, well…another pod of monsters killed. What loss, really, is that to the world?

It could have easily been me on one of those piles of burning bodies. Maybe it should have.

I’ve been thinking about James and his dead sisters for a week, but when I finally see him again outside the store, I’m not sure how to approach him, and so I just assume the familiar pose of chin tucked to my chest, stealing glances as I start walking my bike home.

He falls into step next to me.

“I had a boyfriend,” I tell him, and the awkwardness of the statement strangles me until I’m compelled to explain. “Before. And he was killed. By one of the…them.”

Panic lights a fire inside me that this is coming out all wrong. “It wasn’t me who killed him when I was one of the…them,” I’m quick to add, and that’s what stops the dribble of words from my mouth.

I want him to understand that I know what it’s like to lose someone you know to them. That I’ve been on both sides, and neither one is bearable. A painful silence settles between us, the click of my bike’s wheels counting out the pattern of our steps.

“My mother killed my sisters,” he finally says.

I form the word “Oh” with my mouth.

“She wasn’t one of them,” he clarifies. “It was after the pandemic started. My father kept a gun in the bedside table. She killed him first, then the girls. I heard the last shot. It’s what woke me up. She’d ground sleeping pills into instant mashed potatoes.” For a moment he pauses. “I hate mashed potatoes, and she didn’t remember.”

He brushes his hand along my hip, stopping me. The bike by my side wobbles and then falls against my leg. He’s not even tentative as he reaches out, sweeps the fan of my hair aside, and takes the edge of my ear in his fingers as if he can read the bar code through his fingertips.

“There are other kinds of monsters in the world,” he tells me.

I want to crawl inside him and never leave.

As I stand in the darkness of my house, I press my hands flat against the plate glass window stretched across the sunroom. There’s a pool carved into the patio below, and a body thrashes in the fetid water.

Her claws scrape uselessly at the night. I know it’s a she because her body still retains some of the curves, her breasts just breaking the surface as she fights for air. Moments ago I watched a pack of them race past the house, a few of them stopping to sniff the air, as if they could smell me tucked away inside.

The others turned away, kept going once they must have realized my blood contains the same sickness as their own. Except one. She stepped closer and then again. She was staring at the window, and the pool swallowed her whole, ripples easing toward the walls before she broke back up to the surface.

I wonder at how she doesn’t realize she could stand if she just moved a bit to the right and stretched her feet down.

I have no idea how long it will take her to drown. I have even less of an idea who she must have been before the pandemic, to have taken such an interest in me standing here.

All I know is that she’s a monster. I could call in the hunters, have her shot with the cure and dragged away. I could load my own gun with the cure-tranqs they gave me the day I left the Sanitation Center.

But what kind of existence is that giving her? Who could ever claim my lonely days are anything approaching a life?

“How have you been adjusting since leaving the center?” the scientist asks. White paper crinkles underneath me as I shift on the examination table. The man places his hand on my thigh, casually, as he studies my chart. As if there’s nowhere else for him to put it. As if neither one of us realizes his thumb stretches too close to nowhere good.

I try to shift again, and the pads of his fingers press against the edge of my putrid green examination gown that does little to cover the necessary bits. My nails dig into my palm. There was a time only months ago when they were as sharp as weapons.

“Fine.” I keep my voice even.

He removes his hand to flip a page in the thick folder documenting my life. Who I was before the pandemic, what I was during, who they want me to be now. His touch then falls back to its familiar place. I’d cross my arms over my chest, but that would only drag the hem of the gown higher up my legs.

“You making friends? Finding a community?”

I think about James. How he’s usually waiting for me outside the store after my sessions here. “Sure.”

“Pure or Rehabilitated?” he asks.

I lift a shoulder. “I thought we weren’t supposed to distinguish between the two.”

“Listen, Vail.” He sets the chart on the table and shifts so that he’s facing me, his abdomen so close that the stray fibers on his white coat tickle my kneecaps. Every time his heart beats, his body barely brushes mine.