Ellen Datlow - After - Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia

She never told anyone how she knew so much about medicine and healing, either. Gwyn probably knew, and some of the older ones, but they never talked about anything the Doc said or did. All the others knew was that she had been a day short of her fifteenth birthday when the Change came, a day short of being old enough to go wherever it was that most of humanity went. If they went anywhere, as opposed to simply ceasing to exist.

The Arkle spat as he remembered the caterpillar train that he had willingly climbed aboard. He’d been seven years old at the time, and his mother had vanished in front of his eyes, and he’d been desperately afraid. The train had looked a bit like the one at the fairground, and it was already loaded with children. He even knew some of them from school.

So he’d got on, and it had taken him to one of the first established dorms. A tracking and ID device had been injected beneath the skin of his wrist, and he’d been subjected to a series of tests at the hands of those silvor-visored, faceless, suited humanoids. The tests had said “Ferret,” and from then on, everything he did or that was done to him was designed to make him both less and more than human.

The Arkle looked at the strange purple welt on his wrist as he loped through the high grass that surrounded the main house. They cut the grass occasionally, using scythes, just to reduce the risk of fire, but never enough that it would look new-mown.

The tracking device in his wrist had been removed by Tira, a girl in the dorm, though The Arkle didn’t know exactly how she’d done it. She simply touched her finger to the lump that showed where the tracker lay under the skin, and there had been a moment of pain so terrible that The Arkle had blacked out. When he’d come to, there was no lump. Just the purple welt.

Of course he knew that Tira had used a Change Talent of some kind. He had one too, only it wasn’t as useful. Or at least it was only useful for one thing. The Arkle grinned as he thought of that, then grimaced and almost sobbed as the pain in his tooth came back, darting from his mouth up into his head, savaging him right behind the eyes.

The pain in his tooth was even worse than that remembered pain in his wrist.

Tira had taken her device out too, and they had run together. Only, she never made it over the perimeter wire. Tira was the one who had first called him “The Arkle.” He didn’t know why, but he’d kept the name just to remember her, his truest friend from the dorms.

Greenie was on the verandah of the house, carefully potting up seedlings of some plant or other that The Arkle didn’t recognize. She looked at him with her head to one side, and he could tell she was wondering why he had come in early. But even then, most of her mind was probably on the plants. Greenie had a Change Talent too, and though like all Change Talents, hers was very weak down in the valley, she still had a special empathy for vegetable life. Greenie could always tell when a plant needed water, or more shade, or sun, or was being strangled by its neighbors.

“Got to see Doc,” said The Arkle. He tried to smile, but it hurt too much, so he waved instead and hurried on inside.

The Arkle could see Doc Carol through the small square window that was set high in the inner door to her lab, even though the thick glass was smeared all around with sealant. Doc was clearly cooking up something fairly toxic, since she was wearing a gas mask and an ex-Army NBC suit.

The Arkle hesitated, then knocked on the window. He didn’t want to disturb Doc, but his tooth was getting worse, a lot worse. The pain had been around for weeks, coming and going, and hadn’t ever got too bad. Then a few days before it had suddenly escalated, ebbing occasionally but never going away, and when it hit full force he could hardly think or see, and he just wanted to smash his face into something hard and destroy the bastard tooth. Only, he didn’t because he knew it wouldn’t work.

Doc looked over, her eyes just visible through the round lenses of the gas mask. Doc had weird eyes. They were kind of violet, and bigger than normal. The Arkle had heard that up out of the valley they shone in the dark, and the Doc had to wear sunglasses all the time. He’d never seen it, but he believed it.

“That you, The Arkle?”

Her voice was muffled through the mask and the heavy door, but clear enough.

“Yeah. Can I come in?”

Doc was almost the only person in the Family who called The Arkle by his chosen name. Most of the others called him Arkle, or Ark, or Arkie, which he hated.

“Wait a minute,” called out Doc. “This stuff won’t do you any good. I’ll be out in a minute. Go into my office.”

The Arkle retreated through the outer door. Doc’s office was the biggest room in the old house. She slept there, as well as worked. Her bed was behind the desk. The Arkle looked at it and wondered what it would be like to share it with her. He’d slept with nearly all of the women and at least half of the men on the Farm, because his Change Talent was for seduction, and even the pale version of it that worked down in the valley was enough to help out his natural charm. And since everyone had pretty much grown up in the dorms, there was no such thing as a normal human body anymore. So his snouty face and fangs and slimmest of waists was not a bar to relationships.

The Doc was the one closest to old human, and even then, she had those eyes. The Arkle had never dared try his Talent on her, had never even had a few minutes alone with her to see if it might be worthwhile adding that into the natural equation of liking and desire.

But he couldn’t even begin to daydream about sex with Doc, not with the pain in his tooth. He lay down in the patient’s chair, the old banana lounge that sat in front of the desk, and shut his eyes, hoping that this would somehow lessen the pain.

It didn’t, and the sudden waft of a harsh chemical smell alerted him to Doc’s presence. She was leaning over him, the gas mask off, her short brown hair pressed down in an unnatural way, showing the marks of the straps. Her violet eyes were fixed on his jaw.

“Your jaw is swollen,” remarked Doc. She went behind the desk, put down her mask, and stripped off the suit. It gave off more chemical smells as she opened the window and hung it on the hook outside, ready to be hosed down later.

She was only wearing a pair of toweling shorts and a singlet underneath. The Arkle’s eyes watered as he looked at her ruefully. The tearing up wasn’t from the remnant chemical smell, but from the pain. A pain so intense he couldn’t even appreciate his first real look at Doc without the white lab coat she nearly always wore inside—and there it was, slipping over her shoulders and getting done up at the front, far too swiftly for his liking.

“Is it a tooth pain?” asked Doc.

“Yeah,” whispered The Arkle. He raised one hand and gestured toward the left-hand fang. “It’s got…pretty…bad. Just today.”

“That never got this bad in a day. You should have seen me when it first started,” said Doc. She dragged a box over next to the banana lounge and sat on it. “Open wide.”

The Arkle opened wide in a series of small movements because he couldn’t do it all in one go, it hurt too much. Doc leaned over him, looking close but not touching. Some distant memory made The Arkle shut his eyes. For a moment, he was six again and in the dentist’s chair, and his mother was holding his hand….

“Keep your hands still,” ordered Doc. “Stay there. Just lie quiet.”

The Arkle heard the box slide back and Doc move. He opened his eyes and saw her go over to the door to the cellar. It had two big padlocks on it, and only Doc and Gwyn had the keys. The Family’s hard-won pharmacopeia was stored in the cellar. All the drugs that had been found in scavenging expeditions in the small towns nearby, and in the outer suburbs of the city, plus the things that Doc had been able to make.