Ellen Datlow - After - Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia

There was a time I could have heard that heartbeat from two hundred yards away. He could have hidden from me, crouched in a closet or trembling in a cupboard, and his fear would have sent his heart soaring and it would sing me to his location.

The music of a terrified heart used to be the most beautiful in the world.

“We’ve really found community to be key to reintegration here,” he says. I’m used to his hands that do nothing but wander idly, never too far, and I keep my thighs pressed tight together. He grips my legs so that his fingers slide into the sweaty crevice at the back of my bent knees. “We have sessions here. The notes show that you used to attend some of them but haven’t in a few weeks. I really think…”

I tune him out and try to figure out how old he is. His hair’s sprayed with white, but still predominantly brown. No glasses, clean shaven. A bit of flab around his middle, that I feel as he shifts against me again in his fervor to see me fully rehabilitated. He’s not wearing a wedding ring, but that’s not unusual anymore, with gold being so valuable and most other forms of currency useless.

He doesn’t look like the type that could easily survive the pandemic. And that’s what’s always so confusing to me. It was the Pure who holed up in compounds scattered over the country, trying to hold on to memories of what life had been like before. It was in the remnants of one of the government bunkers that they figured out the cure and designed the recovery.

But it was the Infected who ruled the world. Every day the ranks of the Recovered grow, and yet in everyone’s eyes, including our own, we’re worthless.

As James walks me up the mountain, he tells me about his days at school. “Pretty much like before.” He shrugs. “Smaller classes.

And the teachers are a little more lenient. I mean, once you live through the end of the world, getting sent to detention really isn’t that significant.”

I laugh, and he turns to me. We’re at the top of my driveway, where he always leaves me, and he slips his fingers around mine. “I wish you were there.” His voice is soft, earnest.

There’s an intensity to his eyes, in the stillness, that makes everything inside me unfurl. “You could go again, you know. Those first few weeks, everyone was just trying to figure it all out. There’s a rhythm to it now—you wouldn’t stand out as much anymore.”

I shouldn’t stand out at all. That’s the thing. According to the government, there’s supposed to be no difference between me and James, except after that law there’s a footnote as long as a football field about how the Infected are to be Recovered and what we must do to prove our ongoing Rehabilitation.

They’re even allowed to kill us under certain circumstances. If they suspect the cure will fail, legally they can do whatever they want to us.

I tilt my head, wishing there were a way to explain to James just how very different we are. “You know, before the pandemic, if you had a male doctor, once you put on the gown, he wasn’t allowed to be in a room alone with you. They always called in a nurse just in case.”

He frowns. “In case of what?”

“I don’t know.” I shrug. “It was just one of those rules I always thought was sort of unnecessary. But either way, they don’t do that anymore with us. The doctor just comes in when he wants. No nurse.”

It’s clear James is confused. “Maybe they’re short-staffed at the center.” And then he smiles as if about to make a joke. “Population isn’t exactly what it used to be.”

I try to mimic his grin, but all I can think about is the desperation in the scientist’s eyes as he gripped his fingers against my pulse, counting out every heartbeat as if it could tell him a secret about the end of the world.

I think it surprised everyone that the cure actually worked. Sure, lab testing seemed positive, but it’s different to load up tens of thousands of cure-tranq rounds and go off hunting monsters. Suddenly they had piles of people on their hands, and they rushed to set up the Sanitation Centers to take us all in.

It kept us in one location in case everything failed. Then they could just firebomb the place and be done with us.

They contained us for as long as they could in those centers, but space became an issue, and finally they opened the gate and let us trickle out into the world.

The world went nuts. Enraged communities prohibited Rehabilitated from settling there, vowed to shoot on sight anyone Infected or suspected of having been Infected.

Every time one of us committed a crime, it was because of what we once were. That we shouldn’t be saved. They didn’t want to see that we were just like them: some of us good, some of us bad.

A few political parties rose up, rumbling about colonizing an island with us, making sterilization part of the cure. Some suggested flat-out murdering us, but of course they never called it that, because we were less than animals. It would be preemptive self-defense .

And then one of the self-governing communities by the capital seat dragged a Rehabilitated down to the town square and charged him with murder. He demanded proof; he’d been a model citizen since being Recovered, he claimed. They pointed to the bar code on the back of his ear. He’d been a monster, and the only way a monster could survive was by killing.

The case made it into what was left of the court system, and he was found guilty. The defense took it to one of the remaining four circuits, and the ruling was overturned. It was headed to the Supreme Court, the defense claiming insanity, when the President stepped in and put an end to it.

We were pardoned for any crime committed before we became rehabilitated.

No one ever tried to bring charges against the survivors for what they did.

Her body floats in the pool. She’s on her back, arms trailing out by her sides. She’d sunk at first, right after giving up the fight for air, but then sometime later, when I was asleep, she bobbed to the surface and has been drifting through the stagnant water ever since.

I am so so lonely that I consider attempting school in the morning.

In the middle of the night I feel something thundering through me, waking me up in the darkness as though I’d been hit. My breath is ragged, dreams of sharp teeth and succulent skin still clinging to the edges of my vision.

My ears ring, and as they clear I hear the clacking sort of howling that’s as familiar to me as my own heartbeat. I push from bed and stumble into the living room, pressing against the cold glass window.

The horizon glows fire, and at first I think it’s the sunrise, but then black clouds billow through the brightness. I watch it for a while, the sky undulating as goose bumps spread over my arms and up my neck.

I’m pretty sure I know exactly what just happened, but even so, I reach around the corner and flick on the television. There are only two channels, one fuzzier than the other, but the news confirms what I expected.

An explosion at the Sanitation Center. Clearly on purpose. A purification group has already claimed credit. The entire place ablaze, likely no survivors. The fire engineered to start tearing through the woods, where the monsters sometimes hole up at night.