Ellen Datlow - After - Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia

I watch the inferno boiling in the distance, knowing how dry the season’s been and how thirsty the trees are for flame. I’m sure the town will find a way to stop it before it reaches the city proper. But I doubt they’ll do much to keep my little mountain unharmed.

Why save a mountain populated by nothing but monsters?

Even though I’d promised James I’d give it another try, I don’t bother with school that next morning. There’s already the taste of smoke in the air and the television chirps with news of the uncontrolled fire. I sit in the sunroom and watch the clouds billow in the distance, hazing out the sun. Below me, the dead girl bobs in the pool, her skin liquid white and loose, sloughing off to drift across the surface.

There’s an uneasiness rippling through me, as if I can sense the distress of the monsters hidden in the woods beyond. Every now and again I’ll hear the report of a gunshot. Today, there are no such things as hunting restrictions.

I used to have hobbies. I must have before the pandemic, but it’s hard to remember now what they were. I pace restlessly through the house, trying to piece together how I once spent my time.

Most of it was dominated by school, class piled upon class. Bags stuffed with bloated books, lockers smelling like week-old bananas and new-binder plastic. I once took piano lessons, but now my nails are so thick that even when I chew them short they still clack against the keys.

Everything is a reminder of what I was.

My eyes drift closed. We were wretched beasts, but still we felt a sense of community. There were only so many buildings that refused the sunlight and were safe to hide inside. Somehow we’d find our way to them, and we’d find each other in the dark.

When we hunted, we were sleek and beautiful in our unity, calling to each other as we ran, no such thing as an obstacle in the night.

In our own sick way, we all meant something to one another. Each one lost, indistinguishable, to the pack.

Smoke chokes back the light, sending the day skittering into evening faster than usual. The sun’s a diffuse ball through the haze, burning the sky a sick orange, when I hear a knock on the door.

I stand in the middle of the living room, listening to the slicing silence that follows. There’s a knock again, urgent and pounding, and then I hear his voice.

James calling out, “Vail? You in there?”

A fleeting sensation of joy passes through me at the sound of him. When I throw open the door, he’s standing with his hands shoved in his pockets, shoulders curved in a bit.

We stare at each other, me awkwardly trying to smile, until he breaks first. “I was worried,” he explains. “After the explosion, and there are reports of hunters and you’re up here alone, and I didn’t know if they’d come after you, so…” He trails off, and his eyes slide to the side. The color of his irises is muffled in the darkness, and it takes me a moment before I taste his unease.

Then it hits me, so full in my chest that I take a step back. His features are blurred because of the darkness on this side of the house, the front facing away from the fires along the horizon. Overgrown shrubbery clings to the decayed porch, plunging the front walk into a gray blackness.

The night’s coming faster because of the smoke choking the sky.

Beyond, in the fading trees, I hear the clicking of the monsters gathering.

“Shit,” I murmur, balling James’s shirt in my hands and tugging him inside. That’s when the wailing begins, thick down along my back, as if it could still call me to action. The sound of the monsters calling to the others about their located prey.

I stand mute in the hallway, my steps stuttering as I try to plan the next move. Beside me, James trembles, the edge of my knuckles scraping against his chest as I hold him tight.

At first I start toward the back of the house, thinking about the closets without windows, but then I double around, heading for the stairs into the basement.

It’s a risk, I know. If they make it down the stairs, we’re trapped. They’ll gather around us, bodies so thick there’s no such thing as escape.

I start tearing down the blinds over the windows, tossing them to the floor. We just have to make it through the night. In the morning, with the light, they’ll be gone. I could coat him with my blood, I think. Hope it masks the scent of his freshness with one of disease.

That’s when I realize he’s been calling my name. “Vail,” he shouts, hands on my shoulders. He forces me to face him.

In that split second, while the monsters wail and chatter and the darkness seeps in, I stare at James’s lips. I wonder, for just the barest moment, what they’d taste like. How they’d feel pressed between my own and if I could ever resist sinking my teeth into their tender flesh.

“Maybe we can still make it to the light of the compound,” he whispers.

I finally understand that he doesn’t hear them. Not yet. His ears aren’t tuned to the monsters like mine are. He doesn’t know how close they’ve come. How desperately they want him, and how their need sears through me. “No,” I muster. “It’s too late for that.”

The gun cabinet sits in my father’s closet, and I spin the dial, kneeling as I begin to count out the bullets. James reaches for a case on the top shelf, the label wrapped around a bright blue box with orange stripes.

“Cure-tranqs,” he says, running his hand over the label. When he looks at me, his eyes are wide.

I lift a shoulder as he pries open the lid. “They gave them to me at the center,” I explain. “Sometimes the pack will go looking for the one they lost, and just in case my pack came after me, the scientists wanted me to…you know.”

“The box is full?” He asks it like a question, as if I need to explain why I’ve never used them. “So your pack never came back?”

I focus on my hands, sorting destruction into neat piles. What I don’t tell him is that I can already hear the pack pushing against the air outside the house. They know there’s someone pure inside.

I can already feel the way their mouths water for him.

At night, when they race past the house, is the loneliest I’ve ever felt. Except for now.

“You shouldn’t have come up here.” I stand, angry, shoving a box of bullets in my pockets. My shoulder brushes against him as I walk past, and he doesn’t even hesitate before following.

It all comes back in my dreams, almost more vivid than my day-to-day life. The first one was probably six years old and plump with her baby fat. She smelled like melted ice cream and tasted like salt and misery.

When we came upon her in the park, she seemed unsurprised, almost as if she’d been expecting it.

“Are you my sister?” she asked calmly when the first of us fell upon her. She asked it again as she whimpered with her last breath, still clinging to the hope that one of us would know her, remember her.