Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  His blood froze. McAllister. One by one the Survivors had sickened and died—“badly weakened immune systems, slow-growing cancers, and a fresh influx of microorganisms with each Grab,” McAllister had said, but only Paolo and Jenna understood the words. If it was now McAllister’s turn . . . They could not do without McAllister.

  “She’s in the farm,” Tommy said. He added, “You didn’t say I couldn’t go there, only that I couldn’t follow you!”

  Pete didn’t care where Tommy went. He put Petra down in the middle of the corridor and ran.

  She was beside the fertilizer machine, puking into a bucket. There shouldn’t have been a bucket there, unless one was being rinsed out in the disinfectant stream. McAllister must have brought a shit bucket with her and rinsed it out, but why? Today Caity was on shit-bucket duty. McAllister straightened and raised the hem of her loose homemade dress to wipe her mouth. She saw Tommy and Pete staring at her.

  Tommy blurted, “Are you going to die? Like Bridget and Xiaobo?”

  “No,” McAllister said. She closed her eyes briefly.

  “Then why are you—”

  “Tommy, go to the children’s room. Now.”

  All the children obeyed McAllister, without bribes or arguments. Tommy went, although he muttered and scowled. Pete said nothing. But when she’d raised her dress he had seen, and she knew it. As the oldest of the Six he’d seen enough bellies curved like that: Bridget’s, Sarah’s, Jessica’s, Hannah’s. But not for a long, long time.

  “Pete—”

  “You’re pregnant.”

  “Yes.”

  “From sex with Ravi.”

  McAllister didn’t answer; no need.

  Pete said the first ugly thing that popped up from his foul-tasting hatred. “It’ll die. Like all the other babies.”

  Something painful passed behind McAllister’s eyes, but she said only, “Maybe not. You Six survived, including my Jenna. Pete, you are going to have to come to grips with this. It’s reality, and not only that, it’s a joyful reality for the good of all. Every additional soul expands our gene pool, gives us one more chance to restart humanity. You know that, and you’re no longer a child. You must accept this. If you can, be happy for all of us as a group.”

  “I can’t.”

  “I think you can. I’ve observed you your whole life, you know, and I’ve always found you strong enough to accept this life we have to live. Strong enough to make positive contributions to it. As you must now.”

  “But I love you!”

  “And I love you. Just as I love all of you. And I’m doing the best I can to ensure a future for all of—” She turned and threw up again into the bucket.

  Pete left her there. He thought of waking Jenna to help her, but Jenna was with the babies and anyway McAllister never needed help. She was that stone in Darlene’s otherwise baffling song “Rock of Ages.” It was Pete who needed help, but nobody was going to give him any, that was for sure.

  He thought of volunteering for the next Grab, which was supposed to be Terrell’s if he wasn’t sick again, and deliberately getting himself killed. Then they’d be sorry! He thought of hitting Ravi over the head with the DIGITAL FOTO FRAME until Ravi was dead and then sending his body outside through the funeral slot before anyone even knew he was missing. They’d never suspect Pete. He thought of taking water and a shit bucket and going to live in his secret room, refusing to talk to anybody, just sneaking out at night to the farm to eat raw soy.

  “Pete!” Caity yelled at him. “You left Petra on the floor in the middle of the corridor! What were you doing?”

  She held Petra, whose screaming had woken everyone. Kids cried or peered through the archway of the children’s room. Terrell looked out from the Grab room, on duty to watch for brightening. Darlene bustled from her room, her bitter mouth turned down, her eyes still puffy from sleep. “You know them babies don’t leave the children’s room, Pete! What the hell were you doing?”

  Tommy darted through the archway and wordlessly held out the DIGITAL FOTO FRAME. “Keep it,” Pete snarled. Why not? Everything was shit, anyway.

  Tommy looked incredulous with joy. Caity stared. Petra yelled. Darlene scolded. Pete’s heart hurt so bad he thought it would burst right there in his chest, like some rotten protein-rich soy nut too spoiled to eat.

  From down the hall Terrell cried, “The Grab is brightening! I’m going, everybody!”

  APRIL 2014

  Julie grunted and screamed on her living room floor. She lay in a pool of her waters. Her insides were trying to burst free of her body. The pain was incredible.

  Jake, kneeling helplessly beside her, said, “I still think we should go to the hospital.”

  Between contractions, she glared at him; almost she spat at him. The hospital! She couldn’t move, couldn’t do anything but push. She gasped, “I’m shitting a pumpkin here!”

  “But at the hospital—”

  She screamed again and he shut up.

  It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. Last night Jake had flown in from Wyoming, arriving a full week before she was supposed to go into labor. He would drive her to the hospital and then wait decorously in the waiting room. Linda would coach Julie in the labor room. The first baby, her OB had assured her, always took a long time to come; Julie might even have false labor pains, similar to Braxton-Hicks contractions but “a little bit more intense,” for several days. The baby nurse would come every day for two weeks after Julie came home from the hospital. It was all meticulously planned.

  Then came these sudden, wrenching pains that woke her in the middle of the night; apparently she was already many more centimeters dilated than she should be because now the pumpkin was moving inexorably through her body, trying to kill her. Julie writhed and screamed, Jacob’s terrified face looming over her. She would die, the baby would die, nobody could do this, nobody—

  A final scream that brought neighbors pounding on the wall and a terrified oath from Jake. Linda, in a coat thrown over leopard-print pajamas, threw open the door and burst into the room. The pumpkin slid out and stopped torturing her, although everything on her still hurt and apparently always would. Julie burst into tears. The neighbor pounded harder. Jake cried, “What do I do now?” And the answering machine burst into life.

  If the phone had been ringing, she hadn’t heard it. But now she heard Gordon’s voice, almost as if the relative cessation of pain had somehow created a pool of silence.

  “Julie, this is Gordon. We’ve had another kidnapping. Three-year-old boy disappeared from his bed in southern Vermont. I remember that was on one of the projections you—”

  Julie wasn’t listening. Her baby had started to cry, and the sound filled the entire world, joyous and alive, leaving no room for anything else at all.

  2035

  Pete tried. McAllister had asked him to, so he did. He tried to be happy about her pregnancy. He tried to remember the good of all. He tried to be happy that Terrell’s first Grab had brought back another child, even though it was a boy and not a girl. He tried to be pleasant to Caity while not having any more sex with her. He succeeded in none of these things, and both efforts and failure turned him very quiet.

  “I like you better like this,” Caity said after sex. “You don’t talk.”

  Pete said nothing, turning his face away from her. They lay not in his secret room but in her bedroom at the other end of the Shell. Caity had taped to the wall another picture, this one torn from the box that had contained a toy. The actual toy, a doll, had been broken by some rambunctious child but the picture remained perfect: long body, tiny waist, big breasts, feet made in a permanent tiptoe. It looked nothing like any real woman Pete had ever seen, neither in the Shell nor on a Grab. Why had the Before people made dolls like that?

  Terrell was disappointed that he hadn’t Grabbed a girl. But McAllister said they should all be grateful that Terrell’s first Grab had been so easy. Terrell had been able to get into the house, pick up the kid, and get out withou
t waking anyone. McAllister named the boy “Keith,” since he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, say his own name. “Never mind,” Caity said. “Maybe McAllister’s baby will be a girl.”

  “She’s too old to be having a baby at all,” Darlene said. “Pure foolishness. Probably we’ll lose them both.”

  Pete stalked away, fists clenched at his side.

  Caity had insisted she could handle another Grab—look how easy Terrell’s was! She went and it did turn out to be easy, a store Grab in a “supermarket.” Caity brought back a huge shopping cart of food and they had interesting feasts until it was gone, although the haul had not included any Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. The oversize shopping cart remained and was useful for hauling shit buckets. The next Grab would be Ravi’s.

  Pete spent a lot of time with Petra and Tommy, Petra because he wanted to, Tommy because he’d attached himself to Pete, pestering him about the promised “big adventure.” Pete was harvesting soy in the farm, picking the thick ripe leaves and hard nuts, when Tommy started in again. Two half-full buckets sat on the floor beside the dirt beds. The farm smelled of rich dirt, growing crops, and the disinfectant waterfall by the fertilizer machine.

  Tommy said, “When are we going on the adventure?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What will it be?”

  “You have to wait and see.”

  “I don’t want to fucking wait.”

  “Don’t let McAllister hear you using that language of Darlene’s.”

  Tommy looked around fearfully as if McAllister might suddenly appear, then changed direction. “Why are those new grasses growing outside the Shell?”

  This was no longer Pete’s secret, just like nothing else was his, not even the DIGITAL FOTO FRAME. He said, “You know that, Tommy. You had it in learning circle. The Earth was sick but it’s getting better.”

  “Why did it get sick?”

  “The Tesslies did it. They destroyed the whole Earth.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they’re bastards.”

  “Oh. Why don’t we kill them dead?”

  “Because nobody but the Survivors has ever seen one, and that was a long time ago.”

  “Are the Tesslies going to come back?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Tommy considered this. “They have to come back, Pete, to let us out of the Shell.”

  “Maybe when it’s time the Shell will just melt around us. You know, like the briar hedge in the fairy-tale book.”

  “Really? When?”

  “McAllister says when the air is good to breathe again.”

  “Oh. When will that be?”

  “I don’t know, Tommy!”

  Tommy said judiciously, “I don’t think you know much.”

  Another voice behind Pete said, “You’re right. He doesn’t.”

  Ravi. Pete willed himself to not turn around. He was trying for the good of all, he was trying, he was trying. But Ravi these days had a cutting edge. McAllister had stopped having sex with him once she got pregnant; Pete knew this from Jenna, who’d been trying to make Pete feel better. At first Ravi swaggered and pretended that he and McAllister still did it. When Pete had smirked at him and rolled his eyes, Ravi had stalked away. After that he’d avoided Pete. Now he had come from the direction of McAllister’s room, and Pete heard the dangerous note in his brother’s voice, and knew that Ravi was as angry and frustrated as he was. And looking for a way to let that anger out.

  Ravi repeated, “Pete doesn’t know anything. He only thinks he does.”

  Tommy said, “Pete knows lots!”

  “Really? I say he doesn’t. Do you, Pete?”

  Pete said nothing. Trying, trying, trying! Tommy, wide-eyed, looked back and forth between them.

  Ravi pushed harder. “Pete doesn’t know, for instance, how McAllister’s breasts feel, do you, Pete?”

  He knew he shouldn’t. He knew a fight was what Ravi wanted, and that in giving it to him, Pete was losing. He even knew, somewhere in the back of his love-sick brain, what McAllister had said: The biggest threat to any society is its own young males between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four. None of it stopped him. In one fluid motion he grabbed the bucket of soy nuts and swung it at Ravi’s head.

  The bigger boy was unprepared. The edge of the bucket caught him in the mouth. Ravi cried out and went down, blood and teeth spurting onto the farm floor. Tommy screamed. Then Darlene was there, running from the other end of the farm, shrieking something about Cain and Abel.

  Pete stared, horrified, at the writhing Ravi. “Is he dead? Is he dead?” Tommy cried, even though Ravi clearly was not. But he was hurt, badly hurt, all that blood, those teeth . . .

  Then Pete was running down the corridor. For once Tommy didn’t follow him. Pete hurled himself into the funeral room and pressed the button high on the wall; he had to jump to reach it. The slot opened, low on the opposite wall. Pete dropped to his knees and then onto his belly and crawled into it. The wall closed up behind him, and he was in darkness.

  JUNE 2014

  Julie walked the floor of her living room with Alicia, now six weeks old. Despite being premature, Alicia had weighed a healthy six pounds at birth and just kept putting on weight, emptying Julie of milk as if she’d had a suction pump in her tiny pink mouth. Then, because she drank so fast, she got a tummy-ache and Julie had to walk her, steadily patting the baby’s back, singing songs until Alicia burped, farted, threw up, or fell asleep. Tonight none of these things had yet happened. Julie paced up and down, caught as always in the rich stew of love, exasperation, fatigue, and joy that was motherhood. Behind her, CNN murmured softly. Sometimes the sound of the TV lulled Alicia into sleep. But not tonight.

  Love, exasperation, fatigue, joy—but mostly love. Julie had never expected to feel such fierce, passionate, possessive attachment for anyone as she did for this damp, malodorous bundle on her shoulder. She’d always thought of herself as a cool person (in emotional temperature, not in hipness—she’d never been hip in her life). Certainly Gordon, nor any other man, had never ignited in her this intense love. Did he feel this way about his children? Did Linda about hers? Why hadn’t anyone warned her?

  “. . . continues in the clean-up efforts in Tokyo. Officials say it may be months before there is anywhere near a complete list of the dead. With damage reckoned in the billions and—” And there was the video again, shot from a tourist helicopter over Tokyo when the tsunami hit. The tsunami had registered 4.2 on the Soloviev-Imamura Intensity Scale, almost as large as the 2004 one in Indonesia. A wall of water ninety-four feet high had crashed over Tokyo.

  “. . . not unexpected in that the Pacific Rim is well known for underwater faults that—”

  Julie jiggled at the remote, trapped between Alicia’s diaper and Julie’s forearm. She got a rerun of M*A*S*H, then PBS: “—over 9,000 species going extinct each year, largely because of human activity. The rainforest is particularly susceptible as—” Another fumble at the remote, which fell to the floor. Unthinking, Julie bent to retrieve it. The sudden motion knocked a huge burp out of Alicia. She jerked in Julie’s arms, let out a contented sigh, and went to sleep.

  Don’t think about the children drowned in Tokyo. There was nothing Julie could do about it. But standing there in the dim living room, she clutched her infant tight.

  2035

  As soon as the funeral slot closed up behind him, Pete wanted to get out again. In the complete darkness he pounded on the wall, all the walls. Nothing happened.

  I always knew I would die this way, he thought, and immediately thought how stupid that was; he’d never had any such thought. He’d thought he would die on a Grab for the good of all, or from some sickness, or just old age. Or that he’d fight a Tesslie to both their deaths. But this—why didn’t somebody else push the funeral button to let him out? Somebody would! Tommy would get someone tall enough, McAllister or Eduardo or Ravi . . . but Ravi lay bleeding on the farm floor with his teeth knocked out. Still, somebody
must come soon . . .

  The air went out of the dark room.

  Pete heard it, in a whoosh, and then he couldn’t breathe. Pain invaded his chest. So he would die here, he would—

  Air rushed back in, and light, and Pete was shot forward by a force he couldn’t see. It felt like someone had pushed him hard from behind. He landed beside Xiaobo, half-glimpsed through the rotting blanket, and a pile of bones.

  Pete screamed and skittered away. Xiaobo was barely recognizable, a stinking mass of rotting flesh crawled over by disgusting white things. If it hadn’t been for the little statue of the naked fat-bellied man on top of the mass, Pete wouldn’t have known it was a human. But that was Xiaobo. Pete started to cry, then abruptly stopped.

  He was Outside, but something was wrong with the air.

  He could breathe it; this wasn’t like the airless funeral slot. But the air was . . . dirty. He didn’t know what he meant except that it was somehow not clean and fresh like the air in the Shell, but clogged with stuff he could smell and taste even if he couldn’t see it. Still, it was air and he was breathing it and he was Outside.

  Outside.

  Partly to get away from Xiaobo and the other bones—which were Bridget’s? Robert’s? His father’s?—Pete moved along the sides of the Shell. A plan formed in his dazed mind. He would find the clear patch of wall at the end of the Shell and he would wait there until Tommy or somebody went there and saw him. Then Pete would gesture to be let back in. McAllister could open the funeral slot and Pete could crawl past Xiaobo—ugh—back inside the Shell.

  Unless—

  He rounded the far edge of the Shell and forgot his plan.

  The Shell sat on a hill of black rock. The black rock, broken with various grasses, sloped gently and unevenly a long way down, but then it gave way to . . . what? “Fields,” McAllister had called them about his pictures in the DIGITAL FOTO FRAME. Not fields of amber grain like in Darlene’s song, but of low, spindly bushes covered with green leaves. So many bushes that Pete felt dizzy. And none of them were soy! Beyond that were stretches of very tall grasses dotted with clumps of pink flowers and beyond those, more water than he had ever imagined still existed. It was blue water like on the beach where he had Grabbed Petra and Kara, water like Before!