Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  As he pushed a shopping cart forward, something miraculous came into view: an entire wall of DIGITAL FOTO FRAMES. But these were enormous, and the pictures on them moved. In each DIGITAL FOTO FRAME a beautiful girl, more beautiful even than Susie’s red-haired older sister, ran along a white beach and into blue sparkling water. The girl wore almost no clothes, just strips of bright cloth around her hips and breasts. The breasts bounced. Mouth open, Pete stared at the incredible sight. Could he maybe unfasten one from the wall and—

  He heard a clatter behind him and he turned.

  JULY 2014

  Something was wrong. Suddenly cars jammed the exits to Route 1, as if everyone was trying to leave the highway at once. Julie would have guessed a massive accident blocking traffic, except that the cars were leaving the freeway in both directions. Could a wreck ahead be sprawled across all six lanes? Or maybe a fire? She didn’t see smoke in the hot blue sky. She turned on the radio.

  “—as high as 150 feet when it reaches the coast of the United States! Citizens are urged not to panic. Turn your radio to the National Emergency Alert System and follow orderly evacuation procedures. The tsunami will not hit for another four hours. Repeat, the Canary Islands tsunami will not hit the eastern seaboard of the United States for another four hours. Turn to the National Emergency Alert System—”

  Tsunami. Waves 150 feet high hitting the coast of the United States.

  For a moment Julie’s vision blurred. The car wavered slightly, but only slightly. She recovered herself—Alicia was with her. She had to save Alicia. Drive inland—

  She couldn’t get off the highway. Traffic had slowed to a crawl, fighting for the exit ramps. An SUV left the highway and drove fast and hard into the fence separating the wide shoulder from a row of suburban houses. The fence broke. A blue Ford followed the SUV.

  She knew about the “Canary Islands tsunami”—it had been the subject of a melodramatic TV show. Jake had discussed with her just why the program was wrong. “It couldn’t happen that way, Sis. The fault isn’t big enough, it was exaggerated for the computer model. And the model was based on algorithms—you’ll appreciate this—used for undersea linear quakes, not single-point events. It’s pure and inaccurate sensationalism. You would need a major seabed reconfiguration to get that megatsunami. Or an atomic bomb set off underwater.”

  Hands shaking on the wheel, Julie pulled her car off the highway and followed the blue Ford toward the fence. She had to drive down a slight incline and through a watery ditch, but her wheels didn’t get stuck in the mud and the ground past the ditch was firm and hard, although covered with weeds. Her door handles and fenders tore off the tallest of these. Festooned with Queen Anne’s lace, the car drove through the fence hole and across somebody’s back yard. It was an old-fashioned 1950s house with a separate garage. Julie followed the two cars around the garage, down the driveway, and onto a road.

  Everybody here was driving west, away from the ocean. But Julie had had time to think. Inland was not the answer. Not to the whole picture.

  Her hands shook on the wheel as, guided by the compass on her dash display, she turned east. For several blocks she had to fight cars dashing out of driveways, the people glimpsed through windshields looking frantic and shocked. Cars jumped lanes, blocking her way. A woman stuck her head out of the window and screamed at Julie, “Hey! You’re going the wrong way!”

  By the edge of town, however, she had the road nearly to herself. No one else was heading toward the sea.

  How far inland would the evacuees have to go to escape the tsunami? Jake had once told her that 8,000 years ago in the Norwegian sea, an ancient rockslide had left sediment fifty miles into Scotland.

  With one hand she fiddled with the radio, searching for more information. A Canadian station broke off its broadcast to say something about the Yellowstone Caldera, then abruptly went off the air.

  In her car seat, Alicia slept fitfully.

  In Washington, in Brasilia, in Delhi, in London, in Pyongyang, in Moscow, in Beijing, the Canary Islands earthslide was perceived as unnatural. Too large, too sudden, in the wrong place, not the result of natural plate tectonics. Every single country had received the data on the quake and resulting tsunami. Every single country had a classified file describing the feasibility and techniques for using nuclear blasts at Cumbre Vieja as a weapon. Every single country came to the same conclusion.

  In Washington the president, his family, and senior staff were airlifted to an undisclosed location. From the chopper he could see the Beltway with its murderous fight to get out of D.C. Most would not make it. He could see the dome of Capitol Hill, the Washington Monument, the Smithsonian with its treasures, the gleaming terraces of the Kennedy Center and mellow rosy brick of Georgetown. All would be gone in a few more hours.

  “I need more information,” he said to his chief of staff.

  “Sir, retaliation scenarios are in place for—”

  “I need more information.”

  A woman stood in the doorway of the store, carrying a sort of padded bucket with a handle, curved to hold a baby. The baby was asleep. The woman and Pete stared at each other. She spoke first.

  “You’re the one who has been stealing children, aren’t you?”

  “Not stealing,” Pete said. “Rescuing.”

  “From the tsunami.”

  It was the second time Pete had heard that word today. He scowled to cover his confusion. “No. From the Tesslies.”

  “What are Tesslies?” She moved closer, just one step. It was as if she were pulled closer, jerked on some string Pete couldn’t see, like the puppets Bridget had made for the Six when they were kids. The woman looked about McAllister’s age, although not so pretty. Her hair matted to her scalp and her clothing was wet over her breasts, which made Pete look away. He started throwing bundles of towels into a shopping cart.

  “You’re taking things from this store, the way you did from the others. A sporting-goods store in Maine. A pet store in New Hampshire. A garden shop in Connecticut. A supermarket in Vermont. Ambler’s Family Department Store in Connecticut . . .”

  She recited the whole list of store Grabs, his and Caity’s and Ravi’s and Terrell’s and Paolo’s and even way back to Jenna’s famous Wal-Mart Grab. Pete stopped hurling towels into the cart and stared at her, astonished. “How do you know all that? Who told you?”

  “Nobody told me, or at least not all of it. A law enforcement joint task force that . . . No, it would take too long to explain. You aren’t here for long, are you? How much longer?”

  Automatically Pete glanced at the wrister. “Sixteen more minutes.”

  “I’ve been waiting outside for you.”

  More astonishment. “You have? Why? Don’t try to stop me!”

  “I won’t stop you. At first I came to video you, to get photographic proof that . . . It doesn’t matter. That’s not why I’m here now. Listen to me, please—what’s your name?”

  “Pete.” He yanked at another shopping cart and started emptying a table of clothing into it. So much clothing! And most of it big enough for Ravi and the Survivors. Eduardo’s pants had a hole in them.

  “My name is Julie. Listen to me, Pete. The tsunami will be here within the hour. It will smash everything on the eastern coast of the United States. Almost no one will survive—”

  “McAllister will. She told me.” Pants, tops, jackets, more pants but softer. “All the Survivors will live.”

  “Yes? Where will they go?”

  “The Tesslies will take them to the Shell.”

  “That’s where you live, the Shell? Where is it?”

  “After.” A third shopping cart. If he could tie them together, they would all come back with him—a lot more than Ravi had Grabbed! Better stuff, too. He yanked free a towel to lash the carts together.

  “But the Shell is a safe place, isn’t it? Is it some sort of space ship or underground colony? Are you from the future? It—oh my God!”

  At her voice, Pete jumped
. She stared at the wall behind him. He whirled around to look, knife at the ready. If it was a Tesslie—

  JULY 2014

  The front wave of the megatsunami loomed 300 feet high when it crashed into northwest Africa. When it reached the low-lying south coast of England, the trough of the wave hit first. The sea retreated in a long, eerie drawback before rushing back to land. It breached England’s sea defenses, roaring a mile inland, destroying everything it touched.

  The main body of the wave train sped over the Atlantic at hundreds of miles per hour. When eventually it reached Brazil, the Caribbean, Florida, and the eastern coast of the United States, it would crest to a maximum of 120 feet.

  Long before that, the missiles had been launched. Retaliation for the act of terrorism aimed at smashing the way of life of the Western world. The counter-response was not far behind.

  The far wall of huge DIGITAL FOTO FRAME had stopped showing the moving pictures of the beautiful girl running on the beach. Instead, they all showed fire spurting into the sky. At the same moment the ground shook beneath Pete’s feet and he nearly fell. The woman staggered sideways against a table of rugs, righted herself, stared again at the row of DIGITAL FOTO FRAME, which were screaming loud enough now to wake the baby. Something about a yellow stone.

  Julie said, in a voice Pete recognized: “There goes the West. To match the East.” The words made no sense, but the voice was the one Bridget had used when her last baby miscarried. Quiet, toneless, dead.

  Pete stared at this baby, now awake in its padded bucket and peering curiously around. Was it a girl? How hard would Julie fight for it?

  She said, “Take us with you.”

  He gaped at her. She didn’t give him a chance to speak.

  “You can, I know you can. You’ve taken twelve children, starting—”

  “Thirteen,” he corrected, without thinking.

  “—with Tommy Candless over a year ago, and you can take us. Don’t you understand, Pete? Everything here is dying, the Earth itself is dying! Tsunamis, earthquakes, a mutated bacteria that is killing every plant above tide level. Governments will collapse, and as they collapse they’ll fight back, there will be nuclear retaliation with radiation that will—”

  “Radiation, yes.” She had used a word he knew. “It damages babies. It damaged me. But it’s mostly gone now.”

  “Is it? Then take—”

  “Everything you said, the destroying of the whole Earth—the Tesslies did that. But McAllister is leading us to restart humanity. And Ravi and I will kill the fucking alien Tesslies!”

  “The—”

  Suddenly all the DIGIAL FOTO FRAMES went black at once. The silence somehow felt loud. Into it Julie said, “No aliens wrecked the Earth. We did. Humans.”

  “That’s a lie!”

  “No, Pete, it’s not. We poisoned the Earth and raped her and denuded her. We ruined the oceans and air and forests, and now she is fighting back.”

  “The Tesslies destroyed the world!”

  “I don’t think so. Tell me this: Are there any plants where you live? Growing wild outside the Shell, I mean?”

  “There are now. Grasses and bushes and red flowers.”

  Julie closed her eyes, and her lips moved soundlessly. When she opened her eyes again, they were wet. “Thank God. Or Gaia. The microbial mutation reversed.”

  “What?”

  “Take us with you, Pete. I can help your McAllister start over. I’m strong and a good worker and I know a lot of different things. I can be really useful to . . . to the Shell.”

  She took a step forward and looked at him with such beseeching eyes that all at once Pete saw her. She was a real person, as real as McAllister or Petra or Ravi, a person who was going to die in McAllister’s tsunami. The first person in Before who had ever been real to him.

  “Take us with you!”

  He choked out, “I can’t!”

  “Yes, you can! You’ve done it twelve times already!”

  “Only kids,” Pete said. “If adults go through a Grab, they die.” Robert, Seth, the thing that had come back with him and Kara and Petra. The thing that had been their father. “The Tesslies made the Grab that way. They didn’t want the Survivors to just get everybody on the platform and lead them all back to Before.”

  Julie went so still and so sick-looking that for a crazy moment Pete thought she had turned into the “yellow stone” the wall had been screaming about. Robert, Seth, the thing that had been Petra’s father . . . He started to babble. “But I can take that baby, yes I can, kids can go through a Grab so I can take the baby! Give it to me!”

  Julie didn’t move.

  “Give me the baby! I’ve only got—” a quick glance at his wrister “—another two and a half minutes!”

  The number brought her alive. She shoved the baby bucket into his arms. “Her name is Alicia. Tell her—oh, tell her about me!”

  “Okay.” He couldn’t do that; it was important that the Grab kids belong to the Shell, not to Before. McAllister insisted on it. But he didn’t have to tell Julie that.

  She began to cry. Pete hated it when people cried. But she had a good reason, and anyway there were only three or four sobs before she got hold of herself and began to talk. “Listen, Pete, it was us, not any aliens. Have you ever heard of Gaia?”

  “No.”

  “Is your McAllister an educated man?”

  “She knows everything.”

  “Then tell her this: We did it. We wrecked the Earth, and now the Earth is fighting back. The planet is full of self-regulating mechanisms—remember those exact words!—to keep life intact. We’ve violated them, and Gaia—remember that word!—is cleansing herself of us. It’s not mysticism, it’s Darwinian self-preservation. Maybe Gaia will start over. Maybe you in the Shell are part of that! But tell McAllister that, tell everyone! Say it!”

  She was hysterical, the way Petra’s mother had got hysterical when Pete Grabbed Petra. But she was also real. So Pete repeated the words after her, and then repeated them again, all the while hurling more things into shopping carts. “Gaia. Darwinian self-preservation.” Blankets, socks, a tableful of flimsy books. “Self-regulating planetary mechanisms.” Three folding chairs, all he had room for. “Identical deadly plant mutations in widely separated places. Gaia.” Now he’d reached the start of the food section. Loaves of bread! Boxes of something else!

  The ground shook again. The baby started to whimper. Pete tied the huge shopping carts together with towels. He clutched one of the handles in one hand, the baby bucket in the other. Fifteen seconds.

  “Bye, Julie. I’m sorry about the tsunami.”

  “Alicia!” Julie cried. Then, stopping herself in mid-lunge: “It was us.”

  “It was the Tesslies.”

  “No, no—don’t you see? We humans always blame the wrong ones! The—”

  Pete never heard the rest. He was Grabbed.

  2035

  “I’m back!” Pete cried from the platform. “Look! Look!” No one was in the Grab room.

  That made no sense. McAllister had seen him go. She knew he would be back in twenty-two minutes, and his wrister said that he was. She, at least, should be waiting here. Disappointment lurched through him—he had a baby girl to show her! And all this great stuff! And all those words to tell her that Julie had said . . . If he could remember them.

  He found he remembered them perfectly.

  Pete’s belly churned. The excitement of the Grab, the disappointment at no one seeing his triumphant return, his deep disturbance at Julie’s statements, going deeper every moment. Where was McAllister? Where was everybody?

  “Hello?” he said, but not loud. No answer.

  He hopped off the platform, leaving his Grabbed prizes, still carrying Alicia in her baby-bucket. Cautiously he peered into the corridor.

  No one. But through the wide arched entrance to the farm, he glimpsed a movement behind the wide white bulk of the fertilizer machine. A second later Ravi appeared, gestured wildly f
or Pete to come, then ducked again out of sight. Was it a game of some sort?

  He knew it wasn’t. He set the baby-bucket down in the middle of the corridor and sprinted toward Ravi.

  “We don’t have much time,” Ravi gasped. “They’ll find out it’s missing. My knife doesn’t work at all on its bucket-case. But you have the laser on your wrister. Quick, kill it!”

  Lying on the ground at Ravi’s feet was a Tesslie.

  JULY 2014

  Julie walked calmly to a deep faux-leather chair in the Costco furniture display. Calmly she sat down. The calm, she knew with the part of her brain that was still rational, would not last. It was shock. Also several other things, including a preternaturally heightened ability to simultaneously comprehend everything around her, instead of in the linear shards that the human mind was usually stuck with.

  Alicia was gone.

  The megatsunami was on its way.

  Washington D.C., including her life there, would soon no longer exist.

  Her country would not allow that to go by without a military reaction.

  Pete had left behind a pile of objects that must have slid off one of his shopping carts before he . . . left.

  Jake was dead in whatever was happening at the Yellowstone Caldera.

  The TVs on the wall had stopped broadcasting.

  The Tokyo earthquake and tsunami had been a rehearsal for what would come, once the biologists had detected and contained the plant mutations. Or, alternatively, once Gaia had changed its tactics.

  The chair she sat in was on sale for $179.99.

  Linda and her family were in Winnipeg, far from the coast. Would that save them? For how long? Gordon and his kids, all the people Julie knew at Georgetown and in D.C.—all gone, or soon to be gone. And then incongruously: The motel clerk’s niece will never be crowned Miss Cochranton Azalea.

  Julie drew the snub-nosed .38 from her pocket. She would not wait for the tsunami. This was better. And Alicia—her baby, her treasure, the miracle she had given up hoping to have—was safe. Safe someplace that might, with any luck, become the future.