After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall: A Novel

by Nancy Kress

  “I was all ready,” he later told everyone, although Pete had his doubts about that—why even bother to repeat it over and over unless it wasn’t true? And Ravi had a history of falling asleep during Grab-room duty. But whether he had leaped onto the platform at first brightening, or had just barely caught the Grab before it went away, it was irrefutable that Ravi had gone. He had gone close-mouthed both because of McAllister’s scolding and because he was embarrassed by the lack of the teeth that Pete had knocked out, but he returned smiling wide. His shout had reached both the children’s room and the farm. Pete, on crop duty with Darlene, had run toward the Grab room, along with everyone else.

  Ravi stood on the platform behind the biggest pile of stuff that Pete had ever seen. It almost hid Ravi; it spilled off the edges of the platform; it clanked and clattered as it fell. Pete couldn’t even identify half of it. How could even Ravi, the strongest of them all, load all this in ten minutes? And onto what?

  McAllister, running clumsily behind the bulk of her pregnancy, stopped in the doorway. She went still and white.

  “Look what I got!” Ravi shouted. “Look!”

  “What is it all?” Caity said. She held a child in each arm. “How did you bring it all?”

  “The Grab stayed open for more than ten minutes—for twenty-two minutes! It was a store Grab and I got this big rolling thing—see, it’s under all this—and just piled things on. There only was this kind of stuff, so that’s what I took. But look how much of it!” Ravi practically swelled with pride. Bloated, Pete thought. Like when someone was diseased in their belly.

  Why couldn’t Pete have been the one to bring back the big haul? Whatever it was.

  McAllister finally spoke. “Twenty-two minutes?”

  “I timed it,” Ravi said proudly.

  Caity repeated, “What is it all? What’s that thing with the skinny metal spikes coming out of it?”

  “A rake,” McAllister said. Then it seemed that once she started talking, she couldn’t stop. “A rake, several hoes, bags of seed and fertilizer, trowels, flower seeds, hoses, flower pots, wind chimes—wind chimes!”

  Pete had never seen McAllister like this—wild-eyed, hysterical—not even when he and Ravi had gotten trapped in the funeral slot. Fear pricked him. But the next moment she had recovered herself.

  “You were in a garden store, Ravi. And you did well. Let’s get this stuff off the rolling cart so we can get the cart down off the platform. Caity, take Karim and Tina back to the children’s room, and on your way get Darlene to help Jenna with the children. She’ll have to do it because we need you here. Tommy, go wake up Eduardo. Terrell, you and Ravi and Pete start moving this stuff. We need that platform clear right away.”

  “Why?” Pete said.

  “I don’t know yet. Let’s just do it.”

  Caity ran down the corridor with the kids. Pete leaped forward to help unload the platform. If McAllister was ordering Darlene to help with the children, then something important was going on.

  They got all the stuff off the platform, including the long, heavy rolling cart. Immediately Terrell jumped on it and Ravi pushed him out the room and down the corridor. Terrell laughed delightedly. “I want a ride, too!” Caity cried, running after the cart.

  The platform glowed.

  Pete gaped at it. It never brightened again so soon after a Grab—never!

  McAllister said, in a voice somehow not her own, “Go.” She handed Pete the wrister that Ravi had turned over to her.

  Pete hopped onto the platform, the laughter from the corridor still ringing in his ears.

  JUNE 2014

  Julie continued to read the papers obsessively: "STARVATION REACHES CRITICAL POINT IN SOMALIA." "OVERPOPULATION BIGGEST THREAT TO PLANET." But nothing more was mentioned about the mutated bacteria, not anywhere in the world. Nor could she find anything on-line. If the story about K. planticola was being repressed, several countries must be cooperating in doing that, by every means available. The completeness of the suppression was almost as scary as the microbial mutation.

  Almost.

  Several times she picked up the phone to call Fanshaw’s office. Each time she laid it down again. If there was a cover-up going on, if there really were scientists and covert organizations and high officials in several countries working to keep this from the public, then Julie did not want to call any attention to herself. Fanshaw had probably, given his narcissism, erased any trace of help from anybody else in crafting the article he never got to publish. He would, of course, have preserved her nondisclosure agreement, and Julie could only hope he had it in a safe, secret place. But he had also written her a check “For professional services,” and she had cashed it.

  She Googled him. Until two weeks ago he had been all over the Net. Then his posts on Facebook ceased, as did his blog.

  “You seem preoccupied,” Linda said. They sat under an awning in her back yard, drinking cold lemonade and watching Linda’s three kids splash in the pool. Alicia lay asleep in her infant seat. The beach-cottage-in-August scheme had been dropped; Linda and Ted were taking the children to visit their grandmother in Winnipeg, where it was twenty-five degrees cooler.

  “I’m sorry,” Julie said.

  “Everything all right? The consulting?”

  “Going better than I’d dared hope. And I’m making a lot more money than I was teaching.”

  “Well, I can see that Alicia’s all right. So…Ju, is it Gordon? I know he called the night Alicia was born. You were on the floor with Jake, I burst in, and Gordon’s voice was coming from your answering machine.”

  Linda had never mentioned this before. It had been two days before Julie even listened to Gordon’s message: “We’ve had another kidnapping. A three-year-old boy taken from his bed in southern Vermont.”

  She said to Linda, “He called about the work project. You know I can’t discuss it with you.”

  “I know. Spook stuff. But that wasn’t all he said. At the end his voice changed completely when he said, ‘Are you all right?’ Have you seen him since? Do you miss him? Is that why you seem so…not here?”

  Julie put her hand, cold from the lemonade glass, over her friend’s. “No, I haven’t seen him. And no, I don’t miss him. Sometimes I feel guilty about that, like it proves I’m a shallow person.”

  Linda grinned. “You’re not that. Still waters, brackish but deep.”

  “Thanks. I think.” And then, before she knew she was going to say it, “Linda, did you ever read James Lovelock?”

  “No. Who’s he?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Do you believe…do you think there are things about the universe that we can’t explain? Things that lie so far beyond science they’re something else entirely?”

  “I lapsed from Catholicism when I was fourteen,” Linda said, “and never saw any reason to unlapse. Ju, have you suddenly got religion?”

  “No, no, nothing like that. It’s not anything, really. Just the heat.”

  “Yeah, I can’t wait until we leave for—Colin! If you do that one more time you’re getting out of the pool, do you hear me?”

  Alicia woke. Colin did that one more time. Normal life, routine and mundane as precious as the propagation of plants.

  JULY 2014

  It wasn't dark, and it wasn’t light. It wasn’t anything except cold. I’m dead, Pete thought, but of course he wasn’t. Then he was through and the ocean lay to his right, just as it had all those months ago when he’d Grabbed Petra and Kara. But this beach was smaller than the other, a strip of stony ground jammed between sea and a sort of little cliff. Big rocks jutting out of the water as well as the land. Also, the air was warmer and lighter. In fact, for the first time ever, the Grab seemed to be happening in full daylight. The sun shone brightly halfway above the horizon—so brightly that Pete blinked at it, momentarily patterning his vision with weird dots.

  When they cleared, he saw the little house on the top of the cliff above him. There seemed to be no path up. Cursing, Pete cli
mbed, hands and feet seeking holds in the rock, some of which crumbled under his grip. Once he nearly fell. But he made it to the top and stood, his back against the house, to look at his wrister.

  Five minutes gone.

  The sea below him lay smooth as the mirror Caity had Grabbed long ago. Sunlight reflected off it, enveloping everything in a silver-blue glow. Pete wasted precious seconds staring at the beauty; it made good fuel for his hatred. When he and Ravi eventually found Tesslies…

  No time now for revenge pictures.

  The house had long since lost all its paint to the salt winds. A window, small and too high for Pete to peer into, stood open, but he heard no sounds coming from within. Cautiously he rounded the corner of the house.

  It stood on a point jutting above the ocean, and now he had a new angle on the path down to the beach below. Two figures walked there, away from the house, holding hands. They stopped briefly to kiss, then moved on. Pete moved to the front door of the cottage.

  It stood open. The screen door, with a metal screen so old and soft that it felt like cloth under his hands, was unlocked. Pete slipped into a tiny hallway, cool after the bright sun outside. He could see clear through to the back of the house, which was all glass with yet another view of the sea. All the rooms were small, to fit the house on the narrow point. To his left was a kitchen, to the right a steep staircase. Pete climbed it.

  Two little bedrooms, both with slanted walls and windows set into alcoves. One room held a double bed and a long, low dresser. Crowded into the other were a crib and a single bed, both occupied.

  She was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen, more beautiful even than McAllister. Pete gaped at her long red hair—he hadn’t known hair could be that color!—her smooth golden skin, her sweetly curved body and long legs. She wore a thin white top and panties, and nearly everything was on display. Something about her attitude suggested that she had only recently flung herself onto the bed and had fallen instantly asleep. It was a few moments before he could even look into the crib.

  When he did, he found a miniature of the girl. Not plump and smooth like Petra, this child looked delicate, graceful, like the fairies in The Illustrated Book of Fairy Tales. When Pete lifted her, he scarcely felt her weight, not even on his weak arm. Neither the baby nor her gorgeous sister woke.

  Could he bring the older girl back, too? Pete gazed down at her. The rules of the Grab were strict, except that no one knew what they were. Everyone above a certain age died going through the Grab—but what age? Robert had died going through, at thirty-nine, Seth at forty-two. Petra’s father had died, at who knew what age. Pete could still go through at fifteen. Where between fifteen and thirty-nine was the death age? How old was this girl?

  Pete couldn’t risk it. A lingering look at the redhead and he crept downstairs with the baby.

  Twelve minutes had passed. If he had the same twenty-two minutes as Ravi, then he had to wait ten more minutes. But maybe he didn’t have ten more—who knew what the Tesslies would do? Other than watch humans squirm and struggle to survive. When he and Ravi caught one—not if, when—they would—

  Chime chime chime…

  The doorbell! Pete looked frantically around for somewhere to hide. But it wasn’t the doorbell, it was a clock sitting on a table made of tree branches painted white. Chime chime chime…

  The girl upstairs screamed.

  Pete looked frantically around. Nothing to hide behind, or under… He sprinted for the hall. Before he could reach the front door, the girl came tearing down the stairs. Pete ran into the kitchen. A door stood open and he darted inside, closing it behind him. The girl went on screaming, an incoherent mix of words; if she was calling the baby’s name, Pete couldn’t decipher it.

  Through all of this, the baby hadn’t awakened. Pete couldn’t see his wrister in the darkness of the pantry. But he could smell food all around him. Cautiously he shifted the baby to his shoulder and felt around with his free hand. When it closed on a package of something, he clasped it to the baby and felt for another.

  Now the door slammed; the girl had gone outside. A moment later she was back, tearing upstairs and then down again, still screaming but this time as if talking to someone. “My sister my baby sister Susie she’s gone! I was asleep—I can’t calm down don’t you understand you moron Susie is gone! Taken! I was—they’re walking the beach and—1437 Beachside Way and—yes I’m sure some fucking bastard took her!”

  Pete heard McAllister’s voice in his head, “Not that language, Pete. I know Darlene uses it but it’s not a good example for the kids.” Fucking bastard. The beautiful, beautiful girl was talking about Pete with the same words Pete talked about Tesslies.

  For the first time, he thought about the people left behind when he took their children. How they must feel.

  Why hadn’t he ever thought about that before? Why hadn’t McAllister made him think about it? Did Caity or Ravi or Jenna or Terrell? Maybe Jenna did. But Pete had only thought about getting back home safely with the Grabbed kids, about how important it was to restart humanity.

  Well, it was! And that was how McAllister always said it. Restarting humanity and saving the Grab children from the Tesslie destruction of the Earth. It was a heroic thing to do, and Pete was a hero for doing it.

  The girl on the other side of the pantry door threw something hard against the kitchen wall and again slammed the screen door, screaming, “Mom! Dad! Where the fuck are you!”

  Still the baby slept. Pete felt around again on the pantry shelves. He found another package of something, then yet another. Then the Grab caught him, and he was back on the platform with the slumbering baby, two packages of penne pasta, and a loaf of whole wheat bread with rosemary and dill.

  “Oh!” Tommy cried. “A baby!”

  Everyone clustered around the platform to greet him and take the infant, and even Caity smiled at him. Even Darlene. Pete smiled back. Jauntily he jumped down and handed the baby to McAllister.

  Behind him, the Grab platform brightened again.

  JULY 2014

  Just past midnight Julie, seated in front of her computer, put her hands to her face and pulled at the skin hard, trying to fully wake herself up. Today—no, yesterday—was her thirty-ninth birthday. Jake had called from Wyoming. Linda, in the midst of packing her family for Winnipeg, had dashed over with a chocolate cake with a mini-forest of candles. It had been a good day and Julie should have been in bed reliving it in dreams, but instead she’d sat at her computer for four and a half hours, flipping between news sites and screens full of data.

  She almost had it, the right algorithm.

  She could smell it, tantalizing as apples in October. But this was not autumn and this particular apple evoked Snow White’s Wicked Witch, Alan Turing’s cyanide-laced fruit, the serpent in the Garden of Eden.

  God, she was beyond tired, or her thoughts wouldn’t turn so metaphorical. It wasn’t as if there weren’t enough to fear without figurative exaggeration.

  Three more data points. One she felt certain about: the kidnapping in Vermont on the night Alicia was born. A three-year-old boy had vanished from his bedroom while his parents were out at a party. Local cops had his babysitter, a Dominican woman who barely spoke English, in custody. She swore she had been asleep on the living room sofa when the abduction occurred; undoubtedly they assumed she was lying. Julie knew she was not.

  The other two data points were more uncertain. A break-in in a garden shop in Massachusetts, no forced entry, the cash box untouched. The usual bizarre collection of goods had been taken: rakes, seeds, wind chimes. And yesterday’s incident, the kidnapping of a Maine infant who was supposedly being watched by her teenage sister while the parents strolled on the beach. No trace of the baby girl had been found, but the whole thing so closely resembled a set-up that even the local cops were suspicious, regarding the sister as either a suspect or a scapegoat; Julie couldn’t tell which. Could be a significant, could not. The location fit with her current algorithm, but no
t so closely if she didn’t include it as a data point to create the algorithm in the first place, which was the kind of thinking that drove mathematicians crazy. And when had she started thinking of a lost child as a “data point”?

  She had to go to bed. Just one more scan of breaking news. And there it was:

  SCIENTIST ARRESTED FOR SECURITY BREACH

  Dr. Geoffrey Fanshaw, Biologist,

  Believed Connected to

  Unspecified Terrorist Activity

  The article said nothing much. It didn’t have to. Julie, all exhaustion banished, ran into her bedroom and started packing.

  2035

  Two Grabs right in a row, then nothing for a few days, then another Grab for Caity.

  They’re playing fucking games, ain’t they,” Darlene said. “With our lives!”

  “Not yours,” Caity answered spitefully. “You never have to go.” She was disappointed with the results of her Grab. She’d found herself in a strange, small store for twenty-two minutes and had not known what to do. There were no shopping carts, and anyway she was afraid of this store. She hadn’t said that, not even later, but then Caity didn’t ever admit fear. Still, Pete knew that’s what she’d felt. She hadn’t wanted to touch anything, but neither did she want to come back empty-handed and anyway, she said later and in a strong temper, “Who knew what the fuck McAllister was going to want?” So she yanked some zippered carrying-bags off a shelf and made herself stuff things into them.

  “Gerbils?” Eduardo said, astonished. He and Tommy happened to walk by the Grab room just as Caity returned.