The Apex Book of World SF

by Mahvesh Murad

  Without a word, we started to walk north, away from the Centro.

  In the sky, the meteorite had grown. Now it seemed bigger than the sun.

  We decided to skate. We tried not to do it very often, to save the wheels, but we lost our bike, and it didn’t seem like we’d find anything similar. It made sense to skate.

  Silence was almost deafening. We skated for a long time without talking. Only sound we heard seemed to be that of our boards. As we skated, the ruined buildings and heaps of rubble seemed to repeat, over and over, like the background in an old Scooby-Doo cartoon.

  After a long time we reached the woods of Chapultepec Park, or what was left of them—just a few hollow logs. We passed by one of the few statues still standing. It was covered with graffiti.

  “Wait a minute,” said Wok. We stopped.

  “A national hero,” I said.

  “Not this one. He was a presidential candidate, but he got shot.”

  “Isn’t that good enough?”

  “Guess so. No better president than a dead one. He was the best of this country.”

  We laughed. Wok took his last can of spray paint out of his backpack. He shook it up and wrote on the pedestal THIS COULD BE HEAVEN OR THIS COULD BE HELL.

  “Why that?” I asked.

  “Just felt like it,” he replied.

  We kept walking.

  “Funny thing,” I said after a while.

  “What?”

  “The future always seems better when it doesn’t happen. Like that guy, who got a statue for something he never got to be.”

  “Any future is better than ours. And yes, it will happen.”

  He meant the meteorite.

  “Of course not. Wouldn’t you rather grow up, go bald, and turn into an old fart telling the kids the music of your time was better?”

  “I’d never do that!”

  “Sure you would. Everyone does. Take my parents, for instance. They were punk rockers. Look at how they ended up: desperate, joining Vicente Vargas’s quest for the promised land of Aztlán. Vargas wasn’t even a rocker, he sang ranchero”

  Wok said nothing.

  “Don’t just live through your own destruction. Enjoy it!” I turned back to continue skating. Wok stayed there for a minute, thinking. Then he caught up with me.

  “Bitch. You’re always right.”

  Life’s not as cruel as Wok says. Can’t be. It isn’t a raw onion, and it isn’t a bowl of cherries. It’s bittersweet, like love.

  Sweet as loving, bitter as pain.

  But sometimes there are surprises. Right there, just around the corner, waiting to leap out at you, saying “Hey there! At last, here’s a surprise for you. A nice one.”

  That’s what finding the car was like. An electric car, one of those luxury supercompacts, waiting for us right next to the Oil Workers Monument, as if we’d rented it over the phone. A silver Matsui. This year’s.

  Of course, at first Wok thought it was a trap. He wouldn’t even go up to it. We hung back a long time, waiting for something to happen, something awful.

  Nothing happened.

  Tired of waiting, I sneaked into the car.

  “Aída!” he yelled, frightened.

  I don’t know what fear is anymore. What I’ve seen has worn out that word. When the world collapses, there’s no place left for fear.

  There were dried bloodstains inside the car. There had been a fight, and the Matsui’s driver had lost. Maybe he was some rich guy who had hidden in a bunker in his Las Lomas mansion. Maybe he ran out of water or food. Maybe, one night, he tried to get out of the city. Bad idea. A hungry pack of cannibals must have blocked his way, folks who weren’t interested in cars. It’s a shame about the guy, but I’m sure he fed a few nomad kids.

  When he saw it was not a trap, Wok came over and got into the car. He started the engine.

  “They left the lights on. Battery must be almost gone.”

  “It sure beats skating,” I said while kissing his cheek.

  We got out of there. I’ve never ridden in a luxury car before.

  We had fun for a few minutes, dodging debris on the freeway, but then the battery died, just as we reached the northern suburbs. Wok got it started again without stopping, but as soon as we reached the Satélite Towers, not far from there, the engine shut down for good.

  We left the car right there where it stopped. We got out, holding hands and laughing like children, and got away from there fast.

  The scavengers would thank us.

  We spent the rest of the afternoon the way we spent the rest of every afternoon since everything went to hell: looking for something we were not going to find, since we didn’t know what it was.

  We really wanted to skate in the ruins of the Plaza Satélite mall. It’s so huge. The floor was smooth, and there were no nomads camping in the Liverpool store anymore. We decided to spend the night in its furniture department, even though I would have preferred the previous night’s hotel.

  “There’s no going back,” said Wok. “For us there are no yesterdays or ways back.”

  I felt an unexplainable sorrow. I couldn’t find any more reasons to laugh. My happiness dried as my eyes watered, but I decided to drown my sadness with the very last laugh I had. With my last reserves of happiness.

  We were still skating when it got dark. Without warning, I felt an icy chill shoot down my spine. I stopped short.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Wok, frightened.

  “I can feel it,” I said. He could feel the anguish in my voice.

  “What is it? What do you feel?”

  There it was, clear and loud, no doubt left: the chill was slowly crawling up to my neck.

  “Aída! What are you feeling? You’re scaring me!”

  I turned to him. A tear came down my cheek. I thought I had forgotten how to cry.

  “I feel…the pain of millions of people about to die.”

  The first shock came in the middle of the night. We ran out into the parking lot, barely in time to grab our stuff. The mall collapsed among screeching metal and crumbling concrete.

  I’ve never seen an elephant die, but I guess it must be something similar.

  A hard wind was blowing. It blew away the dust in just a few minutes.

  We stood, uneasy, in the empty parking lot. There seemed to be no one around for kilometers. We could hear only the wind’s howl, as it tried to drown the silence. Without a word, we lay down on the floor.

  “Did your parents know each other in 1985, when the earthquake hit?” asked Wok.

  “Course not,” I replied. “You already know that.”

  “Uh.”

  “Mom was seven in 1985. Dad was thirteen,” I added, in the dark.

  Wok replied with a groan.

  “I’m scared,” he whispered in my ear.

  It seemed as if the ground was slowly sinking.

  “So this is the end of the world,” I said with a sigh.

  A glowing rock crossed the sky. It was a fireball the size of an orange, and it fell to earth several kilometers away.

  “It’s better to burn out than to fade away,” he whispered.

  “That’s a quote from an old movie.”

  “Thought it was a song. Dad mumbled it every Sunday, drinking beer in front of the TV.”

  “My parents used to say it, too. Where are they now?”

  “Praying, for sure,” said Wok.

  We laughed.

  “I have a surprise for you,” I said. I groped for it in my backpack. It was hard to find without a lamp, but finally I got it and gave it to him.

  “Some shades?”

  “They’re Ray-Bans,” I said, putting on mine. “You always wanted a pair. I found them in that first Sanborn’s store we slept at.”

  “You’ve been carrying them around since then?”

  “I knew we’d need them. Don’t forget that I wanted to be an astronomer. I was already accepted into college—in physics.”

  There was a new qua
ke.

  “I dropped out of school,” he was suddenly gloomy.

  “It doesn’t matter. You’re only nineteen.”

  “Not a day older,” he replied, as the sky lit up again. He looked gorgeous in the shades. He kissed me.

  “I love you.” I managed to whisper it, then the roar of the earthquake drowned me out.

  Our bike ran out of gasoline as soon as we crossed the intersection of Reforma and Bucareli. The bike coughed to death. Just like that. Cursing, Wok tried to start it again; he kicked it furiously, refusing to accept that the ride was over.

  “What’s so funny, bitch?” he asked, half angry, half amused. “Stupid Aída!” I’m always laughing.

  But suddenly, I stopped. It was so unexpected that Wok stared at me in surprise. “Hey, what’s the matter?”

  “I…it’s just…”

  “What?”

  “The end of the world doesn’t seem funny anymore.”

  We stood there, beside the yellow wreck of El Caballito. Only sound we could hear was the wind blowing the debris.

  “Come on, baby,” he said, hugging me, “It’s been your laughter that keeps me going on.”

  In silence, we walked down Reforma Avenue.

  “So…this is the end of it all,” said Wok to break the silence.

  I started laughing again.

  “You see? That’s my babe,” said Wok.

  “Been there, done that,” I said.

  He held my hand. We kept walking.

  In the distance, an old man seemed to be waiting for a bus.

  The Boy Who Cast No Shadow

  Thomas Olde Heuvelt

  Translated by Laura Vroomen

  Dutch novelist Thomas Olde Heuvelt is the author of five novels and many short stories that have been published in English, Dutch, and Chinese, among other languages. He has won the Paul Harland Prize three times and was nominated for both the Hugo and the World Fantasy Award. Olde Heuvelt’s horror novel HEX will be published in the UK and US/Canada in 2016, with a TV series currently in development based on the book. The following story was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Novelette in 2013.

  MY NAME IS Look. You’ve probably heard about me in the papers or on TV. I’m the boy without a shadow. You can shine spotlights at me all you like, but it won’t do you any good. Physicists say I’m an evolutionary miracle. The Americans said I was a secret weapon, by the Russians that is, because they figured Al-Qaeda would be too dumb. Christians say I’m divine. Mom calls me an angel, but of the earthly variety. But I’m not. I’m just Look. I wish I knew what that meant.

  It’s something to do with my genes, they say, but they don’t know what. Molecular structures and the effects of light, blah-blah-blah. I don’t give a shit, ’cause they can’t fix it anyway. You won’t find a shadow under my chin, armpits, or ribs, no matter how you illuminate me. They say it makes me look two-dimensional. I don’t know what I look like because I have no reflection. My left hip bears a scar in the shape of a question mark. I got it when the midwife dropped me as she held me up in front of the mirror. Mom told me that only a floating umbilical cord was visible and that the midwife screamed, fleeing the room. The photos of the delivery showed a lot of aaaw and coochie-coochie but no baby. The only images ever captured of me are Mom’s sonograms. They use sound, not light.

  ‘You should be proud of your genes,’ Mom and Dad always say. They’re the founders of the Progressive Parish, a local political party that worships being different. Get-together: ‘We just adopted a little Filipino.’ ‘No kidding! Our son is gay.’ ‘Really? Well, ours has no shadow.’ Three-nil, nobody beats that. Mom does yoga and is Zen, and Dad would rather cook for the homeless than for us. Like a lot of bleeding hearts, their charity ends at home.

  Until I was seven, they managed to keep me under wraps. But you don’t have to be Einstein to figure it was bound to come out. One day two men in dark sunglasses snatched me from the class-room, bundled me into an armored car, and stuck a needle into my arm. When I woke up I found myself at an army base in the United States, where a team of scientists and agents spent four months examining me. The first three weeks I claimed I was from Mars and that my goal was complete world domination, then they got extremely rude and started threatening me. I lost it when I woke up one morning to find that they had sliced a piece of skin from my butt to grow a culture. I told them to go fuck themselves, but that same week I was told I was of no use to them and got reunited with my parents. To compensate for our inconvenience we were offered a feature in National Geographic. First my parents flipped and considered legal action, but when they discovered that the men who had kidnapped me were in fact above the law and that the following media hype was a goldmine for the Progressive Parish’s coffers, they soon came round.

  And me? I became a celebrity, thanks a bunch. On Oprah they wouldn’t let me wear make-up ’cause they figured a floating, painted mask with no eyes or mouth would look too freaky on TV. Practical upshot: a completely invisible boy, which meant that everybody who wasn’t actually in the studio just saw clothes moving and me picking up objects and standing behind an infrared machine to prove my existence. When Oprah asked how the scientists had treated me, I responded: ‘I think the government has no right to experiment with my ass.’ That cost them three million in hush money, and still the accusations of sexual abuse came pouring in. Suckers.

  One-all, you’d think. Not by a long shot. In the years that followed, our front yard was overrun by camera crews eager to catch a glimpse of me. Which is technically impossible. Twelve circuses and twenty-three freak shows, including Ripley’s, offered astronomic amounts to exhibit me. I’ve been called a Saint 268 times and have 29,000,000 hits on Google, as many as Brad Pitt. Cool, Mom and Dad, being different. Until it’s you who’s different. Everybody knows who I am. Everybody, except me.

  Splinter once said your dreams make you who you are. But I don’t dream. Loads of people say this, but I really don’t dream. To tell the truth, I don’t even know what dreams are. The countless EEGs that I’ve had show that my brain performs absolutely zilch activity during REM sleep. They never found a link with my condition, but duh. I suppose that’s why I have no friends, no feelings, and no imagination. I lack a goal. I lack depth. Like I care.

  I guess my only wish is to find my reflection. If I have no idea what my face looks like, how will I ever know who I am? And you know how saints and celebrities go. They get pinned on a cross, and while they watch the life seeping out people piss on their shadows.

  The arrival of Splinter Rozenberg changed everything.

  I was fourteen by then and living a relatively quiet life. The hype had died down, as hypes do. We had moved a couple of times within our shit-hole town, and in exchange for a statement that I had not been abused during my stay in the US, two men in dark sunglasses were stationed in front of our house for a year, removing pilgrims and other freaks from our front yard.

  Obviously all this had an effect on my school rep. I’ve got no friends, and because I’m tall I have a lot of nerve where others don’t. They avoid me, which is exactly how I like it. Sometimes I beat up someone, not because I like it, but I’m helping an image along. And come on, it’s not all that obvious, unless I’m in front of the mirror. I wear long sleeves. Only my face is a dead give-away. With the sun on my right, I look luminous on the left. Mom tried to hide the effect with make-up, but then I look like a drag-queen, so I don’t think so.

  Even Jord Hendriks lets me off the hook, confining to trash talk. On a good day I’m ‘See-Thru’. On a bad day, it’s ‘Zero’ or just ‘Freak’. He says without a reflection I don’t actually exist, except that my fuck-face hasn’t figured that out yet.

  He exaggerates if you ask me. If I’m supposed to believe the stories, I’m no oil painting, but it’s not as bad as all that. Lots of artists, including my grandpa, have made impressions of what I look like. None of the drawings look alike, and none of them really suit me. The charcoal drawing on the cover
of People I can’t take seriously for starters, because it creates the illusion of shadow. Some show a boy with a broad, roughly hewn face. Mom says Grandpa’s is the best likeness. But Grandpa also did a portrait of Mom that sort of makes her look like a man instead of a woman—so much for Mom’s opinion.

  Too bad that Jord Hendriks is such an incredible dick. The other kids are afraid of him. I think he’s hot. I mean, just look at that body in the locker room before P.E., holy fuck!

  Of course that’s about the last thing you’d say to him if you know what’s good for you. One disorder is more than enough, trust me. Mom and Dad would love it, and that’s exactly why I won’t tell them. They’d drag me to lunatic parades and conferences on tolerance by the Progressive Parish, and then the whole media circus would start all over again, so no. The Internet is no good either. It’s easy to click Yes, I am 18 or over, but chat-rooms kick me out ’cause I’m supposedly too scared to show myself on webcam.

  Oh, well. The thought of Jord Hendriks putting his mouth to better use and my right hand offer plenty of release for a healthy boy like me, exclamation mark smiley face.

  Splinter was new in class, so I was old news. Thanks in part to his mom, Mrs. Rozenberg, who had made the unforgivable mistake of accompanying him to school the first day to explain all about his condition. I remember them standing there side by side, Mrs. Rozenberg like she was lecturing some rugrats and Splinter staring glassy-eyed into the room. Splinter always stared at things glassy-eyed. That’s because his eyes were made of glass. As was the rest of his body. It’s one of those funny little accidents you get in certain gene pools. Polished, he was a perfect mirror. He had some flexibility and was able to move his limbs, but slo-mo, like Neil Armstrong on the moon. Facial expressions were a different story.

  Mrs. Rosenberg, all flesh and blood, told us to think of him as a china cabinet, which wasn’t all that far from the truth. He wasn’t allowed to play games during recess or P.E. A well-aimed football would surely kill him. Jack-assing was out of the question. When we heard an old bag like her say that, we screamed with laughter. Mrs. Rozenberg was delighted, thinking she was cool. Splinter knew he was doomed.