Afterland

by Lauren Beukes

  “I’m sorry,” Billie manages. She can’t get back up. Gravity has shifted. It won’t support her, like her tongue in her mouth, garbling the words. “I fucked up. I’m sorry. I’ll make it up to you.”

  “It might be too late for sorry. Here I am, eagerly waiting for a boy, and what do I see? There is no boy. Not here. And your sister has fled with him and the evidence, what she did to you, does not suggest that you have the situation in hand. Bringing a witness to my house? You think I’m stupid? You think because Thierry is not here that I will be the soft one, the pushover? You know that women must work harder to prove themselves. There is even more to prove now, the way the world is.”

  “I can get her. I’ll bring him back.” Empty syllables. Say something, anything, Billie thinks. Seal the deal. Don’t get shot in the face, like Nelly the hedgehog. One head trauma at a time. “I’m the only one who can get them back.”

  Rico shrugs. “We have the tracker, like you said. If they’re not in satellite coverage now, they will be again soon.”

  “No. You don’t understand. I’m the only one.” Say it like you mean it, or you’re dead, bitch. Head full of bloody mashed potato in the rain. “She’s paranoid. Cole. My sister.” The will to live. The conviction of fear. “She’s off her meds. Bipolar.”

  Lying has always been easy for her. Ever since she was a little kid and understood you could remake reality with words, or at least enough to make other people doubt it. “That’s why she attacked me. She’s dangerous. She might hurt the boy. And no one wants that. Do you? I’m the only one who knows her. She’ll ditch the truck as soon as she can. She’ll head for Mexico. Or Canada. I know her. And Miles. He trusts me. You want to get him back here, you need me.” She says it again. “You need me.”

  “What do you think, Rico?”

  “If someone has made a mess, it’s best they clean it up themselves.”

  “With a supervisor. You go with her. You and Zara. No, don’t protest, Billie darling. You can’t possibly do it alone. You’ve proven that.”

  “Cleanup on aisle three,” Rico says with that blank beauty queen smile, all white capped teeth and pink gums.

  12.

  Miles: Lab Rat Boys

  ONE YEAR AGO

  When he was small, he thought it would be the coolest thing to live in a castle or on a submarine or a space ship. That it would be awesome to live on an army base with tanks and everything! But after several months at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, he knows the sheen of exciting new weirdness wears off pretty quickly.

  All the soldiers are women, no big surprise, and most of the kids are younger than he is, except for Jonas, and he’s never so much as seen a tank, let alone ridden in one. He didn’t even get to experience the helicopter ride in from the airport, because they gave him knockout drugs for his stomach pain. And there’s quarantine and all the tests. So, it kinda sucks, and now they have to deal with a rookie guarding the boys’ cafeteria.

  You can tell she’s new, because she can’t keep a straight face and eyes right. She sneaks sideways glances at them, magnetized to where Miles and Jonas are the last boys standing, or rather sitting, because the little ones have already filed out for PE. He and Jonas have early family visits today, because of their operations later. Which is also why they have a special treat of waffles, and fake bacon and fresh fruit, brought in specially, because how tragical would it be if you survived HCV and then died of something dumb like scurvy or contaminated meat. They keep trying to make it seem like a holiday, but quarantine sucks.

  “I hate when they do that,” Jonas says. He’s a year older than Miles, twelve and change, but a whole head taller, and also wider, with sandy blond hair and the first scruffy wisps of a mustache on his upper lip.

  “Like we’re in a boy zoo,” Miles agrees, stabbing a strawberry he’s been chasing around the plate with the balsa wood spork that cracks if you push down on it too hard. It’s dangerous for them to have metal cutlery, even though Jonas says you can make a shank out of anything. Jonas says his dad was a Marine and he knows a thousand ways to kill someone. Jonas has said a lot of different things about his dad over the last year of them being locked away here. But his dad is dead and Miles can kinda understand. Sometimes stories are all you have to hang on to.

  There are eight of them in the under-thirteen group. When you’re thirteen and over, you go into the adolescent dorms, and then there’s the men’s section, but they never see them, except for Shen, because his dad is still alive, and they brought him here to the base, because it’s really rare that you get fathers and sons surviving because they think the genetic resistance is matrimonial or whatever, and all the doctors seem really excited about it, but Shen and his dad only get to see each other during visiting hours, same as everyone else.

  “Hey.” Jonas flicks a blueberry at the soldier-who-can’t-look-away. “Where are your manners? Didn’t your mom teach you it’s rude to stare?” The berry falls short with a soft plap on the tiles in front of her. She makes like she hasn’t noticed, as if she’s always been standing at perfect attention with her arms behind her back, the gun strapped to her hip. They both saw her twitch.

  “I don’t think you’re supposed to do that,” Miles says. They’re best friends, but sometimes he doesn’t like Jonas very much.

  “Oh yeah?” Jonas flicks another berry in a lazy arc and it pings off the seat of one of the bright egg-shaped chairs, and rolls across the floor. She doesn’t react at all this time. “See?” the kid grins. “No one is going to do shit, son. We’re the motherfucking golden boys and we can do what we want.” He shoves his chair away, leaving the fruit uneaten. “C’mon, I’m done here.”

  “It’s still rude,” Miles mutters, embarrassed. But there’s a twist of unease in his stomach too. It means something, he thinks, the soldier and the blueberry. There are signs that he’s gathering, like he used to collect snails when he was a little kid, and bring them home and set them loose on the floor and glide his finger along the slime-slick patterns they left behind. The soldier doesn’t blink as they walk past her. He has to resist bending down to prod the exploded berry at her feet, as if it might hold secrets, like the language of snail trails.

  Another sign. Mom’s brightness when she walks into the visitor’s suite where he’s sitting at the table, drawing in his sketchbook, under the watchful eye of a different soldier (not counting whoever is behind the one-way glass of the observation window). They switch the guards every day between the rooms, on rotation, because “they’re not here to be your friends,” Mel the play therapist says. “They’re here to do a very hard and very important job, which is to make sure you’re safe and your families are safe, so they’re not allowed to talk to you or play with you or make jokes, and I know that can be difficult to understand, but can you try for me? If you can be brave, you’ll be helping them!”

  He sees Mel or the other play therapist, Ruth, in group session every day with the other boys in the kids’ ward, which is annoying, because the little ones cry a lot, and three times a week on his own, when she tells him it’s okay to be angry and it’s okay to be sad or scared or frustrated or have questions. Like he doesn’t know all that already. She also says it’s okay to talk about it, and would he like to talk about how he’s feeling? He would not. Thank u, next.

  “Hey, tiger,” Mom says, holding open her arms, and he gets up and throws himself into her, more of a rugby tackle than a hug. Her hair is still damp from the decontamination shower.

  “Oof!” she protests and squeezes him tight. He’s glad she doesn’t have to wear the plague-o-naut suit anymore for visits like when they first got here and they didn’t want to risk “cross-infection,” but her skin smells like the chemicals they use to wash off the outside. It burns in his nose.

  “You stink, Mom.” He tugs himself free.

  “Guess I should take these stinking presents back then?” She holds up the clear plastic bag containing new books, fat with damp. “Oh, no, wait,” she says, faux-pan
icking as he lets his head droop, shoulders slumping. He’s goofing around…until he isn’t. “Don’t be sad. I would never, you know that.”

  “You mustn’t joke about books, Mom,” he scolds. Sometimes play-acting isn’t play or acting; it’s the cracked-open window the feelings escape through when their wings have been battering and bruising your insides.

  “I’m sorry. Dick move. Although that’s better than a Dickens move, right?”

  “Ugh.” He tucks himself under her arm on the couch.

  “Okay, okay. Behold! I have brought unto you…tributes from the great outside beyond! But you should probably rein in your great expectations!”

  “Did you see who brought them?” He perks up. It’s half-creepy, half-hella cool that the base attracts pilgrims who gather outside the fences hoping to catch a glimpse of them. Like they’re boy bands, Mom says, or gods. They bring presents a.k.a. tributes, and the soldiers select the best ones to bring inside and then the moms and sisters and aunts and wives can sort through them and decide what they want. Fat pickings. Sometimes the pilgrims sing songs or hymns, but it’s hard to hear outside sounds through the reinforced walls where he lives in the quarantine unit.

  “I’m going to guess it was a librarian, because they’re all library books,” she says, taking them out one at a time, trying to flatten the swollen pages with the heel of her hand. No comics, this time.

  “Or a library thief.”

  “Notorious across the land. She only liberates the best books, the most compelling stories, and transports them in a wheelie bag…”

  “A shopping cart,” he corrects her, “lined with spikes and traps, so no one can steal them.”

  “…Of course, yes, sorry. She transports them in the doom cart, while she searches for only the most deserving kids because when you read, the book lives on inside you.”

  “Eww. Like a parasite?”

  “Remember how we used to freak out your dad? Wake him up with the grossest video shoved right in his face when he opened his eyes?”

  “Before he even had his coffee.”

  “So cruel.”

  “And he’d scream.”

  “Like Nicolas Cage. The bees! The beeeees!” Mom does an impression, hamming it up, because there’s a camera in the ceiling pointed down at them, and you don’t want the soldiers to think she’s actually screaming or that something is wrong because then they will come rushing in and escort her out, and there will be so much explaining and extra hassle, and she won’t be allowed to come for the evening visit. The soldiers watch Mom really closely because of all that trouble when they first got here. Sure, she says she didn’t really go apeshit and throw a chair at the general when they told her about the quarantine and the tests—she just kicked it over in frustration—but he knows she did. Badass.

  Now he says, “There aren’t any parasite bees, mom. You’re thinking of wasps.”

  “Sting-y flyers. You know what I mean. But your dad, I bet he misses that the most.”

  “He’s dead, Mom.”

  “In ghost-world, looking down on us.”

  “Yeah. Looking down on us for believing in ghosts!” There’s nothing left of Dad but ashes in a box in Mom’s room that the army was kind enough to bring them after taking them hostage at the airport. Jonas said they would have done a ton of tests on the body before burning him. They had a funeral ceremony for him, in the visitor suite, him and Mom, and some army priest lady saying words that didn’t relate. And how did they know it was Dad in there anyway? It could have been anyone’s greasy cremains (he hates the sound of the word), all the other dead men who were brought here, all jumbled up together so you can’t tell which part is who anymore. And even though everyone is atoms, he gets that too-much-spit-in-your-mouth feeling like when you might puke.

  “Ha,” Mom says, but her eyes are red and puffy, he notices now; her lashes are spiky like sea urchins.

  “Have you been crying?”

  “No. It’s the decontam spray. It burns. It buuuuurns,” she Nic Cages again. “Like bees IN YOUR EYES!”

  “Mom, do I have to do the pity pie test?” The actual term is pituitary gland, he’s seen it written down in the not-very-good video Dr. Blokland showed him, which explains it’s like doing brain surgery through the mouth, animated in a way that is supposed to make them feel better about it. We can access the pituitary gland via the soft palate, the freakily calm explainer woman’s voice on the animation says, to measure testosterone levels and production, which can’t be achieved by a normal blood test. It might be a bit uncomfortable and you will feel a little prick, but this will help our scientists and other boys just like you!

  Not as excruciating as when General Vance came in specially to talk to them, explaining why they needed to be kept in quarantine and that the future was in their hands (she means “pants,” Jonas leaned over to whisper to him). He remembers her going on and on, and how she didn’t really tell them anything. It was a band-aid talk. Nobody was going to put any pressure on them, it was her job to keep them safe and happy, she said, and the only thing she wanted to ask them to do was live their best possible lives in these difficult circumstances and it wasn’t going to be forever, and she promised them that the government was working on a viable long-term solution that put their needs front and foremost and got them back to normal, whatever that looked like, as soon as possible.

  Then she put on another animated video that explained that virus receptors were like keyholes and the viruses like keys, and something inside their bodies, from the genes inherited from their moms, meant that their keyholes were blocked and HCV couldn’t lock on to their cells, and that’s why they survived. And if they have kids, their daughters (who are xx) will survive too because the gene is x-linked. And the scientists are working very hard using the very best technology in the world to make sure that soon, really soon, in the next few years, baby boys (who are xy) will survive too. But that's why all the countries around the world have agreed to have a Reprohibition, where no one is allowed to have babies until the scientists and doctors can figure it all out. So that's why we have to do all these tests on everybody.

  “I wouldn’t ask you to do it if it wasn’t important,” Mom says. She takes his hand and gives it a double squeeze. Family Morse code. One squeeze means “I love you.” Two is “it’s going to be okay, I got this,” three is “can you believe this jerk?”

  “Everything in here is important.” Or an act of heroism and setting a good example for the younger boys, or saving the world, and being brave and being strong and putting up with it, whatever it is this week, for a little while longer.

  But the worst thing on a very long list of terrible things is Mom trying to make it okay. Because it’s not. Okay is another planet where they used to live and she’s definitely wiping her eyes when she thinks he’s not looking, when Dr. Blokland comes to fetch him.

  That night, in his single-occupancy observation ward, when the bell chimes to indicate to all the boys that it’s ten minutes till lights out, he sets down his new book, which is really good, about a boy and a dog and the shouty voices inside you. And he gets up and checks under his bed.

  Because he knows Cancer Fingers might be lying there, in wait, with white moldy lumps growing where his face should be, and his fingers long and thin as chopsticks, and when Miles is asleep, he will clamber out on spindly legs and dip those fingers into his flesh and swirl them around in his guts.

  He knows that’s not how it works. The stomach pains he gets are from anxiety and maybe not enough fiber (and too many American pancakes), and Dr. Blokland has given him pills for pain and healthy bacteria, but he doesn’t take them, because how will he know if Cancer Fingers has been in the night if he can’t feel it?

  He hasn’t told anyone about good old CF, because he knows what they’ll say. His mom will worry, they’ll give him more pills, Jonas will mock him for being a baby.

  He saw it once, in the middle of the night and the whole ward was quiet, so quiet you
could hear the crickets outside, and women singing in the distance, although it could have been a TV or the radio. Authorized channels only. He woke up and felt its weight on his chest and its fingers stirring, stirring in his guts, and he saw it, the pale reflection in the glass. He screamed and two nurses came running, and some of the other boys started wailing and banging on their doors, until they had to let everyone out and have a group session to calm them down. He told the nurses it was a bad dream. But he knows what he saw. He knows what he felt, the low, deep twirling and swirling. And he’s glad for the tests (don’t tell Mom), because it means he can ask: are you sure I’m immune? Are you sure I don’t have cancer?

  There is nothing under the bed. He looks behind the blinds of the window that opens onto a courtyard ring-fenced on all sides by hospital buildings, with a skylight, and hardy plants in pots arranged around benches. But they’re not allowed down there, and he can’t remember what outside even tastes like, and okay, maybe he’s being mega-dramatic, but they’ve been locked up in quarantine for over a year like prisoners. Final check, the door handle, and then leap across the room to get into bed, the covers already pulled back in anticipation, turn off the light.

  That would be what he would normally do. Except. The door is unlocked.

  What the eff, he thinks, because he might have got his head around the s-word, but the f-word is still taboo somehow, even though his mom says it. Maybe because she says it so much.

  The door is never unlocked. Matron always checks at lights out. Can’t have you wandering around willy-nilly!

  Emphasis on willy! That was Jonas.

  Miles opens the door. There are no alarms, no clomping feet of soldier-nurses rushing to tackle him. He pads down the corridor, crouching low like a spy to duck under the windows of the other rooms. Jonas’s is three doors down, because they got moved farther apart when they caught them tapping messages on the walls to each other.