Afterland

by Lauren Beukes

  You really want to go there, boo?

  Later that night, bedded down together in the cabin’s old-fashioned four-poster, under an equally old-fashioned quilt that smells of pine, she’s aware of the warmth of Mila’s snuffling body, that pubescent pilot light set high. When last did she have a living, breathing human sleep next to her? Mila is restless. She sprawls, taking up most of the bed, whacks her in the face with her elbow as she rolls over, cocoons herself up in the quilt, leaving Cole in the cold. It’s inexplicably comforting. Starting young, tiger, taking more than your share, she thinks before falling into the kind of sleep so deep it’s only a shade off unconsciousness.

  When she wakes, the sun angling in the window is already high. Mila is still out for the count, breathing deeply. She leaves her to it. She needs the rest: they both do. Sure, they have a plane to catch—or rather, a boat to find—but for now, she relishes the respite of the moment, the chance to scan her child’s sleeping face, the freckles like cinnamon, the dark curls. Beautiful boy. No, beautiful girl. Girl.

  23.

  Miles: #Bunkerlife

  A WEEK AGO

  “Enemy agent at ten o clock!” Miles hisses to Ella, who is also on her belly in the vineyards, leopard-crawling through the weeds between the vines. Enemy agent meaning grown-up who is not Mom or Aunt Billie, or Ella’s uncle, Andy. Ella’s mom committed suicide when her father died. Ella was supposed to die too, but she spat out the pills her mom gave her, and a neighbor found her, and the government brought her here to Ataraxia because her uncle was still alive.

  Ella freezes, her head turned toward him, a smudge of dirt on her chin and an orange bug picking its way across the terrain of her sandy hair. This close, he can see the yellow flecks in her olive eyes, like constellations you could make up whole mythologies about. That’s what the universe is, he thinks, stories connecting the lines between the stars.

  “Isn’t that the guy?” she whispers.

  Miles cranes his chin to see. He doesn’t want to give away their position. The sun slashes through the leaves, warm on his face, cicadas crackling like electricity. “Yeah,” he says, “that’s him.”

  “How many people do you think he’s killed?”

  The thrill of those words shimmies up his vertebrae. “Like forty? Fifty, maybe? He was in a max security prison. It must have been a lot.” They can hear his boots, that particular dull squidge of rubber pressing down earth and grass. The losers, he’s heard his Aunt Billie call the residents of Ataraxia, and maybe that’s true. Can’t pick and choose your survivors. But unlike the army base, at least they’re allowed outside and Ella is more fun than Jonas ever was. No, maybe that’s not true. She’s calmer. Less like an unexploded grenade you might accidentally set off.

  “He’s spotted us!”

  “Run!”

  They jump to their feet and dash toward the cornfields.

  “Children of the Corn!” Miles yells, but Ella doesn’t get it, isn’t allowed to watch scary movies. Neither is he, but you can get around that with plot summaries on Wikipedia, his secret vice in the life before, when he’d stay up late at night reading them and scaring himself pantless. He’s started making his own mash-up versions of his favorites for Ella with Lego figures, filming with an old DV video camera Mom requested from the library (not to be mistaken for the real library, which is on level four down, and has mainly classics and business books on working harder and smarter and more creatively and disrupting and evolving and other words that don’t really mean anything). There’s a request library, where you can ask for things and they’ll try to source them for you, as long as it’s old-school: video cameras or gaming consoles. But no phones, no internet. Because the internet is all-caps DANGEROUS. Kids end up DEAD that way. The terrorists WILL find you.

  Someone put in a request for sudoku, and the guards brought in a stash of puzzle books too, including a DIY secret codes and ciphers manual which he has been obsessed with. Mom has taken to leaving coded messages for him and Ella stashed around Ataraxia. They communicate in hieroglyphs, lines and dots, a paper ribbon with letters on it that can only be read if you wrap it around a screwdriver. Agents! Command needs you to acquire three oranges from the kitchen. But you must not be caught! Further instructions will follow tomorrow.

  But the real codes he’s looking for are in the grown-ups’ faces, and the conversations that dry up or switch channels when he walks into the room.

  There are a lot of people angry that Billie is here, swanning in like she’s on the VIP guest list, even though the Male Survivors Act says any direct surviving blood relative will be allowed to join their family in a haven facility. There was even a meeting about it, in the dining hall topside, with the doctors explaining about DNA, and no one listening, and people shouting at each other until he had to leave to go play video games in their bedroom. Later, Billie tried to reassure him. “Nothing to worry about. We won’t be here long,” and Mom gave her the big-eyeballs not-in-front-of-the-child look.

  Or yesterday when he found Mom lingering in the compound’s garage round the back after her Mechanics Level 2 class was over, talking low and urgent with Billie, their heads bent over the engine block of the Lada Russian thing Mom was training on. He wouldn’t have seen them there, but the smell of Billie’s roll-up cigarettes tipped him off.

  “Extra credit,” Mom said, when he asked what they were doing in the dark.

  “Smoking,” Billie said at the same time, “in a supervisory capacity.”

  There was that look again, between the adults. Conspiratorial. He’s sick of it. As if he hasn’t noticed them whispering, or how Mom has been since Billie arrived. Happier and lighter and sillier, but also full of whirring anticipation, like a planet-killing machine gearing up to fire.

  Ahead in the maize, Ella crashes through the thicket of green stalks, darting left and right. The swaying heads above them are thick and fat and ready to burst, like alien seed pods. He feels instantly lost, like the field goes on forever in all directions, even though he knows it comes up on the orchards to the west and the boundary fence beyond that, which is even taller and more crazy-secure than at Lewis-McChord. But here, in the midst of it, darting through the stalks, it feels like it will swallow them whole.

  “Hey, you kids!” Irwin’s voice drifts after them. “You cut it out! It’s not funny!”

  “Neither is being a cold-blooded killer.” Ella flashes pure mischief at Miles over her shoulder. A stalk rebounds with a thwack into his face and Miles stops, stunned, and peels it back.

  “Yowtch.”

  “C’mon, slow-poke! This way!” He has no idea how she manages to calibrate where they are, but in a few steps, abruptly, they’re released from that dense and hungry green, into the olive trees with their silvered leaves. Ella drops to a crouch, pulling him down next to her, laughing softly and out of breath.

  “Think we lost him,” she says. “But we should go through the forest to make sure.”

  “We have to be extra careful,” Miles ad-libs. “Because there are sith-leryn guards looking for us.”

  “What kind of things?” she smirks, teasing. “I don’t know if I’m familiar with those.”

  Aaaaaugh, Miles thinks—exactly like that. He’s just going to own it. “Yeah. Sith-leryns are literally the worst. They have magic wands and lightsabers. Especially their leader, Darth Draco. That dude is one evil scumbag.” He knows they’re too old for these kinds of games, but there’s no one here to tell them that. So fuck it, he thinks, fiercely. He loves the piercing jab of the word in his head.

  “We better get moving before they find us. You got any backup spells?”

  “Always.” He raises a makeshift wand and squints down its length. “The Force is strong in Gryffindors.”

  “Yah!” Irwin yells, bursting out of the field, exactly like a movie monster. Miles bolts, too fast, because Irwin grabs hold of Ella. “You think you can go around spying on people?” He shakes her by her arm, his face so pink the broken veins on
his cheeks stand out like veins in marble. “You little shits. We’re gonna have a word with your people about this. You bet your ass. See what the director has to say. I bet she’ll have something to say. Get you evicted, you little shits.”

  “You let her go!” Miles tries to jump on Irwin’s back, but it’s like trying to climb a giant fleshy tree and he has never been acrobatic. There’s the briefest moment of triumph as the man jolts under his weight, and then he’s sliding off. He lands on his tailbone, hard enough to drive out his breath and blacken his vision (the shadow of the Death Vulture passing overhead).

  “Fuck,” he says, but it’s an exhale, more of a squeak. Humiliation tastes sick in his mouth. Ella has broken free. She’s standing, rubbing her arm, in shock, or maybe embarrassed for him. He can’t meet her eyes.

  “Careful there, boy, you don’t want to hurt yourself,” Irwin mocks, leaning over to offer him a hand up. “Don’t you know it’s an act of treason to hurt a male?” He chuckles.

  Miles ignores the hand proffered toward him, and gets to his feet all on his own. “You shouldn’t bully little kids,” he snipes. In his head, this came out more eloquent, more badass. Badassoquent.

  Irwin snorts. “Little, my ass. When I was your age I was working already. My daddy would have striped me raw for pulling this kind of shit.”

  “That’s child abuse,” Miles says. “You don’t hit kids.”

  Irwin flushes all the way down his neck, the exact fresh-liver pink that’s exposed when they open up a body for an operation. Miles’s dad used to watch operation videos on YouTube with him, because “you should know what you’re made of.”

  “You shut your lying hole mouth! I didn’t lay a finger on you. If you try and tell people otherwise…”

  The misunderstanding dawns on him, the same moment it does Irwin. “I mean your dad shouldn’t have hit you. That’s child abuse. He shouldn’t have done that. It’s wrong.”

  “Miles,” Ella warns, like he doesn’t know this train has already jumped the sharks, through the hoops of fire.

  “You feel sorry for me, huh? You think I need your pity. Your girlfriend too? You think you should feel bad for me with your bleeding hearts?” Irwin steps up to him. Miles wills the muscles in his legs to lock up like steel girdles, cased in stone, plated with adamantium, not to move. But he falls back. Not a lot. One step, maybe two. Too many, though. Willpower fail.

  “That’s not—”

  Irwin pinches his cheek, hard enough to bruise, hard enough to pull him closer. “I pity your parents. For having such a stupid little faggot.” Each word a punch. Like Miles cares, like he gives a shit what Irwin thinks about him. “Little pussy boy. Your old man probably died of shame before HCV ever got him.”

  He lets go abruptly and for the second time in so many minutes, Miles lands on his ass.

  “Little fucking pussy,” Irwin says and saunters away, as if Miles isn’t going to retaliate, pick up a rock and bludgeon his head in and keep smashing until he can’t get up again and they have to go borrow garden tools to bury the body. But he doesn’t. He doesn’t even yell “fuck you” after his retreating back, which is not a retreat at all, it’s contempt, and it’s unbearable.

  “Are you okay?” Ella says.

  “Fine,” he brushes the grass off his shorts. “I’m fine. You?”

  “Yeah. But we should tell someone. What he did. That wasn’t okay. He threatened us, and we’re kids.”

  “Fuck it.”

  “Miles. C’mon. Miles!” she calls after him.

  “Forget it. It’s no biggie,” he manages a smile, as fake and over-exaggerated as the shrug he gives her, walking backward, but definitely away. “It’s all good. I’ll see you later, skater-gator-replicator.”

  “Bye for now, brown-cow-taking-a-bow,” she says back, but she is unconvinced, he can tell.

  24.

  Cole: Shotgun Sally

  They’ve been stealing an hour here and there, in the dead towns where there are no other cars around, to teach Mila to drive. She thought about using ninja parenting (Devon’s turn of phrase: reverse psychology and laying the groundwork so the kid thinks something is their idea) because she didn’t want Mila to worry. Or worry more.

  If you’re happy and you know it, overthink!

  She could have sold it as fun times, or forbidden fruit—you couldn’t possibly manage it, kids shouldn’t drive. But this kid was too smart by far. So she told her straight up: “We’re partners.”

  In crime. You made your kid an accessory to murder.

  “And I need you to be able to do everything. If I need to rest. Or something happens to me, savaged by an adorable raccoon for example, or an extradimensional monster from your imagination…”

  Or caught. Dragged away into a police van.

  “…you need to be a self-sufficient badass. So we’re going to learn how to drive, and how to do first aid, and make a fire. Think of it as Survivor: Manpocalypse.”

  But motivation doesn’t make the white-knuckle process of teaching your teenager to drive any less stressful.

  Mila goes straight through the stop sign at the bottom of the hill and Cole clamps onto her leg with a terror grip.

  “What the hell was that?!” she yells.

  “It’s fine. I checked.”

  “You can’t run a stop, Mila, not even in the middle of nowhere!”

  “Stop shouting at me! I looked! No one else is out here. I just didn’t want to stall again.”

  “I’m sorry, but it’s scary!”

  “How do you think I feel? Why can’t we get an automatic? This is bullshit.”

  “Hey, language.”

  “That’s what you’re worried about?”

  “No, mostly I’m deeply concerned about that burning smell coming from the clutch.”

  “Which is why we should get an automatic!”

  “Okay, just pull over. I’ll take it from here. We should be looking for a crash pad anyway.”

  “It’s my turn to choose.”

  “After that stunt? You’re lucky I’m not leaving you here on the side of the road.”

  “Ha-ha. Very funny, Mom.” Mila guides the car onto the shoulder and stalls the car anyway. It lurches forward and she slaps the horn in frustration. It gives a half-hearted bleep.

  “What is going on with you today?”

  “I don’t know,” Mila snipes. “Hormones?”

  “I know you’re angry we had to leave Kasproing House.”

  “That’s not it. It’s because we don’t know where we’re going.”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Can’t, or won’t. ’Cos I’m just saying, Mom, it didn’t turn out so great last time.”

  A stranger’s voice breaks in: “Coo-ee! Hi there, wait up!”

  A wide woman leaning on a crutch is hobbling down the now not-so-empty street toward them. If Cole had been behind the wheel, she’d have hit the pedal and peeled out of there, but Mila freezes. Too late to swap sides, and besides, how do you leave a lame old lady eating your dust?

  Mila hesitates, then rolls down the ancient window that still operates with a rotary winder.

  “Oh, I hope I didn’t scare you. It’s only me, Liz.” The woman has a cheery round face, with her blond hair poofed up in the style Devon used to call lady-realtor.

  “I saw you parked on the verge. And then I thought, maybe the Tomes have come back from Boston after all—they have a young cousin round about your age, and I was coming to invite Bev for dinner, but now I see that it’s you.” Liz is talking a mile a minute. “Would you like to come for dinner? I’ve got chickens, you see, and I’m doing a roast. Normally, the Jensens, they’re a lesbian couple, them and their kids come over on Tuesdays, but they’ve gone to Denver for a coupla days. I think Ramona wants to move there, and it’s just going to break my heart if they do.”

  “Mom?” Mila says, faltering.

  “That’s very kind of you—” Cole starts.

  “Oh for heaven’s sa
ke.” Liz stamps her good foot. “With the state of everything, and people still feel like they can’t accept a little hospitality. Let me tell you, I’d love to have the company as much as I’m sure you’d love to have a hearty meal in your bellies. Besides, I have lights and water, if you wanted to have a hot bath, say, or use a flushing toilet. You seem like the decent type. Not like some folk.”

  “We were heading off soon, we’re going to my cousin’s wilderness retreat. It’s a long drive and—”

  “Well if you change your mind, it’s over the road, one block up. Sixteen Ashfield Street. If you want a home-cooked meal, or you need anything at all, you pop on by. I’d be thrilled to have you.” She nods briskly, like that settles it, and turns to go.

  “Can we?” Mila says, not looking at Cole, that’s how desperately she wants it.

  “Well, she could be the ax-murdering little old lady type. We could take precautions. Check the house for axes before we sit down.”

  “And swap the plates around, make sure she takes the first bite, so she can’t poison us.”

  “Check the bath for onions and garlic. You know, in case it’s really a stew.”

  “Or acid!”

  Cole relents. She’s hungry for other human company. “All right, we just need to see if we can find some cars to siphon gas from, and then let’s head over. But I’m driving this time.”

  The front door of Number 16 is standing ajar in anticipation, a crack of light between the ivy growing up and around the doorway, just starting to bud. The aroma of roasting chicken is a visceral thing that clenches her stomach. Their last meal was dry Grape-Nuts and stale marshmallows, with nori sheets Cole found in the Asian aisle of the last abandoned convenience store they passed. She still keeps her hand on the knife in the pocket of her coat, keeping Mila behind her. The car is parked nose-out on the street, ready to bolt if they need to.