By contrast, her tract, Nayimaland, was two-hundred acres of dead farmland she shared with feral cats made bold because food was scarce — taken by drought, not the Plague. The late State of California had yet more dying to do.
Nayima felt thirsty, but she didn’t stop at her sealed barrel to take a scoop. She couldn’t guess how long her standing water would have to last. Sacramento owed her water credits, but she would be a fool to trust their promises.
At the rear of the chicken coop, Nayima found the hole the cat had torn in the mesh and lashed loose wires to close it. The hens were unsettled, so she could expect broken eggs. And she couldn’t afford to cook one of her reliable laying hens, so she’d have to wait for meat at least another week, until trading day.
By the time Nayima came back to her porch, her two house cats, Tango and Buster, had gathered enough courage to poke their heads up in the window. For an instant, her pets looked like the thief cat, no better.
“It’s okay, babies,” she said. “One of ’em got a chicken.”
Buster, still aloof, raised his tail good night and went to his sofa. But Tango followed her to her bedroom and jumped beside her to sleep. Nayima preferred a bare mattress to the full bed that had been in this room — fewer places for intruders to hide and surprise her. She slept beneath the window, where she could always open her eyes and see the sky. Tango rested his weight against her; precious warmth and a thrumming heartbeat to calm her nerves.
“I can’t feed you all,” she told Tango. “I’m crazy for taking in just you two.” Tango slowly blinked his endless green eyes at her, his cat language for love. Nayima returned Tango’s long, slow blink.
• • • •
Nayima thought the jangling bells outside soon after dawn meant that a cat had been caught in a cage, but when she went to investigate, she found Raul’s mud-painted red pickup slewed across the dirt path to her ranch house. He was cursing in Spanish. His front tire had caught a camouflaged cage, and he was stooping to check the damage. At least a dozen sets of cats’ eyes floated like marbles in the dry shrubbery.
“Don’t shoot!” Raul called to her. He knew she had her little sawed-off without looking back. “You’ll blow off your own culo with that rusty thing one day. ¿Es todo, Nayima?”
Despite the disturbance and his complaining, Nayima was glad to see Raul. He looked grand in morning sunshine. Raul’s eyes drooped slightly, giving the impression of drowsiness, but he was handsome, with a fine jaw and silvering hair he wore in two long braids like his Apache forebears. Since reconciliation and the allotment of the Carrier Territories eight years ago, Raul looked younger every time she saw him.
Nayima had turned sixty-one or sixty-two in December — she barely tracked her age anymore — and she and Raul were among the youngest left, so most carriers had died before the territories were allotted. In their human cages.
Captivity had been their repayment for the treatment and vaccine from the antibodies in their blood. They were outcasts, despite zero human transmissions of the virus after Year One. The single new case twenty-five years ago had been a lab accident, and the serum had knocked it out quick.
The Ward B carriers Nayima had barely known still lived communally, or close enough to walk to each other’s ranches. But Nayima had chosen seclusion on an airy expanse of unruly farmland that stretched as far as she could see. In containment, she’d never had the luxury of community, except Raul. She had enough human contact on her market trips, where she made transactions through a wall. Or her hour-long ride on her ATV to see Raul, if she wanted conversation. Other people wearied her.
“Sorry — cat problem,” she told Raul. “Did it rip?” She had a few worn tires in her shed from the previous owner, but they were at least forty years old.
Raul exhaled, relieved. “No, creo que está bien.”
She squatted beside him, close enough to smell the sun on his clothes. She had not seen Raul in at least thirty days. He had begged her to share his house, but she had refused. She needed to talk to him from time to time, but she remembered why she did not want to live with him, and why she had slept with him only once: Raul’s persistent recollections about his old neighborhood in Rancho Cucamonga and his grandparents’ house in Nogales were unbearable. He always wanted to talk about the days before the Plague.
But after forty years, he was family. He’d been a gangly fifteen-year-old when the lab-coats captured him. Shivering and crying, he had webbed his fingers to reach toward her hand against the sheet of glass.
Nayima missed skin. She felt sorry for the new children, being raised not to touch. She absently ran her fingertips along the dirt-packed ridges in the tire’s warm rubber.
“Do you have meat?” she said.
“Five pounds of dried beef,” he said. Nayima didn’t care much for beef, but meat was meat. “In the back of the truck. And a couple of water barrels.”
Water barrels? A gift that large probably wasn’t from Raul alone, and she didn’t like owing anyone.
“From Sacramento?”
“You’re doing a school talk today, I heard. Liaison’s office asked me to come out.”
Nayima’s temper flared. She could swear she’d felt a ping at her right temple an hour before, waking her from fractured sleep. The lab-coats denied that they abused her tracking chip, but was it a coincidence she had a school obligation that day? And how dare they send so little water!
Nayima was so angry that her first words came in Spanish, because she wanted Raul’s full attention. He had taught her Spanish, just as she had taught him so much else, patient lessons through locked doors. “Que me deben créditos, Raul. They owe a lot more than two barrels.”
“You’ll get your créditos. This is just . . .” He waved his hand, summoning the right word. Then he gave up. “Por favor, Nayima. Take them. You earned them.” He tested the air pressure in his tire with a pound of his fist. “Gracias a Díos this is okay.”
Nayima’s shaky faith had been shattered during the Plague, but Raul still held fast to his God. He told us the Apocalypse was coming in Revelation, he always said, as if that excused it all. Nayima still believed Sunday dinner should be special, but only to honor the memory of her grandmother’s weekly feasts.
Two new orange water barrels stood in the bed of Raul’s truck. Large ones. She needed more credits to get her faucets running, but the barrels would last a while. Nayima climbed up, grabbing the bed’s door to swing her leg over. She winced at the pain in her knees as she landed. She treasured the freedom to move her body, but movement came with a cost.
“¿Estás bien, querida?” Raul said.
“Just my knees. Stop fussing.”
Nayima fumbled with an unmarked plastic crate tied beside the closest barrel.
“Don’t open that yet,” Raul said.
But she already had. Inside, she found the beef, wrapped in paper and twine. Still not quite dry, judging by the grease spots.
But she forgot the jerky when she saw two dolls, both long-haired girls, one with brown skin, one white. The dolls’ hands were painted with blue plastic gloves, but nothing else. They had lost their clothes, lying atop a folded, obscenely pink blanket.
“What the hell’s this?” Nayima said.
Raul walked closer as if he carried a heavy sack of across his shoulders. “I wanted to talk to you,” he said, voice low. He reached toward her. “Come down. Walk with me.”
“Bullshit,” she said. “Why is Sacramento sending me dolls?”
“Bejar de la truck,” Raul insisted. “Por favor. Let’s walk. I have to tell you something.”
Nayima was certain Raul had sold her out in some way, she just couldn’t guess how. Raul had always been more willing to play political games; he’d been so much younger when he’d been found, raised without knowing any better. So Raul’s house had expensive solar panels that kept his water piping hot and other niceties she did not bother to covet. His old pickup truck, which ran on precious ethanol and gasoline, was ano
ther of his luxuries for the extra time and blood he was always willing to give the lab-coats.
Nayima climbed out of the truck more carefully than she’d climbed in, refusing Raul’s aid. Living in small spaces for most of her life had left her joints irritable and stiff, even with daily exercises to loosen them. If she’d had the energy or balance, she would have shoved Raul down on his ass.
“Start talking,” she said. “What have you done?”
“Put the gun down first.”
Nayima hadn’t realized she was pointing the shotgun at him. She lowered it. “Tell me ahora, Raul. No hay más secretos.” Raul’s secrets stung more than anyone else’s.
“I won a ruling,” Raul said.
“About what? Free toys?”
Raul stared out toward the thirsty grasslands. “I have a library portal at my house . . .” he began.
Of course he did. Toys and gadgets. That was Raul.
Raul went on. “I did some research on . . . the embryos.”
Nayima’s cheek flared as if he’d struck her. During Reconciliation, she and Raul had learned that dozens of embryos had been created from her eggs and his sperm, more than they’d known. They had been the cocktail du jour; something about their blood types. Her heart gave a sudden sick tumbling in her chest, as if to drown him out.
“There’s a bebé, Nayima,” he said, whispering like wind. “One survived.”
The world went white. Her eyesight, her thoughts, lost.
“What? When?”
“She just turned four,” he said. “She’s still in the research compound.”
There was a she somewhere?
“How long have you known?”
“Six months,” he said. “When I got the portal. I saw rumors of the surviving infant, did the research. She’s one of ours. They never told us.”
Now Nayima’s sacrifices seemed fresh: the involuntary harvesting of her eggs, three first-trimester miscarriages after forced insemination, a succession of unviable embryos created in labs, and two premature live births of infants from artificial wombs who had never survived beyond a day. Pieces of her chopped away.
“We can’t reproduce,” she said.
“But one lived,” Raul said. “They don’t know why.”
“You’ve known all this time? And you never told me?”
He sighed. “Lo siento, Nayima. I hated hiding it. But I knew it would upset you. Or you might work against me. I didn’t want to say anything until I got a ruling. As the biological father, I have rights.”
“Carriers don’t have rights.”
“Parental rights,” Raul said. “For the first time — yes, we do.”
Nayima despised herself for her volcanic emotions. How could Raul be naïve enough to believe Sacramento’s lies? If there was a surviving child — which she did not believe — they would not release their precious property to carriers.
“It’s a trick,” she said. “To get us to go back there.”
Raul shook his head slowly. Impossibly, he smiled. “No, Nayima,” he said. “They’re sending her to us. To you. She’s free under Reconciliation to be with her parents. All you have to do is sign the consent when they come.”
Nayima needed to sit, so she ignored her sore joints and sat where she’d been standing, on the caked dirt of her road. The air felt thick and heavy in her lungs.
“No,” Nayima said. Saying the word gave her strength. “No no no. We can’t. It’s a trap. Even if there’s a girl . . .” It was so improbable, Nayima could barely say the words. “And there isn’t . . . But even if there is, why would they offer her except as a weapon against us? To threaten us? To control us? Why do they keep trying so hard to make children from us? She’s not from my womb, so she doesn’t have the antibodies. Think about it! We’re just . . . reserves for them. A blood supply, if they ever need it. That’s the only reason we’re still alive.”
Raul’s eyes dropped. He couldn’t deny it.
“She’s our child,” Raul said. “Ella es nuestra bebé. We can’t leave her there.”
“You can’t — but I can,” she said. “Watch me.”
Raul’s voice cracked. “The ruling says both living parents must consent. I need you with me on this, Nayima.”
“I’m an old woman now!” Nayima said. Her throat burned hot.
“And I’m fifty-six,” Raul said. “But we had una hija together. The marshals are bringing her here tomorrow.”
“You’re sending marshals to me?” The last time marshals came to see her in the territories after only nine months, a pack of them had removed her from the house she had chosen and stolen half of her chickens, shooting a dozen dead just for fun. Her earliest taste of freedom had been a false start, victim to a government property dispute.
“Marshals aren’t like they were,” Raul said. “Things are changing, Nayima.” Like he was scolding her.
Raul lowered the truck’s bed door and pulled out the plastic crate. He carried it to her porch. Next, he took down the barrels and rolled them to the house one by one. The heavy barrels thundered across the soil.
When he returned, breathing hard, Nayima was on her feet again, with her gun. She jacked a shell into the chamber. “You could’ve shot me before I did all that work,” Raul said.
“I’m not shooting you yet,” she said. “But any marshals that show up here tomorrow are declaring war. They might bring her, but they could take her at any time. We’re all property! I won’t give them that power over me. She’s better off dead. I’m not afraid to die too.”
Raul gave her a forlorn look before he walked past her and slammed the bed of his truck shut. “I was hoping for some eggs, pero maybe mañana.”
“I swear to your God, Raul, I will kill anyone who comes to this house.”
Raul opened his driver’s side door and began to climb back inside, but he stopped to look at her over his shoulder. He had left his truck idling. He had never planned to stay long.
“She doesn’t have a name,” he said.
“What?”
“Nobody bothered to name her. In the records, she’s called Specimen 120. Punto. Some of the researchers call her Chubby for a nickname. Like a pet, Nayima. Our hija.”
The weight of the shotgun made Nayima’s arms tremble.
“Don’t bring anyone here,” she said. “Please.”
Raul got in the truck and slammed the door. He lurched into reverse, turned the truck away, and drove. Nayima fired once into the air, a roar of rage that echoed across the flatlands. The shotgun kicked in her arms like an angry baby.
After the engine’s hum was lost in the open air, the only sound was Nayima’s wretched sobs.
• • • •
In her front room, Nayima’s comm screen flared white, turning itself on. A minder waited in five-by-five on her wall, as though she’d been invited to breakfast. The light haloing her was bright enough to show old acne scars. Makeup had yet to make a comeback, except the enhanced red lips favored by both men and women. Full of life.
“Hello, Nayima,” the minder said. Then she corrected herself: “Ms. Dixon.”
Nayima nodded cordially. Nayima’s grandmother, born in Alabama, had never stood for being called by her first name, and neither did Nayima — an admittedly old-fashioned trait at a time when numbers mattered more than names.
The minder seemed to notice Nayima’s puffed eyes, and her polite veneer dulled. “You remember the guidelines?”
Guideline One and Only: She was not to criticize the lab-coats or make it sound as if she had been treated badly. Blah blah blah and so forth. Questions about the embryo — the girl — broiled in Nayima’s mind, but she didn’t dare bring her up. Maybe the marshals wouldn’t come. Maybe she could still get her water credits.
“Yes,” Nayima said, testing her thin voice.
“We added younger students this year,” the minder said. “Stand by.”
Three smaller squares appeared inset beneath the girl’s image — classrooms, the children
progressively older in each. The far left square held the image of twelve wriggling, worming children ages about three to six sprawled across a floor with a red mat. A few in the front sat transfixed by her image on what seemed to be a looming screen, high above them. Every child wore tiny, powder blue plastic gloves.
Nayima had to look away from the smallest children. She had not seen children so young in forty years, and the sight of them was acid to her eyes.
Hadn’t Raul said the girl was four?
Nayima blinked rapidly, her eyes itching with tears.
Crying, she was certain, was against the guidelines.
Nayima willed herself to look at the young, moony faces, braving memories of tiny bodies rotting on sidewalks, in cars, on the roadways, mummified in closets. These were new children — untouched by Plague. Their parents had been the wealthy, the isolated, the truly Chosen — the infinitesimal number of survivors who were not carriers, who did not have the antibodies, but had simply, somehow, survived.
Nayima leaned closer to her screen. “Boo!” she said.
Young eyes widened with terror. Children scooted away.
But when Nayima smiled, the entire mass of them quivered with laughter, a sea of perfect teeth.
Nayima’s teeth were not perfect. She had never replaced the lower front tooth she’d lost to a lab-coat she’d smacked across his nose, drawing blood. He’d strapped her to a table, raped her, and extracted her tooth on the spot, without anesthesia.
Nayima had been offered a dental implant during Reconciliation, but a new tooth felt like a lie, so she had refused. In previous classroom visits, she had answered the question What happened to your tooth? without bitterness — why should she feel contempt for brutes any more than she would a tree dropping leaves? — until a minder pointed out that the anecdote about her extracted tooth violated the guidelines.
The guidelines left Nayima with very little to say. She chose each word with painful care.
These schoolchildren asked the usual questions: why she had survived (genetic predisposition), how many people she had infected (only one personally, as far as she knew), how many carriers were left (fifteen, since most known carriers were “gone now”). By the fourth question, Nayima had lost her will to look at the children’s faces. It was harder all the time.
The End Has Come Page 19
