After the End: Recent Apocalypses

by Kage Baker

  “I need to see it,” she told me.

  So we went. One thing I noticed about Timia’s ghettos is that you didn’t see one Ginenian. You saw them at the poetry slams and always in the tea shops but never ever in ghettos. I guess that was sinking too low for them.

  Sometimes Tumaki and I just walked the streets at night. Because we could. And I knew Tumaki liked the risk of it, though deep down she knew that I’d never let anything happen to her.

  Nonetheless, we spent the most time down in her library. We didn’t have to wait until night to go here. I’d meet her here after she finished school, when she didn’t have to work or on her days off on the weekends. We’d simply read and enjoy each other’s company. It was the first time I’d really had a chance to sit down and educate myself since my abilities had begun to manifest. Back home, school was not a good place for me. I was “The Boy That God Was Angry With,” “The Kid Who Kept Getting Struck by Lightning,” the butt of everyone’s jokes.

  “This book was amazing,” Tumaki would say, shoving a thick book in my hand. Or she’d say, “You’ve got to read this! It’ll change your life!” I couldn’t not listen to her. I was in love with her, I guess . . . if I want to use that cliché overused damn-near-meaningless word.

  Anyway, I must have read hundreds of books in those months. Reading kept thoughts of my parents at bay. And it helped me make sense of the strong anti-meta-human discrimination I saw in Timia. I was slowly running out of money but I’d cross that bridge when I got to it. I wasn’t thinking about my future at all.

  I read about witch hunts, persecution, racism, tribalism, infanticide. I read about the genocides that had taken place in the world so many decades ago. In Germany, Rwanda, Bosnia, Sudan, Kosovo. I memorized the eight stages; classification, symbolization, dehumanization, organization, polarization, preparation, extermination, and denial. I, of course, read extensively about slavery and those who fought for freedom. I read about the pollution and eventual nuclear destruction of the environment.

  I read about camels. I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X (I usually don’t care for super-old books like that when it’s not history but I liked this book very, very much). Tumaki made me read some of those novels about Muslim women . . . not bad, except for the ones that were mostly about perfumed and oiled girls dodging eager men and landing a rich princely husband.

  My brain must have doubled in size.

  Rainmaker

  Tumaki didn’t wear make-up. Even without the burka she had no need for it. She only lied when she had to. Like when her mother asked about me. She told her that I was just a friend and that I was harmless. Her mother would have had me beheaded if she knew that I knew every part of Tumaki. Every part.

  Tumaki wasn’t deceptive and because she grew up around trust, it was easy to learn to trust me. She quietly worked hard to earn mine. At first, I couldn’t see past her looks. Then, as time passed, yes, I began to trust her, too. Bit by bit.

  You think of the times in your life where you actual accomplish something useful and good. Where you create love and beauty. Then when you reach the bad ugly place, where everything is a rainy prison, you understand that life is meant to be lived. We are meant to go on.

  That’s what I tell myself here. Each day we get closer and each day those good days with Tumaki get farther and farther away. Soon it will be as if they never happened at all. It will be as if none of this happened. It will only be the wind, the rain, the lightning, this great storm.

  Paradise Lost

  Now, listen.

  I’m not telling the story of my relationship with Tumaki. That was gloriously normal. Textbook stuff. She and I were good together, when you didn’t count all the outside stuff—like her being from a Muslim, fairly well-off family, and me being a meta-human ex-slave who’d been rejected from his basically Catholic stinking-rich family. I told Tumaki a little about my past. And she didn’t ask much more. She knew the basics. My secrets were not her preoccupation.

  The story I’m trying to tell started when Tumaki’s father disappeared.

  Recall the incident I saw with the little boy shadow speaker. I saw so much of that in Timia. Meta-humans treated like radioactive cancer-causing evil infidel waste. Meta-humans were threats to small children and wholesome family values. They caused women to become sterile. They were the cause of all that had gone wrong. It was the Ginen folk spreading these stupid rumors.

  But local people took to it like fish to water. They loved the Ginen folk like people love superstars and the wealthy. You could see it in their eyes. Women would swoon over the young Ginen men. Men would chase after Ginen women like they’d lost their damn minds. I have to hand it to the Ginenians, they had style. Their clothes were always the most fashionable. They had a way of speaking that sounded like music to your ears—I think some of this had to do with the magic involved in their language. And they always had money from selling their rare items.

  It was the people, the natives of Niger, who took to calling meta-humans (and anyone who sympathized with or gave birth to them) “cockroaches.”

  It was a slow disease in Timia. I might have left that city if it weren’t for Tumaki. Hiding away in her library, I didn’t realize how bad it was getting. Not until the day she came running down the winding staircase, shaking, eyes wide and wet. I’d been waiting down there for an hour.

  I jumped up and ran to her. “Tumaki! What . . . ”

  She snatched her hand from mine as she threw off her dark blue burka and let loose a string of obscenities that even impressed me.

  “What?” I asked again. “What happened?”

  “My papa!” she shouted. Her left eye was twitching as she sat down on the couch. She stood up and started pacing. Then she made to go up the staircase. “I have to make sure . . . ”

  I grabbed her hand. “Will you tell me—”

  She whirled around. The look on her face made me back away. I thought she was about to punch me. Her panicked rage practically burst from her skin. “They took him!”

  “Who?”

  “Some men.” She shook her head. “And one woman. All of them strong like oxen. People were cheering! How can that be? People of his own home!”

  “But why?”

  “People are suddenly disappearing all over Timia,” she snapped. “Haven’t you noticed?

  I shook my head.

  “Oh Allah! They took my papa, o!” she wailed. She screamed and moaned. I didn’t dare touch her. Eventually, minutes later, she knelt down and was silent. She shut her eyes. When she opened them, she was calm. She stood and grabbed my hand. “Come, Dikéogu,” she said, her voice steady, her eyes blank. “I don’t care what my mother says.”

  We went up the stairs, across the yard, into her house.

  Her mother didn’t care, either. She didn’t ask why I was with her daughter alone or why I was in her house. It was the house of wealthy folks. It reminded me of my home in Arondizuogu, but not as obnoxious. The floors were wooden, not marble. The furniture was plush, sturdy, and well-made, but probably not black leather imported from Italy.

  There was a large picture with a white silk veil over it. I assumed this was a portrait of Tumaki’s father. The house reeked of burned rice and Tumaki had to run to the kitchen to turn the heat off the pot. Her mother just sat there on the couch. She wore no burka and she stared blankly ahead. It was my first time seeing her face. Tumaki was the spitting image of her mother.

  “It was only a matter of time,” her mother whispered. “Of course they’ll take the imams first. Right there in the mosque. They have no respect.”

  Tumaki brought her a glass of water. Her mother took it absentmindedly. Tumaki looked at me and then back at her mother. “He should have kept quiet,” her mother said. She whimpered. “He used to watch windseekers fly about at night when the bats were out; when they thought no one would see them.” She set the water on the rug beneath her feet.

  That day, I moved my things from the hotel into Tumaki’s h
ome.

  I walked the streets, letting people assume I was a slave. The slave of Tumaki and her mother. I went shopping for them. I helped Tumaki in their electronics shop. I went to tea shops to listen to gossip. The government was finally doing what “needed to be done,” some drunken blockhead said. Everyone, including me, mumbled assent.

  “Soon this city will be free of meta-humans and troublemakers.” More mumbled agreement, this time a bit livelier.

  “Good riddance,” a woman muttered.

  It was all happening so fast.

  Within one week, I stopped seeing meta-humans with obvious characteristics in Timia. No windseekers; they brought wind wherever they went. No metal workers; they attracted things like earrings, necklaces, and keys just by standing near people. No shadow speakers with their weird eyes. Professors started disappearing. And certain students, many of whom we’d seen at the poetry slams, disappeared, too.

  Two weeks later, Tumaki’s mother’s shop was ransacked, then burned down. Two days after that, her mother disappeared from her own bedroom.

  The streets were busy and, dare I say, jubilant. Something was very wrong with these people. It was as if they’d been programmed and then the program had been turned on.

  Tumaki and I dragged as much food and water as we could into the library and hid there. We read books and enjoyed each other, but avoided talking about anything serious. Especially about the fact that I was a rainmaker and she was a female electrician and student.

  We were down there for three days.

  By the third, we were smelly, hungry and angry. And that was when we heard people rushing down the stairs.

  Now, when you’ve been cooped up for that long in a small room, you become concentrated. You know every sound. You know every angle. And you’re a bundle of nerves. We’d been waiting for three days for something to happen.

  Tumaki had her mother’s best hammer. I had myself. But nothing could have prepared us for what came down those stairs. There were four of them. Tall, dark-skinned, bald, even the woman. They wore white long kaftans, the woman a white flowing dress made of the same flawless material. They moved swiftly down the winding stairs and they made not a sound. I mean, not . . . a . . . sound. Silent as ghosts. Once in the room, they zoomed right at Tumaki and me.

  I shoved Tumaki behind me. She tried to shove me behind her. It didn’t matter. With my peripheral vision I saw one of them zip right at Tumaki, grabbing her in his clutches. It all seemed to happen in slow motion. I turned, my mouth open. He slammed Tumaki against a bookcase. She winced, mournfully glancing at me. He had teeth like a snake, fangs. Vampire?

  “Let her g . . . ” I was grabbed from behind.

  But I saw it sink its teeth into Tumaki’s neck as she raked her nails across its face. Its skin tore away but there was no blood. It didn’t let go. Tumaki’s eyes went blank.

  I was grappling with the woman, trying to get back to Tumaki. She said into my ear, “Where do you think you’re going, cockroach?” Two more of them grabbed me.

  I didn’t hear a sound from Tumaki. But I heard the sound of her hammer dropping to the floor. In all that scuffling, I heard that.

  I’d had enough. I stopped fighting. I focused. I let burst the most powerful surge of electricity I could produce. It made a low deep deep thud!

  Screeches like you would not believe.

  Like rabid rats trapped in a tiny tiny cage.

  Spitting and hissing and high-pitched screeching.

  They fled up the stairs. I don’t know if they flew or ran or oozed or what. All I knew was that they took Tumaki. She was gone. They must have picked her up like a sack of dried dates. They’d sucked the life from her and then they took her.

  “Oh Allah, what is this, o?” I screamed. Then I just screamed and screamed until a darkness fell over my mind.

  The only gift my father really ever gave me was a thick book about an Igbo poet named Christopher Okigbo.

  A line from his poetry: “For the far removed, there is wailing.”

  It was several things about Tumaki.

  It was her books. It was the fact that she hid her books. Maybe one of the men who’d helped her install the staircase that led down to her library had told on her. It was her tinkering. It was how she knew to wear her burka despite all this. It was her pride. It was her wanting to attend university. And it was probably her parents.

  I have no doubts about why they killed her.

  I went mad.

  Darkness crowded in on me. Down there in her library, all alone. I barely noticed. Tumaki was gone. I’d seen one of those creatures bite her. Her eyes had gone out. Like a light. I loved her. I was consumed by terror, shock, rage, shame. I tore at the neck of my caftan. I had no one left. A breeze lifted up around me.

  It oozed up though the library floor like some ancient crude oil. It pooled around me, whispering and sighing. It was nothing but a breeze. It was opportunistic, searching for a way into me. I could feel something else bubbling up in me, just as I could feel the darkness oozing around my feet: The Destruction. I wanted to destroy all things. Murder, mayhem, havoc. Crush, Kill, Destroy. “Yessssss,” the darkness whispered to me, like the sound of whirling sand. “Sssssssssss.”

  Only my utter grief made me flee deep into myself instead of taking it out on what was outside myself, and maybe a tiny shred of humanity, too. I was lucky . . . in a way. In another way, I wonder if I’d have been better off succumbing to the thing from outside the cocoa farm that seemed to have followed me into Tumaki’s library, like some lethal black smoky snake that had waited for the right moment to strike.

  A large chunk of my life remains mostly a blank and the few short moments that I remember was just more badness. I do not recall leaving the library, or the city of Timia. I briefly recall some idiot of a man grabbed me and told me I was going with his family to Agadez. He needed someone to help him with his camels. He read my tattoos as the mark of a slave, though they were of a slave and rainmaker. I let him. In Agadez, I slipped away in the dead of night two days later. My memory is blank for weeks after this. In the following months, I’d mentally surface for an hour or two, finding myself in this town or that town. So much blank memory. I’ll not talk about the worst of it.

  My mind was unhinged. I forgot Tumaki. I forgot myself.

  Somehow I ended up nearly dead in the desert squinting up at that curious tall man whose face was covered by an indigo veil. He stood feet away from me, unmoving like some djinni. I think it was being nearly dead that finally woke me up. The closeness of death has a way of awakening even the most damaged senses.

  Nnedi Okorafor (nnedi.com) is an author of Nigerian descent. In a profile of her work, the New York Times called her imagination “stunning.” Okorafor’s novels include Zahrah the Windseeker (winner of the Wole Soyinka Prize for African Literature), The Shadow Speaker (winner of the CBS Parallax Award), and Long Juju Man (winner of the Macmillan Writer’s Prize for Africa). Her latest novel is Who Fears. Her first short story collection—Kabu Kabu—will be published this fall. Okorafor holds a PhD in English and currently is a professor of creative writing at Chicago State University.

  Global warming and other factors have left Mexico better off than the US. After the End, America is slowly eroding and some portions—like the Southwest—have become no-man’s-lands. Mexico sends some help to its northern neighbor, but one aid-giver has more than humanitarian reasons to travel there.

  THE EGG MAN

  Mary Rosenblum

  Zipakna halted at midday to let the Dragon power up the batteries. He checked on the chickens clucking contentedly in their travel crates, then went outside to squat in the shade of one fully deployed solar wing in the 43 centigrade heat. Ilena, his sometimes-lover and poker partner, accused him of reverse snobbery, priding himself on being able to survive in the Sonoran heat without air conditioning. Zipakna smiled and tilted his water bottle, savoring the cool, sweet trickle of water across his tongue.

  Not true, of cou
rse. He held still as the first wild bees found him, buzzed past his face to settle and sip from the sweat-drops beading on his skin. Killers. He held very still, but the caution wasn’t really necessary. Thirst was the great gentler here. Every other drive was laid aside in the pursuit of water.

  Even love?

  He laughed a short note as the killers buzzed and sipped. So Ilena claimed, but she just missed him when she played the tourists without him. It had been mostly tourists from China lately, filling the underwater resorts in the Sea of Cortez. Chinese were rich and tough players and Ilena had been angry at him for leaving. But he always left in spring. She knew that. In front of him, the scarp he had been traversing ended in a bluff, eroded by water that had fallen here eons ago. The plain below spread out in tones of ochre and russet, dotted with dusty clumps of sage and the stark upward thrust of saguaro, lonely sentinels contemplating the desiccated plain of the Sonoran and in the distance, the ruins of a town. Paloma? Zipakna tilted his wrist, called up his position on his link. Yes, that was it. He had wandered a bit farther eastward than he’d thought and had cut through the edge of the Pima preserve. Sure enough, a fine had been levied against his account. He sighed. He serviced the Pima settlement out here and they didn’t mind if he trespassed. It merely became a bargaining chip when it came time to talk price. The Pima loved to bargain.

  He really should let the nav-link plot his course, but Ilena was right about that, at least. He prided himself on finding his way through the Sonora without it. Zipakna squinted as a flicker of movement caught his eye. A lizard? Maybe. Or one of the tough desert rodents. They didn’t need to drink, got their water from seeds and cactus fruit. More adaptable than Homo sapiens, he thought, and smiled grimly.

  He pulled his binocs from his belt pouch and focused on the movement. The digital lenses seemed to suck him through the air like a thrown spear, gray-ochre blur resolving into stone, mica flash, and yes, the brown and gray shape of a lizard. The creature’s head swiveled, throat pulsing, so that it seemed to stare straight into his eyes. Then, in an eyeblink, it vanished. The Dragon chimed its full battery load. Time to go. He stood carefully, a cloud of thirsty killer bees and native wasps buzzing about him, shook free of them and slipped into the coolness of the Dragon’s interior. The hens clucked in the rear and the Dragon furled its solar wings and lurched forward, crawling down over the edge of the scarp, down to the plain below and its saguaro sentinels.