After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia (19 page)

“I left money on the table. You can order a pizza. I want you in bed by eleven, your
sister by nine. And no playing video games till your homework’s done.”

Jenna said, “Let’s play baseball when we get home! Mom bought me a new mitt.”

“I’m not playing with you, loser!”

“Hey! Don’t you dare talk to your sister that way!” Mom said. “You’ll play with her
or no video games for a month.”

I crossed my arms and sulked, and Jenna returned her attention to her pocket game.
“You’re not like him,” she said.

“What?”

“Dad would always play with me when I asked.”

Mom sighed deeply as she raced down Ocean Avenue toward home, speeding through a yellow
light. Just ten minutes ago, my high school future had held so much promise. Now everyone
would be talking about Russell Broward, the kid whose mom picks him up from the Track.
I’d be a dork in their eyes forever.

“I hate you,”
I whispered.

“What did you say?”

We zoomed past three kids popping wheelies, laughing as they raced toward the preserve.
“I so hate you both.”

Jenna’s tears have run out, which is good because the white-skinned Creepy in left
field has begun to dig up the grasses and vomit jewels into the holes. The others
are fidgeting too. This game won’t last much longer. Jenna stands, wipes her cheeks,
and with a jab to the ground, frees the bat of its doughnut. I straighten her hat,
give her my best smile, and pat her backside as she steps up to the plate.

The catcher is some sort of shapeless ball of worms, which reminds me of the squirming
things I once found in our cat Lucifer’s shit, but this Creepy is exceptionally good
at catching the ball and returning it to the yellow-eyed pitcher on cue. It says to
Jenna, “Your not-rot is repulsive to us,” which I assume is some sort of insult intended
to upset her hitting ability.

(Yeah, these Creepies learn fast.)

Jenna steps into the batter’s box, and the many-toothed cat tosses three pitches—all
balls, the umpire declares. Jenna takes them with the steadiness of a mountain.

The next pitch. Jenna swings. For a ten-year-old she’s got quite the upper-body strength.
The ball makes a metallic ping as it connects with the bat, flies over my head to
crash into the windshield of a car.

“Foul ball,” the umpire declares, and distantly, something not quite human screams.

“C’mon Jenna! You can hit the ball!” I cheer. “No pitcher! No pitcher!”

The pitcher’s eyes flicker like moonlit gold.

She takes the pitch. It’s clearly high and outside, but the umpire calls, “Strike
two!”

“What?!” I storm toward him, cursing. “That was totally high and away!”

“Step away from me,” the fish-creature says. “Or I will devour your immortal self.”
He spreads his batlike wings, and on his scaly hide I see dozens of tiny faces crying
out in pain. I leap back, horrified.

“Don’t worry, Russell, I’ve got this,” Jenna says, and her defiance centers me. “These
Creepies got nothing on me.”

“Who you calling creepy?” the worm-creature says.

I step back to my place beside the dugout as the pitcher lofts the next pitch. I hold
my breath as Jenna swings…and connects! A line drive flies over the second baseman’s
head, to land in right field. Jenna screams with joy and sprints to first. A Creepy
made of a thousand hands with eyeballs in their palms fields the ball. It catapults
it to the shortstop, covering second by rolling end over end. I tell Jenna to hold
up at first.

She’s the tying run. We may win this game after all.

“I hit it! I did it!” Jenna screams, over and over. She falls to the ground, hysterically
laughing—or crying. I can’t tell which.

Three weeks after that awful first day of school, the leaves had fallen, and so had
my hopes of being anything other than what I was last year, that nerd who hung out
with Vinny. I went to the Track a few times, but Maeve was never there, and when I
passed her in the hall, she just nodded politely and kept on walking. Whenever I brought
up the subject with Vinny, he just cracked his neck and said, “Tragic.”

As Mr. Verini droned on about the Peloponnesian War, I stared out the window at the
approaching black clouds. I hoped for a violent thunderstorm, something to break my
boredom. I watched Maeve’s left hand scrawl out neatly written notes and wondered
how it was possible to sit so close to her and yet be so far away. Last week I’d heard
she started dating Eric Kellerman, and I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d stayed at
the Track that first day of school, it would have been me.

I decided that when I got home I’d trash the new Nimbus game levels I’d created, even
if they did give Vinny a hard-on. They bored me, and I had ideas for new ones, better
ones, with hundred-story skyscrapers, and bridges that spanned chasms of fire. I started
to sketch them out in my notebook, when our classroom shook with thunder.

The lights flickered. Diana Golina yelped, and the class laughed. “Settle down,” Mr.
Verini said. He resumed his lesson. He would not be thwarted by mere weather. But
the next tremor knocked the corkboard from the wall, and a look of worry crossed his
face. I glanced at Maeve, whose mouth was open as if to speak.

Then it happened.

A tremendous groan and screech, like a battleship being torn in two. The lights sparked
and went out. Everyone screamed. In the twilight I saw a wall come rushing toward
me. I panicked, covered my head.

I must have passed out, because when I opened my eyes, everything was quiet. My legs
were covered with broken cinder blocks, but somehow my head had ended up under a desk.
My legs were cut and bleeding, but I managed to free myself from the rubble. I stood
on a heap of fallen stone, shivered in the strangely warm air, and looked around me.

The school was destroyed. Crooked rebar poked from steaming piles of shattered stone.
Small fires burned. Trapped kids cried, their voices muffled by tons of concrete.
The sky shined with an endless spray of stars, a sky like you’d see in the deepest,
darkest woods. But that didn’t make sense because the sun was up and glowing, bright
as noon, giving everything long, strange shadows that shook like rattlesnake tails.
And there were mountains in the air. No…not mountains. It seemed as if whole towns
had been ripped from the earth and flung into the sky. I blinked, shivered, didn’t
understand what I was seeing, when I heard cries beneath me.

Under a pile of broken cinder blocks was a hand, a pen still wrapped in its fingers.
I tossed away stones, revealing a shoulder, a neck…a head.

Her cherry red Ray-Bans had snapped in two. Her eyes were open, unblinking, pushed
from their sockets. I turned away, threw up.

I heard more cries, heaved more stones, but I quickly realized that I couldn’t do
this alone. I listened but heard no sirens, no evidence of help arriving. I walked
in a daze around the school, trying to convince myself this was just a bad dream,
when I saw a figure at the edge of the school property. He twisted his neck, cracking
it. I ran to him, screaming.

“Vinny, Vinny! Ohmygod, what happened? An earthquake? God, Maeve’s dead. She’s dead,
Vinny! What’s wrong with the sky?” I spoke so quickly I didn’t realize I was crying.
He stared calmly at me, waited for me to finish. And that’s when I realized his skin
had a pale glow, that through his expressionless face I could see the crumbled houses
on the other side of the street. He twisted his neck, released. I didn’t hear a crack.

“Vinny?” He twisted his neck again. And again. And again. “
Vinny!
What’s happening?”

All around me, see-through kids and teachers climbed out of the smoking rubble. They
seemed confused, lost. I poked and prodded, shook and slapped, but none woke from
their mindless trance. “Listen to me, goddamnit!” And, as if choreographed, all heads
turned in my direction together. Terrified, I ran.

Five blocks away, on a street that had buckled up as if the earth had been unzipped,
I ran out of breath, and I remembered. “Oh, god! Jenna! Mom!”

I ran past dozens of translucent people on my way to Birch Lane Elementary, gave them
a wide berth, which was just as well because they didn’t seem interested in me or,
for that matter, anything at all. Houses had collapsed, and mindless people milled
about in upturned yards, standing, staring. I tried to ignore the sky, but was mesmerized
by a billion overbright stars and an asteroid belt made of stones etched with the
circuit-board landscape of cities, leaking water from broken sewers in long, sparkling
tails.

I found her sitting on the curb in front of the school, her Hello Kitty knapsack on
her back, her eyes wide and vacant. I gasped.

“Jenna! Jenna! Are you all right?”

She didn’t move. “Mom was supposed to pick me up from school today.” A line of blood
trickled from her left ear. I was so happy when I realized I couldn’t see through
her, that she was real flesh and bone.

“C’mon,” I said, taking her hand. “I’m taking you home.”

I led her down a buckled street. Three houses attached to a clump of dirt tumbled
overhead. In one of the backyards a dangling swing spun around three hundred and sixty
degrees, like a clock’s hand, as the houses rolled in the air. “That blue one’s Chrissie’s
house,” Jenna said. A row of tall spruces scraped their tops along the street, leaving
a trail of pine needles. “She has a lot of American Girl dolls. But I have more Barbies.”
The houses drifted off with the wind.

We reached a break in the road, a cliff where the earth just fell away. I held Jenna’s
hand as we peered over the edge. Below the pavement was a layer of red clay, veined
with the severed roots of trees. Below that lay an assortment of broken sewers and
torn electrical cables, spilling foul liquid, popping and sparking. Farther down,
a thick layer of bedrock. And a few hundred feet after that, the layers ended. Beyond
were stars a million light-years away, nebulae that crossed the sky like smeared lipstick,
all within an infinite sea of black. Then I knew. We weren’t on Earth anymore. We
were floating on a clump, too.

“But this is the way home, Russell!” Jenna said, looking up at me. “How do we get
home?”

A Ken is up after Jenna. Why I chose this particular batting order baffles me now.
A home run from me could win the game, but the soul-eating umpire won’t let me change
the order. After seeing the tortured faces in its hide, I decide it’s best not to
argue.

The Ken looks like he was about thirty-five when the event happened, and judging by
his suit and name tag (“Arthur”), possibly worked in a bank or a hotel. I tell him
to step up to the plate, do his best to hit the ball, and if his empty eyes comprehend
anything at all, they don’t show it. But, like all the Kens and Barbies, he does what
he’s told.

He lifts the bat over his left shoulder. A lefty. And based on his stance, I figure
he might once have played this game when he still had a soul. I’m not sure how much
of the person is left behind, or if the Kens and Barbies are more like tires rolling
down a hill, unable to alter their course once set in motion until something smacks
into them from the outside.