After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia (28 page)

Dad stayed in the bunker for seven more days. The structure was open at each end but
they built zigzag walls leading out from it, so there were no straight lines for his
pacemaker EMF to leak out.

Jeremy scavenged food from the condos, fishing food out of pantries with long sticks—lucking
out early on with plastic jars of peanut butter and spaghetti sauce. He went alone,
moving carefully among the slowly collapsing buildings, and he always came back with
food or liquids. No cans, of course. No jars with metal lids.

Fortunately, most of the residents had fled early on.
Most.
He didn’t talk about the bodies he
did
find until Dad, stir-crazy in the bunker, wanted to run for it.

Laurie and Jeremy built a solar still with clear plastic sheets and a hose, and the
surface of the pond was substantially lower by the time the National Guard found them.

The Guard moved Dad thirty miles to the west, shielded by sandbags, on the back of
an improvised cart, and when they got to a place where they couldn’t find any bugs,
they put a white chalk symbol on the ground twenty yards across. A helicopter dropped
down from ten thousand feet just long enough for them to throw Dad aboard. Bugs came,
but the copter went high, fast, shooting for the thin air at the upper reaches of
its operational altitude.

It worked. The bugs couldn’t keep up, and the helicopter didn’t fall out of the sky.

Mom, Laurie, and Jeremy didn’t see Dad for another two weeks—the time it took them
to walk out—but he was waiting for them when they crossed out of the zone, near Calexico.

The bugs were behind them, still reproducing, but they weren’t spreading out of Arizona
and New Mexico, a guardsman told Jeremy.

“We don’t know why. Maybe they only like the areas with sunshine? Or they’re consolidating
before they expand farther?”

Like Jeremy, the soldier had half-healed bug burns across his face. Jeremy had told
him about the bodies he’d found in the condos.

The soldier understood. “With holes in their heads, right? Mostly around the jaw?”

Jeremy gulped and nodded.

The soldier hooked a finger in his mouth and pulled his cheek back to show a gap in
his molars. “Once we realized what they were after, I had my CO knock out that crown
using a rock and a stick as a chisel. This was after we starting ditching all our
metal gear.

“It was nice getting your dad out. We found too many people who stayed, with metal
crowns or artificial joints. I mean, we saved one guy by amputating his leg while
the bugs were working on his artificial knee; and we knocked a lot of teeth out. Your
dad, though, is the only survivor I saw with an electronic prosthesis. Saw a lot of
nonsurvivors.”

Then the soldier shook his head, smiling slightly. “Almost weirder are the survivors
who’ve stayed in there, trying to make it without metal, staying clear of the bugs.
We were told to evacuate
everybody
, but it’s hard enough getting the people out who
want
to leave.” He scratched gently at one of his new scars. “Wonder if they’ll make it?”

Dad moved them to Maine, and he would’ve moved farther if there’d been any place in
the Continental United States that was farther from the bugs. Jeremy couldn’t blame
him. If Jeremy had a pacemaker, he’d do the same.

When kids asked him about the scars on his face, he told them the truth, but they
usually looked at him like he was crazy, like he was making it up.

Fine. They weren’t there. They couldn’t really know.

Jeremy tried to be a good kid, working hard in school. He read everything he could
find on the bugs and their dominion, the newly declared Southwest Emergency Zone.
He made a special effort to get along with his sister. His parents had been through
enough, he thought, and he did his best to ease their days.

It was going to be hard enough on them later, when he went back.

The Annals of New Poitiers

After the Fourth Great War, when most of the cities of the world were leveled, for
decades the people lived without governance. Until our city was built, and those who
would become the Court came together and decided that the element of the population
that in the past had caused crime and unrest—the young, angry, and disadvantaged men
who had been sent into a hundred pointless wars—needed a war that made sense to them,
needed to compete for a real and fixed goal.

They also, for the good of the rest of the city, needed to be eliminated.

The reward of a hero in children’s stories is the hand of a princess, the fairest
of them all, and half her kingdom. Power and beauty is what men fight for.

The people who would become the Court created the most beautiful woman who ever lived,
and held the first Trials. They set the traditional tasks of the maze, the monster,
and the mystery, built the maze beneath the city for men to get through, created the
monster for the men to fight, and made up the riddle for men to think their way past.
Every step of the way, the men had to battle with each other, because they knew that
only one of them would be allowed out alive. Every unmarried man who did not receive
the dispensation of the Court had to participate in the Trials.

All but one of the men died, and that one married the queen. With its most violent
element eliminated, the city was at peace.

It was clear to all that the way to ensure civil peace was to repeat the Trials.

We created the most beautiful woman in the world again, and again.

The Court-Ordained Trials Rules

• The Trials must take place every generation: that is, every twenty-five years, or
  when the old queen dies and the princess inherits. The Trials may be delayed or put
  forward according to the judgment of the Court, but it must not be delayed more than
  two years. Each queen is designed to last no more than forty years.
  
• Men of Court families, and other families the Court determines to be contributing
  to society, are exempt from entering the Trials.
  
• To be considered for exemption, families must pay the Court five hundred drachmae
  per head.
  
• Married men are exempt from entering the Trials, but as marriage must not be entered
  into lightly, every man must pay a brideprice. Each family may set their own bride-prices
  for their daughters, but it cannot be less than a hundred drachmae. A bride should
  be treasured, as the queen must be treasured.
  
• All volunteers for the Trials will be accepted. Wishing to enter shows either a commendable
  desire for the queen, or a volatile and violent spirit that needs eliminating.
  
• An order of men will be set up who are trained for the Trials from childhood. Any
  family who gives one son to the Order will be given exemption for another son. The
  Trials offer hope to all contestants, but a properly trained man has a better chance
  both during the Trials, and later with the Court and the queen.
  
• For her own safety, the queen is not permitted outside the palace grounds, kept both
  protected and pure by her guard.
  
• The only occasion on which the queen will appear and speak in public, in each of her
  lifetimes, is at the ceremony before the Trials. This speech will impress upon the
  Trial contestants her absolute authority over their lives and deaths, and the sight
  of her perfect beauty will inspire them.
  

Hers was the face that lit a thousand lamps. She had brought peace to a thousand homes
across their land.

The mosaic of Queen Rosamond was the only bright thing permitted in the temple. Her
image was on the farthest wall in the Great Hall, and they saw her during every meal
and every prayer.

She stood tall as a mountain over land and sea, the whole earth a sweep of gold, which
she had made bright and prosperous, all the waters calm because a glance of her tranquil
eyes had stilled storms.

Her hair streamed over the land, black silk on gold, and her face was calm, kind,
and impossibly beautiful.

No woman was born this beautiful. They had to make her.

Clustered around her feet were the skyscrapers of their city, shining silver blades
rising higher than any buildings had ever risen before. Their city stretched farther,
housed more souls, than any other city ever had, and all these souls were safe in
her keeping. In the middle of the city were the sloping roofs that formed the buildings
of the temple where Tor’s Order lived. On the mountains outside the city rose the
golden dome of the palace, and all the buildings of the Court around it.

The mosaic was two centuries old, but the colors were still as vivid as the queen.
Beneath the gorgeous blaze were words carved dark and deep into the old stone:

WILL YOU BE HER TRUE KNIGHT
?

Tor had learned to read from those words. He’d been four years old when his parents
sent him to the temple, thirteen summers ago, so he did not remember his father’s
face or his mother’s.

The first face he remembered was the queen’s.

The second face he remembered was Master Roland’s, the oldest of the masters, withered
as the last apple left rolling in a basket. He could not teach the trainees how to
fight any longer, so his job was to run herd on the youngest, making sure they ate
and went to bed, monitoring the machines as they trained to be ready for the Trials.

He found Tor curled on the floor by the mosaic of the queen, looking up into those
wide bright eyes.

Tor expected a scolding, but he did not receive one. Master Roland knelt by him, though
his old joints cracked like dry tree branches.

“She’s real, you know,” he said in a whisper.

Tor had placed his hand on the shimmering blue stones that formed the hem of Queen
Rosamond’s garment, confused, not sure if he was proving she was real or trying to
conjure her from the cold stone.

“She is alive this moment,” Master Roland said, and his voice thrilled. “Not so very
far from here. She is always alive, ever alive. She never dies. She is the eternal
rose. She is the soul of this country. And you are training so you may be chosen as
fit to serve her.”

The Order, set up so the right man could be prepared to win the Trials.

Yes, Tor thought, and it all felt so right. He’d known there must be a reason for
the Trials, a good reason. For the simulated programs and the real programs, having
to hurt his friends, for the lack of any warmth or softness in his life. He’d known
there had to be something, somebody, who was worth everything.

Master Roland put out his arm to encircle Tor, to lead him back to the dormitory.
A Knight of the Order must learn to sleep and wake on command.

“So do you think you can do it?” he murmured. “Be her one true knight?”

That night and every night, that day and every day, before the first bit of food or
first prayer passed his lips, Tor looked up at the queen. Rosamond, rose of the world.

He could do anything, for her sake.

His answer was yes, and yes, and yes.

Rosamond was nothing but trouble. Yvain had known that from the time he was fourteen,
from the first moment he’d seen her face stamped on gold.

He’d dreamed about that day every night for the next three years.

He’d hooked a wallet from the lining of a man’s expensive coat. Rosamond bless the
fancy designer who’d had the idea of custom-made coats that fit wallets in the lining
as a preventative against theft. It meant that all the rich guys now kept their money
in the same place.

Then he’d reached the Nests, and opened the wallet, and saw the queen’s face carved
on a gold coin.

Rosamond’s face was only put on sovereigns. Sovereigns were only carried by members
of the Court. The Court used them as passes into exclusive clubs, as markers of identification.
They were worth more than a thousand drachmae—were enough to buy a real house and
not just an apartment lower down outside the Nests. They were too valuable ever to
spend.

Anyone not of the Court who got caught with one was dead.

Yvain had been a stupid boy. He’d laughed and tossed the coin through the air to Persie,
who’d caught it in both hands and gazed at it with awe.

“Rosamond,” she’d said, drawing out the word in disbelief, as if she’d seen the sun
rise in a night sky. “There has to be a way we can spend it.”

Then she’d turned it over and over in her hands, watching it gleam.

Yvain and Persie had been together in the Nests since they were little. They’d gotten
married when Persie turned fourteen, as soon as it was legal to wed, and had been
married for less than two months. Yvain was a boy from the Nests, after all, and one
with a criminal record. Marriage was the only way to escape the Trials. And Persie
was an orphan girl, with no family to set a brideprice that a boy from the Nests could
not afford.

They had planned it like that, to keep each other safe. Yvain could skim the skyscrapers
and pick any pocket in the City. He’d promised Persie that she would never regret
marrying him.

“Believe me,” Yvain had said, winking at her. “I know when a lady is too much trouble.”

It made him impatient even to think about the Trials. As if their lives weren’t difficult
enough, being born with nothing on the horizon but blood and waste, and all for some
woman. A face on a useless coin.

Without Persie, he didn’t like to think about what would have happened to him when
it was time for the Trials.

He took the hand that didn’t hold the sovereign, and kissed it. Persie smiled, but
kept her eyes fixed on the coin in her palm. It caught the multicolored lights of
the city below, and the golden lights from the palace up on the hill beyond the city,
where the queen lived.

“She’s the most beautiful woman in the world, remember,” Persie told him. “And there
is the question of a life of luxury. Nothing but gold and sherbet and the veil of
Rosamond’s hair between you and the world, if you win the Trials. That would be worth
something. Like this coin is worth something. A collector would be interested.”

“Oh, let it drop,” said Yvain. “I’m going to sleep.”

The Nests were called the Nests because they were so high up, the peak of every building,
and so many birds lived there. There were not many trees left in the city, so the
top of every skyscraper was crammed with the filth and noise of the birds.

Yvain liked to lie on his back and watch the birds wheeling. He never turned his head
to the side to look at the mountain where Rosamond had lived for centuries. He had
no interest.

He’d gone to sleep like that a hundred times as a child, watching the birds, hearing
Persie breathe near him.

When he woke up this time, Persie was gone.

Yvain had launched himself from the Nests, slid down the material awning of the sixty-ninth
floor, snagged at the statue on the fifty-first to check his fall, grabbed at the
iron pipe that ran around the thirty-seventh, landed on one knee on the balcony of
the twenty-fifth. He heard the scrape of the balcony door and a shout, but he didn’t
look behind him as he vaulted over the railing to the slanted little roof over the
next balcony.