After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia (37 page)

There was another southerly gust, and more swirling dust devils, and this time the
bridge seemed to sway just a little, which didn’t make my stomach feel any better.

Then I was finally at the car. Up close, it was a little dirtier than it had seemed
from far away. There were a few dents and dings, a little rust, but nothing more than
that. None of the tires were even flat. I stared at the tinted windows and waited
for rovers to jump out and point their weapons at me, but that didn’t happen. For
the first time, I considered the possibility that the doors might all be locked, and
I didn’t even have anything to break out the windows. I looked past the car at the
ruins of Arlington, and considered just sticking to my plan, forget the car for now,
poke around over there a bit, then head home again. And yeah, tell the olders about
the car and take whatever punishment I’d have coming.

I leaned forward, peering in through the glass, but the tinting was too dark even
right up on it like that. I gripped the driver’s side door handle, and it was very
hot from the Florida sun. It was hot enough I almost pulled my hand back, but only
almost. Instead, I gave it a quick twist to the left, and the tumblers clicked. Which
meant it wasn’t locked after all.

I took a deep breath and pulled up on the door. It came open easy as pie—like the
olders say. It lifted, rising above my head, above the roof. The hinges didn’t even
squeak. There was only a soft whoosh from hydraulics and pistons. Scalding air spilled
out of the car.

You know exactly what I found in there, Max? It seems wicked to write it down on these
“borrowed” encyclopedia pages. It seems wrong, but I’ll do it anyhow. Just in case
you’re right, because yeah, I want the dreams to stop. Dead people don’t have dreams.
Dead people probably don’t have anything at all, so it’s stupid me worrying like this,
hesitating and drawing it out.

The door opened, and there were two people inside.

There was what was left of two people.

Like the might-have-been seagulls, THE GOO had gotten to them, and they were that
same uniform shade of bluish green all live things go when the nano-assemblers get
hold of them. I stepped back immediately and turned my head away. I even thought I
might puke. It’s not that I’d never seen a person who’d died that way; it’s just I
hadn’t seen any in a long, long time, and you forget. Or I’d forgotten. I covered
my mouth, not wanting to be sick and have to see my half-digested breakfast spattered
all over the road at my feet. I leaned forward, hands on knees, and took deep breaths
and counted to thirty. Someone taught me to do that whenever I’m afraid I might be
about to throw up, count to thirty, but I can’t remember who it was. Not that it matters.

When I felt a little better, I looked again. The woman was sitting with her back to
the door, and her arms were wrapped tightly around the girl. The woman’s fingers disappeared
into the girl’s hair—hair and hand all one and the same now. I figured they drove
as far as they could, drove until they were too far gone to keep going. It takes hours
and hours for the infected to die. Like the seagulls, the weather hadn’t been at them,
and the woman and the girl looked like they’d just been popped fresh out of a mold,
like the molds they use in the machine shop to turn non-GOO plastic into stuff we
need. Every single detail, no matter how fragile, was still intact. Their plastic
eyebrows, each hair, their eyes open and staring nowhere at all. Their skin was almost
exactly the color of Ma’am Lillian’s teal-zircon pendant. Only completely opaque instead
of translucent.

Their clothes and their jewelry (I noticed the woman’s silver earrings), those hadn’t
changed at all. But it didn’t strike me odd until later, like the car being okay didn’t
really strike me odd, though it should have.

I still felt dizzy even if the first shock of seeing them was fading. Even if I was
just
seeing
them now, not seeing them and wanting to run away. I reached inside the car and touched
the back of the woman’s neck. I shouldn’t have, but I did. It was just a little bit
tacky from the heat, a little soft, and I left fingerprints behind. I thought, You
leave them out here long enough, shut up and baking inside that car, they’ll melt
away to shapeless globs long before the plastic has a chance to get brittle. I thought
that, and pulled my hand back. I was relieved to see none of the PVC had come off
on my fingers. But I rubbed them on my jeans anyway. I rubbed until it’s a wonder
my skin didn’t start bleeding.

They looked like dolls.

They looked almost like the mannequins in the busted shop windows inside Sanctuary.

But they’d both been alive, flesh and bone and breathing, and it couldn’t have been
more than a few days before. A week at the most. I stared at them. I wondered which
of them died first. I wondered lots of stuff there’s not much point writing down.
Then I glanced into the backseat. And right then, that’s when I thought my heart my
might stop, just stop beating like the girl’s and the woman’s had finally stopped
beating. There was a cardboard box in the back, and there was a baby in a blanket
inside the box. I don’t know how the hell it was still alive, how it had been spared
by THE GOO or by the heat inside the car, but it
was
still alive. It looked at me. I saw it was sick, from the broiling day trapped in
the automobile, but goddamn it was alive. It saw me and began to bawl, so I rushed
around to the other side of the car and opened that door, too. I lifted the cardboard
box out careful as I could and set it on the bridge, and then I sat down next to it.
I screwed the lid off my canteen and sprinkled water on its forehead and lips. I finally
pushed back the blanket and took the baby in my arms. I’d never, ever held a baby.
We don’t have many in Sanctuary. And the ones we do have, the dozen or so, not just
any kid can go picking them up. Just the mothers and fathers, the nurses and doctors.
The baby’s face was so red, like she’d been roasting alive in there, so I sprinkled
more water on its cheeks and forehead. It’s eyes were glassy, feverish, and it didn’t
cry as loudly as I thought it should have been crying. I sat there and rocked it,
shushing it, the way I’d seen people do with babies. I sat there trying to remember
a lullaby.

No need to draw this part out, Max.

The baby, she died in my arms. She was just too hot, and I’d come along too late to
save her from the sun. Maybe me sprinkling the water on her had been too much. Maybe
just seeing me had been too much. Maybe she just picked then to die. And I wanted
to cry, but I didn’t. I don’t know why. I knew I ought to, and I still know I ought
to have, but I just sat there holding her close to me like she wasn’t dead. Like she
was only asleep and was gonna wake up. I sat there staring at the blue-green plastic
people in the front seat, at the sky, at the car.

In my bad dreams, there are wheeling, screeching gulls in that blue-white sky, and
it goes on forever, on out into space, into starry blackness, down to blue skies on
other worlds without women and men and youngers, where none of these things have ever
happened and where THE EVENT hasn’t occurred and THE GOO will never reach. Where it’s
still THE BEFORE, and will never be THE AFTER.

God and Jesus and angels and a day of judgment of wicked men, they all live and breathe
inside the Reverend Swales’s black book, and in the songs we sing on Sundays. Many
other gods and devils live in other holy books. But on the bridge that day, there
was no god. In my dreams, there is no god. And I don’t pray anymore. I don’t think
much of those who do.

You’re saying, Now that’s not what happened, Cody. I can hear you, Max. I can hear
you grumbling, plain as day, “Cody Marlene Hernandez, you’re mixing it all up, and
you’re doing it on purpose. That wasn’t the deal, you welcher.”

Fine, you win.

I scrounged about and found a couple of other things inside the cardboard box. I hardly
looked at them, just stuffed them into my pack. Carrying the dead baby in her blanket,
I walked back across the bridge, quickly as I could, quicker than I’d come. It was
a lot harder getting over the fence with her in my arms, but I managed. I didn’t drop
her. I’d have fallen before I ever dropped her.

I spent a week in quarantine, just in case. Five men went out onto the bridge and
brought back the plastic woman and the girl and buried them in the cemetery. They
buried the baby there, too, after Doc Lehman did his autopsy. No one ever scolded
me or yelled or revoked privileges for going out there. I didn’t have to ask why.
You get punished, you don’t have to get punished all over again.

Me and Max sat between the crimson river and the NOW|HERE wall, and I let him read
what I wrote on the back of the torn-out encyclopedia pages. He got pissed near the
end, and just like I thought he would, called me a welcher.

“The baby always dies in my dreams,” I told him, when he finally shut up and let me
talk again.

“I didn’t say, ‘Write what’s in your dreams.’ I said, ‘Write what happened.’”

“It seemed more important,” I told him, and tossed a piece of gravel at the river.
“What haunts me when I sleep, how it might have gone that day, but didn’t. How it
probably
should
have gone, but didn’t.”

“Yeah, but you went and killed that baby.”

“No I didn’t. My nightmares kill the baby, not me. Almost every time I sleep, the
nightmares kill the baby.”

He chewed his lip the frustrated way he does sometimes. “Cody, I just ain’t never
gonna understand that. You
saved
the baby, but you go and have bad dreams about the baby dyin’. That’s stupid. You
waste all this energy gettin’ freaked out about something didn’t even happen except
in a dream, and dreams ain’t real. I thought writin’ the truth,
that
would make you better. Not writing down lies. That’s what I don’t understand.”

“You weren’t there. You didn’t hold her, and her so hot, and you so sure she was already
dead or would be dead any second.”

“I just won’t ever understand it,” he said again.

“Okay, Max. Then you won’t ever understand it. That’s fair. There’s a lot about myself
I don’t understand sometimes. Doesn’t matter the dreams don’t make sense. Only matters
it happens to me. It’s all too complicated. Never black-and-white, not like SWITCH
ON and SWITCH OFF, not like THE BEFORE and THE AFTER. I fall asleep, and she dies
in my arms, even though she didn’t.”

He glared at the pages, chewing his lips and looking disgusted, then handed them back
to me.

“Well, you don’t win,” he said. “You don’t get any more than kisses ’cause you didn’t
even talk about the map or the book, and because you killed the baby.”

“I don’t care,” I replied, which was true.

“I was just trying to help you.”

“I know that, Max. Don’t you think I know that?”

He didn’t answer my question. Instead, he said, “I’m going home, Cody. I got chores.
So do you, welcher.” I told him I’d be along soon. I told him I needed to be alone
for a while (which is when I’m writing this part down). So I’m sitting here throwing
gravel at the sludgy crimson river people used to call the St. Johns River.

Outside my dreams, the baby didn’t die. The olders figured the car had only driven
through Arlington and out onto the bridge the night before I found it. They guessed
the girl and the woman got sick a couple of days before that, probably before they
even got to Florida. They figured, too, the baby would have died of heat prostration
and thirst if I hadn’t found it when I did. “You did right,” Ma’am Shen whispered
in my ear when no one was watching or listening in. “Even if that wasn’t your intent,
you did right.” We never found out the baby’s name, so they named it Cody, after me.

The olders found something in the baby’s blood. It’s like SWITCH OFF, they say, but
it’s different. It’s like SWITCH OFF, but it works better. You breathe it out, and
it shuts off the nanoassemblers all around you. Maybe, they say, that’s why the car
didn’t change, and why the woman and the girl’s clothes and jewelry wasn’t converted,
too. But these new bots, they can’t turn stuff back the way it was before.

And yeah, there was a map. A map of the United States and Mexico and Canada. Most
of the cities had big red X’s drawn on them. Montreal, up in Canada, had a blue circle,
and so did San Francisco and a few little towns here and there. A red line was drawn
from Birmingham, Alabama all the way to Pensacola. Both those cities had red X’s of
their own. I found the red pencil in the box with the baby. And I found pages and
pages of notes. In the margins of the map, there was a list of countries. Some in
red, some in blue.

Turns out the woman was a microbiologist, and she’d been studying when the sanctuary
in Birmingham was breached. That’s what she’d written in her notes. They read us that
part in class. “The containment has been breached.” I also know the notes talk about
the nanites evolving, and about new strains the SWITCH OFF doesn’t work on, and new
strains of SWITCH OFF that shut down THE GOO better than before, like what kept the
baby alive. They know the scientist also wrote about how THE EVENT isn’t over because
the bots are all evolving and doing things they weren’t designed to do.

Of course, they also weren’t designed to eat up the whole world, but they did.

Saul Benedict still frowns and asks his questions, and he says everything’s even more
uncertain than it was before I found the car.

But me, I look at that baby, who’s growing up fine and healthy and breathing those
new bots out with every breath, and sometimes I think about going out onto the bridge
again with a can of spray paint and writing
HOPE HERE
in great big letters on the side of the car. So if maybe someone else ever comes
along, someone who isn’t sick, they’ll see, and drive all the way across the bridge.