The End Has Come (27 page)

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 another 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 girl who spoke up next was not yet eight. Her face held a whisper of brown; a girl who might have been hers. And Raul’s.

“Do you have any children?” the girl said.

All of Nayima’s work, gone. No composure. No smile. A sharp pain in her belly.

“No, I’ve never had children,” she said. “None that survived.”

Nayima shot a pointed gaze at the minder, who did not contradict her. Maybe the minder didn’t know about Specimen 120. Maybe a bureaucrat had made up the story to tease Raul.

“Okay,” the girl said, shrugging, not yet schooled in the art of condolences. “What do you miss the most about the time before the Plague?”

An easy answer came right away, and it almost wasn’t a lie. “Halloween.”

When she explained what Halloween had been, the children sat literally open-mouthed. She wondered which part of her story most stupefied them. The ready access to sweets? The trust of strangers? The costumes?

The host looked relieved with the children’s enchantment and announced that the visit was over. A flurry of waving blue gloves. Nayima waved back. She even smiled again.

“Don’t forget my water credits,” Nayima said from behind her happy teeth.

But the minder’s image had already flashed away.

• • • •

Nayima lined up her contraband on the front table — the sawed-off, a box of shells, an old Colt she’d found in the attic with its full magazine, the baseball bat she kept at her bedside. She’d even found a gas mask she’d bartered for at market. When the marshals came, she would be prepared. In her younger years, she would have boarded up at least her front windows, but her weapons would have to do.

“Raul is the real child,” she told Tango and Buster while they watched her work. Buster swatted at a loose shell at the edge of the table, but Nayima caught it before it hit the floor. “He believes every word they say. ‘Things are changing,’ he says. Believing in miracles. Sending marshals here — to me!”

Tango mewed softly. A question.

“Of course they’re not bringing a child here,” she said. “A judge’s ruling? In favor of carriers? You know the lab-coats would fight to keep her.” She shook her head, angry with herself for her weakness. “Besides, there is no child. Babies with carrier genes don’t live.”