Ghost Summer, Stories

  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 stars. 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 le
ast 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.”

  The crate was light enough to lift to the table with only slight pressure in her lower back, gone when she stretched. But she could only roll a barrel slowly, oh-so-slowly, across her threshold. How had Raul managed so easily? She left the second barrel outside. By the time she closed her door again, her lower back pulsed with pain and she felt aged by a decade.

  “Lies,” Nayima said.

  Tango and Buster agreed with frenzied mews.

  She would have no Sunday dinner if she died tomorrow, Nayima reminded herself. So she got her cleaver from the kitchen, unwrapped the beef, and began chopping the meat on the table, not caring about dents in the wood. She chopped until she was perspiring and sweat stung her eyes.

  Nayima held a chunk with both hands and sank in her teeth. She mostly did not bother with salt in her own cooking, so the taste was overwhelming at first. The cats gnawed at the meat beside her on the table with loud purrs.

  “Could there be a child?”

  Suppose they’d had a breakthrough, found a way to rewire the genes? But why go through that trouble and expense when other children were being born? The girl must be a failed experiment. A laboratory fluke. Did they need caretakers for a child born with half a brain—was that it? Nayima swore she’d be damned if she’d spend the years she had left tending the lab-coats’ mistakes.

  “But there is no child,” she reminded Tango and Buster. “It’s all a lie.”

  After dark, with her flashlight to guide her, Nayima set her traps for the thief cat with slices of meat and visited the wooden chicken coop Raul had helped her build, as big as her grandmother’s backyard shed. She checked the loose wires in the rear, but the hole was still secure. She hadn’t collected eggs earlier, so chickens had defecated on some. A few eggs lay entirely crushed, yolks seeping across the straw.

  Nayima was exhausted by the time she’d cleaned the nest boxes, scrubbed the surviving eggs, and set them on a bowl on her kitchen for Raul to find later—but she couldn’t afford to sleep tonight. The marshals might come at any time.

  Nayima fixed herself a cup of black tea from her new water—so fresh!—and sat vigil by her front window with her shotgun, watching the empty pathway. Sometimes her eyes played tricks, animating the darkness. A far-off cat’s cry sounded like a baby’s, waking Nayima when she dozed.

  Just before dawn, bells jingled near the chicken coop. Heart clambering, Nayima ran outside. The food was gone from the first trap she reached, but the door had not properly sprung. Shit.

  More frantic jingling came from the trap twenty yards farther. Nayima raced toward it, her light in one hand and her gun in the other.

  A pair of eyes glared out at her from beyond the bars.

  The cat scrambled to every corner of the cage, desperate to escape while bells mocked him. This was the one. Nayima recognized the monster tabby’s unusual size.

  “Buddy, you stole the wrong chicken.”

  Nayima could not remember the last time she had felt so giddy. She carefully lowered her flashlight to the ground, keeping it trained on the trap. Then she raised her shotgun, aiming. She’d blow a hole in her trap this way, but she had caught the one she was looking for.

  The cat mewed—not angry, beseeching. With a clear understanding of his situation.

  “You started it, not me,” Nayima said. “Don’t sit there begging now.”

  The cat’s trapped eyes glowed in her bright beam. Another plaintive mew.

  “Shut up, you hear me? This is your fault.” But her resolve was flagging.

  The cat raised his paw, shaking the cage door. How many times had she done the very same thing? How many locks had she tested, searching for freedom?

  Could there really be a child?

  Nayima sobbed. Her throat was already raw from crying. Never again, she had said. No more tears. No more.

  Nayima went to the trap’s door and flipped up the latch. The cat hissed at her and raced away like a jaguar, melting into the dark. She hoped he would run for miles, never looking back.

  Is my little girl with those zookeepers without even a name?

  “But it’s all lies,” she whispered at the window, as she stroked Tango in her lap. “Isn’t it?”

  Dawn came and went with the roosters’ crowing. Nayima did not move to collect the morning eggs, or to eat any of the beef she and the cats had left, or to empty her bulging bladder. She watched the sky light up her empty pathway, her open gate.

  Why hadn’t she closed the gate?

  Based on the sun high above, it was nearly noon when Nayima finally stood up.

  The metallic glint far down the roadway looked imaginary at first. To be sure, Nayima wiped away dust on her windowpane with her shirt, although the spots outside still clouded it. The gleam seemed to vanish, but then it was back, this time with bright cobalt blue lights that looked out of place against the browns and grays of the road. Two sets of blue lights danced in regimented patterns, back and forth.

  Nayima’s breath fogged her window as she leaned closer, so she wiped it again.

  Hoverbikes!

  Two large hoverbikes were speeding toward her house, one on each side of the road at a matching pace, blue lights snaking across their underbellies. At least it wasn’t an army, unless more were coming. Marshals’ hoverbikes were only big enough for two, at most.

  “You damn fool, Raul,” she whispered again, but she already had forgiven him too.

  Nayima was too exhausted to pick up her shotgun. She had failed the test with her cat thief, so what made her think she could fight marshals? Let them take what they wanted. As long as she had Tango and Buster, she could start again. She always did.

  As the hoverbikes flew past her gate, Nayima counted one front rider on each bike in the marshals’ uniform: black jackets with orange armbands. The second rider on the lead bike was only Raul—his face was hidden behind the black helmet, but she knew his red hickory shirt. His father had worn one just like it, Raul had told her until she wanted to scream.

  “Nayima!” Raul called. He flung his helmet to the ground.

  The hoverbike Raul was riding hadn’t quite slowed to a stop, floating six inches above the ground, so Raul stumbled when he leaped off in a hurry. The marshal grabbed his arm to help hold him steady while the bike bobbing obediently in place.

  “Querida, it’s me,” Raul said. “Don’t worry about the marshals. Please open the door.”

  Nayima stared as both marshals took off their helmets, almost in unison, and rested them in the crooks of their arms. One was a young man, one a woman, neither older than twenty-five. The man was fair-haired and ruddy. The woman’s skin was nearly as dark as her own, her hair also trimmed to fuzz. Had she seen this man during an earlier classroom visit? He looked familiar, and he was smiling. They both were. She had never seen a marshal smile.

  The marshals wore no protective suits. No masks. They did not hide their faces or draw weapons. Even ten yards away, through a dirty window, Nayima saw their eyes.

  Nayima jumped when Raul banged on her door. “Nayima, ella está aqui!”

  “I don’t see her.” Nayima tried to shout, but her throat nearly strangled her breath.

  Raul motioned to the woman marshal, and she dismounted her hoverbike. For the first time, Nayima saw her bike’s passenger—not standing, but in a backward facing seat. A
child stirred as the woman unstrapped her.

  It couldn’t be. Couldn’t be.

  Nayima closed her eyes. Had they drugged her meat? Was it a hallucination?

  “Do you see, Nayima?” Raul said. “Ven afuera conmigo. Please come.”

  Raul left her porch to run back to the hoverbike. Freed from her straps, a child reached out for a hand for Raul’s help from the seat. Raul made a game of it, lifting the child up high. Curly spirals of dark hair nestled her shoulders. For an instant, the child was silhouetted in the sunlight, larger than life in Raul’s sturdy upward grasp.

  The girl giggled loudly enough for Nayima to hear her through the windowpane. Raul was a good father. Nayima could see it already.

  “Now you’re going to meet your mamí,” Raul said.

  Nayima hid behind her faded draperies as Raul took the girl’s hand and walked to the porch with her. When she heard the twin footsteps on her wooden planks, Nayima’s world swayed. She ventured a peek and saw the girl’s inquisitive face turned toward the window—dear Jesus, this angel had Gram’s nose and plump, cheerful cheeks. Raul’s lips. Buried treasure was etched in her delicate features.

  Jesus. Jesus. Thank you, Dear Lord.

  Nayima opened her door.

  This is Nayima’s final story in the post-apocalyptic trilogy edited by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey. Each story, in its own way, is about seeking or trying to hold on to family. Nayima had resigned herself to be without human contact—or a human experience as a mother. After all she had been through, I wanted her to experience the kind of Change we see unfolding daily even in the face of fear and pain that has lasted for generations.

  Vanishings