After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall

2035

Kara started screaming as soon as Pete came through the archway to the children’s room.

Thirteen children played or slept or learned in this large open space. Like all interior Shell rooms, it had featureless white metal walls, floor, and ceiling. There was no visible lighting but the room was suffused with a glow that brightened at “day” and dimmed at “night,” although never to complete blackness. The Shell contained only those objects originally gathered by Tesslies before they destroyed the world, or else objects seized on Grabs with the machinery the aliens had supplied a year ago. Pallets of blankets either thin and holey or else thick and new. Pillows on the floor for the adults to sit on. Many bright plastic toys, from the time that one of Jenna’s Grabs had landed her in something called a “Wal-Mart.” That Grab was famous. Jenna, almost as smart as her mother, had used her ten minutes to lash together three huge shopping carts and frantically fill them with everything in the closest aisles, toys and tools and clothing and “soft goods.” The pillows had come from that Grab, and the sheets and blankets that made both bedding and clothes for those who didn’t happen at the moment to fit into any clothes Grabbed at other stores. The shopping carts were now used to trundle things along the central corridor.

One wall held McAllister’s calendar. Crayons and paint just slid off the metal walls, but McAllister had put up a large sheet with packing tape and on that she kept careful track of how long humanity had been in the Shell. As a little boy Pete had sat in front of that calendar in a learning circle and learned to count. He’d been taught to read, too, although until Jenna’s Grab all the letters had to be written on a blanket using burned twigs from the farm. Now the Shell had six precious books, which everyone read over and over. All the pages were smeary and torn at the edges.

The children’s room—and many other rooms as well—held piles of buckets. These had been here from the beginning; evidently the Tesslies considered buckets important. The Shell contained whole rooms full of buckets, from fist-sized (these were used as bowls and cups) to big ones on the farm. The buckets could be stuck to each other with something in tubes that Jenna had brought back from her Wal-Mart Grab. A shoulder-high wall of stuck-together buckets divided the babies’ corner from the rest of the children’s room. And, of course, the buckets were used for pissing and shitting.

Jenna would never do another Grab. Her deformities were worse than most, and now her spine would not hold up her body for more than a few minutes of painful movement. It wouldn’t be long before one of the shopping carts would have to trundle her. But despite the constant pain, she retained the sweet nature she had inherited from McAllister, and now she sat on a pillow, back against the wall beside the open door, reading to four kids sprawled on the floor. Goodnight Moon. Pete knew it well.

Kara looked up, saw Pete, and shrieked. “No! No! Nooooooo!” The child threw herself on the floor and kicked her bare feet against the metal.

McAllister picked her up. “No, sweetheart, no… ssshhhhhhh, Kara-love, ssshhhhh….”

Kara went on screaming until Caity rushed over, took Kara from McAllister, and carried her away, tossing a reproachful glance over her shoulder at Pete. He’d never liked Caity, not even when they were kids themselves. “She’s too much like you,” McAllister had said to him once, and Pete had hid from McAllister in the far end of the Shell for an entire day. He still didn’t like Caity, not even when he was having sex with her.

Jenna said, “How are you, Pete?”

“Great, just great, on this great ol’ day in the morning.” Almost immediately he regretted saying that. Jenna loved the songs Bridget had crooned to them as kids, and she’d loved Bridget. At Bridget’s funeral a few months ago, Jenna had sobbed and sobbed.

Jenna didn’t react to the sarcasm. She, of all the Six, was the best at setting aside her own feelings for the common good. Terrell and Paolo were pretty good at it, too. Pete, Ravi, and Caity often failed.

Failed, failed, failed… That was Pete’s song, unless he made hatred sing louder.

Jenna said, “I’m glad you recovered from your Grab. Kara is coming along very well—”

“Unless she sees me, of course.”

“—and Petra is a darling.”

“I better go Outside to give Kara a chance to adjust.”

McAllister said, sharply for her, “That’s enough of that talk, Pete. Come with me.”

As if anyone could really get Outside!

But he followed her meekly, wishing for the hundred hundredth time that he had Jenna’s patience. Ravi’s physical strength and good looks. Anything that anyone else had and he didn’t. Wishing he could seize McAllister’s waist and take her into one of the rooms at the far end of the Shell, just the two of them and a blanket… His cock rose.

Not a good time! Still, he was glad he was only infertile, not impotent like Paolo. “Pre-embryonic genetic damage is a capricious thing,” McAllister had said. “We were lucky you Six survived at all.”

Lucky. Great, just great, on this great ol’ day in the morning.

McAllister led Pete around the bucket-wall to the babies’ corner. Three infants lay asleep on blankets, watched over by Ravi, who didn’t much like babies but it was his turn for this duty. Ravi was the least deformed of the Six. His eyes were permanently crossed, but his body was strong and, even though he was a year younger than Pete, he was taller and heavier. With thick dark hair and a handsome face, he looked the most like the princes in The Illustrated Book of Fairy Tales. Sometimes Pete hated him for that, although in general they got along well enough. Ravi was his biological half-brother, after all. Not that that counted for much; what counted was the good of all.

“Look,” McAllister said to Pete, “at the treasure you brought us.”

Petra lay asleep on a blanket, a square of plastic between it and the clumsy diaper made of another blanket. On top she wore a very faded yellow shirt too big for her. Her tiny pink mouth, the little curled fists with the creases at the wrists, the shape of her head… She was a perfect human person and of course she would be fertile. Radiation levels had subsided enough by now, McAllister had said, although Pete didn’t really understand what that meant. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that he had done this thing: brought back a perfect, precious boost to the restarting of humanity on Earth. Someday that restarting would move Outside, McAllister said.

If the Tesslies permitted it.

McAllister put her thin hands on either side of Pete’s face and turned him toward her. “Listen to me, dear heart. I am making you this baby’s father. You are now responsible for her life and, as much as possible, her happiness. Do you understand me? I put Petra’s life in your hands. You are her father.”

Both Pete and Ravi gaped at her. No one in the Shell was “father” or “mother” to any kid taken on a Grab! Everyone was responsible for the good of all, always. Why now, why Petra, why Pete? The questions were lost in the feel of McAllister’s hands on his face.

“Why him?” Ravi blurted. “Is it because he’s the oldest?”

McAllister didn’t answer. She never answered anything she didn’t choose to. But she gave Ravi a look that Pete couldn’t read, and didn’t want to. All he wanted was for her to keep on holding his face between her long slim fingers, forever and ever.

She didn’t. But he could feel her hands long after she took them away, could feel his own deep blush, could feel the burden, welcome because she had given it, that McAllister had just placed on his heart. To turn his red face away from her, he gazed down at Petra.

“Hey,” he said to the baby, who woke and immediately shit her diaper.