After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall

2035

Two Grabs right in a row, then nothing for a few days, then another Grab for Caity.

They’re playing fucking games, ain’t they,” Darlene said. “With our lives!”

“Not yours,” Caity answered spitefully. “You never have to go.” She was disappointed with the results of her Grab. She’d found herself in a strange, small store for twenty-two minutes and had not known what to do. There were no shopping carts, and anyway she was afraid of this store. She hadn’t said that, not even later, but then Caity didn’t ever admit fear. Still, Pete knew that’s what she’d felt. She hadn’t wanted to touch anything, but neither did she want to come back empty-handed and anyway, she said later and in a strong temper, “Who knew what the fuck McAllister was going to want?” So she yanked some zippered carrying-bags off a shelf and made herself stuff things into them.

“Gerbils?” Eduardo said, astonished. He and Tommy happened to walk by the Grab room just as Caity returned.

“That’s what they had!” Caity was near tears. “Get McAllister! Never mind, I’ll go myself!”

“Wow, a puppy!” Tommy cried, unzipping a bag with mesh sides.

The Six had never seen gerbils before. Only Terrell, Jenna, and Pete had seen dogs during Grabs, and the one Pete saw had tried to kill him. He didn’t much like the puppy, a small brown-and-white creature with floppy ears. It barked and shit everywhere and chewed up any shoes left on the floor. But everyone else thought it was wonderful, cute and cuddly. Tommy named it Fuzz Ball.

The gerbils were kept in their own room, with an old blanket that McAllister wearily ordered to be torn into strips. The gerbils then finished the job. Unlike the puppy, which had to be coaxed to eat mashed-up soy and only did so when it got hungry enough, the gerbils ate the vegetable crops happily. But their room smelled and had to be cleaned out every day, and Pete couldn’t see the point of them.

“Wait,” McAllister said. “Something is going to happen, I think.”

“What?” Pete said.

“I don’t know.”

“Is it because of what I saw?”

“I really don’t know.”

She didn’t seem to know much. And once, Pete had thought she knew everything!

Two of the gerbils died the day after Caity brought them back. Pete hoped the rest would die, too, and maybe even the puppy, but they didn’t. The gerbils ate and smelled, the puppy raced around and barked and chewed, the babies wailed.

“A regular madhouse, this,” Darlene muttered.

Ravi went on a Grab and returned with yet another large load of objects on yet another large rolling cart. “Look! Look what I got!”

Bundles of tough, heavy cloth that Pete thought would be poor blankets: too uncomfortable. However, it turned out they were not blankets at all. Eduardo let out a whoop such as Pete had never before heard the quiet man make. Eduardo sat on the floor and did things to one of the bundles and it sprang into a little cloth room.

“A tent!” Tommy cried, and crawled inside.

McAllister leaned against the wall, her hand on her belly, and stared at the “tent.”

Eduardo said to McAllister, “Five-pole four-season Storm King. An earlier generation of these is what we used to use on field expeditions in the mountains, when I was a grad student in botany.” Pete didn’t know what a botany or a grad student were, and he didn’t ask. He was too jealous.

There were more tents, plus a lot of rope, a sharp “axe” that McAllister immediately took away someplace, and many metal things Pete didn’t understand the use of. McAllister directed it all to be stowed back on the rolling cart—no playing with this one—and pulled into the room next to the gerbils.

But the most interesting thing, McAllister didn’t see at all. Ravi said quietly to Pete, “Come with me. I want to show you something.”

“I can’t leave the Grab room. I’m next.” Pete already wore the wrister.

“Then wait until everybody leaves.”

Pete nodded, although he wasn’t sure he wanted to see anything from Ravi. Pete regarded it as a private triumph that when he masturbated he no longer thought of McAllister; now he imagined the beautiful red-haired girl that had been Susie’s big sister. He’d already calculated how many years before Susie herself would be ready for sex. Still, every time he saw the growing curve of McAllister’s belly, the old animosity toward Ravi stirred.

At the same time, he and Ravi were now allies. Together they were going to get revenge for Earth. The first Tesslie they saw—and one had to show up eventually, after all he’d seen one when he’d gone Outside!—they were going to kill. They spent a lot of time in Pete’s clear-walled secret room, gazing out at the growing grasses in the black rock and planning ways to accomplish this. If the Tesslie was an alien inside a bucket-case they could hit the case with something until it cracked open, drag the alien out, and stomp on it. If it was a robot, they would find the batteries and pull them out.

“Look,” Ravi said when everyone else had left the Grab room. He reached under his tunic, made from a thick blanket folded and sewn to create pockets. Ravi pulled out something encased in leather. The leather slipped off and there was the knife, long and gleaming and, Pete knew without testing it, really sharp. Then another one.

“They had a lot of knives in the store and I put some on the rolling cart. But these two are for us.”

“Yes,” Pete said. He took one. Just holding it made him feel strange: powerful and bad, both. But he liked the feeling.

“Yes,” he said again.