“Right! And it means a car might come past, and that’s what I said.”
A small bush, fresh and green, sprouted from a crevice in the middle of the highway. Seeing it, Jill sensed that some unknown and unknowable power had overheard them and was gently trying to show them that they were wrong. She shuddered, and summoned up all the good reasons that argued that the bush was wrong instead. “There were live people back at that place. The bus driver was all right, too.”
The iron gates were still there, just as she had seen them the previous day, graceful and strong between their pillars of cut stone. The lions still snarled atop those pillars, and the iron sign on the iron bars still proclaimed POPLAR HILL.
“They’re locked,” her brother announced. He rattled the lock to show her—a husky brass padlock that looked new.
“We’ve got to get in.”
“Sure. I’m going to go along this wall, see? I’m going to look for a place where I can climb over, or maybe it’s fallen down somewhere. When I find one, I’ll come back and tell you.”
“I want to go with you.” Fear had come like a chill wind. What if Jimmy went away and she never saw him again?
“Listen, back at the house you were going to do this all by yourself. If you could do it by yourself, you can stay here for ten minutes to watch for cars. Now
She did not; but an hour later she was waiting for him when he came back along the inside of the wall, scratched and dirty and intent on speaking to her through the gate. “How’d you get in?” he asked when she appeared at his shoulder.
She shrugged. “You first. How did you?”
“I found a little tree that had died and fallen over. It was small enough that I could drag it if I didn’t try to pick up the root end. I leaned it on the wall and climbed up it, and jumped down.”
“Then you can’t get out,” she told him, and started up a road leading away from the gate.
“I’ll find some way. How did you get in?”
“Through the bars. It was tight and scrappy, though. I don’t think you could.”
Somewhat maliciously, she added, “I’ve been waiting in here a long time.”
The private road led up a hill between rows of slender trees that made her think of models showing off green gowns. The big front door of the big square house at the top of the hill was locked; and the big brass knocker produced only empty echoes from inside the house no matter how hard her brother pounded. The pretty pearl- coloured button that she pressed sounded distant chimes that brought no one.
Peering through the window to the left of the door, she saw a mostly wooden chair with brown-and-orange cushions, and a gray TV screen. One corner of the gray screen read MUTE in bright yellow letters.
Circling the house they found the kitchen door unlocked, as they had left it. She was heaping corned beef hash out of her frying pan when the lights went out.
“That means no more hot food,” she told her brother. “It’s electric. My stove is.”
“They’ll come back on,” he said confidently, but they did not.
That night she undressed in the dark bedroom they had made their own, in the lightless house, folding clothes she could not see and laying them as neatly as her fingers could manage upon an invisible chair before slipping between the sheets.
Warm and naked, her brother followed her half a minute later. “You know, Jelly,” he said as he drew her to him, “we’re probably the only live people in the whole world.”
INERTIA
by Nancy Kress
Nancy Kress is the author of 14 science fiction or fantasy novels, and more than 80 short stories, which have been collected in
In 2007 and 2008, Kress will have three new books out: a new story collection from Golden Gryphon Press, a new SF novel,
“Inertia” tells the story of the victims of a disfiguring epidemic who are interned in the modern equivalent of leper colonies. Kress says that identity—who you are, why you’re here, why you are who you are (and what you are supposed to be doing about it)—is a central idea in her work, and this story is no exception.
At dusk the back of the bedroom falls off. One minute it’s a wall, exposed studs and cracked blue drywall, and the next it’s snapped-off two-by-fours and an irregular fence as high as my waist, the edges both jagged and furry, as if they were covered with powder. Through the hole a sickly tree pokes upward in the narrow space between the back of our barracks and the back of a barracks in E Block. I try to get out of bed for a closer look, but today my arthritis is too bad, which is why I’m in bed in the first place. Rachel rushes into the bedroom.
“What happened, Gram? Are you all right?”
I nod and point. Rachel bends into the hole, her hair haloed by California twilight. The bedroom is hers, too; her mattress lies stored under my scarred four-poster.
“Termites! Damn. I didn’t know we had them. You sure you’re all right?”
“I’m fine. I was all the way across the room, honey. I’m fine.”
“Well—we’ll have to get Mom to get somebody to fix it.”
I say nothing. Rachel straightens, throws me a quick glance, looks away. Still I say nothing about Mamie, but in a sudden flicker from my oil lamp I look directly at Rachel, just because she is so good to look at. Not pretty, not even here Inside, although so far the disease has affected only the left side of her face. The ridge of thickened, ropy skin, coarse as old hemp, isn’t visible at all when she stands in right profile. But her nose is large, her eyebrows heavy and low, her chin a bony knob. An honest nose, expressive brows, direct gray eyes, chin that juts forward when she tilts her head in intelligent listening—to a grandmother’s eye, Rachel is good to look at. They wouldn’t think so, Outside. But they would be wrong.
Rachel says, “Maybe I could trade a lottery card for more drywall and nails, and patch it myself.”
“The termites will still be there.”
“Well, yes, but we have to do something.” I don’t contradict her. She is sixteen years old. “Feel that air coming in—you’ll freeze at night this time of year. It’ll be terrible for your arthritis. Come in the kitchen now, Gram —I’ve built up the fire.”
She helps me into the kitchen, where the metal wood-burning stove throws a rosy warmth that feels good on my joints. The stove was donated to the colony a year ago by who-knows-what charity or special interest group for, I suppose, whatever tax breaks still hold for that sort of thing. If any do. Rachel tells me that we still get newspapers, and once or twice I’ve wrapped vegetables from our patch in some fairly new-looking ones. She even says that the young Stevenson boy works a donated computer news net in the Block J community hall, but I no longer follow Outside tax regulations. Nor do I ask why Mamie was the one to get the wood-burning stove when it wasn’t a lottery month.
The light from the stove is stronger than the oil flame in the bedroom; I see that beneath her concern for our dead bedroom wall, Rachel’s face is flushed with excitement. Her young skin glows right from intelligent chin to the ropy ridge of disease, which of course never changes color. I smile at her. Sixteen is so easy to excite. A new hair ribbon from the donations repository, a glance from a boy, a secret with her cousin Jennie.
“Gram,” she says, kneeling beside my chair, her hands restless on the battered wooden arm, “Gram—there’s
