After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia

THE GREAT GAME AT THE END OF THE WORLD by Matthew Kressel

THE CREEPY PLAYING SECOND BASE IS A HELL OF A FIELDER but his arm’s for shit, so they can forget about the double play. My sister Jenna swings a doughnutted bat in the on-deck circle, chewing strawberry gum we found in the drawer of a wrecked house, her Mets cap turned around backward, her yellow hair flowing in the constant breeze. Seeing her like this makes me happy. She shouts at the Ken up at bat, “You’d better hit the goddamned ball, loser!” Mom wouldn’t ever let that language fly. Jenna’s only ten. But I let it slide. Lately, I let everything slide.

The Creepies’ pitcher looks like a seven-foot-tall furless cat with giant yellow eyes that glow no matter what angle you look at them, and rows and rows of toothpick teeth longer than my fingers. But her arm’s the real killer. She’s struck out four batters already, and it’s only the third inning. (These Creepies learn fast.) Bottom of the third inning, actually, and the last. Three innings was all we could coax from these creatures who seem to be more interested in the strange stars spinning wildly above the field than the game. Its Jenna, me, the Kens and Barbies vs. the Creepies, and we’re down 1–0.

The Ken at bat just stands there as the pitch whizzes by. “Strike three!” calls the ump, a three-foot scaly fish with batlike wings. His voice is like frogs dying. Two outs. Jenna throws her bat to the ground. Its clank echoes from the home-run walls. “You idiot! You stupid jerk! You goddamned jerk! Why couldn’t you hit the ball?”

I cautiously approach my sister. Last week, she swung at me, got me right in the balls. But I’ve forgiven her. I forgive everything now. “Hey, hey. It’s all right. We still have a chance,” I say. My hand falls on her shoulder, but she shoves it away.

“No! He should have hit the ball, Russell! Three pitches right down the middle and he just stood there! He’s so stupid!”

The Kens and Barbies are more than stupid, they’re empty. Literally. They look like ordinary people, except at certain angles you can see right through them, and they glow like streetlights in fog. And they also do whatever you ask them, because there’s nothing much left inside to tell them otherwise. (It was easy herding a bunch of them to play this game.) I turn Jenna around, lean in to face her. “You’re up. You can do this.”

“She’s too fast. I’ll strike out.”

“I’ve seen you hit the ball. You’re amazing. Show them what we are.”

“That was before. I’m nothing now.” She falls to her knees, runs her hand through the dirt.

A green monster like a seven-legged Incredible Hulk runs across the field and leaps over the home-run fence into the starry abyss. A moment later, a huge flying hairless ferret-thing arcs over the field, snatches up the monster, and flaps away into the stars. The monster screams, trailing a rain of golden blood. Jenna doesn’t look up.

I squat down and lift her chin. Her eyes are as red as stoplights. “You’re not nothing, Jenna. You’re everything to me.”

She frowns, points a shaking finger up. “He says I’m nothing. He says we’re all nothing, doesn’t he?”

I look at a sky filled with too-bright stars (even though the sun is up and shining) at the giant pieces of earth that drift lazily overhead—entire towns and cities uprooted and tossed into space, never to fall back down. What can I say to comfort her?

Ten weeks earlier, the afternoon of my first day of ninth grade, I lined up my bike behind a dozen other kids, waiting my turn to trick out on the Track. That was our name for the curvy, jump-laden BMX bike course some kids had built years back, with shovels and dirt in the wooded preserve. Each year, some parent inevitably got wind of it, had the town bulldoze it flat. And each year, some industrious kids rebuilt it, with improvements on the original design. Far from the eyes of parents or cops, the Track had become a sacred place, where kids could shred without helmets or pads, smoke cigarettes, and make out behind the trees.

Everyone who was anyone was here, decked out in their new threads. It seemed as if every kid had remade himself for the new year. I felt like anything was possible, that I too could make myself into whatever I wanted.

My friend Vinny (new Adidas pants and sneakers, Lakers cap) leaned in close on his bike and excitedly showed me a picture of what was supposed to be Pamela Huston’s cleavage. With careful pinches, Vinny vigorously zoomed in and out on the screen of his cell phone, as if there were some cosmic secret hidden in the pixels. All I saw was a blotch of color.

“Dude,” he said, “she sits right next to me. I am so going to love math this year.”

To show him up, I whipped out my new Droid. Four calls from Mom, and two messages, but I ignored them and waited impatiently as my Web page trickled in. Last night, I’d created six new levels for the game Nimbus, an opensourced first-person shooter that had become more popular than Jesus over the past few months. “Check out this crazy maze I built. No one’s getting out of this death trap.”

“Dude, you’re such a geek!” Vinny said. “I’m showing you tits and you’re showing me your game levels?”

I felt disappointed. I’d spent hours building worlds in Nimbus, and Vinny was usually excited to see them. I slipped my phone back in my pocket.

Vinny twisted his head with his hands, looked like he was trying to tear it from his skull. I heard a crack. When some people are anxious, they crack their knuckles. Vinny cracked his neck. “So why are we here, again?”

I spotted Maeve and Elsa walking toward us, all dolled up in their brightly colored knee-length jackets, trying to avoid getting dirt on the new fabric. I gestured at them with my chin. “Maeve’s in my world studies class,” I said. Just saying her name made my heart skip a beat. “I told her I bike, and she got all excited.”

My phone buzzed. My mom again. I sent her to voice mail.

“Oh, so that’s why you dragged me here with these douche-bags.” Vinny whispered. “Maeve is a hottie. I’d totally like to—”

“Shut up!” I said. “Here they come. Don’t be a dick. Girls don’t like that.”

“What? Girls don’t like my dick?” He smiled wickedly at me.

“Shut up!”

I’d had a crush on Maeve since spring of last year, when we shared a square dance circle in gym class. Her hands had been so warm. But back then she’d been with Christopher Black, a kid who liked to wear plaid and who probably should have started shaving in seventh grade but had let his peach fuzz grow until it resembled a patch of blond mold. Rumor had it that they’d broken up over the summer, and since then I tried to learn everything I could about her.

“Hi, Vin. Hi, Russ,” Maeve said, smiling. Her cheeks were pink with cold, her black bob of hair half hidden by a gray knitted cap with tassels. Elsa ran a finger slowly around her hoop earrings. Both girls wore Ray-Ban glasses (prescription), which had, for some reason, become the Most-Necessary-Thing™ over the summer, and now all the girls whose moms could afford to buy them sported a pair. Maeve’s cherry red ones made her look like a punked-out NASA engineer. “Are you up soon?” she said.

In my best attempt at laid-back cool, I said, “Yeah, after Mi--ke.” But my voice cracked like I’d just hit puberty.

“Frog in your thr--oat?” Elsa said, mocking me. The girls giggled. My face grew hot, and I fumbled to save myself.

“What my castrato friend here is trying to say,” Vinny said, “is, wait till you see his backside. Backside air, that is.”

I shook my head, but the girls laughed, and all was well again. Maeve stared at me. She looked expectant, her irises the color of fall grasses, a swirl of green and brown, and pupils dark pits that threatened to suck me in forever.