After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia

“Batter up!” the umpire says.

Rain or shine, it seems.

My cell phone had no signal. And the landlines we found didn’t work either. “We’re taking the long way home,” I told Jenna as we looped around town. But home, as far as I could tell, had been torn away.

Empty people waited on broken sidewalks, sat in their dented cars, stared out at their upturned yards. “Why do they just stand there?” Jenna said.

“I don’t think they have anywhere else to go.”

“Are they ghosts?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think Mom’s a ghost?”

I took her hand. “No. I think Mom’s very worried about us.”

“I don’t like how they just stare. What are you staring at?” She screamed, “Go away! Go away!” And as if under her thrall, the see-through people ran from sidewalks, fled their cars, abandoned their once-well-manicured lawns. In a minute, all of them had vanished.

Jenna’s mouth fell open. “They listened to me.”

“C’mon,” I said, trembling. “We need to go.”

We turned the corner and she screamed. A bat-eared elephant rummaged through the public library’s dumpster. It pulled out a ratty book with its humanlike hands and said, “What a stupendous waste!”

We fled down another street.

On a road shadowed by towering sycamores, a seven-foot-tall walking-stick insect rushed toward us. I hunched down and covered Jenna in my arms. The insect paused above us, and from its tiny mantislike head said, “Please, I’m a vegetarian,” and ran up a large tree.

When we rose again, the streets were filled with strange creatures. Apes with yellow fur hopped from broken rooftop to rooftop, singing jazz. A huge hairy spider feasted on the rubber of downed power lines. A clear ball with a single lidless eye floating inside it bounced past us. But like the mindless people, these strange beasts weren’t interested in us.

“What are they?” Jenna said.

“I don’t know.”

“Are they monsters?”

“Are you?” someone grumbled behind us.

We spun to see a hunched, hairless man as thin as a concentration camp survivor, skin the blasted color of the moon. His smile revealed long canines. A ghoul. “They’re same as you,” it said, in a voice like gravel being crushed. “The lost.”

Timidly, I asked, “Lost from what?”

“Do you really need me to answer that?”

When I didn’t respond, he looked us up and down and sighed. “Yours wasn’t the first world created. And it won’t be the last.” He bit his long dirty fingernails. “He didn’t like it anymore, so he destroyed it. Like he did to mine. Like he did to all of ours.”

“‘He?’”

“You know.” With a bony finger, he pointed up. “Him.” He coughed and stumbled away like a drunk.

I shook my head. I’d had enough. “Come on, Jenna.”

“Where are we going?”

“To a safe place.”

“Where’s that?”

The wooded preserve looked as if it had been hit by a hurricane. Downed trees crisscrossed the path, making it hard going, but we made it to the Track. A huge tree had fallen across the course and crushed the ramps. A see- through Eric Kellerman sat on his bike on the other side, moving the pedals back and forth, back and forth. I wondered if he had biked here all the way from school.

I fell back against a tree. I just needed time to think, to make sense of what was happening. But Jenna screamed, “Look!” She ran past Eric.

“Jenna! Stop!” I chased after her.

A hundred feet out, the woods abruptly fell away to reveal a gulf of stars. Floating nearby on a clump of land was a house. Our house.

“Mommy!” she cried. “Mommmmmmy!”

I picked Jenna up, afraid she might try to jump over the edge.

“Let me go! Mommy’s there! I want Mommy!”

For a moment I entertained the thought of using Eric’s bike, building a ramp, flying out into the stars with Jenna on my back. But the house was too far out. There was no way I could reach it. In a game like Nimbus, I’d construct a bridge, or give myself wings, or leap out into the unknown. But even if we could reach it, what would be the point? I squeezed her as I saw something move in my bedroom window.

I turned Jenna’s face away. “Mom’s at the hospital. She had an extra shift today. She’s safe there, with all the doctors.”

“But she was supposed to pick me up from school.”

“No, that’s why I picked you up. She told me to come get you. And now I’m here.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“You swear?”

“…I swear.”

“So Mommy’s okay?”

The figure in the house had long, untamed hair. She folded one of my shirts, put it down on my bed, picked it up, folded the same shirt again. And again. And again.

My voice cracked as I said, “Yes, Jenna, Mommy’s fine.”

I’m up at the plate and I’m shivering. Just as quickly as it began, the phosphorescent rain has stopped, though the field is still pimpled with glowing spots. Jenna leans off of first and her eyes are as wide as moons. It’s up to me to win this game, and she knows it. I can’t let her down. I don’t know what will happen to her if we lose.

The first pitch comes in. It looks high, so I don’t swing, but at the last instant it dips.

“Strike one!”

Damn! I can’t tell for sure, but I think the yellow-eyed pitcher is laughing.

“Hold up!” the umpire says as a figure runs across the outfield. It’s a man, not a Ken. It’s a real, solid, flesh- and-bone human being. He screams, “It’s all gone! All lost! There’s nothing left! Oh god, oh god, oh god!” He runs for the cliff ’s edge that cuts across right field, where the world drops away forever.

“Stop!” I scream. “Wait!” I just want to talk to him, to speak to someone besides my sister, to find out who he is and where he’s from and what he did before. But he has a soul, and therefore his will is his own. He leaps over the edge. For a few seconds, he keeps moving outward, his legs kicking like Wile E. Coyote gone off a cliff. But then some invisible current yanks him diagonally away. That’s the third jumper we’ve seen this week.

Jenna turns back to me. She’s shaking. I wish she hadn’t watched.

I tap my bat on home plate, lift it over my shoulder. “No pitcher!” I say.

After a pause, Jenna says, “No pitcher!”

“Oh and one,” the umpire declares. “Two outs.”

We raided kitchens for food, slept in dank basements and walk-in closets. We once saw a gang of still-living men and women in suits and dresses murder a boy because he would not give them his last beef jerky. But after a few weeks it seemed as if we were the only real human beings left. All that remained of the others were see- through husks.

“We won’t make it to the hospital,” Jenna said.