After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia

sprouted. All that quick growing. It must hurt them. The sprouted snapped at her face, missed. They were fast and strong when they first sprouted, but clumsy in their ever-changing bodies. The sprouted set its jaws in her chest. Through her coat and sweater, its teeth tore into her skin. Pain. Teeth sliding along her ribs. Millie tried to wrestle the head off her. She got her fingers deep into the fur around its neck. Then an impact jerked the sprouted’s head sideways. Citron and his baseball bat, screaming, “Die, you bastard!” as he beat the sprouted. It leapt for him. It was already bigger. Millie rolled to her feet, looking around for anything she could use as a weapon. Citron was keeping the sprouted at bay, just barely, by swinging his bat at it. It advanced on him, howling in pain with every step forward.

Sai seemed to come out of nowhere. She had the piece of rebar she carried whenever she went out. The three of them raged at the sprouted, screaming and hitting. Millie kicked and kicked. The sprouted screamed back in pain or fury. Its eyes were all bleedy. It swatted Citron aside, but he got up and came at it again. Finally it wasn’t fighting anymore. They kept hitting it until they were sure it was dead. Even after Sai and Citron had stopped, Millie stomped the sprouted. With each stomp, she grunted in thick animal rage at herself for letting it sneak up on her, for leaving the warren without her knife. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see a few kids that had crept out from other warrens to see what the racket was about. She didn’t care. She stomped.

“Millie! Millie!” It was Citron. “It’s dead!”

Millie gave the bloody lump of hair and bone and flesh one more kick, then stood panting. Just a second to catch her breath, then they could keep looking for Jolly. They couldn’t stay there long. A dead sprouted could draw others. If one sprouted was bad, a feeding frenzy of them was worse.

Sai was gulping, sobbing. She looked at them with stricken eyes. “I woke up and I called to Max and he didn’t answer, and when I went over and lifted his coat”—she burst into gusts of weeping—“there was only part of his head and one arm there. And bones. Not even much blood.” Sai clutched herself and shuddered. “While we were sleeping, a sprouted came in and killed Max and ate most of him, even licked up his blood, and we didn’t wake up! I thought it had eaten all of you! I thought it was coming back for me!”

Something gleamed white in the broken mess of the sprouted’s corpse. Millie leaned over to see better, fighting not to gag on the smell of blood and worse. She had to crouch closer. There was lots of blood on the thing lying in the curve of the sprouted’s body, but with chilly clarity, Millie recognized it. It was the circular base of Jolly’s musical penguin. Millie looked over at Citron and Sai. “Run,” she told them. The tears coursing down her face felt cool. Because her skin was so hot now.

“What?” asked Sai. “Why?”

Millie straightened. Her legs were shaking so much they barely held her up. That small pop she’d felt when she’d pulled on the sprouted’s neck. “A sprouted didn’t come into our squat. It was already in there.” She opened her hand to show them the thing she’d pulled off the sprouted’s throat in her battle with it; Jolly’s gold necklace. Instinct often led sprouteds to return to where the people they loved were. Jolly had run away to protect the rest of her warren from herself. “Bloody run!” Millie yelled at them. “Go find another squat! Somewhere I won’t look for you! Don’t you get it? I’m her twin!”

First Citron’s face then Sai’s went blank with shock as they understood what Millie was saying. Citron sobbed, once. It might have been the word “Bye.” He grabbed Sai’s arm. The two of them stumbled away. The other kids that had come out to gawk had disappeared back to their warrens. Millie turned her back so she couldn’t see what direction Sai and Citron were moving in, but she could hear them, more keenly than she’d ever been able to hear. She could smell them. The easthound could track them. The downy starvation fuzz on Millie’s arm was already coarser. The pain in her handless wrist spiked. She looked at it. It was aching because the hand was starting to grow in again. There were tiny fingers on the end of it now. And she needed to eat so badly.

When had Jolly sprouted? Probably way more than twenty-eight-and-three-quarter minutes ago. Citron and Sai’s only chance was that Millie had always done everything later than her twin.

Still clutching Jolly’s necklace, she began to run too; in a different direction. Leeks, she told the sprouting Hound, fresh leeks. You like those, right? Not blood and still-warm, still-screaming flesh. You like leeks. The Hound wasn’t fully come into itself yet. It was almost believing her that leeks would satisfy its hunger. And it didn’t understand that she couldn’t swim. You’re thirsty too, right? she told it.

It was.

Faster, faster, faster, Millie sped toward the river, where the spring tide was running deep and wide.

That child’s gone wild.
Oh, Black Betty, bam-ba-lam.

Loup.

GRAY by Jane Yolen

How many ways to describe gray:
gray louring sky, nearly black;
gray stone, a wall fallen down;
gray of rock, ribboned with crevices;
gray wall pocked with bullet holes;
gray splotches of old, dried blood.
The day is gray with weeping,
the hour gray with horror.
The dusk will be gray with no promise.
The night a darker shade of gray
without dreams.

And yet in that corner of the gray wall,
beneath the gray sky,
in the middle of the gray day,
out of the gray, dusty, thirsting earth,
a small green shoot struggles upward,
pulling itself towards the gray light,
harbinger, herald, hope.

If we wait—
a day, a week, a season,
all of them gray—
there will be a flower,
a wall flower.
And it will be red,
the color of life’s new blood,
of the rebirthed sun,
of desire, of chance,
and gray will only be
the color of memory