and it didn’t cry as loudly as I thought it should have been crying. I sat there and rocked it, shushing it, the way I’d seen people do with babies. I sat there trying to remember a lullaby.
No need to draw this part out, Max.
The baby, she died in my arms. She was just too hot, and I’d come along too late to save her from the sun. Maybe me sprinkling the water on her had been too much. Maybe just seeing me had been too much. Maybe she just picked then to die. And I wanted to cry, but I didn’t. I don’t know why. I knew I ought to, and I still know I ought to have, but I just sat there holding her close to me like she wasn’t dead. Like she was only asleep and was gonna wake up. I sat there staring at the blue-green plastic people in the front seat, at the sky, at the car.
In my bad dreams, there are wheeling, screeching gulls in that blue-white sky, and it goes on forever, on out into space, into starry blackness, down to blue skies on other worlds without women and men and youngers, where none of these things have ever happened and where THE EVENT hasn’t occurred and THE GOO will never reach. Where it’s still THE BEFORE, and will never be THE AFTER.
God and Jesus and angels and a day of judgment of wicked men, they all live and breathe inside the Reverend Swales’s black book, and in the songs we sing on Sundays. Many other gods and devils live in other holy books. But on the bridge that day, there was no god. In my dreams, there is no god. And I don’t pray anymore. I don’t think much of those who do.
You’re saying, Now that’s not what happened, Cody. I can hear you, Max. I can hear you grumbling, plain as day, “Cody Marlene Hernandez, you’re mixing it all up, and you’re doing it on purpose. That wasn’t the deal, you welcher.”
Fine, you win.
I scrounged about and found a couple of other things inside the cardboard box. I hardly looked at them, just stuffed them into my pack. Carrying the dead baby in her blanket, I walked back across the bridge, quickly as I could, quicker than I’d come. It was a lot harder getting over the fence with her in my arms, but I managed. I didn’t drop her. I’d have fallen before I ever dropped her.
I spent a week in quarantine, just in case. Five men went out onto the bridge and brought back the plastic woman and the girl and buried them in the cemetery. They buried the baby there, too, after Doc Lehman did his autopsy. No one ever scolded me or yelled or revoked privileges for going out there. I didn’t have to ask why. You get punished, you don’t have to get punished all over again.
Me and Max sat between the crimson river and the NOW|HERE wall, and I let him read what I wrote on the back of the torn-out encyclopedia pages. He got pissed near the end, and just like I thought he would, called me a welcher.
“The baby always dies in my dreams,” I told him, when he finally shut up and let me talk again.
“I didn’t say, ‘Write what’s in your dreams.’ I said, ‘Write what happened.’”
“It seemed more important,” I told him, and tossed a piece of gravel at the river. “What haunts me when I sleep, how it might have gone that day, but didn’t. How it probably
“Yeah, but you went and killed that baby.”
“No I didn’t. My nightmares kill the baby, not me. Almost every time I sleep, the nightmares kill the baby.”
He chewed his lip the frustrated way he does sometimes. “Cody, I just ain’t never gonna understand that. You
“You weren’t there. You didn’t hold her, and her so hot, and you so sure she was already dead or would be dead any second.”
“I just won’t ever understand it,” he said again.
“Okay, Max. Then you won’t ever understand it. That’s fair. There’s a lot about myself I don’t understand sometimes. Doesn’t matter the dreams don’t make sense. Only matters it happens to me. It’s all too complicated. Never black-and-white, not like SWITCH ON and SWITCH OFF, not like THE BEFORE and THE AFTER. I fall asleep, and she dies in my arms, even though she didn’t.”
He glared at the pages, chewing his lips and looking disgusted, then handed them back to me.
“Well, you don’t win,” he said. “You don’t get any more than kisses ’cause you didn’t even talk about the map or the book, and because you killed the baby.”
“I don’t care,” I replied, which was true.
“I was just trying to help you.”
“I know that, Max. Don’t you think I know that?”
He didn’t answer my question. Instead, he said, “I’m going home, Cody. I got chores. So do you, welcher.” I told him I’d be along soon. I told him I needed to be alone for a while (which is when I’m writing this part down). So I’m sitting here throwing gravel at the sludgy crimson river people used to call the St. Johns River.
Outside my dreams, the baby didn’t die. The olders figured the car had only driven through Arlington and out onto the bridge the night before I found it. They guessed the girl and the woman got sick a couple of days before that, probably before they even got to Florida. They figured, too, the baby would have died of heat prostration and thirst if I hadn’t found it when I did. “You did right,” Ma’am Shen whispered in my ear when no one was watching or listening in. “Even if that wasn’t your intent, you did right.” We never found out the baby’s name, so they named it Cody, after me.
The olders found something in the baby’s blood. It’s like SWITCH OFF, they say, but it’s different. It’s like SWITCH OFF, but it works better. You breathe it out, and it shuts off the nanoassemblers all around you. Maybe, they say, that’s why the car didn’t change, and why the woman and the girl’s clothes and jewelry wasn’t converted, too. But these new bots, they can’t turn stuff back the way it was before.
And yeah, there was a map. A map of the United States and Mexico and Canada. Most of the cities had big red X’s drawn on them. Montreal, up in Canada, had a blue circle, and so did San Francisco and a few little towns here and there. A red line was drawn from Birmingham, Alabama all the way to Pensacola. Both those cities had red X’s of their own. I found the red pencil in the box with the baby. And I found pages and pages of notes. In the margins of the map, there was a list of countries. Some in red, some in blue.
Turns out the woman was a microbiologist, and she’d been studying when the sanctuary in Birmingham was breached. That’s what she’d written in her notes. They read us that part in class. “The containment has been breached.” I also know the notes talk about the nanites evolving, and about new strains the SWITCH OFF doesn’t work on, and new strains of SWITCH OFF that shut down THE GOO better than before, like what kept the baby alive. They know the scientist also wrote about how THE EVENT isn’t over because the bots are all evolving and doing things they weren’t designed to do.
Of course, they also weren’t designed to eat up the whole world, but they did.
Saul Benedict still frowns and asks his questions, and he says everything’s even more uncertain than it was before I found the car.
But me, I look at that baby, who’s growing up fine and healthy and breathing those new bots out with every breath, and sometimes I think about going out onto the bridge again with a can of spray paint and writing
YOU WON’T FEEL A THING
by Garth Nix
IT STARTED WITH A TOOTHACHE.
The Arkle had it, in one of the great hollow fangs at the front of his mouth, that would have been simple canines before the Overlords changed him, in the process of turning him into a Ferret. Not that The Arkle was
