After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia

“After the explosion, and there are reports of hunters and you’re up here alone, and I didn’t know if they’d come after you, so…” He trails off, and his eyes slide to the side. The color of his irises is muffled in the darkness, and it takes me a moment before I taste his unease.

Then it hits me, so full in my chest that I take a step back. His features are blurred because of the darkness on this side of the house, the front facing away from the fires along the horizon. Overgrown shrubbery clings to the decayed porch, plunging the front walk into a gray blackness.

The night’s coming faster because of the smoke choking the sky.

Beyond, in the fading trees, I hear the clicking of the monsters gathering.

“Shit,” I murmur, balling James’s shirt in my hands and tugging him inside. That’s when the wailing begins, thick down along my back, as if it could still call me to action. The sound of the monsters calling to the others about their located prey.

I stand mute in the hallway, my steps stuttering as I try to plan the next move. Beside me, James trembles, the edge of my knuckles scraping against his chest as I hold him tight.

At first I start toward the back of the house, thinking about the closets without windows, but then I double around, heading for the stairs into the basement.

It’s a risk, I know. If they make it down the stairs, we’re trapped. They’ll gather around us, bodies so thick there’s no such thing as escape.

I start tearing down the blinds over the windows, tossing them to the floor. We just have to make it through the night. In the morning, with the light, they’ll be gone. I could coat him with my blood, I think. Hope it masks the scent of his freshness with one of disease.

That’s when I realize he’s been calling my name. “Vail,” he shouts, hands on my shoulders. He forces me to face him.

In that split second, while the monsters wail and chatter and the darkness seeps in, I stare at James’s lips. I wonder, for just the barest moment, what they’d taste like. How they’d feel pressed between my own and if I could ever resist sinking my teeth into their tender flesh.

“Maybe we can still make it to the light of the compound,” he whispers.

I finally understand that he doesn’t hear them. Not yet. His ears aren’t tuned to the monsters like mine are. He doesn’t know how close they’ve come. How desperately they want him, and how their need sears through me. “No,” I muster. “It’s too late for that.”

The gun cabinet sits in my father’s closet, and I spin the dial, kneeling as I begin to count out the bullets. James reaches for a case on the top shelf, the label wrapped around a bright blue box with orange stripes.

“Cure-tranqs,” he says, running his hand over the label. When he looks at me, his eyes are wide.

I lift a shoulder as he pries open the lid. “They gave them to me at the center,” I explain. “Sometimes the pack will go looking for the one they lost, and just in case my pack came after me, the scientists wanted me to…you know.”

“The box is full?” He asks it like a question, as if I need to explain why I’ve never used them. “So your pack never came back?”

I focus on my hands, sorting destruction into neat piles. What I don’t tell him is that I can already hear the pack pushing against the air outside the house. They know there’s someone pure inside.

I can already feel the way their mouths water for him.

At night, when they race past the house, is the loneliest I’ve ever felt. Except for now.

“You shouldn’t have come up here.” I stand, angry, shoving a box of bullets in my pockets. My shoulder brushes against him as I walk past, and he doesn’t even hesitate before following.

It all comes back in my dreams, almost more vivid than my day-to-day life. The first one was probably six years old and plump with her baby fat. She smelled like melted ice cream and tasted like salt and misery.

When we came upon her in the park, she seemed unsurprised, almost as if she’d been expecting it.

“Are you my sister?” she asked calmly when the first of us fell upon her. She asked it again as she whimpered with her last breath, still clinging to the hope that one of us would know her, remember her.

Sister, I thought to myself. We are all sisters and brothers in the pack, I wanted to tell her, but I knew that she’d become aware of it soon enough. Once the infection took hold and brought her to us.

And maybe one day she’d be out on a hunt of her own, and a scent would catch the air, and she’d hesitate. Are you my sister? she’d be wondering, the clicks of her tongue unable to form the words.

Even as the pool water poured down her throat, that’s what she’d be asking. Are you my sister?

And I’d stand there mute, wanting to answer “Yes,” but knowing it was a lie.

We’ve gathered every object capable of emitting light and shoved it into the tiny utility room in the basement, but even so it barely creates enough of a glow to sting my eyes.

Which means all we’ve accomplished is knowing that when the monsters break down the door I’ll be able to see clearly as they shred James’s flesh, sinking their teeth into his limbs.

I pace back to the door, candle wax dripping from my fingers as I set trembling flames to wicks.

“Have you ever thought about what it would be like to be one of us?” I ask him as I stand with my hand pressed to the wall. I hear the vibrations of them pounding upstairs. Three months before the pandemic, my father replaced all the windows with double-paned glass, which only causes a moment’s hesitation in the monsters’ assault.

James moves behind me, coming so close I feel the tremor of each exhalation on the back of my ears. “One of you?” he asks, brushing my ponytail aside and pressing his lips to the ridges of my spine.

I close my eyes. “A monster. Creature of the night.”

“Have you ever thought,” he asks, teeth scraping lightly against skin, “that you’re the lucky one? You can live out on the edge, past the compound, in the darkness. You’re free.”

“Hunted,” I tell him. “Alone. Shunned. Hated.”

“I can’t sleep in the darkness.” His hand has been resting on my hip, and now his fingers curl around the bone, pulling me against him until there’s nothing separating us. Above, I hear the crash of the monsters, my blood spiking.

Tears begin to edge my eyes. James holding me makes me remember what it was like to mean something to someone else. “I belonged to something before.” My voice quavers as I tell him the lie that I wish were truth. “They’ve been searching for me. Asking me back. No one else has done that. No one from before ever cared.”

His hand slips up along my ribs, skimming the edge of my bra until he cups my throat, nails trailing lightly over my jaw. “I came looking for you, Vail.”

There’s this moment as they pour down the stairs when I think about calling out to them that I am here. That they have come for me at last and that I’ve been waiting.

Except they’ve known where I am for weeks. Months. And they have never cared.

I stare at the gun in my hand and the two boxes on the table shoved against the door. Bullets or cure-tranqs. That’s the question. Death or salvation.

Except that I can’t figure out which is which. It seems worse to damn them to this life, of loneliness and exile. It’s taking a part of who they are from them, even if that part is the monster.

But to kill them, the finality of it, seems to make my fingers tremble. All the times I’ve taken lives without a thought other than hunger and now such cold ambivalence fails me.

I’ve always wondered if the one who cured me felt righteous. If he left his compound on a Tuesday morning with his pack full of cure-tranqs and thought, Today I will save the world, and instead he found me.

If he could see me now, hesitating, would he think it was worth it? All the monsters’ dens he waded into, all the risks he took, just to preserve us.

Thinking he was saving the world when really he was just giving us greater access to destruction. Letting us loose to be despised and cast aside in a manner that absolves humanity of its guilt.