Tommy darted through the archway and wordlessly held out the DIGITAL FOTO FRAME. “Keep it,” Pete snarled. Why not? Everything was shit, anyway.
Tommy looked incredulous with joy. Caity stared. Petra yelled. Darlene scolded. Pete’s heart hurt so bad he thought it would burst right there in his chest, like some rotten protein-rich soy nut too spoiled to eat.
From down the hall Terrell cried, “The Grab is brightening! I’m going, everybody!”
APRIL 2014
Julie grunted and screamed on her living room floor. She lay in a pool of her waters. Her insides were trying to burst free of her body. The pain was incredible.
Jake, kneeling helplessly beside her, said, “I still think we should go to the hospital.”
Between contractions, she glared at him; almost she spat at him. The hospital! She couldn’t move, couldn’t do anything but push. She gasped, “I’m shitting a pumpkin here!”
“But at the hospital—”
She screamed again and he shut up.
It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. Last night Jake had flown in from Wyoming, arriving a full week before she was supposed to go into labor. He would drive her to the hospital and then wait decorously in the waiting room. Linda would coach Julie in the labor room. The first baby, her OB had assured her, always took a long time to come; Julie might even have false labor pains, similar to Braxton-Hicks contractions but “a little bit more intense,” for several days. The baby nurse would come every day for two weeks after Julie came home from the hospital. It was all meticulously planned.
Then came these sudden, wrenching pains that woke her in the middle of the night; apparently she was already many more centimeters dilated than she should be because now the pumpkin was moving inexorably through her body, trying to kill her. Julie writhed and screamed, Jacob’s terrified face looming over her. She would die, the baby would die, nobody could do this, nobody—
A final scream that brought neighbors pounding on the wall and a terrified oath from Jake. Linda, in a coat thrown over leopard-print pajamas, threw open the door and burst into the room. The pumpkin slid out and stopped torturing her, although everything on her still hurt and apparently always would. Julie burst into tears. The neighbor pounded harder. Jake cried, “What do I do now?” And the answering machine burst into life.
If the phone had been ringing, she hadn’t heard it. But now she heard Gordon’s voice, almost as if the relative cessation of pain had somehow created a pool of silence.
“Julie, this is Gordon. We’ve had another kidnapping. Three-year-old boy disappeared from his bed in southern Vermont. I remember that was on one of the projections you—”
Julie wasn’t listening. Her baby had started to cry, and the sound filled the entire world, joyous and alive, leaving no room for anything else at all.
2035
Pete tried. McAllister had asked him to, so he did. He tried to be happy about her pregnancy. He tried to remember the good of all. He tried to be happy that Terrell’s first Grab had brought back another child, even though it was a boy and not a girl. He tried to be pleasant to Caity while not having any more sex with her. He succeeded in none of these things, and both efforts and failure turned him very quiet.
“I like you better like this,” Caity said after sex. “You don’t talk.”
Pete said nothing, turning his face away from her. They lay not in his secret room but in her bedroom at the other end of the Shell. Caity had taped to the wall another picture, this one torn from the box that had contained a toy. The actual toy, a doll, had been broken by some rambunctious child but the picture remained perfect: long body, tiny waist, big breasts, feet made in a permanent tiptoe. It looked nothing like any real woman Pete had ever seen, neither in the Shell nor on a Grab. Why had the Before people made dolls like that?
Terrell was disappointed that he hadn’t Grabbed a girl. But McAllister said they should all be grateful that Terrell’s first Grab had been so easy. Terrell had been able to get into the house, pick up the kid, and get out without waking anyone. McAllister named the boy “Keith,” since he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, say his own name. “Never mind,” Caity said. “Maybe McAllister’s baby will be a girl.”
“She’s too old to be having a baby at all,” Darlene said. “Pure foolishness. Probably we’ll lose them both.”
Pete stalked away, fists clenched at his side.
Caity had insisted she could handle another Grab—look how easy Terrell’s was! She went and it did turn out to be easy, a store Grab in a “supermarket.” Caity brought back a huge shopping cart of food and they had interesting feasts until it was gone, although the haul had not included any Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. The oversize shopping cart remained and was useful for hauling shit buckets. The next Grab would be Ravi’s.
Pete spent a lot of time with Petra and Tommy, Petra because he wanted to, Tommy because he’d attached himself to Pete, pestering him about the promised “big adventure.” Pete was harvesting soy in the farm, picking the thick ripe leaves and hard nuts, when Tommy started in again. Two half-full buckets sat on the floor beside the dirt beds. The farm smelled of rich dirt, growing crops, and the disinfectant waterfall by the fertilizer machine.
Tommy said, “When are we going on the adventure?”
“I don’t know.”
“What will it be?”
“You have to wait and see.”
“I don’t want to fucking wait.”
“Don’t let McAllister hear you using that language of Darlene’s.”
Tommy looked around fearfully as if McAllister might suddenly appear, then changed direction. “Why are those new grasses growing outside the Shell?”
This was no longer Pete’s secret, just like nothing else was his, not even the DIGITAL FOTO FRAME. He said, “You know that, Tommy. You had it in learning circle. The Earth was sick but it’s getting better.”
“Why did it get sick?”
“The Tesslies did it. They destroyed the whole Earth.”
“Why?”
“Because they’re bastards.”
“Oh. Why don’t we kill them dead?”
“Because nobody but the Survivors has ever seen one, and that was a long time ago.”
“Are the Tesslies going to come back?”
“I don’t know.”
Tommy considered this. “They have to come back, Pete, to let us out of the Shell.”
“Maybe when it’s time the Shell will just melt around us. You know, like the briar hedge in the fairy-tale book.”
“Really? When?”
“McAllister says when the air is good to breathe again.”
“Oh. When will that be?”
“I don’t know, Tommy!”
Tommy said judiciously, “I don’t think you know much.”
Another voice behind Pete said, “You’re right. He doesn’t.”
Ravi. Pete willed himself to not turn around. He was trying for the good of all, he was trying, he was trying. But Ravi these days had a cutting edge. McAllister had stopped having sex with him once she got pregnant; Pete knew this from Jenna, who’d been trying to make Pete feel better. At first Ravi swaggered and pretended that he and McAllister still did it. When Pete had smirked at him and rolled his eyes, Ravi had stalked away. After that he’d avoided Pete. Now he had come from the direction of McAllister’s room, and Pete heard the dangerous note in his brother’s voice, and knew that Ravi was as angry and frustrated as he was. And looking for a way to let that anger out.
Ravi repeated, “Pete doesn’t know anything. He only thinks he does.”