The Widow Windham fumbled with the key in the lock, fumbled, fumbled, dropped the keychain, retrieved it, finally succeeded in insertion, twist, and entry into her home. She accomplished this all as her son stood at her side, carefully holding the brown paper bag that held their daily allotment of food rations. He said nothing, and made no move to help his mother open the door. Although he was only seven, he knew that he should simply stand in silence and allow her to solve the problem of shaking hands and slippery key all by herself.
Hunter followed his mother into the dark flat, dark because of the forever twilight of the dying skies and dark because of the heavy drapes that she never pulled back from the windows anymore. He lugged the bag into the kitchen and waited patiently until his mother took the meager supply of groceries from him and placed them on the tabletop. As soon as his burden was gone, he pulled back a chair and sat at the table while his mother opened cupboards, arranged new cans with old, new boxes with old, and he wondered if they would ever eat that can of lima beans or that box of instant mashed potatoes. He supposed that if the Troubles continued long enough, all they would have to eat would be lima beans and mashed potatoes.
His mother took the long, lean loaf of bread from the grocery sack and placed it on the counter, folded the sack neatly and put it in one of the cupboards along with a stack just like it, shut the cupboard door, sat down at the kitchen table, put her head down on her arms, and proceeded to sob. Hunter’s small hand reached out, paused for a moment above his mother’s mousy, drooping locks, and withdrew. He knew that she needed to fall within for a while.
It was always the same, day after day after day, at least during the week. The weekend afternoons were spent at the community center or the church, each of which were experiencing rapidly-dwindling populations as the war machine cranked into full production. It stripped away entire demographics at a time. First, the young men had gone, then the young women, then layers of society in increasingly-older strata were sent to the stars to fight a war that no one truly understood.
Hunter walked to the living room, in shadows as it was, faint bands of grayish light falling on the floor and somehow dying there, coughing little last breaths on the plain charcoal utility of the carpet. He sat in one of those bands of light, not bothering to turn on the radio or the television. Both technologies had for the most part been abandoned, and they were much too poor to upgrade to silver.
The sobs of Helen Windham were not loud anymore; she had lost her passion long ago, about the time of the Birth. When things fell apart, when the orders had finally come through and the one man she had ever loved was sent to the stars to fight a war for a creature at the center of the planet…She had broken.
Each day it was an exquisite agony to walk by the compound, to see that horrid little girl and her angel staring at them through the fence. Each day she wanted to throw herself against the shield that she knew surrounded the compound and end her life, but she was always brought back to reality by the feel of the little hand in her own, the hand of the little boy who was now her only friend and family left. So she always dragged him past that awful place, and she knew that sometimes the little girl waved at her son, and she knew that sometimes her son waved back. It broke her heart to see that interaction, but she knew that the little girl probably had no idea that she was the last child born of humanity, and that it was her fault that the world was dying.
Hunter sat cross-legged on the floor, leaned to one side to see down the hallway, where his mother still sat in the kitchen, face now covered by weary hands. He pulled his one prized possession from underneath the couch: Honeybear Brown, tattered and one-eyed and abused by five years of love. Hunter knew that he was now the man of the family, had been for a year now, but he just couldn’t give up Honeybear. He grasped the stuffed animal tightly and rocked back, forth, back, finding more comfort in that mindless act than he had been offered from his mother in the year since Papa left.
He heard it in the sky then, another transport, shot into the sky from the same giant trebuchet tube across the ocean that had launched his father off to war. The sonic boom came, shook the picture frame on the wall, set the heavy curtains to swaying at the window, causing the lines of light to shift, leaving him in darkness and then light, darkness and then light. Mommy began sobbing again in the kitchen. There were always reminders, always something to bring those emotions back to the fragile, raw surface.
Hunter Windham held Honeybear as tightly as he could, and wondered when he would be called off to war.
Don’t cry, Mommy. Don’t—
—cry, Lily. Please don’t cry.”
The child was shaking in her embrace, and there was absolutely nothing that the angel who was Nan could do about it. She had known for years that this day would come, that finally Lily would leave this compound forever and ascend to her future. Mr. Pierce sat across the table from her, looking around the room, trying to find something interesting upon which to fix his gaze so that he would not inadvertently stare at the angel and the child.
“Are you sure?” Nan stroked Lily’s hair, the child’s face buried in her chest, her body sending second-hand sobs into the projection’s periphery filter.
“Of course I’m sure. I spoke with Mo—I spoke with Maire myself. It’s time for the girl to begin.” He absent-mindedly picked one of Lily’s dolls from the floor, a buxom lass with impossible features, made even more ridiculous by the fact that almost every female that had even remotely resembled her had died a horrible death at the hands of the silver affliction. The doll was one of a dead breed.
Lily turned from the safety of Nan’s embrace and walked calmly over to Mr. Pierce, defiantly tore the doll from his grasp, walked back to Nan. “Mine.”
Mr. Pierce was taken aback for a moment. It had been decades since he had actually interacted with a child. “I see you’ve taught her how to share.”
Nan scoffed. “Leave her be. She’ll be sharing enough once you get your hands on her.”
He couldn’t believe the gall of the projection, talking to him in that condescending manner. “This isn’t something I want to do, Nan. This is something I have to do.”
Nan pulled Lily closer, kissed the top of her head. The child had finally stopped sniffling, and she was engrossed in her doll. “She’s just a baby.”
“And you knew all along that we’d have to send her away. You’ve become attached, Nan. Never should have become attached.”
She watched the girl, and Pierce saw that look in her eye, that empty, longing look of the projected machine. How she yearned to be constructed of beautiful, awful, mortal flesh. She looked at the girl as if she herself had given birth to her.
“She’s not yours, Nan. Never was.” Pierce leaned back in his chair, smug and proper.
Nan grinned. She stood up, picked up Lily and doll and walked to the door to the child’s bedroom. “She’s not yours either.”
Pierce frowned his objection at the projection. “I need to take her—”
“Mother can have her tomorrow. For now, she needs to sleep.”
Nan took Lily into her bedroom, shut the door behind her. Lily watched Pierce the whole way from over Nan’s shoulder, the chesty doll still held in her tiny hands. Pierce feared that gaze, feared everything about this little girl, and the job that she would begin in the morning.
As for Nan, once the girl was gone, she would be switched off. There was no need for a Nanny in a world without children.
She had fallen asleep at the kitchen table again, no doubt, although it was now too dark in the flat to be able to tell for sure. Hunter knew that if he turned on the light in the living room, it would rouse his mother from the fragile and necessary escape that sleep gave her. He didn’t want to wake her up, because he knew that she wouldn’t be able to fall asleep again for a long time if she did. No real reason to turn the lights on anyways. He found all the entertainment he needed for the evening inside of his head, and outside of the thick wide window behind the thick wide drapes.