Page 196 of The End of the World As We Know It

There it was. Val closed her eyes.

Babies born during the Fallout summer had a high mortality rate due to uneven medical care, but the survivors seemed to be fine well into toddlerhood. Everything had seemed golden and hopeful. Humanity had gone to its knees, almost extinguished, but now it was rising again, bleeding, swaying, but ready to continue the fight.

And then a virtually identical, but crucially different, superflu strain had arrived—as best they could tell in the postmortem—and wiped out the entire generation of those early babies. Around a quarter of all the other survivors, those immune to the original superflu, had perished as well. And in the final reckoning, it turned out anybody producing sperm had simply stopped producing it. The birth rate dropped to zero and stayed there, and it had been there for eighteen years.

Bashir’s theory was an asymptomatic infection resulting in specific inflammation, like mumps. Survivors had caught the second superflu and fought it off, but in so doing, their immune systems cooked and poisoned their spermatocytes to death. The damage had been done. You just stopped hoping, you put the hope away. You remembered the last time you saw a child (twenty-one years ago) and never thought about it again.

Bashir said, “She’s underweight and dehydrated, but not malnourished. Similar to the minor injuries on her hands and feet, I’d guess that’s recent. A couple of days, a week at most.”

“It’s a miracle,” Lois whispered. “She’s a miracle. We have to—”

“We do need to inform the rest of the council,” Bashir said. “Val?”

Val nodded, though it felt distant and cold, as if someone were holding her chin and making her do it. Outside, the gunshot sounds of the lake continued. She had heard of cold snaps, polar vortexes, something about air from the Arctic flowing in an unusual pattern, but she had never experienced one before. The suddenness was terrifying, but the terror remained a low undercurrent under everything else she was feeling.

“Somewhere out there,” she said, “relatively nearby, it sounds like, may be the only fertile couple in the world. I’m probably exaggerating. I hope I am. But we can all do math and I know we’re all thinking the math herelookslike a miracle. Mainly, we just can’t run off all half-cocked. First of all, it was about zero this morning and now it’s minus forty—”

Martin Sykes glanced perfunctorily at the suction-cupthermometer stuck to the window, his lank blond hair straggling over his collar. “Minus forty-seven,” he said.

“… So we’renotsending out a search party in this,” Val said. “We’ll call a council meeting for tomorrow; I think everyone but us is in town,” she added.Townmeant Edmonton, once a city of close to a million people, now about one percent of that, but still the place where everyone bartered and worked and visited friends. In a province speckled with lakes and abruptly empty lakeshore cabins, most folks still preferred to live in the city; only the crustiest hermits and misanthropes (Val thought fondly) chose to live in a cabin community like this one.

“I’ll start calling around,” Lois said, her voice trembling.

“Thanks, Lo.” Val glanced at Martin, then again at the thermometer next to him. Had it dropped again while she was watching? Jesus. “I’ll take her for tonight. Bash, come help me set up the cot in the office; I want her to be close to a bathroom.”

The others—Lois, Martin, Dean and Willa Monahan, Katy Coles, Ethan Weiskopf—filed out, already speculating about the weather, the search pattern, equipment. Val was barely listening; she heard only the discordant song in her head:No. We’re not giving her back no matter what the hell we find. Mine, she’s mine. She’s mine, she’s my child, she belongs to me.

I found her and she’s mine.

She had never experienced cold like this, not in a lifetime of living here. It registered not as temperature on the skin but force, as if the air itself had frozen solid and become a slab of metal pressing the breath out of their lungs. Thank God she’d found the kid when she did; she’d have died of hypothermia in minutes.

That night, sleeping cat-light on the floor next to the little girl’s cot, Val dreamed her usual brain-clearing clutter: a lost gold watch that her grandmother had accused her of stealing; makingpysankyat school, spattering hot beeswax on her hand; a stag that stood atop the snow and watched her with bright blue eyes.

Then it seemed she dreamed of a ringing phone, of screams incomprehensible in their terror and grief, and she dreamed she dressed and checked on the sleeping child and went outside and—

The cold kicked her awake from the night’s haze, burning the strip of exposed skin around her eyes like a blowtorch. It was Willa Monahan, howling herself hoarse, and someone dragging her from the thing sprawled on the cabin’s front lawn. Val stared, speechless, horrified less by what it was than the fact that she could not identify it at once.

It was Dean, splayed to the dawn sky and more than simply naked, opened up not like you’d butcher a deer but split as if by lightning, except that no lightning had ever carved so precisely. The enormous ring of blood around him was going from black to gray under the falling snow; sheets of his skin (Christ!) were arranged in a matching circle, marked with letters, triangles, connecting lines, squirming (Can’t be—just an effect of the snow) lasciviously, demanding a closer look, a spider’s web of arcs and curves and in the center the spider itself, many-limbed with ribs and femurs ripped from its body and broken into sharp-edged legs.

Some sick fuck, some roving stranger. She knew everyone in this place. Hell, maybe it was this very murderer that the child had fled, and the thought would have chilled her blood if she hadn’t been freezing already. It wasn’t important. The murderer wasn’t here, and they had to get Dean, oh God,the body, to the infirmary, where Bash could—

“Val!”

Unthinking, she reached for the bow that wasn’t on her back, and something came at her from the side, knocking her into the snow so that for a second she was staring up into a star field of flakes, half-hypnotized—snapped out of it by something yanking on her boot. She kicked it away and scrambled to her feet, slipping and cursing.

Bashir grabbed her under the arms, and they backed away, panting,the air knives in throat and lungs. The others were scattering, screaming, from a chaos of forms in the snow. Slinking from the woods bordering the lake, demurely veiled in the white lace of the snow, came creatures—predators, Val thought, but just like the people, she knew every creature here, the muskrats and weasels, the wolverines, wolves, the bears, coyotes, the few feral dogs that remained.

These were none of those and all of these, they were essence of carnivore: low, black-furred things, clawed and fanged, with backbones like snakes to squeeze into secret places. “Inside!” Val shouted.

She did not see who piled in, only shoved them to move faster, and was it her imagination or had something snatched at the very hem of her coat as she slammed the door? Surely the things had not reached the cabin in so short a time.

“We can’t leave him,” Willa sobbed. “We can’t leave him out there… We have to…”

“I know, I know,” Val said mechanically, patting the woman’s back. “I know…” She wasn’t listening. Martin and Bashir were stoking the stove as high as it could safely go; Ethan was methodically—she could hear the squeak of his footsteps in the loft—closing and latching the shutters. That was smart; she hadn’t thought of that. Her heart was still pounding. The child was awake, though dazed, and staring up at the roomful of coat-bulked monsters as if they were about to bite her head off.

Val sent Lois to put on the kettle, then knelt next to the child, who was curled on her cot and wrapped in red-and-white-plaid blankets that she had pulled partly over her head, like a hood.

“Hey, you’re awake,” Val said, striving to sound light and cheery. “How do you feel?”