Afterland Read online

  And she’s going to stand up.

  And she’s not going to touch her head again, where the nerves are screaming in protest.

  But she does. She can’t help it.

  The ground rushes up to her, working with the darkness now. Hey, no fair. No teamwork. She falls onto her knees, scuffs them through her jeans. Catches herself. Brace position. On all fours. Doggy style. ’Cos you’re about to get fucked!

  Get up, you stupid cow. You dumb bitch. Get up. There’s warmth down her back, soaking through her shirt. That’s going to leave a stain. The alarms are still droning.

  Not Barcelona. The place…where Cole is. What’s it called. Asphyxia. The billionaire hideout wine farm. She’s in the mechanics workshop. Among the cars. There’s a tire iron lying on the ground in a dark smear of blood. Like the puddles of cosmetic samples on the beauty pages in a magazine. This season’s hottest nail polish color: Head Wound Red. And where is Cole? Gone. Gone with Miles. In their getaway car. All her careful planning. It was her idea, her resources. She came to find them. Had to petition the U.S. government to let her join her sister and nephew as part of their Reunite and Reunify program, “bringing families together.” And now? Left her for dead. Left her for dust.

  Billie leans back against the wall. Still not upright. Shouldn’t be standing for this. Might fall again. She tucks in her chin. A fresh pulse of blood runs down the side of her neck. Grits her teeth. Probes the meaty edge of the flap. Careful. Hurts like a mother. Her stomach lurches. Vision blurs. A low moan torn from her mouth. Answering the sirens. She holds fast. Waits out the nausea, those black-hole suns.

  Another moan. Animal self-pity. Clumps of hair. Sharp bits against her fingertips. She brings her hand to her face to look. Little black pits in the blood on her fingers, which is shockingly red. Gravel. Not bone shards. Not a broken skull. Not that bad. But not good, either.

  Okay. Get up. Get moving. They’ll be coming to see what happened. But gravity is against her. Join the club, she thinks. Furious with Cole. Some high tragedy-level betrayal. The sirens are her own Greek chorus, howling sorrow and outrage.

  She’s up. Shaky, but on her own feet. Fuck you, gravity. How long was she out? Minutes. It feels like minutes. She steadies herself against a Bentley. No keys in the ignition. All the keys are locked away in the main building. Part of how they keep the inhabitants “safe.” Same reason all the cars here are manual transmission, another layer of security, because they assume the inmates can’t drive stick. To be fair, the American ones probably can’t. But the South Africans can.

  In the faint moonlight, the compound is a windowless expanse, solid and fortressed. Lockdown. Any potential threat and the heavy steel security shutters will slam down. She’s been through the drills, twice already since she got here two and a half months ago, although usually she’s on the inside. Impenetrable, bullet-proof, shock-proof, air-tight. In case of terrorist attack, like what happened in Singapore. No, Malaysia. And Poland, wasn’t it? Bombing the last remaining men to death. Any number of triggers will set it off, including but not limited to someone breaking through the fences. It stops invaders getting in. Not so great at preventing people leaving.

  But the car. The Ladida. That’s not right. “Lada.” Ataraxia, not Asphyxia. Cole took the fucking car. After all the orchestration to make it seem a toothless, broken thing. Trojan horse as getaway vehicle. She was impressed with her sister’s duplicity and new mechanical skills. A missing distributor cap, a disconnected fuel hose. You don’t need keys when you can hot-wire. Anyone could have picked up on that, if they’d been looking. They weren’t. But now they will be. All for nothing.

  There has to be another way out. She could walk. Simply stroll through the break in the fence where Cole would have busted through, per the plan. Her plan. Worked out with painstaking care. The white SUV waiting in the mall parking lot so they could switch cars like pros. Mrs. Amato’s going to be so pissed. All her investment. All the trouble she went to—and the time and money—getting Billie in here, setting everything up to bust them out of here. The great boy heist of 2023. All for fucking naught. Screw you, Cole and your short-sighted prudish bullshit.

  The alarms are still going, her ears are ringing. And a car is coming up the drive. She can see the headlights. She squints against the beams. Not her sister. Unless Cole has hijacked one of the patrol cars, blue sweeps of light stammering on top.

  She stoops to pick up the tire iron, holding it low at her side as the security vehicle comes toward her. She slumps against the wall, dramatically. Sincerely. She’s not sure she’ll be able to get up again. Her blood runs down the back of her neck, along her arm. Drip. Drip. Drip.

  The car pulls up beside her. Long seconds while the driver waits, making a decision. Hurry up, she thinks, we got a woman bleeding over here. And then the guard gets out, leaving the door standing open, the interior light on, so she can see she’s holding her gun low and at the ready in both hands, the fish-gape of her mouth. It’s one of the young ones. She knows all the guards by name, has baked them goddamn cookies. Not a euphemism. One thing working as a chef to the stupid-rich has taught her: you can buy a lot of goodwill with carbs and sugar. Intel too: what times people get off shift, for example, patrol routes and timings—all of which are essential when planning your escape from paradise. She has shared cigarettes with this one before. Marcy or Macy or Michaela or something. Why can’t she get her words right?

  “Oh my god,” Marcy/Macy/Michaela says. “Billie. Billie, what happened? You’re bleeding.”

  What’s good for the goose, she thinks and using all her strength, she swings the tire iron up and around, cracking it down onto Marcy/Macy/Michaela’s wrists. The girl howls in agony. The gun skitters across the concrete, ends up somewhere under a car. She can’t see where the hell it’s gone.

  Marcy/Macy/Michaela clutches her wrist against her chest and sobs, as much in outrage as pain. “You broke my arm.”

  “Shut up,” Billie says. “Shut the fuck up.” She’s got enough strength to go looking for the gun, or get in the car. Not both. “I have your gun,” she bluffs. “I’ll shoot you. Shut the fuck up. Get on the floor. Hands behind your head. Now!”

  “You broke my arm. Why did you break my arm?”

  “Fucking now, bitch. Get down. Hands behind your head.” A rush of dizziness. Blood loss. She needs to get to a hospital. She needs to get out of here.

  Marcy/Macy/Michaela is crying harder as she gets down onto the ground. She says something unintelligible through the sobs. Billie doesn’t want any more fucking noise.

  “Shut up, or I’ll shoot you, bitch.” But that’s not her jam. Dodgy deals, smooth operations, getting rare goods to the people willing to pay for them, sure, what’s the harm? She’s not a murderer, though, even if right now she’d like to make an exception for her fucking cunt of a sister who ruined everything. Everything.

  “Behind your head!” she yells.

  “I’m doing it!” the woman whimpers, lacing her hands on top of her head. Or trying to. One arm is definitely broken. She was asking for it.

  Billie sinks into the driver seat. Keys in the ignition. Motor running. Steering wheel on the wrong side of the damn car. Fuck. Fucking Americans. Why the fuck do these people drive on the wrong side of the car, wrong side of the road? Fucking imperial. Imperialists. Ha.

  The gears stick, high-pitched grating. Clutch. Put the clutch in. Remember? Get it into reverse. The car jumps backward so abruptly, she slams on the brakes. Her head jolts. Nausea and that feeling of everything closing in around her. Tunnel vision. Or her options narrowing. First gear. More grating.

  “Keep your fucking head down,” she yells out the window at Marcy/Macy/Michaela, who is craning her neck. “Or I’ll shoot you.”

  And then the gears catch and she’s driving away, she’s doing it, making her getaway. The car scrapes the wall, but Billie doesn’t care, because she’s free.

  4.

  Cole: The first end of the world />
  THREE YEARS AGO

  The global obsession. Where were you when it happened? Where were you when you were first exposed? But how do you draw a line in the sand between Before and After? The problem with sand is that it shifts. It gets muddy.

  Disneyland. Summer vacation 2020. They did a big family get-together every few years across the hemispheres with her math professor sister-in-law, Tayla, and her software engineer husband, Eric, so Miles could get to know his American cousins: rangy, goofy Jay, the oldest, whom Miles followed around like a puppy, and ten-year-old twins, Zola and Sofia, who graciously tolerated Miles and let him beat them at video games. Billie was supposed to come, but she bailed at the last minute, or hadn’t ever intended to follow through. That’s so Billie. She’d only met the extended family a handful of times. Their wedding. Christmas in Joburg two years after that.

  The memories are crystallized around moments when she could have turned back. Like standing in the interminable immigration queue at Hartsfield-Jackson. Flying alone because Devon had gone ahead the week before, Cole had forgotten how long and arduous the flights were from Johannesburg to Atlanta, how suspicious the immigration agents were.

  “I see you’re on a spousal visa. Where is your husband?” the man in the uniform said back then, peering down at them, travel-fragged and jetlagged, eight-year-old Miles dying of embarrassment, shirtless and wrapped in an airline blanket poncho because he’d got motion sick and puked on his clothes and the spare set of clothes she’d brought just in case.

  “At a conference in Washington D.C. He’s a biomedical engineer.” Hoping to impress him.

  “And you?”

  “Commercial artist. Window displays, editorial work for magazines. Not fine art.” She liked to joke that some people have imposter syndrome, but she had im-poster syndrome. She got a lot of “can you get paid for that?” at dinner parties, and she’d quip back, over-saccharine, “Why do you think I married an engineer? Someone has to support my silly little hobby,” and roll her eyes at Devon, because some jobs she pulled in earned her twice his monthly salary. But it wasn’t exactly reliable, or practical, or life-changing, not like making artificial esophagus tubes to help babies to breathe.

  “Yeah, but it’s not art,” Dev would counter, and that was one of the infinite multitude of reasons she loved him. Along with the saving-the-world stuff.

  They met at a science talk on gravitational waves at the Wits University Planetarium back in August 2005, tail end of Johannesburg winter, the nights breathlessly cold and crisp. She was the one who made the playful yarn constructions of the universe decorating the foyer; he was the gawkily handsome PhD student (bioinformatics: sequencing the RNA of malaria, in South Africa on a grant from a big foundation), hanging out awkwardly with a beer. It wasn’t a meet-cute so much as her feeling sorry for the guy on his own, but he was disarmingly funny in a dry way. It took weeks before they got their act together enough to go out for a drink at her favorite dive bar in Parkhurst, where they got so lost in their conversation that the unthinkable happened and they got kicked out of the Jolly Roger at closing time.

  They moved in together, too soon, barely six months later, because her lease was up and he had a tiny house in Melville. And it was all temporary anyway, because he was going back to the States after he finished his PhD, and maybe she could visit him? Which she did, and they tried their best, but she wasn’t allowed to work, and she looked into studying, but she couldn’t sit on his couch all day so they broke up and she went back home, twenty-two hours all the way back to South Africa, and it was hell. And sixteen long and terrible months later, he found a way to come back—a job with a medical appliance company that paid in rands, unfortunately, but which sponsored all his permits.

  She wasn’t going to get into all that with the immigration guy.

  “Mmph,” the officer glanced up from their South African passports, green mambas, her best friend Keletso called them, because they’d bite you with visa fees for all the countries you’re not allowed to sommer just go to. “And you’re returning to South Africa after your vacation?”

  “Yes, that’s where we live,” proud of the hard fact of it. Away from everyday Nazis and school shootings so regular they were practically part of the academic calendar along with prom and football season, away from the slow gutting of democracy, trigger-happy cops, and the terror of raising a black son in America. But how can you live there, people would ask her (and Devon, her American husband, especially), meaning Johannesburg. Isn’t it dangerous? And she wanted to reply, how can you live here?

  The geography of home is accidental: where you’re born, where you grow up, the tugs and hooks of what you know and what shaped you. Home is pure chance. But it can also be a choice. They’d built a whole life in South Africa, with their friends, and Miles’s friends, and good jobs and a lovely school, and their ramshackle house in Orange Grove with the stained-glass windows and the creaky wooden floors that always tipped them off that Miles was about to bounce into their bed, and the rising damp they battled every other year, and their overgrown garden where their cat Mewella Fitzgerald liked to lurk in the long grass and pounce on your ankles. They’d chosen this home, this life, their people. On purpose. So yes, she was damn well going back, thanks for asking, Immigration Guy.

  Don’t tempt the fates.

  “Please place your right hand on the fingerprint reader. Look into the camera. You too, little man.” The agent examined his screen, and then stamped their green mambas and waved them through. “Enjoy Disneyland!”

  Did they pick it up right there? On the fingerprint reader, which she’s never ever seen wiped down? Or was it the elevator call button at the park hotel they’d paid extra for so they could be first through the gates? Jabbing a pin code into the credit card machine at the restaurant? The handrail on the Incredicoaster? Or passed hand-to-glove from Goofy to Chewie to the kids? All she knows is that within a few days, all eight of them came down with the flu. They didn’t know then it was HCV. No one did. Or what the strain carried inside it, like a crackerjack oncovirus surprise.

  They all spent the whole weekend dripping snot and sloping feebly from Splash Mountain to Harry Potter World, on a cocktail of decongestants and flu meds she’d brought along in her family first-aid kit.

  “At least it isn’t measles,” Devon had joked. It made for a good story, all of them holed up together, in the inter-leading hotel rooms. Jay led the kids in making a blanket fort, turning the couches upside down with the comforter spread over them, and they got room service and watched movies and it was a bonding experience, wasn’t it? “Connective tissue(s),” she’d joked, and even Intimidating Sister-in-Law™ Tayla had smiled and groaned at the terrible pun.

  And four months later, Jay received his diagnosis. What were the chances of a seventeen-year-old developing prostate cancer? Like winning the worst lottery in the world. Devon flew back out to the U.S. for Christmas, Cole and Miles joined him in Chicago in February, when air travel was still a convenient irritation rather than a rarity for the very rich or connected. Miles insisted on going to see Jay in the hospital, wearing the “Fuck Cancer!” button he’d asked Cole to buy off the internet for him.

  “Couldn’t you have got a censored version?” Devon complained, “It’s not cool for a kid to wear that. What about the other patients?”

  “I’m one hundred percent sure they share the sentiment.” She and Miles had stoked themselves up on the plane. If you could explode tumors with pure righteous fury about the unfairness of it all, they would have been able to cure Jay and everyone else in a thousand-mile radius.

  She’d switched away from the news when it came up, the cameras hungrily searching out the gaunt men and boys in the cancer wards, the graphs tracking the new cases across the world, the grim statistics—to protect Miles, she’d justified it to herself—and then mainlined it with a junkie’s fervor after he’d gone to bed.

  “An unprecedented global epidemic” was one of the phrases you he
ard a lot, along with “experts are considering possible environmental factors” and, Cole’s personal favorite, from a shell-shocked oncologist, “cancer simply doesn’t work this way.” That one got meme-d. She caught Miles looking at the remix on YouTube, autotuned against a techno beat that kept getting faster and faster, set to scenes from some zombie movie.

  When they arrived at the in-laws’ double-story apartment, smelly and jet-lagged, Tayla hugged her too tight, too long. She was alarmingly disheveled, in an oversize sweater and jeans, her braids pulled into a messy bundle rather than the ornate twists she usually wore, ashy and wan with bags under her eyes. This is what fear does to you, Cole thought. Fear and grief. Eric smiled too much, offered them coffee, and five minutes later coffee again, and the twins were subdued, tiptoeing around their parents, the dread an extra unwelcome guest in the house. But of course, it wasn’t sustainable. They swept Miles off to their room and the bright yelps of laughter that emerged felt like knives to the adults sitting downstairs, drinking only one cup of coffee (thank you, Eric).

  But she still wasn’t prepared for how frail Jay looked when they got to the hospital for visiting hours. Like the life had been sucked out of him. His skin was tight around his bones, eyes sunken and dulled. Tayla and Eric waited outside—because the hospital only allowed three visitors at a time, and her sister-in-law insisted she had grading to do, besides. Holding on to normalcy any way she could. Cole knows what that’s like, now.

  Jay smiled when he saw Miles, a hollow version of his sideways grin, his lips only flicking up a little. The crease at the corners of his eyes could as easily have been pain. In storybooks they warn you about witches with poison apples and conniving chancellors who lace the king’s wine with deadly substances. Try explaining to your ten-year-old kid that the doctors are voluntarily pumping poison into Jay’s veins to kill the other poison that is growing in deep and secret places inside him, the tumors bulging out of his cells like those bath toy beans that expand into sponge animals.