The End Is Nigh

Nancy Kress — PRETTY SOON THE FOUR HORSEMEN ARE GOING TO COME RIDING THROUGH

The school hallway smells of chalk and Lysol and little kids. That smell don’t never change. What’s changed is that this time I’m called to school and missing time I can’t afford from my job ’cause of Carrie, not Sophie. Which don’t really make sense. What kind of trouble can a kindergartner get into?

“Ms. Drucker? I’m Olivia Steffens,” Carrie’s teacher says. “We met at the Parents’ Open House.”

We did, but we didn’t talk much. She was the property of the moms with sunglasses on top of their heads and highlights in their hair. I moved to this school district so’s my girls don’t have to go to that rat-ridden disgrace on Pelmar Street, but that don’t mean I really belong. I shake her hand, the nails manicured pink but one broken off. That helps a little bit.

We sit in tiny chairs that she fits into better than I do. Slim, pretty, she can’t be any older than me—but then, I had Sophie at sixteen. I face a row of cut-out paper pumpkins on the wall. It’s October.

Ms. Steffens says, “I’m so glad you could come today. There’s been an incident on the playground involving Carrie.”

“What kind of incident?” If it was Sophie who’d made trouble, I’d already know. Fighting, taking lunch money—kid is on my mind all the time. Last Sunday I lit a candle to St. Pancras that we didn’t move here too late for Sophie to outgrow all the shit she learned at Pelmar Street.

Ms. Steffens says, “Some older girls caught Carrie and another child, Tommy Winfield, on the playground at recess. The girls taunted them, and, well, two of the girls pulled Tommy’s and Carrie’s underwear off. I only learned about this when Tommy’s mother called me, quite upset.”

And I didn’t learn about it at all. Little bastards. I keep my face rigid—you don’t never give people that sort of edge over you. “Is that all?”

“No, I’m afraid not. Carrie went through the rest of the day, apparently, with no underwear, but your older daughter is in the perpetrators’ fourth-grade classroom.”

So this is about Sophie after all. I might of known.

“She found them laughing about the state of the underwear and has threatened to ‘get even.’ Her teacher would have been at this conference, too, but she’s quite ill and the class had a substitute that day, who is now out of town. Carrie—”

“Why wasn’t these kids being supervised on the playground?”

“They were, of course, but apparently not adequately. The same illness that hit Sophie’s teacher has kept us really short-staffed for a week.”

“You still got an obligation to protect my kids!”

“I know that.” Ms. Steffens’s voice gets colder. “The girls responsible will be punished. But Carrie didn’t fight back, which is what I want to talk to you about. She did whatever they told her to, without even a protest. And when James LeBlanc hit her two weeks ago—the principal called you about that, I know—she also didn’t fight back. She just stood there and would have let him hit her again if the lunch lady hadn’t intervened.”

I say, “What about the state of the underwear?”

“What?”

“You said the girls were laughing about the state of the underwear. What about it?”

Ms. Steffens looks like she said too much, which she did. She don’t answer.

I say, “Never mind.” The panties was probably ragged. Carrie needs new underwear, but Sophie’s shoes came first because you can see shoes and not underwear. Supposedly. “So what do you want me to do about it?”

“Two things.” Ms. Steffens is tougher than she looks. “First, talk to Sophie—we cannot have revenge violence in this school. Second, consider having Carrie see someone about her passivity, which does not seem entirely normal. The school counselor, Dr. Parker, is—”

“No.” I stand up. “Carrie don’t need no therapy. I’ll handle this.”

“But—”

“Thanks for letting me know.” I walk out, past the rows of pumpkins with crayoned-on faces, all grinning at me like demons.

When the volcano blew up, I was three months pregnant with Carrie. It was one of the worst times in my life. Jim had just disappeared, no forwarding address, no ways for the Legal Aid lawyer to get me any child support. They never did find him. Sophie’s daddy was in prison—still is—so no help there.

I got lousy taste in men. Since Carrie was born, I just stay clear of all of them. Safer that way.

So I wouldn’t of paid any attention to the volcano, except that nobody could not pay attention to it. It was everywhere, first on the news and then in the air. Even though it blew up somewhere in Indonesia, killing I don’t know how many people, the ash blew all over the world. Somebody at work told me that’s why the sunsets and sunrises were so gorgeous, red and orange, like the sky itself was on fire.

I pick up Sophie from school and Carrie from after-school daycare. Carrie gives me her sweet smile. Two like her and my troubles would be over. But instead I got Sophie.

“Carrie,” I say in the car, which is making that clunking noise again, “did some older girls pull off your underwear on the playground?”

“Y… e… ss.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You weren’t there, you were at work,” she says, with five-year-old logic. Actually, she’s just barely five, the youngest kid in her class. I probably should of held her back to start kindergarten next year, but it’s a lot cheaper to pay for just after-school care.

“Why didn’t you fight back?”

Carrie just looks at me, her little face wrinkled, and I sigh. Sophie is, weirdly, easier to talk to.

“I pounded those bitches bloody!” Sophie said, once we got home.

“Language!” I tell her. “We don’t talk that way.”

“You do.” She faces me, hands on her hips, lip stuck out. Sophie’s been feisty since she was born. Also, she’s going to be pretty, and I know how full my hands are going to be when she’s a teenager. But she’s not going to mess up her life at sixteen the way I did. I’ll kill her first.

She says, “I was defending my little sister!”

“I know, but—”

“You told me to take care of her at school! Well, do I or don’t I?”

“I told you no more fighting! Christ, Sophie, do you want to get expelled or something? We moved here for the school, you know that, and yet you go and—”

“I didn’t go and do nothing!”

“Don’t talk back to me! I said that if you got into any more fights, I was going to ground you, and I am! You come home right after school for a week and stay here, no playing with Sarah or Ava—nobody in and nobody out!”

“That’s not fair! I wouldn’t have to fight if Carrie would ever fight back herself!”

“She’s not a—”

“I know what she is! A wimp!” Sophie flounces off to her room. But then she says it, over her shoulder: “Just like all the rest of them!”

“The rest of who?” I call, but she’s already gone.

The volcano blew up on February 20 and it just kept blowing up for days. The scientists knew ahead of time that something was going to happen there, but not such a big something. It was the second-biggest blow-up since before Christ was born. Huge walls of flame rose up—I seen pictures. The explosion was heard a thousand miles away. Everything got dark for a couple hundred miles, from all the ash and rocks thrown up in the atmosphere, some as high as twenty-five miles up. Aircraft had to go way around the whole area, after a few of them got caught and fell out of the sky. Whole villages disappeared in lava and hot ash.

I felt sorry for all the people who died, of course, but I had my own troubles. Money troubles, morning-sickness troubles, man troubles. The truth is, the volcano was way over on the other side of the world, and I didn’t really care that much.

Then.

I remember the name of the other kid who got pantsed on the playground: Tommy Winfield. I dig out an old phone book—we don’t got internet anymore, not since Sophie had to have all that dental work done—and find the Winfields’ address. After supper I leave Carrie with Sophie, which I do only for quick trips, and drive over there.

It’s a toney part of town, near the Bay. Big house, trees sending down bright leaves onto the lawn. The woman who opens the door is toney and bright-colored, too, a yellow sweater tossed over her shoulders like she’s some ageing model for Lands’ End.

“Yes?”

“I’m Carrie Drucker’s mother. She’s in your kid Tommy’s class at school.”

Her shoulders kind of hunch and her face changes. I say, “Carrie and Tommy was both pantsed by some older girls on the playground.”

“Yes, well, they—please do come in.”

I do. The hall is bigger than my kitchen, with a table holding a big bouquet of fresh flowers and a floor of real stone. Well, so what? I say what I come here to say.

“I want to ask you something about Tommy. He didn’t fight back, no more than my Carrie did. Is he always like that?” The word that Ms. Steffens used comes back to me. “Passive?”

“He’s an introvert, and very gentle, yes. May I ask why you’re asking?”

I can’t really say why, not yet. But I plunge on. “Are his friends like that? The other kids in his class?”

“Why, I—well, I suppose some are passive and some aren’t. Naturally. Children differ so much, don’t they?”

Now I feel like a fool. The only friends of Carrie’s I ever see are the twins next door, who are a lot like Carrie. I say, “Did Tommy’s teacher say he should get some therapy?”

Mrs. Winfield’s face changes again. “I really can’t discuss that with you, Ms. Drucker. But I do want to say that I—we, my husband and I—appreciate your older daughter’s attempt to protect Tommy and Carrie, if not the form of it.”

All at once I want to defend Sophie for fighting, which don’t make sense because I’m punishing her for fighting. This woman irritates me, even though I can see she don’t intend to. It’s confusing. I mumble, “Thanks, then, bye,” and stumble out.

Anyway, I’m wrong again. Some are passive and some aren’t. What makes me think I’m smart enough to think this out, when nobody else has?

I go home and start the laundry.

It was the summer after the volcano blew up that the weather got strange here—all the ways away from Indonesia in upstate New York. The spring and summer had a weird reddish fog in the air, from volcanic ash high up in the atmosphere. Sunlight didn’t come through right. The winter had been bad, but even the summer was cold, really cold. We had snow in June. Mornings in July, the lake had ice on it. Some crops got killed, others didn’t grow, and food got expensive.

Scientists started publishing reports about all the ash and stuff thrown out of the volcano. They said that some of it was normal for volcanoes but some wasn’t. Also, that the un-normal stuff was causing strange chemical reactions high up. I still wasn’t paying much attention. Carrie was born in August, and managing her and Sophie, who was five, was really hard.

Ash can stay in the upper atmosphere a long time, because it don’t rain much up there.

Most of the ash ended up in Africa and Europe. I don’t know why. Winds.

Saturday, the twins from next door come over to play with Carrie. DeShaun and Kezia Brown, a boy and a girl. They don’t look much alike. The twins don’t go to school yet because they don’t turn five until November. Mary Brown don’t work, but she’s got a husband with a decent job so they’re all right. They got a two-year-old car and internet.

“Do you want to play horsies again?” Carrie says.

“Do you?” DeShaun says. He’s bigger than the girls, really big for his age, but he never bullies Carrie or Kezia. He’s really sweet. Sam Brown calls him “my future linebacker” but I don’t think so.

Kezia says to Carrie, “Do you want to play horsies? Or something else?”

They go back and forth for a while with the do-you-no-do-you’s until they finally settle on horsies. As they head outside, I say, “Stay in the yard where I can see you!” It’s not really a yard, just an empty lot between our Section Eight building and the Browns’ little house, but Sam keeps it mowed and Mary and I do regular pick-ups of all the trash people throw out of their car windows.

I finish my coffee and mop the kitchen floor. Sophie gets up and we have an argument about her room, which is supposed to also be Carrie’s room, but Sophie’s junk is piled on both bunks so that Carrie slept last night on a pile of clothes on the floor. The argument goes on and on, and by the time Sophie stomps off to clean Carrie’s bunk, the kids are gone from the yard.

I tear outside. “Carrie! Carrie, where are you! Kezia! DeShaun!”

I find them behind our building, where there’s a sort of cement alcove beside the steps that comes down from a back door. A boy has them backed up against the dumpster. Kezia holds a drippy ice cream cone. The boy has the other two cones, which Mary must of given the kids. He licks one of them and then shoves the other one in DeShaun’s face.

None of them see me. I stop and wait.

DeShaun is bigger than the other boy. He could take the little turd even if Carrie and Kezia didn’t help. But all three of them just stand there, DeShaun with chocolate ice cream sliding off his nose onto the front of his hoodie. None of the three of them do anything. They look upset, not really scared. But they just stand there.

“Hey!” I yell.

The boy turns, and now he looks scared. He’s not more than six. I don’t recognize him. He drops the ice cream cone and runs.

“DeShaun, why didn’t you hit him?”

DeShaun looks down at his sneakers, then up at me. I can’t read his expression. Finally he says, polite—he’s always polite—“It’s not right to hit people.”

“Well, no, not usually, but when they’re attacking you—” I stop. He’s looking down at his feet again.

I finally say, “Come on, let’s get you cleaned up.”

At lunch, Sophie spills our last carton of milk and I yell at her. “I didn’t mean it!” she yells back, which is true. She goes into her room and slams the door. When I calm down, I apologize. I was only yelling at her from frustration. It’s not her fault. None of it is her fault—the ice cream thing or that I forgot to bring home milk last night or my crappy job or anything.

Later on, I go to the Browns’ and ask to use their computer. I bring some home-made cookies that I had in the freezer. They were saved for the girls’ lunches, but I don’t ever go empty-handed to ask for anything. We’re not charity cases. And this is research.

The summer after the volcano, when the scientific reports of weird chemicals in the ash first came out, the theories started.

Some people said the volcano was a conspiracy, that it had been deliberately set off by white nations to poison the Asians. But nobody who wasn’t already dead from the explosion seemed to be dying of any poison, and anyway how can you deliberately set off a volcano?

Some people said that the volcano was the start of the End Times, and pretty soon the Four Horsemen were going to come riding through, and then Armageddon and the New Earth. But no horsemen appeared.

Some people said that the weird chemicals didn’t come from Earth, so they must’ve been put deep inside by aliens. I wouldn’t of paid no more attention to this idea than to the others, except it was on the news that some scientists agreed that the chemicals weren’t like any we had on Earth. They were brand new here. They blew all over the world and got into everything. Everybody breathed them in. They were found in breast milk.

The kindergarten class is going on a field trip to Pumpkin Patch Farm, and I’m one of the room mothers going with them. I never done this before. It means taking the day off from work without pay, and riding on a school bus, and seeing the other two room mothers in their bright ski jackets and leather boots give me sideways glances, but I go. I have to look at a whole bunch of kids Carrie’s age, not just her and the twins.

I know I’m not some detective like in the mysteries from the BookMobile, but I have to do this.

The kids are excited. They each get a sip of cider from a tiny paper cup, see horses and kittens in the barn, and pick out a pumpkin to take home. The rule is that the pumpkin is supposed to be small enough for the child to carry by himself, but that don’t always work out. Two little boys want the same pumpkin, and I watch them fight over it, pushing and hitting until Ms. Steffens breaks it up. On the bus two girls get into a tussle over who gets to sit next to who. Carrie and four others, two boys and two girls, walk in a little group around the pumpkin field, discussing the choices like they was choosing diamonds, and helping each other pick up and carry their pumpkins to the bus.

My theory is shot to hell. Some of these kindergartners are passive and some aren’t.

On the bus one pumpkin rolls off the seat and smashes, and we get wailing and accusations.

The volcano was supposed to blow up 10,000 years ago. That’s what some scientists are saying now, from tracing all the things that go on under the Earth’s crust. Only something shifted unexpectedly next to something else, and the volcano got delayed.

I found that out on the Browns’ computer, along with a lot of other stuff I never knew. Big explosions like this happened before. One was in 1816, but even bigger ones happened thousands and even millions of years ago.

The weekend after Halloween is Sophie’s birthday. I almost cancel her party because on Halloween, against my orders, she took off with her friends to trick-and-treat at houses without me, where anybody could of given her apples with razor blades in them or poisoned candy. They didn’t, but I had to go over each one of the million pieces of candy she brought home, and then I made her give some to Carrie, who only went to three houses with me beside her.

“But it’s my birthday party!” Sophie rages, and I give in because it isn’t much of a party anyway, only four girls coming over for pizza and cake. I can’t afford more than that, and even the pizza is a stretch.

The girls bring presents. Two are expensive—who gives a ten-year-old a cashmere sweater? Two are cheap gimcracks, and I see that these two girls are embarrassed. After that, the party feels a little strained, and soon the girls all leave. Sophie, scowling, goes to her room, where Carrie had stayed throughout the whole thing.

I clean up, sorry that Sophie is disappointed in her party. But I’m not thinking about Sophie, or about the gifts, as much as about the girls. Two of them, one with a cheap present and one with the cashmere sweater, looked like teenagers. Already. They had on bras, the straps visible, and their faces were slimmer and sharper. The other two looked like Sophie: little girls still. But Sophie told me that they’re all in her fourth-grade class. Did some get held back a year? They didn’t sound any dumber than the others. (Most of the party conversation was pretty dumb.) I try to remember when I was in the fourth grade. I started out nine years old and then turned ten in November, like Sophie, and some of my friends didn’t get their birthdays until spring…

Older. Two of those girls were maybe six months older than the others. So—

Through the bedroom door, Carrie calls out something.

I race to the door, but something stops me. Carrie didn’t sound hurt or mad. I pick up a dirty glass from the party (“Just milk?” the cashmere-sweater girl said, making a face. “No Coke?”) and hold it between my ear and the closed door.

Sophie says, “You’re a baby and a wimp and nobody likes you!”

Carrie says something I don’t catch.

“It is so true! Kezia told me yesterday that she only pretends to like you so she can play with your toys! She really hates you!”

Carrie starts to cry.

“Stop that! Stop it right now, you little bitch!” Whap.

I shove open the door just as Sophie cries, “I’m sorry, Carrie! I didn’t mean to!” By the time I pick up Carrie, Sophie is crying, too. I look at her face and I know she means it—she is sorry she tormented Carrie. She don’t know why she did it.

But I do.

Punctuated equilibrium. Say that ten times. It’s when evolution takes a big skip forward. It’s on Wikipedia. There’s a long, long time when human beings don’t change much, and then all at once something happens—scientists say they don’t know what—and big changes happen. Ten million years ago, or twenty million depending on who you look up, there was a sudden bunch of big changes in human genes. Forty thousand years ago, all at once and mostly all over the world, cavemen started making bone tools and painted beads and drawings on cave walls. Nobody knows why. Something affected their brains.

Ten thousand years ago, when our volcano should of blown up, people invented farming and started living in cities. Then, instead of just having little skirmishes between roving bands of hunter-gatherers, they geared up for real wars. All the wars in the Bible started, and the wars never stopped, right up until where we are now. All the wars that never would of happened if human brains weren’t so violent and angry.

I cuddle Carrie, who don’t cry as long as Sophie does. Carrie, my baby, one of the oldest fetuses affected by whatever stuff the volcano threw into her fetus brain. Most of the others aren’t even in school yet. Kids don’t get studied much until they’re in school.

But two days ago I was talking on my work break with Lisa Hanreddy. She told me she went to a pre-school parent-teacher conference for her son Brandon. Lisa said he’s doing good except in counting, but his teacher also praised him for being nice. “She said he’s the only boy in the class that doesn’t take toys away from other kids or hit them,” Lisa told me, “and my heart sank. He’s gonna be picked on all through school.”

Yes. But it isn’t the bullies that Lisa should worry about. That I should worry about, for Carrie. You can find the bad guys and stop them—some of the time anyway.

I think about a whole generation like Carrie, growing up all around the world. Whether aliens are trying to shape humans and screwing up the timing, or God is doing it and making a piss-poor job, or all the theories are just so many crocks of shit—whatever, something is happening here. These kids will grow up alongside the rest of us, the people like Sophie and me, and we’re going to be more of a danger than the bullies. We, the good people who just get frustrated and take it out, like we all do, on whoever’s closest and will stand for it—on the Carries and Kezias and DeShauns, the butts of that careless kind of cruelty, who don’t ever fight back because the impulse to fight just isn’t in them.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” Sophie sobs. And she is.

For now.

I clutch Carrie closer. What’s going to happen to her and the kids like her?

And what will they turn the rest of us into?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nancy Kress is the author of thirty-two books, including twenty-five novels, four collections of short stories, and three books about writing. Her work has won two Hugos (“Beggars in Spain” and “The Erdmann Nexus”), four Nebulas (all for short fiction), a Sturgeon (“The Flowers of Aulit Prison”), and a John W. Campbell Memorial award (for Probability Space). The novels include science fiction, fantasy, and thrillers; many concern genetic engineering. Her most recent work is the Nebula-winning and Hugo-nominated After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall (Tachyon, 2012), a long novella of eco-disaster, time travel, and human resiliency. Forthcoming is another short novel from Tachyon, Yesterday’s Kin (Fall 2014). Intermittently, Nancy teaches writing workshops at various venues around the country, including Clarion and Taos Toolbox (yearly, with Walter Jon Williams). A few years ago she taught at the University of Leipzig as the visiting Picador professor. She is currently working on a long, as-yet-untitled SF novel. Nancy lives in Seattle with her husband, writer Jack Skillingstead, and Cosette, the world’s most spoiled toy poodle.