The End Is Now

ANGELS OF THE APOCALYPSE Nancy Kress

Me and Ian, along with the rest of the world, were watching the news when my cell rang. My link went through satellite and so the latest vandalism on local cell towers didn’t affect it. I glanced at the number, picked up, and said, “No.”

“Sophie! You have to—”

“I told you last time, Mom, no more. I’m not going out to the settlement again.”

“But they’re under attack! A big gang this time! Carrie said—”

“Forget it!” On the TV, the fifteenth talking head in a row was saying the same thing the first fourteen had said: We don’t yet know anything definitive.

My mother, her voice quavery from more than the MS that felled her at fifty-one, said, “You have to go! Carrie told me—”

“That’s all Carrie will do: tell you things. Tell me things. Let them solve their own problems for once. I told you, I’m done!”

“She’s your sister!”

“And sisterhood already cost me two fingers.” My left hand curled around the place my fingers had been before the shrapnel sheared them off. If Ian and I got around to believing in marriage, I would not have a ring finger for a diamond solitaire. If anyone gave diamond solitaires anymore. If—

“Sophie,” my mother said desperately, “I’m trying to tell you that—”

“I know what you’re trying to tell me.” The Sweet settlement was under attack by yet another band of thugs who knew easy pickings when they saw them, and everybody there would now be frozen in passivity while the fuckers looted whatever they wanted. What Mom wanted was for Ian and me to go out there again and rescue my poor little sister.

Ian’s hand took mine, although his eyes never left the TV. The sixteenth talking head gave his version of We don’t yet know anything definitive. The aliens are not communicating with—

My mother said, “Listen, girl! I’m trying to tell you that Carrie is pregnant.”

Most non-military scientists are not gun people. Ian’s colleagues at Amber Park Biological Research Institute could almost be mistaken for Sweets themselves. But Ian grew up in rural Kentucky, he owns a small arsenal, and he taught me to use it. He drove while I studied his profile and tried to figure out what he was thinking. It was never easy. The firm jaw and gray eyes gave nothing away. Ian hated his good looks because he thought they made people take him less seriously. He was wrong. There was no other way to take Ian.

We covered the fifteen miles from suburban Buffalo—there wasn’t any habitable urban Buffalo any more—to Carrie’s settlement at ninety miles an hour. The old Hummer belonged to APBRI and although Ian had discretion in its use, the Institute would not be happy about this trip. We passed almost no other vehicles. Cars needed gas or biofuels, which need a functioning economy: factories, distribution systems, enough workers to staff both. Sweets didn’t usually work in such industries: “not environmentally friendly.” Those that tried didn’t last long.

“Ian,” I said, “I appreciate—”

“Don’t,” he said, scowling, and I shut up.

The settlement sat on farmland. Dairy cows, apple orchards, a lot of corn. Barns and silos and wells and windmills, all hand-built. From a distance, you could mistake a Sweet settlement for Amish. Up close, you saw the bright and sometimes skimpy clothing, the computers and cells and radios. Some settlements of Sweets—not this one—were buying electronics companies. They didn’t object to machinery if they could figure out how to make, use, and repair it with minimal environmental damage.

As I climbed out of the Hummer on the “village green”—these stupidly archaic terms nauseated me, suggesting that any minute now we’d have a Maypole dance—I could hear the attackers. They were in the community hall, the first structure any group of Sweets built, happily wrecking things. People shouting, glass shattering, wood smashing. No gunfire, but that didn’t mean they weren’t armed. No cops, because even if someone at the settlement called them, they didn’t always respond. The police chief said the department was short-handed (true); the ACLU said that cops discriminate against Sweets (also true). Like God, the boys in blue mostly helped those who helped themselves.

“I’ll check it out,” I told Ian, who got behind the Hummer to cover me. As I approached the window, a bench came hurtling through it.

Inside were only four of them, three men and a woman, all of course late thirties or older. At least fifteen Sweets huddled at the far end of the room, including four children. The adults could’ve jumped the attackers while the fuckers were picking up furniture to smash, their sidearms holstered, but the Sweets didn’t move. They stood frozen, only their eyes darting around the room.

Cowards.

Extreme Involuntary Fear Bradycardia.

Both terms came to mind, and I pushed them aside. “Hey!” I yelled, and fired a shot into the air. The attackers pivoted to face me.

They were a scruffy lot, dirty and maybe drunk. Only one drew his weapon—were the other guns even loaded?—and I snapped, “Don’t try it.” Ian appeared behind me with his AK-47, which was laughable overkill. I said to one of the Sweets, “Was anybody hurt?” and, with great effort, he shook his head.

“Get out of here,” I told the scumbags. “And if anybody in this settlement has been hurt today, or if any of you ever come back here, I swear I’ll hunt you down, each and every one of you. Captain Zap there has your pictures on his cell and we can find out where you live. Do I make myself clear? Do I?”

One by one, they nodded. The only guy with a drawn weapon tried to scowl at me, but I locked my eyes onto his and he lowered both his gaze and his gun. A minute later, they’d all gone.

Slowly the Sweets began to unfreeze, and the adults knelt to comfort their children. Carrie wasn’t there, but I hadn’t expected her to be: If she had been able to call our mother, she hadn’t been confronted directly by an attacker.

Ian, ever the researcher, asked permission to take blood samples. Everyone said yes. Blood tests were the price they paid for people like Ian and me doing for them what they would not do for themselves. Sweets understood that. They were cowardly, but not stupid.

I went to find my sister.

It started with the volcano. When that mountain blew up in Indonesia, the ash contained a weird compound that affected developing fetuses (and still does). The stuff was as eternal as the dormant genes it activated. Twenty-five years later, researchers like Ian were still trying to catalogue all the effects those few genes have on the half-million miles of nerve fibers in the human brain, not to mention the rest of the body. The short list:

• Cooperative, altruistic personality traits.

• Extreme involuntary fear bradycardia—a parasympathetic nervous system response to violence. Heart rate drops, oxygenation lowers, muscles stiffen, the amygdala-periaqueductal gray pathways are disrupted. There may be sweating. There may be fainting. There may be death.

• Heightened nurturing, due to increased oxytocin.

The kicker was that all these states were normal, within limits. Sweets pushed the limits. They were epigenetically altered from the ground up, fashioned by their DNA into much nicer people than the rest of us. Too nice to destroy each other, to destroy us, to destroy animals (they are of course vegetarian), to destroy the environment. They were just fucking angels.

But weren’t people more than their biology? Every day human beings resisted in-built biological urges in favor of cultural ones like monogamy. Or saving people in burning buildings. Or not killing the asshole who snatches your purse.

And the big, gazillion-dollar question is: why were the Sweets this way? There were a hundred theories drifting around the Internet. Yahweh, bringing about the End Times. Sheer Darwinian chance. The Earth, Gaia-like, fighting back to protect itself from polluters and frackers and over-fishers and those of us who own plastic water bottles. Or—

On the pathway through the settlement, I glanced up at the blue April sky.

But of course there was nothing to see. The alien ship was in orbit between Earth and Mars, too far away for anything dangerous from Earth to reach it.

“They took copper,” Carrie said. “Stripped out wiring and pipes. I guess they needed it for themselves.”

“So that makes it okay?”

“Of course not, Sophie.”

My sister had the sort of mild face a Sweet should have, a face from another century: calm eyes, pale oval face, fair hair in frizzy ringlets. Put a ruff and a stomacher on her and she would look like one of those obedient ladies in some patriarchal seventeenth-century court. As always, since we were children, she brought out the bully in me.

“How far along are you?”

Carrie blinked. “Mama told you?”

“Of course Mom told me. Why else would I be here? You have the right to get shot by some looting asshole if you want, but you don’t have the right to get my niece or nephew killed because you won’t defend yourself.”

“I don’t think—”

“Already obvious. You’re coming back with Ian and me.”

“No.” An actual shudder ran over her entire thin body, as if the mere thought of living with us was a toxin. “Sophie, I can’t.”

“You mean you won’t.”

“I won’t.”

“All right, in that case, I’m not doing this anymore. Do you hear me? Baby or no, this is the last time we’re risking our lives for people who won’t do anything to help themselves. But before I go, let me ask you something: Why won’t you come with me?”

And then Carrie said the stupidest, most wimpy thing I’d ever heard her say during a lifetime of stupid, wimpy things. She said, “This is the only place I feel safe.”

In anger, in resentment, in contempt, I turned my back on her and walked out.

The first clear picture of the alien ship flashed onto the wallscreen, caught by a Chinese unmanned spacecraft, the Hope of Heaven, on its long exploratory voyage to the Oort Cloud. The alien ship, a long tapered cylinder of some grayish metal, had three weirdly-shaped projections at seemingly random places on one side of the hull. The magnified image revealed zero about the craft’s occupants. Remotely controlled signals, sent in a variety of forms and in a variety of wavelengths, went unanswered. The aliens were not interested in prime numbers, Fibonacci sequences, or pi.

“Fuckers,” I muttered. Ian and I sat on the sofa in our pajamas, eating pizza. Our apartment on the fortified APBRI compound was small and hastily constructed, but safe. Nobody was going to take our copper wiring. We had a tiny bedroom and a great room not much larger, furnished with a second-hand sofa of a particularly hideous plaid, a table and wobbly chairs, and a very good multipurpose screen. Researchers knew what mattered. I’d made the pizza since pizza chains were few and no longer delivered: too dangerous. The crusts were burned.

Ian, to my surprise, put down his plate and reached for my hand. He is not usually a demonstrative man. “Sophie . . . you have to stop being so angry.”

“But just look at them! Sitting up there all lordly, waiting for everything to unravel on Earth even more than it already—”

“I don’t mean angry at them.”

I looked into Ian’s eyes. In some lights the gray was flecked with silver. Those eyes are my home, a thing I have never said aloud: too silly. “You mean I’m angry at Carrie.”

“No. That’s not what I mean.”

“Then what—”

He dropped my hand. “I’ll let you figure that out.”

“You know I hate it when you go all superior-paternal on me.”

“I’m not,” he said, took another bite of the mediocre pizza, and changed the channel.

The national news was all bad. Unemployment had reached forty-nine percent. Two more cities were on fire: Atlanta and San Francisco. San Diego was also burning, but that was due to wildfires rather than rioting. The GNP was in the toilet and getting liberally shitted on. Children were starving, old people were starving, animals at the zoo were starving. When the entire workforce under thirty years old will not work in any industry that remotely damages anyone, a population already heavy on the elderly inevitably falls into slow, agonizing collapse. The only reason the United States hasn’t had a revolution is that revolutions are made by young people, and our young people were all Sweets.

In the rest of the world the situation was the same or worse, except for China. Their one-baby policy had kept the number of Sweets down, and a few years after the volcano, they’d limited population growth even further. Their trouble will come later than ours, but it will come. Meanwhile, they have the only thriving space program, all of which is secret and worrisome.

Part of the worry is that the economic situation lent itself to idiots. On TV, Louis William Porter, the latest conspiracy-theorist pundit, spewed his kitchen-sink theory of the world.

“Is it just a coincidence that our young people have been biologically incapacitated, our glorious country fallen economically just as China rises, and so-called aliens present in our skies? Do you believe in that much coincidence, my friends? Because I surely do not. No! This is not chance; it is a scheme, the most ungodly and dangerous scheme ever mounted against the United States by a worldly enemy. This has all been planned, planned in the laboratories and spaceports of Beijing. First, create poisons that damage our innocent precious children and spew them like vomit across the globe. Decades later, present so-called ‘evidence’ that there is an ‘alien’ ship waiting out there in space. There is no ship, my friends, there is only the insane ambition toward world domination on the part of the Chinese, who—”

“Turn it off,” I said, and Ian did. “Porter is nothing but a crackpot.”

“His following is enormous and growing. People want someone to blame.”

“So they need three someones—aliens and Chinese and Sweets as an unholy trinity? The E.T. fathers, heathen sons, and insubstantial ghosts?”

Ian laughed. Wit was one of the things he enjoyed about me. Christ, I loved him so much.

Love will get you every time.

Ian’s research group had a breakthrough. He came down to the cafeteria to tell me about it, his gray eyes glowing, his whole face alive. I was in the back room, washing up lunch dishes. Ted and Sarah had already left, and I had the kitchen wallscreen show an ancient rerun of some old comedy, for the mindless company. Before the Collapse I’d been an insurance adjustor, back when ordinary people had insurance. With a community-college degree in English, there was nothing at APBRI that I was qualified to do, but Ian got me this job so that I wouldn’t be one of the 49% unemployed. It paid crap but that didn’t matter. It’s necessary work, feeding people. I wasn’t much of a cook but I could chop and mix and clean. My mother did those jobs her whole life.

“Sophie—I think we’ve isolated it! The protein!”

I wiped my hands on a not-very-clean towel. “Really?”

“Yes!” He began a long, involved explanation of what his team had done, or maybe it was what the protein had done. I’d never taken much biology in school. But from Ian I’d learned Francis Crick’s “central dogma” of molecular biology: DNA makes RNA makes protein. Which then folds and goes about its business in and out of cells. A wrong fold and you can get prions, which can lead to a lot of terrible outcomes like mad cow disease and Alzheimer’s.

I said, “Is it a misfolded protein?”

“A differently folded protein, anyway.”

I let that go. Ian never referred to Sweetness as a disease; it didn’t meet something called “Koch’s postulates.” But then, Ian didn’t have a younger sister.

I said, “So what now?”

“We play with it.” Ian began a long explanation of what this “play” might involve, but I was no longer listening. The wallscreen had interrupted its comedy and raised its volume.

“—report that a so-called ‘Sweet’ has been arrested and charged with murder in Erie, Pennsylvania. The victim, whose name has not yet been released, was a six-year-old child. The alleged suspect, Martin Michael Shields, is being held without bail at—”

“Not possible,” Ian said. “Either he’s not really a Sweet or they have the wrong man. Fear bradycardia—”

I stared at the TV. Martin Michael Shields certainly looked like a Sweet: a big man in his twenties but with the same shy, vaguely bewildered look I’d seen on my sister’s face her entire life. I said, “It’s a frame.”

“What?”

“A frame. Someone else killed the kid so that a Sweet could be blamed.” Bile rose in my throat. Had the child died quickly? Was it a boy or a girl? Six years old . . .

Ian frowned. “Why?”

He was so much smarter than I was about science, but not about things like this. “To justify the violence against Sweets. Not the violence that’s already happened. Something more. Something big and coordinated.”

“That’s a little paranoid, Sophie.”

I hoped so. I really hoped so.

For the next week, all I did was watch the news. In our apartment I watched it on the wallscreen. In the APBRI cafeteria I tried to stay as much as possible in the back kitchen and I kept the screen tuned to news channels. Eventually Ted and Sarah and Kayla, the new cook, objected. “All that doom and gloom,” Sarah said, switching to a rerun of some show so old that cars thronged New York City. A half hour later I said I felt nauseated, went home, and stayed there, watching news shows whenever they were broadcast. A few times I even got recast European and Asian news, with and without translations. I told Kayla that I had the flu.

In seven different countries, children were attacked and mutilated. Each time, the alleged attacker, for whom there was “forensic evidence,” was another Sweet. A little boy in San Diego, twin girls in Munich, children in Cairo and Shanghai and Mumbai and Rio and London.

Louis William Porter was everywhere, vomiting out his poison that it was no coincidence the alien ship had appeared just before Sweets “went vicious.”

Attacks against Sweets ramped up around the world, became more organized and deadly.

My mother phoned constantly; eventually I stopped taking her calls. A dozen times I picked up the phone to call Carrie and then set it down again. What would I say? “Come here?” APBRI was not sheltering anyone but its own personnel. Go somewhere else? She wouldn’t go. Arm yourself for an attack? She wouldn’t.

Eventually I settled for calling her a few times every day, hearing her say, “Sophie?” and then cutting the link. As long as her voice was calm, the settlement was okay.

More murdered and mutilated children on TV.

Scientists fought back. On Understanding the News, Ian took his turn explaining that the biology of Sweets “as it is understood now” simply made such violence impossible to them. It was this objective fairness that sunk him. Fifteen minutes after Ian’s broadcast, Louis William Porter proclaimed triumphantly, practically licking his lips, that “science as it is understood now” implied both incomplete understanding and the possibility of change. The Sweets had changed, and the aliens had caused it. (Porter had changed his mind about their existence—they were now not only allies of the Chinese but were in fact controlling Sweets “like the soulless puppets they are!”)

When Ian got home, I turned on him. “Why the fuck did you say that?”

He stood in the doorway to our apartment, and for a moment I saw it through his eyes: blaring wallscreen to keep me awake, dirty dishes with the bizarre food combinations left in the pantry, myself even dirtier than the dishes. It had been days since I showered. The place reeked. But Ian didn’t look all that great, either: pale, heavy-eyed. He knew he’d screwed up.

He said, too evenly, “I said it because it’s true.”

“Ian McGill, the great acolyte of Truth! And now more people will die because you needed to preserve your scientific purity!”

He took a step forward, and for a moment I thought he was going to hit me. Ian, who was never violent. But neither was he a Sweet, and I knew that in my anger I’d crossed an important line. But he mastered himself, threw me a look so terrible that it seared itself onto my brain, and went into the bedroom. I heard the door lock.

I picked up my cell, called Carrie, and hung up when I heard her voice.

A few days later, the attack came. Not on Carrie’s settlement—the other attack I’d been waiting for.

Only cynics like me believed that what was left of the United States government was mistaken about China’s space capabilities. Was mistaken, or was lying, or was protecting diplomatic secrets—in the end, all three came down to the same thing. NASA said no one on Earth had nuclear missiles that could accurately reach the alien ship, but at 2:47 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time on May 14, China hit the alien spacecraft with enough nuclear power to blow up greater Los Angeles.

Our one remaining orbiting telescope caught the attack on camera. The missile exploded and the ship did not. The photo wasn’t a close-up, but it was clear enough to see that the ship emitted a blue haze a nanosecond before the missile hit, the missile disappeared, and the ship floated serenely in the void, its fragile-looking and oddly-shaped projections still intact.

The news feeds erupted. Theories, accusations, counter-theories, counter-accusations, defenses and offenses—it was a fucking law court on the airwaves. Somewhere a few hours in, I stopped listening. I no longer knew if the aliens had caused the biological changes in the Sweets, or the volcano, or the Big Bang that began the universe. I was sure of only one thing: They were waiting. They would wait for decades, if necessary. Until everyone over thirty-five, every nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw, pre-Sweet human was dead.

But why? Were they waiting for the planet to hold only cooperative humans to ally with, or passive humans to easily conquer?

Suddenly I was very tired. I wanted to sleep, and I wanted it with the passionate intensity of a five-year-old lusting for ice cream. Since our fight, Ian had been staying at the lab. I staggered toward the bedroom.

The doorbell rang.

Ian? Wanting to reconcile? That would be the only thing better than sleep. Tears blinded me as I stumbled to fling open the door.

My mother stared at me, white-faced and clutching her two canes, before one of them gave way and she collapsed into my arms.

“You . . . wouldn’t . . . an . . . answer . . .”

Shame flooded me, followed immediately by anger. It felt old, the same anger that we had passed back and forth since I was ten years old. I snapped, “Of course I wouldn’t answer. You were harassing me sixteen times a day. Nobody sane could deal with that! And are you an idiot, coming all the way over here in your condition—how did you even get here?”

“Ar . . . armored . . . cab . . .”

“For chrissake, sit the fuck down!” I eased her to the sofa, got her a glass of water, stared at her trembling legs and twitching face as if a hard gaze could drill sense into her equally hard skull. An armored cab cost a small fortune. The trip cost my mother even more in strength. And I knew what was coming.

“Sophie,” she said when she’d recovered enough to speak, “you have to go!”

“To the settlement,” I said. Stupid—of course to the settlement. Carrie was what mattered, was what had mattered most to my mother for our entire lives. I shifted to the balls of my feet, like a fighter.

But my mother had a momentary distraction. “This place is a wreck. It smells. So do you.” And then, “Where’s Ian?”

I didn’t want to discuss Ian. “What’s happening at the settlement? More random attacks?”

“Not yet. No—it’s bears!”

“Bears?”

“A whole herd of them! They come into the buildings and take food and then yesterday one of them killed one of Carrie’s friends! Mauled him to death!” My mother started to cry.

She cried easily now, since the MS got so bad, this woman who had never cried when I was a kid. Back then she’d been stronger than diamond cable, and her present tears struck me as deeply wrong on a physical level, as if she’d just grown a second nose. But even I, a city woman, knew that bears can usually be scared off by making noise and waving your arms. And anyway—

“Mom, are you telling me that Carrie’s demented pacifists won’t even do violence to animals? To bears or wildcats or even tigers if one should happen to show up in Erie County?”

“Of course they would. But they have no guns, nothing to fight bears!” Suddenly the terror of an old woman was replaced with an odd dignity. She said quietly, “All I want you to do is go out there and give them a gun. A big one. That’s all.”

“They won’t take it.”

“Not before. But maybe they will now. For the bears.”

She looked at me then, her gaze steady in her exhausted face, her failing body held as upright as she could manage on my hideous sofa in my stinking apartment. She’d worked all kinds of crappy jobs to give Carrie and me as decent a life as she could. Back in another world, when decency was still possible for people who were not Sweets.

“Okay, Mom,” I said wearily. “When it’s daylight, I’ll take Carrie a gun.”

I took Ian’s twelve-gauge shotgun, a lot of ammunition, and a .45 sidearm; the .50 caliber had too much recoil for me to manage it well. I hesitated over the AK-47—did you need that much power to stop a bear?—but then left it.

The day was clear and warm. A whole encampment of people had appeared in a field about half a mile from the Sweet settlement; they hadn’t been there a few weeks ago. Last summer the field had held cows; I didn’t know what happened to them. Eaten, maybe. Now there was a collection of patched tents, a few cars, an ancient RV. This far out from Buffalo, tent towns were rare until crops were ready to harvest, or steal. It was only May.

And then there was the flag.

It was the only new thing I saw as I slowed down for a tent count. Twenty, maybe, and no kids playing on the trampled weeds. This wasn’t a camp of refugees. The flag flapped above it atop a tall pole that might have been the mast of an old boat. Clean white cloth with bright red appliquéd letters: NO ALIEN SWEETS. Each letter dripped blood.

A truck passed me, a twenty-year-old Chevy pick-up, two men in the cab. The passenger gave me a hard stare. They turned down the road toward Carrie’s settlement. When I got there, however, I didn’t see the Chevy.

But I did see the bears.

Two adult black bears rummaged in what I guessed was some sort of compost heap, digging out anything edible. A third one ambled toward the wooden community hall, and a deer stood on the ridge behind the settlement—the place had turned into a fucking zoo. No people in sight. Which one of these bears, if any, had killed, and why?

Several people emerged from the community hall, banging on pots and pans, shouting and singing. The bear paused, turned away. I felt like an idiot, standing beside the car with Ian’s twelve-gauge; clearly I was not needed. At the far edge of the group of pot-bangers stood Carrie, her lips open in a song indistinguishable in the din. The sight of her brought such a rush of conflicting emotions that I turned to get back in the car. I despised her, all of them. Passive cowards. They were, indirectly, costing me Ian. She was carrying a niece or nephew, but that baby would just be another coward, unwilling to even try to resist its biology.

The bear, waddling away from the community hall, suddenly let out a huge roar and raced forward. A second later I saw the cub on the ridge beside a stand of trees. Between mother and cub, but much closer to the cub, walked a boy of about six.

The child heard the roar, saw the bear, and froze. Where the hell had he come from and why was he outside when nobody else was? With that heightened, slow-motion perception that makes such moments sharp enough to cut glass, I saw the boy’s mouth open to scream, as pink inside as Carrie’s had been in song.

Carrie dropped her pot and rushed toward the child. She was closer to him than the bear was—they would reach the kid at the same time.

I fired while I had a clear shot, then fired again. The bear dropped. Carrie clutched the child. The other bears fled. The cub vanished into the trees.

When I reached Carrie she was on her knees, the boy in her arms, her face raised to mine. “Oh, Sophie, thank you! But that poor cub, we have to get him now and maybe raise him because you—”

I slapped her across the face. Nothing ever felt so good.

But then someone was turning me around with a firm pull on my shoulder, his other hand holding down my gun arm. It was the man from the pickup truck, a bearded and none-too-clean guy dressed in jeans and t-shirt, his gray chest hair spilling over the stretched-out neck of the tee. “Ma’am? You with us?”

“With who?” I shook off both his hands. “Who the fuck are you?”

“Just some folks come here to prevent a slaughter. And we ain’t got much time. A few hours, is my guess.”

The man who’d driven the truck stood talking to the group at the community hall. A few Sweets were shaking their heads. Carrie still knelt at my feet, murmuring to the terrified child she’d risked her life to save. They both still looked terrified—but not frozen.

The man said mildly, “Damn fools, every last one of ’em. But still don’t deserve to get massacred by that lot in the tents.” He spat on the ground. “So you with us or you leaving? We gotta make a plan.”

There was time to call Ian. He answered right away. Maybe my mother got to him. I told him where I was, and why. I didn’t ask if he would come out to the settlement with the rest of his weapons. I already knew the answer. We stumbled around for a while, and then he said abruptly, “You never asked me what our breakthrough was.”

“What?” It didn’t seem the right time for a chat about science.

“The night I moved to the lab. You never asked me what the research breakthrough was. The one I rushed to the apartment to tell you about.”

“Ian, we were a little busy fighting and—”

“You never asked me. Never called to inquire.”

“So what is it?” I heard the sarcasm in my voice, regretted it, did nothing to soften it. “Can you cure all the Sweets?”

“You know it doesn’t work that way. What we found is a really important step in how the Sweet brains have been rewired.” He laughed sourly. “And anyway, you’d hate it if we could cure them.”

“What?” I was genuinely confused.

All at once his voice took on venom I had never suspected he felt. “If we could ‘cure’ the Sweets, you’d have no reason to be angry at yourself, for not being as good as your sister is. And without that anger, you’d have no idea who you are.”

When my fingers, all eight of them, could work again, I cut the phone connection.

Now I wait in my assigned place, on the roof of the community hall, behind a pile of concrete blocks. Luke Ames, our self-appointed leader, determined the positions, weapons, and ammunition for the five of us defenders. In a long-ago life he was a Navy SEAL. We don’t know how many will come against us. We do know the Sweets will be no help.

If we could cure the Sweets, you’d have—

Luke’s AK-47 feels warm in my hands. I have a hat, but the summer sun is full on the gunmetal. I should be mentally rehearsing all the instructions Luke gave his tiny army, but instead my mind is full of different images. Of all the things that the world is losing, the things that made the texture of the life I grew up in. Football on crisp autumn afternoons. War movies full of heroism. Sexy military uniforms.

—no reason to be angry at yourself for—

Anna Karenina and Oliver Twist and Charlotte’s Web. Businesses started in garages and built through stubborn, ornery individualism in the face of all consensual wisdom. Sweets did everything by consensus and nobody was stubborn or ornery. Nobody would think of letting an orphan starve, or of throwing themselves under a train for love, or of killing Wilbur the pig for bacon.

—not being as good as your sister is. And without that anger, you’d—

In two generations, maybe less, my lost world would be incomprehensible to the human race. If it survived at all.

—have no idea who you are.

Harbingers of the End Times, the religious nuts call the Sweets. Angels of the apocalypse. But there are all kinds of apocalypses.

The first of the attackers comes into sight down the road. There are three trucks, driving very slow so as to not outpace the walkers beside them. Everyone is armed. On the back of a dusty red pick-up rests some sort of missile launcher. I raise my weapon and wait for Luke’s signal.