Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalipse

"Sure. I’m going to go along this wall, see? I’m going to look for a place where I can climb over, or maybe it’s fallen down somewhere. When I find one, I’ll come back and tell you."

"I want to go with you." Fear had come like a chill wind. What if Jimmy went away and she never saw him again?

"Listen, back at the house you were going to do this all by yourself. If you could do it by yourself, you can stay here for ten minutes to watch for cars. Now don’t follow me!"

She did not; but an hour later she was waiting for him when he came back along the inside of the wall, scratched and dirty and intent on speaking to her through the gate. "How’d you get in?" he asked when she appeared at his shoulder.

She shrugged. "You first. How did you?"

"I found a little tree that had died and fallen over. It was small enough that I could drag it if I didn’t try to pick up the root end. I leaned it on the wall and climbed up it, and jumped down."

"Then you can’t get out," she told him, and started up a road leading away from the gate.

"I’ll find some way. How did you get in?"

"Through the bars. It was tight and scrappy, though. I don’t think you could."

Somewhat maliciously, she added, "I’ve been waiting in here a long time."

The private road led up a hill between rows of slender trees that made her think of models showing off green gowns. The big front door of the big square house at the top of the hill was locked; and the big brass knocker produced only empty echoes from inside the house no matter how hard her brother pounded. The pretty pearl-coloured button that she pressed sounded distant chimes that brought no one.

Peering through the window to the left of the door, she saw a mostly wooden chair with brown-and-orange cushions, and a gray TV screen. One corner of the gray screen read MUTE in bright yellow letters.

Circling the house they found the kitchen door unlocked, as they had left it. She was heaping corned beef hash out of her frying pan when the lights went out.

"That means no more hot food," she told her brother. "It’s electric. My stove is."

"They’ll come back on," he said confidently, but they did not.

That night she undressed in the dark bedroom they had made their own, in the lightless house, folding clothes she could not see and laying them as neatly as her fingers could manage upon an invisible chair before slipping between the sheets.

Warm and naked, her brother followed her half a minute later. "You know, Jelly," he said as he drew her to him, "we’re probably the only live people in the whole world."

Inertia by Nancy Kress

Nancy Kress is the author of 14 science fiction or fantasy novels, and more than 80 short stories, which have been collected in Trinity and Other Stories, The Aliens of Earth, and Beaker’s Dozen. Her novella, “Beggars in Spain,” which was later expanded into a novel, won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. She received the Nebula Award twice more, once for her story “Out of All Them Bright Stars,” and again for “The Flowers of Aulit Prison,” which also won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. In 2003, Kress won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for her novel Probability Space.

In 2007 and 2008, Kress will have three new books out: a new story collection from Golden Gryphon Press, a new SF novel, Steal Across the Sky, and an SF thriller, Dogs, which, like the story included here, involves a highly communicable plague.

“Inertia” tells the story of the victims of a disfiguring epidemic who are interned in the modern equivalent of leper colonies. Kress says that identity—who you are, why you’re here, why you are who you are (and what you are supposed to be doing about it)—is a central idea in her work, and this story is no exception.