Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful

by Arwen Elys Dayton

  “Do you think it smells this bad in the city?” Rocky asked.

  “It’s going to be much, much worse,” said Starlock. “However many people got out to the road in their cars, there might be ten times as many inside.”

  “And if they all died days ago…,” said Luck. She shuddered.

  “I’m not going,” Moonlight said again, not bothering to lower her voice this time. “The rest of our search parties will be here soon, and they can go. Starlock, I forbid you—”

  “Moonlight,” he said, cutting her off, “you knew I was going to the city. That’s why we came. The others will get here eventually, but we can find out what’s happening right now.”

  Moonlight gestured wildly at the road far below. “That was the plan before we saw all the dead humans. One or two isn’t a big deal, sure, but this is going to be…it’s going to be awful.”

  “It is awful,” said Luck, finally allowing her impatience with Moonlight to show. “It’ll be the worst thing any of us has ever seen. But I’m not turning back.”

  The breeze kicked up again, bearing the scent of death and sweets. Rocky retched. He was looking green beneath his freckles.

  “I don’t think you should go, Luck,” Rocky told her. “It’s so disgusting. It’s like I’m breathing in their dead bodies. Did you know there were that many humans? We should go home.”

  “No,” Luck answered, evading Rocky’s arm. “If I go home, I’m just a Proto teenager, waiting to be told what to do. I don’t want to wait. I want to know now. What if the Proto Authority is still there, fully operational, in some kind of special quarantine zone? Or what if it’s not?” When she saw Rocky’s blank face, she added, “Haven’t you ever thought of anything outside the Rez, Rocky?”

  “Jeez, Luck,” said Rocky, stung. “I’m just saying it’s gross.”

  Moonlight looked from Starlock to Luck and then back again. “You want to go be with her,” she said in a stage whisper that was full of anguish she’d obviously been fighting to keep in check.

  Luck averted her eyes, but she could not deny the thrill it gave her to hear Moonlight say this out loud.

  “I have to find out what’s in store for us,” Starlock said gently. He put a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t you want to know?”

  Moonlight picked some dirt off her pants and didn’t meet his eyes. “I don’t have to know right now,” she said.

  “Then you should wait for the others to get here,” he told her softly.

  “All right,” Moonlight said at last. “You find out our future and then come back.”

  She kissed Starlock on the lips, but Luck observed that Starlock kept himself just a little too far away for the kiss to connect properly. With that, Moonlight glared at Luck and turned her back on the two of them.

  A tug on Luck’s sleeve reminded her of Rocky’s presence. “Good-bye, Luck,” he said earnestly. Emulating Moonlight, he leaned forward to plant a kiss on Luck’s mouth, but she stepped back, so his kiss landed somewhere in the region of her shoulder. Rocky didn’t mind—he looked delighted that he’d managed to get his lips to connect with any part of her.

  Starlock and Luck turned to the Naturalists. He put a hand cautiously on Luck’s back—neither of them sure what the men might think of such contact—and walked toward the waiting transpo.

  7. THEY ENTERED THE LAND OF HUMANS

  They’d never been in an air transpo before, so they had no way to judge whether this particular vehicle was airworthy or not. When they’d all strapped themselves to seats—Luck and Starlock and the Naturalist called Raul in the back, and the other two up front at the controls—the transpo’s engines spun up into a whispering torrent of wind. Luck clutched her seat as the vehicle lifted into the air in a cloud of dust. Its engines rattled and thumped as it cleared the edge of the hill and carried them over the wreckage on the road below.

  In a wide sweep, Luck saw the cropland that surrounded the city. The sun was going down to the west, and in the golden light were fields stretched to the eastern horizon, full of brown, withered grain. Then the transpo swerved, showing her dead humans instead of dead crops.

  The pilot was coughing as they went. Every time he coughed hard, the controls jerked, so the transpo was jumping around in the sky. Raul, sitting across from Luck in the back, was not coughing, but he kept his eyes closed, as if concentrating on each breath.

  “Are you all right?” Starlock asked him.

  He nodded without opening his eyes. “The fumes from all the dead bodies are getting to us. Makes a burning in your lungs.”

  “How did they all die?” Starlock asked.

  “Quickly,” Raul answered. “Starting six days ago, this catastrophic…withering.” He made little half coughs as he spoke.

  “There are so many,” Luck whispered as she looked out the window.

  “Yeah,” Raul said, his eyes still closed. “Denver had, like, one and a half million people inside the wall a week ago.”

  One and a half million was such a staggering number Luck couldn’t wrap her mind around it. Riding in a vehicle through the sky, meeting these Naturalists who could almost be Protos, catching glimpses of the devastation below them on the ground—she was losing her sense of reality. She managed, “Are they all dead?”

  “Most of ’em. They tinkered with nature, didn’t they?” Raul drew a gasping breath. He placed a dirt-encrusted hand on his chest, as if to monitor the motion of his lungs. In the confines of the transpo, Luck could smell that he hadn’t washed himself in some time. “We Naturalists have been saying for years that it couldn’t last. It wouldn’t last. Their arrogance has, like, brought the human race to the brink of extinction. Miz Babbidge will explain better. She’s more scientific.”

  Studying Raul, Luck said, “I didn’t know humans could look so much like Protos.”

  “Most don’t,” he answered. “But Naturalists do, because we don’t get mods. Which is why we’re not getting this disease.”

  “Mods,” Starlock whispered, trying out the word.

  Luck remembered that the sentries at the Rez fence had used that word too. The female sentry had said, So our mods are failing?

  “When you say mods, do you mean things like wings and gills?” Luck asked.

  “Mods. Modifications.” Raul opened his eyes and regarded Luck with quiet astonishment. “You don’t know about mods.”

  “We—we do know that humans are different, and they’re different in lots of different ways,” Luck said, looking to Starlock for support, who nodded his agreement. “But they’re born different, aren’t they?”

  “Some mods are programmed into DNA. Eye color, height, reflexes,” he explained, drawing a cautious breath. “But big stuff—legs, wings, whatever—that comes later. Pick and choose, add it on.”

  “So, so…” Luck was at a loss for words to fit his statement into what she knew of humanity.

  “But humans are a new species,” said Starlock.

  “There was the Great Shift,” added Luck.

  Raul was looking at them blankly. “The what?” he asked.

  The Protos turned to each other, feeling their world alter. Humans had evolved. Or had they?

  “Are you saying there’s no difference, really, between us and humans?” Starlock asked, turning back to Raul.

  “Of course not,” Raul said simply. “The only difference is arrogance.”

  “But…,” Luck began, with no idea how to finish the sentence.

  “Hey!” Starlock yelled suddenly, pointing through the front window. “Watch out!”

  Instead of the carnage of humans and vehicles, they were looking at the city’s wall looming huge in front of them—and they were headed straight for it.

  Suddenly Raul was yelling too. “Jason! You’re way too—” But he was
overridden by Matt in the right-hand seat.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Matt yelled at their pilot. “We’re going to crash!”

  In the driver’s seat, Jason was clutching his chest. “Can’t breathe…,” he gasped.

  Matt laid both hands on him and hauled him up. The transpo bucked and banked dizzily to the left. Matt climbed into the driver’s seat, wrenched the controls. The transpo soared in a long, steep arc toward the road. Luck and Starlock pitched forward against their seat belts and grabbed each other’s hands as they plummeted. She and Starlock would be two more corpses no one would ever find…

  …and then the transpo righted. Matt was cursing at the engines in language as colorful as any Luck had ever read. They were gaining altitude. The transpo’s engines whined and shook, but at last they were above the wall, and the city was spread out before them.

  Luck had glimpses of smoke, of stalled vehicles littering roads, of a fire burning in the distance. Then the transpo was dodging lower buildings and bouncing to a stop in a huge concrete courtyard at the center of a complex of low buildings.

  The three Naturalists kicked open the door and stumbled outside. The odor hit Luck as soon as the doors were open—rot and butterscotch, far more intense than the smell outside the city. The air felt thick with it.

  “Welcome to Denver,” Matt said, offering his dirty hand to Luck.

  She and Starlock unclipped themselves from their seat belts and stepped out of the transpo. Luck’s legs were shaky as she stood on the concrete. Heaps of equipment were piled everywhere—boxes and cans of food stacked twenty feet high, clothing, radio parts, medical supplies. Their three escorts were waving to a group of people—Naturalists, Luck supposed, since they looked like Protos—approaching from one of the buildings.

  Starlock whispered, “Let’s not say much until we understand what’s happening.”

  Luck nodded. The sense of having stepped out of the known into the entirely unknown was overwhelming. She felt like that girl Alice, when she’d tumbled into Wonderland—except this wonderland looked and smelled awful.

  In a moment, the new group had arrived and Luck and Starlock were surrounded by people wearing scarves and paper masks to keep out the pervasive odor of human death. An older woman, clearly the leader, pulled the bandana off her nose and mouth, revealing a face of weathered tan skin beneath light brown eyes. Almost ceremonially, this woman knelt in front of the Protos and took their hands in her own.

  “Noble Protos,” she said to them. “How beautiful you are. And exactly what we need.”

  8. THEY WERE EXCESSIVELY ADMIRED

  The woman introduced herself as Miz Babbidge. She looked about sixty years old, by Proto reckoning, though Luck had no idea how age manifested itself with Naturalists (other humans, like Mizter Caldwell, had never seemed to age at all).

  “I’m the Chief Fellow among the Naturalists,” she explained. “Now that we’re all that’s left, I suppose you could say that I’m running Denver. Were there only two of you? I thought the lookout said four.”

  “The others decided to wait for us outside the city,” Starlock answered.

  Luck wondered if the other Proto search parties had reached the promontory yet, or if Rocky and Moonlight were still there alone, perhaps complaining about their future spouses. They felt immeasurably distant now.

  Miz Babbidge directed a look of irritation at the three Naturalists who had flown the Protos into the city. “I had hopes you would bring everyone,” she said. She spoke with a funny wheeze, as though her lungs, too, were bothering her, so this sentence sounded like “I had hopessss you would bring everyone-huh.”

  Matt coughed and asked, “You want us to go back?”

  “Later, maybe,” Miz Babbidge answered brusquely, and then she looked toward the sinking sun and added, “Or maybe tomorrow.” (“Tomorrow-huh.”) She turned her attention back to Luck and Starlock and gave them a sympathetic smile. “We’d love to have all of you here, of course. Come.”

  With a gesture, she dismissed everyone else and the other Naturalists dispersed. Miz Babbidge shepherded the Protos through the concrete yard, around stacks of supplies, toward the buildings at the east end of the complex. The whole of the complex was encircled by its own high wall, isolating it from the streets outside.

  “Are there many people still alive in the city?” Starlock asked.

  “It’s impossible to know, but there can’t be many,” Miz Babbidge answered, as though this was an unfortunate though not unexpected fact, and not to be lingered over. “In there, we’ve set up our sleeping quarters,” she said, indicating one of the buildings. “We’ll find a place for you two, of course. We don’t have running water just yet, but maybe in a few days.” She called their attention to the small, low building toward which they were headed and said, “There’s where we’ve set up the kitchens, and a lab.”(“Kitchenssss” and “lab-huh.”)

  “What sort of lab?” asked Starlock. “Are you studying the sickness? Could there be a way to stop it?”

  “No,” she said. It was a decisive no, like a chop with a knife, so forceful that she stopped walking when she said it. “The modifiers have gotten their due punishment. But it delights me that you’re interested,” she said sweetly as she continued walking. “I would love to show you what we’re doing in the lab. And then some food?”

  “Sure,” said Luck. It was late afternoon and she was famished.

  “Food is the one thing that’s not an issue.” (With the wheeze it sound like “issue-hum.”) “Denver’s filled with enough food for a million people. Canned goods will keep us supplied for months or even years.”

  She was fiddling with a bracelet on her wrist, to which Luck’s attention was drawn as they walked. On the bracelet was a three-dimensional image of a young girl with mismatched eyes and hair of different colors. Her arms were crossed in front of her chest in a warding motion, and she was gazing out at Luck sadly.

  “Why are there so many babies?” Starlock asked, drawing Luck’s attention back to their surroundings. A loose gathering of twenty people was visible in an open area to the side of the courtyard. These people were all wearing camouflage, as every Naturalist had been so far, and each one was walking about with a small baby on his or her shoulder.

  “Our future!” Miz Babbidge said. (“Future-heh.”) When one of the enormous roll-up doors along the complex’s perimeter wall began to clang open noisily, she clapped her hands together in delight and said, “Look! Such good timing. A rescue patrol is arriving now.”

  As the door lifted open, a truck with huge tires and a long, long passenger section rolled into the complex, allowing a glimpse behind it of a street and buildings already in twilight as the sun went down. The door was rolled shut behind the truck so quickly that the metal shook the ground.

  A stream of Naturalists poured out of the vehicle, each one carrying a small child or baby—some had one in each arm. A few of these little ones were crying with great gusto, but most looked weak and exhausted.

  “Our future,” Miz Babbidge said again, looking rather pleased with herself, as the baby-minders began to disappear into the building near the kitchens. “Some have been without food or care for days, so we have to get them fed immediately.”

  Luck followed the parade of children with her eyes, thinking that they looked just like Proto children, except for the mixed variety of their skin tones.

  Perhaps Miz Babbidge guessed what Luck was thinking, because she said, “They haven’t been modified, you see. Big mods happen after children are two years old. So the little ones…well, we are Naturalists, and they are natural, like you. We have patrols out, going block by block to find every one of them still in the city. Their parents and older siblings may have died in this plague of their own making, but we’ll try to save the tiny ones.” (“Onessss.”) She added darkly,
“There are others who wouldn’t do that, who think even their children shouldn’t be saved.”

  Luck and Starlock shared a glance at this unsettling statement, and then they followed the direction of Miz Babbidge’s gaze. For the first time, Luck noticed the large number of armed guards standing atop the buildings of the complex, looking outward. Starlock’s brow creased, and Luck could read his thought: If everyone out there is dead, who are they guarding against?

  Luck took a leap and asked the question that had brought her and Starlock to the city in the first place: “Is…is the Proto Authority still running?”

  Miz Babbidge let out a short laugh, like a bark, which turned into a fit of coughing. Then she scanned the buildings of the city, visible above the complex’s outer wall. She pointed viciously at the tallest building Luck could see, a structure covered in sharp crystal facets like diamond armor.

  “There!” she said, her voice hoarse. “The source of this plague. The Bureau of Modifications and its departments, the Proto Authority and the Cellular Crop Authority. One can only hope they were the first to go!” (“Go-huh.”) Miz Babbidge’s pleasant demeanor, inconsistent as it had been, was now beginning to fall apart in earnest. But at least, Luck thought, the woman’s anger was not directed at them.

  They had reached the low building that was their destination, and Miz Babbidge guided them inside. On their right, the hallway opened onto a public dining area full of other Naturalists, many with weapons. Miz Babbidge led them past this area, saying, “Let me show you our lab.”

  Farther down the hall was a set of double doors. She threw these open to reveal a makeshift laboratory. It reminded Luck of the medical observation room on the Rez, though this space was more crowded and much less clean. Inside were several Naturalists wearing surgical gloves and masks. One was testing the straps on a gurney.