Pretend to Breed

Listening over and over again to his voicemail. On it he grunts like the moment before he comes. He would say, when he wanted her to sneak out, do you want to pretend to breed? Cammie almost always breathed, yes even though he was officially Sondra’s boyfriend.

She owed her roommate Sondra nothing—no fealty at all. No promises not to fuck Joel. In fact, Sondra quite often ate Cammie’s yogurt without replacing it. There was never much in their fridge and these days pilfering yogurt was a serious offense, rolling brown outs rotted their food and left them hungry.

Getting a roommate without the sickness was like winning the lottery. And having a young guy like Joel want you was even better. No sores on him, not even scabs from the time Before when they all walked around crying and screaming and then quiet, tired of all the new shit they had to get used to. And that was just the first round of biochem from the Royals of four other continents. Their own Royals retaliated of course, with biochem and Telly K attacks, bursting arteries in the ruling brains of the other nations. This, to counter the puking, retching, bleeding millions staggering with protodysentery sent powdering the streets. Then, they’d started blowing shit up. But by then news was blacked out and all you got were days of dust from dead people in your face and mouth if you were lucky enough not to get exploded in your own sorry tracks.

After a few weeks, Joel ended their dalliance, of course. His own brand of death-dealing for Cammie. Something inside dried up and then some new creature took its place—a rage so deep and wide it was a river too impossible to forge.

The voicemail: Listen. We can’t. Um. Pretend to breed anymore. Sondra’s on to us and I, I, (there’s that grunt oh it made her go all liquid down there) I think I might really love her.

She couldn’t go back to the apartment. She couldn’t look at Sondra right now. Cammie didn’t want Sondra to see her, either. So she ran out of the apartment, bowels be damned, rented a sleeping pod with some of the last apples she’d found in the basement of the house on Douglas Street. She’d found the house with Sondra, found a crazy half-barrel of wrinkled apples by God, someone must have died to leave them there. They were all scavenging. All the time. You weren’t supposed to eat any of the produce from the After and no one had apples anymore except the Regals. But they’d eaten two of them, one after the other, seconds after they’d found them. She’d heard you could buy a car with a single banana.

The pod was lined with that spun aluminoid they’d created right before everything else went to shit. She’d heard they grew babies in it now that none of them could really make new people in their bodies, except the Breeders whom she had never met. But there were so many rumors like that. She’d heard the Breeders were dying out now, victim to poisons in the air, in the water; targeted by the hatred in the Telly K signals that sent sparks of pain and death to strangers thousands of miles away.

The General Secretary was taken out by Telly K right after the cities were. The kid who’d done it, one of those muties, had been splashed across all of the city screens, his goldfish eyes blazing with the drugs they kept the Ks on to stop them from incinerating the friendlies. After a Telly K assassination, new Secretaries, Presidents and Leaders popped up like limbs of one of those lizards from Nat Geo, overnight. The proppy screens with their endless messages of hate and fear were more deadly than almost anything else they did to people—made you wanna just crawl into a pod somewhere, let the sweepers take you, dump you outside city limits in the miles of graves without markers, the gray hills of dust turning into black mountains overnight.

In the pod, hacking and coughing hit a crescendo all around her. Every morning, the sweepers, garbage robots like metal spiders on stilts, took ten or more dead out of this pod farm. And the Douglas Street farm was the most expensive—the state-run farms closer to the edge of the crater had Done Folk numbers even higher.

Joel looked like a Regal. Sondra had brought him home to their studio apartment in triumph one day. Asked Cammie, “Hey can you make yourself scarce for a second, that would be super,” and Cammie’d stomped the streets for two hours, used some credits on her paycard to get a mouthful of red wine out of the Auto, tart and new and more like a sour-sweet jelly or jam than a thinner vintage.

“Sondra, babe, honey, you know you can’t keep him,” Cammie’d told her when Joel left that first time Sondra had brought him home.

“Why not?” Sondra cocked her head in that adorable way, like she was listening much harder to clues everyone else had already solved. She’d told Cammie she’d known something was happening way back when, fuck it seemed much closer than three years ago. Sondra had said her parents were preppers and were up in the mountains somewhere but before all of this happened, they kept trying to tell Sondra what to do so she’d split, shacked up with some guy Ned in the burbs who never left the house and left her to her own devices. He’d died in the first wave of disease, protoAIDs, the artificially accelerated virus had done him in within a week. Sondra, Cammie and apparently Joel had hit the genetic lottery for some reason: not overtaken by the biowars, Sondra’d cried about her parents to Cam when they’d been together as a couple.

“S’alright baby,” she’d stroked her head as she would a cat’s. “You made it here so’s we could help each other, yeah?” Cammie crooned, low and sweet.

Now, Cammie said, “Because he’s obviously gonna get snatched up by some Regal broad.”

“Where does he work?”

“Backstage at the Rhumba,” Sondra sighed. Cammie heard unshed tears in her voice and stopped herself from reaching out and covering Sondra’s cold little hand with her large, warm one.

“Oh then it’s settled,” Cammie said. “A Regal chick will see him manning the lights and bring him home.”

“He says he hates em like we do,”

“He , he says,” Cammie mocked. “Now you sound like a breeder.” Breeders were rarified creatures of power—women who’d not been sterilized by either the sicknesses or the war. So few.

Landing those words in the soft part of Sondra shouldn’t have made her feel better, but it had. The only way she didn’t think about Mom, Dad or little Larry was to hurt people, then parry, thrust, hurt again. She didn’t know it but she was fingering the locket her Mom gave her that day she had had the kid. Everything in hospital blue and white, and the locket, heart-shaped, glowing in her palm, her mother weeping with joy.

“You put the baby’s picture in it,” her Mom said, “you keep him close.”

She let go of the locket, rose from her seat on the couch in their ratty basement studio.

“I’m sure it will all turn out okay,” she’d told her roommate with her sunniest smile. “You are, as you know, quite irresistible.”

Of course, Cammie and Sondra had slept together when they’d first met at the long, tubed phone banks where they worked. Slept curled up together on their narrow futon mattress on the floor, every night, after the love. A semblance of safety, of rest; no one got breaks at the phone bank. No one wanted them. They were all there for the wrinkled apples, expired yogurts and rare, whole, dead frozen chickens the Regals left for the “girls and boys in the tube.”

The government paid for them. The girls and boys in the tube kept the Regal men and some of their women happy enough to keep killing and dying for the cause. Jeweled hands on toggles that sent death over the WiFi Telly Ks. No planes, no bombs, no more biowars from the final treaty everyone expected to break. Just long-distance Telly-Ks, telekinetic video games full of deadly drones.

Cammie fancied she saw telekinetic smears in the sky some nights, clear nights, when the sparkles of their hatred from one to the dreaded other tricked the people below into thinking they were all on the right side of history. A fairy dust of greed and torment above the clouds, hastening for the glory of their people.

Together, in bed, months ago, Sondra had spoken calmly about killing herself before the sickness could beat her to it. Cammie nodded, greedy for ideas. The Done Folk trucks rumbled outside the window, their robotic garbage men rending the flesh of their limp charges.

“Look there, there’s one across the street,” Cammie said.

“Mmm. Mrs. Enright seems like,” Sondra picked her teeth with a little branch they’d sourced behind the iron fenced courtyard, sharpened with Cammie’s knife. The smell of what had been Mrs. Enright couldn’t reach them here, at the window, where the smell of their sex slicked the atoms of the air.

Now, moving toward the chipped front door, stopping.

The air on each side of her face felt warmer than it had been just seconds before. Cammie supposed she’d turned red—even though she had perfected the pale, still, blank face of a sex worker on her videophone, the Regals sometimes called her after hours and she’d make herself flush with emotion for them, in the hopes of a chicken or some manu-meals of protein pods and bio-chem greens credited to her account down at the co-op. But now, she was done pretending.

Opening the door to the stairs. Moving down, not feeling her legs and feet anymore, becoming just a torso, on the move. Putting her left cheek against the door. Listening to them whispering and laughing together so long that her feet are numb, then her hand, looking like a separate part of herself, reaches out to turn the knob.

She’s opened the door, the lock a maw broken a thousand lifetimes ago; lifts the knife from her side, runs at them. The sores and scabs that have formed over the past few days are livid as mouths on her arms. The ones on her vagina and between her toes burn always now.

When Joel sees her face he leaps up to grab the rifle where it used to lean against the wall.

“No Cammie, no!” Sondra shouts as Joel wrenches the knife from Cammie’s hand, breaking her wrist.

Cammie smiles.

She grasps the handle of the second knife in her overcoat pocket and raises it up to plunge it into Joel’s neck.

He is stronger, as she’d known he’d be.

Joel wrenches the knife from her, plunges it into her chest. Blood gushes past her lips, on to her chest and onto the floor. She sees her mother and Dad and her baby, Larry, in the sunshine by the swing set in the park down the block from the house she grew up in, the house she’d gone back to after Brian left her, she’d been barely pregnant, crying at the door. Right before things turn black she smiles at Sondra, at Joel, whose stunned horror warms her right down to her toes.

“It’s okay. I don’t have to pretend anymore.” On the floor now, Joel and Sondra above her, Joel’s face hard, Sondra weeping. In Cammie’s arms, finally Larry, cooing and warm and perfect in every way.