Fear

She was not a person Sam could love. She was not a person who could love him back.

Probably it was a mistake going to him now. But whatever her failures and foolishness, she still had her brain. She was still, in some attenuated way, Astrid the Genius.

“Yeah. Right. Genius,” she muttered. That was why she was living in the woods with fleabites in her armpits, smelling of smoke and carrion, hands a mass of calluses and scars, eyes darting warily to identify every sound in the woods around her, tense, practicing the smooth unlimbering of a shotgun. Because that was definitely the life of a genius.

The trail led closer to the barrier now. She knew this trail well; it would disappear through the barrier. There would be some rough terrain for half a mile before another trail would appear. Or maybe it was the same trail doubling back; who could tell.

Here, suddenly, she noticed that the dark part of the barrier had crept higher. Two tall spikes of black on the barrier, like fingers reaching up out of the earth. The taller of the two stretched up for maybe fifteen or twenty feet.

Astrid steeled herself for a necessary experiment. She stuck out one finger and touched the black portion of the barrier.

“Ahhh!” She cursed under her breath. It still hurt to touch. That hadn’t changed.

As she threaded her way through dense bushes and emerged into a blessed clearing, she considered the problem of measuring the advance of the stain. Here, too, she saw rising fingers of darkness, not as high as the others she’d seen, and thinner. She watched one of the stains closely for half an hour, anxious at wasting time but wanting to have some kind of observation. The scientifically inclined part of her brain had survived intact where other aspects had diminished or disappeared.

It was growing. At first she missed it because she’d been waiting for the stain to rise higher and instead it had thickened.

“Still remember how to calculate the surface area of a sphere?” Astrid asked herself. “Four pi r squared.”

She did the math in her head as she walked. The diameter of the barrier was twenty miles, which made r half that. Ten miles.

“Four times pi is roughly twelve point six; r squared is a hundred. So the surface area is twelve point six times a hundred. One thousand two hundred and sixty square miles. Of course, half that is underground or underwater, so six hundred and thirty square miles of dome.

“It’s all a question of how fast the stain is spreading,” Astrid told herself, taking pleasure from the precision of numbers.

How long until the dome was dark? Astrid wondered.

Because Astrid had very little doubt that the stain would continue spreading.

Into her head came a memory from long ago: Sam admitting to her that he was afraid of the dark. It was in his room, in his former home, the place he’d shared with his mother. It was perhaps the reason that in a sudden panic he had created the first of what would come to be known as Sammy suns.

Sam had many more terrible things to be scared of now. Surely he was over that ancient terror.

She hoped so. Because she had a terrible feeling that a very long night was coming.

The baby would not look at her. Diana looked at him even though doing so filled her with sick dread.

He could already walk. But this was a dream, so of course things didn’t have to make sense. It was a dream; she knew that for sure because she knew the baby was not able to walk.

It was inside of her. A living thing inside of her own body. A body within a body. She could picture it in there with its eyes closed, all twisted so that its tiny legs were drawn up to its barrel chest.

Inside her body.

But now in her head, too. In her dream. Refusing to look at her.

You don’t want to show me your eyes, she said.

He was holding something now. Tiny, webbed fetus fingers clutched a doll.

The doll was black and white.

No, Diana begged.

The doll had a pouting, dissatisfied mouth. A small red mouth.

No, Diana begged again, and she was afraid.

The baby seemed to hear her voice and it held the doll out to her. Like it wanted her to take it. But Diana couldn’t take it, because her arms were like lead and so terribly heavy.

Noooo, she moaned. I don’t want to see it.

But the baby wanted her to look; it insisted she look, and she couldn’t stop herself, couldn’t look away, could not move or turn or run, and oh, God, she wanted to run.

What is it, Mommy? The voice had no character, just words, not a voice, not a sound, like someone was typing them onto a keyboard so that she could kind of hear but also see the words in letters, bam, bam, bam, each letter thudding in her brain.

What is it, Mommy?

The baby held the black-and-white plush toy in her face and asked again, What is it, Mommy?

She had to answer. No choice now. She had to answer.

Panda, she said, and with that word the full deluge of sadness and self-loathing burst in her mind.

Panda, the baby said, and smiled without teeth, smiled with the panda’s own red mouth.

Diana woke. Opened her eyes.

Tears blurred her vision. She rolled out of the bed. The trailer was tiny, but she kept it clean and neat. She was lucky: the only person other than Sam at the lake to have a place without a roommate.

Panda.

The baby knew. It knew she had eaten part of a boy with the nickname Panda. Her soul was bare to the baby. It could see inside her.

Oh, God, how was she going to be a mother carrying that terrible crime in her soul?

She deserved hell. And she had the terrible suspicion that the baby inside her was the demon sent to conduct her there.