I tell her because I love her. I tell her because I respect her. I tell her because I hope she’ll forgive me.
When I’m done, the look on her face surprises me. She looks at me not with anger, but with sorrow. She looks at me as if I told her I’d killed myself, and maybe that’s what I just did. The man she’d fallen in love with was a lie. She starts crying, and before long is sobbing heavily.
I didn’t expect the screaming.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
She begins pounding on my chest with her fists, hitting me repeatedly, but it’s all I can say: “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
I weather the storm; it’s what I deserve. Before long her anger fades and she collapses. I embrace her and we cry together for a while.
All we have to lean on is each other. Neither of us can get through this alone.
She has forgiven me, I think, as we lie together in the darkness. I’m all she has. She can’t stay mad at me forever. The fact that I told her has to count for something, doesn’t it? She has to know this is something I regret, that it will haunt me for as long as I live.
I think it will be a long time before things will be back to normal between us. But we’ll get there and when we do our bond will be that much stronger now that there are no secrets between us.
We’re going to have to make the best of this world around us if we’re going to survive. Everything is going to be okay. That’s what I think as I drift off to sleep, Alicia sobbing in my arms.
The sun of a new morning shines through the open window, waking me. The bedding beside me is colder than it should be. I reach for Alicia but she’s not there. My eyes open, I look around.
Gone.
She’s gone. And she’s taken all our food, all our supplies, and all of our weapons.
Whether she’s meant to or not, she has killed me.
I won’t last more than five days alone.
Truth be told—without her, I don’t want to.
Danger Word
By Steven Barnes & Tananarive Due
Steven Barnes and Tananarive Due are frequent collaborators; in fiction, they’ve produced film scripts, this story, and three Tennyson Hardwick detective novels, the latest of which is?From Cape Town with Love (written with actor Blair Underwood).?In life, they’re married.
Barnes is the bestselling author of many novels, such as Lion’s Blood, Zulu Heart, Great Sky Woman, and Shadow Valley. He’s also worked on television shows such as The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, Andromeda, and Stargate. Due is a two-time finalist for the Bram Stoker Award, and her novels include the My Soul to Keep series, The Between, The Good House, and Joplin’s Ghost.
Barnes’s short work has appeared in Analog and Asimov’s Science Fiction, while Due’s has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Dark Delicacies II, and Voices from the Other Side. Stories by both have been included in the anthologies Dark Dreams (where this story first appeared), Dark Matter, and Mojo: Conjure Stories.
It’s a universal human urge to leave the world a better place than you found it, and to pass on to your children a world where they can have a happier, more prosperous life than you had. This has mostly been the case throughout human history, as ever-expanding infrastructure and knowledge have generally made life more secure and comfortable generation after generation, through innovations such as fertilizers, vaccines, antibiotics, indoor plumbing, and electronics. But now adults are facing the despairing sense that today’s youth will experience significantly more hardship than the previous generation, as today’s young people confront a world of economic ruin and environmental catastrophe that they had no hand in creating.
Recent works have grappled with this generational guilt in different ways. One of the best-known examples is Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, a post-apocalyptic story in which a father attempts to guide his young son through a devastated landscape, all the while knowing that their situation is hopeless. The notion of enduring anything to protect your children is a primal one, and one of the worst things that most people can imagine is being helpless to aid their children. Our next story deals with this theme in a powerful way.
For a generation facing the prospect of bequeathing to their children a shattered world, one fear stands out even more than being helpless to protect your child: that you yourself might be the architect of your child’s undoing.