Fearful Symmetries by Ellen Datlow

protective bubble from the world. Not in any literal sense, of course—nobody felt safe now, not after what happened—but inside the car, behind a layer of metal and glass, he could at least compartmentalise his thoughts.
    There was no point in staying here, though. He had no choice but to get out. He needed to be sure there were no survivors.
    He shifted his gaze to the windscreen and watched a young woman picking her way through the rubble a few yards up ahead. She was dressed in a blue boiler suit, like the kind worn by staff on the factory floor where he used to work, and her hair was pulled back severely from her face. Her pale cheeks were smudged with dirt. Her tiny white hands looked steady enough, but her gait was ungainly as she moved carefully through the broken bricks and shattered timbers that had once formed a home—presumably hers, or that of someone she knew.
    Jeff felt like crying. He had lost so much. Everybody had. He didn’t know a single person who remained untouched by the events of the past three weeks. When that thing attacked, it brought with it only destruction. Like a biblical plague, it wiped out everything in its path.
    That thing . . . the beast . . . the monster . . . 
    Thinking of it now, he felt stupid. It was a child’s word used to describe something he struggled to label in an adult world. Everything changed the day it arrived; even the rules of physics were twisted out of shape, along with the precarious geometry of his own existence.
    When he was a boy, he loved reading comics and watching films about monsters. Now he was a man, and he had seen the proof that monsters really existed, he could not even begin to fathom what his younger self had found so fascinating about them.
    He opened the door and got out of the car. Night was falling but it was still light enough to see clearly. There was a slight chill in the air. The woman was closer now to his position, and she wasn’t as young as he’d initially thought. Middle aged: possibly in her early forties. The mud on her face clouded her features, at first hiding the wrinkles and the layers of anguish that were now visible.
    “Have you seen them?” She approached him as she spoke, stumbling a little as she crossed onto the footpath. He saw that the heel of one of her shoes—the left one—had snapped off during her travels. The woman hadn’t even noticed.
    “I’m sorry?”
    “We all are . . . we’re all sorry. But have you seen them? My children.”
    He clenched his fists. Moments like these, situations in which he could smell and taste and just about touch someone else’s loss, made him nervous. He felt like a little boy again, reading about mythical creatures from a large hardback book.
    “No. No, I haven’t.”
    “They’re still alive. Somewhere.” She glanced around, at the wreckage of the neighbourhood.” Her eyes were wide. Her lips were slack. “They let me come back here to try and find them. They were in the cellar when it . . . when it hit. The Storm . . .”
    That’s what they called it: the Storm. The name seemed fitting. He couldn’t remember who first coined the term, probably some newspaper reporter.
    “I . . .” He stopped there, unable to think of anything that might help the woman come to terms with her loss.
    “I got out, but they stayed down there. The army truck took me away—they wouldn’t let me go back for them. They were trapped, you see . . . by the rubble. The Storm trapped them inside, underneath. I have to find them.”
    She reached out and grabbed his arm. He could barely feel her grip, despite her knuckles whitening as her fingers tightened around his bicep. “Could you help me look for them?” Her smile, when it struggled to the surface, was horrible. Jeff thought he’d never seen an expression so empty.
    “I have to . . . I have things to do. This was my house.” He pointed to the pile of bricks and timbers and the scattered glass shards; the