Girl Minus X

by Anne Stone

  The kid is sucking on her thumb. “Fingers out of your mouth, now,” Dany tells her.

  Eva asks something then – but her words come out so fast, it takes a minute for Dany to disentangle them.

  “She wants to know where to go,” Dany translates.

  “Just follow the highway,” Aunt Norah says. “We’ll go to their dad’s place. It’s twenty minutes past the bridge.”

  Dany looks at Eva – she is holding the steering wheel in a death grip. The whole of her is shaking. And she’s talking so fast that her words run together. It’s as if Eva has lost her mental space bar.

  “Slow down,” Dany tells her.

  And then she feels it, hears it. The car grinds down into a lower gear.

  “No, no,” Dany calls out. “Don’t drive slower – talk slower.”

  “I’ve got this driving thing down,” Eva is saying, “but, like, it’s better if we choose one speed. Fast, slow, I don’t care, but change is bad, okay. Change is very bad. So let’s just pick a speed and stay there, ’kay?”

  Dany looks in the rear-view.

  Eva’s eyes are darting from mirror to road, mirror to road, as the car zigzags down the highway, as if the wheels are tied to her friend’s gaze. There are cars on either side of her, and Eva is pinballing from near collision to near collision.

  “They painted lines on the road for a reason,” Aunt Norah says. “Ignore everything else. Ignore the other cars. Just follow the lines.”

  “Hey, Little Rabbit, check the glovebox for me,” Eva tells the kid. “See if there’s a manual or something. It’ll have, like, a picture of a car on it.”

  “She can read,” Dany says, exasperated, and shakes her head.

  The kid opens up the glove compartment and sorts through papers.

  “Hey,” Dany asks. “When did you get your license?”

  “Next year,” Eva says. Her voice drops to a whisper, and she asks, “Is Mister Faraday … dead?”

  “Nah, he’s all right,” Dany says. “When we get to Antoine’s, we’ll just sew him up … or something.”

  “Is he going to die?”

  “No way,” Dany promises. “He’s just got a leaky pipe. Drive a bit more. Then, if we pull over a minute, I can get the duct tape out of the trunk.”

  Then Faraday is mumbling, muttering, but Dany can’t make him out.

  Aunt Norah, she sees, is still holding the balled-up fabric to Mister Faraday’s wound.

  It’d been blue, the blanket, but as Dany watches, the fabric turns black. “Hold this a minute,” Norah says to her. And it is then, only then, that Dany gets her first good look at Aunt Norah. She’s aged, these last couple months. And her eyes look strange and saggy. Worse, there is that loose flap of skin on her forehead – that’ll have to be stitched up too. And below the flap, it looks like a goose has laid a prize egg.

  “I’m okay,” Faraday is saying, over and over.

  Dany nods at him. “You are, you’re okay.”

  “I think someone hit me,” he tells her.

  “I think maybe you’re right,” Dany says slowly, her eyes ­narrowing.

  Faraday isn’t okay. His eyes look strange, like they’ve been pinned to his face. Like someone has sewn dark buttons onto a doll. Norah, meanwhile, is still trying to get out of her orange track suit. And then Dany sees her aunt’s face, sees her eyes, dull and unfocused. Her aunt, too, is shaking it rough.

  Dany looks from her aunt’s track suit to her own sad outfit, the plague jacket she is still wearing. Holding the balled up fabric with one hand, she takes the key from her neck with the other. It’s awkward, but Jasper’s one-handed test tube lessons help. Finally, she unlocks the thing, and shrugs it off. The jumpsuit and the plague jacket go out the window.

  In the low beams of oncoming cars, Dany sees the bright flashes of colour – the orange of the bloody prison uniform, the yellow of the plague jacket – as they scuttle over the highway, tossed lifelessly up by the wheels of oncoming cars.

  | Chapter 0 = X + 31

  Dany takes the bottle of sanitizer from her aunt and cleans her hands. Then she turns to her teacher. He isn’t going to like this.

  “I’m sorry, Faraday,” Dany says. “But this might sting.”

  He shakes his head, but Dany lifts the blood-soaked blanket and, as fresh blood oozes out, Dany squirts alcohol gel directly into the wound. A dollop on her hands too, for good measure.

  A beat later, the car is swerving in time with his ratcheting screams.

  “Eyes on the road,” Dany calls out. “Faraday’s fine. He can handle it.”

  And then Aunt Norah presses a new ball of blanket against her teacher’s shoulder. Her aunt talks quietly to him, gently touching his hair, but Faraday is done. Dany can see that he is done. As Dany watches, whimpering, her history teacher squeezes his eyes shut.

  Finally, when they’ve put enough distance between them and the hospice, Eva stutters to a stop on the shoulder of the road. First things first, Dany finds duct tape and pain pills, and heads back to Faraday.

  “Here, take these,” she orders.

  When he doesn’t respond, she thumbs open his mouth – and drops a couple pills in. A second later, she shoves the bottle of water in his mouth.

  “It’ll help with the pain,” she tells him. “Swallow.”

  Eva, up front, is reading the manual out loud.

  “It is advisable,” Eva reads, “to read the first part of this instruction manual, which deals with the operation of your Volkswagen, very carefully. You will then … start off your first trip with complete confidence.”

  Dany tears a long strip of duct tape from the cylinder.

  “I could really use a sticky for the gear shift,” Eva mutters.

  Dany looks at her work-in-progress. She’s set a fabric bandage in place, and now she duct tapes it to his chest. It won’t feel good coming off, but it’ll do the trick. She nods. He’ll hold for a little while. “There now, Faraday,” she says. “I fixed your leak.”

  Next, Dany digs through the trunk, finding clothes for Aunt Norah. Her aunt can’t just sit around in prison-issue underwear and a tank top. She finds a pair of Faraday’s rugger pants and an old Cornell shirt that look like they’ll do. When she gives them to her aunt, Norah tries to stand up, but as soon as she does, she vomits on the gravel.

  “Sit,” Dany tells her. “Don’t stand up.”

  Up front, Eva is studying the VW Bug’s manual like she’s about to be quizzed on it. “One minute,” Dany tells her, “and we go,” but Eva doesn’t take her nose out of the all-important book. She doesn’t even look up.

  Dany taps Eva on the shoulder, nods at her aunt. At first, Dany thought the problem was the goose egg. But now, she sees it’s more than this. She can see it, in her aunt’s eyes and skin. Aunt Norah is sick. Dany thinks back to what Jasper told her, about the hospice-prison, and ticks off the likely possibilities. Dysentery. Cholera. She hopes it’s neither.

  “She looks like shit,” Dany says quietly.

  “She needs to hydrate,” Eva says. “Electrolytes,” she adds and turns back to her book.

  Dany finds what they need in the console between seats. A few ancient packets of sugar and salt, the kind that once came with fast food. A faded cursive M on each packet. They’re probably as old as the car itself. Taking a bottle of water, she empties one sugar and one salt pack inside. Then, with a second look at her aunt, she doubles it. “Drink this,” she tells Norah. “It’ll help. Electrolytes. But no gulping. Take it slow, ’kay.”

  Norah nods.

  In the front seat, Eva flips another page and then she is staring agog, her mouth wide open. “Holy mother of moly,” Eva says. “The gears work according to vehicle speed. That is logical. Of course, if they want my advice, they should automate the whole process.”

  “I could try driving
…” Norah offers.

  “I think we’re better off with Eva,” Dany answers. Not only does her aunt not have her license, but one look, and Dany can see she’s in terrible shape. She glances from Norah to Eva. Eva frowns back and shakes her head.

  “I figured out the scooter pretty quick,” Dany says and shrugs. “I could take over if you need me.”

  “Look,” says Eva. “Duct tape makes me extremely uncomfortable.” Even just the one glance, back at Faraday’s bloody shoulder, has left Eva looking pale.

  “Go on, then,” Dany tells her friend. “Before Mister Faraday decides he wants to take the wheel.”

  As they drive, Dany talks to her history teacher.

  “You got lucky,” she tells him. “I think the bullet might be in one piece.”

  One finger hovers over his duct-taped shoulder.

  “It’s right here,” she tells him, her finger lightly hovering over the fleshy part of his shoulder, where shoulder meets arm. “Honestly, it doesn’t look too bad. But you’ve lost a tiny bit of blood. And we can’t leave the duct tape on forever. We need to sew you up at some point. As soon as we get you to Antoine’s.”

  “I’m bleeding less,” Faraday says.

  Dany smiles and nods, but then she sees her aunt’s expression. Aunt Norah doesn’t say anything, but the look on her face tells Dany that this isn’t the good news that she hopes it is. Still, she doesn’t need to relay that to Faraday. Her aunt, after all, would know. Dany’s heard the stories about her aunt and her mom and Antoine. Still, she doesn’t share her aunt’s resume with Faraday. Most people only know about people like Antoine from the news, so they don’t get it, not really.

  Besides, her history teacher, she can see, is struggling to stay conscious.

  Looking at him, now, for the first time, she wonders how all of this will affect him. She’s been so caught up in everything, it hasn’t even occurred to her to ask. Here, beside her, is a man who tried to save her little sister, who tried to help her, and now he is bleeding out in the back seat of his own car.

  And it’s all Dany’s fault.

  His teaching career is probably over too, plague or no. Of course, he was given a simple choice – they all were – survive or die.

  He’ll never set foot in a classroom again, at least, not outside of a prison. The old Faraday died back there on the prison grounds. And this new one, he’ll bear the scar of that gunshot for the rest of his life.

  In his flesh, now, is buried evidence, awaiting discovery. A prison guard’s bullet.

  And then she sees it – how all of them, in this car, are fatally connected. Somehow, their lives have intersected in blood, and now they are bound together. For better or for worse. Worse, probably. Dany takes a steadying breath. She focuses on the dark windshield. The lines of the road ahead of them. No, Faraday will never forgive her. Not ever. If he survives this – who is to say she hasn’t infected him in the last five minutes? A part of his life, along with a good amount of his blood, is gone. Irretri­evably. One way or another, Faraday’s old life has as good as leaked out on the back seat.

  And then she knows something else. She knows Isobel was right.

  Dany is a ticking clock – a danger to everyone she comes near.

  She stares at the dark road, wishing, wishing, but then, she did a lifetime’s worth of wishing back at Darling-­Holmes – and where had that gotten her?

  At once, the answer comes to her: Here. It’s gotten her here.

  | Chapter 0 = X + 32

  Eva is having trouble keeping her eyes – and the car – on the road. Every time she looks at a road sign, the car veers towards the shoulder.

  Dany presses forward between the front seats. “How’s the driving going?” she asks. But when Eva glances at her, the car swerves. “Whoa. Eyes on the road.”

  Eva nods and stares straight ahead, gripping the wheel in two fists.

  “I’m doing the best I can,” Eva says, “but every time I slow down, to put two full chevrons between us and the car ahead, some budinsky moves into our lane and obliterates my safe zone. One point five chevrons,” she says, sighing. “It’s the best I can do, okay. God.”

  “Uh, okay,” Dany says. “What’s … a chevron?”

  Eva looks at her and swerves.

  “Road,” Dany calls out.

  Slowly, Dany retreats into the back seat again. Safer for all of them.

  In the opposite lane, a flood of bright white lights zip past.

  Dany has been aware of them zinging past for a while, those cars headed back into the city. But only now does it occur to her to ask where, exactly, they think they are going. Heading into the middle of a deadly outbreak is the obvious answer.

  “See the traffic?” Dany asks.

  “Oh dear,” Eva says. “Everybody’s going back. Should we turn around?”

  Dany sure as hell hopes not. Back there are police officers and prison guards and by now, who knows. Maybe even the national guard. Back there, worse than all of that, is the virus, version 2.0, the one that has made the leap.

  Eva reaches over to turn on the radio, but nothing comes out.

  “Hey, Little Rabbit,” Eva says, “do you think you could fix the –”

  “No,” Dany and Aunt Norah call out in unison. Things out there are bad enough, without giving the kid access to a novel source of electrical power.

  Eva risks a glance in the rear-view, the car careens towards the shoulder, Dany screams for her to watch the goddamned road and then Eva, finally, is face-forward again, her hands stiff on the wheel, her mouth clamped shut.

  Dany wriggles up between the front seats and does all she can. She jiggles the radio in its casing, pushes at the thing and, finally, gives it a good bashing, but it’s no use. Whatever loose connection once bound the radio to its power source has fallen away.

  “My Sunbeam,” Mister Faraday mutters.

  Aunt Norah narrows her eyebrows, looking a question at her niece.

  Dany shrugs and adds one vintage scooter to her mental list of debts, along with the things she already owes Faraday, like a working shoulder, what looks to be a couple litres of blood, a car with an actual back window and a first edition of Shrewsbury, signed on the occasion of his receiving a Ph.D.

  | Chapter 0 = X + 33

  Next to Dany, Mister Faraday is time travelling. Sometimes, he’s giving a history lecture. More than once, he calls her either Graham or Gran, she isn’t sure which. She gently pats his cheek and looks up, ahead of them, searching out the source of the bright white lights.

  The lights shine even more brightly in the general darkness. The power isn’t back anywhere else, and Dany guesses they are running these lights with a generator. Soon, they see a line of stopped cars ahead and, as they close the distance, she makes out soldiers carrying what can only be automatic rifles.

  The soldiers are, every last one of them, wearing biohazard masks. And then she notices something else. Their uniforms are all wrong. The fade of the fabric, the cut. They don’t look the same as the soldiers back at the hospice. Dany takes in the front pockets, the shoulders, too, but if these soldiers once wore insignia, they’ve been removed. “Are these even real soldiers?” Dany asks.

  “Oh, they’re real. I just don’t think they’re Canadian,” her aunt says.

  Dany closes her eyes and her heart compresses, the blood suddenly too thick to pump. Still, there is a picture in her head. In it, a cable-stayed bridge is blocked off by a coil of barbed wire, itself spiked with huge asterisks of twisted rebar. Between the traffic directions, a series of concrete piles. In the picture, there is only one place to turn back and it is where those soldiers are.

  This, this was what she was talking about in history class. Because the Port Mann Bridge has been remade into a cordon sanitaire, and a line of soldiers, at the point of guns, are trying to keep a fatal plague fr
om crossing a line drawn by some bunkered politician on a piece of paper.

  “Cordon sanitaire,” she says.

  She leans forward, taking in the rest of the place.

  Just past the checkpoint, there look to be car spikes. The soldiers have set up a temporary gatehouse – a mobile unit, half obscured by the sandbags they’ve piled in front of it. But it’s too elaborate to be in response to the prison break. She counts soldiers and deployment patterns, takes in all of it. This isn’t for them. Whatever this checkpoint is, it has to have been set in motion hours ago. As Dany watches, a soldier meets car after car. After a brisk inspection – at point of flashlight – each makes a slow U-turn and heads back into the city.

  “Sugar, sugar, sugar,” Eva is saying, “what do I do? I have to slow down.”

  But Eva soon figures it out. Dany hears the gears grind slowly down into first. At the end of the line, their car chokes to a stall.

  “Everybody stay calm,” Aunt Norah is saying.

  “This isn’t about us,” Dany tells her aunt. “This is about the virus.”

  Her aunt looks a question at her, but Dany nods at an old rusted van. There, the one that is trying to jump the line – bypassing the checkpoint and turning back to the city. The side panel on the van proclaims its owner to be a Drywall Genius. Drywall genius he might be, but checkpoint genius he is not. The van pulls out of the line and turns back – only to be lit up by floodlights.

  Soldiers range into place, rifles at the ready.

  A single warning shot brings the rusty van to a slow stop on the other side of the road, facing the city, right across from them. The van is forced to the shoulder of the road under the gaze of four riflemen. Dany keeps her eyes on the man driving the van.

  “It’s okay,” Aunt Norah says. “It’s not about us. This isn’t about us.”

  But it doesn’t have to be about them to kill them, Dany knows.

  “Can we turn back?” Eva asks.

  “I think that might draw the wrong kind of attention,” her aunt says.