by Hamill, Ike
“We’re at a safe distance,” Romie said. “Tell us what you want.”
“Romie, I don’t know what they want. I was abducted last night, and I don’t know what’s happening or how many people are involved. I’m going to get away. I suggest you do the same.”
There was a long silence. For a moment, Claire thought that they might have immediately heeded her advice and that she would hear no more from them.
“Abducted by who?”
“Tons of people. Everyone.” She thought about all the people who had taken shifts in the greenhouse overnight. She could hardly think of a single person not involved.
The static began to swell on the radio again. Carrie was moving slowly, but she was approaching another hill. At any moment, her connection to Romie might be severed. Carrie slowed down even more to see if Romie would reply.
“What did they want?”
Carrie was almost at a stop. Romie’s question was nearly smothered by a blanket of static.
“I don’t know exactly, but it’s not good. They made me talk to this guy who they called The Origin. He said something about my cousin, Janice.”
As soon as the name left her mouth, Carrie understood exactly what he had meant. The Origin had said, “She didn’t know how to apologize without thinking less of herself.”
Janice had practically raised Carrie. They were so much alike that sometimes back then Carrie couldn’t understand why Janice did what she did. To understand Janice would have meant understanding herself. Sometimes that required a level of honesty that Carrie couldn’t commit to.
But now, in retrospect, it made sense.
Carrie muscled the wheel around and then put the truck into reverse. The static flared, angry with her. She dialed the volume knob down until it clicked, turning off the radio.
✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪
He was still in the same spot, back there in the heat, with his slow, lazy eyes.
Carrie strode with fast confidence through the greenhouse. She kept one protective hand on her belly, but she had nothing to worry about. She knew exactly what to say. As she drew closer, she noticed things about The Origin that she hadn’t seen before.
He was much older than she had assumed at first. His eyes weren’t just lazy, they were ancient. And he was very sick. There was an open sore on his cheek that was so profound that she thought she could see a flash of white when he smiled. She was seeing through his cheek. When he waved to her, she saw that the skin on one of his fingers had sloughed off, revealing the bone beneath.
None of that mattered.
What mattered was what she had to say.
Carrie squared herself in the doorway to the little hotbox and stared down at The Origin. “Jannie would have thought less of herself because she never admitted that she was raped.”
The Origin’s face showed surprise at Carrie’s revelation, but he didn’t respond.
“Her first time,” Carrie explained, “she was coerced. So when John and I hooked up, she immediately blamed him but got mad at me. Then, she couldn’t apologize to me because if she had, she would have been admitting that…”
Carrie couldn’t finish. With pregnancy, her emotions had ramped up. They had the ability to surprise and then paralyze her. Her mouth was twisted down into a frown. She took a deep breath and managed to straighten herself back up.
“It’s complicated,” she said. “Jannie and John had been dating for two years. I was a randy teenager, and none of the boys at my school were interested. John was the first man to really listen to me—to even really see me. I knew I was betraying Jannie, but at that point the validation of being with a man was more important than her feelings.”
The Origin nodded. He understood.
Carrie leaned against the doorframe.
“The only way I could make it right was to move away. She and John deserved the chance to be together without my presence to remind them. I should have known that they would break up anyway. I couldn’t face her. She was everything. She was just my cousin, but she was like my mother and sister. She was the one who rescued me when my mom…”
Carrie’s rising tears choked her words. She fanned her face with her hand. It was so hot.
“Are you ready to see her again?” The Origin asked.
“What, like in heaven?” Carrie asked when she got control of her voice again.
The Origin laughed. “No!”
He kept laughing until Carrie was sure that he was mocking her. As soon as the thought crossed her mind, he stopped. His horrible face became very serious. She looked at the sore on his cheek. It was oozing something that was too yellow to be blood. One of his slow eyes was bulging. The pupil was as big as a dime and jet black. Around it, the blood vessels throbbed and leaked. Tiny droplets of blood were caught in his eyelashes.
He smiled again. A tooth fell from his mouth. Carrie’s eyes didn’t leave his.
“She’s still alive. I’ll show you how to find her.”
He reached out the hand with the sloughing skin.
Carrie didn’t scream until she saw that her own hand was reaching out to take his.
CHAPTER 17: NEW JERSEY
AT FIRST, THE LIGHT seemed like a trick. It was another reflection of Robby’s flashlights on the tile walls. Gordie pulled at the leash, trying to make Robby go even faster. When they spotted that first sliver of actual sunlight, the boy and dog did speed up. They found a new speed where it felt like their feet weren’t even touching down.
Robby burst into the sunlight and dropped the leash.
He doubled over, propping himself up with his hands on his thighs and sucked in gallons of fresh air. Behind him, the tunnel was a black rectangle, still calling.
“Come on,” Robby said to Gordie. The two of them jogged until the road rose up from between the concrete walls and they passed under the arch that welcomed them to Jersey City. Robby pointed to a big store on their right. Beyond it, the parking lot was mostly empty, but there were a few candidates.
“Let’s find a car.”
✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪
It didn’t take long. They found a car with a manual transmission that was abandoned near a slope. Using all his strength, Robby managed to turn the wheel until the tires were free from the curb. Once he knew that he could get the vehicle rolling, Robby and Gordie tracked down a gas can. The liquid inside looked questionable, but it smelled like it would burn. Robby poured it into the car and let Gordie jump in.
Once they got enough speed, Robby popped the clutch. The car sounded grumpy and tired as it sputtered to life.
Music blared from the speakers. Gordie perked his ears and tilted his head at the sound.
“It’s Death Metal,” Robby said. He poked the knob, shutting off the stereo.
Gordie opened his mouth and started panting. He was sitting in the passenger’s seat and looking through the windshield.
“Hold on,” Robby said. He turned in a tight U turn and got them going the right direction. “We need to find a bridge to Newark that’s still intact. I think the tornadoes targeted a lot of the bridges. Either that, or the bridges were especially alluring to the people who wrote the graffiti, and that drew in the tornadoes. Same result either way.”
Gordie was looking at him.
Robby drove, leaning forward so he could scan the road for cracks or other danger.
He glanced at the dog again.
“I don’t want to talk about it yet,” Robby said. “I need time to think about it more.”
Ahead, they saw a bunch of garbage and debris scattered in the road. The path was obvious as they drew closer. The tornado had cut through a drug store and then continued on to destroy an apartment building. The road looked untouched, but it was blocked by all the trash.
“Up north, the tornadoes were really thorough. They worked for days to completely dismantle entire settlements. Maybe those places had more people who were inspired to paint the symbols, you know?”
Gordie didn’t respond.
&
nbsp; Robby cut through a parking lot and then over a sidewalk so he could get to the next passable road. Up ahead, they saw the road climb upwards as it bridged over the river.
“Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
Robby slowed and pulled the brake. He left the vehicle running while he jogged over to the side to get a good look at the bridge. Even when he knew they hadn’t been damaged, he didn’t like bridges. Using them required putting faith in the design and construction skills of people who had been dead for years.
They were a necessary evil. Robby just wanted to be sure that there was no obvious damage to the structure of the bridge before he tried driving over it.
It looked fine. The sun was bright, the water was blue, and a fresh wind was blowing in from the ocean. There was no reason at all to be concerned.
Back in the car, Gordie was eager to move.
“You’re just nervous because I’m nervous,” Robby said. As he put the car into gear, a hot ball of energy began to bubble in his chest. His arms tingled as he steered to the center of the road. Gordie barked as the ground dropped away on the other side of the guardrail. In the center of the bridge, a giant steel truss gave the structure its rigidity.
“This actually looks like the bridge between Maine and New Hampshire a little,” Robby said. He knew he was talking just to try to alleviate his own nerves. It seemed to be working, so he kept going. “At least I assume the bridge is still there. It was farther south than the snow and the killer liquid didn’t seem to start until New Hampshire. I’m guessing that the river served as somewhat of a natural boundary. Who knows?”
Thinking about that bridge, he remembered a dead kid in the backseat of a crashed car. The memory made Robby’s eyes jump to the rearview mirror.
Robby slammed on the brakes.
✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪
Gordie barked as Robby stood next to the car, looking east.
It was way too far to be sure. Somehow, he was sure anyway.
In the distance, where the buildings of Lower Manhattan cut into the horizon, there should have been one tower with a tall spire reaching up higher than anything else. It wasn’t there.
“It was there,” Robby said.
Gordie stopped barking.
“We were there. It was there. We read the plaque on the side. It was wrong, but it was there. Something changed when we went through that tunnel. We’re not going back.”
He got back in the car and looked at the dog. “We’re not going back. I don’t know.”
Robby put the car in gear. He had to weave between a few abandoned cars. On one, the driver’s door was still open. The other looked like it had been sensibly parked in the middle of the Pulaski Skyway.
“We’re not going back.”
Gordie didn’t answer.
✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪
Further west, a little inland from the city, they began to search. Robby scanned the abandoned vehicles, looking for something tall, fairly new, and diesel. The car he was driving was already starting to choke on the bad gas. Diesel seemed to stay fresh longer.
Their new ride was a tall SUV. Robby made Gordie sit in the back, just in case. In back, there was less for Gordie to bounce off of when Robby had to jump a curb or roll over a small tree.
In North Jersey, every road seemed lined with cemeteries. Robby forced his eyes straight forward when they passed by the fields of headstones. Gordie watched them with excitement, barking occasionally.
On the highway, they were able to move pretty fast. Abandoned cars were off to the sides. The center of the road was pretty much clear. Robby headed south as the sun set to their right. Gordie settled down and stretched out across the back seat.
“I’m not stopping around all these graveyards.”
Robby angled the rearview mirror so he could see Gordie’s face.
He allowed the speedometer to creep a little higher.
“I’ll drive through the night if I have to.”
He didn’t have to. It wasn’t long before the scenery turned industrial, and then even a little rural. It didn’t look like Robby had imagined. In his imagination, the whole coast was one big city from New York down to Washington. That’s the way it looked on the map, anyway. All the tangled lines of roads and recognizable city names cluttered Robby’s map. This was the place where his cultural ancestors had settled on their new continent. This was the origin of the European infection. The concrete and asphalt tentacles spread in every direction from this site.
Robby blinked and shook his head.
It had been a long day.
Darkness fell like someone had dropped a heavy blanket over the landscape. Even in Gladstone, where the four of them had their stronghold, there were enough lights to make the place feel inhabited at night. Robby could always look across the street and see Brad’s reading light, or the porch light that Romie and Lisa left on. Out here, in the middle of Jersey, Robby’s headlights were a candle in a cave. He and Gordie were surrounded by an ocean of black.
A sign announced that there was a rest stop in two miles.
Robby barked out a laugh. In the back, Gordie sat up.
“I don’t do rest stops,” Robby said.
He drove by the place and then took the next exit. At the end of the ramp, they saw gas stations and fast food restaurants. Robby had to drive nearly a mile, keeping careful track of his turns, until they found a neighborhood. The houses were small, old, and looked like they hadn’t been well cared-for even before their occupants had vanished. Robby found one with a driveway deep enough to hide the SUV. He shut off the key and they waited.
Gordie was eager to get outside and sniff their new surroundings. Robby made him wait. He scanned the dark houses around them. A tree limb bobbed gently in the breeze. Across the street, a curtain fluttered in a window. The front door to that house was open. It was possible that the breeze was swirling in through the door and blowing the curtain. Or, perhaps, a family of nocturnal animals had taken up residence in there.
“Stay close,” Robby said. He opened his door and Gordie jumped between the seats to follow him out into the night.
✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪
They stayed in the shadow of the trees between the houses. Robby opened the gate to the chainlink fence and left it wide. Gordie peed on the pole. They climbed the porch stairs and looked in through the back door.
“Blankets, water, food, can opener,” Robby said.
The door was locked. Other houses, like the one across the street, had wide open doors. Robby didn’t trust those. Anything could be inside one of those places. Back down the stairs, a row of rocks marked the border of the walk and the tall grass. Robby used one of those rocks to punch through one of the panes of glass on the door. Reaching through the broken glass, he unlocked the door.
“Watch your feet.”
Before letting the dog in, he brushed aside most of the glass with his shoe. Robby left the door open behind them.
In the kitchen, two doors were side by side. One would be the basement. The other would be a pantry. Robby studied them closely in the moonlight before he made his choice. The pantry held bottled water and some decent canned food. He even found legitimate dog food. Given a choice, Gordie loved canned dog food over anything else.
Robby stuffed the spoils into a bag that hung from the back of the door.
Gordie was nosing around the cabinet under the sink.
“That’s garbage,” Robby said. “Let’s find blankets.”
He waited for the dog before he ventured into the rest of the house.
The living room was darker than the kitchen. The windows were on the wrong side to catch the moonlight, and they had heavy curtains blocking the view of the street. Deeper into the house, it had an old person’s smell. Robby thought of his grandmother’s house. The furniture seemed to pick up the odors of a million roasts and casseroles. The couch would emit these smells like a fungus releasing its spore whenever a person moved too close. This living room was the same way. Robby almost
turned back. Any blanket in the place would be infused with the same nostalgia.
He forced himself deeper. He was too tired to be messing around with yet another house, and the back of the SUV would need some pillows and blankets for padding. The stairs were narrow and steep. Gordie climbed right alongside Robby, threatening to trip him up. Robby didn’t care—he was more than glad for the company.
Three tiny bedrooms and one bath made up the second floor. Robby found what he needed in one. There was a cedar chest at the foot of a bed. It was stacked with blankets. Robby took them all.
That should have been it. They could have nabbed the blankets, snatched the bag from the counter down in the kitchen, and been back in the SUV without incident.
Instead, Robby paused to glance through the window. He looked across the street at the house with the open door. He waited to see if the curtains would flutter again.
They did.
✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪
Robby stared through the second-floor window for a full minute. His eyes were locked on the front door of the house across the street. There was a line of black between the door and the frame. It was open just enough for a small person to slip through without making the hinges creak. The air was so humid—it almost looked like a fog was hanging in the air.
When they had lived in Portland, Judy had always left the back door open like that. She would slip out in the night to sit on the bench behind the garage. Back there she could smoke a cigarette as she looked out across the marsh. She thought that she was stealthy, but Robby always heard her go out and come back in.
Robby watched the house across the street, knowing what he would see. He clutched the blankets to his chest. They didn’t just smell of cedar. They also smelled of mothballs. His grandmother used to call them camphor balls.
