“No.”
“Don’t protect him!”
I flinched. The air around Diego vibrated the way it does before a thunderstorm, warning me that worse was coming. “Stop, Diego, just stop. It doesn’t matter who did it.”
Diego clenched his fist. He punched the steering wheel until his knuckles bled. “Don’t you get it, Henry? I love you. I love you so much, and I know this is all a big joke to you because the world is ending and you don’t think any of this matters, but when it comes to you, it always matters.”
I unbuckled my seat belt and twisted around. I held Diego’s face in my hands and kissed him despite the agony that exploded around my nose and eye. Pain has a way of reinforcing memories. It binds them to the moment so you never forget, and I didn’t want to forget.
“I think . . . I think I love you too, Diego.” They words hurt. Saying them to someone other than Jesse, but I knew they were true. And that made them hurt even worse. “But that’s why we shouldn’t see each other.” I don’t remember when I started crying, but I couldn’t stop. “I wish the sluggers had chosen you to save the world. I just . . . I can’t be the reason you end up back in juvie.”
Diego was shaking, but I couldn’t tell if he was crying or going to punch me. “I don’t need you to look after me. You can’t even look after yourself.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You won’t press the button to save the world because you don’t think you deserve to live in it.”
“I was going to do it, Diego. Because of you.”
Diego shook his head. “Maybe you’re right. We shouldn’t see each other.” He laughed bitterly, but I didn’t get the joke. “I wanted you to press the button because you wanted to, not for me or anyone else. If you can’t see how amazing you are, then . . . forget it.”
I tried to think of something more to say, but I’d run out of words. I got out of the car and walked back toward school to call Audrey for a ride. I half expected Diego to chase after me, but he didn’t.
Superbugs
The first case of untreatable gonorrhea is observed in Maxx Costanza of Warwick, Rhode Island. It is estimated that he infected thirteen sexual partners before being diagnosed.
Within months, outbreaks of antibiotic-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Clostridium difficile, and E. coli are observed in patients around the world. Not even last-resort antibiotics are effective in controlling the diseases.
Governments around the globe direct their resources to the development of new antibiotics. As deaths from simple infections rise dramatically, a new sense of teamwork spreads throughout the world. Knowledge is shared freely, old barriers are eliminated as humanity races to find cures for diseases once considered beaten. Economic and military rivalries are set aside to save the world.
An unparalleled level of global collaboration leads to the first breakthrough nearly two years after Maxx Costanza’s initial diagnosis. The potential new antibiotic is found in the chemical secretions of cockroaches. While attempting to isolate enough of the compounds in the cockroaches, an international consortium of scientists develops revolutionary technologies to increase the size of the cockroaches through genetic manipulation. These novel insects, named Blatella asmithicus after the geneticist responsible for creating them, Dr. Andrew Smith, measure nearly a meter in length, and have an astounding resiliency and immunity to all known toxins. Capable, even, of withstanding significant exposure to radiation. They are more commonly referred to as CroMS: cockroaches of mighty size.
The first new successful antibiotic in a decade is tested on 8 January 2016. Within days, the mortality rate from bacterial infections decreases to levels never before achieved.
United by their cause, a new age of peace and prosperity envelops the world. It is the golden age of humanity.
On 29 January 2016 a pair of CroMS escape from a laboratory in Austin, Texas. They begin to breed. As a result of their increased size, CroMS possess a ravenous appetite and devour everything in their path.
Austin is overrun in three days. Texas in two weeks. The United States in less than a year.
When CroMS are the only living creatures remaining on the planet, they consume each other.
7 January 2016
After Adrian punched me in the hallway at school, which I read on Marcus’s SnowFlake page was retribution for his expulsion, despite not even being the one who’d e-mailed his video confession to Principal DeShields, I spent most of my free time in my room, contemplating my existence.
I’ve been wondering why the sluggers haven’t abducted me since Thanksgiving. They’ve had plenty of opportunities, and there were definitely a few times I might have pressed the button. Maybe they don’t want Earth saved after all. Maybe they’re messing with my head. They want to see if I’ll break under the pressure. Maybe the world isn’t going to end, and I’ll spend January 29 waiting for an apocalypse that won’t come.
Diego sent me a couple of texts, left some messages, but I deleted them unanswered and unread. I’m not sure I did the right thing, breaking up with him. I’m not sure we were ever actually a couple. I’d seen him naked and he’d seen me, so we were more than friends; I just don’t know what more actually means. I wasn’t kidding when I told him I loved him. Somewhere between his bursting into my chemistry class and punching his knuckles bloody on his steering wheel, I fell in love with Diego Vega.
As human beings, we seek meaning in everything. We’re so good at discovering patterns that we see them where they don’t exist. One summer my parents sent me and Charlie to stay with our uncle Joe in Seattle. I had to share a room with Charlie, and his snoring kept me from sleeping. Uncle Joe gave me a white-noise machine. When it was time for bed, I fired it up and listened to the static. It was nice at first—like crumpling paper or a fly’s endlessly buzzing wings—but after a while, I began to hear things in the noise. Random words or bits of music repeating. I woke up Charlie and made him listen, convinced I’d discovered a secret message left by spies, but he punched me and went back to sleep. Once I heard the pattern, I couldn’t stop hearing it, and I spent the rest of the summer looking and listening for patterns in other random sources—the wind, clothes tumbling in the dryer. I even pulled out one of Uncle Joe’s old television sets to watch the snow.
We look for the same patterns in our lives to give them meaning. When someone says, “Everything happens for a reason,” they’re trying to convince you there’s a pattern to your life, and that if you pay close attention, it’s possible to decipher it. If my mom hadn’t packed my lunch on 18 September 2013, I wouldn’t have gotten to the cafeteria early and sat at a table that belonged to a group of seniors, which included my brother. Charlie wouldn’t have stolen my lunch, and I wouldn’t have been forced to buy something to eat and sit at another table on the other side of the cafeteria. Jesse never would have seen me, and we wouldn’t have met. We wouldn’t have dated, fallen in love, and Jesse’s suicide wouldn’t have destroyed me. I wouldn’t have gone to the boys’ room to cry and run into Marcus on his way out. Marcus and I wouldn’t have started fooling around, and I wouldn’t have gone to his party to prove that I could. I wouldn’t have bumped into Diego and gotten to know him, and we wouldn’t have fallen for each other. A person who believed in patterns might be tempted to believe Diego and I were fated to meet.
Only, it wasn’t fate. It wasn’t destiny. And it certainly wasn’t God. It was chance. A random series of events given meaning by someone desperate to prove there’s a design to our lives. That the minutes and hours between our birth and death are more than frantic moments of chaos. Because if that’s all they are—if there are no rules governing our lives—then our entire existence is a meaningless farce.
If Jesse didn’t have a reason for hanging himself, then his death was pointless. And if Jesse died for nothing, how can I live for anything?
• • •
The doorbell rang, but I didn’t move. Mom was somewhere in the house; she could answer the
door. I was inert, still in my school clothes, lying on top of my sheets, dozing in a transitory space between asleep and awake. My skin was moist, but I was too lazy to crank up the fan. I must have drifted off, because I didn’t hear my mom calling my name until she was standing over my bed, shaking me.
“Henry, wake up.”
“What?”
“There’s someone here to see you.” She hesitated in a way that made me think it was Diego. I hadn’t told her we’d broken up or whatever, but she wasn’t stupid, either.
“I’ll be out in a minute.” Mom left. I got a whiff of my pits, slapped on some deodorant, and changed into something less pungent. I wasn’t sure what was left to say to Diego. Nothing had changed. If he stayed with me, he’d end up hurting someone, and I didn’t want him to spend the last days of Earth behind bars. But I missed him. I missed his goofy smile and his stupid jokes and how he blushed when his stomach gurgled. I wasn’t sure if I could see him and hang on to my resolve.
As it turned out, I didn’t have to worry.
Mrs. Franklin sat at the dining room table with my mom. She looked out of place in our house, like finding a van Gogh displayed amongst an army of Thomas Kinkades. Even dressed in a simple outfit of shorts and a blouse, she radiated refinement. A crispness that my mother, in her shabby clothes, could never match.
I thought she must have come to confront me about breaking into her house, and that cops would surely be busting down my door any moment, but I resisted the urge to panic. If police were on their way, freaking out wouldn’t help. “Hi, Mrs. Franklin.”
She turned toward me, the bare hint of a smile on her lips. “Henry. I can’t believe that for as long as you and Jesse dated, I’ve never met your mother.”
“Lucky you.”
Mom scowled at me. “You know, I have a box of baby pictures around here somewhere. Keep it up, mister.” She pushed back her chair. “It was really nice to meet you, Helen. We should have lunch sometime.”
“Absolutely.” She waited for Mom to disappear outside before motioning for me to sit. When I did, she stared at me for so long that I began to feel the same way I did when the sluggers examined me. “I never liked you, Henry.”
Mrs. Franklin’s pronouncement should have shocked me, but it didn’t. “Thanks?”
The hard edges of her face softened momentarily. “It wasn’t you—I’m sure you’re a fine young man.” I noticed the way she lingered on my black eye, and wasn’t sure I believed her. “It was Jesse. I wanted him to focus on his studies. You were a distraction.”
“Jesse would have been valedictorian if—”
“I’m glad he found you, though. You made him happy.” Mrs. Franklin’s voice was wooden, like she was reciting lines, but I didn’t know whether it was because she was insincere or because if she allowed any emotion to creep into her voice, she’d fall apart.
“About the other night—”
Mrs. Franklin held up her hand. “I think I understand.”
“You do?”
“No, I suppose not. But I’m sure you had your reasons.”
“You turned Jesse’s bedroom into a sewing room.”
“I’d burn down that house if I had the nerve.” Mrs. Franklin’s composure cracked. A mad giggle escaped from her mouth, and she seemed as surprised by it as I was. “Jesse is imprinted all over that house. Down every hallway, in every wall. He’s gone, but he’ll never be gone.”
I considered taking her hand, offering her comfort, but if that was what she wanted, there had been plenty of opportunities after Jesse’s death. His funeral, the wake, the lonely days after when even eating had become an unbearable chore. “Why are you here?”
Mrs. Franklin cleared her throat. “We didn’t speak at Jesse’s funeral—I was too bound up in my own grief to be concerned with yours. I hope you can forgive me.”
“There’s nothing to forgive.”
“I wanted to ask you . . . I wanted to know . . . Did Jesse tell you he was sad?”
The question blindsided me the same way Jesse’s suicide had. “No more so than anyone else.”
“Did he ever talk about wanting to hurt himself?”
“Not with me,” I said. “Audrey knew a little, but he kept that part of himself from me.”
For some reason, that made Mrs. Franklin smile. “So like Jesse. He hated to be a bother, and only wanted to make people smile. Especially you.”
“He did. I don’t think I was ever happier than with Jesse.”
“Neither was I.” Mrs. Franklin folded her hands in front of her, and I think we both got a little lost remembering how amazing Jesse was. The way the sun shone brighter, and no trouble seemed to matter when he was near. “Do you think it was my fault?”
“I don’t know.” It probably wasn’t the answer Mrs. Franklin hoped for, but it was honest, and she deserved the truth. “Maybe. Maybe it was my fault. Maybe nobody is to blame.”
“My son was very lucky to have had you in his life.” Mrs. Franklin pushed back her chair and stood. She was even more imposing towering over me. “Please don’t break into my house again.”
“Yes, ma’am.” As she turned to leave, I stopped her. “Did you find anything when you were cleaning out Jesse’s room?”
Mrs. Franklin furrowed her brow. “Like what, Henry?”
“I don’t know. Anything that might have explained why he killed himself?” The whole time we were talking, I kept hoping she’d reveal that she’d discovered a letter addressed to me, something Jesse had left behind that would make sense of everything.
She shook her head, eyes downcast. “What would it have changed if I had?”
“At least we would have known.”
“But knowing wouldn’t return Jesse to us.”
She began to head toward the door again. I’d broken into her house looking for closure, and I think she came to mine looking for the same. I’m not sure either of us found what we were looking for, but maybe continuing to search was the best we could do.
“Mrs. Franklin?”
She sighed. “Yes, Henry?”
“If you knew the world was going to end, but you had the power to stop it, would you?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Mrs. Franklin’s back was to me, but I imagined I could see the determined set of her jaw, the same resolute expression I’d seen on Jesse’s face a hundred times. “Because Jesse believed that life wasn’t worth living, and I refuse to prove him right.”
10 January 2016
I was having a dream. The sluggers abducted me and cut off my limbs. Then they reattached them wrong. My left arm became my right leg, my right leg became my left leg, and so on. Then they tossed me onto the floor and forced me to try to crawl to the button. I wanted to reach the button more than anything, but it was impossible to walk with an arm where my leg should have been.
Jesse was in the dream too. He was lecturing me on the impermanence of memory. Most of the words jumbled together because I was busy having my body parts rearranged, but I remembered him telling me that memories are often amalgams of truth and fiction, sewn together in our heads by our subconscious to support our personal beliefs about the world. He droned on and on about dendrites and voltage gradients, but in my dream I couldn’t stop wondering how much of what I remembered about Jesse was truth and how much was fiction.
As the aliens prepared to switch my hands, feet, and genitals, I heard a banging from the shadows. The sluggers turned as a unit to look toward the source of the noise, but Jesse hadn’t noticed and was still talking about memory, this time in rhyming couplets. He might have also been speaking Italian. Apparently, I am also an Italian poet in my dreams.
The banging grew louder and I tried to sit up, but, lacking limbs, I fell off the table instead. My last thought before I hit the ground and woke up was, Not the nose.
The pounding sound traveled with me out of my dream, but I was groggy and confused, so it took me a moment to realize someone was knocking on my w
indow.
It was 1:37 a.m. Who the fuck was knocking on my bedroom window at 1:37? I lifted the window a crack. “What?”
“Bro. I lost my keys. Let me in.” Charlie slurred his words, barely able to form a coherent sentence. Luckily, I’d been speaking Charlie Denton my entire life.
“Do you know what time it is?”
Charlie was too busy puking to answer. I threw on some clothes and snuck through the house to avoid waking Mom. Charlie wasn’t waiting by the door, and I was shocked by a blast of arctic air when I walked outside in nothing but shorts and a tank top.
“Shit.” Charlie’s car was parked on the front lawn. The headlights illuminated the front of the house, and the hazards were blinking. “You’ve got to be kidding me.” The keys were in the ignition, so I quickly backed the Jeep into the street and parked behind Mom. I couldn’t do anything about the tire tracks marring the grass. Mom was going to strangle Charlie when she saw them.
Charlie stumbled toward me. The front of his work shirt was crusty with vomit, and he was sweating profusely, even in the cold. “Jesus, Charlie, we have to get you inside.”
“When did I eat broccoli?” He lurched and opened his mouth; I thought he was going to throw up again, but he fired off a wet burp that made my skin crawl. “Better.”
“Where’s Zooey?”
“Parents’ house.”
It’s been nearly two weeks since Zooey’s loss, and I haven’t seen much of her or Charlie. Their obstetrician suspects the baby suffered from chromosomal damage. Mom told me those types of pregnancies frequently miscarry early on, but not always. Only, Mom didn’t use the word miscarry. She referred to it as nature’s fail-safe, as if that could draw the poison from the sting. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that with Zooey so far along, the correct term was actually stillbirth. Anyway, it doesn’t matter what word we use; their baby is dead.
“You reek,” I said. “Let’s get you washed up.”
Charlie didn’t put up a fight when I led him inside and got him out of his work clothes, which probably needed to be burned. He stood compliantly under the shower, letting the water run over his head. I turned it up as hot as he could bear to warm his bones so he didn’t get sick. I had no idea how long he’d been outside my window, but his skin was icy. When we ran out of hot water, Charlie dressed and followed me to his room. His eyes were bloodshot, and he was sweating cheap booze.
We Are the Ants Page 26
