She hands Ron the stack of papers.
“The stuff about the train is on top,” she says.
Ron eyes the stack. He sips from his glass.
“Well, I suppose, for me, this is a sort of reckoning.”
“How?”
He smiles. “You might do all you can to avoid the new world, but it’s going to come knocking, in some form or another, soon enough.”
Malorie thinks of the census man. Ron squints as he reads the top page. He nods.
“On the radio, it was said the train was functioning. The host, if you could call him that, he’s literally alone, so he’s everything, he said he’d never take it himself.”
“What did he know about it?”
“He said he didn’t think it was safe.”
“Why not?”
“I imagine that’s because it’s a blind train, Malorie.”
Ron eyes her. It’s supposed to be funny. Malorie doesn’t know, maybe it is.
“Yes,” Ron says, reading again. “Lansing. Although I actually heard it was East Lansing. There is a difference, you know.”
“I do.”
A university town. An agriculture school. Michigan State.
“How far are we from East Lansing?” she asks.
But Ron is focusing on the paper.
“It really is very interesting,” he says. “Preordained paths, I mean. Train tracks. By this logic, the only other safe form of travel in the new world would be by roller coaster. Any desire to see Cedar Point, Malorie?”
Ron doesn’t look at her long enough for her to have to smile.
“How far is it?” she asks again.
“It’s about thirty miles. But of course that’s something you’d want to be sure of before setting out on foot.”
Malorie senses the world sinking. The hope she feels, the hope she cannot deny, partially turns to dust. She almost stands up. Ron sits down.
“Thirty miles,” she says. “There’s just…just no way.”
Ron nods. “It’s a tall order. Your stories of twenty miles on a river are mind-boggling enough.”
“Fuck.”
When she looks at Ron, he’s staring back at her. He looks inquisitive, almost like he’s observing her making a decision. Like he’s wondering what it takes to do something brave.
“In the old world,” Ron says, “thirty miles on foot would take about eight hours. That’s at fifteen minutes a mile.”
“With sight,” Malorie says. “And walking a straight line.”
“So double it. Triple it. Even more. I’d say it could take three days.”
Malorie thinks.
“I don’t mean to be the bearer of worse news,” Ron says, “but there’s no guarantee the train is still there. Or how often it runs. Or what the people are like, the sort of people who would consider running such a thing.”
The dread he’s espousing is palpable, as if Ron has just tossed her a black hole to catch.
He leans forward, causing the lounger to creak. “Imagine the type of person who feels confident enough, in this world, to engineer a train. Sound inviolable to you?”
Malorie sees madness. Annette in that engineer’s seat. Gary strutting car to car, taking tickets.
“No,” she says. She tries to give the word finality, but it’s simply not there. Not in her voice. Not in her heart.
“But hang on,” Ron says. “Let’s read some more, talk some more, before we give up. Yes?”
Malorie stands. She paces as Ron continues to scan the pages. Her thoughts ping-pong, fast, images of Mom and Dad gardening under the sun. Still. Alive. No idea their daughter is breathing and sane and thinking about them right now.
Oh, what she could do for them by showing up at their home with grandkids in tow.
She sits back down. Then she stands. Then she sits again. Dad was good with chopping wood. Both were good cooks. Both could live off the land. Why would they go near the bridge?
Did someone take them there? Force them there? And even if Malorie did go, how can she be sure she’d find them?
The census man found them.
The thought is a good one. It’s clear, and it means something.
“Safer Room,” Ron says. When Malorie looks to him, she sees he’s deeper into the stack of pages. “Did you read about these? What fancies…”
“Safer Room?” Malorie asks.
Ron smiles, but there’s heaviness to him now. Malorie doesn’t imagine he’ll be joking anymore during this visit.
“His words: Twelve-by-eight-foot holes in the ground. Bunkers for safety. If ever the creatures take over. Well, I don’t like the sound of that.”
Malorie wants to tell Ron not to worry. He’s survived ten years in this service station. He doesn’t have to think about Safer Rooms. He doesn’t have to think about the outside world at all. She can see the paranoia expanding in his eyes. The way he looks at her over his glass as he takes another sip. Like he’s suddenly angry she’s here.
“Sounds like a grave,” she says. Because she knows Ron Handy is smart. He’ll know it if she placates him.
“Indeed. No underground bunkers for me,” he says. “I like to keep mine aloft.”
So another joke after all. Good. Ron reads. Malorie, having seen some of what’s in there, thinks to warn him. But she’s too late.
“Oh, no,” Ron says. “Oh, no.”
He tosses the stack to the oil-stained floor. He wipes his hands on his sport coat. The look in his eyes is a fear Malorie hasn’t seen in a long time. Even the housemates didn’t look quite as scared as Ron does now.
“Did you see?” he asks her, his voice an octave higher.
“See what?” Malorie asks. She tries not to imagine a drawing. A photo. What did she miss in the stack?
But that’s not what Ron means.
“Someone says they…caught one?”
“Just rumor,” Malorie says quickly. “That’s impossible.”
“But to even think to try?”
Ron sets his drink on a stack of paint cans. He wipes his hands on his coat again, as if, by doing so, he might erase the fact that he’s touched papers suggesting a creature could be caught.
“Oh, Malorie,” Ron says. “It’s too much. All of this. It’s overwhelming me.”
“I’m sorry, Ron,” Malorie says. She should go. She should get up and leave this place. Why did she come here?
“My sister’s name is in there, too,” Ron suddenly says.
“What?”
He rises and turns his back to her.
“My sister’s name, Malorie.” He’s almost shouting now.
“On the survivor list?” Malorie asks. She looks to the pages he’s discarded.
“Yes. My sister is on the list, too. What don’t you understand about that? My sister is on the list!”
Malorie doesn’t know what to say. Here she hasn’t processed her own news yet.
She bends and takes up the papers.
“My God,” Ron says. “My God, my God, my God.”
Malorie doesn’t read the words in her lap. She only feels the presence of Ron’s emotions. The sadness, the futility, the fact that he’s just learned of his sister having survived at least the arrival of the creatures. Here, a paranoid hermit has gotten word of something worth venturing into the new world for.
Ron sits again. He’s smiling, but his expression scares her. As if his eyes are made of black cloth. As if he isn’t capable of seeing her at all.
His hand slides to the chair’s armrest. He lifts the blindfold and, smiling yet, secures it around his head.
Malorie doesn’t know what to say. She shouldn’t say anything at all. She should go.
“Thank you for letting me in, Ron,” she says. Then she asks it because she feels as though
she must. “Would you take that train to see your sister again?”
“Hmm?” Like he doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Like she’s brought up a subject from some hours ago, a trifle in the course of more important matters. “Oh, that? I wouldn’t have to. She was listed as a survivor in Saugatuck. South of us.”
Malorie waits. But she can’t stop herself.
“Maybe…” she begins. “Maybe it’d be good for you…to…”
Ron’s hand darts out and blasts the volume on the ham radio. He moves fast and the sound is loud and Malorie’s already setting the rest of her drink on the floor and rising to leave.
Ron twists the dial. He’s speaking to her, Malorie can see his mouth move, but the radio inhales the words.
She wants to thank him. Wants to tell him he doesn’t have to go looking for his sister today. He could go tomorrow. He can do whatever he wants whenever he wants to. He’s earned that.
He doesn’t have to seek her out at all.
But…
But he should.
It strikes her then, a truth erupting from nothingness. Yes, Ron Handy should search for his sister. Otherwise he will die, as he is now, living in this squalor and confinement, no sense of purpose, no purpose at all.
Suddenly, with violent clarity, Malorie knows she’s going to search for her parents.
The physical rush following this decision steals her breath.
She secures her fold. A voice comes through the radio, a woman.
“They’re not necessarily taller than they were before…but wider. They take up more space…”
Ron kicks the radio.
“Oh, just go away!” he yells. But does he speak to the creatures…or Malorie? “Take the train,” he says then, turning the radio down. “Oh, please, Malorie, for both of us. Take the train.”
She doesn’t have to see his eyes to know that he’s crying.
“I’m going to,” she says. And her eyes don’t have to be open for her to cry, either. “Ron, I’m sorry I upset you. You didn’t do anything to deserve this today. I’m so sorry.”
“Take the train, Malorie.”
Then, as if it’s the only way for him to survive, as if it’s what’s kept him alive this long, Ron laughs.
“Now, shoo, you!” Levity again. “I’m expecting a murder of friends to arrive any minute and I have sprucing to do.”
“Thank you, Ron.”
She’s thinking of a blind train. And the distance between here and there. Thirty miles roll out before her like a fallen spool, thread unraveling from her once stable fingers, never to be wound perfect again.
Get to the train.
Take it.
To her parents.
“Malorie?” Ron asks. As if he isn’t sure she’s still here.
“Yes?”
“Take those filthy pages with you, if you don’t mind. I don’t want anybody thinking I read that sort of stuff. I’m a respected man, after all. A scholar. And it’s important for us thinkers to keep doing what we do best. Waiting for that inevitable death. At peace. And alone.”
SIX
Tom packs his one bag. But he wants to bring two. He wants to bring a lot. What better place to experiment with his inventions than in the real world? He considers hiding some from Malorie. And if he can’t fit them in, maybe he doesn’t need a change of pants, a change of shoes, or even food after all.
Malorie is up at the lodge, hurriedly gathering canned goods for what she told him and Olympia is going to be “a long trip.” Neither of the teens has traveled very far from Camp Yadin since they arrived ten years ago. Tom remembers the river well. The school for the blind. The long, winding journey that delivered them here. And here is home. Has been home. He knows every sound in this place, every creak, the wind through the trees, the wind across the lake. Malorie didn’t have to tell him she was going to the lodge; she could’ve just gone, and Tom would’ve heard it all play out, just as he has, just as he heard the lodge door open and close upon her entrance.
“Are you scared?” Olympia asks.
Tom looks to her across the cabin. Olympia’s bed is on the opposite side of the space, a distance they agreed upon two years ago.
“Of what?” he asks. But he can’t hide it. His voice trembles. And besides, Olympia seems to see things nobody else does.
She doesn’t respond with words. Only a serious look that’s meant to underscore the horrors of the world they are about to enter. In this moment, she looks like Malorie to Tom, despite not being related by blood.
“I’m sufficiently scared,” Tom says. He’s on his knees by his bunk, eyeing the many inventions he’s kept under his bed. One is something close to the viewfinders people once viewed eclipses through. It’s not lost on him that the census papers listed a similar method as being an eventual cause of madness. He can’t help but wonder what else he’s been proud of that won’t work. But he doesn’t let these thoughts linger. He moves what’s left of the office’s two-way mirror out of the way and reaches for more.
“She’s going to need our ears in a big way,” Olympia says.
“I know.”
“And she’s gonna need us in other ways, too.”
Tom doesn’t look at her when he responds.
“What does that mean?” he asks.
“It means she’s gotta be feeling a lot.”
“Maybe you read too many books, Olympia.”
“Hey, I’m serious.”
“Feelings? You really think Mom has those kinds of feelings? All she cares about is the blindfold.”
He lifts a helmet from the floor. The visor is supposed to close over the eyes when he presses the line switch. But it doesn’t work right now.
“Are you kidding me?” Olympia asks. “Tell me you’re kidding.”
“She lives entirely by rules,” Tom says. “There’s not much room for invention in there.”
“She lives by the blindfold, yes,” Olympia says. “And so do we.”
“Do we?” Now he does turn to face her. “We’ve grown up in this world, Olympia. Don’t you think we know it better than she does?”
Olympia’s cheeks redden the way they do when he exacerbates her.
“Tom. Listen to me. Today isn’t the day to make a stand. She’s scared to death as it is. We’ve got thirty miles to walk. Do you have any idea how far that is?”
“We’re more than that from the school for the blind. We’ve done it before. We were fine.”
“And blindfolded.”
Tom looks back to his inventions. A Hula-Hoop that is to be worn like a belt so that the hoop touches anything before the body does. The plastic tubes he’d fashioned to it hang loosely.
“Right,” Tom says, because it’s best not to argue with Olympia for too long. When she gets going, she’s hard to stop. “What are you bringing?”
“Clothes. Tools. Exactly what Mom told us to bring.”
Tom smiles.
“But not only what Mom said. What else?”
“Nothing.”
But she is. He can tell. Olympia keeps secrets, too.
“You’re bringing books, aren’t you?”
“Am not.”
“Olympia…”
Tom gets up and crosses the cabin. He catches her just as she tries to slide a handful of books beneath her bunk.
“You are!” he says. “And so what’s the difference between you bringing something of your own and me doing the same?”
“Stop it, Tom.”
“Well?”
“Because the things I like don’t put us in danger. Okay?”
This hurts. This belittles everything Tom is passionate about.
“Okay,” he says. “Fuck you.”
“Tom!”
He crosses the cabin again and gets
on his knees by his bed. He reaches under.
“If you can bring books you’ve already read, if you can spend your precious space on that, then I can bring what I want, too.”
“I didn’t exactly say you couldn’t.”
“You thought it.”
Then he finds it. Deep under his bed. His handmade glasses.
Malorie won’t know they’re in his bag unless she checks. And if she does, he’ll fight for them.
“I’m scared,” Olympia says.
Tom, feeling emboldened, turns to her again.
“We’ve lived with them our whole lives.”
“Maybe,” she says. “But they’ve gotten worse.”
“Have they?” But Tom knows this, too.
“A lot more of them now,” Olympia says.
“Well, stop it. And don’t say that kind of thing in front of Mom. If you do she’s gonna get even harder on us.”
“We’ve never ridden a train,” Olympia says.
“No. So?”
“I’ve read about them. They’re huge. They carry a lot of people. A lot could go wrong.”
“Mom wouldn’t even consider it if it was dangerous.”
“She might,” Olympia says. “For her parents.”
In the distance, the lodge door opens and closes again.
“Do you think they’re alive?” Tom asks.
They search each other’s faces for answers. Malorie’s boots flatten distant grass, loud enough for the two to hear, them alone.
“I want them to be,” Olympia says, “but I don’t think they are.”
“Olympia…”
“Whether that list is old or not, I don’t think they’re alive.”
“Why not?”
“I mean…I mean Mom wants them to be alive. You know? And I’ve read about characters who want something so bad they believe it’s actually happening.”
“But the names…”
“I know,” Olympia says. “Like I said, I want them to be. I just—”
A hard knocking at the door interrupts her.
“Guys? Eyes closed?”
“Yes,” Tom says. He does it.
“Yes,” Olympia says.
The door creaks open, and Malorie steps inside. Right away Tom can hear the energy in her breathing. When she speaks, it’s with more urgency than he’s heard in a long time.
Malorie Page 6
