Malorie

by Josh Malerman

  “Dammit,” she says.

  She thinks of her parents, difficult not to refer to them as Sam and Mary Walsh, the written names like a fire in her head.

  She pulls the papers closer and flips past the scant information about the train. As she does, she recalls Ron’s fear of “the people who run it.” Tom said anyone who could get a train running would have to be very smart, but Malorie doesn’t agree. The whole world, it seems, is crazy. And everybody within it is only a gradation.

  She stops at a page titled: WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT THEM.

  She almost laughs, exhausted, at this headline. The page ought to be blank, for all people have learned about the creatures. But Malorie quickly sees it isn’t.

  The list immediately makes her uneasy.

  They make noise, though not traditional sound. There is no flat-footed creak upon floorboards. Rather, it’s as if the floorboards themselves momentarily morph before returning to their natural state.

  Malorie doesn’t like this. She doesn’t want to read this at all. She imagines even the floor going mad.

  Some claim their shadows travel without them. Others claim there’s only one creature, in all the world, and that its many shadows stretch across the planet like dark fingers.

  She doesn’t need this folklore. She doesn’t need rumors and theories. She needs facts.

  There are stories of intentional attacks in what was once New York City. Rumors of aggression in Des Moines, Iowa. NOTE: Only people who live in areas where people-on-people crime was once common seem to suggest these things. There is no verifiable account of a creature forcing a person to look at it.

  Tom snores, and Malorie clicks off the light. Her heart is hammering. Even reading about the creatures tends to send fog to the mind, a cloud to reason.

  Olympia snores. Two teens vying for space, even in sleep.

  In the dark, she remembers a time at home, after school, when she and Shannon fought over who would get to pick what board game the family would play in the living room. Dad, exasperated, told them they could both choose and play their own games. Malorie can see him, his hair as dark as her own, his eyes set deep in his face. She thought of Mom and Dad as law back then. A law to be broken of course, but law nonetheless. And when Shannon got bored with her own game and joined Malorie with hers, Malorie understood that their father had somehow, invisibly, made that happen.

  She hopes she’s done things like this for her kids. She thinks she has.

  She feels a tap on her back.

  She falls flat to the floor, heart thudding.

  “Mom.”

  It’s Olympia, whispering, her lips pressed to Malorie’s ear through the fabric of the blanket.

  “What?” Malorie whispers back.

  “We’re not alone in here.”

  Malorie goes cold.

  “Someone is standing in the doorway,” Olympia says. “I can hear them breathing.”

  Malorie’s mind seems to stop. For a second. She thinks nothing. Only feels. Then, an image of Gary. As if he’s been waiting to reveal himself all this time and chose now to do so. She has to decide something, fast.

  “Is the door closed?” she whispers.

  But she’s already got her eyes closed, and she’s already getting up, slow, quiet, from under the blanket.

  Standing, she turns to the door. No time to listen.

  “Get out,” she says. “Whoever you are, get out. I’m armed. All five of us are armed.”

  No response. But she can feel the person, can feel the presence some twenty feet away.

  “Get out,” she says.

  She hears the familiar sound of Tom waking. Olympia whispers something to him.

  “Eyes closed,” Malorie tells him. Then, “You’re leaving us no choice.”

  “Do it then,” a voice says, a man, from across the shop. “If you’re armed, shoot me.”

  At the sound of his voice, Malorie’s mind goes cold. She’s not looking, but is he?

  “I’ll shoot you,” Tom says.

  “Tom…” Malorie starts, but she stops herself.

  “I mean it,” the man says. “Do it. I’m a day away from opening my eyes outside anyway. You’d save me the complications of suicide.”

  Malorie believes she recognizes sanity in his voice. But she can’t be sure. And she won’t let herself decide.

  “Get out,” she repeats.

  “I’ve been living by the side of this road for two years,” he says. “I heard you enter Dabney’s.”

  “Tom,” Malorie says, “Olympia, do not speak to this man. Do not open your eyes.”

  “I’m not crazy,” the man says. He sounds young, younger than Malorie, older than the teens. “I’m just really not well. But I’ve survived. Like you have.”

  “Get out.”

  Silence. A scoff? A smile? She doesn’t ask.

  “But I don’t want to,” the man says. “I want to make contact. Don’t you?”

  “We have enough,” Olympia says.

  “Olympia…”

  “Do you?” the man asks. “I have nobody. I heard you guys, I came in.”

  “While we were sleeping,” Malorie says. “Get out now.”

  “Yeah, I waited for you to fall asleep because I didn’t know if you were any more dangerous than you think I am.”

  “We’re dangerous,” Malorie says. “Get out.”

  Silence. Malorie makes fists of her hands.

  “All right,” the man says.

  “Now.”

  But Malorie knows they won’t be spending the night here now. No matter what this man does, she’s going to instruct the teens to gather their things and they’re going to leave this place. They’ll walk, paranoid, through the dark of night. And even in the new world, a walk at night feels less safe than one during the day.

  “Let me leave you with something,” the young man says.

  “Don’t open your eyes,” Malorie tells the teens.

  “Just some words, okay? I want you three to know that the world isn’t gonna get any better. We gotta start over.”

  “You said ‘three,’ ” Malorie says. “Your eyes are open.”

  “Yeah? Well, I’m not the only one.”

  “Close your eyes,” she hisses at the teens.

  Her hands in fists, she steels herself. Her parents flash like fire in her mind, names in St. Ignace, taken by the winds of the Straits of Mackinac, blown across Lake Michigan. Lost to her.

  Again.

  “GET OUT!”

  Her voice is almost unrecognizable to herself. She sounds like a woman who has endured years of tension, paranoia, and loss.

  And so she is.

  The man doesn’t answer. But the door opens and closes.

  “Tom?” Malorie asks.

  “He’s walking away,” Tom says.

  “Olympia?”

  “Yes, he’s leaving.”

  “He’s walking up the road,” Tom says. Malorie hears disappointment in his voice.

  “Which way?”

  “The way we came.”

  “Get your things,” Malorie says. “We’re continuing. Now.”

  She hears the teens packing their things back into their bags. She does the same.

  “Tom,” Malorie says, “I know what you’re thinking.”

  “Just like you know that guy was unsafe? Just like you knew the census guy couldn’t help us?”

  “Tom…”

  “Mom,” Tom says, and his voice is closer than she expects it to be. “The census man gave us the names of your parents. You were wrong. That’s all there is to it. You were wrong.”

  But Tom is shaken, too. Malorie can hear it. A stranger in the same space as them. A man speaking of suicide and the end of the world.

  Malori
e waits by the door, her fists gloved now. The teens are ready before she expects them to be.

  “Listen,” she says, tightening the fold around her face.

  “He went the way we came,” Olympia says.

  Malorie breathes in, she holds it, she breathes out.

  She opens the door.

  “Go. Now.”

  Then they’re walking again, too fast, through the dark, hardly any sleep between them. Malorie looks blind over her shoulder, back to where the teens said the man went.

  She feels for him. Just like she feels for Ron Handy. Just like she feels for every person involved in all the horrid experiments documented in the papers left by the census man.

  Isn’t everybody just doing the best they can?

  Isn’t she?

  “It’s cold,” Olympia says.

  It is hours before the sun will rise. The sky and the road are as dark as the world behind their folds.

  “We’ll warm up,” Malorie says.

  But she can’t stop thinking of the young man. He talked of ending his own life without needing a creature to make him do it.

  Malorie allows herself to imagine what he might have been like in the old world and what he might’ve been doing now if the creatures never came.

  Would he have been a good friend? A thoughtful person? A father?

  Her heart burns for him. For all of them. Ron Handy. The census man. The people described in the census papers.

  But the empathy is short-lived as something howls in the dark distance. Malorie thinks it’s a dog. A wolf. A man.

  “We’ll find somewhere else to sleep,” she says. “I promise. Just a little farther.”

  But whatever the distance is to peace of mind feels more than just a little farther. It feels like it’s beyond the state of Michigan. Beyond the world. New or old.

  And absolutely beyond the last stop of any train, real or imagined.

  NINE

  Nineteen miles along old country highways, not maintained, overgrown, cracked, no longer used.

  Malorie feels insane. The old way. Exhausted, sore, and like she’s chosen to put her teens in danger, hastily, without enough of a plan.

  The hood covers her head and neck and the blindfold her eyes. She wears sleeves and gloves despite the heat and also despite the lack of any concrete proof that the creatures have ever destroyed someone’s mind through touch. She drinks from the water bottles they’ve refilled numerous times on their journey (using filters from the camp kitchen rather than the ones Tom invented himself, a thing Tom argued against). She reminds them they need to eat, and she continually asks the teens what they hear. More than once they’ve come to a complete stop and waited upwards of a half hour, as Olympia seemed certain one was near, even when Tom didn’t agree.

  And no matter what they are enduring or when, Malorie thinks of Mom and Dad.

  It’s not hard to pluck a good memory of the two of them, the way they were. Both effusive, both smart as hell. They were what her friends called “hippies,” though neither lived that exact lifestyle. It was their positivity her peers made light of, the way her parents had of constantly talking about expanding the mind.

  Intelligence, Dad told the sisters, is being able to talk your way out of a fight.

  This after Malorie had fought with them about bedtime. Oh, how she wishes she had those fights, those words, that time back.

  And here…she might.

  The thought is almost too big to acknowledge. Nobody is granted a reversal of grief.

  Nobody.

  They would love the teens, Malorie thinks. But she wonders if Tom’s progressive nature would frighten them. It’s an odd, sudden thought to have, and it feels wholly out of place. As if, for a moment, Malorie was nervous to introduce her son to her parents. She has nobody to tell her if this feeling is natural. No book to reference. No friends to ask. Sam and Mary Walsh would love both kids. She knows this. Yet thoughts of Tom are becoming cloudier by the hour.

  She walks. She listens. She thinks.

  It hurts, as if the creatures and the new world they’ve created are present in her memories of the old. She remembers sneaking into a movie with Shannon, a movie rated R for nudity, and how, despite the images, hard kissing they’d never witnessed before in any way, Shannon fell asleep. Malorie sees her sister’s eyes are closed and wonders, now, was there something Shannon was hiding from? A thing that could’ve driven her mad? How about when Mom and Dad lowered the blinds at night, as Mom (Mary, Mary Walsh, Sam and Mary Walsh) told the girls that moonlight induced nightmares, and oh how the sisters giggled at the idea. Was Mom actually taking the same precautions Malorie takes now?

  Close the blinds. Close your eyes.

  Memory and the now, melded.

  Her childhood bedroom has blankets over the windows. The bus ride to school is terrifying, as the driver can’t look.

  The train the train the TRAIN you’re heading toward is a blind train, Malorie, what are you doing what are you doing what?

  Sam and Mary sit in the front seat of the family car. Shannon and Malorie play games in the back. Dad turns the wheel suddenly, and the girls cry out and Mom says that was close, and Malorie, now, here, Malorie remembers it as if there was something in the road Dad wasn’t supposed to see, something that drove him mad.

  But Mom and Dad might not be mad.

  And somehow that’s the craziest part of all.

  “A car,” Tom says.

  For a second Malorie imagines he’s read her mind, as if her son, who has performed so many incredible auditory feats, heard all the way into her head.

  “A car?” she echoes.

  “Something,” Olympia says.

  “Not something,” Tom says. “A car.”

  “Stop,” Malorie says. “Side of the road. Now.”

  She doesn’t want to step off the road. She doesn’t want the straight line made between herself and her parents to be compromised. She wants to go to them, go to them, go to them now.

  “Car,” Olympia says.

  “Told you,” Tom says.

  “Now,” Malorie says.

  She feels grass beneath her boots but it’s not far enough. In the new world, someone driving could be driving blind. Malorie’s done it herself.

  “Farther,” she says.

  But she hears the engine pick up speed. As if the driver saw them. As if the driver is looking for people just like them.

  “Down,” Malorie says. But she can hear it’s too late for that. The car is closer, closer, and slowing to a halt.

  It’s level with them now.

  It stops.

  The engine idles. It revs. It idles. It revs.

  Malorie imagines a gun pointing out an open window. A face behind it, shaped by madness.

  But nobody speaks. And no sudden sound breaks the sky above the open country road.

  Malorie faces the car.

  The car idles.

  She thinks of Camp Yadin and how safe they were. She can almost feel the texture of the rope in her gloved hands, rope connecting each building, one of which housed canned goods, another with a garden beside it. She sees herself, waking there, walking there, living there, safe. She hears herself asking the teens what might be outside. She hears their answers. They lived alone. They lived safe.

  They lived by the blindfold.

  The grass beside her crunches fast, too fast. Malorie cries out.

  It sounds like an animal.

  Something slams into the side of the car.

  “Don’t move!” she yells to the teens, but her voice is lost in the noise of repeated blows to the side of the car. She hears a man yelling, someone who sounds dangerously angry, possibly mad.

  Then she recognizes the voice as Tom’s.

  Tom is screaming at the driver to l
eave.

  “Go! GO! GO!”

  Malorie rushes to the sound of him, to grab him, to get him away from the car. But the engine is revving so hard that dust rises like a curtain, and Malorie coughs.

  The engine revs again, and Malorie holds a hand over her mouth and reaches for Tom with the other. She finds his shoulder.

  Or does she?

  Is this the shoulder of the driver?

  A hand falls upon hers.

  “GO!” Tom yells. And Malorie pulls back. Despite the chaos, despite the fear, it strikes her, suddenly, that Tom is a man now.

  Another blow to the car. Then Malorie has him by the waist. She’s pulling him back. Olympia says something, words lost in the din of the engine.

  The car moves, and Malorie bumps hard against Tom as he’s flung back into her.

  “Go, you stupid assholes!” Tom yells. “Just go!”

  Tears in his voice. Malorie doesn’t understand. His emotions sound wider, more powerful, than they ever did in the cabin.

  “Tom,” she says. “Calm down!”

  But Tom is far from that. And the car is driving away.

  “Why, Mom? Why? Weren’t you gonna tell them to go? Weren’t you gonna tell them to leave? That’s what you do!”

  Malorie wasn’t expecting this. He’s not mad at the car, he’s mad at her. As if she were somehow the danger and not the stranger idling without speaking.

  “Tom, we’ve survived this long—”

  “That’s all we do!”

  “Tom—”

  “That’s all we do is survive!”

  This steals her breath. She doesn’t know what to say.

  The car grows quiet in the distance, and Malorie knows she’ll never know what the driver had in mind.

  In the old world, he or she could’ve given them a ride to the train.

  “Come on,” Olympia says. The mediator.

  The teens return to the road, their shoes crunching the gravel on the shoulder. But Malorie can’t stop thinking of what Tom just said.

  All we do is survive!

  Not a boast. A gripe.

  Malorie walks. Again the faces of her parents return to her mind’s eye. Their jokes. Their advice. The way they parented, too.

  She hopes they’ve lived by the same rules she has.