Malorie

by Josh Malerman

  “Of course.”

  But Malorie is feeling around the room, learning the dimensions. Her fingers alight upon a broom handle.

  “For the more anxious set,” Dean says. “You can sweep the room to your heart’s delight every time you return to it.” Then, as if needing to explain the possibility of her leaving the car in the first place, he says, “There’s a second bathroom in the next car up. Just knock is all we ask.”

  “This is amazing,” Malorie says because she has to. Because she can’t keep it in anymore. Of course tracks are the answer. In a world gone blind, the only safe roads are the ones that grip the vehicle and tell it where to go.

  She thinks of the man Michael, alone out front, searching for debris in whatever way he does it.

  “Thanks,” Dean says. “We’re extremely proud of it. And like I said…no money. But what are you gonna do? Sit in the dark your whole life? Not me. Not us. We gotta try something, don’t we? And I have an idea or two.”

  “Yes,” Tom says.

  Malorie is so swept up in the moment that she doesn’t allow herself to get angry at Tom for speaking. It strikes her that she’s already trusting Dean after all.

  She remembers, briefly, feeling this way all the time.

  “I have a feeling you have more than an idea or two,” Malorie says.

  This is good, talking like she used to, back when every word wasn’t tethered to survival.

  “I admit it,” Dean says. “I do. But for me, and I’m not just saying this to placate you, for me the absolute key is safety. There’s simply no way around that. A train, today, has to be much safer than it was seventeen years ago. It simply has to be, or there’d be no reason for it to exist. It’s ironic, no? That in a world with no litigation, we’ve become even more careful?”

  “Thank you, Dean,” Malorie says. Because that’s enough for now. That’s enough loosening up.

  Dean’s eyes are open. Dean could see something. It feels like she’s standing near a bomb. Something could go wrong. Everything could explode. Any second. Other people have their eyes open on this train. She has so many questions. Has a creature ever made it on board? Into one of the rooms?

  “You’re welcome,” Dean says. “And so you know, this car is already stocked with cans and water. It’s all in the cupboard beside the mirror. The windows are indeed blacked out. In fact, there is technically no window at all in this car, as all the glass on the sides of the train has been replaced with sheet metal, painted black. I’ve never seen this train from the outside, for reasons you can easily guess. But I assume it’s a bit like Frankenstein. Pieces, brought together, brought to life. I’m so glad you guys made it.”

  “Thank you,” Malorie says again. There is a finality in her tone. But she’s not the last one to speak to Dean.

  “Thank you,” Olympia says. “This is all…overwhelming.”

  “It’s so great,” Tom says.

  Malorie wonders if Dean is judging her. Does he look from her blindfolded teens to her, covered in cloth? Does a sympathetic expression adorn his face? Does he think he knows what’s right and what isn’t? Even for her?

  She sets her bag down. It doesn’t matter. That’s enough loosening up for one day. For one lifetime.

  “The trip to Mackinaw City is about two days, barring any delays,” Dean says. “To some that sounds like nothing, to others an eternity. If you need me for any reason, I’m usually in the dining car. And while that sounds like I’m living it up, it really means David and I are working on new ideas or talking to Tanya, checking on Michael. But,” he pauses, “at least there’s some music.” Then, “I hope to see you in there, Jill.”

  Malorie breathes in, holds it, breathes out.

  “You won’t,” she says.

  Is it Dean who sighs? Or Tom?

  “Okay,” Dean says. “Please, enjoy.”

  He steps into the hall, and Malorie slides the door closed behind him.

  Then, for the first time since making the train, she allows the swaying to take her. As if she’s on a singular wave, traversing the entire distance between herself and her parents.

  Mom and Dad might be at the end of this line. They might be anywhere in the world. They might also be buried. She imagines stepping off the train, crossing a bridge, searching St. Ignace for Sam and Mary Walsh.

  It feels good, necessary, to let herself be taken. For someone else to be in charge of the events to follow. It’s a feeling she hasn’t experienced in seventeen years.

  She’s so briefly relieved to be alone in this room, the door closed behind her, that it doesn’t quite bother her when Tom speaks. When he says, “I like him, Mom. I like that man.”

  FOURTEEN

  They spend the night in their private car. The hours pass, and with each one Malorie feels closer. Safer. The reality of this experience becomes palatable, a thing she wouldn’t have dreamed possible in Camp Yadin. When she visited Ron Handy, the idea of a train felt more akin to a giant spider, something that could leap at her, attack her, kill her. But now the details of the train are filling in. The sounds and the smells. The feel of the cushions beneath the bench she sits on. The sense of being taken. And within this new reality (they’re on a train), she finds her own strength, her own rules to live by, a way to convince herself she has not put her teens in danger. They could leap. They could fight. They could stay in this car until the train stops.

  But Malorie knows that isn’t how this is going to go. She hasn’t fully admitted it, but the tendrils of acquiescence have arrived. And they only get stronger as the hours pass.

  Yes, she is going to visit that dining car. She is going to talk with Dean Watts about his train. If she’s honest with herself, she’ll admit it’s not only because the teens have a safe place to stay. It’s not only because an old-world mode of travel that she believed long dead has risen. Yes, she is awed by the machine that carries her. Yes, the romanticized past is present in this way.

  But none of that is why she wants to speak with Dean.

  The reason is, she likes him.

  It’s a feeling she hasn’t felt in years. A decade or more. A thing she also thought long buried, yet now, opening its eyes.

  “Sleep,” she tells her teens. But they already do. She hears them both breathing heavy, the light snoring of two young people who deserve rest after the few days they’ve had.

  Malorie deserves rest, too.

  And so she allows herself some. She closes her eyes, behind the blindfold. She allows the train to take her north, closer to the place where her parents were listed as having survived. How long ago was that list made? Right now it doesn’t matter. Right now she needs sleep. And for the hours to move. So that two days pass as quickly as they can. As the machine that takes them cuts through an entire world she is no longer allowed to look at. Where creatures no doubt outnumber the people. Where the reason for all these precautions, all this fear, roams freer than the people who have survived them.

  Malorie sleeps.

  Rocked to sleep.

  And the hours pass.

  And the dreams that come include Sam and Mary Walsh. At turns they stand before her, living, before becoming dust, sand blown away by a moving train, two tiny points in infinity that no sane woman can be expected to find.

  And in the dreams there are creatures.

  Everywhere.

  FIFTEEN

  Despite the setting, the voices of other people, the sound of guitars being played, the motion of the train, and the man Dean himself sitting across a table she has not and will not see, Malorie still thinks of her parents. And how can she not? The last time she rode a train, it was with them, the Wolverine Line, from Detroit to Chicago, as Dad spent the beginning of his vacation in the bar car and his two daughters stared out the train windows, watching a wholly new landscape pass with more precision than it ever did in a mi
nivan. It was exhilarating then, two Upper Peninsula teens heading to the big city for the first time in their lives. They only saw a sliver of Detroit, their drive down taking them over the bridge, through Mackinaw City, Gaylord, Bay City, Flint, and Saginaw before reaching the bustle of the suburbs of Detroit, the very area Shannon and Malorie would eventually move to, shortly before Shannon looked out a window and took her own life. Back then, on the Wolverine Line, the car full to capacity, Dad laughing with strangers in the bar car, Mom reading a book across the aisle, the idea of Chicago might as well have been Oz. Glittering constructs and shimmering suits, magic in every brick and bone.

  “Here,” Dean says. He guides Malorie’s hand to a plate. “Fruit if you want it.”

  Malorie, blindfolded, wonders if it’s possible that somehow the very train they took to Chicago, the cars themselves, made their way through some sort of boxcar arc, orphans moved from one location to another, so that here she sits in the very same rectangle that she and her sister once rode, feeling then the electricity of infinity ahead.

  “Shoot,” Dean says. “Hit me with all you want to know.”

  But before she does, a woman’s voice comes close.

  “Dean,” the woman says. “There’s a man in car six who thinks a spider or some bug is crawling on him. I keep telling him I don’t see anything, but he insists.”

  “And he wants us to get rid of it?”

  “I guess so.”

  Dean laughs. It sounds genuine to Malorie.

  “Some people do expect old-world luxuries when they board, Jill.”

  Malorie momentarily thinks that he’s talking to the woman. She’s forgotten she is “Jill.”

  “Car six?” he asks the woman.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll take care of it. Thanks.”

  Then, the two are alone again. Only they’re not. Malorie hears the quiet conversation of other people. Hears them discussing cities in Michigan, the telegram, the fact that they’re on a train and if a train again, why not everything again, why not the entire old world again, sooner than later?

  Malorie imagines Tom the man sitting across from her, sitting everywhere in here. It’s been sixteen years. In a way, she attributes this progress to him. This is what he’s accomplished. He’s brought back the train.

  Just like he once brought back a phone book that led Malorie to the school for the blind, then to Camp Yadin, where a man delivered a pile of papers with her parents’ names on them.

  “All right,” Dean says. “Hit me.”

  “How many times has a creature got on board?”

  “None.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Well, I suppose I don’t. But the people who went mad on this train saw something outside.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Again, maybe I don’t. But myself and the other staff walk around without folds. So, I suppose something would’ve happened to one of us by now had there been one on board. Again, the people who went—”

  “You said people transport dead bodies.”

  “We deliver them, yes.”

  “Are there any on board right now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “Two caskets in storage car one. About exactly where we first met. By the back door. I would recommend not sleeping in there. Smells a bit of the grave.”

  “Thank you for the honesty.”

  “Any sunnier questions? Like, how many people died putting the train back together?”

  “I’m sorry,” Malorie says. “But right now all I care about is those two teens. All I care about is getting them where we’re going safely.”

  “Well, where are you going?”

  “I don’t feel like telling you that.”

  “But I’m someone who might be able to give you the most direct route.”

  “I don’t feel like saying.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Are there any passengers on this train that worry you?”

  “Worry me? No. There is a blind woman, but she’s better off than any of us. Why do you wear the hoodie and gloves?”

  The question catches Malorie off guard. It’s the first time she’s felt anything close to being socially self-conscious in a long time. It’s an old-world state of mind she has not missed.

  “You think they can drive us mad by touching us,” Dean says.

  Hearing him say it makes it more real. And less.

  “And I’m sure you have reason to believe this,” he says.

  “I do.”

  “Jesus,” he says. “Here I invited you to the dining car to assuage your nerves and you’ve gone and rattled mine.”

  “I’m good at that.”

  Dean laughs. But not without weight.

  “Tell me, Jill,” he says, “how have you been able to keep it up for this long?”

  “Safety?”

  “Not just that. You act like we all did when it first happened, when they first arrived. Do you have any idea how many people weren’t able to stay focused like you have? I’ll guess we’ll never know that exact number. But you still live by the blindfold and the blindfold alone.”

  The guitars in the room go slightly out of tune before one of the players finds his or her place again.

  “Do you know anything about a census?” she asks, avoiding his question.

  “I’ve heard they’re out there, but I haven’t met anybody yet. Why?”

  “I’m just curious. The numbers of the world. Statistics.”

  “And? Would you take more risks, depending on those numbers? Or would you still do things the way we did them when the world first changed?”

  If anybody else had asked her this question, she would’ve left the table, the car, and possibly the train. She doesn’t want to talk about taking more risks. But the man reminds her so much of Tom the man that she can’t bring herself to turn from him.

  When’s the last time Malorie heard an optimistic voice her own age? When’s the last time she could swap ideas, theories, even just moods with someone who understands the world as she does for having witnessed its change? Tom, her son, speaks like this. But he’s only sixteen. And her job, as she sees it, is to make sure he remains smart about whatever he wants to do. That means telling him no. That means discouraging him. That means…

  Take note, she thinks. Your son talks a lot like the one man whose advice you’ve leaned on for the past seventeen years. And all you do is tell him no.

  “I wouldn’t change a thing,” she says. But it feels wrong to say it, like she means it in a different way than she feels it. Malorie understands that Tom and Olympia were born into this world. She understands that they hear better than she does, that their instincts are naturally stronger than hers will ever be. She gets that Tom and Olympia could be reading a book, completely distracted, and still close their eyes before something rushed into view, as if they can sense an intake of air when anything, man, woman, creature, is near. But she also knows that she herself is the sole survivor of two major incidents—unfathomable tragedies where everyone else went mad and hurt one another, hurt themselves. Forget the countless harrowing events—Shannon’s death, Ron Handy in the service station, the trip on the river—Malorie has actually walked from the new world equivalent of two train wrecks. The house on Shillingham and the school for the blind. In the old world she would’ve been on the news for this. And when the reporter asked her how she did it, she would’ve held up a black piece of cloth and said no more.

  While Dean doesn’t know any of this yet, does he sense she’s been through more than most?

  “Do you have kids?” she asks him.

  “I had two. Both went mad.”

  “I’m—”

  “So we were at home, a ranch, no second floor, windows boarded up, bl
ankets over the boards. I’d sealed every door in the house. We had a lot of food. Dry goods. Canned goods. Enough to last months. In my infinite wisdom, my plan was to simply wait. In the dark. Macy was nine and Eric seven, and I couldn’t risk one or the two of them getting into something, getting into anything, while I was, say, asleep. So the whole place was boarded, sealed, safe. No light. We used buckets in the basement and covered the buckets with stone slabs. Honestly, I can’t imagine living any safer than we did.”

  Dean pauses. Malorie wants to see his face. She thinks of Tom the man telling her of his daughter’s death in the cellar of the house Malorie gave birth in. She knows the bad part of Dean’s story is eventually coming. She readies herself for it.

  “After a while, I didn’t know what was day or night. You know? We really were living in darkness. Some options had crossed my mind. Just as I imagine they crossed everybody’s. Maybe we could view the things through cameras. Maybe we could blind ourselves and carry on without the constant horror of going mad. But I didn’t take any action on any of these ideas. We felt for one another in the dark, we called out each other’s names, we slept in the same bed. All in the dark. As if the house itself was one giant blindfold. I was waiting for a literal message, I think. Waiting for a knock at the door, someone to come tell us it was over. It’s the ultimate fantasy for those of us from the old world, isn’t it? Word that the whole nightmare has come to an end? Well, no magical word came. And then it still didn’t come. And then it still didn’t come all over again. I think we lived that way for seven months, Jill. Macy and Eric growing up in the dark. As if we lived in a cave. And all the while I kept thinking how unfair it was that I, a capable father, had somehow been rendered a useless man. All I did was wait. I made no moves to better our situation. I did nothing but hold their hands down the basement steps and open their cans of food for them. And when they heard sounds outside, when they got scared, I told them they should be. I told them there were things outside that could destroy their minds.”