by Steven John
It clicked open. I pushed the door slowly inward and entered the house, gun barrel tracking from side to side with my eyes. It was quiet. I could smell something cooking. I leaned into the living room, where the day before, Kirk had unraveled my world. It was empty. The chairs and pillows sat as we had left them. Moving down the hall toward the kitchen, I realized that the picture frames that had been removed were now all back on the walls. I leaned in toward the photographs, trying to discern which were new in the gloomy light, but then there was a clattering in the kitchen. A woman cursed.
I lowered the rifle and stepped into the warmly lit kitchen. “Hi, Rebecca.” She screamed and leapt up from where she was gathering pots off the floor. Her face turned white, and her gray eyes were wide above flaring nostrils. She was dressed in a T-shirt and shorts. Despite the terror on her face, I couldn’t help but think that she looked amazing. I’d never seen her legs before. Her skin was taut and smooth. Her breasts rose and fell with each rapid breath she drew. She backed away from me, stopping against a cupboard, her palms pressed against its wooden door.
“Tom! You … you’re not…”
“Dead?” I said quietly, slinging the rifle across my shoulder.
She was silent, then looked away and nodded.
“Does that upset you?”
She immediately looked up and right into my eyes. “Of course not! No. I just … I can’t believe it.… I … what happened?”
“I think that’s a better question for you. I need to know from the start. What did happen?”
She slowly slid down the cupboard until she was sitting Indian style on the ground. She ran her hands through her long blond hair and looked up at me, her face heavy with emotion. “I’m so sorry, Tom. About everything. I hated every second of it. I … I don’t know if I can ask you to forgive me.”
I sat down at the kitchen table, laying my weapon across my knees. “Worry about that kind of thing later. I’m hungry. Thirsty. And I need to bathe. Is it safe here?”
“Yes. I mean, it always was. Why, are—? How are you here?”
“They made me come here. Made me put my fingerprints all over the place.” She nodded sadly, knowingly. “On the helicopter ride back to the city, I figured that was it. I was dead. So I brought the chopper down. I lived. No one else did.”
“What? Who?”
“Government assholes. A soldier.”
“Who?” she asked again, imploringly.
“The soldier, I don’t know. Just some poor bastard. There was a scientist named Anthony Kirk calling the shots and a monkey named Callahan.”
“Callahan’s dead?”
“Very.”
For a moment her face was a mask, and I didn’t know what to make of her. She looked away and then gradually her lips twisted up into a bitter smile. “Good. I hope he’s already burning in hell. Goddamn him.”
“So I guess you knew him, huh?”
She looked up at me sharply. “Yes. If I’d ever met him again, I would have killed him myself.”
“What did he do?”
“Callahan is the one who shot my father.”
“Your…” My head reeled and I rose suddenly, setting the rifle down on the table. Her eyes did not follow it, so I turned and walked hurriedly into the hall. I searched around for a light switch and, finding it, bathed the wall of photographs in light. There she was. With him. And Fallon. The happy, smiling Ayers family. It all finally made sense. In some of the pictures of a much younger Becca, there was a beaming, blond-haired woman with the family too. She stepped into the doorway behind me, resting her hands on the frame above her, head tilted to one side.
“Your father … your brother … you.” Rebecca nodded slightly. I pulled one of the pictures off the wall and studied it closely. The two siblings and father smiled brightly out at me from a thickly wooded, sun-dappled forest. “You all look so happy.”
“We were happy.”
“What did your father do, Becca? Why is he dead?”
She let her hands drop from the doorframe and reached out, taking the picture from my hands. Looking down at it, her eyes welling up with tears, she said quietly, “My father made the fog.”
* * *
I bathed, washing every inch of my body over and over again. The cuts and scratches from the crash stung and my ribs throbbed, but it felt divine to clean myself so thoroughly. The bathroom was spacious and finely appointed: cream-colored tiles along the bottom half of the wall and light brown wood paneling covering the rest. A large window above the sink let sunlight pour in, and the whole room was bright and airy. Rebecca had started to tell me about everything in a rush, her voice cracking, her sentences stumbling and jumping. I had stopped her. It was too much to take while tired, caked in another man’s blood, and smelling of sweat and gasoline.
I dried off, looking at myself in a full-length mirror. The sunlight washed over me, softening wrinkles here and scars there. My skin was pale, almost luminous in the natural brightness. The fading bruise on my face was washed out by the sun. I stood there, staring at my naked self. It was as if I was looking at a stranger. Or rather an acquaintance I had not seen in a long, long time.
I left the bathroom and crossed the hall wearing a soft, luxurious towel. In the bedroom Becca had offered me, I found a fresh set of clothing lying on a wide, four-post bed. Blue jeans and a T-shirt, socks and a light gray sweater. I hoped they were Fallon’s and not Ayers’s, but assumed the latter. I knew it would bother her to see me in her father’s clothing.
I dressed slowly, just as I had bathed. The scent of food cooking filled the house.
I padded downstairs as quietly as I could and stopped in the doorway of the kitchen. Rebecca still wore only a plain white T-shirt and gray shorts. Her hair was up in a ponytail. She was frying bacon and scrambling eggs, and there was bread peeking out of a toaster. A good, honest breakfast. She seemed to sense my presence and stiffened slightly, so I entered the kitchen, saying, “It smells amazing.”
“Just bacon and eggs. I wish I had more here but … I don’t.”
“No, this looks perfect. Thank you.” She nodded without turning around.
“There’s coffee. I don’t have cream, but there should be sugar.”
“Black is fine. Can I pour you some too?” I asked, lifting the small coffeepot off its hot plate and pulling two mugs from the shelf behind it. Both the mugs were white and had black rims and bases. Becca looked over her shoulder and whispered yes, her eyes travelling up and down my body. I assumed it was seeing her dad’s clothes on a living man that made her face twist into an unhappy grimace. “Sorry about your eye. I’m sorry I hit you.”
“Oh, that’s— No, it’s fine. I mean, I wish it hadn’t happened and all, but it doesn’t even hurt anymore. If I had a nickel for every … you know…”
She forced a smile and turned back to the stove. I stood in the middle of the kitchen, awkwardly holding both mugs of coffee. Eventually I set hers down on the counter beside her and stepped back again as she nodded her thanks. This felt so pleasantly domestic … like something from an old TV show, almost. The coffee was warm and rich. I took in a breath to speak, but it came out as a sigh.
“I’m gonna go smoke a cigarette, okay? Then maybe after we eat we can talk?”
“Of course,” she said quietly, her shoulders tense. I walked down the main hall and let myself out onto the porch. At first I could hardly see without squinting. It was a brilliant autumn day. The air was crisp, the sky a perfect cerulean blue, and the clouds frozen in dramatic clusters. Slipping off my socks, I walked down the steps onto the soft grass of the yard and lit a smoke. The blades of grass were damp and chill beneath my bare feet. Taking long drags, I wandered around the house slowly, my eyes shifting from treetops to rolling hills to the bright green carpet of grass below me. This was how she had lived for these last fifteen years. How Ayers had. And Kirk and Watley when he wasn’t in his palatial city dwelling. It felt like, on some small scale, feudal Europe. Keep them
in their places.
I didn’t blame Rebecca for it. For anything. I somehow felt that she was outside the system. But that was likely inaccurate: her father was one of the architects of my life, after all. The need to know—the need to know every detail and motivation and all of it … about the whole city and why me—was less pressing in my mind now. Everything made sense in a macabre, general way, and I worried that more facts would just cloud my thinking and blunt any pride I had left. I had been a pawn. No man likes to be a pawn. While I had never loved my life, at least I thought up until a handful of days ago that I was in charge of my own destiny.
“Do you want to eat on the porch?” Rebecca called out to me.
I was startled back to the present by her voice. I blinked in the sunlight, realizing that I had been standing still with my eyes closed for several minutes. My cigarette had burned out. I turned and replied with a weak “Sure.”
She went inside and I dropped the butt and walked up the porch’s back steps. There was a little wrought iron table with two chairs sitting around it. I set my mug of tepid coffee down and sat in one of the chairs.
Becca came back outside balancing two plates of food, silverware, and her coffee in her arms, and I rose to help set down the meal. I followed suit as she draped her napkin across her lap and then in silence we began eating. I ate slowly, deliberately enjoying each forkful. She kept her eyes down, taking small, rapid bites. As soon as we were finished, she rose and cleared the table, waving for me to remain seated with one hand.
After a minute, Rebecca came back outside with the coffeepot. She freshened both our mugs and then sat. “All right. Anything you ask, I’ll try to answer.”
I leaned back, raising the front feet of the chair off the cherry wood deck and looking out over the countryside. “It’s ironic, isn’t it.… In twenty-four hours time, I’ll learn everything I’ve wanted to know for fifteen, sixteen years, and all of it here at this little house in the country.”
“It used to be the suburbs.” I looked over at her, and she nodded. “The house sat on maybe an acre when I was a little girl. There were houses on either side and a park out back there past where the grass is cut. My school was a half mile away. They spared this house only because Dad made them. Threatened to leave the department. So they scrubbed and cleaned and tested the house for almost a year, and then we got to move back in. I was eleven then. Maybe twelve. Everything around was just bare dirt and a few trees. They bulldozed the buildings, burned most of the brush … even ripped up all the grass. It was like the moon. For miles and miles. We couldn’t play outside without Geiger counters until I was almost fifteen.” She took a sip of coffee and looked out at her yard, her eyes glazing as she slipped back into memories.
“This was all suburbs?” I whispered incredulously.
“Yeah. Mostly. Some trees and fields, but yeah, there were homes all around us.”
“Where did…” I trailed off.
“There’s a band around the city—about fifteen miles wide most places—where there’s just nothing there. Some of it used to be towns; some was woods. Now it’s all just grassland. They tried to tell us it was for decontamination. But that was bullshit. It was to help them catch the escapees. The forests and abandoned—”
“People escape?” I cut her off.
“All the time. They don’t get far, mostly. But a few times a year, we’d see someone running across the fields. Or faces watching as we drove through the ruined towns. Sometimes then you’d hear helicopters or little prop planes circling, searching.”
I shook my head in disbelief. Not at what she was saying, but at the moral fortitude of those who had broken free. The brash will. I’d never once even thought to venture beyond the barricades and fences—I swallowed it all down. I thought of what it must have been like to emerge from the haze on your own two feet. Amazing that someone might have found the answers I’d been so close to but missed.
“I guess no one ever got all the way out, huh?”
“I doubt it.” She sighed. “Everything would have changed then, I guess.”
We sat in silence for a while; then, quietly, I asked, “Rebecca … what did your father do?”
“He was a scientist. Wanted to be since he was a kid. Right out of college, he got a grant to study pressure systems and wind cycles. It fascinated him. He’d talk us to sleep night after night, trying to explain this or that. He was on the state board of research when it happened.”
“The meltdown?”
“Yeah. On the second day, a natural fog bank rolled in over a smaller town about fifty miles from the city and the death rate dropped. Dad was the one who made the connection. So he and his team were tasked with getting as many places … as many people fogged in as fast as they could. So many people had died that it wasn’t even worth trying to save the little towns or the farmhouses or any of it. So they herded everyone into the city. Me too, for a few months. It was horrifying. I was just a kid, you know? Then when we got to go home … it was never the same. I cried all the time. I would clutch my mom’s nightgown to my face and cry for hours and hours.”
“Did…” I trailed off again, wishing I had never started the question. Becca nodded sadly, understanding, her eyes welling up. I furrowed my brow and looked away. “Mine too. Both of them. It’s tough.”
“I’m sorry.”
“So am I. For you and me.” She put her elbows on the table and rested her face in her hands, breathing heavily, obviously fighting back tears.
I nodded, drifting back to those days in my mind. “I enlisted to be a soldier then,” I said very quietly. “When they were moving everyone into the city I was … out on the roads … guarding…” She looked up at me and I lost my train of thought. I sat there staring deeply into her eyes, fascination etched into my face. She blushed and turned away, smiling slightly.
“What?”
“Your eyes. They’re blue.”
Becca looked at me quizzically. She blinked several times, long lashes flitting before her soft, sky blue eyes. “They’ve always been blue.”
“In the city they were gray. I guess everything was. But you have … They’re beautiful.” She looked away again, bashfully. We shared a moment of warm silence, but eventually her expression changed. I took a sip of coffee, avoiding the question I most needed to ask for a second longer.
“Why did they kill him?”
“Because he was a good man. Because he was honest. And foolish enough to trust that others were too. He never wanted any of this, Tom. As soon as it was obvious that we weren’t dealing with some temporary quarantine … that it was being lied about and covered up … he hated it. He protested. They told him to keep quiet. That was years ago. Dad never drank more than a glass or two of wine a week—even after Mom died—until then. He tried to keep his head down. Tried to take comfort in at least knowing that people would be safe and that his children were safe … He always felt like it was his fault. All of it.” Her lip quivered and a tear ran down her left cheek, sparkling in the sunlight. “He was such a good man. He thought it was all his fault, and he couldn’t take it.”
Another tear followed the damp trail of the first, and I grabbed the green cloth napkin off my lap and reached out, half-expecting her to lean away. She closed her eyes and I gently, tenderly wiped away the tears. Her head dropped forward as I withdrew. Her right hand was resting on the table, and I slid the napkin under it, lingering for a moment with our skin pressed together. My chest fluttered at the feel of her soft, warm flesh. She opened her eyes and smiled at me, whispering a barely audible thank you and dabbing at her eyes with the napkin.
Her voice stronger, she continued. “A few months ago, Dad decided he couldn’t bear it anymore. He decided that they had to know. That … you all did. Everyone. He thought I didn’t know how he felt … what he was planning … but I knew. I was working at the Science Department, so I heard things.” I looked up at her quickly when she said this, and she shrugged, guilt and remorse in her eyes. “I
was a research assistant. It was just so I could be near my father. He was determined to stop the fog, stop the lies—all of it. He told Kirk about it. They were friends, he thought. They’d worked together for years. His wife and kids used to come to our house.… They all died, though. He told Kirk about the letters he was drafting to all the newspapers … to foreign governments. He was going to drag it all out into the light in one play. Asked Kirk to help him … and then, two weeks ago, Kirk had him shot in the head in his own backyard.” Her face was a mask when she said this—she displayed no emotion, but her knuckles were white, gripping and stretching the napkin.
“I got home to find an army truck outside and Callahan in the kitchen smiling as he held a gun to my brother’s head. He told me Dad was dead just like you’d tell someone the score of a game. Said Fallon was next. Jesus Christ … I’d barely even seen him in two years. Fallon’s been so busy with his work in the city for so long, and I hated him for so long because he was becoming like them, and then … there he was on his knees in the kitchen, bruised and crying and I started crying and Callahan laughed. He fucking laughed at us.”
She finally broke down, crossing her arms and lowering her head between them onto the table. Sobs racked her body. I sat there like a deer in headlights. It all made so much sense in that instant. She made sense. The seductress in the red dress, the snappily attired business woman … Everything was just a mask covering a frightened girl who missed her father, who would do anything to protect her brother.
I rose and stepped around the table, kneeling beside her. Gently, unsteadily at first, I began to massage her shoulders and neck with one hand. “It’s okay. I don’t want you to keep talking about it anymore. I just … if there’s anything…” I trailed off pathetically and after a moment took my hand off her back. Without so much as looking up, she reached out, found my arm, and guided my hand back onto her shoulders.
