“Listen to me: I can’t give you the truck,” Joe said. “I know we practiced driving, but you might make a mistake and hurt yourself. You’re better off on foot.”
Rage melted from Kendrick’s face, replaced by bewilderment and the terror of an infant left naked in a snowdrift. Kendrick’s lips quivered violently.
“No, Grandpa Joe. You can stay awake,” he whispered.
“Grab that backpack behind your seat—it’s got a compass, bottled water, jerky and a flashlight. It’s heavy, but you’ll need it. And take your Remington. There’s more ammo for it under your seat. Put the ammo in the backpack. Do it now.”
Kendrick sobbed, reaching out to squeeze Joe’s arm. “P-please, Grandpa Joe . . . ”
“Stop that goddamned crying!” Joe roared, and the shock of his voice silenced the boy. Kendrick yanked his hand away, sliding back toward his door again. The poor kid must think he’d crossed over.
Joe took a deep breath. Another wave of dizziness came, and his chin rocked downward. The car swerved slightly before he could pull his head back up. Joe’s pain was easing and he felt stoned, like he was on acid. He hadn’t driven far enough yet. They were still too close to Mike’s boys. So much to say . . .
Joe kept his voice as even as he could. “There were only two people who could put up a better fight than me, and that was your mom and dad. They couldn’t do it, not even for you. That tells me I can’t either. Understand?”
His tears miraculously stanched, Kendrick nodded.
READ REVELATIONS, a billboard fifty yards ahead advised in red letters. Beside the billboard, the road forked into another highway. Thank Jesus.
The words flew from his mouth, nearly breathless. “I’ll pull off when we get to that sign, at the crossroads. When the truck stops, run. Hear me? Fast as you can. No matter what you hear . . . don’t turn around. Don’t stop. It’s twenty miles to Centralia, straight south. There’s National Guard there, and caravans. Tell them you want to go to Devil’s Wake. That’s where I’d go. When you’re running, stay near the roads, but keep out of sight. If anyone comes before you get to Centralia, hide. If they see you, tell ‘em you’ll shoot, and then do it. And don’t go to sleep, Kendrick. Don’t let anybody surprise you.”
“Yes, sir,” Kendrick said in a sad voice, yet still eager to be commanded.
The truck took control of itself, no longer confined to its lane, or the road, and it bumped wildly as it drove down the embankment. Joe’s leg was too numb to keep pressing the accelerator, so the truck gradually lost speed, rocking to a stop nose down, its headlights lost in weeds. Feeling in his arms was nearly gone now, too.
“I love you, Grandpa Joe,” he heard his grandson say. Or thought he did.
“Love you, too, Little Soldier.”
Still here. Still here.
“Now, go. Go.”
Joe heard Kendrick’s car door open and slam before he could finish.
He turned his head to watch Kendrick, to make sure he was doing as he’d told. Kendrick had the backpack and his gun as he stumbled away from the truck, running down in the embankment that ran beside the road. The boy glanced back over his shoulder, saw Joe wave him on, and then disappeared into the roadside brush.
With trembling fingers, Joe opened the glove compartment, digging out his snub-nose .38, his favorite gun. He rested the cold metal between his lips, past his teeth. He was breathing hard, sucking at the air, and he didn’t know if it was the toxin or his nerves working him. He looked for Kendrick again, but he couldn’t see him at this angle.
Now. Do it now.
It seemed that he heard his own voice whispering in his ear.
I can win. I can win. I saved my whole fucking squad. I can beat this thing . . .
Joe sat in the truck feeling alternating waves of heat and cold washing through him. As long as he could stay awake . . .
He heard the voice of old Mrs. Reed, his sixth-grade English teacher; saw the faces of Little Bob and Eddie Kevner, who’d been standing beside him when the Bouncing Betty blew. Then, he saw Cassie in her wedding dress, giving him a secret gaze, as if to ask if it was all right before she pledged her final vows at the altar.
Then in the midst of the images, some he didn’t recognize.
Something red, drifting through a trackless cosmos. Alive, yet not alive. Intelligent but unaware. He’d been with them all along, those drifting spore-strands gravitating toward a blue-green planet with water and soil . . . filtering through the atmosphere . . . rest . . . home . . . grow . . .
A crow’s mournful caw awakened Joe, but not as much of him as had slipped into sleep. His vision was tinged red. His world, his heart, was red. What remained of Joe knew that it was in him, awakening, using his own mind against him, dazzling him with its visions while it took control of his motor nerves.
He wanted to tear, to rend. Not killing. Not eating. Not yet. There was something more urgent, a new voice he had never heard before. Must bite.
Panicked, he gave his hand an urgent command: pull the trigger.
But he couldn’t. He’d come this close and couldn’t. Too many parts of him no longer wanted to die. The new parts of him only wanted to live. To grow. To spread.
Still, Joe struggled against himself, even as he knew struggle was doomed.
Little Soldier. Must protect Little Soldier. Must . . .
Must . . .
Must find boy.
Kendrick had been running for nearly ten minutes, never far from stumbling, before pure instinct left him and his mind woke up again. His stomach hurt from a deep, sudden sob. He had to slow down because he couldn’t see for his tears.
Grandpa Joe had been hunched over the steering wheel, eyes open so wide that the effort had changed the way his face looked. Kendrick thought he’d never seen such a hopeless, helpless look on anyone’s face. If he had been able to see Mom and Dad from the safe room, that was how they would have looked, too.
He’d been stupid to think Grandpa Joe could keep him safe. He was an old man who lived in the woods.
Kendrick ran, his legs burning and throat scalding. He could see the road above him, but he ran in the embankment like Grandpa Joe had told him, out of sight.
For an endless hour Kendrick ran, despite burning legs and scalded throat, struggling to stay true to the directions Grandpa Joe had given him. South. Stay south.
Centralia. National Guard. Devil’s Wake. Safe.
By the time exhaustion claimed Kendrick, rainclouds had darkened the sky, and he was so tired he had lost any certainty of placing his feet without disaster. The trees, once an explosion of green, had been bleached gray and black. They were a place of trackless, unknowable danger. Every sound and shadow seemed to call to him.
Trembling so badly he could hardly move, Kendrick crawled past a wall of ferns into a culvert, clutching the little Remington to his chest.
Once he sat, his sadness felt worse, like a blanket over him. He sobbed so hard he could no longer sit up straight, curling himself in a ball on the soft soil. Small leaves and debris pasted themselves to the tears and mucous that covered his face. One sob sounded more like a wail, so loud is startled him.
Grandpa Joe had lied. Mom had been dead all along. He’d shot her in the head. He’d said it like it hardly mattered to him.
Kendrick heard snapping twigs, and the back of his neck turn ice-cold.
Footsteps. Running fast.
Kendrick’s sobs vanished, as if they’d never been. He sat straight up, propping his shotgun across his bent knee, aiming, finger ready on the trigger. He saw a small black spider crawling on his trigger wrist—one with a bloated egg sac, about to give birth to a hundred babies like in Charlotte’s Web—but he made no move to bat the spider away. Kendrick sat primed, trying to silence his clotted nose by breathing through his mouth. Waiting.
Maybe it was that hitchhiker with the sign, he thought.
But it didn’t matter who it was. Hide. That was what Grandpa Joe said.
T
he footsteps slowed, although they were so close that Kendrick guessed the intruder couldn’t be more than a few feet away. He was no longer running, as if he knew where Kendrick was. As if he’d been close behind him all along, and now that he’d found him, he wasn’t in a hurry anymore.
“I have a gun! I’ll shoot!” Kendrick called out, and this voice was very different than the one he’d used to ask Grandpa Joe for a Coke. Not a little girl’s voice, this time, or even a boy’s. It was a voice that meant what it said.
Silence. The movement had stopped.
That was when Grandpa Joe said the danger word.
Kendrick’s finger loosened against the trigger. His limbs gave way, and his body began to shake. The woods melted away, and he remembered wearing this same jacket in the safe room, waiting. Waiting for Grandpa Joe.
There had never been a gunshot from Grandpa Joe’s truck. Kendrick had expected to hear the gunshot as soon as he ran off, dreading it. Grandpa Joe always did what needed to be done. Kendrick should have heard a gunshot.
“Go back!” Kendrick said. Although his voice was not so sure this time, he cocked the Remington’s hammer, just like he’d been taught.
Kendrick waited. He tried not to hope—and then hoped fervently—that his scare had worked. The instant Kendrick’s hope reached its peak, a shadow moved against the ferns above him, closer.
“Breakfast,” Grandpa Joe’s watery voice said again.
After years of collaborating on film and TV pitches and projects, “Danger Word” was my first prose collaboration with my husband, science fiction writer Steven Barnes. We later expanded the premise and changed Kendrick’s age and gender (to sixteen-year-old Kendra) for our YA zombie novels Devil’s Wake and Domino Falls.
The short film we adapted from this story in 2013, directed by Luchina Fisher, can be viewed at www.dangerword.com.
Removal Order
Tiny black dots speckled Nayima’s white-socked feet as she shuffled across the threadbare carpet in her grandmother’s living room. Gram’s four cats were gone, but the fleas had stayed behind. Nayima had learned to ignore the itching, but the sight of so many fleas made her sick to her stomach. The flea problem had seemed small compared to Nayima’s daily ever-growing list of responsibilities, but she would not keep her Gram in filth.
“Shit,” Nayima said to the empty living room, the fleas, and the slow, steady whistling of Gram’s sleep-breathing in the next room.
Gray morning light beckoned her. Nayima flung the front door open and sat on the stoop, breathing fast to try to beat the nausea, which felt too much like death. Fledgling panic gnawed the rim of her stomach. She could make out the headline of the bright electric pink flier Bob the groundskeeper had dutifully posted on the community bulletin board across the green belt from Gram’s house: REPORT TO THE NEAREST HOSPITAL IF . . . and the litany of symptoms. Stomachache and vomiting were high on the list, beneath persistent headache and double vision.
That had been a month ago. Bob was gone, and the hospital’s doors were chained. Even the bright flier was nearly obscured in the gray-brown haze that had settled over her neighborhood like a sepia camera filter. The San Gabriel mountain range that stood a few blocks from Foothill Park was nearly hidden beneath a sheet of brown clouds. Sunlight bled through the sky in a fuzzy ball, but less light than yesterday. So much for Southern California sunshine. Nayima had gotten used to the smell, the eye and sinus irritation, the coughing at bedtime, but she hated the way the smoke had changed the daylight. Each morning she hoped the day would be a bit clearer and brighter, but the sky was always a little worse than before, like eyesight slowly going dim.
But she could manage the flea problem. That she could do.
The irony wasn’t lost on her: she had only remained because she didn’t want to move Gram. Now she would have to move Gram after all, without the help of neighbors, soldiers or police officers. The infestation was too far gone for insecticides—and she’d already emptied a can, making it harder to breathe in the house. Gram had taught her how hard fleas were to kill, with her menagerie of pets in the house Nayima had been raised in since she was four. Nayima had felt like just another of Gram’s adopted creatures.
The street spread before Nayima with its alien coloring and emptiness, her neighbors’ windows dark and sleeping. Most of the driveways were clear except for a few vandalized cars left behind. The week before, a daytime marauder had come through on a loud motorcycle, raising a racket and tossing clothes into the trees. Kids, she guessed, but she’d stayed out of sight, so she wasn’t sure. A long-sleeved shirt and ratty blue jeans still hung from high fronds in the neat row of palm trees in front of the green belt.
Nayima used to walk her neighborhood for exercise, rounding the green belt and pool area, the basketball court, the rows of stucco exteriors in carefully matched paint. This day she scouted for a new home—testing the doorknobs, sniffing the air inside, assessing the space. She had visited them all before. Most had been damaged beyond usefulness by looters.
She chose the house on the opposite corner from Gram for its proximity and the bright yellow roses blooming in front, lovely and clueless. Mr. Yamamoto’s house. Inside, its Spartan decor had given looters little to muss, although broken glass glittered in the kitchen. But the house had double doors large enough to push Gram’s bed through. The lock was intact. No windows broken. No terrible odors. No carpeting to hide nests of biting fleas.
Sanctuary.
“Thank you, Mr. Yamamoto,” she said.
Mr. Yamamoto had offered to drive her and Gram to the high desert in the back of his SUV, though she’d seen relief flicker in his hollowed eyes when she’d refused. He’d had a carload already, with his daughter and grandchildren from Rancho. Instead, he had given her a box of spices, most of them characteristically useless: every Halloween, he’d handed out clementine oranges instead of candy. Before Gram got sick, she and Mr. Yamamoto had walked their dogs together. Like Gram, he was retired. Like everyone, he had left most of his belongings behind.
Gram’s old digital wristwatch told her it was 7:30 in the morning. From the dark sky, it could be evening. The day had already wearied her, and the hard part had not yet begun.
Gram was asleep. She lay slanted on her side where Nayima had left her at 4:00 a.m., after her careful ritualistic padding of pillows to keep her from slumping on to her back. Studying Gram’s quiet face, Nayima marveled again at how the cancer had stolen the fat from her cheeks, shrinking her grandmother to a smaller husk each day.
The usual thought came: Is she dead?
But no. Gram’s chest moved with shallow breaths. In the early days, when cancer was new to them both, she had fretted over every moan, gasped at every imitation of a death mask on Gram’s brown, lined face. Gram was nearly seventy, but she had never looked like an old woman until the cancer. Her white hair was still full and springy, but now her face looked like she would not last the day, which was how she always looked.
But Gram always did last the day. And the next.
The bell was on Gram’s mattress, though she had not had the strength to ring it in a long time. The hospital-grade bed had cost a fortune, equipped with an inflated mattress that was gentler against Gram’s breaking skin. It didn’t work as well without its electric pump, but Nayima kept it inflated with an old bicycle pump. Not enough, maybe, but it was inflated. The county had shut off the power to the entire area after the evacuation.
Nayima felt the magnitude of her impending tasks. Should she dress and treat Gram’s sores before or after the move? Damnation either way.
Later, she decided. She didn’t want to face the sores with the move still waiting. The move would irritate Gram’s sores with or without a cleaning and dressing first, but maybe after was best. She wished her cell phone worked, not that there was anyone to call for advice. An Internet search would have felt like a miracle. The lack of advice wearied her.
As if her loud uncertainty had awakened her, Gram’s eyes flew open. Gra
m’s eyes had once been the brightest part of her, though they were milky now.
“Baby?” Gram said.
Nayima stepped closer to the bed. She could smell that the wounds needed cleaning—the dead flesh odor she hated. She slipped her hand over Gram’s dry palm. Gram squeezed, but did not hold on.
“I’m here, Gram,” she said.
Gram stared with the same eyes that had probed Nayima when she came home late from “movies” with her first boyfriend smelling of weed and sex. But this time, the questions were too big and vast for words, with answers neither of them wanted to hear. Nayima hadn’t let Gram watch the news or listen to the radio in weeks, so Gram didn’t know how many others were facing illness. She didn’t know the neighbors had left.
“We have to move to Mr. Yamamoto’s house,” Nayima said. “Too many fleas here.”
“The . . . cats?” Gram said.
“They’re fine,” Nayima said. That was probably a lie. She had stopped feeding Gram’s four cats and locked them out after the evacuation, so the cats had left too. She’d cried about it at the time, but at least cats could hunt.
“Tango too?” Gram’s eyes grew anxious. Maybe Gram had heard the lie in her voice.
“Tango’s still mean and fat,” Nayima said.
Was that a smile on Gram’s face? Gram had asked her to keep a single framed photo displayed on the table beside her bed, snapped the first summer Nayima came home from Spelman: the overfed black cat, Tango, was in Gram’s lap while Nayima hugged Gram from behind in her powder blue college sweatshirt. Nayima’s best friend, Shanice, had taken the photo. The glowing pride on Gram’s face haunted Nayima now.
Gram’s eyes started to flutter shut, but Nayima squeezed her hand and they opened again, alert. “I’m going to push you in the bed, Gram,” she said, “but it will hurt.”
“That’s okay, baby,” Gram said. That was Gram’s answer to every piece of bad news.
Nayima had stockpiled pain pills with help from Shanice, who was an RN and had raided the meds as soon as she caught wind of how bad things were going to be. Thanks to Shanice—who had moved next door when they were both in the sixth grade—Nayima had a box of syringes, hundreds of oxy pills, saline packs for hydration, ointment and dressing for bedsores, bed pads, and enough Ensure to feed an army. But Gram hadn’t been able to swallow anything on her own since before the neighbors left, so all Nayima could do was crush the pills in warm, sterile water and inject them. Gram’s arms looked like a junkie’s.
Ghost Summer, Stories Page 27
