Project Pallid

by Christopher Hoskins

  Her satisfied look was disarming. Like a coin flipped, her face relaxed, her body eased into the seat, and she turned back to the wheel to look at the road ahead. “That’s right, Damian,” she said. “Maybe it is time you started listening more. You know, Mr. Laverdier says that’s one of the most important steps in becoming a better person. Listening. Opening your eyes and ears to the suffering around you. Hearing the cries of others. Understanding their pains. Building connections at the core of humanity. It all starts with listening, Damian. And you just made a first step,” she said proudly. Scarily. Like she’d just enlisted a new member into an exclusive club.

  I didn’t want anything to do with it. I didn’t like him, I didn’t like how he’d been treating Catee, and I didn’t like what he was doing to my mom. I barely knew the person sitting beside me anymore, and I could hardly fathom how my dad must’ve been feeling at the time.

  We rode in complete silence the rest of the ride to Platsville, and we found Dad knocked out on the couch when we walked into the living room: one arm tucked under his head, the other outstretched over a partially eaten, Hungry Man dinner.

  “Darryl!” Mom snapped. “Darryl! You get up, NOW.”

  He stirred to consciousness, pulled the remote from beneath him, and flicked off the TV.

  “Hey, guys. You’re home.” He somehow found enthusiasm, in spite of his sad context.

  “Darryl, just look at the mess you’ve made!” Mom pointed to the remains of the “dinner” that he’d left laid-out.

  “Oh, that? I was just taking care of that, Martha,” he answered and moved sluggishly to his feet.

  “Just about to … Was going to … I’m about to …” Mom mocked. “Do you ever finish anything around here, Darryl? Do you even care about this house at all? Is your shop the only thing important to you anymore?” she belittled.

  I couldn’t tell where any of it was coming from. I was a bystander, caught in the crosshairs, who only knew the parts they revealed, or made up for me. Maybe something had been going sour between my parents all along. Maybe I just didn’t know about it. Or maybe, like my instinct screamed, Mom had totally lost it.

  “Martha, I don’t know what you want from me anymore. One minute, it’s to be here, at this hour; another minute, it’s to be there, at that time. Sometimes you don’t want me around at all. Other times, I’m cleaning and taking care of everything around this house while you’re away at god knows what. I - DON’T – KNOW – WHAT – YOU – WANT - ANYMORE!!” My dad yelled parceled words of frustration.

  “I can’t talk to you right now,” Mom answered calmly.

  “What do you mean, you can’t talk to me right now? I can’t talk to you ever, anymore. That’s what you’ve become. That’s who you are now, Martha! A stranger!” Dad’s words echoed the same sentiments I’d felt back in the car. “I don’t know what you want me to do or who you want me to be anymore!” His volume came without regulation or restraint.

  “For the sake of Damian,” Mom returned to her more self-righteous self, “this conversation is done. Clean up your dinner, Darryl, and we’ll talk later. Alone.” She punched her last word with an emphasis that told him it was final.

  And then, with an audible snarl, Dad retreated. He picked up his dinner and took it to the kitchen without another word, resigning to finish his attack, later on.

  Satisfied, Mom removed her earrings and headed down the hall toward their bedroom.

  It was the last I saw of either of them that night, and I decided it best to go straight to my room to avoid the shrapnel of whatever war was about to wage between them. And as tempted as I was to listen-in, ear-to-floor, to decipher their muffled yells later that night, I didn’t. I put my headphones on and slipped away into one of the only remaining solaces I had left.

  May 10th: Day 9

  Catee and I pedaled home in complete silence from their place in Damariscotta, with neither of us having anything insightful to add to the horrifying truths we’d learned at the encampment. We’d each processed what we’d seen and heard. We’d formulated our own conclusions by connecting the dots of what we’d long-seen coming. And for once, neither of us had any new revelations to offer the other. We didn’t need to when the reality of it all stared us so flagrantly in the face.

  And as we stopped to rest in the semi-darkness of intermittent streetlights, I asked a question that rang more appropriate for me than I ever imagined it would: “What would you do if your dad were dead?”

  It wasn’t intended to be a threat, but it could’ve easily come across as one. I asked it more out of concern for what would come of her if she were ever left orphaned. With her mom gone, what if this wasn’t the figurative departure of her dad, too? What would she do if they were both entirely gone from her life? Who would she be left with? I asked it with more concern than it came out sounding.

  But she answered. And without reservation. She announced to me that she was neither her mother, nor her father—that no matter what ate at each of them, she was her own person—and that their fates could never dictate her own. It was a profound statement to hear from another fourteen-year-old. It was a wisdom that drew me closer and closer to her. Catee, of all people, deserved the worship that her dad so manipulatively strove for. She, of both of them, represented the goodness of strength and moral solidarity. She, of both of them, should be the one to survive this. Not him. Not even me.

  I snap back to look down at my dad, still crumpled at the bottom of the stairs, and to face the gravity of the here and now. I can’t look at him. I can’t even think of him. I can’t stand to think about any of it, but I’ve got to do something because I can’t leave him to rot away down here—pallid or not.

  I decide on one of the only remaining options after failing to get him up the stairs, and I inch him along to the furthest corner of the room.

  With hands, pot lids, and an hour’s time, I manage to dig up a foot of gravel that’s almost six feet long, and I drag his body into it. His shoulders barely sink below its surface, and when I cover him with the extracted dirt, it creates a mound that’s all too reminiscent of those clichéd, horror movie graves. I shake my head to clear my thoughts and to refocus on the reality of things around me. I’m living one of those movies.

  After the last bits of gravel are scooped to the top of the mound, I say some final words. They come unplanned and unexpected, but they seize me as essential, given the moment.

  “Dad,” I start out. “Dad, I want you to know that you were the best dad I could’ve ever asked for. You helped me to become a man, and I promise to bring Mom back. I’ll make her see what it’s done to everybody—what he’s done to all of us. She’ll see, Dad. I promise. And things will be just like before. And Nicole will come home. And we’ll make family dinner. It’ll be just like it was. I promise,” I say, and collapse onto the mounded pile.

  “I promise. I’ll KILL him, Dad. I will. For you … I’LL KILL HIM!!!”

  It’s hard to pull away, but everything inside me screams that I’ve got no other choice. I can’t dwell on what I can’t change, and as hard as it might be to walk away and put it from my mind, I do.

  My dad’s belt, stretched taut across the door handle, is a reminder of what’s been lost since the sun last set: a reminder of what’s irreversible. But I still have my mom, Nicole, and Catee to think about, and there’s hope in that. Or, I think there is. There’s got to be, because I can’t do this alone and there isn’t much else left.

  When the sickness escaped the hospital and found its way into homes, there was no stopping it. Cases sprung up all across Madison to crisscross the city in a fabric of infection. Families, who’d been desperately caring for their own, suddenly found themselves attacked by the subjects of their affections. Parents mauled children. Children mauled parents. And as soon as the infection began transmitting through attacks, there was no turning back. It all happened so fast from there.

  One woman, two doors down from Catee’s place and who’d been bedridden fo
r days, suddenly found the strength to greet her three kids at the door, after school. The pale but revitalized mother pounced from the kitchen to tear away each of their throats with her own teeth. Police took her down in the front yard.

  At another house, just around the corner from there, some seven-year-old, who’d been laid-out sick in the living room, suddenly sprang back to life and gnawed away half his mother’s face by the time his father stabbed him through the heart.

  Similar stories occurred concurrently, all across Madison, and they spread quickly to neighboring towns. Even Platsville made it to the news by the second day. We were all sitting ducks as it unfolded around us, and we were powerless to do anything to stop it.

  I’d seen enough.

  I’d learned enough.

  And I’d lived out eight months of suspicious inquiry to know the face behind it. I even had a pretty good idea of what it might be … even more than experts, who scrambled for a cure.

  And I’ve got an even better understanding of The Whitening now that I’ve seen its face and its unrelenting thirst to wipe out everything in its path—fueling itself before it fades to nothing.

  And though we were only teenagers, deemed too young and too immature to understand or be of any use, Catee and I vowed to end it—whatever that meant at the time. We’d tried calling the hospital. We’d tried pretending we were from Crosspoint, too, but nothing landed. Nothing we’d done had changed a thing or altered Mr. Laverdier’s course in any way. We were knee-deep in the rising muck, and we were losing mobility fast when I suggested that we report her dad to the police.

  “The cops?” she asked. “And tell them what? That my dad cleaned out the garage? That he started moving things to our new house???”

  “You know what I’m saying, Catee!”

  “I know, what you’re saying, Damian, but do you hear how it sounds? Imagine you’re on the other end of the line. What are you going to say? How are you going to respond when someone’s kid calls to report what we’ve got to say: That my dad’s some mad scientist with a secret lab in the garage, that he packed up and took to our summer home? Is that what you want me to say??”

  “Well, maybe not exactly that,” I replied. “You can probably leave out the thing about the summer home.”

  “Shut up, Damian.”

  She spoke with a cold, harshness that made me look at her with confusion.

  “Catee?”

  “Catee??” I asked again, after getting no reply.

  “Catee, you don’t have to talk to me, but at least look at me. Look at me, Catee. Please.”

  Her head swiveled my way like it needed a good greasing.

  “Catee. I know it’s hard,” I said. “I can’t even imagine how hard it must be. But, I’m here, and I’ll always be here. No matter what happens, you’re not alone. It’s got my mom now, too. I know how it feels.”

  “What’re they doing, Damian?” she plead. “Why are they doing this?”

  I looked nervously around and hoped that none of her neighbors had wandered curiously into their yards during our heated exchange in the open garage, but there was no one there.

  I couldn’t explain my mom’s fixation with her dad, and I still can’t say what first drew her to him, even to this day. His magnetism had always held an opposite effect on me, and I couldn’t see how anything he said to her could’ve had any bearing on her life, whatsoever. Her captivation with him was as mesmerizing as it was unexplainable—like some sort of tractor beam that no matter how hard my dad and I tried to fight, we lost. And in the end, my dad lost the most: first, my mom, and then, with his life.

  We ended up calling the cops that afternoon. It was one of the few options we had left at our disposal and, given the shared sentiments I’d expressed with Catee, she understood it wasn’t an act of betrayal at all; it was the total opposite. We were doing whatever we could to protect what remained of the lives we’d always known.

  Predictably, our words fell on deaf ears. So as soon as Catee hung up the phone, we mounted our bikes, pedaled to the police station, and waited to speak with an officer, face-to-face.

  The entire station was humming. Outbreaks were springing up all around, and there wasn’t enough manpower to respond to the number and magnitude of incidents that multiplied across Madison. Officers flew in and out, heaping half-lifeless bodies into the barrack’s few holding cells.

  Some that passed snapped viciously our way. Eyes, gloss-white, and arms cuffed behind backs, they struggled to get footing as they were pulled briskly by. One of the more unruly ones was Tasered to unconsciousness while still in my sight, and I counted as eight more were thrown into cells that spared us from friends and neighbors, but did nothing to protect them from each another.

  Traces of their former selves, each one’s skin had become an unhealthy, powder white. Patches of skull showed where there had once been hair. Snarling mouths revealed gleaming teeth, and trails of pearl-white saliva collected on the floor and illuminated a path to their cells.

  Caged, there was no silencing them as they tore into each other. The screaming wails that permeated the building were ear splitting, and it only compounded the mayhem of officers who scrambled in and out, in response to the infinite ring of phone lines. They yelled orders over the melee of metallic screeches and cannibalistic attacks that went undeterred and in plain sight.

  It was only the first day of pandemic, and they were the first cases of what would be hundreds more.

  Eventually, some sergeant—I don’t remember his name—stopped to ask us what information we had to share.

  In a flurry of hurried and mishandled words, the two of us did our best to convey everything we knew; time was of the essence, and it was clear we wouldn’t have much to relay all that we knew.

  He nodded his head, asked some questions of his own, and even went so far as to take down our addresses, including the one to Mr. Laverdier’s Damariscotta compound. And then he quickly ushered us out of the police station, ordered us to go directly home, to lock our doors and windows, and to find a safe place where we could hide until they got the situation under control. I know he worried that they might not; the shakiness in his voice was unmistakable.

  We wondered if he’d take the information we’d given him and do anything with it. We wondered if they even had the forces to take the infection to its source, or whether the police would be lost in crowd control mode until The Whitening claimed them, too.

  And it was only the beginning.

  Hundreds and thousands more would become infected.

  Most are dead now.

  And as much as I can tell, I might be one of the few survivors who hasn’t pledged my allegiance to and been vaccinated by Him. I might be the only one left to vindicate the fallen, and I’ll do it without reservation.

  I’ll cut the head off the beast by myself.

  The gravel mound of my whited-out dad is an image that’ll remain burned in my brain forever, and it’s all the fuel I need to brave whatever might be left out there.

  In four more days, I’ll leave this tomb.

  And even though I can’t say where I’ll find The Gathering, or its leader, I’ve got a pretty good idea where I’ll start.

  April 30th:

  The day after he purged their garage, Mr. Laverdier set up permanent residence at his place in Damariscotta. He’d been staying there on and off until then, for days on end, before he’d return home to work in his garage. My mom seemed to spend nearly as much time there, too—sequestered away at their Gatherings: spiritual retreats that would “cleanse the spirit”, or some junk like that. At least, that’s how my mom advertised them. To everyone. Somewhere along the way, she’d become his personal sounding block, and she advertised Pastor Dave’s campaign for The Light everywhere we went. And when the illness broke out, the group’s slogan became her personal mantra: “Fight the White: Find the Light.”

  There was a distinct difference in the way she said it, too: one-way, before the hospital outbreak, a
nd another, after The Whitening started to rear its ugly head around town. Her eyes turned as clouded as her head whenever she’d repeat the mad man’s rhetoric.

  “Well, we do hope you’ll join us. The address is on the card. We gather nightly, at 8:00,” she affirmed to one woman.

  We’d been standing in the pasta aisle and eyeballing sauces when she caught the attention of this other lady and made her move. The woman, mid-twenties at most, was alarmed by my mom’s affront and became even more so after she started in on her spiel, while I did my best to disappear behind the gridded latticework of our shopping cart.

  When she came to a temporary pause, the woman left hurriedly on her way, and I was left to endure the remainder of Mom’s rant until she finished spewing its garbage and resumed a conversation that even hinted at the sane person I once knew her to be.

  But it was like an erupting volcano. And as soon as I thought it had calmed, her magma chamber refueled, and she spat her ash all across the checkout lanes as we waited in line with hundreds of others who inched forward, anxious to escape the building and to return to the sanctuaries of their own homes—Doomsday rations in tow. For a second, you would’ve thought she was the mastermind behind it all. Somehow, Mr. Laverdier had changed her, and as much as I wanted it to be otherwise, the glimpses of the woman I knew were becoming fewer and fewer. She wasn’t the same person anymore. She’d become mindlessly different.

  And as much as I willed to set her right and turn her back to the person she was, it was hopelessly futile. He had a hold over her that none of us could break—me, Dad, Nicole, Catee, nor all of us combined. We’d lost her to his madness, and we could only wait until she found her own way back from the darkness, guised as hope, that she’d allowed to envelop her.

  “You don’t happen to have any more jugs of water out back, do you?” We’d made our way to the register and Mom spoke to the cashier—a young girl, just out of high school probably, with thick glasses and markedly crooked teeth.