“We’re doing what’s best for him,” her father said.
“What’s best for him?” Nigel threw his head back in laughter, spit spraying out of his mouth. “The best thing you could have done for him, for all of us was to let Carol here die, and then suck up the fact that you were dealt a rough hand with regards to the disease. I know it’s not fair, but when the hell was life ever supposed to be fair. Me? I worked on a farm my entire life, got up early.”
“I really don’t think we need to hear your whole biography,” Robbie said. “Put the blades down. I am trying to help!”
“Stop trying to help, Robbie,” Nigel yelled. “I’m going to cut that pretty head of yours off.”
Becca believed it too. The man they had known, the Nigel from before the NaU, wasn’t there at that moment. Instead, something else, a wild animal caught in a trap, was there, lashing out at anything that got too close, even if the thing getting close was a friend looking for a way to assist the trapped animal. It didn’t matter, not in the animal’s eyes. All that came close was a potential threat, and threats had to be dealt with to the extreme.
“You did this,” Nigel said. “You doomed us all with your so-called ‘good intentions.’ Look at me. Look at all of us. All of those young kids—you’ve killed all of them. For once in your life, take a step at some responsibility for a change and act like a goddamn man. Say it. I want you to say it. You killed all of us.”
“There is still time for a cure,” Robbie said. “If you give me more time.”
“What time? You’re seriously asking for more time?” Nigel said. “How much time do you think these people have? My son was supposed to go off to college next year with his girlfriend, and now because of you and your lack of time, they might be buried in the spring. What about your daughter Robbie?”
Becca felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise. Did he know she was there behind him? Did he even care?
“I might not like her,” Nigel said. “Or you either, Robbie, but for God’s sake, what’s going to become of her? Her entire family, everyone and everything she knows is going to die. Who’s going to take care of her? Truly, Carol, have you ever thought about that? Your mother is strapped to a bed down in a Schoharie nursing home, and your father has been underground for the last dozen years. Neither one of you has any family—or friends for that matter. So what’s going to happen to her?”
Becca herself had never really thought of this before, about what would happen after the NaUs took all of them. She had a vague feeling of her being alone, of everyone she knew dying, but as for what happened after, she never thought about that. It was as though she expected her life to end when her parents died, as though she were infected and doomed to share the same fate as they were. It was the same feeling that anyone feels whenever they have to face the fact that there is a life after the trauma, after the suffering.
But not for Nigel, and the man knew it.
“Don’t pretend like you suddenly care about my daughter,” Robbie said. “You haven’t shown her the least bit of kindness over the years, and I find your current concern to be very coincidental indeed.”
“Was it any consequence that she was unaffected?” Nigel said.
“That’s absurd,” her mother said. “When Robbie injected me with the NaU, he didn’t know what would happen.”
“Yeah, so he says,” Nigel said, “but guilty people make a habit out of concealing the truth. What if Robbie here knew exactly what would happen, knew who would be affected and who wouldn’t?”
Becca knew that that line of thinking was pure absurdity, but she would be remiss if she didn’t at least acknowledge the fact that during many moons, when things got cold in the McCarthy house, she would think that perhaps her father had planned all of this to happen.
I told you I would quit, he had said the night, looking almost as desperate as Nigel looked now.
“If that were the case,” Robbie said, “Then I’d be an idiot. Lest you forget that I, too, am dying.”
“Yeah, but I don’t see your face caving in,” Nigel said. “Or whatever the hell was happening to Kent, or even having seizures like Jolie.”
Her father had grown to like bathrooms of late. He would spend hours in there sometimes, making chilling sounds as he did so, coughing up God-knows-what.
“I see you,” Nigel said, pointing his sword across the room at Robbie. “I know what you did, what you planned to do, and even if you didn’t plan on any of this to happen, I can see that it doesn’t affect you that much, while the rest of us die.”
Nigel took a step forward.
Her parents’ NaU was dormant, stored away in little pockets of their arms. They wouldn’t be able to do anything to protect themselves from Nigel, and the man seemed to know it, to smell it the way a rabid dog can sense fear. He smiled, half of it drooping and malicious.
“Nigel,” her mother said, putting up her hands. “Think about what you’re doing here.”
“Oh, I have thought about it,” Nigel said. “I have thought about it, as long as you thought about leaving Matt and me. I know what I’m doing. You think I’ve gone mad, but in reality, it is you two that are at the far end of your rockers; NaU, giving teenagers powers, bringing the dead back to life. None of this should have been in your hands, Robbie. Only God can have this power because only he can have the sound judgment to placate it and give it out with stern judgment.
“I’ve talked to Sheriff Holder. After I do what needs to be done, I’m going to call him and explain the situation. None of the others will be harmed, but you’re not going to get away from me, Robbie. You say you’re going to die in a few weeks anyway, so you might as well make use of your death by letting me be the one to sever your head from your body.”
Nigel bolted through the living room.
Looking back on that moment, Becca wasn’t sure what it was that made her jump. It wasn’t a conscious thought, one that she planned out and thought about. No, this was a more primal thought, one that rose to the surface of her mind when she needed it to.
She jumped over the railing of the stairs and onto Nigel’s back.
Wet pus and blood filled her nostrils. The skin under his clothes was evidently on its last string since when her legs put pressure on it, it gave way and soaked through the man’s clothes. Wet splotches seeped into her jeans.
Nigel never saw it coming. The man started to tumble under Becca’s weight. Before she knew what she was doing, she brought her pencil down into the man’s neck, right under his jaw. He leaned forward, and she fell.
She landed on her back, looking up. She saw pity on the man’s face, but also happiness. Then her vision became red as blood poured out of the open wound on his neck and onto her face. He fell beside her.
Her mother and father were saying something, but she didn’t hear them. Instead, she kept looking over at Nigel’s eyes.
They were Matt’s eyes.
The man’s skin grew bright white. Then that brightness was traveling to her. She didn’t know what to do, so she didn’t move. As the last breath exhaled from Nigel’s body, a bright light filled Becca’s vision. Her body grew warm. It was like she was being attacked by a hundred bees, all of them trying to burrow themselves into her skin.
Her heart beat faster, and then all became dark.
****
The following day, Becca thought that all of it had been a dream. A nightmare to be sure, but just as fictional.
However, when she woke up in her bed the next morning, she could tell that it had been real. There was a stillness to the house that seemed to warrant complete silence lest some imaginary force comes out of the shadows and swat at you for waking it from a deep slumber.
The blood had seeped through the wooden boards to the basement. Her father had taken care of everything, so there was no reason for her to worry. After the initial incident, and after Robbie took care of the body, he went over to Nigel’s house. The man had been trying to come up with some sort of manifesto o
r something against Robbie and the entire McCarthy family. He attributed everything wrong that had ever happened to him to be that family’s fault, and the fact that he was now dying had a part in that. He had planned on killing all members of the household and then going to press with the story. Only then would the cosmic scales in his mind be pointed right and true to the path of justice?
But that never happened.
Instead, Becca had killed the man with a pencil through his neck.
The floorboards were ripped up and brought out back to burn. If anyone asked, they would say that they were remodeling. Her mother had driven Nigel’s car back to his house and walked the rest of the way back home. If anyone asked, she would claim that she was having an affair with him, and that was why her prints and wig hair were in his car.
But all of that was like background noise. What her parents were most concerned about was what had happened after Nigel Torres had met the reaper, ascended to heaven, saw the angel above him, and decided to join it. They wanted to know about his NaU.
A quick blood test of Nigel’s dead body showed that his NaU was no longer there. It wasn’t dormant and hiding in another part of his body like Robbie’s and Carol’s was. In fact, there was almost no evidence that there had ever been any NaU in his system in the first place.
“So when we die,” her father said that morning over eggs and hash browns, “the NaU will detach itself from your DNA and go to the nearest living person.”
The fact that she had killed someone didn’t feel right to her. No one was talking about it, as though it didn’t happen, which might be a good legal defense, but it made her want to practically blow her brains out. She had killed someone, and she felt nothing. She had at the moment, but now that there was a night between her and the event, it held no weight inside of her.
Was it this easy for everyone else? she thought, thinking of the hundreds of murderers and other killers who went about their days, some of which were behind bars, others not so. She was a part of the club now, and while the blood might have been washed off of her, she still felt its greasy touch, as though it were latched to her for the rest of time, and no amount of soap and water could ever remove it.
Her father brought her to the lab. If Matt came home, then Carol would tell him what happened. Better to hear it from his mother than his half-sister.
The Argyle Research Lab was a small building located on New York Route 40 right in between Argyle and North Argyle but on the other side of the road from Goose Island. The building was tall, four stories, with freshly painted sides. Like a pillar or monument, the building stood out from all of the surrounding farms and trees.
No one else was in the lab that morning, and regardless if it was luck or divine chance, she was thankful for the lack of other people. Looking at people might make her feel weird, and she might find herself thinking if their blood inside of them was as warm as the kind that flowed through Nigel.
Her father brought her to his office and took a blood sample.
If what her father said was true, then that meant that that same sunken-in face, the same wetness that she had felt on Nigel’s body when she attacked him, would soon find itself on her own body.
Her heart had been beating fast all morning and sweat seeped into her clothes.
A few minutes later, her father returned. His face looked in pure shock more than anything.
“Oh God, what?” Becca said.
“You have his NaU inside of you,” he said. When they had spoken earlier, it had been on the side of possibility, not anything real. Now it was real, his words spoken and etched into the ethos of the time, cemented in reality. She was going to die.
He rushed over to her.
“No, no, it’s okay, Becca. I saw something else.”
The two of them walked down the hall.
“You don’t have one NaU inside of you,” her father said. “You have two.”
When the accident happened, and the NaU was released into the air through her mother’s corpse, she too had been affected like everyone else in that house that day.
“Your NaU was different from all the other ones,” Robbie said. “And that’s why I couldn’t see it before. You’re NaU is the most harmless out of all of them because it didn’t change you. You didn’t get flight, or the ability to regrow injuries, and so nothing bad happened to you because of it. And now that you have Nigel’s NaU inside of you, the effect seems to have spread to his NaU as well. You won’t have any cell decay like Nigel.”
And on and on, her father spoke, but all Becca could think of was the fact that she wasn’t dying. Her NaU happened to be harmless. Either she got lucky, or it was who she was. Robbie said that the different NaUs that merged came from the people themselves, like the way that light could be refracted into a rainbow of different colors.
“Can it be extracted?” Becca said, “Or anything else that I can do to help all of you?”
“Maybe,” her father said. “Maybe.”
He was deep in thought, thinking over the hundreds of other the ways in which her powers could be used to save all of the—
The ground shook beneath them. Pictures fell from the walls, and pencils rolled off desks.
In the distance, Becca could see a figure levitating above the open farmlands, and even from there, she could tell that he was angry.
****
Matt didn’t say anything as Becca and her father approached.
The air around Matt sparked with orange light. The boy wasn’t even trying to hide his NaU anymore, like the others of them.
“Why don’t you come down to the ground there, Matt?” her father said. “Wouldn’t want anyone to see you up there, would you?”
Becca felt Matt’s touch on her. Robbie must’ve felt it too.
“This is your sister here, Matt,” Robbie said. “No need to do something you will regret.”
“Where is he?” Matt said.
“Your father is buried somewhere safe and sound.”
“I want to know where.”
“I’m not sure I can tell you that at this moment,” Robbie said. “Not sure what you would do with that information, and you can feel my heart right now, so you know I won’t lie to you.”
“You’re afraid I’ll tell the police,” Matt said.
“Crossed my mind,” her father said.
The wind blew a sharp breeze amongst them, but Becca had a feeling that none of them felt it.
“Mom told me what happened,” Matt said. “Said you protected her and Robbie in self-defense. Is that true?”
“Yes,” Becca said.
She still felt his touch on her, afraid that he might snap her neck at any second.
But he didn’t.
“I came home this morning to tell you that Danni killed Peter last night,” Matt said, “And when I got home, I instead got berated by my mother telling me that my sister had shoved a pencil into my father’s neck the night before.”
“She didn’t want to do that, Matt,” her father said. “None of us last night wanted to be in the situation except for your father. He was mad. I’m sure your mother told you what happened.”
“Yes, she told me,” Matt said. “She told me that you two had been able to subdue your NaUs and that you couldn’t defend yourselves, and that it was only Rebecca who could have stopped him.”
Becca wondered what she could say. She had imagined this talk with Matt ever since she made the jump onto his father’s back and drove the pencil through his neck. She could say thousands of things, all ranging from “I didn’t know what I was doing” to, “I was an adrenaline rush, that’s all,” to “I’m sorry, Matt, I didn’t want to do it.”
She hadn’t planned on killing anyone in her life, and the fact that such an action could carry a nonchalance to it equivalent to that of going to the grocery store or forgetting a birthday, made Becca’s skin crawl.
But none of it would have done any good, and all parties involved seemed to realize that, even if that a
greement hadn’t been brought forward through physical talk, cementing it into the plane of reality the way most conversation does.
Becca felt Matt’s touch leave her. Her father relaxed next to her.
“Like I said earlier,” Matt said, “Danni killed Peter last night. The two of them had gotten into a nasty fight in the Cainabel cornfield. Danni hit Peter so hard that it broke his NaU and killed him.
“Much the same as my mother described this morning, like how my father’s NaU went into Rebecca, Peter’s NaU went inside of Danni. The girl must’ve come to since when Jolie and I found Peter last night, Danni was nowhere to be found. I think I felt him up in the mountains, near the Vermont border. I was coming home to tell you all that, and then say that Jolie and I were going to go look for him.”
“Be careful,” her father started.
Matt put his hand up.
“We still have a great deal to discuss,” Matt said. “When I return, I want to know what really happened last night and why no one decided to tell me until this morning. Had one of you called me, I could easily have subdued my father without killing him.”
And like that, he shot off into the sky.
Neither Becca nor her father moved for a while after that. There was something pumping through each of their veins, and it definitely wasn’t the NaU that made them feel as such.
“We should head back,” Robbie said, “Your mother is worried sick about us.”
****
“We have to go,” her father said.
The three of them were sitting around the dinner table. It was late in the day, and though Carol and Robbie had done their best to try and clean the house, there was a greasy feeling in the air around them. The house would never feel like it had before. Most things in Becca’s life she assumed would carry feelings of change.
“Where?” her mother said.
When Becca and her father had returned home earlier that day, Carol’s face had been bleak white. Evidently, Matt hadn’t taken the news of his father’s death all that well, and while Becca and her father had seen the later end of that rage, Carol was all alone when she saw the first.
The Keeper Page 11
