Going Gray

by Brian Spangler

  “But how?” she asked, looking up into his unshaven face. “How did you get out of the car?” His skin looked pale, and his eyes were set deep and seemed stuck in a permanent squint. The grays in his stubble stood out. And though it had been just a few days, he’d never looked so old. She was anxious to hear the answers. A thousand questions were suddenly born inside her mind, filling a deep reserve, each of them waiting their turn to be heard and answered.

  “My leg,” he answered first. “Pinned from the accident, but I was able to pry it out.” The accident. Emily’s heart sank, her questions dispersing like smoke into the wind.

  “Mom,” she managed to say. Her father closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “The accident, Dad—the other car that you hit—that was us, and Mom…” Emily saw the quick pass of glances between Mr. Halcomb and Peter. She hadn’t shared the details of her parents’ death. She hadn’t told anyone that it was her father’s car that hit them, killing the mother of his children: his wife.

  “I know,” he told her and gently touched the cut on her head. “I was able to get out of the car and stay low. The poison doesn’t always reach the ground; has to do with the cloud density. I saw your mother there—” he stopped abruptly, overcome.

  “Justin was hurt… we both were, but he’s good,” she told him, hoping the news helped.

  “I’m so proud of you,” he struggled to say. “You saved your brother, do you know that? You saved him, and you saved yourself.” He kissed her atop her forehead, whispering her mother’s name, but she couldn’t make out what it was he was saying.

  “This is Peter and Mr. Halcomb. Peter and I were in the Food-Mart, getting what we could—medicine and food—but then the roof caved in.”

  “So, that’s what I heard,” he said. “I didn’t know what the noise was, but turned to go down the closest service tunnel. When I got to the light, the door was blocked. But I heard something ahead of me, and followed it. I had no idea it was you.” Mr. Halcomb stepped forward, listening, and posturing to ask a questions.

  “Good to meet you. You say that you were in the service tunnels?” he asked. “Did you see anyone else?” Her father gave her an adoring look before stepping over to take Mr. Halcomb’s hand. The handshake was a cordial formality; she’d seen her father do the same a hundred times.

  “I’ve been walking the tunnels the last couple of days,” he answered. “When I freed myself from the car, I found an open storm drain off the highway and dropped into the tunnel. Air is good beneath the ground level. Cool too. And other than the rats, you’re the first faces I’ve seen.”

  “Can we talk about this later?” Emily asked. “I’d really like to get my Dad some help and get Justin, too.” Mr. Halcomb nodded, offering an of-course, of-course gesture. Grabbing the trash bags, Mr. Halcomb added, “And I’m so sorry about your wife.” Emily gritted her teeth when she heard the sentiment. After all, how many lives were lost? How many sons and daughters and wives and husbands? And did her father have any idea of the magnitude? Well, if he didn’t, he soon would.

  Justin hung onto their father’s arm, hugging and staying as close to him as he could. Emily thought it was adorable, and maybe even a little sad. Justin had changed—they had all changed. The loss of their mother. The loss of their home.

  Had her brother become colder?

  Distant?

  If he had, she didn’t see it. Not now, anyway. And maybe it was because she could only see what was in front of her—a glimpse into the way it used to be. Family. And though fleeting, she didn’t care. She was happy to live in the bright memories before they disappeared forever.

  “And… and you said, you slept with the rats?” Justin asked, awestruck by the idea of it. His eyes rolled around like giant marbles, looking at the gathered faces.

  “I did. I did sleep with them,” their father answered, curling his fingers into the shape of a claw. Justin leaned back, laughing, anticipating what was coming. “And do you know what else they liked to do?”

  “What?” Justin burst, reeling toward his sister, his voice pitched high and excited; a sound Emily hadn’t heard in what felt like forever. “What did they like to—”

  “They liked to cuddle!” her father snarled, tickling Justin until a fury of laughs erupted. “And they crawled on me, up and down on their funny looking feet, and whipped their funny looking tails!” Justin laughed until his face went red, and his voice disappeared behind a wheeze of throaty clicks. The sight warmed Emily. It warmed everyone.

  With fresh water and a plate of food in him, her father was already starting to look better. Color had come back into his cheeks, and the hard pouches carrying his eyes had softened a little. But the grays that flecked the chin of his beard still looked oddly out of place. They made him look older, and maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing.

  They were being watched. It wasn’t obvious to her at first. She thought that she’d been mistaken. She’d hoped that she’d been mistaken. But when she stood, moving closer to Peter, she caught the stare of a small group. Standing just beyond the food court, a mix of old and young, and none of them looking familiar to her. But a hard shadow cut across some of the faces, leaving her to wait and wonder who they were.

  Emily felt uneasy by the way they kept looking at them; cautious. She glimpsed Justin without turning away, and thought that on some level she must be watching out for him the way her mother would have. The other men moved out of the shadows, out of hiding, revealing who they were without knowing that she was watching them now.

  When one of the younger men stepped aside, Emily saw who was at the center. Jeter is his name, she thought, trying to remember, and watched his thin frame rocking back and forth while speaking to the others. He was the old man from the meeting, the one who’d yelled on and on about the machine being the cause of the accident. He lives by the machine. Emily’s heart sank. She didn’t like the way the other men leaned in and listened to him. And when they looked over toward her father, nodding enthusiastically, she liked that even less. Jeter fixed an accusing gaze in their direction, a grim smile revealing a black chasm where there had once been teeth.

  One of the men looked as old as Jeter, and could have been his brother. His clothes hung slack from his bones, and his skin looked peckish and yellow. The two other men were much younger—maybe their sons, or grandsons. Emily could see at once that they were looking for a fight. Their eyes didn’t have the same tired look as the older men. Instead, they were pensive and angry, but it was the enthusiasm in their body language that scared her more.

  She’d seen the same before at their high school football games. Both of the older men were talking into the ears of the younger men, riling them up like the coaches would do on the sidelines before the game’s kickoff. The younger men nodded and squeezed their fists and shuffled their feet, readying themselves. Emily was certain they were going to come over.

  “Dad?” she said abruptly, reaching across the table to take her father’s hand. He looked up, the messy sound of food dropping from his spork. “Those men—” but when she looked back over his shoulder, they had disappeared. Her father turned in the direction of her stare, finding only a few kids playing a game of tag.

  “Who?” he asked.

  “It… it’s nothing,” she stuttered, unsure. She searched, reaching as far into the shadows as she could see, but the men had gone.

  And while her father continued to eat, he’d talked about the day of the accident, and the thirty or so hours he’d been trapped in the car. He’d told of how he wrenched the car door open and dropped to the ground, still pinned and hung up by his leg. Covering Justin’s ears, her father confessed to having thoughts about breaking his own leg, or even amputating it if he had to. Justin’s eyes stayed huge as her father spoke. Thinking that he had been making jokes, Justin searched for laughter where there was none. He knew better though, once he’d saw that nobody was smiling. His face soured and soon he was trying to uncover his ears, pulling on his father’s fingers.


  “I’m sorry, Justin,” he said. “Some things you shouldn’t hear.”

  “Gotta be growed-up?” he asked. Her father brushed back Justin’s hair, and smiled.

  “That’s right—yes, a grown-up.” Emily felt a stir in her gut, conflicted. She didn’t want to be a grown-up either and wished someone would cover her ears sometimes. And she felt envy: envy of what her brother didn’t know, she would like to have known less, too. Peter rubbed her back, comforting her as her father told the story. And without thinking about it, she leaned into him, marrying their curves like she’d seen couples do. The move didn’t go unnoticed by her father. His voice stopped abruptly, but then continued to tell of what happened.

  He went on to tell them that near the ground, he’d found open pockets in the fog: pockets filled with fresh air. He’d told of how he finally pried himself free, and crawled around the car where he found his wife. Her father covered Justin’s ears again. This time, Justin left his father’s hands alone, letting the grown-ups talk.

  Emily let out a short gasp when she heard what her father said next—he’d buried her mother. Taking her off of the road, he’d dug a shallow grave with an ice scraper—and when that broke, he’d used his hands. Emily turned away as her father described the morbid scene. She tried to think of something other than the images put into her head. She closed her eyes and concentrated on Peter’s breathing. Her body rose and fell to the tide of his breath. She imagined that it was summer and that she was back at the beach; warm sand between her toes, listening to the surf break, listening to the fisherman and the beach-goers. The sun, when would they see it again? Emily opened her eyes when her father mentioned the service tunnel. He said it was a storm drain that led him to the tunnels. And that he would never have come across it if he had not taken to burying his wife.

  In his blindness, her father guided himself using the walls, scraping his way from one tunnel to the next. And while he spoke, black crescent moons danced on the tips of his fingers. The tunnel’s filth had pushed deep beneath his fingernails and into his pores, leaving his skin speckled and blackish. But there was something else on his hands too: blood. There was no mistaking the way the vivid crimson color stood out, or the way it had dried: patchy and flaking.

  The brown stains mixed with what he’d brought back from the tunnels, and Emily couldn’t help but wonder if it was her mother’s blood. But then a terrible idea leaped inside her—a dark intuition: what about the fire extinguisher, and tattoo man and his murder? She shrugged the notion away and pushed a small bottle of hand sanitizer across the table. He picked it up without so much as a glance—second nature. And though he’d rubbed away some of the stains, his hands remained dark and mottled by the filth of their new world. She checked her own hands, and noticed that she’d picked up the same grime. We’ll run out of these soon, she thought, squeezing the hand sanitizer. Justin giggled at the squelching sound, and then motioned for a small dap, mimicking her and her father.

  At Mr. Halcomb’s request, her father mapped where the storm drain was, and what service tunnels he’d traveled. A notepad on the table, and a pencil perched in his fingers, he drew long lazy lines, but struggled to steady his trembling hand. Dehydration, he’d said, but she thought it must have been more than that. How many hours had he slept? And as he drew the lines, connecting them, labeling them, he assured everyone that none of the map was to scale. But nobody objected—nobody would. Even in his exhausted state, she could see how folks revered him. He often spoke fast and used words that she did not recognize, and she knew she wasn’t the only one. Geek talk, her mother called it. Sometimes she’d throw in Chipmunk too, on account of how fast he spoke. Chipmunk Geek Talk. And her mother often joked that he was an engineer first and a human second.

  From their home, along the highway, and some of the other roads, he showed the service tunnels he’d followed. Some of the tunnels open up to the outside too, he’d said. Large culverts, connecting under some of the intersecting roads so that the rain water has somewhere to go.

  “The culverts are tricky,” he explained. “They’re exposed to the outside, but below ground level, so you’re safe from the clouds.”

  “How are you safe?” someone asked.

  “Clouds won’t dip below ground level… most barely make it to the ground.”

  “That explains the air in the service tunnels,” Mr. Halcomb added.

  Emily tapped her finger to the table, nearing the area on the paper where she’d expected to see a service tunnel leading to the beach. But that area of the paper stayed blank. Her father had never gone further than the mall. His map was incomplete—and she was certain it lead to the ocean and the machine.

  The folks that had gathered to listen to her father dispersed, taking what they’d learned and disappeared back into the surrounding mall—the only thing missing were the shopping bags. Otherwise, the view in front of her could have been from any weekend. Mr. Halcomb motioned to Peter, asking for some help. A chill rushed over her back where she’d been leaning against his chest.

  And as she watched Peter join Mr. Halcomb, she caught her father following him too. She bit at her lip, and her heart paced nervously.

  “Emily?” was all her father said, but it was enough. She pulled on her shirt, and sat down across from him, shrugging with a bit of uncertainty. “Just be careful. Understand?”

  “I am, Daddy,” she answered.

  “With everything going on—” he started to say, and motioned around him. “—I don’t want to see you get hurt.” She nodded, deciding to stifle what she really wanted to say. Sometimes the truth is best left unsaid.

  “They’re gathering soon,” she told him, trying to change the subject. “You should join the meeting… maybe help some of the others understand what is going on.” Her father’s eyes widened with alarm. He sat Justin back up, rubbing his son’s back and kissed his forehead like he’d always done when ready to leave them.

  “Justin, how about we play some later?” he asked, but Justin quickly harped a stern no, grabbing his father’s arm in a full hug. “Grown-ups have a meeting, and you don’t want to be bored, do you?” Justin’s boyish blue eyes glanced to where his friends were playing. He shook his head, and was off a moment later.

  “You met Mr. Halcomb, he kind of runs things. Ms. Parks is helping, too. I guess we’re all helping,” she added, wanting to share what Peter had shared with her when she’d first woken up.

  “What do you mean by helping them understand?” he asked. And at once, she recognized his tone. She shrugged, unknowingly, and shook her head, saying nothing. “It wouldn’t help if anyone knew where I worked. They’re going to want answers that I can’t give them.”

  “I didn’t say anything,” she answered. Her tone was sharp, and she suddenly felt hurt and emotional. “I heard you and Mom talking, and I know better than to say anything. I just thought you could help.”

  “Em, listen to me, listen good,” he said, his expression bleak. He glanced to Justin and then back. “It’s very important that nobody knows about where I was working.” For a moment, she let the silence fall between them, but could feel the tension like a static charge.

  “I understand—”, she finally began, but the uncomfortable moment had become something more: disappointment. Her eyes were damp, but she was stronger and held back. Her father did know something, and they were all in danger for it. “Just thought you’d be able to help is all.”

  “Oh Em, I’m sorry. Please,” he said, leaning over to hold her. “It’s just best that nobody ask about the machine or the ocean and what is going on.”

  “We think the service tunnel might go to the beach… to the machine,” she said, hoping to tap her father’s curiosity. It was manipulative, but she’d seen her mother do the same. Emily turned the hand-drawn map around and motioned with her finger past the mall toward the edge of the paper. “That’s the ocean, right?”

  Her father gazed at the map, cradling the table and the lip of t
he paper map. He stared for what seemed a long time, and then beyond her the way he sometimes did, looking at nothing in particular. He was thinking.

  “If that service tunnel reaches the ocean—” he started, and abruptly stopped, but his lips continued moving until he was nodding. “Yes! If that tunnel exits to the beach—where I think it does—then we can reach the machine.”

  “We?” she asked, wondering if he wanted her to come with him.

  He shook his head right away. “We—as in just me, and maybe one more. I’ll need the extra hands to help. Your friend, Peter, looks strong enough.”

  At the mention of Peter’s name, a new kind of concern leapt up inside her. She scowled, regretting that she’d ever mentioned the tunnel.

  “Well, maybe he’d be more helpful here?” she suggested.

  “Or… I might need someone older, more mechanical and experienced and all. Maybe Mr. Halcomb?”

  “Yeah. I think he’s mechanical,” she blurted without having any idea at all what he meant. She added, “Definitely older.”

  Her father placed his hand on top of hers, covering the ocean and the service tunnel. “Don’t worry, Em. I understand.” A smile ticked the corner of his mouth, but then disappeared. “But don’t mention any of this. Not until we know more. People are hurting, and when they’re hurt, they’re going to react.”

  “But why… what is going on?” she asked, unable to stave the curiosity. After all, if there was any chance of stopping what happened, then maybe someone in the group could help him. Her father sat back, shaking his head. “Maybe someone here can help you stop it?”

  “Maybe,” he answered, and gazed past her again. And again, she didn’t think he was looking at anything at all—just thinking: chipmunk thinking. “The service tunnel. Let’s find out if it does lead to the ocean first, and then see if we can figure out if it is near the machine too.”

  XIV

  MERRY-GO-ROUND