Black River Falls

by Jeff Hirsch

  There was a split-second shift, and I saw through a gap in the crowd that Oak Street was practically deserted. I pressed the mask to my face and ran for it. The second I made it out of the throng, there was the blast of a horn, and then the same black truck from earlier came barreling down the street, inches from flattening me. I fell and my elbow crashed into the sidewalk, sending a thunderclap of pain up my arm. A man shouted at me from the back of the truck, and another laughed.

  When they were gone, a second wave of infected rushed past, jostling and shouting. The world spun as I got up and stumbled away from them. I saw flashes of bodies, broken glass, cracked asphalt. I smelled smoke and heard what I thought were bells ringing. The next thing I knew, the crowds were gone and I was on my ass in an alleyway, bent knees in front of me, a greasy Dumpster wedged into my shoulder. Out on the street, teakettle voices screeched and wailed. I pushed myself deeper into the alley and tore off my mask so I could breathe. The air tasted sour and vinegary. My stomach flipped. I remembered what I told Benny, and I clawed through my memories, looking for someplace safe to hide. Most of them slipped away too quickly to get ahold of, but then I felt a snag.

  Me and you. Our old bedroom in Brooklyn. Snow falling on the fire escape outside our window. Mom and Dad had gone to bed hours earlier. Once you were sure they were asleep, you slipped out into the living room. I lay there watching the snow and listening to the sound of you padding around in your socks. A desk drawer opened and closed, and then you flung yourself back into the room and shut the door.

  “Tennant, what were you doing in Dad’s desk? He’ll freak if he finds out.”

  “Dude!” you hissed. “Shut. Up.”

  You fell into bed beside me, and a flashlight flared to life, moving down the length of your arm to the pages you held in your hand. The title was in black letters across the top.

  CARDINAL AND THE

  BROTHERHOOD OF WINGS.

  “Whoa. Tenn, those are—we can’t.”

  “It’s just us,” you said. “Besides, Mom and Dad named you after the main character. That gives you, like, a legal right to read it.”

  I was about to refuse, but then you handed me the first page and it was like everything in the room vanished except for that rectangle of black and white. There they were. The towers of Liberty City shining in the sun. The Brotherhood’s Aerie. Sally Sparrow and Rex Raven soaring through a cloudless sky. We worked through that first issue page by page, warm under the covers while the snow piled up outside. We met Madame Night. Penny Dreadful. Kirzon Sloat and the Emerald Horde. It was like watching a whole new universe explode into existence right before our eyes.

  “Hey! You all right?”

  A woman’s voice tugged me back toward the alley. I didn’t open my eyes, didn’t look up. Whoever she was, I hoped she’d just go away. I wanted to be left alone, wanted to stay where I was, with you, but she didn’t leave.

  “Kid?”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “Funny. You don’t look fine, hon.”

  That voice. I lifted my head and opened my eyes. Sunlight poured around the silhouette of a woman standing at the mouth of the alley. She took a step forward.

  It was Mom.

  4

  I SAT UP SLOWLY and flattened my back against the wall. My mask was sitting beside me, but something stopped me from putting it on.

  “I’m okay,” I said. “Thanks.”

  I’d spent three days after the outbreak searching for her, but this was the first time I’d actually seen her since that night. She was thinner than she used to be, and her skin was a deeper brown, as if she’d been spending a lot of time outside. I looked at her left hand and saw that her wedding band was gone. I tried to remember if she’d already stopped wearing it before the sixteenth.

  The biggest change was her hair. Remember how when we were kids she’d always talk about ditching the chemicals and going natural? Well, she’d finally done it. It looked like she’d chopped it down to her scalp before letting it grow back. Since she was a quarantine away from any relaxer, it was coming in as a half-inch halo of tiny curls. It suited her, highlighting her big eyes and the sharp angles of her face.

  “Well, if you’re sure you’re okay . . .”

  Mom turned toward the wave of people heading for the park.

  I scrambled to my feet, resisting the urge to close the distance between us. “Maybe I’m just hungry.”

  I glanced at a big straw bag hanging from her shoulder. When we were kids, she never left the house without a snack in her purse. Apples. Rice cakes slathered with peanut butter. Remember how she said low blood sugar turned us into monsters? Mom dipped one hand into her bag. My heart leaped a little when she drew out a granola bar and tossed it to me. I rechecked the distance between us and then moved into the sunlight near the mouth of the alley.

  “My name’s Cardinal,” I said. “Cardinal Cassidy.”

  Once the Guard got the town under control, their first order of business had been to try to put everything back the way it was. Tell people their names. Reintroduce them to their families. But when I said my name, there wasn’t so much as a wrinkled eyebrow to suggest that Mom recognized it. Had they missed her?

  There was a shout from somewhere in the crowd. She turned toward it.

  “Nice to meet you, Cardinal. But I better get going.”

  “No, wait a second. Please. I have to—”

  The sound of engines cut me off. Three Guard trucks rumbled by. Mom mixed in with the few infected still on the street as the rest ran out ahead of the trucks. I called out to her again, but if she heard me, she didn’t turn around. The last thing I saw was a flash of her short dark hair as she melted into the crowd.

  The next thing I remember is sitting on the hill overlooking Monument Park. My mask was strapped on tight and my hands were sweating inside my gloves.

  By then a few thousand infected were pressed shoulder to shoulder behind the National Guard trucks. They moved in swells, surging forward and then just as suddenly pulling back. I dropped my head onto my bent knees and squeezed my eyes shut.

  As soon as I did, I was right back in our living room in Brooklyn before we’d moved to Black River. It was a typical Saturday morning. You and I on the floor mashing buttons on the controllers of a beat‑up old Xbox. Dad behind us, hunching his giant frame over that tiny desk in the corner he called his office. He’d be sketching furiously and bouncing his head to The Clash so hard that his mane of blond hair danced over his shoulders.

  Mom was sprawled out on our worn-out blue couch, exhausted from a night of dance rehearsals followed by a late shift at that hipster bar with the fifteen-dollar hamburgers. She had a book tented on her chest, but like always, she was watching us play and enthusiastically yelling out useless bits of advice.

  “Go over there! Now kill that guy! No! Not that guy, that guy! Tennant, come on. Just kill. All. The. Guys!”

  “Shut up, Mom!”

  My eyes popped open at a series of shouts down in the park. An old man with white hair and a tattered black overcoat was elbowing his way through the crowd, picking up speed as he moved away from the trucks. He turned to look behind him and slammed into the postal table, sending stacks of letters flying into the air like confetti. Everyone reared back in anger as he righted himself, but he ignored them and ran on. I looked closer. The black coat and filthy clothes. The scraggly beard. It had to be Freeman Wayne, Black River’s self-proclaimed town librarian. I’d never seen the guy before, but he matched Greer’s description exactly. What was he doing?

  Whatever it was, it had attracted the attention of the Guard. They started moving toward him but stopped suddenly when they saw five of the men in the blue hazmat suits approaching him as well. A few words were exchanged and the guardsmen backed off, allowing the strangers in blue to take hold of Freeman. Why would the Guard do that? As Freeman was led away, the crowd pulsed and squirmed like a nest of bees that’d just been poked.

  I couldn’t sta
nd it another minute, so I went down the opposite side of the hill, ending up on an empty two-lane road. Even with a barrier between me and the park, the air still pulsed with the energy of the crowd. I passed a rusty playground and the old ice-cream shop and then crossed over into a warren of boarded-up houses.

  The yards were overrun, choked with weeds and wildflowers in red and yellow and blue. Honeysuckle spilled out onto sidewalks, filling the air with a sweetness so syrupy it smelled like rot. I pictured Mom in her sun hat and gloves, gardening manual in hand, ordering the two of us around that first year in Black River. Cut this! Water that! Ferti­lize over here! She’d spent weeks making fun of our yard-obsessed neighbors, but there we were, beating back the sprawl of weeds to make room for roses and lavender and that yellow spidery thing that nearly took over the entire lawn. After years of living in Brooklyn, it seemed that having soil under our feet instead of grease-shellacked concrete had made Mom deranged. What would she think if she knew how useless all of it had been?

  I turned down streets at random, following some internal compass with a needle that spun and spun. Soon the sounds of the park were gone, replaced by wind blowing through untended grass and down empty streets. I passed our high school and the library and the now abandoned vintage store where Mom used to go.

  I knew I couldn’t blame the infected for not remembering. But how many times had I seen lightning flashes of the person Greer used to be? Like when some random guardsman was giving him a hassle and he’d clench his fists and grit his teeth. For a second he was that kid from the bus stop all over again. Didn’t there have to be places like that within all the infected? Like knots in a length of wood that could be sanded down but never erased completely. And if there were, how was it possible that I wasn’t one of those places for Mom?

  As I came around a corner, a crow shot out of a tree with a shriek. Startled, I jumped back. That’s when I realized I was standing on our front lawn.

  I hadn’t been back to the house since the sixteenth. It had almost entirely escaped the chaos that raged through town that night. A few soot marks marred the white porch columns, and the attic window was broken, but other than that, it was unchanged.

  A bank of clouds passed over the sun, sending a pins-and-needles chill up my spine. I scanned the yards around me and peered down the gaps between the houses across the street. They were empty. I was alone.

  A voice in the back of my head, yours, told me to turn around and leave, but I didn’t—couldn’t, it felt like. It was as if I’d wandered into a stream and the current was dragging me along. I placed one foot on the bottom step and took hold of the railing, then climbed up to the porch. The floor seemed like it was moving beneath me in rounded swells. I steadied myself by staring at the end of a single brass nail hammered into the door, the one Mom used to hang Christmas wreaths and Halloween skeletons. I heard her singing “The Little Drummer Boy.”

  I staggered backward. Something brushed against my leg. I looked down and was surprised to see that I was clutching the hunting knife. I didn’t remember pulling it out of its sheath, but there was something about that slab of metal in my hand, with its jagged rat’s teeth and cutting edge, that made the pitching feel of the floor beneath me go still. I moved down to the kitchen windows. I told myself not to look inside, but even as the thought went through my head, I was lifting my hand to wipe the dust away from the glass.

  I could make out the edge of the coffeemaker sitting beside the sink, and the turquoise tops of the chairs that surrounded the marble kitchen island. I remembered Mom spending an entire weekend with those chairs after she brought them home from some secondhand store. Cleaning them, sanding them, coating them with layer after layer of spray paint, and then polishing them until they glowed.

  I leaned my forehead against the window and yanked my mask down so I could breathe. Sometimes it seems that all the good things and all the bad things are like vines growing up the side of the same house. There are so many of them, and they’re all so tangled up that it’s impossible to tell one from the other. It’s easy to think you’ve been saved when really you’ve been doomed all along.

  I should have left right then. I should have turned around and run, but I didn’t. I peered inside again. Light from the windows filled that wide-open first floor Mom and Dad loved so much. I could see from the kitchen to the dining room table and beyond, to the stairs at the edge of the living room that went up to the second floor.

  I turned and pressed my cheek against the glass. The wall by the front door was marked by streaks of shadow that gleamed thickly as they ran down to the floor and spread out in dark pools. I stared at them for a long time, long enough to realize that they weren’t really shadows at all.

  I heard bells ringing somewhere out in the neighborhood. No, not bells. Wind chimes.

  The inside of the house swirled into streaks of turquoise and white. My knife hit the ground and the next thing I knew my knees crumpled and my stomach seized, folding me in half. I vomited acid onto the porch and then fell onto my side and buried my head in my hands. I grasped for the hush of the snowfall and the rustle of pages as they went from your hand to mine, but every time I thought I had it, my fingers slipped and the memory went hurtling away. The last thing I saw before darkness rushed in was the silver blade of a knife.

  5

  “DUDE! CARDINAL! Slow down!”

  “Leave me alone!”

  I was running down Water Street toward Brooklyn Bridge Park, and you were struggling to catch up. I hadn’t stopped or slowed down since Mom and Dad announced our impending move to Black River.

  “You totally freaked out Mom and Dad!”

  “Good!”

  “Cardinal!”

  “They freaked me out, Tennant! Didn’t they freak you out?”

  “No!”

  I stopped and turned around. You tried to hold on to the lie, but it took only a couple seconds of being stared at by a pissed-off thirteen-year-old before you threw up your hands.

  “All right! Fine! So maybe it was a little abrupt.”

  “A little? They looked like crazy people!”

  You laughed. “They aren’t crazy. They’re just excited. This is huge for them. Dad’s wanted to quit that stupid advertising job for years. Selling the Brotherhood to Marvel means he can!”

  “But what about Mom?”

  “What has she wanted to do ever since she had to stop dancing? Open her own studio. She can do that up there.”

  I crossed my arms and scowled at the sidewalk. We were just a couple blocks from the park. I could hear kids screaming and the ice-cream truck’s jingle.

  “Look,” you said with a sigh. “You’re freaked. I get it. How about you let me buy you an ice-cream cone—”

  “I’m not nine, Tennant.”

  “I know you’re not nine, Card. I want a cone. Okay? Let’s get a couple, then we’ll sit down and figure this out.”

  I looked over my shoulder to where the East River appeared and disappeared between the buildings at the edge of the park. What choice did I have? If I started running again, pretty soon we’d both be swimming.

  Minutes later we were sitting on a bench watching the skateboarders whiz by while tourists snapped pictures of the bridge. I worked on my soft serve while you ticked off the pros.

  “No more bedbugs. No more roaches. No more getting packed into subway cars with busted air conditioners in the middle of summer.”

  “What about our friends?”

  “Black River is only two hours away,” you said. “We’ll see them whenever we want. And besides, when we start at Black River High, we’ll be the cool and mysterious kids from Brooklyn, so we’ll make tons of new friends. Hot girls will literally swoon.”

  “Hmm.”

  “And there are bike trails,” you continued. “And rivers, and mountains. And people go out and pick their own apples and pumpkins in the fall. We can learn to kayak!”

  “Since when do you want to learn to kayak?”

&n
bsp; “Since right now! I just decided. I’m gonna be Kayak Guy. Oh! And maybe Snowboarding Guy. Wouldn’t that be awesome?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Awesome.”

  “I can see you’re a tough sell, kid. That’s why I saved the best for last. This house Mom and Dad are buying? We’ll have our own rooms.”

  I didn’t say anything, but all I could think was that I didn’t want my own room. You and I had been sharing a room since birth. The idea of being locked up in some room all on my own made me feel like I’d just been tossed into the East River with a sack of concrete tied to my ankle. I dumped the dregs of my ice-cream cone in the trash.

  You nudged my shoulder with yours. “Think about it this way, bro. What would have happened to Kal-El if he’d grown up on Krypton instead of Earth?”

  “Uh, he would’ve died when the planet exploded?”

  “Okay. Fine. But forget that for a second. If Kal-El had grown up on Krypton, he’d have ended up just like everybody else. Dude had to move to Earth to be Superman.”

  You turned to me on the bench and leaned in closer.

  “Just think about it. There’s a whole new world out there, and we can make it into anything we want. We can make us into anything we want.”

  Across the river the sun streamed down over the skyscrapers of Manhattan. I imagined a streak of blue and red soaring over the city and smiled despite myself.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Maybe that is kind of awesome.”

  I woke with a start and found myself still on the porch. I sat up, groaning, and put my back against the railing. The world was hazy and smelled of sweat and vomit. Dark clouds had spread over the town, and the air had that heavy, charged feeling that comes just before a storm. Once my head stopped pounding, I gathered my things, then staggered down toward the street.