by Em Garner
She turns at the sound of my voice. Her smile’s crooked, but real. She’s looking at me, not through me. She tilts her head like she’s curious. “How are you, Mom?”
She blinks rapidly. She lifts a hand, tilts it back and forth. Then she touches her forehead with the tip of one finger in two places, once on each temple. Then she touches the collar and her smile tips into a frown.
“You want to take it off.” It’s not a question.
She blinks again, eyelids fluttering. Her fingers fall away from the collar. Her gaze is a little blurred when she looks at me again. I don’t know how sophisticated the technology is, if they can somehow trace something in her brain that’s reacting to her thoughts, but something’s definitely happened.
Then she shakes her head sharply. Once, twice. She slaps her face next and I’m so startled, I don’t even move to stop her. The sound of her palm on her cheek is loud enough to get Opal’s attention, too.
“Mom, don’t.” I catch her hand before she can do it again, and her fingers twist in mine. There’s a red mark in the shape of her hand on her face.
But her eyes are clear again. I don’t understand this. Something is going on with the collar, with my mom. She’s trying to tell me something with the motion of her fingertips, sign language I can’t figure out. Opal’s been better at interpreting than I am, but even she doesn’t have a clue.
My mom stops. She clings to both of us, hugging tight. When she pulls away, she looks so much like the way she used to that I have to swallow hard against the rush of emotions threatening to choke me.
They told us the Contaminated would never be the way they were. There was no cure. You can’t fix a brain, you can only hope to rewire it. But what if the scientists and doctors and government officials are wrong?
“I can’t take off the collar, Mom. It’s programmed to go off if anyone tries to get it off without a special key. I don’t have one.”
She nods. She touches her head again, once and twice. Then she touches her throat, just above the collar. Then her lips, almost like she’s blowing a kiss.
“What’s she saying, Opal?”
Opal tilts her head just the way my mom did. She’s such a little minimom. “She wants to talk, but she can’t. Something in her throat is wrong, and her mouth won’t work.”
“From the collar.” It has to be.
My mom opens her mouth. Noises come out, but they’re not words. I can see the frustration in her face. She tries again. And again.
The green light blinks.
“Mom, enough. You’re going to hurt yourself.” An idea strikes me. “Opal. Pen and paper!”
Opal jumps at once to the junk drawer, where she pulls out a pad of paper and a dull pencil. “Mama, can you write?”
“Can you draw a picture, maybe?”
My mom takes the pen and paper and looks at them like she’s not sure what they are. My heart’s falling, but Opal takes our mom’s hand and puts the pen to the paper, demonstrating. Mom brightens. The pen skids across the paper, leaving an unsteady black line.
We’re all excited now, the way we used to get when we played Pictionary. My mom’s scribbling. Opal and I are calling out possibilities. My mom keeps drawing.
“House! Um… boat? Noah’s ark!” Opal shouts.
I’m trying harder to make actual sense of this. “House? Our house?”
It’s a square with a pointed top added, but beyond that, I really can’t tell what she means. My mom shakes her hand and lets the pen drop. She flexes her fingers and reaches for the pen again, but it won’t stay still in her grip. She lets out a long, low groan of frustration.
The yellow light’s started blinking. I gently take the pen from her grasp and fold my hands around hers.
“You don’t have to do this now,” I say. I think of what Dillon told me. “It’s going to be okay, Mom. It’s all going to be okay.”
Her eyes are bright with tears, but she nods. She gathers us close again. I can shut my eyes and pretend this is like it used to be, but that will only last until I open them. We squeeze one another hard.
I didn’t believe Dillon when he said it, but somehow, I believe myself.
* * *
I’m not expecting him the next morning so early, but Dillon shows up before any of us have really even managed to get dressed or brush our teeth. He’s so early and unexpected that I don’t answer the door right away, and we all freeze at the knock. I open it, bracing myself for a uniformed cop or worse, a couple of soldiers. My breath rushes out of me in a whoosh when I see it’s him.
“You scared me, Dillon!”
He tugs my arm to pull me into the small formal living room we never used back then and don’t bother with now, either. “Velvet, get dressed. Get whatever money you have. I think you should come to the store right now.”
“Why? What’s going on?”
Dillon shakes his head. “I’ll tell you on the way there.”
It takes me only a few minutes to get dressed, and we’re on the highway in another five. Then… traffic. Backed up all the way to the entrance to the neighborhood.
“More roadblocks?” I ask.
Dillon nods. “Something’s going down. Nobody is saying anything, nothing on the news. But last night…”
His voice breaks, and I’m glad we’re not moving because there’s no way he could drive with his head against the steering wheel. He’s comforted me so many times and now it’s my turn, but I feel like I’m doing a really bad job of it. I rub his shoulder.
“What?” I ask.
“Last night, my mom didn’t come home from work on time. I thought she was just, you know, staying after to take care of the Connies because she had to fire Carlos—”
“You didn’t tell me that!”
Dillon shudders a sigh. “Yeah. Funding’s been cut. She had to let Carlos go, and the docs who usually help out, volunteering, were suddenly not showing up. She thinks they were told not to.”
“By who?” Ahead of us, the line moves the length of one car.
“She doesn’t know. The government, maybe. Anyway, I thought she was just staying late, and I was going to go in and help her, even, but my dad… I know he can be left alone and stuff, but I don’t want him to be alone for so long. He gets worried.”
“Yeah. I know.” I squeeze his shoulder again.
Dillon’s eyes are rimmed with red. I’m not sure what I’ll do if he starts to cry. “Turns out, she was kept after work because they came and took them all away. All the Connies she had left.”
“All the unclaimed? But… why? What would they be doing with them?”
“Mom doesn’t know. They wouldn’t tell her. Soldiers came and rounded them up, told her she’d be shut down by the end of the week. Velvet, Mom says she thinks this is just the beginning. Those rumors about them rounding up all the Contaminated, even the neutralized ones? She thinks they’re happening. The news isn’t reporting it now, but she’s sure this is just the start.”
I think of what he said about mandatory testing. “She thinks they’re going to start taking people in for testing to see if they have any Residual Contamination?”
Dillon nods. “She saw some paperwork when the sergeant or whoever wasn’t paying attention. That’s what it looks like. Velvet, you had some, right? You drank the water.”
My stomach leaps into my throat. “Yeah.”
“And you never went in for voluntary testing.”
“No.” I shake my head. “Never seemed to be a point in it. They said they can’t do anything about it.”
The line moves again. Our car creeps forward. Nobody passes us going the other way. Dillon stares grimly ahead, then at me.
“They also said, after that third wave, that there wouldn’t be any more outbreaks, that it had all been contained. Now I’m even hearing stuff about how maybe there’s more Contamination, not just in the ThinPro, but other stuff.”
“Like what?” All of this is making my head spin.
“It ca
me from meat the first time,” he says. “Protein. So anything with meat or protein in it.”
“But you’re not sure. It’s just rumors. Maybe they’re just trying to scare people.”
Dillon grips the steering wheel so hard, his fingers turn white. “Maybe.”
“So why are we going to the grocery store?”
Dillon looks fierce. “You have to stock up. Canned stuff, nothing with meat. Dried beans, pasta, stuff like that. Out there where you are, if you stay quiet, they’re not going to come for you. At least not right away, or for a while. And we can figure out what they’re doing.”
“You’re really scared.” This scares me, too.
“Velvet… they haven’t said anything about this on the news. Nothing. Do you remember when it was all happening the first time? It was all over the news. And when they brought out the collars and started releasing the Connies back to their families, do you remember how much that was all over the place, too?”
“Yeah. But—”
“Nothing. Not a peep,” Dillon says. “That’s not right. And suddenly there are soldiers all over the roads? And closing down the kennels?”
We’re three cars away from the roadblock. I see soldiers on both sides of the cars, not just one. They have guns. “Where’s your mom now, Dillon?”
“Home with Dad. She’s out of a job. Me, too, I guess. She says it’s okay. She wants to stay home with him now until all of this shakes out.” He doesn’t sound as confident as he’s trying to convince me he is.
We make it through the roadblock without trouble. The soldiers looking through the windows don’t look much older than we are. They look scared, too. Are soldiers supposed to look scared?
The grocery store is crowded, but not necessarily more than usual. Certainly nobody seems to be in a panic or anything. Dillon and I each take a cart. He leads me up and down the aisles. I’m used to making good choices, sticking to a budget. Instead of canned ravioli, though, I pick out vegetarian choices. Or kosher—you can tell by the little symbol on the package, and kosher foods will always say if they have meat in them. I stock up on dried beans and rice and pasta, all of which are plentiful, while the shelves in the cookie and snacks aisles are looking pretty bare.
We don’t buy anything fresh or frozen. Only canned or dried. We fill almost half the cart with ramen noodles, a steal at six for a buck, even if we get only the onion flavored and not my favorite, roast pork. Dillon’s right, we just don’t know. The original ThinPro Contamination came from using animal protein instead of synthetic, but it was all mixed up, and not from just one kind of animal the way mad cow disease was.
Dillon’s stocking up on toilet paper and paper towels. He’s also added batteries, candles, matches, and bottled water to the cart. In this moment, I realize something.
I could love him.
“I can’t afford this, Dillon,” I whisper. “My stamps and assistance only cover food, anyway, and I don’t have much cash.”
“I’ve got some.”
“I can’t let you—”
Dillon stops me right there in the middle of the aisle with a kiss that earns us a few strange looks. “You have to let me. I want to, Velvet, don’t you get it? I want to help you.”
I don’t fight with him about it. He looks too fierce, too determined. Besides, I’m scared he’s right, that something’s going down, and I don’t want to be caught unprepared. I remember too well what that was like the first time, how Opal and I ended up being taken away.
The bill is staggering. The cashier gives us both a funny look. “Stocking up, huh?”
Dillon gives him an entirely false grin and pulls out a wad of cash from his pocket. “We like shopping in bulk. Saves money that way.”
Practically nothing we bought was on sale, but the cashier nods like this makes sense. “Right, right. Paper or plastic?”
“We’re green,” Dillon says with a serious face. “We’ll just put it back in the cart and load it into the car.”
This, too, the cashier accepts without a second look. He rings up the order with a bunch of chatter Dillon fends off while I stand there and look like a moron. I can’t help it. I’m struck as dumb as if I’m collared by everything that’s going on, and I won’t lie, it feels good to have Dillon as my voice.
We’re leaving the store with our carts so heavy, they’re hard to push, when activity explodes in the parking lot. I hadn’t paid much attention to the cop cars when we came in—they’re all over the place, all the time. But the lights weren’t flashing then, and they’re flashing now. Again, not such a strange sight, except that there are four cops standing in a half circle around a man who looks maybe my mom’s age. The woman with him has the slumped shoulders and a hanging head I recognize. Even though I can’t see the collar, I know she’s wearing one.
“Keep moving,” Dillon says from the corner of his mouth, his gaze straight ahead. “Just keep going.”
We push the carts to his truck, which I don’t even think of as his dad’s anymore, now that I know about his father. We unload them quickly, stacking everything in the plastic bins he has back there, secured with bungee cords. Dillon pulls a tarp over everything and secures that, too.
The police have put the woman in the back of their car. The man isn’t taking this quietly. He’s yelling and shouting, waving his arms. He’s gathered a crowd. The cops look annoyed, but they’re not doing anything until the man pushes one of them. Then he’s on the ground in half a minute, face pressed into the concrete. The crowd steps back with a simultaneous noise of dismay.
“Let’s go,” Dillon says, and I can’t agree more.
TWENTY-FIVE
THE TRAFFIC’S NOT SO BACKED UP IN THIS direction. When they ask where we’re going, Dillon says Manheim. I lie without hesitation, tell the soldiers I live there, Dillon’s my boyfriend, and he’s driving me home. I don’t even think about why we’re lying about where I actually live, but it makes sense when we get to Spring Lake Commons and the gate’s been shut across the front again. This time it’s locked with a shiny new lock.
“Crap,” Dillon says miserably. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard him curse. I’d have probably said something stronger than that. “Is there another road?”
“One way in, one way out. It’s, like, some big deal for safety. But…” I think. “There’s a hiking trail back by the power lines. It’s not meant for cars.”
“I have four-wheel drive,” Dillon says. “We’ll make it.”
We do, but barely. The scratches in the paint, and the mud splashed up all the way to the windows, don’t seem to bother him, but they worry me. He managed to get in, but how’s he going to get back out? And why did they lock up the neighborhood again?
We recruit Mom and Opal to unload groceries. My mom seems dim again, or just tired. She moves slowly but follows instructions, though she does seem a little confused. When I tell her to put the beans in the box in the pantry, she puts them in the cupboard, and the cereal I told her to put in the cupboard, under the sink. Opal corrects her patiently, but this worries me. She was doing so good just a few hours ago, and now…
“No, Mama. Here.” Opal takes the cans from her and puts them in the pantry. “Like this, see?”
“I have to get back,” Dillon says. “Check on my mom and dad.”
“Do you think anything’s happened to them?”
“I don’t know. But after what we saw today in the parking lot…,” he says, and stops.
I hug him tight. “Go. We’ll be okay.”
“Don’t turn on the generator,” Dillon warns. “Stay in the house. If you can stay warm enough, Velvet, I wouldn’t even use the fireplace.”
“For how long?”
He stutters at the question. “I… don’t know.”
Dillon looks so bleak, so afraid, I hug him again. I don’t want him to go, but I know he has to. I’d go if I were him. I’d be worried, too.
“Go. Tell your mom I said hi.”
“I will.” He ki
sses me hard, then lets me go and is out the door before I can say anything else. I hope he makes it.
* * *
I don’t hear from Dillon for four agonizing days. I don’t turn on the generator, but we have plenty of flashlights and candles. I turn on the battery-powered radio and listen constantly, but the news reports only list road closings “for construction” and new curfews in effect, nothing about the Contamination at all. That’s scarier than if they ran constant reports on it.
The Voice doesn’t come on the radio at all.
I don’t make Opal do her homework. Instead we pass the time playing board games the way that’s become our habit. I found an old chalkboard in the basement from when we used to play school, and we set that up in the family room so we can keep score. Opal has something like five hundred and three wins, and I’m trailing behind with only three hundred. Mom’s right between us.
She flickers in and out. I can’t tell if she’s getting better or worse. The collar flashes a few times to yellow, but it always goes back to green. It never stops blinking, though, which means it’s either malfunctioning or she’s triggering it nonstop. She touches it often, even though we try to distract her.
On the fifth day, I can’t stand it any longer. Eating cold food. I can live without the lights and good hot water, but I can’t stand another meal of cold tuna on crackers. I light the fire and we gather around it. The days are getting warmer but even so, being around the light and warmth makes this all seem better.
I know I should stop thinking about Dillon and his parents. He can’t call me, and he can’t easily get here, so I have to assume he’ll be all right. I know he’d get in contact with me if he could. I have to think this is a good sign, that nothing bad’s happened, but all I can think is the opposite.
The fire doesn’t bring us any attention and it’s much nicer to be warm and eating cooked food, so I keep lighting it. I do hold off on the generator, though, more because I don’t want to run out of gas than from fear someone will hear it. They locked up the neighborhood, and even the occasional car I used to hear on the street never passes. We’re out here all alone.
