The Warning

by Patterson, James

  Jordan couldn’t stop apologizing as I drove him home.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “You were being so sweet.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “It’s been a really stressful time.”

  “I get it.”

  “Please don’t take it personally.”

  “I won’t.”

  “That was shaping up to be a pretty romantic moment.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Before I ralphed.”

  “Don’t need the recap here, Jordan.”

  “That was disgusting. Tasted awful, too. And fizzy.”

  “Okay, we can stop talking about it now.”

  “It was no reflection on how I feel about you.”

  “I didn’t interpret it as such.”

  “Please don’t take it personally.”

  “I will if you don’t shut up already.”

  He smiled sheepishly.

  “Anyway, I’m sorry,” he said.

  “It’s okay.”

  “I should have left a tender moment alone.”

  “You seriously have to stop right now.”

  He smirked to himself. I guess that was a good sign.

  “Got a breath mint?” he asked.

  I pulled a tin of Altoids from my purse as I turned onto our street. “Take ’em all.”

  After we got home, Jordan recounted his whole disturbing conversation with his father. I didn’t know his dad well, but when I’d seen him at school events or his house, he always seemed like a friendly-enough guy—a nerdy scientist who took quiet pride in his son and family. He may not have been the most effusive fellow, but he also didn’t come across as the cold automaton that Jordan was describing. He didn’t even offer Jordan a ride, just left him sitting there with his wounded leg.

  Also, he gave Jordan a warning. I knew Jordan. Telling him to back off was the quickest way to get him to dig deeper.

  “Well, if you’re going to be staying here longer, let’s make this place feel a bit more like home,” I said in the exam room that he’d been using as a bedroom.

  “Great,” he said without much inflection.

  “Check this out,” I said, and pulled out a rolled-up poster. “I found this at a thrift store before the evacuation and had been waiting for the right occasion to take it out. This is it.”

  I unrolled an Evil Dead II poster, the skull with eyeballs looking sideways off the page.

  “Awesome!” Jordan enthused. “That’s an original?”

  “Of course. And now it’s yours.”

  “You’re the best,” he said, and gave me a hug that included many awkward pats on the back before he pulled away.

  “And, hey,” I said, “pending any other unexpected disasters, school starts tomorrow at last. So that’ll feel somewhat ‘normal.’”

  “Sure,” he said. “Now, where’s that poster putty?”

  I’d hoped to get a decent night’s sleep before the first day of school, but once again I woke up early to frenzied barking. Mrs. Little, the middle-school librarian, arrived at our front door at 6 a.m. with her wild hound dog bouncing off the sides of its carrier. As I stood at the top of the stairs, I heard Mrs. Little telling my mom that she’d had to lure the dog into the carrier with one of Mr. Little’s T-bone steaks, which it had eaten clean off the bone before the loud crunching of bone began.

  “He got away from us, ran off into the woods, and came back like this,” Mrs. Little said. “Please tell me it’s not rabies. He tried to bite my husband.”

  “It’s not rabies,” my mom said. “But you may want to say good-bye to this fella.”

  After Mom transferred the agitated dog from the carrier into a kennel and a distraught Mrs. Little left, I made my way down the stairs and asked, “What’s the deal with all these angry bitches?”

  “Ha,” Mom said. “Who knows, at this point? I’ll do my exam and run my tests, but I suspect we’ll continue to keep Mr. Marsh busy.”

  Ugh. I’d seen enough dog corpses—and ashes—to last the year.

  As Mom went upstairs to shower, I decided it was too late for me to try to get back to sleep. I thought all that barking—which continued from the other room—would have woken up Jordan, but when I opened his door a crack, he was sleeping the sleep of angels. I know it’s a cliché, but he looked so peaceful—all that daytime tension having slipped away. I wanted to walk up to him and run my hand over his curls, kiss that forehead. That’s how I would have loved to be awakened. But, no, I wasn’t going to do that.

  Instead, I sat by the office computer and tried to open a web browser. My muscle memory still thought this would work. Then reality kicked in again.

  I spotted a box from the mortuary on the counter. Every time it cremated one of the dogs, it returned the remains. I opened the box to the depressing sight of seven dog collars—three blue, two red, and two black—with names on the tags: Skeeter, Muffin, Jake, Bowzer, Rooster, Danny, and Bull. Next to the collars was a plastic bag containing little metal discs with thin wires snaking out. The discs were dusty and scuffed up, like spoons that had gotten jammed in the disposal.

  When the mortician previously showed us such pieces, Mom dismissed them as broken bits of the grate or something else mundane. I disagreed.

  I took them to a back room that was used both for storage and as a lab. I had to move boxes out of the way to make room for the heavy case that I pulled out from under the desk. I carefully lifted the microscope out of its felt-lined container and plugged it in.

  I placed one of the biggest discs beneath the lens and peered down. It was out of focus, and as I adjusted the lens up and down, I realized I needed to clean it. A few minutes later, I had a clear view of the piece.

  It looked different from what I expected. Although it felt smooth in my fingers, like a piece of crafted aluminum, the flat surface had a pattern etched or stamped into it, some sort of hexagon. I checked the magnification and did some quick math in my head; each hexagon appeared to be less than a quarter of a millimeter across.

  I stood up from the counter. At some point all of these odd details would have to add up. I caught my reflection in the lab’s mirror. With my rolled-out-of-bed straggly blond hair and pasty complexion, I realized I looked like my mom—the tired version. It would take some work to make me presentable for the first day of school.

  “Hey,” came a deep voice behind me, and I jumped.

  “Hey back. You startled me.”

  “Sorry,” Jordan said, grinning. “I was just looking for someone who might give me a rabies shot.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Bend over.”

  “Ah, that’s all right.” I felt self-conscious standing there all rumpled and unmade-up in my oversize T-shirt, but Jordan’s cheerful look put me at ease. “Well, since we’re both up early, how about a quick field trip before school?”

  Soon we were walking to the Main Street office of the Mount Hope Sentinel. It wasn’t the best paper, but what can you expect from a town of five thousand people? Until the nuclear plant exploded, what constituted big news around here was Mrs. Corrigan’s beet salad placing second at a county cook-off. The Sentinel was a weekly and didn’t even have a functional website to fill in the gaps over the rest of the week. With the portly, wheezing fifty-something editor, Ronnie Stevenson, writing most of the stories while his birdlike layout person, Lizzie Grisbene, took photos and penned the occasional piece as well, this paper had limited utility—except now that we were cut off from the internet and CNN and our smartphone signals.

  As I walked, I thought about what the news outlets would be reporting if they knew what was going on. The Carters apparently were all dead—the mom and dad and their four kids. They were younger than me, so I hadn’t hung out with them, but I couldn’t count the times I’d sat on Jordan’s porch and watched them running around on their lawn.

  Then there were the Moores. I’d promised Evie I’d save her parents, and now she and Hann
ah were orphans.

  Then there was the burning person Jordan saw that night. I feared that I was losing Jordan—that he was going crazy and there was nothing I could do about it. As he strode beside me with no limp, his head was up, his lips closed, his expression almost serene. It was a stark contrast to the previous day, when every little facial muscle was tightened to the max. The night’s sleep had done him good.

  What had sliced him at the nuclear plant, a monster’s arm sword or, more likely, the razor wire surrounding the building? What was with his Superman—or Spider-Man—complex, where he thought he could fight anybody? Could he really see in the dark?

  I wanted to trust Jordan, needed to. Especially now with so much going on. Especially now because, well, we pretty much knew how we felt about each other, even though apparently we never were going to do anything about it. So my nagging doubts and suspicions were a problem. I glanced at him again and took in those clear brown eyes. This was a great guy, my great guy. If only I could believe blindly.

  When we reached the Sentinel’s storefront, the doorknob wouldn’t turn.

  “Look,” Jordan said, nodding toward a sheet of orange paper taped to the window. It said the office had been shuttered by order of the Department of Health.

  “What?” I said. “Since when does Mount Hope have a Department of Health?”

  “Yeah, and it’s not like the place was serving food,” Jordan added.

  The window notice had today’s date on it, so someone had gotten up even earlier than we had.

  “So much for freedom of the press,” I said, standing there staring at the dark office. “Someone is trying to keep us uninformed and submissive. It won’t work.”

  “No?”

  “No, Jordan, it won’t. People aren’t going to put up with this. Everyone knows people who died in that explosion. The animals are going crazy, and roadblocks are keeping us trapped in this town. Now the newspaper has been shut down.”

  “Maggie, no offense, but do you think many people will notice if they don’t get their Sentinel this week?”

  “Yes, Jordan, I do,” I said, feeling heat rising in my cheeks. “Because even a crappy newspaper like the Sentinel is needed in times like this. Who posted this sign? Where are Ronnie and Lizzie, and what do they have to say? Who’s trying to keep us from learning the truth?”

  Jordan put his hands on my shoulders and turned me toward him. “Maggie, some people don’t want to learn the truth, even when you tell it to their faces.”

  “I know,” I said. “When the world gets really crazy, people would rather shut their ears and eyes than process all the difficult, complicated things going on. It’s easier to pretend that everything is okay so you can move forward with your day.”

  “Yes,” Jordan said. “Remember that the next time someone close to you tells you something true that you don’t want to believe.”

  Oof.

  Jordan removed his hands from my shoulders and started walking down Main Street.

  “Where are you going?” I called out.

  “School. Remember?”

  CHAPTER 33

  Jordan

  THERE WAS NOTHING fancy about Mount Hope High, a classic one-story, redbrick, tall-windowed school building. It was built in the late ’50s, and the clang of metal locker doors echoed off the linoleum floors of the narrow hallways, all scented with a mix of industrial cleaners, mildew, and, especially on scorching September days, teenage BO.

  But when Maggie and I and the rest of our classmates entered for the long-delayed start of this school year, the place smelled like chocolate-chip cookies, as if the school were being staged for a real-estate sale by a savvy broker. Everything looked shinier than I remembered it, too; the locker doors didn’t feel quite so wobbly, and the desk in my first class, U.S. History, was perfectly level with the floor.

  Some of the kids in that first class, such as mathletes Missy Shimpkins and Bart Longley, glanced over at me furtively, as if they’d heard about my injuries or assault on two of their classmates and were trying to assess the monster in their presence. I gave them a broad smile and a nod—Hey, I’m still that friendly guy!

  Much to my surprise, the classes whizzed by, and I participated a lot more than I usually did. Shareable ideas were popping into my head during history and English, and the algebra problems seemed simple and logical. This was especially strange because Maggie and I had left the house so swiftly that I’d forgotten to take my ADHD meds.

  At lunchtime I met up under a shaded picnic table with Tico, Maggie, and Suzanne.

  “So this is nice, right?” Tico said. “Normalish.”

  “Sure,” Maggie said. “I just heard the power plant and military put a bunch of money into the place to modernize it. Wait till you see the AV Center—it’s all tricked out.”

  “I’m really glad to be back,” Suzanne said. “But I have to tell you: I saw the booth where Principal Roberts made his announcement, and it now contains a bank of little TV screens in there, plus lots of speakers and knobs. I think he can spy on all the classrooms now.”

  That caught my attention. “Huh,” I grunted. “How many screens?”

  “Thirty-six,” Suzanne said. “One for each classroom. I mean, fuck them!”

  As I headed back to class, I saw Luke and Troy leaning against a tree, smoking, which was allowed outside, but still … such idiots. With a crutch tucked under his arm, Luke smirked at me and did that thing where he pointed two fingers at his eyes, then my eyes. I smiled and walked up to them.

  “Guys,” I said, “things got a little heated on the battlefield of gridiron and beyond. I am truly sorry for laying waste to you, health-wise. Please accept my sincere apology.”

  I extended my hand as if I actually expected one of them to shake it. They regarded it as if I were holding out a moldy sandwich.

  “Careful with that hand,” Luke said. “You’ll need it for your house remodel.”

  Okay, that stung, but I wasn’t rising to the bait. I turned my back to his smirking face, daring the two of them to do something, knowing they wouldn’t. I waved my hand over my head as I walked away, calling out, “Enjoy the rest of your day of learning!”

  Happy now, Mom?

  Maggie wanted me to go with her to the police station after school to—well, I wasn’t sure what she thought she might accomplish there, but she was riled up after our visit to the newspaper and wanted “to get to the bottom of things.”

  “Ruh-roh,” I said in my best Scooby-Doo impression, and told her I had to check in with the coach, so I’d meet her at home later.

  I didn’t have to check in with the coach. Instead, I had maybe my stupidest idea yet, which was saying something.

  I was returning to the power plant.

  My leg wound throbbed in protest, reminding me that I needed to avoid the scarred man and those two faux FBI agents. But I couldn’t just sit around for more bad things to happen as they kept tabs on me. If we weren’t allowed to leave Mount Hope, I had to make something happen here.

  I figured the forest would be the most direct, least conspicuous route to take. Although my leg barked at me as I began to run, the pain soon disappeared, and I felt an exercise high as I increased my speed.

  “Ch-ch-ch-ch,” I said to myself. “‘We can rebuild him. We have the technology. We can make him better than he was. Better, stronger, faster.’”

  As I zipped through the woods, it was as if I were a passenger instead of the person doing the work. My legs pumping, I raced down the trail like a machine, leaping over fallen branches and dodging various obstacles as if I’d done parkour my whole life. Maybe the fatigue would come later.

  I felt that all of my abilities were heightened, like I could do anything. My Spidey sense was at full power, turning this route through the dense woods into a breezy running trail. Too bad Maggie couldn’t see me now. Then she’d know.

  But my exhilaration was tempered by the question of How? How could I be so powerful? How did they make me int
o a freak without anyone knowing? How could my father let this happen?

  Were my new abilities a blessing or a curse? I didn’t know. I consoled myself that Spider-Man asked himself this question, too, and he was Spider-Man. I was glad that I could defend myself and then some against big, tough bullies like Luke and Troy, and being a brilliant quarterback certainly was more fun than running aimlessly in the backfield and flinging the ball in panic.

  I wasn’t a flawless machine quite yet, though, because in the midst of my football reverie, I caught a tree root near the bottom of a hill and tumbled ass over teakettle or however the Brits would charmingly put it.

  “Damnit,” I muttered, and slowly lifted myself off the ground. I stood and tested my limbs. Everything was intact.

  Then I heard a low, guttural grunt behind me.

  I didn’t need a visual or Spidey sense to recognize that the sound came from a wild boar. I could smell it, too; it was so close. These animals weren’t uncommon in these woods, but they normally didn’t go after people. When they did, things didn’t turn out well for the humans. Boars killed hunters every year in forests in the region—and that was before the whole post-evacuation crazed-beast thing.

  As I turned toward it, this particularly large, ugly animal charged, narrowing the small gap between us quickly. I scrambled to my feet and yelled “BLALALALALA!” at it, and it paused for a second before resuming its charge. I thought I should run behind a tree, but my body did something else: squared myself off against it, and when it reached me, I leaped over it, grabbed it by the ears, and pulled it down with all my weight.

  That thing was heavier than I was, but it went down with a crunch, and while my right hand hung on to the boar’s ear, I punched the animal with my left. I felt my stitches tear. Oh, well. I punched again, my knuckles colliding with the boar’s eye and nose with a sickening squish.

  Sorry, fella. There was no stopping me now. I climbed on top of this massive animal and pounded it some more. My dad would have called it a Grand Old Boar, a hunting term for an animal more than seven years old. They were rare, because they were destructive to farms and usually got shot before they reached this age.