The Chaos Function

by Jack Skillingstead

  The Disaster had found her.

  When Brian came back from the men’s room, Olivia was waiting in his Ford with the windows rolled up. “Variola’s made it at least as far as Montana.”

  “Did you get an internet connection?”

  “No. Guy in that Subaru told me.”

  “How does he know?”

  “He has it. Come on, let’s drive.”

  Brian looked at the Subaru. “We have to do something.”

  “Like what? He’s dead, Bri.”

  “Call someone. There’s probably an emergency phone at this rest stop. Or those truckers, they might have CBs. Do they still use CBs?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Brian started to get out of the car. Olivia grabbed his shirt sleeve. “Bri, we need to go.”

  “Just leave a dead body sitting there?”

  “Yes. We don’t know anything about this version of variola. If it’s been weaponized, maybe it’s contagious outside the usual cycle. Maybe there are microscopic particles floating around us right now.”

  “Then we’re already exposed.”

  “Or we’re not. But the next time we get out of the car, we could be. The point is, we don’t know.”

  “I’m going to tell one of those truck drivers, at least.”

  “What if they’re dead, too? Or infected? They could be contagious without showing any outward signs. Or what if the guy you walk up to has already seen the body in the Subaru and he’s locked himself in his cab, afraid to either drive farther west or go back east? He could be sitting there with a road-warrior pistol-grip shotgun. Sees you waltzing up and panics. What if you’ve got it, he’s thinking.”

  “That’s a little paranoid, don’t you think?”

  “It’s realistic.”

  “This doesn’t feel right.”

  “I want us to get vaccinated. After that, we can be the good guys again. Right now we have to be the careful guys. Bri, please?”

  Brian nodded, not looking happy. He took his hand off the door handle.

  They got back on the highway, and a mile down the road they passed a pickup truck pulled onto the shoulder. Brian had walked the hybrid up to eighty-five miles an hour, and at that speed the pickup flashed by on Olivia’s side of the car, and she didn’t spare it a thought until much later, when it was too late.

  They ate the deli sandwiches and split the bag of corn chips. The bag had been manhandled and crushed so badly that, basically, they poured corn chip gravel into their mouths and washed it down with seltzer water. All the salt and seltzer made Olivia feel bloated.

  Whenever she wasn’t driving and they happened to be passing close enough to a decent cellular signal, Olivia used Brian’s phone to scour news sources and social media for information on the outbreak. It became obvious that Helen had been right: Official declarations about the situation, dutifully repeated by CNN, Fox, and other major news outlets, did not jibe with the reality as reported in social media and the alternative press, not even when you filtered out the obvious conspiracy-theory bullshit. Corporate-owned news was in the business of mitigating panic, while variola was scorching through populations on five continents. In Australia and eastern Europe people were burning the dead and burying the remains in mass graves. Militarized police forces had been deployed in a dozen American cities, including New York, Baltimore, Los Angeles, and Chicago. People begged for a vaccine, and the government promised it was coming. But for now, everyone was told to stay home.

  Brian, who had fallen quiet in the last few hours, said, “I can’t believe we’re fewer than five days out from the president’s speech.”

  “It’s accelerated,” Olivia said. “Normal incubation for smallpox is around twelve days, I think. A week, at minimum. This has to be a genetic modification designed for maximum spread of infection.”

  “A weapon, for Christ’s sake. Why would anybody do this? It’s evil.”

  “It’s human.”

  Immediately she regretted saying it. Brian didn’t argue the point, and that was out of character. It was now three o’clock in the afternoon, and they were just over the border into South Dakota. Brian looked drawn and haggard—an appearance manifesting on his features that Olivia could almost not credit. Even in Aleppo, in the thick of the Disaster, he had retained his boyish looks.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “I’m all right.”

  “Want me to drive for a while.”

  “No. You should nap.”

  “I should.” But she was unable to stop thinking about probability streams and altered realities. It was easier to believe in them out here in the empty spaces, with the road spacers thudding under the tires. Could she make it all right again? Did she really have that power? Or had it been some kind of drug-induced hallucination when she chewed the jai ba leaves? She turned inward, afraid but compelled, and searched for Jacob’s crisis-point probability choice, the one that prevented the variola outbreak. It was there, cornered and dangerous—persistent.

  For now it was still a world awaiting permission to overtake the one she had created to save Brian. Olivia sensed her power, the power to reach into the halo and touch it—reach in and choose it. She became frightened and withdrew abruptly, blinking, rubbing her eyes. Had she fallen asleep? Brian glanced at her.

  “Nightmare?”

  “Sort of.”

  He kept flicking his eyes to the rearview mirror. Olivia turned in her seat and looked out the back window. Far behind them, sunlight glinted on metal.

  “You see him?” Brian asked.

  “The car? What about it?”

  “I think they’re following us. I mean deliberately.”

  “Who’s paranoid now?”

  “I’ve tried slowing down, let him catch up, you know?”

  “But he doesn’t catch up?”

  “No. Not even on the downgrade. I mean, people speed up on the downgrade, right?”

  Olivia remembered the pickup truck, pulled off the highway a little past the rest stop in Montana. A beat-up yellow Toyota.

  Like Alvaro’s.

  Brian chuckled, shook his head dismissively. “I’m just tired. It’s easy to get spooked out here.”

  “No. It’s them.”

  “Them who, the Society?”

  “Dee and Alvaro.”

  Brian craned around to look out the back window, as if Dee and Alvaro might be riding the bumper, waving. His attention off the road, the Ford swerved into the breakdown lane. “Shit.” He faced forward again and corrected the drift. “You really think it’s them?”

  “It’s them. They knew I would go to you. I told them I would. They must have been following us since Seattle.”

  Brian looked in the rearview mirror. “What do we do?”

  “Keep driving,” Olivia said. “But we have to figure out how to ditch them before we get to Elmhurst.”

  * * *

  Sixteen hours later and twenty miles outside Elmhurst, Olivia was behind the wheel. A ramp exited off the right lane and fed into State Highway 47. She stayed in the passing lane, as if intending to ride it all the way into Chicago. This close to the city, the traffic had gained some heft, though nothing compared to what it probably was under normal conditions. Olivia kept checking the mirror. The pickup had moved closer. There were two people in the cab.

  “Hang on,” Olivia said. “I’m going to do something.”

  “Okay.” Brian braced himself.

  She calculated the angle, waited for the last second, and gunned across three lanes to the exit. Horns blared, tires squealed, brake lights flashed. A BMW swerved out of the way, and Olivia accelerated behind it just in time to slam onto the ramp, cutting in front of somebody in an RV. The driver laid on the horn and shot her the finger.

  Brian, both hands braced against the dash, said, “Jesus Christ.”

  She looped back, headed north on 47, and exited again, this time into a shopping complex called the Huntley Outlet Center. Reebok sportswear, Banana Republic, et ce
tera. A few dozen vehicles were scattered around the vast parking lot. Olivia pulled in next to an F-350 truck, big enough to conceal them from anyone passing the outlet center on the highway. Olivia and Brian were both breathing hard. Olivia’s heart raced on an adrenaline surge.

  “Where’d you learn how to drive like that?” Brian said.

  “I’m self-taught,” she said, craning around to look out the back window.

  They waited. The sunlight began to fail in a polluted haze. Gradually the parking lot cleared out, leaving them stranded amid twenty acres of asphalt.

  “Let’s find this guy,” Brian said. “What’s his name again?”

  “Najid Javadi. Put the address into your GPS.” Olivia delivered the address from memory, and Brian tapped it into his phone.

  Half an hour later, they rolled onto East Sherman Avenue in suburban Elmhurst. Neat lawns, oak trees, a lot of middle-class homes. Javadi’s address looked like 1950s construction—tan brick, big windows, slate roof. Olivia could almost see the TV antenna that must have been belted to the chimney seventy-odd years ago. A garden gnome with a pointy red hat stood on the porch. The house was dark, and there was no car in the driveway.

  “What time is it?”

  Brian looked at his phone. “Half past eight.”

  Olivia parked at the curb, turned off the engine, unbuckled her seat belt.

  Brian said, “There’s nobody home.”

  “He might be in there, in a back room or something.”

  At the front door she rang the bell, waited, rang it again. She could hear the bell tone inside the house, but no one came to the door. She returned to the car.

  “Let’s wait a while.”

  It was a quiet street, not even a barking dog, everyone huddled behind locked doors—waiting and praying. None of them knew what Olivia and Brian knew, that inside the house with the garden gnome was vaccine that could save them.

  Brian racked his seat back and folded his arms. “Going to rest my eyes.”

  “Go ahead. I’ll watch for Javadi.”

  An hour passed. Olivia’s eyes grew heavy.  They had been driving for more than thirty hours, catching ragged naps between turns at the wheel. She started to drift when something rapped against the driver’s side window. Olivia startled awake. A man stood in the street pointing a flashlight into her eyes. She blinked, held her hand up. Her other hand reached for the ignition button but didn’t press it.

  Brian sat up, rubbed his eyes. “What’s happening?”

  “I don’t know. Some guy out there.” She lowered her window a few inches.

  The man said, “Who are you, and what are you doing here?”

  “Are you a cop?”

  “No.”

  “Then please get that light out of my face.”

  The light moved aside. Olivia lowered her hand. The man holding the flashlight looked like a fit sixty-something, his white hair and mustache as neatly trimmed and edged as the lawns. “I’m the neighborhood watch captain,” the man said. “That’s my house over there.” He pointed at a brick bungalow across the street. “You two have been sitting out here a long time.”

  “It’s a free country,” Brian said.

  “Yes, and I’m free to ask what you’re doing here, am I not?”

  “We’re waiting for a friend to get home.”

  “Is your friend supposed to live in that house?”

  Supposed to? “Yes.”

  “Then you’re going to have a long wait. That place is empty. Has been for weeks. The owners pay a lawn and garden service, but I don’t think they’re advertising for new tenants. It’s the only rental on the block.” He sniffed, like he’d caught a whiff of something rancid.

  The bottom fell out of the little hope chest Olivia had carried halfway across the country. She turned to Brian. It looked like the bottom had fallen out of him, too.

  Seventeen

  They’d driven away from Javadi’s (apparently empty) house and now sat in the car outside a pharmacy in an empty strip mall. Brian played with the screw top on an empty seltzer bottle. “What now?”

  “I don’t get it,” Olivia said. “Helen wouldn’t have given me bad information. That message was barely two days old.”

  “Maybe you misremembered the address.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “So we’re back to my last question. What now? I have an idea, if you want to hear it.”

  “Not really.”

  Brian looked hurt. “Why not?”

  “Because it’s going to be some version of giving up and turning around.”

  “You don’t know me as well as you think you do.”

  “Okay, go ahead. What’s your idea?”

  Brian cleared his throat. “We go back. Stock up on supplies and go back.”

  “Brian.”

  “It’s not ‘giving up.’ It’s practical—realistic, as you like to say.  We go to my friend’s house in Puyallup. He and Joyce are stuck in Paris because of the travel ban. I’ve been to their house. It’s perfect, not in a development or anything, set back on a couple of acres. We go there and ride it out, ride out the epidemic and whatever else happens.”

  “Wait a minute,” Olivia said, suddenly realizing: “He’s in there.”

  “What? Who’s in where? You’re not even listening to me.”

  “Javadi. He’s in that house.”

  Brian tossed the bottle into the back seat. “For crying out loud. You heard the night watchman. The house is vacant.”

  “Neighborhood watch captain.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Javadi’s hiding out, remember? He’s scared. He wants to disappear. If he’s seen going in and out of a house in Elmhurst, the neighbors are going to wonder who he is. So he doesn’t go in and out.”

  “What, he sits around in the dark for weeks, or however long he’s been there? Liv, we’ve got to get realistic. You said yourself, the longer we stay out in the open like this, the more exposed we are.”

  She turned to him, hiking her leg up on the seat. “Bri, he’s in there. I know he is.”

  “Okay. Say he is. Say he’s hunkered in a closet or something. What do you want to do, go up and ring the doorbell again? Obviously he’s not going to come crawling out to answer the freaking door. We have to start being smart before we run out of options. I mean, come on.”

  Olivia grinned. “You’re kind of cute when you get agitated.”

  Brian closed his mouth, probably to evaluate his next words. Finally, with forced lightness, he said, “Yeah, everybody tells me that.”

  “They do?”

  “You know what I read one time?” Brian said. “I read that when couples fight, what makes it probable they will stick together in the long run is that if one of them offers an olive branch—makes a repair attempt, with some humor—and the other one accepts it, instead of clinging to their anger.”

  Olivia waved her hand in front of her face, as if warding off a swarm of gibberish. “That’s great, Bri. I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  “What I’m saying is, when we have a fight, or one of us is mad, the other one always makes a repair attempt. Don’t you think that’s a positive sign?”

  “Who’s mad?”

  “I am—I mean, I was. Because we were fighting about what to do next.”

  “That isn’t fighting. That’s disagreeing. Do you have a crowbar?”

  “What?”

  “Brian, for Christ’s sake, do you have a crowbar or not? Like for changing tires or whatever.”

  “It’s called a lug wrench. Aren’t you going to thank me for accepting your repair attempt?”

  “No. I’m going to get the lug wrench out of the trunk and we’re going to go back to Javadi’s house and break in.”

  * * *

  Olivia parked the car one block over, in case the watch captain was still keeping an eye out, then got out and approached the house on foot. The night was muggy. Brian slapped a mosquito on his neck. Olivia carried
the lug wrench in her right hand, holding it along her thigh, trying to make it less conspicuous. Javadi’s house was still dark, the driveway still empty.

  “This is ridiculous,” Brian said. “Somebody’s going to call the cops on us.”

  “Keep it to a dull roar, okay?”

  “You planning to put a silencer on the lug wrench?”

  “Let’s do the back door,” Olivia said.

  “Or let’s not.”

  Olivia ignored him, walked quickly up the driveway, and slipped around the side of the house. Brian trotted after her. A six-foot-high board fence enclosed the yard, giving them cover from the neighbors. Brian approached the back door and peered through the window. Olivia’s attention fastened on the tool shed. It looked like a typical prefabricated structure dummied up as a rustic barn, complete with red paint and miniature hayloft doors. But something about it felt wrong, besides the outdated taste.

  “I can’t see a damn thing in there.” Brian turned to Olivia. “What are you doing?”

  “Does that shed look funny to you?”

  “No, just ridiculous,” Brian said.

  “It looks funny to me.” She approached the shed and tried the door. It was locked and felt solid as a bank vault.

  Behind her, Brian said, “I thought you wanted to break into the house.”

  “What I want is to find Javadi and get the vaccine.”

  “You think he’s in there?”

  “Let’s find out.”

  She used the tapered end of the lug wrench to probe the space between the door and the jamb. The gap was narrow, almost nonexistent.

  “If you use that thing, it’s going to be loud,” Brian said.

  “Maybe I can sort of crack the wood and peel it away from the lock.”

  “Uh, sure.”

  A light tucked under the eaves of the shed came on and a man’s voice came from a hidden speaker: “Stop that. This is private property.”