Outcome

by Edward W. Robertson

  "Maybe you should embrace it, Dad. Get me boxing lessons. I'll make us millions."

  "You can't be a boxer."

  "You always told me I could be whatever I want."

  "So long as it's a president, an astronaut, or the first lady shortstop. Not a boxer." His stomach rumbled; he hadn't had time for lunch before hopping the train. He stopped at a crosswalk. Cabs and cars gushed down Park Ave. He gazed up the street. An early spring haze hung on the horizon, smudging it gray-yellow. "You want a falafel?"

  She frowned at him, eyes steady, as if this were somehow a trap. "Yes. Yes, I do."

  "Come on." He turned north. Most restaurants up here were utter ripoffs, even the pizza joints, to the point where he couldn't understand how the managers could charge that much and not hang themselves, but he knew a place up here you could still feed two people for less than ten bucks. Ellie had shown it to him years ago. She'd just come back from Lebanon or some damn place and had been on a real Middle Eastern kick. They grilled like champs, Chip gave them that, and after his fourth or fifth meal, he came around on the chick peas and eggplant, too.

  Ellie's spot was a narrow-shouldered place with just four booths smothered in a rich atmosphere of cumin and paprika. Chip bought two falafels and two cans of Sprite. He hated to buy soda—water was free, and had done mankind well enough—but the walk had left him sweaty, and he knew Dee would appreciate it. She had a real sweet tooth. Just because she was about to lose her ritzy uptown classrooms didn't mean she had to lose out on what was shaping up to be a perfect day of early spring.

  He took her outside to eat on the stoop of a quiet brownstone tucked between Park and Lex. He had a lot of thoughts but he didn't speak any of them. Come in too hard and too fast and she'd just wall up with that teenage BS. Dealing with Dee was like getting close to a squirrel. You had to just sit there for a while. Wait for it to know you weren't going to bite it. Maybe feed it a few treats. Squirrels or thirteen-year-olds, it was all the same thing. The only things that worked were patience and peanuts.

  He wiped his mouth, tossed their wrappers in the trash on the corner, and walked with Dee to the subway. A couple dozen people waited with them on the platform. Coughs rattled down the tunnel. After a few minutes, a soft wind buffeted the platform, signaling the arrival of the 4.

  They squeezed inside. A prerecorded and frankly pretty damn dorky voice warned them to stand clear of the closing doors. The train lurched forward. It was two stops before Dee spoke.

  "I'm sorry, Dad," she said. "Really."

  "Okay," he said.

  "So what?"

  "So you were sorry last time, too."

  She scowled at the dark tunnel flashing past the windows. He let her simmer. The train braked; she swayed, bumping him. "Dad, he hit me first."

  He read the ads lined up below the ceiling, Lasik eye surgery (just $500 per eye!) and extolling the wisdom "Si Ves Algo, Di Algo." For the millionth time, Chip wished someone had handed him a Map to Parenthood the day he picked up Dee from the home. Having a kid was like having a drunken mess of a friend who could never hang on to a girl: they required constant advice, yet no matter how wise your counsel, you knew they would rarely if ever take it. If doing good meant leaning on your shoulder, they'd rather screw up on their own.

  He opened his mouth and was clawed by a tickle deep down his throat. He coughed, booming, covering his mouth with the inside of his elbow. His eyes watered. Dee rubbed his back. He smiled, blinking, coughed again, patted his chest, and swallowed. Across the train, a man in a green cap and a transparent surgical mask stared at him blankly.

  "Under normal circumstances," Chip said, hoarse, "I say hit him right back. But when you already been in three fights this year? When they're ready to drop the hammer on your pretty little head? Dee, you got to think."

  She pressed her lips into a skeptical line. "You mean I got to tattle."

  "Beats expulsion, doesn't it?"

  "And gets me in a new fight next week. You don't understand at all, Dad."

  "Yes," he said, "I do. I know it makes you so angry sometimes you want to knock down the walls. To squeeze the other kids' throats until their eyes pop from their heads like champagne corks. They probably deserve it, too. But you know what else I know?"

  She rolled her eyes. "What's that?"

  "That the only chance they have to destroy you is if you get sucked into their games. If you fight back the way they want you to fight back. You want to beat them? You got to be smarter than them. You got to think long-term."

  The train slowed, screeching. Chip leaned into his hold on the rail above his head. Dee blinked, cheek twitching, several emotions struggling for control of her face. Chip saw frustration plainly enough, as well as the highly specific new-teen glint of raw contempt for a parent, but he thought he saw curiosity, too. Maybe even understanding.

  He left it there. His advice had likely spooked her. Patience. Let her come sniffing back.

  The train rocked and whined and clattered and juked. Dee resumed her contemplation of the floor and its grimy, dried footprints. Chip let her be. If he decided he needed to yell at her later, he'd have a whole week. The train pulled into Astor Place and he tapped her shoulder. She looked up, dazed, and followed him to the soiled platform.

  On his way to the steps, the man in the green cap cut around him and stopped in his path. Chip swerved instinctively, long used to dodging drunks, panhandlers, guys passing out fliers, and the general crush of pedestrian traffic, but the man sidestepped, blocking Chip's way again.

  "Sir," the man said, lifting his palm midway between them, "I need you to come with me."

  "Come on." Chip tried to angle around him. The man's hand leapt toward his belt. His windbreaker bulged just above his hip. Chip's skin prickled. He stopped cold. "What's going on?"

  "You're not in any trouble, sir." He flashed a badge. "I'm with the city."

  Chip moved in front of Dee. "I'm with my daughter."

  "She'll need to come with us as well." Behind the odd, clear mask perched over his nose and mouth, the man smiled at Chip, then at Dee. "Don't worry, you're not in any trouble," he repeated. "But for your own safety, I need you to come with me."

  Chip took a step back. Dee's face was creased, worried. Pedestrians flowed around them, ceaseless, paying them no mind at all.

  3

  They had people in Denver, so she booked the first leg from Boise to Sea-Tac. It would leave that afternoon, connecting her to a redeye to LaGuardia. Before heading to the airport, she picked up a 100-pack of disposable latex gloves, a twelve-pack of disposable surgical masks, and large, rattling bottles of echinacea, zinc, and vitamins B and C. She swallowed two of each and headed to the Target down the street, where she bought a high-collared coat and a thin pair of gloves.

  The Boise airport was a one-terminal strip on the south end of town. She'd seen busier In-N-Outs. She parked, put on a pair of latex gloves, and pulled her new black gloves over top. Without her gun—not even a knife—she felt strangely light. Civilian. The airport was too small for self-check-in. Her pulse rose as the woman behind the counter examined her ID. The woman smiled and handed Ellie her boarding pass.

  She stood in the corner of the terminal, one eye out for signs of Rawlings, the other out for coughing. She knew her precautions, such as they were, were ludicrous. She was about to lock herself in a metal tube with sixty-plus strangers on a two-hour flight to Seattle, then repeat the process with two hundred other strangers on a six-hour flight to New York. If anyone on those flights were sick, and this virus were half as infectious as the numbers indicated, the gloves and mask could well be meaningless. If she picked up the disease on the way, she could arrive in the city, find Chip, and promptly infect him.

  But that was defeatist thinking. If she were right about the plague, and she didn't move now, Chip was dead. That was the short and the long of it. Driving cross-country would take too long. She couldn't call. He'd never accept a call from her, let alone let her explain
why she was making it—that if he didn't do exactly as she said, he'd be dead within a month. If she called from a payphone or a burner, he'd hang up. And then he'd be on his guard. Considering her resources were now quite limited, a vigilant Chip could make it much harder for her to track him down.

  So that was it. She had two options. Get to the city before the virus got to him. Or head to the mountains alone right now.

  Seated, she turned to the window, surreptitiously placed one of the surgical masks over her face, and pulled her coat collar up around her nose. She leaned against the window and tried to sleep. A man coughed from up front, the noise wet and chunky, like two livers slapped together. Ellie startled. Her understanding crystallized. She was going to die. She was going to die for a man who wouldn't even answer her calls.

  The plane touched down. She remained in her seat until the jet emptied of all but the old people and a man waiting for a wheelchair—again, she smiled at herself; she'd been breathing their air for two hours; as if keeping her distance from the other passengers would save her—then filed off. Inside the terminal, the windows were dark, the lights of planes winking from the tarmac. Her flight was delayed. She spoke with the woman at the boarding counter, fighting the anger swelling in her gut, forcing herself not to argue or draw attention, but she learned nothing.

  She'd left her phone behind. Didn't want to make it too easy for them to track her down. She'd brought her backup laptop, though, and spent the next hour rereading her files on Chip. Nothing new since the last time she'd checked in on him a month ago. Still running with the ambulance. His bus. The girl was still in her uptown private school. Ellie rolled her eyes. How did he expect to afford to send her to college? Not that she needed to ask him. She'd heard variations of his line of thought a hundred different times. "Things will work out, Ellie. Just watch. Just wait."

  Well, the world probably wouldn't outlast the month, so the girl's private school wasn't so impractical after all. But not because, as Chip would insist, the world had a way of giving you what you needed. Turned out they were both right, in their way, and that they were right for the worst possible reasons.

  At 11 PM, her flight was canceled.

  This time, she had no problem arguing loudly and bitterly with the impassive woman at the check-in counter, but it wasn't any good. It had been the night's last flight to New York. It was too late to puddle-jump to Portland and grab an alternate. Would she like to take the first flight in the morning?

  What she really wanted to do was shoot the woman in the knee, jog outside into the fuel-smelling winds churned by the jets, and hop into the first Cessna she saw. It had been a couple years, but flying a plane was like riding a bike: once you got going, there was nothing to it.

  Instead, Ellie retired to one of the terminal's low-slung black seats and fired up her laptop. She believed the machine was clean, and while Rawlings would no doubt know of her absence by now, if he were that determined, he had easier ways to track her down. She spoofed her IP anyway and surfed around the news networks for stories on the virus. Hardly anything. A quarantine in a hospital in Idaho. A handful of deaths in California and the Pacific Northwest, but nothing like the levels in Rawlings' report. Several cut-and-paste responses from low-level health officials. Hospital reports were clearly being filtered, scrubbed.

  Or maybe it was the sheer speed of the thing: even Rawlings didn't believe the numbers. How could reporters—who had no numbers at all, just vague statements from health workers who themselves had no hard data at hand, no scope or scale of the outbreak—begin to glimpse the truth of what approached? She guessed it would be another two to four days before the networks caught up to what was happening right now. By the time they began, so hesitantly, to recommend their bland, useless, or unrealistic methods for avoiding the outbreak, it would be too late.

  Then again, she was all but certain it already was.

  As she snuggled into the terminal seat, attempting fruitlessly to find a position comfortable enough for her exhaustion to overpower the bite of the chair's arm into her ribs, she once more considered the idea this was all a mistake. She was normally so good at moving on, at cutting her losses, at dismissing the past in favor of a cold-eyed analysis of the present. That very skill had elevated her to her current position within the organization. But for whatever reason, she couldn't apply that skill to Chip. Through all the moves and all the years, all the boyfriends and e-dates, he stuck with her like beach tar on the sole of her foot.

  She slept, woken a half dozen times by the cold, the chair's hard arm, her own dreams. Passengers trickled into the terminal. The windows grayed, showing dark green trees beyond the runways. At last, she boarded, pinching her surgical mask into place as she filed down the umbilical to the waiting jet.

  On her way to her seat, she turned sideways past a man cramming his suitcase into the overhead. Hands above his head, he coughed; particulated spittle sprayed Ellie's ear. She spent the flight reminding herself that she was already dead, and so was Chip, and so was the girl. In this environment, death was the expected outcome. If she managed anything better, then top-notch work, commendations for all, but this was a feel-good mission, not a get-results trip.

  Landing at LaGuardia always made her smile. The jet came in so low over the water you could nearly count the fish. There was always a moment when she thought this would be it, the pilot had finally missed his mark and was about to plunge them into the frigid waters of the East River. Then the strip appeared beneath them and the wheels bounced down and passengers reached for cell phones and coats and bags.

  Again, she waited for everyone else to deplane before leaving. After the pristine chill of Seattle, the New York air tasted humid and polluted and warm. Carry-on in hand, Ellie walked to long-term parking, located her Honda, peeled off her latex gloves, and thumb-keyed the car keys out of the box welded to the undercarriage. Inside the car, she tugged on a fresh set of gloves. The windshield was coated in rain-spotted dust. She ran the wipers and pulled out from the airport. After the clarity of the West, the horizon looked sickly, nicotine-stained, a blurred border between the city and whatever lay beyond.

  Traffic on the BQE to the Brooklyn Bridge was no better nor worse than the usual. Ellie hated driving, particularly in cities. She had a habit of taking every other driver's unsignaled lane change or blown red light personally, which meant she herself wound up driving in a perpetual state of amazed fury, incredulous that these people would so casually put her life at risk. It was maliciously negligent in a way that made her feel as if it wouldn't be so unreasonable to force them off the road, march them to the guardrail, and shoot them in the head.

  She drove downtown, parked, took the key from the glove box, and retrieved her bag from the storage locker it had been sitting in for the last three years. She kneaded the fabric, felt her gun, and walked outside. She'd never really made a habit of observing general streetside sickness levels, leaving her with no reliable baseline for comparison, but a non-insubstantial percentage of pedestrians coughed into their hands or blew their noses and flicked Kleenex into the wire baskets at every corner. She pinched the nose-clamps on her surgical mask tight and got into the car.

  She headed east on Houston and up toward Alphabet City. The East Village looked more or less as she remembered it: four-story walkups above Ukrainian diners, narrow bodegas, and upscale dive bars. A more subdued scene than the towers and traffic of downtown proper, but still lively, thriving. The change between 2nd Ave and Avenue B was drastic and downscale. Broken streets. Shabby, project-looking apartments. She cruised past Tomkins Square, giving the eye to the jacketed old men standing around the benches like misplaced scarecrows. Chip had moved down in the world.

  She parked around the block, doublechecked the simple text document she'd dumped all his info into, shouldered her bag, and walked back to his apartment.

  He didn't answer the buzzer. Near the corner, a bodega worker hosed down the sidewalk, sluicing filth into the gutter. A woman with a
stroller ambled in the opposite direction. Ellie reached into her bag and retrieved two thin metal prongs. The lock yielded in seconds.

  She walked upstairs and knocked on his door. A TV played from the landing below, its voices muted and distorted like the adults in a Charlie Brown special. She knocked again, harder, keeping her eye on the peephole. It never winked.

  His locks were no tougher than the one on the building's front door. The apartment was empty. It was mid-afternoon; he'd be at work, tending to the ill in the back of his ambulance. If he hadn't been exposed to the plague already, he would be soon enough. His daughter was out, too. Possibly on her way back from that uptown school.

  Chip still had a landline by his bed. Ellie bugged it, walked downstairs, and moved the car from around the corner to just down the block. Time droned by. Cabs pulled into the curb, discharging fares. Young men with absurd beards biked toward the park. The squashed notes of a tuba played beneath the hum of traffic.

  At 5:01, with the shadows long in the street and the temperature dropped to a breezy chill, she bought a coffee from the corner bodega, got a couple bucks in change, and used the payphone outside to call Chip's work. After BSing the receptionist, the woman informed her Chip had missed the day's shift. No, he hadn't explained why. Who exactly was calling again?

  Ellie hung up, sighed through her nose, and dialed his cell. It went straight to voice mail. She made a face, dug out the girl's cell number, and called it, but it too went to messaging.

  She hadn't anticipated this. Chip wasn't exactly a man about town. His work schedule might be erratic, but when it came to the kid, Ellie knew he was a gentle tyrant. The girl wasn't old enough for him to let her out by herself. Not this late. Not like him to miss work without notice, either. That was the sort of thing he'd feel disgraced by.

  She ruled out the possibility he had fled from the disease. He had no way of knowing. More likely, the disease had already happened to him—or to the girl.