Sparrow Rock

by Nate Kenyon

  When we entered the bedroom, Jimmie was in the same position he’d been in before, sitting up ramrod straight in bed, head slightly cocked to one side, eyes glassy and sightless. He did not move, did not even blink. Jimmie, at least the person we knew, was not there.

  “Jay was like that in the kitchen,” Dan said. “And then he just suddenly snapped out of it and went nuts. Knocked us to the side and ran for the hatch. There was no warning, nothing.”

  I nodded. “I found him like this when I came in here. He wouldn’t respond to me.”

  “What the hell was that noise they made?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I realized we were both whispering, as if Jimmie were sleeping and might be disturbed by our discussion. It seemed like a ridiculous thing to do, considering the circumstances. We could have invited Kiss in for a live reunion concert and he wouldn’t have heard it.

  “Jesus Christ,” Dan said, pacing back and forth, his voice rising. “I should have stopped him, Pete. I should have, I don’t know, grabbed him, kept him inside—”

  “No.” I shook my head. “There’s no sense blaming yourself. There was nothing any of us could do.”

  But I wondered about that. Sue had come to me for help, and I’d failed miserably. Jay was a good friend too, and he’d needed me. I let them both down. It wasn’t that I hadn’t taken them seriously, but those were the facts, and now he was gone.

  Maybe I’d made a mistake not telling Dan about Jay’s mental condition. Maybe together, we could have done something to stop the meltdown.

  But I didn’t really believe it. There had been something else alive in Jay, something that none of us could have understood.

  The same thing that was alive in Jimmie now.

  “He was so strong.” Dan looked up at me, his eyes red. “It happened so fast. When he pushed past me in the kitchen, it was like getting hit by a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound linebacker. I didn’t know he had it in him.”

  “Adrenaline can do some crazy things,” I said.

  “I have to go out there,” Dan said. “It’s my job, to take care of everyone. I’m the leader, I’m the one in charge. I have to try—”

  “Listen to me,” I said. “He’s as good as dead. There’s no way he could survive out there, even if he’s close enough for you to find him he’d be poisoned by now from the fallout. We have to assume he’s gone for good. And we can’t risk someone else to find out. We can’t lose you, Dan. You’re right, you are our leader, but more than that, you give everyone hope, some sense of control. We need you in here.”

  Dan shook his head. “Goddamn it,” he said. He sat down heavily on the nearest bed, punched the mattress, the hazmat suit still half draped on his shoulders. “I feel like everything is coming apart.”

  “I guess maybe it is, but if you think about it, we’ve done pretty well, considering the circumstances. I think the real question right now is, how can we take care of the people we have left? What are we going to do about Sue? She’s hysterical. How are we going to keep her from following him out the hatch?”

  “We’ll talk to her,” Dan said. “And we’ll keep a close eye on her, and if she looks like she’s freaking out…” He shrugged. “We’re going to have to get more aggressive.”

  “You mean, like tying her up? I don’t think that’s the best way to handle it. We can’t keep her like that forever. And we have to sleep sometime.”

  “We’ll take shifts. That worked the last time.”

  I didn’t know how to answer that. Had it worked, or had we just gotten lucky?

  “Okay,” I said. “But there’s something else too.” I hesitated, unsure about whether I should even bring it up. Everything on the table. “Those things Jay said, about Sue’s grandfather knowing about the attack. She didn’t exactly deny it.”

  “Jay was out of his mind.”

  “Maybe.” I shrugged. “Or maybe not.”

  “Oh, come on,” Dan said. He stood up. “You’re not telling me you’re buying all the conspiracy-theory bullshit, are you?”

  “Jay’s never been wrong before.”

  “You buying that crap about the engineered bugs too?”

  “Regular old ants don’t do something like what we saw with Jimmie’s leg, Dan. Just trying to keep an open mind here. We’ve seen some pretty crazy stuff the past few days. I can’t explain all of it with the usual theories.”

  “Okay, so what?” Dan said. “Sue’s grandpa could have helped drop the bombs. I don’t see how, but why not? Hell, he could have been the devil himself. What difference does that make for us?”

  I thought about that for a moment. I could see Dan’s point; we were stuck in a godforsaken hole, no matter what had happened to get us here. Figuring out whatever or whoever was responsible might not make one bit of difference.

  Except it would to Sue. And maybe, just maybe, it would give us an edge too. If I could only figure out what that edge might be.

  Regardless of what we wanted to do, she was in no shape to be pushed on it now. We’d have to wait.

  I went over to the bed and touched Jimmie’s cheek. It was like touching a plate just out of the oven. “He’s burning up,” I said. “Hey, Jimmie, snap out of it.” I slapped him lightly on the cheek. Nothing. “You think he’s okay?”

  “No,” Dan said. “I don’t. Maybe some kind of coma?”

  “If it is, it’s the strangest coma anyone’s ever seen. So what do we do?”

  “We wait. Maybe he’ll just fight it off on his own.”

  “And if he doesn’t?”

  Dan shook his head. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

  We got Sue calmed down enough to take something from the bottle of Jack Daniel’s, and then we put her to bed. Tessa was really good with her, remaining calm and continuing to speak in low, soothing tones, which seemed to help. She was always good with stuff like that. She had a gentle, soothing way about her, almost like she’d been built to care for people. She was slender, small and delicate, and her face was open, which put others at ease. Tessa could never hide her emotions, which was one of the things I loved about her. She was an open book, and you responded to that even if you didn’t consciously understand it.

  Sue kept saying Jay’s name, over and over again, as if by saying it, she could somehow keep from losing him for good. Her face was all blotchy from Jay hitting her and the crying. It was bad enough what he’d done, but to leave her with his fist as a final, lasting memory of the two of them seemed unimaginably cruel. Eventually she fell asleep with Jay’s pillow clutched to her chest, and Tessa curled up next to her.

  People deal with grief in different ways, I guess. Some get angry and want to tear something apart. Others deny everything, at least for a while; and a few never get through that stage and just bury it deep. There are others who say they’ve accepted it but most of them really never do. Saying something doesn’t always make it true. Me, I’ve found it’s sort of like a scar: the wound heals, but the damage remains, and when the timing’s right it can ache like a ghostly memory of something sharper and more immediate.

  After they were asleep Dan and I shared some more from the bottle and played a round of cards, neither one of us speaking much. Dan checked the radio again, more out of habit than anything else; and for some reason I could not explain, I started poking around the shelter, starting with the kitchen. Something Jay had said just before heading for the hatch had remained with me. Find it…it’s in here, somewhere, the answers to everything.

  I remembered how he’d turned the place upside down the past few nights, as if searching for something important. Maybe it was delusional, or maybe not. But I felt like honoring his last request.

  The problem was, I had no idea what I was looking for, and after nothing interesting came to light in the kitchen, and nothing in the bathroom or dining room, I gave up. I was exhausted, running on fumes. I’d gotten maybe three hours of sleep before Jay and Sue’s argument had woken me up, and now I was feeling the stra
in. Even my eyes ached, my body refusing to cooperate with one more step.

  Dan was still trying the different radio bands, so I climbed into bed and almost immediately slipped into a dream where Jay was standing in darkness. Then, as he stepped forward into the light, his face started to peel away. As I watched in horror and his skin began to drop like orange peels at his feet, he turned into my mother, only in the dream she could still walk, and she turned and started moving away from me as if floating on air. I chased her through darkened city streets and into an alleyway full of people who stood like statues, their features obscured by the shadows. I didn’t know who they were, or what they were doing there, but I knew they were waiting for me.

  My mother stopped at the end of the alley and turned back to me. I cried out for her, trying to run forward, but I could not gain any ground; the faster I ran, the farther away she appeared, until she was only a pinprick in the distance, framed by thousands of ghostly silhouettes of people frozen in place. Finally she was gone, and as the sky bloomed red and black with mushroom clouds, I sat down and cried, and black bugs started pouring out of my eye sockets and nose and mouth.

  I woke up sobbing, an ache in my stomach, the feel of those bugs in my mouth still fresh in my mind, along with my mother’s sad face. I didn’t know how much more of this I could take. Not knowing what had happened to her was the worst, and yet I had to accept that I might never find out the truth. The chances she’d survived the attack were ridiculously slim, but I wanted to believe, and that made it all so much worse.

  If you don’t allow a wound to heal, you’ll never have a scar.

  Something brushed against my leg.

  Chills ran up and down my spine as I looked up, startled. Jimmie was standing over me in the darkness.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said. “You scared the shit out of me.”

  He didn’t move or speak for a moment, and the chills returned, prickling my scalp. I didn’t know why, but I sensed danger. I sat up and hunched backward until I was up against the headboard, the bunk above me kissing the top of my head.

  Jimmie reached out his hand to touch my arm. I could see the reflection of his eyes shining in the dark, but nothing else of his face. He blinked and swallowed, his throat making a dry clicking sound.

  “Jimmie?” I said. “You okay?”

  “What happened?” he said, his voice rough and weak. “My head is…killing me.”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “No, I…” He seemed to drift off again for a moment. “I don’t remember anything.”

  He sat down near my legs and I explained what had gone on with Jay. “He left,” I said. “We couldn’t stop him in time.”

  Jimmie didn’t answer. When I got to the part of describing how I’d found him, sitting up in bed and stiff as a board, he shook his head in bewilderment. “I remember someone saying my name, but it was like it was coming from really far away, and I couldn’t respond. Like a dream.”

  “You made a…sound.”

  “A what?”

  I struggled with how to describe it. “You and Jay, when you went into this state…you both made a sound like you were communicating with each other, but we didn’t hear any words.”

  “I don’t remember anything like that.” Jimmie was sitting so still on the bed, and his voice was so flat that I started getting worried again. It wasn’t like him at all. Jimmie could talk a mile a minute, and he was the most high-strung of any of us, usually with his leg bouncing or fingers tapping or fidgeting in some other way. I used to joke about him having attention deficit disorder when we were kids. Maybe part of it was what he’d been through the past few days; hell, that would have slowed any of us down. But I didn’t think that was all of it.

  “You’re acting weird, man,” I said. “You’re creeping me out. You sure you’re feeling all right?”

  “I’m not feeling anything except this headache,” Jimmie said. “My leg, the pain is almost gone, but I feel like someone cracked my skull open with a hammer.”

  I remembered what Jay had said, just before he went crazy and left the shelter. “You’re not hearing voices, are you?”

  “I…I’m having trouble concentrating on anything. I can’t think straight. Maybe I better lie down again, okay, Peter?”

  “Sure,” I said. I watched him get up from my bed and go back to his own and lie down flat on his back, staring up at the bunk above him. Eventually he closed his eyes.

  Maybe it was nothing. But the thing was, I was always Pete to Jimmie. He hadn’t called me Peter in years.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  I took a shift three hours later, sitting up in the dining room and drinking instant coffee while the rest of them slept. Sue and Tessa were still huddled together in Sue’s bunk, and I let them be. The longer Sue could escape from the reality of what had happened, the better.

  The coffee was bitter and it burned my throat going down. I took my time, blowing across the top of the cup, and stared at the marks on the wall that served as our rudimentary calendar. Nearly four neat sets of seven marks now, six vertical lines with a slash through them; we’d been down here almost a month. It seemed impossible to believe, the time both passing too quickly and not quickly enough. I wondered if Dan had missed a day or two, and figured he had not. If there was one thing we could count on, it was Dan’s orderly mind. Got it from his father, who had served twenty years in the army and demanded the same disciplined approach from his family that he’d received in the service. But Dan’s father did it with love and affection, from everything I’d seen, which was vastly different than my own father’s tactics. There was discipline, there was order, and then there was cruelty. Sometimes the lines blurred together, and sometimes they didn’t.

  For a moment I felt a mix of panic and disorientation as I looked at the clock on the wall: 6:30. I couldn’t remember if it was morning or night. Did it matter, really? If I opened that hatch and looked out, would I even be able to tell?

  Sitting there in the silence, I had plenty of time to think. I listened to the occasional grunt and creak as someone turned over in bed, and thought about Jay, all the years I’d known him, the times we’d spent together. It was mostly as part of the group because, although I liked him a lot, Jay always seemed to have this layer of reserve, this protective aura about him that kept most people at arm’s length. Jay was the kind of guy you could know for years without really knowing him; he didn’t share many secrets, he didn’t break down, he didn’t let you see behind the mask very often. I guess he must have with Sue, but even with that relationship he was secretive. After all, we hadn’t found out they were dating at all until we were locked together down in the shelter, but from the looks of things they’d been a couple for quite a while.

  That got me thinking about the others. How well did I really know any of them? Back before the bombs hit I would have described them all as my best friends, and I would have meant it. But now I wondered.

  The private thoughts they don’t share with anyone. The dreams they don’t want to let into the world. Things that make them bleed inside.

  The prevailing wisdom is that tragedy brings people together. But it can do the opposite too. It can drive a wedge between you, I think. Make you look at a person you thought you knew, and wonder if you really ever knew them at all. Tessa was the only one of the group that I really felt like I knew as well as I knew myself. But she was different. She was closer to me than anyone else in the world.

  Jay wasn’t coming back. It seemed so strange to think about our gang without him. But right now I was feeling alone down here in the dark, even with four sleeping bodies in the other room, and the weight of the world seemed to be pressing down on me.

  I don’t know why I got up to get the radio. Dan had already listened to it for nearly an hour that day, scanning every channel several times and finding nothing. Maybe I needed some noise to fill the empty space, even if it was nothing but static. In my mind I kept hearing Jay’s voice, the way he strained
to get the words out: You take care of her, you p-p-promise me. I…can’t hold them off anymore…hurts…so bad.

  I was beginning to get decidedly creeped out. I took the radio scanner off the shelf, then sat back down. It was one of those fairly high-end emergency kits that had a flashlight built in and ran off batteries, and if the batteries died it had a hand crank on the side that could generate enough power with a few turns to run the thing for five minutes or so.

  We’d been lazy, up until now, running it from the large supply of batteries we’d found on the shelves. We’d only had to replace them once so far, and there were plenty left. Still, if we were going to remain down here for weeks longer, we should have been more careful.

  I turned the crank for a while, the soft whirring sound rhythmic and soothing. Finally my arm started to ache, and I switched it on, turning the sound down low enough to keep from disturbing the others. There were something like a thousand channels on there, including aircraft, police, fire, ambulance, military and ham radio—from 25 MHz all the way up to 1.5 GHz. If someone were broadcasting, we would hear it.

  Static up and down the traditional FM band, which wasn’t surprising. I knew that FM wavelength didn’t cover very long distances. Traditional AM radio offered nothing but crackles, pops and hisses. But when I switched and went down into the lower frequencies, I thought I heard something.

  I turned up the volume, my heart pounding, and worked my way back through, very slowly. Was that a voice, or had it just been my imagination? Already I was doubting myself, and I couldn’t find it again. Quickly I got up and grabbed the book we’d found that explained the frequencies and who broadcasted on them.

  The area I was scanning, down at the lowest end of the readable spectrum, was normally used by the military.

  I tried again, and this time, when I worked the dial back down, I heard, very clearly, the word doomsday.

  Something else followed, but static filled the speaker again, the sound washing in and out. I turned up the volume. The voice was a man’s, that much was certain. My scalp prickled as I bent closer, every nerve in my body alive and screaming, my muscles taut and quivering. I felt this strange sense of unreality, as if I were outside myself watching a play happen onstage, or asleep and dreaming; a voice on the radio, the same radio we had been listening to for weeks now with nothing but static, a voice from the outside world that seemed so far away, so divorced from the world we now knew, these concrete walls and floors and narrow rooms that had become our prison.