The Nearest

by Greg Egan

  Kate glanced again at a photo of the boy. The face looked familiar; he was one of the missing persons whose cases she’d been reviewing when the Grimes murders took over.

  “Before Rowan went missing,” she asked, “did you notice any change in his behavior?”

  The woman frowned. “Yes! I made a point of that to the other officer!”

  Kate nodded apologetically. “I know it’s frustrating to have to repeat yourself, but part of the process is for me to try to come at this with fresh eyes, and make sure we haven’t missed anything.”

  “All right.” The woman shifted uncomfortably in her chair. Kate wished she could remember her name, but there’d been more than thirty files.

  “So can you tell me, in as much detail as possible: In what way did your son seem different?”

  “He was so cold to us,” the woman replied. “He might have had his moods before—he might have been embarrassed or irritated when I said something that a thirteen-year-old boy doesn’t want to hear from his mother—but the day before he left, it was like he had no heart at all.”

  “You mean he was deliberately cruel?” Kate asked.

  “No. It wasn’t that I’d annoyed him and he was trying to be hurtful; it was as if I just didn’t matter to him, one way or the other.”

  If Rowan had caught the disease that had afflicted Natalie’s family, what was the route of transmission? Kate confirmed with the boy’s mother that he’d attended the high school where Natalie and her husband had taught, though he hadn’t been in either of their classes, and it was hard to see how an airborne virus could have affected him while sparing most of the other students.

  “Have you spoken to the families of Rowan’s friends?” Kate asked.

  “Of course.”

  “And have any of their children undergone personality shifts?”

  “Not that anyone admitted.” The woman hesitated. “I don’t believe that Rowan was taking drugs, but I’m past the point where I’m certain of anything. So if you think that’s a possibility, and it could have something to do with the reason he’s missing, I don’t want you ruling it out just because my own instincts say otherwise.”

  “All right.” Kate didn’t like misleading her, but her own hypothesis was hardly more reassuring.

  On her way back to the motel, she bought a small notepad with Wi-Fi only, then she used the motel’s internet connection to download a gallery of missing persons whose names and photos had been made public. Rowan da Silva was there, and most of the other people Kate recalled from her review. At least she hadn’t been listed herself, yet.

  In the next three days, as she spiraled out from the epicenter, she encountered twelve families with sons or daughters, husbands or wives who’d gone missing. In four cases, the person had fled without anyone noticing warning signs, but in the others, the distressed loved ones claimed that the event had been preceded by a change in behavior or demeanor that made them feel as if their relationship had disintegrated, for no discernible reason. “That morning, I swear he looked at me as if he was a trapped animal and I was a zookeeper,” one woman told Kate. “Maybe he woke up and decided that our whole marriage had been a mistake, and it took him another two days to find the courage to walk out. But two days before, he’d either been as happy as I’d ever seen him, or he was the best actor in the world.”

  On the afternoon of the fourth day, Kate knocked on a door and found herself talking to a woman who spoke with a forced cheeriness and couldn’t quite look her in the eye. She had no missing family members, or any information to offer about suspicious activities in the neighborhood; she just seemed discomfited by Kate’s presence. Either she had a drug lab and a fresh corpse in her living room, or Kate’s time was up.

  She found a café with Wi-Fi and did a quick search. Authorities had expressed concern about a missing police officer, Detective-Sergeant Katherine Shahripour (pictured). It wasn’t exactly the kind of news that would muscle its way into everyone’s feeds; she suspected that maybe one in fifty people in the city would see it. But the woman she’d spooked would have reported the encounter. It would no longer be safe to keep door-knocking the area.

  Kate wasn’t ready to come in from the cold. Eight families with stories of sudden alienation wouldn’t cut it; after all, the original investigators had written that off as being down to the usual causes: teenage angst, midlife crises, drug problems, infidelity. At the very least, she needed to bring in some of the afflicted in person, fleshing out her collection of hearsay with actual subjects. Reza might have talked his way out of the emergency department, but if she could drag half a dozen of these fractured families, reunited, into the spotlight, that might be the start of a proper investigation, and the first step on the road to a cure.

  As she left the café, she tried to picture a future where everything was normal again. But all she could think of was Reza’s bizarre charade, and the husk of her son lying in his cot like a cheap plastic doll. She lowered her sights, and made do instead with memories. The days before, when they had still been themselves, remained as vivid to her as ever. She would hold her feelings for them in that vault, and keep working to find a way to revive them.

  7

  Kate cut her hair and dyed it black, then bought some cheap earrings, a battered phone with no SIM card and an assortment of clothes from a charity shop. It took a while for her to find the right look, but at the end of the day she emerged from her room, satisfied that at least she wouldn’t be taken for a cop or a social worker.

  She walked into the city, and made her way to one of the homeless shelters. As Leila, the volunteer, showed her the ropes, Kate took out her phone and brought up a picture of Suzanne Reyes, a missing woman a few years younger than Kate. “You haven’t seen my sister, have you? When she’s off her meds, I don’t know what she’ll do.”

  Leila regarded her warily. “Sorry, no.”

  In the dining room, Kate showed the photo around, but all she got was a few grunts of sympathy. She wished there were some way to seek all eight of her targets at once to better the odds, but it would be stretching credulity to claim a connection with even two of them, and Rowan’s parents had already done the rounds of the shelters. In the dormitory, she lay awake half the night, listening to the other women coughing.

  She spent the next day on the streets, finding the places where the homeless congregated and asking again after Suzanne. It was close to nightfall when a thin, twitchy woman with a crumpled face squinted at the picture and announced, “Yeah, love, I’ve seen her. Just a few days ago.”

  Kate closed her eyes for a moment, genuinely overcome with relief. “Thank God. Do you know where she is now?”

  “She talked a lot of nonsense,” the woman complained. “I’m not surprised what you said about her medication.”

  “Yeah, that’s Suzanne. Do you know where she went?”

  “She tried to recruit me,” the woman recalled irritably. “Like a missionary. Like a fucking Mormon Scientologist.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She wanted me to join her fight against the devil.”

  Kate shook her head forlornly. “My sister said that? She thinks she’s fighting the devil?”

  The woman thought it over dutifully. “Not the devil, exactly. She said she’s fighting the hollow men, the ones who’ve lost their souls. Raising an army of the … I don’t fucking know.”

  “Do you know where I can find her?”

  “Not really. I told her to piss off and stop bothering me.”

  It was growing dark. Kate crossed town and tried a different shelter. “She might not look the same now,” she warned her fellow diners as she helped ladle out the night’s stew. “But maybe you remember her talking about the hollow men?”

  No one could help her, but the next morning, as the shelter was closing, a young woman with long, plaited hair approached Kate. “I don’t think I’ve seen your sister,” she said. “But there was a man I met, talking like you said she talked.”
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  “In what way?” Kate asked.

  “He was warning me about the hollow people. He wanted me to join the fight.”

  “Where was this?”

  “You know that spot in South Bank where all the buskers play?”

  Kate nodded, but this wasn’t much help; she could probably stand there for a month without the same man reappearing, let alone approaching her.

  “I told him I was busy with other things,” the woman continued, “but he said that if I ever wised up and changed my mind, there was a place where I could find him.”

  Kate hardly dared breathe, but when the woman said no more she had to ask. “Asgard? Middle-earth? Hogwarts?”

  “An old warehouse that’s used as a squat.” She gestured at Kate’s phone. “If that thing’s got a map, I can show you.”

  8

  The abandoned warehouse stood at the edge of a sprawling industrial park that still had a few tenants, but the place itself looked as if it had been derelict for years. The wire mesh fence around it had been bent almost horizontal in places, and the sign warning of security patrols, cameras and dogs was brown with corrosion.

  Kate clambered over the lowest part of the fence and approached the building, carrying a blanket she’d bought for five dollars from a man camped in a city alleyway. Weeds taller than she was sprouted from cracks in the concrete forecourt. When she tried the office door it was securely locked, even though most of the paint had flaked off, but the roll-up door to the loading bay had been breached, torn away from its tracks on one side. The aperture was a tight squeeze; Kate pushed her blanket through, then followed headfirst. After the sunlit concrete, she couldn’t see a thing inside, but she ended up doing a handstand onto her blanket before her feet fell to the floor.

  She waited for her eyes to adapt. The place still stank of some kind of oil or solvent, though there was human waste not too far away. Gradually, she made out the silhouettes of a stack of crates and pallets ahead of her, and some large metal drums of chemicals. She walked past them warily, squinting in the gloom at the hazard warnings, hoping that nothing volatile and carcinogenic had spilled out onto the floor.

  Away from the loading bay, in the warehouse proper, a little sunlight made its way through grimy windows set high in the walls. But a dozen or so fluorescent panels hung by cables from the ceiling; no one had ever aspired to make this place function with natural light.

  The floor was filthy, strewn with clumps of oil-clotted sand, scraps of yellowing invoices curling at the edges and a few newer burger wrappers and polystyrene cups. In the distance, someone sat on a bedroll, a slight figure with their back to her.

  Kate called out, “Hi! Is it safe here?” The walls flung her voice back at her.

  The figure turned and replied, “It’s all right. No one hassles you.”

  Kate approached. It took her a while to be sure, but once she had clear sight of the boy, she knew it was Rowan da Silva.

  “I’m Kate.”

  He held out his hand and she shook it, but he offered no name himself. She looked around. “Are we the only ones here?”

  “Right now we are. There’s a lot more people at night.”

  “I heard this was a good place,” Kate said, “but you never know until you see for yourself.”

  Rowan nodded distractedly, then lowered his gaze and stared glumly at the floor. If he really was suffering from the same disease that had struck Reza, Kate found it hard to discern the effects. With Reza, there had been a yawning abyss between the man she knew and the shop-window dummy he’d become, but with this boy she had no expectations to help her gauge the symptoms.

  “How old are you?” she asked gently.

  “Sixteen,” he lied.

  “You don’t get on with your folks?”

  “They’re dead.”

  Kate said, “I’m sorry.” She hesitated, but decided not to push him into embellishing the claim. “My husband, how can I put it … showed me a different side.”

  “Like he hit you?”

  Kate wanted to say yes; it only mattered that she had a plausible story. But something in her rebelled against the slander. “No. He just changed.”

  Rowan said, “You hear that a lot.” He rose to his feet, then picked up his bedroll and a cardboard sign. “Gotta hit the lunchtime crowds if I want to eat.”

  “Yeah. Good luck.”

  He wouldn’t make it to the city by lunchtime; he had to mean the nearest mall, some forty minutes away. Kate waited five minutes, then followed him. She caught sight of him on the main road, following the route she’d expected him to take, then she quickly moved to a smaller, parallel street so she wouldn’t be at risk of discovery if he happened to turn around. After crossing back along side streets a couple of times, she soon had a good enough sense of his pace to feel confident that she wasn’t going to lose him.

  When she was almost at the mall, she spotted Rowan setting up his bedroll and sign on a public street near the entrance. Kate stood beside a tree and recorded video with her phone in one hand and her arm at her side, panning and tilting slowly to sweep the zoomed frame across a range of directions that she hoped would encompass him. It worked, well enough; she managed to extract a still image in which Rowan was clearly recognizable.

  She circled around the mall and went in through a different entrance, then found a café. She’d spent all her small change, so she had to retrieve a fifty-dollar bill she’d hidden beneath an insole. Between that, her choice of wardrobe, and the acrid smell she’d acquired since showering in the shelter by trekking a dozen kilometers in the heat, she’d never felt more self-conscious, but the waitress took her money without a flicker of disdain and handed her the Wi-Fi password along with her coffee.

  Kate logged in and created a Gmail account, then sent the pictures of Rowan to his mother, geotagged. She had to assume that Ms. da Silva now knew that she’d been suspended, so she kept the tip anonymous, and resisted the urge to offer suggestions for a medical examination that would probably sound even more bizarre and unwelcome coming from a stranger than from a rogue police officer.

  She left the café and took up a position outside the supermarket, where she had a clear view of Rowan. Half an hour later, a squad car pulled up in the street, and both of Rowan’s parents emerged. Kate watched them arguing with their son, and when they failed to persuade him to come with them, one of the officers took him by the arm and got him into the car with a minimum of force.

  She had no way of knowing if they would take the kind of steps needed to get him a proper diagnosis, but there was a chance that at least they could keep him from fleeing again for another few days, in which time she might be able to gather enough evidence of the outbreak to trigger a full-scale public health response, and clear her name to the point where she could make sure that Rowan was included.

  When the squad car drove away, she sat on a bench in the mall, pondering her next step. She was on CCTV now, and regardless of her changed hairstyle it was only a matter of time before anyone seriously looking for her would be able to start reconstructing her movements.

  So she had to return to the warehouse that night, or she might not get another chance.

  9

  Kate had expected the warehouse to be pitch black by nightfall—with the occasional beam from a phone, deployed sparingly—but it turned out that some of the squatters had obtained what looked like solar-charged hurricane lamps, which they set up on crates to spread a warm yellow light across the cavernous space. There was even a small portable microwave that people were using to heat up food. The mood of the place was almost cozy, as if they’d gathered here to ride out a storm or a flood, strangers united, however warily, against a shared calamity.

  The squatters around her had been taciturn when she’d introduced herself, but she felt more like a newcomer than an outsider—on probation, not rejected. So far she’d sighted fifteen people, and among them she’d recognized four of the missing whose families she’d interviewed: Suzanne Re
yes, Ahmed Fahadi, Gary Katsaros, and Linda Blethyn. Since none of them were minors, or the subject of warrants, there was no point trying to get police involved; it was possible that the best thing she could do would be to keep her mouth shut until morning, then find ways to tip off their loved ones. If she could get enough people who’d been affected by the disease reunited with the people who could recognize their condition, her job would be half done.

  Gary and Suzanne had been using the microwave, but now Kate saw them walking straight toward her, carrying containers of food.

  “Are you hungry?” Suzanne asked. “It’s Chinese, not too spicy.”

  Kate nodded gratefully and accepted the meal, then she gestured to the floor and the three of them sat cross-legged on her blanket. Her companions were both around her own age, and though she knew Suzanne had spent time in shelters, both were better dressed than she was.

  Gary looked around across the warehouse floor. “This isn’t how I saw myself ending up.”

  Kate laughed sympathetically. “Me neither.”

  “But when my wife changed, I couldn’t stay in the house. I couldn’t stay there, pretending that nothing had happened.”

  Suzanne remained silent, but she was watching Kate intently. “Changed how?” Kate asked.

  “Hollowed out,” Gary replied. “The first time I saw her, I didn’t think it was her at all. Everything that made her who she was had gone. Just because her face was the same, how could I recognize her without that spark? But it was her body, I had to accept that in the end. Her body was still there; it was everything else that had drained away.”

  Kate stared back at him, unable to speak. He was not infected with the disease that had claimed Reza and Michael; his wife was. Kate had spoken to her for twenty minutes, but to a stranger, emitting the right words in the right order was enough for her to pass as normal.

  Had they all been hollowed out—everyone she’d interviewed who’d claimed that it was the missing family member whose behavior had changed? Even Rowan’s mother? Kate struggled with her memories of the interview. It was one thing to be oblivious to the lack of familiar cues that only someone who’d known her for years would expect, but nothing about her fears for her child had rung false.