The Waking Dark

by Robin Wasserman

  “Make what work?” Cass said.

  Jule cast a strange look at Daniel, who turned from it. “Playing hero,” she said. “We’re going to save the day.”

  15

  THE DARK-EYED NIGHT

  Milo wouldn’t leave the room, wouldn’t sleep, wouldn’t stop weaving through Grace’s legs and twining his fingers through Cass’s hair and tugging at Grace’s shirt and begging Cass to read comics with him. No matter how late it got or how much Grace growled, he stayed. And he stayed awake. It was as if he somehow sensed what might happen if he left them alone together. The others had taken off as soon as West came back. Upon determining that Cass was still woozy and Grace was still thirteen, Jule had decided that neither of them be told the details of this great and mighty plan. So they’d been left behind to mind the kid, and each other. It occurred to no one that it might be neither prudent nor kind to leave Grace behind with the girl who’d killed her brother.

  Cass had said nothing, just let them leave. She watched Grace over Milo’s bounding, sugar-crazed shoulders with that newly eerie stare of hers, watchful and, in some aggravating way, knowing. It was the kind of expression Grace longed to master herself. In a different time, with a different Cass, she might have spent the night taking surreptitious mental notes, trying to stretch the muscles of her face to match the babysitter’s. She’d done it before.

  “Wouldn’t you like to take that puzzle back to your room?” Grace asked as Milo dumped out one of her old jigsaw boxes onto the carpet. Pieced together, it showed the entire Disney family, or at least it was supposed to. Over the years, Mickey’s head, Cinderella’s feet, and several other crucial pieces had dematerialized into the ether, leaving behind a family of ill-fitting pieces and jagged holes.

  “It’s not my room,” Milo said.

  It was Owen’s room.

  At least he’d confined himself to the corner and was amusing himself. Though Grace knew, because they’d already tried it, that if she and Cass dared slip away, Milo would follow. He was sticky.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Grace said, in a low voice.

  Cass gave her a thin smile. “I doubt that.”

  “You think I’m infected.” She glanced at Milo to make sure he hadn’t heard. The kid seemed utterly absorbed by the chewed cardboard. “You think I’ve gone crazy, too.”

  “Not crazy.”

  “Off, then. Like spoiled milk.”

  “I think you’re not yourself,” Cass said.

  “So why not tell the others?”

  “I figured this was between us.”

  “If you told them, they’d probably lock me up,” Grace said. “You’d be safe.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I hope you’re not waiting for a thank-you.”

  Cass shook her head.

  “So you’re just counting on the fact that I won’t do anything with Milo here? That seems kind of stupid, doesn’t it? What do I care what an eight-year-old thinks?” But she was sneaking constant glances at Milo; she was whispering. “If you’re right about me, then I’m bad now. Maybe I’ll just kill you both.”

  “I don’t think you will.”

  “Imagine what Daniel would think if he knew about me. If he knew you knew, and let him leave Milo here anyway.”

  “What Daniel thinks isn’t my priority right now,” Cass said.

  It was infuriating, how calm she was, how sure. So irritatingly certain that Grace wouldn’t dash downstairs for one of her mother’s butcher knives. Or maybe not certain, but serene about the possibility. Maybe there was a part of her that wanted to die. That was the most infuriating thing of all, because it couldn’t be a true punishment if Cass wanted it. Then it would be a mercy.

  “You know what I think? I think this has nothing to do with your stupid drug.” It had to be the truth. It was the truest feeling, the deepest need, she’d ever had. If it wasn’t real, nothing was. “This is just me. This is what I want. I’m a killer, too. You made me one.”

  “Prove it,” Cass said.

  Grace nodded at Milo. “Get him out of here, and I’m happy to.”

  “Prove it by waiting.”

  “For what?”

  “Until this is all over – until you’re sure it’s got nothing to do with what’s happening to the town. That it’s just about your brother. Doesn’t Owen deserve that?”

  Cass thought she knew so much, but she didn’t even know that it wasn’t about Owen. It was about her, Grace, and all the things Cass had taken away from her. Grace flexed her fingers, feeling strong enough to get it done right here, right now, just take a grip on her throat and squeeze.

  “If you do it now, you’ll never know,” Cass said. “I think you’ll always wonder. If it was the R8-G, or you.”

  Grace wasn’t stupid. She wasn’t a child anymore, easily tricked into an early bedtime by reverse psychology or a promise of extra dessert. She knew Cass would say anything to save her own life. But if the others came back to find Cass’s dead body and Milo singing about the horrible thing Grace had done, Grace was finished. If they found a way to escape, they’d never take her with them. They’d leave her to the madness of Oleander, to these people with their infection, their darkness, and Grace didn’t belong there. Grace wasn’t one of them. If proving that meant waiting, then she would wait.

  “If I am infected, and I manage not to kill you, then doesn’t that prove that you could have stopped yourself?” Grace said. “That this whole ‘don’t blame me’ thing is bullshit?”

  “If we can find a way to cure you, and you don’t want to kill anyone anymore, that would prove something, too,” Cass said. “That it was just the R8-G. That it wasn’t really you.”

  “I’ll wait,” Grace said. “But not because I care about proving anything to you.”

  Cass didn’t argue.

  “It won’t matter,” Grace said. “Now. Later. It’s all the same. I am what you made me.”

  “Then I choose later.”

  Grace nodded. A deal with the devil.

  As if he knew the danger had, for the moment, passed, Milo was finally asleep.

  Nearly two weeks after the storm, most of the roads had been cleared, the downed trees, smashed cars, and shattered roofs pushed to the curb. Some streets now looked completely untouched, any windows repaired and broken glass swept away. But Daniel, Jule, and West kept mostly to the streets that had been flattened, streets like war zones, where the occasional leaning wall or overturned bathtub was the only sign that where there now lay an ocean of broken boards and bricks and trash, there had once been a town. It was already difficult to remember what things had been like when they were normal. When they’d all taken the sameness for granted, and prayed for it to end.

  They passed a park, where feral children played on swings that miraculously rose from a field of rubble; they passed a license plate embedded in a tree trunk; they passed the tattered remains of American flags; they passed a waist-high brick wall, all that was left of a house, graffitied with the promise JESUS SAVES. Above the promise, a different hand had written WHEN?

  Jule had no idea whether the house she needed was still standing. If it wasn’t, they were screwed.

  But it was.

  “This is it,” Jule said, peering up at the hulking ruin. The aging Victorian had weathered the storm, but two decades of disrepair had taken their toll. The peeling siding, boarded windows, and pitted beams were evident even in the dark. Jule hadn’t been back in nearly ten years, and, judging from the weedy lawn, the overgrown bushes nearly blockading the front walk, the toppled mailbox, and the diseased poplars, entropy had run its course.

  “You sure he still lives here?” Daniel asked.

  “You don’t think someone would have noticed if he’d moved?” West said. Kyle Sorenson rarely ventured out of his house and even more rarely made it into the heart of town, where he would be forced to interact with other human beings. Still, in the way of small towns and hermit-like old men, he managed to be a powerful p
resence, his fearsome scowl and wreck of a house fueling dares and nightmares for more than one generation of Oleander youth.

  “I was thinking more like died,” Daniel said.

  “He still lives here,” Jule confirmed. “Jack down at the Yellowbird makes regular liquor deliveries out here. He was whining about it last month.”

  “So, what?” Daniel said. “We just knock on the door, smile nicely, and ask if we can use his shortwave radio? Because of his reputation for being such a nice guy?”

  “Just let me go first,” Jule said. “He’ll let me in.”

  “What’s he like?” West asked, with the naked curiosity of one about to solve a major mystery of his childhood.

  “Old,” Jule said. “Older now, I guess. And… sad.”

  “Were there any swastikas?” West asked.

  “Maybe he keeps those hidden behind all the photos of his dead wife,” Jule snapped. “Why don’t you ask him?”

  “I was only wondering.”

  “He’s just a lonely old man,” Jule said. “That’s it.”

  “No one’s ‘just’ anything these days,” Daniel said, and his trigger finger twitched.

  Jule stepped gingerly onto the front steps. The rotting wood creaked beneath her weight. “If you men are scared, feel free to wait outside.” She knocked.

  She’d been afraid herself, the first time Scott had brought her here. She’d never bought the Nazi theory, even as a kid, but she’d caught enough glimpses of Kyle Sorenson shadowing his way through town in trench-coated gloom to form some theories of her own, foremost of which was that he possessed some kind of vampiric, youth-sucking powers and survived only by draining the life force of unwitting children. In fairness, she’d been eight years old, and had read her uncle James’s copy of Dracula four times. She had not cried, waiting on the doorstep for the old man to reply to the sharp knock, nor had she begged Scott not to deliver her up to the monster. But she had prayed that he would suffer a heart attack on his way to the door.

  His breath had been foul, his teeth false and yellow, his hands greased with some old-man slime, but he had not been a monster. Just an old man, with a bowl of candies that might well have been left over from World War II. If you ignored the fuzzy coating, they had a pleasant tang. The fearsome beast of Cherry Street turned out to be a lonely old man – whose only source of entertainment was a basement full of shortwave radios.

  She couldn’t believe it had taken her this long to think of the radios.

  When Scott was finally busted and hauled off to the federal pen, he hadn’t accused Sorenson of turning him in. After all, the feds had been tapping the Prevette phone lines – Scott should have realized, he informed his family through the visiting-room glass, that the radio would be no safer. That the feds were always listening. Jule hoped he’d been right.

  No one answered the door. Jule knocked louder.

  “Maybe he’s not home,” Daniel said. He’d been in favor of sneaking into the basement without letting the old man know they were there. “Prudent,” he’d called it, sounding – as Jule pointed out – like an old man himself.

  “Maybe it’s four a.m. and he’s a hundred years old,” West said, pounding on the door. “He’s probably asleep. And deaf.” He pressed a shoulder to the door and, before Jule could stop him, shoved it hard enough to crack the frame. The door crashed inward. “That should wake him.”

  “Or… not,” Daniel said, in a muffled voice, his hands pressed to his nose and mouth.

  Jule gagged. The smell was overwhelming. It was somehow beyond smell, a living thing with weight and texture that clawed its way up her nose and down her throat, coating her insides with some toxic mixture of bile and rot. The air itself felt solid, fuzzed like the decrepit candies, and her body rebelled. Everything in her screamed for escape. She somehow forced herself to stand still; she somehow, swallowing a sour mouthful of vomit that tasted of whatever lurked in the house, forced herself to breathe.

  West pulled his shirt over his face. Daniel was hunched over, a puddle of puke at his feet.

  “The radios are downstairs.” Each word forced out cost more effort than she had. The smell would get better as they got used to it, she told herself. Smells always did. But this one seemed to get worse. She had a moment’s panic at the thought that even if she fled the house, she wouldn’t flee the stench of rot, that it lived inside her now, would hold on and never let go.

  It smelled of freshly disemboweled deer, guts steaming in the fall air; it smelled of landfill, acres of garbage moldering under an August sun; it smelled of wrong. It smelled like it was coming from the kitchen, and to get to the basement, they had to go through it.

  Daniel took Jule’s hand. West nodded. She led the way.

  Kyle Sorenson had ended his days at the kitchen table. The revolver was still lodged in what was left of his mouth. He’d left the light on, making it impossible to ignore the smear on the faded wallpaper behind him, or pretend it was anything other than a spatter of brain. The words I’M SORRY were painted across the table in his blood.

  Now Jule did throw up, again and again, heaving until there was nothing left to expel, until she was hollow and could be entirely filled up by the noxious smell, the thought of which sent her heaving again.

  That’s how a corpse smells, she thought, and tried desperately hard not to think about Ellie, who she’d sent to her death.

  I’m sorry.

  For Sorenson, words hadn’t been enough. She wondered whether he’d caught himself in time. When the storm came, and with it, the toxic cloud that unleashed a darkness, that made whatever wrong lived inside you seem right, how long had it taken before he’d found the gun, and the will to use it? What had the whispers in his head urged him to do?

  “At least, we don’t need his permission to use the radio,” West said, sounding, amid all of this, somehow normal. Jule clung to the voice, and its implied sanity.

  “Let’s do this and get the hell out of here,” she said. “Unless you want to check for swastikas.”

  “I’m good,” West said.

  No one suggested taking the gun.

  They descended into the basement. The light switch on the stairs had no effect, and the narrow beam of West’s useless cell phone cast more shadows than it did light. It only increased the sense that they were delivering themselves up to a dungeon. I’m sorry. Who knew what secrets were lurking underground? If not decaying skeletons chained to the wall or tables laid out with instruments of torture, then surely at the very least, families of rats summoned from far and wide by the ever-richening smell. But the dim light caught only what Jule remembered, a small space crammed with folding tables, each topped with old-fashioned radios in varying stages of dilapidation. Most were only for listening, but a few served as ham radios that would connect the Sorenson house to the outside world. Kyle Sorenson had been a man of organization and habit, laying the radios out from worst to best working order. Trying very hard not to think of the corpse upstairs or the stench, Jule crossed to the far corner, where, as she’d expected, she found the transceiver. It wasn’t the best or most powerful in his collection, and lacked digital tuning, but it was the one he’d shown her how to use all those years ago, his hand covering hers as she inched across the dial.

  She swallowed another mouthful of bile, and held out her open palm. “Phone,” she said, and West handed over the light.

  “You sure you can get this thing to work?” he asked.

  “I’m sure.”

  “If we can’t get a signal out —”

  “We will.”

  “And if there’s no one listening on the other end?”

  “There will be,” she said. “There always is.”

  A whole world of strangers without ever having to leave the house. She’d always wondered what Sorenson saw in these machines – why, if he was clever enough to crave the world beyond Oleander’s limits, he didn’t exercise his adult prerogative and join it. Why settle for voices, she’d wondered, when
you could have the whole thing: new faces and new landscapes, oceans and mountains and canyons and anything but the endless flat? He’d always acted like this was his only option for expanding his small world. “I’m no good around people,” he’d said whenever she asked, and she would think You’re good with me.

  Then Scott had gone to prison, and she’d never gone back. And now Sorenson was dead.

  She took a few slow, deep breaths, trying to remember what she’d once known. She twisted the dial and tuned in the frequency Scott had used for his coded messages, in hopes the feds were still holding vigil.

  “This is a distress call from Oleander, Kansas. People masquerading as soldiers have quarantined the town. There’s been a leak of toxic material at the factory nearby, and people here are getting sick. People here are dying. They won’t let us out, and soon they’re going to kill us all. This is not a joke. My name is —” No one would believe a Prevette. “Eleanor King.” She said another silent apology. “You can look me up. I live in Oleander, Kansas, and if you can hear this, please send the authorities. Send help. Oleander, Kansas. I know this sounds crazy, but if you look into it, you’ll see the town is completely cut off. We need your help. Please.” Jule sent out the same message on another frequency, and then another. Someone a few miles down the road might tune in and hear her; someone in China might hear her. Someone from GMT might hear her, and do what was necessary to shut her up. There was no way of knowing. You just had to send your voice into the void, and believe someone was listening.