The Waking Dark

by Robin Wasserman

  She broke off at the sound of footsteps overhead, seized by the impossible certainty that, stirred by the use of his shortwaves, Kyle Sorenson had woken from death and was on his way downstairs to show them exactly how it was done. But that was nightmare, and these days, reality was bound to be worse. Daniel raised a finger to his lips. Jule darkened the phone.

  They held still in the dark, trying not to breathe. The radio crackled. Feet stomped overhead. There was a sound of porcelain crashing against tile, then a shout. “Smoke ’em out!”

  The basement door eased open and something clattered down the stairs. Jule assumed it was a tear-gas canister – until it erupted in a ball of fire. She hit the ground. West and Daniel piled on top of her. Smoke billowed, and though the rational part of her brain tried to tell her that she still had time before the basement filled with smoke and fire, she could already feel her lungs tightening, her eyes watering, her heart thumping to the steady tune: Get out get out get out get out.

  “We got the message out,” Daniel murmured. “That’s what counts.”

  They could die now, he meant, and maybe the town would live. The town that didn’t mind cornering them in a basement, burning them alive.

  “Just keep behind me,” West said. Assuming a tackle position, head tucked, shoulders hunched, he charged through the smoke. Jule gave in to her body’s panicked demands and followed, Daniel bringing up the rear, all of them bursting into the kitchen and drawing in great breaths of foul air. Six armed men were waiting.

  “Told you I saw ’em go inside,” Michael Louch crowed. He lived next door and, in a saner life, owned the gas station on State Street. Now he carried a rifle in one hand and a wine bottle stuffed with a dirty handkerchief in the other. Which explained the Molotov cocktail. Louch was notorious for playing with fire.

  Six men: a gas-station owner, a shoe salesman, two drunks who spent most days in the drugstore alley, a football coach who by this time had probably killed his wife, and Jule’s eighth-grade math teacher, who had, from the apparent goodness of his heart, passed her despite an 80 percent absence rate. He was the one who dragged her out of the house, while the shoe salesman grabbed Daniel. It took the coach and both of his drunk deputies to subdue a wild West.

  To hell with prudence, Jule thought, struggling in Mr. Schubert’s grasp. Exhilarated despite herself by the fresh air, she told the truth. “There’s something in the air, in the water. It’s making you crazy, but you can fight it.” She had no idea whether that was true. “This isn’t really you, Mr. Schubert.” She had no idea whether that was true, either. “You’re a math teacher. This is crazy!” The man showed no sign of hearing her. When she stopped walking and started kicking, he simply hoisted her off her feet and carried her down the stone path, into the street. Behind her, she heard West grunt in what sounded like pain. Daniel was ominously silent. “They’re going to kill us all,” she tried again. “The soldiers. They’re not really soldiers. They’ve been experimenting on us, and when the experiment’s over, they’re going to kill the lab rats. They’re the enemy. You want to go crazy, go crazy on them.”

  “Seems like you’re the crazy one,” Mr. Schubert said. “But that’s all right. We have a place for you now.”

  “You liked me,” she said, twisting in his grip. “Remember? Please, remember.”

  “You were a little bitch,” he said. “But you looked good in a tank top.”

  “You deserve what they’re going to do to you,” she shouted. “All of you. I hope they burn the place down. I hope you all burn.”

  The math teacher pinned Jule with the same disdainful stare he always gave the class when they mixed up sine and cosine. “You first.”

  West hadn’t been inside the abandoned grocery store since he was fourteen, still young enough to think that breaking glass, scribbling on walls, and pretending to inhale the occasional joint marked him as daring. After that year, the pack of feral boys he’d run with divided: Half went straight, joining the football team and signing on to a new life of pep rallies and vaguely clean living. The other half graduated from pot to meth, from trespassing to vagrancy, and, in more than one case, from middle school to jail. West had joined the team. Thus saving his life – that’s how the coach had put it. Now the coach was the one who shoved him through the door and slammed the padlock in place behind him. The building, abandoned since Clarkson’s had gone under in the late nineties, had never been especially spick-and-span – there had always been discarded rags, used condoms, splashes of unidentifiable bodily fluids and heaps that might have been animal, vegetable, or mineral, a whiff of decay. But now the building warehoused nearly thirty of Oleander’s undesirables, along with their assorted waste products. The smell of the place was part porta-potty, part charnel house.

  The windows were boarded up, the cracks between rotting boards too narrow to let in more than a trickle of the dawn. Bodies cluttered the linoleum, most breathing heavily with sleep, a few suspiciously still. Couples hugged the corners, taking advantage of the darkness and the comfort of a warm body. A handful of solitary figures stood watch by the door, greeting the new arrivals with a hostile snarl that suggested they would find no friends here. So when the hand emerged from the shadows to grab West’s shoulder, he seized it and flipped the body hard to the floor. A head cracked against tile. Jason blinked up at him, dazed.

  “Nice to see you again, too.”

  West cursed. He pulled Jason off the ground, righted him, fussed over the bump on his head, apologized more than once and was shrugged off each time. It was stupid to sneak up on someone in here, Jason admitted. It was smart to stay on guard. It was right to strike first, ask questions later.

  It was, all of it, worse than they’d thought.

  Jason hugged him. West hugged back. Tightly. And didn’t care who saw.

  “Tell us,” West said. “What happened. What’s happening.”

  Jason told them it was no safer inside the makeshift prison than out. Arguments turned into fights turned into brawls, and some of the bloodied bodies fell without rising. No one tried to help. Every few hours the door opened, and either someone was pushed in or someone was yanked out. No one knew what happened to those who were taken away. But they all knew what had happened to Ellie King.

  Everything was crazy, Jason told them. Everything impossible was possible; everyone was different. He’d once had a gun, Jason told them, and if he had it now, he’d cut to the last chapter and pull the trigger on himself. He said this without an abundance of emotion, as if standing in the rain expressing mild regret that he’d forgotten his umbrella. When West confided what they suspected about the “final containment,” he barely seemed surprised. “Guess it sucks to be us.”

  Something had been extinguished in him, and West found that he missed it.

  “We should check out the door,” Jule said. “Maybe there’s some way to break it open.”

  “There’s not,” Jason said.

  “Doesn’t hurt to look.”

  “Not as much as it’ll hurt if you get through to the guys with the guns standing on the other side of it.”

  Jule stood. “Thanks for the input,” she said, disgust plain in her voice. “Daniel?” She left. He followed. Leaving West and Jason relatively alone.

  “Did they hurt you?” West asked quietly. “When they brought you here?”

  Jason shrugged. “What’s it matter?”

  “It matters.”

  “I can’t blame them,” Jason said. “I bet it felt good.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You want to know what it’s like? To be ‘infected,’ as you call it? It’s not like having some voice in your head telling you to do bad things. It’s like… being yourself. But more than you ever were. It’s like everything you want and everything you feel is suddenly right, as long as it’s ugly. And everything you want is ugly. Everything you are is ugly.” He raised his fist, slowly, bringing it into the beam of West’s cell-phone light. The knuckles were scr
aped, the fingers stained with dried blood. “Yesterday I beat up some guy for his candy bar. I wasn’t even that hungry, not then. But he had it, and I wanted it, and I was bigger than him, so… I took it. And then I bashed his head into the wall a few times, for good measure.” He laughed. “Turned out to be an Almond Joy. And I hate coconut.”

  West cradled the fist in both hands, running his thumbs over the swollen knuckles. Jason winced. “I’m a pacifist, you know? Was a pacifist. And a vegetarian. Let no harm come to fish or fowl. Or any living thing. Until I decide I need a candy bar.”

  West had a strange impulse to press his lips to the knuckles.

  “We got a message out,” he said. “Someone’s going to come and stop this and then…”

  “Then what?” Jason said, in a choked voice. “They lock us all up somewhere? Do some superfun experiments?”

  “Find a cure.”

  “You don’t get it, do you?” He shook his head and pulled his hand out of West’s. “I’m not sick. I’m me. These things I’ve done, these things I feel… even if you ‘cured’ me tomorrow, I’d still remember them. I’d still know how it felt to crush that kid’s head into the wall, and how it felt to want to. The sound it made, his skull against the concrete, again. Again.” Jason smiled faintly at the memory – then realized he was doing it, and shuddered. “I’m always going to be the person who did that.”

  West’s father liked to say You are the sum of your choices.

  “You don’t have to be,” West said. “A person can be whoever he wants.”

  “Funny, coming from you.”

  “Meaning?”

  “It’s just funny, that’s all,” Jason said. He looked very small, and very afraid.

  “Jason…” West wanted to take his hand again, assure him that he was a good person, whatever he’d done. But he didn’t want to lie, and he didn’t know what was true.

  “I miss Nick,” Jason said.

  “Me too.”

  Daniel hadn’t owned a watch since he was ten. There was no way to measure how much time passed in the dark. It was, somewhere, daylight: he knew that much. Time was moving forward, too quickly. Running out. Once, the door creaked open. Daniel and Jule rushed it… along with most of the other prisoners. A crush of desperate flesh grabbed and pushed and stomped toward freedom. There was gunfire, and screams. When it was over, there were more bruised and bloodied bodies on the ground, three additional prisoners, and a locked door, and no one was any closer to getting out.

  He’d left Milo alone out there.

  “He’s not alone,” Jule reminded him.

  But he wasn’t with anyone who could protect him. Or who would sacrifice their safety for his.

  Like I would? he thought, and wondered.

  “What are they waiting for?” Daniel asked, meaning the soldiers that weren’t soldiers, and the “containment” of the problem they’d solved.

  “You in some hurry to die?” Jule said.

  “Maybe we’re wrong about them. Maybe ‘containment’ just means they’ve got a cure.”

  “And then what? They march their soldiers in and give us all a happily ever after? Ask us nicely not to tell anyone what happened?”

  He couldn’t even smile. “It could happen.”

  “Have you thought about it?” Jule said. “What happens to all these people, even if they do get out? Get cured? What happens next?”

  “Things go back to normal.”

  “How?”

  He thought of Coach Hart and his naked wife, of the Watchdogs, of his math teacher holding a rifle, and of his father, tied up in the shed, left there to die. “I don’t know.”

  Jule moved behind him, awkwardly, and put her hands on his shoulders. She kneaded them, for a moment, as if it were something she’d seen someone on television do in times of trouble, then gave up, and leaned against him, her forehead to his shoulder blades, her fingers still nestled into the grooves of his shoulders.

  “You don’t have to do that,” he said.

  “What?”

  His face burned at the memory of what had happened at the Tuck house, or what hadn’t. He pulled away from her and turned to face her, sparing himself the answer and her the act. He could feel the eyes in the dark, watching them, and wondered how it was that things had come to this: that there could be so many potential paths to death, and not one to survival.

  She touched him again, again on the shoulder, again hesitantly. Her expression offered no hint of what she was thinking.

  “You don’t understand me at all, do you?” she said.

  He had to agree.

  “But sometimes… it feels like you could,” she added.

  She was close enough that when he nodded, their foreheads kissed.

  “Ever since I met you, this keeps happening,” she said. “The two of us, alone in the dark. Thinking we’re about to die.”

  “I guess that makes me your bad-luck charm. Or you mine.”

  Maybe he had known from the beginning, in the storage closet in the back of the J&C, holding her and waiting for the end. Maybe they were still back there, stranded in the split second before the tornado swept them into nothingness, hallucinating a future because neither had a past worthy of flashing before their eyes.

  “You thought you could somehow protect me,” she said. “From a freaking tornado.”

  He laughed. “Don’t worry, I wouldn’t dare make that mistake again.”

  “All those times, you, me, certain death – you’d think I would be afraid, right? But I wasn’t. Even now, I’m just… not.”

  “You’re not the type,” he said. “No fear. I may not understand much about you, but that part I got.”

  Now she was the one who laughed, and the sound was somehow purer, lighter, than anything he’d heard in days. “You don’t understand anything.”

  She was still laughing when she kissed him.

  Kissing him, in the dark. Reaching for him, touching him, in the dark. Everything simple, in the dark. Need – gratified. Want – have. Everything easy, everything warm and safe, salty and sweet, everything erased by the dark, everything but him. No Jule, in the dark. Only a girl, uncomplicated and unafraid. With no past and no future and no fears. No guilt. His hands on her, but not his eyes.

  In the dark, no one watching.

  Lips insistent, breaths fast, tongues searching out the dark inside the dark, skin slick and radiating heat.

  No hesitation, in the dark.

  No clock ticking away their lives; no consequences.

  No fear.

  A moment stretched like taffy, a word at his lips, stopped by the taste of hers. No talking, in the dark. No Jule, but still a Daniel, still sweet, still nervous, still skinny, still good. Daniel, kissing her, cradling her, wanting her, having her. Giving herself to him – taking him for herself – in the dark.

  And then, beyond the two of them, in the world nonexistent, an explosion.

  A flood of light.

  Jule let go.

  This time, it wasn’t fireworks, either of the diversionary or metaphorically romantic variety. It was a true explosion, blowing the door off its hinges. A foot to the left and it would have knocked Daniel and Jule to the ground. He wasn’t sure the shock would have been any greater. He wasn’t sure the shock could have been any greater than the reality of Jule abruptly launching herself at him, then just as abruptly pushing him away as the door blew apart and their avenging angel appeared in the threshold, cast into shadow by the light streaming past. The shadow had a gun in each hand, a bullet-striped bandolier across his barrel chest, and a booming voice.

  “Daniel Ghent! Hearken unto thy father that begat thee!”

  16

  TO SUMMON UP THE BLOOD

  Outside, it was daylight. Outside, in the sunshine, the ground was littered with bodies. Maybe those foolish enough not to run away when they saw the Preacher coming; maybe all of them – the Preacher had always been a good shot.