The Waking Dark

by Robin Wasserman

  Outside, a still point in the river of fleeing prisoners, Cass and Grace waited.

  Milo was nowhere.

  Gunfire echoed in the distance.

  “The war’s upon us,” the Preacher said, pulling Daniel into a rough embrace. “The soldiers of darkness are laying waste to the works of men.”

  So “containment” had begun.

  “They’re marching,” Cass said. “Tanks, too. Heading for the center of town – shooting everything in their path. We heard they brought you here, and when we heard —”

  Daniel shoved his father away, but the man was bigger and stronger and wouldn’t let go. “Where’s Milo?”

  “We didn’t tell him what was happening,” Grace said. “But he must have overheard. I swear we were watching him, but…”

  A sick certainty, birthed in his gut, spread like poison up through his limbs. While he’d been holding Jule, while he’d been thinking of nothing but himself, believing that, for once, there could be joy without a price, Milo had paid. “Where is he?”

  “He came for me,” the Preacher said. “Through the circles of hell, through Satan’s flames, crawling on his belly with the weight of Atlas on his shoulders, he searched for his father.”

  “Where is he now?”

  But as soon as the question was out, Daniel willed his father’s mouth to silence. As long as the words went unsaid, Milo could live, safe and healthy, in the space between question and answer.

  If I die right on this spot, he’ll always be alive, Daniel thought. Bring the curtain down before the final act and the doomed characters live forever.

  “Young Milo is underground,” his father intoned, “and there he will stay.”

  Daniel punched him. Daniel shouted and Daniel screamed and Daniel flailed in his father’s tree-trunk arms as they held him tight and held him steady, and somehow, the words penetrated, not the Preacher’s incantations or Jule’s sharp rebuke or Cass’s soothing, but Grace’s voice, small and springwater clear.

  “Safe,” she said. “He’s safe.”

  The crawl space under the kitchen, the stacks of tuna and the steel door – if Milo was in that underground, locked up with orders not to open the door until he ran out of food or Daniel assured him he was safe, then he might be. Grace promised him: She and Cass had stowed Milo behind a locked door. They had soothed his fears. They had saved him, for the moment. Underground.

  There was space for more people. Maybe not all of them, but space for Daniel and Jule, if they crowded in tight. If they could make it back to the house, they could ride out the apocalypse until all those infected were gunned down and containment was complete. They could hide beneath the earth and let the town die. Emerge when the smoke had cleared and hope for the best, a life as lab rats. A life for Milo.

  Or they could revert to Plan A: Find a way out, somehow. Alert the authorities. Save whatever was left of the town.

  Milo was safe.

  With that guarantee, Daniel’s fear lifted. Not just the fear of losing Milo, but all of it. It was background noise, buzzing dully in his ears, suddenly as easy to ignore as the mosquitoes and the wind. Milo was safe, and Daniel, and his friends, and the town, were screwed. But Milo was safe, and their father had saved him. Then, for good measure, he’d saved Daniel.

  Grace was towing Milo’s old red Radio Flyer wagon. It was piled high with weapons. Cass handed Daniel a gun. Jule had already taken hers.

  “They’ll have plenty to keep them busy,” the Preacher said, fixing Daniel with a nearly lucid stare. “Town’s going to put up a fight. Not a bad time to head for the woods.”

  “Come with us,” he said, before thinking better of it.

  But the Preacher shook his head. “I’ve got an army to command,” he said. “‘The mind is its own place, and in it self can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.’ I will make of this place a Heaven.”

  “Dad…” Daniel swallowed. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d said thank you to his father, much less had reason to. “I’m sorry. For the shed.”

  “You did what you had to do.”

  “But —”

  “You did what I would do.”

  Daniel believed it was true – and was surprised that the thought brought him no shame.

  “I’ll always come for you,” the Preacher said.

  It wasn’t, Daniel decided, that his father had gotten any less crazy. It was that the world had descended into madness around him. Now they were all together in the abyss.

  There was another rough embrace, a bristle of stubble against his cheek, and then the Preacher hoisted his rifle and saluted his son. He marched west, toward the loudest gunfire, turned a corner, and was gone.

  Jule cleared her throat. “He’s right,” she said, in a back-to-business tone that let Daniel off the emotional hook. No time for any of this mushy crap, her voice said, and the burning in his eyes faded away. His father had been gone for a long time. He’d already mourned the loss. No reason to do it all over again.

  “We’ve got weapons now,” she said, “and a head start, and if this town goes as nuts as I think it’s about to, we’ve got one hell of a distraction.”

  “What about the radio message?” Cass asked. “Did you get it out? Is someone coming to help us?”

  “Does it matter? They’re not here. So we help ourselves.”

  Milo would be safer where he was, waiting for Daniel to call in the cavalry or die trying. He had to try. “I’m in,” Daniel said.

  They all were.

  The other prisoners were gone, all but West and his unlikely friend, who were still hovering just inside the threshold of the grocery, their heads bent toward each other. Daniel waved them over.

  “It’s started,” he said.

  West seized a firearm from the pile. “So what are we waiting for?” he said. “Jason —”

  “No sappy goodbyes, please. I’m a bit of a crier.”

  “I was going to say, come with us.”

  Jason tapped his chest. “Bad guy, remember? You can’t trust me.”

  “Not true,” West said, looking to the others for support. No one spoke. “Come with us.”

  “I can’t trust me,” Jason said, and curled his right hand into a fist. Daniel tensed, but West took the fist in his hands. The grip looked almost… tender.

  Then he let go of the fist, and cupped Jason’s face – again, and no mistake about it this time, tenderly. “I can,” West said, and kissed him.

  Daniel tried not to gape. He wasn’t having much more luck at it than anyone else, except for Cass, who seemed utterly unsurprised.

  “Did that just happen?” he murmured to Jule.

  She rolled her eyes. “You really are dense, aren’t you?”

  But even Jason, when he broke from the kiss, seemed somewhat taken aback. West just grinned at the rubbernecking.

  “You’re coming,” he said.

  Jason shook his head no; West shook his head yes. Jason looked to the others, but no one objected. Daniel wondered if they were thinking the same thing he was: that this was a terrible idea, that Jason was infected, dangerous – he’d said so himself.

  But: the Preacher had come to save him.

  Daniel wasn’t about to tell anyone, infected or not, that they had no chance of saving themselves.

  Jason took West’s hand, giving in. He gave the group a wry smile. “Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  They decided not to give him a gun.

  The quickest route to the woods took them straight past Cassandra’s house, which suited Jule’s needs perfectly.

  “We don’t really have time to stop and pick up your diary,” West said, but there was no fire to the objection. Since the kiss outside the old grocery, everything about him was somehow lighter… looser. Which was fine with Jule, as long as he didn’t get sloppy – or start imagining that she was some sentimental twit who couldn’t survive without her precious bag of keepsakes. In fact, when they reached the house, which had th
e stillness and faint decay of a home abandoned, it was Cass who beelined for the stacks of photo albums and closets of shoes, pressed familiar items to her cheeks as if hoping some of her old self would rub off onto the new. There was no question: this house still belonged to her. Let her have it. The house had nothing Jule wanted; she’d come for what hid in the basement.

  The Molotov cocktail had sparked an idea – the Preacher had set it afire.

  Jule’s uncles had done a good job of keeping her out of their lab, but they couldn’t keep her off the Internet, where she’d educated herself on the substances with which she shared a home. Anhydrous ammonia, a necessary ingredient in basic batching, could burn straight through denim to melt off a testicle (as had happened to her uncle’s clumsy delivery boy). The lithium strip of a battery could, when added to ammonia without caution, blow you up. Overheating red phosphorus could result in a cloud of phosphine gas, which would burn you from the inside out. Hydrochloric acid spoke for itself. Jule was uncomfortable around guns and didn’t trust herself with knives, but chemicals? Those she understood. They were in her blood.

  The basement door was unlocked. Her uncles Axe and Teddy lay at the foot of the stairs, both stained with blood. Both dead.

  She shook it off. Told herself, however unconvincingly, that once you’d seen one dead body up close and personal, you’d seen them all. That it didn’t matter that nearly everyone she’d counted as family was gone. That it had been a long time since Axe and Teddy had babysat her, keeping her up late with thrilling stories of outlaws and their pig-cop pursuers. That they were grown men with a choice, and they’d chosen a life destined to lead them to a pile at the bottom of a stairwell.

  They were still her family, her only family. And now they were gone. Here was her will made manifest: She had finally escaped the Prevettes, and their fate. She was not one of them. She would not think about the body that had stained her bedroom carpet, or the glug and suck of the swamp that consumed it. That had been circumstance.

  It did not define her.

  Jule couldn’t help noticing neither of the brothers seemed to have an obvious weapon. They hadn’t killed each other. But if it had been Scott… where was he? And who else did he now count as his enemy? She half expected him to pop up from behind the basement’s makeshift lab table, wearing his stained apron and wielding an impossible knife. But the lab sat empty, a mad scientist’s collection of plastic tubing and kitchen funnels, frying pans coated with a powdery white residue, stained coffee filters, bottles of Drano and antifreeze, towering stacks of batteries and empty blister packs, a smell like nail polish remover and urine. Finished stock sat on a shelf by the door, ready for distribution via a network that no longer existed. There was no one left to notice what she stole, or to care.

  One foil, a few seconds with the pipe, and this would all cease to matter. She’d never understood that before, so never understood temptation. Now she saw: temptation was too small a word. Here was an answer to the unanswerable; here was an escape. Here was an ending, tidy and swift. Here was happiness, neatly sealed in a ziplock bag.

  She began to gather supplies, packing them carefully into one of the Porter family’s expensive leather satchels. Nothing that would explode in transit – everything that would cause damage when she needed it. She worked quickly, but not as quickly as she could have. As long as she stayed down there, the possibility stayed open: that she could allow herself to give in. Just this once. Become the person she’d been raised to be.

  It had felt so good, in Daniel’s arms, in the dark, letting go. She wrapped, she calculated, she packed, and she kept returning, out of the corner of her eye, to the stack by the door – the one-way ticket to the dark.

  They were supposed to be guarding the door, but West couldn’t take his eyes off Jason.

  West barely knew anything about him, and what he did know, he didn’t much like.

  West wanted to kiss him again.

  Was this how it felt to be infected? Possessed by the temptation to do the last thing you should ever want to do?

  Did it feel this good?

  He gave in enough to let himself smile, and take Jason’s hand.

  “I shouldn’t be here.” Jason wasn’t smiling.

  “It’s fine,” West said. “You’ll be fine.”

  “You don’t know that. You don’t even know me. Not really. And you don’t know…” He was shivering. “I don’t know what I’ll do. You don’t know what that’s like.”

  “Hey, I get it.”

  “No you don’t!” Jason snapped, and jerked his hand away. “All I want is… whatever I want. Anything, you get that? Doesn’t matter what it is, or what else is going on. Right now? I want to tear your clothes off. Right here, in this stupid hallway, with all these people. Screw them, screw the town, screw everything. Just take what I want. Do you know what it’s taking not to do that?”

  “Who says that’s the drug?”

  Jason snorted. “You’re cute. But not that cute.”

  West took Jason’s face in his hands and kissed him, hard.

  “They’re right upstairs,” Jason said. “They’re coming back any minute.”

  “Don’t care,” West said, and ran his hands down Jason’s neck, across his shoulders, down his biceps, and gripped tight. “You think it’s that stuff making you want this? Then fine. You focus on that. That’s not hurting anyone. You won’t hurt anyone.”

  “What if hurting someone is the point?”

  “Who? Me?”

  Jason pressed his face into West’s shoulder, like he was trying to hold something in. “Not you,” he mumbled. “Maybe you. I don’t know. Maybe…” The rest was muffled.

  “Jason?”

  Jason raised his head. “Nick, okay? Nick. It’s not about wanting you. It’s about wanting to hurt him.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  Jason shrugged.

  “So, fine,” West said. “Whatever. You may want to hurt him, but —” He swallowed. “You can’t. He’s dead.”

  “You’re not,” Jason said. “The others aren’t. I’m not… safe.”

  “I’ll make sure you are.”

  “You think you could stop me?”

  “I think you can stop yourself,” West said. And then, because he wasn’t any more convinced of that than Jason was, “And yeah, if you can’t, I can. But try this first. Next time you want to smash someone’s head into the wall —”

  “Picture you naked?” Jason said, his lips quirking into a smile. He looked like Nick then, and felt like Nick in West’s arms, and it made West want to push him away and never let go, all at the same time. Instead, he kissed Jason one more time and told himself it didn’t matter now, wouldn’t matter until they were all safe. In the meantime…

  “Whatever works.”

  My house, Cass thought, trying to believe it. My bedroom.

  Very little had changed, at least up here. Her old stuffed animals still perched in the same corner of the closet, her photo collages still lined the mirror, her name, curlicued and neon, still blazed in lights. Cass felt like an anthropologist, studying a foreign environment for clues about the alien creature who might once have lived there. She ran her fingers across familiar spines. My books. She sat down on the bed. My pillow, my sheets. She lifted a framed photo. My family.

  Grace watched from the doorway, betraying no sign of emotion.

  Grace hadn’t tried to kill her again. That was something.

  They’d even worked together, once Milo had forced them to chase him to the Ghent house, and the Preacher – inexplicably trussed up in the old shed – had told them about the safe room. They’d plotted with the Preacher and with each other to save their friends, all the while watching each other carefully, Cass tensed to fend off another attack, Grace thinking her strange thoughts, frowning as Cass ushered Milo into the crawl space and locked the door. “This doesn’t make up for anything,” she’d said, and Cass had to agree.

  “I always wanted to see th
is,” Grace said now, nudging the doorjamb with her sneaker.

  “If I knew that, I would have invited you over,” Cass said, though they both knew that was a lie.

  “It’s different than I pictured.”

  Cass set down the photo. It had been taken at Thanksgiving dinner many years before, when she was still young enough to perch on her father’s lap. In the picture, he rested his chin on her head. Her mother knelt beside them, planting a kiss on Cass’s cheek. The image of domestic bliss. “Yeah. It is.”

  “You can barely tell the difference,” Jule had said, peeking in on her drugged-out mother for the briefest of moments before going about her business. Daniel wasn’t sure whether he didn’t believe her, or simply didn’t want to. He left her to her explosives raid and Cass to her short walk down memory lane, and he stayed here, in the bedroom, by Jule’s mother’s side. Downstairs, West and Jason guarded the door. Or at least, that’s what they’d said they were doing. Daniel still couldn’t quite wrap his mind around it. West, of all people? West, who he’d more than once imagined switching places with, just to have things simple and perfect and easy, to coast through life. But nothing was as easy as it seemed, not for anyone. That was what he’d learned from the storm and its aftermath. That, and everyone had their secrets.