by David Arnold
“So he’s okay?” asked Lakie, ripping open a pouch of cereal. “Monty’s okay?”
“Yeah,” said Lennon. “Hopelessly in love. But yeah.”
Lakie looked down at Kit, a small, fleeting smile. “He saw that coming a mile away.”
After they’d all eaten something, they sat on the cement floor and waited for the swarms to pass. And here, surrounded by the paints Gabe had used to tell one story, they listened to Lakie tell another. “That night on the baseball field, Monty and Loretta made some excuse to go off into the woods together. You and Kit were gone, I don’t remember why now.”
“He wanted a new stick.”
Harry was nestled in Lennon’s lap, and Nico felt both glad and sad at the ease of their companionship.
“I don’t understand,” said Lennon. “The Flies carried you off.How are you alive?”
Lakie’s face softened, not a smile, but in the family of one. “Big Alma,” she said under her breath.
“No.”
“Who?” asked Nico.
“Seventy-five-denier ripstop nylon shell,” said Lakie. “With Insotect Tubic construction. Big Alma saved my life.”
Nico looked from one to the other. “I’m lost.”
“Her sleeping bag,” said Lennon.
Nico’s father once said there was no kind of magic like nonfiction magic: things too impossible, too inconceivable, to not be true. She thought of this as she listened to Lakie describe how fast the Flies were on them, the sound of Pringles’s animal-like screams, thoroughly inhuman, and how she’d done the first thing that came to mind: zipped herself into her sleeping bag. “Like being buried alive. Just the weight of them on me. And then I felt myself being lifted, like—a giant hand scooping me into the air.” Lakie looked at Kit as she spoke. “Bruno never shut up about the Flies. Blood this, blood that. Fucking fanatical, that man. But I think he was right about blood. I’d just butchered that turkey. Pringles’s elbow was in bad shape. If it was blood the Flies were after, they found plenty of it on that baseball field.”
“I’m sorry”—Nico leaned forward—“how long were you inside a sleeping bag?”
“I don’t know. An hour maybe? Felt like days. And then eventually they just—dropped me.”
Lennon cursed under his breath as Nico imagined the whitetail falling from the sky.
“I hit something on the way down.” Lakie let go of Kit’s hand, lifted her red bandanna to show them a pretty gruesome cut, diagonal from eyebrow to cheek. The eye itself was a mess of popped vessels and blood sores, almost completely red. “And then I hit water. By the time I got out of the sleeping bag and swam to the surface, I was pretty light-headed. Could only see out of one eye. So when I first saw it, I figured I was hallucinating.”
“First saw . . .”
“The city.”
Lakie said she’d landed in a river, surrounded by enormous buildings, roads and bridges, gray skies, fog and a smoggy cold.
“Which city?” asked Nico.
“There were a few different signs. But I think it was Manchester.”
“How far away? From here to there?”
“Took me almost two days, but it’s a lot closer. I was freezing, in shock, couldn’t walk right at first. I can still barely see anything out of this eye; otherwise, I would have hit Bruno in more than the leg and shoulder.”
“How’d you wind up here?”
“I knew our group had been headed east to a river. Figured there was a chance this was that river. Only question then was whether I should follow it north or south. I tried to visualize the maps we’d used. I was pretty sure Manchester was south of us, so—I warmed up inside a house, hung my clothes to dry, got some sleep—and then started walking north.”
Lennon counted on his fingers. “So you’ve been here—four days? Five?”
“Feels like a month.”
“Where’d they keep you?”
“This little house across the street, converted into a prison. Bars on windows, locks on doors. I got a chunk of Bruno’s ear one night. Pretty sure I busted Gabe’s testicle. They could have killed me, I guess, but that would have defeated their little plan.”
“‘Be fruitful and multiply,’” said Nico.
Lakie looked at her, and in that one, piercing eye, Nico saw another life where they might have been good friends. “They had this whole system. One meal a day. Barely any water. No fire.”
“Trying to wear you down.”
“Get me to break.”
“So you couldn’t fight back.”
There was more Nico wanted to know. How Lakie had been caught, for one, and if she’d spent five days here, surely there had been other altercations. But her own curiosity was nothing compared to the level of trauma Lakie had been through. There’s plenty she’s not saying, thought Nico, immediately followed by: Can’t fucking blame her.
Quietly, in a voice thin and faraway, Lakie said, “We’ve been here before,” and while Nico felt she’d heard the phrase recently, she couldn’t place where. “That’s what it felt like, locked in that house. Like I’d been there for ages.”
“How’d you escape?” asked Lennon.
She took a long sip of water, and then, very calmly: “The spaceman. Just like Pringles said.”
Stunned, Lennon told Nico the story of how Pringles had accidentally served poisonous berries only to have someone in a spacesuit appear out of thin air and save their lives. “I always pretended I didn’t see him,” said Lennon. “I don’t know why I did that.”
“A couple months ago Kit said he saw somebody walking in the woods, dressed like an astronaut, only in all black.” Lakie looked at his small hand in hers as if it might come alive at any moment. “I’ve known the kid his whole life and he never lied, not once. The shit he knew, he had no business knowing. But I didn’t believe him.”
Nico hadn’t given much thought to someone not believing in the existence of the Deliverer, just as she hadn’t given much thought to someone not believing in the existence of Harry. Only now, in the company of others, did she understand that her eyes had grown used to the light of the Farmhouse, that her entire perspective of the outside world had, like a prolonged womb, developed within. Down here, in the new light of Lennon and Lakie, she saw how truly insular her life had been. “We called him the Deliverer,” she said, and she described the slat in the door of the Farmhouse, the regular deliveries of goods, and how she’d once thought the hands of the Deliverer were magical little birds.
“Earlier tonight. I’m locked up in that prison-house,” said Lakie, “when I hear the lock click, and I think, Here we go. And then the door opens, and this person in a spacesuit’s just standing there, staring at me. Sets a bolt-action rifle on the floor, nods once, then turns and walks away. Not a word. Leaves the door wide open. I run out of the house just in time to see the—Deliverer or spaceman or whatever—walking out of town—with him.”
She nodded toward Lennon.
“Me?”
“The dog,” said Lakie.
Harry kept his snout on Lennon’s outstretched legs, but his ears perked, his tail wagged. He knows we’re talking about him. Nico recalled his absence during dinner. Now she knew where he’d gone; she just had no idea why.
They sat quietly a moment, and Nico looked at the paints along the wall, imagined Gabe down here with an image in his head, gathering supplies for his murals. And she wondered if Lennon was right, if this had all happened before, and would all happen again. Maybe one day, she and Harry, Kit and Lennon and Lakie would star in their own mural, and some other person thousands of years from now might stare up and wonder who these people were, where they’d come from, what Vesuvius things they’d done.
“Lakie,” she said, suddenly grateful to be alive.
“Yeah.”
“Thank you. And I’m sorry.”
; Aboveground, the woods seemed to have returned to their normal wintersong, the swarms passed. Staring at Kit, she could almost hear that sweet voice explaining how paint made from natural pigments could last forever, and Nico thought, Maybe here, in this little room, that’s exactly what will happen.
Eulogies
It was late, the darkness full.
Nico and Lennon and Harry walked south together, exiting Waterford on the same nameless road they’d used to enter it. The derelict buildings loomed darker, the murals more disturbing. At the southern tip of town, they found a sign identical to the one they’d passed on the northern end . . .
WELCOME TO WATERFORD, NEW HAMPSHIRE
FOUNDED IN 1822
POPULATION 2,023
Nico set down her bag, pulled out the can of red spray paint she’d brought from the shelter for just this purpose. She shook it, walked up to the sign, and when she was done, it read:
WELCOME TO WATERFORD, NEW HAMPSHIRE
FOUNDED IN 1822
POPULATION 2,023
QUARANTINE: FLY FLU PRESENT
Lennon held out a hand. “Let me see it a sec?”
She handed it to him, watched him run north up the road, back the way they’d come. Sometimes talking felt as possible as thinking a mountain into existence; it was a great comfort to have someone who understood things without her having to say them.
As she waited, her mind wandered back to Lakie. Whatever bond Nico had with Kit was nothing compared to his relationship with her. It was obvious in the way she looked at Kit, talked about him, held his hand. “I’ll spend tonight with him,” Lakie had told them as they’d left the shelter. “Tomorrow I’ll pack a bag and head north.”
They’d described the Cormorant, an unmistakable landmark. If Monty and Loretta were still at the cabin, she would find them easily enough. And if not, she would turn east from there, follow them to the coast and the Isles of Shoals.
“You steal my idea?” asked Nico when Lennon returned.
“Improved on it.” He handed back the spray paint. “I used imminent instead of present.”
“Fly Flu imminent.”
“Yeah.”
“That is better.”
“Yeah.”
The truth was, they could plaster fake warnings in red paint all over town, but there was no way to guarantee Kit’s resting place would go undisturbed.
I never should have let him come. As they walked south, the words played like a chorus in her head, over and over until it was all she could hear, I never should have let him come, I never should have let him come, I never should have let him come—
“Hey.” Lennon nudged her shoulder.
“I never should have let him come.”
“You have a short memory, don’t you?”
“What?”
“You told him not to. You said it could be dangerous and that you couldn’t be responsible for him. You remember what he told you?”
But she couldn’t talk through her tears, and so Lennon answered for her. “He said, You’re not the boss of me. And you weren’t. And neither was I. We could have tried to restrain him, I guess, but good luck with that. He was small, but—”
“Lightning quick.”
Two brief smiles in the dark.
“What happened to him isn’t your fault, Nico. It’s not mine, and it’s not his. What happened to Kit is the fault of two fervently fucked-up, fanatical Fly-lovers.”
Unconvinced, but with zero emotional bandwidth for words, she kept quiet as they walked, avoiding the math of their dwindling footsteps.
Swears
They crossed the place where the road cut through saplings and ancients rather than bricks and built-things, a dusting of snow, light and patchy. Overhead, the trees were thick, each side joining forces until it felt like walking through a wooded tunnel. Nico and Lennon and Harry veered off-road, into the forest again, toward the sounds of the Merrimack, each with a silent oath never to return to Waterford, and yet Nico felt, deep down in a place she could not explain, that this would be a difficult promise to keep.
Studies
An hour south of Waterford, they came upon a row of houses with docks lining the river. They found a house that was in decent shape—windows and doors intact, air free of the smell of decay—and camped there for the night.
Judging from the map, they hoped to be in Manchester by late tomorrow morning, leaving them with most of the day to find Kairos (if it existed). As neither of them knew what to expect, they took comfort in the tedium of evening routines: Lennon gathered wood for the fireplace while Nico spread cinnamon in a circle around the house.
After they’d washed their faces and hands in the river, they went inside and set up in the middle of an old living room. Dusty furniture and photo albums everywhere, remnants of people living happy lives—were it not for Lennon’s enthusiasm about sleeping indoors, she would have preferred a fire by the river. As it was, they were surrounded by sad relics, a darkness due not to lack of light, but lack of life.
Harry scratched at the door, eager to get out and let loose his newfound primordial hunting instincts. Nico debated letting him go, given what they now knew of blood.
For a moment she stood at the door, stared through the dark window, the moonlight off the river, and she considered that long lineage of logic: Her parents had been right to be cautious of blood. She wondered now if they’d known, or simply suspected. And how many other theories, shots in the dark, were right? How many far-fetched notions of survival, homemade Flu remedies, how many implausible methods of warding off contraction were actually effective?
Days ago she’d wondered what to do when someone handed you a fiction and called it fact. Now she wondered, in a world where truth and lore looked so alike, how was anyone expected to tell them apart?
“Not tonight, bud.” She reached out, turned the dead bolt.
On the floor of the living room, surrounded by dancing shadows on the walls, the flames in the fireplace waltzing and whirring, they ate a few Metallyte pouches (having replenished their supply from the shelves of the underground shelter) and a jar of mixed vegetables. Even Harry was content with the meatless dinner. And when, once again, he seemed to prefer Lennon’s company to hers, she said nothing.
Later, however, as they crawled inside sleeping bags, she gave a quick whistle and held out a strip of her father’s jerky, the last bit left. It was one thing, watching Harry prefer Lennon during waking hours, but Nico would sooner surrender to the Flies than watch the two of them curl up by the fire for the night. She rubbed behind the dog’s ears, savoring the success of her bribe, knowing things were about to change and there was nothing she could do about it. And Nico thought of a different night, when Kit had sprinkled cinnamon around their campsite, talking about the word meta . . .
“Tell me more about Jean and Zadie,” she said.
“What about them?”
“Anything. I need to get out of my own head.”
“Okay.” For a moment it was quiet as Lennon thought, the only sound the popping of the fire. “Zadie always made this noise after taking the first bite of every meal. Like a cross between a grunt and a purr. Like that motherfucking bite was exactly what she’d been looking for.”
Nico laughed. “My dad did this thing where, after he took the first bite, he’d slap the table with his palm, and then roll his eyes back in his head.”
“What is that? Like, is there some parenting handbook that says, After the first bite, we strongly suggest you lose your mind?”
It was a snowball laughter, the kind where one person ramps up the other until you’ve got a nice, rumbling avalanche. And Nico felt a weight lifted off her shoulders, if only a little.
“Hey, what was the lyric?” she asked. “The one John Lennon was proud of?”
“‘All you need is love.’�
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Nico considered this. “You think he was right?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes I worry it’s one of the things that was only true before.”
Nico propped herself up on one elbow, looked at him in the firelight. When they’d first gotten here, she’d pretended not to notice how quickly he’d unrolled his sleeping bag, leaving their proximity up to her. Of course, there was also the fire to be considered. She tried to remember how it had gone last night, in the darkness of BAM! They hadn’t said much, and she couldn’t be sure who’d made the first move, but somehow their hands had found each other.
Tonight she’d positioned her bag thoughtfully, close to him, yes, but close enough to the fire to maintain plausible deniability. Oh, are we close? Sorry. The fire, you know. Now, surrounded by these dancing flame-shadows, she was closer to him than she would have guessed, and couldn’t help feeling her deniability was less plausible than she’d originally thought.
“Nico? You okay?”
“So you know how sometimes you don’t know how to say what you want to say? So you just say it, and that’s how you know?”
“Okay.”
“I want you to know, I like your birthmark.”
“Okay.”
“I mean, I have no idea how you feel about it, and I’m not saying you should like it or not like it, I just wanted you to know what I thought about it. Which is that I like it.”
Even as the words were coming out of her mouth, she wondered not why she was speaking, but why these words in particular?
“I have no idea what to expect tomorrow,” she said, words like a runaway train. “But I’m glad you’re with me. I miss my mom and my dad, and I miss Kit, and I’m tired of missing people, but I’m glad I don’t have to miss you.”
“I’m glad I’m—”
“You’re the first person I ever talked to who wasn’t related to me.” Nico thought back to that day at the station when she’d seen the boy with the Alaska-shaped birthmark standing in the road. “Earlier that day, I’d almost—”
