Black River Falls (10 page)

“Eight?”

“Finish this sentence: ‘We've got spirit, yes we do, we've got spirit—'”

The girl tilted her head as if he were speaking Arabic.

“Can you describe how to play Quarters?”

She shook her head.

“How about beer pong? Flip cup? T-Rex arms?”

“Those are games?”

“If you wanted to buy beer and didn't know anyone over twenty-one, would you go to Black River Beverages, Quik Stop, or Harry's Gas?”

“I don't think I like beer.”

Greer draped one arm over the back of his chair. “That's a hard
no
on cheerleader, party girl, and athlete.”

I made a note. “Got it.”

Greer did pop culture next. Not much help there. Beyond things that pretty much any teenager in America would know, she was kind of a blank slate. So not a huge movie or TV fan. As for physical abilities—she couldn't draw, sculpt, juggle, tie a trucker's hitch, or start a fire using two sticks and a length of shoelace. When Greer had her sing the Happy Birthday song, she was enthusiastic, but painfully out of tune.

After about an hour of this she started to get restless.

“Is this getting us anywhere?” she asked. “I mean besides establishing the fact that I don't know anything about anything.”

“Finding out what you don't know is just as important as finding out what you do,” Greer said. “Which means you're giving us a
ton
to go on.”

She scowled at him. He grinned and held up another three-by-five note card.

“What does this say? Come on! Time's a'wasting.”

The girl sighed, then sat up and squinted at the card. “E equals MC squared.”

“Hey, you got one! And what does E equals MC squared mean?”

She gave him the same look she gave me when I asked about Superman. “Energy equals mass times the speed of light, squared.”

“And what's the speed of light?”

“One hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second,” she said. “In a vacuum.”

Greer looked back at me, impressed. He held up another card. The girl got it instantly.

“The Pythagorean theorem.”

He held up another.

“Pi.”

Another.

“Deoxyribonucleic acid.”

Another.

“The War of 1812.”

She got ten more right without a single miss. The girl wasn't bored anymore. She was teetering on the edge of her chair, practically trembling. Greer was too. He shuffled through his cards with unsteady hands.

“Quick, Greer! Give me another!”

“Uh . . . Okay! Literature. Finish this quote: ‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family . . .'”

“‘Is unhappy in its own way.'”

“‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune . . .'”

“‘Must be in want of a wife!' Jane Austen.
Pride and Prejudice.
Oh! Give me another one!”

“What book includes the characters Ponyboy, Sodapop, and Cherry?”

“The Outsiders
!”

“Merricat, Constance, and Julian?”

“We Have Always Lived in the Castle.
”

“Aslan and Mr. Tumnus?”

“The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
!”

“Who killed James and Lily Potter?”

The girl shot to her feet, her arms raised in triumph. “Tom Marvolo Riddle, also known as Lord Voldemort!”

Greer and I broke into rowdy applause. The girl's cheeks reddened as she bowed grandly.

“So did that help?” she asked. “Do you guys know who I am now?”

Greer laughed. “Oh yeah,” he said. “You, my friend, are what they call a big ol' nerd.”

Minutes later Greer was sitting on the ground by his chair, sorting through towers of hardback books while the girl watched.

“You thinking St. Edwards?” I asked from my place a short distance away.

“Gotta be, right?”

“What are you guys talking about?” the girl asked.

Greer placed a hand on top of one of the stacks of books. “These are the yearbooks from every school in the area.”

“Greer, uh, liberated them from the local library,” I said.

“Anyone who went to a school anywhere near Black River is in one of these,” Greer went on. “St. Edwards is the closest private school.”

“Why do you think I went there?”

He gave a casual shrug. It was another part of his showmanship. Acting like the whole thing was a snap.

“Solid dental work, general physical health, what looks like professionally dyed hair. That probably means money. No piercings, tattoos, or jewelry says a fairly conservative family. Around here that generally means private school.”

“That,” I added, “and it
definitely
sounds like you studied a lot.”

The girl sifted through the note cards in front of her. “So that's why I knew all this stuff? From studying?”

Greer tossed a book aside and grabbed another.

“If you drill facts into your head hard enough over a long enough period of time, they can move into your semantic memory, which you still have most of. Usually it happens with common-knowledge things, like the president's name or the fact that we live on Earth in the United States, but it can be other things too.”

“Or in your case,” I said, “everything.”

“Lot of good it did me,” she said. “I still don't know my own name.”

“Yeah,” Greer said. “That's because—”

“Card already told me.”

Greer sputtered. The girl and I shared a hint of a smile before she turned again and slid a yearbook off one of the stacks. “So where did you two go to school?”

“Black River High,” Greer said. “The school for weirdoes, morons, and troublemakers.”

“Oh yeah? Which of those were you?”

“All of the above, probably.”

“You don't know?”

Greer shook his head.

“But if you're so great at figuring out who people are, how come you don't know who
you
are?”

“We were able to figure out his name,” I said. “But that was it.”

Greer closed a book and opened another. “We know that me and the birdman here went to the same school. But we didn't know each other. And apparently everyone I
did
know is either infected, dead, or on the other side of that fence.”

“But couldn't you just—”

“We better get back to it,” I said. “Right, Greer?”

“Right. Sorry. You two hush. Work to do.”

He leaned over his books. The girl left him alone, moving across the meadow to sit closer to me. I was backlit by the sun, so she raised her hand to shield her eyes, which cast a little mask of shadow across her face.

“So there'll be a picture of me in one of those? And my name?”

I picked a blade of grass and wound it around a fingertip. “That's the idea. But there are thousands of pictures, so knowing more about you narrows things down. Like for you, Greer will probably be looking at academic clubs, student government, library assistants.”

“Nerd stuff!” Greer called out. “Somewhere in this stack I bet there's a picture of you and Card at some interschool dweeb mixer.”

She laughed, which made her nose wrinkle prettily. “So you're a nerd too, huh?”

I shrugged. “Guess so. But I'm a sci-fi slash comic book nerd. Looks like you're more of an academic nerd.”

“So if we met, we would've had to fight to the death.”

“Probably.”

The girl smiled again. It was like this weird drug. Every time I saw it, I tried to think of ways I could get her to do it again.

“Oh hey,” I called out to Greer. “You should also check band. Jazz band maybe.”

“Good thinking!”

“What? Why band?”

“You're a musician,” I said. “You play guitar anyway.”

“I do? How do you know that?”

I started to reach for her hand but pulled away at the last second. I pointed instead.

“Those calluses on your fingertips. You got them from holding down the strings of a guitar.”

She held her fingers up before her eyes. “I was wondering where those came from.”

“We've seen it before,” I said. “Astrid plays a little too. Her calluses were fainter, though. Looks like you've been doing it longer.”

“So wait, if I picked up a guitar right now . . .”

“You'd be able to play,” I said. “Whole songs you wouldn't even remember learning.”

“That is just . . .
spooky.
”

“A lot of this is,” I said. “You'll get used to it.”

Greer raised his voice again. “Hush, nerds!”

The girl got up and moved closer, stretching out on the grass in front of me. She was right on the line of too close, but I didn't move. I watched as she picked dandelions and gathered them into a bunch.

“I was wondering,” she said. “Why did we stay? I mean, if my family and I weren't infected, why wouldn't we have just left?”

“Most everybody thought a cure was right around the corner,” I said. “And when it wasn't, I don't know, I guess some had relatives who were infected and they didn't want to leave them. Others wanted to keep their eye on their houses or businesses or whatever. Maybe some people just didn't have anywhere else to go.”

“Which one of those were you?”

Her eyes moved up and over the contours of my mask.

“I mean, you're not infected, right?”

I nodded.

“So why'd you stay?”

My face felt like it was burning. I scrambled for an answer, but then, just over her shoulder, I saw Greer slam a book shut and toss it aside.

“What's up, Greer?”

The girl turned around. “What's wrong?”

He was running his palm back and forth over the stubble on his head. “Nothing. It's just . . . you definitely weren't at Edwards, so I was thinking Perkins, but . . . sorry. It's tricky, since you probably looked a lot different then.”

She returned to Greer's side. It was a little disappointing to have her suddenly gone. I watched from my spot as he went through one of the books a second time. When he came to the final page, he went back through St. Edwards and then all the others, one by one. After that he reached into the cardboard box and pulled out a sheaf of papers.

“What are those?” the girl asked.

“Missing posters.”

She waited for more, but Greer was so absorbed in his work, I jumped in.

“Some people who got caught up in the outbreak didn't actually live here. The Guard took pictures and put them online so their families could identify them.”

“But you said I just got infected—what? Yesterday?”

“That's what we thought, but . . .” Greer looked up from his pile of books. “What's the very first thing you remember?”

“Those two men,” she said. “The ones who were chasing me.”

“And you don't remember anything before that,” I said. “Nothing at all.”

“No. Why would I?”

I left my place by the trees and came into the meadow. “Once you're exposed to the virus it takes about ten hours to do its thing. The last couple hours of that, you're kind of going in and out. You know who you are one second, don't know the next.”

“Sometimes people will remember bits and pieces from that time,” Greer said. “Maybe one of them will mean something.”

The girl bore down hard. It was as if there was a mountain in her path and she was scaling it one handhold at a time. “I remember standing beside a fence. It was low and black. And then . . . bells. I remember hearing bells.”

“St. Stephen's,” I said. “This was before the men found you?”

“I think so. I was hot. I smelled flowers. And then I turned around and they were there. Those two men.”

“What did you do?”

“I ran. Oh! I think I dropped something.”

“What was it?”

“I don't know,” she said. “There were bells and then . . .” Her eyes went unfocused on the ground, and then she looked up suddenly. “It was a bag. Like a backpack. That's what I dropped when I ran. A backpack. It was green. I can see it in my hand and then hitting the ground next to—”

She shook her head.

“Next to what?” I asked.

“It doesn't make any sense.”

“What doesn't?”

“I see a green bag on the ground next to a pink crocodile,” she said. “I must have just been confused.”

Greer and I locked eyes. “The sculpture garden,” I said. “By City Hall.”

“Guys, what is it? What's happening?”

Neither of us said anything for a second.

“Guys!”

“You're not in any of the yearbooks,” Greer said. “Not one of them. And you aren't on any of the missing posters either.”

“So? What does that mean?”

Greer turned to me. There was nothing left to do but tell her.

“It means we have no idea who you are.”

“W
HOA!
” G
REER SHOUTED.
“Hold on! Would you wait a second?”

“I'm not going to just sit there!”

The green-haired girl had left the meadow and was racing toward camp. Greer and I were struggling to keep up.

“You guys know where I dropped that bag, right?”

“Well, yeah, but—”

“So we'll find it,” she said. “It'll be a clue.”

I ran out ahead and blocked the way. “We're supposed to be keeping you under wraps, okay? And besides, those guys from yesterday are still down there.”

“I don't care! I—”

“We have a friend in the Guard,” I said. “We'll have him come up here and he'll be able to figure out who you are. You just have to be patient.”

The girl whipped around, getting right in Greer's face. “If you thought there was something out there that could tell you who you really are, would
you
just sit around and wait?”