Authors: Robin Wasserman
There were protesters crowded at each of the government checkpoints surrounding the town, but word had it the biggest group was massed on Route 8, where high schoolers, hippies, housewives, and hunters had set aside their differences for a 24/7 vigil protesting the government quarantine. Howard Schwarz, who’d appointed himself and his press mouthpiece for the Free Oleander! movement, made periodic rounds to rally the troops.
“I don’t think it’s the way to get out.” Jule didn’t have any more faith than Scott did in frontal assaults, especially the kind made with placards and protest chants. There had been rumors of people making it across the border via bribes, nepotism, sexual favors… but nothing that could be verified. “But I’ve been wrong before.”
Daniel mimed his shock and awe.
“Okay, rarely,” she allowed. “Still. It’s been five days, and
nothing.
Aren’t you going crazy here? Figured I’d at least check it out. You… you want to come with?”
She was sure he’d say yes, sure she’d marked him accurately as someone who wanted to get out as desperately as she did, so sure he’d give in to the temptation painted across his face that it took her a moment to process his actual answer.
“I’m sorry,” he said, sounding it. “I can’t. I’ve got to – Yeah. I have to go. Now. So, anyway.”
He wasn’t the smoothest of operators. He wasn’t much of anything, really, except awkward and decent and, for whatever reason, under her skin.
“See you around?” he said, edging for the door, probably sorry he’d thought to come in the first place.
“Better hurry,” she said. “I don’t plan to be here for long.”
There were two kinds of people in Oleander these days: the kind content to stay put and rebuild their lives, and the kind desperate to leave. The former rallied behind Mayor Mouse and Deacon Barnes, busying themselves with carpentry or Christ, kneeling at the dual altars of Uncle Sam and Ellie King. The latter had better things to do. An intrepid handful – determined or drunk – set out to test the government quarantine on their own, picking through the woods that bordered Route 8, driving pickups into the prairie grass, even tackling the lake with dinghies or inner tubes, propelling themselves with paddles, oars, and in one (very drunk) case, a shovel and a broom. They were all turned back: by floodlights and tanks, by barbed wire and electrified fences, by men in uniforms and their very large guns.
Five days since the storm; five days trapped in Oleander. Five days plus the previous seventeen years of Jule’s life, but it was those final five days that had pushed her over the edge. She’d always dismissed Scott’s paranoid ramblings about government conspiracies – mostly under the theory that no one in the government seemed quite sharp enough to pull one off – but there were armed soldiers circling the most boring town in the Midwest. Distrusting their motives wasn’t exactly the same as lying to a census taker or refusing a flu shot.
Not that Jule cared about their motives for keeping her in. She only cared about getting out.
Like her uncles – though not with them, never
with
them – she spent her days prowling the borders and exploring her options, which were narrowing down to none. She was tired of sneaking around and tired of failing and, after Daniel’s hasty departure, unexpectedly tired of being on her own. So on this day, the fifth day, she took a vacation from lonely and fruitless prowling and joined the masses gathered at the Route 8 checkpoint. It wouldn’t be a way out. But she was in the mood to shout at something, and it seemed as good a place as any to do it.
The protest had begun with just a handful of discontents. They tried to beg and plead and bribe their way across the border, and when that didn’t work, they threw produce and cow shit at the soldiers and made timid charges across the line, turned back by volleys of gunfire into the sky. A fist-shaking Howard Schwarz distributed hastily made flyers about abuse of power, and there were murmurings of the Second Amendment and local militias, though no one had yet been dumb enough to flash a gun. By the time Jule arrived, the scattering of people had swelled to a crowd, and the atmosphere had turned carnival-like. The prospect of escape ruled out, the protest was the thing, and the remaining true believers – some furious, some hyperventilating, some weeping – were subsumed by a mass of people who, despite their handmade signs and piss-filled water balloons, seemed almost to have forgotten why they were there. There were couples making out, children running wild, anarchists ranting; there were town gossips who poked their noses in for an hour and then slipped away again; there were spies for Mayor Mouse; there were tents inhabited by people who by the smell of things hadn’t showered in days. There were the occasional unified chants –
Let
us
out! Let us out! Let us out!
– and at least two drum circles. There was an impassive line of soldiers, weapons at the ready, who refused to speak or flinch or allow anyone to approach within a ten-yard radius. There was, at the center of things, Howard Schwarz, standing atop a milk crate and shouting about how the mayor’s craven obeisance to his government puppet masters would be the end of them all. There was a
lot
of beer. Given the sermonizing and the drinking, it felt like a cross between a church picnic and the world’s most pointless tailgate, and Jule regretted coming anywhere near it. Especially when she spotted Baz Demming and a couple of his idiot friends lounging in the back of a pickup, drowning themselves in beer. Even more when he saw her.
“Tampon girl!” he shouted across the crowd, waving wildly. “Yo, tampon girl!” His buddies took up the cry. Everyone was staring.
She thought: At least, Daniel’s not here to see this happen again.
She thought
:
If Daniel had come along, she wouldn’t have to deal with this crap alone.
She thought: Why the hell was she thinking about Daniel?
She yelled: “Yo yourself, brain-dead! How’s your syphilis?”
Baz was laughing. Baz was climbing off the pickup truck and coming toward her.
Jule was not running away, would not run away.
“Clearing right up,” he said as he approached. “So if you’re asking because you want to take me out on a test-drive…”
“I would rather screw Howard Schwarz,” she said, groping for a suitably disgusting alternative to hammer the point home. “I would rather have one of those soldiers shove his gun up my —”
“Got it,” Baz said. “Thanks for the visual.”
“I aim to please.”
Now he was close enough to touch her. “You know, you could be kind of hot if you weren’t such a bitch.”
“I’ll take that under advisement.”
“Though the bitch thing can be hot sometimes.”
“Great.”
“But not in your case.”
“Bummer.”
“Just trying to help.”
“What are you even doing here?” Jule said. “Does the mayor know his little lackey’s sniffing around the dark side?”
“Just keeping an eye on things. Helps to know who’s loyal and who’s not, if you know what I mean.”
“J. Edgar Hoover would be so proud.”
He flashed a smile. “I’ll pretend I never saw you, though. Special favor. For a special friend, right?”
“I’m out of here,” Jule said.
“You’re wasting your time,” Baz said. “There’s no way out.”
She forced her voice not to betray her. “What makes you think I’m looking for a way out?”
“Keeping an eye on things, remember? Things like hot little girls who think they’re smarter than everyone else. Smart enough to find a way out.”
Screw him and his smug face; screw the soldiers; screw the town. “So maybe I am,” she said.
Baz laughed. There was something in the sound of it, something so unnerving that Jule backed away and, without another word, got the hell out of there.
“Never gonna happen!” he shouted after her. “No one’s getting out.”
The Preacher was drunk. But not so drunk that he couldn’t recognize a demon when he saw one. She wore a different face than the others, but her clothes were the same, and bore the sign of the devil. She was of
them,
the plague that had beset his town.
The Lord had taken after her, that was clear. The demon’s face was scarred and scratched and smeared with blood. The demon limped and hugged her arm to her chest and leaned against the trees as if God’s green world would give succor to the likes of her.
And so the Preacher rose before her, rose from the dirt and the bushes, rose in her path like an avenging angel, like an emissary of the Lord, like a large, drunk man waving a loaded gun, and commanded her to leave.
“These are my woods,” he intoned. “Begone, creature of the dark.”
The demon stumbled backward and issued a pitiful, almost human cry, and asked for help.
“I know what you and yours have done,” the Preacher said. “I know what you raised from the pit. Begone!”
She went.
He liked the woods, his woods. He liked the smell of wet bark and the taste of whiskey and dirt. Beyond these trees, the army of the apocalypse had mustered, awaiting the dark times. But in the canopy of green, all was peaceful. All was quiet. The Preacher liked the quiet now. It helped dampen the noise in his head.
No more noise. No more people. No more warnings issued to strangers who laughed and hurried their way to hell. So much time wasted, prying open their eyes.
That time was over now. The demon’s trespass had proved it.
The new era was dawning. The time to reclaim that which belonged to him. To save that which could be saved, and leave the rest to burn.
By the time Cass heard the footsteps pounding toward her and recognized the voices they belonged to, it was too late to flee. She considered her dubious options: The shed was filled with crap, none of it large enough to disguise a full-sized human. Milo’s sleeping bag was made for a child. It would cover her feet or her face, but not both, not unless she curled herself into a ball with her cheek pressed to the gritty, mildewed floor, hugged her ankles, and tried not to breathe. So that was what she did.
They were just outside the door. She recognized Baz’s voice. Daniel had warned her about the Watchdogs. It had been no surprise to hear that Baz had appointed himself their leader. It hadn’t occurred to her that West would have gotten himself involved with them. Or that he would be taking orders from a thug like Baz. But there was no mistaking his voice, either.
“We got a tip she was in this area,” Baz said.
“And how is that your problem?” Daniel’s voice.
“You don’t think it’s everyone’s problem?” Baz said. “A killer on the loose? Don’t let the hot thing fool you. She’s dangerous.”
Cass wasn’t sure which was stranger: to hear Baz describe her as dangerous, or as hot. The last time she’d seen him, a year before on a strained triple date to the movies, he’d barely spoken to her. But she’d overheard him needling West in the parking lot, assuring him that he could do better.
It hadn’t been easy, this past year, to shut the door on her old life. But she’d somehow managed it, accepting that her parents were gone, her future was gone, the Cass Porter she’d seen in the mirror for seventeen years was, effectively, gone. It hadn’t
seemed
easy, at least, but now she realized how much harder it could have been. It was one thing to accept the end of her old life while she was locked in a cell at a remote facility, everything familiar an impossible distance away. It was different back in Oleander, so close to home. It was one thing to hear a nameless doctor or guard or judge call her a murderer. It was different hearing it from the senior quarterback, the guy who’d asked her to dance at their eighth-grade formal, tried to cheat off her tests all through pre-calc, and once pantsed her at a kindergarten picnic.
It was one thing to imagine the people you’d grown up with calling you a monster. It was different to actually hear them.
“She’s not here,” Daniel said. “But my father is, and I’ve got to warn you, he doesn’t like strangers snooping around the house.”
“That guy spooks me,” whined someone she didn’t recognize. “Maybe we should skip…”
“I’m shaking.” Baz raised his voice to a high, flighty register. “Oh, please, bad preacher man, don’t thump me with your Bible. I’ll be a good boy, I promise.” He snorted. “Come on, let’s go.”
“You take the house, I’ll take the grounds and the shed,” West said.
She was suddenly certain: he knew. Maybe from Daniel’s bluster or from whatever expression was perched on his transparent face, maybe because the “tip” had been more specific than Baz let on and they were just playing with her. Somehow, he knew.
“Whatever.” The footsteps departed, Baz’s light and sure, a rhythmic goose step thumping after him.
She curled tighter beneath the sleeping bag and squeezed her eyes shut.
“I’m telling you, I haven’t seen her in a year,” Daniel said.
The door creaked open.
Footsteps.
Please,
she thought, though maybe she was praying for the wrong thing. Maybe it would be good for them to find her and drag her away, to jail or to a lynch mob or, if her suspicions about Baz were right, simply off to some secluded cornfield where she would scream in the moonlight, be used and then discarded, and lie in the corn and cover herself and cry. She couldn’t stay here forever, waiting for Daniel to realize his mistake, waiting to be discovered, waiting for life to magically right itself.
Still:
Please.
The sleeping bag shifted, slightly, as someone pulled it away from her face. She felt the night breeze on her skin, and opened her eyes. West looked back, his face impassive. Was he thinking about their nights together on her parents’ couch, avoiding all discussion of why they were the only couple home alone that Saturday night actually
watching
the movie? About the sophomore formal, back when she’d thought that his asking her actually meant something, and she’d spent all her money on that shimmery silver dress and wasted an hour puzzling out her mother’s makeup and another gathering her newly blond hair into some kind of upsweep she’d found step-by-step instructions for online? They’d danced cheek to cheek with his palm warm on her exposed back, and he’d kissed her on her front step, just like in the movies, her first real kiss, not with tongue, but with mingled breath and starry eyes and hands cupping her cheeks, and for a few feverish weeks she’d decided she was in love. But he probably didn’t want to remember that – who she’d been, who they’d been.