Authors: Robin Wasserman
The execution of Eleanor King was an unqualified success. So much so that, as the deacon had predicted, the town found itself hungry for more righteous cleansing. By the next morning, the Watchdogs joined with the Oleander police force and a posse of citizen volunteers to round up what undesirables they could. In a town of this size, everyone knew the deviants – confirmed and suspected. The lesbian librarian, the gay hippie with the organic tea business and his tow-truck driver boyfriend, the outspoken atheists, the criminals, the drug addicts, and the alcoholics (at least the sloppy, unpopular ones), not to mention the unfortunates whose only crime was landing at the wrong end of a petty grudge or a bad business deal. Once the roundups began, it didn’t take a genius to realize their efficacy in getting inconvenient colleagues out of the way.
Only those with known arsenals (and hair triggers) were spared. Which left the Prevettes and the Preacher unmolested, but everyone else was fair game. Baz and the Watchdogs contributed a list of younger residents who’d already showed signs of deviance and dissent. The primary sign, as it happened, was exhibiting disrespect for Baz and the Watchdogs and their sport of choice.
By midafternoon, the righteousness brigade had rounded up more than thirty people, ages fifteen through seventy-seven (the latter being James Priest, who, before retiring, had spent his career foreclosing on farms with just a little too much joy). They were dragged out of their homes, down their streets, and locked into an abandoned grocery store that would serve as a makeshift brig until something more suitable could be found. There was no consensus on what should be
done
with the deviants. The act of capture, the pleasure of taunting them once they’d been locked up, was enough for one day. Punishment could wait for the next.
The mood in town was joyous. All concern about the quarantine or fear of what lay behind it had burned away in the righteous flames. As if waking from a dream, they discovered that isolation was a gift: the opportunity to create an empire of their own. Every home was a potential kingdom; every man, every woman a dictator, finally empowered to reshape life according to desire and whim.
There were several homicides. Fights broke out on street corners at the slightest provocation. Those addicts who weren’t swept up in the purge drowned in the depths of their poison of choice. Long-simmering sexual tension erupted regardless of circumstance or setting; long-simmering rivalries, grudges held for decades, presented themselves for immediate resolution. There were duels; there were ambushes. And that night there was more than one person who went to sleep and wouldn’t wake up in the morning.
The children noticed; children always notice. Their parents had turned into creatures who lacked impulse control and ignored responsibility, who took what they wanted and did as they pleased, and there were children who ended up bruised, or broken. There were children who were turned out of their homes – or were wise enough to run – and they prowled the streets, enjoying the novelty of adventure until the moon rose and the night cooled and they had no bed to return to. When that happened, wherever it happened, Laura Tanner was waiting. The beloved Miss Oleander, with her weapons and her willingness to do what was necessary to keep her children safe, the children who now belonged to her.
This was the report that Grace brought back for her houseguests after a few hours of poking around the town. They heard very little after “the execution of Eleanor King.”
They blamed themselves.
It was her house, but Grace knew when she wasn’t wanted. They talked past her, as if she were a child – but then, that’s what they believed she was. It was why they trusted her, and so she allowed it.
They barely noticed her, which meant no one thought anything of it when she slipped upstairs to sit in Cass’s room and wait for her to wake. They probably thought it was touching, evidence that she’d accepted their story and forgiven Cass. The poor, helpless, unwitting victim of her own uncontrollable actions.
But Grace was, probably, under the control of this R8-G at that very moment, and she didn’t feel very unwitting. Her desires were her own. The drug was not the reason she wanted Cass to die. If it was the reason she was willing to make it happen, then score one for the evil scientists.
Except that Cass was unconscious, and had been for thirteen hours, and still she lived. Grace could bring herself to do nothing until the older girl woke.
She had to see it coming, Grace told herself. She had to know what was happening, and that Grace was the one responsible.
Maybe.
But the fact was, hours passed, Cass breathed, and Grace sat.
Waiting.
The safest time to leave was the middle of the night. But that wasn’t saying much. Which was why West didn’t tell anyone that he was going, or where. A day of sleep and talking in circles had brought them no closer to figuring out a plan for escape, other than risking another flight to the woods. If they made it that far, maybe they could scramble under the barbed wire and skirt the edges of the floodlights and somehow make it past the heavily guarded border and the twenty miles of prairie that lay beyond. It was a last-ditch, last-moment kind of plan, and they believed this to still be another day away.
Somehow, the others slept. But West couldn’t close his eyes without seeing Ellie. He couldn’t stop thinking about his parents and whether they would be exterminated before they could be returned to their right mind. And he was afraid that sleep meant Nick would come – and more afraid that he would not. So he walked the night.
The old grocery was under guard by twelve men, each carrying a rifle. Thanks to the boarded-up windows, there was no way of telling who lay inside. For all West knew, Jason was curled up comfortably in his own bed, dreaming of live music and dead bullies. But it seemed unlikely – and with Baz involved, it seemed impossible.
West couldn’t get him out alone.
Maybe Jason would be better off inside. If the whole town was infected, then maybe being locked up was the safest place for anyone to be. Until the “final containment” began, that is.
If they could get out of town, if they could stop it, then everyone could be saved. If they couldn’t… then the town was as much prison as the grocery, and did geography really matter if they were all going to die?
They were pretty rationalizations.
If he’d still been at home, West thought, then his parents would have delivered him here. This he did not doubt. Did that give him some obligation to play savior? If he’d been spared by the grace of his heavenly Father (and the madness of his earthly one), then should Jason and the rest be spared by the grace of West? In the morning, he promised himself. In the morning, if there was no better plan, no certain way to save the town or themselves, then he would rally these people who were somehow less and more than friends, and convince them to at least save someone. Or to try.
Is
that
enough?
he whispered.
That’s all I have.
Nick was silent. That night, he did not come. He never came again.
“You sleeping?” Daniel asked, from his spot on the couch.
Jule opened her eyes to darkness. “Not a chance. You?”
The sofa was L-shaped. They lay head to head, their fingers nearly touching at the joint.
“Can’t,” he said. Then, because he didn’t have to see her face in the dark, because he wanted to tell someone and for some reason, he wanted the someone to be her, “I don’t mind. When I sleep… I’ve been having these… dreams.”
“Pretty sure that’s natural in a growing boy,” she said, her tone unable to match the joke in her words. “Testosterone and all.”
“Dreams about that day in the drugstore,” he said. “The shootings. Everyone dies. Again. Only this time…”
“This time you’re the one holding the gun.”
His breath caught. “How did you know?”
She hesitated. “It just figured. But, Daniel, it’s only a dream. You know that, right? It’s not like you’re seeing the future or something.”
There was nothing but to say it: “I wake up in the drugstore. I wake up in the drugstore holding a gun.”
“You mean, in the dream?”
“I mean in real life. In the middle of the night. I wake up there, and my hands are bloody from broken glass, and I’ve got a gun, and I don’t know how I got there, and…” He’d thought it would feel better to say it. But it didn’t. “I thought I was going crazy. Maybe I am. Crazy.”
She shifted on the couch, and when she settled back into place, her fingertips rested atop his palm. Without letting himself think whether it had been an accident, he closed his fingers over hers. She let him. Her hand was cold.
“For me it was a knife.”
He held on to her fingers, afraid to speak and break the spell.
“My uncle’s knife. First in my dreams, then – like you said. I woke up, and there it was. In my hand. Somehow. And it was like it… this is going to sound stupid, but kind of like it…”
“Like it
wanted
you to use it?”
“You too?”
“Me too.”
There was a sound: a ragged breath, or a choked sob. Some explosion of air and emotion.
“But it doesn’t have to mean anything,” he said. “It’s like you said, it’s not the future. If it’s the R8-G, maybe knowing makes it better. We don’t have to do what it wants.”
“But what if…?” The half-asked question hung between them. “Nothing,” she said finally. “It doesn’t matter anymore. It’s over now.”
“What is?”
“I told you,
nothing.
Anyway, maybe the dreams will stop now. I haven’t had one since… well, not for a couple of days now.”
Daniel realized that he hadn’t, either. Not since the night Jule had shown up at his door.
“Not since we’ve all been together,” he said. “It’s like we’re stronger now. Stronger than it.”
“That’s stupid,” she said. “All we are now is screwed.”
“I know that. But still… it doesn’t feel that way. It feels better.”
A shorter exhalation of air this time. Only a sigh, soft and defeated. “Maybe,” she admitted. “It does.”
“I was looking forward to Bali,” he said.
“Tahiti.”
“There, too.”
“But now…”
“Stuck in Oleander for the rest of our days,” Jule said. “Maybe we should be glad we don’t have much longer to go. You think it’ll be a bomb?”
“I don’t know, Jule. We shouldn’t think about —”
“That’s too messy, I think. Too big. If it were the government, maybe. But a private company? They’ve got soldiers, they’ve got tanks – I think it’ll be on-the-ground combat. Like in Iraq or something. A guy with a gun kicks in the door and sprays everyone inside with bullets, and next thing you know, we’re all rotting in some mass grave.”
“Please don’t.”
“Or some kind of toxic gas,” she said. “That would be poetic, right? Less fun for them, maybe. If I had a tank, I’d want to use it.”
“We’ll get out,” Daniel said. “And we’ll tell people what’s happening, and they’ll stop it in time. We’ll save everyone.”
“Superheroes. You’re just like Milo.”
If only it were that easy. “I’ve never been like Milo.”
“But you really believe it. That we’re going to save the day.”
It seemed suddenly important that
she
believe it. “Yes.”
“At least, we know it’s coming,” she said quietly. “And when it does, we won’t have to be alone.”
He kept his hold on her fingers, and wrapped his other hand around hers. He tipped his head back, and met her eyes. The pupils were huge, drinking in the night. He could just make out the curves of her face, the whites of her eyes, the shock of purple slashing across her forehead, the bandage on her cheek. She went very still in his grasp and then, abruptly, sat up.
But she let him hold on.
Daniel sat, too. Their linked hands lay between them, carefully ignored by both, as if to acknowledge them would necessitate immediate release. Her skin was much softer than he had expected. Her fingers were so small.
“You better act now while you still have the chance,” she said, a new sharpness in her voice cutting through the dreamlike intimacy of the night.
“What?” She couldn’t have read his mind; he hadn’t even made it up yet. This wasn’t anything so clear-cut as want, or desire – those he understood, even if he’d never quite been able to act on them. This was… like standing at the edge of a diving board, or a cliff, gravity taunting him, eager to take its inevitable course. This was like the dream, like the gun, and he couldn’t help thinking that if he closed his eyes and let himself fall, he would wake up to find himself in her arms.
“Sleeping Beauty up there,” she said. “Little Miss Dream Come True.”
“What?” he said again, now genuinely confused.
“Not that I encourage making out with the unconscious,” she said. “Fairy tale or not. But she has to wake up sometime, and then I recommend you make your move before the whole food-for-worms thing.”
“Are we talking about
Cass
?”
“Playing dumb probably isn’t going to work for you. I don’t get the sense she goes for stupid.”
“You’re not serious.”
“I see the way you look at her,” she said.
“And how’s that?”
“Like you can’t believe your luck. We’re in the middle of the apocalypse here, but every time she’s in the room, you act like you won the lottery. No, better, like some rock star in a bikini just parachuted into your living room and handed you a bottle of suntan lotion.”
“That’s… very specific. You really think that’s how I look at her?”
“Really and specifically.”
It was too embarrassing to consider that it might be true. And all the more embarrassing to explain that looking at Cass was like admiring a picture in a magazine, something glossy but flat, and more than a little unreal. He’d watched Cass from a distance, while Jule was
here.
Up close, too close, close enough to see the rough spots and touch the imperfections. Close enough to scare him. But he couldn’t tell her that, any more than he could tell her that Cass made him wish he were someone else, while Jule just made him want to be brave.