Authors: Robin Wasserman
“You always do this, you know,” he said.
“I’m not sure you know me well enough to know I ‘always’ do anything.”
“You get kind of mean. When you’re nervous.”
“I’m mean under almost all circumstances. It’s my default.”
He grinned – it took her a moment to get why.
“And I’m
not
nervous,” she added quickly.
It was an obvious lie, which was surprising, but not nearly so much as the fact that
he
wasn’t nervous. Nor, any longer, was he confused.
He was terrified – but somehow, that didn’t seem to matter.
“I thought I was in love with her,” he said. “Cass.”
“Yes, we just covered that.”
“But that was before I even knew her. The real her.”
“The real her doesn’t seem so bad. If you can overlook that whole brainwashed-murderer thing.”
If he told her that maybe the problem was he hadn’t known
himself,
she would laugh in his face.
“Okay, it was before I knew
you,
” he said.
“And that’s relevant how?”
Show, don’t tell,
their English teacher had drilled into them the year before. It wasn’t until now that he understood her point.
He let go of Jule’s hand, and cupped her face. Crossing the distance between seemed at once impossible and the easiest thing he’d ever done. It wasn’t like stepping into an abyss; it wasn’t like falling. It wasn’t
like
anything. It was only what it was: Jule, soft in some places and prickly in others, tough all over, in his arms. Jule, the smell of Jule, sweat and clove cigarettes and leather. Jule, in the dark, a solid shadow, never afraid. Jule’s eyelids, pale. Jule’s cheeks, smooth. Jule’s lips, soft.
It was kissing Jule. Not falling after all but, finally, landing on solid ground.
She didn’t know she was going to push him away until she’d done it. As soon as she did, she wanted to take it back. But the space between them had opened up again. Daniel was on his feet, and she was shaking her head, and of course he took it as a no intended for him, because who would say no to themselves?
“Sorry,” she said, unsure what she was apologizing for, unsure of everything. “I didn’t mean…” She didn’t want anyone to touch her.
She wanted him to touch her.
She could be bold. Move back toward him, close the space, take what she wanted – if she knew what she wanted, if her body hadn’t gone rigid, if her lungs weren’t so tight, if she could trust him enough to explain. If she could trust him.
She was afraid if he tried again, she would slap him or freeze up in his arms or, worst, cry; she was afraid he wouldn’t try again.
Her lip throbbed where Baz had drawn blood.
Everything hurt.
“No, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have,” he said, and so it was too late.
Because going back to sleep – or at least lying quietly together in the dark – seemed too intimate for the sudden awkwardness between them, they retreated to business. As if talking through their impossible circumstances yet again would change the fact that they were surrounded by concentric circles of enemies.
“If you think about it,” Jule said, “we do have one weapon. The town itself. The people. If we aim them the right way…”
“If we start a war, you mean? Set them on the soldiers? Can you imagine how many people would end up dead?”
“They’re not soldiers,” she said. “And people are going to end up dead anyway, even if we don’t do anything. You don’t think they have a right to know what’s coming, too?”
“They’re not in their right mind.”
“Or maybe they’re just doing exactly what they want to do, for the first time in their lives. Maybe they’re more themselves than they’ve ever been. Maybe the R8-G is doing them a favor.”
“You can’t believe that.”
“Inhibitions aren’t always good,” she said, but that was getting too close, and they both edged away.
“We don’t even know if this is curable. What if it’s not, and we let them loose on the world?”
“Maybe the world deserves it.”
“We’d be responsible for everything they did after that, Jule. Everyone they hurt.”
She was sorry for him then, sorrier than for herself. Because he actually believed that; because it was how he had always lived. “You can’t be responsible for everything, Daniel. You know that, right?”
“I’m going to sleep,” he said, not unkindly, but with finality.
This time, without discussing it, they lay toe to toe, their heads pointed in opposite directions.
She did not sleep.
“You awake?” Jule asked.
For a moment, he wondered if maybe he had been sleeping after all, and had dreamed everything, their truth swapping, their kiss, his humiliation, and this was his chance to do it again, for the first time, right this time – or to be smart and not do it at all. Then, for another moment, he considered keeping his mouth shut. But, “What do you think?”
“I think I figured something out,” she said. “A plan.”
“For getting out?”
“What if we don’t have to get out and get help?” she asked. “What if there were a way to make help come to us?”
Cass woke to Grace’s dead eyes, and choked off a scream. Her head throbbed. Grace was fuzzy around the edges. She was in a strange room, but strangely familiar, on a soft bed, with no bars on the door and no guns – and Grace.
Maybe, she thought, she was still asleep.
As she puzzled it out, and the memories of the previous day trickled back, she remembered. The R8-G; the answer. At that, she couldn’t help herself: she smiled.
Grace slapped her.
“It wasn’t my fault,” Cass said. It sounded feeble. “They drugged me. I didn’t know what I was doing. I couldn’t help myself.”
“How do you know?”
“I know. If I could have stopped it, I would have.”
“But you didn’t. So Owen’s dead.”
“You tried to shoot me,” Cass said. She was foggy and feverish and thought she might throw up. The light burned her eyes. “You actually pointed a gun at me and pulled the trigger.”
“Yeah.”
“Are you… do you feel weird at all, Grace? Like, different?”
“They told me everything,” Grace said. She yanked the pillow out from beneath Cass’s head. “Children are immune, remember?”
Cass tried to push herself up into a sitting position, but a wave of dizziness knocked her back to the mattress. The impact set off an explosion in her skull. “I don’t feel well,” she said. “Can we talk later? After I sleep?”
“You can close your eyes if you want,” Grace said. “Maybe it’s better that way. Poetic or something.”
“What’s better?”
“As long as you know it’s coming. And why.” The pillow descended, and her world went first white, then black.
Grace was small, but not too small to bear down. There was nothing for Cass to breathe; there was no breath, only a tightening, then a burning. Her skin tingled with panic. This was terror; this was her lungs swelling to fill her chest, to rise up her throat, to grasp and beg and hurt for the air that lay just beyond the soft cotton. This was floating away; this was death.
“That’s what it felt like.” The voice came from the other side, so far away. “That’s what you did to him.”
Her mouth opened, screaming, screaming noiselessly, tears soaking the cotton. She could feel Grace’s hands through the pillow, pressing down, holding down, her lungs, her pain, her guilt.
It
would
be
poetic,
she thought, her arms spasming.
It
wasn’t my fault,
she thought, her body forcing itself on, rebelling against all things final.
It
wasn’t me,
she thought, and it still wasn’t, neither her mind nor her will but her body, her heart pumping furiously, her blood rushing, her muscles flexing with such force that Grace flew backward and landed on the floor with a noisy clatter and cry. Cass’s chest heaved with the sweet, fresh heaven of one full breath after another. It wasn’t her, but she was the one who got to live.
It had taken all the strength she had, and she collapsed to the bed. There were footsteps in the hallway, murmurs of concern, a bursting through the door, a wait for explanations.
“Grace tripped,” Cass said. Because this was between them. Because neither had had the chance to decide. “I woke up, and she was going to get me some water, and she tripped.”
Jule helped the girl to her feet. Daniel rushed to Cass’s side, rested a cool hand on her forehead. “You’re covered in sweat,” he said.
“A girl loves to hear that,” Jule told him.
“Are you all right?” he asked. “How do you feel?”
“Alive,” Cass said, and drew in another greedy breath, and another.
“Are
you
all right?” Jule asked Grace.
“I… tripped,” she said. She would not look at Cass, at any of them.
“Cass, think you can get up?” Jule said. “We don’t have much time, if we’re going to make this work.”
“Make what work?” Cass said.
Jule cast a strange look at Daniel, who turned from it. “Playing hero,” she said. “We’re going to save the day.”
Milo wouldn’t leave the room, wouldn’t sleep, wouldn’t stop weaving through Grace’s legs and twining his fingers through Cass’s hair and tugging at Grace’s shirt and begging Cass to read comics with him. No matter how late it got or how much Grace growled, he stayed. And he stayed awake. It was as if he somehow sensed what might happen if he left them alone together. The others had taken off as soon as West came back. Upon determining that Cass was still woozy and Grace was still thirteen, Jule had decided that neither of them be told the details of this great and mighty plan. So they’d been left behind to mind the kid, and each other. It occurred to no one that it might be neither prudent nor kind to leave Grace behind with the girl who’d killed her brother.
Cass had said nothing, just let them leave. She watched Grace over Milo’s bounding, sugar-crazed shoulders with that newly eerie stare of hers, watchful and, in some aggravating way, knowing. It was the kind of expression Grace longed to master herself. In a different time, with a different Cass, she might have spent the night taking surreptitious mental notes, trying to stretch the muscles of her face to match the babysitter’s. She’d done it before.
“Wouldn’t you like to take that puzzle back to your room?” Grace asked as Milo dumped out one of her old jigsaw boxes onto the carpet. Pieced together, it showed the entire Disney family, or at least it was supposed to. Over the years, Mickey’s head, Cinderella’s feet, and several other crucial pieces had dematerialized into the ether, leaving behind a family of ill-fitting pieces and jagged holes.
“It’s not my room,” Milo said.
It was Owen’s room.
At least he’d confined himself to the corner and was amusing himself. Though Grace knew, because they’d already tried it, that if she and Cass dared slip away, Milo would follow. He was sticky.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Grace said, in a low voice.
Cass gave her a thin smile. “I doubt that.”
“You think I’m infected.” She glanced at Milo to make sure he hadn’t heard. The kid seemed utterly absorbed by the chewed cardboard. “You think I’ve gone crazy, too.”
“Not crazy.”
“Off, then. Like spoiled milk.”
“I think you’re not yourself,” Cass said.
“So why not tell the others?”
“I figured this was between us.”
“If you told them, they’d probably lock me up,” Grace said. “You’d be safe.”
“Maybe.”
“I hope you’re not waiting for a thank-you.”
Cass shook her head.
“So you’re just counting on the fact that I won’t do anything with Milo here? That seems kind of stupid, doesn’t it? What do I care what an eight-year-old thinks?” But she was sneaking constant glances at Milo; she was whispering. “If you’re right about me, then I’m
bad
now. Maybe I’ll just kill you both.”
“I don’t think you will.”
“Imagine what Daniel would think if he knew about me. If he knew
you
knew, and let him leave Milo here anyway.”
“What Daniel thinks isn’t my priority right now,” Cass said.
It was infuriating, how calm she was, how sure. So irritatingly certain that Grace wouldn’t dash downstairs for one of her mother’s butcher knives. Or maybe not certain, but serene about the possibility. Maybe there was a part of her that wanted to die. That was the most infuriating thing of all, because it couldn’t be a true punishment if Cass wanted it. Then it would be a mercy.
“You know what I think? I think this has nothing to do with your stupid drug.” It had to be the truth. It was the truest feeling, the deepest need, she’d ever had. If it wasn’t real, nothing was. “This is just me. This is what I want. I’m a killer, too. You made me one.”
“Prove it,” Cass said.
Grace nodded at Milo. “Get him out of here, and I’m happy to.”
“Prove it by waiting.”
“For what?”
“Until this is all over – until you’re
sure
it’s got nothing to do with what’s happening to the town. That it’s just about your brother. Doesn’t Owen deserve that?”
Cass thought she knew so much, but she didn’t even know that it wasn’t about Owen. It was about her, Grace, and all the things Cass had taken away from her. Grace flexed her fingers, feeling strong enough to get it done right here, right now, just take a grip on her throat and squeeze.
“If you do it now, you’ll never know,” Cass said. “I think you’ll always wonder. If it was the R8-G, or you.”
Grace wasn’t stupid. She wasn’t a child anymore, easily tricked into an early bedtime by reverse psychology or a promise of extra dessert. She knew Cass would say anything to save her own life. But if the others came back to find Cass’s dead body and Milo singing about the horrible thing Grace had done, Grace was finished. If they found a way to escape, they’d never take her with them. They’d leave her to the madness of Oleander, to these people with their infection, their
darkness,
and Grace didn’t belong there. Grace wasn’t one of them. If proving that meant waiting, then she would wait.
“If I am infected, and I manage not to kill you, then doesn’t that prove that you could have stopped yourself?” Grace said. “That this whole ‘don’t blame me’ thing is bullshit?”
“If we can find a way to cure you, and you don’t want to kill anyone anymore, that would prove something, too,” Cass said. “That it was just the R8-G. That it wasn’t really
you.
”
“I’ll wait,” Grace said. “But not because I care about proving anything to you.”
Cass didn’t argue.
“It won’t matter,” Grace said. “Now. Later. It’s all the same. I am what you made me.”
“Then I choose later.”
Grace nodded. A deal with the devil.
As if he knew the danger had, for the moment, passed, Milo was finally asleep.
Nearly two weeks after the storm, most of the roads had been cleared, the downed trees, smashed cars, and shattered roofs pushed to the curb. Some streets now looked completely untouched, any windows repaired and broken glass swept away. But Daniel, Jule, and West kept mostly to the streets that had been flattened, streets like war zones, where the occasional leaning wall or overturned bathtub was the only sign that where there now lay an ocean of broken boards and bricks and trash, there had once been a town. It was already difficult to remember what things had been like when they were normal. When they’d all taken the sameness for granted, and prayed for it to end.
They passed a park, where feral children played on swings that miraculously rose from a field of rubble; they passed a license plate embedded in a tree trunk; they passed the tattered remains of American flags; they passed a waist-high brick wall, all that was left of a house, graffitied with the promise
JESUS
SAVES
. Above the promise, a different hand had written
WHEN
?
Jule had no idea whether the house she needed was still standing. If it wasn’t, they were screwed.
But it was.
“This is it,” Jule said, peering up at the hulking ruin. The aging Victorian had weathered the storm, but two decades of disrepair had taken their toll. The peeling siding, boarded windows, and pitted beams were evident even in the dark. Jule hadn’t been back in nearly ten years, and, judging from the weedy lawn, the overgrown bushes nearly blockading the front walk, the toppled mailbox, and the diseased poplars, entropy had run its course.
“You sure he still lives here?” Daniel asked.
“You don’t think someone would have noticed if he’d moved?” West said. Kyle Sorenson rarely ventured out of his house and even more rarely made it into the heart of town, where he would be forced to interact with other human beings. Still, in the way of small towns and hermit-like old men, he managed to be a powerful presence, his fearsome scowl and wreck of a house fueling dares and nightmares for more than one generation of Oleander youth.
“I was thinking more like died,” Daniel said.
“He still lives here,” Jule confirmed. “Jack down at the Yellowbird makes regular liquor deliveries out here. He was whining about it last month.”
“So, what?” Daniel said. “We just knock on the door, smile nicely, and ask if we can use his shortwave radio? Because of his reputation for being such a nice guy?”
“Just let me go first,” Jule said. “He’ll let me in.”
“What’s he
like
?” West asked, with the naked curiosity of one about to solve a major mystery of his childhood.
“Old,” Jule said. “Older now, I guess. And… sad.”
“Were there any swastikas?” West asked.
“Maybe he keeps those hidden behind all the photos of his dead wife,” Jule snapped. “Why don’t you ask him?”
“I was only
wondering.
”
“He’s just a lonely old man,” Jule said. “That’s it.”
“No one’s ‘just’ anything these days,” Daniel said, and his trigger finger twitched.
Jule stepped gingerly onto the front steps. The rotting wood creaked beneath her weight. “If you men are scared, feel free to wait outside.” She knocked.
She’d been afraid herself, the first time Scott had brought her here. She’d never bought the Nazi theory, even as a kid, but she’d caught enough glimpses of Kyle Sorenson shadowing his way through town in trench-coated gloom to form some theories of her own, foremost of which was that he possessed some kind of vampiric, youth-sucking powers and survived only by draining the life force of unwitting children. In fairness, she’d been eight years old, and had read her uncle James’s copy of
Dracula
four times. She had not cried, waiting on the doorstep for the old man to reply to the sharp knock, nor had she begged Scott not to deliver her up to the monster. But she had prayed that he would suffer a heart attack on his way to the door.
His breath had been foul, his teeth false and yellow, his hands greased with some old-man slime, but he had not been a monster. Just an old man, with a bowl of candies that might well have been left over from World War II. If you ignored the fuzzy coating, they had a pleasant tang. The fearsome beast of Cherry Street turned out to be a lonely old man – whose only source of entertainment was a basement full of shortwave radios.
She couldn’t believe it had taken her this long to think of the radios.
When Scott was finally busted and hauled off to the federal pen, he hadn’t accused Sorenson of turning him in. After all, the feds had been tapping the Prevette phone lines – Scott should have realized, he informed his family through the visiting-room glass, that the radio would be no safer. That the feds were always listening. Jule hoped he’d been right.
No one answered the door. Jule knocked louder.
“Maybe he’s not home,” Daniel said. He’d been in favor of sneaking into the basement without letting the old man know they were there. “Prudent,” he’d called it, sounding – as Jule pointed out – like an old man himself.
“Maybe it’s four a.m. and he’s a hundred years old,” West said, pounding on the door. “He’s probably asleep. And deaf.” He pressed a shoulder to the door and, before Jule could stop him, shoved it hard enough to crack the frame. The door crashed inward. “That should wake him.”
“Or… not,” Daniel said, in a muffled voice, his hands pressed to his nose and mouth.
Jule gagged. The smell was overwhelming. It was somehow
beyond
smell, a living thing with weight and texture that clawed its way up her nose and down her throat, coating her insides with some toxic mixture of bile and rot. The air itself felt solid, fuzzed like the decrepit candies, and her body rebelled. Everything in her screamed for escape. She somehow forced herself to stand still; she somehow, swallowing a sour mouthful of vomit that tasted of whatever lurked in the house, forced herself to breathe.
West pulled his shirt over his face. Daniel was hunched over, a puddle of puke at his feet.
“The radios are downstairs.” Each word forced out cost more effort than she had. The smell would get better as they got used to it, she told herself. Smells always did. But this one seemed to get worse. She had a moment’s panic at the thought that even if she fled the house, she wouldn’t flee the stench of rot, that it lived inside her now, would hold on and never let go.
It smelled of freshly disemboweled deer, guts steaming in the fall air; it smelled of landfill, acres of garbage moldering under an August sun; it smelled of
wrong.
It smelled like it was coming from the kitchen, and to get to the basement, they had to go through it.
Daniel took Jule’s hand. West nodded. She led the way.
Kyle Sorenson had ended his days at the kitchen table. The revolver was still lodged in what was left of his mouth. He’d left the light on, making it impossible to ignore the smear on the faded wallpaper behind him, or pretend it was anything other than a spatter of brain. The words
I
’
M
SORRY
were painted across the table in his blood.
Now Jule did throw up, again and again, heaving until there was nothing left to expel, until she was hollow and could be entirely filled up by the noxious smell, the thought of which sent her heaving again.
That’s how a corpse smells,
she thought, and tried desperately hard not to think about Ellie, who she’d sent to her death.
I’m sorry.
For Sorenson, words hadn’t been enough. She wondered whether he’d caught himself in time. When the storm came, and with it, the toxic cloud that unleashed a darkness, that made whatever wrong lived inside you seem right, how long had it taken before he’d found the gun, and the will to use it? What had the whispers in his head urged him to do?
“At least, we don’t need his permission to use the radio,” West said, sounding, amid all of this, somehow normal. Jule clung to the voice, and its implied sanity.
“Let’s do this and get the hell out of here,” she said. “Unless you want to check for swastikas.”