White Horse (24 page)

“Huh, look at that. Someone lost their scarf. Dim days, Miss Marshall. Dim days indeed. And they’re only getting darker. Those scientists did something to the weather, because this ain’t right. We’ve been playing God and now God’s having His fun with us.” His mouth keeps on flapping, but his words fade to static, because that scarf—I know that scarf. Last time I saw it, Jenny was winding it around her neck, tucking the ends into her coat.

“Miss Marshall? You okay?”

No, I’m not.

Maybe I shove him out of the way, or maybe he steps aside. Later on, when I think about it, I can’t remember how it happened. One way or another, I push through that door to where the arctic wind bites my face. I go right, because that’s the direction from which the scarf blew. I go right, because that’s where the newspaper dispensers are. I don’t have far to go.

There’s a heap on the ground wearing Jenny’s coat and I hope it’s not her, that some homeless person stole her clothes. But what are the odds they’d have her same hair?

Oh God … I can’t take this. I can’t. Mom and Dad are bad enough, but losing this other part of me is something I cannot bear. I don’t have strength enough to hold this hurt.

“Jenny,” I whimper. “Jenny? Get up. Please, get up.”

She doesn’t. She just lies there in a dead heap, the red circle on her forehead signaling that this is The End of sisterhood. I am orphaned in every way.

“Jenny?” I kneel in her bloody halo, lift her head and cradle it in my lap. I try but I can’t scoop her brains back into her head. I keep trying, but the hole is too wide and the pink stew pours out faster than I can ladle it back in.

My mind cracks like the jar when I beat it with the hammer.

Fractured thoughts from a madwoman’s head. I can’t believe she did this to me. How dare she leave me alone? My sister deserted me. Fuck you, bitch. Fuck you for not just coming down here when I asked the first time.

Fuck you. My balled-up fists press into my brow bone. Her head is heavy in my lap like a cantaloupe. There’s a growing ache in my head that won’t quit. Fuck you, Jenny.

“You idiot!” I scream. “We were always supposed to be there for each other! I wasn’t looking out for you so you could die, too!”

I keep yelling, pelt her with my anger. Then there are voices, and a moment later hands and arms grabbing me, pulling me away from Jenny.

“No, no, no. That’s my sister.”

“Go look for the shooter,” someone says.

“Leave us alone,” I cry. “I’ve got no one else.”

But the hands don’t care; they just keep tugging me further away from what’s left of my family.

Why would anyone shoot Jenny?

DATE: NOW

I am staring down the
barrel of a long, dark channel. The light at the other end rushes toward me as the passage compresses, then telescopes to some unfathomable distance. Time and space shift. Rationally, I know I’m still sitting in that warehouse, separated from the Swiss by olive oil. Knowing that doesn’t make the tunnel feel any less real. Is this what it’s like to die? Is everyone I’ve lost waiting for me at the other end? Have they forgiven me? Do they still care for me like I care for them?

“George Pope? Why do you care about him? He’s dead.”

His voice is jubilant. “Is he? Good. I do hope it was painful. Do you know?”

“Know what?”

“Did he die in great pain? Was it this disease that took his life—this disease he helped create?”

“No,” I say. “It was quick.”

“How quick?”

“Tell me what you found inside Lisa.”

“I found nothing inside her. Nothing. Her womb was empty. Yours is, too.”

DATE: THEN

Who knew the sun could
be so cold? Its brittle glare paints my face, filtered through murky glass. I am in a plain room with a stained wood door, no bars, but that doesn’t mean this isn’t a cell. Iron does not make this a prison.

“I need a newspaper,” I tell the woman who brings my lunch.

The tray lands on the table with a clatter. The table barely registers; it’s fastened to the wall with bolts big enough to withstand a nuclear attack. Everything else could vaporize, but they’d be here, too stubborn to quit biting the concrete blocks.

“This ain’t no Holiday Inn,” she says.

“Gosh, I hadn’t noticed.”

She lumbers away, back to her food cart. It’s a tall, thin insulated box in beige, which makes me think it fell off the back of an airplane. This whole place is filled with things borrowed, begged for, or stripped from institutions.

The food, however, is five-star. There’s no Jell-O salad and brown slush with graying chunks of meat on the plastic plates. Instead what we have is homemade ravioli filled with ricotta and spinach, tossed in a browned butter sauce. There’s a small bowl of salad greens, crisp and fresh and tangy with a vinaigrette that knows nothing about plastic bottles. And fruit salad with delicate bites of fruits the local supermarket doesn’t stock.

They brought me here after Jenny was killed. For observation, the woman in uniform said. Military. Somewhere along the way the president declared martial law and nobody bothered to let people know. They patrol the streets, watching, waiting for someone to cause a ruckus, which I did. They saw that. They pulled me away from my sister. But they can’t tell me who shot her or why. I don’t get that. When I ask, they keep telling me they don’t know. “Do you think I did it?” I ask them repeatedly. “We don’t know.” They’ve gone from being
An Army of One
to being an army of
We Don’t Know
.

There are footsteps. Combat boots with a woman’s light foot shoved inside.

“Zoe Marshall?” The dark-skinned woman’s voice is larger than her body. She’s a Pez dispenser in fatigues, holding a clipboard and cup of coffee. She gives me the coffee.

I nod, because who else would I be?

“Sergeant Tara Morris. You can go. But I want you back here tomorrow to see the shrink.”

“Back here? I don’t even know where here is.”

She reels off the address.

“That used to be a private school.”

“Not anymore. We’re a low-security halfway house of sorts. We help people. At least until …”

“Everyone comes back to life?” I rub my forehead, wonder why it’s
hole-free when my sister can’t say the same. “Did you find out who killed Jenny?”

“No. I’m sorry. It’s not good enough, but that’s all I’ve got,” she tells me. “We’re a militia at best, not a police force. You’re not in any trouble, so you can go home.”

“Then why the locked doors?”

“You were kicking my men. How do you think that looked?”

I close my eyes. “Like some asshole had just shot my sister and they were trying to drag me away from her.”

“It looked bad,” she says. “Real bad. You could’ve been sick, crazy, maybe, or a delinquent. I have to keep my people safe.”

“She was all I had left. Our parents—”

Schultz hunched over the microscope. “I ate the mice.”

“Try and see from our side, would you? We’re seeing the worst of everyone. Jumping to the wrong conclusion is going to keep us alive. If we assume everyone’s a friend, we could lose more people, and that’s not acceptable.”

“Where’s my sister?”

“We burned her. We’ve got more dead than we know what to do with.” For a moment she looks scared. “We’re dying in droves. Not just us. Everybody.”

Not just us. Everybody
.

I take a cab back to my apartment. The cabdriver wears one of those flimsy protective masks. He takes my money with a gloved hand, eyeing the note suspiciously. I half expect him to spray it down with disinfectant, but greed wins out and he stuffs it in his pocket.

“I work for myself now,” he mutters as I watch the bill disappear. “No one to be accountable to out there.”

Porkchop is gone already, so I let myself in with my key, ride the elevator, listen to the lonely hum that seems to chew up the available air and leaves me covered in a thin sheen of cold sweat. I am a robot performing the door-opening routine. The shards and bones I took from the box those weeks ago are still in the plastic Baggie. I cram them into my pocket and leave again.

Pope Pharmaceuticals considers you part of the family
.

No one stops me. The lone security guard grunts as I show him my ID card. He doesn’t look me in the eye, nor do I look into his. We both know why. We’re here when so many aren’t. That’s not a badge of honor, just a sign of otherness.

The lab where there used to be mice is empty. Schultz’s usual seat is pushed away from the bench. The microscope is an old man hunched over a glass-covered lap.

Time is ticking. I do what I’ve seen them do before, or at least a bastardized version of that process. I scrape the bones onto a slide, shove them onto the microscope’s waiting arms.

“What are you doing?”

The voice is inhuman, but the face is still Schultz. He lurches toward me. “You can’t do that.”

“I thought you were—”

“Dead?” He laughs. “This is a hard-core game, man. I’m holding on to the end, otherwise I’m gone for good. We don’t come back. Dust. That’s where we go. So whaddaya have for me?”

He reaches for the slide. When I pull away he feints, and without thinking I move the other way, leaving him free to snatch my prize.

He shoves it into place under the microscope’s all-seeing eye.

“Suh-weet,” he says. “Look.”

Deep breath. Press eyepiece into socket.

And I see it: the disease.

Noises live inside the phone
, now that have nothing to do with dial tones.

Something waits and listens. For what, I don’t know.

“Hello,” I whisper.

Hello
.

FIFTEEN

T
he scientific community has been busy while people die. But they’ve been confounded until now. And from the way this mouthpiece scratches his thinning hair, I’d say there’s still a measure of uncertainty. He doesn’t believe his words, but neither is he convinced they’re false.

He stands there on his podium, a half dozen microphones shoved under his mouth to catch his words like some electronic bib, and tells us that we’re dying of some viral form of cancer.

You got OWNed
.

What he doesn’t say is how we got it. When a journalist from CNN asks, he wipes his nose with the back of his hand and mumbles about how maybe it’s something common that mutated into this mass killer. Like the 1918 Spanish flu that mutated from a killer of the weak to a slayer of vigor during its second wave.

But I know. I
know
. This all began with a man named George P. Pope.

That thought fills me with fear.

This time when I call
the CDC, a sound file asks me to leave my name, number, and reason for calling. They’re busy, it says, they’ll get to me. But for now I have to blow my whistle in a virtual queue.

The week dribbles by
.

Every day I listen to the elevator rattle to the bottom floor. When the doors open I say, “Good morning, Porkchop,” because it makes me feel better to imagine he’s still there. I don’t drop quarters in the dispenser now: it opens freely. I take a paper, try not to notice the faint Jenny stain on the concrete.

Upstairs I go, not bothering to set my apartment alarm. It’s pointless. There’s no one to call and verify that I’m me. The newspaper goes in a pile. War, more war, and mass death fill the front pages now. The secret is out. People finally noticed everyone they know is sick or dead. The other pages are thin on content and advertisement-free. Even the funeral home ads have tapered off, their employees buried in their own coffins.

I lie on the couch. I wait for death, or something like it, to pound on the door and make me an offer I don’t have enough heart to refuse.

On a day I suspect is a Friday, knuckles strike my door. My body rolls off the couch, staggers to the peephole.

“You gonna let me in?”

Sergeant Morris.

“No.”

“Then I’m gonna have to kick your door in, and I’m really not in the mood for door kicking today. It’s been a shit night and I lost two people. So, how about you let me in?”

She strolls in on pipe cleaner legs, carrying body bags under her eyes.

“You gotta see the shrink,” she says. “We agreed on that.”

“You look like shit.”

“Nice place. How long you think it’s gonna hold?”

“‘Hold’?”

She helps herself to my couch, leans back, eyes wide open like they’re propped open with toothpicks. “We’ve got three kinds of people out there that we’ve been seeing. Dead people. They’re the biggest
group. We’re burning them now. It’s for the best. Otherwise they stink and rot. We load them into the wagons and drive them to the public pool at the YMCA. The outdoor one. We drained it couple of months ago. Turns out it’s the perfect place to burn corpses. Community bonfire.”

She laughs.

At first I’m horrified: How can she be laughing at burning bodies piled into a community pool? How can she joke about that? It’s a tragedy. Horror. There is no comedy in that scenario. Then I see it: the funny. The absurdity. And I laugh, too. The mental image of all those people, some in their designer suits, people who used to walk around like they were more important than the swarm; regular people I’d pass in the supermarket who minded their own business just like me; people from work; people living completely different lives, all of them heaped into that concrete shell and doused in—