Girl Minus X

by Anne Stone

  “That’s not what I mean,” Eva says. “I mean it more literally. Like, how do you turn a car around? In cartoons, you just poke your legs out the bottom and swing it around.”

  “I don’t know,” Dany says. “Did you try the steering wheel yet?”

  Eva doesn’t turn around. She lifts one hand from the wheel and, cranking with the other, slowly raises her middle finger.

  Dany grins, but she knows what Eva means. “I can do the turning part if you need me to,” Dany offers.

  Norah leans between the seats.

  “Get the blood off Mac’s face,” her aunt says. She hands Eva a box of Kleenex and a bottle of water.

  The attention of the soldiers may be on the Drywall Genius’s van for now, but they’ll get to the VW Bug soon enough. “The window,” Dany says. “We need a story.”

  Dany looks around. Faraday is slumped, half conscious, in the back seat. Aunt Norah looks like warmed-over goose shit. And the kid? She’s covered in blood, hair spattered with broken glass. Christ, she looks like she’s been in a car accident. And there it is.

  “Car accident,” Dany tells them.

  Eva picks the story up from there.

  “We were driving along,” Eva says, “quite competently, I might add, when a cryptid emerged from the treeline, a sasquatch – well, cryptids, let’s say a breeding pair – which is pretty unusual for this time of year, and, when we slowed to look – naturally, I mean, who wouldn’t? – we were rear-ended by a truck. That would explain everything.”

  Dany pulls the ragged remains of the fleece blanket up to Faraday’s chin, trying to hide some of the damage.

  “We got rear-ended,” Dany says. “That’s all they need to know.”

  | Chapter 0 = X + 34

  Across the way, Dany sees soldiers interrogating the driver of the van.

  The fireflies may be gone from her eyes, but her world is ­evaporating at the edges. She’s been running on force of will. When the adrenaline in her bloodstream runs out, she’ll drop like a rock. She’s been there before. For now, fear is her friend.

  Eva grinds the car forward again and stutters to a stop. They are two car lengths from the checkpoint, now, and her gaze keeps tripping over the soldiers. “We need a map,” she says. Mister Faraday, next to her, is nodding. He says something that might mean glovebox. “Check up front,” Dany says, and her hand finds Mac’s shoulder.

  Mac’s face is no longer freckled red. Her face a stain of pink, Mac rifles through the glovebox. She passes an old map back. Then she curls up again, her thumb, once more, in her mouth. “Hands out of your mouth,” Dany tells the kid, her voice tight. “Sterilize her hands and get a mask on her,” she tells Eva.

  Dany flicks on the overhead light and takes in Faraday. Her history teacher is not looking good. One glance at Norah’s eyes, and she can see her misgivings. No, her aunt doesn’t like what she’s seeing, not any more than Dany does.

  She and Aunt Norah have wedged Faraday between them and now she spreads the map over his lap. The map, she sees, is years out of date. It probably came with the car. The thing is ancient. No sooner has she straightened it out, then the map comes to pieces. Dany lays out first one section and then another, flipping through them until she finds what she is looking for. She leans forward over bloodied paper, her fingers tracing roads.

  “Nobody’s getting through the checkpoint. Nobody,” Eva whispers.

  Dany glances up front – an oversize mask now covers most of her kid sister’s face. She nods. Turning back to the map, Dany traces her finger over a pair of promising lines on the map. “What about this,” she says aloud. But there is no one to ask, really, nothing to do but choose.

  Dany taps the twin lines, thinking. Even Faraday is looking down at the map now. Her aunt, too, is peering over, eyes on the twinned set of lines. “The smaller one, here, you think it’s a railway bridge?” Dany asks.

  “Looks like it,” Aunt Norah says. She meets Dany’s eyes. “It’s a chance,” her aunt tells her. “That’s what it is, a chance.”

  “Old swing bridge,” her teacher whispers. “Train tracks.”

  Coldly pragmatic, that’s what they need to be. “Looks like the power’s out all over the city. We’d have the dark on our side, right?” Dany asks. Just like at the prison camp, a voice in her head adds.

  “I can do it,” Eva says. “My housekeeper, Bianca, she has a story about this time she saw a car driving on the railway tracks, back on Negros. I know I can do it. We have to try.”

  For a moment, as she glances out the window, Dany’s mind holds an image of the map, but already, it’s fading from her eyes. Out there, the Drywall Genius, who has to be in his fifties, is standing outside of his van. His hands are raised, and he’s talking, fast. At least, his mouth is moving in a blur, though none of his words are audible. But another space has opened up in front of them and Eva, once more, starts up the car.

  Again, the car leaps forward. Again, Faraday cries out in pain.

  “Oops,” Eva says. “Neutral. You have to put it in neutral. You know,” she adds, not for the first time, “I honestly think that I could design something much more user-friendly.”

  Dany reaches up and clicks off the overhead light. Soon, they’ll reach the soldier at the front of the line. She doesn’t want him seeing any more than he has to.

  The big guy, the one by the drywall van, is begging the soldiers. She can see him holding up his hands and pleading. Then the car ahead of them is given a pass. It makes a U-turn, heading back to the city, passing by the van. And Eva, she skids them up to the checkpoint. Her eyes dart over the soldier, leaning in the window, and her hands tap dance across the steering wheel.

  “Sorry, sugar junky,” Eva says. “I need a fix.”

  But the soldier just holds up his palm, staying them with a single gesture.

  His eyes are on the drywall van, and Dany’s gaze follows. She sees a flurry of motion by the roadside. Soldiers swinging into position, and the Drywall Genius, he lowers his hands, putting himself between the soldiers and the side panel of the van.

  Dany looks at him. Really takes him in. Balding, a few thin threads of hair combed across his pate. He’s large, a big guy, but the flesh on his upper arms hangs loose, as if he’s used to eating a lot more than he’s getting. It’s a look she sees a lot these days. Hungry. The man is huge, but scared. She can see sweat dripping down from his wispy hairline. The soldier who has been standing by their car, the palm of his hand holding them in place, drops that palm. He raises his hand to his rifle, swinging it round towards the Drywall Genius.

  Across the way, another soldier is edging towards the cargo hold. He swings the side panel wide open and, from twenty feet, Dany can make out the girl’s bulging, skittering eyes. It’s the virus. But here? So far from the lab and from Liz?

  Her aunt shakes her head, but she doesn’t look surprised, just sad.

  Dany looks at Aunt Norah. “You’ve seen that before?”

  Aunt Norah looks at Dany, and narrows. “They’ve been showing up at the hospice, more and more.”

  Norah shakes her head, eyes once more on the sick girl, and Dany chases the math.

  She’s always been quick to see patterns. And the pattern, thus far, is all too clear. And the thin thread of hope this new dot offers, in her constellation of math, isn’t going to change her story. So, maybe someone else was the first to carry the virus out and into the world – but Dany has already been told. Isobel has told her what she is, what’s in her. Adding more vectors is not going to change Dany’s story.

  Dany looks at the girl in the white van. Is she fifteen years old? Sixteen? Framed by the van’s open door, she sees a picture of her own future. Dany and her are probably about the same age. It is so unfair, for a girl’s life to be put out like a cigarette. She’s just a kid. And what’s worse, the thin thread of hope Dany has been hanging
onto – Isobel’s words about her immature immune system – is wearing thin.

  Because if there is no hope for the girl in the van, then there is no hope for her.

  The girl has been bound.

  Her arms are tied behind her and she’s been gagged, to keep her quiet. The man out there, sweat pouring from his forehead, must be her dad. He’s trying to protect his kid. The guard outside of their car takes a step forward, his rifle now level with the man’s chest. The four soldiers outside of the van level their rifles at the man’s head.

  But the girl’s father is brave. Or stupid.

  At any rate, he doesn’t just hide from all his problems at some stupid farmhouse in the country. He does whatever he has to do in order to protect his kid. In spite of the guns, he walks over to the van, pulls the side door to a close.

  It isn’t just sweat, Dany sees. Tears are pouring down the man’s face. Because he loves his daughter. Dany hears the soldiers warn him, but the man turns his back and retreats to the driver’s seat of his van. They call out the warning once, twice, a third time. But the man gets up into the driver’s seat, and the van rolls slowly forward, making its way towards the city.

  A warning shot rings out.

  “No,” Dany whispers. “No, no.”

  In the front seat, Eva’s hand shoots out and she covers the kid’s eyes. Just in time. Because, as the van creeps slowly forward, picking up the pace, the soldiers shoot the driver dead.

  “And that’s what love gets you,” Aunt Norah says. “Every goddamned time.”

  Dany looks at her aunt, but Norah has turned away from them. Looking out the car window, her aunt just shakes her head. Not for the first time, Dany finds herself wondering about her aunt and Antoine. Wonders just how close it is that they’ve become.

  Dany fixes her eyes on Eva. “Car accident,” she reminds her.

  “Yeah,” Eva says, “I got it, I got it.”

  “No sasquatches,” Dany says.

  “I mean, I get why people like sasquai for the plural. It sounds Latin-y,” Eva says. “But sésq’ets is probably better. Better for the singular too, since the word’s Halkomelem and –”

  “Eva.”

  “As an anarchx-feminist,” she says, “I am adept at decentralized consensus, but in this instance, I have to say –”

  “Eva,” Dany says.

  “Okay, okay,” she says. “No sésq’ets. Pinkie swear.”

  And then Dany is blind. The soldier’s flashlight hits her square in the eyes – and Dany’s caught in the glare. When the light turns on Faraday, she blinks, taking the soldier in. Only his eyes are visible through the lens of the biomask. He looks over each of them in turn, staring into their eyes, examining their pupils for signs of the virus.

  The soldier, luckily, is more interested in Eva’s eyes than in her story.

  “Turn around up here,” he says, waving them on.

  Eva looks back at Dany – her eyes panicky. But it’s too late to switch drivers now.

  “You can do it,” Dany tells her.

  “And then it is all on her,” Eva says. “Eva versus the steering wheel. Hands shaking, a determined look on her face, she grinds the gear forward and –”

  Slowly, Eva makes a U-turn.

  It isn’t a perfect semicircle, but she does turn the car around. And then she drives. She drives past the blood-soaked driver, the one whose corpse is hanging half out of the front seat of the drywall van. Dany focuses ahead of them, where, painted onto the highway, a pair of lines gird their car like an infinitely long isosceles triangle, one that will gather them up and shoot them into the future.

  “Okay,” Eva says. “Now for the small matter of gearing up.”

  But Dany can hear it. This time, when Eva depresses the clutch, she finds the sweet spot and they smoothly pick up speed. Eva grins, and her eyes flick to the rear-view mirror.

  “Road,” Dany and Norah call out in synchrony. And Eva straightens out the car and drives on. A half a click after they’ve passed the van, they hear the second shot.

  | Chapter 0 = X + 35

  Dany leans forward between the front seats. They’re on Columbia Drive now, easing onto the small dead-end lane that fronts the swing bridge. As Dany watches, the car rolls to a stop next to a squat brick building that looks like an enormous Lego cube.

  Dany is the first one out of the car.

  The night air smells of creosote, dust and a hint of something green. But everything about the place is coated in a film of ashen dust. In the distance, Dany can just make out the river. There’s the sound of rushing water – and in its empty noise, she can almost hear the voices of children, playing just out of sight. The quantum amplitude. In some other world, Mac is down by the river’s edge. In this other universe, unsplattered by blood, hair free of broken glass, night is day, and the world is filled with sunshine and dragonflies. And in that world, her little sister, Mac, is playing by the river.

  Only they’re not in that world.

  Slowly, Dany’s eyes adjust to the present tense, to the blanket of dark. Blinking away the ghostly image of her sister, only happy, Dany takes in the bridge.

  Bridges, really.

  First, there’s the railway bridge, rising into the dark sky ahead – then, a few hundred yards on, its distant twin – a proper bridge, the kind that cars are supposed to drive over, but just now the car-bridge is filled with people. A lot of people. A huge crowd has gathered at the checkpoint there.

  Turning back to the swing bridge, she searches for the metal railway tracks, the ones that are supposed to be here. Eva, moving towards the railway bridge, is a little ways ahead of her, muttering and walking an invisible line. Following her friend’s gaze, Dany finally picks out the tracks. The twin rails are sunk into the concrete here. Closer to the bridge, the metal tracks rise up from their gutters. So, no, they aren’t going to know if their plan will work, not until they are committed, not until their car is partway up the bridge.

  “I don’t know,” Dany says.

  “I’ll straddle the rails,” Eva tells her, “so they act like guides. If I do that, I won’t even have to steer. Theoretically.”

  Eva walks the sunken rails, muttering, and the kid follows after her, sliding one little hand into Eva’s. Norah takes her place beside Dany, laying a hand on her shoulder, eyes on Eva and Mac.

  Together, Dany and her aunt look out over the railway bridge they plan to cross. But the bridge looks unfinished. All those metal girders holding it in place, they remind Dany of one of the dinosaur skeletons you see hanging from the ceiling at a natural museum. It isn’t a bridge so much as the outline for one, a dangerously incomplete sketch.

  “We’ve done all we can for your teacher,” Aunt Norah says quietly. “We’ve got to get him to Antoine’s.”

  Dany shrugs, her eyes on Eva and Mac. “Faraday will be all right.”

  All Dany can think about is all of the things she should have done for her sister but hasn’t. She should have brought Mac to a place like this, maybe, sometime during the day.

  In the daytime, the place is probably full of birds and dragonflies.

  Only Dany never seems to have time to do the kind of things for her little sister that she should. When Dany was little, before her mom got sick, Phil would take her to the park all the time. Once, when she was six, she ran down to a river like this, and she stumbled on a dozen ducks, scaring the birds into flight. Dany stood stock-still, frozen like a statue, the only still point in a world filled with crashing wings.

  She should have found a way to do that for Mac.

  Dany takes in her aunt and she knows, she just knows. “You’re good with Mac,” Dany says, her voice breaking on the words. “You’re a good mom. Better than me.”

  Her aunt’s face falls.

  Aunt Norah pulls Dany close so that her mask nuzzles Dany’s forehead. “
You’ve been a tremendous big sister,” her aunt tells her. “Amazing. God,” she says. “If I’d known – if I knew that day, if I knew that going to that protest would cause all this, I wouldn’t have gone.”

  Dany looks up at her aunt, but it isn’t her fault. They were just looking for an excuse. “Nah,” Dany says. “They would have revoked –”

  But the night shatters into pieces – and, as she turns to the bridge, she knows the sound for what it is. The crack of another rifle shot.

  | Chapter 0 = X + 36

  Most of the people are on foot. A couple have signs, writing roughly scrawled on cardboard and skewered with a stick. A few are banging on pots and pans. A checkpoint has been set up at the entrance to the Pattullo Bridge, where it rises up over Front Street. She can see more of the unmarked soldiers there – not an insignia in sight – and now one of them has fired a shot over the heads of the crowd, the people who want to get across. No, who need to get across.

  Dany doesn’t need binoculars to see the effect that gunshot has on the crowd. People duck down, covering their heads with their hands – as if that’ll help.

  A riot, they’ll call it. A mob. But when Dany looks out, she sees families. Desperate. The ones at the front of the crowd are backing away. But the ones at the back, heedless with distance, are pressing closer to the checkpoint, pushing the people ahead of them closer to the soldiers’ guns.

  Dany shakes her head. This is going to get bad. It’s going to get bad fast. She wants to be out of here long before that happens.

  Eva, Mac’s hand firmly in hers, comes trotting back to Dany and her aunt.

  “The Liz video, it did all this?” Dany asks her.

  “Er, perhaps it was the shooting at the last checkpoint,” Eva says. And when Dany looks at her friend, she sees that, even now, the little light on her glasses is blinking. Her best friend, Eva, is live streaming the apocalypse.