Malorie

by Josh Malerman

  “Survivors,” Malorie says.

  She wants to break something. She wants to punch a hole in the office wall. She wants to kick the desk over.

  So she does.

  She plants a shoe against the edge of the desk and shoves as hard as she can, sending the old thing onto its side. The pages scatter like white birds leaping from a falling tree, and Olympia hollers, “Mom! Mom! Are you okay?”

  She sounds scared. In the new world, when you hear someone lash out from the other side of a door, it’s not hard to imagine something is in there with them.

  “I’m fine,” Malorie yells. “I’m fucking fine.”

  She hears the teens whispering on the other side. Tom is no doubt asking Olympia why Malorie would be upset by this news and Olympia is no doubt explaining exactly why.

  Because it’s been seventeen years. Because she believed they were dead. Because she grieved already and because she’s felt the insatiable loss of Sam and Mary Walsh for so long that it’s become part of her now.

  And this? This sudden list?

  This is mean.

  Malorie cries. She doesn’t want to but she can’t stop it. She imagines Gary sitting across a table from a younger man, promising the man money or gold or whatever is still worth something out in the new world, if only the rube play the part of a census man. Write all these notes down for me, son, and deliver it to Cabin Three of Camp Yadin. Can you do that for me? Can you sneak these two names like worms for a fish through the front door of Cabin Three at Camp Yadin?

  Big fish in there. Big to me.

  “No way,” Malorie says. “There’s just no way. This isn’t real. This isn’t possible. This is not happening.”

  But, beyond the desk, her parents’ names are still visible on the spilled pages.

  Sam and Mary Walsh.

  Not Gary’s hand.

  And something else, too. Another page, having risen to the top of the pile, as the papers went fluttering through the office. As if this particular page were trying to survive, too. A description of a mode of travel, yes, another impossibility, the proof Malorie needs to officially deny any and all of this.

  The Blind Train.

  Ah, yes. The man who claimed to be from the census mentioned a train.

  One that heads north.

  Malorie feels hot. Like someone is watching her. Has been watching her. Like the walls of the new world are closing in.

  No to all of this. Absolutely no. It’s too inviting, all too perfectly arranged for her to gather her teens and leave the relative tranquility of this place they call home and have called home for ten years. She can sense the worm lowering into the water. Can feel the hunger, wanting to taste it. It’s easy to imagine Gary waiting for her on a platform in the dark.

  Her parents are dead. They’ve been dead for seventeen years.

  Malorie picks up the page that describes the train. She begins to read it, then lets it fall to the floor.

  No.

  No way.

  She’s not leaving this camp. The camp that has kept them safe. The place where Tom and Olympia have grown from children into adults, immensely intelligent teens who can hear all the way to the gates of the camp and who are happy without even knowing why. She will not jeopardize their lives for closure in her own.

  She makes for the office door, momentarily assured with her decision to ignore the whole thing. The names on that page. The existence of a census at all.

  She looks down once more to the pages on the floor.

  The names stand out to her, even now, as she stands far from them, at the door, her hand on the knob. The names seem to be written in something like steel, impossible to remove, hardier than she is. As if the names themselves wear blindfolds and will therefore survive this new world long after Malorie succumbs to it.

  She closes her eyes.

  She opens the office door then closes it again without leaving the room.

  She returns to the page about the train.

  “Mom?” Tom calls from the outer office. “You need help in there?”

  She doesn’t answer. She reads:

  Because of the existing tracks, a train is the safest mode of transportation in the new world. No fear of driving up onto a curve, hitting a parked car, hitting a person.

  No. No. It’s too good. Too possible. And nothing, Malorie knows, absolutely nothing is so ready-made these days.

  But she reads on.

  So long as the tracks are clear, and the machine travels at a slow enough speed…

  Malorie looks away. She feels pain. Literal, physical, pain. Are her parents alive? Have they been alive this whole time?

  She thinks of Shannon’s face, telling her they weren’t answering their phone anymore. She thinks of Shannon’s dead body upstairs.

  By her own hand.

  The guilt for not having sought out Sam and Mary Walsh, to verify their deaths, is almost too rich to endure. It’s been seventeen years.

  The Blind Train runs on tracks between Lansing, Michigan, and Mackinaw City, Michigan.

  Mackinaw City, Malorie thinks. The very tip of the Lower Peninsula. The bottom of the bridge that connects it to the Upper.

  The train travels at no more than five miles an hour. It runs on coal. The windows are painted black. I know almost nothing more about it for I have yet to ride it myself.

  “Nope,” Malorie says.

  But she’s already feeling the very tips of the fingers of yes.

  She closes her eyes and exits the inner office.

  “Mom,” Olympia says.

  “I need to speak with Ron Handy,” she says.

  “The door is closed, Mom,” Tom says.

  She opens her eyes. She sees her two teens looking back at her with flushed faces. This must all be so incredibly exciting to them. This unreality. This lie.

  “We’ll walk you there,” Tom says. “We can use my—”

  “No,” she says. “I need to speak to him alone.”

  She needs to speak to an adult is what she needs. Even one twice as paranoid as herself.

  Ron Handy is the closest neighbor they have. At three miles, the former gas station he dwells in is far, but close enough.

  She needs the self-proclaimed Humorous Hermit because she can hardly breathe. It feels like, any second, her parents could die again. If they are alive, if they also survived these seventeen years, what’s to stop them from dying right now…right now…

  RIGHT NOW?

  “Jesus,” she says. She can’t get a firm hold on any of her reactions, opinions, feelings. She imagines herself on a blind train. She imagines the people who run it. She imagines herself and her teens waiting at a train station for a month, a year, ten years, never knowing when the train is coming, not allowed to look up the tracks for a headlight in the distance.

  Olympia steps to her, takes her hand.

  “It’s okay,” she says. “It’s gonna be okay.”

  But the words bring Malorie no comfort. It’s been seventeen years.

  “I need to talk to Ron Handy,” she says again. Then she’s tying her blindfold around her head, a motion she’s done so many times that it’s as natural as tucking her hair behind her ears.

  “Close your eyes,” she tells them. Even now. Even as the reality she’s finally gotten used to has been cracked again, as she feels the physical pain of grief’s reversal or perhaps grief all over again, even now she tells her teens to close their eyes.

  “Okay,” Olympia says.

  “Closed,” Tom says.

  Malorie opens the office door and steps out onto a wood floor that feels too sturdy, doesn’t conform to her idea of life right now, doesn’t line up with the absolute darkness she falls through, a place where it’s impossible to decipher the right or wrong thing to do.

  FIVE


  Malorie discovered Ron Handy before she found Camp Yadin. A decade ago, she’d smelled the distant odor of gasoline, walking her then six-year-olds in search of a new home. Hoping for canned goods or packaged snacks, she followed the scent to what she couldn’t have known was his home, a fortified service station on the side of a Michigan country road. Ron Handy lives behind wood boards, fat mattresses, car doors, and layers of sheet metal. As far as Malorie knows, he won’t even remove his blindfold inside.

  Now, as she reaches the gravel shoulder of that same road, her nerves electrified, her head dizzy with too many possibilities, she realizes it’s been three years since she’s visited him. Ron has never come into Camp Yadin. Ron doesn’t leave his place. Ever.

  The old-world instinct of looking both ways before crossing the street has long been exterminated, and Malorie hurries across the gravel to the pebbled gas station lot. For all she knows, Ron Handy is dead inside, rotting, mad flies buzzing and breeding on his remains.

  She thinks of Sam and Mary Walsh rotting, too.

  She reaches the fortress, shin first, banging against something hard. If Ron’s alive inside, he’s heard her. But she knocks on a wall of wood all the same.

  “Malorie?”

  It’s been three years and she’s still the last person he’s seen. She knows this now.

  “Yes, Ron. It’s me.”

  The desperation in her voice frightens her. Did she make sure Tom and Olympia were safe and secure in Cabin Three? Did she hurry out too fast?

  A series of clicks tell her that Ron is doing the equivalent of what was once simply called unlocking doors. Now it sounds more like he’s moving a thousand small objects out of the way.

  She hears close creaking. What feels like dark air accosts her. Stuffy. Sour. The scent of an unwashed man opening the door to his windowless home.

  “Malorie!”

  He sounds excited but tired. Even the one word has the aristocratic lilt Malorie encountered ten years ago. She knows that Ron is what people in the old world would have called “too smart for his own good.”

  “Hi, Ron,” she says. “You got a minute?”

  Ron laughs. Because it’s funny. Because all he has is minutes, alone in his bunker of blindness.

  “I was expecting a cadre of friends and family, but they seem to be running late,” he says. “We’ve just enough time for crumpets.”

  Malorie wants to smile. She wants to make anxious jokes about the horrors like Ron Handy does. But her parents’ names are circling through her head like vultures, waiting for the hope to die.

  “Something bothering you?” Ron asks. “Something with the kids? Who, might I add, are not kids any longer?”

  “Did someone come by here, Ron? A man saying he was from the census?”

  She can’t see his face, but she knows this question will scare him. The mere mention of an outsider claiming to be anything is enough to send Ron Handy back inside without a word.

  But he remains. And when he speaks, Malorie can hear the effort of doing so in his voice.

  “No. Unless I was asleep. Or perhaps so far gone into my own head that I mistook his knocking for a thought.” But the joke falls flat between them. Then, “Why not come inside? I don’t much like the exterior world these days.”

  Blind, impatient, shell-shocked, Malorie steps inside. She waits as he slides everything back in place by the door.

  “I used to live in the office,” Ron says. “But there’s a particular window in there that I do not like. I’ve covered it two dozen times over, but I just…do not like it.”

  He touches her hand, and Malorie almost cries out.

  “So I moved. Now I live where they once kept the supplies. Filters and rotors. Cans of oil. Can’t say I haven’t considered drinking one.”

  “Ron…”

  “Well, what? I don’t wear the new world very well. And I’m okay with that.”

  He tugs on her hand, leading her deeper into his home. The moving is easier than she remembers, less junk in the way, and she understands that even a man who lives like this must make home improvements over time.

  But the smell is as bad as it’s ever been. Gasoline and sweat. Piss and possibly more.

  She follows him through what could be a proper hallway but is probably only a path through stacks of clutter.

  “Here,” he says at last.

  Malorie thinks of her parents.

  Impossible.

  “A drink?” Ron asks. “I have a little whiskey left. And I haven’t found cause enough to down it.”

  “No,” Malorie says. “But thank you.”

  “Well, at least take a seat. Would you believe I keep two chairs? It’s probably a bad idea. There are times I believe I’m not alone.”

  He makes to take Malorie’s other hand and feels the stack of papers instead.

  “What’s this?” he asks, heavy suspicion in his voice.

  “The man from the census left these on our porch. It’s why I’m here.”

  She expects Ron to ask her to leave. But he only takes her other hand and guides her to a wooden stool.

  Malorie sits but it’s not easy to stay still.

  “Do you know anything about a train, Ron?”

  Suddenly it strikes her how insane this is. How desperate she is for another opinion. Ron Handy hasn’t left this space in years.

  “The Blind Train,” Ron says. “I’ve heard of it.”

  Malorie’s voice comes out quicker than planned.

  “What do you know?”

  “First I’ll introduce to you the medium by which I heard of it,” he says. “But I warn you…what I’m about to play frightens me deeply. And I won’t listen to it for very long. If the sight of them drives us mad…what might the sound of them do?”

  Malorie rubs her gloved hands along the long sleeves she wears. She thinks of redheaded Annette running mad with a knife through the school for the blind.

  A radio squawks. Malorie recoils. Before she speaks, she hears a distant voice. A man says, “…I used to enjoy that very much!”

  Then the radio goes silent again.

  “So, you see,” Ron says, “not as cut off as I seem to be. It was upon those very waves that I heard mention of a train. I can only assume your question has something to do with that stack of papers I felt in your hand.”

  “It does.”

  “And I also assume that you brought it here for me to read, which means, of course, that I would have to remove my fold to do so.”

  Malorie doesn’t allow the moment to balloon. She senses that, if she waits another few seconds, Ron isn’t going to read what the man left on her porch. He’s going to find an excuse for her to leave.

  “There’s a list of survivors in here. By city and state.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. And my parents are on the list.”

  “Oh…Malorie…”

  She hears the empathy in his voice. Then the long-forgotten sound of alcohol poured into an empty glass.

  “Here,” Ron says. “I’ve determined you were wrong. You do need a drink. And if I’m going to remove my fold…I’m going to need one, too.”

  Malorie has not seen Ron Handy before. She’s only heard his voice. The dozen times she’s spoken with him, whether from outside his service station or in it, she’s never removed her own. Ron has asked that of her. To protect himself.

  She feels a glass against the back of her hand. She takes it.

  “Are we ready then?” Ron asks.

  But Malorie hears concern in his voice. He’s nervous. She’s nervous. What will she see? What will Ron Handy look like?

  “You don’t have to do this,” she says.

  “But it feels like I do,” Ron says.

  Malorie hears him breathe deep. Hears him st
and.

  “Oh, my,” he says. “You’re very pretty. I had no idea I was living so close to a dream.” Then, “You’re wearing long sleeves and a hood. On a hot day. You’re worried they might touch you.”

  Malorie removes her fold. Ron Handy, larger than she imagined, looks like a big, scared child. They share uneasy smiles.

  “Yes.”

  “You told me about the blind woman who went mad. Can’t quit thinking of that?”

  “No.”

  “I understand.”

  They stare at each other a beat. Take each other in. Malorie sees fear and exhaustion in his face. She wonders if, in the old world, Ron Handy was wealthy.

  “Thank you,” she says, “for calling me pretty. Living with two teens…I haven’t had a compliment like that in a long time.”

  Ron reaches his glass toward her. They cheer.

  “To company,” he says. “And to retaining our senses, no matter how many they try to take from us.”

  They drink.

  Malorie marvels at the amount of stuff that surrounds him. Odds and ends are piled floor to ceiling. She sees the radio. A cot. Boxes of wires and tools. Canned goods and blankets. Paint cans, magazines, and gasoline. Ron stands beside a foldout lounge chair. He wears a sport jacket and shorts.

  “Not where I once imagined myself to be.” Ron smiles. “But who knows…it might be better than where I was heading!”

  He laughs. Malorie wants to, but she simply can’t.

  Sam and Mary Walsh.

  It feels like, if she doesn’t start moving now, she’s going to miss the very last breath they take.

  “No photos in there?” Ron asks, acknowledging the papers. She sees the paranoia in his eyes. The shiftiness. The fear.

  “No. I worried about the same thing. It’s all notes and diagrams.”

  “What else?”

  “A lot.”

  Ron nods. He looks Malorie in the eye.

  “Why do I feel afraid?”

  Malorie experiences an emotion she hasn’t felt in a decade or more: kinship with a fellow adult. It’s large enough to bring tears to her eyes. But she doesn’t allow them passage yet.