Malorie

by Josh Malerman

  Does he move out there?

  She hears nothing. She steps to the door.

  “The only way we’re gonna get anywhere,” Tom says, “is if we—”

  “Close your eyes, Tom.”

  “What?”

  “Do it.”

  He does.

  Olympia slides the door open, quickly. She expects to see the silver-haired man standing, staring back.

  But the hall is empty. She closes the door.

  “What’s going on?” Tom asks.

  “Nothing. Sorry.”

  Tom scoffs again. “And you don’t think you’re starting to act like Mom? Jeez. The only difference is you don’t always wear your fold! Even when we’re outside!”

  Olympia feels exposed. How does he know this?

  “How would you know?”

  “Are you kidding? I can hear the cloth against your skin when you wear it,” he says. He gets up and stands behind her. Both of them are reflected in the glass now. “And I know when there’s no cloth on that face of yours. So don’t get all dramatic on me. You break rules, too.”

  She’s trying not to look him in the eye.

  Don’t get all dramatic on me.

  Dramatic.

  Malorie has used the word a thousand times. Always a warning.

  Is there a type? Are the ones who perform on this stage, the new world, the maddest?

  “Anyway,” Tom says. “Get ready to close your eyes. To pretend to go along with the rules. Mom just left the dining car.”

  SEVENTEEN

  As the door to the dining car closes behind her, Malorie walks with her arms outstretched.

  She brushes shoulders with someone.

  “Excuse me,” she says.

  She hears a woman whisper to someone else, “Why is she still wearing her fold?”

  She hears fear in the question and knows the woman wonders if she should be doing the same. But there’s mockery, too. The same tone she heard so often at the school for the blind. She feels it. With each person she passes, with each conversation she momentarily halts, she knows the people on this train are wondering about her.

  Paranoid.

  But this train is set up to be wrecked. She knows this. Just like the house where she gave birth to Tom was set up to be wrecked. And the school for the blind. And, possibly, Camp Yadin, had they stayed there any longer.

  This train will go mad.

  There are more people here than lived in the house. But fewer than the school.

  “Excuse me,” she says, as her gloved fingers nick what is probably the top of somebody’s head.

  The first car is like the one she rode in with Shannon a lifetime ago, with people seated like they used to be.

  She moves fast.

  Tom and Olympia have been alone too long.

  This train will go mad. She knows this. Eventually, the metal sheets Dean secured to the train’s side will come loose. Eventually someone crazy in an old-world way will lower something onto the tracks, too late for the man Michael to clear them. Eventually someone will see something and someone will go mad. A crazy person will be allowed onto the train. Someone who doesn’t believe in the creatures. Someone who will want everyone else to think the same way he does.

  She reaches the end of the car. She opens the door.

  In the moment between cars, she thinks of a blink. Perhaps, the inverse of one. Darkness, darkness, darkness, a blink of the world, darkness, darkness, darkness. She thinks of Shannon pointing out the dilapidated buildings and weird city names. Malorie laughed at her sister’s jokes, and soon they were making up stories, giving names to the people they saw out in the fields on the horizon. Giving them lives and interests, relationships and problems. Malorie remembers their mother, across the aisle, smiling at them. She wanted to impress Mom in that moment, wanted Mary Walsh to think her daughters funny. There was a boy at school, a writer already, whom everybody called imaginative, and Malorie wanted Mom and Dad (Sam and Mary Walsh) to say the same about her.

  And Mom did.

  On cue, she nodded Malorie’s way and said, Those are better stories than the one I’m reading.

  Now, it’s impossible not to see Mom as she might look today. Older, whiter, meeker. She must be wearing a blindfold because, even in Malorie’s imagination, she can’t have anybody look in a public place. Certainly no one she cares about.

  She sees Mom, blind, reaching out across the aisle. Her fingers are white and wrinkled and she says, Do you hear that? People are talking in the cabins you pass. And when people talk, they reveal themselves. And when they reveal themselves, you need to be listening.

  Malorie almost starts at the sound of voices coming from her right. Her gloved hand on the wall, she understands she has come to the series of cars with rooms, like the one Tom and Olympia are in. Here people have spaces of their own. Here people have two beds, red cushions on a bench, a mirror.

  Here, too, people talk.

  Malorie stops. She listens.

  She hears:

  “…a new start. And that means everything. Not just where we live, Judy, but how we live. And how we treat each other, too…”

  Malorie asks herself if she, too, is starting over. But she knows this isn’t the case. What she’s doing is justifying all the living she’s already done.

  She continues, up the hall, gloved hands sliding along both walls. The fingers of her right hand intermittently touch doors. She hears voices. A new set. She pauses. She listens.

  She hears:

  “…have to find a bath sooner than later…”

  “…longest we’ve ever gone…”

  She continues. She thinks of the dead bodies in storage. The safest two passengers on board.

  Her gloved fingers touch the walls. Another door.

  She hears:

  “…never again in my life. I mean it. No more big houses. I want us to find the smallest shack in the state to call home…”

  She continues. She bumps into someone.

  “Excuse me,” she says.

  She has no doubt this person is eyeing her the way they did at the school for the blind. Here she stands, hoodie and gloves, blindfolded in a place where they’ve been told they don’t need to be. Long sleeves and long pants. Her hair covers her neck.

  She makes to pass the person and bumps into him again.

  It’s a him. She can tell. He’s soft in the middle and taller than her and he smells like a man.

  “Excuse me,” she says again.

  Maybe the man is old. Like Dad must be now. She recalls the first time she saw her father had aged. It was during a soccer game of Shannon’s. Malorie was in the stands with Mom and Dad, and Shannon’s team was up by five goals, and another man asked Dad if he wanted to shoot baskets on the small court beside the soccer field. Dad said sure and joined him, and Malorie watched as the two started to play one-on-one. Then the other soccer team scored, and Malorie got swept up in Shannon’s game again. When she looked back to the half-court, she saw Dad, the strongest man in the world, lean and fit, a full head of dark hair like her own, she saw Sam Walsh on the ground, one hand on his shoulder, grimacing.

  She went to tell Mom, but by then Dad was already getting up. And when the other man tossed Dad the ball again, Dad made to shoot, then stopped himself. He passed the ball back and made his way to the bleachers. When he sat down beside Malorie, he said, Guess I can’t do that anymore.

  Now, Malorie reaches out, and the tips of her gloved fingers touch the body before her.

  “Please,” she says. But she says no more. What is this man doing? And what is she doing? Has she forgotten that, just because she’s taken every precaution to avoid the creatures, actual people have always been and will always be just as bad?

  “Move,” she says.

  Bu
t the man doesn’t move.

  Malorie breathes in, she holds it, she breathes out. She thinks of redheaded Annette going mad, because how can she not? A blind woman gone mad. And maybe it wasn’t from the touch of a creature after all but the touch of a man.

  “Please, if you would,” she says. “Move.”

  Maybe the man is old. Maybe the man is asleep. Maybe his back is to her and she’s got it all wrong. Maybe he’s blindfolded, too. Maybe he’s deaf.

  Maybe.

  She hears no movement. She doesn’t know what else to say. She could knock on the nearest door. Call out for assistance. She could stand still until someone else enters the hall and asks the man to move for her.

  The train shakes. It makes her think how feeble this all is, how everybody in the world is only on somebody else’s train, somebody else’s big idea, and how safe that person thinks is how safe it is for all.

  Tom and Olympia are on the other side of this man. This man who will not move.

  “Please,” she says.

  She has to decide. She can’t sit still. She didn’t take her kids and leave her home and make it here just to be frightened into standing still by someone she doesn’t know. Someone she’s never seen. Someone she will never see again.

  So she moves. She walks as if the man was never here. She passes where he must be. She doesn’t feel him. Doesn’t hit him. Doesn’t bump into anything at all.

  She stops, reaches out behind her, feels both walls. The train rattles as she takes another step forward. She reaches out. Feels nobody. She goes the length of the hall, then back. All the way. She feels to know the doors to each cabin are closed and have been closed, since she did not hear them move. She smells the air. It still smells of a person, of a man. She can easily recall the touch of him. A bigger body. Like Dad’s was.

  She looks up, blind, as if the man could somehow be hiding on the ceiling.

  She makes it to the end of the hall again. She must pass through another set of doors to get to the next car. Then another at the end of that one. And so on.

  She listens. Voices within the cabin beside her.

  She hears:

  “…someone on board claims to have caught one.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I met him between cars.”

  “Who?”

  “He says it’s stowed in one of the caskets in storage.”

  Malorie moves before she decides to. She’s through the doors and into the next hall, and her hands are extended, and her mind’s eye is cluttered with so many memories, so much fear, that it becomes even darker, as if, this whole time, all these years, she’s actually had the lights on, and the words she’s just heard through the closed door of a stranger’s cabin on a stranger’s train have flipped the switch off for good.

  He claims to have caught one.

  On board.

  Stowed in one of the caskets in storage.

  “Tom,” she says, “Olympia.”

  Breathless, but breathing. Moving on her own but ultimately carried by the train.

  By somebody else’s big idea.

  Someone else’s idea of safe.

  EIGHTEEN

  “We’re not leaving this cabin until we get there,” she says. She’s still wearing her fold, her hoodie, her gloves. She’s made sure her teens are doing the same.

  She doesn’t ask that they repeat what she’s said. She believes the ferocity of her tone is enough.

  But is it?

  “What happened?” Tom asks.

  Of course Tom asks this. And of course Tom is going to resist. She crosses the cabin so that she’s closer to him. So that there’s no question as to how serious she is.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she says, tremors in her voice. “I said we’re staying. That means we are.”

  “But, Mom…”

  “Tom.”

  …claims to have caught one.

  The phrase is a horror. The census man spoke about somebody who asserted the same thing. Malorie read of other claims in the pages he left behind. Indian River, right here in Michigan. Close. In its way, the new world is the wild west: lawless and boastful. She understands the chances of any of this being verified are slim to none. But what kind of person would brag of such a thing in the first place?

  And in a public place…

  That person worries her as much as what might be in a coffin in storage.

  “Mom,” Olympia starts, like she’s about to tell her something she’s been meaning to say. But Malorie doesn’t want to hear any more. She doesn’t think she can take any more. They’re out in the world. They’re on a train with people they do not know. In the hands of others now.

  “Not now,” she says.

  And she asks herself: is it true that she fears men more than she does the creatures? Is she being honest with herself when she says the person who claims to have caught one is worse than the lauded catch could ever be?

  Her personal darkness turns green, then sickly, as if the entire world is wrinkled and decaying. As if every memory and every thought is filtered through black fabric, all the hopes and reverse-grieving stolen, only cold wind remaining.

  It’s something she hasn’t considered in a long time. Something she hasn’t quite told herself before.

  It’s not people who have driven her to the brink of paranoia.

  It’s the creatures.

  They stole her life. They destroyed the world she loved. They took her sister and, she once believed, her parents. They took Tom the man and Olympia the woman, and Rick and Annette from the school for the blind. Even the census man doesn’t know how many lives were taken by the unfathomable entities because even the ones tallying the numbers aren’t allowed to look at them.

  She feels chilled, sickly, and so she steps to where she thinks the mirror is and feels the counter for a sink. There isn’t one. She gets to her knees and feels for a container, anything to—

  She finds one. A small metal garbage can. She brings it to her face just in time as the sickness comes out of her, splashes her chin but only her chin as almost every other part of her is covered in cloth and clothes.

  Olympia is by her side.

  “You need to lie down,” she says.

  But the advice is so jarring, so entirely not what she thinks she should do, that it almost comes to Malorie as a memory. She hears her mom saying the same thing after she’d picked her up from school for being sick in the bathroom. She remembers the sights on the drive home. It was autumn. Mom pointed out the colors, told Malorie a lot of people get sick when the seasons change, told her don’t worry.

  How about when the world changes, Mom? she thinks. And how about seventeen years after the world changes? Do they get sick then? And do they ever get better if they do?

  Yet, still, the images comfort her. Even now, harried and afraid. The sights and smells of autumn. How it once was. How it must still be, though Malorie doesn’t have proof of that anymore.

  “No,” she says. “I’ll be okay.”

  But the silence from her teens following this statement tells her they don’t believe it. That’s fine. Somebody on this train spoke of a man who claims to have caught one. Says the thing lies in a box in storage.

  Now isn’t the time to lie down.

  She breathes in. She holds it. She breathes out.

  Then she’s up again. Can this be happening? It’s bad enough that they can touch you now (can they?), it’s bad enough that there are more of them now than there used to be (are there?), it’s bad enough that this very train will pass through what Dean described as a concentrated area, a place where, for whatever unholy reason (and Malorie doesn’t want to know what that reason is) they congregate alongside the tracks, but now this? That one might actually be with them on the train?

  “We have to tell everyone t
o close their eyes,” she says. Because now she’s thinking of the other people on board. Not because she worries for their happiness. But because of what they might do to her and her kids if that thing in the box (is it really there?) were to get out and walk the same halls Malorie just took herself. Out there where men don’t feel they have to respond to the smaller, blindfolded woman who keeps her entire body covered for fear of contact of any kind.

  Jesus, she thinks. You gotta slow down.

  “Well, we can’t tell everyone if we can’t leave the cabin,” Tom says.

  And Malorie slaps him.

  It’s sudden and it’s unplanned, and it feels like the only thing to do.

  Because Tom has been looking for a reason to leave this cabin since the moment she said they wouldn’t be leaving it anymore. Because Tom is at that damnable age where he believes he must resist every fucking thing his mother tells him.

  He’s walking away from her now, no doubt a hand to his face. She can’t help but feel pride for having touched what she believes to be the cloth of his fold at the tips of her gloved fingers when she slapped him. Even now, having done something she would never have dreamed herself capable of doing seventeen years ago, even now she thinks, Good. He’s wearing his fold.

  “Wow,” Tom says. And he’s about to say a lot more. She can tell. She can hear it in the three letters, as if they comprise a picked lock, the door now open to everything.

  “Wait,” Olympia says. “Hang on. This is crazy. Mom, you need to calm down. We’re okay. This is good. We’re on a train. We’re heading to see your parents. We’re—”

  Then it comes, Tom’s rage, but in an unexpected form. Malorie anticipates a rash of words. She even braces herself for a return strike. But no, the door to their cabin slides open, then closes, and Tom’s angry steps thunder up the hall.

  “No,” she says, imagining a box in storage opened, the lid slid aside, something terrible sitting up. She makes for the door, and Olympia holds her and talks to her, says things like Mom come on, he needs a minute, Mom it’s okay, Mom don’t go out there angry, Mom let him be, Mom it’s Tom, remember Tom? Your own son?

  Remember Tom?