Yet, everything, everything feels wrong. The movement, the voices, the smells, the fact that they are in the hands of other people, Olympia alone in their room, Tom alone and angry, Malorie alone and searching.
The caskets in storage. Dean checking them.
How? How can he possibly know if one is in there or not without looking?
Absolutely everything feels wrong, everything is wrong, like it’s gone wrong, like she fucked up something that was once precious to her. She’s struggling to get a grip, to find purchase in the pitch-black present.
Jesus.
She should’ve stayed home.
She knocks on the next door. A man slides it open. When he speaks, his voice comes from above. He’s tall. He sounds like what people used to refer to as conservative, though that word doesn’t apply to the new world. Not to Malorie. There are only those who are safe and those who are not, and today she was not.
“My son,” she says.
Before she says any more, the man speaks.
“Young man? Teenager? Black hair like yours?”
“Yes.” She hears the light, the hope in her voice. It startles her.
“Saw him go down the hall. Closed my eyes when he made it to the end there.”
“Okay. Thank you.”
This is something.
“But he stood between the cars for a long time.”
“How would you know that?”
“Because I listen closely, ma’am. And I didn’t hear that second door, the door to the next car, open for a long, long time.”
“How long?”
“Two, three minutes.”
“But you heard it open?”
“Yes.”
“So you know he went through?”
“Me?” the man says. “What do I know? I think we’re out of our minds for taking a blind train in the first place. Could’ve been a creature that opened the next door for all I know.”
“But, you—”
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he says. “That’s all I know.”
Firm. Final.
She understands. She thanks him as the door slides closed again.
Two or three minutes.
Between cars.
What was he doing there? No hoodie. No gloves. No fold.
Malorie hurries to the door, slides it open herself.
She stands where he stood.
She listens.
She thinks.
She feels.
Wind. The openness. Is that all? Or did Tom leave from here, from this very spot? It’s not hard to imagine him doing it. Tom jumped from the roof of Cabin Two, landing on a pile of mattresses he’d prearranged himself. Once, he rolled down a particularly steep hill in the woods bordering Camp Yadin. He swam the lake, eyes closed. He’s been injured, broken bones, spent weeks laid up in his bunk. His whole life he’s dared, been daring, tried new things, pushed back against his lot, their lot, the new world in full. It’s not hard to see him making a decision, his face still red from where Malorie struck him. It’s not hard to see him smiling even as he leaps from the moving train, the gravel cutting into his elbows, his bare hands splintered by the tracks.
But then what? Where from there? And while Tom might flee Malorie and her rules, would he ever go without saying goodbye to his sister?
She can’t help but think of her own sister. Shannon, dead upstairs, a glimpse of something she shouldn’t have seen from the upstairs bedroom window. A bedroom they fought over when they moved in together.
Malorie enters the next car and knocks on the first door she comes to. Silence from within.
Someone’s coming up the hall. A woman speaks.
“Is everything okay?”
Malorie stands still, just like she would’ve had someone asked her the same thing, suddenly, in Camp Yadin.
But the truth is, this train is not home. And sometimes the clearest path to safety is through other people.
“Did you see a teenager ahead?” she asks. “A young man. About my height. Dark hair. Short-sleeved shirt?”
“Did you lose someone?”
The way she says it, Malorie wants to reach out into the dark and grab her.
NO, I DIDN’T LOSE SOMEONE. SOMEONE LEFT ME.
“Yes,” she says.
“No. I didn’t see anyone like that at all.”
“Not in the dining car? Not seated? Think.”
“I’m thinking.” She sounds like the people from the school for the blind. No doubt she is questioning why Malorie is wearing her sweatshirt, gloves, a blindfold, in a place they were told is secure. “I didn’t see him, no.”
Malorie walks. She knocks on the next room. There’s movement within. The door slides open.
“Is someone there?” a voice asks. Maybe this is the blind woman Dean spoke of.
“My son is missing,” Malorie says.
“Oh, no.”
“He’s sixteen. Did you…see…or hear a young man, dark hair…”
“I’m wearing my blindfold.”
This steals Malorie’s breath. In a place where they’ve been told it’s okay to look, this woman still lives by the fold.
Lives like Malorie does.
“Please,” the woman says. “Don’t ask me to look.”
“I wouldn’t dare. I understand.”
There’s a moment of silence between them. Malorie feels it, a kinship. Something deeper than personality or character or even worldview.
Instincts.
The word doesn’t feel as good to her as it normally does. She has trusted her instincts since the world went mad, and so far it has served her well. She is alive. Her teens are alive. Despite abhorrent tragedy erupting around them, they have survived. Yet, only days ago, Malorie abandoned those instincts for the first time. Even as her parents’ names flared bright from the page, even as images of the people they once were and the people they might’ve become rose like colored fog in her personal darkness, Malorie’s gut told her to stay. Her gut told her she’d been doing it right, that it was the only way to do it, and that to leave, in a rush, to run for a train run by who knows who, to be accompanied by who knows who, was all much worse than simply being unsafe; it was playing too many games of cards at once, too many chances to lose.
And now she faces her old self. Her strict, instinctual self. And she feels shame for having come.
“It’s the only thing in the world I’d remove my fold for,” the woman says.
“What is?” Malorie asks.
“My boy.” Then, “I’m sorry I couldn’t help you.”
The woman slides the door closed, and the clicking of the latch severs their worlds.
Malorie is alone again.
She breathes in. She holds it. She breathes out.
She steps to the next door and knocks. She waits. She tries the handle. The door slides open.
She steps inside.
The train is rocking as she enters somebody else’s room. She stands still. She listens.
Is the stirring coming from the wheels beyond the wall she faces? Or does somebody move in this very space?
“I’m looking for my son,” she says. Surely whoever is in this room, if they were to see her, blindfolded, scared, hooded, surely they would empathize, understand, respond.
She steps deeper into the room, arms extended. Her gloved fingertips come into contact with what she thinks is the mirror.
Motion behind her. The door slides closed.
She doesn’t move. She waits.
The train hums. The wheels whir. Is Dean uncovering a creature as she stands here? Are his eyes open, allowing the unfathomable in? Does the lid to the second box creak open as he checks the first?
Is Dean, mad, in this room?
“Is anybody t
here?” she asks.
It’s impossible not to imagine everything, every kind of thing, every potential danger, in this darkness. People, expressions, features, feelings, animals, smells, rivers, homes, schools, cabins, trains, madness.
But there is no answer.
Malorie steps forward, checks the bench.
Tom wouldn’t be waiting here in the quiet, would he? Tom wouldn’t intentionally hide, would he?
She moves quick now to the bunk beds. She swipes across the upper bunk, feeling nothing but a blanket. She bends and reaches across the lower bed.
Someone grabs her wrist.
“Get out,” the person says. Malorie can’t tell if it’s a man or a woman. Her heart is thundering. This isn’t Tom. And whoever it is now yells. “GET OUT!!”
Malorie is either shoved or kicked. Either way she’s falling, suddenly, backward, tumbling through many darknesses. The train jolts, hard, and when she lands, she lands funny, so that her shoulder hits first, then her chin.
“GET OUT!!” the person yells. And they’re no longer hiding, no longer curled up in a lower bunk in the dark.
They’re coming out now. Coming for her.
She scrambles, disoriented, afraid. She isn’t sure where the door is, where it’s not. Hands pull her by the hood, drag her toward the sound of a sliding door. Then she’s up. Before they can throw her out, she’s up.
“I’m sorry,” she says. But what she wants to say is, FUCK YOU! MY SON IS LOST IN THE NEW WORLD!
The door slams closed.
Malorie turns to continue up the hall.
Someone is there.
“I’ve seen him,” a man says. “Back this way.”
“What? My son?”
“Yes,” he says. “Come on. I’ll show you.”
Malorie tries to determine, in seconds, what the man might look like. How old he is. If he’s safe. But she’s moving, following him, back the way she came. Through the doors, car to car, passing the people she no doubt scared with her search for her son.
“He’s up here,” the man says.
He takes her by the hand. She thinks to pull away, but she wants to get there. Wants to get to Tom.
“He’s okay? He’s alive?”
“Yes,” the man says. “He’s absolutely fine. This way.”
Malorie is partially dragged now, partially jogs alongside the man. They pass through another car, walk another hall.
“Are we in storage now?” she asks.
Have they come that far?
“He’s right here,” the man says. “One more car up.”
“Are you sure you saw—”
“One hundred percent sure.”
He’s tugging on her, drags her to the next set of doors.
Malorie reaches out with her other hand, feels for anything familiar. What car is she in? How deep back into the train have they come?
She hears movement to her right. Someone in storage?
“Just on the other side of these doors,” the man says.
Malorie pulls her hand from his.
“A teenager? Black hair?”
The man laughs. “Ma’am. I told you I saw him. Right through here.”
His hands on her shoulders now, through sliding doors, out into the open air.
She can’t see it, but she knows this is where she boarded the train. The platform her teens pulled her onto, as the safety of Camp Yadin receded.
“Tom?” Malorie asks.
It’s a different voice that responds. Not her son. Not the man who took her here.
But a voice she recognizes all the same.
“Take her, Nate,” the second man says. Malorie imagines a beard. A briefcase. Hands tearing down the drapes in the house in which she gave birth to her son.
“No,” she says.
But it’s so obviously yes.
The blindfold is torn from her face.
“I’ll meet you at Athena’s,” the second man says to the first.
“No,” Malorie says.
But it’s so irreversibly yes.
She turns to reach for the train’s back door, but her hands only find other hands. Hands that grip her hard.
Before pushing her off the train.
She thinks she hears one of them leaping, too, just before she hits the tracks, headfirst, just before she blacks out and sinks into a darkness no blindfold on Earth could provide.
TWENTY-ONE
Dean is in the first storage car, the very back of the train, when he hears what sounds like people moving by the train’s back door, the door Malorie came through when she and her two teens boarded. He knows his mind is piqued by the things Malorie has been saying. A missing son. A creature in storage.
And the fact that she believes touch can drive someone mad.
This worries him. Not because he believes everything he hears, but Malorie is especially believable. She’s sharp. She’s dedicated. And, most of all, her kids have survived this long. Dean has nothing but unfathomable respect for any parent who pulled that off.
He didn’t.
Blindfolded, he steps through the boxes of canned goods and clothing, his palms out, moving slow, lest something was jostled loose by the motion of the train, something that would hurt to run into.
He thinks of something touching his hand. He imagines going insane.
In his version, he doesn’t act stealthily. There’s nothing cunning about his vision of madness. Rather, he’s embarrassed by what he does: he sees himself, frothing, wild-eyed, racing the halls of this train with an axe.
He shakes his head no. He doesn’t need to be thinking this way. Not while searching for a casket that the woman Malorie thinks may be harboring a creature.
Who told her this? It doesn’t matter. Rumors abound on a blind train. A lot of scared people. But if safety is truly his top priority, then he must look into this now. Only, look is the one thing he won’t do.
Or perhaps one of two things.
“She’s really gotten into your head,” he says.
She has.
He doesn’t know yet how he’s going to search the casket for what’s inside.
His first idea was to open the lid and reach in. Nobody knows any more about the creatures now than they did seventeen years ago, but Dean believes some things must be assumed. For example, the space they take up. If Dean opens the casket and feels a dead body within, it stands to reason that there wouldn’t be space for a creature as well.
But Malorie has him questioning reason.
Is there any? Any more?
Who’s to know if they occupy any space, any of what people know space to be, at all?
He knocks a box off a table with his hip and bends to pick it up. He can tell by its weight that it’s clothing. He sets it on the table just as the train jolts, and he reaches out for balance. Finding none, he imagines the fingers of something that can drive him mad.
He opens the box of clothing.
Scarves. Winter hats. No gloves. That’s okay. Hats will do.
He uses two as gloves and, still blind, continues deeper into storage. The coffins are the first to be loaded in as they are typically the heaviest and can be used as a tabletop if need be. For this, he has to go all the way in.
“Malorie,” he says, “I hope you realize I’m braving this for you.”
He thinks of his staff, if such a word applies. David, Tanya, Michael, and Renee are only people looking for progress, no different than Dean. They’re more family than workmates, as they’ve done the impossible together: got a train running in the new world. He can’t have them getting hurt. He couldn’t live with that. It’d be like reliving the loss of his children, but possibly worse for not having learned the first time around.
He bumps a second table and, his hands cove
red with hats, he discovers he’s reached the coffins.
Two of them. To be delivered to Mackinaw City. Those who have asked for them will take them from there and bury them wherever they want them to be buried.
Dean breathes in. Holds it. Breathes out.
In a world without pills or therapy, it’s as effective an anti-anxiety treatment as any he could imagine.
He feels along the wide wood surface of the first coffin.
It’s clear.
He opens the wood lid.
The smell is strong. Too strong. Dean turns his head and gags. He brings one of the hats to his mouth and gags again. Eyes closed, he can easily imagine what makes this smell. A decomposing body without what was once modern science to stave off the stench.
“Malorie,” he says again. “Thanks a lot.”
He reaches into the box and feels an arm. A chest. A second arm. Legs.
Then, the head.
He closes the lid.
He takes a few steps from the box and allows his breathing to return to normal.
The second coffin is deeper into the space, boxed in by the first. He climbs up onto the first and feels the lid of the second. Two boxes have somehow ended up here. Dean doesn’t doubt it was the motion of the train, but it’s not difficult to imagine someone or something else rearranging things in here for reasons he knows nothing about.
Reason.
On his knees, the hats still over his hands, he lifts the second lid. He’s prepared this time, breathing only out his mouth, and he gets to work checking it immediately.
He feels legs. Fingers. Arms. This man is naked.
Dean’s hands move fast, too fast, and the hat slips from his left.
He yanks his arm back.
“Jesus,” he says.
He doesn’t want to reach back in for the hat. Doesn’t want to touch the dead body
(something else?)
bare-handed.
“She’s really gotten into your head, man,” he says.
But maybe what Malorie speaks is the truth. In a world without shared experiences, who knows what laws she’s discovered on her own?
He begins to close the lid. But he hasn’t felt the head yet.
He doesn’t know why this matters. But it does. As if, in the end, it’s the head that separates sanity from madness.
Malorie Page 17