Malorie

by Josh Malerman

  And if so, could he step into a wholly new future without them?

  Voices outside the room. People sound worried. Maybe they suspect something’s outside, too. She needs to tell everyone what she’s heard. If there’s one horror Malorie has underscored more than any other, it’s that it only takes a single person to look, one to see, one madman to set the entire matchbook aflame.

  She slides open the cabin door, half expecting to see the man Henry who, if she’s honest with herself, reminded her of Malorie’s description of Gary. Malorie’s boogeyman. In the hall. With an axe.

  GOTCHA!

  But, no. In his stead are a half dozen scared people, looking to her, a sixteen-year-old girl, for guidance, information, hope.

  “What’s going on?” a woman asks.

  “Like Dean warned us,” she says, “we’re passing through an area with a lot of them.”

  Them.

  Nobody needs further clarification in the new world.

  But the people only stare at her.

  “Please,” Olympia says. Then she adopts her mother’s voice. “Stick in your cabins, close your eyes, till we get past them.”

  Leading. Guiding. Olympia has been doing variations of this for years.

  She heads up the hall. The doors to each room are open. People sense something is up.

  “Close your eyes,” she tells each she passes. “Sit tight.”

  When she reaches the end of the car, she does the same. She slides the door open and steps through.

  Here, more people. More conversation. They all look so confused. So vulnerable. Don’t they know there’s only one rule to live by? Don’t they understand that any time they feel like something is up they should close their eyes?

  “Hey!” she calls, gaining confidence in giving directions. “Everybody close your eyes. Lots of them outside.”

  A man stops her.

  “What do you know?” he asks, suspicion in his eyes. Olympia thinks of something Malorie taught her long ago.

  Whoever you meet, whoever we encounter, you have to remember that they’ve experienced loss. Whether it was their parents, their kids, their friends…they’ve lost someone to the new world. And you need to keep that in mind when they talk to you, when they sound like they don’t trust you, when they eye you like you’re the danger.

  “There are many outside the train,” she says.

  The man closes his eyes.

  “Thank you,” he says.

  Olympia is moving again. Thinking of Tom. Thinking of Malorie. Where are they?

  “Hey,” Olympia says to a woman who stands facing the black metal slate that was once a window. “You should close your eyes.”

  By way of the woman’s profile, Olympia sees a sadness she has not encountered before. When the creatures arrived, Malorie, Olympia knows, got angry. She got scared. But she never let the sadness of the new world rule her.

  Mom, Olympia thinks. I’m coming.

  Malorie thought her parents dead for seventeen years, for longer than Olympia has been alive! Yet she found the energy to raise her kids. She’s found the resolve to repeat her rules, over and over again, to pound safety into their heads, always. What would Olympia do if she’d read her birth mother’s name on that list of survivors? Would she have reacted as swiftly as Malorie did? Or would she have withdrawn?

  “It’s over,” the woman says. But she doesn’t seem to be speaking directly to Olympia.

  Olympia begins to tell her to close her eyes again but stops herself.

  The woman has painted open eyes on her closed lids.

  “It’s over,” the woman says again.

  A cabin door opens. A man peers out.

  “Close your eyes,” Olympia says. “A lot of creatures outside.”

  The man does more than that; he vanishes back into his room and slides the door closed. Olympia hears him moving something in front of the door.

  Good, she thinks. And she knows Malorie would think the same. And it feels good, God, it feels good, to play the part of Malorie. To step into her shoes, Mom, who must be losing her mind, looking for Tom, thinking of her parents, so long believed dead.

  Dead!

  Olympia reaches the end of the car. She slides the door open, steps through. No sign of Malorie or Tom yet. Maybe they’re in the dining car. Maybe they’re fine.

  But why hasn’t Malorie come back to check on her?

  It strikes Olympia that the people they are going to see, Sam and Mary Walsh, the people she wants so badly to be alive, are the people who checked on Malorie her whole life, too.

  Until the creatures came.

  Creatures that, Olympia can hear, number in the hundreds. As if the entire landscape is made up of them. As if this very spot, here in the middle of Michigan, U.S.A., as if this is where they came from, broke through, entered the old world, making it the new.

  A door slides open to her left. A kid looks out.

  “No, no,” Olympia says. “Back in. And close your eyes.”

  “Why?”

  It’s a little boy. He reminds Olympia of Tom. Dark-haired. Fierce-eyed.

  “Because we’re passing through a dangerous area and we may as well be extra safe. Right?”

  But the boy, so much younger than Olympia, looks at her the same way she imagines she once looked at Malorie. There’s less severity in his reaction than hers. Less horror. This child is growing up in a world where the creatures are commonplace. For all Olympia knows he’s stood beside a thousand in his lifetime thus far. For all she knows, he’s completely unafraid.

  Is it possible? And will every generation feel more and more comfortable until…

  Until what?

  “Inside,” she repeats. Then, “Where are your parents? Are they with you?”

  As she asks this, a hand emerges behind the boy, takes him by the arm, and pulls him back into the room. The door slides shut.

  Olympia moves on.

  Still, she wonders…until what?

  Malorie would say that so long as the creatures remain here, the world must wear a blindfold. But Tom would argue that eventually someone is going to figure out a way to beat them. But to that little boy in the room…what does “beating them” mean?

  She reaches the end of the car, slides open the door, enters the next one.

  There’s Dean. Okay. Good. Maybe he’s seen Malorie. But he asks her before she asks him.

  “Have you seen your mother?”

  He looks anxious. Olympia knows he has piloted the train through this concentrated stretch many times.

  Does something other than the creatures worry him?

  “No. Maybe she’s in the dining car?”

  Dean holds her eyes a beat. Yes, there’s worry there.

  A lot.

  “I don’t want to frighten you,” he says, “but I’ve searched the entire train for both your mom and your brother. And…”

  Olympia feels something break inside her. Whatever this is, it’s bad.

  “And they’re simply not on the train.”

  Olympia feels younger than she’s felt in a long time. She’s a child again, leaving the school for the blind. Maybe even younger.

  “They have to be here,” she says. “They—”

  “There’s someone else missing,” Dean says.

  Olympia knows who it is.

  Henry. The man Malorie would’ve killed them for talking to.

  As Dean says his name, as he begins to describe him, Olympia is already heading the other way. The length of one car, then another, her heart is beating too hard. Too heavy. Malorie’s always telling her to breathe when she feels afraid, that oxygen, simple as it is, is actually the best medicine for fear.

  But she can’t do it.

  Gary.

  Dean didn’t ca
ll him “Henry.” He called him Gary.

  “TOM!” she screams. “MOM!”

  Gary is missing, too.

  Into a storage car. No cabin doors here. Dean is somewhere behind, calling out. Olympia doesn’t stop.

  The second storage car. The end of the train.

  Beyond the door ahead is the big open world.

  And that world is teeming with creatures.

  Olympia opens the door, passes through, stands on the metal platform, feels the wind rush to meet her.

  Dean’s out here, too, now. Telling her to be careful. Not to worry. This can’t be as bad as Olympia thinks it is.

  But Olympia hears something else, buried beneath his voice.

  A fluttering at her feet.

  She kneels and discovers the source of the sound is a singular piece of fabric, flapping in a grate where the platform meets the door.

  She’s touched this particular piece of cloth so many times that she doesn’t question what it is.

  As the train carries her farther north, she rises and faces south.

  “Mom,” she says.

  Because if there’s one single item that Malorie Walsh would never lose, would not let off her person, if there’s one object in all this mad world that defines her more than any other, Olympia holds it now.

  She knows the worst has come. Something has happened to Malorie.

  The proof is not in Malorie’s absence…but in what Olympia holds, what flaps, black and angry, in her hand.

  Her mother’s blindfold.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Malorie hides in a cluster of trees at the far end of her home’s property. The pond is between her and the house where her parents and Shannon are, hopefully, desperately looking for her.

  She’s upset.

  Mom and Dad insist she read the kids’ book for class, the book the teacher assigned her, but she doesn’t want to read the kids’ book, she wants to read the adult book, the one Mom is reading, the book written by an adult woman with an adult brain. She doesn’t like the idea of what she calls a pretend book, a book geared for someone who’s supposedly not as developed, not as smart, as her parents. And isn’t she? Isn’t Malorie as smart as her parents? And what’s worse than them denying her is the fact that Mom and Dad are usually so encouraging. Yes, that’s what bothers Malorie most of all. It’s that they’re siding with Mrs. Cohn when it’s so obvious that Malorie is right.

  It’s why she ran away. No, she didn’t get far, but it’s far enough to let them know that what they’re doing, what they’re saying, is wrong.

  From where she hides, she can’t hear them anymore. Can’t see them at all.

  That’s good. They can’t see or hear her, either.

  She sits on the fallen needles and cones but discovers it’s too wet, so she gets up.

  Does Mom know where she is? If she does, she’s going to have to walk out here and scold Malorie to her face. Malorie isn’t going back inside. Not for anything in the world.

  She hears a stick crack, and she thinks aha, Shannon is coming to talk. An ambassador for their parents. Shannon will come and say come on, Mal, come on, they’re just doing what’s right, it’s just Mom and Dad, you know them, come on. But Malorie won’t come. This is the moment she’s growing up. The exact moment. Can’t they see that? Can’t everybody tell that the world has changed?

  But when Malorie peers between the trees she doesn’t see Shannon or her parents at all. She sees no one. Nothing. Not even an animal.

  So what’s made the sound? Something surely stepped just outside the cluster. It was clear as day, even as day wanes, as the sun goes down, as it gets colder yet where she stands and has her thinking momentarily about the comfort of her coat inside, her blankets, the couch, the heat of the house.

  But no. She’s not going. Not right now. Not until Mom and Dad say she can read an adult book for her book report and not the one about the dog who travels to outer space.

  Another crack and Malorie actually steps out of the cluster. Shannon’s got to be here, about to leap out, scare her. Or maybe it’s Mom or Dad, come to talk after all. Maybe they’re watching her, spying, waiting to see what she does.

  Should she run farther from home?

  “Shannon,” she says, because her sister has got to be messing with her. It’s just like Shannon to pick a weak moment, to come out all smiles, to scare her, to poke fun, to roll her eyes at the meager distance Malorie actually got away.

  But Shannon isn’t there.

  Nobody is.

  And nothing.

  Malorie feels a chill. Is the sun going down faster than it normally does?

  “Damn you all,” she says. It’s a phrase she heard on TV. It struck her. It feels like the exact kind of thing she wants to say to her parents right now.

  She sits down again, just as the sky gets really dark. She hugs her knees to her chest.

  She should’ve worn something warmer, should’ve taken the fifteen seconds to pack. Gosh, why did she leave in such a rush? And do Mom and Dad even know she’s left? Or do they think she’s only in her bedroom, quietly stewing?

  She should’ve told them she was leaving. Yes. For full effect. But it felt like her anger was enough, felt like the whole world could feel it.

  A crack. Again. This one so close Malorie gasps a little and turns to face it. She has no doubt something is about to leap through the trees, a hand coming for her, a face, barely lit, in the dark.

  She’s seen stuff like that on TV, too. Scary stuff. Ghosts and demons and, for Malorie, worst of all, creatures.

  The inexplicable kind, the ones that don’t fit neatly into boxes like vampires or werewolves, goblins or ghouls. It’s the abstractions that scare her deeply, for she has no reference for these.

  “Go away,” she says. Then, “Please.”

  Because who knows? Maybe whatever inches closer will listen to her just as Mom and Dad will not. Maybe whatever is out here with her will honor her wishes. Maybe, maybe, maybe—

  “Mal.”

  She leaps to standing, arms out, ready to box whatever’s close, a thing that must’ve watched her run away, followed her to the far end of the property.

  “Can I come in?”

  Her instinct is to say no, no, but she recognizes the voice.

  “I’m not in the mood for a lecture, Dad.”

  It’s almost like she can hear him smiling, just past the trees, in the dark.

  “And I promise not to give you one,” Sam Walsh says.

  Then the trees are parting and, for a second, she can see the sky, see there’s some light left, and Dad is painted purple and orange with the setting sun as he steps into the clearing and is swallowed by the very darkness she stands in.

  “So,” he says. “This is a neat little place. I’ve never actually come in here. Didn’t realize it made a little room like this.”

  Malorie thinks of it as hers, already, a clubhouse, a fort, a place where only people who think like she does are allowed entrance.

  “I get it,” Dad says. “And I respect the hell out of what you’re asking for.”

  She doesn’t know if she should trust this. Does he really get it? Does Mom?

  “Yeah, well, why can’t I read Mom’s book then?”

  “You can,” Dad says. “Any time you want to. Even right now.”

  “I can?”

  “Of course. You can even do a book report on it. But you gotta write about the other one, too.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” Dad says, his silhouette comforting in the small cold space, “there’s a way to do both things at once.”

  “Both?”

  “Yes. A way to follow the rules and break them at the same time. Some people would call it ‘paying your dues,’ you know, you read the kids’ book so you can re
ad the other one. But I’ve never liked that phrase. To me it’s more like, hey, you can actually learn something, even something big, by doing the things you don’t think you should have to. Like mowing the lawn. You think I wanna do that every week? But meanwhile, every time I mow the lawn my mind wanders and I end up happier for having done it.”

  “But, Dad…”

  “What?”

  “I’m too big for that book.”

  “Then write the biggest book report ever, Malorie. And hand in the one about Mom’s book a week later. Trust me…Mrs. Cohn will never look at you the same way again.”

  Footsteps near, someone on the lawn. The trees part, and Malorie sees Mom.

  “Found her,” Mary Walsh says.

  She steps into the darkness, too. It’s comforting, in its way, being in the dark with the two of them. They can’t see her face, can’t see that she’s embarrassed. At the same time, she can say exactly what she wants to, how she feels, without worrying what she looks like while doing it.

  “Cold out here,” Mom says.

  “I was gonna sleep here,” Malorie says.

  “Were you?” Then, “Well, I hope you thought to bring a flashlight.”

  Malorie feels what she at first thinks is her mom’s hand against her own. But it’s not. It’s the book. The adult one.

  She takes it.

  “Can’t imagine us ever telling you not to read a book,” Mom says. “And it’s a good one.”

  “Thanks,” Malorie says. She doesn’t want to cry. Doesn’t want them to think she’s weak.

  The trees part again.

  Shannon.

  “What’s up, Mal?” she says. “You ran away to the backyard?”

  “Shut up,” Malorie says.

  But Dad laughs. And then Mom laughs. And then Malorie laughs, too. She can’t help it and she can’t stop it. Even more, she doesn’t want to.

  “I read the kids’ book while you were hiding,” Shannon says.

  “It sucks,” Malorie says.

  “You haven’t read it!”