Malorie

by Josh Malerman

  “We knew it,” Sam says. And his voice is unfathomable relief. “We knew if we came here we’d find you.”

  Olympia is talking. Then, so is Tom, near now. He’s asking if Malorie is okay. He’s telling Olympia his idea worked. He’s asking Olympia why her eyes are open. “I saw them open from the stage,” he’s saying, “from behind the mirror. I saw your eyes were open.”

  And a creature, too. He’s telling Olympia he saw a creature.

  But through all this, a chaos more confusing even than the arrival of the creatures themselves, Malorie still hears what her father, her impossible, living father just said.

  We knew if we came here we’d find you.

  “Dad,” she says, her lips touching the fabric that’s wrapped around his face. “Dad, why did you come here?”

  Sam laughs, and in his laughter she hears boundless, painful reprieve.

  “You were always our rebel,” he says. “You took risks we were always too afraid to take.”

  He’s hugging her, hard. And Malorie thinks, I was once the kind of person who took risks…

  Where did that person go?

  She hears dignity, elation in Tom’s voice. Astonishment in Olympia’s. The community surrounding them is getting louder, and Malorie realizes that, despite what Tom claims to have done, despite the unadulterated, unsafe joy of this crowd, she isn’t scared.

  For the first time in seventeen years, she isn’t scared.

  And for a second, a flash, she remembers the girl her father described. She remembers pushing back against a world she felt was unfair.

  She remembers being like Tom.

  “Your mother,” Sam says. And the pause worries her. “She would’ve…”

  “Mom…” But Malorie can’t finish the sentence out loud.

  Mom is dead.

  Sam rises and makes to help her up. Then Olympia’s and Tom’s hands are upon her, too.

  Together, they’re trying to help her to standing. But as Dad speaks again of Mom, as Dad stands with her two teens, as the most dangerous community Malorie’s ever known celebrates on high, Malorie, here, unable to process this new reality, unable to see it as anything but a fantastic variety of madness, Malorie passes out in the arms of those she loves.

  THIRTY-ONE

  When Malorie wakes, she does so with her eyes closed. She is lying on something soft. A blanket covers her to her chest.

  She can tell there are people in the room.

  “Mom?”

  It’s Tom. Tom is here.

  “You can open your eyes.”

  It’s Olympia. Olympia is here.

  But when Malorie does open her eyes, the first face she sees is her father’s.

  “Oh…Dad…”

  The vision of him is blurred by sudden tears. A joy she once believed impossible.

  “Hey,” he says. But his eyes are wet, too.

  He looks older, but good. White hair. Bright eyes. The same smile she remembers from before the world went mad. His clothes are different; a flannel shirt and sweats. Clothes she doesn’t remember him ever wearing. He looks like someone who has walked instead of driven for seventeen years. Like someone who hasn’t seen a television, hasn’t used a computer, hasn’t eaten at a restaurant for that time, too.

  There’s something else in his eyes. Malorie can see enormous emotions, memories, knowledge, there.

  She looks to Tom. Because she remembers now. His name cheered by a lunatic crowd. Olympia saying her brother’s eyes were open.

  Facing a creature.

  “Tom…”

  She makes to sit up but doesn’t get very far.

  Tom is watching her. Sane.

  Olympia. Sane.

  “Your kids are amazing,” Sam says.

  Malorie looks to him and can barely get the words out through fresh tears. “Your grandkids.”

  “I’ll get you some water,” Olympia says. Then she’s up and out the door.

  Malorie looks about the room. Blankets over the windows. Wood-paneled walls. She’s in a small bed in what feels like a guest bedroom.

  It’s clean. It’s nice.

  Dad is here.

  Malorie looks to Tom again.

  “What happened?”

  Tom looks older, too. But not in the same way Dad does. Her son has the tranquil look of someone who has achieved something he set out to do.

  The look of success, possible even here in the new world.

  “Seems my grandson invented a way to look at them,” Sam says.

  Malorie starts to sit up again, but Sam is up and out of his chair, kneeling beside her.

  “You don’t have to hear it all at once,” he says. “But you definitely have to hear it.”

  “Where are we?”

  Sam smiles.

  “It’s what I’ve called home for a few years now. Your mother and I worked our way south after they arrived. I have enough stories to fill a library.”

  Malorie smiles. But while Tom may have invented a way to look at the creatures, some still roam the horizons of her mind.

  “Oh, Dad…me, too,” she says.

  “We’re in a house about as far from the maddening crowd as you can get,” he says. He looks to the blanketed window, and Malorie easily remembers him doing the same in her youth. Only then he looked pensively out at the world. And now? “Mary insisted you’d come here. I can’t tell you how often we argued this.”

  “And she’s…?”

  “Yep.”

  No grieving in his voice. Sam has already gone through that. Just as Malorie went through it for him.

  “Shannon…” Malorie says.

  Sam nods and holds a finger to his lips.

  “Olympia filled us in.”

  He still smiles. Malorie knows it’s because her parents accepted the deaths of their daughters a long, long time ago.

  “Us?” she says.

  “Just because your mother has moved on doesn’t mean I don’t keep her up to date. She’s buried in the backyard.”

  “Oh God, Dad. I’m so sorry.”

  Sam only nods, raises a hand to say he’s okay.

  “I’d like to see her,” Malorie says.

  Sam gets up and holds out a hand to help her do the same.

  “She would love that.”

  * * *

  —

  Malorie breathes deep before exiting the home’s back door. She holds Sam’s hand.

  Despite the fact that the people of Indian River are currently fashioning visors out of two-way mirrors, both are blindfolded.

  “How long have you guys been here?” Malorie asks.

  “Close to three years.”

  “Did a census man ever come to your door?”

  Sam seems to think about this. Malorie hears the wind through the leaves on the trees. Hears leaves gently swept across the lawn.

  “Yes,” Sam says. “A little man. Very dangerous what he was doing. Your mother said it was noble. We offered him our place to stay for the night, but he said he had a lot of work to do.”

  Malorie feels fresh tears behind her fold. She wants to find this man. Wants to let him know that what he did, what he does, it works.

  “Let’s go see Mary,” Sam says.

  He guides Malorie down concrete steps to the lawn. She can hear a fence rattling by that same wind. The fold is tight to her face.

  “Here,” Sam says. “It’s not much. But I dug it myself and that means something to me.”

  “How did she…”

  “In her sleep, Mal. Thank God it wasn’t the creatures.” He kneels, guiding Malorie to do the same. She feels stone beneath her fingers. A large block of it. Leaves and grass, too. “Here.”

  Then his hand slips from hers and Malorie is left alone with Mary W
alsh. Until now, she believed she’d already lamented the death of her mother. But it strikes her, in full, here, that she’s never been allowed to grieve.

  The creatures stole the time to do so.

  “I missed you so much,” Malorie finally says.

  Then she’s crying too hard to speak.

  * * *

  —

  Malorie visits Mary every day for the two weeks they’ve stayed in this house. Not all of Indian River is as progressive as what she witnessed, without sight, in the town square. She understands why Sam didn’t leave. Despite the behavior by some that she considered unfathomably dangerous only fourteen days ago, she also gets it. People in the new world fall into two categories: safe and unsafe.

  But who’s to say which lives the better, fuller life?

  She thinks of Gary a lot. Too much.

  She is preparing herself, she knows.

  Olympia is on watch.

  The teens join her at Mary’s graveside often. They tell her stories, about the river, about the school for the blind, about Camp Yadin, and the Blind Train. Malorie talks about Shannon. It feels good to do it. She describes the people she met in the house. About Tom’s namesake. About Olympia the woman. Felix, Jules, Cheryl, Don. Even Victor. And she can tell by the looks on her teens’ faces when they get back inside that they’re hearing a lot of this for the first time. Has it really been so difficult for her to relive the house? The people she met, loved, and lost?

  Sam tells her of his crossbow kept in the home’s front closet. He says he’s killed numerous deer with it. Blind.

  There are moments, wonderful hours, in which Malorie feels like she’s home in the Upper Peninsula where she grew up. As if this were the house she was raised in. As if far in the backyard is a cluster of trees she once ran away to, a place where Sam and Mary Walsh knew she would go.

  While they eat canned goods in the kitchen, Tom tells Malorie what happened. He’d made the glasses all the way back in Camp Yadin but was too afraid to try them out. He brought them with him despite her telling him not to. Here, in Indian River, on stage, two men attempted to view a creature from the other side of the glass, the two-way mirror from a local grocery store. They didn’t go mad. About the time Malorie arrived is when Tom tried it himself.

  He saw a creature through the glass. Yes. He saw Malorie, too.

  Every time he tells the story, Malorie thinks she’s going to be horrified by the ending.

  But she just isn’t.

  Tom’s here. He’s sane. And maybe, maybe, he’s done something to change the world.

  The people of Indian River are attempting to mass-produce the visors, Tom says. People have been sent to find more material from neighboring towns.

  Olympia and Tom spend time outside. They look out there. Neither is mad. And when they’re inside again they tell and retell their stories to Malorie and Sam.

  Sam takes Malorie’s hand often. He silently tells her it’s okay.

  And it is.

  Her teens are living, for the first time in their lives. One by way of genetics, the other by the creativity of his own mind.

  Malorie endured. She delivered them to this moment in time. Dad and Mom endured. Many people in Indian River have, too.

  Even those who didn’t deserve it.

  “Teach me how to use that bow,” Malorie says one morning, alone with Sam in the living room. She’s ready now.

  Sam nods.

  “Of course.”

  * * *

  —

  Olympia and Tom guide her as Malorie carries the weapon. She didn’t outright tell Sam what she’s doing, but he knows.

  She hasn’t been able to bring herself to use Tom’s visor. It would be what feels like a seventeen-year leap. Yet, getting this done requires being able to see.

  So she uses the eyes of her children.

  This is the fourth time they’ve gone into town, looking for him, the man Tom still mistakenly calls Henry. The man Olympia knew, instinctively, was wrong from the start.

  With each trip out, Malorie steels herself for change. She has never killed anybody. She has never had to pull a trigger, slit a throat, strangle an intruder. None of the dangerous people they encountered on their myriad journeys. Not even the uncommon strangers discovered in Camp Yadin, the place she last called home.

  But killing Gary will mean more than just becoming a killer. She will also be leveling the loose ends of her time spent in the house with the housemates. The very friends she buried, finding everybody’s body but his.

  They find him outside a former liquor store not far from where they stay with Sam. Olympia spots him and taps Malorie on the shoulder in the manner she’s been instructed to do.

  “He’s sleeping against the outside wall,” Olympia says.

  “It’s him,” Tom says.

  The bow is formidable. But after seventeen years of living to protect, Malorie is the strongest she’s ever been.

  “A little higher,” Tom says.

  He’s at Malorie’s shoulder, helping her aim.

  “A little more,” Olympia says. She adjusts the angle of the bow.

  If they miss, they will have to think fast.

  She can almost hear the door closing. The clicking of a lock. The past put away.

  It strikes her as somewhat incredible that, in a way, Gary was right.

  Man was the creature she and the housemates had to fear most.

  “All right,” Tom says.

  Malorie pulls the trigger. Gary makes no sound.

  “It hit him right in his chest,” Tom says.

  “His heart,” Olympia says.

  The three walk cautiously to his dead body.

  “Eat shit,” Tom says.

  “Watch your mouth,” Malorie says. Then, “For someone who talked too much, he had no last words.”

  Olympia guides Malorie’s hand to check Gary’s pulse.

  He’s dead.

  “Don’t remove that arrow,” Malorie says. “I want him to stay forever this way.”

  * * *

  —

  The teens are asleep. Sam is asleep.

  Malorie has spoken long with her dad about what he wants to do and how he wants to do it. Neither of them believes they ought to live here, in this home, in this community, forever. Sam often speaks of wanting to return to where Malorie was raised. It would be a long journey, one Malorie believes her dad can endure, one they both want to take, but neither of them has declared today the day to do it.

  Now, six in the morning, the world still dark outside, Malorie takes the stairs to the first floor. There, in the kitchen, she dunks a glass in a wooden bucket of water and drinks.

  On the kitchen table is the visor the people of Indian River fashioned out of Tom’s two-way mirror. Some of those people have come to the house, hoping to speak to Tom about his invention. It used to be that Malorie wouldn’t let anyone in. Now, she picks and chooses. When she denied Athena Hantz entrance, the local legend was offended. When she asked for an explanation, Malorie told her she got lucky. Lucky that Tom came up with what he did. Because if something had happened to him…

  Malorie picks up the visor. She eyes it. She considers.

  She puts it on.

  She stands by one of the blanketed windows, facing the darkness for many minutes, before she takes her coat from the rack beside the back door, closes her eyes, and steps outside.

  It’s autumn now. Malorie hears leaves crushed beneath her boots.

  Her head is lowered as she waits for the heat of the sun to warm her. She likes standing here, beside Mary’s grave. She likes talking to her still. She repeats stories about Shannon, her head lowered, eyes closed.

  She tells Mary about Dean Watts. She says that maybe, when they finally do head north, Malorie will make a point of ch
ecking Mackinaw City for the man who brought back the train.

  And just when the sun prickles her neck, just as she senses that some semblance of light has begun anew, Malorie, for the first time in over ten years, opens her eyes outside.

  It surprises her how familiar the colors are. Old friends, back again. At her feet is Mary’s grave; yellow, orange, and red with leaves. When she looks up, she sees a creature stands twenty feet farther into the yard.

  Malorie does not move.

  She senses a bird attempting to take flight somewhere in her head, a thing as black as her hair and as blue as her eyes.

  But, despite the sound of flapping feathers, whatever is trying to get away doesn’t quite get there.

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

  She looks.

  She sees.

  Infinity considering itself. Eternity facing its own endless journey.

  * * *

  —

  And despite the thousand various words that rise to describe it, and the struggle to name it, she knows that by looking, now, beside her mother’s grave, with her father and her teens asleep and safe inside, she has bridged some gap, she is losing no more, nothing more is being taken. And something has been returned.

  Malorie is for Kristin Nelson.

  AFTERWORD/ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’ve got a thing for rough drafts. Some might call it a fetish. In a slightly different reality I consider the rough draft/demo of a book or a song a finished thing. I’ve even gone so far as to consider outlines realized stories, albeit oddly told. Thing is, before getting my first book deal I had no real reason to rewrite at all. I’d wrapped a dozen rough drafts by then (in those days I only called them books), and, to me, they were as complete as any hardcovers on my shelves. I shared them with everyone; bands we, The High Strung, toured with, friends and family, strangers. In the ’90s, my songwriting partner, Mark Owen, and I had a list of names we’d send cassette dubs to, generation-loss copies of already lo-fi albums. Those twenty people were enough. They made the group of songs real. By virtue of mailing out Bid Me Off and A Lot of Old Reasons, Mark and I could move on to the next batch, as yet unwritten, relieved to have another album in our bag, enthused for the next one. It was in those days that I learned to love the initial go-round, the first try, the stab at it when nobody was watching. Do you like live music? The rough drafts and demos were and still are like that. A performance. Fluctuating speed, some miffed notes, a forgotten lyric here and there.