by Megan Hart
“Not until we see the face.”
Reluctantly, Emma agreed to move away from the ladder to look for it. Maddy took her hand again, not so much to offer comfort as to make sure Emma didn’t decide to run away. They moved through the water, looking, until Emma hung back, refusing to go further into the darker part of the basement.
“No way. It’s too dark. And dangerous,” Emma said. “There’s all sorts of equipment and stuff down here!”
“Yeah, and bits and pieces of that man’s head,” Maddy said gleefully.
Emma started to cry.
Maddy and Emma had been best friends since kindergarten, when Emma had fallen at the bus stop and skinned her knees, and Maddy had given her a couple of adhesive bandages from her book bag. Maddy almost always had stuff like that, because you never knew when someone was going to bleed.
“Stop it,” Maddy said. “Shut up, Emma.”
“I’m leaving! My mom said I had to be home for dinner!”
Maddy had put up with a lot from Emma over the years. She whined a lot. She was a scaredy cat. She could only watch monster movies through the shield of her fingers, and she had nightmares for weeks, after. She puked on roller coasters. She was allergic to cats, dogs and hamsters, and when her fishes died, she always cried. Always.
“Not until we see the face!” There was no face, and Maddy knew it, but Emma didn’t. That she could keep insisting on leaving before they even looked…well.
Emma really ought to know better.
When Maddy pushed Emma, she did it hard. Both hands hands shoved her into the water, then grabbed her up again to shake her. Emma cried and flailed, but it didn’t matter. Maddy was bigger, and Maddy was stronger, and Maddy was always going to get her way.
Maddy dragged her friend toward the back of the basement where there was an alcove, almost pitch black. Several saw-horses with wood laid across them half-blocked the entrance. On top of the wood were a couple of cinder blocks.
“I don’t want to see the face! I don’t want to see the face!” Emma screamed.
So Maddy hit her in the face with a chunk of broken cinder block.
Emma stopped screaming.
She went face down into the water. Her hair floated. She didn’t get up.
Maddy watched her for a few minutes, noting when the bubbles stopped. She let the piece of cinder block fall into the water — it would dissolve or wash away her fingerprints, or…something, anyway.
In the yard outside, her shoes stuck in the mud. Thick, gooey, gloppy. She’d have loved it in bare feet, but it clung to her sneakers and weighed her down. They were her favorite sneakers, and they were dirty. Worse, it wouldn’t wash off in a puddle or when she rubbed it against the wet grass. She had to walk all the way home with her feet encased in mud. Her shoes, ruined. When she got home, she took off her shoes and put them in the garage before her mom could even see.
In the kitchen, her mom was waiting. “Emma’s mom called, she wanted to know where you were.”
“I don’t know,” Maddy said. “She wasn’t with me.”
Later, when she tried to clean them, the mud wouldn’t come off even with the hose. She’d had to throw the sneakers away, and that’s why Maddy was crying into her pillow. Not because Emma had been missing for four days.
That’s what her mom thought, though, when she came in to stroke Maddy’s hair and tell her it would be okay. “Shh, honey. I’m sure Emma will come home.”
But when the phone rang, Mom’s face went white. She sat on the edge of Maddy’s bed and rubbed at the bedspread with her fingers, over and over along the pattern of squares and circles as she listened to whoever was on the other end.
“Maddy,” her mom said quietly. “Where you and Emma playing together at the end of Willow Cove Street?”
“No, Mom.”
Maddy’s mom didn’t say anything for a few minutes. She cried a little, her eyes red, and had to blow her nose with a tissue from Maddy’s night stand. “Are you sure?”
“No, Mom. I told you.” Maddy dried her own tears, this news about Emma more interesting than the thought of her ruined shoes. You could always get a new pair of shoes. A new best friend would be a little harder. Only a little. “Is she dead?”
“Why would you say that?” Mom’s voice was short and sharp, kind of like a bark. She gripped Maddy’s shoulder hard enough to leave a bruise that Maddy would admire in the mirror for a couple weeks. “Why would you think that, Madison?”
“Because when kids go missing, it’s always because of the man in the white van, the one who asks if you want candy or if you want to help him find his puppy.”
Mom went very still. She pulled Maddy closer, closer, almost nose to nose. She had dark eyes, not like Maddy’s, which were blue like Dad’s. Mom’s dark eyes were rimmed with red. Her breath smelled a little like flowers, because she liked to spritz her mouth with breath spray to cover up the smell of wine.
“There was a man in a van?”
Maddy was creative. Maddy told lies. Maddy made up stories. Maddy said, “oh, yes, Mama. He came by the school and asked Emma if she wanted to see a funny video on his laptop, and she said yes.”
“Oh, God. Oh, my God.”
“Not in a van,” Maddy said, suddenly inspired. “It was a pickup truck with a cap on the back. He had a nice smile. He asked me if I wanted to go with them, but I knew you wouldn’t want me to. I really wanted some ice cream, though. Do you think he gave Emma ice cream?”
Mom didn’t say anything. She got up from the bed and went down to the kitchen. Maddy crept to the top of the stairs to listen to her mom call her dad on the phone. She couldn’t hear everything her mom said, because Mom was crying, but it must’ve convinced Dad to get home, fast.
Then the police came, and they asked Maddy all kinds of questions. She had answers to most of them, too. The same answers, she was careful about that. Because if they asked you something and then used different words to ask the same thing, you had to be sure you answered them the same way. Otherwise, they wouldn’t believe you.
Everyone believed her.
Well. Maybe not Mom, because after that not even the breath spray did very much to cover up that smell of wine, and the bottles piled up in the recycling bin, and Ev once came home from school to find her passed out on the kitchen floor. After that, Mom went away for awhile, and when she came back, she smiled a lot more than she used to. She didn’t laugh, because that would’ve meant she thought something was funny. She smiled at everything, but she never laughed.
Only once more did she ever ask Maddy what had happened, and it was late at night in the dark. She crept into Maddy’s room. She stood over her bed, watching her while Maddy pretended to sleep.
“I know you’re awake, Madison.”
Maddy didn’t move or say anything. She didn’t open her eyes. She waited for her mom to go away.
“What did you do to her, Madison? What did you do to that little girl? Is it the same thing you did to Patches?”
Patches was their puppy, the one who’d peed on Maddy’s favorite doll when she was seven.
“Was it the same thing you did to baby Jameson?”
That’s when Maddy opened her eyes and sat up. “No.”
Mom let out a long, shaking noise, like something was caught in her throat and she was trying to get it out. It went on and on, not like a cough, but it wasn’t until she turned her face so the light from the window could shine on it that Maddy saw what she was doing. She was laughing.
“It wasn’t quite the same,” Maddy said. “I hit her in the head, first.”
Mom said nothing after that.
Nothing about it ever again.
45
She lay by the road for a long time. When the men came and stood over her, she wanted to get up but something kept her down. A puppet with strings, that’s all she’d become, waiting for the hand to make her move.
When night fell and the blistering sun went away, she lifted her head. Salt and sand crusted
her face, gritting in her teeth. Thick on her tongue. She pushed up with her hands, got to her knees. She didn’t have much farther to go, not compared to how long she’d already travelled.
It took her four days to get from the place she’d fallen, back to the place where it had begun. Nobody had tried to stop her, though there had been a few times when shadows moved behind the curtains and doors closed at her approach. She wasn’t motivated to follow the source of the noise, or to find out whose voices cried out in horror at the sight of her. She didn’t care, not any more.
The pain tears her apart, ripping her from the inside out, and though they ask and ask her, she refuses to take the drugs. The pain is huge and vast and violent and it tears her open, but it’s also the most real and authentic thing she’s ever had. This is hers, it is nothing anyone can ever take from her. She owns it.
And at the end, into her hands they push a child.
Warm and wet, still slick from her mother’s body, the baby’s eyes are open and wondering at the world. She cradles her daughter next to her, flesh to flesh. This is what she has made, this is what she has created. This is the best thing she has ever done and will ever do.
Crouching over his body, she remembers this. Blood-slick hands. Her teeth ache.
A small voice. “Mama?”
Where have the babies gone that nursed at her breast? The chubby toddler legs, the sweet kisses, the soft baby hair and tiny fingers? Who are these strangers in front of her who look at her with her own eyes?
There is need inside her that isn’t her own. Oh, it took from her, all right. Dug around inside her brains and guts to find the bits and pieces it could use to operate her. It’s what gave her the strength to tear the truck driver apart and what set her upon the man so still and silent beneath her now.
But it is not what set her feet to the road when she was so far from home.
That strength came from those three children in front of her.
She has used her body hard in ways it was not meant to work, and now it’s broken. Everything about her is falling apart, succumbing to something else that shifts and moves and owns her. And still, she finds some last strength to push herself upright and pull out the last word she will ever speak aloud.
“Run.”
The moon had risen, though clouds obscured it. She turned her face to the sky. Lights above, far away, cold. What was inside her head and veins, whatever ran along the ever-branching threads of her nerves, yearned with sudden fierceness for the sky.
This is me, she thought. I am made of stars.
The rush and roar of the ocean filled her head. It might be the rush and roar of her breath or blood being pushed through her arteries and veins through the effort of the thing settled at the base of her spine. Everything in her body that once happened naturally was now forced.
Everything but this desire.
She stood at the water’s edge and let it wash around her feet until they sank into the sand. She could move if she had to, but she didn’t have to. She stared out at the blackness and listened to the rush of water and of the blood in her body; she took one breath and another, then nothing for a long time, forgetting.
She breathed when she saw him.
His distance must have been as great as hers, and he’d fared little better. It didn’t matter. Beauty, to her, had never come from what was on the outside.
Now, of course, she had no trouble seeing what was inside. Bone and muscle and sinew and vein. The coil of intestine, undone. The pair of them had been ravaged and made into monsters. It doesn’t matter. Even if she could think of words, lips and teeth and tongue and jaw no longer worked together for speech.
They worked just fine for biting.
They run.
The itch in her brain becomes a throb, a stab, an almost overpowering urge to chase — instead, she slams her skull into the doorframe until the world goes black. Not long enough. She’s taken two steps after them before she can stop herself.
If she can’t see them, she can’t want to follow.
She gouges her eye with her fingernails, digging at the meat until it pops free and dangles on her cheek and she tugs it out of her skull. Her fingers are moving toward the other when every muscle goes stiff and tense, immobile. She can’t move. She falls, hitting a chair on the way down. Her collarbone snaps.
Minutes pass.
Outside, the sound of sirens. Gunfire. Screams.
The world is changing all around her, and she is already changed. But she has to know if the children are all right. Time means nothing, how long has it been since she found her way back to the front porch, how long before that did it take her to find her way home? She doesn’t know.
On the street, red and blue lights. Police car. Oh, the children are there. A man and a woman in blue protect them.
They are safe.
They are safe.
All that matters. Nothing else matters. Only that.
“Ma’am?” Another man in blue. “Ma’am are you okay? Ma’am, can you tell me your name?”
She doesn’t remember her name.
“…oh, Jesus. Holy fucking Christ.” He pulls a gun. “Stop. Don’t move!”
She has to move. Hands out, teeth bared, it’s not what she wants but all she can do. When it’s over, there’s blood, a lot of it. When she can move again, the puddle of it is deep and thick enough to sink her entire hand into, and she studies how it coats her skin but feels nothing.
Overhead, the sun shines. A bird, startled when she moves, breaks into flight, but otherwise there’s only silence. It takes her some time to realize it’s because her ears don’t work, not because the world has stopped speaking.
She pushes against the rough concrete of her front porch. She gets to her feet. She looks at the sky and the grass and the trees and feels the wind lift the edges of her hair.
And then, she walks.
46
Maddy managed to strip out of her ruined clothes and clean herself up pretty good before anyone saw her, but only because everyone had gone down to the meeting room. She hid her roller skates — she didn’t think Dad would mind that she’d “found” them, but others might. Showered and in fresh clothes, she pulled the box from under her bed to get a snack. She had candy bars and cookies, sugar treats that would rot her teeth, and that would be bad because there’d be no dentist visits. Not for a while. Mr. Diamond’s face had swelled up from a bad tooth just after they all got here, and his wife had pulled it out with a pair of pliers. He’d screamed. A lot.
Still, Maddy had no intention of giving up her treats, especially since they were a secret. When Ev came back from the meeting room, he found her brushing her teeth. She’d thought about offering her brother a candy bar sometimes, but…well, once he knew she had them, she’d always have to share.
“Mom and Dad were looking for you.”
“I was playing.”
Ev didn’t care where she was. He hardly paid any attention to her. He spent most of his time pretending he didn’t care about Lacey Harris, who was two years older than him and stupid as a box of rocks.
“Well,” he said. “You missed it. The crew who went upstairs found one of those things and brought it inside. It was the fourth guy, the one who got away.”
This perked her up. “What? How come they brought it back in?”
“I don’t know.” Ev shrugged. “I guess they’re trying to figure out what’s wrong with it.”
What was wrong with it, with all of them. That’s what Maddy wanted to know. She’d watched the coverage of the tornados on the TV, fascinated by how wind could cause so much destruction. When she got older, she thought she might become a storm chaser.
Or maybe a mortician.
Or possibly a kindergarten teacher.
Any way, Maddy had been more interested in watching the news coverage of the trailer parks that had been destroyed by the storms than in any of the shows her friends were into. She couldn’t have cared less about kids who sang and danced and g
ot all excited about their first kiss — Maddy liked to watch the people crying about how everything they had was gone.
A little later, when the first reports of riots and sickness had started showing up on the news, she was even more intrigued. When the news reports started blacking out all coverage, she turned to the internet, where blogs and uploaded videos told the true story. The world had become a horror movie, and Maddy knew how that went.
Ev had called them zombies, but they weren’t, not really. She’d watched that preacher guy’s face explode. It had looked a little like when she blew apart a dandelion that had gone to seed. Whatever was inside him had gone into other people, making them sick and bringing them back after they’d died. That’s how it would’ve worked in a horror movie, but nobody really seemed to have put that together. Besides, she was just a kid. What did she know?
Still, she hadn’t seen any of them up close. Dad had brought them here within the first few weeks. One hundred families in a facility designed for a thousand, not counting all the storage space and the rest of the places Maddy hadn’t even seen. Dad said they’d only have to stay a short time, until everything calmed down.
But now…they’d found one of the things and brought them inside? This, she had to see. Ev didn’t say a word when she went out of the apartment. He was too busy in the bathroom, where he spent way too much time. In the corridor outside she passed the doors to the other apartments, most of them empty, and headed toward the meeting room.
“Where’s my Dad?” she asked Mom, who typically was sitting toward the back, sipping from her “water” bottle.
“He went with Mr. Sylvan and Mr. Kunis.”
“Where?”
Mom took another sip and looked Maddy over, top to toe. “If I don’t tell you, you’ll just find out anyway. Won’t you.”
“Probably,” Maddy said.
She and Mom seemed to have reached an understanding. That was good. Maddy needed a mom. Kids without a mom got labeled. Plus, without Mom there’d be nobody to take care of her until she could do it herself, and that would’ve been annoying too.