“Wow.”
“Yeah.”
Laura stubbed her Parliament out on the stucco wall. “I think you convinced me. Congrats. Now what are you going to do?”
Tristan let out a shaky breath. “I’m going to get my life together.”
She drove back to the hospital to see Alden, but the nurse told her he was asleep. In the lobby, Pete rose and took her elbow.
“I want to talk to you.”
“No you don’t,” she laughed.
He raised his thick brows, straightening his spine so he could look down on her from all his height. “Pretty sure I do, Triss.”
“I fucked another guy.”
Pete’s smile froze on his face mid-patronize. “What?”
“A guy named Zeke. He has an ironic mustache and won’t listen to music with electric guitars.”
“What?”
“I know,” she said. “Not even Hendrix?”
His voice became brittle. His well-muscled arms hung useless from his shoulders. “I don’t believe this.”
“Then take some time to wrestle it down, because it’s true. We’ll talk more later. Swear. But right now I need some time with my family. If you promise you won’t talk, I’ll drive you back to your car.”
The skin around his mouth twitched as if it were infested with worms. “I couldn’t. You done more than enough for me today.”
He strode across the dirty tile. Tristan glanced at her parents seated a few rows away. “Did you hear any of that?”
Her mom winced. “If I pretend I didn’t for long enough, do you think I can convince myself to believe it?”
“Well, I’m sorry. And I’m sorry about Alden. Pete shouldn’t have been there. I’ve been confused.”
Her dad scowled at his copy of TIME. “Apparently.”
“He’s going to be all right, right?”
“They still have a couple tests,” her mom said. “But my heart has stopped competing for Olympic Gold. I think he’ll be fine.”
“I’m going to go home and search for jobs,” she said. “Call me when he wakes up?”
Her dad glanced up from an infographic on rising mortgage failure rates. “Try and stop me.”
Tristan drove home. The house was deeply quiet. A lawnmower buzzed from down the street. She flipped open her laptop and copy/pasted every Craigslist wanted ad in the greater Bay Area into three different files: “DREAM JOB,” “YOU GOTTA DO WHAT YOU GOTTA DO,” and “PLEASE GOD NO.” Starting with the first file and working her way down, she spent the next three hours tweaking and emailing resumes.
She sent out a few dozen all told, for positions ranging from a PR gig at a startup indie label to receptionist at a shoe factory in Oakland. It was bracing. Invigorating. A shot of espresso straight to the nerves. Was that all it took? To just...act? Already, she couldn’t believe she’d told Pete. All the guilt and worrying and avoidance annihilated by a few simple sentences. The fallout would certainly require many more sentences—pages and pages of them, an endless, Kerouac-style ream of them—but if the closure of their relationship were an essay, she was thoroughly prepared to turn it in half-assed. After all, a D was much better than an F.
Her dad called as she was scrubbing down the kitchen.
“Not to pry you away from finding a future outside our house,” he said, “but Alden’s awake.”
She rushed out the door. At the hospital, Alden sat up in bed and grimaced. A sling cradled his right arm. He didn’t have a shirt on and a morbid red-purple bruise stained the skin around his shoulder.
“You’re alive!” she said.
He blinked at her. “Did the girls see?”
“That’s what you care about right now?”
“Well, did they?”
“Are you kidding? They had a front row seat.”
He frowned at his splayed toes. “At least they don’t know my name.”
“Do you feel okay?” she said.
“All except my head. And my shoulder. And my me.”
She laughed, then grew sober. “Alden, I’m so sorry. I should have been paying more attention.”
He tried to swivel his head to meet her eyes and winced so hard he showed his teeth. His voice was strained with pain. “I’m not three.”
“That’s what I told Mom and Dad!”
“So did it look cool? I mean, before I crashed?”
“For sure. It looked like you were ready to deck Morpheus.”
He lowered his chin and laughed. “Totally worth it.”
The remaining tests came back negative; visiting hours ceased. Her dad drove them out for cheeseburgers and took them home to eat and shower before the return to the hospital. The kitchen smelled like french fries and microwaved bacon.
Her dad dabbed his napkin to his mouth. “Apply for anything interesting today?”
“A few,” Tristan said. “As well as a lot more not-so-interesting things.”
“You know,” her mom said, “even the crummiest job isn’t a death sentence. Nothing lasts forever.”
“That’s very comforting.”
“Well, it doesn’t. As today proved, to my everlasting horror.”
“I know.” Tristan took a long drink of Sprite. It was painfully sweet. She had successfully eliminated high fructose corn syrup from her diet since her third semester at Berkeley—it wasn’t a looks thing, it was just bad for you—but she felt no regrets breaking her streak. “I’ll find something. I’ll make it work until I find something better.”
Her dad finished his cheeseburger and folded the wrapper into eighths. “Your mom and I were talking.”
“Why do I have the sudden urge to run?”
Her mom rolled her eyes. “Ho ho.”
“Figure out what you want to do,” her dad went on. “Whether it’s get any job you can and stay in the city or come back here until you find the one you want. Figure that out, and we’ll talk.”
“Wait, really?” Tristan said. “When we go back to the hospital, can I get a sample of your blood?”
Her mom made a face. “What are you talking about?”
“Because you’ve obviously been replaced by aliens and I’m going to need proof.”
“We’re your parents,” she said. “We want you to try, but we know things are different these days. Until things change, it’s our job to keep you happy. To keep you safe.”
Tristan frowned, eyes going watery. “I am trying. I’ll let you know what happens.”
They returned to the hospital. Her dad finished his TIME. Her mom pawed through a collection of Philip K. Dick’s short stories. Tristan exchanged texts with Laura. As the hospital thinned out, her dad volunteered to sleep there overnight. Her mom drove Tristan back to the house.
“You shouldn’t blame yourself,” her mom said while Tristan brushed her teeth. “It wasn’t your fault.”
She spit white froth into the sink. “It was a little my fault. But I’ll do better.”
She couldn’t have been more exhausted if she’d spent all day playing fast-pitch softball with boulders. Alden came home the next morning. They’d given him some painkillers and he fell asleep on the couch watching Five Deadly Venoms, which Tristan had rented for him. And then it was afternoon, and it was time for Tristan to drive back to Berkeley.
Her dad hugged her in the driveway. “Keep us posted.”
“I hope I have something to post you about,” Tristan said.
Her mom squeezed her tight. “No one says no to a girl as pretty as you.”
“Well, I’m glad to see we’re finally being judged for our brains.”
Her mom grinned and slapped her on the shoulder. Tristan got in the car and drove slowly from the development. It smelled like grass clippings again. Trash bins lined the sidewalk.
She swung onto I-5 and headed south down the valley through the endless fields of grapes and olives and walnuts. If you squinted, you could almost pretend you were driving down the middle of Italy. Sunlight smashed through the windshield. The hills w
ere yellow and the fields were green. She had a CD player, but let the radio play what it would.
The drive took a good four hours. She got back to her apartment just before sunset. Her roommate Connie sat on the couch with a beer and a Wii remote, flicking her wrist to send the bowling ball tumbling down the lanes. It smelled vaguely of pot; a joint had been tamped out in the ashtray.
“How was home?” Connie said.
“I fought with my parents, broke up with my boyfriend, and almost let my little brother die.” Tristan dropped her suitcase to the worn carpet. “You?”
“I thought about going outside.”
“We all need dreams.”
She didn’t particularly want to do her reading for Monday’s class in The Letter as Literature, but she did so anyway, diving into Rilke’s Teutonic madness with the same vigor she’d used to dump Pete. Pete, incidentally, didn’t text or call once over the next three days. Two employers did, though, arranging interviews with her for the next week. Wednesday afternoon, she checked her phone after class and found a new message.
She flipped it open hungrily, anticipating another interview, but it was from her dad. She frowned. Her dad didn’t call much. That was Mom’s job.
“Tristan, your brother’s back in the hospital,” he said through the crackling message. “He’s sick. They don’t know what it is.”
5
As Ness processed Tim’s death, the world honed to a focused beam. Tim’s sheets were crimson, obscuring the color of the stains, but when Ness leaned in, all he smelled was blood, excrement, and a general organic miasma. He pinched the sheets between his thumb and forefinger and pulled them from Tim’s head. Tim’s eyes were open and withered. Blood crusted his tear ducts, his mouth, his ears. Ness sniffed again, but got no whiff of decay. Blood. Bowels. Phlegm. That was it. Tim’s forehead was still warm.
Ness straightened. Physically, he entered a state of sheer terror—sweating, trembling, his whole body hot as a brick oven—but if he had a superpower, it was the preternatural calmness that came to him in the face of the right kind of danger.
Mrs. Rogers was obviously dead as well. If not, she would’ve taken her son to the hospital, not left him to bleed to death in bed. He went to her bedroom to confirm. Her bed was empty. Out of town? He found her in the tub. The water was as crimson as Tim’s sheets. It had pruned her skin, seeping into the creases and staining them pink. Her skin was cool, but that could have been the conductive properties of the water at play rather than an indication of an earlier time of death.
Ness went to the kitchen and washed his hands three times. Heavy metal poisoning? That could cause hemorrhaging. If it were in their food, it could easily have affected mother and son.
But its symptoms might not present for weeks or months. Tim’s body hadn’t yet stiffened. He and his mom had died within a day of each other, probably a few hours. Mom in the tub while Tim shivered and bled in bed. Radiation poisoning? It would have to be an awfully strong source to take them both so fast. But not impossible. On the off chance Mr. Rogers’ last business trip had been to sub-Saharan, ebola-plagued Africa, Ness found a fresh cloth in the linen closet, soaked it with water, and tied it around his mouth. He found rubber gloves under the sink and donned them.
He didn’t spend much time thinking about what he was looking for. He doubted he would find a Soviet ICBM parked in the garage. Without a doubt, he should just leave. But two people had died in very strange circumstances, and that was too interesting to run from.
A bowl of noodles sat soggily on the counter. In the garbage, he found a WinCo receipt dated four days ago. They’d been in circulation that recently, at least. If it were radiation, it would probably have to be something from a shared space—the bathrooms, the dinner table. The car. He found nothing in the bathroom but the usual assortment of conditioners and razors and hairdryers. There was nothing on, below, or near the table besides a couple of candles and a tablecloth.
He flipped on the garage light. The room was simple, uncluttered; they kept the farm tools in the shed and the barn. The wall shelves held two flashlights, a rake, a mallet, and a shovel. A sack of wheat spilled into the corner of the outer door. He checked the truck. There was a tarp in the bed, but nothing beneath it. Nothing under the seats. A few maps and menus and matchbooks in the glove box.
If it were radiation, he should probably be going. He returned to Tim’s room to make sure there was no obvious pornography sitting around. For once, there wasn’t, but now that Ness’ eyes were open to change, he spotted the difference at once.
A metal canister sat on top of the TV. It hadn’t been here last time he’d been to Tim’s the same day Shawn had moved into Ness’ room. The canister looked like brushed nickel. A bit darker. Its stark curves reminded him of the elegant soap dispensers in the Bed Bath & Beyond catalogues his mom clipped coupons from but never wound up using. The device was shockingly heavy. The sides were blackened and damascened like copper plumbing. He shook it. It rattled lightly. He turned it over and shook two wheat kernels from a hidden hole in its top.
He took the canister to the garage and knelt beside the bag of spilled wheat. A paper tag was tied to the burlap handle. The address was Willy Shoreman’s. Ness had seen him at the Rogers’ before. Shoreman was another farmer who lived a couple miles across the mountain.
After the heat of the house, the cold night struck him like one of Shawn’s fists. He gazed toward the Shoreman’s farm, but the mountain was dark. His blisters throbbed. His stomach squealed. Instead of heading to the Shoreman’s like he wanted, he went back to the garage for the shovel and buried the canister beside the bare-branched larch in the back yard. He went inside to wipe his fingerprints from the doorknobs and return the rag and gloves. He went outside. His cell was nearly dead, but it called 911 with no problem.
The police and the ambulance took nearly twenty minutes to arrive, sirens keening up the mountainside, lights washing the grass in bands of red and blue. They skidded in the farmhouse’s gravel drive, dust blossoming from their tires. While the paramedics went inside, two policeman spoke to Ness.
The younger policeman scratched notes on a yellow pad. “You say your friend hadn’t been responding to texts?”
“Not in at least a couple days,” Ness said.
“And when you got to the house, what did you do?”
“The door was unlocked and I was cold. I went inside. The lights were on. I found Tim first. I didn’t think his mom would leave him like that. That’s when I found her in the tub. After that, I came straight outside and called you.”
The officer nodded, scribbling notes. “Did you notice anything unusual while you were inside?”
Ness pretended to think. “No.”
They asked him several more questions. He stuck to his story, telling the truth whenever he could. Something strange had happened to Tim and his mother. Something awful. Something Ness didn’t want to get wrapped up in.
The paramedics emerged several minutes later. They looked pale. They pulled the two officers aside and murmured in the night. One of the paramedics climbed in the ambulance cab and clicked on his radio. The two cops watched Ness steadily. The paramedic clambered back out and nodded to the older cop whose hair was as flat and gray as the deck of a battleship.
“Look, son,” the older officer said, “they’d like to take you down to the hospital and give you a little exam.”
“What’s wrong?” Ness said.
“Well, nothing, we hope! But you were inside that house. You seen it. We’d like to make sure whatever happened to those folks isn’t about to happen to you.”
“But I was only inside for a second.”
“What’s that the women say?” The cop’s eyes crinkled. “It only takes a second?”
“I live right on the other side of the mountain.” Ness pointed west toward the trailer. “I’ll call you if I start to feel anything funny.”
“Listen, you’ve been straight with us, so I’ll be straight with yo
u. Right now, this isn’t what you’d call a choice.”
An itch spidered up Ness’ neck. “I don’t want to go.”
“Here’s the deal. You either take a ride in the back of their car.” The gray-haired cop pointed to the ambulance, thick thumb extended to the side. “Or you take a ride in the back of mine.”
Ness wanted to run. Why had he called the police? Someone else would have found Tim and Mrs. Rogers eventually. They weren’t going to be any less dead because the paramedics were hauling their bodies off on a Tuesday instead of a Thursday. He’d tried to do good and now he was trapped. He couldn’t say no to the police. That would be a Shawn-style move, resulting in another Shawn-style arrest. There must be some way to talk his way out—to cite law, to plumb for sympathy—but Ness couldn’t begin to find the words. He felt frozen, helpless.
He nodded to the ambulance. “I’ll go with them.”
The cop’s eyes crinkled. “I knew you looked smart.”
One of the paramedics loaded him into the back while the other climbed behind the wheel. The ambulance lurched off and headed downhill.
“What about Tim and his mom?” Ness said.
The paramedic glanced over his shoulder toward the house, face as sober as a snowfield. “Someone else is coming for them.”
“But I’m fine.”
“I’m sure you are. To confirm that, we’re going to run a few tests there in the house. And a few on you to confirm everything’s normal.”
In other words, they wanted to collect in-depth forensics. The ambulance bounced down the dark mountain road, jolting Ness’ spine. Forensics for what? The Rogers’ had possibly been murdered. The method of murder would have to be an unusual one—heavy metal poisoning or exposure to radiation—and again, unless those substances were present in extremely high doses, it was unlikely Tim and his mother would both die within such a brief window of time.
Ness’ skin prickled. The possibility of exotic disease no longer seemed so far-fetched.
The Last Days: Six Post-Apocalyptic Thrillers Page 109