Project Pallid

by Christopher Hoskins

  With a slight wobble to set herself right, she passed over a shopping list of what looked like a couple dozen items.

  “Geesh, Mom, do I at least get a shopping cart?”

  “Well of course you do, Damian. It’s right there at the top of the stairs,” she pointed to the kitchen and to its inconspicuous doorway, set into the floorboards of the far corner.

  “And how do you expect me to get it up and down those stairs?” I asked, and thrust further into the fabrication.

  “That’s for you to figure out. I’m in charge of the cooking, and you’re in charge of the shopping. I don’t ask you how to do your job, and you don’t ask me how to do mine.”

  “Fair enough.” I ended the banter, because it could’ve gone back and forth for hours. It sometimes did. But no matter what, the end would be the same: I was headed down to the pantry, no matter what, and there was no sense delaying the inevitable.

  “How’s Nicole doing at school?” I asked. Mom stood at the sink on the other side of the kitchen, prepping like a doctor before surgery.

  “She’s been so busy since she got there, I haven’t had much chance to really talk with her yet. You should ask her all about her first few days when she gets here.”

  “Sooooo …… you want me to dig for gossip for you? Is that what you’re saying?” I asked, half-joking, and half-serious. My mom, like most, always wants to know more than she probably should about the two of us. Nicole and I draw the line at what she needs, versus what she wants to hear.

  I kicked the heavy, braided rug aside and pulled up and propped open the pantry door as I continued my playful chastisement of Mom’s curiosity. “If you want to know the good stuff, you’d better be ready to get your own hands dirty, Mom. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some shopping to do!” I yelled behind me—up the narrow, wooden stairs that I’d half-descended.

  Gravel crunched beneath my feet. My arms stretched and swung for the overhead pull-cord as I strained to distinguish it in the semidarkness.

  I couldn’t make out her muffled response.

  May 8th: Day 7

  The light bulb’s been flickering on and off for what seems like forever. It hasn’t ever done that before. I’m watching it from my cot and it’s making me nervous. I’ve been totally still. I’ve been completely silent. Has it been minutes? Hours?

  I’m not sure if it’s the bulb, the electricity, or one of those things messing with my house. It could be any of the three; I’ve got no idea what it looks like out there anymore. Is there anyone left? Will it ever be safe to go back up?

  I’ve had too much time alone down here to think things through; tomorrow’s a full week. This must be what solitary confinement feels like: like slowly losing your mind.

  I had no reception during the first three days as my phone’s battery faded away to nothing. And when the screen went black, I launched it at the rock wall on the other side of the room, making solid contact that shattered it to a hundred pieces. It was my dad’s, and the brief meltdown made me feel a flash of remorse; it was my only hope for outside contact, and it’d turned into a useless paperweight.

  My eyes are fixed on the flickering bulb as I reach for and pop open a jar of pickles. Before it all happened, this secluded space was nothing more than food storage: a place to warehouse Mom’s preserves. But with the news broadcasts and the warnings to stock up and hunker down, she packed this place to its bursting point and with enough rations for a much larger family than the four or five of our own.

  Thankfully, food won’t be an issue for a while. Neither will water or most other, basic essentials. Well, except for electricity … and a cell phone charger.

  The surplus down here quadrupled in just two days’ time, and when I look around now, it’s hard to distinguish Mom’s homemade goods, now concealed behind jugs of water, canned vegetables, lamp oil, batteries, and other, apocalyptic essentials.

  The shelves first started to swell after the massive outbreak at Madison General, and that was barely four days after the first reported incident, relayed casually to us in the checkout lane of the grocery store.

  We overheard the girls on register talking about some woman who’d just lost it at the bank next door. We only caught pieces, but my mom, already consumed by Mr. Laverdier’s sermons by then, didn’t hesitate to intrude and to ask more questions that would satiate her curiosity and quench her sudden thirst for the macabre.

  Basically, what the girls knew was this: some woman in the bank line went totally nuts, and she ripped a random father of three to shreds, completely clawing and chewing his face from his skull by the time bystanders were able to pry her off him. I heard it took five guys just to hold her down until the cops showed up and got her restrained enough to be taken away. From what witnesses described, it was a total gore-fest.

  Later that night, when Mom, Dad and I were eating dinner and watching TV, we caught the news report that included edited-down footage from inside the bank. But even those cleaned-up images made the things we heard in the checkout sound like a Pixar film.

  Through the first ten minutes of video—speed-edited for television—the lady just swayed there. Her chin rested against her chest. Her body moved thoughtlessly forward with the crowd. And her skin, even in the second-rate feed, was remarkably pale. Her hair, totally white. Her appearance was thin and gaunt, to the point of breakable, but with an unforeseeable strength.

  Then, about five minutes in, she pounced on the back of this suited man in front of her. Her arms reached around and her fingernails slashed at his face. She pulled him to the ground before he could react, and her entire body perched on his, lighting-fast and on all fours, like she was some animal. Her arms and hands whirled wildly to pin him down and grip the sides of his head. She held it steady enough for her mouth to tear away chunks of face flesh, and she slurped and swallowed what would keep her alive.

  Even though most of it was blocked out, and even without audio from the surveillance camera, the dictation of the newscasters and the spraying blood that spurted around the CENSOR square gave audiences a pretty good understanding of what went down.

  She was the first.

  She was their neighbor.

  And it lent credibility to our earliest suspicions.

  Even if we didn’t know the disease, we knew its source.

  The flickering stops and the blackness consumes me.

  But even if it weren’t dark, I’d still know that it’s night. The crispness of the air and the faint sounds of distant crickets are dead giveaways.

  I’m envious of their immunity to it all. Their ability to keep going, totally ambivalent and unaffected by what’s decimated everything I knew from before. Still, their soft harmony gives hope for life as I stretch across my cot for a couple hours sleep and to rest for tomorrow: my one-week anniversary.

  My plan’s to give it another week. I’ve got the rations to survive—to wait them out until they starve to death. I hope the others do too, wherever they might be hiding. And I pray that when it’s all said and done, we can retake what’s left and make things the way they were—not what the warped mind of some twisted, scientist-turned-prophet, wants them to become.

  Whatever you call them—his minions, his monsters—they’re becoming fewer and fewer. And in another week, and without fuel to survive, I think they’ll be gone. Or, I hope they’ll be gone.

  And in seven days, I’ll return to the surface, no matter what.

  My flashlight clicks on, and I swing its beam under my cot. Pocketknife in hand, I carve a single notch into the hard, wooden vertices of my cot.

  One down.

  Six to go.

  Four days to whiteness. Six days to death. They can’t have much longer.

  Without blood, they starve, and with nothing left, the smart, the secluded, and the savvy survive.

  September 4th:

  Even though I eventually got my locker assignment on day one, I didn’t have time to go to it, and I still had no idea who I’d be sh
aring the small space with when I found my way there to pack it with my things on day two. Someone else, another guy I assumed, had been there first. He’d already settled comfortably in for the year by plastering its insides with football memorabilia and other sports-related things. It wasn’t my taste, but it was his space as much as it was mine, and I’d deal with it.

  With the wall real estate claimed, my locker would just be a place to drop my books. And, figuring the guy had to be bigger than me, I started to reorganize his things to the top shelf and laid claim over its bottom. It felt kind of like moving into someone else’s house, but the space was as much mine as it was his. Just because I got my schedule late, didn’t mean I should have to carry my stuff on my back like an ass all year.

  “Hey, dude, what the hell are you doing in my locker?” a deep voice commanded from behind me.

  Still crouched on the floor and unloading my backpack into the base of our locker-share, I turned and looked up. Way up. What must’ve been almost seven-feet up. The guy had to be the tallest freshman ever.

  “I … I …… Uh ……” Thrown by his unexpected arrival and his even more surprising stature, I struggled for words.

  “I said,” his voice grew deeper and more authoritative, “what the hell are you doing in my locker?”

  “I guess we’re locker partners,” I tried to explain, and stood to look eye-level with his mid-section. I extended my hand upward to shake his and took the initiative to introduce myself. “I’m Dami—

  “Listen, you little turd. I really don’t care who you are. I just want to know who told you it was okay to go touching all my shit?” His words weren’t so much a question as they were a declaration that I’d already overstepped my boundaries.

  “Well … ” I carefully searched my words. “I guess I just assumed, by the football stuff and all, that you’d be bigger than me. So I took the bottom, and I gave you the top.”

  At this, he just laughed—loud enough to draw attention from everyone who mingled around us before the homeroom bell.

  “Guess you were right, man. Heck, I’ve got a little sister who’s bigger than you. Should you even be in high school? You sure you don’t need a chaperone to be here?”

  I could feel myself growing red again. I knew exactly what I wanted to say to the guy, but figured he’d grind me into the floor like a pancake if I spoke up.

  I remembered what my mom said about standing up for myself—that there’d be lots of guys like him trying to throw their weight and size around in high school—and so I re-extended my hand to shake his and to finish my introduction, instead.

  “My name’s Damian Lawson. I’m in Mrs. Dorr’s homeroom.”

  The giant just slapped my hand aside and stepped into the space between the locker and me. He reached down and scooped up the things I’d started to organize in its bottom, and he held them out for me to take. But before I could get my arms up, the pile dropped to the floor, filling the hallway with the echoing thud of textbooks, supplies and shame. Some of the faces that watched on looked stunned, but they were few. Most watched with sick pleasure, glad to see someone else taking the torment and not them.

  “Great to meet you, Damian,” he said. “Now, why don’t you go and find yourself another locker because, as you can see, this one’s already taken. And if you’ve got anything to say about it, to anyone else, I know where to find you: Mrs. Dorr’s homeroom, right?” His words were an obvious threat.

  “Yeah, Mrs. Dorr’s homeroom,” my shoulders caved, and I still can’t believe those timid words came from my mouth. It’s one of those moments you’d return to, and change what you said, and act how you didn’t: a chance to see how things might’ve been different if you’d said and done exactly what you were thinking at the time.

  “Cool. Then we’re on the same page.”

  He moved his things back to the locker’s base, grabbed what he needed, slammed it shut, and left me to scoop up my scattered belongings in shaky humiliation. I didn’t get the guy’s name then—he didn’t give me any opportunity to—but as horrible luck would have it, we landed on the same team in gym class, where his name became etched in my brain forever: Ryan Hayes. Apparently, he was some football legend from middle school, and he’d already made it to the starting line-up on the varsity squad as a freshman.

  And even though we’re on the same team that day, he made sure I took more of a beating than anyone else on the flag football field. He made certain that I never got the ball when I was open or when I could do anything meaningful with it. Not once. Instead, he’d wait until I was totally surrounded by all his jock buddies from the football team, and then he’d lob an easy one my way. After a few times of being clobbered, I learned to deliberately miss the catch just so I wouldn’t have to take the crunching blows that accompanied it.

  And even though it was only supposed to be two-hand touch rules that day, our teacher, who also happened to be the varsity football coach, always seemed to be looking the other way whenever I got pummeled. He said nothing about it and allowed it to happen. Maybe gym class was just an added opportunity for his players to get in some practice. Or then again, maybe he just had it out for the little guy, too. Either way, I wrote Coach Swanson off that day, and my list of Madison High douchebags grew one name longer.

  By geometry that afternoon, my second day was going just as poorly as my first—maybe worse. I became more and more weighed down by textbooks with each passing class, and the pull of my pack tugged from behind and fought to bring me to the ground. Occasionally, someone in the hall noticed and gave it a little extra push downward, just to see how much more I could handle. I only went down once, but when I did, I left the bag behind and sprang quickly to my feet. Fists clenched and headed after my assailant, I was ready for a fight. My reaction was enough to get an apology out of the guy though, who was only after laughs—not the fight that my breaking point almost unleashed on him.

  “Good afternoon, Damian. Welcome back!” Surprisingly, Mr. Atkins greeted me by name when I entered the room.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Atkins.”

  Only half the class had arrived by then, and as far as I could tell, they’d all reclaimed their original seats from day one. Naturally, I considered a swap to the other side of the horseshoe, closer to Catee, but better judgment stopped me short. I wasn’t about to put my neck on the line for a girl who might not even know I existed.

  Class ran a lot like it did the day before, too. I’d look up to catch her looking across at me, and I’d look away out of embarrassment.

  I’d look up again and catch Justin glaring back at me from the seat beside her, and I’d look away, intimidated.

  And when class got out, I was one of the first to go, weighed down even more by the heavy geometry book that stretched my backpack to its limit. And only steps down the hall, I was planted on my butt again: this time by Justin, who loomed over and sneered down at me.

  “What did I warn you about yesterday, Farm Boy?”

  I stared blankly back up into his hate filled eyes.

  “What did I tell you about stepping on my turf???” he demanded.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked. “I didn’t do anything.”

  “You didn’t have to do anything. I could tell what you were thinking just by the way you were looking at us … trying to work up the balls to say something to her.”

  “You’re wrong. All I—

  “You’re wrong. All I—” he sniveled a mocking rendition of me. “I don’t care what you think you were doing in there. It’s not what I said you could be doing! Consider this your last warning, Farm Boy,” he pointed and commanded. “Don’t even look at her! Next time, I’m not going to remind you so nice.”

  I sat on the ground, still collecting myself, as he turned the corner and disappeared with his boys.

  My backpack anchored me there like a piece of lead, and my first move to get up was unsuccessful. And by the time I got my arms unhooked and rose to my feet, she was standing in f
ront of me.

  “Hey. We haven’t had a chance to properly introduce ourselves yet,” she spoke with a friendly wave of her hand, pulled tight to her body. “I’m Catee. Do you need some help?” She looked to my bloated backpack, then up to me.

  “Naw. It’s no problem. I got it.”

  I hoisted it up and around my shoulders, steadied my balance, and returned the introduction. “I’m Damian.” I could’ve waved or even reached out to shake her hand if both mine weren’t already jammed deep in my pockets.

  “Looks like you’re moving in … or out. What’s with all that stuff you’re dragging behind you?”

  “Oh this?” I jerked my thumb over my shoulder and referenced the mule-sized load I carried. “Yeah. You know. It’s all about conditioning. This week it’s all about my calves. Next, it’s lats and shoulders.”

  “Oh, really?” I liked how quickly she caught onto the sarcasm of my reply. “And what’s that going to look like?” And I liked her even more when she prodded me to go on.

  “Well, not so different, really. Same bag. A little more weight. But next week, I’ll be carrying it over my head. And after that, I’m going to start running the stairs.”

  “I don’t mean to come on too strong or anything, but that’s really hot,” she answered and broke into infectious laughter. “You’re pretty funny, Damian.”

  “Thanks. You too, Catee.”

  “So, why are you carrying all that around with you? You really only need a book at a time around here. You look like some sort of Sherpa.”

  “Eh. Well, I had this locker conflict earlier.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yup.”

  “How so?”

  “Well,” I began to weave another twisted tale for her. “It seems we’re just incompatible.”