Project Pallid

by Christopher Hoskins

  “Big Boy!!” he yelled, having evacuated his meat-filled mouth. “Big Boy!!!” He repeated. “Did you catch that, Martha?! Looks like we’ve got ourselves a player here!”

  “Don’t try to use language you don’t understand, Dad. Damian’s no player. Damian’s not even allowed on the field!” Nicole stoked a growing fire.

  “Nicole, you just watch it,” Mom piped. “If Damian wants to be a player, then we’ll support him, because that’s what a family does.”

  And the three of them grew so quickly engulfed in a debate about my pending player status that I worried what Catee might be thinking.

  “Hey … ”

  “Hey …… ”

  “Heyyyy!!” Catee yelled, as she banged the salt and peppershakers, like two gavels, on the table.

  All three voices came to an abrupt halt and inquisitive attention turned to her.

  “Do you have something to add, Catee?” Mom spoke first.

  “I do,” she declared.

  “Well?” my dad asked from her right.

  “I just think I need to clarify where the train went off the tracks here.”

  “Okay … ” Nicole prodded.

  “If you don’t mind me saying, I think everyone got hung up on the terminology here.”

  “How do you mean, Catee?” Mom asked.

  “Well, I guess I’d agree with Nicole and your husband, Mrs. Lawson. Damian’s no player. Actually, he’s barely got any game at all.”

  “Amen to that,” Nicole replied, and returned to the untouched dinner that grew cold before her.

  “Agreed,” my dad chimed and returned to the remaining bites of his own.

  “But I think we can all agree,” Catee continued, “that he’d make one hell of a ball boy.”

  At this, they all erupted into a laughter that rattled the tableware and shook the water from our glasses, and I joined in suit, at my own, playful expense.

  It was a defining moment for us and for Catee’s establishment within our family. In that brief back and forth, she immersed herself as just another member of the table. Her transition-in was flawlessly smooth, and as good-natured as it was, it marked the silent start of our tragic dismantling.

  And when the laughter subsided, and after mom had blotted the tears from her eyes, she turned her attention toward me. With hard fought composure, she managed to choke out, “Okay, Ball Boy, lead us off!” The table rattled again with laughter from all sides.

  I’m not really sure what I shared that day—it could have been anything. My sister’s share was equally irrelevant. As was my mom’s, and my dad’s. Predictably, the one that hangs heaviest in my memory was Catee’s. Though her contribution was entirely optional during her first visit to Family Dinner, her delivery came without interruption and without prompting, and just as soon as we’d finished with ours.

  “So, Low first?” Catee asked rhetorically, having already seen the procedure unfold, four times before.

  “Always end positive,” Mom reaffirmed.

  “So, I guess my Low for the day was that I had a fight with my dad before school this morning.” I wondered if she’d continue and hoped she’d go on. My curiosity was unrestrained.

  “I told him I was done going to fractured family therapy with him. That I was done playing his games and letting him look like some good dad that he isn’t. He told me I didn’t have a choice. I told him to go to hell. Then he slapped me. Hard. Across the face.”

  Catee’s share was supposed to have been a goldmine for me. I’d set myself up to learn more about her when I invited her over that night. I’d opened my doors, hoping she’d do the same. But I hadn’t properly planned for what I’d learn once she did. My fists clenched to tight, white-knuckled balls, and my fingernails dug into the palms of my hands.

  The air quieted to intermittent chomps.

  Intermittent chomps turned to four, successive, distinctive swallows.

  The final one turned to silence that blanketed the table.

  And then Catee continued.

  “And for my High … well, I guess my High would be coming here to meet all of you tonight. I’m not trying to sound like a brownnoser or anything like that. It’s just nice to be around family again. My mom was the only one who was ever really there for me, and even though it was just her, at least there was that feeling … you know … of being important. Part of something.” There was a pause before she continued. “I don’t really feel like that anymore. At least, not until I met Damian. And now you guys.” It was moving. Even for my dad, who was first to respond.

  “Catee, the door’s always open for you here. You’re welcome back anytime you like.” It was one of the most thoughtful and sincere things I ever remember him saying.

  “Thank you, Mr. Lawson.”

  “You can call me Darryl.”

  “Okay, Darryl,” she smiled, then turned to my mom. “And thanks for the delicious meal, Martha.”

  My mom glowed, thrilled that Catee finally felt comfortable enough to call her by her first name.

  “Anytime, Catee. It’s been great having you here, and I hope Damian brings you by more often now.” My mom looked to me, and I knew her suggestion was more than just wishful words.

  “Don’t worry about it, Mom,” I said, and squeezed Catee’s thigh under the table. “It’s a promise.”

  My understanding of Catee, of me, and of us, changed that day. In hindsight, I guess it’d been changing all along. No relationship’s ever entirely stagnant.

  That day brought the realization that as different as we might have seemed, Catee and I were more alike than anything else.

  Loneliness isn’t measured by the people who surround you, and it can’t easily be solved by any one variable. Still, we’d somehow managed to defy the odds, and we’d found our cure in each other.

  May 10th: Day 9

  It’s impossible to dismiss the frequency with which they’re returning. What had been multiple, daily, dwindled to a sporadic one or two every couple of days. But now, nine days into hiding, they’re on the rebound.

  It’s unexplainable.

  And it makes me question my timeframe and my game plan. If I’m going to die, why delay the inevitable? If they’re not going to die out, why not go up and face them head-on? Plus, who’s to say I’m not already infected, too?

  I grab a handful of my hair and give it a pull for good measure. I do something similar with my fingernail, too, and try to pry one back and peel it off. But I’m successful in neither endeavor, and I breathe a quiet sigh of relief.

  I had to have been exposed to it. There’s no way I couldn’t have been. Why should my future be any different than anyone else’s?

  The alert of its airborne status came the same day the policeman was shot in his house. Madison General, on the other side of town and where Mrs. Arnold was being held, was first to experience it. It happened on the third and fifth floors, above and below her room.

  Four other patients, three from above and the fourth from below, each being treated for their own distinctly manageable conditions, began to show symptoms beyond explanation of their independent ailments. Doctors noted a paling of all four patients’ skin, then a whitening of their hair. Then came the bleaching of tongues and a loss of eye coloration, followed by patchy hair loss. Fingernails and toenails went chalk-white and peeled away all too easily—killed by the hosts’ own bodies.

  The remembrance of this lineage stirs me back to my feet. I need to check my reflection again.

  Cautious footsteps carry me across the floor and back to the sliver of mirror on the wall. Its dark and I can barely make out my own reflection, moreover my coloration, or lack thereof.

  The screws that hold it in place are loose from age, and it’s an easy task for me to pull them out and remove it from the wall. As thin and delicate as it is jagged, I have to be careful not to break it as I move to where one of the last rays of sunlight cast through the crack above, down into my tomb.

  With it face-up in my open
palms, I look down to my reflection. My skin pulls forward and sags downward to add undue age and wear onto what was youthfully unscathed only a week before. My eyes are still blue. My hair is still brown. I open my mouth and lift my tongue … still pink.

  With the coast clear, I decide against returning the mirror to the wall, and I add it to the crate by my bed, alongside my pocketknife. In the process, I nick my finger on one of its raw edges and draw immediate blood that drips from its tip, and lands in a white puddle below. It spreads outward and fades to pink before it dissipates entirely, and I suck on what’s left as I return to my cot, checking and rechecking for the slow surfacing of red to subside.

  According to the doctors, whitening of the body is stage one. It’s the first sign in knowing you’re infected; it was the first thing they noticed about all the other cases. Mrs. Arnold was only there two days when doctors noticed it in the patients on adjoining floors. But they didn’t put the puzzle together fast enough. They’d already quarantined the entire wing of the hospital by the time they attributed its spread to the ventilation systems. The rooms above and below hers were only the first to be impacted; many others would follow.

  And two days after noting the degenerative pallor of the hospital patients, and on the same day that Officer Stallon was taken down across town, stage two set in for the infected—something doctors described then as delirium.

  The infected, almost in synch with each other, became totally consumed by whatever it was. Weakened by unrelated illnesses, each turned instantly animated.

  But they became something else.

  Something different.

  Witnesses said it sounded like a pack of robotic wolves had been let loose in the hospital. The metallic screeching began on the fifth floor: first one voice, then another, and another, and then a piercing fourth. Then a fifth voice rose up to shrilly join from the third floor.

  And Mrs. Arnold, who’d given up snapping and fighting her restraints two days before, and who’d been entirely unresponsive to everyone, suddenly jerked back to life. Head thrown back, her cry made six.

  A horrifying harmony of sheet metal music sounded from the East Wing before her head kicked back on the pillow and what little remained of her pale body turned lifeless.

  Her bank mauling was only four days before.

  When I pull my finger from my mouth, it’s still bleeding. Another droplet escapes, drops to my sheet, and stains it with a small, crimson circle.

  The door to my house hasn’t been closed in days—I’ve heard it banging since the first group came hunting for me—and the sudden scramble of hands and feet above is in tandem with the droplet that strikes my cot.

  It stops directly over me.

  I can hear it there, but can see nothing in the darkness of twilight. My hair nearly lifts off my scalp with the intensity of its inhale. The hair on my arms rises with the howling screech that follows. And then, for the first time in over a week, I hear a voice. One that used to sound human, but like its words are being forced through a throat of scrap metal now.

  “DAMIAN!” My name hisses through the darkness and threads of glistening, white saliva trail through the crack. They barely miss my face and land on the sheet beside me. “DOOR!!” The voice is broken and scratchy. Pitchy and grinding. They’re more like sounds than they are like words. But they’re there. And he’s here.

  My dad finally made it home.

  February 9th:

  Catee kept true to her word. She didn’t return to therapy after dinner at our place, and it became a huge ordeal. She fought with her dad about it the next week, too, then again, the week after that, until finally, Mr. Laverdier admitted defeat and let her have her way.

  It didn’t seem like he minded all that much, though. As much time as he’d spent at work before, he’d somehow extended to even longer days, plus sporadic weekends, in the weeks until then—no one knew on what, and no one offered up any suspicions until Catee and I tipped them off.

  For the two of us, Mr. Laverdier’s commitment to his job, as ungodly as it was, was a godsend at the time. It gave us extra time together. And by early February, we’d moved to a five-day a week schedule instead of four: mostly staying after school in Madison, except for once or twice a week, when we took the bus to my place for family dinner.

  I found the courage to go back to her place that month. Sufficient time had passed that I thought the smoke had finally cleared from my run-in with her dad. By then, Mr. Laverdier had become so preoccupied with work that even Catee only saw fleeting moments of him in a week.

  Just to be safe though, we worked out a better cover for ourselves by pulling the curtains shut and closing and locking whatever doors we could so we’d be more likely to hear if he came home unexpectedly. And if he did, we’d use one of the escape routes we’d planned to get me out of her place—even if that meant the less than desirable, shove-Damian-out-a-window option.

  The only door we didn’t lock that afternoon was the one to his office. It’d been locked already: once by the knob, and twice by the latch and padlock he’d installed on its top.

  “What’s that all about?” I asked with a point, as we shot by to pull the blinds of her house’s street-facing eyes.

  “He added that after he caught me in there last month,” she answered.

  “Why?”

  “I was looking for a paperclip, that’s all,” she admitted.

  “No, dough-head,” I played. “Why’d he add a lock at all? What’s he got to hide?”

  “I don’t know. You know him: all secretive and stuff. Probably keeps his porn in there or something.”

  Her laughter cut short as we pulled the final curtain shut. We stood alone in the darkened living room and in a second of silence before I spoke again.

  “Well, I want to see inside. Get the key.”

  “The key?”

  “Yeah, get the key and let’s see what’s inside!”

  “Damian, do you honestly think I know where the key is? Do you really think he’d go through all that,” she said, with a motion back to the lock, “just to leave it laying around for me?”

  “Well, where’s he keep it?”

  “I don’t know. His keychain, probably.”

  “Doesn’t do us any good,” I said, more to myself than to her, while I searched an alternate solution.

  “Why are you so curious anyway?” she asked. “This can’t just be about the porn, can it? You know you can get that anywhere, right? Maybe even here if you play your cards right,” she suggested, and repositioned her chest in her shirt.

  “Don’t tempt me,” I threatened and grinned, while I continued to trouble-shoot the lock in my head.

  I gave the handle a jiggle before I checked the keyhole, hoping it’d be one of those pushpin types where all you need is a nail to get it open. No luck. I grabbed its dangling lock and gave it a few tugs. No give. “I just think it’s weird that he’d go locking you out of your own house, that’s all. Like he doesn’t trust you or something. Or like he’s got something to hide. Don’t you think it’s a little strange?” I asked.

  “I suppose so, yeah. But I’m used to it by now. That’s how he’s always been, Damian. He’s never told me anything. You know that. We live together, but we’re complete strangers. I barely even speak to him anymore. You’ve seen how he treats me. He’s got no respect for me. He’s got no respect for life. He’s a monster, Damian. I knew it when he ran over that dog. He doesn’t care about anyone or anything but himself.” She spoke the revelation like I’d heard it before.

  I processed her words, assembled a fragmented story, and remembered back to my dad’s disturbing dinner-share on the first day of school. I thought back to her tears as I waited for my schedule in Mr. Grayson’s office.

  “Oh my god!” I gasped. “He took his car to my dad’s shop!”

  “What! Really?!”

  “Yeah! He told my dad there was something rattling under it. My dad checked it out, and he found a collar and leash!” Tea
rs welled in Catee’s eyes as I added fresh dimension to her remembrance of the events.

  “He didn’t even stop!” she cried. “THUD!” “THUD!” Her hands moved in wavelike movement with her sound effects to illustrate the hit and run. “He told me he didn’t have time to deal with a mess! He didn’t even slow down. He just kept driving, and he dropped me off at school and went to work like it was nothing!” she recalled.

  I was stunned that I’d completely forgotten to ask about our first-day encounter. Blinded by love, I’d been so focused on the moment-to-moment that I’d totally forgotten to ask about her first day tears.

  “Wow.” I didn’t know what else to say. Before I’d even known who he was, Mr. Laverdier had already left his dark, indelible impression on my family. He’d been making us sick from the start.

  “Catee.” I asserted, and refocused our attention to the task at hand. “We’ve got to get in this office. If he could do that to that poor dog,” I said, capitalizing on the moment, “just think what else he could’ve done! He could’ve killed an entire family! They could be rotting away in there, right now!!” I jabbed my thumb at the door, half-kidding, but half-worried about the inherent possibility of my words.

  Dropping to hands and knees, I pressed my nose to the floor and to the crack of the door. “Do you smell that?” I asked with the heavy seriousness of discovery.

  “Smell what?” Skeptical at best, she looked down with her hands on her hips.

  “Get down here! Smell it!” I insisted.

  Begrudgingly, Catee took to the floor and to hands and knees, too. The tops of our heads pressed together as we pushed our noses to the small crack.

  “Do you smell it?” I asked.

  “No … well … maybe. Yeah, I think so … it’s kind of … well, it’s sort of … What is it??” She breathed deeply to process a scent that I’d only pretended to discover.

  “Catee,” I said with panicked alarm, “I know exactly what it is,” I rose solemnly, spoke gravely, and left her to continue sniffing out the floor’s dust bunnies, alone. “That’s the smell of ………… a SUCKER!”