Love is the Drug

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

  But that might just be because he’s trapped here with the rest of the powerless students — summarily demoted from the role of hotshot government operative he’s been playing these last few weeks. With most networks down, jammed, or simply inaccessible from the basement, the most he’s been able to find out was that Aaron’s school had fully evacuated about fifteen minutes after the attack. Fifteen minutes isn’t a long time when you’re struggling to finish a chemistry exam, but it’s plenty of time to get an extra, deadly inhale of whatever rained down from the sky this afternoon.

  At six o’clock, when it looks like the students might stage a mutiny if they don’t get something to eat, a few soldiers come back with wet boxes of Oreos and milk. It looks like they scored it from the snack room of the lower school, and even the peculiar dampness doesn’t deter everyone from grabbing what they can.

  Paul wades through and brings her back three of each. “It’s like Lord of the Flies down here,” he says.

  “Why is it wet?” Bird wipes one of the blue-and-black packages on her pants leg.

  “Standard decontamination procedure for potential nerve agents,” he says, like he’s auditioning to be the munitions expert in a heist movie. She doesn’t laugh. She just contains the hollow echo of nerve agent while thinking about Mrs. Early, who still hasn’t said anything to them besides vague platitudes, and the soldiers, who squawk and bark into their walkie-talkies like it really is the end of the world, and everyone else, who munches metallic chocolate and talks about the war that’s inevitably coming as if it’s a high-budget video game.

  She stands up. “I need to be alone for a second, Paul,” she says. He opens his mouth in genuine astonishment before nodding once. She picks up the rest of the food he brought her.

  It’s Coffee’s lawyer who looks up when she approaches them, though she knows that Coffee knows she’s there, a bird on a live wire.

  “You didn’t get anything,” she says, offering the unopened packages to the lawyer.

  After a beat, he takes the food. “Had a protein bar in my pocket. Alonso, you want something? We have a ministering angel.”

  At that, Coffee snorts and turns to her. In the corner of her eye she sees Mrs. Early frown and lean forward in her chair, but what can she really do? It’s the apocalypse, Bird wants to shout, but it turns out she doesn’t have to speak truth to power — only ignore it.

  She squats while Coffee eats a cookie in two economical bites. “Nicky? Aaron?” he asks softly.

  She shakes her head and forces the words past her throat. “No word. Paul only knows that Aaron evacuated. Fifteen minutes after.”

  Coffee grimaces at the number, offers her one of his cookies. She takes it, more to feel the brush of his fingers than out of any particular desire for empty calories.

  “Paul says they’re wet as a precaution against nerve gas,” she says.

  Coffee nods. “Could be. I caught a whiff of something though, just before we went down. Not many nerve gases have a smell at nonlethal concentrations. It could have been a choking agent. Or some sort of bioterror weapon.”

  “Is that any better?”

  “I’m not sure anything could be better.”

  “Nicky and Aaron being healthy and alive.”

  “No one else? My mother? Trevor’s dog?”

  She stiffens at that gentle, almost loving barb. “Why shouldn’t I care about my family first?”

  “Why shouldn’t you?” Coffee says, and stuffs the last cookie in his mouth.

  She looks away, searching for something to smother her awareness of being in the wrong, and is rewarded by Mrs. Early stepping away from conversation with one of the soldiers. Her raised arm is as effective as a mute button.

  “I’ve just gotten word that the terror alert will be lifted within the next hour.” A few people clap, but most keep still, waiting for the bad news. They are not disappointed.

  “The attack we witnessed also took place over Capitol Hill and downtown Manhattan. Three crop dusters were used to deliver a poison gas called phosgene. Luckily, most people were able to get to safety or treatment in sufficient time. The death toll right now is being estimated at five hundred in the District, and somewhere between five hundred and a thousand in New York. I am praying that our loved ones are safe. I also need to tell you …” She wipes at her eyes, which have gone owly with smeared mascara and under-eye foundation. “The president has declared martial law.”

  In the profound silence that follows, Coffee’s low whistle echoes like a firecracker. Mrs. Early glares at him, but the other students regard Coffee with wary respect. Apparently, fleeing from justice helped improve his rank in their stratified, privileged world.

  “What does that mean?” a sophomore boy asks, his gaze wavering between Coffee and Mrs. Early.

  “For now, it means that only authorized personnel are allowed to move between checkpoints. You’ll all have to sleep at school for the night.”

  Coffee’s response is drowned out by the chorus of groans and not-very-well-muffled curses. “The writing was on the wall,” he says, and Bird turns to him while her heart gallops and her head throbs like he’s driven a chisel into her skull.

  “You did write it!”

  “Write what?” He looks so genuinely puzzled that she wants to hit him.

  “When you gave me your number. That night.”

  There’s only one night that night could be, but he still frowns at her. “I wrote down my number.”

  “Anything else?” The fluorescent lights seem to waver to the rhythm of the throbbing in her head. She squints against it.

  “What? My name? I figured that you’d know it was mine, one way or another.”

  “No,” she says, and only realizes that her voice has risen to a shout when everyone turns to stare at her.

  “Bird?” Coffee says.

  “The writing on the wall,” she whispers. “Who else could it have been? Roosevelt?” The thought makes her taste chocolate product and stomach acid.

  “Emily? Is he bothering you?”

  She looks up, startled, to see Paul hovering above the two of them. She opens her mouth to tell him off, but then remembers what he said about her being his responsibility one way or another. He believes it, whatever she thinks, and she knows that Roosevelt does too. He wasn’t much use in helping her find out what happened to Nicky and Aaron, but he tried. Wouldn’t it be better to have him as a friend and not as an enemy? But that creature trying to break out of her skull doesn’t seem to think there’s much of a difference.

  Coffee stands up, his greater height giving him a slight advantage in the cockfight those two are always an insult away from starting. Her head is going to burst like an egg in a microwave if she has to spend another minute in this basement with either of them.

  She pushes past them both, putting more energy into the shove than she has to. Coffee stumbles back, nearly tripping over his lawyer.

  Mrs. Early tries to block her from the door. “Emily? What —”

  “Bathroom,” she says, and Mrs. Early hurriedly motions for one of the soldiers to accompany her down the hall. He gives a startled shout when she starts up the stairs instead of going into the janitor’s bathroom. She takes the stairs two at a time, wondering if he might shoot and almost hoping he will.

  The exit is only one flight up. She sinks to her knees on the sidewalk outside the door, much to the surprise of the two soldiers guarding it. Their gas masks dangle from around their necks, and so she figures it’s safe enough to gulp the chill, damp air and wonder how her tears can feel so hot on her cheeks, like a liquid that has boiled under subterranean pressure.

  “You all right?”

  She looks up at the one who spoke, the young one who reminds her a little of her cousin. He shakes his head and pats her shoulder awkwardly. “I’m sorry,” he says. The other one looks back down at the open door but then shrugs.

  “All clear in a few minutes anyway,” he says.

  Bird feels empty, a cra
cked shell covered with a crude, Emily-shaped mâché. The migraine has settled in for an extended visit, and she knows that by morning she’ll miss her melatonin even more than her toothbrush.

  “That doctor,” she asks, “the one who collapsed. Is she all right?”

  Soldier-two shares a look with soldier-cousin, who chews his tongue. “Did you know her?”

  That forlorn tense is answer enough. “Was it the gas?”

  She’s not surprised by soldier-cousin’s slow shake of his head. “Bad coincidence, honey. Probably a heart attack.”

  Bird summons an image of Dr. Granger, their first casualty of the new war. Latina, curly brown hair, a small nose, and large gray eyes, tired and watchful. Maybe ten pounds overweight, maybe early forties. The sort of woman she sees a lot in the halls of Devonshire: accomplished, holding it together, a little lonely.

  “She wasn’t old,” Bird says.

  Soldier-cousin shrugs. “My mom went that way too. It happens.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He rubs his gun like a rabbit’s foot. “Yeah.”

  The all clear goes off then, a clear, high aria in the breeze and starlight. And as it does her phone buzzes in her pocket. She fumbles, spills it onto the pavement, and then has to wipe off the grit with her sleeve.

  Five new messages, it tells her. Three generic school announcements. A blank email from an address that looks vaguely familiar, but is probably spam. And there, the golden ticket:

  I’m safe. We weren’t too close to the plane, but Aaron’s school got them to the shelter too late. He inhaled a bit of the stuff. Don’t worry, Em, he’ll be fine, but they’re keeping him at this treatment center near the school. I’ve got the address below, but I know you won’t be able to get across town with all this bullshit going down. Don’t worry, remember we love you. Write back as soon as you get this — they said you guys cleared out quick, but I want to make sure!

  She replies immediately (fine here, c u soon), and then closes her eyes. The steps of the first students out of the shelter echo behind her, but she can’t summon the will to move out of their way. Nicky’s fine. Aaron will be. Nicky wouldn’t lie about something like that. But maybe the doctors lied to him, maybe no one knows what happens when you inhale the toxic gas some terrorists decided to drop on the one city spared the pandemic.

  She smells him before she sees him, tobacco and laundry detergent and stale basement air. She grips his hand before she can think better of it, and he jerks a little in surprise.

  “The toxic effects of phosgene,” she says. “A list.”

  “You think I make chemical weapons in my spare time?”

  “I think you read chemistry textbooks in your spare time.”

  “Did something happen?”

  She doesn’t look at him. “Aaron.”

  He swears softly. “Is he okay?”

  “Nicky says he is. They’re at some treatment center near Capitol Hill. I need to get there.”

  Coffee hauls her up by their shared hand and moves her a few feet away from the bumbling crowd of newly freed prisoners.

  “Coughing, watery eyes, blurred vision.” He ticks off each one with the fingers of his free hand.

  “That can’t be it,” she says.

  He shakes his head. “It was pretty common during WWI, not a conflict known for its humane weaponry. Burns if it touches you. Pulmonary edema — that’s when lungs fill with fluid. Low blood pressure. Heart failure. Death.”

  “Jesus.”

  “It’ll be all right, Bird. The dose makes the poison. He couldn’t have inhaled too much in Northeast. The winds weren’t blowing that direction.”

  “I have to get to him.”

  Coffee nods slowly, then looks down at her with a vaguely puzzled frown. “It’s nice to see you.”

  “How did they catch you?”

  His eyes stray to something over her shoulder. “I made a deal.”

  This sounds uncomfortably close to Paul’s obviously untrue version of events. “If you were going to pull a stunt like this, I might as well have narced on you!”

  “Wish you had?”

  Does she wish she threw in with Roosevelt, that she kept Paul’s bracelet, that she trusted, for the rest of her life, the parallel lines of her mother’s judgment?

  But, the shining edges of those eyes. “I told you to save yourself.”

  “You told me a lot of things, Bird.”

  She gapes at him, wondering what he means even as her knees wobble and her head fills with sparks.

  “Upper school ladies! Please follow Mrs. Cunningham, we’ll dine at the boys’ refectory and then sort out the sleeping arrangements.”

  Mrs. Early’s announcement results in the dutiful herding of the fifty or so older boys and girls stuck in this particular shelter. The young girls line up behind one of the medics to go across the campus, back to their walled compound. Other groups of students emerge from their underground lairs like just-molted cicadas and head to the brownstone facade of Bradley Hall. She hopes that no one got caught out when the phosgene dropped.

  The lawyer comes up to them. “Better go with them, Alonso,” he says, gesturing with the hand holding his rumpled coat.

  Coffee frowns and cracks his knuckles. “I need to get to Capitol Hill,” he says.

  “I think I’ve worked enough miracles for one day, buddy. That thing won’t let you get past Wisconsin Avenue, let alone Southeast.”

  He gestures at Coffee’s feet and Bird notices, for the first time, the white plastic box strapped to his right ankle.

  “Is that a monitor?” she asks stupidly.

  Coffee just shrugs. “Part of the bail agreement.”

  She’s going to be sick. He could have gotten away. Now he’s got an ankle monitor and a lawyer and her hornet’s nest. What could he do for her now? Does he think she’ll be grateful? She is grateful.

  “What’s this about Capitol Hill?”

  Coffee drops her hand abruptly. Paul, inevitably and always. Paul, butting his way in with a solicitous mask for the adult in the conversation. She would glare at him if she weren’t so exhausted, and so worried for Aaron. “My cousin is at a treatment center over there. They set one up in a school near RFK. I need to see him.”

  “Is he okay?”

  At least he’s retained that much humanity, Bird thinks, looking up at him. At least he cares just a little about someone who can’t help his career. She hates that she’s someone who could have once loved him. When she looks at him, she sees her own reflection. She sees Carol Bird’s inferior copy. She hates everyone sometimes.

  “I don’t know, Paul. That’s why I need to get there. And if there’s anything you can do with your connections … you know, put in a word with Lukas Group or whoever, I’d be very grateful.”

  She can’t believe that she’s calling on Roosevelt to help with this mess, but Paul understands her meaning perfectly well, and he smiles with the thrill of self-importance and responsibility.

  “I’ll do my best. Let me just make a call, if I can get through. Just you, right?”

  “All of us,” she says while the lawyer gives her a sharp look and then laughs.

  “Why the hell not, if you can do it. I’ve got a friend who lives a few blocks from there.”

  Paul doesn’t look too happy about the prospect of bringing Coffee anywhere, but he’d lose face if he objected. He walks a few yards away, phone to his ear. Coffee looks between the two of them and grins.

  “You’re using him,” he says, a light in his eyes that makes her palm itch with the memory of his hand.

  The lawyer steps closer to Coffee. “I seem to recall Lukas Group coming up in the charges. Doesn’t one of the testifying witnesses work for them?”

  “Roosevelt David,” Bird says before she can stop herself. “Asshole in chief. But in this case, I think he’ll be useful. After all, what else can he do to Coffee?”

  The lawyer looks at her and sighs. “The president declared martial law tonight. Th
at means soldiers — not just National Guard, but the army, the marines, even the air force — on our streets, out of the jurisdiction of civilian courts. At least the police can go to trial. The first time it’s happened since the Civil War. And private security contractors like your Mr. David, well, let’s just say they aren’t going to get less dangerous.”

  “What kind of a lawyer are you, anyway?”

  He raises his eyebrows and pulls a card from his wallet.

  “Bao Tran, Citizens for Humane Drug Policy, Legal Defense Department,” she reads. “So your group, it’s like the ACLU or something?”

  The ACLU is on Coffee’s very short list of Decent Institutions. “Very similar aims,” Bao says, “but we focus on drug policy. Your friend Alonso was very eloquent about the worthiness of his case.”

  “Do you think he can get off?”

  Coffee rolls his eyes at her but looks sidelong at Bao Tran, as though he hasn’t dared ask the question.

  Bao shrugs. “I’ve argued more hopeless cases.”

  Which isn’t precisely reassuring. Paul comes back over a moment later, after a brief exchange with Mrs. Early. He looks smug, which tells Bird that her gamble worked.

  “They’re sending a car over. It’ll take Emily to the treatment center, but no one will be able to leave again until end of curfew.”

  He says this last to Coffee, who just flicks his finger against his palm. “No worse than sleeping in the dining hall,” he says.

  “I have to stay with my client,” Bao says, though she suspects that he doesn’t, and really wants to sleep somewhere besides a school cafeteria.

  “Then we’ll all just go together,” he says with a rigid smile. “I’m sure your uncle will appreciate the support.”

  She’s sure Nicky will jump out of his damn skin to see Coffee and Bao the lawyer and Paul roll up in a black asshole-mobile with some tinted-glasses national security type at the wheel, but this is her bed, and she is relieved to lie in it.