Among These Bones

by Amanda Luzzader

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Okay. Well, all that’s left is his age—oh.” His hand went to his mouth. “Oh, shit.”

  “What?” I said. I bent forward to see. “Three zeros? What’s that mean?”

  P.J. turned to me with a bleak expression. He shook his head. “I’m sorry.”

  But wouldn’t I know? Wouldn’t a mother know?

  “Sorry, Al,” said Chase. He stepped away.

  Ruby placed her hand on my neck. She pulled me into the folds of her coat, and I cried.

  CHAPTER 16

  My knuckles were white from gripping the steering wheel as we drove away from the data center.

  “Al? You okay?” asked Chase.

  “Of course I’m not okay,” I said.

  Chase was quiet for a few minutes. Maybe he had nothing to say. Maybe he was trying to think of something. I didn’t care. All I could think about was the Agency and what they had done to Arie.

  “I want you to find me a gun,” I said finally.

  “What? Why?”

  “What’s the difference? That’s what you do, right? Get things? Well, get me a gun.”

  I pushed down on the gas pedal. The truck bounced across the rough surface of the hay fields.

  “You said you don’t like violence. Guns are very violent, Alison. Do you even know how to shoot one?”

  “I’ll figure it out.”

  I stared straight ahead but without really seeing watching. I was on auto-pilot, but with an objective: justice for Arie.

  “Listen,” said Chase, “I know you’re angry—”

  “Angry? Angry doesn’t begin to describe it. They were following him. Why? What reason could they possibly have? And then he mysteriously gets sick? Goes missing? Then he dies? They can’t do this. I’ll take them out one by one if I have to.”

  I was starting to realize that, on the one hand, Arie’s death was senseless, but in a way some parts of it actually made sense. All the attention Gary paid to us—was he involved? Did Arie discover something dangerous? Is that why he had an encoded journal?

  “This is the grief talking, Al, not you. It’s totally understandable. Getting your hopes up, then finding out he really is gone—”

  I pounded on the steering wheel. “He’s not gone! Arie is not dead! I know he’s not! They’ve taken him. They’ve taken my son.”

  “Just tell me what you’re planning on doing with a gun.”

  I started to cry. “I don’t know. I just—I have to do something.”

  Chase put his hand on my shoulder, and I was mildly surprised that the tenderness in his touch actually had a sedating effect. My shoulders relaxed and my fingers loosened around the wheel.

  “Alison,” he said, “I don’t know you very well, but I do know that you’re not a killer. We can figure this out. I’ll help you. But don’t let your anger make you blind. You’ll make a mistake and it’ll all be over for you, and then you’ll be in no position to help anyone.”

  I breathed in ragged gulps of air to avoid crying uncontrollably.

  “If your kid really is out there somewhere, he needs you to keep it together right now—not lose it.”

  What he said was right, but my jaw clenched. What was I supposed to do with this rage? With this sense of completely helplessness?

  “I wouldn’t be a good mother if I didn’t fight for my son.” I looked over at Chase. “Just get me a gun.”

  *

  Chase tromped along in front of me without speaking as we wound through the shadowy bowels of the haunted house. Ruby and Woolly had gotten back already and sat on benches at the table eating. I smelled the sour but homey scent of stewed cabbage.

  Glen stood at a high table where he stirred a pot with a wooden spoon. “Come eat up,” he said.

  Chase grabbed a bowl and Glen dished up some cabbage for him. Chase took a seat on the bench across from Woolly and tore a hunk from a loaf of dark, coarse bread.

  I wasn’t hungry. Glen offered me a bowl and I shook my head.

  “How about a game?” Woolly asked Chase.

  Chase nodded, but his expression was dark.

  Woolly jammed his hand into the cargo pocket of his shorts and produced a miniature folding chess board with tiny magnetic chessmen.

  They set up the board and Chase made an opening move. The two men noisily slurped up spoonfuls of the cabbage. I realized that many of the utensils there had been lifted from the fake scenes of terror in the haunted house. A beverage tankard shaped like a human skull, beakers and bowls from the mad scientist’s lab. When I came to the table, Woolly scooted over on the bench to make space.

  “Are you doing okay?” Woolly asked me.

  I hunched my shoulders nodded.

  Ruby plopped a bowl in front of me and it splashed onto the table.

  “Eat,” she said. “You’re going to need your strength.”

  I took a bite of cabbage. It was mostly flavorless and tepid, but it was comforting.

  Gracie walked up to me holding a piece of paper and a broken crayon.

  “I drew this for you,” she said. “So that you can remember.”

  She handed me a paper with two stick figure drawings. Arie and me. To remember him. Arie would certainly approve. Without cameras, Gracie’s likenesses of Arie and I would have to do, and like all crayon portraits rendered by children, this one was not only oddly accurate but deeply affecting. I knew Arie was fond of Gracie. It would be impossible not to be. If only he could have gotten to know her better.

  “I love it,” I told her. “Thank you.”

  She smiled at me and I wrapped my arms around her. She squeezed me around the middle. Then I saw that she had lost a tooth.

  That’s how things are with kids, I thought. They’re always changing and progressing. Even when we’re not ready for it. They’re always moving on—even when we don’t want that, when we want them to stop and wait for us to catch up. Gracie sat beside me and rested her head on my arm. We watched Woolly and Chase play their game.

  I suddenly thought of how she’d been watching our house and something occurred to me.

  “Gracie,” I said. “Remember how you used to hide in my backyard? And Arie would bring you food?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you ever see anyone else around there? Anyone hiding or following Arie?”

  She looked at Ruby.

  “S’alright, kiddo. You can tell Al.”

  Gracie swallowed and nodded again.

  “Who was it? Agency men?”

  She nodded again.

  “Do you know who they were? Or what they wanted?”

  “No,” she said so quietly I almost couldn’t hear her. She turned away from me. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.” She walked away and lay down on the pallet bed in the corner of the room.

  Ruby shook her head. “I think they did something to her. You know? We found her half-starved and scared to death that we’d take her to the Agency.” She scowled.

  “Check,” said Woolly.

  Chase frowned and moved his king.

  “So, what are we up to, anyway?” I asked. “The stealing, the hacking, the secret plans.”

  “Guess you oughta know everything”—Ruby tapped her neck to indicate where her chip used to be—“now that you’re really one of us.”

  “Check,” said Woolly again.

  “Dammit,” muttered Chase.

  “We don’t think it’s like this everywhere,” said Ruby. “The way we are. We got no memories. We’re barely surviving. It can’t be like this everywhere, and if it is, it shouldn’t be. Know what I’m saying?”

  I’d thought about this a lot—before I’d ever met Ruby, I’d wondered. Arie had, too. The Agency told us staying healthy was a matter of containment, quarantine. There was suspicion, of course. I was dubious about everything, almost from the moment I woke up in the infirmary, and so were a lot of people. But there was no TV, no Internet, and few utilities. We could talk to one another, but there was no w
ay to trust anything we heard, no way to know what was going on even fifty miles away, let alone out in the rest of the world. The fences and patrols kept us penned up like sheep, but it was the lack of information that really isolated us.

  “Yeah,” I answered. “Of course. But how can we know? How can we establish what’s really going on? Or what really happened?”

  “Those are the questions we’re working on,” Ruby said, squinting one eye and jabbing her chubby finger at me.

  “Something happened,” Chase said glumly. “I’ve seen the graves.”

  “It’s safe to assume there was a global pandemic,” Woolly said. “The evidence is there. It’s in newspapers and recordings that pre-date Year One. It’s the memory effects of the serum, obviously, that are suspect.”

  “So, what do we do?”

  “Figure it out, Al,” said Woolly. “Start from the assumption that the pandemic was real, and that the need for the serum is real, but the memory effects are unnecessary.”

  I thought about it. “Well,” I said, “We need to find a way to keep our memories or get them back. Because if we keep losing our memories, we just stay in the dark.”

  “Correct,” said Woolly. “But we also need the serum. And if we’re assuming that the supposed memory-erasing effects of the serum are simply a measure to control us, to keep us in the dark, as you say, then it’s not the serum we’re afraid of, is it? What we have to worry about is—” he trailed off and held up his hand to let me finish the thought.

  “What we have to worry about is taking the serum from them,” I said. “It’s not the serum. It’s something else. It’s a treatment or drug they add in or give us at the same time.”

  “Check,” said Woolly.

  Chase bonked the table with his fist. “Dammit!” He moved his king again.

  “So,” I said, “we steal the serum before they put in the memory-erasing part.”

  Woolly nodded.

  “And we give it to ourselves,” I said.

  Woolly moved his queen across the board. “Checkmate.”

  Chase tossed his spoon into his empty bowl, then got up to get more cabbage.

  “So, that’s why we broke into the computer room?” I asked. “To find out if this is all true?”

  “Yes,” said Woolly, taking a bite of the dark bread. “Or, more accurately, to find out where the serum is stored so that we can steal it and test our hypothesis.”

  “But,” said Chase.

  “But what?” I said.

  “My computer bit the dust today,” said Woolly. “Power surge or something. Or it overheated. The mo-bo melted like a s’more.”

  “Toldja you should have lifted a couple from the data center,” said Chase.

  “Yeah,” said Woolly with an exasperated sigh. “You’ve mentioned that. I can build another one.”

  “With what? You got no parts. You got no source for parts. You got no source for a source for parts.”

  “I’m gonna check with that old guy out by the bridge who fixes radios.”

  Chase laughed. “Nope. I checked. He doesn’t know a hard drive from a hole in the ground.”

  “I’ve got computers,” I said.

  “I’ll just have to keep looking,” said Woolly.

  “Better look faster,” said Chase, tapping his wrist. “Tick-tock.”

  “Hey,” I said, my voice raised. “Guys. I’ve got hard drives.”

  They looked at me as if they’d forgotten I was there.

  “My son collected them. Computers, cables, adapters. Lots of hard drives. Piles of computer parts.”

  Woolly raised one eyebrow, as if I’d just said something suggestive. “When you say, ‘lots of hard drives’—”

  “I mean boxes of hard drives,” I said. “Some are new, haven’t even been used. Dozens, maybe. All kinds of parts.”

  Chase grimaced. “No wonder I could never find any.”

  “This is the last piece of a big old puzzle,” said Ruby. She leaned forward and squeezed my arm. “Wool’s finally got the files. If he can get his computer back up and runnin’, we can really make some head-way. Then we can find out what happened to Arie.”

  “So, this will really work?” I asked. “We’ll keep our memories—and not get sick?”

  Ruby grinned. “That’s the idea.”

  “And what if they catch us?” I asked.

  Chase was scrutinizing the little chessboard and his humiliated king. “Checkmate,” he said.

  “Yeah,” said Woolly. “So, let’s not let it get to that point. Let’s go computer shopping. Alison, you driving?”

  “Wait till dusk,” said Ruby holding up a cautionary finger. “Don’t attract any attention.”

  “There’s just one thing,” I said.

  “What is it?” Ruby asked.

  “I want a gun,” I said.

  Chase frowned at me. “That’s not a good idea. Ruby, you know it’s not.”

  “What’re you wanting a gun for?” Ruby asked.

  “I just do.”

  Chase shook his head slowly. Ruby just chuckled.

  “Tell you what,” she said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  *

  The truck was a big mistake after all. The people in my Zone were accustomed to seeing Agency patrol vehicles, and maybe the occasional gas-powered scooter, but not loud, fully functioning pickup trucks. Automobiles were not illegal, but they were quite rare. From behind their curtains and blinds, my neighbors peeked out as the Tacoma rumbled conspicuously through the streets, weaving past the debris and the hulks of abandoned cars. Woolly stood in the truck bed bracing himself on the roll bar.

  By the time we reached my street, people were stepping out onto their porches to watch. Woolly waved at them like some humongous pageant queen on a parade float.

  “Gosh, this is how rumors start,” I moaned, slouching in the seat as low as I could.

  “You didn’t tell me you lived in the burbs,” said Chase, waving at a little boy who ran alongside us. “Don’t these rubes not have anything better to do?”

  “We’re driving through their yards,” I said.

  “They’re gonna think we’re newly married.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself.”

  Chase laughed. “Methinks the lady doth protest too much.”

  I parked in the driveway of my house. It was the first time I’d see a car of any kind there.

  Woolly began to climb down out of the bed. At least twenty people gathered on the perimeter of my yard.

  “Let’s go, let’s go,” Chase said, heading to the front door. “We’re attracting attention.” He waved at the people. They waved back.

  “You think?” I said. I prayed Gary wasn’t inside waiting for me. I went to the door and unlocked it.

  “Anyone here?” I called as I opened the door.

  “Who are you talking to?” Chase asked.

  “No one,” I said.

  “Then why’d you ask if anyone was here?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Habit?”

  He narrowed his eyes.

  Woolly clapped his big meaty hands and then rubbed them together. “Al? Where’s the stuff?”

  “In the den past the kitchen. I’ll show you.”

  “No need,” he said, and with that he pulled a flashlight from the pocket of his denim shorts and clicked it on. Then he scooched his bulky frame around us and continued into the dark of the den. Chase gave me a questioning look but then followed after Woolly.

  Just a few seconds later, the beam of Woolly’s flashlight came wobbling back into the living room, followed by Woolly himself carrying a huge plastic tote of Arie’s computer parts.

  “I’ll be back,” he said as he passed by.

  Chase was close behind with a second load. He nodded his head and went out, and soon they came back for more. I stood there in the living room and thought about Arie’s collection and how long it had taken to assemble. I wondered to myself what he’d think about Chase and Ruby and Wooll
y. I was at least happy the computers and adapters and other electronics would not sit in this empty house and be covered over with dust—it was good to know they might help us out after all.

  When Chase and Woolly had made several trips apiece, Woolly came into the house and stood in front of me. He had a contented smile on his face and he bowed at the waist.

  “Once again,” he said, “you have bailed us out of a very tight situation, Al. My thanks to you and your son. Shall we?” He gestured at the door as if inviting me to dance.

  The evening air was cool—fresh and alive. As I started up the Toyota, I felt fresh, too. And alive. Maybe it was again that inextinguishable optimism of Ruby and her little team. Maybe it was having friends in the house where Arie and I had lived. It definitely had to do with the prospect of not losing our memories anymore—the thought of that was like the thought of salvation. Only the hope of seeing Arie again was brighter to me, and as we drove out of my neighborhood under the strange and fascinated gazes of my neighbors, I was sure that with Ruby’s help, I was going to find out what happened to my son.

  Even if I had to kill to find out.

  Even if it killed me.

  CHAPTER 17

  Woolly went to work with the computer cases and parts the moment we got back. He unfastened the screws on the back of one of Arie’s old computers and began pulling out circuit boards and cables as if he were cleaning the innards of some animal. Then he cracked open another of the cases. He examined each component before sorting it, nodding or shaking his head as to their usefulness.

  We stood around him for a while, watching, thinking maybe it would take him only a few minutes or an hour. Soon he looked up at us.

  “What?” he said. “What are you waiting for? Leave me alone. This is gonna take me some time.”

  We wandered off. I sat down on the worn-out old sofa in the far corner of the room. The armrests were frowzy, and on the cushions were overlapping stains in disturbing shades. I idly thumbed a book I found nearby. Chase sat at the table and opened a wooden chess set, arranging the pieces into various positions. As I watched him, I began to nod off to sound of beeps and the whir of computer fans and Woolly’s grunted curses.

  Sometime early in the morning I awoke to a shout of success. I opened my eyes just as Woolly spun around in his computer chair with a wide grin on his face.