Kara grimaced as the crow pulled a hunk of something free.
“NatSec drone. Showed up while they were finishing off the screamers. Killed them all in about ten seconds, then buzzed off to its next party.”
“Nice. Don’t suppose they’ll be sending ambulances?”
Kara looked around.
“Do you see anybody who needs one?”
I looked at her.
“I don’t know. Me?”
She laughed again, and I couldn’t help but smile.
“No, Drew. You don’t need an ambulance.” She got to her feet, and offered me her hand. “You need a Band-Aid. Let’s go home.”
We were back on the highway before we saw the first emergency vehicle headed toward Briarwood. It wasn’t an ambulance. It was NatSec.
“Drew?” Kara said.
I turned to look at her. Her chin was quivering, and her eyes were liquid.
“We’re not getting Hannah back, are we?”
I looked away. My stomach was knotted, and my mouth was too dry to speak.
“This is bad, Drew. This is worse than the Stupid War. That was just about the AIs and the fanatics. This is everyone. Hannah’s been gone for . . .” She sniffled, and wiped at her eyes with both hands. “Jesus, Drew. I don’t even know how long now.”
She leaned forward, and rested her head in her hands.
“We’re not getting Hannah back.”
It wasn’t a question the second time. It was a statement of fact.
32. In which Hannah stares into the void, and the void declines to stare back.
“Well,” Nathan said. “I guess this is it.”
We were sitting on his couch, feet up on his coffee table, camp lantern between us. He held the last of his bologna sandwiches out to me. I took it from him. The white bread had taken on a slightly greenish tint, and it was stale enough to break up into croutons. I tore it in half, and handed the bigger piece back to him.
“No,” he said. “You can have it all. You need it more.”
I shook my head.
“Two weeks ago, I needed it more. You’re almost as skinny as I am now.”
That was a little bit of an exaggeration, but not much. Ever since the lights went out, Nathan had been shorting his rations, saying he wasn’t hungry, making sure I got most of everything.
I’d been letting him do it.
I took a bite of the sandwich, grimaced and chewed, washed it down with a swig of bathtub water. I looked over at Nathan. Between his shaggy half-assed beard, his sunken eyes, and the dim blue light from the camp lantern, he looked like the bastard offspring of Che Guevara and a cut-rate zombie.
“You know,” I said. “I’ve been wanting to ask you something.”
He shrugged.
“Shoot. You’re probably the last person I’m ever going to talk to. No reason not to be honest now.”
“Right. So tell me—what’s up with the bologna sandwiches? I mean, I don’t know about your setup here, but when the lights were still on, I could get pretty much anything at all that I asked for, food-wise. We could be sitting here eating the last of our steak au poivre right now instead of bologna and stale Wonder Bread, right?”
He gave me a long, sour look, chewed slowly, and swallowed.
“First,” he said, “how do you suppose that unrefrigerated steak would be tasting right now? Food doesn’t do you much good if you just puke it back up right away. Bologna is very calorie dense, it’s packed with protein, and it will never, ever rot.” He took another bite—maybe the next-to-last bite of bologna he’d ever take. “Anyway,” he said when he’d finished chewing, “I like bologna.”
I finished my last two bites in silence. I did not like bologna, but I had a feeling I’d be missing it soon enough.
“So,” I said when I’d picked the last bit of rind out of my teeth. “What now?”
Nathan shrugged.
“Wait for death, I guess.”
“Huh,” I said. “I see where you’re going with that, but I was actually hoping you’d have some kind of last-minute escape plan to present now.”
“Escape plan?”
“Yeah. If this were a vid, this is where you’d suggest a super-complicated scheme to get out of here. I’d say, ‘That’s crazy!’ and you’d say, ‘Do we have a choice?’ and then we’d do it and it would work somehow and you would totally be my hero.”
He stared at me, downed the last of his bathtub water, and stared at me some more.
“So,” I said finally. “Do you, uh . . . have a plan?”
“No,” he said. “Unless ‘wait for death’ counts as a plan, I do not have one.”
“Huh.”
I looked down at the lantern, and found myself wondering if the battery would give out before we did. A shiver ran from the base of my spine to the back of my neck and down again.
“Hannah?” Nathan said. “Are you, uh . . .”
I groaned.
“Am I what, Nathan?”
“Are you really gonna eat me?”
I stared at him.
“Seriously?”
He looked away.
“Well, yeah. I don’t mean now. Just . . . you know . . . eventually?”
I dropped my head into my hands.
“No, Nathan. I am not going to eat you.”
“Are you sure? I mean, you might have to, right?”
I stood up, and picked up the lantern.
“You are an odd duck, Nathan. I’m going for a run.”
Over the course of the next few trackless days, I did a lot of thinking.
One of the things I thought a lot about was the amount of time I’d spent over the course of my life complaining about being hungry. I thought about sitting in the car with Dad on the way home from practice and saying, “You need to get dinner going when we get home, old man. I’m starving.”
I also thought about all the things Dad had made for me over the years that I’d refused to eat. Pan-seared scallops. Sweet-potato casserole. Shrimp scampi. Corned beef and cabbage. A day or so after that last bologna sandwich, you could have blended them all up into slurry and poured it into a rusty bucket, and I would have eaten it with my face, like a goddamned dog.
By post-bologna day four or so, my stomach actually stopped hurting so much. I think it had just given up by then. I didn’t have much left in the way of energy, and I could feel what little body fat I’d started with melting away. Believe it or not, though, I kept running—not far, and not fast, but I’d had a sort of epiphany. I was a runner. That’s who I was, and that’s who I was going to be until there wasn’t enough meat left on my bones to drag my ass around the track.
When I wasn’t running, which was most of the time, I was hanging around with Nathan. Weirdly, he seemed to be having a much worse time with the whole slow-starvation thing than I was, even though he’d started with a lot more excess fat than I had, and he should have been burning it off at a much slower pace. He got really morose really quickly, and after a couple of days without sandwiches I had to practically twist his arm behind his back to get a conversation out of him.
It was probably another three days on, and I was back on Nathan’s couch, staring into the camp lantern and wondering if it was possible to die from B.O., when Nathan looked over at me and said, “It’s time, Hannah.”
I looked at him. He was slumped half over, head resting on the back of the couch, staring up at the ceiling. I waited. He looked like a boneless chicken in dirty jeans and a hoodie.
“Well?” I said finally.
He closed his eyes.
“Well what?”
“What is it time for, Nathan?”
“It’s time,” he said somberly, “for you to eat me.”
I laughed. He did not.
“Nathan,” I said. “I’m pretty sure I’ve told you several times that I am not actually going to eat you.”
His head rolled over until he was looking at me.
“You have to,” he said. “I’m done for
. You’ve still got a chance to survive.”
I laughed again, but with a little less conviction this time.
“You’re an idiot, Nathan. What am I supposed to do? Just grab an arm and go for it?”
“No,” he said. “I’m not crazy. Obviously, you have to kill me first.”
I rolled my eyes.
“Uh-huh. And how do you propose I do that?”
He took off his belt, and held it out to me.
“You could strangle me.”
I dropped the belt and stood up.
“You know what?” I said. “This is getting weird. I think you need to take a nap. I’ll come back when you’re feeling a little bit less morbid.”
“I could just hang myself while you’re gone,” Nathan said. “Would that be better?”
I was still trying to decide how to answer that when the wallscreen came on.
At first it was just a blank white field. After a few seconds, though, a cartoon dog appeared.
“Hey,” it said. “Hannah. Long time no see, right?”
I looked at Nathan. He looked at me. I turned back to the screen.
“Uh,” I said. “Do I know you?”
The dog managed to look offended.
“Madam, you wound me! And here I’d thought we were the best of pals.”
I could feel my jaw sag open.
“Inchy?”
The dog smiled.
“Ding ding ding! It’s good to see you again, Hannah.”
I stared at it.
“Well,” it said finally. “I’m going to be generous, and attribute this reaction to stunned joy rather than a complete lack of manners.”
I kept staring.
“Or, I guess it could just be brain damage. Anyway, sorry it took so long for me to dig you up, but the Bioteka security guys are annoyingly good at their jobs. Not to worry, though. All you need to do now is sit tight. The cavalry’s on its way.”
33. In which Jordan learns to quit worrying, and love the SZA.
I woke up on Monday morning to find a notice from Briarwood on my phone. They were shutting down for the duration, whatever that meant. I thought about sending out a note to the team list telling everyone to run intervals or something that afternoon. I’d even managed to dictate the first few words before I stopped and looked down the screen in my hand. This wasn’t a snow day. Micah was right. Shit had gotten freaking real, and worrying about cross-country practice suddenly seemed incredibly stupid. I seemed incredibly stupid. We didn’t need to start gearing up for Sectionals, because there wasn’t going to be any Sectionals. I deleted the message, and pocketed my phone.
“Hey,” Micah said.
I looked up. He was standing at the top of the basement stairs.
“Hey,” I said. “No school today, huh?”
He grinned.
“Doesn’t look like it. How do you want to celebrate?”
I sighed.
“First thing, I think we’d better go see what’s left of my house.”
“Wow,” Micah said. “You weren’t shitting me, huh?”
I pulled myself out of his crap-ass electric scooter and slammed the door.
“Nope,” I said. “I was not.”
The house wasn’t entirely burned to the ground. There was a lot of marble and stone in that place, and a lot of tempered steel to support the weight. It was definitely gutted, though. The walls around the windows and doors were blackened, and the roof had collapsed in a couple of places. I held up my phone, snapped a picture, and sent it to my mom. Micah was walking slowly across the yard. The grass and landscaping were torn to shit, tire ruts running back and forth across everything.
“Yeah,” he said. “Something definitely went down here last night, but I’m still not one hundred percent sure it wasn’t just a really crazy party. You might have . . .”
He’d stopped beside one of Mom’s landscaping projects.
“Oh, shit.”
I came up beside him.
There was a body there, half hidden by a cluster of three-foot hostas, sprawled on his back in the churned-up turf.
I’d been right the night before. He was a pimple-faced, dirt-lipped kid. Broken ribs jutted out of his chest where the cab’s tires had rolled over him. Micah turned to look at me.
“You’re telling me that cab did this?”
I nodded.
“There’s probably a couple more in the back.”
We walked slowly around the house. One body was laid out by the reflecting pool. The other was half sitting against the deck. It looked like he’d been pinned there and crushed. Micah closed his eyes, took a couple of deep breaths, and then opened them again.
“Is this all there were?”
I shook my head.
“Somebody was still shooting at me when I bolted.”
“And he just left his friends lying in the yard?”
I shrugged.
“Might have been worried about NatSec coming to clean up the mess.”
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s legit. I saw a thing this morning about drones breaking up a riot in Baltimore with live fire.”
We kept walking. There was a detached garage on the far side of the house. I pulled out my phone and poked the door icon. Nothing happened, of course. I shaded my eyes with my hands, and peered in the side window.
Velociraptor was still in there, safe and sound. Bless, bless, bless.
I was back at Micah’s eating sandwiches on his deck when my mom finally pinged me back.
MBarnes12: Jordan! What the hell did you do to my house??
Jordasaurus: It’s a long and tragic tale, Mom. When are you coming home?
MBarnes12: Coming home? Ha! I don’t have a home! You burned my home!
Jordasaurus: I’m not going into it now, Mom, but trust me—when I do, you’re going to feel like a giant asshole for giving me shit right now. When are you coming home?
MBarnes12: . . .
Jordasaurus: Mom?
MBarnes12: I don’t know, Jordan. There aren’t any flights right now. The rest of the world has pretty much put the States under quarantine. I’ve spoken to your father, and he’s in the same boat. You’re going to have to manage on your own for a while. Do you have a place to stay?
Jordasaurus: Yeah, Mom. I’m fine. I’m staying with Micah.
MBarnes12: Great. Tell him I said thank you.
Jordasaurus: I will.
MBarnes12: Okay. And Jordan?
Jordasaurus: Yeah?
MBarnes12: Please . . . be careful?
“So,” Micah said around a mouthful of ham and cheese. “What does Mommy have to say?”
“Well, she’s not too happy about the house.”
He laughed.
“Yeah, I bet. She coming home?”
I shook my head.
“Looks like I’m an orphan until the world turns right side up again.”
He opened his mouth to say something else, but a crash and shouting inside the house brought us both to our feet. It sounded like Micah’s dad yelling, but I couldn’t make out the words. I followed Micah in from the deck to the kitchen. His dad was standing by the breakfast table, fists clenched at his side. I could hear the sound of his mother’s feet pounding up the stairs. His dad turned to look at us. I took an involuntary step back. He was even bigger than Micah, and his face was murderous. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath in and let it out, then pulled a chair out from the table and slowly sat.
“Dad?” Micah said. “What the shit?”
His father dropped his head into his hands.
“Your mother’s sick,” he said.
“So what . . .” I could almost see the wheels turning in his head. “Oh. Oh, shit.”
“Yeah,” his father said. “Oh, shit.”
It wound up falling to Micah to take care of his mom for the next few days. His father couldn’t be in the same room with her. The first day was bad—puking and diarrhea and a brutal, blood-red rash, with a fever that the analgesics w
e gave her couldn’t touch. The second day she was pretty much unconscious. We tried to get her to drink a little water every hour or two, but other than that we pretty much left her alone. By the third day, she was starting to look better.
By the fourth day, she was yellow.
Micah’s dad was gone by then, staying in a hotel somewhere because he just couldn’t bear the thought that his poopsie had banged some random Goo Flu zombie while she was supposed to be picking up groceries. Micah tried to tell him that it wasn’t her fault, that it was pheromones and whatnot that made her do it, but his dad was having none of it.
It took all of three days before Micah’s mom tried to molest me.
I woke up in the coal-black dark of Micah’s basement, disoriented, knowing something was wrong but not able to figure out what it was. I’d been having a really freaky sex dream, and for a minute I thought I was still in it, because someone was touching me.
Someone was touching me, I mean.
I jerked upright on the futon and scrambled backward.
“Shhhh,” a voice whispered. “It’s okay, Jordan. It’s just me.”
“Shit,” I said. “Micah’s mom?”
She laughed.
“My name is Moira, Jordan.”
“Micah!” I yelled. “Get down here, Micah!”
She tried to shush me, but I pushed her hand away and kept yelling. I felt the futon shift as she stood. I heard two or three quick steps before the door at the top of the steps opened and the lights came on.
“Jordan?” Micah said. “What the hell, brother? You having night terrors or something?”
That’s when he saw his mom. She looked up at him, then back at me, then burst into tears.
Micah put a lock on the basement door the next morning.
We settled into a routine over the next week or so, Micah and I. Most mornings, we hung around the basement with the lock thrown while his mom made breakfast and watched the world fall apart in slow motion on the living-room wallscreen. Sometime around noon she’d go up to her bedroom, and we’d come up to the main floor to eat. Afternoons we’d go for runs around the neighborhood.
That ended the Saturday after my house burned, when NatSec declared a twenty-four-hour curfew until the crisis was resolved.
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