The side effect of the discomfort, however, was that it gave him time to think about what he was doing. Did he really want to do this? He was not sure yet. For now, he was only taking a walk to clear his head. The key…well, maybe he could just say he had dropped something in the hallway in their rush to reach the stairwell.
Even as he reached the stairwell, however, he knew this would be a weak excuse. He should just turn back right then and hope they were both still asleep. He dreaded the conversation he would have with Victor if Victor was awake when he returned.
His face flushed with guilt and bitterness. Why was it always his role to make mistakes? Why could he never escape his brother’s shadow?
Life is a circle, he thought absently. Just when you’re farthest from where you began, you start coming home again.
Haunted by this inchoate idea, Dante opened the stairwell door and stepped into the hall. He closed the door behind him, leaving it locked just in case the middle-aged “zombie” returned.
He slipped the key into his pocket and turned on the flashlight. A cat shrieked outside, its garbled voice reaching Dante through a broken window.
Left or right? he thought, turning the flashlight on the darkness. He kept the beam of light low, not daring to shine it down the center of the hallway for fear what he might see. If he did shine the light into the darkness, he supposed, he would either see the reflection of a pair of eyes or there would be nothing at all. If someone was watching him, he would slip back into the stairwell and go back to the rooftop. If nobody was there…
Despite this logic, he kept the light low to the ground and moved into the darkness, continuing away from the main entrance of the hospital. Pictures lay smashed on the floor, leaving a litter of glass Dante was careful to sidestep. A heap of white powder had been spilled on the ground, and, like some hunter’s experiment, tracks could be read in the powder: human, yes, but animal as well, cats and raccoons and rodents.
This hospital may be dead, but it never sleeps. And suddenly Dante knew that if the world ever righted itself again, he would know the perfect line for a horror movie.
He pushed through a pair of swinging doors, careful to ease them back in place. His light caught a laminated map on the wall showing the floor plan for the hospital in colored sections. According to the map, they had come in through the north entrance. Up ahead, where the corridors formed a T, he could turn left (east) to reach Environmental Services, or right (west) toward Human Resources, a branch of executive offices, and (if he continued much farther) the Sleep Disorders Center. Dante was curious to know what he would find at this last stop, not least of all because he was currently feeling like an insomniac, but for now he had bigger fish to fry.
He followed the West Corridor, then turned left at Human Resources. At the end of this second corridor, he reached the first of his two objectives.
The snack machine had been pulled forward, landing hard enough to smash the front window and rip the cord from the outlet. Dante considered the likelihood of finding anything underneath. Not good. Still, he hadn’t limped this far for nothing, so he placed the flashlight between his teeth, let the rifle hang free from his neck, and placed both hands beneath the edge of the snack machine.
He was able to get it off the ground, but not enough for him to move his hands underneath and finish righting the machine. Besides, how loud would it be when it landed on its feet? It might rock back into the wall, and there was no telling what might be attracted by a sound like that.
He sat on the edge of the machine. Strike one. Maybe this was a sign he should just turn back now, forget all about it. What was he hoping to find, anyway? What good could it possibly do?
Rising again, certain he wouldn’t be able to sleep without knowing, he continued down the dark hallway. He did not have to walk far. Just before the North Corridor that would loop him back to the stairwell, he reached his final destination.
The shelves outside, once lined with plastic bottles and little cardboard boxes, were now nearly empty—except, perhaps, for diarrhea medication and similar treasures. But on the other side of the counter built to hold customers at bay, maybe, just maybe, he would find something others had missed.
Armed with this slim hope, not hesitating for fear he would change his mind, he crawled over the counter and limped into the pharmacy.
Chapter 26
Morning came early to the rooftop, bright, clear, the sky flushed with strips of pink cloud. It was enough to make even Victor, a man with little artistic talent, imagine how it would feel to spend that morning with no greater ambition than to transcribe the sky’s beauty to canvas.
But what drew him even before the sky was the rich and salty scent of meat. Scarlett was cooking on a propane camp stove, humming a tune, her back to Victor. He watched her. Absently she tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. The rest was hidden beneath a blue knitted cap.
After a few minutes, his stomach growled loudly. He straightened his back and stretched, faking a yawn just as Scarlett turned her head toward him.
“Sleep alright?” she asked.
“Just fine. That smells awfully like bacon, but it can’t be bacon…right?”
She lifted a tin of whitish-pink uncooked meat. “Spam,” she corrected.
“Ah. Should I be worried?”
“Why, you’ve never tried it before?”
“Can’t say I’ve had the pleasure.”
“It’s really not bad,” she answered. She shook the can in an effort to dislodge the cube of meat. It came free with a plop not unlike the sound of the fish down in the basement when they broke through the surface.
“Heart attack in a can,” Victor pronounced. “At least we’ll die with full stomachs.”
“You sound like your brother. He’s the joker, right?”
“Something like that.” Victor rose and sat on a cooler set against one of the AC units. He could see the morning through the front of the tunnel, light shedding across other rooftops, sparkling against crystals of dew.
“Must have been nice,” he said. “Waking up to this view every day.”
“You get used to things, even the beautiful ones.”
He nodded, keeping his eyes on the daylight.
Scarlett flipped the slices of Spam with a plastic fork. “So are you two close?”
Victor thought about that. “We’d do anything for each other.”
She smiled patiently. “That’s not the same thing.”
“We weren’t very close before all this, no. He had his life, I had mine. We did everything together as kids. Then I was off to the military, and Dante—well, he had some things to figure out.” Victor always felt a need to justify Dante’s choices, make it sound less like Dante was just another kid who never learned how to grow up. He tried not to think about Dante that way, but considering the radically different paths they had chosen, it was a difficult task.
“It’s good, though—you two having each other,” Scarlett replied. “Living on your own can change you. You lose the chance to see yourself through someone else’s eyes.”
“Is that how you felt when you lost Calvin?”
She flinched. Victor realized it was too soon, the wound too fresh. “Sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have—”
“No. No, it’s fine.” She pressed her lips together in a thin line, half smile and half frown.
“Were you two together?” Victor asked.
“He was thirteen. Just a kid. But he was someone I could talk to. He always listened, never complained. He was like a little brother to me.”
Victor allowed a respectful silence to follow her words as she turned off the stove and handed him a paper plate with slices of Spam on it. It did smell almost like bacon.
“Sorry I don’t have bread,” she said.
“Don’t apologize.” He crunched into one of the slices. It was salty, fatty, and tastier than he would have expected. Considering the calories he’d been burning lately, he thought he could have eaten three or f
our cans of the stuff before blunting the edge of his hunger.
“Tell me something,” he said after they had eaten in silence for a few moments. “Why were you on the run?”
She frowned at him. “I told you, I was scavenging for supplies.”
“Really?” Victor answered. “When I brought you back to that brook, you were ready to head south—the opposite direction you came from.”
“Maybe I was worried you would follow me.”
“Or maybe you decided the place you came from wasn’t right for you.”
She finished her breakfast and set the plate aside. The sun was quickly rising, dawn advancing to day, but Victor didn’t want to leave until he had his answers. Dante went on sleeping. He must have been exhausted.
“It was…difficult, living there,” she began.
“It couldn’t have been too bad if you’re willing to take us back there.”
She didn’t answer. Her eyes had taken a far-off look, lost in some distant memory.
“Whatever’s waiting for you back there,” Victor said, “I’ll protect you.”
She met his eyes. Hers were the blue-gray of a troubled sea, deep and restless, and Victor felt as though he was seeing her now for the first time. All that sarcasm was just a bluff to hide how vulnerable she really was.
“Are you sure you can keep that promise, Victor?” she asked softly.
“I can try.”
She held his gaze a few more seconds before turning away. She rose, looked out at the day, and it was as if she had closed a door on everything they had just said, the moment they had shared.
“You should wake your brother,” she said, hardly meeting Victor’s eyes now. “We don’t want to waste any more daylight.”
___
The hospital was silent as they retraced their journey back to the front entrance. They soon discovered the city was not as lifeless as it had seemed the previous night. Shopping carts laden with clothing and liberated trash rattled up and down the alleys; voices shouted across streets, window to window, passing news and asking about each other’s health; sleepy faces peered at the three travelers through the grimy windows of vehicles with broken windows, empty hoods, and sagging tires.
The city was alive, but it was more the life of insects gathered beneath a rotten log than of human civilization. Strangers watched them on the street but kept a safe distance away. An old man with sunken cheekbones shouted a vulgar suggestion to Scarlett from the steps of a pawn shop. Victor showed him the barrel of his Colt, and the old man went scurrying into the shop on all fours.
“Cockroach,” Victor murmured, lowering the gun to his side.
“How much farther do we have to go?” Dante asked. “I don’t like being watched. It reminds me of some people we passed when I was with the horsemen.”
“The Junkers,” Victor said.
Dante snapped his fingers. “That’s right. Strange people. I could’ve sworn they wanted to eat us.”
“Horsemen?” Scarlett asked. “You mean the ones who kidnapped you?”
“It’s a long story,” Victor said. “I’ll tell you another time.”
She nodded. “You might have to.” She pointed to a billboard on the side of the street. Over a sign that read OLD RUM: ALMOST AS HARD TO FIND AS WHITEY BULGER, red graffiti depicted a hammer crossed over a scythe.
A quarter mile later, Victor saw it: A high concrete wall, topped with coils of barbed wire, cutting across the congested highway. Figures in riot gear manned a street-level gate, while others with rifles stood atop the wall and watched a stream of refugees jostling one another to get to the gate.
“Holy guacamole,” Dante murmured. “They’re Communists?”
Scarlett shrugged. “Everyone needs a cause, even if it’s a bad one.”
“I should have brought my Stalin portrait. I could have sold it for mucho dinero.”
Victor jumped on the trunk of an old Audi and saw that there was more than just a stream of people trickling through the gate. The stream backed up to a pool of hundreds, perhaps even thousands of people milling among the vehicles, nursing infants, holding children on their shoulders, wheeling suitcases and shrugging in their backpacks. Victor saw children kicking a soccer ball in a tight circle, teenagers holding hands and kissing on the hoods of cars, elderly people in wheelchairs reading newspapers, a pair of brother and sister recognizing one another across the crowd and pushing toward each other with tears on their faces.
So much life, so much promise, a chance right here for society to start over. After the isolation Victor had experienced for the past few years, the sight was staggering. So many people. Maybe the end hadn’t yet come, after all.
He jumped to the ground.
“This is it,” Dante said. His eyes were feverishly bright. “This is our second chance.”
Victor smiled. “It sure is, Dante,” he said, looking away, taking in the view, pretending he was every bit as happy as his brother was.
Chapter 27
“There are two types of people in the world,” Allen had told Jenny, “and you’re neither of them.”
He’d said this as a compliment, back on one of those long summer evenings sitting on the porch while the rest of the Fairfield children Jenny’s age played duck-duck-goose, musical chairs, Red Rover Red Rover, and other games to forget the troubles behind and ahead. There was a bonfire on the town common only twenty feet from the stump of the old Christmas tree. Every year the town decorated that spruce, capping it with a large copper star shaped by Jenny’s grandfather, until last winter someone cut it down, throwing the green wood into a fireplace to ward off the cold a little longer.
Now all that was left of the tree was an old, half-rotten stump bleeding sap. But it taught Jenny a lesson. Even at ten years old, she looked at that stump and understood: Nothing is sacred any more.
“Allen,” she whined in an exaggerated voice, “that’s not how the joke goes.”
Allen’s smile was pure contentment. “No, maybe not, but it’s true. I suspect that’s the reason you’re sitting here with me instead of playing with the other kids.”
“I’m not playing with them because their games are silly.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Their games are silly, or it’s silly to be playing games?”
She dug her toe into the dirt at the bottom of the porch steps, creating a small impression like those made by the antlions in the sand behind the school. She and a friend had once dug one of the insects from its lair and set it on a picnic table, then held twigs in front of its face and watched it attack them with its mandibles. She remembered hearing that the antlion was only a larva that would one day emerge from a cocoon and fly high above the ground it used to burrow inside. This idea fascinated Jenny.
“I never wanted this for you,” Allen said in a different voice. He leaned back on the steps and stared at the bonfire. “I wanted to give you the chance to live a normal life. Guess it wasn’t in the cards.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in chance.”
He smiled. “Just an expression.”
She watched a carpenter ant crawl across her foot, running some mysterious errand. “You mean I’m not normal?”
Allen immediately reached over and pulled her to his chest. “No, honey, that’s not what I mean.”
“Do you think that’s why I’m not playing with the other kids? Is something wrong with me?”
“Nothing’s wrong with you, okay?” He cupped her cheeks and stared into her eyes. “Okay?”
He let her go and she settled back on the steps, hip to hip with her second father. Sometimes she thought he was the only person in the world capable of understanding her. Ever since the night she had been taken from her parents, she had questioned how she could ever be normal again. It was like going down a river in a boat and coming to a fork, and as soon as you take the left you know you should have taken the right, but it’s too late now because the water will never let you return. And so you wonder where you might have g
one, who you might have been, if you had chosen the right path.
Only she hadn’t chosen, had she? Or might she have gone down the other side of the fork if only she had been a better daughter?
Allen added, “I just hope you understand you have my permission to act your age.”
The children were gathering around a woman with gray hair who had promised them a frightening tale about someone named Edward Poe. Or maybe it was Allen Poe—Jenny couldn’t remember.
“Sure you don’t want to join your friends?” Allen asked. “You’d really prefer to sit with an old fart like me?”
“You’re not old,” she said, punching him in the arm.
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