by Matt Richtel
“What next?” Eleanor said.
Nobody responded.
“I’m concerned this person may be violent,” Lyle said.
“Ditto,” said Jerry.
“Why?”
“Because that’s the precautious way to think,” Jerry said.
“Precautious?”
“This syndrome, it might impact how people behave. I’m not sure about that.” Lyle was thinking about how the man on the airplane had been hit in the head. Someone had done that.
“What does that have to do with the radio waves?” Eleanor said. “You keep asking about them.”
“I’m thinking of onset. Sorry, dumb fancy word. When this syndrome hits, what happens. Do we feel something, or react in some way? How much time do we have before . . .”
His voice trailed off.
“Maybe the guy is just as scared as we are,” Eleanor said. She pulled up the pickup parallel to the station wagon, left it idling.
There was a flash of light and—rat-tat-tat—bullets tore through the front of the pickup.
Twenty-Four
The world lurched forward. That’s what it felt like. Bullets tore into the tires and they deflated and the pickup truck lunged with its passengers like it had fallen to its proverbial knees, sending everyone tumbling. Lyle’s forehead smacked the front panel. The girl wailed from the backseat. Lyle felt the clutch of Eleanor’s hand on his leg. He saw the blood on her own forehead as she bounced back. Jerry, head low, cracked the passenger’s-side door.
Rat-tat-tat. Another two bullets spat at the front of the car.
Steam hissed from the engine, a spark flew, metal clanged, and then silence again. The message seemed pretty clear: Don’t move or I’ll shoot.
Without taking her hands from the steering wheel, without moving perceptibly at all, Eleanor said quietly: “He’d probably have killed us already if that’s what he wanted to do.”
“Sounds like a semiautomatic, at least,” Jerry said with equal care. “We’re outgunned. But if I can get a clean look—”
“Jerry, Jerry. Don’t even think about it. If I had to guess, there’s someone out there who is just as scared as we are. So let’s not spook him further. Dr. Martin?”
“Sounds right to me, Captain.”
“You don’t think it’s some half-sick madman? Like with the disease or something?” Alex said from the back. “We’ve got children here.”
“Good point,” Jerry said.
For Lyle, the world felt like it had split into two or, rather, into two screens, each showing different camera angles of the same scene. One camera focused on the house, quaint but deadly, hiding a powerful weapon and its trigger person. The other camera focused on the car, and the people in it, the formations of alliances and coalitions, primitive psychology forming. Whom to trust? Jerry was like a less-evolved animal, dangerous, impossible to communicate with but possible to manipulate and fundamentally unaware of his primitive psychology. Quite the opposite of Alex. Every time she spoke now, Lyle sensed her many layers. She stared at him almost like he was a savior or lover. Other times, as if he were a foe.
Maybe he was going nuts, he thought.
“Deep breaths,” Eleanor said. “Let me tell you what I’m going to do.”
She explained that she would slowly open the door, hands up, and walk in surrender toward the house and let the person understand the situation.
“No, please.” It was Alex. “You’re too important. I’m just a . . .” Before she finished or could say anything further, she’d opened the passenger-side back door and climbed over the boy. A bullet spat the ground in front of the truck but she stood her ground.
“Back in the truck,” Eleanor said as patiently as she might, clearly about to lose her shit.
“Jerry,” Alex said. “Don’t let him shoot me.”
“Get back in the truck,” Eleanor repeated.
“Keep your hands up,” Jerry said. “Tell him you don’t have a gun.”
“Don’t let him shoot me.”
“Give me a sign if he’s crazy,” Jerry said.
“Like what? Like a little loco sign behind my back?” Alex whispered.
“Draw him out.” Jerry sounded like he’d been thinking it all along.
Alex took another step forward, arms raised, and yelled toward the house: “We have children!”
She took another step. Now she was a step in front of the pickup. This time, no shots. From the backseat, the girl whimpered and now the boy choked out a sob, too. “You two, keep it down, I don’t want to have to ask you again,” Jerry said. “I will get you out of this.”
Alex took two more steps forward. Then two more. Now she was within fifteen feet of the porch. With the headlights shot out of the pickup, she was getting less visible. Wind had joined the snow, blowing from the west. Arms over her head, Alex balled her fists for warmth.
She said something the people in the pickup couldn’t hear and then the right side of the downstairs curtain moved. Not a lot, but enough to indicate the whereabouts of someone in the house.
“We have children and a doctor,” Alex said. “We landed on an airplane.”
Eleanor clutched Lyle’s leg, and he reached over and took her hand.
From inside the house, a voice said something that sounded like: “Slowly.”
“I can’t hear,” whispered Eleanor. “Damn it.”
Alex took two more steps and stopped and raised her hands higher. She said something else.
“Channelopathy,” Lyle said, almost exclaimed, with some wonder.
“What?”
“Of course, ah,” he said.
Alex took a step forward.
“We should stop her,” Lyle said. He was emerging from a trance.
“Why? What are you talking about?”
Lyle reached over and honked the horn. H-o-o-o-o-n-k.
“What the hell are you doing?” Jerry pulled Lyle back. Lyle hardly seemed to notice, so lost was he in thought. “Sodium ion channels, it’s got to have something to do with that.”
Alex took another step forward. She was talking but they couldn’t hear what was going on. Alex had lowered her hands. One of them she now held behind her back and she was twirling it in a circle, the loco sign. This guy in here is nuts.
“Draw him out,” Jerry muttered.
“No,” Lyle said. “We need him. We need—”
The front door to the house opened, slightly, and a gun barrel emerged, pointed at Alex. She made the sign behind her back again. Somewhere along the line, Jerry had opened his door and now he was moving himself outside of it. “I’m a doctor,” Jerry lied, talking in the direction of the house. He had the gun pinned to his right side trying to keep it blocked from the gunman’s view.
“You’re going to get us all killed,” Eleanor said. “Dr. Martin, why do we have to keep her out of the house?”
“I don’t know. She knows something.”
“You don’t know? You don’t know?!” Eleanor hissed.
“Tell him I’m a doctor,” Jerry said to Alex, who stood with her hands now back in the air. She said something. The person from the house pushed the door open.
Images and thoughts were colliding inside Lyle’s brain: the passenger on the tarmac, the one on the couch, their smiles, the frozen screen with The Godfather, an old man with his head bludgeoned, the girl clutching her head. The way the static electricity woke up that man. It would be about sodium channels and epilepsy. What was the connection there? It had to do with how the brain transferred electricity.
His mind’s eye searched through his mental archives while through an actual blank stare, he watched as Jerry took another step forward in front of the pickup. His hands inside his jacket hid the gun.
“Jerry, tell her to come back,” Eleanor said.
He ignored her.
Alex took another step forward, then she dropped to her knees.
“What’s going on up there?” Eleanor muttered.
The fro
nt door to the house swung open and a man stood with an automatic gun slung over his shoulder. Tall and round, but sleek in his full-length leather jacket. On his woolly head, a kerchief pulled tight like you might see on a biker.
Jerry dropped to his knees and the shooting started.
Twenty-Five
Pop-pop-pop.
It was over in under two seconds.
The man in the doorway flopped backward, his hand making a last clutch at the door frame and then he collapsed.
“That’s right. That’s what I’m talking about!” Jerry exclaimed. He sounded like a high school linebacker who had just flattened a receiver.
“Jesus,” Eleanor said.
Alex lay on the ground.
“You all stay right where you are,” Jerry said. “We need to make sure he didn’t have company.”
He kept his body low and closed in on Alex. When he got to her, he gave the thumbs-up sign to indicate she wasn’t hurt. Then, still crouching, he made his way to the porch. He pasted himself against the wall next to the front door.
“Crack shot,” Lyle said to Eleanor.
“All clear!” Jerry said. “Let’s get these kids inside where it’s warm.”
Eleanor grabbed Lyle by the sides of the face and turned him her direction.
“Are you seeing something here you recognize—medically? If so, I would really appreciate you communicating it to me.”
He switched his gaze from Eleanor to Alex, watching how she watched him—with some fascination. He needed to talk to her.
The porch lit up, presumably from Jerry flicking a switch inside the door. Now it was clear that there was another building, to the right and set back slightly from the house. Out here it might be called a carriage house or even a barn, but in the city, another living quarters, like a cottage. Out front of it sat a sedan. It had only a dusting of snow on it. The image suggested to Lyle that people were inside the small building.
“Have you ever had a seizure?” Lyle asked Eleanor.
“Yes.”
“You have?”
“Two, actually, minor, when I was young, some strange syndrome that passed.”
“You remember what they were like?”
She remembered. Like her world had locked up. “These people had seizures, or are having them?”
“It’s just seizures aren’t viral.”
“So it’s not a seizure.”
“I’m not sure. When you had a seizure, what do you remember about it?”
“I just told you; the world paused.”
“Sorry, what did you remember about what happened beforehand, like, what were you doing when it happened?”
Eleanor processed the question. She couldn’t remember a thing, that was the problem; she felt like she’d lost hours of her life, like they’d gone blank. She told Lyle. He nodded. Short-term memory loss, he said, a common side effect.
“I need you to talk to me, Dr. Martin. I’m not sure what or who to trust and I need information. I’m not trying to play captain here. I’m trying to play reasonable adult in a totally alien situation. What would we do if this were another planet?”
“I’d take you to dinner.”
“What?” She laughed, seeming both slightly irritated by and appreciative of the random nature of the comment.
“It’s been a long time since I met someone who welcomed my opinion in an adult conversation,” he said.
“Hold it together, Dr. Martin.”
“I don’t know who or what to trust at this point.”
“You can trust me,” Eleanor said.
“Yep.”
Lyle reached into the glove compartment and fumbled around. His hand returned with a pen that he used to write something on a yellow scrap of paper he’d found. He scribbled on the paper and ripped it in half. He handed half to Eleanor.
“Put this in your pocket,” he said.
“What is it?”
“A note. Put it in your pocket. For later.”
She looked at it quizzically.
“Trust me.” He caught her eyes with his own and held the look for emphasis.
Then he stuck the other half of the scrap of paper in his back pocket. Lyle looked again at Eleanor and said, “You want to know the thing that my ex-wife hated most about me?”
“Not right now.”
“The thing she hated most was that I had instincts about things that I couldn’t prove, that often seemed wildly off base but that wound up being true. Like when I realized she was pregnant with someone else’s child even though I had no real basis for knowing it was true.”
“There are children in the car.”
“This is one of those times.”
“So you handed me a piece of paper with scribbles on it?”
“Something’s about to happen,” Lyle said. He slid out of the pickup.
He got out of the vehicle, sensing Alex and Jerry were watching his every move. He guessed that Jerry would be furious he’d had this intimate exchange with Eleanor, face-to-face.
“You gotta see something,” Jerry said. “Get a load of this.”
He was standing in the doorway of the house, gesturing to Lyle. Every part of Lyle wanted to ignore him.
“What are you afraid of, Lover Boy?” Jerry said.
Lyle saw that Jerry was trying to play off his lover boy comment as no big thing. He was clearly pissed while Alex’s face was implacable.
“What are you afraid of?” Jerry repeated and gestured Lyle over with his gun. Lyle couldn’t figure a way around it. He walked up the slick stairs onto the porch. He stared down at the body and then peeked inside the house and found himself fascinated. What was it about this place and this man that left him unharmed—well, until he was gunned down? The first thing Lyle saw was the image of the serpent. Along the far wall on the first floor, a banner hung with a picture of a snake. Lyle took a step inside. It smelled of cooking, boiled meat, Lyle guessed, coming from an open-style kitchen separated from the room where Lyle stood by a yellow linoleum countertop. The place was lit by a camping lamp. It showed a couch with a blanket folded neatly across it and a recliner. Along the wall to the right, a startling sight: stacks of canned goods—corn was the first thing that struck Lyle’s eye, and peas and chili—and cases of bottled water. Someone was ready for the apocalypse. To the left, there was a trophy case made of thick glass. It was filled not with trophies but with guns, big, powerful guns, stacked horizontally.
In the middle of the room, though, were the two things that most caught Lyle’s attention: a camping light that lit the cabin and a small black radio.
“What is that?” Lyle asked Jerry.
“Narrowband radio.”
“Who uses it?”
“Public safety folks, hobbyists. You know what kills me?”
“What?”
“I took out one of the good guys.”
“What do you mean?”
“Prepper.”
Lyle took his meaning and knew it was right. This dead guy was one of those militarized citizens who was “prepping,” preparing for the collapse of the government or society. Not just planning for it but hoping for it, probably. When the whole thing collapsed, the spoils would go to the ones who had stocked up on guns and food and the tools of survival.
Lyle started walking through the house taking everything in. The place was orderly to the point of being pristine. A room behind the kitchen was too dark to make out but seemed to be an office. A doorway to the right of the kitchen was padlocked. Back in the living room, he looked at the banner of the serpent: Don’t Tread on Me.
Jerry was no longer in the room. Alex fiddled with her phone.
“I’m getting a signal,” she said. “I think the network is back.”
Lyle couldn’t pinpoint what was so extraordinary about this place.
“Something’s changed,” Alex said. “Things are making sense to you.”
He stared at her. Was she turning insane?
“I don’t know yo
u that well but you seem to be in a kind of thrall,” she said.
“He doesn’t have electricity,” Lyle answered. “That’s it. He’s off the grid.” He looked again at Alex. “Tell me how you’re feeling? Does your head hurt?
“Have you stopped limping?”
He stared at her leg. It no longer had that nuanced rectitude in it. He shook his head, wondering what to make of this new puzzle piece. Something about her immune system? No, it meant something else.
“You don’t really care about her,” Alex said, ignoring his question.
“I think you need to lie down.”
“Eleanor, the captain. That was an act, wasn’t it?”
Outside, the car honked. It honked again.
Alex smirked. “I’ve been watching you.”
He stopped now and stared at her as if she were lying on the autopsy bed. Outside, the honking was going nonstop.
“Please, lie down,” Lyle said. He started walking to the door. He felt his phone buzz. Then he felt Alex’s hand on his arm. He turned and saw an odd look on her face, like she had grand plans.
Twenty-Six
The horn outside the cabin continued to blare. “They’re in trouble,” Lyle said to Alex. It wasn’t the sort of stupid obvious thing he usually said, but this woman was well more than unnerving him. What the hell was she talking about?
“It’s only the beginning.”
“What?”
“This is alpha, not even beta, not quite the way it should go. Give me a month to work the kinks out. You helped find them, the kinks. Of course you did, I knew you would. We needed a genius, the world did, and there you were.” She paused. “I had no idea it wouldn’t work on kids. I’m glad, of course. They need it so much less.”