by Tara Brown
I should have waited an extra second. The drugs are making me crazy. I'm talking to myself and making mistakes.
I look around. Memories and skills are flooding my mind, as I try to formulate a plan.
Do I stay in the room and wait for Anna to come back? I need weapons. I glance back at the dead doctor and turn the knob closed again. I stumble over to where his tools are splayed across the floor. I bend as best as I can and pick up a couple of the silver knives from the floor. The cold metal in my fingers feels just as amazing as I imagined it would. There are bags of water and other things. I grab them, stuffing a couple in my pockets, and stagger back to the door. I put my hand back on the door and grip the cold knife with the other. I take a breath and imagine how the forest is going to feel when I'm in it again. Leo’s fur and the cold air of the woods; my daydreams consist of so little.
The cold metal and stark white of the room make me feel exposed and naked. The door handle turns again with ease. I open it a crack and peak out. The hallway doesn’t look the way I thought it would. Anna is nowhere to be found; no one is. It isn’t like the breeder farms.
The lights are muted and flickering. They make me painfully aware of the fact that she probably wasn't real. She wasn't really there. I am still alone.
The old fluorescents flicker like they're running on something unstable. Brian's generator was like that. The lights would flicker. Granny's generator was too. I never ran it much, but when I did, it freaked me out the way the power felt half on.
The light in the hallway looks the same.
But the hallway itself isn’t immaculate and stark like the room I'm in. It's dingy and empty of life. I look down one end of the hallway. Nothing stirs. I can see papers on the floor and closed doors. It looks like people fled in a panic, like all the other buildings I've seen. I look down the other side of the hallway to find it looks the same. Nothing is the way I think it will be. It's not clean like the breeder farms or organized. Where am I? How could this be the place Marshall would bring me?
I have a bad feeling. What if Anna was real? Is she safe? Is she alone? I gag as my vision blurs. I don't have the strength to help her.
I whistle softly in case he's with her. Nothing moves or makes a sound. I look up to see if there are cameras or anything. Dad always hated the video cameras that recorded everywhere you went and what you bought. He hated being recorded. He had weird theories about the cameras and the information they gathered. I smile faintly when I think about how crazy I thought he was. He would have loved this place. It would have confirmed so many things for him.
My first steps feel forced, like I'm wading through water. I can't listen to the nothingness surrounding me. I don’t know if I hear everything correctly. The flickering lights are working against me. They're trying to drive me crazy. I twitch and shiver, knowing it's too late; I already am crazy.
There is too much suspense and empty space in the hallway. Sweat is trickling down the sides of my face, making me twitch and wipe it away. The flickering lights make it impossible to get a good view of everything. I see nothing but me, the papers, and doorways, but the flashes won't guarantee I am alone.
I try every doorknob along the hall, but they're locked. The cold of the metal against my fingers is shocking. I think I have a fever. He has injected me with poison and now I'm dying.
I put a hand on the bumpy wall to steady myself. I lick my lips. Everything feels slow and pronounced.
The lights flash at the same rate my heart beats.
I peek around the corner at the end of the hall. Again, I find myself alone in a long corridor with papers and debris on the floor.
A sharp pain hits me in the stomach. I break a rule, not that it matters—I think I've broken them all at this point.
I bend and cry out. I can't stop myself. The pain is agonizing. It feels as if my insides move. I drop to my knees and slide myself along the floor. I ride a piece of paper like it's a magic carpet and grip my stomach with my left hand.
The flashing lights are inside my eyes now. When I close them, I can see the flashing and the hallway. Even in my mind, nothing about this hallway makes sense. Except maybe, the flashing lights. The uneven power supply makes sense.
I move forward on my knees until I feel like I can stand again. I grip a door handle and pull myself up. My legs shake and attempt to buckle. I refuse to fall.
The wall is holding me up completely.
"Leo," I whisper his name. I need his fur in my fingers. I always imagined it would be the last thing I touched. Tears are streaming down my cheeks. I'm going to die alone in a hallway with nothing in my fingers and no wind on my face.
The pain is unbearable.
I lean on a doorknob for a breath, but instead I fall inside. The handle was unlocked. I hit the floor and cry out again. I wait for the room's occupants to attack me. I wait for the sound of my own tearing.
Nothing happens.
I look up and in the flashes of light from the hallway, I see something I never expected. Jesus is looking down on me with huge wide-open arms. He is smiling and telling me that everything is going to be okay. I drag myself into the room and kick the door shut. As the door closes, the light leaves us. Me and Jesus, perfect strangers, sit alone in the dark. I don’t introduce myself. He will know me soon enough.
Chapter Two
In the darkness of the closed-up room, flashes of images pass in front of my eyes—memories of the beginning.
In the flashes and fever, I see the TV at Brian's. It's old and small. When we got there, I didn’t even know how to turn it on. I hadn't seen a TV like it before. Gramps had a huge flat screen. I miss Gramps and Granny.
My dad had his face plastered to the rounded screen the entire time we were at Brian's hiding out. We barely made it there. I remember the panic and pandemonium. I remember the way he dragged me through the woods, yelling at me to hurry up; we needed to get to Brian's. We had left it too late. A tidal wave was coming and we needed to get to high ground and cut through the woods to Brian's. He screamed and I tried to run, but my legs hurt.
Once we made it to the bunker, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't fight the urge to watch the news. It was so scary, and yet, my eyes wouldn’t leave it.
The same news lady was on everyday. I knew her voice better than my own. "We have passed the point of needing blood donations. The public is safer to stay inside and wait it out. Rations and remaining inside are your best bets at this point. Right now, on the Western Seaboard, we believe there to be at least one million cases of the Dengue fever that is sweeping across America. That number is reported cases. We do not know the exact number, as many people are trying to stay home and fight it out." Her face was tired, and the makeup didn’t hide the pain in her eyes. Her perfect brown bob was shiny and clean. She was the last clean person I remembered, before the breeder farms.
I was already dirty when I watched her on the news in Brian's bunker. I glanced back at Dad. I didn’t like the way he nodded, like he was part of the conversation with the news lady. He looked crazy when he turned to me and said, "We leave soon, kid. When the panic is over."
I nodded and hugged my knees in tighter to my body. I looked back at the news lady. Her dark-blue eyes were glassy. I imagined she knew something, but couldn’t tell the rest of us, like how bad it all really was.
She swallowed hard and continued, "In other news, Japan has again been hit by several strong earthquakes. They are ranging between 4.3 and 7.5. As we all know, the Dengue fever is considerably worse in Asia, so this couldn’t come at a worse time for them. Several small tidal waves have already hit Alaska and Northwestern Canada. Power outages and flooding have been bad along the Northwest Coast. Canada is suffering through its own earthquakes. The famous Hot Springs Island in British Columbia is dry. The hot springs are gone. In other news, New York and New Jersey are still underwater from the mass flooding that’s left over from the hurricanes this season." My stomach sank.
Brian turned the T
V off and we sat in the bunker in silence. Dad had been saying it would happen. He had been saying it for as long as I could remember. All the names I'd called him inside my mind started to make me feel bad. I remember thinking bad things about him as he dragged me along the hillside, yelling at me that we needed to get to high ground. The highway was blocked and another tidal wave was coming.
Brian left the bunker a lot. He turned the handle and opened the sealed door in the ceiling. It made a noise like Granny's Tupperware did. I could imagine the outside world. The news images were horrifying, but I would still see it the way it was when we came into the bunker. Only Brian and my dad got to leave. The only fresh air I got was when they cracked the door open to leave. The cold wind shot down the ladder. I would get goose bumps and feel excitement every time.
I hated the bunker. We ate canned and dried food and watched the small TV. The panic was all just the way Dad said it would be. The news footage was scary—looting, bombing and countries at war. Everyone blamed each other for the Dengue fever. Then they all started bombing areas to kill the sick who weren't dying from the fever. It seemed like it would never end.
But then it did, when the TV stopped working. When the power and the water turned off, we sat in the candlelight and spent the days wondering and imagining. What was it like out there?
The day we left the bunker was a bad day. The TV hadn’t been on for two weeks. The last thing I saw was the President making a speech and crying. I missed half of it. I was sleeping. That's all there had been to do in the bunker. I woke to Dad packing the jeep and the bunker door opening.
When we got into the jeep, Dad told me and Brian his plan, again.
He was as impassioned telling it the hundredth time, as he had been the first time. "So we'll cross the freeway at the Green Mountain exit and take the back road till we get to the base of the mountain range, where the cabin is. It's a day's hike up then. There is an old farmhouse there at the base of the mountain that the cabin is on."
I was so tired of the plan. I was so tired of his voice, I could scream with frustration. The only thing getting me by was a copy of a book I found, called Twilight. I'd read it three times in the bunker, always wondering if she ever got what she wanted.
I gripped the thick book to me in the jeep and held back the screams that clogged my throat and left me breathless.
Dad looked back at me, "When the people who live at the farmhouse die off, we can go and see what they have. Farmhouses always have the best stuff. Canning and dried foods, and not to mention, the best survival supplies. Ropes and shovels and extras of everything. Remember that, Em. It's us and them now." I had heard it so many times, I could have choked him. There were moments I hated him.
Brian looked back at me and tried to smile like he always did, trying to make me feel better. Dad never sugarcoated anything. He wanted me to know the worst. He always wanted me ready.
Brian disagreed. He wanted me to be a little kid. But I had never been a kid. I'd always been more.
Sometimes they fought about me, like a mom and dad would. More than my mom and dad ever did.
I would never forget Brian's face as he tucked my hair out of my face, and gave me a small sucker. He always had candy. It was red. I didn’t really like red, but I took it anyway.
He grinned. "It'll be fun at the cabin, kid. Lots of things to do there."
I rolled my eyes. "Fun? My iPad, iPod, DSI, Xbox, and even that stupid eReader Granny gave me, are all dead. What fun is there? I've been to wilderness camp every summer for five years. I know what there is to do at a cabin. It's never been fun."
Brian laughed.
My dad eyed me up in the rearview window. "Em, you know those things are part of a world that doesn’t exist anymore. Your generation is soft—weak. One day you'll thank me for all that camp. I can tell you now, no other girl your age has been going to camp since she was five."
I scowled. "I know." And I did. The other girls at camp always thought I was weird. They had been sent because the other summer camps had filled up and their parents just needed somewhere for them to go for a few weeks. I, however, was almost able to teach the stupid courses. Shooting with a bow and a rifle, setting traps, first aid, and everything else. My favorite thing was when we learned how to make a bow and arrows.
Dad went over the map one last time before we drove away from the bunker. I looked back once and missed it instantly. The place I hated all those weeks was gone, and in its place was the unknown.
The jeep could drive over anything… logs, broken roads where the bombs had dropped, bumps Brian told me not to look at, anything. I covered my eyes and peeked through my fingers.
There were cars, trucks, vans, and people everywhere when we got to the freeway. People had been hiding out in the beginning, but when the food and supplies started to run out, they fled the cities. Everyone ran.
The panic was over by the time we left the bunker. What was left was unimaginable. The road was broken everywhere and lined with burned-out vehicles. A huge, burned-out jet plane sat in a field next to an old house. It looked like a skeleton but burned badly. I couldn’t help but wonder if anyone had lived.
Fortunately, we didn’t have to drive through the city. The freeway was bad enough. I couldn’t imagine the city. Brian lived in the country, in a small town on the outskirts of a city. He bought the house because it had an already-built bunker from the Cuban Missile Crisis.
As we drove, we passed people straggling along the roads in small clusters. They looked broken and half dead. It looked like a movie.
"Every one of those people probably has the fever, Em. You gotta remember that. Every one has the potential to kill you now. It's us and them, Em." The more things we saw, the less annoying his voice got. I gripped the book to my chest. His voice was calm and haunting, like a narration to the things I was seeing.
"The water is going to be sick for a long time where the bombs were dropped. The fields too."
The tear-stained and filthy faces of the people we passed made me feel scared and sick. I'd never felt smaller. I wanted to curl into myself, hug my knees, and rock, but I couldn’t stop looking at them. Cars turned over. Burned-out old trucks. People carrying children and bags. People dragging suitcases on wheels. People holding hands and pulling each other along. People.
"Look at them. They're fools. They still group up." He pointed at a small group.
I saw a man with blood-shot eyes, and I knew from the pictures Dad had shown me that he had the fever.
The man looked at me. His blood-shot eyes seemed like they saw everything inside of me, all my fear.
A little girl who looked like she was my age was walking alone. For a moment, I swore I knew her. She looked lost. She turned in a circle and cried, but no one helped her. They walked by her and ignored her. Just like we did. When we drove by, my eyes met hers. She waved her arms and for a small moment, I swore she screamed my name. Her lips formed it perfectly. Her eyes stopped feeling self-pity and became impassioned. She chased the jeep. But we drove by anyway.
It was us and them.
We got stuck behind a huge crash. A trucker had jackknifed, and between the huge eighteen wheeler and the trucks and cars, we couldn’t get through. We turned around and went back.
Dad and Brian fought. I ignored them and pretended to sleep.
I could hear the others outside the vehicle. I could hear their screams and the crying as we slowed down.
"They're taking the women. Look at that," Dad whispered, trying to hide his voice from me, but I could hear him.
"No doubt looking for healthy females. It's just like Doctor Fitzgerald said it would be," Dad sounded smug and scared at the same time. His whispers scared me. I held my breath.
Then I heard a bang followed by another. Then nothing.
"Holy hell. He shot him, Bri. He shot him in the head. We need to get out of here now."
"Turn around, man. Go that way. Up the hill." Brian sounded scared, which made me scared.
"It's the wrong way."
"Who friggen cares. DRIVE!"
The jeep sped up and I felt a huge bump. Then my stomach felt like it was rolling around inside of me. I lost my grip on the seat and was flung up. The thick book hit me in the face. My seatbelt caught me, and I saw colors behind my eyes as I was thrown back onto the seat. It didn't feel comfortable anymore. It felt hard and scraped my skin.
We turned over and over and loud bangs filled up all the air there was.
I heard them screaming and then it stopped. Then it was just me screaming. We stopped moving, but my lips stayed open and my cries were everywhere.
I heaved slightly and looked around. I was upside-down and hanging by my seatbelt. I clicked it, but I didn't fall. The top of the jeep was closer than it was before. I could see blood. Some of it was mine and some of it came from the front seat. Brian was gone. The windows were gone. I heard a groan.
"Em," Dad groaned.
I reached frantically. "Dad. Dad. I can't see you." His headrest was up and the jeep was bent and crumpled around him. I slithered out the back of it and dragged myself onto the dry, brown grass. There were other cars surrounding us and in no better shape than the jeep. In the distance, I could see other people, but not many. I could see them noticing the accident and pointing.
"Em, the others will want our stuff. Run," he whispered harshly and coughed.
I dragged myself to his window, which was gone. His body was stuck, pinned by the jeep. I pulled on the door handle, but it didn't budge. I cried and scratched and slapped at the jeep. I kicked at the door, but it wouldn't move. I was too small and too skinny, and I couldn't even dent the metal. All my anger, pain, and fear wouldn't even scratch at the cold, hard door.
He looked bad. His body was upside down, but not hanging. The jeep was all around him, snug.
He moaned again, "Em. Run. You can run fast and far, don’t let yourself give up. Take this and run. "
He held nothing out for me to take, but his hand was bent funny. I sat on the grass beside him and cried. I could feel the defeat.