by Jeff Hirsch
“He didn’t just end it with everybody dead, did he?”
I shook my head. Hannah sat down behind me, on the far side of the bed.
“So what happened?”
I turned through the pages until I came to Cardinal running through the Aerie as bombs exploded all around him.
“Cardinal had built this experimental time machine,” I said. “He used it to go back a hundred years, to when Liberty City was still Abaddon. He thought that since he knew what was going to happen, he’d be able to stop everything before it started. He thought he could bring his friends back.”
“Did he?”
I moved the last stack. Pulled an issue from the bottom. Cardinal surrounded by a crowd of men and women in rags. His armor shattered and burned, hanging off him in pieces. His wings gone.
“He tried,” I said. “But everyone thought he was crazy. They drove him out of the city and exiled him to the Gardens of Null.”
“And that’s it?”
“There was supposed to be more, but . . .”
“But what?”
I didn’t say anything. Hannah got up from the bed and moved through the room, her hands brushing over your trophies and your pictures and your books. She stopped at your closet and opened the door. Hangers rattled and pressed shirts swayed. Your running shoes were lined up neatly by the hamper. A scent I thought of as distinctly you—grass and sweat and just-washed clothes—drifted into the room.
“Your brother’s not at college, is he?”
I turned and looked out the window by your bed. Lucy’s Promise was a black swell against a gray sky. I thought of the waters of the reservoir and how it felt to dive into them, to feel the world recede as the cold seeped into my veins. More than ever before, I wished that I was Cardinal, the real Cardinal. I wished I could fly out over the Marvin lines and land by that shore. I told myself that if I could, I wouldn’t be such a coward this time. I’d dive in and never come out.
“Cardinal?”
Hannah sat on the bed by the headboard, waiting, clutching one of your pillows to her belly. I felt like someone had taken an entire universe and stuffed it down inside my chest. It was straining against my ribs and pressing down on my heart.
“My mom and dad had been fighting.” My voice sounded strange in my ears, as if it were coming from somewhere else in the room. “The night of the fifteenth. I guess Dad got sick of it ’cause the next morning he left early. I hadn’t slept at all, so I heard the door slam when he walked out. I didn’t see him again until that night. He must have gone to the park at some point, because by the time he got home, he was already infected.”
I closed my eyes and saw him as he was when I ran downstairs behind Mom. He was standing in the kitchen with his back to the stove. His eyes were red and glassy and he was covered in sweat. When he saw us, he started raving in a voice I barely recognized as his.
“Mom tried to calm him down, but he didn’t understand what was going on. He took the carving knife out of the block to keep her away from him. That’s when Tennant got home. He grabbed me and we ran outside. Things were already happening by then. Sirens. People running in the streets. Fires. Tennant told me to stay where I was, and then he ran back inside to get Mom.”
Hannah shifted on the bed behind me. I was there, with her, but at the same time I could feel that night on my skin. I could smell it. I could see you running toward the open front door and the way the light in the hall made the hardwood floor glow this molten brown.
“I heard them arguing, and then something glass broke and Mom screamed and Tennant kind of stumbled back into the doorway. He had one hand on the wall behind him and the other pressed into his stomach, like he’d just been laughing or something. And then he fell back against the wall and slid down, and his hand fell away and . . .”
There was so much blood. Throbbing red in the porch lights. There were streaks of it against the wall behind you and a growing pool on the floor.
“Dad still had the knife in his hand when he came out onto the porch. He and Tennant gave each other the weirdest look, like they were strangers, and then Dad ran off down the street. Mom and I got to Tennant at the same time. He was so pale. It got really quiet, and then there was this sound of wind chimes coming from one of our neighbors’ yards. Tennant looked up at me and he whispered, We weren’t supposed to be here, before he closed his eyes.”
There was a long silence. My throat ached and my mouth was dry. I started restacking the Brotherhood comics.
“I don’t really remember much else about that night. I guess Mom must have gone for help, and that’s when she got infected. The next thing I knew, it was a day or two later. I was in Monument Park and they were gone.”
The sheets rustled as Hannah moved to the foot of the bed and laid down on her stomach.
“That wasn’t your dad,” she said. “He didn’t know what was happening to him. He was scared.”
“Everybody was scared.”
I lowered the comics into the bin and snapped the lid shut.
“What happened to him?”
“I heard the police caught up with him a few days later,” I said. “He’d ended up with some other guys and they all . . . they’re in prison somewhere outside Black River.”
“You haven’t tried to . . .”
I shook my head. Hannah touched my shoulder. It was gentle at first, tentative, but then her fingers tensed, pressing into my skin. The place where we touched bloomed with heat.
“Hannah . . .”
She wrapped her arms around me from behind and her forehead fell onto my shoulder. She was only there a second though before I felt her stiffen and start to move away. I reached up and grabbed her hand.
“Wait.”
“Card, we can’t be—”
“Don’t go,” I said. “Please.”
“It’s not safe. We—”
I pulled my mask down and kissed her. Hannah’s lips parted with a gasp. I tore off my gloves and took her face in my hands. Her skin was warm and soft.
“Card,” she breathed.
“It’s all right,” I said. “It’s done.”
I kissed her again, and this time she didn’t back away, so I took her by her shoulders and slid her off the bed and into my lap. Her fingertips dug into my back, and mine tangled in her hair. Tremors moved between us, and soon it was hard to tell whether they had started in her chest or mine. Time slipped away. No past, no future, only that moment, right then, with her.
Sometime later we leaned back from each other to catch our breath. She brushed the back of her hand against my cheek.
“How long until . . .”
“Eight hours,” I said. “Maybe ten. A little after dawn tomorrow, I guess.”
“Where do you want to be?” she asked. “When it happens.”
There was a framed picture on your desk. It was too dark to make it out, but I didn’t need to. I knew which one it was. It was the photo Dad took of him and Mom standing side by side, drenched in sweat and grinning madly, giving the camera a goofy thumbs-up. Just behind them was the side of a white moving van. Looking closely, you could see my hands reaching up into the van while you handed me a cardboard box. It was the day we moved to Black River.
“Anywhere but here.”
24
HANNAH AND I sat on the hill overlooking the park. Below us, hundreds of infected circled a bonfire. The hum of their conversation mixed with the smell of smoke and roasting meat.
“The Ferris wheel was your idea, wasn’t it?”
I looked away from the fire and found Hannah watching me.
“It’s okay,” she said. “Greer told me. I was standing by one of the booths with Ren and Makela when he ran up and said, ‘Card said we should take a ride on the Ferris wheel. Just me and you. Together.’ He was all jumpy when we got on. Talking a mile a minute. But then we got to the top of the wheel, and our car stopped. It was so beautiful, with the lights and all the people, that it even shut him up. Before we got movin
g again, he leaned over and kissed me.”
She drew her legs up to her chest, hugging them.
“It lasted about two seconds before we both started laughing. He said he didn’t know if he had any cousins, but he was pretty sure that kissing me was like kissing one of them. I told him I’d rather be kissing Snow Cone.”
She smiled a little at the memory.
“Every time I close my eyes, I want to be back there at the top of the Ferris wheel, but I end up on the bridge instead. Was it like that with you and . . .”
I nodded. She moved closer and laid her head on my shoulder.
“Does it get better?”
“Sometimes it goes away for a while,” I said. “But it always comes back.”
“Not for much longer, I guess,” she said. “Not for you.”
“Yeah. I guess.”
A few guys managed to bring down a small tree at the edge of the park. The crowd cheered as they dragged it over and hauled it up onto the fire, branches and leaves and all.
“Who was he really?” Hannah asked. “Before.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It does.”
“Why?”
Hannah was quiet a moment. “Because I want to know all of him,” she said. “And once you forget . . .”
Down below, the bonfire leaped higher as it consumed its new fuel. Leaves curled and turned to ash. What could I do? Tell her that when I met Greer, practically the first two words out of his mouth were “mongrel” and “trash”? Or that half a second after that, his big brother pinned my arms behind my back so Greer could give me a black eye? Or that they’d done the same thing to Luke Tran and Rashawn Walken and to a dozen other kids like us? Telling Hannah any of that felt like killing him all over again.
“That other Greer—” I said, “—that wasn’t him.”
We watched the fire until it died down and the crowd thinned, wandering off into the dark. Eliot waved up to us, and then the others fell in behind him and he led them back toward the high school.
“How much time is left?” Hannah asked.
I looked at the moon hanging just above the tree line. Pretty soon the sun would be coming up over Lucy’s Promise. “Not long.”
We started down the hill side by side. Hannah took my hand and held it tightly. The feel of her skin, warm and slightly rough against my own, was still so new. We passed the remains of the bonfire and crossed the park. In the days since the riots the rubble had been cleared away and the worst scars in the grass had been filled in. Softened by the moonlight, Monument Park looked almost like new.
“We moved into the school’s auditorium after you left,” Hannah said. “There’s more room and we can get away from everybody else. One day Freeman came by and gave us a copy of Hamlet. He said no one could truly understand what it meant to be human until they’d read Shakespeare.”
“Sounds like something he’d say.”
“So we started reading it which, of course, led the kids to actually wanting to perform it. Maybe it’s crazy, but I thought it’d be good for them. Take their minds off things. Turns out Makela was born to be on the stage.”
We came up out of the park and started along Magnolia Street.
“Makela?”
“I know,” Hannah said. “I thought it would be Astrid, but as soon as Makela got onstage, it was just obvious. She’ll be playing Hamlet, of course. Tomiko is Ophelia. I’m playing the queen.”
“So you’re an actor now.”
She laughed. “I was going to say no, but then I started reading it, and—have you ever read Shakespeare?”
“A little.”
“I don’t think I knew anything that beautiful existed. Most of the time I feel like I’m this jumble. You know? But when I’m up on that stage, saying those words, it’s like I come into focus.”
“I guess we missed it when we tested you,” I said. “You weren’t just a nerd, you were a theater nerd.”
She shook her head. “That’s what I thought at first too,” she said. “But there’s nothing familiar about it at all. I think maybe that’s the reason I like it. It feels new.”
The high school appeared at the end of the street. Its windows were all lit up, casting a warm glow on the brick walls and the lawn that surrounded it. I could see shadows moving around inside. Every room seemed to be filled.
“We’ve still got a few parts we haven’t cast yet,” Hannah said as she crossed into the schoolyard. “I bet you’d make a pretty good Horatio. Oh! Or you could be King Claudius. I think we’ve even got a crown that’ll fit you. We’ll check it out tomorrow after breakfast, and then we’ll—”
“I think I should be alone.”
She turned around and saw me standing at the edge of the sidewalk. The wind whipped her hair over her cheeks.
“When it happens,” I said. “I think I should be alone.”
“Why?”
I thought about the bonfire, how the flames had burned the leaves and the branches off that tree and made the bark into a crust of ash. I imagined the core of it deep inside, pale and untouched. When Lassiter’s was done with me, I wondered what would be consumed and what would be left behind. Would I come out the other side like Greer? Like Dad?
“Because I don’t know who I’m going to be yet.”
I thought Hannah was going to fight me, but instead she came and took both my hands.
“You want to come inside and get your things first? We’ve got your pack and—”
I shook my head. There was nothing I needed. Nothing I wanted.
“There’s a stand of dogwoods on the other side of the park,” I said. “Near the fence. I’ll be there. Come find me in a few hours.”
Hannah’s lips touched my cheek, and then she whispered in my ear.
“Who do you want to be when it’s done?”
Everything that had happened in the last year ran through my mind all at once. The outbreak. Mom and Dad. You. Greer. I felt like a handful of barbed wire had been tied in a knot and buried in my stomach.
“No one.”
She kissed me again, then squeezed my hand and crossed the lawn to the school’s front steps. The door squeaked on its hinges as she opened it. Hannah looked back one last time, and then she went inside. The door shut behind her with a click.
Black River was hushed and still. I left the school and moved along the empty streets until I came to the dogwoods on the other side of the park. I found a place beneath one of them. Wind rustled the leaves, filling the night air with the scent of it. I thought of you and Mom and Dad and Greer and Hannah, and then I turned toward Lucy’s Promise and watched as the first traces of dawn stretched over the summit, turning the black sky a deep ocean blue.
25
THE SUN ROSE over the town and fell again. I stepped onto the bridge that spanned Black River Falls.
The Marvin barricade was a mile and a half up the road, shadowed in the blue-gray twilight. I didn’t see anyone manning it, just a line of sandbags and razor-topped fence. I walked out to the middle of the bridge and knelt in the roadway. The roar of the falls was like a radio caught in between stations. I laid my hand against the concrete and closed my eyes, praying there’d be nothing there, just darkness.
But no. Greer ran past, bare-chested, a blade flashing in his hand. There was a crack of thunder and then the sound of the knife hitting the ground. The world stopped, rewound, unspooled again.
I left the road and went to the stone guardrail. Forty feet below, the Black River was a ribbon of slate turning to foam as it went over the rocks. The sound was tremendous. I saw myself standing beside you down on the bank. It was summer. A month after we’d moved. We were tossing rocks into the water and you were telling me that as soon as you learned how to kayak, you were going to be the first guy ever to go over the falls and live to tell the tale. You laughed, but then the river was gone and I wasn’t on the bridge anymore. I was in the yard across the street from our house, watching as you came stumbling out of the
kitchen and onto the porch. You looked like you’d been laughing, but then your hand dropped away from your side and you fell against the wall next to the open door. Dad appeared and was gone again. And then I was on the porch, taking your hand. It was cold, and you were pale. There was the sound of wind chimes. Someone struck me from behind. Greer. Running past. I was on the bridge. There was the flash of a knife and then a crack and the ping of steel on concrete. A door slammed. I was in my room. Mom was running down the stairs. I followed. Dad’s eyes were red. His back was pressed up against the stove. He had a knife in his hand. He raised the knife. There was a scream, and then you came stumbling out of the kitchen and onto the porch, your hand pressed into your side like you’d been laughing. Wind chimes clattered and pinged. The world smelled like the burnt head of a match. Cardinal told me the great secret of the world, and then he slipped a knife into my hand. His armor was torn. His wings were gone. There was a crack and then a scream and then the clang of a knife hitting the ground. You came stumbling out of the kitchen and onto the porch.
I took hold of the light post at the end of the bridge and climbed onto the railing. It was narrow and peaked in the middle, so my toes hung over the edge and I tipped forward. All I could see was stone and white water. Gravity tugged at me. I closed my eyes again, but you were still there and so were Greer and Mom and Dad.
“Cardinal.”
It was a man’s voice. Quiet enough not to startle me. I saw gray hair and a black coat out of the corner of my eye.
“Leave me alone, Freeman.”
“Just come down off the railing,” he said. “We can talk.”
“There’s nothing to talk about.” He came closer, trying to get within arm’s reach. “I said leave me alone!”
I faltered. Righted myself. Freeman backed off and put up his hands.
“You’re immune,” he said. “Aren’t you?”
The wind whipped at my clothes. I nodded.
He took a small step toward me. “I knew it. All that time with those kids. You had to be. Think about what this means, Cardinal. Whatever’s in your blood might be able to keep people from getting this. Maybe cure the ones who do.”