by Ronald Malfi
It was less like a 7-Eleven and more like one of those sundry gift shops that populated the boardwalks of beach towns, with novelty T-shirts, souvenirs, and stuffed animals hanging from wire carousels. There was a food aisle, comprised mostly of canned goods, bags of chips, and dry, packaged noodles; a clothing aisle, with gaudy summer clothes and silly hats on display; a hardware section; and a rack of magazines—mostly pornographic—against one wall.
David crossed up and down the aisles, grabbing items at random. When he came upon a Cinderella toothbrush, he pried it from the wall peg. Yet a moment later he wondered if perhaps Ellie would think it silly, childish, and if he should opt for a simple adult toothbrush for the girl instead. These are the decisions that plague my mind now? He nearly laughed aloud at the thought. And in the end, he decided to buy both the adult toothbrush and the Cinderella one. Just in case.
He went to the magazine rack, too. Aside from the porno rags, there were celebrity tabloids, teen magazines, automotive catalogues, and even a booklet with a marijuana leaf on the cover. No newspapers, though, which was what he really wanted. It occurred to him that he had no idea if his daughter read any of this stuff—the teen mags, the tabloids, comic books. She wasn’t that type of girl. He didn’t think so, anyway. In the end, he decided to bypass the magazine rack altogether.
It could have been a shopping trip just like any he’d made in his lifetime . . . until he paused beside a hat rack, a plan forming in his head. He selected a nondescript blue baseball cap from the rack—emblem-free and just about as unmemorable as a hat could get—and realized that he would have to explain much of this to Ellie upon his return back to the motel. If he was going to do this, to put this plan into action, then she would have questions. He couldn’t lie to her forever.
He decided to buy the hat.
That settles that.
By the time he took everything to the front of the store, there was a sullen-looking man grazing behind the counter. His comb-over was thin and greasy and his eyes were denim blue. He wore a paper carpenter’s mask over his nose and mouth, a trend that had gained popularity after the CDC suggested Wanderer’s Folly might be airborne. At one time, David had tried to purchase some of the N95 masks that were initially recommended by the World Health Organization, but that was before it became known that the masks were virtually useless in protecting against the virus. (One WHO spokesperson suggested it was the equivalent of taping up your doors and windows during a nuclear fallout.) The virus was in the blood—not in a sneeze, not in a cough—but many theorized that it was transmitted when the airborne virus gained access to the body by osmosis through the flesh. Those who still wore the masks did so out of fear or a false sense of security.
David’s gaze lingered on the man just long enough for the man to draw his eyebrows together in consternation. Without a word, he proceeded to ring up David’s items.
“You have any books?”
“Books?” the man said, his voice muffled through the mask.
“Like, YA books.”
“What’s that?”
“Books for young adults. Like, for preteens.”
“Ain’t a library.”
“That thing really work?” David asked him, nodding at the mask.
“Couldn’t hurt,” the man said.
“Do you have any more?”
The man pointed to a wall of mismatched items—plungers, automotive air filters, toilet paper, picture frames. There were several paper masks hanging from a peg. David retrieved two of them and added them to his purchase. It had nothing to do with protection against the Folly; he thought the masks might help hide their faces, if it came to that.
“I need a charger for an iPhone, too. I didn’t see any on the shelves.”
The man reached beneath the counter and set one beside David’s other purchases. “Kids tend to steal ’em,” the man said.
“There are still kids around here?”
The man eyeballed him but said nothing.
“And a few packs of Marlboros,” David said.
“We’re all out.”
“What other brands do you have?”
“None.”
“None? No cigarettes?”
The man’s milky eyes narrowed. “No cigarettes,” he repeated.
“How about a place to eat around here? A diner or something?”
The man shook his head as he bagged David’s items. He moved with a zombie’s lethargy. “Not ’round here.”
“What about off the highway?”
The man hoisted a disinterested shoulder. “Wouldn’t know.”
“Where is everybody?”
“You with the Census Bureau?”
David laughed—a forced whip-crack of a sound that sounded false to his own ears.
“That’ll be forty-nine ninety-five,” said the man.
David handed him fifty bucks, considered telling him to keep the change, but decided to hang around for it in the end. From here on out, every penny would count.
Back outside, the homeless man with the sandwich board was gone. So was the dog.
7
Ellie was awake when he returned to the motel. She was propped up against the headboard, her long hair in uncombed tangles. She was watching a cartoon on the TV. She had the shoe box in her lap, the lid open, and was gently running a finger along the bird eggs inside. There were three of them, small, speckled things that looked impossibly delicate to David, like porcelain. They were fitted snugly in a nest of twig-bits and leaves. Ellie swung her legs off the side of the bed and, setting the shoe box aside, studied the shopping bag he hauled into the room and set down on the table.
“Did you find my note?”
“Yes,” she said.
“I got some stuff for us. Some food, but some clothes, too. And toothbrushes.” He offered her a conciliatory smile.
“I want to call Mom.”
“It’s still early.”
“She wakes up early.”
“There are some things we need to do first,” he said. From the shopping bag he withdrew a T-shirt with silk-screened trucks on it, the nondescript baseball hat, some other items. “Also, we need to talk, Little Spoon.”
“Is it about Mom?”
It was, but he didn’t need to go there just yet. He still needed some time to figure out how he was going to explain what had happened to Kathy, and now certainly wasn’t the time. Right now, they needed to get back on the road and keep moving. Which meant, for the time being, he would lie to her. It was a lie he had begun last night when they traded the Bronco for the Olds, and he’d had several hours to build upon that story in his head so that it sounded plausible.
David pulled a chair out from the table and sat opposite her. “I want to explain to you a little bit about what’s going on back home. Do you know what a quarantine is?”
“It’s when they keep you in one place and they don’t let you leave. Like jail.”
“Yes, that’s right. I’m surprised you knew that.”
“They’ve been talking about it on the news for a long time. Some towns are being quarantined if too many people have the disease.”
“That’s right,” he said. “Well, that’s what’s going on at home right now. Our neighborhood has been quarantined.”
“That means we shouldn’t have left,” she said.
“But then we wouldn’t be able to see Mom.”
Her eyes narrowed the slightest bit, and David could read her thoughts: We aren’t able to see Mom now, so what’s the difference?
“It’s like you said,” he went on. “It’s like being in jail. But I didn’t want that for us. So I took you away before they locked everybody down.”
Ellie said nothing.
“Because of that,” he said, “there’s a good chance people will start looking for us, Ellie. These are people who think they’re doing the right thing and will want to make us go back.”
“Back home?”
“Yes. But you don’t want to be locke
d in your house without being able to leave, do you?”
“And we wouldn’t be able to see Mom?”
“No,” he said. “We wouldn’t.”
“Okay.”
“It’s important we don’t let these people find us,” he said.
“What will they do if they find us?”
He chewed at his lower lip. When he spoke, his voice sounded paper-thin and intangible to his own ears. “We don’t need to worry about that, sweetheart, because they won’t find us.”
“But what about Mom?”
“Mom is safe. You know that.”
“Do you promise?”
He felt something toward the back of his throat click. “Yes,” he said, the word tasting funny. Poisonous. “Yes, hon. She’s safe. You know she is.”
“Okay.”
“Because I want us to be as safe as possible, too, there are a few things we need to do today before we get back on the road.”
For the first time, he saw Ellie’s gaze shift to just over his shoulder, to the items he had placed on the table behind him. The T-shirt, the baseball hat. The scissors, comb, hair dye . . .
“They’ll be looking for a father and daughter,” he said, his voice level, unemotional. When he realized that his hands were fidgeting between his knees, he forced them apart. “We need to change that.”
Ellie had always been a perceptive child. Even as a toddler—heck, as an infant—it seemed her demeanor reflected the emotions of her parents. On more than one occasion, Kathy had commented that Ellie was special, and not just in the way all parents thought their children were special. Kathy was convinced that sometimes their baby daughter was able to know things. Emotions. Feelings. David had always presumed this was a trait all young children shared—that they were mirrors of their parents’ emotions and fundamentally more perceptive than their adult counterparts—but now, looking at his daughter and seeing the wheels working behind her eyes, he wondered if Kathy might not have been on to something.
The corners of Ellie’s mouth turned downward. Her chin wrinkled.
“Hey. It’ll be okay,” he promised her.
“I don’t understand. If we can’t go back home, where will we live?”
“It’s just temporary,” he said. “Things will work themselves out soon enough. This isn’t permanent.”
She had grabbed a lock of her auburn hair and tugged it down over her shoulder. She wound a finger in it now, as if feeling it for the last time. She was perceptive, all right.
“Things are going to be okay,” he said again.
But her expression told him that she knew he was lying.
8
David cut off Ellie’s auburn locks in the motel bathroom. They went through it together, without ceremony, the whole thing as somber as an execution. Ellie sat there with a look of horror on her face the entire time, but never once did she complain or cry or put up a fuss. He could be grateful for that, at least.
David was no barber, but he did the best he could, and in the end his daughter wore the approximation of a young boy’s modest if clumsy haircut. When he finished, he came up behind her and they both looked at the mirror together to examine his work. Tears threatened to spill down her face, but she still did not make a sound. She no longer looked like his daughter. David kissed the side of her face. Her skin felt hot against his lips.
“Put on the T-shirt and hat I bought,” he told her as he cleaned up the curls of auburn hair from the bathroom floor. He was careful to get every strand, every scrap, which he tucked away inside the plastic shopping bag. He’d take the hair with them and dump the bag somewhere along the way.
“Boy clothes,” she intoned, leaving the bathroom.
“You’re a boy now,” he called after her.
Once he was done cleaning up the hair, he trimmed some of his own, then opened up the box of hair dye. His was a natural tawny brown, the sorrel hue of a deer’s hide. The hair dye would turn him Superman black. He hoped it would be enough to suitably alter his appearance. He wondered, Should I dye my eyebrows, too? Best to do the hair first and see how things looked.
Ellie appeared in the bathroom doorway as he was midway through the coloring process, his dripping head hanging over the bathroom sink, muddy tracks of dye sliding down his forehead.
“Are we in trouble?” she asked him. She had obliged, and was wearing the T-shirt with the trucks on it, the blue baseball cap. She looked alien to him. Some stranger’s little boy.
“No,” he said.
“Are you?” she said.
He looked at her sideways. “I said no, didn’t I?”
Ellie shrugged. “What’s my boy name?”
“Huh?”
“If I’m a boy now, you can’t call me Ellie. Or Eleanor.”
“I’ll just call you Little Spoon.” He grinned at her while he combed the dye through his damp hair.
“I don’t like that,” she said. “Not anymore.”
“I’ve called you that since you were a little kid.”
“Not anymore.” She looked at the bag of hair clippings that sat on the sink counter. “I don’t like it anymore.”
“Since when?”
She rolled her slight shoulders. The T-shirt was a tad too big. “For a while now, I guess.”
“How come?”
“I just don’t. Stop calling me that. I’m not a baby anymore.”
He straightened up, wiping the inky droplets off his forehead with a hand towel. He’d have to take the towel with them, too. No evidence left behind. “Okay. Okay. I won’t call you that anymore. Sorry.”
“Where are we going when we leave here?”
“To get something to eat. Aren’t you hungry?”
“I mean, we can’t just keep staying in hotels. Where are we going to go if we can’t go home?”
“I’ll figure that out after we eat. I’m starving. Aren’t you starving?” He was desperate to change the subject.
“Are you telling me the truth?” she asked him. “About why we can’t go home, I mean.”
The question jarred him. And it wasn’t just the question itself, but the confident and suspicious tone Ellie used when asking it. As if she knew the truth and was testing his honesty. It caused him to pause before answering, and she seemed to pick up on that, too.
“Of course,” he said.
“And about Mom, too?”
“Yes,” he said.
Her gaze hung on him.
She’s special, Kathy’s ghost-voice spoke up in his head then. A special child.
“I’ll only be a few more minutes,” he said, and eased the bathroom door closed with his toe.
9
Nineteen months earlier
It was one of the rare evenings he stayed late at the university grading papers. Walking across the quad, the night was a cold, wet soup. Late-winter snow swirled around the lampposts, weightless as dandelion fluff, and never touched the ground. He took the footpath to the parking lot, slowing in his progress when he noticed something small and dark flapping about on the path. He came within two feet of it and saw that it was a small brown bird. It was still alive, its twig-like feet scrambling for purchase on the stamped concrete. As David watched, one of its wings flared open and fluttered maniacally to no avail.
David crouched down and watched the bird die. It took less than a minute. By the time he stood, a chevron of geese was honking across the sky just above the treetops. He thought it odd that they were there in February. Didn’t geese fly south in the winter?
He coughed into a fist as he continued along the footpath toward the parking lot. There were still a number of cars in the lot, even at this hour. His Bronco was parked at the far end of the lot, since he’d misplaced his faculty pass earlier that month and didn’t want to risk being towed by parking in any of the faculty spots without it. The tow-truck drivers fished the campus parking lots day and night and were ruthless.
He was halfway across the lot to his car when something exploded off to his lef
t. It was very close, the sound of its detonation causing him to drop his briefcase. He looked around but could not see what might have caused it. The lampposts were spaced too far apart, and it was too dark to make out any real—
He caught movement out of the corner of his eye, a large object bulleting down from the sky at such an alarming speed, David drew his arms up to cover his head despite the fact that the object was crashing down several yards away. It struck the hood of a Volkswagen with a sickening solidity, rolled up over the windshield, then toppled to the asphalt. It took David only a second to realize what it was, but by that point, more and more had begun to rain from the sky, a mortar attack. Only instead of bombs, they were geese.
A car alarm went off. Windshields imploded. Most of the geese were killed upon impact, but a few of them survived, albeit mortally wounded, and their shrill cries were more like the agonizing shrieks of a child than any bird he’d ever heard. Some of them screamed just a few feet from him, their massive, twisted wings sliding cruelly along the pavement.
The whole thing lasted thirty seconds, maybe less. When it was over, the parking lot was a minefield of dead fowl, the occasional spastic jerk of a massive black wing, the incessant trilling of a chorus of car alarms.
David gathered up his briefcase and ran for the Bronco, thankful that he’d misplaced the parking pass, which had left his own vehicle, parked so far away, unscathed.
He felt the urge to call someone on the drive home, but who would that be? The police? The fire department? The goddamn ASPCA?
It was generally a thirty-minute commute home, but an accident on the beltway had knotted up traffic near Baltimore, and David found himself staring at a wall of taillights for over an hour. Rain began to fall. To make matters worse, someone thumped against his rear bumper, and David had to get out and examine the damage. There was only a faint white scuff on the Bronco’s rear bumper, but it was enough to cause him greater unease. He couldn’t stop hearing the shriek of those birds, the terrible sounds they made as they smashed through windshields and caved in the hoods and roofs of those cars.