by Ronald Malfi
David slowed the car, letting the pickup truck and the police car collect some distance. He managed to blend in with traffic as they passed through the next several intersections, thankful that the lights held green and there was no more stopping.
“It wasn’t just a bad dream, was it?” Ellie said quietly. “About Mom.”
“No, hon.”
There were still a few businesses open along this road, though many others looked dark and deserted. Placards containing biblical quotes had been erected in some of the darkened windows. When they drove past a grove of condominiums, David could see yellow police tape over many of the doors and windows. Trash cans lay strewn about on the sidewalk. The few pedestrians who meandered up and down these blocks looked like extras in a George Romero film.
Because he felt too conspicuous—and too uneasy—driving down what appeared to be the main street of this run-down urban area, David took a turn onto a tree-studded secondary road that was mostly deserted. A few houses stood a distance from the road, mostly shaded behind pin oaks and corralled behind fences made of pine logs. There were large red X’s painted on each of the front doors of the houses, something that chilled David on sight. He had heard about such places on the news and had even seen pictures in newspapers back when neighborhoods were first being evacuated, but until now he hadn’t witnessed it in person. It was like coming face-to-face with a mythological creature.
“Did I hurt you?” Ellie said, looking at him. She glanced at his wrist.
“It’s okay now,” he said. The jolt of electricity he’d felt shoot up his arm and radiate through the marrow in his bones had faded just as he’d pulled his wrist free of Ellie’s grasp. “What was that, Ellie? What did you do?”
“I don’t really know,” she said. “It’s never happened like that before.”
“What’s never happened like that before? What are we talking about?”
“The touching thing,” she said.
“Like what you did to me last night,” he said. “In the car.”
She nodded.
He had all but convinced himself that he had imagined the whole thing—how he had been driving like an erratic mess when they first lit out in the Oldsmobile, his body a jumble of live wires, Kathy’s death like a lead weight in the center of his chest. That small hand had touched the nape of his neck, her palm as cold as ice, and in that instant he had been flooded by an overwhelming serenity that quickly staunched his grief and panic and let him regain focus and composure. It was like being injected with some kind of narcotic, something ten times more potent than morphine—yet it had been a morphine that calmed only his nerves while leaving him at a level of alertness that made the world around him clear and comprehensible again. She had kept her hand on his neck for a while, until she had fallen asleep and the hand had dropped away. As her hand left him, the fear and anxiety and grief returned to him, but in a more manageable dosage. By the time they had reached the motel last night, he had all but convinced himself it had been his imagination.
This had been different, though—not the lulling serenity of Ellie’s cool touch, but the fiery zap of a Taser. It had resonated through his molars and burst like fireworks behind his eyes. Thank God it had only lasted for a second or two.
“How do you do that?” he asked.
“I don’t know. It just sort of started.”
“When?”
“A while ago,” she said. “I don’t really remember. I used to do it just to sort of calm you and Mom down when you were upset.”
“Me and your mom,” he said. “You’ve done that to us before?”
She nodded again. “You didn’t used to notice. But last night you did.” She seemed to consider this. “I think it’s getting stronger.”
“But how do you do it?”
“I don’t know. I just think about it. I think about taking your sadness away. Your worries and the things that make you scared.”
He was staring at her, unsure if he was hearing this conversation correctly. Or perhaps he just wasn’t comprehending what she was telling him. His mind seemed cluttered and confused at the moment, making it difficult to concentrate.
“I never did it the other way before,” Ellie went on. “The bad way, I mean. I guess I was just scared and angry earlier. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“You didn’t hurt me.” He considered this. “Did it hurt you?”
“No.”
“Not at all?”
“No.”
“And you can do it whenever you want?”
“I’m not sure.”
He held out his right arm. “Do it again,” he said.
She just stared at him, not moving.
“Go on,” he said. “Just a little shock, okay? I’ll be ready for it this time.”
Hesitantly, she reached out and closed her small, cold fingers around his wrist. Her gaze hung on him, unblinking. She remained that way for several seconds.
“Nothing’s happening,” he said.
“I don’t know how to shock you,” she said. “It’s never happened before, like I said. That was the first time.”
“Then do the other thing,” he said. “The thing you did last night.”
She opened her fingers and slid the palm of her hand halfway up his arm. Other than his daughter’s soft touch, there was nothing unusual about—
He felt it filter through his system like warm medicine, coursing through his veins and arteries, networking through his body until the hairs along his arms stood at attention and his skin tightened into gooseflesh. In that moment, all the clutter and confusion in his head cleared. It was like a fog lifting and exposing a grand, lighted city against a dark horizon. He felt anesthetized.
“Holy shit,” he said, and uttered a laugh. “Holy shit, Ellie.”
Ellie smiled, though somewhat timidly. She removed her hand from his arm, and David felt the serenity quickly drain from him. That thick fog blew back into his brain and obscured the lighted city.
Grinning to himself like an idiot and shaking his head in disbelief, he said, “Jesus Christ, El. I don’t understand.”
“I don’t understand it, either,” she said. Then she turned in her seat and faced forward.
“And you’re sure it’s not . . . it’s not doing anything to you? It doesn’t hurt you to do it?”
“No.”
“How did you learn . . . I mean, how’d you figure out . . .” He couldn’t even formulate the proper questions.
“I don’t know,” she said.
His smile fell away from his face. He could tell she was troubled by either this conversation or of her ability in general. He rubbed the back of her head. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Are you scared of it?” he asked. “What you can do?”
“I haven’t been,” she said. “Until I hurt you.”
He put both hands back on the steering wheel. “You didn’t hurt me, El. I’m fine. You didn’t hurt me.”
She said nothing.
They drove for several minutes in silence. David’s head reeled. He had so many questions, but it was obvious that Ellie had no answers for him: She was just as perplexed by the whole thing as he was.
“What are those big white things?” Ellie asked, sitting forward in her seat.
At first, David didn’t know what she was talking about. But when they cleared a bend in the road and the trees opened up, he saw several large white tents set up on a grassy slope of lawn before a large schoolhouse constructed of white stone. Emergency vehicles were parked in the paved roundabout at one side of the school, and there was a single police car blocking the entrance. Sawhorses had been erected in front of the paved driveway.
“I don’t know, hon,” he said, slowing down. As they drove by, he could see people filtering back and forth between the tents, all of them wearing crisp white biohazard suits and faceplates.
“It’s a school,” Ellie said.
“Yes.”
“Why ar
e those people dressed like that?”
“The people inside that school must be sick.”
“Kids?”
“I don’t know.”
She read the name she saw in large blue letters over the front doors of the building. “Morristown Elementary School. It’s for little kids, Dad.”
“Maybe they turned it into a hospital,” David suggested, unable to pull his eyes from the community of tents that had been erected on the front lawn of the school. The people in the biohazard suits looked about as hospitable and familiar as alien invaders.
Beyond the school, there were a few more houses on either side of the road with red X’s on their doors, as well. He was so busy scrutinizing these homes for some sign of life that he failed to see the roadblock up ahead until he was just a few yards from it.
“Shit,” he uttered, and hit the brakes. The Olds growled to a stop, skidding on the gravelly pavement in front of a series of yellow sawhorses adorned with blinking orange emergency lights. On the other side of the roadblock stood another emergency vehicle, this one parked horizontally across the street as if to prevent passage to anyone who had inadvertently—or perhaps purposefully—gone through the roadblock. There were more tents set up here, as well, only these were of the camouflaged military variety. These troubled David more than the white tents back at the school.
A man in a hazmat suit hoisting an assault rifle approached the vehicle, seeming to materialize out of nowhere. There were insignias on his sleeves and a name sewn above the breast, though David couldn’t make it out because it was partially obscured by the rifle’s strap. The suit’s plastic faceplate obscured the man’s features.
“Shit,” David muttered again. Then he glanced at Ellie. She was watching the man in the hazmat suit approach the car with something like awe in her eyes. “Stick that box under your seat,” David instructed.
She didn’t move.
“Do it now,” he barked.
Ellie bent forward and stashed the shoe box containing the bird’s nest beneath her seat. When she straightened back up, the figure in the hazmat suit was right outside David’s window, motioning for him to roll it down.
“Hi,” David said. “My son and I just got lost. I’m sorry.”
“This is a restricted area,” said the man. His voice was muffled on the other side of the clear plastic shield that covered his face. His breath caused little clouds of moisture to bloom on the plastic. “This road is closed. There were signs posted.”
“Were there? I must have missed them. I apologize. We’ll just turn around and go back—”
“You live around here?”
A second figure dressed in similar attire—and carrying his own rifle—appeared in the space between two of the camouflage tents. He approached the scene without hesitation, pausing just a few yards behind his comrade. The person was too far away for David to make out any features behind the plastic face shield.
“No, sir,” David said.
The man bent slightly so that he could peer into the car. His hazmat suit crinkled like tarpaulin. His breath continued to fog the faceplate. David couldn’t tell if he was checking the interior of the vehicle for anything in particular or if he wanted a better look at Ellie. David held his breath and found he couldn’t take his eyes from the man’s gun.
“You two need to turn around and get out of here,” the man said finally, straightening up. He pointed with one gloved hand back in the direction they had come. “Don’t stop until you’re back on the main road.”
“Yes, sir,” David said, already rolling his window back up.
The man in the hazmat suit stepped backward onto the curb. He continued pointing in the direction they had come, one hand on the grip of his rifle.
David executed a clumsy three-point turn, his heart hammering in his chest the whole time, and found himself waving stupidly at the man in the hazmat suit as he drove past him at a quick clip.
What if he had asked to see my driver’s license? he wondered, passing those darkened, eerie houses with the X’s on their doors again. What if he had recognized my name and pulled me out of the car right then and there? What if—
But he could what if himself to death. The important thing was that the man hadn’t asked to see his driver’s license. They were headed back the way they had come, no worse for wear. Couldn’t he just leave it at that?
Also, that wasn’t just a man. It was a soldier. National Guard, most likely.
This time, when they drove past the school and its assortment of antiseptic white tents, David saw what were undeniably body bags lined up in a tidy queue along the sloping lawn. A few of the people in hazmat suits paused to watch them go by. Ellie waved to them. To David’s astonishment, a few waved back.
16
David bought a newspaper, two packs of Marlboros, and two sixteen-ounce bottles of Pepsi at a gas station just over the Kentucky border. The gas station was nothing more than a ramshackle clapboard structure with a few ancient pumps beneath a graffiti-laden portico and a murky front window as dark and uninviting as a panel of glass that looked down into the depths of a black sea. The blacktop had been defaced by graffiti, and straggly haylike weeds sprouted through its many cracks. Ellie waited in the car.
They were back on the road before anyone else pulled up to the gas station, and were motoring along with steady traffic—the most they had seen in several hours—a minute or so later.
In the passenger seat, Ellie had the shoe box back in her lap again. Its lid was open and she was absently stroking the three tiny eggs inside the nest while watching the ebb and flow of traffic. She had calmed since the incident at the diner and her subsequent breakdown behind the highway billboard. In fact, her face had grown tight, her eyes distant, with a look of contemplation. Grief at her mother’s passing was normal, but David worried that she was regretting having spoken to him about her ability. He was anxious to bring it up again—to have her touch his arm or the back of his neck again—but he didn’t want to make her uncomfortable. She looked frightened.
But she’s strong, he thought. She’s strong.
They drove until hunger growled deep in his belly. He knew better than to ask Ellie if she was hungry, so he simply turned off into a shopping center and drove around until he found a random burger joint that was open. Ellie said nothing as he read the items on the menu aloud, and David did not afford her the opportunity to rebuke any suggestions he made; he merely ordered a sack of cheeseburgers and two Cokes at the first window, avoiding the whole messy routine.
Across the plaza was a strip mall that had long been forsaken, judging by its appearance. Skeins of yellow weeds swayed among the broken shelves of asphalt. The windows of the shops were either soaped over or boarded up, the signs above each entranceway no longer in existence, save for the ghostly gray outline they left behind on the façade, like fingerprints at a crime scene. Someone had rolled a bunch of steel barrels beneath the awning of one shop, their arrangement somehow suspicious and off-putting to David, though there was no one around to cement his discomfort.
David drove along the ruined parking lot, the Oldsmobile bumping and thumping the whole way, until he pulled out of sight behind a row of Dumpsters, shielding them from the street traffic and the rest of the plaza.
Ravenous, he tore open the paper sack, yanked out a fistful of burgers, and tossed a couple into Ellie’s lap.
“Not hungry,” she intoned.
He rubbed the back of her head, then stripped away the greasy wax paper on his own burger and folded half of it into his mouth.
The newspaper was wedged between his seat and the console. He grabbed it now, a wad of burger swelling his right cheek as he chewed, and opened it up in his lap. He searched first for any mention of him and Ellie. There was none. That was good; it most likely meant they hadn’t been looking for him by the time the paper went to press. Still, it was a small victory, what with their faces—their old faces—presumably on television screens across the country. Freshly
dyed hair and a baseball cap would only get them so far. If some inquisitive police officer happened to stop them and ask for identification, they were screwed.
It’s not just the police, he reminded himself, stuffing the rest of the burger into his mouth. It’s those people in the white vans and the black cars I’ve got to keep an eye out for, too.
On the second page of the A Section, he found what he was looking for: a map of the United States. This map had become a staple in pretty much every newspaper throughout the country over the past few months. David had stopped looking at it many months ago, unnerved by the prospect of what the future held. Or whether or not there would even be a future. But he needed it now.
The map detailed a variety of things, from the diplomatically named “free zones,” to the hot spots with their color-coded bull’s-eyes, the coding disconcertingly similar to the Department of Homeland Security’s terror alert levels. There were also a few areas designated by stark black X’s—only a few, but still, more than there had been the last time David had checked this map in the newspaper back home. The colored bull’s-eyes were bad enough, signifying the estimated level of infection in any given area. There was a key in the lower right-hand corner of the map that explained, in very general terms, what was typically being done in these areas depending on the color level. But the black X’s were worse, because those were the places that had fallen early and fallen quickly. The key identified these locations as places of thorough evacuation, though there had been rumors back at the college that those X’s really meant that everyone there had died. Looking at the increased number of X’s on the map now—perhaps two dozen at a glance—David hoped that rumor was not true.
Whether it’s true or not, that doesn’t change the fact that those places are empty, he thought now, studying the map. He traced an index finger along the ridge of the Great Smoky Mountains. Either those places have been evacuated or the people there are all dead. Either way, there will be no people. No cops.
As if reading his mind, Ellie said, “Where will we go?” She was staring out the window, the cheeseburgers in her lap untouched. On one slender thigh she balanced the shoe box. Its lid was off, and she was absently petting the three speckled eggs within.