by Ronald Malfi
“You know, I’ve been thinking about that. Do you remember Uncle Tim?”
“Your stepbrother,” she said.
“We should get in touch with him, go to his place for a while.”
“I haven’t seen him since I was little.”
“Yeah, well, it’s been a long time for me, too,” David said.
“Mom says he’s a slouch.” Then she hung her head, as if physically pained by the sheer mention of her mother. “Where does he even live?”
“Missouri, last time we talked.”
“That’s far.”
“It isn’t so far,” he said. “We can do it.”
“In this car?” She glanced up and looked out the windshield, which appeared hazy behind a cloud of gravel dust.
“It’s the only car we have, Little Spoon.”
She looked back down at her lap and at the speckled eggs in the bird’s nest.
“I’m not going to let anything happen to you,” he told her.
“I know.” She turned over in the passenger seat so that he was left staring at her back.
David went back to the newspaper’s map. Yes—given their situation, Tim was the only logical choice he had left.
It wasn’t that he and Tim had left things on bad terms; despite Kathy’s disapproval of his stepbrother’s irresponsible lifestyle, David had never expressed this to Tim, nor had he let it sour anything between them. It was simply that they had gone off in different directions in life, and their infrequent conversations over the phone had eventually stopped altogether. He wondered now what kind of reception Tim might show him, receiving a phone call out of the blue. Moreover, what might he say or do if he’d already seen the news bulletin? David couldn’t imagine.
David’s mother had married Tim’s father when David and Tim were nine and eleven years old, respectively. Memories of David’s stepfather, Emmitt Brody, were of a hulking lumberjack of a man, broad-shouldered and thick-nosed, with a deeply furrowed brow and hands as abrasive as the outer shell of a pineapple. He had been a physically intimidating man, a stern man, but also a fair and kind man, and he had always treated David and his mother with respect and, to the degree he was capable, love. As he grew up, Tim Brody had adopted some of his father’s workmanlike attributes—he took to building things with his hands, for instance, to include an entire canoe that he carved from the bole of an enormous tree one summer—but he did not possess his father’s work ethic. Time spent punching a clock, which Emmitt Brody had done his entire adult life in a Pennsylvania quarry up until he was whisked away by pancreatic cancer in his early seventies, was time wasted slaving away so some corporation could get rich, according to Tim. And while David had somewhat admired Tim’s aloofness and free spirit, he couldn’t quite bring himself to follow in his stepbrother’s shoes. David had gone on to college, got his teaching certificate, fallen in love with and married Kathy, had a daughter. Tim had dropped out of high school his senior year, spent the next decade or so running around with various women—one of whom accidentally got pregnant and had a subsequent abortion, David had heard—and never worked the same job or stayed in the same place for long before his feet got itchy and, like a wonky compass needle, he switched direction. It occurred to David now that while Tim had been living in Kansas City the last time they had spoken, there was a good chance he had rolled up his carpets and headed someplace else—perhaps many other places—since then. For all David knew, Tim Brody could be anywhere in the world right now.
Or dead, he thought, the notion seizing him about the throat. Maybe it’s unlikely, but maybe it’s true, too. Just look at that map. Look at all those colored bull’s-eyes printed right there in front of you.
There was also an ever-changing number printed below the map, maintained by the Social Security Administration, known morbidly as the Death Tally. The SSA and the CDC had stopped using actual numbers and had changed to percentages sometime last year, because 0.05 percent of the country’s population dead or infected sounded a hell of a lot better than 17.5 million people. David folded the paper in half and tucked it down between his seat and the console.
He rubbed Ellie’s shoulder. “I’m gonna step outside and check my phone, see if I can get reception out here.”
Ellie didn’t respond.
“Try to eat something,” he said.
Leaning over the seat into the rear of the car, he dug around in his bag until he located his cell phone. Then he stepped outside, startled by the heat of the fading afternoon, and of the smells of gasoline and decay emanating from the deserted strip mall.
He turned on the phone. A series of chimes indicated that there were more text messages waiting for him. He ignored those. At least there weren’t any additional voice mails; if there were, he might be tempted to listen to them this time.
He scrolled quickly through his contact list, distraught when he did not find Tim’s number listed under the T’s or the B’s. It had been so long since they’d spoken that it wasn’t out of the question that he’d deleted Tim’s number or simply replaced his phone since then. Goddamn, that was foolish. He wondered if Tim had likewise deleted him at some point.
He executed a quick Google search on his phone for Tim’s name, and was hastily assaulted with over five million results. He blinked and looked stupidly at the phone’s screen, his greasy fingerprints smudging some of the lines of text. This would require more extensive searching, at a time and a place where he could sit down and do it properly without worrying about the federal government tracking his cell phone via GPS. As it was, he was beginning to feel conspicuous parked out here all alone in the middle of a run-down, deserted shopping center.
He was about to power the phone off again and get back in the car, when the phone suddenly rang in his hands. The number wasn’t programmed into his phone, yet he recognized it nonetheless.
Anger twisted his guts. Suddenly, he was back in that horrible hospital room again, the smell of death clinging to everything, his wife’s eyes on him at first . . . then gone, distant, emptied of life. The utter helplessness of it all. And it was bad enough that they had broken in to his family’s house and stolen pictures of him and Ellie—goddamn family vacation photos!—to use for their bullshit news bulletin, but now they were calling him to goad him out of hiding . . .
Before he knew what he was doing, he answered the call.
“You sons of bitches,” he growled into the phone.
“David.” It was the heavily accented voice of Dr. Kapoor. He sounded surprised that David had answered the phone.
“You’ve got a lot of nerve,” he said into the phone.
“Please, David, hear me out—”
“I saw the news report. That’s some stunt.”
“It wasn’t my idea. I was against it.”
“Bullshit.”
“David, you must hear me out. You are acting out of impulse, and you are only causing greater harm. Believe me, I understand your grief, and I’m here to help you see things more clearly before you—”
“You’re here to help me?”
“If you’ll only listen—”
“Leave me and my daughter alone,” he said.
“David, please—”
“Listen to me. You stay out of our way or you’ll be sorry.”
“David, it doesn’t have to be this way. You have misunderstood the situation.”
“Don’t you fucking tell me what I—”
“Listen to me, David. You can’t keep running.”
“You’ll never find us.”
“You can’t keep it up, David.” There was a hitch in Dr. Kapoor’s throat. “David, you’re sick.”
For a moment, Dr. Kapoor’s voice faded out . . . then faded back in.
“You’re sick, David. Your last blood test. You’ve got it.”
“You’re a liar,” David said. “You’re just trying to get me to come back. I won’t do it.”
“It’s not a lie. It’s no trick. David, please, think about your daugh
t—”
“Fuck you,” he said, and ended the call.
His hands shook. Sweat rolled down his forehead, though the rest of his body felt strangely cold. Through the center of his body, he felt as though an electrical current pulsed, causing every fiber of his being to vibrate with a surge of power—of anger—that threatened to shatter him into a billion microscopic pieces. He wondered if it was a residual effect of Ellie’s touch or if it was generated internally, born of his own anger.
He closed his eyes, leaned against the car, and focused on controlling his respiration. The last thing he needed was for Ellie to see him upset. Things were already bad enough without that.
In his hand, the phone rang again.
He powered it off without a second thought.
17
For better or worse, he opted to drive to the nearest city identified as a black X on the newspaper’s map. It was a town in Kentucky called Goodwin, and he liked the sound of it. Even when he turned the map on its side, making all the X’s look disconcertingly like little black crosses, he clung to the plan and didn’t veer off in another direction.
While he smoked, he pulled up directions to Goodwin on his phone. He was fearful it might ring again in his hand—fearful he might actually answer it and scream at the person on the other end of the line right in front of his daughter—but the phone did not ring. He kept it on long enough to scribble the directions down on a slip of paper he found in the glove compartment, then shut it back off. He lit a fresh cigarette with a match and, for the first time since he was a little boy watching his mother smoke in the car, marveled at how there used to be cigarette lighters built into the dashboards of American automobiles.
As they drove, the horizon soured to the color of a bruise. The sun sizzled out like a dying fire. Ellie scrolled through the radio stations, hoping to find a broadcast that played music, but the reception was poor and there was nothing but static across the dial. Even the radio evangelists had disappeared. To keep her happy, he stopped at a gas station and bought a few used CDs from a bin, things he would never listen to in his real life—Roxette, Cyndi Lauper, Bananarama. They were only a dollar apiece. Ellie played them but remained unemotional. Detached. It concerned him.
That evening, they ate the remainder of the burgers from earlier, now cold, tasteless, the patties beginning to stiffen. Ellie kept the shoe box of bird eggs tucked between them on the console. As he drove, David kept glancing at her profile, desperate to decode her emotions. He didn’t like how silent she was being, didn’t like the distant look in her eyes. He knew it would only get worse tonight, when they arrived in Goodwin. He would have to put on a good face. He would have to somehow make it all palatable, them staying overnight in what promised to be a deserted ghost town.
But that proved more difficult than he had thought.
As he had assumed, based on the X that covered the town on the map, Goodwin had been evacuated. He was prepared for the empty streets, the darkened buildings, the ghostly nothingness left behind. What he wasn’t prepared for was what greeted them a good five miles prior to reaching the town. Signs had been staked along the shoulder and the median, the handwriting done in harsh lettering with thick markers of varying colors, some signs so large they looked like billboards, others so small they were barely noticeable among the clutter. Snippets of phrases stood out as they drove by: THIS IS A DEAD TOWN; THE LORD GIVETH, THE LORD TAKETH; POPULATION ZERO; SODOM & GOMORRAH. One sign in particular caught David’s attention, perhaps because it was decorated much like a poster for a high school pep rally, adorned with glitter and letters cut from brightly colored construction paper. It read:
Let the little children come to me,
and do not hinder them,
for the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to such as these.
As they drew closer to the town line, David saw small crosses erected in the grass on either side of the road, eerily similar to ones he sometimes noticed along the highway memorializing victims of automobile accidents. There were too many crosses here to count, blank white structures perhaps two feet in height, each one identical to the next. That was what he found most troubling—the sameness of all those crosses—for it spoke of some morbid unity that had taken place here, a ceremonial mourning of the collective dead.
“I don’t like those things,” Ellie said, gazing out at the crosses as they drove by.
“They’re just crosses.”
“Did all those people die here?”
“I don’t think so,” he said. It was a lie; he felt the wrongness of it on his tongue. “I think they put them here before they evacuated.”
“Crosses mean someone’s dead,” Ellie said flatly.
David said nothing.
“Where did the rest of the people go?” she asked.
“Someplace else.”
“Why are we here?”
“Because no one else is.”
“So people left this place because of the disease,” Ellie said. It wasn’t a question.
“According to the newspaper, yeah,” David said.
“That means the disease was worse here than in other places.”
David nodded. The white crosses blurred together as he drove.
“What if it’s still here?” she said.
“What’s that?”
“The disease,” she said. “The Folly. What if it’s still around, hanging in the air or something?”
“I’m not sure it works that way.”
“But it might.”
He glanced at her. “You’re immune, Ellie. You’re safe.”
“But what about you?”
He smiled wanly at her. “I’ll be fine, too,” he told her. Thinking, That son of a bitch Kapoor won’t get inside my head with his lies and his tricks.
They drove beneath an overpass. American flags hung from the ramparts, and there were stuffed animals tied to the chain-link fencing. A plastic doll’s head dangled from a length of rope like some primitive trap. In startling white letters, someone had spray-painted across the roadway a single, blinding word:
CROATOAN
“What’s that word mean?” Ellie asked.
“I don’t know,” he said, though he recalled a history lesson from his school days about a group of settlers who mysteriously vanished from Roanoke Island in the sixteenth century, leaving no trace behind, save for the word croatoan carved in the trunk of a tree. He thought it best not to mention this to his daughter.
“I don’t like this place,” she said. She had gathered her shoe box into her lap again and was now running her fingers along the three eggs inside the nest. “It’s scary.”
“It’s just a town,” he assured her, wondering just how confident his voice sounded. “It’s roads and buildings and cars. There’s nothing here to be afraid of.”
“There’s nothing,” she said, and David couldn’t be sure if she was repeating part of what he said or if she was making some observation of her own. Perhaps trying to convince herself. “It’s not just a town,” she added. David did not ask her to elaborate.
Just before the city line, they were greeted by a road sign welcoming them to Goodwin, Kentucky. It was incongruous, though, since it was posted on what remained of a chain-link fence outfitted in concertina wire. Several sections of the fence had been knocked down, including the part that should have run across the roadway. The place had been quarantined at some point, too. David drove through, feeling his skin prickle. There were more white crosses here, and someone had painted a crude biohazard symbol on a tree trunk in neon orange.
“Daddy!” Ellie shrieked and David slammed on the brakes.
There was a figure slumped over in the middle of the road, perhaps ten yards ahead of them. In the garish light of the car’s headlamps, David could make out the awkward angle of the person’s head, the stiff, unnatural way the figure was sitting upright in the middle of the road. A leg was bent at an aggressive angle off to one side, the foot seemingly absent and leaving behind the abru
pt bone-white stump of an ankle.
But—
“Another one,” Ellie said, pointing toward the shoulder of the road. This figure was standing, arms strangely akimbo, its body propped against the guardrail and leaning at an impossible angle. Its head was missing.
David felt a prickling sensation course down his chest and melt like steam off his body.
“It’s okay,” he said, touching Ellie’s knee. “They aren’t real.”
She leaned forward, staring out the windshield.
David flicked on the high beams and said, “See? They’re dummies. Mannequins.”
“Oh,” she said, still tense. David thought he could feel her heartbeat vibrating through the Oldsmobile’s chassis. “Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“To scare us?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Like scarecrows,” she said anyway. “But for people.”
“No, hon. I don’t think so.” He pointed farther ahead, to a row of shops that flanked the main road. Several shop windows were broken, and there were items strewn about the sidewalk and street—clothing, furniture, household appliances, a shopping cart tipped on its side. A third mannequin leaned halfway out of a storefront’s busted plate-glass window. The stores here had been ransacked.
David lifted his foot up off the brake and rolled down the street, carving a wide arc around the mannequin in the center of the road. As they went by, the headlights washed over its blank, emotionless features, its eyes dulled to tan orbs, the whole of its nose busted off like the nose of the Great Sphinx of Giza. They cruised through an intersection where the traffic lights were dark. Pages of newspaper whipped along the pavement in the breeze. There were no cars in sight, with the exception of a scorched black frame that sat on four rims, door-less and windshield-less against a curb. It looked like some great slaughtered beast that had been picked clean to the bone by vultures.