The Infinity of You & Me

by J. Q. Coyle

  “I know it but…” Pynch squints at me. “All of Thorn Lane could be gone by now. There are a lot sinkholes over there, crater pockets just under the top layers of dirt.”

  “My father’s there. I have to get to him. I mean, I hope we can.”

  Pynch smiles. “Hope.” He stands up and ruffles my hair. “Adorable.” And I’m pretty sure he’s blowing me off, but then he starts walking to the truck.

  I run to the passenger door. “Thanks, Pynch. I mean it.”

  “No problem. We all die somewhere doing something.”

  His words chill me, but I climb in, settle on the cracked seat. As the truck starts to pull away, I look up at the upstairs windows, and I see Jax—for just a second—at the torn, gauzy curtains in my room, before he turns away.

  * * *

  Pynch drives through what looks like a suburban neighborhood planted in a cow field. Tall wooden fences ring the houses, all of them roofed with curved clay tiles. All of them dark.

  “So I’m going to make a run to the camp and check on people,” he says to me, slowing to a stop and propping the rifle on his lap. He scans, looking for movement, and I realize I’m doing it, too. “And then I’ll come back for you. Keep an eye out for me.”

  “Okay,” I say, reaching for the handle.

  “If I was you, I’d get to the door as fast as you can.”

  “Thanks for the ride. I’ll be as quick as I can.” I jump out and run past a stunted tree to the gate. My father—cut? I’m scared to find out what’s left of him. I keep running until I reach the door.

  The house is completely dark, like all the others—with boarded windows. It’s so still and empty it’s hard to believe anyone ever lived here. I knock loud and fast, and the wood splinters a little. From inside, I hear shuffling, scraping, something being shoved aside.

  “Dad?” I say, and all movement inside stops. I realize my mistake. “Uncle Ellington?”

  “Alicia?” It’s my father’s voice, no question.

  “Yeah! It’s me!”

  The door opens, and there’s my dad. I’m startled by the way he looks. His cheeks are sallow and sunken, his hair almost entirely gray. He wears a rumpled button-down shirt over faded jeans. I see the tattoos, inching down one hand, another curling around his neck. “What are you doing here?” he says. He pulls the door wider. “Come in—hurry!”

  I step inside. He shuts the door and shoves a scuffed-up bureau in front of it.

  In the little bit of light coming through the boarded windows, I make out a small living room, two chairs, a sagging couch, a coffee table piled with books.

  And sketches, dozens of them, taped to the walls. They are all variations on a theme: branches and vines, like the trees I used to doodle in my notebooks. But these are massive, drawn on several taped-together sheets. They twist and overlap in elaborate patterns, covering the walls.

  “Why are you here?” he asks. “You should be at home.”

  “Listen, I have to tell you something, and I need you to hear me out.”

  He gives a hesitant nod. “What is it?”

  “It’s been a few years now since you got cut, right?”

  He stares at me, blinking, as if he’s not sure what I mean.

  I try again. “The operation. So you wouldn’t be able to jump or see other worlds.”

  He gives me a smile, and for a moment, I can sense the father I’ve glimpsed from world to world—sometimes haggard, sometimes exhausted, but a raw power running through him, an animal cunning. But what he says next shakes me to the bone. “You always were a jokester, Ali-gal. Always coming up with crazy stories.”

  Ali-gal? The nickname is probably buried inside of me somewhere. I wonder if I’ll ever get used to this fragmented existence. “I’m not joking,” I say.

  My father looks genuinely concerned. “Are you okay? Did you get your last round of shots?”

  Of the worthless vaccine? “You did have an operation, didn’t you?”

  “I did,” he says rubbing the back of his skull. “A lesion. They had to go in so the cancer wouldn’t spread.”

  “It wasn’t cancer!” I tell him.

  He doesn’t believe me.

  I point at the wall. “How about these sketches? Don’t you know what they are?”

  “Just a way to pass the time.”

  I get up, pull one of them from the wall. “This doesn’t remind you of your tattoos?” I set the sketch on the cluttered coffee table.

  My father shrugs. “The tattoos were just for fun. I was pretty stupid back in the day.”

  I feel like I could scream. I try to keep my voice calm. “Are you lying, or do you really just not remember?”

  He sits down on the couch. His entire body sags. “There’s a lot I don’t remember. Your dad’s been good to me. Francesca too. He offered to take me in, but I never want to be a burden. You know?”

  That’s how I felt before I knew I was a spandrel, why I almost leaned into that knife. “Do you remember anything about an atlas?” I ask.

  “An atlas?”

  “You’re going to have to try to remember. You hid it and I have to find it.” I pace a few seconds and then sit down in the chair across from him, lean forward. I take a deep breath. “First of all, you should try to remember that you are my father,” I say. “You used to know this. You have to believe me.”

  He closes his eyes, shakes his head slowly.

  I rush on. “You created this world to do right by me and Mom, but also because you lost faith in yourself. Maybe you were trying to be another, better version of yourself. You said that to me once.”

  My father looks at me with a sadness I recognize: it’s the same expression he had in the backyard looking at my mother. I know some part of what I’m saying rings a distant bell.

  “Okay, I’m going to tell you something else, something that happened before I was born, something I’m sure you or my mother or Alex would never have told me.”

  “Ali-gal,” he says, “don’t stir up ancient history.”

  “You were in love with my mother, Francesca, once, weren’t you? And you knew I was yours. You made a hard decision. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten that.”

  “Alicia—” my father says, trying to slow me down, but I won’t stop now.

  “No, listen.” I lean so close to my father that our knees are almost touching. “You said the first time you saw her, you were sure that this was the face of the woman who’d break your heart in a million ways.”

  My father raises his head, stares at the wall covered in his drawings of winding and twisting branches.

  “Maybe you left me a note about the atlas before your operation.” I stand up. “Maybe something’s hidden here.”

  “No,” my father says, shaking his head. “There’s nothing.”

  “All of these drawings of branches,” I say. “Your brain, some deep-down part, is trying to tell you something.”

  “They aren’t branches,” Ellington says.

  “Of course they are!”

  “No,” my father says. “Some reach up like branches or out, but, in my head, they’re all underground. They’re all roots.”

  I freeze. Roots. My father has been drawing roots. “What was the last tattoo you got before the operation?”

  He shakes his head. “It was just stupid. I got it on a whim. It doesn’t even go with the others I’ve gotten.”

  “What is it?”

  He takes off a boot, pulls down the sock, and shows me a tiny orange sun near his ankle.

  I think of the images on Hafeez’s phone. This is it. The body trigger to the roots has to be next to the anklebone. “Blood,” I say to my father. “The mind trigger into your worlds is always blood.” I grab his wrist and show him all of the fine nicks on his skin. “Did you cut yourself?”

  He shakes his head. “A bad habit when I was younger. I don’t anymore.”

  “If too many people knew your mind trigger, if they were breaking into your worlds, you’d have t
o have made a different one. And this is it. The sun.”

  He reaches out and cups my chin. “Alicia,” he says.

  “What?”

  He hugs me and then he whispers, “I miss you.” And I know what he means—he misses knowing, he misses his daughter, he misses his other worlds.…

  “Thank you,” I whisper.

  “For what?” he asks.

  “You have no idea what you had to give up.”

  We both hear the rattle of an engine coming closer, and he looks through a crack in the boarded windows.

  “Truck out there.”

  “Pynch is back.” I walk to the door, and he drags back the dresser, unlocks the bolt for me.

  With the drawings of roots behind him—twisting and spiraling—it seems like they’ve sprouted from his body.

  “I know one thing,” my father says.

  “What’s that?”

  “No matter what, family is family.” Does this mean he believes that I’m his daughter, on some level?

  I hug him again. “I love you,” I say.

  “I love you too,” he says.

  And whether he knows he’s my father or not doesn’t matter. I got everything I came for.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  IN THE truck Pynch is silent, his jaw clenched. I guess things weren’t good at the camp. I decide it’s better not to ask.

  I look out the window at the blighted blur of landscape rolling by. Mostly craters, swirling with dust.

  On one hand, I feel kicked in the gut—seeing my father like that, burnt out, lost to himself—but on the other, it was like some part of my father, deep down, was there and acknowledged me, his daughter. I was sure my father had given up on me, so maybe I was just hungry for anything fatherly from him. In the prime I grew up feeling starved for his love. And I never realized what that feeling was until I saw him.

  I’m also elated. I got what Jax needs to get me into the roots where the map is hidden—mind and body triggers.

  “I need Jax’s help,” I say.

  “He’s gone, left Biddy with your dad and headed for Houston.”

  “He couldn’t have gotten far.” I feel a buzz spreading through my body, zeroing in on my hand. I reach down and press hard on the opposite pressure point to keep myself here.

  “He took the Humvee.”

  “Hey,” I say to Pynch. “Will you—”

  “No.”

  “I might be able to get a cure. Maybe we can still turn things around here.”

  “I grew up around here and I had a pretty happy childhood,” Pynch says. “My parents both died in the second wave of the epidemic. I lost my sister in the third. The waves kept coming. A couple years ago, I was playing baseball on scholarship.” He glances up at the sky. “I have no illusions about how this is going to end.”

  “I’ve got a shot at this. It’s not a great shot, but it’s something,” I say. “And I need Jax.”

  Pynch’s face is stony.

  “Come on,” I say. “Everybody’s got to die somewhere doing something.”

  He glances at me, gives a grunt, and then turns the wheel, and I know we’re headed into the city.

  Pynch drives past the gates of the quarantined camp. It’s vacant, not a soul in sight, but some sections are smoldering. A few yards ahead, he guides the truck onto a razor-straight two-lane road. In the rearview mirror, I see the camp sign: SJ RECOVERY CENTER, DISTRICT 15, AREA 108.

  “So this was where people went to try to survive,” I say.

  Pynch nods. “You’ll find bullshit lives on even in the worst of times.”

  We pass a huge billboard for Sienna Plantation rocked back as if someone tried to bulldoze it and gave up, and then we cross an intersection with a highway. It stretches before us, cracked and empty except for a few wrecked and deserted cars.

  On the roadside, there’s a body, bloated from dehydration and rotting in the sun.

  “God forgive us all,” Pynch says then, his voice hoarse. “For whatever we did to deserve this.”

  “Nobody here did anything to deserve this.”

  He looks back and forth around the horizon, scanning, always scanning. “You know I got the truck because I was a guard. It was my job to dump dead bodies into the mass graves. After my family was all gone”—he coughs, spits out the window—“after that, these survivors were my family. Jax, his mother, Biddy, all of them. The other guards hightailed it when they had the chance. But I stuck around.”

  The sky above us is the brightest blue I’ve seen.

  “How did you survive?” I say.

  “I must have a natural immunity in me, somewhere. A tiny percentage of the population had it. But maybe that’s not the kind of surviving you’re talking about. Maybe you mean how did the ones still around not go crazy.”

  “You and Jax seem to have kept it together.”

  “We have a purpose. That’s why he doesn’t want to go with you.”

  I wonder if Pynch knows what happened between the other me and Jax last night. I think about asking but stop myself. I don’t really want to know.

  “Where should I look for him?”

  Pynch sighs. “He’ll be around the hospitals. Pretty much what’s left of the civilized world is on military bases and warships. There are a few in the Gulf. They still send some supplies to the hospitals, the ones that could barricade themselves good enough.” Pynch angles into the oncoming lane to avoid several wrecked cars. He doesn’t bother to switch back. “Going off-road for a bit.”

  He swings the truck into a field. We’re driving alongside a canal for a while, and then we’re back on a road again. It widens into a highway lined by dead strip malls, bone-white and bare in the sun.

  I try to concentrate on my other self, Alicia in the world where I didn’t take the gun. I don’t jump into my other world. I just try to catch a glimpse.

  I see a window with one pane covered with cardboard, taped into place. Jane’s office. Jane is sitting next to me on the sofa, not in her chair where she usually sits. She’s holding my hand. She’s talking about an operation. My mother—she’s there, too. She’s pacing, too anxious to sit down. She’s nodding along to what Jane’s telling me.

  Cut? In that world, are they trying to talk me into getting cut?

  I feel sick. I don’t want to think about it. I can’t. No one would really go through with it. I wouldn’t go through with it. Or would I? I’m a different person there now. Completely different.

  I stare out at the ghostly Texas landscape—gaping holes where storefront windows used to be, divots in the earth that yawn open into pits.

  Pynch points ahead. “You’ll follow this road. But not on the road, you understand me?” He looks over at me.

  I don’t know what I should be afraid of, which only makes me more afraid. I nod.

  “Head straight for about a mile. Go under the loop—the freeway. At the fork, bear right. You’ll see a big stadium on Old Spanish Trail, but I don’t know if there are signs anymore. After you cross Greenbrier, you’ll see a hospital on the right. Start there. There’s another one just southeast of that. And Shriner’s to the north, about a mile. Follow Fannin Street for that one. Not on the street, right? Stay out of sight.”

  “Right, okay,” I say, but I’m not sure if I have it all. All of these roads should be familiar to me—the Alicia who grew up here. But I don’t recognize anything.

  “He’ll be on foot by now. The Humvee would just make him a target.”

  “Got it.”

  “It might look like the place is deserted, but it’s not.”

  Stretched before me are malls, industrial parks, and weed-seamed parking lots dotted with decaying cars, all flattened under the heavy sky. I can’t tell if the day is already fading or if it’s just the darkening clouds.

  Pynch takes us to an overpass, and I see a church on the right, Iglesia de los Santos, hand-painted in red on a peeling street sign. Church of the Saints—Señor Fernandez would be proud. His classroom feels like w
orlds away, and it is.

  “Saint Pynch,” I mutter under my breath. I know better than to say it loudly enough for him to hear.

  We bump along, the grass almost as high as the truck doors. The engine strains, but Pynch makes it through and wedges us into the trees, cutting the engine. We sit for a moment, listening, but there’s nothing beyond the sound of wind.

  He gives me some water, one of his MREs, pulls out a heavy plastic bag, and tosses it to me. “Dump your stuff in there. You can knot it at the top, keep your hands free.”

  I do what he tells me to, and when I look up, Pynch is holding a knife out to me, the curved tip of the blade pointed down. “Wish I had something better to give you, but I’m fresh out.”

  I take the knife. “Thanks.” I don’t want Pynch to know how scared I am, so I reach for the door handle like I’m in a hurry to go.

  Pynch doesn’t seem fooled. “Listen. There’s a place not far from here that I’ll stop at tomorrow. Jax will know where it is. I’ll get you guys back out of here, hopefully.”

  The “hopefully” makes me nervous. “I’ll see you again soon,” I say, as if I’m asking him to make me a promise.

  “I don’t say good-bye to people.” Pynch glances at the sky through his windshield. “So good luck.”

  I slide out of the cab, slam the door, watch Pynch back out and head for the road. I can hear the truck engine for a long time after it disappears beyond the rise of the overpass. Soon, the only sound is the dry grass bending and ticking around me.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CLOUDS ARE rolling in over Houston’s pocked and empty streets. Thunder in the distance, the afternoon light dimming.

  I slide the bag over my shoulder, knife in hand, and head for the parking lot of the next shopping center. I move from one spot of cover to another—a fallen awning, a rusted Dumpster. I feel a flash of hope when I see a towering sign at one entrance that reads MAIN MEDICAL CENTER.

  I pass a Carefree Inn with a mattress in front of the smashed office door.

  With each step I’m listening and watching for movement, but there’s only the soft, wet wind, the smell of brine.