by Joe Hart
“Yes,” she says quietly. “Us.”
37
They drive into the cold morning sun.
The interior of the ASV is cramped with everyone riding together. Shoulders and knees touch, and after a time the air begins tasting used and stale.
They stop once to fill the large gas tank with fuel they’ve brought in cans attached to the roof. Everyone takes advantage of the break to stretch their legs. Zoey walks with Sherell and Rita across a little clearing beside the road, listening to them talk about what’s happened since she left them in the clinic, which, according to Rita was the stupidest thing she’s ever seen, and she’s glad Zoey got shot in the foot since maybe that will keep her from running away again. Zoey takes the admonishments and smiles as Sherell rolls her eyes behind Rita’s back.
As they start to return to the ASV, Sherell frowns, walking slightly slower so that they have to match her pace.
“What’s the matter?” Zoey asks.
“Something’s going on with Newton.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s acting strange.”
“He always acts strange,” Rita says, flicking a piece of dead grass she’s been rolling between her fingers in Sherell’s direction. The other woman shoots her a look.
“He’s been jittery since last night. When he didn’t come to bed, I went outside and found him in the yard. He was looking around at the trees and the sky like he was lost.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Rita says, stopping. “Come to bed?”
Sherell raises her eyebrows and a smile surfaces on her face. “What?”
“You know what! I can’t believe you didn’t tell me!”
“I don’t tell you everything, you know.”
Rita stands with her mouth open. “When did you . . .”
“A few nights ago. We were sitting in my room near dark and I was telling him about one of my new drawings. And . . . well, it just happened.” Zoey smiles, both at Sherell’s apparent happiness as well as Rita’s disbelief. “Anyway, he’s been really distant today and jumpy. I touched his shoulder before we left the road and it was like I’d hit him.”
“Maybe being away from home for so long is affecting him,” Zoey says as they continue walking.
“Maybe he’s traumatized by you two . . . you know . . .” Rita says.
“It’s definitely not that. He can’t talk, but he speaks very well with his body,” Sherell says with an evil grin.
Rita stops dead again. “You’re unbelievable.”
“I think he’d say the same thing if he could.”
Rita’s mouth drops open once more, and Zoey and Sherell both laugh as they step back onto the road.
Merrill stands beside the ASV, head tilted up toward the clouded sky. Zoey moves toward him, and he glances at her before returning his attention overhead.
“What are you looking at?”
“I don’t know. Thought I saw something.”
She brings her gaze upward and scans the intermingling clouds. “Like what?”
“Not sure. Like a bird, but . . .” he says almost to himself before looking around. “Is everyone back?”
“I think so.”
“Good. Let’s move out.”
Zoey waits for the others to climb inside and notices Newton standing a few yards behind the vehicle looking at a large, gnarled tree beside the road. Its branches extend out over the highway like dead, reaching fingers tipped with razor points.
“Newton?” she says, and he flinches, turning toward her. His eyes are wide, large portions of white surrounding his irises. “Are you okay?”
It’s almost as if he doesn’t see or hear her. He moves past without acknowledgment, climbing inside to sit near the door without looking back. She touches his arm as she takes her seat across from him, but he doesn’t react, his complete attention on the floor.
Zoey and Sherell share a look as the door slams closed and the ASV begins to accelerate.
“Six or seven hours and we’ll be close to the ARC,” Merrill says from the driver’s seat. “We’re taking a roundabout way since the last few storms probably dropped snow on the passes we usually use. We’ll go south, then northeast.”
“Gee, I’d love to spend more time in here breathing everyone else’s air,” Tia says. “Can you take an even longer route?”
“Unless you want to chance sliding off the side of a mountain, I’d stow that shit,” Merrill replies.
“If we all can’t keep our bodily functions to ourselves for the next seven hours, I’d prefer plummeting to my death. I’m looking at you too, dog,” she says, pointing to Seamus, who stares up at her from where he lies on the floor. His tail thumps. “Rotten mutt.”
“Tia . . .”
“Just saying.”
Zoey leans into Lee, who sits beside her, and almost automatically he puts an arm around her. The vehicle sways and rumbles. There is low, comfortable conversation. Some of it is trivial, only to pass the time, but some is serious: ideas about how to retrieve her daughter from inside the ARC’s walls. But of course there is only one way.
There has always only been one way.
The symmetry isn’t lost on her. She’s returning to the only place she never hoped to see again. She feels like the sculpture of the angel and demon in the old man’s house—half of her screams to run away while the other half is steadfast, an anchor of resolution.
She doesn’t know how long she’s been lost within herself, only that something is wrong as she sits up. Sherell is repeating Newton’s name, but he is standing, face and hands pressed to the window in the side of the vehicle. Ian begins to rise, reaching for him, and Merrill is asking what’s wrong, when Newton puts his hand on the door and opens it.
They are all jerked forward as Merrill steps on the brake. They lurch into one another, the ASV shuddering as it struggles to slow, and all the while Newton stands by the open door, staring out at the decelerating landscape.
Before anyone can say or do anything else, he jumps out.
He hits the ground running and doesn’t stumble. Then the ASV stops and everyone is piling out.
They’re in an intersection in a town. Small buildings line the street for the next quarter mile before the road curves away out of sight. Broken overhead cables lay by the sidewalk and dead leaves clog a nearby drain. Newton hurries away, arms swinging at his sides, his head jutted forward, strides stiff and quick.
“Newton!” Sherell yells, and starts after him, jogging to keep up. “Stop!”
They’re all moving, Zoey realizes. All going after him, but for some reason none of them are running like Sherell is.
She glances around the street they’re on. It’s unremarkable except for a huge yellow house on the corner that looks like it’s over a hundred years old. It leans hard to the left and she’s sure a strong wind would blow it over. Newton continues down the center of the street, head turning first one way and then the other as if he’s looking for something.
“Newton!” Sherell says again, finally catching up to him and grasping his arm, but he pulls away from her gently, as if she’s part of the landscape he’s hooked himself on.
“Sherell,” Merrill says from beside Zoey. “Let him go.” Sherell gives him a long piercing look before starting after Newton again, but she keeps her distance this time, trailing him by a dozen steps.
They follow him down the street to another block that turns to the left, the opposite way ending in an empty lot filled with torn plastic bags that flap like waving hands. Newton doesn’t pause at the junction. He goes left, up onto the narrow sidewalk, stepping over several tree branches that are dry and clean of their bark.
There are residues of life everywhere Zoey looks.
A car with a door half open in a driveway.
A child’s bike on its side.
Two lawn chairs on a deck; a coffee cup on the railing beside them.
Newton runs past a two-story house with blue siding, bleached almost white with t
ime, before pausing in front of a low home with an attached garage whose doors are open and gaping. The house itself is unremarkable, brown trim peeling around dark, hazy windows. The lawn is long grass folded over and brown beside a walkway leading to the small front porch. Newton stands statue-like, staring up at the house as they gather behind him.
“Newton, what—” Chelsea begins to say.
But he’s no longer there. He’s moving up the walk, traveling faster and faster until he’s running as they call out his name, and Zoey hears herself say it as well even as something registers to her.
A tall piano sits at the back wall of the garage, a sheet draped partially over its top.
Her attention is brought back as Tia nudges her shoulder. “Zoey. Come on.”
They go up the walk and into the house in a line, entering through a small foyer that holds only dusty furniture and a row of shoes of different sizes. Next is a kitchen, yellow flooring and beige walls. Some used dishes sitting beside a sink, dust motes hanging in the light from a window above it.
She stops with the rest of the group in the archway of a larger room, a slight smell of decay drifting past her. A picture hangs on the wall to her left, and she swipes a hand across it, clearing the glass of dust.
Four people smile out at her, forever locked in the single second. A good-looking man with graying hair at his temples and a wide smile, his arm around a petite woman with sparkling eyes, her head tilted to the side. Before them are two boys, one nearly as tall as his father, a crooked grin creasing his features, the other no more than three years old holding a tiny guitar, but anyone could easily see Newton’s handsome features hidden in the young boy’s face.
“Oh no,” Zoey breathes. “This is his house.”
“What?” Rita asks from beside her, but she’s already stepping past Ian and Chelsea into the larger room.
A long rug with dark blotchy stains in its center is thrown back revealing a trapdoor set in the floor that reminds her of the attic access she hid in after escaping the ARC. Beside the rug are two bundles of white cloth laid side by side near the wall. It takes a second for her mind to recognize the shrunken shapes beneath the sheets as people.
“Newton. Can you hear me?” Merrill says, kneeling beside the trapdoor. Sherell stands next to him, looking down into the space below, and it’s only when Zoey moves closer that she can see what they’re looking at.
Cobwebs dance around the hole in the floor and Newton sits beneath them in the dirt under the house. He rocks in place, staring off into the darkness surrounding him. His hands flick as if he’s playing an instrument.
“Newton, come back up,” Sherell says. “Please. It’s okay.” She stoops forward and reaches down to him but he scoots away from her hand, still not looking up.
Merrill touches her arm. “Give him a minute.” Sherell shoots Zoey a look that’s both afraid and sad at the same time, but steps back.
Newton continues to rock, his boots pressing little ridges of dirt up each time he leans forward. The house is silent around them, the sweet smell of old decay more pungent.
“Can you hear me, Newton?” Merrill says in a low tone. “I know you’re scared, but we’re right here.” He pauses. “This was your home, wasn’t it?”
Newton’s rocking increases. He turns his head to the side.
“We found you fifty miles north of here. Remember? You fell out of the tree. And that’s how you got your name. But it’s not your real name, is it?” Zoey sees Merrill turn something in his hand. A small photograph in a frame, Newton’s young, smiling face filling up the picture.
Newton’s hands move faster.
“Merrill,” Zoey whispers.
“You already had a name, didn’t you?”
Newton’s head cranes around and his eyes are wide like they were on the road, bright against the darkness he sits in.
“Merrill, stop.”
“Your name is Alex. Isn’t it?”
Newton freezes, blinking long and slowly as if he’s on the border of sleep. “This is you when you were very young,” Merrill continues, turning the frame so Newton can see. “You’re Alex.”
Newton stares at the picture and the left corner of his mouth begins to pull down until his teeth are exposed on that side. His jaw lowers and his eyes close and open in another drawn-out blink. A breathy grating sound like fabric drawing across concrete comes from his throat.
Zoey feels a collective hush fall over all of them, much thicker than the silence of before. They’re all huddled around the hole now, looking down at the man in the dirt who resembles the little boy in the photo so much they could be the same age.
“Ahhh . . . I,” Newton whispers, and Zoey feels her lungs hitch. “I w-was pl-playing a-and they c-came.” He looks away from the photo and finds Merrill with his gaze. “They h-heard m-m-me playing. Dad s-said hide. D-d-d-d . . .” Newton struggles, his face growing red. “D-d-don’t m-make a s-s-sound. Don’t ma-make a sound. Don’t make a sound.”
His voice breaks into jagged pieces with the last word and tears slip from his eyes as he starts to sway in place again. Zoey feels the air around her head become thinner as if they’re suddenly at a higher elevation. She puts a hand out and Lee is there, clasping her fingers in his palm.
Merrill sets the picture aside and moves to the hole, lowering himself down easily. He settles into the dirt beside Newton and gradually draws the younger man to his chest. Newton tries to keep rocking for a moment before leaning hard into Merrill’s shoulder, burying his face against the side of his neck.
And the sobs that quake through him are the only sounds in the quiet house.
38
They bury Newton’s father and brother in the backyard beneath the boughs of a pine tree.
Ian says that his mother must have been taken after his father had him hide beneath the floorboards. Or perhaps she was already gone by that point, and it was only the three of them. But Zoey can’t get past the notion that Newton was forced to listen helplessly while the rest of his family was murdered above him. What had he endured afterwards? How long had he sat in that house with the bodies of his father and brother? For it must have been him that wrapped them in their shrouds. She can’t fathom the trauma it must have inflicted, but the fallout is something all of them are familiar with. Newton followed his father’s final instruction long after the man himself was gone.
The conundrum of his name is also something they discuss as they place the last few shovelfuls of dirt over the graves. Should they continue to call him Newton or use the one given to him by his parents? For now they agree to continue calling him what they always have.
“Give him time,” Merrill says, collecting the few shovels to return to the garage where they found them. “The dam is broken now. He’ll tell us eventually what he wants.”
Zoey gazes at the two mounds of dirt in what was never meant to be a graveyard. Burying the dead is fast becoming commonplace, another task to be completed, but she knows she’ll never get used to it. She’s sure it would feel unnatural even under ordinary circumstances, almost as if something is being stolen without ever knowing what it is.
Inside she walks through the rooms. It looks to have been raided at least once over the years since Newton departed. Several crushed cans lie in a room that might’ve been where his parents slept. There is a bird’s nest in the bathroom, no sign it was ever inhabited except for two frayed feathers stuck to its top nodding in a draft. The last room she looks into keeps her locked in the doorway.
The wood of the many instruments is glossy beneath layers of grime. She recognizes another, more elegant piano than the one she spied in the garage. There are several guitars on stands as well as a set of drums that she knows by sight only because of one of Ian’s record covers. A band called the Beatles.
This is where Newton learned to play the music that spills from him at times. She guesses it was the only solace his parents could provide after the events of the Dearth came calling, and ironically the
very thing that brought death upon them in the end.
She closes the door tightly.
Outside it is barely past midday, the sun a bright disc behind the clouds. Everyone is gathered by the ASV that Tia and Lyle went and retrieved from where they left it on the main road. Newton sits inside on the bench with Sherell inches from his side. She hasn’t left him since Merrill helped bring him up from beneath the house, turning him over to her care. Newton appears tattered and thin, like a work shirt ready to be retired. He sips on some of Ian’s tea, the porcelain mug wrapped in both his hands.
“How is he?” Zoey asks Chelsea as she stops beside the vehicle.
“Okay. I think he was in shock when we came into town. The area must’ve kick-started his memory the closer we got. When he saw his street and house it must’ve been almost like reliving what he’d gone through.”
“So terrible,” Nell says. “No wonder he was quiet all that time.”
They stand in the drive looking back at the house before Merrill finally says they should go. And Zoey agrees. This is a bad place, but more so, a necessary one. Lee had said most necessary things were bad, and she can’t disagree with him. What comes next will be necessary. Bad but necessary. She hopes everyone else will see it that way too.
“We’ll be there in half an hour,” Merrill says from the driver’s seat. There are thankful groans and several colorful comments from Tia as they coast down a lonely stretch of road beside a length of water, upthrusts of dark rock in its center.
Zoey knows this place.
They passed through it while looking for NOA’s agents, the southern approach to the ARC still forty miles distant, but close enough to raise the hairs on her arms.
She is going back.
Across from her, Lyle coughs and takes off his glasses to rub his eyes before replacing them. The older man has been particularly quiet since leaving the safe house that morning.
Zoey stands, moving to the other side of the narrow aisle, and gestures to the small opening in the seat beside him and he nods, scooting closer to Nell.