A Cure for Madness

by Jodi McIsaac

  I climbed in first and pressed myself as far toward the back as I could get, folding my legs against my chest.

  “Do you know where you’ll go?” he asked.

  I’d been thinking about this, and only one option had come to mind. “Our old place in the country,” I said.

  “You don’t think they’ll look for you there?”

  I shook my head. “Why would they? It doesn’t belong to us anymore—not the house, anyway. Other people live there now. But there are plenty of places to hide out. We still own some of the adjacent property and outbuildings. My dad and Rob keep saying maybe they’ll build another house on the property someday.”

  He looked doubtful, but then he reached for his wallet. “It’s all I’ve got; I don’t carry a lot of cash. And don’t forget about the prescription.” He handed me a few bills, which I stuffed into my jeans pocket in my cramped position.

  “Thanks. I’ll pay you back soon. For everything.”

  He leaned into the trunk and kissed me, and I wished that he could crawl in next to me. Instead, he helped Wes climb into the trunk and then stuffed one of our backpacks in with us, tossing the other one onto the backseat of the car. He gave me a long look before he turned to Wes and said, “Hey. Look after her.”

  “I will,” Wes said, and then Kenneth closed the trunk.

  Fortunately, I was the opposite of claustrophobic. All my life, I’d sought out small, confined spaces in which I could be alone: a reading tent I’d made behind a dresser in the spare room; a small closet I’d discovered in the apartment Latasha and I rented during college.

  After a minute the car door opened again and I heard Maisie’s sleepy question, “Where are we going?”

  “To Nai Nai’s, baby,” Kenneth said. “Daddy has to go back to work.” When the engine started, my chest tightened and my head swam. Those other spaces had also been easy to escape when I was ready, and I hadn’t been running from the police at the time.

  “You okay?” I whispered to Wes as the garage door lifted and we slowly rolled out. He grunted in response. I closed my eyes, pretended I was back in my reading closet, and started to count my breaths. Then the car stopped. We must have only gone a few feet. I fumbled around in the dark until I found Wes’s arm, and squeezed it. All they’d need to do was open the trunk, and Wes would be back in the lab.

  The trunk was hot and stuffy. A trickle of sweat ran down the side of my face and pooled in my ear. I longed to reach up and wipe it away, but I didn’t dare move.

  A woman asked, “Where you headed, Doctor?”

  “To the hospital,” Kenneth answered calmly. “I’ve been called in.”

  “You’re taking your daughter with you?”

  “I’m dropping her off at my mother’s house.”

  “Wait here, please,” the officer said, and her voice grew quiet. There was static and the sound of other voices, and then her voice became clear again. “You’re good to go, Doctor. Good luck. And stay safe.”

  “Thank you,” Kenneth said, and then we drove away. Wes exhaled loudly, but neither of us said a word, still afraid of being overheard. After only a couple of minutes, the car stopped again. Kenneth’s door opened and closed, and soft voices floated into the air as he took Maisie inside. Then a rush of fresh air filled the trunk, and I squinted against the glare of a streetlight.

  “Hurry,” Kenneth said, helping Wes out of the trunk. Then he extended his hand to me. We hadn’t been in there for very long, but the stress, combined with my awkward position, seemed to have fused my joints together. I winced as I straightened out my legs and clambered out of the trunk.

  We were in a back lane, tucked into a gravel driveway surrounded by trees. Kenneth opened the front door of his car, and I climbed into the driver’s seat. Wes was already seated on the passenger side.

  “There’s a phone charger in the glove box. Keep your phone on and I’ll let you know of any developments on this end. And . . . be safe.” Giving me a worried look and a forced smile, Kenneth walked down the lane, heading back toward his mother’s house.

  “Are you okay?” I asked Wes.

  “No,” he said dully.

  I clenched the steering wheel as I drove, sticking to back lanes and sleepy residential streets. Sirens wailed in the distance and I tensed, but then we drove by the source of the trouble: someone’s house was on fire. A cop car passed us at top speed, lights flaring. I quickly turned onto an intersecting road, and Wes grabbed the dashboard to steady himself.

  “Seat belt,” I said from behind gritted teeth. I wanted to floor it, but I knew getting pulled over for speeding would be a bad idea—if the police even cared about things like that anymore.

  “Are there any twenty-four-hour pharmacies in town?” I asked. I dreaded going somewhere we might be recognized, but we needed to get his medicine.

  Wes shook his head. He was sweating, but his skin was pale under the tattoos.

  “We’ll have to wait until morning, then. But at least we can get you some smokes,” I said. We drove for a few more minutes, and then I pulled up to a corner store. The neon “Open” sign was off, but the lights were on inside and someone was moving around. “Put the seat back and lie down,” I told him. He obliged silently, which made me even more nervous. There was often a calm before Wes’s storms.

  I walked up to the door and looked inside. Someone was definitely in there, but when I tried the door, it was locked. I rapped on the window. “Hello? Are you open?” The figure moved out from behind one of the shelves and headed toward the door. I hesitated, my hand still on the handle. This didn’t look like the owner. She looked about my age and was wearing yoga pants and a hoodie. Her blonde bob looked wet, and both of her hands were clutching a tote bag. A bag of Doritos stuck out of the top. Through the glass I could hear a child crying somewhere in the back of the store.

  As the woman came toward me, she stumbled. I instinctively looked down at her feet and cried out. She had tripped over a body. An elderly man lay sprawled near the cash register. The side of his skull had been smashed in.

  The woman reached the door and started fumbling with the deadbolt as I started in horror. Then she raised her head and looked right at me. There was no flicker of reason in her eyes. They were manic, terrified. I sprinted back to the car and yanked the door open.

  “What happened?” Wes asked as I fought to get the key in the ignition. The engine finally started and I tore out onto the street, unable to hide the terror on my face.

  “There was an infected woman in there . . . with a child . . . I think she had killed someone . . .” I stammered.

  “Hey. Hey, it’s going to be okay. You’re safe with me,” Wes said.

  But I shook my head, my chin trembling. “We’re not safe anywhere.”

  I tried to block the scene out of my mind as I kept driving.

  “So,” Wes said after a couple of minutes had passed. “I guess you didn’t get the smokes?”

  “Jesus Christ, no,” I said. “You’ll have to wait until morning.”

  “Whatever. It’s kind of cool, isn’t it? We’re heading to our old home. Just you and me.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Cool.”

  My parents hadn’t lived in the country house for some two dozen years, but it was where I’d spent the first eight years of my life. I still thought of it as home, partly because it was the one place from my childhood unmarred by memories of drugs and abuse and illness. My parents had sold it when I was in the third grade, but I’d always had this crazy dream of going back and buying it someday. It wasn’t that I wanted to live in it; I just didn’t like the idea of other people living in it. As though their lives would somehow tarnish my good memories.

  But maybe those memories were embellished. Maybe they were just ordinary, and they only looked bright and shiny compared to everything that had come after. The house was inside the quarantine zone, so there was no reason we would encounter any roadblocks en route. As I’d told Kenneth, there were probably other people
living in it now. It may have even changed hands several times since we’d sold it. But there was one building in particular that I hoped would give us refuge.

  We drove past the graveyard where my grandparents and cousin were buried—and where my parents’ remains would be interred once all of this was over. I’d always hated graveyards, even in the middle of the day, but Wes was drawn to them like a vampire to blood. I averted my eyes, setting them on the welcome sight ahead: an old farmhouse, all white siding and black gables, sitting on a small rise off the side of the road.

  It was a quintessential turn-of-the-century farm home. My mother had been born here, and my grandparents had sold it to her and my dad for a penny as a wedding gift. When I was young I had imagined it as Green Gables and myself as Anne Shirley.

  I slowed down, watching for any sign that we were expected. There were no lights on in the main house, no cars parked outside. My hands relaxed on the wheel. Barely visible in the dark behind the old house, sitting just on the edge of the forty acres of forest my family had once owned, was our destination: the hen pen.

  The hen pen, as we affectionately called it, used to be just that: a barn where my grandfather kept hens. Either he or his father had built it; I could never remember which of them. After we stopped using it for hens, it was converted to a storage barn by my grandparents, my aunt and uncle, and my parents. It was four stories tall, and though it shared the same white-painted siding as the main house, it was in much poorer repair. I assumed my uncle and my parents had continued to use it after my grandparents died a few years ago, but I couldn’t be sure. The paint was peeling on almost every board, and the roof was sagging in more than one spot.

  It was also the place where Tracey had died. I glanced at the tattoo on Wes’s neck. Would coming back here set him off?

  I turned onto the long gravel driveway and pulled up on the far side of the hen pen, out of view of the house. Directly in front of us was a corrugated metal door large enough to drive a tractor through. I hoped it wasn’t too rusted over to open; the sooner we could get this car out of sight, the better. Beside me, Wes was vigorously rubbing his temples. “We’re here,” I said, poking him gently with my elbow.

  “Yeah,” he said, but he didn’t stop rubbing.

  I turned off the headlights, hoping the light of the moon would be enough. I jogged over to a small door near the corner of the building. The knob looked rather new. It didn’t turn. I gestured to Wes to join me, hoping his penchant for destruction would actually come in handy this time.

  “It’s locked. Can you kick it in?” I asked him.

  “Fuck yeah,” he answered. “Get back.”

  I took the requisite few steps back and glanced down at the road, watching for cars. Would the noise of the door breaking down alert the occupants of the house only a few hundred yards away? I prayed that it was as empty as it looked. I couldn’t see my uncle’s old house across the tracks from here. Were its owners at home? Had the police warned them to be on the lookout?

  I needn’t have worried—about that, at least. The sound created when Wes’s boot connected with the door was more of a smoosh than a resounding crack. The door had rotted, and his leg went right through the middle. “Fuuuck!” he cried out, his leg still halfway through the splintered door.

  “Shhhhh!” I ran over to him and helped him pull his leg out. His heavy black pants had protected his skin from the sharp splinters. I cautiously reached through the hole he’d made and felt around until I located the doorknob, then unlocked it. The hinges creaked loudly as I pushed the door open, and I winced. How much more noise would the corrugated door make when we opened it? A small bit of moonlight followed us, and I could make out vague shapes within but nothing else.

  “Did you bring a flashlight?” Wes asked.

  “I didn’t bring anything!” I said in frustration. “Go look in the glove box.” I could use my phone as a last resort, but I wanted to save the battery. Kenneth seemed like the kind of guy who would have a safety kit in his vehicle, though I knew there wasn’t one in the trunk. If anything had been in there, I’d still have the imprint on my face.

  I felt my way around the inside walls, struggling to remember where the pulley was that lifted the door. I’d played here as a kid—much more than my parents would ever have allowed had they known—but I’d only been back a couple of times since our move into town. Many, many years had passed since then. This place felt both familiar and foreign.

  Something hit me on the shoulder, and I barely managed to stifle a scream. “Found one,” Wes said with a grin. Then he switched it on and held the beam under his chin. “Boo!”

  I snatched it from him. “Stop that.” I shone the flashlight around us. It was just as I remembered it, though there seemed to be more cobwebs this time. A small dark shape darted across my beam of light. More rats, too. Great.

  “There it is,” I said, pointing the flashlight at a length of rope hanging from the ceiling, a wooden handle on its end. There was also a light bulb hanging from a cord, a thin metal chain beside it. I gave Wes the flashlight and pulled on the rope. The corrugated door lifted off the ground with a loud screech of protest that arrested me.

  “Keep going,” Wes said, and, cringing, I pulled again. As soon as the door was open enough to let the car through, I ran back out and drove it inside, cutting the engine as soon as possible. When I got out, Wes was once again holding the flashlight under his face.

  “I am the demon slayer!” he said in a gravelly voice.

  “Uh-huh,” I said, relieved to have gotten this far undetected. “Look, I don’t know about you, but I’m exhausted. Let’s get a few more hours of sleep. I’ll go get your medication in the morning.”

  That consideration worried me more than I was willing to admit; if these CDC guys were serious, they’d flag Wes at every pharmacy in the area. Or wait for him to self-destruct, in which case he’d probably lead them right to us.

  Wes didn’t move. He was pointing the flashlight at the floor, at a spot near the rustic elevator platform. “That’s where she died,” he said. His hand caressed his throat.

  “Hey,” I said. “Come on. Let’s get some sleep. We can pay our respects to Tracey in the morning.”

  “She knows we’re here.”

  His words made me shiver.

  “I gotta take a piss,” Wes said, stepping outside. I hung back uncertainly, not wanting to watch my brother relieve himself but also not wanting to let him out of my sight. I compromised by hovering near the door and watching his dark form out of the corner of my eye.

  “Come. Sleep,” I said when he had finished, opening the passenger door and beckoning him inside. He sat down and reclined the seat.

  “I’m hungry,” he said.

  “I’ll get some food in the morning.”

  “Maybe we could cook up some of those rats.”

  “That’s disgusting.”

  “Good source of protein,” he said, then laughed as though he’d told a hilarious joke.

  “You’re so weird,” I said with a slight smile.

  He grinned over at me and tapped the side of his head. “Not just weird. Crazy.” Then he laughed again.

  “Hey, Wes,” I said, my mind returning to the bigger picture now that we were once again safe, however temporary that state might be. “Remember when we were talking on the phone before . . . before I came home, and you told me about that scientist who committed suicide?”

  “Yeah. What about him? He hasn’t been talking to you from the dead, has he?”

  “Um, no. But I’m interested in his story. You said he was working on something called Project Amherst?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you know where?”

  “Some secret lab, he said.”

  “Why was he in the facility with you, do you know?”

  “A lot of the people in there were geniuses,” he said. “They knew things, y’know? I bet most of them were in there because someone wanted to keep them quiet.”
<
br />   “Do you think that’s why this guy was in there?”

  “Maybe. Wouldn’t surprise me. He knew a lot of fucked-up shit.”

  “Oh yeah? Like what?”

  “Well, like I told you. He said there was this government project . . . something to do with mutants, I think . . .”

  “Mutants? Not . . . biological weapons?”

  He frowned. “Nope. Didn’t say anything about that, though it wouldn’t surprise me. Whatever it was, it got all fucked up.”

  “Fucked up how?”

  “He didn’t give me details—probably afraid of being knocked off and shit. I wonder if that’s what really happened to him.”

  “You really think he was killed?”

  “Dunno. Maybe he was just a mad scientist.” At this he laughed again.

  “You’ve got the giggles tonight.”

  “Well, it is kind of funny, you have to admit. Mom and Dad are dead, and the two of us are on the run from the feds, sleeping in your ex-boyfriend’s car in the hen pen.”

  “Wes, this isn’t funny at all,” I said, sitting up slightly.

  He shrugged. “Everything’s funny if you look at it the right way.”

  We sat in silence for several moments. I closed my eyes and willed my brain to stop churning, knowing even as I did it that it was an exercise in futility.

  “Why did you ask me about that scientist?” Wes asked suddenly.

  “Just . . . curious,” I answered, staring into the darkness. “I was wondering: if something like that did happen, how far would they go to cover it up?”

  Sleep eventually found us both. I awoke a couple of hours later, stiff and disoriented. The dim morning light forced its way through cracks in the walls and through the hole Wes had made in the door. He was still asleep in the seat beside me. I climbed out and stretched.

  My head ached, and I longed for a coffee. I peeked outside to make sure the coast was clear, then squatted against the wall of the hen pen that bordered the woods and relieved myself. That done, I went back to the car and checked my phone. There were a few work emails, which I ignored. It seemed strange that the world outside Clarkeston continued to go about its business. There were several messages from Rob, wondering where I was and if I was okay. I ignored these as well, certain that Dr. Hansen and the CDC were leaning on him. I hoped they believed him when he told them he didn’t know where we were. I checked my texts—still nothing from Latasha.