Domino Falls (ARC)

by Steven Barnes

  “But this here’s our secret weapon,” Tom said.

  Piranha could barely make out the huge rolls and rolls of fencing piled inside, but the gray mass Tom gestured toward was tall enough to stir his heart. Hell, yeah!

  “My family’s been running this factory since World War II,” Tom said. “We had four orders ready to go out when the freaks hit. We just kept the fence for ourselves. Scavenged from the surrounding land. Got a hold of all the raw stock we could. We can always put it to good use.” He lowered his voice. “Town’s biggest industry was my daddy’s fence plant. That’s what really saved Domino Falls—not Wales.”

  No mistaking he wanted to make that point good and clear.

  If Piranha’s eyes had been working right, filled with distraction, he might have missed the tremor in the man’s voice, something that sounded more like anger than pride.

  Six

  The woman who met Kendra and Ursulina at the main intersection in town was slightly plump and ruddy-faced, with pinned white hair. She called herself Granny Daisy. Kendra felt better about her first separation from Terry since quarantine.

  “I thought that was the schoolhouse at the edge of town, out by the fence factory,” Kendra said. The quaint building had reminded her of Little House on the Prairie.

  “Too hard to patrol out on the fringes,” Granny Daisy said. “Besides, that old elementary wasn’t near big enough. That’s why we keep the kids at the theater. Dead center of town. I have any problems, I ring a bell and the whole town is here. A town’s not worth a snot if it can’t protect its children.”

  The Olde Domino Theatre was a redbrick building in the middle of Main Street. The red lettering in the marquee read All Children We come, missing a letter in welcome, although the message still got across. The theater was fenced off from its neighbors. Except for the barred windows and razor wire above the fence, it looked like a regular theater. If the outer town defenses failed, the freaks would have to start over again if they wanted to get to the kids.

  Traditional classroom desks crammed the lobby, and twelve students between ages fourteen and nineteen were getting a wicked geometry lesson on a rolling chalkboard from a pockmarked woman with bright red hair. Life had taken everything but math out of the teacher. Her voice was strong as she tapped the board.

  The students were rapt on the teacher, barely noticing Ursulina and her. People must come and go often.

  “The high schoolers have to hit the classroom at four-thirty,” Granny Daisy said.

  “In the morning?” Kendra said.

  “Yeah, class is by lamplight so they can finish their schooling and get to work. Everybody works. Kids grow up fast. Most of these kids have been through something that could turn your hair white,” Granny Daisy said, patting selfconsciously at the snowy ponytail that made her face youthful. She leveled a look at Kendra. “We don’t force ’em, so these here really want it. Like we tell the kids, the world’s going to sort all this out sooner or later, so might as well go out there knowing something. You’re the new leaders of the world.”

  “Hear that, Madame President?” Ursulina teased Kendra. “Hit those books.”

  Kendra had expected to be working at a day care, not going to school. She hadn’t survived this long just to bisect triangles again.

  Ursulina snickered. “I’ll be your alarm clock,” she said.

  “As if,” Kendra whispered.

  Double doors from the lobby led to the theater space. Kendra hadn’t walked two steps into the room before her eyes filled with tears.

  Children filled every space in the room. The theater had seating for at least a hundred people, and there were children in almost every seat. There were kids working in circles on the stage ahead of her. On the floor. If not for the bruises and bandages, their laughter would have lifted her spirits.

  One boy about six sat in an aisle seat, busily drawing on a pad in his lap. He had only one arm. His other elbow was a stump in a grimy bandage. The boy’s face was knit with concentration as he drew. Kendra had heard stories that it might be possible to stop the infection if a limb was chopped off within seconds after a bite. Was that what had happened?

  Kendra heard Ursulina suck in her breath. For a moment, they both just stared.

  “Why so many?” Kendra asked.

  “Some came with their parents. Some were rescued from their parents, or strangers dropped ’em off. There’s a do-gooder a few miles up who drives an old ice-cream truck and rescues kids, brings ’em here. Parents died outside, or on one of the crews. We do all we can, but it’s barely enough.” Granny Daisy’s words died into a sigh. “I’ve heard some towns won’t even take children. Too much of a burden. Not useful enough, or some such doodley. How can anyone turn a child away?” She smiled a sad, wise smile. “When we stop making room for children, we’re lost.”

  Kendra remembered the sad look on Reverend Meeks’s face as he had stared at her. He’d probably been thinking the same thing.

  “What you got there, huh?” a woman’s gentle voice said nearby. The voice flowed like a waterfall of loving patience, but that was impossible. It was Ursulina!

  Ursulina had wandered to the one-armed boy to see what he was drawing.

  The boy glanced toward Granny Daisy, uncertain. He didn’t trust strangers.

  “It’s all right, Skylar,” she said. “This is Kendra and Ursulina. You’ll be seeing them here for a while.”

  Skylar seemed to relax, but he didn’t smile. He went on drawing. “Hey, Skylar, this is some picture you drew!” Ursulina said, voice bursting with amazement.

  Skylar bit his lip, trying hard not to let in a smile.

  “Look at all that red!” Ursulina said. “That house looks so real.”

  “It is real,” Skylar said, almost angry.

  “Yeah, Skylar, I know,” Ursulina said. “It’s as real as it gets, buddy.”

  Kendra peeked over Ursulina’s shoulder to see the picture. It was a two-story house engulfed in bright red flames. Stick figures big and small were running, their mouths exaggerated black Os as they screamed. A tall figure in a dress was bleeding from her head. Or maybe just her mouth.

  Kendra tried to tell Skylar what a great job he’d done, but her throat was frozen.

  “… so we rotate them around the room in shifts. The seats. The stage. The floor. We use it all. There’s a fenced-off area out back where they can run off their energy …” Granny Daisy’s ongoing orientation helped Kendra forget the burning house.

  Other drawings by the children were showcased on the walls, shrieking histories. Smaller people running from larger people. Larger people running from smaller people. One older child had drawn a huge pair of eyes, nearly the size of the entire page, with pencil sketches of anime-inspired mayhem in the background. Art therapy.

  Mom and Dad would have liked this place, she thought.

  Was that the first time she had thought of her parents in past tense? Mom and Dad had receded into a foggy space behind her, a part of a life she knew she would barely remember one day. They didn’t hurt so much in the fog. Stand still, Kendra. Listen to yourself, Dad used to say. But Kendra didn’t want to listen. Not today. She had no right to cry in front of these kids.

  The day got easier. The children were just like any other, as far as she could see. At least, their hearts were the same. One little pale redheaded kid named Jaxon had lost part of his left arm to a freak bite. Someone had grabbed a machete damned fast. The kid was fine, his stump was bandaged and slung, and he seemed to have decided not to notice as long as no one else did.

  The kids teased, laughed, cried, and chased one another the way they might have in happier times. Kendra had always heard people talk about how resilient children were, but she’d never witnessed the miracle.

  They would probably make out better than anyone, she thought. She hoped so.

  Ursulina darted around the room to tie shoelaces, wipe noses, and even change diapers, which was where Kendra drew the line. Ursulina uneart
hed something in a two-year-old boy’s Pampers that looked like a scientific experiment. The smell alone was worthy of study, but Ursulina didn’t complain. She tugged, taped, and snipped like a pro.

  “Do you have kids?” Kendra asked Ursulina before she could stop herself.

  It wasn’t a question you could blurt out lightly. Kids weren’t a phase people outgrew, or old belongings left in storage lockers. If she did have kids, where were they?

  Ursulina hung her head so low that her chin touched her breastbone. Her body language said Back the hell off. Or she was closing up like a turtle. “Not me,” Ursulina said, finally looking up at her. She picked up the two-year-old like a bag of flour and set him running off on scurrying legs. “Granny Daisy,” she called. “Taking a break.”

  “All right, dear,” Daisy said. “We’ll survive.”

  Ursulina motioned Kendra outside. She leaned up against the redbrick wall and shook a cigarette out of a wrinkled pack. She halfheartedly offered one to Kendra, smiled when she refused. The soldier lit her cigarette, inhaled deeply, exhaled, and finally spoke. “My partner, Mickey. She had a daughter, Sharlene.”

  “Wait, never mind,” Kendra said. “I’m sorry to …”

  Ursulina shrugged. “I don’t mind remembering. Hate works for me.”

  “Love can work pretty well too.”

  Ursulina gave Kendra a sour look. Don’t push it, chica.

  “We were together four years, through my deployment,” Ursulina went on. “She was in Chehalis, Washington, so it was my turn to move.” Ursulina’s face went stormy. She sighed long and hard before she went on. “Sharlene. Man, that little angel was a real beauty, inside and out. The coolest human I’ve ever met. So damn smart. Funny. A good little heart. That kid was our whole world.”

  Ursulina shook her head, working through her memories. “We were trying to get gas so we could make it to the Vancouver base, so we stopped at this station. There was still gas then, the first few days. It looked safe.”

  Her eyes burned with her betrayal at how badly she’d been fooled. “Sharlene is standing right next to Mickey at the tank. I’m on guard, but … he was just on the other side of the pump. Right where we couldn’t see him. Not even hiding, one of the slow ones. Like he fell asleep on his feet and we woke him up. Two steps, he grabs Sharlene’s arm, and … she’s bit.” She shook her head, still trying to wrap her mind around it.

  “One minute it’s like a family trip. You know, ‘Are we there yet?’ Then … she’s infected. We were sure her shirt stopped the bite. We rolled it up, looked for the mark. We thought we were okay, all of us crying and thanking God, all that. But we’d missed it. Sharlene was sleepy as soon as we got back in the car.

  “Suddenly we were the people they’d been talking about on TV. We had a sleeper. We’d seen it a million times, people trying to keep ’em awake. Coffee. NoDoz. Cold showers. While I drove, Mickey did everything she could to wake that kid up. Shook her. Yelled at her. Slapped her. Back then, we still thought there was a cure around the corner, so I’m thinking if I floor it to the Barracks, a medic can patch her up. Maybe I knew better, but I had to have a plan.

  “You can guess the rest. All they gave Mickey was a locked room where she could sit with her and be there. Rocking to her. Singing to her. She wouldn’t even let me in. I sat outside listening to Mickey singing … then I heard the gunshot.” Kendra heard a gunshot too. She flinched at the shared memory, her teeth gritted.

  “After that, Mickey didn’t really want to be here anymore. In this world. This life. She hung around for me, to have my back. As soon as you guys showed up at the Barracks, she pushed me out of those doors … she checked out.”

  “I’m sure she wanted to come with you,” Kendra said, even if she wasn’t sure it was true or even the right thing to say.

  Ursulina shook her head. “Nah,” she said, exhaling a pale stream of smoke. “She looked like she was alive, but Mickey was already gone. And you know the hardest thing about this place? I’d started telling myself maybe it happened the way it was supposed to. Maybe it was a blessing. If Sharlene had been with us at the Barracks, if she’d seen what we saw … it would have been worse. Maybe she’s better off dead.” Glassy-eyed, Ursulina stared at the sea of children in the theater. “Now I know we would’ve had somewhere to bring her. Other kids to be with. Even if it was just for one day.”

  A sob tried to sneak into her last words, and Ursulina turned away.

  Kendra wanted to hug her companion, but instinct told her she would get shoved away, maybe hard. Ursulina was saving her hugs for the children.

  The soldier stubbed her cigarette out on the ground and went back in.

  “You got a little boo-boo,” Ursulina told a girl who was howling because she’d tripped and scraped her knee. “Bet that hurts, doesn’t it? It’s gonna be okay, princess …”

  Ursulina’s voice was full of light, but her eyes were broken.

  Kendra didn’t want to hear her using the syrup-sweet voice she’d used with Sharlene, the voice from the gas station when she’d told the infected girl it was okay, she and Mommy would get help for her boo-boo from the bad man’s bite.

  Instead, Kendra drifted toward the stage. There, alone on the shadowed steps, a girl was working on a project with poster board, glue, and red glitter. Glitter twinkled in her face and hair.

  The girl was dark-haired, about thirteen, with a moonshaped face. Soon, this girl would be old enough to work instead of playing. The price of adulthood was steep here.

  “I saw it in a dream,” the girl said, before Kendra could ask.

  She’d drawn a convincing landscape of farmland draped in fences.

  Glitter sparkled from bright red ribbons floating down from the clouds.

  Seven

  Darius couldn’t believe that he and his cousin had landed their dream job—mobile support for fence crews. They had a wheelie contest up and down an empty stretch of road, celebrating their luck. They were two miles from Main Street, and the only sure way to avoid the fences was to take the east-west path through town. As long as they had their bikes, they were still free.

  Overnight, the road had changed faces. The dangers had been washed away, replaced by a fantasy. Even Dean felt it; Dean was in the best mood he’d been in since he’d come back from his folks’ place. Done what he’d done. Dean had never flinched when they’d fired at the Siskiyou pirates; none of it was real to him anyway. Not since the trailer park. Everybody had it, he’d said. Three words. Dean had never said so outright, but Darius thought he might have hunted down his family one by one so he wouldn’t leave them that way.

  One of the trucks in the convoy honked, and a window came down. Blond hair whipped in the breeze, almost close enough to smell. It was Jackie! Darius had no statistics to back it up, but the redhead might be the finest woman left in the world.

  If I’m dreaming, please don’t let me wake up. Ever.

  “Thought you were on guard duty!” Darius called to her. She was definitely following them; he hadn’t been sure, until now.

  “That was yesterday!” she called back. “Every day’s brand-new.”

  She was flirting. The truck drove on and seemed to pull Darius with a tug of heat. Laughing, he dropped back to Dean. They pounded fists across the roadway.

  “Dibs,” Darius said. “She wants me.”

  “No way. This is war.”

  Yep, the old Dean was coming back. Darius might let Dean have Jackie if she could repair whatever was broken in him. He’d like to think he would, anyway.

  When the convoy stopped, the crew leader parked beside her white pickup and waved Darius and Dean off the road. The freeway was bisected by dirt paths on either side, and one of them was Claremont Road. A cloud of dust brought them to the perimeter of a sun-faded farmhouse set back about fifty yards. Fields on three sides, woods on the other. There was already some fencing up near the cow pastures, but the path to the woods gaped open.

  The crew leader, a thirtyish, su
n-broiled Gold Shirt, looked as if he lived in the weight room. He wasn’t particularly friendly, but Darius didn’t need him to be. The freakfest had burned off people’s manners. The crew leader tugged what looked like a pile of leaves out of the bed of his truck.

  “Homemade ghillie suits,” the crew leader said. “Sniper’s paradise. While we put up the fences, you watch our backs. Get yourself downwind, and the freaks won’t smell you or see you. First, we need to see if you can shoot.”

  “Cool beans,” Dean said.

  “Hell to the yeah,” said Darius.

  Dean’s uncle Bucky, a deepwater fisherman and hunter, had taken Dean out every other weekend during hunting season, teaching him everything he knew about tracking, trapping, and shooting. He’d never said if Uncle Bucky had been bitten too, but his silence said it all. The whole park had it, he’d said.

  Dean had taught Darius everything he could. Dean had the practice, but Darius had the eye.

  Darius eased the loose-fitting bodysuit over his shoulder. Dean mirrored him, and they grinned at each other. The suits were painted standard green, but the twigs and leaves looked real enough to fool his own eye, although some of it was fake plants and AstroTurf. Someone had spent serious time on the ghillie suits.

  The fence was being built for a farmhouse that looked like it belonged to several families, with bystanders spilling from the porch. The farmhouse already had fencing, but the crew had come to fortify it like the fences along the roadway toward town.

  If you lived in Domino Falls, the government protected you. Darius wondered what the protection cost, or if everybody got treated the same.

  “First we gotta make sure neither of you knuckleheads will shoot us in the back,” Jackie said. Beyond the farmhouse, in the open field that had already been burned away, Jackie sashayed over to a shooting range with aluminum cans on rows of wooden poles.

  Darius took extra time to appreciate her easy walk as she led them. Her faded blue jeans were about a size too tight. Dean was staring too. They grinned steel at each other. Back off, she’s mine. Darius hadn’t thought about the possibility of a girl in so long that he’d forgotten how nice smooth skin and scented hair could be.