All the Devils Here

by Astor Penn

  Some weeks later, I stumbled upon the still-smoldering remains of a small plane crash. It couldn’t have been the same plane—this one was just a two-seater—but I knew its fate probably wasn’t much different. After that, I thought I welcomed the silence. Over time, I thought it’d drive me mad.

  “There will be a line of vehicles,” Jackson continues.

  Right, I think, a loading area for the vans. It’s been so long since I’ve seen one, I’d nearly forgotten.

  “Or, hopefully there will be.” He might sound concerned; I can’t quite tell over the alarm.

  “People are evacuating?” I shout, because I can’t quite manage like he does to project my voice.

  He nods, never once looking at me. Does he feel conflicted about saving me? Is there anything to save me from, or is he leading me down a dangerous path of his own volition?

  “I don’t understand,” I shout, and this time it isn’t just to be heard. “What’s going on? If people are evacuating, why haven’t I seen anyone else?” There should be a panicked mass; there should be the same tidal wave of screaming I saw in my dream. I’ve seen panic. This is not panic. This is an isolated incident.

  “We need to keep moving” is his reply. These words are the only meaning I’ve had in life; how dare he tell me we need to keep moving. He doesn’t know who I am or what I can do.

  When he grabs my arm, I plant my feet. My arm slips from his forceful grip, which probably left bruises, but he has to stop and turn to me. The heavy door in front of us is open already—I can see the plastic tunnel that replaces the concrete walls. It moves, breathing, because on the other side of that flimsy material is the open air and cool breeze. I want to step outside in it and tear it apart.

  Jackson looks at me with such sorrow, I’d give anything for him to look away and never look at me again. In Jackson, I’d always recognized the kind of sadness that extended through his apathetic features; he had given up long before me.

  “There’s some kind of outbreak in the labs in front of this building,” he says slowly. In the tunnel, it’s blissfully silent. No wailing alarms. He stands on the outside of the door where the alarm just echoes, whereas I stand with my feet inside the building, still deafened and hanging on.

  “Why aren’t you wearing a suit to protect yourself?”

  “I figure it’s already too late.” He grins at me, and I see what he could have been in his last life—a caring partner, a father, even. Someone who liked to laugh. “Especially since I was the one who created the outbreak.”

  It should be chilling, his admission, but it’s not. It doesn’t even surprise me. “That’s where you’ve been all this time? Instead of being with me, you were in the labs?”

  “Something like that.” Gently, he reaches for my hand. I step out into the tunnel and let the door close behind me. “I took a little break, and when I got my wits about me again, I decided to get you out, at least. But we need to hurry. The primary workers will evacuate, but a special team comes in to clear everything once they’re gone. It won’t take them long to figure out what I did isn’t much; it can be erased in a few hours.”

  “They’ll come back?”

  “And continue their research. But you won’t be there.”

  In the tunnel, there are few lights, but it’s more than the halls had. They hang down, almost bare bulbs, but wrapped in metal cages swinging in the wind. The alarm still rings behind us, seeping out the carefully air-locked door.

  “What about the people inside? The ones in the rooms?” They call them patients, but I never could.

  “They don’t evacuate them. They’re already infected.”

  “And if it was a fire?”

  “There wouldn’t be enough manpower to evacuate all those people.”

  I nod. I’ve seen the number of doors in the building, and even if only half of them had someone inside, the number is staggering. This wasn’t just an old mental hospital; it was a modified research center. They added more and more to the facility. More than they were ever equipped to deal with. That’s what crisis calls for.

  “You have to choose.” Jackson nods over his shoulder, where at the end of the tunnel, shrouded in shadows, there is another door. “You can leave now and fight your own battles again, or you can stay and fight theirs. You can’t do both.”

  He’s right, and I know already as he’s saying it there’s never been a doubt in my mind: I’m leaving, and I’m just putting up an outer fight for the greater good that I’ve never felt internally. I am the worst sort of person. Without answering, I walk past him toward the door at the end of the swaying plastic.

  Once we exit the tunnel, it looks more similar to the air hangar I imagined than a garage; it’s huge and dome-shaped, with an incomplete line of vehicles. There are four still parked, but holes in the line mean that many are gone. Behind the row near the door, there are other vans—older, rustic versions that lack the paint job. A few have a missing bumper or long gashes in the sides. I suppose it’s difficult to find vehicles to suit their needs now. They scavenge many of their cars, apparently.

  “C’mon.” Jackson rushes me to the passenger side of one. “Get in.”

  It’s strange voluntarily crawling into one of the vans; stranger yet to think that I’ve ridden in one before. I just don’t remember it. I’m leaving under much different circumstances than I was brought in—or am I?

  “Were they really ever going to let me go?” I ask quietly. Jackson turns the key; the engine sputters once, then groans. My seat vibrates rather violently. Behind me, I can hear articles in the back moving; I refuse to turn around. There must be buckles, straightjackets, and other restraints back there, things that once held me down. What else, I don’t want to know.

  “I have no idea,” he says, jerking me out of my thoughts, confusing me. What did I ask? We creep forward in the moving vehicle. There’s no door to the garage—or if there is, it’s already open, because all I can see is a giant plastic chute similar to the one we walked through. “No. I don’t think they would have ever let you go.”

  The van pulls through the plastic; it collapses down around us so it’s impossible for Jackson to see where he’s driving. His foot stays steady on the gas, though. I can’t tell if this tunnel has been partially destroyed in haste or if it’s always been like this. It’s white all around us, as if we’re driving through the clouds, or something far more innocent than what the material is actually used for.

  “We’re close to the end of the perimeter. When we exit, we’ll be outside the fences.” He doesn’t need to tell me this; one moment it’s all still white, then the plastic turns red. Not a perfect red, but a smeared waste of a red. I want to yell, but my throat feels scratched from screaming while the alarms drowned the sound out.

  Then, just as suddenly as the plastic sleeve appeared, it lifts and disappears. A crystal clear night sky blankets us, reminding me that we’re not as far from what I know as I always believed: the wilderness. It’s here, around us. They built a fort in a savage area they don’t understand. These are the kinds of places that turn on you, and I think—some small part of me hopes—that they experience that firsthand now that they’ve been driven out of their precious compound. Even if just for a few hours.

  “Where are we going?” I ask, gripping the side of the van door. We’re not on a road, so the vehicle lurches up and down over rough terrain.

  “Nowhere for now. We’re going to drive north and assess options later.”

  “We’ll freeze up north.”

  “We’ll be okay.” His voice sounds distant, like even he’s not sure he believes that. “Look behind you.”

  I don’t want to; I sit there for a while longer, swallowing the bad taste in my mouth. I barely peek over my shoulder, then whip around fast enough to give myself an injury. The van is stocked not with medical supplies, but gasoline, canned food, blankets, and a black duffel bag, a glittering knife and presumably other weapons stashed inside. There’s enough here for a few
people to live on comfortably for months.

  “There’s a girl,” I start. But how do I finish?

  “There’s always a girl.” And this time he sounds wistful.

  “I’m not going anywhere without her.”

  “What makes you think she’s still alive? I’m sure that’s what they told you, but they had the tendency to tell you what you wanted to hear, after all.”

  “No, I believe she’s alive. She was leverage.” Of course, I know the story of her being infected but surviving is fantastical at best. But I have to know. I won’t be able to live without knowing. “Wyles told me the camp wasn’t far.”

  “‘Not far’ is about twenty miles in the opposite direction of where you want to be.”

  “Twenty miles isn’t far in a car,” I argue. “Besides, I think north is the last direction we want to go. It’s winter. We’ll be better off headed towards warm weather.”

  Shaking his head, he says, “Do you want to get caught again? How were you caught the first time, anyway?”

  We drive silently for a while. We’re not yet on a road. The rocking of the van upsets my stomach—my very empty stomach. Twisting around in the seat, I grab the closest edible item, which happens to be peanut butter. Once the cap is off and the first finger scoop is in my mouth, I slip on my seat belt. A wave of something stronger than nostalgia hits me—nostalgia for the things I once had that I could possibly have once more, but there’s no such thing anymore. This van won’t be able to carry us forever. Eventually, the gas will run out. Eventually we will be thrust back into the dark times.

  I don’t need to answer him. So I don’t. I just eat. I can use him for what he’s worth, which is little besides resources. I must put the armor back on.

  “There are fewer people up north,” Jackson says quietly. “Fewer people means greater chance of survival.” He turns to me.

  “This game isn’t about avoiding infection anymore. Not for you, anyway. If what they cooked up in there didn’t kill you, then I think you’ll survive whatever is mutating out there. But the virus isn’t the only thing killing—it’s people. People have grown harder. No one trusts anyone, and it’s a shoot first, think later mentality. Now it’s best to avoid people for entirely different reasons.”

  “What do you know about it? You haven’t lived out there.”

  “The ominous ‘out there’ you like to describe has been just as present in the labs, I assure you. However, if it means I’ve justified myself to a teenage girl, I lived in an abandoned suburban neighborhood for a while before coming to Invo.”

  “With your family?” I ask. Every look Jackson has ever given me was pity, one so deeply resigned that I knew he’d lost someone.

  “Yes.” Even now, his face is set, like stone. No cracks to be seen. “It was just my wife and me, but then her parents decided to surprise us with a visit. I’m not sure if it was lucky they came when they did or not; shortly after they arrived, the initial panic began to break. They couldn’t get a flight or a bus or anything back home.”

  He pauses.

  “And the virus killed them?” Depending on the age of his in-laws, they would have been most susceptible.

  “No.” Detached. Far away. As if it were simple. “No. One of our neighbors, delirious in grief, came to the door to ask for a shovel. We all knew what he needed the shovel for. Then he asked for a cup of sugar. He came back sometime later, when I was out arguing with a grocer about paying for food.”

  Money was the first thing to depreciate, or maybe the second. Life would be the first.

  “We boarded up all the windows, but he broke through them. I don’t think he was even looking for anything. I think he was just lonely, or maybe he still held the petty grudges against us that neighbors always do. Either way, I think that underneath all his grief, he was perfectly conscious of what happened. I think he wanted out, but was too much of a coward to do it himself.”

  “What happened?” I ask, even though I don’t want to know. The pauses in the story grow longer.

  “My wife’s parents were older. They were too scared to do anything, which forced my wife to take actions into her own hands. She killed him with a knife from the kitchen, but when she saw the blood on her hands, she was too scared to let anyone near her. She locked herself in the bedroom upstairs with the body until she could unboard the windows there and crawl out. I don’t know what she did with the body. I thought maybe she put him back in his house, and that I could maybe find her there later.”

  Finally we even out onto a paved road. It’s uncared for, with massive potholes scattered about, but it feels heavenly compared to the terrain we previously drove on. I’m glad—I feel nauseous enough listening to the story.

  “I found her body less than five miles from our house. Someone shot her, that much was clear, but I never could figure out why. She didn’t have any money on her, or food. No extra clothes or weapons. Nothing that would have made her a target. It must have been over some small misunderstanding. You remember what it was like when they first announced how contagious the virus was, but they didn’t know if it was airborne, blood-borne. No one knew. Someone saw blood on her hands and got nervous.”

  I wonder when this was on the grand time line of things; was I out of the city by then? I must have been. Panic usually grips cities fastest and hardest; the suburbs have more time to remove themselves from these situations simply because they have room to move.

  “I’m sorry,” I say quietly. I hope he doesn’t even hear me, for what good will my apologies do? The last thing survivors want to hear is apologies. Survivors live by action and action alone. Words are useless. “Did your in-laws…?”

  “They were old.” He repeats himself, but he doesn’t need to go into detail.

  “I don’t understand how you came to be at Invo. Wouldn’t they have wanted contained employees? Anyone easily identifiable as outside the spread of the virus?” I wouldn’t think Wyles would take a chance on someone who lived in a neighborhood of outbreak.

  “I’ve worked there for years. After I buried my wife, in our own backyard, because there was nowhere safer, I went to work permanently. They put me through the tests—they burned me out, then froze me too. I was in isolation for the worst of the outbreak. By the time anyone would talk to me, the world population had fallen drastically. It was worse than we ever imagined, far worse than what we planned for.”

  “And it’s a privately owned corporation. I find it hard to believe that it survived when government programs at the Pentagon or whatever have disappeared.”

  “You saw how far out that place was. It was mostly luck that they were able to continue working. Hard to reach, and they could generate their own green power to at least supply electricity to the most important areas of the building.”

  The road is the bumpiest I’ve ever been on, and my stomach turns on itself. I shovel more peanut butter in, hoping to appease it. It’ll do that or make it worse. I guess my mentality of eat as much as possible still hasn’t passed.

  “It hasn’t changed, you know. Before people, there were actual lab rats. Monkeys too. I worked with animals; I was trained to give them injections and take their blood. Just a wrangler. I was never certified to work with people.”

  Now it’s my turn to be quiet; I think of his gentle hands as they slid a needle under my skin. It never occurred to me that he would be the one least qualified, or maybe none of them were really qualified. But then again, they survived as a whole. I guess that qualified them.

  “You never had children.” It’s really not a question. I know it as well as I know anything about anyone.

  “No.”

  “Did you want to?”

  He doesn’t reply; I can only imagine. He wanted kids, but she didn’t, or vice versa. Maybe they just didn’t have time for it.

  “Is that why you saved me?”

  “I don’t know why I’ve done anything since my wife.”

  But we both know I represent nothing but the idea of
a child, even if I’m not longer a child. I’m the child who wouldn’t die, couldn’t die, and like Wyles, to him I was safe. Indestructible. The difference between the two men is still laughable, in a completely tragic way.

  “You never did tell me all your story,” he says, easing up in the driver’s seat, like we’re in for a long ride. We are. “The only thing you ever did mention was your girl. What I don’t understand is how you’ve made it this far—just a couple of teenage girls.”

  “Raven and I met not long before we were brought in. We were only together for a matter of days.” The pain of speaking about Raven subsides; I have a chance of seeing her again. A real chance.

  “Someone you knew for only a few days isn’t someone worth risking your life for.”

  My throat burns with angry replies. They range from What do you know to How can you judge me when you gave up? He lost his wife. Raven is still out there, alive. He’s given up, but I haven’t; we are two very different people, and it’s not the age or gender gap that defines us. It’s sheer will.

  “She’s worth everything.” My voice is cold. Not all the rationale in the world could warm it up. Raven gave me life, and will, and humanity. She gave me back everything worth having, and everything that means anything when it’s taken away.

  “You’re young,” he says, and the additional thought that I don’t know what I’m doing lingers behind it. Instead he says, “It’s not worth risking it.”

  “I’ve made it this far on my own. I make my own decisions.” I uncross my arms when I realize how petulant I look. “So you can either help me, or I’m jumping out of this car right now.”