by RJ Crayton
Elaan startled. The question seemed to come out of nowhere. “I …” she started, paused. “Don’t they test everyone?”
Lijah shook his head. “No, it’s an expensive test, and generally, you only do it if someone seems to be near infected people and not get sick. Usually, they perform the test just to make sure you’re not a carrier.”
“Then why did they test me?”
“Because of Mom. They weren’t testing you for immunity. They were testing you to see if you were a carrier, like her. Dad took the blood sample and labeled you patient 226. When they test for carrier patterns, they also run an immunity test. Your carrier test came back negative, but the other test showed you were immune.”
In the darkness, Lijah looked almost feral, his face contorted in such misery. She had to remember he was still her brother. Though this Lijah felt like a stranger. “Did Dad test you?”
Lijah gazed out at the river, with its slow-moving current, then turned back. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m not immune, nor am I a carrier. But, given Mom’s genetic disposition, I’m likely to be a very good carrier if I come in contact with the disease.”
“Look,” Elaan said. “I understand what it’s like to be lied to, and I know Mom and Dad hid important information from you. Because you didn’t have that knowledge, you took a vaccine that’s made things … um, worse... but your hostility toward her.”
“Is what? Unwarranted?” he asked. “She’s making people sick, Elaan. You know that, right? She’s a carrier who is able to unleash a deadly virus with only a few drops of her bodily fluids and you think it’s OK for her to do that — why? Because she’s your mom. It’s OK for her to make people sick because she’s your mom. Well, I don’t think that’s OK. I would have told you, I would have told everyone, except it meant that people would have found out what Dad did. They would have found out what Kingston did. It meant they would come for me, the way they should come for her. She’s making people sick, and she deserves to die. We’d all be better off if she actually were dead.”
And there it was. Every ounce of venom he’d expressed toward their mother in the last few months. Every ounce of anger all came from that place. She hadn’t understood it because she hadn’t known the truth. But now it was starting to gel in her mind. He was angry at her. Angry for not telling him the truth. Angry for being someone different than he thought she was. Angry that he’d taken the vaccine because he thought she’d gotten sick and died. Or maybe he was just angry in general. Angry at the world for the lot he’d been given, and she’d become an easy scapegoat for all the anger. Easier than his father and Kingston, who he had to see every day. She was gone, a mystery, a myth, a phantom, like the boogeyman. Weren’t boogeymen always hiding in closets and under beds? Always someplace you couldn’t see them but that you knew they were. Their mom was gone, untouchable, and he’d made her his only personal boogeyman. She’d wondered briefly how she hadn’t seen it. Why hadn’t she pieced it together? Lijah’s lack of grief should have been the first clue. Only, her father’s grief had been so convincing, so all-encompassing.
“Why?” she said, trying to hold in the flood of emotions threatening to rise to the surface.
“Why what?” Lijah asked.
“Why has Dad been like this all these months?” she asked. “I thought it was grief. I thought he was lost without Mom. But, she’s not dead, and he knows it. So why can’t he function? Why has he fallen apart?”
Lijah sighed and rubbed his temples. “For all the reasons you thought he couldn’t function,” he said. “Even though she’s not dead, he’s still without her. He feels alone. And he feels guilty, Elaan. He’d told the world there was nothing to worry about when there was. He’d decided it was right to kill a man who was a carrier of this disease. He was the final vote, and it turns out that vote also was a death sentence for his wife and his son. He can’t function because he knows, if she’s caught or I’m caught, we will be killed, all because he voted to kill a man he thought was a danger. He cast a vote that sentenced half his family to death. Then he lied to the government about his family and hid them. And while our father was more willing to fudge the truth than Mom, less strenuous in exerting that truth ruled above all else, he still valued truth and honesty. He still valued it on a basic level, and his life has been nothing but a lie since the moment he decided to hide his wife to protect her from the punishment he doled out to others. He is the biggest hypocrite there is, because he demanded death for Dayton but lied and cheated to gain survival for Mom, and for me, and for Josh. And that kind of hypocrisy, that kind of guilt, is hard to live with, whether your wife is dead or not.”
Elaan breathed deeply, trying to digest everything he’d said. She supposed it made sense. She’d always thought it had been a combination of their mother’s death and the guilt over others, but it had been a more specific guilt. Over not just his public decisions, but his private ones. Watching the videos had been a clear, easy reminder of the damage he’d done. Something he could see and hear. But the private thing he’d done, he wore that on his heart, too. He’d lied and connived to save their mother. To his government, to his son, to Elaan, and probably to himself.
Chapter 15
Elaan opened her eyes and looked at her brother. Despite her own feelings of betrayal, she could see the anguish on Lijah’s face. She reached out and touched his hand. “Lijah,” she said. “Listen, I’m sorry this has been so difficult for you.”
Lijah shook his head. “I don’t want your sorrow,” he spat, and then climbed out of the jeep, startling both Josh and Elaan. He looked back at them. “I have to take a leak,” he said, and stalked off toward a grove of trees.
Elaan closed her eyes. She understood how Lijah felt. No one wanted to be pitied, but she did feel for him and she wanted him to know that she was there for him, despite everything. She felt a hand rub her knee and opened her eyes to see Josh’s sympathetic face. “You alright?”
She shook her head and half laughed at the irony — Kingston Wells had been right. “Josh,” she said. “I appreciate everything you’ve done to help us, but maybe … maybe you should listen to your father and go it alone. What’s going on with my family… it’s completely messed up. Don’t feel obligated to stay because you said you were coming with us.”
He squeezed Elaan’s knee gently. “I don’t feel obligated. And besides, where would I go? For all his grand plans, my father didn’t have a location in mind for me to lie low. I’d rather be here with you.” He blushed slightly and cleared his throat. “I think the three of us should stay together.”
A cool breeze blew in and Elaan shivered. She opened the backpack to look for a sweater, but she hadn’t packed the bag, so she wasn’t sure where to start. She dug around the bag, locating a sweater near the bottom. But she also found something else: an envelope. She pulled it out and squinted at the letters scrawled across the front. She’d recognize the handwriting anywhere. Her father had scrawled out a single word: Elijah.
“What is it?” Josh asked. She hadn’t realized he’d been watching. She handed him the envelope, and he pulled it close to his face to read the label. “Did you write it?”
She shook her head. She’d thought her father’s offer to pack her bag was just him being helpful, but was there more to it than that? “It’s my dad’s handwriting,” she admitted, as Josh handed the envelope back to her.
In the distance, she could see Lijah walking back. She and Josh were silent while they waited for Lijah to close the gap. She was wondering if now, when he was already so irritated, was a good time to give him the letter, but the moment Lijah reached the jeep, he started speaking, as if he’d not even been gone. “We should take the train,” Lijah declared.
“What train?” Josh asked.
Lijah looked behind them, so both Elaan and Josh turned to follow his line of sight, where they spotted railroad tracks just uphill a bit from where they were.
“But we don’t know when it’s coming,” Josh said.
> “Eleven-thirty,” Lijah responded, cool and clear as day.
“How do you know?” Elaan asked.
He took in a breath and said, “Remember Dee Dee?” Elaan nodded. Dee Dee was a student of their mother’s. She was the same age as Lijah. At one point Elaan had thought their mother was trying to fix Lijah and Dee Dee up. Elaan wondered briefly if it had been her imagination that her mother wanted Lijah and Dee Dee together, or if her mother realized when that didn’t work out, that maybe Lijah wasn’t into girls.
“Well, Dee Dee,” Lijah said, “had a sister come into town for Spring Break. Her sister had a son who loved trains. Mom asked me to find out what time the trains come by. That way, Dee Dee could take her nephew to train spot. The commuter trains were fairly easy to get info on, but the interesting ones, the freight trains, were tougher. I stopped by and talked to the guy who works in the museum here. He said the daytime schedule was a little erratic because the commuter lines shared freight tracks in places. But, at night, a cargo train blows through here at 11:30 p.m. every day, headed for St. Louis.”
“How long ago was this?” Josh asked. “How do you know the train still comes?”
“It was Spring Break. So six months ago,” Lijah said. “And I don’t know if it still comes. I just suspect it does. I suspect they want supplies and other commodities of that nature, if they can still get them. I also think it’s the safest way to travel. We’re going to be reported missing, and they’re going to look for this jeep. We can try stealing a car, but there are a fair number of problems with that. I have no idea how to hotwire a car, but more importantly, that’s probably not even doable. Most modern cars need radio frequency ID chips just to start. So, unless you or Josh have technology to replicate the RFID, then I think our best bet is to ditch the jeep in the river and get as far away from here as we can as quickly as possible. The train accomplishes that with the least amount of trouble.”
“Ditch the jeep in the river,” Josh said way too loud. A vein bulged in his neck. “And if the train doesn’t come, what should we do?”
Lijah looked up at the tracks, then at Josh. He bit his lip and said in a low voice, “Can I talk to you privately, Josh?”
Elaan gaped at Lijah. Josh opened the driver’s door of the jeep and started to get out. “No,” Elaan said. “You guys are not going to run off and make more secret decisions without me. You’ve done that enough already. No more, Lijah.”
Josh stopped where he was. Lijah leaned on the jeep’s door and looked at his sister. “It’s not about anything that has to do with the decisions tonight. There’s something I need to tell Josh that has to do with me and me alone. I want a minute, and when we come back, we’ll figure out a plan.”
Elaan stared at her brother, not sure what to make of it. “What is it that you want to tell Josh that you can’t say to me?”
He sighed and she could see his shoulders stiffen. “Elaan, please,” he said, his voice begging for mercy. “I’m asking for two minutes, and then we’ll hash the rest of this out. Do me this favor. Please.”
She wanted to say no. She wanted to tell him she was tired of him leaving her behind. But, she had already told him that and he still insisted. “You swear to me you won’t talk about the plan for tonight, that it’s completely unrelated?”
“I promise you it has nothing to do with the train or with us making a plan for tonight.”
He seemed sincere. Elaan sighed and nodded reluctantly. “Fine.”
Josh and Lijah walked off into the tree line near the water’s edge. Elaan sat in the back of the jeep, the wind whipping through the open-air vehicle. She wondered if it was supposed to have a top or some type of cover. She’d seen jeeps with covers before. It was cool and they were heading to Illinois, where it would be cooler. Maryland, the part she lived in, bordered Virginia and was almost the South. They got snow in the winters, but it stayed milder longer. Much longer than it did in places like Chicago. They never flew through Chicago in the winter because of the bad weather, and the news always reported on the snow in places like Boston and Chicago. The thought of heading there as the seasons changed chilled her. She looked over in the distance and tried to see Josh and Lijah. It was really too dark to see them or hear even a snippet of what they were saying. Not that she’d try to eavesdrop. She’d been there, done that, and was not going to go back.
She examined the envelope in her hand and wondered what her father wanted to tell Lijah. Part of her was tempted to peek inside, but the envelope was sealed with tape. That was deterrent enough to keep her curiosity from making her do something she knew she shouldn’t. She heard the crunch of branches and turned to see the guys coming back. She stuffed Lijah’s letter into her backpack and climbed out to meet them. They walked a little faster than she did, and they greeted her about 10 yards from the jeep.
“So, let’s figure out the plan,” Elaan said, before either of them could speak.
“Well,” Lijah said, clearly trying to sound even-keeled and reasonable. “My thought was that we could get on a boxcar and, with luck, ride the rail through until we reach somewhere in Illinois. If it’s the same train, it’s supposed to stop in St. Louis, which is about two hundred miles due south of where we want to go.”
“And where is that?” Josh asked, his tone less hostile than when he’d queried earlier.
“Dahinda, Illinois,” Lijah said.
“Where is that? I’ve never even heard of it,” Elaan said.
Lijah sighed. “I don’t know exactly.”
A hint of panic invaded Elaan. “What do you mean you don’t know?”
“I’ve never been there, OK?” her brother said. “Dad said there’s a little lake community there, Oak Creek. The city is just to the southeast of Galesburg.”
“Another town I’ve never heard of,” Elaan said, her anger rising.
“Gee, if Elaan hasn’t heard of it, it must not exist,” Lijah shot back, his tone also tense.
“Guys, come on,” Josh said, and Elaan flushed with embarrassment. She shouldn’t be snipping at Lijah and vice versa.
“Sorry,” Elaan said.
“Look,” Lijah said, irritated. “I’m sorry I don’t know more. But just because we’re not sure exactly how to get there doesn’t mean we shouldn’t go. We’ll have a better idea of where it is once we get closer. The locals know where it is. We’ll get a map when we get there. Dad never wanted to look it up on the computers in the compound in case we ever had to go there to try to contact her. He wanted nothing to link us to her in the computer records. So, he took me to the library in the compound and we pulled out an Illinois map and looked at it. I remember the closest large cities were Galesburg to the west and Peoria to the east.”
A bunch of towns she’d never heard of and that he didn’t know how to get to. This didn’t seem like the best plan. “And if we don’t take the train?” she asked.
Lijah shrugged. “We could take the jeep as far as we could, but at some point they’d be looking for it. We’d have to ditch it.”
She turned to Josh, who was silent, and his expression was hard to read with only the moonlight to illuminate him. “What do you think, Josh?” she asked.
He looked up toward the tracks. “I think Lijah is right. The jeep is a liability because they know we have it and they’ll be searching for us in it. The train is probably the best bet.” He sighed and stared at the jeep. “I hate to shove it in the river, because if the train doesn’t come, we’re screwed.”
“I know,” Lijah said. “But, if we don’t get rid of the jeep, get it well hidden before we get on the train, they’ll know exactly what we did. They’ll stop the train and search it. Our best bet is to get the vehicle submerged in the river and catch that train when it rolls by.”
“How fast will it be going,” Josh asked.
Elaan hadn’t even thought about the logistics of it. The train would be moving. Lijah wanted her to get on a moving train. This was looking less appealing by the second.
; “It depends,” Lijah said. “They can go sixty or seventy miles per hour in the country, but this is still within the city, which usually has speed restrictions, so maybe thirty.”
“Isn’t that kinda fast?” Elaan asked, her voice coming out higher than she wanted.
He nodded. “We can’t get a train moving that fast, but I don’t think it will be. The track follows the trajectory of the river, which curves a bit south of here. So, it’s got to slow down where the track curves. That’s probably the best place to try to catch it.”
Elaan didn’t like the idea of catching a moving freight train, but she didn’t like the idea of being caught in that jeep, either. She looked at Lijah, then Josh. “So, train?”
Josh nodded. “I think that’s the best move.”
It was 10:30, which meant they only had an hour before the train came. And they were supposed to get rid of the vehicle. Elaan recalled her eighth grade planting trip. The water wasn’t that deep here. She mentioned this to Lijah, and he concurred. “It gets deeper as you get closer to DC,” he said. “We should drive further down and ditch it there.” The Anacostia River cut through Maryland and Washington, DC, eventually meeting up with the Potomac, DC’s more famous river.
They drove along a wide path that went beside the river. It was mainly used for walkers but was big enough for the jeep. Staying on the path also ensured they didn’t run into trees or other large debris. They’d gone about a mile, and decided to try ditching the jeep there. They all got out, Josh put the vehicle in neutral, and Elaan watched as the guys pushed the jeep into the water. It sank slowly, taking about five minutes for it to submerge. Luckily, this part of the Anacostia was deep enough. She wondered if it was deep enough to escape detection. “What if one of the tour boats hits it?” she whispered, remembering pontoon boats that regularly went up and down this river.