by K. M. Malloy
“I’m sure you’ll find other activities to occupy your time.”
Aire sighed and straightened her shoulders. “You’re right. I’ve already waited fifteen years, what’s a few more measly months.”
“That’s the spirit.”
“Well,” she said, extending her hand again as she stood up. “Thank you again for all of your help. I couldn’t have done any of this without you.”
“You’re welcome.”
Jenkins heard her footsteps echo through the hallway, followed by the slam of the heavy door behind her. He sipped his coffee alone in his office, his head nodding to no one.
“I was surprised too,” he said. He placed the mug on the desk and picked up a pen, tapping it against the letterhead paper he’d been jotting a note on. His face began to sag again as he nodded, his forehead furrowing into a deep frown. “It seems like such a waste doesn’t it? Hell, half the kids in Arizona can’t even pass the AIMS test, and she blew the SAT out of the water without having a real education. Couldn’t we just-”
Jenkins fell silent as his pen pressed hard onto the paper. A blob of blue ink soon began to puddle through onto the desk. He nodded.
“Yes, sir, non-negotiable.” He searched for a tissue to wipe the ink away before it dried.
***
Her elation at her scores and her fear at the events at school created a sickening mix that made her stomach pitch and flutter on her way home. The rich aroma of spices wafting through the front door had the ironic effect of easing the nausea. Her stomach growled as she strode through the living room, reminding her she hadn’t eaten since that morning. Stepping into the kitchen, her appetite faded when she saw that once again only Mitch and her father were at the table eating readymade chicken soup. She poured herself a small bowl and sat down, her gut now lurching at the sight of the preservative packed water, as though angered that it had been tricked into thinking it would be receiving a home cooked meal and was instead met with soggy cardboard drowning in flavored water.
“I got good news today,” she said as she stirred the pale yellow noodles.
“What good news?” Mitch asked as he wiped stray broth from his chin.
“I got an almost perfect score on my SAT test.”
“Cool.”
“And Mayor Jenkins is going to submit my application to a good university on the east coast.”
Her father’s fist slammed against the daisy tablecloth, sending watery broth raining down onto the table and his children jumping back in their seats.
“Can’t you just leave it alone? You’re always running around here causing trouble. Why can’t you be a normal person instead of some kind of freak!”
Mitch and Aire’s eyes widened. They sucked in their breath as they watched a thick vein pulse in their father’s neck through his red flesh. His eyelid twitched, and his face softened as he took hold of himself.
“Oh, Aire, sweetie, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it,” he pleaded, reaching for her hand.
She stood up from the table and took the stairs three at a time up to her room. Her breathing ragged, she strained to push her oak desk in front of the door to seal herself in. Collapsing on the bed, she took deep breaths to calm herself. Whatever was happening with the rest of John’s Town was now affecting her father as well. Whatever it was, it was here, and she was powerless to stop it. She paced her room, trying to figure out what to do next. The alarm clock next to her bed clicked through the hours as she paced and sat at the bench seat, only to stand up and begin pacing again.
Midnight finally returned. She scurried through her window and went to meet Troy at their secret place. She hugged him tight when she reached the clearing. He stared at her for a while before retrieving the blanket from where they’d hidden it under some dead branches. They laid on their backs in silence looking up into the sky. She was glad to see Orion staring back at her from above, his three star belt an easy mark of guidance in the southern night sky.
“What’s wrong?” Troy asked.
“Nothing. Why?”
“You seem distant. Did you not do well on your test?”
She turned to her side and propped on her elbow to face him. She frowned and tucked a strand of tangled hair behind her ear.
“I’m really happy about my test.”
“Then what is it? I was expecting you to be all smiles.”
“I’m just…I don’t know what I’m most worried about.”
“Is it your mom?”
“Partly, she wasn’t at dinner again tonight,” she said. “It’s this whole place. There’s something really wrong here, but no one seems to think it’s a problem that the whole town is going crazy.”
“Maybe it’s a virus or something, or too much salt in the water.”
“That could be it,” she said. “Too much salt makes people delusional and do weird things. Good idea. I think I’m going to see Dr. Caughlin on Monday about it. He’s got to have some type of answer.”
Troy laughed. “Yeah ask him about my little brother too. He’s been bouncing off the walls and laughing like a hyena about everything.”
“My little brother is okay so far, but my dad had a freak out tonight. He flipped out and almost smashed our kitchen table. Scared the crud out of me and Mitch.”
“I’m sure he didn’t mean it. Come on,” Troy said as he laid back down and stretched out his arms towards her. “Let’s stop worrying and get cozy before my watch beeps. This is our place to forget about John’s Town. No more worries.”
Aire smiled and sank down onto his chest as his arms squeezed around her.
“You’re right,” she whispered. “No more worries.”
“No more worries,” he repeated. “Now get some sleep.”
She snuggled closer into the crook of his arm and closed her eyes to listen to the crickets chirp. “Hmm,” she mumbled.
“What?”
“Do you ever wonder why no one sleeps in the same bed? Not even married people?”
“I think,” he said, pulling her on top of him, “it’s because no one but us does this.”
His kiss melted her thoughts away, and his touch took her to another world where there was no worry, no John’s Town, no identity, only their two energies lacing into one.
***
Control Room, tech office near central security systems
Reginald Jackson was one of the lucky few to have an office. It wasn’t much of an office considering he had to close the door and push his desk forward to open his filing cabinet, but it was still an office. The rickety desk was piled in paperwork threatening to consume his computer monitor. Nothing could be seen under the avalanche of graph paper and scatter plots except for a photo of his daughter Sandra. She smiled at him from the frame on an old tree swing in front of their home, wearing the necklace he’d bought her for her sweet sixteen the day before. It was the last picture he had taken of her, and he thanked God for that small amount of foresight. Any photo of her in a drab hospital gown with a bald head and grey tinge to her beautiful ebony skin would have sent him over the edge after the funeral. Thank God he didn’t have any of those photos to look at afterwards as he twirled his pistol and sucked down a bottle of Gin. Thank God.
The monitor beeped at him, pulling his mind away from the darkness and back to the dim light of his office. His face drooped in defeat at the words on the screen.
ACCESS DENIED
“Damn it,” he said, taking off his glasses to rub his strained eyes. “Still no rodeo.”
The virus was a slow progressor, and it had taken almost two weeks for the monitoring systems to register that anything had been wrong. At first he hadn’t been particularly worried about it. Occasional viruses and malfunctions occurred with the chips, but he’d been trying to eradicate it for weeks now and the fix for this one still eluded him. Jackson was beginning to worry.
When signs of the virus first began, he was quickly able to determine it had been planted by an outside source. The coding within it and th
e way it replicated was an algorithmic anomaly that none of their chips could produce on their own. Whoever had put it there had been good, good enough to pad lock and trace code it to levels that could take him months to crack and clean from the system. Months were something they didn’t have, not at the virus’s rate of replication. His next line of business had been to find who had put the virus there in the first place, and then make them fix it.
It had been a kid, some damn civil rights left winger kid on the east coast. He was part of the No Mark No Madness religious group that had arisen shortly after certain companies in east Texas began to require the implantation of microchip identifications into the wrists of its employees. He could understand the group’s outrage at the new identification since the religion warned against the “mark of the devil,” but he couldn’t understand why the psychos were bombing buildings and killing people by the thousands in the name of God. It was so hypocritically nonsensical it made him sick to his stomach.
Jackson shook his head at the intelligence of the millennial generation. They were getting smarter, sneakier in their attacks against these corporations. Their guerilla tactics now branched into hacking the government’s top secret projects and setting malfunctions in the software. He hated hackers, but still felt sorry for the kid. They’d never find him now, not now that Manning’s team had finished with him.
The phone began to ring. Jackson shuffled through a stack of notes he’d taken on his attempts to find the receiver, which he located after the fourth ring.
“Jack,” a gruff voice on the other end barked. “What’s the status? Are we any closer?”
Jackson’s weary eyes flicked to the monitor beside him.
ACCESS DENIED
“No, sir. We’re not any closer.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Saturday May 1, 2010
Population: 268
She and Troy had gone to the park, hoping a stroll around the water would ease their minds after the fight at school the previous day. The beginning of spring always brought the town to Duck Park to enjoy the new flowers and warm sunshine. Children ran across the grass dragging kites behind them while their mothers sat smiling on blankets next to picnic baskets. Fathers could be seen on the banks of the pond teaching their sons how to cast a line, and beaming with pride when their boys reeled in a catfish. Games of Frisbee, soccer, and basketball were easy to join as the teens their age usually covered the meadow, happy to be out of the house and under the sun.
But the park was nearly desolate when they arrived, and only half a dozen people trickled in by the late afternoon. She was sitting atop a boulder playing her guitar and looking over the meadow as Troy skipped rocks across the still black water. She noticed that the stray collies and shepherds rolling in the grass and swimming in the pond vastly outnumbered their owners. Some of the dogs she recognized, but their owners were nowhere to be found. Aire stopped playing, and turned to look at Troy.
“There’s been a lot of strays lately.”
“Stray what,” Troy asked as he skipped another rock across the pond’s smooth surface.
“Stray dogs.”
“They’re not strays. That’s the Walters’ shepherd, that’s the Smith’s lab. There’s Mrs. Stonewell’s golden retriever.”
“But where are their families?”
“I don’t know,” Troy shrugged. “Maybe they’re on their way.”
“No.” Aire shook her head. “Everyone’s dog always stays by their side on the way here. They don’t run around like little savages. See that big black lab there? The one coming out of the water?”
“Yeah.”
“That dog belongs to Chris Amos and his family. I’ve seen him running round town for the last two weeks.”
“So?”
“So, I haven’t seen Chris at school for the last two weeks either.”
Troy turned his head to look at her, his eyes darkening under his scrunched brow. His knuckles turned white as he clenched the pebbles in his hand. “Why are you watching Chris?”
“Calm down crazy, I’m not watching Chris. There’s a lot of people I haven’t seen at school. I’m just saying that Chris’s dog starting running around town after Chris disappeared. That must mean something happened to his whole family too.”
“They were probably just recruited, Aire. It’s not a big deal.”
“It is a big deal,” she said as she stood up. “Why would the Army need a whole family? Especially one with a five-year-old?”
Troy slammed the remaining pebbles he had into the ground. “What is the big deal? They’re gone, we’re here. Why do you care? Why can’t you just accept the way things are? You’re always so uptight about everything. Why can’t you be a normal person?”
“I am a normal person. It’s everyone else around here who has something wrong with them.”
“So you think there’s something wrong with me?”
“Right now? Yeah, I do.”
“I’ve got a news flash for you, missy,” he said, pointing his finger at her. “There’s something wrong with you. You’ve always had some weird superiority complex and think you’re so much better than everyone.”
“I do not.”
“Yes you do,” he shouted. “That’s why you think you’re too good to stay in John’s Town and that’s why you’re abandoning me to go to some school. You think you’re smarter and better than the rest of us.”
“Is that what this is about?” She crossed her arms and sank her heels down, the guitar clutched firmly by her side. “You’re mad that I’m going to go away to college so your ploy to keep me here is too insult me?”
“Aire, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it,” he said as he held his hand out and began walking towards her.
“No, you did mean it, Troy.” She jumped down from the boulder and picked up her pack, strapping the guitar over her shoulder.
“Aire, please. I said I’m sorry.”
“No,” she said, spinning on her heel to face him and pointing a finger back at him. “You’re not sorry, you’re an idiot.”
“But-“
“No, you get away from me. Don’t talk to me until you can act like a normal person.”
She spun back around and stomped across the grass, her black hair whipping behind her. His temples throbbed as he watched her walk away. His breathing quickened, and he clenched his fists as his fingers began to numb. A strong ring pitched in his ears, growing louder and louder as his face reddened. His body shook from the rage boiling within.
The Walters’ shepherd sat down in front of him, his tongue hanging out as he waited for the boy to pet him. Troy continued to stare ahead, watching Aire fade into the distance. She was leaving him. She was choosing to leave him.
Blood trickled from his palms as his fingernails buried deeper into his skin. She wasn’t going to leave him. She would always be with him. He’d make sure of that.
The shepherd barked, impatient for Troy’s attention. He glared down at the dog, his lips curled in a sneer. His foot lashed out and gave it a hard kick in the ribs. It let out a yelp and hobbled away, its limping steps slowing as it crossed the meadow. Troy smiled as he watched the dog collapse into the grass.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Monday May 3, 2010
Population: 239
She felt empty. Not speaking to Troy made her uneasy, increased the loneliness she felt. Twice on Sunday she had almost gone over to his house to talk it over with him. She’d made it to the sidewalk on the second attempt, but turned around instead. She was still angry, and any conversation would be pointless until she cooled down.
She took a deep breath and pulled her shoulders back when she saw him sitting in their first hour class. Holding her head high, she walked by without looking at him and took her seat. She could feel his eyes boring into her the whole hour, could almost hear him whispering to her to turn around. She kept her eyes forward, never taking them off Mrs. Finch the entire agonizing hour.
He tapped her should
er when the bell rang.
“Yes,” she said, still averting her eyes from him as she packed her bag.
“I really don’t like not talking to you.”
“Well, then maybe you shouldn’t say stupid things when you do talk to me.”
“I know,” he said. “I was a dumb jerk and I’m sorry. I didn’t mean any of those things. I was just upset.”
She glanced up at him. Heavy bags drooped under his bloodshot eyes from sleepless nights, and a feeling of victory washed over her.
“Okay.”
“Do you forgive me?” he asked.
“Maybe,” she said, and threw her backpack over her shoulder as she stood up.
“Look,” he said, stepping in front of her. “I truly am sorry. Let me make it up to you. Can I take you to Maggie’s after school?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m going to talk to Doc about my mother after school, remember?”
“How about after you get done? Like four o’clock?”
“Okay,” she said, allowing a smile to break through. “And don’t be late.”
“Great. I’ll be there.”
“Okay.”
“Can I walk you to your next class?”
“Hmm,” she said, tapping her finger on her chin and looking at the ceiling. “I don’t know.”
“Please?”
She laughed and looped her arms around his. “Of course.”
“Thanks,” he said, his smile broadening.
She felt lighter the rest of the day, thankful her show down with Troy was over. Her step had a slight bounce in it on her brisk walk to Dr. Caughlin’s after school, but it quickly disappeared as the heaviness of her mind returned when she entered the practice. Darlene was at her desk, painting her nails with her shoes kicked off like always. The old door still creaked and groaned as she struggled to close it behind her. The same smells still filled her nose as she sat on the broken chair. She felt something was off though, something she couldn’t name.