Suffer the Children

by Janden Hale

  He seeks the annals of his mind for a suitable answer, even though he isn’t sure she’s actually asking for one. She sometimes just likes to talk out loud.

  She gestures toward the house. “Trying to preserve whatever we can from before. All we have. All we’ve done together is here. I want you to know I appreciate everything you are doing to keep those things alive.” She smiles. “Even now you try to give me things I’ve never had.” She glances toward the house when she says it. This is another one of the redeemable qualities he has. He actually tries to make her happy. “I’ll wait for you to get back. We can go down together.”

  “I’ll see you in a bit,” he says, stepping down off the porch toward the school. “And for the record, I don’t think you should think about it too much. Maybe your desire to snuff out all weakness is a weakness. Think about it.” He slings the rifle and disappears into the darkness. He knows she doesn’t like to philosophize too much, but she could use some of it right now. Sometimes it’s better to help someone come to their own conclusion rather than giving them one of yours.

  Jane has had enough thinking for one day, though. Not in the mood to fill the rest of her night with philosophy, she paces through the house to the kitchen. She thinks he posed that question on purpose, to overwhelm her mind and force her to take a break from thinking so much. To get her to relax. She deposits the teacups in the sink. She can wash them tomorrow. She fires up a camping lantern and hangs it from a nail above the island, then briefly stops to face the doorway to the basement. Everything they are trying to preserve is down there. Their purpose is down there, everything they want to keep to themselves. All the things Edward wants her to have.

  Her shoulders sag as she lets out another long sigh. Then she reaches out and grazes her fingertips across the face of one of three combination padlocks securing the door.

  Caden

  FIVE

  Amy Runkle sits uneasily in a chair next to the gurney in the old school nurse’s office, humming a Phil Collins tune. That poor lady, the school nurse, had met a grisly end in this very room, and Amy can still see the faded blood stains on the far wall where someone did a less than competent job of trying to clean it. The nurse, Gloria Berger, was the first to fall prey to what they would later call the twitchers; being school nurse had exposed her more than the other staff to the sick children. There are similar stains in the gymnasium and the lunch room, among other places.

  Amy tries not to think about it. Any thought related to the twitchers has a sickening way of twisting into thoughts of her own son, to wondering what happened to her husband. She finds it best to direct her thoughts elsewhere. Hence the Phil Collins tune. Getting a song stuck in her head was like a little scarecrow, keeping the other thoughts away.

  She had waited around while Dan Shenk eased into consciousness. She was the only one who stayed behind, so she ended up having to break the news about the amputation to him, though he expressed a vivid recollection of the beginning parts of the procedure, something she was unaware of. She’d heard the screams, she just didn’t put two and two together. Such an awful series of events, she now feels more obligated than ever to comfort him however she can. It’s the right thing to do, especially considering he had saved her life. It doesn’t even occur to her that she had also saved his. Jane Landry had gone home for the night, and instructed Amy to raise her on the walkie if she needed anything. It makes Amy nervous to think that something medical might go wrong. She doesn’t have the first clue about those things, so the walkie-talkie is a small source of comfort. She wished she’d have had one earlier when she left the library to go in search of help.

  Dan, however, doesn’t share her somber disposition. He is elated that she is there waiting when he wakes. Even through his disappointment about losing a precious appendage, what concerns him most is that she had stayed to wait with him.

  His mind scrambles to make sense of it through a film of light morphine and numbness. He can still feel pain, though it is slurred, having passed through the filter of painkillers. Jane Landry made sure the drip was slow so the stuff would last longer. Apparently there isn’t much of it, and it will probably run out. That fact was brushed aside as soon as he heard it. His thoughts are swimming in other waters.

  Dan stares at Amy’s angular features, her blond hair greasy from not being washed in several days. Not enough water to waste on bathing at regular intervals, and it’s not safe for them to be going outside the walls to the river all the time. So everyone is filthy. He can smell her perfume again; the gentle scent erases any displeasure that might have been welling up from the sight of her hair. In the before-days he wouldn’t have given Amy a second glance, looking the way she does now. But circumstances being the way they are—along with the scarcity of women—has a way of transforming the homely into the comely. Apocalypse trumps liquor a hundred-fold when it comes to amplifying attraction.

  He wonders what it means, her staying to see after him. His heart stutters at the thought that she might have stayed because she likes him. It’s the loudest thought in his head. That she likes him. He struggles for things to say, fumbles around for something to fill the silence. He doesn’t like the silence, assumes it makes her uncomfortable. He doesn’t want her to be uncomfortable, not even a little bit. He has to play his cards right, because she’s technically available in his eyes. A widow. At least that’s how everyone else views the situation. Since her status is presently unsubstantiated—no one actually knows what happened to her husband—Amy might still see it as being up in the air. Not an official widowship. Part of her probably holds out hope that he’s still alive or something. Dan doesn’t know how any of that works, if she’s on the market or not, if she’s off limits or not; it doesn’t matter to him either way. His plan is that if she decides to finally move on with her life, he wants to be the one she drifts to. He barely knows her, but it’s the least of his concerns. They have plenty of time to get to know each other, and whatever else they happen to think of. And he can think of plenty.

  “How are you feeling now? Do you need anything?” It’s been about ten minutes since she last posed that same exact same pair of questions.

  A surge of warmth floods his chest. “No. Thank you. I’m good.” Any other person might have been annoyed at her asking over and over, but not him. Every time she asks is like the first time. It’s a distinct reminder that she still cares.

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Not at all,” he lies. He needs to appear hard, tough, even though it probably doesn’t matter. He doubts she would hold it against him if he admitted that it hurt, but the better choice in his mind is to pretend it doesn’t. Maybe it will make her feel safer somehow. He knows that girls like to feel safe. It seems like a good strategy.

  Today is the first chance he’s had to get any real exposure to the woman. He keeps getting struck by the idea that maybe it was fate that brought them together, that caused all this. It’s too coincidental. He’s never had a chance to talk to her much until now. It feels too convenient that it would happen like this. He can’t go anywhere, so maybe the hand of fate brought them here to get acquainted. She’s outlived him by at least ten years, but that doesn’t phase him. The age difference might have mattered to some people before, but the world doesn’t have time for such nonsense now. Things are a struggle to survive. He knows what that means, that making more humans to replace the old ones is more important than ever. He only hopes she feels the same way. The thought of making babies with Amy Runkle causes a tornado in his mind. As exciting as it sounds, he can’t get ahead of himself so much. His priority is to not fuck this up. Which is gonna be hard to do considering he doesn’t know much about her. Hence the need to get better acquainted.

  He knows she used to work at the bank downtown, that she used to drive a Volvo. That’s about it, minus the elephant in the room. He’d vaguely heard about her husband and son. He’d love to hear it all straight from her, b
ut he has no idea how to ask without being rude. He doesn’t want to do anything that might deteriorate her opinion of him. He needs to divert the focus back onto her. It’ll be harder for her to find some flaw in him if the conversation is about her. The entire ordeal must have shaken her.

  “The question is,” he squirms to get more comfortable on the gurney, “how are you doing?” His words are not as tangled as when he first woke up.

  She waves her hand, shrugs. “Okay, I guess.” He looks at her more closely, trying to figure out where to take the conversation next.

  She can tell he doesn’t believe her. Truth is, it had taken her hours to stop shaking. Same way he doesn’t want to reveal he’s in pain, she doesn’t want to reveal exactly how jolted she really is.

  “It’s okay to be scared. Hell, I think even Dressler was scared. Did you get a chance to see the thing that did this?” he says, smiling, holding up his bandaged arm, trying to lighten the mood. She stiffens, forces her gaze away, suddenly quiet. His mind reels, backtracks. Did he already ruin any chance he had? The thought makes his heart shudder. He tries to stimulate his mind, to recall what he did wrong. Eventually he recognizes his mistake. His thoughts must not be fully lucid yet, not like he thought. Mentioning the twitcher was the problem, and he understands why she doesn’t want to confront that piece of information.

  She had a kid, before. The elephant in the room and he’d ignored it completely.

  Seeing the twitchers always makes you remember the kids. They churn your thoughts into soup, trying unravel the mystery. People try to connect the dots, how a kid could go from a kid to some kind of creature. That piece of knowledge—that the twitchers used to be fucking kids—is impossible to escape, and no matter how feral and grotesque they become, the thought of killing them is too much for some people. He suspects Amy is one of those people. Of course she would be hesitant to kill them. That’s probably part of the reason she never carries a gun. She’d rather die than have to kill one of them. Others—people like Dressler, himself, the Ranton boys, his best friend Jason Murl (may he rest in peace)—understand that they aren’t children anymore. Somehow able to flip a switch and see them as they are, not as they used to be.

  “I’m sorry. I—”

  “It’s okay,” she says. He doesn’t believe her. Of course it’s not actually okay. His brain is astorm with the realization that he may have just blown it. It’s far from okay, and now he needs to find a way to compensate for his stupidity. What worries him is not knowing whether she can overlook it. It might be a dealbreaker.

  But she actually thinks none of those things. Aside from attempting to conjure Phil Collins again, her mind still has room to understand he didn’t mean to cause her any distress. He couldn’t have known the extent of her thoughts on the subject. Barely a man, he never had kids, not like her. Not like most of the other survivors. He couldn’t possibly know what it was like to lose a child. Or to have to confront what used to be one.

  It haunts her everyday, what happened to the kids. What happened to her kid. Even sleep is not a refuge.

  Caden occupies her dreams, lying in his bed slicked with fever sweat, eyes darkened and bloodshot. The little crucifix necklace she’d given him to wear around his neck, a tiny C.R. engraved in the horizontal part of the cross. She told him it would bring him comfort if he focused on it and prayed. She said it was a lucky cross because his initials also stood for Christ Redeemer. She knew Caden would like that. In her dreams she is there by the bedside with a wet washcloth for his forehead to help keep him comfortable. All she does is dip, wring, and replace the rag, for hours, days, only ever interrupted by an occasional mommy, raspy and barely leaking from his dried lips. Forever in the dreams she sits, helpless with her rag.

  The sickness had spread like wildfire, all the kids came down with it. Everyone tried to avoid it, but nothing worked. Doctors weren’t even ready for it. The world was caught off guard, and ever remained two steps behind. It was a new virus, the grisly surplus from an ill-fated government experiment.

  She was spared the horror of witnessing the moment of Caden’s transformation, but she hadn’t been so lucky with the rest of the process. She had the displeasure of watching the sickness chew him up. The feeling of helplessness had been the worst part, knowing there was nothing she could do. Trying to comfort him, seeing how futile even that was. Trying to cope, to steel her nerves for the day her son would cease being Caden. For when he would become...something else. There was a sickening dichotomy of wanting to delay the process as long as possible, to buy a little more time, while also knowing that it would prolong the child’s agony. Sometimes she thinks the parents suffered the most, not the kids. It was like they were spectators to a lengthy torture session, powerless to intervene. No matter what she did to prepare herself, though, it turned out she wasn’t ready for it. The moment came knocking far too soon, like an unwanted solicitor. It never crossed her mind that she would never have been ready for it.

  She’d been hard asleep that morning, exhausted from a long night of trying to keep Caden cool with wet rags. The crash of an exploding window was loud enough to sever her heavy slumber. She relives that moment every day. The panic of fighting the weariness, rushing through a house that now seemed ten times its usual size, scrambling, stumbling, all the way to his bedroom only to face the horror she’d been dreading, bursting in to find not her son but only piercing desolation. Caden wasn’t there. Nothing was there but broken glass and a broken heart. Tousled bedsheets wet and deserted. Not even Mike to console her. He had gone to work that morning, back when the world was still trying to be normal.

  Caden’s vacant bed remains exactly the way it was that awful morning, complete with shards of glass flecking the carpet like little sparkling tombstones. She couldn’t bring herself to clean it. She keeps the door shut and never goes in there.

  This is why she doesn’t want to talk or think about the twitchers. For all she knows, Dressler had killed what was left of her only son this morning.

  It could have been Caden.

  The thought twists her guts into a noose, but the worst thing is that she might never know what happened to her son. Or her husband. He disappeared just as the children started to turn, not two days after Caden broke through the window. As if God thought her first loss wasn’t enough. No one had ever found a body, for either of them; for all she knows Mike could have been caught by the rovers. The thought sticks in her mind like a stain she can’t cleanse, and she tries everything she can think of to avoid it.

  She wants to go home now. Being here is too stressful. Knowing what happened to the nurse, to Dan, and now thinking about Caden and Mike, it’s all too much to handle. She could go home, maybe take one of the Ambien pills she’d been hoarding for a time like this. Only she can’t escape the dreams. She’s damned at every turn.

  “I’m going to have Jane come by, have her check up on you.”

  “No, I’m fine,” Dan says. “Please. Stay.”

  She shakes her head, trying to suppress an onslaught of hot tears. She stands and he grabs her wrist with his remaining hand. The grip is weak, but his eyes make up the missing intensity.

  “It’s dark out. I don’t want you wandering around outside,” he says. “It’s too dangerous. We don’t know if there are more out there. Maybe they can get through the wall, too. I think it’s best if you stayed here.”

  “Jane left the radio in case one of us needed to call her.” Amy easily pulls away from his weak grip and strides over to the handset. “Besides, maybe it’s okay for you to move to an actual bed now. Doesn’t that sound nice?”

  No, no it doesn’t. He doesn’t care about going home. He wants to protest again, to say something that will make her stay. He knows he can make it work between them, somehow, that if she’ll just give him a chance she’ll see that he can be better than anyone she’s ever had, even her husband. That he’ll do whatever it takes to make he
r happy, keep her safe. If she leaves it must mean his chances are shot, or at least suffering a heavy setback. He cares more about having her presence than he does having his arm back. Hell, a part of him thinks losing the arm was worth it, if it means getting a chance to spend time with her. He still thinks this is all destiny.

  He wants her to ask him again how he’s feeling, does he need anything. He wants things to go back to the way they were a minute ago. It doesn’t look like that’s going to happen. She pauses at the counter and glances back at him, her eyes red and damp. He tries to tell her he’s sorry with a glance, that staying is the right thing to do. It doesn’t work.

  She grabs the walkie-talkie and faces the wall so she doesn’t have to see him like that. She makes the call and waits. Jane Landry responds on the other end. Amy tells her she needs to go home now and that she thinks Dan might be able to go home, too.

  Edward is on his way down there now. I want Dan to stay put for the night, I’ll come check on him in the morning. He’ll be all right. Make sure he knows to drink water.

  Dan’s gaze never leaves the back of Amy’s blouse. Amy is hunched over the little handheld radio like someone receiving bad news. She looks tired. He wants to tell her he can walk her home, that he can manage and that he’ll be glad to do it, but the words don’t come out.