by Rich Larson
The intersection ahead was stoppered up with the splintered geometry of a crash, a three-car pile-up that had happened during the big panic when the ship came down. Violet didn’t want to walk around it, so she clambered up onto the accordion-scrunched hood of an SUV. The soles of her Skechers popped little dents in the aluminum. She tried to ignore the dead-thing smell that wafted from the backseat.
On the other side of the wreck, she faced a corner liquor store, half of it black and crumbled from an electrical fire, and then beyond it her destination: the Safeway where she’d shopped with her mom four months and a lifetime ago. The parking lot was strewn with garbage, picked at by a flock of dirty gulls, and wasters shuffled slowly around it with grocery bags that Violet knew were sometimes full, sometimes empty. Some of them were pushing squeaky shopping carts across the ruptured tarmac.
But one of the carts wasn’t being pushed by a waster. Violet narrowed her eyes. It was a boy, maybe ten or eleven, skinny frame swallowed in an oversized hoodie. She watched him roll his sleeves up to his elbows, one of which was swatched with Technicolor Band-Aids, and start wrestling with the cart again. He’d picked one with sticky wheels, but it had alright stuff in it: a sleeping bag, a trussed-up Styrofoam mattress, canned food, and bottled water. Usually kids fresh out of the warehouse were too dopey to do much more than wander around all shell-shocked.
Violet swapped the duffel to her other shoulder and cut across the culvert of yellowed grass to the parking lot pavement. By the time she was close to him, the boy had snatched an empty cart from one of the wasters and was dumping everything from his own into the replacement.
“Hey,” Violet said. “Those Winnie the Pooh Band-Aids?”
The boy looked up, startled. The hood fell back off his head and Violet could see his face still had a bit of chub to it, the kiddie kind, but his eyes were sharp. A little bloodshot from crying, but focused. His black hair reminded her of a ball of steel wool, and she could see a comb mostly buried in the tangle. He yanked his sleeve down over the yellow patchwork on his elbow and stared back at her for a moment, mouth working for words.
“You’re not a zombie,” he finally said, in a voice that was a little closer to cracking than she’d expected from someone his size. It made her extra conscious of her own.
“Nobody’s a zombie,” Violet said, as the waster he’d swapped carts with stumbled past. “They don’t eat brains or anything. Just wander around being useless. We call them wasters.”
“Where’d you come from?” the boy asked.
Violet peeled the stretchy fabric of her shirt up off her stomach, showing him the rust-red Parasite under her pale skin. The boy immediately stuck his hand to his own belly. His face twitched.
“Same as you, Pooh Bear,” Violet said, tugging her shirt back down. “You thought you were the only one who got out?”
The boy frowned. “Is everyone else … Is all the grown-ups …” He tapped the back of his head, where the clamps went in.
“Everyone over sixteen,” Violet said. “Or around there.” She reached over and yanked the sleeping bag and a single bottle of water out from the cart. “What’s your name?” she asked.
“Bo,” the boy said. “Bo Rabiu.”
“Violet.” She stuffed the sleeping bag into his arms and tossed the bottle on top with a slosh. Getting groceries could wait. “Alright, Bo, time to get out of the streets,” she said. “The othermothers are going to start coming through soon.”
“What?”
“The o-ther mo-thers,” Violet enunciated. “You’ll see one soon enough. For now, we’re going to a safe spot, alright? A hideout. So you can meet Wyatt.”
Bo tucked the sleeping bag under his arm and tossed the water bottle up and down with his other hand. “Who’s he?” he asked suspiciously.
“He’s a jerk,” Violet said. “Let’s go.”
She set off back out of the parking lot, mapping the way back to the theater in her mind’s eye. She didn’t bother to check if Bo was following. They always did.
3
Bo slipped into the wake of the dark-haired girl named Violet as she weaved through the shuffling dim-eyed adults. It made Bo feel sick looking at them, seeing the shiny black piece of metal that dug into the backs of their heads and made the veins in their necks bulge. One man in a shredded business suit stopped abruptly on the sidewalk, reaching into his pocket to pull out an invisible phone. Bo nearly plowed into him, jerking away at the last second. He didn’t quite manage to hide his shudder.
Violet stopped, shooting him a look over her shoulder. “Don’t be scared of them,” she said in her slightly scratchy voice. “They don’t do anything.”
“Not scared,” Bo said reflexively, watching the businessman turn away, mouthing a conversation. “They stink real bad. That’s all.”
Violet bent to snatch something up off the sidewalk. It was an old cracked iPhone. She flashed Bo a smile, and for a moment he thought she was going to go up and put it into the businessman’s empty fingers. Instead, she juggled it once in her hand, then hurled it at the back of the man’s head. His neck snapped forward. Then he steadied himself, continuing his pantomimed phone call with a tiny trickle of carmine running down his scalp where the cracked screen had cut him.
“They’re like NPCs,” Violet said. Her smile didn’t crinkle her eyes. “Think of them like that. Not like people.”
“They are, though,” Bo said. “People.” He’d already had a horrible thought. He’d thought of going back to his burned house and finding his mother was alive but wandering through it with her eyes filmed over, smiling all empty-like. He didn’t know which option would be worse: dead or a zombie. There was a reason he’d decided to get supplies first.
“Not anymore,” Violet said in an icy voice. “Clamp’s in the head, better off dead. Got it?”
Bo glanced away, pretending to tend to his elbow. Violet had already decided which was worse. He couldn’t think about his mom yet, anyway. He had to think about Lia. If he was going to rescue her from the warehouses, he was going to need help. At the very least, he was going to need to know what had happened on the outside during the four months he’d been locked away. Violet seemed like she knew those things.
As for the othermothers, whatever they were, Bo still remembered the slimy silhouette dumped from the belly of the whale-thing, and it still made him shiver.
“Got it,” he said.
Violet gave him a skeptical look, one eyebrow cocked high, then turned and hurried on. Bo followed. She was taking him into the oldest part of the downtown, past an ancient hotel where his mom had told him to be careful of strangers and stepping on needles. The sidewalks were narrower and crooked, with a blackish moss seeping through the cracks. One waster they passed was knocking her fist against a graffiti-splashed brick wall, over and over, like she thought it was a door. Her knuckles were a mess of raw meat.
“They look happier than they used to,” Violet said, catching him off guard. “The wasters who hang around here. Happier than before they got clamped.”
“What do they see?” Bo asked.
“Dunno,” Violet said. “Not us.” She gave a vague wave around the street. “Something nicer than this, I bet. Lots nicer.”
They came to a halt in front of an old theater Bo remembered passing on the bus once, maybe twice. It had been closed for years. The signage had more blank white spaces than it did black letters, making it look like a wide gappy grin, and the few movie posters that hadn’t been snatched were curled and yellow inside their glass slots. Most of the globe lights around them had been smashed. Up on the top of the building, Bo saw the name of the place, Garneau Cinema, painted in dark red letters that were peeling like scabs.
The door had been boarded over with a two-by-four, but Violet skipped up and yanked it open, showing the plywood to be nailed on only one side. The inside looked dark, dark as the warehouse, and Bo smelled dust and mothballs and what might have been old popcorn grease.
“Why no
t the IMAX theater?” Bo asked, hesitating on the threshold. “They have those comfy seats. Memory foam seats.”
“Be full of wasters pretending to watch movies, wouldn’t it,” Violet said. “Come on in. You know Peter Pan?”
“Sort of,” Bo said.
“This is Neverland,” Violet said. “Come meet the Lost Boys.”
“Who are you, then?” Bo asked. “You, uh, Tinkerbell?”
“Fuck you,” Violet said, flashing that smile again that was both pretty and scary. It was better than the dull grins of the drugged-up warehouse kids or the wasters. That counted for something.
Bo stepped into the musty entryway, and she eased the door shut behind him. The dark gave him a nervous drop in his stomach, and the Parasite gave a sluggish twitch. He was half relieved, half disappointed that it was finally moving again. He’d thought maybe it was dead after whatever had happened with the fence.
Violet switched on a bulky black-and-yellow flashlight, thumping it a few times with the heel of her hand. In the stark beam Bo saw the interior of the theater was floored with cigarette-scorched carpeting. The wallpaper had water stains.
But there weren’t any whirlybirds. He licked his dry lips and followed Violet past the abandoned ticket booth and concession stand, where the smell of ancient cooking grease still hung off a defunct popcorn machine. Through a set of faux-oak doors thrown wide open, Bo saw the blank movie screen, half-illuminated by mismatched lamps. Violet led the way in, switching off her flashlight. Stripes of exit lighting still glowed faintly on the floor.
The theater had velvet red seats, some of them with armrests torn away or their cushions slashed open, and some of them had kids splayed on them. Bo had a sudden thought: Maybe his sister was already here. Lia’d always been smarter than him. Maybe the power outage had affected all the warehouses, or maybe she’d gotten out before that, somehow. Bo looked hopefully over the ten or so kids, most of them clustered in a group near the front, others scattered.
None of them looked older than Violet, who Bo had pegged for fifteen—the carefully drawn makeup around her eyes made it harder to tell. And none of them were his sister.
Bo sank a bit. Some of the kids gave him curious looks as he followed Violet along the aisle, but most of them kept their attention fixed toward the front, where a tall and bony boy maybe Violet’s age, maybe a bit older, was seated on the edge of the stage. He had a messy blond head and gray eyes, and Violet was fixing her hair all of a sudden.
“… at least a block away before you start heading back here,” the boy was saying, splayed back with one leg dangling off the edge, swinging slow like a pendulum. “We don’t want mothers following us back, right? So we have to be careful, right?”
“Right,” came the reply, a dozen intent mutters.
“Elliot knows, don’t you, El?” the older boy said, flicking a look to one of the kids in the front, a slightly younger brown-haired boy hunched on the edge of his seat.
“I know,” Elliot said solemnly, and the older boy, who Bo could guess by now was Wyatt, gave him an affirming nod in return. As Wyatt’s gray eyes traveled back over the theater seats, they caught on Bo and Violet. He smiled, bright and white, how Bo had seen mostly in movies.
“All the under-tens, you go everywhere in doubles when there’s othermothers out,” Wyatt continued. “From now on. And what if the mother stops and squats and squeezes her glands? What’s she doing?”
“Pheromones,” the kids chanted, in unison this time. Bo sideways-saw Violet forming the word on her pink lips.
“So what do we do?” Wyatt asked. “Elliot?”
“If a mother drops ’mones, don’t breathe through your nose,” the boy named Elliot recited, wiping at his own with the neck of his oversized orange T-shirt.
“Right,” Wyatt said. “Breathe through your mouth and get away from there quick, or you’ll be following her right back to the warehouses.”
A collective shiver went through some of the kids, and Bo took a second look to note their slightly distended stomachs. One pale boy had no shirt on, and he could see the rust-colored tendrils splayed around his belly button like a flower. Bo’s own Parasite gave a wriggle of recognition. He didn’t recall any of their faces from the four months he’d been inside, but he didn’t know how many warehouses there were either.
“That’s it,” Wyatt said. “Everyone clear out so I can talk with Vi and our new recruit, alright?” He paused. “What’s it take to be a Lost Boy?”
“Guts,” the kids chorused.
Wyatt nodded, then they all slid off their seats and started filing past. Most of them shot looks at Bo on the way, some friendly, some not. Bo had been new before. He met the gazes cool and calm, how Lia had told him to do, not too friendly but not too mean. Bo remembered getting the bus together to their first day at a new school, in a new country, back when they both had their accents still.
You can just look at the spot between their eyes, if it’s hard, she’d advised. Shouldn’t need to, though.
Why? Bo’d asked, sticking his head against the cold glass window.
You’re cooler than them. Then she’d jabbed him under the ribs, right where he hated it. Not as cool as me, though.
As for the kids here, Bo estimated he was older than half of them, even if he was only taller than a handful. But he’d been small before too. He was probably faster than any of them, except maybe Wyatt, who was approaching now on long lanky legs.
“Hey, Vi,” he said, warm all at once as he turned to her, putting a hand just above her elbow. “Found something more interesting than food, I see.”
“Yeah,” Violet said. “He was there foraging. He’s fresh out the warehouse.”
“Yeah?” Wyatt turned to Bo again with a renewed interest. “Fresh out the warehouse? There hasn’t been any new kids out in a month.” His gaze felt like a laser scanner. “How’d you get over the wormy wall?”
The Parasite squirmed in Bo’s stomach and he remembered the storm of static and the impossible hole it had sliced through the living fence—the wormy wall. He debated whether Wyatt would believe him or not.
“I didn’t,” Bo said. “Didn’t go over it. I went through. With my Parasite.”
It was the first time he’d said it that way: my Parasite, not the Parasite. It didn’t feel as strange in his mouth as he’d thought it might.
Wyatt’s brow furrowed. “How?” He shot a glance over to Violet, who shrugged, lips pursed.
“It just happened,” Bo said. “One of the whale-things was chasing me. Right over me, blowing air on me. I got, you know, the twitches. And then the static. I was running at the fence—at the wall—and I felt shakes all through me. Like, vibrating.”
Wyatt was rapt, and Bo realized even Violet was frowning intently.
“I shut my eyes,” he continued, standing up a bit straighter, speaking a bit louder. “And the static was really big, like, making my hairs all stand up, and I thought I was going to smack into the wall. But I went through it instead. And when I looked back, there was this chunk missing. This hole.” He stretched his arms out to approximate the circumference. “Bigger than that. Like it just got punched out with a … a … you know.”
“Hole punch,” Violet supplied.
“Yeah,” Bo said. He mimed the motion. “Pop.” He looked at Wyatt, daring him to disagree. “That’s what happened.”
Wyatt raised his chin, narrowed his eyes. “What’s your name?”
“Bo,” Bo said. “Bo Rabiu.”
“I believe you, Bo.” Wyatt’s mouth curled into a smile. He turned to Violet. “Show him a shift, Vi.”
Violet looked startled, brushing her hair back behind her ear. “I’m not amped up,” she said. “And it’s early.”
“Just a little one,” Wyatt said. “Come on. You’re best at it.”
Violet didn’t show it on her face, but the tips of her ears were flushed, and the way she looked at Wyatt when Wyatt wasn’t looking reminded Bo of the boys he teased his si
ster about. She slid her hand under her shirt, splaying her fingers across her stomach. The outline of her hand through the fabric, long skinny digits, looked like a spider.
“That seat on the end,” she said, nodding to one of the dilapidated chairs. Bo looked at it, unsure what he was watching for. Violet’s hand clenched tight under her shirt and Bo felt a faint static charge whispering around the room. His own Parasite tingled in response. Violet’s face was screwed up, focused on the chair, and Wyatt gave her an encouraging nod.
The chair wasn’t there. Bo blinked. The plush red seat, one armrest, and a thin slice of the seat beside it, had disappeared entirely. Bo’s eyes leapt around the empty space where it should have been, uncomprehending.
Suddenly the static stopped and the chair was back in its place, Coke stains and all, as if it had never moved. Bo saw Violet shoot Wyatt a pleased look, but Wyatt was already speaking.
“That’s a shift,” he said, with a hint of eagerness in his voice. “That’s what you did on accident. You moved a bit of the wall out of the way and ran through the gap before it came back.”
Bo looked at Violet, who was breathing hard, like she’d just run, then back to the seat she’d shifted away. But that wasn’t what he’d done to the wall. He hadn’t shifted it for just a moment. He’d bored a hole right through.
“Can everyone do it?” he asked.
“A few of us,” Wyatt said. “With practice. Takes work.”
“Can you?”
Wyatt gave a wry smile. “Not me.”
“Why not?” Bo asked.
In answer, Wyatt tugged his red shirt up. But instead of the dim silhouette of the Parasite, there was something else entirely: a ripple of jagged scar tissue, salmon-pink, crossing him from hip to hip.
“First thing I did when I got out,” Wyatt said darkly. “I hated the little monster. I hate the fuckers who put them in us.”