by Nate Kenyon
“I remember when you were younger, before your father died…you used to get these looks in your eyes sometimes, and I could see you tighten up, clench your fists, breathe faster. You’d start to sweat, and sometimes you’d have to go to the nurse. It was panic attacks, wasn’t it? I figured maybe you’d understand.” She inched her chair closer, hunching over the tabletop toward me. “Then, after the funeral, you were gone for a few weeks and I thought—”
“We went to my grandmother’s house in Miami,” I said. “Mom had to get away from our place, away from the people.”
“And when you got back you seemed different somehow. How’d you beat it, Pete? I haven’t seen you do that in a long time now.”
I thought of Tessa. When we got back from Miami, she’d been there. The girl next door. It was such a cliché, but I couldn’t help being fascinated by her from the very first moment. I remembered the first time I saw her, standing out in the rain in her backyard, just letting it wash her clean, her hands and face up to the sky. I remembered wondering how good that felt, and when I went out to join her, she didn’t think it was weird at all. We stood there together for a long time, staring up into the raindrops. She knew who I was, and what had happened to me, she told me later. But she didn’t ask about it then. Somehow, that made it bearable.
“I don’t know. Just grew out of it, I guess. It’s really bad, with Jay?”
“He’s holding on, but it’s like, I don’t know, a coiled spring. It’s taking every ounce of energy he has. Maybe you could talk to him?”
“That would probably screw him up worse,” I said, trying on a smile. It felt wrong and I dropped it quickly. “There’s no magic formula, Sue. I wish there was, but there’s not. And I’m not a psychiatrist.”
“I know. But if you told him what you went through, if he knew you understood…” The look in her eyes made me ache for her. “Maybe it would help. Please. I—I love him. I don’t know what else to do. With what’s happened, and being locked down here…I’m afraid he’ll try to hurt himself.”
“Okay. I’ll try.” I reached across the table and took her hand in both of mine. It was big and soft and felt too warm to me. I didn’t know Sue as well as the others, but what I did know I liked. She was a good person, concerned with others, helpful and kind. But she was in an impossible situation here, and I knew it. I wanted to help her, I just didn’t know how.
“I’m sorry about your grandfather. I know you were pretty close. It’s hard enough down here, you know? Without seeing that. I’m really sorry.”
Her eyes welled with tears. “You understand that too, don’t you, Pete? You know how I feel.” She sniffled and wiped her free hand across her nose while I clutched her other hand more tightly. “God. I still think I saw something out there, something I can’t explain. And I can see how that might be my mind playing tricks, I really can. But maybe there’s another reason to hope. We never found out for sure. Maybe it wasn’t him, after all. Maybe it was a—a neighbor or a friend or something. Maybe he’s still alive up there, and my mother too. His house was built to withstand a hurricane. And that tunnel, it would have protected him too, right?”
“Sue—”
“No, listen to me. We don’t know, do we? We don’t really know anything.”
I shook my head. “No, we don’t. But we can’t just open up that door again and take a look.” I didn’t tell her about my nightmares about my own mother, about her turning black and blowing away in the wind and flames, or my unreasoning hope that somehow, some way, she had survived it, and was waiting for me to come get her.
Or my feeling that somehow, some way, I was going to do it.
“I do know one thing,” I said. “Jay’s going to need you. If this thing he has is the way you’ve described it, he’s going to need someone to lean on, and lean on hard. It might not be fair, but you’ve got to be strong for him.”
“We’ve all got to be strong, don’t we?” she whispered. A tear ran down the outside of her nose and hung there, trembling, until she wiped it away. “We all need each other. But for what, Pete? What kind of life is left out there for us?”
I wondered what world would come out of something like this. That is, if humanity survived at all. Would it turn everyone into a violent criminal, a survival-of-the-fittest situation when resources were so scarce? Or would the same people who were naturally kind and helpful build a society from the ashes of the old, and cast out those who were more naturally prone to murder?
I thought about the secrets we all held; keeping Jimmie’s rash from Sue, Jay’s illness from the rest of them. My own secrets kept from everyone except for Tessa. And all the other secrets they each had from me, those I’d probably never know. We acted like friends, and maybe we all really were; but when it comes down to life and death, friendships change. You begin to see the cracks in some, and the strength in others. You find out who your real friends are, which might just surprise you.
“I’ll talk to him,” I said again. “I’ll do my best.” I squeezed her hand again and smiled at her. This time, it felt more natural. She smiled back.
“What’s this?”
I’d been concentrating so hard on Sue’s face that I hadn’t seen Jay emerge from the shadows of the door opening behind her. Now he stood there staring at us, looking ridiculous with his hair sticking up in clumps, owlish glasses slightly askew, Creed concert T-shirt clinging to his bony frame, bare legs and white socks pulled up over his ankles. He kept scratching nervously at a red patch on his arm and glancing around the room, then back at us.
Sue spun around in her chair, pulling her hand from mine like it had been scalded. Someone caught with her hand in the cookie jar. That probably made it worse. I saw the muscles in Jay’s jaw tighten.
Something about the look on his face made my blood boil. He had no right to think this; we were only trying to help. Looking back on it now, I guess it made sense that I would get angry, considering the amount of pressure we were all under; and when I get tense, I tend to say something stupid. It’s my way of dealing with the stress. But I never expected Jay’s reaction.
“We’re planning a spring wedding,” I said. “Sue wanted to elope but I said we simply had to have it right here, in the backyard. Wouldn’t it be beautiful?”
Me and my big mouth. “Shut up, Pete,” Sue said. “Jay, I was upset and Pete was trying to make me feel better. That’s all.”
“How long have you been screwing her?” Jay said abruptly, stepping forward. “A few days? Or has it been going on for a while?”
“Jay, Jesus Christ—”
“I asked you a question!” he shouted. “Answer me, damn you!”
I’d never seen Jay lose it like this, ever. It was like someone had just opened up an emotional fire hydrant. Sue reached up to touch his arm. “Calm down—”
“Don’t touch me.” He yanked himself away from her. “I’ve seen it, don’t think I haven’t. The way you two look at each other. And then the other night, Sue sitting on your bed and the two of you whispering in the dark? I heard you.”
“That was nothing,” Sue said. “I’m just scared. Nothing’s going on.”
“She’s worried about you,” I said. Sue turned and shot me a look, and if looks could kill, I’d surely have been dead right then and there. But I kept going. “She asked for my help. I know about your claustrophobia and the meds. I know you must be going nuts down here, dealing with this.”
Wrong choice of words. Again. Jay crossed his arms over his chest and looked from one of us to the other. “So that’s it now? You two talking about how to deal with poor crazy Jay?”
“Look, this is getting out of hand,” I said. “I get it, okay? You think you’re the only one who’s dealt with bad shit in his life? Come on. I’ve looked into that darkness, I’ve been there. And now we’re all locked away down here, and we have to deal with it somehow. But if we end up attacking each other—”
“You have no idea. You really don’t.” Jay ran his fingers through his hair and s
tarted pacing back and forth. I could feel the nervous energy streaming off him in waves, and I wondered whether he’d been sitting in the dark in his bed, obsessing for hours before coming in here. “You’re worried about us attacking each other? You don’t know what we’re in for, but I do.”
“Really? Why don’t you enlighten me?”
“Don’t start,” Sue said. Maybe she was just trying to avoid him slipping into full-blown paranoia. But I glanced at her pleading face, the way she looked at him, and I had to wonder. You ever walk into a room where there was something else going on, a hidden conversation or deeper meaning that left you feeling out in the cold? That’s the way I felt now. I kept thinking I was missing something important here.
“You’d never believe me,” Jay said.
“Try me.”
He took a deep breath, let it out slowly in a long hiss of air. “I know what was wrong with that rat.”
I sat back, unable to process the sudden shift. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Jay—” Sue said.
He waved her off. “No, listen to me. It’s time someone around here started listening to this. She won’t. For God’s sake, you people don’t even have a clue!” Jay’s hands were shaking as he ran his fingers through his hair again. “There’ve been rumors of experiments like this circulating for a while now in the online chat rooms. I used to read about them all the time. If you went to a place like whispers dot com, you’d see threads about it. Most people talked about al-Qaeda bankrolling them, but nobody ever seemed to know for sure.”
“Bankrolling what, exactly?”
“Biological weapons. But not the ones everyone thinks of when people say that, like anthrax or smallpox or Ebola. These are quite a bit more sophisticated.”
“That attack was nuclear,” I said, as calmly as I could. “I saw it. Atomic-bomb mushroom clouds, the works.”
“I know it was nuclear, damn it,” Jay said. “But that was only the first wave. Computer simulations clearly show that even in the event of a full-scale nuclear war, human beings would survive. And not in the organized way that people who would plan something like this would want. Humans would survive in pockets here and there and grow like weeds again. There’d be no controlling them and we’d be back where we started eventually. If you really wanted to do the job right, you’d need a second wave. And to do that, you’d need to make weapons carriers out of the creatures most likely to survive the first attack.”
“You know how crazy this sounds,” Sue said. “We’ve talked about this. Why would anyone want to wipe out every single human being from the face of the earth? It makes no sense.”
“You know why,” he said.
There was silence for a moment between them; then Jay looked at me. “It makes sense if those planning it know it’s coming. They can prepare a place to hide out and wait, a kind of Garden of Eden. They can engineer it so they can control the plague. Then once everyone else is dead, they can begin to reshape society on their terms, in their image. Start from scratch.”
“Sounds sort of like eugenics,” I said. Jay and Sue glanced at each other again quickly, but I caught it. “You think that’s it?” I asked. “Ethnic cleansing?” I shook my head. “Okay, I’ll bite. What exactly is most likely to survive a nuclear war?”
“Insects,” Jay said. “They make the best disease carriers too. Our own government used insects in field tests of biological weapons way back in the Korean War. Fleas, for one. But there were other programs. The point is, insects are best equipped to survive. They’re tough, difficult to find, and they can move quickly over pretty large distances.”
“So al-Qaeda snatches up half the nuclear warheads in existence, figures out how to drop them all at once across the world, then follows up with a plague of disease-ridden bugs? I don’t buy it. These are the same assholes who spent ten years planning how to fly a couple of planes into some buildings. This sounds like it’s a little beyond their abilities.”
“I didn’t say it was al-Qaeda.” Jay ran a hand through his hair again, and I swear to God, he looked like he might just blast off at any moment right through the ceiling, he was so hopped up on adrenaline or something. I started to wonder if maybe Sue didn’t have a point about him being about to lose his mind. And that would be a very nasty thing down here. It was bad enough with Jimmie’s leg, and no doctors or hospital to take him to for treatment, but what about mental illness? What the hell do you do about that?
You stay out of the way, that’s what. Try to contain the damage. But if he got violent, with himself or others? Paranoia could lead to all sorts of trouble. I used to see it in my father often enough.
“So if it’s not al-Qaeda, then who?” I said. “What, the Russians again? That’s what you said when it first happened. And what does this have to do with the rats, anyway?”
This time the look Sue shot Jay was loud and clear. Keep your mouth shut. Why she would feel that way, I had no idea. She’d come to me for help, after all. It made no sense. And yet I couldn’t have gotten it wrong. Sue might as well have reached out and smacked his face, it was that obvious.
Jay shrugged, looked away, then back at her again. He opened his mouth and shut it. “I-I don’t know,” he said.
“Come on, guys,” I said. “I might be a little thick, but even I can see that something’s going on here. You’re not telling me something. Spill it.”
If things had turned out differently, maybe I would have gotten some answers right then, and there would have been no turning back. But the silence was shattered by Jimmie’s bloodcurdling scream from the other room.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I’m the first to admit that sometimes my mind goes to pretty dark places. In the depths of my anger and fear after my father’s death, there were times I wanted to hurt everyone, myself most of all. It’s a natural function of what happened to me, or so I’m told; but to be honest, I think it’s more than that. I think we’re all hardwired to the tendencies that show up later in life. Sure, our moods and habits can be influenced by our experiences, but there are too many instances of a person going through terrible trauma, rape and torture and horrible violence and coming out the other side with more compassion than ever, while someone else who has a perfect upbringing in suburbia with a caring mother and father, lots of friends and plenty of money ends up killing people for fun. Some are wired for empathy, and some are not.
When I went to these dark places in my mind, I tended to feel pretty insignificant. I wondered about the meaning of life. We see a fly on the wall and we smack it dead, and don’t give it another thought. Why? Because it’s nothing to us. And yet, as small and unimportant as that fly is to a human being, imagine how much more so a human being is when compared to the universe. Here we are, living and praying on earth as if we matter to God, as if he exists and actually can spare the time to pay attention to us, when the reality is that our planet is like a grain of sand in a nearly infinite beach, and we are specks of dust in a hurricane.
And if we’re hardwired to be the type of person we are, what of free will? We like to believe that we choose the paths we take, but our psychological tendencies choose for us, more often than not. Even if we could change our own lives, our destiny, so to speak, why would it matter? If the entire human race just blinked out all at once, the universe would keep on expanding and God would keep on laughing, if he noticed at all.
My mind had gone to a pretty dark place right then, when Jay was talking. I didn’t know exactly what he was trying to say about all this, but whatever it was between him and Sue, whatever secrets they were sharing, I knew it wasn’t good. The look that passed between them was enough to tell me that. Still, Jay was the smartest of all of us, the smartest kid in our school, maybe the smartest one to ever come through White Falls. As crazy as he seemed to be, I still wanted to believe him. And if we really were facing some kind of biological warfare, the sliver of hope I’d been holding on to since the strike would disappear in an instant.
>
Nuclear war was bad enough. There was no way we could survive something like that.
When Jimmie screamed we all rushed back into the bedroom. Dan had jumped out of bed by then and turned on one of those portable lanterns, so that Jimmie was lit from the side as he writhed and kicked in his bunk.
Dan was standing in the middle of the room now, staring. Tessa stood just inside the door with her arms at her sides. She didn’t make a sound but I could see her hands clenched into fists. I wanted to go to her but did not, just stood there with the rest of them watching the bizarre scene in the lower bunk.
“Make it stop!” Jimmie screamed, convulsing upward until I thought his spine might break. He raked his nails down his chest. “It itches…”
I could see the sweat pouring off him. His shirt was damp and his head…there was something wrong with it, but for a moment I couldn’t figure out what. I moved a step closer, close enough to see clumps of hair on his pillow.
What I was seeing were patches of scalp.
My stomach was churning. We all looked at each other. “He’s going to hurt himself,” I said. “We better tie him down somehow.”
Dan nodded and pulled a couple of belts out of the closet. Sue went to her bed and found a robe she’d been using and pulled the white cloth belt from it. Together Dan and I went to the bed where Jimmie lay, and Dan took his arms while I grabbed at his legs.
Jimmie kicked out at me and almost caught me in the chest. I dodged and then grabbed at his leg again. His skin was slippery with sweat and burning hot, and as he twisted and writhed I wrapped both hands around his lower thigh, just above the bandage that, so far, was remaining in place. Tessa had done a good job of wrapping it. His entire leg was red and swollen. I forced it down with my own weight, pinning it to the bed as Dan quickly lashed the belts around the slats of the headboard and secured his wrists.
As I looked up to see Dan finishing the job, I felt something move in the flesh of Jimmie’s leg.
It felt like a snake or worm wriggling under his skin. I let go and fell hard off the bed onto my back, stunned from the blow.