A Single Light

by Tosca Lee

  “I thought about my high school girlfriend who got pregnant the summer before college. We decided to terminate. I have never stopped thinking about that. Wondering who that person would have grown up to be. How Shelly seemed to go on with her life and be okay when I definitely, at times, was not. Thinking I should have tried harder to reach out to her after she quit taking my calls.

  “When I found out about Truly I was shocked, and then happy—so happy. But the months I was in prison, not knowing if I’d live another hour, let alone make it back home to ever meet her, I figured it was just what I deserved. And I would’ve been okay with never meeting her if I thought, at least, that I’d done something to give her a better world to live in. To feel that I’d been a good father, if in the only way I could. But I’d only been a part of making it worse.”

  “It wasn’t your fault, Ashley,” I say.

  “There’s other stuff,” he says, shaking his head. “I had to do things to get out and in exchange for help to have even a shot at making this right. Things I know I have to live with, but don’t know if I can.” He looks at me, gives a simple shrug.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. For all of it. For what happened to him, and the obvious torment he’s in.

  “The thing is, every time I go back to the moment of any of those decisions—to who I was and what I knew then—”

  “You can’t change it,” I say.

  He looks away. “But I keep trying to,” he says softly. “And that is crazy.”

  I consider him a moment.

  “Come back to the Enclave with us after Puerto Rico,” I say.

  He shakes his head. “I wouldn’t want the person I am today as a father. Or want Truly to know these kinds of things about the man who’s supposed to be her hero.”

  I think of my own father the last time I saw him, waving a gun at my mother, threatening to shoot us all.

  I give him a small smile. “Come with us and meet her. So someday when you’re ready to tell her, you’ll already be her friend.”

  He sits back then. “Okay.” He nods and looks away, biting his lips together, his eyes filled with tears.

  • • •

  DOC ENDS UP stitching the graze in the back of my head, which came open again in the crash. He says I’ll need antibiotics.

  “What do you recommend?” I say, opening my pack.

  I do sleep, finally, after eating something and taking a pain pill.

  7:51 P.M.

  * * *

  When I wake up, Chase is propped up on an elbow looking at me. His eyes so turbulent I might be staring at the sky.

  Ashley sits alone beyond him, not moving, fist folded against his mouth. Doc and Jonas nap, hats over their faces, rucksacks behind their heads.

  “I invited Ashley to come back with us to the Enclave,” I say.

  Chase glances at him, chewing the inside of his lip. “You sure that’s a good idea?”

  I consider the muscle tightening against his jaw.

  “I think he needs it,” I say.

  “What about Truly?”

  “I don’t think now is the time to tell her.”

  “Was he always like that?” Chase asks, tilting his head in Ashley’s direction.

  “Not the few days I knew him before.”

  “Being held prisoner can really mess some people up.”

  “He’ll be fine,” I say. “We’ll keep an eye on him.” And then I smile.

  “What?”

  “You really love her.”

  “I do,” he says. “Now Lauren—I love her, too, but she’s a pain in the ass.”

  “Yes, she can be.”

  He goes quiet a moment, toying with a tendril of my hair, and then says, “You know, I had the craziest crash dream a few hours ago.”

  “Oh really.”

  He looks alive, more comfortable in his own skin than he’s seemed since I met him. It’s been cool and not only a little sexy to see him in his element. I’ve even made a bet with myself that he’s considering reenlisting.

  “I could’ve sworn you were saying you loved me.”

  I feel my lips curve into a smile.

  “You know, I was thinking . . .”

  “Mm-hmm?” I say, brows raised, wondering if I’m about to win a bet with myself. Thinking I should have put money on it, if only on principle.

  “Would you two get a room already?” Jonas mutters from beneath his hat.

  Yantiss leans into the room. “Getting dark,” he says. “Gear up.”

  10:31 P.M.

  * * *

  Fires burn throughout the city like sinister constellations. Gunshots crack the night, the sound carrying farther in the dark.

  We hear them, moving in packs. Shouting and calling out enemies in a variety of languages. Raiding houses and buildings, demanding “parachutes.” Somehow the plane drop, rather than sustaining life, has only endangered it even more, the presence of food stoking primal hunger.

  Yantiss moves first and we follow. Jonas brings up the rear.

  I feel as cumbersome as our armored helicopter with my new vest and protection detail. Slow and ungainly as we make our way from the industrial park where we’ve spent the last twelve hours through a neighborhood along the route Nance scoped out earlier and we reviewed for over an hour.

  “By now, the entire city knows there are passengers of a downed military chopper somewhere outside the airport perimeter trying to get back in,” Yantiss had said.

  I’ve heard Yantiss fire five times so far. Which I assume equates to five dead in the name of saving lives.

  Even in a city this size, the houses tell the same story: broken windows like put-out eyes, burn barrels in some of the backyards. The only difference is there are too many doors to mark. Some bear the X we’ve seen in Nebraska. Others simply hang open.

  I force one foot in front of the other as we reach the tollway. My entire body hurts, the pain pill from earlier having worn off

  Here, there’s no more cover but the darkness itself as we slip past the refuse of wrecks and fires.

  A hundred yards from the fence, a shot pierces the air. Flies so close to my head it sounds like an insect.

  Chase drags me down behind the concrete reinforcement wall as Nance and Doc return fire.

  “Where’s it coming from?” Jonas calls out.

  “Parking garage over there.” Yantiss.

  I can’t do this.

  I don’t want a world like this for Truly. I don’t want her to live in fear. Watching the good disappear like the last fireflies of the evening.

  A vaccine won’t bring back the light.

  It’ll only extend the darkness.

  “Anybody see him?” Nance.

  “Yup,” Yantiss says, sliding the barrel of his rifle over the concrete block and slowly adjusting a dial.

  He curses a second later.

  “Lost him.”

  “Probably went to call his friends,” Jonas says, turning to survey the wooded area between us and the airport fence.

  A shot hits the pavement behind us.

  “New shooter—building beside the garage.”

  “Friends are coming,” Jonas says. “Four o’clock.”

  Another minute and they’ll cut off our exit through the woods.

  “Jonas, Miller, Nancy,” Yantiss says. “Get ready to move your asset. Ashley, Doc, with me.”

  “Right beside you,” Chase says.

  We crouch, shuffling low on the pavement.

  And then we’re bolting toward the first abandoned car as Yantiss and Doc fire in the opposite direction behind us.

  We stop behind the bumper of an SUV and then run again, lurching across the tollway from cover to cover. Chase on my right. Nance in front, Jonas on the left, both firing toward the incoming others.

  We reach the woods and run twenty yards in, drop down in a small clearing ready to provide cover fire.

  Someone shouts—more gunshots.

  “Prof’s been hit,” Jonas says. “Get read
y!”

  The heat leaves my hands and face.

  Prof. The Professor. Ashley.

  “What?” I straighten, and Nance pulls me back down as Yantiss enters the woods dragging Ashley with him, firing in his wake.

  “Hostiles coming in fast!” Doc shouts, running in after him.

  I scramble for Ashley. He’s leaning back on one arm, blood seeping through the fingers over his abdomen below his vest.

  Yantiss lets him go and Nance grabs him. Doc takes a quick look at the wound as Chase and Yantiss form up around me. We prepare for a last sprint to the fence while Jonas and Nance cover our retreat.

  “Is he okay?” I say. “Is he gonna be okay?”

  “You won’t make it if you have to drag me,” Ashley says. He pulls out his pistol. Trains it toward the incoming pursuers.

  “Ashley, no!” I say.

  “We don’t leave men behind,” Yantiss says.

  Ashley glances back at us. “I’m not a Marine. I’m a father.” His eyes fall on me.

  “No!” I buck against Doc as Yantiss grabs me by the vest.

  “Move!” Yantiss shouts as Chase brings up the back.

  I scream as Ashley opens fire. Glance back in time to see the weapon fall from his arms as he slumps to the side.

  And then we’re running for the airport perimeter.

  DAY 184 1:12 A.M.

  * * *

  The only plane out of O’Hare is too small to make it to San Juan. It flies our team instead to Rantoul, a decommissioned Illinois base recommissioned during the crisis. A plane has been diverted to meet us there.

  Chase holds me and I pretend to sleep, lulled by the drone of the engines. But I can’t stop thinking about what Ashley told me when we spoke earlier. Unsure if he died killing the darkness inside himself, or to keep the light alive.

  “I’m sorry about the Prof,” Yantiss says sometime later when Chase is asleep. “He was a good man.”

  I nod, unable to summon words. I finally manage: “He reminds me of our friend Noah.”

  “The silo guy?” Yantiss asks.

  I nod.

  “What happened to him, anyway?”

  I think of Noah and his mural inside the asylum. That wall is the one thing of beauty that could make the place worth saving.

  I give a small smile. “He’s off helping others.”

  What will I tell Truly about her father?

  I’ll tell her he was a hero.

  I fall asleep searching the darkness below for the Atlantic I know to be there.

  And wake to a runway filled with light.

  DAY 190

  * * *

  “You’re probably the first person to have their own designated sharps container,” Chase says as we wait inside the Rodriguez Army Health Clinic, following my gaze to a cart full of vials, gloves, syringes, and a red container with a biohazard sign on it that’s been marked with a black X.

  He doesn’t know that I’m really looking at the wall behind it. Trying to imagine the beige paint covered with a Vietnamese village, a girl carrying pails of water hanging from a pole across her shoulders.

  We’ve spent the last week watching the news from our room here, in Fort Buchanan, stunned by the headlines. The estimated 100 million dead, the vast majority of the casualties in the United States. The alarming infection rate in South America and growing number of sick in Europe and Asia. Russia’s state-sponsored doping program turning to the distribution of IV “vitamins” to boost immunity against the disease. The U.S. battleships surrounding the islands of Puerto Rico, where frantic research is rumored to be underway on a vaccine.

  I want to marvel at the palm trees. At the exotic and sometimes star-shaped fruits that arrive with lunch and cooked bananas Chase says are plantains. At being so close to the ocean I can practically taste it on the air.

  But I have no idea if Julie’s still alive.

  I trust that Truly is safe with Kestral. For all I know she’s ecstatic to be back in the only real home she’s ever known. But Lauren, I worry about. She’s almost seventeen.

  Marriage material by New Earth standards.

  Meanwhile, the hot showers, air-conditioning, fresh clothes, clean linens, twenty-four-hour television, and regular meals we’ve had since we arrived haven’t felt so much luxurious as disconcerting. The sounds of the vehicles inside the army base too frequent, the electric lights too many.

  I’m not allowed to go anywhere without an armed escort, and then only to visit the medical center, where I spent the entire first day submitting to examinations, tests, and blood draws.

  My first day here they said it could be eight weeks before I’m allowed to leave. To protect not just their ready supply of blood samples should the pharmaceutical companies here or in the United Kingdom require more from Donor X, but my anonymity, should another country get the idea to abduct me for similar purposes.

  I’ve asked for only two things since we arrived: for Julie, Lauren, and Truly to be brought here as soon as Julie’s well enough to travel, and to talk to them via satellite phone in the meantime, as soon as possible.

  Also, to visit the beach.

  • • •

  CHASE, AT LEAST, was able to reach his family in France our second day here and reassure them that he was okay as he talked to them for an hour. I was glad for him, and to hear my name brought up in conversation, but also envious at how much lighter he seemed afterward.

  A knock, and the door opens. But instead of Dr. Acheson, who oversees the clinic, or Dustin, the sole phlebotomist allowed to draw my blood, it’s a member of my detail.

  “For you,” she says, handing me a phone with a thick antenna.

  My heart jumps.

  “Hello?” I say, the instant she steps back out.

  “Sylvia?” a man on the other end says.

  It’s my mother’s name, and the one I’ve agreed to go by—for this conversation, and any other interactions while I’m here.

  “Yes. Who’s this?” I say.

  “Just a moment,” he says. And then, to someone else: “She’s on the line.”

  The phone changes hands.

  “Sylvia?”

  Kestral.

  “Hi!” I say, getting off the end of the exam table and turning to look at Chase.

  “Oh, it’s so good to hear your voice!”

  “Yours, too. How’s Julie?”

  “She’s doing great. She responded to the antibiotics right away. Here, hold on.”

  A few seconds later, Julie says, “W—Sylvia? Oh, my God. Are you okay?”

  “I’ve been so worried about you!” I say, voice tightening as my vision blurs. “We got the antibiotics—we found some in North Platte, but by the time we got back, you were already gone . . .”

  “Are you okay? Tell me you’re okay. I can only imagine everything you’ve gone through!”

  “I’m fine.” I look around at the medical equipment plugged into the wall, the lights on overhead. By all accounts, I’m far better off than they are. “Is Truly—”

  “Truly’s fine,” she says.

  “I just want to know you’re all right. All of you.”

  “Lauren’s good, Truly’s good. I’m up and moving around—a little slowly, but hey. They don’t let me do too much.”

  I cover my mouth, on the verge of bawling in relief.

  “And you’re doing okay.” And what I mean is: inside the compound. I’ve wondered who’s taken over Magnus’s position, how much stricter things have gotten in the middle of what I know they regard as the final cataclysm. Wonder how Julie and Lauren are dealing with all the talk of Final Day, or faring inside a community I know Julie considers as crazy as the deranged outside world. But for all I know they’ve taken this call inside the (rebuilt) administrative building and can’t speak freely.

  “You’re repeating yourself,” she says. “And yes. I promise. I just hate that you’re by yourself,” she says, and then lowers her voice. “Is Ashley with you, at least?”

  �
�No, he, um, couldn’t make it,” I say, not wanting to talk about it on the phone. “But Chase is.”

  “Oh really,” she says, and I can hear her smile.

  “And you and Lauren and Truly will be, soon as you’re healthy enough to travel. Kestral, too, if she wants.”

  For a moment, she doesn’t answer.

  “Julie? You still there?” I say.

  “Yes,” she says. And then: “Wynter . . . I think we should stay.”

  “What?” I say, thinking I must have heard her wrong.

  I think back to the way we were enveloped with friendship and acceptance on our arrival fifteen years ago. “Love bombing,” they call it in the articles I read after I got out. But Julie hates New Earth for what it did to my mother, Jackie, and me. Is far too cynical for it to work on her. Isn’t she?

  It hasn’t even been two weeks!

  “Truly and Lauren are happy here,” she says.

  No. No, no, no.

  “Julie, I know it might seem like—”

  “And I am, too.”

  “But you hate them!” I say, feeling strangely betrayed.

  “A lot’s changed since you were here. We’re needed here. Also, the military people who brought the satellite phone said maybe they can help me get in contact with the boys. Hon, I’ve spent the last six months wondering if they’re still alive. I need to know. And if they are, I want to bring them here.”

  “They can come here, too!”

  “Wyn—Sylvia. I’ve been to Puerto Rico. I’ve seen it—and a lot of places. But I’ve never seen anything like this.”

  I start to argue with her, angry panic rising inside me, but then Kestral gets back on the phone.

  “Sylvia, what’s an island but just one more enclave cut off from the rest of the world?” she says gently. “You could probably insist that they put Truly on a plane—”