I do have brief spells of what I can only describe as cozy numbness. Some of those are due to the efforts of my family and friends. Although I no longer feel capable of showing it, I am grateful for their love. I’m also grateful they haven’t given up on me. Even Jesse has ceased to annoy me. Seeing her and her antics doesn’t fill me with joy like it does some people though, because all I can think of are the many ways I could lose her.
The Dumb Luck Club hasn’t met since Ghost died, at least as far as I know. Maybe I’ve become too “Katatonic” to be anything but a liability these days. But Mouse’s crusade to record the residents here carries on, and she’s recruited me to draw the faces to go along with the stories. Sometimes I sketch people while she interviews them, and sometimes I sketch them alone while they sit in silence. These are the ones who don’t want to talk, the ones who submitted their one-page bio in lieu of an interview. Their stories are so gut wrenching and shocking they lessen my self-pity…but not my pain.
There is a new source of comfort in my life now: the companionship of Killer. He hid in the shadows from the moment the soldiers let him go; like many of us, he didn’t seem to trust anyone. I remember the first time I saw him in the refugee center. I was working the lights over the stage, having fun moving the spotlight away from Nemesis or shrinking it till it only lit up her feet. I saw a flash of movement out of the corner of my eye. I left the spotlight trained on Nemesis’s tapping foot and let my eyes follow a waiting figure only a shade darker than the blackness around it—Killer. “What are you doing here?” I mumbled while I reached out to pick him up. But with one swift movement he hopped up to a higher plane, and then again, and again. Stairs! I carefully climbed in the pitched darkness until, “Ouch!” I hit a door. Good thing I was looking down at the time, or I would have hit it with my nose instead of my forehead.
I couldn’t open it, but that was okay; I knew I could get Ghost to pick the lock. He didn’t come alone, the rest of the lighting crew (plus an uninvited, but very observant, Nemesis) came with him. Oh yeah, and there was Killer too, staying just out of the way.
It wasn’t a special room, it was more like a storage room, and it was disappointingly empty. Well, empty except for a few discarded cans of food and a sharpie-made sign that read, “Abandon all hope ye who have entered here.” Ghost believed one of the disappeared had chosen to live up here and got caught when he came down for more supplies.
“Why do you assume it was a he?” I asked, slightly offended.
“Because a woman wouldn’t have left those cans lying about,” he said matter-of-factly.
“Hey! That’s sexist!” I shot back. “I’m just as capable as you guys are at being a slob!”
Kaboom thought he was a simpleton because he got the quote all wrong…but I understood what he/she meant. I didn’t care. I was just amazed that a cat would lead us to the perfect meeting spot for the lighting crew, later known as the Dumb Luck Club.
Killer leapt into the room like it was his, and he seemed to spend most of his time up there, out of sight, in the shadows. Until now that is. Now he’s my shadow. We hardly see Naked these days because the soldiers use her on their patrols, so it’s nice to cuddle up to something soft and purring and warm. I know it’s senseless to feel safe because of a little black cat, and yet somehow I feel protected by Killer, like Ghost sent him to watch over me.
That’s not all that Ghost sent me. I was in too much of a state to notice anything those first few days after he died, but one night I flopped down on my pillow and heard a “clunk!” as I hit something hard. There was something in my pillow! I reached into my pillowcase and felt around. I stretched my fingers into the space and drew out a book.
But not just any book. This book was homemade, unpublished. It was an ordinary notebook that someone had turned into a book. A printed label had been made for the front, but everything else was handwritten. The label read, Notes From A Necrophobe.
For the first time since Ghost died I felt excited about something. Who could resist that title? I had to see what that book contained. My heart beat fast and my anguish disappeared as I lost myself in its pages. The inside cover read, “By Eric Holdings.” A more familiar script had been added just under Eric’s name. It was in handwriting I recognized from study sessions in the library: “And W. Benedict.”
Ghost! That had to be Ghost! A warm soothing feeling spread through me, like hot chocolate after a cold day in the snow. I was holding a gift from Ghost.
This book is my consolation prize. I didn’t win more time with Ghost, but I did get something to remember him by. I carry it with me everywhere; it usually sits in an inconspicuous pocket inside my jacket. At night I sleep with it under my pillow. I pull it out whenever no one’s around, dividing my reading between the Dumb Luck clubhouse and my cot. I feel Ghost’s voice in its pages, a voice that carries with it a tiny bit of hope. I realize that I’m not as helpless as I thought I was as I read its pages. I may be able to protect my family after all. There’s so much valuable information in Ghost’s book, it just might help us survive whatever the soldiers plan on throwing at us.
The first few chapters were obviously written by Eric in his spidery humorless scrawl. They cover things like “Hoard your supplies on the upper level and get rid of the stairs if at all possible,” and “Create a quick exit to the roof,” or even “In case of the infected breaking in and stacking themselves up to the second floor, expand laundry chute for another method of escape.”
“Buy Jeep with plastic sides and reinforced bulletproof front windshield to prevent breakages during flight. Run engine every five days (with proper ventilation!) to prevent battery from dying.” Okay, that explained the Jeep…the plastic sides could be pushed in without breaking and were too thick and strong to bite through. The hood was also large enough to provide a bit of a barrier to the front windshield. Too bad we didn’t get to use it for long. Even if we found a way to fight off the crowd of cadavers that surround it, and even if we found a way to pull it out of the ditch, we still couldn’t start it without a source of power, ‘cause I’m pretty sure AAA is on hiatus.
Ghost and Eric’s writings were a bit back-and-forth in the middle of the book; this must have been written while Eric was teaching him how to survive without him. I felt bad for Ghost; a lot of this stuff was absolutely stomach churning. Eric went through the various stages of decomposition to explain how to recognize and defend yourself from the dead. “Carry a retractable stick, like a tension rod for a shower curtain, to pull out and extend at a moment’s notice. Note the state of the infected and use the stick to push the threat off its feet. The time it takes to upright itself will buy you time to get away.”
“Do not use the stick if the body is in the bloat stage. Never touch it under any circumstances unless wearing a Tyvek suit with gloves, face shield, and head cover.” I was wondering what a Tyvek suit was, but Ghost (or Eric) had helpfully drawn one. It looked like something you’d see on one of those CSI shows. “The bloat stage will be obvious. The byproduct of cellular breakdown is gas, which will inflate the abdomen. Face, arms, and legs will swell up to resemble balloons. A body can expand to four or five times its original size in this stage. Blowflies will overwhelm moist areas like the mouth, eyes, and groin. Skin will slough off in sheets. If you poke a bloated body with a stick the flesh can give way and cause the liquefied body tissue to suddenly rupture and cover you with infected tissue.”
Ugh, how could Ghost stand this? Skin coming off in sheets? Now I understand how he was able to scalp that zombie with his bare hands. My stomach said, “Stop reading, please!” My mind said, “Carry on; we might need to know this someday.” My heart said, “I sure hope not.”
Ghost’s parting message came through his edit of his Grandfather’s opinion. “Attachments to others carry a risk to your survival, avoid at all costs,” had been crossed out and replaced with “Find someone worth living for.”
JESSE
It’s dinnertime in the school
cafeteria and Mom’s making us sit with Sarah again. I gave up on her a long time ago—she’s boring. She’s too sad to play with me. She won’t even play hide-and-go seek. I mean, seriously, come on! Mclean High School is the best place to play hide-n-go-seek! But no, she’d rather sit and stare off into space…kinda like KC does now. I mean, yeah, I know Sarah’s lost her family, but I haven’t heard from my dad either and I lost Ghost who was like a big brother to me. But I don’t let my thinking about them show to other people. I think Sarah’s mind drifted when she was thinking about her lost family and it wandered so far off that it couldn’t find its way back. I don’t do that. I just shove the bad feelings way down, real deep in my gut, and I don’t let them loose until I’m by myself and can cry when no one’s looking. That’s another good reason to play hide-n-go-seek; I get a chance to be by myself when I’m hiding so I can be sad on my own.
Mom says that people like Sarah need our help, but I don’t think she really needs us; she’s got Mr. Cromwell now. They knew each other before ‘cause he was her sister’s teacher and she was friends with his kids. Now he has no wife and kids and she has no parents or sister, so they kind of replace each other’s family.
They don’t talk much. They seem happy enough just to sit next to each other. Today’s dinner is different though because there’s a bunch of students surrounding Mr. Cromwell and they’re really into whatever it is they are talking about, so this time I’m listening. Even KC is listening, when she’s not feeding Killer little bits of her dinner under the table.
“Aliens! It has to be aliens because they come from the sky!” I don’t know the kid’s name that’s into the aliens. He’s a really tall and skinny kid with frizzy red hair and lots of it.
“Again with the aliens! Do you think of anything else?” Kaboom is here too, but he looks more tired than fired-up. Not sleepy-tired, but tired in a I’m-sick-and-tired-of-everything way. I’ve seen that look on people’s faces a lot lately.
“Oh yeah? Then how do you explain an atmosphere that rains death on us? Who’s seeding those clouds with killer microbes? Those microbes are nothing but tiny aliens!” I can’t agree with the frizzy-haired kid. If those microbes were really little aliens, wouldn’t the infected be green? Or Grey? Aliens in movies seem to come in only those two colors.
“Then why didn’t the army pick up the mother ship on its satellites? Why didn’t anyone pick anything up? Google Earth was still up and running before I came here, so there’s footage of the Earth and the space around it available to just about everybody. There’s enough dedicated alien-hunters in Arizona alone who would have picked up on a big cloud-seeding ship!” Kaboom is acting like an attack dog now.
“It’s probably cloaked.”
“Then why have satellites not crashed into it?”
“How do you know they haven’t?”
Kaboom sighs. I’m not sure what they’re talking about, but still, this is fun to watch. It’s like a fight you might see on TV, except this one’s with words and feelings instead of fists.
“Besides, who else could release something so potent it can wipe out most of the planet?” says the frizzy red-haired kid.
“The government,” Doom says. A few people around the table roll their eyes.
One of the yellow-haired girls who had just rolled her pretty blue eyes asks, “Why would they do that? What does the government have to gain by killing millions of taxpayers and leaving the rest as welfare-cases?”
“I’m not saying they meant for things to happen the way they did!” Doom sounds put out. “I think they were manufacturing the ultimate biological weapon and like usual, it got out of their control. Just think, they wouldn’t have to send troops into an area, they could just infect the water supply. They probably thought they could control the residents after they had a drink. I bet this thing out-evolved and out-smarted its creators and found its way out of the lab.” Doom smiles at the end of this, probably for the same reason I would—people are paying attention to him now.
“Okay, I can almost go along with that, but that doesn’t explain how it got into our atmosphere.” Kaboom is back in the fight! He looks up hopefully to the teacher. “Mr. Cromwell?”
Mr. Cromwell has that look he gets when he’s about to say something real important. Instead he says, “Well, you got me there. I honestly don’t know.”
Everyone looks a little disappointed. So I guess that’s the end of that; time to go back to ignoring the grown ups…
“What about Lake Vostok?” says KC.
What? What’s a Vostok? I look around and I see that the others look just as confused as I am. Well, some of them are smirking, and I hear one person whisper, “When Ghost died, so did KC’s brain.”
Then the really cute girl (I think her name is Nadia) says, “I think KC lost her mind when she lost Ghost.”
Oh boy, that was stupid. That’s going to get her slapped for sure. KC face goes from bland to furious in less than a second. She puts on her I’m-mocking-you-before-I-take-a-swipe-at-you voice (my mom calls this “sarcasm”) as she says, “Ooooooh Nadia, you must be right. You know me so well! I’m just an open book to you. This particular volume is titled ‘Bite Me.’” Okay, now I’m scared, ‘cause I think Nadia’s going to suddenly stop being so pretty.
But Mr. Cromwell butts in and says all excited, “No, no, no, no, no! I think she’s got something there! Wait, just a minute, wait…I need to think about this… Yes! It could work!” He’s really wound up about this. He’s got crazy eyes right now, which is good, because he can outdo the crazy between KC and Nadia.
“That’s amazing, I would have never made the connection…” Mom’s got that look in her eye too. What is it about a Vostok that winds people up? What’s so special about it? Mom carries on like she’s in a trance. “KC, where did you come up with that?”
The anger disappears from KC’s face as she realizes that what she said has made her the center of attention. “I, uh, read it in a book.”
Suddenly Doom jumps up and yelps, “Hey, I know what Lake Vostok is! My dad told me about it! He read about it in some science journal. He said ‘We survived the Cold War and now this—Those damned Russians might be the end of us after all.” He’s got that same crazy “Aha!” look in his eyes that Mom and Mr. Cromwell have. Maybe this Vostok thing is catching.
KC ignores Doom and turns to the teacher. “Mr. Cromwell, can you tell me what it is?” KC is back to being serious. “My book didn’t say much.” Well, KC never passes up a chance to let us know how much more she knows than everyone else, so that couldn’t have been a very good book.
Everyone is quiet and looking at Mr. Cromwell. He still looks like he’s thinking about something real hard, but then he clears his voice and starts to explain: “Lake Vostok is the third largest lake in the world. Or maybe the seventh. It’s been a year since I read about it.”
“Then how come I’ve never heard of it?”
“Yeah, I’ve never seen it on a map!”
“That’s because it’s been under sheets of ice for at least twenty million years. Well, at least it was under ice. The Russians spent the last twenty-five years drilling to get to it, and they claimed they finally punched through in February 2012.”
“That’s right.” Mom chimes in. “I remember reading about that in the paper. The thing is, there was no proof they had made it. There were no pictures, no outside confirmations, no testimonials to go with the claim. No one was allowed access to the site other than those who were already there.”
“Wait, if the ice is so thick it takes twenty years to drill through it, how is the lake not frozen?” asks Kaboom.
“It’s so deep in the Earth, the heat from the magma layer keeps it from freezing,” says Doom knowingly.
“Yes, geothermal heat from the Earth’s interior may warm the bottom of the lake itself, but it’s actually nearly fifteen-hundred feet above sea level. It was believed that extreme pressure from the weight of thousands of meters of ice increased th
e temperature of the lowest levels of the ice sheet to the point that it melted.”
“Ice that melts itself?” Kaboom sounds doubtful.
“That’s not all it does, it also insulates the lake from the cold surface” says Mom. The area above the lake is officially called the ‘Pole of Cold’ because the coldest temperature ever observed on Earth was recorded there. It was something like minus one-hundred Fahrenheit.”
Mr. Cromwell nodded. “There were two big concerns in the leadup to their extraordinary claim. One was that they were using environmentally-damaging chemicals like Kerosene and Freon to help them drill, and that made scientists wonder how a lake protected for twenty million years would react to these poisons.”
Everybody’s eyes are getting big, especially Doom’s. He looks like he really wants to say something, but a few people are giving him that “Shut Up!” look that KC normally gives me. I look to see if Sarah’s listening and I see her trying to get my attention. We look at each other and I can tell she finds this interesting. This is the most awake her eyes have been since that night we first met.
I started thinking about what that lake looks like, all big and dark and trapped under ice. Is it noisy down there? Does the water run real fast and make whooshing sounds? I couldn’t help myself; the words, “Wow, what kinds of creatures live in a lake cut off from the rest of the world for millions of years?” came out of my mouth before I could stop them.
A few people nod their heads like they were wondering the same thing. Mr. Cromwell keeps talking like he didn’t hear my question. “The second thing scientists worried about was the possibility of the lake rising up through the hole.”
Okay, I may be nine, but I’m smart enough to know that water doesn’t go up a tunnel unless you’re sucking on it like a straw. “Um, how is that possible?” I ask.
“They know from the ice samples around it that the lake is full of gasses. All that weight and pressure from the ice sheets squeezes the air bubbles into the lake below. They actually expect the water to fizz in your hand like carbonated water. Now think about it, the drilling hole itself is only eight inches in diameter. If, or when, they drill into an area with high pressure, the lake might shoot up through the hole like a geyser…”
Notes from a Necrophobe Page 20