“It’s too late to be sorry,” Aaronovich retorts, not willing to relinquish her anger. “What on earth is so important?”
“I translated part of the logbook,” he says. His voice is breathless in the blackness, as though he’s been running. “I know what it means. It was Plan John, talking to survivors back in the city. Johnson says they’re probably all dead, that probably they died months ago. But what if they’re not? What if we can get them on the radio and talk to them and there’s a way we can meet up? Maybe they can save us. We’re going to die here otherwise, aren’t we?”
“Kyle, no, we’re—”
“Yes, we are. You know it. Everyone knows.”
“Kyle….” Aaronovich’s brief outrage is all but gone. “I appreciate what you’re saying. Still, you’re getting your hopes up over a prospect that may come to nothing. As much as it’s not what you want to hear, likely Johnson is right. Even if he isn’t, it’s the middle of the night.”
“But I need the last few pages,” he says. “I ripped some pages out so I could look at them without having to carry the stupid book around. I left them in your room before, when I was playing with Abigail. Just let me go and get them.”
“My god, Kyle! No, you can’t. You’ll wake Abigail. You’ll frighten her.”
“I won’t,” Kyle says. He’s almost sobbing. “I bet she’s not even asleep. And she’s not once been frightened of me. If she’s awake then I’ll play with her until she settles down.”
This is beyond her. Standing in darkness, arguing with this apparition, Aaronovich longs to crawl back into her makeshift bed. The pall of recent sleep still clings to her, and within its folds is the nightmare, like lice in an old blanket. None of this – Kyle’s near-hysteria, his talk of other survivors – seems important, or even wholly real.
“Please,” he says. “I can’t sleep. I’m going crazy. I need to know.”
Aaronovich holds out the bunch of keys, relying on Kyle to find them by their soft jingle. His fingers brush hers, and then the keys are gone.
“Make sure you lock the door behind you. And put the keys in the desk drawer in my office. I don’t want to be woken again.”
“Thank you,” Kyle says. His voice is small.
“And Kyle,” Aaronovich finishes as she turns away, readying to negotiate the stairs into the profounder blackness of the infirmary, “we’re going to have words about this in the morning.”
* * *
Austin can’t make out what they’re saying. For all he knows, Kyle is telling the doctor everything. Now that they’re here, he wants urgently to be elsewhere. Every step of the next few minutes, every potential moment of his future, seems unimaginable. He can’t go into a room with a Sicker. If he should manage to get the gun, does he really believe he’s going to go outside the walls of Funland? That he’ll track down his stepfather, who terrified him even before he turned into a monster?
Maybe it would be better if Kyle is betraying him. Maybe then someone will stop him.
There’s the faint scuff of footsteps. The door to the doctor’s office opens and closes. “I got them,” Kyle whispers.
Austin slides from beneath the desk where he’s been hiding. A faint glow emanates from the skylight above, just enough that he can make out Kyle as more than a shape.
“There’s a flashlight,” Kyle says. He’s barely murmuring, yet sounds loud in the empty office. When he opens a drawer, Austin can’t convince himself that the doctor won’t hear. After all, isn’t the infirmary directly beneath their feet? Then, with the snap of a button, a cone of illumination spills across the floor. Kyle moves to the second door, keeping the flashlight beam ahead of him, leaving Austin in renewed darkness. There’s the scratch and click of a key turning in a lock.
“You should wait here,” Kyle says. “I’ll go get it and bring it out to you.”
“No. I’m coming.” Austin doesn’t know why he insists, except that he’s disgusted with himself for being so scared. After everything he’s endured, everything he’s done, he can hardly bear the shame.
He thinks Kyle will argue. If he does, maybe Austin would let himself be talked round. However, all Kyle says is, “Okay. But stay back. Let me go first.”
Kyle opens the door and steps through. Hesitating for Austin to follow, he closes it behind them. Then Kyle pans the flashlight’s beam steadily across the room. When it reaches the bed, he slows, as though expecting to find some presence there, but there are only the sheets, piled in a tousled mound.
“Abigail?” Kyle asks softly.
He begins to move the beam again, more slowly still. Austin has to fight the urge to wrench the flashlight from Kyle’s hand. This, the helplessness he feels, is like something out of a nightmare. All he can see is the small circle that Kyle chooses to illuminate, and even that is distorted by the wan light. The rest is absolutely dark, and in that dark is a creature, lurking.
The light stops, settling on a small figure. Crouched, limbs folded tight, it scarcely seems human; it’s more like an insect. How could they have mistaken this thing for a child? It looks up, and Austin observes a small, oval face, ghost-pale. Austin is sure that its eyes flash under the glare, as a cat’s would. Then it tilts its head, and for the first time resembles a little girl. Yet also, as much so, an animal: its teeth are bared, those eyes narrowed to slits.
“It’s okay, Abigail,” Kyle says. “This is Austin. He’s my friend. He’s not going to hurt you.”
Kyle has stopped before a chest of drawers. As he concentrates the flashlight there, the darkness reabsorbs the Sicker girl. Austin had hated to look at her – so nearly human, enough to fool you if you chose to be fooled – but not seeing is worse. Kyle is searching through the keys that he holds with one hand, flipping them one by one from the backs of his fingers to his palm. Austin wants to wrestle those keys from him, the flashlight too, wants to so badly that his fingers twitch.
A thin note trembles on the air. It’s unlike anything he’s heard, and it takes him a moment to understand. The Sicker girl is growling. And the noise isn’t coming from the corner of the room where she’d been, Austin is certain.
Kyle doesn’t seem to have noticed. He’s picked out one key, is rattling it against the top left drawer.
“What are you doing?” Austin asks. He does his best not to sound afraid.
“Just a minute. Dumb key’s stuck.”
Austin can feel panic rising. He’s helpless to stop it. “Hurry,” he snarls.
“Hold on. Let me put the flashlight down.”
Kyle reverses the flashlight and sets it atop the chest of drawers. Its light spills back into the room, rocking crazily. Austin’s gaze follows. All he identifies of the Sicker girl is one foot, disappearing into the shadows beyond the bed. She must have crawled over it on all fours, crept like a bug. That means she’s near him, nearer than she’d been – and closer to the door.
“Okay,” Kyle says. “I’ve—”
But before he can finish, Austin has dashed across the distance between them, is grabbing for the gun, is using his free arm to elbow Kyle aside. When Austin’s fingers contract around metal, his relief is a dizzying surge. Then the barrel clips the flashlight. It spins, teeters. Austin glimpses the door and flings himself that way, gripping the gun as though he’s drowning and it’s the hand that’s reaching out to save him.
He knows she’s close. The flashlight is still spinning, slower now. As its light slides by, Austin sees her, crouched, jaws open, watching him with naked interest. He flails with the gun, holding it by the barrel, almost losing his grip as the stock strikes flesh.
He hadn’t meant to hit her. By the flashlight’s stark illumination, it’s impossible to make sense of distance. He definitely hadn’t meant to hit her so hard. When the pistol’s stock slaps her cheek, her head jolts with the fragile helplessness of a doll’s. In that moment, again, he recogni
zes her as a child. He has struck a little girl.
Then she bites him.
Her jaw clamps onto his forearm. One hand locks about his wrist, while the other scrabbles at his shoulder. Austin roars, in pain and fear. And more fear than pain, for he can feel how her teeth have broken skin.
The flashlight makes one last rotation. He’s at the entrance. With all of his strength, he hoists her, her weight entirely on her jaw and on his perforated arm, and he shoves her at the doorframe, putting his own mass behind. She doesn’t let go. Austin tries harder, crunching her small body against the wood. Still she hangs on. Her small teeth only sink deeper.
“Abigail!” Kyle screams.
Then she lets go. Austin gets the door open, falls out, stumbles over a chair. He claws himself to his feet and whirls away and crashes through the second door. He doesn’t dare even look at his arm.
He knows that it’s covered with blood, with blood and spit.
He knows what’s going to happen.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Even before Aaronovich reached the bottom of the stairs, doubts had begun to intrude. By the time she’d maneuvered back to her bed by the alarm clock’s brittle light and had lain down, not bothering to undress, she’d known something wasn’t right.
Nothing is right. She’s never seen Kyle in such a state. He’d seemed on the verge of panic. She should have waited and talked to him. She likes Kyle, and more, she needs him. She can’t look after Abigail on her own. She can’t afford for him to break.
Still, she doesn’t get up straight away. The urge to sleep is like quicksand, and with every lapse of concentration it threatens to draw her down. She is so, so tired. It’s been so long since she’s eaten anything close to a proper meal, since she’s slept the whole night.
The sound of an impact is what gets through to her. She isn’t even certain she hasn’t imagined it, yet suddenly Aaronovich is tumbling from her bed, skidding across the floor, flinging the door open, and taking the stairs so fast that she has to scramble on hands and knees.
She wrenches at the second door and is halfway to the next, the one to her private office, when it springs open and a figure barrels through the opening. Aaronovich cries out. By then, whoever it is, they’re past her and gone. For an instant she’d assumed it must have been Kyle, but even in the darkness, she could tell that the build was wrong. And already another shape has appeared in the doorway; a flashlight beam is swinging toward her.
“Kyle?” Aaronovich asks, surprised by the rawness in her own voice.
“You’ve got to come,” he pleads. “Abigail, I think she’s hurt. And Austin, she, she….” The sentence dissolves into a wrenching noise, half sob, half retch.
Aaronovich fights the urge to take hold of his shoulders, to shake the words out of him. “What are you saying?”
“She bit him. Austin. She was scared.”
“Oh my god,” Aaronovich whispers. “What have you done? You’ve killed her, Kyle.”
“No….”
But she’s not listening. Aaronovich snatches the flashlight from Kyle’s hand and shoves past him, not caring how terrified he looks in its passing glare. She gets as far as the open doorway to her apartment before dread freezes her muscles. She needs all of her strength to raise the flashlight.
She finds Abigail immediately. She’s retreated to her corner, as she does when she’s afraid. Aaronovich can see that she’s shaking, and at the same time rocking back and forth.
“Why would you do this?” Aaronovich demands of Kyle, barely expecting an answer.
“I had no choice.”
“What?” She glances back at him, while leaving the flashlight beam trained into the room. “There’s always a choice.”
Kyle shakes his head helplessly. He looks so small, so lost, like the boy he might have been if that other world, the world before, had continued the way everyone had thought it would. “Austin wanted the gun,” he murmurs. “He…I couldn’t say no.”
“And does he have it?”
“Yes.”
“Good god.” Aaronovich forces herself to consider, though all she desires is to go to Abigail and comfort her. “Do you know where he’d have gone?”
Kyle hesitates. “I think. Maybe.”
“Then you’ve got to get Johnson. Tell him what happened. Tell him where his son is.”
For a moment, Kyle looks ready to refuse. Rather, he nods and dashes away.
Aaronovich feels ephemeral relief. She’s glad that he’s gone and that she has one less thing to process. Then she remembers the awful magnitude of what remains. Here, now, is everything she’s feared, the hidden terror she’s hardly dared acknowledge since the day she first took Abigail in.
Yet she has acknowledged it. She isn’t someone who denies her fears. She’s planned for this day, and if that doesn’t make it less appalling, nevertheless she knows what she has to do.
She shuts the door and locks it, drawing the thick bolts at top and bottom. She goes to the drawer, takes out the box of candles she keeps there, and removes four. Two of these she kindles and places in the bedroom. The others she sets in the kitchen. Then she switches off the flashlight and gives her eyes a few seconds to adjust to the much-reduced light.
Only once that’s done does she turn her attention to Abigail. She’s still huddled in the corner, whimpering softly. “It’s okay,” Aaronovich says. “It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay.” Each time she moves closer. When she’s close enough, she kneels in front of Abigail. “It’s okay,” she vows, and bundles the child gently into her arms.
Aaronovich waits until Abigail has stopped trembling, and then stands, still holding her. She weighs so little, less than any human being should. Aaronovich carries Abigail into the kitchen, returns for the pillows and quilt from the bed. She spreads the quilt on the kitchen floor and wraps Abigail within. By candlelight, Aaronovich checks for injuries. The bruise on Abigail’s jaw is obvious, unmissable, already a stain of purple and black. Aside from that, however, she seems unhurt.
As a final thought, Aaronovich returns to the bedroom to retrieve a couple of Abigail’s toys, the ball and the ragged cloth dolly she likes to chew and pick at, and takes them to her. She says, “Abigail, I’m going to shut you in here for a brief while. Don’t be scared. Everything’s going to be all right.”
She gets up and goes back into the bedroom, closing the door behind her, trying not to notice how Abigail has begun once more to whimper softly.
Just in time. Abruptly, the apartment door is shaking, at first as its handle is tested, then as a series of blows rain upon it. “Doctor, open this door!”
A pause. Aaronovich sits on the stripped bed and tenses, silently preparing.
“You need to open up. You know what has to be done.” Johnson’s voice is muffled by the heavy door. Still, she can discern the words clearly. He doesn’t sound angry, and that worries her. She feels dimly that an angry Doyle Johnson could be reasoned with, that calm he might be beyond her reach.
Aaronovich walks to the door, stopping a foot away, sufficiently close that her own voice will carry. “I’m not going to open the door, Johnson. And nothing you say is going to change my mind.”
She can identify his breathing, even through the intervening plastic and metal. “You told me that monster was safe!”
“She’s not a monster.” Aaronovich’s composure seems to her a sheen of ice just waiting to be cracked. “She’s a child. A sick, frightened child.”
“That frightened child has killed my son.”
Infected, she thinks. She infected him. She knows that, in the initial outbreaks, less than one in five of those infected actually died, and a considerable proportion of those deaths were self-inflicted. But this isn’t the time to argue semantics, nor statistics. Instead, Aaronovich says, “Your son attacked her. Your son bullied his way in here and stole a g
un, a gun you forced me to have. I never wanted it. I told you, guns make people get hurt, they don’t stop it.”
“Don’t you dare put this on me,” Johnson snaps. “You listen to me—”
“No. You listen to me, Doyle. This door is reinforced. You can’t break it. And I’m not opening it. Not unless I’m certain that neither Abigail nor I are in any danger. I’ve food and water for a couple of days. Once that runs out, I have two syringes prepared, one for her and one for me. If we’re still in here when that food is gone, I’ll use them. Do you suppose I have a single reason not to? Maybe you can’t hear this right now, but there’s going to come a day when White Cliff needs me, and it’s coming soon. You, all of you, need me more than I will ever need you. So you’re going to stop this, and you’re going to help your boy. Because he needs you.”
Aaronovich ceases then, her breath spent. She presses her cheek against the cool surface of the door and gulps for air, wishing the room were not so suffocatingly warm, while at the same time willing Johnson not to detect her weakness. It seems to her that her fragile body is traitorously undermining her argument.
She guesses at the passage of seconds by the inconsistent metronome of her own heartbeat. She wonders if she’ll ever open the door again, and finds that the enormity of that notion defies her current ability to process.
She’s heard nothing, has no evidence. Yet she feels sure Doyle Johnson is gone.
* * *
Now that Austin knows he’s going to lose himself, he can think clearly.
It hadn’t been that way at first. As he’d run across the yard and around the Big House, as he’d jumped for the ladder and swung up its rungs, as he’d slid and slithered through the ventilation shafts that he recognizes every inch of by touch alone, his mind had been completely vacant.
He’d navigated the ducts in total darkness. But here, in his space within the walls, he has lit a candle. Its quivering light makes the indents between the cinder blocks shudder, and the result resembles a net slowly settling upon him. The candle is the last of the ones he stole. He hadn’t tried to get any more. Funny…as if a part of him had anticipated this. Soon that narrow flame will go out, and that’s okay, because he looks forward to the darkness. He knows it will be cool on his skin.
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