Lazarus

by Willcocks, Daniel

  “Maybe the time she caught me hissing at her cat—”

  “James!” she turned to Kurt. “Continue, dear.”

  Of course, Kurt held back on some details. He decided to omit Emily from his story, though he wasn’t sure why. Maybe because it hurt too much to remember that part? Maybe because he felt that, in some way, by leaving her at rest in the story, he could leave her at rest forever? Perhaps because it was something that he didn’t really need two strangers to know? She was at peace now, and that was all that mattered. Or, at least, he hoped she was.

  He missed the part about Lucas saving his life. How he had appeared from nowhere, unaffected by the chemical, and driven him home. “Lucky for me, the bus driver was still there, and managed to bring me back.”

  The lie came easy enough.

  And he missed the part where the darkness had come and he had found himself in some other world where time slowed and the shadows turned to ink. How everything around him was trapped in a stasis, but Kurt was free. Until, at least, came the glitching. But Kurt felt that, really, they were just mere details in the grand scheme of things. Details that Kurt felt better left in his own head.

  The Powells kept their poker faces throughout Kurt’s story, slowly sipping away at their glasses. When Kurt neared the end of his tale – the part that he was finding hardest to articulate – Karen silently proffered Kurt a glass of his own.

  “He’s only…”

  “Thirteen.”

  “Thirteen!” James protested.

  Kurt accepted a small glass and took a greedy gulp. He had always wanted to try wine. To see what all the fuss was about. But, when the warm liquid hit the back of his throat, he felt his throat instantly tighten, and wasn’t sure he was keen on the burning sensation that followed after he swallowed.

  Still, a couple more sips later and it did ease his muddled head.

  “After I got back, that was when I saw… I saw her.” His words trailed off then as Kurt tried not to think of the image of his adopted mother in her chair, alone and cold. Karen and James nodded empathetically. Then a thought crossed Kurt’s mind and he eyed the couple with suspicion. “But you know that part. You were there too… You were there before me. Did you see what happened? Who killed her?”

  “Honey, the mist killed her,” Karen said, placing a hand on his knee. “You said yourself, when the mist turns people feral, they’re not people anymore. They do crazy things.”

  Kurt thought about the puncture wounds on her body. Wondered what kind of messed-up formula could cause someone to drive a blade into their own throat.

  “Unless…” James said, leaning forward.

  “Unless?” Karen asked.

  “Curtis…”

  “It’s Kurt.”

  “Kurt, have you heard anything from Steve at all?”

  Karen gave James a burning look, almost as if to say ‘What are you doing? He’s just a kid, don’t put ideas in his head.’

  “No,” Kurt said, shaking his head. “Not since he took off for work this morning. But he’s always so busy in the day, I never usually hear from him. Why?”

  “Well… and, I mean, this may not be the case, but… what if Steve did exactly the same as I did and came home as soon as he heard the news to see if Linda was okay? But, by the time he got home, he had taken in too much of the stuff and it had affected his system? What if – and I’m really sorry for this image, Kurt – what if he turned feral too? Did the unspeakable to Linda and ran off into the fog?”

  Kurt’s head felt airy and light. He imagined the scene. Steve running through the door, “Linda? Linda, a terrible thing has happened. There’s been an explosion. We need to leave… now.” Linda sitting in the chair, veins creeping up her neck, eyes aflame. Fighting with Steve. Fists. Blood. Until eventually, Steve emerges the victor.

  But no one really wins, do they?

  Kurt took a deep gulp and drained his wine. It was certainly helping. Despite the haunting images in his head, there was a growing separation between the reality of the events of the day, and his feelings. He found himself growing sleepy.

  “Drink up,” Karen said, tilting the bottle and refilling Kurt’s glass.

  A silence passed before Kurt found himself growing curious about those that had carried him from his home. The wine made him bold, and his initial feeling of shyness when Karen had revealed herself left for the wayside. After a short while, more questions were asked. About the bomb, the bomber, what the mist could possibly be. But after another half-glass of wine for Kurt (the equivalent of three more for Karen and James), conversation began to lighten and turn to the ordinary, everyday topics. Karen grabbed a blanket for herself and Kurt and made herself comfortable on the sofa.

  “Since it looks like we’ll be here a while.”

  Kurt learned a lot about the Powells that night. Mostly that Karen could handle her drink, having finished an entire bottle to herself after what felt like only an hour. He learned that James was a collector of sorts, having spent years working as senior management in a city skyscraper, he had saved enough money to live fairly lavishly in his early retirement. He took a particular fancy to historic war equipment, which Karen suggested only fuelled his paranoia. He learned that Karen used to run a successful online business dealing as some form of online marketeer. She too had retired early, knowing that she and James had enough to keep them happy until the day they died. He learned that they had a cat that they hadn’t seen in days, called ‘Boots’ – a ginger tom with white paws. He also discovered that Karen had family down south in North Carolina that they could stay with until whatever was happening died down.

  “He can ride with us, can’t he?” Karen asked James.

  James nodded sleepily. But, though part of Kurt felt thankful to have people to keep him company, there was a large part of him that wanted Karen to ask his opinion. What if Kurt didn’t want to go with them? They seemed nice enough, but was he ready to up and leave without being able to tell Amy where he was going?

  Yet, as the hours wore on they joked, they talked, and they shared more wine until their heads were wobbly. On occasions when the room went quiet, the three of them huddled around the radio, listening for any scraps of news updates.

  It seemed that little more had happened in the outside world. By evening (Kurt guessed) News had finally started to spread of the terrorist attack, though the radio failed to mention the effect that the ‘pollenated air’ (as one radio station had called it), had on people. One radio station had even gone as far as to suggest that the entire display at Colonial Williamsburg’s Visitors’ Center was nothing more than a huge marketing scheme. That the pollen was their way of reaching to a wider audience and upping their ticket sales. When a guest law enforcer came on the show and asked why there would be so many dead on the field if this was just a marketing scheme, the presenter had the audacity to simply call it a ‘flash mob.’

  There was, however, one radio station that seemed to have it right. James stumbled across the channel while spinning the little dial, hunting through static. The signal wasn’t the clearest, but in this case it was a woman who reeled off the truth. She gave the rough body count of those found on the field (over 200 people). She detailed the effects that the chemical cloud seemed to have on civilians. From the aggressive demeanour, right to the stages where conscious thought seemed to leave their bodies and they ran around as animals.

  Towards the tail-end of the pirate report, the woman listed off groups that had supposedly been victims of the Williamsburg bombing. When she read the words ‘Jamestown High School’, followed by ‘no survivors’, Kurt found himself breaking down again. It was at this point that Karen, who had been watching the boy closely for most of the night, pulled his head onto her lap and began stroking his hair. She motioned for James to switch off the radio.

  “Get some sleep, now. By morning this will have all passed, and we’ll be off to Durham. My sister will take us in. And you’re more than welcome to stay there with us as lon
g as you want.”

  Kurt found himself smiling beneath the tears. But it wasn’t at the thought of finding somewhere safe to stay down south. There was a voice, no louder than a whisper. The soothing sounds of a girl singing. He closed his eyes and listened as it grew a little louder. The voice of Amy, singing the lullaby that his mother had sung to him so many years ago.

  Go to sleep my baby, rest your weary head…

  Without even thinking, Kurt nestled into Karen’s lap, found the edge of the sofa with one arm, and gave it three gentle knocks – tap, tap, tap. Karen watched curiously and smiled. He did it once more – tap, tap, tap – before the tiredness washed over and sleep took him.

  *

  Once Kurt had begun snoring loudly, Karen eased herself from under Kurt, found James’ lap and sat herself down. They whispered in hushed tones about the boy, wondering about where his head would be at. Whether he’d be okay travelling with them and leaving the Johnstone’s house behind. At one point they heard the sound of a scrap in the street above them and Karen had to clap a hand to her mouth to keep from crying out.

  Once the sound had faded, James walked over to the little white door in the corner of the room and unlocked it. He stepped inside the cube room and took a second to look around the automatically lit walls lined with various firearms that he had collected over the years.

  “Surely we won’t need these? The radio says it’ll be gone by morning.”

  James plucked his favourite pistol – a sleek, black, Glock 19 – off the wall.

  “The whole world just turned upside down, Kaz. You really think this will all blow over by morning? You heard the kid, people have gone feral. We don’t know what we’re dealing with here.” His eyes flicked to Kurt.

  “Oh, James. You don’t mean?”

  “Of course I do,” James whispered. “The boy has been exposed, Kaz. He’s come halfway across the state, direct from the source. Who knows how much of that shit is in his system?”

  “And has he turned so far?”

  “That doesn’t mean shit.”

  “We saw how quickly Linda turned,” Karen argued. “I don’t know what it is about the boy, but if he’s still good so far, who knows? Maybe there’s something special about him? Maybe some of us can resist it.”

  James turned, found a fresh ammunition cartridge, slid it inside the pistol and turned to Karen. “I’m just saying, best party up. We don’t know what we’re going to find come sunrise.”

  12

  Lucas crooned as the CD whirred in the player. Nothing beat a bit of Donny-boy in the evening. He reached down and found the handle to recline his seat.

  It was dark out, but the bright fluorescents from the motel flickered and danced on the windshield of the Dodge. From where he parked in the near-empty motel parking lot he could see the empty reception area, the metal stairs that lead to the balconies that lined the building with dozens of doors in parallels. The freeway was just out of sight, tucked behind a series of tall bushes. When he had arrived, Lucas had every intention of nodding to the reception clerk, requesting a bedroom, and collapsing on his front. But was surprised to see that, despite having put a fair old distance between himself and the Visitor Center, those mystifying droplets of yellow had followed. They floated onto his windshield and splatted like bugs caught on a trucker’s grill. Lucas had considered running from Donny to the reception to his room, but fate didn’t have that on the cards.

  The clerk had run at him, arms flailing. Lucas sprinted back to Donny. One bullet later (and a whole load of emotional scarring), and that clerk was now crumpled outside of the passenger-side door.

  Lucas lowered the bottle of bourbon from his lips, swallowed deeply, then roared along to Any Dream Will Do.

  The car shook as he sang on enthusiastically.

  The intention had been to sleep, of course. Even if it meant hunting through hundreds of jangling keys – that experience had taught him were probably not on the right hangers. But the car was just as cosy, and the glove compartment held his emergency liquor. Did this constitute an emergency? Perhaps not. Fuck it, life’s already too short, he thought to himself, opening the middle buttons on his shirt and looking at the black jagged lines spiking from a pinprick hole in his sternum. It was a pretty pattern really, one that could easily have been mistaken for a tattoo. But Lucas knew it for what it really was. He had seen plenty of it on the battlefield today.

  Lucas took another swig from the brown bottle and rooted through his wallet. From this, he extracted a tatty photograph that he smoothed with calloused fingers and examined.

  The picture showed six adults, mostly about the same age. Apart from the boy Lucas used to call family. His best friend. His face young and full of promise. The poor kid looked excited. In the picture Lucas was sat on an operating table in the centre, a white gown lazily tied around his body. To his right was a man and woman, arms around each other, heads knocked together, clearly in love. On the other side, the lady with the mean mug stood next to a smiling woman with tanned skin. In the background was the khaki green of a tent canvas, with a couple of torches hanging from hooks on the tent’s roof. They looked happy. As though anything were possible. Lucas moved his thumb from the lower right corner to read the words scrawled in thick black pen. ‘Revivers ‘05’.

  He scanned their faces, a tear in the corner of his eye. In the background, he became aware that Any Dream will Do had changed now to Puppy Love. He paused at the cuddling couple on the right side of the picture and gently ran a finger over the blonde woman’s face. She was incredibly pretty, with bright red lipstick that had faded to a soft purple as time had worn the picture. She wore a flowery dress that stopped just above the knee. Lucas smiled.

  “Maddie…”

  His felt his heart flutter at the sight of her. Even after all these years, you don’t know what you do to me. But tomorrow he’d see her again. Even if that meant putting on a brave face and acting as though everything was fine in front of Fred. At least he’d get to see her.

  Lucas sunk into his chair and let his mind wander. He could probably have driven through tiredness, but he knew he needed rest. At least with a few more swigs of booze he could feel drowsiness coming. He had found the secret to sleep in those brown glass bottles years ago. The best sedative money could buy. A few hours of kip, sleep off the worst of it, then straight on through to get some goddamn answers.

  Lucas brought the little ID card out of his pocket – the one he’d found in the spot where the bomber had been – and rolled it between his fingers. In the top right of the card was the profile picture of the bomber’s face, clean-shaven, hair tidy. Underneath, his name. Maurice Parker. In the top left of the card was a large letter ‘A’ in a serif font, circled by a thin line with electron shells.

  Somewhere nearby, Lucas heard a screech. Maybe from one of the rooms. Maybe the clerk receptionist wasn’t entirely dead. Lucas shuffled in his seat and turned off the engine, the picture and the card tight in his grip.

  Part 2

  The Crossing

  13

  The radio stations were wrong. Very wrong.

  When morning rolled around and James, Kurt, and Karen opened the front door they were greeted once more by the yellow mist. The morning rays caught the droplets and they twinkled like golden glitter thrown into the air. In its own way, it was beautiful.

  The good news was that the streets were clear. There were no noises from Linda’s house, and though there were a few bodies strewn across the lawns, laid as though they were nothing more than knitted dolls dropped from the sky, the neighbourhood was all but silent. The bad news was that Kurt was experiencing his first ever hangover. His head pounded with each blink, and it took several glasses of water before his throat felt like a throat again, and not the sticky dregs at the bottom of a cat litter tray.

  James and Karen threw their heavy bags in the back of their Land Rover, softly closed the doors, and gave one more precautionary glance around. Despite Kurt’s offer to help
, they insisted on Kurt waiting in the back of the car. All of them now in their masks, hissing like gas leaks with each breath. Kurt figured he didn’t need his but wore it to please James who threw him a studious look every few seconds. “No mask, no rider’s pass.” He even insisted Kurt buckle up as though at any moment the boy might turn feral and attack them both.

  But that didn’t happen. And soon enough Karen had walked out of the door with her last box of wine, and they were on their way.

  Kurt didn’t feel good about leaving his home behind – or at least the closest thing he had had to one since his parents had passed. The idea of leaving Linda to rot and infuse herself with her chair without anyone else knowing she was there made him feel ill. They could at least have moved her. Maybe buried her. They could have done something to suggest that maybe they’d return home at some point and life would continue as normal.

  Nothing’s normal though, is it? Kurt thought to himself as he watched his house disappear from view, noting an odd thing that made his brow crease. Where was Steven’s car? In all the flurry of yesterday, he hadn’t thought to look. The thought of Linda’s pierced body was too fresh in his head as he was carried across the lawn by the Powells. But if Steve had played in the murder of his wife, and gone feral himself, would he really have driven off afterwards? Maybe someone had taken his car to make their own escape?

  James took a left at the end of the road and the street vanished. Karen must’ve caught something in Kurt’s eyes through the rearview mirror. “There’s always a chance he’s not home yet,” Karen said, lifting her mask enough to be heard.

  James shot Karen a sharp look.

  “I’ve left a voicemail,” Karen said. “On the off-chance that it wasn’t him, and he’s out there looking for you. If we were wrong, he’ll call us when he gets home.”