Superposition

^{CHAPTER 13}

We tore across the bridge into Pennsylvania. I blew a dozen street lights getting to Media, with one hand on the wheel and the other calling Elena’s number over and over again, but getting no answer. I swerved into my driveway, hardly slowing down. The front door was standing open. Heart hammering, I tumbled out of the car and raced inside, knowing before I got there that we were too late.

I saw Elena immediately. She lay crumpled just inside the door, eyes staring at the ceiling. She wore her brown suede coat, as if she had been about to leave the house. Her purse was still over her shoulder, and her keys lay on the floor not far from her outstretched hand.

I bellowed and threw myself on her and clutched at her hair. She had beautiful hair, full and black and slightly curled. A scream was sounding in my head, a long, drawn-out, high-pitched noise like boiling water, that drove away thought and reason. I started to shake her. I had to wake her up. I had her by the shoulders, and I realized that the high-pitched noise was actually coming out of my mouth while I yanked her up and down.

Strong hands closed around my wrists. I tried to fight, but Marek pulled me up away from her, and I let him do it.

“She was coming to see me,” I said. “She was coming to New Jersey to be with me.” The realization that Elena was not the only person who lived here suddenly penetrated the fog of my brain. Where were my children?

We searched the house, the choking dread thick in my throat. I thought I might throw up. It felt wrong to just leave Elena lying in the entryway. My brain started manufacturing reasons why I needed to stay downstairs, or even leave the house, rather than search from room to room for my kids.

I found Claire in our bedroom, sitting up against a pile of pillows. The stream was still projecting, a show about the real-life exploits of a famous actress, but I barely noticed it. Her face was a twisted into an expression of terror, as if she had seen her death coming just before it arrived.

I heard Marek call my name and followed his voice into Sean’s room. There was Sean, on the floor next to a half-finished Lego spaceship, his longer arm bent awkwardly under him. Hundreds of Lego blocks surrounded him, like a shroud draped across the carpet, and I had a quick memory flash of helping him build a miniature Lego version of the NJSC.

There was something wrong with his body. Everything seemed wrong—in fact, seemed utterly impossible—and my brain kept trying to invent ways for it all to be a lie. The walls seemed to press in and then out, making the things around me grow huge and then shrink away into the distance, like someone else’s story in a sad documentary. Out of this haze, however, a fairly rational part of my brain was insisting that something really was wrong with his body.

I took a step closer, crunching Lego bricks under my feet, and stared. His face seemed wrong. It was Sean, my son, no question of that, but… what was different? Was it just death that caused his face to look like that? Finally, I noticed the obvious. His longer arm was on the wrong side. The arm tucked under him was his left arm, and his right arm was now the short one, just visible beyond the special, shortened sleeve that Elena sewed for all of his winter clothes. Once I saw that, I noticed the other things on the wrong side: a mole on his neck, the part in his hair.

“He’s backwards,” I said.

Marek grabbed my bicep, probably expecting another violent outburst.

“No, look at him,” I said. “He’s the reverse of himself. His short arm is on the wrong side.”

Marek’s forehead wrinkled and he bent to look more closely. “Was it on the left?” he asked. He obviously didn’t remember, and I was starting to doubt it myself. I knew it had been on the left, knew it as well as I knew my own name, but everything was so surreal, I wouldn’t have been surprised if someone told me I had that wrong, too.

I pulled out of his grip and ran back to my bedroom. At the sight of my beautiful Claire lying dead, my vision blurred and my stomach clenched, but I fought through it and made myself actually look at her. Gorgeous blond hair flowing over her shoulders. Elegant young body just beginning to grow to adulthood. All the experiences she would never have, all the joys she would never know, crammed themselves into my brain so that I couldn’t think, could hardly swallow the bile rising in my throat, but I made myself look. The T-shirt she was wearing had an image of a pop superstar singing on a stage surrounded by lights and the members of her band. It also featured the singer’s name, DELIA SHARP, blazoned across the top. The letters were printed backwards.

Marek saw it, too. “It was not made like this?”

“No.”

“What is going on?”

“I don’t know.”

We heard a noise from downstairs, a crashing sound, and then a girl’s scream. I had only one daughter left. Alessandra.

I raced downstairs and there she was, still very much alive, but she wasn’t the only one in the room. The varcolac stood next to her, gripping her impassively by the wrist. She struggled and twisted to get free, but it held her there with no apparent effort, as if made from steel. In her pinioned hand she held a letter. Even from where I stood, I could see that the address was in Brian’s handwriting.

The varcolac pulled the letter out of her hand. It turned its head toward us as we entered the room, its features all wrong, like the bones in its face had been broken, staring at me with that utterly blank yet hungry expression. It stood on top of Elena’s body, and for that alone I would have gladly torn it to shreds. In one of its hands, the letter burned briefly and then disintegrated. Its other hand still held tightly to Alessandra.

“Let her go,” I said.

The varcolac stared placidly at me. There was intelligence there, but no emotion, like an auctioneer valuating items for sale.

“Alessandra,” I said. “I’m going to distract it. If you can, pull your hands away.” Her eyes were round and frightened. She nodded.

I slipped my keys from my pocket, took careful aim, and hurled them at the varcolac’s face. It blurred, as it had done before, a waveform of probabilities, and reconverged a foot to the right, with the hand that had been gripping Alessandra now holding the keys. It opened its hand slightly and regarded them eyelessly, its head cocked like a bird’s. Satisfied with whatever it saw, it squeezed, crushing the keys to powder, and opened its hand again, letting the steel filings drift to the floor.

“Slowly,” I said to Alessandra. “Back up, but not fast.” Without taking my eyes from the varcolac, I pulled two glass candle holders from the mantel and hefted one. I didn’t have to hurt it, just distract it long enough for Alessandra to get away. “When you get the chance, run out of the house and just keep running, as fast as you can. Don’t look back. We’ll come find you.”

She took another step, and the varcolac’s head swiveled toward her. “Hey!” I said, and hurled the candle holders in quick succession. The varcolac caught both of them, but this time, instead of destroying them, it awkwardly threw them back. They crashed into the wall on either side of me.

Alessandra kept backing up toward the kitchen. Marek beckoned to her and held out his hand. I cast about for something else to throw and saw the poker and shovel in their stand by the fireplace. It was a gas fireplace, so they were just for decoration, but they were just what I needed. I snatched them up.

“Get her out of here!” I shouted to Marek. “Both of you, run now!” Marek grabbed Alessandra’s arm, and they sprinted around the corner and out the back. I hurled the poker, javelin style. I’m strong, and it flew straight and hard, but the varcolac caught it effortlessly.

It wasn’t graceful. Its body jerked backward with the impact, and at first, when I saw half the length of the poker protruding from its chest, I thought I had impaled it. No such luck. It twisted its hand, snapping the iron bar like a stick, and pulled the remaining half out of its chest with no ill effects. It showed no menace on its face, no anger, only curiosity, like a tourist experiencing a strange new country. The two lengths of iron clattered on the floor.

My mind raced. This thing had killed Elena and Claire and Sean and Brian, and it would kill the rest of us if I couldn’t figure out some way to stop it. If Brian had been right, however, it had no true body that we would recognize, just a mind formed from the complexity of particle interactions. The body I could see was somehow formed by it in imitation of us. I didn’t know if it could die. I didn’t even know what it wanted.

As I was thinking this, the varcolac advanced. I ran, heading the same way Marek and Alessandra had, out the back door. I heard sirens, and a police cruiser pulled up against the front curb. There were no bushes on that side of the house, and they could see me. Two policemen spilled out of the car and shouted for me to stop. I kept running.

I climbed the fence into my neighbor’s yard and out toward the next street, but another police cruiser pulled up, lights flashing, and blocked my way. I turned back to see the first two cops clearing the fence and coming after me, their hands on their holsters.

“Stay right where you are. Put your hands behind your head,” one of them shouted.

It wouldn’t help Alessandra if I got myself shot. I put my hands on my head, but I didn’t lace them together. I held my body loose, ready for action.

One of the cops pulled handcuffs off his belt. He was a light-skinned African-American man with a livid scar on one side of his face where his ear used to be. “Jacob Kelley?” he said.

“Yes.”

“You are under arrest for the murder of Brian Vanderhall. Anything you say can be used against you…” He rattled off my rights.

My mind raced. Murder? They must have found Brian’s body. I realized how bad things looked for me—I had left his body lying in the bunker. I had Brian’s gun in my pocket, and Brian’s car was parked in my driveway. They would find the bodies of my wife and children inside, which I also couldn’t explain. My story wouldn’t convince anyone. It wouldn’t even have convinced me a few days earlier.

Time slowed like we were underwater. My muscles tightened, and I felt the familiar buzz of a boxing match before a punch is thrown, when you can’t quite believe you are actually going to walk into that ring and let a very strong, very fast man try to beat you to a pulp while you try to do the same to him. I couldn’t let them take me. I had to find Alessandra and make sure she was all right.

My cell phone rang. The cops jumped at the sound, and I took advantage of their moment of distraction. I ran toward the closer one, maybe three steps away, and hit him in the face with a two-punch combination that knocked him flat. He never saw it coming. When you’re boxing, you learn that if you telegraph your punches, they never land. You have to go from nothing to full acceleration with no chance for your opponent to react. The other cop tried to get his gun out, but the whole advantage of having a handgun is that you can shoot people when they’re too far away to reach you. He was too close, and I dropped him with a single knockout punch before his gun even cleared his holster.

Of course, there were two more cops from the other car. One aimed his weapon and shouted at me not to move. I turned to run anyway, and the cop fired. I had expected a few more warnings before he actually fired in a suburban neighborhood, and I threw myself to the ground. I heard more shouting and another shot, and I risked lifting my head a fraction to look.

The varcolac was tearing the police car apart. The cops were firing at it, now, and as I watched the varcolac split itself into two, then three, then four duplicate versions of itself, each with same clumsy, conglomerate look, as if put together with written instructions by someone who had never actually seen a person. They pulled the metal frame away like it was tissue paper. The cops fired shot after shot into them with no effect.

I jumped to my feet and ran back toward my own house, climbing the fence again and racing across the yard. I climbed into Brian’s car, turned the key, and pulled out over the grass, across my neighbors’ yard, and into the street. I felt a pang of guilt for leaving the policemen to fend for themselves, but really, what could I do for them? The best course of action was escape. It was the only way I had any hope of finding out what these things really were and how to stop them from killing anyone else.

Once I was a block away, I pulled out my phone and checked the number to see who had called with such good timing. It was Elena’s cell number. It gave me a rush of adrenaline to see it, before I realized that Alessandra must have gotten a hold of Elena’s phone and called to tell me where she was. I started dialing back, but before I finished, I spotted her and Marek not far ahead. They climbed into the car. Alessandra’s eyes were wild.

I looked at her face, and suddenly all the horror of the last half hour came crashing in on me. Elena, Claire, Sean, all dead. I grabbed her hand and squeezed it, tight. She started to cry.

“We’re going to find a safe place to go,” I said. “I won’t leave you. I promise.”

We drove. After ten minutes with no flashing lights in my mirrors, my heart rate slowed. I figured the varcolac and its duplicates must have killed the cops. I wasn’t glad about it, but it gave us a chance to get away.

There was only one person I could turn to now, though I hated to ask him: my Uncle Colin. I navigated back roads, staying off the highways, driving automatically. I was boiling with rage. The dead faces of my wife and children kept floating in front of my eyes. If Brian had been alive, I would have gladly killed him. I wanted to kill him, to take his letter and all his selfish foolishness and shove it down his throat until he choked.

I wanted it all to be his fault, but I couldn’t help thinking that it was my fault, too. I had failed them. I should have been there. I should have stayed at home and protected them instead of chasing after Brian. After a while, I just wanted to shut down, to stop thinking altogether. We approached an overpass, and I wondered what it would be like to just step on the gas and plow headfirst into the concrete wall.

But I couldn’t. I still had a daughter, and she needed me. She would need my comfort, but first, she needed me to make her safe. I looked in the rearview mirror at Alessandra, now wrapped in the brown blanket and staring silently out the window. She was all I had now.