White Horse

TEN

There is no nuclear war, no fight for land, no arguing over human rights and petty despots. The beginning of the end comes because of the weather, just like Daniel, my blind date, said it would. Only, he’s wrong about the culprit: it isn’t China, it’s us. So we’re both right.

The end begins in hurricane season, although in truth the seeds had been sown much earlier with mass filing of patents and theories about how the weather could be controlled with man’s hand and a whole lot of funding.

Weather modification. Playing God. Modern man couldn’t conquer death, had a flimsy grip on disease control, so he turned to another lost cause.

Scientists scream, but they’re soon silenced with money stuffed down the throats of their pet research projects. Which leaves the entrepreneurs, the government, and their nodding stable of scientists to tinker with the weather.

Hurricane Pandora, they name her, although it isn’t her turn alphabetically. Because, like me, they are insatiably curious. Some say she’s a typical woman, one minute hugging the coast, the next hurling winds and rains at that same jagged finger of land, daring it to look into her single eye as she hypnotizes the Gulf Coast region into a false sense of calm.

The experiment is a secret. Until it fails. Details hemorrhage into the media after that.

Pandora claims houses and lives for her own. Returns land to the ocean. Drains money from a lot of already-empty pockets.

A week later, a cyclone forms off the east coast of Australia. This time the experiment is a success and the cyclone dies before she makes landfall.

The attack comes when the U.S. and her allies are celebrating their victory.

It’s an electronic Pearl Harbor that leaves the country unable to buy books, check movie times, send pictures of funny cats with misspelled captions. It’s an outrage, people cry, until they realize how deep it goes. Suddenly they’re cognizant that their wealth exists only in a computer database. They’re virtual millionaires and billionaires. Or they are until China implements the One Way, Our Way policy, as the media aptly dubs it.

The country panics. We’ve jumped too far forward to go back to newspapers and passing paper notes in class. The Internet is gone. Cell phones are night-lights and colorful paperweights. We are hostages with all the luxuries we had twenty years ago. We are adrift….

Give us the technology, China demands, as though this is the high seas and they’re toting peg legs, parrots, and cannons.

The United States doesn’t give in to demands; it’s not Lady Liberty’s way. Instead she buys allies. Our technology for their help.

Then someone gets clever, decides that if we can unmake a hurricane, maybe we can help one grow. I don’t know if that’s possible. It’s for smarter people than me to know. But that’s when everything explodes. The atom bomb, its power and destruction, is tossed aside for a new potential weapon that everyone wants: the weather. Mother Nature as a war machine, bent to man’s will at last.

Every able-bodied man goes to war. There is no fleeing across borders because they’re going to war, too. Pick the wrong border and the final taste in your mouth is metal.

Colleges close, so even those are no longer havens for those who don’t want to fight.

Who could have known that the War to End All Wars would have nothing to do with God?

The Elpis lurches across the sea, and my stomach along with her. Crossing the Mediterranean should only take a handful of hours, but the captain tells me their fuel supplies are low and they must stretch what they have—so she creeps. The journey will take as long as it takes. He says this in cobbled-together English, filling in the blanks with hand gestures.

We are a dozen, not including the skeleton crew. All of us downtrodden, our hearts crushed beneath life’s careless boot heels. Not long ago this route was filled with honeymooners and vacation-goers, people who would have to struggle to conjure up anything dimmer than a delighted grin. Not us. We can barely lift our chins to acknowledge each other with anything more than grim suspicion.

There are two other women, both middle-aged, maybe sisters, maybe friends. They cling to each other as though the other is a life vest. The men slouch in their carefully selected territories. None of us turn our backs. We are still animals with animal instincts. Who carries the disease? Who passes as human and yet is not? We watch. We wonder. We don’t risk.

My gaze sticks on the man hunched in the far corner. He’s maybe sixty, although stress can age a person and we’ve had more than our fair share of trauma. His shoulders stoop as though he carries the burdens of a thousand men upon each one. It’s not just his hair that’s gray but his very soul. Despair seeps through his pores. He’s a man out of context, so I slot him into various visions of my old life, trying to gauge where he fits.

Lisa rests her head on my shoulder. I put my arms around her, link my fingers. The Swiss leans on the railing on the starboard side, watches the sea.

Still, the man captivates me. I change his clothes, make him one of those paper dress-up dolls I loved as a girl. Tidy his hair. Shave him close to the bone. When the penny slides down the chute in my head, I gasp. For a time, I sit and watch him and try not to stare. Why is he here? Stupid question, because why are any of us here? Still, why is he here? When I can no longer rein in my curiosity, I get up, pace back and forth until I can’t help myself, then take a seat near him. Close, but respectfully distant.

“Mr. President?”

He looks me in the eye like I’m his superior.

“I’m the president of nothing.”

“I voted for you.”

He nods slowly, as though he aches from it. “Really?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you.”

“I was pleased to do it.”

“You should have bet on the other guy.”

The war taints all. Men go to war and never return. Word of their demise sometimes reaches home. Wal-Mart’s shelves empty and remain that way without cheaply made goods to replenish them.

One night on the news I see Jorge’s red truck being pulled from the river, squirrel heads sodden and rotting, still danging from the mirror.

Nobody says anything at work. Nobody says much of anything now. We all go about our jobs like automatons set to toil.

Soon I start missing faces. One day the regular receptionist is gone from the downstairs lobby, and in her place is a perky twenty-something who’ll stay friendly until benefits kick in. After that, she’ll adopt a bored stare and a Whatever! attitude. Later that afternoon, winter personified follows me onto the elevator. Her arms are stretched around a box filled with photo frames and knickknacks, things meaningless to everyone but her. She stares through me like I’m an open window, no twitch or blink to suggest she’s trying to place me the way I’m placing her. I remember her in white and she doesn’t remember me surrounded by dead mice and George. P. Pope’s questions.

Another day I go into the bathroom, where three women are gathered around a calendar, trying to calculate the first day of their last periods. One of them stops mid-conversation, races to the nearest stall. The door slams, then swings open just as her vomit splashes the floor.

“Sorry,” she says. “I figure I only have about eight more weeks of this.”

I make all the right noises, but really I’m thinking about Ben, Raoul, James, Mrs. Sark.

And Nick.

I contact the CDC. They redirect me to 911. The tin woman answers, and when I tell her about the jar, she dismisses me as a lunatic.

George P. Pope appears in the paper one morning, posing next to a brittle blonde the caption identifies as his wife. He’s made all the right quotes, meant to soothe a panicking public. Phrases like get your flu shots now and our scientists are making new discoveries every day. Hollow words from a self-serving mouth.

Mrs. Pope doesn’t buy it, either. There’s a speck on the ground more worthy of her attention. So she places it there and hides her lack of faith behind a wall of fair hair.

The picture gives a better sound bite than Pope’s mouth.

Night comes to the open sea, creeping from the east. When the ferry’s lights flicker on, their beams absorbed by the encroaching darkness—when just we two are on the deck—the president of nothing begins to speak.

“Where are you from?”

I tell him.

“They liked the other guy.”

“How did you get here, Mr. President?”

He shrugs. “I never wanted a life in politics. It chose me… much later on. When I was a boy, I wanted to be an astronaut.”

Even in his world-torn state, he oozes charisma, and I remember why I—and millions of others—voted him into the highest office. Together we lean against the port rails and watch the void come for us.

“You and every other American boy.”

He nods. “Ours was a country with great dreams, all of them bold and large in scope. But we were not too good at the details. Do you have time for a story?”

Anything for you, Mr. President, I want to say, but the words won’t come, so I’m forced to respond with a nod. This seems to satisfy him.

He pauses for a moment. Two men have come on deck, gripping the ends of another; two trees and a hammock. They swing back, forth, toss him overboard. Sending the dead to a better place.

“There was a man whom the people chose to lead them. ‘If I accept,’ he said, ‘I want you to share with me your ideas to make this country stronger.’ ‘No, no,’ they said. ‘This is why we have you. Your ideas are better.’ Pleased that they had so much faith in him, he accepted. Soon they came to his doorstep crying. ‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘I want you to share your ideas for making this country a happier place for all.’ ‘No, no,’ they cried. ‘This is why we have you. Your ideas will make us happier.’ Time passed, and again they came to his door, this time shouting. ‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘Share your ideas for making this country wealthier.’ ‘No, no,’ they shouted. ‘It’s your ideas we trust to put more money in our pockets.’ Then a great war came. The people came stampeding to his doorstep with their pitchforks. ‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘Please, help me preserve this country for your children. Give me your ideas.’ Again they refused. ‘We gave you power so you could decide for us,’ they yelled. When the sickness came, he pleaded with them again, and was again refused on the grounds that he knew best. This time, when he failed, they came for him, cast him to the winds. ‘That man was worthless,’ they said. ‘He never did what we wanted.’”

“That’s how it happened for you,” I say.

“That’s how it happens for every elected leader.”

“So you left?”

“In the night like a common white-collared thief.”

We speak of other things after that. Of apple pie and ice cream, of baseball, of times when people still celebrated July Fourth. Of times when those we loved were still with us. When a stable government meant we were less free, but pleasures lay thicker on the ground.

The next morning, the captain finds him hanging from a thick pipe below the decks.

“I saw you talking,” he says. “Who was he?”

“A good man, for all his flaws. Better than most.”

Lisa listens as the crew cuts the president down, throws him overboard with nary a prayer to send him on his way. Her head tilts as though she’s trying to put this into some context that makes sense in her world. She can’t see, yet she observes.

Her fascination makes me shiver.

“Do you think he could fix me?”

I know what Lisa means. “If what the Swiss says about his past is true, yes. But the risk would be huge. You’d need somewhere clean, sterile. Proper equipment. We have none of that.”

“I bet Greece has hospitals.”

“You’re right. But what they don’t have is electricity.”

“I don’t care.” A tiny smile curves her lips. Her face is soft and dreamy. She looks content. “I bet he could fix me.”

Nick likes to hang out in my head sometimes, as though he’s enjoying the clutter.

I said open the jar, I hear him say, not smash it.

“Sometimes my temper gets the best of me.”

Do you realize you’re talking to yourself?

“Yes.”

It’s good that you know the difference.

“Go away.”

Okay.

“No, stay with me.”

About a week after he mentioned his sickness, I began scanning the newspapers for his obituary. I know, I could have just picked up the phone, called, but I didn’t. Denial and acceptance; I had a foot planted squarely in each. See, with a newspaper I could lick my thumb, rub it against the paper, make it not true. But I couldn’t handle hearing the phone ring off into infinity. There’s no way to erase the sound of a dead man not answering.

On the door’s other side the grayscale world is waiting. I slip a leash on my gloom and go out to greet it. When I reach the lobby, my feet stop. Someone has thrown a pair of combat boots in my path. They’re filled with Nick.

“You’re not dead,” I say.

“I’m not dead.”

“Why? How?”

He laughs. “Dying wasn’t on my list.”

My smile sputters until it’s full and real. “What is on your list?”

“Not dying. Coming here. This.”

He reels me in, cups my face with both hands, and becomes my whole world. This is a kiss—maybe the last one we’ll ever know, so we stay there forever, warm and safe. When he pulls away, something is lost. I think it’s my heart.

“What else is on your list?”

“Zoe…”

My lips are cooling too quickly; I know what he’s going to say. “I get it. I do. You have to go. Men need to be heroes.”

“I don’t want to fight,” he says. “But I want to win.”

“I know. And I’m glad you came. But if you die out there, I’ll hate you forever.”

“No you won’t,” he says, and turns until both feet point toward war.

The glass door drifts shut behind him. My hands dangle by my sides, those useless things.

How do you file a restraining order against sadness?

Week after week there’s nothing. The obituaries come thick and fast now. Not just the elderly, but young people dying of what appears to be an errant stomach flu. The media blames it on farm animals, contaminated food, illegal immigrants, but really they don’t know. And I feel better in some ways because how could this have started with me? It’s arrogant of me to think I could be that important. And yet, a voice still tells me none of their guesses have struck truth. None of them speculates that somewhere in this city there’s a box filled with shards and bones, and the whole thing feels like death.

The newspapers don’t list war deaths. With the Internet still dead, computers are little more than boat anchors, so there’s no database running queries, spitting out names, or coming back with—one hoped—no result.

We return to the old ways: lists slapped onto walls in government buildings, people hovering, hoping, fists pushed between their teeth, chewing their lips, twirling their hair. Nervous tics. Superstitious, too.

Jenny and I visit the library every evening. She’s always there in her cherry-red coat, the one that should be too warm for this time of year, leaning against the center pillar. I see her sometimes as a stranger might: relaxed, the contrast of her dark hair against the red wool pleasing to the eye; a vibrant young woman. The illusion lasts until I’m close enough to read her face. We sprang from the same gene pool, and while we look like our own separate beings, her facial expressions are my own. Constant fear has knocked the girlish layer of subcutaneous fat from her face so that the line of her jaw and cheekbones jut through her skin in an off-key rendition of magazine-cover chic. Her brow line dips in the middle even when she paints on a false smile, like she’s doing now. I’ve faked that same smile before. I’m faking it now. And she knows that I know that she knows.

Wearing that polyester smile, I jog up the stone steps to meet her. My preference would be to sit at the bottom, pull myself into a ball, and rock back and forth until the world swings back to normal. But I have to be strong for Jenny, because Mark is out there. Like so many others, he swapped a keyboard and mouse for a gun and cut-rate body armor.

We perform the ritual: hug, squeeze, peck on the cheek.

“How was work?” she asks.

“Fine. How are you?”

“Fine. Ready?”

“Sure.”

More lies.

We push through the towering doors, take a sharp left, stride to the far side of the lobby, where the wall is covered in corkboard.

The list is up. I don’t know who puts it there, only that they do. Today there are over a hundred names—and this list is just for our city, not the country. The violence is escalating. Or they’re dying from the same disease that’s killing people here. I can’t tell. The papers are silent about everything except our victories. They ply us with a steady stream of celebrity gossip, feel-good stories, and minor grievances to keep us from asking What? Where? Why? The news channels are more of the same—those that haven’t gone dark.

Jenny squeezes my fingers until the bones are nearly crushed to crumbs. I wince but I don’t say anything, nor do I pull away. She needs to give pain and I need to accept it. Because if I see Nick’s name up there, I’m going to take shelter in that physical hurt.

We join the cluster of some hundred heads and wait our turn.

This is the worst part: the waiting. It’s relative: if we see a name we recognize, that becomes the worst part. We’ve seen some. Mostly people we knew in school or worked with in some distant time. Those days we walk away with our heads hung low, not speaking until we reach the bottom of the steps. We go, we sip coffee on a street corner, silent until one of us says, “I hope it didn’t hurt.” War being war, I figure there’s a fifty percent chance of that being true. You can either go quick in a single blast or make a grab for life’s tail and hold on while it tries to shake you off like a pissed-off tiger.

“He won’t be there,” I say.

“He won’t be there,” she parrots.

People peel away from the front. We inch closer. They wear temporary smiles. Tomorrow they’ll be back, tense with fear. I envy them; they already know they’ll return.

An anguished cry cuts through the crowd. I flinch, because even though it’s expected, I still hope that we’ll all walk away wearing that transient smile. I am a fool.

“No, no. It’s a lie,” the woman shrieks. Hysteria has her in its grasp. “They’re wrong.” She makes to tear the list from the wall but is stopped by the people behind her. They shove her aside and insert themselves in her place. “Fuck you!” she screams. “Fuck you with a chain saw! I hope your sons, fathers, and husbands are dead. Why should I be the only one? Fuck you.”

I move to break from the pack, comfort her, but Jenny holds me fast. “Stay with me,” she whispers.

The woman picks up a stack of free newspapers, a local publication filled with upcoming events around town. They’re two months old now, remnants of a time when a concert or festival sounded like it mattered.

“Fuck you.” She flings a paper at the nearest person. “And fuck you.” Another paper aimed at someone else. “Fuck you and her.” More papers. Finally she tosses the remainder across the crowd. “Fuck you all!” She drags the last word out until there’s no more breath to carry it.

Some watch her shuffle away, too broken to be humiliated by her actions. The rest don’t dare glance at her because they know how easily they could break. Words on a page could make them her.

When it’s our turn at the head of the line, Jenny grips my hand tighter. The pink of my fingers fades to white.

“I can’t look.” She always says this and yet she always stares at the list unblinking until she doesn’t find Mark’s name.

It’s my finger that glides down the page, sticking on any name with a similar formation to Mark’s. We’re looking for Nugent. Mark D. Nugent. I enter the Ns and shoot right out the other side without glimpsing his name.

Jenny clutches my arm. “He’s not there. He’s not there. Check again.”

But I’m already on the move, falling down the list, falling, falling until I hit R. Ramirez, Rittiman, Roberts. No Rose.

“He’s not there, Jen.”

“Check again.”

Feet shuffle behind us. I glance quickly at the Ns again. “Mark’s fine.”

Jenny’s smile shaves five years from her face. “He’s fine.”

Neither of us says today.

Afterward, we perform our new ritual. We buy coffee at a nearby café and hang out on the street corner that will carry us in different directions.

“Who are you looking for? On the list,” Jenny asks.

My hands tense and I realize I’ve been hugging the cup too tight between my fingers. The cup is hot, the coffee even hotter, and the warmth seeps into my skin. I’m shivering. I look up at the darkening sky. It shouldn’t be this cold in October.

I look back at Jenny. She’s giving me that look like I’m holding out on her—and I am.

“No one.”

“If you say so.”

“It’s nothing. Just a friend.” But he’s not even that, although I felt it was true. There’s a gap in my heart, or maybe just my soul, large enough to park a city bus.

“I know that look.”

I say nothing.

“It’s the one I get every day when I know Mark is safe for another day. That’s when I can let my guard down and feel hope again. That’s why I like drinking coffee afterward, because that’s the real beginning of my day. Tomorrow morning the deathwatch starts all over again.” I go to speak but she stops me. “It’s a deathwatch, Zoe. We both know it.”

When you have a sister, you hold a mirror in your hands.

ELEVEN

To watch Lisa is to stare into Alice’s looking glass. Nothing about her is quite as it should be. Each day her fingerhold on reality slips a little more, dipping another inch of her essence into dark waters. She faces the sea, always wearing a secretive smile that fades if anyone approaches.

She holds vigil at the stern, feet in ballet’s first position, hands resting lightly on the rail. Her hair is a greasy mass pinned to her scalp, the result of not enough shampoo and too many weeks of rainwater. Her spine is distinct and prominent, its own creature, one I half expect to see flick its tail independent of her movements. A steady diet of thin air and canned foods has carved the meat from our bones, leaving us just enough to live on. Each time I glimpse myself in the ferry’s sliding glass doors, I can’t believe I’m seeing me. The ragamuffin person with stick legs is not who I am. In my mind, I am robust and healthy, with flesh that threatens to sprawl if I take that third cookie.

I need to eat more. We all do. War and disease have cured obesity too well.

“Hey,” I say, to warn her of my approach. “Do you want to hear something neat?”

She shakes her head. Keeps staring at what we left behind.

“There’s land. It’s a long thin strip of not much at the moment, but the captain says it’s spectacular to watch it come into focus.”

She dips down in a rigid plié. “And then what?”

“When we get there?”

“What happens when we get there?”

“I have to go north.”

“And me?”

“I told you. You can come, too.”

“What if I don’t want to?”

I swallow slow, consider the words on my internal Scrabble board. If I push them into the wrong formation, something will be lost.

“You’re your own woman. You have to do what’s right for you.”

“Yes, I am.”

She starts as a distant speck, the isle of Greece, and as I watch she steadily inflates, bobbing above the waves like a massive buoy. Technically she is not an isle; that’s just a pretty word thrown in there to fill out the lyrics of a pop song.

“The bottom half, the Peloponnese, she is an island made by men,” the captain tells me. “One hundred years ago, maybe more, they cut into the land so the boats can pass through. Just like the…” His mustache jerks about as he chews on the right words.

“Panama Canal?”

His fingers snap. “The Panama Canal, yes.” He holds up a dehydrated hand. “This is one level. No boomp-boomp-boomp.” As he says this he bunny-hops his hand to simulate the lock system for which the canal at Panama is famous.

“How long until we get there?”

“Eh.” He coughs. “Just a few hours.”

A few hours. My heart knocks faster.

The new receptionist from the lobby disappears two weeks after she arrived. Her facsimile is already in place. “Good morning, howkinIhelpyew?” she snaps into the headset. Her hand is heavy with a rock. Somewhere out there she’s got a fiancé—probably in the war.

Upstairs in the bathroom, the women have gathered, but not to talk babies.

“Did you hear? Cynthia is dead,” one says when I walk in.

Two weeks ago she was jubilant, and now she’s gone. I barely knew her, and yet it takes everything I have to hold myself in a single column.

That afternoon a man approaches me on the train. The usual crowd has dwindled to just a smattering of backsides in seats, so he stands out like a bloodstain on white pants. He’s burrowed down in his green sweater, fingertips peeking out the ends of the sleeves. He has a lollipop head covered in thick sandy hair that hasn’t seen a barber’s scissors in some time. So slight is he that the messenger bag slung crosswise his body seems to be the only thing holding him down.

“Can I… May I talk to you? It’s polite to ask, so that’s why I’m asking instead of just talking.”

I turn in the seat, look up at him, try not to be annoyed at having my worrying interrupted. He goes on without my consent, which should be my first clue to shut him down, but he’s caught me in an unguarded moment.

“You work at Pope Pharmaceuticals, right? Of course you do. I mean, I know you do. I followed you from there. I didn’t want to pick one of those science people, because they won’t say squat, at least not in terms most people can understand. So I had to pick someone else. Someone not so important who’d talk to me. People in menial jobs like to talk. I’ve seen them on the television. Everyone wants their fifteen minutes. So I picked someone like you.”

I try to ignore the insult, because something about this kid is different. “You’re a journalist?”

His gaze settles on my left ear. Flicks to my right. Down to my hands. To some spot atop my head. “Jesse Clark, United States Times. I used to have an Internet blog. Maybe you’ve heard of me.” He waits in an unnatural pause.

I try to shake the surrealism away.

“No, I’ve never heard of it, or you, or the United States Times. I’m sorry.”

“It’s new.” The kid is a whole litter of still-blind-puppies full of enthusiasm. “So many people have gone to fight that there aren’t enough qualified journalists and newspaper people left. They want one big newspaper that tells the same news to everyone who’s still here. It’s easier that way, they say. I think it’s a conspiracy and the government wants to control the news. But since they’re paying for my stories, I just got my first apartment all on my own, so the money is nice. I’m learning to cook, too. I made oatmeal this morning, in the microwave. Last night I made an omelet. With those green peppers and bacon. The recipe said ham, but I like bacon better.”

Again he waits as though this is chess and it’s my move.

“I prefer bacon, too.”

He beams, focuses on the armrest. “Can I sit down? I know I should wait until you ask, because that’s the polite thing; but I don’t know how long it’s going to be before you ask, and standing on a train facing in the wrong direction doesn’t make me feel so great.”

Normally I’d ignore him, hope he goes away before he proves to be a problem, but these are not normal times. I wave at the aisle seat and hope he takes that, not the middle.

He chooses wisely. “I don’t want to take the middle one. That would make it look unbalanced. So if you sit there and I sit here, it’s almost symmetrical.” Prim and proper. Hands flat on his chino-clad thighs. Bag across his body. “Thank you. I have to say thank you because that’s polite.”

“You’re welcome.”

“That’s polite, too.” He stares straight ahead. “I want to ask you some questions, if that’s okay. I’m working on a story no one knows about yet. You might think I’m crazy, and it’s okay if you do, because lots of people think I am. Even my best friend Regina thinks I’m crazy, but that’s okay because she’s my friend and she’s kind of weird, anyways. My parents think I’m crazy, too. They don’t say it, but I can see it. My dad’s always getting angry at me because I’m no good at driving or playing football like my brothers, and my mom’s always saying, ‘Don’t say that. He’s a smart boy. He’s just different.’ I love my mom. I love my dad, too, because that’s what you’re supposed to do: love your parents. But I don’t like him all that much. Do you like your parents?”

“They’re good people.”

Jesse nods. “About a month ago I was looking through the newspapers and I noticed something strange. I used to get all the major papers on account of having my blog and wanting to have all the latest news. Checking out the competition, my dad calls it. Only, now I don’t have a blog because no one has the Internet anyway. When the newspapers come I like to cut out the pieces and lie them on the floor in the basement. It’s flat and no one else goes down there much, so I can spread them out and move them around however I want. I like to look for patterns. And in the past month, I’ve been seeing all kinds of patterns in the obituaries. Lots of people are dying who wouldn’t normally be dying, and they’re all dying of the same thing. Only, I don’t think anyone else has noticed or it would be in the newspapers already, right?”

I don’t tell him that I’ve noticed, too, or that I don’t know whether to feel relieved or terrified that someone has made the connection.

“So I said to myself, ‘Jesse, this could be the story that makes you someone.’ My dad will be pleased that I’m someone important and maybe people won’t think I’m so stupid. What I did next was talk to some families of the people who died. Mostly they said things like ‘Go away, mind your own business, we’re trying to grieve here,’ but some of them used ugly words, too. Like f-u-c-k.” He glances around, his face pinched. “I hope nobody heard.”

“I don’t think they did.”

“But you know what? Some of those people talked to me. And they all told me the same stories and described the same symptoms, so I said to myself, That’s weird, because how do all these people in different cities and states have the same thing?”

My heart plays skipping stones in my chest before stopping for several beats.

“How do you know?”

“I told you, I saw the patterns in the paper. Then I got on a bus—lots of buses—and visited a whole bunch of people. My dad said I was crazy and that I should get a job at McDonald’s or someplace, but the grease smells funny, so I got on the bus instead. I talked to this real nice lady in Little Rock and she said both her cat and her husband died and he wanted the cat buried with him but the funeral home wouldn’t do it. Dead is dead, so I think they should have done it, because that’s what he wanted. This lady, she told me that first her husband got real sick and vomited blood all the time. She apologized, because we were in her kitchen eating red velvet cake and she was worried I had a weak stomach. Then she said her husband got all these weird pains in random places in his body, like he was getting jabbed like a voodoo doll. After a couple of weeks he died. She said after the funeral the mortician came over to her and asked if he’d always had a tail. She said yes because she didn’t know what else to say, but then she told me he never had that tail before and they’d been married forty years. Isn’t that strange? You know what else is strange? I saw a whole lot of stones in Little Rock but I couldn’t tell which one was meant to be the little rock.”

“Why aren’t you in the war?”

“Special dispensation on account of my condition. Do you know what that means?”

“I’ve heard it before.”

He nods, keeps his gaze fixed on the seat ahead. “Asperger’s is what the doctors say I’ve got. It doesn’t mean anything other than I’m different. Different can mean good or it can mean bad, depending on who’s doing the talking.”

His fingers start to tap. At first I think piano, but the longer I watch, I see number patterns.

“After I went to Little Rock I went to some other places and then I went home. They’ve got a big library there at the college. Before, I would have just gone to Google but I had to do it the old way, which was a lot of hard work after riding all those buses. I couldn’t use the Internet, but they still have an internal system where you can search for books and journals. You know what? There’s no disease like that. Nothing that makes you sick and then grow a tail. Some of the other dead people grew other weird stuff, too. One kid had two hearts when they cut him open; only, one was growing up in his throat and choked him to death. Some of them just died after all the vomiting, but some grew stuff people shouldn’t have. So I talked to my mom and she said maybe I’d discovered something new, something no one ever heard of, and maybe if I figured out what that was, they’d name it after me. If there’s anybody left to care.” His shoulders slump. The number patterns slow.

The inside of my head is a radio station turned to static. I believe what he’s saying: the pieces are all there.

“Why me?”

“A new disease has to come from somewhere. Have you seen Resident Evil? There was an accident in a laboratory and everyone turned to zombies. I figured maybe this was like that.”

“That was just a movie.”

“Nuh-uh. It happens. There are lots of online forums that talk about how it could happen for real. I went to a lot of labs and companies that make medicine and no one would talk to me. They just smiled and gave me pamphlets to read or threatened to throw me out. One guy threatened to have me locked up in an institution. All I wanted was to ask some questions. I think they wouldn’t talk to me because they think I’m different-bad.”

I shake my head. “They won’t talk to you because what if you’re right?”

It’s crazy. It should be crazy. But just because something is crazy doesn’t mean it isn’t true. All those dead mice. Jorge. The bones crammed inside the jar. It’s making me want to ask questions. Maybe my paranoia isn’t.

Ben’s dead. James. Raoul. Two receptionists now. The woman from the bathroom. And the man in Arkansas with the tail—oh God.

Jesse’s fingers pick up pace, then slow again. His head turns and I think he’s going to look at me, but he stares at my mouth instead. “Will you answer my questions?”

I want to. But I can’t. I explain about the contract I signed, the confidentiality agreement, so maybe he’ll understand how the business world works when there’s a whole lot of green and reputations at stake. I think it’s going to sink in when he goes back to staring at the chair.

“You’re scared. I’m scared, too. My mom says it’s okay to be scared because that’s just our brain’s way of telling us to be careful.”

On the other side of the window, the scenery changes. Two minutes until my stop.

“I wish I could,” I tell Jesse. He seems like a good kid. I like him. I’d love to help.

“Please.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t want either of us to get hurt.” Or worse.

“But my dad will be proud of me if they name the disease after me. I’ll be different-good.”

The train slows. I tug my bag over one shoulder, hold the strap in place with my opposite hand, shielding myself from his questions. “I’m sorry.”

The last I see of him is his face pressed against the window as I glance back over my shoulder. He’s looking straight into my guarded soul.

I go about my business. I clean, talk to the mice, monitor them for signs of imminent death. I do not name them, although the little guy at the end with the bent whiskers is begging for an identity that doesn’t include numbers.

I watch the mice and wonder if the experiment is larger than this bank of cages.

My paranoia has its own mind.

You know you want to, Nick says in my head.

“Not now.”

He falls silent. Please don’t let today be the day I see him on the list.

I pull on slippers with my jeans, throw on a coat. Still, I shiver when the chill slams my body. The two quarters are cold lead weights in my palm. It stings to hold them. They clank into the newspaper dispenser and I use the edge of my sleeve to tug it open.

The city newspaper is gone; in its place is the United States Times. Jesse flashes into my mind, that kid who just wants to be different-good.

The stairs fly by two at a time. My apartment door crashes behind me. I grab more quarters and I’m gone again.

Two by two, I shove them into the other dispensers, the ones that should be holding newspapers from all over the country. I have to see, I have to know if there’s other news out there. But they’re all filled with one publication now: the United States Times. That journalism has been distilled to this dangerous point catapults me into action. I’m doing nothing when I should be doing something.

Back in my hidey-hole, I dissect the paper. I pick through the pages as a soothsayer might a tangle of entrails, trying to divine a course of action. It’s just a paper. It’s like all the others with its bold title announcing its presence. Nothing about it screams, I killed the competition. I took away your choices overnight. The cover is more of what we’ve been seeing: battles won. Men cheering. Leaders happy with the troops’ success. There are twelve more obituaries than in yesterday’s paper.

The hall closet looms, its clean white paint darkening as I assign it characteristics it can’t possibly possess: dark, foreboding, dangerous.

When the phone rings, I leap.

“We’re showing an alarm at your residence. Do you need assistance?”

I forgot the alarm. Damn. “No, no, I’m fine. I was carrying… groceries.”

“Code, please.”

I give them the code, and the secondary code, and my mother’s maiden name. When they’re satisfied I’m not a doppelgänger, they reset the system and I lock myself in.

I stand in front of the closet, hands poised on the handles.

“I’m ready,” I tell Nick-in-my-head.

It’s still in there, that carton I stashed, wrapped in its packing-tape straitjacket. Between the fake Christmas tree I keep because I hate hauling a fresh one up the stairs, and building rules state they’re not allowed to ride the elevator anyway, and the box of Bibles I’ve collected over the years from people who thought my soul needed saving. Too superstitious to throw them away, I keep them here to ward away people who’d give me another. The flaw in my plan was James. Last Christmas he gave me a children’s Bible painted with toothy cartoon characters.

They smile cheerfully at me from between the box flaps. I glance away before my eyes start to heat up.

On the floor I sit, legs in a wide V and pull the carton to me. It doesn’t look like much. It’s quite ordinary, really. Logically, there’s nothing ominous about a package wrapped in tape. If someone saw me struggling into the post office with this thing, they’d assume it was a care package bound for a beloved friend. It’s the contents that lend it the sinister air of a secret long turned malignant.

I have a plan. It’s been in my head since Jesse approached me on the train, but the human mind excels at withholding information from itself. Errant thoughts loiter in the less-traveled parts of our hemispheres until something triggers their leap from the shadows.

The United States Times. Jesse. His face pressed against the train’s window, looking me in the eye for the first time, daring me to do something bigger than clean floors and cages.

The scissors leave ragged edges on the tape. A new roll sits beside me ready to take its place as soon as I’ve done what I must.

Deep breath.

Lift lid.

Scoop a handful of pieces with a plastic Baggie. Seal the bag first, then the box. Shove it back into its hiding place with my foot.

I’m ready to do something bigger.

The Swiss corners me on the deck. “Your stupid friend wants an abortion.”

“No she doesn’t.”

“Who are you to decide for her? Is it not her body? Americans. Every life is sacred except the lives they neglect to save because some places have no useful resources.”

“I’m not making a moral judgment. This is about her safety. There are no tools and no place clean and safe enough for any kind of surgery. Lancing a boil could be risky these days. I’ve told her already.”

“If we find a hospital, there will be antibiotics,” he says.

“You don’t know that.”

“I know more than you about many things.”

Anger rolls through me, gathering my power. I want to grab his throat, squeeze, but I don’t. Instead my elbow shoots out and up, catches him on the chin. He stumbles backwards, falls in a sprawling heap. For a moment he lies there, limbs flailing like a lobster freshly plucked from its saline home.

No one moves to help him. They look away, don’t want to get involved. Who can blame them? The ugly side of humanity has shown its face for too long, and I’ve contributed. Shame burns me. I should have held back, but he’s done enough to Lisa already.

He flips over, jumps to his feet.

“What about when she delivers her child? What will happen then? What will happen when you deliver yours?”

Help me, I beg of the ocean, the sky, and all the world in between. I don’t know what to do.

Athens’s Parthenon has many cheaper, lesser cousins scattered across the world; man’s capacity to create is just as limited as it is infinite. One such building houses the National Museum, where James and Raoul once sorted potsherds. What was a mere tap of my boots on the sidewalk is now a pounding on marble tiles in an almost empty lobby. Its sole occupant is a girl seated behind the front desk, only her eyes visible over the uncreased covers and rigid spine of the Bible.

“Oh.” As though surprised that someone would choose to visit the museum on purpose. “Hello.”

She stands, brushes her pants, smiles like she forgot to perform some important task to which she is bound.

“I’m supposed to say ‘Welcome to the National Museum,’ but I wasn’t really expecting anybody today. We haven’t had anybody in for a week now. Except the staff. And they usually come in the back because that’s where our parking is.” She leans on the marble-top counter and whispers, “I’m not supposed to do this, but you can go in for free. Normally it’s ten dollars, except on Tuesdays, when admission is free, but I don’t think ten dollars is going to help much. A museum isn’t much of a museum if no one is looking. So it’ll be nice to have someone appreciating our collections. Are you here to see anything in particular?”

From behind the counter she pulls a glossy pamphlet, spreads it open to reveal all the world’s wonders. So great is her enthusiasm that I don’t tell her I know the way. Let her have her moment.

“Anthropology?”

She draws a ring around the whole east wing. “It’s huge, but it’s worth all the walking, I promise.”

She settles back into her chair, cracks open her new Bible. She’s either looking for answers or salvation. I hope she finds both.

I’ve been here a dozen times times over, delving deep in the basement where curators and their lackeys keep poky offices that are close kin to coat closets. Like a car that’s traveled the same roads pulling toward the familiar exit, my feet carry me to James’s nook. There he is in white on black: James Witte, PhD. I will not lose it. I will not cry. Weeping won’t serve anything now. And yet, as my fingers trace those white plastic grooves, my eyes are hot and damp and full.

The door I’m looking for is at the end of the row and sits in a corner, which means it’s a larger closet than its neighbors. But it’s a dead end because my knocks go unanswered. I hope Dr. Paul Mubarak isn’t dead.

But he still lives. I find him sitting on one of the museum’s many benches, hunched over a coin too rough to be modern.

He looks up, gives a little laugh, flips the olden-time money between lean, brown fingers.

“A denarius. A day’s wage for some in ancient Rome. It became obsolete in the second century, but for four hundred years, it meant something in the world.” His bright eyes inspect me, catalog me, place me on a pedestal behind glass. “We’ve met.”

“At James Witte’s funeral, yes.”

“And what has brought you to the museum today? Surely you can’t be here as a tourista—not when another civilization is crumbling right outside these doors.”

I take a deep breath. “I need help identifying something. James and Raoul were helping me when…”

“Then let us walk and pretend you’re here to see our magnificent collections, first. My soul is heavy with many things, least of all the new shipments for which I have no interns to torture into sorting. I will be your tour guide and hope the company of a pretty girl will lift my spirits. We’ll take care not to disturb the crowds.”

I fall into step beside Dr. Mubarak, let him enthrall me with tales of ancient Rome and Egypt. His faint accent helps me imagine I’m someplace exotic where Death doesn’t stalk.

“Sometimes I like to look at her and ask: Are you my great-great-great-grandmother?”

We’ve stopped beside a mummy whose charm lies in her age, not her current attire of rotted fabric strips.

“Who was she?” I could read the bronze plaque with its black lettering, but I’m enjoying this too much.

“Alas, my fair ancestor has no name, so we call her Grace until such a time as she can wear her own title once more. A queen, perhaps, or a princess. Someone of enough significance that they made certain her form would endure. And now, why don’t you tell me what has brought you to my door. As you can see, we are not blessed with many visitors these days. The world has problems and stares at anything but history for answers, and so the people do not come. Everything we need to know today can be found in the past. It is the foundation upon which we stand. Mistakes have been made before; they will be made again in perpetuity.”

I cannot repay this man with a half-truth, so I tell him everything about James, Raoul, and their intention to help me discover the origins of the jar. When I am finished he says, “Show it to me.”

We go into the light so he can peer at the Baggie into which I’ve stuffed several shards and a handful of dust. Several bones have made it into the mix.

“No, no, no,” he murmurs. “Old, they said?”

“Yes.” I punctuate the word with a small nod.

“No.” His sigh pushes up through centuries of rubble. “Sometimes the mind picks apart reality and restitches it to form a fabric it prefers. James and Raoul are—were—both hungry for a new, brilliant discovery that would serve to elevate their careers. Men like to pin their names to things; it makes us feel immortal.” He gives me a small, apologetic smile. “You presented them with a fascinating mystery and that lent your jar qualities it does not possess. He was wrong about your bit of pottery. He and Raoul both. That thing is not old. My wife has something similar in our foyer. People assume it’s old because of what I do. She’s always winking at me, telling them it is Etruscan or Greek.”

“And they believe it?”

“My dear, they eat it up with a dessert spoon. People believe what they want to believe. It does not fit with their worldview, you see, that a curator of archaeology would display modern ceramics in his home. People are funny. We have changed and yet we are the same as always.”

The words thump inside my head. The jar is not old. And yet, James and Raoul believed. I was there, I saw them. Or maybe I was the one seeing what I wanted, and they were toying with my funny bone. Or maybe they thought I was tickling theirs with my new-old jar, and so they played along. They took the answer to their graves without leaving me an explanatory note.

For a moment I want to laugh, because I’d kill them both if they weren’t already dead.

“The bones,” he continues, “belong to something in the Muridae family.”

“You know bones?”

“No. I know mice.”

TWELVE

The mouse with the bent whiskers is gone. There’s another in its place, one whose whiskers run straight and true.

“Wow, they look great,” I say.

Schultz is leaning back in his chair, munching on Doritos.

“I’m glad this lot didn’t die.”

“Yeah.” Chip crumbs fly from his mouth. “It’s great.”

“Hey, Schultz, what happened to all those mice that died? I mean, do you guys incinerate them or what?”

“Why?”

“Just curious, I guess.” I try and look dumb. Like there’s nothing more to me than a mop.

He grunts. “We burn ’em. It used to be Jorge’s job.”

“I hope I don’t have to do it. Eww.”

“Don’t worry, the big guy does it himself now. Doesn’t trust anyone else.”

“Well, I’m glad of that.” My mop continues to slap the ground.

I find the jar’s siblings crowded onto a low shelf between nested tables and a magazine rack. They’re not just brothers and sisters but clones spawned from the same mold. The only past they’ve emerged from is a truck, and before that a factory, and before that a bag of dust.

If there really is a book of fools, both old and new, I am surely on the first page.

The label reads: Made in Mexico. I laugh like a madwoman, because that’s the possibility I hadn’t considered.

The Corinth Canal is a hungry mouth cut into the landscape.

“See those?” The Swiss points to the twin breakwaters that cup the chasm, their lighthouses dead and impotent to guide ships between them. “Whore’s legs, wide open to let everybody inside.”

“Why do you hate women so much? Was your mother a whore?”

I saw something on TV once about Scott Base in Antarctica. The coldest place on earth, I remember thinking. Until now. His eyes make the South Pole seem warm and welcoming.

“My mother is none of your concern.” He taps on the railing. The canal nears. “I will tell you something, but you must not speak of it. If you do, I will cut up your friend just as she asked.”

I watch the dead stone cones and hope for light.

“Look in the cargo hold tonight. Tell no one what you see there.”

I go. Of course I do. I can’t help myself. Dropping a mystery in my lap is like waving chocolate cake in front of a starving woman. And I am famished. Not right away, though: I wait until the dark creeps in, just like the Swiss told me, and let the shadows tuck me in their pockets for safekeeping.

My feet fall lightly on the steps; they barely rattle. Through the guts of the boat I slip, seeing no one, until I’m at the cargo hold door.

It’s not locked. How bad can it be if the door’s not sealed shut? From my pocket I draw out a lighter and hold it ready to flick. Through the door I go, though I do not close it behind me.

“Loose lips sink ships” is a lie. It’s dead lips that are going to sink this boat.

The whole crew is here for the death parade. The captain is on the top of the corpse pile, his face caked in blood, his body bent like a crude coat hanger. The others are there, too, although some are just faces without names. Someone has stacked them as fishermen do their bounty, minus the ice packing to keep them fresh.

The Swiss.

This time I thunder up the steps, not caring about a quake that pinpoints my location. I race to the simple lounge where the others are in various stages of sleep, some twitching, some snoring. Others keep a weary eye open for danger. Lisa is curled in a corner, her head cradled by our backpacks. Scan. Pan. No sign of the Swiss.

I try the door, the one that leads to the bridge. Its handle is a battered, broken barrier between the controls and the rest of us.

“Wake up!” I shout. “Everybody, up. We’ve got a problem.”

They stare at me, these sheep awaiting slaughter. Nobody bothers beating the door; watching me try and fail is good enough for them.

My mind scans the possibilities and clutches on to the most likely answer: the lone lifeboat that had hugged the rails on the port side.

It’s warmer tonight. The air stinks of salt, a smell I used to love, but now it no longer reminds me of cheerful days at the shore. Now it’s the smell of defeat and death. Here I lost my president. Here the Elpis lost her crew.

The ferry grinds onwards. The lights are on but they barely penetrate the dark, and the moon gives me little to work on. The only tell is a small counter ripple in the water.

“You piece of shit!” I scream into the night. “Why did you kill them?”

The Swiss’s words drift back to me.

“The captain was already sick. Some of the others, too. Better to kill them now than let them suffer.”

“They might have lived.”

“Then they’d be changed. Unfit. Inhuman. What I did was merciful.”

“Bullshit. This is all a sick game to you. We’re toys.”

“Life is an experiment and I am a scientist! Will you survive, America? We shall see.”

“Then why bother warning me? You’ll skew your results.”

“Did you look at those other people? They are sick with wanting death. But you want to live, so I give you this chance.”

Then he floats into what’s left of the night, leaving nothing behind him but a thin lunule quavering in the sea. I go back to the others and wait to live.

We stand. We wait. Eventually the sun thrusts her horns over the horizon and we see.

Piraeus speeds toward us.

What happens next comes fast and slow, like any good disaster.

“What’s happening?” Lisa asks. “Tell me.”

Her naïve question pokes holes in my tenuous temper.

I grab her by the shoulders, turn her body toward the swelling landmass, describe what’s coming for us.

“This ferry has no captain and plenty of fuel.”

She considers this, stuck on stupid. “How do we stop it?”

The words fly out like knives. “We don’t. We’re going to hit that concrete, like it or not. Unless another ship drifts into our path or someone here can do magic. Can you pull a miracle out of your ass? Because I can’t.”

“So, what do we do?”

“Stand at the back. When I say jump, we jump overboard.”

The other two women are panicking. They cling to each other, weep snot and tears. The men, being men, remain stoic. Too calm, almost. And in a moment I understand what the Swiss said is true. The world as we knew it is gone. We’ve lost families and friends and enemies. What do we do when there’s no one left to love or hate?

The shore is a concrete and steel tiger coming for our throats. There is no time to admire its stripes, there’s no time to pray. We barely have time to survive.

“Jump!” I scream at Lisa, and drag her fingers from the railing. Holding her wrists in mine, we fall.

The sea makes us work for our landing. It does not surge to meet us but waits until we slam into its membrane and sink. For a moment, peace. Then the water shakes until my bones want to fly from my body.

Jenny and I are drinking our coffee on our usual corner when she drops the bombshell on me.

“I’m seeing someone.”

“You’re cheating on Mark?”

She frowns. “Jesus, no. I mean a therapist.” She takes a mouse-like sip of coffee. Today we’re both shivering. “It’s too hard. I’m not coping. I keep telling myself I am, but it’s just a lie, and it’s getting thinner by the day. You’re great, and Mom and Dad are supportive, but I need somebody outside of all this to help me cope.”

“I understand.”

“Really?”

I nod. Sip my coffee. Try to savor the warmth. I don’t think about Nick. I searched for his name again today and didn’t find it; that’s all I need.

“I’m glad. I needed someone to tell about the person I needed to talk to, which is funny, isn’t it? I can’t tell mom and dad because they’ll say—”

“You can talk to us about anything,” we say in unison. We laugh.

“Exactly,” she says.

“I had a therapist for a while.” The words blurt out, bridging the gap between us.

“Did he help?”

“He might not agree, but yeah. It’s his name I look for on the list every day.”

“Because you love him?”

“No. Because I could have.”

“It’s the same thing,” she says. “You just don’t know it yet.”

If I stare up at the sky, I can pretend I am at the beach, that my mother and sister are paddling in the shallow waters, that there will be ice cream when I tire of floating. In my fantasy I’m not surrounded by splintered wood and steel. The Elpis is not burning, her fuel weaving smoke plumes thick enough to chew. Her front half is not concertinaed against the concrete docks of Piraeus. Her backside does not dangle in the water, a beached whale of a vessel whose faulty instincts have sent her to her doom.

Sea birds circle overhead. Their cries are a dirge; to them I am nothing more than a big fish. Their obsidian eyes watch me for signs of surrender, but I will not do it. I will not.

But oh, how sweet it would be to let go.

I close my eyes just for a moment, and when they open again the sun has shifted behind the clouds, and me along with it. The tide is a helping hand pushing me toward the bulb-shaped concrete shore. Then it shifts again and I am being dragged sideways, parallel to the shore, into the path of a drifting yacht. We collide. It’s a gentle bump for the boat, but a sharp blow to my shoulder. Salted tears flood my eyes and instantly blend with the seawater that laps my face.

“America!”

My flagellating feet spin me around so that I’m facing the shore again. The Swiss is there. Lisa, too. She’s on her knees, panting, trying to pull as much oxygen as she can. But the Swiss stands, legs apart, hands on hips, his lips in their familiar cruel twist.

She’s alive, and so am I. We’ve made it this far.

“America, do you need help?”

I do, but I don’t want his brand of help. Help that costs is no help at all. So I struggle to the shore in the great harbor of Piraeus where the land races skyward, its spine an intricate trellis of houses and roads. This is Brindisi all over again, great ships low-slung in the water, their corpses rusting. In time they’ll sink below the surface when there’s no one to patch the red powdery bubbles and the sea first seeps, then floods through.

Already weak, my arms ache as they fight the steadily thickening water.

“You won’t make it,” he calls out.

My head is heavy, my arms, too. My whole body longs to stop and let the sea claim it. There’s a sleepy fog rolling into my mind. I blink, shake my head, try to clear a path, but it persists. The shore is too far. Too, too far.

“Come on, America.” He bends, picks up a tattered life preserver, waves it in the air, declaring his victory with a makeshift banner.

Another painful stroke.

“Maybe you need incentive. European incentive. Americans only act for money. But you… I think you will act for something else.” He turns, circles Lisa. “For her you will do anything, even though she is close to worthless.”

“No,” I start, but the salt water sloshes up, fills my mouth, stings my eyes. A hefty slug of brine pours into my stomach and I spit it back up again. Up on the concrete dock, the Swiss draws his leg back. Look, he taunts me with his icy eyes. I control even this. I have power, you have nothing.

No. No. No.

Then he unclenches his glutes, lets that leg fly, nails Lisa in the ribs. She makes an oofing sound as she collapses flat on the concrete. Another subtle wave drifts through the water, covering my face. I hold my breath, tilt my head, search for air. When my vision clears again, the Swiss is watching me.

“Come on, swim. Lazy American.” This time he catches Lisa in the shoulder. She cries out.

Fresh anger is a forest fire burning through me. Fueled by rage, my body conjures up energy stores from nothing. Maybe my muscles saved a doughnut for emergencies. Or that chunk of cake I once ate in the kitchen after a lousy date. Maybe my body is devouring itself.

Slowly, I cut through the water, my arms duel blades slicing so that my kicking feet propel me forward. On dry land, the Swiss continues to mock me. His words are punctuated with Lisa’s cries. I wish she would fight him, but I know she’s afraid—of his temper and losing his cruel affections.

One stroke turns into two. Two turns into three.

He pins her to the ground, boot grinding her neck.

Three leads to four. Four to five. My lungs ache. On stroke thirty I touch concrete. Is it victory if you’re too exhausted to care? Does it matter that you’ve survived?

Hugging the ground to me, I swing my body ashore, not caring that the rough surface is sloughing my skin away. Oxygen, sweet oxygen, is what counts. It comes in jagged clouds, stinging my throat and lungs. With each breath the pain lessens.

The Swiss laughs. “You’re alive. I’m impressed. You saved this one, of course.” He pokes the girl at his feet.

“If you’ve got a problem, take it out on me, you piece of shit.”

“I like this better. I enjoy watching your reactions. Your face tells me everything. I can see what you want to do to me. And for what? This creature would turn on you for little more than a bag of hot chips. Wouldn’t you?” He prods her with the tip of his boot. When she groans, he plants it in her ribs once more.

I can’t help myself. Every time I look at Lisa I see Jesse, I see Nick, I see everyone who’s crossed my path since this all began. They collect in my mind, bunching into one violent black cluster, so that when I finally fix my gaze on the Swiss, I… just… can’t… stop.

Every ounce of energy that drained into the water comes roaring back into my body. My muscles quiver with rage until my whole body shakes. I am a cat coiled into a tense crouch, waiting… waiting… waiting for my prey to move. Goddamn you, move.

He laughs at us.

No more.

My spring-loaded muscles snap into action and I hurtle across the concrete until I’m pummeling his chest with a combination of weary fists and limp hands. Laughter, that’s what he gives me to spur me on. The balance shifts. His hands encircle my wrists, squeeze them until the bones want to shatter.

“You can’t hurt me,” he says. “You don’t have it in you.”

“If I can kill you, I will,” I tell him.

“No.”

For a moment I think the cry has come from him, but his lips are pale stone lines. The noise is Lisa’s.

“No,” she repeats. “Please, don’t.”

He holds me there; I am at his mercy. My attentions shifts from him to Lisa and back to him before making the journey to her once again. To which side of the fence has she slipped? Is she sitting on my grass or his?

“He’s a monster,” I say. “He’ll kill us both if we let him.”

“What do you keep saying? What do you keep telling me? We have to hold on to what makes us human. That’s what you said.”

She pulls herself along the ground, one arm cradling her ribs.

“Don’t move. Your ribs might be broken,” I say.

“You told me that. We have to show compassion and mercy because it’s part of what makes us us.”

The Swiss grins, tightens his grip. “Do it, you fucking coward. Fight for your life. Try to kill me. You can’t survive in this new world if you can’t kill.”

“Shut up.”

His body shakes with silent laughter.

“Zoe,” Lisa says. “Stop.”

The fight melts out of me. There’s a soft thud as my hands fall from the Swiss’s vise. My shoulders slump. That vital force that kept me burning bright enough to fight slips back into the harbor. Energy is never lost, only transformed, yet I feel as if something is lost to me.

“Okay.”

This time, when my body uncoils, it’s like a ribbon tugged loose from a ballerina’s ankle when she’s pushed herself past exhaustion, languid and halfhearted. “Okay.” There I sit, beside the man I could easily murder were Lisa not here to stop me—and draw my knees up to my chin. “I hate you.”

The Swiss stares down at me, his mouth a rictus grin. He prods me with his boot. “Coward.”

“Maybe,” I say. “Maybe not.”

“Make no mistake, you are a craven fool. Anyone with guts would find a way to kill me.”

“I wanted to. I want to.”

“And yet, you stopped fighting.”

“Not my idea.”

“Then you are no better than me. We are the same shit, America.”

“Make up your mind. Either I’m a coward or not.”

I crouch and help Lisa to her feet. Her side looks like an oncoming storm, all black and blue with flashes of raw red. Right now I’m useless to her. I’m no doctor. There’s no way of telling if anything is broken, but we have to take the chance that she’s fine and move on.

“Is your baby okay, do you think?”

She shrugs. Does not ask after mine.

“Go,” the Swiss says. “I will not stop you.”

I don’t say anything lest he change his mind.

Map and compass in hand, we limp toward Athens and let the Swiss’s cackles fade first to white noise, then to nothing.

The sky is the flat and constant gray of a paint swatch, but at least it does not rain. Here we are again, Lisa and I. The bike is gone. Our food is gone. Her cane is gone. My knives are gone. The Swiss is gone.

I could have killed him, erased his life like it was nothing more than a smudge. I should have tried. But the sea sipped away my strength, leaving me as empty as a forgotten wineglass. Still, my hands quiver and quake, and no amount of gripping my backpack’s straps will steady them.

If he comes for us again, he’s a dead man.

Holding hands, we trek the Peiraios, the highway that will take us to Athens. Abandoned cars are few. The Greeks must have been courteous enough to die in their homes with their automobiles safely ensconced in their narrow residential streets. We weave between what’s left of the dead. It doesn’t seem respectful to step over them. In my nightmares they grab me, try to grapple me to the ground and take me to where the dead things are.

My dark thoughts ride shotgun all the way to Athens. We should go around, but there is no around to go. Piraeus bleeds into Athens; there is nothing to divide the two cities.

This is the concrete jungle in freeze-frame. Nothing moves except us. We are thieves stealing through a city of dead people, trying to go unnoticed. In plain sight seems like the best place to be. The highway is elevated. No one can approach us in stealth.

We walk until night comes and Athens plunges into darkness. Save for a dot of light up ahead. I describe the scene for Lisa.

“Let’s check it out,” I say.

“I don’t want to go.”

“We’ll sneak up and I’ll see if it’s okay.”

“No.” Hysterical.

“I’ll go alone, then.”

“No, don’t. Stay.”

“Okay. I’ll stay.”

We move closer, because that’s the way the road goes. The dot spreads; we are bugs drawn to its welcoming glow. Lisa tenses until I am walking alongside a violin bow.

Ahead is an optical illusion. The light emanates from a wooded area near enough that I could spit and hit it. It’s to our right and down, down, down.

“We can stay low; I’ll look over the edge.” I nod at the highway’s lip. “We don’t have to get any closer.”

“We’re not going down?”

“No.”

“Okay.”

We do that. We go to the edge, stay low. Only my eyes peek over the solid gray line. What I’m looking at used to be a playground and park. Now it’s growing wild, with nature reasserting its dominance all over the equipment bolted into the ground where children once played. The swings are covered in a tangle of greenery that does not care that steel can’t choke. A waterfall of vine pours down the slide. And in the middle a fire blazes inside a metal trash can wrenched from its original place against the water fountain.

“I can hear fire,” Lisa whispers. “Are there people?”

Sure enough, I hear the crackle, snap, pop of fire eating.

“I don’t know.” We wait for a while but no one comes. Tired of speculating, I steer Lisa along our original path. She seems okay. Exhausted. But I am, too.

Not more than a few dozen feet have passed when I turn and glance over my shoulder. The light is gone.

Slightly south of nowhere it’s raining cats. They fall from the trees like ripe apples. While people put recreation on hold, the forests filled with all the felines who heard the call of the wild and answered.

It’s a couple who’ve “gone bush” in Australia that solve the mystery of the missing cats. They tell it to a reporter over fish and chips and Carlton Draught.

“We got tired of the government telling us to stay home. Home’s where everyone’s dying. So we packed up all our gear and went into the rain forest. Nobody’s sick out there, aye? Anyway, we get to the middle of the fuckin’ bush and what do we see?”

There’s a pause while the reporter coughs.

“Go on, guess. Bet you can’t. It’s all those cats. Thousands of the buggers. Must have been imitating koalas, aye?”

“Were they all dead?”

“Yep. The lot of ’em.”

“Why’d you come back?”

“We figured if the disease went that far, we’d rather die holding a cold beer.”

Reports of the same soon trickle in from the Americas and Europe: dead cats perched in trees until storms shake them from the branches, until gravity pulls them back to the earth. They’ve died from starvation—waiting and watching for reasons unknown.

I think they were hiding from us.

I’m on the train again when Jesse marches up to me, a marionette man in a puffy coat.

“I’m not going to ask if I can sit down because we already know each other and if we were friends you’d ask first. Friends ask friends to sit down. That’s good manners.”

“Have a seat.”

He sits. Same as before. Hands splayed on his thighs, eyes ahead.

“I know you can’t talk to me. My mother explained that to me when I called her. She said you could get into very big trouble and maybe lose your job. ‘Don’t mess with someone’s livelihood’ is what she said, ‘because maybe that woman’s got mouths to feed.’ So I want to give you my business card. Would that be okay?”

“Sure.”

He exhales sharply like he was worried about my answer.

“Okay. I’m going to have to write it out because I haven’t got any printed yet.” His coat whispers and squeaks as he shoves a hand into his pocket and pulls out a sparkly purple pen and note card cut into four equal pieces. On the top piece he writes his name, address, phone number, and e-mail address. “That’s just in case the Internet starts working again. ‘Be hopeful,’ my mom says.” He gives me the card, stashes the rest back in his pocket.

He waits until I’ve slipped the makeshift business card into my purse.

“Do you like cooking?”

“Sure.”

“I like to cook. Last night I made mini pizzas on muffins. I hardly burned them at all.” For the rest of the ride he talks food. I listen and make all the right noises. Because I know what he doesn’t: I’m going to tell him everything. But not here. And when the train ride ends, I tell him so.

THIRTEEN

I have to stay awake. I can’t rest. Not if it means closing my eyes. We’re in a department store. Lisa’s lying on a dais that once held dummies dressed in next season’s fashions. I’m on the floor beside her, legs crossed, elbows pressed into my knees. A band tightens around my head, and as it does, my neck grows weaker and weaker. I have to use my hands just to keep my head from sagging onto my chest.

She’s bleeding. It started during the night: at first a crimson smear, then a slow drip. Now it’s painting a Picasso inside her thighs.

Death waits, but I’m not ready to let it take her. Fuck you, I scream inside my head, because saying it aloud would scare her. She’s the color of blood-drained chicken. Exsanguination, they call it, death by blood loss. I don’t even know how to go about replacing what she’s lost—not in this world.

Lisa knows I’m watching her.

“Don’t worry so much, Zoe. I’m okay.”

She’s not okay. What she is doesn’t even have any of the same letters as okay. She’s bleeding still. At the very least I need to get to a drugstore, find some pads, diapers, antibiotics, anything, but I can’t go without her and I can’t take her with me. I wish the Swiss was still here. I’m glad he’s not. I wish my mother was here, or Jenny, or Nick. I want Nick here. He’d know the right thing to do. She’d be safe with him until I returned with supplies.

“I’m okay,” Lisa repeats. Her words slur together. “Let’s both sleep. Tell me about the place we’re going first.”

“We’re going north to a village called Agria. It’s by the water in a gulf.”

“They play golf?”

“You don’t know what a gulf is?”

“Uh-uh.”

Somewhere between yearning for sleep and berating myself for needing rest, it happens.

I dream of Sam. He’s in a car, the one he died in, his body mangled beyond repair. Blood bubbles between his lips. His mother is there, too, filing her nails.

You can’t save everyone, Sam tells me.

She can try, his mother says.

They argue back and forth while I listen to the steady drip. Gasoline, probably. Maybe blood. After a while I get tired of their banter.

How will I get my Girl Scout badge if I don’t save them all? I ask.

Neither of them has an answer. My former mother-in-law sets her file on the dash, closes her eyes, and quits breathing, just like she’s too stubborn to do anything else but die.

Sam looks at me, smiles a crimson smile.

I would have fallen in love with you, I say. In time.

Stop collecting badges, he tells me. They don’t matter in the end.

Then I wake up and Sam and his mother are gone, and so is Lisa. Only, this time she’s left me a trail. Little red blood droplets lead down the sidewalk, a morbid trail of bread crumbs. They’re a bold and royal red. Fresh.

I follow the trail, try to remember the story of Hansel and Gretel. The birds ate their bread crumbs while the lost and hungry children consumed their fill of the gingerbread house in the woods. But the house was just a ploy, a lure for children who couldn’t resist candy. Witches, the Brothers Grimm told us, liked nothing more than a good leg o’ child for supper. She took Hansel and Gretel captive, then plumped them for the eating. Her reward was a fiery end after being stuffed into her own oven by a gutsy Gretel.

What is Lisa’s gingerbread house? If I find that, I will find her.

The next few drops are smears. I try to think what that means, but my mind is both sleep hazy and scared sharp. I leapfrog conclusions, toss away hypotheses, form new ones that have nothing to do with reality and everything to do with conspiracy theories.

I’m running now, following the crumbs. I need to know where they go. I need to find her. Because I don’t think she’s alone. She can’t be—not without someone to tempt and guide her.

Over and over, I hurl the lash at myself. This is my fault. I fell asleep when I knew I couldn’t afford to. I knew she was hurt, her mind clouded.

This is my fault for walking away from her when she was my responsibility.

Blood. Blood. More blood. All the way up the street, past abandoned tavernas, past shops with no clientele. Some wear shattered windows and battered doors, but most remain untouched, as though humanity just up and walked away from life.

The landscape changes. Retail starts a gentle shift toward car yards hawking vehicles old and new. Most are gone. The rest are scrap metal. Others have tried to take a car, get the hell out of here, and failed. A skeleton hangs from a steering wheel, his or her arm snared by the driver who has rolled the window up to form a fatal trap. The driver is there, too, only sloppier. The other guy has had his body picked clean by predatory birds and overzealous bugs. The driver is a meat sack dressed in rotting rags.

I can’t care about them right now.

Lisa’s blood trail leads me to a squat building with windows made of wire-threaded glass blocks. The sign on the door is all Greek to me. Ha-ha. I can’t even laugh at my own joke. I wind up being sarcastic to myself, a sign that I’m on my way to crazy or already there.

The blood leads here, to this beige building with Greek letters and business hours from 9:00 a.m till 5:00 p.m. on some days of the week that don’t matter. I don’t even know what day this is; they’ve blurred since leaving Brindisi. That was the only date that mattered, and it’s gone.

The smell hits me the moment I lean against the door with my shoulder. It makes a pah sound, like an old, wealthy man sucking a cigar in a casino, holding, holding, then exhaling into the face of his date—the one he bought for too much money, yet doesn’t value. A lungful of institutional air is what I get. Pine that’s never seen a forest, or a cone, mixed with the cat-pee stench of ammonia. It almost, but not quite, covers the bright copper of fresh blood.

My heart clacks on my ribs. Get the hell outta here, it taps in Morse code. But this is like one of those dreams, we’ve all had them, where the Big Bad Wolf is coming right for us but we can’t move for love or bags stuffed full of money.

Clack, clack.

Chairs. Plastic molded chairs, the kind they have at the DMV. They’re set up in a square horseshoe surrounding a table. The laminate is snapping off at the edges so the cheap board underneath peeks through. There’s a counter with frosted glass panels that slide on ball bearings. There’s a bare spot on the wall where a television used to hang.

I want to laugh, because when disaster strikes, people always prioritize by racing for the electronics. Take that, Joneses, they seem to say. We’re just as good now. Which is all well and good, except the Joneses are probably lying in a gutter facedown, rotting. They don’t care about television or toasters that cook eggs and bacon at the same time as their bread. Death is the great demotivator.

Clack, clack.

My feet won’t work. They wriggle inside my boots, ignoring the flurry of messages from my brain.

Clack, clack.

This place, I know it. I don’t want to admit it, but I know. There’s only one kind of place that smells the same the whole world over. It’s like they all get their cleaner from one central warehouse. I know it. I worked with it. The smell is as familiar to me as chocolate chip cookies warm from the oven or Nick’s sunshiny skin when I’d breathe him in as deep as I could take him.

This is a clinic. A medical facility of some flavor. The furnishings give nothing away; the paintings are generic prints of scenery: flower-filled fields, a grazing cow. The Virgin Mary stares down from one wall, also silent as she balances her babe on one knee.

Lisa’s blood is here, too, smeared across the floor. A monochrome rainbow stretching down the hall.

Pine and blood. Copper and autumn.

Clack, clack.

My legs move like they’re new. The joints grind and squeak beneath my skin. But then I realize, no, that noise isn’t me, it’s coming from the other end of the Lisa rainbow, the one that’s hidden around a corner at the end of a hall. It’s the sound of cutlery rattling around a stainless steel sink.

Clack, clack.

Someone thought it was funny to run a line of yellow tiles down the hallway. Lions and tigers and bears— oh my! I follow them, because that’s what lost girls do when they want to find the wizard and get the hell home.

Down the hall. Turn right. Follow the yellow tile that’s orange in places where Lisa’s blood overlaps. A door that isn’t closed, just pushed until a narrow crack of the world beyond is visible. I nudge it with my knee until it swings wide.

Clack, clack, pow.

Lisa is there. At least, I think it’s her. There’s so much blood, I can’t tell what’s what. She’s on the examining table, legs in stirrups, arms flaccid and dangling off the sides. Her head lolls toward me but she does not know I’m here. She won’t know anything again except maybe Hades or God or whichever deity she prayed was real.

Between her legs is another figure, also doused in blood. His clothes are soaked, his blond hair smeared and flecked, all of it a bold and vivid red. Which strikes me as weird, because Lisa is dead and yet her blood still looks like it should be in a living body.

When the Swiss turns, he’s holding her insides in his hands. I don’t know what a uterus looks like except as a line drawing in an anatomy book, but I think that’s what he’s dumping into a metal basin.

He swings around, his eyes wild and blue and stark inside his painted face.

“It should be here,” he mutters. “It should be.”

“What did you do to her?” My throat is numb, my lips feel flabby; it’s a wonder the words come out in any order that makes sense.

He picks through the Lisa-meat with the edge of a scalpel, then looks up at me. “It should be here.”

“What?”

“The fetus!” he screams. He hurls the bowl at the wall. It ricochets and lands at my feet, where the contents spill in a grisly mess. “She was pregnant. There should be a fetus. Where did it go?” He’s still screaming. With every syllable he stabs her, then he drags the scalpel to him, vivisecting her from the waist down. “It is in here and I will find it.” He reaches inside her with both hands until he’s up to his elbows in viscera.

“You killed her,” I say simply.

He shakes his head so vigorously, his drenched hair flicks dots on the wall. “No, no, no. She killed herself. She laid down for the father. She got pregnant. She sucked my cock while pregnant with another man’s child. She came willingly while you slept. ‘Help me,’ she begged. Who am I to refuse aid? I have assisted many such women.”

“You killed her.”

“I… did… not… kill… her!” he roars. His body shakes with the anger but he does not look at me. “Where is it? Where did she hide it?” He whirls around. “You took it, didn’t you?”

I don’t understand. Lisa was pregnant. He said she was. All that morning sickness, no evidence of White Horse. If not that… then what?

Tears roll down my face. I wipe them away with the back of my hand.

“Look what you did to her, you monster,” I say. “She was a human being. Just a girl. What’s wrong with you, you crazy fuck? You’re like one of those insane women in the newspapers, the ones who cut open a pregnant woman and steal her child. You’re a crazy woman, not a man.”

This enrages him. Between the blood and the twisting of his face, he’s a portrait of insanity and he’s racing toward me, scalpel in his hand, covered in more blood than I’ve ever seen in my life. He is a ruby gleaming under the dead fluorescent bulb.

I run. He follows. We slip and slide down the hall on Lisa’s blood. Two stooges. The Swiss lunges for me, but I jump right while he keeps going straight. I snatch up one of the plastic chairs. The symmetry isn’t lost on me. I’ve done this before: used a chair to save myself.

When he realizes he’s missed, that I’m not in front of him, he turns. That’s when I smash him in the face.

Oh, I think. That stings. I can’t figure out why I’m the one who hurts when I hit him.

Then I look down and see the correlation between the pain and the scalpel jutting from my arm.

Holding his face with one hand, the Swiss staggers toward me as though his soles were dipped in molasses.

“I will cut you.” His voice is thickened by broken lips. “And I will show you.”

My baby. Please, not my baby.

A switch flips inside my brain. I will never let that happen. He’s killed Lisa and that’s as much as he will ever take from me. He’s got it all wrong. If he kills me, I’m taking him, too. I dredge up as much spit as I can and launch it at his face.

I imagine my father’s look of disapproval, but he’s dead. I can hear my mother’s lecture about things ladies should never do. But she’s dead, too. It’s just me and him, and I figure my folks would be okay under the circumstances.

“I am going to cut you.” His voice crackles like wrapping paper.

I run.

“Come with me,” Jenny says one Thursday afternoon when we meet on the library steps. She’s in her red coat, a camel scarf wound around her neck. My outfit is similar, but black.

“To see my therapist, I mean.”

I look at her like she’s lost her mind, which makes it a very lucky thing that she’s in therapy. When I tell her that, she laughs.

“You’d like her. Lena is fantastic.”

My shoulders slump slightly. Somewhere at the back of my mind the possibility lurked that Nick was her therapist.

“I don’t think so.”

“It would help me.”

“How?”

“Lena says I have unresolved issues about abandonment that stem from childhood. She feels that meeting you will paint a better picture. So?”

“No. When were you abandoned, anyway?”

She’s huffy when we go inside, her shoulders tense, her chin high. She doesn’t look at me save for the occasional glare delivered sideways.

We follow the drill. Inch our way forward. Try to steel ourselves when we hear the inevitable anguished bursting of battered hearts.

Our turn arrives too soon and not soon enough. I see it before Jenny. Mark’s name leaps off the page. My arm goes around her, I try to steer her out of there before she sees.

“Jenny, let’s go.”

But it’s too late, she’s seen his name. Mark D. Nugent. There’s no way for her to unsee. She’ll lie in bed, close her eyes, and that string of letters will come at her out of the darkness. Tonight. Tomorrow. All the days after. The pain strikes me, too —less of course, but there’s no time for me to feel it; I need to get Jenny out of here.

She sags against me, moans.

I walk her to her car, drive her to the only place I know to go: home. When I pull into our parents’ driveway, the pitted lawn and the ragged garden that our parents normally keep so beautifully don’t register. Times are anomalous, so unusual things no longer surprise me as they once did. Our mother is slow to come to the door.

We are portraits of the same woman: grief, determination, and, thirty years later, surprise.

“What’s wrong?” she asks, but the answer comes to her as quickly as the question forms. She presses a hand to her chest. “It’s Mark, isn’t it? Oh my.” She’s in her nightie, the latest in a long line of floor-length garments designed to prevent me from having a good time, our father used to joke. She closes the door behind us and seals us in the furnace. It has to be eighty-five degrees in here, easy.

“Mom, is everything okay?”

“Fine, fine,” she says, and I know that means it’s not. She takes over, doing the things a mom always does. She steers Jenny to the cabbage rose sofa, sits her down like she’s a small child again, and pulls my sister into her arms and rocks her.

Jenny needs her mother now. No, Jenny needs Mark, but he can’t be here. He won’t be here ever again. We’re all just meat puppets with an invisible hand inside us, making us dance and live. When that hand slips off the glove, we collapse and that is the end of everything.

I go into the kitchen, fill the electric kettle, then go in search of Dad. From room to room I wander. I check the garage. It’s the same as it always is. There’s a table set up in the center with a half-finished project taking shape. The pile of wood pieces look like they’ll grow up to be a clock.

Then I make for the basement. You won’t find it behind a door in the hall. There’s no rickety staircase descending into darkness, with a bare swinging bulb to light the way. The way to this basement is through a cupboard in the bathroom. It’s a trapdoor in the floor with a ladder attached. Usually it’s open unless company comes over. No one likes to imagine a head popping up through that hole while they’re flipping through the magazine rack beside the toilet.

Today it’s closed. But that’s not what worries me. What makes my heart thump so hard my mother’s cooing in the other room dims to a whisper is the brass bolt locking the wood flap to the floor. There are new hinges, too. They’re the same shiny metal as the bolt. That shouldn’t worry me, either, except the trapdoor used to lie flush with the floor all the way around, and now the hinges jut at perfect right angles. Outside.

“Hiya, Pumpernickel.”

I slip right out of my body, crash into the ceiling, then glide right back in, sliding on a spiritual banana peel. My father is here, not down in the basement locked in like—

A monster.

—a prisoner. And he looks great. His eyes sparkle with suppressed punch lines.

“You scared the crap out of me, Dad.”

“Then you’re in the right room, aren’t you?”

We hug.

“What’s wrong with your sister?” he says into my hair.

My eyes are rapid-filling cisterns.

“Mark,” he says in a voice too jovial for this conversation.

He marches into the living room, pulling me in his wake even though I don’t want to hear what comes next, because I know something isn’t right; Dad doesn’t look great, he looks young. He’s ten years older than Mom but now he’s fifteen years her junior.

“Jenny, my girl,” he says. “Let’s celebrate. He was never any good for you anyway. So he’s dead, so what? Now you can find another one. One with a real job. A man’s job. Not that sissy sit-behind-a-computer shit he liked so much.” On and on he rambles while Jenny stares at him in horror. I’m wearing the same expression. But Mom isn’t.

Her gaze meets mine, weary with resignation. She knows this isn’t right, that something’s seriously wrong with Dad, and yet she doesn’t intervene.

“Turn up the heat, would you?” Dad thunders, and she scurries to accommodate him.

The air thickens. The heat isn’t flowing just from the vents but also from him. There’s a fire raging inside his body. I can almost see the steam rising from his pores. The air around him shimmers. He’s a sidewalk in summer.

“Dad,” I say. “That’s not—”

“Zoe,” Mom says.

“Why’s the basement locked?” I ask her.

Dad doesn’t stop the flow.

“He was worthless. I never wanted you to marry him, if you remember. ‘Jenny,’ I said—remember this?—‘are you sure you want to do this?’ You were so young, only twenty-two, a baby. You should have lived your life first, done some things, then settled down. Trust me, it’s a good thing Mark is dead, because now you can live.”

I press on. “What’s in the basement, Mom?”

“Nothing,” she says. “We’ve had raccoons.”

“Bullshit. This is the city. We don’t have raccoons.”

Dad wheels around. “Don’t talk to your mother like that!” he screams.

I recoil. One hand—that’s all I’d need to count the number of times he’s snapped at me. He loved Mark. Treated him like a son. This is not my father.

“It’s good that he’s dead!” he shrieks at Jenny. “It’s good.”

He flops on the ground, body shaking like James did. Only James’s body wasn’t a griddle.

“Get ice,” I bark at my mother. She runs in that nightie, hand at her throat clutching the ruffles closed, not to the kitchen like I expect, but to the basement. Jenny sits on the couch, eyes the size of dinner plates. First her husband, now her father. I slap her. Her eyes focus.

“Call 911.”

She hurries for the phone, dials, waits. “They’re not answering.” Not even a tin lady.

“Keep trying.”

Mom rushes in with a plastic bucket, shoves me aside, upends the contents onto Dad’s chest. Ice cubes. Some sizzle on contact, the steam rising off him in a dense, wet cloud. A one-man sauna. She takes the phone from Jenny’s hands, gently places it back in its cradle.

“They won’t come. They never do. They don’t bother answering anymore.”

My father starts to moan. His eyelids flutter. The seizing stops and soon the ice cubes melt no more.

Jenny stares at him in horror. “What’s wrong with him?”

I look at my mother. See her fate in her resignation.

“Has he been sick? Have you?”

“Yes,” she whispers. “You girls have to go. As a mother, that’s the best I can do for you both.” She kisses my sister’s forehead. “I’m sorry about Mark. We loved him very much.”

I can’t leave without knowing. “What’s in the basement?”

Her voice drops so Jenny doesn’t hear. “That’s where we’ll go. When it’s too late. We have a pact with some of the neighbors, to… to help each other.”

I hold her tight, tell her I love her, and repeat the exercise for my father.

To my old room is where I want to run, not out into the cold with my grieving, shell-shocked sister. To my room where the covers have powers to protect me from the bogeyman. To my old room, where my parents are young and whole and my sister is a pain in my ass. To my old room, where death was just a word in my Merriam-Webster dictionary.

The streets of Athens limp by. I wish the sidewalks were filled with people who’d conceal me with their bodies and banter, and yet I can move more freely with empty streets; I am divided by my loyalties. The scalpel is rooted in my arm, and I can’t remember if I’m supposed to pull a blade or leave it until help comes. But help isn’t coming—only the Swiss. So I tug it free and hide it in my pocket like a dirty little secret. A red carpet rolls the length of my arm. I need a place; I need a place now to stop it unraveling further.

Refuge is a warehouse. Gallon cans of olive oil stacked ten feet high create a shield from the world. And still he finds me like I knew he would.

“I know you are there, America. I see your blood. Is the scalpel still inside you? I believe it is. Are you bleeding faster now? I know how to hurt a person, America. I know how to kill. Can you say the same?” His voice lowers, and I know he has crouched or sat on the other side of the cans. His voice comes from my level. “There was no baby in her. I believed there was, but I was wrong. But I found something. Do you want to know what I found? Maybe it’s inside you, too. Do you want to know? You are a curious person; I sense all your questions. Even now you are burning to know: What did he find inside the stupid girl?”

Black spots mar my vision like a fungus as I slide the belt from my hips and yank it tight around my arm. They sprawl, contract, disappear, and new replace the old. My eyes are a kaleidoscope through which I can barely see. Is this what dying looks like?

“Talk to me, America. Ask me what I found, what was inside her.”

His voice comes from further away now, but I know he hasn’t moved. It’s me. I’m drifting away.

“I don’t care.”

I don’t realize I’ve said it aloud until he laughs.

“Of course you care. All you do is care. Why else bring that stupid girl with you? What is she to you?”

I speak through gritted teeth. “Just a girl.”

“No, I don’t think so. I know people, America. I know people do things for reasons that they do not always understand. She told me how you took her from the farm, away from her family. Why would you do such a thing? Shall I guess?”

“Fuck you.”

“When you are a doctor, you see many different people. The women I saw always had a story for why they were in my office. Some, they wanted medicine for birth control. Some wanted an abortion. Some wanted tests for disease. All wanted me to say, ‘It is okay.’ Validation for their actions. Absolution for their sins. Redemption. Who were you trying to save, America? Not that girl. She was nobody to you. A surrogate.”

Jesse. My parents. Everybody.

I close my eyes, hope the names remain in my head. Reality is shifting out now and something new is moving in furniture. The black spots metastasize—from my eyes to my neural pathways.

“Who were you trying to save, America? A sister, perhaps? Your family. A husband? No. No husband. No ring on your skinny finger.”

Jenny. Nick. My parents. Am I trying to save someone? Is that what I am? Some kind of wannabe hero? I don’t feel like a hero. I just feel scared. For my child. For my future, which looks to be about five minutes long; maybe fewer.

“That stupid English girl killed herself. You helped her.”

“I don’t understand.” My tongue grows thick, my words slide into one another.

“Ask me what I found inside her.”

“I’m tired of your games. Just tell me.”

Skidding, scraping. Metal on concrete. Death touches my leg and I jerk, but already my fingers are reaching for it. I know what it is. I know what it is before my fingers slide along the tight curves that make up the slick, shiny helix. The cold comes for me, arms open wide. Let me take you, it whispers. Let me take you to a place where nothing can ever touch you, where you’ll never feel again. We’re all dead and soulless there.

“You know this thing, don’t you, America?”

“Yes.”

“How? Tell me.”

“I gave it to her. So she could protect herself.”

“You provided her with the means to rip out what she believed was inside her. She pushed it through her cervix, as though her womb was a bottle of cheap wine.” Satisfied. Smiling. “Are you shocked?”

“Is that what was inside her?”

“No. She was clutching this thing in her hand as though it was precious to her when I found her. Happy. This is what the foolish girl wanted. If you are shocked, you are as big a fool as she.”

“I couldn’t save her. I can’t even save myself. I’m not a hero.”

“No, you are not. I could have saved her. I am the hero. I am trying to save the world from the abomination its sins have produced.”

A chuckle bubbles out of my mouth. “You?”

“I am a hero. You are nothing. What do you try to save? One stupid, blind girl. My goals are much bigger. More important. They will benefit the world. I will kill the monsters man created.”

My eyes close. The here and now is greased rope slipping through my fingers. “Why do you give a shit about me, then? I’m nobody. Just a cleaner.”

“Not just a cleaner. You worked at Pope Pharmaceuticals. Which means you belonged to George Pope.”

FOURTEEN

Beep.

“Mom? Dad? If you’re there, pick up. Please.”

Pause.

“Jenny and I are fine. Neither of us are sick. Just so you know. I… we miss you.”

Beep.

It could be the dead of winter except there’s no snow. Yet. God knows, the air is cold enough to hold a flake to its unique form. The library is still aglow, but the watch on my wrist tells me it won’t be long. I can’t stay out late. Jenny is holed up in my apartment, eating a pint of mint chocolate chip ice cream.

“Is that all they had?” she asked when I jubilantly waved the carton at her. “I wanted rum raisin or cookie dough.”

The ice cream had cost me twenty bucks. Twenty. That was all they’d had at the drugstore unless I wanted their store brand for twelve. And that’s more air than cream.

One week since Jenny lost Mark and we discovered our parents were lost to us both. I call and call and no one answers. The phone system is dying. Calls ring off into nowhere more frequently now.

I still come here every day—without Jenny. I look for Nick’s name and hope I don’t see it. Usually I come straight after work, but today Jenny called in tears.

“Can you believe this?” she asked when I let myself in the door. She’d had the television on, old episodes of some soap because they weren’t making any new ones. “He died in a plane crash before she could tell him she was pregnant with twins.” Then she started sobbing. “Mark and I were going to try for a baby this year. Then he had to go and die, just like Julian.”

“Who’s Julian?” I’d asked.

“On the show.”

So I’m late to the library because of a soap opera.

The head librarian looks up as I walk in. She’s a cliché right down to the glasses performing a balancing act on the end of her snip nose. She’s the only librarian now, aside from a young grad student who prowls the aisles with his metal cart. It looks like it should rattle, but it doesn’t: the wheels are greased into submissive silence. She nods at the round metal clock hanging on the wall like I should be aware that the doors will be locking at any moment. I nod back, to let her know that, yes, I’m aware of the impending closure. Not quite satisfied, she turns back to her work.

The list is up. The crowd has long petered out except for the lone figure standing, legs akimbo, inches from the wall. My heart accelerates. I know the lines of that body. Many a time I admired them across a coffee table, skimmed them in my fantasies. He seems taller to me now, but I’m not sure if that’s because I haven’t seen him for a while or because he’s become almost mythical in my mind these past months. Larger than my tiny life.

Then he turns….

Oh God, he’ll see me. Not now. Not like this. I’m wearing graying underwear and no makeup. Did I shave my legs? No. There was no need. I am Sasquatch and he is magnificent.

His face is stone. Granite. Marble. Is there something harder? I don’t know, but the hardest rock is what I’m seeing. He’s Nick, if Nick had been carved from the sheer side of a mountain instead of flesh.

“Dr. Rose.”

The words come out stiff, formal. He told me to use his first name but I can’t. Dr. Rose implies there is a wall between us—me safely ensconced on one side, him on the other.

“Hello, Zoe. Are you looking for someone?”

You. “A friend.”

He nods, glances over his shoulder at the list, then returns to me. “I hope you don’t find them there.”

“Who were you looking for?”

Across the invisible wall. “My brother, Theo.”

“I hope you didn’t find him.”

“Stay well, Zoe.” He walks away and I watch him leave without saying another word, my arms dangling helplessly at my sides. Something about the way he moves is altered. There’s a slight hitch—a limp, I guess you’d call it—on his right side. How did it happen? I want to know. But it’s too late, he’s gone, and I’m stuck to the ground like I’m trapped in one of my own nightmares. I could call him back, make him tell me, but my mouth won’t work, either.

Nick is alive. That’s good. That’s all I need to know. That’s all I wanted to know, right? I repeat the words: Nick is alive and that’s what matters in this very moment.

Behind me, the librarian clears her throat disapprovingly. Dusty phlegm breaks the spell and I spring forward, study the list just so the librarian doesn’t berate me further. I scan the list, double-check for Nick’s name, just in case his being here was some kind of delusion. But no, he’s not on the list.

But another name is: Theodore Rose.

I bolt out the door, into the freeze, glancing frantically each way. But night has claimed all but the faintest halo from each streetlight, and Nick is lost to me.

Beep.

“Hello? Mom? Dad?”

The tape whirs onward.

Beep.

The Pope Pharmaceuticals lobby is no place for a receptionist. No ringing phones, no vendors buzzing through, no public left in public relations. If we still had one, she’d be filing her nails, flipping through magazines, sipping coffee.

I ride the elevator to my floor. Steel cables whine through pulleys, the brakes bump and grind to a halt. I never knew how loud my world was until there was no one to fill it. The locker rooms are empty. My every move is amplified until I sound like a multiarmed woman running the whole percussion section of a symphony. I clean, just like on every other day. I vacuum, mop, empty the trash into the designated chutes. Some lead to a furnace that belches and bellows in the basement. Others go some place I’m not privy to. And that bothers me when once I didn’t care.

The mice are all gone. Their cage doors sag on bent hinges.

“Did they die?” I ask Schultz. He’s hunched over a microscope, peering at slides.

He sniffs, swipes his dripping nostrils with the back of his hand. “I got hungry.”

I stare at him, wait for him to crack, wait for the punch line. There’s always a punch line. Right?

“You ate the mice?”

“I didn’t have change for the vending machine, okay?”

Every day we work in the same spaces and I can’t read him.

“You ever see Demolition Man?”

“Sure,” I say, “I saw it.”

His head pumps up and down. “They’re not so bad. Better than what’s in the cafeteria.”

There’s nothing in the cafeteria, now. We’re all brown-bagging it. I have no words. No, that’s a lie. I have two: I quit.

I say good-bye, try to leave, but he waves me over. “Lookit this.” Leaning to one side, he makes enough room that I can stand beside him and peer into the lens. Blobs and squiggles swimming on a green sea. Pretty. Alien. Terrifying in its otherness.

“What is it?”

“Opportunistic wanton neoplasm.”

“Neoplasm—you mean like cancer?”

“Aha. Not just any cancer. This one has a mind of its own, goes where it pleases. you never know what you’re going to get with OWN.” He laughs, snorts. “OWN. I wish I’d thought of that.” He snaps his fingers at me. “You get a dose of this and you get OWNed.” He takes in my blank look. “It’s hacker slang, meaning you take some of this and it’s taking over your body.”

“Is that what you’ve been giving the mice?”

“It’s not like people are lining up to volunteer.”

I remember the flu shot Dr. Scott gave me, and I wonder if I’ve been OWNed.

That afternoon I hand in my two weeks’ notice. When I get home I call Jesse and give him his story, because some things are bigger than a nondisclosure agreement.

“But it’s freezing,” Jenny complains a week later. She’s regressed. I have become both parent and sister to a petulant teenager.

“Fine, you cook breakfast.”

She hesitates, weighs the situation, because she knows she asked me to make Mom’s pancake recipe, so I’m already doing her a favor. With a sigh that comes all the way from her feet, she snatches up the quarters I laid out on the counter, shrugs into her coat, winds a scarf around her neck, and slams the door so hard the frame shivers.

It’s no big thing, just the newspaper. You know, the newspaper that should contain Jesse’s article. The one that would make him different-good to his disapproving father. I need to know what he’s written. Every day I’ve been down at that newspaper dispenser, depositing my quarters, flicking aside the pages of the United States Times with no result. The paper is slimmer each day. Stories dwindle with the population.

One at a time, the pancakes turn that perfect pale gold. Soon I have two neat stacks that want to be eaten. Jenny isn’t back. The way she’s been acting, she should have been flouncing in by now, complaining of the cold. I experience a shiver that has nothing to do with the weather.

Porkchop, the day doorman, is in the lobby peering through the glass. There’s a mouth-sized patch of mist on the glass below his nose. I think he’ll turn when my footsteps tap across the floor, but he keeps on staring through the door.

He grunts when I ask him about Jenny.

“Saw her leave, but she hasn’t come back yet. She stomped on through here with her nose in the air.” He looks abashed. “Sorry, ma’am, I know she’s your sister.”

“What’s going on?”

“Don’t rightly know. There was a noise but I don’t see anything.”

I inch up to the glass door beside him, peer through. The world outside my window is dead. A ghost town. Light wind rolls suburban tumbleweed down the street. The United States Times. There is no other.

Cold seeps through the windows, absconds with the heat.

Porkchop clears his throat. “Friday’s my last day. This place can’t support two doormen with just five apartments being occupied. Can’t support one. Don’t know if Mo said anything, but he’s a goner, too.”

A plastic bag rolls by. The letters have faded to yellow. When Porkchop’s words register, I can’t believe what I’m hearing. “Just five?”

“Uh-huh. Herb Crenshaw passed couple of days ago. His wife last week. Their son’s over in India or someplace they wear bandages on their heads. The way the news is, I doubt the kid even knows yet. Hell, could be he’s dead, too.”

He leans forward until his nose presses against the glass.

“Huh, look at that. Someone lost their scarf. Dim days, Miss Marshall. Dim days indeed. And they’re only getting darker. Those scientists did something to the weather, because this ain’t right. We’ve been playing God and now God’s having His fun with us.” His mouth keeps on flapping, but his words fade to static, because that scarf—I know that scarf. Last time I saw it, Jenny was winding it around her neck, tucking the ends into her coat.

“Miss Marshall? You okay?”

No, I’m not.

Maybe I shove him out of the way, or maybe he steps aside. Later on, when I think about it, I can’t remember how it happened. One way or another, I push through that door to where the arctic wind bites my face. I go right, because that’s the direction from which the scarf blew. I go right, because that’s where the newspaper dispensers are. I don’t have far to go.

There’s a heap on the ground wearing Jenny’s coat and I hope it’s not her, that some homeless person stole her clothes. But what are the odds they’d have her same hair?

Oh God… I can’t take this. I can’t. Mom and Dad are bad enough, but losing this other part of me is something I cannot bear. I don’t have strength enough to hold this hurt.

“Jenny,” I whimper. “Jenny? Get up. Please, get up.”

She doesn’t. She just lies there in a dead heap, the red circle on her forehead signaling that this is The End of sisterhood. I am orphaned in every way.

“Jenny?” I kneel in her bloody halo, lift her head and cradle it in my lap. I try but I can’t scoop her brains back into her head. I keep trying, but the hole is too wide and the pink stew pours out faster than I can ladle it back in.

My mind cracks like the jar when I beat it with the hammer.

Fractured thoughts from a madwoman’s head. I can’t believe she did this to me. How dare she leave me alone? My sister deserted me. Fuck you, bitch. Fuck you for not just coming down here when I asked the first time.

Fuck you. My balled-up fists press into my brow bone. Her head is heavy in my lap like a cantaloupe. There’s a growing ache in my head that won’t quit. Fuck you, Jenny.

“You idiot!” I scream. “We were always supposed to be there for each other! I wasn’t looking out for you so you could die, too!”

I keep yelling, pelt her with my anger. Then there are voices, and a moment later hands and arms grabbing me, pulling me away from Jenny.

“No, no, no. That’s my sister.”

“Go look for the shooter,” someone says.

“Leave us alone,” I cry. “I’ve got no one else.”

But the hands don’t care; they just keep tugging me further away from what’s left of my family.

Why would anyone shoot Jenny?

I am staring down the barrel of a long, dark channel. The light at the other end rushes toward me as the passage compresses, then telescopes to some unfathomable distance. Time and space shift. Rationally, I know I’m still sitting in that warehouse, separated from the Swiss by olive oil. Knowing that doesn’t make the tunnel feel any less real. Is this what it’s like to die? Is everyone I’ve lost waiting for me at the other end? Have they forgiven me? Do they still care for me like I care for them?

“George Pope? Why do you care about him? He’s dead.”

His voice is jubilant. “Is he? Good. I do hope it was painful. Do you know?”

“Know what?”

“Did he die in great pain? Was it this disease that took his life—this disease he helped create?”

“No,” I say. “It was quick.”

“How quick?”

“Tell me what you found inside Lisa.”

“I found nothing inside her. Nothing. Her womb was empty. Yours is, too.”

Who knew the sun could be so cold? Its brittle glare paints my face, filtered through murky glass. I am in a plain room with a stained wood door, no bars, but that doesn’t mean this isn’t a cell. Iron does not make this a prison.

“I need a newspaper,” I tell the woman who brings my lunch.

The tray lands on the table with a clatter. The table barely registers; it’s fastened to the wall with bolts big enough to withstand a nuclear attack. Everything else could vaporize, but they’d be here, too stubborn to quit biting the concrete blocks.

“This ain’t no Holiday Inn,” she says.

“Gosh, I hadn’t noticed.”

She lumbers away, back to her food cart. It’s a tall, thin insulated box in beige, which makes me think it fell off the back of an airplane. This whole place is filled with things borrowed, begged for, or stripped from institutions.

The food, however, is five-star. There’s no Jell-O salad and brown slush with graying chunks of meat on the plastic plates. Instead what we have is homemade ravioli filled with ricotta and spinach, tossed in a browned butter sauce. There’s a small bowl of salad greens, crisp and fresh and tangy with a vinaigrette that knows nothing about plastic bottles. And fruit salad with delicate bites of fruits the local supermarket doesn’t stock.

They brought me here after Jenny was killed. For observation, the woman in uniform said. Military. Somewhere along the way the president declared martial law and nobody bothered to let people know. They patrol the streets, watching, waiting for someone to cause a ruckus, which I did. They saw that. They pulled me away from my sister. But they can’t tell me who shot her or why. I don’t get that. When I ask, they keep telling me they don’t know. “Do you think I did it?” I ask them repeatedly. “We don’t know.” They’ve gone from being An Army of One to being an army of We Don’t Know.

There are footsteps. Combat boots with a woman’s light foot shoved inside.

“Zoe Marshall?” The dark-skinned woman’s voice is larger than her body. She’s a Pez dispenser in fatigues, holding a clipboard and cup of coffee. She gives me the coffee.

I nod, because who else would I be?

“Sergeant Tara Morris. You can go. But I want you back here tomorrow to see the shrink.”

“Back here? I don’t even know where here is.”

She reels off the address.

“That used to be a private school.”

“Not anymore. We’re a low-security halfway house of sorts. We help people. At least until…”

“Everyone comes back to life?” I rub my forehead, wonder why it’s hole-free when my sister can’t say the same. “Did you find out who killed Jenny?”

“No. I’m sorry. It’s not good enough, but that’s all I’ve got,” she tells me. “We’re a militia at best, not a police force. You’re not in any trouble, so you can go home.”

“Then why the locked doors?”

“You were kicking my men. How do you think that looked?”

I close my eyes. “Like some asshole had just shot my sister and they were trying to drag me away from her.”

“It looked bad,” she says. “Real bad. You could’ve been sick, crazy, maybe, or a delinquent. I have to keep my people safe.”

“She was all I had left. Our parents—”

Schultz hunched over the microscope. “I ate the mice.”

“Try and see from our side, would you? We’re seeing the worst of everyone. Jumping to the wrong conclusion is going to keep us alive. If we assume everyone’s a friend, we could lose more people, and that’s not acceptable.”

“Where’s my sister?”

“We burned her. We’ve got more dead than we know what to do with.” For a moment she looks scared. “We’re dying in droves. Not just us. Everybody.”

Not just us. Everybody.

I take a cab back to my apartment. The cabdriver wears one of those flimsy protective masks. He takes my money with a gloved hand, eyeing the note suspiciously. I half expect him to spray it down with disinfectant, but greed wins out and he stuffs it in his pocket.

“I work for myself now,” he mutters as I watch the bill disappear. “No one to be accountable to out there.”

Porkchop is gone already, so I let myself in with my key, ride the elevator, listen to the lonely hum that seems to chew up the available air and leaves me covered in a thin sheen of cold sweat. I am a robot performing the door-opening routine. The shards and bones I took from the box those weeks ago are still in the plastic Baggie. I cram them into my pocket and leave again.

Pope Pharmaceuticals considers you part of the family.

No one stops me. The lone security guard grunts as I show him my ID card. He doesn’t look me in the eye, nor do I look into his. We both know why. We’re here when so many aren’t. That’s not a badge of honor, just a sign of otherness.

The lab where there used to be mice is empty. Schultz’s usual seat is pushed away from the bench. The microscope is an old man hunched over a glass-covered lap.

Time is ticking. I do what I’ve seen them do before, or at least a bastardized version of that process. I scrape the bones onto a slide, shove them onto the microscope’s waiting arms.

“What are you doing?”

The voice is inhuman, but the face is still Schultz. He lurches toward me. “You can’t do that.”

“I thought you were—”

“Dead?” He laughs. “This is a hard-core game, man. I’m holding on to the end, otherwise I’m gone for good. We don’t come back. Dust. That’s where we go. So whaddaya have for me?”

He reaches for the slide. When I pull away he feints, and without thinking I move the other way, leaving him free to snatch my prize.

He shoves it into place under the microscope’s all-seeing eye.

“Suh-weet,” he says. “Look.”

Deep breath. Press eyepiece into socket.

And I see it: the disease.

Noises live inside the phone, now that have nothing to do with dial tones.

Something waits and listens. For what, I don’t know.

“Hello,” I whisper.

Hello.

FIFTEEN

The scientific community has been busy while people die. But they’ve been confounded until now. And from the way this mouthpiece scratches his thinning hair, I’d say there’s still a measure of uncertainty. He doesn’t believe his words, but neither is he convinced they’re false.

He stands there on his podium, a half dozen microphones shoved under his mouth to catch his words like some electronic bib, and tells us that we’re dying of some viral form of cancer.

You got OWNed.

What he doesn’t say is how we got it. When a journalist from CNN asks, he wipes his nose with the back of his hand and mumbles about how maybe it’s something common that mutated into this mass killer. Like the 1918 Spanish flu that mutated from a killer of the weak to a slayer of vigor during its second wave.

But I know. I know. This all began with a man named George P. Pope.

That thought fills me with fear.

This time when I call the CDC, a sound file asks me to leave my name, number, and reason for calling. They’re busy, it says, they’ll get to me. But for now I have to blow my whistle in a virtual queue.

The week dribbles by.

Every day I listen to the elevator rattle to the bottom floor. When the doors open I say, “Good morning, Porkchop,” because it makes me feel better to imagine he’s still there. I don’t drop quarters in the dispenser now: it opens freely. I take a paper, try not to notice the faint Jenny stain on the concrete.

Upstairs I go, not bothering to set my apartment alarm. It’s pointless. There’s no one to call and verify that I’m me. The newspaper goes in a pile. War, more war, and mass death fill the front pages now. The secret is out. People finally noticed everyone they know is sick or dead. The other pages are thin on content and advertisement-free. Even the funeral home ads have tapered off, their employees buried in their own coffins.

I lie on the couch. I wait for death, or something like it, to pound on the door and make me an offer I don’t have enough heart to refuse.

On a day I suspect is a Friday, knuckles strike my door. My body rolls off the couch, staggers to the peephole.

“You gonna let me in?”

Sergeant Morris.

“No.”

“Then I’m gonna have to kick your door in, and I’m really not in the mood for door kicking today. It’s been a shit night and I lost two people. So, how about you let me in?”

She strolls in on pipe cleaner legs, carrying body bags under her eyes.

“You gotta see the shrink,” she says. “We agreed on that.”

“You look like shit.”

“Nice place. How long you think it’s gonna hold?”

“‘Hold’?”

She helps herself to my couch, leans back, eyes wide open like they’re propped open with toothpicks. “We’ve got three kinds of people out there that we’ve been seeing. Dead people. They’re the biggest group. We’re burning them now. It’s for the best. Otherwise they stink and rot. We load them into the wagons and drive them to the public pool at the YMCA. The outdoor one. We drained it couple of months ago. Turns out it’s the perfect place to burn corpses. Community bonfire.”

She laughs.

At first I’m horrified: How can she be laughing at burning bodies piled into a community pool? How can she joke about that? It’s a tragedy. Horror. There is no comedy in that scenario. Then I see it: the funny. The absurdity. And I laugh, too. The mental image of all those people, some in their designer suits, people who used to walk around like they were more important than the swarm; regular people I’d pass in the supermarket who minded their own business just like me; people from work; people living completely different lives, all of them heaped into that concrete shell and doused in—

“What do you use for accelerant?”

“Gasoline,” she says between outbursts. “It’s free now. We just take what we need.”

—gasoline, going up in flames, is hilarious. “I thought you quit smoking.” “I did, until the plague got me and I died. I figured I got nothing to lose now.” It’s like July Fourth, with real baby-back ribs—and grownup ribs, too. And I can’t stop. The volcano is erupting and my laughter flows down its sides in great fiery rivers. Burning people. In the community pool.

We laugh until we’re doubled over. And then something changes and the horror comes back and we start to cry.

“This is fucking bullshit,” she says, “I’m a soldier. Soldiers don’t cry, especially if they’ve got tits. It’s hard enough as it is.”

“The other two types?” When she squints, trying to figure out what I’m talking about, I remind her she said we were down to three types of people, and the dead ones were just the first.

“Two more types, right. You and me, the living. The ones who aren’t sick. For whatever reason, we’re the lucky ones who seem to be immune to this thing. Or unlucky, maybe. I haven’t decided yet.” She sits up straight, stares at the TV. The president is giving a press conference with what’s left of the press. “And the others.”

“‘The others’?”

“Come on, you have to have seen them. The ones who got sick but didn’t die. At least, not straightaway.”

I think about Mike Schultz eating the mice. One day he was sick, the next he was supplementing his diet with test subjects. I think about my father and his Mr. Hyde routine. There’s no way I can twist that to make it sound normal.

“I’ve seen some. How bad is it?”

She nods at the TV, reaches for the remote.

“Human beings are no longer compatible with life.”

These words are heard around the nation. Heads turn like sun-flowers to the sun. A split second after the gasping chorus sweeps the crowd, the president of the United States realizes his microphone is not turned off.

We watch his eyes widen, his mouth sag, as he takes in the truth, and now everybody left knows our leader has no faith in any of us.

He clutches his face. He is Edvard Munch’s Scream.

Sergeant Morris buries her face in her hands—that’s how bad it is. “I always thought I was a survivor, but now I’m not so sure that’s a good thing. I wish I knew…”

“Knew what?”

“How this shit all went down. How it began. The war, the disease, everything. I wish I had a neck to crush. Maybe that’d make me feel better about all this. Barring that, I wish we had the things we need. First sign of trouble, everything got looted. Drugstores first.”

“And electronics.”

“I know, right? World turns to shit and people steal big-screen TVs. Like that’s gonna save them.”

The world is broken, its contents smithereens. Therapy won’t change anything. I don’t want to sit around and talk about how I feel about losing everyone. I don’t want to shred my psyche to pulled pork, then pick through the strands looking for that moment when I began to fail everyone I loved. I don’t want to lie here on this couch and wait for the end of all things. And it’s coming, the end; the president knows it, the woman next to me knows it, and I know it. The end is coming. I don’t know if this is Armageddon, because there’s a distinct lack of religious people shaking their fists and yelling, “We were right! We told you so!” There’s no leader stepping forward to pull us together and stamp bar codes on our foreheads. If there’s a beast, we’re it. My religious studies have fallen far from the wayside, but I’m sure that possibility wasn’t accounted for: man as his own Antichrist.

A thin stream of air seeps from my lungs. “I’m not going to see your shrink.”

“I can compel you.” No conviction in her voice—just deep-boned weariness.

“You can try, but you’re overtaxed. I’m not going to do it. If you make me, I’ll just sit there and say nothing.” I take a deep breath, try not to think about losing everyone. “That sounds like a bullshit reason for coming here, anyway.”

“You’re right,” she says. “It’s partly bullshit. Truth is we could use more uninfected heads and hands. You’ve got both.”

I like that idea. I want to be more than a part of my couch. And I tell her so.

“I can get drugs,” I say. “Medication.”

“Legal?”

“More or less.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“Maybe,” I say. “But does it even matter anymore? I can’t sit here and do nothing.”

She shakes her head. “You’re stubborn as hell. Nick’s gonna love you.”

My heart stops. “Nick?”

“Our therapist. Good guy. Delicious. Makes me wish I was interested.”

Heart starts. “My best friend James was gay, too. I miss him like crazy.”

She smiles, tight and small. “No, I’m not gay. My husband was one of the first casualties of this fucking war. And for what? We’re all gonna die anyway. As much as I know it was his job, I think he died for nothing. He could have been here with me.”

I reach across the couch, take her hand. We sit there like that, still, watching the struggling Secret Service men try to rush the president to safety. But their hearts aren’t in it. The president is just a symbol of something that no longer exists, of dignity we no longer possess.

Pope Pharmaceuticals is a sterile tomb. My footsteps echo on the lobby floor before the high ceiling whisks them away.

The pharaoh greets me. Pope Pharmaceuticals considers you part of the family. It’s the devil inside me that makes me flip him off on the way past as I hoist my knapsack higher. I’m here with a shopping list that begins with George P. Pope.

I ride the elevator to the top floor. When the doors part, I am in the ivory tower, staring into the face of the sanest madman I have ever seen. He sits behind his vast marble desk, hands flat on the blotter. To his left sits a fountain pen in an ebony holder. To his right is a cell phone that’s as impotent as the men for which Pope Pharmaceuticals develops drugs. These are the tools of the modern villain in this new Wild West.

“We’ve got a problem,” George P. Pope says.

He looks like he wants to tell me, so I wait.

“We’re like the mice. All of us. People. Including you. What do you think? Why are you still alive?”

“Really?”

His nod is an almighty blessing. The great and terrible George P. Pope wants to hear my opinion. I can hardly contain myself.

“I know I should be grateful, but when everyone around you is dead or dying, it’s hard to find comfort in being alive.”

“I don’t give a shit about your personal feelings. I asked for your thoughts. That means I want you to tell me why you think you’re special. What’s different about you?”

“I don’t know,” I say truthfully. “I don’t even take a multivitamin.”

“We could cut you up and find out. You’re company property. And it’s a new world. Laws are gone. Pope Pharmaceuticals owns you. I own you.” His fingers slowly tap out a steady beat on the blotter. “I want to show you something.” He gets up from behind the desk. There’s an odd lurch to his steps, like a woman trying to walk in too-high heels. “Follow me.”

Commanding.

Inside the elevator, he pokes the keypad with a trembling finger.

“Your family?”

“They’re all dead. At least, I think so.”

“You don’t know?”

And it’s the strangest thing, because suddenly I’m standing there, telling about the day we found out Mark died and the incident at my parents’ house the last time I heard from them. I start talking and I can’t shut up. He just stands there and listens, no polite noises, no grunts or nods in the socially appropriate places.

When I’m done, I take a long breath. We’ve stopped and the doors have opened down on what has to be a subterranean level. There’s no illumination but that which comes from tubes of gas. A white, harsh light with no life in its glow.

Pope pushes past me. “I don’t care about your family. I didn’t ask for their life stories.”

“What do you care about?”

He turns, sweeps me with his ice chips. “My business. The board. Shareholders. No one else ever mattered.”

“What about your own family and your wife?”

“I don’t have family. I no longer have a wife. I have—had—employees. You can only trust the person who relies on you to eat. Have you ever been fucked in the ass?”

“None of your business.”

“That’s what family does—and friends. But employees think about their next meal, their benefits, their professional reputations, so they keep their cocks in their pants.”

After that, there’s nothing else to say. We’re in a long white hall broken periodically with doors. They have numbered plaques instead of names. The only other splash of color comes from the red of fire alarms and emergency axes. Orderly blood spatter on a maxi pad. Pope lurches left. With each step, the right side of his jacket swings as though there’s a counterweight concealed in the pocket. I keep distance between us just in case—

He’s a rat-eating monster.

—he stops in a hurry. But he doesn’t show any signs of stopping until we reach a door labeled TC-12.

“TC? Torture chamber?”

“Yes.”

I cannot read him. His face is a foreign language. The expression is there in his eyes, but I can’t grasp the truth. A torture chamber—really? What is this, this company where I’ve worked for two years? What is George P. Pope that he needs such a place?

“Do you know what I am?”

It takes me a moment to formulate an answer that doesn’t involve a stifled scream.

“A businessman?”

He nods slowly, as though his neck hurts. “A businessman, but also a scientist. I enjoy experiments. Throw a cat into a flock of pigeons and what happens? Don’t answer—we both know what happens. I like large experiments with potentially extreme results. Not this small-scale… stuff where I inject a rat and wait to see if it’s more or less likely to lose weight. My passion is the big stage.”

He lifts his hands: God displaying His grand works. “Life. Sometimes the only way to test a drug is to put it out there and see what transpires. The mice only tell us what happens to a mouse. But I make medicine for people. To know what happens to people, you must use people.”

“You’re a monster.”

“Don’t look at me like that,” he says. “For years, I have sought other ways. Our prison system, for one. All those forfeit lives could be put to use. Testing on real people—that’s how you get real results, solid data. Good employees—that’s what a businessman needs. Good employees—that’s what visionaries need. Give an employee enough money and he will do anything you ask of him. Particularly if he can kill two birds with one shiny coin. Jorge was such an employee. He had no morals, enough debt to crush that truck of his, and a serious grudge against you for reasons he never shared with me.”

Every muscle that makes up me tenses until I am as stone as he.

“He wanted my job for his cousin.”

“Ah. A male minority pissed off because a middle-class white woman took a job he felt belonged to his blue collar. Yes, I can see that. Entitlement is just as powerful as jealousy, although not, perhaps, as all-encompassing as lust. Interesting. Although I don’t care why he did it, only that he did. You were a wild card. I never expected that you’d hold on to the container as long as you did. And to be immune as well? A double curse. You were supposed to be exposed and spread my work like a good little incubator. Instead you sat on the thing and went to therapy.” He waves a hand when my lip twitches. “Yes, I know about all that. One of my employees farts and I know about it. Pardon me: passes gas. But my creation found a way to leap into a host body. Perhaps Jorge didn’t seal the container as tight as he should have in his eagerness to see your employment was terminated. Perhaps he touched it with contaminated fingers. Perhaps the virus grew legs and climbed out.” His laugh is chillingly sane. “Survival of the fittest.”

“You created a weapon.”

“You say weapon, I say medicine. You may not believe this, and what you believe is unimportant to me, but we started with the best of intentions. Like everyone else, we sought to cure cancer. You wouldn’t understand the science—I barely do—but sometimes it’s possible to hit an On switch when you’re aiming to turn it off. Did you ever walk into a room and flick the light switch the wrong way? That’s what we did. And the result turned out to be potentially more profitable than our original idea. Although, of course, we continued to develop that, too. More product, more money. More money, more power.”

“Is there a cure?” Hope creeps.

“No. I’m a businessman, not Jesus. I can’t even bring myself back from the brink of extinction.” He shoves his left jacket arm high. The skin underneath is a pincushion plucked of its metal quills. The injection sites are strawberry red with infection. “I am a dead man walking, a Dr. Frankenstein who has become his own monster.”

He pushes the door to Room TC-12 wide: bold, confident befitting his status between these walls. “Good employees will do anything for a sum of money slightly larger than what they feel they’re truly worth.”

The white blinds me with its cleanliness. Willy Wonka’s Wonkavision room.

“Get in.”

I hesitate.

“That wasn’t an invitation.” He reaches into his pocket, pulls out a gun, points it at me like he means it.

“What’s inside?”

“An old friend. Of yours, of course. I don’t have friends.”

I see it now, the blood. I’ve seen too much of it, but I don’t think there’s a quota these days. I scan through the mess until I find remnants of a face I knew. The splayed body still wears its puffy coat, the one I knew from the train.

“It was easy to lure him here. All I had to do was offer him a glimpse at his big story.”

Not Jesse. No, no, no. He was just a kid trying to prove his worth.

“You’re a fucking monster.”

“I suppose I am.”

“Why? Because he wanted to expose you for what you are?”

He grabs me by the throat, but though his heart might be in it, his fingers tell the tale of a body weak with disease.

“It’s a new world. I’m not the man I was. If the tests are to be believed, then I’m not a man at all anymore. I’m some kind of animal. New species, new rules.”

Then he turns the gun to his chest and fires.

Blood mist on the pristine wall. Pope slumps to the ground, a sack of potatoes in an ill-fitting suit. He grins up at me as his body leaks.

“Do something for me.” Blood bubbles.

I don’t look at Jesse. “No.”

He laughs, gags. “I had your sister killed. What do you think about that?”

“Why?”

“She was supposed to be you.”

My body heat circles the drain; I don’t need a mirror to see that I’m as white as these walls. Pope is the thief of hope.

“Why me?”

“Villain’s choice, you might say.”

“Just die, you miserable shit.”

With his last breath, he whispers his want. Then the great George P. Pope dies with the image of a horrified me burned into his retina—a portent of his journey.

“Coward,” the Swiss spits. “For a man to take his own life tells me he knew he had no value.” Something slides off his native tongue.

“Who gives a shit?” Imminent death has loosened my lips at both edges. Nobody’s going to slap my hand for cursing. My mother’s dead….“Why do you even care about George Pope?”

He rants on. Not English. Not even English enough for me to pick out words. Somewhere along the way, while I’m busy not listening, he switches back to English.

“His wife. I knew her. A foolish, foolish whore.”

“She’s a whore, I’m a whore, your mother’s a whore. We’re all whores.” I am going to die and I don’t care. I just want him to shut up. “You knew I worked for Pope Pharmaceuticals. Is that why you helped me save Lisa?”

“I had to see, America.”

“See what?”

“I had to know how a nobody, a janitor, is the only Pope Pharmaceuticals survivor. When all others died, why did you live? You are nothing special.”

My fingers feel around for the blade in my pocket. I hold it there like a blood-slickened talisman.

“You are not stupid. I thought you would be, you know. A janitor. A stupid janitor. Someone who cleans rat piss from the floors.”

There’s no pain now. Just warmth enveloping me in its fluffy pink blanket. I want to snuggle down and lose myself in its hold. Soon.

“You’re the stupid one, assuming people are only one thing. We’re an amalgamation of things we’ve collected along the way. I was never just a janitor.”

“What else were you? A whore?”

“A daughter, a sister, a wife, a lover, a friend.” I thought I was going to be a mother, but I’m not going to make it. I’m sorry, baby. I’m unable to sustain life. Your incubator is broken. “A killer.”

“You? I do not think so.”

Am I still bleeding? It’s too wet to tell. “You don’t know anything, you overgrown piece of cheese.”

“I know everything. Things a creature like yourself could never imagine.”

I laugh, because that’s all I’ve got left. This is how I’m going to go, not kicking and screaming like some dying animal, but laughing. I’ll die with a side stitch and tears streaming because the Swiss actually believes he knows it all.

“What is so funny?” he says.

“Because.”

“You make no sense, America.”

“George P. Pope was a coward. He couldn’t stand to live another minute with his disease. He couldn’t stand what it was doing to him—what it might do to him if he kept on sucking oxygen.”

“I do not see the humor in this.”

Saliva bubbles between my lips. “You wouldn’t. You weren’t there. It’s so funny. It’s so damn funny.”

“Tell me.”

I’ve never giggled, but now, at the end, I do. The Swiss shifts on his haunches; attack is imminent. His breath comes closer. I feel him. My bloody hand reaches out and touches the end of my world.

There is only one way to do what I do next: remove my emotions, place them in my pocket, keep them safe from the rest of me.

I look up at Jesse. I’m sorry, I want to say. I thought I was doing the right thing by talking to you. But I’m not sure if that’s true or if it’s just another story I’m telling myself to feel better about him being dead. But for the sake of coping, I try to believe it.

I want to be different-good, not different-bad.

Nothing. I feel nothing. My psyche has flatlined. That’s a good thing. That makes it easy to heft the long-handled ax I wrenched off the white wall. It’s little more than a feather in my hands. I pull it up high, behind my head, and let it fall. Gravity does my dirty work. Gravity hugs the blade close. Together they disconnect George P. Pope’s head from its body.

I feel nothing.

I feel nothing.

I feel nothing.

Just a hole where my soul used to be.

I will not die with my eyes shut and my heart in my throat. Not this far have I come to die a coward. My hand is ready, the scalpel tucked away in my palm: my bloody ally.

In the dark the Swiss grabs my throat, shoves me so hard against the wall my jaws snap shut on my tongue. Blood fills my mouth. I spit it into his face and laugh.

Can’t control the laughter. Merriment is helium in my balloon. My nitrous oxide.

“Why do you care? It won’t do you any good. Nothing can help any of us now. Soon we’ll be dead, too.”

His fingers are a ring tightening around my throat. One good squeeze and my laughter dies, bottling up below the seal. I see stars. I see a light hurtling toward me, and voices whispering just beyond. I have seconds until the end, and I’m taking the Swiss with me on the ride.

“Pope just had to screw with me one last time. And you’re wrong, you know.”

“I am never wrong.”

“This time you are.”

There’s a perverse pleasure in withholding what I know is true from this man in his final moments of life. So I do not speak of Pope’s final request: it might bring the Swiss joy.

There’s not enough room for a bold thrust, but the scalpel’s edge is more deadly than a razor. The blade skates across his throat, shudders as I scrape up the last of my energy to drag it sideways. The Swiss gasps; his pupils widen enough that even I can see them in this dim space.

His hand tightens. This is it. The end. Lights out. Ladies and gentlemen, Zoe has left the building. But he slackens and slumps to the ground and his fingers slap against the concrete. I reach out, shove his face with my foot as hard as I can muster.

The voices are getting louder. The light is drawing near. This is it, my tunnel, my emergency exit. Sorry, I tell my baby. Sorry I didn’t get to be a good mother, or any kind of mother. I’m sorry I couldn’t keep our tiny family safe.

Then my world flashes yellow and I see maybe the world has a surprise left in her yet. There’s no tunnel, and the voices belong to actual people.

Hopefully they will bury us far away from the Swiss.

SIXTEEN

Are you for real?” Sergeant Morris asks the question across her desk.

A slow nod through air soup.

She pulls the vials and packets from the bag and lines them up. Soldiers marching across paperwork mountains.

The ground undulates beneath my feet. Or maybe I’m the one swaying to and fro. One palm flat on the desk doesn’t make a difference. My world is shifting sands.

“There’s more where that came from. But if you want it, you’d better move fast. There’s no security now, and the CEO is dead. It’s just a matter of time until the place is gutted.”

“I’ll send some people over. It would help if you’d go with them. We need all the meds we can get.”

“Okay.” My words tilt. I slap my fist on the desk, next to my hand. It’s heavy. The air is stew. No, I’m holding something. A white sack. Not a sack—a lab coat, the ends tied together to form a crude swag that would make Huckleberry Finn proud.

Sergeant Morris grimaces. “What’s in the sack? Shit, girl, it’s bleeding.”

“It’s nothing,” I say. “Nothing at all.”

“Nothing, my ass. Nothing doesn’t look like Aunt Flo came to visit and wound up moving in her furniture.” She tries to take it from me but it’s my burden to carry.

I sit, trapping the swag between my knees. “It’s nothing.”

I don’t die. At least, not then. And for a time I’m not sure if I’m sorry or glad. My baby still lives, though, and that is something. It dances inside me, celebrating our victory. We are still two.

The sun beams at me through a window. See? it says. But I don’t. Not really. So I mirror its smile while I try to discern which of us is the village idiot.

The groan comes all the way from my toes when I sit, press a hand to my sutured wound so I won’t pop open like a worn teddy bear. I am surrounded by women. They watch me with wary eyes and sullen faces.

“What is this place?”

No answer. They chatter amongst themselves with foreign tongues.

“What happened to the man?”

They stare at the oddity in their midst. I have nothing more than cobbled-together sign language—mostly obscenities.

“Jesus Christ.”

The women cross themselves. Head to sternum. Shoulder to shoulder. Religious figures—those they understand. One of the squirrels breaks away from the pack. The rest of them stare at me as though I’m a spaceman. Maybe I am. I’m from another world, I know that much. We look at each other, all of us trying to find a way to bridge the language chasm. My language is, in part, descended from theirs, and yet the pieces that now belong to the English tongue are useless to me here.

I drag myself to my feet, one hand on my arm. Pain slices through me. I am white-knuckled, dizzy, displaced in this reality. Hands grab me, hold me steady. Mouths tsk.

“I’m okay, I’m okay. I have to keep going,” I say.

“You are going nowhere today.”

My head jerks up, because those are words I understand. Amongst the static they are clear and bright and shiny. They belong to a boy not yet old enough to scrape a blade down his skin.

“I went to the English school in Athens,” he explains. “My name is Yanni. In English, I am John.”

His hand dives into his pocket, retrieves a pouch filled with tobacco and a box of white papers. He crouches on the dirt floor, pushes the tobacco into a neat line on the paper using his leg as a table, seals the edge with his spit, and lights up. One of the women reaches out, flicks his ear. Screeches at him until his head sags. He offers me the hand-rolled cigarette, one end soggy with spit. “Would you like?”

Humanity has crumbled, yet here are people who would still instill good manners in their children.

“No, thank you.” I watch as he shoves the damp end greedily into his mouth and sucks deep. He can’t be more than eleven, maybe twelve.

“Where am I?”

He speaks with the women. Arms flap until they reach a noisy consensus.

“Not far from Athens. My people found you. They were looking for…” He puffs on the cigarette, drawing deep like he means it, flipping through his catalog of English words, looking for one that fits. “Supplies. Clothes and things we can maybe swap with other people.”

“There are others?”

Again he consults the women.

“Some,” he says. “And some…” He shrugs, tries to look cool as he flicks the cigarette ash. “My people do not talk to strangers.”

“You’re talking to me.”

“You are sick. When you are well, you will go.”

Sounds of children scooting a ball across the ground end the conversation. He drops the cigarette, grinds it into the dirt with a worn boot heel, his body humming with tension. Wants to run and join his friends.

“Wait.”

He stops.

“The man—the one who was with me. What happened to him?”

More talking. Solemn words.

“Your husband lives. But for how long, who knows?”

He must be mistaken.

All this world is theirs to live in now, yet the Roma choose to stay here in their familiar nest of lean-tos and shacks with their suspicion of outsiders to keep them warm. But who can blame them? My clothes are brown with the blood of three. I wear blackface made of sweat and road dust.

They are wary; I am wary. Too many faces twist diabolically of late. My faith in my own kind has evaporated to mist. But when I reach out, my bag is beside me untouched. That small gesture lends me some hope that I am among those still as human as me.

Cups of steaming tea come and go. Voices swim around me like I’m fish food. Faintly, faintly, I’m aware that my sanity is going walkabout, that I’m acting as though I’ve got one foot in an asylum and the other in a pool of blood. How much can a human mind take before it breaks?

Then he is there.

And here I am.

The desk groans as Nick clears an ass-shaped space and sits. I don’t look, but I feel the air divide as he leans forward and fills what was empty. He’s close enough for me to smell. No cologne, no aftershave. Just Nick. Made of sunshine.

“What’s going on, Zoe?” His voice caresses my cheek.

“The sky is falling.”

“Feels that way, doesn’t it?”

“It’s going to kill us all, one by one, one way or another.” My hand that is not my hand rubs my face. “He started this. All of it. We were an experiment. My apartment was his Trinity Site.”

“Where they conducted the first nuclear test?”

“He wanted to test his drug. No, not a drug: a weapon.” I tell him the things George Pope related to me in the last few minutes of his rotten life. Nick listens with the attentiveness of his profession. When my words fade to ellipses, he remains taut, alert. And when I look up to him he is still wearing that old familiar mask, the one that stops me from knowing him. So many questions. Who are you? What happened to you on the battlefield? Do you cry for your brother? Did you think of me while you were gone? But the questions stick to my tongue like sun-warmed gum to a shoe sole.

“What’s in the sack, Zoe? Can you show me?”

Penitent and afraid, I kneel before him, the bleeding sack a guilty offering. “Are you sure?”

“Show me.”

His is a command wrapped in silk, but an order nonetheless. Somewhere deep in my soul a gong strikes; I have no choice but to obey.

Stiff fingers untie the knot binding the lab coat. The fabric is soaked with blood and sticks to the contents. Wet red cotton peels away from the cold flesh inside.

Meat. Just like beef or pork or lamb. The lie that dams the bile in my stomach. If I stop and think about where it came from, I will run screaming from this room.

Meat. Just like the supermarkets used to stock.

Nick inhales. I close my eyes and wait. He doesn’t state the obvious, doesn’t ask the stupid question. He can see the coat contains a severed head, so he doesn’t need to underscore and bold.

“Okay,” he says. “Okay. Whose is it? Does anyone need medical attention?”

I shake my head. Just meat, Zoe. Chicken and ham. “He was dead already. I was following instructions.”

“Whose?”

“His.” I nod at the just-meat-maybe-turkey. “George Pope.”

He sits. Processes. Then he asks why. And I tell him how Pope was afraid that he’d rise in death.

“Do you believe he would have?”

“I have to.” Otherwise I chopped off his head for nothing.

Nick pulls a notepad and pen from his shirt pocket. Without looking at me, he begins to scratch words onto the page.

I look at him. “You’re making a shopping list.”

“I’m making a list.”

“A list.”

For ten more beats of my heart—I tick them off—he scribbles, then pockets the pad.

“I’m going to help you. That’s what I’m here for.”

“I’m fine. I can deal alone.”

He crouches in front of me, wraps the head so it’s no longer staring up at us.

“We might all get our fill of alone. Take companionship while you can, Zoe. I’m reaching out my hand. Don’t slap it away.”

Nick and I are not done.

Jesse makes the front page that day—and the second. The United States Times has turned him into a different-bad person. A villain. A criminal who tried to pin the blame on a company committed to saving us from, not just this disease, but a whole host of ills.

That night a preacher from the South gives the disease a name that rolls easily off tongues and sticks inside heads.

“This disease is a white horse coming to claim the sinners. The end isn’t nigh, it’s here.” He speaks to an audience of dying millions where his words find purchase and flourish.

White Horse. It gallops amongst us.

A week passes before I can walk more than a few steps without my vision fading to black. During that time I eat better than I have since before the war. These fringe people are smarter than the rest of us. Forced to exist on the periphery of society, they’ve developed skills suburbanized people allowed to devolve. They grow what they eat. Each member of their clan performs tasks to help the whole. While the rest of us were mourning junk food, they kept on doing what their people have done for generations. Cogs in a simple, elegant machine.

Another week passes before I seek out Yanni. I don’t believe the Swiss survived. He can’t have. Unless my mind fabricated his death so I’d go to my grave victorious.

“What does the man look like?” I ask the boy.

If he thinks my request is strange, he doesn’t show it. Every word is a chance to show off his English skills.

“He is”—Yanni waves a hand over his head—“white. His hairs is white. Not like old man. Like a movie star.”

It’s the Swiss; it has to be. I don’t know how he survived, what Gypsy magic they wove. I don’t know how I failed.

“Blond,” I say with a thick, numb tongue. “We call that color blond.”

He tries the word on for size. “Blond.”

“I want to see… my husband.” A gallstone, bitter and bilious, rolling around my mouth.

Two women come, both clad in tie-dyed T-shirts and tiered skirts that hang like tired draperies. They talk to the boy, stare openly at me without social propriety. To them I am a curiosity, both a foreigner and an outsider.

“Is he alive?” I say. Please let him be dead. Although it goes against everything I believe, and makes me a little less human, I want that to be true. Can I still look myself in the eye?

“He is not good,” the boy says.

“I need to see him.”

“Okay, I will take you.” His arm links through mine. Stronger than he looks. Wiry. We go slow.

A man cuts across our path wheeling a barrow heaped with watermelons. It’s warm here. Feels like high summer. A caterpillar of sweat hunches across my upper lip. I can’t help but wonder what the weather is like at home. Although it no longer exists, home stands still in my memory, a monument to what it was before the fall. My heart has been rubbed raw with steel wool. Words need to come out of my mouth, and soon; otherwise I’m going to lose it. I swallow. My throat stings with the big gulp of clean air.

“There are lots of people here.”

“Yes. Many people.”

“Did they get sick?”

A pause as he translates on the fly. “Some. Not as many as the city.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It is life. Many of my people die young.”

Corrugated iron walls and roofs form makeshift mansions. Maybe fifty in all. Nothing that couldn’t be broken down easily enough and hitched to the back of a donkey. The Roma have livestock. They congregate untethered at the edge of this shanty town, smart enough to stay close to food they don’t have to gather themselves.

Yanni’s boot-clad feet halt outside a shack slapped with white paint. “Your husband is in here.” He tugs my sleeve as I stumble toward the door. “He is not good.”

I’m a shit lying to this boy. But I make it right inside my head, tell myself they chose to believe this. They assumed the Swiss and I were together. A lie of omission. They were there, they saw him bleed. They could have gone the other way, seen the truth, that I cut him to save myself. To bring him to break bread with the Reaper.

The boy hangs back, lets me enter the building alone. It’s a cracker box room with a thin curtain bisecting the space. The room stinks of blood and shit and piss and death.

Foot by laborious foot toward the curtain. He’s back there, that Swiss bastard. His boots jut past the flimsy fabric. They do not move.

I hope he is dead, or at least close enough to tumble over that edge into the long sleep.

My fingers jerk back the curtain and there he is. I half expect him to leap up from that military cot and strangle me, but he doesn’t. His eyeballs perform a vigorous ballet under the thin membranes. His chest rises and falls rapidly; his breathing is shallow. Parchment skin stretches across the planes of his face. He’s a parody of himself carved in damp wax. Not so male now. Not so intimidating. All the bite leached from his bark. Across his throat a poultice sips the infection from his body, but the area is raw and red. The infection has taken hold. Death creeps.

Too slow.

I’ve tried so hard to be good, to stay human enough to recognize myself in those quiet moments when it’s just me and the voices inside my head. But the gods of this land are either testing me or telling me something, because they’ve placed a thin pillow covered in striped fabric just inches from my hand.

Do it, they’re saying. Snuff him. Take him outta the human race before he gets another shot at you. My fingers twitch with want.

Ladies and gentlemen, the parade marches through my head. Theme: Thirty Years of Yearning. On the first float a pony stands, its saddle so polished that all my other desires reflect back at me: Cowgirl Barbie with Dallas the horse; just one more chocolate-frosted cupcake; red shoes, like Dorothy; impossibly high heels; a Trans Am; a Ferrari; Sam; a good education; and then Nick— only Nick. On the last float, the Swiss takes his final breath and exits the world stage left.

The pillow is in my hands, then it’s not, then it is again. My hands keep changing the game. So easy to wipe him out. One firm, enduring press and there would be one less thing to worry about. A rectangle of salvation. All I have to do is act.

But… but…

Lay the pillow across his face and lean as I would on a ledge. Easy. Pretend the tin wall is a shop window filled with unbroken things. Mentally, I could tally the coins in my pocket and choose one thing as a treat for coming this far, while the Swiss finally climbs off the fence and chooses death.

Inside me, tectonic plates clash and collide, scraping at each other, wrestling for dominance. To kill or not to kill? That is my question, my imaginary friends. I push the pillow away from me, release it from my tight embrace, lower it onto the Swiss’s sweat-slicked face. The stopwatch starts in my head. I need three minutes, maybe four.

Thirty seconds. His hands twitch at his sides as he tries to suck air and gets nothing but cotton for his effort.

One minute. A struggle. Jerking shoulders. Snapping knees.

Two minutes. The Reaper chews a breath mint, shoots his cuffs, primes himself for seduction.

Then my baby kicks, swift and hard, right where it counts.

The anger dies. A disappointed Reaper slinks away, toting his blue balls. I’m tired, I want to rest, I want to go home and find my family still alive and raise my child with Nick. I don’t want to have to kill to survive.

The Swiss isn’t coming back. There was no real fight in his movements, just the herky-jerky reactions of a brain stem with enough power left to simultaneously breathe and piss his pants. He’s already dead, it’s just that nobody’s bothered to deliver the bad news.

“I don’t know how the fuck you’re still alive, you bastard. But if you don’t die, I promise I will kill you.”

Yanni is still waiting outside, cigarette dangling from his lip. A little kid playing at being a man. I want to snatch the cigarette from his mouth, tell him to be a child awhile longer, because being an adult isn’t always fun. Hard choices have to be made. Battles need to be fought. Struggle is inevitable. Then I look around and see this is no place to be a kid. It’s a hard world encapsulated in a brutal new world. Being an adult before his time might just save his life.

The boy rushes to steady me.

“He is not your husband. No?”

“No.”

“I did not think this is true.”

“Does anyone else know?”

“No. I hear everything and no one says nothing. They say he is a dead man.”

“Good.”

“Is he a bad man?”

“Worse.”

He leads me back to my own bed. I don’t look back. If I do, I might race to the building and finish what I started. I want to. I don’t want to.

If he leaves that bed, I will kill him. Can I look myself in the eye if I do that?

I think I can.

Nick watches me for cracks. I watch him for pleasure when he’s not looking. Life has changed him, scraped away any softness he once had, so that he’s all hard edges. If we two were strangers passing in the street, I’d hold my purse a little tighter while checking him out.

“I’m not crazy.”

“I know,” he says.

“I’m not.”

“I know.”

“Is that your professional opinion?”

“Are you sleeping?”

His fingers are long and thick, even curled around a pen. Capable hands. Safe hands. I wonder how they’d feel cupping my ass, tearing off my clothes, holding my legs up over his broad shoulders. How would he look holding our children? Dangerous thoughts anytime, but now more than ever.

“Zoe?”

“Some.”

“Do you dream?”

“No.”

He knows. It’s in the set of his jaw, the steel in his eyes. He knows when I lie.

“I dream about Pope. Fifty times a night I lift that ax and let it fall. His head bounces. Not like a ball. Have you ever dropped a melon?”

“Sure. Once or twice.”

“It’s like that.”

“How do you feel when you wake up?”

My face burns. “Like shit. How do you think I feel?”

“It’s okay,” he says. “Feelings are healthy.”

“I’m not crazy. But if I’m not crazy, why do I feel like I am?”

Sometime later, Morris says, “He wants you.”

Steam rises from the two coffee cups between us.

“I’m not going to risk loving him.”

“Who said anything about love?”

“What else is there?”

She laughs. “You want him, too.”

I slurp my coffee, fill my mouth with piping hot liquid so I can’t say, “I do.”

Moving into the old boarding school is merely a formality. Nick and Morris help me carry the few things I can’t live without. Clothing, important papers, the plain gold band Sam slid onto my finger on our wedding day. I almost never think of him now and it shames me. I could tell Nick, but I don’t want him to see me naked. My soul is not a newspaper to be read.

I claim a room on the second floor as mine. A space that has never known the jar.

In a world full of death, things are still born: legends, myths, horror stories. The imaginations of men don’t need to toil hard to create terror in these times.

The moon is a narrow slit once more. She waxes and wanes, oblivious to the planet beneath her. She is an absent guardian and a fickle friend, one who tugs the tides and denies she’s made of green cheese.

At night, the Roma congregate around the campfires. Meat and vegetables bubble over the naked flames. A lone accordion holds the night’s feral sounds at bay. After the meal, the music becomes infectious—

White Horse, coming right for us.

—flitting from body to body until most join in the song. When the song changes, voices drop out and others rise up to take their places. These are people who’ve never heard of karaoke or American Idol; they sing for love, for expression, to nourish their souls.

Afterward, the vocal cords change patterns and tongues tell stories not set to music. There’s a rhythm to tales oft-told. A smoothness to the words. Polished stones that have witnessed a million high tides.

“I have to go soon,” I tell Yanni.

“The women say you will have your baby here.”

“I’ve been here too long already.”

I shake my head, feel the whips of my hair.

“I have to keep going north.” His head tilts. That is his tell, the one that signals that he hasn’t understood. “North is up.”

“On the road?”

“Yes.”

“The way up is not safe.”

“Nowhere is safe.”

“No. Listen,” he says, “to the story.” He nods at the man who, by his sheer physical presence, manages to occupy the head seat at a round campfire. Not a large man, but he expands to fit the tiny crevices in the air around him and defends his space with broad hand gestures that supply punctuation and italics.

Yanni translates in hobbled English.

“He talks of Delphi. Do you know it?”

All I really know is Delphi’s famous oracle, but my head nods regardless.

The boy listens for a moment before continuing. The Gypsy man has drawn his arms close to his body, hunched his shoulders, scrunched his neck. Taut vocal cords push out a voice drum-tight.

He talks of Medusa, the woman with snakes for hair and a gaze that turned all who looked upon her to stone. By Perseus’s hand she was decapitated, and from her neck sprang Pegasus, the white winged horse, and his brother Chrysaor. Greek mythology involves many creatures born from un-holey body parts.

The mood shifts to something darker. There are rumors, he says, that Medusa is reborn, that she dwells in the woods near Delphi, petrifying anyone who dares meet her gaze. The woods are filled with statues that were once people with hopes and dreams and families. Anything she doesn’t turn to stone she devours. The main road north along the coast was destroyed in a quake. Now the only way up is a perilous pass through Delphi, through the territory of this modern-day Medusa.

“You see? Is very dangerous.”

A flesh-eating woman who turns people into columns of stone. A year ago I would have scoffed, but no more.

“Has anyone seen her?”

Yanni thinks. “Many people. My uncle. He sees her carrying the wood and he runs away fast. Do not go north. Is not good. Stay here.”

I’ve lingered too long. I have to go soon. I have to find Nick before our child comes.

SEVENTEEN

Nick makes a list. He always does.

“You’re assuming blame that doesn’t belong to you,” he says. “You’re not responsible.”

“I opened the jar.”

“People were dying before that.”

“I know.”

“So taking the blame isn’t logical. Pope was going to do this—with or without you.”

“I know.”

He makes his list. Of what, I don’t know.

“Are you sleeping?”

“Yes.”

He checks my face for lies. There are none to find.

“What do you write now?”

“Now?”

“It can’t be a shopping list. There’s no shopping to do.”

“It’s a list,” he says, “of all the good things I’ve still got.”

“Like what?”

“Like you.”

“Why me?”

“I’ll write you a list.”

My body mends. My belly swells. My child treads viscous fluid, ignorant of the sins of men. She’ll never know a whole world, just the fragments of what civilization used to be. To the absent God I say nothing. Instead, I direct my prayers to the ones who once ruled this land. I ask for a safe place to raise my child, a place with enough food to nourish a growing body, and healthy people to serve as teachers. I want my child to know what we once were, and how we fought to maintain our humanity.

I am a being with three pulses now: my own, my child’s, and her father’s. All three dance to a steady beat in my soul. If he were dead, I’d feel the Nick-sized hole in my heart.

I have to go.

The war doesn’t so much end as it simply stops happening.

Our men and women come home to silence. At the docks and airports there’s no one to greet them except a few reporters who ask questions in which they’re not invested; they’d rather be at home, dying with what remains of their own families.

A bold one shoves his microphone in the face of a coughing corporal who doesn’t look old enough to have hair around his cock.

“Are you glad to be back?”

The soldier stops. He’s too thin, too tired, too war-weary for civility. “Glad?”

“To be back home.”

“My whole fucking family is dead. How d’you think that feels?”

“How—”

“I just want a fucking cheeseburger.”

“Do you think we won?”

The corporal lunges, his hands choking the reporter as they fall to the ground. “I… just… want… a… fucking… cheeseburger.” He punctuates every word by bashing the man’s skull on the concrete. Flecks of bone rain down in the creeping blood pool.

No one stops him. No one says anything. Someone mutters, “Did someone say cheeseburger? I’d kill for a cheeseburger.” Another voice laughs nervously. “I think he just did.”

We watch this on the news as Luke Skywalker’s about to discover Darth Vader is his father. When regular television comes back, the movie is over and we’re left blinking at the screen without so much as a crinkle of a protein bar wrapper. Twenty-something bodies, a whole bunch of muscles, and not one of us twitches.

The weather war is over, and we’re down about three hundred million citizens. Maybe more. Maybe all, before White Horse is done. Despair folds us in her arms and squeezes us in her loveless arms.

Hope is a four-letter word rotting in antique dictionaries between hop and hopeless.

High upon the rooftops, Nick and I watch night arriving, a sky full of stars hitching a ride on its coattails. From up here the world looks almost normal. Only the curious absence of cars skidding through the icy streets makes the eye catch and the mind whisper: The world is not okay.

“You’re really not afraid of heights, are you?” he asks.

“No. Heights don’t bother me. I haven’t fallen yet, so there’s no precedent for fear.”

He nods. “Good attitude. Heights scared a lot of my patients. Wide spaces, too. I see—saw—people all the time scared of life. Every day I wanted to shake them, tell them that this day is the only guarantee they’ve got.”

“But?”

He gives me a tight, wry smile. “It’s not in the psychologists’ handbook. We’re not supposed to freak the fuck out and shake the shit out of clients.”

“Even if it’s for the best?”

“My clients don’t always want what’s best. They’re human. They like what’s comfortable. Coming to therapy every week is comfortable, familiar. Even at a hundred-plus bucks a pop.”

“Was I comfortable?”

He turns to face me, but I don’t look at him. I keep staring at the city. That’s what’s comfortable, familiar, safe. Nick isn’t safe.

“You could have just told me the truth. I was on your side.”

“It sounded crazy.”

“Hey, crazy is what I do every day. I see women who save their shit in plastic Baggies and weigh it so they can make sure what goes in comes back out. I see guys who spend their nights beating off to Internet porn when they’ve got beautiful wives in the next room. Real women don’t turn them on anymore, they’re so into the fantasy. I see kids who cut themselves to mask pain, kids who cut themselves because their friends do it and they want to fit in. You want crazy? I can tell you a million stories. But some jar showing up in your apartment? That’s criminal, not crazy. Crazy was lying about it to someone who was on your side—a person you were paying. You wasted your own money. That’s crazy.”

“I get it, I’m crazy. You’re the expert, you should know. Do you want me to climb up on the cross or would you like to nail me up there yourself?”

“C’mon, Zoe….” He’s big and broad this close, densely muscled enough to crush me if he chose. And maybe I’d like that.

“Kiss my ass.”

I stalk toward the door, grab the handle, meet resistance. The building has two rooftop entrances— or exits, depending on how you look at things. One gets locked at night so we only have to guard the other. Morris doesn’t like to keep both locked, in case of emergencies.

“Shit.”

He groans. “It’s the end of the world. Let’s not fight.”

His words deflate my anger. “You’re right.”

“Say it again.”

“You’re right.”

“I’m always right.”

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

“You will when you see I’m always right.”

This is almost flirting, except neither of us are smiling. A million million miles away, a star hurls itself across the sky.

“I don’t want to be Chicken Little,” I say. “I don’t always want the sky to be falling.”

“It’s going to be okay.”

“Is it?”

“Truth?”

I nod.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. Or if it is it won’t be okay in the same way. We’ve lost too much.”

There’s a wall between us. I long for a sledgehammer.

“I’m sorry about your brother. I saw his name on the list.”

He slouches to my side. I want to slip into his arms. He has the perfect place for me right below his chin, but I don’t dare. Not without an invitation. Maybe not even then.

“I have to get to my parents if they’re still alive.”

“Are they in the city?”

“Greece. Every summer they head back to the motherland and talk about how great America is.” He smiles. “When they’re here, all they do is talk about how perfect Greece is.”

“How the hell are you going to get to Greece?”

“There are still planes—if you can pay the price.”

“Which is what?”

“Blood. Medicine. Food. Whatever they don’t have enough of.”

The city goes out. The night stays on.

Nick and I stare at each other through the darkness, three hundred million corpses stacked between us. In another life I could love him. In this life I could only lose him.

The lights flick back on in the morning. This brings us no comfort, because we know it can’t last. The electricity will leave us forever; it’s just a question of when. We hold our breath and wait.

The animals have a secret.

Birds are the first to leave, in one giant airlift, a dense cloud thousands thick, from the surrounding trees. The Roma begin to whisper amongst themselves. Something is happening, but I don’t know what. Mass migration is never a good thing unless it’s fall.

The lurchers are next. Those lanky Gypsy dogs pace ditches into the earth, their ears low, their tongues thick, red rubber lolling from their mouths.

Secret keepers, all of them.

One morning a thousand feet come, shambling along the weather-worn blacktop. They’re a stew of ages and sexes, all of them exhausted, filthy, dull-eyed. They brought their bodies on their journey but forgot to pack their souls.

“Canadians,” Nick says. “They’re migrating south.”

“Like the birds,” Morris says.

The others trickle in behind her. Through the second-floor windows we watch the indigent parade trickle past.

“We should feed them.” This from a big guy named Troy. He’s barely out of high school. Now there’s no college for kids like him. Everything he learns has to come from the streets.

“What, all of them?” Casey snaps. Former National Guard. A twig who used to hawk cosmetics.

Troy crosses his arms, increases his bulk. “They’re starving.”

Morris serves as peacekeeper. “We can’t feed all those people from our supplies. They’re gonna have to find their own food. There’s still food out there—shelter, too. If they want it bad enough, they’ll find a way. We can’t do everyone’s surviving for them. All we can do is watch and make sure there’s no trouble.”

The bickering fades to a cease-fire. Everyone knows why there’s shelter. So many died that there’s a surplus of everything except people and fresh food and optimism.

“We’re being naturally selected,” someone mumbles.

“No we’re not,” I say. “There’s nothing natural about this.”

Morris claps her hands, wrestles for control before we turn friends to enemies.

“Positions, people. Let’s make sure there’s no problems. I don’t think there will be; they’re too beaten down, but they’re desperate, too. Desperate people don’t always think right.”

Everyone leaps into action. It’s been days since we’ve had new scenery. The power comes and goes as it pleases, and the television and news along with it. New is new. New is different. New is shiny. New means there’s still life.

A family comes, also from the north road, its members clinging to each other as though the least thing might sever their delicate ties. Their feet are soundless, but they do me a kindness and cough politely to warn me of their approach. I unfold myself from a crouch and shake the numbness from my legs. My hand rubs away the cola foam from my mouth’s chapped edges.

Each man is a bookend keeping his three children upright. They stop on the sidewalk, their mouths full of questions.

“We’ve never been here,” one says. “We always meant to but never did.”

“And now here we are,” says the other. “What’s there to do here?”

Besides wait to die or fight to live? I don’t say that, though, because I don’t want to frighten the children. But the men know it; that hard truth is ground into their posture.

“Not much,” I say. “We have a good library and a great museum.”

I am a tour guide selling my dead city.

“Is there food here? Some place decent to stay?”

“If you’ll tell us where to go, we’ll go there.”

I reel off directions, but they stare at me with blank eyes, because everything that is stale to me blinds them with its newness. So I offer to walk with them a short way and show them what sights still stand. Before we part ways, they press a paper envelope into my hands.

“It’s all we have,” they tell me. “Worthless at best. But maybe someday…”

Tickets to Disney World, the happiest place on earth.

“Be safe,” I say before good-bye.

There is a long, dim hall inside the old school, and Nick stands at one end with bloodlust smeared the length of his face. At the opposite end, I wear a mask painted with indifference. In between, there’s a doorway that leads to a room with coffee. We set out together: Nick taking long, murderous strides and me on a Monday stroll.

“I know why you’re pissed,” I say when we meet.

“Don’t ever do that again.”

“I’ll do what I need to.”

“Don’t sacrifice yourself for other people.”

I stare him down like he’s the devil asking for one last dance.

“It was the right thing to do.”

“Bullshit. You could have been raped, beaten, killed. Sold into slavery. A million things.”

“I’m a lot of things, Nick, but stupid isn’t one of them. They were good people. It was the human thing.” I turn away from him and make a break for the coffee, but he uses my ponytail as a crude brake, then reels me in. His thumb strokes my collarbone. Heat radiates from that tiny spot until I am a bonfire on a dark night.

“I want you.”

“Don’t pull my hair like that again.” My protest barely escapes the deafening lust haze.

“I might.” His eyes make me a promise. “But next time you’ll like it.”

It’s night when the quake punches its way through the ground. The earth seizes and shakes. Vomits rocks and dirt.

This is it: the secret the animals were keeping.

All the usual rules don’t apply. There’s no bathroom to hide in, no table for cover, no doorways with headers strong enough to hold up a roof, just makeshift shacks with the staying power of light-hold hairspray. Flimsy metal walls struggle to stay upright, but they have nothing with which to grab the earth and hold on for the ride.

I snatch up my backpack and run.

People zip around me, none of them paying attention as I stumble through the camp. Rocks roll from around the fire pits, creating open paths for the red coals to bounce free. The ground is dry enough for the leafy debris to spark, then burst into naked flame. Mother Nature’s temper tantrum splits the ground, shooting each half into jagged inclines. The dilapidated pickup trucks are homicidal bowling pins, pinning bodies between them. The world becomes a tangle of bodies and metal and movement. Pained braying punctuates the cacophony as the donkeys realize they can’t out-stubborn seismic activity and they rush to save themselves.

We’re running, all of us, with nowhere to go. This can’t be outrun.

When the ground grinds to a halt, the night holds its breath.

“Yanni?” I call out.

A woman is lying on the ground nearby. I help her up. She’s hurt, her face bloodied, but I can’t do anything for her right now. Another woman is a magician’s trick gone wrong, her body severed by a sheet of corrugated iron. There’s no cavalry coming for her, either.

Yanni is a puppet sprawled across the hood of a pickup truck. A tree pins him to the grill. Gone is the boy who would be a man. He’s devolved, a child again, his jaw shuddering as the tears pour in sheets from his face.

I race to him. I can’t help it. But there’s nothing I can do to make his body right. There’s no way to separate his ribs from the mangled chrome.

“Hi, baby boy.” I try not to choke on my tears. “How are you doing?”

He doesn’t even try to smile. “Cigarette?”

With shaking hands, I reach into his shirt pocket, roll the paper around a thin finger of tobacco like I’ve watched him do. And although it’s no good for me or my baby, I suck on the stick until the end flares red before wedging it between his lips.

Smoke leaks from his mouth. Not enough lung capacity to draw a good breath and hold it fast, so he puffs at it quick, quick, slow, before letting it fall. A smoky serpent coils around my wrist as I lift it up again for him to take.

“Will I die?”

I don’t want to lie, but the truth hurts too much to tell.

“No, baby. You’re just sleepy.”

He nods slowly. “I will die.”

“We’re all going to die one day.”

“Today. Where is my mama?”

Saliva thickens in my throat. I can see his mother from here, burning and inert.

“With your brothers and sisters.”

“Good.”

There’s no room between the tree and the truck for me to slide in alongside him, put my arm around him, give him comfort, so I reach across and fit his hand in mine. His fingertips are ice chips, but I cannot thaw them with my body heat.

“It’s just a bad dream. When you wake up, this won’t have happened.”

I am a piece of shit, lying to a dying child.

“Do you know songs?”

“Yes.”

“Sing. Please.”

In a light place in my memories, I find the song my mother sang to me, of a maiden in a valley pleading to her love, begging him not to forsake and leave her. And as I sing to the boy, I cry.

Miles down, the plates slow dance again, grinding against each other in the dark. Fire spreads, climbing the tinder-dry trees with the ease of firemen scaling ladders. Up, up it goes, until the canopies are ablaze and night becomes artificial day. What buildings still stand are falling now, crushing their contents with no care for whether they hold people or possessions. Dark heads bob and blur as everyone tries to save themselves. Mothers cry out for their children, husbands for their wives. The land is on the move and she is merciless. My hand tightens on Yanni’s arm. I keep singing.

Flames lick at a truck at the far side of the camp, kissing their way up the metal body like an attentive lover. Higher, higher, until the night explodes. The light stains my vision white as the fireball unfolds like a flower, its petals reaching out… out… out, until it races back to its moment of conception.

My face is dry and tight. The white spots are old celluloid melting until I’m left with a dim picture of the disaster zone. Bodies still and bodies moving.

At the edge of my vision something creeps. When I flick my head around to capture the form, it fades. My body turns cold, stiff. In my heart I know what it is, and if that muscle wasn’t already in my boots, it would be sinking fast through my chest and organs. The Swiss is still alive. He survived all this and now he’s getting away.

But it can’t be. He’s stretched out on a cot, fighting for his life. What I saw was a ghost.

The hand in mine falls slack. My fingers understand before I do.

Yanni’s head sags to his shattered chest. All the singing in the world can’t bring him back. A cold mist seeps into my body. Anger will come in time, but for now I need to remain calm, leave this place behind, keep pushing north.

But first I need to be sure.

Lisa’s ghost follows me to the shack. My earlier vision was just the night and the trauma and my fear playing cruel tricks on my mind, because the Swiss is still here, dormant and benign in his illness. But something has changed. His wound is the neat, pale seam of a long-ago injury when it should be pink rope.

What was new has turned old too quickly. It’s not right.

This time, when I pick up the pillow, I am resolute. All this death, all this destruction and loss, and still I can say the world is better without this one life in it.

His body tenses as it realizes there is no oxygen to be found in the pillow’s fibers. His fingers curl up, dig into his palms. One moment he’s struggling, then everything fades away. The last switch has been flipped on his life.

Lights out.

The end.

Beneath my boots, the earth gives another shake, rattle, roll. I have to go. There’s no time to make extra-sure the Swiss is gone. A stopped pulse is good enough; I don’t have time for breath and mirrors.

I tell myself I did this for Lisa and the others, but beneath the lie the truth prevails: this wasn’t revenge. This was insurance. The small black stain on my soul is the premium.

I killed a man. I killed a man and I don’t care.

With calm purpose, I slip my arms through the backpack’s straps and cut a path through the dead and the dying. There are enough hands still alive to help those in need. I’m not necessary here. My place is somewhere else.

I wipe the back of my hand across my eyes and try to convince myself it doesn’t come away wet.

I killed a man and I don’t care.