Black River Falls by Jeff Hirsch(8)
“Well, if you’re sure you’re okay . . .”
Mom turned toward the wave of people heading for the park.
I scrambled to my feet, resisting the urge to close the distance between us. “Maybe I’m just hungry.”
I glanced at a big straw bag hanging from her shoulder. When we were kids, she never left the house without a snack in her purse. Apples. Rice cakes slathered with peanut butter. Remember how she said low blood sugar turned us into monsters? Mom dipped one hand into her bag. My heart leaped a little when she drew out a granola bar and tossed it to me. I rechecked the distance between us and then moved into the sunlight near the mouth of the alley.
“My name’s Cardinal,” I said. “Cardinal Cassidy.”
Once the Guard got the town under control, their first order of business had been to try to put everything back the way it was. Tell people their names. Reintroduce them to their families. But when I said my name, there wasn’t so much as a wrinkled eyebrow to suggest that Mom recognized it. Had they missed her?
There was a shout from somewhere in the crowd. She turned toward it.
“Nice to meet you, Cardinal. But I better get going.”
“No, wait a second. Please. I have to—”
The sound of engines cut me off. Three Guard trucks rumbled by. Mom mixed in with the few infected still on the street as the rest ran out ahead of the trucks. I called out to her again, but if she heard me, she didn’t turn around. The last thing I saw was a flash of her short dark hair as she melted into the crowd.
The next thing I remember is sitting on the hill overlooking Monument Park. My mask was strapped on tight and my hands were sweating inside my gloves.
By then a few thousand infected were pressed shoulder to shoulder behind the National Guard trucks. They moved in swells, surging forward and then just as suddenly pulling back. I dropped my head onto my bent knees and squeezed my eyes shut.
As soon as I did, I was right back in our living room in Brooklyn before we’d moved to Black River. It was a typical Saturday morning. You and I on the floor mashing buttons on the controllers of a beat?up old Xbox. Dad behind us, hunching his giant frame over that tiny desk in the corner he called his office. He’d be sketching furiously and bouncing his head to The Clash so hard that his mane of blond hair danced over his shoulders.
Mom was sprawled out on our worn-out blue couch, exhausted from a night of dance rehearsals followed by a late shift at that hipster bar with the fifteen-dollar hamburgers. She had a book tented on her chest, but like always, she was watching us play and enthusiastically yelling out useless bits of advice.
“Go over there! Now kill that guy! No! Not that guy, that guy! Tennant, come on. Just kill. All. The. Guys!”
“Shut up, Mom!”
My eyes popped open at a series of shouts down in the park. An old man with white hair and a tattered black overcoat was elbowing his way through the crowd, picking up speed as he moved away from the trucks. He turned to look behind him and slammed into the postal table, sending stacks of letters flying into the air like confetti. Everyone reared back in anger as he righted himself, but he ignored them and ran on. I looked closer. The black coat and filthy clothes. The scraggly beard. It had to be Freeman Wayne, Black River’s self-proclaimed town librarian. I’d never seen the guy before, but he matched Greer’s description exactly. What was he doing?
Whatever it was, it had attracted the attention of the Guard. They started moving toward him but stopped suddenly when they saw five of the men in the blue hazmat suits approaching him as well. A few words were exchanged and the guardsmen backed off, allowing the strangers in blue to take hold of Freeman. Why would the Guard do that? As Freeman was led away, the crowd pulsed and squirmed like a nest of bees that’d just been poked.
I couldn’t stand it another minute, so I went down the opposite side of the hill, ending up on an empty two-lane road. Even with a barrier between me and the park, the air still pulsed with the energy of the crowd. I passed a rusty playground and the old ice-cream shop and then crossed over into a warren of boarded-up houses.
The yards were overrun, choked with weeds and wildflowers in red and yellow and blue. Honeysuckle spilled out onto sidewalks, filling the air with a sweetness so syrupy it smelled like rot. I pictured Mom in her sun hat and gloves, gardening manual in hand, ordering the two of us around that first year in Black River. Cut this! Water that! Ferti-lize over here! She’d spent weeks making fun of our yard-obsessed neighbors, but there we were, beating back the sprawl of weeds to make room for roses and lavender and that yellow spidery thing that nearly took over the entire lawn. After years of living in Brooklyn, it seemed that having soil under our feet instead of grease-shellacked concrete had made Mom deranged. What would she think if she knew how useless all of it had been?
I turned down streets at random, following some internal compass with a needle that spun and spun. Soon the sounds of the park were gone, replaced by wind blowing through untended grass and down empty streets. I passed our high school and the library and the now abandoned vintage store where Mom used to go.
I knew I couldn’t blame the infected for not remembering. But how many times had I seen lightning flashes of the person Greer used to be? Like when some random guardsman was giving him a hassle and he’d clench his fists and grit his teeth. For a second he was that kid from the bus stop all over again. Didn’t there have to be places like that within all the infected? Like knots in a length of wood that could be sanded down but never erased completely. And if there were, how was it possible that I wasn’t one of those places for Mom?