The Night Parade(60)

What if he’s gone dark? Completely off the grid? It was only a matter of time before Tim vanished completely.

Tim had never trusted the government, the police, the politicians, the bureaucrats. He’d stopped carrying around a cell phone because he didn’t want NSA listening in on his calls. He didn’t own a TV. The last bit of correspondence David had received from Tim had been in the form of an e-mail, so that kept some hope alive that he was still connected to the World Wide Web . . . but even that knowledge was not very reassuring.

What will we do if I don’t hear back from him? Where will we go? We can’t run forever.

David turned his phone off and shut his eyes. He slept for a while, surprised at the ease with which he came upon it, only to awaken sometime later by the harsh, mechanized sound of a helicopter flying close to the ground. He opened his eyes, hearing nothing but the steady chuh-chuh-chuh sound of its rotors.

It passed directly overhead, a great black hornet against a smoky black sky. It had a single searchlight combing the ground below. For a moment, the light passed right across the hood of the car. David sat there holding his breath, watching as the helicopter continued on into the night, the massive propeller eating up the darkness.

They’re looking for a black Ford Bronco, he reminded himself.

Once the helicopter was gone and the world settled, it was as if it never existed.





29


Six months earlier


In the weeks before his classes were discontinued, David would arrive at his classroom to find that a great number of his students had taken to wearing cheap plastic Halloween masks. The trend had begun months earlier, after fears that the virus might possibly be airborne and that any precautions that might keep exposure to germs at a minimum—to include the use of face masks—were recommended. When the sale of face masks could no longer keep up with the demand, people began rioting in the streets. It was then that the CDC revealed that the masks held little to no benefit. Nonetheless, people—mostly teenagers and young adults—who couldn’t get ahold of the N95s and similar masks took to wearing plastic dime-store masks. After a time, wearing the masks became less about protecting yourself against the disease and more about the solidarity of the healthy. To wear a mask meant you were still “clean.” In a way, it even became some sort of morbidly bizarre fashion statement. It wouldn’t be unusual to see packs of teenagers roving through the streets in the early evenings, their faces adorned with the countenances of Wolverine, Spider-Man, Minnie Mouse, or Smurfette. At first, the college had tried to ban the wearing of masks in the classrooms, but they ultimately conceded that point when students, citing public health fears, threatened to withdraw from their classes altogether. And so it became typical for David to arrive at class and look out upon a sea of plastic cartoon faces.

Creepier than the cartoonish masks were the paper plates with eyeholes cut out that some people tied around their faces. The more imaginative individuals drew faces or designs on their plates, sometimes beautifully and skillfully rendered, though more often than not just downright eerie. The more practical individuals kept their plates untarnished, walking around with blank white ovals strapped to their faces like expressionless mutes in a hospital psych ward. In David’s estimation, these were the creepiest.

It was one of these blank white plate-wearers who happened to remain standing near the back of the classroom when David entered. Most everyone else had dropped into their seats right away when he entered, with the exception of a few stragglers who felt entitled to finish their conversations first. David always gave them about a minute. He removed a stack of texts from his briefcase and waited for the murmurs to die down before looking up and out over the columns of masked faces.

The student in the plain white plate-mask was the only one who had not taken a seat. He wasn’t even facing forward, but gazing across the classroom at the wall of windows that looked out onto the quad two stories below. In general, David had always been pretty good at learning his students’ names, but since they’d started wearing masks, it seemed a futile and unreasonable task, so he had given up on it. It provided for anonymity when grading their papers, which alleviated implications that a low grade on an essay was because he disliked a particular student (though a slim few still attempted this, albeit unsuccessfully), yet the trade-off was that the masks made for rather antiseptic and emotionless discussions during class. In any case, because of the masks, David did not know the name of the student who stood at the back of the classroom.

“Take your seats, please,” he said, flipping to one of the bookmarked pages in the Bible-size Norton Anthology. He briefly scanned the highlighted text before glancing back up at his students.

The student in the plain white mask remained standing at the back of the classroom. The student was male and dark-skinned—that much David could determine—with hair buzzed nearly to the scalp. He wore a flimsy nylon jacket over a checkered flannel shirt. His motorcycle boots were covered in grime.

There was a roster somewhere in David’s briefcase. He kept it handy whenever he felt the need to address a certain student by their name (as opposed to the corresponding character depicted on their mask), and he produced it now, scrutinized it. The empty seat belonged to Sandy Udell.

“Mr. Udell,” David said, straightening his posture behind the desk. “Is there a problem?”

Udell ignored him; he just kept gazing out the window. David looked out into the quad to see what might be attracting the guy’s attention, but save for a stamped concrete walkway papered in dead leaves and an overcast sky, there was nothing.