Malorie(23)

What he wrote next was worse: This philosophy, scant as it is, has garnered followers.

And his summation was perhaps most troubling of all:

Without being able to verify if she lives the way she claims, I only have our brief encounter to judge her by. And by my own estimation, Athena Hantz is sane.

“Should we stop?” Tom asks. Malorie knows where this question is coming from. Has she ever not told them to stop in the presence of a creature?

Malorie thinks of the people like the woman from Indian River. The people who populate the papers in her bag.

Those people are unsafe. For that, every decision they make is coming from an unsafe place.

But Malorie, now, out in the world again, must trust herself. She must believe in her own rules and the lifestyle she has forged for her teens.

“Hoods up, cover your faces,” she says. “And keep walking.”





EIGHT


The teens sleep, but Malorie can’t do it.

They walked thirteen hours today, and the map tells her they’ve only gone nine miles. It’s daunting. It’s overwhelming.

Malorie doubts herself.

They’re in what was once a bait and tackle shop. The map tells her the names of the nearby lakes. And the old smell of worms and water remain. The teens sleep by what was once the front register. Malorie is near them. She’s under a blanket, the cloth edges secured to the ground by her own boots. She’s on her knees, her legs sore from the walking, her nose close to the map on the ground. The flashlight shows her the legend, the mileage, and how unfathomably far they have to go. A little math helps. It’s close to an hour and a half per mile, walking blind along existing roads, through former crop fields, woods, even some swamp. Because the distance to East Lansing (if Ron is right that it’s East Lansing and not Lansing) is almost exactly twenty-one miles, this means they could have thirty walking hours to go. That would be two more days’ worth, if they put in the work they did today. In the old world, these figures aren’t much. A long weekend. But now, under the blanket, Malorie feels an urgency she hasn’t experienced before. Even leaving the house by way of the river required four years of gathering the courage to do so. Right now, she would run if she could.

“Dammit,” she says.

She thinks of her parents, difficult not to refer to them as Sam and Mary Walsh, the written names like a fire in her head.

She pulls the papers closer and flips past the scant information about the train. As she does, she recalls Ron’s fear of “the people who run it.” Tom said anyone who could get a train running would have to be very smart, but Malorie doesn’t agree. The whole world, it seems, is crazy. And everybody within it is only a gradation.

She stops at a page titled: WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT THEM.

She almost laughs, exhausted, at this headline. The page ought to be blank, for all people have learned about the creatures. But Malorie quickly sees it isn’t.

The list immediately makes her uneasy.

They make noise, though not traditional sound. There is no flat-footed creak upon floorboards. Rather, it’s as if the floorboards themselves momentarily morph before returning to their natural state.

Malorie doesn’t like this. She doesn’t want to read this at all. She imagines even the floor going mad.

Some claim their shadows travel without them. Others claim there’s only one creature, in all the world, and that its many shadows stretch across the planet like dark fingers.

She doesn’t need this folklore. She doesn’t need rumors and theories. She needs facts.

There are stories of intentional attacks in what was once New York City. Rumors of aggression in Des Moines, Iowa. NOTE: Only people who live in areas where people-on-people crime was once common seem to suggest these things. There is no verifiable account of a creature forcing a person to look at it.

Tom snores, and Malorie clicks off the light. Her heart is hammering. Even reading about the creatures tends to send fog to the mind, a cloud to reason.

Olympia snores. Two teens vying for space, even in sleep.

In the dark, she remembers a time at home, after school, when she and Shannon fought over who would get to pick what board game the family would play in the living room. Dad, exasperated, told them they could both choose and play their own games. Malorie can see him, his hair as dark as her own, his eyes set deep in his face. She thought of Mom and Dad as law back then. A law to be broken of course, but law nonetheless. And when Shannon got bored with her own game and joined Malorie with hers, Malorie understood that their father had somehow, invisibly, made that happen.

She hopes she’s done things like this for her kids. She thinks she has.

She feels a tap on her back.

She falls flat to the floor, heart thudding.

“Mom.”

It’s Olympia, whispering, her lips pressed to Malorie’s ear through the fabric of the blanket.

“What?” Malorie whispers back.

“We’re not alone in here.”

Malorie goes cold.

“Someone is standing in the doorway,” Olympia says. “I can hear them breathing.”

Malorie’s mind seems to stop. For a second. She thinks nothing. Only feels. Then, an image of Gary. As if he’s been waiting to reveal himself all this time and chose now to do so. She has to decide something, fast.

“Is the door closed?” she whispers.