Malorie(26)

“Now,” Malorie says.

She feels grass beneath her boots but it’s not far enough. In the new world, someone driving could be driving blind. Malorie’s done it herself.

“Farther,” she says.

But she hears the engine pick up speed. As if the driver saw them. As if the driver is looking for people just like them.

“Down,” Malorie says. But she can hear it’s too late for that. The car is closer, closer, and slowing to a halt.

It’s level with them now.

It stops.

The engine idles. It revs. It idles. It revs.

Malorie imagines a gun pointing out an open window. A face behind it, shaped by madness.

But nobody speaks. And no sudden sound breaks the sky above the open country road.

Malorie faces the car.

The car idles.

She thinks of Camp Yadin and how safe they were. She can almost feel the texture of the rope in her gloved hands, rope connecting each building, one of which housed canned goods, another with a garden beside it. She sees herself, waking there, walking there, living there, safe. She hears herself asking the teens what might be outside. She hears their answers. They lived alone. They lived safe.

They lived by the blindfold.

The grass beside her crunches fast, too fast. Malorie cries out.

It sounds like an animal.

Something slams into the side of the car.

“Don’t move!” she yells to the teens, but her voice is lost in the noise of repeated blows to the side of the car. She hears a man yelling, someone who sounds dangerously angry, possibly mad.

Then she recognizes the voice as Tom’s.

Tom is screaming at the driver to leave.

“Go! GO! GO!”

Malorie rushes to the sound of him, to grab him, to get him away from the car. But the engine is revving so hard that dust rises like a curtain, and Malorie coughs.

The engine revs again, and Malorie holds a hand over her mouth and reaches for Tom with the other. She finds his shoulder.

Or does she?

Is this the shoulder of the driver?

A hand falls upon hers.

“GO!” Tom yells. And Malorie pulls back. Despite the chaos, despite the fear, it strikes her, suddenly, that Tom is a man now.

Another blow to the car. Then Malorie has him by the waist. She’s pulling him back. Olympia says something, words lost in the din of the engine.

The car moves, and Malorie bumps hard against Tom as he’s flung back into her.

“Go, you stupid assholes!” Tom yells. “Just go!”

Tears in his voice. Malorie doesn’t understand. His emotions sound wider, more powerful, than they ever did in the cabin.

“Tom,” she says. “Calm down!”

But Tom is far from that. And the car is driving away.

“Why, Mom? Why? Weren’t you gonna tell them to go? Weren’t you gonna tell them to leave? That’s what you do!”

Malorie wasn’t expecting this. He’s not mad at the car, he’s mad at her. As if she were somehow the danger and not the stranger idling without speaking.

“Tom, we’ve survived this long—”

“That’s all we do!”

“Tom—”

“That’s all we do is survive!”

This steals her breath. She doesn’t know what to say.

The car grows quiet in the distance, and Malorie knows she’ll never know what the driver had in mind.

In the old world, he or she could’ve given them a ride to the train.

“Come on,” Olympia says. The mediator.

The teens return to the road, their shoes crunching the gravel on the shoulder. But Malorie can’t stop thinking of what Tom just said.

All we do is survive!

Not a boast. A gripe.

Malorie walks. Again the faces of her parents return to her mind’s eye. Their jokes. Their advice. The way they parented, too.

She hopes they’ve lived by the same rules she has.

“Ready, Mom?” Olympia says. Still mediating. Still attempting to sidestep the fact that Tom just blew up at Malorie.

Malorie doesn’t respond. She only walks, knowing the teens can hear her, can pinpoint her exact location with their ears.

And as she walks, she hopes her parents have done exactly what Tom has suddenly accused her of.

She hopes they live by the fold.

She hopes all they do is survive.





TEN


Tom waits for Malorie to fall asleep. Even in the dark, it’s not hard for him to determine. Malorie and Olympia don’t always snore, but both breathe differently when they go under. Tom believes he can hear it when they dream. Often, back in Camp Yadin, this idea comforted him and eased him into his own deep slumber.

They’re in a barn. Olympia found it a mile and a half after Malorie asked that they abandon the road and walk “in tandem” until they found a place for the night. Tandem, for these three, means Malorie sticks to the road, Tom walks some forty feet into the grass, Olympia forty feet beyond him. The teens can hear how close each are to one another, and the sound of Malorie’s shoes makes it so they don’t go too far to get back. When Olympia called out what she’d found, a dirt drive first, then the barn itself, Tom began planning.

It’s all driving him a bit mad.

He understands Malorie grew up in a world where it was normal to look outside, to see the barn, and therefore to detect any sign of danger. But he doesn’t think she really understands that he and Olympia can do the same thing with their ears. She’s praised them for it through the years, but her bottomless precautions reveal what she really thinks: they’re vulnerable children without her. Tom’s out in the world, for the first time since he was six years old, and the last thing he wants more of is Malorie. He can hear if something is near a barn. It’s more than sound. It’s instinct. One Tom and Olympia trust like Malorie once trusted her eyes.