Malorie(39)

Malorie tries not to think of Gary. She tries to shove him as far from her mind’s eye as she can. But there he is. In a distant corner. At the far right side of the darkness.

He waves.

“There’re two open cars this way,” Dean says. “Come on.”

Malorie decides, here, now, to continue. Dean didn’t try to hide the past from her. This means something.

She can tell he walks slowly for them. She reaches both arms out, feeling the walls of the hall as it sways with the motion of the train.

“So, like I said, this is a storage car,” he says. “This and the next. There’s a bathroom here, too.”

Malorie thinks of what he said about transporting dead bodies. Are there caskets on the other side of this wall? Dead people swaying even as she does?

“All sorts of stuff in there,” Dean says. “Survival stuff.”

Malorie wants to feel good about this. Two cars full of supplies. As if they dragged the basement of the lodge at Camp Yadin with them.

“And this,” Dean says, “is the door to the next car.”

She hears it slide open.

“You’re already blindfolded so I won’t tell you to close your eyes. We’ve tried dozens of ways to block off the view between cars, but either the wind takes them, the motion breaks them, or those who’ve wanted to look do so anyway. Come on.”

Malorie feels a hand in hers. It’s not Tom. Not Olympia. She pulls back.

“Sorry,” Dean says. “I just thought—”

“We can manage.”

“All right. Follow me.”

She reaches behind her and takes Olympia’s hand. The air is cold between cars. Powerful.

Inside the second car, Dean closes the door behind them.

“More storage. Clothes for the needy, though we’re all needy now, aren’t we?”

Malorie imagines an alternate reality with this man, one in which she would say yes, we’re all needy, and winters in Michigan are brutal, and how kind to deliver clothes, what an incredible thing you’ve started here.

But she doesn’t want to talk any more than she has to. She wants that private room, that space. No more.

They walk.

“Another door,” Dean says. “Ahead is the first of the passenger cars.”

Someone opens the door before Dean does. The person comes fast, and Dean is shoved back into Malorie.

Malorie grips Olympia’s wrist. This is it. The moment they’re going to have to leap from the train. It’s not hard to imagine the gravel cutting into her elbows and knees just like it did when she fell off her bike, riding it for the first time. She can still see Mom crouched beside her, placing a Band-Aid on a cut.

“Sorry,” a man says. “Bathroom.”

He gets by Malorie and the teens clumsily, apologizing as he goes, his words breathless the way words are when someone hurries.

“You see?” Dean says. “A bit like the old world after all.”

He laughs, and Malorie wants to laugh, too. But she was prepared to leap from a moving train, mistaking a man in a hurry for a man gone mad.

“Door,” Dean reminds her.

They step through. Between cars, the motion is stronger, the wind stronger, the feeling that she’s doing something she shouldn’t be doing stronger, too.

“Here,” Dean says once they’re through. “This room is open.”

She hears a door slide. The sound of the wheels gets louder. A distant grating comes into focus. The outside world that much closer. As if Dean has let some of it in.

But this is what she’s asked for. This is what she wants. The safety of privacy. Where Tom and Olympia will not be tempted to discuss anything with anybody lurking deeper on this train.

She steps into the room.

“It’s actually quite nice,” Dean says. “If you decide to remove your fold, you’ll find red cushions on a bench. Two twin beds. A mirror. And I’ve learned that, at this slow speed, it can sometimes feel like what a hotel once did. Do you remember those, Jill?”

“Of course.”

But Malorie is feeling around the room, learning the dimensions. Her fingers alight upon a broom handle.

“For the more anxious set,” Dean says. “You can sweep the room to your heart’s delight every time you return to it.” Then, as if needing to explain the possibility of her leaving the car in the first place, he says, “There’s a second bathroom in the next car up. Just knock is all we ask.”

“This is amazing,” Malorie says because she has to. Because she can’t keep it in anymore. Of course tracks are the answer. In a world gone blind, the only safe roads are the ones that grip the vehicle and tell it where to go.

She thinks of the man Michael, alone out front, searching for debris in whatever way he does it.

“Thanks,” Dean says. “We’re extremely proud of it. And like I said…no money. But what are you gonna do? Sit in the dark your whole life? Not me. Not us. We gotta try something, don’t we? And I have an idea or two.”

“Yes,” Tom says.

Malorie is so swept up in the moment that she doesn’t allow herself to get angry at Tom for speaking. It strikes her that she’s already trusting Dean after all.

She remembers, briefly, feeling this way all the time.