Malorie(48)

She looks up, blind, as if the man could somehow be hiding on the ceiling.

She makes it to the end of the hall again. She must pass through another set of doors to get to the next car. Then another at the end of that one. And so on.

She listens. Voices within the cabin beside her.

She hears:

“…someone on board claims to have caught one.”

“What do you mean?”

“I met him between cars.”

“Who?”

“He says it’s stowed in one of the caskets in storage.”

Malorie moves before she decides to. She’s through the doors and into the next hall, and her hands are extended, and her mind’s eye is cluttered with so many memories, so much fear, that it becomes even darker, as if, this whole time, all these years, she’s actually had the lights on, and the words she’s just heard through the closed door of a stranger’s cabin on a stranger’s train have flipped the switch off for good.

He claims to have caught one.

On board.

Stowed in one of the caskets in storage.

“Tom,” she says, “Olympia.”

Breathless, but breathing. Moving on her own but ultimately carried by the train.

By somebody else’s big idea.

Someone else’s idea of safe.





EIGHTEEN


“We’re not leaving this cabin until we get there,” she says. She’s still wearing her fold, her hoodie, her gloves. She’s made sure her teens are doing the same.

She doesn’t ask that they repeat what she’s said. She believes the ferocity of her tone is enough.

But is it?

“What happened?” Tom asks.

Of course Tom asks this. And of course Tom is going to resist. She crosses the cabin so that she’s closer to him. So that there’s no question as to how serious she is.

“It doesn’t matter,” she says, tremors in her voice. “I said we’re staying. That means we are.”

“But, Mom…”

“Tom.”

…claims to have caught one.

The phrase is a horror. The census man spoke about somebody who asserted the same thing. Malorie read of other claims in the pages he left behind. Indian River, right here in Michigan. Close. In its way, the new world is the wild west: lawless and boastful. She understands the chances of any of this being verified are slim to none. But what kind of person would brag of such a thing in the first place?

And in a public place…

That person worries her as much as what might be in a coffin in storage.

“Mom,” Olympia starts, like she’s about to tell her something she’s been meaning to say. But Malorie doesn’t want to hear any more. She doesn’t think she can take any more. They’re out in the world. They’re on a train with people they do not know. In the hands of others now.

“Not now,” she says.

And she asks herself: is it true that she fears men more than she does the creatures? Is she being honest with herself when she says the person who claims to have caught one is worse than the lauded catch could ever be?

Her personal darkness turns green, then sickly, as if the entire world is wrinkled and decaying. As if every memory and every thought is filtered through black fabric, all the hopes and reverse-grieving stolen, only cold wind remaining.

It’s something she hasn’t considered in a long time. Something she hasn’t quite told herself before.

It’s not people who have driven her to the brink of paranoia.

It’s the creatures.

They stole her life. They destroyed the world she loved. They took her sister and, she once believed, her parents. They took Tom the man and Olympia the woman, and Rick and Annette from the school for the blind. Even the census man doesn’t know how many lives were taken by the unfathomable entities because even the ones tallying the numbers aren’t allowed to look at them.

She feels chilled, sickly, and so she steps to where she thinks the mirror is and feels the counter for a sink. There isn’t one. She gets to her knees and feels for a container, anything to—

She finds one. A small metal garbage can. She brings it to her face just in time as the sickness comes out of her, splashes her chin but only her chin as almost every other part of her is covered in cloth and clothes.

Olympia is by her side.

“You need to lie down,” she says.

But the advice is so jarring, so entirely not what she thinks she should do, that it almost comes to Malorie as a memory. She hears her mom saying the same thing after she’d picked her up from school for being sick in the bathroom. She remembers the sights on the drive home. It was autumn. Mom pointed out the colors, told Malorie a lot of people get sick when the seasons change, told her don’t worry.

How about when the world changes, Mom? she thinks. And how about seventeen years after the world changes? Do they get sick then? And do they ever get better if they do?

Yet, still, the images comfort her. Even now, harried and afraid. The sights and smells of autumn. How it once was. How it must still be, though Malorie doesn’t have proof of that anymore.

“No,” she says. “I’ll be okay.”

But the silence from her teens following this statement tells her they don’t believe it. That’s fine. Somebody on this train spoke of a man who claims to have caught one. Says the thing lies in a box in storage.