Malorie(51)

He doesn’t want this moment to end. He wants it to last another sixteen years. Outside, eyes open, free.

He steps to the end of the platform between cars. This is where someone would jump if they wanted to. This is where Dean might’ve thrown someone off, too.

Tom sits, cross-legged, glasses on. The wind comes at him, and he raises his arms.

He feels it. All of it. Every bit of this moment in time.

Nobody is out here with him. Nobody passes between the cars.

And nobody, absolutely nobody, tells him what to do.





TWENTY


Malorie knows it’s Dean before she runs into him, before he speaks. She’s not convinced her other senses have gotten stronger in the new world, but she can smell certain people and places seconds before reaching them.

“Malorie,” Dean says. “Are you well?”

She doesn’t want to tell him what she heard. The casket in storage. She doesn’t want a panic. She only cares about finding Tom and getting out of here before it all goes mad.

“No,” she says. She hates that there’s fear in her voice. She hates that she’s speaking to what would have once been considered an intelligent, interesting person, and all she can do about is be afraid.

“What’s wrong?”

“This whole thing is wrong,” she says. “The train. Thinking we can push back. All of this is insane.”

“Hey, Malorie. Wait…”

“I’m finding my son and we’re getting off. We’re walking home because back there, when my teenager storms off angry, I know where he’s going and who he’s with.”

She makes to pass him. Dean doesn’t reach out to stop her, but his voice does.

“Don’t you think that, now that they’ve seen the train, now that they’ve ridden it, it won’t be the same back home?”

Malorie doesn’t have time to do this right now. She needs to keep moving, needs to make sure her son, who she’s protected for sixteen years, doesn’t do something dangerous.

Oh, my God, she thinks. You hit Tom.

It’s like she just hit him again. And again now. The memory of it feels more like a realization every time it returns. And the only color she can see is the color of a face that has been slapped.

“Are you sure he went this way?” Dean asks.

“Yes. No. I don’t know.”

“I just came from the dining car,” he says. “And I didn’t see him.”

This is somehow worse. Like the train itself swallowed him. As if, by severing the umbilical cord (because that’s what it felt like, even to Malorie), Tom stepped into Malorie’s personal darkness and was pulled so deep she’ll never see him again.

“He’s here somewhere,” Dean says. “We’ll find him. So don’t worry. I’ll help.”

Malorie doesn’t want help. She doesn’t want to be here at all. It’s because of men like Dean Watts that everyone goes mad in the end. It’s the people who think beyond the fold.

Tom the man appears then, in the dark. He stands before the couch in the living room of the house where Malorie met him. At his feet are the pieces of a helmet he’s failed to keep together.

“I’m not gonna be able to get anything done until you find him anyway,” Dean says.

“Okay,” Malorie says. “Help me then.”

Because Tom the man wasn’t the reason that house went mad. That outcome, that blood, stains the hands of Gary. Gary, who convinced Don to tear the drapes down. Gary, who entered the house like a little, lethal spider in thespian’s clothing. It’s been sixteen years and she still shudders at the thought of him. Of his voice. His face. His beard. His jacket. His notebook. His words. His chalky white hands upon Don’s shoulder. Whispering in Don’s ear like a demon. Telling him the creatures aren’t real, mankind has lost their collective mind. Man is the creature he fears.

Malorie walks up the hall, fast. Dean is close behind.

“You two had a fight?” he asks.

“Something like that.”

“Well,” Dean says. “My eyes are open. And I can tell you he isn’t in this hall.”

“How about the cabins? Is he in someone else’s room?”

“Whose would he be in?”

They’ve reached the end of the hall. Dean opens the door.

The air comes at her, fresh and cool, and Malorie, blind, turns her head left, imagining Tom leaping from the moving train, stepping off between cars.

She hears the sound of the slap, her hand against Tom’s face.

“He’s not in this hall, either,” Dean says as they enter the next car. “But there’s something ahead you’re not going to like.”

“What?” Malorie freezes. She thinks of the casket in storage.

“Sorry,” Dean says. “It’s just clothing. But…a hoodie and some gloves. And, yes, a blindfold, too.”

“Oh, God.”

Because now Tom didn’t just storm off. Now he’s discarded the armor.

Malorie can’t think straight. She needs to find him. She needs to get off this train.

And she can’t keep what she heard to herself anymore.

“I overheard someone talking about a creature on board,” she says, her voice rattled, nearly hoarse. “Someone in one of the cabins said something about a creature in one of the caskets in storage.”