Malorie(52)

Dean is quiet. Is he studying her? Is he weighing how paranoid she really is? And the next words he speaks…Will they placate? Will they humor? Will they dismiss?

“I’ll check storage,” he says. Firm. Decisive. Serious. “You keep going ahead. Find Tom.”

“Okay.”

Then he’s gone. And Malorie kneels to pick up the clothing Tom has left behind.

“He shed his skin,” she says. Or thinks. She doesn’t know.

But what if his skin is all that protects him from the new world?

She can barely stop from falling apart. The train rocks. Dean’s footsteps grow quiet behind her before she hears a door open and close. She’s alone again. Looking for her son. No, not looking. Never looking. Never looking at all.

And isn’t that exactly why Tom wants to get away from her? From this life? Isn’t that exactly why anybody, even those born into it, would want to shed their skin?

She continues. She calls out his name. She knocks on the nearest door, and a voice from within says they don’t need anything. She tells them she’s looking for her son. The voice, a woman, tells her he’s not in there with her.

Malorie continues.

The train sways.

She knocks on the next door. Nobody responds this time. She imagines Tom standing silently inside. She tries the door. It won’t slide. It’s locked. Now a voice comes. Tells her they don’t need anything. She says she’s looking for her son. We’re on a train. First time ever. Please. Help. Is he in there? No, they say. No, go away. Please.

Malorie continues. She reaches the door. Near to shaking now, she steps between the cars. But before entering the next one, she checks how much space is here, how much room. Could a sixteen-year-old boy fit through the space between cars? Could he jump from here?

The wind crawls up the long sleeves of her sweatshirt. Like the fingers of the creatures she’s never been allowed to look at.

If they have fingers. If they have anything at all.

She doesn’t know. Doesn’t know a thing about them.

Still.

She enters the next car.

Has Dean found anything in storage? An empty casket? Or worse, much worse, a creature in a box, and Dean Watts too proud of his train to be careful when he opened it?

Has Malorie sent Dean to his madness? Has she sentenced them all?

It’s not difficult to imagine Dean beside her again. Suddenly. Forcefully. He’d be saying the same things he was saying before. Using the right words. But she’d hear it. The madness in him. Possibly before he heard it himself.

She knocks on the nearest door in the next car.

“Yes?” It’s a young woman. She sounds scared. Malorie hears her whisper to someone. Is it Tom?

“I’m looking for my son,” she says. “He’s sixteen. Is he in there? Have you seen him?”

“Please, go away,” the woman says.

Malorie feels a sudden stab of rage. She wants to tear the door down, wants to storm into the young woman’s room and ask her how she could possibly only be thinking of herself at a time like this.

“Please,” the woman says. Firm. “Go away.”

And she sounds a lot like Malorie used to. Back when a man on a boat approached her and the kids on the river. Back when people knocked on the door to their room at the school for the blind. Even as recently as when the census man came.

“I’m sorry,” Malorie says. And it feels like she’s saying it to herself, telling herself she’s sorry for losing sight of Tom. Sorry for slapping her son. Sorry for turning into the paranoid person she’s become.

She stumbles from the door, visions of herself and Tom and Olympia tucked safely inside. As if she’s leaving that possibility now. Leaving security and safety at last. Becoming, in the end, unsafe.

If they’d run for the train a year earlier, would this be happening? Would Tom have reached his end with her?

And her with him?

She can’t think about that. Not now. The names of her parents burn bright in her head, burn the very pages they appeared upon, and Tom vanishing into the darkness of a moving train cannot eclipse this.

Yet, everything, everything feels wrong. The movement, the voices, the smells, the fact that they are in the hands of other people, Olympia alone in their room, Tom alone and angry, Malorie alone and searching.

The caskets in storage. Dean checking them.

How? How can he possibly know if one is in there or not without looking?

Absolutely everything feels wrong, everything is wrong, like it’s gone wrong, like she fucked up something that was once precious to her. She’s struggling to get a grip, to find purchase in the pitch-black present.

Jesus.

She should’ve stayed home.

She knocks on the next door. A man slides it open. When he speaks, his voice comes from above. He’s tall. He sounds like what people used to refer to as conservative, though that word doesn’t apply to the new world. Not to Malorie. There are only those who are safe and those who are not, and today she was not.

“My son,” she says.

Before she says any more, the man speaks.

“Young man? Teenager? Black hair like yours?”

“Yes.” She hears the light, the hope in her voice. It startles her.

“Saw him go down the hall. Closed my eyes when he made it to the end there.”