Malorie(60)

“It’s over,” the woman says. But she doesn’t seem to be speaking directly to Olympia.

Olympia begins to tell her to close her eyes again but stops herself.

The woman has painted open eyes on her closed lids.

“It’s over,” the woman says again.

A cabin door opens. A man peers out.

“Close your eyes,” Olympia says. “A lot of creatures outside.”

The man does more than that; he vanishes back into his room and slides the door closed. Olympia hears him moving something in front of the door.

Good, she thinks. And she knows Malorie would think the same. And it feels good, God, it feels good, to play the part of Malorie. To step into her shoes, Mom, who must be losing her mind, looking for Tom, thinking of her parents, so long believed dead.

Dead!

Olympia reaches the end of the car. She slides the door open, steps through. No sign of Malorie or Tom yet. Maybe they’re in the dining car. Maybe they’re fine.

But why hasn’t Malorie come back to check on her?

It strikes Olympia that the people they are going to see, Sam and Mary Walsh, the people she wants so badly to be alive, are the people who checked on Malorie her whole life, too.

Until the creatures came.

Creatures that, Olympia can hear, number in the hundreds. As if the entire landscape is made up of them. As if this very spot, here in the middle of Michigan, U.S.A., as if this is where they came from, broke through, entered the old world, making it the new.

A door slides open to her left. A kid looks out.

“No, no,” Olympia says. “Back in. And close your eyes.”

“Why?”

It’s a little boy. He reminds Olympia of Tom. Dark-haired. Fierce-eyed.

“Because we’re passing through a dangerous area and we may as well be extra safe. Right?”

But the boy, so much younger than Olympia, looks at her the same way she imagines she once looked at Malorie. There’s less severity in his reaction than hers. Less horror. This child is growing up in a world where the creatures are commonplace. For all Olympia knows he’s stood beside a thousand in his lifetime thus far. For all she knows, he’s completely unafraid.

Is it possible? And will every generation feel more and more comfortable until…

Until what?

“Inside,” she repeats. Then, “Where are your parents? Are they with you?”

As she asks this, a hand emerges behind the boy, takes him by the arm, and pulls him back into the room. The door slides shut.

Olympia moves on.

Still, she wonders…until what?

Malorie would say that so long as the creatures remain here, the world must wear a blindfold. But Tom would argue that eventually someone is going to figure out a way to beat them. But to that little boy in the room…what does “beating them” mean?

She reaches the end of the car, slides open the door, enters the next one.

There’s Dean. Okay. Good. Maybe he’s seen Malorie. But he asks her before she asks him.

“Have you seen your mother?”

He looks anxious. Olympia knows he has piloted the train through this concentrated stretch many times.

Does something other than the creatures worry him?

“No. Maybe she’s in the dining car?”

Dean holds her eyes a beat. Yes, there’s worry there.

A lot.

“I don’t want to frighten you,” he says, “but I’ve searched the entire train for both your mom and your brother. And…”

Olympia feels something break inside her. Whatever this is, it’s bad.

“And they’re simply not on the train.”

Olympia feels younger than she’s felt in a long time. She’s a child again, leaving the school for the blind. Maybe even younger.

“They have to be here,” she says. “They—”

“There’s someone else missing,” Dean says.

Olympia knows who it is.

Henry. The man Malorie would’ve killed them for talking to.

As Dean says his name, as he begins to describe him, Olympia is already heading the other way. The length of one car, then another, her heart is beating too hard. Too heavy. Malorie’s always telling her to breathe when she feels afraid, that oxygen, simple as it is, is actually the best medicine for fear.

But she can’t do it.

Gary.

Dean didn’t call him “Henry.” He called him Gary.

“TOM!” she screams. “MOM!”

Gary is missing, too.

Into a storage car. No cabin doors here. Dean is somewhere behind, calling out. Olympia doesn’t stop.

The second storage car. The end of the train.

Beyond the door ahead is the big open world.

And that world is teeming with creatures.

Olympia opens the door, passes through, stands on the metal platform, feels the wind rush to meet her.

Dean’s out here, too, now. Telling her to be careful. Not to worry. This can’t be as bad as Olympia thinks it is.

But Olympia hears something else, buried beneath his voice.

A fluttering at her feet.

She kneels and discovers the source of the sound is a singular piece of fabric, flapping in a grate where the platform meets the door.

She’s touched this particular piece of cloth so many times that she doesn’t question what it is.