Malorie(63)

Dizzy, she stumbles across the space. The lack of the fold is horrible. The sense of a sky above. The vulnerability.

She gets to a second wall and reaches for the top. Can’t find it.

It’s damp here. Cellar damp.

She remembers a familiar voice at the back of the train.

“No,” she says. Because it’s too terrible. The voice she believes she heard. How many times has she been wrong about hearing that same cadence of speech? How often did she wake to discover it was only Gary speaking from the other side of partially opened doors in dreams?

“No.”

But maybe. Maybe.

She touches her head, feels a lump. She was struck. On the platform. She remembers it.

“Oh, God.”

The train. And Tom and Olympia still on it.

Traveling away from her now.

“HEY!” she calls. She has to.

She was struck. Hit in the head. Thrown off the train.

Right?

She breathes in, but she can’t hold it. She can’t calm down.

She hurries across the space, finds a third wall. Can’t reach the top.

All dirt.

A hole in the ground?

Words from the census pages rise to her mind’s eye.

Safer Rooms.

Efforts by men and women to build bunkers in the event the creatures completely take over.

Have they taken over? Is she the last sane woman alive?

She moves faster. Finds a fourth wall. She scrambles to touch all four again.

The space is big. Bigger than any grave. But a hole in the ground all the same.

“Help!” she calls. But she doesn’t want to do this, doesn’t want to give herself away. She needs to listen. She needs to think.

Whatever’s happened…she’s survived.

She digs at the walls. She has to get out of here. Has to find her teens. Has to get back to the train.

Now.

She tries to tell herself it’s one thing at a time. Get out of this hole first. Then find her kids.

She can’t breathe steady. Can’t control it.

“Tom!”

She shouldn’t do this. There could be anybody above. The people who’ve trapped her. She remembers the name Nathan. She remembers Gary’s voice.

Or does she?

And does he wait above? Does he look down on her in the hole?

Or did they put her here to get her out of the way?

“TOM! OLYMPIA!”

She scrambles up the wall but finds no purchase.

She remembers Tom leaving the train cabin, his face red from where she slapped him.

“Oh, no,” she says.

Because whatever this is, whatever’s happened, it suddenly feels like she’s the reason it did.

“Tom,” she says, as if her son were in this room (safer room?) with her. “Tom, please. Don’t be angry. Don’t do anything unsafe. Please, Tom, don’t be unsafe.”

Please, Tom

don’t go mad.

She recalls the name Indian River, spoken in a familiar voice. Just before being shoved from the train. But the moment she thinks it was Gary, the voice shrinks further into her head, a spider avoiding detection.

Indian River, she knows, is no place for her. It doesn’t matter if they’ve caught a creature there or not. The kind of community that would celebrate something like that is…

“Fucking insane,” she says. And her voice is rising with panic and guilt.

Her breathing picks up again. She can’t sit still. She tries climbing the walls.

Oh, Malorie shouldn’t have brought Tom and Olympia to the train. She shouldn’t have let them taste the new world. Certainly not a train. She didn’t have to bring them. There were options. She could’ve searched for her parents on her own.

But now…

This is Malorie’s fault.

The things people say about her are true. Paranoid. Overbearing. A helicopter mom. And here she thought there was no other way to be. Here she couldn’t be any other way.

She remembers swatting a two-year-old Tom with a flyswatter when he woke with his open eyes. She remembers slapping his face in the cabin on the train. She remembers yelling, so much yelling, so much saying no no no, Tom, NO!

But if you tell someone no enough times, they start thinking yes, just to hear something else, just to hear a different word, they start thinking yes.

Malorie imagines Tom’s young face standing before a group of new-world lunatics, the lot of them excited to pull back a tarp, to show him what they’ve caught. That’s the world Tom wants. Like the one in Indian River. She sees his blue eyes, huge now in her mind, his black hair, hair like hers. Young Tom bracing himself for that fabulous rebellion, making small fists to fool himself into feeling bigger than he actually is. She sees something in his mind, his brain, the spot where actual insanity begins. She hears it flutter, coming alive.

She imagines the tarp pulled back.

She sees Tom’s eyes go wide, wider.

Because that’s why they’d want Malorie out of the way, right? The people who put her here? Why else if not to get to her kids?

She opens her mouth to say the name Gary, but she won’t do it. Can’t.

She scrambles up the wall, imagining Tom as he tilts his head with curiosity toward the thing under the tarp, Tom’s last stand, the last attempt at assimilation, as the origin of insanity takes flight, a bird as black as his hair and as blue as his eyes, flying up into the infinity of his own mind. He attempts to grab it, to put it back in its box, to stop the sound of those fluttering wings, insanity afoot, a young man gone mad, a mind not yet mature enough to recognize his thoughts as being wrong, as cracked, as flown. She imagines him thinking he’s succeeded, that he beat the creatures that have held him down so long, the thieving entities that stole views, any views, all views, them all.