Malorie(73)

“Well,” she says, “in sight, from where we stand, and we’re just at the border, literally…”

“Olympia. Out with it.”

“Bodies, Mom. So many bodies.”

Malorie knows that, right now, this moment, she has to be as strong as she’s ever been.

“And there’s…” Olympia’s voice trails off the way it does when someone is observing something bad. “Flags. Plastic flags…pinned to each of their chests.”

“What do you mean?” But it doesn’t matter. Whatever Hell unfolds before them, they must go through it.

“Heroes,” Olympia says. “Tributes, I think. To the fallen.”

Malorie thinks, Sacrifices.

“It’s bad,” Olympia says. “I’ve never seen…so much…”

It smells to Malorie like an entire graveyard’s worth of bodies never buried.

“Okay,” Malorie says. She’s trying to remain calm. She must. “Do you see your brother?”

“No,” Olympia says, her voice shaken. “It’s not like that. The road leads toward buildings. Bodies in the road.”

“Don’t look at them. Don’t think of them. Do you see Tom ahead?”

Malorie hardly recognizes the stability in her own voice. A thought flutters distantly; all her paranoid preparations, all her rules, have led to this moment in time.

Is she ready? Has she done right by herself, by her teens?

“No.” Olympia stifles a cry. “Oh, Mom. These people killed themselves. Their faces are torn apart. These people…”

“They went mad,” Malorie says. She breathes in. She holds it. She breathes out. “But we need to move. We need to go. Now.”

She feels Olympia’s hand in her own. The sun, still up, gets hotter. The smell gets worse.

They walk. And every time Olympia squeezes her hand, Malorie imagines another atrocity in the road.

“So now,” Olympia says, audibly shaking, “there are…things, too.”

Malorie stiffens.

“Creatures?”

“No. Like…makeshift things. Things Tom would’ve made. I don’t know what any of them are. Things made of wood and plastic, rope…metal…”

Malorie wants to move faster, to whip through this insanity, to find Tom now. The census papers talked about the risks this community is willing to take. She knows these broken objects are failed experiments left to decay with those who went mad.

“What do you see?” Malorie asks. “Talk to me.”

“Street signs. A gas station. Storefronts. I don’t know. Mom. No people. Wait…”

Olympia stops.

“What is it?”

“Can you hear that?” she asks.

Malorie listens. Hard.

“No. What do you hear?”

“People. Cheering. I think.”

Malorie starts walking again, and Olympia guides her along a curve in the road.

The stench is worse. Yet, somehow, this suddenly feels horribly right to Malorie. How long has it felt like she’s been walking through Hell? How many years? And how long has she seen the new world as a place of death and decay from the darkness behind the fold?

In its terrible way, this is exactly where she’s supposed to be. Indian River. An eventual point in time, a location in space, where the last seventeen years have carried her.

“So many bodies,” Olympia says. “So many…”

Are the failures so commonplace that the people who sacrifice their sanity and lives are simply wheeled to the lawn and dumped at the city gates, left to rot under the sun?

“Bones,” Olympia says.

Malorie was expecting this. The closer they get to town, the older the corpses. Like all graveyards, this one grows out.

And at the center of it, its source, she hears the voices now, too.

Cheering. There is no doubt.

“It’s going to be okay,” Malorie says. But she hears the lie in her voice.

Who waits for them downtown in a community like this? Who stands guard?

In her memory, she hears Victor the dog destroying himself in the emptiness of a dive bar.

“It’s going to be okay,” Malorie says.

“Bones,” Olympia repeats.

Malorie’s never heard this level of fear in her daughter’s voice. She doesn’t want to know what Olympia sees. Yet she’d rather see it for her. She’d willingly carry these memories herself.

A crowd cheers. A central voice erupts. A woman speaking through a megaphone.

Malorie thinks of the name from the census pages: Athena Hantz.

The amalgamation of barker and bad sound reminds Malorie of the Marquette County Fair.

Possibly the most unsettling aspect of all, for Malorie, is that, despite what Olympia sees…it sounds festive.

“Ahead,” Olympia says. “The buildings, the sidewalks, lined with more bodies. Oh, Mom. Oh, no. A kid.”

Malorie wants to demand why, why? What kind of community dumps the dead in the streets?

But she knows the answer.

One gone mad.

Altogether.

Unsafe.

An explosion of cheers tells Malorie the crowd is to the right of her, but the sound is still muffled. Distance to go.

“Step down,” Olympia says.