Malorie(76)

For the first time in seventeen years, she isn’t scared.

And for a second, a flash, she remembers the girl her father described. She remembers pushing back against a world she felt was unfair.

She remembers being like Tom.

“Your mother,” Sam says. And the pause worries her. “She would’ve…”

“Mom…” But Malorie can’t finish the sentence out loud.

Mom is dead.

Sam rises and makes to help her up. Then Olympia’s and Tom’s hands are upon her, too.

Together, they’re trying to help her to standing. But as Dad speaks again of Mom, as Dad stands with her two teens, as the most dangerous community Malorie’s ever known celebrates on high, Malorie, here, unable to process this new reality, unable to see it as anything but a fantastic variety of madness, Malorie passes out in the arms of those she loves.





THIRTY-ONE


When Malorie wakes, she does so with her eyes closed. She is lying on something soft. A blanket covers her to her chest.

She can tell there are people in the room.

“Mom?”

It’s Tom. Tom is here.

“You can open your eyes.”

It’s Olympia. Olympia is here.

But when Malorie does open her eyes, the first face she sees is her father’s.

“Oh…Dad…”

The vision of him is blurred by sudden tears. A joy she once believed impossible.

“Hey,” he says. But his eyes are wet, too.

He looks older, but good. White hair. Bright eyes. The same smile she remembers from before the world went mad. His clothes are different; a flannel shirt and sweats. Clothes she doesn’t remember him ever wearing. He looks like someone who has walked instead of driven for seventeen years. Like someone who hasn’t seen a television, hasn’t used a computer, hasn’t eaten at a restaurant for that time, too.

There’s something else in his eyes. Malorie can see enormous emotions, memories, knowledge, there.

She looks to Tom. Because she remembers now. His name cheered by a lunatic crowd. Olympia saying her brother’s eyes were open.

Facing a creature.

“Tom…”

She makes to sit up but doesn’t get very far.

Tom is watching her. Sane.

Olympia. Sane.

“Your kids are amazing,” Sam says.

Malorie looks to him and can barely get the words out through fresh tears. “Your grandkids.”

“I’ll get you some water,” Olympia says. Then she’s up and out the door.

Malorie looks about the room. Blankets over the windows. Wood-paneled walls. She’s in a small bed in what feels like a guest bedroom.

It’s clean. It’s nice.

Dad is here.

Malorie looks to Tom again.

“What happened?”

Tom looks older, too. But not in the same way Dad does. Her son has the tranquil look of someone who has achieved something he set out to do.

The look of success, possible even here in the new world.

“Seems my grandson invented a way to look at them,” Sam says.

Malorie starts to sit up again, but Sam is up and out of his chair, kneeling beside her.

“You don’t have to hear it all at once,” he says. “But you definitely have to hear it.”

“Where are we?”

Sam smiles.

“It’s what I’ve called home for a few years now. Your mother and I worked our way south after they arrived. I have enough stories to fill a library.”

Malorie smiles. But while Tom may have invented a way to look at the creatures, some still roam the horizons of her mind.

“Oh, Dad…me, too,” she says.

“We’re in a house about as far from the maddening crowd as you can get,” he says. He looks to the blanketed window, and Malorie easily remembers him doing the same in her youth. Only then he looked pensively out at the world. And now? “Mary insisted you’d come here. I can’t tell you how often we argued this.”

“And she’s…?”

“Yep.”

No grieving in his voice. Sam has already gone through that. Just as Malorie went through it for him.

“Shannon…” Malorie says.

Sam nods and holds a finger to his lips.

“Olympia filled us in.”

He still smiles. Malorie knows it’s because her parents accepted the deaths of their daughters a long, long time ago.

“Us?” she says.

“Just because your mother has moved on doesn’t mean I don’t keep her up to date. She’s buried in the backyard.”

“Oh God, Dad. I’m so sorry.”

Sam only nods, raises a hand to say he’s okay.

“I’d like to see her,” Malorie says.

Sam gets up and holds out a hand to help her do the same.

“She would love that.”



* * *



—

Malorie breathes deep before exiting the home’s back door. She holds Sam’s hand.

Despite the fact that the people of Indian River are currently fashioning visors out of two-way mirrors, both are blindfolded.

“How long have you guys been here?” Malorie asks.

“Close to three years.”