She breaks down into sobs, and Chelsea can feel echoes of heartbreak in her own chest. She reaches for Amy and pulls her into a hug. It’s awkward, as they’re both on their sides in a tiny bunk, and they can’t see anything, but this is how people deal with the Violence. They hug, they press, they wait patiently to ride it out. Amy cries against her shoulder as if she’s been holding this torrent in all along with that same gut-deep rage that Chelsea roared earlier when Arlene prodded her.
They both contain these deep wells of pain, these dammed-up rivers that need to run.
“It’s not your fault,” Chelsea whispers. “You couldn’t have known. It was just bad luck. He shouldn’t have said that to you.”
“It was a dick move,” Joy growls from the bunk overhead. “Fuck that guy.”
“Who could know?” Maryellen adds. “If he was at work, too, it was equally his fault. Fuckin’ patriarchy.”
Hearing their voices, Amy ducks her head into Chelsea’s shoulder, and Chelsea can feel a hot flush of embarrassment surge up her body.
“I stomped the dog to death,” she says to the darkness behind Amy. “And then I beat my only friend to death with her water bottle trying to get here. She had it, too.”
“I killed my neighbor with a shovel,” someone else says from the darkness.
“I was taking care of my mom. She was in hospice. Afterward, I was almost relieved,” says someone else. “And I hate myself for thinking that.”
“It was my boss,” someone else says. “That pedophile deserved it.”
“I was a teacher,” someone else says, voice breaking. “One of my kids. I fucking loved my kids.”
One by one, the voices ring out in the darkness.
Everyone has killed someone.
Everyone but Amy, but Amy feels as if she did.
Neighbors, friends, baristas. Amy is the only one who lost a kid. And maybe she didn’t do it with her own hands, but that just means she was there for every moment of it, didn’t even have the mercy of lost memories.
Chelsea wants to ask Amy why she would come here, why she would put herself in such proximity to the very thing that killed her son.
But she thinks she knows.
Because, like her, Amy has nothing, and she needs that vaccine because it’s only a matter of time before she’ll get infected and hurt someone herself.
And if Amy were to die by the Violence here, then that would make things even.
Holding Amy like this, her shoulder soaked with tears, Chelsea is almost grateful.
At least she still has her girls to go home to.
At least her girls are safe.
34.
Ella’s food isn’t going to last long. Mr. Reese’s house isn’t like Mrs. Reilly’s. Mrs. Reilly had electricity, a freezer full of Lean Cuisines, running water, air-conditioning. Mr. Reese’s house is much cleaner, much better smelling, but hot and humid and empty. There is no electricity, which means her phone is on power-saving mode. She has to change bathrooms multiple times as the tanks run out of water to flush. She drinks hot, fizzing sodas and eats the individually packaged snacks she brought with her.
The most important thing right now is finding her mom, and she needs Wi-Fi to do that. She sets her phone alarm for four in the morning and wakes up, hot and sweating on top of the covers, in Mr. Reese’s guest bed. The heat is so unbearable that getting up isn’t that much of a pain. Outside, the air is a little bit cooler, but not by much. She should’ve left a window open, but now mosquitoes feel like little grenades, even if she’s already got the disease. It’s not raining, but the low-lying clouds and feeling of heavy expectation suggest it will soon.
With her charged laptop in her bag with Mrs. Reilly’s knife, she hurries out Mr. Reese’s side door and scurries a few streets over to the neighborhood playground, keeping to the shadows. It’s the last place her dad would look for her, but she knows for a fact that she can pick up her home Wi-Fi signal from here.
The playground is deserted, cordoned off with yellow caution tape. Ella doesn’t know if that’s because someone got hurt here or because the neighborhood is trying to keep the HOA from being sued in case some kid gets killed on their property by someone with the Violence. The equipment is a bit run-down and has seen some changes since she was a little kid, but this playground still holds good memories.
Mom used to bring her here, when she was tiny, back before Brooklyn was born. Before things got bad. She has odd, fractured, dreamlike memories of swinging in that swing with buds on the trees, coming down that slide after a rainstorm and soaking her jeans. The neighborhood used to do an Easter egg hunt here every year, and Ella loved the feeling of being held back until someone counted down from ten, then the glorious feeling of being released to run free, careening in a crowd of kids, certain this year she’d find the big prize egg they always hid for one lucky kid to find and cash in at the local chocolatier. She never found the egg, but there was never a shortage of candy, either.
Now it’s dark, lit only by a few streetlights strategically placed so that if any teenagers come here to get in trouble, their hijinks will be highly visible to the nearest Concerned Carol with a phone set to record. Ella hasn’t seen a single light on inside a house on her way here. Half the homes are completely dark, but many of them have their outside lights on. Even during a strange pandemic, four in the morning is forgotten time. She sits at one of the picnic tables, checking it first for gum and bird shit, and opens up her laptop.
There’s her family Wi-Fi, uncreatively named with a string of letters and numbers. She signs in and starts by searching for Chad Huntley to see what the papers had to say about that. The story is barely a blip, these days—brave hometown officer killed in the line of duty, protecting citizens from the Violence. Unknown assailant.
Ella releases a huge breath she didn’t know she was holding.
They don’t know it’s her.
Or they know and aren’t making it public.
Maybe Uncle Chad wasn’t bringing her in officially but as a favor to her dad. Maybe he wasn’t even supposed to be there, and it was embarrassing to randomly track his phone or car or whatever to a dead old woman’s house. Maybe the labs are so backed up that no one is testing for DNA. Maybe they’re to the point where it doesn’t matter. Since you can’t prosecute someone for violence committed while storming, what’s the point in wasting a bunch of taxpayer dollars on it? It’s a crazy time for crime. But for Ella, this is a good thing.
At least in this regard, she has one less thing to worry about.