Chapter 22
My head throbs with tension that has me clenching every muscle in my body, and I don’t know if I can go much farther. I push sweat-crunchy bangs from my forehead and force my legs to continue forward.
The glass skyscrapers of downtown Denver reflect the brightening sky, glowing with the promise of a very near sunrise. In between the slender skyscrapers, a few blocks away, the wall looms—a muddle of stacked, rusty train cars and cinder-blocks.
Bowen pauses, and I almost walk into him before I realize he’s stopped moving. I halt, wanting to fall to the dusty sidewalk and sit, but stay standing.
“Where are we?” I whisper, wobbling on unsteady legs. My voice is out of place in the quiet morning. Bowen tilts his face toward the sky. I follow his gaze and blink at a massive, ornate glass skyscraper that seems to touch the blazing blue sky.
“Marriott,” Bowen states, sticking his head through the frame of a glassless revolving door in the building’s exact center.
“The hotel?” I ask, wondering if my sluggish brain heard him right.
“Yeah. You need rest. And sometimes there’s water in the toilet tanks, in case we run out. And if we are really lucky,” he says, looking at me with a gleam in his weary eyes, “we might find a room with a bed that hasn’t been destroyed. You can sleep in comfort.”
In spite of the terror of the night, I smile at the thought of sleeping in a real bed. Bowen smiles back, an expression that reaches his eyes and warms my exhausted body. A moment later his smile fades and he presses a finger to his lips. I cringe and twirl around, expecting attack. A hand softly squeezes my shoulder, and Bowen turns me back to face him.
“It’s okay. You’re safe. When the militia passed the order to shoot raiders on sight, the raiders stopped coming out in daylight.” He nods toward the remnants of the revolving door, presses his finger against his lips again, and tiptoes into the hotel.
Inside, sunlight glints off the glass-speckled marble floor—the glass from the revolving door—and I find myself in a ransacked lobby. Faded, once-red furniture has been pushed to the sides of the room. The stuffing is spilling out of most of the pieces, and I see a rat—a rat!—poke its head out of a hole in a sofa to watch us with beady eyes. Paintings hang crookedly on washed-out walls, and a layer of dust dulls everything.
In the lobby’s center sits something out of my dreams. A dusty black grand piano.
A slew of music fills my head, resonates in the ugly minuscule sounds of this dead world. It turns into a haunting melody of snow and ice. Christmas music. At Christmastime I would dress in scarlet velvet trimmed with white lace and play the piano. This piano.
Child prodigy.
That’s what my mother called me. That’s what my teachers called me. That’s the name my peers teased me with. That, and Fotard.
I can still hear my music theory teacher’s voice: With those fingers, she’s destined to be one of two things in this life. A surgeon or a musician. But who would want to be a surgeon?
My fingers could fly across the keys faster than human eyes could see, dancing to the music as they created it, brought it to life. If I wasn’t doing homework, or spying on the boy across the street, or playing games with Jonah, I was sitting at the piano, filling myself with music—with joy. Or sorrow, depending on the piece. On that day, right before I turned thirteen, it was foreboding that overwhelmed me as I learned Beethoven’s Seventh. I’d studied the piece the night before, memorized the translated words of a poem that had been sung to the tune, the words of “Figlio Perduto”—“Lost Son”—about a boy and his father going home, but the boy keeps hearing things and seeing things that his father cannot. And then the Erl King—a fairy king—comes to steal the boy away into another world. Only, the father couldn’t see the king.
“MY FATHER, MY FATHER, HE SEIZES ME FAST,
FOR SORELY THE ERL KING HAS HURT ME AT LAST.”
THE FATHER NOW GALLOPS, WITH TERROR HALF WILD,
HE HOLDS IN HIS ARMS THE SHUDDERING CHILD;
HE REACHES HIS FARMSTEAD WITH TOIL AND DREAD,
THE CHILD IN HIS ARMS LIES MOTIONLESS, DEAD.
My fingers pounded the keys, the song consuming me, haunting me, making me feel as if I were the one being stolen away by the Erl King’s magic.
Dad’s voice bellowed into the music room, military fierce. “Quiet!”
My hands jerked off the keys, my toe released the pedal, and I stood from the glossy black bench, shocked.
The television boomed from the other room, turned so loud the windows rattled. I closed the piano, pushed the bench in, and followed the noise.
Jonah and Lis sat on the sofa, leaning toward the television, their eyes wide. Dad sat in his wheelchair beside the sofa, square hands resting on the wheels, attention glued to the TV screen.
I glared at my family. No one had ever yelled at me to be quiet before. I was a prodigy, after all. “Why can’t I play the—”
“Shhhh!” they hissed as one. Lis glanced at me, and without speaking a word, I knew something was wrong. She held up her hand and I clasped it and stared at the television, too. And the more I heard, the closer to the television I leaned.
“Because of the direness of the situation, we thought it best to speed matters along,” said a man in a gray suit. He stood alone at a podium in front of a group of reporters. The reporters wore white masks over their mouths: the kind doctors and surgeons wore to avoid spreading disease. “If we didn’t step in, bees would already be extinct and that would potentially lead to worldwide famine, possibly even the extinction of the human race.”
“So, you’re saying you fixed the bee problem? Honeybees are no longer on the endangered species list?” a woman from the crowd asked the man in the suit.
The man looked away from her, straightened his red tie, and looked right at the camera and stared, as if staring directly into our family room, staring into every room in America. “Yes. We found a solution,” he said, his eyes fastened to mine through the plasma screen. “We have already genetically modified honeybees.”
On the bottom of the screen, words zipped by. Flu death toll at a new high. Over fourteen thousand known deaths with thousands more expected. Hospitals too full to admit new cases. Entire East Coast advised to stay indoors. West Coast predicted to follow.
“So, you’re saying, in the midst of this monumental flu epidemic, we finally have something to celebrate?” another masked reporter asked.
The man in the suit tugged at the collar of his white shirt, swallowed, and looked down. Slowly, he placed his hands, palms down, on the podium. “No,” he said, unable to meet the camera with his eyes. “We modified the bees. But the GenMod bees … they killed the other bees. All of them.”
Another reporter chimed in, “Well, that’s okay, right? As long as they reprod—”
“They’re the cause of the flu,” the man blurted.
“What?” Lis said, dropping my hand. “How can bees be causing the flu?”
The reporters burst into a flood of questions, raising their hands, trying to be heard over each other.
The man in the gray suit coughed into his balled fist before saying, “We genetically modified the bees’ sting to be more powerful, more deadly to its predators. Unfortunately, we discovered that when a human being is stung, the bee’s venom causes flu-like symptoms, followed by aggressive behavior and then death. The bee flu is highly contagious, spreading through bodily fluids—something as simple as a cough makes the germs airborne.”
Jonah’s face drained of color. “The bees? That’s why so many people have died? Because of your stupid bees?” he yelled at the television. Lis grabbed my hand once more, holding it tight.
The man, his face turning a sickly shade of green, tugged on the collar of his shirt again and pointed to a reporter who stood frantically waving his hand. The reporter tore the surgical mask from his mouth. “So kill them! Exterminate them!” he cried, his voice rising to near panic.
“We tried,” the man muttered, eyes full of misery, shoulders slumped.
“And?”
He looked right into the camera again. Right into the eyes of America. “We modified them to withstand all known pesticides. We have come up with a new pesticide that kills them, but it is worse than the bee flu—a last resort. We’re not sure if anything will survive its effects.”
“They’re going to kill the whole country,” Dad whispered, knuckles white from his grip on his wheelchair wheels.
“Use the pesticide!” a reporter yelled. More join in, chanting, “Pest-i-cide! Pest-i-cide!”
“Wait!” The man at the podium raised his hands over his head. “There’s hope. We’ve manufactured a vaccine, a sort of antivenin derived from the bees. There’s only a limited supply, so …”