The days passed strangely after that. I didn’t sleep. I wasn’t hungry or thirsty. I never left the high school, just drifted from room to room. People talked endlessly. In the classrooms. In the halls and stairwells. In the lunchroom. They knew everything. They knew nothing. The Marvins had been pushed out for good and their leaders arrested. The Marvins were mounting an imminent counter-attack, this time backed up by the National Guard and Special Forces.
Hannah and the kids had claimed a small classroom in a remote corner of the school. I spent most of my time there, watching from the other side of the room in my mask and gloves as Hannah tended to the kids. Everyone was in a shell-shocked daze, but Benny and DeShaun and Carrie had it the worst. They barely moved or spoke. Hannah did what she could. She held them. Whispered to them. Fed them. She kept them all close, bound up into a warm knot of bodies. They held hands. They slept draped over one another at night, as if they were being stalked by some dark and prowling thing and if there were any stragglers, if anyone wandered from the fold, they’d be consumed. I wanted to help, wanted to add my body to theirs, but what could I do?
One day I left the school and walked through Black River.
There were signs of the riots everywhere. Broken windows. Torn-up lawns. Roads that were crisscrossed with black skid marks and littered with the casings of tear gas shells. There was a Marvin Humvee lying on its side at a corner, scorched black, its windshield shattered. The familiarity of it all, the feeling like I’d been in exactly this place before, was overwhelming.
At the end of one street I came to a pile of rubble made up of wrecked cars, scrap wood, and old furniture. It stretched out of sight in either direction. Teams of infected were using wheelbarrows to haul more debris up to the line and heap it on, so the barricade grew and grew. It was patrolled by men and women carrying hunting rifles or shotguns that had probably been stolen from fleeing Marvins. Still others carried axes, baseball bats, shovels, kitchen knives.
Beyond the barricade was a narrow no man’s land and then a Marvin wall made of sandbags and a new quarantine fence of steel and razor wire. On the other side, a mix of Marvins and state police leaned against their vehicles, sipping coffee and chatting, high-powered rifles hanging from their shoulders. Behind them was a third line. The news vans. CNN. MSNBC. Fox. PBS. Satellite dishes reached up into the sky like sunflowers. Reporters primped and fussed in side-view mirrors.
I turned toward Lucy’s Promise. The green of the mountain was dazzling. My eyes ached just looking at it. I could see the notch in the trees near the top, where our camp sat. I thought of the cabins and of Snow Cone and Hershey Bar trapped up there alone. I felt a tug deep inside me that grew until I had to turn my back to the mountain and walk away.
Eventually I found myself back on our front lawn. The house still seemed practically untouched. I climbed the stairs and stood on the porch. The door was unlocked, so I went inside, passing through the entryway without daring to glance at the wall by the door. I pulled off my mask. The air was dusty and stale, heavy with old humidity. There was a sour, rotten smell too, one that became sharper as I moved into the kitchen. The refrigerator was nearly empty, but what was there had slumped into piles of green-black mold. In the back corners of the cabinets by the fridge there were a few forgotten cans of tuna and beans. Unopened boxes of cereal.
A shattered wine glass lay on the floor by the stove, the gleam of the shards dulled by a layer of dust.
I went to the sink and turned the spigot. Water splashed against the stainless steel and swirled down the drain. I stared at it for a long time, lost in the staticky rush, and then I took a paring knife from the block by the stove and left the kitchen.
I paused at the edge of the living room, my hand resting on the cap of the banister. The stairs to the second floor were gray with dust. I started up, then heard something behind me and turned. That’s when I saw Cardinal. I was surprised I hadn’t noticed him before. He was standing between the coffee table and the TV. He looked smaller than he had last time. His armor was dented and scorched, broken at the joints, so that bits of red plate hung loose, the exposed wires sparking. In some places I could see down to his skin, the deep brown of it crisscrossed with wounds and slick with blood. His wings were gone, leaving only ragged stumps.