Magda Dubcek sat astride her son’s corpse. She had finished him off by sliding a green-streaked shard of the blender jar into the side of his neck, and made sure of it by driving another shard into the opening of his ear and all the way down his auditory canal until it buried itself in his brain. Blood continued to spurt from the wound in his neck, soaking the beige carpet in a larger and larger pool.
Tears began to roll down her cheeks. Magda, at some strange distance, was dimly aware of them. Why is that woman crying? she asked herself, not certain who it was that was crying, or where. Come to think of it, where was Magda herself? Hadn’t she been watching television and decided to have a rest?
She wasn’t in her bedroom now. “Hello?” she asked the darkness that surrounded her. There were others in that darkness, many others, she thought she sensed them, but she couldn’t see them—maybe over here? Over there? Somewhere. Magda probed outward.
She needed to find them. She couldn’t be alone in here. If there were others, maybe they could help her get back home, to her son, to Anton.
Her body rose from the corpse, elderly knees cracking. She stumbled to the bed and flopped down on it. Her eyes closed. New white filaments began to unfurl from her cheeks, wavering, then falling gently down to the skin.
She slept.
She searched for the others, in that other place.
CHAPTER 6
1
It was a hot afternoon, one that felt more like summer than spring, and all across Dooling telephones were beginning to ring, as some of those who had been keeping up with the news called friends and relatives who had not. Others held back, sure the whole thing would turn out to be a tempest in a teapot, like Y2K, or an outright hoax, like the Internet rumor that Johnny Depp was dead. As a result, many women who preferred music to TV put their infants and toddlers down for their afternoon naps, as always, and once their fussing had ceased, they lay down themselves.
To sleep, and dream of other worlds than their own.
Their female children joined them in these dreams.
Their male children did not. The dream was not for them.
When those hungry little boys awakened an hour or two later to find their mothers still slumbering, their loving faces enveloped in a sticky white substance, they would scream and claw, and tear through the cocoons—and that would rouse the sleeping women.
Ms. Leanne Barrows of 17 Eldridge Street, for example: wife of Deputy Reed Barrows. It was her habit to lie down for a nap with her two-year-old son Gary around eleven each day. That’s just what she must have done on the Thursday of Aurora.
A few minutes after two o’clock, Mr. Alfred Freeman, the Barrowses’ neighbor at 19 Eldridge Street, a retired widower, was spraying his curbside hostas with deer repellant. The door of 17 Eldridge banged open and Mr. Freeman observed Ms. Barrows as she staggered from her front door, carrying young Gary under her arm, like a piece of siding. The boy, wearing only a diaper, was screaming and waving his arms. An opaque white mask covered most of his mother’s face, except for a flap of material hanging loose from one corner of her mouth to her chin. It can be presumed that it was this rip that awakened the boy’s mother and gained her far-from-pleasant attention.
Mr. Freeman did not know what to say as Ms. Barrows made a beeline for him, as he stood thirty feet away just on the other side of the property line. For most of that morning he had been gardening; he had not seen or heard the news. His neighbor’s face—or absence of it—shocked him to silence. For some reason, at her approach, he removed his Panama hat and pressed it against his chest, as if the National Anthem were about to be played.
Leanne Barrows dropped her bawling child into the plants at Alfred Freeman’s feet, then swung around and returned across the lawn the way she had come, swaying drunkenly. White bits, like shreds of tissue paper, trailed from her fingertips. She reentered her home and closed the door behind her.
This phenomenon proved to be one of the most curious and most analyzed enigmas of Aurora—the so-called “Mother’s Instinct” or “Foster Reflex.” While reports of violent interactions between sleepers and other adults ultimately numbered in the millions, and unreported interactions millions more, few if any occurrences of aggression between a sleeper and her pre-adolescent child were ever confirmed. Sleepers handed over their male infants and toddlers to the closest person they could find, or simply put them out of doors. They then returned to their places of slumber.
“Leanne?” Freeman called.
Gary rolled around on the ground, weeping and kicking the leaves with his fat pink feet. “Mama! Mama!”
Alfred Freeman looked at the boy, then at the hosta he had sprayed, and asked himself, do I bring him back?
He was not a fan of children; he’d had two, and the feeling was mutual. He certainly had no use for Gary Barrows, an ugly little terrorist whose social graces seemed to extend no farther than waving around toy rifles and yelling about Star Wars.
Leanne’s face, screened in that white crap, made it seem that she wasn’t really human at all. Freeman decided he would hang onto the kid until Leanne’s deputy husband could be contacted to take charge.
This was a life-saving choice. Those who challenged the “Mother’s Instinct” regretted it. Whatever disposed Aurora mothers to peacefully cede their young male offspring, it was not receptive to questions. Tens of thousands learned this to their detriment, and then learned no more.
“Sorry, Gary,” Freeman said. “I think you might be stuck with old Uncle Alf for a little bit.” He lifted the inconsolable child up by his armpits and brought him inside. “Would it be too much to ask you to behave?”
2
Clint stayed with Evie through most of the intake process. Lila did not. He wanted her with him, wanted to keep emphasizing that she couldn’t go to sleep, even though he’d started in on her as soon as she’d stepped out of her car in the prison parking lot. He’d told her half a dozen times already, and Clint knew his concern was testing her patience. He also wanted to ask her where she’d been the previous night, but that would have to wait. Considering developments both here and in the wider world, he wasn’t sure it even mattered. Yet he kept coming back to it, like a dog licking a sore paw.