“I couldn’t go on if something happened to you, Ellie,” he said. “I would hurt so much that I wouldn’t be able to take it. Is that something that you’d want to happen to me?”
Slowly, she shook her head. Her eyes had become glassy, filling with tears.
“I would die, Ellie. If something bad happened to you, I would die. Do you understand?”
She nodded, knocking a tear loose and sending it down her cheek.
“So if you love me,” he said, “please, please stay with me on this. Please. Will you? Will you trust that I’m doing the best thing and stay with me on this?”
“I will,” she whispered. “I love you, Dad.”
“I love you, too, Ellie.” He handed her a napkin. “Now dry your face before someone notices.”
31
David continued to check his e-mail on his cell phone as they drew closer to Kansas City, but somewhere along the way he stopped receiving an Internet signal. His e-mail wouldn’t refresh, and he could no longer pull up any web pages. Panic seated itself firmly at the back of his head. He began to consider the worst—that the government had zeroed in on them and were currently jamming his phone.
They crossed into a town called Harmony, which David hoped wasn’t one of those ironic names. The town looked normal for the most part, much as their own hometown of Arnold, Maryland, had been up until they left. The same sign hung in a number of shop windows, large red letters on a white banner—FOLLY FREE, COME AND SEE! This sentiment struck him as both morbid and hopeful. The country had changed so goddamn quickly in the wake of this epidemic.
David negotiated the streets until he found what he was looking for: the Harmony Public Library. It looked deserted, and that was more than okay by him.
“Put your hat back on,” he said, circling the block, then pulling into the library’s parking lot. There were only two other cars here—a metallic red Prius and a white van whose quarter panels were speckled with mud. The windows on the van’s rear doors were obscured by dark curtains. This gave David pause. He’d maintained an aversion to windowless, nondescript vans ever since he’d noticed one showing up in his neighborhood, parked across the street from their house.
Overreacting, said the head-voice. There was no way they could anticipate you coming here.
Yet this logic didn’t make him feel any better.
“What do you think?” David said. He patted Ellie’s knee. “I need to use the computer. Maybe you can read some books or something for a while.”
She shrugged. “Okay.”
He realized what he was doing: seeing if she’d suggest they skip the library and keep going. It was her intuition he would put his trust in, much as he should have done back in Goodwin. Perhaps her intuition was somehow related to her newly discovered ability, much as he believed the ability itself was somehow related to her immunity to the Folly. Ellie seemed okay with the suggestion, which brought him some peace of mind. God, how he needed some peace of mind . . .
He parked around back. The library was a squat brick saltbox with narrow windows of tinted glass. The mechanized doors swished open and they crossed into an air-conditioned lobby decorated with a contradictory assortment of inspirational posters and antitheft mirrors. The main floor of the library was quiet, drab, sedate. The sections were marked clearly with large signs above the aisles—ADULT FICTION; CHILDREN’S BOOKS; NONFICTION; PERIODICALS—and there was a rank of computer terminals near the DVD and CD displays. A few plush chairs had been arranged on a woven carpet on the other side of the computer terminals.
David pointed to the computers and said, “That’s where I’ll be. Go find a book, then sit in one of those chairs, okay?”
She nodded, then wandered toward the nonfiction aisle.
David went to one of the computers. The screen saver was on, some sort of cartoon animal in sunglasses and buckteeth bouncing around the screen. He jiggled the mouse and the screen saver vanished. Glancing over his shoulder at the two women talking behind the checkout counter—they hadn’t done more than glance in his direction since he and Ellie had come in—he was satisfied that he’d be left alone, at least for a little while.
He opened the Internet browser and pulled up his e-mail account. His flesh prickled with hope. But when he saw Tim hadn’t responded to his e-mail, he felt a lead weight pulling down on him, weakening his knees. It wasn’t just that they had nowhere else to go; he was beginning to worry that maybe Tim was sick. Or worse.
Behind him, Ellie climbed up into one of the plush chairs with a hardcover book roughly the size of a dictionary. David turned and winked at her. He hoped he looked somewhat sane. She smiled back at him. Beyond Ellie, halfway across the library, a figure stood watching him between two bookshelves. It was a man, broad-shouldered and tall, in faded khakis and a blue chambray shirt. He wore a paper plate mask over his face. As David stared at him, the masked figure turned and disappeared behind one of the bookshelves.