“You just . . . just pulled the car over and turned around and . . .”
“Hey, everything’s okay.” He gave her his best smile. “Why are you so upset?”
“You scared me. You were talking, telling me a story, and then you started talking funny and then you just stopped.”
“I’m tired, El. Very tired.”
He could see that her eyes were searching his. In the end, he looked away.
“Let’s get back on the road, okay?”
After a moment, Ellie nodded.
They got back on the road.
36
Four months earlier
As more and more students dropped their courses, the college granted the remaining students the option of completing the semester from their homes. Certain instructors lectured via Skype while others simply e-mailed assignments to their students and awaited the return e-mails with the work attached. For David, who taught English literature, the change was welcome and easy: There was little he needed to lecture on, and his students could all read the assigned work from the privacy—or safety—of their own homes. Papers were submitted to him via e-mail. When someone failed to send in a paper, David would send a follow-up e-mail as a reminder. If that e-mail went unanswered, David gave up. He assumed he was dealing with your basic collegiate delinquency—there were always a slim few who carried their laziness straight out of high school and into college . . . and, David supposed, throughout the rest of their lives, too—but on the chance that something more profound had come into these students’ lives, he was not going to be the one to inquire about it.
He assumed a good number of them died in those final weeks before the school year ended.
The faculty was also allowed to work from home, yet David opted to come to campus at least two days out of the week. For one thing, there was little work he could get done with both Kathy and Ellie at home now. Kathy had taken to homeschooling the girl, and while Ellie had always been a good student, Kathy became frequently frustrated in her inability to get the information across to her. But it was more than this distraction that caused him to work in the English department’s office these few days a week; it was Kathy’s overall disposition, which seemed to be worsening with each passing day. Her eyes always looked clouded with dark morbidity; her thoughts always seemed to be elsewhere, occupied by some distant but oncoming doom that, sometimes, David could feel if he sat too close to her or stared at her long enough. If he spent too much time around her, she would inevitably lash out at him. Lately, their arguments had been frequent and fierce.
This change in Kathy terrified him. However, he didn’t have the luxury of falling apart. Kathy’s disposition forced him to remain falsely positive, if only around Ellie. His hours spent at the college allowed for him to release some of his own anxiety without worrying about keeping up a strong front for his family’s sake. Sometimes he had to pull over on the shoulder of the road during the hour-long drive to the college, overcome by a panic attack. Sometimes he sat in the department office’s lounge area with the lights off, staring off into space, terrified to talk to anyone else on campus for fear that their conversations would inevitably turn apocalyptic.
Sometimes Burt Langstrom was there, sometimes he wasn’t. When he was there, he acknowledged David with the same detachment as Kathy. More than once David wondered if this was a sign of the illness itself—a preemptive disassociation prior to the onset of the hallucinations. Indeed, there was a fog about Burt that spoke to his mind being elsewhere. Wandering was the word that immediately came to David when he looked at Burt like this. His mind is wandering. But for obvious reasons, he didn’t like to think about it in those terms.
On this particular afternoon, David arrived in the lounge to find Burt propped up on the ratty sofa, eyes glued to the television on the counter. On most channels, it was nothing but news reports now. Today, the news report was about some small island in the Pacific whose entire population had died. The newscaster kept using the term extinct in all its forms, which made David think of the dodo bird. And then birds in general.
“I didn’t know you were here today,” David said, pausing in the doorway of the lounge.
Burt did not answer.
“You look like a zombie. You shouldn’t be watching this madness.” He reached out to turn the TV off, but Burt barked at him. It was just that—a nonverbal bark, just like an animal might make. David froze. When he looked at his friend, he saw that Burt’s eyes were bleary with tears.