Those That Wake

THE ROAD

LAURA WAS CRUISING as fast as she could along bumpy side roads, avoiding the highway but trying to run parallel to it. They were speeding toward the nearest town with a train station, according to a tattered map that had been in the car. Luck had been with them for a change. The car they’d stolen—yes, Laura realized with a shock: she was a car thief now—was old enough that it had no GPS to track them by, but did have a veritable atlas of old road maps crammed into the glove compartment. Once they got there, they could ditch this thing and go … somewhere. Laura squinted to see through the cracks in the windshield. The black night rushed by them, skeletal trees and jagged rocks lit up at the edges of their path.

Silence hung heavy in here. Laura had described the conversation with the Librarian, and without Remak here to usher them through the full understanding of it, each wrestled with it in his or her own mind.

“It isn’t over for us, you know,” Laura said, and received a snorting bark of laughter from Mike in back. “It’s not. It hasn’t won, yet. We’re still here, aren’t we?”

“Some of us,” Mike said. “Or did you forget about Remak already? It has won. We just keep running away from the consequences.”

“No,” Laura said absently, her mind moving toward something else. “It hasn’t, because it’s not inside us.” She looked at Mal. “Why isn’t it inside us?”

Mal looked back, short on answers, but holding her eyes as long as he could.

“Teenagers,” Mike said acidly, sick of the bond that had formed between the two of them. “Teenagers are what ruined my life.”

“You’re a teacher,” Laura said, turning her eyes back on the rushing road ahead. “And that’s your attitude?”

“What the hell do you know about it?” Mike demanded. “What the hell do you know about teaching and what the hell do you know about kids?”

“I teach sometimes,” Mal said. “Coach little kids, I mean.”

“You’re a damned kid yourself. You teach them what, exactly? How to beat the shit out of people?” Mike would not give an inch.

“No.” Mal stiffened in his seat. “Discipline, confidence. I treat them with respect and I teach them to show respect.”

“Well,” Mike said, his shadowed face deepening into a scowl, “I want to personally thank you on behalf of every teacher, every real teacher, who was ever ignored or cursed at or attacked with a knife in a hallway. Thanks for getting those really, really important messages through to our kids.”

Laura’s instinct was to intervene, to defuse this the way she defused her mother’s depression, her father’s ire, once upon a time. But was there a point here? Would either of them ever give up?

No. Laura flinched at the realization. Neither of them would ever give up.

“This thing that’s after us, ” she said, “it lives in people’s heads. It makes them think and do things they wouldn’t normally think or do. That’s why our friends, our families don’t remember us. This thing is in their heads, and it took those memories away.”

“It’s made out of our fear, or our desperation,” Mike interrupted her, a disembodied voice from the darkness in back. “I see it every day when I look at a classroom of kids who gave up. I see it in other teachers. I see it in the mirror every goddamned morning. It looks exactly like those people at the Librarian’s house did, exactly like Brath did before he shot Isabel. It looks like everybody you walk by on every street in the world.”

“No,” Laura said. “That’s not true.”

“It is true!” Mike shouted from the back. “You know it’s true! It’s in us right now, and that’s why we’re all f*cked!”

“No.” Laura’s voice was consumed with a preternatural calm. “It’s not true. It’s not in all of us. That’s why it’s chasing us instead of just making us want to crash into a tree. It can’t control some of us.”

“Our dreams,” Mal said quietly.

“Yes,” Laura said. “Our dreams. That was the meme, hopelessness, whatever you want to call it, trying to take us over and not being able to. You, Me, Mike, Jon. And Isabel.”

“Why?” Mike said, his voice smaller now. “What makes us so special?”

“Mal,” she said with serene self-assurance, “how did you do that, back in the house? I saw a fight once, between my high school football team and another team. One punch was enough to put someone out of it. What’s your trick?”

“There is no trick.” The green and blue light off the dashboard instrumentation made the yellow and purple bruises on Mal’s face glow weirdly, turning them into a partial mask.

“You just take it,” Laura said, completing Mal’s unspoken answer.

Laura had seen the picture of Tommy and Annie; Mal had showed it to her on the bus ride back from East Woodman. Tommy looked like a thinner, shorter Mal. Where the younger brother’s face was somber but unyielding, the older brother’s was impatient, lines of anger etched permanently around his eyes. But Tommy looked happy, in the picture at least, standing in the sun with his arm around a girl he loved. Annie was softer, her happiness fresher and without a history. Yet there was a sense in her of something else. Laura knew she must certainly be projecting this onto the picture, but it looked as if there was an undeniable melancholy to Annie’s happiness, that she knew even then what was coming.

That image was Mal’s goal, the brother he believed he had a debt to. But it was not the reason he was going on. Mal was going on because it was all he knew how to do. He fought with his life every day. Laura had never faced a future without certainty, without family, without a clear path before her, until now. But that was the future Mal stared down every day. What had he said? You make your own future. And Mal kept moving toward it because he simply refused to go down.

“You just take it,” she said again. Mal looked at her, confused at the import she put into the words. He might not have understood it about himself, but she could tell Mike had caught on from his silence.

“Jon,” she said, “believes he has a duty to solve this. He’s, like, a scientist and a soldier. He said it himself when he was talking about his dream. He has a duty to figure this out.”

“He was a scientist and a soldier,” Mike said. “Now he’s just dead.”

“We don’t know that,” Mal said.

“Please.”

“Even if he is,” Laura said, “all it could do was kill him. It can never really have him the way it did those people.” Or my parents, Laura thought, and her heart fluttered.

“Killing him isn’t bad enough?” Mike muttered. “You talk about fighting, about going on no matter what, like you know it from the movies or something. It’s not all cool and dramatic. It sucks ass. It’s what happens when everything you care about is gone, when you have to face the worst things about yourself and you still keep going. It doesn’t feel impressive and powerful when you’re doing it; it just f*cking hurts. Do you know that?”

“Yes,” Laura said, and her calm had broken, her jaw trembling. “I know that. And I know that you do, too.”

She heard Mike shift, set up an angry response.

“Mike,” she said, hoping to cut it off. “Why are you a teacher? You seem to despise it and the students. Why are you doing it?”

She looked into the shadowy depths of the back seat, and Mike’s eyes glistened back out at her.

“When I was a kid,” he said in an even voice, “my mother had a scolding chair. That’s where you sat when you were in trouble, so Mom could give it to you real good. Over Mom’s shoulder, if you were sitting in the chair, there were all these faces staring back like judges. That was the family wall: all the great Boothes throughout history.” He let out a choked, ridiculous laugh at that. “Really, most of the pictures were of my grandfather, as a young man, as a teenager, in the army, his framed medal, family gathered around his grave. Granddad was the great wonder of the Boothe line, the one great success that made the rest of us f*ck-ups look that much worse. See, while he was stationed in Texas, waiting for his assignment, a fire broke out in his barracks. Granddad—well, back then he was only a father to two children he saw about two days a year—Granddad rushed in and pulled out three GIs with his own hands. He went back in for a fourth and never came out. We weren’t even at war. It was an accident, a fire. So, do you see what the great success of the Boothe lineage was?”

Sacrifice, Laura thought with admiration.

“Giving up our own, worthless lives.” Mike laughed a high-pitched shrill that threatened to go on and topple him into madness. But suddenly he recovered and pulled himself up just inches from Laura’s ear.

“So why do I teach these kids? That was your question? I do it because somebody has to do it,” he said. “Anyone can teach smart, ass-kissing suburban kids like you, Laura. Somebody has to suffer and teach the kids who can’t be taught. And since my life is a towering pile of crap anyway, why not me?”

Laura saw it: the kids he was talking about hadn’t stolen his life; he had given it to them. He had sacrificed his life to them, thinking that only in that sacrifice could he give his life value. The realization caught in Laura’s throat. She was flummoxed, not out of pity, but out of awe.

The car was quiet and bumpy for a long stretch of the black expanse outside the cracked windows.

“What about you?” Mal said to her. “Why aren’t you giving up?”

“I feel like”—she fumbled for the right words—”I don’t know. It’s hard to say. My parents have given me … I feel like I owe something to the world, to make it better. To make it a place where the fear and desperation that Mike talked about can’t be used as a weapon. I guess the reason I’m not giving up is for the future.”

Mal looked like he wanted to reach out and touch her, and she wanted him to. But her hands were locked white-knuckled on the jittering steering wheel. And there was another thought that came unbidden into her head.

“What I can’t figure out is how it got my parents,” she said. “They made me this way, didn’t they? They always pushed and pushed to give me a good life. To give me the future I’m talking about. Why couldn’t they find strength in that, too?”

“Because they’re those kind of parents,” Mike said. “The kind that make your life into theirs, that hover over every decision like the world is hanging on it.”

“You make that sound like a bad thing,” Mal said, his question coming from some deep place inside his own head.

“No,” Mike said in a voice steadier and more resolute than he had ever used in Mal and Laura’s experience; as if for just a moment, he was talking about something he actually believed. “Whatever strength they had before they were parents, it’s all concentrated now. Because everything changes when you become that kind of a parent, and it only takes one thing to upset your precariously balanced strength. Whatever this is, a meme“—he said the word as if it tasted bad—”it climbed into them and took away the one thing they couldn’t go on without: you, Laura.”

The road blurred before Laura, as she found new tears from a place she had thought was all dried up.

The twinkling lights of a town came into view in the distance.

Laura should have been exhausted, but her eyes were wide with her recent realizations. She was ready to keep going now, even without Remak. It occurred to her, for no reason she could form coherently, that maybe it served them in some way to be without Remak and his precise command of every situation. And she thought of her parents, who had given her something they no longer possessed, this sense of strength that had saved her. Was this how it was supposed to be? Were parents supposed to slowly fade away, bequeathing the best of themselves to their children?

She was ready to keep going. But to where?

“What happens now?” Mike said from the back, seeing the lights of the town approaching and beating her to the question. “We take a train into Canada, climb into the mountains, and disappear forever?”

“That’s not what you really want, Mike,” Laura told him flat.

“Like hell it isn’t.”

“No.” Mal’s voice was hard and final, not unlike it had been right before he had ordered Mike into the corner and lit into the invaders. “We go back to the building, the one with the doors. Whatever’s making this happen, that’s where it is.”

“That is utter genius,” Mike said. “You want us to go there without Remak? And when we find whatever we find in the building? Then what do we do?”

Mal’s voice was as heavy as a stone when he said it.

“Fight.”