Those That Wake

GREY

LAURA JOLTED AWAKE from a dream, her heart thumping fast with paranoia and her stomach heavy with nausea. She opened her eyes with effort, sticky as they were with sorrow and sleep, and found herself on the train, the last echo of its horn fading as it left a station. The figures around her were sparse, but she saw their faces turn back down to their cells. She wondered for a nervous moment just what they had been looking at while she slept.

She blinked the remnants of the disturbing dream away, and everything still seemed far away from her, impossible to grasp. She had literally lost her roots, and for the first time was truly, utterly alone. And alone she had never been, even at her worst moments. It had robbed her even of the parents in her mind, against whom she always measured her actions and ideas. She felt afloat, a drowning person with nothing to grab hold of.

Nothing?

She pulled her cell from her pocket with stiff fingers and began to key Rachel’s number, when she saw that her cell screen was an inert gray. She jabbed at it, keyed to switch to the secondary battery, slapped the thing hard against her knee, all to no effect.

“Oh, come on,” she breathed out in a harsh whisper. She looked around at all the other cells in all the other hands and realized in a flash of sour insight how helpless she felt without her cell, her immediate connection to other people, to the Internet, the world. And she felt the panic; it didn’t have its fangs in yet, but it was sniffing around with the sense that it might soon have a meal here.

She breathed deeply and shut her eyes, but when she did, she felt as if she could hear sounds and voices from her dream still, just beneath the hum of the train’s motion. So she abandoned her calming breaths and opened her eyes.

Thirty-five interminable minutes later, the Stony Brook station rolled into view. She practically leaped from the train and got to her car in the lot only to realize that with her cell dead, she couldn’t activate the damned cellock. She could break in—she would certainly have been happy to break something—but without the cell, the car wouldn’t start either. She called from a paycell for a cab to pick her up and used twenty-five of the two hundred dollars to get herself to the front door of Linus P. Talbot High School. The majority of days over the last four years had found her passing through this doorway at least twice, though now what might have been comfortingly familiar was instead loaded with stomach twisting tension.

Having begun this unbelievably shitty odyssey so early, she had made it here during the second-to-last period. Rachel would be in Advanced Bio, Cheryl in gym, and Ari, ex-boyfriend and all-around scumbag, whom she would barely even consider speaking to in this dire situation, would be either in Statistics, or out at the track field cutting Statistics. Surely if there was ever a situation that called for disrupting a class, this was it. But whatever was happening, Laura was still a product of her upbringing, her social structures, and so rather than cause a stir in a class, she walked directly to the administrative office.

The woman behind the desk looked up and fixed her eyes on Laura. Laura knew she was a mess from a sleepless night and spewing every imaginable fluid out of her face back at the hotel. But if that elicited an extra measure of sympathy, then so be it. She wouldn’t turn it down just now.

“Mrs. Greene,” Laura said, smiling shakily at the woman behind the desk.

Mrs. Greene nodded in response as Laura came up to the counter.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Greene,” she said. “I’m having kind of an emergency at home, and I really, really need to speak to Rachel Parker. She’s in Advanced Bio right now. Could you possibly call her down to the office?”

But a sick feeling had already settled in Laura’s stomach. She had not shown up for classes this morning, and no excuse had been phoned in by her parents. The first words out of Mrs. Greene’s mouth when Laura entered the office should have been a demand for an explanation.

“I’m sorry for your trouble at home, sweetie,” Mrs. Greene said in a measured display of both concern and suspicion. “But who are you, exactly?”

“Mrs. Greene,” Laura repeated, still trying to smile, though her voice was beginning to fray at the edges, “it’s Laura.” Mrs. Greene remained blank. “Laura Westlake. We just strung up all the balloons for the PTA potluck in the gymnasium two weeks ago.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t recognize you,” Mrs. Greene said, “and I can’t call a student out of class without a request from a parent or faculty.”

Laura yanked her cell out, but before she keyed the screen to call up her license, she remembered it was dead. She slapped it on the desk hard enough to arouse the attention of two people seated at desks nearby.

“I’m Laura Westlake,” Laura said, and she spelled her last name out slowly. There was no smile left now. “I’ve been attending this school for four years. You may not remember me, but if you look at the school records, you’ll find my name there.”

Mrs. Greene accepted the information evenly and bowed toward a screen and moved her fingers about it for a moment.

“I’m sorry,” she said after a moment. “I don’t see you listed here. If there’s some—”

But Laura was already backing away, absolute rage tearing her features apart.

“God!” she screamed, surely loud enough to be heard through the hallways. “This is so f*cking unfair!”

She ran out of Linus P. Talbot High and ran and ran until she had no breath left to drive her any farther.

Exhausted, her brain aching from endlessly cycling ideas about what to do next, she arrived home. Would her parents be back soon, or did they think they lived somewhere else now? Or, her heart skipping a beat as she realized it, wouldn’t they think that she lived somewhere else now?

Wouldn’t they arrive home to find a teenage trespasser waiting for them? But there she would have them, of course, because her room was still there, filled with a lifetime’s worth of proof.

She forced her aching legs to churn faster. She ran up her yard and through her door to make sure that her room was actually still where she had left it, only to stop short at the sight of two strangers sitting in her living room.

They sat at the edges of the sofa, in the poise of experienced visitors, never in one place for more than a few minutes before having to move on. They both wore unremarkable suits and bland expressions that characterized their professional detachment.

“Ma’am,” the lead man said, standing, as he pulled out his wallet and flipped it open for her, “I’m Agent Grey with Homeland Security.” His ID card had a gold seal beside his photograph and the name “Grey, Rodney.” A holographic American flag leaped an inch off the card, beneath the words “Department of Homeland Security.” “This is Agent Deel.” The other man stood and held his ID out. “We’ve received a complaint from a Mr. and Mrs. Ronald Westlake, whose home this is, regarding harassment by an unidentified teenage female. Would you please accompany us to answer some questions?”

She shook her head. Despite what had happened to her in the last eighteen hours, it turned out she could still be shocked. Homeland Security? Responding to a complaint of harassment? Arresting a teenager? What the hell?

She looked from their badges to their faces. They were as nondescript as the suits, as if they were for formal presentation and nothing else. Both pairs of eyes looked identically dull.

“I live here.” She looked Grey right in his flat gaze. “And I can prove it.”

Slipping his badge away, Grey looked over at Deel and then back at her.

“Ma’am, if you’d just come with us.”

“Come with you?” This was insane. “Let me see your badge again.” She held her hand out. When Grey hesitated, she pushed her hand forward. He slipped it out and handed it to her. She pulled out her cell by instinct, before remembering that it was the most recent casualty of this cosmic breakdown that had been plaguing her. She tossed the useless thing onto the nearby table. “Give me your cell, please,” she said without embarrassment.

With no shift in his disinterested expression, he pressed several keys and then put his cell in her hand.

“Department of Homeland Security, how may I direct your call?” came a clean, clipped female voice from a screen that framed a Homeland Security shield. Advertisements for surveillance products—binoculars with thermographic enhance, digital cameras in the form of fake fingernails—began to scroll down the side.

“I want to confirm an agent’s name and badge number.”

“Hold, please.”

She looked up at Grey while she waited for some sign of discomfort. He watched her placidly.

“Special Agent Kingston, may I help you?” said a male voice, the Homeland Security shield still holding the screen.

“I’d like to verify that you have an Agent Rodney Grey working out of your office and that his badge number is…” She flipped open the badge and read the number off. There was a pause on the other end.

“Please put the agent on the phone.”

She handed the cell to Grey. He lifted it to his ear.

“Grey. Check. Check.” Everything was a bore, it seemed from his monotone drone. He held the cell up so that the screen faced him, and a red light from the lens flickered a hazy laser across one vacant eyeball. He handed the cell back.

“Yes?” Laura said.

“Retina scan confirms an Agent Grey, Rodney, badge number as follows.” He read it off, and she followed it on the badge.

“And what address has he been sent to?”

“I’m sorry, ma’am, that’s confidential.”

“But it’s my home.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am.”

“Please describe Agent Grey.”

“Height: five feet ten inches, weight: one hundred seventy-five, eyes: brown, hair: brown. Hold for image.” Instantly, the picture of Agent Grey that adorned his ID replaced the Homeland Security shield.

“Thank you,” she said absently, and keyed off. Grey took his cell and badge back.

“Ma’am, please come along quietly.”

“My room is right through that door,” she said, taking a step in that direction. “Just walk over and I’ll show you.”

Agent Deel pulled out a sleek gun of hard black plastic and pointed it right at her.

Her eyes went wide, the muzzle of a gun something inconceivable to her, utterly disassociated from her life. Neither of the agents’ eyes changed. They were as lifeless and dull as they had been when she first saw them sitting and waiting. Deel looked as if he was fully prepared to snuff her out simply to spare his partner and himself the trouble of further argument.

“Ma’am.” Grey’s hand lashed out and had her by the arm as swiftly as his other hand had produced a hypodermic.

“What?” Laura cried, incredulous. None too gently, Grey thrust the needle through her sweater and into her arm.

“Mookie,” she tried to yell, but it came out choked and quiet. She wasn’t expecting him to come charging around the corner, to leap up and bite the agent’s hand until the gun fell and she could run for her life. No, she just wanted him to appear so she could see one thing she loved.

But he didn’t appear, and in the fleeting moments before darkness saturated her vision, she wondered if it was because Mookie was confused by the call of a stranger’s voice.