Monsters

“Did what? The EMPs?” He shook his head. “If this was a book or movie, there’d be some guy who’d explain it, give you all the answers. Tidy everything up, wrap it with a bow. We’ll never know, and it doesn’t matter. This is like war, Chris. When the soldiers come marching in, all you care about is protecting your family. When you’re boots on the ground, all you think about is the mission and your buddies, your brothers. It’s not political. There’s no big picture. You don’t agonize over the morality. Everything narrows down to the essentials. Yeah, some days—the impossible days when no matter how careful you are, someone will die—you wonder what it’s all for. But in the end, there are your brothers, your people, and only that. You’re not looking to die, but you’ll sacrifice it all for them. I lost that for a while, too. When I went on leave, got stateside?” He paused, wondering if he really wanted to admit this, out loud, and then thought that, hell, in a few more hours, nothing he said now would matter. “I was on the fence, maybe a step away from never going back. Deserting. Had it all mapped out, too, how I would lay tracks in Michigan but then work my way over on the sly into Minnesota and then Canada. Big country, easy to get lost. But my best friend, Jim—we were on the same EOD team—I bet he knew something was up when I mentioned the Waucamaw. My family was in Maryland; there are plenty of nice places to camp there. So why was I going to the U.P.? I think that’s why Jim invited himself along: to remind me of my brothers, my people. But then . . . the world died and it just wasn’t an issue anymore.”

“Would you have gone back if nothing had happened?”

“I’ll never know, will I? I’d like to think that I would have. But then I found”—he swallowed back the lump—“found my people anyway. Found Alex and Ellie. For a little while, I got back what I’d lost. So, to hell with the rest, Chris. How this happened, who did it . . . all I care about, all that matters, is that Alex and Ellie helped me find myself again.”

Chris was silent a long moment. “It was the whistle, Tom,” he said, quietly.

“What?” For just a second, he’d been back in the Waucamaw: striding in with an armload of wood as Alex looked up with a smile that found its way into his chest. “What are you talking about?”

“Alex,” Chris said, shaking out the dregs before carefully twisting the cup back onto the thermos. “She ran because of the whistle.”

He remembered the high, impossible note that pierced his heart. “How do you know?”

Screwing on that cup seemed to take all Chris’s concentration. “Ellie told me. She gave the whistle to a boy we brought back from Oren. I think her idea was that if Alex and you were in Rule, Alex would put it together that Ellie was somewhere up there, and you guys would go get her. So if Alex had a whistle at the mine, she must’ve found hers on that boy. Too much of a coincidence otherwise, isn’t it? Alex left to go after Ellie. I got here too late, and the rest was just”—Chris tightened the cap—“lousy timing. Or good timing for Jess, I guess. If I’d gotten back sooner, I might’ve saved Alex. Knowing Jess, though, probably not. One way or the other, Jess was bound and determined that Alex should go, and then me, too.”

He didn’t know how he was supposed to feel. “Why are you telling me this?”

Chris’s violent red eyes met his. “It’s the end of the world, Tom. Rule is done. I don’t know if we have a tomorrow. So there’s one thing you need to get clear in your head. You found your people, and you never lost them. Alex left because she wasn’t sure she could count on me to help her. Knowing how I was back then, she’d have been right. But I don’t think she would’ve felt the same way about you, Tom,” Chris said. “Not then—or ever.”

Dawn was an hour away, more or less, as Chris walked the now empty hospice halls. All the terminal patients with whom he’d spent time were long dead. Illuminated only by moonlight, the halls were sultry with shadows. He slowed as he approached the only occupied room left. Through the open door came a light floral perfume, but the rest was silence. Hesitating a moment, he quietly rounded the corner and saw first the woman on the bed and then, belatedly, a figure huddled in a large bedside chair.

“Oh. I’m sorry,” he said, already beginning to back out. “I didn’t know—”

“No, no.” Between the soft upholstery and a blanket, his grandfather looked gnomish. His bald scalp gleamed in a splash of silver-green moonlight that cut his face into deep black wedges and taut skin over stark ridges of bone. “You’re not disturbing me. Leaving soon?”

“Yes. Sarah and Jayden are still settling the kids, but . . . soon,” Chris said.

“What about you?”

“I’m staying a while longer with Tom. We’ll leave together.” Although Chris had a very bad premonition he couldn’t put into words or quite shake: leaving wouldn’t be quite so simple.

“Well, come in,” Yeager said, beckoning. “You don’t need my permission.”

Chris crossed to stand over the bed. The silence was eerie. Jess lay on her back, hands curled over her stomach because the small muscles had atrophied with disuse. Someone had brushed her hair, which spilled over the pillow and her shoulders. Kincaid, probably. In the moonlight, the whites showed through her lashes in thumbnail slivers. Chris kept expecting her to say something, or those lids to snap open, and to see himself captured in those black-mirror eyes. The prolonged bout of REM sleep that had seized Jess for weeks had ended abruptly only a half hour ago, Kincaid said. Chris had felt only a mild shock when the doctor showed him the book from which he’d gleaned the drug’s formula: Ghost-Walkers: The Ethnobotanical Encyclopedia of Medicinal and Psychoactive Mushrooms. In another half hour—and probably less, because Kincaid hadn’t stinted on the dose this time—Jess would be past dreams.

“Would you like to sit?” Yeager indicated a chair with a bony hand that jutted from an arm as thin as a chopstick. His clothing puddled. “We haven’t talked.”

It was on the tip of his tongue to point out that he’d been in cardiac arrest part of the time and busy the rest, but he let that fizzle. The last time he’d seen this old man, his grandfather had smacked him around. Taking a seat also made him uneasy, as if he’d be conceding something, maybe getting himself under this old man’s thumb. “What for? I don’t have anything to say. I don’t forgive you, if that’s what you want. You and the Council let terrible things happen. I don’t even care about whose idea it was first, because if it was Peter’s, you should’ve said no. If it was yours, then you took advantage of Peter and that’s even worse. You had every chance to stop this, but you didn’t. You didn’t even save Kincaid, a friend. You let Aidan take his eye, for God’s sake. What could you say that will make any of that better, or even justify it?”

“Nothing,” Yeager said, his tone void of emotion but not indifferent or cold. “But I thought you might have questions.”

“Like I said—”

“Then I have one. How is my brother?”

“Last time I saw him, he was pretty sick from smoke inhalation.” Which was totally my fault.

“I’m sorry for that. We haven’t always seen eye to eye, but I admire him for setting up a place for children who wanted a different life from their parents. He always did want to help.”

“He helped me when I was hurt. It’s a long story.” Coming back from the dead wasn’t a subject he wanted to broach with this old man.

“How much did he tell you?”

“Pretty much everything. Some stuff, I figured out on my own.” “Ah. Do you have questions?”

Oh, about a million. Although he’d resolved that it didn’t matter, that it was water under the bridge, he couldn’t help being curious. “Yes. How did you decide? Between me and Simon, I mean.”

“Mmm.” Yeager knit his skeletal hands together. If he’d had a sickle, he could’ve passed as the Grim Reaper. “To be honest, I chose the infant on the right.”

“What do you mean?”

“I could only take one. Your mother was holding you both at the time, and she cradled you on the left.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” The mention of his mother stung. He heard the sharpness, his simmering anger, and decided, Screw it. “What difference did the side make?”

“Oh . . .” Yeager drew a slow hand over his bald scalp, the gesture of a man who’d once had hair to smooth. “Because Christ sits on God’s right hand, I suppose. If you want something scriptural. But it’s mystical, really. Goes back to the Jews. For them, the body’s two sides mirror the divided nature of our soul. There is the power to give and hold back. The right hand is stronger; you give with your right, whether it’s justice or kindness. With your left, you hold back. The left hand is discipline and restraint. The left hand keeps its secrets.”

And lives in the shadows. His grandfather had just described him and his life to a T. “So you went for strength.”

“I chose the sword.” Yeager paused. “But in my arrogance I forgot that it takes just as much strength to refrain, be slow to anger and rash action. It’s easy to trick yourself into thinking that in the righteousness of your anger, cruelty is justified. But you are strong, Chris, much stronger than I’ve given you credit for.”

“I’m not strong,” Chris said. Yet of all the things he remembered about Rule, a place where he thought he might finally find a home, the mornings after a fight were the most vivid: kneeling next to Peter in church, as everyone—including Alex, especially Alex—looked on, and feeling his grandfather’s hands on his head in blessing. It was hokey and stupid and incredibly sexist, and yet he had felt pride: This is what it’s like not to be afraid. This is what it feels like to belong. He was like Tom, wasn’t he? Looking for my people . . . Except Alex was gone, and if his dreams held true, Peter was worse than dead. A strange lump forced its way into his throat. He should go. No way he’d break down now. He didn’t forgive Yeager, he couldn’t. Chris could let go of the hammer for Peter but never for this old man. “Sometimes I wait too long and then it’s too late.” ns class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block" data-ad-client="ca-pub-7451196230453695" data-ad-slot="9930101810" data-ad-format="auto" data-full-width-responsive="true">