The Crossing Page 8

  “Come this way,” he said, tugging me off the pavement and onto the soft crunch of the dirt road that led to the farmhouse.

  I didn’t want to follow, but I didn’t have the strength to protest.

  The farmhouse climbed up out of the earth one angle at a time. A sharply pitched roof. A porch that wrapped the house in old wooden arms. Milky white windows that looked like eyes casting aspersions. The smell of burning firewood that peppered the air.

  “I’ll do the talking,” Tommy said.

  “Don’t be stupid,” I replied. My voice was still far away, barely present, but it was stern and confident. “They’ll be more likely to be nice to us if they see me first.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m a girl. I’m less threatening.”

  Tommy thought for a moment, trying to find a flaw in my logic. As usual, he came up short. “What if we just both stand side by side? That way they see us both at the same time. They’ll know we’re not hiding anything, you know?”

  I took a deep breath and clenched my jaw. “I’ll do the talking.”

  “Okay,” Tommy said finally.

  * * *

  When the old woman opened the door, she was backlit by sun that had finally begun piercing the fog and had come to rest just above her shoulders, rushing in through a back window. It was difficult to make out what was giving her such a strange, bug-like appearance until, finally, I realized that like so many people since the arrival of The Disease, she was wearing a gas mask. The light on her shoulders turned her grand and ethereal, like some creature of myth discovered after uncounted ages. But the double-barreled shotgun held in her hands and leveled at us reminded me that there were no more oracles left in this world. Just frightened people.

  “Good morning,” I said brightly, as if the woman had only been offering a handshake rather than twin barrels of a twelve-gauge.

  The woman squinted, peering at me through the lenses of her gas mask, and then past me, at Tommy. He waved and smiled.

  “First of all,” I declared, “we’re not going to hurt you.”

  All over the globe there were reports of Embers like Tommy and me attacking—and even killing—anyone old enough to possibly be infected by The Disease. The idea was that you could stop its spread by snuffing out its potential victims. A dark thought of starving The Disease, but there was no sign of it working. It was, at the end of the day, simply an act of murder in a world that was slowly losing its mind. No one understood how The Disease started or was spread.

  The old woman had every right to hold us at gunpoint.

  “My name’s Virginia,” I declared. “That’s my brother, Tommy. We’re twins, can you tell?” I smiled a wide, toothy smile that made it seem as though I might have been a traveling Bible salesman in another life.

  “What do you want?” the woman’s muffled voice said. I couldn’t see much of her face, but from her hands I guessed her to be somewhere near sixty. Maybe older. Which was a rare thing since The Disease.

  She had silver hair that was cut short like a boy’s. She was short and wide, like an old refrigerator. Her gun darted back and forth between us as her breath came and went in ominous gasps through the gas mask.

  “We just want a little respite,” I said in my brightest “Please Don’t Shoot Us” voice. “We’ve been walking all night and we’re just hoping to get a break from the cold. Everything’s starting to feel disconnected and far away.” I held up my hands so that the woman could see the way they trembled.

  “Let’s hear him tell it,” the woman said in her muffled voice, eyeing Tommy. He was still standing some distance behind me, just far enough away that, if he were up to something, it would maybe give him some way to take advantage of the old woman.

  “It’s like she said, ma’am,” Tommy said. “We’re just cold. Really cold.” His voice trembled from genuine fatigue. Plumes of steam rose from the house as the warmth exhaled into the cold world. Tommy and I both longed for that warmth, like a flower thirsting for sunshine.

  The woman watched us for another moment. Somewhere off in the distance there was a deep booming sound, like thunder or an explosion. All three of us turned and looked in the direction of the sound. We waited, but nothing ever followed that would explain what we had heard.

  “Who you running from?” the woman asked.

  Before Tommy could speak, I said, “Our father.”

  The woman considered this for a moment.

  “You infected?” she asked.

  “Actually,” I said, “they don’t know how The Disease is spread. So—”

  “No, ma’am,” Tommy interrupted. “We’re not infected. Just cold. That’s all.”

  Then, as if she had seen this all before, she lowered the shotgun and simply said, “Come on in.”

  * * *

  Her name was Maggie and she seemed the serious sort. The type of woman who always knew more than she cared to say. The type of woman who asked direct questions and demanded direct answers.

  “Sit down and I’ll feed you,” Maggie said, ushering us into the old house. It smelled of mildew and the sweetness of old wood, of dust and children come and gone decades ago. Maybe it was the scent of crayon wax cured into the wood over a lifetime of child rearing. It was difficult to say. Whatever it was, I liked the house and Tommy did too. He later told me that it felt more like home than anywhere else he had ever been before.

  I expected to find her house filled with bottled water and canned food. There were doomsday preppers all over the globe who were finally seeing all of their years of planning suddenly become a valuable commodity. Even though things weren’t yet in that pure lawless state that most of them expected, it was hard to make a case for the world not soon descending into just that.

  But Maggie wasn’t a doomsday prepper or a hoarder. She was just an old woman who was afraid that a pair of strange children might infect her with something that would make her fall asleep one night and never wake up again.

  “Thank you,” Tommy said. It was the fourth time he had thanked her. And for the fourth time she said, matter-of-factly, “You’re welcome.”

  Maggie was already fixing our plates—without ever removing her gas mask—as we stood next to a large, old fireplace in the living room. The fire crackled and roared and embers popped now and again, flaring briefly like an idea and then disappearing.

  “It’ll take me a few to get more eggs going,” Maggie said. “I’m used to cooking for one.”

  “Thank you,” Tommy said again.

  I left the fireplace and took a seat on the couch. I was still too cold. Still not able to connect to my body, only able to connect to my memories again. The living room faded away, less real than the time when...

  ...I’m five years old and Tommy and I are sitting together in the back of an ambulance and a paramedic named Alice is wiping the blood, staring at us as if we carry some form of contagion, and she smiles now and again but it’s a weak, sad smile and she says, after a moment of not being able to come up with anything else, “I’m going to step out for a moment, but I’ll be right back.” And then Tommy and I watch her leave and it’s like a hollow place opening up in the sky because now Tommy and I are alone and all we can do is hold one another and listen to the sound of the people outside the ambulance and all they’re saying is how sad they are for us and how terrible it is and how much they pity us and Tommy can’t stop crying. I put my arm around him and it’s like holding onto an earthquake and this is what losing someone feels like. This is what it would always feel like...

  “Have you ever tried talking to them?” Tommy asked. He was sitting beside me, holding me.

  “What?”

  “You were remembering Mom and Dad, weren’t you? You’re always remembering them. Have you ever tried talking to them?”

  “You can’t talk to memories,” I replied.

&nbs
p; “But they’re not just memories for you, though. They’re real. So maybe you can talk to them. Maybe you can find a way to stop remembering them.”

  “Who says I want to?”

  “You’d be surprised how good forgetting is,” Tommy said. He took his arms from around me. He ran his fingers through his hair. “I hardly remember them. I’m not even sure I do remember them. It’s like hearing some song in your head and you think maybe what you hear is how the song sounds but you’re not really sure. That’s what Mom and Dad are for me: a song I half remember.” He shook his head, looking guilty. “I guess I’m supposed to want more than that. I guess I should want to remember everything about them—and sometimes I do. But other times, I’m glad I can’t remember them. Because forgetting them means forgetting what I lost.” He looked at me long and hard. “Maybe you can’t forget anything because you don’t want to.”

  Hate is a hard thing to let go of. It’s the kind of thing that burrows into your skin until it changes the very way your skin feels, and eventually, you can’t remember feeling any other way.

  I hated Tommy in that moment. And in a way, I still hate him. But that’s my sin to bear, one that would sting all the sharper later when Tommy was gone and all that I had left was my memory of hating him.

  “Come on up,” Maggie said, leaning in from the kitchen.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Tommy said. Then to me, “Food.”

  We went in and sat at the table. Maggie had plated eggs and bacon and two large biscuits apiece. For someone who was used to cooking alone, she seemed well-practiced in tending others. “There’ll be more up in a bit,” she said. She coughed behind her mask. “Then the two of you can be on your way.”

  “You sure we can’t rest just a little?” Tommy asked. “We’re really tired.”

  Maggie mulled this over for a moment, then shook her head.

  “Oh,” Tommy said, and he tapped the back of my hand.

  It was a signal dating back to our earliest days in foster homes. It was our way of letting each other know that we needed to convince someone of something for the sake of us both. I knew my part and Tommy knew his.

  “You’ll have to excuse my brother,” I said, firming up my voice to sound like the know-it-all most people took me for. “He’s not the most communicative of the bunch. He’s what you call an iceberg: just that little bit ever gets to peek up through the surface. But he’s a good kid underneath.”

  “That a fact?” Maggie asked. She stood with her back to the stove, watching us closely.

  “A fact it is,” I said. “He tries hard, but he’s just not much of a wordsmith. Or rather, he just doesn’t really like to talk.”

  “Good to know you don’t have that problem,” Maggie said.

  “You bet I don’t.” I scanned the house. In the corner there was an old, dusty chess board. “Do you play?” I asked.

  “Not particularly,” Maggie said. “Know how to, but never quite could get the hang of it.”

  “It’s a complicated game. Invented in Eastern India sometime between 220 and 550, in the Gupta Empire.”

  “The what empire?” Maggie asked, moving her jaw back and forth.

  “The Gupta Empire,” I answered. “Founded by Maharaja Sri Gupta. He lived from the year 240 to 280.”

  “You some kind of expert on him?”

  “Nope. I just remember everything.”

  Maggie clucked a laugh. “I bet.”

  “No, ma’am,” Tommy added. “She’s telling you the truth. She remembers everything.”

  “Nobody remembers everything,” Maggie said.

  “I do.”

  “She does,” Tommy said, almost at the same time.

  Maggie watched us both anew, and again her lower jaw grated back and forth behind her mask, like a cow chewing cud. After a moment, she laughed and waved her hand dismissively. “Bull,” she said. “But you almost had me.”

  Tommy looked over at me. “Go ahead.”

  I closed my eyes. “Your kitchen counters are almost nine feet in length,” I began, “and sitting across the top of it, in order from left to right, are a white toaster with three scratch marks along the side. The middle scratch mark is beginning to rust. Next to the toaster is a ceramic container holding three spatulas—two of which are the exact same—one wooden spoon with a nick in the handle shaped like a crescent moon, one metal fork for turning meat, one large green plastic spoon for soup or broths, and a pair of chopsticks with black marks on their tips.”

  “Do the living room,” Tommy said.

  “The chess table has seven pieces on the board: one white queen, two white pawns, a black knight and rook, and both kings. The white king is on G7. The black king is on C2. The knight is...”

  “Hold on,” Maggie said.

  Finally I opened my eyes and smiled as politely as I knew how. “And I’ll never forget,” I said. “Not any of it. I remember everything.”

  Maggie’s eyes were as thin as reeds. “That...that can’t be true,” she said. Her voice was hardly a whisper behind her mask. I could barely hear her, like an echo at the bottom of a well. Tommy cut his eyes from Maggie to me. Tommy’s job now was to mend the bridge.

  It’s human nature not to trust intelligence. And memory is a key element of intelligence. So being able to remember everything makes people nervous. It inspires a sense of inadequacy which, in turn, makes them defensive and suspicious. After all, a person who remembers everything may just as well know everything. And a person that knows everything could know parts of you that you aren’t proud of.

  Tommy told me that once. Then by the next day he had forgotten.

  “She won two chess championships,” Tommy said. He smiled to show that he was being sincere. “But I was never any good at it. I’m more like you, Miss Maggie. I tried for years to get good, but I can barely keep the rules straight in my head.” He laughed, an offering for Maggie to not feel as small as he knew she felt. “That one there,” he said, pointing to me, “she’s a bit of a freak.”

  Finally Maggie smiled too. I was the only one who didn’t.

  “Seems that way,” Maggie said. Then, after a moment, she cleared her throat and said, “I guess you could rest here for a little while.”

  “Thank you! We won’t be here long,” Tommy said. “We’ll move on just as soon as we’re rested up a little.”

  “Fine by me,” Maggie said. She sipped from a cup of coffee. “So, you say you’re running from your daddy?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “No,” I corrected him. “Not our daddy. Our foster father.”

  Tommy reached over and squeezed my hand. “Just let me talk,” he said in a hard whisper. It was clear that Maggie heard, but she offered no response. “It’s a long story, but basically we’re going to Florida. Down to Cape Canaveral to watch a shuttle launch.”

  Maggie considered this for a moment. “Seems like a long way for something you can watch on TV, especially with things the way they are. Did you hear what the Russians are doing now? Word is they’re going to use the nukes. With all that going on, I don’t know how some damn rocket launch is still happening.”

  “Because it has to happen!” I exclaimed.

  “Why?” Maggie replied. “It’s a waste to me. By the time it gets wherever it’s going—if the Russians don’t shoot it down first—won’t be nobody left down here anyhow. Makes me believe what people say about it being some kind of secret weapon or maybe something for the president and the rest to escape.”

  Everything she said was stupid and foolish. She was just like all the rest who didn’t know anything about anything. People who didn’t understand that the Europa mission was all we had left. All that mattered. It was one last gasp of wonder in a world drowning in blood.

  I wanted to tell her all of that, but I held my tongue and let Tommy do the talking.

  �
��I guess,” Tommy said. “But the freak here is a big fan of the space program.”

  “Don’t call me that,” I said.

  Tommy ignored me and kept his focus on Maggie. “One day she’s probably going to work for NASA. And this is an important launch, so we’re going to watch it. And our foster father didn’t want us to go.”

  “So you’re runaways,” Maggie said.

  “We try not to think of it that way,” Tommy said. “We like to think of it more like an adventure.”

  Maggie returned her attention to me. “You really don’t forget anything?”

  “Nothing at all,” I replied.

  “That’s some kind of a blessing,” Maggie said.

  “Some kind of freak,” Tommy said.

  * * *

  Before breakfast was over there came the long, loud whine of the emergency alert system from the television. We stopped and turned as the sound went away and a news broadcaster appeared. Solemnly, he said simply, “We interrupted your programming for this message from the President of the United States.”

  And then the president was there standing behind a large wooden lectern bearing the presidential seal. He stood tall and solid, like always, but there was also a look of exhaustion on his face. “My fellow Americans...” the president began.

  “They’ve got nukes now,” Maggie’s almost robotic gas-mask voice said.

  New York had been attacked again. They were still estimating the death toll, but the current count was in the hundreds. Someone in Times Square had exploded.

  Every explosion, every gunshot, every flash of light and sound and steel that ended someone’s life chipped away at the remnants of what the world used to be. There is always someone dying, always someone in pain. The world doesn’t spare anyone. No person nor country nor creed.

  Tommy and I learned that early. America was learning it late.

  Then came the latest news of The Disease. A man in his midthirties had been found in his apartment, unable to awake. It was a case of The Disease affecting someone far beyond the bell curve of its spread. Up until then the youngest person affected had been a fifty-year-old woman from Tennessee, and even she was considered an outlier. But now The Disease was escalating, as if it was competing with the war to see which of them could extinguish humanity first.