Black River Falls (24 page)

I threw myself from the desk to the wall by the door and staggered out of the room. There were more people lying in the hallway and still more in the classrooms beyond. I came to a staircase and started down, my hand clamped to the railing. A boy, eight or nine years old, ran up the steps, calling out to someone. His shoulder hit mine, spinning me around. There was a crack of thunder, and then I dropped my pack and fell against the railing. Darkness swirled. I hit the ground and the world went shooting away.

When I came to, I was in another classroom. Dusty sunlight streamed in through the windows. My backpack was on the floor by my feet.

“It's all right. We got separated.”

Hannah was sitting in front of me, clutching the key around her neck. Her blue-speckled dress was torn in places and filthy with ground-in dirt and sweat and blood. Her eyes were shadowed with exhaustion.

My body ached as I sat up. The others were huddled behind her. I looked from face to face, ticking off the names in my head. They were all there. All but one. I turned to Hannah.

“Where's Greer?” I asked, but as soon as I said it, I knew.

The days passed strangely after that. I didn't sleep. I wasn't hungry or thirsty. I never left the high school, just drifted from room to room. People talked endlessly. In the classrooms. In the halls and stairwells. In the lunchroom. They knew everything. They knew nothing. The Marvins had been pushed out for good and their leaders arrested. The Marvins were mounting an imminent counter-attack, this time backed up by the National Guard and Special Forces.

Hannah and the kids had claimed a small classroom in a remote corner of the school. I spent most of my time there, watching from the other side of the room in my mask and gloves as Hannah tended to the kids. Everyone was in a shell-shocked daze, but Benny and DeShaun and Carrie had it the worst. They barely moved or spoke. Hannah did what she could. She held them. Whispered to them. Fed them. She kept them all close, bound up into a warm knot of bodies. They held hands. They slept draped over one another at night, as if they were being stalked by some dark and prowling thing and if there were any stragglers, if anyone wandered from the fold, they'd be consumed. I wanted to help, wanted to add my body to theirs, but what could I do?

One day I left the school and walked through Black River.

There were signs of the riots everywhere. Broken windows. Torn-up lawns. Roads that were crisscrossed with black skid marks and littered with the casings of tear gas shells. There was a Marvin Humvee lying on its side at a corner, scorched black, its windshield shattered. The familiarity of it all, the feeling like I'd been in exactly this place before, was overwhelming.

At the end of one street I came to a pile of rubble made up of wrecked cars, scrap wood, and old furniture. It stretched out of sight in either direction. Teams of infected were using wheelbarrows to haul more debris up to the line and heap it on, so the barricade grew and grew. It was patrolled by men and women carrying hunting rifles or shotguns that had probably been stolen from fleeing Marvins. Still others carried axes, baseball bats, shovels, kitchen knives.

Beyond the barricade was a narrow no man's land and then a Marvin wall made of sandbags and a new quarantine fence of steel and razor wire. On the other side, a mix of Marvins and state police leaned against their vehicles, sipping coffee and chatting, high-powered rifles hanging from their shoulders. Behind them was a third line. The news vans. CNN. MSNBC. Fox. PBS. Satellite dishes reached up into the sky like sunflowers. Reporters primped and fussed in side-view mirrors.

I turned toward Lucy's Promise. The green of the mountain was dazzling. My eyes ached just looking at it. I could see the notch in the trees near the top, where our camp sat. I thought of the cabins and of Snow Cone and Hershey Bar trapped up there alone. I felt a tug deep inside me that grew until I had to turn my back to the mountain and walk away.

Eventually I found myself back on our front lawn. The house still seemed practically untouched. I climbed the stairs and stood on the porch. The door was unlocked, so I went inside, passing through the entryway without daring to glance at the wall by the door. I pulled off my mask. The air was dusty and stale, heavy with old humidity. There was a sour, rotten smell too, one that became sharper as I moved into the kitchen. The refrigerator was nearly empty, but what was there had slumped into piles of green-black mold. In the back corners of the cabinets by the fridge there were a few forgotten cans of tuna and beans. Unopened boxes of cereal.

A shattered wine glass lay on the floor by the stove, the gleam of the shards dulled by a layer of dust.

I went to the sink and turned the spigot. Water splashed against the stainless steel and swirled down the drain. I stared at it for a long time, lost in the staticky rush, and then I took a paring knife from the block by the stove and left the kitchen.

I paused at the edge of the living room, my hand resting on the cap of the banister. The stairs to the second floor were gray with dust. I started up, then heard something behind me and turned. That's when I saw Cardinal. I was surprised I hadn't noticed him before. He was standing between the coffee table and the TV. He looked smaller than he had last time. His armor was dented and scorched, broken at the joints, so that bits of red plate hung loose, the exposed wires sparking. In some places I could see down to his skin, the deep brown of it crisscrossed with wounds and slick with blood. His wings were gone, leaving only ragged stumps.

The couch groaned as Cardinal lowered himself onto it. He didn't look at me, and he didn't say anything, but when he held out his arm, I knew exactly what he wanted.

A few sections of his armor were held together by dirty rags and bits of wire. I cut those first. Once they were gone, I had to cut into the plate itself. It was like sawing through a lobster's shell. The armor fell away in sections. The arms. The legs. The breastplate. Each time I removed a piece, Cardinal pointed to me and I put it on my own body. It was strange because Cardinal was twice my size, but each section fit me perfectly, the components coming together with a satisfying click. Eventually he was down to his helmet and a torn blue jump suit. The Brotherhood's insignia—the Aerie tower with a pair of wings unfurled behind it—was sewn onto his left breast pocket in bright yellow thread.

Cardinal lifted the helmet from his shoulders. Beneath it wasn't Dad or me or you or Greer. It was Cameron Conner. He leaned forward to help me snap the helmet into place. Then I saw the world as he did, a video feed that made everything seem extra sharp, but far away and flat at the same time. I got up from the couch and left the living room. The stairs moaned under the weight of my armor. I made it to the first landing, stopped, rested, and continued on. The curtains on the stairwell windows were open, filling the upstairs with buttery sunlight.

My room was just the way I'd left it. The sheets a blue, rumpled mess. A pile of comic books at the foot of the bed. I went back into the hall. The other rooms sat in an arc in front of me. Mom and Dad's room. Your room. Dad's office. I could see the edge of Mom and Dad's bed through their open door and the corner of your bookshelf through yours.

Dad's office door was the only one that was closed. The walls shot up over my head, and the next thing I knew, I was sitting at the top of the stairs with my armor-clad legs out in front of me, warning lights in the helmet flashing red. Malfunctions. Fatal errors. I blinked in a proscribed pattern and they all went out. I blinked again and the video turned off too, leaving me in total darkness. The house was quiet, except for the water as it splashed against the sink in the kitchen below. It was incredibly loud, like a scream.

T
HE FRONT DOOR
opened and Hannah walked in.

She was carrying a plastic bag in each hand. I was sitting on the couch in the living room. It was morning but I didn't know how long it'd been since I'd left the high school. One day? Two? The water was still running in the kitchen sink, so she turned it off, then went to the counter, which was covered in garbage I didn't remember being there before. Hannah cleared the trash away and began unloading the bags, never once looking up at me. It was like I was there but invisible.

I watched her as she worked, making neat stacks of cans and cardboard boxes in the cabinets. Her blue and white dress was gone, traded for jeans and a T-shirt. Her hair was pinned up behind her ears, and when she turned into the light, I could make out a band of brown in the part, pushing against the green. I saw Greer standing in a meadow, his hands cradling the back of her head as he tipped her face into the sun.
A light, honey brown.
My chest ached. I pushed myself against the arm of the couch and drew my knees up to my chest.

“How'd you find me?”

Hannah glanced up from her work. “Easy,” she said. “Just checked every house in Black River.”

“In one night?”

Hannah stopped emptying the bags.

“It's been eighteen days since the riot, Card.”

I looked over her shoulder and into the kitchen. The cabinets were open and nearly empty except for what she'd just put in. The trash she'd pushed aside was empty cans of tuna and beans. Boxes of cereal.
Eighteen days.
I tried to remember any of them, but all I saw was the bridge and the school and then Hannah walking through the door.

“We're still living at the high school,” she said. “A lot of people are.”

She took one of the bags off the counter and came into the living room. I lifted my hand to my face and suddenly realized I wasn't wearing my mask or gloves. They were sitting on the coffee table. I grabbed them and quickly put them on.

“There are plenty of empty houses,” she went on. “But I guess people just like being together. They've pretty much let Tomiko take over the kitchen. Oh, and Snow Cone showed up the other morning. She must have made it down the mountain before they moved the quarantine fence. No sign of Hershey Bar, though.”

Hannah set the bag on the table in front of me, then retreated to the opposite side of the room. I peeked inside. Three small, golden biscuits. I saw a bundle of red set on a stone by the side of a trail. I saw Greer. I pushed the bag away from me and looked out the back window through a gap in the curtains. The lawn was overgrown and the flowers Mom had planted our first year were in bloom. The sky was bright and cloudless.

“You haven't missed much,” she said. “They've turned the power back on for now and we're getting supplies again. Mail too. Astrid got a letter from some long-lost uncle. Don't think I've ever seen her so happy. Other than that, the Marvins sit on their side of the border and stare at us, and we sit on our side and stare at them.”

“They're stalling,” I said. “As soon as the reporters leave—”

“The adults say they can work something out.”

I laughed. Hannah turned toward the wall. Her lips drew taut, and she took a hard breath. I stared at the floor in front of the couch.

“There's a cookout in the park tonight,” she said. “I guess everybody's sick of eating out of the school cafeteria. I thought you might want to—”

“I'm not going to a party.”

“It's not a—look, the kids want to see you. They want you to come back.”

“I can't do that. You know I can't.”

“No,” she said. “I don't.”

I looked up. A shaft of sunlight had cut across her face.

“It's like the flu,” she said, that old intensity coming into her eyes. “Right? The way it's transmitted? These kids would do
anything
to make sure you never get sick. We can make it work. You just have to want to.”

I lowered my head, twisted at a bit of fabric at the edge of the couch.

Hannah's voice softened. “They get why you're here,” she said. “But they miss you. So do I. What do you think?”

“I think if none of you ever met me in the first place, then you wouldn't have anyone to miss.”

Hannah started to reach out to me, but I got up from the couch and went upstairs to your room. It was as neat as ever. Clothes put away. Desk clean. Books arranged on the shelves alongside your trophies and ribbons from track. Your bed was rumpled, though, which was strange. I wondered if I'd been sleeping there all this time.

I sat on the floor with my back pressed up against the foot of your bed. In front of me were four large plastic bins with blue tops. They were the ones you kept in the attic, so I figured I must have pulled them down at some point. I popped off the lids. The comics inside were just as you left them, alphabetized, with the titles divided by hand-labeled sheets of white cardboard.
Alias. Alpha Flight. Avengers. Batman. Blue Devil. The Brotherhood of Wings.

These were the single issues, before they'd been collected into volumes. Mint condition. I pulled them out in a stack and sat there with them in my lap, shuffling through the covers and then dividing them into four piles, one for each of the four volumes. I started at the beginning and worked through the series until I found myself back at
Behold, Abaddon.

“So how does it end?”

Hannah was standing in the doorway. Some time must have passed because the light coming in from the window behind her had turned a twilight bluish gray. She nodded toward the comic in my hand.

“He didn't just end it with everybody dead, did he?”

I shook my head. Hannah sat down behind me, on the far side of the bed.

“So what happened?”

I turned through the pages until I came to Cardinal running through the Aerie as bombs exploded all around him.

“Cardinal had built this experimental time machine,” I said. “He used it to go back a hundred years, to when Liberty City was still Abaddon. He thought that since he knew what was going to happen, he'd be able to stop everything before it started. He thought he could bring his friends back.”