Black River Falls (3 page)

“What? Where?”

Benny pointed his chin toward the trail that led to Black River.

“In all those houses down there,” he said. “And up here too. In the trees and stuff. They say if you're not careful, the ghosts'll reach out and—”

“Isaac and Eliot were teasing.” I made a mental note to have Greer give them a talking-to. A vigorous one. “There aren't any ghosts.”

He gave me a deeply skeptical look. “How do
you
know?”

“Because I know.”

“But, well, what if I get lost? Or somebody grabs me, or they make me go back to that shelter—”

“Do you think any of us would let somebody grab you?” I said. “Or let you go back to that place?”

His forehead wrinkled as he considered it, but clearly he wasn't convinced. I checked behind me and found the trail deserted. The rest of the group was already past the first turn. I squatted down so I could look Benny in the eye.

“You know, when I was your age, I had nightmares a lot.”

Benny cocked his head. “You did?”

“Oh yeah. Bad ones, too. They'd wake me up in the middle of the night, and then I'd be too scared to go back to sleep. And since I shared a room with my big brother, that meant he couldn't go back to sleep either. So he came up with this thing to help me get over being scared.”

“I'm not—”

“No, I know. You're not scared. But still . . . you wanna try it?”

The way Benny looked at me it was clear that every atom in his body was primed for some kind of trick. But in the end, he nodded.

“What's the happiest thing you can remember?”

The question took him by surprise, but then he thought about it for a second and said it was one day last month when he and DeShaun—the camp's other seven-year-old and Benny's best friend—were walking through the woods and found a bird's nest. It was small, he said, the size of two hands cupped together, made out of twigs and leaves and bits of plastic. Each of the four eggs inside it, snow white and speckled with blue, was hardly larger than his thumb. Benny said that he and DeShaun stood there for the longest time, not saying anything, just staring at those tiny eggs until it was like they were the biggest things in the whole world.

“Okay,” I said. “Now, close your eyes.”

He did.

“I want you to see those eggs again,” I said. “Not like you're looking at a picture, but like they're really there in front of you. Do you see them?”

Benny nodded slowly.

“Now I want you to feel how warm the sun is on your skin and how the pollen tickles your nose. Now smell the honeysuckle and the dogwoods and that musty smell that comes from all those old decaying leaves on the ground. I bet there are birds up in the trees too, right?”

Benny nodded again.

“You can hear them singing and DeShaun's breathing beside you and your own heartbeat.”

Benny's shoulders relaxed and his mouth fell open, his bottom lip fluttering in and out as he breathed. It was almost as if he were on the edge of sleep.

“Open your eyes.”

When he did, they were steady and bright. Calm.

“No matter what happens, no matter what you see, that moment is locked up inside you. So if you ever get scared, that's where you go. Deal?”

He nodded solemnly, never taking his eyes off mine. “But nothing bad's going to happen, right?”

I raised my hand. “I swear. There's nothing to be afraid of.”

It was as if the chains holding him back snapped. He went shooting off after the others, kicking up a cloud of dust as he went. I knelt there in the quiet of the camp, staring at the trail and thinking about walking the streets of Black River for the first time in eight months. It had to have been eighty degrees that day, but I felt as if I'd swallowed a bucket full of ice.

Once Benny was out of sight, I went back to my own campsite. I dropped to my knees and hunted around inside my tent until I found what I was looking for: a T-shirt–wrapped bundle hidden under my sleeping bag.

From time to time we traded with the other groups that were scattered throughout the woods and hills surrounding Lucy's Promise. Not long after I moved up to the mountain, I sought out one of them, and swapped almost everything I had for the one thing I wanted.

I unfolded the T-shirt. Inside was a six-inch hunting knife with a leather-wrapped handle. All along the top of the blade there were these rat's teeth serrations, the kind you'd use to saw through thick branches. The cutting edge itself was so sharp it seemed to hum.

I tested the edge with a finger. It whispered through the skin, sending a pinprick of blood curling into my palm. The world became a little brighter and a little more clear. I smeared the blood off on my jeans, then sheathed the knife and threaded it onto my belt. I left camp and started down the trail toward Black River.

I 
SAW THE RIVER
first. I'd come around the second-to-last switchback and the trees had started to thin. The Black River cut the Quarantine Zone roughly in half, with the mountains on one side and the town on the other. From up on Lucy's Promise it looked like a dark ribbon. The only bright spot along its course was where the water ran fast over the falls, turning to white foam as it slipped beneath the stone bridge.

The town appeared next. From where I stood it was just trees mixed with black and russet-colored roofs and a few lines for roads. It grew larger with every step, until I could pick out the red brick of Black River High at the south end of Main Street and the crown of mansions way up at the north end. As soon as we came off the mountain, the kids sprinted down Route 9. Greer chased after them, but my legs wouldn't move. I stood there, one foot on the asphalt, one on the grass, looking down the road at what had become of Black River.

The last time I'd been off the mountain was just after the sixteenth, when the QZ had been packed with people. Infected. Uninfected. National and local news teams. Ten different charities. Eight different government agencies.

The uninfected went first. They were released from quarantine around Thanksgiving. Once another month or two passed without any real developments—no cure or vaccine, no culprit, no other outbreaks—the news vans left skid marks on their way out of town. The Red Cross and the Salvation Army were next, followed by the Gates people and the Clinton people and the World Health Organization. The CDC, USAMRIID, and the rest of the government agencies hung in there until early March. After they left it was just us, a dwindling force of National Guardsmen, and the occasional smalltime charity—a bunch of losers shuffling around an empty dance floor long after the cool kids had found someplace better to be.

It was the silence that tripped me up the most. The chaos of those early days was long gone, but there was nothing to take its place. There were none of those old summer afternoon sounds. The pre-outbreak sounds. No whirring lawnmowers or blaring radios. No hissing hoses as people washed their cars or watered their lawns. Just wind moving down empty streets and in and out of the open windows of abandoned houses.

Months of neglect had led to overgrown yards and weed-cracked sidewalks. Roofs with missing shingles. Shutters hanging from broken windows. A family of white-tailed deer, two adults and two fawns, stood on someone's front walk, nibbling at the grass. Another house seemed completely untouched, except that the front door was hanging open, exposing the empty throat of the hallway and shiny hardwood floors.

“Yo! Cardinal!”

Greer had stopped in the middle of the street and was waving me forward. Benny was standing next to him, looking back, curious, as if maybe I'd forgotten something. Of course it was also possible that he was wondering why a seventeen-year-old kid couldn't just walk down an empty street. I took a deep breath and then I forced one foot in front of the other.

Every few blocks there were reminders of the night of the sixteenth. Empty lots where, instead of a house, there was a pile of ash and charred wood. Two police cars, burned black with smashed windows, sat in the cul-de-sac at the end of Elm Street. Spent tear gas canisters, mixed in with trash and fallen leaves in the gutter, made bonelike sounds as I kicked through them. A rat's nest of zip-tie handcuffs lay bleaching in the sun.

I stepped up onto the cobblestone bridge that spanned Black River Falls. My shoulders tensed. Forty feet below me, the water crashed against jagged slate-gray boulders. The sound was like a wave of static. I looked over my shoulder, up toward the peak of Lucy's Promise. The trail I had walked on only minutes before had vanished into the trees. It felt like a hand had grabbed hold of my guts and twisted.

“Hey. Take a look.”

Greer had stopped the kids at the far side of the bridge. He nodded up the street as a large black pickup truck came rolling toward the intersection. The back of it was open, packed with ten or fifteen men wearing bright blue hazmat suits. Black rifles hung from their shoulders. The men turned to face us as they passed. The eyeholes in their suits were shiny plastic, blankly white in the sun's glare. The air filters that grew out of their masks looked like the jaws of huge insects. I stepped back, my hand automatically going to the knife at my side.

“Easy,” Greer said. “They're just passing by.”

They picked up speed as they crossed Route 9 and headed toward Main Street. Just before they disappeared, I saw a logo on the tailgate—a globe pierced by a sword. Beneath it were the words
MARTINSON/VINE
.

Greer stepped into the street to watch them go. “Dude, who the hell is Martinson Vine?”

I didn't know, but something about them made me feel my heartbeat pulse in my throat. “Come on. Let's just get this over with.”

Greer and the kids had a quick huddle, and then they were on the move again. I followed along, and pretty soon the heart of Black River came into view. This is where most of the infected lived. Thousands of them. They slouched against the walls of boarded-up shops or lounged in the tall grass around abandoned houses and apartment buildings, eyeing us as we moved down the street. I'd heard that there were infected with enough money hoarded away from before the outbreak that they could make a life in the QZ that was almost normal, but they were a minority. Most everybody lived like these people, jobless and adrift.

See, as soon as the quarantine came down, Black River became like a body that was dying one organ at a time. The tourist shops and art galleries closed first, then the grocery stores and the drug stores and the all-night diners. Last to go were the schools and churches. The National Guard and the charities had tried various kinds of resuscitation, but none of them worked. We were too far gone. No wonder Benny believed Isaac and Eliot when they told him Black River was haunted. In a town like this, there were bound to be ghosts somewhere.

By the time we hit Main, small bands of infected were coming out of every alleyway and side street, merging into a flood of people as they funneled toward the park. I tightened the straps of my mask and tried to get Greer's attention, but he was talking to Astrid and Ren and they were laughing. How was that possible? How could they laugh in the middle of this?

It didn't matter. I spun around, looking for the street that would take me away from the gathering mob, but was surprised to find myself lost. Hundreds of shifting bodies made streets and storefronts that had once been so familiar seem strange and distorted. My only choice was to fight against the tide and get someplace where I could think and breathe.

There was a split-second shift, and I saw through a gap in the crowd that Oak Street was practically deserted. I pressed the mask to my face and ran for it. The second I made it out of the throng, there was the blast of a horn, and then the same black truck from earlier came barreling down the street, inches from flattening me. I fell and my elbow crashed into the sidewalk, sending a thunderclap of pain up my arm. A man shouted at me from the back of the truck, and another laughed.

When they were gone, a second wave of infected rushed past, jostling and shouting. The world spun as I got up and stumbled away from them. I saw flashes of bodies, broken glass, cracked asphalt. I smelled smoke and heard what I thought were bells ringing. The next thing I knew, the crowds were gone and I was on my ass in an alleyway, bent knees in front of me, a greasy Dumpster wedged into my shoulder. Out on the street, teakettle voices screeched and wailed. I pushed myself deeper into the alley and tore off my mask so I could breathe. The air tasted sour and vinegary. My stomach flipped. I remembered what I told Benny, and I clawed through my memories, looking for someplace safe to hide. Most of them slipped away too quickly to get ahold of, but then I felt a snag.

Me and you. Our old bedroom in Brooklyn. Snow falling on the fire escape outside our window. Mom and Dad had gone to bed hours earlier. Once you were sure they were asleep, you slipped out into the living room. I lay there watching the snow and listening to the sound of you padding around in your socks. A desk drawer opened and closed, and then you flung yourself back into the room and shut the door.

“Tennant, what were you doing in Dad's desk? He'll freak if he finds out.”

“Dude!” you hissed. “Shut. Up.”

You fell into bed beside me, and a flashlight flared to life, moving down the length of your arm to the pages you held in your hand. The title was in black letters across the top.

CARDINAL AND THE
BROTHERHOOD OF WINGS.

“Whoa. Tenn, those are—we can't.”

“It's just us,” you said. “Besides, Mom and Dad named you after the main character. That gives you, like, a legal right to read it.”

I was about to refuse, but then you handed me the first page and it was like everything in the room vanished except for that rectangle of black and white. There they were. The towers of Liberty City shining in the sun. The Brotherhood's Aerie. Sally Sparrow and Rex Raven soaring through a cloudless sky. We worked through that first issue page by page, warm under the covers while the snow piled up outside. We met Madame Night. Penny Dreadful. Kirzon Sloat and the Emerald Horde. It was like watching a whole new universe explode into existence right before our eyes.