In The Falling Light (8 page)

Then there was a long silence, and Emily
sighed, thinking she might get some relief, some distance from
Miranda, a rare thing indeed. In order to keep away from her, she’d
found herself running home from school each day, taking different
routes, dodging through yards and peeking around fences like a
soldier in a war movie. Sometimes it worked. And sometimes she felt
a small measure of victory and felt good about being so clever, but
usually she just felt tired, drained. Most people did not think
children could feel stress,
real
stress. They were
wrong.

Miranda leaned forward again, her breath hot
and smelling like cheese crackers. “I took a knife from Mommy’s
kitchen.”

Emily stopped writing, stopped listening to
Miss Crane.

“The next time my baby brother Leo starts
crying, I’m gonna push it into his tummy. I think he’s full of
spaghetti-o’s.”

Emily bolted to her feet, knocking her
textbook to the floor, spinning to face the girl and clamping her
hands to her ears.
“Shut-up-shut-up-shut-up!”

“Miss
Green!”
the teacher yelled,
slapping her lesson plan onto her desk and striding up the row.
“You know we don’t tolerate outbursts in class.”

Emily was crying and started stomping her
feet. “It’s
her
, Miss Crane! She won’t leave me alone!” She
pointed at Miranda, who was staring down at her textbook as if she
was innocent, one finger sneaking towards a nostril. “I hate you!”
Emily screamed, wanting to slap her and pull her hair until she
cried. Miss Crane snatched her by the upper arm and marched her
through the class, and as she was pulled along Emily saw the
shocked looks, the smiles, the whispering, the faces. A moment
later she was alone in the hall with her teacher, who pressed her
against a wall with both hands on her shoulders.

Miss Crane seemed out of breath and rattled,
looking as upset as Emily felt. “Now you’re going to stand here
until I come get you, and you’re going to calm yourself down.” She
straightened and took a deep breath, smoothing her hair back, her
hands trembling just the slightest, then gave Emily a stern look
before pushing back into the classroom.

Alone in the hall, Emily’s crying soon
stopped as she stared at the bulletin board on the far wall,
bordered by green and blue twists of crepe paper with a blue
background. A large school of multi-color construction paper fish
covered it, and Emily saw the fish she had made, a neat, precise
rendering of Nemo, complete with one fin smaller than the other.
Then her eyes fell on Miranda’s, a giant, choppy red piranha with
one bulging eye and a vast, open mouth filled with sharp teeth. For
the first time she noticed the positions of the fish, and her eyes
widened.

Miranda’s fish was moving in for the
kill.

It was aiming for Nemo.

Class dismissed at 2:30, and by 2:33 Emily
was into the straps of her Bieber backpack and headed briskly
towards an exit, trying to stay ahead of the crush of children
pouring into the hall. She needed some lead time.

A hand caught hold of her pack, and Emily
was jerked into a recessed doorway.

Miranda, nearly a foot taller and fifty
pounds heavier, held her against the door with one hand pressed
against her chest. Her eyes were narrowed, and she kept licking her
lips.

“You gonna tell on me?” she asked. “You
gonna tell what I said about my baby brother?”

Emily tried to speak, tried to say, no, she
wouldn’t tell, wanted to scream for a teacher to make the monster
go away. All she could do was shake her head violently.

Miranda seemed to think it over for a
moment, then leaned in. “I think you’re gonna tell.” She bit her
bottom lip and chewed. “Can’t let you tell. Gonna have to make you
be a quiet girl.”

Emily screamed and kicked out, landing a
blow on the bigger girl’s shin, and Miranda howled, taking her hand
off Emily. She took the opening and darted past, into the hall,
heading for the exit doors and the promise of sunlight in the
windows, the safety of outside. A moment later she was through and
leaping down the steps, sprinting across the lawn, her backpack
bouncing against her shoulders.

“
Emily!”
A bellow behind her, and
then the thud of heavy feet pounding down the steps. Emily ran
faster.

Taking the straight, direct route home was
fastest but the bigger girl’s longer legs would catch her out in
the open. Instead, she cut across Marshall Avenue and ran past a
block of nicely kept homes, her pink Nikes slapping the sidewalk,
then turned at the corner onto Douglas. She zipped between a pair
of parked cars, crossed to the other side and ran past more houses
before cutting diagonally across a yard and sprinting up the side
of a brick ranch. There were no fences, only a hedge across the
very back and in seconds she had dropped to her knees and was
scrambling under it. Her backpack snagged, and for a terrifying
moment she was hung up, trapped, losing valuable seconds. Then she
heaved, and with a tearing of nylon, was free.

Beyond was another yard with a turtle
sandbox and a swing set, but thankfully no dog – she worried a
little about dogs – and no one to yell at her for trespassing.
Another run, this time under a rose trellis, and she was out on
Palmer Street. Her street, only two blocks from home.

She was puffing hard, her heart at full
gallop, and there were leaves in her hair. The hedge had cut a red
stripe across one cheek, and though she felt the sting, she didn’t
care. Miranda would do far worse if she caught her.

And the pounding feet were close.

Emily didn’t see the puddle until she was in
it, a small brown pond at the corner where a clogged storm drain
had backed up. Her right foot splashed into it, nearly to the knee,
and she was slow to react. A slimy leaf shot out from under her
sneaker and she went down, face first, arms pin-wheeling.

The splash was spectacular.

Sputtering, she fought to her knees,
blinking brown water out of her eyes, and then Miranda smashed into
her from behind, forcing her back down. She felt the girl’s weight
on her back, her hands in her hair, pushing her head under. She
tried to scream, but only let out a burst of air and reflexively
gasped, sucking in rain water that burned and made the world turn a
quickly darkening red.

Someone leaned on a car horn, a long,
blaring close by that scared Miranda off her victim. Emily felt the
weight leave her back and she flailed for the surface, choking and
pulling in ragged breathes as Miranda ran away. The smaller girl
barely glanced at the old woman in the nearby car, the one who had
saved her and who now just stared at her with a look of shocked
horror. Emily staggered on the asphalt, dripping and daring a
glance back, but Miranda had ducked away between houses. She limped
the last block home as quickly as she could.

A few minutes later she banged through her
front door and squeaked towards the kitchen, her shoulders hitching
with a mixture of half sobs and relief. She didn’t care that she
left wet, brown footprints on the floor and the hallway runner,
didn’t care that she left a brown handprint on a wall. She had just
escaped murder at the hands of a fifth grader. She was traumatized,
her worst school day ever, and her mother would just have to
understand.

“Mom?” she said as she entered the
kitchen.

Emily Green, a single mom and a very
worn-out thirty six, turned at the voice. She had a used-up look,
her face long and lined, her eyes weary. Leo was riding her hip,
his face covered in pasta sauce.

“For Christ’s sake, Miranda, what have you
been into?” She looked at her daughter, a heavy, hulking thing with
a laundry list of imperfections, standing before her with arms limp
at her sides and her mouth hanging open, wearing her usual dull
expression. And now wet and muddy as well. “Did you track that
through the house?”

Miranda said nothing.

Emily Green sighed as she took in the soggy,
sack-like gray sweatshirt, the patched corduroys, the plain, yellow
dollar store backpack with a big rip in it. All she could afford.
She shook her head and looked away, putting Leo back in his high
chair. “Go get cleaned up.”

Emily stood in the doorway shocked, her
designer clothes ruined and dripping. Get cleaned up? That was it?
She had barely made it home alive, and this was her welcome? She
turned and ran for her room, slamming the door behind her.

“Don’t slam the door, Miranda,” called her
mother.

Emily shed her now-ruined Justin Bieber pack
and walked into her closet, closing the door behind her and moving
to the back, pressing against the wall, kicking a doll with a
melted face out of the way. Sitting in complete darkness, she
started chewing her thumbnail. Life was so unfair.

A match flared, white and intense at first,
then warm and flickering. “Leo’s gonna start crying soon,” Miranda
said. “Wanna see my steak knife?”

Emily began to scream.

It got out.

This single thought kept repeating itself as
Joanna Bishop stood in a room of frightened people, everyone
seeming to be moving and yet no one able to take their eyes off the
big, wall-mounted screens. And the fact that it had gotten out – as
catastrophic as that was - wasn’t the worst part. What it was doing
was the real horror.

On screen, live images shot from news
choppers over Southern Connecticut, and a few attempts at ground
coverage that didn’t last very long, brought home a central
message. Groton Research Facility E-11 had become a monster
factory.

A screen on the left showed a bumpy image
shot from a fast-moving car, the driver trying to negotiate a
street in New London lined with businesses. The reporter’s
narration came from off screen, and in the excitement of the moment
whatever professional broadcasting skills he had learned no longer
applied.

“…left turn, left, left! Brian, as you can
see the destruction is widespread, and it looks like most people
have evacuated. We’re not seeing anyone on the streets, though
there were some small groups fleeing the area a few minutes ago. At
this point we don’t even see police or other emergency services.
There are fires…”

The jumpy video showed an overturned bread
truck burning in an intersection, a dozen motionless bodies
scattered around it on the pavement. The vehicle swerved to avoid
running over one of them, and bounced over a curb.

“…Ow! Shit! Okay Steve, head up this way. I
thought I saw lights from a squad car. Brian, it looks like they’ve
already moved through this area, so we’re heading east, into a more
residential area. We’re going to try to find someone in command,
though around here it seems -“

A massive black shape with too many legs
leaped from behind an abandoned bus, slamming head on into the news
vehicle, starring the glass. There was a crunching of metal and the
view tipped upside down as the car flipped over. The camera was
still pointing forward, showing blood on the windshield, the driver
slumped over with his head and neck flopped at an obscene angle.
The view jerked as the camera was struck, rolling to show a
cockeyed shot of a shattered window, then a man started screaming
off screen, a bloody hand appeared, clawing for a grip as it was
dragged away, and a moment later the video was lost to a blue
screen.

Connecticut 12 cut back to its studio.
Brian, the anchor, looked pale and mumbled something about
technical difficulties.

Joanna looked at another screen, this one
with the words RECORDED EARLIER scrolling across the bottom. A news
chopper was sweeping low over I-95 outside Groton, above six lanes
of divided highway packed with refugee traffic. A tide of black
shapes spilled over the southernmost guardrail and poured across
the slow-moving lanes. None of the cars were moving fast enough for
dramatic wrecks, but collisions quickly piled up, and it all came
to a halt. Helpless.

The larvae were the size of footballs.

The nymphs were as big as picnic tables.

Adults were the same size as the cars they
ran at, struck and flipped over. All were hard-shelled and black,
eight-legged with barbed claws. Some of the smaller ones were
crushed by low speed crashes, but after being hit the larger ones
simply flipped from their backs to their legs and attacked the
cars, claws reaching through open windows, pincers ripping open car
doors to get at the occupants. Hunting for blood meals.

“Lt. Jeffries,” Joanna called, not looking
away from the screen, “temperature reading?”

A man behind her responded at once. “The
complex is reading a constant forty-one degrees, Colonel.”

“Complex status?” This question was directed
to the man standing beside her, a major with dark good looks and an
impeccable uniform.

“We’re on complete lockdown, Colonel.”

“The lab?”

“On lockdown as well.”

“Keep an eye on the temperature, Spencer. I
don’t want it above forty-two.” It was an order she had repeated
several times already, but the major affirmed it as if it was the
first time, and Joanna looked around at the people in the bunker’s
command center. Most wore sweaters or jackets, and most wore
gloves, except for those working keyboards, who had to stop and
shake their hands every so often to keep the blood moving. Breath
puffed in the air like little white ghosts, but no one complained
about the cold. They had all been briefed on what happened at
anything warmer than forty-five degrees.

Major Peck moved off to check on an officer,
and Joanna took a seat at an unused workstation, her iPad in her
lap. She ran her fingertips over the leather cover, tracing the
letters stamped into it, smiling;
Bishop, Joanna C. Lt. Col.
U.S. Army.
Olivia had given it to her last year, a gift to
celebrate her promotion to light colonel. Olivia, her tough-minded
sister who had survived both a divorce and breast cancer. She would
have made an outstanding officer. Joanna wondered if Delaware was
far enough away to keep her sister safe. And for how long?