Project Pallid (26 page)

“The
cops?” she asked. “And tell them what? That my dad cleaned out the garage? That
he started moving things to our new house???”

“You
know what I’m saying, Catee!”

“I
know, what you’re saying, Damian, but do you
hear
how it sounds? Imagine
you’re on the other end of the line. What are you going to say? How are you
going to respond when someone’s kid calls to report what we’ve got to say: That
my dad’s some mad scientist with a secret lab in the garage, that he packed up
and took to our summer home? Is
that
what you want me to say??”

“Well,
maybe not
exactly
that,” I replied. “You can probably leave out the
thing about the summer home.”

“Shut
up, Damian.”

She
spoke with a cold, harshness that made me look at her with confusion.

“Catee?”

“Catee??”
I asked again, after getting no reply.

“Catee,
you don’t have to talk to me, but at least look at me. Look at me, Catee.
Please.”

Her
head swiveled my way like it needed a good greasing.

“Catee.
I know it’s hard,” I said. “I can’t even imagine how hard it must be. But, I’m
here, and I’ll always be here. No matter what happens, you’re not alone. It’s
got my mom now, too. I know how it feels.”

“What’re
they doing, Damian?” she plead. “Why are they doing this?”

I
looked nervously around and hoped that none of her neighbors had wandered
curiously into their yards during our heated exchange in the open garage, but
there was no one there.

I
couldn’t explain my mom’s fixation with her dad, and I still can’t say what
first drew her to him, even to this day. His magnetism had always held an
opposite effect on me, and I couldn’t see how anything he said to her could’ve
had any bearing on her life, whatsoever. Her captivation with him was as
mesmerizing as it was unexplainable—like some sort of tractor beam that
no matter how hard my dad and I tried to fight, we lost. And in the end, my dad
lost the most: first, my mom, and then, with his life.

We
ended up calling the cops that afternoon. It was one of the few options we had
left at our disposal and, given the shared sentiments I’d expressed with Catee,
she understood it wasn’t an act of betrayal at all; it was the total opposite.
We were doing whatever we could to protect what remained of the lives we’d
always known.

Predictably,
our words fell on deaf ears. So as soon as Catee hung up the phone, we mounted
our bikes, pedaled to the police station, and waited to speak with an officer,
face-to-face.

The
entire station was humming. Outbreaks were springing up all around, and there
wasn’t enough manpower to respond to the number and magnitude of incidents that
multiplied across Madison. Officers flew in and out, heaping half-lifeless
bodies into the barrack’s few holding cells.

Some
that passed snapped viciously our way. Eyes, gloss-white, and arms cuffed
behind backs, they struggled to get footing as they were pulled briskly by. One
of the more unruly ones was Tasered to unconsciousness while still in my sight,
and I counted as eight more were thrown into cells that spared us from friends
and neighbors, but did nothing to protect them from each another.

Traces
of their former selves, each one’s skin had become an unhealthy, powder white.
Patches of skull showed where there had once been hair. Snarling mouths
revealed gleaming teeth, and trails of pearl-white saliva collected on the
floor and illuminated a path to their cells.

Caged,
there was no silencing them as they tore into each other. The screaming wails
that permeated the building were ear splitting, and it only compounded the
mayhem of officers who scrambled in and out, in response to the infinite ring
of phone lines. They yelled orders over the melee of metallic screeches and
cannibalistic attacks that went undeterred and in plain sight.

It
was only the first day of pandemic, and they were the first cases of what would
be hundreds more.

Eventually,
some sergeant—I don’t remember his name—stopped to ask us what
information we had to share.

In
a flurry of hurried and mishandled words, the two of us did our best to convey
everything we knew; time was of the essence, and it was clear we wouldn’t have
much to relay all that we knew.

He
nodded his head, asked some questions of his own, and even went so far as to
take down our addresses, including the one to Mr. Laverdier’s Damariscotta
compound. And then he quickly ushered us out of the police station, ordered us
to go directly home, to lock our doors and windows, and to find a safe place
where we could hide until they got the situation under control. I know he
worried that they might not; the shakiness in his voice was unmistakable.

We
wondered if he’d take the information we’d given him and do anything with it.
We wondered if they even had the forces to take the infection to its source, or
whether the police would be lost in crowd control mode until The Whitening
claimed them, too.

And
it was only the beginning.

Hundreds
and thousands more would become infected.

Most
are dead now.

And
as much as I can tell, I might be one of the few survivors who hasn’t pledged
my allegiance to and been vaccinated by Him. I might be the
only
one
left to vindicate the fallen, and I’ll do it without reservation.

I’ll
cut the head off the beast by myself.

The
gravel mound of my whited-out dad is an image that’ll remain burned in my brain
forever, and it’s all the fuel I need to brave whatever might be left out
there.

In
four more days, I’ll leave this tomb.

And
even though I can’t say where I’ll find The Gathering, or its leader, I’ve got
a pretty good idea where I’ll start.

April
30
^th:

The
day after he purged their garage, Mr. Laverdier set up permanent residence at
his place in Damariscotta. He’d been staying there on and off until then, for
days on end, before he’d return home to work in his garage. My mom seemed to
spend nearly as much time there, too—sequestered away at their
Gatherings: spiritual retreats that would “cleanse the spirit”, or some junk
like that. At least, that’s how my mom advertised them. To everyone. Somewhere
along the way, she’d become his personal sounding block, and she advertised
Pastor Dave’s campaign for The Light everywhere we went. And when the illness
broke out, the group’s slogan became her personal mantra: “Fight the White:
Find the Light.”

There
was a distinct difference in the way she said it, too: one-way, before the
hospital outbreak, and another, after The Whitening started to rear its ugly
head around town. Her eyes turned as clouded as her head whenever she’d repeat
the mad man’s rhetoric.

“Well,
we do hope you’ll join us. The address is on the card. We gather nightly, at
8:00,” she affirmed to one woman.

We’d
been standing in the pasta aisle and eyeballing sauces when she caught the
attention of this other lady and made her move. The woman, mid-twenties at
most, was alarmed by my mom’s affront and became even more so after she started
in on her spiel, while I did my best to disappear behind the gridded
latticework of our shopping cart.

When
she came to a temporary pause, the woman left hurriedly on her way, and I was
left to endure the remainder of Mom’s rant until she finished spewing its
garbage and resumed a conversation that even hinted at the sane person I once
knew her to be.

But
it was like an erupting volcano. And as soon as I thought it had calmed, her
magma chamber refueled, and she spat her ash all across the checkout lanes as
we waited in line with hundreds of others who inched forward, anxious to escape
the building and to return to the sanctuaries of their own homes—Doomsday
rations in tow. For a second, you would’ve thought
she
was the
mastermind behind it all. Somehow, Mr. Laverdier had changed her, and as much
as I wanted it to be otherwise, the glimpses of the woman I knew were becoming
fewer and fewer. She wasn’t the same person anymore. She’d become mindlessly
different.

And
as much as I willed to set her right and turn her back to the person she was,
it was hopelessly futile. He had a hold over her that none of us could
break—me, Dad, Nicole, Catee, nor all of us combined. We’d lost her to
his madness, and we could only wait until she found her own way back from the
darkness, guised as hope, that she’d allowed to envelop her.

“You
don’t happen to have any more jugs of water out back, do you?” We’d made our
way to the register and Mom spoke to the cashier—a young girl, just out
of high school probably, with thick glasses and markedly crooked teeth.

“Nope.
Everyone’s been asking the same thing. We’re all out, but they say we’ll have
more in by tomorrow, probably. You might want to get here early, though. I
don’t think it’ll last long.”

“Well,
don’t you think it’s a little inappropriate that you haven’t ordered enough at
a time like this?” Mom queried. “When all the news is telling us to go out and
stock up? How are we supposed to stock up on things that you don’t have?”

“I
know, Ma’am, and I’m sorry, but we’re doing everything we can. We’re all in the
same boat right now.”

“And
those.” Impervious to the apology and to all rationality, Mom pointed toward
canned vegetables that rolled down the belt. “Don’t you think it’s a little
ridiculous to go marking up your prices just to make an extra profit at a time
like this?”

“Ma’am,
I can assure you, those are the same price they’ve always been. We haven’t
marked anything up.”

“I
come here every week,” Mom asserted. “Every week for the past ten years. And I
know very well what those where and what they are now. Don’t even try to
pretend like someone’s not making money off all this,” she proclaimed, waving
her arm behind us and toward the sea of shoppers and carts, jam-packed with
rations.

“Ma’am,
I’m sorry, but I’m just in charge of the register. I can get you a manager if
you’d like to speak with someone, though.” The emerging aggravation in the
young cashier’s voice was clear and apparent.

“Don’t
bother. It’s not like it’ll do any good, and it’s not like I’ll ever be coming
here to shop again. No one will, if what Pastor Dave says is true.”

“Pastor
Dave?” The girl cynically snickered. “That nut-job from TV?” she asked,
referencing the clips of Mr. Laverdier that’d begun to air the day before. In
them, he calmly iterated the words of warning that my mom and the rest of his
troops had taken to the streets. “That guy’s totally off his rocker. He thinks
this is some Armageddon, right? Like, from the
Bible
? That anyone who doesn’t listen to him is as good as gone?
I’m sorry, Ma’am, but I wouldn’t put much faith into anything you heard from
that lunatic.”

There
was a second of processing before Mom’s forehead crinkled, her expression
turned firm, and her eyes went red with hate. Both her hands moved to the
small, check-writing pedestal, and her fingers curled around it, white-knuckled.
She leaned in so close that her intrusion forced the girl to stop swiping cans
over the scanner. The young cashier took a step back and raised both hands
defensively as my mom unleashed. And like she’d wanted all along, Mom finally
had the complete attention of everyone around us: lanes 4, 5, 7, and 8
included.

“You
listen to me, honey. And you’d better listen good, while you’ve still got time
to change your ways. I know you’ve only been around for the past sixteen
years—

“Nineteen,
Ma’am.” Whether brave or just plain stupid, the girl interrupted.

“Oh.
Par-don me.” The heavy sarcasm was unmistakable in Mom’s voice. “You’ve only
been around
nineteen
years. Sixteen, nineteen, it doesn’t make any
difference. You’re young, you’re naïve, and you’ve got no idea what this world
is becoming. He does, though,” Mom said, with a look toward the ceiling. “And
we don’t think he’s too happy with where things are headed.
This
is His
time, and we’re all just messengers of that. We’re here to help you—the
young, the numb, and the just plain ignorant—to right your ways and to
see things for what they are before it’s too late. All this? This sickness
they’re warning everyone about? Well, it’s only just the beginning. You just
wait and see what He has in store for us. All this … this chaos … this panic …
it might seem like some bad dream, but it’s not, and its utopia compared to
what’s left to come. And it’s one you’ll be begging for when The Whitening
really
takes hold. All this is just a glimpse. And when all’s said and done, I hope
you don’t suffer much. Or for long. Nope. Not at all. In fact, I hope you come
to your senses before then. And when you do, that
lunatic
you spoke so
critically of—that lunatic will be waiting for you with open arms,” Mom
concluded, and neatly placed one of The Gathering’s contact cards on the
keyboard of the register. “And now, if you’ll kindly finish up here,” she
motioned to our groceries at both ends of the belt, “we still have preparations
of our own to attend to.”