Project Pallid (4 page)

“How’s
Nicole doing at school?” I asked. Mom stood at the sink on the other side of
the kitchen, prepping like a doctor before surgery.

“She’s
been so busy since she got there, I haven’t had much chance to really talk with
her yet. You should ask her all about her first few days when she gets here.”

“Sooooo
…… you want me to dig for gossip for you? Is that what you’re saying?” I asked,
half-joking, and half-serious. My mom, like most, always wants to know more
than she probably should about the two of us. Nicole and I draw the line at
what she needs, versus what she wants to hear.

I
kicked the heavy, braided rug aside and pulled up and propped open the pantry door
as I continued my playful chastisement of Mom’s curiosity. “If you want to know
the good stuff, you’d better be ready to get your own hands dirty, Mom. Now, if
you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some shopping to do!” I yelled behind me—up
the narrow, wooden stairs that I’d half-descended.

Gravel
crunched beneath my feet. My arms stretched and swung for the overhead
pull-cord as I strained to distinguish it in the semidarkness.

I
couldn’t make out her muffled response.

May 8
^th:
Day 7

The
light bulb’s been flickering on and off for what seems like forever. It hasn’t
ever done that before. I’m watching it from my cot and it’s making me nervous.
I’ve been totally still. I’ve been completely silent. Has it been minutes?
Hours?

I’m
not sure if it’s the bulb, the electricity, or one of those things messing with
my house. It could be any of the three; I’ve got no idea what it looks like out
there anymore.
Is there anyone left? Will
it ever be safe to go back up?

I’ve
had too much time alone down here to think things through; tomorrow’s a full
week. This must be what solitary confinement feels like: like slowly losing
your mind.

I
had no reception during the first three days as my phone’s battery faded away
to nothing. And when the screen went black, I launched it at the rock wall on
the other side of the room, making solid contact that shattered it to a hundred
pieces. It was my dad’s, and the brief meltdown made me feel a flash of
remorse; it was my only hope for outside contact, and it’d turned into a
useless paperweight.

My
eyes are fixed on the flickering bulb as I reach for and pop open a jar of
pickles. Before it all happened, this secluded space was nothing more than food
storage: a place to warehouse Mom’s preserves. But with the news broadcasts and
the warnings to stock up and hunker down, she packed this place to its bursting
point and with enough rations for a much larger family than the four or five of
our own.

Thankfully,
food won’t be an issue for a while. Neither will water or most other, basic
essentials. Well, except for electricity … and a cell phone charger.

The
surplus down here quadrupled in just two days’ time, and when I look around
now, it’s hard to distinguish Mom’s homemade goods, now concealed behind jugs
of water, canned vegetables, lamp oil, batteries, and other, apocalyptic
essentials.

The
shelves first started to swell after the massive outbreak at Madison General,
and that was barely four days after the first reported incident, relayed
casually to us in the checkout lane of the grocery store.

We
overheard the girls on register talking about some woman who’d just lost it at
the bank next door. We only caught pieces, but my mom, already consumed by Mr.
Laverdier’s sermons by then, didn’t hesitate to intrude and to ask more
questions that would satiate her curiosity and quench her sudden thirst for the
macabre.

Basically,
what the girls knew was this: some woman in the bank line went totally nuts,
and she ripped a random father of three to shreds, completely clawing and
chewing his face from his skull by the time bystanders were able to pry her off
him. I heard it took five guys just to hold her down until the cops showed up
and got her restrained enough to be taken away. From what witnesses described,
it was a total gore-fest.

Later
that night, when Mom, Dad and I were eating dinner and watching TV, we caught
the news report that included edited-down footage from inside the bank. But
even those cleaned-up images made the things we heard in the checkout sound
like a Pixar film.

Through
the first ten minutes of video—speed-edited for television—the lady
just swayed there. Her chin rested against her chest. Her body moved
thoughtlessly forward with the crowd. And her skin, even in the second-rate
feed, was remarkably pale. Her hair, totally white. Her appearance was thin and
gaunt, to the point of breakable, but with an unforeseeable strength.

Then,
about five minutes in, she pounced on the back of this suited man in front of
her. Her arms reached around and her fingernails slashed at his face. She pulled
him to the ground before he could react, and her entire body perched on his,
lighting-fast and on all fours, like she was some animal. Her arms and hands
whirled wildly to pin him down and grip the sides of his head. She held it
steady enough for her mouth to tear away chunks of face flesh, and she slurped
and swallowed what would keep her alive.

Even
though most of it was blocked out, and even without audio from the surveillance
camera, the dictation of the newscasters and the spraying blood that spurted
around the CENSOR square gave audiences a pretty good understanding of what
went down.

She
was the first.

She
was their neighbor.

And
it lent credibility to our earliest suspicions.

Even
if we didn’t know the disease, we knew its source.

The
flickering stops and the blackness consumes me.

But
even if it weren’t dark, I’d still know that it’s night. The crispness of the
air and the faint sounds of distant crickets are dead giveaways.

I’m
envious of their immunity to it all. Their ability to keep going, totally
ambivalent and unaffected by what’s decimated everything I knew from before.
Still, their soft harmony gives hope for life as I stretch across my cot for a
couple hours sleep and to rest for tomorrow: my one-week anniversary.

My
plan’s to give it another week. I’ve got the rations to survive—to wait
them out until they starve to death. I hope the others do too, wherever they
might be hiding. And I pray that when it’s all said and done, we can retake
what’s left and make things the way they were—not what the warped mind of
some twisted, scientist-turned-prophet, wants them to become.

Whatever
you call them—his minions, his monsters—they’re becoming fewer and
fewer. And in another week, and without fuel to survive, I think they’ll be
gone. Or, I hope they’ll be gone.

And
in seven days, I’ll return to the surface, no matter what.

My
flashlight clicks on, and I swing its beam under my cot. Pocketknife in hand, I
carve a single notch into the hard, wooden vertices of my cot.

One
down.

Six
to go.

Four
days to whiteness. Six days to death. They can’t have much longer.

Without
blood, they starve, and with nothing left, the smart, the secluded, and the
savvy survive.

September
4
^th:

Even
though I eventually got my locker assignment on day one, I didn’t have time to
go to it, and I still had no idea who I’d be sharing the small space with when
I found my way there to pack it with my things on day two. Someone else,
another guy I assumed, had been there first. He’d already settled comfortably
in for the year by plastering its insides with football memorabilia and other
sports-related things. It wasn’t my taste, but it was his space as much as it
was mine, and I’d deal with it.

With
the wall real estate claimed, my locker would just be a place to drop my books.
And, figuring the guy had to be bigger than me, I started to reorganize his
things to the top shelf and laid claim over its bottom. It felt kind of like
moving into someone else’s house, but the space was
as much mine as it
was his. Just because I got my schedule late, didn’t mean I should have to
carry my stuff on my back like an ass all year.

“Hey,
dude, what the hell are you doing in my locker?” a deep voice commanded from
behind me.

Still
crouched on the floor and unloading my backpack into the base of our
locker-share, I turned and looked up. Way up. What must’ve been almost
seven-feet up. The guy had to be the tallest freshman ever.

“I
… I …… Uh ……” Thrown by his unexpected arrival and his even more surprising
stature, I struggled for words.

“I
said,” his voice grew deeper and more authoritative, “what the
hell
are
you doing in my locker?”

“I
guess we’re locker partners,” I tried to explain, and stood to look eye-level
with his mid-section. I extended my hand upward to shake his and took the
initiative to introduce myself. “I’m Dami—

“Listen,
you little turd. I really don’t care who you are. I just want to know who told
you it was okay to go touching all my shit?” His words weren’t so much a
question as they were a declaration that I’d already overstepped my boundaries.

“Well
… ” I carefully searched my words. “I guess I just assumed, by the football
stuff and all, that you’d be bigger than me. So I took the bottom, and I gave
you the top.”

At
this, he just laughed—loud enough to draw attention from everyone who
mingled around us before the homeroom bell.

“Guess
you were right, man. Heck, I’ve got a little sister who’s bigger than you.
Should you even
be
in high school? You sure you don’t need a chaperone
to be here?”

I
could feel myself growing red again. I knew exactly what I wanted to say to the
guy, but figured he’d grind me into the floor like a pancake if I spoke up.

I
remembered what my mom said about standing up for myself—that there’d be
lots of guys like him trying to throw their weight and size around in high
school—and so I re-extended my hand to shake his and to finish my
introduction, instead.

“My
name’s Damian Lawson. I’m in Mrs. Dorr’s homeroom.”

The
giant just slapped my hand aside and stepped into the space between the locker
and me. He reached down and scooped up the things I’d started to organize in
its bottom, and he held them out for me to take. But before I could get my arms
up, the pile dropped to the floor, filling the hallway with the echoing thud of
textbooks, supplies and shame. Some of the faces that watched on looked
stunned, but they were few. Most watched with sick pleasure, glad to see
someone else taking the torment and not them.

“Great
to meet you, Damian,” he said. “Now, why don’t you go and find yourself another
locker because, as you can see, this one’s already taken. And if you’ve got
anything to say about it, to anyone else, I know where to find you: Mrs. Dorr’s
homeroom, right?” His words were an obvious threat.

“Yeah,
Mrs. Dorr’s homeroom,” my shoulders caved, and I still can’t believe those
timid words came from my mouth. It’s one of those moments you’d return to, and
change what you said, and act how you didn’t: a chance to see how things
might’ve been different if you’d said and done exactly what you were thinking
at the time.

“Cool.
Then we’re on the same page.”

He
moved his things back to the locker’s base, grabbed what he needed, slammed it
shut, and left me to scoop up my scattered belongings in shaky humiliation. I
didn’t get the guy’s name then—he didn’t give me any opportunity
to—but as horrible luck would have it, we landed on the same team in gym
class, where his name became etched in my brain forever: Ryan Hayes.
Apparently, he was some football legend from middle school, and he’d already
made it to the starting line-up on the varsity squad as a freshman.

And
even though we’re on the same team that day, he made sure I took more of a
beating than anyone else on the flag football field. He made certain that I never
got the ball when I was open or when I could do anything meaningful with it.
Not once. Instead, he’d wait until I was totally surrounded by all his jock
buddies from the football team, and then he’d lob an easy one my way. After a
few times of being clobbered, I learned to deliberately miss the catch just so
I wouldn’t have to take the crunching blows that accompanied it.

And
even though it was only supposed to be two-hand touch rules that day, our
teacher, who also happened to be the varsity football coach, always seemed to
be looking the other way whenever I got pummeled. He said nothing about it and
allowed it to happen. Maybe gym class was just an added opportunity for his
players to get in some practice. Or then again, maybe he just had it out for
the little guy, too. Either way, I wrote Coach Swanson off that day, and my
list of Madison High douchebags grew one name longer.

By
geometry that afternoon, my second day was going just as poorly as my
first—maybe worse. I became more and more weighed down by textbooks with
each passing class, and the pull of my pack tugged from behind and fought to
bring me to the ground. Occasionally, someone in the hall noticed and gave it a
little extra push downward, just to see how much more I could handle. I only
went down once, but when I did, I left the bag behind and sprang quickly to my
feet. Fists clenched and headed after my assailant, I was ready for a fight. My
reaction was enough to get an apology out of the guy though, who was only after
laughs—not the fight that my breaking point almost unleashed on him.