Swarm (26 page)

At
the travel agency, the window Marvin had broken was boarded up. They'd stapled a poster of a beach onto the plywood. Tall palm trees, like the ones we'd seen at the botanical gardens, arched over white sand. I had wanted that. I'd grown up wanting that, listening to my mother tell stories about stepping out into the gasoline smell of a foreign summer, her regular winter life left far behind. I was like the people Marvin talked about who would have done that: ignored the future, answered my own desires.

“Go in,” Marvin said and rushed by without slowing, leaving me standing, stunned, at the door.

“Wait,” I said, but he didn't.

I hesitated only briefly before I pushed through the door. Bells sounded, a deeper tong than the jingly ones at the diner. There were a couple desks on each side of the space. All empty, except one. An older woman looked up from her computer. Silvery hair pulled back in a messy bun, lips outlined in dark red pencil, the inner colour faded. When she stood, she knocked over a picture on her desk of a black dog.

“Hello,” she said, righting the photograph. “Isn't it a beautiful day?”

I didn't trust my voice so instead I stretched my mouth into what felt like a grimace but was meant as a smile. Sweat trickled down my spine. Carefully, I hitched the backpack more securely onto my shoulder and turned away from her, to look at a shelf of promotional materials. Marvin had told me what to do. Walter and Margo were up the street. Marvin watching from the doorway of a pawnshop across the road. I picked up a handout about Macedonia, a place I'd never heard of.

“Don't speak with her,” Marvin had told me. “Don't engage. Keep your head down.”

But she walked up to me, her head tipped to one side, interested in what I wanted, which places in the world I hoped to see. She gestured to the glossy page pinched between my fingers. “Have you been?” I shook my head. “Beautiful,” she said again, the second time in only a few minutes. “So historic.”

I looked again at the sheet: red tile roofs, a green domed church with golden crosses, the snow-crested mountains.

She pulled a flyer about New York City off the shelf. “Our more local destinations are popular.”

My hands were clammy. I cleared my throat.

“Last year,” I said. “I went with a friend.” Without meaning to, I gestured to the window where Margo would soon appear and flinched. I shifted the backpack. The book Walter had chosen to hide the bomb in was called
Manufactured Landscapes
, and on its cover a toxic red river snaked through a black wasteland.

The other night in his workshop I'd asked them where that was but none of them knew. It was hard to believe it was on earth, our earth, the same planet that held tropical beaches and coral reefs and the mountain trails of this place called Macedonia.

“Where is this?” I asked, disregarding Marvin's rules.

“Europe,” she said, stepping forward at the exact moment that Margo slammed against the window, laughing.

She kissed the glass, leaving a bright pink lipstick stain. Walter, behind her, licked the window like the maniac he was, and as the woman stared at them, startled, I did my job. The one Marvin assigned me. The one that meant my future. I opened the backpack and slid the book behind the shelf. The cackle of Margo's fake laugh trailed down the street and the woman stumbled backward and leaned against a desk.

My heart banged against the wall of my chest.

The backpack felt conspicuously empty, slouching on my shoulder, the opening gaping. “Leave,” Marvin had said. “Right away.”

The woman wiped at her eyes, leaving delicate, spidery streaks of mascara. I noticed the wobble of flesh on her neck. “Are you all right?” I asked.

“This violence,” she said. “First the window, now . . .” Her gaze settled on the wide, blurry smear of greasy pink and spittle. Through it, I saw Marvin crossing the road.

“Jenny,” he said when he pushed through the door. A made-up name, a made-up story. I stepped toward him, relieved to be told what to do, to get away, but as we walked out the door, I glanced back, wanting already to make amends, to say sorry.
It's only property
, they had said, and Marvin praised me as we walked south, his arm around my shoulders. It was dusk, and the sky was turning pink. Thin streaks like crepe paper tangled in the crumbling chimneys. The end of a party, its quiet aftermath.

We
went back at night to watch. Marvin told me to wear dark colours, but the temperature had suddenly dropped and the only winter jacket I had was bright orange, a style several years old.

“God,” he said when he saw me. “You're a flare.”

Margo laughed as she pinched a joint out of Walter's claw.

Across the street from the travel agency, they tucked me in a doorway and stood in front like a fence. The streetlights were out in that section of town and car alarms screamed in the night. Nothing moved. I smelled the stale alcohol on Walter's breath. Marvin pulled a cellphone out of his pocket and stepped back into the hollow with me.

“Ready?”

I wasn't. I was afraid. But I'd come too far to stop it so I only watched as Marvin dialled. The second before he hit the last digit, Margo said, “There's a light.” We all saw. A sudden pulse of yellow from deep inside the building. But it was too late. Marvin's thumb dropped onto the number pad and the building exploded, pushing all of us back into the same burrow like a family of rats.

“Fuck,” Walter breathed, and a tremor seized my insides and what I wanted was to run from the sudden throbbing silence into which the rubble clattered relentlessly down.

What
we did then we hadn't even discussed. Marvin and I ran south and Walter and Margo went north. There was no time to talk. We wove through the streets, down alleys, reaching the dark zone by the time the sirens started from a long way away. On the other side of the fence, in the first layer of the area's darkness, Marvin and I turned around and saw it: a pillar of smoke stained orange. Even in the dimmest light, his face caught some of its glow, and I saw the wildness in his eyes. We followed a route I didn't know, along roads that smelled of urine and rot. He swept his penlight over broken glass, a mash of papers, the torn cover of a book. In the mess I spotted a couple of dark zone dollars. His voice drifted back to me—snippets of confusion about what had happened, why the black window had suddenly lit, how it must have been a sensor—but I couldn't follow his words. I was cold, trembling hard, dressed only in a forest-green hoodie because Marvin had taken my orange coat and tossed it behind the cement footing of the overpass. The big meal I'd had for lunch lurched in my stomach. I focused on moving forward, making a plan to stumble onto a slushy patch of lawn if I had to throw up. “It'll be all right,” he said as we turned up the walkway of his house, but I already knew that was a lie. Dread had rooted in me like an impregnation, something you can't reverse.

When we got to Marvin's squat, he held out his hand at the end of the walkway, stopping me. A sliver of light showed through the boards that covered the front window. A thread of smoke wound out of the chimney. We smelled it.

“Someone's here,” I whispered as if he didn't already know. I won't forget that moment, ever. The sudden shape of Phoenix inside the open door.

At
first I thought they must have known, that she and Thomson were there because of what we'd done. Marvin's map was still pinned to the wall and the red stars glowed like spots of shiny blood. I tried not to look at them. Casually, Marvin stepped across the room to the fire that they'd built. I stood with my hood still up, hiding my face, my chest heaving as I tried to catch my breath.

“Go to the fire,” Thomson said from his spot in a chair. “Get warm.”

Phoenix leaned on the kitchen door frame as if ready to disappear. She didn't look at me and I felt relieved, that the state I was in could be excused as anxiety over seeing her. I moved to the flames, turned my back to them.

“What are you doing here?” Marvin asked, once I was beside him.

After a beat of silence, Phoenix and Thomson started speaking at the same time, unintelligible, but then Phoenix's shrill voice fell away. “Mob of kids,” Thomson said. “They got in, destroyed everything.” He didn't say anything else.

“That's it?” Marvin said.

“We tried to stop them. What do you want me to say?”

Marvin kicked at a piece of wood that was rolling out of the hearth. “Who were they?”

“We don't know,” said Phoenix. “Those same kids.”

“Little fucking bastards,” Thomson said.

“Where are the others?”

“Zane went to a shelter, I think,” Phoenix said. “They all ran. They're scared.”

“And you're not?” I asked. I still hadn't turned around.

“I didn't say that.”

“They're brought up thinking they can have whatever they want and now they're just taking it,” said Thomson.

“That's not how I grew up,” said Marvin.

I backed up, lowered myself onto the edge of the mattress. My legs felt like jelly. How could he say that after what we'd done? I put my hands between my knees and pressed tight to stop the shaking, trying not to think about what we might have done. I wanted to lie down, black out, sink into deep sleep, disappear.

“They wrecked the hives,” Phoenix said. “The bees are gone.”

I glanced back. Her eyes darted away from me.

“They could have swarmed,” said Thomson. “Gone to find a safe place. It's been warm enough, at least during the day . . .” His voice rose in pitch and faded away, like an old faucet squeezing shut.

“Can we find them if they swarmed?” Thomson didn't seem to hear me. He opened and closed one fist as if making sure his hand still worked. Marvin started rolling a cigarette, scattering tobacco into the paper's curve.

“We didn't want to come here,” said Phoenix.

“You can come here,” Marvin said, sharply looking up. I heard the snap in his voice. “Where else would you have gone?”

“There are places,” Phoenix said. “We'll figure something out. We don't want to get in the way.” She pushed off the door frame and walked over to Thomson, sinking onto the floor beside him. “We'll clean up and start over again.”

I could see her more clearly, her face was lit by the flames. Bluish skin stained the bags under her eyes. Her face was drawn. I wondered if that was what she wanted. Marvin lit his cigarette and dropped the black curl of the match onto the hearth.

“Yes,” Thomson said, pulling out a hanky. He spat into it before speaking. “The drones will sacrifice themselves to try to keep the queen warm. They'll cluster around her.” He stared off into a corner of the room. “But there isn't much for food.”

“We'll make do,” said Marvin.

“The bees!” Thomson shouted.

The fire popped in the sudden silence.

“It's an early spring,” I said.

“Freakishly early,” said Thomson. “A frost could still come.”

Phoenix put her head in her hands. I felt sick still so I stood and walked through the kitchen to go outside. In the yard, I leaned against Marvin's showering shed and thought about the woman. The manifesto, Marvin's doctrine, was programmed to e-mail at midnight and I hadn't even read it.

The moon was almost full, and the giant faces on the billboard stared out in a morbid kind of glee. When the back door of the house opened I expected to see Marvin, but it was Phoenix. She leaned against the porch railing and I stayed in the yard, unseen, as I imagine you doing, hidden in the forest, watching me with my troubles with Thomson, while Marvin and I argue about you.

Phoenix wiped her nose on the tail of the scarf tied around her head. She was above the spot where I'd thrown up, days earlier. I stepped forward, stood at the bottom of the porch stairs.

“Are you crying?”

“Fuck off,” she said and wiped her eyes like she was angry at them.

It frightened me, seeing her vulnerable like that, so displaced. I thought of the church where she'd been buried and had dug herself free, crawling over the dead bodies with the instincts of an animal. I climbed the stairs. She crossed her arms over her chest. I was afraid, but I reached out and my fingers brushed her upper arm, the slightest contact, barely anything. It was all I could do. She rubbed her nose with the back of her hand. A gleam of snot shone on her skin as she stared out at the moon, the shimmer it made on the water.

We
needed another mattress, and Phoenix said she knew where we could get one.

“The diner?” I asked, but she shook her head

“I know another place,” she said. “At least there's no shortage of stuff in this world.”

When I told Marvin I was going with Phoenix, he didn't say anything but his jaw tightened and I could tell that he didn't want me to leave. We were safe there, hidden in the farthest house from the gate, and maybe it was more than that. Maybe it was about her. His jacket hung on a hook by the door, and I pulled it on over my hoodie before Phoenix led me out to the street.

We passed house after house in silence, walking quickly, and I breathed heavily as I tried to keep up. Phoenix hadn't turned the flashlight on. It hung from her hand like a wand, and when we rounded the corner at the end of the street she pointed it toward a column of orange smoke, billowing skyward.

“What the hell is that?”

“A fire. We saw it on the way down.”

“Big one.”

“Mmmm,” I mumbled.

Of course I didn't like lying to her. I knew she'd eventually find out. As soon as she heard the news about Jump Ship's latest hit she would know how far my connection with Marvin had gone. My whole body tightened against the night's dampness and the dread, and I felt like a stupid, lost kid in Marvin's large leather coat.