Читать книгу The Book of M - Peng Shepherd - Страница 20

THE MORNING AFTER THE BOSTON EMERGENCY BROADCAST, I opened my eyes to the worst hangover I’ve ever had. Dim flashes of the night before returned. Marion, my best friend from high school who’d become almost as close to Imanuel as she and I were to each other, calling for calm. Jay “Rhino” White, someone’s plus one—although we never quite figured out whose—declaring himself captain of an investigative scouting team he’d just created. Paul saying, “Fuck this, I’m getting the champagne,” and going to get it. All of it. “If this is the last day on earth, we can’t waste a drop.” Do you remember that? I had to agree with him.

It all became a blur after the eighth glass. At some point during the night, I’d managed to get myself to our guest suite, pull the blankets and pillows off our bed, bring them back downstairs into the ballroom, and pick us out a spot on the east edge, in the corner where the wood wall met the glass one. I woke up with my face buried in your tuxedoed shoulder, which smelled of Bollinger, candle smoke, and cinnamon, somehow. The light through the trees was so clear it was blinding. Sharp, piercing beams cut through the branches and seared white shapes into the dark grass.

The news was still on the TV in the corner, the volume lowered so that only the people clustered beneath it could hear, to allow the rest of us to sleep. I tried to blink the world back into focus. Capitol Hill was on the screen, and then the Golden Gate Bridge replaced it, some kind of ticker running below.

“Ory.” I nudged your arm. “Wake up.”

You sat up slowly, but by the time you were fully upright, you looked alert. “What happened? Where else?” you asked. We both turned back to the TV.

“You’re awake,” Rhino said when he saw us sitting. I noticed Paul, Imanuel, and Marion already standing awkwardly next to him, as if ordered to be there. “Volunteer?” he asked hopefully.

That was how we became the first scouting party for the Elk Cliffs Resort survivors.

“They’re for the occasional bear or wolf that wanders too close to the grounds,” the resort maître d’, Gabe, said as he unlocked the STAFF ONLY closet. He brought out two shotguns and one hunting rifle. “Not even occasional, very rare. Very rare,” he corrected himself on instinct, still thinking of us as luxury guests. Maybe we all still did as well.

“How many bullets do we have?” Rhino asked.

“Enough for an exploratory trip down the mountain,” Gabe replied.

“Enough for hunting when we run out of food?”

“That’s getting a little ahead of ourselves,” Ory said.

Rhino shrugged. “Is it, though?”

“What will the rest of us use?” I interrupted. There were six of us—you, Rhino, Paul, Imanuel, Marion, and me—and only three guns.

“Well, I can actually shoot,” Marion said. The others all looked at her. “I grew up on a ranch in Texas. A little cattle ranch. What?”

“Okay, one for Marion, one for me,” Rhino said. “Imanuel?”

“Give it to Ory,” Imanuel offered politely.

“Give it to Max,” Paul overrode him. You rubbed the back of your head, cheeks reddening.

It was not the right time to smile. Paul and I tried not to, without much success.

“This isn’t soccer,” you protested weakly.

“Exactly,” Paul said. “It’s worse. Definitely give it to Max.”

“What is the matter with you?” Imanuel whispered sharply to Paul. Paul finally choked, and the giggles escaped him in a strangled gasp. You had been the only kid in their high school to ever score a goal for the opposite team—twice, I finally explained to the rest of them as Paul collapsed into a fit of laughter.

We climbed down the mountain in silence, walking just next to the paved road that led up to the picturesque resort from Elk Cliffs Road. You, Paul, and Imanuel carried huge backpacks instead of weapons. “Odricks Corner,” Rhino said to us as we marched. “That’s the first neighborhood we’ll hit.” The trees opened up ahead.

I braced for the eerie, deserted silence of Boston we’d seen on the news after all the shooting stopped, but Odricks Corner was chaos. Cars blaring at each other, women herding families back and forth across streets, people biking with mountains of belongings strapped to their backs. Men defending laden shopping carts in parking lots with their lives.

“Food,” Marion said when she spotted a grocery store. It all dawned on us then. How much food did we have at Elk Cliffs Resort? Imanuel had booked caterers for the ceremony and reception, but how long would those leftovers last? How much was in their deep freezers for regular guests? How long would deep freezers last if the power went out? Would the power go out?

Rhino stayed outside with the guns, asking passersby for information. The rest of us went inside the shop and pulled everything we could find off the shelves. You, Paul, and Imanuel tried to look large and intimidating as Marion and I snatched whatever was left. Single shoppers approached, eyed the five of us, then slunk away for other aisles.

“Grab the rice,” Marion hissed at me as we wheeled ourselves into the never-ending line to pay. I grabbed as many as I could. In a strange way, it reminded me almost of something she and I might have done in university with our friends, while too drunk: run to the campus food store just before it closed and play various games—who could fit inside the plastic shopping cart seat like a kid again, who could swipe an entire shelf into the basket at once without dropping a single item, who could finish their list first and race to the checkout line before the other teams. But no one was laughing this time.

“Please—I have children,” a woman behind us said. We turned around. Her cart was a third as full as ours, with food half as useful. The shelves were almost bare by then. “I have children,” she repeated. I wanted to crumble inside.

“We have children, too,” Marion lied before any of us could answer. She knew me too well. She stepped in front of us, between me and the woman, so I had no choice but to set the rice back down into our own cart.

“Please,” the woman said again, but weaker this time. “No, it’s all right.”

“Has it reached Arlington yet?” Paul asked her gently. “We’re all—we’re on vacation. With our kids. We only just found out.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But I think Maryland, at least. I saw something like that on the news. That’s when I came here. My sons are still at home.”

“It’s in D.C.,” the man in line ahead of us said. He held up his phone. “They caught a guy downtown near the Verizon Center this morning.”

The woman moaned. She sank lower over her cart.

“How are we going to pay for this?” I suddenly whispered to you. “I didn’t bring my purse.” It was probably a month’s worth of food, and all I had was a handful of crumpled bills in my jeans pocket from the day before, from when you had to pay a toll fee on the highway into Virginia from D.C., to reach Elk Cliffs.

“Put it on my card,” Imanuel said. “Wedding expenses.”

“Oh, God,” the woman behind us said suddenly. We turned to look at her. She was holding her wallet as if it were white-hot porcelain, searing her fingers, but too precious to drop. “Oh, God.” We all looked inside. The dark green ink on the bills had somehow vanished. The papers were completely blank.

“What the fuck,” Marion said in horror. “What is that?”

“My children,” the woman wailed. “I have to feed my children!”

“I’ll pay for it!” I gasped. I was crying, terrified. I tried to shove whatever bills were in my pocket at her, desperately pressing them against her chest. Far at the front of the line, a fight broke out. People began to yell. Then we all realized that my money had become the same impossible blank things as well.

Three days after that, reports said that almost everyone in D.C. was now shadowless. We sat in circles around the main ballroom TV, cutting marshmallows into tiny pieces and eating them slowly, to make them last. The brand on the front of the bags was a name I couldn’t read. The letters looked like they had once spelled something, but didn’t quite look like letters anymore. Rhino suggested we start trying to hunt game for food in the forest around the resort with the guns.

Philadelphia, Baltimore, then Arlington. After that, Elk Cliffs Resort lost power, because we were on the Arlington grid.

The day after there was no more electricity, Rhino and Marion returned from the far side of the mountain stumbling under the weight of a small elk. The wedding band made a fire in the fancy stone pit in the courtyard using the strange, empty dollar bills as kindling. We burned it all. Not a single person kept even one piece. We wanted it gone. They roasted the elk while you, me, and a couple of other guests from Paul’s side went through what was left in the kitchen and separated it into “eat tonight, before it goes off,” “eat within the next few days,” and “save as long as we can.”

The singer didn’t want to sing that night, or anymore. The rest of the band played something instrumental, and we all feasted on elk steak, shrimp, random fillets of fish, and a metric fuckton of ice cream.

Tomorrow was going to be a lot worse than today, I realized dimly as I sat in front of the fire, digging around in my own personal gallon of mint chocolate chip. There was so much that every single guest got their own container. And the day after tomorrow was going to be a lot worse than tomorrow. Today was probably the last good day. After I finished that ice cream and crawled under our blankets with you and fell asleep it was never going to go back up again. Only down.

“Want some rocky road?” you asked, and we swapped. The chocolate fudge was so gooey and sweet that it made the glands at the back of my jaw pinch painfully. That was probably never going to happen again either. A kind of sweetness so artificially strong that it could make my mouth ache.

Suddenly I was crying again, before I even knew what was happening.

“I have to pee,” I said hurriedly, and scrambled away from the fire before anyone else realized my eyes were swollen and red. I don’t think you saw.

I stopped as soon as I left the manicured part of the hill and hit the trees, and found myself gulping desperately as I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes. I should have savored it more, I thought. I should have fought violently for my favorite flavor. Then I realized someone else was already out here, probably doing the same thing in the trees.

“The ice cream?” Marion asked through the darkness.

I nodded. “It just …”—I tried to clear my throat—“it was so fucking good.”

Marion snorted gently in agreement. I could tell she dug the toe of her shoe into the dirt only by the sound of it grinding.

“It’s the phones for me,” she murmured.

“Fuck,” I said. Her husband and daughter were still in San Diego. He’d had to skip the wedding to take care of their little girl who’d caught the flu. “Fuck, Marion.” I felt sick for having forgotten, in all the chaos. “What are you going to—”

“Don’t,” Marion said. “I can’t think of it directly. Not yet.”

I wanted to go to her, to hug her like we always did when one of us had just argued with a boyfriend or done poorly on an exam, but I didn’t know how to. We stood there for a while, pushing rocks around with our feet instead, not saying anything.

There was no more ice cream. There was no more of a lot of things. But there was still you, Ory, here with me. That was something. That was more than hope.

Marion’s outline, barely visible in the night, was leaning against a tree, holding some kind of leaf. It was so dark, I realized I couldn’t tell if either of us still had a shadow anymore. I think that was the first time it occurred to me to wonder, and the last time I could ever have that thought without compulsively checking to make sure my own was still there. Of being able to do nothing else, not even breathe, until I saw that it was still a part of me.

“What do you think—” Marion spoke suddenly. “What do you think caused this?”

“I don’t know,” I said. It was true. I didn’t—not for sure.

She laughed. It didn’t sound much like a laugh. “Rob and I separated,” she finally said. All the air went out of me. “Two weeks ago. Hallie doesn’t have the flu. I was going to tell you at the reception, once we were drunk enough. But then Boston happened.”

“Marion.”

“I know it’s not karma,” she interrupted, cutting me off. “That would be—stupid. But I just can’t help but …” She took a shaky breath. “You and Ory, Paul and Imanuel—happy. Here we all are at the end of the world, and you guys are here together. I’m the only one with marriage troubles—and look at where I am, where he is.”

“It’s not karma,” I said, desperately. “Karma doesn’t exist.”

“I know,” Marion replied. “But it sure seems like it, doesn’t it?”

I didn’t know what to say, but it didn’t matter. I knew what she wanted me to know: that if she’d known somehow that it really was going to end now—not in some far future time, but now, right now—she never would have left him. She would have cherished all the moments. We waited in silence for what felt like hours.

“I’m going back now,” I finally said. I couldn’t think of anything to comfort her. There was nothing to say, without looking at the truth of it head on—no way to offer hope without also reminding her that she might never see them again.

“I’m going to stay,” Marion answered.

When I reemerged from the woods and sat down beside you again at the fire, Rhino was standing, stating to the group that he was going to drag his blankets out onto the grass after we put the fire out, because now that there was no electricity and therefore no air conditioning, it was going to be disgustingly hot in the ballroom where we were all camped out.

He wasn’t really announcing it, I knew as I watched him. It was more that he was trying to ask the rest of us to join him without begging outright. For comfort in numbers. I realized that none of us had even tried sleeping in our individual guest rooms once. After the wedding reception had been interrupted by the news about Boston, we’d all banded together in the ballroom and never left, save to retrieve our suitcases and bring them back down. The courtyard where Rhino wanted to sleep was a couple hundred feet from where the rest of us were still set up inside. Nine days ago, that wouldn’t have been enough distance for me to be from a random stranger. Now it felt terrifyingly far.

“That’s a good idea,” you said. “Let’s all move out here.”

Over the top of the flames, Rhino looked at you so gratefully it made my eyes tear again.