Black River Falls (27 page)

Freeman produced a thin white envelope from another pocket deep in his coat.

“Like I said, I was a scientist once too. Dr. Lassiter will be able to use what's inside this envelope to engineer a version of the virus that will infect you.”

“Why would he do that?” I asked. “Infect some kid he doesn't even know.”

“Because, unlike Charles Ellis Dumay,” he said, “Evan Lassiter is a good man. He'll understand that the reason those scientists started their research in the first place was to help people like you.”

“What do you mean people like me?”

“People who are trapped somewhere they don't want to be.”

I took the envelope and turned it over in my hands. It contained nothing but a few sheets of paper. Was it really possible? A new world. A new me. I slipped it into one of the notebooks.

“You trust me with all of this?”

Freeman allowed himself a thin smile. “I told you, one glance and I knew your past and your future.”

“If all this gets out, the Marvins won't be the only ones in trouble.”

“I'm responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people,” he said. “Including your friends and family. Even after I testify against my employers, I expect to be in jail for a very long time.”

“And you're okay with that?”

Freeman looked over the ruins, back toward Black River.

“I've stood on that bridge too, Cardinal. Many times. Whatever the powers that be decide to do with me will be better than I deserve.”

He held out the flashlight and I took it.

“You're not coming?”

Freeman didn't answer, he simply turned his back on me and walked out into the wreckage, until the darkness swallowed him up.

I
WAITED UNTIL
I was sure everyone would be asleep before I went to the high school. The front door creaked as I pushed it open. I snapped the flashlight on and followed its beam down halls lined with stacked chairs and tables. The walls were covered in construction-paper posters from before the outbreak. I felt like I was walking through a haunted house.

I found Hannah and the others sleeping on cots in the auditorium. Safety lights by the doors cast a cool glow through the cavernous room. I crept down the aisle and onto the stage. Hannah was on her back, her eyes closed. In the flashlight's beam the white sheet that covered her looked like a mantle of snow. My backpack sat on the floor beside her.

I turned off the flashlight and knelt by her cot. Hannah moved onto her side, her lips slightly parted, her breath ruffling the thin sheet that draped her shoulder. I forced myself to look away from her face and reach for the backpack. I unzipped it and felt around inside. My notebook. A pen. At the very bottom was the cell phone Gonzalez had given me. I dropped Freeman's notebooks inside and zipped the pack closed.

When I stood up, a hand snapped around my wrist.

“Card?”

I tore myself away and sprinted out of the room. I was nearly to the exit when I hit one of the stacks of chairs that had been left in the hallway and went sprawling across the floor in a rattle of collapsing steel. I tried to get up again, but Hannah was on me before I could move, her hands on my shoulders, pinning me down.

“It's still you, isn't it? You're still Card.”

“I don't—”

“We tried to find you, but you were gone. We looked everywhere. What happened? How did you—”

I knocked her hands off me and rolled away, scrambling for the backpack amid the fallen chairs. There was another crash of metal as I yanked it out of the pile.

“You're immune.”

I pulled the backpack close and wrapped my arms around it. Outside, moonlight struck the sidewalk and lawn. They were only a few feet away, on the other side of the glass doors, but I suddenly felt so tired I stayed where I was, kneeling on the tile floor, my back to her. I nodded.

“So, you're leaving?”

She was sitting cross-legged behind me in a pool of moonlight coming through the windows in one of the open classrooms along the hall. Her hair was mussed. She was barefoot, in plaid pajamas.

“Yeah.”

“I could go get the kids if you—”

I shook my head. If I saw them, if I talked to them, I knew I'd never be able to do what I had to do. “I think I should just go.”

Hannah stared at me. Footsteps sounded on the floor above us. Someone was coming to check on all the noise. I lifted my backpack and started for the door.

“Hey.”

Hannah was standing in the hallway.

“Let me change,” she said. “I'll walk out with you.”

It was a clear summer night. The streets were empty. I told Hannah everything that had happened with Freeman. Who he was. What he'd done. The notebooks, his hope for a cure, and his certainty that Dr. Lassiter would be able to infect me. She nodded through it all, saying little. When we passed a neighborhood playground, she left the sidewalk and sat on one of the swings. I took the one beside her, and we drifted back and forth.

“Do you think they'll send you back here?” she asked. “Once you're infected.”

“Guess they'll have to send me somewhere.”

“Well, if it's here, you don't have to worry. We won't bother you.”

“Hannah—”

“Not
bother
you,” she said. “You know what I mean. We'll let you be no one, like you want.”

We were quiet for a while, and then Hannah jumped off the swing and crossed the playground to a set of monkey bars. She climbed the ladder and crawled out to the middle, where she sat with her legs folded beneath her. I climbed up behind her and found a spot of my own, four or five feet away. Old habits.

“Do you really think he'll be able to make a cure?” Hannah asked.

“Freeman seems to think so.”

“You don't?”

I shrugged. Miracle cures and villains brought to justice. They seemed like things that happened in the pages of one of Dad's comics.

“If there's a cure, do you think they'll
make
us take it?”

She was leaning over the edge of the monkey bars with her arms wrapped around her middle, staring at the ground.

“You don't want to find out who you are?” I asked. “Why you came here?”

“I already know.”

“You do? Did you talk to the Marvins or—”

“I didn't talk to anybody.”

“Then how do you know?”

Hannah sat up and looked out to where St. Stephen's spire rose over the town.

“There's this scene in
Hamlet
where the queen has to tell Laertes that his sister, Ophelia, died,” she said. “Ophelia was in love with Hamlet, and he loved her too. But then one day he became cruel. He toyed with Ophelia and he rejected her and he would never even say why. In the end Ophelia drapes herself with wildflowers and lies down in a stream to drown. When the queen tells her brother what she's done, it's this beautiful, sad speech.
There is a willow grows aslant a brook . . .
The first time I read it, I started to cry. There was something about it that seemed so familiar. I thought maybe it was because I'd studied the play in school or something. But it wasn't the whole play that felt familiar, it was just them, just Hamlet and Ophelia.”

She smiled dreamily.

“I felt like I knew them so well that I knew things Shakespeare didn't even write. Like how, in the beginning, when they were still happy, they used to meet in secret at a cabin with a sky blue door. But there were things Shakespeare got wrong, too.”

Her look darkened and she turned away again.

“It wasn't Hamlet who became cruel. It was Ophelia. He loved her and she toyed with him and rejected him. It was Hamlet who was heartbroken. It was Hamlet who drowned. And when Ophelia saw what she'd caused, she felt this pounding deep in her chest, like a second heartbeat, and she just . . . ran.”

Hannah fingered the key around her neck.

“No one needs to tell me who I am,” she said. “I know.”

“Hannah, you can't really know that. You—”

She looked back over her shoulder. The sun was just coming up over Lucy's Promise.

“Tomiko and Crystal have to start cooking breakfast soon,” she said. “I like to be there when everybody wakes up.”

She slid off the bars and landed on the ground. When we got back to the high school, Hannah climbed to the top of the stairs, but she didn't go inside. She stood there, just under the single bulb that lit the entryway, staring at our reflections in the glass of the front door. The night was soft and quiet.

“I'll tell everybody you said goodbye.”

I kicked at one of the concrete steps. “Yeah. Thanks.”

I started to move away, but Hannah spun and ran back down the stairs. The next thing I knew, her arms were around me and her lips were pressing into mine. I closed my eyes and it was as if some barrier between us had dropped away, as if we'd both melted into this warm darkness.

“Do you remember the night we saw the fireflies?” she asked.

Our arms were still around each other and our foreheads were touching. I imagined our breath swirling together in invisible eddies between us. I said that I did.

“And then later, when it was just you and me on that trail and the moon was out?”

I tried to say yes, but I couldn't seem to speak. She pressed the flat of her palm against my chest.

“You'll forget that too,” she said. “And this.”

She kissed me again, and then a light came on inside the school, erasing our reflections in the door. Tomiko and Carrie came out of the auditorium, yawning and stretching. Snow Cone padded beside them, sniffing at the air. Hannah reached back and undid the leather cord that held her key.

“Here,” she said. “Take this.”

“No, I can't. You—”

The key twisted and flashed as she tied it around my neck. It settled in the hollow of my throat, still warm from resting against hers.

She went back up the stairs and reached for the door.

“Do you still feel it?” I asked. “The heartbeat.”

Tomiko and Carrie saw Hannah and waved, huge smiles brightening their faces. Hannah waved back, and then she looked over her shoulder at me.

“Every day.”

She pushed open the door and went inside. Snow Cone barked happily as Carrie and Tomiko threw their arms around Hannah. As they started toward the cafeteria, Hannah turned back to me one last time. The glow from the lights in the hall washed over her, warming her face and her shoulders and her long neck. She smiled, and then she was gone.

I ran a fingertip along the blade of the key, and then I walked away.

W
HEN
I
PULLED
the phone out of my backpack and turned it on, I was greeted by a dozen old voice mails and text messages, all from Gonzalez, all from the days following the riots. I got him on the third ring, and after a few minutes of assuring him that I was fine and Hannah and the kids were fine, I asked if he thought he could still get me out. He said he could, and then there was a long silence that made me think we might have lost the connection.

“Gonzalez?”

There was a sigh, and then he said one word. “Greer.”

I was in the park then, and I sank against the fence that surrounded the basketball courts. “Didn't know you knew.”

“Whole thing was twenty-four-seven breaking news out here,” he said. “For a few days, anyway. There was some noise about the guy who shot him being prosecuted, but nothing came of it. Chaotic night. He was just doing his job. He felt threatened. The usual thing.”

There were other voices on his end. Gonzalez leaned away from the phone and called out to them in Spanish.

“Sorry,” he said. “I'm back in the Bronx with my folks for a while. I'll text you the address. You're coming here when you get out, right?”

My hand went automatically to Freeman's letter in my pocket. “I don't know. There are some things I have to do.”

“Could really use you, buddy,” he said. “Remember that portfolio review at Comic Con?”

I had forgotten about it completely. It seemed impossible to believe that there was a world where things like that were still going on.

“It got me a sit-down with some guys at Marvel, which is awesome, except they want me to pitch projects to them. I'm sitting here trying to brainstorm, and it's like, when nobody cared about my ideas, I had a million of them. Now that someone
does
care, I got nothin'. I need that Cassidy
brain.
”

I kicked at the bottom of the fence. “Listen. I better—”

“Yeah. Say your goodbyes, man. I'll have news soon. A few hours from now Cardinal Cassidy will be NYC bound!”

Gonzalez hung up. By then, scores of infected were coming into the park. I threw the phone into the backpack and got moving without any real destination in mind.

As the sun rose, the infected headed toward Monument Park or to the barricades. They gathered into work crews as they went. Some set about carting off the last of the riot debris, others fought back overgrown foliage or fortified the wall that stood between us and the rest of the world. On a tree-lined street one group stood around a vacant lot between two houses that had been cleared and tilled, revealing rich black earth.

“So we put cauliflower here,” a man said as he sorted through packets of seeds. “And the broccoli over there.”

“But then where does the cabbage go?” asked another.

“What cabbage?” a woman asked. “Where do you see cabbage?”

“Right there.”

“That's not cabbage, that's arugula.”

“What about the tomatoes?”

“Guys! Hold on, okay? Just give me a second.”

The group shifted, revealing a woman in a wide straw hat standing with her back to me, poring over a book. She looked from the garden plot to the book and back again.