The Trap (15 page)

Her father snorted. “Whatever happened to
the Origin first
? That nothing else—not even family—can get in the way? Whatever happened to your
priorities?”

“You go to hell.” The doctor pulled his broad shoulders back. “Never question my commitment,” he whispered in a steely voice. “Nobody is more devoted to this
cause. You know I place it above all else.”

They spoke more, and Ashley June tried to listen. But strength leaked out of her, and she could no longer hold up her body. She sank back down into the sofa and drifted into an
unconsciousness that felt like death.

When she awoke again, the house was filled with the harsh glow of daylight. This was unusual. In the daytime, their house was always shuttered to keep out the dangerous
sunlight that could tan or even burn their skin. But now the door was wide-open, and from where she lay she could see the dusk sun, hanging low and bloated over the line of rooftops across the
street.

The doctor’s family was leaving. Even though they were on the
street outside, she could hear the fear in their frantic whispers. Something was wrong with the horse. Perhaps it
was all the blood, her blood—now all safely burned and bleached away—that had unsettled it.

“Maybe you should just stay,” her father said. “You’re cutting it too close.”

The doctor glanced at the sun, assessing. “No, we can make it back. Better that we not deviate from routine.”

They set off, all three of them, the report of the horse’s clip-clops growing dimmer and fading, even as it quickened in pace and rhythm.

Ashley June thought she’d never see that family again. But she was wrong. She saw them only twenty minutes later. She was awakened by an incessant knocking on her door. It was muted,
deliberately, meant only for her family to hear and not the neighbors, but she heard the urgency behind it.

She sat up. The pain between her legs made her vision swim. The shadow of her father flew past her to the door. He’d been getting ready for the day, washing up and shaving. A set of
fake fangs was gripped in his hand.

“Stop making such a racket!” her father said, his mouth cupped against the door.

“Let us in!” A muffled cry came from outside. It was the doctor’s voice. But it was hoarse now, bereft of composure and dispassion.

Her father was about to unlock the door when he paused. A grayness settled into him like a layer of sediment. He moved to the shutters next to the door and pressed a button to open
them.

Ashley June could now see the doctor on the doorstep. Farther down the street a block away was his wife. She was carrying the young girl in her arms. The girl did not seem to be awake. Her
head was slung backward, her hair dragging on the ground. Except Ashley June did not remember the girl having long hair. She peered more closely.

It was not hair.

It was blood.

Long strings of blood streaming from an open wound on the girl’s head. Trailing to the ground.

It was dusk. It was past dusk.

The girl’s legs dangled out of her mother’s cradled arms. Something was wrong with one of her legs. It was misshapen and bent at an acute angle.

The man pounded the door on the other side. “Hurry up! It’s almost night!”

“Why did you come back?!” Ashley June’s father responded angrily.

“The horse bucked. Something spooked it, threw us off before running away. A hoof caught my girl, broke her leg. We were too far from our home—we’d never have made it.
Returning here was our only option.”

“You should never have—”

And then he froze. As did her father. At a single sound.

Howling. From somewhere across the street. Joined, a second later, by another howl.

The neighborhood was waking up. To the smell of heper blood.

Her neighbors were probably still dangling in their sleepholds, their half-asleep minds unable to comprehend or believe what they were smelling. But very soon, they would rush out of their
homes in their pajamas and into the darkening dusk light.

Ashley June, her body still wracked with pain, sat up.

“For heaven’s sake, open the door!” the doctor shouted.

Her father: “No.”

A pause. Then the sound of pounding ensued, only louder, more urgent, even angry. “Open up! They’re coming!”

“No.”

“You can’t do this. You leave us out here, we’re all dead. You hear me? All of us.”

Her father did not say anything. He only pressed his hands against the door, his head hung low like a man pushing uphill against a
heavy boulder. Ashley June glanced at her
brother’s room. The door was still closed, her brother and mother staying behind it, willfully blind.

“You let us die out here and you lose me! You lose everything we’ve worked so hard for.”

Her father did not reply.

“Think of the Origin! He’s only seven! How long do you think he’ll last alone? Now let us in!” The rest of what he said was drowned out by the sound of pounding. It
was her father pounding the door now, not the doctor, three, four times, tortured with indecision.

More howls broke out.

“I can’t let you in!” her father said. “She’ll leave a blood trail right into the house.”

“It’s nothing! Just a scratch. We can stem it. It—”

“No! She’s left a trail. There has to be an explanation for the trail.” And the next words from Ashley June’s father came out lower, the quiet of guilt.
“I’ll let you in. But not the girl. Do you understand? Not the girl.”

There was a long silence on the other side of the door.

More howls screeched into the dusking sky.

Ashley June moved to the other side of the sofa. Her legs dragged along, paralyzed like lifeless sacks. From there, she was able to glimpse out the unshuttered window, see more of the
street. She observed the doctor hurrying back to his wife and daughter. He pulled his daughter out of his wife’s arms, let the young body fall misshapen onto the ground. The leg, bent at a
hideous angle, lay on the ground like a broken twig. The mother screamed, her high-pitched screech joining with the wails of the neighborhood.

The man grabbed his wife from behind, pinned her arms down, and began dragging her down the street toward the home. The little girl was left lying in the street and her mother screamed and
shouted, and tried to extricate herself from her husband’s grip. But he was
too strong. Already, the distant sound of doors and shutters automatically opening hummed in the
air.

Ashley June’s father opened the front door for them. Quickly, just enough for them to slip inside. The doctor entered first. But as he twisted his body to slide in, his grip on his
wife loosened. She torqued her body and fled from his grasping hands.

“No!” the doctor shouted, spinning around to go after her.

But the door slammed shut in his face. Ashley June’s father pushed his body against the door, faced the doctor. “No! It’s too late!” her father said, spit sputtering
out of his mouth. “For heaven’s sake, you open the door, we’re all dead! All of us!”

The doctor pushed back, shoving Ashley June’s father against the door.

A scream from outside. The woman’s scream.

The doctor, hand frozen on the doorknob, stood rigid. Whatever he was feeling, anger, fear, panic, it was expressed only through the bunched muscles of his back and bulging veins along his
neck. He did not move.

Outside, the woman ran to her collapsed daughter. Neighborhood shutters were fully opened now, revealing thumbprints of pale faces peering out windows. Within seconds, front doors were
slammed open, windows smashed right through by people leaping out. Their flannel pajamas fluttered like ripples across a windblown puddle as they raced down the street. Faster and faster toward the
mind-blowing discovery of two live hepers lying right there in the middle of their street.

The mother had draped her body like a blanket over her daughter. Ashley June would forever remember how the woman gazed at her child as if there were nothing else in the universe. The
woman’s expression was not of panic nor of despair. Rather, a maternal stillness—as if she were singing a soothing lullaby over her sleeping baby—glowed from her face. Then, a
second later, the mother herself was blanketed, but this by the arrival of a dozen people, with
violence, with obscene force. They flung themselves at her. And a split second later more
arrived, pummeling her with the force of a hailstorm that separated her from her daughter, separated the mother from even herself in a thousand bloody pieces.

Inside the house, no one spoke, no one moved. But everyone found a wall—or a door, or the floor—against which to press their faces and shield their eyes and cover their ears from
the loud mauling of flesh and spillage of blood.

And all Ashley June could think about was the doctor’s poor son at home, how he was oblivious to what was happening, how he did not know his mother and sister were being ripped apart,
how he did not know that his life had just irretrievably changed. And a sadness clamped around her heart, for she felt for him, and for just a moment she wished she could absorb some of the pain
and loneliness that would shortly and surely visit him like the cold, stark arrival of night.

A
SHLEY JUNE
’
S BATHROOM
is as I’d hoped it would be. Intact, filled with cleaning agents. Her homemade
concoctions are similar and in many ways superior to mine. Everything is placed in orderly compartments, on shelves, racks, in cabinets and hampers. Skin powder, odor neutralizers, bars of soap,
nail clippers. Next to the mirror on a glass shelf are bottles of a translucent liquid I realize is hair soap—in liquefied form. Ingenious. In the top drawer of a small sundry tower are her
fake fangs. Over a dozen of them, varying in size, all the fangs she’s worn since she was a toddler. She’d kept them, for whatever reason. I rub my thumb over the blunt tip of one of
the smaller fangs. So tiny. She was maybe only five when she last wore them. The sight of these fangs, the span of years they represent, make my throat go suddenly thick.

“We should start,” I say, my voice low. “Sundown is less than an hour away.” I check the water level for the shower. Good. The two overhead containers are filled to the
brim with rainwater. They haven’t been used in weeks.
Since the night of the Lottery,
I think to myself. That was the last time Ashley June was here, in the pre-dusk hours before the
Lottery.

“I’ll go first,” Sissy says.

I nod, walk out.

A minute later, I hear the sound of water splashing. Sissy will need a change of clothes—what she’s been wearing is grungy and stinks. Shouldn’t be a problem finding clothes.
She and Ashley June are close enough in size. I browse through a chest of drawers, grabbing a pair of roll-up capri pants, a casual denim shirt. And underwear, quickly chosen, which I fling between
the shirt and pants, sandwiching it.

I knock gently on the bathroom door. “Hey. I picked out some clothes for you.” She doesn’t answer. Concerned, I push the door open and step in.

She’s fine. There’s no shower curtain and I see everything. Her soaked hair, dark as a horse’s mane, pressed halfway down her back. Water streams down, pooling briefly in the
small of her back, then over her pale-white buttocks. Glides down over the curvature of her calf muscles. Her face is upturned inches from the showerhead, her mouth gaped wide, drinking in some of
the water as it splashes noisily over her. That’s why she didn’t hear me knock.

I quickly drop my gaze. I place the clothes on top of the hamper, turn to leave. But not before I notice she’s holding the bar of soap in her right hand, is softly grazing it across her
left arm. Too delicate, too soft. She’s not cleaning herself.

I begin to step out. I’ll speak louder from the other side of the closed door, tell her that she has to scrub harder.

“What is it?” she asks, jolting me. “What’s wrong?”

I’m sorry
is on my lips, one foot already stepping out. When I stop.

She’s turned sideways to me. There’s no shame, no embarrassment, no shielding. Just her eyes, honest and open. Her arms by her sides, the water splashing on her shoulder, creating a
mist of tiny water droplets.

I shift my eyes away. Cold tiles, metal frames, gray containers. Swing my eyes back to hers and the warmth in them is like a flame suffusing me.

“You have to really scrub hard,” I say.

“I am.”

“You’re not.”

She holds my eyes. “Show me,” she says softly.

I walk over, take the bar of soap from her hand. I remove the coarse rag from a hook on the wall, soak it in the water.

“Turn around,” I tell her. My voice sounds hollow in the confined space, the words muted by the splish-splash of water.

She does. Water flows in waves down her back, coursing down the vertical dip of her spine.

“Don’t think of it as washing,” I say. “Think of it as erasing.”

I lather her back with the soap, moving in small circles. Trying not to let my fingers touch the skin of her back. “Erasing everything that makes you different. Erasing everything that is
human.”

With my other hand, I press the towel against her skin. I rub down, gently at first; then I scrub harder and harder until her skin is chafed red, until it must feel like I am scraping her raw.
She does not complain. She does not move.

“We have to erase everything. The smells. The oily secretions. The dead skin cells. And later, we need to cut our fingernails and toenails, pluck our eyebrows, shave the hair from our
legs, arms, armpits. We erase all signs.”