In the glow of the fire I see Denny talking to Matt. Matt looks distressed. Denny is jabbing a finger into Matt’s chest. He rips the shears out of Matt’s hands and I have the sudden fear he is going to ram them into Matt’s neck. Aubrey stands off to the side, away from Denny and Matt, away from the bald guy and his scarecrow sidekick, both of whom seem fascinated by the burning body.
“Take her inside, Leslie,” Auntie Annie says.
Leslie steps past me and whispers, “Come on,” as she goes up onto the porch. She stops on the top step and turns stiffly. I take one last look at the bonfire out in the street. When I look up at the stars, my eyes fill with tears. Two years ago, on a night like this, I was sneaking off to a field alongside some railroad tracks to hang with Lane and our friends around a fire made of sticks and fallen trees.
Leslie calls out to me. “Miss?”
The woman with the pulled back hair gives me a shove. I spin on her, but her friend with the long, black hair pulls her arm and whispers, “Not now, Bethany.”
I slowly make my way to the porch and follow Leslie inside. I have a chilling thought that maybe this is the last night I will ever have on earth.
Six
Leslie leads me up the great staircase. There are more pictures of the family that once lived here. Portraits mostly. A pretty but tired mother. A smiling husband whose eyes tell me he looked at more women than just his wife. A boy; a younger girl. All in pink and white shirts or sweaters. An Easter portrait, I think. The wife probably changed these seasonally.
At the top of the stairs is a window that looks out on the backyard. With no lights on up here I can see into the backyard. Some of the tents glow from lanterns lit inside them. I can see the silhouettes of the people living out back. They talk in small groups. I wonder what has brought all of these people here, or if they were rounded up like I was.
Like Matt wanted to do with the runner.
“The bathroom is over there,” Leslie says. She steps back against the wall, puts her hands behind her back, and leans against the paneled wall beneath the wainscoting. Leslie won’t look at me. She keeps her eyes on the floor.
“So you’re Leslie,” I say. “My name is Robin. Robbie to just about everyone.”
Leslie looks up, but looks past me. “The bathroom is over there.” She nods her head, indicating where I should go.
I decide to take her advice. As I open the door, I hear an anguished wail from outside. I look back at Leslie. She hangs her head far down against her chest. She shakes it and mutters to herself.
“Leslie. What’s wrong?” I ask.
She doesn’t answer me. She hurries down the stairs. I hear the door slam.
I lock myself inside the bathroom.
With my haircut, I look like one of those kewpie doll anime girls: big, almond eyes, puckered little mouth, and straight, chopped lengths of dishwater blonde hair. It hangs over each of my shoulders, but my neck is bared. I have an image of permanently open curtains revealing the back of my head. I lean into the mirror and stare at myself. I notice a tiny white dot on my chin and my heart skips.
It could be just a pimple.
Or it could be the rash.
I lift my shirt and look at my belly. There’s nothing there, but I feel around anyhow. The rash starts on the belly. It spreads out like a belt, usually three rows wide. The face is the last place the rash spreads. If it gets to the face, the carrier is just days from trying to latch. Because it starts on the belly, a lot of the early theories said it had something to do with food. More specifically, hormone injected, gene manipulated super foods. Just before the pandemic, industrial complex farms had been experimenting with growing larger foods faster. It was thought that our bodies tried to combat the manipulations and the rash was some type of mutational residue.
I’ve heard so many theories since I set out on my own I don’t know what is fact or what is fiction. The only fact I know is that the human race is changing.
There’s a bar of soap on the edge of the pedestal sink. I run a little water and wash my face. The water smells heavily of iron and rust. I’m familiar with well water. The cabin my family owned in the Upper Peninsula has a well. My dad installed a water softener, but my mom insisted we always buy our drinking water from the grocery stores. I’m too far north to have the comforts of city water. This stuff is pumped directly out of the ground.
I look around for scissors to cut my hair evenly. If I had Baby with me, I could use the ones I carry. The drawers in the cabinet behind me are empty. I don’t even see towels.
I sit down on the toilet seat lid and cover my face in my palms. For thirteen months I have avoided any long-term contact with people. I’ve come across campers and squatters, but I’ve kept my distance, even when acknowledging them. And now, in a single moment of weakness, I have landed myself in the type of situation I promised myself—and Yuki—I would never enter into.
There’s a light tapping on the door. I stand up and turn on the hot tap in the sink. I start rubbing my hands over the bar of soap.
“Who is it?” I ask. I half turn to look over my shoulder at the door. I can see it fine in the mirror over the sink. I hear the old-fashioned door lock tumble. The door opens a sliver.
“Aunt Alice wants to know if you are all right,” one of the girls says.
“Leslie? Is that you?” When I get no answer, I shake the water and soap off my hands and shut off the tap. I open the door. Leslie steps back quickly. She tucks one of her short locks of hair behind her ear. “There’re no towels in here.”
“We have to use our own,” she says. Her voice is very low.
“Is everything all right?”
Our eyes meet. Hers are wide. They say more than Leslie ever will.
I ask, “What is it?”
Auntie Alice calls up the stairwell. Leslie practically jumps out of her skin. “Leslie? What’s taking you two?”
“We’re coming, Aunt Alice. She doesn’t have a towel.”
“Tell her I have one in my backpack,” I say. Leslie hesitates to tell her. I mouth, “Go on.”
“She says she has one in her backpack.”
There is no immediate response. I strain to hear. I think Aunt Alice is talking to someone downstairs. A moment later, she shouts up, saying, “There’s an extra in the hall closet up there. She can use that for now. Get it for her and then get down here.”
“Yes, Aunt Alice.” Leslie wiggles a finger for me to follow. She walks down the hall, her eyes down. I watch her open and close her fingers. She might be talking to herself. Leslie opens a dark, wooden door. There are towels, but there are also plenty of other utensils in there that could be useful. Hanging on the inside of the door is a plastic organizer with see-through pockets. Sticking up out of one is a pair of scissors.
“Leslie.” The sound of my voice makes her jump again. She looks at me like a frightened mouse. I smile to try and calm her. She doesn’t buy into it. “The scissors. I want to even out my hair.”
Leslie looks at the scissors. I think she is afraid to touch them. I walk down the hall and take them out of their pocket. “See?” I say. “They didn’t bite.”
There is no humor in Leslie’s face. She stares at me as if I’ve just admitted I started the rash.
“Please tell Aunt Alice and the others I will be down in a moment.” I leave Leslie standing outside the hall closet. Inside the bathroom I watch her hurry past in the mirror, her eyes still cast down. She stops for a brief second and looks at me. When our eyes meet in the mirror, she turns to go, then stops.
“Denny must like you,” she says.
“Why do you say that?”
Leslie drops her eyes and walks away.
With the door closed behind me, I take hold of my hair and slip it between the blades. It takes a couple of small snips until I find a groove, but I cut it away. By the time I finish, I look like a pixie.
There’s hair all over the sink. It takes me a while to clean up the mess. I’ve lost track of time, but really, time abandoned me a while ago.
When I go downstairs there is a small meeting going on in the living room. The former owners of the house decorated as much as they could with Victorian furniture. There’s a wooden frame couch with ball and claw legs, a pair of high-back chairs at either end of an oval coffee table, and an oval, hooked rug in the center of it all. An autumn landscape painting hangs above the sofa. It saddens me when I look at it. I am reminded of how much I once loved the fall. I used to love a lot about the old world. I just didn’t know I did.
But there are modern conveniences in the room as well. A flat screen TV sits on an entertainment center in one corner of the great room. A grandfather clock that is all too modern sits catty-corner from the TV. None of these electronic devices are operating. I wonder if they ever will again.
Auntie Alice sits in the high-back chair nearest the front bay window, the standing clock to her left. Denny sits in the one across from her, the flat screen TV to his left. Aubrey sits between two other women on the sofa. They are the women I saw with Leslie earlier. One of the women has bright, orange hair pulled back in a tight bun. The woman on the other side of Aubrey has long, black hair that frames her narrow face. The bald guy with the head tats and his scarecrow buddy sit on folding chairs, squeezed in between the high-backed chairs and the ends of the couch. Leslie stands off to the side behind the bald man. It’s a cramped family portrait. If I were to have come upon this scene in the days before the rash, I would have thought I was interrupting a Sunday afternoon brunch.
I can’t tell what the topic is, but Aubrey is visibly upset. He has been looking at Denny, but when Leslie looks up and sees me standing at the base of the staircase, she lets out a breathy “Oh!” and everyone looks from her to me. I move into the narrow hall that leads into the back kitchen and separates the cluttered dining room from the busy living room. Everyone is staring at me. I touch my hair self-consciously.
“I could still feel the runner’s hand in my hair,” I say. No one says anything. I look away from their stares and see for the first time what is strewn over the coffee table. It is all of my belongings. The wrist rocket. My hand axe. My knife. My disposable lighters have been piled off to the side. There are a couple of books of matches. I see a picture of Lane I’ve kept with me forever. There’s also the tennis ball I toss for Yuki. I have never felt so violated.
“You went through my backpack,” I say.
“It’s a good thing we did,” the orange haired woman says. “What were you planning to do with all of these?”
Denny holds up a hand for silence. “That’s enough, Bethany,” he says. Bethany shrinks back against the couch. Denny turns his attention to me. “You certainly are well equipped,” he says.
“It’s a dangerous world out there,” I say.
Bethany cuts in on me. “Smart people stick together for safety. Ain’t that what you always say, Denny?” Denny gives Bethany a lingering glare. She slumps deeper into the couch. “It’s what you always say,” she says. It’s basically to herself.
“Ever kill a runner?” Denny asks.
I nod. “Killed a few,” I say. “But it’s not really killing if it’s already dead.”
“Government propaganda,” Bethany says. Denny doesn’t even bother to look at her anymore. This seems to frighten Bethany more than his stony glares. She looks to Leslie and the other younger woman for support.
“If what you told us outside is true,” Auntie Alice says, “then maybe it’s getting a little more complicated.”
“Living or dead, they’s still the enemy,” Sledge says. He slaps a hand down on his bald head and rubs the bare scalp. He yawns. “Think it’s time to call it a night.” Sledge stands. Scarecrow stands along with him.
“I think it’s time everyone got a little shut eye,” Denny says.
Bethany stands and holds out her hand. I think she’s reaching for Aubrey’s, but then the other woman, the one with the long, straight black hair, holds up her arm. Their hands fold around each others’.
“Come on, Tessa,” Bethany says.
They walk like that to the stairs, holding hands, Bethany practically pulling the other behind her. Bethany glares at me over her shoulder. Her friend only gives me a thin smile that frightens me. As they go up the steps, Tessa reaches up and scratches at something on her scalp. It’s perfunctory. She probably doesn’t even realize she’s just given herself away. Not every itch is an indication you are infected with Balzini’s Rash, and I hope that it was just an absent gesture. It isn’t until she wipes her fingertips on her clothes that I know my suspicions are real. As if to check and see if anyone noticed her, Tessa turns and looks over the railing at us.
“Come along, Leslie,” Bethany says.
Leslie tucks her blond hair behind her ears. She glances sideways at me without looking at me directly. I frighten her. I frighten all of them. They think I am something I’m not. All I am is a girl who never got to graduate from high school because the world went bat-house crazy. I lower my eyes. That was something my dad always said when things like this happened in the world. “That guy who shot up his office was bat-house crazy…What are those people thinking? Are they bat-house crazy? If you think I’m going to let you go camping with that Lane doofus, then you are…’
“Robbie? You okay?”
Aubrey’s question snaps me back to my immediate reality. I bring my attention back to the people in the room. He, Auntie Alice, Denny, Sledge, and the scarecrow stare at me.