He told her about that day in the drugstore. He told her, as he hadn’t told anyone, about his nightmares. She told him what it was to feel guilty every second, to wish for judgment even as you were desperate to escape it. He didn’t know why it was so easy for him to understand how she felt. But when he closed his eyes that night and saw the drugstore bodies lying beside him, and smelled the blood, he felt it, too.
It felt strange to talk to her like he still knew her; she admitted it felt strange for her to talk to anyone at all.
She asked him for some of his father’s whiskey, to make it all go away; she said they could share, and that way they could both forget. He said no, because he knew where that kind of forgetting led; she pretended not to be angry, then she pretended not to be crying. He pretended not to pity her, and cursed whatever law of the universe dictated that everything good turn to ruin.
When the sun rose, he sat with her and watched her tip her face to the dawn, and told her she could stay as long as she needed. Milo could obviously be trusted to keep his mouth shut, and the Preacher didn’t talk to outsiders… or at least, when he did, they knew better than to listen. She’d be safe. Daniel promised her that, then gave Milo a stern lecture on the right way and wrong way to keep a secret, and dropped him off at day care. And then, without giving himself time to overthink it, he went to see the Prevettes. He rang the doorbell with no plan whatsoever for talking himself inside.
“You again,” Jule said, opening the door. “Does everyone in your family have a death wish?”
“The drugstore’s closed, and Milo’s at day care, so I, uh, I didn’t have anything to do. I thought maybe you’d want to hang out.” He cursed himself for sounding so lame.
“What, you don’t have any friends?” Despite the fact that it was even hotter inside than out, ten a.m. and already an egg fryer of a day, she wore baggy sweatpants and a sweatshirt three sizes too big. The pants were gray but the shirt was a pale blue. It was, as far as Daniel could remember, the first time he’d seen her in a color.
“I guess… not really?” He could feel his cheeks warming.
She swung the door wide and jerked her head in an awkward imitation of a welcome. “Lucky for you, neither do I.”
He stepped over the threshold, trying not to make it obvious that he was eyes peeled for knife-wielding giants.
“They’re in the basement,” she said. “Don’t ask why.”
He hadn’t planned on it.
Everything was as Cass had described, down to the photos climbing the staircase and the lace runners spanning every table. He assumed the dirty dishes, the half-empty pizza boxes, and the six-foot bong were more recent additions. Jule led him upstairs to her bedroom – Cass’s bedroom.
“You can stop staring – none of it’s mine,” she said as he took in the wrought-iron bedposts, the Christmas lights artfully arranged into a peace sign, the photo-studded vanity mirror, and, feeling like a sleaze, the black bras draped over the desk chair. “Well, those are,” she added, stuffing the bras into a black duffel. “Perv.”
He forced a laugh.
“I hope you know I didn’t bring you up here to screw you.”
This time the laugh came unprompted. “Excuse me?”
She pointed at the bed. “You. Me. There. Not happening. Got it?”
“Got it.” Then, aware it might be pushing his luck, he cocked his head at the bathroom. “So does that mean shower sex is still on the table?”
Instead of a kick in the ass on his way out the door, this earned him a curious smile. She pointed to the floor. “Sit.”
It was awkward at first. They were not friends, and their potential areas of common ground – teachers in classes that Jule never attended, students at a school where neither of them spoke – amounted to little more than a trickle of small talk. Fortunately, there was a more obvious topic of conversation at hand.
“Scott thinks it’s some kind of conspiracy,” Jule said. “Of course, Scott thinks everything’s a conspiracy. He’s convinced everyone’s out to get him.”
“Aren’t they?”
“Fair point.”
“What does he think it’s a conspiracy to do?” Daniel asked.
“Take over.” She curled finger quotes around the words, then laughed. “Destroy the common man, steal all his money, ruin his life. You know, the usual.” She wadded up a pamphlet and tossed it at his head. “Some literature on the subject, in case you’d like further enlightenment. Scott’s got the rest of them convinced this is just the first step – that all that junk in the air is some kind of chemical warfare. I think he’s raising an army, just in case.”
Daniel snorted. “I guess all the cool kids are doing it.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Inside joke with myself.”
“Shocking that you have no friends,” she said.
“Whereas all the girls at school must be begging you to let them come over and hang out with the meth militia.”
Her expression never flickered, but something about her went taut, and he realized he’d gone too far.
“Sorry,” he said.
“Trust me, it’s not the family I would have picked, but…”
But who got to pick? “Yeah.”
They watched each other in not-quite-comfortable silence. “So do you believe him?” Daniel said, trying to steer the conversation onto a safer track. “You think there’s a conspiracy?”
“I think anyone who thinks keeping us trapped in this town is ‘for our own good’ has never actually been here.”
“You seem to be doing all right,” Daniel said, and they both knew he was talking about this room, which couldn’t be more mismatched to the girl currently living in it.
“You think this was my idea?”
“Is it that bad?”
“It’s…”
He waited.
“I’ve never had my own bedroom before,” she said. “I’ve never had a door.”
It was a plain-enough admission, but he could tell there was too much behind it that he wasn’t supposed to know about, and she was wondering why she’d said it and what she’d do if he was stupid enough to follow up.
“Why are you here, Daniel?”
For a moment, he was tempted to admit it: one half confession for another. But before he could decide to trust her based on nothing but guilt, the door eased open. Daniel had never been this close to Scott Prevette. Even if he were a normal-sized man, his aura of pure menace would have been more than enough to strike fear in the hearts of scrawny teenage boys everywhere. And Scott Prevette was basically a giant. Each of his fists looked powerful enough to crush Daniel’s head like a tomato. It was the aura that suggested he’d have a good time doing it.
Scott jerked his head. “You. Outside. Now.”
For a heart-stopping moment, Daniel thought the order was meant for him, and quickly debated the merits of defenestration. Then Jule rose and left the room with her uncle, and Daniel could breathe again. Of course, the reprieve wouldn’t last long if Scott caught Daniel going through his niece’s underwear drawer. So he would hurry. As a bonus: the faster he plowed through her drawers, the less time he’d have to spend feeling like a pervert.
Scott wanted to know what she was doing with a boy in her room. Biting back all the more tempting responses – these days Scott was even less a person to mess with than usual – she muttered an insistent “Just a friend.” He looked so pleasantly surprised she wasn’t sure whether to be touched or offended.
“I do have friends,” Jule said.
He was kind enough not to argue, and then the dark shadows returned to his face. “You want to keep him, you keep him away from the basement.”
“He’s not some lost puppy off his leash.”
Scott grunted, and that was to be the end of it.
She couldn’t blame Daniel for looking nervous when she came back into the room. Scott tended to have that effect. But she’d figured that Daniel, of all people, would be willing
to cut her a break on the demented home-life front – instead of jumping to his feet, avoiding her eyes, and muttering something awkward and unconvincing about having other places to be. If one not-so-harsh look from Scott Prevette was enough to scare him off, then she shouldn’t be so disappointed to see him go. Let him.
But the words were out of her mouth before he could. “Have you been down to Route 8 yet?”
“The main checkpoint?” he said, sounding surprised. “No. I heard it’s pointless. You?”
There were protesters crowded at each of the government checkpoints surrounding the town, but word had it the biggest group was massed on Route 8, where high schoolers, hippies, housewives, and hunters had set aside their differences for a 24/7 vigil protesting the government quarantine. Howard Schwarz, who’d appointed himself and his press mouthpiece for the Free Oleander! movement, made periodic rounds to rally the troops.
“I don’t think it’s the way to get out.” Jule didn’t have any more faith than Scott did in frontal assaults, especially the kind made with placards and protest chants. There had been rumors of people making it across the border via bribes, nepotism, sexual favors… but nothing that could be verified. “But I’ve been wrong before.”
Daniel mimed his shock and awe.
“Okay, rarely,” she allowed. “Still. It’s been five days, and nothing. Aren’t you going crazy here? Figured I’d at least check it out. You… you want to come with?”
She was sure he’d say yes, sure she’d marked him accurately as someone who wanted to get out as desperately as she did, so sure he’d give in to the temptation painted across his face that it took her a moment to process his actual answer.
“I’m sorry,” he said, sounding it. “I can’t. I’ve got to – Yeah. I have to go. Now. So, anyway.”
He wasn’t the smoothest of operators. He wasn’t much of anything, really, except awkward and decent and, for whatever reason, under her skin.
“See you around?” he said, edging for the door, probably sorry he’d thought to come in the first place.
“Better hurry,” she said. “I don’t plan to be here for long.”
There were two kinds of people in Oleander these days: the kind content to stay put and rebuild their lives, and the kind desperate to leave. The former rallied behind Mayor Mouse and Deacon Barnes, busying themselves with carpentry or Christ, kneeling at the dual altars of Uncle Sam and Ellie King. The latter had better things to do. An intrepid handful – determined or drunk – set out to test the government quarantine on their own, picking through the woods that bordered Route 8, driving pickups into the prairie grass, even tackling the lake with dinghies or inner tubes, propelling themselves with paddles, oars, and in one (very drunk) case, a shovel and a broom. They were all turned back: by floodlights and tanks, by barbed wire and electrified fences, by men in uniforms and their very large guns.
Five days since the storm; five days trapped in Oleander. Five days plus the previous seventeen years of Jule’s life, but it was those final five days that had pushed her over the edge. She’d always dismissed Scott’s paranoid ramblings about government conspiracies – mostly under the theory that no one in the government seemed quite sharp enough to pull one off – but there were armed soldiers circling the most boring town in the Midwest. Distrusting their motives wasn’t exactly the same as lying to a census taker or refusing a flu shot.
Not that Jule cared about their motives for keeping her in. She only cared about getting out.
Like her uncles – though not with them, never with them – she spent her days prowling the borders and exploring her options, which were narrowing down to none. She was tired of sneaking around and tired of failing and, after Daniel’s hasty departure, unexpectedly tired of being on her own. So on this day, the fifth day, she took a vacation from lonely and fruitless prowling and joined the masses gathered at the Route 8 checkpoint. It wouldn’t be a way out. But she was in the mood to shout at something, and it seemed as good a place as any to do it.
The protest had begun with just a handful of discontents. They tried to beg and plead and bribe their way across the border, and when that didn’t work, they threw produce and cow shit at the soldiers and made timid charges across the line, turned back by volleys of gunfire into the sky. A fist-shaking Howard Schwarz distributed hastily made flyers about abuse of power, and there were murmurings of the Second Amendment and local militias, though no one had yet been dumb enough to flash a gun. By the time Jule arrived, the scattering of people had swelled to a crowd, and the atmosphere had turned carnival-like. The prospect of escape ruled out, the protest was the thing, and the remaining true believers – some furious, some hyperventilating, some weeping – were subsumed by a mass of people who, despite their handmade signs and piss-filled water balloons, seemed almost to have forgotten why they were there. There were couples making out, children running wild, anarchists ranting; there were town gossips who poked their noses in for an hour and then slipped away again; there were spies for Mayor Mouse; there were tents inhabited by people who by the smell of things hadn’t showered in days. There were the occasional unified chants – Let us out! Let us out! Let us out! – and at least two drum circles. There was an impassive line of soldiers, weapons at the ready, who refused to speak or flinch or allow anyone to approach within a ten-yard radius. There was, at the center of things, Howard Schwarz, standing atop a milk crate and shouting about how the mayor’s craven obeisance to his government puppet masters would be the end of them all. There was a lot of beer. Given the sermonizing and the drinking, it felt like a cross between a church picnic and the world’s most pointless tailgate, and Jule regretted coming anywhere near it. Especially when she spotted Baz Demming and a couple of his idiot friends lounging in the back of a pickup, drowning themselves in beer. Even more when he saw her.
“Tampon girl!” he shouted across the crowd, waving wildly. “Yo, tampon girl!” His buddies took up the cry. Everyone was staring.
She thought: At least, Daniel’s not here to see this happen again.
She thought: If Daniel had come along, she wouldn’t have to deal with this crap alone.
She thought: Why the hell was she thinking about Daniel?
She yelled: “Yo yourself, brain-dead! How’s your syphilis?”
Baz was laughing. Baz was climbing off the pickup truck and coming toward her.
Jule was not running away, would not run away.
“Clearing right up,” he said as he approached. “So if you’re asking because you want to take me out on a test-drive…”
“I would rather screw Howard Schwarz,” she said, groping for a suitably disgusting alternative to hammer the point home. “I would rather have one of those soldiers shove his gun up my —”
“Got it,” Baz said. “Thanks for the visual.”
“I aim to please.”
Now he was close enough to touch her. “You know, you could be kind of hot if you weren’t such a bitch.”
“I’ll take that under advisement.”
“Though the bitch thing can be hot sometimes.”
“Great.”
“But not in your case.”
“Bummer.”
“Just trying to help.”
“What are you even doing here?” Jule said. “Does the mayor know his little lackey’s sniffing around the dark side?”
“Just keeping an eye on things. Helps to know who’s loyal and who’s not, if you know what I mean.”
“J. Edgar Hoover would be so proud.”
He flashed a smile. “I’ll pretend I never saw you, though. Special favor. For a special friend, right?”
“I’m out of here,” Jule said.
“You’re wasting your time,” Baz said. “There’s no way out.”
She forced her voice not to betray her. “What makes you think I’m looking for a way out?”
“Keeping an eye on things, remember? Things like hot little girls who think they’re smarter than everyone else. Smart enoug
h to find a way out.”
Screw him and his smug face; screw the soldiers; screw the town. “So maybe I am,” she said.
Baz laughed. There was something in the sound of it, something so unnerving that Jule backed away and, without another word, got the hell out of there.
“Never gonna happen!” he shouted after her. “No one’s getting out.”
The Preacher was drunk. But not so drunk that he couldn’t recognize a demon when he saw one. She wore a different face than the others, but her clothes were the same, and bore the sign of the devil. She was of them, the plague that had beset his town.
The Lord had taken after her, that was clear. The demon’s face was scarred and scratched and smeared with blood. The demon limped and hugged her arm to her chest and leaned against the trees as if God’s green world would give succor to the likes of her.