Unraveling

  I walk along the fence line, getting closer but staying in the shadows. The last thing I need is for my dad to look up and recognize me. No amount of pretending I belong here would save me then.

  “—after we’ve finished collecting all the evidence. We need to burn the house down.”

  “Burn it down, are you crazy? This is a family home.”

  “Yeah, it is. And it’s been infected with God knows what. You really want to chance letting someone else catch whatever did that and then spread it around?”

  “Of course not, but—”

  I keep moving, even though they start falling out of earshot. My goal is to get around the other side of the house and then get close to the back door. I need to see what’s inside that house, see what it is that has my father proposing to burn it down.

  “Can I help you?”

  In front of me is a guy in a cheap suit. He’s in his forties, his hair slightly disheveled, his complexion pale. SDPD—most likely the detective on scene.

  I tilt my head to the side and parrot the question back to him.

  His eyes widen in surprise and his eyes move over me again, this time reassessing who I might be. My father has two female agents in his unit. One is Deirdre. The other, who is oh-so-conveniently on maternity leave, is—

  “Special Agent Aimee Cortene,” I say, offering my hand. I sound—and look—absolutely nothing like Aimee, but I’m going to fake it until someone calls me on it. “You been inside? Because that’s the freakiest shit I’ve ever seen. I’m looking forward to burning it down. Excuse me.”

  Without giving him a chance to respond, I push past him and continue my path. Only, as I’m walking, the back door opens. Two hazmat suits walk out.

  And behind them, before the door shuts, I see it.

  I see what had that uniform puking his guts out, and I see what has my father and his team arguing to burn this place down. I have to lift my hand to my mouth to keep it closed. And that beer I drank tonight burns my esophagus the second time I swallow it down.

  What used to be a man is slumped in the back hallway.

  He’s burned, just like the bodies in the photographs, the radiation making him look completely unrecognizable—inhuman. Only it also looks like his skin has melted, as if it’s gelatinous. And it’s melting off his face. My eyes focus on his chin and jaw, which looks like it’s become detached on the right side and unnaturally stretched on the left. His eyes are red, like they were bleeding when he died, and when I take another couple of steps to see him at a better angle, I realize it’s not just his skin, but also his bones that look melted—because I can see his skeleton, and the bones look like they’re dripping—like a Salvador Dalí painting come to life.

  I can’t stop staring. No matter how much I want to look away, to vomit and run back to the car, I’m frozen in place. Because my brain just can’t process what it’s seeing. There are chemical compounds that can do something like this to a body—can liquefy body tissues and bones—or at least I assume there are, but a body that looks like that should be something that’s been dead for years or at least months, not something that happened tonight.

  My hands are shaking and my pulse is too loud in my ears, loud enough that I’m afraid that the detective from before is going to hear it if he followed me.

  But I still can’t move.

  Because what else is in that house? Is it worse—could anything even be worse?

  Of course, as I’m taking it all in and staring, whatever kind of cover I thought I had going for myself is blown because Struz sees me.

  “J-baby?” he says, grabbing my arm and pulling me to the fence. “What are you doing here? Where’s Taylor? I sent him to get you.” Struz’s grip is tight enough to bruise as he pulls me out onto the front lawn on the opposite side of the house where I went in. “Janelle, I’m serious,” Struz says again. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

  Speaking of good old asshole Taylor Barclay, I see him over Struz’s shoulder. He’s obviously heard his name, and he’s staring back at me, his chin lifted as if daring me to tell Struz what happened. But I’m not about to do that. Because even though he’s pretending he doesn’t care about authority and rules and all that, if he wants to advance ever he’ll need to actually do something right. And having him owe me is worth the lie.

  “Janelle, did Taylor bring you here?”

  “Who’s Taylor?” I say, crossing my arms over my chest and leaning back. “I wanted to see what was going on.”

  “Jesus H Christ, Janelle,” Struz says, swiping a hand through his hair. “Don’t blame me when you wake up in the middle of the night from the nightmares.” He grabs my shoulder and starts walking me down the driveway to a police cruiser. The uniform that puked his guts out is leaning against it, still looking queasy.

  Struz says a few words to him, gives him my address, and opens the back door. As I get in, I look over to where Taylor is standing, and as we make eye contact, I know he understands perfectly.

  He owes me.

  15:10:55:00

  When my alarm goes off in the morning, I don’t turn it off right away. My whole body is stiff and heavy with exhaustion. Which isn’t much of a surprise. I mean, it’s been less than two weeks since I got hit by a truck, and I also had about three hours of sleep.

  But I need to talk to Alex about what I saw. Which means I need to get out of bed.

  The alarm just keeps beeping.

  And I do the same thing I do any other morning I’m tempted to turn it off and roll over. I think of my mother and the life she’s slept away, and in seconds the alarm is off and I’m out of bed and digging through the pile of clothes on my dresser.

  Yeah, I’m aware, normal people don’t dump clean clothes in a pile on a dresser without folding them, but my dad does. It’s why I try to hold on to the laundry duties for the family. It cuts down on the ironing. But whenever I get busy and fall behind, my dad takes it upon himself to try to “help.” Between bumming rides, homework, and all the research Alex and I have been doing, and of course that fiasco last night—my body tries to heave when I think about it—yeah, I’ve been falling behind.

  I throw on faded black jeans and a white Circa Survive T-shirt because they’re the first things I grab. The shirt is from a concert two summers ago I didn’t even go to, because the book I was reading turned out to be crack. And well, I chose it over the concert, because I’m like that. Alex brought me back the shirt, because, well, he’s like that.

  After giving Jared his “Dude, you’ve got ten minutes” warning, I’m downstairs rooting through the kitchen. I turn on the TV for background noise before I crack a couple of eggs and throw a few strips of bacon into a pan. The newscaster is talking about how the world might end from the string of natural disasters we’ve been having—a tsunami hit the coast of Indonesia yesterday, tornadoes are wreaking havoc across the Midwest, and apparently there was another earthquake in San Francisco during the hours I was actually asleep last night. She’s dramatic about it, though, and she gets even more dramatic when she starts predicting an eruption in some dormant volcano in New Zealand. After I throw two slices of bread in the toaster, start the coffee, and pour a glass of OJ, I change the channel to MTV2, then start in on the mound of dishes in the sink. You can always tell when I’ve fallen down on the job because our house looks like a fraternity moved in for a few days.

  Twelve minutes have passed by the time I have Jared’s breakfast on the table and all the dishes either in the dishwasher or the drying rack, so I bolt back upstairs and barge into his room without knocking—he never gets out of bed unless I’m half dragging him.

  “Yo,” I say as I turn on every light in the room and flick open the window shades. “Time to get up.”

  Jared groans from under his covers, then comes his muffled, “Five more minutes.”

  “Your breakfast is getting cold.”

  That has him sluggishly sitting up as I dig into his closet, making sure all the dirty clothes are act
ually in the hamper and there’s nothing that will stink up this room—at least not worse.

  “Take this down with you,” I add, laying the hamper at his feet.

  “Can’t I do it—”

  “No,” I say when I’m halfway out the door. For good measure, I lean back in to tell him he has fifteen minutes before we leave, but he’s staring at my shirt.

  I look down.

  And see a splotchy pink stain.

  Like someone who didn’t know what they were doing ran the wash. Someone who washed the whites and reds together in hot water.

  I look up at Jared, whose apologetic smile answers the question of which someone is at fault.

  “Hey…,” he says, blushing. “So, I wanted to try to help, but…”

  I look down at the shirt—it’s hardly one of my favorites. I look back at Jared. He looks way too guilty. “What else did you ruin?”

  He shrugs. “I might have shrunk the gray zip-up hoodie you always wear....”

  “Fuck, Jared!” I say without thinking. Because that is my favorite piece of clothing. But Jared flinches, and I immediately feel like I just kicked a kitten, so I try to relax. “Sorry. Don’t worry about it.”

  “I just—”

  “No, stop,” I say with a smile. “It’s not a big deal. It’s just a sweatshirt after all. I’ll get another one. I’m going to change, though. I’ll meet you downstairs.” And then, because I’m pretty sure he still feels like shit, I add, “Seriously, dude, your breakfast is getting cold.”

  I pull off my T-shirt as soon as I get into my room. The one thing I hate most in the world is being late, even if it’s just school, and even if my teachers probably won’t care. But as I’m rifling through the T-shirts on my dresser, I pause and stare at my reflection.

  Correction: I stare at what’s different about my reflection.

  It’s not the first time I’ve looked in a mirror since the accident. But it is the first time I paused long enough to notice that something’s different.

  After everything—the conversations with Alex, Ben’s denials, my John Doe, and the radiation killings going around—I was willing to let the whole Ben thing go. I mean, I had just gotten hit by a truck; it goes without saying that my lucidity might have been in question.

  Again, I was willing to let the Ben thing go. Because of all the other shit going on.

  Now I’m not.

  Because staring me right in the face is the proof I needed. Proof that I’m not crazy or overly imaginative.

  I throw on a new shirt and decide exactly what I’m going to say to Ben Michaels next time I see him.

  15:08:50:05

  Only, finding anyone in this school is harder than it should be. Jared and I got to school late and had to head straight to homeroom, and even though I check the known stoner haunts between classes, I come up short.

  In physics, I sit at a two-person lab table sandwiched between Cecily and Alex, and attempt to take notes on kinetic energy.

  “These are to die for,” Cecily whispers, sliding me a piece of See’s candy.

  “And by ‘to die for’ you mean?” Alex whispers back.

  “To. Die. For,” Cecily repeats before turning back to her notes. Her limitless energy and the way she practically bounces in her seat during a physics lecture is strangely contagious. No one can make science fun like she can. But today her enthusiasm just reminds me how exhausted I am.

  The chocolate is good, so I can’t complain too much.

  But I do give up taking notes—I can’t possibly pay attention to school. My mind is at war with itself. The image of that man with his face melting off his bones, the proof that I died and Ben Michaels brought me back staring me in the face this morning, and the flashes of my life replayed before my eyes. I’m going to sort this out.

  Alex slides me a piece of paper.

  Yo. What if the people in that house somehow got a concentrated dose of the virus? What if they were the scientists working on it? And something went wrong? What do you think??

  I shake my head, because I have no idea. How could a virus do that to a human being—melt bones like that?

  Did you talk to your dad yet?

  Again, I shake my head. The first thing I’m going to do when I get home, though, is give him a call and demand he hear me out. Even though I don’t think we’re right. I don’t know if this is viral at all. How can someone harness a virus and keep it this controlled—not that what happened in that house was controlled. At least not in the normal sense. But it was controlled enough that it didn’t spread. Anything viral would take on a life of its own.

  Cecily raises her hand and asks something about the difference between kinetic and potential energy, and I know I should focus on this so I don’t end up behind. But I can’t.

  Not if in fifteen days something big is going down.

  Tonight I’m going to hack my dad’s computer and find out how I can get in touch with Barclay so I can call in my favor.

  15:04:00:43

  We’re a few minutes into third period, and Poblete is handing out the reading assignment when the classroom door opens. She glances back to the door and then gestures toward me as she hands me a sheet of paper. “Mr. Michaels, glad you could finally join us. Please sit down next to Miss Tenner.”

  This can’t be happening. I looked for him all morning, and now here he is. He looks relaxed, comfortable, and when he meets my eyes his lips curl into a half smile. My insides flip-flop as I watch Ben, who still doesn’t have a backpack, walk toward me. I can’t be surprised—the only empty chair in the classroom is on my left at my already overcrowded table.

  Poblete hands me an extra paper, presumably for Ben, and continues as if she didn’t just get her forty-seventh student. “Your job is to read the passage. Beware, it’s a marriage proposal. Analyze the devices that the man is using to persuade, and then predict what you think the woman’s response is going to be.”

  Ben sits down next to me, close enough that I can smell the minty soap on his skin, and I think again of the moment I came back from the dead. My throat constricts. It’s ridiculous, but I’m half tempted to ask if he transferred into this class in some effort to stalk me. Though I had no luck finding him myself, so I don’t know why I’m complaining that he just fell into my lap.

  Of course he just fell into my lap at the same moment we’ve been given an AP prompt to analyze. Why is life so inconvenient?

  “You have ten minutes,” Poblete says. “Ready, go.”

  I glance at Ben and watch him as he turns his paper over and begins working. There is no way he’s getting out of my sight before I talk to him. I glance at the clock—we’ve got eighty-five minutes before the end of the period, eighty-five minutes before I can confront him about what he did to me.

  Our eyes meet for a second before he turns back to his paper, his hair flopping down to shadow his face.

  Resigned to focus on this assignment and get those eighty-five minutes over with, I flip over my paper and don’t recognize the passage. It’s from some novel I haven’t read, apparently written by Dickens.

  Like Poblete said, it’s a marriage proposal.

  It’s definitely persuasive. It begins with a romantic declaration and continues with a passionate “I’d die without you” type of speech. It’s enough to make even me smile a little.

  Only as I keep reading, something about it bothers me. It’s like as the guy goes on he gets more and more dramatic. But buried in all the lines reiterating exactly how he would die for her (fire, water, crime, disgrace, he tries to hit all the ways possible) is this line: “what I mean is, that I am under the influence of some tremendous attraction which I have resisted in vain, and which overmasters me.” Why do guys do that? Rather than just say how they feel, they act like the girl is seducing them or something. It’s ridiculous.

  On my right, Alice Han and Vince Le are both bent over their papers and scribbling annotations. On my left, Ben is leaning back in his chair, his passage seemingly unt
ouched. He notices me looking at him and gives me another half smile.

  I turn back to the passage and read it again.

  “And stop,” Poblete says. “Pencils down. Someone tell me about the passage.” Hands go up around the room. “Miss Zhou, what persuasive devices is the speaker using?”

  “He focuses directly on his audience—on her,” Margaret begins.

  “Thank you,” Poblete says. “Who can tell us something else?” Several hands shoot up. “Mr. Le?”

  “It’s all pathos appeals—appealing to her emotions.”

  “Not entirely true; the first half is an emotional appeal, and the logos appeals are in the second half.”

  “Yeah, but that’s only because this is the nineteenth century. Every guy has to say he can take care of his wife.”

  Poblete raises a hand, and everyone about to launch into a discussion shuts up. “We need to go back to the text,” she says. “Ah, Mr. Trechter, go ahead.”

  I smile and glance back at Alex, who’s never shied away from anything academic in his life. “Well, the opening line, ‘You know what I am going to say. I love you,’ gives the reader context. The woman he’s talking to knows he loves her and that love, not reputation, is the basis for his declaration. He lists all the influences she has on him—she could draw him to water, to fire, to the gallows, to death. It’s the ultimate romantic declaration of devotion.”

  And because it’s Alex, I feel free to interrupt him. “But you don’t think that’s creepy?”

  “Whatever do you mean, Miss Tenner?” Poblete asks with a smile, the only indication that I’m right.

  “‘You could draw me to the gallows, you could draw me to any death.’ That’s just like saying, ‘Hey, you could make me commit crimes punishable by death.’ That’s morbid.”

  “You don’t think it’s romantic?” Ben asks.

  I turn to look at him to see if he’s serious, and he appears to be. “No, not at all. He says she could be the death of him—what’s romantic about that?”