A Different Alchemy (15 page)

“You stupid asshole,” Jeffrey said. “Don’t ever touch my son.”

God help the young thief if Jeffrey happened to be holding a knife or a gun at that exact instant. The amount of pain and blood on display would have been astounding. Even with just his bare hands, he thought about tearing at the kidnapper’s face until his eyes and lips were gone. He thought about using a sharp rock to scalp the defeated mess beneath him. Anything he could think of to hurt this person in front of him, he would have relished it.

Instead, he merely turned and started back for home. As he turned the corner at Glebe Road, he looked back one more time. The kid was still motionless, still alone. It was no loss if the body just sank into the ground without any fanfare.

“Piece of shit,” Jeffrey muttered as he walked back home. “He’s a living, breathing person,” he said, crying. “He’s my son. Why would someone want to harm my boy? Why would anyone want to harm anyone else?”

No one was around to answer his questions. He was sobbing now. In that moment, if he saw the other thieves he would do his best to kill them too. Right then, as mad as he was, he would kill just about anyone except his family.

“Touch my son and you’re dead!” he yelled.

He noticed then that he was in front of the Sparts’ house. The four newcomers were watching him from the living room window of their newly inherited house as he stalked down the road. Quite the neighborhood welcome. They were probably scared shitless at what they could only assume, on their first night in the neighborhood, was a nightly occurrence. He wouldn’t be surprised if the van was gone when the sun came back up.

His heart stopped when he got to his driveway: Galen was gone!

The other two guys must have circled back for his boy. He looked up and down the street for any sign of his son. Maybe there had been more than the three thieves he saw originally, and the kids he chased off had merely served as a distraction. A band of deviants would spend the night torturing Galen until the poor boy was dead. His son would be all alone in the cold, probably out in the middle of a forest, maybe in an abandoned basement, as a group of kids, not much older than the one Jeffrey had just caught, took turns burning him with their lighters, pissing on him, breaking his fingers, and laughing the entire time because nothing they did would elicit a response.

Katherine came to the front door then. Her hands were on her hips the way she held them when she disapproved of something.

“Did you see where they took him?” he yelled at her from the edge of the street.

“What is going on out here?”

“Our son! Galen. Where did they take him?”

She stomped her foot on the ground. “I,” she said, an accent appearing out of nowhere, part Midwest, part English. “I took our son back inside because his father was nowhere to be found.”

“They were going to light him on fire.”

He was almost crazed now, confused. Looking back, he thought how poorly he performed when his family needed him to be calm.

Katherine asked how their son ended up in the grass.

“Some kids,” he said. “Some random pieces of shit were going to kidnap Galen and torture him.”

“Kids?” Her voice emphasized skepticism.

“You know what I mean. Guys. A couple of young guys just a little older than Galen.”

“Was he hurt?”

“You’re the one who took him inside,” he said.

“He seemed fine,” she said, still looking confused about the whole thing and why her son had been sitting on the ground by a telephone pole.

“Why aren’t you more upset?”

“I don’t understand what happened.”

Maybe on the news the next day the anchorman would talk about a kid who had been stomped to death and then Katherine would realize how serious things had been. He walked past her without saying anything else, disappeared into the house, while she remained standing on the porch. The first thing he did, before washing the blood from his hands, before looking at himself in the mirror to see if he looked like a crazed maniac, was go to his son’s room. And there Galen was, back in his wheelchair.

“It’s OK,” he said as he scooped his son up in his arms and transferred him into bed.

Katherine was in the doorway saying something. He didn’t hear what she said, and when he looked up the next time she was gone.

In the old days, before the Blocks appeared and people slowly started moving south, the police would have arrived at his door, handcuffed him, and taken him to the station for processing. The parents of the boy he had kicked would have sued him for everything he was worth, even though he was only protecting his son. He could even imagine himself yelling, “But they were hurting my boy!” as the cops handcuffed him and put him in the backseat of their cruiser. Now, though, even if they did receive a call that a fight had taken place down the street and someone was in critical condition, the police would ask what it was they were expected to do, seeing as how the city’s population was getting ready to head south.

There was no use in arresting people for fighting. There was no use in arresting people for almost anything these days. Unless you were the Block Butcher and went around killing people just for kicks, you shouldn’t expect to be arrested. Speeders had no fear of getting tickets. You could smoke whatever you wanted in front of the cops and they would shrug. You were free to piss right in front of a cop car and no one would do anything about it.

“Everything will be all right,” he told Galen again. “I won’t let them hurt you.” He held his son’s head in his arms. He stayed like that, Galen resting against him, the way he had when his son was just a baby, until it was completely dark out and Jeffrey’s eyes refused to stay open. The bedroom light was already off and Katherine asleep when he got upstairs.

It wasn’t until his son’s eyes randomly closed that Jeffrey’s temper finally subsided and he too could think about sleep.

**

He had the option of turning off of 95 and heading more directly north, but chose instead to stay on the course that kept him near the water.

He never thought about going west. Going inland would only leave him feeling lost. If he drove the tank into one of the national parks, he would become overwhelmed with options. Should he keep going west or should he keep north? Should he stop and enjoy the wilderness, or should he see where each winding road led? He would die in the forests, far from anything he knew. Staying in line with the ocean kept him next to something familiar.

Just before noon, he stopped the tank and looked out across the water at an island in the distance. With the water between him and the land, he couldn’t tell if it was a mile away or ten miles away. It looked deceptively close, but he knew if he tried to swim there he would never make it. There was no smoke coming from the island, no sign that it was inhabited.

Years earlier, the parcel of land had been taken over by a group of people who didn’t want anything to do with Blocks, which was ironic since it was called Block Island. Just east of Montauk, the island became their private Block-free settlement. Anyone was welcome as long as they didn’t bring a victim of the Great De-evolution with them. Not long after it was established, the anti-Block settlement stopped communicating with the rest of the world, and no one was sure if they simply chose not to interact with others, or if they had all died.

On the edge of the mainland, a stack of bodies was piled on the side of the road. Most still had remnants of rotted, decomposing flesh, but some were nothing more than bleach-white bone. A billboard read, ‘Block Island Welcomes You.’ Only now, it also had the spray-painted words, ‘But not your Blocks.’

The message was clear to anyone struggling to make their way south: you could stop traveling, stop struggling to fix your flat tires each day, stop worrying. All you had to do was leave your quiet brother or sister, your motionless son or daughter, on the side of the road. And then your worries could go away.

He tried to think of a set of circumstances where his situation could get so bad he might consider ditching Galen before entering their settlement. Even faced with death, faced with struggling to live, eventually dying on the side of the road with no one but his son, he would rather die a hundred times in a hundred different places than go to the settlement just once if it meant betraying his boy.

He left the bodies there, rotting, food for maggots and flies. It was someone else’s shame that they were there, not his.

The tank continued on.

It only took an hour on Highway 1 before he regretted getting off 95. The tank approached a giant tree in the road, and it was obvious the machine would not be able to make it over the obstacle. The road-blocked, isolated stretch of highway made him think of old TV shows in which someone got out of their car only to get ambushed by men waiting in the tree line. There was no sign of human life here, though, so he climbed down from the tank to assess the giant tree in his path.

Instead of running into a band of criminals, Jeffrey was greeted by an elderly man. And instead of looking into the barrel of a gun, the person staring at him offered a smile and waved hello. The little, grey-haired man showed no concern that a tank had appeared, a tank that could feasibly destroy his home in seconds, there was only pleasure at seeing another person. That was what being alone for too long did to you.

Without even bothering to close his front door, the man began shuffling toward Jeffrey. He would plant his cane into the ground, make sure it was steady, then scuttle a leg forward. His back was so hunched over he appeared to be half the size of a normal person.

“Fancy meeting you here!” the old man called out.

“How’s it going?” Jeffrey said, offering his arm for the old man to take hold of.

“It’s been a long time since someone has come through these parts.”

“How long?”

“I reckon five years. Probably longer.”

“You’ve been here by yourself the entire time?”

The old man shook his head. “Not many people take these roads anymore when they can shoot down 95 to get south.”

“There isn’t much of that anymore either,” Jeffrey said. “I only saw one small group, just south of New York. No one else.”

“So why are you in these parts then, young man?”

“I wanted to stay near the water.”

“A man after my own heart. I keep my windows open so I can smell the salt water all day.”

Jeffrey said, “I’ll help you over to the beach if you want to go.”

The old man chuckled, maybe even blushed.

Jeffrey added, “It would be my good deed for the day.”

“I don’t remember the last time I did a good deed.”

“I doubt many people do.”

“That’s the problem with the world,” the old man said.

“The problem with the world is the Blocks can’t have children and we’re all dying out.”

“Well,” the old man chuckled, “there’s that too. I thank you for the offer, but you save your good deed for someone else. Don’t waste it on this silly old man.”

“It doesn’t have to be a one time deal. I can help someone else tomorrow.”

“Maybe,” the old man said, as if suddenly realizing that was possible. “Maybe,” he said again.

“Why are you here by yourself?”

“I’m not really sure.”

“You don’t know how you ended up here alone?”

“Don’t talk to me like that. I’m old, but I’m not stupid. My family were some of the first people to head south. I stayed here because one of my friends needed my help. He got sick so I took care of him while the next caravan was leaving. Eventually, he got better and headed south too, but I stayed.”

“But why?”

“It was all I knew by that time. I got so used to seeing the people I know leave, one by one, that it became the norm. I wasn’t even sad when my friend went south because I’d already seen my family leave—my parents, my wife, my daughter, my other friends. Going south and seeing them again would have felt stranger than staying in the place I knew.”

Jeffrey asked what the man did all day. Surely, he would have some great insight to the world after turning the beach town into a giant meditation chamber for himself.

“Think about my mistakes, mostly,” the old man said, then looked carefully at Jeffrey for a moment before continuing. “I killed a man once. I still don’t even know why, except I was young and dumb. I know it doesn’t look like it, but this old man used to be something fierce. I was a two-time state champion wrestler in high school. Even got a full ride to wrestle in college. But I was an angry kid. Never had a reason to be, just was. After a night of drinking, I was walking back from dropping off my girlfriend at her dorm, and on my way back to my apartment this drunk guy started talking all sorts of nonsense. Didn’t have a reason to other than he was drunk. Must have just been the unlucky circumstance of two angry people meeting. I swung at him, then got on top of him and hit him a couple more times. I knew I was in trouble when he shit himself. You don’t do that just from going unconscious. I read in the paper the next day that a man was found beaten to death in an alley a couple of blocks away from the bar I’d been at. I kept expecting the cops to show up and arrest me, but no one did. And I never told anyone about it. Not even my wife. That’s what I think about now, during all these days when I’m by myself. I think about why I did that in the first place, about the type of person I was to be able to do something like that. And I think about how my life would have been different if the police had come and arrested me. And of course I think about the life the man would have had if I hadn’t killed him. Maybe he would have been the man to find a cure for the Blocks. Maybe he would have had a Block child of his own. Who knows? That’s what I think about. Spent my entire life thinking about it. But no matter how much I think about it, I can never stop. Nothing will change what I did.”