A Different Alchemy (4 page)

His shoes clacked against the metal as he walked to the turret and the hatch. He looked down inside of what was, essentially, a moveable cave. He could climb down into the dark, climb back out to see the daylight whenever he wanted, but this cave could also transport him across the broken roads. This armored rock could move him anywhere he wanted.

And with that thought, he lowered himself inside. Unsure of what to expect, he partly assumed it would look like a jet’s cockpit. But the controls in front of him didn’t seem that complicated: a steering lever, a speed lever, a brake pedal, a clutch. Nothing he couldn’t handle.

The engine came alive on the first try. Part of him had expected the tank not to start up at all as if sensing he wasn’t the type of person who should be driving it. Another misconception was that he expected it to be as loud as a jet, that he would need industrial strength headphones to block out the noise, but it was similar in volume to a riding lawn mower—if the riding lawn mower could crush cars and go through brick walls.

He pulled a lever, pushed a pedal, and took a deep breath. The machine lurched backwards. He kept the turret door open as the tank made its way out of the hangar.

The black sky was spreading. The infection now covered every part of the city’s outline and was continuing to the surrounding parks and suburbs. And more smoke was still pouring up into the sky, the sickness spreading as far as the eye could see. Surely, given time, it would spread all the way to the ocean before enveloping the entire world.

Griggs was staring out the window at him as the tank rumbled by. The two men looked at each other for a moment, but neither waved goodbye or smiled. Two days later, Griggs would get in his SUV with his wife and his brother and his brother’s wife and they would all head to Washington together, trapped by the silence of not being able to discuss why their children weren’t with them.

The tank rumbled past the front gate. No longer was there base security checking your ID on the way on and off the government grounds. Years earlier, when the base was fully functional, they had even had speed traps set up around the roads. Anyone going faster than fifteen miles per hour would have gotten pulled over by the unsmiling pseudo police.

Instead of turning west to go back to the city, toward the flames, the tank turned east, toward the ocean. Jeffrey was aware of his actions enough to know he was driving away from the city, but he never really gave thought to the fact that he was actually leaving it. He didn’t think about his son’s dead body because, somewhere in his head, he still envisioned his son at home on the porch, enjoying the silence. Before long, the tank approached the Garden State Parkway. Instead of heading south toward Washington, where everyone else would be going in two more days, he took the ramp north. Fort Dix got smaller and smaller as he drove away.

The newness of driving a tank made him feel like he was flying down the road on a go-cart. In reality, he was only going twenty miles per hour. He kept it that speed until he felt like there was no way the black cloud could descend on him. If it rained, he was sure that black liquid would pour down on him and suffocate him too.

The entire first day of driving, he looked back at the cloud of smoke as though expecting it to catch up to him, overtake him, and then kill everything ahead. It must be visible from Washington and New York. Maybe people over seas were wondering if a different type of madness, something other than the slow decline of mankind, had come over the Americans. Maybe the final astronauts were seeing it from outer space and were wondering what in the hell was happening.

Once he was finally away from it, he slowed the tank even more. He would continue at that casual pace for the rest of his journey. There was no point going faster; he had nowhere he had to be and no schedule for when he had to be there.

He merely focused on avoiding abandoned cars on the road. He was still too overwhelmed with fleeing the smoke, being inside a tank, traveling on a deserted highway, to think about his son. And even when he did think of Galen, he didn’t think of him at the epicenter of the flames, but, as though nothing tragic had happened, at home.

And then, with even more black smoke rising up into the sky, he closed the hatch door, and continued north. That was all.

Chapter 3

“Whether you like it or not, the calls are getting louder for us to leave this city.”

Two men sat facing each other in front of studio cameras. The more fiery of the two men made a habit of wearing pinstripe suits that exaggerated just how tall and skinny he was. Along with sunken cheeks, he bore a striking resemblance to a smug Grim Reaper.

“Why isn’t anyone stepping up to help us?” he asked into the camera. “Do they want us to just sit here until it’s too late and we’re all dead?” He had been saying the same thing for two years.

After the disaster in Boston, the remains of an entire stubborn city frozen to death in a terrible blizzard, it was easy to see the importance of moving south where there were still enough people to keep the infrastructure functioning properly. It had been four years since New York sent a delegation up to see why no one had heard from the Boston settlement following the harsh winter. Frozen bodies were everywhere. The city’s workers had already left. Without them, the roads didn’t get plowed. People were stuck in their houses. The power generators, designed to make each house self sufficient, began killing entire families due to carbon monoxide poisoning. Worse yet, the generators at the group home in the Boston Garden failed. Most people went to sleep shivering underneath green championship banners, then never woke up again. The stories of what had been found there were enough for New York to join up with Philadelphia earlier than planned.

It was amazing, though, how quickly the houses around Jeffrey, temporarily infused with people wearing Yankees hats, would start to empty again. A family would leave in the middle of the night to join their relatives in Florida. An elderly couple would pass away. Someone would finally succumb to cancer. Each day a few more people were gone, without new children to replace them, and after three years the city was once again reminding them how empty a metropolis could feel.

As if to exacerbate people’s fears as they watched the gradual decline in population, protests were held each week to make people even more afraid. Half the protests were organized by groups that were frustrated with the lack of planning for how to get the entire city relocated to Washington. The other protests were to complain about having thousands of people to take along for the ride who couldn’t otherwise take care of themselves. On bad days, both protests occurred at the same time and the two masses of people combined into a scared mob looking for someone to blame.

But there were still people who said everything would be OK. There was no need for panic. Jeffrey was one of them.

“These are trying times,” the other man on TV said. “But we have to make sure we have the resources necessary for the trip if we’re going to pick up and move everyone a hundred miles south. You can’t just do something like that at the drop of a hat. You need to plan. Especially with the roads the way they are.”

The man in pinstripes sighed and rolled his eyes. “If it was up to you we would still be planning the trip to Washington after everyone there had already packed up and gone down to Raleigh.”

Jeffrey had to hand it to the skeleton—he had a way of helping people realize they were disgusted or horrified when they hadn’t previously known it; he had a way of getting already irritated people to yell out their windows that they weren’t going to take it anymore.

The screen went black.

“Why do you insist on watching that stuff?” Jeffrey said to Katherine, the remote still in his hand. “It just makes you worry.”

He had to admit, though, that this show was better than most of what was left for entertainment. Twenty years ago, there were more than forty radio stations available in the area. Now, there were only three still broadcasting live across the airwaves. A couple of stations, their doors already closed for the last time, kept a loop of songs playing over and over. Others had pre-recorded motivational speeches playing, intended to keep people’s spirits up. The other stations became static. The only thing remaining were a handful of men bantering all day about the Blocks and what to do with them. One show was compassionate toward the silent army, but most of them, not realizing their time as shock jocks had already ended, spoke about using Blocks to fill the potholes in roads or for target practice. The last time Jeffrey ever listened to one of these shows, the host was laughing about wanting to use hundreds of motionless Block bodies to spell out HELP in giant letters so anyone watching from outer space would see it and know we were still fucked.

And yet, as bad as the radio could be, it wasn’t as bad as the gangs roaming southern California. Without any new teens to recruit, their youngest members were now in their thirties. The bandana-wearing delinquents didn’t bother with drive-by shootings anymore. Most of the members had moved into gated communities with cast-iron fences originally intended to keep their kind out. The fences were spray painted with symbols to let everyone else know exactly which gang was living in which celebrity’s former mansion. No longer, though, did the gangs go around the rest of the city spray painting nonsense on brick walls and underpasses. No one had understood what things like “808” and “Squirrely 4 Ever” were supposed to mean anyway. To add insult to injury, a senior citizens’ club in Los Angeles had seen a collection of graffiti at the old rec center and thought it was a beautiful way to liven up depressed people, so they started a club to paint every abandoned office building with happy images of Hokusai waves, Starry Nights, and even The School of Athens. The entire city was soon covered with graffiti that warmed everyone’s heart. Gang symbols seemed foolish against such artistry.

That didn’t stop the gangs from spreading their symbols, however. They were just spread in a different way: Blocks were being found all around the city with insignias tattooed on their foreheads. A Block’s family would turn their backs at a park, or even in their own backyard, just long enough for a group of forty-year old thugs to kidnap the motionless body, drive the Block around the neighborhood in a van, before dropping them back off. The only difference was that the Block had a fresh tattoo, inked in the gang’s colors, right on their forehead.

In Chicago, before the city was evacuated, two rival gangs competed for how many new members they could get. The Great De-evolution was in full swing, so the only new members were Blocks. Gangs made daily raids on the Block shelters to kidnap the biggest and meanest looking Blocks they could find. The mannequin-like bodies were dressed up in the gang’s colors. But the Blocks never learned fancy gang signs. They never stole or robbed. They couldn’t even sell drugs. Really, all they did was sit in rooms, all dressed in the same color clothing, doing nothing at all. Needless to say, aging gang members didn’t want to be babysitters; the contest ended a month after it started, and the newly indoctrinated members were all returned to the Block shelters from which they had been stolen.

Aging populations still needed their drugs, but the dealers were having as hard a time as everyone else when it came to adjusting to the changing world. When paper money became useless, a little baggie of pot that would have sold for twenty bucks would now cost whatever jewelry the buyer was wearing. After they realized jewelry meant as little as money, dealers started trading their drugs for the few things that still had some sort of value: real seafood instead of the food processor’s version, spare batteries instead of the bulky power generators everyone was issued. If you wanted a lifetime supply of coke, it was going to cost you your beachfront property at one of the final settlements. The user, who used to be able to wake up each day to a view of the waves crashing, would relocate to a condo further in town, but they would be too stoned to care.

Katherine was still looking at the blank television screen. “I hate that you always turn the TV off. I feel like we might get left behind if we don’t keep up on the news each night.”

“That wasn’t the news. It was something that gets off on pretending to be the news. Don’t let them scare you.”

Upstairs, Galen was already in his version of sleep. Katherine snuggled closer to her husband. Every day he told her not to worry, and every day he knew she was more concerned than the previous day.

“The guys on TV always say the same thing,” he told her for the hundredth time. “And they’re only on TV at all because they’re good at making everything seem so incredibly urgent.”

Her grip relaxed, but she still stared at the black box with glassy eyes that didn’t really see anything. “How many other families are going to leave before we go too?” she said. “I hate feeling like we’re going to wake up one morning and be the last people here.”

The corner of his shirt was damp from where her face had rested on his shoulder.

“Honey“—he stroked her hair while he spoke—“we aren’t being left behind. The Donaldsons and the Carters are gone, but—“

Her face came back into light when she spoke: “And the Lees, and the McCarthys, and the Sosas.”

In her face, he saw thirty years of memories with her, saw their lives together in the sparkle of her eyes. Tiny wrinkles were starting to appear at the corners of her cheeks where the skin had once been smooth. Her hair had the tiniest hint of grey mixed in with the blonde.

“Look at everyone who’s still here,” he said, “not the people who have left. The Cunninghams are still here. So are the Crenches and the Kramers. If we leave in the middle of the night, we’re no better than anyone else who’s already gone. Wouldn’t you rather go down with the caravan?” Before she had a chance to respond, he added, “We’ll be fine.”

A couple of minutes went by without either of them saying anything. When he looked down again she was asleep. Her eyes were twitching and she gave a light groan as if receiving bad news, but it was sleep nonetheless.

He still remembered the early days, back when Galen was a baby. The news reported on a mother who had drowned her four-year old child in the bathtub. The baby, who had been born before the first signs of the Great De-evolution, had wailed at the hospital like any other normal baby, but then the mother killed it and threw it in the forest. When asked why she did it, she told the police her baby had turned into a Block. No one, especially the police, believed her; she was arrested and sent to prison for the rest of her life. But when the story was told on the evening news, instead of mentioning her mile-long rap sheet, her history of child abuse, they made her sound like an unfairly treated, distraught mother who was trying to cope with her child’s disease. Burglary, drug use, drug dealing, obstructing a police investigation—she had done it all. The only thing that was reported on the news, though, was that a mother said her healthy baby had suddenly become a Block.

Afterwards, there were similar stories every few months, with each one causing another wave of hysteria until people eventually regained their senses. No one wanted to believe bad things could happen to good people: “There must be a mistake! It’s not the end of man, it’s just a sickness!” Others liked blaming the silent masses for their problems even though a silent body, a motionless body, couldn’t do anything to cause anyone any problems at all.

In Australia, a python suffocated a baby. In a crazy world, it made perfect sense that the parents refused to blame the python. Surely, they said, their baby would have cried for help as the monster wrapped itself around the baby’s little body… unless it too had become a Block! People all around the world took their healthy children to the doctor’s office to see if their child might be next.

The population found a way to blame any normal baby’s death on it having turned into a Block. A normal baby was said to have turned into a Block baby right before it died in a house fire. No matter how many scientists said there were no confirmed cases of this, no matter how many autopsies disproved these theories, people went on believing the Blocks were victims of a sickness, a plague, rather than accepting that it was simply the way the world was working. Those dedicated to a life of faith told anyone who would listen: “God wouldn’t create man just to have him go extinct this way. This has to be a mistake. There has to be something we can do!”

Just a year earlier, as Jeffrey ate his cereal next to Galen, a news report had recounted how a teenager was found inside the remains of an imploded convention center in New Orleans. News footage of the implosion showed a single silhouette standing on the sixth floor of the building, doing nothing but staring out the windows in the seconds leading up to the explosions. The news kept saying that the only reason someone would ignore all of the warnings, alarms, and the loud countdown to the detonation was if they had become a Block. Jeffrey had groaned and, as he always did, turned the TV off. But when he went to work that day one of the other officers was asking everyone what kind of chemicals were used in the construction of the convention center that might have caused someone to change from being a normal person to a Block. And how many other buildings had used those same chemicals?

Sliding away from his sleeping wife, he turned and walked down the hall to Galen’s room. His son was in the same position as earlier, the same position he would be in when the morning arrived and Jeffrey and Katherine woke up. His boy’s eyes were open, staring at the blank ceiling in a way that reminded Jeffrey of a dead body, so he leaned over and swiped his fingertips across them so they were closed again. Katherine never failed to chide him for continuing with the pointless motion—it was, after all, only for Jeffrey’s own benefit—but he liked the feeling it gave him, even if it was false, that he could put his son to bed properly.

The boy’s room was as different from Jeffrey’s room when he was Galen’s age as Jeffrey’s room had been from his father’s at the same age. But the changes weren’t because of the times they lived in or the hobbies they enjoyed. Jeffrey’s father had grown up with posters of sports stars on his walls while Jeffrey had posters of popular bands. But Galen had no hobbies. There were no singers he liked more than others. Nor were there any sports trophies or academic ribbons. Katherine had once said that a child’s room without any memories or pictures wasn’t a kid’s room at all. What was it then, a sarcophagus? A day later, Jeffrey called in sick to work and spent the afternoon painting dignified stripes of blues and greens—a place holding life instead of a box waiting for its opposite. On two of the walls, he put up framed pictures of the three of them together. At least his son would have that much.