The Variables (12 page)

“Oh my. No,” she whispered. “I couldn’t.”

“Money doesn’t exist. People don’t exist. That book is worth something only if it means something to you,” Darla said, and she leaned back against the floor and looked up at the dark ceiling and watched the way the candles created a dancing picture show against the wood. She closed her eyes and could still see and feel the fluttering images just beyond her reach. “Keep it safe, because we have a long way to go.”

None of them slept particularly well; each of them tossed and turned, and listened to the steady summer rain beat outside. Darla’s mind kept wandering to her son—she could only pray that he was safe. As much as it pained her, she also prayed that he didn’t miss her too badly. Teddy had attached himself to Ethan in the weeks they had spent together, and she hoped that the two of them found comfort in each other. More than anything she wanted Ethan to tell Teddy that she was coming for him. Ethan may not remember the details surrounding his capture, but he would know, in his heart, that Darla would never abandon Teddy.

Several times throughout the night, she found herself saying out loud, “Hang tight little man. I’m coming for you,” as if her voice could carry on the wind to her son’s ears. Once she had read a story of a son near death who spoke out loud a beautiful goodbye to his mother who was miles away. She woke and heard his words, as clear as if he had been standing right next to her. It was the type of supernatural bullshit that Darla would have laughed at in a different life. Now, she hoped that Teddy could hear her—wished that he would know in his heart that his momma would be there soon.

She tucked herself into a ball and tried to sleep. Deep, fatigue-ending sleep never came.

“Darla?” Ainsley whispered into the night as the candles burned down to their waxy finishes. “Are you awake?”

“Uh-uhmmm,” Darla moaned and shifted to look at Ainsley in the light. Dean snored from in the corner as if to announce that he had been able to doze off with ease.

“Someone else was here,” she said and she shoved over a pile of books. “Look.”

Darla grabbed a book and opened it. Written into the front cover of some book on berry picking, a person had written a pseudo diary along the copyright page.

“Can’t get home,” Darla read. “Hiding at Powell’s. Population dwindling. It would appear the employees closed shop early. Most people done. Few deaths, most cleared. This room felt safest. No way to tell what’s happening outside. Scared.” Then the date and initials: PZ. Darla flipped through the rest of the pages and they were blank. She put the book back down on the floor. “Huh,” she said and closed her eyes again.

“No,” Ainsley said and she pushed another book along the floor. “They wrote more.”

Darla’s shoulders slumped and a headache pounded in the middle of her forehead, but she humored Ainsley and kept reading. The diary entries were uninspired, most short choppy sentences with vague recollections. When the writer, PZ, realized there were active looters he/she stayed away from sight, sleeping in the dark. The person had written an entry for every day, sometimes multiple entries per day, dedicating a single book for each day’s writing. The defaced rare books were scattered around them, open to the title pages with PZ’s writing slanted along the white spaces.

“So, what do you notice?” Ainsley asked when Darla had finished reading the stack.

Darla stared at the pile. She flipped through them each again. Day 1. Day 2. Day 3. Day 4. Day 5. Day 6. And then—Day 7. Day 8.

Day 9 was a manifesto, a laborious rant against isolation and a fervent plea to remember the survivors of the vicious attack. There was a declaration of leaving the Rare Book Room and venturing out, despite not hearing or seeing another living being in several days.

“A day six survivor,” Darla said. She put her hands on top of the books and gave them a thoughtful pat. “Another person made it out alive.”

“Grant, Dean...this person,” Ainsley said. “And that’s just from one little area. There has to be more. Don’cha think?”

Darla nodded. “ I do.”

“Isn’t that amazing!” Ainsley’s face brightened and she pulled back all the books and began reading them again. “I mean...there are others. PZ. Paul. Patty. Peter. Penelope. It could be anybody.”

Rummaging back through the small pile of clothes, Darla found her gun and held it in her right hand; Ainsley saw her but didn’t say anything. She kept the gun against her side. After Ainsley had read the mysterious camper’s rambling and defacing notes again, she ran her hand under her nose, and that was when Darla noticed she was crying.

“Please don’t cry,” Darla said.

“You can’t tell me not to cry,” Ainsley replied and she leaned her head back against the bookshelf, holding the Walt Whitman to her chest like a shield.

“Fine. Cry. You’re right,” Darla replied and she turned away.

“Sometimes...” Ainsley started and she sniffed, “I don’t like you very much.” Then she covered her face with Whitman.

Darla watched as Ainsley sat there unmoving, her face covered, waiting for Darla to yell at her, or crawl over and make it all better—she wasn’t sure which response Ainsley was expecting. “Read me something out of your book,” Darla said finally.

Ainsley didn’t pull the book away from her body. “You want me to read you Walt Whitman?”

“Yup,” Darla tugged the sweatshirt up around her chin and straightened out against the floor to get more comfortable. “Make it good.”

She lowered the book and opened it carefully to a random page. “
As the time draws nigh glooming a cloud, a dread beyond of I know not what darkens me. I shall go forth, I shall traverse the States awhile, but I cannot tell whither or how long...
” she stopped. Flipped the page and then flipped back again.

“Keep going,” Darla said.

Ainsley read, “
Perhaps soon some day or night while I am singing my voice will suddenly cease. O book, o chants, must all then amount to but this? Must we barely arrive at this beginning of us? And yet it is enough, o soul; o soul, we have positively appeared—that is enough.
”

The candles flickered and the rain pattered. Ainsley closed the book and held it tight.

“I always hated Walt Whitman,” Darla said.

“You asked me to read it.”

“I hate anyone that people tell me I am required to like. It’s a character flaw.”

Ainsley snorted. When Darla shot her a glare, she lowered her head, still smirking. “Darla admits her flaws. It’s almost charming.”

“No,” Darla said, sitting up halfway and propping herself up on her elbows. “You buy that shit? That it doesn’t matter what the journey is or how dark and awful the world seems, because we’re all going to die, and, then he says, it’s okay. Because it was worth it just to have been born?”

Ainsley shrugged. She opened the book up and scanned the lines again. “I was a nursing student. Science and medicine are my thing. Whitman and I aren’t intimately connected. I couldn’t tell you what he means.”

“I can. And I don’t buy it,” Darla said and she slid back down to the floor where she could feel the hardness of the gun next to her body. “Read me more.”

Without bothering to argue, Ainsley resumed the reading of
Leaves of Grass
by candlelight until Darla was fast asleep.

CHAPTER SIX

“Was this planned?” Lucy asked her father as the beeping rang through the hallway. The Announcement Alarm lights flickered as the King family made their way en masse up the elevator and through the hoards of gatherers and into the Center. Whenever the beeping interrupted their day, the System’s occupants began the slow trek to their meeting place to see what Huck had to tell them. The Center had been transformed from the carnival a few days earlier, and it was set up like the first gathering Lucy had attended with Cass.

“Yes,” Scott answered in a terse reply. “It’s a planned meeting.”

“Is it about getting out of this place?” Galen asked, sidling up beside his father. Someone nudged him from behind on his way through and Galen stumbled. He shot a look upward, but the offender had already passed.

“Come on, stay close,” Maxine commanded. She held Teddy on her hip—he was covering his ears with his hands and closing his eyes tight. Harper trotted alongside, and Maxine kept putting her hand on her youngest daughter’s head to steer her in the direction of the crowd. “Head to the place on the right. With our pod. Come on, keep moving.” Monroe and Malcolm tried to duck between other congregants and found themselves at an impasse behind the metal doors. Maxine snapped her fingers and the twins slunk back to the family. “I said, stay close,” she reiterated.

From down the hall, Lucy spotted Grant making his way through the crowd. He waved at her and she motioned for him to join her. He nodded and disappeared. While they were technically supposed to sit by pod, Huck had stopped enforcing it—the trapped survivors divided themselves into distinct groups on their own, splintering into cliques.

After his stint as a prisoner and guinea pig ended, Grant had been given a shared room halfway across the System from the King residence. Propelled into roommate life, he now shared living space with Todd, a computer prodigy from Texas, and Dylan, one of the System’s guards—recruited secretly from his military school with a promise of life-changing opportunities and upward mobility in the Elektos army.

Grant never had anything negative to say about the guys. He called them his “System Brothers” and often arranged to meet them for pick-up basketball games. It was endearing how much Grant wanted to show that he was trying to fit in. Late at night, Lucy and Grant found themselves discussing how they wanted to handle life underground. She refused to see how Huck’s leadership could be accepted so blindly, but Grant didn’t want to draw attention to himself by looking ungrateful for a second shot at life. She understood his need to transition from inmate to approachable System resident. While she knew it was calculated, she also knew that Grant could find fun and friends anywhere.
 

Lucy watched as Grant made his way closer, wearing a big smile every time his face popped up in the ambling crowd. Her family turned from the hall into the Center, and Lucy’s attention was drawn away from Grant and into the room.
 

Set up in front was a temporary stage and a white screen had been erected with a video playing on a loop. As the rest of the System’s population entered, they were naturally glued to the images: computer generated buildings, architectural designs, a white soaring tower with a helipad, and an open center looking down into beautiful green foliage. Surrounding the initial tower, there were walkways leading to smaller buildings. Glass ceilings peered into shopping centers. Through the art of computer animation, the video swooped through the ceiling and into hallways lined with artisan shops, manned by silhouettes.

Outside, the incessant beeping continued to call the System drones forward. Inside, a soft melody played as the soundtrack to the film.

“The Islands?” Lucy asked her dad, and he nodded a curt, single nod.

The Islands were not actual islands, as Lucy had imagined. Instead, they were floating cities. The images played again on a loop. Their future home was presented with a slideshow of enticing pictures, and for a moment, Lucy felt herself being pulled toward the excitement and beauty. They would no longer be shut up tight under the earth; the unavoidable dark sterility of their underground home could soon be a distant memory.

“They’re not what I pictured,” Lucy said to herself. Her father glanced down and acknowledged the comment, but his face was blank, studious, and altogether tense. He picked at his cuticles as they walked, his tell that he was mentally occupied and stressed. “Dad?”

“They
are
remarkable,” he replied, but he didn’t look at her. Scott’s face scanned the people in the room, his mouth taut. When he spied Huck, Gordy, and Claude taking their places at the podium, he closed his eyes for a second and took a deep breath.
 

Grant slipped into their row and worked his way around Galen, Monroe, and Malcolm and took his seat next to Lucy. He leaned in and kissed her on the cheek, and she smiled.

“This is exciting,” Grant said. He reached out to hold Lucy’s hand and gave it a squeeze. “Act three begins.”

“They’re pretty, but—” Lucy started, but her father turned sharply and waited for her to finish, so she let the sentence go, shaking her head. “Stuck in a cave or stuck out at sea,” she then said, under her breath.
 

Lucy turned as she heard Cass’s voice materialize behind her. “Eskize mwen. Pardon, pardon,” her friend said, slipping between French and Creole effortlessly, as she slid past those already seated and took the chair directly behind Lucy. Once settled, she leaned forward and put her hand on top of Lucy’s head. “Good morning, dear ones.”

“The unveiling of your dad’s crowning achievement. Excited?” Lucy asked. Her father bristled beside her. She took umbrage with his prickliness.

Cass laughed and shook her head. “Excited? No. I am not excited about the presentation. This will be nothing compared to when everyone sees them in person the first time. But his shirt looks nice. I picked it out myself.”

Lucy watched as Cass’s eyes scrutinized the slideshow. Then she looked intently over Lucy’s shoulder, distracted from the good-natured greeting a moment before. When she turned to see what Cass was staring at, she could hear her mother’s voice in a cold monotone. Standing before the King family was Blair—dressed in a short skirt, a billowy blouse, and a headband with a peacock feather—she leaned in over some of the other System residents and was smiling at Teddy, who had buried his face into Maxine’s shoulder.

“He’s shy,” Maxine said. “He’s been through a huge ordeal. And the noise is scaring him.” Teddy shivered against Maxine and looked on the verge of tears; he held her around the neck and didn’t turn to make eye contact with the woman itching for his attention.

Blair slid in further to the row. “I’ve watched him play in the Center with the boys. I just wanted to say hello.”

“Another time, Blair,” Maxine said.