WhiteSpace: Season One (Episodes 1-6 of the sci-fi horror serial) (47 page)

But that wasn’t why he felt he should go.
 

He had to go to the meeting because the hush inside him was screaming.
 

Something weird was happening on the island, and the survivors group might be a great place to see more of the pieces, maybe even fit a few of them together.
 

Milo scribbled a note to his dad, then went to the garage, grabbed his bike, and pedaled furiously toward the meeting, racing the dark clouds gathering overhead.

**

Milo locked his bike on the rack just outside the school auditorium, then zipped up his hoodie, climbed the stairs, and entered the dimly lit auditorium, with seating left for around 460 or so of the 500 people the room could hold.

A few chairs were scattered across the stage, without shape or pattern. Most of the attendees were sitting in the first few front rows, though there were others dotted across the theater, as well. Milo took a seat in the second to last row, pulling his hood over his head, as if it would make him invisible in the dark room.

Milo listened as survivors took the stage, and considered the difference between the general anonymity of LiveLyfe and the world in front of him, filled with red eyes and sad faces.
 

Milo wasn’t exactly sure what he expected a survivor’s group to be like, but he did think he’d see some of the students from the recent shooting. But none of these survivors were telling tales about Mr. Heller, or Hamilton K-12, despite the location.
 

The last thing Milo thought was that he’d be the youngest person in the room by at least a decade.

The moderator, a rail-thin woman with a fat braid of silvery white hair, thanked Jenna — the tiny blond mom with the missing husband — for sharing. She reminded the room that the group was “a place to share and connect with others going through similar struggles,” then told her story, like Milo was sure she must have done to open each meeting.

The silver braid was named Connie Fawcett. Connie never had children when she was younger, and thought she couldn’t. She was even more surprised than her husband Tom when the blue line lit the white plastic just three weeks after her 42nd birthday. She about had a heart attack. Tom did. Though it took him another four years to have it. He died at 59, just a few months shy of retirement from Lab E at Conway, where he worked most of the past three decades.
 

Connie raised her son, Nathan, as if the moon would dim if he wasn’t smiling. At least for the first seventeen years, until Nathan vanished into thin air.
 

Others were vanishing, too. So Connie went to the police, but they didn’t care. No one did.
 

The police said they were runaways. All of them.
 

Words from the stage echoed the pamphlet in his hand. Milo slowly turned the narrow glossy pages, moving his eyes from the type to the stage and back.
 

Connie lost her son five years ago, then started the survivors group three years into her grief because she recognized the need for a single harbor to dock the island’s collective grief.
 

Connie cleared her throat. “We’ve extended the meeting to survivors and family members of the Hamilton K-12 Shooting. Everyone deserves a place to connect and bond with others suffering through a similar loss.”

She looked down, probably remembering her Nathan, then invited Suzanne Hawthorne up onto the stage. As Suzanne curled her hands around the front of the podium, slowly breathing her way into an introduction, a short man with thinning hair slipped into Milo’s row and sat six seats away.
 

Like the place isn’t big enough?

Suzanne Hawthorne, ninth grade algebra teacher at Hamilton, told the room about how she saw Mr. Heller a few days before the shooting, and
knew
something was wrong. She blamed herself, since she knew deep inside, right at that moment, that something was off. Really off. Instead of doing something, she simply ignored it. The format was AA, not Q&A, so it took Mrs. Hawthorne a while to say why. When she did, Milo felt a frost inside his veins.
 

She went into Heller’s room, to ask if he happened to know if the Williams brothers were sick, since both boys seemed to have been sporadically absent throughout the week. Heller’s head never budged. He just stared at the TV, the screen full of snow, his eyes wide and jaw swinging low, like he was watching live footage of the end of the world.
 

She called three times: “Mr. Heller, Mr. Heller,
Roger
,” but it was if he was in a trance.

In a trance!

Mrs. Hawthorne shook it off and figured he must be exhausted. Since the theory matched the red in his eyes, she left. He probably just wanted to be alone, anyway. Ignoring the stir in her gut, she went back to algebra, and didn’t think about Mr. Heller’s red eyes or swinging jaw again, at least until she heard the first gunshot, and found Jimmy Marlowe running through the hallway a half-minute later yelling, “Mr. Heller has a gun!”

Milo kept hearing her words, “he was in a trance.” Each time, he pictured Beatrice, dazed and staring ahead without blinking, then shoving cold cuts into her handbag a minute later.
 

The guy six seats from Milo seemed to be studying his reaction to every story. Milo kept his face straight, and expression fixed. He barely moved except for the occasional itch he had to scratch beneath his bandages.

The man was in his late 30’s early 40’s, slight and with glasses. Hardly threatening, and certainly not scary. Still, Milo couldn’t ignore the scrutiny, or the creep in his glare.
 

Mrs. Hawthorne’s confession about Mr. Heller gave Mrs. Dalquist the confidence to say she saw almost the same exact thing. Except her words rang with a hollow thud. Milo could tell from the room’s expression — she was a regular leach and no one believed a word that she said.
 

Milo didn’t think that was true about Sam, a man who had lost his brother three years before. He saw something similar, though different. His brother was playing the same playlist on his iPod repeatedly, over and over, and over. His brother was usually a monkey, always swinging from tree to tree; repetition his foe. That was why he’d been married four times, after all.
 

He didn’t listen to playlists, especially when they were two songs long.
 

The thing that bothered Sam most, he confessed with a shake of his head, was that he couldn’t for the life of him remember what either of the two songs were.
 

Milo wanted to stand up, walk to the front, and tell the room about Beatrice, but he was having a hard time working up the courage. He was about to raise his hand when the guy six seats down whispered, “Don’t say a word.”

Milo bristled.
 

The man stood, crossed four chairs, then sat two seats from Milo.

“It’s Cody,” he whispered. “Don’t say a word right now, not to these people. We’ll talk when this is over.”

And here he is, without his tinfoil hat.

The rest of the sharing took a million years, with no new revelations and the stories mostly sad. “Cody” slipped from the auditorium as the last speaker stepped to the stage.
 

Milo went outside and saw Cody standing by the bike rack.
 

He looked up at the sky, hating the island for its dark clouds, chilly breeze, and the distant thunder forever rumbling the distance.

“So you always look for grieving kids to talk to in chat rooms?” Milo said. “You some kinda pervert?”

Cody ignored him, looking into the shadows as though hunting the dark, and rubbing his arms like they were covered in ants.
 

“I’m sorry about that,” he said. “But I had to talk to you, or someone like you, and couldn’t exactly use my real name.”

“Why not?” Milo said.

“Because I like breathing.” He leaned into Milo. “Look, I meant what I said the other day, before your accident with Other Mother.”

Milo’s eyes widened at the words other and mother, used together and with an implied capital. “How did you know I called her that?”
 

“I know a lot,” Cody said. “A shit ton more than I want to.” He swallowed. “More than you want to.”
 

Milo said, “I want to go home. So unless you’re about to enlighten me with something concrete, I’d rather you leave me alone.”

Cody said, “Understood.” Then, “My name’s not Cody. It’s Don Bellows. Like a lot of the folks in there,” he jerked his thumb toward the auditorium. “My loved ones disappeared under mysterious circumstances.”

“What happened?” Milo said.

“Most of the disappearances are a person at a time. My entirely family disappeared. Gone, overnight. My wife, Lucinda, and our twins, Mark and Ryan.”

“Fraternal or identical?” Milo asked, as if it mattered.

Don looked up from his sleeve. “Identical.” He cleared his throat. “Anyway, they all went missing three years ago, and nothing made sense. No bodies, no ferry rides — they have a camera 24 hours, you know — nothing. So I started investigating all the weird shit on the island. And there’s plenty.” He shook his head. “I still can’t believe all of the layers in this onion.”

Milo was willing to buy into conspiracy but Milo’s patience was paper thin, and the guy was giving off some weird stalker vibes. Milo glanced around, suddenly aware that nobody else had left the auditorium yet. If Don wanted, he could easily pull a knife or gun on Milo.

Don was too busy scratching at his arm beneath his jacket, however, to make Milo too concerned.

He looked at Don’s arm. “You okay?”

Don stopped scratching, then looked at Milo and said, “Sorry, one of the symptoms.”

“Symptoms of what?”
 

“Well,” he shook his head. “It’s something like Morgellon’s, I imagine, though I don’t know that for sure. And if it is, it’s only like Morgellon’s in
some
ways. It’s also altogether different.” Don went back to scratching, like he couldn’t help it. “These . . . things in my skin. It’s the stuff they put in us.”

Something about the way Don was speaking reminded Milo of Beatrice staring at the snowy TV, and all the many weird ripened stories he’d just heard in the Hamilton auditorium.
 

Milo wasn’t strong enough to stand up to the power of suggestion, so he started dragging his nails across his own arms, too. “What are you talking about? What’s Morgellon’s?” he said.

“You’ve got it, too? The itching?”

Milo shook his head. “It’s nothing. Probably just itching from the healing wounds.”

Don lifted his shirt and jacket, displaying a long line of red welts dotting the length of his arm; armies of scars where his torn skin had healed over.

Milo’s stomach flopped like a fish.
 

Above them, clouds parted and returned their wet to the ocean floor.
 

“
They’re
doing this to us,” Don said. “Everything is connected.” He looked up as the first of the exiting survivors opened the door to the auditorium and began to flow out.

Milo was done. “You’re not saying anything,” he said. “And I’m not willing to stick around to get drenched and jerked around.”

“Research for yourself,” Don said, handing Milo a flash drive. “There’s some docs on here to get you started. And some advice on how to do research undetected, well relatively undetected. And whatever you do, don’t tell anyone what you find.”

“Do you think I’m still in danger?” Milo asked, not really sure he was buying what Don was selling just yet, but too curious not to ask.

“Not at the moment. If they wanted you gone, you wouldn’t have come out of the hospital.”

People began to walk past them, on the way to the parking lot.

“I should go,” Don said. “I’ll be in touch.”

Don walked toward the parking lot. Milo unlocked his bike, watched the people filing out, though making sure not to make eye contact with anyone who might recognize him. As Milo began to ride home, he noticed that Don had kept walking, through the parking lot, and into the woods beyond.

Where the hell is he going?

 
Milo wasn’t about to follow. Instead, he biked home — scared, alone, and itching like crazy as the sky began to open up.

* * * *

CHAPTER 8 — Jon Conway

Wednesday night…
 

The four of them sat around the small circular table in Cassidy’s kitchen, while Cassidy tried not to look embarrassed about the size or shape of her miniature house. Jon could see her stealing glances at the peeling paint, probably thinking that her square footage was probably less than Jon’s smallest guest bathroom in his L.A. villa.
 

Jon’s smallest guest bathroom was about the size of a small closet, and he could have given a giant squishy shit about the size of Cassidy’s house. He was happy to be sharing a meal with the Hughes family, even if it was forever missing a vital member.