Scared, I whisper, “What isn’t?”
She steps over to the monitor and starts punching in commands.
“It’s a program we found on a laptop that belonged to one of the infested,” Dr. Pam explains. Before I can ask what the hell an infested is, she rolls on: “We’re not sure what the infesteds had been using it for, but we know it’s perfectly safe. Its code name is Wonderland.”
“What’s it do?” I ask. I’m not sure what she’s telling me, but it sounds like she’s telling me that the aliens had somehow infiltrated Wright-Patterson and hacked into its computer systems. I can’t get the word infested out of my head. Or the bloody face of the soldier bursting into my tent. They’re inside us.
“It’s a mapping program,” she answers. Which really isn’t an answer.
“What does it map?”
She looks at me for one long, uncomfortable moment, as if she’s deciding whether to tell the truth. “It maps you. Close your eyes, big, deep breath. Counting down from three…two…one…”
And the universe implodes.
Suddenly I’m there, three years old, holding on to the sides of my crib, jumping up and down and screaming like someone’s murdering me. I’m not remembering that day; I’m experiencing it.
Now I’m six, swinging my plastic baseball bat. The one I loved; the one I forgot I had.
Ten now, riding home from the pet store with a bag of goldfish in my lap and debating names with my mom. She’s wearing a bright yellow dress.
Thirteen, it’s a Friday night, I’m playing pee-wee football, and the crowd is cheering. Going deep.
The reel begins to slow. I feel like I’m drowning—drowning in the dream of my life. My legs kick helplessly against the restraints, strapped in tight, running.
Running.
First kiss. Her name is Lacey. My ninth-grade algebra teacher and her horrible handwriting. Getting my driver’s license. Everything there, no blank spaces, all of it pouring out of me while I’m pouring into Wonderland.
All of it.
Green blob in the night sky.
Holding the boards while Dad nails them over the living room windows. The sound of gunfire down the street, glass shattering, people screaming. And the hammer falling: bam, bam, BAM.
“Blow out the candles”: Mom’s hysterical whisper. “Can’t you hear them? They’re coming!”
And my father, calmly, in the pitch black: “If anything happens to me, take care of your mother and baby sister.”
I’m in free fall. Terminal velocity. There’s no escaping it. I won’t just remember that night. I’ll live it all over again.
It has chased me all the way to Tent City. The thing I ran from, that I’m still running from, the thing that’s never let me go.
What I reach for. What I run from.
Take care of your mother. Take care of your baby sister.
The front door crashes open. Dad fires point-blank into the chest of the first intruder. The guy must be high on something, because he just keeps coming. I see a sawed-off shotgun in my father’s face, and that’s the last I see of my father’s face.
The room fills with shadows, and one of the shadows is my mother, and then more shadows and hoarse shouts and I’m tearing up the stairs cradling Sissy in my arms, realizing too late I’m running toward a dead end.
A hand catches my shirt and flings me backward, and I tumble back down the stairs, shielding Sissy with my body, smacking down headfirst at the bottom.
Then shadows, huge shadows, and a swarm of fingers, pulling her out of my arms. And Sissy, screaming, Bubby, Bubby, Bubby, Bubby!
I reach for her in the dark. My fingers hook on the locket around her neck and tear the silver chain free.
Then, like the day the lights blinked out forever, my sister’s voice abruptly dies.
Then the punks are on me. Three of them, jacked up on dope or desperate to find some, kicking, punching, a furious rain of blows into my back, my stomach, and as I bring up my hands to shield my face, I see the silhouette of Dad’s hammer rising over my head.
It whistles down. I roll away. The head of the hammer grazes my temple, its momentum carrying it right into the guy’s shin. He falls to his knees with an agonized howl.
On my feet now, running down the hall to the kitchen, and the thunder of footsteps as they come after me.
Take care of your baby sister.
Tripping on something in the backyard, probably the garden hose or one of Sissy’s stupid toys. Falling face-first in the wet grass under a star-stuffed sky, and the glowing green orb, the circling Eye, coldly staring down at me, the one with the silver locket clutched in his bleeding hand, the one who lived, the one who did not go back, the one who ran.
I’VE FALLEN SO DEEP, nothing can reach me. For the first time in weeks, I feel numb. I don’t even feel like me. There’s no place where I end and the nothingness begins.
Her voice comes into the darkness, and I grab on to it, a lifeline to pull me out of the bottomless well.
“It’s over. It’s all right. It’s over…”
I break the surface into the real world, gasping for air, crying uncontrollably like a complete pansy, and I’m thinking, You’re wrong, Doc. It’s never over. It just goes on and on and on. Her face swims into view, and my arm jerks against the restraint as I try to grab her. She needs to make this stop.
“What the hell was that?” I ask in a croaky whisper. My throat is burning, my mouth dry. I feel like I weigh about five pounds, like all the flesh has been torn from my bones. And I thought the plague was bad!
“It’s a way for us to see inside you, to look at what’s really going on,” she says gently. She runs her hand over my forehead. The gesture reminds me of my mother, which reminds me of losing my mother in the dark, of running from her in the night, which reminds me I shouldn’t be strapped down in this white chair. I should be with them. I should have stayed and faced what they faced. Take care of your little sister.
“That’s my next question,” I say, fighting to stay focused. “What’s going on?”
“They’re inside us,” she answers. “We were attacked from the inside, by infected personnel who’d been embedded in the military.”
She gives me a few minutes to process this while she wipes the tears from my face with a cool, moist cloth. It’s maddening, how motherly she is, and the soothing coolness of the cloth, a pleasant torture.
She sets aside the cloth and looks deeply into my eyes. “Using the ratio of infected to clean here at the base, we estimate that one out of every three surviving human beings on Earth is one of them.”
She loosens the straps. I’m insubstantial as a cloud, light as a balloon. When the final strap comes free, I expect to fly out of the chair and smack the ceiling.
“Would you like to see one?” she asks.
Holding out her hand.
SHE WHEELS ME down a hallway to an elevator. It’s a one-way express that carries us several hundred feet below the surface. The doors open into a long corridor with white cinder-block walls. Dr. Pam tells me we’re in the bomb shelter complex that’s nearly as large as the base above us, built to withstand a fifty-megaton nuclear blast. I tell her I’m feeling safer already. She laughs like she thinks that’s very funny. I’m rolling past side tunnels and unmarked doors and, though the floor is level, I feel as if I’m being taken to the very bottom of the world, to the hole where the devil sits. There are soldiers hurrying up and down the corridor; they avert their eyes and stop talking as I’m wheeled past them.