Flowertown (11 page)

“I didn’t catch it,” she said. She hoped she sounded casual. “I didn’t pay attention.”

She didn’t know what the message meant or if it was even just a badly timed joke, but until she had a chance to talk it over with Bing, Ellie was keeping the story to herself. If Olivia was actually trying to help her in some way, the last thing she wanted to do was tip off Feno.

Guy rubbed his eyes again. “Did you get a text telling you about your appointment?”

“No, Guy, they shot a flaming arrow into my room last night—”

“Goddamn it, Ellie!” He pounded his fists on the desk, bouncing the laptop onto the file. “You’re in a lot of trouble,
don’t you get that? You’re lying to a security officer about your whereabouts during a terrorist attack.”

“I’m not lying!”

“It’s Tuesday, Ellie. You are a QOL patient.” He gripped the edges of the table as if he were going to flip it. “The med center doesn’t take quality of life patients on Tuesday. The QOL center is closed for administrative maintenance. Every Tuesday. Every single Tuesday. If you had been at the med center for a QOL blood test, you would have been standing outside a locked room.” He took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Now, do you want to change your story about where you were when that bomb went off?”

Rage evaporated from her body. Ellie slumped down in the chair, her jaw slack, her breaths coming in shallow rasps. She wanted to answer; she wanted to tell Guy the truth. She had been at the med center. She had seen the message on the tape; she could picture Olivia as clearly as she could see Guy sitting before her. A confusion washed over that she hadn’t experienced since those early days of contamination, and part of her wondered if she was simply remembering a scene from those horrible months in East Fifth’s lockdown. She’d been talking about it with Guy, hadn’t she? Maybe she was just mixing up her memories. But she wasn’t. She knew it. She knew she couldn’t hide from the truth even if nobody else could see it.

Ellie bent forward in the chair, pressing her fingers against her eyelids until she saw stars. She could hear the words of the counselors from years ago instructing her in the deep-breathing techniques they wanted her to use to control her violent temper. She pulled in one breath, then another, and on the third she straightened up and faced Guy, her whole body trembling.

“I had a med check.”

Guy shook his head and took a moment before speaking. “Do you still have the appointment text on your phone?”

“Yes.” Hope flared up for a second as she reached into her pocket, then burned out with sickening speed. She could hardly say the words. “I lost my phone.”

“You lost your phone.”

She could hear the accusation in his voice. Ellie, like most residents of the modern world, rarely went anywhere without her phone. And as a QOL patient, Guy knew her medical reminders were sent via text. She would not have lost her phone. He stared at her and she could feel herself shrinking under his gaze. When he spoke, his voice was soft.

“We can run a trace on your phone’s GPS. We will find it, and when we do, we’re going to check to see if there is any record of a med check appointment. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

Ellie nodded, unable to speak, unable to swallow. She knew if they found her phone, they would find the text message confirming her med check. It would clear her name. What made her hands go cold, what made the pit of her stomach twist in a painful knot, was that she wasn’t sure where her phone was. She had dropped it when she had seen the message written on her bandage, so the phone was one of two places. Either it was on the street in front of the med center, further strengthening her defense, or it had fallen into the bag with the oyster crackers and the stolen Feno files that was now hidden in a runoff drain less than thirty feet from the explosion site.

The guards locked her in a small classroom. “Aren’t you afraid I’m going to steal the chalk?” She banged on the door they locked behind them, then turned back to the overly lit room. On one wall hung a large, detailed map of Flowertown, marked with Feno logos and notations. Ellie rubbed her wrists, which were bruising from being pulled by the guards.

“You are here.” She read aloud the words on the arrow pointing to a highlighted area on the map at the south end of Flowertown, the Feno personnel compound. “Yes, I am. And I am fucked.”

Guy had called the guards in to take her away when she had refused to say anything else. It wasn’t like she could incriminate herself. The Fifth Amendment was the least of Feno’s concerns. There was simply nothing else to say. Above her head, the air-conditioning vent opened and a blast of cold air blew down over her skin. She could smell the chemical filter and stepped away from the draft, deciding the smell of her own fear-sweat was preferable.

Bolted high on the wall, a flat-screen TV was on, the audio muted. Ellie stared at the images flashing before her, hoping they would drag her mind out of the vortex of anxiety. Silent and slack-jawed, Ellie stood and watched a young woman bury her face in a fluffy towel and inhale ecstatically over the scent of her fabric softener. Without thinking, Ellie fingered the hem of her filthy Cheap Trick T-shirt, feeling the crust of some old food stain. Maybe it was the chili she had used to torment Cooper. Horror threatened to wash over her, so she clamped her teeth together and shut her eyes hard enough to see bolts of blue light. One, two, three breaths and she opened her eyes once more, emptying her mind.

Children lined up to get onto a school bus, clean and laughing. Ellie watched scene after scene flash of swimming pools and baseball fields, cutting in with shots of mothers holding their children and fathers frowning with loving concern. It was a well-made ad, Ellie knew from her days designing advertising campaigns. The people were attractive and real, the lighting soft and inviting. She didn’t know what they were selling, but she imagined people bought it. The camera shot closed in on a wide-eyed child clinging to his mother’s leg, then the screen went to gray with soft white letters: “It’s your job to protect them. It’s our job to give you the tools. EcciVac, pediatric vaccines.” Half a second before the commercial ended, the Barlay Pharma logo glowed from the bottom of the screen. Ellie turned her back.

There wasn’t much in the room, just some long tables, uncomfortable chairs, and some display tools. It obviously didn’t take much equipment to indoctrinate the Feno staff. People willing to risk contamination for a paycheck were
probably on board for just about anything. A dented gray file cabinet leaned against the wall and Ellie couldn’t help herself. She pulled open a drawer and shouted to the guards she assumed were posted outside.

“I’m touching your stuff!”

Nobody came charging through the door. The drawers held nothing but blank requisition forms, maps of Flowertown, and other useless generic forms. Ellie slammed the drawer shut and turned to the bank of windows. They were double-paned and well sealed. She figured, paycheck be damned, nobody at Feno yearned for what passed for fresh air around here. Ellie pressed her forehead to the glass and looked out over the fog of her breath.

She couldn’t remember ever being this close to the barrier zone. In all the years she had been here, and she’d been here since the beginning, it had never occurred to her to come to the barrier. Of course, Feno and the army preferred it that way. Those who came close to the security perimeter tended to get a lot of guns trained on them very quickly. Here she stood now, though, less than fifteen feet from the first line of chain-link fencing that separated the compound from the void beyond.

The fence had to be twelve feet high, not including the enormous roll of razor wire that decorated the top for another three or four feet. She peered to both sides but couldn’t see any gates along this length of fencing. Beyond the fence for several yards was a lane of large, sharp gravel, and past that another tall razor fence. Ellie knew that beneath the gravel lay the largest of the drainage pipes and runoff culverts. It was essentially a service alley. Beyond that, however, was the actual barrier zone proper. Ellie wasn’t
sure she believed in hell, but as she stared over the burned ground, she imagined if it existed it would look a lot like this.

The ground was charcoal gray, almost like asphalt but with less firmness. Nothing grew in it; nothing broke from its dull surface. And from where she stood, nothing limited its vast expanse. Bing had told her the ring stretched for as far as three miles in some directions, sometimes narrowing down to a mile, depending on the terrain. She knew she could refer to the map on the wall to see if this was a wide stretch of the ribbon, but one mile or three, it was far enough that Ellie could not see what lay beyond it. All she could see was death, or at least the absence of life.

A tamping drone rolled slowly into her line of vision, far out in the barrier zone. Like a short, fat steamroller, the machine rolled along its programmed course. Ellie had seen the reports on the tamping drones when she had been too sick to get out of her cot, during the first round of maintenance medications that had nearly killed her. It’s funny, she thought, that she would remember what they were called after all this time. Nobody ever talked about them; she couldn’t remember ever seeing one in real life, but she remembered what she had learned when she had been too sick to get up and shut off the television. She knew it was the kind of thing Bing would have been able to draw from memory, complete with schematics and specs. All she knew were the basics.

The tamping drones never stopped. The machines were in constant rotation throughout the barrier zone around Flowertown. The front of the machine carried a tank of powerful herbicides and pesticides that it blew out in a fine,
low mist. The back of the machine consisted of an enormous steel barrel that rolled over the moisture, packing the ground down hard, ensuring no dust could rise and get picked up by an errant breeze. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for almost seven years, the tamping drones rolled their prescribed acreage, ensuring a lethal barrier between Flowertown and the rest of the world. She wondered if anyone on the other side of the barrier could ever smell the chemicals and stenches of the spill zone. Probably not. She doubted anyone could or would live close enough.

Ellie pressed her face against the glass, smashing her nose and lips painfully into the smooth surface. What did it matter if she got arrested for the bomb? What were they going to do? Kill her? She was already as good as dead. Her liver had failed her. She would never get out of Flowertown; she doubted any of them ever would. All she had was a shitty room in a shitty building where she banged a shitty guy who ratted her out to his shitty bosses. She had shit clothes, shit food, a shit job, and decent weed. Ellie ground her face into the glass, hearing the squeak of friction. She jammed her hands hard into her pockets to keep from punching them through the glass, and when her fingers hit something hard, her sob would not be held in.

Rachel’s tooth. After all this she still had Rachel’s tooth in her pocket. Ellie gripped the sharp white tooth, feeling her tears and her harsh breaths heating up the glass beneath her skin. She didn’t have much, she had almost nothing, but she wanted it. It was hers. She had a right to it. She had a right to her shitty clothes and her dirty mirror and the nasty filth in the little refrigerator she shared with that sweet, stupid
country girl who still believed she was going to survive her detox and finally get to see Las Vegas. She had a right to get high with Bing and stare at his ugly white socks when he sprawled out under his coffee table and yelled at her for not caring about his crazy conspiracies. She had a right to eat shitty chili and not read the newspaper and smoke cigarettes with Big Martha.

“Agh.” No other sound would come out as she pushed off the glass and turned her back to the void. “Agh!” She grunted louder, trying to close her eyes and take her breaths, but her body and mind would not cooperate. Instead she kicked out before her, high and hard, and sent the nearest table skittering across the room. That felt a hell of a lot better than deep breaths, so she kicked again, this time a chair, then another, then a third. She was clearing quite a space for herself, kicking and grunting and breathing only when whatever she kicked clattered and fell. If kicking felt good, throwing felt even better, and Ellie found she could toss the cheap plastic chairs hard enough to make a satisfying crash against the walls. She didn’t just throw them, she swung them up over her head and hurled them, sometimes sideways, sometimes straight on, but always hard enough to make enough noise to let her breathe.

She had to climb over a toppled table to free the closest chair. Her hands were slick from the sweat pouring down her arms, but she knew her grip would hold. She didn’t care if the guards shot her; all she wanted to do was throw and smash and scream. She hoisted the chair over her head and decided the television was far too smug on its little wall-mounted stand and she took aim. And she stopped.

Unrest in PennCo Containment Area
. The words crawled across the screen over the heads of two somber newscasters. Behind them, the image of dark clouds of smoke rising in the distance played in an inset screen. Ellie had to squint to read the scrawl.

Four confirmed explosions in last forty-eight hours, two dozen confirmed dead, death toll expected to rise, stay tuned to this channel for live coverage of press conference with General Admont of U.S. Army PennCo Special Command. President expected to make statement. Authorities insist containment “secure.”

“Two dozen dead?” Ellie asked the television. “There weren’t two dozen dead. There weren’t.” She dropped the chair behind her and ran to the set, trying to find a volume button to hear what the reporters were saying. On the screen a young man in a windbreaker stood against a chain-link fence, an army truck to his left, and gestured into the space behind him. There was nothing to see, only the expanse of the barrier zone, but from his gestures it looked like he was describing the plume of smoke that had been witnessed.

“That’s not what happened!” Ellie banged against the bottom of the set, looking for a button that wasn’t there. “That’s not right! That’s not what happened!” Desperate to hear the story, she looked around the toppled tables and chairs for a remote that would adjust the volume. She found one. It lay in pieces underneath the second table she had kicked over. Ellie swore again and went back to watching the television, holding the bottom of the set as if it would get the reporter’s attention and she could tell her story.

The reporter vanished as the cameras cut back to one of the newscasters, who had been joined by an elderly man with an ugly bowtie and long eyebrows. Between them hovered a
map of the United States on what looked like some sort of space-age bulletin board. The newscaster seemed pleased with the high-tech toy, touching and pointing to it, lighting up sections of the map with every move. The old man nodded and put his finger on Iowa, lighting up a small area in bright red that Ellie knew all too well to be Flowertown.

Ellie swore again and again. Did America really need a map to remind them where the disaster had occurred? Had they already forgotten the corner of hell that had popped up in the middle of their safe little world? She was ready again to smash the screen in when the graphic changed. Instead of just one small red dot where Penn County was, a dozen pinpricks of red appeared scattered throughout the middle of the country. Ellie dropped her arms and stared as the old man pointed to several of the dots and spoke with short bursts of hand movements. He was angry; periodically he looked into the camera. Whatever he was telling America, he intended it to scare them.

The old man touched the screen again and Georgia, Florida, and South Dakota turned pale red, while several others glowed a flashing yellow. The newscaster nodded with a television-friendly scowl and motioned for a new graphic. A list filled the screen.

Sites of Contaminee Apprehension:

Georgia (confirmed)

Florida (confirmed X2 locations)

Oklahoma (unconfirmed)

South Dakota (X5, lockdown in place)

(All contaminees deceased.
NO CONTAMINATION RECORDED.)

Ellie staggered back, feeling behind her for a place to sit, but she had thrown every chair against the walls. Unable to keep her feet, she let herself fall backward, landing hard on her bottom, and kept watching the news. The screen filled with photographs of men and women, like mug shots. She recognized those photos. They were too small to make out the faces, but she recognized the background and the tags superimposed on the bottom of each picture. Those were Flowertown identification photos.

Had people escaped?

Chairs clattered as two guards swung open the door. “What the hell?” Seeing the chaos around them, they lifted their guns and trained them on Ellie, who sat on the floor clutching her knees.

“On the ground!” the second guard screamed, jabbing the air with his gun.

“I’m on the ground,” Ellie said, not moving. “How much more on the ground can I be?”

The two men kept their guns trained on her as they came into the room and circled her, careful not to trip over the debris. The one in front of her shouted to someone in the hallway. “The room is not secure, sir. I repeat: the room is not secure.” Ellie started to protest, and he turned his full attention and his weapon on her. “Put your hands behind your head.”

Ellie stared at him. “No.”

“Put your hands behind your head.”

“No.” She was too tired to be angry. “You want to keep going? I’m free all night.”

“Stand down, gentlemen.” Guy stood in the doorway. The two guards hesitated until Guy nodded at them. “Put the weapons down. The room is secure.”

“Mr. Roman,” the guard behind Ellie lowered his voice, “someone has been searching this room. If the suspect has an accomplice on the premises—”