Quarantine (5 page)

B
ob's revelations made me sick in my stomach. If they were not going to move, then I was wasting time here. First light, I could leave, back to the zoo, take my chances heading out with the girls—but if it was dangerous for four grown men to head north, what chance for a sixteen-year-old and a couple of girls barely older? Little to none.

But part of me thought that if I could convince anyone here, it might be Paige. She seemed to like me. Better yet, if I could convince her, get her onboard, that might bring on Audrey, then Tom, and with his reasoning might come the people who were too spooked to leave because of what had happened to those who'd dared venture out.

I found Paige playing poker with a few others. I made a beeline for her: she'd bathed and was wearing track clothes, pajamas maybe, her hair still wet and wrapped in a towel. I joined in and quickly bet myself out of the game. The same thing happened to Paige and, game over, I followed her out.

When I looked in on one of the groups, through the glass wall, I saw a middle-aged couple quietly arguing.

“Kinda surprises me,” I said to Paige, settling on a new thought that had just hit me.

“What's that?”

“That, in there—the arguing. That there's still anger, there's still confusion, all that baggage between people.”

“Baggage?” she said, looking back to the couple.

“Whatever it is we carry around. Guilt, regrets, anger, all that useless stuff getting in the way of living in the now and surviving.”

Earlier on, all I'd seen was these people's cheerful acceptance of their situation. But there was division here. Maybe that was something I could use to get people to come with me. Leaving this city with half this group was a better prospect for me and Felicity and Rach than no one leaving but us.

All I had to go on was my few days of UN camp training before the attack. We'd sat in on talks and lectures about negotiating skills, delegation, and second-guessing the decision making of others. We'd participated in mock scenarios that made us confront what the facilitator called “the ugly reality of diplomacy.” I'd never have guessed that, two weeks on, I'd be dealing with real-life situations fraught with all these issues and more. Would Paige or the others believe me that the risk involved in seeking out a better, safer existence was worth it?

I wanted to take her someplace quiet, but she led us to the adjoining room, an office now set up as a makeshift chapel. “I want you to see this,” she said.

Paige and I watched as Daniel led about twenty people in prayer before bed. Bob entered and moved up front, a happy little preacher's boy inside the body of a pro wrestler. He was wearing a T-shirt that exposed the tattoos on his neck and arms, the crude monotone type that spoke of time spent inside.

Bob filmed everything. I sat next to Paige, on the periphery.

“In being a priest, Daniel is a symbol of hope to so many here,” she whispered to me. “Are you religious?”

“Not especially,” I replied. “I went to a Catholic school for a bit, but then we moved, and dad was cool with all that kind of stuff, never really into it. Tell me about your parents.”

“Dad's a plastic surgeon. He and Mom divorced about ten years ago when I was—Jesse, how old are you?”

“Sixteen.”

“Yeah, me too. Everyone else here's either heaps old, or a kid. Where's your mom?”

“I've got a stepmom too,” I said. “She's not like Audrey though, mine's a dragon—and not a cool Harry Potter dragon.”

“I don't think Harry Potter's cool.”

“Me neither,” I whispered back. “Third book was okay, though.”

She smiled. “Did your mom live close by?”

“Don't know,” I replied. “I've been wondering about finding her—lately. Since all this happened. I've had plenty of time to think, you know? What about yours?”

“San Fran,” she said. “I visit her every two weeks. It's a short trip now—she used to live in Phoenix, which was harder. Moves around a lot.”

I caught her look of doubt, as if she were questioning her own use of the present tense, so I shifted the conversation. “Do you like L.A.?”

“Where we are, yeah, I like it,” she said. “Good friends, awesome weather, and we've got, like, the best beaches.”

Her eyes . . . it was hard to look her in the eyes, harder still to choose which color iris to focus on.

“Mom's seeing a guy, he's okay,” Paige said, a little distant in thought. “Audrey didn't used to be so cool. Actually, I kind of hated her, until all this happened. She's changed.
I've
changed. Hell, everything's changed, right?”

I nodded. The rest of the room was listening to Tom read from the Bible, his voice low and resonant, his flock nodding and believing.

“We go to church sometimes,” I said to Paige, and I felt her look at me as I watched the flickering of the candles on our table. “Dad and me. No special occasion, we just might be driving by one or whatever. We go in, light candles for those who aren't with us anymore.”

For a moment I could clearly see a mental slide show of all the faces of the departed. There were not enough candles in the world right now.

“That's nice,” she said. Her hand under the table squeezed my leg. “We should do that, tonight—light some candles for the friends you lost.”

I nodded. Was now the right time, while we were talking close like this, to ask her to leave?
I want you to leave here with me
. I went to take her hand in mine but she moved it. I looked away, at Daniel.

“You know, we're lucky here,” she said. “We've got good shelter, and just about everything we need—things that might be scarce out there on the road. That's what you're dying to ask me, isn't it? Will I leave?”

“Well—”

“We have a couple of badly wounded people who can't walk—what's supposed to happen to them?”

“You could use the truck—”

“What if we can't drive it in this weather? On those choked roads?”

We watched the black clouds rolling in for the night's snow dump, the strong frozen wind fast behind it.

“I hear what you're saying . . .” I admitted.

“But you're not convinced that we're doing the right thing, are you?” Paige asked, looking at me.

I was taken aback by her question. “If it were me in your situation? Yeah, I probably would leave,” I replied. What a choice. Wait until trouble comes knocking on your door here or go out and meet it head on. Who's to say which is the greater risk?

“But way out there, Jesse? On the road, like sleeping in abandoned houses or whatnot until, what, we somehow find safety?” Paige threw a golf ball out onto the snow-covered fake plastic turf. When it landed it disappeared, swallowed up by white. “I mean, for you, maybe, but for the women and the younger kids here—it's not for us.”

“Yeah, it's cool,” I said. “I get it.”

“Totally makes sense to play it safe, yeah? At least while it's so cold and the days are so short.”

She asked, “There's nothing that gives you any doubt about leaving here?”

“My two friends at the zoo? I can't leave them behind, and I can't let them wait around. I want to get them to safety.”

“Didn't you say that you had another friend too—a guy?”

I thought of Caleb, and how I felt must have showed because she put her hand on mine: hers was soft and warm.

“Why don't you tell me more about Anna,” she said. “I'd like to hear about her.”

T
here was a sleeping hall with cot beds set up in what once had been a conference room. It was warm in here, the warmth of a dozen bodies already at rest. The sound of the snowstorm outside was a constant whirring and whistling. It almost made me nostalgic for the sanctuary of the skyscraper I'd stayed in at 30 Rock—then I remembered the creaky old building that Felicity and Rachel were stuck in right now.

“It's mainly the kids and women in here,” Paige said. She went to a corner, lit by a little battery-powered lantern. “The rest are at the other side of the dining hall.”

Paige sat down among five kids, two of whom I'd seen arrive that afternoon with their parents. They'd lasted two weeks in their apartment a few blocks from here and ventured out for food and fuel and, like me, decided to try this place out. Their mom was already asleep in a bed nearby, and I could hear relief in her quiet snoring. I sat next to Paige, leaning up against the wall, all the kids in their cot beds, under blankets, looking up at me with sleepily suspicious eyes. I poked my tongue out at the youngest, a five-year-old girl, and she cracked into a smile.

Paige read them
Stuart Little
. They were already about thirty pages in. She read the part where Stuart's doing his sailboat race, and then about Margalo. I really liked that story, how he protected her and his family adopted her; she flees for her life, he goes out to look for her. We don't know how it ends for the two of them, if they will ever come together again, but I'm confident that Stuart found her. I preferred stories that didn't provide all the answers.

The kids soon fell asleep, except for a boy of about eight, who was happy to lie there and watch patterns on the ceiling from the LED strip lights outside in the hall. This warm environment made for a comforting time and place. I felt as tired as I could remember. I drifted off and woke with a start, as if I had tripped.

“Looks like you need to get some sleep,” Paige said. “I've set your bed up, I'll show you.”

She took me through a screen of hanging sheets that acted as curtains to a row of beds. A couple of other teenagers were asleep, along with the middle-aged pair I'd seen arguing earlier.

“My parents sleep in the far corner over there,” she said. “They'll be a few hours still, they're always staying up with the others. Yours is over there.” She pointed, and I nodded.

“Thanks. I'll go to bed in a sec,” I told her, and watched as she climbed under the quilt, turning away from me.

I went to the bathroom, washed with some cold water and soap, brushed my teeth, changed T-shirts and put my gear in my pack, which I took with me and plunked at the end of my bed. I hung my coat on the clothes peg further down the hall. I lingered. Hesitation ran through my every fiber. I could slip out now, leave them all, head back to the zoo and figure my own way out of the city. But then I'd be forever wondering what happened to them. I wanted to wait and watch it play out. I'd give it until tomorrow. I wanted Paige to stick with her parents but it was not my place to tell her so—or to persuade her to the point where she would leave them. Was it?

I carried on further down the hall. I wanted to pick up a bottle of water, but I was also intrigued to see how the adults spent the dying hours of the day, once the children and the injured were safely tucked up in bed. The dining room was still abuzz with talk. Many bottles of wine and cans of beer had been and were being consumed. It was pretty clear that the arguments weren't any closer to being resolved.

Daniel and Tom stood up at the front. I was watching in the wings, the bottle of water steady in my hand. The difference between them was stark. Science versus God.

“All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry,” Tom said, pleased with himself.

“We are all free to choose our ways,” Daniel countered.

“You can lead your friends into the unknown, I choose to stay here.”

Paige's father looked around the room at the people who had come to rely on them both, but who might have secretly chosen one allegiance over the other.

“Nothing will get better if we stay here,” Daniel said. “Don't you get that? It's dangerous.” I got the sense that those who wanted to go with Daniel wanted just to be
around
him—they'd follow him anywhere.

“Perhaps. But we are comfortable here, we are sheltered—”

“Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time, not for the better,” Daniel said. He considered the people around him, sitting and standing, listening and quietly talking among themselves. “We've been stuck here long enough.”

“My outlook is more optimistic.”

Daniel shook his head.

We were all getting uncomfortable at what was not being said and could see that Tom was seething about it: why couldn't those who wanted to leave, go, and those who wanted to stay, stay?

If Bob were here, he'd be taping the meeting from the far corner. I wondered what he would do with all that footage, all those little memory cards he'd pilfered from a Radio Shack. Would he edit them together one day to tell a streamlined, structured narrative? Or was this it—a raw stream-of-consciousness thing, real, hyper-real even, shaped by us all? What was it like to see life through his lens?

“
We
are the ones we've been waiting for, these people here, they have the power in them to act,” Daniel said. “
We
are the change that we seek—it's in us. You should know that.”

“I agree with you, Thomas, I really do,” Daniel continued. “I would have liked consensus but I see that's unlikely. You do what you have to do. I'm not stopping you from staying.”

“You're stopping them!”

“We're all free to choose,” Daniel reasoned. “All major religious traditions carry basically the same message—”

“Spare us!”

“That is love, compassion and forgiveness; the important thing is that they should be part of our daily lives. You know these people arrived here, they found us, and more arrive every day—”

“You're stopping
her
!”

His voice was loud as a gunshot and suddenly, I turned to look at the object of the harsh accusation.

Tom's wife—Paige's stepmother, Audrey—wanted to be wherever the preacher was. She seemed sad. She knew they were fighting but could not hear it. She watched these two men and she knew they'd spoken about her because so many in the room were looking at her, Tom and Daniel included. It must hurt Tom that she would rather be with Daniel than stay with him.

The preacher's words and oratory skills were impressive, but there was much more to him than that, and Audrey probably saw it better than anyone. Felt it. Maybe there was so much more, more than I could ever sense or see. I wondered what Caleb would have made of this power struggle. Maybe Rachel would be better equipped to handle it—this was animalistic, two bulls locking horns for supremacy.

“To hell with you, priest! To hell with your whole goddamn business!”

“Tom, I'm sorry you feel that way—”

“Don't you dare pity me!”

“Please, Tom, you will wake the children—”

“Don't sermonize me, you sonofabitch!”

“Tom, you're being—”

Screaming—a woman was screaming. The kind of scream you hoped you never heard, primal, life or death.

Bang! Daniel hit the floor. The room was silent but for the sound of two men grunting and shuffling, the sound of a man being beaten, the hush of stunned onlookers as they computed what was going down and whether or not they should do anything about it.

As I pushed through the gathered onlookers the silence broke. There were close on thirty people, several of them yelling and screaming.

Tom was on top of Daniel, punching him in the face with his full force. Daniel was on his back on the floor. His head was bouncing off the tiles, and it sounded hollow and dangerous, like a coconut cracking. His face was a bloody pulp, becoming more and more swollen with every hit.

“Get up! Go!” I said to Daniel, who rolled to his side. He stood up. Groggy. Swayed on his feet. His face was a bag of blood.

“You—”

Whatever Daniel was going to say was stopped by more violence.

I grabbed Tom as he lunged at Daniel again. But the surgeon quickly broke my hold and was punching the preacher back down onto the ground, putting all his weight into turning Daniel's face and head into a mess on the floor: a plastic surgeon undoing a lifetime's work and destroying his tools at the same time. Past, present, and future, all intertwined through an act of violence.

Maybe he was blaming this man of God for his wife's injuries, for the city or country or world being like this . . .

“What kind of god would let that happen?” Tom said. “Your god!”

I knew that if I did nothing then Daniel would die. I had to intervene.

I pulled Tom off Daniel by his shoulders. I put my hands under his armpits and hauled him back onto the hard ground. He was squirming but I had all my weight pulling down at him. He was angry, but had eyes for only one man, and he was getting up, reaching out to attack again . . .

There was a scream to my right. A piercing shriek.

Audrey.

“Nooooo!”

Paige stood by the door to the hallway, neither entirely in nor out of the room, watching us. She had my pistol in her hand. It was loaded. I pulled at Tom. He fell back, wide-eyed.

Paige brought my pistol up, fired a shot into the ceiling.

Everyone froze. The sound of that gunshot resonated in me, thunder in my heart.

Tom looked around, dazed, out of it. He'd spun off the planet.

Daniel's face looked as if he'd put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. There was a mess of blood on the floor.

The next sound was a kid crying in the bedroom. Then other people joined in. Some were screaming, some vomiting, many had fled the room.

I let go of Tom and walked to Paige. “It's over,” I said. “Go and help Daniel.”

She put an arm out and held onto mine. I stopped, looked down at her, and I had the flash recall of seeing the lifeless eyes of Anna, glass marbles on an abattoir floor. But they were unalike, really. I reminded myself of Paige's Californian tan and light, sun-bleached hair, whereas Anna's hair was shiny and dark, a legacy of her Indian parentage. I blinked myself back into the now as Paige passed me the gun she was holding in her other hand.

Four men from the crowd came and hauled Daniel to the medical room. His body, being carried like that, looked like a big broken doll. Others pulled Tom away. All the fight had left him a second after that gunshot.

My hands were bloody—blood dripped and flowed off my knuckles where I'd scraped hard against the rough tiled floor in the struggle. My knees were grazed. I felt no pain. I could only think of how the sound of other people's crying had worn me out.