Contain (4 page)

“
It's just that your father
adamantly resists discussing the possibility of—”

“
Leaving? He won't talk
about it because it's a moot point, Bren. We can't! Not
yet.”

“
Why not? It's not just me,
Finn. Jack is— He and some of the others are saying it's past time
for some new thinking, new ideas.” She hesitates, then adds, “New
leadership.”

“
We don't need change!” I
shout. “We need to be strong, hold steady. Sure, things break down.
That's what happens after three years! But we fix them as best we
can.”

“
Your dad can't fix
everything forever. We've already lost one of the heating elements
we use for cooking.”

“
So?” I say, incredulously.
“That's such a minor thing.”

“
But minor things add
up.”

“
Dad's doing the best he
can! It's not like we can just go to the hardware store and buy
replacements! How is anyone else going to do any
better?”

“
Finn, calm down! I'm on
your side. Honest. But you know how Jack is. Once he gets an idea
in his head . . . . And everyone knows he's
never been happy about not being in charge. Every time your father
votes against him just gives him another reason to want your dad
out.”

“
Dad votes against him
because Jack Resnick comes up with the stupidest ideas!”

“
Well, he's been going
behind your father's back, gathering support for his
side.”

“
He has?”

She doesn't answer. She knows this
isn't news to me, as it's not exactly a secret. I'm just more
surprised that Jack would exploit this accident to make his
move.

Bren stands up. “Look, I better go,”
she says. “Before they come back. I don't want you to get into
trouble if they find me here.”

“
Yeah, because everyone
already thinks so highly of me.”

“
Self pity is a terrible
look on you.”

I reach for her hand and manage to
catch it before she can escape. I don't want her to leave. I want
her to reassure me that it'll all be okay. But in my heart, I know
changes happening, and I feel helpless to stop them.

“
Don't worry,” she
whispers. She bends down and brushes her lips against my cheek.
“Everyone knows how much your father cares about us and our
safety.”

Not
everyone
, I think.

She straightens up. “We'll get through
this.”

I can't tell if she means
this
in general
or
this
us
. The
uncertainty is a terrible weight on my chest, and it's crushing the
breath from me.

The meeting goes on for hours, leaving me with little to do but eye
the monitors while imagining the worst possible outcome for my
father. Inevitably, my thoughts drift, and I’m back to watching the
mental movie of my siblings dying at the hands and teeth of the
Wraiths.

Why do I punish myself like
this?

Eventually, Harry Rollins comes to
relieve me. He averts his eyes and doesn't speak of what transpired
in the meeting. I don't ask. I’m sure I’ll be hearing all about it
soon.

I go straight to our room to wait for
my father, but despite my agitation, I'm overwhelmed with
exhaustion and slip into a restless sleep. Memories of the outbreak
plague my dreams. They always start off the same way, with Dad
showing up at my school.

I had no idea then that I'd never see
the rest of my family again. Of course, in my dreams, I do know
this, as well as everything that's going to happen. So it is in my
dreams that there's always this voice deep down inside of me
desperately screaming not to go with him. That's why, when I
finally wake up later, it's always with an overpowering sense of
loss and impotence, as if my subconscious is punishing me for being
unable to change the outcome of what has already
happened.

I'm in the nurse's office, sitting in
one of those hard plastic orange chairs with the scratched graffiti
on top and the gum stuck underneath. I'm pinching my nose with one
hand. The other holds a bloody tissue.

It's an especially bad bleed this
time, a gusher, as the nurse says. All I know is that it's a
blessing my asthma doesn't kick in, because my lungs are barely
treading water in a swamp of my own blood. It drips into the back
of my throat, forcing me to swallow it, which just makes my stomach
hurt more than it already does.

The stupid nurse won't let me move to
spit it out. She orders me to sit still.

I press a little harder on the bridge
of my nose, and a spark of pain explodes behind my eyes. A wet
gurgle bubbles up out of me.

“
Not so hard, Mister
Bolles,” she warns in her sugary sweet, don't-you-dare-disobey-me
voice. “Gentle pressure. It's not a tourniquet.”

I consider telling her that I'm pretty
sure it's broken, but I know it would just come out sounding whiny.
Not that she'd care anyway. She's already grumpy enough from having
to call my dad for the second time in the same week.

I'm relieved when she finally stops
fussing over me and leaves the room, shutting off the lights as she
goes. As I sit there, my thoughts drift back to the event that
ended in such humiliation. In my mind, I'm winning the fight. I
always win the fight in the do-over.

The bell for final period rings and
the halls fill with noise, so I don't hear when the door to the
room opens.

“
Finn?”

I lift my head and look
over. And there, clear as day, is the disappointment in my father's
eyes. Instinctively, I know what's going through his head:
Why couldn't you have been more like Harper?
Harper would have fought back. Harper would have kicked the other
guy's ass.

He's never actually said anything of
the sort to me before. I almost wish he would this time, so I'd
know he gave a crap. But he doesn't ask. And for that I'm also
glad, because how would I ever be able to face him again if I had
to explain that it wasn't a guy who did this?

He wraps a hand around my scrawny
forearm and gently leads me out of the office. The hallways are
still crowded with students, though they're beginning to thin out.
I can feel the stares of my fellow classmates on me, and I wish I
could just crawl into a locker and hide. It's such a cliché, but
that's how I feel.

He gets me into his car before I
remember I’ve left my backpack in the nurse's office. Dad tells me
to forget about it.

“
But my books. My
homework!” It comes out as
boogs
and
hobeworg
because of my shattered nose. “My
phone!”

Which sounds like
phobe
.

“
I'll leave a message for
Harper to pick it up.”

Harper. Somehow, he always ends up
saving the day.

Except I remember that Harper's not in
school today. He's at his stupid elite genius internship at some
bleeding-edge tech company in the valley.

I lean my head back and shut my eyes.
I'll just get it in the morning.

We drive home in awkward silence, the
news station Dad normally listens to turned all the way down, which
means he wants to talk, if he could just dredge up the courage. I
pray he doesn't.

“
Finn . . . .” he eventually begins, and I
wait. But after that rather auspicious start, he quickly loses
steam.

I finger the bottle of pills in my
pocket with my free hand, turn my head toward the window and shut
my eyes. When we get home, I go straight to my room and lie down on
my bed.

When I wake hours later, the house is
silent and dark. In my dreams, I somehow manage to make my way back
to the elementary school where my little sister, Leah, is a third
grader. I somehow catch my mother and Harper as they're leaving,
and I go with them instead of to the evac center with Dad. But the
moment I get into the car, the scene always shifts, and I'm back
inside the house, and it's my father's car that pulls into the
driveway.

He rushes up the steps and slams
through the door and grabs my shoulders. “Have you heard from any
of the others?” There's panic in his eyes, and it intensifies as I
shake my head. He squeezes me tighter, starts to shake me, and the
pain and pressure inside my head feel like a balloon about to
burst.

My chest starts to constrict. My
breath comes out as a whistle. I reach for my inhaler, but it's
back in my room.

“
We have to go,” he tells
me. “Now!” And he pulls me toward the car.

“
Go where?” I ask. “Didn't
you try calling them?”

“
Phones are
down.”

“
Phones? How is that even
possible?” I notice that the lights on the street are out. In fact,
lights everywhere are out. I smell smoke. “What's
happening?”

“
Not now, Finn,” he says,
his words clipped. He slips past the front of the car, keys
jangling in his hand. “Hurry!”

A block away, someone is running down
the sidewalk in our direction, a woman. I can't tell who it is, but
she's really in a hurry. And something in the way she moves strikes
me as odd.

“
Get in the car!” Dad
hisses.

“
But maybe she
knows—”

“
Get in the goddamn car,
Finn!
Now!
”

I glance back at the woman, and
suddenly I'm terrified. She's moving way too fast, and I don't like
the way her legs scissor. It's not natural.

“
Dad, what's going
on?”

The door opens and slams into me,
jolting me away from the car before he grabs my shirt and yanks me
inside. My head hits the edge of the roof. I see stars.

“
Close the damn
door!”

The engine starts up, howls angrily as
he stomps on the gas. But it's not in gear. He shifts, and then
we're tearing off down the street, tires screaming.

We approach the running figure, and
just for a moment I see her face in the car's headlights. There's
nothing but darkness in her eyes. No emotion, no awareness. She
turns as we pass and she reaches out for us. Dad
swerves.

As we accelerate away, something about
her shifts, and a howl of rage erupts out of her throat, sending an
icy shiver through me. She grabs for us, but her fingers slip off
the metal and she tumbles to the pavement.

“
What the hell?” I shout.
“I think you hit her! Stop!”

What the hell was wrong
with her?

“
Get your seatbelt on,
son.” He throws a glance at my lap, then into the rearview mirror.
“Do it!”

I reach over and clip it on. “Dad,
please, tell me what's going on?”

He grips the steering wheel and barely
slows when we reach the stop sign at the end of the block. The
tires screech and the car fishtails around the corner.

“
Dad!”

“
Finn! Not now. I need to
think.”

“
Think about what? This is
crazy! Slow down.” I point out the windshield, gesturing at the
road ahead. “Speed limit's twenty-five here! You're going to
kill—”

And that's when I see them.

They're everywhere— in the streets, on
lawns. Standing around with their faces in the air, as if they were
watching something in the sky but suddenly forgot that they were.
They all turn to look at us, and they all have those dead, empty
eyes.

Every coherent thought in my head
completely vanishes. They look like zombies.

“
Can't go through town,”
Dad mutters. “Too many.”

“
Too many what? Dad, what's
wrong with them?”

The muscles in his cheeks ripple as
his jaw flexes. He casts a look over at me, purses his lips, then
focuses again on the road.

“
Dad?”

“
It's some sort of
disease,” he answers, and once more the Z-word comes to mind. But
there's no blood. No one is trying to eat anyone else. No
blood
yet
, anyway,
because nobody realized what was happening until much later, when
most people were already lost to the infection.