The Night Parade (29 page)

H
e thought her name was Candy, and called her as much, for the first twenty minutes of their drive. It was Ellie, seated in the backseat of the Cadillac, who ultimately corrected him. “Dad, it's
Gany.
With a
G.”

Gany laughed. “It's short for Ganymede.”

“That's a cool name,” Ellie said.

“It's one of the moons of Jupiter.”

“Sorry,” David said. “My mistake.” His head hurt.

“My parents were of the ‘free love' variety. Big-time granola hippies. And my mom was something of an amateur astronomer.”

“What exactly did Tim tell you?”

“He said to meet you and your little girl here around nine o'clock. I'm supposed to drive you to straight to the Fortress. No stopping.”

“The Fortress?”

“Of Solitude,” Gany said. “Like in the Superman comics? The ice castle in the North Pole where Supe goes when he needs a little R and R?”

David shrugged, not comprehending.

“I thought you were supposed to be an English professor or something,” Gany said.

“Not much room in the curriculum to take on Superman comics, unfortunately,” he said.

“Are you Uncle Tim's girlfriend?” Ellie piped up from the backseat.

“You know,” Gany said, drumming fingertips on the Caddy's steering wheel, “that is a spectacular question. You should remember to ask your uncle exactly that when you see him. I'd love to hear the response.”

“I don't understand you,” Ellie said.

“Story of my life, dear heart,” said Gany.

“What else did he say about us?” David asked.

“Nothing. He just said to take the Caddy and pick you guys up. He said if you weren't there when I got there, I should wait. Give you a few hours. He thought you might be late, but you weren't. Not
too
late, anyway. Oh—” she said, interrupting herself, “one more thing. Do you have your cell phone on you?”

“Yes.”

“Let's take a peek-see.”

David dug it out of his pocket and handed it to her. “I've been careful not to—”

Gany rolled down the window and flipped the phone out into the darkness.

“What the hell?” David said.

“Tim said to lose the phone. So now it's lost.”

“Jesus. There might have been info on there that I needed.”

“Was there?”

He considered this. “I guess not.”

“Besides, I wouldn't have let you turn it on. Tim was very adamant about that—‘Do not let him turn on that phone. Get rid of it. Don't fuck around with the phone.' Oops, sorry about the language, honey pie. I'm just quoting your uncle.”

“I've heard ‘fuck' before,” said Ellie.

“Hey,” David said, leering at his daughter from over his shoulder. Then he turned back to Gany. “I was careful with the phone. I figured they might be able to trace it if I was on it.”

“I assume you mean the federal government,” Gany said. “In that case, they don't even need for you to be using it. Just
having
it is a liability. Did you know that the Feds have a device that can turn any cell phone into a listening device? Like, an actual
microphone
?”

“Jesus,” David said. “No, I didn't.”

“Of course, on the other hand, you've got some things playing in your favor right now, too.”

“Do I? By all means, fill me in.”

She glanced at him, an expression on her face that suggested he might not fully grasp the entirety of the situation. “For one thing, David, the whole world is falling apart, in case you haven't noticed. The government has a lot more important things to worry about than to track down you and your kid, no matter what you've done.”

“So Tim didn't say anything about why we needed help?” he asked.

“He didn't say and I didn't ask. That's sort of how we operate in these types of situations.”

“These ‘types of situations'? What's that mean? How often does something like this come up?”

Gany laughed. It was a pretty sound. David examined her profile. It was too dark to guess her age with any accuracy, but he could tell she was younger than he was. There was no glamour about her—she wore no makeup or jewelry and her fingernails had been gnawed to nubs—but there was an innate attractive quality about her that was unbridled, untamed. What some people called a natural beauty.

“Your brother's always got his mitts in something or another,” Gany said. “I'd like to say this isn't the craziest thing I've ever helped him with . . .” Here, she paused. Her gaze flirted in his direction again, albeit for just a second or two this time. “Far as I can tell, anyway.”

When he heard light snoring from the backseat, David turned around and found Ellie asleep, sprawled out across the seats, the shoe box wrapped in her arms.

“Your kid asleep?” Gany asked.

“Yeah.”

“You get in a bar fight or something?”

“Huh?”

“Your face. And that bandage on your arm.”

“What happened to asking no questions?”

“Sorry, Charlie. Was just making conversation. It's a long drive, you know.”

“I know.”

“So . . . bar fight? Please tell me it was an angry bar fight.”

“You should see the other guy,” David said.

Gany put her head back and laughed a silent laugh.

“You said we're driving straight through without stopping,” David said. “To Wyoming?”

“Just sit back and enjoy the ride,” Gany said.

“But you must be exhausted.”

“Not yet, but I'll get there soon enough. That's when you'll take over the driving duties. In the meantime, I suggest you get some shut-eye. I'll wake you when I start feeling sleepy.”

“I can't sleep. I'm too wired.”

“Don't be an asshole,” she said. She pushed a CD into the player and a moment later, Zeppelin issued through the Caddy's crackling, overwrought speakers. She lowered the volume so it wouldn't wake Ellie. “Close them eyes, bugaboo.”

David considered protesting some more. Instead, he reclined the seat, folded his arms over his chest, and shut his eyes. Night air coming through the cracked windows, cool and fresh-smelling, coupled with the melodious caterwauling of Robert Plant, helped usher him to sleep. At one point he thought he woke up and asked Ganymede some question—what it was, he had no idea—but then he realized he was only dreaming, and so he let himself fall into it.

 

T
here was some talk about it on the radio, but before he could catch any of the details, he lost the signal completely. It was his final day at the college—the last of his students had bailed out of their summer courses this past week, a determination David made after several attempts at e-mailing those few remaining students were met with no responses—and he had been only half-listening to the radio broadcast while letting his mind wander on the drive back home. When he finally realized what had happened, he turned up the volume . . . only to lose the station completely an instant later.

He scrolled through the other radio stations, but the rest were all dead, too. However, it wasn't just static on each channel, but a high frequency trill that emanated from the Bronco's speakers, a sound that was not exclusive to any one station in particular, but to all of them. It sounded like someone was deliberately jamming the frequencies.

About a mile and a half before his exit off the beltway, traffic snarled to a stop. Up ahead, two large white vehicles with flashing orange lights on the roof were parting the traffic. David could see no windows on either vehicle, and there were large vents on the sides. Despite the nondescript whiteness of them, he could tell they were comprised of bulletproof armor. Government vehicles.

A few people got out of their cars and snapped photos of the vehicles with their cell phones. Other commuters honked and shouted out open windows. David's own vehicle came to a standstill beneath the shadow of an overpass. When he unrolled his window and craned his head out, he could see traffic on the overpass above at a standstill, too.

The radio disc jockey had been saying something about an explosion, a possible terrorist attack. David had missed most of it, but seeing those roving white vehicles with the bulletproof hides caused a finger of panic to rise up in him.

More people got out of their cars and began milling about the road. Many looked stricken. David peered to his right and saw a blond woman behind the wheel of a maroon Subaru, her knuckles white as her hands clenched the steering wheel. A small child was in a car seat in the back. David caught the woman's eye and she quickly looked away, as if he was some swarthy figure eyeing her up on the subway. She said something, presumably to the child in the back, whom she kept glancing at in her rearview mirror.

When he heard the whirring blades of a helicopter, he got out of the Bronco and stared up at the sky. A chopper soared by, so low to the ground that David felt the wind from its rotors. It was a black, sleek affair with no insignia on it, as far as David could tell.

David squeezed between the Bronco and the Subaru and continued down the narrow slip between the parked cars. Horns blared and people shouted from every direction. Someone's dog was barking and someone else's baby was screaming.

“What happened?” David said, coming upon a man and a woman standing beside the open door of an F-150. The man was as thick as a construction barrel, with springy silver chest hair spooling out over the neck of his Harley-Davidson tank top, but when he turned to look at David, his was the haunted face of an asylum inmate.

“I don't know, brother,” the man said.

“I heard something about an explosion just before my radio went dead,” David said.

“I don't
know,
brother,” the man repeated, his voice cracking. “My radio's out, too. Cops are probably using the channels.”

“They can
do
that?” David said.

“They're the cops, man. They do what they want.”

The woman at his side—a meaty biker gal in her midfifties with fatty forearms reddened from the sun—pressed a set of acrylic fingernails into the cleft at her chin. Her eyes cut toward David, and he could see gobs of mascara snared in her lashes. She looked like someone who'd just been told they had twenty-four hours left to live.

“Those ain't the cops,” she said. “They're federal. Top-secret NSA shit.”

“No Such Agency,” said the man.

They heard sirens but couldn't tell where they were coming from or where they were headed. People began climbing onto the roofs of their cars for a better vantage. A second helicopter cut through the sky, this one with a TV station logo on its side.

“They're so
low
,” said the biker gal. “Whatever happened must be close.”

A third news chopper chased after the others. This one flew low enough to throw grit into David's eyes. The biker gal coughed and hocked phlegm onto the blacktop.

At that instant, something exploded on the far side of the beltway. The sound was like a crack of thunder, only David could feel it like an earthquake in the ground, radiating up his legs. A moment later, a black column of smoke rose up on the horizon. People started pointing and shouting.

“Jesus,” David muttered.

“Jesus is right,” said the biker.

A helicopter appeared in the vicinity of the smoke. Someone asked where it was coming from and someone else said it was too far away to tell.

“It was a bomb,” said the biker. “Done my time with the marines. I know what a fucking bomb sounds like.”

David could only shake his head and watch as the column of black smoke was slowly blown westward on the breeze.

Once the large white vehicles had exited the beltway, and as the sirens began to fade, traffic started to limp along again. David nodded at the guy and his biker gal and the guy patted him on the shoulder—they had shared some brief and confusing camaraderie, it seemed—and then he hustled back to the Bronco. More horns blared. Where did all these assholes expect people to go?

Back behind the Bronco's steering wheel, he geared it out of Park and eased forward no more than a couple of inches. The car in front of his—a sea-foam green Prius with a University of Maryland sticker on the rear windshield—seemed hesitant to make a move.

David peered out the side window again. The woman in the Subaru was frantically checking her mirrors. Clutching the steering wheel, her knuckles were white as bone. David glanced in the backseat and was startled to find the kid in the car seat looking back at him through the rear window. The kid was maybe four or five, too damn big to still be facing backward in a car seat, and he had a fresh summer crew cut. A black slick of blood trickled down from the kid's left nostril, coursed over his lips, and had been smeared in a bright crimson streak along his chin. The kid's eyes were strangely unfocused, the pupils too big, the whites a canvas of broken blood vessels. The irises themselves seemed to dance as if floating on the surface of rippling water. Yet David knew the boy was staring right at him.

Jesus,
he thought, looking back at the frantic mother. Her panic seemed to be a result of the commotion on the road and the black smoke that still clung to the horizon, not because of the child in her backseat. He wondered if she even knew the kid was sick. Had the kid been facing
forward
instead of backward, she might have caught the poor kid's reflection in the rearview mirror, but as it was—

The car behind him blasted its horn and someone shouted at him to step on the fucking gas. At the same moment, the Subaru bucked forward then sped off to join the rest of the traffic. David watched it go, noting the vanity plates—
BUSYMOM
—and the stick-figure family decals on the rear window, which showed she had a husband, two other kids, and a cat at home. The husband stick figure swung a golf club while the mom wielded a tennis racket.

Jesus,
he thought again, his heart racing. It seemed the only thing he was capable of thinking at the moment.
Jesus Christ Almighty.

The asshole behind him laid on his horn again. David rolled down his window, flipped the guy the bird, then shoved his foot down on the accelerator.

He arrived home two hours later than he should have, sweaty and unnerved. He realized he was speeding through his neighborhood at twice the speed limit when he reached the turn onto Columbus and he nearly lifted two tires off the ground. He slowed to a cool gallop until the Bronco jerked to a stop in the driveway.

“Kath,” he said, coming into the house. His voice cracked.

Ellie appeared at the far end of the hallway. Her expression was one of confusion and fear, a mixture of emotions David so rarely saw on his daughter's face.

“What happened?” he said.

“The news,” Ellie said. She pointed toward the living room. “Mom's watching it now on TV.”

In the living room, Kathy was parked on the edge of the sofa staring at the television. The volume was turned way up, and the image on the screen showed a stricken male reporter standing in front of a crisscross of yellow police tape. David could tell Kathy had been crying.

“What happened?” David said.

“Explosions,” Kathy said. “Bombs.”

“Where?”

“One in Towson. One in downtown Baltimore.”

“I heard one. I was stuck in traffic, saw trucks on the beltway. There was an explosion and there was smoke in the distance.”

“It's bad,” Kathy said. Her lower lip trembled. “The one in Towson was a day-care center or something.”

David shook his head in disbelief. Ellie appeared at his side.

“The other was a hospital. Hopkins.”

“Who did it?”

“They're not sure yet,” Kathy said, “but it looks like a pair of lunatics with homemade bombs drove their cars into the buildings.”

“My God.”

Ellie's hand crept into one of his. Just the feel of her helped him relax. It was like a drug. He squeezed her hand gently.

“They think it was related to the virus,” Kathy said.

“The bombers were sick?”

“They don't know that for sure,” she said, “but that's not what they're saying. Apparently the day-care center is in an area that has the highest percentage of infected kids in the state, and it had recently been quarantined by the CDC with the kids and teachers inside. And then there's Hopkins, where they've been taking people who get sick in the city. Some reporter said the CDC has been working there, too.” She looked at him, her eyes muddy and foreign. “David, there were
kids
inside. Little
kids.”

The TV cut from the reporter to one of the scenes of the crime. At first, David couldn't tell what he was looking at. But then the camera pulled back, and David could make out the rear end of a large automobile—or what was left of it—wedged within the crumbling maw of jagged brickwork and smoldering debris. There was black smoke everywhere. A second angle showed a portion of the building blown out, debris littering the parking lot. Medics were loading small shapes buried beneath white sheets into the backs of ambulances. Men and women screamed from the street.

“. . . found here at the recently quarantined Towson Day School, where the death tally has now risen to eighteen students and three instructors,” the reporter said. “Eyewitnesses said there had only been one occupant in the vehicle that—”

“Go play in your room, sweetheart.” He rubbed the back of Ellie's head.

“I want to see it.”

“No. Do as I say.”

She exhaled audibly, then turned and sulked down the hallway toward her bedroom.

“This is so messed up, David,” Kathy said. She was gnawing on her thumbnail. “The whole world is falling apart.”

“
We're
still here,” he assured her.

She looked at him. There was something beyond fear in her eyes: There was a hopelessness so deep it looked bottomless. “For how long?” she said. “For how long, David?”

He couldn't answer her. In his mind's eye, he was back on the beltway, staring out the Bronco's window at the little boy with blood spilling from his nose while black smoke fell like a shroud over the horizon. A boy with eyes like the gray backing of a mirror.

By the close of the day, there was a total of five children and four teachers dead at the day-care center. Eleven people died at the hospital, with many more treated for injuries. The suspects, both retired toll collectors named Hamish Kasdan and William Maize, were also killed in the blasts. They'd outfitted the trunks of their cars with a mixture of ammonium nitrate and nitromethane, similar to the cocktail Timothy McVeigh had used in the Oklahoma City bombing. A search of Kasdan and Maize's Baltimore City apartment revealed suicide notes detailing their roles as “renegade saviors for the earth,” here to help usher in the last days of mankind. They said they were part of the Worlders' movement, a group of radicals who praised Wanderer's Folly for bringing an end to mankind's parasitic reign over the planet. They hadn't been targeting the sick, but the doctors and nurses who were attempting to help them.

Kathy wept in her sleep that night.

David hardly slept at all.

* * *

When dawn finally cast its lurid hues through their bedroom window, David got up, went to the bathroom, then crept into the kitchen to make a pot of coffee. There was a newspaper on the kitchen counter, the front page comprised of a map of the United States with various “hot spots” where the infection was the greatest. Other cities had been completely evacuated. The report said these evacuees had been transported to one of the CDC's quarantine stations, with D.C., Philadelphia, and Newark being the closest to David's area. The report also listed the most recent estimated death toll, both domestic and global—numbers that increased daily and required decimal points. He balled up the paper and shoved in down into the kitchen trash.