The Resurrected Compendium (39 page)

He nodded.

She scooted to sit next to him, a scant inch of space between them so it wouldn’t seem overwhelming to him. She let her heels tap against the bed as she studied her hands on her lap. “You are not an asshole, Dennis. Not even close.”

“I just never met anyone, I mean I met people, women, I mean. But never anyone I wanted to, well. Or that wanted to with me, I guess.”

She found that hard to believe.

Dennis shrugged. “And then the longer it went on, the more ridiculous it seemed to have to tell someone, I mean, how do you do that?”

“You just told me,” she pointed out. “It wasn’t so bad, was it?”

He slanted her a sideways look. “It was pretty bad.”

She laughed again, softer this time. She took a chance and reached for his hand, and when he let her take it, she lifted it to her mouth and brushed a kiss over the knuckles. “Everyone has a first time. I’d be very —”

But before she could finish what she meant to say, the house started screaming.

50

Crazy people heard voices in their heads. Maddy had always thought it would be kind of cool to have someone talking to her from inside her skull, like her own private radio show or something — it wouldn’t be as cool as being able to talk inside someone else’s head, but pretty neat anyway. Telepathy was when you could hear someone’s thoughts. She’d learned that from watching scary movies. But that wasn’t what crazy people had. They just had craziness.

In her bed, looking into the dark with her hands folded on top of her belly, Maddy listened to the whispering inside her head. Not voices. Not words. Yet something was going on inside her. Something tried to get her to do what it wanted. She laughed at that a little, softly so nobody could hear.

Nobody made Maddy do anything she didn’t want to do.

The whispering was like a shush-shush and that was okay. The itching wasn’t. It had started in her lungs, making her cough so much Mom had actually tried to get Maddy to take some medicine. She’d put her hand on Maddy’s forehead, searching for fever, like she was worried. Maddy knew better. Mom only worried when her “water” bottle was empty.
 

Anyway, Maddy wasn’t sick. It was those wiggly things from that egg that made her cough, and that went away after a day or so. Her throat tickled next so that she was always thirsty, but no matter how much she drank she couldn’t seem to wash away the itch. That or the taste and smell of those flowers. Not even sticking her finger down the back of her throat helped, though she studied her puke really carefully to see if there were any of those black wiggly things inside it.

The day after that, everything seemed brighter. Colors. Shadows. She could count the lines at the corners of her mom’s eyes from all the way across the room. Maddy could smell things, too. Perfume, sweat, soap. She could tell that Mrs. Baxter and Mr. Rivel had been getting up to some things they shouldn’t in one of the janitor closets, because they both smelled like spit and bleach and sort of like microwave burritos.

And now her brains itched. Wiggly threads, little tadpoles, swimming in the meat of her brain. In and out, along all the curves. What were they doing?

Brains weren’t supposed to be able to feel anything, that’s how come you could stick a needle into someone’s eye socket and scramble them up to make them less crazy. You could do it with a knitting needle. That was called a lobotomy. She’d learned that on the internet.
 

She put her fingers to her eyeballs and pressed hard enough to make the colors dance, but not quite hard enough to hurt. The whispering stopped. So did the itching.

What are you?

No answer, which frustrated her. She tried again, thinking harder this time.

What do you want?

Still nothing. Maddy stopped pressing her eyes and put her hands back on her belly, fingers linked. She blinked away the red haze and stared again into the darkness. She was hungry. She wanted ice cream, but they only kind they had was freeze-dried in pouches. Astronaut ice cream. It was shitty, that’s what she’d heard her dad say to her mom when he thought nobody could hear them, but they had boxes and boxes of it in one of the store rooms. It was meant to be sold in museums and amusement parks, not for people to survive on, that’s what her mom had said. They were lucky enough to have food, water, power and shelter. They didn’t need ice cream, too.

That’s why Mom was dumb.

The itching came back. With a frown, Maddy pictured a fist, squeezing her brain. Smooshing the wigglies. The itching stopped.

What are you? What do you want?

No answer. It occurred to her that whatever was inside was either refusing to answer, or incapable of it. This was interesting. Tadpoles didn’t talk, she knew that. But something in these things made people go crazy, something made the whispers.
 

Maybe she was trying too hard to keep them from doing what they were meant to do.

In science class, Maddy had done a report on a type of zombie ant. A parasitic — that meant something that lived off something else — fungus got in the ants brains and made them kill themselves so the fungus could release its infectious spores and make more zombie ants. Her teacher had said Maddy’s research was “exemplary” but that the pictures she’d drawn of dead ants was a little too graphic for class. She got an A, though. Maddy almost always did.

Was that what had happened to all those people? Was it some sort of parasite in a fungus? Or maybe it was more like that movie she’d seen up late one night in her best friend Emma’s house, after her parents had gone to bed. In that one, aliens had come from outer-space and attached themselves to people, on their backs. They rode them like horses, sort of, except the aliens were tiny, easily hidden underneath clothes so nobody could know if a person was normal or had a puppet master on its back.
 

Slowly, slowly, Maddy let her imaginary fist loosen. She hated puppets, always had. You couldn’t make them do much of anything really fun — soft puppets always looked stupid, and she’d never been able to make a marionette work. The strings tangled. She couldn’t even make them dance. People were so much more fun to work.

The tickling and itching returned, spreading now down her spine. It didn’t feel so much like tadpoles now. She thought of the flowers, vines and tendrils unfurling. Spreading. Tiny threads inching along her nerves.

Something like electricity crackled inside her, not quite the way it was if you rubbed your stocking feet on a carpet and touched a doorknob, but close. Maddy stretched her arms wide. Her legs. Her back arched. Her toes curled.

Oh, this felt goooooood.

51

“Shit.” Dennis pulled away from Kelsey at the sound of the shrieking alarm. He’d heard it only a few times before, when mom was testing it — this alarm was meant to frighten off intruders who’d been clever enough to bypass at least some of the preliminary defenses. That or disarm them by making them deaf. He’d thought it was a stupid idea when she’d told him about it, compared to the much better system she’d had in place, but by the time she installed this one, he’d been on his way to moving out.
 

“What is it?”

He looked at her. “Something got at the camera outside.”

She was right behind him when he checked the monitors. Sure enough, dark. All of them. Even the ones set high in the eaves and the few placed around the back of the property.

“Not just the camera, but the wires. They’re all cut.”

Kelsey made a low noise and tapped one of the blank screens before looking at him. “It would have to be smart to cut the wires. Wouldn’t it?”

He thought so, but wasn’t sure. “Could be a fluke.”

She snorted soft laughter. “C’mon. Your mom seems to have a pretty good system in place. You think something simple could do this? Has to be deliberate, huh?”

She was so smart it made his head hurt. So beautiful it made his heart ache. Dennis nodded after a second, listening to the screaming alarms, muffled in the house but deafening outside.

“He did it. Your dad,” she offered. “Your father, rather. I guess he’s not really your dad.”

“He had to. I don’t know how he’d have known about it though.”

“If he knew your mom, he might’ve guessed.”

“But he’s dead,” Dennis said suddenly, with bite. He ran a hand over his hair, digging his fingers into his scalp. “Days dead, by the looks of it. What the hell is going on?”

Kelsey put her hands on his shoulders, turning him until he looked her in the eye. “Maybe not all of them are stupid. I mean…he was probably pretty smart when he was alive, right? Top secret clearance and all that.”

“You don’t have to be smart to get top secret clearance.” Dennis laughed.

“Still.” Her grin made heat sizzle all through him. “I bet he was. So maybe
 
if he was that super brainy before he died, some of it stuck around after he died.”

“I wish we knew what was going on. That’s all. Not with the alarm, that I can figure out. But all of this.” Dennis shook his head.

“It’s fucked up, that’s for sure,” she said solemnly, “but you know what I think?”

He studied her, curious. “What?”

“I think it doesn’t matter.”

“How can it not matter,” Dennis asked, “when the world’s gone to shit?”

Kelsey shrugged, then took his hand. She smiled at him. “Not all of it.”

52

“Maddy. Pay attention,” Dad said. “This is important.”

Math problems weren’t important anymore. History, not important. Grammar, ridiculous. Maddy stared at the pile of books he’d put out in front of her. Busy work, that’s what it was. Something to make the grownups feel like they were doing something impressive by keeping the kids in line with word problems and spelling tests.

“Why?”

Dad licked at a bead of sweat on his upper lip. The complex was part of a storage facility that had been built in a mine. Everything was underground, the temperature never changing except when it was artificially altered. That’s why it made such a great place to store stuff, Dad had told her early on, because everything could be climate controlled. They heated the living spaces of the complex to make it more comfortable for them, so it wasn’t like living in a cave, but that wouldn’t explain why Dad would be sweating.

“Maddy, it’s important to do what you’re told. That’s why.”

“Why?” She sat back in her chair to look at him. He had more gray hairs in his eyebrows than he had a few weeks ago. More glinting in the stubble on his face, too.
 

It was because of the man she’d experimented on, the one they’d caught and put in the lab room. Nobody knew it was her for sure, but Mom guessed. She might’ve told Dad. If anyone else in the complex had any idea it had been Maddy, she supposed they’d have said something or at least looked at her funny, but c’mon. Who’d suspect a kid?

“Because if everyone just did whatever they wanted to, everything would become chaos.” Dad rubbed at his eyes with his thumb and middle finger, not looking at her. He sounded tired. “So do the math problems, Maddy, and stop being such a…so naughty.”

Both her brows rose. Then her eyes narrowed. She looked at the problems copied onto the beige lined paper. They’d found an entire pallet of these school notepads in one of the storage rooms, the size of a trade paperback book, the paper soft and pulpy. The blue lines were all slanty. She lifted the paper to her nose to breathe in the scent of old paper and fresh ink. The smell of it was much better than Dad’s stale coffee breath or the stink of his sweaty armpits. This paper had been made of living things. Trees had grown in the soil, pushing their branches and leaves to the sky, nourished by the sun and water…She breathed again.

Again.

Again.

“Maddy!”
 

She opened her eyes, still a little lost in the perfume of dead trees. “What?”

Dad tapped the book. “Homework.”

Maddy smiled. That’s all she did, but Dad frowned. He scooted back in his chair a little bit.
 

“Maddy…”

Maddy smiled some more.

Dad looked at her for a long time without saying anything. His eyes wouldn’t quite lock on hers, and that wasn’t like Dad at all. He always said making eye contact was super important when you were talking to people because it told them you meant business, and that you could be trusted. People who didn’t make good eye contact were usually liars, that’s what Dad had said to Ev when he caught him sneaking liquor from the cabinet.
 

Maddy trusted Dad, though, at least as much as she’d learned to trust anyone over the age of seventeen or so. After that, people started getting shifty, thought they “knew better.” Thought they needed to teach kids stuff “for their own good.” That was a bunch of stinky-poo, as Maddy’s kindergarten teacher would’ve said. The one she’d only had for half a year, because somehow she’d accidentally eaten some bad, poison berries instead of the good kind and she’d had to stay in the hospital for a long time.

“Maddy. You know you can tell me anything, don’t you?” Dad looked serious all of a sudden. He leaned forward to capture her hand across the table before she could pull it away. His hand was sweaty.

Gross.

“I know, Dad.”

“Anything,” he insisted, not letting go of her hand though she tried to slip free. His other hand came around to grab her wrist. Hold her tight. “No matter if you think you’ll get into trouble, or if you think me or Mom would be mad. If there’s something bothering you —“”

“Nothing’s bothering me.” Maddy stopped trying to get her hand free and gave him another smile instead.
 

It didn’t work the way she thought it would. Dad gripped harder, leaned closer. She could smell the stink of him, and it turned her head. She grimaced.
 

Something shifted and twisted inside her skull, close to the top of her spine. Something tickled. Something stretched and grew, and it felt so good, so good, that her head lolled back for a second or two. Her mouth gaped. She blinked rapidly against the pleasure of it.

“Tire swing,” she muttered.