Three A.M. (22 page)

I didn’t blame Rebecca for it. For anything. I somehow felt that she was outside the system. But that was likely inaccurate: her father was one of the architects of my life, after all. The need to know—the need to know every detail and motivation and all of it … about the whole city and why me—was less pressing in my mind now. Everything made sense in a macabre, general way, and I worried that more facts would just cloud my thinking and blunt any pride I had left. I had been a pawn. No man likes to be a pawn. While I had never loved my life, at least I thought up until a handful of days ago that I was in charge of my own destiny.

“Do you want to eat on the porch?” Rebecca called out to me.

I was startled back to the present by her voice. I blinked in the sunlight, realizing that I had been standing still with my eyes closed for several minutes. My cigarette had burned out. I turned and replied with a weak “Sure.”

She went inside and I dropped the butt and walked up the porch’s back steps. There was a little wrought iron table with two chairs sitting around it. I set my mug of tepid coffee down and sat in one of the chairs.

Becca came back outside balancing two plates of food, silverware, and her coffee in her arms, and I rose to help set down the meal. I followed suit as she draped her napkin across her lap and then in silence we began eating. I ate slowly, deliberately enjoying each forkful. She kept her eyes down, taking small, rapid bites. As soon as we were finished, she rose and cleared the table, waving for me to remain seated with one hand.

After a minute, Rebecca came back outside with the coffeepot. She freshened both our mugs and then sat. “All right. Anything you ask, I’ll try to answer.”

I leaned back, raising the front feet of the chair off the cherry wood deck and looking out over the countryside. “It’s ironic, isn’t it.… In twenty-four hours time, I’ll learn everything I’ve wanted to know for fifteen, sixteen years, and all of it here at this little house in the country.”

“It used to be the suburbs.” I looked over at her, and she nodded. “The house sat on maybe an acre when I was a little girl. There were houses on either side and a park out back there past where the grass is cut. My school was a half mile away. They spared this house only because Dad made them. Threatened to leave the department. So they scrubbed and cleaned and tested the house for almost a year, and then we got to move back in. I was eleven then. Maybe twelve. Everything around was just bare dirt and a few trees. They bulldozed the buildings, burned most of the brush … even ripped up all the grass. It was like the moon. For miles and miles. We couldn’t play outside without Geiger counters until I was almost fifteen.” She took a sip of coffee and looked out at her yard, her eyes glazing as she slipped back into memories.

“This was all suburbs?” I whispered incredulously.

“Yeah. Mostly. Some trees and fields, but yeah, there were homes all around us.”

“Where did…” I trailed off.

“There’s a band around the city—about fifteen miles wide most places—where there’s just nothing there. Some of it used to be towns; some was woods. Now it’s all just grassland. They tried to tell us it was for decontamination. But that was bullshit. It was to help them catch the escapees. The forests and abandoned—”

“People escape?” I cut her off.

“All the time. They don’t get far, mostly. But a few times a year, we’d see someone running across the fields. Or faces watching as we drove through the ruined towns. Sometimes then you’d hear helicopters or little prop planes circling, searching.”

I shook my head in disbelief. Not at what she was saying, but at the moral fortitude of those who had broken free. The brash will. I’d never once even thought to venture beyond the barricades and fences—I swallowed it all down. I thought of what it must have been like to emerge from the haze on your own two feet. Amazing that someone might have found the answers I’d been so close to but missed.

“I guess no one ever got all the way out, huh?”

“I doubt it.” She sighed. “Everything would have changed then, I guess.”

We sat in silence for a while; then, quietly, I asked, “Rebecca … what did your father do?”

“He was a scientist. Wanted to be since he was a kid. Right out of college, he got a grant to study pressure systems and wind cycles. It fascinated him. He’d talk us to sleep night after night, trying to explain this or that. He was on the state board of research when it happened.”

“The meltdown?”

“Yeah. On the second day, a natural fog bank rolled in over a smaller town about fifty miles from the city and the death rate dropped. Dad was the one who made the connection. So he and his team were tasked with getting as many places … as many people fogged in as fast as they could. So many people had died that it wasn’t even worth trying to save the little towns or the farmhouses or any of it. So they herded everyone into the city. Me too, for a few months. It was horrifying. I was just a kid, you know? Then when we got to go home … it was never the same. I cried all the time. I would clutch my mom’s nightgown to my face and cry for hours and hours.”

“Did…” I trailed off again, wishing I had never started the question. Becca nodded sadly, understanding, her eyes welling up. I furrowed my brow and looked away. “Mine too. Both of them. It’s tough.”

“I’m sorry.”

“So am I. For you and me.” She put her elbows on the table and rested her face in her hands, breathing heavily, obviously fighting back tears.

I nodded, drifting back to those days in my mind. “I enlisted to be a soldier then,” I said very quietly. “When they were moving everyone into the city I was … out on the roads … guarding…” She looked up at me and I lost my train of thought. I sat there staring deeply into her eyes, fascination etched into my face. She blushed and turned away, smiling slightly.

“What?”

“Your eyes. They’re blue.”

Becca looked at me quizzically. She blinked several times, long lashes flitting before her soft, sky blue eyes. “They’ve always been blue.”

“In the city they were gray. I guess everything was. But you have … They’re beautiful.” She looked away again, bashfully. We shared a moment of warm silence, but eventually her expression changed. I took a sip of coffee, avoiding the question I most needed to ask for a second longer.

“Why did they kill him?”

“Because he was a good man. Because he was honest. And foolish enough to trust that others were too. He never wanted any of this, Tom. As soon as it was obvious that we weren’t dealing with some temporary quarantine … that it was being lied about and covered up … he hated it. He protested. They told him to keep quiet. That was years ago. Dad never drank more than a glass or two of wine a week—even after Mom died—until then. He tried to keep his head down. Tried to take comfort in at least knowing that people would be safe and that his children were safe … He always felt like it was his fault. All of it.” Her lip quivered and a tear ran down her left cheek, sparkling in the sunlight. “He was such a good man. He thought it was all his fault, and he couldn’t take it.”

Another tear followed the damp trail of the first, and I grabbed the green cloth napkin off my lap and reached out, half-expecting her to lean away. She closed her eyes and I gently, tenderly wiped away the tears. Her head dropped forward as I withdrew. Her right hand was resting on the table, and I slid the napkin under it, lingering for a moment with our skin pressed together. My chest fluttered at the feel of her soft, warm flesh. She opened her eyes and smiled at me, whispering a barely audible thank you and dabbing at her eyes with the napkin.

Her voice stronger, she continued. “A few months ago, Dad decided he couldn’t bear it anymore. He decided that they had to know. That … you all did. Everyone. He thought I didn’t know how he felt … what he was planning … but I knew. I was working at the Science Department, so I heard things.” I looked up at her quickly when she said this, and she shrugged, guilt and remorse in her eyes. “I was a research assistant. It was just so I could be near my father. He was determined to stop the fog, stop the lies—all of it. He told Kirk about it. They were friends, he thought. They’d worked together for years. His wife and kids used to come to our house.… They all died, though. He told Kirk about the letters he was drafting to all the newspapers … to foreign governments. He was going to drag it all out into the light in one play. Asked Kirk to help him … and then, two weeks ago, Kirk had him shot in the head in his own backyard.” Her face was a mask when she said this—she displayed no emotion, but her knuckles were white, gripping and stretching the napkin.

“I got home to find an army truck outside and Callahan in the kitchen smiling as he held a gun to my brother’s head. He told me Dad was dead just like you’d tell someone the score of a game. Said Fallon was next. Jesus Christ … I’d barely even seen him in two years. Fallon’s been so busy with his work in the city for so long, and I hated him for so long because he was becoming like them, and then … there he was on his knees in the kitchen, bruised and crying and I started crying and Callahan laughed. He fucking laughed at us.”

She finally broke down, crossing her arms and lowering her head between them onto the table. Sobs racked her body. I sat there like a deer in headlights. It all made so much sense in that instant. She made sense. The seductress in the red dress, the snappily attired business woman … Everything was just a mask covering a frightened girl who missed her father, who would do anything to protect her brother.

I rose and stepped around the table, kneeling beside her. Gently, unsteadily at first, I began to massage her shoulders and neck with one hand. “It’s okay. I don’t want you to keep talking about it anymore. I just … if there’s anything…” I trailed off pathetically and after a moment took my hand off her back. Without so much as looking up, she reached out, found my arm, and guided my hand back onto her shoulders.

I rose and stood behind her, firmly but tenderly massaging her neck, upper arms, shoulders, and back. It was amazing. Sensual. Satisfying. I could have rubbed her pale neck and run my fingers through her soft, golden hair for hours, forever. From time to time, she let out little sighs and whimpers. I leaned down and took a long, deep breath of her essence. Honey sweet and fresh, young.
She’s just a kid,
I thought to myself. Maybe a young woman, but still, a twenty-something orphan with the weight of the world on her shoulders. And my forty-something hands. I had to help her as much as I could. I owed her that. She had done exactly what anyone would have for as long as she had to, and then, at the first opportunity, she had been honest. Her honesty had set me free. If more than a third of my life was robbed from me by their lies and their fog, if everyone I knew died by their failures, so be it. At least I knew. At least I would never again wander through the foggy streets with my mind in a haze.

It saddened me to know that the most helpful thing I could do for her was to disappear quickly and forever. Maybe five minutes had passed as I ran my hands along her back and through her hair. Reluctantly, I patted her softly on the left shoulder and drew my chair around the table nearer to hers. I sat, my hands clasped between my knees, looking at her. After a moment, she slowly raised her head a bit, resting her chin on her folded arms. Her soft blue eyes were red with tears, and her hair fell around her face. I could scarcely believe this perfect, innocent young woman was the same person who had reeled me in not two weeks ago.

She stared off into the distance for a while and then turned to look at me, dabbing at moist eyes with my napkin. “Thank you. That felt great.”

I leaned toward her, not wanting to change the mood of the moment, but I felt it was incumbent on me to tell her what I was thinking. “Rebecca … as long as I’m here, you’re not safe. I was just some asshole to be framed and dealt with before.” She winced slightly as I said this, and I held up my hands and inclined my head slightly to say,
It’s okay,
and then continued. “But now it’s a lot bigger than that. I know about everything now. I … I’ve killed people now.”

“People who had it coming,” she said sharply.

“Yes, but their people. City people. If they find me here, you and Fallon are in more danger than ever. I need to leave. Immediately. Now.”

“No! Tom, no!” She sat up and grabbed both my knees. I sat back rigidly in surprise. “I don’t want you to leave! I have no one! Nothing! I … I’m just here in this house alone and now, I’m out of eggs and I … I don’t know where to get them.…”

Her lip began to quiver, and instinctively I reached out to grasp her shoulder. She sprang forward from her chair and wrapped her arms around my neck. Her hair fell across my face, her lips grazed my ear.

“Don’t leave me. Please.”

“I don’t want to … but I want you to be safe. You’re so young. You need to be safe. I can’t be caught here and let you throw your whole life away.”

“What will you do?” she whispered, her soft lips brushing the skin of my cheek.

“I don’t know. I mean … there’s still a world out there, right? I’ll get to a city. Blend in and disappear.”

“How much harder is it for two people to disappear than one?”

“Becca,” I said, drawing her up off her knees and into my lap. She kept her arms around my neck and nestled her head against my chest. I looked out over the rolling, sunny hills. Her scent mingled with that of the pure, open land. “You don’t want to follow me. I’m just … just a tired, homeless man almost twice your age. And a wanted one, at that. There’s a mark on my head. If I can get away … slip out of their system and into another world … well, then maybe I’ll have something of a second chance. Thanks to you. But you don’t have to take the risk. You can do whatever you want. You don’t want to follow me. I’m a mess.”

“You’re a good man,” she said quietly, stroking the hair on the back of my neck. “You tried to help me even when you knew I was lying to you.”

“You have nothing to atone for. You did what you had to.”

“They would have killed you. I … I’m so sorry. They would have killed you because of me—”