The rest of the staff here are all much younger. They’re all jocks and phys-ed types. Friendly though. Anyway, I wanted to specially mention Terry, since he’s the guy that you need to thank for Grace (if you ever get the chance).
12/21
I had a totally WTH of a nightmare last night. It was pretty bad. I saw it all again, Mom being overrun by those little crawly things. You know what her last words to me were? (Of course you don’t.) Well, I’ll tell you: “They’re inside me.”
Uh-huh, you read that right. “Inside me.”
That’s what keeps coming back to me the most. But, my God…she could feel those little bugs cutting through her and getting into her body. I don’t want to think about what that felt like. I try not to think about it, but, seriously, I get no friggin’ say in what I get to dream about. Jeez. I do NOT want to go out like that.
“She seems very popular,” said Freya. She turned to Leon. “Everyone loves her.”
They watched Grace helping a couple of the spa’s groundsmen, Carlo and his young apprentice, dig up the decorative flower beds and the plastic palm trees. Mr. Carnegie had suddenly gotten a bee in his bonnet about self-sufficiency and turning the unused faux flowerbeds into genuine vegetable gardens.
“After all,” he’d said at yesterday’s breakfast briefing, “we’re living in a giant greenhouse. Come on! Who wants to eat something fresh instead of canned?”
He’d addressed that to an audience who were decades younger than him and were used to the ping of a microwave. Leon guessed it had more to do with boosting morale than dealing with nutrition, something to keep his young staff busy. Grace was among them. She’d managed to find a pair of kitchen rubber gloves from somewhere and was making them all giggle with her City Girl Does Rural act, hamming up her Big Apple accent, groaning about the muck on her gloves and curling her lips like a drama queen, relishing the attention, the good-natured head shaking and eye rolling from the others.
“Everyone always loves her,” Leon replied. For the first time, he realized he’d said that with just a little pride, not the way he would have in the past, sarcastically and layered with resentment. He smiled. “She’s a natural at it. She didn’t just chatter at school—she networked.”
“Unlike you?”
“I’m the contrast, right?” He turned to Freya. “The sibling who’s, like, the total opposite, the miserable loner.”
“No! Just…you’re quieter. I’d say a thinker rather than a talker.”
Absently, Leon ran a hand through his dark hair.
Freya snorted at that.
“What?”
“You! That! Doing the whole romantic, mysterious outsider thing.”
“Huh?”
She mimicked him, running a hand through her hair, narrowing her eyes, jutting her chin, pursing her lips, and staring off into the middle distance. “The whole brooding poet act.”
Leon closed his eyes and shook his head. “Ah, did I just do that?”
She nudged his shoulder with hers. “Only works with pretty boys, I’m afraid.”
“Charming.” He frowned as he thought about something. “What do you guys call a dog? Oh, yeah…I’m a ‘minger,’ right?”
She smiled at his pronunciation of the word. He’d made it sound like ginger. “I love it when you Yanks try on our accent for size.”
“Except I’m not a Yank. I’m a Brit.”
“Bollocks to that.”
“No, seriously. I was born in England. Mom comes…” He dipped his head for a moment, then started again on a different tack. “I’ve got English grandparents. I went to elementary school here. I have a British birth certificate an’ all. What more do I need to be one of you Brits?”
“Drop a few H’s and T’s, bruv…know wha’ I mean?”
“Right, so you guys all talk like that when no one’s looking?”
“Yeah. Wicked, innit?”
Leon winced. “Half the students in my college speak like that.”
“College? What, like, degree college? I didn’t think you were that old.”
“No…no. Sixth Form college. Same as U.S. high school. I’m, like, seventeen.”
Freya looked surprised at that. “You look younger but act older. So I had you as a really young-looking university-age kid.”
“I hate looking so young. Maybe when I’m in my fifties I’ll finally get to shave.”
“Leon, seriously, it’s the right way around. Better than looking older and acting all immature. Too many man-childs around.”
Freya watched Grace puttering around, offering unneeded advice and being generally no real help at all. “I often find myself wondering about how all the famous people have got on.”
“Huh?”
“You know, the Hollywood royalty, the billionaires, the catwalk models, the rap stars… Normally the real world never touches the likes of them. They live in their comfy bubbles and every now and then reach out to us with a tweet or an Instagram, usually something stage-managed. I wonder whether they all escaped to some mystery safety island somewhere in the Maldives…or whether I just squished one of them in the car last time we went out.”
Leon laughed.
“Life’s lottery winners,” she sighed. “They usually come out on top.”
“I bet most of them were chomping pills of one kind or another.” He nudged her. “Hey, maybe we’ll meet celebrity survivors.”
“Oh God, kill me now.”
They watched Grace tiptoeing across the earth bed, trying not to soil her pink tennis shoes, one uprooted plastic carnation in her gloved hands.
Standing to one side of the volunteers and watching them work was Dave Lester.
“Come on, boys and girls, put your backs into it!”
“Now, he’s the kind of douche that always survives,” Freya said, nodding his way. “I’ve seen his chalet room. He has posters of girls in skimpy bikinis holding big guns.” She cocked her head. “Just great.”
Leon watched him. Watched what he was gazing at. Claire was squatting down at the side of the garden. Dave was admiring the tattoo at the base of her spine.
“The guy seems like a total sleazebag.”
“Tell me about it. He’s made a crack at pretty much every female in here…except Mrs. Lin. Even me a couple of times. You know what his charming chat-up line was?” She didn’t wait for Leon to shake his head. “My job is to be making as many babies as possible now.” She narrowed her eyes. “Thank God he’s not the one running things here.”
Chapter 38
Grace really didn’t dream very often. Hardly ever, in fact. Leon once said it was because she had absolutely zero imagination with which her unconscious mind could fool around. In return, she’d said she’d rather have zero imagination than zero personality.
Shots fired—she won.
But she’d definitely just had one. A horrible dream. She turned over in her bed and looked at Leon. Gray light was seeping into their chalet, but it wasn’t yet dawn and he was fast asleep and snoring gently.
“Leo…”
She tossed a cushion across the gap between their beds. “Jeez! What the…?” He jerked awake in his bed and turned to look at her, bleary eyed. “God, Grace…what did you go and do that for? I was sleeping!”
“I just had a nightmare.”
She saw him roll his eyes.
“Well, just… For God’s sake, just try and forget about it and…” He stopped midsentence when he realized she was crying. “About Mom?”
She nodded.
He sighed. “Do you need, like, I dunno…a hug or something?”
She nodded quickly, didn’t wait for a further response from him. She tossed the sheet back, hopped across the space between their beds, and curled up beside him, nudging him backward to make some space for herself.
Leon put an arm
around her narrow shoulders. He could feel them shaking. “Whatever it was…it was just a bad dream, OK?”
“Mom came here,” she whispered. “She came here to this place. She came to the front entrance…”
“Just forget about it. Just a dream, kiddo,” he mumbled sleepily.
“Leo, oh God… She was being chased by those crabs. I couldn’t open the door to let her in.”
He squeezed her shoulder. “OK, maybe that does sound like a pretty shitty nightmare.”
“She kept saying, ‘They’re inside me… They’re inside me,’ and I couldn’t open the door…”
“Shhh…”
Grace became quiet, but he could feel her sobbing, trying to be as subtle as possible about it, but her shuddering shoulders gave her away.
“Shhh…it’s OK. It’s OK.”
Jeez…what do I say? ’Cause it isn’t OK. It isn’t even close to OK.
“She’s gone, Grace. She saved us. She died knowing we were all right, we were safe. That kind of thing means everything to parents, right? The kids are everything that matters to them.”
Grace turned over to face him, a tress of her dark hair stuck to a damp cheek. “What if she didn’t die? Maybe she got out? What if she’s looking for us right now?”
Unlikely. Very unlikely. She died. He knew that. And hope, the kind with which Grace seemed to be wrestling, was like feeding the grief troll, feeding the pain.
“Maybe it’s, like, a premonition or something, Leo?” Her wide eyes challenged him to say different.
Leon shook his head. “Listen, Grace…dreams aren’t premonitions. They’re not warnings or omens, they’re just…I dunno, the brain firing randomly. Like you know sometimes when a slow, clunky laptop boots up? Sometimes you get a flash on the screen of the last game you played or the last website you visited? Grace, a dream is just your brain sort of trying to make a story from the random stuff your sleeping mind throws around.”
She seemed to wilt slightly at his explanation.
“You don’t want to do this, Grace…hope for something like that. ’Cause it won’t happen. She’s gone.”
She turned over, presenting her back to him again. “I miss her so much.”
“Me too.”
The pillow rustled as she nodded her head. “You won’t ever leave me, will you?”
“Don’t be an idiot. I’d be lost without your funky fashion tips.”
He felt her giggle at that.
“And your advice on my nonexistent love life.”
“You’re totally terrible at that.”
So true. He’d never had a girlfriend. On the other hand, Grace traded boyfriends like Yu-Gi-Oh! cards. He suspected her definition of boyfriend was something of a gray area. Holding hands, once, in a crowded playground, probably counted as that.
“Although”—she turned to look at him, smiling now—“my may-dar says Freya may just like you.”
“You think?”
“I think.”
She was silent for a while, long enough for Leon to be convinced she was done talking and might let him actually go back to sleep, when she turned to look at him once more. “What’s wrong with her?”
“She has MS.”
“What’s MS?”
“Remember that older kid, Clay Baumgardner, in the apartment down from ours?”
“Uh-huh. The red-haired guy?”
“Yup, well…pretty much the same thing he had. I think.”
She was quiet again for a while. Leon guessed she was trying to remember what he’d looked like, how he’d started walking with a cane, then later moved to a wheelchair. How quickly his condition had deteriorated. “That so sucks,” she said sleepily. A minute later, she was breathing deep and regular, fast asleep and hogging most of his single bed.
Chapter 39
Freya liked it out here on the spa’s roof terrace. It extended above the ground-floor gym, a two-story protrusion out from the side of the large rectangular glass box of the tropicarium. The virus’s “mode” had changed from being clouds of particles to a liquid with weblike feeler tendrils, to small experimental crustaceans that seemed unable to do anything more adventurous than scuttle across the ground. And since there’d also been no signs of those clouds of particles for months, Ron had declared this open space safe.
The terrace was covered with an almost-convincing carpet of artificial grass, surrounded by a safety rail from which flower baskets hung. It had a clear view across the woodlands. Over the tops of the shorter trees, she could see the glint of the park’s small artificial lake, the two clay tennis courts, now dusted with the dead leaves that had fallen from the overhanging maple trees.
Nature, well at least the flora part of it, still had its busy schedule to keep to. Winter was finally here, leaves had fallen in order to make a squishy nuisance of themselves, and the air had a pleasing chill to it.
She hung her laundry on the line strung out across the roof garden. Although this park had electricity, Ron was determined to preserve it for more important things than washing and tumble drying. The turbine and the solar panels provided enough for everything else, but the gym below her, full of energy-draining treadmills, and the laundry room in the basement remained locked and unused.
“Laundering clothes and maintaining personal hygiene,” Ron had reminded everyone recently at the daily breakfast briefing, “is still very important and is everyone’s personal responsibility.”
Freya didn’t mind this particular chore. It was a chance to be outside, to get some alone time and some fresh air, to feel the sun on her face…and to be perfectly safe while doing that. The Snark didn’t seem to be able to make things that could climb or fly…yet.
The Snark? She shook her head at herself, at the name she used for the plague.
She realized, in her mind, the virus had evolved into a single entity, a thing…with a name. Like a person. It reminded her of a beat-cancer campaign from a couple of years ago. How cleverly the advertising company responsible for those TV ads had personalized the disease, made a million unlinked clusters of tumorous cells into one big punch-in-the-face-able bad guy. The cancer character had had a name: Vincent, a chain-smoking douchebag with slicked-back hair, grayish skin, and, oddly, an Essex accent.
And now the virus had a name: Snark. And he was a douchebag too.
“Screw. You. Mr. Snark,” she muttered as she reached into the basket for her bedsheet.
“Potty mouth!”
Freya spun around, staggering slightly, reaching for the back of one of the deck chairs to steady her balance.
“Oh…it’s you.”
Dave sat down casually on a chair nearby. “Offer still stands, by the way.”
“What’s the matter, Claire turn you down again?”
“No,” he replied defensively.
“Have you tried any of the cleaning girls yet?” There were three of them, the cleaners. They spoke about five words of English between them. She wasn’t sure if they were Polish, Romanian, Hungarian, or Czech. “You never know, with the language barrier an’ all, they might not have figured out you’re a complete idiot yet.”
“You’re a sarcastic cow, aren’t you?”
“Hey, it’s my superpower.” She shrugged. “I use it only for good though.”
Dave’s hard face creased with an insincere smile. “Hey, do you want a hand?”
She didn’t. She wanted him to go. But before she could answer him he clapped his hands slowly.
“Oh, my, ‘give me a hand,’ that’s so-o-o hilarious! Did you write that joke all by yourself?”
The sarcasm whistled over the top of his head. “No. It’s an oldie.” He got up from the chair. “Here, I’m gonna help you with that sheet anyway.”
“Thanks, but I’m fine…honestly.”
He ignored that and grabbed two corne
rs from her. “You need to double it over or you’ll take up too much space on the line.”
She had been going to do that. The line was already covered with other people’s bed linen and clothes.
He advanced toward her, arms spread, one corner of the sheet in each hand. Very close. Far too close. She took the corners from him quickly. “There.” He smiled.
His hands were free…and hers weren’t. He placed one hand on her hip, the other on her right breast. “Come on, Frey—”
She dropped the sheet and tried to push him back. “No!”
His arm slid from her hip, around the back of her waist: a hold on her, a very firm one. “Come on…just a bit of fun.”
“I said no… Now piss off and let me go!”
He scrunched his hand on her chest. Painfully.
“Ow! You’re hurting me!”
“Come on, Freya. Just a—”
She jabbed a finger, hard and straight, into his right ear.
He recoiled, let her go, and cupped a hand to the side of his head. “Ow! That hurt!”
“So did that,” she said, rubbing her chest. “You really are a complete shit, Dave.”
He took his hand away and stared at a small smear of blood. “Bitch.”
She rolled her eyes. “Don’t be such a baby. I poked you, that’s all.”
He stepped forward, grabbed her wrists, and pushed her back so that she lost balance and collapsed on to the deck chair. He swung a leg over and sat on her. Pulled her arms down to her sides and planted a knee on each wrist.
“You really don’t get it, do you?”
She bucked and wriggled, but his weight was too much. His hard knees ground into her wrists painfully. “Get off me!”
“It’s all new rules now, Freya. No more of that political-correctness garbage. It’s survive in the jungle time. Just us… You better get used to the idea.”
“Get off me!”
“Now, then.” He started to tug her tucked-in shirt out of the waistband of her jeans and lift it up.
“Hey!”
Dave looked up and saw Grace standing in the doorway carrying a plastic laundry basket.