The car rumbled to life when he turned the key. He pressed down on the gas and listened to the engine roar, grinning from ear to ear. It was such a beautiful sound.
Do not get distracted, Thomas, the persistent new voice in his head ordered.
“Whatever,” he mumbled, and then did what he was supposed to. He picked up his phone and dialed the number he needed.
It was answered after two rings. “Larry,” he said, “this is Tom Steinberg. Yes, I haven’t heard from you in a while, either. Not since Florida eight years ago. Now listen, I have job for you. Got to keep this under wraps, you hear? No, no questions. No one needs to know a thing. Just come to my house. Bring the Cleaning Crew. I’ve got a bit of a…mess in my kitchen. Yes, standard procedure. I’ll work out the details with Peter this afternoon. No, you don’t have to worry about a thing. Just get over here. And prepare yourself; it isn’t pretty.”
He was about to hang up when the image of two smiling faces appeared in his mind’s eye. “Oh, and Larry,” he said. “Ally and Shelly will be back by three this afternoon. So you’d better make it quick.”
He backed the Beamer out of the driveway and sped away. He’d never felt so full, so at peace, in all his life. It was as if his whole existence had suddenly slipped into place, as if every choice he’d ever made had the purpose of leading him to this moment right here, right now, driving sixty-seven miles an hour through empty side streets. The image of the previous night’s encounter was nothing but a speck of dust on the surface of his cognition. He didn’t understand what was happening, but it didn’t matter. What did matter was that Tom Steinberg was important. Tom Steinberg was needed. Tom Steinberg was special. It struck him as no consequence if he had to sell his soul in the process. Hell, he’d done it before. That’s what you call it when a man of strong Jewish heritage becomes the figurehead for the New Christian Right. Selling your soul. It was his father’s voice, scolding him from his deathbed.
The old man had been gone for years, and his words meant nothing. Tom laughed and turned on the radio. There were no urgent warnings to be heard, no fearful commentators presenting doomsday scenarios to a terrified public. The cheerful voice of a hipster deejay came over the airwaves, saying the cold snap had ended. “It’s gonna be a mild day in the D.C. area today, cats,” the deejay chirped, “so get ready for some rockin’ oldies!”
You Can’t Always Get What You Want by the Stones started playing. Tom hummed along and drove onward, gleefully anticipating his day.
The devil you know, he thought. Oh, yes, the devil you know.
CHAPTER 5
INNOCENCE
JOSH RECLINED in the uncomfortable plastic chair, his cup of tea resting untouched on the table in front of him. The donut shop was empty that morning, which he didn’t find shocking. The normal pre-work rush had been rapidly dwindling over the last few days as news of possible terrorist attacks and communicable diseases widened. Now he found himself relatively alone, with no one to keep him company but the cashier, his Boston Globe, and the television on the wall.
He sat in silence with the paper spread open to the national news section. His eyes skimmed over lines of blurred words and he tried hard to focus. It took effort just to keep his eyes open, let alone read. He hadn’t gotten a solid night’s sleep in nearly a week. The nightmares, both real and in his head, saw to that.
A headline in bolded typeset stated ‘News of Our Day’, but it might as well have said ‘News of the Weird’ or even ‘News of the Really Fucking Disturbing’. Every article he skimmed painted dark, unsettling scenarios. There was one story on the “Rodent Flu”, as the media had dubbed the new influenza epidemic (or pandemic; it seemed for a brief moment a few days ago that he’d seen news of cases in France and Norway, but not a word since), which had caused emergency rooms around the country to fill beyond max capacity. Then there were the odd cases that the lower-end tabloids had been reporting (and the bigger periodicals like the Globe were now starting to pick up), chronicling cases of acute psychosis that affected all types of people, from young to old, healthy to sick. They were people who’d been the vision of sanity one day and then BAM, they lose it. One article was of a boy who gouged his mother’s eye out at his birthday party in Austin, Texas; another told of an eighty-year-old grandmother who opened fire with a hunting rifle at a mall in Clearwater, Florida, killing six. And to close it all out, there were the countless reports of rioting and terrorist activity that only a week ago seemed so far away but had now spread into North Carolina. Civil war seemed inevitable, with Muslims and other minority groups being attacked daily. Hell, thought Josh. Maybe we’re already at war.
He turned the page. “Is this the beginning of the end for U.S. sovereignty?” asked an editorial. Josh closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and started tapping his right foot nervously. It had all gone to hell. I don’t wanna be a grown-up anymore. I miss being a kid, with nothing to worry about except having a good time. Where did that innocence go?
He shut the paper, folded it in half, tucked it under his arm, and stood up. The television on the wall, tuned to CNN with the sound thankfully off, showed a male field reporter framed in front of a ruined cityscape. Bursts of light flashed in the background. The reporter flinched and ducked when flames ejected from a window of the building behind him. The banner in the upper right-hand corner of the screen said: Macon, GA.
Josh quickly turned his head away, nodding to the old lady with the far-away eyes behind the counter before exiting the building. His watch said it was seven-thirty, a half-hour before his shift began. With a few minutes to spare he stopped in the middle of the parking lot and gazed at the sky. The morning was much warmer than usual, close to sixty degrees already. For the first time in weeks there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. As the sun heated his skin, he almost smiled. The dichotomy of this situation was not lost to him. The happy nerve endings beneath his flesh told him life is beautiful. The thoughts flying through his head said the opposite.
* * *
There were only two cars in front of J & P Diagnostics when Josh arrived. The workforce had taken their cues from the patrons at the donut shop, it seemed. He seriously considered turning around and driving home, but a lingering sense of responsibility—who would fill the orders if there was no one there?—forced him to park and head in.
He swiped his ID badge through the time clock, eerily aware of the silence inside the warehouse. “Hello?” he called out. His voice ricocheted off the aluminum walls and a touch of concern strummed at his temples.
He walked through the building. There wasn’t a soul to be seen in the aisles of merchandise or on the loading dock, so Josh made his way to the manager’s office. There he found James Conroy, the medical supply storehouse’s janitor. James, a sixty-three-year-old Vietnam veteran, served as Josh’s best friend in the place. He’d been an engineer in his younger days and his intelligence, combined with an outgoing nature, made him the only person Josh had met in his four years on the job that he felt completely comfortable around.
James beamed when he saw his young friend. “Good morning, kiddo,” he said.
“What’s up, Mister C?” asked Josh.
“No work today.”
“No?”
“Nope. Rick shut us down. With all the call-outs, he said it’s pretty useless to have a shift. Though you’re the seventh person I’ve turned away, so maybe we could have gotten some work done.”
Josh grinned. “We gonna get paid for this anyway?”
“Supposedly,” James said with a wink, “but you never know with these cheap bastards.”
“I hear you. They’re always trying to squeeze us, aren’t they?” He flipped off the empty building.
“Oh, let’s not have that, my boy. Don’t even worry about it. Just go home. Have a good time. There’s too much shit going on in the world right now to worry about something as useless as money.”
“Money? Useless?”
James winked again. “If everything goes t
o hell, what good’s a dollar gonna do you?”
Josh grimaced as the old man playfully nudged him.
“Don’t look like that, Josh. You’re young, my boy. You got your whole life ahead of you, no matter what happens.”
* * *
Josh napped the rest of the morning away, his sleep uninterrupted by his pesky subconscious for once. He awoke feeling refreshed and spent the rest of the day listening to music and reading old comics in an attempt to clear his head of the world’s newfound dreadfulness. It seemed to work. By the time the sun began to dip beyond the horizon he felt downright jovial. He opened the freezer, scowling at the stacks of microwave dinners. No, he was in much too good of a mood for that garbage. The perfect solution was to go to his folks’ house yet again. It had been a few days, and he was sure they’d welcome his company.
He arrived at five-thirty, eagerly anticipating another home-cooked meal. What greeted him when he walked inside, however, was an emptiness that felt jarringly similar to what he had experienced in the warehouse. There were dirty dishes piled up in the sink and muddy tracks on the kitchen floor. In the Benoit household, both these sights were far from commonplace. Gail and Don Benoit believed ‘cleanliness is next to Godliness’ to be a way of life.
“Hello?” he called out, again with that feeling of deja-vu. Hadn’t he said that same thing, the same way, only nine hours earlier? “Hello?” he repeated, and still nothing. Josh turned to the window. The cars were still in the side port. It seemed that everyone had just…vanished.
A muffled sound reached his ears and he swiveled toward it. He approached the living room carefully, not wanting to make any noise in case of an intruder. When he was halfway across the kitchen he recognized the sound for what it was—intense, grief-filled sobbing. He took off toward the closed living room doors as fast as he could.
He threw the doors open and saw Sophia hunched over on the couch, face buried in her hands, weeping as her body shook. His mother sat on one side of her, running her fingers through her daughter’s hair, while his father took the other side, his firm right hand squeezing Sophia’s willowy shoulder. The scene was shocking enough to Josh, but the expressions on his parents’ faces more than doubled it. He’d never seen them so disconcerted, with lips thin and quivering.
“What’s going on?” he asked above Sophia’s wails.
Don raised his head. He had tears in his eyes, and the joy Josh arrived with completely abandoned him. Lest not the pillar of strength crumble.
“It’s your cousin. Sean,” Don said.
“What happened?”
Gail leaned over, kissed Sophia on the cheek, and stood up. Her face transformed into that mask of strength that Josh knew all too well. With a silent wave of the hand, she walked past him and into the kitchen. Josh followed.
“Mom, what’s happening?” he asked when they were safely out of earshot.
Gail spoke in a steady voice bordering on robotic. “Your Aunt Peggy called from Weymouth today. Sean had fallen ill a couple days ago. The doctors gave him the new vaccine and told them not to worry about it, that he’d be fine in a few days. That was two days ago. Peggy got home from work today and…and…”
The robotic tone was broken.
“And what, mom?”
“Sean hanged himself in the backyard. Without warning. Without a note.”
Josh’s mouth dropped open. Peggy Driscoll was his mother’s younger sister, and Sean her only child, born two months after Sophia. He’d been a happy-go-lucky kid, though there seemed to be a strange quiet about him, a sweet vulnerability he tried his best to hide but couldn’t, like a force field made of cotton candy. He and Sophia were close, in personality as well as in age. They were, in a way, best friends. They’re empathic children, Gail had said once. It’s what sets them apart. It’s why they relate so well.
As he thought of this, Josh’s gut twisted in knots. He couldn’t imagine what Sophia must be going through.
“Should I go?” he asked.
“Of course not,” said his mother, and she hugged him. Her resolve came back in that moment, and she spoke to him as the teacher she’d always been.
“Your sister needs you right now. You know how much she looks up to you. You’re the most important thing to her—even more than Sean. Always have been. For you to leave now would devastate her.”
He gave her a half-smile and they walked back into the living room together.
* * *
Josh held Sophia on the edge of her bed. She lay with her head in his lap and her hands tucked beneath her cheek while Josh rubbed her back. She wasn’t crying any longer, but every so often her body would shudder.
“I’m sorry,” he heard her say in a voice so faint he almost mistook it for the whistle of the wind blowing in through the open window.
“Sorry for what?”
She sniffled. “I know you probably don’t wanna be here.”
He gently grabbed her shoulders and guided her into a sitting position. Streaks of tears made her cheeks glisten and her lips trembled like a baby’s. She definitely wasn’t a little girl any longer, but she still appeared childlike.
He wiped her trickling nose with his bare hand. “C’mon, Rascal. Of course I want to be here. I’ll always be there for you. You know that.”
Sophia nodded. Her eyes drifted to the floor.
Josh nudged her with his leg. “Buck up, soldier,” he said. “Talk to me.”
She looked at him again and her wide blue eyes filled with tears. “I’m scared,” she said.
“I know,” replied Josh.
“Sean’s dead. He’s gone. He’s not coming back.”
“I know.”
“I mean, I just saw him last month. He was f-f-fine. We talked about high school. He wanted to go so bad.”
“I know.”
She broke down. “N-n-now he’s n-n-never gonna g-go. He’s n-n-never gonna c-c-come over and play X-Box. He w-w-won’t ever get to tell Lucy Underhill how much he l-l-likes her.”
“I know.”
“Stop saying that!” Sophia shrieked, her voice quavering with anger. It was such a sudden reversal that Josh almost fell off the bed in surprise. She began flailing her arms, whacking him on the chest and neck.
“Whoa!” he yelped as he leaned away from her thrashing. “What’s wrong?”
“You don’t care! You don’t care at all!”
She took a swipe at him, but Josh grabbed her wrist before her fist connected. He took his free hand and swung it around her back, pulling her into him. There he held her close to his chest, fighting against her spasms. She jabbed him with her elbow and kneed him on the inner thigh, but he wouldn’t let go.
Her rage gradually subsided, and Josh let his sister melt into him. Her thin frame went limp and she started crying all over again. It wasn’t the subdued whimper of a young girl who’d lost her best friend, but the mighty, piercing howl of a wounded animal. It agonized him to hear those sounds coming from his baby sister. He wanted to sit her up and console her, but dared not let her go.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered instead. “Let it all out.”
She did, yowling until exhaustion forced her to sleep. Josh released his bear hug and laid her out on the bed. A moan escaped her lips as she curled into the fetal position. She pulled the covers up to her neck, cradling them as she had her baby dolls when she was a toddler. Josh watched her in silence, waiting until her breathing became steady. He briefly considered going downstairs but decided otherwise, instead stretching out beside her and wrapping his arms around her upper body, trying to shield her from pain using his own body as the armor.
“I’m here for you, Rascal,” he said. “I’ll never let anything happen to you.”
“Promise?” asked Sophia, sounding far away.
“I promise.”
* * *
The lady of shadows guides him through a landscape of lush sea grass. She walks far ahead, on a horizon where the separation between day and nig
ht appear as clear as the sun reflecting off the water’s surface. He looks at her with mystery, but no matter how much he tries to focus, her image remains as vague as a whisper.
The beach sand feels cool beneath his feet. A soft wind blows through his hair. The sounds all around him create a natural percussive symphony. The crashing waves play the cymbals, the wind howling across the dunes is the bass drum, the seagulls’ guffaw the chiming of a hundred triangles. He smiles as he walks and the sonata, which plays only for him, causes his mind to wander. Before long he forgets about his mysterious guide altogether and finds himself alone.
At the beach’s end he crosses a narrow pathway cut between two rows of palm trees. The music of the ocean becomes fainter the farther inward he treks, and then it disappears. He doesn’t mind. Another song has replaced it, one much closer to home.
The soft vibrato of a woman singing.
He follows the sound, entranced. The song builds up in his ears, fills his head. The sand underfoot grows hard and unforgiving, his surroundings become hazy. He ignores these things and moves onward. Finding the song’s source is all that matters.
The environment changes again. Pastel greens and blues are replaced by the cold grays and browns of a city. The buildings that rise above him are the hollowed husks of steel giants. A single sheet of paper skitters across the pavement, blown by a waft of stale air. The sky overhead is filled with billowing, ominous clouds.
The song in his head persists. He follows it. He has no choice.
It leads him down deserted side streets, past abandoned shops whose windows have long since been smashed and overturned cars whose tires still spin. The melody grows stronger with each step he takes.
He arrives at a large arched doorway hovering in the middle of the road. This should be strange to him but it is not, because the singing has become clear, and he can understand every word. “Rich relations may give you,” it says, “a crust of bread and such.” He grasps the door handle. It is cold. He pulls the door open, creating a never-ending black void where the street should be. Unafraid, he steps inside.