Squad was a word Kit knew, which denoted a group of cool kids who talked in shorthand and mostly walked around towns causing nonviolent shenanigans.
Kit, Nico, Lennon, and Harry (an honest-to-goodness “squad”) followed the Merrimack south. The river was an easy enough go, winding in some places, occasionally cutting through fields or smaller towns, but mostly keeping to the woods. There were riverside houses and buildings, and occasionally a wide bridge would cross the river to the east bank. They would walk underneath these bridges, and Kit would imagine how cars had once passed overhead.
One of the main roads from the olden days ran alongside the river, disappearing for long stretches and then reappearing around bends when they least expected it. They avoided the road where they could, hoping to remain unseen, keeping close to the water and the old train tracks (which continued their parallel route beside the river).
As they walked, they talked about histories and hopes. About their parents. About their lives before they’d met.
Nico said she’d been raised in a boarded-up farmhouse in the middle of the woods, which had a deck on the upstairs attic. When she was little, she said, she would sit up there and pretend her farmhouse in the middle of the woods was a lighthouse in the middle of the ocean. “I used to think Dad saved his best stories for the attic deck, but now I think maybe the deck brought those stories out of him.”
Kit liked watching Nico talk, all these soft words blossoming in the air in front of her face, disappearing as new ones came. And when Lennon described their circle of campers in Pin Oak Forest, Kit watched his words blossom and disappear too, and he thought, Maybe words are the origins of a breeze, and he found he wanted to contribute.
“Before I was born, my Dakota practiced midwifery, which is a fancy word for helping pregnant women have babies, which means she was there at the genesis of hundreds of lives. She was my beginning, and she was a dancer and a runner before the world went dark, and I’ve seen pictures of her twirling a baton in high school, and she liked to move her hands when she talked. She used to live in a commune in the mountains. And since she helped so many other people have babies, she was scared to have one herself. But one night in the commune, an angel spoke to her in her dreams. The angel told her not to be afraid, and then, when she woke up, she had this key in her hand”—he pulled the necklace out from under his shirt and coat, showed them the silver key attached to it—“and then she got pregnant with me and saw a sign that she remembered from before the world went dark, and that sign reminded her of Town, and then she moved into an old cinema, which is where I was born, and where I lived my whole life, in the projection room upstairs. My Dakota spent most of her days in a garden, where she grew vegetables, and tomatoes were her favorite. And they were my favorite too, and I just really love her. Loved her. I miss her. And Lakie. I miss them both a lot.”
Kit felt every ounce of the silence that followed. I went overboard, they don’t want to be friends anymore, I knew I would annoy the bejesus out of them.
Nico reached out a hand. “Dakota sounds lovely.”
He took her hand in his, and felt his Dakota’s key around his neck, and it was like a perfect circle with no beginning or end.
“Nico?”
“Yes, Kit.”
“Why do you draw marks on your hand?”
He’d noticed them before but hadn’t wanted to pry. Now, holding that marked-up hand, seemed a good time to ask.
“See how there are five?” she said. “When there are eight, I have to be in Manchester.”
“How come?”
Nico smiled but in a way that made Kit wish he hadn’t asked. “My dad sent me to find something. And I need to be there on a certain day to find it.”
“Can I help you look?”
“I was hoping you would.”
“Is your mom dead?” he asked, immediately regretting it. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay. Yes, she died.”
Somewhere a bird chirped, and he thought maybe it was a finch from the sound of it, and he said, “My mom died too,” as he looked at his feet, such weird little feet, and he wished they were wings. “That’s who I was talking about. She called me her Kit and I called her my Dakota because we belonged to each other.” But his feet were just feet, sadly, not the flying kind, and so he tossed his thoughts into the air instead, watched them glide around, blossom into breezes, little I-see-yous floating this way and that, landing like a soft quilt on all the world’s small forgotten things.
“It’s okay if you don’t want to answer,” Nico said. “But do you mind if I ask how she died? Was it recent?”
He felt like climbing a tree, and just living there forever. “Yes, it was recent. I don’t know how.”
“Did she sweat a lot?” Lennon’s voice, quietly, behind them. “Bad cough?”
“Yes,” said Kit.
“Start getting confused, mumbling? Seeing things that weren’t there?”
I see you, little knot, little Elefint.
I see you, beautiful purple flower.
“Yes,” Kit said.
“It was the same with Jean and Zadie,” said Lennon.
And suddenly Nico’s blossoms weren’t so pretty as she explained her father’s theory that they all had Fly Flu, but that in some, for whatever reason, the virus was dormant. “It’s called a latent virus, and a person can have it for years and not know it, until something reactivates it. Could be another sickness, wholly unrelated. Could be physiological changes. So maybe . . . age? I’ve seen a few other people but can’t be sure any were adults.”
“You’ve seen other people?” asked Lennon.
Nico said, “Before you guys,” and her tone made it clear: whoever she’d seen, she didn’t want to talk about it.
“Carl Meier sounded super old,” said Kit. “The voice from Monty’s radio. He’s still alive.”
“Was the recording date-stamped?” asked Nico. “That could have been years ago.”
Kit thought about this for a second; he couldn’t be sure, but he didn’t think it was. “You said the Flu could be reactivated by another sickness?”
“That was one of Dad’s theories.”
In his mind, Kit could still see the cover of Humphries and Howard’s A Beginner’s Guide to Infectious Diseases. “Do you know how easy it is to get pneumonia out here? Tuberculosis, mononucleosis, whooping cough, Hodgkin’s lymphoma, scurvy—”
“Scurvy?”
“Micronutrient deficiencies are a serious matter,” said Kit. “Which, given how we eat, seems not impossible.”
Beside him, Harry whined.
This was quickly becoming Kit’s superpower: bringing every conversation within a ten-mile radius to a grinding halt.
Lennon threw a stick, and they watched Harry run after it.
“Dad could have been wrong,” said Nico. “He even admitted it. It may not be reactivating at all. Might just as easily have found its way into our food and water, so now people are contracting it years later for the first time.”
Lennon, who’d been quiet for the last few minutes, laughed under his breath.
“What?”
“Nothing, just—for some reason, I started thinking . . .”
“Yes?”
“Zadie kept this old calendar on the wall. I used to flip through it. Everything from friends’ birthdays to dinner parties to oil change reminders. It was all so . . . mathematical. Mapped out, all the things she was going to do. And here, we’re headed to two different cities, which, for all we know, are nothing more than holes in the ground. Swarms around every corner, eating meals out of bags, maybe we’re carrying the virus that wiped out humanity, maybe not.” He shook his head, the laughter long dead in his throat. “A calendar. Can you imagine?”
It was silent for a long time after that.
At least I’m not the only one who shuts down a conversation, thought Kit, whose hand had grown considerably sweaty in Nico’s grip, but whose heart was too full to let go.
The book was hard to forget for two reasons: first, the front had a photograph of a lion’s head bursting through the cover, as if attempting to escape the pages inside; and second, it was called Language Arts, which, at the time, Kit found highly intriguing.
The book was totally boring, of course.
Kit could only assume that the brains inside the heads of those kids who’d lived in the olden days had been dulled by the luxuries of their soft lives, a time when growing old was expected, and one’s heart didn’t jump out of one’s chest at the sight of small flying bugs.
Language Arts was a sham.
(And nary a lion to be found, though Kit liked to think this was because it had succeeded in its pursuit of emancipation. He wished that lion all the best.)
The book did, however, prod Kit into a Time of Intense Thought. He’d sit in that orange beanbag in the corner of the Taft library, let his mind go where it needed going. And he decided then that while Language Arts was a sham, the language of arts was not.
His paintings talked to him.
But only if he was listening.
Once, in a very different (far more interesting) book, he’d read about the importance of “finding your voice” as an artist.
“Voice” was, apparently, a highly desirable, exceedingly elusive commodity. If this book was to be believed, artists had climbed mountains, crossed oceans, plummeted mines, drank very old liquids made of corn and grapes until they’d forgotten not only their names and problems, but also how to breathe (in, out, repeat), all in hopes of finding their “voice.”
But Kit thought maybe it was easier than all that. His paintings only spoke when he was listening, so maybe you just had to be super quiet. Maybe to find it, you just had to hear it.
Maybe that’s why it was called voice.