Some people said a lot in quiet voices, some said nothing in loud ones. And some, she was learning, simply loved the sound of their own voice.
“We’re the last survivors of Waterford, proud descendants of the town’s first fucking settlers.”
Bruno and Gabe Rainer looked like they’d been eaten, digested, and passed through the bowels of an adult moose. Small but sinewy, white, with oil-black hair pulled back into tight ponytails, the dirt on their faces had moved into whatever stage came after caked on.
Bruno was older, probably in his fifties (calling into question Nico’s theory that age reactivated the virus), with a chunk missing from one ear. He’d introduced himself first, and then, with a flourish, “And this is my son, Gabe.” The bravado in his voice was off-putting, as if Nico and Lennon and Kit had crossed mountain, canyon, swarm unending with the sole aim of meeting his offspring, Gabe Rainer, the Chosen One.
Gabe was a bit older, maybe early twenties, with perpetually watery eyes and the face of an empty sack. He walked with a limp and carried an object about the size of a rifle, made of wood and metal and a kind of cord. Clearly a gun-like weapon—Nico could only guess at its function.
The way they carried themselves, Bruno’s tone of voice, Gabe’s weapon, both sets of eyes dim as could be—these two would’ve fit right in with the Metal Masks, thought Nico.
Bruno, especially, whose dramatic shift into consummate host was clearly an act.
Inside the church, he rattled on about its history while they took in its bizarre architecture. It reminded Nico of a photograph she’d once seen of an old town after it had been bombed, buildings where one side remained intact, while the other was demolished.
The entire back wall of the church, and part of the ceiling, was gone. And since the church backed up to the woods, she found herself staring out into a thick-forested darkness. In the middle of the floor, an enormous firepit with flames kicking around, smoke funneling up through the hole in the ceiling. What walls were still intact had hanging torches, which, when combined with the size of the firepit, accounted for the relative warmth in the room, as well as the damp floors.
“What’s that sound?” Lennon looked at the floor.
Nico had noticed it too, a low frequency humming under their feet.
“Catacombs.” Bruno walked to the corner, stomped his foot on a trapdoor with a giant padlock. “Run the length of the church underneath. With the falls upriver, certain times of year, water rattles the ground, you can actually feel it here.” He fell back into his regional history lesson, how this was the first structure built in Waterford. “Should have seen it in its heyday, long before the businesses arrived.”
“Businesses?” asked Lennon.
“He means Flies.” From the moment they’d entered the church, Kit had stood like a statue, facing the interior of the front wall, less interested in catacombs and gaping holes, more interested in the strange mural looming over them. “Business is the technical term for a swarm,” he said quietly.
Bruno smiled. “Little man knows his shit.”
This mural was done in the same style as the ones they’d seen outside, though it was bigger and more elaborate. In the top corner of the wall, a big moon, and in the sky around it, instead of stars, bright red computers and telephones, blue light bulbs and televisions, neon outlets and keyboards, a thousand twinkling technologies wild and alive in the dancing firelight.
Nico put an arm on Kit’s shoulder. “You okay?”
He didn’t say anything, just stared up at the strange image.
“Our very own drawings on the cave wall.” Bruno pointed to Gabe, who’d been sitting quietly in the corner, wooden weapon on one shoulder, watery-eyed and silent. “Man of few words, my son, but quite the talent. Now see, you got me rambling on about history, and I’ve forgotten my fucking manners. Who’s hungry?”
The only real furniture in the church was a long wooden table with chairs on each side. Surely, somewhere in Waterford, they have a building with four walls and a ceiling, thought Nico. Even for their strange hosts, dining in the ruins of an old church seemed bizarre. But the firepit and torches made it feasible, temperature-wise, and she thought it best not to question.
Eager to get back on the road, they wouldn’t have accepted the dinner invite had it been presented as an invitation. As it was, Gabe’s rifle-like weapon was never far from use, always on his shoulder or in his hands or beside him as he tended the fire.
The food was fine: a salted lettuce with tomatoes and some sort of corn relish. Bruno sat at the head; Nico and Lennon sat by each other on one side, while Kit sat across from them, staring up at the mural over their heads. Seemingly uninterested in food, Gabe remained preoccupied with the fire. Under the table, Harry’s wet snout rested in Nico’s lap.
“So you’re an artist,” said Bruno, chewing as he talked.
“Not really,” said Nico.
“Actually”—Bruno pointed to Kit—“I was talking to Little Man.”
Kit turned from the mural, looking genuinely shocked to be addressed.
“Some people see my son’s art and it sort of—freaks them out.” Bruno turned in his chair, looked up at the wall. “But the way you’ve been staring at it makes me think, There’s an artist who gets it. You saw the ones coming into town, I assume. What’d you think of the empty eye socket? Mark of genius, am I right?”
Kit took a well-timed bite.
“We’ve got a whole setup of art supplies in an underground bunker out back.” Bruno pointed through the back of the church, into the forest.
“Sorry.” Lennon gazed out into the woods. “Underground bunker?”
“Good place to hide, when the need arises. Thoroughly designed and fucking fortified. But it’s primarily a space for Gabe to store his supplies. My boy would’ve had quite the life for himself in the old world. Big studio in New York City, the whole nine. As it is, he’s got a bunch of brick walls and a hatch in the ground. But so be it.”
Bruno’s smile was the opposite of a smile; even the way he ate his salad—slowly, methodically, planning the next bite while chewing the current one—felt scripted. And yet somehow, each topic bled into the next, so that now he was talking about some period of time in which America was in jeopardy of being bombed by the Russians. “1960s, I think. Underground bomb shelters were all the rage. Of course, they never attacked, but we got pretty good and wiped out anyway, didn’t we?”
Under their feet, the river’s dull roar took the reins of the conversation for a moment.
Harry had disappeared, gone out for dinner, no doubt.
“So”—Bruno gulped his water, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand—“what brings you three to Waterford?”
“We’re headed to the coast.” Like that, Nico was in the lie, espousing Monty’s motivations as her own, explaining how they’d had a radio in their old town, how they’d heard a recorded loop, and were now making their way to an island off the coast. She was careful to omit specific names and timelines, not wanting to get caught in the lie, but mostly, wanting to keep her friends safe. If the Isles of Shoals really was some safe haven, she had a feeling it wouldn’t be for long once Bruno and Gabe got there.
“Interesting.” Bruno looked up at his son. “Isn’t that interesting, Gabe?”
The room was well lit, warm. But apparently not warm or bright enough for Gabe, who’d been piling wood and prodding the fire while they ate. Like he’s a servant or something, preparing the room for his guests.
“Yes. Interesting.” Gabe’s first words of the evening. He followed them up with a few more. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to use the facilities.”
They watched him leave, then ate in awkward silence. Eventually, as much to break the silence as anything, Lennon commented on the freshness of the salad.
“Gave up meat for obvious reasons,” said Bruno. “Thought I’d miss it, but we’ve gotten creative with the vegetables. You like the relish?”
“Obvious reasons?”
“Hmm?”
“You said you quit eating meat for obvious reasons.”
“Right.” Bruno stopped chewing as he looked around the table. “Oh. You don’t know?”
“Know what?” asked Nico.
Bruno leaned back in his chair, rubbed his hands together slowly, as if savoring the moment. “Okay, well. Let’s start here. Did you know sharks can smell blood in the water from hundreds of meters away? Doesn’t take much either. One part blood for every one million parts water. Roughly”—he picked up his cup, held it out, and tipped a few drops of water onto the floor—“that. In a room like this. Resilient creatures, sharks. And still. No match for Flies.”
“Hard to imagine a shark being deterred by cinnamon,” said Nico.
“Cinnamon doesn’t do anything.” Kit sank a little in his chair. Until now he’d managed to go the whole dinner without saying a word. “Our friends got carried off by Flies. We had cinnamon all over the place.”
Bruno took a sip of water. “Au contraire, Little Man. Cinnamon is pretty effective against smaller swarms. Larger ones, not so much. Now, I wasn’t there when your friends got carried off, but I bet you guys killed some kind of animal that night. Lots of blood, yeah?”
“The wild turkey,” said Lennon.
Bruno nodded. “We Rainer boys don’t put too much stock in theories. We put our faith in God and in ourselves. Outside of that, faith becomes fantasy. For example, if I said I knew how the Flu operated, how it killed—that’d be fantasy. But, now, if I said I knew the Flies, understood what made them tick, how to control them, how they operated . . .”
He stood, crossed the floor to a small closet beside one of the torches on the wall, pulled a key from his pocket, and unlocked the door.
They heard the Flies first: in diminutive form, like a small sampling. Appropriate, considering that’s exactly what it was. From the closet, Bruno pulled out one end of a broom. On the other end, a clear plastic bag had been applied with a hefty amount of tape. The bag was alive, expanding and contracting, pushing and pulling, flailing in furious punches. “No need to worry,” said Bruno, eyeing the end of the broom as if it were a beloved pet. “I’ve spent time with this little business—and many before it—studying them, getting to know them. Another month or two, they’ll outgrow the bag. For now, you’re safe.”
Outside, the forest was alive with invisible things, nighttime critters and near-winter winds and tree-siblings breathing staccato breaths, reaching out for one another, seeking touch. Nico listened for their words of comfort . . . We are here. You are not alone. She felt her place among them, felt them calling her home.
We have to get out of here.
“When we ran the planet, we went where we pleased, and whenever we damn well pleased, and not always with some urgent purpose.” Bruno spoke with a quiet resolution, as if talking himself off a ledge. “Flies enjoy that same privilege now. You might see giant swarms roaming aimlessly, you might not see one for weeks. Maybe you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, and now you’re dead. But there is one way to up those chances. Like sharks, Flies are drawn to blood. The smell alone is enough to make them crazy. You can roll the dice, hunt smaller animals. Might go days hunting without seeing a swarm. But it just takes once. And so no—we don’t fuck with meat in Waterford. We don’t fuck with blood any more than we have to.”
With great care, as with some ancient relic of the church, Bruno gently placed the broom back in the closet with a soft “Amen.” And as he inserted the key into the padlock, turned it with a metallic click, Nico noticed it was the same lock used on the trapdoor in the corner, the one leading down into the catacombs. And suddenly, the low frequency humming under her feet took on frightening new possibilities.
If one were to crawl under the Farmhouse, strike a match, and look around, that person would see that the roots of the house were sunk deep into the intersection of science and faith. “I’m not saying I definitely don’t believe in God,” her father said one night. “Just that there’s no empirical evidence to support the theory.”
Nico remembered it clearly. It was a Delivery Day. They’d taken four Metallyte pouches of chili mac, tossed in boiled corn and a packet of something called taco seasoning. So far as Nico was concerned, if it was empirical evidence of God her father was looking for, he need look no further than his own plate.
“Okay, two things. First”—her mom paused; whereas her dad let loose every word that came to mind, content to sift and reorder afterward, her mother let words build up inside, carefully choosing the ones best suited to her purposes—“if there were empirical evidence of God, it wouldn’t be called faith. I see God in the starry sky. The snow and rain, the books in our library. I see God in my snowstorm girl. In our survival.”
This particular conversation was more like a very long book, which her parents never finished, only dog-eared when they were tired of reading. It rarely felt like an argument; the further in they got, the wider their smiles became. Their tones were calm, loving, tender—sometimes to a fault, in Nico’s opinion. Her mother would talk of God, her father would talk of science, and the looks in their eyes would turn to a fervent sort of hunger, just as the nausea in her own stomach roiled.
Her parents were the only two people in the history of the world for whom debating the existence of God conjured romantic sparks.
“And second?” asked her father, eyes alight.
Her mother’s smile grew, and at first Nico thought it was for all the usual nauseating reasons. “If not God,” said her mom, “then where did it come from?”
Under the table, Harriet whined.
“Where did what come from?” Nico asked.
Her mother continued, as if Nico hadn’t said a word. “Have you considered the possibility—”
“No.”
“—that God put it there? As a way out? That maybe He placed each and every Tollbooth strategically around the world to save humanity from itself? Maybe Tollbooth is the wrong nomenclature. Maybe . . . Ark . . . would be better.”
“Uh, okay.” Even the miracle of taco seasoning took a back seat to whatever was going on. “What are you guys talking about?” asked Nico. “What tollbooth? Like from the book?”
Her father wiped his mouth, set down his napkin, stared at her mother across the table. “There was a time when humans looked at the aurora borealis and thought it was a window to heaven,” he said. “Throughout history, ambiguous elements of fantasy are eventually proven to be anything but fantastic. Science wins the day, every time.”
Ambiguous elements of fantasy? Aside from his stories, Nico had never heard her father speak like this.
“You call it ambiguous,” said her mother. “I call it divine.”
“The Tollbooth has nothing to do with divinity, believe me.”
“Careful. That sounded dangerously close to an absolute.”
“Okay.” Nico dropped her fork on her plate. “You guys are freaking me out.”
The silence that followed drowned out everything. And then: “Believe it or not,” said her mom, “the idea of houseflies wiping out the world’s population once sounded like pure fantasy. But that’s not the only fantasy that—”
A throat clear from across the table; that was all it took to put a stopper in the sentence. Carefully chosen words or not, her dad clearly didn’t approve.
But the stopper didn’t hold.
“Before the Flies came, your father and a group of scientists—”
“Honey.”
“—found something.”
“Not yet. Please.”
Her mother’s eyes dimmed; she returned to her food.
“Well, you can’t stop there,” Nico said. “What did they find?”
The dinner table, the library, the attic deck, hunched over the radio in the cellar: through the years, every corner of the Farmhouse had played host to mysterious conversations. Sometimes her parents would hand her a piece of the puzzle, though it was rarely a corner or edge; and so she was left with a splotchy and incomplete view of her own world.
The older she got, the more questions she had: What had her father found? Had fantasy and reality somehow evolved to coexist? Were the secrets of the universe bound up by God or science, and did it have to be binary? In arguing for one over the other, weren’t her parents reducing the size of their own respective faiths? Nico often asked these questions, and many others, alone on the attic deck, her back to the panoramic view.
The Bell was stable, present, loyal. In its shadow, she felt understood.
That night, over chili mac with corn and taco seasoning, Nico didn’t care about feeling understood—she wanted to understand. But she was years away from her eighteenth birthday; Harriet was alive, Harry not yet born, her mother was a spiritual sprite with cheeks the color of the rainbow. Nico’s life was small but intact.
“I want to know,” she said, wishing for a bigger world.
Her father put a hand on her arm. “I’m not saying never. I’m saying not yet.”
Being treated like an outsider was bad enough. But that it should come from this man who’d never babied her, always trusted her, only made it worse. As she got older, and the not yets piled up, she was better able to articulate this incongruence. For a rational man, she would think, it’s his most irrational belief: that survival is only possible when the kid is kept in the dark.