IT ISN’T THE noise that wakes me. It’s the silence.
I live in the trailer park on the Dagger Hill side of the canal. There’s a railroad track that cuts through town going north to south. An iron trestle just north of the Hill-to-Hill Bridge brings the route across the canal and down, cutting almost right through my backyard. Once or twice a night, a train comes whistling through, wheels singing across the rails, rumbling the entire trailer. The lonely sound of the horn blasting into the night usually startles me out of sleep, but the steady ka-chick, ka-chick, ka-chick of the cars rattling along the tracks will lull me back into it. It’s a cruel game we play, night after night. But I’m so used to it that after a few hours here, in a strange room, in a strange bed, I jerk awake in a panic.
My body shifts, stiffening with the fear of realizing that I have no fucking clue where I am, and pain explodes in my legs. It’s so bad that I feel it in my groin, deep in the bottom of my gut. It takes my breath away, as thin as it was to begin with, helped along by an oxygen mask strapped over my face.
I try to roll onto my side, try to curl into a ball. But I’m too bogged down by wires and tubes, all of which wind their way back to various machines circling my bed. Not to mention that one of my legs is wrapped in a full-length cast, as solid and unmoving as concrete. The white plaster material starts at my ankle and encircles my left leg all the way up to the thigh. And I can only really make out the hazy impressions of what I’m looking at because I don’t have my glasses. I don’t even want to know what kind of Frankenstein bullshit this will look like when I can fully see again.
My body wants me to hyperventilate now. My lungs are gearing up for it. My nerves are frayed wires whipping and snapping and sparking along the surface of my skin. But my chest hurts. My throat, too. Each breath I take is only managed with the push of the oxygen tank, shoving air down into my lungs. I’ve seen enough movies to know that I must have inhaled a bunch of smoke. If it hadn’t started raining, cutting through some of that fire, we might have died up on Dagger Hill … when? Today? Yesterday?
We.
I realize with another start that I’m alone. I have no idea where Gabe and Sonya and Kim are. Or if …
For a minute, my vision is blinded by a scene from earlier yesterday: the storm unfurling over Windale like a black, gnarled balloon; the rain and the thunder and the lightning accompanying it; the dark shape of the plane barreling out of the clouds, first just a vague outline, then a full-on monstrosity plummeting toward us like one of the freight trains that rocket past my house every night.
“Ah, you’re awake!”
The sound of another person’s voice in the room startles me out of the vision. And even though the images fade, they leave behind a ripple of goose bumps down my arms.
There’s a doctor in the doorway, white coat standing out a little too white against the patterned, textured walls of the room. Even though I’m pretty sure this is the Windale Medical Center I’m in, I don’t recognize her. She’s got one hand in the pocket of her slacks and the other gripping a clipboard. Trying to look casual, I guess? I don’t know; but whatever it is, she looks stiff and robotic. Uncomfortable in her own skin.
“How are you feeling?” the doctor asks. She doesn’t check the clipboard. Keeps her eyes on me. Sapphire blue under a nest of hair that’s almost entirely gray. It’s kind of creepy to be watched like that. But the adrenaline from my initial burst of panic is starting to wear off. The agony in my legs is tuning up for a Metallica guitar solo of pain. It feels like something is trying to rip them off. Maybe I’d be better off that way.
I just shake my head at the doc and look down at the cast.
“I won’t lie to you, Charlie,” she says. “You’re lucky to be alive.” Her eyes are still locked on mine as she says it. There’s a sympathetic grimace on her lips, but it doesn’t quite make it to those perfect blue orbs. They’re pretty eyes—they just don’t look very alive.
She steps farther into the room. Right behind her, to my immense dismay, I see my stepdad, Chet. He’s even skinnier than I am, with bones and tendons standing out at every joint. His eyes are always sunken and purple, his hair a thinning puff of smoke. It’s pretty clear that he needs some kind of fix—a smoke, a drink, a snort. His eyes dart from side to side, looking up and down the medical center hallway with his hands jammed down in the pockets of his ratty jeans.
The doctor sees me watching him and says, “Your dad can come in if you want.”
“He’s not my dad,” I say instinctively. Through the rasp of my voice and the muffling of the rubber mask, it comes out garbled. It also hurts to speak, so I don’t think I’ll be doing that again for a while.
Chet comes in anyway, looking relieved to be out of the open sight lines of the hallway. He takes one last nervous glance over his shoulder, and then he turns the hate on, laser-focused, and aims it right at me.
Dr. Blue Eyes doesn’t seem to notice. She plows ahead, finally lifting the clipboard to examine it. “I’m Dr. Claudia Reed, by the way,” she says. “I’m a doctor with the United States Army.”
The army? Jesus, no wonder Chet’s so paranoid.
“There was some pretty severe damage to your legs, Charlie,” Dr. Reed continues. She lowers the clipboard and looks at me gravely. “We were very nearly forced to amputate one of them. I’m sure you can guess which one.” She glances at my left leg as if it’s a piece of art. “Let’s just say that you’ve got most of the nuts and bolts aisle of a hardware store in your leg. Getting back to normal is going to take a lot of time and a lot of work. A lot of pain.”
I don’t have a response for that. The pain she’s talking about already outweighs the anxiety of what my future looks like. I just don’t want it to hurt anymore.
“The commanding officer here in Windale, Colonel Higgins, will arrive later this evening to get a statement from you about what happened. Leave that respirator on. It’ll help with the smoke inhalation and make it easier for you to talk when the time comes. We’ve got you on a shallow morphine drip right now for the pain in your legs. Just enough to take the edge off. Once Colonel Higgins gets her testimony from you, we can amp up the meds to make you more comfortable if you need it. Okay?”
Her voice is kind enough but also sort of robotic. Like her eyes, it doesn’t have a whole lot of life in it.
Dr. Reed gives Chet a look. “If this isn’t your dad,” she says, “then are your parents around?” I guess she understood me after all. It’s the first time that she sounds genuinely interested.
Chet speaks up first. “I’m … uh … Charlie’s stepdad, Chet Landry. Charlie’s dad … he, uh … he passed away a while ago. Big truck accident on the highway. Real shame. The kid’s mom … uh, my wife, I mean. Samantha. Sammy. Everybody calls her Sammy. She got caught outside of town when your guys closed the roads. She works at Martin Guitars over in Nazareth. Kind of a hike, so she doesn’t get home until late usually.”
Oh god. They closed the roads?
And of course Mom is stuck outside the barricade. That thing about her working at Martin would have been true ten, maybe eleven, years ago. She used to come home smelling like sawdust and lacquer, whistling some Johnny Cash song or other, her fingertips stained black with ebony. It was a good job, and she loved working it. But after she met Chet, her interests followed his into things that seemed a little more worthy of their time. Cocaine, mostly. Which is why Mom’s not here and Chet looks nervous as hell.
“Well, then,” Dr. Reed says, addressing Chet directly for the first time. “I guess that makes you Charlie’s legal guardian for the time being.” Talking to me again, she says: “I’ll be back shortly, probably when the colonel shows up. Don’t go walking off on me now.” Then she winks.
When Dr. Reed is gone, Chet turns to me. His eyes are boiling over with a slow-burn rage that I know all too well. Behind them, though, I see a hint of something else. Panic, maybe. If Mom was out on a drug run, and with the army skulking around town, there’s no telling when Chet will get his next line. He’s already fidgety and anxious. I have so many questions I want to ask. Mostly, they’re about my friends. But Chet won’t know anything. Even if he does know, he won’t tell me. Every little torture is a new kind of treasure to him. And right now, he’s got me all to himself. Even the fresh, vivid memory of a plane falling out of the sky on top of me and my friends—the pain in my legs a constant, throbbing reminder—can’t rival how terrifying that is.
Chet shows his crooked, browning teeth in a grin that’s even more lifeless than Dr. Reed’s eyes. “Guess it’s just you and me, kid,” he says.