Monday night was family fun night, usually reserved for movies or bowling or going out to dinner. Part of New Arlington’s forced normalcy was the presence of chain restaurants. I heard it was the same for other dome communities; the restaurants and pubs didn’t offer much in the way of food, but they gave us somewhere to meet up and socialize. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy going out and running into friends at these places, but did they have to be the same rubber-stamped chains like TGIFridays and Applebees? Not even a zombie apocalypse could bring those places down.
But we didn’t go out on our last family fun night. We were still having “quality family time” according to my parents, but it was a thin veneer of ordinary life over a raging river of stress. We weren’t watching TV together or playing one of those super-old Monopoly/Scrabble/Clue board games Mom and Dad insisted on playing. We were updating our split kits. Or Seventy-two-hour kits. Or bug-out bags. Whatever they called it in those days. We had always had one on hand since the Invasion started and they saved our lives on more than one occasion. Our last family fun night was spent “updating” them. There used to be those government-sponsored shows like 72-Hour Kits: What You Need To Survive after The Lost Day that would show us what we needed in our split kits, but tonight’s version was more like Pimp My Bag.
My parents were trying to pretend this was all routine, a standard precaution that we probably wouldn’t need because we lived under a dome protected by vigilant soldiers. But the smiling bottom half of their faces did not match the tension and fear in the top half. Did they know something we didn’t know? Or did they finally notice how bad the segregation had become?
“Here, hold this,” Dad said as he handed me a small jar of petroleum jelly and cotton balls.
“Planning to start a fire with these?” I asked.
“Glad you know what they’re for,” he said while he rummaged through his bag. “Anything else you’d like to put in your bug-out bag?”
“Yeah, Chuck Norris.”
Dad looked at me like I had a bad case of the young-and-stupids and added a Taser to my bag while KC and Jesse added sketchpads to theirs. I wish he had told me what was going on. I understood why he didn’t say anything out loud—whatever they knew would have upset Jesse, yet they couldn’t leave her out of that night’s disaster-planning session because she would be involved if something happened. I knew if I talked to Dad on the side, I’d find out what was on his mind. He wouldn’t tell KC because she’d just blurt it out. She thinks like I do, that it’s too late to preserve Jesse’s innocence. But Dad knew that if he asked me to keep something secret, I would. It made me feel like the gatekeeper to Jesse’s innocence.
“There’s a call for you,” Mom said, breaking me out of my thoughts.
My heavy mood lifted because I was hoping it was Nemesis. I really wanted some time alone with her, even if it was only over Skype or FaceChat.
I went into my room, closed the door for privacy, turned and saw Doom’s face on the screen. Damn. I was halfway up to hope but ended up all the way to disappointed. I hoped it didn’t show on my face. Doom appeared more haggard than usual. Hell, he looked downright insane, like he’d just broken out of the asylum. He’d always been scrawny, but at that time his face stretched taut over his skull and his dark frightened eyes were sunk into their sockets. He looked like one of the Infected.
“Doom! What’s the matter with you? When did you last eat?” I couldn’t keep the alarm out of my voice. I didn’t have to anyways since it was Doom I was talking to, the kid with no social filter.
“I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. I can’t think straight with their constant buzzing in my head.” He sounded hollow. Haunted.
“Have you seen anybody about this? Have you told anyone else?” And then I remembered Mouse was living with him like a stepsister. “Is…”
“Yes, Mouse is okay. She’s fine.” That’s when I registered the faraway sound of her practicing her violin. “She’s admitted she can feel the buzzing in her head too sometimes,” Doom continued, “but it’s not nearly as bad as mine. She deals with it the way she deals with most of her stress; she turns to her music.”
“Uh, Doom, you hate violin music.”
“I know. When she starts playing, I start walking.”
“Doom, I’m not trying to be a putz, but you can’t walk around like that. You look like an RB. One of these days someone’s going to come across you and snuff you out.”
“Don’t worry, I stick to the perimeter. Nobody likes to go near the edges of the compound anyway. And the soldiers cannot see me when I’m directly below them. They’ve been paying extra attention to me since our last call. They had to be listening in. I shouldn’t have said anything, but I would have exploded if I didn’t tell someone. You know me, Houston. I was the homeschooled kid with the paranoid parents. I don’t have any friends. The Dumb Luck Club is the only place I’ve belonged. If I didn’t tell you guys, who could I tell?”
“Doom, I don’t think you have anything to worry about with these soldiers. They’re nothing like the ones who abandoned us at the refugee center…”
“Oh yeah? They’re all suffering from PTSD man! The same machine that churns out soldiers grinds up people. They’ve got record rates of depression and substance abuse and suicide. They’ve had to fight an enemy that looks just like their family and friends and neighbors because they once were their family and friends and neighbors! And now they’re stuck with protecting people like me.”
“Doom, you’re my friend and you can tell me anything, but right now you’re starting to spiral into one of your government conspiracy rants.”
“But, Houston, there’s a deadly game of dominos happening right before our eyes, and we’re not getting out of the way!”
“Why don’t you tell me what you’ve heard and seen. I don’t notice things like you do. I won’t deny we live in a bubble here, especially with my parents keeping up the illusion of safety going as long as they can.” I didn’t mention they were in the other room preparing souped-up split kits. Doom’s parents tapped into all sorts of underground information when they were alive. I’m sure he could still get information through the same back door channels.
“The first thing I noticed, the first Domino, was when this kid at school fell out of a tree and hit his head. He was unconscious and bleeding, but still alive. We called for an ambulance and the first thing the operator wanted to know was his name. I could tell she was checking it against the list of the inoculated. He must have come up as a positive match because all she said was, “Help is on the way,” and hung up before she could get any details of what was wrong with the kid. And you know who came?”
“An ambulance? The EMTs?”
“Nope. Soldiers.”
“Oh.” I don’t know why I was surprised. “Maybe they were short of ambulances and EMTs…”
“I doubt it. They just dragged this kid and threw him into the back of their troop truck. No consideration for a possible broken back or neck; they treated him like he was dead already.”
“What happened to him?” I asked, even though I knew what his answer would be.
“Don’t know. Never saw him again. No one wanted to talk about it. I guess it’s much easier to make people disappear when there are so many orphans. There’s no one related enough to them to care. No lawsuits, no enquiries, no funeral. And this isn’t an isolated incident. All my sources tell the same story in their compounds.”
“I haven’t seen it myself. But I have seen the fear. People are afraid that if we die in some kind of accident, we’ll come back as one of the Infected and start attacking the Pure Bloods. Or scratch or bite someone like that kid Jenny did.”
“Old men dying in their sleep, a girl dying of anaphylactic shock after finding peanuts in her salad, a soldier hanging himself on the wall, and all the current Darwin Award winners. If they’re inoculated, they come back from the dead. Well, their bodies do. It’s like living with the enemy. That’s why so many Pure Bloods are moving south, the dead rot too fast to be of any danger down there and they can live away from us ticking time bombs.” Doom sounded like doom, but I couldn’t laugh at his crazy ideas like I used to.
“Why can’t we move down there?”
“Many have tried, but they turn the inoculated back at Richmond. Did you know there’s a wall up there now? It’s just like the one they have at the Arizona/Mexico border. Not many of our kind try to go over it anyways because, frankly, most of us do not want to live with them.”
“I have friends who are Pure Bloods. They know I wouldn’t hurt them. I have no problem living with them.”
“YOU won’t hurt them, but the RB that takes over your body will. You’re lucky you have friends willing to take that risk for you. But aren’t you sick of living under a policy of segregation? My complex doesn’t have water fountains any more but if we did, you’d be forced to drink at a different one than the uninoculated.”
“Well, yeah, you could accidently touch the spout with your lip and infect the next Pure Blood that drank out of it.”
“It wouldn’t be an accident.”
“Not cool, Doom, you know I wouldn’t spread germs on purpose.”
“Once again, you wouldn’t transfer the microbes to the spout, but the Parasites that now live in your head will make you do it. Don’t tell me you haven’t felt the buzzing as well.”
An uncomfortable silence settled between us. Well, it was more uncomfortable for me than him because, as much as I hated to admit it, he was right. “All right, Doom, I have felt the buzzing in my head. But it’s not like you described it. It doesn’t cancel out all other thoughts and make me want to do things I wouldn’t normally do.”
“It didn’t have that effect on me the first time I felt it either. But it gets stronger, and at times it spikes. Houston, I’m afraid of what happens when my mind gets taken over. I don’t know where I go when that happens; it’s like the microbes take my brain hostage. It takes all my will to fight to get my mind back. But the messages I’ve been getting from the outside talk about the rise of serial killers, people inoculated like us who stage accidents or hunt down the Pure Bloods. I think weaker-minded people are being overtaken by the germs that are shacking up in their heads, and the Parasites are out to create more of them.”
“Why haven’t I heard of this?”
“Because the government has been heavily editing the news and Internet.”
“Maybe they want to avoid panic and lynching.”
“Or maybe they want complete control.”
We fell back into silence again while I turned over Doom’s words. After a heavy pause, I got to the point of the matter. “Doom, how can I help?”
“I want you to leave. You and your whole family. Anybody involved with the Dumb Luck Club. Come and get me and Mouse. My real parents had a place in the mountains. We can live without the fear of hurting anyone else, somewhere off the grid.”
“Doom, I’m happy here. My family is happy here. Do you really think I can convince them to leave this much comfort and security after barely surviving so much deprivation?”
“Don’t you want your own space?”
I sure did.
“And if I’m not mistaken, some of our little gang has already left. When I gave Mr. Cromwell and Ghost clues on how to get to my safe house, they left.”
“You’re the reason why Ghost disappeared? And did you get Mr. Cromwell and Sarah to leave without saying goodbye? You might want to keep this information to yourself next time you talk to KC or Jesse.”
“Just don’t leave it till the last minute. Look, I’ll message you clues tomorrow on how to get there. It’ll be stuff only people from the refugee center would know. I’m not going to wait much longer. These things in my head are getting stronger, and I don’t want to be around long enough to hurt my new parents.”
“You won’t hurt your parents…”
“Just get ready. It’s won’t be long now.”
“It won’t be long till what?”
But we got cut off. The Internet went down, again. And that was the last time I ever heard from Doom.