Jesse rounded the corner before we had a chance to hide what we were doing. She’s such an odd little duck. The first thing she noticed was that Houston had replaced his discarded shoes with Dad’s. “Houston, why are you wearing Dad’s shoes?” she started to say, but then she finally took in the rest of the scene: the bowls of warm soapy water next to the bowls of platelet-tinged water, the kitchen towels soaked in blood, my father’s leg wrapped in one of those kitchen towels, and my mother’s shirt rolled up to reveal the gaping wound where she was shot. She let out the scream the rest of us had been holding in and fell to her knees in shock. She crawled like a wounded animal to Mom’s side and held her slack hand in hers, crying and kissing it over and over. My mother tried to raise her other hand to touch Jesse’s head, but she was too weak. I was seeing my mother fade right before my eyes, and I wanted to scream and cry and carry on like Jesse, but I couldn’t.
“Jesse! Shhhh! They’ll find us!” Houston hissed. I knew he was not trying to be harsh, but it sounded awful against Jesse’s weeping. I tried to distract myself by looking for something useful. My eyes had adjusted to the light by then, but all I could see was chintz and blood everywhere. Chintz and frilly lamps and blood. Cheap little figurines and blood. Knitted throws and blood. Dusty fake plastic floral arrangements and blood. Old issues of Reader’s Digest and blood. My mind got stuck in the loop of the toxically stressed: chintz and blood, chintz and blood, chintz and blood…
“KC. Jesse.” My father’s voice pulled me out of my repetitive thoughts. He used his calm and authoritative voice, the one he employed when he was about to say something we did not want to hear. “It’s going to be all right. If you leave now, we can draw the soldiers to us and your mother can get the treatment she needs.”
“We can’t turn our parents into decoys so we can get away!” But as soon as those words were out of Houston’s mouth his face changed and betrayed what he was thinking: that’s exactly what we had to do. His shoulders slumped and his head bowed as he realized this. Jesse dropped her head and buried it in my mother’s chest before she could say what was on her mind. My brain began to hum in agreement and I wondered if there was anything of the old me left. Were we hardened by too many life and death experiences? Or had the microorganisms in our brain taken over the human part of us, the part that would never, ever consider leaving our wounded parents behind? I know that if it weren’t for this second brain, the one that made me bite…that made me kill Chip, I would be paralyzed with worry over my parents’ injuries. Instead I had the overriding need to survive at all costs. Well, almost all costs. If I had given into that second brain, we would have left our parents already.
Suddenly I sensed something, like a wave of anticipation. Houston and Jesse looked up as if they felt it too. We turned and looked at the door. My father looked at us with a puzzled expression while my mother closed her eyes. They did not seem to be feeling the same thing. I could actually detect a separation from them; a break in a mental chain that I wasn’t even aware was there before. The Parasites were no longer active in my parents. They had given up on them.
But not on us. There was a knock on the door that made my father jump and my mother open her eyes in surprise. Houston, Jesse, and I didn’t react—we knew it was coming. I could tell by the look on Dad’s face that he was spooked by our lack of reaction. He would have been more than spooked out if he knew what I got up to an hour before. I jumped up and crossed the floor towards the front door. My father barked, “Don’t open that door!” but I ignored him. I knew it was not the soldiers.
I opened the door to three of the people who shared the elevator with us. They were vaguely familiar. Houston definitely knew one of them and he wished he didn’t. I recognized the awkward know-it-all Margaret from one of his classes and saw him visibly wince when she walked in. The other two were a father and son. The father was short and skinny and looked like a child compared to my dad. The little boy was small as well, and so cute he looked like he had been assembled in Build-A-Bear. He couldn’t have been more than five. They all had their clothes spray-spattered with blood.
“Where are the others?” Houston asked. It seemed like a stupid question. They were probably still in the hall. “Where were you?”
“Apartment 438. Doorknob was a little stiff, but we managed to get it open. We weren’t sure if we should keep following you—it didn’t work out so well the last time.”
“Then how did you find us?” asked Houston. “I created a scene that would divert attention away from…”
“We know. We saw what you did,” Margret said tartly. “I would have done a better job of it.” I had a feeling she couldn’t have done a better job of whatever it was that Houston did—it was just something she had to say. Frequently.
“Well next time we get involved in a mass shooting, I’ll let you be the diversion.” My brother was usually a nice person, but he could barely keep the venom out of his voice.
Margaret did not seem to pick up on this. “Don’t worry; we didn’t tamper with your little scene. We threw our bloody shoes in with yours and got ourselves some new ones from the apartment.” Well that was lucky, finding shoes that fit three very different people. Well, not so lucky for the boy and his father. From the look of things the only people who lived in that apartment were women and girls. The boy seemed to be playing dress-up in his Disney princess slingbacks and his father looked even more ridiculous in his new red patent leather kitten heels. It was a good thing he had small feet. Then I remembered where I knew him. He was the other half of the odd couple that we called “fat and skinny” from that Shel Silversteen poem
I remember how much the picture of a squashed stick figure in bed made me laugh. He and his wife were just like the cartoons from the poem, except his wife was bigger. She had to be the only person I knew whose weight could survive an apocalypse. Their difference in size didn’t seem to affect their affection for each other, which made me feel guilty for the “Yo momma” jokes that had been whispered behind her back. It made me feel even more guilty to realize that this mother probably didn’t make it because of her size. She definitely wasn’t in the lift, so she must have been left behind. I could imagine she made it down the stairs but couldn’t make it back up when the soldiers started pouring in.
“How did you know we were here?” Dad asked.
The diminutive man finally got a chance to speak. “We heard your little girl scream, and we followed the sound.”
Ordinarily I would have fixed Jesse with my, “I Told You So” glare, but I didn’t have it in me to do that anymore. We uncomfortably stared at each other until the man broke the silence.
“What now?” he asked.
“We’re only on the second floor and there’s a window out the bedroom that faces the allotments. We thought we could tie up a couple of sheets and escape that way.”
“And go where? Are we supposed to hang out among the cornstalks until they canvass the fields? You guys are too famous not to be noticed missing!”
Jesse gently placed my mother’s right hand over her left hand and stood up. She gave us all a serious look and said, “I know where to go. Follow me.”